Women, Citizenship and Difference

In this text scholars from various disciplines discuss citizenship and its relation to gender, ethnicity, class and national status. They focus on the dismantling of welfare states, the attack on civil society, the rise in state terror and the growth of religious and cultural fundamentalisms.

This book makes an important contribution towards an understanding of citizenship as mediated by other collective, historically determined identities: of gender, ethnicity, class and national status. It brings together a group of prominent international scholars from moral philosophy, law, political science and sociology to offer a major reconceptualization of the idea of citizenship. Throughout, the book is concerned with the current dismantling of welfare states, the attack on civil society and the rise in state terror and religious and cultural findamentalisms. The contributors demonstrate how the growing ambivalence of state sovereignty in the face of multi-national capitalism and the absence of political accountability structures 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 as a whole shows the need to negotiate and transcend difference and to find means for creating alliances across differences. The most comprehensive, comparative statement on the present state of the gender and citizenship debate available, this book will be necessary reading for students and academics of nationalism, citizenship, human rights, globalization and women's studies.