Citizenship, Borders, and Gender: Mobility and Immobility

Conference Program

	I. Citizenship Then and Now
	II. Federated Citizenship/Multiple Allegiances
	III. Mobility/Immobility: Gender and Crossing Borders
	IV. Transnational Movements, Women’s Equality and Citizenship
	Crossing Borders Roundtable: Transnational Forms of the Nation-State

To download the complete conference program ( PDF), please click here.

I. Citizenship Then and Now

Thursday, May 8, 2003
7:00 – 9:00 p.m., Auditorium

Moderator

• Seyla Benhabib

Speakers

• Alexander Aleinikoff
• Linda Bosniak
• David Jacobson
• Cynthia Patterson

Discussants

• Gerald Neuman

Alexander Aleinikoff

Professor, Georgetown University Law Center

Working Title:

Abstract:

My presentation will be about the changing notions of citizenship, examining trends in law and policy regarding dual nationality, acquisition of citizenship and citizenship requirements for benefits.  On the one hand we see an expanding (or eroding) notion of citizenship with greater tolerance of dual nationality, movement away from jus sanguinis rules and the provision of social rights and benefits to settled immigrants; on the other, subnational and supranational challenges to the nation-state lead some to suggest making citizenship more meaningful.  The presentation will draw on a comparative analysis of citizenship regimes in a number of states.  I will also speculate on the impact of the trends on women and women migrants.

Linda Bosniak

Professor of Law, Rutgers University

Working Title: Citizenship’s Subjects

Abstract:

One of the persistent themes in the now-copious academic literature on citizenship, including literature on gender, concerns the question of how far citizenship extends in social terms. This is the question of who will constitute the class of citizenship’s subjects. Because, in substantive terms, citizenship is broadly conceived as representing political or social membership. The question of citizenship’s subjects is the question of who it is that will be counted as political or social members. Yet because this membership is differently conceived in different understandings of citizenship, the answer to citizenship’s “who” question may possibly vary as well. The class of republican participatory citizens, for example, will not necessarily correspond, and has not always corresponded–with the class of rights-bearing citizens more generally, nor with the class of people having the legal status of citizenship, nor with the class of “psychological citizens.”

Most discussions of citizenship’s subjects tend not to acknowledge distinctions in the meanings of citizenship; the usual approach is to treat citizenship as an undifferentiated whole. Scholars of citizenship do tend to diverge, on the other hand, in the way in which they approach citizenship’s normative orientation. Some treat citizenship principally as a universalist project while others emphasize its exclusionary attributes. Much of the literature on citizenship’s “who” question can be divided this way.

On one side, the story of citizenship is often recounted as a tale of progressive incorporation, with new social classes increasingly demanding, and ultimately achieving, inclusion as citizens over time. The ideal of “universal citizenship” has been a powerful normative touchstone in most liberal democratic societies in recent years, but it is an aspirational value and tells only part of the story. Historically, the progressive trajectory has been interlaced with other, more regressive social narratives. Multiple groups have been excluded from universalism’s accepted domain; further, even where citizenship has been made available to widening groups of people, the citizenship they enjoy or display in substantive terms is often strikingly narrow. Still, in political and legal theory on citizenship, universalism remains the defining normative touchstone–though the notion of “universality” is itself subject to contest and renegotiation.

Yet universalism is the prevailing ethic only within a political community whose boundaries and identity are taken as given. Most scholars of citizenship do take these boundaries as given: they presume a fixed national citizenry and devote themselves to inquiring about the nature of the relations that do our ought to prevail among its members. Yet the study of citizenship is not confined to these internal questions and universalism does not exhaust citizenship’s fundamental commitments. For other scholars–especially scholars of immigration and nationality – citizenship is the core analytical concept for thinking about the way in which the community’s membership and boundaries are constituted in the first instance. And in the context of this enterprise, citizenship stands not for universalism but for closure. These scholars’ focus is not the interior life of the political community, but its threshold. And in most versions, the community’s threshold with which citizenship is concerned is that of the nation state. Citizenship is a status which assigns persons to membership in specific nation-states. And the status in any given nation is almost always restricted, available only to those who are recognized as its members.

