This book offers a provocative thesis. Mario Feit argues that a larger concern lurks below the stated anxieties of traditionalist opponents of same-sex marriage and that this concern should be taken seriously. On this argument, democratic citizenship requires biological reproduction and the rearing of future citizens if society is to survive. Whereas marriage with reproductive potential is “heroic and selfless,” marriage for “mere love” is selfish and shirks the duties of citizenship (p. 2). More broadly, “sexual reproduction serves … as a vehicle for death transcendence” and for both personal and collective immortality (p. 3). Feit explores alternatives to this standard of heteronormativity by engaging works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hannah Arendt, and Friedrich Nietzsche, concluding with some analysis of the perceived threat of same-sex marriage to the transmission of the values of queer culture.

Feit views Rousseau as the intellectual precursor of today's same-sex marriage opponents. For Rousseau, citizens fear death, but they must learn to cultivate its acceptance if they are to endure the strictures of morality. Sexual reproduction both manifests death acceptance and endorses the moral and political order through family life: “The opposite of degeneration and extinction are regeneration and repopulation” (p. 54). Through heterosexual reproduction, citizens thus achieve a secular immortality. It both perpetuates the collective sovereign and allows the individual achievement of vicarious immortality through biological offspring. Although Rousseau's emphasis on death anxiety is a key insight, Feit concludes that his heteronormative focus on sexual reproduction is antipluralist and diminishes democracy.

Arendt, on the other hand, poses an implicit critique of heteronormativity. For her, although sexual reproduction perpetuates a uniform nature, only our distinctive individuality gives rise to the speech and action that are enshrined in memory and thus constitute immortality open to pluralism. The tension in Greek thought between household and polis informs her contrast among labor that only produces what perpetuates life, work that produces enduring objects, and action, including speech, the memory of which renders what is perishable permanent. Because politics both memorializes human uniqueness and preserves community, “democratic citizenship at its very core for Arendt is about death transcendence” (p. 96). So long as stories remain, immortality does not require sexual reproduction but politics and the power that flows from it. For Feit, however, Arendt's critique excludes all forms of sexuality from politics, and we must therefore look further.

Nietzsche rejects Arendt's determination to separate citizenship and sexuality. Like Rousseau, he connects sexual and cultural reproduction, but in unusual terms. His protagonist “Zarathustra becomes pregnant with new ideas as a result of withdrawing into a feminine space—solitude—which indicates that a ‘lesbian’ reproductivity is at work here.” Moreover, the affinity that biologically unrelated individuals have for these ideas makes them Zarathustra's descendants (p. 126). Because many individuals will not accept death as a part of life as it is, they attend to those who promise immortality. This promise, however, ironically contains a death wish within itself as individuals valorize the otherworldly over actual life. Biological reproduction to counter life's finitude produces “a culture of death in the effort to combat death” (p. 131). Children may constitute a legacy, but for Nietzsche, these “children” may also include ideas to which the thinker gives birth. The thinker then functions as a father who disseminates his ideas in the hope that they take root and grow. Good citizenship for Nietzsche includes reproduction, but involves “his queering of reproductive and kinship metaphors” (p. 156) at the expense of heteronormativity. Therefore, he implicitly promotes pluralist citizenship.

For Feit, Arendt is a more promising resource for democratic citizenship than is Rousseau. The action that begets political immortality is open to all, whereas sexual reproduction may not be. Arendt is limited, however, by the fact that only a minority of actors achieve political immortality. For Nietzsche, on the other hand, words and deeds are central to one's living identity, regardless of whether their memory persists after death. A lesson exists here for queer culture, Feit suggests. Queer critics of same-sex marriage fear that it will cause queer culture to disappear. The individuals who constitute this culture, however, should not look to citizenship as a means of death transcendence. Instead, they should engage in self-creation, or should speak and act to fulfill their own identities, regardless of any possible legacy for other generations. As citizens and self-creators, heterosexuals and gays may be equally sterile if they fail to value this sort of activity. If death awareness impels us “to engage our morality in an ethically productive way” (p. 177), however, democratic citizenship may become less anxious and both more pluralist and more vibrant.

Democratic Anxieties is a provocative contribution to scholarship concerning sexuality and politics, pluralism, and democratic citizenship. Feit builds on a tradition in political theory that focuses on the tension between the claims of the family and the claims of citizenship. This tradition is well exemplified in Susan Moller Okin's critique of Rousseau (Women in Western Political Thought, 1979). The first tension is between the impulses of the natural individual and the requirements of citizenship as illustrated by Rousseau's protagonist Emile. An additional tension is that between intimate love and the welfare of larger entities, whether nation or humanity. Finally, tension exists between the demands of the family and those of the ideal republic.

Like Okin's, Feit's analysis of Rousseau suggests that an exclusive focus on sexual reproduction can draw citizens away from living out their citizenship. Although biological offspring perpetuate the collective sovereign, death anxiety and a desire for immortality may feed this focus at the expense of the development of one's living identity as both individual and citizen. It also excludes those to whom sexual reproduction is not open. In Emile, moreover, the education of Sophie as the ideal wife in the patriarchal family shows that women—and others thus inculcated—are primed to prioritize intimate love and family over the claims of the wider world and of citizenship. Arendt pushes to the opposite extreme on Feit's interpretation, excluding the private or what she terms “the social” from citizenship altogether. Nietzsche, on the other hand, fruitfully combines private and public, individual and citizen. On Feit's metaphorical interpretation, Nietzsche teaches us that through self-creation, all may engage with the world productively, whatever their sexuality.

In the final section of his last chapter, Feit engages with Judith Butler's examination of responses in the United States to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as these bear on a possible democratizing effect of death awareness. Although I understand the connection with Feit's theme, I found this treatment distracting. Perhaps if this material had been interwoven with the body of the book, it might have been more successful. Nevertheless, Democratic Anxieties stands out as a fine approach to the connections between sexuality and political theory as these bear on democratic citizenship.