Engendering Citizenship,Feminizing Civil Society

Abstract

In this paper, I describe how feminists in countries of the Middle East and North Africa are challenging their second-class citizenship largely institutionalized in patriarchal family laws-and are calling for an extension of their civil, political, and social rights. I use the term “feminist” to denote de jureand de factofeminists working to advance women's rights. The paper seeks to make theoretical sense of contemporary rights-based movements and discourses in the region through an application of theories of citizenship. It highlights the role of women's organizations in the regional call for democratization, civil society, and citizenship and it provides an empirical content to the discussion of citizenship, state, and civil society. Data and information are gleaned from a close reading of the literature by and on women's organizations in the region, and from personal observations and interviews.     

Failed individualism in community care: An example from elder abuse

Summary

Community care has been associated with a particular vision of interpersonal relations reflecting the demands of a market economy of welfare. It is argued that individualised notions of citizenship significantly effect how social actors respond to issues such as dependence, independence and interdependence, with consequences that locate unacceptable attributes within failed individuals'. This gives rise to a number of possibilities for collusion between workers, carers and older people who require services, and forms the basic triangle for interpersonal relations within community care policy. The parallel rise of elder abuse as a recognised social problem is considered in this light and three forms of collusive alliance, based on life-task, family solidarity and heroic defence are explored in greater detail. The paper concludes by examining the possibility of interdependence as a guiding principle which can be used to contain each actor's perspective, whilst contributing to the development of non-abusive relationships.     

Positive Men: searching for relational dignity through health activism in a South African township

This paper explores how men from a South African township appropriate health and rights discourses in times of existential needs and uncertainties, in order to construct isidima, or what the author calls a relational model of dignity. The activists’ efforts were tied to gendered moral practices of granting respect to others and expecting to be respected as “positive” men who struggle against gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS. Their involvement in situations of moral breakdown, however, forged a situated transfiguration of gendered social relationships that went beyond both “traditional” notions of masculinity and “modern” ideals of liberal citizenship. The findings are based on life histories of 15 Xhosa-speaking men who were involved in the group Positive Men (PM). Furthermore, they are the result of direct and participant observation of key events that took place between 2007 and 2010.     

Framed Encounters with Conservation and Mining Development: Indigenous Peoples' use of Strategic Framing in Suriname

While studies on the use of framing as a strategy for social movements have proliferated in the past 20 years, little is still known about how and why the frames vary across social movement actors and/or events. This article addresses this knowledge lacuna by comparing and contrasting Indigenous peoples' use of rights and identity frames in response to conservation and development events in Suriname. The variation in frames, and possible reasons for these variations, was compared across actors and events by considering (1) alignments of the global Indigenous rights movement with different movements and organizations over time, and (2) participants' level of involvement with national and global Indigenous rights movements. Evidence of strategic frame variation in this study demonstrated Indigenous peoples' ability to creatively and strategically pursue their interests by asserting their collective identity and rights in encounters with conservation and development projects. They accomplished this through the presentation of frames that called into question the logic and fairness of protected areas, their innate capacity to protect the environment, as well as their rights to land, and economic interests in mining. The greater use of rights frames by participants reflected networks generated with human rights organizations. Frame inconsistencies were apparent across conservation and development events that indicated uneven levels of involvement with Indigenous rights movements, which may yet produce unintended consequences for Indigenous communities. However, this case could also signal new possibilities for Indigenous peoples in terms of greater maneuverability in being able to assert their rights and negotiate their identities in relation to conservation and development, and ultimately to gain more power and autonomy over their own affairs.     

Social inclusion for whom and towards what end? A critical discourse analysis of youth and sport policies in Turkey

This article examines the social inclusion policy strategies of the Turkish Ministry of Youth and Sport (MYS). Using a critical discourse analysis, based on Norman Fairclough’s work (2012), the aim is to analyse the discourses used within policy-related documents regarding social inclusion, youth, and sport. In order to achieve this objective, we analysed 15 key documents, including annual activity reports, national youth and sport policy documents, and strategic plans produced by the Ministry. Findings revealed that the dominant discourses about young people seem to be embedded within neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies in which depoliticised notions of ‘employment/apprenticeship’ and ‘the family’ are put forward as solutions for the social inclusion of young people. However, such a discourse risks further sustaining the social exclusion of youth, denying their full citizenship.     

