The emerging of "female citizen": The subject identity of modern Chinese women through literary practices

The construction of “citizen-state” relations in the intellectual world of modern China and the establishment of individual citizenship in political discourse have opened up a political and discourse sphere for modern women to strive for new identities, wherein some intellectually advanced women have managed to establish their individual identity as “female citizen” by carrying the debate on the relationship between women and the state with regard to their rights and responsibilities, and on the relationship between gender role and citizenship. Though the idea of “female citizen” was not provided with a political theory of practical significance, the subject identity of women, however, was repeatedly spoken about and strengthened in brand-new literary practices, resulting in a dynamic discourse of “female citizen”; in the meantime, disagreements concerning the concepts of “female rights,” “civil rights,” and “natural rights” have all helped create significant tension inside the related discourse sphere.     

美国建国初期女性慈善社团与白人女性公民身份的初步建构——以波士顿科班社为中心的考察

19世纪初期,受国内外局势的推动,女性慈善社团在美国大量涌现。成立于1811年的波士顿科班社就是这股浪潮的产物。以科班社为代表的女性慈善社团在美国白人女性公民身份的初步建构中起到了重要作用。女性慈善社团的日常运作为白人女性提供了扮演美国公民的机会与训练。在起草与签署社团章程、向立法机构请愿并以法人身份行使法律和经济权利、通过选举和表决来解决社团事务的过程中,白人女性确立起公民意识。此外,女性慈善社团开展的活动进一步为女性成员提供了以公民身份行动的平台。通过参与慈善活动,美国白人女性能够把经济优势转化为公共影响力,关注家庭以外的公共事务,进入公共领域。公民意识的确立与公民身份的践行,为日后美国白人女性追求完整公民身份奠定了基础。     

Welfare Warriors: Towards a Genealogy of the Soldier Citizen in Canada

Over the past few decades, new forms of citizenship have emerged in the context of a globalizing and urbanizing world. The government of citizens and economies, it is argued, is increasingly trans‐, supra‐, or sub‐national in scale, and characterized by the eclipse of Keynesian welfarism and rights‐based citizenship. Scholars have documented the emergence of targeted, risk‐based, and workfarist governmentalities and political economies at various spatial scales, and have even described emergent forms of citizenship as "post‐national". And yet, in many countries we are concurrently confronted with massive symbolic and fiscal reinvestment in national militaries, particularly in the welfare of personnel. Given this, and the longstanding relationships between the nation‐state and military service, it is curious that the soldier has hardly figured in recent discussions about citizenship. This paper provides a genealogy of the soldier‐citizen in Canada, from iconic national worker‐citizen in the post‐World War II period to its recent anxious positioning at the intersection of "domestic", entrepreneurial, workfarist citizenship, and the widespread re‐emergence of militarism and national security. It demonstrates that the military citizen has at key times been a template for innovations in social forms of national government, and argues that the soldier has been a crucial figure in their re‐engineering in recent years. Situated amidst transformations in work and worker‐citizenship, and at the intersections of political struggles in both the domestic and international spheres, the soldier provides a unique lens on questions of the national and the social. Through an engagement with the labour of social citizenship, and the war work that initiated many of its governing techniques, the military citizen emerges as a critical figure in the contemporary neoliberal nation.     

The re-emergence of wardship: Aboriginal Australians and the promise of citizenship

In this paper, I suggest that the category of ‘ward,’ a designation used for Aboriginal Australians in the 1950s and 1960s, has re-emerged in contemporary Northern Territory (NT) life. Wardship represents an in-between status, neither citizens nor non-citizens, but rather an anticipatory citizenship formation constructed by the Australian state. The ward is a not-yet citizen, and the deeds, acts, and discourses that define the ward's capacities to act as a political subject can maintain their anticipatory nature even as people ‘achieve’ formal citizenship. Wardship can be layered on top of citizen and non-citizen status alike. Rather than accounting for the grey areas between ‘citizen’ and ‘non-citizen,’ therefore, wards exist beyond this theoretical continuum, demanding a more nuanced accounting of political subjectivities and people's relationships to the state.I trace the emergence of the category ‘ward’ in the 1950s and 1960s in Australia and its re-emergence for Aboriginal Australians impacted by the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response legislation. The promise of citizenship offered by the status of ‘ward’ is built upon expectations about family life, economic activity, and appropriate behaviour. These assumptions underscore an implicit bargain between individuals and the state, that neoliberalised self-discipline will lead to both formal citizenship rights and a sense of belonging. Built-in impediments, however, ensure that this bargain is difficult, if not impossible, to fulfil.     

