Reflection paper

First Reflection Paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7301291/

The article on racial capitalism and Covid-19 closes with the words, “COVID-19 is showing us who we are . . . again.”

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Please respond to the following questions in 500 words or more:

What do you think the author means with those words, especially with regard to the word “again”? What evidence in the article supports your view?
Do you agree that a racial capitalism has become more visible today? Why or why not?

Reflection Paper 2: (attached below)

Please summarize each reading (Connell and Johnson only) and why it is relevant from your own viewpoint.
Ideally, you will discuss the readings in terms of their main points and include examples of how some (not all) of these points have changed or improved your understanding of matters and/or events in the world today.

This paper should be, at minimum, 400 words.

Your responses are visible only to me.
I support folks of all gender identities and sexualities, as well as questioning folks.
That said, no one is obligated to divulge personal information at all.

Current Sociology Monograph
2014, Vol. 62(4) 550 –567

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0011392114524510

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The sociology of gender in
Southern perspective

Raewyn Connell
University of Sydney, Australia

Abstract
In its founding generations, sociology was greatly concerned with gender, as part of
its theorizing of the world of colonialism and empire. Sociology then focused on the
global metropole, so its analysis of gender in the decades since the Women’s Liberation
movement has been developed in a Northern container. This can now change, if the
extraversion of sociology around the global South can be overcome. The thematics
of gender analyses in the periphery highlight historical processes of the formation and
disruption of gender orders, dealing with issues of violence and land. The work of a
number of gender theorists and researchers from the South is discussed. The material
conditions of knowledge formation in developing countries have to be recognized, as
well as the differing ways intellectuals in the South handle influences from the metropole.
New issues have emerged in the sociology of gender as a neoliberal world order has
taken shape, producing new patterns of masculinized power as well as pathways of
change for women.

Keywords
Gender, globalization, patriarchy, postcolonial, sociology, southern theory

Introduction

Gender research is, today, one of the major fields of sociology, both academic and
applied. The sociology of gender has had significant impact in the education and health
sectors, in violence prevention, antidiscrimination and equal opportunity policy. As an
organized field, however, it is not yet strongly influenced by the postcolonial revolution
in knowledge.

Corresponding author:
Raewyn Connell, University of Sydney, Faculty of Education and Social Work A35, Sydney, NSW 2006,
Australia.
Email: raewyn.connell@sydney.edu.au

524510CSI0010.1177/0011392114524510Current SociologyConnell
research-article2014

Article

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In this article I explore how the sociology of gender can be developed in the light of
Southern theory and Southern research. This is not a small task, not a matter of creating
a postcolonial corner inside the sociology of gender. The issue concerns foundational
concepts and methods, global relations of power and centrality in knowledge production.
The analysis must be grounded in an understanding of the history of sociology, but also
needs to engage contemporary global developments in feminist thought.

I start with the changing place of gender issues in the discipline of sociology, how
sociology in the global North has tried to theorize global issues, and how both metropole
and periphery are embedded in a global economy of knowledge. I then turn to intellec-
tual work in the global South, first considering some of the distinctive themes that emerge
from gender analyses in the periphery, then sociology-of-knowledge questions about the
production of knowledge and configurations of knowledge. Finally, I discuss the view of
gender relations on a world scale that is tentatively emerging from these starting-points.

I am conscious that this article addresses a vast terrain and can offer only a few details
from a rich literature. The material is drawn mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, parts of
Latin America, India and Australia; a longer treatment would also consider gender analy-
sis in the Arab world, East and Central Asia, and more. I hope this is enough to document
the need for change and show some of the directions of movement.

Sociology and gender

The place of gender in sociology is debated, and has changed. A quarter-century ago, US
colleagues spoke of ‘the missing feminist revolution in sociology’ (Stacey and Thorne,
1985). The revolution at that time was not so much missing as refused. Sociology clung
to a foundation story in which the discipline was invented by a group of white male
founding fathers preoccupied with European modernity and its experience of industriali-
zation, class conflict, alienation and bureaucracy. There was little place for gender in this
story.

It is true that white men were central to the creation of sociology as a cultural project.
But the group was larger than the Marx–Weber–and–Durkheim foundation myth usually
acknowledges, and its history is much more interesting. Nineteenth-century sociology in
the global metropole drew much of its data from the colonized world. It had a great deal
to say about gender and race. In fact these were key issues for the first two generations
of sociologists.

These issues were seen, however, from the point of view of the colonizing powers.
The discipline of sociology was constructed as a debate among the intellectuals of the
imperial centre about the world that global imperialism had encountered or created. In
Comtean sociology, as I will call the dominant form of the discipline c. 1850–1920, dif-
ference between the metropole and the colony, interpreted as ‘progress’, was sociology’s
key organizing concept.

The status of women was commonly seen as an index of progress. The evolution of
sexuality, household and marriage was a theme of great interest to Comtean sociologists.
Spencer, whose Principles of Sociology (1893–1896 [1874–1877]) was probably the
most influential sociology book ever written, wrote at length about ‘domestic institu-
tions’, meaning family, kinship and the status of women. Ward, the most prominent

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among the founders of North American sociology, wrote in Dynamic Sociology (1897) at
even greater length about sexuality, gender differences and ‘sexuo-social inequalities’.
Engels’ interest in the ‘origin of the family’ is famous. Sumner’s Folkways (1934 [1906])
was stuffed with details about kinship, sex, marriage, prostitution and incest; and more
examples could be given.

Northern sociology’s twentieth-century history involved a partial retreat from impe-
rial concerns and a sharp retreat from the Comtean framework, to focus on social differ-
ence and social conflict within the society of the metropole (Connell, 2007). It was a
more restricted version of sociology, with its research technology of censuses, surveys
and urban ethnography, that was exported to the rest of the world during the Cold War
era, and became the basis of academic and policy sociology as we know it today.

In the mainstream sociology of the mid-twentieth century, gender issues were mainly
understood as questions about the domestic order inside metropolitan society. This was
the era of ‘sex role’ concepts, as understood in the USA by Parsons (Parsons and Bales,
1956) and Komarovsky (1950). Change in gender norms was certainly recognized by
these writers. But their conceptualization of sex roles was addressed to the functioning
and normative integration of Northern society, understood as a closed system. The first
phase of feminist sociology in the 1970s offered a more critical evaluation of norms and
roles, now seen as restrictions on women’s freedom, without immediately changing the
conceptual framework.

Nevertheless sociology under the impact of the women’s movement paid more atten-
tion to gender issues than most academic disciplines. Gender is currently one of the larg-
est fields of empirical sociology. Journals such as Gender and Society publish a stream
of research on the gendered division of social labour, gender patterns in culture, gen-
dered institutions, gender identities, sexuality, household structures, and more. Sociology
became the main base for theoretical analysis of gender relations as one of the main
structures of the societies we live in (Barrett, 1980; Walby, 2009).

In the last generation, the themes of the sociology of gender have continued to evolve.
Studies of sexuality have become more prominent, influenced by the urgency of the
struggle with HIV/AIDS (Dowsett, 1996). The appalling scale of gender-based violence
around the world has become clear, though we are still far from having adequate theories
about this (Small Arms Survey, 2011). Gender patterns in schooling, the subject of sev-
eral waves of public controversy, have become increasingly important issues in the soci-
ology of education. Under the influence of post-structural thought since the 1980s, the
discursive construction of gender identity, and the instability of gender identity, have
become major themes. In this context, questions about patterns of embodiment displaced
the old nature/nurture quarrel.

Sociology as a discipline has been greatly enriched by this work. The injustice,
violence and distress that unequal gender relations produce are widely recognized as
key concerns for applied sociology. The development of the sociology of gender over
the last generation is, all things considered, a notable achievement of progressive
social thought.

It must be said, however, that the sociology of gender has developed essentially within
the framework of twentieth-century Northern sociology, with its post-Comtean
preoccupation with the society of the global metropole. Northern theorists provide the

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field’s leading ideas and Northern methodologists its main research techniques. This
situation is in urgent need of change.

Northern gender analysis and the global dimension

The situation has already begun to change. In the last 20 years it has become normal for
Anglophone gender scholarship to acknowledge global issues. The number of papers
recorded in the ISI Web of Knowledge database whose titles or abstracts combined the
term ‘globalization’ with a gender term rose 10-fold between the early 1990s and early
2000s. Collections of ethnographic, historical or thematic studies from around the
periphery such as Women’s Activism and Globalization (Naples and Desai, 2002) are
now an established publishing genre. So are integrative international surveys of knowl-
edge, such as Gender, Work and Economy: Unpacking the Global Economy (Gottfried,
2013).

Influential sociologists in the metropole now try to formulate their conceptual analy-
ses at a world level. Notable examples are Chow’s (2003) argument on the gendered
character of globalization; Acker’s (2004) sociology of the gender processes in global
capitalism; Unterhalter’s (2007) global analysis of gender and social justice in education;
and Cockburn’s (2010) analysis of gender relations, militarization and war.

This scholarship on global gender is illuminating and productive, but contains a deep-
seated problem. Acker (2004: 17) refers to ‘the mostly Western scholarship on gender
and globalization’, and – setting aside some doubts about the concept ‘Western’ – she is
right. It isn’t only that Europe and the United States publish most of the world’s journals
and that most of the articles in them are about Europe and the United States. Most schol-
arly gender analysis remains in the conceptual world of Marx, Foucault, de Beauvoir and
Butler even when it is talking about sexuality in India, identity in Australia, migration in
the Mediterranean or factories in Mexico.

