Citizenship, gender and sexuality

The term citizenship has traditionally been understood in relation to the rights and responsibilities of citizens within a given nation-state (Richardson and Monro, 2012). This classic model of citizenship is associated with the work of T.H. Marshall (1950), a British sociologist who defined citizenship in terms of three stages of sets of rights: civil or legal rights, political rights and social rights. The other traditional model of citizenship has been characterized as the ‘town hall’ model, which emphasizes the participation of citizens in civil society, and is linked to communitarianism (which emphasizes the responsibility of the individual to the community) and republicanism (where, in a ‘republic’, the head of state is not a monarch). In contrast to the traditional liberal conception of citizens as autonomous individuals who make choices, advocates of civic republicanism see citizenship as communal, where citizens are people whose lives are interlinked through shared traditions and understandings that form the basis for the pursuit of the ‘common good’ (Delanty, 2000). Since the 1990s debates over the inadequacies of these two traditional models have led to the development of new ideas about citizenship. It is in the context of such developments that notions of gender and sexual citizenships have emerged, much of it fuelled by (respectively) feminist and lesbian, gay and bisexual, or queer, scholarship. For Ruth Lister: ‘feminist theory and research have significantly transformed the theorization of citizenship.