Retrieving the Partisan History of Australian Citizenship

Current debates on Australian citizenship overlook its partisan dimension. Until very recently, the term citizenship fitted more comfortably into nonlabour's discourse than into Labor's. Nonlabour's understanding of citizenship is embedded in Australia's constitutional framework. As well, in the first half of the century the term was as much moral as political, concerned not so much with the rights and entitlements which dominate contemporary understandings but with individuals' duties and obligations to their fellow citizens. For nonlabour, citizenship was linked to ideas of service and the national interest, and explicitly opposed to Labor's commitment to sectional, class-based interests. This conception of citizenship was realised in the meeting procedures of voluntary associations in which there was a clear line of implication from the government of the self through the government of the community to the government of the nation. The working man is not merely a working man, nor can all his interests be subsumed (classed) under the term Labour. The working man is and knows himself to be, the citizen of a great State. ( The Liberal 2 December 1912, 114)     

Defining Citizenship for a New Nation

A key part of any process of decolonisation is the need for the emerging nation to determine the rules for citizenship. In Papua New Guinea, what it meant to be a citizen was the first topic that the Constitutional Planning Committee considered when it set about its task to develop a ‘home grown’ constitution in late 1972. The process by which it first comprehended this matter and then involved thousands of Papua New Guineans in their villages, missions and schools in a territory-wide exercise in consultation forms the subject of this paper. The records of the discussions that took place between February and April of 1973 reveal much of how the criteria for membership of the national enterprise came to be established. This case study of defining citizenship in PNG demonstrates the intensive consultation of the local peoples on key issues in nation-building and reveals the high degree of Indigenous agency in the decolonisation process.     

Intimate citizenship? Rethinking the politics and experience of citizenship as emotional in Wales and Singapore

Conversations around, and conceptions of, citizenship have changed over time. Assumed initially as a mark of membership, of belonging to a political community (Marshall 1950), the essence of what it means to be a citizen and what the contractual ties of citizenship are have evolved over time. This evolution has been encouraged by processes of migration and increasing mobility. More recently, our ability to traverse geographical and political boundaries has meant that notions of borders and boundaries, of who belongs where and why, have also been subject to dramatic changes. This article investigates the impact of such mobility on the individual lived experience of migrant women who, as a group, have been traditionally excluded from more formal political arenas, and asks questions of what citizenship means for them. Though I do not contest the very political fact of citizenship as status, this article challenges the way in which the nature of this status is assumed or implied for all. This article therefore argues that citizenship itself is a much more fluid concept, incorporating the emotional and lived experience of individuals and that it is in these emotional accounts through which citizenship, and its extended rights and political capabilities, must be understood through a sense of everyday, grounded and personal politics.     

The right to be heard: Citizenship and language

In this paper we address the importance and contestation of language in terms of citizenship and the development of political communities by focusing on the example of a minority language – British Sign Language. Language is crucial to debates about citizenship and belonging because the State has to rely on language for its very functioning, indeed political practice itself is a form of communicative action. For individuals language is deeply implicated in their ability to claim and maintain their rights and in their affective connections with others and sense of identification. The paper therefore begins by identifying that Deaf people's legal entitlements (e.g. to vote) are an abstract form of citizenship because as sign language users they have difficulties understanding both political and wider civil institutions and practices, and so lack the cultural proficiencies necessary to exercise citizenship in a substantive sense. We then go onto consider citizenship in the broader sense of how groups are included or situated in the public sphere, and in doing so to consider the extent to which Deaf people might be understood to have a liveable place in an oral society. The final section examines how the sense of injustice which flows from Deaf people's experiences of marginalisation in the public realm means that they are developing alternative forms of political commitment predicated on non-state spaces of belonging – where they can live their language – at both local and transnational scales. The paper concludes by reflecting on the notion of differentiated citizenship and the implications of Deaf people's claims to language rights.     

