(Studies in The Psychosocial) Leticia Sabsay (Auth.) - The Political Imaginary of Sexual Freedom - Subjectivity and Power in The New Sexual Democratic Turn-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2016)

THE POLITICAL IMAGINARY
OF SEXUAL FREEDOM
Subjectivity and Power in the
New Sexual Democratic Turn
STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOSOCIAL
LETICIA SABSAY
Studies in the Psychosocial
Series Editors
Stephen Frosh
Department of Psychosocial Studies
Birkbeck University
London, United Kingdom
Peter Redman
Department of Social Sciences
Open University
Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
Wendy Hollway
The Open University
Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom
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Leticia Sabsay
The Political
Imaginary of Sexual
Freedom
Subjectivity and Power in the New Sexual
Democratic Turn
Leticia Sabsay
LSE Gender Institute, London School of Economics
and Political Science, London, United Kingdom
Studies in the Psychosocial

ISBN 978-1-137-26386-5 ISBN 978-1-137-26387-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-26387-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956247
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Acknowledgments
It took me a long time to finish this book. I have written it while moving
to the UK, and in between different academic contexts. Along this jour-
ney, my thoughts found new paths, and my insights were enhanced, as
the different spaces of interlocution in which I found myself made me
rethink some of my initial ideas. But my first intuitions remained, and
so I persisted in the task. Throughout this period I have found invalu-
able colleagues and friends, who not only supported me during this time
but with whom I started multiple conversations that made their way
into the book. These voices joined with those of long-lasting friends and
comrades, whose words and gestures also facilitated my own thoughts.
Thinking is dialogical, in my view, and while everything that is written
here is my exclusive responsibility, I would have not been able to write it
without those exchanges, nor could I have found an internal space to do
it without their company. I am gratefully indebted to them.
First and foremost, thanks to Judith Butler for the inspiring voice,
constant support and encouragement, as well as for the insightful com-
ments on previous versions of this manuscript; and Stephen Frosh, who
patiently followed its development, for his supportive approach to the
book, and his invaluable insights for improvement. Their suggestions have
been key to putting this manuscript in better shape. I am also grateful
to Lisa Baraitser, whose support was also key to the development of this
project. Brenna Bhandar, Sarah Bracke, Piyel Haldar, Jack Harrington,
v
vi Acknowledgments
Engin Isin, and Gail Lewis have read and commented on previous
versions of some of the chapters. I am thankful for their great questions
and generous suggestions, which have also oriented my writing. I thank
Zeynep Gambetti, Nacira Gueniff-Souilamas, Carrie Hamilton, Clare
Hemmings, Elena Loizidou, Sumi Madhok, Cecilia Sosa, Sadie Wearing,
and Alyosxa Tudor for lively conversations and advice; Tara Atluri, Deena
Dajani, Aya Ikegame, Alessandra Marino, Andrea Mura, Zaki Nahaboo,
Lisa Pilgram, and Dana Rubin, all of them members of the research proj-
ect ‘Oecumene: Citizen after Orientalism’ with whom I enjoyed three
years of weekly inspiring discussions between 2011 and 2014; and the
participants of the workshop ‘Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance:
Feminism and Social Change,’ held at the Columbia Global Centre of
Istanbul in 2013, where I discussed a previous version of Chapter 6. I
thank Angela Duthie for her immense help with the editing of the text,
Richard Schumphoff for his work in between languages, Amanda Shaw
for her assistance with the index and the edition, and Eleanor Christie,
from Palgrave, for her helpful and patient guidance throughout. Finally,
my deepest gratitude to Andy Bonomo, whose unconditional support
and good company have been vital to my work.
Chapter 2, ‘Diversity and the Sexual Imaginary,’ has been substantially
expanded for this monograph from a text that appeared as ‘Questioning
Diversity: Sexual Politics, Identity and Liberal Individuals’ in Culture and
Power: Identity and Identification, eds. Angel Mateos-Aparicio Martin-
Albo and Eduardo Gregorio-Godeo (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2013) published with the permission of Cambridge Scholars
Publishing.
A previous version of Chapter 4, ‘Sexuality in Translation,’ was pub-
lished as ‘From Being Sexual to Having Sexual Rights: Translation as a
Form of Dispossession,’ in Darkmatter 14, under a Creative Commons
license.
Some of the arguments developed in Chapter 3, ‘On the (b)orders of
Sexual Citizenship,’ and Chapter 5, ‘Body Matters: From Autonomy to
Relationality,’ appeared in summarized form in ‘Paradojas de la Ciudadanía
Sexual’ (Debates y Combates 3), and ‘Abject Choices? Orientalism,
Citizenship and Autonomy,’ published in Citizenship after Orientalism:
Transforming Political Theory, ed. Engin Isin (London: Palgrave, 2015),
respectively.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Diversity and the Sexual Imaginary 31
3 On the (b)orders of Sexual Citizenship 85
4 Sexuality in Translation 129
5 Body Matters: From Autonomy to Relationality 165
6 Being Sexual 213
Bibliography 253
Index 269
vii
1
Introduction
The sexual subject, which is the theme of this book, is both a pervasive
and elusive figure. It can be viewed in many different ways: as an onto-
logical proposition, a construct, or even natural fact. Depending on the
emphasis of our approach, it could be addressed as a therapeutic or a
psychoanalytic subject; it could be interpreted as a moral being, a bio-
logical individual, or as a historical subject, born in a specific time and
space; it could be the political subject, formed through and within social
practices; a subject of power, an intersectional subject, or the site for
sexual agency; the list could go on endlessly, depending on our chosen
epistemological framework.
What is clear is that, despite successive deconstructive moves, the
notion of the sexual subject endures. In one way or another, it seems we
cannot do otherwise than presuppose that there is, ostensibly, something
like a sexual subject—in other words that subjectivity necessarily has a
sexual dimension, and that sexuality is first and foremost intrinsically
located in the subject, or more specifically in the subject’s body, although
of course not only there.
© The Author(s) 2016 1

L. Sabsay, The Political Imaginary of Sexual Freedom, Studies
in the Psychosocial, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-26387-2_1
2 The Political Imaginary of Sexual Freedom
This common sense assertion has been widely theorized and debated.
So, why write another book on this? The sexual subject this book is con-
cerned with is the subject who has become entitled to be sexual as a subject
of rights. In other words, it is a reflection on the production of the sexual
subject as a subject who, on the one hand, is entitled to become a subject
of rights on the basis of having a sexuality, or being assumed as sexual
and, on the other hand, is a subject that becomes sexual on the basis of
the rights that such a subject is entitled to claim.
The Question of Freedom and the Sexual

Subject of Rights
I will examine here how Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer
(LGBTQ) politics have transformed the consideration of what a sexual
subject might be. If we want to talk about sexual subjects and rights, the
most obvious path will lead us back to feminist interventions in this field,
as it was at the juncture of women’s bodies and (hetero)sexuality that the
question of sexual rights first came to prominence (although if we attend
to the genealogy of the notion of gender in relation to the normalization
of intersex subjects, this case should be seriously reframed).1 However, if
we look at the Western genealogy of sexuality, the configuration of the
sexual subject and subsequent questions pertaining to its rights take us
back to the theorization of heterosexuality via its myriad complex ‘devia-
tions.’ This was the point when that which exceeds normative heterosexu-
ality became a matter of concern, and when the sexual subject emerged
as an object of study2—and also a subject of discourse. It has been in
dialogue with the field of sexual dissidence that different understandings
of the sexual subject and sexuality have developed.
The emergence of LGBTQ politics has not only had an impact on the
field of sexual dissidence and the transformation of gay and lesbian life.
More crucially, it has contributed to the redefinition of the sexual subject,
which has involved the consolidation of the homo/heterosexual divide.
This divide became crucial for the understanding of sexuality, now primor-
dially organized around ideas of sexual identity, object choice, and rights.
1 Introduction 3
Starting with the idea that LGBTQ rights are not only about LGBTQ
rights, but have in fact transformed the whole relationship between sexu-
ality and rights, I argue here that we should also reflect on the constitution
of sexuality as a right to which an individual becomes entitled, qua sexual
subject or a subject of sexuality. How does the sexual subject have to be
conceived to become a sexual rights-bearing subject? And how does sexu-
ality have to be imagined to become a right? These very basic questions
form the kernel of this book. We will see—if I succeed in my endeavor—
that many other sexual subjects will be included in the discussion when
addressing the specific formation of the sexual rights-bearing subject: the
historical, the political, the intersectional, and the therapeutic, among
them. But within all of these figures we can find the pervasive form of the
liberal individual of Western democracies, or, more broadly, of political
representation within the tradition of political liberalism. This becomes
clear in relation to the neoliberal subject, as the subject that is mobilized
by current neoliberal policies depends on, and is in fact a re-articulation
of, the ontology of the individual proper to the liberal tradition.
So what kind of implications can we identify from the fact that the
sexual subject of rights is a liberal subject? In a way, this book questions
both the liberal subject and the liberal understanding of sexuality: the
task is to highlight those instances where subjectivity and sexuality could
be understood otherwise. I believe that this is important because, among
other reasons, if the freedom we can imagine for sexuality and for the
subject is restricted by this liberal paradigm, our notion of freedom is
inevitably limited. So I have decided to undertake this task in pursuit
of an expanded idea of sexual freedom, beyond liberalism. This seems a
timely endeavor if we consider the costs of inclusion and liberal sexual
rights gains, as well as the racist ways in which sexuality has been consid-
ered within current colonial or imperialist discourses. This book is also
about the liberal ethos that dwells in widespread notions about the sub-
ject of politics more generally, and democracy tout court. At a time when
democracy has come to be synonymous with liberal democracy, and has
been hijacked to the point that we talk about post-democracy, it is also
time for us to try to think again about freedom and the frameworks that
have both shaped and restricted it.
We may ask ourselves why we need another book against the liberal
subject of sexuality. There has been a whole strand of queer scholarship
specifically dedicated to questioning the liberal paradigms that reign
within identity politics and LGBTQ politics, and in some important
ways this work could be considered a contribution to this field.3 Much
of critical queer scholarship has criticized this neoliberal politics, sug-
gesting that a way out of its trap is to focus on questions of equality and
social justice. An example of this is Lisa Duggan’s significant interven-
tion depicting homonormativity as a neoliberal formation.4 But I do not
think that we have to abandon the ideal of freedom, as if the only way to
imagine it were within liberal grids.
Amber Hollibaugh, for example, reclaiming freedom in a way that
clearly challenges the LGBTQ mainstream agenda, remarks that we
should not consider sex as a separate issue; desire and the erotic are at the
center of any political vision.5 Reframing the question of LGBTQ rights
as the right to be desiring beings, Hollibaugh insists that any political
vision has to consider the role of desire, that is, the possibility of desire
for all. We all have the right to be desiring beings and to fulfill our desires,
but sexual liberation has a social context that involves questions of eco-
nomic and social justice. And so Hollibaugh asks: in what conditions can
we have sexual freedom? How can we have sex at all? When the right to
have sex is usually depicted in heterosexual terms—as tends to be the case
within disability, medical realms, and so on—social and economic condi-
tions that allow us to act on our sexual desires should be queered as well.
I totally agree with this position, but still the reconsideration of freedom
in the light of social justice might not provide us with all the answers to
the question as to how sexual freedom is currently imagined. To address
this question it is important to look at the politics of the LGBTQ social
movements and consider the extent to which ideas of sexual freedom
might have been reframed by neoliberal ways of reasoning.
My interest here is to revisit these politics once again to reflect upon
the ontological presuppositions embedded in the imaginary of sexual
freedom that belongs to the pervasively liberal conception of the subject
that the neoliberal reason seems to re-articulate.
1 Introduction 5
The Psychosocial Imaginary of Post-Essentialist

and Transnational Times
To talk about ontology and subjectivity might seem untimely now, when
the subject seems to have been theorized to exhaustion. Symptomatic of
this exhaustion is the decentering of the subject within the current focus
on the agency of objects—an ontology oriented toward objects, which
goes hand in hand with new materialisms. Similarly, the so-called turn to
affect, which has constituted for some of its strands a serious challenge to
the centrality of the subject as a clear and distinct entity, is an indication
of the shortcomings that such a subject as an object of study involves.
And yet, the figure of the subject in its most conventional form per-
sists. The critical work that aimed to deconstruct it has been done and we
can congratulate ourselves within the walls of our academic bubble, but
the world keeps going on as usual. The focus on the object, the subject’s
historical, logical, and ontological alter ego, might offer valuable insights
into this critical work. However, the pervasiveness of the self-centered
subject demands reflection, especially if we take into account that the
re-articulation of this liberal figure continues to be mobilized in this par-
ticular historical constellation against the background of, and responding
to, the cultural turn, the discursive turn, the performative turn, and the
certified death of poststructuralism (or at least of the efficacy of critique,
its most valued attitude).
When I insist on this figure of the subject I am neither referring to the
Cartesian subject of reason, nor to the Kantian subject of phenomenology.
Although the current liberal subject still carries some of their basic features,
this is a complex formation pretty much based on post-essentialist and
post-identitarian imaginaries. In this regard, the book contends that cur-
rent mainstream trends toward the democratization of sexuality are framed
by a psychosocial imaginary configured around the prevailing figure of
a neoliberal post-essentialist subject who nevertheless is characterized as
transparent and autonomous in its self-understanding. It also argues that
renewed orientalist and colonial mentalities emerge within this imaginary
to sustain this refashioned modern subject. In this context, then, despite
the fact that we are said to live in a post-identitarian moment, one of the
aims of the book is to question the naturalization of the idea of sexual
identity. Basically, one of my main arguments here is that the ideas of sex-
ual orientation and identity ultimately rely on a liberal understanding of
the subject. So the question for me is: how is this liberal version of sexual
subjectivity built in such a way that it can both retain classic characteristics
and sustain a deconstructive disenchanted view? The move from the liberal
to the neoliberal subject explains this in part, but it does not exhaust all the
aspects in question here.
If the affective forces that traverse social life have been the focus of more
attention in recent years, I believe that it is partly due to their capacity
to reveal the affective life of categories, which seems to follow a dynamic
of its own, and effectively survives and circumvents critique. In other
words, what the renewed attention to affect underscores is that neither
the critical work of historical contextualization nor the deconstruction of
social categories and constructs have been successful in understanding,
and therefore hopefully contributing to the transformation of, our deep
attachments to those categories that shape our ways of seeing, thinking,
living, and ultimately being. My sense here is that the fantasy of a decon-
structed post-ideological time actually depends on the disavowal of this
affective dimension. What I find strange is that some quarters reject the
psychoanalytic insight into the world of affective life.
There are two main ways in which a psychosocial approach enters my
discussion. Firstly, my point of departure is that the continued pervasive-
ness of the liberal ethos is due to the fact that, at a psychic level, we con-
tinue to be invested in the categories that we have otherwise abandoned.
Secondly, I believe that by paying attention to the psychic formation
of the sexual, we might find ourselves on a path that contributes to the
undoing of these liberal assumptions, revealing that therein lies the fragil-
ity of sexual imaginaries. I believe that the psychic dimension of sexuality
might in fact allow us to understand sexual freedom in a way that marks
what this liberal politics cannot capture.
My aim here is to provide some grounds for a relational and performa-
tive approach to sexuality that is capable of challenging these assump-
tions—or at least to provide a framework for those who cannot organize
their sexuality according to a neat type (or types) of object choice. I would
1 Introduction 7
like to offer an approach that is not organized around the presupposition

that the object is central to the organization of sexual lives. On a personal
level, I have, historically, had some difficulties with the ways in which
sexual desires are socially codified. ‘Are you a bisexual?’ might have been
one of the recurrent questions I have had to confront. And to make my
life easier I often just limited myself to responding ‘yes.’ Well, the situ-
ation is, of course, more complex, and this book is a way of giving the
long response. Why? Because I am certainly not the only person who
has been in this situation, but also because the new politics of gender
have altered the cartography of gender positions and desires. Just as the
current gender positionalities available today are not the same as those
that were available in the past, the cartography of desire in relation to
object choice shifts as well. What I mean by this is not just that we have
‘more categories available.’ I mean that the logic of distribution of what is
socially considered masculine and feminine has shifted in ways that have
radically transformed the dynamic relations between identification and
desire as well.
Framing things this way, however, requires an important caveat. To
start this book by setting such a context presupposes a very specific loca-
tion from where I am writing. However, I embarked on this project while
going through a number of transitions from one academic context to
another, and along this journey, there was a point at which I felt some-
how uneasy about it. A large part of my hesitation was related to what I
felt as certain lack of timeliness of my project. This thought came to me
as a scholar working in London for some years. But I am also a Latin
American scholar, and someone who has worked for many years in Spain
as well, and I still maintain close contact with those worlds. So my think-
ing lives not only in different spaces, but also in different times. Time is
heterogeneous, as we know. And just as borders are predominantly figured
spatially or geographically, they work through time lines as well. Where
is it that this or that debate may not seem timely? From which vantage
point may we say that certain debates have already been exhausted after
all? What is the time of this figured ‘we,’ referring here to my community
of academics working in the humanities and the social sciences?
Of course, I am not proposing here a progressive narrative, by which
one should assume that certain debates have taken place already in some
places, and have yet to take place in others (although unfortunately it

does work in this way to a great extent). We cannot even assume that
these would be the same debates, even if theories, concepts, ‘turns,’ and
arguments do travel, and often in not the most promising foreseeable
modes. What I am suggesting is that the definition of what is contempo-
rary or currently relevant depends on the hegemony of certain centers of
knowledge production, and so another challenge for me is to contest this
definition of what the contemporary supposedly is—hence the focus on
cultural translation that is also present in the book.
At the intersection of politics and theories in translation, then, this
book describes the political imaginary that belongs to what could be
broadly described as a ‘new sexual democratic turn,’ providing a criti-
cal examination of the sexual subject conceived within current con-
figurations of citizenship and human rights, and notions of progress in
contemporary sexual politics on a transnational scale. The ‘new sexual
democratic turn’ reveals the complex and multidimensional political and
cultural processes by which the ideal of sexual freedom has assumed a
new imaginary legitimacy since the early 1990s. It is clear that the mobi-
lization of progressive ideals regarding gender and sexuality through the
language of rights in the last three decades has enabled positive social
transformations that are the result of social and political struggles that
now appear normal to us. However, in the course of this transforma-
tive process, the very same notions of sexuality, gender, and subjectivity
underwent certain re-articulations that led to new forms of subjectiva-
tion and modes of othering. It is precisely the relation between these
new subject formations and their abjected others that the book tries to
understand: normalized new transgender variants; new homonormative
sexual identities such as the ideal middle class gay couple; diverse models
of family and kinship arrangements, on the one hand, and sex workers
and public sex; orientalized ‘antidemocratic’ sexual subjects, particularly
prominent within Islamophobic discourses; and neo-colonial figures of
victimhood on the other.
The starting point of my argument is that on the surface there seems
to be a liberalizing trend in terms of the expansion of key liberties and the
‘acceptance’ (or toleration) of sexual and gender diversity, primarily in
the so-called advanced democracies of Europe and North America, but
1 Introduction 9
also globally. However, what we are seeing is that ostensibly progressive

discourses, laws, and policies associated with this liberalization are actu-
ally instituting historically new modes of sexual regulation, which in fact
condition the ways in which sexuality and gender are currently under-
stood, perceived, and experienced.
In order to highlight the imaginary dimension of the regulative power
concerning gender, sexuality, and subject formations, the book takes its
departure from the parallel psychic constitution of the subject and the
phantasmatic dimension of social imaginaries. From a psychoanalytically
informed perspective on the imaginary, we come to understand that it
is through fantasy that imaginary fictions become a reality for the sub-
ject and it is at this psychic level that social imaginaries—and the regula-
tive power they entail—are enacted.6 As Kaja Silverman remarks, reality
is imaginarily mediated.7 This means for Silverman that ideology works
through psychic mediation at the level of belief. The hegemony of ideo-
logical reality and specific forms of subjective constitution are sustained by
psychic beliefs and fantasies—which we get hold of through processes of
interpellation and representation—in which we (mis)recognize ourselves
and our desires. That is why, as Silverman states, ‘the subject can continue
to “recognize” itself and its desires within certain kinds of sounds, images,
and narrative paradigms long after consciously repudiating them.’8 This
does not mean that we are deemed to just reproduce ideology, or hege-
monic imaginary fictions. While we have been shaped to some degree by
these hegemonic imaginary fictions, the fact that this psychic mediation
is required for the imaginary to work opens up the path to other kinds of
subjectivities as well. The renegotiation of our relationship to this imagi-
nary is also an open possibility, as we rework those attachments Foucault
speaks of, and, following Silverman, ‘rather than seeking access for all sub-
jects to an illusory “wholeness”,’ as the liberal self and subsequent politics
of recognition and inclusion seem to require, ‘we collectively acknowl-
edge, at the deepest level of our psyches, that our desires and our identity
come to us from outside, and that they are founded upon a void.’9
Following this approach, this book analyses the changing concep-
tions of the embodied (gendered and sexualized) subject and, in par-
ticular, how these conceptions—articulated through and within social
discourses—shape a new psychosocial imaginary concerning subjectivity,
identity, and sexuality. The book argues that it is at the level of the psy-
chosocial imaginary that we are currently individualized and governed by
hegemonic forms of neoliberal individualism, made evident in the new
forms of sexual respectability and correctness entailing new orientalist
and colonial views. Against these subject formations, the book pursues a
characterization of subjectivity psychoanalytically informed both by the
unconscious and by a radical relationality that questions this deliberative
and exclusionary framework.
Desire and the After-Life of the Liberal Ethos

Through a critical examination of different key theoretical frameworks
and ‘glocal’ public discourses on sexuality and rights, including debates
on sexual citizenship, the international frameworks that delineate the
politics of sexual diversity, and the racialization of sexual progressiveness,
my purpose is to rethink and reformulate the entanglement between
sexuality, subjectivity, and the political beyond the hegemonic Western
imaginary of the liberal sexual subject. I critically examine the generally
accepted idea that we are subjects entitled to sexual rights. This gener-
ally accepted idea is in fact relatively recent, and it entails a series of
assumptions about sexuality, subjectivity, citizenship, and politics that I
try to uncover and problematize. How has sexuality changed the terms
of citizenship? How are we formed, governed, and empowered as sexual
subjects? How has citizenship changed the terms of sexuality? How have
our understandings of desire and pleasure changed since sexuality started
to be articulated in the language of rights?
What I aim to do here is to unravel the presumptions that hamper
the understanding of sexuality as a relational phenomenon. Against the
ontology of the liberal subject, and a limited idea of sexual orientations
and identities, which forms the basis of current mainstream sexual poli-
tics, I offer a reflection on the political challenges posed by a notion of
subjectivity as radically relational and psychically divided to this prevalent
notion of the subject. Finally, I aim to put forward a relational approach
to the dynamics of sexual desire and identifications, together with a post-
sovereign notion of sexual and political agency.
1 Introduction 11
For my argument, I am continuing in my endeavor to work along

the lines of the performative approach developed by Judith Butler on
subject formations in order to develop a methodology of analysis capable
of tracking the political imaginaries that structure the subjective fields
within which subjects come to make sense of their sexual lives. Here, I
trace some aspects of the trajectory of Judith Butler’s work, from the cen-
tral notion of resignification to the notion of dispossession for thinking
about sexual norms and ways of becoming. I am interested in taking this
detour because if the first considerations of Butler gave voice to radical
demands (as developed in her groundbreaking Gender Trouble or Bodies
that Matter),10 they were also prescient about what eventually occurred
with regard to the normalization of queer movements. The counterpoint
between resistance and vulnerability when thinking about bodies seems
most timely to trace the trajectory of recent political struggles against
austerity policies and racist sexual politics. In effect, the entanglement
between resistance and vulnerability that we see within Judith Butler’s
work could also be read along the lines of what different political moments
have been demanding as they question current forms of sexual regulation
and modes of exclusion.
In a way, the questions that have driven this book are genealogical,
in Michel Foucault’s sense of genealogy, that is, the questioning of the
conditions of possibility for the emergence of truths that we assume as
natural or ostensible givens.11 The question about the conditions of intel-
ligibility under which the ways of knowing and thinking about sexual-
ity became to be hegemonically framed in liberal terms was the starting
point for this project. What has been gained and lost by the re-inscription
of emancipationist or liberationist ideals of sexual freedom and justice
under the language of rights? By asking this question my intention is not
to dismiss the rights that are actually demanded, but to open up those
notions of sexual freedom and justice where their legal definition limits
them. It is also about questioning the disciplining and regulative dimen-
sion that these ideas mobilize, as well as the new sexual norms and the
renewed exclusions and hierarchies that a liberal frame propounds.
This endeavor refers back to the critique that Foucault made to the his-
torical emergence of sexuality as a Western modern dispositive. This dis-
positive configures a whole system of classification of subjects according
to their sexual behaviors, turning sexuality into a key mechanism for

defining social-sexual types, while placing sexuality as the locus of the
subject’s ultimate truth. But most importantly, drawing on Foucault’s
consideration of the liberal reason as a new form of relationship between
government and the governed, the other aspect of sexuality that is key in
this book is the link that Foucault allows us to make between the sexual
dispositive and the formation of the liberal subject, that is, a subject that
is defined by the production of freedom and the desire to be free. My
point is that the liberal politics of sexual diversity, sexual citizenship, rec-
ognition, and inclusion, based on sexual identity and ideas of freedom
intimately indebted to liberal autonomy, are dependent on, rather than
challenging, the sexual device as Foucault envisioned it. In this sense,
they tend to a further governmentalization of the sexual, extending the
regulation of the subject through sexuality. In this context, the book con-
tends that current mainstream progressive sexual politics are, more or
less, implicitly sustained in a liberal conception of the individual, which
functions as a mode of social regulation. Against the backdrop of this
regulative force, it argues that this political articulation points to a new
form of reification of subjectivity that has exclusionary consequences and
forecloses the promise of a more radical sexual politics (i.e., anarchists,
precarity movements, anti-homonationalist movements, gender-queer,
and non-liberal trans mobilizations).
Central to the liberal autonomous self-enclosed, sovereign subject
of liberalism is the assumption that the self could be to a large extent
transparent, either to others or to itself. This idea is based, in turn, on
what Denise Ferreira da Silva characterizes as a post-enlightenment
racialized conceptualization of Western reason associated to the trans-
parency of truth, which delineates the limits of what is conceived, until
today, as properly human.12 The pervasiveness of this attachment to a
somehow transparent self (whose truth might be produced either via self-
knowledge or self-production) is at the basis of mainstream conceptions
about how to politicize sexuality, and therefore its racialized tone. At the
same time, the pervasiveness of the attachment to the self conceived in
this way, despite its longstanding critique, can be simply related to our
own subjectivation.
1 Introduction 13
Foucault’s notion of productive power has been extremely useful in

exploring the link between power and subjectivity. However, the idea of
subjectivation, rich as it is, does not really account for the mechanism
by which, from the point of view of the subject, attachment to power
occurs. The contingent and contradictory character of productive power
does not seem to completely resolve the problem of resistance, either
in Foucauldian or psychoanalytic terms. It is at this point where I sug-
gest that Foucault’s theory of subjectivation (and passionate attachment)
could be complemented with the psychoanalytic understanding of invest-
ment. This would allow us to have a more complex comprehension of the
affective dimension of social life, which encompasses the productivity of
power within the psyche of the subject, and where conflict and contra-
diction are not just the mirror of what happens in power dynamics, but
something that is proper to the very dynamic of the psychic register (of
that power). The idea of investment becomes central within this frame-
work. Without (subjective) investment, there is no norm, control, or
otherwise repressive power that can work. The psychic register of produc-
tive power that makes for the pervasiveness of certain social constructs,
despite their deconstruction and now common sense critique, forms part
of the idea of the imaginary that is implicit in my readings, which, within
other grammars, could also be read as a way of incorporating the affective
dimension into an analysis of ideology.
Taking as a starting point this idea of the role of the imaginary in the
process of subjectivation, the book considers the psychic dimension of
subject formations in relation to politics, and from there, it questions
the phantasmatic foreclosures operated by the ontology of the liberal
individual taken as the basis for the Western understanding of politi-
cal representation and democracy. How does the ‘psychosocial’ or the
‘imaginary’ work in those regulatory modes by which sexual and gen-
dered political subjects are formed? In each chapter considering the rel-
evant public discourses concerning the different cases examined here, I
identify the psycho-imaginary dimension of the closures that facilitate
subject constitution. Taking as a point of departure this understanding
of the entanglement of the psychic and the social, the questions posed
in the course of this analysis function to further formulate a notion of
subjectivity whose internal alterity and antagonism challenge liberal and

orientalist conceptions of the subject and prevalent forms of deliberative
and exclusionary subject formations.
A Route Map
In the course of each chapter, I consider three main lines of argumenta-
tion. In the first place, I address the re-articulation of the ontology of the
liberal individual as a mode of sexual regulation, offering a critical read-
ing of this ontology as a product, in part, of sexual regulation, and at the
same time, the occasion for the regulation of sexuality. Secondly, I take
issue with the mobilization of exclusionary logics and the productions of
others, which seem to be constitutive to the figure of the liberal sexual
subject of rights, paying attention to the orientalist and neo-colonial
imaginaries mobilized by sexual citizenship and its associated politics.
Thirdly, I examine the decentering psychic dimensions of imaginary sub-
ject formations that contest these foreclosures that are characteristic of
identity logics. While each chapter has a different emphasis according to
its relevance in relation to the specific debates addressed, they all critically
consider the move toward the neoliberal subject for whom the uncon-
scious relation to desire and identification seems to be lost. They also
highlight how this liberal imaginary is linked to new phantasmatic others
proper to its constitutive outside. And finally, they consider an alternative
psychoanalytically informed notion of subjectivity capable of giving an
account of the necessarily contradictory, open, and relational character of
political subjectivities.
Chapter 2, ‘Diversity and the Sexual Imaginary,’ introduces the cri-
tique of the hegemonic model of liberal democracy and its consequent
focus on the rights-bearing subject, which leads to a re-articulation of rei-
fied identities and subject configurations. Here I try to show that despite
the inauguration of a supposedly post-identitarian era in the context of
current sexual (and also queer) politics, the enactment of political sub-
jectivities remains profoundly linked to phantasmatically fixed, recog-
nizable, stable, and unequivocal positions. I introduce this discussion
through a critical examination of the sociopolitical models within which
1 Introduction 15
the hegemonic notion of sexual diversity and the politics of recognition

have been configured. Understanding these models as epistemic frames
that regulate contemporary subject formations, through the analysis I
offer in this chapter I aim to open the discussion around some of the
implications that the liberal notions of representation and recognition
entail for the conceptualization of difference as diversity. To do so, I take
as a point of departure the governmentalization of trans-variants, the per-
vasiveness of presumptive monosexuality, and the hegemony of couple-
dom, and I show that the contested negotiation of the public appearance
of sexuality exposes the limits of the liberal perspective on the individ-
ual—both based on the stabilization of identity on the one hand, and the
ontological status granted to bodies on the other. This framework limits
progressive ideals and therefore, I argue, demands that we keep thinking
critically about giving ontological forms to boundaries that risk the nor-
malization of difference.
How have new sexual politics re-enacted the sexual subject still config-
ured through the sex/gender system? What notions of the body emerge
from such politics? In order to challenge the liberal framework, I intro-
duce Judith Butler’s performative theory of gender and show that this
approach cannot be easily included within constructivist views, which, I
argue, ended up being complicit with the liberal paradigm. On the one
hand, I focus on the kind of post-foundationalist approach that perfor-
mativity proposes, challenging constructivist notions of representation,
while paying particular attention to the potential and the predicaments
of the politics of resignification. On the other hand, I call attention to
implicit theories of the body in the light of the performative turn and its
re-conceptualization of the relationship between matter and signifying
practices.
In my view, it is not so much against, but rather starting with, the
new politics of sexuality and gender that we are today witnessing a new
trend toward a kind of post-essentialist imaginary of the corporeal sub-
ject as an ontological fact. These re-articulations of the individual’s self-
enclosed body shape current debates about the scope of sexual politics
that are mostly limited to the restricted framework of liberal democracy
and individual rights. In this context, rather than being the consumma-
tion of freedom, the framework of liberal rights conceived of by sexual
democracy brings back longstanding arguments about the entanglement

(not at all simple) between the politics of recognition and the shaping of
identities. At the same time, it evokes an even more complex question:
how are political subjects configured in the context of societies that iden-
tify themselves as self-reflexive and inclusive?
The ontological effect that marks the subject’s sexual body not only
mirrors the liberal conception of the individual upon which the entire
apparatus of political representation continues to be sustained. The self-
enclosed individual establishes its boundaries according to the heterosex-
ual matrix that divides sex as the material locus of our bodies, and gender
as the cultural inscription of norms onto our sexed bodies qua matter.
This distinction between sex and gender, while sustained by the feminine
and the masculine poles as the standards according to which gender for-
mation and object choice take place, is complicated by Lacanian ideas of
sexual difference. Therefore, I revisit the controversial tension between
a performative theory of gender—which, I insist, is different from con-
structivist notions of gender in that it understands that the operations of
sexual norms are registered at an unconscious level—and this psychoana-
lytic theory of sexual difference, and rehearse another possible dialogue
between them, which highlights the ontological lack of foundation on
which sexualization takes place.
The next chapter, ‘On the (b)orders of Sexual Citizenship,’ focuses on
the development and further expansion of the paradigm of sexual citi-
zenship on a global scale. This is a privileged angle for the analysis of the
Western liberal assumptions that populate mainstream sexual politics,
taking into account that this model also mobilizes sexual forms of cul-
tural imperialism and an orientalist/neo-colonial framework for conceiv-
ing the sexual subject of politics.
Here I examine the notion of sexual citizenship as well as ideas of the
subject of sexual rights and sexuality that are implied in the notion of sex-
ual citizenship. The notion of sexual citizenship has emerged and further
expanded to a great extent in line with the framework of sexual human
rights politics. Within the framework of the defense of human rights and
the struggle against discrimination and toward gender equality, the recog-
nition of gender and sexual diversity has become an ideal that characterizes
the democratic spirit. In this context, various governments and regional
1 Introduction 17
and international agencies have been developing new legal frameworks as

well as regulations aimed at greater equality and the expansion of indi-
vidual liberties. In the European Union, this has been a sustained policy
with countless plans and programs implemented in the area of gender
and sexuality. Further, the EU has also developed legal recommendations
and guidelines through which the union members’ national governments
have been explicitly requested to implement policies oriented toward the
ideals of equality and non-discrimination with regards to matters sexual.
Therefore, by paying attention to these exchanges, I address some of the
key assumptions about sexuality, subjectivity, and the political that the
politics of sexual citizenship enact on a transnational scale. To pursue this
reflection, I critically analyze some of the norms of sexual citizenship and
highlight the presumptions implicit in the translation of the horizon of
sexual freedom into the language of rights. After revealing the exclusion-
ary logic mobilized by this construct on different scales, in relation to sex
work on the one hand and in relation to cultural difference on the other
hand, I propose that queer non-identitarian principles together with their
consistent challenge to normalization can offer a way out of what I would
characterize as current forms of sexual imperialism.
The chapter starts by outlining what I understand as the paradigm of
sexual citizenship, to move toward a consideration of the relationship
between subjectivity, sexuality, and political agency within the process of
the culturalization of citizenship that forms its context. The question that
guides this discussion revolves around what happens to both subjectivity
and sexuality when Western hegemonic models of sexual citizenship are
rendered universal principles for making sexual rights claims. In particu-
lar, I am concerned with how this process is affected by a logic of citizen-
ship, which I characterize as structurally bound to an othering logic, as
the contours of citizenship necessarily depend on the systematic produc-
tion of a constitutive outside. At this point I propose that if the universal
‘citizen-subject’ is at the core of the production of sexual and cultural
others, we need to focus on how this ‘sexual citizen’ has been constituted
and how it operates within the political field of struggles over sexual free-
dom and justice, while showing that this liberal framework enables the
entanglement of sexual freedom and justice ideals with orientalist, and
more broadly, neo-colonialist views.
In the light of this panorama, I ask: what other kinds of political

agency are possible beyond the ‘citizen subject of sexual rights’ form?
Should the state even be in the position of continuing to legitimize the
ways in which subjects become eligible as political subjects of sexuality?
There are no straightforward answers for these questions, but I believe it
is still important to pose them in order to challenge the limits imposed
by a liberal version of diversity and sexual democracy. How could sexual
claims be articulated in such a way that they require us to move beyond
political liberalism and the sexual subject of liberal democracy? What
might sexual democratization look like if it ceased to be defined by the
politics of inclusion and the reduction of sexual freedom to sexual diver-
sity and subsequent cultural differences?
To begin answering these questions, I propose to think along the
lines of radical democracy, as theorized by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe.13 Their conception of radical democracy and hegemonic strug-
gles might provide a different approach to this problem. From this radical
democratic point of view, citizenship, politics, and democracy should not
be regarded as just a state of accomplished recognition (e.g., of individual
legal rights), but as an on-going project that is necessarily subject/ed to its
misrecognitions. Further, from such a radical democratic point of view,
the closures effected by citizenship would be the effect of hegemonic
struggles, where the constitutive outside that emerges from them reveals
itself as being unstable and subjected to open-ended re-articulations. This
is so because what is key to radical democracy is the idea that society as
a totality (or any identity or political community for that matter) has no
foundational basis. According to Laclau, the ontological void upon which
society constitutes itself as a self-identical unity depends on a necessary,
albeit impossible, contingent closure at the level of the ontic. In other
words, ontic social reality has no foundational ontological basis.14 Rather,
this reality is the product of hegemonized contents whose stability and
consistency depend on a constitutive outside with which they antago-
nize. Antagonism, therefore, is constitutive of a radical understanding of
democracy, wherein there is no ultimate reconciliation or final harmony.
This means that hegemony and its constitutive other make it impos-
sible to think of full inclusion. From a radical democratic point of view,
recognition is dependent on a hegemonic closure of identity and involves
1 Introduction 19
a fundamental exclusion. That is one of the reasons why recognition

reveals itself as always already a form of misrecognition. As the identities
involved in this process are ontic contingencies subjected to hegemonic
struggles, the radicalism of this approach resides in the affirmation of
democracy’s antagonistic open character. Whereas in radical democracy
identity and difference are understood as the effect and object of politi-
cal struggles and subsequent re-articulations, the forms of diversity and
cultural difference proper to liberal democracy end up giving ontological
forms to identities, and thus reifying them as established and unchange-
able forms of identification and differentiation.
In contrast to this approach, in this and subsequent chapters I argue
that, together with a radical democratic approach, vulnerability and dis-
possession, taken as indicators of relationality, could offer a critique of
this mode of production of ontological effects and differences. I will
address this last insight into relationality when considering Chapters 5
and 6, but at this point I would like to clarify that by this displacement
I do not intend to get rid of all and every ontology tout court. But if
there is a form of ontology that I would be inclined to defend against
liberal ones, it is the idea of the ontological void that works as a motor of
contingent identifications. At the level of sexuality, then, in this chapter
I begin outlining a parallel between the ontological lack of foundation
of the social with the lack of foundation of the subject, and propose
that the sexual, at an ontological level, also signals a void that might be
equated to the Lacanian real and, as such, it works as the motor of the
contingent movement of desire.15 Drawing a parallel between sexual-
ity and the political, I highlight how this ultimate lack of foundation
of desire and identification could be mobilized in a radical democratic
direction.
In Chapter 4, ‘Sexuality in Translation,’ I foreground the cultural ten-
sion pinpointed in the previous chapter in order to reflect on how this
liberal scheme over-determines the current sexualization of cultural bor-
ders that imaginarily continue to divide the West and the rest. To do so,
in this chapter I also expand on the questions introduced in Chapter 2,
focusing on the globalization of sexual identities, which poses problems
concerning competing sexual epistemologies, and the work of cultural
translation.
As stated earlier, as far as the new politics of gender and sexuality have
been framed by the parameters established by so-called advanced late
modern democracies, they have been implicated in, and evoke, oriental-
ist and colonial imaginaries. Certainly, this sexual democratic turn has
become a synonym for secularism, democratic values, and a renewed form
of modernity that seems to define the boundaries of the Occident. This
tendency becomes apparent in current mainstream campaigns against
sex trafficking, the controversies over the veil in Europe, and the recent
European and US official anti-migrant discourses. Likewise, EU sexual
policies and politics have become the leading framework under which
every project concerned with these matters is forced to define its own
terms. The regulation of sexual diversity and the pre-eminence of gay
marriage claims in diverse postcolonial contexts is a good example of this.
Considering this scenario we might ask: who are the respectable sexual
subjects that function as the benchmark against which all other sexual
subjects must be measured? How have colonial and orientalist mentalities
reshaped contemporary sexual subjectivity?
In line with the critique of the entanglement between sexual progres-
sivism and neo-colonial mentalities, I highlight the imperialist cue that
the expansion of the liberal politics of LGBTQ rights on a transnational
scale has assumed, pointing out that together with this politics, we can
see a number of presumptions about the sexual subject and the appropri-
ate ways of politicizing sexuality. What are the implications of applying
the liberal democratic model to other political horizons? How does the
expansion of this model work? As this model assumes a universalist tone
defining the parameters through which all sexual others could be recog-
nized as such, it works in tandem with the re-articulation of an orientalist
or neo-colonialist vision of historical progress. Activists who identify as
queer and trans activists of color have been seeking to disrupt the pro-
gressive narrative that belongs to such imperialist projects. Attentive to
the fact that it is precisely in order to disrupt this racist assessment that
we need to keep questioning, again and again, the narrative that justifies
it, in this chapter I discuss how ‘queer’ can be or is mobilized differ-
ently, so that we might rethink citizenship and sexual democracy against
such narratives. In the light of current processes of homonationalism,
Islamophobia, and the proclaimed failure and end of multiculturalism,
1 Introduction 21
I ask: how might queer interventions challenge current forms of sexual

racialization?
In this chapter I argue that the multiculturalist approach to sexuality
falls short in its critique of humanism, and repeats the same humanist
logic as universalist visions. I explore whether a queer perspective (and
which queer perspective) could get us out of this bind. If the queer, as
much as sexual citizenship, are transnational developments, how might
they work through decolonial translation processes?
I suggest that we need to scrutinize the idea of co-optation of queer
ideals or ideas of sexual freedom for racist projects. This demands that we
look more closely into the investment of LGBTQ movements in ideas
of diversity, and their own images of the subject of politics. How can we
make sense of sexual democracy, and the ways it regulates sexuality and
subjectivity through freedom? How does tolerance of diversity relate to
that which is not conceptualized as a recognizable, appropriate diversity
or even as a threat to either the nation or the political community, or the
human in the transnational scene?
Arguably, the controversy over the troubling links between sexual and
cultural diversity has produced a discursive field organized around two
opposite poles: on the one hand, if we think that the difference between
sexual diversity and ethnic, religious, or cultural diversity in relation to
the sexual redefinition of the borders of the West is merely coincidental,
what appears to get lost? On the other hand, if we agree with the idea
that the two are mutually implicated, how could this be read in relation
to politics of sexualities? And more generally, from a feminist queer posi-
tion, what kind of politics would that approach call for? In my view, one
of the central points of the constitutive intersection between cultural and
sexual diversity that does not allow for a simple idea of co-option as a
way to understand why sexual diversity politics has been lending itself
to racist visions is related to the impact of the liberal tradition for the
understanding of the subject of politics. This liberal form affected the
democratization of sexuality, organized around tolerance, discrete differ-
ences, and individual rights.
The two basic points that I am making here are, in the first place, that
sexual diversity politics is not just empirically implicated in supremacist
views, but is in fact conceptually entangled with them (as is evident in the
notions of sexuality and political subjectivity, and the notion of freedom

associated with them). The second point relates to critiques of liberal-
ism and multiculturalism—as well as multiculturalist liberal views—that
pose an opposition between sexual and gender freedom on the one hand,
and cultural freedom on the other. Within these debates, exemplified by
Susan Moller Okin’s influential presentation, culture is opposed to either
gender or sexual equality, and the problem for feminists and queer theo-
rists is how to ponder that tension.16 Drawing on Foucault’s notion of
sexuality as a social device,17 I undertake this discussion focusing on how
Western sexual epistemology has been construed and expanded, while
analyzing what kind of interventions may be able to challenge it more
radically.
While the preceding chapters focus mainly on the tensions posed by
the articulation of sexual freedom claims into claims for rights based on
sexual orientation and sexual identity, Chapter 5, ‘Body Matters: From
Autonomy to Relationality’ focuses on the predicaments of sexual auton-
omy and presents an alternative relational approach to embodiment and
desire. Bearing in mind the idea that sexual autonomy is a key figure that
emblematizes liberal ideas of sexual freedom, the chapter asks: what are
the conditions that a subject has to comply with in order to count as a
political sexual autonomous agent? How does sexuality have to be config-
ured in order to become a property of such a subject? Using these general
questions as a starting point, the chapter explores some of the ways in
which the liberal paradigm affects what counts as sexual freedom when
characterized as sexual autonomy, and associated ideas of free choice in
particular.
The question of autonomy is a vexed one, and when it comes to assess-
ing which of the uses that we make of our own bodies count as an auton-
omous choice, we inevitably find ourselves examining matters related to
the production of cultural difference and cultural translation as well. As
I exemplify with the cases of sex trafficking and the controversies around
the use of the veil among others, the moral antagonisms prompted by
the regulation of sexuality within and without the West are very much
driven by the question of what can and cannot be considered a sign of
subjective autonomy. Feminist and feminist postcolonial scholars among
others have addressed the cultural tensions concerning what counts as
1 Introduction 23
autonomous choice, or even agency, in particular contexts, looking at a

wide range of issues, from the reformulation of autonomy and agency
within neoliberal trends, to a focused postcolonial critique of Western
specific ideas of agency.18 However, the focus of this chapter is not on
agency, but rather on the liberal rhetoric of autonomy and the ways in
which it works as a mechanism for regulating sexuality and ideals of free-
dom. In this regard, Anne Phillips, for example, takes issue with feminist
liberal positions and proposes that to address this tension, rather than to
focus on a culturalist version of autonomy, it might be better to rethink
political autonomy together with equality.19 I agree with her assessment
of the tensions that arise when the entanglement between culture and
sexuality are at stake. However, the question of freedom still remains. Also
addressing the liberal understanding of the self, Wendy Brown points out
that such a figure emerges as an ontological basis for politics. Drawing
on Brown’s assessment, I highlight the fact that the way in which cultural
rights emerge as different from sexual freedom is already embedded in a
particular Western vision, namely, that of liberalism.
By considering some of the implications of rights-based discourses
on sexuality for conceiving political subjectivity, which relies on this
liberal understanding of the self, then, I critically explore some of the
basic characteristics that define it, namely, the idea of sovereignty over
one’s own body and desires, the notions of self-ownership, by which
sexuality becomes an attribute that the subject is said to possess, and
self-transparency, all of which are in dialogue with deeply rooted ideas of
moral autonomy. To do so, I look deeper into the question of autonomy
and self-determination over one’s own body. In contrast to the liberal
idea of a self-owned subject that is at the basis of the sexual subject of
rights, I suggest a relational approach to the body, which I understand in
phenomenological terms as a chiasm between matter and signification.
In parallel with the development of political demands for the attain-
ment of rights relative to self-determination with respect to our bodies,
various critical perspectives have formulated new conceptions about the
gendered and sexualized modes in which our lives are configured (to the
extent that they are corporeal lives). Among them, I return to the consid-
erations on the ‘lived body’ developed by Simone De Beauvoir and Judith
Butler and discuss Butler’s interpretation of Sigmund Freud’s assessment
of the ego as the projection of a bodily surface. Freud calls our attention to
the unconscious dimension of embodiment and opens the path to a lim-
inal conception of the lived body, which I explore further in Chapter 6.20
On the basis of these insights, together with a relational understand-
ing of the subject based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism, I speculate on
the potential of focusing on sexual relationality.21 Bakhtin’s approach to
discursive interaction, based on the dispossessed character of what we
understand as our own discourse, complements Butler’s considerations of
vulnerability as a capacity for being affected by the other, and disposses-
sion. Putting Bakhtin in dialogue with Butler actually allows me to push
forward his notion of discursivity and otherness in a phenomenological
direction, while being attentive to historicity and antagonism. Drawing
on these developments, and in contrast to the liberal reason and the sub-
sequent craving for freedom, which, following Foucault, orchestrates the
understanding of sexuality as a Western device, I propose an alternative
to the notion of sexual autonomy propounded by the identity of the
self (based on self-transparency, and self-ownership), and toward a rela-
tional approach to desire and identification, where matter and significa-
tion (understood in a broad sense beyond representational discourse) are
co-constitutive, and the primacy of the other in the configuration of the
self becomes key.
Finally, the last chapter, ‘Being Sexual’ focuses on the possibility of
imagining sexual freedom otherwise. What other ways of thinking about
sexuality and agency are possible beyond the ‘citizen subject of sexual
rights’ form as well as the universalizing, and hence exclusionary logic,
that characterizes it? Following from the relational approach to the body
of sexuality developed in Chapter 5, in this last chapter I expand on my
relational approach to desire, and go deeper into the idea of liminality.
As a way into my final notes toward a notion of sexual freedom capable
of challenging the liberal ethos, I take as a point of departure the idea
that when considering sexual politics in opposition to the objectification
of culture and sexuality, it might be useful to think of sexuality along the
lines of Judith Butler’s work, where she argues against the ontology of the
sovereign subject.22 With the help of Butler and Jean Laplanche’s con-
sideration of the sexual,23 sexuality could also be understood as the locus
of our own social dependency, as a site that exposes us to our radically
1 Introduction 25
relational condition, an experience by which we are reminded of our fate

as dispossessed beings.
Further, this liminal character of desire not only points to the perme-
ability that characterizes the embodied subject in relation to others, but
also the chiasmic nature of the juncture between bodily matter and sig-
nification. Here, not only Jean Laplanche’s considerations about fantasy,
seduction, and the sexual become key, but also the ideas of Bakhtin in
relation to subjectivity and discourse, understood as a phenomenologi-
cal experience. Bakhtin’s considerations of discourse (that I develop in
Chapter 5) can be applied to the broader notion of signification, includ-
ing bodily acts.
Drawing on Bakhtin and Butler, I argue that in the chiasm between
matter and signification, as well as between the ontological void upon
which sexuality emerges and its representation, there is a fissure of repre-
sentation. This fissure of representation may appear as a necessary failure
in communication; however, this fissure or ‘failure’ of every sign (and
which reveals the necessary insufficient character of ‘reality’ vis-à-vis the
real in Lacanian terms) is what allows signification to remain open, either
in the form of displacement or iteration. Signification constitutively
involves a process of ‘failed’ translation. This is so, insofar as all discourse
is citational, that is, it has no virgin origin, and therefore it constitu-
tively implies a translation where the historicity of signs would impede
a literal translation of the message—always already over-determined, for
instance, by the history of antagonism.
This view of discursive interaction informs ideas of misrecognition as
well. As much as in discursive interaction, in the scene of interpellation,
misrecognition of the interlocutors and the message is a necessary feature
of the relationship between them. Signification and misrecognition are
constitutively bound together. Laplanche, as well, highlights the question
of failed translation in order to explain subjectivation, and in particular,
the role of the sexual in this process. For Laplanche it is precisely the
necessary failure of translation that constitutes both the subject and its
unconscious.24
Taking this approach to sexuality as a point of departure, I suggest that
we might arrive at what I propose as sexual relationality, which relies on
the capacity to be undone by fantasy and, more broadly, by the limits
of what one can know. Maybe such an understanding would help us to

develop notions of sexual freedom and justice that challenge the liberal
constructions of the individual and of the North-Western modern tradi-
tion that gave rise to it. Moreover, conceived in this way, sexual rela-
tionality matches a vision of radical democratic practices opposed to the
ontology of the individual and a neo-essentialist understanding of sexual
identities. Finally, it also addresses the question as to whether the liberal
paradigm for conceiving sexual freedom has become in certain instances
a perverse mechanism of management of populations.
Moving from the political toward the poetic, on the basis of these
considerations, I propose the figure of a sexual threshold to highlight the
liminal character of desire, and therefore, the ultimate impossibility of
giving a full account of it. Taking the case of migration as an example of
the myriad forms of dislocation we experience in daily life, not least of all
passion and the erotic features of embodiment, the other trope that helps
me figure the dislocated character of the erotic and embodiment is that of
diasporic sexuality. These figures, albeit rather speculative, are ultimately
intended to evoke some of the main preoccupations that prompted this
book, namely, the possibility of thinking about political sexual agency
beyond liberalism, to reflect upon different vocabularies of desire. These
vocabularies may question the centrality that sexual identity based on
object choice has acquired within established liberal scripts, and open
potential paths for imagining sexual freedom from a radical democratic
point of view.
In sum, the book is ultimately an invitation to try to find paths for
imagining sexual freedom in more democratic ways, and proposes that
one path to do so is by paying attention to the psychosocial formation
of sexuality. The reasons for this are twofold. My psychosocial approach
to the sexual is intended to understand the rigid way in which hege-
monic imaginaries attach desire to self-identity, specifically, their (psy-
choanalytic) resistance to both critique and to the destabilizing force of
desire in light of its unconscious formation. But also, this approach is
one that insists on those instances where desire and pleasure give us hints
of their partial and unruly nature, as well as their constitutive liminality.
Those diffuse boundaries of the body where the sexual and the subject are
always already spreading out toward what is other, and never identical to
1 Introduction 27
themselves, are ones that mark the interstitial space of the imaginary. In
this space we may find the threshold between matter and signification,
soma and fantasy, between the subject and its otherness, both within
and without. Within this imaginary threshold, desire and pleasure may
find a zone of freedom that lays open the possibility of displacing the
liberal category of the subject and envisaging a different future for sexual
democracy.
Notes
1. See Jennifer Germon, Gender: A Genealogy of an Idea (New York:
Palgrave, 2009).
2. The canonical historiography of Western sexuality lead us to the
work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, published
in 1886; Havelock Ellis’ seven volumes of Studies in the Psychology of
Sex, published between 1897 and 1928; and Sigmund Freud’s theory
of sexuality, which found as a landmark his seminal Three Essays on
the Theory of Sexuality, published in 1905 and subsequently revised
in further editions until 1925 (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
Michel Foucault’s first volume of his The History of Sexuality (New
York: Vintage Books, 1990) highlights how this new field of medical,
psychiatric, psychological, and later psychoanalytic studies on sexu-
ality reframes the relationship between sexuality and science in such
a way that sexuality acquires a new relationship to truth and, as a
social apparatus, compounds a new articulation between power and
knowledge. For a comprehensive study of the emergent forms of
knowledge and reasoning that form this genealogy, leading to the
development of the Western modern notion and experience of sexu-
ality, see Arnold Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical
Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2004).
3. See, for example, Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism,
Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press,
2004); David Eng, Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, eds.,
“What’s Queer about Queers Studies Now,” Special Issue of Social
Text 23 (3–4, 84–85) (2005); David Eng, The Feeling of Kinship:

Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010). In this regard, Joseph Massad’s book, Islam
in Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) offers a
strong critique of queer studies and politics for its commitment to an
Orientalist vision of Islam in great part sustained by a Western liberal
paradigm.
4. Lisa Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of
Neoliberalism,” in Materializing Democracy: Towards a Revitalized
Cultural Politics, eds. Russ Castronovo and Dana Nelson (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2002), 175–194.
5. Amber Hollibaugh is former director of Queers for Economic Justice
(queersforeconomicjustice.org), and made a series of public inter-
ventions in this regard.
6. See Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London:
Routledge, 1992); and Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power:
Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
7. Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins.
8. Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 48.
9. Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 50.
10. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(London: Rouledge, 1990); and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive
Limits of “Sex” (London: Rouledge, 1993).
11. Foucault’s take on genealogy can be traced in his reading of Nietzsche.
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language,
Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed.
Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 145–148. A clear summary
of his genealogical method in relation to his own research can be
found in Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvere Lotringer,
trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter (New York: Semiotext(e),
1997), 150–165.
12. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, 2007).
13. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:
Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).
1 Introduction 29
14. The conceptualization of the political as the ultimate ontological

basis of society is already proposed in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. The idea that the political is
the institutent moment of society, and that there is no ontological
foundation other than this undecidable moment was further devel-
oped by Laclau in a number of texts. See, for example, Ernesto
Laclau, “Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony,” in Deconstruction
and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996),
47–68. For a study of this dimension of Laclau’s political ontology,
see Oliver Marchart, “Politics and the Ontological Difference: On
the ‘Strictly Philosophical’ in Laclau’s Work,” in Laclau: A Critical
Reader, eds. Simon Critchley and Oliver Marchart (London:
Routledge, 2004), 54–72.
15. In a way, following the reading that Oliver Marchart offers on the
question of ontological difference in contemporary political thought,
what I am proposing here is to take the Heideggerian split between
the ontic and the ontological as recast by Claude Lefort, and then,
redeployed through Laclau’s theory of hegemony, to the domain of
sexuality. See Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought:
Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
16. Susan Moller Okin, et al., Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, eds.
Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha Nussbaum (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999).
17. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1.
18. For a feminist critical analysis of the notion of agency, with a focus
on neoliberal transnational dynamics, see Sumi Madhok, Anne
Phillips, and Kalpana Wilson, eds., Gender, Agency and Coercion
(London: Palgrave, 2013).
19. Anne Phillips, Multiculturalism without Culture (Princeton: Princeton
20. Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” SE Vol. XIX (1923–25), ed.
and trans. James Strachey (London: IPA/The Hogarth Press, 1990),
1–66.
21. See Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
22. As a matter of fact, one could arguably read the whole trajectory of
Butler’s work along the lines of a critique of the ontology of the sov-
ereign subject. Clear examples where she explicitly addresses her
commitment to this critical task can be found, for example, in Judith
Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2005), 9–25 and 101–110; or in Butler’s Introduction to
Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2012), 4–8, among many others. This
consideration is in line with Elena Loizidou’s reading of Butler’s
notion of gender performativity. As Loizidou remarks, this notion
could be used as a method for a critical analysis of the idea that the
subject is at the origins of its own agency. Elena Loizidou, Judith
Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics (New York: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007),
26–42. In a similar vein, Vikki Bell also points out the work of per-
formativity as a critical methodology for the analysis of the subject.
Vikki Bell, Culture and Performance: The Challenge of Ethics, Politics
and Feminist Theory (New York: Berg, 2007), 11–27.
23. See Jean Laplanche, The Temptation of Biology: Freud’s Theories of
Sexuality (New York: International Psychoanalytic Books, 2015).
24. See John Fletcher, “Seduction and the Vicissitudes of Translation:
The Work of Jean Laplanche,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 76(4)
(2007): 1253–1259.
2
Diversity and the Sexual Imaginary
The social transformations that have been taking place over the last two
decades have placed the struggles for recognition of different ways of
being at the forefront of the dynamics of so-called Western representative
democracies. The notion of ‘diversity’ has acquired a central role, and has
become a crucial marker defining the democratic character of politics
tout court.
On a global scale, these struggles for the recognition of difference
(whether sexual, gender, cultural, religious, or ethnic) are marked by rela-
tionships of growing inequality nurtured by the globalization of capi-
tal. This is one of the main features of the contemporary horizon, in
which the politics of recognition of Western Europe and North America
have provided forceful models of political action. With regard to gen-
der and sexual matters, following Western European–North American
hegemonic models, both international and regional organisms, as well as
non-governmental organizations, and supra-national, national, and local
authorities, have been actively intervening, either by providing new legal
frameworks and implementing concrete policies to give recognition to
sexual diversity or by including sexual matters in their public rhetoric.

