(En)gendering the Political: Citizenship from marginal spaces

What is the relationship between being political and citizenship? What might it mean to be marginalised through both the practices and knowledge of citizenship? What might citizenship look like from a position of social, political and cultural exclusion? This book responds to these questions by treating marginalisation as a political process and position. It explores how different lives, experiences and forms of political action might be engendered when subjects are excluded, made vulnerable and invisible from contemporary forms of citizenship. It aims to contribute to the growing body of literature on the politics of resistance by investigating how complex forms of marginality are not only produced by dominant forms of citizenship but also actively challenge them.

Modernist approaches to politics tend to see the citizen as the ideal type of political agent and citizenship as the zenith of struggles over rights, representation and belonging. This edited volume challenges this approach to political subjectivity by showing how political acts work for but also against/beyond citizenship claims, towards different orientations and as ‘acts’ of (non)citizen. By bringing together diverse theoretical and empirical contributions, and exploring the emergent politics of marginalised subjects, this collection challenges how we think about citizenship and opens up space for alternative imaginaries of political action and belonging.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.

Joe B. Turner is a Research Fellow in International Migration in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is interested in the politics of citizenship and how internal/external borders emerge and are governed in (post)colonial states such as the UK. His work lies at the cross-section of IR, political sociology and historiography. Joe has previously published work in journals such as British Journal of Politics and International Relations and Citizenship Studies.