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Reproduction and citizenship/reproducing citizens: editorial introduction
Sasha Roseneila, Isabel Crowhurstb, Ana Cristina Santosc and Mariya Stoilovaa
aBirkbeck Institute for Social Research, University of London, Birkbeck, London UK; bDepartment of Criminology and Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Kingston University, Kingston upon Thames, UK; cCentro de Estudos Sociais, Colégio de S. Jerónimo, Largo D. Dinis, Coimbra, Portugal
Whilst the politics of reproduction have been at the heart of feminist struggles for over a century and a half, their analysis has not yet come to occupy a central place in the interdisciplinary study of citizenship. This special issue on Citizenship and Reproduction/Reproducing Citizens takes up the challenge posed by Bryan Turner in the pages of this journal, when he noted âthe absence of any systematic thinking about familial relations, reproduction and citizenshipâ (Turner 2008, p. 45). However, we take issue with this claim, and argue that there is now a substantial body of scholarship that explores this nexus of practices and political contestations. Nonetheless, Turner is rare amongst âmainstreamâ citizenship scholars working outside feminist or queer frameworks in paying explicit attention to reproduction. Despite the powerful challenges posed by theorists such as Carole Pateman (1988, 1989, 1992), Ruth Lister (1997) and Nira Yuval-Davis (1997) to traditional civic republican and liberal understandings of citizenship that rest on an un-interrogated public/private dichotomy, the complex entanglements and gendered valencies of âpublicâ and âprivateâ, âpoliticalâ and âpersonalâ, ârationalâ and âemotionalâ, and âmindâ and âbodyâ in constructions and practices of citizenship have been almost exclusively the critical terrain of feminist and queer scholars. And so, the biological, sexual and technological realities of natality, and the social realities of the intimate intergenerational material and affective labour that is generative of citizens, and that serve to reproduce membership of, and belonging to, states, nations, societies and, thus of âcitizenshipâ itself, have largely remained marginal to âcitizenship studiesâ.
Yet over the past two decades, across the social sciences, there has been a flourishing of empirical and theoretical âcitizenship researchâ that builds on the second wave feminist argument that gendered practices of reproduction are central to the reproduction of inequalities in social and political life (Mitchell 1966, Firestone 1970, Chodorow 1978, OâBrien 1981). This work has been framed through a variety of conceptualisations of citizenship, each of which offers a rather different emphasis: feminist citizenship (Jones 1990, Lister 1997), inclusive citizenship (Knijn and Kremer 1997, Lister 2007), gendered citizenship (Siim 2000, Lister et al. 2007, Caldwell et al. 2009, Halsaa et al. 2011, 2012), sexual citizenship (Cossman 2007, Ryan-Flood 2009), intimate citizenship (Plummer 2003, 2005, Smyth 2008, Roseneil 2010, Roseneil et al. 2012), as well as embodied (Bacchi and Beasley 2002), bodily (Outshoorn et al. 2012) and biopolitical (Tyler 2010) citizenship.
Across these expositions and discussions, attention to the politics of reproduction has resulted in a number of radically new ways of thinking about citizenship that underline the many and varied ways in which states regulate and shape the reproduction of their citizens. Substantively, it has drawn attention to the centrality of reproductive rights to womenâs citizenship (OâConnor et al. 1999, Mazur 2002), highlighting how full and equal citizenship remains a distant goal, given that the project of securing full reproductive self-determination for women is far from achieved across much of the world (see, for example, Petchesky and Judd 1998, Rajan 2003, Gouws 2005, Einhorn 2006, Rousseau 2007, Outshoorn et al. 2012).1 It has demanded that the quotidian, gendered and increasingly globalised and racialised2 work of caring for children, and elderly and disabled people, that is central to the reproduction of the social, be understood as practices of citizenship (Sevenhuijsen 1998, Williams 2004, Tronto 2005). This has led to arguments about how the analysis of the ways in which welfare regimes of the global north support, provide or neglect care-work is crucial to understanding citizenship (Knijn and Kremer 1997, Tronto 2001, Lister et al. 2007, Bergman et al. 2012, Le Feuvre et al. 2012). Relatedly, the care-work of citizen-mothers has come to be understood as vital to âthe reproduction of the nationâ (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989, Yuval-Davis 1996, Luibheid 2004, Tyler 2013), so that demographic concerns about the health, strength and/or ethnic/racial composition of the nation have historically often shaped reproductive law and policy, and hence who is and is not able to have children (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989, Mottier and Gerodetti 2007).3 The dependence of nations, states and ethnicities on natality and ancestry (jus sanguini) to determine membership (Stevens 1999) has also become the critical object of scrutiny, as has the stateâs âprimary demographic objective of securing and enforcing the historic connection between reproduction and citizenshipâ (Turner 2008, p. 53).4
Through the lens of queer cultural theory, a critique has been developed of how the foetus, disconnected from the pregnant woman, has, in certain times and places, come to be seen as making claims as a citizen (Berlant 1997), and how in a culture of âreproductive futurismâ, the figure of the child has come to embody the citizen as an ideal, âthe telos of the social order [âŠ] the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trustâ (Edelman 2004, p. 11). In parallel, social policy scholars have identified the emergence, potency and increasing global ubiquity of a âsocial investmentâ citizenship regime, in which the child, as the future citizen-worker, and the âhard-workingâ family that produces human capital, have become the primary, or only, worthy welfare subjects (Jenson and Saint-Martin 2003, Dobrowolskly and Jenson 2004, Williams and Roseneil 2004). And ontologically, taking seriously the âfleshyâ (Beasley and Bacchi 2012), biological realities of reproduction has been regarded as overturning conventional constructions of the citizen as an autonomous, rational actor, giving rise instead to an appreciation of the citizen as embodied, relational and gendered, as fundamentally interdependent and always potentially vulnerable (Beasley and Bacchi 2012, Roseneil et al. 2012).
