Lund University SIMP25

Department of Gender Studies Autumn term 2013

We are here. We are queer. Get used to it!
Citizenship, governmentality and identity politics
(4440 words)









Kypros Savva

1

1 Introduction
In recent years, issues pertaining to gay rights made the headlines both in Europe and the
United States. I understand such discussions to be an effort to reclaim citizenship status on
behalf of individuals with alternative sexualities
1
. This struggle evolved nowadays into a
quantified reclamation of a list of rights. This is demonstrated, for instance, in ILGA-
Europe's Rainbow Map that presents the legal situation of the human rights of LGBT people
in Europe, as classified in six categories of rights with 46 criteria in total
2
. I believe that there
is more in this reclamation of citizenship and rights struggle, than a complex list of rights to
be achieved.
In this paper I want to explore how this struggle takes place and is accomplished. I
address this issue through Foucaults perspective on governmentality. First, I will introduce
the concepts citizenship and governmentality. Then, I will critically approach the questions
how dominant discourses (re-)produced the identities of individuals with alternative
sexualities, and how social rights movements used such identities as a vehicle for reclaiming
citizenship. My aim is, then, to problematize these identity politics, and expand the
discussion on identities and citizenship with the introduction of queer theory.
I have tried to make use of most of the course literature. I selected ideas and
discussions from the books and articles according to my needs. Some of them get more
reference that others, while some did not qualify as relevant for my present discussion.
Moreover, I expanded the discussion with other materials. Due to space and time
considerations, this paper is more of a brief sketch of my thoughts on these issues, than an in-
depth analysis.
2 Introducing citizenship
An expansive body of literature related to citizenship developed recently, reflecting a variety
of philosophical, legal, social and political framings (Meer, 2010: 8). In general, theories of
citizenship fall into two categories. The normative theories attempt to set out the rights and
duties a citizen ideally ought to have and the ideals of the good citizen (Bellamy, 2008:

1
I try to avoid formulations such as LGBT or queer intentionally. Instead I use the formulation 'individuals with
alternative sexualities' throughout my text when I am speaking about individuals with sexual and gender
expressions and desires other than the heterosexual. I assume that this is more attuned with my argument.
Besides I believe that individuals should not be confined to a mere acronym.
2
ILGA-Europe is the European section of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex
Association, an umbrella international NGO first established in 1978. For the 2013 index see http://www.ilga-
europe.org/home/publications/reports_and_other_materials/rainbow_europe (access 21 October 2013).
2

27). The empirical theories seek to explain how citizens came to possess those rights and
duties that they actually have, and the ways this citizenship status has been granted to
different groups of people (Bellamy, 2008: 28).
Alternative normative approaches were presented. The liberal perspective is based on
the equality of rights of the individual as recognised by the state and protected by the law.
Citizenship is understood in individualistic terms, defined as the set of expectations
specifying the relationship between the nation-state and its members (Yuval-Davis, 1997:
69). The communitarian perspective focuses on the shared norms and values of individuals,
and their mutual responsibilities in the pursuit of the collective good. As such, citizenship is
seen as a status bestowed on all full members of a community, and this conception of
citizenship stands both as a duty towards the community and as civil, political and social
rights deriving from this status (Meer, 2010: 10-11). This communitarian approach is further
expanded by republicanism which sees citizenship both as a status and a means of active
involvement and participation in the common good (Yuval-Davis, 1997: 71).
A definition that summarises such normative approaches, focuses on (a) the
membership/belonging in a political community, (b) the collective benefits/rights associated
with this membership, and (c) the participation in the community's political, economic, and
social processes (Bellamy, 2008: 12). However, such approaches obscure the nuanced and
highly personal ways in which many people, and especially members of historically
disempowered or politically marginalized groups, experience citizenship in everyday life
(Caldwell et al., 2009: 4). Thus in order to understand citizenship, one must see also the
empirical aspect of it.
Central in this aspect is the dialectical tension between notions of inclusion and
exclusion, that is the citizenship of certain types of people and the non-citizenship of others
(Meer, 2010: 9). In order to understand this exclusionary character, one should start from the
foundations of citizenship in the creation of the state. Several empirical analyses were
provided for the nature of the state, with positions varying from the Marxist approaches of the
state as reflecting the interests of the ruling class, to approaches of the state as an
independent institution which mediates between contending pluralist interest groups
(Yuval-Davis, 1997: 13)
3
. In this paper I am interested in the foucauldian perspective on

