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Sexualities

Sex Zones: Intimacy, Citizenship and Public Space

Phil Hubbard Sexualities 2001 4: 51 DOI: 10.1177/136346001004001003 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sex.sagepub.com/content/4/1/51

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Article

Abstract Recent studies of sexuality and space have demonstrated that public spaces are constructed around particular notions of appropriate sexual comportment which exclude those whose lives do not centre on monogamous, heterosexual, procreative sex. In a wider sense, such studies have noted that this spatial exclusion of sexual dissidents reects (and reproduces) notions of citizenship based on heteronormality. Elaborating these ideas, this article proceeds to explore the way in which dissidents have transgressed public and civic spaces in their attempt to undermine this dominant notion of citizenship. In so doing, the article questions the idealization of public space as a site where new notions of sexual citizenship can be forged, arguing that the relationship between intimacy, citizenship and space is less straightforward than some commentators suggest. Keywords citizenship, uidity, space, transgression, visibility

Phil Hubbard
Loughborough University

Sex Zones: Intimacy, Citizenship and Public Space

Introduction
Space, as many geographers are currently at pains to point out, does not simply exist as a given but affects (and is affected by) things which are always becoming. Or, to put it another way, space is not just a passive backdrop to human behaviour and social action, but is constantly produced and remade within complex relations of culture, power and difference (see, for example, Hetherington, 1999; McDowell, 1999; Sibley, 1995). It is this rejection of an empiricalphysical model of spatiality in favour of a more critical, constructionist notion of space that informs this article, wherein an attempt is made to elucidate the importance of space in the creation of (new) sexual identities. More specically, the concern of this article is to explore how the transgression of sexual dissidents into public spaces can challenge the naturalization of heterosexual norms. I will seek Sexualities Copyright 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 4(1): 5171[1363-4607(200102)4:1; 5171; 015816]

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to explain that it is because sexual minorities have been excluded from public view in a variety of different ways throughout history that the idea of bringing private sexual fantasies into public view has often been written about as representing a powerful political statement, a way that dissident groups can challenge the tyranny of oppressive heterosexuality (Calia, 1994; Geltmaker, 1992). While this argument is widespread, I will argue that it is only a partial reading, suggesting that a more uid and topologically complex interpretation of public and private space is necessary to understand the changing geographies of sexuality. Yet this article is not solely about the geography of sexuality; it is also about citizenship. As has been evident in the pages of this journal, discussions about citizenship are never far away in debates about sexual politics (e.g. Humphrey, 1999; Seidman et al., 1999). Indeed, a widely noted phenomena in democratic societies is for judgements about whether groups and individuals are participating in the life of the nation in a responsible and desirable manner to centre on questions of sexuality (Armstrong, 1994; Evans, 1993). Accordingly, those whose sexual proclivities are adjudged suspect, dangerous or undesirable may nd their civil and welfare rights curtailed as politicians and policymakers seek to redene the moral boundaries of the nation. For example, discussing the shifting parameters of social policy in the United Kingdom, Carabine (1996) highlights the importance of pregnancy, AIDS/HIV, child sex abuse, promiscuity, birth control and pornography as issues used to exclude certain individuals from the rights and entitlements associated with full citizenship. More widely, debates about surrogacy, embryology and the age of consent continue to raise key questions about what is natural as western politicians fall back on ideas of biological essentialism to resolve the tension between individual freedoms and collective obligations. Plummer (1999) illustrates this point by referring to current debates about the morality and ethics of (eu)gen(et)ics the parentheses presumably indicating the ambiguous status of a practice that involves the intervention of science into what has traditionally been imagined as a biological process. At the time of writing, the possibility that scientists are engineering a cyborg society is sending media commentators into paroxysms of rage; is it appropriate that a sixty-year-old, unmarried woman is receiving IVF treatment, they wonder? Or, at the other end of the age spectrum, is it right that the Roman Catholic church pays a twelve-year-old not to have an abortion? And should hopeful parents be able to buy eggs from models auctioned over the internet? These are not just rhetorical questions; they demand a response (both from politicians and the public). As such, debates about sexual morality potentially inform and change the way we all live, simultaneously forcing us to interrogate and monitor our behaviour in line with expectations of what constitutes a good citizen. 52

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Hubbard Sex Zones: Intimacy, Citizenship and Public Space

