WGS Analytical Reading Response

The sexual politics of citizenship and violence

Suzanne Franzway University of South Australia, Adelaide 5001, Australia

a b s t r a c ta r t i c l e i n f o

Available online 10 June 2016 Violence against women appears to be endemic even in those societies where women have formal and equal citizenship. The influential theorist of citizenship, T.H. Marshall, found the status of women, or at least married women to be ‘in some important respects peculiar’. Women in social democratic societies seem to have overcome those peculiarities and achieved full citizenship. And yet women's rights as citizens continue to be undermined by violence, specifically gender-based violence. In order to address the question about the apparent failure of citizenship rights to protect women from persistent violence this paper will suggest that the state is integral to our understandings as well as to any useful strategies for change. Based on the argument that citizenship is defined and practiced in terms of the sexual politics of contested gender relations, the paper argues that the state connects citizenship and violence. The persistence of violence against women is implicated in the sexual politics of citizenship. Hence, the challenge of violence against women is recognised as an issue for the state, citizenship and the whole community. Campaigns to recognise this challenge are becoming valuable sources of agency and activism as can be seen in recent campaigns and heightened media attention.

© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Citizenship Gender Sexual politics Violence The state

‘Don't you have problems like domestic violence, sexual harassment, things like that?’ ‘Oh yes,’ they said, ‘but these are not women's issues, they are community issues—they have to be solved by the whole community’. (Women living in slums of Bombay Batliwala, 2013).

The story of civil rights… is one of gradual addition of new rights to a status that was held to appertain to all adult members of the community—or perhaps one should say to all male members, since the status of women, or at least of married women, was in some important respects peculiar (Marshall, 1950).

Introduction

The women of Bombay see violence against women as community issues, as a problem for the whole society. The classic theorist, T.H. Marshall sees (married) women as having a peculiar status, which excludes them from full citizenship. While even married women now appear to have overcome their peculiarities and achieved full citizen- ship, their rights as citizens continue to be damaged by the persistence of violence against women. The question is raised, why does women's citizenship not provide them with more protection from what is specif- ically gender-based violence? How can the whole community solve this problem?

Such questions suggest that there are interconnections between citizenship, violence and gender. In this paper, I examine the meanings of each term and their historical, political and social interdependencies. On the question of how to address the problem of the persistence of violence, I further suggest that the state is integral to understandings as well as to strategies for change. I argue that citizenship is gendered, but that we need to reconsider the meaning of gender; that citizenship is constituted within the power of the state, and that power and thus violence is also integral to the state and is very much part of the dynam- ics of gender and citizenship.

Citizenship

Citizenship is a highly contested concept (Hall & Held, 1990; Hearn, Oleksy, & Golanska, 2010; Lister, 1997, 2003; Mann, 1987; Turner, 1997; Walby, 1994), but continues to be central to meanings and practices of everyday life. It is now thought to be a sign of modernity and of justice, freedom, equality, dignity and integrity of the self. Yuval-Davis and Werbner describe citizenship as ‘inflected by identity, social positioning, cultural assumptions, institutional practices and a sense of belonging’ (Yuval-Davis & Werbner, 1999 4). Historically, the notion of citizenship emerged in conjunction with the development of structured and ordered power in forms of the state. It is the state which enables, sup- ports and secures citizenship. The rights, duties and freedoms of citizen- ship depend on a structured and ordered power; disorder and chaos undermine the status and practices of citizenship. The state's power relies on its control of violence, institutionalised in its control of the

Women's Studies International Forum 58 (2016) 18–24

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military and the police. Gender has always been integral to the state and to citizenship. Race, ethnicity and structural inequalities of class, caste and status likewise are important (depending on context) to the fluid concept of citizenship, but each requires specific historical and epistemological argument to untangle the intersectionality of their constructs and effects.

Mainstream definitions of citizenship tend to avoid attention to either gender or violence. For example, citizenship may be defined as ‘passive and active membership of individuals within a nation-state with universalistic rights and obligations at specified levels of equality’ (Janoski & Gran, 2002 3). Debates on definitions of citizenship focus on the question of the universal rights of individuals rather than challenging the conceptualisation of individuals as gender-neutral, reinforced by the all-encompassing notions of universalistic rights and obligations. Strategically, universal rights may enable greater legitimacy and discursive leverage in legislatures and the courts than specific group rights are likely to (Kymlicka, 1995).