If we look back into the history of gender research, it is clear that data acquired by
European colonial conquest and postcolonial dependency have been very important to
metropolitan theorists. Mohanty’s famous essay ‘Under Western eyes’ (1991) revealed
the colonial gaze that constructed a false image of the ‘third world woman’. But even this
understated the importance of knowledge from the periphery.

The colonized world provided raw material for metropolitan feminist debates about
the origin of the family, matriarchy, the gender division of labour, the Oedipus complex,
third genders, male violence and war, marriage and kinship, gender symbolism – and
now, of course, globalization. Such pivotal feminist texts as Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis
and Feminism (1974), Rubin’s ‘The traffic in women’ (1975) and Chodorow’s The
Reproduction of Mothering (1978) would be inconceivable without the colonial knowl-
edge on which Freud, Lévi-Strauss and other mighty men of the metropole built their
theories.

Gender analysis, then, is involved in a global political economy of knowledge. Global
imperialism left no culture separate or intact, not even the culture of the imperialists. The
colonial encounter, continuing as the encounter of contemporary communities with glo-
balized power, is itself a massive source of social dynamics – including intellectual
innovation.

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This is the territory now being explored in a vigorous literature on the global dynam-
ics of knowledge. The strands of this literature include research on Southern theory
(Connell, 2007; Meekosha, 2011), alternative traditions in social science (Alatas, 2006;
Patel, 2010), postcolonial sociology (Bhambra, 2007; Reuter and Villa, 2010), indigenous
knowledge (Odora Hoppers, 2002), the psychology of liberation (Montero, 2007), deco-
lonial thought (Mignolo, 2007; Quijano, 2000), the decolonization of methodology
(Smith, 1999) and more. In the context of this article it would be superfluous to discuss
this whole terrain, but my analysis of the sociology of gender has a specific starting-point
within it. This is the global sociology of knowledge developed by the Beninese philoso-
pher Paulin Hountondji in Endogenous Knowledge (1997; see Connell, 2011).

Hountondji observes that imperialism created a global division of labour in the sci-
ences, in which data were collected in the colonies and concentrated in the metropole,
where theory was developed and the data were processed. This division of labour per-
sisted after decolonization. The global periphery still exports data and imports applied
science, the global metropole is still the centre of theory and methodology. An interna-
tional circulation of knowledge workers accompanies the international flows of data,
concepts and techniques. Workers from the periphery travel to the metropole for doctoral
training, sabbaticals, conferences or better jobs; workers from the metropole frequently
travel to the periphery to collect data, rarely to get advanced training or to learn theory.

One of the most striking parts of Hountondji’s analysis concerns the attitude of knowl-
edge workers in the global periphery resulting from this global structure. This attitude he
calls ‘extraversion’ – being oriented to external sources of intellectual authority.
Extraversion is seen in practices such as citing only metropolitan theorists, publishing
preferentially in metropolitan journals, joining ‘invisible colleges’ centred in the metro-
pole, and acting as native informants for metropolitan scientists who are interested in the
periphery.

We can add to Hountondji’s analysis the powerful influence of neoliberal politics and
management. Neoliberal agendas are currently deepening extraversion by locking the
universities of the periphery into market competition and global ranking systems – in
which the elite universities of the United States and Europe always appear on top, defin-
ing the ‘excellence’ others must strive for. Scholars in the periphery are now under heavier
pressure than ever to publish in metropolitan journals, gain recognition in the metropole
and form partnerships with prestigious centres.

Extraversion in this sense is as widespread in gender studies as in other fields of
knowledge. Metropolitan texts about gender are translated and read in the periphery, and
treated as authorities. Gender researchers from the periphery travel to the metropole for
qualifications and recognition. Whole frameworks, terrains of debate and problematics
are liable to be imported.

A few examples may illustrate the point. The late Heleieth Saffioti’s A mulher na
sociedade de classes (1978 [1969]) was a towering achievement, yet shaped by structur-
alist Marxism from Paris. Not even Subaltern Studies was immune to extraversion: the
journal’s main attempt at gender theory, Tharu and Niranjana’s ‘Problems for a contem-
porary theory of gender’ (1996), defines the problems of Indian feminist politics by
applying postmodernist feminism from the metropole. Bhaskaran’s lively Made in India
(2004), treating sexual diversity, applies queer theory from the USA. The empirical core

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of Masculinities (Connell, 1995) is Australian but its main theoretical sources are
German, British and North American.

But there is always some friction between the intellectual perspectives created in the
imperial centres, and the realities of society and culture in the colonized and postcolonial
world. Nelly Richard (2004 [1993]), importing French postmodernist thought to femi-
nism in Chile, notes that these ideas have to be ‘re-worked’ in the periphery.

We could put this more strongly. The re-working requires a critique and transforma-
tion of the metropolitan frameworks themselves. The debates about decolonial thought,
Southern theory, indigenous knowledge and postcolonial thought, though they have
mostly not been gender-informed, are now vital resources for developing the sociology
of gender.

Southern thematics for gender analysis

The necessary starting-point is imperialism itself. Gender dynamics take specific forms
in colonial and postcolonial contexts because, as María Lugones (2007) states, they are
interwoven with the dynamics of colonization and globalization. As Valentine Mudimbe
(1994) has argued, the colonizing power, in order to establish itself, had to create a new
society. It is important to register that the large majority of the world’s people live in such
societies with colonial, neocolonial and postcolonial histories. The global metropole is
the exception, not the norm. Analysis informed by what Lugones has usefully called ‘the
coloniality of gender’ should be the mainstream of the sociology of gender.

Recognition of the fact of colonization has already polarized postcolonial gender anal-
ysis. In reaction against Northern feminism, more exactly a simplified version of it, one
school of thought asserts that ‘gender’ is itself a product of colonialism, imposed on socie-
ties which previously did not organize themselves in gendered ways. Perhaps the best-
known example is Oyeronke Oyewumi’s The Invention of Women (1997), which contrasts
Western sex dichotomy with ‘a Yoruba stance’ that does not classify people on the basis
of bodies. Accordingly, gender is not a structure of precolonial Yoruba society and
‘women’ does not exist as a social category. This argument has been criticized in Africa as
both an inaccurate account of precolonial society, and as replacing an essentialism of bod-
ies with an essentialism of culture that helps to legitimize postcolonial patriarchy (Bakare-
Yusuf, 2003; Lewis, 2002). Powerful men in postcolonial regimes can, and do, fend off
demands for gender equality by branding feminism as a neocolonial intrusion.

Uma Narayan (1998: 103), whose critique of cultural essentialism is exemplary,
defends legitimate generalizations about gender: ‘virtually every community is struc-
tured by relationships of gender that comprise specific forms of social, sexual, and eco-
nomic subjection of women’. This view is complicated by research that shows precolonial
conceptions of gender to be complex and structured differently from European concep-
tions. Thus Sylvia Marcos (1998), examining the metaphorical religious thought of
Mesoamerican communities in surviving colonial-era documents, finds powerfully
embodied conceptions that emphasize duality, integration and the absence of barriers. On
the other hand, oral-history evidence from Aboriginal people and anthropologists about
precolonial society in Australia points to ritual separation of women and men, as well as
a marked gender division of labour, in that very different civilization (Berndt, 1974).

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Whatever the precolonial situation, it was transformed by colonialism, and not gently.
Gendered violence played a formative role in the shaping of colonial and postcolonial
societies. Colonization itself was a gendered act, carried out by imperial workforces,
overwhelmingly men, drawn from masculinized occupations such as soldiering and
long-distance trade. Colonial violence against women in colonized societies was a
normal part of conquest. The colonial state was built as a power structure operated by
men, based on continuing force. Brutality was built into colonial societies, whether
they were settler colonies or colonies of exploitation. The level of gendered violence
in postcolonial societies is now a central issue in global feminism, from
international policy forums (Harcourt, 2009) to local research and action agendas –
illustrated by the emphasis on gender violence in the women’s studies programmes
in Costa Rica (Cordero, 2008). Saffioti’s (2004) later work paid close attention to
the issue; she quotes survey data showing about half of Brazilian women have
experienced gender-based violence.

In a powerful paper, Amina Mama (1997) recalls the violence of imperial
patriarchy, the creation of colonial economies that marginalized women, and the
gender dimension of the struggles for independence in Africa. Women widely
supported the nationalist movements, but once in power, few of the nationalist
regimes defended women’s interests. With the economic crisis of the post-
independence states that began in the 1970s, very harsh conditions were created for
women, and high levels of violence against women became apparent.

Mama argues convincingly that the feminist strategies against gender violence
devel-oped in the metropole do not apply in this context, because these strategies
presuppose a well-functioning state and a coherent gender order; neither of which is
experienced by Black and working-class women in postcolonial Africa. Nina Laurie
(2005) makes a similar point when discussing masculinity politics in the
contemporary Andes, that research in the global South cannot presuppose a
consolidated gender order. Jane Bennett (2008: 7) in South Africa describes the
specificity of gender research in conditions where ‘relative chaos, gross economic
disparities, displacement, uncertainty and surprise’ are the norm not the exception.

