‘It’s not at all chic to be denied your civil rights’: Performing sexual citizenship in Holly Hughes’s Preaching to the Perverted1

Abstract

The following discussion examines processes of governmentality and regulation in the arts during the culture wars in the USA. Using performance artist, Holly Hughes’s, Preaching to the Perverted, as a case study, I examine this performance as resistant to cultural policy that attempts to constitute heteronormative citizens. I engage with the question of how a queer critique can rethink the possibilities of citizenship by arguing that performance art is a queer time and space in which American citizenship is contested and reconceptualized. The moral panic that ensues from cases such as this solicits the participation of the general public, wherein some citizens demand regulation often bringing closure to any serious debate about alternative responses to controversial issues. Debates about the politics of representation in the arts, and of government-subsidized production of particular kinds of citizen subjects are critical because they significantly impact on the formation of cultural policy.

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