Feminist theorists do contest the universality of citizenship arguing that ‘there are assumptions within the broad concept of citizenship of universality, that citizenship status transcends “particularity and differ- ence”’ (Young, 1989 250). Lister suggests citizenship can incorporate both meanings (Lister, 2002). By contrast Chantal Mouffe (1992) criticises those who attempt to replace the false universalism of tradi- tional conceptualizations of citizenship with ‘a sexually differentiated, “bi-gendered” conception of the individual and to bring women's so- called specific tasks into the very definition of citizenship’ (Mouffe, 1992 375). Instead of ‘making sexual difference politically relevant to its definition’, Mouffe argues for ‘a new conception of citizenship where sexual difference should become effectively non pertinent’ (Mouffe, 1992 376). The problem with such suggestions is that the notions of sexual difference, women's specific tasks or bi-gendered conceptions is that they are constituted as static categories and fail to in- corporate the dynamic of historical and social meanings of gender. The result is that critical thinking about citizenship and gender is limited to making claims for the visibility of difference while the importance of the power of the state to citizenship is sidelined.

Gender and sexual politics

Much of the research literature, theorising and analysis of citizen- ship and of violence tends to take the meaning of gender for granted; it is generally understood to refer to women as a social category, or to relations between women and men, or less often, to a diversity of sexu- alities. Women's disadvantaged situation in most societies is generally inferred by a gesture towards gender, such as in the phrase, gendered work, which implies unequal work for women as well as different work conditions from men. Focus on how women's inequality is produced and reproduced is relatively rare. To give just one example: Lister's discussion of the value and centrality of the concept of ‘gendered citizenship’ refers to the ‘gendered experience of the public/private divide’ (Lister, 2011 32) She goes on to point to ‘the gendered division of labor and time as well as questions of bodily integrity.’ The clear implication is that women's experience is disadvantaged relative to men's experience. When terms such as experience and divisions of la- bour are qualified by ‘gendered’, as in these examples, we understand their meaning to incorporate not only that different genders are in- volved but also that the genders are unequal to the advantage of men. Or more precisely, to the advantage of heterosexual men. How this comes about and how it continues is unspoken. Women's disadvantage just is. It exists without any apparent causes or as a result of any material, discursive, historical or current struggles.

The notion of gender relied on here carries implicit assumptions about inequality, which has the unfortunate consequence that women appear to be always and already unequal. And so nothing can be done to change the position fundamentally. Alternatively, when gender is invisible or the category such as the individual member of

the nation-state is gender-neutral, the effect is that nothing needs to be done. For feminists, neither position is acceptable. One useful move has been to bring ‘the gendering of citizenship’ into the light. As Jeff Hearn puts it, ‘The silence that has persisted on the category of men [as gendered actors] in both theory and practice around citizenship’ (Hearn, 2002 246) can be made explicit by naming ‘men as men’. How- ever, this effectively continues to rely on the assumption men are not simply men, but that they are advantaged in relation to women, that they unequally powerful. And it is this unequal power that needs to be addressed if progressive change is to be achieved.

In order to develop an understanding of gender as dynamic, social and implicated in power Franzway (2001) proposes a modified version of the term, sexual politics, derived from Kate Millet (1969). Sexual politics incorporates understandings of gender as fluid and relational, and centrally, that gender relations are continually being contested. In sexual politics, contested gender relations are dynamic and therefore open to change, including transformative challenges to women's disad- vantage. Sexual politics is not simply a matter of women in conflict with men, but recognises the wide and mobile diversities of gendered identi- ties. For example, non-heterosexual men have a chequered history in which they may join with other men in benefitting from male dominance, but at other times and places are subject to its most intense controls and constraints (Browne, Lim, & Brown, 2007; Seidman, 1997; Tiemeyer, 2013). The achievement of male dominance is constantly being re-claimed and re-asserted as it is challenged by the shifting and changing meanings and effects of gender, power, masculinities, femi- ninities, bodies, and material, social and political contexts.

