Citizenship Studies

ISSN: 1362-1025 (Print) 1469-3593 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccst20

The emergence of the other sexual citizen:

orientalism and the modernisation of sexuality

Leticia Sabsay

To cite this article: Leticia Sabsay (2012) The emergence of the other sexual citizen:
orientalism and the modernisation of sexuality, Citizenship Studies, 16:5-6, 605-623, DOI:
10.1080/13621025.2012.698484

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2012.698484

Published online: 30 Aug 2012.

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 Citizenship Studies
Vol. 16, Nos. 5 – 6, August 2012, 605–623

The emergence of the other sexual citizen: orientalism and the

modernisation of sexuality
Leticia Sabsay*

Politics and International Studies (POLIS), The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
(Received 27 January 2012; final version received 11 May 2012)

Guided by the claims of the feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender social
movements and international human rights agendas, governments in late modern
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democracies have been implementing (or pressured to implement) new juridical frames
to recognise sexual diversity. As a result, in the last two decades, gendered and sexual
‘others’ have been ‘included’ in citizenship leading to the formulation of what has been
called ‘sexual citizenship’, propounding the formation of new sexual rights-bearing
subjects. However, this seemingly respectable and progressive contemporary sexual
citizen has become the benchmark against which all sexual subjects are measured, and
involves a particular liberal self that has been constituted against a myriad of ‘others’
marked by cultural, religious and racialised differences. How has this ‘sexual citizen’
been constituted and how does it operate within the political field of struggles over
sexual freedom and justice? This article explores to what extent the sexual citizen has
been configured in Euro-American terms within political liberalism, and how colonial
and orientalist ideas about sexual citizenship and democracy follow on from this
restricted notion of the subject of rights.
Keywords: sexual citizenship; orientalism; homonationalism; queer politics

Born in the USA in 1990, the political movement Queer Nation has marked the birth of
queer politics and, as such, it stands out as a point of reference for different queer groups
across the world. The name itself, ‘Queer Nation’, has become a symbolic brand and has
travelled far beyond its local point of origin as a reminder of what the queer movement
was. At the same time, it has crystallised a new form of activism and an anti-
assimilationist politics which is crucial to politics today. Indeed, its enduring influence is
not limited to matters sexual. It can also be sensed within the street politics of recent
years.
However, like Queer Nation itself, which moved towards a less radical approach
(manifested, for example in its growing tensions with Act Up), queer politics also became
increasingly identitarian, conforming to classically liberal models of political
participation. ‘The queer’ became normalised, was incorporated into mainstream lesbian,
gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) politics, and, through a process which this article
elaborates, ended up becoming a sign of nationalism. Indeed, some versions of the queer
became complicit with the current entwinement of Euro-American nationalist and
imperial projects with sexual progressive rhetoric and politics. Sexual progressive

*Email: l.i.sabsay@open.ac.uk

ISSN 1362-1025 print/ISSN 1469-3593 online

q 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2012.698484
http://www.tandfonline.com
 606 L. Sabsay

rhetoric, in effect, functions today as a marker that distinguishes the so-called advanced
western democracies in opposition to their ‘undeveloped others’, and in this way it justifies
the current re-articulation of orientalist and colonial politics (from the war on terror and
anti-migrant politics in Europe to new forms of cultural imperialism). The clear
alternatives to this are other emergent groups of queer activists and scholars that explicitly
contest current homonormative definitions of western late modernity in new sexual terms
and are against racialised versions of sexual modernisation.
How is it possible that queerness could be re-inscribed in such orientalist or colonial
ways? What was there in ‘the queer’ that allowed sexual progressivism to be cast in
nationalist terms? In order to answer these questions, in this essay I contend that one way
to analyse the conditions of possibility of this re-inscription is through the notion of
‘sexual citizenship’. Euro-American rhetoric and politics on gender equity and sexual
freedom and justice have been articulated through the language of rights leading to the
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institution of ‘sexual citizenship’. In turn, sexual citizenship has been cast under the
framework of political liberalism in order to conceive the subject as entitled to be a
potential claimant of sexual rights. This article explores to what extent current colonial and
orientalist ideas about the sexual rights-bearing subject follow from an orientalist
conception of citizenship and the liberal sovereign subject in which sexual citizenship is
sustained.
To consider this issue, I examine the recent history of sexual politics in the USA and
the European Union where these debates have acquired a public and international
visibility, while becoming a landmark for sexual politics across other regions. By focusing
on the notion of universal sexual rights and the debates that surrounded the emergence of
sexual citizenship and its further deployment, I discuss the role that notions of citizenship,
diversity and the sovereign subject have played in building this sexual narrative.
The analysis I offer here bears on the question of the implications of casting
contemporary ideas of sexual freedom and justice through the language of rights. This
discussion mirrors other forms of queer activism that question the terms of
citizenship. Insofar as the ‘queer’ signifier has spread in many different directions,
politically, culturally and geographically, questions of what it would mean to be politically
queer nowadays and what compromises should queers make seem to remain open matters
of contestation. If the framework of rights and liberal democracy embedded in the
institution of sexual citizenship has allowed current culturally racist sexual politics, this
points to key articulations of queers’ radical commitment to countering liberal forms of
sexual subjectivation and identity, with antiracist, de-colonial and postcolonial queer
critiques. To contest both nationalist and universalist queer positions, I suggest that we
need to open up the question about the parameters within which sexual modernisation
establishes a field of intelligibility for conceiving the political, i.e. what is considered as a
matter of politics and/or a political matter.

Queering nationalism?
Although the movement Queer Nation was active for only a few years until the middle of
the 1990s, the impact it made as the marker of the birth of queer politics was so strong that
it continues to reverberate in the slogans displayed at public demonstrations. We may ask
to what extent this impact is due to the retrospective narrative that built it as such, or to its
actual interventions during those years. But there is no doubt about its significance. As the
emblem for what ‘queer’ would mean, the movement was essentially committed to a
radical critique of the multiple forms of sexual regulation embedded in national identity
 Citizenship Studies 607

formations. It therefore focused on a politics of cultural subversion, the aims of which

