Postnational acts of citizenship: how an anti-border politics is shaping feminist spaces of service provision in Toronto,Canada

Postnationalism has seen a modest resurgence in recent years as both a theory of citizenship and as a set of claims frequently articulated by anti-border movements. Yet the implications of postnationalism for feminist politics remain relatively under-theorized. Using interviews with feminist advocates in Toronto, Canada, this research examines how postnational challenges to state power are being mobilized in spaces of service provision addressing gender-based violence. I show how, for some advocates, a postnational politics deeply informed their critiques of state borders and restrictive immigration controls as fundamental sources of gendered and racialized violence. However, postnational approaches were also limited in offering few concrete alternatives to state protection from domestic or interpersonal violence, particularly for women with precarious immigration status. Significantly, it was through advocates’ everyday practices of service provision that they blueprinted an alternative feminist ethics of solidarity. I argue that these practices constitute postnational acts of citizenship, in so far as they attempt – albeit imperfectly – to de-border institutional spaces from within.     

When food becomes a feminist issue: popular feminism and subaltern agency in the World March of Women

In ongoing contests over neoliberal globalization, feminists are increasingly forging alliances with non-feminist others around common struggles, both locally and transnationally. This is indicative of a broader shift in transnational feminist politics from intra-movement to inter-movement alliances, and maps onto a historic transition from the UN era (roughly 1985–1995) to the global justice era (roughly 1995–present). Engagement with new partners on non-traditional issues is shifting the scope and contours of the feminisms in question and raising anew the question of hierarchy in transnational feminist networks and in their coalition politics. This article traces the appropriation of food sovereignty by the World March of Women in the context of its alliance with the transnational peasant movement, Vía Campesina, the development of a feminist politics and discourse of food sovereignty, and enquires into the relationship between these processes and “grassroots” members of the March – the rural, peasant and Indigenous women who are understood to be the primary subjects of a feminist politics of food sovereignty.     

Agents for Change and Changed Agents: The Micro‐politics of Change and Feminism in the Academy

This article explores gender politics and processes in the academy and investigates change from the perspectives of feminist academics. In particular, it explores the experiences of women academics attempting to effect change to the gendered status quo of their own institutions. Focusing on micro‐politics, the feminist movement is empirically explored in localized spaces of resistance and in the small but significant individual efforts at making changes in academic institutions. The analysis is based on interviews with female academics working in business and management schools and focuses on the challenges for change and how change attempts affect their personal and professional identities. The article explores the range of change strategies that participants use as they try to progress in their academic career while staying true to their feminist values and priorities through both resisting and incorporating dominant discourses of academic work. The analysis highlights such tensions and focuses on a contextualized, bottom‐up perspective on change that, unlike more totalizing theorization, takes into account mundane and lived experiences at the level of the individual.     

Governability and Women's Citizenship

SUMMARY

The fragility of Latin American democracies places the subject of gendered citizenship as an important issue in the context of a most needed democratic governability. This article first develops a proposed nexus between democratic governability and gender equality and assumes the need to place women within a universe of citizenship, as an inherently inclusive democratic perspective would require. We emphasize what we see as women's citizenship deficit according to a traditional definition of the political. The second part of the article analyzes the insertion of Mexican women in the construction of citizenship on the basis of empirical material drawn from the second National Survey on Political Culture and Practice of Citizenship. We then present some conclusions, with an eye on what Victoria Camps has called the public virtues, such as solidarity, responsibility and tolerance, as democratic values of the first order and as characteristics of a gendered citizenship within new political spaces. We believe the fragile democracies of Latin America and the important quality of democratic governability can be strengthened if a new form of gendered citizenship, more inclusive of women's concerns and practices, is recognized and nurtured.     

(Re)producing Statelessness via Indirect Gender Discrimination: Descendants of Haitian Migrants in the Dominican Republic

Gender discrimination as a risk factor for statelessness has been understood as direct discrimination whereby legal frameworks prohibit mothers from conferring their nationality. This article discusses research findings from the Dominican Republic where indirect gender discrimination, evident in documentation and birth registration practices applicable to Haitian migrants and descendants, is causing matrilineal transmission of statelessness. Restricting access to citizenship has become a form of migration control, just as the creation of temporary, ad hoc status forms allows the state to sidestep responsibilities for migrant incorporation. If the links between gender and statelessness are not only legal, but also historical, structural, and procedural, then disrupting this cycle requires more than legal reform. For advocacy campaigns, such as UNHCR's #IBelong Campaign and the Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights, to be successful, they must adopt a broader interpretation of the relationship between gender and statelessness, based on CEDAW's substantive conception of gender equality.     

