Why Europe Is Lesbian and Gay Friendly (and Why America Never Will Be)

Chapter 5: Caring Citizenship

93 Chapter 5  Caring Citizenship This chapter incorporates another analytical frame, citizenship, in order to hone in the relationship between individuals and their collective representatives, broadly defined as “the state.” If the democratic state has a responsibility to ensure that citizens can fare well, then one key aspect of that process is to clarify the lawful beneficiaries of care. In the words of Bryan Turner: “who gets citizenship clearly indicates the prevailing formal criteria of inclusion/exclusion within a political community and how these resources following citizenship membership are allocated and administered largely determines the economic fate of individuals and families.”1 Who counts as citizens matters: It matter because the state bestows political and economic benefits to citizens. Much of the citizenship literature focuses on the political and social rights of citizens to benefits provided by the state. This includes familiar rights claims made by identity-based social movements. LGBT activists make significant use of rights discourse but “cashing in” rights claims can be difficult in political regimes without clearly defined guaranteed rights—even more so if the political context is hostile. In European countries, with extensive social rights but where shifting demographics and social change underpins a care crunch, calls to extend social rights are, to say the least, a tough sell. However, in the 1980s, European citizenship discourse began to move away 94 Why Europe Is Lesbian and Gay Friendly from an emphasis on rights. Instead, political rhetoric articulated a responsible, active citizen with duties to the state and to others. As an active, responsible citizen there are various ways one can be in “public service,” for example, somewhat passively through paying taxes, more actively through political engagement in the public square, as well as through providing services that alleviate state responsibilities, such as caring. Although caring has not always been recognized as a public service, arguably one of the outcomes of feminism has been to highlight the importance, economically and socially, of those providing care. It may be private, unpaid, altruistic, familial, and beyond the gaze of the state but individuals who provide care are, at least in a welfare capitalist system, providing a service to the larger community and the state. Regardless of one’s motivation—values , altruism, or obligation—the outcome of such care is that it lessens the state’s responsibility to vulnerable citizens and the subsequent financial burden. The linguistic shift to active citizenship gave a new “speakability” to the care taking place in non-heterosexual “kinship networks” and “same-sex intimacies.”2 This chapter continues to contextualize the extension of lesbian- and gay-friendly policies within a political economy of care, one that became increasingly reliant on active citizens. There are two reasons for this. First, most of the existing literature on “sexual citizenship” argues that the mantle of citizenship bestowed on lesbians and gay men has resulted either from increased economic activity or from political activity demanding civil and human rights. Although I find some sympathy with both of these constructs, I believe they underestimate a crucial element in the development of lesbian- and gay-friendly policy: the legacy of care. Second, parameters of citizenship establish for whom the state has a responsibility to provide care and on whom the state can rely, or require, to provide care for others. Previous chapters have addressed the post-war commitment of many European states to ensure that citizens fare well and the continued negotiations between the state, civil society, and individuals as to the form of this care. Given that commitment and a care crunch, a consideration of “active” responsible citizenship contexualizes increasing levels of “friendliness.” I argue that lesbians and gay men have earned citizenship through care activities, particularly at times when care has been not provided by the state, family, or faith-based sector. 95 Caring Citizenship Conceptualizing Citizenship Citizenship is a compelling signifier in sociopolitical relations. According to contractual liberal conceptions, “citizens are regarded as autonomous individuals who make choices, as individuals who are bound together by a ‘social contract,’ rather than as friends and neighbors united by common activity.”3 Alternatively, communitarians and/ or advocates of civic republicanism see citizens “as social and political people whose lives are intertwined . . . such ‘communal’ citizens share with their neighbors common traditions and understandings which form the basis for their public pursuit of a common good.”4 Political rhetoric relates tangentially to these constructions with varying emphasis on the rights...