This book is an ambitious intertwining of multidisciplinary themes about citizenship, social exclusion, statelessness, civil society, knowledge, the public sphere, networks and narrativity. Margaret Somers offers a fundamental rethinking of democracy, freedom, rights and social justice in today's world. This is political, economic and cultural sociology and social theory at its best.

Being Political presents a powerful critique of universalistic and orientalist interpretations of the origins of citizenship and a persuasive alternative history of the present struggles over citizenship.

'The contributions of Woodiwiss, Lister and Sassen are outstanding but not unrepresentative of the many merits of this excellent collection'- The British Journal of Sociology From women's rights, civil rights, and sexual rights for gays and lesbians to disability rights and language rights, we have experienced in the past few decades a major trend in Western nation-states towards new claims for inclusion. This trend has echoed around the world: from the Zapatistas to Chechen and Kurdish nationalists, social and political movements are framing their struggles in the languages of rights and recognition, and hence, of citizenship. Citizenship has thus become an increasingly important axis in the social sciences. Social scientists have been rethinking the role of political agent or subject. Not only are the rights and obligations of citizens being redefined, but also what it means to be a citizen has become an issue of central concern. As the process of globalization produces multiple diasporas, we can expect increasingly complex relationships between homeland and host societies that will make the traditional idea of national citizenship problematic. As societies are forced to manage cultural difference and associated tensions and conflict, there will be changes in the processes by which states allocate citizenship and a differentiation of the category of citizen. This book constitutes the most authoritative and comprehensive guide to the terrain. Drawing on a wealth of interdisciplinary knowledge, and including some of the leading commentators of the day, it is an essential guide to understanding modern citizenship. About the editors: Engin F Isin is Associate Professor of Social Science at York University. His recent works include Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship (Minnesota, 2002) and, with P K Wood, Citizenship and Identity (Sage, 1999). He is the Managing Editor of Citizenship Studies. Bryan S Turner is Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. He has written widely on the sociology of citizenship in Citizenship and Capitalism (Unwin Hyman, 1986) and Citizenship and Social Theory (Sage, 1993). He is also the author of The Body and Society (Sage, 1996) and Classical Sociology (Sage, 1999), and has been editor of Citizenship Studies since 1997.

This book charts the changing definitions of unemployment in the UK over the last century.

In Necro Citizenship Russ Castronovo argues that the meaning of citizenship in the United States during the nineteenth century was bound to—and even dependent on—death. Deploying an impressive range of literary and cultural texts, Castronovo interrogates an American public sphere that fetishized death as a crucial point of political identification. This morbid politics idealized disembodiment over embodiment, spiritual conditions over material ones, amnesia over history, and passivity over engagement. Moving from medical engravings, séances, and clairvoyant communication to Supreme Court decisions, popular literature, and physiological tracts, Necro Citizenship explores how rituals of inclusion and belonging have generated alienation and dispossession. Castronovo contends that citizenship does violence to bodies, especially those of blacks, women, and workers. “Necro ideology,” he argues, supplied citizens with the means to think about slavery, economic powerlessness, or social injustice as eternal questions, beyond the scope of politics or critique. By obsessing on sleepwalkers, drowned women, and other corpses, necro ideology fostered a collective demand for an abstract even antidemocratic sense of freedom. Examining issues involving the occult, white sexuality, ghosts, and suicide in conjunction with readings of Harriet Jacobs, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Frances Harper, Necro Citizenship successfully demonstrates why Patrick Henry's “give me liberty or give me death” has resonated so strongly in the American imagination.

This Handbook sets a new agenda for theoretical and practical explorations of citizenship, analysing the main challenges and prospects informing today's world of increased migration and globalization. It will also explore new forms of membership and democratic participation beyond borders, and the rise of European and multilevel citizenship.

Preliminary Material --List of Figures --Preface /Margaret Sönser Breen --History, Sex, and Nation --Kertbeny's "Homosexuality" and the Language of Nationalism /Robert D. Tobin --Prostitution, Sexuality, and Gender Roles in Imperial Germany: Hamburg, A Case Study /Julia Bruggemann --Cultural Clash on Prostitution: Debates on Prostitution in Germany and Sweden in the 1990s /Susanne Dodillet --"Staying Bush" - The Influence of Place and Isolation in the Decision by Gay Men to Live in Rural Areas in Australia /Ed Green --Literature: Re-writing Desire --Whoring, Incest, Duplicity, or the "Self-Polluting" Erotics of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders /Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou --Catastrophic Sexualities in Howard Baker's Theatre of Transgression /Karoline Gritzner --Un-sacred Cows and Protean Beings: Suniti Namjoshi's Re-writing of Postcolonial Lesbian Bodies /Shalmalee Palekar --Desire-less-ness /Fiona Peters --Bodies: Representations of Gender Identities --Underneath the Clothes - Transvestites without Vests: A Consideration in Art /Barbara Wagner --Of Swords and Rings: Genital Representation as Defining Sexual Identity and Sexual Liberation in Some Old French Fabliaux and Lais /Tovi Bibring --Only with You - Maybe - If You Make Me Happy: A Genealogy of Serial Monogamy as Governance Self-Governance /Serena Petrella --Legality, Bureaucracy, Religion, and Sexuality --A Project for Sexual Rights: Sexuality, Power, and Human Rights /Alejandro Cervantes-Carson and Tracy Citeroni --International Law, Children's Rights, and Queer Youth /Valerie D. Lehr --Acting Like a Professional: Identity Dilemmas for Gay Men /Nick Rumens --How Big is Your God? Queer Christian Social Movements /Jodi O'Brien --Notes on Contributors.

Breaking new ground in scholarship, Niraja Jayal writes the first history of citizenship in the largest democracy in the world—India. Unlike the mature democracies of the west, India began as a true republic of equals with a complex architecture of citizenship rights that was sensitive to the many hierarchies of Indian society. In this provocative biography of the defining aspiration of modern India, Jayal shows how the progressive civic ideals embodied in the constitution have been challenged by exclusions based on social and economic inequality, and sometimes also, paradoxically, undermined by its own policies of inclusion. Citizenship and Its Discontents explores a century of contestations over citizenship from the colonial period to the present, analyzing evolving conceptions of citizenship as legal status, as rights, and as identity. The early optimism that a new India could be fashioned out of an unequal and diverse society led to a formally inclusive legal membership, an impulse to social and economic rights, and group-differentiated citizenship. Today, these policies to create a civic community of equals are losing support in a climate of social intolerance and weak solidarity. Once seen by Western political scientists as an anomaly, India today is a site where every major theoretical debate about citizenship is being enacted in practice, and one that no global discussion of the subject can afford to ignore.

Explores the intermingling of women's bodies and nations' boundaries

In Relative Races, Brigitte Fielder presents an alternative theory of how race is ascribed. Contrary to notions of genealogies by which race is transmitted from parents to children, the examples Fielder discusses from nineteenth-century literature, history, and popular culture show how race can follow other directions: Desdemona becomes less than fully white when she is smudged with Othello's blackface, a white woman becomes Native American when she is adopted by a Seneca family, and a mixed-race baby casts doubt on the whiteness of his mother. Fielder shows that the genealogies of race are especially visible in the racialization of white women, whose whiteness often depends on their ability to reproduce white family and white supremacy. Using black feminist and queer theories, Fielder presents readings of personal narratives, novels, plays, stories, poems, and images to illustrate how interracial kinship follows non-heteronormative, non-biological, and non-patrilineal models of inheritance in nineteenth-century literary culture.