Our interest in the questions and challenges posed by this literature on citizenship and reproduction has developed in parallel with our involvement in a large cross-national, multidisciplinary research project, FEMCIT (see Halsaa et al. 2011, 2012).5 The aim of FEMCIT was to understand the legacies, impacts and resonance of womenâs movements across Europe in relationship to the gendering of citizenship (see Halsaa et al. 2011, 2012). The project was organised through separate empirical studies of six âdimensions of citizenshipâ â political, social, economic, multicultural, bodily and intimate â each of which addressed a set of claims and demands arising from post-1960s womenâs movements.6 One of the most striking aspects of FEMCIT, in terms of our focus in this special issue, is that the relationship between citizenship and reproduction emerged as a matter of central concern in each of the sub-projects, and thus as part and parcel of the study of each dimension of citizenship. So, for example, FEMCIT research by Threlfall and colleagues7 (see Halsaa et al. 2011, pp. 10â20, Threlfall et al. 2012) suggests that womenâs traditional relegation to the private sphere and their reproductive roles â actual and potential â continue to impact upon their realisation of full political citizenship as elected representatives. The work of Solveig Bergman and colleagues8 (see Halsaa et al. 2011, pp. 20â28, Bergman et al. 2012) found that childcare politics and policies remain one of the most important and unresolved issues of social citizenship addressed by European womenâs movements, albeit that movements frame their claims and visions of âgood childcareâ, âgood motheringâ and âgood fatheringâ in different ways across different national contexts, and sometimes within countries. Le Feuvre and colleagues9 (see Halsaa et al. 2011, pp. 29â38, Le Feuvre et al. 2012) identified gender inequalities and the differential level and nature of state regulation of, and involvement in, the social reproductive work carried out in the rapidly expanding elder care sector as increasingly important in understanding womenâs differentiated experiences of economic citizenship across Europe. The study of bodily citizenship carried out by Outshoorn and colleagues10 (see Halsaa et al. 2011, pp. 47â55, Outshoorn et al. 2012) found that European (majority) womenâs movements have, since the late 1960s/early 1970s, placed the struggle for bodily integrity, autonomy and self-determination, and particularly for control over reproduction and access to abortion, at the centre of their agendas, and that their interventions have made a significant difference to the development of abortion law and policy: in times and places where there was no significant autonomous feminist mobilisation of women, reform was limited, and control over abortion remained in the hands of the medical profession.
But it was our own research on intimate citizenship (see Halsaa et al. 2011, pp. 55â67, also Roseneil et al. 2011, 2012) that particularly spiked our interest in citizenship and reproduction. Our analysis of the intimate citizenship regimes of four contrasting European countries â Bulgaria, Norway, Portugal and the UK â draws attention to the ongoing potency of the procreative norm: the assumption, expectation and cultural demand that biological procreation should occupy the centre-ground of the social formation, that intimate relationships, sexuality and the wider organisation of the social should be driven by, and structured around, a naturalised notion of a primary, fundamental procreative imperative. More specifically, we suggest that the analysis of the procreative norm should be central to understandings of the historical and contemporary configuration of European citizenship, and that the dynamics of inclusion/exclusion/marginalisation that are integral to the promulgation of the procreative norm are central aspects of regimes of intimate citizenship. Our research points to the importance attached by governments of all political hues across the four countries to encouraging good citizens to have children, and to the construction of the good citizen as properly procreative â which has overwhelmingly meant, procreative within the context of the co-residential heterosexual, gender normative couple. However, it also found that pro-procreative policies and other laws and policies that promulgate the procreative norm are far from just the top-down product of governments: policies aimed at protecting and supporting mothers and families are also the outcome of historical struggles by maternalist sectors of womenâs movements and, in some cases, labour movements, and have sometimes been fought for by conservative and religious pro-family pressure groups. Moreover, there have been significant differences between nation states in both emphasis and technique in the pursuit of this fundamental aspect of intimate citizenship policy, and there have been important changes over time in the ways in which intimate citizenship regimes operationalise the procreative norm. Broadly speaking, âstrong-armedâ technologies employing legal sanctions, punitive measures and explicit propaganda, such as the Bachelor Tax in Bulgaria wh...
