ABSTRACT
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 ‘the absence of any systematic thinking about familial relations, reproduction and citizenship’ (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 ‘mainstream’ 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 uninterrogated public/private dichotomy, the complex entanglements and gendered valencies of ‘public’ and ‘private’, ‘political’ and ‘personal’, ‘rational’ and ‘emotional’, and ‘mind’ and ‘body’ 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 ‘citizenship’ itself, have largely remained marginal to ‘citizenship studies’.