3
One such feminist approach to the state focuses on the development of the state as a separate sphere, and aims
at explaining the long exclusion of women from the status of citizenship and politics. This has its basis on the
classical theories of the social contract which divide the sphere of civil society into the public and private
domains, with the private domain rendered as politically irrelevant (Yuval-Davis, 1997: 12). Following Carole
Pateman's reading of the social contract, we see the development of fraternity as a system where men get the
3

government, which I will introduce in the following section.
3 Governmentality
Central is this analytical and theoretical perspective is the state, that is the sovereign body
that claims monopoly of independent territorial power and means of violence, [...] inheres in
but lies behind the apparatuses or institutions of organized and formal political authority and
[] is separate from the rulers and the ruled (Dean, 2010: 16). Government is defined as the
conduct of conduct: it involves attempts to shape aspects of the individual's behaviour
according to particular sets of norms and for different ends (Dean, 2010: 18). In his approach,
Foucault rejected the idea of a unitary state (Yuval-Davis, 1997: 14). Instead, he sees a
plurality of governing agencies and authorities, of aspects of behaviour to be governed, of
norms invoked, of purposes sought, and of effects, outcomes and consequences (Dean,
2010: 18).
Governmentality is concerned with the analysis of the different mentalities of
government, the different regimes of practices in governing. The central question in this
analysis is how (Dean, 2010: 33): how we govern and are governed within different regimes
of practices? How do such regimes emerge, continue to operate, and are transformed? For
explaining the idea of governmentality, Lewis identifies three embedded notions: (a) the
modern Western state which strengthened itself by adopting a number of techniques other
than the threat or use of force directly applied to the body; (b) the family which occupies a
central place in governmentality; and (c) the demographic changes in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries in Europe which lead to the formation of a population that became the
telos of the government (Lewis, 2000: 22-23). The government now has the objective to
recreate this population accordingly to fit to the present social policies, law, institutional
arrangements and discourses. This mass of population is transformed into a people with
national, gendered, classed and even raced specificities (Lewis, 2000: 24). This
transformation is conducted with the use of disciplinary power as a normalising strategy for
the creation of stable and domesticated subjects and subject positions (Lewis, 2000: 25).
This perspective demonstrates how the modern state is not established for the totality
of individuals. Different grounds for exclusion from the normalised population are identified,

right to rule over their women in the private domestic sphere, but agree on a contract of a social order of
equality among themselves within the public, political sphere (Yuval-Davis, 1997: 79). This can be seen in
relation to what Acker (2000), for example, explains as regimes of inequality of class, race and gender within
organisations. For reasons of lack of space, I am not expanding this discussion in my text.
4

including gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, religion (Meer, 2010: 10; Yuval-Davis,
1997: 84). Therefore, empirically one sees that the citizenship status is given to individuals
exceptionally, and since it implies certain rights, it is a fair ground for struggle for minorities.
I will further explore this in the following sections.
4 Subjects with alternative sexualities
In governmentality, both the government and the individuals act in a way to shape, sculpt,
mobilize and work through the choices, desires, aspirations, needs, wants and lifestyles of
individuals and groups (Dean, 2010: 20). So in my analysis I will focus on both levels. I will
first explore the construction of discourses excluding individuals with alternative sexualities.
Then I will see how such individuals came to reclaim their rights and the citizenship status
with the politics of identity.
4.1 Discourses of punishment and discipline
In relation to my first aim, my intention is not to present a linear historical account of events,
as if this is possible. I take into consideration Hemmings (2005) warnings about the Western
feminism telling the story of its past, which ended up in presenting a narrative of progress
and lose that oversimplifies its complexity. In my brief narrative I will try to employ the
genealogical method. Genealogy can be seen both as a diagnostic of the present by
problematising any taken-for granted assumptions, and also an anti-anachronistic refusal to
read the past in terms of the present (Dean, 2010: 3). The origins and causal structures are not
of interest here. Instead genealogy critically examines the traces that a certain concept left in
history.
Alternative sexualities have potentially existed from the ancient times, and so did the
different discourses framing them. In the ancient Greek Classical era there was a relative
tolerance for some forms of same-sex sexual action and expressions of homoerotic desire in
literature. This gave way to very harsh proscriptions against all sexual activity outside of
heterosexual marriage during the Christian era (Hall, 2003: 27). The Church as the
sovereign of the era had a specific negative understanding toward the sin of sodomy. The
sodomite was punished with castration and incarceration (Hall, 2003: 28). Especially from
the beginning of the 13
th
century, any pre-existing homoerotic literature disappeared, and the
suspicion of sodomy could lead even to execution (Boswell, 1981: 295). The medieval man
engaging in anal intercourse with other men was committing a crime against nature, that is a
5

