Sexual Morality and Citizenship

Abstract

Eithne Luibheid’s chapter reminds us that ‘[i]mmigration controls uphold and reproduce the distinction between citizen and migrant, and they are a key site of struggle over these histories and legacies of inequality’. She traces critical shifts in Irish legislation that have undermined the notion that a child born in Ireland is the automatic bearer of Irish citizenship and examines the Irish government’s responses to controversies over migrants’ childbearing as a route to legal residency. She goes on to consider the debates over heterosexual marriage and same-sex couple migration to Ireland and explores LGBT rights and how they have been made subject to particular forms of state scrutiny even as they have been extended. She argues that ‘sexual and intimate norms have become reconfigured and harnessed to serve the state and nation in new ways in the context of neoliberal globalization’.