The Sexual Citizen

Abstract

The `sexual citizen' is a new phenomenon in the erotic world, and a new player in the political and cultural arena, a product of the new primacy of sexual subjectivity in contemporary societies. Living at the fateful juncture of private claims to space, self-determination and pleasure, and public claims to rights, justice and recognition, the sexual citizen is a hybrid being, who tells us a great deal about the pace and scale of cultural transformation and new possibilities of the self and identity. Consideration of the sexual citizen also offers a new angle on recent debates about citizenship in all its complex dimensions, bringing to the fore issues that have often been occluded in these debates. The article explores these issues through the prism of three significant social developments: the democratization of relationships; the emergence of new subjectivities; and the proliferation of new `stories' about the body, the erotic and intimate life which both signal and encourage the growth of social and cultural capital, and in turn lead to new demands on the institutions of political life.

Silencing youth sexuality in Senegal: intersections of medicine and morality

“…Even a male youth activist and blogger who described sexuality as 'something that was regal' reportedly asked the female YR if she 'accepted or denied' her sexuality, as if this was something an individual could assume, or decline to assume. This way of speaking about sex is quite remote therefore from an understanding of human beings as necessarily sexual beings, where citizenship and sexuality are recognised as co-implicated and mutually constitutive (Richardson 1998;Weeks 1998). …”

‘Why can't I?’:an exploration of sexuality and identity among Canadian youth living with physical disabilities

“…Inherent to the politicization of the rights of minority groups, including those living with disabilities, is the idea of sexual citizenship. Sexual citizenship encompasses a demand for control, access, and choice regarding a myriad of individual, societal, and structural forces within people's lives, including the body, gender, identity relationships, representation, knowledge, and lifestyle (Weeks 1998). For people with physical disabilities, their specific demands, needs, and challenges must be identified in order to ensure that they are viewed as sexual citizens within society.…”

Youth and intimate media cultures: Gender, sexuality, relationships, and desire as storytelling practices in social networking sites

“…Relying on tendencies of late modernity, such as the transformation of intimacy (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1995;Giddens, 1992), sociologists of sexuality have documented how our personal intimate lives have become increasingly intertwined with the public arena (Plummer, 2003;Weeks, 1998). Ken Plummer (ibid.)…”