crime against the church and the state (Hall, 2003: 28)
4
.
With the development of the context of governmentality, any male same-sex sexual
acts were criminalised, with legislation such as the Labouchre Amendment introduced in the
British legal system in 1885, and other anti-sodomy laws elsewhere. Labouchre Amendment
specifically outlaws acts of gross indecency between male persons (Jagose, 1996: 13),
and could lead to many years of imprisonment
5
. A change in the regulation of sodomy is
imminent now: instead of torturing the body, those arrested for sodomy were held in prison.
In Foucaults words, [b]y the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth
century, the gloomy festival of punishment was dying out (Foucault, 1995: 8). In this new
context, the strategy has been not to enforce a repression of their desires, but to compel their
bodies to signify the prohibitive law as their very essence, style, and necessity (Butler, 1990:
134). In the new formulations of the people, such individuals became abjects, excluded
from any status of citizenship, that needed to be corrected by a new whole army of
technicians who took over from the executioner: warders, doctors, chaplains, psychiatrists,
psychologists, educationalists (Foucault, 1995: 11).
4.2 Reclaiming identities and citizenship
Nevertheless, the story of alternative sexualities does not end in the disciplinary discourses of
the government. As mentioned above, discourses are also developed by the same individuals.
For instance, the practice of identifying someone with same-sex sexual relations as
homosexual, emerged around 1870 (Jagose, 1996: 11), even before the word
heterosexual. This reappropriation discourse was first proposed by Karoly Maria Kertbeny,
a Hungarian journalist and human rights campaigner who raised his voice against the
Prussian anti-sodomy law (Greenberg, 2007).
The catalyst for the establishment of the homosexual identity was the historical
development of capitalism. As D Emilio argues, gay men and lesbians have not always
existed but rather their emergence as identities and groups is related to the development of
the free labour system which allowed large numbers of men and women to call themselves
gay, to see themselves as part of a community of similars, and to organize politically on the

4
One such story of the severe bodily regulation of sexualities and the punishment of sodomy was the case of
the crusades order of Knights Templars. Mainly for political and economic reasons, the majority of the
members of the order were arrested in France and elsewhere in 1307, and were executed by burn in the stake.
The decision for these executions came from the king of France and the Pope symbols of total power in the
age on the grounds of, among others, 'sodomy' (cf. Barber, 1978).
5
Female same-sex desire was excluded and not recognised in this discursive regulation of alternative
sexualities.
6