American Red Cross posters and the cultural politics of motherhood in World War I

Scholars have long held that World War I markedly impacted women's participation in the public sphere as questions of appropriate wartime participation for women arose. Posters were an important tool for communicating notions of feminine citizenship and patriotism during the US involvement in the war. In this article, I explore the influence of the US involvement in World War I on social constructions of white femininity and citizenship through their portrayal in American Red Cross posters produced between 1914 and 1919. These posters offer a distinct visual documentation of the cultural shift in the portrayal of, and the insistence on, white women's – particularly nurses’ – responsibilities during wartime. I argue that the sentiments and language of the newly splintered women's movements were co-opted into the service of the war and were further emboldened with religious sentiments. American Red Cross posters called upon women to enact their presumed innate nurturing tendencies, and by extension, their feminine citizenship, at both the home and warfronts. In this way, the labor of the private sphere was drawn into the service of the war but without fully admitting women into the public sphere.     

Imagining female citizenship in the "New Spain": gendering the democratic transition, 1975-1978

This article analyses the contestation over female citizenship in Spain's transition to democracy in the mid 1970s. It posits that the transition opened up a discursive space for the construction of a new concept of female citizenship, which was filled with competing images of female citizens, from the Francoist housewife to the consumer activist to the feminist. Through a close reading of the democratic press, the article explores the contradictions and tensions involved in imagining a new female citizen for a democratic Spain. With a focus on the representation of feminist citizenship, the article argues that the central tension surrounding female citizenship was the contradiction between new modes of female participation, new sets of rights and a framework of meaning which could not make sense of these changes. As a result, there was no comfortable place for the female citizen in the emerging master narrative of the transition.     

Civic Education and Political Knowledge in Australia

As part of the renewed emphasis on national identity and citizenship, interest in civic education in Australia has increased. Although both Labor and Liberal national governments have been committed to introducing civic education, there is little research to show that the politically knowledgeable citizen is the more sophisticated and competent citizen. This paper uses survey data collected in 1996 to examine the extent of political knowledge in Australia and to analyse its consequences for political literacy, competence, and participation. The results show that the median citizen could answer two out of seven factual questions correctly, with women, the young and those with less education being more likely to provide incorrect answers. The relationship between knowledge and attitudes and behaviour shows that factual knowledge increases political literacy and, to a lesser extent, competence. However, knowledge has little effect on political participation, a major goal for civic education among politicians. Overall, the increased political knowledge that civic education creates is more effective in generating positive views of democratic institutions, and less effective in shaping political behaviour. The democratic citizen is expected to be well informed about political affairs to know what the issues are, what their history is, what the relevant facts are, what alternatives are proposed, what the party stands for, what the likely consequences are. (Berelson, Lazarsfeld and McPhee 1966, 308)     

New spaces of citizenship? Rethinking gendered participation and empowerment in South Africa

This paper draws on empirical research in South Africa to explore questions about the exclusionary nature of citizenship, the problems and possibilities of participatory citizenship and its potential reconceptualisation through the lens of gender. The paper examines some of the major debates and policies in South Africa around issues of citizenship, participation and gender and explores why the discursive accommodation of gender equity by the South African government is not fully realised in its attempts to construct substantive and participatory citizenship. It explores some of the emergent spaces of radical citizenship that marginalized groups and black women, in particular, are shaping in response. Findings suggest that whilst there are possibilities for creating alternative, more radical citizenship spaces, these can also be problematic and exclusionary. The paper draws on recent feminist writing to examine the possibilities for rethinking citizenship as an ethical, non-instrumental social status, distinct from both political participation and economic independence. This reframing of citizenship moves beyond notions of ‘impasse’ or ‘hollowness’, challenges the public/private distinction that still frames many debates about citizenship and considers the emancipatory potential of gendered subjectivity. The paper argues that citizenship is shaped by differing social, political and cultural contexts and this brings into sharp focus the problematic assumption of the universal applicability of western concepts and theories.     

Performative citizenship and the politics of scale: Local,national and global citizenships in Zimbabwe

This paper explores the interaction between different scales of governance and performative citizenship, understood as acts by citizens that claim new political rights and reshape the political arena. Performance allows citizens to creatively transform the meanings and functions of citizenship during struggles over rights. The paper focuses on a series of examples in Zimbabwe, which highlight the entanglement of different scales of citizenship and the ways that the acts of citizenship both challenge and sustain these relationships. This is examined through a framework that combines theories of performative citizenship with concepts from human geography that examine scales of governance. The argument draws out the implications of these dynamics in relation to conflicts over customary citizenship in rural Zimbabwe, the issue of dual citizenship among white Zimbabweans and the exercise of citizenship rights by non-Zimbabweans. It highlights both the ways in which citizens have harnessed the creative potential of acts of citizenship which address multiple scales, and the constraints that scalar hierarchies put on citizen action. The examples demonstrate that new forms of political rights can be produced across scales, but that opportunities for creative acts of citizenship are unevenly distributed due to these scalar hierarchies, which are produced by postcolonial legacies.     