In this paper, I consider the relationship between these two broad answers to citizenship’s “who” question in the literature: “everyone,” on the one hand, and “ nationals,” on the other. I suggest that while it may appear that these answers are complementary (with the universalist answer prevailing within the political community and the particularist answer at its edges), there are, in fact, important contexts in which these answers stand in direct tension to one another. Questions concerning alienage, on the one hand, and transnational distributive justice, on the other, place them in some respects at cross-purposes.

David Jacobson

Professor, Arizona State University

Working Title: Spaces of Identity: Gender, Immigration and the Evolution of the Nation-State

Abstract:

I wish to examine the theme of gender at the intersection of two interrelated issues: the impact of immigration on gender (such as the status of immigrant women); and, in that context, using gender as a prism to elicit the evolving political form of the nation-state. The multicultural project, and the largely unproblematic depiction of transnational communities, splinters on the rock of gender issues. Sharp divisions have ensued between some immigrant communities and host societies on the status of women; gays; child brides; female genital mutilation and even “honor” killings. So gender issues are, on one hand, associated with the efforts of various minorities – traditional minorities and immigrant minorities – in a primarily judicial struggle for rights. Yet gender concerns are also the basis for resisting certain multicultural or transnational developments, and asserting a shared culture of a bounded, republican nation. Gender is at the nexus of the “national” and the “transnational,” the “assimilationist” and the multicultural, and the republican and judicial modes of the state. In that context, we can look to gender issues to arrive at more nuanced understandings of the contemporary state than terms such as “multiculturalism” or even “transnationalism,” and their opposites, suggest.

Cynthia Patterson

Department of History, Emory University

Working Title: Citizenship Yesterday: Women in the Athenian Democracy

Abstract:

I will discuss the ways in which Athenian women did and did not take part in (“have a share in” to use the Greek expression for citizenship) the public life of the Athenian democracy. This will build upon earlier published work (“Hai Attikai” the other Athenians” Helios 13 (1987)) and also a forthcoming essay for the Oxford Companion to the Age of Pericles.

II. Federated Citizenship/Multiple Allegiances

Friday, May 9, 2003
9:00 – 11:00 a.m., Room 202

Moderator

• Judith Resnik

Speakers

• Catherine Dauvergne
• Vicki C. Jackson
• Patrizia Nanz
• Aihwa Ong

Discussants

• Jay Winter

Catherine Dauvergne

Canada Research Chair in Migration Law, University of British Columbia

Working Title: How Globalization Challenges the Immigration and Citizenship Linkage and What That Means for Women

Abstract:

I have previously argued that migration law does citizenship law's dirty work, freeing citizenship law to the lofty concerns of formal equality. (See enclosed paper, "Citizenship, Migration Laws and Women: Gendering Permanent Residency Statistics") As migration laws create the pool of potential citizens, this means that the most important hurdles to citizenship are inscribed in the texts of migration laws, not citizenship laws themselves. While citizenship laws are often equal for men and women, migration laws are about preferences, and preferences are for men. My previous work on this argument examined Australian migration statistics. In this new paper, I will extend this work in two ways, first, by considering to what extent the statistical trends from Australia are borne out in other principal nations of migration, and secondly by considering some of the challenges to the traditional migration law - citizenship law pairing which are presented by contemporary globalizing forces.

Vicki C. Jackson

Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center

Working Title: Citizenships, Gender and Federal Structures

Abstract:

This paper will reflect on the possible relationships between feminism, federalism and citizenship, exploring the multiple meanings of citizenship for a world of increasingly complex and layered forms of governance. Though often thought of in terms of rights (political, civil, social), or of membership (affiliation, belonging, exclusion), citizenship also may have structural implications about the nature of relationships among citizens as well as between citizens and governments. What, if any, are the possibilities and implications of these structural relationships for gender equality? Multiple citizenships layered or overlapping in multiple governments may be in the process of becoming more of a norm; note the possibilities for trilateral citizenship in federal nations, like Germany, that are also members of the European Union. This paper asks whether there is anything of a systematic nature that can be said about relationships between governmental structures and progress towards gender equality.

