‘A Stranger to its Laws’: Sovereign Bodies, Global Sexualities, and Transnational Citizens
| Published date | 01 December 2000 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00169 |
| Author | Carl F. Stychin |
| Date | 01 December 2000 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 27, NUMBER 4, DECEMBER 2000
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 601–25
‘A Stranger to its Laws’:
1
Sovereign Bodies, Global
Sexualities, and Transnational Citizens
Carl F. Stychin*
This article examines the importance of mobility in the historical and
ongoing constitution of lesbian and gay subjectivities. While the state
in the past frequently sought to restrict the movement of sexual
dissidents across national borders, current developments in an array of
jurisdictions suggest a more permissive attitude, particularly in the
case of the ‘unification’ of same-sex couples. These legal and political
developments are interrogated with respect to the construction of
`acceptable’ homosexualities and, more broadly, in terms of
cosmopolitan and communitarian visions of sexual citizenship.
INTRODUCTION
This article is about mobility, migration, and sexuality. I seek to build upon a
body of work that has considered the centrality of free movement and
mobility to the constitution of lesbian and gay subjectivities, both
historically and currently. Mobility has been a powerful dimension in the
601
ßBlackwell Publishers Ltd 2000, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
1 ‘A state cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws’: Romer v. Evans 517
US 620 (1986), per Kennedy J (invalidating the Colorado state constitutional
amendment repealing provisions that barred discrimination on the basis of sexual
orientation).
*Department of Law, University of Reading, Whiteknights, PO Box 217,
Reading RG6 6AH, England
Funding for this research was provided by an ESRC funded research project, ‘Strategies
of Civic Inclusion in Pan-European Civil Society’, within the ‘One Europe or Several’
research programme, award no. L213252002, and is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks to
Jon Binnie, Davina Cooper, Didi Herman, Jo Shaw, and Alex Warleigh for their extensive
comments. Earlier versions of this paper were delivered at the Socio-Legal Studies
Association Conference (Belfast, April 2000), the American Law and Society Conference
(Miami, May 2000), and at a workshop on European Citizenship and Social and Political
Integration of the European Union (organized by the University of Sassari, and held at
Alghero, Italy, June 2000). Many thanks to participants at those gatherings for questions
and comments.
construction of the lesbian and gay subject but, at the same time, movement
across national borders historically has produced anxieties within the nation
state which have been articulated to highly sexualized discourses, deployed
in part in order to control and curtail mobility, not only of sexual dissidents,
but of a wide range of people. Thus, I will consider migration and movement
from (at least) two quite different vantage points: as enabling and
empowering, but also as producing an historically hostile response. I then
go on to discuss current legal and political developments with respect to
same-sex relationships which cross national borders as an example.
I consider as well the related question of whether legal recognition
symbolizes ‘progressive’ change in social attitudes and a hegemonic shift,
particularly in an era characterized by increasingly reactionary responses to
migration more generally, most obviously in the context of refugee
movements. In a time in which the nation state responds to perceived
globalization through a selective tightening of border control, how might we
understand what appears to be a liberalizing of legal and political responses
to the movement of lesbians and gay men, especially when migration is
aimed at facilitating unification with a same-sex partner? In other words,
how might we ‘map’ what appear to be liberal and progressive developments
onto a genealogy of legal and political responses to the sexuality-migration
nexus? And, finally, I consider what these developments might suggest
regarding broader concepts of citizenship, community, and cosmopolitanism,
and notions of inclusion within civil society and the state. In keeping with
the transnational focus, my analysis will itself take a somewhat ‘nomadic’
approach. Examples will be drawn from a range of national and geopolitical
contexts to answer these questions.
MOBILIZING SEXUALITY
I begin by clarifying some concepts integral to my argument. I use the term
‘mobility’ to refer to the idea of ‘uprooting’; a concept closely tied to
freedom of movement and, more generally, associated with the nomadic
subject – the crosser of borders and boundaries (whether by ‘necessity’ or
‘choice’). Thus, mobility is used not only in terms of a legal right to free
movement, but also to suggest wider connotations with respect to sexuality.
2
Mobility provides a useful lens through which to analyse sexual identities,
and here it is connected to migration and travel more generally: movement
towards a new place and a new life(style). The connections between travel,
mobility, and sexuality have a long and complex history which I want now to
trace, albeit in an admittedly abbreviated form.
602
2 For an exploration of these connections in the context of ‘gender’, see R. Braidotti,
Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist
Theory (1994).
ßBlackwell Publishers Ltd 2000
To continue reading
Request your trial