Citizenship

About this book

The competing pressures of globalization and immigration have forced Americans - as well as people from most other countries - to think long and hard about what it means to be a citizen. In Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives, Ruth Lister argues for a new feminist notion of citizenship, one that can accommodate difference. Lister argues that citizenship has traditionally been a tool of social and political exclusion, inequality, and xenophobia. How, then, she asks, can it lend itself to an inclusive analysis and to politics able to accommodate difference? And how can it offer a solid foundation for progressive, nondiscriminatory policymaking? Addressing these difficult questions, Lister draws on a range of disciplines and a burgeoning international literature on citizenship. To pinpoint the important theoretical issues that they raise, Lister recasts traditional thinking about the concept of citizenship, exploring its political and policy implications for women in all their diversity. Themes of inclusion and exclusion (at the national and international level), rights and participation, inequality and difference are thus brought to the fore in the development of a "woman-friendly" theory and praxis of citizenship. This book provides new insights for both theory and policy. It will be of particular interest and relevance to students in a range of disciplines - including women's studies, political science, sociology, and public policy studies - as well as activists and policymakers.