Containing uncertainty: Sexual values and citizenship

    Authors

    C. Schippert

    Comments

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    Abbreviated Journal Title

    J. Homosex.

    Keywords

    sexual values; queer ethics; citizenship; transgression; Jeffrey Weeks; POLITICS; Psychology, Multidisciplinary; Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary

    Abstract

    This essay reflects on one dimension of the challenge of being a queer ethicist. Can we have norms/vafties without liberal assumptions that might undo the important contributions of queer theory? The reemergence of appeals to "citizenship" in lbgt and queer debates serves as illustrations of this question. Reading Weeks's Invented Moralities: Sexual Values in an Age of Uncertainty (1995), while considering various scholars who have engaged the issue of sexual citizenship since, enables me to illustrate some of the issues that emerge around ethics and queerness at this particular moment. My argument is that attempts to offer constructive ethical engagement in the end often contain challenges rather than successfully address them. Critically examining Weeks's intervention into what he sees as our "loss" of moral authority and ethical concerns to the right wing is helpful for queer ethical conversations that consider available theoretical and philosophical models of claiming citizenship as way of claiming values in uncertain times. Weeks (1995; 1998), Richardson (2000), Bell and Binnie (2000), and Phelan (2001) provides helpful guides to the struggle with tensions that faces us in lbgt/queer debates of citizenship.

    Journal Title

    Journal of Homosexuality

    Volume

    52

    Issue/Number

    1-2

    Publication Date

    1-1-2006

    Document Type

    Article

    Language

    English

    First Page

    285

    Last Page

    307

    WOS Identifier

    WOS:000243894800013

    ISSN

    0091-8369

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