Sexualities

http://sexualities.sagepub.com Locating Sexualities: From Here to Normality

Diane Richardson Sexualities 2004; 7; 391 DOI: 10.1177/1363460704047059 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sexualities.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/7/4/391

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Article

Abstract Lesbian and gay movements are increasingly demanding equal rights of citizenship on the grounds of being the same as most heterosexuals. Citizenship is the central concept appealed to in calls for inclusion, and it is through claims to normalcy that social integration is justied. Moreover, it would appear that access to this new citizenship status is located primarily through being in a publicly recognized normative (good gay) couple relationship. This integration of lesbians and gay men into social and political life as normal citizens represents a signicant shift with important implications for (a) understandings of sexual citizenship, (b) the meanings and importance attached to sexual identities and (c) the public/private binary. This article will develop and extend previous theoretical work on sexuality and citizenship by considering these issues. Keywords lesbian and gay rights, public/private, sexual citizenship, sexual identities

Diane Richardson
University of Newcastle, UK

Locating Sexualities: From Here to Normality

Introduction
The relationship between sexuality and citizenship, and the construction of concepts of sexual and intimate citizenship, has become an important theme in studies of sexuality across a number of disciplines, including legal theory (e.g. Robson, 1992; Herman, 1994; Cooper, 1995; Stychin, 1998), political theory (e.g. Phelan, 1995, 2001; Wilson, 1995), geography (e.g. Bell and Binnie, 2000, 2002), literary criticism and cultural studies (e.g. Berlant, 1997; Isin and Wood, 1999) and sociology (e.g. Giddens, 1992; Evans, 1993; Plummer, 1995; Richardson, 1998, 2000a; Weeks, 1998). The question of how citizenship is constituted through heterosexual norms and practices is an important theme within this body Sexualities Copyright 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 7(4): 391411 DOI: 10.1177/1363460704047059 www.sagepublications.com

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Sexualities 7(4)

of work. It is argued that the normal citizen has largely been constituted as heterosexual (Duggan, 1995; Phelan, 1995; Richardson, 1998) and, consequently, that heterosexuality is a necessary if not sufcient basis for full citizenship (Phelan, 2001). In extending theoretical frameworks in this new eld of study we are now at a point where we need to address this relationship in more detail, prompted by the emergence of a new citizenship discourse that asserts the normality of being gay. It is, moreover, primarily through such claims to normalcy that social integration is justied. As Seidman (2002) remarks in his analysis of such trends in the USA, within this discourse the normal gay is: . . . presented as fully human, as the psychological and moral equal of the heterosexual, and accordingly gays should be integrated into America as respected citizens (Seidman, 2002: 133). The idea of lesbians and gay men as being normal, good citizens who are deserving of inclusion and integration into mainstream society is associated with recent shifts in the meaning and focus of sexual politics. Since the 1990s, a rights-orientated assimilationist agenda has dominated lesbian and gay movements (Waites, 2003). The primary goal is normalization and citizenship is the key concept appealed to in demands for social change (Phelan, 2001). Within such discourses lesbians and gay men are represented as oppressed minorities seeking access to core institutions such as marriage, family and the military, as good citizens who want to be included and share in the same rights and responsibilities as heterosexuals (DEmilio, 2000). The concept of equality is central to these political discourses, as exemplied by the UK lobbying group Stonewalls Equality 2000 campaign (1997), and their position statement The Case For Equality (1998). A further aspect of these recent rights-based campaigns is that they tend to be couched in terms of demands for equality on the grounds of sameness, rather than equality in difference arguments that were characteristic of many rst-wave feminist and earlier lesbian and gay movements (Chasin, 2000). In the context of contemporary sexual politics, social acceptance is sought through emphasizing the continuity of lesbian, gay and heterosexual lifestyles and values. Much of the argument for the recognition of lesbian and gay relationships and families, for instance, takes the line of arguing for the sameness of families, of sharing similar family values (Lukenbill, 1995; Chasin, 2000). Opposition to such politics takes a variety of forms. Both feminist and queer academics and activists have been highly critical of the normalizing politics that form the basis of mainstream lesbian and gay movements organized around claiming equal rights (e.g. Warner, 1993; Seidman, 1996, 1997; Richardson, 2000c). These include criticisms of a model of citizenship that reinforces both normative assumptions about sexuality and 392

