Citizenship and Difference: Feminist Debates An Annotated Bibliography

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1 Annotated Bibliographies Series of the Transformative Learning Centre (TLC) Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT) Edited by Daniel Schugurensky, OISE/UT No. 1 Citizenship and Difference: Feminist Debates An Annotated Bibliography (OISE/UT) 2002 Transformative Learning Centre (TLC) 7 th Floor, OISE/UT 252 Bloor St. W. Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6

2 Alexander, Jacqui M. and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, 1997, Introduction: Genealogies, Legacies, Movements, in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies and Democratic Futures, Jacqui M. Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty eds, pages xiiv-xlii, New York and London, Routledge. This article opens with a general discussion of Alexander and Mohanty s larger project, which is in two parts. Firstly, their intent is to investigate the theoretical implications of rethinking the social formations of gender and race as interlocking phenomena. Secondly, Alexander and Mohanty s concern is to make preliminary recommendations towards developing a feminist theory of democracy that will address, with a view to alleviating, the interconnection and intersection of race, class and gender as modes of oppression. The second element of their project involves an informed and critical discussion of the nature of citizenship, as it currently exists, as well as suggestions for its reconfigured within a frame of a feminist democracy. Both their discussion of democracy and that of citizenship are equally relevant to the central focus of this bibliography citizenship and difference. Of particular interest is the section of the article entitled, Hegemonic Democracy, Citizenship and Capitalist Patriarchies. As part of their project for developing a model of feminist democracy, Alexander and Mohanty stress the need to address the pedagogical failure of inherited nationalism, including the delineation of the racial, gendered and heterosexual relations typified under hegemonic democracy. This means undertaking an analysis of the myth of universal citizen, to uncover its gendered, racialised, sexualised and class specific nature, and attempting instead to reconceptualise people as citizens within a framework of anti-colonial feminist democracy. Liberal citizenship, for Alexander and Mohanty, is a politics of exclusion, wherein sexual and racial politics are central to the process and practices of governance. There exists in western democracies machinery of citizenship that is mobilized to produce citizen subjects and subordinate class of non-citizens as gendered, sexualized and racialised subjects. Gender, race, class and sexual differences are naturalized through law, which consolidates and legislates dominant values and attributes. Because the rhetoric and ideology of democracy occludes inequities we must be aware of how struggles that address the state as self-evidently democratic reify relations of domination. Alexander and Mohanty claim that the democratic myths of freedom and equality serve to consolidate oppressive practices and values of capitalist domination. The ideal of private property indicates a systematic worldview wherein capitalist values have infused the ideas about citizenship so that one can say that democracy has been colonized under capitalism. The nature of rights guaranteed under capitalism begs the question of who is the presumed citizen of liberal discourse. Under capitalism the roles of consumer, taxpayer, earner have become central to the ideological mechanism for shaping citizenship. They form the prototype of citizenship that justifies exclusions. For example, by privileging waged employment, liberalism allows for the construction of women as dependents, or recipients of charity, and therefore denies their citizenship 1. Because citizenship rights are associated with wage labour, consumption, tax paying, property ownership, freedom is defined as access and choice rather than the material conditions that makes choices meaningful. White consumer, taxpayer, wage earner is the core identity of the liberal citizen. These factors are the basis for a series of exclusions that Alexander and Mohanty argue that we need to understand in order to reconceptualise democracy. A 2

3 feminist theory and practice of democracy would require a new political culture, one capable of uncoupling capitalism and democracy so as to recast democracy in anticapitalist terms, and one that also takes into account the effects of colonization. The concept of feminist democracy that they propose suggests a different order of relationship between people that includes a process of decolonialisation. Decolonisation is the active process of thinking oneself out of the spaces and relations of domination and into collective processes of democracy, wherein an ongoing analysis of power and power relations becomes part of an individual s everyday democratic practice. Alexander and Mohanty offer up a model of democracy wherein agency is theorized differently, severed from the free market procedural influences currently in vogue, and reconceptualised as a conscious and ongoing reproduction of one s terms of existence that includes a dimension of accountability. This focus on decolonialisation is the main effect of beginning to think modes of oppression together rather than separately. Mohanty and Alexander conclude by stating that there is also a need for a global understanding of citizenship that goes beyond the nation state. The authors insistence on thinking race and gender together in the context of citizenship is what sets this work apart from many of the articles that have been included in this bibliography. (Cross references: Stasiulis and Bakan, Evans, Dhaliwali, Fraser and Nicholson) Bakan, Abigail and Daiva Stasiulis, 1997a, Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada and the Social Boundaries of Modern Citizenship, Not One of the Family: Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada, Abigail Bakan and Daiva Stasiulis, pages Toronto, University of Toronto Press. " citizenship in any given country is to be understood as a variable and unequal process shaped not only by national-local conditions but also by global realities and accompanying racialized, gendered discourses. Such a perspective challenges traditional approaches to citizenship that assume a single, advanced nation-state model, from which the attainment of rights is inappropriately universalized" (Bakan and Stasiulis, 1997a: 32). In this article the author's explore the limits and contradictions inherent in liberal theories of citizenship, particularly with regards to racial and gender inequities, in the context of the actual lived experiences of foreign domestic workers in Canada. There is no denying the extent to which these women are denied access to citizenship rights and status, a situation that has worsened considerably as a result of the recent turn to the right in Canadian politics. However, according to Bakan and Stasiulis the racist and sexist character of Canada's foreign domestic program is not to be considered an aberration in contrast to other areas of Canadian citizenship and immigration policy that are impartial, fair and universal. The foreign domestic program is anomalous only in its obviousness. A close read of the policies concerning foreign domestic workers, coupled with awareness as to their effects, reveals the ideological and institutional presumptions that usually remain hidden in other policy initiatives. In particular, Bakan and Stasiulis are concerned with the unequal and exploitative nature of global relations between developed and under-developed states that recreate, at a micro level, processes and relations of domination. Beyond the specificities of their chosen case study, Bakan and Stasiulis' arguements have implications for the way in which we conceptualize citizenship in general. They 3