were set beyond liberal – legal claims and the logic of the nation-state, which set out to
disrupt of the heteronormative character of what was conceived to be the public sphere and
hegemonic national imaginaries.1
At the same time, as Lauren Berlant would put it, Queer Nation aimed to ‘dismantle
the standardizing apparatus that organizes all manner of sexual practice into “facts” of
“sexual identity”’(Berlant and Freeman 1992). In effect, what originally defined the queer
movement was its contestation of the identity politics of gay and lesbian social movements
that were by then committed to a politics of inclusion within a heterocentric framework.
To identify with a queer nation, or even to acquire a ‘queer nationality’ meant to adhere
to a politics of difference that would find ‘a home’ in the practices of dis-identification and,
in turn, would inflect the nation in a queer way. But where has the ‘queer inflection of
nationalism’ ended up? Paradoxically enough, the promising contradiction between the two
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terms that compose the name pointed out by Escoffier and Bérubé (1998) – ‘queer’, the
signifier for the politics of difference against identity, and ‘nation’ being the place of
sameness – seems to have found an ironic resolution: instead of queering the nation,
nationalism re-inscribed the queer into its own narrative.
The call for queering nationalist fantasies, which was supposed to disrupt or at least
disturb heteronormative nationalism, has become, according to many scholars, the
occasion for the emergence of new homonormative forms of nationalism and therefore the
brand of a new exclusionary version of ‘queerness’. Jasbir Puar (2007) coined the term
‘homonationalism’ to describe the way in which the imaginary inclusion and the
celebration of sexual diversity have assumed a key role in the configuration of current
national fantasies in the USA during the war on terror. As many authors have suggested,
the rising in islamophobic discourses that accompanied US imperial nationalism after 11
September 2001, was due to the assumption that Muslim subjecthood is inseparable from
sexual backwardness. Very often the rescue narratives that present ‘the other’ women and
gays as mere victims of ‘other cultures’ supposedly committed in essence to gender
oppression, homophobia and transphobia are aimed at justifying this imperialism (Hunt
and Rygiel 2006, Puar 2007, Kunstman and Miyake 2008, Bracke 2012, Haritaworn
2012).2
In a similar way, it has also been extensively argued that the definition of ‘European
Nations’ against their ‘foreign migrant others’ together with overtly anti-migrant policies
is pretty much based on the other’s alleged sexually conservative, intolerant and
constitutively anti-democratic sexual values (Dorlin 2006, Guènif-Souilamas 2006, 2010,
Butler 2008, Fassin 2010). The mobilisation of orientalist views on the other’s supposedly
backward gender culture has been prominent within the hijab debate in France and Spain
for years. And this is also the case regarding the reluctance to recast the relation between
British Law and Sharia Law in the UK (see Pilgram in this issue).3 Whether in the ‘Middle
East’, at the borders or within Europe, all these tendencies attest to the racialisation of
progressive sexual politics and its functionality in the process of cultural othering.
These contradictions at the core of the present ‘age of diversity’ would have been
difficult to understand from the perspective of the early 1990s. Now, to talk about a queer
nation no longer means any kind of destabilisation in the policing of national borders. In
fact, just the opposite would be the case: it addresses a new tendency to patrol the borders.
How have both queerness and the expansion of rights concerned with gender and sexual
freedom and justice become such objects of investment?4
The political stakes here are multiple and complex. The signifier ‘queer’ has assumed
many different meanings as a result of its widespread expansion. At the intersection of
 608 L. Sabsay

race, culture and sexuality, a far more critical queer activism and scholarship has emerged,
aiming to attest to the whiteness of the hegemonic queer tradition and its indifference
towards the racialised dimension of queer configurations (Haritaworn 2008, eL Tayeb
2011, Jivraj et al. 2011).5 What it means to be politically queer, and what political
compromises queers should make, will necessarily continue to be open to discussion,
negotiation and cultural translation. Obviously, the queer character of a political
intervention will only make sense according to the context of different geo-political sites.
To establish an a priori of what would define it as such would be to repeat an already
extensively criticised universalist position.
Although the debate over universalism seems to be out-dated, the critiques of
universalist positions seem to be still relevant in the field of queer struggles when we take
into account that the nationalist or imperialist defence of what could be understood as the
‘democratisation of gender and sexuality’ either within the nation or abroad, depends on a
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universalist understanding of (a normalised version of) queerness. Such investments in

gender and sexual democratisation not only determine in advance the ways in which
queerness should be performed for queers to be read as such, but also orientalises those
who are reluctant to perform their queerness according to these (in fact provincial)
standards.

Sexual politics and orientalism

How are we to consider the relationship between sexual democratisation and the complex
blend of orientalism, nationalism and cultural imperialism with which the normalisation of
queerness has become identified? I would like to suggest that we are confronted with a
perverse logic by which the inclusion in recent decades of gendered and sexual ‘others’ in
Euro-American imaginaries of citizenship has led to the formulation of what has been
called ‘sexual citizenship’, propounding the formation of new sexual rights-bearing
subjects as if they were already existing entities. This reification of the sexual rights-
bearing subject presumes that gender and sexuality are universal entitlements rather than
specific outcomes of social and political struggles. This universalist (and hegemonic)
‘sexual epistemology’, as Joseph Massad (2007) calls it, remains unquestioned even
among some sexually progressive critiques denouncing the co-optation of progressive
sexual ideals for imperialist, populist, racist and exclusionary projects (I return to what I
take to be the caveats of such critiques in the following sections).
Arguably, to better understand the exclusionary logic that sexual democratisation has
assumed, it will not be sufficient to emphasise the ways in which the democratisation of
gender and sexuality have come to help nation-building discourses and politics. I think it is
necessary to consider the terms through which sexual democratisation is formulated. How
are gender and sexuality conceived under current political conditions? What and who do
these politics supposedly defend when we consider their mode of address? Admittedly,
these are rather large questions. To broach them in a preliminary way, in what follows I
will discuss how the notion of sexual universal rights operates. I aim to highlight how this
notion produces the ideal of universal inclusiveness on the basis of an exclusionary logic
that depends on the parallel configuration of those who are to be included within the realm
of rights and their constitutive Other.
The fact that sexuality has come to be viewed as an entitlement of a rights-bearing
subject is but one instance of this discursive field of political liberalism that has come to
monopolise sexual politics and the very meaning of ‘sexual democracy’.6 It works directly
in the service of a double standard that is aptly illuminated by current US politics
 Citizenship Studies 609

