Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and the Dilemmas of Citizenship.

• Author: Smith, Ralph R.
• Position: Book Reviews

Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and the Dilemmas of Citizenship. By Shane Phelan. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001; pp. 232. $59.50; paper $18.95.

For students of argumentation, the significance of Phelan's study of gay advocacy lies in her synoptic analysis of the cultural origins of address about issues concerning rights to autonomy and expression for people who are sexual nonconformists. She describes constructs that are premises for many of the arguments used, with mixed success, to alleviate the legal and cultural disadvantages of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons.

Phelan critiques the foundational arguments constituting claims by sexual minorities for full participation in society. Beginning with the concept of "citizenship," she describes what she believes is a "phallic" regime of exclusion which provides the assumptions as well as points of resistance in public discourse on a broad range of topics ranging from citizenship's obligations and benefits to the connections between the civic and the familial. Along the way, Phelan recognizes that the gay movement is caught in a series of paradoxes that make positive movement in any direction difficult for gay people.

Citizenship, for Phelan, is rooted in culture. Thus, public debates over gay/lesbian people serving openly in the military, access to marriage or civil unions by same-sex couples, sexual orientation employment protection, and bias crime ordinances exemplify civil/political struggles largely conducted through discursive means and deeply influenced by many powerful social orthodoxies in competition with one another.

The underlying concept of Phelan's book is that in the United States lesbian and gay people are currently, in Zygmunt Bauman's term, "strangers." Sexual minorities, she argues, are occupants of an underdetermined ground, neither full citizens nor enemies of society. This is a ground important in the operation of mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. As Phelan observes, the "republican tradition has provided robust visions of participation inextricably bound to robust exclusions of those seen as unfit" (p. 13). Thus, many "strangers" are prevented from protecting their interests through claims to citizenship. Most important for students of communication, the "enactment of citizenship is itself the recognition that one has a claim to be heard and responded to--that one should be acknowledged" (pp. 14-5).

Heterosexuality, for Phelan, is the...