basis of that identity (D Emilio, 1983: 102; cf. Drucker, 2011).
Newly developed theories about homosexuality became an ideological response to a
new way of organizing one's personal life, with men and women who had same-sex desires
coming to define themselves by their erotic life (D Emilio, 1983: 105). These new forms of
identity and patterns of life became more visible in streets, parks, and bars, especially at night
(D Emilio, 1983: 106). Furthermore, the decisions of men and women to act on their erotic/
emotional preference for the same sex led to the formation of an urban subculture of gay
men and lesbians in the States (D Emilio, 1983: 106), which grew and stabilised in the
decades from 1940s to 1960s (D Emilio, 1983: 107) and let to the development of a mass
movement.
Brian Walker (1998) discussed the formation of different social movements, such as
the gay and lesbian movements, in terms of cultural nationalism. These constituencies make
up distinct peoples with cultures, public institutions, dialects, tastes, and social practices that
set them off from the people or peoples around them (Walker, 1998: 1). For example, gay
and lesbian movements came to have a flag, institutionalised annual gatherings, a sub-
economy and also a network of gay institutions like community centres, bars, magazines,
coalitions and NGOs (Walker, 1998: 5), as any nationalistic movement.
In general, the establishment of a political movement is a crucial turning point for any
minority as it helps move from existing in itself and bearing a historically ascribed identity,
to mobilisation on its own terms and for itself in adopting a politically self-defined
identity (Meer, 2010: 4). Such political movements help the formation of an inner group,
constitute new forms of belonging and new positions from which to speak and organise
around and through particularity and difference (Lewis, 2000: 2). The creation of a we as a
vehicle for reclaiming the citizenship status and rights, addresses subordination and
resistance at the subjective, as well as collective and institutional level (Caldwell et al.,
2009: 4).
Their identity politics helped celebrate their difference from heterosexuality. A new
meaning in the everyday life of individuals identified differently from heterosexuality was
given through this belonging, and also by focusing on the shared experiences, struggles and
political, social and cultural aims. Struggle was made for visibility, pride and cultural
existence. The gay and lesbian cultural institutions offered a shelter away from the
homophobia of the society and helped gay and lesbian identified individuals to overcome a
number of difficulties and obstacles they face, as for example the case of coming out
(Walker, 1998: 12).
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4.3 Homonormativity and exclusions
In many cases, these movements were successful in claiming visibility, recognition and
citizenship status. For example, in many cases the sodomy laws were repealed, and the
discussion on gay and lesbian rights became prevalent in the European context
6
. These
developments are always celebrated as success stories in gay and lesbian movements.
Nevertheless, homophobia, discrimination and crimes against individuals with alternative
sexualities, still persist. Especially seeing these movements in terms of a cultural national
project, one must be aware of the potential exclusions (cf. Yuval-Davis, 1997).
Over the years, these identity politics evolved into an assimilationist strategy of the
political gay and lesbian subject reclaiming rights of existence. The narrative of these
movements shows a progressive and successful story of break with the repressive past
towards liberation and achievement of a status of citizenship for their subjects. However,
what they miss is what Butler said about gender: it becomes impossible to separate our
gender from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and
maintained (Butler, 1990: 3).
These political and cultural intersections of governmentality are based on the
normalisation of some discourses and individuals over others. Such normalisation of the new
cultural and political identities of gay and lesbian individuals is understood as
homonormativity. This concept explains a politics that fails to contest the dominant
heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but rather upholds and sustains them, while in
the same time promoting a specific gay culture (cf. Duggan, 2003)
7
. This homonormativity
came to exclude individuals with alternative sexualities who were not considered to be gay
enough. For example, bisexuals were considered (and still are) to be traitors to the common
struggle, and they have to make up their minds.
A clear instance where this homonormativity came to exclude others was the case of
the regulation of sex workers in Vancouver's West End in the mid-1980s. Here, the civic
crusade against prostitutes in the area of West End was led by a charismatic gay man
(Ross, 2010: 250), and was seen as a great opportunity for middle-class gay men to achieve a
measure of respectability, political and social capital, and residential entitlement in the West

