Enslaved by one's body? Gender,citizenship and the ‘wrong body’ narrative

This paper uses the concepts of slavery, citizenship, the body and political subjectivity to interrogate how gendered bodies are produced, regulated and normalised. It explores the ‘wrong body’ claim within transsexual narratives to analyse how we can be enslaved by/to our body. The coercive force of embodied existence is demonstrated by examining how gender norms act on us through our bodies, thus identifying the body as a major conduit of power. It argues that the ‘wrong body’ claim must be understood as a discursive construction that is rendered possible by established gender norms and practices, which place heavy restrictions on the available actions of individuals. These norms and practices are linked to the normalising processes of becoming an acceptable citizen. It is argued that the enslaving effects of embodiment can be mitigated through constructing alternative narratives of gender based upon performativity and fluidity. Such alternative gender narratives are used to contest and disrupt the meaning of the acceptable citizen, thus opening up new claims for citizenship and new forms of embodied subjectivity. These narratives are then used to critique the medical community's understanding and treatment of transsexuality, which is itself a site of coercion and normalisation.     

Bodies in abolition: broken hearts and open wounds

This paper explores some of connections between bodies and slavery in the antislavery discourses of the late eighteenth and the early twenty-first centuries. It focuses on representations of violence and cruelty, and on the discourses of blood, sweat and tears in the eighteenth century to interrogate the bases of the humanitarianism discourses and what it meant to ‘compassionate’ the suffering of others. It argues that the connections between slavery, the body and citizenship lie in the socialization of sentience, the ‘complicated stings’ of social death and the idea of having a secure property in the person. Some of these connections were broken by the de-historicizing move towards focusing on the vulnerability of the slave and the power of the consumer. Using the slave sugar boycotts of 1791–1792 as a particular example, the paper argues that these more complicated stories are ‘leached out’ by discourses that treat slaves only as bodies, moralize consumption and rely on a neat split between public and private at the expense of a layered understanding of citizenship and empire, and of inequality, subordination, marginalization and social conflict. The article then traces some of the ways in which this emphasis on moralized consumption and disposable bodies resurfaces in current antislavery campaigns in the twenty-first century in the rhetoric of ethical consumption, risking the same ‘leaching out’ of political analysis, hollowing out our understanding of the link between slavery and citizenship.     

Let's go outside: bodies,prostitutes, slaves and worker citizens

In liberal thought, slavery is imagined as reducing the human being to nothing but a body, while the free and equal political subjects of modern liberal democracies are held to be abstract, universal and disembodied individuals. In theory, bodies are also unimportant in the wage labour exchange. Though traditional models of worker citizenship insist on state and employers' duty to protect the human worth of worker citizens, they also assume the disembodied, thing-like nature of commodified labour power. Because bodies are so obviously important in the exchange between prostitute and customer, sex work is difficult to reconcile with liberal fictions of disembodiment, and one strand of feminist debate on prostitution is preoccupied by the question of whether prostitutes are like slaves or wage labourers. Protagonists on both sides of this debate often reproduce liberal understandings of labour power as a ‘thing’ that can be detached from the person. And yet labour power is also a contested commodity, and wage labour has historically been likened to slavery by activists struggling against the commodification of labour power. This article argues that stepping outside liberal fictions of disembodiment and recognising the parallels between prostitution, wage labour and slavery would allow greater scope for establishing a common political subjectivity amongst prostitutes, other wage workers and all those who have an interest in halting and reversing the current global trend towards the commodification of everything. In this way, common political ground between prostitutes and other wage workers is more visible when we step outside liberal assumptions about embodiment, slavery, work and citizenship.     

Fundamentalism's encounters with citizenship: the Haredim in Israel

This paper centers on the challenge that fundamentalist groups – such as the Israeli ultra-Orthodox community (the Haredim) – pose for citizenship. It focuses on two issues: challenges centering on contribution to and sacrifice for the Israeli nation-state; and alternatives that fundamentalism poses to definitions of citizenship. Empirically, it is based on research in three arenas: service in the Israeli military; a voluntary organization aiding state agencies after terror attacks (ZAKA), and a charitable association offering help in health and social welfare (Yad Sarah). Two trends – challenges to concepts of security and the state, and the weakening of the state in the economic sphere and social services – have opened up spaces for fundamentalist groups to operate in civil society and complement the state. The Haredi community has gradually developed a new concept of inclusion that both fits the state-centred view of citizenship and their own fundamentalist perspective.     