The recognition of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans (LGBT) rights as

human rights by the United Nations in 2008, and the Yogyakarta prin-
ciples, a worldwide-recognized document that, in 2006, established a
general framework and specific guidelines for the application of Human
Rights Law in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity, are land-
marks in this regard.1 This widespread range of discourses regarding sexu-
ality has contributed to legitimizing the need to recognize diverse sexual
modes of being as valid ways of living; in other words, it has legitimized
the right to dissent from hegemonic sexual norms. Today, there is grow-
ing public acceptance of the need to recognize and legitimize other ways
of experiencing gender and sexuality, especially when those ideals are
articulated in the name of human rights, anti-discriminatory principles,
freedom, equality, and justice.
These recent transformations—executed in the name of equality,
human rights, freedom, and anti-discrimination—are indicative of ‘more
open’ views on sexuality, a movement toward a fairer, less exclusionary
society that seeks to undo its own biases, promoting a more relaxed atti-
tude toward different gendered modes of appearance and sexual practices,
thereby expanding the field of sexual autonomy. However, this social pro-
cess of legal reformation that has been advancing since the beginning of
this century not only reflects the increasing dominance of a more liberal
paradigm but also, and essentially, highlights a more fundamental and
complex set of social changes in relation to gender and sexuality, rais-
ing broader questions about gender and sexual norms. One of the most
important of these is the question of how the field of gendered and sexual
relations is interpreted and shaped in terms of sexual identities and the
differences among them.
Both the United Nations declaration mentioned earlier and the
Yogyakarta principles, for instance, are aimed at the protection and enjoy-
ment of full human rights of all people on the basis of their universality,
regardless of individuals’ sexual orientation or gender identity.2 The notions
of sexual orientation and gender identity, as defined by these documents,
however, rely on a series of universalizing presumptions about sexual life
that might be arguably contestable. They tend to structure the sexual
field in terms of identities in such a way that it reifies the heterosexual-
ity/homosexuality divide as the organizing principle of sexual diversity,
as if this principle were transcendental. Notwithstanding the fact that

the field of sexual diversity could also be organized in terms of practices,
these directives privilege identity politics as the main, if not the exclusive,
path to claim access to full humanity. Further, as the campaign ‘Free
and Equal,’ launched by the United Nations in 2013, shows, the United
Nations’ main approach to sexual diversity seems to be based on the taken
for granted assumption that Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender are
universal (and even trans-historical) categories.3 Along the same lines, in
the European context inclusiveness based on identitarian features led to
the enforcement of the European Commission laws and directives aimed
at countering discrimination ‘based on sex, racial or ethnic origin, reli-
gion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation,’4 a common ideal that
associates democracy with tolerance while maintaining the unquestioned
universality of the idea of what is tolerable.
Does the acceptance of a diverse society implied by liberalization
trends and established by public policies mean that certain norms of sex-
uality and gender have ceased to regulate the ways in which we under-
stand our relationship with our bodies, sexual pleasures, and desires?
How is sexuality imagined and produced in a gender-aware society?
How should the normative of gender be reformulated with the aim of
including diversity? How is sexual normativity reformulated in order to
include and tolerate diverse forms of sexual life? In confluence with other
strategies of power, the forms of regulating sexuality and gender have
certainly changed; therefore we should continue to elucidate how this
regulation is currently working. What are the roles that governmental
systems are assuming in the definition of our ideals as they continue to
discriminate between practices and identifications that are more and less
legitimate: between respectable and less respectable lesbians, between
acceptable and unacceptable sexual dissidents, between good gays and
bad queers? Which are ultimately the regulatory practices that have been
made possible by these newer and more liberal formulations of tolerance
and diversity? All of these questions about the regulation of gender and
sexuality in contemporary life also point to the need to ask about the
ways in which we understand certain basic political categories, such as
the subject of rights that is preconceived in our demands, or how it is
that we understand recognition or representation. In other words, these
questions mark the need to continue theorizing contemporary modes of

political subjectivation.
To approach this question, in what follows I focus my examination on
the regulative dimension of sexual democratization insofar as it follows
the path of liberalism, and I examine the ways in which diversity and
identity control our idea of politics. My contention is that some of the
regulative operations of current sexual democratic politics are related to an
exclusionary logic currently sustained by a pervasive liberal understand-
ing of the individual and subsequent accounts of identity. Specifically,
the liberal understanding of freedom, reduced to versions of autonomy
and individual rights that enhance regulatory power and expand zones of
subordination and effacement, and of diversity, understood in pluralist
terms as a compound of self-enclosed identities. The claim might sound
outmoded. However, my view is that despite the deconstructivist critique
of identity (which is now part of common sense) and the massive criti-
cism that liberal conceptions of diversity have received, subjecthood and
identity remain profoundly linked to phantasmatically fixed, recogniz-
able, stable, and unequivocal positions, and in these terms, sexuality and
cultural identities continue to be essential to the drawing of the politi-
cal map. Consequently, we can see how, despite the inauguration of a
supposedly post-identitarian era, subject configurations (and therefore
‘diversity’) are constantly rearticulated in new ontological forms. So, my
question is, how can we understand the pervasiveness of these liberal fig-
ures? How can we explain the profound attachment we seem to profess
for them? Why has critique been so innocuous in the field of politics?
Bearing in mind the productive dimension of power, which empowers
the subject before repressing it, in a very Foucauldian manner, we need
to remember that gender and sexual regulation might be understood as
a productive field. Governed through the paradigm of liberalism, sexual
regulation is exercised through the promotion of desire as the locus of
our true identity, and the ideal of personal liberty.5 This means that our
attachment to these forms of regulation is basically due to the fact that
both our desires and our selves have been formed through them. And yet,
this attachment is also constantly challenged both in the realm of fantasy
and by those desires that cannot easily follow prescribed grids or scripts.
This is the tension I aim to address. To do so, however, I need to go step
by step. While I will be focusing on the question of personal liberty in

relation to autonomy later in the book, in this chapter my focus is on the
identitarian formation of sexuality in light of the paradigm of the liberal
individual, and the organization of sexual heterogeneity as diversity that
follows from it.
My point of departure will be a number of specific trends within cur-
rent sexual politics, namely, the fixation of gender and sexual identities in
the form of an expansive production of identity variants, and the perva-
siveness of monogamy as a normative horizon for conceiving sexuality. To
develop this discussion, I follow Judith Butler’s views on performativity
and the theory of subject formation. In the first section, I address the
controversies that attend to the different ways of understanding gender-
identification and unfixed sexualities, and I expose the link between the
liberal perspective of identity and the heterosexual matrix. I argue that
this matrix reworks the ontology of bodies, and this is one of the reasons
why there continues to be such powerful investment in it. In this context,
I examine the extent to which the iteration of norms within the scope
of discourses on sexual diversity reinforces heterocentricity or subverts
it. The second section focuses on the persistence of mononormativity as
the legitimate form for sexual public appearance in order to show how
the performativity of normative power works, admitting certain changes
while foreclosing the scope of what is intelligible, questionable, or politi-
cized in current sexual politics. I then draw certain conclusions, exposing
the limits that the liberal perspective on the individual imply for progres-
sive sexual ideals and for thinking critically about the ontological effects
that normalize difference. Finally, I suggest that we need to rethink indi-
vidual sovereign autonomy as the grounds for making political demands.
Trans Variants, Monosexuality,

and Heterocentric Views
Let us now consider trans politics.6 The boundaries between the differ-
ent signifiers that define the variants of gender identification and sexu-
ality are omnipresent and continue to institutionalize these variants by
means of legal and medical frameworks. For instance, we have circular
normative standards for accessing gender-reassignment treatments and,

in some contexts, even surgery is a requirement for gender change to be
legally recognized. For the right to access sex-reassignment treatments
to be legally recognized, a number of restrictive normative signs that are
assumed to be clearly indicative of cross-gender identification have to be
manifest. Even if medical intervention is not a requirement, as is the case
in Spain or the UK, and someone makes an application to change their
name in identification documents, they still need to manifest all the signs
of ‘gender dysphoria’ required in order to be given a psychiatric certifica-
tion before they can proceed. In the legal realm, even if the recognition
of non-normative gender identification does not require a psychiatric
screening, as in the case of Argentina, Malta, or Denmark,7 the options
still tend to grant privileged recognition to the canonical two options:
man or woman. In fact, as Mauro Cabral has highlighted, the Argentine
law does not establish that the person’s gender identity has to be stated
in the documents, focusing instead on the liberty to changing one’s own
name. However, I would argue, this does not impede the requirement of
identifying the gender of the person required in related documents such
as birth certificates (which only have two gender options). Further, the
name might be taken as a proxy for this binary organization of gender.
The law, therefore, in spite of its force to decentering the norms of the
gender binary, is clearly not enough to debunk the legitimacy of the orga-
nizative centrality, if not exclusiveness of a pervasive binary view.
Marlene Wayar, the director of El Teje, the first Latin American travesti
newspaper, and coordinator of the activist collective Futuro Transgenérico,
states this limited character of what gender identity laws can and cannot
transform. In May 2012, two days after the Gender Identity Law was
passed in Argentina, she stated:
The Law now exists, congratulations to those who have been working hard-
est to get it passed, congratulations to all of us who have voiced our support
to achieve it, and many thanks to those who have stood by us in solidarity.
Now, let us focus on its specific impact. This is a law for those who want to
sustain the normality of man-woman; for those of us who have higher
goals, the law leaves us where we were, or rather, it blackmails us by asking
us to normalize ourselves within just these two categories (…) So much so
that now travestis can visibly relate (politically and bodily) to the State
without major problems. Transexuals will be able to do so, relating
themselves (politically and bodily) with the State from the invisibility of
man-woman without any difficulty or with legal tools in place for denounc-
ing any irregularity. What is the problem with legitimizing the categories
M and W? That there is an identity that eventually remains cancelled, trav-
esti or trans does not exist.8
In fact, as stated earlier, the law does not limit gender possibilities.9
Arguably, Wayar might be colliding here the capacity of transforma-
tion of the law vis-à-vis the heteronormative governmental institutions
with which the law has to negotiate, with the limits allegedly set by the
law itself. Notwithstanding this differentiation, I still agree with Wayar’s
assessment of the two aspects of the law. On the one hand, the possibil-
ity of de-linking the ‘sex’ assigned at birth from the gender position with
which one identifies is a salient achievement. On the other hand, the
potential normalizing effects of the law when considered in relation to its
institutional context, which prevents the law from being able to radically
question the gender binary, may reinforce the fact that only some forms
of non-normative gender identification merit recognition, while others
remain forgotten, if not further erased.10
The legal recognition of sexual diversity tends to facilitate only some
gender styles and ways of being, and this implies that in accordance with
these specific variants, only some articulations of demands become pos-
sible. Partly, this is due to the weight that identity categories have in the
legal field. Such weight is associated with the fact that rights tend to be
organized around groups of persons identifiable by a common character-
istic, namely, their recipients. Thus normally, the articulation of demands
that would turn us into ‘sexual subjects of rights’ have to adjust to ideals
of sexual diversity based on the classification of a limited spectrum of
discrete and normalized identities.
The requirement to assume a univocal position within the gender
spectrum and the precise location of this position in fact poses far more
complicated issues in relation to gender identification. There have been
numerous arguments about the difficulty of using the notion of trans-
gender as an umbrella concept, and parallel problems have emerged
later with reference to the category trans*.11 Since the early 1990s,
there has been continued controversy surrounding gender identity.
Prominent at that moment were questions revolving around the tension
between transgender and transsexual, as Jacob Hale makes clear: should
transexuality be included under the transgender category?12 Does the
frontier posed by transexuality relate to being regarded as a man or a
woman instead of being regarded as another gender variant?13 Does this
frontier have to do with the desire to adapt bodies to the gender with
which each of us identifies?14
Questions have proven to be even more difficult, as the ‘sex’ of the
body became an object of inquiry too. Contemporary debates within
trans studies that are relevant for this discussion include, among others,
a critical reconsideration of the relationship between matter and signifi-
cation in the light of current revisions of the notions of sex and gender.
On the one hand, these revisions revisit a long-standing critique made
to constructionist approaches to gender for leaving the question of sex
unproblematized. On the other hand, they also question forms of dual-
ist thinking more broadly, which, for instance, as Riki Lane remarks,
oppose biology as the site of rigidity (attached to the sex binary) to cul-
ture as the site of change and multiplicity.15 It is in connection with these
debates that, for instance, the use of the prefix ‘cis’ to signal the align-
ment between the gender assigned at birth and the gender with which
one identifies has recently gained particular prominence. How are we to
address the distinction between trans and cis-gender positions? Marking
the difference is absolutely integral to highlighting the privilege that nat-
uralized forms of gender identification have received. And yet, the prefix
‘cis’ is clearly not enough, nor is it exempt from controversial assump-
tions, to de-center normative gender alignment.16
For instance, drawing on Mauro Cabral’s insight into the need to
think in terms of bodily diversity—an important notion for the Intersex
movement—what is missed in relation to debates over the question of
gender assignment and identification is this multiplicity. Bodily diver-
sity is a question that cannot be subsumed into the question of gender
identification.17 In reference to the Intersex movement, Cabral asserts:
‘We have challenged the reduction of Intersex issues to gender identity
issues. We have confronted the sexed limits of “human” every time we
have demanded the fulfilment of our human rights, and we have defied
the imaginary right to “human,” binary appearance.’18
In light of our further discussion on the re-articulations of sexual dif-
ference, what seems important to highlight is that along with the gov-
ernmentalization of gender variants, the concern about ‘authenticity’
seems to reappear and is once again at stake.19 This authenticity might be
located in the material body, or in the psyche, forefronting the dimension
of identification as a totalizing effect. Either way, an identifiable location
in gender seems to be required. How can this institutionalized form of
recognition address other positions within the spectrum that are not nec-
essarily univocal, or unified, or those who are not willing to occupy only
one of the available categories? Where should we locate gender-queers?
The ideals of the politics of sexual diversity and its legal materialization
in the field of gender are in fact attached to definitions that re-establish
implicit and insufficiently questioned distinctions between sex as the site
for a material ontological body and gender as the site for an immate-
rial, either psychic or sociocultural positioning, reactivating the sex/gen-
der system sustained by a heteronormative way of understanding bodily
lives.20 These tensions not only appear at the level of public policies. It
is interesting to mention here that one of the discussions taking place
now among some feminists revolves around the question of if and how
to reconsider their own approaches in the light of trans-feminist insights.
Further, a number of transphobic arguments are usually leveled when
the issue at stake is whether or not trans interventions should form part
of a common feminist vision on gender and equality. These are impor-
tant and large-scale questions, but ones that normally materialize in the
most mundane ways, for example, when the issue at stake is whether or
not trans identified persons should be accepted in feminist organizations,
raising the question again: what entitles one to become a woman?21
Despite the fact that these definitions constantly tend toward a multi-
plication of gender variants, their discrete character ultimately reinscribes
implicit and, again, insufficiently questioned feminine/masculine poles
onto these definitions. And even more so when these poles remain the
two exclusive points of reference that organize the gender map, still sus-
tained in either the supposed materiality of a sex located in a biological
body, or the normative and fixed vision of a psychic gender identification
that could only be resolved in either one of two neat binary options. Seen
in this light, the heterocentric matrix thus seems to find ways to re-enact
its hegemony for the understanding of both gender and sex. This re-
enactment occurs at the very core of a set of positionalities that are in fact
contesting the heterosexual matrix.22 The ontological effect by which the
body is conceived as a surface of social inscription rather than as already
inscribed with power through materiality continues to be at stake in these
debates, and the battle over its limits remains centrally operative.23
A parallel trend could be recognized in relation to sexuality, as the
movement toward the production of ontological effects concerning desire
happens in related ways. How, for instance, does the performative capac-
ity for identifying these positions and differences relate to what we can
say about boundaries and desire? It also seems that discourses of desire
still depend on the double binary logic of gender (feminine/masculine;
gender/sex). Otherwise, how, for example, does the phrase ‘same sex’
define the object of desire? Yet, if we accept the difficulty of establish-
ing these identitarian boundaries, if we take as a standpoint the queer
reformulation of the notion of gender for making visible this difficulty,24
if we agree to the fact that femininity and masculinity are not supposed
to be located unequivocally and in a unitary form in any specific kind
of body—as queer theory suggests—25, and if we understand that there
is no need for gender identification and/or gender practices to be stable
or totalizing of any subject at all, why is it then that we can still reduce
sexual desire to such fixed terms?
Even if we put aside such questions, another cultural signifier that
calls attention to the ontological weight granted to both body and self
through the reinstitution of the sex/gender system and its consequential
binaries is bisexuality and the conflicting ways through which it has come
to be understood. It is not my intention to dismiss bisexuality either as a
wishful discourse or as a postmodern position that presupposes the sub-
ject of desire as a consumerist citizen who wants to have ‘many options’
available to consume.26 I will not deny it as a self-sufficient, adult, and
‘permanent’ sexual position. I will neither follow the tradition of some
discriminatory discourses, nor situate the bisexual self as the iconic sub-
ject of an enlightened vanguard community freed of the fixation of more
discrete sexualities.27 Finally, I will not argue for contemporary versions
of a presumptive primary bisexuality.28 We cannot forget the historicity

of primary bisexuality that frames Sigmund Freud’s thesis in Three Essays
on the Theory of Sexuality.29 Primary bisexuality as it is theorized through
the figure of the perverse polymorphous infant opens up Freud’s promis-
ing critique of heterosexuality as a natural given and the split between
normality and pathology. However, there is a tension in his theory,
clearly expressed in his legacy. Although Freud understands pre-Oedipal
bisexuality as a primary characteristic of the human, this feature func-
tions in his theory as a key hypothesis for explaining the etiology of neu-
roses, and, from a developmental point of view, adult bisexuality might
be understood as a failed resolution of the Oedipal crisis.30 Bisexuality is
key to Freud’s conceptualization of the twofold character of the Oedipus
complex, which involves a positive and a negative (inverted) form, and
establishes that the infant both identifies with and keeps as object choice
both parents. However, its resolution is expected to be unidirectional,
leading to the final identification with only one parent, while keeping as
object choice the other (taken for granted that the parents occupy oppo-
site gender positions).31 This unsettling historicity of primary bisexual-
ity—first conceived as a disease, then as a perversion, or a personality
disorder—is implied in both current celebratory and derogatory views.
Instead of trying to redefine bisexuality or assess its different defini-
tions, for the purpose of my argument I will limit myself to stress that
there are some polemical ideas that continue to circulate within popular
culture, which tend to fix desire. By doing so, such ideas shroud bisexual-
ity in suspicion. As Clare Hemmings suggests, there are normative episte-
mological reasons to explain ‘why bisexuality is rarely conceived of as an
adult sexuality.’32 In dialogue with Freud’s inheritance, Hemmings states
that one of the problems is that ‘the sex or gender of object choice can-
not signify bisexuality, where for heterosexuals, gay men, and lesbians it
can, in representational and structural terms at least.’ Further, Hemmings
points out that ‘where masculinity and femininity must remain sexual
complements irrespective of heterosexual or homosexual object choice,
bisexuals’ inconsistent gender of object choice presents further structural
difficulties’ for the process of becoming gendered. This is so, she argues,
because ‘failure to repudiate one or other gendered object is thus consti-
tuted as a failure of identity, and transformed into variations on other
identities (failed homosexuality or heterosexuality), or a temporary state

in the process of proper identity formation (becoming homosexual or
heterosexual).’33
Surfing bisexual networks such as the UK National Bisexual Conference
(BiCon), the US National Bisexual Network (BiNet), the Bisexual
Resource Center (BCR), or even the American Institute of Bisexuality,
one can easily see that one of the crucial challenges for all these different
organizations is to combat biphobia, without falling into the ontological
trap of redefining what, supposedly, bisexuality is in a reactive response to
widespread stereotypes. Biphobic discourses persist in holding on to the
idea that bisexuality does not really exist, or can be cast either as a tran-
sitional phase or as the consequence of a refusal to admit one’s own ‘true’
desires. It is therefore considered either as a consequence of committing
to a privileged position and/or to a tendency of internalized homo/lesbo-
phobia. Such is also the conception of bisexuals as ‘partially heterosexu-
als,’ ‘partially homosexuals’ (therefore, frequently seen as neither ‘enough
hetero’ nor ‘enough gay’ or ‘enough lesbian’), or as potential traitors to
gay or lesbian communities for their desire not to be permanently or
univocally oriented to a ‘same sex’ object. Indeed, bisexuals can be seen
as people incapable of sustaining monogamous relations as a result of
their desire, whether conceived as impermanent or as multiple. Let me
add that I am not defending monogamy and would not contribute to the
critique of ‘promiscuity’; on the contrary, my intention is to point out
that the idea of bisexuals as incapable of monogamy or even as neces-
sarily promiscuous, and therefore even ‘high-risk’ lovers, works within
a conservative view of sexual freedom. This fixation points to an ideal
of sexual purity to which any sexual non-normative or dissident vision
would surely be opposed.
What does this originally normative term, ‘bisexuality,’ and its different
uses and resignifications open up and foreclose within contemporary dis-
courses of desire and identity? It is worth remembering that when under-
stood as merely a combination of hetero/homo, bisexuality still sustains
an opposition that has been largely contested within queer parameters.
The same holds true for the fear that the ‘impermanence’ of veering off
from a single and enduring form of desire seems to prompt. I do not want
to evoke the naïve idea of a totally fluid circuit for desire free from any
kind of constraints, a desire made outside or beyond social norms. And

yet, it is also true that sexual practices (and desires) are always exceeding
the logic of identity, as becomes clear once we take into account that
sexuality emerges and lives in the field of fantasy formations.
Indeed, one of the main contributions of Jean Laplanche’s reconsidera-
tion of Freud’s seduction theory would be to highlight the fundamental
role of fantasy in the formation of the unconscious and the subject. In so
doing, Laplanche also underscored the prime role of fantasy as a media-
tor of reality—in the traumatic origin of unconscious sexuality it is not
the event of the encounter with the adult world that is traumatic. Rather,
what makes it traumatic is its deferred remembrance, already traversed
by fantasy.34 In Lacan, fantasy is said to function as the support of real-
ity, and it is connected as well to the traumatic encounter with the social
world. In this case, however, such encounter refers to the symbolic Other,
and it is in view of the lack in the Other that fantasy emerges to conceal
this lack. However, given that this lack signals an abyssal gap in relation
to the ‘real thing’ (Das Ding), it also constitutes and prompts desire.35
These are indeed brief comments, but my point here is just to highlight
the partial character of the objects of desire, which are always already
substitutes for something else. In other words, at the level of unconscious
fantasy, identifications and object choices all might work in unpredict-
able, ‘contradictory,’ and most of all, unknown and neither unified nor
coherent ways.
As we know, it is not so much the case that the hetero-homo divide
works solely on the exclusion of each other in oppositional terms. Rather,
heterosexuality may include an array of homosexual elements in such a
way that these could be negotiated within heterosexual terms, and the
same could be said about homosexuality and its negotiation of heterosex-
ual features. Granted that more often than not, these negotiations work
in such a way that they can form part of each one’s position to the extent
that they are also repudiated or disavowed. But this does not undo the
fact that there is no neat boundary between each other’s field. How can
we address those whose sexual fantasies, practices, pleasures, and desires
are not defined by the gender and/or sexual identity of the object choice?
Why is it that within certain circles, the popularity of trans, as sig-
nifying the impossibility of the binary gender normative to work in a
totalizing way, is regarded as positively subversive—and yet, when this

challenge takes place on the level of desire, it becomes still so difficult
to welcome? Why is it that desire is still asked to be so permanent and
coherent? I do find it curious that while gender appears to be more rec-
ognizably incoherent, the fixity of desire remains implicitly prescribed
as a significant defining feature for individuals to sustain. What is the
threatening spectral fantasy that is mobilized by the demand made upon
desire to be stable, recognizable, and totalized to the point that it seems
so much easier to address such issues at the level of non-conforming gen-
der identification than at the level of desire? Is it because while gender
necessarily implies a public perception the performance of desire and
sexual practices continue to be relegated to the more private, even inti-
mate domains? Certainly, this division is impossible to uphold; we largely
know that sexuality as a public and political issue has been at the center
of the development of gay and lesbian communities, and the seclusion of
the sexual within the private has been one of the main conservative argu-
ments that the gay and lesbian movement has struggled against.36
As long as gender variability disrupts the gender binary, sexual vari-
ability across the hetero/homo/bi configuration needs to be seriously dis-
cussed in the same way, and as disruptive in its own way. Obviously, the
changing politics of gender and the new possibilities for gender negotia-
tions do not only affect specific subcultures in an endogamous fashion.
In fact, they modify the whole diagram of available positions of identi-
fication and desire as well as the links among them.37 These new poli-
tics, subcultures, and positions alter the whole system of sexualities and
gender definitions. Emerging from the social condition in which gender
normativity has been renegotiated to produce a different cartography for
the course of both desire and identification, to define oneself as a het-
erosexual can no longer mean the same as it did before, as if this new
cartography only consisted of adding a new self-sufficient identity. The
same can be said of current efforts to define oneself as lesbian or gay, and
of those who identify themselves as bisexuals. From a relational approach
to the logic of categorization, the shifts regarding which categories come
to be available for identification and the mobilization of desire trans-
form the whole system of differences, as each category is defined through
its relations with the others. And yet, by making this remark I am not
suggesting that sexuality follows from gender (an assumption that still
seems to be at work sometimes, so that if one gets the gender ‘right,’ the
‘right’ sexuality may follow). I am just trying to highlight the unpredict-
ability of the nexus between gender and desire (which does not mean that
it is ‘radically free’).
If masculinity and femininity can be located, combined, and per-
formed in many different ways, taking place across many different kinds
of bodies, how can we address how this situation affects the organization
of identification and desire? How are masculinity and femininity chang-
ing as a result of these negotiations? Is it not the case that this weight of
heteronormativity that bodies are required to support is sustained in that
vague but still operative notion of authenticity, which invokes an idea
of the materiality of bodies configured outside all social norms? All of
these open questions lead us to consider that it is simply not the case that
the operations of power within which the heterosexual matrix is repro-
duced only work outside queer subjects and worlds, or that this matrix
functions outside these identity formations. On the contrary, it seems
that heterocentric ways of understanding gender and sexuality draw their
strength from the subtle ways the matrix of intelligibility framed by a
heterocentric imaginary can and does normalize queer positions in new
terms. Of course, one could take the opposite view and suggest that these
practices also challenge heterocentric values.
But my point here is that confronting the post-essentialist notion of
identity, the operations of power that allow for the pervasiveness of the
heterosexual matrix within the context of Western (so-called advanced)
liberal democracies tend to be less concerned with the strict disavowal
of other positionalities than with the task of defining the boundaries by
which identity and diversity could be considered. In this way, they come
to play a key role in their capacity to frame the identity-centered socio-
political map. What is significant for me at this point is that both gender
and sexual coherence (i.e., the understanding of gender and sexual modes
of relationality as coherent identities regardless of whether or not they are
heterosexual) are bound up with a liberal conception of the individual,
which, in turn, is indebted to a heterocentric gaze.
It is therefore important to make a distinction between the exclusions
operated by the heterosexual matrix and the heterocentrism that rules
in so-called inclusive reflexive societies. In effect, within the field of the

struggles over recognition, the heterocentric conceptions of embodied
life are not merely and primarily reinforced against non-normative gen-
der and sexual positionings, in this case through phobic discourses that
naturalize the gender binary and heterosexuality (although this is also
true), but in complicity with them. The centrality of the heteronorm
within progressive frames is made possible by the inclusive normalization
of queer positionings as a set of discrete and discernable identities still
sustained in the sex/gender divide (which repeatedly reinstalls the oppo-
sition between material body and imaginary gender). This remains true,
as do many other presuppositions that, for instance, relate to certain yet
unquestioned links between gender and sexuality.
Confronting these negotiations, however, it is commonly held that
there is no boundary, and therefore no identity, outside the power/author-
ity or force of naming. Moreover, as Judith Butler has suggested, this
does not occur just once but can be seen in the incessant reiteration of
norms governing ‘nameability’ (or interpellation) as gendered subjects.38
Of course, this idea does not lead to the call for the magic of signification
to produce another reality. Instead, it reminds us that there can be no
transcendental or universal ontological basis for establishing any bound-
ary of this kind.39 At the same time, it implies that this performative force
of naming entails those operations of power that socially materialize the
boundary in question. The boundary is in fact a matter of practices of
boundarying—and we should not forget that these boundaries are tra-
versed by investments at the level of the imaginary, and therefore beyond
sovereign control.
On Performative Revisions and Embodied,

Psychic Investments
The new constellations of power have reformulated notions of identity,
but this has not overcome the weight that the liberal conception of the
individual continues to bear upon the idea of subjective formations. In
fact, the acceptance of the constructed character of identity tends to reify
the category of the subject with a new sign rather than destructuring or
decentering it. The liberal reification of the individual (that is occurring

in confluence with the shape in which pluralism conceives of identity
multiplicity) makes extensive use of the ideas that come from so-called
constructivism. The reading that is often made of this process welcomes
the relativity of assumed positions or identities, which in spite of being
conceived as plural, relative, and even unstable continue to be fixed as
the transparent effect of the construction of an identity that could be
captured by this subject in a way that is finished and complete.40
Though supposedly dead, the liberal subject seems to be enjoying a
rich afterlife in which it continues to reappear and return in various ways.
An example of this is when the historically configured character of identi-
ties is accepted and these identities or subject formations (now histori-
cized and constructed, and therefore relative and subject to the cultural
drift) are once again dealt with as a second nature that observes all the
characteristics of reified, given facts. Another is when popular culture
appeals to the autonomy of a subject for which self-production would be
its ultimate truth. The (neo) liberal subject, conceived as a personal enter-
prise, would no longer be dealing with the discovery of its ‘truthful self,’
as in the modernity of Foucault from The History of Sexuality.41 Rather, it
will construct a truth for itself departing from its supposed transparency
and interpreting itself, again, as the absolute owner of its desires. This
tendency is one of the defining traits of so-called reflexive societies and
leads market and consumerist dynamics.
In the political sphere, the representation of difference has been swing-
ing between rejection and toleration; either way it has been guided by an
obsessive dismissal of anything that might disturb the fantasized harmony
of classifications. This is seen not only in the case of neoconservative cru-
sades committed to the rejection of difference, understood as antagonis-
tic and threatening, but is also the case of a progressivism that is content
with a timid consecration of diversity and satisfies itself in the discourse
of toleration. The discourse of diversity gives ontological forms to the dis-
similar configurations of identity from the very moment in which they
are conceived as a spectrum of discrete and clearly classifiable identities
to be placed in a model of representation that does not question itself as
such. This discourse considers multiple identities as already conformed
and constituted from outside, or independently of their own political
articulation. Thus, these perspectives essentialize political positions and

subjects that, in accordance with a radical vision of democracy, in fact
shape themselves in the same struggles for representation.42
Confronted with this panorama, what is the contribution of the per-
formative theory of subject formations developed by Judith Butler? The
crucial impact that the performative turn had upon the conceptualization
of gender is fundamentally due to its allowing us to understand gender as
a normative system that configures every position of the subject, empha-
sizing the fact that the binary division of gender is not substantial. Butler
pointed out that, although it has been normativized, the space for an
open meaning for gender can be, and is, constantly resignified and dis-
placed. The fundamental contribution of her theory is the idea that the
gendered identity of the subject is nothing more than a multiplicity of
performative rituals. This is the aspect of the Butlerian theory of gender
performativity that has been most highlighted. Nevertheless, the other
question that I consider to be of particular interest is the way in which
Butler reinstates the notion of subject, distancing herself from so-called
constructivist views, attempting not to fall into the essentialist naturalism
of the ‘sexes’ or the cultural constructivism of ‘gender’ as a sociological
category. Furthermore, one of the main objectives of Butler’s early work
was to build an anti-substantialist critique of the subject as gendered,
severely questioning the Lacanian notion of sexual difference. The means
by which Butler finds a way out of these three perspectives is by taking
into consideration the exclusions that are implied by all imaginary rep-
resentation (understood as structuring both reality and the subject) and
consequently the impossibility of a complete or totalizing representation
of identity. These exclusions occur on a psychic level, and although they
do not respond to a Lacanian symbolic necessity, they do respond to
traumatic fundamental repressions that are constitutive of the social for-
mation of the subject.
Butler’s critical use of psychoanalysis to inquire into the processes
of subjectivation provides us with a useful theoretical-methodological
framework for questioning constructivist visions that support liberal
(and neoliberal) versions of the subject. Butler’s conceptualization of the
constitutively embodied dimension of the subject leads to the conclusion
that the subject cannot be considered apart from the name that genders
us. It is through the continuous experience of ‘being named’ that the

human body is given status and, so, becomes a battlefield in which the
contradictions of gender materialize.
The intrinsic instability of gender, which becomes evident in the pre-
cise moment in which we recognize that gender norms need to stamp
their seal on the body incessantly, gives us keys to the necessarily open
status of the embodied subject. But this is not only because we become
embodied subjects through a socialized ritual practice that is by defini-
tion open to successive negotiations. The aperture, the opening of this
embodied subject, emerges also because when we are interpellated, the
authority of gender produces an exclusion that cannot be accessed by
representation. In Butler’s words:
Psychoanalysis insists that the opacity of the unconscious sets limits to the
exteriorization of the psyche. It also argues—rightly, I think—that what is
exteriorized or performed can only be understood by reference to what is
barred from performance, what cannot or will not be performed.43
The effects of the ritual of gender cannot be totally transparent, and this
exclusion opens a space of indetermination within the subject. In the
fissure of representation—that is also a fissure of the social meaning of
gender—the dreamy totality of the self is revealed as a fantasy. However,
this fantasy of totality is a necessary one, and this is not a minor detail.
It is important to remember here that it is Freud himself who estab-
lishes that it is precisely the normativization of sexuality that is the cor-
nerstone upon which the foundations of what we conceive of as humanity
lie. That being the case, as is well known in the framework of feminism
and queer theory, one of the problematic aspects of this conception is the
normative role that Freud has the Oedipal process play. On the one hand,
even the most controversial later writings of Freud such as ‘Femininity’
and ‘Female Sexuality’ allow for a reading that may insist on the unnatu-
ralness of heterosexuality and the fact that both gender and sexual iden-
tities are an attainment rather than a given—these texts, after all, are
intended to give an account of how one becomes a woman.44 Put in our
contemporary lexicon, this suggests that against the scientific paradigm
of his time, for Freud gender identity and normative heterosexuality
are phenomena that should be explained rather than being self-evident.

On the other hand, it has also been widely emphasized that the trajec-
tory of Freud’s theory tended toward a developmental and biologized
understanding of sexuality, which became highly normative. After all, it
is the girl who is supposed to become a woman, never the boy, and vice
versa; the ‘anatomical differences between the sexes’ are not only based
on the differentiated trajectories of one and the other, but also explain
the necessity of heterosexuality and differentiated gender roles.45 Finally,
within the long-standing psychoanalytic critique of the normative path
followed by psychoanalysis, some vindicate the earlier pre-Oedipal theo-
ries of Freud—prominently sustained in the Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality and a reconsideration of the significance of his theory of seduc-
tion. This is the case of the general theory of seduction of Jean Laplanche,
which I will address in Chapter 6, but also the interpretation offered by
Philipe Van Heute.46 I will come back to Laplanche later, but for the
moment let us go back to the canonical reading of the Freudian Oedipus,
and the de-biologization of psychoanalysis operated by Jacques Lacan.
Schematically, the classic Lacanian account of the Oedipal process is
structured by the dialectic between having the phallus (and not being it)
and being the phallus (and not having it). From this orthodox point of
view, if the process is resolved correctly, becoming a man will mean to
identify with the father and desire to have the phallus like him; man’s
anxiety about castration will thus become the fear of losing the phallus.
Becoming a woman, on the other hand, will mean to identify with the
mother and assume that she does not and will not ever be able to have
the phallus; her anxiety will be that of accepting, as a woman, her effec-
tive castration. It is with this confirmation, it is assumed, that she will
then displace her search for the phallus to her father and then to other
men. In this respect, it is important to remember that from the perspec-
tive of Lacanian structuralism, the fact of becoming a ‘boy’ or a ‘girl’ is a
function that strictly depends upon a symbolic identification, meaning
there is no ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ prior to the identification with the masculine
and feminine positions: this sexuation is produced at the level of signi-
fiers and any anatomy could occupy any position. This displacement is
important because it marks the strictly fantastic and arbitrary character of
differential identification within the field of gender. The problem is that
although the displacement is significant, insofar as it opens up a radical

critique of the idea of ‘natural sexes’—in the Lacanian scheme sexuation
is not natural, but rather involves arbitrary processes of identification,
marking the fictional character of identity as well—it also reinforces the
heterosexual matrix. This is so to the extent that the operative presup-
positions of this scheme are that: (a) there are only two possibilities of
identification, supposedly opposite and complementary, of being or of
having the phallus, and (b) this identification continues shaping itself in
a heterosexualized opposition to desire in such a way that the identifica-
tion with the masculine position implies the desire of having the phal-
lus represented by the feminine position, and the identification with the
feminine position would suppose the desire to be the phallus for whoever
occupies the masculine position.47
As it is well known, from this psychoanalytic perspective, the Oedipal
process is the representative of the symbolic Law, and therefore the cen-
tral axis around which the subject configures itself. Becoming a subject is
a process signaled by the entrance of the subject into the law, co-extensive
with the fall in the order of language and the acquisition of a symbolic
sex. Key to the Lacanian scheme is that by entering the symbolic realm,
the body of the subject is transfigured. Granted that this symbolic trans-
figuration of the body not only entails the structuring of the unconscious,
but also the controversial mark of sexual difference. However, despite
the problematic character of the Oedipal account of subject constitution,
what is still valuable in this psychoanalytic approach is its affirmation that
it is nothing more and nothing less than the penetration of the signifier in
the body that will elevate us to the category of subjects.
Many feminist and queer authors have used this key insight into the
psychic dimension of our becoming embodied subjects to insist on the
void upon which all identity, in particular sexual identity, is configured—
from Jacqueline Rose to Teresa De Lauretis, from Kaja Silverman to Leo
Bersani or Lee Edelman, to name but a few.48 And it might be also found
in Butler’s reasoning, but not without her first making a series of concep-
tual displacements that are crucial for her radicalization of psychoana-
lytic contributions. In line with the remarks made by a series of feminist
authors, one of the fundamental problems arises, as Butler notes early
on, when the interdiction of incest is called upon to conjugate the ‘law
of language’ with ‘the law of kinship.’ While ‘the law of language’ splits
all subjects equally, the ‘law of kinship,’ that is the law of sexual differ-
ence, redoubles the split, distinguishing the assumed position before the
symbolic order between being man or being woman, and further grant-
ing these two positions an originary and exclusive status. The ‘law of
language’ that marks the entrance into the symbolic order castrates all
subjects regardless of their symbolic sex. Within the order of the signifier
no one has access to the phallus, the signifier of power, and ultimately, the
relation of any subject with the phallus is a matter of ‘seeming to have’
the phallus that one does not have and ‘seeming to be’ the phallus that
one is not, hence the meaning of the phallus also as lack. In contrast, the
law of sexual difference opens a foundational bifurcation that not only
makes the way for the exclusive feminine and masculine positions but
also expels those who occupy the feminine position out of the symbolic
order altogether—which could arguably be read as a residual trace of the
Levi-Straussian claim that in the symbolic domain women are precisely
defined by their status as objects of exchange.
One of the fundamental aspects that some feminists criticized about
the structuralist scheme of Levi-Strauss and Lacan was the transcenden-
talization of the role of the exchange of women and sexual difference as
the conditions for the emergence of humanity in the former case and
subjectivity in the latter. Apart from the differences between the vari-
ous readings, the classic critiques of Gayle Rubin, Kaja Silverman, Teresa
de Lauretis, and Judith Butler49 all highlight in different ways the prob-
lematic elevation of a historical situation into a structural necessity, and
the subsequent naturalization of the association between men/domina-
tion and penis/phallus. What is at stake in this revision of the scene of
symbolic castration is a call to historicize the sexist and homophobic
component of this reading of the myth of Oedipus. There is no essen-
tial or transcendental necessity that justifies the taboo of homosexuality
(evident to the extent that the logic of the prohibition of incest implies
that our desire is oriented to the gender with which we do not identify)
and that the taboo of incest cannot be structured in a way that is not
binary or phallic.50 In the case of Butler, this line of critique translates
into her critical inquiry on the statute of the symbolic order as the condi-
tion of possibility of culture, which translates into her rejection of sexual
difference and the primacy that Lacan grants to the symbolic order over
the imaginary order. According to Butler, the presumed structural rules
of symbolic exchange are the product of the sedimentation of history, in
other words, they are not in any way different from the historical forma-
tions of the imaginary.51 In sum, the ‘difference between the sexes’ can-
not be explained by a structural universal law (the symbolic order) that
is found above the imaginary as an a priori of culture. In Butler’s words:
My view is that the distinction between symbolic and social law cannot
finally hold, that not only is the symbolic itself the sedimentation of social
practices but that radical alterations in kinship demand a rearticulation of
the structuralist presuppositions of psychoanalysis and, hence, of contem-
porary gender and sexual theory.52
While the critique of the naturalization of sexual difference is not relevant

for the case of Lacan, for whom sexual difference is an arbitrary position,
the problem lies in the necessary character that still is granted to it. The
arbitrariness of sexual difference, in the sense that it is symbolic, and not
imaginary or social, is read in Lacanian terms as necessary and therefore
unchangeable. As Butler highlights, this has implications not only for
how we theorize the historical character of this difference, but also for the
political future of it. This is the direction that Butler’s critique continues
to focus upon. The polemic with the Lacanian position moves toward the
contingency of this arbitrariness. Butler notes:
Only when the mechanism of gender construction implies the contingency

of that construction does ‘constructedness’ per se prove useful to the politi-
cal project to enlarge the scope of possible gender configurations.53
Accepting arbitrariness, but denying contingency, the Lacanian concept

of sexual difference becomes transcendental. When Butler points out the
need to consider, on top of arbitrariness, the contingency of sexual differ-
ence, she is also questioning the prejudice that is present in the oedipal
framework and, in these terms, shows that there is no transcendental need
for identification and desire to function as a binary and in an opposite
and exclusionary manner. It is only within a heterosexual matrix that the
interdiction of incest ‘necessarily’ implies the crossed opposition between

identification (with a gender) and desire (of the gender that is opposite
to the gender with which one has identified), and the subsequent melan-
cholic constitution of gender, based on compulsory predetermined losses
that must be repudiated as such.54 But what Butler also suggests here is
that whenever we assume any identity in the field of gender or sexuality
(I am the one who desires this kind of objects), either in normative or
non-normative combinations, we are still operating within this melan-
cholic field.
So, this critique that Butler undertakes, recovering the Freud of
‘Mourning and Melancholia,’ implies that Butler is not denying the effi-
cacy of power for gendering and sexualizing the subject at the psychic
level, but rather is confirming it.55 Precisely because the interpellations of
which we have been objects in our entrance into culture involve uncon-
scious losses (or, in other words, exclusions), we cannot give a full account
of our identity, and yet we are inevitably compelled to do so. Following
this line of reasoning, we could say that it is precisely the efficacy of
the performativity of power in the unconscious that reifies gender and
sexuality as identities at the imaginary level with such pertinence. This
imaginary that registers itself at the psychic level can give us some hints
as to why it is so very difficult, despite deconstruction, to renegotiate that
sexual normative that continues to organize the complexity of identifica-
tions and of desires in terms of identity.
The notion of gender performativity shares, along with constructivist
theories of gender, the indication of the contingent character of becom-
ing gendered. However, distancing itself from theories of gender social-
ization, it shares with the perspective of sexual difference the introduction
of the psychic dimension in the elaboration of gender and of sexuality—
according to Butler, the process of gendering psychically traverses the
body and subject. This is one of the pivotal points that distinguished the
psychoanalytical concept of sexual difference from constructivist notions
of gender: while the first attempts to show that gendering exceeds the
ego and identity, the second does not. Both the concept of sexual dif-
ference and Butler’s notion of gender performativity hold in suspicion
the blind faith that some discursive approaches profess for ‘the name,’
that is, the profound confidence in the capacity of self-consciousness and
self-representation, either at the level of the subject or society, which in

this sense would be considered as positive totalities.
Now, there are ways of thinking about performativity that emphasize
resignification and subversion—concepts that emerge within a discourse
of power and that belong to the social-political realm, often upholding lib-
eral versions of agency which are based on this faith on self-representation
or transparency. At this conjunction, while the constructivist version of
the liberal subject is precisely what has been undone by performativity,
performativity is always at risk of being assimilated back into that lib-
eral model. But does not this key psychoanalytic insight keep the idea of
political performativity at a critical distance from liberal notions of the
subject? In my view, psychic (and also historically produced) exclusions
provide a limit to resignification. However, at the same time, they are part
of the very process of performativity, propelling the compulsive character
of the citation of norms, even when this citation implies a displacement.
Repetition and displacement are part of the process of performativ-
ity, but this is a process that could hardly be subsumed into a strategic
project.56 The process that Derrida calls iterability foregrounds the repeti-
tive character of the sign, highlighting the slippage between the sign and
what it signifies. A sign works by repeating in time, and yet, that iterable
dimension of signification is not always evident. Citationality is another
word for iterability: a sign works in the way that it does because it invokes
a previous set of acts that worked that way. When we refer to performa-
tive utterances that generate certain effects, their generativity relies on
this citational character. When a performative utterance or act becomes a
social practice, its citational character is sedimented (built up over time)
at the same time that that sedimentation is not at all obvious. Further, we
could argue that the performative force of these citations partly depends
on the oblivion of their citational nature. Let us see what Butler says
about this in a footnote to the introduction of Bodies that Matter:
It is not simply a matter of construing performativity as a repetition of acts,

as if ‘acts’ remain intact and self-identical as they are repeated in time, and
where ‘time’ is understood as external to the ‘acts’ themselves. On the
contrary, an act is itself a repetition, a sedimentation, and congealment of
the past which is precisely foreclosed in its act-like status.57
At this point, Butler clarifies that ‘every act is to be construed as a rep-

etition, the repetition of what cannot be recollected, of the irrecover-
able, and is thus the haunting spectre of the subject’s de-constitution.’58
Recomposing the Derridean and the Lacanian insights that fed into
Butler’s point, we could arguably speculate that the force that drives per-
formativity is the compulsion to deny, to suppress its citational character,
and ultimately its lack of a foundation. On this basis, what would seem
to be foreclosed is the citational character of the citation. It is along these
lines that we could say that it is not so much an irrecoverable content that
cannot be recollected, as the original absence of that content. In this way,
it would seem that the citational character of performativity relates to the
enforcement of repetition because of the lack of a foundation, the absence
of an origin. As we know, the authority of gender does not have any
ultimate foundation, but rather is based on the sedimentation produced
by this very same obligatory imitation. This authority not only refers to
the dynamic of power, but also reveals imitation’s compulsory character.
The compulsory character of gender imitation is necessary to establish
the intelligibility of the subject. Gender is not founded on a prior rule or
ground: rather, it is established by repetition. Because it has no founda-
tion, it is established again and again, and it is never established once and
for all. Hence, the necessary openness of any assumed gender position
that forms part of performativity.
Diversity, Mononormativity, and the Iterability

of Norms
In contrast to this view, what remains presupposed in the conceptualiza-
tion of identity as conventional and arbitrary, though exempt from the
contingency and temporality that create its permanent reconstitution,
could be described as a simplified version of what is left by the Saussurean
legacy. In Saussure’s scheme, the relational character of identity is
exclusively understood through the logic of opposition and congealed dif-
ference (i.e., the value of each one of the elements of the system is defined
by its difference from the rest in a closed and complete system of differen-
tial relations). Despite the long-standing poststructuralist critique of this
perspective,59 this is still a conception that communes with that which, in

political terms, is translated as ‘diversity.’ But the determination of subjec-
tive identity as a signifier that can be fixed in a system of differences is not
easy to sustain if we accept that the signifiers in which an identity can be
momentarily fixed depend upon an operation of exclusion, by which they
cannot account for the referent they are said to embody. Signifiers and
signifieds are incommensurate, and so the relationships between them can
never be isomorphic.60 This relationship that alludes to the impossibility
of completely fixing the signifier has been analyzed from multiple and
prolific perspectives, and it is also nodal to the Lacanian barred subject.61
When it is lightly stated that identities are multiple, it is the distance
between identity (worked at the level of the Ego) and the subject that is
forgotten. The concept of gender performativity reveals the ritualistic char-
acter of gender identities, which are nothing more than the effect of the
sedimented authority of reiterated practices without any foundation out-
side of the very practices of forced reiteration. However, we must not forget
that another fundamental aspect of the concept is the ‘ritualistic character’
showing the force of the authority of the law in order to reiterate itself.
Taking up Derrida again, for Butler, repetition is recast as iterability and,
consequently, the opening to potential resignifications of the same law—
reconceived for Butler as power. The subject of desire cannot be exhausted
by the identity the self assumes. This subject does not own its desire but,
thanks to it, the subject is psychically inserted into the social fabric. There
is no subject who is the owner of its desire, rather, power desires us as an
object. Clearly, this is not a desire that we can control, neither is it a mere
‘desire for recognition,’ as if this longing to being recognized by the other
were the reason why the subject would ‘agree to’ becoming subjugated.
According to Butler, the heteronormative ordering of desire and identi-
fication implies losses and negotiations that form a substantial part of the
constitution of the subject, and yet the forms that desire and identification
assume systematically fail with regard to those heteronormative ideals.62
When this failure implies a disruption of those norms, this does not mean
that the subject formation that veers off from these norms constitutes itself
without any reference to them. The question, then, is: what kind of dia-
logue is established in this case? What is the relationship between those
orderings of subject constitution and those of resistance?
Recalling Butler’s perspective, we might then ask whether heterocen-

tricity reinforces itself precisely through the new politics of gender, or
whether by focusing on the fact that all of these struggles hinge on the
operation of the iterability of norms, we would better understand this
dynamic.63 If the displaced repetition of the norm—namely, the sub-
versive iteration of the norm, such as we might understand for instance
‘same-sex marriage’—implies the contestation and transformation of the
marriage norm, we could understand the acceptance of sexual diversity
as a challenge to the heterocentric notion of citizenship. At the same
time, however, if we keep in mind that it is precisely this pervasive notion
of marriage that establishes the terms of the idea of sexual diversity, we
would have to track the performative power of such norm to maintain its
implicit centrality and therefore resist any subversive potential.
But how does normative power work? The Butlerian claim that the
norm produces its own transgressions offers plenty of hope. Every time
this argument is invoked, the line of reasoning begins with the presump-
tion that there is a weakness of the norm that provides the possibility
of subverting the norm. Whenever iteration is mentioned, one cannot
help but think of the resignification of gender norms or the destabilizing
effects that the resistance to the norm has on the logic of identity. Yet,
the subversions of the norm do not always appeal to its weakness for
destabilization. Not all transgressions lead to a renegotiation of the norm.
And certainly, subversions of the norm do not necessarily lead to social
change. There is no causal or mechanical logic at work here. On the con-
trary, one could suggest that the constitutive failure of the norm is what
gives the norm its plasticity and, therefore, its strength. The acceptance of
the failure of the norm allows the norm to fail and still be legitimate. As
long as the failure of the norm is accepted, the norm might keep failing
without losing its legitimacy.
As a case in point, mononormativity (or normative monogamy) may
underpin clear differences among resignification, transgression, resistance,
and subversion. Consider a non-hierarchical monogamous arrangement
that includes a scene of desire and affectionate stable bonds. In this
arrangement, monogamy is the norm and faithfulness and commitment
to that social form is the regulatory horizon. Despite the fact that the
norm that sustains and ensures this system of affection is transgressed
time and again, its regulatory power is still at work. Infidelities, ‘betrayal,’
seem to be ‘failures’ that are instituted and required by this normative
system: open secrets. These transgressions do not weaken the monoga-
mous norm but instead legitimatize mononormativity. Once again, one
can see how the journey of love is conceived of in terms of a romantic
narrative. Desire and love are bound to each other within this framework;
from this point of departure, we start to experience the ‘permanent uni-
vocal desire’ both as an ideal and as impossibility. Thus, the work of love
now develops around the task of negotiating this impossibility without
defaulting to the monogamous arrangement sustained by this impossible
ideal. This ‘structural’ impossibility posed by the ideal of monogamy is
both recognized and disavowed at the same time. Within the terms of
this permanent contradiction, there is a constant call for negotiation. Yet
no matter what the outcome of these negotiations may be, or what differ-
ent momentary resolutions might be achieved, the solutions largely tend
to reinforce the hegemony of monogamy.
It could be the case that a partnership decides to be an open one.
However, even then, the arrangements are made most of the time on the
basis of strict restrictions regarding the role of the ‘others’ outside the part-
nership. Those other relations have to be limited to ‘sex,’ and this rigid
separation of sex from affection becomes crucial precisely because it is
the criterion for distinguishing monogamy from non-monogamy within
the ‘non-monogamous’ arrangement. In effect, that distinction becomes
the norm for guaranteeing the monogamous bond. Or, it could be the
case that the partners simply decide that desire is not that important. In
this instance, disavowal is the norm that protects the fantasy of monog-
amy. Although this seems simple, it might prove to be unsustainable in
the long term. It could also be the case that one or all of the members
of the arrangement agree to the double standard. It is not desire that is
rejected but the possibility of achieving its univocal ideal. This could lead
in two different directions: (a) this subtle norm could work as long as the
silence afforded by privacy protects the bond or (b) the transgression of
the norm comes to light. If the latter is the case, various things may occur.
Either the arrangement with the ‘outside’ person(s) ends, which would
leave monogamy intact (as the ideal could not be sustained, monogamy
requires that the external bond has to be broken), or the arrangement
with the ‘inside’ person ends (as the ideal proved unsustainable, the part-
ners split), which would also leave the monogamous ideal intact. Finally,
it could also be the case that monogamy continues with a more realistic
view of possibilities (and monogamy is re-established), and the disavowed
relation is sustained.
There is yet another possibility: monogamy could be strongly and
actively contested. Polyamorous communities are one of these contesta-
tions. However, polyamory has become controversial for its normative
views on the link between sex and affection. Regarding what the ideals of
polyamory are (or should be) about, the following moral statements are
more than clear:
Polyamory has been defined as the philosophy and practice of loving more
than one person at a time with honesty and integrity. Synonyms for poly-
amory are responsible, ethical, and intentional, non-monogamy…
Polyamorists say that sex is not the enemy, that the real enemy is the
deceit and betrayal of trust… Polyamorists say that sex is a positive force if
applied with honesty, responsibility and trust…
Swinging and polyamory are not ‘free love’ in the 60’s sense of the term.
(This seems to be one of the objections of those who survived, or were
wounded, in the sixties.) In a lot of cases, free love in the 60’s was a response
to the enormous freeing up of taboos against sex that occurred at that time,
and often was not accompanied by honesty or responsibility, but used as an
excuse to have a lot of sex…64
Already the tone of this call together with these principles that polyamorists
are asked to follow point to the conclusion that although polyamory might
contest mononormativity, it is still bound to a restricted moral view of sexual
freedom. I will come back to this. But, leaving aside for a brief moment the
case of polyamory, can one think of all of these negotiations as resistances to
the norm? Can we think of these strategies as contesting monogamy? Or, on
the contrary, are they not ways to sustain its fiction? The case of mononor-
mativity, or the normativity of monogamy, points to clear differences among
transgressions, resistance, and subversion. None of these terms are inter-
changeable, and the process by which a norm could be effectively destabilized
is more complex than may at first appear when reciting the Butlerian claim.
There are transgressions that seem to be intended to survive within

the norm.65 There are other strategies that might resignify and renego-
tiate the norm. Yet there are still others that take the form of a politi-
cal articulation and are intended to contest and therefore subvert the
norm. Polyamory could be such a case as long as it takes a political and
public form. However, we should take into account the controversial
dynamics of polyamorous communities as a result of their normative
values. Christian Klesse also reminds us that while diminishing sexual-
ity, polyamorous discourse tends to represent polyamory as polyfidelity
or responsible non-monogamy, against pleasure-centered sex, casual sex,
swinging, or promiscuity.66 Indeed, the dismissal of practices centered
on sexual pleasure leads us to suspect that such communities emasculate
sex-radical politics to a significant extent. Besides, according to Melita
Noël, who studied numerous polyamorous public texts produced in
the USA, the polyamorous communities’ stance tends to be exclusion-
ary, assumed as being white, middle-class, able-bodied, and educated.67
Finally, the enclosed character of these communities together with the
modes through which monogamy is abandoned (although still resisting
the norm), prone to an endogamous dynamic, leave polyamory’s disrup-
tive potential unclear.68
Mononormativity operates in ways that cut across heterosexual, lesbian,
and gay communities. The fact that monogamy is set against infidelity, its
most recognizable (and widespread) transgression, could be understood as
a way of privatizing and therefore containing the potential destabilization
that the transgression of this norm might imply. This dynamic resonates
with what Eve Sedgwick has remarked in relation to marriage: its official
and public status inaugurates all kinds of furtive and private desires, and
so it keeps the hegemony of marriage within the public domain.69 In this
context, then, it may well be the case that gay marriage tends to operate
as the way in which gay/lesbian relationships move out of the ‘furtive and
private’ and into the public. This suggests that marriage remains the most
legitimate, if not the condition of possibility for any fully recognized pub-
lic appearance of sexuality, except in those cases where there is ‘scandal’ or
‘criminality.’ As for the distinction between the private and the public, it
also suggests that public demands for the ‘show’ of monogamy are much
greater than any demands for actual monogamy.
One can understand that these ‘private’ transgressions of mononor-

mativity attest to the public failure of the norm. However, it is also clear
that the passage from the private transgression to the public contestation
is hardly a trivial one. It is only when it is made public that the transgres-
sion can become a potential subversion of the norm. However, this is not
a fully sufficient condition, as evidenced by the case of polyamory. The
subversion of the norm might require another kind of political articula-
tion aimed not just at resisting monogamy but also at contesting mono-
normativity more generally.
A parallel argument could undoubtedly be posed about sexual diversity,
as discussed in previous sections: the subversion of heterocentricity might
require another kind of political articulation aimed not just at amplify-
ing the map of possible positions—although not essential, still clearly
discernible—but also contesting the liberal assumptions about auton-
omy that give ontological forms to the heterocentric boundaries—within
which non-normative positions make sense—that shape what will count
as identities. As suggested earlier, homoerotic worlds are not external to
the heterosexual matrix, and neither is the heterosexual world indepen-
dent from homoerotic landscapes, even if based as it is often the case, on
its repudiation or disavowal. Both of these terms are co-constitutive and
transform each other to the extent that their own dynamic also involves
the negotiation of homosexuality within heterosexuality as much as the
negotiation of heterosexuality within homosexuality.
It is through this critical lens that we see the normalized inclusion of
queer positions, which might gain recognition as long as they are con-
figured as discrete and discernable identities shaped according to a new
sexual respectability. For instance, those positions can become acceptable
as long as they adhere to certain modes of subjection organized through
key social constructs such as the family and the nation, among many
other presumptions that, for instance, relate to cultural belongings and
as yet unquestioned links between gender, sexuality, and kinship. The
pervasiveness of coupledom, and even of the nuclear family household,
demonstrates the limited scope of diversity and tolerance. Although it is
true that many diverse forms of family have now become thinkable, the
former model of the heterocentric nuclear family continues to exclude
other intimate and sexual arrangements that challenge the monogamous
stable couple as the central figure for organizing our social reality: these
forms of sexuality certainly remain out of question. It is true that this new
sexual respectability is less heteronormative than it used to be, but this
does not mean that it does not involve new norms defining which sexual
and gender arrangements are going to be entitled to recognition and pro-
tection. Class, ethnicity, property, cultural belongings, and attachment to
different conceptions of ‘family’ are in fact crucial to these norms.
Sexual Freedom and Intelligibility

The different scenarios that I have discussed in these pages—the contro-
versies around trans politics and governmentalization, the reluctance to
engage in a serious discussion of presumptive monosexuality, and the per-
sistence of mononormativity for the legitimate public appearance of sex-
uality—point to a series of hegemonic loci of the hegemonic psychosocial
imaginary that regulate contemporary sexual lives. These include the pre-
eminence of coupledom and family values, the privatization of sexuality,
in particular under the form of the privatized couple or household, the
univocity of desire, and the control over our desires and identifications
(or at least, a sense of self-transparency) that guarantee the stability (or
developmental understandings of the transformation) of identity.70 So
much so that even in a post-essentialist fashion, within this imaginary
identities tend to remain classifiable and statistically located thanks to the
organization of univocal desires and identifications in accordance with
what is considered to be publicly respectable. All of these characteristics
point to a deeply engrained liberal and pluralist imaginary of diversity
that establishes the relevant horizon and vocabulary with which those
differences are organized.
The identity-based politics of gender and sexual diversity has made
positive achievements, mostly in terms of political recognition, the recog-
nition of sexual rights, and the articulation of public policies. However,
this politics of recognition reveals its limits insofar as it continues to sub-
scribe to an idea of diversity as comprising a number of already given dis-
crete identities. If this remains the operative presupposition, the politics
of sexuality will remain co-opted by an implicit idea of universality that
denies anything that signifies difference. Seen in this light, sexual diversity
runs the same risks and in fact has become the object of critique of those
that were the object of multiculturalist politics, also organized around a
liberal idea of universality that establishes in advance the forms difference
should take in order to be entitled to inclusion. Both multiculturalist and
sexual diversity politics set the limits of difference according to a univer-
sal notion of diversity that establishes in advance the conditions in which
identities might become recognizable.
The hegemonic map of available gender and sexual positions aims to
give a thorough account of the many and diverse forms that gender and
sex must assume, as well as of the modalities at which they must inter-
sect. However, as they continue to be based on reified notions of differ-
ence, they tend to extend the norms that the established logic of identity
assumes. I think that it is necessary to remember that there can be no
clear consensus about how diversity might be understood, or about what
diversity should include or involve. Very often the meaning of ‘diversity’
appears to be assumed, even though there is substantial disagreement
about what it should mean, and those who treat the term as obvious regu-
larly disavow this lack of consensus. It is the implicit and barely problem-
atized character of the various conceptions in conflict about diversity that
make this debate so thorny and so difficult to articulate. With respect to
sexual diversity, recognition is mainly concerned with specific forms of
pluralization of sexual and gender positions, but it questions neither the
framework that makes it possible for such differences to appear nor the
modes that certain differences must assume in order to be included in the
map of politically representable identities.
In sum, the regulatory dimension of the democratization of gender
and sexuality is partly obscured through the dissemination of a reified
idealization of diversity that draws upon uncritically accepted notions
of gender and sexual identity. Within this field of knowledge and policy
making, the conceptualization of sexual diversity re-inscribes sexual prac-
tices as sexual identities; and the fact that these debates keep tending
toward a pluralization of possible (and potential) discrete gender, sexual
and cultural variants ultimately re-inscribe insufficiently questioned ideas
of difference onto these definitions. They fail to think critically about
what norms implicitly regulate the pluralization of identities, and what

form those identities are compelled to take.
The binary pair Identity/Diversity as it operates in the politics of rec-
ognition is just one way to understand and give form to the existential
uncertainty about sexuality that is inherent to the development of the
sexual subject. However, the categories of identity do not always recog-
nize that form of becoming. Most of all, this happens when the liberal
identitarian form of becoming is already foreclosed by a heterocentric
universalistic frame. Similarly, this pair limits how the ideals of free-
dom and justice, as well as the demands of sexual dissidents, could be
articulated. The ontology of the subject’s identity reflects on the scope
of progressive ideals. While the claim for the recognition of sexual non-
normative identities enables certain rights to be accomplished, it also
imposes a limit on the very ideas of freedom and justice at stake. In sum,
it structures and subsequently regulates what is conceivable as a politi-
cally valid object of struggle.
These reflections point to questions about resignification and resis-
tance, and how the performativity of normative power works, producing
certain alterations while foreclosing the scope of what is intelligible, ques-
tionable, or politicized in the current field of politics. As we have seen,
certain resignifications within the field of gender norms—currently legit-
imated in the name of equality, non-discrimination, human rights, and
freedom—have led to a number of subversions of heterosexual norms.
However, the legal renegotiation of heterosexual norms within liberal pro-
gressive politics have been implicated in the regulation of gendered and
sexual life through the normalization of diversity and the reconfiguration
of sexual freedom as an individual right, as in the case of the individual’s
right to privacy or not being discriminated on the basis of gender identity
or sexual orientation. Within this context, sexual diversity remains irre-
mediably subjected to the limits that the liberal perspective imposes on
the very conception of the individual—and this is, in turn, based on the
stabilization of identity as well as the reification of bodies. This restrictive
ontology of the individual has implications for progressive ideals and for
thinking critically about boundaries that risk the normalization of differ-
ence by giving them fixed and ontological forms.
It might be that the conceptualization of intelligibility developed by

