Contesting Recognition: Culture, Identity and Citizenship

Contesting Recognition

Identity Studies in the Social Sciences Series Editors: Margaret Wetherell, Open University; Valerie Hey, Sussex University; Stephen Reicher, St Andrews University Editorial Board: Marta Augoustinos, University of Adelaide, Australia; Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley, USA; David McCrone, University of Edinburgh, UK; Angela McRobbie, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Syracuse University, USA; Harriet B. Nielsen, University of Oslo, Norway; Ann Phoenix, Institute of Education, University of London, UK; Mike Savage, University of Manchester, UK Titles include: Will Atkinson CLASS, INDIVIDUALIZATION AND LATE MODERNITY In Search of the Reflexive Worker John Kirk and Christine Wall WORK AND IDENTITY Historical and Cultural Contexts Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor MOVING HISTORIES OF CLASS AND COMMUNITY Identity, Place and Belonging in Contemporary England Janice McLaughlin, Peter Phillimore and Diane Richardson (editors) CONTESTING RECOGNITION Culture, Identity and Citizenship Susie Scott TOTAL INSTITUTIONS AND REINVENTED IDENTITIES Margaret Wetherell (editor) IDENTITY IN THE 21ST CENTURY New Trends in Changing Times Margaret Wetherell (editor) THEORIZING IDENTITIES AND SOCIAL ACTION

Identity Studies in the Social Sciences Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–20500–0 (Hardback) 978–0–230–20501–7 (Paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Contesting Recognition Culture, Identity and Citizenship Edited By

Janice McLaughlin Newcastle University, UK

Peter Phillimore Newcastle University, UK

and

Diane Richardson Newcastle University, UK

Selection and editorial matter © Janice McLaughlin, Peter Phillimore and Diane Richardson 2011 Individual chapters © their respective authors 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–28050–2 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Contesting recognition : culture, identity and citizenship / [edited by] Janice McLaughlin, Peter Phillimore and Diane Richardson. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978–0–230–28050–2 (hardback) 1. Group identity. 2. Intergroup relations. 3. Social conflict. 4. Culture. 5. Citizenship—Social aspects. I. McLaughlin, Janice, 1968– II. Phillimore, Peter, 1950– III. Richardson, Diane, 1953– HM753.I356 2011 305—dc23 2011030617 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Acknowledgements

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Notes on Contributors

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Introduction: Why Contesting Recognition? Janice McLaughlin, Peter Phillimore and Diane Richardson

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1 Belonging and the Politics of Belonging Nira Yuval-Davis

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2 Disability and the Pitfalls of Recognition Jackie Leach Scully

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3 ‘Normal people’: Recognition and the Middle Classes Steph Lawler

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4 Biological Citizenship in Aotearoa/New Zealand Ruth P. Fitzgerald

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5 From the Stranger to ‘the Other’: The Politics of Cosmopolitan Beirut Steven Seidman

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6 Naming Ourselves: Recognising Racism and Mestizaje in Mexico Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa

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7 Lesbian and Gay Parents’ Sexual Citizenship: Recognition, Belonging and (Re)classification Yvette Taylor

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8 The Paradox of Recognition: Success or Stigma for Children with Learning Disabilities Rayna Rapp and Faye Ginsburg

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9 ‘The Rush to (East) German History’: Recognising Memory and Belonging Anselma Gallinat

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References

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Index

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Acknowledgements The initial ideas behind this book began to take shape at a research symposium on the theme of ‘Belonging: Citizenship, Difference and Inequality’ organised by the editors at Newcastle University back in September 2007. The symposium was co-funded by the British Academy and the University and we are grateful for that support. In translating from symposium to book, we decided to make recognition, rather than belonging, our primary analytic focus. The editors would like to take the opportunity to thank the authors within the collection for their diligent efforts to respond to our suggestions for change, submit material on time (or just about) and most importantly for providing chapters which truly cast new light on issues of recognition in varied contexts and with new perspectives. We would also like to thank colleagues at Newcastle for their support and understanding, particularly as we brought the book to its conclusion. The chapter by Nira Yuval-Davis was originally published as ‘Belonging and the Politics of Belonging’, Patterns of Prejudice, 40(3): 197–214 (2006). It is reproduced here with permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.informaworld.com). A longer version of the chapter by Steph Lawler was published as ‘The middle classes and their aristocratic others: Culture as nature in classification struggles’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 1(3): 245–61 (2008), Taylor & Francis. It is reproduced here with permission of the publisher, (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.informaworld.com). The chapter by Yvette Taylor is a revised extract from Lesbian and Gay Parenting: Securing Social and Educational Capital. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2009). It is reproduced here with permission of the publisher (Palgrave Macmillan).