Sexuality, as Weeks (1995: 4) eloquently argues, may therefore be considered as the magnetic core that lies at the heart of the national political and cultural agenda. Indeed, conicts between different sexualities, moralities and identities are often orchestrated by the press in a lurid and sensationalist manner to create national moral panics about particular individuals and groups (McRobbie and Thornton, 1995). Frequently, as with the moral panic surrounding the transmission of HIV/AIDS, this process is based on the discursive deployment of fear as the press plays on anxieties concerning the danger of sexuality cut loose from its traditional moorings in marriage and the family (Armstrong, 1994). As such, gures as diverse as the single mother, the prostitute, the cyber-stalker, the errant father, the spinster, the pervert and the pornographer (not to mention lesbians, bisexuals and gays) have been demonized as bad citizens in different ways at different times to dene what is considered normal and desirable behaviour (Knopp, 1995). The idea that the state requires these periodic moral panics to reassert its right to power (see Evans, 1993) supports the view that questions of sexual morality are prominent in denitions of citizenship. In the urban West, where all individuals are apparently equal in the eyes of the law and the state (McDowell, 1999), the failure to match up to these dominant denitions of sexual morality has resulted in sexual others being denied full citizenship in terms of state benets and political recognition (Smith, 1989). At the same time, such individuals may experience social stigmatization for failing to match ideas of how a good citizen should act; they become regarded as second-class citizens not only by the state but also by decent, respectable sexual subjects. Hence, the term citizenship is used in this article in its widest sense to refer to the political and social recognition that is granted to those whose behaviour accords with the moral values underpinning the construction of the nation-state (Plummer, 1999). Such broad notions of citizenship are particularly useful for explaining how the state is able to exercise control over people without recourse to physical violence. After all, ideas of citizenship are ostensibly constructed through the bureaucratic and benevolent rituals of modern political debate, rather than being imposed upon an unknowing and oppressed mass through coercive means. This means that citizenship is a central concept in studies of governmentality, which, drawing on Foucault, focus on how the human subject is constituted in relationship to itself and constellations of power (see Donzelot, 1979). Essentially then, it can be argued that ideas of citizenship are crucial in the process of nation-building via governance (rather than government), with notions of sexual comportment and behaviour being central to the negotiation of citizenship. In the remainder of this article, I want to elaborate this contention by focusing on the importance of space in debates about 53

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sexual citizenship. Following Susan Smith (1989), I consider it essential that such issues of citizenship are examined in relation to geographic ideas and concepts, given that ideas of citizenship concern what is appropriate within particular spheres (and spaces) of civil life. Working from the premise that a basic right of citizenship is the right to access and use specic kinds of space within a given territory, I particularly want to explore how ideas of sexual citizenship are institutionalized and contested in a variety of different spaces including private spaces of home, work and leisure as well as those spaces which have become synonymous with the concept of public or civic space (streets, parks, squares, precincts, etc.). To illustrate this, the aricle begins by describing how dissident sexual behaviours and identities have been made less welcome in public space before exploring the effects (and effectiveness) of sexual transgression into these civic sites. As will be seen, while equal access to public space has been a key rallying call for many sexual dissidents, the extent to which public space can be used for forging new models of citizenship based on intimacy and respect is highly questionable.

Sexualising citizenship: geographies of exclusion and inclusion

Although the notion that it is possible to document a geography of sexuality was not widely shared until the 1990s, there is now a substantial body of work demonstrating that space is sexed in a variety of complex ways (for a review, see Binnie and Valentine, 1999). While such research has noted that there may be signicant variations in the way that sex is represented, perceived and understood in different national contexts, collectively it has suggested that the organization of space in western societies serves to naturalize heterosexuality. For instance, Nast (1998) has written that western forms of state-capitalism and social reproduction make heterosexuality seem unremarkable, benign and normal, arguing that the worlds of work, leisure and consumption are saturated with images and behaviours that encourage people to adopt heterosexual identities and perfomances. Similarly, Elder (1998) has argued that the ostensible normality of heterosexuality is maintained through regulatory regimes which control peoples use and manipulation of space. Here, he writes particularly of the social and legal codes of conduct that discipline those who transgress sexual and spatial order, highlighting how assumptions about the right of different groups to occupy space serve to reinforce hegemonic heterosexuality. This is illustrated in his study of apartheid-era housing policy in South Africa, where he contends that the exclusion of black and coloured nationals from white areas was underpinned by anxieties about the forms of sexual 54

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relationship that might occur across the colour divide (Elder, 1998: 1567). When considered in relation to arguments about sexual citizenship, such writing serves to support the idea that national citizenships in the urban West have overwhelmingly been (and continue to be) based around socially-constructed visions of liberty and equality which (paradoxically) reinforce heterosexual identities (see also Van Every, 1993; Weeks, 1995). Of course, the way such assumptions have been codied in constitutional laws or practices varies internationally. Developing this point, Susan Smith (1989: 151) refers specically to the example of Australia, where notions of citizenship appear to have been constructed around notions of mateship and fraternity, which are simultaneously racialized, gendered and sexualized. This, she argues, results in political and civil rights for Australians that are not liberatory per se but instead represent an institutionalization of sexual (and gender and racial) inequality. Here Smith draws on the theories of sexual and social contract developed by Carole Pateman which suggest that civil society is, in effect, a patriarchal construct that serves to limit womens participation and rights in the public sphere. For Pateman (1989: 20), the idea that the social state of nature is inhabited not by isolated individuals but families appears to be particularly important in determining the importance of heterosexuality as the natural basis of civil life. Consequently, she asserts that the historic development of civic society has revolved around specic associations between private space, sexuality and love, invoking contractual and democratic theories of the state to suggest that individuals are only entitled to leave this space and enter a civic space of rights, property ownership and citizenship if their interests are subordinate to the wider interests of the (heterosexual) state. As such, it appears that civil society can be conceptualized as a heterosexual (as well as patriarchal and racist) construction that serves to make entry into the public realm very difcult for those whose sexual lives are judged immoral. These arguments have perhaps been most forcibly made in geographic research which has described how everyday urban spaces are experienced by gay men and women as aggressively heterosexual (e.g. Adler and Brenner, 1992; Namaste, 1996; Valentine, 1993). Noting that displays of heterosexual affection, friendship and desire are regarded as acceptable or normal in most of these spaces, such research has consequently highlighted that many homosexuals deny or disguise their sexual orientation when in public because of fears of homophobic abuse and intolerance (coupled with a concern that such intimidation is not taken seriously by the state and law). Valentine (1993), for example, explored how lesbian women in one British city deployed a range of coping strategies in their day-to-day use of public space; avoiding certain areas at 55