Structures of power are shaped by sexual politics re-producing the gender inequalities of the public/private divide and the patriarchal state. Relations of gender are never settled, although the apparent universality of male dominance and gender inequality gives that impression (Okin, 1991). If the sexual politics of relations of gender were fixed, the considerable and constant efforts to enforce and main- tain male dominance of the relations of gender would not be needed (Bradley, 2013; Connell, 1987; Tuana, 2006; Walby, 2009). Such efforts may be simple, such as the bland television panel with no women speakers, or much more complex, such as the wilful ignorance about causes for workplace inequality (Franzway, Sharp, Mills, & Gill, 2009; Mills, Franzway, Gill, & Sharp, 2013), the cultural violence of sexual harassment, and the systemic inequalities integral to the sexual division of labour. These efforts limit and constrain those who are not (hetero- sexual) men from exercising their human capacities to learn and produce knowledge, to grow and create art and policy, technologies and social organisations, to build and lead communities, to embody public power. And yet, ways are found and created to circumvent or transcend such limitations and to challenge men's dominance of sexual politics (see for example Batliwala, 2013 on women's empowerment in India). The subordination of women demands unceasing attention, since subordination can never be finally stabilised. It is always being contested.

Citizenship and gender

Understood in these terms, I argue that gender has not been exclud- ed or ignored in the development of citizenship. Citizenship has always been defined, understood and practiced in terms of gender. That is, of sexual politics. The definitions and content of citizenship changes with the sexual politics of contested gender relations around constructs of power from the emergence of the Athenian city state to the democratic nation-state. The earliest documented forms of citizenship developed in the city state of Athens in which only (free) men could be citizens. Neither slaves nor women could be citizens. As Gordon Childe observes: ‘…citizens secured leisure for politics and culture largely at the expense of their wives, of aliens who had no share in the government, and of slaves who had no rights whatever’ (Childe, 1954 207). Citizenship was defined in gendered terms, where gender was a specific criterion

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for inclusion or exclusion, which was the result of a sexual politics aimed at ensuring certain men's dominance of city state power. When the Roman Empire extended citizenship beyond the city to the vast majority of imperial subjects, it was only to the free men (Nicolet 1988 cited in Janoski & Gran, 2002 fn 2, 54). The sexual politics of gender was and continues to be a central aspect in the construction of the category of citizen (Lister, 2003; Lombardo & Verloo, 2009; Pateman, 1992; Walby, 1994).

Citizenship is a site of contested gender relations and more broadly it is a site of ‘on-going struggle with no stopping point’ (Hoffman, 2004 13). Thus, the shifts in the definition of citizenship emerge in struggles to reframe its meanings. The enormous changes to citizenship have resulted from material levers and discursive strategies which have been deployed in these struggles as the form of the state has changed from city state, ancient empire, and feudal states to capitalist nation states (Isin & Turner, 2002). Citizenship disappeared in feudal states as entire populations became subjects of a small elite of monarchs and their supporters. The forms taken by male dominance have also under- gone great changes in the face of changing configurations in the relations of gender, such as those from patriarchal to fraternal sexual contracts identified by Pateman (1988). As Pateman later pointed out, a major paradox of citizenship is that women have been excluded and included on the basis of the very same capacities and attributes (Pateman, 1992). Women were included but subordinated to men and different from them in their capacity for motherhood. Nineteenth century feminists argued on this basis that women's duty as mothers should entitle them to the standing and rights of citizens (see for exam- ple Erenreich & English, 1978).

Although the concept of citizenship has its roots in the BCE world, the starting point in social and political theory is generally the frame- work proposed by T.H. Marshall in his 1950 lecture (Marshall, 1950). Marshall was heavily influenced by the times in which he worked (the 1930s Depression and post-war social and economic change) de- veloping a model of the citizen who was ‘an advanced construct of a man (sic) who could operate with dignity free from want and enforced idleness’ (Murray, 2007 225). Marshall divided citizenship into three parts or elements called civil, political and social.

‘The civil element is composed of the rights necessary for individual freedom—liberty of the person, freedom of speech, thought and faith, the right to own property and to conclude valid contracts, and the right to justice …[including] the right to defend and assert all one's rights on terms of equality with others and by due process of law … the institutions most closely associated with civil rights are the courts of justice. By the political element, I mean the right to participate in the exercise of political power, as a member of a body invested with political authority or as an elector of the members of such a body. The corresponding institutions are parliament and councils of local govern- ment. By the social element, I mean the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilised being according to the standards prevailing in the society. The institutions most closely connected with it are the educational system and the social services’ (Marshall, 1950 10–12).