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gender, and the desirability and necessity of marital-style sexual coupledom, privileged over other forms of relationships of care and support, as a basis for many kinds of rights entitlements (see, for example, Duggan 1995; Berlant, 1997; Warner, 1999; Bell and Binnie, 2000; Wise and Stanley, 2004). However, it is noteworthy that in contemporary debates over lesbian/gay marriage relatively little attention has been given to earlier critiques by lesbian/feminists and gay activists (see later in this article) of the normal heterosexual family and the historical role marriage has played in maintaining racial and other divisions (Weeks, 1977/1990; Barrett and McIntosh, 1982; Jackson, 1997). Despite the challenges to an equal rights-oriented assimilationist agenda from other forms of lesbian/gay/queer politics, these have tended to be marginalized in mainstream lesbian and gay political organizations (Waites, 2003). There are a number of possible reasons for this. The history of homosexuality reveals the many and various ways in which expert knowledges positioned the homosexual as sexual other, dened as inferior, abnormal, unequal, subordinate to normative heterosexuality (Terry, 1999). Situated in this context, it is perhaps understandable that some lesbians and gay men come to disavow difference and desire normalcy, or at least desire to be understood as normal, in addition to wanting equality with heterosexuals. We can also interpret these trends at the level of political exigency. It is primarily through utilizing such discourses of citizenship that lesbian and gay movements have been successful in gaining specic rights and freedoms, much more so than more radical campaigns (Cooper, 1993). The dominance of the notion of citizenship within contemporary sexual politics, and the associated emergence of the idea of the normal lesbian/gay, also needs to be understood within the wider social and political context. The adoption of new forms of social governance associated with neoliberalism by almost all western governments since the 1980s is of particular relevance (Richardson, forthcoming). The emphasis in neoliberal approaches is on individual freedom and rights, and the importance of self-surveillance and regulation over direct state control and intervention. Central to neoliberal modes of governance is normalization, the means by which norms of behaviour are identied, encouraged and (re)produced within populations. The primary goal is to establish the selfregulating citizen, who has internalized the norms and goals of new liberal governments (Lupton, 1999). In this respect, one might argue that there is a convergence occurring between contemporary lesbian and gay politics and neoliberal state practices (Cooper, 2002; Richardson, forthcoming). Processes of detraditionalization and pluralism have also enabled lesbians and gay men to make their case for equal rights, through the inculcation of norms of respect for social diversity as part of good citizenship 393

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(Seidman, 2002). Paradoxically, by drawing on respect for diversity lesbian and gay movements may further their efforts in seeking social conformity as normal gays, who espouse the norms and values of the ordinary citizen. Organizations that favour integrationist strategies to achieve social change, such as the Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in the USA and, in Britain, the cross-party campaigning and lobby group Stonewall, would claim that through using discourses of citizenship their rights-based approaches have been successful. Certainly, it is the case that in many parts of the world gains have been made in relation to age of consent laws, to healthcare, rights associated with social and legal recognition of domestic partnerships, immigration rights, parenting rights and so on (see, for example, Rosenbloom, 1996; Kaplan, 1997). However, the signicance of such changes has been questioned on the grounds that homophobia, discrimination, marginalization and hostility towards lesbians and gay men continues, and that any progress that has been made is slow and uneven (see for example, Warner, 1999; Bell and Binnie, 2000). A more fundamental critique of rightsbased claims for equality, and the political goal of assimilation and integration as normal gays, is that it will only achieve an imaginary equality and the illusion of progress (Vaid, 1995; Phelan, 2001). The normal lesbian/gay citizen is, then, a contested concept and it is this contestation that I want to consider in this article. Exclusions are, of course, necessary to the meaning of citizenship and act as a mirror, reecting back to us conceptions of both citizenship and sexuality, and their interrelationship. The integration of lesbians and gay men into social and political life as normal citizens has, therefore, implications for notions of good (and bad) citizenship and what are considered sexual rights and responsibilities. This is something that has already been addressed in sexuality studies (see for example, Evans, 1993; Smith, 1995; Richardson, 2000b). What has received less critical attention is the relationship between certain institutions and citizenship. For instance, the presumed importance of the role of marriage or relationships based on a marital model in establishing legitimate citizens and, in the context of this discussion, normal gays. The article examines how this new social category of the normal lesbian/gay is currently being constituted in rights discourses and suggests that public recognition of the normative lesbian/gay couple is a key site. It also considers how the notion of the normal lesbian/gay might broaden our thinking about sexuality more generally. In particular, the article focuses on two interrelated questions. First, how might extending the status of being a normal, publicly acceptable citizen to (some) lesbians and gay men affect the meanings and importance attached to sexual identities? Second, what impact might such 394

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normalization processes have on understandings of the public/private divide?