Ethnographic Cartographies: Social Movements,Alternative Media and the Spaces of Networks

Research on social movement networks has been defined by an emphasis on structural determinism and quantitative methodologies, and has often overlooked the spatial dimension of networking practices. This article argues that scholars have much to gain if (1) they move beyond the understanding of networks as organisational and communication structures, and analyse them as everyday social processes of human negotiation and construction, and (2) they pay attention to how networks between different organisations create multiple and overlapping spaces of action and meaning that define the everyday contexts of social movements. Drawing on ethnographic research within the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, this article explores the everyday dimension of political and communication networks. It shows that everyday networking practices are embedded in processes of identification and meaning construction, and are defined by a politics of inclusion and exclusion; introducing the concept of ethnographic cartography, it demonstrates that social movement networks are incorporated into everyday practices and narratives of place-making.     

Engendering Global Democracy

The inadequacies of hegemonic liberal democratic ideas and institutions have been exposed by feminist theorists focusing on the marginalisation of women and by global theorists examining the impact of globalisation. These theorists have developed two distinct sets of reconstructive strategies that, until very recently, have remained in ignorance of each other. Further, both feminist and global democratic schemes have been dogged by problems in terms of their theorisation of power, politics, agency and change. Recent feminist arguments about citizenship and governance go some way to bringing together concerns about gender inequality and globalisation, but they remain centred on states and the states-system as vehicles for democratic representation and participation. This article argues that a more radical reconstructive strategy can be derived from debates about the democratisation of feminism itself. Drawing on the responses of black and third world feminists to racism in the white-dominated feminist movement, and examining their influence on efforts to organise transnationally, the article points to innovative ways of thinking about power, politics, agency and change. Together these amount to a democratic framework which has applicability beyond feminist organising and which confronts the marginalisations of both gender and globalisation.     

Unsettling Spaces: Grassroots Responses to Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women During the Harper Government Years

Abstract

In Canada, Indigenous women and girls are 4.5 times more likely to become victims of homicide than other women. Over the last 30 years, more than 1000 women identified as First Nations, Inuit, or Métis were murdered in Canada, and more than 100 are still missing. However, the Canadian government has not acknowledged the economic, social and environmental colonialism that has allowed this violence to become naturalised. Focusing on activism around the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people in Canada during the years of the Conservative Harper Government, this article examines how these grassroots initiatives challenge Canadian politics, reclaim streets and liminal zones, and make space for sacred commemoration. Specifically, Twitter campaigns, memeing, the REDress Project, and Walking With Our Sisters are studied. Engaging with scholarship that analyses spaces of violence, this article, in turn, discusses how activism can disrupt violence by transforming physical, virtual and affective spaces.     

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.     

Where Is Gender in Agenda Setting?

Abstract

Why do some issues surge to the forefront of our attention while others languish in obscurity? Feminist scholars have explored the emergence of issues such as rape, battering, no-fault divorce, pay equity, and other women's issues on the public agenda. Despite a burgeoning body of literature on feminist social movements within history, political science, and sociology over the last twenty-five years, scholars of agenda setting, public policy, and American politics more generally have largely ignored this work. Not surprisingly, this research cannot be simply added in to the dominant agenda setting theoretical paradigm; rather, the findings disrupt conventional understandings. This essay critiques two canonical works, Kingdon's Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies(1995) and Baumgartner and Jones's Agendas and Instability in American Politics(1993), and discusses exemplary feminist research. It argues that if we want to know how norms change we need to broaden our scope beyond political elites and interest groups to include social movements and newly politicized grassroots activists. We must see change as produced by networks of insiders and outsiders rather than exclusively caused by elites in formal positions. Feminist scholarship also takes seriously the discursive and emotional aspects of politics rather than utilizing a narrow pluralist framework. Moreover, it recognizes the important yet neglected role of law as both an arena and a discourse.     