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certain times, dressing in ways that brand their bodies as heterosexual and not holding hands or kissing partners in places where they were in the public gaze. In other studies, it has been shown that gays, lesbians and bisexuals may avoid using public transport, carry personal attack alarms and only walk on the streets when accompanied by others so as to avoid homophobic violence (Comstock, 1991; Moran, 1996). Even in cities where the authorities are seemingly tolerant and even encouraging of gay tourism and nightlife (e.g. Manchester, UK), it is evident that most gay men and women face routine prejudice, discrimination and violence on the streets (Whittle, 1994). Unsurprisingly then, the metaphor of the closet can be seen as an appropriate description of the schizophrenic spatial lives of many gays, lesbians and bisexuals who are not out in public spaces for fear that they will be the victims of verbal or visual intimidation, and, at worst, gay-bashing (see Seidman et al., 1999). Accordingly, specic private spaces (such as gay nightclubs, cafes or galleries) may be the only spaces where they feel comfortable expressing their sexuality or adopting dress codes that signify their membership as members of particular sexual communities. As Johnston and Valentine (1995) suggest, the (non-parental) home has become a key site for the celebration of gay identity a space where sexual dissidents can come together in an environment that is (relatively) secure, comfortable and free from surveillance. Of course, the fact that much housing in the urban West is designed around the assumption that it will be occupied by a nuclear, heterosexual family means that gays and lesbians may be relatively limited in their place of residence in the rst place (a factor that has been identied as signicant in the phenomena of gay gentrication see Knopp, 1995). Simultaneously, it is evident that many gay and lesbian individuals continue to live in a state of continuous anxiety because of the way that their lives divide into an outwardly straight persona and a privately gay existence. There is always the threat that someone aware of their sexuality might expose them in public, shattering the boundary between their neatly compartmentalized private and public lives. In Johnston and Valentines (1995: 106) account, this is demonstrated by reference to the elaborate charade which one lesbian couple enacted to maintain the illusion of normality when visited by their parents (preventing them from using rooms adorned with lesbian posters). The idea that homosexually-identied individuals lead something of a dual existence that they can be gay only in certain spaces at certain times, and rarely in public space is an idea that features prominently in the campaigning rhetoric of gay rights groups. Consequently, a common tactic has been the practice of outing seeking to identify certain high-prole individuals as gay in an attempt to force them to publicly acknowledge this dual existence. While controversial, the motive here is 56

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undoubtedly well-founded; that gay men and women should be able to be identied as such in the public realm without feeling stigmatized. In this sense, questions of sexual identity can be seen to intertwine with those of citizenship in a number of profound ways for gay and lesbian groups; they are, in Richardsons (1998) parlance, only partial citizens, in that they are excluded from certain entitlements in the eyes of the state but do have a number of obligations. For example, while all lesbians and gay men are expected to pay taxes, respect the laws of the land, participate in the labour force, etc., they are often denied certain rights, such as ability to marry, serve in the armed forces, act as foster parents and so on. Even when they are granted formal political recognition and rights, their branding as citizen-perverts by other individuals may prevent them from participating in civic society (Bell, 1995). Fundamental here, perhaps, is that they feel free to express their sexuality only in certain (and principally private) spaces, with the streets being experienced as exclusionary spaces where heterosexuality is aggressively asserted as the norm. While dominant notions of citizenship undoubtedly serve to spatially exclude gay men and women on a variety of different scales, there is an important sense in which this interpretation needs to be extended to consider the way that a particular notion of heterosexuality is implicated in this process. Specically, it needs to be stressed that dominant notions of sexual citizenship are based on the normalization (and encouragement) of the idealized nuclear family (Donzelot, 1979). This in turn relies on the perpetuation of the idea that mothering and fathering are the only appropriate modes for sexual activity, with procreation represented as the ultimate (and emotionally fullling) product of the sexual relation. As Rubin (1989: 14) contends, while good sex acts are imbued with emotional complexity and reciprocity, sex acts on the bad side of the line are considered utterly repulsive and devoid of all emotional nuance. Of course, this is a notion that excludes a number of other (hetero)sexual subjects from enjoying full citizenship, particularly bad women (see Hubbard, 2000; McDowell, 1999). The states moral condemnation (and exclusion) of scary heterosexualities and practices such as fetishism, prostitution, pornography, masturbation, voyeurism and sado-masochism accordingly indicates the complex way in which heterosexuality and patriarchy intertwine to create non-citizens. For instance, women who have sex outside monogamous, procreative relationships are often condemned as bad sexual subjects, while male promiscuity is widely tolerated, or even celebrated, as the natural outcome of male sexual urges (Jackson, 1991; Seidler, 1995). Equally, women who live alone may be portrayed as sexual failures, with the spinster having been a particularly important gure in histories of sexual morality (see Jeffreys, 1986). As such, several geographers have begun to point out that the spatial 57

