Governing Sexuality: The Changing Politics of Citizenship and Law Reform.

• Author: Rehaag, Sean
• Position: Book review

Carl F. Stychin, Governing Sexuality: The Changing Politics of Citizenship and Law Reform. Oxford: Hart, 2003. Pp. x, 162.

In this book, Carl Stychin explores a number of struggles for recognition of same-sex sexualities within European spheres of citizenship. His aim is not so much to systematically trace out the trajectory of any particular rights struggle, as it is to offer a series of points of access for us to inquire into both the possibilities and the limits of citizenship discourses for those who seek to challenge hetero-normativity.

Stychin's provocative thesis is that whenever we deploy citizenship claims to achieve recognition for same-sex sexualities, we invite heightened levels of social scrutiny into our life choices: the technologies of citizenship amplify demands for hetero-normative assimilation, normalization, and disciplinarity (in the form of capitalist participation, monogamy, normalized gender roles, etc.). Stychin is careful, however, to remind us that disciplinary pressures inevitably engender unpredictable eruptions of resistance--in just the same way that hetero-normative oppression provides the impetus for the Pride movement. As such, "[t]he ability of law to manage and to discipline is never totalising, and subjects are not necessarily as docile nor as unimaginative as we may sometimes think" (113). Thus, the question is not whether those of us involved in struggles surrounding same-sex sexualities should engage in "assimilative" citizenship politics in exchange for the practical benefits that accrue to those included within citizenship's ambit, or, instead, struggle to maintain "transgressive" sexual identities that are actively corrosive to hetero-normativity. Framing the debate in this way is unhelpful because all identity politics (consider contemporary struggles of bisexuals for recognition in gay communities) replicate the "normalization accompanies inclusion claims" pattern visible in citizenship discourses, regardless of where we decide to draw the particular lines around that inclusion (e.g., the polity, the LBGT community, etc.); and all normalization provokes unanticipated forms of corrosive resistance, which in turn produces a corresponding set of emerging identities. Where we should focus our efforts instead, Stychin suggests, is on understanding the complexity of the interaction between inclusion and normalization. Such an understanding is important partly to avoid the unnecessarily divisive...