Inclusion or transformation? Gender and the politics of citizenship

Abstract

Citizenship has tended to be an ambiguous concept for feminist activists and academics. This paper explores two different engagements with the politics of citizenship. The first centres on the politics of inclusion: struggles by feminist activists to secure equality of rights and benefits of citizenship. Here I focus on the problems associated with the predominant topic of citizenship as inscribed in the nation state, the problems associated with state citizenship projects, and the limitations of the bourgeois public sphere. The second set of engagements addresses transformative projects that seek to overcome such problems and limitations. These include challenges to the public/private divide; the turn to notions of recognition and respect; and grassroots struggles that mobilise practical conceptions of citizenship irrespective of, and well as in conflict with, legal and political definitions. I argue that these struggles for inclusion and transformation, while conceptually separate, are politically entangled. The paper concludes by suggesting ways in which the analysis might speak to the present political conjuncture.

Key words: Citizenship; Feminism; Social Movements; Inclusion; Transformation; Austerity.