Gendered Citizenships

By engaging deeply with American legal and political history as well as the increasingly rich material on gender history, Gendered Citizenship illuminates the ideological contours of the original struggle over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) from 1920 to 1963. As the first comprehensive, full-length history of that struggle, this study grapples not only with the battle over women’s constitutional status but also with the more than forty-year mission to articulate the boundaries of what it means to be an American citizen. Through an examination of an array of primary source materials, Gendered Citizenship contends that the original ERA conflict is best understood as the terrain that allowed Americans to reconceptualize citizenship to correspond with women’s changing status after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Finally, Rebecca DeWolf considers the struggle over the ERA in a new light: focusing not on the familiar theme of why the ERA failed to gain enactment, but on how the debates transcended traditional liberal versus conservative disputes in early to mid-twentieth-century America. The conflict, DeWolf reveals, ultimately became the defining narrative for the changing nature of American citizenship in the era.

This book sheds new light on gender-based inequalities in a globalized world. Interdisciplinary in scope, it reveals new avenues of research on gendered citizenship, analysing the possibilities and pitfalls of being represented and of representing someone. Drawing on contexts both historical and contemporary, it queries what it means to have access to representation, which power structures regulate and produce representation, and who counts as a citizen. Situating its arguments in the global struggle for hegemony, it answers such thought-provoking questions as whether one can represent someone or be represented without recourse to citizenship and, conversely, whether it is possible to be a citizen if one does not have access to representation. This engaging edited collection will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, social anthropology, history, media studies, political science, literature, gender studies and cultural studies.div div>

Adopting a historical conceptual approach, this book examines the gendering of citizenship. It argues that through successive historical periods, `becoming a citizen has involved a gradual extension of the status, to more and more persons and groups, in particular, women, which resulted in a more inclusive and egalitarian structure. But, the promise of equal membership in the politcal community masks the exclusionary framework that defines citizenship as found in caste hierarchies, gender differences, and divides between religious communities based on majority and minority status. Engaging with contemporary debates on citizenship that place themselves within the framework of multiculturalism and world citizenship this work asserts the need to redefine the notion of community by focussing on citizenship as a measure of activity and practice, and by exposing the subtleties of role definition of women implicit in community norms.

This collection responds to the need to re-evaluate the very important concept of citizenship in light of recent feminist debates. In contrast to the dominant universalizing concepts of citizenship, the volume argues that citizenship should be theorized on many different levels and in reference to diverse public and private contexts and experiences. The book seeks to demonstrate that the concept of citizenship needs to be understood from a gendered intersectional perspective and argues that, though it is often constructed in a universal way, it is not possible to interpret and indeed understand citizenship without situating it within a specific political, legal, cultural, social, and historical context.

It has been shown time and again that even though all citizens may be accorded equal standing in the constitution of a liberal democracy, such a legal provision hardly guarantees state protections against discrimination and political exclusion. More specifically, why do we find pervasive gender-based discrimination, exclusion, and violence in India when the Indian Constitution supports an inclusive democracy committed to gender and caste equality? In Gendered Citizenship, Natasha Behl offers an examination of Indian citizenship that weaves together an analysis of sexual violence law with an in-depth ethnography of the Sikh community to explore the contradictory nature of Indian democracy--which gravely affects its institutions and puts its citizens at risk. Through a situated analysis of citizenship, Behl upends longstanding academic assumptions about democracy, citizenship, religion, and gender. This analysis reveals that religious spaces and practices can be sites for renegotiating democratic participation, but also uncovers how some women engage in religious community in unexpected ways to link gender equality and religious freedom as shared goals. Gendered Citizenship is a groundbreaking inquiry that explains why the promise of democratic equality remains unrealized, and identifies potential spaces and practices that can create more egalitarian relations.

This book proposes the framework of gendered academic citizenship to capture the multidimensional and complex dynamics of power relations and everyday practices in the contemporary context of academic capitalism. The book proposes an innovative definition of academic citizenship as involving three key components: membership, recognition and belonging. Based on new empirical data, it identifies four ideal-types of academic citizenship: full, limited, transitional citizenship and non-citizenship. The different chapters of the book provide comprehensive reviews of the relevant research literature and offer original insights into the patterns of gender inequalities and practices of gendered academic citizenship across and within different national contexts. The book concludes by setting a comprehensive research agenda for the future. This book will be of interest to academic researchers and students at all levels in the disciplines of sociology, gender studies, higher education, political science and cultural anthropology.

Focusing on the relationship between gender, education and citizenship, this book explores, from a feminist perspective, how the concept of citizenship has been used in relation to gender, and how young people are being prepared for male and female forms of citizenship.

Constitutions around the world have overwhelmingly been the creation of men, but this book asks how far constitutions have affirmed the equal citizenship status of women or failed to do so. Using a wealth of examples from around the world, Ruth Rubio-Marín considers constitutionalism from its inception to the present day and places current debates in their vital historical context. Rubio-Marín adopts an inclusive concept of gender and sexuality, and discusses the constitutional gender order as it has been shaped by debates such those around same-sex marriage and the rights of trans persons. Covering a wide range of themes, from reproductive rights to political gender quotas and violence against women, this book offers a comprehensive feminist account of constitutional law. Truly international in scope and ambitious in subject matter, this is an invaluable resource for students and scholars working on gender within multiple disciplines.