The colonial dynamics between the Western world and Latin America have created a heteronormative dynamic that

actively excludes anybody identified as queer. That same Western epistemology has become so engrained into Latin American Politics and Discourse that the fundamental idea of citizenship has been normalized in accordance with the exclusion of queer bodies. Complicity with this heteronormative understanding of citizenship infects knowledge production. This is why the topic provides the best starting point for rupturing the dominant narrative of sexuality since it is fundamentally intertwined with the concept of citizenship. Gonzales Garcia 11' ( Harrison, "The Reconstruction of Citizenship and the Politics of Exclusion, Writing Thesis on International Relations for McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies, Boston, MA, May 16th, 2011)
Constructivist and Queer theories allow us to understand and resist the creation of social structures and constructs, which are often misunderstood or disguised as natural occurrences, and thus perpetuated by their interaction with systems of knowledge production. Such are the case of citizenship and heteronormative sexuality. Both historical traditions of citizenship have a built-in heteronormative component, which at the same time is utilized to promote homophobia and political exclusion. This exclusionary process is even more accentuated in Latin America where colonial structures of power served to the creation of highly hierarchical and elitist societies. Pervasive homophobia in Latin America is the result of the society interaction with heteronormative constructs of citizenship, masculinity and sexuality. These constructs first condemned non-conforming sexualities, but later made them invisible by omission. Such invisibility was institutionalized via legalities, and has been challenged repeatedly. Human Rights discourse is the latest taxonomy under which LGBT rights are framed. While productive, such a perspective is criticized because of its perpetuation of heteronormative precepts and exclusionary nature. Queering citizenship (as in to promote non-prejudice and non-identity-based politics) serves as an alternative interpretation and resistance strategy. Brazil, Mexico and Argentina provide precise examples scenarios and approaches to the advancement of LGBT-inclusive policies; always remembering the contextual nature of both citizenship and its politics of exclusion. The inclusion and protection of minority groups is considered to be one of the hallmarks of liberal democracy. In Latin America and the Caribbean however, a region renowned as the most unequal in the world1; the struggle facing sexually-diverse populations for the vindication of their rights and responsibilities, while urgent and just; continues to be blatantly dismissed. The advancement of rights for sexually-diverse populations is largely considered post-material and is overshadowed by struggling alongside racial and class-based claims in what seems to be a sea of institutionalized prejudice. Moreover, a rough transition to nationhood and eventually to democracy, as well as the role of prevailing effects of colonial dynamics of power; has helped entrench a concept of citizenship that is heavily informed by political clientelism and elitism. However; in recent years Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) populations have gained considerable legal and political ground in Latin America. The LGBT Rights movement has developed strategies in order to challenge the subordinate positions they have been forced to occupy, and have accordingly begun to build their own spaces within the public sphere. A central theme of this struggle is the assertion of advocacy for the rights to sexual diversity and gender identity as