Social Smoking: An Untenable Position

Abstract

Social smokers manage the conflicting aspects of their liminal identities by negotiating complex roles of performance and exchange. Using a combination of methods, including both participant observation of cultural performances and informal interviews, to elicit lay theories and accounts of self-conscious practices, this project examines social actors, self-defined as nonsmokers (or reformed smokers), who engage in recreational tobacco use. Through in-depth interviews and observations of self-identified female social smokers, we document general characteristics of this subpopulation, sampled from a large Midwest capital and its surrounding areas. Social smokers occupy an untenable social space; as neither smokers nor nonsmokers, they use both practices and discourses about those practices to stake their claim to an untenable social position. We conclude with a theoretical discussion that compares our findings with other discourses on smoking, especially the discourse of addiction narratives. In an age of increasing awareness of the health consequences, smoking has become a culturally unavailable category producing “disconfirming realities” in which social smokers constantly renegotiate their status.     

Labour market integration and transnational lived citizenship: Aspirations and belonging among refugees in Germany

Transnational lived citizenship has gained prominence as a means to analyse mobility and foreground activist notions of citizenship over legal status. I argue that lived citizenship and transnational movements are strongly intertwined with aspirations and belonging. I use the material example of labour market integration as the space of enactments of citizenship and analyse the patterns of belonging those create and contest. I develop my argument through the empirical example of labour market integration of refugees in Germany. I demonstrate how such integration transforms social, and more importantly, economic location and in turn creates complex and often contradictory forms of transnational allegiances. I ultimately argue that lived citizenship can in important ways advance aspirations of refugees and migrants. At the same time, transnational lives and multiple allegiances are often hindered by state-based citizenship and the rights this confers. Legal status thus remains an important marker of citizenship.     

This Is What Democracy Sounds Like: Protest Performances of the Citizenship Movement in Wisconsin and Beyond

This article is a case study of an ongoing singing protest in Wisconsin, the group that calls itself Solidarity Sing Along (SSA). An offshoot of the 2011 Wisconsin Uprising, for the first 15 months of its existence SSA was an important nexus of local activists working to recall Republican state senators and the governor. After the recall's failure the group not only continued to carry on but quite effortlessly reoriented its claim making and centered its protests on the freedom to assemble and petition the government, which had been an important cause from early on. Maintaining its pro-labor orientation, SSA has become part of a broader movement for democratic citizenship rights. Situating the group in musical practices of the Wisconsin protests and social movements more generally, I show that how SSA makes and performs its music makes it a part of the citizenship movement. This case study reveals a novel form of claim making within the repertoire of contention practiced by social movements: SSA is a ‘part-time occupation’ and as such has potential to be more resilient and durable than ‘permanent’ occupations à la Occupy Wall Street.     

Citizenship: reflections on a relevant but ambivalent concept for persons with disabilities

This article examines the significance of citizenship with respect to disability. The article first highlights the idea of citizenship as ‘social contract’. This means the possession of civil, political, economic, cultural and social rights as well as the exercise of duties in society. Due to societal barriers, many disabled persons have difficulties fulfilling citizenship roles. Further, this article draws on citizenship theories; it examines three types of citizenship participation – the social citizen, the autonomous citizen and the political citizen – and discusses their promises and ableist implications. To counterbalance the exclusionary aspects of citizenship, we argue that human rights prove important. At the same time, human rights are more easily proclaimed than enforced and citizenship remains a precondition for effectively implementing human rights. The article concludes that citizenship is a relevant but also ambivalent concept when it comes to disability; it calls for a critical understanding of citizenship in Disability Studies.     

Migrants as strategic actors in the European Union's Global Approach to Migration and Mobility

The European Union's discourse of ‘partnership’ in the Global Approach to Migration and Mobility and the widely expressed critique of this discourse as a process of ‘externalization’ of EU policy both depend on unitary accounts of the main policy actors involved. Two separate literatures contest such unitary accounts. Within political science and international relations, institutional approaches identify a range of strategic actors involved in policy development; in anthropology, there is a well‐established interest in the strategic behaviour of disempowered actors. In this article, I set out to link these two approaches with an examination of undocumented migrants as strategic actors. I use a case study of events at the borders between Morocco and the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in late 2005, which have proved extremely influential in the continued development of the EU's global approach, to identify the ways in which even highly marginalized migrants were able to develop transnational social organizations.     