Butler could offer a suitable conceptual framework for this consideration,
mostly if we consider that it is at a psychosocial level that the question of
intelligibility is played out. The overwhelming changes we have under-
gone in the last 20 years have led to an indisputable multiplication of the
points of view on how to track the relationships among gender, sexuality,
and subjectivity. And yet, within this framework of plurality, we might
find a blind spot from which sexual diversity is organized and totalized,
one that establishes the boundaries of what is sexually intelligible within
the framework of sexual diversity. This blind spot is the result of that
liberal imaginary of the individual that sustains what counts as a political
representation. When the ideal of sexual diversity applies only to individ-
ual expressions of being sexual, then it restricts in advance what counts
as ‘diversity.’
Indeed, progressive sexual politics currently tend to mirror (and in
fact are concerned with) the framework established by Western liberal
democracies, focusing on the figure of the liberal autonomous individual,
who is able to pose demands according to a self-sufficient identity that is
presumed to be totalized and totalizable. This move parallels the conver-
sion of the destabilizing potential of difference into the pluralist liberal
notion of diversity, and it is in this context that some queer positions—
evident in the discussion around the boundaries that enable identities
to stabilize—thus end up standing for the defense of this disciplined
diversity, veering off from a more radical politics that would imply the
questioning of the ontological forms granted to gendered and sexualized
bodies and selves.
According to Butler, ‘[i]nsofar as power operates successfully by con-
stituting an object domain, a field of intelligibility, as a taken-for-granted
ontology, its material effects are taken as material data or primary giv-
ens.’71 This primary given seems to be a post-essentialist subject within
whom the liberal autonomous individual still reverberates. How can we
then think about the limited intelligibility of identity and personhood
configured through the ontology of the autonomous liberal individual?
Apart from the fact that social intelligibility is not available to all, can
one think of this figure of the politically unintelligible as a limit to what
is thinkable within the imaginary at a psychosocial level? Of course, it is
impossible to give a general answer to that question. But let me develop

my argument to see whether it is possible to find some paths to better
understand this problem, and its entanglement with what I see as a het-
erocentric imaginary.
One important axis through which the field of intelligibility of sexual
diversity is delimited and hierarchically organized revolves around the
difficulty for decentering heteronormativity. The power to reinforce the
centrality of the heterosexual norm that continues to organize our social
reality (and the homonormative trends that follow) seems to be located
precisely at the core of new gender and sexual politics. Though laudable
in its ideals, the democratization of sexuality, understood in terms of the
politics of recognition and the inclusion of sexual and gender diversity,
upholds the re-articulation of sociosexual hierarchies. Along with the pre-
vailing heterocentrism, the recognition of gender and sexual minorities’
rights mobilizes new homonormativities based on a new hierarchy of sex-
ual respectability. For instance, the institution of the family and couple-
dom continue to be the hegemonic models of social organization within
the liberal politics of sexual diversity. The privileged focus that gay mar-
riage has received across a variety of countries attests to this hegemony.
Despite the objections made regarding essentialist claims, there appears
to be a reluctance to embark on a radical critique of identity politics. This
also raises the question of the ontological effects that mark distinct identi-
ties as embodied ones, a process which, I argue, upholds heterocentricity
as well. The limit imposed on the field of intelligibility seems to be sus-
tained by a psychosocially mediated investment in individual autonomy,
which, in turn, re-enacts a heterocentric mode of granting the body a
specific ontological status around the sex/gender divide. Both individual-
ity and diversity are sustained by a conception of a self-sufficient (and
self-reflexive) identity—individual or collective—as the basis for mak-
ing political demands. The displacements that the framework of diversity
operates reiterate without challenge to the investment in individualistic
and volitional conception of autonomy: the self-sufficient liberal indi-
vidual as a political subject (of will and consciousness) is constituted
through the establishment of differentiating boundaries that stabilize its
positioning, which in turn sustains the idea of freedom and supports the
claim for rights. This identity-centered political map relates directly to
the conception of autonomy as a matter of control over our bodies. In

this way, the boundaries that configure the autonomous individual estab-
lish the ontological status of the body as an enclosed, clear, and distinct
object or entity or even, as in neoliberal frames, as an enterprise.72
While displacing binary norms, the ontological status granted to bod-
ies as objects upon which autonomy is exercised enacts heterocentric pre-
sumptions about identity, especially with regard to political representation
and within its legal frameworks. This liberal ontology of the individual is
bound up with the specific ontology of a sex/gender binary that is posed
by the opposition between the body as a material object on which the
imaginary would inscribe its cultural marks, and an imaginary identity
configured by gender and sexual norms. Furthermore, whether norma-
tive or non-normative, as I have argued, these boundaries draw upon
the other female-woman/male-man binary alignment. This points to the
articulation of a heterocentric conception of the individual through the
binaries of gender/sex and naturalized masculine/feminine poles as fixed
points of reference. The re-articulation of the heterosexual matrix there-
fore appears to be reactivated through the investment in bodily bound-
aries, which in turn support the ontological conception of the liberal
individual as an enclosed self. It is by maintaining this ontological split
between a material body and an imaginary identity that the preeminence
of the liberal individual in current politics is mobilized. In effect, if this
ontological status granted to the embodied subject maintains the figure
of the liberal individual as its political addressee, as the liberal individual
is already a notion based on the heterosexual matrixial imaginary of sub-
jecthood, it follows that this ontological effect holds up heterocentricity
as well.
This question brings us to another problematic aspect underpin-
ning the political subject conceived by mainstream sexual diversity
politics: the liberal re-interpretation of constructivist versions of gender
identity and sexuality. In my view, this does not mean that we have
a modern ontological vision persisting despite its postmodern ‘decon-
struction’ (although this is also true). Instead, the ontological status
of the embodied individual has been renewed in the face of cultural
transformations, undoing the critical potential of the deconstructiv-
ist turn. Similarly, liberal notions about the subject have not imposed
themselves upon the constructivist gaze on gender and sexuality from

outside, but rather, certain constructivist visions were already liberal
in some of their assumptions about the subject, as in the case of those
culturalist interpretations of gender that rely on a neat ontological dis-
tinction between body and mind.
The force of this ontological split is enacted by our awareness of the
fact that our identities are social constructs. These post-essentialist views
presume that we can be aware of the operations of power through which
we assume a subject position, and lead to the fantasy that we can manage
these social constructs. Against this stance, with Butler, I have argued that
these positions are based on the denial of the fundamental exclusions by
which we come to be. In other words, there are operations of power and
knowledge that orchestrate in advance what will make any of us intel-
ligible to others, and there is no ontological foundation for intelligibility
to be achieved. Rather, the compulsory work of performativity is an effort
to achieve intelligibility, but this effort is haunted by what has been ruled
out as an unintelligible sexual life. Since we do not always know the price
we have paid for our intelligibility, we may find that the moments of
becoming intelligible are those in which we know ourselves least well and
are most aware of our own opacity.
The contemporary investment in either a form of matter or affect that
is indifferent, autonomous, or prior to our systems of signification on
the one hand, or on the other, in the full-awareness of our contingency
and constructed character, both obscure, albeit in different ways, the
same originary lack.73 In one case, the fantasy is about direct access to
the real, in the other about imaginary self-transparency. Further, both
the approach to materiality as a pre-discursive power and the approach
to discursive power as self-evident reveal an illusion of immediacy by
which the fundamental exclusions that constitute our historical horizon
are rationalized as well. In effect, this tendency to think that we are con-
scious of all the exclusions that we negotiate presumes a facile resignifica-
tion of the terms that deny the traumatic traces of antagonisms and past
struggles that continue into the present. Similarly, it denies the fact that
the psychosocial imaginary cannot be completely aware of itself, in the
same way that the subject cannot be conscious of the reach of the power
relationships in which it is embedded.
The fantasy that we live in a post-ideological world in which decon-

struction has rid us once and for all of the illusion of a final truth of
history, the illusion that we are fully aware of the relativity of our truths
would seem to be the ideology of today. This is a general offense of which
the liberal democracies in which we live are a clear example. Its negative
side is manifest in the transparency of violence and the cynicism of power.
Its benevolent side is articulated through denial: ‘Were we discriminatory
in the past? Well, from now on we won’t be.’ This stance denies exclusion
and carries with it is the return of those things it is trying to suppress
or deny (sexism, heterosexism, transphobia; or xenophobia and cultural
racism): the return of the repressed, the ghost that continues living there,
slumbering and reappearing. Such rationalization denies a series of exclu-
sions which, upon not finding a channel of expression in the political
arena, become symptoms in the forms of phobias, ‘excesses’ of power,
censorship, wars, and violent persecutions. These ‘excesses’ could be read
as symptomatic of the suppression of the possibility of enacting social
antagonism through political struggle.74
The deconstruction of the categories of identity in which we live and
the resignification of their terms are not programmatic tasks and do
not work by decree. Categories are channels that, working on a psycho-
social level, enable us to live; we live within the categories, and ruling
them as arbitrary or constructed does not enable us to get rid of them.
Our imaginary investments in them might not be susceptible to reflex-
ive deconstruction, for they are less a matter of objects of thought than
structuring beliefs through which objects (and subjects) come to be. It is
precisely at this imaginary level that the question about the ontology of
the corporeal (as the site for defining the recognizability of identification
or desire) continues to be the locus where the struggles for establishing
the boundaries of the self-reflexive individual and identity take place.
Against the backdrop of a liberal conception of identity and subjectiva-
tion—articulated through a heterocentric frame—these body ontologies
continue to be the object of critical scrutiny, notably reconsidering the
relationship between matter and social significations. Hence the need
to continue reflecting critically upon the embodied subject, both in the
light of new sexual politics, and the so-called turn to matter in current
academic debates.
For my part, as a counter to liberal constructivist views, I still con-

sider Butler’s approach to performativity relevant. In her earlier work,
Butler’s performative notion of gender gave way to a notion of resistance
as resignification. On the one hand, through the conceptualization of
gender as regulated social practice, the intrinsically iterable character of
regulatory norms that constitute the essence of gender exposed the fra-
gility of this ontological construct. Considered as a matter of significant
practice, gender norms are necessarily exposed to resignification, and in
this way, resignification becomes a potential site for subversion. On the
other hand, or as a reversal of this first statement, if gender becomes a
practice of signification, this could also mean that subversion would have
to involve the work of resignification as well. The performative notion of
gender would then function as a theoretical foundation for thinking of
new possibilities for political action, but at the same time, would work
as an argument through which to rethink what political change might
involve. Indeed, if political change would necessarily have to involve
the resignification of norms, this would imply that politics could not be
reduced to matters of recognition by explicit rights and laws, but would
also have to address that other dimension of power that has to do with
the productive dimension of regulation. At the level of subject forma-
tions and political practices, this shift would mean that politics could not
be reduced to matters of representation of and/or distribution of social
resources to already constituted political subjects. It would mean instead
that a significant radical political action would have to confront the ques-
tion of how those political subjects were constituted, both as subjects
and as politically significant, and address the constitutive exclusions these
formations may require and entail.
Against forms of pluralism and diversity that end up giving an onto-
logical form to identities and thus reifying them as established positions
rather than open and relational processes of identification, Butler brings
up two key notions: fundamental exclusion and contingency. Translated
into ethical-political terms, these two principles highlight the quasi-
transcendental condition of our being, which is dependent on an origi-
nary ontological lack. These principles also guarantee the impossibility of
a permanent suture of society as a totality, and therefore remind us of the
constitutive antagonistic character of society and the infinite openness
of social struggle, all of which form the grounds of a critique of liberal,

rationalist conceptions of democracy, and are the basic tenets of a radical
understanding of it.
With regard to the precarious status of our bodies as our own and the
openness of the self, it is also interesting to take up Butler’s conceptual-
ization of an embodied life. Butler’s critical inquiries into the category of
life and what it means to be human have led her in her most recent work
to consider the conditions of vulnerability and dispossession as central
to subjectivation.75 Her compelling ideas have led to an ethical-political
reformulation of selfhood that opposes a self-sufficient and deliberative
autonomous individual in the name of the differential distribution of pre-
cariousness, vulnerability, and a radical relationality that characterizes the
life of an embodied subject. To the extent that this radical relationality is
characterized by the unknowingness of the identities at stake,76 we may do
well to consider the turn to vulnerability and dispossession as a critique of
this mode of making differences seem as if they were ontological necessi-
ties. I will develop this aspect of Butler’s approach in Chapter 5.
My point in the arguments developed in this chapter is simply that the
liberal way of understanding difference can be countered by performa-
tivity interpreted as a dimension that shows how political subjects come
into existence through the re-articulations of norms throughout the
struggles and renegotiations that take place within power relations. This
aspect of Butler’s approach resonates with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe’s performative take on the configuration of political identities.77
According to these authors, one of the main characteristics to take into
account for a radical approach to democracy is that there is no subject
(of politics) prior to hegemonic and counter-hegemonic articulations.
Identities are not the cause but rather the effect of political agencies: they
are articulated through political struggles, wherein the ‘we’ and the ‘other’
are mutually constituted.
We need to continue to be aware of the risk of following that path
of recognition according to which identity and diversity control our
understanding of politics, and even more so when this politics involves
either post-essentialist or neoliberal versions of the individual (either
as a self-transparent ‘constructed’ self, or as an enterprise or a voli-
tional auto-production). We err if we think we can contest boundaries
without criticizing the liberal presuppositions that disavow the epis-

temic limit of what can be known about our bodies—with their plea-
sures, sufferings, vulnerabilities, and possibilities. In relation to the
epistemic limits of the political, this liberal frame is arguably one of
the reasons why it is so difficult to see that sexual struggles are impli-
cated in migrant, religious, and other minority struggles, and why it so
often appears that each one is only concerned with its ‘own’ recogni-
tion. From a radical democratic perspective, we should also constantly
bear in mind that current groupings are actually articulated within the
political field of struggles and do not really exist apart from them.
By drawing attention to the limitations imposed by liberal ideas of
individuality and identity, I am not so much trying to make a claim
against recognition or rights-claims, arguing that this would imply the
assimilation into a heterocentric world that would enhance its power
thanks to these new politics and demands. Rather, I am simply pointing
out that power works agonistically, and from a radical democratic point
of view, any hegemonic configuration of imaginary identities will imply
some exclusions, and therefore the task of counter-hegemonic resistance
against normalization is never-ending. There would be a normalizing ges-
ture together with a response to recognition, and that is why we cannot
celebrate recognition as such, without criticizing its limits at the same
time. From a radical democratic perspective, the terms in which we are
able to think—which always imply some exclusion of what cannot be
thought, and which are directly related to the ‘whos’ that could have
access to the substitutable positions of the ‘you’ and the ‘I’—always have
to be questioned.
If the liberal imaginary that requires identitarian subjects of politics
organizes the terms within which political demands become legible, we
may have to reconsider the perils of celebrating recognition without criti-
cizing their liberal presuppositions. This form of critique would ques-
tion the over-determination that confirms a hegemonic understanding
of the kind of subjects who can make demands and in what way. We
have to keep questioning as well the universalizing framework that pre-
determines what we can understand as political, pre-political, or even
anti-political articulations, including the basic political issues of how
bodies and their pleasures can be thought of and become thinkable at all.
Notes
1. See UN General Assembly Declaration on “Human Rights, Sexual
Orientation and Gender Identity,” June 3, 2008; UN Human Rights
Council Resolution, “Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender
Identity,” June 17, 2011; UN Human Rights Office, “Free & Equal
Campaign for LGBT Equality,” 2013; UN Resolution to apply the Vienna
Declaration and Programme of Action to Sexual Orientation and Gender
Identity, September 24, 2014. The Yogyakarta Principles are a set of 29
principles “On the Application of Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual
Orientation and Gender Identity,” signed by 29 human rights experts on
March 26, 2007. The Yogakyarta Principles, accessed October 23, 2013,
http://www.yogyakartaprinciples.org/principles_en.htm
2. The operating definitions are as follow: (a) “Sexual orientation is under-
stood to refer to each person’s capacity for profound emotional, affectional
and sexual attraction to, and intimate and sexual relations with, individuals
of a different gender or the same gender or more than one gender.” (b)
“Gender identity is understood to refer to each person’s deeply felt internal
and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond
with the sex assigned at birth, including the personal sense of the body
(which may involve, if freely chosen, modification of bodily appearance or
function by medical, surgical or other means) and other expressions of gen-
der, including dress, speech and mannerisms.” The Yogyakarta principles.
3. UN Human Rights Office, “Free & Equal Campaign for LGBT Equality,”
2013, accessed October 3, 2014, https://www.unfe.org/. The campaign
includes a historical world-map based on the notion that sexual orientation and
gender identity are trans-historical and universal categories, whose title states
“LGBT People Have Been Part of All Societies throughout History,” accessed
January 10, 2015, https://www.unfe.org/en/actions/idahot-infographic
4. The text summarizes the reformulation of the Article 13 of the European
Commission Treaty, along the Treaties of Amsterdam (October 2, 1997) and
of Nice (February 26, 2001), accessed August 10, 2015, http://eur-lex.europa.
eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=URISERV:a10000&from=EN
5. I am alluding to the productive hypothesis of power developed by Michel
Foucault in Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I:
An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books,
1990), and to the tracing that Foucault undertakes in relation to liberal
forms of governmentality and individualization. See Michel Foucault,
“Governmentality,” and also Colin Gordon, “Governmental Rationality:

An Introduction,” both in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality,
eds. Graham Burchell, Collin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1991), 87–104 and 1–51; and Ethics,
Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and
others (New York: The New Press, 1997).
6. The terminology related to trans-positions has been shifting over time, in
line with political struggles and possibilities. I opted for using the term
Trans instead of Trans*, as the addition of the asterisk has raised some con-
troversy and there are some trans communities that reject it. Cf. note 11.
7. See Mauro Cabral, “Ley de Malta en el camino,” in Página 12, Suplemment
Soy, April 17, 2015, accessed April 19, 2015, http://www.pagina12.com.ar/
diario/suplementos/soy/1-3937-2015-04-21.html
8. The Gender Identity Law (Law 26.743) was passed in Argentina on May 9,
2012. Marlene Wayar’s article “Qué pasó con la T?” (What happened with
the T?) was published on May 12, 2012, in Soy, the Gay and Lesbian
Supplement of Página 12, one of the three major national newspapers in
Argentina. Accessed January 10, 2015, http://www.pagina12.com.ar/dia-
rio/suplementos/soy/1-2436-2012-05-12.html. The original article states:
La ley ya ha sido, felicitaciones a quienes con más esfuerzo han trabajado
por conseguirla, saludos a quienes articulamos para lograrla, y muchas gra-
cias a quienes acompañaron solidariamente. Ahora bien, vamos por el
impacto concreto. Esta es una ley para quienes quieran sostener la normali-
dad hombre-mujer y a quienes tenemos un techo más alto nos deja en
donde estábamos, o mejor dicho nos extorsiona a normalizarnos en estas
únicas categorías (…) Así las cosas, las travestis podemos relacionarnos vis-
ibles (política y corporalmente) sin mayores problemas con el Estado. Lxs
transexuales podrán hacerlo relacionándose desde la invisibilidad hombre-
mujer (política y corporalmente) sin inconvenientes o con herramientas
legales para denunciar irregularidades. ¿Cuál es el problema con legitimar
las categorías H y M? Que una identidad queda finalmente cancelada, no
existe lo travesti o trans. (Translation is mine).
9. See Cabral, “Ley de Malta en el camino.”
10. For an analysis of the relationship between Argentine legal institutions and
trans movements that form the context in which later law was passed, see
Mauro Cabral and Paula Viturro, “(Trans)sexual Citizenship,” in Transgender
Rights, eds. Paisley Currah, Richard M. Juang, and Shannon Price Minter
(Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2006).
11. In relation to the use of transgender as an umbrella category, see Surya

Monro and Lorna Warren. “Transgendering Citizenship,” Sexualities 7(3)
(2004): 346–347; Paisley Currah, “Gender Pluralisms under the
Transgender Umbrella,” in Transgender Rights, eds. Currah, Juang, and
Minter, 4–24; Megan Davidson, “Seeking Refuge under the Umbrella:
Inclusion, Exclusion, and Organizing within the Category Transgender,”
Sexuality Research & Social Policy: Journal of NSRC 4(4) (2007): 60–80. The
extended use of ‘trans’ has been understood to be more inclusive, while not
so directly linked to ‘gender,’ which, given its history, tends to evoke the
gender binary as a point of reference. The use of Trans* has resulted in
greater controversy either because it suggested that trans (without asterisk)
was not inclusive enough, or for being too inclusive. Given the permeabil-
ity of the boundaries within and across gender, the question raised by these
debates revolves precisely around how those boundaries are established.
Trans could mean moving from one category to another in relation to the
gender binary (such as trans-man, trans-woman, FTM, MTF, transsexual
man or woman). It can evoke a location within the gender spectrum that is
neither woman nor man (such is the case for many people self-identified as
transgender, or gender-fluid). At the same time, it can also mean occupying
gender in a way that challenges the normative expectations concerning the
gender with which one identifies (such as non-conforming gender positions
and, in some cases, also gender-queer positions). Finally, it can also invoke
a refusal to resolve the question of gender through identification, prob-
lematizing the connections and dissonances among gender identity, expres-
sion, and legibility. While some understandings of trans emphasize the
challenge that ‘trans’ poses to ‘gender’ as a stable and neat category, marking
its constructed, non-univocal, and/or porous character, other understand-
ings take trans as a category of identity. In this latter case, trans positions
could also be understood as being more or less fixed. It is not my place to
align with a particular understanding of this term, as my point is to under-
stand the political character of these definitions and the implications of
these historical shifts (made clear by the successive emergence of neolo-
gisms), as well as the significance of trans knowledge production for both
the study and institutional practices of gender more broadly.
12. Jacob Hale, “Tracing a Ghostly Memory in My Throat: Reflections of FTM
Feminist Voice and Agency,” in Men Doing Feminism (Thinking Gender), ed.
Tom Digby (London: Routledge, 1998), 99–129; Jamison Green, Becoming
a Visible Man (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press), 2–15 and 45–52.
13. Hale, “Tracing a Ghostly Memory in My Throat,” 100–104.

14. Myra Hird, “Unidentified Pleasures: Gender Identity and Its Failure,” Body
& Society 8(2) (2002): 43–47; Green, Becoming a Visible Man, 89–116.
15. Riki Lane, “Trans as Bodily Becoming: Rethinking the Biological as
Diversity, Not Dichotomy,” Hypatia 24(3) (2009): 136–157.
16. On the emergence and political uses of ‘cis,’ see A. Finn Enke, “The
Education of Little Cis: Cisgender and the Discipline of Opposing Bodies,”
in Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies,
ed. Anne Enke (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 60–77.
Alyosxa Tudor analyzes different notions of gender mobilized in relation to
trans, and in this framework, they point to the complexities involved in the
distinction between cis-, trans, and binary gendering, in “Dimensions of
Transnationalism,” Feminist Review 113 (forthcoming).
17. Mauro Cabral, “Versiones,” in Interdicciones: Escrituras de la Intersexualidad
en Castellano, ed. Mauro Cabral (Córdoba: Anarrés Editorial, 2009),
110–121.
18. Mauro Cabral, “The Marks on Our Bodies,” Intersex Day, accessed January
10, 2016, http://intersexday.org/en/mauro-cabral-marks-bodies/
19. Myra Hird, “Gender’s Nature: Intersexuality, Transsexualism and the
‘Sex’/‘Gender’ Binary,” Feminist Theory 13 (2000): 347–364; Hird,
“Unidentified Pleasures,” 51–52.
20. Monro and Warren, “Transgendering Citizenship,” 345–349; Surya
Monro, “Beyond Male and Female: Poststructuralism and the Spectrum of
Gender,” International Journal of Transgenderism 8(1) (2005): 18–35; Dean
Spade and Paisley Currah, “The State We’re In: Locations of Coercion and
Resistance in Trans Policy, Part 1,” Sexuality Research & Social Policy: Journal
of NSRC 4(4) (2007): 1–6; Dean Spade and Paisley Currah, “The State
We’re In: Locations of Coercion and Resistance in Trans Policy, Part 2,”
Sexuality Research & Social Policy: Journal of NSRC 5(1) (2008): 1–4.
21. Indicative of this tension is the increasing popular circulation of the term
TERF, which stands for Trans-exclusionary radical feminism.
22. David Bell and Jon Binnie, The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 3–9; Spade and Currah, “The State We’re
In…” (2008): 1–4.
23. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London:
Routledge, 1993), 1–5 and 27–35; Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power:
Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 90–91
and 120–128.
24. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(London: Routledge, 1990), 164–180; Judith Butler, Precarious Life. The
Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 20–27.
25. Gayle Rubin, “Of Catamites and Kings: Reflections on Butch, Gender, and
Boundaries,” in The Persistent Desire. A Femme-Butch-Reader, ed. Joan
Nestle (Boston: Alyson, 1992), 466–482; Judith Jack Halberstam, Female
Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 50–85 and 141–145.
26. See Jonathan Dollimore, “Bisexuality, Heterosexuality and Wishful
Theory,” Textual Practice 10(3) (1996): 523–539; and Merl Storr,
“Postmodern Bisexuality,” Sexualities 2(3) (1999): 309–325.
27. For a critical review of these biases, see Clare Hemmings, Bisexual Spaces: A
Geography of Sexuality and Gender (New York: Routledge, 2002), 15–50;
Miguel Muñoz-Laboy, “Beyond ‘MSM’: Sexual Desire among Bisexuality-
Active Latino Men in New York City,” Sexualities 7(1) (2004): 55–80; and
Storr, “Postmodern Bisexuality.”
28. Michael Kimmel, Sexual Self: The Construction of Sexual Scripts (Nashville:
Vanderbilt University Press, 2007), 267–269.
29. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey
(New York: Basic Books, 2000), especially “The Sexual Aberrations,” 2–14
and 23–26 and “The Transformations of Puberty,” 83–96. In Freud, the
idea that humans are primarily bisexual, where bisexuality is understood as
a combination of feminine and masculine characteristics, relates to the
usual understanding that sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and Kraft
Ebbing had at the time—see Merl Storr, Bisexuality: A Critical Reader
(London: Routledge, 1999), 20–21. Freud’s conceptualization of innate
bisexuality in the Three Essays is analyzed by Phillipe Van Heute and Tomas
Geyskens, who argue that it is the development of the theory of Oedipus
(later incorporated to the Three Essays), rather than the theory of infantile
sexuality, which signals the definitive normative turn in Freud toward the
justification of the naturalness of heterosexual development, even if the
theory of infantile sexuality already indicates a developmental approach
that ultimately justifies the primacy of heterosexuality. For these authors
the emphasis is in fact on the infant’s originary polymorphous dispositions
and partial drives, which are, in effect, sexually undifferentiated, although
the libido is ultimately conceived as masculine/active. See Philippe Van
Heute and Tomas Geyskens, A Non-Oedipal Psychoanalysis? A Clinical
Anthropology of Hysteria in the Works of Freud and Lacan (Leuven: Leuven
University Press, 2012), 36–43. This first approach to bisexuality will give
way to a notion of libido (which is masculine, or active in nature), combined

with passive (feminine) impulses. This view is clear in his explanation of
Oedipus, see Sigmund Freud, “Female Sexuality,” in On Sexuality: Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works (Penguin Freud Library)
Vol. 7, ed. Angela Richards, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1991), 367–392 (originally published in 1931); and Sigmund
Freud, “Femininity,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (The
Standard Edition), trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1990), 139–167 (originally published in 1933).
30. Van Heute and Geyskens, A Non-Oedipal Psychoanalysis?, 11–24 and 73–80.
Even Teresa De Lauretis, who defends pre-Oedipal sexuality, will recast
Freud’s pre-Oedipal undifferentiated sexuality to explore lesbian sexuality,
introducing in this instance sexual difference and clear definitions of the
object of desire. Teresa De Lauretis, The Practice of Love; Lesbian Sexuality
and Perverse Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
31. Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XIX (1923–25), ed. and
trans. James Strachey (London: IPA/The Hogarth Press, 1990), 28–34
(originally published in 1923). For an analysis of the twofold character of
the Oedipus complex and the bisexual element in relation to the structure
of the subject, see Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London:
Routledge, 1992), 356–362; and André Green, Key Ideas for a Contemporary
Psychoanalysis: Misrecognition and Recognition of the Unconscious, ed. Dana
Birksted-Breen, trans. Andrew Weller (London: IPA/Routledge, 2005),
190–195.
32. Hemmings, Bisexual Spaces, 24.
33. Hemmings, Bisexual Spaces, 24–25.
34. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of
Sexuality,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 49 (1968): 1–18. For an
extended reflection on the key role of deferred action, see Cathy Caruth, “An
Interview with Jean Laplanche,” Emory University, 2001, accessed January
10, 2015, http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.101/11.2caruth.txt
35. See Jacques Lacan, “Che vuoi?,” in Le Séminaire, Livre IV, La Relation d’Objet
(1956–57), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1998).
36. Bell and Binnie, The Sexual Citizen, 3–9; Diane Richardson, “Locating
Sexualities: From Here to Normality,” Sexualities 7(4) (2004): 404–407.
37. Diane Richardson, “Patterned Fluidities: (Re)Imagining the Relationship
Between Gender and Sexuality,” Sociology 41(3) (2007): 457–474.
38. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 106–130.

39. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 12–23, 36–53, and 67–87.
40. Patchen Markell articulates a similar critique in Bound by Recognition (New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1–8 and 10–16.
41. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I, 15–35. See also “The Ethics of
the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” an interview with Michel
Foucault, by H. Becker, R. Fornet-Betancourt, and A. Gomez Müller, in
Foucault, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, 281–301.
42. On radical democracy and the conformation of political identities, I make
reference here to the theoretical framework developed by Chantal Mouffe
and Ernesto Laclau in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical
Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). With respect to the performa-
tive approach to the conformation of political identities, that is, the idea
that political identities are not pre-given, but rather constitute themselves
in the articulation proper to political struggles, see, Chantal Mouffe, The
Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), 74–89; and Ernesto Laclau,
Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), 36–46.
44. Freud, “Femininity,” 139–167; Freud, “Female Sexuality,” 367–392.
45. Sigmund Freud, “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical
Distinction between the Sexes,” SE Vol. XIX (1923–25), ed. and trans.
James Strachey (London: IPA/The Hogarth Press, 1990), 241–258.
46. Van Heute and Geyskens, A Non-Oedipal Psychoanalysis?, 33–43. See Jean
Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macey (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1989); and “The Theory of Seduction and the Problem of the
Other,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 78 (1997), 653–666. For an
account of the significance of Laplanche’s intervention, see John Fletcher’s
Introduction to Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness (London: Routledge,
1999), 9–17; John Fletcher, Freud and the Scene of Trauma (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2013), 59–87.
47. See Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre V, Les formations de l’inconscient
(1957 – 58), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1998), espe-
cially the sections “La logique de la castration” and “La signification du
phallus”; Jacques Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” in Ecrits: The
First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 1996), 575–584; and Juan-David Nasio, Enseignement
De 7 Concepts Cruciaux De La Psychanalyse (Paris: Payot, 1992).
48. See, for example, Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London:
Verso, 2005), 49–81; Teresa De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on
Film, Theory and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987),

1–50; Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1983), 195–236; Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the
Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 1–32.
49. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of
Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210; Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics,
132–193; Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 159–170; Butler, Gender
Trouble, 49–99; and also from Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship
between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 1–26.
50. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 58–80.
51. In her critical review of symbolic castration to consider the constitution of
subjectivity, Silverman takes issue with the under-questioned association of
the phallus as a signifier of power with the masculine genital organ.
Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, 178–193.
52. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 19.
53. Butler, Gender Trouble, 38.
55. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” SE Vol. XIV (1914–16), ed.
and trans. James Strachey (London: IPA/The Hogarth Press, 1990),
243–258.
56. I am aware that iterability only constitutes one part of performativity
(through Derrida), and that through Foucault, we get the idea of ‘inadver-
tent consequences’ and ‘unexpected convergences of discourses’—and here
is where certain teleological aims of power can be defeated or subverted.
57. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 244.
58. Ibid.
59. Derrida’s notion of différance was somehow an inaugural concept for the
critique of this oppositional structural scheme. Jacques Derrida,
“Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bas (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1982), 3–28.
60. Ernesto Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the
Constitution of Political Logics,” in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and
Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues
on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), 68–72.
61. See Slavoj Zizek’s analysis of the fallacy of both descriptivists and anti-
descriptivists vis à vis the Lacanian notion of point de caption, which indi-
cates the constitutive inadequacy of every signifier, always marked by excess
or lack. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989),
97–108.
62. For a detailed analysis of the relationship of the concept of gender perfor-
mativity with the formation of melancholy gender, see Butler, “Melancholy
Gender/Refused Identification,” in The Psychic Life of Power, ed. Butler,
132–150.
63. The performative dimension of norms as sites of enduring struggles opens
up its contesting iterations according to their citational character. To work
as an authoritative ‘fact,’ the norm needs to reiterate itself constantly.
64. Derek McCullough and David Hall, “Polyamory: What It Is and What It
Isn’t,” Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality 6 (2003), accessed December
20, 2014, http://www.ejhs.org/volume6/polyamory.htm
65. I am thinking of transgression as a practice. Therefore, I am not using
‘intention’ as the conscious attitude of a self-determined subject but as the
not fully known direction of a certain agency in a struggle within the norms
that make that agency possible.
66. Christian Klesse, “Polyamory and Its ‘Others’: Contesting the Terms of
Non-Monogamy,” Sexualities 9(5) (2006): 577.
67. Melita Noël, “Progressive Polyamory: Considering Issues of Diversity,”
Sexualities 9(5) (2006): 615.
68. Ani Ritchie and Meg Barker, “‘There Aren’t Words for What We Do or
How We Feel So We Have to Make Them Up’: Constructing Polyamorous
Languages in a Culture of Compulsory Monogamy,” Sexualities 9(5)
(2006): 591–592.
69. In Sedgwick’s framework, normative heterosexuality, emblematized by the
heterosexual couple, comes to represent the public form that sexuality can
take (even if by the same movement it becomes de-sexualized). Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990). About that project in this regard, see also Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 5–11.
70. For a critique of the paradigm of transparency, and how it limits any eman-
cipatory potential, see Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race
(Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2007).
72. Gordon, “Governmental Rationality,” 42–44.
73. For a discussion of the ontological focus within some strands of the so-
called turn to affect and its critique within feminist scholarship, see my
“Permeable Bodies: Vulnerability, Affective Powers, Hegemony,” in
Vulnerability in Resistance, eds. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia

Sabsay (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
74. Chantal Mouffe developed the thesis that moral antagonisms are in part the
effect of the foreclosure of agonistic political struggle in On the Political
(London: Routledge, 2005).
75. See Butler, Precarious Life, 19–48; Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
(London: Verso, 2009), 33–55; and Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou,
Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity, 2013). In
a similar vein, Butler revisits some of her work on subject formation along
the lines of dependency and the capacity to be affected, in the Introduction
to Judith Butler, Senses of the Subject (New York: Fordham University Press,
2015).
76. Butler, Giving and Account of Oneself, 30–39 and 50–65.
77. See Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Laclau,
Emancipation(s); and Mouffe, The Return of the Political.
3
On the (b)orders of Sexual Citizenship
In 2008, in an issue celebrating the first 10 years of the journal Sexualities,

Jeffrey Weeks wrote an article, which was mischievously titled ‘Traps We Set
Ourselves.’ In the article, Weeks posed a simple argument: in terms of justice
and sexual freedoms, basically we are not doing that well, but neither are we
doing that badly.1 Putting aside for the moment the barely problematized
idea of the West that comes through in the article, as if Weeks were oblivious
to his particular location, what is interesting about Weeks’ observation lies
in the way he describes the different lines of thought that err, according to
his view, on the sign—whether positive or negative—of this balance. In his
article, Weeks reviews the various traps into which we fall when we use an
erroneous measurement of historic perspective to assess the present moment.
According to Weeks, the first trap we set ourselves ‘is to believe in the
transformation as automatic or inevitable, a journey from the darkness
of sexual repression into sexual freedom.’2 The second trap consists of
seeing ‘everything as a decline from a state of grace.’3 Finally, the third
one is ‘to believe that despite all the huffing and puffing nothing has

really changed.’4 Weeks reviews these traps, which he characterizes as

progressive, declinist, and continuist, respectively, to conclude that:
Above all, in various ways they occlude what seems to me the inevitable
reality: that the world we have won has made possible ways of life that
represent an advance not a decline in human relationships, and that have
broken through the coils of power to enhance individual autonomy, free-
dom of choice and more egalitarian patterns of relationships.
The context in which Weeks’ critical review is situated alludes to what can
be characterized as a global, albeit differentiated, process of sexual democ-
ratization.5 In effect, guided by the demands of feminist and Lesbian,
Gay, Trans*, Bisexuals, Queer, and Intersex social movements (LGBTQI)
as well as by human rights international agendas, different governmental
initiatives have been implementing (or are being pressured to implement)
new legal frameworks led by anti-discriminatory ideals and democratic
models of inclusion. Internationally, this is leading to a broadening of
sexual freedoms and increased access to rights. However, while reflecting
a growing consensus on the need to recognize sexual and gender diversity,
this transformation has been full of contradictions and intense conflicts.
I agree with Weeks on the need to celebrate these legal and institu-
tional achievements of the LGBTQI collectives. However, in his diag-
nosis there is a residual aspect of the argument that would seem exempt
from all problematization. I refer to the notion of freedom by which the
transformations of the last few decades are measured. Based on the com-
mon diagnosis summarized by Weeks, I propose to review here the idea
of freedom that underlies progressive sexual politics and the development
of that which, in this context of sexual democratization, has been known
as sexual citizenship.
I will begin with a critical reading of the development of the notion
of sexual citizenship, which signals a displacement from the radical cri-
tique of heteronormative culture to the politics of inclusion and the rec-
ognition of legal rights. Following this, I will review the assumptions
inherent in the category of sexual citizenship, focusing on the configura-
tion of the rights-bearing subject. While the rights of sexual minorities
have been largely understood as a stage in the advancement of freedom,
supporting a linear narrative of progress, this trajectory shows a more

complex distribution of sexual freedoms, which makes way for a differen-
tiated sexualization of citizenship. By reviewing the most prominent pub-
lic debates over the legal status of sex work at international levels, with a
particular focus on Latin America, as well as the emergence of new forms
of sexual racialization, I will analyze the imaginary borders of citizenship
and democracy, when they are characterized in sexual terms. How have
these new sexual citizenships constituted themselves and how have they
operated within the field of struggles for sexual freedom? Following this
analysis, my conclusions ultimately question the limits that the model
of sexual citizenship might impose on the ways in which we can think
of sexual freedom and justice, with the aim of opening the possibility of
reconsidering them from a radical conception of democracy.
The Liberal Sexual Citizen

During the last two decades, some gender and sexual ‘others’ have been
incorporated into the sphere of citizenship, leading to the emergence of
the political formulation of sexual citizenship. This figure of sexual citi-
zenship has made way for the formation of new sexual rights-bearing sub-
jects, indicating a profound transformation of the imaginary relationship
between sexuality, justice, and freedom. This transformation has led to
these new sexual citizens and especially the new sexual respectability that
they represent, becoming a point of reference against which all sexual
subjects have to measure themselves. This situation invites us to con-
sider some of the implications of the entanglement between citizenship
and sexuality, and examine the tensions arising from the articulation of
gender and sexual claims into claims for rights for conceiving political
subjectivity.
The figure of sexual citizenship is another example of the way in which
the liberal imaginary is mobilized to conceive the political subject and the
sexual subject that we have seen in Chapter 2. As in the case of the poli-
tics of identity and diversity, sexual citizenship, configured under the par-
adigm of individual rights, has made possible the expansion of freedoms
and the achievement of a number of rights. But at the same time it has
led to new modes of sexual regulation accompanied by new modalities of

discrimination. What I wish to discuss here is the regulative dimension
of citizenship, which in my view is partly due to the liberal legacy that
weighs upon the notion of sexual citizenship. The fact that the sexual
rights-bearing subject upon which sexual citizenship is based is config-
ured within the tradition of political liberalism imposes a set of limits on
citizenship while, at the same time, presupposing certain norms through
which sexuality acquires social meaning.
The notion of sexual citizenship was developed in the 1990s and
became a significant constituent in the mainstream of current sexual poli-
tics of recognition and inclusion.6 In order to consider the scope of sex-
ual citizenship, it is useful to remember Diane Richardson’s distinction
between different kinds of sexual rights.7 Richardson remarked that there
are two broad notions of sexual citizenship: the first is related to specific
sexual rights addressed to particular communities and the second is con-
cerned with the differential accessibility to universal rights depending on
one’s own gender and/or sexuality. The former refers to the politics of
recognition of particular sexual identities or the rights of specific collec-
tives that challenge heterosexual norms more broadly, such as the right to
self-definition and freedom of expression of one’s sexual identity or gen-
der (i.e., the gender identity law), rights related to the decriminalization
of homosexuality (i.e., the derogation of sodomy laws), access to gender
reassignment treatments, or the demand to cease the practice of ‘repara-
tive surgeries’ for intersex infants and children. The latter refers to the
horizon of universal abstract equality; in other words, it subscribes to the
principle of inclusion of every subject within the scope of universal citi-
zenship and equal rights (i.e., gay marriage) and involves those measures
against discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation,
extending a so-called universal right to every member of the population.
However, beyond this orientative general characterization, there is no
exact consensus as to what sexual citizenship involves or what is covered
by it. As it depends on the contingency of struggles and demands that are
posed in the public arena, sexual citizenship is necessarily an open and
unfinished concept.
The notion of sexual citizenship emerged from the critique of the het-
erocentric bias that the notion of citizenship entails. One of the main
aims of this critique was to counter the heteronormative assumptions

that organize the public sphere as well as the divide between the public
and private domains. It emerged from a critique of the heteronormative
central figure of the family that organizes the private sphere, which has
been the object of vexed debates in the last years concerning the sanc-
tioning of gay marriage in the USA among other countries. With regard
to the heteronormative assumption that weighs on that which is public,
sexual citizenship was a response to those arguments that—albeit rightly
defending the right to privacy—state that sexual preferences and prac-
tices are a private matter and therefore should be limited to the private
domain. These arguments are apparently indifferent to the public char-
acter of the institution of heterosexuality, perpetuating the naturaliza-
tion of heterosexual relations, which enjoy an omnipresent visibility in all
dimensions of public life, and rendering invisible those sexual practices
and preferences that run counter to the assumed heterosexual ordering
of social relations. A similar movement can be observed with respect to
those expressions of gender that trouble the heteronormative presump-
tion of the gender binary. Systematic erasures and discriminations reveal
a pervasive transphobic ethos, so that certain genders or expressions of
gender are seen as a burden for the moral landscape of the public, and the
abundance of legal codes that have been penalizing expressions of gender
and/or sexuality that contradict the heteronormative organization of real-
ity are nothing but clear traces of the endurance of the naturalization of
heterosexualized binaries.8 In this sense, the development of sexual citi-
zenship not only implied a critique of what in the USA is understood as a
liberal or libertarian approach to rights, by which sexuality is conceived as
a strictly private matter. Through more radical or hopeful eyes, the prom-
ise of sexualizing citizenship (understood as de-hetero-sexualizing citizen-
ship) indicated the possibility of transforming the norms of citizenship as
a whole, as well as the public and political fields that give citizenship its
meaning and scope as a heterosexual construct. Further, considering citi-
zenship as a fundamental form of belonging to a community, advocates
of sexual citizenship seriously questioned the heterocentrism that reigns
in the organization of social life.
Seen in this light, the promise of sexual citizenship has not been lim-
ited to the attainment of a list of rights—from reproductive rights, the
right to adoption or access to therapies for assisted reproduction for non-

heterosexual subjects, to the right to be legally recognized according to
the self-identification of gender, independent of the gender assigned at
birth—but rather it has aimed to transform those norms of citizenship that
create this same construct as a heterosexual one. As citizenship is always
already sexual, what this critical notion of sexual citizenship implies is
not so much sexualizing citizenship, as the de-heterosexualization of citi-
zenship. In this sense, the transformative horizon of sexual rights would
extend well beyond the expansion of the field of citizens’ rights and the
inclusion of various ‘others’ in the sphere of citizenship (although this
movement, of course, is a positive part of its operation) toward the poten-
tial resignification of citizenship itself.
Perhaps it is partly in view of this promising transformative potential
of sexual citizenship that Jeffrey Weeks considers the changes that have
occurred in recent years as a positive sign of the advance of autonomy
and freedom, distancing himself from the critique that queer movements
have made of the politics of inclusion for being limited to the expansion
of the field of rights within the heteronormative framework established
by the liberal-democratic state. He considers that the queer critique falls
within the third trap, the continuist trap, in diagnosing the current situ-
ation, which considers that nothing has radically changed, disregarding
‘the legal reforms and institutional achievements of LGBTQI people that
many of us have welcomed as the signs of greater toleration (and the
result of hard work).’ According to Weeks, the queer critique presents an
unfair assessment of these achievements by viewing them as ‘little more
than the latest ruse of power, fully complicit with the strategic need of
neo-liberalism,’9 or, when suspecting them of being complicit with the
neoliberal model, doubting the value of ‘gay identity (as) little more than
a pseudo ethnic identity that is easily accommodated by late capitalist
societies, easily succumbing to the pink dollar or pound or euro.’10
It is not my intention to vindicate the queer critique or what Weeks
thinks of it. However, I do want to point out that when the celebration
for the heralded achievements of sexual citizenship is reduced to a list of
acquired liberties, while leaving aside a radical questioning of the frame-
work within which those liberties take shape—that is, leaving aside a
critical examination of what is understood by freedom and choice, as well
as the critical dimension that sexual citizenship may assume with respect
to the imaginary norms that weigh on citizenship given its liberal and
heteronormative legacy—their transformative potential is undermined.
To enhance the potential that these rights could imply for the transfor-
mation of the hegemonic political-sexual imaginary, we have to take into
account that these freedoms imply new modalities of regulation and new
forms of discrimination. In effect, the sexual politics of inclusion and
recognition are more contradictory than they may seem at first glance, for
instance when becoming the occasion for reconfiguring their own ‘others’
and in doing so making way for a renewed articulation of old and new
forms of discrimination.
The thesis that I want to develop here is that one of the aspects that
undermine the potential radical sexual transformation of the imaginary
of citizenship is that this sexual critique of citizenship has not altered the
idea that citizenship corresponds to the rights of an abstract and universal
individual. Within the framework of this limited concept of citizenship,
the liberal individual is authorized to become a rights-bearing subject
precisely by virtue of their universal and equivalent value. However, this
classical notion of citizenship always has depended on the configuration
of its constitutive other as one who lacks these characteristics that define
the subject as potentially political. As I will show in what follows, the fig-
ure of the sexual citizen points to idealized forms of belonging and subse-
quent exclusionary dynamics. As discussed in Chapter 2, the universality
and equality that define the sexual rights-bearing subject depend upon
cultural norms to which that subject must adjust in order to be recog-
nized as such. These norms point first and foremost to the configuration
and subsequent reification of the self—conceived as the ultimate reality
of the subject—under the guise of the sovereign individual.
This is the self that Michel Foucault characterized as the subject of
liberalism. In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault depicts liberalism as a par-
ticular regime of government where both the state and the governed are
co-constituted as sovereign separate entities.11 The central feature of the
relationship between government and governed is freedom, and it would
be ‘the management and organization of the conditions in which one can
be free’ that would distinguish the liberal reason from any other form of
government.12 Within the liberal reason, subjects are interpellated by the
state as free subjects; and it is precisely through this ‘liberating regime’

that subjectivation occurs. According to Foucault, freedom comes into
play, not in opposition to oppression but as a specific modality of power.
This configuration of power helps us understand different instances of
biopolitics, among which the sexual will occupy a central place. In effect,
the sexual subject that Foucault analyzed in his The History of Sexuality
Volume I is a variant of the liberal self.13 According to Foucault, ‘liberal-
ism must produce freedom, but this very act entails the establishment
of limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations.’14 Within
the liberal reason, freedom entails a whole new order of regulation, and
freedom with regard to sexual behavior will not be exempt from it. This
is the logic that Foucault is drawing attention to when he describes the
emergence of sexuality as a social dispositive. It was precisely through
this liberal self that sexuality was also produced and reified as an already
existing reality and an entitlement of such a self (always already enticed
to want to be sexually free).
On the basis of this political tradition, then, sexual citizenship
announces the formation of new subjects of sexual rights, as if these were
pre-existing entities. This reification of the subject of sexual rights pre-
sumes that sexuality is a universal attribute of the subject conceived of
in liberal terms. However, the fact that sexuality has been visualized as
the right of a subject is just one instance in the discursive field of lib-
eralism that today monopolizes sexual politics and the very meaning of
the process of sexual democratization. Even when sexual progressivism
critiques the exclusions that sexual democratization might produce, this
sexual epistemology, as Joseph Massad calls it, remains for the most part
unquestioned.15 But, what are the problematic implications of conceiv-
ing of sexuality in liberal terms?
The Sexual Norms of Citizenship

Jeffrey Weeks somehow plays down the argument he presents in this article
when explaining his own vision about the current scenario. Very much in
line with his seminal work and long trajectory, Weeks recognizes that he does
not ‘believe in the possibility of an unproblematic sexual liberation’ either.16
In this respect, he himself reminds us of the observations of Michel

Foucault, and points out that ‘you cannot “liberate” sexuality as if you
were taking the lid off a cauldron.’17 Weeks goes on to say:
Sexuality is not a property that that can be repressed or released, but a his-
torically shaped series of possibilities, actions, behaviours, desires, risks,
identities, norms and values that can be reconfigured and recombined but
cannot be simply unleashed.18
This anti-essentialist claim about sexuality not only undoes any claim to
a progressive narrative, but also suggests that we need a different (his-
torical) approach to sexual freedom that addresses its socially constructed
character. What are the implications of thinking of both freedom and
sexuality as substantial universal attributes, liable to become, by virtue of
this essentialization, the objects of rights? Albeit problematic, the positive
aspects of this transfiguration are clear to Weeks. The socially regulated
aspects of this transformation, which preserve the social role of sexuality
as a regulative field, are what I want to explore. I am particularly inter-
ested in the liberal character of this sexual epistemology as it imposes
norms that determine the conditions in which certain subjects can appear
as sexual rights-bearing subjects and, as such, also defines the terms in
which the relationship of the subject with its gender and its sexuality can
become politically intelligible or, in other words, registered as a political
matter.19
In Chapter 2, we saw some of the ways in which, when put into
practice, these norms impact on the conformation of gender and sexual
identities. The politics of recognition and the governmentalization of
sexual diversity depend on certain sexual norms that similarly overdeter-
mine citizenship. These norms indicate an urge to normalize the field of
gender-sexual dissidence and the subsequent configuration of renewed
versions of sexual-political respectability. This sexual respectability might
not necessarily be restricted to a rigid heteronormative framework, but it
is still based on an incipient and also disputed homonormativity.20 It is
this new respectability that then determines the inclusion of some sexual
and gendered ‘others’—normalized and invested as sexual citizens—and
the exclusion of other gender-sexual dissidents that challenge its norms.
Certainly, it is not a radically queer version of sexual practices, rela-

tionships, and gender expressions that is mobilized by the defense of
the human and citizenship rights of lesbian, gay, and trans people. Nor
is it a queer understanding of freedom and sexual justice that is hon-
ored when governments grant certain freedoms. The reach of sexual
diversity does not know how to accommodate easily and unhesitatingly
a long list of people who are not normalized according to the canons of
a determined version of sexual progressivism. These include sex work-
ers, gender dissidents whose expression of gender does not coincide
with the institutionalized (i.e., medicalized) gender variants, bisexu-
als and others with sexual preferences and inclinations more complex
than those that can be represented by the figures of gay and lesbian.
These might include non-monogamous dissidents, polyamorous com-
munities, sadomasochists, fetishists, not to mention racialized, non-
national, disabled, or poor non-conforming subjects whose access to
virtual abstract rights in terms of recognition does not match the actual
exclusions they encounter when they wish to access social resources,
from health care to education.
In relation to respectability and sexual and political practices, let us
take the case of sex work. The contrast between the advance of sexual
democratization and the impasse at which the demands of the move-
ments of sex workers find themselves merits some reflection. This con-
trast is not new and can be seen both at the global and the local levels.
There has been heated debate for decades on the legal status of sex work,
both on the international stage and in regional forums, and sex work-
ers’ demands for rights and the decriminalization of sex work continue
to be the object of much disdain. The legal deadlock which the rights
demanded by sex workers systematically encounter signals some of the
borders of sexual citizenship, which, in turn, mark boundaries for the
democratization of gender and sexuality, a process that continually pro-
duces new norms of citizenship in accordance with re-articulated versions
of sexual respectability.
The renewed abolitionist impulse within feminism and the growing
and expansive framing of the sex industry within the paradigm of human
trafficking have not helped and, in fact, have worsened the situation.21
Abolitionist feminists totally oppose the demands of associations of sex
workers who—at local, national, regional, and transnational levels—are

demanding the decriminalization of sex work. In this context, the possi-
bility of the relevant governmental agencies responding to these demands
and creating policies in line with them remains remote. These organiza-
tions denounced this lack of response during the European Conference
of Sex Work organized by The International Committee on the Rights
of Sex Workers in Europe (ICRSE) that took place in the European
Parliament October 15–17, 2005. The aim of this conference was to
‘reformulate the debate on human trafficking towards a debate on work,
migration and human rights.’22
In the Latin American context, echoing a broad coalition of local and
national organizations, the Network of Women Sex Workers of Latin
America and the Caribbean, RedTraSex, also denounced this situation,
arguing that these conditions leave sex workers in a situation of greater
vulnerability not only in relation to human trafficking networks and the
abuses within the sex industry, but also exposed to the risk of persecution
by governmental authorities and dangerous working conditions. During
the General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) that
took place June 5–7, 2011, RedTraSex declared23:
Although we live in democratic countries where we are protected by laws

and treaties to which the legal systems of Latin American and the Caribbean
adhere, our rights are unreasonably constrained by various rules with puni-
tive content dictated on the pretext of pursuing society’s common good…
We talk about basic rights such as the right to privacy, life, the right to
choose one’s own project that a person can choose or accept.
(…)
This constant removal and police chases—protected by laws that far
from recognizing sex work as a legal activity tend to criminalize it—oblige
sex workers to go underground…
(…)
It is evident that there is a need for an urgent review of the legislation
not only in Latin America but worldwide, to ensure that the rights as
human beings of those of us who practice sex work are respected.
Recognition—and not indifference or denial—is that which will allow the
generation of a fair and healthy society, in which everyone can access the
full enjoyment of their rights.24
The demand for recognition of the basic (human) rights of sex workers,
as well as the denouncement of the effects of the punitive measures that
weigh upon sex work, marks the territory of sex workers’ political strug-
gle. In a manifesto published on their web page on December 14, 2011,
AMMAR-CTA, the Association of Sex Workers of Argentina, current
member of the national Central Union of Workers of Argentina (CTA, la
Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina) and one of the most solid unions
at the international level, stated25:
Some of those who are against the concept of sex work maintain that ‘all
prostitution implies violence against women and it is necessary to eradicate
it.’ They are wrong to aim to eradicate it, but correct with respect to vio-
lence. Our work, in the conditions in which we undertake it, is not exempt
from violence.
We suffer the violence of being discriminated against by a hypocritical
society that calls us indecent and then hires us; as well as the physical vio-
lence we suffer from some of our clients, partners and pimps.
We suffer the violent absence of the State in public policies of health,
social security and education that should take care of the needs of our sec-
tor, and of the legislative frameworks that should protect our work from
exploitation and abuse.
But also, we suffer the presence of that same State through its judicial
system that issues legislation that criminalizes us and through its security
forces that arrest and repress us, and charge us to ‘allow us’ to work.26
What does this indifference regarding the rights of sex workers tell us
about what could be considered democratic sexual values? How are we to
understand this refusal to include the concrete demands of the collectives
of sex workers within the ideas of progressive sexual politics? What does
the sustained resistance by governmental agencies against decriminalizing
sex work with the aim of meeting the demands of those who practice it
tell us about the sexual norms that constitute citizenship?
The significant number of States that continue to criminalize inde-
pendent sex work while implementing other progressive sexual policies
is symptomatic of the regulative and hierarchical dimension of sexual
democratization. Sex work is an area that marks the limits of what
we understand as sexual freedom and democratic ideals, highlighting
the sociopolitical models of sexual respectability and the exclusionary

imaginaries that configure hegemonic notions of diversity, recognition,
and autonomy. These models work as epistemological frameworks regu-
lating contemporary subject formations, among which the sexual citizen
has become central. The debates on the social status of sex work and
the struggles for the rights of sex workers draw attention to some of the
exclusions that liberal notions of difference that are conceived as diversity
imply for the conceptualization of recognition and democracy.
The case of the sex industry reveals that, rather than advancing in a
linear manner toward freedom and sexual justice, what we see is a dif-
ferential sexualization of citizenship that rests upon renewed normative
visions of the modes in which sexuality can be practiced and experienced.
In this case, sex workers emerge as the other of sexual democratization.
It is within this othering logic that the process of sexual democratiza-
tion mobilizes both a differential distribution of sexual freedoms and the
regulation of the conditions in which one may be registered as a sexual
subject with full rights.
Sexual Democracy and the Fail

of Multiculturalism
The entanglement between sexual democratization and othering pro-
cesses that follow the exclusionary logic of citizenship can also be assessed
in relation to the entwinement of current European sexual rhetoric and
politics of diversity with nationalist and imperialist projects. On a factual
level, it has been amply argued that the liberalizing trend regarding the
‘acceptance’ of gender and sexual diversity which, according to Eric Fassin,
points to a ‘sexual democracy’ has become the occasion for implement-
ing other discriminations based on cultural, religious, or racially marked
differences.27 Indeed, the us/them geopolitical borders configured around
the rhetoric of freedom and democracy have acquired renewed sexual con-
notations since the ‘War on Terror’ era, where the emblematic other has
been associated with ‘Islam,’ in turn used as a monolithic and amorphous
signifier. In this context, ‘Islam’ has worked stereotypically to evoke ‘the
fundamentalist threat,’ in accordance with increasing Islamophobia. As if
it were clear what that signifier, Islam, would represent, one of the ways
in which cultural racism has been re-articulated has taken recourse to a
progressive sexual rhetoric that places Islam at the borders of the West.
The sexual conservatism associated with Islam has been one of the main
arguments used as proof of the need to intervene and modernize it.
In turn, the logic of othering based on the idea that those who fol-
low Islam are intrinsically sexist and prone to homophobia has allowed
for the reaffirmation of a monolithic self-image of the West as sexually
democratic and free from ‘anachronistic’ biases. The dichotomous image
of a world geopolitically divided between presumably sexual democrats
and antidemocrats has marked this moment as being characterized by
the proclaimed ‘failure and consequent end of multiculturalism.’ The
addresses of Angela Merkel in October 2010 who stated that the German
multicultural society has failed and David Cameron in February 2011,
who said ‘the “doctrine of state multiculturalism” has failed,’ together
with statements by Nicolas Sarkozy in February of the same year were
landmarks in this regard.28 In this scenario, the phantasized image that
undermines any attempt of cultural translation could be summarized as
follows: ‘the terrorist who threatens Western democracy is similarly the
enemy of sexual dissidents.’29
Clearly, it is not that these borders were not sexualized before; the
issue here is that these borders are being sexualized in an inverted way,
with particular political outcomes. When Edward Said analyzes the work
of Flaubert, for example, he shows how the Orient was characterized as
having a too relaxed sexuality and it was defined as the other to a sexu-
ally repressed Victorian society that understood itself as respectable and
reserved. However, today we find that the signs have been inverted. The
West, or the global North, currently defines itself as sexually liberated,
and the Orientalized other, which a century ago represented the threat of
hyper-sexuality, now occupies the place of hypo-sexuality. The other that
long ago was the object of erotic fantasies that trespassed on the limits of
the repressed sexual culture of the West is now archetypically configured
as repressed, authoritarian, and intolerant in contrast with the supposed
sexual freedom that characterizes the West today.
Indeed, the democratic sexual turn is a key element for defining the
borders of the advanced West or the global North, becoming an essential
element in the re-articulation of neocolonial imaginaries. In this context,