Marshall outlines a history of the three elements in the UK and Europe across several centuries, which he links with the emergence of the nation state and capitalism. These three elements evolved through struggles and changing forces from the 17th to 20th century and were established through a process of institutional differentiation by which special agencies evolved to express these rights (Turner, 2001 190). Civil rights were accumulated, political rights were actively won while social rights were originally associated with membership of viable local communities and functional associations. Georgina Murray argues that modern social rights were born from the fight for ‘collective bargaining over wages and working conditions, insurance against unemployment and in health and the guarantee of minimum standards of housing, employment and health care’ (Murray, 2007 228). In

historical terms, social citizenship rights have been closely associated with the involvement of individuals (typically men) in the formal labour market (Turner, 2001 192). Walby (1994) observes however, that Mar- shall followed by Mann (1987) and Turner (1990), is presenting a histo- ry of men's citizenship, and that women won their rights in a different historical sequence from men.

While Marshall's model of three elements or kinds of citizenship rights has become foundational to theories of citizenship, the signifi- cance of the associated agencies and institutions has tended to be overlooked. Yet without them, the elements of citizenship would be merely abstractions. These agencies and institutions of the courts, parliaments and social services are very much part of the modern state. The state is therefore critical to the development and meaning of citizenship. The state makes it possible for the citizenry to access and enjoy the civil, political and social rights of citizenship. And in turn, the citizenry has responsibilities, duties and obligations to the state, to take up and exercise its rights (Pateman, 1992, 2011). In addition, the historically diverse formations of states or nation-states produce comparably variable citizenships across the world. In many Third World countries women won the franchise at the same time as men, at the time of national independence from colonial power (Walby, 1994 384). (See also Nash, 2001).

While the state is central to citizenship, Marshall was equally concerned with the centrality of the capitalist market to modern citizen- ship. He was faced with the contradiction between the support given by the state to citizens to exercise their rights, and the inequalities of the capitalist market which also requires state support. He saw the problem in graphic terms: ‘…in the twentieth century, citizenship and the capitalist class system have been at war.’ (Marshall, 1950 29). The principle of equality which Marshall believed was inherent in the concept of citizenship undermined the necessary inequality of the class system. His solution was to find civil rights as indispensable for the capitalist market, and that in the 1950s, the vast changes that could be brought about by the peaceful exercise of political rights were unpredicted (Marshall, 1950 33). Marshall argued that citizenship modifies the negative impact of the capitalist market by a redistribution of resources on the basis of rights, and as a result there is a permanent tension between the principles of equality that underpin democracy and the de facto inequalities of wealth and income that characterise the capitalist market (Murray, 2007).

Changing states

A similar but less permanent tension exists between these principles of equality and the sexual politics of the patriarchal state. In the decades since the development of the welfare state in Marshall's era, neo-liberal policies have eroded those principles and are clearly aimed at overturning the social equality of citizenship (Turner, 2001; Wacquant, 2012). As Bauman argues, the shift towards reducing the state's role in citizenship has ‘a clear intention to alter the social distribution of wealth, and that the dismantling of Marshall's trinity of rights,’ results in ‘the consistent weakening of human bonds resulting from the interrelated processes of deregulation, privatization and individualisation’ (Bauman, 2005 22). Agamben is even more pessimis- tic observing that ‘…human rights are rarely conceptualised in terms of a set of corresponding obligations, and therefore there is some doubt about whether human rights are rights at all’ (Agamben, 1998 cited in Isin and Turner 2002, 7).

Globalisation has had a significant impact on the roles and functions of nation states, with some arguing the nation state is losing its value as a meaningful concept or its role has diminished (Habermas, 2001; Hutton, 1996). It is suggested that the nature of citizenship is also changing (Hobson & Lister, 2001; Turner, 1990). In response, some advocate global citizenship. However, while male dominance of sexual politics prevails, women are more likely to be disadvantaged as global citizens in comparison to men. Transnational and global organisations

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such as the United Nations are shaped by sexual politics. For example, the Universal Declaration of Human rights sponsored by the United Na- tions fails to include specific rights of women (Yuval-Davis & Werbner, 1999). Issues of migration, both legal and illegal economic migration as well as movements of refugees and asylum seekers have become central to debates on global citizenship (Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2002; Pettman, 1996). Munday observes that issues that affect women such as ‘bodily integrity and intimate violence are often ignored and not seen as legitimate grounds for granting refugee status’ (Munday, 2009 250). Overall, it appears unlikely that a global state with legitimate ju- ridical powers around the world will emerge to override state legisla- tion, and hence it is difficult to see how human rights legislation can have authority over the legal rights of citizens of legitimate states.

