Citizen Subject Research Articles

The Inner Life of Medicine: A Commentary on Anthropologies of Clinical Training in the Twenty-First Century

As I read through the essays for this provocative and resonant collection, I found myself entering an imaginative dialogue with each contributor. These scholar/ clinicians/social scientists/anthropologists of contemporary biomedicine mark a new generation of research and scholarly analysis on how medicine constructs its subjects as well as its objects (Good 1994), and how temporalities, narratives, places, spaces, and technologies create particular modes of clinical subjectivity as well as pathways to wisdom and good, challenges to being just, and dilemmas with being medical professionals in the contemporary world. The subjectivity and quests of the authors, not only of their research subjects, are interpreted, too, in many of these essays, conveying insight and immediacy—and encouraging self-reflection. It brings me to my new project on ‘‘the inner life of medicine’’ (an old title of a formerly unfinished collection of essays). The essays in this collection are good to think with as they vividly bring us into that ‘‘inner life of medicine’’ conveyed through its many facets. My dialogue with these essays begins with the editors’ question: what kinds of people are formed through contemporary processes of clinical training, and how do these evolving subjects transform health, power, and other aspects of social life? This question resonates with questions raised by my own scholarly work (and perhaps subjectivity), which emerged out of an unexpected and very long journey into many diverse worlds of medicine, psychiatry, international health and global health. I began academic life as a comparative political sociologist, with no interest in medicine, but rather with an interest in the role of the state in everyday life and in political subjectivity of citizens. I began my research in Turkey, where I spent 2 years as a Peace Corps volunteer working in orphanages; but due to the 1971 coup, I shifted my dissertation research to pre-Revolutionary Iran in Azerbaijan

Unofficial Citizens: Indian Entrepreneurs and the State-Effect in Dubai, United Arab Emirates

AbstractBuilding upon theories of the state as an “effect” of multiple, sometimes contradictory practices and narratives, I argue that Indian business elites in Dubai play an important role in both bounding the state as distinct from the economy and legitimizing its power. I focus, therefore, on the forms of citizenship and subjectivity that are being produced in Dubai and how the legitimacy of the state relies not just on the recruitment of citizen subjects, but also on those who are excluded from belonging—like Indian elites in Dubai. Neoliberal narratives and practices of economic “freedom” by elite expatriates mask the ways in which foreign elites are complicit with the state in producing social and economic hierarchies that benefit both citizens and elite expatriates while maintaining a structure of labor migration that significantly disadvantages the majority of foreign residents living in the United Arab Emirates.

Haunted by Citizenship: Whitenormative Citizen—Subjects and the Uses of History in Women's Studies

Haunted by Citizenship: Whitenormative Citizen—Subjects and the Uses of History in Women's Studies

Islamism and Secularism: Between State Instrumentalisation and Opposition Islamic Movements

In Palestine, a reassertion of the ‘secularist’ identity of the ‘Palestinian national project’ is taking place against a deeply divided political society characterised by a Palestinian authority in conflict with Hamas. This article argues that the instrumentalisation of religion by the state has backfired leaving secular feminist activists in an unenviable position – without a constituency or a socially legitimate framework through which to address gender and social justice issues. At the same time, a reassertion of the ‘secularist’ identity is taking place against a deeply divided political society characterised by a Palestinian authority in conflict with Hamas. This conflict accompanying the ‘secularisation process’ resulted in crushing the very structure of the notion of citizenship and the figure of the secular citizen subject itself.

