Collective Identities, Women's Agency, and the Framing of Citizenship

Not too long ago, one would have a hard time imagining a set of debates about the concept of citizenship in gender terms. The contours of citizenship were bounded by notions of universality, envisioned as a person who embodied a bundle of obligations and rights. However, within the universal framework was a gendered inner frame that contained a male citizen: he was the independent, paterfamilias in the liberal state, the male breadwinner and his family in Marshall’s (1950) framework of social citizenship, or the Rawlsian just representative of the independent household (1971). ¹ Applying a gendered lens to citizenship, the recent wave of feminist research has sought to redefine and extend the conceptual boundaries of citizenship by decoding keywords that form the basis of dominant theories: dependency/independency; private/public; and needs/rights (Fraser 1989; Gordon 1994; Saraceno 1992, 1997).