Gendered Citizenship and the Politics of Representation

Brita Ytre-Arne, Kari Jegerstedt, Hilde Danielsen, Kari Jegerstedt, Ragnhild L. Muriaas, Brita Ytre-Arne, Hilde Danielsen, Kari Jegerstedt, Ragnhild L. Muriaas, Brita Ytre-Arne

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781349704217
  9781137517647
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137517654
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Social Sciences

This book sheds new light on gender-based inequalities in a globalized world. Interdisciplinary in scope, it reveals new avenues of research on gendered citizenship, analysing the possibilities and pitfalls of being represented and of representing someone. Drawing on contexts both historical and contemporary, it queries what it means to have access to representation, which power structures regulate and produce representation, and who counts as a citizen. Situating its arguments in the global struggle for hegemony, it answers such thought-provoking questions as whether one can represent someone or be represented without recourse to citizenship and, conversely, whether it is possible to be a citizen if one does not have access to representation. This engaging edited collection will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, social anthropology, history, media studies, political science, literature, gender studies and cultural studies.

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© The Author(s) 2016

Hilde Danielsen, Kari Jegerstedt, Ragnhild L. Muriaas and Brita Ytre-Arne (eds.)Gendered Citizenship and the Politics of RepresentationCitizenship, Gender and Diversity10.1057/978-1-137-51765-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Gendered Citizenship: The Politics of Representation

Hilde Danielsen¹ , Kari Jegerstedt² , Ragnhild L. Muriaas³ and Brita Ytre-Arne⁴

(1)

Uni Research Rokkan Centre, Bergen, Norway

(2)

Centre for Women’s and Gender Research, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

(3)

Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen, Christiesgt 15, 5007 Bergen, Norway

(4)

Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, 5020 Bergen, Norway

End Abstract

Introduction

As we entered the new millennium, suffrage, the founding gesture of all representational democracies, is almost taken for granted. Yet the rights, privileges and duties of citizens, as well as the possibilities to be seen and heard as part of a democracy in other ways than through voting or engagement in formal political forums, are not equally distributed—neither within nation states nor across the globe. These differences are gendered, as well as economic, racial and sexual, and form an ingrained part of everyone’s situatedness in a globalized world where capital and new technologies reign. Who counts as a citizen and in what ways is part of an ongoing global struggle for hegemony. What are the relationships between representation and equality? And how can they be analysed and conceptualized in present times?

This book presents new avenues for research on gendered citizenship precisely through the prism of representation, bringing together scholars who discuss what are the possibilities and pitfalls of being represented and of representing someone, highlighting in particular the gendered aspects of representation. The present interrogation of the gendered processes in which humans become political citizens has moved beyond traditional understandings of representation to open for a more thorough questioning of the very concepts of citizenship, democracy and gender. Not only does the concept of gendered citizenship allow for a reflection on rights, participation, entitlements and voice, as well as political, economic and cultural processes of inclusion and exclusion, it also evokes questions of belonging, language, identity and the body, calling for a more thorough rethinking of what it means to be a human being and a member of society.

In order to address these questions, we believe that it is necessary to retain and further develop the duality of the very term “representation”: representation points both to the endeavour of “standing (in) for/acting for”—as in representational democracy—and to the act of “re-presenting”—as in presenting something/somebody in language, discourse, texts, images and so forth. This duality has been noted repetitively in feminist scholarship and has found several forceful examinations, most notably following Gayatri Spivak’s seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak 1988), where she points out that the relationship between these two meanings are that between “proxy” and “portrait”—a distinction she rehearses in her contribution to this volume. The distinction between the two needs to be kept alive, Spivak argues. To confuse them—that is, to believe that you represent someone without also re-presenting them or, indeed, to believe that you represent someone by re-presenting them—amounts to nothing short of a fundamentalist shortcut: the belief that there is a stable, unitary “woman”, “class” or other “identity” behind representation, that speak, act and know for themselves.

Spivak’s aim is to call into question the power implicit in representation: Representation—in both meanings—is steeped in power relations, involving not only inclusion and exclusion, but “othering” and “worlding”—the imperialistic processes through which the “other” comes to know its “self”—as well as the international division of labour (Spivak 1988). This vexed problematic also concerns attempts at feminist subject constructions. As Judith Butler reminds us in the introduction to Gender Trouble: “The suggestion that feminism can seek wider representation for a subject that it itself constructs has the ironic consequence that feminist goals risk failure by refusing to take account of the constitutive powers of their own representational claims” (Butler 1990: 6). In other words: goals of inclusive representation need to take heed of the processes of re-presentation, whether feminist or not: What are the wider (political, economic and ideological) structures and discourses through which and in which a feminist subject can assert itself? Is it enough to be asserted within these, or does that simply mean new forms of subordination? This problematic is not any the less relevant in a postcolonial, globalized world where, as Barry Hindess, amongst others, has pointed out, the granting of citizenship to populations formerly denied citizenship has become the aim of a new transnational governance subjecting populations to the demands of a common, globalized marked (Hindess 2002). Thus, if we are to continue to work for wider and more inclusionary citizenship, we need to simultaneously and continuously ask: What does it mean to have access to representation? Which power structures regulate and produce this accessibility, and on whose and what premises is representation possible? What is necessarily excluded by and in the act of representation? Is it possible to represent someone or be represented if you do not have access to citizenship? Is it possible to act out citizenship if you do not have access to representation?

