The article discusses some of the major issues which need to be examined in a gendered
reading of citizenship. However, its basic claim is that a comparative study
of citizenship should consider the issue of women’s citizenship not only by contrast
to that of men, but also in relation to women’s afliation to dominant or subordinate
groups, their ethnicity, origin and urban or rural residence. It should also take
into consideration global and transnational positionings of these citizenships. The
article challenges the gender-blind and Westocentric character of many of the most
hegemonic theorizations of citizenship, focusing in particular on the questions of
membership in ‘the community’, group rights and social difference and the ways
binaries of public/private and active/passive have been constructed to differentiate
between different kinds of citizenships. The article argues that in order to be able
to analyse adequately people’s citizenship, especially in this era of ethnicization on
the one hand and globalization on the other hand, and with the rapid pace at which
relationships between states and their civil societies are changing, citizenship
should best be analysed as a multi-tiered construct which applies, at the same time
to people’s membership in sub-, cross- and supra-national collectivities as well as
in states.
Keywords
women; citizenship; difference; nation; state; transversal politics