Rethinking Citizenship

Citizenship, as conventionally understood, draws its definitional strength from a framework of national law increasingly supplemented by international law. There is a radical potential to the idea of citizenship as a concept that allows it to represent the rights of groups that have historically been marginalised. The recent history of the queer rights movement shows an attempt to frame queer struggles within the language of rights. While this has undoubtedly been an extremely useful strategy in terms of putting forward the radical idea of queer people as citizens of this country, it suffers from serious limitations. While mapping out the strengths of the use of rights as a framework of articulation, this article goes on to note the significant ways in which the radical critique of institutions such as the family and monogamy is muted by an appeal to the law. What the law eventually protects is a queer citizen who leaves aside his queerness and joins the mainstream as a person who is different but equal. In this context, this article addresses the role of the ´illegal citizen’ who resists the demands of ´normality’ and thereby struggles to articulate his/her concerns in the face of a legal system that cannot take on board the diverse ways in which his/her life threatens mainstream institutions.