concerning humanitarian discourse.7 To what extent the US approach to human rights has
shifted during President Obama’s administration is a highly controversial matter.
Notwithstanding the extent to which Obama’s administration has followed or changed his
predecessor’s lines of action, President Obama’s foreign policies increasingly rely on his
rhetorical commitment to the promotion of human rights, freedom and democracy across
the world. Whereas the administration of President Bush justified US interventions in a
much more overtly imperialist and self-defensive manner, President Obama bases his
policies on allegedly humanitarian solidarity with the well-being of the Other. In this
context, the motive of the protecting of LGBT people across the world started to play a
central role in the justification of his foreign policies; as Hilary Clinton declared in a
speech she gave at the Palais des Nations of Geneva, Switzerland, on the occasion of the
celebration of Human Rights Day, the recognition of human rights of LGBT people ‘is
now one of the remaining human rights challenges of our time’.8
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Clinton made this declaration on 6 December 2011, the same day that President
Obama formally urged US officials to consider how countries treat their gay and lesbian
populations when making decisions about allocating foreign aid. In a Presidential
Memorandum delivered by the White House that day, Barak Obama stated:
The struggle to end discrimination against LGBT persons is a global challenge, and one that is
central to the United States’ commitment to promoting human rights. I am deeply concerned
by the violence and discrimination targeting LGBT persons around the World . . .
The Department of State shall lead a standing group . . . to help ensure the Federal
Government’s swift and meaningful response to serious incidents that threaten the human
rights of LGBT persons abroad.
Agencies engaged abroad are directed to strengthen existing efforts to effectively combat the
criminalization by foreign governments of LGBT status or conduct...9
A critical reader may well ask, does President Obama make the same demands of the Tea
Party and the fundamentalist Christian right in his home country? The flagrant gap between
the diligent vigilance he selectively shows towards sexual rights violations abroad and the
lack of concern about what happens at home is indeed striking. However, it does work. As
Jasbir Puar puts it, ‘homosexual subjects who have limited legal rights in the U.S. civil
context gain significant representational currency when situated within the global scene of
the war on terror’ (Puar 2007, p. 4). The message contained in Obama’s call is part of the
same discourse that has justified the recent US wars as making good on a commitment to
liberate gender oppressed and sexually intolerant societies from themselves. The anti-
discrimination ideal conveyed here does not preclude the imperial function that this call
actually serves.
President Obama’s claim closely follows the logic of what Joseph Massad (2007)
termed the ‘Gay International’. Massad uses ‘Gay International’ to refer to those
organisations that, by basing their claims on human rights discourse, represent both the
missionary task of liberating gays across the world and the discourses they produce.
Emblematic representatives of the Gay International are the International Lesbian and Gay
Association (ILGA), the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission
(IGLHRC), Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. According to Massad, it is
pure and raw cultural imperialism that motivates the Gay International ‘in undertaking this
universalising project’, by which, he continues, ‘the Gay International ultimately makes
itself feel better about a world it forces to share its identifications’ (Massad 2007, p. 190).
For Massad, the organisations of the Gay International not only represent the friendly
branch of armed interventions, although this aspect is also central to his arguments, but
 610 L. Sabsay

also and fundamentally entail the definition of the terms on which sexual modernisation
can and should be achieved and recognised.
Considered from the perspective of the constitution of potential sexual citizens or,
more precisely, potential sexual political subjects, what is at stake here is the hegemony of
a western mode of understanding the sexual subject who would become, by virtue of this
sexuality, a potential claimant of rights. Here, it is not so much a blunt disqualifying
process by which the ‘cultural other’ – constructed as sexually undeveloped, primitive,
religiously repressed, homophobic and traditional – is brought to the fore. Rather, while
various culturally specific sexual practices are destroyed through this framework, they are
also being offered ‘admission’ to democratic modernity on the condition that they conform
to western norms.
However, in order to work, the colonisation (and victimisation) of either southern,
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coloured, religious – today especially Muslim – and orientalised gays, lesbians, bisexuals,
queers and trans people depends on these normative cultural frameworks to which they are
subjected through exclusion or compulsory assimilation. This means that the inclusive
discourse of human rights offers to ‘cultural others’ admission to the realm of the political as
long as they adhere to secular, modern and what the west understands as democratic sexual
norms.10 But in order to do so, it configures the culture to which ‘the victims of human rights
violations’ belong as being in opposition to secularism, modernity, tolerance, and those
anti-discriminatory ideals and democratic values implied by the western understandings of
sexual freedom and justice.
Through the logic of human or universal sexual rights that defines the terms on which
sexual citizenship might be configured, the sexual citizen becomes the reference point by
which every sexual subjectivity can be thought of as political. This sexual subject does not
need to conform exclusively to heterosexual norms, but still, it does have to conform to
other western sexual norms that would entitle it to become lesbian, gay or transgender in
such terms that all sexual rights might be attested to it. In this way, this sexual subject also
becomes the referent by which international human rights organisations and western
governments at national and regional levels now draw the bad and the good sexual
political subject, and by extension, the east and the west, and also the north and the south.
When the Ugandan gay activist David Kato was killed in Uganda in January 2011, this
oppositional logic was also mobilised. Tragic as it was, this event gave way to a myriad of
discourses condemning Ugandan ‘vernacular outrageous homophobia’ carefully ignoring
the fact that the conservative Christian groups that espouse antigay beliefs have a
prominent influence in Uganda. It is not my task here to adjudicate the question of whether
or not there is homophobia in Uganda, as in other places around the world. I just want to
point out how homophobia was understood to be intrinsic to this ‘cultural site’ and its
practices, and how, in turn, the characterisation of Uganda as essentially homophobic and
backward legitimates the project of modernisation.
Indeed, modernisation in this context implies not only the establishment of a rights-
bearing subject with rights to sexuality, but also a set of cultural norms that alternately
expel and assimilate non-western ‘others’. Consider the operation of both of these
dimensions of liberal discourse in Hilary Clinton’s response to the assassination of Kato:
Everywhere I travel on behalf of our country, I make it a point to meet with young people and
activists – people like David – who are trying to build a better, stronger future for their
societies. I let them know that America stands with them, and that their ideas and commitment
are indispensible to achieving the progress we all seek . . . Our ambassadors and diplomats
around the world will continue to advance a comprehensive human rights policy, and to stand
 Citizenship Studies 611

with those who, with their courage, make the world a more just place where every person can
live up to his or her God-given potential.11
In contrast to the ‘bad others’ who actually killed the gay activist, Kato functions in
Clinton’s discourse as the representative of the ‘good other’ who identifies himself with –
in this case – American notions of progress. Far from being inclusive, this interpellation
configures a sometimes more implicit and sometimes more explicit set of ‘others’ who fail
to integrate: those ‘non-integrated others’ who serve as a background of and foil for the
‘good integrated ones’. The split between ‘bad and good others’ is not just an opposition:
the former defines the conditions of possibility of the latter, and so becomes its constitutive
Other. In this way, the apparent inclusive discourse of universal human rights produces a
tension between integrated and non-integrated ‘others’ showing the process of othering on
which inclusive ideals depend.
We can uncover this logic within European politics concerning LGBTI asylum seekers
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and migration as well (see Barbero in this issue). Asylum seekers are welcomed in Europe
on the basis of non-discrimination against cross-gender identification or sexual
orientation, as long as they adhere to a recognisable form of gayness or transgenderness
(Bracke 2012). However, in a much less benevolent fashion, the development of anti-
migrant policies within the EU, where migrants are by default assumed to be homophobic
and have to prove their liberal credentials, gives clear account of the othering logic on
which integration is based (Bracke and Fadil 2009, Mepschen et al. 2010, Bracke 2011).
Direct exclusion is not the only process by which the idea of a queer nation has come
to stand for the modern, the secular and the democratic, redefining the borders of western
late modernity in sexual terms. Indeed, a complicated process of inclusive othering
takes place when this new sexual respectability, that now imaginarily includes some (but
not all) former sexual ‘others’ defined by liberal European and US ideals, becomes the
benchmark against which every sexual subject must be measured. Through fostering
the orientalisation of all those cultural ‘others’ who are seen as apparently ‘insufficient’
according to this standard, the double moral principle enacted by European and American
governments justifies missionary western interventions abroad and a selective exclusion at
home.

