Engendering Citizenship: An Agenda for a Praxis of Citizenship

Abstract

Citizenship's constitutive outsiders denote differential and layered inclusions, signifying the physical and notional boundaries demarcating citizenship. While examining the gendered nature of citizenship which is manifested in layered inclusions, this paper outlines an agenda for democratic citizenship. Engendering citizenship, it proposes, has at its core a practice of citizenship that involves opening up spaces in a public world of action, for continual re-examination of forms and terms of membership. Moving beyond legal-formal frameworks, this paper examines the manner in which ‘people's practices of citizenship’ evolve at the intersection of contending and dialectical practices of citizenship, and particular strands of liberatory citizenship that emerge there from. For a practice of citizenship to emerge at all sites of systemic and structural exclusion and violence, it is important that the public domain of action is reclaimed by citizens. This domain of action which is always potentially ‘there’ gets continually re-constituted as and when the radical ‘people’ articulate themselves in the ‘disturbed zones of citizenship’ as women, workers, dalits, etc., and emerge as citizens, in the process of this articulation.