Gender analysis from the global South thus, in a sense, must invert the problematic of
recent gender theory in the global North, where a deconstructionist agenda is
hegemonic. In the colonial and postcolonial world the making of gender orders, or
the attempts to make them, are central issues. Establishing colonial gender
arrangements required, as well as formative violence, a sustained cultural and
organizational effort on the part of the colonizers. This is rightly emphasized by
Lugones (2007), though I think she is mis-taken to describe gender arrangements as
‘imposed’ on the colonized. Active responses by the colonized were also involved;
and the active responses by women of colonized societies are now well recognized
in feminist historiography and indigenous critique (Moreton-Robinson, 2000).

Less recognized in most of the gender literature are the active responses also made by
men. This issue is explored by Ashis Nandy, whose book The Intimate Enemy: Loss
and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (1983) is a classic study of the social
construction of masculinity. Nandy traces how the pressure of British conquest and the
colonial regime re-shaped Indian culture, including its gender order. The response to
this pressure called out specific elements of Indian tradition, over-valuing the Kshatriya
or warrior category,

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to justify essentially new patterns of masculinity in a modernizing process. Equally
important, Nandy shows how the colonial encounter re-shaped models of masculinity
among the colonizers. As the regime settled into a permanent governing structure during
the nineteenth century, a distinctive culture emerged that exaggerated gender and age
hierarchies. This produced a simplified, dominance-oriented, and often violent masculin-
ity as the hegemonic pattern among the British, despising weakness, suspicious of emo-
tion, concerned to draw and police rigid social boundaries.

More recently, the making of masculinities and negotiation of gender relations in
colonial and postcolonial transitions has been the subject of intense research in southern
Africa (Epstein et al., 2004; Morrell, 2001). This research goes far to establishing two
important conclusions. The first is the sheer diversity of masculinities that are under
construction at the same time in the one national territory. Postcolonial gender reality
cannot be captured by generalized models of ‘traditional’ vs ‘modern’ manhood. The
second is how intimately the making of masculinities is bound up with the vast and con-
tinuing transformations of postcolonial society as a whole. Gender is not off to the side
in a cupboard of its own. It is enmeshed with the changing structure of power and shifts
in the economy, the movement of populations and the creation of cities, the struggle
against Apartheid and the 1990s lurch to neoliberalism, the institutional effects of mines,
prisons, armies and education systems.

This illustrates a tendency in postcolonial gender analysis towards a sociological view
of gender. Mara Viveros (2007) from Colombia, in a discussion of the concept of differ-
ence, argues that colonialism forged an integral link between gender and race that was
not present in the global North (which has tended to treat these dimensions through
concepts like ‘intersectionality’). Fundamental themes in the gender studies programme
of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (2009) are the sociocultural conditions con-
structing gender relations, women’s visibilization, the social inequalities of sexuality and
gender and public policy. Of course there are institutions with greater emphasis on phi-
losophy and culture. But when we factor in the significance of development issues
(Harcourt, 2009), there is a sense in which the sociological approach to gender as a
structure of social relations is central to gender scholarship in the global South, in a way
that is not true in the global North.

This can be seen, for instance, in Chilean discussions of voice and identity. Julieta
Kirkwood’s feminist classic Ser política en Chile (1986) concerns the establishment of
women’s political voice in twentieth-century Chile. This could be treated in terms of
cultural identity, but it is not. A key step in Kirkwood’s research was an interview study
with women’s movement activists under the dictatorship, and she constructs the history
of Chilean feminism as a collective story of social struggle. The emergence of women as
a political subject, in her narrative, was closely bound up with the features of a postcolo-
nial political order, and the changing ways in which Chile’s socioeconomic formation
was articulated with the world economy and international politics. Sonia Montecino
(2001) similarly emphasizes that gender identities are collective constructions, in their
diversity; indeed, she suggests that an understanding of identity as emerging from social
struggle is characteristic of Latin American thought.

As I have argued in Southern Theory (Connell, 2007), the issue of land is crucial in
understanding colonial society, and this applies to gender relations. Marcia Langton

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(1997), a leading Aboriginal intellectual in Australia, shows one dimension of this.
Australian Aboriginal culture has been portrayed as patrilineal and patriarchal, but this
account mainly comes from male anthropologists convinced of women’s inferiority.
Women have increasingly demonstrated that women’s rights were embedded in precolo-
nial land tenure systems. In the conditions of violent conquest, and the extreme pressure
on most Aboriginal cultures that followed, this land-and-gender order was badly dis-
rupted. Langton argues that it was women’s traditions and ties to place – ‘Grandmothers’
law’ – that were the more resilient, and proved crucial in holding Aboriginal society
together. Older women thus became the key to social survival.

Land is also central to the analysis of gender relations in agricultural society in the
Indian subcontinent by Bina Agarwal, whose A Field of One’s Own (1994) is one of the
great classics of modern gender analysis. Agarwal is professionally an economist, but A
Field of One’s Own is actually a rich interdisciplinary exploration of peasant society,
involving regional and legal history, sociology of the family, studies of political move-
ments, and more. Land is shown to be a crucial element in gender practices ranging from
kinship alliance and inheritance to the constitution of patriarchal power structures.
Agarwal documents a vigorous gender politics including collective mobilizations by
women for land ownership and land use, and widespread, sometimes violent, resistance
by men.

To argue there are common themes that emerge from Southern gender studies is not
to imply there is a single Southern gender order. Very certainly, there is not – neither
before nor after colonization. Indeed, recognition of the diversity of gender orders is an
important consequence of the arguments of Southern feminists in forums such as the UN
world conferences on women, from Mexico City in 1975 to Beijing in 1995. Critique of
unexamined universalism in Northern gender theory has been a persistent theme in
African feminist studies (Arnfred et al., 2004), and the arguments apply also within the
global South.

Gender analysis from the global South therefore poses the question of diversity, the
multiplicity of gender forms, not at the level of the individual, but at the level of the
gender order and the dynamic of gender relations on a societal scale.

Conditions and configurations of knowledge

Thematics are one thing, practicalities another. One of the big differences between gen-
der research in the global North and the global South is the scale of resources available
for scholarship. There are some well-resourced universities in the periphery, such as the
federal university system in Brazil, the elite universities in India, the ‘sandstones’ or
‘Group of Eight’ in Australia, the ‘historically white’ universities in South Africa and the
National University of Singapore. Public investment in higher education, currently static
or contracting in the North, has grown in China and Brazil especially. Smaller resources,
multiplied, might still amount to a significant asset: across Africa, about 30 universities
were teaching gender studies in the early 2000s (Mama, 2005).

None of this, however, is comparable to the scale and wealth of the higher education
systems in Europe and the United States, the publishing industries of the metropole, the
corporate and state-funded research centres (including census bureaux), and therefore

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the workforce potentially engaged in gender research in the global North. With the crisis
of the postcolonial developmental state and the advent of global neoliberalism, gender
research in the South depends to a large degree on NGOs and development aid pro-
grammes. As Mama notes, the African university programmes have been struggling with
contradictory demands, staff in need of qualifications and erratic institutional support.
Continent-wide networks and capacity-building programmes have been created, but the
situation is precarious.

The consequences for gender studies are significant. One of the most important is the
framing of much gender research by economic development agendas. The ‘women in
development’ movement of the 1970s, and the ‘gender and development’ framework that
grew out of it, have been important in funding research and providing political legiti-
macy for gender studies. But the ‘gender framework’ in development work has usually
been categorical, if not essentialist – treating ‘women’ as an undifferentiated natural
category. NGO-based research is generally small-scale, focused on practical problems,
and short-term; not a promising way to develop new perspectives. Dependence on aid
funds means subordination to donor-driven agendas and established formulae which, as
Desiree Lewis (2002) points out for African gender research, marginalizes critique and
intellectual innovation. Teresa Valdés (2007) similarly speaks of a ‘technification of gen-
der knowledge’ in the Southern cone countries of Latin America, as policy research tends
to replace movement-based feminism.

These are among the bases of the extraversion of Southern intellectual work discussed
earlier. The ‘traffic in gender’, to use Claudia de Lima Costa’s (2006) witty phrase, is
mainly from North to South.

Sometimes this is planned. In the early days of women’s studies in China, for instance,
the US model of women’s studies was deliberately imported in the 1980s. In the absence
of an autonomous women’s movement, especially after the political crackdown of 1989,
no other base for theory was available. Min Dongchao (2005) notes that research was at
this stage only done if funded from outside, mainly from the United States; it had to be
practical, and expressed in conceptual terms familiar to the donors.

Min also notes, however, that the women engaged in creating Chinese women’s stud-
ies were conscious of major gaps between the historical experience of Chinese women
and women in the global North. Costa (2006) points out a return traffic. For instance,
French post-structuralism, so influential in Anglophone gender studies, was itself influ-
enced by the experience of Francophone North Africa. She also notes the difficulties in
translating concepts from one region to another. For instance the concept ‘women of
colour’, important in challenging essentialism in US gender studies, makes little sense in
other places; while the concept of revolutionary transformation of society, central in
Julieta Kirkwood’s thought, has little grip in the global North.