Patrizia Nanz

Centre for the Study of Democracy

University of Westminster

Working Title: European Citizenship From a Migrant’s Perspective

Abstract:

I have previously presented a vision of the European public sphere as a multiplicity of continuous and overlapping civic dialogues conducted across cultural and national boundaries which lead to intercultural and inter-societal learning (see enclosed paper “Multiple Voices: An Interdiscursive Concept of the European public sphere”). One major implication of this argument is that deep national and cultural differences are a precious asset, not a threat to the emergence of a new Europe. By promoting intercultural translation or inter-societal learning, transnational practice of citizenship could produce a European political community which is not based on a demos or a common cultural heritage, but on a pluralistic and situated constitutional patriotism beyond the nation state.

In this paper, I move from the demonstration of the theoretical possibility of an ‘interdiscursively’ operating public sphere to showing its empirical possibility on the basis of interviews with intra-European migrants. I have conducted in-depth interviews with a sample of Italians living in Frankfurt/Main emphasizing sociological variables that might be expected to affect the ways in which they cope with (and make constructive use of) their multiple, overlapping identities as Italians, Germans and Europeans. My findings indicated that, for the migrants, European identity is not a matter of convergence but of ‘interdiscursivity’. Their accounts display a pastiche self-understanding and a multilayered conception of citizenship, both of which can serve as a basis for their engagement in daily transnational or intercultural citizenship practices.

With these empirical findings, my paper aims to ‘inform’ political theory of post-national democracy in general and, the political theory of contemporary Europe in particular. Contrary to the orthodoxy that assumes (1) that Europe has no collective identity; (2) that such an identity is a prerequisite for democratic politics; (3) ergo, Europe cannot be or become democratic, I raise the possibility (1) that Europeans might already possess multiple, overlapping identities; (2) that manipulation of these identities within single persons and communication between such persons might provide the basis for mutual comprehension and tolerance; and (3) that such a process of continuous translation might be sufficient to provide the basis for supra-national patriotism and post-national democratic politics.

Aihwa Ong

Professor of Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley

Working Title: "Migrant Others: from Biopolitical Availability to Bio-legitimacy"

Abstract:

In recent decades, Southeast Asia has emerged as a region heavily dependent upon flexible female labor markets. Scholars have long considered the plight especially of the foreign maid

in Asian tiger economies from a political economic perspective, a problem of  unequal access

to wages earned by nationals, and the hidden abuses suffered in the privacy of homes.  The dehumanizing treatment of foreign maids is scandalous, and discriminations against them is tolerated, symptomatic, and even systemic in Asian societies.  The question I pose is how does their participation in flexible markets create the political and institutional spaces for an ecology of diverse belonging.  Second, how is this biopolitical availability of foreign female workers linked to processes of othering as ethno-racial others?  Third, how does this kind of ecological positioning create the milieu for a mode of ethical reflection on how should people live amidst poor foreign others in affluent Asia today?

III. Mobility/Immobility: Gender and Crossing Borders

Friday, May 9, 2003
11:15 a.m. – 1:15 p.m., Room 202

Moderator

• Seyla Benhabib

Speakers

• Dilek Cinar
• Nicola Lacey
• Sarah van Walsum

Discussants

• Jacqueline Bhabha
• Alicia Schmidt Camacho

Dilek Cinar

European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research

Working Title:

Abstract:

I intend to focus on contemporary approaches to citizenship, by feminist scholars and scholars of international migration. I will try to argue that feminist reflections on how to “re-gender” citizenship seldom deal with legal citizenship status as a force of exclusion in the context of international migration, while in migration and citizenship studies gender is still a topic more or less exclusively addressed by female scholars. With this in mind, the purpose of my presentation will be two-fold: to assert the need to establish a more systematic link between feminist citizenship studies and international migration theory, and to elaborate how this project might contribute to “radicalizing“ citizenship beyond nation and state.

Nicola Lacey

Professor of Criminal law, London School of Economics

Adjunct Professor of Social and Political Theory, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University

Working Title: Feminist Legal Theory and the Rights of Women

Abstract:

In this paper, I shall consider the relationship between feminist analyses of law and contemporary campaigns seeking to use codes of human rights as vehicles to secure justice, autonomy or equality for women. I shall begin by sketching out the varieties of methods developed by and issues taken up within feminist legal theory. I shall then move on to consider theories of legal and political rights, and feminist critiques of the ways in which rights as often articulated – both conceptually and substantively – fail satisfactorily to accommodate the dynamics of gender. Finally, I shall consider models developed within both feminist and critical race theory aimed at reconstructing rights in a more satisfactory way, examining in particular how far critiques developed primarily in relation to conceptualisations and institutionalisations of rights at the national level might be brought to bear on the debate about human rights at the international level.

