Introduction: Citizenship

A South Asian woman follows her husband to the United States on an H-4 dependent visa. A victim of domestic violence, she finds herself legally barred from working and unprotected by important U.S. domestic violence laws. An Indian IT worker comes to the United States on a temporary immigrant visa. Lacking a Social Security number, he is unable to rent an apartment, drive a car, or open a bank account. These stories from essays in this special issue of WSQ highlight the space between citizenship and noncitizenship, a space that is widening as the global economy grows. How can we understand the meaning of citizenship—a concept firmly tied to the nation-state—in a transnational world? What kinds of legal protections are afforded those involved in global practices, such as immigrants, migrant workers, and victims of sexual trafficking? As we move away from the dominance of nation-states, what institutional structures exist to enforce fundamental human rights? In this volume, we show that feminist thinkers have developed frameworks for understanding these emerging issues and, perhaps, for creating a political discourse in which women’s lives are more valued and more fully their own.

In its most legalistic construction, citizenship is a status that confers rights and imposes obligations. As a lived experience, however, it is less sharply defined. It includes what T. H. Marshall famously termed social citizenship—a sense of belonging and active participation—as well as political citizenship, such as suffrage; and civil citizenship, the protection of rights. Scholars such as Ruth Lister (2003), Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon (1998) have emphasized the distinction between citizenship as a practice and citizenship as a status. Citizenship is also about power; it comes out of “battles among a variety of excluding groups pursuing ‘personhood’—the initial right to be considered a citizen and thus be a member of the society and nation in question” (Van Den Berg and Janoski 2005, 89). Citizenship is thus more than a single legal status; it is a richer mix of legal status, the ability to have access to formal protections in daily life, and inclusion in civic and social life.

Even when ostensibly gender neutral, citizenship shapes our rights and obligations in deeply gendered ways. What does it mean for women to be citizens—of a nation-state or of the world—and what does it mean to fall outside the boundaries of citizenship? Changing political and social dynamics are both strengthening and weakening women’s political positions. In the United States we see more women emerging as political elites, of which the most high-profile examples are Hillary Clinton, Sonia Sotomayor, and Nancy Pelosi. While this can be seen as evidence of women’s progress, it takes place within a complex context. The human trafficking of women and children is emerging as one of the most profound ills of the global economy. Globalization and the fluidity of boundaries have brought more people into the liminal states of immigrant and guest worker. For many migrant women, this work is domestic labor, an area that provides few if any enforceable protections.

As globalization weakens the power of nation-states to act in isolation from the world, social networks are emerging as critical to structuring world economies and conflicts. Governments and supranational organizations such as the United Nations are struggling to accommodate multiculturalism in its truest meaning. Of particular urgency is the issue of whether extreme practices such as genital cutting and the exchange of child brides can be tolerated by the world community on the grounds that they represent cultural difference. As so often happens in times of great change, however, questions of women and gender are set to the side as scholars and politicians deal with problems framed as more important, such as nation building, terrorism, and the economic crisis, issues that we would argue are intertwined with the roles and rights of women as much as with those of their male counterparts.

Rethinking Citizenship

The 1990s witnessed a boom in scholarship, both mainstream and feminist, on citizenship. The fall of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of...