Women’s public lives and sovereign arrangements in Karachi’s inner city

Women’s public lives in Pakistan are often presented through tropes of oppression and restricted mobility. While women do struggle with all kinds of limitations that curtail their movement in the public sphere, they also negotiate their way and find their place in the public realm through various means that remain understudied in this context. In this article I track women’s movements in public space in the historic quarters of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest and most populous city. What emerges in the study is that a key aspect of women’s movement through their neighbourhood is their membership in or attachment to various sovereign arrangements – political and religious, formal and informal – that seek to rule and govern the space of the quarter. These arrangements include political parties and groups, religious organizations and the shrines of Sufi saints. Ultimately I argue that women’s public lives are driven not so much by the assertion of an individualized citizenship as by an attachment to and association with collective arrangements that allow a participation in the making of political and religious imaginaries.     

The image of the city in modern literature

This article considers the meanings attached to refugeehood, repatriation and liberal citizenship in the twentieth century. Refugees are those who have been unjustly expelled from their political community. Their physical displacement is above all symbolic of a deeper political separation from the state and the citizenry. ‘Solving’ refugees’ exile is therefore not a question of halting refugees’ flight and reversing their movement, but requires political action restoring citizenship.

All three ‘durable solutions’ developed by the international community in the twentieth century – repatriation, resettlement and local integration – are intended to restore a refugee's access to citizenship, and through citizenship the protection and expression of their fundamental human rights. Yet repatriation poses particular challenges for liberal political thought. The logic of repatriation reinforces the organization of political space into bounded nation–state territories. However, it is the exclusionary consequences of national controls over political membership – and through this of access to citizenship rights – that prompt mass refugee flows. Can a framework for repatriation be developed which balances national state order and liberal citizenship rights?

This article argues that using the social contract model to consider the different obligations and pacts between citizens, societies and states can provide a theoretical framework through which the liberal idea of citizenship and national controls on membership can be reconciled.

Historical evidence suggests that the connections in practice between ideas of citizenship and repatriation have been far more complex. In particular, debate between Western liberal and Soviet authoritarian/collectivist understandings of the relationship between citizen and state played a key role in shaping the refugee protection regime that emerged after World War II and remains in place today. Repatriation – or more accurately liberal resistance to non-voluntary refugee repatriation – became an important tool of Cold War politics and retains an important value for states interested in projecting and reaffirming the primacy of liberal citizenship values. Yet the contradictions in post-Cold War operational use of repatriation to ‘solve’ displacement, and a growing reliance on ‘state-building’ exercises to validate refugees’ returns demonstrates that tension remains between national state interests and the universal distribution of liberal rights, as is particularly evident when considering Western donor states’ contemporary policies on refugees and asylum. For both intellectual and humanitarian reasons there is therefore an urgent need for the political theory underpinning refugee protection to be closely examined, in order that citizenship can be placed at the centre of refugees’ ‘solutions’.     

Dig for Victory! New histories of wartime gardening in Britain

Prompted by the curious fact that both progressive environmentalists and Conservative Party politicians have recently drawn on popular understandings of austerity associated with Britain’s wartime domestic gardening campaign, this article broadens the range of histories associated with Dig for Victory. It suggests firstly that far from simply encouraging self-sufficiency, the government conceptualised Dig for Victory as requiring the extension of order and control into the domestic sphere. Second, it shows how the ideal figure of a national citizen digging for victory elided differentiated gender and class experiences of gardening, and finally the article demonstrates that statistics of food production were more about fostering trust than picturing the realities of vegetable growing. By so doing the paper illuminates the particular ways in which present-day articulations of Dig for Victory’s history are partial and selective.     