When the State Speaks, What Should It Say? The Dilemmas of Freedom of Expression and Democratic Persuasion

Hate groups are often thought to reveal a paradox in liberal thinking. On the one hand, such groups challenge the very foundations of liberal thought, including core values of equality and freedom. On the other hand, these same values underlie the rights such as freedom of expression and association that protect hate groups. Thus a liberal democratic state that extends those protections to such groups in the name of value neutrality and freedom of expression may be thought to be undermining the values on which its legitimacy rests. In this paper, I suggest how this apparent paradox might be resolved. I argue that the state should protect the expression of illiberal beliefs, but that the state (along with its citizens) is also obligated to criticize publicly those beliefs. Distinguishing between two kinds of state action—coercive and expressive—I contend that such criticism should be pursued through the state's expressive capacities in its roles as speaker, educator, and spender. Here I extend the familiar idea that law, to be legitimate, must be widely publicized; I contend that a proper theory of the freedom of expression obligates the legitimate state to publicize the reasons that underlie rights, in particular reasons that appeal to the entitlement of each citizen subject to coercion to be treated as free and equal. My theory of freedom of expression is thus “expressive” in two senses: it protects the entitlement of citizens to express any political viewpoint, and it emphasizes a role for the state in explaining these free-speech protections and persuading its citizens of the value of the entitlements that underlie them.

'I Integrate, Therefore I Am': Contesting the Normalizing Discourse of Integrationism through Conversations with Refugee Women

The discourse of integration has been ascendant in migration policy internationally, particularly after western concerns linking terrorism with cultural separatism. Retreats from multiculturalism signal a view that conformance by outsiders with a normative, universal, and static national citizen subject will facilitate social cohesion. The discourse of integrationism, perpetuated through the practice of UnSpeak (Poole 2006), represents resettled refugees as innately problematic against dominant, normative values (Marston 2004). I explore these representations in Australian settlement education policy and suggest an appeal to marginal voices (Foucault 1980; Spivak 1988) as a means for contesting them. Rejecting an engagement driven by policy categories (Bakewell 2008), I interview nine, long settled Melbourne refugee women about education’s purposes. I make sense of the women’s feedback through Foucault’s (1990) Care of the Self, which provides an account of agency in the subject. The interviewees emphasize education’s role in facilitating self actualization, informed by a ‘knowledge of the self’. In contrast to their dominant representation as the problematic subjects of a policy encouraging conformity, refugees should be regarded as agents with potential.

Lone motherhood, welfare reform and active citizen subjectivity

Welfare-to-work policies have become a central priority of governments in Canada, the US, the UK, Australia and Scandinavia. Drawing on multiple in-depth interviews generated as part of a longitudinal qualitative study, we explore how welfare is imbricated in lone mothers’ subjectivity and citizenship. We consider women’s everyday claims-making activities as we interrogate three dimensions of welfare reform in British Columbia, Canada: (i) the employment imperative underlying active citizen subjectivity and the way this plays out in terms of gender, race and class-based occupational streaming; (ii) the coerciveness of gendered norms instantiated in such streaming; and (iii) the resulting practices of stratified reproduction. Following in the tradition of critical poverty studies, our research focuses on claims-making activities to challenge prevailing public policy practice that risks positioning impoverished lone mothers ‘under erasure’, invisible as mothers or moral citizens, and visible only as low waged worker citizens.

Citizen minds, citizen bodies: the citizenship experience and the government of mentally ill persons

The concept of citizenship is becoming more and more prominent in specific fields, such as psychiatry/mental health, where it is constituted as a solution to the issues of exclusion, discrimination, and poverty often endured by the mentally ill. We argue that such discourse of citizenship represents a break in the history of psychiatry and constitutes a powerful strategy to counter the effects of equally powerful psychiatric labelling. However, we call into question the emancipatory promise of a citizenship agenda. Foucault's concept of governmentality is helpful in understanding the production of the citizen subject, its location within the 'art of government', as well as the ethical and political implications of citizenship in the context of mental health.

The ‘pleasure citizen’

In this article, we explore the potential for leisure as a site for new forms of political participation. Using electronic dance music culture (EDMC) as an example, we locate our analysis within theories of neo-liberalism and neo-tribalism, both of which suggest that political participation may be occurring at an informal level through consumption. Interview and focus group data on participation in EDMC in the southwest of England were analyzed, producing the themes of ‘community, sociality and belonging’, ‘hedonism’, ‘multiplicity and flux’ and ‘Sovereignty’. These themes provided evidence for EDMC as a site for neo-tribal social and political participation, in which people created local and informal spaces of au-tonomy characterized by a celebration of community, sociality and hedonism. However, participants also drew on neo-liberal discourses of individualism, rights and responsibilities to make sense of their participation in EDMC, producing a move from economic and consumer citizen subjects to the ‘pleasure’ citizen.

