Introduction: The Sexual Politics of Austerity (original) (raw)

The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism and Austerity in an ʹ′Exceptionalʹ′ Country: Italy

Homonormativity, meant as the " sexual politics of neoliberalism " , has become a widespread concept within social sciences and geography. Associated with the domestication of homosexual lives and the access of LGBT people to full citizenship rights, this notion creates a monolithic account of neoliberalism and its sexual politics all around the Global North. Focused on the case of Italy, the paper challenges this homogenizing concept through adopting the perspective of the " exception " developed by Aihwa Ong to analyse neoliberalism. Following her conceptualization of the interplay between " neoliberalism as exception " and " exceptions to neoliberalism " , the paper shows how the same interplay characterizes the sexual politics of neoliberalism and austerity in the Italian case. Indeed Italy represents an exception within the model of the " sexual politics of neoliberalism (and austerity) " concerning LGBT issues, while exception has been invoked in Italian politics to regulate sexuality, notably sex work. Moreover, exceptions have been assembled by public institutions in order to protect LGBT (consumer) subjects from " risk " and " danger " through a strategy defined as " soft entrepreneurialism " .

Marriage and the spare bedroom: exploring the sexual politics of austerity in Britain

Heteronormativity and homonormativity are connected. Changing social attitudes to homosexuality and the creation of new homonorms influence changing social norms around heterosexuality. To study the emerging sexual politics of austerity it is important to consider how normative social attitudes to both heterosexual and homosexual relations are changing in the current period. This paper examines two recent social policy developments in the UK to this end. It interrogates the debates about 'marriage equality' for same sex couples in conjunction with recent changes to welfare benefits, particularly the 'Bedroom Tax' which penalises social housing tenants receiving housing benefits, if they are deemed to be living in accommodation with more bedrooms than they need. While marriage equality (re)privileges certain types of couples and domestic economies, simultaneous attacks on the welfare system are disproportionately affecting single people and those couples who find their relationships outside the reconfigured normative values of austerity Britain. The paper concludes by considering what these changes reveal about the sexual politics of austerity and the role of mainstream lesbian and gay advocacy groups in shaping them.

Queer Politics in Neoliberal Times (1970s-2010s)

Routledge History of Queer America, Don Romesburg (ed.). New York: Routledge, 2018

Neoliberalism has had a profound effect on post-1970s LGBT/queer cultures and politics. This essay reviews how, by privatizing social services, fostering consumer citizenship, and promoting corporate welfare and urban redevelopment, neoliberal policies have pit “deserving” gays and lesbians against “undeserving” others: the same-sex married couple vs. the “welfare queen,” the gay/lesbian consumer-citizen vs. the poor queer, and the gay gentrifier vs. the “dangerous” other. Historicizing these oppositions reveals the intersections of sexuality, class, gender, race, and social policy that remain central to queer politics today.

(Re)Articulating Sexual Citizenship: Between Queering the Urban Space and Subjugating the Queer

In today’s post-industrial cities, how urban citizenship is defined and performed have been ambiguously positioned in their relationship with the urban societal space. While the cities become more commodified and privatized with the inter-urban competition, the concept of citizenship is put into a tentative position between being participatory political subjects and passive consumers. Sexuality, in this regard, raises up as an important element of political expressiveness and passivity, with its constructive role on the identity. The discussion on political economy of sexuality by Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler contributes to the study where the participatory role of sexual citizenship can be grounded on cultural and/or economic aspects of subjectivity, from their poststructuralist perspective. By using the discourse theory by Laclau and Mouffe as its method, the thesis explores the articulatory practices for the antagonistic construction of sexual citizenship through discourses of neoliberalism and its counterparts. An analysis on subject positions in a neoliberal era is defined with their participation in the urban as a consumptuary and/or political space. Therefore, this study analyses Stockholm Pride as a case to show how sexuality in the urban space is (de)politically (re)defined, and how an entrepreneurial agenda of a post-industrial city, Stockholm, discursively functions for positioning sexual citizens between the antagonisms of being a consumer or citizen.

Sexual subjectivities within neoliberalism: can queer and crip engagements offer an alternative praxis

Journal of International Women's Studies, 2018

Neoliberal processes have been wrought on the body, and have formed an effective oppression against 'deviant' bodies that do not, or cannot, maintain the idealised, heterosexual and able-bodied, neoliberal figure. By engaging with feminist, queer, and crip theoretical framings of the body, and the impact of neoliberal governmentality on non-normative sexuality, I find varied sites where queer, crip, or crip-queer bodies can challenge dominant discourses of heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness. These challenges are crucial to creating counter-publics and counter-discourses to undermine the neoliberal-neoconservative complex. Exploring theorisings of the body and agency further, I look toward a crip/queer alterity, suggesting areas for further research, collaborating with postcolonial theories to examine the neoliberal body in globalised contexts. Introduction By understanding the body as a site of oppression, it may also be conceived as a site of resistance. This article explores how Foucauldian notions of governmentality have regulated the non-normative body, and have sought to manage and normalise 'deviant' populations. Neoliberalism has become a hegemonic frame within Western democracies, seeking to control and regulate populations through processes of governmentality (Harvey, 2005). These processes have been wrought on the body, and have formed an effective oppression against bodies that do not, or cannot, maintain the idealised, heterosexual and able-bodied, neoliberal figure (Phipps, 2014). This article begins by exploring the relationship between neoliberalism and the body. I then go on to analyse the ways that queer and/or crip bodies are managed and regulated by neoliberal imperatives, and explore some avenues and opportunities for resistance to the corporeal regulation, namely through dissident sexuality. These challenges are crucial to creating counter-publics and counter-discourses to undermine the neoliberal-neoconservative complex. Bringing these conversations back to the theoretical discourse, this article then elaborates on a crip/queer alterity, and the possibilities imaginable through more intersectional analyses, suggesting areas for further research collaborating with postcolonial theories to examine the neoliberal body in a globalised context.

Queer Selfhoods in the Shadow of Neoliberal Urbanism

Journal of Historical Sociology, 2013

This article explores the political and performative shift in representations of same-sex desire within the context of neoliberal urbanism in Bengaluru, India. The affective shift from labile sexual practices to defiant assertions of sexual identity over the past two decades warrants a conjunctural analysis that tracks the intersections between neoliberal cultures of consumption and liberal rhetorics of equal rights and freedom of choice. Focusing on the queer subject in Mahesh Dattani's dramatic oevre, this article considers progressivist accounts of same-sex desire in neoliberal Bengaluru over the past two decades. By examining how non-normative sexual practices are disciplined into the epistemological categories of LGBT identity politics, the essay charts the itineraries of "queer" as it travels to India.