6
Apart from the establishment of NGOs and lobbies, as the aforementioned ILGA-Europe, in the case of the
EU, protection against discrimination expanded to include grounds of sexual orientation, and can be found both
in the Treaties and case law of the EU.
7
This is obvious, for example, in the present discussion on gay marriage. Instead of challenging the grounds of
heteronormative determination of the modes of kinship, the movement supporting marriage equality accepts the
heterosexual concept of marriage and struggles to further normalise and regulate it with the participation of non-
heterosexuals in this norm.
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End while prostitutes and their clients were subjected in a denial of their legal subjectivity
and cultural existence (Ross, 2010: 253). A certain gay culture was promoted: middle-class,
male, and white.
Furthermore, this homonormativity entered the mainstream governmental politics, as
an official discourse. Jasbir Puar introduced the concept homo-nationalism, which shows the
collusion between homosexuality and [American] nationalism that is generated both by
national rhetoric of patriotic inclusion and by gay, lesbian, and queer subjects. In this
discourse, the acceptance and tolerance for gay and lesbian subjects becomes a barometer
by which the right to and capacity for national sovereignty is evaluated (cf. Puar, 2006; 2007;
2013). The official government uses the level of gay rights and acceptance as an indicator of
superiority over the others who still suppress individuals with alternative sexualities. And
some LGBT movements become part themselves in this discourse, by advocating for pink-
washing and reaction of their government against the intolerant others
8
.
One can conclude that such developments focus on the re-production of gay, lesbian
and queer bodies that reiterate heterosexuality as a norm (Puar, 2006). The discourse of the
gay liberation movements first, and LGBT movements later, concerning the repressive past
and the need for cultural recognition is actually reinforcing the same regime that once
suppressed such individuals. As Ross mentions in her discussion, gay men openly demeaned
prostitutes as vulgar, lowerclass, and deviant the very pejoratives hurled at 'queers' a mere
decade earlier (Ross, 2010: 256).
5 Problematising politics
Foucault reminds us that in fact sexuality previously was not repressed. Rather it was
regulated by specific mechanisms of knowledge and power centred on sex, which from the
eighteenth century, focused on the hysterisation of women's bodies, the pedagogisation of
children's sex, the socialisation of procreative behaviour and the psychiatrisation of perverse
pleasure (Foucault, 1978). Instead of the proclaimed liberation, the success story of such
identity politics was to alter the model of organising sexuality. We are still part of a certain
juridicial system of power which produces the subjects that subsequently comes to represent
through limitation, prohibition, regulation, control and protection (Butler, 1990: 2).

8
Puar focuses her discussion of homo-nationalism in the case of the war against terrorism. As she noted
recently (2013), homo-nationalism goes global. This could lead us to include other cases of homo-nationalism:
the Western reaction against Ugandas bill against homosexuality or very recently against Russia's anti-
propaganda law. In any case, is important to be critical towards this rhetoric of homo-nationalism, but in the
same time recognise the problematic situation in countries such as the aforementioned.
9

Both the government and these movements worked for the creation and normalisation
of the new people according to the needs of the government itself. Furthermore, the
reclamation of the citizenship status for individuals with alternative sexualities even though
successful in many cases is still part of the technologies of the government which seek to
enhance or deploy our possibilities of agency
9
(Dean, 2010: 196). And especially with the
development of the neoliberal globalised regime and its implications on the economic, socio-
political, spatial and personal relations (Perrons, 2004), these strategies, identities, regimes of
practices and new regulations of sexualities become global (cf. Cruz-Malav and Manalansan
IV, 2002). In this section I will try to problematize the identity politics, and expand the
discussion with the introduction of queer theory.
5.1 Limitations of identity politics
One cannot ignore the powerful potential for social support and political mobilization that
identity-based movements offer and their role in collective claims for rights and citizenship
(Caldwell et. al., 2009: 6). However, as demonstrated above, these identity politics approach
failed to challenge heterosexuality and the normative understandings of citizenship. One
could argue that it rather reinforced them. For example, the binary opposition homosexuality
heterosexuality, which forms the discussions basis, is among the things that plunge
women and men [] into the discursive, institutional, and bodily enmeshments of gender
definition (Sedgwick, 1990: 30).
This identity politics strategy has certain limitations. For Butler, the insistence on a
stable subject of feminism, understood as a seamless category of women, inevitable generates
multiple refusals to accept the category (Butler, 1990: 4). The same can be said for the gay
and lesbian politics. In Connells case studies, for instance, we see Australian men having
same-sex sexual experiences with other men, but refusing to be identified as gay men
(Connell, 1995). As Jagose notes, it is important to make a distinction between homosexual
behaviour and homosexual identity (Jagose, 1996: 15).
Several attempts were made for the expansion of such identities. The introduction of
intersectionality perspective, for instance, helped the accommodation of race, gender, and