Approaching sexual democracy?

To what extent and in which forms this liberalising trend regarding the ‘acceptance’ of
gender and sexual diversity has actually developed in the so-called advanced western
democracies should be the subject of further consideration.12 I come to this point later,
when discussing the model of sexual citizenship on which sexual democratisation is based.
But in the aftermaths of the war on terror, it clearly indicates that national and regional
politics of exclusion and cultural othering have assumed new sexual forms.
As already indicated, this fact has been the object of an extended critique, prompting a
relatively recent mass of scholarship concerned with the various forms and multifaceted
aspects this process involves. This emergent field of enquiry is clearly heterogeneous. Given
the complexity of the phenomenon, critical insights tackle different issues and encompass a
wide range of approaches, which sometimes differ in accent and reveal significant
differences, attributable to the particularities of the case under analysis or to the use of
different analytical tools. The location of these analyses is fundamental in the production
of these differences. But there is a more fundamental confrontation within this emergent
field that does not merely reflect a different perspective or situation of analysis, and instead
reveals an utterly divergent understanding of what the phenomenon at stake is. This
 612 L. Sabsay

fundamental confrontation concerning the comprehension of the phenomenon itself relates

directly to both radical divergent valuations and opposing political stakes and commitments
in relation to it.
It was a queer intersectional critique that shed light on the orientalist and racialised
enactment of sexual politics, which at the same time implies the sexualised enactment
of orientalist mentalities at the service of imperial and/or nationalist projects. This
ground-breaking critical perspective counters a hegemonic position that I would define
as a humanist response to this problem. The humanist approach does not neglect this
phenomenon altogether. Yet, while it is aimed to counter the uses of progressive sexual
politics for cultural and political domination, it cannot question the already racialised and
orientalist presuppositions that are intrinsic to its universalist understanding of both
sexuality and politics. At the same time, in contrast to this humanist response to the
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challenges posed by intersectionality, we can also identify an anti-imperialist framework.

Although this framework would be more proximate to the critique of intersectional
approaches, due to its unidirectional comprehension of cultural and sexual imperialism, its
radical critique leads to a different response in relation to possible resistances to this trend.
In what follows, I will describe some of the most relevant differences among these positions
in order to highlight the questions they open up and the challenges they pose.
The process of othering involved in the entwinement between the democratisation of
sexuality and the mobilisation of orientalist and colonial mentalities needs, and at the same
time produces, reified versions of cultural and sexual identities. This aspect of sexual
politics calls for the need to rethink intersectional approaches. And certainly, these points
had to be made. It was precisely in an attempt to contest fixed views on identity and cultural
stereotypes, which intersectional perspectives have criticised both pluralist and
multiculturalist essentialist assumptions regarding self-sufficient identities that were
presumed to be clear and distinct totalities. According to the intersectional perspective,
identity would become a matter of positionalities shaped by unstable negotiations with a
number of entangled axes of power (the popular class/gender/race trilogy). Undoubtedly, as
an analytical tool for interventions by subaltern feminisms ‘concerned with “decentring”
the “normative subject” of feminism’ (Brah and Phoenix 2004, p. 78), intersectionality has
offered a more complex understanding of both power and identity formations that continues
to be crucially relevant today (Brah and Phoenix 2004, Lutz et al. 2011).
There is a challenge that intersectional approaches might confront, though. Insofar as
intersectional approaches find their places of resistance and contestation within the realm
of marginalised identities – like feminist intersectional positions in the 1980s – they are
obliged to constantly negotiate and keep open the apparently irresolvable tension between
the deconstruction of identities and the identity politics of minority groups. This is a
necessary counter to the threats posed by the mainstreaming of intersectionality, when it is
used, for instance, at governmental levels (see Schiek and Lawson 2009, Franken et al.
2011).
When focused on the representation of the marginalised subjects rather than on the
multifaceted lines of power that produce them as invisible, the dissemination of
intersectional axioms risks the reification of particular marginalised identities (Dhawan
and Castro Varela 2005). This aspect of intersectionality is worth noting as long as the
panorama becomes even more complicated when the same framework that is aimed to
counter multiple discriminations might pave the way to certain ‘white’ investments in
intersectionality, thereby producing new gendered and sexualised cultural stereotypes. As
Jasbir Puar puts it, intersectionality should serve to question a pernicious bias that has
 Citizenship Studies 613

emerged in the era of sexual and cultural diversity, namely ‘the homosexual other is white,
the racial other is straight’ (Puar 2007, p. 32).
Privileging such a focus on the already reified oppressed or marginalised subjects,
these spurious uses of intersectional approaches do not seriously question the axes of
discrimination and inequality built up by the operations of power. Instead of contributing
to the creation of reactionary figures such as the (presumptive heterosexual) ‘oppressed
Muslim woman’, intersectionality should offer us a way to analyse how, for instance,
islamophobic arguments serve the defence of feminist emancipation discourses, or how
new homonormativities are functional to nationalist ideals and therefore complicit with
contemporary forms of cultural racism.
The question that arises from these considerations about the intersection of political
practices (rather than the already reified subjects constituted through them) is whether the
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very notion of sexual democracy is implicated in certain ideas about the secular and the
modern that are already indebted to racist, colonialist and orientalist views at their origins
– and serve them still. If so, then as a result of its conceptual and cultural presuppositions,
sexual democratisation is inherently implicated in this American –Eurocentric logic.
One way out of this conclusion is to assume a ‘humanist’ approach, according to which
both processes – in this case, the democratisation of sexuality and the renewal of
orientalist discourses – are merely de facto mutually implicated in one another. Without
going further into the conditions which have produced this mutual entanglement,
according to the humanist approach the ideals of sexual freedom and gender equity have
been used or instrumentalised by nationalist agendas. As a consequence of this view,
sexual democracy and colonial and racist bias become external to one another, appearing
only to be related in an accidental (or historically contingent) way.
This is, I think, why the perspective offered by Éric Fassin is untenable. Fassin (2011a)
has pointed out that the progressive ideals concerned with gender justice and sexual
recognition have become instrumental to the definition of western modern national
identities as opposed to their ‘others’. For Fassin (2011b), the uses of this western
progressive impulse that he refers to as ‘sexual democracy’ might be enmeshed with
extending western values abroad, as in the case of America, or with defending cultural
borders inside, as in the case of Europe. Either way, he rightly points out that sexual
democracy has become an instrument for governments to implement other discriminations
based on cultural, religious or racial differences.
However, although Fassin detects the instances where the democratic ideals of ‘sexual
democracy’ contradict themselves – for instance showing how the ideals of sexual
inclusion and recognition revert to cultural exclusion and segregation – he does not
question the implications of these ideals, but rather calls for them to be fully met. From the
point of view of the instrumentalisation hypothesis articulated by Fassin, sexual
democracy’s ideals are not questioned. In a humanist fashion, these ideals become
universal and it would be only its spurious uses that should be contested. According to this
perspective, sexual democracy’s particularistic origin would be disavowed. In this way,
the ideals of sexual democracy would be cleansed of any power relations, and its
asymmetric conditions of appearance and development would be erased.
What makes this view untenable is its ignorance that certain specifically western
assumptions are constitutive of sexual democracy itself, and therefore sexual democracy
becomes a necessarily American –Eurocentric construct; it is these ideals that have to be
interrogated. This would be an anti-imperialist account as opposed to the humanist one I
characterised before. This is in fact the argument that Joseph Massad has made.
 614 L. Sabsay

