'Sexual Citizenship' and the Regulation of Intimacy: Citizenship as an Ethical Regime in Cosmopolitan Asia.

The concept of citizenship draws attention to the rights and responsibilities that accrue to individuals on the basis of their membership in a community, with the latter typically understood to be that of the nation-state (Marshall 1963). In recent times, though, the concept has come under significant interrogation, with questions raised about whether it is possible to imagine citizenship beyond the confines of the state (Faulks2000); whether citizenship ought to itself be considered a right in addition to being a status that allows subsequent access to certain rights (Somers 2008); and whether there is a need to recognize different kinds of citizenship, such as ecological citizenship (Van Steenbergen 1994), sexual citizenship (Richardson 2000; Weeks 1998), and linguistic citizenship (Stroud 2001). This paper focuses on the issue of 'sexual citizenship' and on the ways in which a particular city state in Asia, has attempted to regulate intimacy among the citizenry, and attempts to clarify the implications of this for the notion of 'sexual citizenship'. The focus of the paper is on cosmopolitan Asia although a broader theorization and conceptualization of the debates around sexual citizenship in undertaken by the authors. This issue of sexual citizenship is of particular sociological interest because of the broader theorization of the concept of citizenship which such research implies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]