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mobility and freedom of female sex workers, lone mothers and single women is emaciated when compared to the mobility of those heterosexual women who full the role of the good wife and mother (see, for example, Bondi, 1997; Watson, 1986; Winchester, 1990). The female prostitute, in particular, represents a paradigmatic gure whose legal and social regulation symbolises the contradictions inherent in notions of equal citizenship; in many cities prostitutes are forced to work out of sight, off-street in brothels, massage parlours or private ats where their sexuality can be commodied with apparent impunity. The ability of these prostitutes to leave these spaces of connement and enter the public realm as sex workers remains highly restricted, with the sight of the sexed body of the prostitute in the city disturbing assumptions that feminine sexuality should be domesticized; cocooned in a monogamous, procreative relationship (Duncan, 1996; McDowell, 1999). Consequently, the state and law often conspire (along with other good sexual citizens) to police the limits of these spaces, preventing prostitution from leaking out into the public realm (see Hubbard, 1999). In post-war Britain, for example, vice squads have principally aimed to control sex work so that it does not interfere with the right of the normal, decent citizen to go about the streets without affront to their sense of decency (Wolfenden Report, 1957: 23). The isolation and connement of prostitutes to the dark and dangerous spaces of British inner cities appears a potent means by which the authorities have sought to minimize the public visibility of sex work in a heterosexually-ordered city. The way that notions of (hetero)sexual citizenship underpin the mutual constitution of society and space have therefore been explored by geographers primarily at the scale of the city. While the city clearly provides the context and coordinates for most Western subjects, it should not be overlooked that similar processes of heterosexualization are played out at different spatial scales. As Elder (1998) testies, these processes are evident in spaces ranging from the bedroom to the nation, with monogamous heterosexual relationships made to appear natural on a variety of interdependent scales. Many of these spatial inscriptions are only obvious to those who do not conform to these norms; for example, the constant barrage of images of heteronormal bodies in glossy magazines, in lm and on television (where the idealized male/female form has been used to sell everything from healthcare insurance to stock cubes); the design of heterosexual family housing; the planning of suburbia; the notion of the motherland or fatherland, and so on. No matter where one looks, it seems, one can see heterosexual socio-spatial patternings at work (Nast, 1998). In sum, we could argue that notions of morality what is right or wrong in the eyes of the state and its citizens create sexual geographies at a variety of spatial scales. Notions of morality are thus branded onto the spaces of the body, 58

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the city, the region and the nation in constantly shifting and complex ways that, nonetheless, serve to order ows of desire. Referred to by Donzelot (1979: 21) as the pure little lines of mutation, these ows act collectively to reify the heterosexual family as normal and desirable, marginalizing sexual others in the process. By channelling and damning these potentially polymorphous ows of desire, it is these geographies that dene the boundaries of sexual citizenship (Weeks, 1995).

Between the sheets, on the streets: challenging heteronormality

Far from being natural, then, heterosexuality is something that is produced (and made to appear natural) through repeated spatial performances and ows of desire. These occur within different contexts of legal and moral regulation which serve to dene what sexual identities and practices are permissible or acceptable in public or private spaces. In this regard, most Western governments persist in their discrimination against non-heterosexual and non-nuclear sexual families despite the efforts of protest groups. For example, the identication of lone mothers as a problem group a prominent feature of much right-wing rhetoric in the UK has survived the political transition to New Labour (a party ostensibly committed to tackling social exclusion). Indeed, the publication of a Green Paper on The Future of the Family reiterated that marriage is the best way for two people to bring up their children (The Independent, 5 November 1998), simultaneously alienating gay couples who are raising (or wanting to raise) children. At the time of writing, therefore, it is perhaps difcult to be optimistic about the possibilities for marginal sexual subjects to assert their claims to full citizenship. This point has been particularly powerfully made by Davina Cooper in her critique of New Labours attempts to redene the public around an imagined (and normative) notion of the public citizen dened with reference to a cultural majority whose security is threatened by the behaviours of a dispossessed other:
New Labours creation of a universal class . . . with its emphasis on discipline, traditional morality and religious norms has generated a community politics in which communities are intended to police themselves and turn a suspicious, or, at most, faintly tolerant, eye upon outsiders. Despite New Labours attempts to tackle social exclusion and to focus on generic rather than group interests, its paradigm of community has reproduced the normative assumptions endemic within a conventional conception of the general public. (Cooper, 1998: 471)

