Revolutionary and Lesbian: Negotiating Sexual Citizenship in Cuba 379
Citizenship as “the Right to Have Rights”^1
European and U.S. discourses of citizenship are highly influenced by
the Civic Liberalist tradition, which emphasizes “the state’s paternal
role in securing the rights of its citizens,” as well as binding them
together as a social unit (Bell and Binnie, 2000:7). T.H. Marshall,
author of Citizenship and Social Class, is one of the most influential
theorists of post-war citizenship theory (Kymlicka, 2002:287; Bell and
Binnie, 2000:7). For Marshall, citizenship “is essentially a matter of
ensuring that everyone is treated as a full and equal member of soci-
ety...through affording people an increasing number of citizenship
rights” (Kymlicka, 2002:287). Marshall’s classic ideas of citizenship,
often called “passive” or “private” citizenship, framed citizenship in
terms of the possession of rights and entitlements, to be guaranteed
by a liberal-democratic welfare state, without any previous or subse-
quent obligation to participate in public life (Kymlicka, 2002:288).
In the late-modern/neoliberal moment, Marshall’s Orthodox post-
war model of citizenship-as-rights came under attack from the Right
(Kymlicka, 2002:288). In the context of the privatization of the func-
tions of the state, passive citizenship was replaced with a more active
model in which greater emphasis is put on individual responsibility:
good citizens are economically self-reliant, don’t make demands on
the (former) welfare state, and are valued according to their contribu-
tions as consumers. Citizens are “made over as a particular kind of
sovereign consumer, who has the right to choose and ‘buy’ access to
aspects of collective consumption provided traditionally by the state
(welfare, healthcare, education).” As Lang explains, citizenship is com-
modified and, as a result, rights claims are based on LGBT economic/
consumer power which translate to political power (Bell and Binnie,
2000:6).
In such a context, struggles for sexual citizenship have taken the
form of fragmentary identity-based social movements, which mobilize- This comes from a US Supreme Court decision Perez v. Brownell, 356 U.S. 44, 64
(1958)] in which Chief Justice Earl describe citizenship as by [as “man’s basic right, for it
is nothing less than the right to have rights” (Tushnet 2010).