Queer citizens and the perils of the neoliberal city: Racialized narratives of homophobic hate crime in Oslo, Norway

This article examines the relationship between queer citizenship, state violence and the exclusion of racialized, homophobic ‘others’. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with LGBT people in Oslo, Norway, I investigate the presence of racialization in narratives of homophobic hate crime. The findings suggest that racialization structures narratives of risk assessment among several of the participants. However, in these narratives, racialization often operates through place-specific references, rather than racial and ethnic markers of identity. The narrative work thus displays ambivalence and a disassociation from racism. I argue that these narratives feed on an already established conflation of space, ethnicity, religion and homophobia, to which both mainstream media and part of the LGBT community contribute.

Introduction

I begin this book with the story of my spouse and I essentially being kicked out of the Des Moines YMCA for being lesbians. I use this narrative to introduce the ways relationships between social and legal definitions of “legitimate” family are used to regulate access to social rights and resources. The most pervasive stories in public dialogues about families headed by lesbians and gay men at the turn of the twenty-first century suggest that legalizing same-sex marriage should be either the panacea for all the constitutional vulnerabilities of queer citizenship, or the downfall of civilization due to the crumbling of the institution of marriage. I argue that the construction of lesbian-headed families should be explored in the context of other arenas of social policy, including adoption, immigration, and welfare. I discuss my family’s location in this research.

Queer Citizenship

This chapter sutures the pre- and post-civil rights movements—a divide that operates as a historical schism for Latino Studies. Analyzing José Antonio Villarreal’s novel Pocho (1959, which many have hailed as the first Chicano novel), this chapter argues that the novel is better understood not as an origin point but rather as a node within a longer genealogy of Latino culture. This chapter focuses on sexuality, homoeroticism, and homophobia, depictions that are at odds with some of the stated objectives of the Chicano movement’s foundational documents, but that situate the novel within earlier discussions of American democratic values. Read alongside early Chicano movement manifestos and correspondence, the chapter calls for a more historically expansive understanding of the emergence and legacy of the Chicano movement.

Rethinking the sexual citizenship from queer and post-Soviet perspectives: Queer urban spaces and the right to the socialist city

In this article, I use the analysis of citizenship regimes and their revolutionary changes as a point of departure to offer an improvement of the notion of grassroots politics. The focus of the article is on queer citizenship as it evolved in alternative modernity that the USSR conditioned. Immediately after the October Revolution, the new government deliberately proclaimed a new sexual freedom and rearranged the material conditions of living in urban areas of the country. This resulted in unexpected changes of practice, one of which is the multiplication of public space. Contrary to conventional forms of politics, Soviet queer politics was reallocated to parallel urban spaces. This analysis allows one to address the particular relations between one’s sexuality and political participation, citizenship and materiality, market economy and revolutions.

Repairing Bad Objects

The Introduction outlines the prospect of an “improper” queer citizenship. It points to a queer church (where queer damage is revisited) in a city hailed for its racial and sexual diversity as a key site for understanding how people affectively work through the contradictions of liberal citizenship.

Feminist, Sexual, and Queer Citizenship

The line dividing citizens and those excluded from its promise was long shaped by the public/private dichotomy, consigning women to the private, while reserving citizenship’s sphere of the public domain for men. Feminist theorists, in criticizing this dichotomy, have examined the relationships between citizenship, dependency, and reproduction. While those considered sexually deviant have suffered exclusions from citizenship, gay and lesbian subjects in some sites currently enjoy a role as model citizens. This shift has accompanied a transition in the role of the citizen from producer of work to consumer: the privatized, self-governing, and sexually free individual is today’s prototypical citizen. This new sexual citizen is contrasted with illiberal others, who are cast outside as unfit candidates for citizenship. Queer citizenship does not provide a more encompassing vision; citizenship is not available to be queered, given how it inevitably splits the world into those who belong and those left outside.