The two spheres

A key focus of feminist critiques of the modern state has been the problematic public/political sphere as the realm of liberty and equality and central to classical formulations of citizenship. Public citizenship has hidden the reality of women's subjection: the ‘woman's sphere’ or private sphere can be read as ‘male property’ since wives are described as naturally subordinated to their husbands. Feminists argue that the rigid separation drawn between the private and public spheres has prevented women from gaining access to the public and hence to full citizenship (Bacchi & Beasley, 2002; Bussemaker & Voet, 1998; Hobson & Lister, 2001; Lister, 1997, 2003; Lombardo & Verloo, 2009; Longo, 2001; Nash, 2001; Prokhovnik, 1998; Young, 1989).

The historically pervasive role of the public/private divide in structuring the relationship between women and the state in ways that have (re)produced gender inequality is well documented in feminist scholarship on citizenship and human rights (García-Del Moral & Dersnah, 2014; Hobson & Lister, 2001). The public/private divide is shaped by the dynamics of sexual politics to function as a ‘shifting’ gendered mechanism of exclusion that intersects with other areas of difference to prevent women from becoming full subjects of citizenship and human rights (Lister, 1997; Young, 1989; Yuval-Davis, 1997). Okin sees this rigid division as mythical since both the separation itself and the radically unequal conception of the household that it presupposed are clear outcomes of a politics of gender (Okin, 1991). Such decisions, we argue, are produced by the contestation of sexual politics; the processes of political decision making are not gender- neutral, and neither are the outcomes.

Pateman (1988, 1992) argues that the masculine, public world, the universal world of individualism, rights, contract, reason, freedom, equality, impartial law and citizenship and ‘gains its meaning and significance only in contrast with, and in opposition to, the private world of particularity, natural subjection, inequality, emotion, love, partiality-and women and femininity’ (Pateman & Grosz, 1986 6). On the one hand, [women] have demanded that the ideal of citizenship be extended to them, and the liberal feminist agenda for a ‘gender- neutral’ social world is the local conclusion of one form of this demand. On the other hand, women have also insisted, often simul- taneously, as did Mary Wollstonecraft, that as women they have specific capacities, talents, needs, and concerns so that the expres- sion of their citizenship will be differentiated from that of men (Pateman, 1992 197). Laws and policies structure personal circum- stances (for example, laws about rape and abortion, child-care policies, allocation of welfare benefits, etc.) and some ‘personal problems’ have wider significance that can only be solved collective- ly through political action (Pateman, 1989 131). However, this does not make the distinction of public/private irrelevant and the catego- ries collapsible, but it does mean that the boundaries between public and private are social constructs subject to contestation and resistance (Lister, 2011; Okin, 1991).

The feminist politicisation of the private sphere aims to dismantle the entrenched public/private divide and its damaging impact on

epistemologies of women (Okin, 1991). Bringing the private sphere into the political has challenged the gender-neutrality of citizenship as well as of violence; it has made it possible to open up possibilities for reconfiguring women's citizenship in its national and transnational dimensions (García-Del Moral & Dersnah, 2014 663). This strategy has been central to feminist critiques of the exclusionary character of- citizenship with its limitations of membership to the public sphere. It also overcomes the confinement of violence against women to the private sphere, and hence outside the concerns of the state and thus contributes to feminist advocacy of the category of violence against women as a human rights concern to be adopted by agencies of the UN and its member states (See for example, Joachim, 2007; Keck & Sikkink, 1998). As Garcia-Del Moral and Dersnah summarise the issue: ‘The gendered politics of the public/private divide underlying this historical depoliticisation of violence against women has shielded the state from addressing it’ (2014 661). The politicisation of the private sphere has made it possible to argue that states, both nation and trans- national have responsibilities towards the private sphere as much as to the public.

The body of the citizen

Other feminist theorists have taken issue with the concept of the citizen as limited to the rational and reasonable, as bodiless and unham- pered by emotional, leaky and irrational bodies. ‘In both the liberal and republican traditions, the citizen has stood as the abstract disembodied, individual of reason and rationality’ (Lister, 2002 Her italics). (See also Bacchi & Beasley, 2002; Benhabib & Cornell, 1987; Gatens, 1996). Lister goes on to argue that only male individuals ‘were deemed capable of transcending the body; women as sexual beings and bearers of children were not’ (2002 7). Weak women's bodies depended on the protection of the male citizen. However, it was not reason and rational- ity that would protect women, but the capacity of the male body that may safeguard them. And it is a ‘capable body that has been formally or informally trained which can then be deployed as a weapon’ (Walby, 2009 198). Bacchi and Beasley stress that the distinction is based on the capacity to control the body that enables the constitution of full citizenship.

