Situated Citizenship

Abstract

Chapter 2 advances situated citizenship as a general theoretical and methodological framework to study the lived experiences of unequal democracy across subordinated demographics and to understand gendered and racialized citizenship in different locations across the world. In developing a framework of situated citizenship, chapter 2 reviews democratization and legal studies literatures, identifies the major limitations of these literatures, and explains how a theory of situated citizenship overcomes these limitations. Chapter 2 argues that institutional indicators and formal rights fail to tell the full story—and hide more than they show because through nominal female inclusion these formal institutions often render the mechanisms of exclusionary inclusion invisible. In contrast, situated citizenship explains how uneven and unequal experiences of citizenship are created, maintained, and challenged in the private and public spheres through concrete face-to-face social practices often compounded by intersecting categories like gender, caste, class, religion, and nation.