Beyond Citizenship?

Feminism and the Transformation of Belonging

S. Roseneil, S. Roseneil

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137311351
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Beyond Citizenship? Feminism and the Transformation of Belonging pushes debates about citizenship and feminist politics in new directions, challenging us to think 'beyond citizenship', and to engage in feminist re-theorizations of the experience and politics of belonging.

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Beyond Citizenship? Feminism and the Transformation of Belonging

Sasha Roseneil

Beyonding is a rhetoric people use when they have a desire not to be stuck.

(Berlant, 2011a:80)

Citizenship is a troubling proposition for feminism. Intensely luring in its expansive, inclusionary promise, yet inherently rejecting in its restrictive, exclusionary reality, it is an ambivalent object for those of us committed to radical projects of social transformation. Since the late eighteenth century, the prospect of full and equal citizenship has animated the individual and collective struggles of generations of feminists, whilst feminism has also always been a process of recognizing and exposing the limitations, restrictions and violence enacted by states through constructions of citizenship. This paradox has intensified in recent years, as the notion of citizenship has been mobilized and reworked by legions of feminist scholars. Operating as both an aspirational and an analytical concept, it has been used to articulate and theorize demands for social, political, economic and cultural change, and to critique the practices and experiences of marginalization, misrecognition and oppression that continue to condition lives, even as feminist citizenship claims are being partially realized.¹

The compulsive ‘can’t live with it, can’t live without it’ quality of feminism’s engagement with citizenship raises the question that any of us should ask of an attachment that has long seemed to offer so much, that tantalizes and teases, but that continues to fail to give us what we really want. Should we hang in there, trying to make the relationship work, or should we let go and move on?

Do the multiple and substantial successes of twentieth-century feminism in remaking citizenship for women – allowing access to formal politics, expanding social benefits and welfare, opening up economic participation and the possibility of financial independence, granting new forms of self-determination in intimate life and transforming the legal and cultural regulation of sexuality, for instance – auger well for the future?² Does this suggest that citizenship is an inherently malleable formation, open to reconstruction by social movements? Is the concept reinvigorated for feminism by its re-theorization as multi-layered (Yuval-Davis, 1999) and multi-dimensional (Roseneil, Halsaa and Sümer, 2012), expanding it beyond the classic Marshallian concern with civil, political and social rights (Marshall, 1950) granted by the nation state, to attend to the local, to diversity and difference, and to the transnational, to include concern with access to adequate economic resources, and with equality, self-determination and recognition in intimate, sexual and embodied life?³ Does this mean that citizenship is an ideal worth fighting for, and a vital lens for the critical analysis of the contemporary human condition?

Or does the incompleteness of the victories of second-wave feminism actually mark the limits of what is possible under the auspices of ‘citizenship’? Do the lived realities of those who are still not caught in the warm embrace of a full and equal citizenship – the disabled, the dependent, members of minoritized, racialized and sexually excluded groups, denizens and illegal aliens, the poor and precariously positioned, gender non-conformists and many others – not point to the fundamental flaws in citizenship as a feminist objective, tied as it is to post-Enlightenment liberal individualism and to the Westphalian nation-state form?⁴ Can the interdependence and fundamental relationality of human existence ever be recognized and supported when citizenship adheres to the individual? Can difference and singularity really thrive under the universalistic intentions of citizenship? Can citizenship transcend the gendered dichotomies on which it has historically rested: between public and private, reason and emotion, the cognitive and the embodied? Is investment in state-centred solutions to complex, deeply embedded psycho-socio-economic problems not a vain hope? Might feminism’s relation to citizenship be one of ‘cruel optimism’, in which our desire for citizenship is ‘actually an obstacle to [our] flourishing’, impeding rather than facilitating our aims (Berlant, 2011b:1)? Should we seek a different language to express our desires to belong, and alternative means to enact our yearnings for equality, justice and reciprocity? How might we think beyond citizenship?

These questions, which animate this book, have acquired a new urgency as the landscape of citizenship and belonging undergoes radical change in the early twenty-first century. In a globalizing world, in which the intensification of migration and mobility meets the securitization of borders and the emergence of new racisms, fundamentalisms and ethnic conflicts, and the largely unfettered operations of capital produce ever great inequalities within and between nation states, the role of states and nationally bounded social formations in remedying injustice and grounding belonging is increasingly problematized.