‘Political subjects who are deemed not to exercise this control, who are considered to be controlled by or subject to their bodies, do not mea- sure up on the citizenship scale; hence, their activities can be regulated in ways deemed inappropriate for full citizens’ (Bacchi & Beasley, 2002 334).

Yeatman likewise stresses that only men ‘could attain the imperson- al, rational and disembodied practices of the model citizen’ (Yeatman, 1994 84). But the concept is contradictory. The citizen may be defined as rational, but it is the ultimate duty of the citizen to die for the state. The citizen bears arms in defence of the state; the warrior citizen is the embodied soldier. And the embodied soldier is also in conflict with disembodied rationality. For example, histories of war, such as Joan Beaumont's (2013) excellent study of Australia's World War One (Broken Nation) is graphic and detailed in its evidence of the huge efforts required to ensure that the soldier's body does not refuse its obligations to kill and be killed in the service of the state. The rational approach to that huge and relentless destruction of life would have been to repudi- ate the entire enterprise.

The practices of the model citizen integrate a degree of choice over how they undertake their responsibilities and obligations to the state. As Janoski and Gran argue, ‘the extent of citizenship rights and obliga- tions is directly connected to the level of the individual's independence’ (Janoski & Gran, 2002 47). (See also Hall & Coffey, 2007). However, as the example of the warrior citizen shows, it is an independence achieved in balance with the demands and supports of the state. The citizen's independence is contingent not only on their developmental age (such as that recognised by reaching voting age), but also on their capacities underpinned by their mental health, their education and

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employment and their housing. The state is integral to these domains in its function to provide and protect access to them for the citizenry. This may be seen in the reverse example of non-citizens who are asylum seekers and refugees where the state refuses to provide access to such support. Specifically, the Australian state's current policies towards asylum seekers denies them independence of movement allowing only the most rudimentary access to housing, education and work, while neglect and detention undermine their mental health (James, 2014; Procter, Newman, & Dudley, 2013; Welch, 2014).

The independence of the citizen may appear to be disembodied if separated from private concerns (Beasley & Bacchi, 2000 350), but clearly capacities and capabilities are integral to that independence. As Margaret Gardner observes: ‘political rights count for little without the capacity to exercise them free from sexist barriers’ (Gardner 2004 cited in Murray, 2007 229). Susan James has expanded on ‘citizenly independence’ in her piece on the ‘good-enough citizen’ (James, 1992). Since citizens need to be free of coercive constraints in order to participate they first need to be ‘physically independent, free from bodi- ly violation or the threat of it.’ (1992 60). Second, citizens need to be able to express their political views (that is, to participate as citizens) without running the risk of either destitution or slavery. These freedoms are traditionally secured by individual rights to life, liberty and property, which are defended by the state. James argues for emotional indepen- dence and ventures into the problem of women's apparent lack of emotional impartiality, given their caring practices. She goes on to argue via a discussion on the importance of self-esteem that emotional dependence and emotional independence may be reconciled through the valuing of difference. ‘To be able to voice one's own opinions in the polity one must esteem oneself as one is, rather than believing that some of one's characteristics—one's gender, colour or class, for example—disqualify one from participation’ (James, 1992 63 Her italics).

However, as we have seen, citizenly independence depends on capacities and capabilities that are secured, or denied by the state with its means of power and force. And it is this power which connects citizenship and violence. Sylvia Walby makes this connection between independence and violence, observing that ‘women's dependency in marriage is correlated with violence: among women with high marital dependency […] the rate of severe violence was much higher’ (Walby, 2009 209). The individual citizen's capacity to participate and undertake their responsibilities and duties of citizenship is effected by violence.

