2004]
BOOK NOTE / RECENSION
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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.
Stychins 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 resistancein 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 citizenships 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
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 name-calling of the transgression versus assimilation debate, but also partly
to help us imagine new ways for thinking about how law might be used to facilitate
(or at least remain neutral towards) an endless variety of ways of living, less
constrained by a heteronormative world order (4).
inclusion claims pattern visible
The book opens with a general discussion of a number of the inclusion/exclusion
binaries that constitute citizenshipa discussion that will prove an essential guide to
the rest of the work for the reader unfamiliar with the explosion of academic discourse
on citizenship in the past decade, and in particular with the critiques of citizenship talk
by post-structural feminists and queer theorists. In this discussion, Stychin basically
reiterates Judith Butlers contention that all inclusion both excludes and disciplines
those whom it includesbut that there remains an important distinction between an
inclusion that seeks to naturalize and obscure its boundary drawing and normalization
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processes, and an inclusion which attempts to render its own boundaries and
disciplinary effects both contingent and explicitly open to political challenge. As
Stychin puts it:
[Vol. 49
[T]he interesting questions in relation to sexual citizenship turn not on whether
citizenship disciplines, or whether it can serve as a means of resistance or
empowerment, for undoubtedly the language of citizenship and rights can do
both simultaneously. Rather, of interest is how citizenship discourse might be
deployed, a quintessentially political question going to issues of strategy and
the role of legal discourse (14).
The book proceeds to examine this question through a series of vignettes of European
debates surrounding same-sex sexuality inclusion claims in, notably, Britains Third
Way, French Republicanism, the decisions of the European Court of Justice, and the
discussions surrounding EU accession of Romania. In each case, Stychin cites from
transcribed public debates to offer examples of how the language of citizenship
produces both empowering and disciplining effects on those making (and those
contesting) inclusion claims. For those of us more familiar with North American
sexual citizenship politics, these debates provide fascinating distorting mirrors from
which to reconsider our own experiences.
Sitting somewhat unexpectedly in the middle of these vignettes is an intriguing
discussion of the role of mobility across borders in discourses of sexual citizenship.
As Stychin has persuasively argued elsewhere, there are close parallels between
traditional mainstream anxieties over border control and anxieties with respect to
homosexuality:
[T]he figure of the illegal alien provides a useful analogue to the homosexual.
Both are produced as outside the bounds of normalcy, and of law, and they are
strangers; but also the most dangerous strangers of all, in that they are
essentially different, but also able to pass undetected in the absence of close
surveillance (99).
Because of the centrality of these metaphors, Stychin celebrates what he calls the
remarkable hegemonic shift in the recent changes in one of the key intersections
between these two anxieties, the repeal of homosexual exclusion in immigration laws
around the world at the turn of the century. Yet, he is quick point out that these repeals
have, consistent with the pattern he establishes throughout the book, actually
increased the surveillance to which homosexual bodies and relationships are subject
at the bordera surveillance justified by reference to the tropes of disease (e.g.,
AIDS) and immigration fraud (e.g., scrutiny of same-sex partnerships for
legitimacy, as defined against hetero-normative standards).
By the end of Stychins book, the reader has encountered a variety of forms and
modes of claims for recognition and inclusion for same-sex sexualities in European
legal settings, has seen how some of these claims both relate to and spill across
borders in complex ways, and has witnessed many compelling examples of how with
inclusion and recognition inevitably comes disciplinarity and normalization.
Unfortunately, Stychin does not offer us much of an indication as to what we should
BOOK NOTE / RECENSION
2004]
do once we understand the complexities he has elucidated, beyond taking satisfaction
in the hopeful prediction he offers that we are likely to see in the near future a
proliferation of critical voices in sexual citizenship politics that will challenge how we
govern ourselves through law.
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Stychin suggests that this book marks the end of [his] intellectual journey on
these particular themes (140). When I finished the book, however, I had the distinct
impression that this was just a beginning.
Sean Rehaag