Cosmopolitanism: The Foundational Ground for a More Inclusive Understanding of Belonging to Protect the Human Rights of North Korean Stateless Women

In this article, I will examine the use of the notion of cosmopolitanism to address the exclusionary nature of citizenship. Citizenship is a contemporary social norm that privileges citizens and discriminates against others, leading to consequent human rights violations experienced by stateless populations. I will use the case study of North Korean stateless women who reside in China and who are victims of human trafficking as an example of stateless people who lack legal guarantees for human rights. By uncovering the way citizenship operates as a social structure that deprives people of their human rights, I will argue for Seyla Benhabib's notion of cosmopolitanism, which pursues a more inclusive notion of belonging and necessitates institutional changes. These include the juridical implementation of improved immigration policy and citizenship law, involving the cooperation of the global society, to recognize the dignity of the stateless and protect their human rights.     

The social welfare impact of privatisation in sub‐Saharan Africa: A discussion

Against the background of rising levels of anxiety around the state of the social fabric in South African society, this paper explores the disjuncture between the post-apartheid state’s policy discourse on social cohesion and the local discourses of South African residents in 24 focus groups held in townships around the country, which reveal significant levels of social fragmentation and intense contestation regarding the new regime of rights. The paper argues that the state’s policy discourse on social cohesion is part of an attempt to manage a complex social environment in terms of a project of developmental nation-state building that seeks to constitute the social domain as a normative realm of imagined homogeneity in which citizenship is premised on constitutional values. I argue that while the state’s concern with the ‘social’ relates to the critical question of solidarity in modern democracies, this has led, in the South African context, to the constitution of the social domain as a site of pathology, divorced from the broader political and economic relations of power in which this ‘pathology’ is embedded. At issue in this interaction between state and local discourses on the question of solidarity are the terms of membership in the political community. Who will and will not be part of the ‘new’ nation?     

Stakeholder identities in Britain's neoliberal ethical community: Polish narratives of earned citizenship in the context of the UK's EU referendum

This article examines the narrative strategies through which Polish migrants in the UK challenge the formal rights of political membership and attempt to redefine the boundaries of ‘citizenship’ along notions of deservedness. The analysed qualitative data originate from an online survey conducted in the months before the 2016 EU referendum, and the narratives emerge from the open‐text answers to two survey questions concerning attitudes towards the referendum and the exclusion of resident EU nationals from the electoral process. The analysis identifies and describes three narrative strategies in reaction to the public discourses surrounding the EU referendum – namely discursive complicity, intergroup hostility and defensive assertiveness – which attempt to redefine the conditions of membership in Britain's ‘ethical community’ in respect to welfare practices. Examining these processes simultaneously ‘from below’ and ‘from outside’ the national political community, the paper argues, can reveal more of the transformation taking place in conceptions of citizenship at the sociological level, and the article aims to identify the contours of a ‘neoliberal communitarian citizenship’ as internalized by mobile EU citizens.     

Citizenship as cultural: Towards a theory of cultural citizenship

Traditional notions of citizenship have focused on formal membership, including access to rights, in a national community. More recent scholarship has expanded this definition beyond citizenship as a legal status to focus on struggles for societal inclusion of and justice for marginalized populations, citizenship as both a social and symbolic boundary of exclusion, and post‐colonial and post‐national citizenship. In this article, I review conceptions of citizenship that involve more than legal rights. After reviewing this scholarship, I discuss the theoretical framework of cultural citizenship – a move to center the cultural underpinnings of modern citizenship in analyses of citizenship as a boundary of inclusion and exclusion. I use the example of France as one site to locate the connections between citizenship and culture and the cultural underpinnings and implications of citizenship more broadly.     

Sharing and exchanging: understanding common grounds in northeast India

ABSTRACT

Northeast India, a ‘zipper region’ that gives impetus to Southeast Asian and Himalasian studies, is marked by complexities and ambiguities. The paper examines the multiple identity construction in contemporary Assam, the central state of this region and seeks to recover the other experiences that make ethnic life-world possible while challenging the ethnocentric discourses—in academia, politics, public and social movements. Acknowledging the presence of common or possibly universal processes behind the production of such discourses, it aims to interrogate the factors that cut across socio-cultural, political-economical or ecological dimensions. It further examines the multiple discourses and narratives that makes that social possible in the region. In doing so, it locates the strategic positioning of such discourses and how they deal with Indian nation-state and beyond. This paper in essence is interested in the question of possibility of various discourses—as a question of post-history.     