Violence, the state and citizenship

Public understandings of violence in some contemporary Western countries have shifted at least to some degree. In 1989, Franzway et al. wrote that parents may use varying degrees of force upon their children, husbands upon their wives, and violence against gay men is widely regarded as legitimate (Franzway, Court, & Connell, 1989 37). Now, we witness greater public dismay when instances of such violence come to light. But the story has become much more complex. For example, intense debates in Australia were aroused by Christos Tsiolkas' book and TV series, ‘The Slap’ (2008; Tsiolkas et al., 2011). The issue was as much about whether adults who are not the actual par- ents of a child can inflict punishment as it was about the actual hitting of a child. Shock, dismay and confusion are common when separated fa- thers kill their children, expressed most eloquently in Helen Garner's re- cent book (Garner, 2014). Among the most visible have been responses to the case of schoolboy Luke Battye killed by his father at a playground. A few months later, Luke's mother Rosie Battye was appointed Australian of the Year by the Australian government. This title gives the holder a public platform for the following year and is one which Ms. Battye has used to advocate strongly against such violence. Royal commissions into family violence are being held, national policies are being developed yet violence against women has not declined. Violence against gay men and lesbians likewise continues; as Dennis Altman

notes, up to a third have encountered violence, most often in public (Altman, 2013 47).

Violence is (overwhelmingly) gendered and is constituted by the dynamics of sexual politics. The threat of violence has been central to sexual politics; violence is integral to the patriarchal subordination of women. Violence and citizenship are connected through the state. Citizenship is central to the legitimation of modern states and thus to the power of those who control these states. Weber defined the state as ‘a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory (Gerth & Mills, 1948 77). This has become a widely held assumption, but it is worth noting that Weber goes on to say: …the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the “right” to use violence’ (1948 My italics). The phrase ‘the extent to which the state permits it’ has particular relevance for our concerns with the sexual politics of citizenship. Male dominance of sexual politics is achieved to an important extent by the threat of physical force and its manifestations as rape, sexual assault and domestic violence (Dobash & Dobash, 1980; True, 2012; Wendt & Zannettino, 2015). And it is that dominance which entails women's disadvantage as citizens, first by processes of exclusion and subordination and second, by social constructs that inhibit women's independence and capacity to partici- pate as citizens.

However, feminists argue that other sites such as the family also serve as sites of power relations and therefore of force and violence (Barrett & McIntosh, 1982; Franzway et al., 1989). The family is well understood as a site of violence, in forms of intimate partner violence, child abuse and the broad category of domestic violence (Stark, 2009). As Wendt and Zannettino argue, the family has become the location of a femininity as inferior to masculinity in which women are positioned as ‘submissive, dutiful, obedient, emotional, bitchy, hyper-sexualised and deviant’ (Wendt & Zannettino, 2015 215). Violence comes to be seen as an inevitable, even warranted, consequence of the sexual politics of such subject positionings of both women and men. Women's inferiority within the family paradoxically becomes the normative ratio- nale for men's violent exercise of power. The family as well as the state is part of a wider structure of power relations that embodies violence or the possibility of violence.

Walby also goes beyond the notion of sites of violence to make the radical proposal that violence is of such significance that it should be understood as an institutional domain of equal significance to economy, polity and civil society since violence is both an instrument of power as well as ‘constitutive of social relations’ (Walby, 2009 20). In addition, major forms of interpersonal violence are not definitively criminalised by the state, underlining the state's lack of a monopoly of the legitimate use of force (Walby, 2009). Rather, violence against women, particularly within the family, but not exclusively, largely falls outside the purview of the state's focus. Bringing violence against women into the attention of the state is a major part of feminist anti-violence campaigns national- ly and internationally. For the purposes of this discussion, Walby's proposal serves to highlight the centrality of violence to the argument that citizenship, gender and violence are closely interconnected.

Citizenship, sexual politics and ignorance

A critical aspect of modern/contemporary citizenship in western democratic states, is its constitution within discourses of equality. Citizenship serves as a powerful discourse that obscures gender entirely, and certainly obliterates women's subordination from prevailing under- standings. Citizens are discursively equal in spite of the material, social and political conditions of women's subordination. It is the discourse of citizenship equality that allows the denial of gender inequality, that is, the denial of men's unequal advantage (Eveline, 1998). This may be characterised as a powerful form of a politics of ignorance in which the refusal to know about the systemic and discursive gendered

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inequalities in citizenship and the state works to maintain gendered subordination. Such ignorance is not passive but arises from active and persistent efforts to deny the unequal effects of a sexual politics in which male dominance prevails (Franzway et al., 2009). Nancy Tuana defines this as ‘knowing that we do not know, but not caring to know’ (Tuana, 2006 13). At the same time, such knowledge does exist and continues to be produced by research and in the articulation of personal experience in everyday life at all levels.