Sarah van Walsum

Senior Researcher in Migration Law, Free University of Amsterdam

Faculty of Law, Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law

Working Title: Transnational Mothering, National Immigration Policy and International Human Rights Law

Abstract:

Recently there has been some debate concerning the effect of international human rights law upon national immigration policies.

In my paper, I shall examine what role, if any, Article 8 of the European Charter of Human Rights – which deals with the right to respect for family life – has played in mitigating restrictive Dutch policies regarding family reunification. I shall particularly focus upon the situation of single and divorced migrant mothers who have left children behind with family in their country of origin.

In the first part of my paper, I shall briefly discuss transnational mothering, on the basis of empirical research that I have conducted among Surinamese Javanese immigrants in the Netherlands. Subsequently, I shall describe the Dutch immigration rules that apply regarding the admission of children for purposes of family reunification, focussing in particular on policy and jurisprudence regarding single and divorced mothers. Finally, I shall describe some recent developments in the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights regarding the admission of children, and, on the basis of my findings, address the more general question: to what extent can third world women invoke international human rights law in order to mitigate the restrictive immigration policies of western nations?

IV. Transnational Movements, Women’s Equality and Citizenship

Friday, May 9, 2003
2:30 – 4:30 p.m., Auditorium

Moderator

• Judith Resnik

Speakers

• Suad Joseph
• Angelia Means
• Valentine Moghadam

Discussants

• Linda Kerber
• Audrey Macklin
• Reva Siegel

Suad Joseph

Professor of Anthropology and Women’s Studies, University of California at Davis

Working Title: Mobile Subjects, Immobile Citizenship: Arab Women Between States and Nations

Abstract:

That Arab women suffer from unequal citizenship in the Arab world is rather well documents (Joseph, 2000, Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East). In almost all the Arab countries, they cannot pass citizenship on to their children or their non-national husbands. In many Arab countries, they need a guardian to marry and to conduct business transactions. In many they need the permissions of their husbands/fathers/brothers to obtain a passport and travel abroad. In some, they do not have the vote. UN statistics regularly show Arab women to have among the lowest economic participation rates of women anywhere in the world. Across the board, they are less educated, have less income, own less property and have less powerful positions in the public domain than men.

One would therefore expect an overwhelmingly favorable comparison between Arab (Arab American) women’s citizenship rights/responsibilities in the United States versus their citizenship rights/responsibilities in Arab countries. Indeed, it would be hard, if not impossible, to argue otherwise. Yet, I suggest that Arab women (and men) do not have equal citizenship in the United States. I argue that there are some critical continuities and discontinuities in subjecthood and the representation that affect the citizenship of Arab women in the U.S. That Arab women are the symbol par excellence of what the United States wants to liberate in the Arab world makes these paradoxes rather poignant.

Angelia Means

Professor of Government, Dartmouth College

Working title: The Other Woman: Democratic Citizenship and the Right to Family

Abstract:

