(Re)Articulating Sexual Citizenship: Between Queering the Urban Space and Subjugating the Queer

Abstract: In today’s post-industrial cities, how urban citizenship is defined and performed have been ambiguously positioned in their relationship with the urban societal space. While the cities become more commodified and privatized with the inter-urban competition, the concept of citizenship is put into a tentative position between being participatory political subjects and passive consumers. Sexuality, in this regard, raises up as an important element of political expressiveness and passivity, with its constructive role on the identity. The discussion on political economy of sexuality by Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler contributes to the study where the participatory role of sexual citizenship can be grounded on cultural and/or economic aspects of subjectivity, from their poststructuralist perspective. By using the discourse theory by Laclau and Mouffe as its method, the thesis explores the articulatory practices for the antagonistic construction of sexual citizenship through discourses of neoliberalism and its counterparts. An analysis on subject positions in a neoliberal era is defined with their participation in the urban as a consumptuary and/or political space. Therefore, this study analyses Stockholm Pride as a case to show how sexuality in the urban space is (de)politically (re)defined, and how an entrepreneurial agenda of a post-industrial city, Stockholm, discursively functions for positioning sexual citizens between the antagonisms of being a consumer or citizen.