(En)gendering the Political

Citizenship from marginal spaces

Joe B. Turner

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138637016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351794695
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What is the relationship between being political and citizenship? What might it mean to be marginalised through both the practices and knowledge of citizenship? What might citizenship look like from a position of social, political and cultural exclusion? This book responds to these questions by treating marginalisation as a political process and position. It explores how different lives, experiences and forms of political action might be engendered when subjects are excluded, made vulnerable and invisible from contemporary forms of citizenship. It aims to contribute to the growing body of literature on the politics of resistance by investigating how complex forms of marginality are not only produced by dominant forms of citizenship but also actively challenge them.

Modernist approaches to politics tend to see the citizen as the ideal type of political agent and citizenship as the zenith of struggles over rights, representation and belonging. This edited volume challenges this approach to political subjectivity by showing how political acts work for but also against/beyond citizenship claims, towards different orientations and as 'acts' of (non)citizen. By bringing together diverse theoretical and empirical contributions, and exploring the emergent politics of marginalised subjects, this collection challenges how we think about citizenship and opens up space for alternative imaginaries of political action and belonging.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.

INTRODUCTION

(En)gendering the political: Citizenship from marginal spaces

Turner Joe

Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

ABSTRACT

This introduction sets out the central concerns of this special issue, the relationship between marginality and the political. In doing so, it makes the argument that the process of marginalisation, the sites and experiences of ‘marginality’ provide a different lens through which to understand citizenship. Viewing the political as the struggle over belonging it considers how recent studies of citizenship have understood political agency. It argues that marginality can help us understand multiple scales, struggles and solidarities both within and beyond citizenship. Whilst there is a radical potential in much of the existing literature in citizenship studies, it is also important to consider political subjectivities and acts which are not subsumed by right claims. Exploring marginality in this way means understanding how subjects are disenfranchised by regimes of citizenship and at the same time how this also (en)genders new political possibilities which are not always orientated towards ‘inclusion’. The introduction then sets out how each article contributes to this project.

This special issue concerns the relationship between marginality and the political. It contends that an understanding of this relationship is of central importance for an exploration of contemporary citizenship. In focusing on the production of marginality, the emphasis here is on how marginality or marginal spaces are fashioned but equally how they provide conditions for forms of political becoming and the emergence of ‘alternatives’. These articles thus explore how practices, experiences, legacies of marginality (en)gender different sites of political struggle, which in turn shape, contest and disrupt citizenship as it is both practised and conceptualised. The collection offers a series of interventions into both how we understand the production of marginality across modern societies but also the way we understand how subjects become constituted as political subjects through the process of marginalisation. They provide theoretically informed but empirically rich explorations by both activists and scholars into how different struggles, acts, events, practices and conduct disrupt the hierarchisation and ordering of social life. The relationship between marginality, citizenship and the political represented here is underpinned by the persistent struggle over belonging. If marginality is the process through which certain subjects and groups’ belonging is problematised, then this is often materialised through dominant norms and practices of citizenship. Following McNevin, we can thus read the political as a radical questioning of what it is to belong (2007). This special issue aims to highlight how the process of marginalisation itself, and the new co-ordinates it makes possible, have (en)gendered this radical form of questioning.

Broadly conceived, citizenship studies have been at the forefront of exploring the tension between inclusion/exclusion at the heart of modern citizenship, with many studies revealing an emphasis on either inclusion or exclusion. Those scholars focusing on inclusion have tended to rely on a normative commitment to citizenship as an empirically flawed but ultimately inclusive project. Whilst granting citizenship necessitates a privileging and demarcation of rights (citizen/non-citizen), this is often treated as a problem that can be overcome with more pluralistic definitions of (active) citizenship (Çakmaklı 2015; Grugel and Singh 2015; Lister 2007), more progressive border regimes (Sandelind 2015), the detaching of national identity to right claims through multiculturalism (Joppke 2007; Kofman 2002; Kymlicka 2001), etc. The literature on exclusion works against elements of this commitment. Through interlocutors with security and border studies (Muller 2004; Nyers 2009; also see Guillaume and Huysmans 2013), critical approaches to migration (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008) as well as (post)colonial (Rigo 2005), gender and queer theory (Roseneil et al. 2013), there is now a relatively large body of work exploring citizenship as an inherently exclusive mode of political subjectivity (Hindess 2004). Through both legalistic and normative definitions, the case is presented that the citizen has been scripted as a liberal, white, bourgeois, heterosexual, man and this inherently leads to the powerful hierachisation and securitisation of others (Basham and Vaughan-Williams 2013). In those accounts treating citizenship as a component of sovereign politics, exclusion from citizenship is linked to process of de-humanisation, exemplified in the abject figure of the ‘deportable’ asylum seeker or irregular migrant reduced to a form of ‘bare life’ (Doty 2011; Edkins, Pin-Fat, and Shapiro 2004; Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007; Rygiel 2008; Vaughan-Williams 2010). Citizenship maintains its (post)colonial co-ordinates in Western states, where neoliberal ideologies persist to contain racialised and dangerous ‘others’ outside of the state’s ‘juridical and spatial confines’ (De Genova 2007, 440; Schinkel 2010). Whilst analyses of exclusion(s) are far from monolithic they tend to lean towards an account of state violence; exclusion from citizenship is imagined through a prism of inside/outside.

