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INTRODUCTION
Gender, Citizenship
and Subjectivity:
Some Historical and
Theoretical Considerations
Kathleen Canning and Sonya O. Rose
Just a few years ago the concept of class, and its inflections by
race, ethnicity, and gender, formed the focal point of debate across
the humanities and social science disciplines. Since the mid 1990s,
citizenship has gained a new salience, propelled in part by the political
transformations of relations within and between those zones once
termed the first, second and third world. Feminist scholars have taken
a particular interest in the historical inception as well as current prac-
tices of citizenship across the globe. One of the most porous concepts
in contemporary academic parlance, citizenship can be understood
as a political status assigned to individuals by states, as a relation of
belonging to specific communities, or as a set of social practices that
define the relationships between peoples and states and among peoples
within communities.1 Citizenship, according to sociologist Margaret
Somers, is an ‘instituted process’ by which the social practices of
peoples in particular historical settings engender citizenship rights
through their ‘interactions with institutions, ideals and rules of legal
power’.2 In recent years citizenship has also signified either one or
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At issue here is the designation of ‘the people’, the ‘we’, that master
category of group identity that we have understood in the modern
era as ‘the nation’, ‘our nation’. The practices of inclusion and exclus-
ion, which stem from what Smith calls ‘ascriptive civic myths’, were
crucial to the project of forming and maintaining a sense of common
political identity. Thus, citizenship, as Rogers Brubaker has argued, is
a powerful instrument of ‘social closure’.14
Having uncovered the ideologies and exclusions of gender at the
heart of civil society and liberal democracy, feminist scholars have
more recently sought to render citizenship a useful category of social
analysis. They have embraced the dualities, contingencies and contra-
dictions encompassed in the concept of citizenship, which render it
‘a site of intense struggle’, both theoretical and political.15 As Ruth
Lister has shown, conceiving of citizenship as both (rather than either)
status and practice provides a useful framework for examining the
gender differences that are intrinsic to citizenship. Lister argues that
women who have the status of citizen may not always be able to ‘fulfill
the full potential of that status’ by practising or acting as citizens.
Her point is to underscore that women whose political participation
as citizens is constrained by domestic or caring responsibilities be
counted as citizens politically and historically. The approach taken
by Pnina Werbner and Nira Yuval-Davis, who understand citizenship
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While many of the essays in this volume probe the changing meanings
of private and public over time, they also offer powerful evidence of
the impossibility of establishing a meaningful boundary between the
two. In this sense our notion of citizenship as subjectivity seeks to link
collective or public prescriptions and invocations of citizenship, to the
interior, individualised meanings and experiences of citizenship.
Pnina Werbner and Nira Yuval-Davis have also analysed citizenship
in terms of subjectivity, emphasising the ‘aspirational politics’ of
citizenship, which ‘raises its eyes towards the future, to common
destinies’, thus forming a ‘politics of desire’ that linked rather than
divided public and private concerns. Illustrative is Laura Mayhall’s
contention in her essay that both John Stuart Mill and Giuseppe
Mazzini analysed the ‘private realm of family life’ as ‘embedded in the
heart of public life’. Mayhall stresses how reading Mill and Mazzini
in dialogue provided suffragists with a vision of active resistance
against their exclusion from the political arena, and enabled them to
connect family to the realm of the political. She asserts that both Mill
and Mazzini deployed the analogy of slavery to insist that women’s
oppression ‘should not remain a relationship embedded within the
private realm, but should be a matter of concern within the public’.
