ABSTRACT
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 '[cjontemporary 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).