the hypothesis of homonationalism developed by Jasbir Puar has won great
popularity. Jasbir Puar coined the term ‘homonationalism’ to describe
the process through which the imaginary inclusion and the celebration
of sexual diversity end up playing a key role in the elaboration of new
nationalist fantasies fundamentally articulated around foreign policies.30
This is the case of the USA, in which, following 9/11, ‘saving women and
gays from Islamism’ has served to justify the nation’s imperial impulses
and its intervention in the Mid-East. In the case of the European Union,
particularly in the case of the UK, Germany, France, and Holland, the
homonationalist hypothesis is used to describe a process through which
the welcoming of sexual and gender diversity has served anti-migration
policies and the segregation of postcolonial populations within Europe.
In this last case, the construction of a nationalist discourse, based on the
supposed tolerance that characterizes the contemporary culture of multi-
cultural Europe, serves as a basis for setting up security measures to guard
against, expel, and prevent the entry of migrants and creates a space for
the display of xenophobic positions, all in the name of defending these
values of diversity.
These considerations expose the role that these new sexual norms have
in national and regional politics of exclusion and othering. But the inter-
nationalization of the politics of inclusion also points in a similar direc-
tion. In a more benevolent fashion, a set of international developments
have taken place to secure sexual and more specifically sexual minorities’
rights as human rights.31 However, it is the liberal universalist vision of
the United Nations and EU policies regarding the recognition of gender
and sexual diversity that has become the leading trend and the frame-
work within which every project concerned with these matters will have
to define its own terms. The fact that these agencies have set the agenda
of sexual democratization implies that, to be perceived as democratic,
governments and progressive sexual movements are forced to adhere
to the liberal model. As a result, critiques or challenges to liberal and
subsequent neoliberal approaches to questions of sexual inclusion and
recognition run the risk of being interpreted as antidemocratic. In the
light of the hegemonic liberal understanding of sexual freedom and jus-
tice, the question remains: What does it mean to be in favor of sexual
democratization? Is it possible to think of alternatives to the particular

liberal understanding of sexuality that hegemonizes notions of freedom
and justice?
The production of sexuality as an entitlement or a right of a rights-
bearing subject has come to monopolize sexual politics and the meaning
of sexual democratization. As I argued in Chapter 2, this has specific
consequences for the ways in which we can imagine sexual diversity and,
when looked from a transnational perspective, has another set of other-
ing effects. The reframing of sex work within the antitrafficking para-
digm reinforces the persecution of sex worker migrants and is a serious
obstacle to the mobility of sex workers across borders. In turn, within
liberal Western democracies, a number of recently instituted directives
are actively recasting the aims of feminist and LGBTQI movements to
liberalize gendered and sexual life and to affirm greater sexual diversity
in order to promote discourses on gender equity and sexual freedom that
have assumed racist and exclusionary forms.
Sexual democratization has become essential to the definitions and
implications of secularism, modernity, democratic values, and even the
opposition between Western modern national identities and their ‘others.’
This prompts us to ask whether the ideals of sexual democracy have been
used to reinforce and legitimize processes of cultural othering and racial
profiling, or if we would better understand this dynamic by assuming that
the democratization of sexuality implies certain ideas about the secular
and the modern that are already indebted to racist/colonialist views at
their origins and continue to serve them. This would mean that, due to
its conceptual presuppositions, sexual democratization might be inher-
ent to a Eurocentric and racializing logic. Faced with this panorama, we
seem to be in an epistemological impasse. On the one hand, those who
defend sexual democratization as it is dismiss the critiques made of it for
its Eurocentric bias. On the other hand, those who defend cultural diver-
sity, including forms of patriarchal power and heterosexism, dismiss the
critiques leveled at those features from an emancipationist point of view.32
The project of current mainstream sexual politics has been the object of
manifold critiques. Among them, one could mention humanist critiques that
are based on the idea that emancipatory ideals were instrumentalized by rac-
ist agendas33; critiques made to the allegedly intrinsic cultural imperialism of
such ideals34; or those indebted to the tradition of the queer of color cri-

tique,35 within which a renovated intersectional and postcolonial critique has
also emerged.36 On each side of the debate, either promoting the expansion
of sexual human rights, albeit with a critical eye on its racist instrumentaliza-
tion (critique of Islamophobia, humanist/universalist, and pluralist/multicul-
turalist positions), or questioning its logics more radically (queers of color,
intersectional approaches, anti-imperialist and decolonial critiques) we may
find a wide range of positions, but it is beyond of the scope of this chap-
ter to address them thoroughly enough to do them justice in all their rich
complexity.
What is important for my argument is to highlight the constitutive
process of othering that accompanies sexual democratization and its nor-
malizing effects. To address this question, it is necessary to keep question-
ing on the one hand the notion of sexual citizenship and the language of
rights, and on the other hand the sexual epistemology that is assumed by
this legal framework. What are the implications of articulating sexual dis-
sidents’ claims in terms of sexual citizenship? What are the implications
of thinking about sexuality in terms of rights?
Subjects of Law
I suspect that in order to better comprehend the exclusionary logic of sex-
ual democracy and citizenship, it will not be enough to stress the ways in
which the democratization of gender and sexuality have become essential
to nation-building discourses and politics. Although this is undoubtedly
a most important task given the current scenario, we also need to consider
the following question: through which terms do sexual democracy and
citizenship build themselves? How are gender and sexuality conceived in
these current political conditions? What and who do these politics sup-
posedly defend when we consider their mode of address?
The question here is whether sexual democracy and citizenship could
be imagined in more inclusive terms or whether their others figure as
the constitutive outside of sexual democracy and citizenship them-
selves, awaiting their admittance through forms of assimilation. In
order to address this problem, I place the critique of the exclusionary
logic of sexual democratization within the broader critique of its lib-

eral assumptions from a radical democratic approach. I suggest that if
the sexual rights-bearing subject has been established in Euro-American
terms, this has partly become possible because, despite this process
entailing questioning the heterocentric bias of citizenship, this critique
still remained attached to certain unquestioned colonial and orientalist
ideas about citizenship, such as the entitlement of an abstract individual
and the universal subject-citizen. In effect, as Engin Isin has remarked,
the Western classical notion of citizenship is configured through an
orientalist view that depends on the production of the other of Western
modernity as lacking the abstract and universal subject position that
defines the subject as a citizen.37 As it is the abstract individual who
becomes entitled to be a subject of rights by virtue of his or her univer-
sal and equal value, sexual democratization becomes implicitly secular
and stands for toleration, personal liberties, and individual rights.
I suggest that the notion of (sexual) citizenship and concomitant ideas
of sexual democratization enable two entangled dynamics. The first one
is the establishment of the rights-bearing subject who has rights to sexual-
ity, so that sexuality becomes the right of a citizen-subject conceived in
liberal terms. This dynamic, in turn, inherits the specifically sexual modes
of regulation that have been part of the production of the liberal citizen,
some of which were addressed in Chapter 2, such as sexual respectability
and the heterocentric bias in norms of modern citizenship. The second
dynamic concerns the model of exclusionary integration that governs
the idea of democratic modernity. Sexual politics—and sexual citizen-
ship in particular—assumes an inclusive discourse of universal rights
that depends on non-integrated others (those who cannot be integrated
or assimilated). In this way, it establishes a universal discourse of rights
that requires those who are not included to actually work. Both of these
dynamics help to establish the liberal subject of rights that is pivotal to a
model of sexual democratization that depends upon the exclusion and/or
assimilation of those who are considered backward or outside a progres-
sive history.
The sexual rights-bearing subject is an imaginary formation that estab-
lishes an imaginary relationship between a subject and a political com-
munity, be it the nation-state or the human understood as a political
formation entitled to human rights. This subject position is assumed to

be abstract and universal, hence its equal value, but, as we have seen with
Foucault, the universal subject that appears as an a priori of any possible
politics is already traversed by a set of historical conditionings and power
relations, namely, those of the liberal reason.
Along these lines, Wendy Brown’s critique of multiculturalism further
expands on this critique of the liberal self.38 According to Brown, the
particular kind of self figured by the subject of rights is free in the sense
that it is split from any cultural or other contextual conditioning; its
moral autonomy is defined through a core inner self that is conceived as
an ontological a priori. Its relation to culture or any set of norms will be
determined by reason. Brown argues that within liberal views of cultural
diversity, culture is reconceived as a particular (secondary) attribute of a
reified universal subject, which is imagined as split from culture so that it
will ‘choose’ how to relate to it in a reasoned and sovereign way. Drawing
on Brown, I have argued elsewhere that when sexuality is operationalized
as a right it reproduces this split and poses an undifferentiated univer-
sal sexual subject as an ontological a priori of sexual politics.39 In other
words, this sexual rights-bearing subject is a formal figure assumed to
exist beyond any determination; and yet, it evokes a sexual inner self that
christalizes as a totality. Now, for this totality to appear as such, a consti-
tutive outside has to emerge, and here is where the inevitable process of
othering finds its place, both at the level of the subject of sexual rights
and the community to which this subject imaginarily belongs.
At the level of social formations, against the liberal fantasy of total
inclusion, Judith Butler’s and Ernesto Laclau’s understandings of the con-
stitutive outside might allow us to see the inevitability of this dynamic
of othering by which both social and subjective totality turns out to be
simply a suturing effect. Butler’s view is that the networks of significa-
tion in which subjects are constituted produce areas of exclusion that
remain outside the field of signification, and therefore outside intelligi-
bility. Butler’s take on Derrida’s constitutive outside allows us to grasp
those subject formations that, like the sexual citizen, are habilitated in
opposition to that which is deemed abject, that is, figuring as the limits of
who we may conceive as part of intelligible humanity.40 For Laclau, it is
through the production of an outside figured as a constitutive other that
society—as much as a political community of citizens—is configured as a

whole.41 Whereas in Butler’s outside the abject seems to be excluded from
the field of signification, Laclau’s outside remains within signification,
although only to signify negation; their abject other delineates an antago-
nistic other that negates the identity of, and therefore threatens, this total-
ity. These are different versions of constitutive exclusion, and yet for both
authors, the outside that configures this constituent moment depends
on the power dynamics of signification (for both signification and power
cannot operate without the implication of the other). This means that
for neither of them is there any kind of ontological break between what
remains inside signification and what remains outside. Further, this con-
tinuity means that for both of them the configuration of this outside
would be contingent and undetermined.
Now, the way the contingency of the constitutive exclusion is under-
stood is again different. From Laclau’s point of view, the fact that any
social totality depends on a constitutive exclusion leads to an equally
constitutive antagonism within society. The containment of this antago-
nism depends on the hegemony achieved by certain signifiers to represent
(suture) this totality, which, at the same time, will be inescapably haunted
by counter-hegemonic moves. According to Laclau, the result of hege-
monic struggles is contingent and the meaning of these signifiers only
depends on the struggles for the signifiers themselves. Butler’s outside,
in contrast, would be better understood as a fold within power.42 In a
Foucauldian manner, for Butler this fold exceeds and might even subvert
the field of signification established within power, so that the possibilities
of resignification opened up by this constitutive outside depend on the
contingent effects of productive power, and therefore the performative
effects of subversion and resistance cannot be foreseen.
At the level of the citizen-subject of rights, against the ontological con-
ceptualization of the particular kind of self I referred to earlier, the excess
produced in the elaboration of an abject and constitutive outside parallels
the psychic excess produced in the process of subjectivation. This process
involves a complex dynamic of incorporation of social norms, which is
at the same time a process of embodiment of norms. The question that
arises here is that beyond the multiplicity of positions and differences,
the self totalizes—sutures—a multifaceted set of positionalities. So what
kinds of dynamics are at stake in the work of mediation that the self does
as a unifying force upon its plural configuration? From a narrative point
of view, it has been argued that the self always emerges in retrospective
forms and signals the tension between sameness and otherness to account
for the plurality of its own formation.43 Now, the other element that calls
upon this unifying force is the embodied character of that self. How does
the fact that we are bodies impact on that tension between unity and
plurality?
The reconceptualization of the Freudian embodied subject that Butler
radicalizes against Lacan may perhaps enable us to consider this question.
Lacan’s reading of Freud’s ‘The Ego and the Id’ in the ‘Mirror Stage’ leads
Lacan to develop his concept of the imaginary character of the Ego.44 The
Ego as the projection of a bodily surface can only be imaginary—and the
images with which the Ego identifies, and is therefore formed, aggregate
into a necessary illusionary unity. Between the self-satisfied images of the
ideal Ego and the desiring subject of language, marked by the lack that
emerges in confrontation with the law—the Ego Ideal—the subject is
split. In Butler, the self is also an illusionary construct and the subject is
also split, but instead of being structured as a tension between imaginary
embodied self and symbolic lack, body image and language, the lack of
correspondence of the self with itself, that is, the discordance between the
subject and the self, is at the core of imaginary embodiment. For Butler,
the coherence of the self depends on a set of norms of embodiment that
involve fundamental exclusions—notably the objects that are forbidden
from love, which will be incorporated in the form of identification. The
Ego becomes the projection of a bodily surface that, first and foremost,
embodies a set of losses. In The Psychic Life of Power,45 Butler engages
with Freud’s ‘Ego and the Id’ and ‘Mourning in Melancholia’46 to show
that the social mechanisms of subjectivation through which the self is
constituted operate in a psychosomatic way and effect a set of (social)
prohibitions that translate into fundamental losses that are not evident
to the self (who comes into being through those losses, and therefore
cannot account for them). In sum, the self is the effect of an exclusion
that remains unconscious to the subject, not because it implies a distance
from its ‘constitutive lack’ but because this exclusion responds to the loss
that cannot be acknowledged as such.
Introducing Freud in order to think about the embodied configuration

of the subject and her further engagement with Jean Laplanche for think-
ing about the crucial role of the Other in the formation of the subject
both point in the direction of originary exclusions that operate at psycho-
somatic levels.47 The embodied dimension of the self indicates that the
self emerges as the totalizing effect of a suture, but one that is internally
split. Butler recognizes that this split, in turn, indicates the necessary
misrecognizing logic that structures the self, by which any signifier that
is said to represent the self would necessarily be inadequate to actually
do so. But these signifiers remain within the realm of the imaginary, and
it will be the force of fantasy that mobilizes them. The fact that suture
depends on misrecognition means that the self is the effect of the equivo-
cal signifiers on which its imaginary unity depends.
From the point of view of both interpellation and enunciation, we
may say that on the one hand the subject of enunciation represents a
halt—a fixing point—in the open process of signification. As the subject
of enunciation, the subject becomes a point of reference, localization,
and anchoring that organizes discourse, but this is a structural position
that undoes the subject’s singularity. Moreover, as this subject of enun-
ciation is also a signifying subject (which brings us to the barred subject
of Lacan), we are reminded that this fixing that occurs in the moment
of enunciation (or interpellation) cannot be closed. On the other hand,
the self, as the subject of discourse, cannot be fixed either because, as we
have just argued, by virtue of the very logic of signification, no signifier
can be completely homologous to any given signified. The signifier is
not homologous to the signified that it claims to represent, but rather
calls for other signifiers to produce temporary sutures in a never-ending
process. As Laclau notes, those politics that pretend to include more and
more signifiers to exhaust the meaning a signified aims to represent are
deemed to fail because the relations between signifiers and signifieds are
not isomorphic.48
This is the problem we are faced with when thinking about identity,
which is located in the realm of the psychosocial imaginary self. Seen
in this light, the homologation of identity to some given signifieds as
in the case of a liberal politics of recognition that is based on identity
politics too soon forgets the problem of the performative interpellation
that configures the subject as such. This interpellation depends on fun-

damental exclusions whose negations are constitutive of the practices of
subjectivation. These constitutive exclusions shape the limits of repre-
sentation. They also signal the condition where the radical contingency
of signification is founded.
Conversely, given that there is no subject beyond the performativity of
interpellation, neither is it possible to think about a politics of indetermi-
nation nor to posit a form of resistance that might be outside power. The
foundational character of exclusions denies us the possibility of imagin-
ing a core undetermined self or a natural state of unbound sexuality, prior
to the touch of culture. This constitutive exclusion—which is embedded
in cultural norms—marks the lack of foundation of the self but is at the
same time the foundation on which subject formation takes place. So
that the politics of recognition based on the imaginary of self-identity
might offer a political framework for understanding sexual diversity by
disavowing these exclusions, while sex work as much as myriad sexual
preferences that are not organized around identity and object choice, do
not ‘count’ as a position within such a field.
The Sexual Imaginary and The ‘Real’ Question

The psychosomatic dimension of subjectivation and the productive function
of language in the constitution of the desiring subject complicate the idea of
a subject conceived merely as an effect of social practices, whether as a pure
product of historical determination or—once ‘conscious of its character
of effect’—as a transparent and unequivocal agent of social change. Butler
states: ‘What has been understood as the performativity of gender—far from
the exercise of an unconstrained voluntarism—will prove to be impossible
apart from notions of such political constraints registered psychically.’49The
performative force of these constrains resides in the fact that they are psychi-
cally registered, inflecting the subject’s identifications and desires.
This means that the subject cannot be thought of outside desire, or
for that matter sexualization. The embodied subject is in fact formed
through the working of desire and of identification. But to say that sub-
jectivity and sexualization are co-constitutive does not mean that the
psychic register of those social constraints should be restricted to the

binary forms that adapt to the framework of the heterosexual matrix.
To think that the forms of desire observe constitutive restrictions means
here that the fact that there is no metaphysical cause, or sexual nature,
or precultural structure in which the prescription of the enforceability
of heterosexuality can sustain itself, does not mean that the subject can
control or select its forms of desire. A few lines after stating the psychic
dimension of the performative work of norms, Butler points out: ‘in the
domain of sexuality these constraints include the radical unthinkability
of desiring otherwise, the radical unendurability of desiring otherwise,
the absence of certain desires, the repetitive compulsion of others, the
abiding repudiation of some sexual possibilities, panic, obsessional pull,
and the nexus of sexuality and pain.’50
In sum, what is highlighted here is that being compulsively tossed
about to assume a gendered and desiring position based on objects of
desire and identifications produces a series of exclusions at the psychic
level that remain unknown to the subject. However, this does not mean
that these restrictions must necessarily be structured by sexual difference,
which in Butler is read as a matter of heterosexual hegemony. According
to heteronormative ideals, these restrictions assume an exclusionary rela-
tionship between desire and identification, but there is no ontological
need for this to be so. When Butler remarks that ‘constraint calls to be
rethought as the very condition of performativity,’51 it is the psychic reg-
ister of the performativity of gender and sexual norms that is at stake. The
psychic register of social constraints drives and sustains performativity,
beckoning generative power to make way for multiple forms of sexualiza-
tion, while not invalidating the compulsory character of sexualization as
constitutive of the subject.
This psychosocial articulation of gender and sexuality based on psy-
chically registered performativity leads Butler to object to all those posi-
tions that, in one way or another, presuppose either a too far beyond or
a falling short of gender and sexual norms. From this point of view, it is
clear that we cannot postulate a sexually predetermined subject, either
based on a prelinguistic ‘naturalized’ (dimorphically) sexed body assumed
to be prior to the mark of the performative interpellation, or based on
the symbolic necessity of sexual difference—in the Lacanian sense—that
determines a specific content for sexuation. Nor can we postulate a sex-

ually undifferentiated subject as pure a-sexual universal consciousness,
or as a polymorphous pervert as the anchoring of unbound sexuality.
Whether we appeal to a universal a-sexed reason—beyond sexuality—or
a polymorphous hypersexed body—a falling short of sexuality as a his-
torical device—we would be presupposing a substantialized and tran-
scendentalized subject, conceived of as previous to the encroachment
of language and power as discourse and social practice. This conception
does not take into account the founding character of sexuality in the pro-
duction of the embodied subject and takes it for granted that the capacity
of agency (homologated to freedom) can only occur as transcendence of
the body. The configuration of the embodied subject as a totalizing effect
is associated in Butler’s work with the marking of that subject as sexual.
This totalizing effect works by covering over, or ‘suturing,’ inconsistencies
and differences; at the same time, these very inconsistencies and differ-
ences potentially challenge the unity of the sexual subject, exposing it as
a suturing effect, and therefore an unstable and precarious figure.
The exteriority produced by these fundamental exclusions, which, in
a Derridean fashion, is effected by discourse itself, exposes the limits of a
constructivist vision for which signification is able to exhaust the order of
being. Similarly, it also challenges the idea of an all too powerful symbolic
determination, according to which the effects of this exclusion might
be structurally predetermined to produce, in Lacanian terms, sexual dif-
ference. Although interpellation and exclusion are inevitable, according
to Butler, their effects are contingent. Concurring with Derridean and
Foucauldian approaches, the interpellation of the subject takes place
through an iterable process, and it is never quite complete. What ‘exceeds’
the process of interpellation also constitutes its performative potential.
On the one hand, the lack of foundation for the subject establishes its
incompleteness, compelling a never-ending process of re-articulation; the
subject is constantly in the making.52 On the other hand, the law that
generated the subject through exclusions becomes a form of subjectiva-
tion entailing productive forms of power. This also means that the sym-
bolic law, reconceived as imaginary norm, is never just repressive but also
productive. It produces the subject, but also the subject’s resistance to
that very law.
In other words, the exteriority understood as that which remains out-

side of the symbolizable or the intelligible is produced by the order of
signification itself, and as such it undoes the normative horizon of the
universality of all that is social as well as the illusionary completeness of
the subject. In its place, the politically controversial concept of contin-
gency emerges. Contingency is inherent to society and to the subject. It
shapes the unforeseeable chain of effects of interpellation, and the iter-
ability of the performative logic, both of which suggest that the subject
cannot be the mere mirror of the law, but neither can it be completely
outside of it. To consider this exteriority, following Derrida, Butler sug-
gests that it emerges as an effect of discourse itself:
There is an ‘outside’ to what is constructed by discourse, but this is not an

absolute ‘outside’, an ontological thereness that exceeds or counters the
boundaries of discourse; as a constitutive ‘outside’, it is that which can only
be thought—when it can—in relation to that discourse, at and as its tenu-
ous borders.53
Seen in this way, we could ask ourselves whether this ‘constitutive outside,’
which is also linked to Laclau’s understanding of it as the excluded term of
social constitutive antagonism, is so far opposed to the notion of the Lacanian
real. After all, this ‘real’ has no ontological weight; it is defined as an effect
produced by the symbolic order/language. As we could arguably reframe lan-
guage as the site of signifying practices, the real as much as the constitutive
outside of discourse is that which exhibits the conditions, always limited,
of representability. Conceived of in this way, the exclusion that evokes the
notion of Das Ding—the Freudian ‘real thing,’ and the Real in Lacan—also
marks the empty origin invoked by the ontic-ontological split or difference,
separating off that inaccessible ontological notion of ‘Being’ from a specific
ontic subject, situated and discreet. No signifier can bring forth the plenitude
of the signified. This is one consequence of the radical cut produced by signi-
fication, and the impossibility of an immediate recourse to experience. Joan
Copjec explains Lacan’s notion of the real in this way:
Lacan’s definition of the real is precisely this: that which in language or the
symbolic negates the possibility of any metadimension, any metalanguage.
It is this undislodgeable negation, this rigid kernel in the heart of the

symbolic, that forces the signifier to split off from and turn around on
itself. For, in the absence of any metalanguage, the signifier can only signify
by referring to another signifier. The point is that if one wants to prevent
the formation of an outside, one must not, as was said, avoid any negation
for fear it would cause a domain to emerge that would limit power from
the outside… but must rather inscribe in the interior a negation that says
‘no’ precisely to the possibility of an outside… Far from positing the exis-
tence of an elsewhere, the real as internal limit of the symbolic—that is, the
very impotence of the signifier—is the obstacle that scotches the possibility
of rising out of or above the symbolic.54
According to Copjec, the real is that which indicates the internal limits
of language and exposes the necessarily limited character of representa-
tion. If we put aside for a moment the question of sexual difference and
focus our attention solely on the consideration of language, what fol-
lows? The positing of the real as a retracting of the symbolic on itself—
its internal limit—may imply that discourse more generally produces its
‘exterior’ as its own defining limit. Is that very far from the notion that
the symbolic produces its own exterior? Perhaps the parallelism does not
hold. Perhaps the real is not produced as a mere effect, but operates as a
limit on what can be produced. Even if we are not convinced that the real
is a mere internal limit, as a potentially productive figure for the fissure
of representation, it may be plausible to reconsider it in a queer manner.55
The real, after all, conceived as this void and lack of foundation of
the exclusions that are constitutive of subjectivation, not only saves us
from the risk of ‘metadiscourses’ closuring the ‘agonistic’ nature of signi-
fiers but also reminds us that it is precisely this void that the real repre-
sents, what propels desire and its infinite movement. The exclusion and
its relation to the real traverses the sexual and desire, always craving an
unachievable ‘thing,’ the non-reachable complete satisfaction, and subse-
quently mobilizing an infinite chain of substitutable surrogates, always in
search of the petit object a.
We can see this effort to cover over the fissure produced by the real in
some specific contemporary instances at the level of the political imagi-
nary, when it is precisely the idea that we are fully aware of the limits of
representation that is mobilized. The real keeps open the gap between
contingency and cynical justification, when not self-satisfaction, in a

present that sees itself as self-reflective. Against the temptation of the
present to find in the death of truth the occasion for reinventing self-
transparency, the direct encounter with the force of pure matter, or cyni-
cally implementing the worst atrocities, the real continues to undo any
illusion of reconciliation with the fact that we do not make sense. At the
level of the sexual imaginary, the real reminds us not only of the fantastic
character of our desires, how fantasy—either in Butler’s bodily Ego, or
in Lacanian oriented ideas of body image and scheme—56 traverses the
relationship to our bodies, but also the insufficiency of this proposition,
if we do not take into account their destabilizing effects.
Just as a void that marks the limited character of signification, the fissure
of representation, the real could perhaps be dissociated from the symbolic
and the law of sexual difference attached to it and simply indicate the
limits of the imaginary to represent itself. After all, as Levi-Strauss himself
suggests, referring to the distinction between knowledge and mythology,
this is an arbitrary distinction: for Levi-Strauss, ultimately, there is no
structural a priori of truth. Read in this way, Levi-Strauss’ account of the
symbolic order and the subsequent psychoanalytic oedipical account of
sexual difference, as is suggested by Juan-David Nasio, may not refer so
much to a transcendental mode of being of social existence, as to a mode
in which the phantom of this neurotic culture has digested its origin.57
This foundational moment of which we cannot speak in terms of knowl-
edge marks the impasse where logos ends and mythos begins. In this sense,
the real could come to indicate that this is just a foundational narration
through which we have attempted to resolve our relationship with sexual-
ity. Precisely by virtue of our entrance in the order of signification, not
only can sexuality not be a given for us but neither can we know anything
about it. And yet, we cannot cast off the desires that it prompts.
Performative, Othering Citizenship

In contrast to this understanding of the role of sexualization in the con-
figuration of the subject, which posits the sexual as a locus where the self
is destabilized, sexual citizenship is based on the reification of sexuality
as an attribute that describes our identity. Forgetting the destabilizing

work of the real, at the level of this sexual politics the imaginary seems to
be satisfied in itself. In effect, the conditions that create the possibility of
being considered a rights-bearing subject interact with each other in the
various modes in which the regulation of sexuality stabilize the param-
eters in which self-identity can be determined; and one of those param-
eters consists precisely of the liberal configuration of the self as a free,
transparent, and sovereign configuration. It is this over-determination of
liberalism on both subjectivity and sexuality that conditions the forms
that sexual demands must take in order to be registered as political. Now,
while this transmutation undermines the psychic reality of the sexual—
always already traversed by fantasies that not only are beyond our control,
but neither are they susceptible to our full awareness—it does function
as a productive constraint, compelling the self to invest in sexual identity.
And this investment cannot be ruled out as just an imaginary formation.
Of course it is, but then the question would be what kind of work this
kind of investment might do to turn this liberal imagination into such a
deeply engrained ‘dominant fiction,’58 whose pervasiveness makes it look
like an ethos, surviving endless critiques. Given that this imaginary is
constitutive of our own formation as subjects, the question now focuses
on the borders of our lives as sexual beings and the extent to which citi-
zenship and identity honor this.
As I have suggested in this chapter, one way into a critical approach
to citizenship could be to try to interpret the interweaving of demands
and negations that are at play here by paying attention to the discursive
dynamic of identification and differentiation/exclusion. Ernesto Laclau’s
insight into the rhetorical dimension of political articulations could be
useful in this regard.59 His understanding of the constitutive character of
the rhetorical dimension of the political opens up the possibility of ques-
tioning the restricted idea of the political subject outlined by the canon
of the tradition of liberalism. With respect to the liberal notion of the
citizen, following Laclau’s theoretical framework we can suggest that citi-
zenship and the rights that delineate it are not simply demanded, but are
actually realized through the articulation of demands themselves—rhet-
oric in Laclau’s understanding of discourse is eminently performative.
From this perspective, the subject of citizenship could not be assumed
to be there, as if it were prior to the articulations of struggles that may

place this subject inside or outside of citizenship. Rather, this subject
would also be constituted within and through the very same struggles
over citizenship.
Arguably, the process of articulation of collective demands could cer-
tainly be understood as a struggle for rights that are already there. But if
this were the case, the problem would be resolved by analyzing who can
and who cannot access already established citizen-rights, or how certain
(already constituted) subjects gain (already established) specific rights.
The assumption here is that the political community and citizenship are
realities that exist prior to the political process of articulation of demands
and rights. However, it may well be that citizenship does not just demar-
cate a status or belonging of an already established political community
(to which some subjects belong and others do not) or a group of rights
(whether political, social, economic, sexual, ecological, cultural, and
so on). Thinking of citizenship as an imaginary relation that produces
specific subject formations such as citizen-subjects vis-à-vis an imagined
political community, citizenship could be understood as a social prac-
tice in which both the subjects and the political community configure
themselves.
Very much along these lines, Engin Isin proposes that we consider cit-
izenship as an ‘act’ that enacts a subject position on the basis of ‘the right
to claim rights.’60 Leaving aside for the moment the peculiarity that Isin
grants to ‘acts,’ one could arguably extend his insight into citizenship
and consider it as a practice by which subjects institute themselves as
political. Seen as a practice of making claims that would institute our
right to claim rights more generally, citizenship may exceed the sphere
of state-oriented politics, or a scripted set of legal claims to recognition
or inclusion, to include myriad forms of activism and cultural expres-
sions that we may not at first identify as citizenship-oriented.61 But most
importantly, Isin’s conceptualization of citizenship as a practice by which
the subject position of the citizen and the political community are con-
figured resonates with the critique that Laclau’s approach implies for the
conceptualization of political identities. Both approaches not only imply
a critique of the ontology of the liberal political subject and, as in the
case of Isin, the need for a genealogical approach to how political subjects
are configured, but also an implicit critique of the reduction of politics

to matters of inclusion and distribution, as this politics take rights and
subjects as already ‘there.’ In both cases we find that there are no pre-
constituted ‘agents’ but relations, acts, practices, constellations, and in
both cases it is this constellation that constitutes the subject of politics.
Isin’s approach to citizenship also highlights that this is a construct
which not only configures citizen-subjects, but also entails the neces-
sary parallel configuration of citizenship’s outsiders. We could reinterpret
Isin’s suggestion along the lines of the tension analyzed by Laclau between
antagonism and hegemony. For Laclau, society is intrinsically antagonis-
tic, and its unity as a social totality is dependent on the hegemony of
certain signifiers for representing it, projecting antagonistic forces onto
the ‘constitutive outside.’62 As we have noted, according to Laclau the
political is sustained by a hegemonic relationship that stabilizes certain
political signifiers.63 Drawing on Laclau’s observations, then, one could
consider that the demands associated with sexual citizenship actually work
as signifiers over which hegemonic and counter-hegemonic struggles are
played out to define the political community and its borders. It is in the
light of this framework that sexual citizenship, understood as a political
demand, constantly configures and reconfigures not only an imaginary
tie between an imaginary (ideal) citizen and an imaginary community,
but also those others that will stand for its constitutive outside.
With regards to the problem of sexual citizenship in particular, the
question that arises then is: what are the signifiers that hegemonize the
political field of sexuality? Given that the imaginary of citizenship cannot
be exempt from a parallel imaginary configuration of its borders, when
considering sexual citizenship as a practice that enacts a particular subject
position, I suggested that we might have to consider the kind of sexual
subject that is presupposed by the boundary that discriminates between
the abstract citizen and its others. What kind of sexual norms are mobi-
lized by the hegemonic imaginary of sexual citizenship that conceives of
it as the entitlement of a liberal self for whom sexual identity is invested
as a given?
As we have seen, the notion of citizenship articulates an inclusive exclu-
sionary logic, and just as we can see how the subject of rights reduces the
sexual field to the right to sexuality that belongs to this subject, in the
global arena we can also see the model of exclusionary integration that
governs the idea of democratic modernity or modernization. The ideal of
universal inclusiveness attached to sexual human rights is also based on
an exclusionary logic, which works through the parallel configuration of
those who are to be included within the realm of rights and those who are
going to be figured as their constitutive other. At this level, we have seen
that it is the cultural racialization of sexuality that does this work. In this
case, for the inclusive ideal of this incarnation of universality to work, the
positions are usually split within the Other’s culture: on the one hand,
the one who wants to assimilate or is assimilated (the victim), and on
the other hand, the constitutive other represented by the culture that
victimizes them. In effect, as Sarah Bracke as well as some other authors
have pointed out, this logic of othering is typical of feminist and gay res-
cue narratives, which rely on victimization.64 Thanks to this universalism
on which humanitarian discourse is based, this logic operates through
exclusion or compulsory assimilation. In this way, the universalizing and
inclusive scheme always produces its own exclusions: in this case, it does
so by including ‘the good other’ who wants to assimilate at the expense of
excluding ‘the bad other’ of whom the good other is figured as a victim. It
cannot be otherwise, since the bad other is constitutive of the emergence
of the good one.
Within this logic, the sexual reinvention of citizenship is giving way
to new forms of sexual respectability as well. Although this respectability
might not be strictly defined by the hegemony of heterosexual normativ-
ity, as we have seen, there are new norms that continue to shape the sexual
features of the sexual citizen. This can be seen at both state and transna-
tional levels, although with very different political dynamics. For instance,
contesting the assumption that we are progressively advancing in a new
sexual democracy, the central, if not almost exclusive, place that same-sex
marriage has acquired within mainstream LGBT agendas shows that these
norms continue to foreground family (and property) values as the basis for
the future of the nation. However, this observation might deserve a caveat.
Many scholars who consider the way in which progressive sexual politics
have inadvertently become involved in the practices of nation-building
fail to consider the equal importance of the ‘family’ in these debates, but
‘the family’ appears to be a key social construct in the rhetoric of nation-
building. In this sense, Jasbir Puar argues that in the frame of the US war
on terror, ‘the production of gay and queer bodies is crucial to the deploy-
ment of nationalism’ for the ‘idealization of the US as a properly multicul-
tural heteronormative but nevertheless gay-friendly, tolerant and sexually
liberated society.’65 I agree with the homonationalist hypothesis and Puar’s
criticism of those perspectives that presuppose heteronormativity to be the
only normative domain, forgetting the role homonormative frames play
in dismissing more radical sexual politics. Still, if we take into account the
heterocentric paradigm of the family, the performance of homonormativi-
ties may in fact also contribute to reinforcing heterocentrism.
As for questions of discrimination and marginalization vis-à-vis the
sexual norms of respectability that mark the borders of sexual citizen-
ship, we have seen that the differential sexualization of the public sphere
might be another case in point. The qualified sexualization of the public
sphere suggests key links between psychosocially invested gendered con-
structs and ideals such as coupledom, parenthood, and family in relation
to heightened state regulation of the sexual freedom of distinct popula-
tions. In this sense, the case of sex work is significant as it highlights con-
tradictions found in current trends that are taken as pointing toward the
democratization of sexuality. The politics of recognition are promoted as
a step forward toward the achievement of sexual freedom and full inclu-
sion, but in fact their dynamic is a lot more contradictory.
When sex workers claim that their ‘rights are unreasonably constrained
by various rules with punitive content dictated on the pretext of pursuing
society’s common good,’66 they are in fact denouncing their exclusion from
the margins of citizenship despite living in democratic nations. With this
indictment, the workers reveal key social antagonisms: the rights denied
to a portion of the population run parallel with the exclusion of this
population at the level of the political imaginary. The stabilization of
the signifiers associated with ‘the common good of society’ is based on
the exclusion of sex workers from the imaginary of citizenship. In other
words, the demand for the decriminalization of sex work destabilizes the
sexual norms that define citizenship as well as the social good that it rep-
resents. When the workers state that ‘recognition, and not indifference
or negation, is what will allow us to create a more just society,’ they are
actually disputing what the signifier ‘society’ mobilizes.67
We can see how this logic works in relation to the configuration of the
public space. As I have argued elsewhere, the spatialization of the public
sphere depends on a set of measures and governmental strategies that reg-
ulate how one should appear in the public space.68 Sex workers are usu-
ally secluded in fenced-off zones that limit the level of visibility allowed
to them. They become subjects who are barred from transgressing this
ban on visibility; if they do so, they will be regarded as a menace to the
defining values of the community, understood as a homogenous realm.
These boundaries materialize a spatial (and also a visual) field that not
only organizes a differentially sexualized public space, but also, more cru-
cially, configures sex work as the constitutive other of the public sphere
understood as the stage where the political community is represented.
Imaginary Citizenship, Sexual Challenges

As we have seen, the forms of sexual citizenship depend on the normal-
ization of discrete identities as well as being founded on a liberal notion
of the transparent and sovereign individual. I have argued for the pos-
sibility of delving into the transformative potential of progressive sexual
politics in the pursuit of a continuous critique of the forms in which the
new sexual citizen’s ideals and ‘others’ are produced. In the field of sexual
citizenship, we do well to celebrate achievements as Weeks command us
to do but we should be careful to leave open the space to continue ques-
tioning its norms. The paths for such questioning are open; a possibility
between them opens on analyzing a broader field of sexual demands, as
well as the signifiers that hegemonize the contents of sexual citizenship
and its constitutive exclusions.
To articulate this critique, I have suggested thinking of citizenship not
as a status but as a practice that enables a subject position. This theo-
retical displacement implies questioning the liberal ontology of the sexual
and gendered individual, which tends to be reified as a given. Based on
this, I have presented the idea that if citizenship is a political practice
that configures subjects, it is also a practice that depends on an imagi-
nary of citizenship—which presumes a field of psychosocially operative
norms—around which a ‘constitutive outside’ is constantly (re)configured.
The constitutive outside that emerges on the political scene of struggles
parallels the exteriority produced by the hegemonic imaginary of sexuality

as transparent to the self, in the face of which the psychosocial reality of
the sexual subject emerges as always insufficient.
At this point, I suggested that while sexuality cannot be transcended, on
an ontological level it might be linked with the Lacanian real understood as
the name for the ontological void. This means that the sexual is constitutive
of the subject, but that does not tell us in advance how we might conceive
it, or which forms it may take. This understanding amounts to Butler’s
claim for the proliferation of the imaginary possibilities of desire, under-
stood to be infinite and not pre-established by any transcendental limit.
One way of considering this proliferation is by linking it to the impossibil-
ity of access to the real—desire is bound to the petit object a, and is irreme-
diably subject to displacement; it is pivotal to the transferability of aim and
object constitutive of the drive. Like the real, the sexual is ungraspable but
is still the motor of our fantasies. Our relation to our sexual self is mediated
by fantasy, whose kernel is an ontological void. Seen in this light, the sexual
could be conceived as the ontological marker of our foundational lack (in
Lacanian terms, marked by an inaccessible real), while sexuality would be
its ontic particular determination (an imaginary suture).
To sum up, then, the first element of this approach to the sexual that
I would like to highlight in pursue of a critique of the imaginary of sex-
ual citizenship and identity is that we are inevitably sexual subjects, but
the form in which the sexual might assume an ontic form is concep-
tually contingent and undetermined.69 Following a Laclausian inspired
reasoning, this means that (the imaginary of ) sexuality will not just be
indeterminate, but it will necessarily operate closures that suture, at least
momentarily, the ontic and the ontological.70 One way in which this
suture works is through the device of sexual identity, but this device does
not account for the fact that this fixation is constantly undone from the
point of view of unconscious desire and the exclusions on which it is
based. We know that in order to take its shape, desire relies on exclusions
we cannot account for, and that at a distance from the real, insufficiency
is its norm. As psychosocially constituted subjects, we do not have a
transparent relationship with sexuality, we cannot objectify it as some-
thing we can completely account for, we cannot give a full account of our
desires; sexuality, to a great extent, is also unknown to ourselves, and in
this sense it is not our own.
The opacity and incompleteness of the sexual subject is one way that
the liberal imaginary of the sexual subject is challenged. It is challenged in
another way be the relational character of sexuality itself. This brings me
to the second element that I will be stressing in this book. The relational
status of sexuality could be understood in manifold ways. It could be read
stressing that desire is always attached to something. Like identification,
desire is never an itself; further, it is always related to what we iden-
tify with and for whom. But this relational status is not limited to our
unconscious. My point here is that sexual relationality emerges in more
phenomenological terms, as a way in which we orient ourselves toward
others and the world. I will pursue this idea in the following chapters and
develop it more fully in Chapter 5. For the moment, suffice is to say that
based on the idea that neither sexual formations nor our sexual subjecti-
vation depend on our own, the sexual could arguably be recast as a lim-
inal formation. The understanding of sexuality as primarily a dimension
of a relational scene challenges our investment in sexual identity, and the
idea of our selves as being the owners of our sexual desires. In contrast to
the hegemonic liberal imaginary of personhood that undermines sexual-
ity as a relational phenomenon, the sexual might emerge as a field that
is constantly negotiated in relation to others, not even an identity or a
practice, but a form in which relations and borders might actually come
to existence, maybe even a key dimension of our relational being.
It is my view that this sexual dimension of our insufficient and rela-
tional existence, which does not deny its psychic reality, the central role
of fantasy, its capacity to undo us, and to challenge our illusion of mas-
tery as owners of our desires, should be honored by the ways we may con-
tinue imagining sexual freedom, and the citizenship to which it belongs.
Notes
1. Jeffrey Weeks, “Traps We Set Ourselves,” Sexualities 11(1–2) (2008): 27–33.
2. Ibid., 28.
3. Ibid., 29.
4. Ibid., 30.
5. Eric Fassin, “National Identities and Transnational Intimacies: Sexual Democracy
and the Politics of Immigration in Europe,” Public Culture 22(3) (2010):
507–529.
6. David Bell and Jon Binnie, The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
7. Diane Richardson, “Constructing Sexual Citizenship: Theorising Sexual
Rights,” Critical Social Policy 61 (2000): 105–135.
8. See Leticia Sabsay, “The Limits of Democracy,” Cultural Studies 25(2)
(2011): 213–229.
9. Weeks, “Traps We Set Ourselves,” 31.
10. Ibid., 30.
11. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France
1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (London:
Palgrave, 2008).
12. Ibid., 63–64.
13. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
14. Ibid., 64.
15. Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
16. Weeks, “Traps We Set Ourselves,” 28.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 28–29.
19. Joseph Massad has recently expanded on the critique of current forms of sexual
imperialism he offered in Desiring Arabs into a thorough analysis of its connec-
tions with liberalism. See Joseph Massad, “Pre-Positional Conjunctions:
Sexuality and/in Islam,” in Islam in Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2015), 213–274.
20. For a critique of current forms of homonormativity and their investment in
neoliberal values, see Lisa Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The
Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism,” in Materializing Democracy: Toward a
Revitalized Cultural Politics, eds. Dana Nelson and Russ Castronovo
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 175–194.
21. For a critical examination of this trend, sees Laura Agustín, Sex at the
Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry (London: Zed
Books, 2007); Elizabeth Bernstein, “The Sexual Politics of ‘The New
Abolitionism’,” Differences 18(3) (2007): 128–151; Nicola Mai, “Between
Minor and Errant Mobility: The Relation Between Psychological Dynamics
and Migration Patterns of Young Men Selling Sex in the EU,” Mobilities
4(3) (2009): 349–366; Rutvitca Andrijasevic, Migration, Agency and
Citizenship in Sex Trafficking (London: Palgrave, 2010).
22. International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe, “Aims &
Results,” accessed April 10, 2015, http://www.sexworkeurope.org/about/
conference-2005/aims-results
23. Red de Muejres Trabajadoras Sexuales de Latinoamérica y el Caribe (RedTrasSex),

“Situación Regional de las Trabajadoras Sexuales,” accessed April 10, 2015,
http://www.redtrasex.org/spip.php?page=imprimir_articulo&id_article=14
24. Original text in Spanish (my translation): Si bien vivimos en países
democráticos donde nos amparan leyes y tratados a los que adhieren distin-
tos ordenamientos jurídico de Latinoamérica y El Caribe, nuestros derechos
se ven irrazonablemente coartados por distintas normas de contenido puni-
tivo dictadas con el pretexto de estarse persiguiendo el bien común de la
sociedad… Hablamos de derechos básicos como a la privacidad, a la vida,
el derecho de elegir el propio proyecto que la persona pueda optar o aceptar
(…) Este cercenamiento y las constantes persecuciones policiales, ampara-
das en legislaciones que lejos de reconocer al trabajo sexual como una activi-
dad lícita tienden a criminalizarla, llevan a las Trabajadoras a clandestinizarse
(…) Resulta evidente la necesidad de una urgente revisión de la legislación
a nivel no sólo americano, sino mundial, para lograr que se respeten los
derechos que como seres humanos, tenemos quienes ejercemos el trabajo
sexual. Es el reconocimiento y no la indiferencia o su negación, lo que va a
permitir generar una sociedad más justa y sana, donde todas las personas
puedan acceder al pleno goce de sus derechos.
25. Asociación de Mujeres Meretrices de la Argentina, “Somos Trabajadoras
Sexuales,” accessed April 10, 2015, http://www.ammar.org.ar/Somos-
Trabajadoras-Sexuales.html
26. Original text in Spanish (my translation): Algunos de los que están en con-
tra del concepto del trabajo sexual sostienen que ‘toda prostitución implica
violencia contra las mujeres y es necesario erradicarla’. Se equivocan al pre-
tender erradicarla pero aciertan con lo de la violencia. Nuestro trabajo, en
las condiciones en que lo ejercemos, no está exento de violencia.
Sufrimos la violencia de ser discriminadas por una sociedad hipócrita
que nos llama indignas y luego nos contrata. Así como sufrimos la violencia
física de algunos clientes, parejas y proxenetas.
Sufrimos la violenta ausencia del Estado en políticas públicas de salud,
seguridad social y educación que atiendan las necesidades de nuestro sector y
de marcos legislativos que protejan nuestro trabajo de la explotación y el abuso.
Pero también sufrimos la presencia de ese Estado mediante su sistema
judicial que dicta legislaciones que nos criminalizan y a través de sus fuerzas
de seguridad que nos detienen, nos reprimen y nos cobran para “permitir-
nos” trabajar.
27. Fassin, “National Identities and Transnational Intimacies.”
28. German Prime Minister Angela Merkel made these declarations in a con-
text of heated discussions about multiculturalism in Germany vis à vis the
rise of anti-migration partidaries. In an address delivered at the Christian
Democracy Youth Annual Congress on October 17, 2010, it was reported
that Angela Merkel affirmed that: ‘Of course the tendency had been to say,
“let’s adopt the multicultural concept and live happily side by side, and be
happy to be living with each other.” But this concept has failed, and failed
utterly.’ In “Merkel’s Rhetoric in Integration Debate is ‘Inexcusable’,” Spiegel
Online, October 18, 2010, accessed January 10, 2015, http://www.spie-
gel.de/international/germany/the-world-from-berlin-merkel-s-rhetoric-
in-integration-debate-is-inexcusable-a-723702.html. A few months later,
UK’s Prime Minister David Cameron gave a speech at the Munich Security
Conference on February 5, 2011, that not just echoed Merkel’s assessment
but also pushed it even further. In this address, he declared: ‘Under the
doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures
to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream. We have
failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong.
We have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways
that run counter to our values.’ David Cameron, “PM’s speech at Munich
Security Conference,” Cabinet Office, Prime Minister’s Office, February 5,
2011, accessed January 10, 2015, http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/
the-staggers/2011/02/terrorism-islam-ideology
Along the same lines, French President Nicolas Zarkozy declared in a TV
news interview that multiculturalism was a failure. Despite France never imple-
mented multiculturalist policies, Zarkozy made these comments on February
10, 2011, a few days after Cameron’s address, and while in the midst of the
heated debates that Cameron’s remarks propounded within and outside the
UK, somehow making it clear what the conservative agenda was going to be in
Europe. Tom Heneghn, “Zarkozy Joins Allies Burying Multiculturalism,”
Reuters UK, February 11, 2011, accessed January 10, 2015, http://uk.reuters.
com/article/us-france-sarkozy-multiculturalism-idUSTRE71A4UP20110211
29. Prime Minister Cameron’s address continued: ‘So when a white person
holds objectionable views—racism, for example—we rightly condemn
them. But when equally unacceptable views or practices have come from
someone who isn’t white, we’ve been too cautious, frankly even fearful, to
stand up to them. The failure of some to confront the horrors of forced
marriage, the practice where some young girls are bullied and sometimes
taken abroad to marry someone they don’t want to is a case in point. This
hands-off tolerance has only served to reinforce the sense that not enough
is shared. All this leaves some young Muslims feeling rootless.
And the search for something to belong to and believe in can lead them
to this extremist ideology. For sure, they don’t turn into terrorists overnight.
What we see is a process of radicalisation.’ “David Cameron | Speech on
radicalisation and Islamic extremism.” Cameron, “PM’s speech at Munich
Security Conference.”
30. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
31. Cf. Chapter 2, 31–33.
32. Seen in this light, one could arguably be reminded of the controversial essay
of Susan Moller Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” and the debates
around it. Susan Moller Okin et al., Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, eds.
Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha Nussbaum (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999). One of the ways out of the bind that lib-
eral positions like Moller Okin’s propose has been associated with intersec-
tional perspectives. However, intersectional perspectives seem to find it hard
to work in all their potential, and the persistence of mainstream liberal femi-
nist politics give account that despite the increasing recognition that ‘subal-
tern feminism’ has been gaining within academia, it has still found it difficult
to achieve significant political changes at the level of policies.
33. See Eric Fassin. “A Double-Edged Sword. Sexual Democracy, Gender
Norms and Racialized Rhetoric,” in The Question of Gender: Joan W. Scott’s
Critical Feminism, eds. Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2011), 143–158.
34. See Massad, Desiring Arabs; Greg Thomas, The Sexual Demon of Colonial
Power: Pan-African Embodiment and the Erotic Schemes of Empire
(Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2007); Fatima el-Tayeb,
European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, “Straight
Migrants Queering the European Man,” in What’s Queer about Europe:
Productive Encounters and Re-Enchanting Paradigms, eds. Mireille Rosello
and Sudeep Dasgupta (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); the
section “War and Borderzones” of Queer Necropolitics, eds. Jin Haritaworn,
Adi Kunstman, and Silvia Posocco (London: Routledge, 2014), 91–147.
35. See Puar, Terrorist Assemblages; Jin Haritaworn, ed., “Women’s Rights, Gay
Rights, and Anti-Muslim Racism in Europe,” Special Section on European
Journal of Women Studies 19(1) (2012): 73–114 and 19(2) (2012): 237–252.
36. See Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color

Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Sirma Bilge,
“Mapping Québécois Sexual Nationalism in Times of ‘Crisis of Reasonable
Accommodations’,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 33(3) (2012): 303–318;
and Rahul Rao, “Queer Questions,” International Feminist Journal of Politics
16(2) (2014): 199–217.
37. See Engin Isin, Being Political (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2005).
38. Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and
Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 149–1775 and
177–182.
39. Leticia Sabsay, “Sexual Citizenship and Cultural Imperialism,” in The
Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies, eds. Engin Isin and Peter
Nyers (London: Routledge, 2014), 96–109.
40. The re-elaboration that Judith Butler offers of the psychoanalytic concept of
the abject proposed by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) seems to be aimed at under-
scoring how certain others are excluded from the field of signification, which,
in turn, is associated with the human. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the
Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993), 3–21.
41. Ernesto Laclau, The Rhetorical Foundations of Society (London: Verso,
2014), 11–36 and 101–126.
42. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (London: Routledge, 2004), 40–55.
43. See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1995).
44. See Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” SE Vol. XIX (1923–25), ed. and
trans. James Strachey (London: IPA/The Hogarth Press, 1990), 1–66; Jacques
Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in
Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English,
trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), 75–81.
45. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1997), 132–150.
46. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” SE Vol. XIV (1914–16), ed.
and trans. James Strachey (London: IPA/The Hogarth Press, 1990), 243–258.
47. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2005).
48. Ernesto Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the
Constitution of Political Logics,” in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and
Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues
on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), 44–89.

50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., 59.
54. Joan Copjec, Imagine There Is No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 95–96.
55. See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2004).
56. See Françoise Dolto’s distinction between body scheme and body image.
According to Dolto, the body scheme refers to the kinestesic and sensorial
perception of the body in connection to the tridimensional experience of
the world, and although it has a psychic dimension, it should not be con-
fused with unconscious body image. The body image is the unconscious
image we develop of our bodies out of our relational experience with the
other, and is, according to Dolto, dependent on the experience of subse-
quent castrations. Dolto questions the temporal sequence implied in
Lacan’s ‘Mirror Stage’ and asks to what extent the imaginary body has not
been already traversed by the symbolic function. Françoise Dolto, L’Image
Inconsciente du Corps (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1984).
57. Juan-David Nasio, Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: The Splendid Child of
Psychoanalysis (New York: The Other Press, 1998), 75–85 and 111–124.
58. Kaja Silverman uses the notion of dominant fiction developed by Jacques
Ranciere to refer to those key narratives that structure ideological beliefs, or
in other terms, imaginary formations, and proposes an understanding of
the phallic structural law of kinship in these terms. Kaja Silverman, Male
Subjectivity at the Margins (London: Routledge, 1992).
59. Laclau, The Rhetorical Foundations of Society, 53–78; and “Why Do Empty
Signifiers Matter to Politics?,” in Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), 46–36.
60. Engin Isin, “Theorizing Acts of Citizenship,” in Acts of citizenship, eds.
Engin Isin and Greg Nielsen (London: Zed Books, 2008), 15–43.
61. Engin Isin’s notion of ‘the right to claim rights’ obviously echoes (but also
is intended to displace) Hannah Arendt’s notion of ‘the right to have rights.’
See Hannah Arendt, “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the
Rights of Man,” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt,
1973, originally published in 1951), 267–302.
62. Laclau, The Rhetorical Foundations of Society, 101–126.
63. Laclau, Emancipation(s), 46–36.
64. See Sarah Bracke, “From ‘Saving Women’ to ‘Saving Gays’: Rescue
Narratives and their Dis/continuities,” European Journal of Women’s Studies
19(2) (2012): 237–252.
65. Jasbir Puar, “Mapping US Homonormativities,” Gender, Place and Culture
13(1) (2006): 67–68.
66. RedTrasSex, “Situación Regional de las Trabajadoras Sexuales,” (my emphasis).
67. Ibid.
68. Sabsay, “The Limits of Democracy,” 222–226.
69. This idea resonates with Drucilla Cornel’s call for a less predetermined or
scripted way of conceiving sexuality, so that rights in this realm should be
limited to the protection of an undetermined ‘imaginary space.’ See
Drucilla Cornell, At the Heart of Freedom: Feminism, Sex, and Equality
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
70. I follow Oliver Marchart’s interpretation of Ernesto Laclau’s take on the
ontic/ontological distinction (Oliver Marchart, “Politics and the Ontological
Difference: On the ‘Strictly Philosophical’ in Laclau’s Work,” in Laclau: A
Critical Reader, eds. Simon Critchley and Oliver Marchart (London:
Routledge, 2004), 54–72. Laclau understands the ontological difference as a
dislocation in the ontic order of being and asserts that ‘one should rather say
that the ontic/ontological distinction is constitutive of any actual entity’
(Ernesto Laclau, “Glimpsing the Future,” in Laclau: A Critical Reader, 311).
I further elaborate on the parallel between this philosophical insight and the
psychoanalytic notion of the Real understood as that ontological dimension
that dislocates the order of reality in Chaps. 5 and 6.
4
Sexuality in Translation
In this chapter, I would like to reflect on a number of aspects of sexual

identity that I consider relevant to include in any discussion on sexual
freedom and justice. Sexual identities have been the object of much criti-
cal speculation and debate. And yet, we seem to find ourselves irremedi-
ably in the same well-known bind: on the one hand, we apparently live in
a post-identitarian era; on the other hand, it seems we cannot overcome
the logic of sexual identification. Even those who advocate sexual fluid-
ity cannot escape the habit—or the requirement—of locating others and
themselves in an identifiable place within a grid of positions in relation
to sex or gender and object choices, also organized in terms of identities.
These places or positions can be defined as multiple, fragmented, unsta-
ble, even provisional or precarious. But these qualifications do not negate
the fact that when we refer to same-sex desire or practices, heterosexuality
or pansexuality, a set of positions within gender and object choices are
inevitably mobilized.
I am not denying the fact that processes of subject formation work
through psychic forms of identification where desire plays a key role.
But if we concede that selfhood is attained at the level of the imaginary

through an incessant process of identification (which might be related to

the incorporation of that which we cannot desire), then we have to accept
that identity is never fully achieved. Identification undoes the solid base
of identity, showing that the identity of the self is in fact an ongoing
process of becoming. We can make a parallel case for desire. If we accept
the psychoanalytic insight, which establishes that desire is always already
mediated by unconscious fantasies and, while propelled by an unreach-
able ‘real thing,’ works incessantly by displacement, we may arrive at the
conclusion that there is no self-identity in desire either. So, even if we
accept that processes of identification and desire are key to subjectivity,
the language that enables us to make sense of these processes does not
necessarily have to be tied to identity politics. There is a gap between
these psychic processes and the politics emanating from them.
However, as we have seen in Chapter 2, despite the deconstruc-
tive turn, subjectivity and identity continue to be deeply connected to
imaginary positions that continue to be perceived as clearly recogniz-
able, fixed, stable, and unequivocal. Correspondingly, despite the so-
called post-identitary epoch, we bear witness to the establishment of new
ontological forms for the individual in pursuit of a limited version of
freedom. Individuality, as much as diversity, has been based on a con-
ception of identity—individual and collective—that is self-sufficient and
self-reflexive as the foundation for realizing political demands. The sub-
ject would become a potential political subject to the extent that it is a
conscious and willful subject in control of itself. Its political subjectivity
would depend, above all, on its ability to make demands for rights on
the foundation of the establishment of frontiers that stabilize its identity.
This is certainly the case within the framework of the politics of rec-
ognition and the judicialization of sexual struggles, as I tried to show in
previous chapters. My focus on sexual identity has been, in this sense, an
entry point into the larger problem that drives this book, concerning the
link between the sexual subject and the political tradition of liberalism,
when, in the context of the politics of recognition, gender and sexual
freedom and justice ideals are translated into rights-claims. What hap-
pens to both subjectivity and sexuality when sexuality is translated into
a specific set of rights? This chapter addresses this question by looking at
the complications involved in the translation of sexual identities within a
transnational framework, relating the psychic constitution of the subject

to the complex social and political requirements governing the designa-
tion of sexual positions.
The problem of the configuration of sexuality as a matter of identity
becomes more complicated in relation to the internationalization of gay
and lesbian politics within human rights frameworks. In the last decade,
the changing juridical frameworks regarding sexual and gender diversity
have taken on a central role in the development of human rights and gov-
ernment planning on an international scale.1 But with this expansion, a
set of assumptions regarding the identities of the sexual subjects that these
juridical frameworks are said to address has also been in question. For
instance, the formula LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender)
functions as a universal descriptor in manifold reports, declarations, and
campaigns organized by international organizations. These uses appeal to
notions of sexual orientation and identity as if they were ontological reali-
ties, reinforcing the oblivion of their historical character. ‘Free & Equal,’
the ‘United Nations campaign for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
equality,’ is clearly a case in point.2
In this chapter, I argue that both at international and local levels, these
assumptions correspond to the pervasiveness of a liberal frame of mind by
which sexuality becomes an attribute or a property that a subject is said
to ‘possess.’ This conception involves an appeal to transparency, which,
while denying any psychoanalytic insight, is based on the presumption
that we can know our selves. Our knowledge of these sexual attributes
that we are said to possess enables us to demand recognition.
Some of the problems and arguments I will bring into the discus-
sion might sound well worn; others will recall old critiques that we all
know too well but that for some reason seem to have been condemned
to oblivion, thanks to the fantasy that we have already overcome
them. Like the return of the repressed, there is a set of assumptions
about sexual orientation and identity conceived as one’s own attri-
butes or possessions that are continually propping up current hege-
monic trends within sexual politics. So my interest is precisely to try
to understand the pervasiveness of these assumptions when thinking
about the sexual in relation to freedom and to understand their ability
to survive critique. I think this question is even more pressing now, when
homonormativity and the possessive modality of being has been

heightened through neoliberal logics. Consider, for instance, how the
ideal of freedom has been co-opted by the figure of choice; or how
‘empowerment’ now works at the service of an entrepreneurial subject.
What happens when we consider this in transnational contexts? In
Chapter 3, I have discussed whether the principles of the democratiza-
tion of gender and sexuality have assumed orientalist and colonial forms,
not only in their rhetoric but also in the actual politics they give rise
to, from the war on terror and anti-migrant politics in Europe, to new
forms of cultural imperialism. As we have seen, one of the aspects of this
debate involves the different mechanisms by which sexuality has become
a reference point for defining the imaginary borders of a modern and lib-
erated West against its imagined backward and undeveloped Other. This
othering can occur through exclusion and distancing, but also through
the politics of recognition and inclusion by which those queer others
might be offered a place within Western modernity on the condition
that they assimilate into the paradigm of this modern West. The glo-
balization of sexual identities, which parallels the internationalization of
sexual democracy, is, then, central to this debate, referring as it does to
the expansion of the Western paradigm for conceiving the sexual subject,
and it is not surprising that this globalizing trend has been the object of
so much controversy among different groups of activists and scholars.
The internationalization of sexual politics that works either within
universalist frameworks, or humanitarian dynamics, has forefronted once
again the question of cultural differences and the problem of cultural
translations. And it has done so both in ways that show significant resem-
blances with older but enduring feminist struggles and in renewed ways.
As we know, rather than honoring the politics of translation, the ways
in which sexual democratization has been functioning in the last decade
indicate a process of othering. A growing body of scholarship concerning
questions of Homonationalism, Pinkwashing, and current trends regard-
ing the racialization of sexuality more broadly has amply documented
this.3
Taking into account that sexual human rights and concomitant sexual
citizenship paradigms have become the point of reference when defining
the terms for any project concerned with sexual matters—whether to align
with them, to be critical of them, or to mark a more radical distance—the