Passing into normality

Lesbians and gay men have historically had ambiguous citizenship status, neither fully accepted nor totally excluded; their place in the national imaginary has been as marginal citizens (Phelan, 2001). For lesbians and gay men to begin to be recognized and accepted as good sexual citizens who deserve equal rights to heterosexuals suggests, therefore, that there has been a profound shift in the meaning of both homosexuality and citizenship, calling into question the historical division between the good heterosexual citizen and the homosexual as alien outsider, who represents a potential threat to the nation state. The idea of the homosexual as culturally subversive has a long history. It is, moreover, a view that has been both resisted and reinforced by lesbians and gay men themselves in ways that draw on and reect concerns with gay normalization. During the 1950s, for instance, homophile organizations1 sought tolerance and civil rights for homosexuals; some by arguing that, as a psychiatric disorder, homosexuals deserved treatment not punishment, while others aimed to reverse the medical model by claiming that homosexuals were normal people like heterosexuals (Richardson and Seidman, 2002). This picture was to change with the radicalism of the 1960s, which ushered in the womens and gay liberation movements and new political struggles. High on the political agenda of gay and lesbian liberation movements was to rid society of negative ideas about homosexuality, in particular that it was abnormal and/or unnatural (Weeks, 1990; DEmilio and Freedman, 1997). Signicantly, liberationist attacks on constructions of sexual and gender abnormality were not associated with seeking to be normalized through incorporation into the dominant culture. These social movements were highly critical of mainstream society, and contested many core institutions and cultural values in fundamental ways. A major focus of political action was opposing traditional (heteronormative) denitions of family and gender roles. Thus, for example, in 1971 the Manifesto of the London Gay Liberation Front, echoing the critiques of womens liberation movements, declared that:
The oppression of gay people starts in the basic unit of society, the family, consisting of the man in charge, a slave as his wife, and their children on whom they force themselves as the ideal models. The very form of the family works against homosexuality. (quoted in Weeks, 1977[1990]: 196)

The construction of gay identity as subversive and potentially troublesome to society was upheld, but there was something new about this. From the 395

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1970s, the notion of the homosexual as troubling to society was strengthened by a heightened construction of lesbian and gay as a politicized identity, constituted as oppositional/counterculture and actively seeking to bring about social change. It is against this backdrop that in the 1990s, neoconservative gay male writers such as Andrew Sullivan (1995) and Bruce Bawer (1993) began to advance an integrationist argument, challenging the idea that being gay is culturally subversive. They asserted that most gays want to be seen as normal citizens, who desire nothing more than to be fully integrated into society as it is. This is often referred to as a politics of assimilation, in so far as it emphasizes wanting in to the mainstream (DEmilio, 2000). The term assimilation is often used to refer to discourses and practices that seek to minimize social difference through detaching immigrants from ethnic traditions and identities. Its deployment in debates over lesbian and gay rights raises important questions about the relationship that lesbians and gay men have with the mainstream. An ethnic model of gay identity and politics suggests that lesbians and gay men share common characteristics that dene them as alike in certain ways and as different from the mainstream (Epstein, 1992; Sineld, 1998). To gain equal citizenship status with heterosexuals they need to be assimilated into straight culture, but do they need to undergo a process of transformation in their self-understanding and practices? If lesbians and gay men are constructed as the same as most heterosexuals, with similar values and lifestyles that are indistinguishable from that of most heterosexual couples in similar professional and economic circumstances (Bawer, 1993: 334, my emphasis) then this would imply that they are already assimilated. The central question, from this perspective is how to render lesbians and gay men intelligible and acceptable to the mainstream as normal ordinary citizens. Another way of addressing this question of lesbian/gay normalization is to consider how and in what ways homosexuality has been perceived as troubling to mainstream society? A common stereotype is of the homosexual as the enemy within, threatening the stability of traditional social structures and norms (Edelman, 1992). One way this has been resisted, as I have already suggested, is to contest the meaning of lesbian/gay as a political identity critical of and opposed to mainstream society, emphasizing instead similarity and commonality with heterosexuals and with normality. A further site of contestation is the construction of homosexuality, but more especially male homosexuality, as an intensely sexualized category. In contrast to the conduct-based rights claims of earlier campaigns, which focused primarily on the rights of same-sex (male) consenting adults to engage in sex in private, since the 1990s there has been a gradual move towards focusing on identity and relationship-based rights claims (Richardson, 2000b). Warner (1999) claims this represents, 396

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in part, a decoupling of homosexuality and sex, which he regards as central to the process of gay normalization. If this is the case, then it would suggest that we are witnessing a re-evaluation of the meanings attached to being gay, as this is increasingly constructed as a social rather than a sexual identity (see later in this article). Warner argues that this shift in meaning has occurred not only through the dominant discourse of contemporary sexual politics increasingly distancing itself from sexual conduct-based rights claims, but also through locating lesbian/gay sexuality primarily in a domestic setting in the political focus on the right to lesbian/gay marriage. The normative emphasis is on the loving lesbian/gay couple living together in marital-style relationships, rather than the rights of the individual sexual actor. The sex/love binary enables this perception of domestic (homo)sexuality, however we should note that there is a residual tension as it is primarily through sexual coupledom that a normalized lesbian/gay status is achieved. These trends in lesbian/gay normalization pose a number of important questions. If lesbians and gay men are becoming normal citizens, what kinds of citizens are they being constituted as? How is this new normal lesbian/gay citizen characterized within rights discourse? What cultural values and norms are associated with gay men and lesbians being considered as normal citizens? According to Seidman (2002), the normal gay is:
associated with specic social behaviours. For example, the normal gay is expected to be gender conventional, link sex to love and a marriage-like relationship, defend family values, personify economic individualism, and display national pride. (Seidman, 2002: 133)