Massad argues that these ideals are indebted to the western imperialist impulse, which
today is represented by the Gay International. He points out that ‘the Gay International is
destroying social and sexual configurations of desire in the interest of reproducing a world
in its own image, one wherein its sexual categories and desires are safe from being
questioned’ (2007, p. 189). Along these lines, Massad also sees any non-western project
concerned with calls for sexual justice as a result of the destructive forces of western
cultural imperialism. He notes that what he calls the Gay International ‘is proceeding
apace with little opposition from the majority of the sexual beings it wants to “liberate”
and whose social and sexual worlds it is destroying in the process . . . ’ (Massad 2007,
p. 190). I agree with Massad to this extent, but if one follows his argument further, it does
not seem likely that he would believe in the possibility of any queer resistance to sexual
imperialism either.
Insofar as queer frameworks have originated in the west and, to Massad’s view the
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queer is articulated in a western language, one might ask whether would this mean for him
that any queer politics would be destined to enact the same particularist and orientalist
stance as the Gay International. Certainly, such a view raises the question of whether there
is, and might still be, a radical democratic claim that can actively contest and refuse those
structural orientalist biases without being trapped within its logic (see Nahaboo in this
issue).
The question here is whether another image for sexual democracy is thinkable – for
instance, non-racist or that can overcome colonial and orientalist assumptions and be more
inclusive – or whether the Others of sexual democracy are the constitutive outside of
sexual democracy itself, awaiting their admittance through forms of assimilation. Yet,
between the humanist denial of the profound particularity of certain universalistic
democratic values and the radical anti-imperialist criticism of any and every universal
claim à la Massad, in less aporetic terms, the question remains: why – and how – have the
democratisation of sexuality and the development of nationalisms based on sexual
progressivism become entangled in just such a manner? What are the conditions which
made this entanglement possible?
In my view, one of the difficulties presented by the arguments that put the focus
almost exclusively on the sexualisation of cultural otherings is that they overlook the
question of the kind of political sexual subjectivity that could lead to a sexual citizen. I
propose that one way to analyse the conditions that made this entanglement possible is
through the institution of citizenship. If the universal sexual subject – citizen is at the core
of the production of cultural ‘others’, we need to focus on how this ‘sexual citizen’ has
been constituted and on the assumptions about her as a political subject, namely as a
citizen, that are operating within the political field of struggles over sexual freedom and
justice.

The birth of sexual citizenship

In what follows, I attempt to demonstrate that the institution of sexual citizenship still
carries with it the traces of the subject – citizen configured under the framework of political
liberalism. Just as we have seen how the subject of rights reduced the sexual field to the
right to sexuality that belongs to such a subject, we can also see (a) the specifically sexual
norms and modes of regulation that have been part of the production of this liberal citizen,
and (b) the model of exclusionary integration that governs the idea of a democratic
modernity or modernisation. Both of these trends help to establish the liberal subject
of rights who, in turn, has become a model for sexual democratisation that depends upon
 Citizenship Studies 615

the exclusion and/or assimilation into a progressive history of those who are considered
backward or outside.
The notion of sexual citizenship was developed in the 1990s, and became a significant
constituent in the mainstream of current sexual politics of recognition and inclusion (see
Bell and Binnie 2000). In order to consider the scope of sexual citizenship, it is useful to
remember Diane Richardson’s distinction between different kinds of sexual rights
(Richardson 2000). Richardson remarked that there are two broad notions of sexual
citizenship: the first is related to specific sexual rights addressed to particular
communities; the second is concerned with the differential accessibility to universal
rights depending on one’s own gender and/or sexuality. The former refers to the politics of
recognition of particular sexual identities, such as the right to self-definition and freedom
of expression of one’s sexual identity or gender (i.e. the gender identity law). The latter
points to the horizon of equality: in other words, to the principle of inclusion of every
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subject within the scope of universal citizenship and equal rights (i.e. gay marriage) and
involves those measures against discrimination based on gender identity or sexual
orientation.
The notion of sexual citizenship emerged from the critique of the heterocentric bias
that the notion of citizenship entails (Warner 1993, Richardson 1996, Berlant 1997). One
of the main aims of this critique was to counter the heteronormative assumptions of the
public sphere and the divide between the public and private domains, as well as the
heteronormative central figure of the family that organises the latter. In this sense, the
development of sexual citizenship not only implied a critique of what in the USA is
understood as a liberal or libertarian approach to rights, by which sexuality is conceived as
a strictly private matter (Warner 1997). Through more radical or hopeful eyes, the promise
of sexualising citizenship (understood as de-hetero-sexualising citizenship) pointed to the
possibility of transforming the norms of citizenship as a whole, as well as the public and
political fields that give citizenship its meaning and scope as a heterosexual construct.
However, this critique still remained attached to certain unquestioned ideas about
citizenship, such as the entitlement of an abstract individual and the universal subject–
citizen. The notion of sexual citizenship countered the heterosexual bias of citizenship, but
with regard to the kind of abstract and individualistic political subjectivity that the western
normative institution of citizenship presumes, it left the notion of citizenship as it found it.
The sexualisation of citizenship, therefore, brought with it the inheritance of ‘political
orientalism’ (see Isin in this issue). In effect, through this restricted institution of
citizenship, the abstract individual becomes entitled to be a subject of rights by virtue of
his or her universal and equal value. But, according to Isin (2002, 2005), this western
classical notion of citizenship is configured through an orientalist view that depends on the
production of the Other of western modernity as lacking the abstract and universal subject
position that defines the subject precisely as a citizen. The citizen is already an orientalised
construct.
Through this particular conception of citizenship as the potential entitlement of an
abstract individual, a certain liberal self is also produced and reified as an essential
attribute and ultimate reality of the subject. Within this framework, political practices
would be articulated in certain ways to mobilise this particular kind of self, and at the same
time, it would be only this kind of self who would be entitled to do politics. The self I am
referring to is proper to an individualised sovereign subject, capable of self-reflection (and
therefore able to govern herself), which corresponds to the figure that Michel Foucault
characterised as the subject of liberalism. It is based on this idea of citizenship as an
entitlement of an abstract individual/subject of rights conceived as a liberal self that sexual
 616 L. Sabsay