Spectacle and Subversive Laughter in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow

paper examines the resistant spectator in Wizard of the Crow who refuses to be awed by state power and who, by laughing at the spectacular excess, inscribes a different meaning to the spectacles. The spectator essentially contests the state’s monopoly of meaning and its performance. It will be the argument in this paper that by answering back to the monologue of the spectacle through unscripted performances including silence where they are supposed to applaud, the average citizen subjects of the fictional state of Aburiria engage in a dialogic exchange with the repressive state, contesting what Simon Gikandi has described elsewhere as the postcolonial state’s “monopoly of meanings, performances and discourses” (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 38). Spectator laughter is a central component to this contestation.

States at the Limit: Tracing Contemporary State-Society Relations in the Borderlands of Southeastern Turkey

There is theoretical significance to studying states and nations at their metaphorical and literal ‘borders’. Focusing on the contested border region of southeastern Anatolia, this chapter highlights the tensions, contradictions, and recent shifts in state-society relations in the rural spaces of the southeast. As I detail, state delivery of irrigated agriculture represents a recent and significant chapter in the evolving state-society relations in this contested border area. With contemporary changes associated with the large-scale Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP), state influence in rural areas and encounters with the state by rural populations are intensified. This occurs both horizontally, in terms of infiltrating new spaces and life practices, and also vertically, in terms of intensified interaction, such as that associated with the increased incorporation of rural residents into the Turkish economy or the increased dependence of villagers on state services. Reading the state ethnographically through the differentiated responses of villagers to recent irrigation-related changes, my aim is to analyze how the state is lived, in very real terms, in the fabric of everyday life, and to consider what this suggests for understanding state-society relations and the changing citizen subjectivities in the liminal spaces of Turkey’s southeast.

Entre ações coletivas e subjetividade: o caráter educativo dos movimentos sociais

Discutem-se, neste artigo, os movimentos sociais em sua dimensão educativa, lançando especial atenção sobre eles como elementos estruturantes da subjetividade dos sujeitos que os constituem. Além disso, estabelecem-se correlações com o Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra (MST) quando se define o conceito de educação e processos educativos não formais, com a finalidade de identificar o potencial transformador dos movimentos sociais relativos não apenas ao cenário político-econômico, mas também à dinâmica das relações vividas pelas pessoas mais diretamente ligadas a ele.

Nuove politiche di appartenenza

- The two foundational subjects for membership in the modern nation-state, the citizen and the alien, are undergoing significant changes in the current period. The effect is a partial blurring of each the citizen subject and of the alien subject. I first outline these changes vis-ŕ-vis nationality and citizenship. Second, I dissect notions of membership in order to create a set of tools for incorporating the undocumented immigrant as well as the minoritized citizenship. In the third section, I examine some key features of Europe and its immigrations in order to extract these ambiguities in the politics of membership. Fourth, I situate these repositionings within contemporary immigration facts and politics.Keywords Citizenship, membership, minorities politics.

On the outskirts of form: cosmopoetics in the shadow of NAFTA1

On the outskirts of form: cosmopoetics in the shadow of NAFTA1

Disability, Citizenship and Uncivilized Society: The smooth and nomadic qualities of self-advocacy

People with the label of "intellectual disabilities"1 are often objectified and devalued by master narratives of deviance, tragedy and lack. In this paper, we draw on poststructuralist and feminist resources (e.g. Deleuze & Guattari 1987 and Braidotti 1994, 2002, 2006a) to argue that a disabling society is uncivilized in ways that block the becomings of citizenship. We draw upon our work with self-advocacy groups in England and Belgium where self-advocates open up different life worlds. We shed light on their politics of resistance and resilience, and map how they, as politicized citizen subjects, move in a web of oppressive disability discourses. However, we suggest, as nomads, they set foot on the landmarks of their lives in a never-ending search for smooth spaces in which something different might happen.

