Sexual Citizenship: The Material Construction of Sexualities

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This enthralling and provocative book provides a new grounding for the understanding of sexual rights. It argues that all varieties of sexuality under capitalism are materially constructed out of the complex interrelationship between the market and the state. The examples of different sexual rights and lack of rights that it examines include the experience of male homosexuals, bisexuals, transvestites, transsexualists and children. Meticulous, focused and challenging, it will be required reading for anyone interested in modern human sexualities.

Sexual Citizenship: The Material Construction of Sexualities Review

When Foucault first appeared upon the scene, a number of writers tried to incorporate his keen observations into a more sensible, materialist context where real people lived and worked. Evans attempts this elaboration for Foucault with very interesting results.

Among Foucault's many insights was the observation that contemporary people felt that sex had deep and mystical secrets, central to the reason of each individual's existence, and vitally important to maintaining the most cherished of relationships. Yet 'sex' is a new idea, not ancient at all. Starting in the 1650's, the word 'sex' merely recognized that some living things are divided into male and female. About 1800, sexual began to mean having to do with copulation or generation. As the 1900's approached, it came to mean a capacity for sexual feelings (just as the Marxist idea of labor-power meant the capacity for labor). By the 1930's, ever more uncensored sex steamed up endless novels as Kate Millet observed in her groundbreaking book, Sexual Politics. Naturally, human beings have been reproducing for millenia--so why new words to describe a very old behaviour?

Here, Evans reveals the underpinnings of Foucault's observations in late capitalist consumer culture. Another book with a parallel observation is State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America). Both writers observe how contemporary culture is entirely focused on market relationships rather than actual relationships unmediated by the market whether of the family (as with Evans) or the workplace (as with Lichtenstein).

In any event, Evans distills four ideas from Foucault: 1)the hysterisation of women's body whereby they become saturated with sexuality; 2) the pedagogization of children's sexuality whereby they become defined as pre- or a-sexual; 3) the socialization of procreation where elaborate means arise to assure the safety of children and medicine elaborates appropriate ways of dealing with infertility, contraception, etc.; and, 4) the psychiatrization of perverse pleasure such that each is classified into a type. Evans then explores the commercial enterprises which have arisen for the purpose of enabling people to refine these activities into appropriate lifestyles or stages within lifestyles. The interests of the resulting constituencies must then be both segregated and assimilated into the appropriate interest groups from electoral coalitions are now formed. As a consequence, a space has been created between that which is immoral and that which is illegal. For example, the state does not morally condone homosexuality though it remains legal in certain contexts, especially in private. Sexual politics is highly contingent and multifaceted, subject to conflicting and contradictory justifications.

Most of what Evans writes about concerns Britain in the 1990's. Nevertheless, his recognition of the commercial underpinnings of the vain pursuit of the mystical secrets of sex appropriately frames the question of 'sexual citizens.' Our emerging era of austerity suggests the demise of such politics especially as the space between what is deemed immoral and that which is illegal narrows through the dismantling social programs and constriction of consumer spending. The world Foucault describes may descend into the more familiar terrain of class politics as those in need eschew the mystical truths of sexuality in favor of the necessities of life.

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