part of the larger and universal discourse of human rights. There is therefore an increasing need to understand the underpinnings of this process of how citizenship is constructed as the region moves towards diversity and inclusion via the protection of minority groups under state polities and institutions. At its core, the LGBT Rights movement currently battles normalized notions of citizenship that are heteronormative. Thus, the idealization of heterosexual relationships as the norm via procreation becomes a common theme for systematic and institutional disenfranchisement of LGBT people. Although most Latin American nations have subscribed to international human rights declarations and resolutions which protect individuals from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity; and moreover, many countries have enshrined these rights under their constitutions; on the ground these dispositions appear ineffective and anecdotal as cultural attitudes and institutional discrimination operate as the law of the land. Nevertheless, as universalizing discourses continue to include the struggles of LGBT populations as part of a larger-scope umbrella of human rights, this heteronormativity will most likely continue be challenged. As attitudes and perceptions of sexual diversity continue to change, state polities are bound to follow suit. This is especially important in impoverished countries where social/political inclusion has become central to exiting developmental efforts, which I argue; must go beyond gender equality and disease prevention and move into more politically offensive strategies to become truly effective. I hope to offer some insight into how these transformative processes occur as I consider them inexorable, thus; there is an understandable urgency for the creation of state policies to address them. Through the lens of Constructivist theory I expect to shed light upon how systems of oppression are normalized through a normalized notion of citizenship. I attempt to highlight the idea that citizenship is not a "natural" idea, but an invented concept that shifts with economic, political and social changes. The idea of citizenship as a discourse is central to the utilization of this structure as a tool for systematic exclusion. Queer Theory will serve as my theoretical leverage in elaborating a critique of these narratives and possible resistance approaches to overcome them. My ultimate goal is the creation of a multifaceted approach for the advancement of sexual (queer) citizenship, which will highlight the strategies that have been proven fruitful in the region, but also promotes the idea of self- criticism and the inclusion of new alternatives to strengthen the successes already achieved. This concept of citizenship provides a perfect analog to the debate sphere. To gain "citizenship" in debate one must abide by heteronormative institutions. Just (x) years ago, a team from SF State made an argument about sexuality and immediately they were accused of sexual harassment. Even now, when a team that identified as queer finally won the NDT, rupturing the hierarchy, all hell broke loose on the college circuit this year. Debate has been framed by heteronormativity, attempting to dehomosexualize the community with arguments like framework and topics that fundamentally engrain masculine colonialist sentiment into them. Gonzales-Garcia continues explaining the exclusionary nature of citizenship: Since its inception as an idea by Greek philosophers, citizenship has been transformed as it has adopted different nuances and characteristics. Bellamy provides with a comprehensive definition of the term: "Citizenship is a condition of civic equality. It consists of membership of a political community where all citizens can determine the terms of social cooperation of an equal basis. This status not only secures equal rights to the enjoyment of the collective goods provided by the political

association but also involves equal duties to promote and sustain them."32 Much of the contemporary citizenship literature is marked by the challenge it poses to citizenship's exclusionary tendencies and by its attempt to make real citizenship's inclusionary promise. This work can be analytical or normative or sometimes a mixture of the two. Theoretical analysis has interrogated citizenship's universalistic claims from the particular perspectives of a range of marginalized groups and of nation state "outsiders'" and has developed new differentiated forms of citizenship. Citizenship has been a topic of increasing interest in the social sciences during the last decades. There is an extensive literature covering its origins and modern interpretations as the concept has become hotly contested. As the definition above states, there is an inferred duality/contradiction in the conceptualization of citizenship. On one hand it is encased within the real of connection to a community with similar goals and values, and on the other hands it refers to the individualistic quality of such membership and its inferred hierarchies. This ambiguity is summarized by Fabio Reis: The idea of the citizen includes, on the one hand, an egalitarian and consensual element that correspond to the status derived from the involvement in a community, an element related to solidarity, to civic virtues and to the duties and responsibilities of the citizen. However, it also includes an element of autonomous self-assertion of each individual member of the community -and this element is potentially conflictive, instead of expressing solidarity or social convergence.33 The origins of such ambiguity may be found in the historical evolution of the concept of citizenship. The earliest snippets of what was to become a general idea or notion of citizenship originated in ancient Greece. However, the modern interpretation of citizenship; defined by the dynamic between an individual's rights and responsibilities and the state (the purveyor and protector of these rights and responsibilities), emerged during the Enlightenment era and flourished after the French and American revolutions. One may say therefore that the very idea of citizenship is a Western construct. According to the literature, there are two main historical subdivisions to the conceptualization of citizenship. They are the Republican Civic and the Liberal tradition of citizenship. Many authors argued that the latter has come to replace the former. The Republican Civic notion of citizenship "requires identification with and commitment to the political community's goals, gained through the processes of education and active engagement in the democratic process"34. This tradition stems from classic philosophies such as Aristotle's writings on democracy, and highlights the centrality of two supports for the formation of the Greek city-state: "a citizenry of politically virtuous; and a just mode of government [...] both elements were essential. Citizenship therefore entailed primarily duty and civic virtue."35 The Athenian citizen is therefore constructed as the ideal to be mimicked. It is within the Republican Civic notion of citizenship, which was underlined by the writings of Aristotle, that a key component of our modem idea of citizenship is constructed: the distinction between a private and a public sphere. Aristotle "made a distinction between the oikos and the polis. The former indicated the world of the Household and comprised three distinctive relationships -namely, that of husband and wife, parent and child, and master and slave. [...] In contrast to this the polis symbolized the public political domain."36 The public, in much political theorizing in the West, is "idealized as a universal space for all, where the mind rules with rationality and logical thought; the private is a sphere of body, emotion and the particularity of relationships."37 For LGBT individuals this division between the public and private spheres has resulted on a two-fold conundrum: on one hand the very construction of the idea of citizenship rests on a binary system of the public/strong/masculine vs. private/weak/feminine which not only is non-inclusive to non-conforming sexualities, but it renders it invisible by omission. Secondly, as Bell and Binnie explain: "sexual citizenship is circumscribed and simultaneously privatized, its limits set by the coupling of tolerance with assimilation [since] lesbian and gay men are granted the right to be tolerated as long as they stay within the boundaries of that