9
These technologies of agency, also referred to as 'technologies of citizenship', comprise the multiple
techniques of self-esteem, of empowerment and of consultation and negotiation that engage us as active and
free citizens, as informed and responsible consumers, as members of self-managing communities and
organizations, as actors in democratizing social movements, and as agents capable of taking control of our own
risks (Dean, 2010: 196). The idea of empowering the disenfranchised, the marginal, the victims of social
inequalities and discrimination, economic deprivation and political subordination was positively thought of
since the 1960s in the liberal-democratic countries (Dean, 2010: 82).
10

other identity categories excluded from the liberal discourse (Crenshaw, 1991; cf. Yuval-
Davis, 2006). Crenshaw's focus on the intersections of race and gender highlights the need
to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is
constructed (Crenshaw, 1991: 1245). In the case of gay and lesbian movements, one sees for
example the recognition of other alternative sexualities and expressions, and the inclusion of
bisexual, asexual, trans, intersex and others in the definition of the subject of these
movements. Nevertheless, the assumption that the universal identity simply needs to be filled
in with various components of race, class, age, ethnicity, and sexuality in order to become
complete is wrong (Butler, 1990: 15). Especially the embarrassed etc. added in the end
of the list of predicates to be included, strives to encompass a situated subject which fails to
be complete (Butler, 1990: 143).
5.2 Performativity and the queer
Taking everything into consideration, this attempt to expand the identities should not be seen
as the end story. For Butler, [t]his illimitable et cetera [...] offers itself as a new departure
for feminist political theorizing (Butler, 1990: 143), and queer political theorising in that
respect. Such a possibility is presented, for instance, in Butlers theory of gender
performativity. This perspective subverses the fixed nature of the subject of the feminist and
gay and lesbian politics by showing that the illusion of gender is constituted by different
bodily gestures, movements, and enactments (Butler, 1988: 519), and thus is rendered to
different possible styles of the flesh (Butler, 1990: 139).
Following the notion of performativity, citizenship can be seen not as a normalised
status that can be reclaimed by normalised subjects, but rather as a performance with
different meanings and different possible reiterations (cf. Mikdashi, 2013). Furthermore,
citizenship as gender can be seen as a strategy which has cultural survival as its end
(Butler, 1990: 139). This means that (a) its reiteration guarantees the reproduction of the
given culture (Butler, 1988: 524) and (b) performing it wrongly initiates a set of
punishments both obvious and indirect (Butler, 1988: 528). The punitive consequences are
there, but still such a theorisation of gender, sexuality or, in this case citizenship opens up the
possibilities for action.
All things considered, the political task is not to refuse representational politics, since
there is no position outside the contemporary field of power (Butler, 1990: 5). Rather, a new
sort of politics is desirable, one that will contest the very reifications of identities, and will
take the variable construction of identity as both a methodological and normative
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prerequisite, if not a political goal (Butler, 1990: 5). In such a political project, the identity
of the subject need not be in the foundation (Butler, 1990: 6), as it was previously assumed
(Butler, 1990: 142). Towards this end, Puar (2007) proposes the move from the intersectional
model of identity to that of the assemblage. According to her, a queer assemblage is a
collection which recognises other contingencies of belonging that might not fall so easily into
identity politics. As such, the assemblage is more attuned to interwoven forces that merge
and dissipate time, space, and body against linearity, coherency, and permanency (Puar,
2007: 212).
This new approach expands the possibilities for organisation, discussion and
reclamation of social change in many different ways from the traditional models of
organisation. An example could be Boris and Parreas (2010) discussion on intimate labours.
I understand the later as exactly one potential assemblage that breaks from the previous
narrow understandings of labour as paid job in economic organisations, and opens a new
discussion of a variety of labours across space, time, fields and agents.
6 Concluding remarks
In this short paper I tried to explore the construction of gay and lesbian identities and
movements as a vehicle for reclaiming citizenship status. By following a critical perspective,
my aim was to problematize these politics of identity and also the normalised notions of
citizenship. In many cases it seems that I am nihilistic in my approach. This is not the case.
My aim is to demonstrate the need of being critical towards our own actions as a fundamental
part of our struggles for social change.
As I presented, such politics acting in the modern governmental system came to
exclude others and reinforce heteronormativity instead of challenging it, in the process of
reclaiming the status of citizenship. This has negative consequences to individuals with
alternative sexualities, gender expressions, ethnic origins, class background and other, as
presented in the case of prostitutes regulation in Vancouver and elsewhere. Furthermore, the
quantified reclamation of rights for LGBT people, as mentioned in the introduction,
delimits the struggle to 46 acceptable rights, and can be seen as a liberal normative
approach towards citizenship, which, in any case, comes to reregulate and redefine the
discussion without challenging the present status quo.
Nevertheless, as I briefly demonstrated, there is a possibility of break from such
politics. As Dean mentions in his analysis, the government comes to be viewed as a kind of
12

