Class Discussion Questions on Walby and Plummer
Sylvia Walby’s key concepts: Define these for your notes. Patriarchy, Compulsory Heterosexuality, Feminism.
Walby has written many books on patriarchy. In this article, she builds her thesis on a critique of previous citizenship scholarship that neglected gender analysis.
1. What does she identify as the limitations of (Marshall/Mann/Turner) writings on citizenship? What is her critique of Mann (1987) who analyzed the evolution of US citizenship and his ideas on “labour” and “white adult males?” Remember that you have engaged with H.M. Marshall’s (1950) citizenship theory that most scholars engage with when writing about citizenship.
2. How is private patriarchy transformed historically? How do the norms of compulsory heterosexuality continue to exclude women and sexual minorities from citizenship in the 21st century? What does she mean by “the structuring principles of gender?”
Walby,1994: 382, “The question of citizenship belongs not only to the classic debates about the balancing of liberal freedom with the demands of a capitalist economy, of the relationship between the labour market and the state, of efficiency and equity, that is, of class and capitalism; it is also about the major structuring principles of gender. When half the population might be denied effective citizenship because of gender, then gender matters to citizenship. The question of the relationship of the public and private is not incidental.”
Kenneth Plummer’s key concepts: Identity and citizenship, Public Sphere, counter-publics, Intimate Citizenship, New citizenship, Plurality, Sexual Citizenship, and Identity politics. Plummer gives his readers a very good knowledge of the relationship between identity formations (the politics of difference), social movements, and the media. Find definitions of these in the reading.
Plummer. p. 55. “We arrive, then, at the classic problem of universals and differences, or the “moral boundaries debate”: who is inside and who is outside, who is included and who is excluded, both within and across social worlds. The process of setting boundaries often reveals strong patriarchal, racializing, nationalizing, and heterosexist elements, drawing boundaries that tacitly (and sometimes not so tacitly) exclude others on grounds of gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, and so forth. The last decades of the twentieth century saw a lot of writing that attempted to demolish these boundaries that celebrated a politics of difference. Quite rightly, much of this writing sought to discredit the notion of both universals and boundaries. Yet as the liberal sociological critic Alan Wolfe also quite rightly points out, “It is impossible to imagine a society without boundaries.”1”
3. What are the problems with traditional models of citizenship proposed by T.H. Marshall according to Plummer? What is sexual citizenship? How has citizenship been sexualized according to Diana Richardson’s scholarship discussed by Plummer?
4. What evidence does he provide for his argument for the emergence of new identities and “intimate citizenship” due to new Public spheres and counter-publics? How do you understand the debates on “identity politics?”