4 argue that in order to understand citizenship we need to reconceptualise it as a dynamic rather than a static process that draws on particularist criteria and reflect global inequities and relations of power and then subsumes its boundaries under the guise of naturalised universalism. Bakan, Abigail and Daiva Stasiulis, 1997b, Negotiating Citizenship: The Case of Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada, Feminist Review 57: Published in the same year as the previously reviewed article, this one focuses more on the theoretical implications of Bakan and Stasiulis research regarding foreign domestic workers in Canada. The authors argue that liberal theoretical understandings of citizenship comprise an ideal type that is largely legal and is particular to individual and advanced capitalist post-war liberal democracies. In contrasts to this static liberal model, the authors advocate a reconceptualisation of the term citizenship to denote a dynamic, negotiated relationship that is subject to change and can be acted upon collectively within social, economic and political relations of conflict. This alternative conceptualisation acknowledges the contestational - hence political - nature of relations and identities of citizenship, including both its inherently oppressive and resistive tendencies. In addition, Bakan and Stasiulis claim that citizenship is context specific shaped by race, class, gender structures on both a global and a national level. In contrast to widespread claims as to the pervasiveness and inevitability of forces of globalisation, they caution against underestimating the tenacity of national territorially based sovereignty. They argue that despite the emergence of transnational borders, regional citizen forms persist, and the power to control who has access to membership in the nation remains a characteristic of the modern state. The importance of this article lies in the fact that it constitutes an example of grounded feminist and post-colonial theorising concerning the nature citizenship in Canada. Its theoretical implications far exceed its national focus. Bannerji, Himani, 2000, Geography Lessons: On Being and Insider \Outsider of the Canadian Nation, in The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism and Gender, Himani Bannerji, pages Toronto, Canadian Scholars Press. Himani Bannerji is a well-known and influential Canadian feminist theorist. She has written extensively on the issue of racism and feminism. The following essay is from her most recent book entitled, On the Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism and Gender, which is a collection of her writing on racism, Canadian nationalism, citizenship and multiculturalism. The entire book is a must read for anyone interested in any of these areas. It provides an interesting and disturbing view of Canada from the perspective of immigrant women of colour. Bannerji attacks the myth of Canadian tolerance and inclusiveness, naming colonialism as a central factor determining our past and present social organization and serves up a damning indictment of official multiculturalism. Relying on Anderson s theory of nations as imagined communities, Bannerji opens by stating that Canada is a mental as well as a historical space, an idyllic construction of nature and adventure. a set of representations embodying certain types of political and cultural communities and their operations (Bannerji 2000:64). However, if the nation is an imagined community Bannerji asks, whose imagination dominates its construction. In other words, what is the link between the Canadian 4

