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   26:3 Young Feminisms Book Review: Sexuality and Citizenship

Sexuality and Citizenship

   by Diane Richardson, Polity Press, 2018
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   Reviewed by Nancy A. Naples

   Diane Richardson began writing about sexuality and citizenship not long
   after David Evans introduced the term ‘sexual citizenship’ in his 1993
   book, Sexual Citizenship: The Material Construction of Sexualities. In
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   as recommended reading for my students, and her many subsequent
   publications on the topic have been a mainstay of my teaching over the
   following years. With analyses of the intersection of sexuality and
   citizenship having expanded and diversified since the 1990s, Diane
   Richardson’s history of scholarship in this field makes her just the
   right person to chronicle these changes, which she does in Sexuality
   and Citizenship.

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   initially sceptical of the adoption of the term ‘sexual citizen’. She
   feared that it would limit understanding of the co-construction of
   sexuality and citizenship and that, used as part of a strategy for
   people to claim their rights, it would prompt a shift to a series of
   discrete rights claims from ‘a dynamic process of public and personal
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   developments over the past 20 years, managing to cover most of the key
   concepts and processes that have deepened academic understanding of
   sexuality and citizenship, including heteronormativity,
   homonormativity, homonationalism, hetero-sovereignties,
   homocolonialism, and neoliberalism, and the ways in which these
   function to derail the radical impulse of earlier theorisations. She
   also provides an important analysis of the limits of considering
   sexuality and citizenship through the lenses of human rights, choice,
   and privacy. In the final chapter of Part I, Diane Richardson discusses
   ‘the ways in which citizenship is sexualized’ and the fact that ‘all
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   citizenship.

   In Part II, ‘Transforming Citizenship? Sexuality, Gender and
   Citizenship Struggles’, Diane Richardson shifts attention to
   constructions of sexuality and citizens, globally (Chapter 5), the role
   of the state and neoliberalism in a global context (Chapter 6), and
   ‘Materializing Sexuality’ (Chapter 7). In Chapter 5, Diane Richardson
   concentrates on persistent inequalities on the basis of class, gender
   identity, national origin, and race, for example, even in countries
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   argues, are incapable of addressing the complexities in non-Western
   settings where ‘religious and cultural traditions still
   outlaw homosexuality and fear of, if not actual, violence is an
   everyday reality for sexual and gender minorities’
   (p. 124).
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   In Chapter 7, the final chapter, Diane Richardson addresses the limits
   of approaches to sexuality and citizenship that do not recognise their
   materiality – that is, that ignore the wider social and political
   material context in which they are constructed and expressed She
   discusses the economic dimensions and class dynamics that, she argues,
   have been neglected in much thinking about the intersection of
   sexuality and citizenship. She points out that the ‘lack of attention
   to economic diversity’ has ‘been compounded by a lack of intersectional
   work in the field of sexuality and (sexual) citizenship’ (p. 167). It
   is indeed important to consider how constructions of sexuality and
   citizenship differently affect the lives of citizens, non-citizens, and
   those whose relationship to the state is ambiguous, as they intersect
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   (sexual) citizenship?’ Furthermore, since we all are sexual citizens,
   how do we produce analyses that capture the
   complexity of our lives as it relates to sexuality? Clearly, addressing
   all relevant questions would lead to a much longer, and possibly
   unwieldy text. Fortunately, Diane Richardson has given us a powerful
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   produce rich, in-depth critical analyses of the shifting local,
   international, and transnational contexts for the co-constitution of
   sexuality and citizenship.

   © 2018 Nancy A. Naples
   Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Women’s,
   Gender, & Sexuality Studies, University of of Connecticut, USA

   Review originally published in Gender & Development 26(3) November 2018