This book explores the relationship between sex and belonging in law and popular culture, arguing that contemporary citizenship is sexed, privatized, and self-disciplined. Former sexual outlaws have challenged their exclusion and are being incorporated into citizenship. But as citizenship becomes more sexed, it also becomes privatized and self-disciplined. The author explores these contesting representations of sex and belonging in films, television, and legal decisions. She examines a broad range of subjects, from gay men and lesbians, pornographers and hip hop artists, to women selling vibrators, adulterers, and single mothers on welfare. She observes cultural representations ranging from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to Dr. Phil, Sex in the City to Desperate Housewives. She reviews appellate court cases on sodomy and same-sex marriage, national welfare reform, and obscenity regulation. Finally, the author argues that these representations shape the terms of belonging and governance, producing good (and bad) sexual citizens, based on the degree to which they abide by the codes of privatized and self-disciplined sex.

Sexual citizenship has become a key concept in the social sciences. It describes the rights and responsibilities of citizens in sexual and intimate life, including debates over equal marriage and women's human rights, as well as shaping thinking about citizenship more generally. But what does it mean in a continually changing political landscape of gender and sexuality? In this timely intervention, Diane Richardson examines the normative underpinnings and varied critiques of sexual citizenship, asking what they mean for its future conceptual and empirical development, as well as for political activism. Clearly written, the book shows how the field of sexuality and citizenship connects to a range of important areas of debate including understandings of nationalism, identity, neoliberalism, equality, governmentality, individualization, colonialism, human rights, globalization and economic justice. Ultimately this book calls for a critical rethink of sexual citizenship. Illustrating her argument with examples drawn from across the globe, Richardson contends that this is essential if scholars want to understand the sexual politics that made the field of sexuality and citizenship studies what it is today, and to enable future analyses of the sexual inequalities that continue to mark the global order.

This provocative book provides a new grounding for the understanding of sexual rights. It examines the ways in which sexuality is constructed, with reference to the rights and lack of rights of homosexuals, transvestites, children and others.

Most of us want to be decent people in the world. Yet when it comes to sex, we so often stumble and contribute to sexual injustice. Think about it: are we really still blaming victims of sexual assaults? Can it truly be that there is a gender based orgasm gap? Are we actually labeling people based on the kind of sex they do or don’t have? Why do we insist on questioning if sex is consensual when someone’s passed out drunk? Our society is undergoing an evolution, and we should take this as a call to action to ensure that all people, regardless of gender identity, sexual orientation, ability, age, ethnicity, race, religion, or social class, are treated as humans worthy of respect. Good Sexual Citizenship asks us all to break down sexual hostility and build up something better. To promote understanding and empathy, Friedrichs includes a factual and historical backdrop covering gender disparities, women’s rights, sexual violence, prevention, and sex education, and challenges readers to use this insight, along with guided exercises, to examine their own potential for “good sexual citizenship.” Covering topics like consent, sexual assault, pleasure, double standards, casual sex, hook-up culture, and teen sex, she provides us with tools to navigate societal messages, sexually hostile climates, stereotypes, and outdated mentalities.

Sinners and Citizens explores how sexual habits changed in Sweden during its development from an agrarian society into a modern welfare state. Jens Rydström examines the history of homosexuality and bestiality in that country to consider why these sexual practices have been so closely linked in virtually all Western societies. He limns sharply the distinctive experience of rural life, showing that to regularly witness farm animals stirred passions and sparked ideas, especially among young farmhands. Based on medical journals, psychiatric reports, and court records from the period, as well as testimonies from men in diaries, letters, and interviews, Sinners and Citizens reveals that bestiality was once a dreaded crime in Sweden. But in time, mention of the practice disappeared completely from legal and medical debates. This, Rydström contends, is because models of penetrative sodomy shifted from bestiality to homosexuality as Sweden transformed from a rural society into a more urban one. As the nation's economy and culture became less identified with the countryside, so too did its idea of deviant sexual behavior.

Sexual citizenship is a powerful concept associated with debates about recognition and exclusion, agency, respect and accountability. For young people in general and for gender and sexually diverse youth in particular, these debates are entangled with broader imaginings of social transitions: from ‘child’ to ‘adult’and from ‘unreasonable subject’ to one ‘who can consent’. This international and interdisciplinary collection identifies and locates struggles for recognition and inclusion in particular contexts and at particular moments in time, recognising that sexual and gender diverse young people are neither entirely vulnerable nor self-reliant. Focusing on the numerous domains in which debates about youth, sexuality and citizenship are enacted and contested, Youth, Sexuality and Sexual Citizenship explores young people’s experiences in diverse but linked settings: in the family, at school and in college, in employment, in social media and through engagement with health services. Bookended by reflections from Jeffrey Weeks and and Susan Talburt, the book’s empirically grounded chapters also engage with the key debates outlined in it's scholarly introduction. This innovative book is of interest to students and scholars of gender and sexuality, health and sex education, and youth studies, from a range of disciplinary and professional backgrounds, including sociology, education, nursing, social work and youth work.

Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South