intermediate region which is not purely one of either freedom or domination, consent or
coercion (Dean, 2010: 58). This denotes that a space of freedom can exist for the
construction of new social movements, feminist, gay, lesbian or queer, inside this very
system of governmentality. A prerequisite is that the different agents to be aware of the
regimes of power and avoid reproducing them. New theorisations on citizenship are possible,
and gender and sexuality can be made differently and less violently.
In this paper, I decided to make a brief outline of this potential, without getting into
details. For example, I could have discussed further the transversal politics (Yuval-Davis,
1997) and the comparative feminist studies/ feminist solidarity model (Mohanty, 2002), two
proposed models of action that could expand our understanding of feminist and queer
politics. But I chose not to, mainly for two reasons. First, I had to consider the space and time
limitations of this paper. Second, I agree with Halls statement that [q]ueer theories must
themselves be queered often and energetically (Hall, 2003: 7), which means that any brief
discussion on queer theories and their potentials, would not have made justice to the new
developing field of the queer. Finally, I take full responsibility for the perspective I used for
my analysis. I am aware that if I used different ways of approaching the question, and
explored opposing viewpoints, I could have reached a different conclusion. As I mentioned in
my introduction, the present paper can only be seen as an outline of my thoughts on these
issues.

13

References
10

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California: SAGE Publications.

10
The course literature is emphasised with an asterisk (*).
14

Drucker, Peter, 2011. The Fracturing of LGBT Identities under Neoliberal
Capitalism, Historical Materialism, vol. 19, no. 4, p. 3-32.
Duggan, Lisa, 2007. The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the
Attack On Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press.
Foucault, Michel, 1978. The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. New
York: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, Michel, 1995. Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison. New
York: Vintage Books.
Greenberg, Gary, 2007. Gay by Choice? The Science of Sexual Identity. 2007-08- 27
[Electronic] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/08/gay-choice-science-
sexual-identity?page=2. Download date 2013-10-20.
Hall, Donald E., 2003. Queer Theories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
*Hemmings, Clare, 2005. Telling Feminist Stories, Feminist Theories, vol. 6, no. 2, p.
115-139.
Jagose, Annamarie, 1996. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University
Press.
*Lewis, Gail, 2000. Race, Gender, Social Welfare: Encounters in a Postcolonial
Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Meer, Nasar, 2010. Citizenship, Identity and the Politics of Multiculturalism: The Rise of
Muslim Consciousness. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mikdashi, Maya, 2013. Queering Citizenship, Queering Middle East Studies, International
Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 45, p. 350-352.
*Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 2002. Under Western Eyes Revisited: Feminist Solidarity
through Anticapitalist Struggles, Signs, vol. 28, no. 2, p. 499-535.
*Perrons, Diane, 2004. Globalization and Social Change: People and Places in a Divided
World. London: Routledge.
Puar, Jasbir, 2006. Mapping US Homonormativities, Gender, Place & Culture, vol. 13,
no. 1, p. 67-88.
Puar, Jasbir, 2007. Terrorist Assemblanges: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham and
London: Duke University Press.
Puar, Jasbir, 2013. Rethinking Homonationalism, International Journal of Middle
East Studies, vol. 45, p. 336-339
*Ross, Becki, 2010. Sex and (Evacuation from) the City: The Moral and Legal Regulation
of Sex Workers in Vancouver's West End, 1975-1985, in Eileen Boris & Rhacel
15

Parreas (eds.) 2010. Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of
Care. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. p. 249-263.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Walker, Brian, 1998. Social Movements as Nationalisms or, On the Very Idea of a
Queer Nation, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, supplementary vol. 22.
*Yuval-Davis, Nira, 1997. Gender & Nation. London: SAGE Publications.
*Yuval-Davis, Nira, 2006. Intersectionality and Feminist Politics, European Journal of
Women's Studies, vol. 13, no. 3, p. 193-209.