Sexual Democracy and its Discontents

Abstract

The question of sexual democracy, i.e., the extension of full civil rights to women as well as to citizens who do not conform to heterosexual ‘normality,’ has in recent decades come to play an increasingly central role in debates on European citizenship and the symbolic meaning of Europe. Notions of sexual equality and liberty have been central to a culturalization of citizenship - a process grounded in discourses that represent the world as divided into different, inimical cultures and that frame European societies as in need of protection against the effects of immigration, transnationalization, and ‘Islamization’. Proponents of this cultural protectionism frame migrants - especially Muslims - as outsiders and emphasize the need for their cultural education and their assimilation into a European moral universe. Indeed, the culturalization of citizenship has gone hand in glove with the framing of Muslims as backward, intolerant and incongruous with ‘European’ secular modernity. In debates around sexual democracy - especially lesbian and gay rights - European societies have been recast in terms of an opposition between ‘autochthonous’ and ‘non-native’ moralities, between ‘tolerant citizens’ and ‘intolerant (migrant and Muslim) others’. In this panel, we aim to examine these dynamics by inviting papers on the complex relationships - in European societies - of cultural and diversities. We discuss empirical and theoretical papers on faith and LGBTQ rights; sexual nationalism; and on the rise of queer Muslim social movements.

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