This suggests that the attribution of being normal may be achieved through a variety of mechanisms. As Seidman (2002) suggests, in addition to participation in the market and the military, a key site for the operation of these normalizing processes is same-sex marriage and/or civil partnership recognition. The normal lesbian/gay citizen, it is argued, is in the process of being materialized primarily through an adherence to dominant intimate norms. That is, by lesbians and gay men demonstrating at both individual and collective levels a desire for, and commitment to, loving, stable, marital-style couple relationships (Richardson, forthcoming). The introduction of same-sex partnership registration schemes in many European countries, as well as elsewhere in the world including Canada, Australia and parts of the USA, which grant same-sex couples access to civil rights such as next-of-kin inheritance and pension rights, would seem to provide support for this position. This is also evidenced in the recent proposals for the legal recognition of same-sex couples in civil partnerships in England and Wales (DTI, 2003), following years of lobbying by 397

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Stonewall and other gay rights campaigning groups. Under these proposals, couples who register would have: a new legal status as registered civil partners, and would acquire a package of rights and responsibilities (DTI, 2003: 10) that might include, for example, joint state-pension benets, recognition for immigration purposes, ability to gain parental responsibility for each others children, tenancy succession rights, recognition under inheritance and intestacy rules and joint treatment for income-related benets. In other words, one of the effects of such proposed legislation would be to make a package of lesbian and gay citizenship rights contingent on coupledom status. By excluding co-habiting heterosexuals from civil registration, on the grounds that opposite sex couples have the option of marriage available to them, the British governments proposals can be seen as acting as a push towards marriage. In addition, by making it clear that the government has no plans to introduce same-sex marriage (DTI, 2003: 13), such policies reinforce the social valuing of the homosexual/heterosexual binary. Nevertheless, as illustrated later, lesbian and gay inclusion and access to civil rights is dened throughout the proposals in terms that invoke ideals of conventional married family life. The governments justication for extending civil rights to same-sex couples is principally that it would:
send a strong message about the seriousness of such a commitment and, in turn, promote and support stable relationships . . . It would provide for the legal recognition of same-sex partners and give legitimacy to those in, or wishing to enter into, interdependent, same-sex couple relationships that are intended to be permanent . . . Committed same-sex relationships would be recognised and registered partners would gain rights and responsibilities which would reect the signicance of the roles they play in each others lives. This in turn would encourage more stable family life. (DTI, 2003: 13, 17, my emphasis)

There are a number of important points to make here. First, good sexual citizenship is here dened through association with certain intimate norms, rather than a specic sexual identity. In some respects, this is nothing new. The tendency to treat heterosexuality as universal, unitary and monolithic (Richardson, 2000a), should not obscure the fact that the heterosexual other has a long history and that heterosexuality per se is no guarantee of the attribution of good citizenship status. The prostitute, the promiscuous woman, the young single mother, those dened as high risk through their unsafe sexual practices, are all examples of categories of bad hetero/sexual citizenship (Alexander, 1994; Lupton, 1999). In this sense, such policies would seem to challenge the binary distinction among couples on the basis of sexual identity. However, there are apparent contradictions in this policy environment, with the state seeking to continue to reinforce a heterosexual/homosexual binary. This 398

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is exemplied, as I have already outlined, by the fact that marriage continues to be dened as a specically heterosexual privilege. There have been various theoretical claims made about the possible effects of these normalizing processes, in particular how they might affect dominant understandings of marriage and family. A central aspect of these debates is the question of whether public recognition of lesbian/gay relationships will result in a transformation or a conrmation of these social institutions. Or, as it is sometimes put, will it result in a queering of marriage and family or a straightening of queers? As Warner (1999) points out, this is a question that is posed too sharply as any answer is likely to be far more complex. In the case of lesbian/gay marriage, it might be argued that such moves reinforce dominant conceptions of family and intimate life. In making citizenship rights for lesbians and gay men contingent on being in (good) gay couple relationships that appear to replicate but are not actually sanctioned as marriage, one could argue that this (re)asserts conventional sexual/gender values and the dominance of heterosexuality as a normatively better way of life. One way of interpreting such policy shifts, therefore, is that they represent a new form of social regulation of lesbian and gay subjectivities by neoliberal nation states that aim to domesticate promiscuous queers and defuse any presumed threat to social order (Phelan, 2001). This is the line of reasoning followed by Nussbaum (1999) who argues that:
The denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples has socially undesirable consequences . . . if gays cannot legally get married, their efforts to live in stable committed partnerships are discouraged, and a life of rootless or even promiscuous noncommitment is positively encouraged. Thus a form of discrimination that has its roots in a stereotype may cause the stereotype to become, in some measure, true. But this state of affairs is irrational: Society has strong reasons to encourage the formation of stable domestic units by both heterosexual and homosexual couples. (Nussbaum, 1999: 202)

