Women, Citizenship and Difference

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This text brings together a group of international scholars from various disciplines to rethink the idea of citizenship and its relation to gender, ethnicity, class and national status. It focuses on the dismantling of welfare states, the attack on civil society, the rise in state terror and the growth of religious and cultural fundamentalisms. The contributors show how the ambivalence of state sovereignty in the face of multi-national capitalism and the absence of structures of political accountability are complicit in the definitions of gendered citizenship. Against these, women's communal mobilization and political activism are considered in terms of their power effects and political potentialities. The book illustrates the need for women to negotiate and transcend difference and to find means for creating alliances across differences.

Reviews

This book makes a major contribution to broadening the discussion of citizenship. Not only are the cetnral questions of gender and difference incorporated organically, but anyone interested in global perspectives on a debate which can all too easily remain rooted in a small part of the world will learn a great deal from these essays. They raise issues which are too often forgotten and which no consideration of citizenship should ignore. * Anne Showstack Sassoon, Professor of Politics, Kingston University, Kingston upon Thames, UK. *
Here is a notion of citizenship that looks to horizons far beyond the nation state. It also answers to our more intimate and shifting longings and belongings. An impressively theorized collection in which a creative gender analysis liberates citizenship from its usual narrow formalism. * Cynthia Cockburn, author of The Space Between Us and Research Professor in the Department of Sociology, City University London. *
This book, the product of a truly exciting conference, explores many of the key issues in the contestation of citizenship. Interweaving feminist and postcolonial perspectives, it brings fresh insights to the citizenship debate. * Ruth Lister, Professor of Social Policy Loughborough University and author of Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives. *

Author Bio

Pnina Werbner is professor emerita in social anthropology at Keele University. She is an urban anthropologist who has studied Muslim South Asians in Britain and Pakistan and, more recently, the women's movement and the Manual Workers Union in Botswana.