Sexual stories go to Westminster: narratives of sexual citizens/outsiders in Britain

'Sexual citizenship' is relatively a new term, which emerged in
recent decades with gay and lesbian demands for 'equal rights' with
heterosexuals. Rather than taking the concept of sexual citizenship as
given, this thesis investigates the conditions of its emergence and the
process of its making by focusing on 'stories' offabout homosexuals
or hoinosexualities, which have been circulated, debated and
represented in the British parliament. I analyse these stories at three
different moments in time: during debates on the Sexual Offences Act
in the 1960s;Section 28 of the Local Government Act in the 1980s;
and the Civil Partnership Act in the 2000s. In particular, I explore the
gradual coming-out ofwhat Scott calls, 'the evidence of experience' in
the debates, which, in the form of personal stories, has become an
important way of (re)presenting/relating evidence of the 'truth' of
homosexual identities, linked in turn to the idea of their rights/
rightness. A number of questions guide my inquiry. What are the
conditions upon which a (sexual) story's access to the political arena
is authorised (or rejected)? Who tells stories or whose stories are told?
What 'problems' do stories recount? How are personal sexual stories
publicly represented and contested in parliament? What moral and
political effects do these stories have on political claims about sexual
rights and responsibilities? In addressing these questions, I explore
the complexity of stories' journey from personal to political in the
sexual citizenship making process, which entails not just a transition
from non-recognition to recognition, but also a process of exclusion
and misappropriation whereby stories, in the process of becoming
public narrative, are often rigidified and formalised, producing
stereotypical/fixed 'facts' and 'moral' points. In analysing this
problematic process by which sexual stories enter into a public and
national political domain, and make their case for the recognition of
sexual rights in Britain, I hope to shed light on the more general
question of what it means to be a recognised (or recognisable) sexual
citizen in contemporary Britain.