There is a growing consensus in political theory that democratic communities should allow ‘others’ to be different in political space, and not just private space. Of course, family law, which has often been recognized as an exemplary sphere of cultural difference and cultural reproduction marks a private space that is not only constituted by but constitutive of the ‘political’. This ‘private’ space relies upon legal validation of norms of differentiated citizenship and reiterative recognition, norms which have historically proved successful strategies for ensuring that all recognize the ‘right’ of each to inhabit a political space in which private (familial-religious) life can reproduce diverse forms of life. Aside from the various historical cases of multicultural empire, the idea of “multicultural jurisdictions” takes many forms in contemporary politics. (Ayelet Shachar, Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women’s Rights, 2001) Despite its long history and continued practice, I think the idea of a “cultural jurisdiction” supported by norms of differentiated citizenship and reiterative recognition is fundamentally undemocratic, and specifically opposed to the equal citizenship of women including “other women”—i.e. women who, in Otfried Hoffe’s terms, are “extreme aliens”. (Otfried Hoffe, Moral Reasons for an Inter cultural Criminal Law: A Philosophical Attempt, 1998). Democratic communities can learn little from the history of multiculturalism. Democratic culture, unlike other forms of culture, allows for the possibility of communicating across cultures, and thus achieving a form of social recognition and inter-cultural legal validation that is much deeper than the co-existence strategy of reiterative recognition. Prior to the maturation of democracy, reiterative recognition or (colonizing) assimilation were the only options. But, now we can actually structure a human community such that we can learn from the Other. By “learning,” I do not mean simply using the Other as a resource to re-generate and affirm our values (while acknowledging that, at times, others will not only affirm “us” but de-stabilize “us”). (Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner) Learning is mutual and it refers to a normative idea of gaining access to better than interpretations of democratic practice and laws. And it is very important that this type of democratic pedagogy is not just a phenomenon of civil society institutions, such as schools, social movements, churches and families. Multicultural learning (as a feature of moral learning) must be built into formal institutions like constitutional courts and norms of juridical reasoning—especially when these institutions are in the midst of deciding the boundaries of the private sphere and hence deciding the political space allocated to other people’s culture. To do this, we must “force” all to articulate claims of justice to all others and structure institutions that hear justice claims to really “hear” such claims despite the different modes of argumentation of different litigants. Unfortunately, I advocate a minority position since most real-world democratic citizens just want others to assimilate and political theorists increasingly agree that others should be accomodated with some “weak” form of the “cultural jurisdiction” thesis. Given the recent turn in theory, I have chosen two interlocutors who represent the “weak” cultural jurisdiction thesis---one from the liberal tradition (Nancy Rosenblum) and one from the communitarian tradition (Bhikhu Parekh). Both offer nuanced theories that deviate from the now anachronistic liberal-communitarian divide. Both view individuals as “situated” and both believe that some degree of cross-cultural communication is possible. Yet, both justify leaving “extreme aliens” with a sphere of decision that loosens the democratic requirement of justification to all, and they do this because they are either persuaded of the limits of cross cultural communication and hence inter-cultural validation of the law in areas such as family law (Parek) or persuaded that though basic democratic norms have already been decided in key areas like family law, Others play a pivotal role as (cultural) dissidents who will revitalize our public sphere only if we pay the price of recognizing some form or other of a “cultural jurisdiction”. While I take both types of argument seriously, and I think that there is something especially important about thinking through the cultural politics of family, I ultimately defend what is apparently a minority position: the idea of the intercultural validation of private rights, including the right to family.

Valentine Moghadam

Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies, Illinois State University

Working title: Global Feminism and Women’s Citizenship in the Muslim World: Comparing Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan

Abstract:

Are classic theories of citizenship still relevant in an era of globalization? Yes and no. The paper will explore the tension between state-centered citizenship and recent analyses of transnational social movements/transnational advocacy networks/global civil society, and examine the role played by transnational feminist networks in the pursuit of women’s equality and citizenship. I argue that classic citizenship theories are still relevant to the Middle East and North Africa, where women’s organizations and feminist groups seek full citizenship rights and raise demands around honor crimes, the status of women in family laws, nationality rights, and political participation. The discourse of Islamic feminism is one among several, and women may use strategies of consensus building (e.g., Iran) or confrontation (e.g. Algeria) to accomplish their goals. At the same time, women’s civil, political, and social rights issues are increasingly taken up by transnational feminist networks (e.g., DAWN and Women Living Under Muslim Laws), sometimes in close collaboration with local or regional women’s groups. The case of Afghanistan exemplifies the efficacy of the mobilization of transnational feminism in defense of women’s rights in a single country. Taken together, the three cases illustrate the tension between state-centered and transnational theories of citizenship, suggesting that both nation-state and global dynamics need to be taken into account. Separately, they show how women’s citizenship is being promoted in the face of a strong state and weak global links (Iran); how a state-feminist alliance against an Islamist opposition resulted in political rewards for women (Algeria); and how the plight of women in a failed but repressive state captured the attention of transnational feminist networks (Afghanistan).

Crossing Borders Roundtable: Transnational Forms of the Nation-State

Saturday, May 10, 2003
10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m., Room 202

Moderator

• Vilashini Cooppan

Commentators

• Alexander Aleinikoff
• Linda Bosniak
• Aihwa Ong

Discussants

• Robert Barsky
• Seyla Benhabib
• Judith Resnik