Knowledge co-production with social movement networks. Redefining grassroots politics,rethinking research

Drawing on ethnographic research with social movement networks in Spain, this article explores the challenges and possibilities of research collaboration. My project focused on the emerging logics and practices of collective action, the ongoing re-definition of grassroots politics. The engagement with social movements as reflexive communities – not simply objects to be studied, but subjects actively producing their own analysis and explanations, their own ‘knowledge-practices’ – deeply transformed the in-fieldwork encounter. Through a series of co-analysis workshops, designed and implemented together with the research subjects/collaborators, this research became an open-ended dialogue of reflexivities. The shift from working on social movements to working and thinking together with social movement activists as co-researchers produced new scholarly knowledge, advancing our understanding of contemporary collective action, while simultaneously making research useful for the activists. Moreover, locating epistemic and methodological questions at the centre of the project, I addressed salient debates in social science, exploring collaborative frameworks in order to problematize traditional forms of knowledge production and validation.     

Citizen Bodies: embodying citizens – a feminist analysis

The starting point for this paper is that bodies give substance to citizenship and that citizenship matters for bodies. However, the growing literatures on the body and on citizenship rarely 'speak to each other' in any straightforward sense. Feminist theory has made a significant contribution to both fields of thought,but once again the connections between these fields tend to be passing and underdeveloped. Feminist literature on citizenship – for example in discussions of participation – increasingly offers a critique of the model of the disembodied (supposedly universal) citizen as exclusionary and advocates taking bodies seriously (Lister; Yuval-Davis). Yet bodies appear in such discussions in quite limited ways and remain instrumentally conceived. On the other hand,the growing work on the body fromcontemporary feminist theorists has designated the body a political site par excellence (Grosz). Nevertheless, these writings are typically relatively abstract and philosophical, tend to perceive corporeal politics in circumscribed ways, and are positioned at a distance from political theorizing about implications for citizenship. We intend to consider how to flesh out the bodily element in feminist citizenship literature and how to interrogate the contextual sociality of the political in recent feminist theorizing of the body, in order to suggest ways of thinking about citizen bodies and related future directions for policy-making.     

The Globalization of Care

The purpose of this article is to theorize a concept of global citizenship that challenges feminized neo-colonialism. Migrant Filipina domestic workers are creating such a notion out of their experiences and struggles at a number of interconnected levels. We demonstrate the value of a relational approach to rights by showing how Kant’s right to hospitality is transformed as it is actualized within the context of feminized neo-colonial relations of care. We show how Kant’s right to hospitality can frame world citizenship as an anti-colonialist practice and how feminized neo-colonial relations of care in turn reshape this right and the practice of world citizenship. Our overall argument is that in order to dismantle feminized neo-colonial relations of care, world citizenship must be embedded in a multi-layered notion of citizenship.

Our argument differs from Kant’s notion of citizenship because his notion is genderbiased, since servants and women have world citizenship, but are excluded from state citizenship. Our aim is not merely to add women to state citizenship, but to show how the incorporation of migrant domestic workers requires a different multi-layered notion of citizenship that reaches from the household to the global. The case of migrant domestic workers illustrates how the pressing of rights brings paid care

workers and inevitably the issue of care into public discourse and policy. Migrant workers show how the global interdependence of care, because it is negotiated by states, is ripe for a feminist global politics of care.     

On Sabır and Agency

This article focuses on the pious practice of sab?r (patience) within the context of the weaving neighborhoods in Konya, Turkey. Through an ethnographic analysis of the everyday politics of the practice of sab?r, which is central to labor relations, this article adds to and complicates feminist analyses of labor politics and the economy by highlighting the interconnected nature of ethical religious practice and labor politics. Additionally, I argue for the need to go beyond the question of whether women have or lack agency as subjects in feminist analyses of labor politics and relationships, and instead point out the need for the empirical examination of specific, contextually-bound practical conditions through and within which women cultivate various forms of ethical action and subjectivities. In pointing out the importance of a project that analyzes operations of power with a keen awareness of context, this essay presents an ethnographically grounded discussion of pious practice within the context of Konya's weaving neighborhoods, underscoring the effects of the coexistence of exploitation and empowerment on the construction of women weavers’ selfhoods.     