first question we should ask ourselves is: how do these paradigms, regardless
of the position one takes, already over-determine the understanding of
sexual self-determination as the capacity to define one’s own identity?
How can we consider sexual self-determination across cultural and social
differences? How can one challenge this over-determination? In order to
address these questions, I will discuss the political implications of address-
ing the struggle for sexual freedom and justice in terms of sexual identity,
while conceiving of sexuality as an individual possession. Drawing on the
perspective of critical cultural translation, I will then consider whether a
dialogue between queer and decolonial perspectives might challenge the
possessive modality that sexuality has assumed.
While in Chapter 3 I looked at how coloniality over-determined a
universal version of the sexual citizen, in this chapter I propose to look
more closely into how the translation of sexuality is working. More spe-
cifically, I consider to what extent a queer cultural translation may lead
to a sexual politics that defies Western hegemonic versions of sexual iden-
tity that proved to be so problematic, linked as they frequently are to
either civilizational or supremacist impulses. This question of identity
and cultural translation leads to others related to temporality. We have
also seen how the globalization of sexual rights under the paradigm of
human rights builds a narrative of progress.4 While numerous arguments
have been raised against this narrative, my interest focuses on the fact that
it is through this narrative that the notion of gender and sexual rights has
become naturalized.
According to the Euro-North American narrative of progress, the
Global North is located in the historical present to which the othered
South has yet to arrive. This temporal scheme leads to a politics of inter-
vention that may take either the benevolent form of paternalism, or the
less fortunate one of blatant condemnation. For instance, when inter-
national organizations assume that activists from the global South are,
by default, in need of education, and therefore intervene in these areas
with programs for raising awareness, training, and skill building, they
are not promoting horizontal relationships of mutual learning and soli-
darity, but a vertical paternalist logic based on a core division between
those who ‘already know’ and those who are in need of that knowledge.
More broadly, as state regimes of sexual regulation are functioning as an

indicator of how democratic these states arguably are, they also become
an indicator of how democratically ‘advanced’ a state is. When thinking
about the relationship between a queer and a decolonial view, we should
therefore consider to what extent radical or queer movements of sexual
dissidence contest this progressive narrative—and if in fact they do so,
how they question this linear temporality. Further, we should also look
at how, in the aftermath of multiple diasporas and migration processes,
this narrative others some populations within, as if they were not part
of its imaginary space.5 From the point of view of cultural translation,
the question might be: in what instances does the queer gaze tend to
reproduce certain forms of cultural imperialism and paternalistic logics
of action as the liberal model does? To what extent could it promote an
opening at the level of signifiers of sexuality and promote more demo-
cratic transnational solidarities?
Sexual Epistemology
The current political currency of sexual identities is directly linked to the
juridification of gender and sexual freedom and justice claims under the
promotion of identity politics, the politics of recognition and inclusion,
and concomitant minoritization. Notwithstanding the discredit that
identity politics has received since its inception, sexual identities con-
tinue to be central to the displacement of sexual struggles toward the
legal realm, the idea being that every individual has a sexual identity,
on behalf of which he or she is entitled to make a legal claim as an indi-
vidual or as part of a group (the right to not be discriminated against, to
marry, and so on). As this brand of politics plays an important role in
homonormative views and Western modern notions of progress, we may
want to examine the Western modern and then late-modern epistemic
assumptions regarding the relationship between sexuality and subjectivity
that are presupposed therein. In other words, we may want to explore the
hegemonic contemporary understanding of what sexuality presumably
‘is,’ in order to be naturally assumed as being linked to personal identity,
and therefore part of citizenship, or the grounds of a right.
At this point, we may need to differentiate between the question of

how sexual politics are articulated locally and globally, and the underlying
problem concerning the onto-epistemological sexual categories that are
put into play through those politics. Although the political and the epis-
temological dimensions of the dynamics of sexual identity are necessarily
connected, it is useful to distinguish both levels for heuristic purposes.
Otherwise, we might run the risk of obscuring what I understand to be
the Western-centric hegemony in defining not only which politics are
legitimate, but also and most crucially, the forms of sexual subjectivation
that are enacted through those definitions.
In this regard, I believe that Foucault’s analysis of sexuality continues
to be relevant. As we know, Foucault showed us that the emergence of
Western modern sexuality, characterized by the transformation of sexual
practices into the markers of new sexual species, was a dispositive of bio-
political government. Following Foucauldian leads, authors such as John
D’Emilio, Ann Stoler, Rosemary Hennesy, and Joseph Massad, among
others, have also shown that this technology is a racialized construct with
a colonial legacy, which also depends on class markers.6 After all, the
dispositive of sexuality emerges, according to Foucault, as a regulative
mechanism of European bourgeois sexuality.7
What interests me about the Foucauldian insight in this context is
that this biopolitical governmentalization of sexuality took place under
the guise of liberalism, describing a new relation of the ‘I’ with itself.
This relation was based on an inward self-reflective movement, by which
the ‘I’ became an autonomous subject in search of the realization of the
freedom of its self. This new relationship of the ‘I’ with itself may involve
manifold features. Among them, there are three aspects of the sexual dis-
positive that are worth highlighting, as current mainstream sexual politics
of recognition tend to operate within them. Firstly, the conception of
sexuality as an attribute that defines crucial features of the identity of the
subject, and the visualization of sexual rights as indisputable individual
entitlements or properties of such a subject. This aspect is related to the
impact of the paradigm of ownership and possessive individualism upon
the subject’s body. This paradigm involves a sovereign subject for whom
sexuality becomes an objectified attribute or property and the dynamics
by which this occurs relate to the fact that this subject is conceived as an
entity that possesses a body, rather than being a body, taking for granted
that sexuality is located within this body that this subject has. Secondly,
the idea that we can fully know those desires that define our sexual iden-
tity through a discourse of reason. This idea is embedded in notions of
transparency that not only deny the unconscious dimension of desire but
also disavow the complexities of embodiment and forms of knowledge
that are not articulable in self-reflective sovereign judgments. Finally, fol-
lowing from this imaginary of transparent subjectivity, the notion that
we can fully account for our sexual identity by relying on self-knowledge.
In my view, the sexual politics of recognition does not challenge the
dispositive of sexuality as I have briefly described it. On the contrary, it
is based on it. This imposes a limit on what can be conceived as sexual
freedom and agency. For instance, it cannot address the biopolitical regu-
lative dimension that sexual identity, as key to the sexual dispositive, may
encompass. As Ann Laura Stoler has brilliantly remarked, this dispositive
of sexuality is part and parcel of the emergence of a broader biopoliti-
cal cosmology, where race certainly plays a central role, characterized by
the production of scientific discourses of biologized differences within
and between populations.8 Reading The History of Sexuality together with
Society Must be Defended, Stoler reminds us of the important kernel of
the Foucauldian definition of biopolitical governmentality, by which the
classification of subjects into species becomes pivotal to their regulation
as members of a population.9
Responding to Ann Stoler’s demand for an account of how the colo-
nial context and racialization are inscribed in the Western history of sexu-
ality, Piyel Haldar’s Law and Orientalism contributes to this enterprise,
although through a different route and in an indirect way.10 Haldar’s aim
is to explore the constitutive role that colonization and ‘the other’ had
in the construction of modern Western subjectivity, which he defines
as a process by which subjectivity was colonized by law; his main argu-
ment being that the legal colonization of subjectivity implied a reasoned
and civilized relation to pleasure and desire. This process was articulated
against surplus enjoyment or excess, which, in turn, was to be found
within an Orientalized other located in the East. Of course, this reasoned
relation to pleasure and desire involves a whole reconfiguration of the
order of power/knowledge, where reason becomes the means by which
the subject (already colonized by law) becomes transparent to itself, and

through the knowledge that reason habilitates, subsequently free (thanks
to the rule of law).
Nowadays, the signs of this mapping of self and other in relation to
sexuality have been seemingly inverted: now, what complements this ori-
entalized other is the repression of sexuality, while the reasonability of
the West is defined by its imagined liberated sexual self. However, despite
the shifts in valuing different sexual cultures, the empire of identity and
liberal individualism remains. Today as much as yesterday, the passage
from sexual practices to sexual types or species points to ‘the paradigm of
transparency,’ extensively discussed by Denis Ferreira Da Silva,11 wherein
sexuality becomes both an object of knowledge and a means of self-
knowledge, demarcating, in turn, the battleground of the game between
liberation and control.
This paradigm is indebted to the possessive individual, imagined as
being in sovereign control of its body. This is the subject form that has
over-determined sexual agency as well as the imaginary of sexual iden-
tity. By virtue of the logics of the sexual rights-bearing subject, subjects
are conceived as possessing a sexuality that remains objectified as a set
of rights, while the subject is posed as an ontological foundation, prior
to the rights that are claimed. But which subjects do have access to the
possibility of owning a body ready to be fully known and controlled?
Within this logic, the relationship of subjectivity with sexuality—under-
stood as a technology of government—points to a liberal rationale, which
is also racially codified. The possessive modality in which this subject is
currently compelled to relate to its sexual orientations, preferences, and
identifications forms the basis of Western imaginaries of sexuality and
identity, which in turn over-determines the translation of sexual identi-
ties across geo-cultural differences.
Joseph Massad has analyzed the vexed relationship between sexual
identity and cultural difference in his book Desiring Arabs.12 In this book,
Massad develops the notion of ‘sexual epistemology’ to describe those
ideas that emerged in modern Europe and made of sexuality (and all
its derivatives: homosexuality, bisexuality, heterosexuality) an ontologi-
cal category. According to Massad, it is this sexual epistemology that
is at the basis of current global and mainstream sexual politics, which
are operating under the assumption that ‘being gay’ is a universal (and
even trans-historical) experience. Although within academic circles it is
widely accepted that homosexuality is indebted to the modern Western
tradition, as Foucault’s seminal The History of Sexuality highlighted, the
assumption is that there is an ontology of being sexual, whether hetero
or homo, and to a much lesser extent bisexual, so that certain experiences
and ideas about sexuality become naturalized.13 Within this sexual episte-
mology, this particular historical and cultural trajectory for experiencing,
imagining, and understanding sexuality is universalized and subsequently
understood as the point of reference by which any experience associated
with the sexual is to be judged.
This process of naturalization enables colonial narratives of progress,
as, indeed, the idea of progress is based on the homogenization of cat-
egories. The idea of progress with regard to sexual rights in the world
relies on the reification of these onto-epistemological categories revolving
around sexuality, to the extent that sexuality has to appear as a homo-
geneous category to be thought of in terms of evolution. It is from this
point of departure that sexual freedom, then, is displayed along the lines
of a progressive narrative, giving way to the civilizing enterprises that pro-
mote it. The progressive narrative according to which the Western model
of ‘the sexual rights-bearing subject’ has become a benchmark needs this
to happen in order to ensure its continuity. In effect, for this benchmark
to work, it is necessary for specific notions and trajectories of gender and
sexual ways of being, such as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender, to
become naturalized: the benchmark represents the historical present to
which ‘all the others’ should aspire and, sooner or later, should meet.
Massad relates this onto-epistemological problem specifically to the
question of identity. However, the problem is even more complicated
because the search for more inclusive categories able to contain the dif-
ferent ways of being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans does not necessar-
ily avoid the risk of reproducing this sexual epistemology, according to
which sexuality is supposed to define who we are. As I have argued else-
where, it is in the light of the over-determination of the liberal subject
form that, in my view, the multiculturalist responses to humanist uni-
versalization of sexual identities remain limited.14 This response, which is
particularly important within popular culture, has consisted of adding to
the spectrum of sexual identities more names that do not exactly comply
with the LGBT denominations: MSM (men who have sex with men),
hijras, travestis, two-spirit people, tortilleras, dykes, jotas, putos, and many
others. These categories do trouble the spectrum of available possibili-
ties for sexual identifications and are important instances for marking
an array of positionalities that are at a distance from mainstream trans-
national trends, according to different genealogies, axes of power, and
‘cultural difference.’ However, they do not in themselves necessarily chal-
lenge the normative field within which such identifications become intel-
ligible, nor would they question by their sole existence the link between
sexuality and identity.
This is what happens when, in the attempt to dismantle the universal
idea of what it means to be gay, the potentiality of the deconstructive
gesture is provincialized as a particular case which confirms the universal-
ity of homosexuality, as a framework configured through ideas of sexual
orientation and identity. This is the case, for example, of the fate of the
MSM category. As Massad points out, this category, which originated
precisely to distinguish a culturally inflected sociosexual practice from
the universalist paradigm of homosexuality, has been reintroduced in the
logic of sexual orientation and converted into another sexual identity
category to be added to the list of non-normative sexual identities that
oppose the norm of heterosexuality.15 Similarly, in the realm of gender
we can see how investigations aimed at questioning the universality of
the category transgender, as in the case of hijras in India, are turned into
an exemplary case showing other ways of being transgender. In this vein,
Gayatri Reddy complicates those ideas that immediately identify the
emancipatory positionality of hijras by ‘their transgressive gender identity
and its place beyond the realm of procreative sexuality….’16 The question
remains: how can we avoid investing hijras with a certain imaginary more
proper to European American academia?
Here we are confronted with the tension posed by hegemony and
power differentials concerning the conditions that enable the produc-
tion and translation of knowledge. ‘We’ might have witnessed this ten-
sion in international conferences and forums where these issues are put
at stake.17 ‘We’ might have seen how different analyses of, for example,
locas, travestis, or two-spirit people, which challenge this Western sexual
onto-epistemology, tend to be re-interpreted according to the grammars

and standards of mainly Euro-North American traditions. It is frustrat-
ing that cultural translation works mainly in one direction, reducing such
interventions to case studies which, under hegemonic eyes, supposedly
limit themselves to highlighting other gender and sexual identities—so
much so that they are ‘minoritized’ within the hegemonic understand-
ings of sexuality in academic circles as well.
Along these lines, Greg Thomas criticizes hegemonic Western contem-
porary academia for not being able to address the whiteness embedded in
the onto-epistemology of sexuality itself. Thomas states:
(A)s neo-colonialism and imperialism are replaced by the language of mul-

ticulturalism and the rather liberal rhetoric of ‘race, gender, class and sexu-
ality’, contemporary academia does not confront but rather consolidates
the Occidentalism that universalizes sexuality both at the level of politics
and epistemology.18
According to Thomas, the problem with these frameworks is that they cir-
cumscribe their inquiry to the question of how this or that sexual identity
might be racialized, while remaining unable to grasp the fact that what is
understood as sexual in such a proposition is, at an epistemological level,
already racialized. In Thomas’ view, ‘when sexuality is said to be a social
construction in academia, the social constructions of Western empire are
sanctified above all.’19 That is why, the author continues, Western ‘erotic
schemes are naturalized by theories of denaturalization.’20 It would be
precisely through such a deconstructive move that sexuality is produced
as an onto-epistemological category. Hence the need to question the fun-
damental categories in which this sexual epistemology is based.21
When difference is translated into a culturally specific way of express-
ing homosexuality or being transgender, this difference is transmuted into
a sign of cultural diversity in the field of sexuality and gender, respec-
tively. This sort of negotiation of categories confirms rather than chal-
lenges the universality of sexual (and gender) identity as the shift consists
of expanding the notion of sexual identity to encompass more options.
In other words, what this logic exposes is that while it may not be a spe-
cific sexual identity that is universalized (although this is also the case), the
universality of the identitarian field or domain in which all these pluralized

identities qua identities become meaningful is actually confirmed.
Conceived in this way, diversity is called upon to convey how ‘a culture’ or
a certain epoch lives its own sexuality. But through this gesture, the effects
of the dispositive of sexuality are taken as an ontological reality, confirm-
ing the assumption that sexuality, conceived as an objectified property that
shapes a univocal core identity for the subject, is an inalienable fact and
not the effect of a particular (Western modern) episteme.
It is not enough to expose cultural sexual diversity if by doing so we are
unable to intervene and question the fundamental categories on which
this sexual epistemology is based. But how can we deconstruct the uni-
versalism of LGBT identitarian schemes without reinforcing the sexual
epistemology that we are trying to dismantle? One step toward such an
enterprise clearly demands that we abandon the paradigm of diversity,
regarding both their sexual and cultural manifestations, as they are con-
stitutively entangled. There have been many critiques of liberal diversity
when it comes to either sexual matters, as we have seen in Chapter 2, or
cultural ones, as we have seen in Chapter 3. In the following sections, I
discuss some other possible paths, pointing out the challenges they have
posed to hegemonic paradigms and the predicaments they face.
The Decolonial Turn

Western modern sexual epistemology has, particularly, come under the
severe scrutiny of decolonial critique. The so-called decolonial turn con-
stituted a key epistemological intervention, highlighting the dynamics
of global capitalism and obliging us to look anew at the ‘epistemology
of the West’ from the point of view of subalternized knowledge tradi-
tions.22 Initially, the canonical representatives of the decolonial tradi-
tion criticized postcolonial studies for their alleged ‘culturalism’ and,
as perceived by these authors, for acting in concert with a complacent
poststructuralist paradigm that, arguably, did not take social inequali-
ties seriously into account. However, the positions have softened over
time, and in fact both approaches now share a central interest in the
overlap between culture, politics, and global capitalism. But there is
another criticism that decolonial scholars such as Walter Mignolo or

Ramón Grosfoguel have made of postcolonial studies, which still stands
today.23 According to these authors, postcolonial studies cannot offer a
radical critique of the implications of colonialism, as they are part of the
poststructuralist or postmodern turn and, therefore, are understood as
part of the dominant Western paradigm of the moment. This decolonial
view is controversial. It advocates a position of exteriority from which
to offer a radical and absolute counter-discourse to Western modernity,
and therefore reinforces the idea that there is an ontological difference
between Western modernity and its other. In more or less implicit terms,
decolonial positions tend to reinforce untenable ideas of cultural purity.24
Let me expand. When Walter Mignolo wrote The Darker Side of
Renaissance, published in 1995, he called into question the hegemonic
stories of modernity, which reflected the English and French colonial
experience.25 Bringing in the Spanish history of Empire, he challenged the
periodization that emerged from hegemonic narratives of the West, mak-
ing a very important historiographic intervention. Mignolo’s reconsidera-
tion of colonial configurations, taking into account the Latin American
experience, was part of the cultural atmosphere of the time, sharing the
concerns of Anibal Quijano and Enrique Dussel, who were interested in
revisiting world-systems theory in order to show that modernity was not
exclusive to Europeans.26 Instead of one evolutionary model for moder-
nity, these authors insisted on the idea that colonial encounters produced
multiple and differentiated modernities.
The idea that postcolonial studies could not give an account of this mul-
tiplicity, and were instead complicit with the hegemony of poststructuralist
Western paradigm, seems more problematic. The common idea of deco-
lonial positions, either in line with the work of Walter Mignolo, Ramon
Grosfoguel, or Boaventura de Sousa Santos, is that although colonization
is a constitutive condition of possibility for the emergence of Western
modernity, there is a radical difference between Metropolitan modernity
and colonized worlds.27 While the postcolonial emphasis is on the co-
constitution of these two worlds, the decolonial vision maintains a not so
clearly resolved tension between co-constitution and ontological difference
between Western modernity and its other. It is around this tension that the
opposition between decolonial and postcolonial visions arises.
The hallmark of decolonial views, despite the different theoretical

avenues followed by diverse authors, is their commitment to a posi-
tion of exteriority from which to offer a radical critique or even an
all-encompassing counter-discourse to Western modern paradigms.
Decolonial positions rest, in this respect, on a view of historical pro-
cesses organized around two key players: hegemonic and subordinate,
dominant and dominated, self and other. Historically aligned with subal-
tern studies, these decolonial genealogies also mirror an epochal climate,
which not only amounts to the tension between subaltern and postco-
lonial studies, but also the reformulation of the Latin American Marxist
heritage as well as totalizing notions of social transformation or revolu-
tionary break, and the trail left by theorists of dependency, to mention
some aspects of Latin American intellectual history.
Both the epistemology of exteriority proposed by Mignolo, and the
epistemologies of the South proposed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos
are based on an assumed and radical break between the West and the
rest, and a subsequent purist notion of otherness. Such a break would
be an effect of the colonial encounter, but whereas postcolonial authors
would focus on the ongoing relations that result from it, these decolo-
nial scholars would insist that this encounter effects an inevitable split,
giving way to two opposed universes. The radical exclusion of colonized
worlds on which Western modernity is based produces an exterior, whose
radical difference is pivotal to their theoretical schemes. But where can
one find that pure otherness, uncontaminated by Western modernity?
One of the key problems of decolonial approaches such as these arise
precisely around the purity of ‘the other.’ The kind of research that the
decolonial perspective has generated tends to focus on old, precoloniza-
tion mystified pasts, but which are, nevertheless, dependent on the story
of colonization. In some cases, it leads to essentialist versions of a purified
past prior to colonization, or to nativist visions that freeze the past and
deny these other cultural traditions their own history of transformation,
change, and, most crucially, hybridization. The value assigned to a fro-
zen origin and an idealized past, together with the denial of the com-
plex ‘impurity’ of this otherness, leads to a problematic view because this
vision in fact entails an epistemic gesture that rehearses colonizing logics,
re-articulating cultural or epistemological forms of essentialism.
This form of cultural and/or epistemological essentialism is a subtle one.

Any decolonial scholar would have no problem in admitting that such
purity does not exist, and that, in fact, this idea of otherness is itself the
product of colonization. However, the next move will be to find a coun-
ter position able to articulate a radical and absolute break with Western
modernity based on the idea that the very history of domination and
exclusion imposed by colonization has created an outside (the excluded,
tout court), and it is from this outside that another epistemology can be
conceived. But under what conditions could that pure radical otherness
have been configured? How could that paradigm emerge untainted by
Western modernity, and potentially become counter-hegemonic? How
are we to think of that outside?
Here, I should point out that this form of exteriority is radically different
from Laclau’s conception of the constitutive outside discussed in Chapter 3,
for in this latter case there is no referent that might be able to give positive
content to what is exterior. Rather, the exterior marks the insufficiency of
any positivity. In contrast, the decolonial position reinforces the ontological
difference between the West and the rest, even if it is recast as an epistemo-
logical one. According to this framework, the colonial encounter had created
a relation of exclusion giving rise to two opposing camps: on the one hand,
the colonial legacy, on the other hand, the purity of the counterculture of
the colonized (subaltern) other, both conceived as positive actualities.
Further, the problem with this epistemological proposition is that this
state of perfect purity is nowhere to be found. That is why I would like
to suggest that rather than invest our hopes in an imagined outside—the
more it is othered, the better—perhaps what we need is a theoretical and
political framework that would allow us both to question and to build
an alternative to the re-articulation of Western hegemony for defining
our current postcolonial condition in the context of contemporary colo-
niality. Following Quijano, I understand coloniality to be the continu-
ation of colonial relations after decolonization. Therefore, if we refer to
the postcolonial condition, it does not imply that we assume colonial
powers to have been eroded. In fact, it suggests that they are being re-
articulated.28 The continuing process of ‘recolonization,’ and the fact
that colonial legacies remain alive and well within the context of post-
coloniality, perhaps requires a different response. Instead of assuming
that the right (and best) contestation to this hegemony will be found
in some alternative outsider paradigm, whose legitimacy is based more
on its exteriority than on its critical efficacy, perhaps we should follow a
line of enquiry that enables us to address how the hegemonic paradigm
of Western modernity is constantly being re-articulated in more and less
subtle ways. Given the co-constitution of these worlds, the question is
to see how to best dislocate contemporary relations of coloniality, with-
out assuming that the exteriority of the ‘locus of enunciation,’ as Walter
Mignolo defines it, will per se give us the most effective answer.
Some decolonial approaches that have been linked to a queer stand-
point from their inception point in this direction. In effect, the intro-
duction to the decolonial canon I have just offered does not account
for the influence of Chicana feminist theory in the development of a
decolonial perspective which, in fact, is also linked to feminist and queer
traditions.29 From this perspective, it is, above all, impurity and a per-
manent state of translation that define the decolonial vision. Anzaldúa’s
mestiza is also a queer figure destined to defy binaries and preconceived
systems of categorization.30 And this is the case of some representatives of
the so-called queer of color critique, who have been trying to articulate a
decolonial queer perspective.31
Let us examine more closely the conditions, and the sense in which a
queer approach might be productively decolonizing. What kind of dia-
logue can be established between queer and decolonial views? Or is it that
these are two incompatible perspectives given their different origins and
trajectories, as some would argue?
Postcolonial Revisions and Cultural Translation

As many authors have suggested, the current phobic, discriminatory,
or more generally conservative positions, of which the third world is
systematically accused, cannot be considered separately from the pro-
cess of hybridization enabled by colonization. As Massad has argued,
the heterosexual/homosexual partition of sexuality that we find today
in the Middle East is in fact indebted to Western standards mobilized
on that region in the colonial period. Similarly, Maria Lugones has
pointed out that the heteronormative gender system as we know it in

Latin America was not autochthonous, but was imposed by coloniz-
ers. If this is the case, the critique of the so-called imperialism of the
sexual democratic turn cannot depart from a decolonial position that
presupposes an epistemic exteriority which is not already embedded
in Western ways of thinking or not already contaminated by them. Of
course, this hybrid epistemic conglomerate has affected the metropo-
lis and former colonies differently—to the point that even sexuality
as a dispositive is dependent on its racialized character, as I have sug-
gested, drawing on Thomas. However, as I have just argued, it would
not be the ‘exteriority’ of the locus of enunciation that would guaran-
tee per se the rightfulness of a position.
The field of sexuality is not stable. Each of its uses and meanings evokes
very different genealogies, trajectories, experiences, and senses according
to the geo-cultural, linguistic, political, and intellectual dis/locations in
which they circulate, and the exchanges they are exposed to in a transna-
tional scene. It would therefore be misleading to attempt to stabilize its
meaning without noting the necessarily partial character of any possible
answer. Some would argue that one solution to this problem might be to
locate our claims, but such an attitude presupposes that it is possible to
fully represent that location. I am not sure that this is feasible, and what is
more, in so doing we would be reproducing certain ideas of authenticity
with which we may not want to identify. Yet another possibility would
be to dwell on the difficulty imposed by such displacements, rather than
trying to overcome or eliminate it. This is what cultural translation as a
methodology is about. Finding ourselves in different ways in constant
transit, living already in a diasporic space,32 we may want to opt for this
second method. It could not be otherwise, since, in fact, whether we
want it or not, the recourse to a clear, neat location will not save us from
the fact that this location may well already be a contaminated and hybrid
space.
The problems posed by cultural translation are not easy to deal with.
Moving away from traditional understandings of translation that rely
on the fixity of the terms to be translated, postcolonial authors such as
Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Rey Chow have extensively theo-
rized both the translation of texts and processes of cultural translation,
aiming to develop a notion of translation able to challenge the reifica-

tion of cultural difference.33 According to Bhabha, when we consider
cultural translation we become aware that there is no identity that could
claim authenticity or purity; cultural identity is already a hybrid product.
Furthermore, identity is played out precisely in the exchange with the
‘other’ so that it becomes a borderline concept itself. Cultural identity is a
liminal configuration and therefore cannot belong to any singular entity.
Rather, it indicates the relational character of identity itself. In this sense,
identity becomes translation. Gloria Anzaldúa has also highlighted this
hybrid character of identity. The queer mestiza she refers to is after all
another situated figure for the life that happens in the borders: not here,
not there, but rather in the negotiation—that is, a continuous process of
translation—of that border zone.
The tension between purity and impurity (which is also the tension
between hybridity and authenticity) is of primary importance in debates
over universalizing frameworks for sexual rights. As Judith Butler points
out, when the universalization and internationalization of certain terms
are put into play, we cannot refer to ‘one culture which defines itself over
and against another.’34 This is not just because translation is constitutive
of these cultures, but also because, as Butler points out, ‘the very con-
cept of universality compels an understanding of culture as a relation
of exchange and task of translation.’35 This point leads us to the need to
uncover how the division between the West and the rest is constantly re-
articulated, both politically and epistemologically.36 To contest this divi-
sion, we may need to redirect our claims of sexual rights on the basis of
connected histories, and also change the norms and the terms of political
subjectivity. This mobilization of the universal to redefine the terms of
what is encompassed by it would be at odds with the universalism of
assimilation or accommodation of ‘the others’ into Western models of
sexual identity and associated modes of political subjectivation. It would
point instead to a renegotiation of the political contract on the basis of
the shared histories of those excluded and included in modern political
subjectivity.
When examining the link and the distance between universality
and universalism, we inevitably find ourselves wondering about the
scope of the universal (and not just universalism) in relation to the
demand for equality, inclusion, and particular forms of subjectivation.

We can see this tension when the horizon of universal equality opens
up a site of contestation of universalism, that is, a site where the
political space is negotiated in order to redescribe the ‘who’ (in
Butler’s terms, the human) who might have access to becoming a sub-
ject that deserves equal treatment or recognition. Following Jacques
Rancière, this might also be the space of politics, which challenges
the universalist pretension of the police state.37 What I am suggesting
here is a key displacement from universalist assumptions toward the
idea of universalization as a political process of hegemonic struggles.
Drawing on Laclau and Mouffe’s conceptualization of hegemony and
also on Butler’s considerations of the universal and cultural transla-
tion, while we may be compelled to contest foreclosed versions of
universalism, we can only do so through a universalizing logic. For
example, the claim that human rights are based on ‘universalist’ pre-
sumptions implies that they are not as universal as they pretend to
be; it is because the realm of human rights lacks universality that the
claim is made. ‘Universalism’ is already a marker of deficient uni-
versality—an indication of its provisional hegemony. When Butler
suggests that the human should be re-described in order for human
rights to be open to those who are considered less human, she does so
on the basis of the horizon of universality. Read through the lens of
hegemonic enactments of political subjectivity, what is at stake here
is a counter-hegemonic re-articulation of the universality evoked by
‘the human’ as the grounds for political subjectivation, against the
particular, and yet hegemonic, universalism of the liberal (presumably
cosmopolitan) individual.
These tensions indicate, as Butler suggests, ‘the problem of cross-
cultural translation that the concept of universality has become.’38 This
problem is directly involved in the question of the hegemony of cer-
tain languages over others. Hegemony, by definition, renders any ulti-
mate realization of universality impossible. Universality, then, can only
appear as an unreachable horizon, where an ideal, unattainable transla-
tion takes form. As translation is always already marked by hegemonic
relations, the point would be to try to understand the formation of
these hegemonies. So, when sexual rights are claimed, the question to
ask ourselves is: what is being translated and how does this translation
work (if it does) when the sexual identities that go with these rights
are universalized as well? Within the tension between the constitutive
hybridity of sexual subjectivities and the hegemonies involved in the
universalization of sexual identities, who has access to make demands in
the name of sexual rights?
In this light, cultural translation may be a good way to question
liberal ideas of diversity, as previously discussed. However, taking
this path might mean locating our focus beyond identity. My view is
that we need to distinguish between onto-epistemological categories
of identity and the sexual field within which these categories make
sense—in other words, the conditions of intelligibility that make such
forms of identification possible in the first place. On the one hand,
we are confronted with the tensions among different identity catego-
ries, or systems of identification and classification that refer to certain
sexual orientations defining sexual ‘types.’ Here we are dealing with
identity categories: lesbian, tortilleras, two-spirited people, traves-
tis, trans, locas, gays, and when the queer designates an identity, also
queers. On the other hand, we have categories that describe a sexual
field or domain that organizes those identities. This domain refers to
the semantic fields that establish the constraining horizon for the for-
mation of these subjects and subsequently shape and give meaning to
these particular identities, namely, sexuality, citizenship, and politics.
Only by focusing the critique on the conditions of intelligibility that
allow for the emergence of these identities, and by further questioning
the link of ‘the sexual’ with identity as a whole, would it be possible
to challenge the universalization of Western sexual epistemology. The
critique of this second type of categories, which designates a semantic
field (and not just the positions that can be included within it), will
allow us to intervene in disciplinary fields, or even in the modes in
which political subjectivities might be conceived. And it is precisely
at the level of these semantic fields, as they encompass a diverse range
of positions, that universalist presumptions about sexuality might be
seriously questioned.
Queering the Sexual?
How are we to alter, intervene, or re-articulate the fundamental epis-
temological categories that delineate the contours of this imaginary of
sexuality? Have queer perspectives managed to do this? When thinking
about sexual rights as if they were a given, we need to seriously reconsider
our notions of sexuality, freedom, and autonomy, as well as notions about
the sexualized ‘I.’ What imaginary defines the terms by which any person
can become intelligible as a sexual subject, as well as a political subject?
Is it not the case that in the field of hegemonic academic production,
the sexual subject is taken as a valid political subject by virtue of very
specific modes of understanding its sexuality? Is it not the case that this
subject becomes meaningfully sexual through the very same rights that
are claimed, and the prescribed manner in which these rights must be
claimed? Rather than accepting the pre-established ideas of sexual rights,
perhaps an enhanced imaginary of sexual freedom demands that we
review the ways in which we understand the sexual aspect of our experi-
ences and our lives, and how this aspect can be imagined as a political
matter. And here, it is necessary to distinguish sexuality, understood as a
Western modern dispositive, from what I call ‘the sexual,’ broadly con-
ceived as an indefinite field associated with erotic bodily pleasures.
Could a queer perspective help us in the task of decolonizing the for-
mation of the ‘sexual’ as sexuality? And by doing so, could it also enhance
or radicalize the meaning of the ‘democratic’? The question of how we
might think of a queer-decolonizing perspective immediately calls for a
reformulation of this very same question in a far unstable horizon. This is
a complicated question, because the meaning of queer politics is not clear
from a transnational point of view. The queer signifier has been around
for various decades now and has traveled across continents, so to assume a
univocal meaning for it would be misleading. We have different versions
of what queer may mean, and different forms in which the queer circu-
lates. This instability might be understood as an indicator of its potential
to enable processes of cultural translation. Against those arguments that
reject queer approaches tout court on the grounds that this is an approach
that belongs to Euro-North Atlantic academic circles and therefore could
only amount to a colonizing move, as Massad and Lugones suggest, I
would argue that the difficulties or even the impossibility of dialogue

with queer views emerge when we deny the instability of the term queer
and assume that it necessarily describes a fixed set of meanings.
A recurrent problem that emerges within queer international
forums is whether we all mean the same by the signifier queer—this
is far from being the case. When thinking about queer politics, the
confusion and sealing of the dialogue is often exacerbated when the
meanings attributed to the queer are contradicted by the different
voices in the debate, and often steeped in prejudice. This can give
rise to tremendous misunderstandings. It is often due to freezing the
meaning of what queer might mean that the fear of its colonizing
potential arises. For example, in the midst of polysemy and dissemi-
nation, the signifier queer encounters strong resistance on the part of
certain social movements whose main demands are concerned with
the visibilization of particular non-normative identities. This is par-
ticularly true in Latin American and Spanish contexts. A number of
Spanish and Latin American groups reject the term queer because
they understand it as indicating the ‘police of identity,’ as an attendee
at a conference once told me. In this case, the rejection of the queer
has less to do with its colonizing potential and more with the fact that
it might question certain forms of identity politics.39
The historical tension between the politics of visibilization and
queer politics might sound out of place here. However, they actually
resonate on the one hand with the problem of self-transparency—
what is it that becomes visible—and on the other hand, with the
imperialist forms that the normative discourses of coming out might
assume, where the conditions of visibility are at stake. If we under-
stand visibility as a performative effect, where it is the same mode
of appearance that constitutes the subject, it will be the mode of its
appearance within a multilayered and complex game between the vis-
ible and the invisible that allows the subject to become what it is.
Visibility is not opposed to the invisible. Rather, it emerges within a
field configured by a relationship between the visible and the invisible
that visibility cannot overcome: an ongoing game of translation itself.
The regime of visibility constitutively depends on an invisible field,
which allows the visible to appear as such. There are always interstices
that render complete or total visibility impossible. And then it seems

that, from a queer perspective, the potential of visibility might not be
in the ideal of making a particular subject fully visible. This line of
reasoning inevitably brings us face to face with the problem of what
kind of subject will be defined by the regime of visibility in question,
which ways of being in front of others, or exposed to others, might
be privileged or even recognized at all. The potential of the politics of
visibilization might be related, instead, to the task of making visible
the means and the procedures of invisibilization, pointing to how the
visible is structured; exposing how certain ways of seeing prevent us
from seeing otherwise.
As a critical perspective that stands at a distance from simplistic
views on visibilization, to stand for a queer position is related to the
need to highlight that the creation of category systems necessarily pro-
duces exclusions. In this instance, to assume a queer standpoint is to
align with what remains abject in that system. This has less to do with
representing the other than with an ethical commitment that requires
us to be alert against any complicity with exclusionary and hierarchi-
cal manifestations of power. I think the political potential of a queer
approach is associated with the fact that it stands for the position of
the abject or for what has been excluded from a social order, in an
antagonistic and therefore negative relation to it. In this sense, it delin-
eates a horizon of resistance to every form of exclusion and abjection,
without giving a specific content to that resistance. That is why queer
as a signifier that stands for this positionality lends itself, and even
demands, to be re-appropriated, redefined, and iterated. In my view, a
queer approach points to a permanent questioning of the limits of the
paradigms with which we operate, inviting us to an incessant process of
cultural translation. And in this sense, I think the untranslatability of
the term at the level of its literal meaning as a term—queer is not the
same as raro or torcido, as it has been literally translated into Spanish,
now transliterated as cuir—is an advantage, because it marks the origin
of the term, and in this sense does not deny its history, does not forget
its legacy. I would say that in this regard it is a signifier whose traces
compel decolonizing translations.
Following this line of reasoning, conversations between queer

theoretical investments and the decolonizing task become extremely use-
ful. These dialogues parallel those queer alliances leading to a type of
transnational solidarity that does not promote paternalistic logics such as
those we find in some LGBT agendas and some NGOs and international
organizations—not to mention the paternalism of some governments’
foreign policies or domestic measures, such as those of Barack Obama
and James Cameron, when both, at the dawn of 2011, threatened to
withdraw international aid to countries that criminalize homosexuality.
As much as they oppose the pathologization and criminalization of non-
heterosexual sexuality, their discourse also imposes colonial norms for
recognizing the gay and lesbian subject.
As previously highlighted, the queer has been associated with the deco-
lonial enterprise right from the beginning, although this association has
not always been properly acknowledged. In part imbued by this tradition
of ‘border thinking,’ at the intersection of race, culture, and sexuality, a
strand of ‘queer of color’ theory emerged, disrupting these condescend-
ing and racist cultural assessments, while at the same time challenging the
hegemonic queer tradition and its indifference to the postcolonial condi-
tion and the racialized dimension of queer configurations, including a
specific Latino tradition of queer studies.40 It is within these entangled
genealogies that we need to contextualize questions about the kind of
critique that a queer perspective might offer to the sexual epistemology
described in the previous sections.
In my view, this possibility involves an understanding of queerness as
disrupting the exclusionary borders connoted by the legislation of cat-
egories. Understood in these terms, a queer critique may aim to ally itself
not just with those who occupy the place of the segregated, the excluded,
but first and foremost with those who signal a social vacuum where any
society draws the radical boundary to give a totalizing and conclusive
account of itself. Of course, there are no straightforward or easy answers
to this. Following Butler, I would simply limit myself to drawing a paral-
lel between the queer commitment to challenging the epistemic limits
that I am proposing and the form of recognition that Butler proposes.
Butler refashions recognition as a form of translation in which, in a
very queer fashion, one could be undone, or dispossessed from what one

knows. In this regard, Butler writes:
One can give and take recognition only on the condition that one becomes
disoriented from oneself, that one undergoes a ‘de-centering’ and fails to
achieve self-identity… This version of recognition will be based less on
knowledge than on apprehension of epistemic limits.41
A queer critique of those sexual epistemologies that become universal-

ized through one-way processes of cultural translation also takes us back
to the idea of queerness as that which dismantles preconceived notions
of the social. It is from this ‘constitutive outside’ (understood in Ernesto
Laclau’s terms) that I think the queer offers possibilities for disputing the
epistemological assumptions about sexuality, this heavily loaded term. In
pursuit of a permanent questioning of the epistemic limits of the para-
digms with which we operate, a queer perspective might be inviting us
to an ongoing process of cultural translation that could be truly open
and genuine in order to challenge well-established canons. This openness
might be associated with a radical productive negativity,42 which, rather
than presenting a demand for inclusion, calls for a revision of what is
understood as properly sexual.
Queer Translations and the Domain

of Sexuality as Property
How does this approach to a queer form of cultural translation relate to
the question of the liberal conditions of intelligibility of sexuality, which
depend on a possessive modality that defines both sexual orientation and
identity, and the political subject of rights? What kind of idea of sexual-
ity would be able to re-articulate in a critical manner the fundamental
epistemological categories that revolve around the logic of possession and
control?
As I have pointed out in previous sections, the dispositive of sexu-
ality is part and parcel of a Western hegemonic imaginary indebted to
possessive individualism, and the subsequent model of self-ownership.
Embedded in this tradition, the Western paradigm of individual sexual

rights based on sexual orientation and identity relies to a great extent
on forms of identification that reinforce imaginary self-owned subjects
whose relationship to their bodies, desires, and sexuality becomes one
of ownership.43 These imaginary formations, to which subjects become
attached at a psychosocial level, are aided by the development of particu-
lar sexual onto-epistemological categories. The counterpart of this sexual
epistemology, which reframes sexuality as a possession, is the abstract
sovereign subject defined by possessive individualism and transparent
reason.44
This pervasive notion of transparency that survives any post-essentialist
and critical claim is key. From a psychosocial point of view, it is clear that
this illusion of transparency contradicts the dynamic of subject forma-
tion, which points to the opacity of subjectivity and desire. However, it
has been my contention that it is precisely because the fiction of trans-
parency is part of an imaginary that operates at a psychic level that it is
so difficult to disarticulate. This resistance to critique is directly linked
to concomitant subjects’ investment in freedom. Within the paradigm
of transparency, freedom (and for that matter sexual rights, which imply
being able to exercise self-determined control over our bodies and desires)
would be achievable through the attainment of self-knowledge—the ker-
nel of the dispositive of sexuality. The sexual epistemology implied by
the sexual rights-bearing subject preconceives sexuality as a property that
a self-owned subject is said to know and possess. This subject will relate
to its sexuality in a possessive modality, as the owner (and knower) of its
body, and the sexual properties that come with it. The possessive char-
acter of the relationship between subjectivity and sexuality is, in effect,
indebted to the liberal subject, who will be defined precisely as a political
subject, as it is in possession of its own being. Through this possessive
modality, which is one of the conditions that make the emergence of
sexual onto-epistemological categories of identities possible, sexuality is
translated into a right.
It is in this context, then, that I propose to examine the queer-
decolonial gesture of border thinking as a way to challenge this hege-
monic imaginary, as it emerges as a demand to question the epistemic
limits of the paradigms with which we operate. We can find examples
of this work of translation at the level of politics, for example, in the

Ecuadorian Constitution that reconceived gender identity as an aes-
thetic liberty. Promoted by one of the members of the collective Proyecto
Transgénero, whose interventions are based on alternative uses of law, the
introduction of ‘Aesthetic Freedom’ in the Ecuadorian Constitution of
2008 aimed to open the way for further claims regarding gender justice,
antidiscrimination legislation, and depathologization, including but not
limited to preconceived ideas of gender or sexual expression.45 In a simi-
lar manner, and based on the plurinational juridical framework of the
Ecuadorian constitution, this same collective put forward an appeal for
the recognition as a family of four sex workers that live together. This
was made in collaboration with Brazilian activists, who, based on the
Brazilian legal recognition of ‘de facto’ families, advocate the recognition
of street families. These initiatives challenge the link between normative
kinship, private household, and property. They are formulated in such a
way that they include myriad forms of mutual affective chains of care,
within which matrimony, either straight or gay, becomes just one pos-
sible format.
Among academic interventions that examine this kind of border think-
ing is Scott Morgensen’s book, Spaces Between Us. Morgensen accounts
for alliances between Native queer, Two-Spirit, and Native activists that
contest the naturalization of settler colonialism, which, as Morgensen
points out, is ‘the very formation homo-nationalism reinforces,’ while
also developing ‘transnational modes of naming and defending Native
sovereignty,’ and engaging Native peoples in diasporas caused by coloni-
zation.46 Particularly in relation to the question of sovereign sexual sub-
jects, Gloria Wekker’s ethnographic research on the mati also comes to
mind.47 Wekker shows us how in the ‘Afro Surrinamese working class
universe, it is sexual activity and sexual fulfilment per se that is signifi-
cant; and it is not the sex of one’s sexual counterpart that carries the most
meaningful information.’48
But at the center of recent and less recent Western traditions, we also
find possible evocations of this opening gesture that troubles this self-
owned sovereign ‘sexual I.’ For instance, it might be there in the frag-
mented lesbian body of Monique Wittig, which challenges the unity of
the sexual body when traversed by passion, and where the J/e is traversed
by a bar.49 Wittig states that this bar ‘helps to imagine an excess of “I”…
where this I and this You are intercheangable….’50 In a similar vein, Anne
Carson suggests that according to the Saphic tradition, Eros dwells in ‘the
moment when the soul parts on itself in desire, (and) is conceived as a
dilemma of body and senses… a moment when boundaries of the body,
categories of thought are confounded.’51
A move toward ‘the erotic,’ either in the terms of Audre Lorde, or
as a practice of ‘erotic embodiment,’ as Greg Thomas calls it, point in
this direction, and I will engage with their interventions in Chapter 6.
For now, suffice is to say that thought of in these terms, the sexual, or
the erotic dimension of our embodiment, makes it impossible to give a
totalizing account of who we sexually are, and, very much in line with
a psychosocial conception of the sexual domain that takes into account
the unconscious dimension of desire and fantasy, speaks to a corporeal
dimension, where our bodies are and are not our own. Conceived as
a liminal matter, sexuality might become a threshold that exceeds (and
may undo) the individualities involved, rendering indistinguishable the
lines between what belongs to me and what belongs to you. Indeed, it
may be that ‘my desire’ emerges within the negotiation of the borders,
in translation, between other and self. Ultimately, I think this relational
focus not only evokes one of the basic tenets of feminist traditions and
queer perspectives, understood as critical methodologies, but also points
to a form of cultural translation destined to expand the meanings of the
sexual domain.
I began this chapter by posing the problem of the transnational
dynamics of sexual politics and cultural differences. In order to consider
the possible modalities of a queer critical approach to the universalism
of the ‘sexual rights-bearing subject,’ and the universalization of sexual
identities that come with it, I suggested a series of enquiries that I con-
sider important for situating the discussion, following from my critique
of liberal approaches to diversity. Here, I highlighted that the liberal char-
acter of sexual and cultural diversity is not restricted to the political ideals
that this figure embodies, but rather to the onto-epistemological founda-
tions on which this hegemonic imaginary of sexuality is based. Therefore,
in the second place I have argued for the need to revise these political
categories on an epistemological level, showing that they were based on
a specific Western modern historical tradition particularly invested in

notions of progress and superiority, hence their exclusionary and racially
marked character.
My contention is that in order to be transmuted into a set of rights to
which an abstract subject is entitled, the sexual aspects of our lives remain
tied to a sexual epistemology that makes of sexual identity a universal
ontological reality based on naturalized notions of sexual orientation and
identification, which are, in turn, shaped by possessive individualism
and transparent reason. In this context, I proposed a distinction between
identity categories and categories of field or domain, which would
describe the conditions that shape the identitarian onto-epistemological
framework orchestrated by this hegemonic imaginary, one that is based
on ideas of sexual orientation and identity as possessions that a subject is
said to have.
I have suggested that it would be through the disruption of these
second types of categories—the categories of field or domain—that it
becomes possible to question the possessive ontology of sexuality defined
according to a Euro-North Atlantic horizon. It is on this second level
that we find the most productive challenges to the political imaginary
of the sexual subject proper to the tradition of political liberalism, and
the presupposed universality of the categories of domain or field—the
conditions of intelligibility—in which cultural and sexual diversity are
recognized and accommodated.
The problematization of the field of intelligibility in which the norms
of gender, sexuality, and citizenship make sense, resonates with the queer
commitment to deconstruct not only identities but the categories that
define the field in which these identities are configured as such. So I
considered to what extent a queer perspective, in dialogue with a decolo-
nial approach, could expand the signifiers of sexuality against sovereignty
and toward more democratic solidarities. Countering the reification of
cultural difference, I argued for a queer-decolonial approach to cultural
translation. In the light of this account, I finally considered how a queer
cultural translation, inflected by a decolonial vision, might be able to
challenge this possessive scheme of sexuality. Ultimately, I think this focus
not only evokes one of the basic tenets of a queer perspective, understood
as a critical methodology able to challenge disciplinary boundaries, but
this form of cultural translation, destined to mark the boundaries of an

episteme is also a call to resist hegemonic forms of categorization; a call
that could also carry the echoes of a decolonial view.
Notes
1. A series of initiatives give account of this recent shift: from the Yogyakarta
Principles developed in 2006 to the presentation of the UN General Assembly
Statement (66) that ‘Affirms Rights for All’ in 2008; from the creation of the
Human Rights Council in 2006 and the prominence it has since given to
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) rights, to the United Nations
‘Human Rights, sexual orientation and gender identity’ Resolution of 2011,
and the subsequent ‘Free & Equal Campaign for LGBT Equality’ launched by
the UN Human Rights Office in 2013. Also following this trend, see, for
example, the Directive 2006/54/EC; Council Directive 2004/113/EC;
Directive 2002/73/EC, all of them in relation to the implementation of the
principle of gender equality and the latter banning discrimination based on
sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Also, the Employment Directive
(December/2003), and the different activities run under the ‘Action pro-
gramme to combat discrimination 2001–2006’ (Res. 750/2000). To these
main frames, the multiple European Parliament resolutions on the subject
should be taken into account, as well as the legal activity of the European
Region of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA-Europe) and
the Amnesty International EU Office (AIEU).
2. United Nations, “Free & Equal,” accessed January 10, 2015, https://www.
unfe.org/
3. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). Puar coined the term homona-
tionalism to refer to an analytic tool to understand the entangled dynamics
of ‘a historical shift marked by the entrance of (some) homosexual bodies as
worthy of protection by nation-states, a constitutive and fundamental
reorientation of the relationship between the state, capitalism, and sexual-
ity.’ Jasbir Puar, “Rethinking Homonationalism,” International Journal of
Middle East Studies 45 (2013): 337. Pinkwashing became a popular con-
cept to describe those State politics that mobilize gay-friendly policies as a
device to divert attention from anti-democratic, colonial, and/or violent
exercise of power. It is used to refer, in particular, to Israeli politics, pointing
out the operative logics of Israel’s gay-friendly branding in the context of its
settler-colonial practices.
4. See Judith Butler, “Sexual Politics, Torture and Secular Time,” The British
Journal of Sociology 59(1) (2008): 1–23; Fatima el Tayeb, European Others:
Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011).
5. This is precisely what the work of Fatima el-Tayeb underscores in the con-
text of Europe, where some Europeans are taken as not belonging to Europe
(el-Tayeb, European Others). Along these lines, for example, in “Circumcised
Citizenship?” Antke Engel draws on el-Tayeb to show that one of the ways
in which the reification of this division happens is through the ideology of
post-racial Europe and color blindness. Antke points to the idea of queer-
ing ethnicity to trouble both orientalist views and occidentalist universal
knowledge. Talk given at The Oecumene Second Symposium:
Deorientalizing Citizenship?, Open University, London, November 12–13,
2013, accessed January 10, 2015, http://backdoorbroadcasting.
net/2012/11/antke-engel-circumcised-citizenship/
6. See John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of
Sexuality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, origi-
nally published in 1988); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of
Desire: Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” and the Colonial Order of Things
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and
Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2000);
and Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
7. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
8. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 19–54.
9. Foucault, The History of Sexuality; and Michel Foucault, Society Must Be
Defended: Lectures at The Collège de France 1975–1976, eds. Mauro Bertani
and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Penguin Books,
2003).
10. Piyel Haldar, Law, Orientalism and Postcolonialism: The Jurisdiction of the
Lotus-Eaters (London: Routledge, 2008).
11. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, 2007).
12. Massad, Desiring Arabs.
13. Foucault, The History of Sexuality.
14. Leticia Sabsay, “Queering the Politics of Global Sexual Rights?,” Studies in
Ethnicity and Nationalism 13(1) (2013): 80–90.
15. Joseph Massad, “Débat—L’empire de la sexualité en question 2/2,” Revue
des Livres 10, May 15, 2013, accessed January 10, 2015, http://www.
revuedeslivres.fr/debat-l%E2%80%99empire-de-%C2%AB-la-
sexualite-%C2%BB-en-question-22-par-jospeh-massad/
16. Gayatri Reddy, “‘Men’ Who Would Be Kings: Celibacy, Emasculation, and
the Re-Production of Hijras in Contemporary Indian Politics,” Social
Research 70(1) (2003): 163–200.
17. A case in point is the controversy generated by the Conference “Sexual
Nationalisms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Belonging in the New
Europe,” organized by the Amsterdam Research Center for Gender and
Sexuality, Uva, and the Institute de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur les
Enjeaux Sociaux, EHESS, Paris. University of Amsterdam, January 27 and
28, 2011.
18. Greg Thomas, The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment
and the Erotic Schemes of Empire (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press,
2007), ix.
19. Ibid., 146.
20. Ibid.
21. Greg Thomas further denounces the violence implicated in this de-
naturalized notion of sexuality. In this respect, Thomas notes that ‘sexuality
is never truly denaturalized by this historicist discourse of denaturalization.
The white world is always renaturalized as a universal standard of human
civilization and its erotic practice; and the mechanisms of race that inscribe
it are erased from the category of sexuality itself… Such a two-fold erasure
cannot be underestimated, for sexuality is academically, analytically coded
to mean what colonizers do to themselves for pleasure, not what they do to
the colonized for purposes of pain, pleasure, and politics.’ Ibid., 22–23.
22. See Ramón Grosfoguel, ed., “From Postcolonial Studies to Decolonial Studies:
Decolonizing Postcolonial Studies,” Special Issue of Review 29 (2006);
Santiago Castro-Gómez and Ramón Grosfoguel, eds., El giro decolonial.
Reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global (Bogotá:
Siglo del Hombre Editores, 2007); and Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar,
eds., Globalization and the Decolonial Option (London: Routledge, 2010).
23. See Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern
Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2000); and Gorsfogel, “From Postcolonial Studies to Decolonial Studies.”
24. Although the decolonial turn takes us back to the intervention of scholars
focused mainly on Latin America, the term ‘decolonial’ has been reappro-
priated by activists and academics working within nonclassical postcolonial
approaches, making it difficult to give a precise idea of what a decolonial
position may imply today.
25. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality,
& Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003, originally
published in 1995).
26. See Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin
America.” Nepantia: Views from South 1(3) (2000): 533–580; and Enrique
Dussel, “The ‘World-System’: Europe as ‘Center’ and Its ‘Periphery’ beyond
Euro-centrism,” in Latin America and Postmodernity: A Contemporary
Reader, eds. Eduardo Mendieta and Pedro Lange-Churión (Atlantic
Highlands: Humanities Press, 2001), 93–121.
27. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against
Epistemicide (London: Routledge, 2014).
28. Quijano, “Coloniality of Power.”
29. See Gloria Anzaldúa. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San
Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987); and Cherríe Moraga and Gloria
Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of
Colour (San Francisco: Ism Press, 1988, originally published in 1981).
30. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera.
31. See Emma Pérez, “Queering the Borderlands: The Challenges of Excavating
the Invisible and Unheard,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 24(2–3)
(2003): 122–131; and Scott Morgensen, Spaces between Us: Queer Settler
Colonialism and Indigenous Deoclonization (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011). Activist networks such as decolonize-queer.org,
Decolonizing Sexualities Network (decolonizingsexualities.org), and Queer
Migration Research Network also work in this direction.
32. I make reference to the notion developed by Avtar Brah in her Cartographies
of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996).
33. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” in Outside in
the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 179–200; and also
from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “More Thoughts on Cultural
Translation,” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, 2008,
accessed January 10, 2015, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608/spivak/en;
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); and
Rey Chow, “Film as Ethnography: or, Translation Between Cultures in the
Postcolonial World,” in Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography,

and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press,
1996). I am aware that the translation of texts cannot be easily equated to
processes of cultural translation. However, as they are intimately related to
one another, as we will see in what follows, let me take them together for
the moment.
34. Judith Butler, “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of
Formalism,” in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek, Contingency,
Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso,
2000), 25 (original emphasis).
35. Butler, “Restaging the Universal,” 24.
36. For instance, one of the ways in which this division is re-articulated comes
into view when time is colonized placing indigenous peoples in prehistory
and then calling the descendants of coloniality newcomers.
37. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. Steven Corcoran
(London: Continuum, 2010).
38. Butler, “Restaging the Universal,” 25.
39. This kind of resistance to queer movements has been central to the posi-
tioning of Spanish mainstream feminism in the last two decades. For a
review of this trend, see Gracia Trujillo, Deseo y Resistencia: Treinta años de
movilización lesbiana en el Estado español (Madrid: Egales, 2009).
40. Among many others, some important interventions within this tradition
include: José Estaban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Colour and the
Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999);
José Quiroga, Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America
(New York: New York University Press, 2000); and Juana María Rodríguez,
Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: New York
Press, 2005), 42–43.
42. This allusion to negativity is inspired by Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer
Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
43. According to Margaret Davies, insofar as the queer is defined by its trans-
gression of identity conceived as a property, it may challenge the possessive
modality of sexual rights (Margaret Davies, “Queer Property, Queer
Persons: Self-Ownership and Beyond,” Social & Legal Studies 8(3) (1999):
327–352). Complicating the idea of the possessive subject, Brenna Bhandar
points out the limits of those critiques of the liberal self-owned subject that
still rely on a naturalized and rather unquestioned subject-object paradigm.