This focus has produced fascinating accounts of inclusion/exclusion; we now have a far more complex understanding of the assemblages of control and regulation through which certain forms of life are both made possible and denied. However, this focus tends to obscure a view of the active contestation of both practices of inclusion and exclusion. There has been a general absence of analysis of the emergence of political events, moments or ‘acts’ of resistance in the literature on exclusion (see Guillaume and Huysmans 2013, 9; Isin 2008; Nyers and Rygiel 2012). Equally, the focus on inclusion tends to read the political through the existing narrative of citizenship, as a territorialised regime of rights. Citizenship becomes the key site of political struggles and claims (see Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013). Arguably, in this context the divergence and heterogeneity of the political is obscured, either through a focus on the extent of the social reach of governmentalities, or because politics is reduced to those events which mobilise around formal rights claims. This special issue thus contributes to a movement in critical citizenship studies which seeks to push beyond the focus on inclusion/exclusion (Bagelman 2015; Guillaume and Huysmans 2013; McNevin 2011; Nyers and Rygiel 2012; Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008; Squire 2011; Tyler and Marciniak 2013). This body of work has attempted to subvert the analytical focus on the institutional practices of citizenship in favour of the contestation and refashioning of citizenship through protest and activism. Many of these studies have explored the role of migrants, those classically conceived as non-citizens, in contesting, claiming and effectively ‘practising’ citizenship (Nyers and Rygiel 2012, 2). In particular these studies seek to understand how global migration, the experiences and practices of mobility and forms of control provide new spaces for (re)shaping and (re)conceptualising citizenship. Exemplifying this move, Nyers and Rygiel (2012, 2) argue that we need to ask ‘how, through various strategies of claims-making, non-citizen migrant groups are involved in practices and ways of engaging in citizenship even when lacking formal status’. Drawing upon Engin Isin’s now seminal work on ‘acts of citizenship’, and a wider turn in politics, political and economic geography (Darling 2014; Harvey 2008; Ong 2006; Scott 2009) and International Relations (IR) (Death 2010) towards a focus on resistance, I read these studies as seeking to (re)politicise the analysis of citizenship by bringing into focus those acts which ‘protest’ exclusory regimes but, in doing, also help delineate the contingency of citizenship itself. This focus is subversive in that it addresses both the (im)possible agency of non-citizen (migrants), against a focus on passivity, victimhood and ‘bare life’, and equally accounts for changing nature of citizenship ‘from below’ through active ‘transgressions’.

This special issue’s examination of how marginality (en)genders the political, aims to extend this emerging literature. It does this in three ways. (1) By unsettling the binary of inclusion/exclusion by exploring how marginality is productive of political subjectivity. The role of (en)gendering is important here as it refers to a process of ‘emergence’ – emergent activism, solidarities, political being. (2) The emphasis on marginality brings into focus a more divergent set of subjects, sites, scales of struggles over citizenship, alongside and beyond the justified yet restrictive focus on the ‘migrant’. To use the verb (en)gender thus alludes to feminist scholarship on gender and intersectionality (Hunt and Rygiel 2007) which provides us with unique insights into the production of marginal subjects. (3) It further examines the political as more than a claim to rights. Whilst agreeing that an analysis of rights claims is helpful in understanding contestation, this special issue also recognises the different orientation of acts, events and movements which may not always be subsumed by the existing co-ordinates of citizenship that they contest (also see Tyler and Marciniak 2013, 2; Walters 2008). This means exploring what Aoileann Ní Mhurchú refers to as ‘Unfamiliar acts of Citizenship’ (Ní Mhurchú 2016), ‘Acts against Citizenship’ (Tyler and Marciniak 2013, 8), as well as acts that are orientated towards different relations and cosmologies (see Bird 2016; Shilliam 2016).

