Citizenship on the Edge: Sex/Gender/race (Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism) - Hardcover

Buch 17�von 17: Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism

9780812253672: Citizenship on the Edge: Sex/Gender/race (Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism)

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ISBN 10: 0812253671 ISBN 13: 9780812253672

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022

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What does it mean to claim, two decades into the twenty-first century, that citizenship is on the edge? The essays in this volume argue that citizenship cannot be conceptualized as a transcendent good but must instead always be contextualized within specific places and times, and in relation to dynamic struggle.

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Nancy J. Hirschmann is the Stanley I. Sheerr Term Professor in the Social Sciences at University of Pennsylvania. Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Introduction
Citizenship on the Edge: Sex/Gender/Race
Deborah A. Thomas and Nancy J. Hirschmann

What does it mean to claim, two decades into the twenty-first century, that citizenship is on the edge? In the United States in 2020, police violence against women and men of color, the rolling back of voting rights, the strengthening of the glass ceiling, ongoing resistance to marriage equality, and the persistence of sexual violence are but a few recent examples of the ways citizenship is stratified by race, gender, and sexuality. Globally, labor outsourcing, ethnic conflict and war, sexual trafficking, antigay legislation and violence, inequitable access to health care and public spaces, and the repression of pro-democracy movements all reflect the complex dynamics and interrelations of class, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, disability, and sexuality as these relate to political, social, cultural, and intimate forms of belonging. Anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States and Europe has swept far-right politicians and coalitions into office, where they have legislated new immigration restrictions. Undocumented immigrants are being deported from the United States with renewed vigor, and those seeking to enter the United States have encountered delays, confinement, and separation from their children. Despite this rising nationalism and hostility to immigrants across the world, capitalism is increasingly dependent on globalized and mobile labor, production, and markets.

Given the current conditions of political violence, economic insecurity, and scarcity of opportunities worldwide, how can we productively reckon with the limits of liberal notions of citizenship? Who "counts" as a citizen in today's world, and how might we recognize and account for other avenues through which people attempt to make themselves as political subjects? This volume explores the ways in which compounding social inequalities redound to thinking, conditions, and expressions of citizenship in the United States and throughout the world. It also reckons with the ways citizenship itself is being reformulated, and with emergent technologies that are challenging definitions of citizenship previously bound by nation or geographic area. While these technologies have the potential to create new parameters for the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, they also create the means for circumventing both.

The notion of citizenship being on the edge has an intentionally ambiguous meaning for this volume. First and foremost, it refers to the precarity of belonging and security for populations across the globe. It addresses the ways in which individuals outside the circle of the state struggle for but are denied citizenship status, those peering over the edge but denied entry, such as immigrants, refugees, and migrant workers. It also refers to the ways in which citizenship rights are precarious for or altogether denied to individuals already within the circle of the state, such as the incarcerated, those who face employment or housing discrimination (and who are not eligible for public housing), and those who rely on welfare benefits or on publicly funded student loans for higher education. Being on the edge of citizenship also means being subject to ongoing state surveillance, a condition shared by those within or outside the circle of the state. Though public assistance agencies in the United States, for instance, may no longer conduct "man in the house" surprise checks, newer measures such as workfare, family caps, and financial incentives for Norplant, not to mention the reams of paperwork required to file for financial assistance, entail a degree of surveillance unimaginable to more economically secure citizens. At the same time, we know that citizenship is always tracked through documents like the census or immigration papers, and that these documents both afford and frustrate access to the infrastructures of health care, education, and the workforce and are therefore also always modalities of surveillance.

Citizenship on the edge also refers to the "100 million missing women," to use Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen's (1990) formulation, who are denied state protection, education and economic resources, and independence, and even a right to exist through sex-selective abortion and higher rates of female infant mortality. Sexual harassment and assault still prevail around the world, and women frequently have diminished access to legal systems, which nevertheless fail to respond adequately at all levels—from police to the courtroom to legislative bodies. LGBTQ+ individuals are likewise subjected to violence and intimidation and are denied access to rights of intimacy and family that are granted to their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts. And across the globe, racial profiling and anti-Black state violence prevail.

While the concept of citizenship is the normative modality through which the relationship between individual and state is made legible, it is not only a legal category but also a social, economic, and political one. The relationship between the state and something usually understood as "civil society" is therefore neither clear cut nor static. Today's context draws attention to the fundamental contradiction of liberal citizenship, which is that it emerged within and has been reproduced through historical-ideological and onto-epistemological phenomena that produce whiteness, maleness, and Europeanness as the apex of humanity (Wynter 2003), the epitome not only of transparency and universality but also of determination and causality (Ferreira da Silva 2007, 2017). That modern citizenship—and its handmaiden, liberal democracy—was grounded through Indigenous dispossession and African slavery in territories throughout the Western Hemisphere is a disavowed reality within political contexts that privilege perfectibility and slow, incremental change. Yet the moment we imagine rights and truths to be universal and self-evident, we turn our backs on the historical reality that rights have only ever been partially (and often begrudgingly) granted to people of color, women, immigrants, and other groups that have been marginalized within the social and political body of the state (Pateman 1988; Hirschmann 1999, 2008). Citizenship, therefore, cannot be conceptualized as a transcendent good, but must always be contextualized and critiqued within specific places and times, and in relation to dynamic struggle. Citizenship is, at its base, a practice and process of boundary making, one that is riven by what Adriana Petryna and Katerina Follis have framed as "fault lines" that disturb normative understandings of citizenship as progressively inclusive (2015, 403).

Within the United States, the relations among sexism, racism, and xenophobia are perhaps most obvious in the 2019 attacks on U.S. congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley. The "send her back" chants directed first at Omar and later the others (all of whom are U.S.-born American citizens) and the insult that President Trump directed at them to "clean up the messes in the countries they came from" (Rogers and Fandos 2019) clearly operationalize the xenophobia of the anti-immigrant movement to express in new and vitriolic ways the familiar hostilities of racism and sexism. Indeed, the rhetoric of these movements, while exemplifying the long history of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia in the United States, also dovetails with other kinds of hostilities toward women and racial and ethnic minorities. New and creative ways to suppress the right to vote, for example, hit at the most basic entitlement of citizenship and undermine its status. And the ongoing phenomena of police violence, the glass ceiling, resistance to marriage equality, transgender rights, and sexual harassment provide constant...

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