5 imaginary and social divisions of race, class, gender and sexuality? Its important to note that Bannerji is one of the only theorists included in this bibliography that explicitly includes sexuality to the radical mantra of race, class and gender. For Bannerji, the central paradox of liberalism is that immigrant women are simultaneously constructed as belonging and not belonging to the nation. They are at once subject to the laws of the country, bear the responsibilities of full-fledged members of civil society and are part of economy but they are not part of the selfdefinition of Canada. According to Bannerji, citizenship does not provide automatic membership in the nation s community. Living in a nation does not, by definition, provide one with a prerogative to imagine (Bannerji 2000:66). Despite our claims to embrace principles of inclusion and tolerance and our wish to see ourselves as other than the United States and Great Britain in terms of our history, Bannerji unsettles our complacency. She argues that colonialism is the entry point for understanding the nature of social relations and cultural forms in Canada. From the beginning the Canadian national imaginary has been conditional, wherein formations of race, class, gender and sexuality restricted one s access to citizenship by modifying the conditions of freedom, property and literacy. These various social formation effectively marks one out for a merely formal equality and a nominal citizenship. Our official policy of multiculturalism, introduced by Trudeau in the late 60s has done nothing to mitigate this situation. In fact, multiculturalism has become part of the problem, disguising relations of dominance that were once more obvious in their workings. In Bannerji s estimation, Canada as a national imaginary, its multiculturalism and its lip service to Quebec s Canadianess notwithstanding, is actually an anglo-white male idea that blurs the class lines (Bannerji 2000:79). Official multiculturalism is an administrative device for managing social contradictions and conflicts. It succeeds in reducing very real social and economic demands to the level of the cultural or symbolic, and thereby denying their material aspect. It allows one to speak of culture without making reference to power, thereby displacing and trivializing its effects. Official multiculturalism establishes Anglo-Canadian culture as the ethnic core while tolerating and hierarchically arranging others around it as multicultural so that difference is not a simple marker of cultural diversity, but rather, measured or constructed in terms of distance from civilizing European cultures, always branded with inferiority or negativity (Bannerji,2000: 107*). The problem that I see with Bannerji s arguments is that she leave culture under-theorised, thereby implicitly subscribing to the same reductive model of culture that she see as so problematic in liberal discourses of multiculturalism. * Bannerji, Himani, 2000 On the Dark Side of the Nation: Politics of Multiculturalism and the State of Canada, in The Dark Side of the nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender, Himani Bannerji, pages Toronto, Canadian Scholar s Press. (Cross references: Stasiulis and Bakan, Lowe, Ong, Dhaliwali) 5

6 Butler, Judith, 1992, Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of the Postmodern, in Feminist Theorize the Political, Judith Butler and Joan Scott eds., pages 35-57, New York and London, Routledge. This is a classic article on the subject of feminism and postmodernism. Butler s arguments are complex and very challenging. Although the article is not ostensibly about citizenship, it is included in this bibliography because the theoretical position that Butler is expounding underlies much of the more radical feminist work in citizenship theory. Butler begins with a point of clarification. She starts by dispelling two myths about post modernism - postmodernism and post-structuralism are not the same thing despite the tendency to use them interchangeably and neither are unified theoretical positions. However, there are three elements that identify a postmodern critique. They include a critique of the subject, adherence to a method of discursive analysis and the questioning of the integrity or coherence of totalizing descriptions. Responding to the oft heard criticism that postmodernism threatens the basis of all political action, Butler argues that to question the desirability of foundations is not to throw into question all politics but rather a specific version of politics. She argues that for modernist politics to require a pre-existing subject as the basis of all political is to establish a normative frame for politics to which there can be no opposition. It is unquestioned and unquestionable because the existence and identity of the subject of modern politics is assumed to be above the play of power establishing its authority by laying claim to a pre-existing universality. According to Butler, to establish a set of norms that are beyond power or force is itself a powerful and forceful conceptual practice that sublimates, disguises and extends its own power play through recourse to tropes of normative universality (Butler 1994:7). In contrast to modernist politics that views subjects as external to the social field, Butler s position is that the matrices of power and discourse that constitute the social also produce the I that is the viable subject of modernism. Therefore, the struggle to define the nature of this subject is itself the nature of the political. Butler claims that the modernist concept of universality, based in the ideal of there existing a universal subject, is highly ethnocentric so to impose it on any social field regardless of context is to be guilty of cultural imperialism. Given the contested nature of the term, to assume from the start a procedural or substantive notion of the universal is of necessity to impose a culturally hegemonic notion on the social field (Butler 1994:7). Critics of post modernism have charged that it is postmodernism, particularly its critique of the subject, that is an instrument of western imperialist hegemony. In response, Butler states that all theoretical and political positions are dangerous, in the very struggle towards enfranchisement and democratization, we might adopt the very models of domination by which we were oppressed, not realizing that one way that domination works is through the regulation and production of subjects (Butler 1994:14). Butler s aim is not to do away with the subject but rather to ask as to the process of its construction. The critique of the subject is not a negation or repudiation of the subject, but rather, a way of interrogating its construction as a pregiven or foundationalist premise (Butler 1994:9). If there is anything that can be called postmodernism, Butler claims that it is the theoretical position that recognizes that power pervades the very conceptual apparatus that seeks to negotiate its terms, including that of subject positions. For Butler, far from being nihilistic, this 6

