Normative Citizenship Research Articles

Racial Politics in An Era of Transnational Citizenship: The 1996 "Asian Donorgate" Controversy in Perspective (review)

Reviewed by: Racial Politics in An Era of Transnational Citizenship: The 1996 “Asian Donorgate” Controversy in Perspective Pei-te Lien Racial Politics in An Era of Transnational Citizenship: The 1996 “Asian Donorgate” Controversy in Perspective. Michael Chang . ( Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004.) Aptly titled, this book has a singular purpose to help readers understand the conditions, facts, and meanings surrounding the 1996 campaign finance scandal to Asian (and other) Americans. Through a critical reading of the various discourses and the associated political practices related to the "Asian Donorgate," Chang produces a solid and inspiring contribution to the growing literature on the contemporary political experiences of Asian Americans. The book offers not only a rare treat to the politically concerned about the paradoxical and situational racial status of Asians in American politics, but a candid discussion of the dilemmas for community political organizing and empowerment given the opportunities and pitfalls that arise from globalization and the availability of transnational capital. Specifically, the author deconstructs events and discourses in the four-year period that begins with allegations of illegal campaign money raised by John Huang and several other naturalized Chinese Americans for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during President Clinton's reelection campaign in 1996. His research ends with the release of Dr. Wen Ho Lee, a naturalized Taiwan-born nuclear scientist who was laid off and jailed for 9 months because of unfounded espionage charges. The choice of the two time-points was to reveal the pattern of shifting discourses and the consequences the former had on the development of the latter. By analyzing the ways that Asian American citizens were racialized as perpetual foreigners during this time period, the author shows "how citizenship and race in globalization play a critical role in locating Asian Americans as simultaneously marginal and central to mainstream American ideologies of nationhood" (3). The discreetness of the author in his approach to the sensitive subject matter is evinced by the opening pages, when he scrupulously defines the increasingly popular but much abused and often misunderstood terms of globalization, flexibility, transnationalism, flexible citizenship, diaspora, and hybridity. The same kind of prudence is seen in the organization of the book, which has a section on [End Page 111] research design and another on conceptual framework, and a "map" within subsequent chapters to prevent readers from getting lost in the jungle of complex ideas. Built upon themes of "shifting discourses," "neo-orientalism," "transnational citizenship," and "political agency and the public sphere," the book clearly articulates the flexible meanings of citizenship and challenges to community incorporation and empowerment regarding a highly transnationally-affiliated population. Besides the main methodology of discursive analysis, the author adopts sociological and anthropological approaches to data collection which involve elite interviews and archival research of governmental reports and news media coverage. The book's primary theoretical framework is critical transnationalism, which specifically opposes celebratory discourses of transnationalism that wishfully foresee the end of world divisions and inequality in the era of globalization. Rather, as informed by prior conceptions of transnational citizenship, racial formation, and dual-domination and extraterritoriality, the author views as inevitable the emergence of new forms of power hierarchies that may transcend national borders but still maintain the structures of inequalities within each nation-state and other social and political boundaries. In addition to critiquing the traditional Eurocentric "foreignizing" discourses adopted by mainstream American media and politicians in the "Asian Donorgate" events that deny the possibility of dual citizenship and loyalties to the majority-immigrant community, the book expresses serious concern about the deepening class and political divisions as a result of unequal access to transnational capital and transborder mobility in the post-1965 Asian American community and the challenges that this reality imposes on community-organizing and strategies for sovereignty and empowerment. Herein lies the value of the theory of a progressive sense of citizenship, which exposes the problems of distinguishing "aliens" from "citizens" in the assimilationist notion of normative citizenship in the age of globalization and proposes an alternative model of citizenship that appreciates the multicultural diversity brought in by individuals who maintain transnational affiliations. Whereas the author delivers powerful and repetitive attacks against the utility of the assimilation paradigm and the...

Sexual identity, citizenship and medical power of attorney: case illustrations from Northern Ontario, Canada1

Current analyses of sexual identity and citizenship offer complexity to debates about what it means to be a citizen in liberal democratic societies. However, thus far there is limited inclusion of ethnographic, narrative‐based research that addresses how lesbians and gay men experience and negotiate citizenship in their everyday lives. In this paper, I argue that attitudes about medical power of attorney are a lens through which we can examine how lesbians negotiate and experience citizenship in their daily lives and in medical settings. My analysis demonstrates how normative citizenship structures are experienced, reinforced and challenged by four lesbians living in a community in Ontario's Near North region, Canada. In providing case illustrations, I argue that the inclusion of lived experiences strengthens and deepens textual, historical and political analyses of citizenship.

Universal Citizenship and the Problem of Alienage

Many commentators have noted the return of the to normative political and legal theory. Yet there is a widespread tendency among theorists to treat the subject of national citizenship status as thematically and analytically separate from the rest of the citizenship field. Something of a division of labor in the literature has developed, according to which threshold questions regarding both access to, and the significance of, formal national citizenship status are treated as distinct from questions about the nature and quality of citizenship as practiced within the political community. The former questions are usually consigned to the domain of immigration scholarship, while the latter are treated as political and legal theory's core enterprise. This essay argues that the prevailing tendency to bracket citizenship's threshold questions is intellectually problematic because it has the effect of limiting, and perhaps distorting, analysts' ability to theorize the nature of citizenship as it exists within the political community. Questions concerning citizenship's threshold and it's substantive character are, in fact, deeply interwoven. Regulation of citizenship's boundaries reaches deep into the heart of the national political community, and profoundly affects the nature of relations among those residing within. To make the argument, the essay focuses on one recent development in normative citizenship theory - the growing perception that rights and status-based approaches to citizenship are exhausted or otherwise obsolete. This perception reflects a theoretical world in which citizenship's threshold, national questions are assumed away - a world in which everyone is presumed to be a formal citizen and in which citizenship's basic rights are presumed to be universally available. To the extent these presumptions are problematized, however, and citizenship's national dimension is taken into account, the ideal of universal citizenship can no longer be so easily presumed. The challenge to universal citizenship becomes especially clear if we focus on the condition of non-citizens, or aliens, who reside within the liberal democratic community. Aliens, by definition, are outsiders to citizenship. Yet they are also persons residing within the liberal democratic political community, and their presence in the community raises pressing questions about the practice of citizenship within, including questions about precisely how far the rights and status of citizenship can, and should, be understood to extend. Attending to alienage serves to underscore the continuing salience - and the continuing intractability - of liberal status and rights questions in citizenship theory, their current unfashionability notwithstanding.

Leisure studies, leisure policy and social citizenship: the failure of welfare or the limits of welfare?

This paper argues that much theorizing and research in leisure studies takes place within a normative citizenship paradigm which regards public leisure provision as a central component of social citizenship and largely ignores the predominantly commercial nature of modern leisure. This combines with a reproductionist, society in leisure, approach to emphasize leisure as an area of inequality and inequity with a consequent downplaying of issues relating to the nature of leisure experiences. The assumption that public leisure provision is necessarily about the extension of citizenship rights is questioned by examining the centrality of the merit good rationale and suggesting that the leisure studies' defence of recreational welfare and leisure needs is not wholly coherent. It suggests that certain approaches within leisure studies risk proposing welfare without citizenship and over-estimating the role of public leisure facilities as a component of citizenship. It concludes that what is needed is the exploration of issues of consumer authority and the changing relationship between public and commercial provision in the mixed economy of leisure.