Bhandar exposes the plasticity of the polarity between subject and object,
showing how this polarity depends on legal relations of property. Drawing
on Davies, she highlights the potential of a queer position whose challenge
to identity norms and their concomitant dependence on relations of prop-
erty and propriety also destabilize such polarity. Brenna Bhandar, “Critical
Legal Studies and the Politics of Property,” Property Law Review 3 (2014):
186–194.
44. On transparent reason, see Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race.
45. A caveat should be posed to this legal resource, as the question of bodily
diversity and intervention remains out of its scope.
46. Morgensen, Spaces Between Us, 195.
47. Gloria Wekker, The Politics of Passion: Women’s Culture in the Afro-Surinamese
Diaspora (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
48. Ibid., 118.
49. Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body, trans. David Le Vay (New York: Beacon,
1994).
50. Monique Wittig, “Some Remarks on The Lesbian Body,” in On Monique
Wittig: Theoretical, Political and Literary Essays, ed. Namascar Shaktini
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 47.
51. Anne Carlson, Eros: The Bittersweet (London: Dalkey Archive, 2005), 7.
5
Body Matters: From Autonomy
to Relationality
In the previous chapters, I have argued that the universalization of

individualized free will, rationality, and moral autonomy figure as the
conditions of possibility of sexual politics along the lines of recognition
and sexual citizenship. This characteristic is not exclusive to Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, and Intersex (LGBTQI) mainstream
agendas or, more specifically, to the limits imposed on claims for inclu-
sion and recognition within heteronormative grids, which are manifest
in their focus on the legalization of same-sex marriage. Within the
confines of citizenship, there is another limitation that indicates how
freedom and subjects as free beings might be imagined. As we have
seen, sexual citizenship was intended to de-heterosexualize citizenship,
but it did not question the regulative field of citizenship itself, which is
characterized by a number of assumptions about political subjects that
belong to the Western tradition of liberal modernity, among which the
idea that we are governed through freedom is key. Of all the different
ways in which freedom is exercised within this tradition, one of the
most important is autonomy. In the public realm, freedom encom-
passes the freedom of association and the freedom of speech. But to be

free to speak out, or to associate with others, assumes that individuals

are entitled to these liberties as autonomous subjects. In this chapter,
I will reflect on this presumption of autonomy and consider how free-
dom is regulated by it.
There are two aspects of autonomy that are key to shaping contempo-
rary ways of understanding what an autonomous individual might be,
namely, ‘free choice’ and ‘self-ownership.’ The epistemic frameworks that
have facilitated the association of sexual freedom, in turn characterized
as autonomy, with ‘free choice’ have led to the subsequent problematic
dichotomy between choosing and not choosing. However, it is clear that
the question of autonomy demands a more nuanced analysis that dis-
mantles the stark opposition between choice and non-choice by consider-
ing the complex negotiations and conditionings that allow choices—or
preferences, or consent—to emerge as such. This is not limited to the
case of sexual desires and identifications, where psychosocial condition-
ings are crucial. If we look more closely at the dynamics by which we are
said to choose, we can see that all choices are conditioned by a number of
factors. Among these, the cultural, social, and economic conditions that
shape us play a significant role, affecting whether and what we might be
able to actually choose (or consent to).
This caveat against a strictly liberal idea of choice is indebted to the
overarching feminist and postcolonial critique of liberal conceptions of
autonomy and deliberation, which has proved to be central to the devel-
opment of a more nuanced concept of agency. However, the focus of my
concern is not agency, but the functioning of discourses of autonomy as
a regulative means. This leads me to the second aspect I want to discuss.
Mirroring the function of the body as property in the case of sexual iden-
tity, freedom also highlights the body as a possession, as the embodied
character of the subject is cast in specific liberal terms as body owner-
ship. In line with feminist and postcolonial critique, I propose to explore
the relational character of the sexual subject against the limits imposed
by freedom understood as the property of a self-enclosed subject. This
relational approach will be informed by a discussion of our discursive
and psychosocial formation in search of an enhanced notion of freedom,
which is not restricted to individualist notions of deliberation. While my
concern with the foundations of the idea of autonomy follows from the
discussion I developed in previous chapters regarding liberalism as a form

of government, transparency, and self-ownership, my point of departure
for this discussion will be the subject as embodied being.
With what conditions does an embodied subject have to comply in
order to count as an autonomous political being? What uses of the body
might count as the expression of sexual freedom? We could think of
forms of nakedness, for instance, as a form of protest, in more or less
explicit terms, as in the case of FEMEN activism. But also the contrary
might be true. The covering of the body in ways that are thought to be
inappropriate could also be interpreted as a form of resistance to specific
cultural norms, as it has been argued in relation to the use of the veil in
public spaces in some European countries.1 How do bodies, conceived of
as a property, become our own? In posing these questions, my aim is to
challenge the kind of relationship between sexuality, desire, and freedom
that is dependent on self-ownership understood as a paradigm.2 To do
this, I propose to move from the autonomous to the relational sexual
subject, drawing mainly on the theories of Judith Butler and Mikhail
Bakhtin. This move toward relationality will allow us to question the
extent to which autonomy and identity should be the main, if not the
exclusive, basis for making political demands. In my reading of Butler’s
ethical-political formulation, together with Bakhtin’s considerations of
dialogism, I suggest that they offer a new ground for rethinking contem-
porary politics more broadly.
Differential and Conditional Autonomy

The idea that autonomy is a trait or capacity that any subject has is actu-
ally constitutive of the very definition of the subject and is crucial to our
understanding of the political field. But we need to qualify this philo-
sophical need and see how it also works as a regulative horizon within the
field of politics. In this light, freedom as autonomy can reveal itself as a
mechanism of control, for instance, by undermining the ideal of freedom
and the freedoms we might imagine for ourselves, or detaching questions
of freedom ‘as a subjective capacity’ from the social and economic condi-
tions in which subjects could be actually free. The neoliberal casting of
autonomy as ‘free choice’ is a stark example of this. We might also be able

to see the regulative dimension of autonomy as choice in the way diversity
works, establishing a new sexual respectability that distinguishes between
proper and inappropriate choices. And when ‘autonomy’ works by deny-
ing autonomy to those subjects that do not make the right choices, its
regulative function is put to work as well.
As I have argued elsewhere, the idea of autonomy promoted by (neo)
liberalism and its regulatory forces is problematic, especially when this
idea is posed as a requirement for potentially becoming a rights-baring
subject and, therefore, a political subject.3 The idea of autonomy under-
stood in terms of personal choice works as a regulative force because,
within this framework, only certain choices figure as such, while other
choices cannot in anyway be interpreted as legitimate, or even as choices
at all. We can see this logic at work in the case of deciding to dedicate
one’s self to sex work. From a liberal abolitionist standpoint, the argu-
ment is that those who are sex workers are sexually exploited and that
no one who is free to choose would choose to make their living being a
victim of sexual exploitation.
The same logic operates in the case of the Islamophobia that has been
fostered in Europe, North America, and beyond. The controversy around
the choice of women who use hijabs is well known. The hegemonic femi-
nist stakes would maintain that women who choose to wear hijabs do so
because they are oppressed.4 At the center of these controversies the ques-
tion that arises is: can these ‘decisions’ actually be considered a choice?
Could these choices be regarded as a legitimate expression of individual
conscience (or moral autonomy) and should they therefore be protected
as a right? At the heart of this debate, then, a number of core assumptions
about the autonomy of the self are mobilized.
The current debate on the legal status of sex work revolves around the
notion of freedom (understood in terms of freedom of choice and sovereign
autonomy). In a similar vein, discussing the ban of the use of headscarf in
public schools in France, Joan Scott notes that, according to the current
individualist ethos, ‘[f ]or those who urged a ban on headscarves, the auton-
omous self was an objective fact.’5 The validity of these choices, the author
argues, are dependent on a secularist understanding of selfhood. According
to this view, Scott asserts, ‘Autonomous individuals might hold religious
beliefs, but these must be separable from their sense of self’ in such a way
that their ‘privatized belief (invisible or discreet) would not compromise
their independence.’6 Clearly, the problem emerges when certain choices
are not considered as legitimate expressions of that liberal self, endangering
the relationship between the sovereign subject, autonomy, and the subject
of rights.
This is precisely the case of abolitionist positions in relation to the
legal status of sex work, according to which sex work should be banned
tout court. The positions of abolitionist feminism and the current hege-
monic approach to sex work that recast the sex industry in the para-
digm of human trafficking rest on the idea of slavery and assume that no
sex worker could ever freely choose to work in the sex industry. Hilary
Kinnell, from the UK Network of Sex Work Projects, echoes a common
view among sex workers’ rights-based organizations:
I believe it is completely incompatible with the human right to autonomy,

and with what I understand by feminism, to dismiss or override any wom-
an’s choices or assessment of her own best interests. To denigrate women’s
choices as self-delusional or based on ‘false consciousness’ is not feminism
but fascism. I find this dismissal of women’s choices especially offensive
when those doing the dismissing are privileged, university-based western-
ers and the women whose choices they dismiss are from poor communities
bearing the brunt of global economic and social inequalities.7
As this quotation suggests, as the paradigm of human trafficking has

hegemonized the debate, the same notion of autonomy that has served
as a basis for the attainment of other rights operates in this case against
sex workers who claim their right to self-determination. The argument
against their rights as workers is that they are not in a position to ‘choose’
their subjection, and that even when they independently engage in sex-
ual labor, this decision is not a valid expression of their autonomy. In
this respect, it is worth noting that certain feminist campaigns against
trafficking have ended up contributing to the strengthening of support
for the prohibition of all types of sex work, disregarding the needs, cir-
cumstances, and demands of independent sex workers who, as a result,
find themselves in an even more precarious and vulnerable situation with
increased risk of prosecution. In addition, these campaigns have reinforced
the representation of women as mere victims of patriarchy and lacking

the ability for self-determination.8 Against this trend, the International
Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe (ICRSE) demands
that the debate on trafficking should be changed to a debate on labor,
migration, and human rights.9
From an abolitionist position the claims of sex workers, who demand
the legalization of the sex industry, are simply dismissed. Implicit in their
victimization is the understanding that sex workers’ claims are neither
a valid expression of their freedom (understood as a choice) nor reflect
their moral and sovereign autonomy, both of which are defining features
of political subjectivity. In response to the refusal to address sex work-
ers’ demands, the organizing committee of the European Conference of
Sexual Workers held in 2005, ICRSE, elaborated a manifesto demand-
ing, among others, ‘The right to be heard.’ This right was detailed as
follows:
We assert our right to participate in public forums and policy debates

where our working and living conditions are being discussed and deter-
mined. We demand our voices are heard, listened to and respected. Our
experiences are diverse, but all are valid, and we condemn those who steal
our voice and say that we do not have the capacity to make decisions or
articulate our needs.10
It seems that certain choices like working in the sex industry cannot be
considered politically valid options. Even when sexual workers explicitly
claim to have independently chosen to engage in the sexual industry, a
decision that like any other work decision is made in a context of social-
possibilities and constraints, their choice is not respected as such at all.
This regulatory notion of what counts or not as an expression of free-
dom evokes a paradoxical notion of individual autonomy and sovereign
self, which operates as a mandatory requirement to qualify as a potential
subject of rights and therefore as a potential political subject. In this way,
the victimized status that some feminists attribute to some women (for
instance, when they are sex workers, when they wear a hijab) acts in
complicity with the exclusionary logic by which certain choices serve to
deny recognition to certain subjects as political agents. The fact that these
voices are systematically disregarded exposes the differential effects that

the reduction of individual freedom and sovereign autonomy to personal
choice has had. In fact, the idea of personal choice does not establish a
subject of rights, but rather can lead, in some cases, to certain subjects
being denied their entitlement to rights-claims. It is as if certain choices
cannot be understood as choices after all, because when they are actually
made, they exemplify the subordination to which the subject that makes
them will be subjected. And so the normative restrictions about what
does and does not count as a possible personal choice becomes a way to
deny agency to all those whose actions the very same regulation describes
and judges. To be able to be interpreted as an autonomous subject, cer-
tain truly obligatory choices already have to have been made.
There are other cases in which autonomy and personal choice do not
seem to work in the same way, though. In the case of abortion, so-called
‘pro-life’ movements deny women autonomy over their own bodies and
their right to choose not to continue with the pregnancy, but here, it is
not women’s faculty to make autonomous choices per se that is being
questioned. Rather, it is their right to exercise this capacity over another
sacred value: the life of the fetus. It is the legitimacy of the choice that is
in question, not necessarily the faculties of the subject as an autonomous
being that has the ability to choose. Nonetheless, through this differential
valuation of choices, autonomy is clearly restricted too. Further, although
it is not autonomy as a faculty per se which is under discussion in this
case, ‘pro-life’ arguments will still qualify the subject who makes the deci-
sion to terminate pregnancy with some sort of deficit—which usually will
be linked to morality and the most conservative views on gender—ulti-
mately also putting their moral autonomy under question.
Another paradoxical situation presents itself when it comes to same-
sex desire. It has been precisely to counter the differential valuation of
choices that one of the strategies of LGB movements was to deny that
same-sex desire was a choice or preference. As with abortion, homo/
lesbo/bi and trans phobic discourses mark not only non-normative
‘choices’ but also and more crucially mark those subjects who make
them as deficient. In order to contest those phobic arguments against
same-sex desire, LGB activists argued that homosexuality and bisexu-
ality were innate, not a question of choice. A similar movement has
occurred in relation to gender identification, the argument being that

we do not choose the gender with which we identify. The predica-
ment of this strategy is that if, as autonomous beings, non-normative
desiring subjects and their choices could be easily criminalized, the
naturalization of their desires would not necessarily undo—and may
actually contribute to reinforcing—the long tradition of pathologiza-
tion of those subjectivities, considering the subjects in question, for
example, ‘victims of a disease.’
Of course, we do not choose how to desire or how to identify ourselves
in the field of gender. At this point, the psychic dimension of subject
constitution becomes essential if we are to undo this bind. However, this
should be approached with care, to avoid it leading to an impoverish-
ment of autonomy, as in the case of psychiatric regulatory practices that
pathologize certain forms of psychic sexual and gender life. Gender dys-
phoria is a clear example of this, but I am also referring to orthodox
psychoanalytic interpretations of sexual difference that disqualify gay and
lesbian parenthood, or assume that bisexuality is linked to a pre-oedipal
infantile fixation, if not bordering on a psychotic disorder.11
These are some examples of how autonomy functions differentially,
and how in many cases it can in fact contribute to controlling which
freedoms are worthy of being addressed or denied. In other words, it rules
the field of freedom as much as the entitlement of certain subjects to act
in its name. So, what is it about autonomy that can turn freedom into a
regulative field?
Embodied Truths, Freedom, Relationality

Let us consider autonomy in Foucauldian terms. For Foucault, the con-
ceptualization of freedom is the kernel of liberalism. Foucault theorized
liberalism as a particular regime of government of others and oneself that
was based on the production of freedom as a condition of subjecthood
that governments should protect.12 The liberal reason of government,
understood in Foucauldian terms, is characterized by a regime of power/
knowledge whose goal is to produce both freedom and the subjective
desires for it. Seen in this light, subjects’ freedom might not be so much
in opposition to, or limited by, government. Rather, freedom works as

the key device through which subjects are governed. But what do we
mean when we say that government should be performed on the basis of
subjects’ freedom? The freedom to which Foucault refers is also based on a
particular relationship to truth. Subjects will be able to achieve their free-
dom through the search for truth, which they might reach via the labor
of reason. It is reasoned knowledge that will provide us with a potential
access to freedom.13 Freedom as a subjective condition is embedded in
the parallel production of new regimes of truth, which, based on scien-
tific reason, will guide the rationale of government.
In Foucauldian terms, scientific discourses on sexuality bring together
and crystallize a new kind of relationship of the ‘I’ to itself and to oth-
ers, based on an inward self-reflective movement in search of ‘unrepressed’
desires and truth. This relationship is configured within a new field of
power characterized by the ‘government of oneself and others,’ where indi-
vidual freedom is to be combined with the biopolitical regulation of the life
of (differentiated) populations.14 At the intersection between liberal under-
standings of freedom and biopolitics, sexuality emerges as a new regime
of truth about the self, while adding to the various mechanisms by which
the desire for freedom is prompted, and then is pivotal to regulation.15
Indeed, we have learned with Foucault that sexuality emerged, within Post-
enlightenment episteme, as a dimension of experience capable of revealing
the truth about ourselves. Through this modern conception of sexuality,
erotic or sexual activities, as well as fantasies that evoke the sexual, passed
from being mere happenings to being considered carriers of key signs of
our personal identity. Sexual desires, fantasies, practices, acts, habits, and
modes of appearance became indications of something that supposedly
precedes them, namely, our personality, and later our sexual identity.
Under this regime of power/knowledge that gives birth to what
Foucault understood as a Scientia Sexualis, the discovery of the truth
of oneself will find in our sexualized bodies—turned into a subjectively
intimate, privatized matter, the most intimate property of the isolated
individual in the modern world—a privileged place where we can find
the truth about who we are.16 Through the knowledge produced by these
new discourses which saw themselves through the mirror of science, but
which according to Foucault inherited a longer history of confessional
practices of self-examination, the body of sexuality becomes nothing

more and nothing less than home and refuge of our ultimate truth.
Thanks to sexuality, our bodies will be vested with the power to truly
know who we are.17
Contemporary approaches to sexuality have undergone radical changes
since Foucault’s observations. And yet, the idea that freedom derives
from knowledge continues to be at the root of current ideas regarding
the attainment of sexual freedom, as it will be the possibility of knowing
the desires of a sovereign transparent subject that will allow us to claim
the right to those desires—hence, the enduring importance of knowing
ourselves. Today as much as yesterday, self-knowledge continues to be the
path that leads to our freedom. Sexuality actually becomes the crux of the
liberal self. Of course, our current ideas of truth are different and far less
naive than this. Today it is commonly understood that truth is not a self-
transparent fact waiting for us if we just know how to find it. Similarly,
we may easily understand that our identities are produced (and to some
extent self-produced) rather than being something to discover, indicating
a displacement that may mark the adjustment of the liberal individual to
more neoliberal terms, as an ‘enterprise,’ or a self-production.18
In this way, the contemporary post-essentialist subject (re)iterates a
conception of liberal autonomy, now recast in neoliberal terms. Immersed
in what Anthony Giddens has understood as reflexive societies, the neo-
liberal autonomous subject would be conscious of its own ‘unnecessity,’
and therefore pragmatically dedicate itself to its self-production, upon
which the map of politically available identities at a given moment is
configured.19 The identity-centered political map and the new normativi-
ties that these identities configure relate directly to autonomy understood
as a defining characteristic of the political. As such, autonomy refers to
the control over ourselves and to the control that effectively extends cul-
tural and political regulation to ‘others’ who are understood as lacking
this autonomy. Just like those symbolic frontiers that shape the hori-
zon of acceptable diversity, the liberal ontology of the subject imposes a
limit on sexual politics in accordance with specific versions of individual
autonomy. And so, the establishment of frontiers that normalize the map
of diversity as well as the map of autonomy that sustains it continues to
differentiate between possible and impossible political subjects.
Ideas of sexual freedom are linked to a conception of autonomy that is

based on the notion that subjects have an innate faculty to make autono-
mous choices on the basis of unconditioned reason and self-knowledge,
two characteristics that shape what is understood as moral autonomy.
But this idea of autonomy that conceives freedom mainly as freedom of
choice also bases the capacity for being morally autonomous on notions
of self-ownership, among which to be in possession of our own body
takes center stage. As Anne Phillips points out, many liberal presump-
tions about moral autonomy are actually more dependent on notions
of self-ownership than they would seem at first sight. In ‘Feminism and
Liberalism Revisited: Has Martha Nussbaum Got It Right?’ a review essay
on Martha Nussbaum’s book, Sex and Social Justice, Phillips indicates that
‘liberalism is primarily driven by its commitment to free choice rather
than its recognition of individuals as equal and separate.’20 Free choice,
in this context, Phillips continues, is associated with the idea of being
free to choose without the intervention of the State (or any other author-
ity), pretty much along the lines of free market logic. Furthermore, in
accounting for different feminist critiques of this conception of freedom,
Phillips reminds us of Carol Pateman’s classic critique of liberalism, which
is based on a masculinist contractual model based on self-ownership. As
Pateman has argued, within this contractual model, freedom of choice is
presented as the freedom to dispose of our bodies as our own property. In
this sense, Phillips remarks that while it is absolutely relevant that each
individual has the power of self-determination in relation to their bodies,
this scheme already detaches the body from the self and is conceived as
an objectified entity instead of part of our being.21
The reflexive move toward the self and its own desires traced by
Foucault also corresponds with the imaginary that conceives the body
as an objectified property of such a self. This liberal understanding of
freedom corresponds to an understanding of the subject that, as I have
suggested in Chapter 4, is similarly indebted to possessive individual-
ism, in which the model of self-ownership is embedded.22 As much as
sexual orientation and identity, individual sexual rights and the ideal of
sexual freedom that connects to them all rely on self-owned subjects for
whom their relationship to their bodies, desires, and sexuality becomes
one of ownership.23 This leads to problematic versions of freedom, for it
is not only a deliberative relation that we have with our bodies. As they
are a crucial instance of who we are, the freedom to treat our bodies as
objects ultimately undermines our freedom. As Phillips asserts, ‘the equa-
tion of freedom with the freedom to dispose of oneself is still a pretty
impoverished understanding—and not one feminists should too readily
endorse.’24
There have been a number of critiques leveled at the conceptualiza-
tion of the autonomous subject built on notions of moral autonomy and
self-ownership, among which feminist critiques have been particularly
significant. Following from this tradition, Butler’s theorization of perfor-
mativity and relationality can also be read along these lines. Contesting
ideas of self-ownership, and the understanding of the body as an individ-
ualized property, her proposition is that we cannot ‘be’ if it is not already
outside of ourselves. This occurs at various levels: we are constituted by
others at the level of our intelligibility and as affectable beings, and we
radically depend on others in order to live. This is one of the central
themes of Giving an Account of Oneself, and at this point, arguably, rela-
tionality became a predominant focus of her work.25 However, we can
also trace a commitment to a relational conception of subjectivity in texts
focusing on questions of performativity. As we have seen in Chapter 2,
the resignification of gender norms is not a volitional matter insofar as
the process of resignification does not happen beyond the frameworks of
power in which the subject of gender is constituted, which poses a rela-
tional understanding of subject constitution as well.
Here, the question of power is crucial. While the reproduction of the
norm is rewarded and receives automatic recognition in the social sphere,
the questioning of it is castigated by discrimination, segregation, exclu-
sion, and even death. Gender norms impose a hierarchy and a system of
exclusionary recognition that make the subjects who compulsorily partic-
ipate in that normative system differentially vulnerable. This last aspect of
Butler’s performative perspective is vital for connecting the focus on per-
formativity and her more recent work on relationality. From the notion
of resignification to the interest in notions of vulnerability and dispos-
session, which is characteristic of the author’s later works, there is a pas-
sage that I consider highly productive for thinking about the relational
character of subjectivity.26
As far as the relational consideration of sexuality is concerned, this

change in emphasis is significant for my argument because if Butler’s first
consideration about performativity and resignification voiced a series of
radical demands by queer movements, in light of the developments of
the last decades, her most recent contributions can be read as a wake-
up call in the face of what has finally been produced with respect to the
normalization of progressive sexual movements and the domestication of
queerness. The relative shift in emphasis from resistance and resignifica-
tion to vulnerability and dispossession could also be productively read
as a response to this political transformation. Given the relative success
that the recognition of sexual diversity has achieved, the current politi-
cal moment is characterized by new forms of sexual regulation and by
the production of other forms of exclusion in addition to the traditional
ones, making the scenario of struggles and demands for gender-sexual
freedom and justice more complex. Butler’s more recent work on the
consideration of vulnerability and dispossession has mainly addressed a
different formation of politics, calling for a move away from the notion
of autonomy as the basis for formulating political demands. However,
it might also speak to the normalization of trends within contemporary
sexual progressive movements, especially the entrenching of libertarian-
ism that we see taking place in some quarters. It is around this point that
Butler’s considerations on the relationship between corporeal life and the
conditions of vulnerability and dispossession in which subjectivation is
produced assume particular relevance for us.
According to Butler, relationality refers to the fact that bodies depend
on others and on social means to survive and flourish. This dependency
is one of the things that mark us as precarious beings. However, rather
than being strictly linked to an existential claim, in Butler’s approach,
the shared character of precariousness is linked to social ontology, as pre-
cariousness is always already socially configured and differentially dis-
tributed, producing some lives that are more valued than others. As the
conditions in which bodily lives are exposed to mutual dependence are
not equitable, perhaps, as reading Butler’s writing suggests, rather than
focusing on individual liberties we should instead be examining social
mutual interdependence in order to understand the significance of a radi-
cal, democratic queer politics committed not only to freedom but also
to equality and justice. As Butler suggests, what is important to retain

of queer politics is the politics of alliances that understand the fight for
freedom in line with the struggle for social equality, and against racism.
It is in this context that she endorses queer movements that fight against
conditions of precariousness, violence, and exclusion, not taking identity
as the basis of such movements.27
It is within this framework that Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou
take up the task of reframing dispossession, pointing out its double
valence.28 On the one hand, at a conjunctural level, dispossession accounts
for specific neoliberal logics of deprivation, which deny certain popula-
tions proper conditions of survival by way of precarization, or by render-
ing them disposable once human lives are reconsidered as human capital.
On the other hand, at the level of the relational conceptualization of the
subject, dispossession re-describes the possibility of becoming oneself as
having been dispossessed by others: our mutual interdependence, charac-
terized as a radical relationality, means that the ‘I’ is entangled and always
already dispossessed by the others through whom it is formed. In this
latter sense, dispossession refers both to the ways in which we are con-
stituted by norms of intelligibility and are constitutively interdependent,
unavoidably exposed to others and vulnerable by virtue of this exposure.
With regard to how we can imagine sexual freedom and justice, this
condition of exposure and radical relationality poses a challenge to those
considerations of moral autonomy and self-ownership that constrain in
advance the class of subjects that can make demands and prescribe the
specific ways in which they can be made. Similarly, it questions the liberal
framework of autonomy that excludes in advance what can be under-
stood as political, pre-political, and even anti-political articulations.
We are relational beings as social subjects, dispossessed and at the same
time formed by norms, and as subjects whose subsistence depends upon
certain conditions that can only be provided for socially. We are rela-
tional beings as psychic subjects, at the mercy of the unconscious and the
projections of the adult world that formed us. As subjects of desire, we
are dispossessed by that which drives desire, which in reality is not exclu-
sively ours, but rather a polyphonic phenomenon traversed by fantasy,
and that takes place in between the I and the You. And we are relational
as subjects of identification, dependent on and confused by that with
which we identify.
Now, what is important for my argument here is the centrality of the

embodied dimension of subjectivity in all of these relational instances. The
question of how to conceptualize processes of embodiment has been cen-
tral to Butler’s thinking, but is not easy to subsume in a generalized theory.
Throughout her work, Butler has developed and reformulated a notion of the
body that can be highly productive for critically revising the limits of what
might be considered susceptible of politicization in the present moment,
from the reformulation of the naturalist conception of sex and the critique
of the sex/gender binary in her first writings, to the question of the life of the
human-animal, which led her to think about vulnerability and dispossession
as its condition of existence in her most recent works. The role that the body
plays in identification, desire, and relationality has to be traced along a thread
of arguments that Butler has been developing over the course of years.
Throughout this trajectory, however, Butler’s reflection is marked by a
persistent preoccupation: how is power able to operate in such a way that
only some bodies acquire the status of being recognizable, while others are
destined to be unacknowledged? How is the intelligibility of humanness
defined? These questions that locate the body at the center of her preoc-
cupations resound over and again among the multiple folds of her thought.
Further, the body might be key to Butler’s conceptualization of the political,
as Elena Loizidou points out.29 In this context, I will focus my attention on
the interlocking between materiality and signification that shapes the body
together with the psychic dimension of the embodied subject and bodily
life. This interlocking has remained central to Butler’s problematization of
identity and subjective formations, bracketing some substantialist premises
supporting the demarcation of political subjects, whether these are women
or humanity, ultimately obliging us to rethink the foundations upon which
every political identity is configured. Further, adding to the impact that the
perspective of performativity has had on the debates about identity during
the last three decades, Butler’s reflection on the body acquired other impli-
cations in the contemporary political horizon, punctuated by the logic of
biopower, that is, the power centered on the corporeal life of humanity as
a species, a question that Foucault developed in extenso in his 1976–1978
courses.30 In taking this path, my aim is to contribute with some notes to
the critique of the liberal ontology of the autonomous individual, whose
pervasiveness still dominates Western democracies and their biopolitical
logic of regulation.
Chiasmic Bodies
As a practice, resignification is about producing new meanings from
old ones, and in this sense is dependent on the plurivocity of signifiers.
Signifiers are populated by a number of voices and are sites of struggle
for their meaning; it is in the midst of these struggles that we may find
the non-normative potential of resignification. This is certainly the case
in relation to social dynamics, but it can also describe the work of theory.
One such case is the notion of performativity. The use of the term per-
formative in Butler’s approach has brought together on the one hand the
connotations that the term performance carries in the original English,
as in acting, and associated with the performing arts, and on the other
hand the performative dimension of social discourse. That is, that dis-
courses are types of action, and that they produce effects that might not
be merely discursive. The first aspect of the term performative seems, in
theory, to have very little to do with the post-substantialist reading of the
theory of acts of John Austin,31 from which the notion of discourse as a
social action is derived and that, in the reinterpretation of Butler, is very
much in line with the Foucauldian idea of discursive practice. Crucial
to this differentiation is that while the idea of performance introduces a
subject understood to be prior to what is performed, in the idea of per-
formativity, the subject is configured precisely through this performance.
There are clear differences between performance and performativity. And
yet, performativity as a discursive instance has also served Butler for mak-
ing the claim that speaking is a form of acting as much as any acting is also
a form of ‘speaking’ (understood in a broad sense as the capacity to produce
meanings). Butler has consistently insisted, especially in her early writings,
that speaking is a doing of the body, and the doings of the body are also a
form of meaning making. The performative dimension of meaning making
is aimed at pointing out the embodied dimension of signification, and with
it, the lack of depth of gender, in the sense that below the acting, in effect,
there is no interior truth to express. Butler’s critique of expressive theories
of gender (e.g., as the cultural expression of sex) in favor of a performative
one hinges on the idea that it is (the performativity of ) acting that creates
the metaleptic effect of a subject—with some attributes of gender, among
others—as if it existed prior to the acting.
However, the double evocation of the term ‘performative’ on signifying/

speaking and on performing has taken its own path, leading to two
opposed visions. On the one hand, there are interpretations of the per-
formative theory of gender, which, either in a critical or a celebratory
fashion, emphasized the performative aspect of the theory and pointed
out the falsehood of gender—since there is no foundation for gender
outside of its performance, gender becomes an arbitrary accident we
could easily circumvent. These readings nonetheless retained the idea of
a willful subject capable of (autonomously?) ‘choosing’ or performing
a ‘chosen’ gender—logically relying on a supposedly universal substan-
tive genderless conscience. In a rather liberal mode, they posed agency
outside of gender, a move by which they also assumed that the body is
configured as an entity outside and/or prior to its gendering, or more
generally re-instating the body/mind split. In this way, they contradict
one of the key tenets of the performative notion of gender, namely,
that there is no subject prior to gender, just as there is no body that is
not traversed by the matrix of power that defines the current gender
binary. What this perspective of performativity highlights is precisely
that the social norms configured within the heterosexual matrix genders
the subject to come into being in such a way that, in effect, its body
becomes eligible to be recognized. This does not mean, of course, that
the gender binary cannot be subverted, but rather that this subversion
cannot take place in a disembodied way.
On the other hand, the interpretations that placed the emphasis on
the discursive aspect of performativity have criticized an alleged reduc-
tion of the performance of the body to discourse. Hence the critiques
of the dematerialization of the corporeal that Butler supposedly posited
in her beginnings.32 These readings rely on a sort of logic leap, by which
the idea that we have no direct access to the materiality of the body, but
can only access it through a system of significations, implies a denial of
this very materiality.33 However, as Butler has consistently referred to
the chiasmic nature of bodies in relation to the entanglement between
matter and signification, this interpretation seems to some extent mis-
guided. In this respect, it is worth remarking that the embodied charac-
ter of subjectivation has been highlighted since Butler’s earliest writings.
For instance, already in ‘Variations on sex and gender: Beauvoir, Wittig

and Foucault,’ Butler assesses the idea of gender as a project or as an
obligatory apprenticeship and points out the limits of conceiving gender
as a disembodied project whereby choice assumes a primary role.34 Butler
stresses that, when conceived as a project, freedom becomes not just split
from the body, involving, as Beauvoir suggests, a choice to transcend or
not our situation, but also a necessary endeavor for the transcendence of
the body. In contrast, gender conceived of as an obligatory apprentice-
ship highlights the social conditioning that relentlessly requires indi-
viduals to become gendered in a certain way. In the latter case, freedom
would not be unmoored from cultural norms that precede us and mark
the parameters through which we learn how to live in and through our
bodies. The paradox that Butler raises in this article is the following:
Gender becomes the corporeal locus of cultural meaning both received and
innovated. And ‘choice’ in this context comes to signify a corporeal process
of interpretation within a network of deeply entrenched cultural norms.
When the body is conceived as a cultural locus of gender meanings, it
becomes unclear what aspects of this body are natural or free of cultural
imprint. Indeed, how are we to find the body that preexists its cultural inter-
pretation? If gender is the corporealization of choice, and the acculturation
of the corporeal, then what is left of nature, and what has become of sex?35
What Butler aptly points out here is that the idea of project and ‘choice’
would limit Beauvoir’s existential philosophy if she were to recover the
universal Cartesian subject marked by the dualism mind/body. It is from
here that Butler recuperates the existential notion of situation and, in
particular, the idea that there is no such separation between conscience
and body, which Beavuoir also suggested. It is due to this entanglement
that it is not possible for Butler to consider gender and freedom as the
project of a disembodied subject (that is logically assumed as prior to
gender), but rather as a bodily subject that becomes such under the con-
dition of its obligatory insertion in the order of gender. Indeed, the per-
formative dimension of bodily signification and the normative fields in
which bodily signification works point to the idea that signification is
materialized through its very performance.
That there is no direct access to bodily life is already at the center of

Beauvoir’s endeavor in The Second Sex.36 And this mediated character of
embodiment is precisely what Butler has since then radicalized. Beauvoir
departs from the idea that ‘humanity is not an animal species; it is a his-
torical reality,’ and therefore ‘woman could not be considered simply as a
sexual organism, for among the biological traits, only those that take on
concrete value in action have importance. Woman’s awareness of herself
is not defined exclusively by her sexuality; it reflects a situation….’37 It is
precisely when Beauvoir begins to dismantle the biological presupposi-
tions that would define ‘the woman’ that she opens up the possibility of
questioning any claim to an immediate access to the body and to sex.
Certainly, it is the body in Beauvoir that phenomenologically emerges
already as the lived body. In this respect, Beauvoir states:
…(I)t will be said that if the body is not a thing, it is a situation, as viewed
in the perspective I am adopting—that of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-
Ponty: it is the instrument of our grasp upon the world…38
The lived body is our point of departure and our arrival. The lived body cannot
be reduced to an object, as if it were the surface or matter upon which, only
in a secondary moment, social norms are inscribed, nor an originary base or a
site where socially mediated experience is then stamped (as in a multilayered
model). The lived body of our sexual being exceeds that form of substantial-
ization through which the body is reified as a thing we are said to possess. On
the contrary, the body of our experience points to the chiasmic character of
corporeality, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty would argue.39 For Merleau-Ponty,
an author who appears rather surreptitiously in Gender Trouble and Bodies
that Matter and with whom Butler establishes a more extended dialogue in
her essay ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Touch of Malebranche,’40 the lived body of
phenomenological experience is a chiasm in which an exterior world cannot
be quite distinguished from a self-enclosed self.41 Recast by Butler, this body
of experience will also be a chiasm where matter and signification are inter-
woven, each indistinguishable from the other.
While Beauvoir asserts that ‘it is not the body-object described by scien-
tists that exists concretely, but the body lived by the subject,’42 Butler takes up
the Freudian notion of bodily-ego to question the reification of the body as
pure materiality, or rather, the reduction of our experience of the body to its
anatomy. For both authors, albeit with a different grammar, our body as our
situation is traversed by power and signification. However, unlike Beauvoir’s
subject, Butler’s subject is not simply a sociological subject that incorporates
a social world with which it would then have to negotiate. In ‘The Lesbian
Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary,’ Butler points out:
Here the materiality of the body ought not to be conceptualized as a uni-

lateral or causal effect of the psyche in any sense that would reduce that
materiality to the psyche or make of the psyche the monistic stuff out of
which that materiality is produced and/or derived.43
Butler emphasizes the chiasmic nature of the relation between corporeal-

ity and psyche when referring to the lived body understood in phenom-
enological terms. But taking a step further, when discussing the lived
anatomy of this body, she highlights the dimension of fantasy and the
imaginary that marks the embodied subject. In this regard, Butler asserts:
…(I)t is no longer possible to take anatomy as a stable referent that is

somehow valorized or signified through being subjected to an imaginary
schema. On the contrary, the very accessibility of anatomy is in some sense
dependent on this schema and coincident with it.44
Here she points out that not only is there no pure anatomy that could
be accessible to us without the mediation of an imaginary investment,
but neither can we assume ‘pure’ anatomy to be the cause—nor a unilat-
eral effect—of this imaginary mediation. Without taking into account
this imaginary dimension, it would be impossible to understand either
desire or identification. Nor would it be possible to link sexuality to
negativity and loss. How can we understand the melancholic constitu-
tion of gender otherwise? The psychoanalytic imprint is central to the
idea of bodily life in Butler, and it is precisely this component that dis-
tances her from Beauvoir’s and subsequent constructivist views.
Conversely, the psychoanalytic insight taken up by Beauvoir, who
admits to preferring Adler over Freud,45 tends to see the contribution of
psychoanalysis as a possible, albeit incomplete, understanding of the process
through which the ‘baby-human-animal’ becomes a social individual as a
process of socialization,46 that is, as a process of incorporating social values.
Seen in this light, Beauvoir tends to sociologize psychoanalysis in such a

way that she seems to reduce it to a sort of social psychology of the ego. In
contrast, Butler grants the psychic another status. The psychic mediation of
the social is not reduced to a process of incorporation, but rather transforms
social meanings while translating them into the grammars of psychic reality.
Butler further specifies that the ‘imaginary schema’ of the body must be
understood under the paradigm of signification and, therefore, of power,
and not as the result of an autonomous psychic substance.47 In The Psychic
Life of Power she asks how it is possible to conceive of resistance to power
while at the same time being constituted within it.48 On the one hand,
following Foucault, she asks how we are to understand the body both as
an effect of discipline and simultaneously the source of resistance. On the
other hand, she questions how the unconscious is supposed to be conceived
if it is the remainder that resists being domesticated by social norms. Her
conclusion is that the constitutive restrictions that enable subjectivation
as well as resistance derive neither from rules of a natural body-object, nor
from a symbolic law prior to culture or a naturalized psychic mechanism.
Butler takes up Freud’s formulation that the ‘I is a projection of a bodily
surface.’ ‘The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a sur-
face entity, but is itself the projection of a surface,’ the famous formulation
of Freud goes.49 According to Butler’s reading, this characterization is of
utmost relevance to understanding the specific work that the psychic elabo-
rates on the social. But it is also crucial to grasping the constitutive social
and corporeal dimensions of the psyche. Several lines before this famous
phrase, Freud states, ‘a person’s own body, and above all its surface, is a
place from which both external and internal perceptions may spring.’50 The
lived body and the image of the psychic apparatus are mutually entangled,
if not forming part of one and the same entity. Rather than imagining it
as a kind of interiority, the psychic apparatus functions as a kind of mem-
brane through which the external and internal impressions are filtered; and
therefore at a psychic level, neither can be separated from the other.
If we reconsider the social character of this configuration, the idea
that the ‘I’ is the projection of a bodily surface also implies that norms
are not merely lodged in the body, but are co-extensive with it. This co-
extensive character of norms and bodies implies that there is not a norm,
on one hand, and, on the other, a body that is said to incorporate it:
social normativity and corporealization are a knot or a chiasm to borrow

the vocabulary of Merleau-Ponty. Precisely because the body cannot be
separated from its inscription in the psyche, its materiality cannot be split
from its cultural meaning. The psychic imaginary of the body, which is
also socially significant, is embedded in a normative field; it is within this
framework that the question of intelligibility emerges in opposition to
the socially rejected. This double genealogy that has served precisely to
show that there is no body graspable for the subject outside of the lines
that delimit a field of intelligibility comes into play not only in relation to
the recognition of the other but also to the possibility of being intelligible
to oneself. Intelligibility cannot occur without reference to those others
in, with, and by whom we constitute ourselves.
According to this scheme, the body could be understood as a chiasm in
manifold senses or dimensions, highlighting the intertwinement between
body, experience, and signification. By virtue of this intertwinement,
body/matter cannot be distinguished from body/signification, and fol-
lowing from this, neither would it be possible to distinguish between the
psychically imaginary mediated body and the imaginary mediation of
social significations and norms (pinpointing the social mediation of the
psychic). There is no body that we could apprehend outside signification,
or independently of the significant experience of the body, just as there is
no significant experience that is not traversed corporeally. This chiasmic
apprehension of the body challenges grammar in that the body-object
that we take as our own appears as an entity, while as a lived body it works
better as a verb, that is, as part and parcel of a regulated practice whose
substantialization is an effect of sedimentation.
It is in order to consider how performativity effects the materialization
of the body as an object that Butler invokes the concept of sedimented
practices.51 As a chiasm, the lived body is undone as property, and rather
than just being, it is reconceived as a relational experience that happens.
However, thanks to the sedimentation of bodily social (and performative)
practices, the lived body is nonetheless also experienced as a thing. This
invocation of sedimentation of practices of signification alludes to the
impossibility of considering discourse beyond its reification. It also high-
lights that what appears as (reified) matter cannot be understood outside
these practices of signification. The logic of sedimentation of performative

practices refers to the substantializing effects of their reiteration, by which
the embodied performance of gender is turned into something that one
supposedly has or is. This framework contests any categorical distinction
between sign and referent, between world and subject, between body
and its psychically imaginary and socially significant dimensions. But
also, positing the body as sedimentation and elaboration of performative
practices implies conceiving materialization through temporality. Bodies
come to be as the materialization of the past and as the opening to the
future: the body itself as a verb, life in process, becoming.
Temporality and radical relationality are two components that point to
the crucial relevance of the corporeal for a reconsideration of the subject
beyond the liberal ontology of the individual. In the first place, tempo-
rality indicates that by virtue of being bodies, as subjects, we also neces-
sarily become an opening. To the extent that the body is a happening,
it cannot be but rather occurs in relation to the exterior, other bodies,
and space. Beyond our corporeal limits, the very materialization of the
body as our own takes place as a psychically mediated experience, in turn
entangled with social practices, delineating an open time. Secondly, this
liminal character of the lived body is a reminder that we are from the
first moment and forever traversed by otherness. The psychic reality of
our body evokes the reality of a subject that is dispossessed by its (psychi-
cally mediated) imaginary experiences. Our body is marked by relational
experiences; we live and experience our body through the traces left upon
it by others. The body is populated by other bodies: present, past, future,
and imaginary bodies with which we are in contact in one way or another,
bodies that leave their traces in ours. Thus, our body is always decentered,
and even dispossessed by them, as we have stated earlier on along with the
points that Butler makes in Giving an Account of Oneself.
Attending to the way that we inhabit the body and at the same time are
inhabited by it, the ‘I’ indeed becomes, as Merleau-Ponty would have it,
‘a network of relationships.’52 In line with this consideration of the lived
body or the embodied subject, sexuality becomes, as well, a particular
relational affair, one that challenges identity and choice. In her compel-
ling non-phallic reading of Merleau-Ponty, Gayle Salamon observes:
Transposition describes the process by which the desire that houses itself in
my body becomes my body itself… Simultaneously, my body, in its desire,
becomes desire itself… My body becomes a leaning or a yearning, a
propulsive force that negates any sense of my body as solid or still, or
indeed as mine, in that this sensation owns me more than I own it.53
Salamon notes that in Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of sexuality, desire

is tied to the body, but this tie works in the form of ‘transposition,’ that
is, without being predestined to be attached to any prefigured particular
body part or object. Rather, desire undoes the self-centered subject and
describes a form of ‘being toward the other’ and the world.54 This version
of the desiring subject, which figures perhaps as an extreme inflection of
the lived body, challenges engrained notions of self-ownership, and defi-
nitely illustrates the notion that the embodied subject is configured in a
relational practice, living as an opening to the world and to time.
Seen in this light, this conception of the embodied subject contrib-
utes another path into the overarching critique of the liberal ontology
of the autonomous and self-sufficient individual, and in this way, it may
illuminate the predicaments of a politics guided by a biopolitical logic
focused on the (neo)liberal regulation of life. And yet, this potential
might also require us to pause and consider an approach to political
meaning making that matches this perspective on embodied relational-
ity. After all, we cannot effectively argue for this move from autonomy to
relationality by considering only embodiment. If the subject of politics
is to be conceived as a relational embodied one, we may also need to
think how political meanings are relationally configured. How are we to
understand the process of meaning making enacted by these embodied
subjects as political subjects?
The Primacy of the Other: A Bakhtinian

Approach
Butler’s relational vision takes into consideration how we are undone by
others, and by this I also mean what is other to us within us. Radical
relationality is characterized by the primacy of the other in the consti-
tution of the ‘I,’ and the subsequent unknowingness of the identity of

this ‘I.’55 As embodied beings, our relational nature emerges out of our
interdependence but is also due to the entanglement of matter and sig-
nification that we find at the core of the corporeal, which brings to the
fore the otherness of our own constitution. We do not have immediate
access to our experience of the body, or more generally to our embodied
experience; and to the extent that this experience is traversed by meaning
and fantasy, otherness becomes constitutive of it.
The primacy of the other in our own bodily constitution suggests a
possible link between Butler’s conceptualization of the embodied subject
and Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical approach to subjectivity, politics, and
discourse. But the introduction of Bakhtin’s dialogical perspective is also
pertinent in relation to the communicational dimension of bodily per-
formativity. In effect, one could arguably extend the notion of discursiv-
ity developed by Bakhtin to other forms of communication that are not
restricted to verbal speech, such as the expanded notion of the ‘sign’ and
enunciation including, for instance, visual or bodily meaning making,
as in the case of performative bodies. This extended notion of discursiv-
ity would allow us to point to the intertwinement between materiality
and signification, central to embodiment, in a slightly different way from
Butler’s approach, while at the same time complementing it. Drawing
on the Bakhtinian approach to discursive interaction, I propose we look
at how bodies communicate, which, following Bakhtin, would then be
dialogical as well.
The possibility of mobilizing the Bakhtinian perspective for thinking
in new ways about relational subjectivity and politics arises on the basis
of two main aspects of Bakhtin’s theory of discourse. The first one is asso-
ciated with the notion of alterity that underlies his concept of speech,
which includes not only notions such as heteroglossia, polyphony, and
intertextuality, but also the less explored contention regarding the primacy
of otherness in one’s own speech. The second aspect that I would like to
explore further is concerned with the phenomenological dimension of the
production of speech, and the subsequent consideration of the produc-
tion of speech as an ethical-political act. This ethical-political dimension
emerges in relation to the values involved in the historicity of speech and
the forms of antagonism that are part of that historicity.
The notion of otherness in Bakhtin’s dialogic theory is also relevant to

my proposal because it provides us with another insight into the idea that
signification is primordial to the constitution of embodied subjectivity.
For Bakhtin, we are also ‘spoken by language’ before we are capable of
using language as a means to speaking about ourselves. Further, in the
work of the Bakhtinian Circle, we also find a theory of the self, or con-
sciousness, that, arguing against Freud, sustains that psychic interiority
is in fact the product of the social circulation of signs. In this regard,
Valentin Voloshinov asserts56:
What sort of reality pertains to the subjective psyche? The reality of the inner
psyche is the same reality as that of the sign. Outside the material of signs
there is no psyche […] the inner psyche is not analyzable as a thing but can
only be understood and interpreted as a sign.57
For Bakhtin, as for Lacan, we are spoken by language while language

figures as the locus of otherness. The difference, however, lies in how
otherness is conceived. As we know, for Lacan the otherness of language
amounts to the symbolic order, and therefore has an absolute and tran-
scendental status. It is the law that imposes (symbolic) castration, the
name of the father, the kernel to subjectivation; for Lacan, the subject
comes properly into being when it surrenders to this law. In contrast,
for Bakhtin, the otherness of language is given by its own historicity.
This otherness is social rather than structural. There is no law to submit
to. For Bakhtin, what rules discourse is the history of struggles for it.
In heteroglossia, polyphony, and interdiscursivity the subject emerges
within the traces of struggles between various voices, positions, and
evaluations of the world. Each speech act, or utterance, testifies to the
victories, the subjections, the erasures and absences, the traces of dis-
cursive battles.
This insight into the primacy of otherness within our own embodied
speech acts could be a useful contribution to ongoing critiques of the
ontology of the liberal individual as the central figure of politics. As I
will try to show in what follows, the dialogical structure of these strug-
gles, which are crystallized in discursive genres, could be understood
as normative frames of intelligibility. Further, Bakhtin’s approach to
communication (the exchange of signifying values) and historicity

may illuminate the connections between ‘the order of discourse’ and
the historic states of these struggles in such a way as to show that
their organization has as a foundation, ultimately, in antagonism and
hegemony.
There are two main dimensions of Bakhtinian dialogism that are worth
exploring for this purpose. The first dimension is related to the idea that
every utterance is a response in an infinite chain of utterances that fol-
low and precede it, and it is through the enunciations effected within
this chain of utterances that subjects are shaped. The second dimension
relates to the role of otherness in his phenomenological understanding of
subjectivity and communication.
For Bakhtin, it is through measuring the experience of communication
that the individuality of the subject emerges.58 Furthermore, according to
Bakhtin, the interiority of consciousness of a subject is a secondary effect
of signification with respect to the interdiscursive reality of the sign.59 For
Bakhtin, the signs of consciousness are a product of the intersubjective
character of signifying reality, and this is due to the real and concrete
materiality of communication that traverses all human praxis. The mean-
ings conveyed by utterances are a dialogical effect of material concrete
signs (at a distance from the abstract signifier) and only exist in and by
circulation (communication). Utterances and their meaning are constitu-
tively a dialogical enterprise.
Utterances, or even texts, could also be for Bakhtin a way to under-
stand human activity tout court. As the author states: ‘A human act is a
potential text and can be understood (as a human act and not a physical
action) only in the dialogic context of its time (as a rejoinder, a semantic
position, as a system of motives).’60 Thus, understanding the exposure of
the body also as a sui generis kind of utterance, we could use Bakhtin’s
insight into the dialogical structure of utterances to argue that bodily
meaning making is also shaped in a dialogical way. Following this line of
reasoning, it could also be argued that it is through this dialogical scene
that the performative ‘speaking body’ emerges and communicates as if it
were my own.
Let us have a closer look at the dialogical character of the utterance and
the speech genres in which they are inserted. According to Bakhtin, the
minimal unit of speech is the utterance, whose meaning emerges out of

the concrete event of communication, that is, the singular and dialogical
event of ‘discursive interaction.’61 ‘The utterance is not a conventional
unit, but a real unit, clearly delimited by the change of the speaking sub-
jects,’ Bakhtin states.62 Of course we may see this structure at work in any
‘real’ dialogue in daily life. But what is important to remark here is that
for Bakhtin this dialogic dynamic structures not only every discourse, but
rather our whole life experience. Further, this ‘change of speaking sub-
jects’ is in fact aimed at underscoring the phenomenological dimension
of communication as a singular encounter whereby we orient ourselves
in the world.
Bakhtin insists on ‘[t]he dialogic nature of consciousness, the dia-
logic nature of human life itself.’ ‘Life by its very nature is dialogic. To
live means to participate in dialogue,’ he writes.63 The totality of mean-
ing of our own discourse, which surely could take embodied forms, is
structurally dialogical, as the minimal unit of meaning emerges pre-
cisely when an utterance/act is capable of responding to other utter-
ances/acts and producing further responses. For Bakhtin, key to the
dialogical understanding of utterances/acts is their addressability and
answerability. The totality of meaning of utterances/acts are defined
by their responsiveness and their ability to further continue the ‘open-
dialogue’ that life is.64
From the perspective of Bakhtinian dialogism, the borders of the utter-
ance that are configured in the discursive interaction are the first instances
of the emergence of subjects in discourse. This approach to the dialogical
structure of the process of meaning making undoes the subject’s own
discourse as its own. Whatever we may understand as our utterances,
they are structurally dispossessed by the utterances of others to which
we may respond, and for whom we may articulate them. Referring to
the boundaries of the utterance in the here and now of the speech act,
Bakhtin states:
The boundaries created by this change are weakened here and of a special
sort: the speaker’s expression penetrates through these boundaries and
spreads to the other’s speech […] Echoes of the change of speech subjects
and their dialogical interrelations can be heard clearly here. But any utter-
ance, when it is studied in greater depth under the concrete conditions of

speech communication, reveals to us many half-concealed or completely
concealed words of others with varying degrees of foreignness […] The
utterance proves to be a very complex and multiplanar phenomenon if
considered not in isolation and with respect to its author (the speaker)
only, but as a link in the chain of speech communication and with respect
to other, related utterances.65
This observation points toward the rather permeable (and foreign)

character of one’s own speech, highlighting that the totality of meaning
cannot be considered independently from its constitutive otherness, a
thick texture made of others’ voices and echoes that overdetermine what
we communicate. Furthermore, the totality of meaning achieved in the
utterance also challenges the subject’s sovereign and autonomous willful
control of meaning making, as for this meaning to be achieved it has
to comply with sui generis norms that govern these interactions. These
norms are systems of rules of use of language, which Bakhtin calls ‘speech
genres,’ and are ‘determined by the specific nature of the particular sphere
of communication.’66 According to Bakhtin, speech genres are discur-
sive spaces that define relatively stable types of utterances that adjust to
the different areas of human activity. In other words, to be intelligible,
any utterance has to comply with the norms of speech genres that regu-
late specific frames of intelligibility related to different spheres of human
activity.
The notion of speech genre is crucial to the Bakhtinian perspective
because it puts into correlation the rules of use of language with social
praxis, and defined in this way, not only shows that all discursive inter-
action refers to social praxis but also, conversely, that all social praxis is
mediated by a process of discursive interaction. Further, to the extent
that speech genres are made of sedimented uses, they also suggest the
citational character of communication. Seen in this light, there might be
a productive relation to explore between Butler’s approach to relationality
and performativity, and the dialogical (and citational) structure of dis-
course and speech genres, understood as regulative spheres of social prac-
tices. While the theory of speech genres is to Bakhtin a way of reading
the phenomenon of human experience as dialogical communication, we
could extend his hypothesis and posit that speech genres overdetermine
all social processes of meaning making.
It is in belonging to a genre that utterances, understood in a broad
sense as social praxis, become dialogical, while it is within this dialogi-
cal structure that they receive their intelligibility. Furthermore, we could
arguably understand that dialogical communication also occurs as soon
as the lived body is in the presence of others. From the point of view of
the embodied subject, the meaning produced by discursive interaction as
much as bodily forms of enunciation could be understood as regulated
by heterogeneous systems of discursive rules of use that also govern their
intelligibility.
This leads us to the second dimension of dialogism that I consider
productive for exploring the relational character of the subject of politics.
Very much in line with the Wittgensteinian understanding of language
games, according to Bakhtin’s theory of speech genres, we learn the rules
of use of language through their use—hence its resonances with cita-
tional practices. This means that we learn how to ‘speak’ within a specific
genre through our engagement with other prior utterances articulated
within it. The norms of use that enable us to speak, understood in a
broad sense as meaning making, are learned in ‘the speaking’; they are
not formal or abstract rules, but rather ways of doing that we learn in the
doing as well. This definition is important because, among other things,
it points out that it is the history of concrete and truly materialized utter-
ances, the sedimentation of reiterated uses, that configures the speech genre
and allows us to emerge as subjects in communication. The historicity of
these uses defines the utterance as a regulated and heterogeneous entity.
But it also means that each of our utterances—again, understood in an
extended sense as any form of verbal or non-verbal enunciation—is in
fact populated by the utterances of others, including those that we con-
sciously respond to, but also those with and through which our utter-
ance is made. The implication of this pragmatic approach to the process
of meaning making is that our own speech is constitutively marked by
otherness, while indicating the central role of the other in shaping our
individuality.
Here is where the ethical-political dimension of discursive interactions

comes into play. According to Bakhtin, the social conventionality of
discursive uses forms the subject and delineates the social relation-
ships that are implied in the utterance, conceived as a kind of social
action. The utterance is mediated (and enabled) by some uses that
are ruled by conventions that are grounded on social and histori-
cal hierarchies. From Bakhtin’s perspective, speech genres function
as evaluative systems of the world.67 Furthermore, as these rules are
apprehended through our relation to previous concrete utterances,
they can never be evaluated as neutral. When we immerse ourselves in
discursive interaction we are already taking a position and enacting an
ethical relationship with the world. According to Bakhtin’s formula-
tion, the singularity of the relational phenomenon of communication
necessarily involves an ethical-political dimension that is marked by
the otherness of discourse.
In effect, to speak of dialogism in Bakhtin brings us, unfailingly, to oth-
erness. The otherness or foreignness of discourse is directly associated with
the fact that, as I have suggested, each utterance is shaped by foreign utter-
ances. This is so not only because the utterance is a response to previous
utterances and itself demands a response, but also because each utterance
belongs to sedimented regulative speech genres, and therefore is populated
by echoes, voices, and uses that imbue each utterance with their own values
and meanings. This foreign character of each utterance reveals itself to us
in various forms: as polyphony, which describes the multiplicity of voices
and positions that are found within each utterance; as heteroglossia, which
refers to the loaded values that signs carry because of sedimented uses; and
as interdiscursivity, because no utterance creates meaning autonomously,
but creates it in its relations with others.68 But leaving aside the specifici-
ties of each of the forms in which otherness appears, what is important to
remember for our argument is that the historicity of speech genres implies
that all present utterances are structurally in dialogue with past and future
utterances. This dialogical structure builds up a dialogical form of tempo-
rality and shapes the conditions of intelligibility and opening of the totality
of meaning that each utterance represents.
Historicity gives an evaluative aspect to the utterances/acts, tributary

of heterogeneity and the expressive nuance related to the discursive orien-
tations and genres in which they place themselves. Given the historicity
of words and speech genres that traverse any act, the totality of meaning
encompassed by the utterance/act can never be neutral. This evaluative
accent of the utterances/act as well as their heterogeneous being is due
to their acquiring meaning for us through the past/spoken experience. In
turn, the historicity of discursive genres grants the utterance/act its intel-
ligibility and determines the conditions of possibility for certain forms of
the ‘I’ to emerge.
This ‘I’ who not only speaks for the other but is also spoken by the
other finds in discursive matter the medium by which their subjectivity
takes shape. The historicity of discursive genres places us in discursive
positions subject to regulation, and as these genres are configured and
themselves configure social hierarchies, the historical weight of the utter-
ances also places us in a dissymmetric system of values.69 It is this his-
toricity that explains the antagonistic form of discourse: the utterance
occurs in a horizon of conflicts within the polyphony of myriad voices
and positions.
Bakhtin’s insistence on the otherness of one’s own speech shows
significant resonances with Butler’s dispossessed ‘I.’ In Bakhtin, it is
the polyphonic nature of discourse and the dialogical character of the
utterance that structure the here and now of the subject, which, like
Butler’s subject, is both singular and plural at the same time.70 Unlike
certain interpretations of Bakhtin that insist on his allegedly subjectiv-
ist approach, I hope it is clear from what I have explained so far that by
deferring to the idea of a singular subject Bakhtin is not claiming that
intentionality is the ontological ground of the subject. Unlike the phi-
losophies of consciousness, Bakhtin’s dialogic approach makes it clear
that the totality of meaning of the utterance exceeds the author’s inten-
tion. Meaning emerges in praxis and as an effect of utterance, which
is by definition intersubjective. As stated earlier, both the borders of
the utterance and its conclusiveness reveal the otherness that is already
present in ‘my’ discourse. The opening to otherness is present in the
materiality of communication, whereby subjectivity emerges as a kind
of experience that implies a constitutive relationship with the otherness

of the world, of others, and oneself.
Furthermore, Bakthin’s model of communication, which stands as the
explicit locus of the relational structure of action and discourse, points to
interesting resonances with iterability and performative agency, which
also aim to open up a space of freedom that is not reliant on a volitional
and autonomous subject as its founding basis. Investing in the discursive
interaction with a phenomenological dimension, Bakhtin highlights the
singular and creative character of the phenomenon of discursive interac-
tion, within which the ethical dimension of action and discourse emerge.
However, this does not mean that the significance of the historic sin-
gularity of discourse is left to the speaker’s intention. It means that the
meaning that emerges from that interaction is singular in its occurrence
and it brings something new. Read through the lens of performativity, we
could suggest that while the utterance is the product of the norms that
enable the use of signs, the meaning made in this ‘utterance,’ which is
dialogical per definition, exceeds the rules of use. As stated earlier, from
Bakhtin’s point of view, in order to be legible and susceptible to being
interpreted, the discursive phenomenon must be subject to rules (of use)
that are the result of social and historical conventions.71 As much as the
signified/signifier formal and neutral equivalence is undone as soon as the
sign comes to life, in the material and sensitive phenomenon of discur-
sive interaction, the utterance becomes part of an infinitely open chain,
whereby contingency and singularity are not divorced from the weight of
historicity and hegemonic meanings.
Relational, Performative, Dialogical Embodied

