# Transcript

Mary Langan

We are going to look at citizenship, not citizenship just in the legal sense, but the idea of social citizenship of rights and obligations within society. In D218 we have tried to show that the notion of citizenship is very important, it’s discussed particularly in Books One and Five. Recently I was able to meet and talk to several women involved in looking at different aspects of citizenship at a conference on citizenship and women. I asked Professor Ruth Lister why is citizenship such an important concept for women and for other groups?

Prof. Ruth Lister

At a very basic level citizenship is about membership of a community and it’s about the rights and obligations that flow from that membership and it’s a very useful way of looking at and campaigning around women’s exclusions from full citizenship, full membership and the way women’s rights are still undermined.

But there is also another tradition of citizenship, which is about participation, obligations, and in particular political participation, as a form of obligation, and I think that is important for women also because it’s a way of constructing women as actors and not just passive victims of discriminatory processes and structures.

So we can see citizenship in a sense both as a process in which women although often invisibly are very much involved and as an outcome which women and other disadvantaged groups are still struggling for in terms of full substantive citizenship as opposed to necessarily formal rights of citizenship. The question of formal citizenship rights is also important in the context of migrants’ asylum seekers and so forth and in that context that is one of the reasons why it has become a very important issue again.

Mary

Ruth Lister talks about citizenship in relation to membership of a community, but are we all equal in the community? In recent years there have been many challenges to the idea of universal citizenship, the idea that we are all equal before the law, but what about our access to the social benefits of welfare provision for example. There are those who claim that some groups enjoy status, powers, privileges and material resources while others do not. This is called the politics of difference by many women’s groups, gay and lesbian groups, minority ethnic groups, and the disabilities movement, but there is by no means agreement on this issue.

Professor Fiona Williams.

Prof. Fiona Williams

The fact that the development of politics and the development of critiques of politics from say feminism, from racialised and ethnic minority groups, from sexualised minorities, from the disability movement, that the politics of all of that, the politics that some people call the politics of difference, has actually fragmented social movements alongside the fragmentation of class anyway, right that class movements no longer have the power that they used to have, the trade unions no longer have the power that they used to have. Alongside that there has been some fragmentation of those social movements, which were gaining power from the late 60s.

In this situation what has happened is that people have begun to recognise difference a lot more. In that recognition of difference what has seemed to be slipping away is any idea of unity, solidarity, commonality, the very process by which you are made stronger in your struggle for rights and what I think that citizenship enables people to think about is to have a concept which on the one hand seems to embrace everybody, but to have a concept that allows us to talk about difference as well.

And therefore the critique that is emerging around citizenship is precisely the critique of modern politics which is how can you at one and the same time talk about equality and also difference, talk about universalism and also diversity.

How can you talk about a politics which is about redistribution, redistribution of materials and resources as well as a politics which is about recognising people’s rights to their individual culture and so on and so forth.

Mary

What does Fiona Williams see as the consequences of this new critical look at citizenship?

Fiona

What citizenship denotes is membership of a community and what the new critical look at citizenship enables us to do is first of all interrogate that notion of community, how far is this a real community or actually an imagined community, what does it mean to be British, how real is that and how imagined is that, that is one thing.

The second thing that we can do is actually look at and unpick that notion of membership, not only who is included and who is excluded from this community, so to give you an example the rules around nationality have changed significantly since the 1950s to exclude certain groups of people from the former colonies who previously were included. So we can look at who is included and who is excluded but we can also look at who is included formally in a notion of membership of that community, but actually when it comes to securing their rights, they don’t get the rights presumed to go to everybody.

Mary

There is one group that feels particularly excluded from the benefits of full citizenship, Helen Meekosha is a disabled woman from Australia and a leading campaigner for the rights of disabled people.

Helen Meekosha

People with disabilities haven’t really been constituted as citizens at all. I like to use the word that it is beyond the public imaging, it is beyond the public imagination. They are not fully participating members of our society, they are not part of any powerful groups, they are not visible simply. Whilst many indigenous peoples like from Australia where I come from, indigenous Australians, Aboriginal Australians didn’t get the vote until 1967. In many ways people aren’t even aware that there are large numbers of disabled people who don’t have the vote now and that’s not simply a question of access to voting booths, its about understanding the political process. If you are a person with a severe learning disability, what part are you playing in electing your representatives? So that is a political right, that’s a citizenship right, which hasn’t been dreamt of yet about how we might reorganise our society, which includes those sorts of people.

In the debates around citizenship I feel that the disability and disabled people are neglected, yet the language and imagery of citizenship is imbued with a notion of normalcy. We talk of upright and upstanding citizens, we stand to attention at the playing of the National Anthem, and in America of course we salute the flag. So we have this notion of the good citizen as embodied, as male, usually white, active, fit and able, in effect in complete contrast to what is seen as an unvalued, inactive, perceived inactive, disabled other. Disability is always a marginalized said status in our society, one that is often described in negative and offensive languages and language. People who are blind or deaf and so on, this is a term of abuse.

Mary

So can citizenship be a useful concept for disabled people to use? Helen Meekosha again.

Helen

Citizenship is useful as a political organising tool. People with disabilities worldwide have demanded citizenship rights which is not rights to settle in a country as in the traditional notion of citizenship, but rights within a country for basic human rights. They have demanded rights to transport, to education, to employment, they have demanded rights for the law to protect them from discrimination. We contribute to society, we have been described, we have been only imagined as receiving, as passive but we contribute and furthermore we demand to be involved in all the basic institutions of our society and so citizenship has been useful as an organising tool. It worries me that conceptually trying to understand a fairer and more just society, citizenship might not work for all disabled people and for all women.

There is an issue about now we have legislation, we have inclusion, we have in Britain we have legislation apparently protecting people with disabilities, in America too, in Australia too, so most Western countries are introducing legislation. We are apparently included, we see little wheelchair symbols everywhere. We are actually excluded continually, simply there are no resources, there are no people to monitor the legislation, there is no people to ensure that people with disabilities. We are sitting in a building in a university in London where it is impossible to get a wheelchair through the doors of most of the rooms. There are no facilities for people with hearing impairments, or visual impairments. I have a right to come here as an academic, as a student, but I cannot get in.

Mary

Helen Meekosha fears that even with legislation, citizenship cannot deal with all the differences among disabled people and women. Whereas Ruth Lister, while not underestimating the difficulties, thinks a radical approach to citizenship can promote equality for all.