tolerance, whose borders are maintained through a heterosexist public-private divide."38 Therefore, gay men and lesbians can only be citizens if they are "good" citizens.

We have an ethical obligation to ourselves to map out the repressive, heteronormative institution and perform the future in the present. This is specifically true in the dialectic that is debate. Munoz 07' (Jose, Duke University Press Editor, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity, Queers Futurity, 2010, Duke North Carolina)
During sex panics such as the current one, it seems especially important to enact a criticism that accomplishes a few tasks. As Kaprow s happenings and Delany s memoir did, we crucially need to map our repression, our fragmentation, and our alienationthe ways in which the state does not permit us to say the whole" of our masses. It is also important to practice a criticism that enables us to cut through the institutional and legislative barriers that outlaw contact relations and obscure glimpses of the whole. These glimpses and moments of contact have a decidedly utopian function that permits us to imagine and potentially make a queer world. Such a criticism would work by allowing us to see the future in the present." C. L. R. James entitled his first volume of collected writing The Future in the Present. This title riffs on an aspect of Hegelian dialectics suggesting that the affirmation known as the future is contained within its negation, the present. In Jamess coauthored Facing Reality, a document that has been described as a classic of the American left, he argues that a socialist future could be glimpsed by observing worker interaction and sociality within the space of the industrialized factory. Furthermore, he explains that the shop floor was an actually existing socialist reality in the present. His most striking proof for this thesis considers the case of an anonymous worker at an unnamed factory: In one department of a certain plant in the U.S. there is a worker who is physically incapable of carrying out his duties. But he is a man with wife and children and his condition is due to the strain of previous work in the plant The workers have organized their work so that for ten years he has had practically nothing to do.111 fames looks to this situation and others like it throughout the world as examples of an already existing socialist present outside of the bureaucracy that was the Eastern Bloc. James argues that the fundamental task is to recognize the socialist society and record the facts of its existence; thus, the scenes he describes are to be read as outposts of a new society.'1'1

This is not an empty theoretical gesture toward ontological violence. The logic of reproductive futurism literally compels us to constantly identify new threats to the eternal reproduction of the ordered polity. REAL VIOLENCE is visited upon these queers who must be eliminated lest they endanger the Child and the future for which this celebrity stands. (This card im okay with) Edelman 04' (Lee Edelman. No Future: Queer Theory and Death Drive. 2004) On October 12, 1998- the evening of the death of Matthew Shepard, a twenty-one-year-old gay man then enrolled at the University of Wyoming who was lured from a bar by two