Cecília Sardenberg (2010) in Brazil has recently been exploring another way that
Northern hegemony is contested. The language of ‘women’s empowerment’ has recently
spread in Brazil, in the context of development agendas – it is seen by many as World
Bank jargon (though it originated in feminist activism). But it is possible to inflect such
language in different ways. A group based at the Federal University of Bahia has been
doing just that, rejecting liberal empowerment in favour of ‘liberating empowerment’
directed to transforming the gender order of patriarchal domination.

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Northern wealth and power therefore do not necessarily produce intellectual domina-
tion. Nor does the critical response to Northern gender analysis have to be ‘denunciatory’
or engage in ‘castigation’, to use Lewis’s (2007) terms. There can be constructive critical
use of Northern thought, treating it as a resource rather than a framework, and moving
ahead of it on the basis of Southern experience.

An example is a notable piece of sociological theorizing, ‘On the category
“gender”: A theoretical-methodological introduction’, published in 1992 in the Revista
Interamericana de Sociologia by Teresita de Barbieri, a South American sociologist who
settled in Mexico. This paper starts with feminist movements and their hypothesis that
the subordination of women is a question of power, not nature. After reviewing a number
of metropolitan feminist thinkers, especially Gayle Rubin, de Barbieri sets out a line of
analysis centring on social control over women’s reproductive power, and men’s asser-
tion of their rights over offspring. This commits her to a relational view of gender, though
one in which biological capacities are at stake – it is not a disembodied or purely discur-
sive view. De Barbieri sees the relationship between the cultural figures of the mother
and the male head of household as the nucleus of gender relations in Latin American
societies.

But she does not have a binary view of gender. Indeed, she emphasizes the signifi-
cance of the family life cycle that gives a different social position to post-menopausal
women. Drawing on Brazilian black feminist thought, she explores the interaction of
gender with race and class in a stratified society. She further complicates the picture of
the gender order by laying stress on relations between men, and the class and racial dif-
ferences among women.

In explicit critique of the simplifications of metropolitan gender analysis, de Barbieri
locates gender relations in the context of the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, and
the impact of global restructuring on the popular classes. The result is a sophisticated,
structurally complex picture of the gender order; at least as diversified as, and notably
more dynamic than, the intersectional model emerging in the metropole at the time this
paper was published.

There are, however, problems that more strongly resist interaction with Northern
categories of gender analysis. This can be seen in a fascinating study in historical soci-
ology, Uma Chakravarti’s Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens (2003). ‘Caste’
is not capable of being cross-classified with ‘gender’ in the style of North American
intersectional sociology. Rather, caste is gender in a unique configuration. Chakravarti
pictures the Indian caste system as a deep-seated structure of privilege and exclusion
that combines gender hierarchy, property ownership, religious ideology and social
identity. Caste is a hierarchical system of endogamous groups, making exclusive mar-
riage its key institution. Control over women’s sexuality is therefore crucial to the
maintenance of male lineages. An ideology of purity, focused on women but also
affecting men, provides the cultural rationale. Upper caste women become complicit in
this system, as their conformity to patriarchal prescriptions is what guarantees their
access to privilege.

Chakravarti traces how this gender order came into existence, over a long historical
period. The caste system was associated with the consolidation of an agricultural econ-
omy and a state structure, rationalized by Brahmanical intellectuals. A flexible social

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order allowed some caste mobility, and created a patchwork of different castes in differ-
ent parts of the country. Colonialism did little directly to change this, as the British impe-
rial regime drew upper castes into the colonial state and gave them Western-style
education. Nevertheless the caste system was always contested. In its early stages it was
challenged by no less a figure than the Buddha. In the late colonial period it was chal-
lenged by Phule, Ambedkar and others speaking for the ‘untouchables’. But it remains
powerful in postcolonial India, enforced by violence as well as ideology – violence
directed at lower caste men as well as women who break the rules.

Taking these initiatives and examples together, we can imagine a global configuration
of gender research very different from the Northern-centred patterns of the past genera-
tion. It has gradually been accepted that there are irreducible differences between femi-
nist perspectives. But it is also argued that dialogue across such divides is possible
(Bulbeck, 1998). Not only dialogue, but active political cooperation across national bor-
ders, and conceptions of feminism on a global scale, are increasingly visible elements of
gender politics (Naples and Desai, 2002). Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003) nicely sum-
marizes this in the idea of ‘feminism without borders’.

Ashwini Tambe (2010) has recently offered an intriguing model of ‘transnational
feminist studies’ that contests the metropole-centred narrative of development, the
homogenizing vision of essentialist global feminism, and even the kind of metropole/
periphery model used in this article. Local feminisms differ from national, she rightly
observes, and may have distant links. Mara Viveros (2007) also notes the importance of
South–South alliances in getting beyond the mosaics of liberal conceptions of difference
and the hierarchies that are the legacy of colonialism. To change social structures still
requires a decolonizing practice; and in this practice, the connection between the per-
sonal and the political can be re-established.

Gender and the neoliberal world order

Quijano’s (2000) fruitful concept of the coloniality of power explicitly applies to the
time after national independence as well as before. An examination of the coloniality of
gender similarly has to attend to historical continuities in global power. But global power
relations have changed; the old empires have gone, and new formations of power have
appeared. It is now necessary to understand gender in the era of transnational corpora-
tions, the Internet and global neoliberal politics. This requires gender analysis to move
beyond states and even regions into what Elisabeth Prügl (1999), in a study of home-
based work and the ILO, calls ‘global space’.

There is now considerable industrial-sociology research on this interplay in sites such
as the garment and microprocessor factories of Southeast Asia, the south China eco-
nomic miracle, or the maquiladora industries of northern Mexico (e.g. Elias, 2004). The
gender effects are much more than economic. This becomes clear when we reflect on the
toxic conjunction of US-dominated free trade, labour migration, narcotráfico, corrup-
tion, poverty and masculine cultures of violence that has produced femicide in Ciudad
Juárez (Dominguez-Ruvalcaba and Corona, 2010).

There has been less attention in gender studies to the groups privileged by gender
relations in the most powerful institutions of the neoliberal global economy and political

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order. Of the 500 largest transnational corporations in 2012, as listed by Fortune maga-
zine, just 2.6% had women as chief executives; which is to say, 97.4% had men. We have
some beginnings of knowledge about this heavily masculinized arena, in studies of the
hegemonic forms of masculinity among the managerial cadres of transnational corpora-
tions and local businesses involved in the international economy (Elias, 2008; Olavarría,
2009). There is a great deal to be done to fill out the empirical picture, to link these stud-
ies to theory, and to link the theorization of gender to contemporary understandings of
neoliberalism and the modern security state.

It is important to realize that neoliberalism on a world scale is not a matter of the
privatization/deregulation package in the economies of the global North trickling down
to the global South. Neoliberalism first got a political grip in the South, under the
Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. The structural adjustment programmes and the reshaping
of world finance were contemporaneous with, not later than, the neoliberal regimes of
Thatcher and Reagan. Neoliberalism seen from the South has always been about global
trade and new market-driven development strategies, quite as much as privatization and
deregulation (Connell and Dados, 2014).

The shift to trade-led development strategies has had complex implications for gender
orders. By drawing new groups of women workers into export industries, it has created
some opportunities for economic autonomy for women or at least a shift away from
breadwinner/housewife norms, also creating pressure for change in masculinities. Public
investment in women’s education, as a strategy for creating a more competitive work-
force on world markets, has opened paths into higher education and professional occupa-
tions for middle-class women, though not yet in such numbers as middle-class men. Yet
the increasing reliance on market incomes, rather than redistribution via the state, gener-
ally advantages men. And corporate management is a strongly masculinized world in
which wealth and power is accumulating on an unprecedented scale, overwhelmingly in
the hands of men.

Gender politics, too, increasingly occurs in global space. Valentine Moghadam’s
Globalizing Women (2005) is an important demonstration of this, documenting three
groups of transnational feminist networks: one group concerned with structural adjust-
ment and trade, one doing solidarity and advocacy work for women in Muslim-majority
countries, the third linking women’s groups around the Mediterranean. Here are some of
the South–South links invoked by Viveros, and necessary for the project of knowledge
creation outlined in this article.

We are still at an early stage of understanding these dynamics. We are also at an early
stage of reconstructing the sociology of gender from Southern perspectives. I think the
two tasks are connected, because only a gender analysis systematically incorporating the
experience and thought of the majority world will be powerful enough to understand
gender dynamics on a global scale. I also think this work is highly important, as the
worldwide making and unmaking of gender relations is a significant part of the most
urgent issues of our time.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

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Author biography

Raewyn Connell is University Professor at the University of Sydney, a Fellow of the Academy
of Social Sciences in Australia, and one of Australia’s leading social scientists. Her most recent
books are Confronting Equality (2011), about social science and politics; Gender: In World
Perspective (2009); and Southern Theory (2007), about social thought on a world scale. Her
other books include Masculinities, Schools and Social Justice, Ruling Class Ruling Culture,
Gender and Power and Making the Difference. Her work has been translated into 18 languages.
She has taught at universities in Australia, Canada and the USA, in departments of sociology,
political science and education. A long-term participant in the labour movement and peace
movement, Raewyn has tried to make social science relevant to social justice. Details at website:
www.raewynconnell.net.

