(Un)thinking Citizenship

Feminist Debates in Contemporary South Africa

Amanda Gouws, Amanda Gouws

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351963251
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The study of citizenship in the context of South Africa implicitly challenges the rights-based democracy in South Africa, while literature regarding women and citizenship has greatly contributed to a new understanding of citizenship. Locally, many global processes are reproduced in the discourse of rights-claiming, issues of institutional representation, bodily integrity in the face of violence, and care in the face of a lack of care. This volume takes the debate of citizenship in South Africa in a more theoretical and empirical direction while engaging with knowledge produced elsewhere in the world. As part of the Gender in a Local/Global World series, it investigates the making of gendered citizenship, institutionalization of gender politics, the state of gendered policy making, local citizenship, rights, the women's movement, gendered violence, as well as citizenship and the body.

PART I
FROM IN/EXCLUSION TO THE
CONSTITUTION OF THE SUBJECT

Chapter 1

Constituting ‘Women’ as Citizens:
Ambiguities in the Making of Gendered
Political Subjects in Post-apartheid South
Africa

Linzi Manicom

Introduction

As women, citizens of South Africa, we are here to claim our rights. Preamble, Women’s Charter for Effective Equality. South Africa, February, 1994.

The clarion tones of this opening sentence of the Women’s Charter¹ herald the questions that instigate this chapter. When read against the preoccupations of contemporary politics and theorizing of citizenship, the statement above and the ones that follow in the Charter’s Preamble evoke something like a nostalgia for the clear and unambiguous elements of the modernist, liberal-feminist project they express, namely: the quest for inclusion as equal citizens on the part of all South African women; a sovereign nation-state as addressee of women’s political demands; the framing of those demands in an unequivocal language of rights; and a unitary claimant-category, ‘women’, portrayed as universal on the basis of ‘shared oppression’. For it is precisely these elements, so effective in mobilizing women as a collective identity and a political constituency within the gender politics of the political transition from apartheid, that today are being destabilized by the effects of globalization and reproblematized within transnational feminist debates on citizenship. Yeatman (2001), reflecting on the political-conceptual challenges of current feminist citizenship theory maintains that ‘[c]ontemporary feminism is historically positioned in ways which require it to have a more complex and ambivalent relationship to what we may see as the classical-modern project of citizenship: self-government for individual as citizens, and for the national citizen community’ (p. 138).

This chapter explores aspects of that ‘more complex and ambivalent relationship’ as these are pertinent to a critical rethinking of gender and citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa. The period since that particular modernist framing of citizenship for women was encapsulated in the Women’s Charter, has been one in which an ongoing paradigmatic shift in the institution of citizenship has become increasingly legible.² The proliferation of citizenship debates attests to the wide-ranging and profound implications of this reconfiguration (Isin and Turner, 2002). Put starkly, the most significant features of this emergent form are a loosening and realignment of the association of citizenship with, on the one hand, the modern nation-state and its attendant notion of an imagined, culturally-coherent national community linked to a bounded territory, and on the other, with the self-identical individual subject (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000; 2001; Sassen, 2002; Walker, 1999; McClure, 1992). This shift is being expressed politically in the push for recognition and rights of identities of difference (of culture, region, nation, gender, sexuality, etc.) and in sites of political practice that are not coterminous with the nation-state, but may be trans-, supra- or sub-national.

Feminism³ has of course played a significant role in bringing about transformations in the ‘classic-modern’ citizenship project. It has exposed the masculinist and class-privileged normative subject of earlier versions of liberal citizenship; it has questioned and re-drawn the gendered designation of the public sphere, making visible and contestable the political regulation of the private sphere; it has promoted ‘women’ as an identity of gender difference, pushing the boundaries of inclusion in both the concept and practice of citizenship. At the same time however, feminist conceptions and politics of citizenship have been increasingly challenged for their own exclusionary tendencies, for their implicit heteronormativity (Alexander, 1994; 1997; Carver, 1998), their complicity in racialized subject-making (Dhaliwal, 1996) and for their limited nation-state orientation (Pettman, 1999; Werbner and Yuval-Davis, 1999; McClure, 1992). Crucial to this revisioning of feminist citizenship have been the analytic contributions of post-colonial theorists who have reflected the political voices of black and Third World women living in the metropoles and post-colonies. These are women who are gendered in ways that do not wholly conform to the normative constructions of Eurocentric feminist models of gendered citizenship, women whose cultural, racialized, national, ethnic, religious or communal identities have been central to their exclusion from citizenship and are integral to their strategies for pursuing an inclusive, democratic politics.