democracy could then define itself as implicitly secular, and stand for personal liberties
and individual rights.
In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault (2008) describes liberalism as a regime of
government where a new relation between state and subjects is established. The kernel of
liberalism is freedom, and it would be ‘the management and organisation of the conditions
in which one can be free’ that would distinguish the liberal reason from any other form of
government (Foucault 2008, pp. 63 –64). According to Foucault, what characterises
liberalism is that it is a ‘consumer of freedom’, which can only function, he continues,
‘insofar as a number of freedoms actually exist’ (p. 63). Of course, the freedoms of the
subject of liberalism are not there as a universal given; Foucault says, if ‘the new
governmental reason needs freedom’, this means that ‘it must produce it’ (p. 63).
The emergence of liberalism signals the constitution of the sovereign-free individual
and it is within this liberal framework that we can understand western modernity as a
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situation where subjects will be interpellated by the state as free subjects. It is through this
‘liberating regime’ that subjectivation occurs and that is how freedom comes into play, not
in opposition to oppression but as a specific modality of power. In this regard, it is worth
noting that the liberal self and the Foucauldian sexual subject are born together under the
episteme of liberalism as a new form of relationship between governors and governed.
Following Foucault’s insight one could suggest that it was precisely through this
liberal self that sexuality was also produced and reified as an already existing reality and
an entitlement of such a self (always already enticed to want to be free). According to
Foucault, ‘liberalism must produce freedom, but this very act entails the establishment of
limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations’ (p. 64). In order to govern, he
continues, ‘freedom of behaviour is entailed, called for, needed, and serves as a
regulator . . . ’ (p. 65). If the liberal system of freedom entails a whole new regulative order,
as he argued in the first volume of the History of Sexuality (1990 [1976]), freedom with
regard to sexual behaviour will not be exempted from it.
We can see the traces of this liberal framework enabling the current entanglement of
sexual freedom and justice ideals and colonial and orientalist projects if we look at the
normative frameworks that regulate the notions of identity and the sovereign subject,
which sustain the ideal of sexual democracy itself. As far as the sovereign subject is
concerned, we can give an example. At the centre of the continuing veil debate in France
and in Spain, for instance, is the question of autonomy (related to an idea of freedom
reduced to choice and individual rights) and the presumption that women cannot choose to
use a hijab (Scott 2007). As Joan Scott pointed out in her analysis of the headscarf
controversy in France, the positions for and against the ban were partly organised around
one central question: ‘could the headscarf be considered a legitimate expression of
individual conscience and therefore warrant protection under liberal secular law?’ (Scott
2007, p. 124). At stake within the veil debate was the defence of a restricted notion of
liberal sovereignty of the individual that, in Scott words, ‘exists prior to his or her choices
of lifestyle, values and politics’. These choices, Scott continues, are conceived as ‘external
expressions of a fixed inner self, a self which, by definition, cannot relinquish its
autonomy’ (p. 127). The problem appears when certain choices cannot be considered as
expressions of such liberal self, endangering the problematic relationship between
‘sovereign autonomy’ and the legal definition of the subject of rights.
Similarly, feminist abolitionist stakes in relation to sex work and the current
hegemonic sex trafficking discourse rely on the idea of slavery and assume that no sex
worker would ever choose to make a living from the sex industry. Within this framework,
the campaigns against sex trafficking generated by mainstream feminist groups have relied
 Citizenship Studies 617

upon the monolithic representation of migrant women in their entirety as mere victims of
hetero-patriarchy and various ‘pre-modern’ sexist gender cultures (Andrijasevic 2010).
In situations such as these, the ideas of individual sovereignty and freedom, understood
in terms of personal choice as a requirement to be entitled to become a subject of rights,
shows its limitations, since it seems that certain choices, such as wearing a hijab and also
working in commercial sex, could not be choices at all. As Scott remarked, from the point
of view of those in favour of the ban of the veil in France, even when girls chose to wear
a headscarf, ‘wearing a veil didn’t represent a choice that could be respected as such’
(Scott 2007, p. 125). These regulative forces evoke a paradoxical notion of individual
sovereignty and freedom that serves as a requirement for becoming a potential subject of
rights, and therefore a potential political subject as well. It appears that only certain kinds
of personal choices can be regarded as a legitimate expression of sovereign autonomy,
since when other choices are made, they are suddenly understood as what are called,
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oxymoronically, ‘compulsory choices’ that serve as evidence that such subjects lack
sovereign autonomy altogether. In this way, the normative restrictions on what counts as a
possible personal choice become a way to deny the autonomy of those they describe and
judge. In order to be understood as a sovereign subject, certain compulsory choices should
have been already made.
With regard to the problem of identity, in a similar manner, the politics of recognition
concerned with sexual diversity depend on sexual norms of citizenship that point both
to the normalisation of former sexual ‘others’ and to the configuration of a new sexual
respectability, based on the inclusion of some sexual ‘others’ – invested as sexual citizens –
and the exclusion of sexual dissidents who challenge those norms. Indeed, it is not a radically
queer version of sexual practices and gender positions and relations that has been at
work within international organisations defending the human rights of lesbian, gay and
transgender people. Nor is it a radically queer understanding of sexual freedom and justice
that is at stake within national frameworks of self-democratic affirmation and nation-building
discourses that now define their cultural borders in sexual terms. The scope of ‘sexual
diversity’ does not easily encompass those who are not normalised according to the grammars
of this version of sexual progressivism: sex workers; gender queers and those who exhibit
non-conforming expressions of gender that cannot be easily classified according to the
available institutionalised gender variants; bisexuals or others with more problematic sexual
‘orientations’ or preferences; non-monogamous, or even not already coupled sexual others.
Within the framework of liberal citizenship, sexual politics facilitated certain ways of
being and certain claims and ways of making claims by which the possibilities of being
integrated as a sexual rights-bearing subject were normalised according to the ideals of a
sexual diversity based in normalised and discreet identities. By the same move, those
racialised beings that challenge this identity-based map have been orientalised.
This process of orientalisation relates to ideas of sexual modernisation and progress
(see Harrington, Nahaboo, both in this issue). In effect, when the sexual rights-bearing
subject becomes the referent by which to measure every sexual subject, it is a progressive
narrative that is at stake: those who do not recognise this referent are conceived either as
strangers, because of their refusal to define themselves in accordance to this point of
reference, or as outsiders unable to recognise this referent ‘yet’; therefore, something has
to be done for them to acquire this capacity in time.
Of course, through the narrative of progress, this referent forecloses what can be
considered political. This is the referent against which the terms of political sexual
subjectivity are articulated, and if one wants to be political one can only be so in the terms
that this referent gives. Political liberalism and the Eurocentric institution of citizenship
 618 L. Sabsay