Résumé
Durant ses générations fondatrices, la sociologie s’inquiétait beaucoup du genre dans le
cadre de la théorisation du monde du colonialisme et de l’impérialisme. La sociologie
s’est ensuite concentrée sur la métropole globale, si bien que son analyse du genre dans
les décennies écoulées depuis le mouvement de libération de la femme a été développée
dans le contexte boréal. Ceci peut maintenant changer si l’extraversion de la sociologie
vers le Sud global peut être exercée. Les thématiques des analyses du genre font en
périphérie ressortir les processus historiques de la formation et de disruption de l’ordre
des genres, examinant les problèmes de violence et de territoire. Les travaux de divers
théoriciens du genre et chercheurs des pays du Sud sont discutés. Il faut que soient
reconnues les conditions matérielles de la formation du savoir dans les pays développés,
ainsi que les différentes manières utilisées par les intellectuels du Sud pour gérer les
influences de la métropole. De nouveaux problèmes ont émergé dans la sociologie du
genre avec la formation d’un ordre mondial néolibéral, produisant de nouveaux modèles
de pouvoir masculinisé et ouvrant des possibilités de changement pour les femmes.

Mots-clés
Genre, globalisation, patriarchie, postcolonial, sociologie, théorie australe

Resumen
En sus generaciones fundacionales, la sociología se preocupaba mayormente de las
cuestiones de género como parte de su teorización del mundo del colonialismo y el
imperio. Luego, la sociología se enfocó en la metrópolis global, por lo que su análisis

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del género en las décadas que siguieron al movimiento de liberación femenina se ha
desarrollado dentro del Norte global. Ahora, esto puede cambiar, si se puede lograr
la extraversión de la sociología sobre el Sur global. Las temáticas de los análisis de
género en la periferia destacan los procesos históricos de formación y disrupción de
las órdenes de género, tratando temas de violencia y tierra. Se analiza el trabajo de un
número de teóricos e investigadores del género del Sur global. Deben reconocerse
las condiciones materiales de formación del conocimiento en los países en vías de
desarrollo, así como también las diversas maneras en que los intelectuales del Sur global
manejan las influencias de las metrópolis. Al delinearse un orden mundial neoliberal,
surgen nuevos temas en la sociología de género, produciendo nuevos patrones de
poder masculinizado, así como vías de cambio para las mujeres.

Palabras clave
Género, globalización, patriarcado, postcolonial, sociología, teoría austral

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Sexualities

2017, Vol. 20(1–2) 159–175

! The Author(s) 2016

Reprints and permissions:

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DOI: 10.1177/1363460716645787

sex.sagepub.com

Special Issue Article

Sexual citizenship in a
comparative perspective:
Dilemmas and insights

Carol Johnson
University of Adelaide, South Australia

Abstract

In this article, the author explores some of the key dilemmas that are involved in

attempts to apply concepts such as ‘sexual citizenship’ in a cross-cultural perspective,

with particular focus on Australia and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region. The

concept of sexual citizenship can usefully be applied to gay and lesbian rights issues in

Australia relatively easily. However, it is not quite so easy to apply this concept to

some of Australia’s Asian neighbours. Any comparative analysis needs to take differing

priorities, conceptions of sexuality, gender, identity, rights, state and civil society into

account but, nonetheless, useful insights can be gained. The author argues that

the concept of sexual citizenship is even more widely applicable if aspects of other

conceptions of citizenship are incorporated into it, such as conceptions of ‘hetero-

normative’ citizenship and ‘affective’ citizenship.

Keywords

Affective citizenship, heteronormativity, intimate citizenship, sexual citizenship

Introduction

In this article, I address issues of the relevance of sexual citizenship to the ‘Asian’
region in two ways. Firstly, I apply the concept of sexual citizenship to a particular
country in the Asia-Pacific region, namely Australia. I use the Australian case
study as an example of how relatively easily conceptions of sexual citizenship
can be applied to ‘Western’ societies. However, I then ask whether the concept
of sexual citizenship works quite so well if applied to some other ‘Asian’ countries
in Australia’s region.

In order to explore this issue, I problematize the initial Australian analysis by
providing a range of examples from other countries in the Asian region that
‘trouble’ the specific ‘Western’ concept of sexual citizenship that was applicable

Corresponding author:

Carol Johnson, School of Social Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia 5005, Australia.

Email: carol.johnson@adelaide.edu.au

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1177%2F1363460716645787&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2016-07-23

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in the Australian case, using examples from Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong,
Singapore and India, amongst others.

1
The point here is not to provide a detailed

analysis of the workings of sexual citizenship in those diverse societies (given the
detailed case study of an Asia-Pacific country provided here is of Australia)
but rather to use such varied examples to critique one-size-fits-all, universalizing
concepts of sexual citizenship. Nonetheless, while opposing universalizing con-
structions of sexual citizenship, I also disagree with perceptions that the concept
is so flawed because of its Western origins that it is best abandoned. Rather,
I conclude that the conception of sexual citizenship can, indeed, be more widely
applicable – but only if conceptions of both the ‘sexual’ and ‘citizenship’ are not
taken as fixed but are adapted to be able to take non-Western social and political
constructions, including gendered and sexualized power relations, into account.

Finally, I also argue that the concept of sexual citizenship can be made more
flexible and widely applicable by acknowledging the important role played by
intersections with related forms of citizenship, such as heteronormative, intimate
and affective citizenship, in shaping the form that sexual citizenship takes in diverse
societies.

The concept of sexual citizenship

Weeks (1999: 36) has argued that the emergence of the category of the sexual
citizen is related to what he sees as a now ‘commonplace’ development ‘at least
in the metropolitan heartlands of Western Societies’. In that political trajectory,
members of previously marginalized sexual groups claim an identity on the basis of
a sexual identity and then rights related to that identity. Such developments also
contribute to a breakdown of a clear public/private division. The concept of sexual
citizenship therefore draws on work which emphasizes the social and political sig-
nificance of intimate life, including issues regarding gender, identity, relationships,
family, the body and emotional life, or what Plummer has termed ‘intimate
citizenship’ (Plummer, 2003: 13–16). However, sexual citizenship focuses on the
sexual aspects of the politics of intimate life, given that intimate citizenship can
cover a range of non-sexual intimate relationships, including friendships (Roseneil,
2010).

Theorists of sexual citizenship emphasize that the sexual has played a key role in
how citizenship rights are constructed by Western governments (Bell and Binnie,
2000: 10). Feminists have long pointed out that Western citizenship rights and
entitlements developed around the conception of the citizen as a male head of
household where women were subordinate (Okin, 1979). In other words, although
many earlier feminist analyses did not make this point explicitly, citizen rights,
benefits and entitlements were constructed in a way that assumed the citizen was
heterosexual. They were a form of heteronormative sexual citizenship (Johnson,
2002: 316–336, 2003: 45–62). The concept of sexual citizenship is therefore particu-
larly useful in drawing attention to the heteronormative nature of the way in which
many citizenship rights were originally constructed and in explaining why,

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as discussed below, obtaining such rights can sometimes have normalizing conse-
quences given their origin in a heterosexual model.

It is not possible to give a more detailed aetiology of the concept of sexual
citizenship here (see further Bell and Binnie, 2000; Richardson and Monro, 2012:
60–83). Additional contributions to debates, including critiques of the concept, will
also be analysed later in this article. Diane Richardson (2000: 83–100), however,
has identified three major aspects of sexual rights which are implicated in sexual
citizenship. These three aspects involve sexual practice, rights of self-definition and
identification, and rights gained via social and political institutions. Note that
sexual citizenship issues are not just political in the narrow sense involving gov-
ernment; they are also economic and social, and include the rights of minority
sexual groups to be recognized and represented symbolically as legitimate (Bell
and Binnie, 2000: 20) in both mainstream political discourse and popular culture.
Sexual citizenship is implicated in how citizenship is conceived more broadly and in
particular forms of governance of the individual. Neoliberal versions of sexual
citizenship, for example, are partly shaped by a commodification of citizenship
which places particular emphasis on consumer ‘lifestyle’ choice (Evans, 1993).
Given the wide range of potential issues that could be covered, it has been neces-
sary to narrow the focus of the analysis here. Consequently, this analysis will focus
largely on examples drawn from the field of same-sex politics, but many aspects
analysed are potentially applicable to other aspects of sexual citizenship mentioned
above.

Applying the concept of sexual citizenship to Australia

I argue here that applying existing concepts of sexual citizenship to Australia is a
relatively straightforward matter. This is partly because some of the most influen-
tial concepts of sexual citizenship were initially developed by British academics.
Australia was established as a British colonial-settler society, resulting in similar
constructions of sexual identity, of the public and private, of citizenship and of the
respective roles of the individual and the (liberal democratic) state. Australia is
also, however, located in the Asia-Pacific region – which makes it a particularly
interesting site to apply conceptions of sexual citizenship and then to compare and
contrast the results with issues that arise in other countries in the same region.

However, this article does not aim to give a detailed account of the impact of
British settler colonialism on issues of sexuality in Australia. Rather, the key points
being made here are that British colonialism introduced both political institutions
for white settlers and British-inspired laws criminalizing male homosexuality via
a sodomy offence (Kirby, 2011: 1–32) that facilitate applying British-influenced
conceptions of sexual citizenship to the Australian case.

