Women on the Fast Track? Coloniality of Citizenship and Embodied Social Mobility (original) (raw)

2018, Samuel Cohn & Rae Blumberg (Eds.) Gender and Development: The Economic Basis for Women's Power. London: Sage

The paper explores the gender aspects behind the structural distribution of unequal citizenship rights that shaped the modern/colonial institution of citizenship from its inception and that gets continuously rearticulated in new forms and understandings of citizenship today. We argue that gender and citizenship have been embedded in highly complex ways with other dimensions of stratification and inequality such as racialization and enslavement, placing men, women and transgender persons at very different positions in racialized colonial hierarchies. Today, as investor citizenships and visas proliferate, naturalization and visa requirements for the majority of the world’s migrants become more restricted, are criminalized as well as met with gendered forms of racialization and precarization. This double standard runs through the global logic of the coloniality of citizenship. While both investor citizenship and labor migration are geared towards more people gaining access to premium citizenship, the racial criminalization of migrants to core regions only targets the latter: For labor migrants, inherited citizenship and lengthy naturalization procedures are legally (re)inforced as the only legitimate options. In addition, the curtailment of women’s rights, mobility, and access to capital, which has historically made them more vulnerable to physical and sexual violence in Western societies and all the more so in the context of colonialism and enslavement, continues to do so today. Currently, non-Western women and other marginalized persons of non-conforming gender performance still are the most vulnerable migrants. Their precarious position at the crossroads of multiple axes of inequality requires them to negotiate their options for global mobility along the continuum ranging from prostitution to marriage into which they have been defined since the sixteenth century. Forms of racialization, sexualization and precarization to which the acquisition of citizenship and the corresponding gain in social mobility are linked today are illustrated with examples of practices to subvert citizenship law through marriage or childbirth.