Here, Labours cosy notion of social egalitarianism based on equal citizenship appears to be based around the dubious idea that we are all prepared 59

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to accept certain values as desirable, and, simultaneously, that we are prepared to expel those who do not conform. In essence, it is a vision of social inclusion which rests on a set of (unstated) exclusions primarily of those sexual perverts, criminals, workshy social security scroungers, anarchists and travellers who threaten this imagined idyll. Indeed, as Fraser (1992) argues, it is important to realize that any notion of community is inevitably based around the anthropophagic erasure or anthropoemic exclusion of difference, rather than its celebration. In consequence, it is apparent that good heterosexual citizens continue to be rewarded by the state in terms of medical, welfare and housing provision, whereas sexual dissidents remain largely invisible in terms of rights (though not obligations). This visibility and invisibility is apparently mirrored in the presence (or absence) of particular sexual identities in public space. The geography of sexual citizenship thus organizes and naturalizes heterosexuality in so much as it divides and connes sexual identities across public and private spaces, restricting certain dissident groups to sequestered spaces (e.g. a sex dungeon, a cottage, a brothel or a private sex club). For some though, this geography is the logical outcome of what sexual subjects want, the product of what Lyotard termed a libidinal economy driven by lack and desire:
The city is a map of the hierarchy of desire, from the valorised to the stigmatised. It is divided into zones dictated by the way its citizens value or denigrate their needs. Separating the city into areas of specialism makes it possible to meet some needs more efciently; it is also an attempt to reduce conict between opposing sets of desires and the roles people adapt to try and full those desires. (Calia, 1994: 205)

Perhaps then we need to balance a wholly negative interpretation of the geographies of sexual citizenship with a more positive assessment of how these geographies provide spaces for sexual experimentation among counter-public groups (McDowell, 1999). If cities contain sites of sexual connement, these spaces are also potentially sites of sexual liberation. This argument is particularly evident in the writings of those who suggest that the spaces in the city which are used to marginalize sexual dissidents may be appropriated (or reterritorialized) by these same dissidents to stake their claim for citizenship (Binnie, 2000; Castells, 1983). After all, cities are characterized by a dense concentration of human beings and offer innumerable moments for the urban citizen to seize opportunities of initiating, deviating or interrupting various ows of desire. Elizabeth Wilson (1991) provided a notable development of these ideas in her feminist reading of urban life, The Sphinx in the City. Therein, she offered an intriguing account of the way that women have been represented as other in the city, yet simultaneously drew out the advantages inherent in this. 60

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Specically, she suggested that (heterosexual) women have always been able to use their place in the margins of the city to explore and celebrate their identities, asserting new sexual freedoms in the process. Duncan (1996: 141) expands on this argument, stressing that many women freely choose marginal or eccentric locations to challenge the structures of patriarchy. In her view, these locations may act as sites where subversive discourses rst articulated in private can be made public, in effect challenging the relationship between cities and identities. However, it has been in writing on the lives of gay men and women that this idea has been subject to closest scrutiny, with many commentators highlighting how city spaces have been used as a basis for the promotion of homosexual values and a more widespread acceptance of gay lifestyles (Geltmaker, 1992; Knopp, 1995). In particular, it has been recognized that the transgression of public spaces may be a potent means for lesbians, gays and bisexuals to destabilize and undermine processes of homophobic oppression. Examples of such political tactics include marches, performance art, Gay Pride parades and the numerous kiss-ins organized to draw attention to gay rights (see Duncan, 1996; McDowell, 1999). While these acts aim to queer public space, paradoxically some gay parades (like Sydneys Mardi Gras) have become spectacles for heterosexual consumption. Less spectacular, but more signicant perhaps, is the way that gay men and women perform particular queer identities (like the gay skinhead and the lipstick lesbian) which parody and destabilize the heterosexual construction and coding of public space (Butler, 1993). More permanently, the establishment of queer spaces, frequently referred to as gay or lesbian villages, is recognized to play a fundamental role in this process, with such sites often acting as bases for the social, economic and cultural reproduction of gay male and lesbian communities (Castells, 1983). While some appear cynical about the way gay culture has been commodied and represented in places like West Hollywood, Castro in San Francisco or Canal Street in Manchester (see Binnie, 2000; Skeggs, 1999), for many others these are spaces which play an important role in staking a visible claim to full sexual citizenship (Forrest, 1995; Whittle, 1994). After all, until about 30 years ago homosexuality was rendered virtually invisible to those in the putative mainstream, restricted to marginal sites of the city and the night. Today, however, a profusion of clubs, shops and cafes catering for gays and lesbians play an important public role in asserting a claim to sexual citizenship. As Binnie (2000) stresses, these often centre on an upper-class, white notion of cosmopolitanism and sexual openness, but even if some gays and lesbians themselves feel excluded from these spaces, they have been politically and symbolically important in the struggle for gay rights (see also Berlant, 1997; Calia, 1994). For example, Forrest (1995: 149) argues that the visibility of gay 61

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lifestyles in West Hollywood was vitally important in lending gay identity a legal legitimation, encouraging its incorporation into mainstream notions of Californian civic culture. Therefore, it is by considering the way in which gay and lesbian individuals have made their presence felt in (and through) such spaces that some have begun to think about how public space can be used to act as a locus for new sexual and moral orders.

