Is the United States a heterosexual regime? If it is, how might we understand the political position of those who cannot or will not align themselves with heterosexuality? Are such persons citizens, albeit stigmatized and embattled ones, or are they more fundamentally excluded from membership in the U.S. polity? What social and political institutions structure the regime of heterosexuality? Can sexual minorities refigure those institutions enough to make room for themselves in them, or will they find themselves continually stuck between the pressure to conform and rejection of their best efforts?

We live in a time of new challenges and...

Citizenship has a long history, both as a legal concept and as a political ideal. It is “a weighty, monumental, humanist word,” speaking “of respect, of rights, of dignity” (Fraser and Gordon 1998, 113). Yet, as Peter Riesenberg (1992, xvi) has observed, “there is no single office in which its essence is defined. It has no central mission, nor is it clearly an office, a theory, or a legal contract.” Despite its status as an “ambiguous institution” (xvii), however, citizenship is a primary, perhapstheprimary, modern category of political membership.

The association of citizenship with democracy and self-governance is...

Understanding strangeness requires an examination of the regime that creates it. This is especially the case where the exclusion is so unevenly distributed as it is at present in the United States. The United States is not one community, not one culture, but a multiplicity of cultural, economic, legal, and political sites held together by a combination of force, history, and continually created national identity. We may, then, expect to see that exclusions at certain points coexist with cautious inclusions at some other sites and comfortable equality at yet others. Each exclusion rests on larger ideas about the relations between...

At the end of the nineteenth century, Congress was faced with a series of decisions about polygamy. The practice of polygamy among Mormons, most notably in Utah but also in Idaho, was the subject of popular outcry as these territories moved toward statehood. Groups opposed to statehood demanded laws banning polygamy throughout the United States, and prospective voters in Utah were forced to sign an oath foreswearing “polygamy, bigamy, unlawful cohabitation, incest, adultery, and fornication” (U.S. Congress 1890, 1). Such oaths did not settle the issue; legislators and citizens continued to hunt down polygamists and ban them from citizenship rights....

Describing the dilemma of Jewish refugees from Nazism, Hannah Arendt constructs a composite “Mr. Cohn from Berlin,” a man who “had always been a 150% German, a German super-patriot” (Arendt 1978, 62). Upon the Nazi rise to power, Mr. Cohn, if he saw clearly, left and went somewhere else. Upon arrival he became a patriot of whatever country he landed in. When the Nazis pressured the government of his new land, or invaded, he left and found another “home.” What Mr. Cohn cannot bear, cannot face, according to Arendt, is the fact that for these governments and their Christian populations,...

The questions of assimilation and of group presentation bear not only on lesbians and gays, but on all those marked as sexual strangers. Claiming respectability for one group of strangers often proceeds by implicitly or explicitly contrasting that group to others, constructing relations of similarity between those seeking entry and their gatekeepers while simultaneously articulating that group as “normal” compared to other groups. This happens both within groups, as when “good homosexuals” make their bid for entry by condemning “bad queers,” and among groups that many see as closely allied. Indeed, whether a collection of people is seen as a...

In democratic regimes, minorities can only change the rules if they persuade a substantial number of the majority that such changes are justified. Such changes are often fleeting and imperfect; we should not read every piece of legislation as reflecting perfectly the mood of the people at that time. Still, we can be confident that laws will endure only if they find reasonable accord with the population. Thus, citizenship for some depends upon the willingness of the majority to acknowledge them as members. This willingness in turn depends upon the construction of a new hegemony, with new readings of rights,...