As Povinelli (2006: 17, 4) points out, imposing Western heterosexual norms of
conventional couple relationships on colonial societies is ‘a key transfer point’ of
‘liberal forms of power in the contemporary world’ and is seen as being ‘constitu-
tive of Western civilization’. There were therefore particularly detrimental

Johnson 161

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implications for Australia’s indigenous peoples, whose traditional sexual relation-
ships and behaviours, both same and different sex, frequently transgressed Western
norms (Povinelli, 2002: 11–152). British laws also attempted to impose respectable
British sexual norms on colonial settlers (and convicts), constructing particular
heterosexual and (deviant) homosexual identities in the process.

Initial struggles over homosexual sexual citizenship therefore took a form that
would be familiar to many British readers (albeit fought out at state level
in Australia’s federal system), namely the struggle for decriminalization.
Richardson and Monro (2012) have characterized this stage in the fight for equal
citizenship rights as a struggle over mis-recognition, challenging the negative character-
ization of gays and lesbians as pathologically deviant (and, more specifically in the
case of men, as criminal). Arguments were often influenced by a liberal public/
private division (Berlant, 1997; Richardson, 2000: 105–135), where it was argued
that same-sex acts in private between consenting adults simply should not be sub-
ject to criminal charges by the state. Such liberal arguments (Reeves, 1994), derived
from British colonial influences, played a significant role in homosexuality first
being decriminalized in South Australia (in the years 1972–1975). Male homosexu-
ality was subsequently decriminalized in other Australian states and territories
(Australian Capital Territory in 1976, Victoria in 1980, Northern Territory in
1983, New South Wales in 1984, Western Australia in 1989, Queensland in 1990,
and Tasmania in 1997) (see further Willett, 2000). Decriminalization in Australia
proceeded more slowly than in Britain (1967) but faster than in some US states
(where the 2003 US Supreme Court case of Lawrence vs Texas was to play
an important role in decriminalizing homosexuality in those states that still
criminalized it).

There were, however, some more specifically Australian aspects to the fight for
decriminalization. The public mobilizations of the gay and lesbian community,
including Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parades (Willett, 2000: 203),
rather than arguments over privacy, played a significant role in hastening decrim-
inalization in New South Wales. Australia’s internationally innovative public
policy response to HIV/AIDS, with its focus on co-operation, public education
and prevention (Dowsett, 1998) encouraged a climate favourable to decriminaliza-
tion in some states that had not yet followed South Australia’s lead. AIDS councils
and activists were encouraged to participate in the policy process, thereby bringing
‘gay men into the political mainstream in a way that would have been unimaginable
a decade before’ (Willett, 2000: 174–175). Nonetheless, British-influenced liberal
arguments about the rights of homosexual individuals to live their private lives free
from state intervention continued to be used as late as the 1990s. The Keating
federal government justified its measures against the Tasmanian state government’s
criminalization of male homosexuality on the grounds of the right of adult
Australians ‘to pursue their . . . private sexual lives, free of unjustified government
intrusion’ (Crowley, 1994: 2481).

The struggle for same-sex rights, post-decriminalization in Australia, was fought
out at various levels: state, federal and bureaucratic (Johnson et al., 2011: 27–42;

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Willett, 2000). The issues moved incrementally beyond decriminalization of indi-
vidual behaviour carried out in private to broader conceptions of the need for equal
citizenship entitlements for same-sex couples, following the common Western tra-
jectory of demanding rights based on a previously marginalized sexual identity
(Weeks, 1999: 36). Consequently, Australian same-sex couples began to challenge
the heteronormative constructions of citizenship that I have referred to above.
Unlike the US and the UK, however, key rights and entitlements were not
dependent on couples being married. In Australia, de facto heterosexual couples
were generally entitled to the same rights and thus same-sex couples began to fight
for de facto relationship recognition.

In Australia, differences between heterosexual and same-sex de facto sexual
citizenship rights had implications for over 80 pieces of federal legislation in
areas ranging from taxation, welfare and superannuation to immigration. They
impacted on bereavement benefits, superannuation benefits, students living away
from home allowances, health rebates and the ability of same-sex couples to immi-
grate together (HREOC [Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission],
2007). Such discrimination was justified by then Prime Minister Howard (The
Australian, 1996: 3) on the basis of a conservative version of the liberal privacy
position, namely that ‘sexual preference is something very private’ and same-sex
relationships (unlike heterosexual ones) should be tolerated but not endorsed. For
Howard, legislatively recognizing same-sex relationships involved endorsing them.

In 2008, after a long struggle (Johnson et al., 2011: 27–42), and the election of a
new Labor government, most forms of formal citizenship discrimination were
removed. Once Labor’s legislation came into effect in 2009, same-sex couples
basically had the same entitlements as unmarried heterosexual couples in a de
facto relationship at federal level. Meanwhile, same-sex couples were increasingly
recognized for state government benefits too, including same-sex family rights,
although the models used in various Australian states and territories differed.
The changes were largely welcomed by the gay community as important equality
measures.

There is an ongoing debate, however, about whether religious organizations
should continue to have exemptions which allow them to discriminate against
gays and lesbians when providing employment and services (Hepworth and
Rout, 2013). Because most Australian government entitlements are means-tested
if legally recognized couples live together, some Australian same-sex couples lost
benefits. Means-testing had normalizing consequences. Same-sex couples could find
themselves being required to be financially dependent on their partner in a way that
mimicked the old heterosexual family model of a (male) citizen breadwinner with a
dependent spouse. The concept of sexual citizenship therefore helps to explain the
historical underpinnings of a citizenship model that is still having real effects on
gays and lesbians.

Australian forms of sexual citizenship are therefore vulnerable to arguments that
they are implicated in the ways in which the state constructs ‘good’ and ‘bad’
homosexual citizens (Smith, 1994), with those homosexuals who ape heterosexual

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marriage relationships being constructed as ‘good’ homosexuals (see further Bell
and Binnie, 2000: 30; Butler, 2002: 14–34). The financial dependence and means-
testing of couples also reduces government welfare expenditure, potentially reflect-
ing a neoliberal form of homonormativity, critiqued by Duggan (2003: 65–66),
where homosexual domesticity reinforces a minimalist state. Nonetheless, recogniz-
ing same-sex love clearly also challenges heteronormativity by moving away from
the traditional construction of the citizen as exclusively heterosexual.

There has, therefore, been steady progress in terms of reform, even though there
were downsides. Nonetheless, same-sex marriage continued to be opposed by the
majority of Australian federal parliamentarians (including by some Labor MPs
who have been granted a conscience vote on the issue) and by former Prime
Minister Abbott. His successor as Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, endorsed
holding a future plebiscite on same-sex marriage.

Sexual citizenship, however, is not only a form of heteronormative citizenship,
but it also intersects with forms of intimate citizenship, affective citizenship and
social citizenship that can go well beyond the sexual. I argue below that drawing
out these intersections facilitates the concept being more flexible and applicable to a
range of countries. As already noted, sexual citizenship is a form of intimate citizen-
ship, implicated in people’s personal identity and their most intimate personal
relationships (Plummer, 2003: 69; Roseneil, 2010: 77–82). Intimate citizenship
is therefore not confined to the sexual. Some Australian state legislation does
recognize non-sexual Domestic Partnerships (South Australian Government,
2007) — partly due to assuaging the religious right which did not want to privilege
the sexual component, but sometimes due to arguments that this could potentially
lead to the recognition of broader friendship and kinship relationships, including
those found in indigenous communities.

Sexual citizenship is also a form of affective citizenship (Johnson, 2010: 495–509)
in that citizenship identity and entitlements are partly shaped around which
emotional relationships between citizens are recognized as legitimate (as well as
how citizens are encouraged to feel about ‘others’).

3
Analyses of affective

citizenship would therefore emphasize the importance of legally recognizing
loving same-sex emotional relationships, given the implications for policy issues
ranging from immigration and medical decision-making rights to the care of child-
ren in same-sex families.

Applying the concept of sexual citizenship in regard to Australian examples of
same-sex relationships has therefore been a relatively straightforward matter
whereby same-sex relationships have been increasingly recognized by the state,
accompanied by changes in intimate and affective citizenship. Despite some
national specificities, the story is not dissimilar to that in many other Western
countries. The major grounds for opposition to same-sex marriage amongst
Australian politicians remain religious Christian, and social conservative, ones
that are not dissimilar to traditional positions in the UK or US (Johnson et al.,
2011: 31–32). Some conservative Australian politicians have also, however, cited
examples from Australia’s Asian neighbours. When confronted with the fact that

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the US, like most other English-speaking countries, had now legalized same-sex
marriage and Australia still had not, senior government senator Eric Abetz (2015)
responded by saying ‘the Labor Party and other journalists tell us, time and time
again, that we are living in the Asian century. Tell me how many Asian countries
have redefined marriage?’