Seeking publicity, craving privacy?

Theoretically then, it appears that sexual dissidents should be able to use public space as a space of presence, forcing their existence to be recognized and demanding a reconceptualization of non-procreative or monogamous sex as a legitimate and healthy expression of sexual desire. Indeed, it has been widely argued that if sexual minorities like gays, lesbians, prostitutes and so on manage to successfully reterritorialize public space as sites of sexual diversity and respect between strangers, they would succeed in changing their rights as citizens (Duncan, 1996). By making dissident sexualities visible, the queering of public space reminds people that sexual others have claims to citizenship alongside good heterosexual subjects. After all, if a group does not exist in public, it is effectively invisible in the eyes of the state and decent citizens, apparently having no rights and no needs. Accordingly, many proponents of sexual rights for minority groups have emphasized the potentiality of seizing the street, using public space to ght homophobia and misogyny. In his seminal analysis of gay rights, for example, Castells (1983) argued it was crucial that gay groups were out that is to say, visible in the public realm on their own terms, able to move between sequestered spaces of private intimacy and the public sphere of rights, property ownership and political representation. In a somewhat similar sense, Jeffrey Weeks (1998) claims that new sexual movements have always had two characteristic elements; a moment of transgression followed by a moment of citizenship. In proposing this, he contends that moments of carnivalesque transgression in the public gaze challenge the status quo, conveying a claim to inclusion which ultimately allows equal access. These moments, therefore, go hand-in-hand; without the transgressive moment there can apparently be no inclusion, no notion of equality. For Weeks (1998: 37), the sexual citizen makes a claim to transcend the limits of the personal sphere by going public. The idea that sexual dissidents can dene themselves as sexual citizens by occupying public space on their own terms thus offers a tantalizing vision of a situation where a wide range of individuals are granted rights, recognition and respect, irrespective of their sexuality. In effect, they would have no need to hide their sexuality and to conne its expression 62

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to sites that are out of the public gaze (and the prying eyes of the state and law). This ideal geography would be one of what Duncan (1996: 143) calls radical openness, a geography that discourages the reication, marginalization and privitization of sexual otherness. As sexual citizens, sexual dissidents would at least be able to live their lives as other (heteronormal) urban dwellers do in the midst of cities that facilitate, and occasionally celebrate, the coming together of different cultures and identities. Adopting terms invoked by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Duncan suggests this presents a very different vision of sexual geography; a smooth geography where polymorphous ows of desire can be pursued rather than being curtailed, diverted and bogged down in the striated spaces of the heterosexually-ordered city. Such visions of a sexually-open and democratic public sphere thus drive many to resist the heteronormality of public space and to use the streets as spaces from which to make claims for sexual rights (again see Calia, 1994). While not wishing to denigrate their actions, or to downplay the very important efforts that have been made to publicize the rights of sexual minority groups, here I want to offer an alternative reading of the importance of space in debates about sexual citizenship. In effect, I wish to reject this (rather straightforward) conceptualization of public space as representing a democratic space where marginalized groups can seek to oppose oppressive aspects of heteronormality. Moreover, I think that it has been too easy for those advocating equal sexual rights to imagine that having free access to public space represents the achievement of full citizenship. Indeed, this appears to be based on the (implicit) utopian notion that the public sphere can be used as a site where denitions of community can be broadened to encompass a wide range of sexual identities and differences. As Coopers interpretation of New Labours notion of citizenship began to suggest, such utopian thinking is somewhat naive given that the construction of community of relies on the effacement of difference and the suspension of selfhood in the interests of an imagined norm. So while minority groups may occupy and use the streets that exclude them in order to represent themselves as part of some wider public, they usually do so in public spaces which do not match their needs and requirements. Even in so-called gay and lesbian villages, the transgressive moment which publicizes certain needs and wants is followed by a moment of citizenship which serves to bring dissidents into a public sphere not only of rights but also of obligations. This might make it acceptable for certain acts to become visible in public (e.g. gay couples kissing or sex workers soliciting) but inevitably means that these dissidents must surender a certain level of control over their bodies, feelings and identities to the wider community of which they are claiming to be a part. 63

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Beverley Skeggs has therefore written of public visibility constituting a trap for sexual dissidents:
It summons surveillance and the law, it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, the colonist/imperial appetite for possession . . . it reduces the body to the sign of identity. . . . Only some groups can positively and resourcefully spatialise the claim for recognition via visibility . . . and only some groups can legitimate and/or symbolically convert their visible claims. (Skeggs, 1999: 228)

