Feminist Citizenship: Activating Politics and Theory

I feel honored to comment on Ruth Lister’s Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives (second edition, 2003), as it is a highly important feminist intervention into citizenship studies. I first encountered the book as a PhD student when I was thinking through citizenship as a framework for exploring the struggles of migrant women to gain agency and articulate new forms of belonging and participation. But this was easier said than done: most theorizing on citizenship was concerned with normative questions, often in the idiom of political philosophy that I found at once obscuring and far removed from lived experience. Coming across Lister’s book was helpful at the time in rescuing the concept of citizenship for me as a workable tool. Migrant women are too often seen as only partially capable of being subjects of agency or citizenship (Erel 2009), so the conceptual tools that Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives provided were very valuable for me and, of course, for many others.

One of the great qualities of the book is that it addresses citizenship not only as a status but also as a practice. As such, Lister argues, citizenship is always linked to the ways in which people, both citizens and those excluded, develop their agency. Citizenship both articulates and is articulated by the agency of those it affects, and this is not limited to those formally deemed citizens. Citizenship thus can be both a disciplining tool and a dynamic force for resistance. This approach throws light on the struggles over citizenship and offers valuable perspectives for debating as well as practicing citizenship in social and political struggles. Indeed, since the book was first published in 1997, the academic field of citizenship studies has taken off. There are vibrant debates about many different aspects of citizenship. For example, a search of the database of academic publications ISI Web of Knowledge reveals 589 entries under “woman or women and citizenship” between 1997 and 2009, compared with only 78 in the preceding twelve-year period. Yet academic debates about the democratizing potential of citizenship sharply diverge from the political discourse, as Lister (2008) has argued more recently. In countries like the United Kingdom, for example, Gordon Brown (2008) presents citizenship as a privilege and “prize” that needs to be “earned.” The privileging of formal sociopolitical participation, income levels, and other factors for measuring whether migrants have indeed “earned” the right to citizenship are, of course gendered. It is against this backdrop that Lister’s arguments, bridging academic debates and political activism, remain much needed.

Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives covers a wide range of issues. The book starts by revisiting the mainstream debates on citizenship, which for me at the time was a welcome way of positioning critical feminist perspectives in the wider debates. The question of inclusion and exclusion frames the next chapter, which addresses migration, the role and relevance of the nation-state, and possibilities for realizing global citizenship. It also discusses the relationship between human rights and citizenship and how each in turn feeds into global forms of governance, solidarities, and politics. These are key issues for the changing challenges and struggles around citizenship. Lister’s book names the issue of migrants’ rights to enter a territory as a key citizenship question. Issues of citizenship are today contested at both external and internal borders, where migrants with different migration statuses find that access to the right to work, health care, education, and political activity is stratified. This complicates the constitution of subjects of citizenship in migration: thus, institutions of the receiving state can act as deterrents for migrants’ citizenship practices. At the same time, those without authorization to stay in a country can infuse the notion of citizenship with the most acute political meanings (cf. Squire forthcoming). Migration is one important arena for changing global articulations of citizenship. Yet the globalization of the political and the economic is tangible, albeit in different degrees for migrants and nonmigrants. Lister’s book already underlined that processes of inclusion and exclusion cannot be neatly delineated and that both can be oppressive. In a similar vein Ong (2006) argues that neoliberalism in the context of Asia...