Two decades of feminist scholarship have made clear that western
representations generally equated women and domesticity and under-
stood femininity as characterised by partiality and emotion.26 Hence
women’s issues, raised in the French Revolution, the democratic
transition in Spain, or amidst the reform of empires, were generally
defined as particularistic or private. Carol Harrison’s study of ‘Citizens
and Scientists’ argues for the significance of science and scientific
societies in the mapping of public and private in the wake of the French
Revolution. Scientific societies endowed men with the capacity for
citizenship in the sense of imparting to them certain citizenly qualities,
like rationality, expertise, and public spirit, performed in the public
sphere of the salons, while banishing women from the domains of
science and citizenship. In Harrison’s view ‘preserving the link between
science and civic capacity’ meant ‘maintaining the masculinity of
both. They were to remain closed to women by nature, not merely by
social custom’. During the mid- and late nineteenth century, social
reformers and intellectuals mobilised science to explain that women
could be neither citizens nor scientists. Yet Harrison also emphasises
that the ‘links among science, citizenship and masculinity’ were
unstable and thus ‘refused to stay put in the masculine camp’. By the
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public debate and scrutiny. Tanika Sarkar shows the political centrality
of the domestic, a space claimed by Indian nationalists to be outside
the purview of the colonial state, that became a battleground in
the struggle for women’s immunities and entitlements. Marriage,
intermarriage (Studer) and ‘the reproductive potential of citizens’
(Camiscioli) shaped discourses and legal definitions of citizenship in
interwar France and Switzerland. At stake in both cases were the
reciprocal duties of nation and female citizens: the loss of nationality
that occurred when Swiss women married foreigners meant that the
nation, or their home communities, no longer had to provide for them
in times of crisis. Brigitte Studer explores the issue of the relationship
between marriage rules and citizenship in twentieth-century Switzer-
land, a relationship that Nancy Cott and Linda Kerber have examined
for the United States.27 Women who married non-Swiss nationals
lost their Swiss citizenship, a practice legally codified in 1941 and not
totally eliminated until 1992.28 Studer’s analysis of the debates among
jurists from the 1930s reveals that the control of women’s bodies was
central to their support for the exclusion. Women, it was presumed,
were only weakly attached to the nation, and would transfer their
loyalties to the homelands of their non-Swiss husbands. This vision
underscored the idea that there was a ‘natural’ gender hierarchy. Studer
argues that women were ‘borderline’ citizens, occupying a contingent
and conditional place within the nation-state. As Nancy Cott has put
it, ‘formal inclusion … is never as decisive and determinative as formal
exclusion’.29
Elisa Camiscioli places race and gender at the centre of her inquiry
into the changing meanings of citizenship in interwar France. In the
aftermath of the First World War, she argues, French women were
called upon as ‘social citizens’ to relinquish the purported economic
and sexual independence of the postwar period in order to restore the
nation. In the pronatalists’ vision, immigration offered one solution
for the French ‘demographic crisis’. They hoped to import men who
were believed to be readily assimilable to serve in the labour force and
as husbands of French wives and fathers of their children. Pronatalists
would not encourage immigration of men from the French African
and Asian colonies, but rather those from European countries with
traditionally high birth rates – Italy, Spain and Poland – men who
could serve not only as workers and husbands, but as fathers who
would produce white children. Race and gender therefore determined
the perception of their ‘assimilability’. The two essays by Studer and
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Notes
The authors would like to thank editiorial assistant Meghan Hays for her creative assistance in
preparing this Special Issue for publication.
1. On the dual nature of citizenship as a status and a practice, see Ruth Lister, ‘Citizenship:
Towards a Feminist Synthesis’, in Citizenship: Pushing the Boundaries, ed. Pnina Werbner
and Nira Yuval-Davis, special issue of Feminist Review, 57 (1997), pp. 29–33, and Bryan
S. Turner, ‘Contemporary Problems in the Theory of Citizenship’, in Citizenship and
Social Theory, ed. Bryan S. Turner (Sage Publications, London, Newbury Park and New
Delhi, 1993), pp. 2–3.
2. Margaret R. Somers, ‘Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere, Law, Community
and Political Culture in the Transition to Democracy’, American Sociological Review, 58
(1993), pp. 589, 610–11.
3. T. H. Marshall and Tom Bottomore, Citizenship and Social Class (Pluto Press, London
and Concord, MA, 1992).
4. See, for example, Sylvia Walby, ‘Is Citizenship Gendered?’ Sociology, 28 (1994), pp. 379–95,
and Linda Gordon (ed.), Women, the State and Welfare (University of Wisconsin Press,
Madison, 1994), p. 18.
5. Pnina Werbner and Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘Introduction: Women and the New Discourse of
Citizenship’, in Women, Citizenship and Difference, ed. Pnina Werbner and Nira Yuval-
Davis (Zed Books, London and New York, 1999), p. 2.