At the same time, one might consider the extent to which extending rights of partnership recognition to lesbians and gay men may be transformative of the current social/sexual order. Giddens (1992), for instance, argues that key to the transformations of intimacy, which he claims are taking place in late modernity, is a move towards pure relationships, which are dened as relationships based on sexual and emotional equality. He suggests that lesbians and gay men are pioneers in this respect, helping to bring about such a transformation in democratic intimacy. Weeks (1998) is also of the view that the normalization of lesbians and gay men has the potential for reimagining concepts of marriage, family and citizenship, as new forms of knowledge about intimate relationships and families of choice enter the mainstream. Similarly, Stacey (1998) argues that gay 399

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marriage raises far more threatening questions than does military service about gender relations, sexuality and family life. (Stacey, 1998: 139). It is important, therefore, to recognize that the consequences of gay normalization may be uneven, and we should be careful to collapse analysis into a simple dichotomy of assimilation versus contestation across all sites and locations of citizenship, or even within one particular rights issue. As I have outlined earlier, it may be that in the case of lesbian/gay marriage some aspects of the institution of marriage will be conrmed, certain familial values for instance, while others may be challenged such as, for example, the gendered language and assumptions underpinning conceptualizations of marriage and family life. In the following section I will go on to consider what the implications of this passing into normalcy might be for the meaning and signicance attached to sexual identities.

New sexualities?
A commonly held assumption is that sexual identity is more or less xed by early adulthood. This is reected in the literature, where historically the main emphasis has been on the development of gender and sexual identities. Analysis of the processes by which we maintain particular identities or not has received far less attention (Richardson and Hart, 1981). In recent years, however, sexual identities have come to be understood less as xed attributes static entities whose meaning and signicance to the individual remains the same once formed and more as fragmented and uid, continuous, complex, self-reexive processes (Butler, 1990; Giddens, 1992; Adkins, 2002). It is claimed that this complex process of negotiation of the sexual self is managed through the monitoring of identity borders, that are revealed through the anxieties and unease produced at traversing those normative borders (Rose, 1999; Johnson, 2002). In other words, it is through these points of threatened identities (Breakwell, 1983) that we may begin to understand the ways in which sexualities are (re)produced. This model of understanding sexual identities would suggest that the emergence of the social category the normal lesbian/gay citizen is likely to provoke important questions about societal and personal investments in sexual identity, as well as leading to the production of new subject positions. More specically, and of particular relevance to this article, is the question of how these normalizing trends might represent a challenge to the meanings of sexual categories like lesbian and gay. As Plummer (1995) has argued, the meanings attached to homosexuality are differently organized according to their specic historical and cultural location, what he refers to as the ever-changing stories of homosexuality. In the new stories that are emerging, as I have outlined in the previous section, the 400

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normal lesbian/gay is a valued citizen, a good citizen, a respectable and responsible citizen (Richardson, forthcoming). This public recognition and valuing of (some) lesbians and gay men does suggest that important shifts are taking place in what it means to be lesbian/gay (and heterosexual see later). For example, one effect of this may be on feelings of self-worth and personal integrity. The emotion role that homosexuality has previously played in society is through being associated with concepts of shame, disgust, immorality, mental instability, risk and danger, by which hegemonic forms of heterosexuality have been contrasted as acceptable, respectable, pure, moral, stable, safe (Moon, 2002). The process of normalization disrupts these sexualized understandings of emotional and moral worth and, according to Seidman (2002), as a result: More and more gay people accept themselves, dene being gay as a good part of themselves, and feel a sense of entitlement to be treated respectfully by all other Americans (Seidman, 2002: 195). Assumptions about the interrelationship between sexuality and gender identity may also be challenged as a consequence of these normalizing processes. In particular, the assertion that lesbians and gay men are the same as heterosexual women and men would seem to imply that the association of homosexuality with the threat of gender subversion is diminished (Chasin, 2000: 133). Although old stories of homosexuality are unlikely to disappear and continue to exert inuence, what appears to be different about this new story of the normal lesbian/gay is the potential it has for reshaping meanings between self and other. One suggestion is that gay normalization may lead to the deconstruction of the homosexual/heterosexual binary and that with increasing social integration sexual identity may become less signicant, an identity thread rather than a core self-denition (Seidman, 2002). A process of transformation that, some have argued, may lead to the disappearance of the modern homosexual (Bech, 1997). The question of whether sexual identity will decrease in social signicance or, by contrast, we will see the emergence of a desire on the part of some to re-establish clear identity boundaries between heterosexual and lesbian/gay is one that also needs to be addressed in relation to heterosexualities. However, in attempting to answer this we need to address a fundamental issue: what are the criteria deployed for locating (hetero)sexual identities in self and others? More specically, what identity borders are invoked that secure heterosexuality as a coherent identity and, furthermore, how dependent are these borders on notions of homosexuality as other? These questions remain relatively unexplored in the literature. As I have explained elsewhere (Richardson, 1996), it is not surprising that little attention has been given to studying heterosexual identities. Heterosexuality is rarely acknowledged in accounts of social life, it is simply presumed. Indeed, it is precisely because of its naturalized, 401

