Gendered Citizenship: Manifestations and Performance
Book: Gendered Citizenship: Manifestations and Performance
Edited by: Bishnupriya Dutt, Janelle Reinelt, and Shrinkhla Sahai
Published by: Palgrave Macmillan (2017)
‘Gendered Citizenship: Manifestations and Performance’ is an international collaboration that seeks to develop a distinct comparative lens on performances in relation to major political movements since the 2000s. A culmination of a two-year project (2014-2016), this volume is an intervention on how citizenship is embodied and performed through actions across boundaries— emphasising that the political efficacy of both practising citizenship and suppressing it relies on public performances of gendered citizenship. By investigating how forms of violence against women and the queer community become spectacles of humiliation, the volume examines the regulation of the public sphere that seeks invisibilization of the marginalised thereby establishing that the ‘[p]erformance is permeated by power, and power is performative’(p.4). The book also inspects what citizenship can mean in a globalised context, for instance through Janelle Reinelt’s essay ‘Is a Trafficked Woman a Citizen? Survival and Citizenship in Performance’ and Aastha Gandhi and Bishnupriya Dutt’s ‘Laws and Marginalised Bodies: Sex Trafficking, Child Labour and Circus as a Site of Negotiations’.
The volume uses “ performance to designate public enactment of the role of citizens; institutional performances or ceremonies involving citizenship (such as ceremonies conferring citizenship or procedures at immigration centres leading to detainment of non-citizens); representation of citizenship in media, artistic performances, and other public venues; and public acknowledgement of rights and duties of citizenship as designated through the behaviour of institutions and organisations (the courts, social service NGOs, and so on) Some of these performances are highly visible and public, while others are invisible or silenced, overwritten by dominant practices which exclude or represent differentially.” (p. 13)