Contesting Neoliberal Urbanism in Glasgow's Community Gardens: The Practice of DIY Citizenship

In this journal, it has been suggested that citizens practising community gardening “can become complicit in the construction of neoliberal hegemony”. Such hegemony is maintained, it is argued, through the day‐to‐day work of neoliberal citizen‐subjects, which “alleviates the state from service provision”. In this paper we acknowledge that community gardens are vulnerable to neoliberal cooptation. But, even where neoliberal practices are evidenced, such practices do not define or foreclose other socio‐political subjectivities at work in the gardens. We contend that community gardens in Glasgow cultivate collective practices that offer us a glimpse of what a progressively transformative polity can achieve. Enabled by an interlocking process of community and spatial production, this form of citizen participation encourages us to reconsider our relationships with one another, our environment and what constitutes effective political practice. Inspired by a range of writings on citizenship formation we term this “Do‐It‐Yourself” (DIY) Citizenship.     

Beyond the civic–ethnic dichotomy: investigating the structure of citizenship concepts across thirty‐three countries

ABSTRACT. The traditional distinction between civic and ethnic citizenship continues to dominate the study of citizenship concepts. In recent years, various authors have questioned the dichotomous character of these concepts. In this article, we empirically investigate the applicability of this dichotomy based on an analysis of International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) survey data across thirty‐three societies. The analysis demonstrates that this dichotomous structure can indeed be detected and therefore the theoretical dichotomy can be considered as empirically valid. While ethnic citizenship refers most strongly to having national ancestry, for civic citizenship the most important criterion seems to be to obey national laws. However, the ethnic concept of citizenship can also be defined in a negative manner: for ethnic citizenship, obeying the national laws is clearly not a sufficient condition. Further analysis also reveals that the measurement of both concepts is not equivalent cross‐nationally, so that findings on civic and ethnic citizenship are difficult to compare across societies.     

Public reason and private passion

Distinctions between ‘public’ and ‘private’ dimensions of human life have traditionally been associated with philosophical distinctions between Reason and other, supposedly lesser, mental traits, such as passions and desires. This paper examines the ways in which these associations have affected character ideals associated with citizenship and our understanding of sexual difference. It discusses, in particular, Hegel's idea, in The Phenomenology of Spirit, that female consciousness is constituted through the exclusion of women from the public domain, and relates it to earlier interconnections between the male‐female and public‐private distinctions in Rousseau, Hume and Kant.     

Refugees, repatriation and liberal citizenship

This article considers the meanings attached to refugeehood, repatriation and liberal citizenship in the twentieth century. Refugees are those who have been unjustly expelled from their political community. Their physical displacement is above all symbolic of a deeper political separation from the state and the citizenry. ‘Solving’ refugees’ exile is therefore not a question of halting refugees’ flight and reversing their movement, but requires political action restoring citizenship.All three ‘durable solutions’ developed by the international community in the twentieth century - repatriation, resettlement and local integration - are intended to restore a refugee's access to citizenship, and through citizenship the protection and expression of their fundamental human rights. Yet repatriation poses particular challenges for liberal political thought. The logic of repatriation reinforces the organization of political space into bounded nation-state territories. However, it is the exclusionary consequences of national controls over political membership - and through this of access to citizenship rights - that prompt mass refugee flows. Can a framework for repatriation be developed which balances national state order and liberal citizenship rights?This article argues that using the social contract model to consider the different obligations and pacts between citizens, societies and states can provide a theoretical framework through which the liberal idea of citizenship and national controls on membership can be reconciled.Historical evidence suggests that the connections in practice between ideas of citizenship and repatriation have been far more complex. In particular, debate between Western liberal and Soviet authoritarian/collectivist understandings of the relationship between citizen and state played a key role in shaping the refugee protection regime that emerged after World War II and remains in place today. Repatriation - or more accurately liberal resistance to non-voluntary refugee repatriation - became an important tool of Cold War politics and retains an important value for states interested in projecting and reaffirming the primacy of liberal citizenship values. Yet the contradictions in post-Cold War operational use of repatriation to ‘solve’ displacement, and a growing reliance on ‘state-building’ exercises to validate refugees’ returns demonstrates that tension remains between national state interests and the universal distribution of liberal rights, as is particularly evident when considering Western donor states’ contemporary policies on refugees and asylum. For both intellectual and humanitarian reasons there is therefore an urgent need for the political theory underpinning refugee protection to be closely examined, in order that citizenship can be placed at the centre of refugees’ ‘solutions’.