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normative status, that it becomes invisible as an organizing principle of social organization and personal identity. However, as I suggested earlier and as Sedgwick (1990), Butler (1990) and others have demonstrated, our identities are more than that which we identify with, they are also about our dis-identications. Thus, for instance, Sedgwick argues that the homosexual/heterosexual boundary is not just a matter for the production of lesbians and gay men as marginalized others, but is also an issue of continuing determinative importance to the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities (Sedgewick, 1990: 8). More specically, it is suggested that forms of social exclusion and discrimination of the sexual other are sites at which heterosexual identities are reproduced and maintained. Within the literature, as I have indicated, the focus has been on the possible impact that new forms of social belonging associated with normative citizenship status may have on lesbian and gay identities. Little has so far been written about how new forms of social inclusion and visibility of lesbians and gay men might reshape the self-conceptions of hegemonic sexual identities. HIV/AIDS health education policies have been identied as one context in which the heterosexual person may be in the process of being produced. The initial association of AIDS with gay men, for instance, meant that heterosexual men could identify themselves as not at risk because they were heterosexual (Richardson, 2000a: 137). Recent analyses of the techniques and practices associated with HIV testing, involving self-identication in relation to risk categories, have similarly argued that this is productive of heterosexuality as a self-reexive identity (Lupton, 1993; Waldby, 1996), involving the creation of selfmanaging, self-regulating heterosexual subjects in relation to HIV and AIDS (Adkins, 2002: 116).2 In this article I am arguing that the mainstreaming of lesbians and gay men is a further context for the production of self-reexive heterosexual subjects. This is to suggest that we might be witnessing something new: the formation of a self-conscious public heterosexual identity at both the individual and collective level. As Phelan comments:
Current debates over inclusion have not only foregrounded the ways in which heterosexuality is presumed by political communities in the United States, they have also served as locations for the progressively more self conscious articulation of heterosexual identity and the intensication of the heterosexual body politic. (Phelan, 2001: 35)

Recent debates over the right to marry, for example, have both highlighted the ways in which heterosexuality is taken for granted, whilst at the same time bringing it into sharp focus. A good illustration of this is the introduction of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act in the USA, and the more 402

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recent attempts by the Bush Administration to change the US constitution, in order to conne the denition of marriage to heterosexual couples only. In addition to asking what kind of heterosexual identities are being produced through such practices, we also need to consider how such developments might be productive of new conceptions of otherness as well as belonging. As I pointed out earlier, some writers have suggested that the incorporation of homosexuality within modern democracies is likely to lead to the deconstruction of the homosexual/heterosexual binary (Seidman, 2002). Alternatively, one could argue that it might secure difference rather than negate it. As Lupton (1999) has pointed out, if boundaries between self and other are threatened or blurred this does not necessarily undermine the notion that others exist. Indeed, new conceptions of otherness and their attendant identities may be created and developed to accommodate such changes. This new othering may include women and men who are not in couple relationships, who engage in sex outside of monogamous relationships and who form intimate associations and family relationships that are not based on traditional gender and familial norms (Smith, 1995; Richardson, 2000c; Phelan, 2001). It is also likely to extend to reproductive practices, in the sense that as with lesbian and gay marriage, access to parenting rights may divide lesbians and gay men as respectable citizens. Thus, Lewin states that in future: the otherness of childless lesbians may be intensied not because they are lesbians but because they are not mothers (Lewin, 1993: 192). The challenge to notions of sexual difference posed by the normalization and mainstreaming of lesbians and gay men, whilst it has the potential to produce new stories and identities, may then also provoke backlash stories that assert forms of sexual and gender fundamentalism. Plummer (1995) describes this type of response to conicting stories as the (re)assertion of tribal warfare, where attempts are made to afrm stories which lay claim to providing essential truths over others, prioritizing a particular group, culture and identity. This can be seen, he argues:
in the dissolution of old nation-states, and it is present in religious fundamentalisms of all sorts. Likewise both sexual and gender fundamentalism (so common in the past) is still on the agenda: with the potential for sexual and gender tribes to assert their own fundamentalist stories. (Plummer, 1995: 162)

The new story of the normal lesbian/gay, I would argue, has the potential to produce both new forms of social cohesion and to cause trouble through creating new social, economic and moral divisions: between lesbians and gay men, between heterosexuals and across the heterosexual/homosexual divide. The issues raised here therefore pose important questions for future research and understandings of sexuality, citizenship and conict. 403

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I have so far discussed how the normal lesbian/gay has the potential to challenge a number of boundaries including acceptable and nonacceptable sexual behaviour, good and bad citizenship, and what is considered other. In the following section I will go on to consider how the boundaries of the public and private might also shift to accommodate these changes.