As will be shown throughout this book, which is the seventh volume in the series Citizenship, Gender and Diversity, the concepts of citizenship and of representation share many dilemmas and are deeply connected to each other. T.H. Marshall’s original concept of citizenship (Marshall 1950) is based on an understanding of representative democracy tied to legal and social rights, while feminists have developed a wide range of concepts pointing to other aspects of citizenship. Other books in this series explore intimate, bodily and cultural citizenship. Like representation, citizenship is a troubling proposition for feminism, as noted by the sociologist Sasha Roseneil, one of the series’ editors: “Intensely luring in its expansive, inclusionary promise, yet inherently rejecting in its restrictive, exclusionary reality, it is an ambivalent object for those of us committed to radical projects of social transformation” (Roseneil 2013: 1). Citizenship speaks of inclusion and points to exclusion; it is always constituted in relation to its outside, its opposition. This paradox in the understanding of citizenship is also inherent in the concept of representation. When addressing representation we also need to point to the lack of representation or challenges regarding representation.

The Dual Meanings of Representation

Our book embraces an interdisciplinary and broadly framed approach to historical and contemporary questions concerning representations, gender equality and democracy, both in the political and in the cultural sphere. Thus, we hope to renew the debate on the dual meaning of representation and its relation to citizenship, placing it firmly within contemporary, global challenges to thinking gendered citizenship on a large scale, creating a meeting point for research both from the social sciences and from the humanities addressing the problematic of representation from diverse perspectives. This book covers empirical examples from Europe, Africa and Asia, and contains chapters that problematize gendered citizenship and representation in a transnational perspective. In the following sections, we briefly present some different conceptualizations of representation and how these have resulted in multifaceted streams of research within the humanities and the social sciences.

Representation as Standing/Acting for

Broad sections within the literature on representation base their understanding on the distinction of representation as standing for and acting for women, a distinction coined in Hanna Pitkin’s seminal work, The Concept of Representation (Pitkin 1967). In Pitkin’s conceptualization of political representation, she develops three dimensions of representation that exceeds that of formal representation. Two of these dimensions understand representation in terms of a representative that stands for those represented. Descriptive representation refers to the compositional similarity between representatives and the represented. Symbolic representation (role modelling) refers to the feelings of the represented of being fairly and effectively represented. The last dimension understands representation in the sense of a representative acting in the interest of the represented, in a manner responsive to them (Pitkin 1967: 209). This dimension is substantive representation, which then refers to the congruence between the actions of the representatives and the interests of the represented.

Although several works study only one of these notions of representation, a significant stream of research involves the connection between descriptive and substantive representation, studying how the composition of legislatures affects policy outcomes. The key assumption is that if more women are elected into political office, the outcome will be more pro-women legislation. The inspiration for these studies is, amongst others, Drude Dahlerup’s notion of gender balance and critical mass theory (Dahlerup 1988) and Anne Phillips’ notion of gender parity (Phillips 1995). Critical mass theory postulates that legislatures should be composed of “more than 30 per cent female politicians” as only then would they become “strong enough to begin to influence the culture of the group”. Gender parity theory demands a composition of 50/50, based on the justice argument—women shall have half of the seats because women are half the population—and the experience argument—a conflict of interests exists between men and women on a number of issues, which implies that men cannot represent women (see also Threlfall et al. 2012: 145).

The assumed link between descriptive and substantive representation faced stark criticism amongst scholars in political science (Childs and Krook 2006), yet the idea has gained recurrence amongst politicians across the world and contributed to the global spread of various kinds of gender quotas. The key criticism against the focus on descriptive representation and its effects highlight that identities are not only gendered but also formed by the intersections of class, ethnicity/race, age, physical ability, sexual preference and so on (Celis 2013: 179). For example, women hold contradicting and conflicting views on what their interest is, and since conflict is the essence of politics, one should not expect that women agree on how their interests are best served (Celis 2013: 184). What would actually be the purpose of an increased presence of women in elected offices across the world? Should we assume that women should only stand for women or should they also act for women? Such approaches also include questions regarding whether it is really possible to represent those that are excluded from having a citizenship that makes them entitled to hold certain positions and articulate their claims. It is difficult to talk about responsiveness to the represented if there are clear restrictions on the legal status of a person, a person’s right to act as a participant in political institutions and a person’s membership in a political community (Threlfall et al. 2012: 141).

Representation as Re-presenting

In scholarship on media, arts and culture, both understandings of representation have played a role while the main emphasis has been on issues of representation as re-presenting. The idea that women deserve equal representation as men within the media, for example, has echoed notions of descriptive representation. Similarly, there have been attempts to include female writers and artists in the traditional canons and historians have written the histories of different marginalized groups. Yet, analysis of gendered representation in media, arts and culture is not merely a question of counting, but rather of analysing how gendered re-presentations are constructed, expressed and interpreted within shifting social, cultural and political contexts, and how they are bound up in a network of intersectional power structures (van Zoonen 1994; Carter and Steiner 2003; McRobbie 2009). In the words of cultural theorist Stuart Hall, representation is “one of the central practices which produce culture” (Hall 1997: 1).

While feminist critiques of gendered represe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Gendered Citizenship: The Politics of Representation
• 1. Becoming a Citizen–Interrogating the Constitution of Political Subjects
• 2. Gendered Participation in Representative Democracies–Working from Below and/or Above?
• 3. Challenging the Public–Private Divide
• 4. Can Exclusions Speak?
• Backmatter