7 recognition of the pervasiveness of power is the basis for any worthwhile politically engaged critique. The idea is not so much to take a position of anti-foundationalism but to interrogate what the theoretical move that establishes foundations authorizes in terms of relations, practices and identities, and in terms of exclusions and foreclosures. The goal of postmodernism is to expose foundational premises as contingent and therefore contestable. It is not so much an abandonment of politics per se, as it is an expansion and deepening of the political. Responding to criticisms that postmodernism negates political agency, Butler claims that to acknowledge that the subject is constituted is not the same as claiming that the subject is determined. In fact, she maintains that the constituted nature of the subject is the very precondition of its agency. If power lies in the establishment of the conceptual apparatus, then the fact that subjects are constituted, rather than pre-fixed universals, means that they are alterable or reconfigurable and therefore agency is possible. Far from removing the basis for political action, postmodernist politics opens up possibilities that are not even fathomable under modernism. In modernist terms, agency refers to a way of thinking about persons as instrumental actors who confront an external field. However if we assume that politics and power exist already at the level at which the subject and its agency are articulated and made possible, then conventional notions of agency can be presumed only at the cost of refusing to inquire into its construction (Butler 1992:13). Butler maintains that feminists are misguided in their insistence on subscribing to a politic that depends on women being recognized as autonomous subjects because the autonomous subject of modernism refers to a particular subject and is therefore antithetical to the feminist goals: there is a fear that, by no longer being able to take for granted the subject, its gender, its sex, or its materiality, feminism will flounder, it might be wise to consider the political consequences of keeping in their place the very premises that have tried to secure our subordination from the start (Butler 1994:19). An alternative postmodernist politic would render the concept of the universal as a site of permanent political contest, the term universality would have to be left permanently open, permanently contested, permanently contingent, in order not to foreclose in advance future claims for inclusion (Butler 1994:8). In terms of feminist politics, Butler states that identity categories are never merely descriptive but normative and therefore exclusionary. In other words, the identity category women does not describe a pre-existing, diverse social formation but establishes the boundaries of what it means to be a women and therefore regulates membership in this group. There is no social formation or object women that pre-exists the social and linguistic designation women. According to Butler, feminist need to allow for the term women to designate an undesignateable field of difference, a site of permanent openness and resignifiability. So what makes Butler s work so contentious? Butler s theories pose difficulties for imagining a concrete political practice and therefore her position appears untenable and irresponsible. Specifically, Butler s questioning of the subject and her questioning of the concept of universalism appears to remove the moral and ethical ground for political action that is a definite strength of liberalist discourse. However, as Butler maintains, To deconstruct is not to negate or dismiss, but to call into question and, perhaps most importantly, to open up a term, like the subject, to a reusage or redeployment that previously has not been authorized (Butler 1994:15). Unlike Foucault, who has been criticized by feminists for not considering gender, not developing a theory of agency and not recognizing that all social formations arise as 7

8 a result of struggle, Butler seems to have addressed all of these points. One wonders if it is not simply a wide-spread aversion to Foucault among some feminists that has made Butler s work controversial. Regardless, as critique, Butler s work remains critical to discussions of the political particularly in light of the limitations of liberalism in this regard. (Cross references: Dhaliwali, Flax, Laclau and Mouffe, McClure, Mouffe, Scott ) Cruikshank, Barbara, 1999, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects, 149 pages, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press. Drawing on Foucauldian theory, particularly in the area of governance, Barbara Cruikshank views democratic theory as a constitutive discourse that determines what can be said, thought, and felt with regards to citizenship. Accordingly, to change what it is possible to say is also to change what it is possible to do, think and be as a citizen. Rather than just viewing citizens as participants in governance, Cruikshank posits citizens as being both the effects and the instruments of democratic governance - both subjects and objects of the discourse. The terms and conditions of citizenship as defined by liberal theory, what Cruikshank refers to as the technologies of citizenship, serve to constituted subjects as different types of citizens prior to, and apart from, their active involvement in the political field. Cruikshank is definitely influenced by post structuralism, particularly the work that has been done concerning Foucault s theories and governmentality. Her intention seems to be to throw into question the desirability of the subject position of citizen as a reasonable goal for progressive political struggle. This considering the extent to which it is always already implicated, at a deep discursive level, in the structures and relations of governance that have created the inequities that make struggle necessary in the first place. According to Cruikshank, the term citizen does not stand for freedom, as opposed to the presumed unfreedom of the subject. The subject position of citizen is itself a part of the relations of ruling and therefore is a form of subjection, whether to the state or to the forms of self-regulation that citizenship entails. It is Cruikshank s contention that the introduction of the social through the recent rise of identity politics, far from threatening democracy, in fact extends the relations of ruling and therefore the technologies of citizenship, into the private sphere. According to Cruikshank, historical projects of self-help and social reform, however well intentioned, are in fact depoliticised solutions to political problems. I understand her argument to be that modern-day forms of political activism also turn on a will to empowerment that assumes many of the division and relations so problematic in liberal theory. Empowerment as a strategy of radical political action assumes the depoliticised nature of the marginalised thereby upholding the opposition of citizen to subject and seeing active citizenship as the answer to both political and social problems. This not only obscures that extent to which citizenship is itself a form of subjugation but also the extent to which the seemingly depoliticisation of the marginalised is likewise an intended outcome of the technologies of citizenship. Here Cruikshank seems to be treading some of the same theoretical ground as Butler in her insistence that to participate in relations of governance, from whatever perspective, is to take for granted, and therefore reproduce, the terms and conditions of one s subordination. 8

