Guided by the claims of the feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender social movements and international human rights agendas, governments in late modern democracies have been implementing (or pressured to implement) new juridical frames to recognise sexual diversity. As a result, in the last two decades, gendered and sexual ‘others’ have been ‘included’ in citizenship leading to the formulation of what has been called ‘sexual citizenship’, propounding the formation of new sexual rights-bearing subjects. However, this seemingly respectable and progressive contemporary sexual citizen has become the benchmark against which all sexual subjects are measured, and involves a particular liberal self that has been constituted against a myriad of ‘others’ marked by cultural, religious and racialised differences. How has this ‘sexual citizen’ been constituted and how does it operate within the political field of struggles over sexual freedom and justice? This article explores to what extent the sexual citizen has been configured in Euro-American terms within political liberalism, and how colonial and orientalist ideas about sexual citizenship and democracy follow on from this restricted notion of the subject of rights.
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