Gendered, Sexual, and Intimate (Non)Citizenships

Abstract

Feminist, queer, trans, and decolonial scholars have long questioned and examined gendered and sexual citizenships and their relationships to the private spheres. Understanding noncitizenship as a distinct relationship with a state – one which can overlap with citizenship – can contribute to this trans-, feminist, and decolonial interrogation of gendered and sexual citizenship. Rather than focusing on the negation of citizenship (‘non-citizenship’) as something which exists in an oppositional, binary relationship with citizenship, scholars can employ ‘noncitizenship’ to address the complicated relationships that people have with the states in which they live, whether they have citizen status or not. Mobilising a noncitizenist lens allows us to examine how gender- and sexual minorities navigate kinship bonds and forms of embodiment which sit uneasily within and alongside legal technologies of citizenship, which are frequently heteronormative, cissexist, and hyper nationalist. In placing noncitizenism in dialogue with the trans-, feminist, and decolonial interrogation of gendered- and sexual citizenships, this panel develops an important and underexamined dimension of the noncitizenist turn. Through its examination of the (non)citizenship of gender- and sexual minorities, this panel invites analysis of the complexity and limitations of legal citizenship, as well as of the noncitizen agency exercised by those whose forms of kinship and lived experience may not fall fully within the traditional, heteronormative categories of citizen. The discussion will consider how such individuals come to be in noncitizen relationships with the States in which they live, whether as a result of a partial exclusion from public or private life, by enacting embodied resistance to the normative privileging of citizens, or both.

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