straight men and taken in the dark to a deserted spot where he was savagely beaten, pistolwhipped, and then tied to a wooden fence and abandoned to the brutal cold of the night (from which he would not be rescued until some eighteen hours later, when he was discovered, already comatose, by a bicyclist who thought the limp, bloody body lashed to a post was a scarecrow) - on that evening of Matthew Shepard's death a hospital spokesman, "voice choked with emotion," made the following statement to the national press: "Matthew's mother said to me, 'Please tell everybody who's listening to go home and give your kids a hug and don't let a day go by without telling them you love them.' " 4 These words of a grieving mother, widely reported on the news, produced a mimetic outpouring of grief from people across the country, just as they had from the spokesman whose own voice choked as he pronounced them. But these words, which even on the occasion of a gay man's murder defined the proper mourners as those who had children to go home to and hug, specified the mourning it encouraged as mourning for a threatened familial futurity -a threat that might, for many, take the form of Matthew Shepard's death, but a threat that must also, for others, take the opposite form: of Shepard's life.s Thus, even as mourners gathered to pray at the bier of a mother's slain child, others arrived at his funeral to condemn a "lifestyle" that made Matthew Shepard, for them, a dangerous bird of prey. An article printed in the New York Times speculated that the symbolic significance, for the killers, of leaving his body strung up on a fence might be traced to "the Old West practice of nailing a dead coyote to a ranch fence as a warning to future intruders." 6 The bicyclist who mistook him for a scarecrow, then, would not have been far from the mark; for his killers, by posing Shepard's body this way, could be understood to be crowing about the lengths to which they would go to scare away other birds of his feather: birds that may seem to be more or less tame- flighty, to be sure, and prone to a narcissistic preening of their plumage; amusing enough when confined to the space of a popular film like The Birdcane (I996) or when, outside the movies, caged in the ghettos that make them available for ethnographic display or the closets that enact a pervasive desire to make them all disappearbut birds that the cognoscenti perceive as never harmless at alJ.7 For whatever apparent difference in species may dupe the untrained eye, inveterate bird-watchers always discern the tell-tale mark that brands each one a chicken-hawk first and last. In an atmosphere all atwitter with the cries that echo between those who merely watch and those who hunt such birds, what matter who killed Cock Robin! The logic of sinthomosexuality justifies that violent fate in advance by insisting that what such a cock had been robbing was always, in some sense, a cradle. And that cradle must endlessly rock, we've been told, even if the rhythm it rocks to beats out, with every blow of the beating delivered to Matthew Shepard's skull, a counterpoint to the melody's sacred hymn to the meaning oflife. That meaning, continuously affirmed as it is both in and as cultural narrative, nonetheless never can rest secure and, in consequence, never can rest. The compulsive need for its repetition, for the drumbeat by which it pounds into our heads (and not always, though not infrequently, by pounding in a Matthew Shepard's) that the cradle bears always the meaning of futurity and the futurity of meaning, testifies to something exceeding the meaning it means thereby to assure: to a death drive that carries, on full-fledged wings, into the inner sanctum of meaning, into the reproductive mandate inherent in the logic of futurism itself, the burden of the radically negative force that sinthomosexuality names.

Therefore, We queer the citizenship in the context of the topic and debate.

The world is heteronormative in the present. It is exclusionary and restricting like a jail. That is why we locate queerness in the future, always on the horizon as a potentiality. We cannot remain complacent with the present conditions, in which everything has already been rendered straight. By locating queerness in the present, we would allow queerness to be assimilated under heteronormative institutions. We must rather engage in a desiring of a future queerness-to-come. By embracing this queer futurity we are always already replacing, rupturing, and reconstituting sexuality. Rather than letting sexuality just exist with heteronormativity so long as it assimilates itself, we affirm a utopian queerness on the horizon that exists in and of itself. The aff is an isolation of the heteronormative exclusion in the status quo outside and inside debate and an affirmation of the queerness on the horizon that we can hope for and strive towards. Voting aff is a recognition of the anticipatory illumination of queerness on the horizon in an effort to thrust the debate sphere into the queer utopia. Munoz 07' (Jose, Duke University Press Editor, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity, Queers Futurity, 2010, Duke North Carolina)
QUEERNESS IS NOT yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. \Ve may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queemess exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and nows totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queemess is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queemess is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing. Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queemess in the realm of the aesthetic. Hie aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity. Both the ornamental and the quotidian can contain a map of the utopia that is queerness. Turning to the aesthetic in the case of queemess is nothing like an escape from the social realm, insofar as queer aesthetics map future social relations. Queerness is also a performative because it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future. Queemess is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world. []