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Notes on Contributors Ruth Fitzgerald is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Her research interests include ideologies of health, innovative medical technologies, embodiment, reproduction and moral reasoning. She conducts fieldwork on these topics in New Zealand and recently began fieldwork in Utah, studying the experience of problems with fertility for Latter-Day Saints. She publishes in Social Science and Medicine, Medical Anthropology, Sociology of Health and Illness and Health, among others. Her teaching includes introductory courses to anthropology and fieldwork methods as well as postgraduate courses in her speciality area of Medical Anthropology. Anselma Gallinat is a Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology and conducts field research in Eastern Germany, working on areas such as the ritual of Jugendweihe (youth consecration) and cultural change and identity, narratives of suffering among former political prisoners and public discourse, and the memory of socialism and questions of morality. She is currently working on a book project on the last area. She has published in Ethnos, Social Anthropology and Identities, among others. Methodologically, she is interested in ethnography and anthropology at home and she has published a volume with Peter Collins titled The Ethnographic Self as Resource: Writing Memory and Experience into Ethnography (Berghahn Books, 2010). Faye Ginsburg is Kriser Professor of Anthropology at New York University where she also is Director of the Center for Media, Culture and History and co-Director of the NYU Council for the Study of Disabilities. She is author of the award-winning Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (University of California Press, 1998), and is currently completing a book: Mediating Culture: Indigenous Media in the Digital Age. Her current research with Rayna Rapp is entitled Learning Disabilities: The Emergence of a Category. Steph Lawler is a Reader in Sociology at Newcastle University. She is a feminist sociologist whose work centres on theorising identities, notably those of class, gender and generation. She is especially concerned with the ways in which concerns about identity underwrite contemporary vii

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anxieties about social relations, and with the relationship between everyday life and large-scale social relations. She has published widely on identity and inequality, and her latest book is Identity: Sociological Perspectives (Polity, 2008). Janice McLaughlin is Executive Director of the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Centre and Reader of Sociology at Newcastle University. Her research interests, explored via a range of research projects funded by national research councils and charities, include the care networks and practices that surround childhood disability; genetics and kinship; and feminist social theory. Her most recent book is Families Raising Disabled Children: Social Justice and Enabling Care, written with Dan Goodley, Emma Clavering and Pamela Fisher and published by Palgrave Macmillan. Previously, with Diane Richardson and Mark Casey she co-edited Intersections Between Feminist and Queer Theory, also for Palgrave Macmillan, a 2nd edition in paperback will be published in 2012. Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa is a Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University. Her research is concerned with the contemporary practices of racism in relation to discourses of mixed-race identities, feminist theory and emotions, with a specific focus on Mexico. In particular, she is interested in the qualities of the lived experience of racism; the significance of racial ideologies and notions of race and nation; and the experience of racism analysed from the particular perspective of the visible, specifically the relationship between visual representations of identities, embodiment and racist practices. Mónica has published in Ethnicities, Journal of Intercultural Studies and History of the Human Sciences as well as in the edited collections Raza, Etnicidad y Sexualidades (Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2008) and Porn.Com (Peter Lang Publishing Group, 2010). Peter Phillimore is Professor of Social Anthropology at Newcastle University. He received his Ph.D. from Durham University, based on fieldwork in North India. He has published widely on health inequalities, environmental health, and the politics of risk and trust. He is now leading part of an EU-funded project on health policies and practices relating to diabetes and heart disease in four Mediterranean countries, in conjunction with Newcastle University’s Institute of Health and Society. Rayna Rapp is Professor of Anthropology at New York University. Her research has focused on biomedicine, assisted reproductive technologies and the impact of genomic science on social life. She is the author of