are not just models but also a narrative in which some people move forward and others are
left behind or outside. Sexual rights have taken on a role in this story, understood as a
moment or stage in the progressive advance of democracy. And in this way, some
feminists and G&L movements focused on the politics of inclusion have therefore
legitimated this orientalising idea of progress.
Activists who identify as queer and trans activists of colour have been seeking to
disrupt the progressive narrative that belongs to such orientalist projects. Among them,
one could mention, for example, the queer and trans activists groups GLADT, LesMigraS,
SUSPECT and ReachOut, which acquired a prominent visibility when Judith Butler
refused the Berlin Pride Prize for civil courage she was offered by mainstream German
LGBT associations in 2010, and symbolically passed it to them. In a massive act on the
occasion of the Berlin Gay Pride, on 19 June 2010 Judith Butler publicly refused this prize
due to complicity in racism of the Berlin Pride organisers, stating that if she could take the
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prize she would only do so to offer it to these German groups, because they are the queers
who ‘render this racism’ visible and ‘are fighting against such a policy’.13 Certainly, these
intersectional expressions of the queer can teach us something about citizenship or
political subjectivity aimed at countering orientalism in their will to enhance the meaning
of the political that is prevalent in sexual mainstream politics.
This act performed an alliance between generations, and in this way, it stands out for
the possibility of thinking in alternative stories. In this regard, it is worth noting that
originally, queer activists were also thinking of a different politics, beyond both the state
and a restricted notion of the political (Cooper 1994, Duggan and Hunter 1995). In this
sense, one could posit that when Butler symbolically offered this prize to the German
activist groups in alliance with queer and trans activists of colour that fight against
homophobia, transphobia, sexism, racism and militarism, she was showing her solidarity
with their struggles. But also, her act implied a dispute and a re-negotiation of the political
meaning of what could be identified as queer and the drawing of a queer counter-narrative
as well.

Conclusion
For many activists, in the beginning of the 1990s, being politically queer meant countering
both the entanglement between heteronormativity and nationalism and the policing of
identity. For them queer politics was defined by the claim for a non-heteronormative public
space that could be safe for sexual dissidents and against the normalisation of sexuality
implied in some gay and lesbian minority identity politics. More recently, the emergence of
homonationalism has inspired a contemporary generation of queer and trans activists and
scholars to critique the ways in which queering nationalism has been serving racist and
orientalist purposes as well as the hegemonic homonormative ideas that reign within some
progressive but still humanist politics, and certainly within the institutionalised liberal
LGBTQ politics, which live in complicity with homonationalist ideals.14
The sexual reinvention of citizenship over the last three decades is at the centre of the
formation of a new ‘western late modern’ sexual respectability that now not only includes
some former sexual ‘others’ at the cost of further exclusions and normalisation, but also
has played a key role in defining what it means to be democratic against a myriad of
colonised and orientalised ‘others’. I argued that the unquestioned liberal assumptions
about sexual citizenship forms one of the main conditions that gave rise to the position of
the sexual citizen as the basis of the homonormative forms in which nationalism and
sexuality are currently entangled. This position underscores the importance of setting the
 Citizenship Studies 619

critique of the colonial and orientalist logic of sexual democracy within the broader
critique of a restrictive version of citizenship in relation to its liberal assumptions.
Countering the liberal imaginary, an intersectional approach allows us to see that
the current forms of homonationalism that are serving racist, colonial, imperialist and
orientalist purposes are inconceivable without or outside the normalisation of the queer
and the consequent conversion of the queer into another identity-based community within
a liberal framework. In effect, the current sexualisation of western modernity against its
‘others’ and the demarcation of national frontiers in sexual terms constitutively require the
disciplining of sexuality in accordance with its own liberal, either multiculturalist or
pluralist terms.
In the context of liberal democracy, subjecthood and identity remain intimately linked
to imaginary fixed, recognisable, stable and unequivocal positions, and in these terms,
sexuality and cultural difference continue to be central to the pluralisation of identities and
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to the drawing of the political map. This imposes a limit on the field of citizenship that is
sustained by norms that implicitly regulate what form those identities are compelled to
take, and relates directly to very specific versions of who the sexual subject of rights is, and
under what conditions this subject can be read as such. The kind of self that establishes the
field of what can be conceived as politics is sustained by a conception of sovereign
freedom, which, effectively, extends to cultural and political regulation of ‘others’ who are
understood to lack this defining characteristic for ‘becoming political’, that is becoming
the subject of rights.
How can the ideal of sexual freedom question its own current regulatory dimension
and, while preserving the right to non-sovereign forms of autonomy, point beyond the
scheme of personal liberties and the western conception of individual sovereignty, which
is, in effect, profoundly exclusionary? This first question leads to even larger ones: Can we
do without the idea of ‘having a right’? Would it be a good idea to abandon the language of
rights altogether? Shall we look for another language beyond citizenship? It is not my task
to try to find the answers to such questions. The people articulating their claims in
whatever language this might happen are already doing this work.
Maybe thinking in terms of citizenship after orientalism means in this case continuing to
pose these questions in order to disrupt the narrative of progress that dismisses other sexual
struggles and justifies both normalising and condescending or overtly discriminatory racist
cultural assessments. This task demands that we question the universalising normative
framework that forecloses what we can understand as political, and reminds us that the
language of western sexual citizenship is by no means the only way of making sexual claims.
This challenge implies keeping open the basic political issue of how bodies and their
pleasures can and do become the locus of political practices of citizenship beyond liberal
and orientalist presumptions. Moreover, it forces us to question the colonial or orientalist
over-determinations that confirm a hegemonic understanding of the kind of subjects who
can make demands and the forms those demands can take.