Human Rights, Inc. , and: That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity (review)

Reviewed by: Human Rights, Inc., and: That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity Eleni Coundouriotis (bio) Joseph R. Slaughter , Human Rights, Inc. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007) 435 pp.; James Dawes , That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007), 289 pp. Joseph Slaughter's Human Rights, Inc. (winner of the 2008 René Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association) argues that human rights as articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the United Nations Covenants defined the modern individual in a manner that mirrors the literary genre of the novel of formation, or the Bildungsroman. Human rights and the Bildungsroman are mutually reinforcing ideological constructs, which according to Slaughter, argue for the person's inclusion and enfranchisement in the nation state, a process he calls the "incorporation" of the individual and which structures the human rights "plot," a narrative pattern implicit in the formulation of human rights law. Thus human rights and the Bildungsroman are "mutually enabling fictions that institutionalize and naturalize the terms of incorporation in (and exclusion from) an imagined community of readers and rights holders."1 Because the subject of human rights is the individual, its project has helped historically to contain the potential for revolution, what Slaughter calls "act[s] of collective self-assertion."2 Where human rights has become hegemonic, the impulse to collective action is redirected and manifests itself instead as "socially acceptable modes of narrative protest that make individual claims on the state."3 Slaughter highlights what he calls the "institutional conservatism of human rights law,"4 the origins of which he sees in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) that legalized "an operative distinction between man and citizen" creating "a paradoxical 'historical figure' of Enlightenment civil subjectivity that is neither man nor citizen."5 Slaughter relies here on the critique of this document by Étienne Balibar who argued that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen invented the "Citizen Subject," a figure who although no longer subjected to the authority of a king is not yet a citizen but must prove himself, or develop into, a citizen.6 In France, [End Page 1002] this meant to own property and to be educated; in Germany, which provides the literary-cultural model that Slaughter draws from, there was no centralized state in the late eighteenth-century and thus the "qualifying criterion was Bildung . . . a philosophy for the positivizing of human nature."7 Indeed Slaughter sees Bildung as a response to the violence of the French Revolution, "a reactionary alternative to revolution," which reinforces the project of human rights because both Bildung and human rights law share the same "pacific spirit."8 Slaughter's study provides a strikingly different narrative for the linkage of human rights to literary culture than the one given by Lynn Hunt in her widely reviewed history, Inventing Human Rights (2007). Hunt examines the epistolary novel of the eighteenth century, in particular Samuel Richardson's influence in France, and argues that the epistolary novel fore grounded inter-subjectivity and taught its audience new ways of imagining equality, which led in turn to the formulation of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. Hunt's argument also draws from the growing disapprobation of torture in the eighteenth century that illustrates radically new attitudes towards the body. Hunt, therefore, looks squarely at English and French literary culture of the eighteenth century and at a genre (the epistolary novel) which became peripheral in the nineteenth century onwards as the novel became more focused on the individual's interiority. Although Slaughter, as I show below, also takes a reference point from the English novel Robinson Crusoe, he places the German idea of Bildung at the center of his history and discusses it as a reaction to the French Revolution. Slaughter's model enables him to suggest a much fuller narrative for the nineteenth century as the Bildungsroman form attained canonical status,9 and transformed the genre into the "world novel" referred to in Slaughter's title. However, like Hunt, Slaughter also ultimately places his primary focus away from the nineteenth century. His primary...