Judith N. Shklar and American citizenship

It is claimed that although the European debate about social rights has concentrated on the formation of citizenship, American political and social theory has focused almost exclusively on civil liberties and individual rights. The specific characteristics of American history – the Declaration of Independence, slavery, the Civil War, the persistence of the race issue and the civil rights movement – explain this fundamental difference. This article explores some of the exceptions to this claim in the work of sociologists and political scientists such as W.E. DuBois, Talcott Parsons, Morris Janowitz, Rogers Smith and Michael Schudson, but the contrast between individual rights and social rights remains important. The American tradition is explored primarily through the work of Judith N. Shklar whose approach to cruelty, misfortune and inequality represented a major and innovative approach to what we might call the phenomenological foundation of justice and rights. She emphasised the importance of earning a living to the basic American understanding of dignity and responsibility. The article concludes by speculating that the credit crunch and more importantly the endemic character of unemployment and under-employment in the modern economy radically undermine access to rewarding employment for the majority of the population. These economic and social changes – ‘the financialization of capitalism’ – make the defence of social citizenship more rather than less important.     

Twenty-first century cyborgs: cosmetic surgery and aesthetic nationalism in Colombia

Abstract

In this article, I explore the institutional and symbolic construction of aesthetic nationalism in Colombia around a fetishization of women’s surgically exaggerated breasts and buttocks. While political scientists have focused almost exclusively on the internet and social media, other technological advancements have altered the relationships between state and society, public and private, and bodies and national inclusion. Combined with the transnational flow of ideas, goods, and people and a political economy that embraces cosmetic surgeries as a development model, this intersectional analysis suggests that aesthetic nationalism in Colombia has recentered the female body in the practice of nationalism, communicating political information, belonging, and power. Based on archival research, direct observation, and elite interviews, I argue that cosmetic interventions play a key role in conferring citizenship rights and defining the borders of the political community. This study contributes to our understanding of how intersectionality can help explain the ways in which technology shapes national body politics, disrupts conventional modes of political communication and representation, and positions the body at the center of contemporary citizenship practices.     

Educating for active compliance: discursive constructions in citizenship education

This article examines the discursive construction of ‘active citizenship’ within recent civics curriculum documents across three provinces in Canada. New secondary school civics curricula have emerged across liberal democratic states since the year 2000, presumably in response to the perception of youth as disengaged from political involvement. Many of the new curricula subsequently emphasize ‘active’ engagement within the polity. The central task of this paper is to better understand what such ‘active citizenship’ actually means, via the methodological tool of discourse analysis. Engaging a theoretical frame that incorporates Foucauldian governmentality theory and cultural theories of the role of the state in creating subjectivities, the paper ultimately argues that the ‘active citizen’ of contemporary civics curricula is, in fact, a deeply neoliberal subject. The article then draws on feminist theories of citizenship in order to assess the forms of exclusion that the curriculum documents inadvertently create, arguing that they ultimately participate in a long tradition of devaluing such elements of citizenship as relationality and emotional ties. We conclude that one of the fundamental goals of citizenship education – to expand access to citizenship participation for all – has failed.     

When the slaves go marching out: indignatio,invisible bodies,and political theory

In January 2010, hundreds of illegal migrants took to the streets of Rosarno in Italy for a violent protest against the acts of racism which they had routinely suffered. A collective subject, considered invisible, dared to revolt. These migrants are an anomaly in the social, legal, and political senses. Their revolt is an example of rebellions who constitute a litmus test for the discourse of citizenship; it reveals itself as a form of political subjectivity and highlights the corporeality of the conflict. Understanding the revolt also troubles the boundary between body discourses and traditional political theory. In this paper, I analyse the revolt through categories of contemporary political theory such as the ‘bare life’ of Giorgio Agamben, and the ‘disagreement’ of Jacques Rancière. I show how these categories only partially help to interpret the phenomenon of this uprising. However, the Spinozist concept of indignatio is a more useful intellectual tool to interpret and understand the phenomenon of the revolt of Rosarno.     

Citizenship,reproduction and the state: international marriage and human rights

The relationship between citizenship, marriage and family has often been overlooked in the social and political theory of citizenship. Intimate domestic life is associated with the private sphere, partly because reproduction itself is thought to depend on the private choices of individuals. While feminist theory has challenged this division between private and public – ‘the personal is political’ – the absence of any systematic thinking about familial relations, reproduction and citizenship is puzzling. Citizenship is a juridical status that confers political rights such as the right to carry a passport or to vote in elections. However, from a sociological point of view, we need to understand the social foundations and consequences of citizenship – however narrowly defined in legal and political terms. This article starts by noting the obvious point that the majority of us inherit citizenship at birth and in a sense we do not choose to be ‘Vietnamese’ or ‘Malaysian’ or ‘Japanese’ citizens. Although naturalisation is an important aspect of international migration and settlement, the majority of us are, as it were, born into citizenship. Therefore, the family is an important but often implicit facet of political identity and membership. In sociological language, citizenship looks like an ascribed rather than achieved status, and as a result becomes confused and infused with ethnicity. This inheritance of citizenship is odd given the fact that, at least in the West, there is a presumption, following the pronouncements of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, to think of citizenship in universal terms that are ethnically ‘blind’, but it is in fact closely connected with familial or private status. These complex relations within the nation-state are further complicated by the contemporary growth of transnational marriages and this article considers the problems of marriage, reproduction and citizenship in the context of global patterns of migration.     