But these questions also have a powerful personal resonance for me, because they encapsulate the tensions that I have long felt around the concept of citizenship. My early feminist learning had come from involvement in anarcha-feminist activism, at Greenham Common, and in anti-nuclear, animal rights and environmental non-violent direct action groups. From Emma Goldman (1972), Virginia Woolf (1938/1993), Barbara Deming (Deming and Meyerding, 1984) and Audre Lorde (1984), amongst others, I had come to understand nations and states as patriarchal, racist, military-industrial formations, which could not be dismantled using ‘the master’s tools’ (Lorde, 1984). If being a citizen meant belonging to the state, or to society as presently constituted, then citizenship could hardly be a desirable goal. Later on, in the late 1990s, as citizenship re-entered social science research agendas with a vengeance and was taken up by feminist and lesbian and gay scholars for critical interrogation and repurposing, I was concerned about the fate of the excessive, emotional, improper, queer positionalities within feminism, with the feminisms that do not ask nicely, that do not seek a seat at the table or recognition as respectable members of a moderately refigured social order. Having spent many years thinking and writing about the queer feminisms of the 1980s (Roseneil, 2000a), I was anxious that feminism’s deep-rooted, but rarely acknowledged affinity with anarchist critique, its scepticism about the state, its concern with autonomous self-organization and the creativity and energy that come from being outside established structures might be lost in the turn to citizenship.⁵

Yet as I was carrying out research into contemporary practices of intimacy and sexuality, I found myself gradually and inexorably drawn into feminist and queer conversations about citizenship.⁶ The move to develop Marshall’s understanding of citizenship as ‘full membership of a community’ (Marshall, 1950) – as not just rights, responsibilities and legal status, but as also concerned with subjective experiences of participation and belonging, in relation to both state and civil society (Lister, 2007; Lister et al., 2007; Abraham et al., 2010) – was an important one. It seemed to open up a way of thinking critically about intimacy and sexuality – analytically and aspirationally – that might take seriously both the constitutive and regulative power and the potentiality of social policy and law, and of culture and social relations.⁷ Moreover, debates about citizenship became unavoidable because so much was changing in the legal and policy landscape around intimacy and sexuality, as intimate and sexual outlaws were rapidly being reconstituted as citizens worthy of legal protection and, to a greater or less extent, being extended recognition as couples and parents, and as feminist demands around gender and sexual violence started to be taken seriously.

Then, lured by the possibility of designing a substantial research project on the impacts of second-wave feminism in Europe, I became involved in writing a proposal to the European Commission, responding to a call for research on ‘new forms of citizenship and cultural identities’.⁸ The European Union (EU) funding that we secured for FEMCIT – Gendered Citizenship in Multicultural Europe: The Impact of Contemporary Women’s Movements – enabled a group of over 40 researchers to carry out research across 13 countries, the scale and scope of which would have been impossible otherwise.⁹ Whilst we structured the project around the investigation of six interrelated ‘dimensions of citizenship’ (political, social, economic, multicultural, bodily and intimate), we continued, throughout our work together, to debate the usefulness of our core concept. Indeed we found that the concept has little emic purchase within women’s movements (Nyhagen Predelli, Halsaa and Thun, 2012), and that its rather limited use by activists has been largely dictated by the citizenship framing of government funding (kennedy-macfoy, 2012). These findings, and the intellectual rewards and sociable pleasures of EU-funded feminist collaboration, served to intensify my concern about the spectre of incorporation through ‘citizenship’ that haunts contemporary feminism, and posed a further set of questions with which this book is concerned.

Have we been seduced into adopting the discourse of contemporary governmentality, the increasingly hegemonic language of legislators and policy makers for whom ‘citizenship’ – promoted and assessed through tests, and ‘activated’ amongst the failing and feckless by a host of social policies – has become the favoured solution to many of the most pressing problems that Europe is thought to face?¹⁰ If ‘citizenship’ is simultaneously supposed to deal with the ‘democratic deficit’ within the EU, the challenges of ‘integration’ and ‘cohesion’ posed by migration and ethnic and religious diversity, and to ensure the triumph of communitarianism in the face of the ‘Austerity State’s’ (Berlant, 2011c) assault on welfare, can it really also work for feminism?¹¹ Does feminism’s recent enthrallment with citizenship represent a defeat for the utopian, creative imagining of what belonging might mean beyond the framework of the increasingly (il)liberal nation state?¹² Or is it rather a coming-to-terms with the importance, in the struggle to make lives liveable, of defending and extending the ameliorative strategies of redistributive social policy, the legal recognition of marginalized groups, and the protection against discrimination and exploitation that have been, and might in future be, formulated under the designation ‘citizenship’? Might feminist preoccupation with citizenship also constitute an acknowledgement of the psychosocial reality that belonging to and within nation states matters, not just for the rights it grants, but because people wish passionately to belong to a community, a large group, beyond the intimate, immediate and local, and that citizenship offers a way of conceiving and creating attachments to the collective.¹³ Whilst the (many and varied) standpoints of outsiders have generated much of the vitality of recent critical thinking – with Irit Rogoff claiming that ‘To “unbelong” and to “not be at home” is the very condition of critical theoretical activity’ (Rogoff, 2000:18) – might we need now to risk taking seriously both the desire and need to belong and the reality that feminism and feminists are, in many contexts, no longer straightforwardly ‘outside’?¹⁴ Perhaps, then, we might hold on to, and indeed deepen, our criticality about citizenship by acknowledging our entanglement and investment in the attachments it offers, as well as the power relations it creates.

