Women, Citizenship and Difference (Postcolonial Encounters)

This is an important contribution toward an understanding of citizenship as mediated by other collective, historically determined identities: of gender, ethnicity, class and national status. It brings together prominent international scholars from moral philosophy, law, political science and sociology to offer a major reconceptualization of the idea of citizenship. Throughout, it is concerned with the dismantling of welfare states, the attack on civil society and the rise in state terror and religious and cultural fundamentalisms. Contributors demonstrate how the growing ambivalence of state sovereignty in the face of multinational capitalism and the absence of political accountability structures are complicit in the definitions of gendered citizenship. Against these, women's communal mobilization and political activism are considered in terms of their power effects and political potentialities; the book as a whole shows the need to negotiate and transcend difference and to find means for creating alliances across differences.