(Re)negotiating public and private boundaries

Although the concept of the public/private binary has been subject to powerful critiques, especially within feminist theory, it continues to exert an important hold on the conceptual frameworks that we use to make sense of ourselves and the worlds around us, what Cooper (1993) refers to as its normative power. Itself a social construction, the public/private distinction has been central to how both sexuality and citizenship have been dened as belonging to the private and the public spheres respectively. There is therefore a certain conceptual tension in bringing together sexuality and citizenship, indeed, as Weeks (1998) also notes, sexual citizenship might be seen as a contradiction in terms. In this sense, demands for changes in the citizenship status of lesbians and gay men are an example of a broader shift that is taking place in the locus of citizenship, as increasingly peoples everyday private practices are becoming the bases for discussing citizenship (Richardson, 2000b). The private/public distinction has also had an important inuence on the production of sexualities. The association of sexuality with the private, and with rights of privacy, is part of the legal constitution in many countries and central to the denition of the role of the state in individuals lives. In the UK, for example, the Wolfenden Report (1957), which led to the liberalization of laws on prostitution in 1959 and male homosexuality in 1967 in England and Wales (later enacted in Scotland in 1980 and Northern Ireland in 1982), concluded that it was not the role of the law to interfere in the private lives of citizens, but rather it was the laws duty to preserve public order and decency (Moran, 1996). In this approach, homosexuality is dened as a matter of individual moral conscience of (consenting) adult citizens, tolerable only as long as it did not leak across the boundaries of the private into the public. The public sphere is here identied with heterosexuality, where homosexuals may pass through. One of the effects of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, then, was to underline the public/private distinction, at the same time privatizing the homosexual who was considered out of place in public. The restriction of both lesbians and gay men and homosexual practices to the sphere of the private is complicated, however, by the fact that the term private 404

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has not only been identied as the context for legitimate sexual relations, but is also associated with concepts of home and domestic space. This not only exposes how understandings of the public and private are far from clear cut, but also highlights how homosexuality does not t easily into the assumed neat divisions between public and private life (Weeks, 1985; Valentine, 2002). Lesbians and gay men are constituted as belonging in the private sphere at the same time as they have been historically excluded from it, where this is associated with the spaces of the home and family life (Sineld, 1998). This can be evidenced in social policies that uphold the normality of heterosexuality and of heterosexual family relations such as, for example, section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 in the UK (Carabine, 1996). Set against this background, the new changes in the social and legal status of lesbians and gay men that are now taking place in many parts of the world seem even more challenging. The normalization of lesbians and gay men through a number of key sites including the military, the market, marriage and the family, suggests that old public/private boundaries are breaking down. New public/private distinctions may be emerging, which reect different constructions of the public sphere, what can and cannot be done there, as well as assumptions about who can legitimately occupy such spaces. As I have outlined earlier, homosexuality has been regarded in the past as a threat to public order in various ways, for example to social stability, to public health, to traditional gender and familial norms. This reects, in part, the presumed heterosexuality of everyday public spaces and practices (Valentine, 2002), which has meant that for lesbians and gay men these are often associated with danger and shame, related to fears of public exposure, harassment and violence. Lesbian and gay liberation movements challenged this presumption of heterosexuality in the public sphere through coming out of the closet and claiming the right to public visibility. Since the 1990s, however, lesbian and gay issues have entered the public sphere in unprecedented ways, in the media, in legislature, through the growth of markets for identity-based consumption among lesbians and gay men, and the establishment of the inter/national lesbian and gay press and social movements (Chasin, 2000). Indeed, although equal rights campaigns in the west might appear to mimic the normalization strategies of homophile movements of the 1950s, their focus is not on demanding the right to exist in private, where the boundaries of private are marked by the limits of tolerance, but on the right to public recognition and the right to privacy. As I discussed earlier, the privatization of homosexuality in the past followed from an understanding both of the private as the acceptable site for sexuality and of the (especially male) homosexual as an essentially sexualized category. The public recognition of (some) lesbian and gay couple 405