9 Present day activists and radical reformers tend to conceptualize their role as being that of searching for the sources of sovereign power. However these are the terms as they are laid out in liberal democratic theory. Alternatively, Cruikshank argues that the political is not just about voting and democratic debate, but also involves forms of regulation and control which are embedded in even the smallest details of everyday existence. Therefore, the nature of political power and the political field needs to be reconceptualised. At the level of theory, this means democratic theory that is "less a solution to the conundrum of the political than a way to articulate the contingency of the political that neither exhausts nor determines any efforts to reconstitute political order and the space of politics" (Cruikshank,1999,17). Furthermore, Cruikshank argues that the liberal art(s) of governance depends not upon passive but rather active subjects - citizens. Therefore, the will to empower, so dear to the hearts and minds of radical reformers, is in keeping with state interests which require the political participation of the population. To empower the poor is to make them over into the kinds of citizens that the state prefers - to discipline bodies to produce citizens. Essentially Cruikshanks is questioning the liberatory potential of the category of citizen. Unfortunately, Cruikshank is left with the same problem that plagued Foucault - how to respond politically to the discursive structures that appear to impose their will so thoroughly on the subject. A question that she is also unable to provide a satisfactory answer for. (Cross references: Butler, Flax. Laclau and Mouffe, McClure, Mouffe) Dhaliwali, Amarpal K., 1996, Can the Subaltern Vote?: Radical democracy, Discourses of Representation and Rights, and Questions of Race, in Radical Democracy: Identity, Citizenship and the State, David Trend ed., pages 42-59, New York and London, Routledge. "That the image of United States democracy is crafted through constitutive erasures and exclusions and that the norm of democracy is constructed against the deviant or abnormal of non- or antidemocracy and therefore needs its opposition means more than the contention that democracy is a politically constructed and mobilized category produced through its manufactured opposite ; it also explains how the United States always appears democratic, which it does by defining the very term and setting its standards" (Dhaliwali, 1996:51). This is an important article as Dhaliwali serves up a powerful critique of theories of both liberalism and of radical democracy, such as that proposed by Chantal Mouffe. This is a dense and complex article that deserves to be read through several times. Dhaliwali s arguments concerning the racialized nature of democracy stand as a rebuttal to the claims made by progressive, liberal theorists regarding the transformative potential of models of radical democracy. These theorists assert that a theory of radical democracy, premised on the notion of anti-essentialism, is well poised to deal with issues of plurality and therefore, rather than abandoning democratic ideals and systems altogether, our goal should be to strengthen and deepen the claims of democracy. Influenced by post colonial theory and therefore mindful of issues of race, Dhaliwali argues two central points. Dhaliwali argues that democracy is a racial formation that is necessarily produced through a racially defined other, as well as through selective erasures of certain aspects of itself and its history. In addition to its racialized identity, Dhaliwali claims that democracy is also a 9

10 colonial discourse because an ideal construction of democracy is implicated in western claims of superiority. Dhaliwali charges that theorists of radical democracy falsely assume that the problems of exclusion that plague western democracies are ones of implementation and realization rather structural. Conversely, Dhaliwali claims that democracy is a modernist notion. Its alignment with modernity and enlightenment beliefs can be seen in several areas, in its epistemological privileging of absolute categories and.(its) implicit theory of representation, its teleological progress through to modernization and its ontological premises including its individualism (Dhaliwali, 1996: 43). While advocating a notion of modified plurality and inclusivity, theories of radical democracy do not adequately account for the ways that inclusive practices can still oppress and too often result in the reaffirmation of a hegemonic core. Dhaliwali cites processes of exoticization, fetishization, and commodification as examples. Radical theorists tend to interpret inclusionary practices as necessarily fair and equal, a fact that obscures the relational nature of democracy. The tendency has been to propose an expansion in the sphere of applicability of core liberal concepts such as freedom, autonomy and citizenship. However, Dhaliwali charges that radical theorists do so without revealing how radical democracy will account for cultural differences in ways that liberalism does not. Dhaliwali faults both radical theorists and feminist for not engaging the specificity of the racial history of democracy in sufficient detail. The result is a continuance of the construction of a race neutral core subject. Although having proven proficient at revealing the masculinized nature of the universal subject, feminists have exhibited a tendency to simply to tack on minority women without theorising how the dimension of race further alters the original representation. Dhaliwali stresses the need to problematise the binary of man\woman that is foundational to feminist theory. She argues that it is essential to recognize that these identities are more complicated than this binary reveals and that we can no longer afford to treat gender identities as essentialist and monolithic. Feminist theories of citizenship and democracy have tended to presume the separability of analytical categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Instead, Dhaliwali calls on feminists to account for the simultaneous, overlapping and intersecting negotiations that constitute subjects. The add-on models of the past are no longer sufficient; these categories need to be treated as mutually constitutive. Because the erasures and silences that Dhaliwali find so problematic can only maintain themselves through the continued abstraction of core concepts and relations, Dhaliwali sets out to map the discursive boundaries of democracy through an investigation of the historical development of voting rights in the United States. Her historical overview reveals that the political issues of exclusion and inequality are far more complex than a conscious act of excluding any one group from participatory rights. Dhaliwali claims that history reveals that democracy, rather than being an absolute concept, is in fact relational in that the process of othering has proven necessary in order to consolidate the image of the rights bearing subject and the nation. Her arguments are well supported by historical and contemporary examples. However, problematic is the fact that although she critiques the US s promotion of itself as the quintessential democracy, her exclusive use of the United States as a case study illustrating why democracy itself is fundamentally flawed seems to privilege the very idealism that Dhaliwali is critical of to begin with. 10