The book

Starting from the premise that neither citizenship nor belonging are unitary, universal trans-historical phenomena, Beyond Citizenship? Feminism and the Transformation of Belonging recognizes that there are no simple answers to these thorny feminist questions. Whilst rooted in a critique of the exclusionary, oppressive, governmental aspects of citizenship, the book refuses to relinquish the concept, and insists on the importance of analysing its fissures and fragilities, its contradictions and complexities, its possibilities and potentials, through a range of feminist perspectives and a number of disciplines, including art practice, comparative literature, philosophy, political theory, psychosocial studies, social policy, socio-legal studies, sociology and transdisciplinary feminist theory. It works with a multi-dimensional understanding of what citizenship is and might be, with chapters that focus on its articulation through culture – in literature and art, and in politics – mainstream-democratic and oppositional-activist, that address sexual, embodied and intimate citizenship, cosmopolitan, global and nomadic citizenship, as well as citizenship’s affective politics and lived emotionality.

Contributors explore some of the specificities of citizenship and belonging in Argentina, Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Britain, France, Latvia, Pakistan and the United States, as well as being concerned more generally with Western societies. They address constructions and legacies of citizenship across a range of historical eras – from Sam McBean’s re-consideration of feminist engagements with Sophocles’ Antigone, and Tone Brekke’s discussion of feminist cosmopolitanism and citizenship discourse at the time of the French Revolution, to Karen Frostig’s grappling with the legacies of the Holocaust, Lynne Segal’s attention to the politics of the women’s liberation movement, Maria-Andreana Deiana’s critique of the Dayton Peace Agreement in the final years of the twentieth century, and Lynne Segal’s, Janet Newman’s, Davina Cooper’s, Leticia Sabsay’s and my own analyses of the current conjuncture. Contemporary and historical processes of globalization and transnational border-crossing, and their implications for citizenship and belonging, are of central importance in the chapters by Brekke, Segal, Frostig and myself. Economic transformation and processes of neo-liberalization are addressed in Segal’s and Shildrick’s chapters. The emergence of equality politics, human rights discourses and processes of sexual liberalization in the wake of the claims of women’s movements, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) movements and the disability movement are critically interrogated by Newman, Cooper, Shildrick, Deiana and Sabsay.

In Chapter 2, ‘Dragging Antigone: Feminist Re-visions of Citizenship’, Sam McBean offers a challenge to the very terms within which the book is framed, putting into question – as does Lauren Berlant’s epigraph for this chapter – an affective attachment to a temporal notion of ‘beyond’, and querying the futurity invoked by the book’s concern with ‘transformation’. Through Elizabeth Freeman’s (2010) notion of ‘temporal drag’, McBean considers how feminists – particularly Virginia Woolf, Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler – have been drawn back to Sophocles’ Antigone, a figure ‘from the past’, and a political outsider, to think about gender and citizenship, and the complexities of feminist engagements with the state. She argues that the feminist practice of ‘dragging Antigone’ may demonstrat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Beyond Citizenship? Feminism and the Transformation of Belonging
• 2. Dragging Antigone: Feminist Re-visions of Citizenship
• 3. ‘Citizen of the World’: Feminist Cosmopolitanism and Collective and Affective Languages of Citizenship in the 1790s
• 4. Reluctant Citizens: Between Incorporation and Resistance
• 5. ‘But We Didn’t Mean That’: Feminist Projects and Governmental Appropriations
• 6. Public Bodies: Conceptualising Active Citizenship and the Embodied State
• 7. Sexual Citizenship, Governance and Disability: From Foucault to Deleuze
• 8. Citizenship in the Twilight Zone? Sex Work, the Regulation of Belonging and Sexual Democratization in Argentina
• 9. Citizenship as (Not)Belonging? Contesting the Replication of Gendered and Ethnicised Exclusions in Post-Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina
• 10. Citizenship after Genocide: Materializing Memory through Art Activism
• 11. The Vicissitudes of Postcolonial Citizenship and Belonging in Late Liberalism
• Index