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relationships might be taken as meaning that sexuality now occupies a more ambiguous position between the private and the public. However, these shifts might not necessarily challenge conventional distinctions between private sexuality and public life. Increasing public recognition and access to equal rights could paradoxically, given that many of these rights are dependant on sexual coupledom, lead to a desexualizing of lesbians and gay men as a consequence of their incorporation into the public (Warner, 1999). This is to suggest that the public recognition of lesbian and gay sexualities is contingent on conforming to a model of sexual citizenship that (re)asserts the idea of sexuality as a private concern, and at the same time constitutes a normative public. That is, where the appropriate expression of sexual relations is located in long-term, monogamous, relationships modelled on (hetero)normative marriage and family values. In this context we can see how such changes can work to stabilize any potential disruption to the public/private division that might be thrown up by the emergence of the normal lesbian/gay citizen who has public respectability and legitimacy. However, as I have already argued, these normalizing trends have also highlighted how the public and the private are not xed and stable categories, but are uid and contested. Previously the normativity of the public sphere was exclusive of homosexuality. These changes represent a move towards the public as a new site of belonging for lesbians and gay men, a broadening of the contexts and locations in which it is acceptable to be lesbian/gay. Although it is important to recognize that this is uneven; it is certain public sites for example marriage and the market and not others such as education and the military where these normalizing shifts have been most apparent. Related to this, I have also suggested that that the public may also be differently constituted through the emergence of a new kind of public culture of heterosexuality that is self-reexive. Understanding of the private and public are relational and, therefore, it is also important to consider how any such changes to notions of the public might impact on constructions of the private. Even though many of the liberal arguments put forward in the past were couched in terms of respect for rights of privacy as well as rights of free association (Richardson, 2000b), in fact for lesbians and gay men this amounted to a responsibility to remain within the private. As I have argued elsewhere (Richardson, 2000a: 109), it is through claiming such rights to public visibility that lesbians and gay men have sought to protect the possibilities of having private lives of their own choosing. This is then a new politics of privatization (Warner, 1999), different from that in the past, when both the homosexual and (homo)sex were located in the private. The implications of these social changes are as yet unclear. As Seidman 406

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(2002) has argued, in the era of the closet passing as heterosexual in public was a way of life for many lesbians and gay men. If what we understand as the public is no longer sexually exclusionary in the same way by incorporating the normal gay and lesbian citizen, at least in some respects and contexts, does this mark the end of the closet and also, therefore, the need to come out of it? What might this mean for different communities and populations if homosexuality is increasingly to become a part of everyday life, where homosexuality is no longer just an abstract issue of morality or rights but a matter of dealing with real people (Seidman, 2002: 97)?

Conclusion
In this article I have examined the impact of a changing policy discourse on homosexuality that can be regarded as mainstreaming (some) lesbians and gay men through extending certain rights of citizenship, which, although not necessarily equal rights, are grounded in notions of equality and normalcy dened in terms of sameness with heteronormative mainstream values and practices. As I have outlined, until very recently in the UK homosexuality was socially regulated as a private matter, with little or no provision of state funding for lesbian and gay communities. Now we are witnessing a different form of public concern with homosexuality, with a growing number of neoliberal states engaged in the process of implementing policies that extend rights of citizenship primarily, though not exclusively, through recognition and support of (some) lesbian and gay relationships. This represents a signicant shift from previous constructions of lesbians and gay men as living lives less ordinary to imagining them as no longer outsiders, but as ordinary people who can be good lesbian/gay citizens. In addition to the consequences this might have for understandings of the public/private distinction, I have also considered how these shifts might transform the discourses in which understandings of both homosexuality and heterosexuality are embedded. In particular, through disrupting notions of homosexuality as alien and other. Related to this, I have suggested that it is important that we consider the possible impact of these changes at the level of everyday (inter)action, including the experiences of those who are expected to gain from these changes. These transformations also raise interesting questions for future work on sexuality and citizenship. The argument that the normal citizen has largely been constituted as heterosexual (e.g. Duggan, 1995; Richardson, 1998; Bell and Binnie, 2000), would appear to be queried by the emergence of the normal lesbian/gay. However, as I have argued, we need to set against this the question of how far these changes actually reinforce 407

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dominant constructions of citizenship, rather than challenge them, in so far as these are constituted through heteronormative assumptions and practices.

Acknowledgements
I would like to express my thanks to those who offered constructive comments on this article, including the reviewers and Janice McLaughlin, Mark Casey, Nina Laurie in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at the University of Newcastle.

Notes
1. During the 1950s homophile organizations such as the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society established chapters in major cities across the USA. In Britain, a few years later, the London-based lesbian organizations Kenric and Minorities Research Group, which had similar goals to the Daughters of Bilitis, were established. 2. Discussion of the construction of heterosexual identities also needs to acknowledge recent work by those who lay claim to a new politics of heterosexuality that is critical of normative heterosexuality, drawing on queer theory, which opens up the possibility of becoming queer straights or straight queers (Thomas, 2000).

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Biographical Note
Diane Richardson is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy and Director of the Centre for Gender and Womens Studies at the University of Newcastle. She has written extensively about feminism and sexuality and her publications include Theorising Heterosexuality (Open University Press, 1996), Rethinking Sexuality (Sage, 2000) and, co-edited with Steven Seidman, the Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies (Sage, 2002). She is currently working on a book with Mark Casey and Janice McLaughlin on the Intersections Between Feminist and Queer Theory due to be published in 2006 by Palgrave. Address: School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK [email: diane.richardson@ncl.ac.uk]

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