ABSTRACT
All references to democracy, either as a notion or as a social and political reality, presuppose a particular idea about who the citizen is, as the subject of democracy. The way in which the citizen is defined, and, by the same token, the way in which the notion of the subject (or the individual, according to the dominant view) has been delimited beforehand, leaves its mark, seals with specific characteristics the profile of contemporary democracy itself, and contributes to its distortions and its weaknesses. However, as R. Lister notes,1 “citizenship” remains in contemporary bibliography an essentially contested concept; contested in its meaning as well as in its political application, while, especially in the feminist literature, dealing theoretically with it is frequently treated with scepticism, since it mainly refers to rights, whose formal possession is obviously insufficient.