It is not just feminism that is confronting this ambivalence and critical self-reflection in relation to citizenship. Thus we can find Yuval-Davis (2002) referring to ‘citizenship as the main inclusionary emancipatory discourse of the left’ (p.44). The struggle for citizenship and rights clearly continues to provide the narrative frame for those peoples contesting various forms of disenfranchisement and marginalization, notably those under authoritarian regimes and from formerly colonized zones, whether located in the West or in the Third World. Yet, at the same time, Hindess (2002) can convincingly argue that where liberalism earlier regulated populations in the non-Western, colonized world by denying citizenship, today, under neo-liberal political conditions, the institutions of liberal global governance are actively promoting democratic citizenship, intent on regulating the populations of post-colonial states and subordinating them to the imperatives of a global market. In what ways can a feminist politics draw on the democratic and ethical claims of citizenship within anti-hegemonic struggles while remaining alert to ways in which citizenship might work as a modality of subjection, potentially channelling opposition into containable, governable forms?

There are other unsettling questions about the politics of citizenship that feminists in South Africa, as in other parts of the world, are implicitly having to confront today. Why now, when inequalities between citizens in all countries are growing exponentially and when states’ capacities to meet the survival needs of their populations are increasingly compromised by market determinations, is such an overarching emphasis placed on constitutionalism and rights (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000, pp.328-330)? Why, too, have universalist discourses of citizenship and ‘women’s rights as human rights’ assumed global prominence at the point when many Third World women in the post-colonies and metropoles are problematizing binary notions of gender and insisting on recognition of class divisions, of racialized, cultural and national difference in the shaping of ‘women’s issues’ (e.g. Stivens, 2000)? A related contemplation in South Africa is particularly poignant. What does it say about the meaning of the celebrated constitutional guarantee of human rights, gender equality and non-sexism when a huge proportion of the population, predominantly female, lacks the effective right to dignity and bodily integrity?

Though somewhat rhetorical and perhaps morally stultifying, such questions nevertheless contextualize and motivate the critical reconsideration of citizenship in South Africa. They also indicate that such a rethinking must involve more than an analysis of the many gender requisites of institutionalizing and substantiating democratic citizenship. Also required is a critical evaluation of the analytic adequacy of the prevailing (if eroding) modernist conceptual framework which has generally shaped debates on gendered citizenship in the course of the transition to post-apartheid. This would include an examination of the political effects, the limitations and possibilities of that framework, in the light of changes wrought by the transnational processes of late capitalism. Are the politics of inclusion and the extension of citizenship rights to women specifically still the most democratic and effective strategy for realizing an equitable citizenship for all women and men in this later post-apartheid conjuncture?

To forge a selective path through this expansive topic and offer some critical reflections I identify some of the issues and ambiguities – conceptual and strategic – that reside in the central elements of modern citizenship as highlighted in the opening quote. These conversations – on ‘women’, ‘citizenship’, ‘rights’, and ‘South Africa’ (as the site of political identity and belonging) – both structure the chapter and in turn, are informed by my analytic approach. As signalled in the title of this chapter, I focus on the ways in which ‘women’ are variously and unsteadily constituted as subjects within discourses of citizenship that have been circulating within academic and policy debates in relation to the political transition and post-apartheid transformation.⁴ I argue that ‘women’ as a political category is equivocal, expressing at times, or even simultaneously, an agentic, rights-bearing subject and subject of national narrative. Moreover, in as much as it elides difference, its effect is to mask the ways in which struggles for realizing particular forms of citizenship for ‘women’ privilege some women over others within shifting matrices of power relations. The exploration of this ambiguity will make more discernable the different political agendas that might be borne by notions of women’s citizenship.

Also in the title, I refer strategically to ‘the making of political subjects’ (rather than citizens) with a two-fold intention. The first is to draw attention to the freight of associations that comes with that latter term and ensure scrutiny of the various meanings of citizenship, specifically those that cite citizenship within the language of liberal democracy and those that see citizen-subjects of national narratives. The second is to declare my indebtedness to a Foucauldian approach in understanding citizenship as a productive and disciplinary category (Carver, 1998) where political subjects, as citizens, are both subject of the powers and potential that attach to that status, but at the same time, subject to its regulatory aspects. As Cruickshank (1999) argues: ‘The citizen is an effect and instrument of power rather than simply a participant in politics’ (p.5). In other words, the women who were claiming citizenship in the Women’s Charter campaign in the first democratic elections and through consultations around subsequent policy-making were being produced as specifically gendered citizens in that very process, through ‘the technologies of citizenship’: ‘discourses, programmes and other tactics aimed at making individuals politically active and capable of self-government’ (Cruickshank, 1999, p.1).

