Sexuality and Citizenship Syllabus

This article reviews feminist critiques of same sex marriage and analyzes how marriage as a socio-legal institution relates to inequality based on factors such as sex, race and class. The article first identifies how the legalization of same sex marriage can be viewed as a positive step in the quest for equality and recognition of lesbians and gay men. It then describes the legal and statistical trends in relation to marriage in Canada, as one of the first countries to legalize same sex marriage. The heart of the article discusses the key feminist critiques of both marriage and same sex marriage, drawing on an international survey of primarily English language literature. It considers why these critiques have been understated in the debates on same sex marriage and reviews empirical studies on the views of lesbians and gay men on marriage. While acknowledging that legal marriage can offer important rights to some couples, the conclusion suggests alternatives to placing marriage at the center of the lesbian and gay movement for equality and recognition.

Tel Aviv's Gay-Center is unique in Israel for being sponsored, managed and controlled by the municipality. This article focuses on the Gay-Center as a material, symbolic and discursive space in order to clarify the relationship between LGBT individuals and the nation. Based on an ethnographic study, we show that since its establishment the Gay-Center has undergone centralization processes as a result of being located in central Tel Aviv and by striving for LGBT mainstreaming, thereby accelerating the achievement of sexual citizenship and urban belonging. However, the expansion of sexual citizenship, which is always based on processes of inclusion and exclusion, reveals homonational practices and homonormative discourses. Since being in the city is the easiest and, at times, the only way to earn sexual citizenship, we argue that LGBT urban citizenship is an indication, a marker and thus a prerequisite of homonationalism.

Uses an article in an April 1985 issue of the 'Body Politic,' a gay and lesbian periodical published in Toronto, Ontario, as a springboard for discussion of the publication's policies and politics regarding personal advertisements and issues of sexual and racial identity.

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2012

This essay discusses Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's choice to foreground arguments from due process rather than equal protection in the majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas. Kennedy's choice can realize constitutional legal doctrine that is more consistent with radical queer politics than arguments from equal protection. Unlike some recent critiques of Kennedy's opinion, a queer rhetorical analysis of Lawrence reveals a futuristic, alwaysopen-to-change vision in Kennedy's rhetorical framing of constitutional law that is significantly less damaging to possibilities for ''queer world making'' in the United States than other contemporary US judicial arguments of and about sexuality.

This paper engages with the South African Constitutional Court's sexual orientation jurisprudence and argues that despite some "queer" moments in earlier judgments, the jurisprudence has fallen back on relying on heteronormative notions of sexual citizenship.

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Gender & Society, 2010

The South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO) delivered Namibia from South African apartheid rule in 1990. Namibia’s democratic future began with the promise of equality. In 1995, however, SWAPO initiated a campaign of political homophobia. In this article, I make a case for viewing SWAPO leaders’ deployment of political homophobia as a gendered political strategy. I draw on a qualitative analysis of 194 articles from Namibian newspapers published between 1995 and 2006. My analysis illustrates two features of political homophobia. First, I demonstrate how political homophobia stifled political dissent and enhanced SWAPO leaders’ masculinist position and legacy as liberators. Second, I show how SWAPO leaders used political homophobia to expel gender and sexual dissidents from official accounts of history.

On June 10 2003, the High Court of Ontario, ruled that the exclusion of same-sex couples from civil marriage infringes human dignity and breached Charter rights. This momentous decision resulted in hundreds of couples from Canada and overseas applying for marriage licenses and undergoing a legally recognised marriage ceremony. Globalisation has meant other jurisdictions have not been able to contain the ‘overflow’ of same-sex marriages across their borders. The uncontainability of same-sex marriages can be likened to that of the illegal immigrant who is at once alien yet confusingly and simultaneously a domesticated citizen. This article examines the impact of Ottawa’s marriage laws in the lives of same-sex couples in Australia. Internet communication and travel have produced a northern hemisphere zone for queers in the antipodes, inaugurating a ‘new imagining’ of legal relationalities and legitimacies. Whilst the gay community is uncertain about the legitimacy of supporting gay marriage over ‘bread and butter’ issues, same-sex couples continue to subvert this mêlée by leaving on a jet plane to Toronto, creating their own legal parallel universe. This article examines the gay and lesbian communities attempts to deal with same-sex marriage issues and the way narratives of citizenship are deployed within socio-legal talk.