11 Dhaliwali claims that the exclusions so central to the construction of modern democracies such as the US are not mere absences but constitutive, perhaps even necessary to the formation of liberal democracies. However, whereas there is no doubt that discourses of race have been preeminent in consolidating modern democracies, the question remains as to whether we must therefore allot race a foundational status. Is the constitutional nature of the racial other foundational to democracy or just the product of a particular history? The fact that Dhaliwali s critique is limited to a discussion of US makes it impossible to answer this question. Similarly, in terms of the colonial legacy of democracy, there is no doubt that ideal constructions of democracy Dhaliwali includes a rather lengthy discussion of the centrality of an ideal of freedom to US nationalism have been, and continue to be, implicated in (neo)colonial relations. However, the author does not convincingly answer the question as to whether the concept of democracy can be employed without necessarily reproducing colonial discourses and relations. In fact, in the end the author herself chooses to remain ambivalently disposed towards the concept. While not suggesting its complete or total recuperabilty, I also do not wish to imply its inevitable, eternal, weddedness to or function as a (neo)colonial discourse (Dhaliwali :57). More fruitful is the author s caution to theorists against maintaining a pure or static meaning of the term, and its core concepts, encouraging instead more cautious and specific useages of the kind that she has demonstrated. (Cross references: Alexander and Mohanty, Bannerji, Butler, Lowe, McClure, Mouffe, Ong) Dietz, Mary, 1992, Context is All: Feminism and Theories of Citizenship, in Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship and Community, Chantal Mouffe ed., pages 63-85, London, Verso. Although, judging from the title, Dietz s main argument appears to be about the importance of context, beyond affirming that context is important she has very little else to say about it. Instead she provides a very succinct critique of the major tenets of liberalism and then pursues an interesting discussion as to the contributions feminist theory has made to our understanding citizenship. However, Dietz laments that all too often these benefits do not reach beyond the level of critique to offer viable alternatives for the future of citizenship. The major principles of liberalism that Dietz identifies as problematic include; an essentialist view of a universal human nature that exist outside the context of the social; the privileging of the identity and rights of the individual over the collective; the limiting of the notion of equality to apply only to the formal political sphere; and the separation of public realm of politics from private domestic realm. She briefly outlines why these elements of liberalism are problematic, as well as the problems that are associated with various positions that feminists have taken in response. According to Dietz, feminist challenges that use gender as a central unit of analysis explode the liberal myth of equal opportunity by demonstrating that access is not enough. However, not every feminist critique is equal in this regard. For example, Dietz explores Marxist feminist and maternal feminist critiques of liberalism and citizenship and finds both unsatisfactory. She finds Marxist feminism lacking due to its tendency to dismiss the idea of citizenship as a bourgeois concern and focus instead on the ideal of revolutionary struggle. For their part, maternal feminists focus more on responsibility and relationships at the expense of rights. Both approaches, 11