Acknowledgements
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council
under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007 –2013)/ERC grant
agreement no. 249379. I thank Professor Engin Isin, who patiently followed the development of this
article and offered many significant suggestions for improvement, and Professor Judith Butler, for
her encouragement and insightful comments on previous versions of it. My gratitude extends to my
colleagues of the Oecumene research group, who have discussed with me some of the ideas I present
here. I am also grateful for discussions with colleagues during the Opening the Boundaries of
 620 L. Sabsay

Citizenship Conference (6 – 11 February 2012, The Open University), where I presented parts of this
essay in its first stages. Finally, thanks to Jack Harrington and Angela Duthie for their help with
editing.

Notes
1. Heteronormativity refers to the naturalisation of normative heterosexuality and the gender
binary on which heterosexuality depends as the standard norm that organises society. It describes
a ‘sexual order’ organised around the deeply embedded assumption that heterosexuality is
equivalent to ‘the normal’ and the consequent socio-sexual hierarchy that defines and marks all
gender positions and sexualities in relation to the heterosexual norm. Heteronormativity is
embedded in every social institution, at the level of actual policies, everyday practices, cultural
imaginaries, enacted through manifold of heterocentric assumptions implicit in the ways social
relations, practices and identities are hierarchically imagined.
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2. Although there are substantial differences between the logic of othering typical of feminist and
gay rescue narratives, the emancipationist discourse of feminism and the victimisation of
‘other women’, be they Muslim, Maghrebi, Latin American or Roma women, has still many
similar points in common with the discourses in defence of gay and lesbian human rights
(Bracke 2012, Haritaworn 2012). The ‘globalisation of sexual diversity’ (Binnie 2004) faces
vexed debates and controversies that to some extent resemble those that were aroused when
subaltern feminisms denounced the colonial logic of humanist ‘first world’ feminists for not
being able to forge an alternative understanding of gender, and were therefore impotent to
contest what Gayatri Spivak brilliantly synthesised as the enterprise of ‘white men saving
brown women from brown men’ (2010 [1988]: 49).
3. Incidentally, in Spain, the congressional deliberation on the ‘Religious Freedom’ bill has been
delayed due to the vexed tensions that the debates on the hijab have brought to the fore.
4. In fact, we have contested meanings of the signifier ‘queer’. For instance, when referring to the
movement towards the nationalisation of the queer along my argument, in a more or less
implicit way, the signifier queer evoked and was extensive of LGBT contemporary politics.
This slippery character that I give to the term is not due to my own personal ambiguous or
careless use of it. On the contrary, it is intended to draw the attention to the fact that the field of
meanings of the signifier queer has effectively been marked by the alignment of the queer – in
this context understood as queer community – with LGBT collectives. Many associations, in
effect, have added the letter Q to their branding. Although still distinguished from other
positions, with the addition of the ‘Q’, queers are aligned or conceived as part of the same
movement, as if they were adhering and supporting its demands and politics. Obviously, this is
a contested terrain, and in fact, it has been a contested terrain for many years now (in the early
1990s many prominent figures – Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick and Teresa de Lauretis among
them – were already disputing the normalisation of the queer). And yet, as long as ‘queer’
became more identitarian and normalised in many contexts, it has started to be popularly used
as synonymous with gay and lesbian.
5. Both in the USA and across Europe as well as globally there are quite strong networks of
racialised queer and trans activists drawing the attention to the pitfalls and contradictions of
contemporary politically so-called queer stakes. For example, from the UK, decolonizequeer.-
org, gather a virtual community of queers against homonationalist, islamophobic and racist
trends currently displayed within queer and mainstream LGBT politics. The Safra Project as
well as x:talk, a space mostly dedicated to empower workers in the sex industry to ‘encourage
critical interventions around the issues of migration, gender and labour’ (xtalkproject.net) add
to the list. In Germany, we can mention GLADT, LesMigraS and SUSPECT (including the
blog nohomonationalism.blogspot, active until 2011); in Belgium, Merhaba comprises
‘women, men and trans-gender persons mainly with roots in the Magreb, the Middle East,
Turkey and sub-Saharan Africa who feel attracted by persons of the same sex and/or question
their own sexuality or gender identity’ (merhaba.be). The queer migration research network
reunites a network of scholars from the USA and Europe (mainly UK based) whose website ‘is
dedicated to providing a forum for scholars whose research particularly focuses on the
intersections among international migration and LGBTQ individuals, communities, histories,
cultures, and politics’ (queermigration.com). Also in the USA, manifold of networks of queer
people of colour (many of which are university campus based) have been flourishing in the last
 Citizenship Studies 621

decade, addressing particular communities, such as Latino, Asian and African-American. A list
of many different active networks can be found at: http://www.uic.edu/depts/quic/resources/
queers_of_color.html [Accessed 12 March 2012]. Finally, anti-pinkwashing activism deserves
in this context particular attention, including the following groups: Palestinian Queers
for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, Queers against Israeli Apartheid (Toronto), QUIT
(San Franciso), Helem (Lebanon), Al-Qaws (Jerusalem) and Pinkwatching Israel, ‘a global
web-movement to promote queer-powered calls against Pinkwash and for BDS’
(pinkwatchingisrael.com).
6. I take the term coined by Éric Fassin (2010).
7. This new trend in politics is not exclusive of the USA. Actually, UK Prime Minister David
Cameron has made similar strides in 2011 (see Atluri in this issue).
8. http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2011/12/178368.htm [Accessed 25 April 2012].
9. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/12/06/presidential-memorandum-
international-initiatives-advance-human-rights-l [Accessed 12 March 2012 (my emphasis)].
10. I realise that I am moving from human rights to citizenship rights in a rather rapid manner, but
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the fact is that in the case of matters sexual, governments incorporate human rights approaches
to develop citizenship rights in their obligation to honour their adherence to human rights
international treaties. As many authors have suggested, citizenship has incorporated human
rights language (while the reverse is also the case) making it increasingly difficult to
disentangle both languages (Nash 2009). This entanglement is the object of a rich and complex
debate that I cannot enter in this article.
11. http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2011/01/155520.htm [Accessed 12 March 2012 my
emphasis]. By the interplay among identifications and solidarities mobilised by the use of
the language, the entanglement between progress, modernisation and imperialism is clear:
America – reduplicated by the figure of Clinton as a metonymic voice for America – stands
with the ‘other gays’ (those who are reachable only through travelling) and whose ideals
converge with what America understands as progress. This progress that, firstly, has to be made
in their societies, becomes in the following sentence the progress we all seek. Finally, progress
is rhetorically universalised through a spatial metaphor in the last sentence of the statement,
evoking the task of ‘ . . . making the world a more just place . . . ’.
12. See the report of the EU on Homophobia and Discrimination on Grounds of Sexual Orientation
and Gender Identity in the EU Member States (EUAFFR 2009).
13. http://nohomonationalism.blogspot.com.es/2010/06/judith-butler-refuses-berlin-pride.html
[Accessed 25 April 2012].
14. See note 4.

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