6. See, for example, Jacqueline Bhabha, ‘Embodied Rights: Gender Persecution, State
Sovereignty and Refugees’, and Jan Jindy Pettmann, ‘Globalisation and the Gendered
Politics of Citizenship’, in Werbner and Yuval-Davis, Women, Citizenship and Difference,
pp. 178–91, 207–20.
7. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American
Citizenship (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, forthcoming spring 2002), ch. 2:
‘Citizenship’, ms. pp. 11–28.
8. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1988),
and Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminist and Political Theory
(Polity Press, London, 1989). On Pateman’s influence, see Birte Siim, Gender and
Citizenship: Politics and Agency in France, Britain and Denmark (Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge and New York, 2000), pp. 1, 31.
9. See also Zillah Eisenstein, The Female Body and the Law (University of California Press,
Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989); Iris Marion Young, ‘Impartiality and the Civic Public’,
in Feminism as Critique: Essays on the Politics of Gender in Late-Capitalist Societies, ed.
Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Polity, Cambridge, 1987); and Anne Phillips,
Engendering Democracy (Polity in association with Blackwell, Cambridge UK, 1991).
10. Carole Pateman, ‘The Fraternal Social Contract’, in Civil Society and the State: New Euro-
pean Perspectives, ed. John Keane (Verso, London and New York, 1988), pp. 101–27.
11. Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal
Thought (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1999), p. 65.
12. Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Multiculturalism: Examining the
‘Politics of Recognition’, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1994),
pp. 25–74.
13. Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (Yale
University Press, New Haven and London, 1997), pp. 30–1.
14. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Harvard Uni-
versity Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1992), ch. 1, ‘Citizenship as Social Closure’,
pp. 21–34.
15. Werbner and Yuval-Davis, ‘Introduction: Women and the New Discourse of Citizenship’,
p. 2. See also Citizenship, special issue of the Austrian journal L’Homme: Zeitschrift für
Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft, 10 (1999), ed. Erna Appelt.
16. Werbner and Yuval-Davis, ‘Women and the New Discourse of Citizenship’, p. 4.
17. Nick Mansfield, Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway (New York
University Press, New York, 2000), pp. 3–4.
18. Mansfield, Subjectivity, pp. 3–4.
19. Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities. A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920
(Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1991), pp. 8–9.
20. Nancy Cott, ‘Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States, 1830–1934’,
American Historical Review, 103 (1998), p. 1440.
21. Gagnier, Subjectivities, pp. 8–10.
22. Aihwa Ong, ‘Cultural Citizenship as Subject Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and
Cultural Boundaries in the United States’, in Race, Identity, and Citizenship: A Reader,
ed. Rudolfo D. Torres, et al. (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1999),
p. 262. See also her Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (University
of North Carolina Press, Durham NC and London, 1999).
23. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizen-
ship (University of North Carolina Press, Durham NC and London, 1997), p. 10.
24. Antoinette Burton, The Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial
Culture, 1865–1915 (University of North Carolina Press, Durham NC and London,
1995), and Jane Rendall, ‘The Citizenship of Women and the Reform Act of 1867’,
in Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867,
ed. Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall (Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge UK and New York, 2000), pp. 119–78.
25. Werbner and Yuval-Davis, ‘Women and the New Discourse of Citizenship’, p. 12. See also
Tanika Sarkar’s brief discussion of Nancy Fraser’s views on this issue in her essay in this
volume.
26. See, for example, Joan B. Landes, ‘The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Recon-
sideration’ and Iris Marion Young, ‘Impartiality and the Civic Public: Some Implications
of Feminist Critiques of Moral and Political Theory’, in Feminism, the Public and the
Private, ed. Joan B. Landes (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1998),
pp. 135–63, 421–47.
27. See Cott, ‘Marriage and Women’s Citizenship’, and Public Vows: A History of Marriage
and the Nation (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000); and Linda K. Kerber,
No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (Hill and
Wang, New York, 1998).
28. In the US this was the case until 1934; in the UK, until 1948.
29. Cott, ‘Marriage and Women’s Citizenship’, p. 1473.
30. Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’.
31. Both Laura Mayhall and Tanika Sarkar make this point and use the term ‘vaulting’ in
reference to crossing the public/private divide.