ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how symbolic representation shapes, produces, and reproduces legitimacy. It relates the issue of legitimacy to that of intimate citizenship. The analyses gender equality policies on intimate citizenship in Belgium and Italy to determine the construction of legitimacy of particular positions and relations above others. It starts with the Italian case, given its more traditional approach, and then contrasts that with the Belgian case. Intimate citizenship is linked to legitimacy because policies that regulate it can have the effect of excluding certain groups of people from full participation within a political community due to the unjust distribution of not only economic but also legal, symbolic, social, and cultural rights'. The chapter explores which affective responses in Hanna Pitkin's terms towards women and men are being constructed in policy discourses, and to what extent these responses legitimise particular social relationships and social systems that then have consequences for people's lives.
