Good sexual citizenship: How to create a (sexually) safer world Ellen Friedrichs

Abstract

operate in the lives of young people, and how they offer multiple ways to practise and experience one’s gender and sexuality. In Cover’s work we see how the proliferation of the new taxonomies has created a new matrix where the configurations for intimacy are beyond the dominant idea of the “relationship” or “casual sex” but offer myriad ways that include non-sexual or non-romantic intimacies, making way for the messiness of people’s desires. The new taxonomies are engaged in a political battle to undo the power of the norm, to eliminate its power to produce exclusions, and to make the lives of those whose gender and sexuality are not within a binary logic liveable. Cover makes an exciting contribution to our understanding of emerging gender and sexuality taxonomies and the relationship configurations they engender. While the new schema of gender and sexuality is not radical, it does provide a robust challenge to binaries and normativities that have come to shape gender and sexuality. Cover’s call beyond the new taxonomies is for more fluidity than classificatory taxonomy, a gender and sexuality ideology that is without boundaries, forever moving, operating from a logic of de-naturalizing categories of identities in order to do away with hierarchization. In this we inch closer to liveable lives, as the conditions for liveability wouldn’t be hinged on the proximity to normativity but would rather be forever moving, forever becoming.