Given that the answer to Abetz’s question is currently ‘none’, what happens if
we try to apply the concept of sexual citizenship to some of the other (highly
diverse) societies in the Asian region? The following analysis does not seek to
provide a detailed analysis of additional societies in the Asia-Pacific region,
given that the main case study of an Asia-Pacific society given here has been of
Australia. Rather, the analysis will problematize attempts to provide a one-size-fits
all, universal concept of sexual citizenship by providing some examples from
diverse countries in the Asian region that ‘trouble’ key concepts, such as public
and private, citizenship, sexual identity and individual rights versus the state. These
are concepts that have been central to the analysis of the Australian case that has
been discussed above. In the process, I argue for the need for more flexible and
varied conceptions of sexual citizenship and ones that can be strengthened by
incorporating insights from related forms of citizenship, such as intimate, affective
and heteronormative citizenship. It should be emphasized that the differences to be
discussed below are not just ‘cultural’ ones. Rather, they involve differing social
and economic power relations and differing relations between the individual and
the state.

Applying the concept of sexual citizenship to
other societies in the Asia-Pacific region

Bell and Binnie (2006) have acknowledged that different geographies of sexual
citizenship must always be taken into account. Similarly, Ken Plummer (2005:
79) has noted that issues of intimate citizenship, including sexual citizenship,
differ greatly between the Western world and the ‘low income ‘‘poor’’ rest of the
world’ where, for example, struggles are over inequality involving ‘selling body
parts, sexual slavery, the death of children at early ages, living with HIV-AIDS
and all kinds of illnesses, executions for criminal sex, female genital mutilation,
forced and arranged marriages, and so on’.

Nonetheless, conceptions of sexual citizenship can work relatively well when
analysing issues of state criminalization and decriminalization, not least because
some of the laws which criminalize particular sexual acts result from European
colonialism (Kirby, 2011: 1–32). Various countries still have Section 377 of British
colonial law on the books (such as Malaysia, Singapore and India) (Sanders, 2009:
165–189). Indeed, in 2013 the Indian Supreme Court overruled a 2009 New Delhi
High Court ruling that found section 377 to be discriminatory, thereby effectively
making homosexuality illegal again in India (Mahapatra, 2013; Supreme Court of
India, 2013). It should not be assumed, however, that the struggle for decriminal-
ization will take the same trajectory as in Western countries such as Australia or be

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formulated in the same way in regard to issues of rights, identities or Western
liberal divisions between public and private.

In particular, the concept of sexual citizenship needs to be sufficiently broad to
encompass societies where an authoritarian state can still intervene much more
directly in civil society, and in individuals’ private lives, than would be acceptable
in many societies. Baden Offord has pointed out that the Singaporean government
micromanages homosexuality and has ‘sustained an instrumental approach to
managing sexual citizenship’ (Offord, 2011: 139), including using ‘surveillance,
repression, regulation and control’ to contain the gay and lesbian movement
(p. 137). The concept of ‘citizenship’ also needs to be flexible enough to recognize
that, precisely because of the authoritarian nature of such states, struggles by the
gay and lesbian movement over citizenship issues and ‘mis-recognition’ (to refer
back to the arguments of Richardson and Monro, 2012) may also take more indir-
ect and less explicit forms. These include the use of forms of popular culture and
electronic communication where the state may have less control. Arguments over
the right of the state to interfere in citizens’ behaviour and in the private sphere
may also have to be formulated differently in countries where liberal discourses on
individual freedom and limits on the state’s rights to intervene, such as those used
in the Australian case, are not so well recognized. Lynette J Chua (2014) gives a
detailed analysis of the forms of ‘pragmatic resistance’ developed by Singaporean
gay and lesbian activists, who often present their case within the context of existing
state and public discourses. So, activists have argued that police harassment of gays
operated outside of Singapore’s established legal rules rather than citing explicit
individual rights or civil liberties arguments (pp. 20–21). Or, they have argued that
accepting diverse sexuality, and the freedom to love, can strengthen social stability
and loving ties between family members (pp. 129–130). Finally, forms of normal-
ization related to sexual citizenship can be radically different too. ‘Good’ homo-
sexual citizens in Singapore may at times be expected to suppress their sexuality
altogether, or stay in the closet (Offord, 2011: 138). At other times, a slightly more
tolerated homosexuality has been seen as an expression of a Singaporean cosmo-
politan and commercial ‘creative class’ (Chua, 2003) that it is necessary to foster in
the context of globalization.

Indeed, globalization is opening up some interesting problems for authoritarian
governments, conservative movements and LGBTI activists in terms of sexual
citizenship. Chong (2011: 571, 575, 580) argues that globalization has led
Singaporean governments to partially deregulate and liberalize some areas of
social and economic life on purely pragmatic grounds. The Christian right, how-
ever, moved to fill the moral vacuum left as the state partly moved out. Such
developments are not confined to Singapore. Ho (2008) argues that, despite
hopes that forms of UN-sponsored ‘global governance’ would result in a reduction
in authoritarian government, an expanded civil society and more chance for diverse
human rights arguments to flourish, in practice, Asian Christian right NGOs,
amongst others, have seized the opportunity to pursue populist moralistic agendas
attacking homosexuality in countries ranging from Singapore, Taiwan and

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Hong Kong to South Korea. The religious right is also responding negatively to the
globalized commodification of gay sex, and the consequent export of particular
forms of global gay identity, politics and community, as analysed by Evans in his
critique of limited, capitalist conceptions of homosexual citizenship (Evans, 1993:
89–113; Ho, 2008: 465, 471). In short, gays and lesbians can face narrow, neo-
liberal, commodified constructions of sexual citizenship at the same time as facing
what Altman (2001: 139) has identified as a ‘politicization of issues around sexual
morality’, and a growth of religious fundamentalism, in response to the rapidity of
the social, political and economic changes related to globalization.

Furthermore, some authoritarian governments in the region responded to both
globalization and gay rights arguments by simply depicting homosexuality as a
foreign ‘other’. Gay rights arguments based on liberal individual rights arguments
were depicted as alien to ‘Asian values’ and constituting a new form of colonialism.
Former President Mahathir of Malaysia articulated such arguments particularly
clearly:

The world that we have to face in the new decades and centuries will see numerous

attempts by the Europeans to colonize us either indirectly or directly. If our country is

not attacked, our minds, our culture, our religion and other things will become the

target. In the cultural and social fields they want to see unlimited freedom for the

individual. For them the freedom of the individual cannot be questioned. They have

rejected the institutions of marriage and family. Instead they accept the practice of free

sex, including sodomy as a right. Marriage between male and male, between female

and female are officially recognized by them. (Mahathir, 2003)

Mahathir does not mention that it was the British who introduced Malaysia’s laws
against homosexuality (which the Malaysian government used against Opposition
Leader Anwar Ibrahim). Nor does Mahathir mention that, at the time he was
speaking, US President George W Bush in the US and Australian Prime
Minister John Howard were opposing same-sex marriage on Christian religious
grounds. Furthermore, while Mahathir’s conception of the Malaysian family may
be different from Western ones (in terms of its extended nature and the individual’s
subordination to the family), his conception, like that of George W Bush or John
Howard, is still highly heteronormative. In other words, while Mahathir may be
denying equal sexual citizenship to gays and lesbians, he is clearly constructing a
form of sexual citizenship, namely heteronormative citizenship. In these respects,
the concept of sexual citizenship is still highly applicable, even if Western trajec-
tories for achieving same-sex rights are being rejected.

Conceptions of sexual citizenship also need to be flexible enough to allow for
different relationships between public and private, the state, society and religion.
Judicial imperatives related to this can be very different from those in the West. In
Malaysia, heteronormative citizenship is constructed, for Muslims at least, not just
by the central state but also by local Islamic courts administering customary sharia
law, particularly in family and sexual matters.

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Countries where many forms of sharia law apply would have to develop con-
ceptions of sexual citizenship that take the role of religious courts into account.
Nonetheless, as we have seen, religion can also influence sexual citizenship rights in
avowedly secular democracies such as Australia, where attempts to retain sections
of the religious vote have influenced issues ranging from same-sex marriage to anti-
discrimination measures. So, Western conceptions of sexual citizenship also need to
take account of religious influences. There is, therefore, no reason why conceptions
of ‘citizenship’ cannot be flexible enough to allow for such different conceptions of,
and relationships between, state, society and religion (or for related non-state
forms of discrimination).

Conceptions of sexual citizenship also need to be flexible enough to allow for
varying conceptions of how the ‘sexual’ relates to individual and familial identity.
They need to move beyond the Western trajectories of sexual identity leading to
the articulation of rights-based arguments related to that identity which then
constituted the forms of sexual citizenship that have been identified by Weeks
(1999: 36). An alternative perspective can be seen in Chou Wah-Shan’s analysis
of ‘coming out’:

The Western notion of ‘coming out’ is not only a political project of the lesbigay

movement, but is often a cultural project of affirming the Western value of individual-

ism, discourse of rights and the prioritization of sex as the core of selfhood. The

model of coming out is hinged upon notions of the individual as an independent,

discrete unit segregated economically, socially and geographically from the familial-

kinship network. (Chou, 2001: 32; see also Chou, 2000: 5)

Chou argues that in some other cultures, including Chinese ones, where familial
relations are more important, both sexuality and individuality are not so crucial to
identity formation. Admittedly, Chou’s depiction of the relationship between
family, sexuality and identity would be contested by those who have criticized
his depiction of the Chinese family as representing a ‘culturally distinct, harmoni-
ous and ‘‘tolerant’’’ ideal (see the overview by Martin, 2015: 35–38). Others see
issues of sexuality and identity as being both more complex and more explicit,
including in Chinese societies (Khor and Kamano, 2006). Nonetheless, such ana-
lyses also allow for the fact that identity categories when they are embraced may
differ markedly from those described in the Anglophone acronym LGBTI (lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex).