In a somewhat similar manner to those commentators who suggest that the public acceptance of gay villages is, more correctly, a strategic appropriation and commodication of the pink pound (e.g. Knopp, 1995), Skeggs argues that public acceptance and recognition of dissidents inevitably relies on them accepting certain compromises. Not least of these is the fact that the acceptance of difference depends upon the marking of certain bodies as belonging to particular sexual identities. For example, to assert their claims to equal citizenship, lesbians and gay men must (paradoxically) continue to mark off their bodies as different from the heterosexual norm. For many sexual dissidents, this type of visibility is exactly what they would wish to avoid at present given the homophobic intolerance which persists in many western cities. Even in a society that grants them full citizenship, they would remain all too visible, vulnerable to any backlash that the putative mainstream might later unleash on minority sexual groups (a point alluded to by Comstock, 1991). In a similar sense, for sex shops to become acceptable features throughout the urban landscape, they would presumably have to advertise their wares very publicly. This too would presumably render these shops obvious to the majority, potentially making them visible to any group who might subsequently seek to exclude them. Such tendencies are certainly evident in the public spaces of the worldwide web, where the policing of cyber-porn indicates the limits of apparently democratic space (see Hubbard, 2000). Accordingly, we should perhaps remain sceptical of the potential for sexual dissidents to use public space to act as a site for the assertion of claims to citizenship and full rights (c.f. Goheen, 1998). Instead, we can perhaps turn these arguments around by stating that the problem for most sexual dissidents is not a lack of publicity but a lack of privacy. This seemingly paradoxical statement is supported by reference to the arguments of Kilian (1998: 124) who suggests that publicity needs to be dened as the power to access whereas privacy needs to be dened as the power to exclude. Adopting these denitions, it can be suggested that many sexual minorities have too much publicity (in that they can access a number of different spaces) but not enough privacy (because they lack the ability to exercise control over those spaces by not being able to exclude others from them). Kilian quotes from Judith Squires to emphasize this line of argument: 64

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Privacy is viewed as the means of achieving individualism by providing the barriers necessary to enable the individual to make uncoerced choices in life. Privacy could therefore be viewed as a mechanism for the realization of pluralism and tolerance. (Squires, 1994: 390)

Or, to put it another way, privacy appears as the primary means by which an intimate citizenship (Plummer, 1999) based on control over ones body, feelings and relationships could be forged. When they challenge dominant notions of citizenship, therefore, sexual dissidents should never simply be seeking more publicity but rather increased public legitimacy for their own privacy. Ultimately, this rejection of the streets as the primary site where new sexual citizenships can be forged indicates the difculties evident in distinguishing between public and private in matters of sexuality (see also Brown, 1999). Upheld by the state as determining the limits of its intervention into civil society, the public/private dichotomy has been fussed over for centuries, made concrete in the city and subsequently used to maintain divisions between good and bad sex (Duncan, 1996). Yet when we examine the geographies of sexual citizenship, we nd that this distinction, though enshrined in law, is nothing more than a regulatory ction. Seen as threatening national morals, sexual practices like prostitution, sado-masochism and same-sex relationships are accordingly represented as crimes against public decency. In this way, even though these are crimes without victims, they become dened as public problems even when they occur in a private context between two consenting adults. As was discussed earlier, it may well be that sexual dissidents are sequestered and conned in apparently private sites (e.g. the brothel, the sex club, the home), but, as research demonstrates, these sites are rarely out of the gaze of the state and the law. In Bells (1995) reading of the Operation Spanner case, for example, English law interpreted sadomasochistic sex between consenting adults as interpersonal violence. In doing so, it served to bring privatized sexual activities into the public realm, portraying them as a crime which was subsequently projected back into a reduced private realm. As Bell asserts, this represented a highly contradictory set of moves whereby a private sexual act was bought into the public gaze only for it to be expelled back into a space which was not truly private because it remained subject to monitoring by the state and law (in the interests of public order, of course). Similarly, it is evident that the police routinely raid public toilets identied as cottages (Knopp, 1995), local authorities seek to close down brothels (Hubbard, 1999) and the obscene publications squad may conscate pornographic materials purchased for private consumption. In Bells (1995) summation, the fact that sexual dissidents enjoy neither true publicity nor privacy indicates that they are denied full sexual 65