By exploring marginality, we in this special issue follow the observation that the experience of marginalisation, restriction, social control also constitutes political subjectivities (Nyers and Rygiel 2012). However, marginality is embodied and experienced by a multiplicity of subjects and groups. This means recognising that citizenship has historically related to many different forms of marginalisation and hierarchicalisation, not all of which coalesce around the figure of the migrant, alien or asylum seeker (see Anderson 2013). The racialised, classed, sexualised, gendered dimensions of citizenship produce a complex assemblage of marginality; even when achieved, formal status is differentiated and does not always equate to legitimacy or belonging (see Harrington 2012). The history of the poor, women, homosexuals, the mad and ‘feebleminded’, colonial subjects, naturalised citizens attests to this. Whilst previous studies have arguably reconstituted the dichotomy between citizen/non-citizen, this special issue seeks to understand the treatment of subjects along a broad continuum of marginality (intergenerational migrant youth, black minorities, ‘Problem Families’, Traveller groups, the ‘workless’) and to explore the (un)familiar processes which constitute the spatiality of the marginal. Marginality is divergent and historical and by exploring marginality as a continuum this means recognising the ‘many relay points in the weave of modern politics, which are neither exceptional nor comparable, but simply relational’ (Weheliye 2014, 37). Whilst different experiences of marginality are relational, this equally leads to different explorations of the politics of contestation which dispute and interrupt dominant modes of belonging. This special issue brings into focus different (yet related) strategies, practices and solidarities that intertwine between those with formal status and those without. For instance, border practices that (en)gender (temporary) solidarities between activists and irregularised migrants (Stierl 2016), or right to work protests between asylum seekers and trade unions (Mayblin 2016), Irish Travellers and ‘No Border’ protesters rejecting acts of ‘domicide’ (Turner 2016), white and black ‘Ethiopianist’ in the contestation of Imperial sensibilities (Shilliam 2016).

What this emphasis on a stratified continuum helps us engage with are the different sites, scales and character of political acts. Whilst marginality encompasses a spatial dimension so does the political. Investigating the constitution of political subjectivity in liminal spaces means that we need to explore the multiplicity of such sites and the practices relating to them. The articles collected here thus work alongside and beyond the focus on mobility, borders and the bodies of non-citizens to a multitude of sites of marginality and political possibility: street art and music, unmarked graves/yards, the Traveller caravan, the African village, the Rastafari movement. As the individual articles argue, these sites provide the (partial) raw materials for the constitution of subjects and groups into political subjects who can contest the apparently settled boundaries of social life in new ways (Balibar 2012). To think of marginality in terms of different political spaces is also to contest the linear and liberal notion that inclusion ‘back in to’ normalised modes of belonging and equitable rights is the objective of all struggles. Such a perspective risks leading to a fixed imagination of inside/outside and replays the commonsensical boundaries of citizenship against the cultivation of an ‘imaginary and a practical sensibility to what lies after citizenship’ (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013, 179).

Acts of citizenship/acts after citizenship

Isin’s work on ‘acts’ of citizenship has been influential in reconceptualising the political character of citizenship (Isin 2008). ‘Acts’ refer to the performances and events through which subjects constitute themselves (or are constituted) as ‘those whom the right to have rights is due’. As Tyler and Marciniak (2013, 7) argue

This redefinition has proved fruitful for thinking about ways in which populations who are disenfranchised by the states in which they reside, and are ‘outside of politics’ in any normative sense, are able to act in ways that allow them to (temporary) constitute themselves as political subjects under sometimes extreme conditions of subjugation.

However, it is our sense that the radical potential of Isin’s formulation is often overlooked in subsequent analysis (with significant exceptions – see Marciniak, and Tyler 2014; McNevin 2011; Tyler and Marciniak 2013), this is because the ‘constitution of political subjectivity’ is often analysed precisely through the existing co-ordinates of (liberal) citizenship. This is in part to do with a focus on ‘right claims’. Exemplary examples of ‘acts of citizenship’ provided in the literature are those incidents where non-citizens – irregularised migrants, asylum seekers, or the undocumented – protest or involve in activism and thus appear to mirror the expectations and actions of ‘good’ civic’ citizens. This seemingly reveals the contingency of boundaries demarcating citizen/non-citizen (see Andrijasevic and Anderson 2008). To Andrijasevic (2013, 54) this ‘accounts for th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: (En)gendering the political: Citizenship from marginal spaces
• 2. Unfamiliar acts of citizenship: enacting citizenship in vernacular music and language from the space of marginalised intergenerational migration
• 3. Contestations in death – the role of grief in migration struggles
• 4. Troubling the exclusive privileges of citizenship: mobile solidarities, asylum seekers, and the right to work
• 5. Governing the domestic space of the traveller in the UK: ‘family’, ‘home’ and the struggle over Dale Farm
• 6. Between safety and vulnerability: the exiled other of international relations
• 7. Ethiopianism, Englishness, Britishness: struggles over imperial belonging
• 8. Beyond the nation state: the role of local and pan-national identities in defining post-colonial African citizenship
• Index