Not life but the world is at stake: Hannah Arendt on citizenship in the age of the social

This article evaluates Hannah Arendt's contribution to ‘thinking citizenship’ in light of her controversial account of the modern rise of ‘the social’. It argues that Arendt's writing on the social is best understood not primarily as analytical and normative but as an historical argument about the effect of capitalism and modern state administration on meaningful citizenship. This short piece analyses one important element of Arendt's story about the historical rise of the social: that it is a peculiar hybrid of polis and oikos, a scaled-up form of housekeeping, and its threat to the public, political world.     

Immigrant protest: an introduction

The last decade has witnessed an explosion of ‘immigrant protests’, political mobilizations by irregular migrants and pro-migrant activists. This special issue on ‘immigrant protest’ has emerged in response to this rise in the visibility of immigrant protests, and its central aim is to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on migrant resistance movements and to consider the implications of these struggles for critical understandings of citizenship. This introduction maps out some of the central issues and themes emerging from the contributions to this issue, exploring the tensions between integrationist and autonomous approaches and theories of migrant activism and resistance and between migrant and activist strategies of invisibility and visibility. By bringing immigrant protests to the heart of debates about citizenship, we hope to further extend discussions about the limits and the possibilities of citizenship as the material and conceptual horizon of critical social analysis and political participation and practice today.     

Established and emergent political subjectivities in circular human geographies: transnational Arab activists

In this paper, we argue that Arab transnational citizenship mobilization can be configured through ‘geographies of circularity’ (e.g. bridging multiple locales, encircling the state, transversally stirring political subjectivities, and in the full-circle return of identity). Circularity helps ground and highlight the character and significance of transnational political and social activism, and the transfer of communications, skills, behaviors, organizational forms, tools, and projects (political technologies’) for citizenship. Based on the networks initiated by the Arab revolts, we argue that Arab émigrés, workers, and students – framed here as Arab transnationals – traverse and embody these geographies of circularity and leverage connectivity to mobilize citizenship claims and remit/ bridge/diffuse/export/import important progressive ideas and values locally in the western world and into the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.     

Assessing models of citizenship in the EU: the idea of responsive citizenship

There is an interesting debate about democracy and citizenship in the EU. Views diverge about the features of democratic deficits currently facing the EU and accordingly, about the scope for Union citizenship. The paper suggests an analytical distinction between asymmetric and symmetric normative models of dual – national and Union – citizenship. Moreover, it proposes an alternative model of dual citizenship that puts emphasis on the responsiveness of citizens vis-à-vis phenomena that undermine democratic governance and the claim for equal respect and concern. One of the main ideas of responsive citizenship is that effective democratic control should complement procedural legitimacy in the EU as a means to prevent phenomena of political domination and guardianship. This is possible through the combination of competences ascribed on citizens through national and Community legislation vis-à-vis national and Union executive bodies.     

‘But this is a park’! The paradox of public space in a Buenos Aires ‘no man's land’

Drawing upon qualitative fieldwork, this paper analyzes the occupation of an abandoned park in the south of Buenos Aires by the city's urban poor, delineating the implications of this incident for notions of citizenship in the context of deeply fragmented social rights. While public space has historically been understood as an expression of the universality of rights bearing membership in a political community, I show how this universalism became the object of struggle during a conflict over the park between the local middle class and squatters, many of which were of immigrant origin. The discourses mobilized by various social groups blurred the distinction between citizenship as a set of legal–formal rights versus a project of normative inclusion. While public space is juridically constructed as universal, particularistic claims to these spaces are imbued with increased legitimacy in a context in which social rights – conceived as a set of provisions guaranteed by the state under a regime of liberal citizenship – are unrealizable. By claiming this space for particularistic uses, squatters drew attention to the contradictions embedded in public space's democratic pretensions in a setting in which putatively universal rights are ignored by the state.     

