Women’s Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century: The Ideals of Global Citizenship and the Privatization of Rights

Abstract

The view of women’s citizenship—beyond the debate deserved by the very notion of citizenship as applied to women—is often, to use a visual metaphor so cherished by Western philosophical and scientific traditions, a strabismic gaze. It is directed either toward the configuration of new scenarios or toward the feminization of poverty; either toward international arenas as places of empowerment for women or toward the transformations suffered in living conditions, which, at least in a peripheral country such as Argentina, have entailed significant setbacks.

This paper seeks to establish a path capable of assuming the tensions and limits that the crisis of late capitalism imposes on women’s demands for citizenship, as they unfold in international arenas. Assuming that citizenship is understood as the “right to have rights”, the ideals of global citizenship coexist in tension with two complementary phenomena: the privatization of rights and the feminization of poverty and survival.