12 according to Dietz, fall into the trap of essentialism and therefore, akin to liberalism, leave us with a one-dimensional view of citizenship. While lauding the feminist impulse to expand the notion of what counts as the political by including spaces, activities and values that have traditionally been identified as feminine, Dietz warns that in order to arrive at a viable and credible redefinition of citizenship feminists should limit their discussion to virtues, relationships and practices that are expressly political. For example, a mother s bond to her child is not the same as a citizens bond to his/her nation. While still needing to redefine politics beyond the formal, public sphere of politics, feminist need to remember that politics is the "collective, participatory engagement of citizens in the determination of the affairs of their communities" (Dietz: 74). It is clear that Dietz favours a conventional definition of politics. In contrast to liberalism, Dietz maintains that feminism emphasizes the positive liberty of participation in self-government rather than that of the negative liberty of protection from interference. While acknowledging the importance of reclaiming women s historical work as citizens as a means of redefining the concept, Dietz warns that feminists can t afford to launch an alternative vision from a position of gender opposition alone, nor can they defend it just from within their own political territory. She seems to be counseling feminists to engage more fully with the sphere of formal politics in order to have their voices count. Dietz seems to missing the point here as it is the public sphere that feminist are arguing needs to be redefined and wrestled from its historical position of privilege. Despite her critique of liberalism, Dietz s adopts the classic and limited liberal response of advocating for increased access as a remedy for equality. (Cross reference: Pateman, Phillips ) Dillabough, Jo-Anne and Madelaine Arnot, 2000, Feminist political frameworks: New approaches to the study of gender, citizenship and education, in Jo-Anne Dillabough and Madeleine Arnot eds., Challenging Democracy: International Perspectives on Gender, Education and Citizenship, New York and London, Routledge and Falmer Press. This is the introductory essay by the co-editors of a recently published volume addressing the issues of gender, citizenship and education. This particular chapter attempts to link educational feminist theory with that of political feminist theory to develop a model for feminist citizenship education. The authors claim that, despite sharing much in common, the links between feminist political theory and feminist educational theory have not always been made explicit. This is because, despite its significant contributions in other areas, educational feminism has neglected citizenship education and therefore citizenship theory. In order to address this shortcoming the authors proceed to investigate the way in which education feminism would address the problematic of citizenship as identified by feminist political theory. They begin by pointing out the important commonalties that exist between the two streams of feminist thought. Both political feminism and educational feminism focus on constructions of gender and the social relations that gender dualism brings about. For the most part they are both also concerned with the gendered nature of democratic institutions, including that of education. However, unlike their political counterparts, educational feminists tend to focus on the cultural rather than the political nature of gender in schooling. Their tendency has been to adopt a practical 12

13 orientation rather than a political one. As well, the fact that educational feminists are positioned within educational institutions has had a bearing on the theory that they produce so that some institutional affiliations and continuances have been assumed rather than problematised. Historically these differences in orientation have sometimes led to conflictual relations between the two. After these initial remarks, the authors proceed by constructing a schema for framing their discussion regarding the possible contributions that educational feminism could make to the reformulation of citizenship. They outline three types of feminism responses, or positions, regarding citizenship humanist (liberal), women-centred (maternalist) and deconstructionist (post-structuralist). They also identify three fundamental problematics of citizenship the fraternal pact that lies at its centre; the gendered nature of nationhood and national educational systems; and the problem of woman as political category. This is followed by a lengthy discussion that is intended to locate educational feminism within the theoretical field of citizenship by addressing these three problematics from the perspective of educational feminism. The final section of the chapter addresses issues of citizenship and education by offering suggestions towards a feminist framework for studying citizenship. This is by far the most interesting and valuable section of the piece because there is such a lack of theorising in this area. Unfortunately it is far too short. However, the authors are able to introduce some interesting concepts such as reflexive solidarity and differentiated difference, although they are not very thoroughly defined. The author s conclude by stating that educational feminists need to engage with feminist political theory because the work of reconceptualising key concepts such as citizenship, democracy, education and woman is a necessary and central part to the project of creating a model for feminist citizenship education. Evans, Patricia M., 1997, Divided Citizenship?: Gender, Income and the Welfare State, in Women and the Canadian Welfare State: Challenges and Changes, pages ,Toronto, University of Toronto Press. This is another article that deals with the issue of citizenship in a Canadian context. In it, Patricia Evans embarks on a discussion of women s social citizenship in the context of recent changes - cuts - to the income security programs - welfare and unemployment insurance. Her intent is to account for how the working of the system serve to make women s social rights unequal to those of men despite claiming to be gender neutral. Evans argues that investigating the way that women are able to access social services is to attend to the practices, rather than the formal articulation of rights and obligations, of citizenship and therefore reveals the realities of women s citizenship. Therefore her research focuses on social assistance and unemployment insurance as two areas in which the principles of membership in the national community are articulated and enacted. To determine the legitimacy of any claim to income assistance - to define a successful claimant - is to determine who can legitimately make claims upon state and exercise social rights belonging to a citizen. Evans claims that the income security system in Canada, particularly unemployment insurance, is neither gender neutral nor gender sensitive as claimed but instead has a distinctly male cast. Although the system takes account of the market, the family, as a domain of inequality, is ignored and women s unpaid work is not accounted for. Evans agrees with Ruth Lister when she asserts that social citizenship has been " shaped by women s roles as mothers, careers, paid workers and is constricted by 13