Chou’s example involves not only a potentially different form of identity for-
mation to that in countries such as the US, Britain or Australia, but also a different
articulation of the relationship between sexual citizenship and forms of intimate
and affective citizenship. The unit of intimate citizenship with which sexual citi-
zenship intersects in Chou’s formulation is constructed in a much broader context
of the extended family rather than in terms of parental breadwinners in a nuclear
family. Sexual citizenship also intersects with a very different articulation of

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affective citizenship from that in mainstream Australian political culture. A cou-
ple’s romantic love is not being privileged over other emotions, including the
responsibility that is part of filial love. Consequently, unpacking the multiple citi-
zenship models at work, including forms of familial, intimate and affective citizen-
ship which interact with a couple’s sexual citizenship, helps to throw light on
different conceptions of rights and responsibilities.

That broader construction of the unit of intimate citizenship, revolving around
an extended family, can also pose another set of sexual citizenship problems.
Antonia Chao (2002: 369–381) has pointed out that, as in Taiwan, the lack of
individualization in some Chinese societies can cause problems for gays and les-
bians precisely because of the failure to differentiate individuals from heterosex-
ual family structures. It can result in gays and lesbians facing difficulties in
accessing accommodation and hospital treatment. Nonetheless, while family
structures and the role of individuals within them may be being constructed
differently from conventional Western structures, the family is still part of a
form of heteronormative (sexual) citizenship. There are implications not only
for the recognition of same-sex couples but also for the recognition of alternative
parenting forms in same-sex families (and may result in very different circum-
stances and also different demands from those articulated by the Australian gay
and lesbian movement). Different conceptions and levels of welfare provision also
mean that equality arguments, if they are articulated, will take forms relevant to
the particular social policy context where they are being made. Once again,
unpacking the multiple underlying citizenship models, including different, com-
plex interactions between sexual, intimate and affective citizenship, can help to
throw light on that context.

In addition, conceptions of ‘sexual’ citizenship need to be flexible enough to
deal with markedly different conceptions of how the ‘sexual’ itself is constructed.
Peter Jackson (2001: 15) suggests that in Thailand what is at issue is often best
understood not so much as sexual identities as eroticized genders. Similarly,
Atluri (2012: 721–736) suggests that Western conceptions of the ‘sexual’ cannot
adequately encompass the complex identities, including the religious significance,
of ‘sexual’ minorities such as Indian Hijras, who have complex gender identities.
Nor can conceptions of sexual ‘citizenship’ adequately encompass the complex
gender/sexual politics encapsulated in the Hijrass’ transgressive and comedic
public performances. Furthermore, Atluri argues that Western conceptions of
the ‘sexual’ in ‘sexual’ citizenship do not allow for forms of sexual politics
(including Mahatma Gandhi’s) which involve conceptions of sacrifice and
sexual renunciation rather than sexual activism. Other conceptions, such as intim-
ate citizenship, may still have some purchase here, while conceptions of hetero-
normative citizenship may also throw light on some of the discrimination to
which Hijras can still be subject to and on their transgressive challenges to con-
ventional gender identities (p. 733). Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge
that there are instances when conventional conceptions of ‘sexual’ citizenship are

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not adequate or appropriate.
5
Consequently, Atluri calls for a ‘sexual citizenship

after orientalism’ which might:

involve a liberation of epistemologies, thoughts, and desires that lie dormant within

the Western scholarly and political imagination. Perhaps, sexual citizenship after

orientalism might move outside market-driven cultures of sex as property and legal

entitlement to revisit the embodied spirit of sacrifice and love that defines other trad-

itions of sexual politics. (p. 734)

Atluri’s words remind us that sexual politics and sexual citizenship can take very
diverse forms and that they intersect with varied forms of affective citizenship
which can privilege emotions other than sexual attraction and romantic love. It
should be noted, though, that the struggle to decriminalize male homosexuality in
India has often used quite conventional arguments about rights and equality
(Sharma and Das, 2011: 721–736).

Such qualifications about unproblematically using Western-influenced concep-
tions of sexual citizenship are particularly important to acknowledge in a situation
where arguments over sexual citizenship rights are increasingly taking international
forms, including the UN forms of ‘global governance’ referred to above. Same-sex
rights are now being seen as a crucial part of international human rights regimes
(Ban, 2012; Clinton, 2011). International activists and commentators have to be
particularly careful in how they articulate such demands. Writers such as Atluri
(2012: 721–736) and Sabsay (2012: 605–623) have mounted strong critiques of
discourses which construct conceptions of Western superiority in regard to (nar-
rowly homonormative) constructions of rights, in which it becomes the role of the
West to intervene to liberate what is constructed as a vulnerable, sexually victim-
ized, racialized ‘other’. After all, there is a long history of Western conceptions of
citizenship being entwined with justifications for Western superiority and coloni-
alism (Harrington, 2012: 573–586; see also Dreher, this issue). It also needs to be
remembered that Western conceptions of citizenship have also long involved forms
of exclusion of the ‘other’ as national boundaries and identities were policed (Payne
and Davies, 2012: 251–256), as well as the construction of racial, gender and sexual
‘strangers’ within the body politic (Phelan, 2001).

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that it was both a useful and relatively straightforward
matter to apply the concept of sexual citizenship to Australia because of Australia’s
history as a Western colonial-settler society, with British-influenced political insti-
tutions and conceptions of the relationship between the state and civil society, as
well as British-influenced conceptions of sexual identities and laws on homosexual-
ity. One needs to be much more careful, however, when attempting to apply the
concept of sexual citizenship to other countries in the Asia-Pacific region which
have different conceptions of the relation between state, law and society as well as

170 Sexualities 20(1–2)

Rayna
Highlight

different conceptions of the nature and significance of sexual identity. Narrow
conceptions that work so well in the Australian, or other Western contexts,
cannot be so easily exported elsewhere.

Consequently, I have argued strongly against universalizing Western concept-
ions of sexual citizenship. Nonetheless, it would be very unfortunate if conceptions
of sexual citizenship were to be rejected on the grounds that they were not
applicable to a range of societies, not least because they do raise important
issues of constructions of heteronormative citizenship. Furthermore, I have
argued that it is possible to develop alternative, flexible, conceptions of sexual
citizenship which do throw light on differing conceptions of sexual identity and
sexual power relations and for diverse relationships between the state, society, the
economy and religion.

I have also suggested that providing a better understanding of the relationships,
articulations and intersections between sexual citizenship, heteronormative citizen-
ship, intimate citizenship and affective citizenship can usefully assist in the task of
broadening conceptions of sexual citizenship beyond narrow Western conceptions.
I have argued that conceptions of intimate citizenship can help to explain how
differing roles of the family, in relationship to the individual, can impact on
sexual identity formation and how differing conceptions of the relationship
between the heteronormative family and the state can impact on access to govern-
ment resources. Similarly, conceptions of affective citizenship can help to explain
how love of family might be privileged over romantic love or how emotions asso-
ciated with sexual renunciation and self-sacrifice might be privileged over sexual
feelings. I have also argued that the concept of heteronormative citizenship, as an
aspect of sexual citizenship, can sometimes be more useful than the broader con-
cept of sexual citizenship itself. For heteronormative citizenship can signal the
privileging of heterosexual relationships, while allowing for a diversity of margin-
alized identities which are not necessarily reducible to the ‘sexual’ (or Western
LGBTI categories).

Consequently, the concept of sexual citizenship needs to be articulated within a
broader framework of forms of citizenship. Here, as elsewhere, the task is not to
dismiss conceptions of sexual citizenship as irretrievably Western-centric but to
develop conceptions of sexual citizenship that are not.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial,
or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. The concepts of ‘Western’ and ‘Asian’ have been surrounded by inverted commas initially
to indicate that both are highly problematic concepts; see Bonnett (2004), Wang (2007)

and Hall (2009). That is even more the case given that many ‘Western’ societies such as
Australia are increasingly multicultural so that, for example, many Australian citizens
may have varying conceptions of ‘sexual’ identity, or views on the role of the family.

Johnson 171

Nonetheless, for ease of exposition the inverted commas have been dropped in the
remainder of the text but should be assumed as implicit.

2. The recognition of Australian de facto relationships for many citizenship benefits has

removed some grounds that have been used in other countries for arguing for the import-
ance of granting same-sex marriage in order to remove some obvious discrimination.

3. Note that issues of intimate and affective citizenship also raise an issue which it has not

been possible to address here because it is beyond the scope of this article, namely
whether it is justifiable that sexual relationships be privileged as a unit of citizenship
and whether doing so disadvantages other forms of close personal relationships such as

friendship (Roseneil, 2010).
4. Of course, major advances in gay and lesbian rights have not just occurred in Europe or

North America. Significant advances have also taken place in countries ranging from
South Africa to parts of South America (Tremblay et al., 2011).

5. While not wishing to suggest that Hijras can be simply incorporated into Western
‘trans’ categories, it is worth noting that Western conceptions of sexual citizenship
also have difficulty dealing adequately with trans issues (Richardson and Monro, 2012:

175–176).

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