Feminist, Sexual, and Queer Citizenship

The line dividing citizens and those excluded from its promise was long shaped by the public/private dichotomy, consigning women to the private, while reserving citizenship’s sphere of the public domain for men. Feminist theorists, in criticizing this dichotomy, have examined the relationships between citizenship, dependency, and reproduction. While those considered sexually deviant have suffered exclusions from citizenship, gay and lesbian subjects in some sites currently enjoy a role as model citizens. This shift has accompanied a transition in the role of the citizen from producer of work to consumer: the privatized, self-governing, and sexually free individual is today’s prototypical citizen. This new sexual citizen is contrasted with illiberal others, who are cast outside as unfit candidates for citizenship. Queer citizenship does not provide a more encompassing vision; citizenship is not available to be queered, given how it inevitably splits the world into those who belong and those left outside.

Inclusive Citizenship Beyond the Capacity Contract

There is deep tension within mainstream citizenship theory. On the one hand, citizenship is often defined in terms of social membership, such that all those affected or all those governed should be part of the demos. On the other hand, citizenship is often limited by an implicit “capacity contract” to those with sophisticated cognitive and linguistic capacities to engage in rational political deliberation, thereby excluding children, people with cognitive disabilities, and animals, who are relegated to a nebulous (and neglected) status of wardship. This chapter explores this tension between these two accounts, and argues that we should abandon the capacity contract as both theoretically arbitrary and politically pernicious. Citizenship should include all members of society, and this in turn requires new models of (interdependent) agency that enable all members to participate in shaping the society and laws by which they are governed.

Denationalization

Citizenship in the modern state is in many ways uniquely secure as a status. Yet states have always possessed some bases through which they may remove citizenship, including fraud, disloyalty, acquisition of another citizenship, marriage to a foreigner, and threat to public order. Indeed, denationalization powers have recently gained attention as many liberal states have created new laws to strip citizenship from individuals involved with terrorism. In this chapter, I explore the practice of denationalization. I first consider the definition, grounds, and historical development of denationalization power. I then draw from recent academic work to show how denationalization offers insights into questions of significance relating to the ethical limits of state power, the historical development of citizenship status, and the way restrictive immigration controls impact upon state members. I conclude with a discussion of some outstanding issues raised by the denationalization for scholars of citizenship.

Secular and Religious Citizenship

Citizenship, having antecedents in the ancient world and in the Enlightenment, is often understood in political theory as a secular framework of rights and duties. This chapter argues that there is typically a parallel religious development in which members of churches have to pay taxes, follow the authoritative commands, abide by an orthodoxy and norms of religious and ethical practice, and in return they receive sacramental services and frequently welfare and educational services. Just as citizens can be incarcerated for misdemeanours, members of a religious community can also be expelled or denied ritual services. While there are two distinctive spheres of membership, their relationship has varied considerably over time and by national context. In the liberal politics of western societies, the two spheres are kept apart by the constitutional separation of church and state. However, the two spheres often overlap or conflict with each other.

On Refugeehood and Citizenship

This chapter explores the relationship between citizenship and refugeehood. In particular, it examines the extent to which loss of meaningful citizenship defines the predicament of the refugee. It then examines the status of refugee and refugee rights. Thirdly, it considers how refugeehood comes to an end, in particular the role of citizenship (new or restored) in ending refugeehood. Citizenship is formally viewed as bringing refugeehood to an end, whether that emerges as return to the home country or naturalisation in a new state. However, in practice, a new citizenship for many refugees remains out of reach, and the status of refugee often becomes an intergenerational carrier of civic and social exclusion. The reflects the realities of refugee containment, in contrast to the vision of shared responsibility that underpins the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees and the refugee regime.

Fragmentation of Citizenship Governance

A future of greater migration will put pressure on the exclusive territorial model of citizenship. In the deepest analytical sense, bundled citizenship is incoherent, and made more so by extraterritorial effects of national decision-making—by the effects on persons in other territories—and, as salient for this chapter, by the mobility of persons that makes them experience effects of governmental decisions in other territories. For most historic periods since the emergence of the modern state system and in most regional contexts this mobility of persons was not significant enough, and the role of the state in providing positive rights was not great enough, to necessitate an international regime for assigning states responsibility for positive rights, and assigning individuals duties to states. However, with greater demand for mobility, greater cooperation to divide up the components of citizenship may be desirable.

The Place of Territory in Citizenship

The idea that political community implies a special connection to a particular territory supplies a key dimension of traditional conceptions of citizenship, and was consolidated under the modern state system. In a longer perspective, however, the development in modernity of a more abstract model of sovereign rule, together with the emergence of transnational political entities such as the European Union, has diluted the territorial relation. Yet post-territorial citizenship remains a matter of degree. It is not, nevertheless, a moot question, but one constantly tested in today’s more globalised political environment. Within this environment, a graduated language of commitment, perhaps one no longer even comfortable with the traditionally dichotomizing language of citizenship, may become better able to depict the nuances of our increasingly non-exclusive and fluctuating relationship to collective belonging and practice , and to the conceptions of place that have for so long stood behind collective belonging and practice.

Citizenship in Immigration States

This chapter traces the development of citizenship in immigrant-receiving states, comparing the Gulf States in the Middle East with the Western states of Europe and North America. In particular, I juxtapose these states` opposite responses to the fact of immigration, which is exclusion in the Gulf and inclusion in the West. These opposite responses articulate a structural ambivalence of citizenship, which is to be inclusive to the inside but exclusive to the outside. Among the factors conditioning inclusive or exclusive outcomes are the liberal-democratic features of Western states and the autocratic and rentier character of Gulf States.

Citizenship in Non-Western Contexts

This chapter surveys the major challenges, opportunities, and insights of scholarship on citizenship and migration in the so-called non-Western world in order to move the field of citizenship studies forward by critically reevaluating our assumptions about the concept of citizenship, its associated rights, and the lived realities of citizenship practices in various parts of the world. The study of citizenship in various non-Western contexts provides a distinctive lens through which we can analyze its contradictions. Rather than begin with the assumption that citizenship is universal, democratic, and inclusive, research in this area highlights how citizenship—as a legal status, symbol of national and/or ethnic identity, institution, and practice—is contingent. The chapter explores how technologies of citizenship create hierarchies of citizens and noncitizens that prioritize meso-level membership over individual rights, that extend beyond national boundaries, and that generate “in-between” statuses among both native and migrant populations.

Indigenous Citizenship in Settler States

Like most liberal democracies, the western settler states supplement jus sanguinis rules with jus soli principles that accord birthright citizenship to most people born in their territory. Indigenous tribal nations in those states, on the other hand, do not include birthplace criteria in their allocation of birthright citizenship. Thus while settler states and tribal nations both permit naturalization, tribal nations continue to use ‘jus sanguinis’ descent rules as the exclusive determinant of tribal birthright citizenship. This chapter examines the tensions that arise in settler and tribal law as a result of this divergence, and argues that the tribal preference for unlimited jus sanguinis rules is a legitimate one.