Title

Containing Uncertainty: Sexual Values And Citizenship

Keywords

Citizenship; Jeffrey Weeks; Queer ethics; Sexual values; Transgression

Abstract

This essay reflects on one dimension of the challenge of being a queer ethicist. Can we have norms/values 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 a 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. © Copyright (c) by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

Publication Date

3-9-2007

Publication Title

Journal of Homosexuality

Volume

52

Issue

1-2

Number of Pages

285-307

Document Type

Review

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1300/J082v52n01_12

Socpus ID

33847685632 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/33847685632

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