Race, class, gender and sexuality — challenges for an inclusive citizenship1

Abstract

This article explores the contribution of Jacklyn Cock' s work on child care and the working mother in relation to both the process of research and the content. It identifies the challenges to capturing the specificity of women' s subordination in the context of predominant concerns with class and race discrimination in the early 1980s. The paper argues that subsequent gains in rights of women and sexual minorities, amongst others, were made as a result of a paradigm of inclusive citizenship. However, in the past-apartheid period, this paradigm has been severely tested as people living with HIV/AIDS and other minorities have had to take up their own struggles in the absence of a public national commitment that values people with all their differences and guarantees them the benefits of citizenship, including access to resources, social recognition and political representation. It uses the concept of sexual citizenship to identify ways in which diverse minorities and marginalized groups share common cause and proposes that these may provide the basis for alliances to build an alternative vision of citizenship that continues to give priority to addressing paverty while bUilding a more inclusive notion of social justice.