14 ideology and reality of women s economic dependency" (Evans,1997:94). She argues that women are incorporated into the welfare state under an assumption of dependency. They are more likely than men to be recipients of social assistance than unemployment assistance are. In contrast to unemployment benefits, social assistance claims are based on need rather than entitlement, benefits are low, the stigma associated with receiving benefits is considerable, and the scrutiny is intense. A woman s income security benefits are only equal to a man s if her behaviour towards work and family are the same as a man s. Claims to unemployment insurance are based on the citizen-worker identity. The citizen-mother identity of social assistance is not accorded the same degree of legitimacy. Claims are gender specific because they treat men and women differently despite claiming gender neutrality. Contrary to claims and assumptions of gender neutrality, underlying features such as social values and unequal distribution of domestic responsibilities maintain the gendered nature of the system: "a shift is occurring in income security policy that, with few exceptions, increasingly emphasizes the formal notion of gender equality. At the same time, the gendered disadvantages that accompany the actual operation of income security are exacerbated by budget cuts" (Evans,1997:107). As it stands now, women can either choose to become more like men - citizen workers - or continue doing women s work which has no value in terms of social citizenship rights. Evans claims that paid work, although increasingly difficult to obtain in a rapidly globalising economy, is becoming more and more central to the modern construction of social citizenship. Meanwhile, the notion of social rights is eroding and being replaced by a discourse of dependence which sets up an opposition between a contractual exchange amongst equals and unreciprocal, unilateral charitable relationships. This article is a good compliment to other articles that explore the Canadian context, as well as articles such as that of Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon that explores the changing nature of the discourse of social citizenship in the US. (see Alexander and Mohanty, Fraser and Gordon, Stasiulis and Bakan) Field, Anne Marie, 2000, Contesting Citizenship: Renewed Hope for Social Justice, Canadian Women Studies\les cahiers de la femme, 20 (2): Field is a graduate student in political science at the Carleton University in Ottawa. The focus of her doctoral work is citizenship. More specifically she is developing a model of citizenship that revitalizes the concept, making it more relevant to today s pluralistic societies. This article appeared in an issue of Canadian Women Studies, entitled National Identity and Gender Politics. The first two sections of the article offer a critique of liberalism and introduce a sociological, as opposed to a political science, approach to citizenship. The later makes Field s article important to the field of citizenship theory. Field takes issue with what she sees as the paradox of citizenship. Meaning liberalism s historical claim to univeralism despite the fact that citizenship is a gendered and racialised identity. The normative definition of citizenship has been derived from the experiences of white, heterosexual, middle class males and then expanded outwards without being reconceptualised. In particular, Field faults Marshall s linear model of citizenship for being androcentric, ethnocentric and therefore not relevant to groups other than the English, white, heterosexual, middle class males that it was based on. 14

15 In pluralistic democracies such as Canada exclusion is a fact, based in part on the invisibility of certain social groups within the traditional national identity. Citizenship defines the boundaries of the nation in terms of who belongs and hence has access to the benefits and entitlements associated with citizenship. In contrast to liberalism, Field reconceptualises citizenship to refer to a broad spectrum of elements ranging from the political and legal aspects associated with liberal citizenship to the everyday qualities that are not normally thought of as being political and therefore relevant. In short, citizenship s social construction extends well beyond the formal title of citizen. Field argues that in order to understand the relations and machinations of citizenship, we need to develop a theoretical frame that goes beyond traditional issues to engage with issues of identity formation, subjectivity and power. Hence, Field s sociological approach to citizenship. Such an approach she argues is necessary for understanding the relations of exclusion, contestation, power, and dominance that are enacted through the frame of citizenship. It entails a study of structures and processes involving power relations and inequality rather than just tracing the evolution of rights and responsibilities and access, as traditional liberal theory is wont to do. Field s sociological account views citizenship as a hegemonic project that is contingent on particular relations of power in the form of subordinations that support the liberal claim of universality. Citizenship is dependent upon a universal national identity as its main reference point and therefore can be seen as a regime that is constructed and upheld by the state. By introducing this notion of citizenship as a regime Field hopes to better understand how institutions, the state and social practices shape experiences of citizenship. How social control is exercised extra-legally, by informal means such as the media, and religious beliefs that operate separate but parallel to state. It is this description of her sociological approach that warrants the article s inclusion in this bibliography. Her central thesis, contained in the article s final sections and stating that citizenship needs to be recognized and redefined as an essentially contested identity, is less interesting. Here she draws heavily on the theorising of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, as well as Mouffe s later writing. (Cross references Laclau and Mouffe, McClure and Mouffe) Flax, Jane, 1992, Beyond Equality and Justice: Gender, Justice and Difference, in Beyond Equality and Difference: Citizenship, Feminist Politics and Female Subjectivity, Gisela Bock and Susan James eds., pages , New York and London, Routledge. Although Flax does make reference to citizenship, this is another article that has been included in this bibliography because it offers a good critique of liberalism and helps to elucidate the post modernist leanings of some feminist political theory. Flax is known for her writing regarding feminism, psychoanalysis and post modernism. Flax begins by defining gender not as natural formation associated with sexual biology but as a set of persistent and asymmetrical power relations. Then, turning her attention to issues of difference Flax claims that in the context of western culture, difference functions to generate and justify hierarchies and relations of domination. The concept of equality functions as the dualistic opposite of difference 15