Between ballots and bullets: elections and citizenship in and beyond the nation-state

This article approaches electoral acts and performances as central sites for the negotiation of citizenship relations. I argue that, in order to understand how these relationships are shaped, we must attend to governmental actors beyond the nation-state, from trade unions to criminal organizations. Focusing on the case of Jamaica, I show how non-state actors have come to play a central role in hybrid forms of governance, shaping citizens' allegiances to multiple, overlapping political communities. How are campaigning and voting affected by such multiple allegiances? What new understandings of citizenship can we develop if we take the role of non-state actors in the electoral process seriously? I suggest that we should study elections as a site where citizenship – understood here in its broad sense of membership of a political community – can develop both within and beyond the nation-state.     

Is Trafficking Slavery? Anti-Slavery International in the Twenty-first Century

Why was Anti-Slavery International (ASI) so effective at changing norms slavery and even mobilizing the support that ended the transatlantic slave trade at the end of the nineteenth century, and why has that success not continued on into subsequent eras? This article claims that ASI's organizational structure is the key to understanding why its accomplishments in earlier eras have yet to be replicated, and why today it struggles to make modern forms of slavery, such as human trafficking, salient political issues. Organizational structure is defined by how an NGO distributes power over agenda-setting (proposal and enforcement power) and its implementation. Those NGOs that centralize agenda-setting and decentralize the implementation of that agenda will be most effective at changing international norms. This paper demonstrates the tractability of that claim with a comparative analysis of ASI past and present to show that changes in organizational structure have led to differences in their effect on international norms, in spite of the fact that slavery in its modern forms persists as a political and social problem.     

‘Living Rights’, rights claims,performative citizenship and young people – the right to vote in the Scottish independence referendum

This paper examines the rights claims-making that young people engaged in during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum when the right to vote was extended to 16- and 17-year-olds for the first time in the UK. Understanding citizenship and rights claims-making as performative, we draw on the novel idea of ‘living rights’ to explore how young people ‘shape what these rights are – and become – in the social world’. They are co-existent and situated within the everyday lives of young people, and transcend the traditional idea that rights are merely those that are enshrined in domestic and/or international law. We explore the complex and contested nature of rights claims that were made by young people as ‘active citizens’ in the lead up to the referendum to illustrate how the rights claims-making by young people is bound up with the performativity of citizenship that entails identity construction, political subjectivity (that challenges adult-centric approaches) and social justice.     

The citizen of empire

In this paper, the authors imagine a Citizen of Empire. This is a conceptualization of global citizenship as it might appear in Hardt and Negri's global social order of Empire. The article draws on Hardt and Negri's Empire as the model of global society to imagine what citizenship might look like on a global scale. Hardt and Negri's conceptualization of Empire offers a palette of new and emerging social relationships from which a vibrant conceptualization of citizen and citizenship can be imagined and new democratic politics practiced. First, the authors examine the concept of Empire to unearth foundational concepts upon which a notion of Citizen of Empire can be built. Second, the authors imagine a citizen who ‘calls Empire into being' rather than participating in the ready-made political, cultural, and economic institutions of the nation-state. Without institutional support, citizenship in Empire must be highly generative and creative, and it will operate on a virtual and poetic terrain by enacting mechanisms of deterritorialization, networking, and communication.     

On the promise and perils of citizenship: heuristic concepts,Zimbabwean example

Increasingly, struggles in the name of citizenship inspire and catch the imagination and support of individuals and groups found in a variety of locales within a nation as well as transnational spaces. At the same time, their consequences may be quite different from the assumptions and dreams of those involved in perpetuating and imagining these struggles. To analyse how new social citizenship claims can embolden and channel struggles in particular directions with varied results – the promise and perils of citizenship more broadly – I suggest that one should pay attention to the promulgators of such visions of citizenship, the techniques of promoting their claims and the cultural politics and political economies of belonging in the locales of mobilization. Drawing on an ethnographic example of a farm labour struggle in the late 1990s in Zimbabwe, I explore the importance of attending to wider shifts in the political importance of citizenship as well as its entanglement in particular localities. Through examining how farm workers are situated through such struggles, I show the promise and limits of citizenship in addressing social justice concerns of a group historically marginalized through racialized, classed and gendered processes.     

Empathetic trappings: Revisiting the nineteenth century in Octavia Butler's Kindred

Octavia Butler's 1979 novel, Kindred, is a postmodern slave narrative that redefines the previous literary constructions of slavery in the United States. Through its rejection of the nineteenth century slave narrative and sentimental novel, Kindred highlights the main problem with nineteenth century narrative empathy: Forging an intimate identification between reader and character to enact empathy is founded through the representation of bodies in pain. In place of this identification tactic, Kindred reveals a new critical apparatus, essential for a mobilization of empathy centered on understanding both history and the process of historical recuperation. This investigation of empathy sheds light on the problematic construction of the early liberal human rights model across the Americas, a model centered on promoting identification with the suffering other.