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citizenship. For him, it appears that sexual dissidents are therefore condemned to a life which oscillates wildly between pleasure/danger as they move between public/private. Yet for some, this transgressive neither/nor lifestyle is no doubt attractive, as accounts of the illicit thrills experienced by some customers who solicit prostitutes on the streets testify (see Hubbard, 1999). And if the public streets are sites of sexual adventure for some, private spaces may be sites where others submit to fantasies of submission, control and rapture (often all at the same time). Following this logic, it might be argued that the transgressive existence of sexual dissidents renders dominant heterosexual geographies transparent in various ways, but that this cannot (and should not) act as a basis for challenging existing models of citizenship. Indeed, for some dissidents, the experience of pushing against the boundaries of citizenship may be sexually arousing in itself; remove the boundaries to full citizenship and the thrill would be gone (c.f. Sennett, 1994, on the failure of the Paris commune). However, this acceptance of exclusion is not one to which most sexual dissidents would subscribe. Instead then, it might be suggested that they should ght to produce their own models of citizenship by producing spaces where they have both the right to publicity and the right to privacy. As Kilian (1998) writes, this relies on the wholesale rejection of concepts of public and private space per se, with the geographies of heterosexual citizenship capable of being destabilized only by the creation of spaces that sexual dissidents are able to control on their own terms (i.e. by excluding those who threaten their rights to privacy and welcoming those who do not). Unlike contemporary gay villages, redlight districts and other public expositions of sexual dissidence, however, these spaces would not be xed and permanent communities (something that would only perpetuate the distance between mainstream and dissident sexual identities). Instead, they would be ephemeral sites of freedom and control which could be used to create eeting but transitory identications out of which new identities and citizenships could emerge (see also Hetherington, 1999). In essence then, these zones of alternative citizenship might provide the basis for new models of sexual citizenship in ways that, for example, contemporary gay villages do not by being critically exclusive rather than radically inclusive (i.e. based on a set of norms which would not allow full rights to those who threaten the privacy of those uniting around a shared sexual identity). In such ways, it is important to realize that these spaces would be somewhat different to the permeable and open spaces of empowerment proposed by some commentators (e.g. Duncan, 1996: 142). Instead, the freedoms and intimacy possible in these spaces would have to be policed, in effect rejecting one partial model of citizenship in favour of a different though transitory model. This space would, 66

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therefore, not be public (in the sense that it would be open to all), but would encompass a different sense of order than that existing elsewhere an alternate order in which the views of sexual dissidents could be freely articulated and in which their identities could be freely performed. The idea that there can never be an ideal public sphere free from exclusions may not be a utopian prognosis, as Kilian (1998) notes, but neither is it a dystopian one. After all, Euclidean notions that spaces are either public or private can be seen to be badly lacking if we consider that the world consists of ows rather than bounded regions, of crumpled and heterogeneous spaces rather than ones that are geometrically dened (Hetherington, 1999). In this sense, publicity and privacy co-join differently in different places, and it is in sites that are imagined as not solely public or solely private that new identities will emerge.

Conclusion
Jeffrey Weeks (1995) has argued that the conditions for the forging of new sexual identities and moralities are just right. The family is perhaps no longer what it was (or ever claimed to be), divorce is higher than ever, birth control is widespread and generally reliable, and new patterns of intimacy are disturbing ordered erotic categories. In sum, issues of sexual citizenship have (in themselves) moved from the margins to the centre and the time seems right for sexual dissidents to stake their claims for full citizenship. In this article, I have briey considered some of the spatial tactics that these groups and individuals have adopted for seeking recognition and rights. As has been shown, these have chiey revolved around attempts to queer public space, making the needs and wants of specic sexual minorities visible through transgression onto the heteronormal street. In essence, such tactics seem driven by a concern that a lack of publicity deprives sexual minorities of full rights in a society where citizenship is focused on the maintenance of the procreative nuclear family. In seeking this recognition, however, sexual dissidents have often sacriced their own rights to privacy; by equating privacy with political inaction and publicity with political empowerment, they appear to have fallen into a trap whereby they are left with neither. Rejecting the reication of the streets as the ultimate site for political action, I have therefore begun to draw on some of those geographers who have argued for a reconceptualization of public and private, arguing that claims for citizenship cannot be sought solely in the public or private realm. Instead, I have begun to explore the spatial construction of new models of sexual citizenship which rely on the celebration and acceptance of difference as well as the exclusion of those who threaten the ability of people to control their own bodies, feelings and relationships with other 67

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consenting adults. This alternative model of citizenship is one that cannot be rooted in conventional understandings of public space or for that matter, private space but in liminal spaces that disrupt dominant geographies of heterosexuality by creating transitory sites for sexual freedom and pleasure where the immoral is moral and the perverse is normal. As has been described, these spaces would inevitably need to exclude those whose presence threatens the control and freedom which inhabitants exercise over their own sexual performances, allowing them to articulate their needs and desires in a safe and pleasurable environment. It is from these sex zones that new citizenships based on sexual respect, intimacy and egalitarianism might ultimately emerge.

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Biographical Note
Phil Hubbard is an urban/social geographer with a particular interest in the negotiation of sexuality in the city. His work on the policing and politics of sex work culminated in the publication of Sex and the City: geographies of prostitution in the urban West (Ashgate, 1999), and he is currently seeking to develop new theoretical understandings of the role of space in the creation of sexual identities. Address: Department of Geography, Loughborough University, Leicestershire, LE11 3TU. [email: P.J.Hubbard@lboro.ac.uk]

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