Subjects
In this chapter I have attempted to question the work of autonomy as
a form of regulation, especially when our self-determination in relation
to our own bodies and desires comes into play. Against a liberal imagi-
nary of autonomy that today is recast in the light of neoliberal appeals to
choice, I proposed another entry into relationality, this time through a
reading of Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and dispossession, in

combination with the dialogical perspective of Mikhail Bakhtin. Drawing
on Butler, I focused on the materially and psychically embodied dimen-
sion of the subject. My aim here was to stress that the idea of discrete
subjects is the effect of a negotiation of their own limits. Within the con-
ditions of possibility for the emergence of the discrete individual, we find
not only the otherness of our own unconscious but also the otherness of
the others that psychically and socially constitute us. Otherness emerges
as soon as we take into account that our apprehension of our bodies and
their materiality is traversed by signification, as we are born to a world
already spoken and configured by rituals and norms that are not our own,
and yet are constitutive to us. This conceptualization (which could also
be read in line with the phenomenological tradition that has attempted
to disarticulate the subject/object binarism characteristic of philosophical
modernity) follows on the commitment of critical social theory to de-
structure the polarization between social determination and individual
autonomy that is still the order of the day. But while this polarization is
still prominent in the social sciences, my main point has been that this
vision also naturalizes the liberal imaginary of the individual. This con-
ception of autonomy assumes that the subject-agent is the causa-sui of
choice, and therefore is, in this sense, assumed to be the sole and uncon-
ditioned origin of its own actions. This vision creates a vicious circle and
cannot challenge (and might even end up being complicit with) current
mechanisms of neoliberal regulation, making the subject responsible for
its alleged lack of commitment to freedom, or victimizing it as a kind of
dupe subjected to a Machiavellian social determinism which it can never
get rid of.
The productivity of a psychosocial approach to the formation of
the subject is due to the fact that it not only counters the opposition
between society and individual but also questions the polarity between
social determination and autonomous agency. This kind of questioning
is important because, as we have seen, one of the main ways in which
autonomy functions as a regulative discourse is by deeming some sub-
jects as lacking autonomy and subsequently depriving them of their
agency, depending on the choices they make. Given that every choice is
conditioned, and autonomy can only emerge as a socially conditioned

discourse, arguments that insist on regaining autonomy for those subjects
who are deemed non-autonomous remain vulnerable to the exclusionary
terms imposed by the logic of autonomy.
Rather than disputing whether or not those subjects who make certain
choices, such as to work in the sex industry or wear a hijab, are autono-
mous, the terms of the debate need to be shifted. Upon destabilizing the
polarization between determinism and autonomy through a psychosocial
insight, what I highlighted here, then, is the relational character of the
subject, and closely related to this, the agonistic dynamic of power. The
issue is not whether we originate meaning and actions or are simply their
destination. The relationship of subjects to their lived bodies may rather
be understood in a relational and, in my terms, dialogical way, taking
into account the productive operations of power (among which we may
also find forms of resistance) in an unending and immeasurable psycho-
social process.
I have drawn on the performative approach to gender as a mode of
bodily signification to recast the question of the autonomy of the subject as
embodied being. This, combined with a focus on the corporeal as a locus of
a dialogical experience suggests another entry point from where to displace
the polarization between voluntarism and determinism, which today has
been reconceived in the light of the primacy of the (neo)liberal individual
as the subject of politics. On the one hand, voluntarism emerges in the
figure of the self-determined and deliberative individual that imaginarily
becomes the interlocutor of the state within the liberal-democratic model,
or the architect of its own self in more neoliberal terms. On the other
hand, determinism haunts constructivism, to the extent that the common
acceptance of the social configuration of the subject serves the purpose of
questioning its capacity for self-determining its fate.
If we take into account the psychic mediation involved in the process
of embodiment, the embodied dimension of subject formation could be
another instance from where to think about what constitutes the psy-
chosocial field and question the polarity between the individual and
society. The psychic constitution of the subject is enacted at the level
of the corporeal as the body is a locus of subjectivation. In this sense, it
would not, then, be completely accurate to claim that norms act upon
bodies from the outside, but are, in fact, in constant renegotiation, mutu-
ally shaping each other. Through the lens of a relational performative
approach, the psychic-bodily instance marks the intertwinement between
the social and the subjective, and challenges the idea that pre-formed
individuals might simply be governed from the outside, as if the social
were exclusively an external reality for the subject. It is at the level of
embodiment that the subject negotiates its corporeal borders, and where
socially mediated fantasies have a fundamental role.
At this point, I followed Butler’s argument that power does not simply
operate at the social level conceived as pure exteriority.72 Drawing on
Butler, I pointed out that the constitution of the subject is not the
result of a mere psychological process of socialization, as if some exter-
nal social norms were simply introjected through socializing mecha-
nisms by the subject (an idea that is behind social constructivism and,
as we have seen, in Beauvoir as well). Instead, by relating norms with
desire, identification, and the dimension of fantasy in the formation
of the I-self, it becomes clear that the normative apparatus not only
constitutes the subject and traverses the formation of subjectivity (this
first reading is still haunted by the ghost of constructivism), but more
importantly, we see that it is through this socially mediated process of
subject formation, that a psychic apparatus takes shape.
This does not mean that our psychic life is simply determined in com-
pliance with social norms. What happens is that the exclusions effected
by the ‘social domestication’ of the drives and dispositions (which involve
both traumatic foreclosure and repression) mobilize a psychic dynamic
in a state of permanent tension with the norms that shaped the psyche
in the first place. This tension leads the psychosomatic conditions of cor-
porealization and the unconscious dimension that makes us unknown
to ourselves. Due to this psychosomatic level of subject constitution, the
struggle against social norms might not be accomplished through a pro-
cess of becoming aware alone (whereby the deliberative individual would
have primacy). Resistance to the norms may appear in this instance as
psychic conflict. In effect, one of the basic lessons of psychoanalysis is that
awareness does not necessarily lead to change. The gap between conscious
and unconscious life very often presents itself as a contradiction or a

conflict between a conscious will to make changes and an unconscious
attachment to that we supposedly want to change; or between a conscious
rejection of different forms of social injustice, and a psychic investment
in them. Profound social change may involve working on the process of
establishing an affective, psychic commitment to norms and beliefs—and
we must think of belief as well as a normative field.
However, it is not only due to our psychic constitution that relation-
ality becomes so important, and neither is it the case that this psychic
dynamic is exempt from social meanings. Here is where I looked to
Mikhail Bakhtin to help me highlight the intersubjective dynamic of
psychically mediated social meanings, focusing on the relational dynamic
of life through the lens of discursive interaction. Bakhtin proposes that
discursive interaction occurs within the regulated practices apprehended
through the dynamic of discursive genres, and that otherness is an inher-
ent feature of this (embodied) interaction. This otherness that we may
encounter in every singular event of our existence refers, on the one
hand, to the fact that each utterance/act is always a response to prior
utterances and always demands a response (proposing a communicative
project). On the other hand, this otherness is connected to the fact that
every utterance/act is itself conformed by foreign voices—a foreignness
from which we understand that the ‘subject’ is an effect and, at the same
time, the condition of the possibility of meaning. This foreignness pres-
ent in the here and now of every experience, linked as it is to historicity,
invests each utterance/act with an evaluating dimension. The historicity
embedded in each utterance/act and the genres within which they oper-
ate imbues them with myriad differential visions of the world, displaying
the antagonism of the plurality of voices that populates each ‘act of speak-
ing.’ Taking into account all these characteristics, the dialogic concep-
tion of discourse provides a useful complement not only to the notion
of performativity, linking the potential of iterability and resignification
to antagonistic forces and their ability for mobilizing counter-hegemonic
processes, but also to the relational vision of subjectivity.
Clearly, the appeal to performative and dialogical relationality also
involves a questioning of politics that are based on sovereign ideas of
choice and mastery over our bodies. To circumscribe the political to the
space of already established autonomy, taking as an anchor the liberal
individual as the only representative of the subject of rights, defined as
sovereign and transparent to itself, would mean depoliticizing the pro-
cesses of subjectivation and the relations of power that configure us. But
more importantly, it would limit the imaginary of freedom and justice
to a politics that can only recognize very specific versions of autonomous
subjects for whom their bodies become an objectified possession, while
discounting the relational conditions that make our lived bodies a crucial
instance of who we are.
Drawing on Butler’s relational view, what is in question here is the
limitation of an ethical-political formulation that ignores the psychic
dispossession to which we are exposed in order to become ourselves, as
well as the vulnerability that emerges from our relational dependence as
embodied beings. In line with what she had already proposed in terms
of intelligibility and abjection in the early 1990s, the ethical-political
formulation she developed approximately a decade later focused on the
thesis of a differential distribution of recognition and precariousness.
Along these lines, she suggested that if we depoliticize what we under-
stand as legitimate forms of embodiment (which may figure as signs of
freedom), we will not understand the operations of power that orches-
trate in advance the definition of bodily human life. This last point is key
for undertaking a critique of current systems of governance, in particular
when we take into account that under the logic of biopower, the current
regulation, control, and administration of the life of human bodies is
exerted through mechanisms that exceed the political framework of the
liberal horizon of representation.
If we think of the political merely as a space of representation and
struggle for recognition, reducing it to the question of choices associated
with an already constituted sovereign autonomous subject, we will not be
able to question the political definitions of who is truly or fully autono-
mous, or the political definitions of the bodies we are. Nor will we be able
to contest how the polity is sustained by the exclusion of certain forms of
embodiment, condemning them to social death, which in Butler’s vision
is not the same as reducing them to bare life.73
If social existence is limited to pre-established forms of recognition,

both the bodies that are reduced to social inexistence and those illegitimate
forms of inhabiting our bodies according to certain models of citizenship,
preconceptions about humanity, or moral autonomy mark the limits of
representation as the only political field. It is precisely those limits of
autonomy and representation that ultimately oblige us to invoke the
politicization of bodies once again. Although they are configured as the
origin and destiny of power, lived bodies are also the site where regulatory
power is destabilized. And in this way, beyond the ontology of the liberal
individual, these relational bodies may broaden the horizon of that which
we conceive of as our political life.
Notes
1. The online based community MuslimaPride, and its critique of FEMEN
activism is a case in point. While FEMEN anti-Muslim activists use nakedness
as a symbol of freedom in their protests, MuslimaPride activists remind us that
‘there is more than one way to be free,’ as one of their slogans asserts. See
MuslimaPride Facebook page, accessed April 10, 2015, https://www.face-
book.com/MuslimaPrideIntl. I offer a brief reflection on the clash between
these two groups in Leticia Sabsay, “Abject Choices? Orientalism, Citizenship,
and Autonomy,” in Citizenship after Orientalism: Transforming Political Theory,
ed. Engin Isin (London: Palgrave, 2015), 17–33.
2. For a feminist-queer critique of legal notions of self-ownership, see Margaret
Davies, “Queer Property, Queer Persons: Self-Ownership and Beyond,”
Social & Legal Studies 8(3) (1999): 327–352; Beverly Skeggs, “Exchange,
Value and Affect: Bourdieu and ‘The Self,’” The Sociological Review 52
(2004): 75–95; Brenna Bhandar, “Critical Legal Studies and the Politics of
Property,” Property Law Review 3 (2014): 186–194; and Christine Klapeer
and Karin Schönpflug, “Queer Needs Commons! Transgressing the Fiction
of Self-Ownership, Challenging Westocentric Proprietism,” in Global
Justice and Desire: Queering Economy, eds. Nikita Dhawan et al. (London:
Routledge, 2015), 163–179.
3. Sabsay, “Abject Choices?” 17.
4. Joan Scott offers an excellent analysis on the polemic of the veil and the use
of the hijab as a personal choice in France. See Joan W. Scott, The Politics of
the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), especially the chap-
ter on “Individualism,” 124–150.
5. Ibid., 129.
6. Ibid., 134.
7. Hilary Kinnell, “Why Feminists Should Rethink on Sex Workers’ Rights,”
Global Network of Sex Workers Projects, Beyond Contract Seminar Series,
December 16, 2002, accessed April 10, 2015, http://www.nswp.org/
resource/why-feminists-should-rethink-sex-workers-rights (downloadable
document).
8. See Rutvitca Andrijasevic, Migration, Agency and Citizenship in Sex
Trafficking (London: Palgrave, 2010).
9. See ICRSE Aims, International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers
in Europe, accessed April 10, 2015, http://www.sexworkeurope.org/about/
aims
10. “Sex Workers in Europe Manifesto,” International Committee on the
Rights of Sex Workers in Europe, accessed April 10, 2015, http://www.
sexworkeurope.org/resources/sex-workers-europe-manifesto
11. In this regard, Juan-David Nasio observes that while bisexuality is usually
understood to be linked to hysteria, in fact, it does relate to the inability of
bisexual subjects to identify as either a man or a woman, that is, they ignore
the split of sexual difference. Juan-David Nasio, Hysteria from Freud to
Lacan: The Splendid Child of Psychoanalysis (New York: The Other Press,
1998), 56–57. In relation to the movement of bisexuality from desire and
object choice to identification, Lacan observes that the experience of a
bisexual (i.e., perverse polymorphous) body in Freud can only be possible
outside symbolization. Jacques Lacan, “The Psychotic Phenomenon and Its
Mechanism,” in The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Rusell Griggs (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1993), 83–85. Gayle Salamon also suggests that in Freud’s early
writings, the idea of bisexuality led him to distinguish between different
registers (soma and psyche), pointing out that in Freud, the bisexual body
of multiple erotogenic zones ultimately is resolved in the psychic register of
sexual difference. Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and
Rhetorics of Materiality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010),
16–19.
12. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France
1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (London:
Palgrave, 2008), 27–47.
13. Foucault directly relates the post-Enlightenment notion of critique to the

question of the grounds on which governmentalization could be under-
stood as legitimate. See Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?” in The
Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy, ed. David Ingram (London:
Blackwell, 2002), 192–194.
14. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction,
trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 135–159; and
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at The Collège de France
1975–1976, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David
Macey (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 239–263.
15. See Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I, 17–35.
16. See Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I, 53–73.
17. As it is well known, Foucault grants psychoanalysis a special place within
this long tradition. Foucault emphasizes the important displacements that
psychoanalytic theory produced in relation to this scientia sexualis, moving
away from theories of degeneracy and depathologizing non-normative
desires. However, Foucault also insists that despite the great potential of
linking repression to social mechanisms of domination, psychoanalytic
theory ‘unfolded within the deployment of sexuality’ and therefore could
not be able to ‘dismantle’ it. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I,
112–131.
18. Colin Gordon, “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,” in The
Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. Graham Burchell, Collin
Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991),
41–46.
19. Giddens conceptualization of the reflexive self can be found in Anthony
Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge: Polity, 1991).
20. Anne Phillips, “Feminism and Liberalism Revisited: Has Martha Nussbaum
Got It Right?” Constellations 8(2) (2001): 252.
21. Phillips offers a compelling critique of the conceptualization of bodies as
commodified property in her book, Our Bodies, Whose Property? In this
book, the author elaborates a thorough analysis of the problematic and
paradoxical consequences that arise when bodies are exclusively thought of
as individualist property and argues for an egalitarian understanding of the
fact that ‘we have bodies’ after all based on ‘our shared vulnerability, (as)
that which alerts us to the common experience of living as embodied beings
in the same world.’ Anne Phillips, Our Bodies, Whose Property? (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2013), 11.
22. Cf. note 2.

23. Brenna Bhandar questions those liberal and progressive approaches to iden-
tity that do not problematize the polarity subject-object, as this distinction,
she argues, depends on legal relations of property. Further, Bhandar high-
lights the potential of a position that exposes the plasticity of this polar-
ity for destabilizing relations of property and propriety that are dependent
on its fixation. Bhandar, “Critical Legal Studies and the Politics of Property,”
Property Law Review 3 (2014): 186–194.
24. Phillips, “Feminism and Liberalism Revisited,” 254.
Press, 2005).
26. On vulnerability, see Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning
and Violence (London: Verso, 2004); and Frames of War: When Is Life
Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009).
27. Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2015), 68–70.
28. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou. Dispossession: The Performative in the
Political (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 1–29.29.
29. Elena Loizidou, Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics (New York: Routledge-
Cavendish, 2007), 129—130 and 139—140. Notably, Loizidou links the cen-
trality of bodies in Butler’s theorization of the political to her focus on their
double nature as both figural and material. In what follows, I also discuss this
double nature of bodies, but I refer to signification more broadly (including
forms of bodily signification), while focusing on Butler’s relation to the phe-
nomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir.
30. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended; The Birth of Biopolitics, and also Michel
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France
(1977–1878), ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell, Lecture one,
1–27.
31. Though at the risk of stating the obvious, I would like to clarify that I am
referring to the Derridean reading of the theory of speech acts of John
Austin which gave way to the crucial notion that statements carry a per-
formative or realizing dimension. John Austin, How to Do Things with
Words? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). Derrida antisubstan-
tialist reading of the Austinian schema consists precisely in observing
that there does not exist a preconstituted subject prior to the statements
that are realized. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Margins
of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1982), 307–330.
32. The critique of Butler’s alleged constructivism ranges from the work of
liberal feminist authors such as Martha Nussbaum to neo-materialists as
Karen Barad and, albeit indirectly, Patricia T. Clough, who accounts for
others who also criticized her alleged disembodied perspective from
affective, neo-materialist, and Deleuzian inspired perspectives. It also
prompted the critique of Lacanian scholars as Joan Copjec, among many
others, certainly not in defense of materialism, but rather in favor of
sexual difference. See Martha Nussbaum, “The Professor of Parody,” The
New Republic 22(2) (1999): 37–45; Karen Barad, “Posthumanist
Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to
Matter,” Signs 28(3) (2003): 801–831; from Patricia T. Clough,
“Introduction,” to The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, eds. Patricia
T. Clough and Jean Halley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007),
7–14; and “Feminist Theory: Bodies, Science and Technology,” in
Routledge Handbook of Body Studies, ed. Bryan S. Turner (London:
Routledge, 2012), 94–105; and Joan Copjec, “Sex and the Euthanasia of
Reason,” in Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1994), 201–236.
33. Butler also argues that the very idea that there is a pure corporeal materiality
depends for its formulation on a system of signification that isolates this
matter from its historical-cultural dimension. This argument is object of
contestation for authors such as Karen Barad—Cf. note 32—who also
points to the chiasmic nature of the pair matter-signification, for it seem-
ingly indicates the primacy of signification over matter to define in the last
instance what materiality is or does.
34. Judith Butler, “Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig and
Foucault,” in Feminism as Critique, eds. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla
Cornell (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 128–142.
35. Butler, “Variations on Sex and Gender,” 129.
36. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (London:
Vintage, 1997; originally published in 1949).
37. Ibid., 53.
38. Ibid., 66.
39. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” in The Visible
and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1968), 130–155.
40. Judith Butler, “Merleau-Ponty and the Touch of Malebranche,” in Senses of

the Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 33–62 (originally
published in The Merleau-Ponty Reader, ed. Carmen Taylor (London:
Cambridge, 2005)).
41. Elizabeth Grosz points to Judith Butler’s critical engagement with
Merleau-Ponty in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(London: Routledge, 1990), highlighting that while Butler welcomes
the Merleau-Pontian understanding of sexuality as a modality of our
existence, she also points out the masculinist model of subjectivity upon
which this idea of sexual existence is built. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile
Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1994), 103, 108.
42. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 57.
43. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London:
Routledge, 1993), 66 (emphasis in original).
44. Ibid., 65.
45. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 74–75.
46. See Beauvoir, The Second Sex, “Part IV: The Formative Years.”
47. What Butler understands as ‘imaginary schema’ may correspond to
what is otherwise understood as ‘body image.’ See Françoise Dolto,
L’Image inconsciente du corps (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1984). This is the
understanding of Elizabeth Grosz, who offers an alternative non-dualist
account of the ‘imaginary anatomy’ of the body and the psychical medi-
ation of the corporeal. See Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 27–61.
Elizabeth Grosz will critically engage Butler’s non-dualist perspective
on this imaginary dimension of embodiment, as for Grosz this ulti-
mately Foucauldian approach can neither account for sexual difference
nor can it overcome the privilege granted to epistemological questions
and disembodied forms of knowledge as the means to effect change. In
contrast, Grosz argues for the transformative capacity of the affective
and the corporeal following a Deleuzian path. See Elizabeth Grosz,
Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (London:
Routledge, 1995), 212–224.
48. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1997), especially Chapter 3, “Subjection,
Resistance, Resignification: Between Freud and Foucault,” 83–105.
49. “The Ego and the Id,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XIX (1923–25), ed. and trans. James Strachey
(London: IPA/The Hogarth Press, 1990), 25–26.
50. Ibid., 25.
51. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 10–31.
52. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith
(London: Routledge, 2002; originally published in 1945), 530.
53. Salamon, Assuming a Body, 52 (emphasis in original).
54. Ibid., 51–52.
55. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 30–39 and 50–65.
56. It is acknowledge within the Bakhtinian scholarship that the attribution of
authorship within the Circle of Bakhtin is not clear, and it is probably the
case that work signed by Valentin Voloshinov or Pavel Medvedev could be
produced by Bakhtin himself.
57. Valentin N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans.
Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973), 26
(emphasis in original). See also Valentin N. Voloshinov, Freudianism: A
Marxist Critique, ed. Neal H. Bruss, trans. I.R. Titunik (London: Verso,
2012), 3–37, and the study of Neal H. Bruss “V. N. Voloshinov and the
Structure of Language,” included as an appendix in this book, 197–257.
Bakhtin also undertook a critique of Freudian theory based on the socio-
discursive mediation of experience, pointing out that the use of sexualiza-
tion as a metaphoric figure for the formation of the subject—what
Bakhtin called ‘Freud’s pansexualim’—leaves aside the materiality of the
social. According to Bakhtin, the definition of psychism, to the extent
that Freud is only interested in what it implies for subjective meaning,
leads to the resurgence of a new form of spiritualism. Mikhail Bakhtin,
“Más Allá de lo Social: Ensayo sobre la Teoría Freudiana,” in Mikhail
Bakhtin, Lev Vygotsky, and others, Bajtin y Vigotski: La Organización
Semiótica de la Conciencia, eds. Adriana Silvestri and Guillermo Blanck
(Barcelona: Anthropos, 1993).
58. Taking up a Bakhtinian perspective, Leonor Arfuch develops the notion of
‘biographical space’ to underscore the dialogical nature as well as the plural-
ity of narrative voices with which the self is configured. See Leonor Arfuch,
El espacio biográfico. Dilemas de la subjetividad contemporánea (Buenos
Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002).
59. See Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” and “Notes Made
in 1970–71,” in Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, eds.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee

(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 100–101 n2, in reference to
V.N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, and 143–146,
respectively.
60. Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and
the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis,” in Speech
Genres and Other Late Essays, 107.
61. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” 67–77.
62. Ibid., 72.
63. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl
Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 293.
64. Ibid.
66. Ibid., 60.
67. Ibid., 84–90.
68. Drawing on Bakhtin’s dialogism, Julia Kristeva proposes a series of analytical
categories aimed at defining different types of discourses in relation to the
form of appearance of otherness in discourse. These are classified analytically
as: (a) intertextuality, which is defined with respect to the specific character-
istics of a text and its relations to other texts; (b) interdiscursivity, which
relates to the field of significations; (c) polyphony, which alludes to the mul-
tiple voices within a text; and (d) heteroglossia, which refers to intertextual-
ity seen from the prism of power relations. Julia Krsiteva, “La Palabra, el
Diálogo y la Novela,” in Semiótica I, trans. José Martín Arancibia (Madrid,
Fundamentos, 1978; originally published in 1969), 187–225. Published in
English as “Word, Dialogue, Novel,” in Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
70. The ethical dimension of the act/utterance is associated with the phe-
nomenological dimension and the singularity of its occurrence—the
here and now of the unique encounter between the subject and the
social world. In the performance of this act/utterance, the subject is
both singular as it is anchored to this unique occurrence, and at the
same time plural, as it embodies the historicity of utterances and cannot
be separated from the others with which the encounter takes place. See
Mikhail Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, eds. Vadim Liapunov
and Michel Holquist, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1993).

72. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power.
73. Arguing with Agamben, Butler states: ‘Those who have become effec-
tively stateless are still under the control of state power. In this way, they
are without legal protection but in no way relegated to a “bare life”: this
is a life steeped in power. And this reminds us, crucially, that power is
not the same as law.’ Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
Who Sings the Nation State: Language, Politics, Belonging (London:
Seagull Books, 2007), 8–9.
6
Being Sexual
In previous chapters, I outlined the difficulty that cultural translation

poses for thinking about the universalization of sexual identities and the
translation of sexuality into a specific set of rights. There I analyzed what
happens to both subjectivity and sexuality when Western hegemonic
models of sexual human rights are rendered as universal principles for
making sexual rights claims. In particular, I tried to show how this pro-
cess over-determines the way in which sexual self-determination is valued
across cultural differences. Following on from this, I analyzed the process
by which subjectivity and sexuality are ontologically reconstituted, so
that, regardless of any particular cultural background, sexuality becomes
an entitlement, and subjectivity becomes both its source and its effect. We
have seen, then, that as an entitlement, sexuality also becomes an attri-
bute that a liberal subject is said to have. This formulation poses, in turn,
a set of related problems associated with the question as to how we can
conceive of sexual autonomy without rendering that autonomy already
predetermined by the liberal subject form, while attending to the rela-
tional character of the sexual subject. At that point, I posed a set of ques-
tions with the aim of exploring the extent to which, and in which ways,

a dialogue between queer and decolonial perspectives may challenge the

liberal and possessive form of sexual citizenship that privileges the subject
of sexual rights and its universalizing and therefore exclusionary logic.
In trying to answer these questions, my contention has been that this
problem cannot be solved by opposing different (socially determined) sex-
ual cultures to a universalist version of sexuality.1 My argument is that both
the culturally particular and the universalist understandings of sexuality
rely on a liberal version of the sexual conceived as a possession that any and
all individuals are said to ‘have.’ This understanding conceives of sexuality
as a secondary feature, peripheral to the constitution of such an individual,
and exterior to the subject’s core, which is understood as primarily rational
owner of a free will. As Wendy Brown argues, when contesting the limits
of liberal understandings of difference, rational consciousness and free will
are understood as the defining faculties of such a subject.2 As Brown states:
[T]he methodological individualism of liberal theory produces the figure

of an individuated subject by abstracting and isolating deliberative ratio-
nality from embodied locations or constitutive practices […] Across
Lockean, Kantian, Millian, Rawlsian, and Habermasian perspectives,
rationality transcends—or better, exceeds—embodiment and cultural loca-
tion to permit a separation between rational thought on one side and the
constitutive embodiment of certain beliefs and practices on the other.3
This way of casting deliberative rationality and free will, Brown explains,
leads to the conviction that we choose our beliefs, attachments, and forms
of belonging, and that these are to be considered as undetermined facul-
ties and dispositions that exist prior to any social or cultural framework.
According to this epistemic framework, therefore, when we think of a
subject as adopting any particular sexual culture, we are already positing
a universal ontological subject who is presumed to be prior to, and inde-
pendent of, the sexual culture to which this subject belongs. As this sub-
ject (equated with the human as an individual free will and the individual
incarnation of rationality) is understood as an ontological foundation, it
is universalized as the condition of possibility of politics, including sexual
politics. But such a configuration of an ontological subject is already a
particular cultural construction, namely, that of liberalism.4
6 Being Sexual 215
This is the problem that certain human rights frameworks are facing
when uncritically adhering to humanist versions of the subject of politics;
it is also the problem that international LGBT organizations are facing
for the same reasons as well. The entanglement of debates on cultural
difference with sexual matters is misleading, for it already understands
sexuality (and culture) as split from an ontological subject that works as
an a priori of politics. As Brown eloquently shows, multiculturalism, as
the management of difference, is already over-determined by the liberal
subject form. The question then arises: what are the implications of the
sexualization of cultural difference by means of which the culturalization
of sexuality also takes place?
The problem is in fact more complicated: what is happening with sexu-
ality debates is a complex movement by which sexuality is either equated
with culture or ascribed to the core of the individual, or sometimes both
at once. So far, we have seen that when sexuality is equated to culture it
becomes secondary and non-constitutive of the liberal subject as an onto-
logical foundation. This is the multiculturalist position that affirms that
there are many different cultural approaches to sexuality. Here, sexuality
is understood as a possession that remains identical to itself in its core
definition, whereas ‘cultures’ are taken as particular and in the plural.
In other words, there is a universalist understanding of sexuality evident
in ideas of preference, identity, and orientation that prefigures the dif-
ferent ways in which such features could be interpreted and lived. Such
a presumption is implicit in conservative positions as well. In this case,
the idea is that there are different sexual cultures, among which there are
some that cannot be assimilated to LGBT ideals.
However, when sexual human rights are at stake, sexuality seems to lie
in an in-between space, both as a secondary trait, and also as constitutive
of subjectivity. Just as the ontological subject (equated with the human)
is presupposed as an a priori (regardless of the subject’s particular sexual
position), so is sexuality, which becomes part of that ontological unit that
the individuated liberal subject is. In this case, sexuality becomes, in its
most abstract form, an ontological foundation for the multiple experi-
ences of sexuality that can take place at an ontic level. The difference
Heidegger posits between the ontic (particular existences) and the onto-
logical (Being in general) implies that the only access to the ontological
is through the signs of its inaccessibility. In the case of the liberal sexual
subject, a series of ontic contents such as particular sexual orientations
or identities have passed as features of the ontological foundations of
the sexual core of the subject. According to this framework, these sexual
foundations would be inaccessible, and therefore, as I argue, the site of
an ontological void.
This ontic-ontological split of sexuality points to a particular sexual
epistemology that, as we have seen, has been also criticized by Joseph
Massad.5 One of the main characteristics of this sexual epistemology is the
elevation of the particular ontic contents of Western modern understand-
ing of sexuality as an ontological fact. According to this scheme, sexuality
also functions as an ontological foundation that mirrors the elevation of
the sovereign subject as an a priori of rights-based politics. It is this onto-
logical status that sexuality acquires within the liberal framework that is
then doubled by the culturalized multiple contents of sexuality.
In Chapter 4, I have addressed the flaws of these liberal onto-
epistemological effects, ones that serve the minoritization of those sexual
cultures that contradict or distance themselves from current Western
hegemony within international arenas. As an ontological a priori, the
Western model of sexuality figures as a core feature of the subject’s being.
As an ontic realization of that ontological dimension of sexuality, differ-
ent sexual cultures will impose on the subject a particular form of sexu-
alization. Sexuality operates, in this sense, in a very peculiar way. On the
one hand, sexuality is understood as embedded in the body, and since the
subject cannot be thought as a completely disembodied being, sexuality
becomes a key feature of subjectivity and an inevitable marker of the
subject’s identity. On the other hand, when the subject is primarily char-
acterized by its abstracted rationality and autonomy, embodiment and
sexuality are also recast as secondary elements, with no essential weight
on its definition qua subject, and therefore susceptible to taking multiple
cultural forms.
One way of bridging this potential tension between the universal-
ized ontological status of sexuality within Western sexual epistemol-
ogy—already structured around orientations and identity—and its ontic
realization within a (limited) plurality of forms might be found in the
possessive relationship that the subject is understood to have with its own
6 Being Sexual 217
body. If the sexual subject has to be necessarily thought as an embodied

being, this embodied dimension is also understood in liberal terms in a
possessive modality, where the body becomes an objectified possession
rather than a dimension of life. Objectified as an inevitable attribute of a
body one is said to possess, sexuality remains both central to the configu-
ration of the subject and detachable from the subject’s abstracted (i.e.,
disembodied) core. That is why gender and sexuality, and, not least of
all, race, occupy a special place when it comes to contesting forms of
disembodiment proper to the figure of the abstract individual. Gender,
sexuality, and race, for instance, cannot be reduced to just another con-
tingent or even avoidable feature irrelevant to how humanity is con-
ceived. However, when acknowledged within a possessive framework, the
structuring operations of gender, sexuality and race are still disavowed as
secondary attributes that a prior universal subject is said to have, and in
this way the orchestrated forms of sexualization and racialization as con-
stitutive of subjectivation are denied.
Now, if we cannot get away from the ontological dimension of sexual-
ization, I want to explore how we can consider it in such a way that it is
not over-determined by the liberal subject form. I started to suggest a way
for this exploration in Chapter 3, by re-conceptualizing the ontological
dimension of sexuality as an ontological void.6 The sexual, then, would
indicate at an ontological level an imagined irrecoverable plenitude, the
presence of an absence that works as the source of desire, one that could
be linked to the Lacanian real.
In parallel with the sexual ontological void, this ontic-ontological split
and the void that emerges at the level of the ontological is at the center
of radical democracy as conceptualized by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe. Among other factors, what makes democracy radical is the lack
of any ontological foundation for society. This originary lack of founda-
tion—the ontological void that is at the kernel of any social totality—is
not a mere absence, but rather the presence of an absence that demands
to be sutured or filled by a hegemonic content. Like the sexual in my
proposition, a radical approach to democratic practices implies that there
is neither any sort of foundational rationality, nor original formations of
desire that could justify the liberal terms in which sexual politics might
be played out.
Can sexuality be articulated in a way that requires a move beyond

political liberalism and the citizen-subject to configure the predominant
idea of sexual rights? What would democratization look like if it ceased to
be defined by the politics of inclusion or by the reduction of sexual rights
to cultural rights? What would sexuality look like beyond the ontology of
the liberal individual? These questions led me to explore what other ways
of thinking about sexuality and agency are possible beyond the ‘citizen
subject of sexual rights’ form that I have discussed in Chapters 3, 4 and 5.
Here we should point out a terminological distinction between sexuality
as a Western apparatus, understood in line with Foucault’s nomenclature,
and what could be characterized as sexual. Having made this distinction,
against the ontology of the liberal subject, and a limited idea of sexual
orientations, preferences, and identities, in what follows I put forward a
relational approach to the dynamics of sexual desire and identifications. I
also further develop questions about the possibility of thinking of a post-
sovereign notion of sexual and political agency that I started to outline
in Chapter 5.
Sexuality and Critique
I am not trying to deny that there is, inevitably, a subjective or individu-
alized dimension to our social life, in a sort of wishful gesture denying
our ‘passionate attachment’ to the self. But, if the self to which we are so
passionately attached is ‘the correlate of a set of social technologies,’ as
Foucault would put it, it is worth considering ‘how it would be possible
to elaborate new kinds of relationships to ourselves’ as well as to others.7
Along these lines, then, as sexuality is one of those instances where the
self is called upon, the question would be: how can we approach this
social technology differently? What set of new technologies might corre-
late with new sexual relations of the self to itself and to others? Or rather,
how would another kind of government of our selves and others enable
the possibility of envisioning the sexual dimension of our lives otherwise?
In exploring these questions, we must also ask: What kind of idea
of sexuality would be capable of exceeding and challenging modern
Western sexual epistemology? What features might characterize such a
6 Being Sexual 219
notion? Of course, the conceptual move I am thinking of does not call

for an abandonment of an ‘arbitrary’ notion of sexuality in favor of a
more ‘accurate’ one. Rather, in the spirit of a Foucauldian critical mode,
the point would be to engage the limits of current political frameworks
for conceiving sexuality in order to think of sexuality in a different way:
instead of extending the ways in which we are governed by and through
sexuality, this questioning should allow us to govern ourselves differently.
As Foucault might have put it, the task ahead would be to turn our minds
toward the possibility of practicing ‘the art of not to be governed’ by
the dispositive of sexuality as we currently are. In fact, Foucault him-
self suggested that we move from sexuality to pleasure…8 But given the
importance of sexual politics, I would like to explore another path, and
consider what could be understood as a sexual self-governance.
In ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Foucault characterizes this critical
ontology as an attitude in which ‘the critique of what we are is at one
and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed
on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them’.9
It is through the practice of critique that we enact our freedom. In the
same text, Foucault states that this is a ‘work carried out by ourselves
upon ourselves as free beings.’10 Of course this freedom is not originary:
the practice of this freedom that might turn us into ethical subjects,
committed to the ‘theoretical and practical experience that we have of
our limits and of the possibility of moving beyond them, is always lim-
ited and determined.’11
So, how are we to conceive this limited and determined (sexual) free-
dom? In ‘What is critique? An essay on Foucault’s virtue,’ Judith Butler
offers a reading of Foucault’s essay and points out that the ethical commit-
ment of critique is precisely the questioning of the limits of knowledge-
power formations.12 The question that concerns Butler is ethics, and she
proposes that this ethics would be based on ‘a critical ontology of our-
selves,’ which leads to what she refers to as ‘virtue.’ She suggests that,
unlike judgment, critique is concerned with a reflection on the frame-
works of evaluation, that is, with the epistemological fields within which
judgments are made. According to Butler, ‘for Foucault, this exposure
of the limit of the epistemological field is linked with the practice of
virtue, as if virtue were counter to regulation and order….’13 So virtue
is understood as a critical relation to norms. But for this critical relation

to norms to become an ethical commitment through which the self can
form itself as a ‘free being,’ it should expose this limit. Butler writes: ‘lib-
erty emerges at the limits of what one can know, at the very moment in
which the desubjugation of the subject within the politics of truth takes
place.’14 Reflecting on the practice of liberty in Foucault as a particular
critical relation to authority and norms, Butler makes it clear that ‘self ’
and ‘norms’ are co-constitutive, even if they stand in opposition to each
other in the scene of resistance, or for the purposes of critique:
[T]he formation of the subject is the institution of the very reflexivity that
indistinguishably assumes the burden of formation. The ‘indistinguishabil-
ity’ of this line is precisely the juncture where social norms intersect with
ethical demands, and where both are produced in the context of a self-
making which is never fully self-inaugurated.15
In accordance with Butler’s framework, social norms and self-making

are mutually entangled, and this chiasmic entanglement makes the
boundary between norms and auto-poiesis indistinguishable. That is
why the liberty that is enacted through a process of self-making is not
derived from an innate capacity of the subject. Rather, it is a practice
that takes place within a concrete social field and in a specific criti-
cal relation to the terms in which the social field is organized. And
at this point, the ethical cannot be totally separated from its political
dimension; the ethical is always already ethical-political. Further, the
freedom of the self to which Foucault refers, and of the sexual experi-
ence of ourselves in particular, is bound to governmentalization and the
subsequent call to individualization, reflexivity, and deliberation: the
practice of (sexual) liberty is an effect of being governed. But we have
to take into account that this effect leads to a mode of being that might
challenge the very same authority that has called upon the subject to
be free. Therefore, in order to practice this freedom, the subject should
question the terms in which it is supposed to experience itself as a free
subject. Freedom or liberty emerges only when the subject questions
the terms of its own formation. Hence the necessary desubjugation that
comes with the ethical commitment to freedom.16
6 Being Sexual 221
How could the ethical commitment to freedom as discussed by Foucault

and Butler inform questions that pertain to the relationship between free-
dom and sexuality? In the context of my argument, their suggestion that
freedom emerges at the limits of self-knowledge would lead to the idea
that sexual freedom, then, might have more to do with questioning the
parameters through which one recognizes the sexually free subject and its
alter-ego, the sexually un-free one, than with re-affirming the norms that
structure the sexual field within which such subject positions are taken
up. A radical commitment to sexual freedom would lead to our neces-
sary desubjugation as sexual beings. This desubjugation relates to the fact
that the subject is not at the origin of its own formation, and therefore it
necessarily involves a critique of the field within which we are formed as
sexual subjects. Taking into account the structuring role played by liber-
alism in the formation of the sexual subject, I suggest that this desubjuga-
tion might involve a challenge to embedded notions of sexual orientation
and identity and their problematic implications as I have discussed them
in previous chapters. It might also challenge the ontological position of
the liberal subject form that over-determines such sexual configurations,
and the possessive modality of the relationship of the subject toward its
body that is derived from it.
Now, one could object that the task of critique defined by Foucault
and Butler also relies on a liberal ontological form of subjectivity. After
all, who is this subject who is capable of self-critique? Does my defense of
critique provide a suitable response to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s critique
of transparency and reason?17 As I have discussed in Chapter 4, da Silva
rightly criticizes emancipation discourses which rely on an agent of eman-
cipation that is already cast according to the grids of post-enlightenment
transparent reason, that is, an agent whose capacity to emancipate
itself depends on the prior acceptance of an idea of agency that mirrors
Western rationality and autonomy. The price of emancipation within this
scheme points to the assumption of a subject position that relies on the
constitutive irrational and heteronymous other. Posed in these terms, it
could be objected that the task of critique proposed by Foucault and
then re-interpreted by Butler in ethical-political terms, might actually
rely on these ideals of the subject of freedom, rather than offering a strong
challenge to them. However, countering this caveat, it is not at all clear
that such form of critique would be committed to transparency. On the

contrary, this form of self-reflection calls for the subject’s own desubjuga-
tion, and in this sense questions the limits of our knowledge, pointing to
the disarticulation of the liberal sexual subject as well. If the liberal sub-
ject of sexuality is not universal, as we have seen with reference to Brown,
it is this figure, mobilized by current mainstream transnational sexual
politics, which resonates with Foucault’s neoliberal governmentality, that
needs to undergo a process of critique. That this form of critique is far
from relying on a subject of reason transparent to itself becomes clear
once we take into account that self-critique cannot take place without a
critique of the field in which the subject acquires its intelligibility, and
therefore it demands that this subject undoes itself.
Butler reaffirms this auto-poietic (but also relational) dimension of free-
dom in Giving an account of Oneself, and she does so in order to argue for
an ethics based on the acknowledgment of the limits of self-knowledge.18
For Butler, such limits are related to the radical relationality through
which the subject is formed, which includes the schemes of intelligibility
that shape subject-formations, the narrative conditions in which an ‘I’ can
emerge, and also, the structure of address that calls for the ‘I’ to appear.
Along these lines, I would like to suggest that a relational conception of
sexual subjectivity might pave the way for a reconsideration of sexual poli-
tics. In the following section, I propose that we may find a way to chal-
lenge such a formation through a relational approach that complements
Butler’s proposition. This conception leads to a series of hypotheses worthy
of further elaboration. These include a reflection upon sexuality as one of
the sites for the negotiation of the borders of the self, which, subsequently,
might point to the liminal character of sexuality as the site for negotiation
of those boundaries, and the primacy of the other for becoming sexual,
which includes the relation between sexuality, norms, and fantasy.
On Being Sexual
The first move consists of departing from the concept of sexuality as an
attribute of the ‘I’ toward a consideration of a looser notion such as what
might be felt as erotic about embodiment. Thinking about the erotic
6 Being Sexual 223
along the lines of Audre Lorde’s ‘Uses of the Erotic,’ for instance, as a
force of life whose borders are blurred, we might be able to challenge
sexuality as a western-built dispositive. According to Lorde, the erotic
lingers in every aspect of life, and it is not so much about what we do,
but rather ‘a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.’19
Located at the level of embodiment and feeling, and even the spiritual,
the erotic seems to dwell in a continuum where the differences among
sexual identities seem to be erased. Seen in this light, then, the erotic side
of embodiment might lead us to think of the sexual in such a way that it
is not trapped within the logic of sexual identities, but rather challenges
the reduction of freedom to legal-rights and recognition, which are, in
turn, based on very rooted ideas of sexual orientation.
Precisely in order to contest the cultural imperialism embedded in the
Western history of sexuality and the globalization of its categories, Greg
Thomas addresses the question of embodiment and erotic desire from an
African and African Diaspora point of view. To consider embodiment
and the erotic, Thomas draws on Ifi Amadiume’s readings of Cheikh
Anta Diop to encourage a ‘radical new interpretation of what is hailed
as the history of sexuality in Europe and North America.’20 As Thomas
highlights, in the field of sexuality studies ‘this history of the West is
misunderstood as the history of the world, or historicity proper,’21 rein-
forcing a universalizing gesture that, according to the author, is indebted
to the past and present of cultural imperialism and its associated ‘con-
ventional system of classification which views heterosexuality and homo-
sexuality as the ultimate categories of human sexuality in modern social
life.’22 The problem with the categories with which this system operates
is that it might allow us to ‘problematize sexual oppression, when it fits
an established paradigm, but it also preserves the conceptual framework
of this oppression.’23 However, against the backdrop of this conceptual
framework, the possibilities of erotic desire, pleasure, or embodiment far
exceed current hegemonic systems of classification. It would be by means
of these possibilities, then, that we might be able to consider alternative
forms of transnational alliances that counter the logics of cultural imperi-
alism and neo-colonialism. These alliances, as Thomas states, depend on
an approach that ‘would not assume that currently dominant concepts
and politics are trans-cultural or trans-historical. They would therefore
be able to detect and discuss the relationship between sexuality and

geopolitical hegemony’.24
The focus on embodiment and the idea of the erotic that I draw from
Greg Thomas and Audre Lorde open up another path for cultural transla-
tions and transnational politics. But this focus also aims to highlight the
sexual as a trans-individual sort of experience, a way of being in the world.
As Audre Lorde points out in her famous essay, the erotic emerges in the
deep ‘sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellec-
tual,’25 and the embodied openness ‘to the erotically satisfying experience,
whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining
an idea.’26 Finally, the erotic is a way ‘to share the power of each other’s
feelings.’27 These figures of deep sharing and openness suggest a possible
link with the idea that the sexual, linked to erotization, might be better
grasped as a relational experience.
Moving a step further, it could be argued that this is an experience
whose eroticism dwells precisely in its liminal character. The sexual, as a
diasporic space, both at the level of culture and the subject, would find
its erotic element in the figuration of a self outside itself, while negotiat-
ing its limits. As a trans-individual experience of the world, such a notion
suggests that it is precisely the negotiation of the borders of the self, and
the ‘work of a limit,’ that ‘becomes the occasion for eroticization.’28 In
this regard, Butler affirms:
The pursuit of pleasure not over and against its own constituting limits, but
a pursuit for which limits become the condition of erotization itself. In
other words, it is not as if the ready-made subject meets its limits in the law,
but that the limits that the law sets decide in advance what will and will not
become a subject.29
Indeed, the sexual dimension of our existence could be conceived as a

form of eroticization that emerges in the negotiations of the borders of
the self, where that which configures its outside works as an enabling con-
dition rather than a limiting restriction. This negotiation would involve
the borders between self and other, within and without oneself, as well as
the indistinguishable, but workable, borders between the self and norms.
This experience is well described by Monique Wittig in her work on The
6 Being Sexual 225
Lesbian Body and Anne Carson’s work on Eros: The Bittersweet, both of
which I have referred to in Chapter 4.30 In these cases, the negotiation
of the borders that form the self on a sexual level involves, of course, the
figure of the other with whom these borders are negotiated. But while
Butler’s emphasis is on the decentering character of the norm as a condi-
tion for erotization, rather than a limit against which erotization takes
place, the other through which this relational experience takes shape is
also a phenomenological other. The figure of the other in the scenes of
the erotic of embodiment, seduction, desire, and passion, as described by
Wittig and Carson, refers to a phenomenological experience of otherness
rather than the other evoked by the law.
This is where Bakhtin’s elaboration on the constitutive otherness of
oneself as a discursive-phenomenological being seems apt. We need to
remember that Bakhtin’s theory of discourse encompasses myriad forms
of meaning making that exceed representational speech, as I have argued
in Chapter 5.31 It is in this broader sense, then, that for Bakhtin discourse
is basically a transubjective experience.32 The idea of oneself as otherness
evokes the figure of an ‘I’ conceived as palimpsest, made up of experi-
ences that are neither intrinsic to us nor totally external and autonomous
from us. This ‘I’ defines a sui generis instance not reducible to an internal
‘me’ or an external ‘you.’ And it indicates the unknowability of both the
‘me’ and the ‘you’ as such. Yet, borders are negotiated, and the figure of an
‘I’ still emerges, even if only delineating a spatiotemporal conjuncture in
the midst of a trans-individual scene—hence, the Bakhtinian chronotope
of the threshold that I will address later, in relation to embodiment.33
Along these lines, perhaps the sexual could be conceived as emerging
within the parameters of a threshold as a liminal spatiotemporal juncture
between self and other.
The figure of the palimpsest for conceiving the subject is due to the
fact that for Bakhtin all discourse is citational, and therefore we carry
the voices of others in every act of communication that we might con-
ceive of our own. As such, the discourse of the subject is always in trans-
lation, and decentered by the other voices with which it is made. But
the primacy of the other in Bakthin’s conceptualization also emerges in
the scene of address, a threshold between the subject and its addressee.
Arguably, one could extend this phenomenological approach to discursive

communication into the sexual domain. Such a relational vision takes
into account how we are undone by others and by the otherness of the
other—including what there is inside us that is other to us. Therefore, it
would draw attention to the crucial role of the other in the constitution
of our sexuality, or in other words, the sexual dimension of the ‘I.’
To develop this line of reasoning it is useful to draw on Jean Laplanche’s
general theory of seduction, which demands that we displace our focus to
what he calls ‘the sexual.’34 Unlike sexuality—understood in Foucault’s terms
as a social technology, and in psychoanalytic terms as genital sexuality—the
sexual refers, in Laplanche, to an enlarged Freudian notion of sexuality, which
is paramount in Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality.35 The sexual involves uncon-
scious infantile sexuality, our more repressed sexual features and fantasies.
According to Laplanche, it is the sexual (and not genital/oedipal sexu-
ality) that is at the core of the ‘fundamental anthropological situation’
by which we come into existence as ‘human-animals.’ The fundamental
anthropological situation consists of the adult-infant relationship, which
refers to the primary process by which the infant is brought into the
world and is inevitably compelled to enter into a relation with the adult
carers, which is primarily a relation of dependency, as Butler remarks.36
In very schematic terms, according to Laplanche’s theory, adults implant
messages in the infant while taking care of it, and what is key about these
messages is that they are compromised by the adults’ own sexual uncon-
scious, which is made up of the residues of infantile polymorphously
perverse sexuality. The infant, who does not yet have an unconscious
and has not yet developed their sexuality, is confronted with messages
that are enigmatic to them. Furthermore, as these are also messages that
come from the other, which is the adult’s unconscious, the messages are
also enigmatic (if recognized as a sexual message at all) for the adult itself.
It is through a process of a necessarily failed translation, Laplanche’s
argument goes, that the psychosexual apparatus of the human-animal
emerges. The enigmatic message is first inscribed in the infant and sub-
sequently ‘the message is reactivated from within.’37 This reactivation
prompts the translation of the message proper, which not only stimu-
lates the configuration of the ego, but also the formation of the uncon-
scious. Given that the message is compromised (by the adult’s sexual
6 Being Sexual 227
unconscious), and enigmatic (for an infant that as yet has no sexual

unconscious), the translation is necessarily a failed one, as it involves
a process of repression that shapes ‘the remainders that constitute the
unconscious in the proper Freudian sense.’38
The fundamental anthropological situation described by Laplanche
locates the question of seduction and fantasy at the threshold of the infant’s
emergence into culture (the adult world). But instead of according any
privileged primacy to the Oedipal law, Laplanche dwells in the enigmatic,
and ultimately ungraspable, character of that encounter. According to the
author, translation occurs with the help of a manifold of codes, among which
the Oedipus story has historically gained a prime position. But despite its
historical significance, Laplanche does not concede to the Oedipal scene
any primary structural value in the formation of the subject. Rather, he
understands it as mythical cultural code—a narrative scheme—by which
the subject can tell a story of itself.39 In this sense, his understanding of the
sexual has the potential to de-universalize the Oedipal narrative and offers
a more open approach to the formation of the unconscious, not necessarily
derived from this particular heteronormative kinship formation.
Butler retains the ethical consequences of this inaugural encounter, where
the other proves to have a primary position in the constitution of the self
and its own otherness. But here, I wonder, what are the implications of the
fact that this fundamental anthropological scene is one of seduction, with
the sexual dimension at its core? The significance of this ‘inaugural scene’
lies in the fact that it does not limit itself to a moment in our biography. The
scene is ‘inaugural’ insofar as it works, in fact, as an inevitable and constitu-
tive scene in which the ‘I’ is continuously formed; it points to the inextrica-
bility of the other in this course of perpetual formation. So the primacy of
the other, that is, of everything that constitutes otherness, is present in the
constitution of the ‘I’; but this other’s primacy is also, and fundamentally,
always and already there and present in the constitution of ‘my’ sexuality.
The relational approach described here is not only based on a phenom-
enological understanding of the subject and discourse. It also revolves
around seduction and the sexual dimension of our own formation. So,
while this relational ‘I’ challenges the liberal conception of the individ-
ual, it may also comport with the challenge to the liberal conception of
sexuality. As I stated earlier, drawing on Bakhtin, the primacy of otherness
in this relational conception refers to a phenomenological other rather

than the constitutive Other of the Law. But, drawing on Laplanche, it
also points to the otherness of our own sexuality, where the sexual exceeds
sexuality as a dispositive. In effect, according to Laplanche’s view, the
attachment developed between baby and caregiver is, from the begin-
ning, fueled by ‘the sexual’; and the sexual unconscious that emerges
from this encounter retains the perverse polymorphous, unbound sexual-
ity, and the unarticulated fantasies that haunt sexual lives.
Now, if for Laplanche, following Freud, this unbound, fragmented,
anarchic sexuality is a destructive force (Laplanche argues that the sexual
can be equated with what he calls the ‘sexual death drive’), over which the
subject has no control, the question then arises: how can we derive from
such a disruptive element an idea of sexual freedom and subsequent poli-
tics? There are two problems here. On the one hand, according to Butler,
it would be precisely because we are not of our own, but are the effect of a
violent impingement imposed by the other on us from the beginning, that
we have to avoid that sort of violence and not impose on others. This may
well be appealing. And yet, the question remains: how can this ethics over-
come the fact that precisely because we are made through violence, aggres-
sion is constitutive of who we are and we cannot rule it out completely?
How might the aggressive dimension of our psychic life find the ‘correct’
ways of expressing itself? On the other hand, the primacy of the other in
the constitution of the self may lead us too quickly to think in terms of
the Hegelian aporia: in the idea of primacy, we might be presupposing
the separation of self and other. But, in fact, such separation is undone
by the idea of impingement and formation, which do not belong to the
self or the other, but rather to the relational bond. While animating our
sexual activity, the relationality of ‘the sexual’ makes it impossible to give
a totalizing account of who we sexually are. But this should not lead us to
the conclusion that we are exempt from any sort of responsibility. On the
contrary, the fact that the other forms part of our own formation, and that
we become who we are by virtue of our responsiveness, requires us to be
responsible for the others who encounter us, even if without our consent.
At this point, I wonder how the erotic side of embodiment could speak to
the corporeal dimension (taking into account the tension posed by the fact
that our bodies are and are not of our own), and the register of sensibility
that puts at stake, as Butler, suggests, the ‘nearly involuntary dimension of
6 Being Sexual 229
our somatic lives.’40 To conceive embodiment as a liminal matter traversed

by the sexual would turn sexuality into a threshold that exceeds (and might
undo) the individualities involved. This threshold would render undistin-
guishable not only the lines between what belongs to me and to you, but
also the borders between otherness and ‘self.’ Following the argument I
have developed with the aid of Butler and Foucault, it may be the case that
‘my desire’ emerges within the negotiation of such boundaries. But then,
the negotiation of the limit conceived as a threshold where the sexual self
struggles to thrive would indicate, in turn, the excess of fantasy that does
away with the constraints imposed by the language of norms.
While liberal sexual politics, based on prefigured ideas of sexual ori-
entation and identity, tends to an additive logic that does not challenge
what we mean by sexuality, this conception of the sexual, the erotic, and
embodiment as a way of being in the world, a way of relating to the
world, de-individualizes desire and pleasure. Further, once we take the
fantastic character of desire into account, not only does desire become
partly defined by the ‘outside,’ but in addition, it cannot be accounted for
in terms of transparency or directly accessed. From this relational point of
view, sexual agency cannot but be post-sovereign.41
The idea of a sexual threshold, together with the dimension of fantasy,
and the role of the sexual in our own formation (the story of which we
cannot tell) make it impossible to give a thorough account of our desire
as our own. They confront us with our own limits, and in so doing they
prompt us to challenge what we know. Along these lines, then, maybe
rather than trying to expand all-known freedoms for preconceived sexual
selves, it would be better to continue questioning, again and again, the
presuppositions that disavow the epistemic limits that restrict how co-
extensive bodies and their erotic experiences can be thought.
The Body I Feel: Ontological Void,

Relationality, and Representation
If up to this point I have pinpointed a series of possible relational insights
for considering the sexual in relation to subjectivity and embodiment,
I have done so in order to emphasize the political dimension of this
experience, which the liberal language of rights cannot capture. At this
point, the political might touch on the poetic, or the spiritual. But I also
reflected on the experience of the body as a relational matter as a way
to put words to feelings and trajectories that are not just elusive, but
obscured, if not disavowed by a discourse that associates freedom with
extreme individualism, and, not least of all, isolation. This is a discourse
that, as any other, senses its own cracks.
What a certain grammar can and cannot evoke points to the ontic-
ontological split I have addressed at the beginning of this chapter. Before
the ontological void, the constitutive outside that allows for the hege-
monization of certain contents to pretend to speak the truth—be it the
language of sexual identity and transparent desire, or other—is also the
point at which the fissure of representation surfaces. Referring to the
limits of specific political grammars, Judith Butler writes:
The face, if we are to put words to its meaning, will be that for which no
words really work; the face seems to be a kind of sound, the sound of lan-
guage evacuating its sense, the sonorous substratum of vocalization that
precedes and limits the delivery of any semantic sense.42
The idea that there is a gesture for which words do not work might sound
strange to many, especially if they come from the pen of Judith Butler.
The truth is that the quotation above comes from ‘Precarious Life,’ in
the course of her reading of Emmanuel Levinas, who confronts us with
the question of our human existence as ethical existence. The demand of
the other may emerge as an interpellation that requires of us an ethical
response in that face upon which representation trembles. If the face is
one of the many possible gestures of the body of the other, then we must
grant that one of those gestures could be the sound of the voice. The
voice, like the face of which Butler speaks, can pose an ethical demand.
To the extent that it is a sonorous face, the voice indicates from the
beginning how vulnerable is the humanity of a subject whose emergence
depends upon a gesture whose otherness is, as Jacques Derrida would put
it, infinite, absolute, irreducible.43
That kind of vulnerability that alludes to human relationality and oth-
erness may evoke the fissures of representation in a way that presents
deep similarities to sexual relationality. Sexual relationality, as I propose
6 Being Sexual 231
here, also relies on the ‘insufficiency’ of signifiers, and their ultimately

indecipherable nature. Similarly, it also indicates a chiasm between self
and other, as well as the chiasmic relation between matter and significa-
tion in the experience of embodiment, traversed as it is by fantasy forma-
tions. I might be accused of stretching ideas too much, but I can hear
in this text the echoes of objections made to a simple constructivism
that, perhaps too quickly, subsumes the referent to the order of the signi-
fier. This is a constructivism that forgets that it is precisely the order of
representation that reconfigures matter as its opposite, as if the found-
ing status of representation could capture the material corporeality of all
experience. Through representation, materiality emerges as that which
is located beyond the signifier, but in this move, excess is also produced
and meaning making becomes a divided event. This is the terrain of the
supplement, a chiasm in which incompleteness appears.
Postulating that what we understand has always already been medi-
ated by language does not imply that thinking of our sexual life is only
and nothing more than that which can be expressed in representational
speech. Between the social representations of sexual life and its psycho-
socially mediated experience there might be a hiatus. It is precisely this
leap over the abyss between the representation of things and their medi-
ated experience that allows meaning not to become closed. This hiatus
precludes experience from becoming frozen in the fantasy that it has
found a final truth. If experience is alive, it is thanks to the unfinished
and fractured character of its meaning. Derrida reminds us that, from the
very beginning, meaning is always deferred, delayed; meaning requires a
supplement, infinitely more (or less), and too far beyond (that is also a
falling short of ), toward which it inexorably heads. In the hiatus between
the signifier and its excess, between representation and its imaginary ref-
erent, meaning is glimpsed, always unfinished, split and never completely
adequate. And it is this necessary inadequacy that keeps it alive. This hia-
tus signals as well the ontic-ontological split, by which reality or meaning
reveal themselves as always insufficient.
This hiatus between the ontological void and its insufficient filling, the
fissure of representation, seems to be precisely what is recovered in the
psychosocial experience of the sexual body and its difficult translatability.
Nonetheless, this does not mean that the sexual body, to the extent that
it is matter and experience, does not have or produce meaning. What it

refers to is the fact that this signification that produces matter cannot be
captured by representational logic.
The moment in which representation breaks down has also been the
starting point for my reflection upon the body as a Merleau-Pontian
chiasm between matter and signification.44 And certainly, sexual desire
is one of those familiar, albeit extraordinary, instances where the chias-
mic character of the body becomes most apparent. In reference to the
dynamic of transposition that, according to Merleau-Ponty, pertains to
sexuality, Gayle Salamon writes:
This then is the substance of the transposition which, according to Merleau-

Ponty, animates my body in desire: my sensation becomes more ambiguous
and diffuse even as it intensifies because I am suddenly spread out as a sens-
ing subject, located both in my body and that toward which my body
bends… A sexual transposition also involves a displacement of the body as
a coherent amalgam of conscious thinking… That center, suddenly, is
shared.
But if I am found in the other, so too I am lost there. The “me” that is
conjoined with the world in this way is already displaced, disassembled.45
In Salamon’s writing, transposition unsettles the representation of the

subject as a self-enclosed unity and its distance from its object starts to
close. As much as the permeability of the ‘me’ points to the chiasm that
the embodied subject is, so does the loss of seemingly assembled coher-
ence evoke the excess that is proper to desire, and thus locates desire
both within and outside representation. We could think of this chiasm,
for example, in the troubling experience of extreme proximity to which
desire may allude. Sometimes, extreme proximity seems to work as one of
those instances where representation breaks apart. When extremely prox-
imate, bodies’ meaning seem to exceed representation; their unity and
wholeness disintegrates in an unruly palimpsest of signs and sensations
that are hardly translatable into representational language without failure
or excess. Their image zoomed in to the point of pure fragmentation dis-
solves in gestures and non-sequential movements in intimate confluence
with the touch, the smell, the sounds, the traces of the skin, and the
6 Being Sexual 233
voice. At this point, the moans, laughter, screaming, and intimate sounds
of the body might not take meaning through representational language,
but rather acquire their signification through their texture or ‘grain,’
as Roland Barthes would say. For its part, the skin, in its radical close-
ness, loses its reference to an individual coherent body and also becomes
scattered texture. These textures of human skin and voice communicate
something beyond (or falling short of ) representational discourse and
the word. In transit and without necessary direction, a fleeting point of
unforeseeable intersections, the humanity of this voice and body could be
also Derridean—neither this nor that, and yet both this and that: beyond
phenomena, the voice of the body is still a phenomenological experience;
one that is not completely accessible to representation, yet does not stop
being both signifier and signified.
The point here is not to argue for certain immediacy of the body or
its experience. Rather, my argument is that texture and grain are modes
in which the body signifies. These forms of bodily signification are not
reducible to representational discourse or speech. The fissure of repre-
sentation is exposed here, for the translation of these unspoken forms
of bodily signification entails a failure, one where excess emerges as that
which is also missed.
The echoes of the limit or the hiatus of representation are evoked in
the textures of the voice at those moments in which the voice does not
materialize in words, but neither is it reduced to a merely indecipher-
able sound. That crude and pure sound sets itself up as just an indexical
sign of a subject over there. But even further, the voice, when vocalizing
something that is not indecipherable noise but neither is it recognizable
speech, inaugurates another intermediate scene in which ‘being’ arrives as
a bridge between the incommensurable orders of signification and mat-
ter. So tremendously and intimately close, the skin and the flesh, while
losing all reference to an individualized body, seem to allude to a perturb-
ing corporeality that is yet to come. This disruption that is part of the
grain of the voice and the texture of the corporeal invites us to a reflection
upon the body’s transitional space-time, when the body communicates
something as an almost tactile presence.
Here we find another threshold, an in-between space where signification
and soma meet. As much as representational discourse finds a limit when
it comes to its capacity to translate bodily signification, so does signi-

fication seem to be deemed to the logic of failed translation when it is
somatized. The somatization of processes of meaning making traversed
by the imaginary and fantasy produces another excess, one that marks the
incommensurable relation between signification and materiality. Texture,
in this case, is also a reference to that incommensurability.
Voice and body could call for each other in different ways. For
instance, referring to the ‘voice of the body’ is not the same as referring
to the ‘body of the voice.’ What is the difference between these two
formulations? In both cases, the body presents us with a crossroads,
one that exposes the intricacies of translatability. I think that the ‘body
of the voice’ alludes to the corporeal character of our significations, to
the corporeal dimension of language when it comes to life—and effec-
tively acquires existence—in communication and in human relational-
ity. The ‘voice of the body’ evokes a different language: the language of
the body or corporeal language, as some psychoanalysts would describe
it. This language requires an elaborate exercise of translation. How do
we understand what the body is saying to us, or what it appears to be
saying to us? How do we speak with that body? What form of listen-
ing do we employ so that its messages do not pass us by unperceived?
From the infinite and multiple networks of signs that emanate from the
body, constantly and involuntarily, to which ones shall we pay atten-
tion? Which are the signs that make this body one we can recognize as
being capable of saying something?
To speak of the body in such abstract terms is clearly a problem. This
was something that feminism, in its moment, knew how to denounce,
and it was also a crucial object of critique within postcolonial and critical
race studies. The abstract body is, obviously, the effect of an ideal image of
a body already marked by its (denied) particularity.46 To speak of the body
out of all contexts denies the crossings and exclusions that are implied by
the images we have of the body, for instance always already gendered
and racialized in certain ways. Richard Sennett recognized this in his
book written long ago, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western
Civilization, showing how power is exercised ‘...by speaking that generic
language of the body, a language which represses by exclusion.’47 However,
it is for this reason, Sennett continues, that the ideal and collective image
6 Being Sexual 235
of a body (also, collective) necessarily invites us to ambivalence and the

subject in fragmentation.
I have not been referring here to bodies in plural, the bodies of some
subjects and others, the bodies as practices, technologies of power, or
potential sites of subversion. The question for me is: how can we speak
of the body as a concept? There are various conceptions of the body
hovering over these various uses, both normative and critical. These may
allude to the way we have of understanding what the body is (onto-
logical question) or how we represent it (a pertinent question for critical
reflection). My reflection on the concept of the body starts with the
following question: what signification does the corporeal have in our
relational existence?
Confronted with this question, I considered the speaking body’s trans-
latability. As stated earlier, there are modes of bodily signification that can-
not be satisfactorily translated into representational terms. The point here
is not that bodily experience is immediate rather than represented, but that
language, when ‘spoken’ by the body, also assumes a non-representational
status. At this juncture, representational discourse proves insufficient, and
we can grasp its inadequacy in the fissures of representation. The second
point is that the body indicates an intermediate zone that seeks to bridge
signification and its matter. As I have argued in Chapter 5, the chiasmic
character of the body points to the intricate relationship between matter
and signification. But the figure of the chiasm for describing the lived
body is also indicative of its relational nature. Relationality cannot always
be reduced to representation, and because there is no immediate recourse
to its corporeal dimension, signification also meets its limit.
In sum, in trying to think the zone of the sexual encompassing the
corporeal and the imaginary, I elaborated on it through two proposi-
tions. The first one, concerned with the fissure of representation and the
ontological void upon which representation is built, disrupts discrete
categories within representational language. The second envisages bodily
relationality as a chiasm, and shows that representation as well as signifi-
cation are necessarily partial, that whatever ‘matter’ is—either visualized
as soma, remainder of the real, or inassimilable real jouissance—it does
not translate and remains excessive to language itself.
Diasporic Sexuality, Migrating Embodiment