Renewable energy transition under multiple colonialisms: passive revolution,fascism redux and utopian praxes

ABSTRACT

This essay outlines intermedia theory’s contribution to the emerging multiple colonialisms framework and argues that a socio-ecological reproduction feminist approach to the multiple colonialisms problematic is critically necessary for thinking through the contradictions of renewable energy transition. A multiple colonialisms framework needs to be a kind of utopian theorizing, I argue, just as any feminist renewable energy transition seeking to realize energy democracy and energy justice must create a utopian collective praxis that regenerates common-being and reproduces common wealth. Drawing on research on a network of petroleum-free subaltern feminist agricultural cooperatives in Medak, India, and on the creativity of their media practices, this article examines the social contradictions of energy democracy and just transition politics in a conjuncture defined by green passive revolution and fascism redux. The essay proposes the concepts of ‘subaltern counter-environments’ and ‘molecular media’ to decolonize energy democracy and just transition discourse and to articulate the importance of an autonomous domain of subaltern politics for a degrowth strategy of regenerative delinking through and against the state. Molecular media created by the Feminist Energy Futures research collaboration at the University of Alberta seek to regenerate the bias of time in our contemporary intermedia ecology where the bias of spectacularized and colonized space is otherwise dominant so that regenerative delinking strategies can endure social contradictions they embody through subaltern counter-environments they can create.     

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.     

The poverty of postnationalism<Emphasis Type="Italic">:</Emphasis> citizenship,immigration, and the new Europe

Over the last decade and a half, in a literature otherwise obsessed with citizenship in all its forms, a broad array of scholars has downplayed, criticized, and at times trivialized national citizenship. The assault on citizenship has had both an expansionary and a contractionary thrust. It is expansionary in that the language of citizenship is no longer linked with nationality, but rather protest politics. An earlier generation of social scientists would have described these actions as lobbying; they have now become “citizenship practice.” It is contractionary in that what one might have thought to be the core of citizenship; nationality, the possession of a nation-state’s passport is viewed as less and less relevant to citizenship. Scholars have dislodged both the substance of citizenship, what it is, and the location of citizenship, where it “happens,” from the nation-state and national citizenship. The article challenges this devaluation of citizenship and the nation-state on empirical, conceptual, and normative grounds. Empirically, scholars, whom I link together under the umbrella term “postnationalists,” have based their anti-statist arguments on evidence that, when subjected to further inspection, wholly fails to support the arguments advanced. Conceptually, postnationalists rely on categories that are confused and untenable, being that national variables are cited as evidence of transnational developments. Normatively, postnationalists have lost the emancipatory thrust that once gave concerns with citizenship real-world purchase.

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Transgressive Sexualities: Politics of Pleasure and Desire in Kamasutra: A Tale of Love and Fire

Utilizing feminist film theory, critical reviews, and viewer responses, this article examines visual representations of transgressive sexuality in two diasporic Indian women's films: Kamasutra: A Tale of Love by Mira Nair, and Fire by Deepa Mehta. The article draws from research on ancient discourses on sexuality in India to argue that contemporary constructions of women's sexuality in South Asia are not devoid of patriarchal and fundamentalist cultural politics of representation.     

Citizenship on the Margins: A Critique of Scholarship on Marginalized Women and Community Activism

This critical review essay addresses the underappreciation of citizenship inequalities in scholarship on marginalized women’s community activism in the United States. Although both students of citizenship and women’s grassroots resistance argue that neither citizenship nor lived experience is an individual‐level phenomenon or a public issue divorced from private troubles and that politics need not be formal and male, the two literatures do not break bread with each other. I contend that this lack of cross‐pollination owes to our fixation on the hallowed trifecta of race, class, gender intersectionality, but one that has elided the fact that the three have always constituted, and been constituted by, citizenship. Despite the fact that in recent decades immigrant women of color have taken the helm of community campaigns – such as in social reproduction (e.g. schools, churches, health), Environmental Justice, and immigration reform – few scholars mention citizenship and thus few analyze citizenship racism and its ties to other axes of inequality. I critique the existing scholarship by drawing on the contributions of the few works that analyze and intersect citizenship within women’s community resistance struggles. I then point to future research directions to underscore their importance in an age of more exclusionary and draconian citizenship paradigms.