Sexual Citizens: The Legal and Cultural Regulation of Sex and Belonging (review)

I confess. I have a terrible weakness for 'transformation tv.' All too frequently, at the end of a long week, confronted with my mortality in the form of my ever-expanding list of tasks not yet done (writing projects, committee work, children's science projects, laundry), I can be found curled up in front of the tv with an episode or two (or three) of What Not to Wear, Extreme Home Makeover, Supernanny, or even The Dog Whisperer: any of that myriad of shows in which people, families, or homes are pulled apart and then put back together in new and improved versions of their true inner selves.

Thus, the speed with which Brenda Cossman drew me into her book, Sexual Citizens: The Legal and Cultural Regulation of Sex and Belonging was unsurprising. The book opens with a discussion of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, a 'transformation tv' show where five gay men undertake an emergency makeover of a heterosexual man. Rather than treating the show as a piece of pop-cultural cotton-candy, Cossman takes it as a site of important socio-legal action. It is not simply that the show takes five gay men and makes them visible as 'heroic' characters in a way unimaginable twenty years ago.¹ It is also that the men are engaged in the project of helping hetero men be better versions of their hetero selves. Both gay and straight men are transformed by the staging of this encounter, both become different kinds of citizens.

And so, the turn to transformation tv provides the locus for an exploration of citizenship. For citizenship, Cossman argues, is about a process of becoming – of becoming recognized citizens. In Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Cossman sees the contours of what she calls the new sexual citizenship. This new modality of sexual citizenship, she argues, is one in which 'gay and heterosexual subjects alike are being increasingly sexed but not too much, privatized through a celebration of market consumption, and transformed into projects of self-governance' (2).

Cossman draws on the citizenship literature in what might be non-traditional ways for some, but ways that push in productive directions. Thus, in exploring the 'what' and the 'how,' Cossman draws on, but departs from, approaches that focus on the normalizing or transgressive dimensions of sexual citizenship. Her interest is in the ways sexuality is brought to bear on both homosexual and heterosexual self-formation, and indeed, on the ways that those processes occur together. Her focus is also on the 'private' or 'marketized' (45) dimensions of these processes. That is, rather than focusing solely on the role of government in the making of citizens, she explores the making of 'good' and 'bad' citizens through popular culture and in the private spaces of home and market. She also draws on the governmentality literature, with its focus on projects of self-help or self-disciplining, along with its attention to the languages of responsibility and individual choice.

Cossman explores sexuality as a regulatory domain and does so using a wide lens to capture both legal and popular culture. For this regulatory domain exceeds the boundaries of disciplinary (or geographic) jurisdiction. As she notes, the 'images, norms, and narratives of popular culture seep into legal discourse' and 'legal discourse casts its shadow over popular culture' (18). Her thesis is this: 'Sexual freedom has become a terrain to be managed, preferably through a privatized self-disciplined subject. We are all called upon to manage our sex lives, to make "good" sexual choices and engage in the "right" sexual practices, affirming both our sense of sexual autonomy while governing in and through it.' (206)

In four chapters, she explores different dimensions of the conversations in which law and popular culture engage on this terrain in which this new sexual citizenship is being made and remade. In the first chapter, she looks at the ways citizens are produced through the...