Cruising Utopias first move is to describe a modality of queer utopianism that 1 locate with in a historically specific nexus of cultural production before, around, and slightly after the Stonewall rebellion of 1969. A Blochian approach to aesthetic theory is invested in describing the anticipatory illumination of art, which can be characterized as the process of identifying certain properties that can be detected in representational practices helping us to see the not-yet-conscious.7 This not-yet-conscious is knowable, to some extent, as a utopian feeling. When Bloch describes the anticipatory illumination of art, one can understand this illumination as a surplus of both affect and meaning within the aesthetic. 1 track utopian feelings throughout the work of that Stonewall period. I attempt to counteract the logic of the historical case study by following an associative mode of analysis that leaps between one historical site and the present. To that end my writing brings in my own personal experience as another way to ground historical queer sites with lived queer experience. My intention in this aspect of the writing is not simply to wax anecdotally but, instead, to reach for other modes of associative argumentation and evidencing] Thus, when considering the work of a contemporary club performer such as Kevin Aviance, I engage a poem by Elizabeth Bishop and a personal recollection about movement and gender identity. When looking at Kevin McCartys photographs of contemporary queer and punk bars, 1 consider accounts about pre-Stonewall gay bars in Ohio and my personal story about glowing up queer and punk in suburban Miami. Most of this book is fixated on a cluster of sites in the New York City of the fifties and sixties that include the New York School of poetry, the Judson Memorial Church's dance theater, and Andy Warhols Factory. Cruising Utopia looks to figures from those temporal maps that have been less attended to than OHara and Warhol have been. Yet it seems useful to open this book by briefly discussing moments in the work of both the poet and the pop artist for the purposes of illustrating the project's primary approach to the cultural and theoretical material it traverses. At the center of Cruising Utopia there is the idea of hope, which is both a critical affect and a methodology. [...] A posterior glance at different moments, objects, and spaces might offer us an anticipatory illumination of queemess. We cannot trust in the manifestations of what some people would call queemess in the present, especially as embodied in the pragmatic debates that dominate contemporary gay and lesbian politics. (Here, again, I most pointedly mean U.S. queers clamoring for their right to participate in the suspect institution of marriage and, maybe worse, to serve in the military.) None of this is to say that there are not avatars of a queer futurity, both in the past and the present, especially in sites of cultural production. What I am suggesting is that we gain a greater conceptual and theoretical leverage if we see queerness as something that is not yet here. In this sense it is useful to consider Edmund Husserl, phenomenologys founder, and his invitation to look to horizons of being.* Indeed to access queer visuality we may need to squint, to strain our vision and force it to see otherwise, beyond the limited vista of the here and now. To critique an overarching here and now" is not to turn one's face away from the everyday. Roland Barthes wrote that the mark of the utopian is the quotidian.10 Such an argument would stress that the utopian is an impulse that we see in everyday life. This impulse is to be glimpsed as something that is extra to the everyday transaction of heteronormative capitalism. This quotidian example of the utopian can be glimpsed in utopian bonds, affiliations, designs, and gestures that exist within the present moment. Turning to the New York School of poetry, a moment that is one of the cultural touchstones for my research, we can consider a poem by James Schuyler that speaks of a hope and desire that is clearly utopian. The poem, like most of Schuylers body of work, is clearly rooted in an observation of the affective realm of the present. Yet there is an excess that the poet also conveys, a type of affective excess that presents the enabling force of a forward-

dawning futurity that is queemess. In the poem A photograph," published in 1974 in the collection Hymn to Life, a picture that resides on the speaker s desk sparks a recollection of domestic bliss.