Violence against women is impacted by ignorance constituted by sexual politics. Although the rates of reported violence against women are significant, its occurrence is denied by individual male perpetrators, who adopt a range of defence options from outright denial to the extremes of killing their partners and their children. But many more in the community fall into Tuana's description of ‘not caring to know’. Equally distressing and difficult for many women who experience such violence is that their experience is rejected and ignored by their families and communities, and by the institutions and agencies of the state. Many studies of violence against women report that the women experience rejection and hostility from their own families, from police and courts, from colleagues and employers, from health and service providers (Ailwood, Easteal, & Kennedy, 2012; Drigo, Ehlschlaeger, & Sweet, 2012; Jasinski, 2010; Rowntree, 2010). Denial is the cause, betrayal is the experience.

While feminists have mounted strong and creative critiques of the patriarchal state, and concepts of citizenship which benefit men, an epistemology of ignorance about already gendered meaning of citizen- ship precludes recognition of the denial of the dynamic conflicts of sexual politics. Most critically, however is the construction of specific categories of people as lacking the requisite capacity, creditability and knowledge to participate as fully active citizens. Women are construct- ed as ‘epistemically disadvantaged identities’ by knowledge practices imbued with prejudices against such factors as their character, intellec- tual capacity, body and nature (Mills et al., 2013; Tuana, 2006). Domestic violence serves to further undermine those capacities. In these terms, women are constructed as having less capacity to be active citizens than almost any man. For example, any woman who seeks to take a role as a leading citizen in the public domains of the state or business corporations or bureaucratic administration must always over- come assumptions about having less ability or capacity. Such assump- tions rely on a constructed ignorance that produces the denial of gendered inequality in citizenship.

This gendered inequality in citizenship is exacerbated by violence. In discursive terms, violence perpetrated by the state or by citizens against others is likewise framed as gender-neutral and equal. For example, whenever academic colleagues speak publicly about violence against women, they are invariably asked to justify their focus on women. What about men's experience of violence is the persistent cry. This occurs even in instances where the speaker carefully sets out the most rigorous of statistics that show that the great majority of intimate partner violence incidents and family violence incidents are perpetrated against women by male partners and ex-partners. By contrast, the great majority of violent incidents experienced by men are perpetrated by other men (Connell, 2005; Graham & Wells, 2001; Seymour, 2003).

Conclusion

The history of citizenship is marked by the dynamics of sexual politics in which male dominance has claimed the power of the state and in which women's struggles have won some measure of equality. Women were deliberately excluded from citizenship, but nevertheless always had an integral role in the state. Women were and continue to be necessary to the material and social reproduction of citizens. Without their incorporation into the construction of citizenship, that is, without their bodily inclusion, the state and citizenship would be short-lived. However, women's contributions remain generally different from men's. Feminists have therefore argued that women's difference be

recognised and valued, but this demand is not sufficient to end citizen- ship inequality. Pateman argues that if women's citizenship is to be ‘worth the same as men's, patriarchal social and sexual relations have to be transformed into free relations’ (Pateman, 1992 29). Such a move is significant to the need to challenge the prevailing sexual politics of citizenship.

The persistence of violence against women is implicated in the sexual politics of citizenship. If women were citizens on equal terms with men, their access to the power of the state, and to their political, social and civil rights would ensure effective and equitable responses to violence. The incidence and consequences of such violence would no longer be denied or ignored by perpetrators, families, communities or state agencies.

We recognise that struggles for citizenship have become a fruitful source of political agency and activism. The long and bitterly fought struggle for suffrage opened up legal and electoral citizenship to women. ‘The success of the women suffrage movement was the largest single step ever accomplished in the democratisation of state structures’ (Franzway et al., 1989 38). Struggles to recognise the sexual politics of violence are becoming valuable sources of agency and activism across the whole community, as evidenced by current national campaigns, as well as the White Ribbon organisation (True, 2012), the UN's 16 Days campaign, and trade union moves to incorporate measures to counter domestic violence into industrial awards (Elger & Parker, 2007; McFerran, 2011). Building on these campaigns, it will be possible to suggest that violence against women becomes an issue for the whole community and potentially transformative of the sexual politics of citizenship.

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