The ‘neat concept’ of sexual citizenship: a cautionary tale for human rights discourse

Abstract

The growing interest in human rights discourse is a welcome development for strategic lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activism and the appropriation of such a global signifier continues to move LGBT political claims into the mainstream. However, such language appropriation or strategic deployment opens debate as to its meaning and the limits of its descriptive power. For example, the popularity of citizenship discourse in the early 1990s led to an array of commentary from social and political theorists sketching the contours of epistemological meaning and potential policy outcomes. In the wake of this, queer social theorists pontificated on the meaning of ‘sexual citizenship’. Citizenship was the new black and everyone was wearing it. Citizenship was interesting because it had, and still has, purchasing power within a liberal democratic tradition. Human rights discourse is interesting for similar reasons. This article's cautionary tale addresses the twofold concern: ‘what is at stake in focusing on “human rights”?’ and how can such a strategic linguistic shift be ‘explained by political and sociological theories’? In raising these concerns, the article encourages those articulating human rights to be mindful of the potential variety of frames – readings and strategic or competing activists and academic agendas – within which this discourse might be used or, potentially, abused.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.