What is it that a body knows? What is it that a body can know? The
critique that Foucault developed with respect to sexuality and redefined
as an emerging mechanism of Western modernity is still valid. With
Foucault we learn that sexuality has been produced, in the framework
of the Western modern episteme, as a dimension of experience capable
of unveiling the truth about our selves. According to Foucault, through
the mechanism of sexuality, the body is problematically figured as the
refuge of the ultimate truth of the subject. Thanks to sexuality, our
bodies will become invested with the power of truly knowing who we
supposedly are.
This idea that Foucault criticized is something against which we must
also rebel, Foucault would warn us, because it is precisely thanks to this
idea of corporeal truth that our bodies have become objects of regula-
tion—and key to bio-political regimes. This idea has survived the brunt
of deconstructivism and is, in fact, a key point upon which many of
today’s progressive sexual movements base their demands. In relation
to the intricate co-dependence of power and desire, Foucault’s thinking
first went in the direction of an ethic founded upon the displacement of
the logic of desire by the logic of pleasure, although he returned to desire
in his subsequent work in search of an all-encompassing critical geneal-
ogy. At this point, a number of questions arise: to what extent would
the displacement of desire as our ultimate truth be able to challenge the
instrumentalization of a sexuality constructed to serve the government
of oneself and others? To what extent would it be able to save our body
from the obligation of having to provide us with enjoyment, no matter
the cost? While sex-desire has to some extent lost its weight as a regis-
tration of truth, and knowing our ‘true desires’ as a means of knowing
ourselves no longer matters so much, neither has the mandate of enjoy-
ment saved the body from having to carry the weight of giving ourselves
‘true experiences.’
In Sexuality and Solitude, a work of two voices with Michel Foucault,
Richard Sennett comments that their meeting was due to the fact that
both were interested in the same problem: understanding why sexuality
had become ‘the medium through which people seek to become conscious
6 Being Sexual 237
of themselves.’48 For both authors, the interest in the history of sexual-

ity was part of a larger investigation about the genealogy of the Western
modern subject. In the case of Foucault, a large part of his project would
be associated with the relationship of the body with truth, not only in the
field of sexuality, but also in relation to madness, disciplinary regimes, the
ethical relationship with one’s self. In the case of Sennett, the reflection
on sexuality formed part of a history of solitude in modern society. For
Sennett, the experience of solitude was a good way of approaching the
infinitely broader problem of ‘how the concept of the “I” has changed in
the last two centuries.’49
The evolution of the experience of being in solitude is what concerns
Sennett, and in the framework of this concern the author reflects on
the link between the experience of solitude and sexuality. In Flesh and
Stone, Sennett states that the emphasis on sexuality as a means of access
to the truth of the self, and the centrality that, consequently, sexuality
has acquired in contemporary culture, has been achieved at the price of a
radical de-intensification of interpersonal relationships, and even ‘a nar-
rowing of physical sensibility to sexual desire.’50 The promotion of the
possibility of being alone in the presence of others, of feeling alone, or
even more importantly, of experiencing one’s self as a person alone among
many others, Sennett says, can be valued in the design of modern cities,
in which the freedom of individualized movement is achieved. According
to his analysis, with modernity freedom begins to be conceived of as free-
dom of movement. So, the author points out, the price of this transfor-
mation is isolation and the loss of contact. In tune with the emphasis on
sexuality, there is an emergence of the fear of corporeal proximity, the de-
intensification of the passions of the body, and, I would suggest, a fear of
intimacy, when it expands beyond the rigid social organization of desire.
Reading Sennett’s references to the freedom of movement, I consider
the obligation of movement and the impact that migration has on the
body and on space, or rather, on the relationship between the two. Given
this association, I turn to Doreen Massey. I read: ‘Conceptualising space
as “open, unfinished, always becoming” (…) is an essential pre-requisite
for history to be open; and thus, after the arguments of Laclau, a pre-
requisite for the possibility of politics.’51 This is how Doreen Massey envi-
sions space from the perspective of social geography. Space, she argues,
‘is one of those most obvious of things which is mobilised as a term in

a thousand different contexts, but whose potential meanings are all too
rarely explicated or addressed.’52 In opposition to the presumption that
space is something self-evident, Massey returns her gaze upon spatiality
to question the category of space that circulates in various human and
social disciplines, functioning as a condition of possibility for the produc-
tion of knowledge.
In opposition to the conventional conception of space as an abstract
magnitude, Massey proposes the idea that space, understood as an inex-
tricable condition of our existence, is a form that multiplicity and rela-
tionality assume. Space, to the extent that it is a modality of multiplicity
and relationality, is by definition constitutively open. With respect to
relationality, Massey says: ‘…I would argue that identities/entities, the
relations “between” them, and the spatiality which is part of them are
all co-constitutive.’53 So much so that the ‘between’ is put in quotation
marks because there is no such ‘between,’ but rather an indiscernible
coalescence between the borders of the entities and the space whereby
their identity is formed. This relationality joins together the multiplic-
ity of trajectories that are found in, disrupt, and crisscross each other in
order to configure space. The resulting characteristic of space, then, is
the opening: she urges us to ‘imagining space as always in a process of
becoming, as never a closed system.’54 According to Massey, multiplic-
ity, relationality, and constitutive opening intrinsically delineate space.
For Massey space, conceived in this way, is a condition of temporality;
and I would add along the thread of my speculations: a condition of
corporeality.
The relationship between space and embodiment could be considered
in at least two ways. In a more conventional manner, the identity of
space as one (even if as a suspended point within the open multiplicity
to which Massey refers) seems to be a requisite for the identity of a body
to emerge as my body, or for the emergence of Sennett’s discernible body
of the subject, capable of feeling one and only among many. This body
as mine needs a space as a point of reference, with respect to which it
can distinguish itself, and where it can place itself, to appear as such. The
same notion of body depends upon the border, a notion that is distinctly
6 Being Sexual 239
spatial. For my body to be my body it depends upon a sharp boundary

that separates me from others, a boundary that also indicates to me some
limits that allow me to distinguish myself from this relational multiplic-
ity that space is, and place myself in space, before forming a part of it.
We could consider that the individualization of the experience of the
body goes hand in hand with the ontological status granted to space as a
magnitude.
However, in another way, the body could also become, with space,
a site of multiplicity, relationality, and non-closure. Arguably, if space
is not a natural magnitude and neither is the body limited to being
an already constituted ‘surface of inscription,’ even prior to inscription
itself, we could see their delimitation as being part of a social relation-
ship. As a social relationship, space and body would lose their weight
as substance; while the border, which defines the territoriality of space
and body, would become conceived of as social practice. By means of
the border as a social practice, what is made evident is the performative
character of the body/space articulation and the spatial forms that the
body/truth articulation assumes.
Within this configuration, the body as much as the sexual and the
erotic site of embodiment could become diasporic figures: in and out
of themselves, belonging to the self and at the same time dispersed in
a multitude of others with whom the self is formed. Between the para-
noid defense of our own boundaries and the hysterical loss of the border
between self and non-self, the diasporic character of every identity signals
a process where the body and its sexual domain become experiences that
are and are not our own, constituting a tension between sameness and
multiplicity that is not to be solved. Seen in this light, the idea of a dia-
sporic sexuality not only indicates a spatial formulation of relationality,
but is as well a figure destined to challenge both the individual subject’s
ownership of sexual identity and the liberal multicultural sexual politics
that derive from it.
In this sense, diasporic sexuality could also be a figure that calls for
a post-liberal transnational sexual politics. The diasporic character of
embodiment is clear in the experience of migration. In the configuration
of a migrant subjectivity, the transformation of body, space, and how we
conceive borders becomes nodal. In one sense, the experience of migra-

tion—perhaps like other intense experiences such as the death of a loved
one, passion, panic—is non-transferable. In these situations, we are deal-
ing with what the body experiences: something that with difficulty and
always unsuccessfully finds a form of translatability. But there is another
sense in which body/space/truth articulations are transformed in migra-
tion, sharing deterritorialization and fragmentation with other quotidian
experiences.
In the diaspora, my body sees itself multiplied in the screen of Skype.
My voice, a trace of my body, extends itself into space—deconstruct-
ing space—through the familiar technologies of communication. I see
it there, disoriented by the reflection of those images, multiplied in
Facebook albums, in the instantaneity of a photo uploaded ipso facto
through Instagram, in the faces Skyping on the screens of the iPad.
Infinite messages on cellphones, messages that are not really ‘messages,’
but rather the slightest indication of a body over there, wanting to
establish contact, almost in the mode of the phatic communication
that Jakobson spoke of, WhatsApp …55 all of these technologies deter-
ritorialize the body and space. However, can the feelings of this deter-
ritorialized body perhaps release themselves from the materiality that
is the body, alone, needing an embrace, to some extent unknown to
others, always recently arrived?
My affections are scattered across the world; but in what sense can I
say that my body is scattered as well? Longing, the pain of solitude that at
times becomes unbearable: isn’t this a sign that, to the extent that they are
relational, my feelings and my body are dispersed, configured and living
with others, and yet this same relationality, at the same time, is the mark
of my singularity?
Diasporic Bodies: The Sexual Threshold

What is it that a body can know? There are certain understandings, or
specific forms of understanding, that can only be accessed through the
body. How can we tell if we are loved, or truly and deeply welcomed in
the lives of others, if not? How can we tell what kind of love it is that we
6 Being Sexual 241
collectively profess? How do we apprehend desire and pain if not through

the body?
Reflecting upon how freedom is reconceived in Western modernity as
individual freedom, Sennett focuses on the metaphor of individualized
freedom of movement:
The physical condition of the travelling body reinforces this sense of dis-
connection from space […] The traveler, like the television viewer, experi-
ences the World in narcotic terms; the body moves passively, desensitized
in space, to destinations set in a fragmented and discontinuous urban
geography.
Both the highway engineer and the television director create what could
be called ‘freedom from resistance.’ The engineer designs ways to move
without obstruction, effort, or engagement; the director explores ways for
people to look at anything, without becoming too uncomfortable.56
Sennett’s quotation may sound a bit archaic with its reference to TV, a
medium that today seems rather outmoded. Even so, it is still certain
that the virtualization of communication thanks to which our bodies
can be present every day in many places at once (and in this sense it
has radically altered the geography and experience that we could expe-
rience of spatiality) becomes coupled to a kind of emotional detach-
ment. While it is true that the screens, postings, and chats bring us
closer together in a way that was unthinkable barely 10 years ago, they
do so at the cost of the development of a low intensity emotionality. The
metaphor of movement and the screens serve Sennett to reflect upon the
experience of individualization and freedom as solitude, which, accord-
ing to the author, is associated with the decrease of the intensity of ‘the
consciousness we have of others through the body, as much so in pain as
in the promise of pleasure….’57
Nevertheless, this low intensity emotionality is weighed against other
urges in which the body also reveals to us (and rebels) as an impasse of the
borders of the ‘I.’ Let us consider, for example, erotic experience. Here,
not only is desire in its broadest sense at risk, but also pain, its favorite
counterpart. Is this not perhaps what Eros speaks to us of? As Anne Carson
points out, ‘Homer and Sappho concur, however, in presenting the divinity
of desire as an ambivalent being, at once friend and enemy, who informs

the erotic experience with emotional paradox.’58 These emotions might be
those of joy and sadness, love and hate, simultaneously; the excitement
provoked by the anticipation of the desired one and the pain of lacking,
the pain of losing one’s self in the rapture of desire for the one that is not
‘I.’ Therein lies the bittersweetness of Eros, not just desire but also pain.
Carson says:
[N]o simple map of the emotions is available here. Desire is not simple. In
Greek the act of love is a mingling (mingnumi) and desire melts the limbs
[…] Boundaries of the body, categories of thought, are confounded.59
In Eros: The Bittersweet, Carson reminds us that Eros is a primordially

bittersweet emotion that perhaps figures as the archetype of the paradox to
which the emotional world subjects us: it is precisely through the feeling
that most sharply summons our singularity that our dispersion is produced.
This bodily experience can show us something of the limits of the liberal
ontology of the individual. Against such a liberal subject, Butler states:
To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but

also a chance to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also
to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to
vacate the self-sufficient ‘I’ as a kind of possession.60
Butler establishes on this stage a possible ethics. In her view, it is pos-

sible to establish an ethics not so much on the subject’s capacity as an
autonomous subject, but rather in the ‘limits of self-knowing.’61 This
constitutive relationality goes against the ontology of the ‘I’ and of the
individualized body. As in the case of erotic desire, to the extent that it is
a paradigm of the ‘ex/static’ experience of the ‘I,’ in the moment in which
we most personally feel the desire (or the ethical necessity) that plunges
us into our solitude, we recognize that our singularity depends upon the
inalienable situation of being exposed to the other, and of being ‘unmade’
by an other.62 The paradox is that it is only thanks to the dispossessed
character of the self, thanks to this constitutive relationality by which we
6 Being Sexual 243
are always feeling outside of our selves, that we are able to feel our body
as a singular entity.
This lack, this desire, the profound aching of being faraway, this
anguish of the disappearance, the disquiet through which we are dragged
by those who depart from this world, but also the passions of the body,
confront us with the paradox of corporeality and the voice of the body,
marking an impasse between representation, dispossession, and solitude.
In this impasse, the voice of my body disintegrates into multiple frag-
ments populated by other voices, and I recognize the deceptiveness of the
ontology of the self.
As suggested earlier in this chapter, perhaps we can read what the
voices of the body dramatize through the chronotope of the threshold.
The chronotope is a Bakhtinian concept that describes the articulation of
a singular space and time through which the novelistic tale and the bio-
graphical story are organized. As subjective identity is the effect of a nar-
rative—identity is formed in part through the telling of a story about the
self 63—it finds in the chronotopes the anchor from which it organizes
and gives meaning to the infinite constellation of experiences that make
up ‘our life.’ We can consider with Bakhtin the chronotopes of the path,
of the home, of the journey, as metaphors of life.64 Such is the meaning
of a life that is narrated as a journey from an origin to an end, or the life
that is deciphered around the chronotope of the path, which organizes
a succession of life events as paths that retrospectively find their place,
one after another.65 And with the home, life, as a novel, is both spatially
organized and narrativized through the metaphor of belonging. From
the ‘homeland’ and its structure of identity/difference, to the ‘household’
and the space of intimacy, the home evokes that instance where a sense
of self is reassured.66 Key to autobiographical genres, the ‘home’ could be
the site of origin or destiny; either way it becomes a privileged metaphor
for those loci that allegedly define us.
In the case of relational sexuality, the voice could claim, on the
other hand, the much more destabilizing chronotope of the thresh-
old. According to Bakhtin, the narrative work of the threshold ‘can
be combined with the motif of encounter, but its most fundamental
instance is as the chronotope of crisis and break in life.’67 The threshold,
as an encounter, could be as well a time-space axis that indicates the

moment of the experience or of the present, of that experience that
exists between the doors of a possible occurrence and the closure of that
which has already occurred—or even more compelling, the heteroge-
neous constellation of the present moment, whose infinitude already
harbors all different times. The threshold evokes the moment of passage
or of intersection between two sites. As a transitional space of inde-
termination, it describes the experience of being in both places and in
neither at the same time. The threshold implies openness and essen-
tially has a relational character as it destabilizes the borders between one
space and another, one time and another. Ultimately, the threshold is a
liminal concept.
Could we imagine the voice of the body through the chronotope of
the threshold? Or even more, could we consider the encounter evoked
by the threshold as a metaphor of the body? Apertures, hollows of the
body-subject: originating in a body, the voice exists to the extent that it
has been expelled from the body, and at the same time, in order to be, it
needs to have been taken into (at least) one other body that, in hearing
it, makes the voice become incarnate with it. We speak of the voice in
ways that tend to confirm the solidity of individuality as owners of our
own voices, or more humbly, we speak of the voice that announces the
existence of a social subject, the voice that functions as a metaphor for
that which marks an identity: the voice of those others to whom ‘we must
give voice,’ or those who ‘raise their voices’ and ‘make us hear.’ However,
paradoxically, this voice that claims the consistency of a subject’s identity
and functions as a metaphor for that which is most autonomous and self-
sufficient in us is something that in reality is indicative of how diffuse the
borders between bodies can be.
So, the metaphor of the voice as a threshold reminds us of our rela-
tional and diasporic being as subjects. Despite our attempts to forget—or
perhaps thanks to the very desire to forget—that the border between
one’s self and the other is many times extremely hard to discern, there is
in us a constitutive heterogeneity that leaves us half closed and half open,
without the certainty of knowing where our singularity begins and where
it ends. The metaphor of the voice, conceived as a threshold, evokes the
6 Being Sexual 245
psychically mediated, liminal character of the body. The voice metapho-

rizes a threshold at which the limits of the body become diffuse. In the
threshold, the subject is always creating itself and always to be made; in
the liminality of the body the identity of the subject disintegrates—and
in this sense, it also points to a break, a crisis.
In this case, the voice would therefore not only be indicating to us the
inalienable link of the signifier with its remainder. Even more disturb-
ing, we would be placed before the impossibility of endowing unity and
completeness to an ‘I,’ that, as Butler referring to Freud suggests, could
not be anything other than the projection of a bodily surface. In this
sense, the threshold of the voice gives us other coordinates for approach-
ing the open status of the subject-body. In this case, the aperture, the
hollow of this subject-body, appears because when the representation
interpellates us, it produces an exclusion that prevents the meaning of our
body’s experience from becoming transparent. It is precisely this fissure
of interpretation (and of representation), in which we have metaphorized
the figures of a voice and of a skin in the confines of language, wherein
resides the force that perforates and cracks the fantasy of the dreamlike
totality of one’s self.
Not only do we speak for an other, but also we speak through an other,
Bakhtin reminds us, highlighting that our entry into the order of sig-
nification, our taking of the word, is always preceded by the word of
others. This otherness can take the form of that claim of the face that
I mentioned earlier, quoting Butler—the claim of the face of the other
as a condition of the possibility of my human existence—or that of the
interpellation that calls us to existence through the name. But this other-
ness also appears, in another way, in the threshold of passion, a shared
feeling, or through the voice where we testify to the diasporic relation-
ality of our bodies—territories where otherness interrupts and unfolds
itself, transforming us into fragile shadows of a subject that we will never
know if we were and who will never know if we will become. This other-
ness does not allow us to become fully owners of our erotic desires, which
are also diasporic, emerging in between the liminal space that our bodies
shape. Here we might find a sexual threshold, and with it, a place where
freedom could be imagined otherwise.
Notes
1. At a theoretical level, this discussion could be translated, as well, into the
tension between structure and agency and the question regarding the
ways in which the agency of this individualized subject has been condi-
tioned by social structures, and yet, is able to take distance, and act rela-
tively autonomously, from them. And yet, this opposition—emblematic
of conventional sociological scholarship, following the paths of Max
Weber intervention, rejecting both systemic models of Durkheim and
Marx—should be questioned as well, as it belongs to a very particular
Western sociological tradition of thought. This tradition resonates with
the methodological individualism that is embedded in liberal contempo-
rary political thought.
2. Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and
Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
3. Ibid., 152.
4. In this regard, when Saba Mahmood makes a similar point in relation to
the notion of religious freedom within the framework of minority poli-
tics, which relies on a liberal conception of the subject of religion—that
is, the configuration of subjectivity as split from and prior to religion—
we need to pause and see the differences. Saba Mahmood, “Religious
Freedom, the Minority Question, and Geopolitics in the Middle East,”
Contemporary Studies in Society and History 54(2) (2012): 418–446.
5. Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2007).
6. Cf. Chapter 3, 107–112.
7. Michel Foucault, Lecture on “The Culture of the Self,” given at Berkeley,
CA, on April 12, 1983, accessed, April 4, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=CaXb8c6jw0k
8. In the last pages of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault
states: ‘It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim—
through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality—to
counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and
knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The
rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality
ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.’ Michel Foucault,
The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley
6 Being Sexual 247
(New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 157. This claim, however, should be
nuanced as in the second volume of this genealogy of the hermeneutics of
the sexual subject Foucault also finds that the very conception of pleasure
becomes constitutively entangled with desire, and therefore it becomes
rather unclear the terms in which Foucault proposes that pleasure and
desire could be detached. Foucault recognizes from the outset that the
history of sexuality is not something different from the history of the
desiring subject. As he states: ‘Thus, in order to understand how the mod-
ern individual could experience himself as a subject of a “sexuality,” it was
essential first to determine how, for centuries, Western man had been
brought to recognize himself as a subject of desire.’ Michel Foucault, The
History of Sexuality Volume II: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 5–6. And as Foucault shows in
this second volume, it is the subject of desire who emerges at the core of
the history of the practices and ethics of pleasure. (See “Aphrodisia,”
42–52; “Chresis,” 54–57; and “Enkrateia,” 63–70, in Foucault, The
History of Sexuality Volume II).
9. Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in Interpretive Social Science: A
Second Look, eds. Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan (Berkeley:
University of California Press), 174.
10. Ibid., 171.
11. Ibid.
12. Judith Butler, “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue,” in The
Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy, ed. David Ingram (London:
Blackwell, 2002), 212–226.
13. Ibid., 215.
14. Ibid., 221.
15. Ibid., 225.
16. In this regard, Butler concludes: ‘The self forms itself, but it forms itself
within a set of formative practices that are characterized as modes of subjec-
tivation. That the range of its possible forms is delimited in advance by such
modes of subjectivation does not mean that the self fails to form itself, that
the self is fully formed. On the contrary, it is compelled to form itself, but
to form itself within forms that are already more or less in operation and
underway… But if that self-forming is done in disobedience to the princi-
ples by which one is formed, then virtue becomes the practice by which the
self forms itself in desubjugation, which is to say that it risks its deforma-
tion as a subject, occupying that ontologically insecure position which
poses the question anew: who will be a subject here, and what will count as
a life…’ Ibid., 226.
17. Cf. Chapter 4, 137.
Press, 2005), 15–19.
19. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider:
Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1984), 54.
20. Greg Thomas, The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment
and Erotic Schemes of Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 156.
21. Ibid. (emphasis in the original).
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 155.
24. Ibid.
25. Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 56.
26. Ibid., 56–57.
27. Ibid., 58.
28. Judith Butler, “Agencies of Style for a Liminal Subject,” in Without
Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, eds. Paul Gilroy, Larry Grossberg, and
Angela McRobbie (London: Verso, 2000), 32–33.
29. Ibid., 32.
30. Anne Carson, Eros: The Bittersweet (London: Dalkey Archive, 2005); and
Monique Witting, The Lesbian Body, trans. David Le Vay (New York:
Beacon, 1994). Cf. Chapter 4, 157.
31. Cf. Chapter 5, 188–197.
32. Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres and
Other Late Essays, eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern
W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 60–102. Cf. Chapter
5, 190–194.
33. Mikhail Bakhtin developed the literary concept of the chronotope to indi-
cate those articulations of time and space ‘where the knots of narrative are
tied and united… [and] to them belongs the meaning that shapes narra-
tive.’ Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the
Novel,” in The Dialogical Imagination: Four Essays by Mikhail Bakhtin, ed.
Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michel Holquist (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1981), 250. The essay was originally written in
1937–1938.
34. Jean Laplanche, Freud and the Sexual, ed. John Fletcher (New York:
International Psychoanalytic Books, 2011).
6 Being Sexual 249
35. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey
(New York: Basic Books, 2000).
36. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself.
37. Laplanche, Freud and the Sexual, 208. In relation to the question of reacti-
vation, that is, the notion that the trauma does not occur as a first event,
but only retrospectively when a second moment already took place, see
Cathy Caruth, “An Interview with Jean Laplanche,” Emory University,
2001, accessed January 10, 2015, http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/
issue.101/11.2caruth.txt
38. Ibid., 208 (emphasis in the original).
39. See Jean Laplanche, “Incest and Infantile Sexuality” and “Castration and
Oedipus as Codes and Narrative Schemas,” in Jean Laplanche, Op. Cit.
285–302, and 303–310, respectively. This argument is also pointed out by
Judith Butler, when discussing John Fletcher’s reading of Laplanche, see
Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, endnote 19 of “Against Ethical
Violence,” 142–143.
40. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the
Political (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 96.
41. In this regard, Gayle Salamon notes: ‘Phenomenology suggests, and psy-
choanalysis would agree, that the object of desire is never a person whole
and entire, but a fixation on this particular part or that—or a number of
parts in succession. There is already at the heart of sexuality something
disassembled about the body as an object of desire and also as the vehicle of
my desire, to the extent that various areas of my body may be differentially
called forth through my desire, that the intensity of my sexual feeling would
manifest more intensely in some regions than in others. We unmake the
other even as we create them as an object of our desire.’ Assuming a Body:
Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2010), 54–55.
42. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London:
Verso, 2004), 134.
43. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida
to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2000).
44. Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm refers, in fact, to the intertwining between the sub-
ject and the world. I am loosely appropriating the figure to indicate that as
soon as the embodied subject is thought as chiasm, this also troubles the
dualism between matter and signification, or more generally between pre-
discursive (or un-mediated) and discursive reality. Maurice Merleau-Ponty,

“The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” in The Visible and the Invisible, ed.
Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1968), 130–155.
45. Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body, 54.
46. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “In a Word,” interview with Ellen Rooney,
Differences 1:2 (1989): 124–156.
47. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western
Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994), 24.
48. Michel Foucault and Richard Sennett, “Sexuality and Solitude,” London
Review of Books 3(9), May 21, 1981, accessed April 4, 2015, http://www.lrb.
co.uk/v03/n09/michel-foucault/sexuality-and-solitude
49. Ibid.
50. Sennett, Flesh and Stone, 27.
51. Doreen Massey, “Philosophy and Politics of Spatiality: Some Considerations:
The Hettner-Lecture in Human Geography,” Geographische Zeitschrift
87(1) (1999): 4.
52. Ibid., 1.
53. Ibid., 3.
54. Ibid., 4.
55. Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed.
Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 350–377.
56. Sennett, Flesh and Stone, 18.
57. Ibid., 27.
58. Anne Carson, Eros: The Bittersweet, 5.
59. Ibid., 7.
60. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 136.
61. Ibid., 19.
62. TN: we use the antiquated spelling ‘extatic’ of ‘ecstatic’ in order to reference
the root meanings contained in the word’s etymology.
63. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: Chicago
64. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.”
65. Leonor Arfuch re-articulates a series of chronotopes to examine contempo-
rary forms of modelling what she conceptualizes as our ‘biographical
space’—Leonor Arfuch, El Espacio Biográifo: Dilemas de la Subjetividad
Contemporánea (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002).
Among them, Arfuch analyzes, for example, the street as an emblematic
6 Being Sexual 251
condensation of time and space that refers to a sense of historical and politi-
cal belonging that shapes the self. Leonor Arfuch, “Arte, memoria, experi-
encia: políticas de lo real,” in Préterito Imperfecto: Lecturas del Acontecer, eds.
Leonor Arfuch and Gisela Catanzaro (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2008),
111–127.
66. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” 103, 144.
67. Ibid., 248.
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Index
A Anzaldúa, Gloria, 147

Abortion, 171 Arfuch, Leonor, 209n58, 250n65
Agency, and Austin, John, 180, 206n31
autonomy, 23, 24, 166, 171, 181, Authenticity, 39, 45, 146, 147
197, 198, 221, 246n1 Autonomy, and
liberalism, 18, 23, 26, 167, 221 choice, 22, 23, 86, 90, 166–72,
Agency, political, 10, 17, 18, 218 175, 182, 188, 197–9, 202
Agency, sexual, 1, 26, 137, 229 freedom, 12, 22–4, 32, 34, 67,
AMMAR-CTA (Asociación de 68, 86, 90, 97, 150, 165–8,
Mujeres Meretrices de la 170–78, 182, 197, 198, 202,
Argentina), 96 221
Carson, Anne, 157, 225, 242 neoliberalism, 90, 168
Antagonism, and rights, 22–4, 32, 34, 67, 86, 90,
constitutive exclusion, 104 97, 103, 150, 168–71, 174,
as constitutive of society, 18, 104, 175, 201, 213, 216, 221
110, 115, 117 self–ownership, 23, 24, 166, 167,
hegemony/hegemonic struggle, 175, 176, 178, 188
18, 104, 115, 191 sovereign individual, 35, 168,
history/hostoricity, 24, 25, 70, 170, 171
190, 201 transparency, 12, 47, 167, 221
Antidiscrimination legislation, 156 transparent self, 12, 23, 24

in the Psychosocial, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-26387-2
270 Index
Autonomy, liberal conception of, 12, speech genre, 192–95

34, 164 and Voloshinov, Valentin, 190,
Autonomy, moral, 22, 23, 101, 165, 209n56, 209n57
168, 170, 171, 175, 176, 178, Bhabha,Homi, 146, 147
202 Bhandar, Brenna, 163-64n43,
Autonomy, sexual, 12, 22–4, 32, 213 206n23
Autonomy, sovereign, 23, 24, 35, Biopolitics
103, 168–71, 174, 193, 201, biopolitical regulation, 173
202, 216 and governmentalization, 135
Biphobia, 42
Bisexuality, 40–2, 78n29, 137, 172,
B 204n11
Bakhtin, Mikhail Bisexuality, and
on answerability, 192 Oedipus, hysteria, 41, 78n29,
chronotope, 217, 243, 244, 79n31
248n33 Bodily ego, 112, 184, 185
dialogism, 24, 167, 191, 192, Bodily life, 179, 183, 185
194, 195, 210n68 Bodily signification, 183, 199, 233,
discursive interaction, 24, 25, 235
189, 192–95, 197, 201 Body, and
and ethics, 167, 195, 197, imaginary, 38–40, 46, 49, 51, 54,
210n70, 228 67–70, 105, 108, 109, 112,
on Freud, Sigmund, 24, 190, 126n56, 132, 136, 137, 155,
209n57 157, 175, 184–8, 197, 198,
intersubjectivity, 191, 196, 201 208n47, 231, 234,
otherness, 24, 189–91, 193, 238
195–8, 201, 210n68, 225, matter/materiality, 15, 16, 23–5,
227, 245 38–40, 45, 46, 68–70, 108,
performativity, 189, 194, 197, 112, 132, 155, 157, 165–204,
201 207n32, 209n57, 230–6, 240
phenomenology, 24, 190–95, objectification, 24
197, 198, 210n70, 225, 237 ownership, 23, 24, 135, 155, 166,
relationality, 24, 167, 189–98, 167, 175, 176, 178, 188, 239
201, 245 phenomenology, 249n41
self, 24, 190, 209n58, 225, 227, relationality, 24, 26, 165–204,
243 230, 234, 235, 238–40, 242
speech act, 191, 193 sedimentation, 187, 194
Index 271
sexual difference, 16, 39, 51, 54, and Freud, Sigmund, 23, 24, 49,
108, 109, 112, 172, 204n11, 54, 105, 106, 110, 184, 185,
207n32, 208n47 226, 228, 245
signifying practices, 15 and imaginary, 35, 46, 48, 49,
the unconscious, 16, 24, 26, 49, 51–8, 60, 66, 69, 71, 72,
51, 54, 105, 125, 136, 157, 105–9, 112, 119, 154, 184,
178, 185, 198, 200 185, 187, 188, 197, 198, 202,
Body, as a possession, property, 208n47
155–8, 166, 167, 173, 175, intelligibility, 11, 56, 66, 69, 71,
176, 187, 202, 217, 242 72, 103, 154, 176, 178, 179,
Body, as chiasm, 23, 25, 180–89, 194, 196, 202, 222
231, 232, 235 iterability, 55, 57, 58, 60, 66, 69,
Body, as lived, 23, 24, 183, 184, 71, 72, 110, 197
186–8, 194, 199, 202, 203, and Lacan, Jacques, 25, 48, 51–3,
235 56, 57, 105, 106, 108–10,
Body image, 105, 112, 126n56, 112, 119, 207n32
208–3n47 and Laplanche, Jean, 24, 25, 106,
Body scheme, 126n56 226–28
Body, the voice of and Merleau–Ponty, 183, 186, 188
speaking body, 192, 233–40, 239, performative theory of gender/
242–4 gender performativity, 15, 54,
Brown, Wendy, 23, 103, 214, 215, 69, 106, 172, 173, 175–7, 183,
222 185,190, 193, 197. See also
Butler, Judith Gender and performativity
and Athena Athanasiou on relationality, 24, 25, 72, 167,
dispossession, 178 176–85, 187–9, 194, 196,
and chiasm between matter and 197, 200, 202, 222, 228, 230,
signification, 23, 25 242, 245
on de Beauvoir, Simone, 23 sexual difference, 48, 51–4, 108,
on dependency, 24, 83n75, 177, 109, 112, 208n47
226 universality and cultural
and ethics/ethical–political, 60, translation, 110, 147, 148,
71, 72, 167, 197, 202, 153, 154
219–22, 227, 228, 230, 242 vulnerability and dispossession,
on Foucault, Michel and critique, 11, 24, 72, 176–9, 197, 202,
11, 103, 179, 219–22 230, 242
272 Index
C Constitutive outside, 14, 17, 18,

Cabral, Mauro, 36, 38 101, 103, 104, 110, 115, 118,
Castration, 50, 52, 126n56, 190 119, 144, 154, 230
Chiasm, 23, 25, 180–89, 207n33, Constructivism, 47, 48, 199, 200,
220, 231, 232, 235, 207n32, 231
249–50n44 Contingency, 53, 56, 69, 71, 88,
Chiasmic, body, 180–89 104, 107, 110, 112, 197
Choice Copjec, Joan, 110, 111, 207n32
and autonomy, 22, 23, 86, 90, Corporeality
166–72, 175, 182, 188, corporeal, 15, 23, 70, 157, 177,
197–9, 201, 202 (see 179, 181–87, 189, 199, 200,
autonomy) 208n47, 207n33, 228, 231,
free choice, 22, 166, 167, 175 233–7, 242
and freedom, 3, 6, 22, 26, 86, corporealization, 182, 186, 200
92, 129, 132, 166, 168, Critique, as methodology, 11, 48,
170–72, 175, 182, 197, 198, 146, 157
202 Cultural diversity, 21, 100, 103, 140,
Chronotope, 225, 242, 243, 157
248n33, 250–51n65 Cultural imperialism, 16, 100, 132,
Citizenship, and 134, 223
exclusion, 10, 14, 17,91–94, 97, Cultural translation, as a
99–111, 113, 115–19, 132, methodology, 146, 157, 158
158, 202, 214
norms, 16, 17, 58, 89, 90, 92–7
otherness, 105 D
Citizenship, as social practice, 71, Davies, Margaret, 163,164n43
107, 109, 114 de Beauvoir, Simone, 23
Citizenship, sexual, 10, 12, 14, 16, Decolonial
17, 21, 85–120, 132, 165, 214 and post–colonial debates, 101
Citizen–subject, ideal citizen, 17 turn/approaches, 101, 141–46,
Colonial 158, 162n24
contexts, 5, 20, 132, 135, 136, de Lauretis, Teresa, 51, 52, 79n30
144, 153, 160n3 Deliberative
encounter, 142–44 individual, 72, 199, 200
imaginaries/mentalities, 5, 20, 99 rationality, 214
legacies, 135, 144 Derrida, Jacques, 55, 57, 103, 110,
Coloniality, 133, 144, 145, 163n36 206n31, 230, 231
Index 273
Desire, and E
identification, 7, 44, 45, 53, 130 Ecuador, Constitution of, 156
lack, 243 el-Tayeb, Fátima, 160n5
liminality, 24, 26, 244 Embodiment
object choice, 7, 26, 41, 43, 129, embodied self, 105
204n11 embodied subject, 25, 49, 51, 68,
ontological foundation, 217 70, 72, 105, 107, 109, 167,
relationality, 19, 24–6, 45, 120, 166, 179, 184, 188, 189, 194,
167, 171–75, 178, 179, 184, 197–203, 232, 249n44
188, 200, 230, 236, 242, 245 Embodiment, and
sexual identity, 12, 22, 26, 43, 51, Eros, 157, 231, 242 (see erotic
119, 120, 129, 130, 136, 166, embodiment)
173, 230 lived body, 23, 24, 183, 188, 235
unconscious fantasy/fantasy, 9, norms, 104, 105, 199, 200, 225,
25, 27, 34, 43, 44, 59, 70, 229
112, 119, 120, 157, 178, 184, subjectivation, 104, 105, 199, 202
200, 229, 245 Empowerment, 34, 132
de Sousa Santos, Boaventura, 142, Engel, Antke, 160n5
143 Eros, erotization, 224, 225
Desubjugation, 220, 221, 247n16 Erotic, the
Dialogism, 24, 167, 191, 192, 194, erotic and embodiment, 26, 229
195, 210n68. See also Bakhtin Essentialism, cultural and
Diaspora, 134, 156, 219, epistemological, 143, 144
239
Diasporic sexuality
embodiment/embodied self, 26, F
235–40 Fantasy, 6, 9, 25, 27, 34, 43, 44, 49,
space, 146, 224, 237–40, 243, 59, 69, 70, 79n34, 103, 106,
245 112, 119, 120, 131, 157, 178,
Discursivity, 24, 189 184, 189, 200, 222, 227, 229,
Dispossession 231, 234, 245
double valence of, 178 FEMEN, 167, 203n1
psychic dispossession, 178, 179, Ferreira da Silva, Denise, 12, 82n70,
202 137, 221
and relationality, 19, 24, 72, Foucault, Michel, on
176–9, 197 biopolitics/biopolitical government,
Dolto, Françoise, 126n56, 208n47 91, 92, 135, 136, 173
Dussel, Enrique, 142 episteme, 173
274 Index
Foucault, Michel, on (cont.) 173, 175, 215, 221, 229,

freedom and critique, 11, 12, 230, 239
22,91–93, 175, 182, 219–22 LGBTQ politics/social
freedom and liberalism, 22, 91, movements, 2, 4
92, 135, 172, 175, 221 liberalism, 3, 12, 18, 22, 23, 26,
genealogy, 11, 27n2, 236, 247 34, 88, 91, 92, 130, 135, 166,
n8 168, 172, 175, 221
history of sexuality, 27n2, 47, progress, 8, 87, 133, 134, 138
74n5, 92, 136, 138, 205n17, radical democracy/radical
237, 246n8 democratic view, 18, 19, 26,
neoliberal governmentality, 222 177
pleasure, 219, 236, 246n8 recognition, 12, 16, 32, 36, 63–5,
sexual dispositive/device/ 67, 71–3, 86, 88, 91, 95, 94,
technology, 12, 22, 24, 109, 97, 99, 117, 130–2, 134, 135,
135, 136, 173, 218, 226 156, 166, 170, 175–7, 202, 223
subjectivation, 12, 13, 92, 104, rights, 2, 3, 10, 16–18, 24, 63,
109, 135, 182, 185 87, 88, 90–93, 102, 103, 133,
‘Free and Equal’ UN Campaign for 135, 137, 138, 147, 149, 150,
LGBT rights, 33 155, 157, 175, 213, 214, 218
Freedom, as sexual democracy/
as freedom of choice, 86, 168, democratization, 15, 18, 21,
175 27, 34, 86, 92, 94, 96–101,
as freedom of movement, 237, 132
240 Free market, 175
freedom of speech, 165 Free will, 165, 214
as an ideal, 4, 8, 11, 21, 23, 65, Freud, Sigmund, and
96, 132, 167, 177, 221 bodily ego/surface, 24, 105,
as a mechanism of regulation/a 184–6, 244
modality of power, 23, 92, Oedipus/Oedipal, 41, 49, 50, 78,
173, 198 79n29, 79n30, 79n31, 80n46,
Freedom/sexual freedom, and 226, 227
autonomy (see autonomy) primary bisexuality, 41
desubjugation, 220, 221 the real, 43, 110
identity, 2, 6, 12, 22, 26, 43, 51, seduction theory, 43
64, 88, 113, 115, 119, 120, Simone de Beauvoir, 23
129–31, 133–37, 139, 140, theory of sexuality, 27n2, 41, 50,
147, 149, 154, 158, 166, 79n29
Index 275
G and sexual difference, 16, 39, 48,

Gender 52–4, 108, 172
gender and diversity, 8, 67, 86, Gender identification, 35–40, 44,
99, 131 172
gender assignment/reassigment, Gender identity
38 Gender Identity Law (Argentina),
gender binary, 36, 37, 44, 46, 68, 36, 88
76n11, 89, 179, 181 Giddens, Anthony, 174
gender dysphoria, 36, 172 Grosfoguel, Ramón, 142
gender norms, 49, 58, 65, 71, 176 Grosz, Elizabeth, 208n41, 208n47
gender position, 7, 37, 38, 41, 56,
64, 76n11
gender-queer, 12, 39, 76n11 H
gender variant, 38, 39, 94 Haldar, Piyel, 136
and identity politics, 33, 67, 130, Hegemony
134 as a concept/theory of, 29n15,
and imaginary/imaginaries, 8, 9, 148
39, 45, 46, 48, 53, 54, 63, hegemonic struggles, 18, 19, 104,
66–9, 87, 99, 129, 130, 132, 115, 148
134, 139, 158, 185, 187 Heidegger, Martin, 29n15, 183,
melancholic constitution of, 54, 215
185 Hemmings, Clare, 41
new politics of, 7, 15, 20, 58 Heternormativity
and object choice, 2, 7, 16, 41, heteronormative, 39, 57, 63, 86,
43, 129 89–91, 93, 108, 117, 146,
and ontological void, 17, 217, 234 165, 227
performative theory of/gender heterosexual matrix, 16, 35, 40,
performativity, 15, 16, 48, 54, 45, 51, 53, 62, 68, 108, 181
57, 181 Heterocentric
psychoanalytic accounts of, 9, 11, citizenship, 58, 88, 102, 117
16, 50, 54, 130, 131, 172, 185 family, 62, 67, 117
rights, 32, 87, 88, 94, 133 imaginary, 35–46, 58, 62, 65, 67,
and sex, 8, 16, 17, 20, 31–5, 40, 68, 70, 73, 102, 117
45, 46, 49, 53, 54, 63, 64, matrix, 40
67–9, 87, 93, 94, 97, 99, 101, Heterocentricity, 35, 58, 62, 67, 68
108, 130, 132–34, 138, 140, Heteroglossia, 190, 191, 195,
161n17, 217 210n67
276 Index
Heterosexuality, 2, 32, 41–3, 46, 49, and relationality, 166, 172, 179,
50, 62, 78n29, 82n69, 89, 184, 200
108, 129, 137, 139, 223 and sexual orientation, 6, 10, 22,
Hijab, controversy around (or 32, 74n1–74n3, 88, 131, 137,
headscarf, veil), 168 139, 149, 154, 158, 159n1,
Hollibaugh, Amber, 4 175, 212, 218, 221, 223, 229
Homonationalism, 20, 99, 132, 159n3 Imaginary
Homonormativity/ of citizenship, 91, 115, 117, 118
homonormativities, 4, 67, 93, and embodiment, 24, 26, 105,
117, 121n20, 132 134, 157, 188, 199, 202, 231,
Human rights, humanitarian, 116, 238
132 of sexuality/sexual imaginary, 14,
Human trafficking, 94, 95, 169 31–73, 91, 107–12, 119, 150,
Hybridity 157
hybrid, 146, 147, 149 Interdiscursivity, 190, 195, 210n68
hybridization, 143, 145 International Committee on the
Rights of Sex Workers in
Europe (ICRSE), 95, 170
I Interpellation, 9, 25, 46, 54,
ICRSE. See International Committee 106–10, 230, 245
on the Rights of Sex Workers Intersex, movement, 38
in Europe (ICRSE) Isin, Engin, 102, 114, 115, 203n1
Identfication Islam/Islamophobia, 20, 97, 98, 101,
and embodied subject, 49, 51, 68, 168
70, 72, 105, 107, 167, 179,
184, 188, 189, 200
identification and gender (see K
gender identification) Kristeva, Julia, 125n40, 210n68
imaginary, 14, 33, 35–9, 40, 41,
43, 44, 45, 50, 51, 53, 54, 57,
63, 70, 71, 109, 111, 112, L
137, 155 Lacan, Jacques, 43, 50, 52, 53,
and masculinity/femininity, 40, 80n47, 105, 106, 110,
41, 45, 49 126n56, 190, 204n11
and ontological void, 18, 19, 119, Laclau, Ernesto
214, 230 on antagonism (see antagonism)
psychic/psychoanalytic accounts and citizenship, 18, 103, 104,
of, 14, 49–51, 54, 112, 119, 106, 110, 113–15, 119
157, 228
Index 277
on constitutive outside, Libertarianism/libertarian, 89, 177

18, 103, 104, 110, 115, 119, Liminality/liminal, 24–6, 120, 147,
144, 154 157, 187, 222, 224, 225, 228,
on hegemony (see hegemony) 243–5
on signifiers, 104, 106, 115 Lorde, Audre, 157, 223, 224
on suture, 104, 106, 119, 217
Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe,
Chantal, 18, 29n14, 72, M
80n42, 148, 217 Marriage
Laplanche, Jean, 24, 25, 43, 50, 106, and monogamy, 58, 61
226–28, 249n37, 249n39 same-sex/gay, 20, 61, 67, 88, 89,
LGBT/Q/I 165
LGBT as universal Massad, Jospeh, 28n3, 92, 121n19,
denominations, 139 124n34, 135, 137–9, 145,
movement/collectives, 19, 32, 150, 216
86, 135, 171, 173, 215, 237, Massey, Doreen, 237, 238
241 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 183, 186,
politics/agenda, 2, 4, 20, 21, 86, 188, 208n40, 232, 249n44
90, 100, 116, 131, 153, 165, Mignolo, Walter, 142, 143
215 Migration
rights, 3, 4, 20, 32, 159n1 anti-migrant discourses, 20
Liberal imaginary, 14, 66, 73, 87, anti-migrant politics, 132
120, 195, 196 migrant, 73, 99, 100, 239
Liberalism Minoritization, minority politics,
and democracy, 3, 18, 88, 217 246n4
feminist critiques of, 175 Misrecognition, 18, 19, 25, 79n31,
and freedom, 3, 12, 18, 22, 23, 106
26, 34, 88, 91, 92, 130, 135, Modernities, mulitple, 142
166, 168, 172, 175, 221 Monogamy, 35, 42, 58–62, 82n68
and identity, 12, 18, 22, 26, 34, Mononormativity, 35, 56–63
88, 90, 113, 130, 135, 158, Morgensen, Scott, 156
166, 175, 221 Multiculturalism
liberalism and citizenship, 12, 18, Cameron, David, 98, 123n28,
88, 90–92, 113, 158, 214 123, 124n29
the subject of, 12, 91 Merkel, Angela, 89, 123n28
Liberal ontology, 68, 118, 174, 180, and Zarkozy, Nicolas, 123n28
187, 188, 242 MuslimaPride, 203n1
278 Index
N P
Nasio, Juan-David, 112, 204n11 Performativity
Neoliberal in Butler, Judith, 15, 35, 48, 194,
reason, 4 197
subject, 3, 6, 14 definitions of, 197
Normalization, 2, 11, 15, 17, 46, 65, and Mikhail, Bakhtin, 189, 194,
73, 118, 177 197, 198, 201
of norms/normative power, 35,
58, 65
O performativity and
Object choice, 2, 6, 7, 16, 26, 41, performance, 15, 35, 44, 48,
43, 107, 129, 204n11 49, 54–7, 65, 69, 71, 72,
Oedipus/Oedipal, 41, 49–53, 78, 81n56, 82n62, 107, 108,
79n29, 79n30, 79n31, 172, 117, 176, 177, 179–81, 183,
226, 227, 249n39 187, 189, 194, 197, 201,
Ontic and ontological 206n31
differentiation psychic register of, 108
ontic-ontological split, 215, 218, Permeability, permeable speech,
230, 231 232–33
ontological void, 18, 19, 25, 119, Phallus, Lacanian critical readings of,
216, 217, 229–35 50–3, 80n47
Ontic-ontological configuration of Phillips, Anne, 23, 29n18, 175, 176,
sexuality, 131 205n21
Ontology Pleasure, in Foucault, 160n6, 219,
of the individual, 3, 13, 14, 26, 229, 236, 246n8
35, 65, 66, 68, 70, 118, 158, Political articulation(s), 12, 61, 62,
174, 177, 180, 187, 188, 191, 113
203, 216, 242 Politics of inclusion, 18, 86, 90, 91,
ontological effects, 19, 35, 40 99, 218
ontological status granted to the Polyamory, 60–2
body, 15, 68 Polyphony, 190, 191, 195, 196,
Orientalist imaginaries/mentalities, 210n68
5, 14, 20 Possesive individualism, 133, 135,
Otherness, 24, 27, 105, 143, 144, 137, 154, 155, 158, 175, 214
187, 189–91, 193, 195–8, Possessive
201, 210n68, 225, 227, 229, modality of being, 132, 133, 137,
230, 245 154, 155, 163n43, 217, 221
Index 279
understanding of sexuality, 133, Radical democracy, 18, 19, 80n42,

134, 138, 175, 214–6 217
Postcolonial Ranciere, Jacques, 126n58,
condition, 142 148
studies/critique, 142, 161n22 Real, the
Post-essentialist subject, post- psychoanalytic concept of, 54
essentialist imaginaries of Recognition, politics of, 9, 14, 16,
subjectivities and identities, 5, 31, 63, 65, 67, 88, 93, 106,
66, 174 117, 130, 132, 134–6. See also
Post-sovereign sexual agency, 10, politics of inclusion
218, 229 RedTrasSex (Red de Muejres
Precariousness, 72, 177, 178, 202 Trabajadoras Sexuales de
Progress, narratives of, 20, 133, 138 Latinoamérica y el Caribe),
Pro-life movements, 171 122n23
Psychosocial Reflexive
approach, 6, 9, 26, 198–200 individual, 67, 70, 130
formation of subjectivity and society, 46, 47, 174
sexuality, 26, 35, 200 Reification
imaginary, 5–10, 13, 63, 66, 69, of bodies, 65, 184, 187
70, 106, 118–20, 155, 231 of cultural difference, 147, 158
Puar, Jasbir, 99, 117, 159n3 of sexuality, 92, 112, 138
Public space, differentially sexualised, of subjectivity, 12, 92
118 Relationality
and Bakhtin, Mikhail, 24, 167,
189, 191, 193–95, 197, 198,
Q 201, 245
Queer perspectives of bodies, 72, 167, 171, 173–77,
queer of color critique, 20, 101, 179–89, 197, 199, 201–3,
145, 153 242, 245
queer theory, 40, 49 in Butler, Judith, 24, 25, 72, 167,
Quijano, Anibal, 140, 142 176–85, 187–9, 194, 196–8,
200, 202, 222, 228, 230, 242,
245
R concept of, 147
Race in Massey, Doreen, 237, 238
racialization, 10, 21, 87, 116, radical relationality, 10, 72, 178,
132, 136, 217 187, 189, 222
racialized visions of cultre and sexual relationality, 24–6, 120,
sexuality, 136, 153, 217 230
280 Index
Resistance Seduction
to norms, 57, 58, 60, 71, 96, 167 in Freud, 43
psychoanalytic resistance, 13, 26 in Laplanche, 25, 43, 50, 80n46,
resistance and resignification, 177 226, 227
and subject formation, 11, 57, 71, Self-ownership, 23, 24, 154, 163n43,
107, 155 166, 167, 175, 176, 178, 188,
and vulnerability, 11, 82, 83n73, 203n2
177 Sennett, Richard, 234, 236, 237,
Respectability 238, 241
new sexual, 62, 63, 87, 116, 168 Sex/gender system, 15, 39, 40
rearticulations of, 67 Sexual citizenship. See citizenship
Richardson, Diane, 88 norms of, 17, 89, 90, 92–7,
Rights 102
claims, 17, 18, 22, 67, 73, 87, 101, Sexual democracy/democratization,
114, 130, 147, 170, 171, 213 15, 18, 20, 21, 27, 34, 86, 92,
language of, 8, 10, 11, 17, 101, 229 94, 96–102, 116, 132
LGBTQI rights, 86, 90, 100, 165 Sexual dissidence, 2, 93, 134
and sexual citizenship, 10, 14, 16, Sexual diversity
17, 86–97, 99–104, 113–17, organising principle of, 32
132, 214 politics of, 10, 12, 18, 39, 63, 67,
sexual rights as human rights, 16, 93, 97
101, 116, 132, 213, 215 Sexual epistemology, onto-
sexual rights-bearing subject, 3, epistemological categories,
87, 88, 91, 93, 102, 103, 137, 138, 149, 155
138, 155, 158 Sexual freedom. See freedom
sex workers rights, 169 Sexual identity, 2, 6, 12, 22, 26, 43,
subject of, 2–4, 14, 16, 18, 23, 51, 64, 88, 113, 115, 119,
24, 33, 92, 102–4, 115, 154, 120, 129, 130, 133–37, 139,
169–71, 214, 218 140, 147, 158, 166, 173, 230,
239
Sexuality
S and diaspora (see diasporic
Salamon, Gayle, 187, 188, 204n11, sexuality)
232, 249n41 history of, 27n2, 47, 74n5,
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 56 80n41, 92, 136, 138, 160n6,
Scientia Sexualis, 173, 205n17 223, 236, 246n8
Scott, Joan, 168 as property, 22, 63, 93, 131, 135,
Sedgwick, Eve, 61 141, 154–9, 161n43, 166,
Sedimentation, 53, 55, 56, 187, 167, 173
194 psychoanalytic accounts of, 114
Index 281
and race/racialization, 10, 21, 87, Silverman, Kaja, 9, 51, 52, 81n51,
116, 132, 136, 140, 153, 160, 126n58
161, 217 Soma
as a relational phenomenon, 10, psychosomatic, 105–8, 200
120 somatic, 27, 204n11, 229, 233,
as a western dispositive/device, 234, 235
11, 12, 24, 135, 136, 141, somatization, 234
146, 150, 154, 222 Space/Spaciality
Sexual politics, 8, 10–12, 15, 16, and embodiment, 236–40
24, 28n4, 35, 66, 67, 70, 86, in Massey, Doreen, 237, 238
88, 91, 92, 96, 100, 102, 103, and relationality, 167, 187, 193,
113, 116–18, 121n20, 197, 201, 202, 238
121n21, 131–33, 135–7, 157, Speech genres, 191–96
165, 174, 214, 217, 219, 222, Stoler, Laura Ann, 135, 136
229, 239 Subversion of norms, 58, 62, 65
Sexual rights/sexual righs-bearing Supplement, 75n8, 231
subject. See rights Suture, 71, 104, 106, 119, 217
Sexual self
sexual self-determination, 133,
213 T
sexual self-governance, 219 Temporality
Sexual subject, relational chacater of, of bodies, 187
120, 166, 213 and dialogism, 195
Sexual, the Thomas, Greg, 124n34, 140, 146,
as a domain, 29n15, 44, 89, 108, 157, 161n21, 223
117, 149, 154–9, 225, 239 Trans
in Laplanche, 24, 25, 43, 50, understandings of, 75n11
226–28, 249n39 politics, 35, 63
Sexual threshold, sexuality as a transgender, 8, 33, 37, 38, 75n10,
threshold, 26, 229, 240–5 76n11, 76n20, 131, 138–40,
Sex work 159n1
and abolitionism, 121n21 transsexual, 38, 76n11
and antitrafficking paradigm, 100 Transnational
legal status of, 87, 94, 168, 169 mainstream politics, 4, 10, 16, 68,
as other, 17, 97, 117, 170 100, 116, 139, 222
and sexual democratization, 18, solidarity-ies/alliances, 134, 153,
34, 86, 92, 94, 96, 97, 156, 223
99–102, 130 and translation, 8, 17, 21, 131,
sex workers associations, 94–6 132, 134, 139, 146, 150, 153,
sex workers rights (see rights) 156, 157, 224
282 Index
Transparency Vulnerability
and liberalism, 12, 55, 70, and Butler, Judith (see Butler)
131, 221 and relationality, 19, 24, 72, 176,
paradigm of transparency, 137, 155 177, 179, 202, 230
transparency of the self/
transparent subjectivity, 23, 24,
63, 69, 136, 151 W
Transposition, 188, 232 War on Terror, 97, 117, 132
Wayar, Marlene, 36, 37, 75n8
Weeks, Jeffrey, 85, 86, 90, 92, 93, 118
U Wekker, Gloria, 156
UK Network of Sex Work Projects Western modernity, 102, 132,
Kinnell, Hilary, 169 142–45, 236, 241
Wittig, Monique, 156, 157, 182,
224, 225
V
Van Heute, Philipe and Geyskens,
Tomas, 78n29, 79n30, 80n46 Y
Visibility, visibilization, 89, 118, Yogyakarta principles, 32, 74n1,
151, 152 74n2, 159n1

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THE POLITICAL IMAGINARY

STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOSOCIAL

More information about this series at

Studies in the Psychosocial

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956247

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Cover image © Andy Bonomo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

2 Diversity and the Sexual Imaginary 31

3 On the (b)orders of Sexual Citizenship 85

4 Sexuality in Translation 129

5 Body Matters: From Autonomy to Relationality 165

6 Being Sexual 213

© The Author(s) 2016 1

The Question of Freedom and the Sexual

The Psychosocial Imaginary of Post-Essentialist

like to offer an approach that is not organized around the presupposition

places, and have yet to take place in others (although unfortunately it

also globally. However, what we are seeing is that ostensibly progressive

Desire and the After-Life of the Liberal Ethos

For my argument, I am continuing in my endeavor to work along

to their sexual behaviors, turning sexuality into a key mechanism for

Foucault’s notion of productive power has been extremely useful in

subjectivity whose internal alterity and antagonism challenge liberal and

the hegemonic notion of sexual diversity and the politics of recognition

democracy brings back longstanding arguments about the entanglement

and international agencies have been developing new legal frameworks as

In the light of this panorama, I ask: what other kinds of political

a fundamental exclusion. That is one of the reasons why recognition

I ask: how might queer interventions challenge current forms of sexual

notions of sexuality and political subjectivity, and the notion of freedom

autonomous choice, or even agency, in particular contexts, looking at a

relational condition, an experience by which we are reminded of our fate

of what one can know. Maybe such an understanding would help us to

Text 23 (3–4, 84–85) (2005); David Eng, The Feeling of Kinship:

14. The conceptualization of the political as the ultimate ontological

© The Author(s) 2016 31

The recognition of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans (LGBT) rights as

as if this principle were transcendental. Notwithstanding the fact that

questions mark the need to continue theorizing contemporary modes of

by step. While I will be focusing on the question of personal liberty in

Trans Variants, Monosexuality,

normative standards for accessing gender-reassignment treatments and,

of a presumptive primary bisexuality.28 We cannot forget the historicity

identities (failed homosexuality or heterosexuality), or a temporary state

kind of constraints, a desire made outside or beyond social norms. And

totalizing way, is regarded as positively subversive—and yet, when this

in so-called inclusive reflexive societies. In effect, within the field of the

On Performative Revisions and Embodied,

decentering it. The liberal reification of the individual (that is occurring

articulation. Thus, these perspectives essentialize political positions and

us. It is through the continuous experience of ‘being named’ that the

are phenomena that should be explained rather than being self-evident.

although the displacement is significant, insofar as it opens up a radical

While the critique of the naturalization of sexual difference is not relevant

Only when the mechanism of gender construction implies the contingency

Accepting arbitrariness, but denying contingency, the Lacanian concept

interdiction of incest ‘necessarily’ implies the crossed opposition between

self-representation, either at the level of the subject or society, which in

It is not simply a matter of construing performativity as a repetition of acts,

At this point, Butler clarifies that ‘every act is to be construed as a rep-

Diversity, Mononormativity, and the Iterability