Neoliberal discourses and ethnonormative regime in post-recognition Peru: redefining hierarchies and identities

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the impact of ‘recognition’ of cultural and ethnic diversity in Peru. It proposes that the rise of a new global ‘ethnonormativity’ – a regime to define and administrate cultural and identity differences, to establish boundaries between those who ‘are’ ethnic and those who are not, and to set rights and duties derived from identities – has had meagre effects in Peru. While the past decades have witnessed the emergence of Latin American political actors who regard indigenousness as their basic political identity, there has been no ‘emergence of indigenous movements’ in Peru. The discourses that highlight the importance of diversity have gained terrain – unsettling, to a certain extent, the narratives of assimilation through ‘development’ and mestizaje – and the Peruvian state has officially embraced ‘recognition’, including it in its official rhetoric and creating institutions to design policies to guarantee the rights of the indigenous and Afroperuvian ‘peoples’ (itself a label part of the language of multiculturalism). The state has also crafted a definition of ‘indigenous peoples’ and introduced ethnic variables in censuses and official statistics, thus being active in the production and regulation of subjects. Some civil society actors have also incorporated ethnic labels into their rhetoric to adapt to the global turn to identity politics. Peru remains, however, a fertile terrain for neoliberal policies and discourses of a different kind. A discourse that exalts ‘emprendedurismo’ (entrepreneurship) and states that success depends entirely on personal effort has become a new common sense, obscuring the structural inequality that has historically affected indigenous and Afroperuvian people. Extractivism continues to damage the environment and the rights of indigenous people, while the expansion of agribusiness in the coastal valleys of Peru keeps people – regardless of their ‘ethnic’ self-identification – in poverty and without basic labour and social rights. The article suggests that the ambiguities of the ethnonormative regime in Peru may serve as a diversion from structural issues in a context of neoliberalism and may re-elaborate racial hierarchies, racism and the narratives of mestizaje it allegedly opposes.     

Women's rights in Peru: insights from two organizations

In this article we explore the appropriation of ideas about women's rights in Lima, Peru through an ethnographic study of two non‐governmental organizations. SEA is a local NGO grounded in the Catholic Church's liberation theology movement, which seeks to promote integrated human development, and is linked to the worldwide Catholic Church. DEMUS, the second NGO, with feminist roots, actively fights gender discrimination and belongs to networks of international women's human rights movements and UN organizations. We argue that the struggle for women's rights is part of a broader struggle for recognition and equality for the poor, shaped by changing notions of national identity, citizenship and diversity. Our research revealed clear examples of vernacularization, whereby local context, values and culture played a decisive role in the adoption of women rights ideas. Encounters with other concepts and movements, including social justice, family violence and women's mobilization, intimately shaped the vernacularization of women's rights. Ultimately, the adoption of rights ideas involved changes in women's individual and collective empowerment.     

Female narratives of ‘new’ citizens’ belonging(s) and identities in Europe: case studies from the Netherlands and Britain

Public discourses on citizenship, identity and nationality, which link geographical borders and the political boundaries of a community, are infused with tensions and contradictions. This paper illustrates how these tensions are interwoven with multilayered notions of home, belonging, migration, citizenship and individual's ‘longing just to be’, focusing on the Dutch and the British context. The narratives of a number of Dutch and British women, who either immigrated to the respective countries or were born to immigrants, illustrate how the growing rigid integration and assimilative discourses in Europe contradict an individual anchoring in national and local communities. The narratives of women participating in these studies show multilayered angles of belonging presenting an alternative to the increasing strong argument for a fixed notion of positioning and national belonging. The female ‘new’ citizens in our study tell stories of individual choices, social mobility and a sense of multiple belonging in and across different communities.     

NATIONAL TIMES AND OTHER TIMES: RE-THINKING CITIZENSHIP

Citizenship is a temporal as well as spatial phenomenon. While it conceptually located in a legal, territorial entity, within which it is associated with the privileges of sovereignty and the rights of individuals, it is also understood is terms of the historical process by which peoples develop shared characteristics. However, the attempt to code citizenship interms of shared cultural backgrounds belies the ways in which citizen-subjects are temporally disjunctive. Beginning with attention to the way some writing practices challenge the state system's monopoly over the meaning of citizen presence in time and space, this essay turns to a reading of an Israeli woman's novelistic treatment of a geographically and culturally diverse Jewish family, whose characteristics challenge the State of Israel's myth of national homogeneity. Ronit Matalon's, The One Facing Us, which juxtaposes a version of what Julia Kristeva calls ‘women's time’ with the historical time of the state, restores the diverse forms of co-presence that are denied in the discourses of nation-state legitimation. Her novel, along with the other genres treated in this analysis, encourages an understanding of politics that resists the identity-fixing effect of a state-oriented model of political space and the homogenizing of the temporal presence of citizen-subjects. More generally, the writing performances treated in this essay cast political interaction as a continuous negotiation of co-presence among those with diverse ways of being-in-time.