Young women, late modern politics, and the participatory possibilities of online cultures

New technologies are often perceived as important resources in attracting young people to formal politics, but less is known about how young people use them to create participatory practice on their own terms. This article examines young women's less conventional technology-enabled political and social activity in order to understand how these are operating as emergent modes of participation in a new political environment. It explores young women's use of online DIY culture, blogs, social networking sites and related technologies to open up questions about what counts as politics, and what is possible as politics for young people, and young women in particular, at the present moment. It suggests that these activities represent new directions in activism, the construction of new participatory communities, and the development of new kinds of public selves, while also telling us important things about the limits of the kinds of conventional citizen subject positions offered to young women at this time.

Mapping spectral tropicality in The Maid and Return to Pontianak

Contemporary, postcolonial Singapore has tamed, managed, and essentially disavowed its tropicality, aptly captured symbolically as the ‘air‐conditioned nation’. This essay traces how two recent Singapore horror films, The Maid (2005) and Return to Pontianak (2001), evoke the ‘return of the repressed’ as a form of haunting that I call ‘spectral tropicality’. The films image and imagine this spectral return through unruly bodies (citizen subjects, female domestic workers, ghosts and vampire‐ghosts) and uncanny landscapes (the jungle and city). In particular, the films and this analysis examine two sociocultural spectres lurking beneath Singapore as a tropical urban city‐nation: the female domestic worker (The Maid) and ethnoracial folk beliefs (The Maid and Return to Pontianak). The Maid features the Hungry Ghosts Festival in the Chinese religious calendar, ghost marriages and an engagement with yin and yang energies, while Return to Pontianak deals with Malay folk beliefs of semangat (‘life force’), and the pontianak, a female vampire‐ghost. The Maid attempts to integrate Chinese folk beliefs into contemporary Singapore's cityscape, particularly the architecturally conserved Chinatown shophouses, while Return to Pontianak displaces Malay folk beliefs onto the tropical forest, which is mapped as a threatening other(ed) space and serves as Singapore's tropical doppelganger. Both films suggest that these folk beliefs have an unruly presence within the state's seemingly harmonious and meritocratic ethnoracial ideologies.

“City of Whores”

The rapid urbanization and industrialization of Katunayake resulting from transnational production at the Free Trade Zone (FTZ) and related globalized sociocultural flows affected the lived experiences of citizens in this new urban space in varied ways. The vast majority of FTZ workers are rural to urban migrant women. Consequently, neighbors reinvented themselves as moral guardians of these new arrivals while many agents and institutions, including the media and NGOs, got involved in spatial and conceptual production of the new city and its gendered citizen subjects. This essay explores the fragmented production of the gendered and classed subjects within this transnational space and how FTZ women workers responded to this by negotiating an identity that challenged the particular subjectivity that middle-class and capitalist narratives imposed on them. The essay focuses on how workers engaged in oppositional cultural practices and created and participated in gendered public spaces.This article analyzes the new spaces and cultural practices to delineate the gender and class critique and asserts that the women's performances in public spaces conveyed a specific migrant FTZ garment workers identity that registered their differences from men, other women, and their counterparts in other working-class spheres. Although they participated in politics of citizenship by registering difference, their transgressive practices evidenced acquiescence to different hegemonic influences, especially capitalist hegemony. Ultimately, these women's experiences indicate how the transnational flows of ideas and resources shape responses to marginalization in ways that discourage transformational politics.

Rhetorically Representing Public Policy

This essay offers a critical reading of National Geographic's 2002 documentary The Search for the Afghan Girl as a means to suggest how, and in what ways, communication scholars can retheorize the relationship between media representations and policy. Reading critically National Geographic's strategic redeployment of the Afghan Girl, I argue that the text functions rhetorically to refigure the public understanding of, and attitudes towards, current biometric and identification-based policy. Put differently, I suggest that the 2002 representation of the Afghan Girl helped to render acceptable and intelligible what the American public had once vehemently opposed: biometric national identification technologies. In turn, the media spectacle of the 2002 Afghan Girl helped to rhetorically constitute a new kind of post-9/11 US citizen subject. Understanding the ways in which feminist postcolonial theory can lend credence to issues of cultural and public policy can help bridge the gap between the theoretical production of communication scholarship and the material realities of government action.