NOISE Summer School 2025
Sexual Citizenship:
Bodies, Technology, and Governance
Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies
25-29 August, 2025, Utrecht University, The Netherlands.
• How is sexual citizenship constructed and negotiated in relation to contemporary practices and technologies of biopolitical governance?
• How do communities use technology to extend the boundaries of their social and political spaces/networks, whilst interrogating the separation of private and public, the citizen and the foreigner?
• How have queer and trans lives benefited from—or been hindered by—their being imagined and evoked through membership of the nation-state?
• What kinds of “acts of citizenship” are possible for communities of marginalized sexual and gender identities?
This year’s NOISE summer school focuses on how sexuality is negotiated, practiced, and mediated in relation to various notions of citizenship. The concept of “citizenship” can be defined as outlining the contours of the society a community aspires to create (Mouffe 1993). Or, in the words of Judith Butler, “the nation-state can only reiterate its own basis for legitimation by literally producing the nation that serves as the basis for its legitimation” (Butler and Spivak 2007, 31). Citizenship is, therefore, inseparable from border construction and policing. It serves as a mechanism for establishing distinctions between “us” and “them”, “insiders” and “outsiders,” the “good” and the “bad”, “health” and “pathology,” “public” and “private.” This dynamic often involves technologies of management and governance set up to protect preexisting notions of purity and its assumed value . These aspects highlight how citizenship functions not only as a legal or political status but also as an instrument for delineating and regulating societal boundaries.
During the summer school, we will address forms of technologically mediated biopolitical governance and policing that aim to regulate our sexual lives. One of the features of our modern and contemporary societies is how “private decisions and practices have become intertwined with public institutions and state policies, such as public discourse on sexuality, legal codes, medical system, family policy, and the media” (Oleksy 2009, 4). A central concept for our discussions is “sexual citizenship”, which addresses that precise space where “our most intimate lives” become a springboard for a “claim to rights” on the part of citizens (Plummer 2003). Such rights are granted to sexual and gender minorities under very specific conditions insofar as the rights of sexual minorities are seen to benefit and contribute to the reproduction of the hegemonic world system of welfare capitalism (Wilson 2009). As seen with ongoing debates on biocitizenship related to constraints placed on homosexuals when it comes to blood donation (Weil 2023), access to and distribution of HIV Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (Jones et al. 2020), access to gender confirmation therapies, or the ever-present “charmed circle” of “good” sexuality (Rubin 2011), sexual citizenship is inseparable from strategies of biopolitical governance, such as fast-developing “smart” systems of self-quantification, diagnosis, and administration (Lupton 2016; Isin and Ruppert 2020).
Apart from technologies of governance, we will address the many potential political, aesthetic, and ethical “acts of citizenship” (van Klinken 2018) through which individuals and collectives engage with, and express themselves in, the public realm, in particular in relation to sex, gender, and sexuality. Such “acts of citizenship” represent practices through which individuals position themselves as social agents while simultaneously contributing to the imagination of new political and societal possibilities that are yet to come (van Klinken 2018), within or beyond the constraints of the nation-state.
This edition of the NOISE Summer School introduces students to key discussions and debates in queer, feminist, anti-racist, postcolonial, and decolonial, as well as media studies. It focuses on the various mechanisms through which citizenship generates processes of exclusion while also fostering political, aesthetic, and media engagements that redefine sexual and gender norms.
For more information, see NOISE 2025.