Citizens are always therefore, subjects.⁵ Citizenship, when detached from an assumed individual subject, does not have to be seen as a once-off achievement or status acquisition, or indeed as the only form of political subjectivity available to women. Rather, citizen-subjects are constituted within the different discourses, practices and institutions of citizenship and the various, even disjunctive modalities and temporalities of power that are inscribed therein. This perspective, in allowing for a fragmented and contingent subject, enables appreciation of the different forms of agency and moral grounds for political participation that are available within different constructions of citizenship. Difference – in this case, amongst women -can thus be understood not as affixed to certain social identities but rather as varying across different sets of power relations.

I am posing, therefore, a different set of questions from those which have predominantly informed the feminist literature on citizenship in South Africa. One set has sought to understand how women might be fully included in the institution of citizenship, to identify the conditions necessary in order that women are able to realize gender equality rights and to determine the appropriate terms in which to frame policy so that gender implications are addressed. Another critique has explored the ways in which the actual concept of citizenship needs to be revised to discount its gendered assumptions which have worked, historically, to preclude women and non-dominant men. Rather than assuming that women exist as political subjects a priori, that is, outside of their representation in political forms, processes and discourses, I am wanting to explore how ‘women’ are fashioned as different kinds of gendered political subjects when they are constituted as democratic citizens with rights, as active participants in democracy, as citizen-subjects within the new nation, or normatively defined as virtuous or entitled citizens. Each of these different constructs of woman-as-citizen contains ambiguities that I am suggesting need to be exposed. My concern here is to start uncovering the political effects of these constructs, to decipher their latent inclusions and exclusions, and to explore how aspects of the distinctly gendered practices and discourses of citizenship might be implicated in national projects, in emergent class and elite formation, in the re-marginalization of certain categories of women, and in producing new modalities of power and forms of hierarchy amongst women in South Africa.

As Siim (2000) has pointed out, the cumulative body of research and analysis on gender and citizenship from around the world has confirmed the uniqueness of feminist citizenship struggles within different nation-states. It has also revealed how the specific travels and traditions of theory have shaped local debates. Feminist debates on citizenship in South Africa, as indicated above, emphasize state-civil society relations, juridical reform and policy-making, and evidence the strong influence of Anglo-American feminist theories of democracy. This profile reflects the formative place in the trajectory of South African feminist politics, of the negotiations towards the transition, the first democratic elections and the constitution-making process. It also reflects the dominance of liberal feminism within international bodies like the United Nations as well as the way in which feminist political theory over the past decade or so has been engaging the transnational effects of the post-Cold War ascendancy of liberal democracy and the rash of constitution-making in newly-, or ‘re-newly’ democratic states around the world. But there is another significant part of the ‘tradition’ of citizenship studies in South Africa, the one that deals with notions of membership in the national political community, of belonging in the nation. This focus has perhaps been over-shadowed by the constitutional and legislative focus of national gender politics and hence underplayed within feminist writings on citizenship. Certainly, gender has been inadequately treated within analyses about nation-building except in relation to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (e.g. Wilson, 2001; Ross, 2003). Lewis (1999) rightly argues that discussions of gendered citizenship must ‘address how women define themselves in national communities’ (p.44). Equally, I would argue, those discussions must explore how women are defined as citizen-subjects within vying conceptions of national political community, and how constructs of women and gender are invoked and implicated in contesting those imaginaries of political community.

The spectre hoyering over the achievements of South Africa’s women-friendly constitution and state programmes is that of the derailing, even reversal, of the gains made for women in the political arena during the propitious moment of democratic transition. The rescinding of political space and power for women in many post-independent African states is invoked as an eventuality to be rigorously avoided. Adding to this concern is the global trend, evident in South Africa, of reassertions of ethno-nationalisms and communal identity politics as well as a preoccupation with national identity. A question that must be broached, therefore, is whether there are understandings of women’s citizenship circulating within official or more popular discourses which are more susceptible than others to being appropriated to a nationalist project or an exclusive conception of political community. Which conceptions of citizenship are more likely to accord women effective political agency that will ensure their access to resources? Are there ways in which rights-based constructs of citizenship might be articulated to apartheid or nationalist notions of maternal citizenship which confer a strong gender identity and moral agency on women even while positioning them asymmetrically vis-à-vis the state?

Opening up to scrutiny and political contestation the various ways in which ‘women’ are constituted as political subjects within different practices, institutions and discourses of citizenship will, I argue, not only reveal potential complicities between certain kinds of feminism and nationalist or ruling class projects,...