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the award-winning Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (Routledge, 2000) as well as over 65 articles. Diane Richardson is Professor of Sociology at Newcastle University. She has written extensively about gender and sexuality including Rethinking Sexuality (Sage, 2000), the Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies (Sage, 2002), co-edited with Steven Seidman, and with Vicki Robinson, Introducing Gender and Women’s Studies (Palgrave Macmillan 2008), now in its third edition. Her most recent books are Sexuality, Equality and Diversity (2011 Palgrave Macmillan), co-authored with Surya Monro, and Intersections Between Feminist and Queer Theory, 2nd edn. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), co-edited with Janice McLaughlin and Mark Casey. Diane is currently working on an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project entitled Post Trafficking Livelihoods in Nepal: Women, Sexuality and Citizenship. Jackie Leach Scully is currently Reader in Social and Bioethics and Director of Research at the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Centre, Newcastle University. After a Ph.D. in molecular biology, she has worked in neurobiology, public and medical education, and for the past 15 years in bioethics. She has an overarching research interest in the formation of moral understandings and moral agency, and in particular how they can be investigated using the analyses of feminist theory and disability studies. She is the author of Quaker Approaches to Moral Issues in Genetics (Mellen, 2002) and Disability Bioethics: Moral Bodies, Moral Difference (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), and co-editor of Good and Evil (Ashgate, 2007), Gekauftes Gewissen? Zur Rolle der Bioethik in Institutionen [Buying a Conscience? The Institutional Role of Bioethics] (Mentis Verlag, 2007), and Feminist Bioethics: At the Center, On the Margins (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Steven Seidman teaches sociology at the University at Albany. He works primarily in the fields of social theory, cultural sociology, Queer studies and the sociology of nationalism and the Middle East. He is the author of, among other books, Contested Knowledge (Basil Blackwell, 1994), Embattled Eros (Routledge, 1992) and Beyond the Closet: The Transformation of Gay and Lesbian Life (Routledge, 2002). He has also edited Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates with J.C. Alexander (Cambridge University Press, 1990), The New Theory Reader with J.C. Alexander (Routledge, 2008), Jurgen Habermas on Politics and Social Theory (Beacon Press, 1992) and Queer Theory/Sociology (Blackwell Publishers, 1996).

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Yvette Taylor is Professor in Social and Policy Studies and Head of the Weeks Centre, London South Bank University. She has held a Fulbright Scholarship at Rutgers University (2010–11). Books include Working-Class Lesbian Life: Classed Outsiders (Palgrave, 2007), Lesbian and Gay Parenting: Securing Social and Educational Capitals (Palgrave, 2009), and Fitting Into Place? Class and Gender Geographies and Temporalities (Ashgate, 2011). Edited collections include Classed Intersections: Space, Selves, Knowledges (Ashgate, 2010), Educational Diversity (Palgrave, 2012) and (with S. Hines and M. Casey) Theorizing Intersectionality and Sexuality (Palgrave, 2010). She has articles in a range of journals including British Journal of the Sociology of Education, European Societies, Sociological Research Online, Sexualities, Feminist Theory. Yvette is currently working on an ESRC standard grant ‘Making Space for Queer Identifying Religious Youth’. Nira Yuval-Davis is the Director of the Research Centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB) at the University of East London. She has been the President of the Research Committee 05 (on Racism, Nationalism and Ethnic Relations) of the International Sociological Association, a member of the Sociology sub-panel of the British Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) of 2008 and of the 2013 Research Excellence Framework (REF). She is an editor of the book series ‘The Politics of Intersectionality’ by Palgrave Macmillan and has written extensively on the theoretical and empirical aspects of intersected nationalisms, racisms, fundamentalisms, citizenships, identities, belonging/s and gender relations. Her works have been translated by now to more than ten different languages. Among her written and edited books are Woman-Nation-State (Macmillan, 1989), Racialized Boundaries (Routledge, 1992), Unsettling Settler Societies (Sage, 1995), Gender and Nation (Sage, 1997), Women, Citizenship & Difference (Zed Books, 1999), Warning Signs of Fundamentalisms (WLUML, 2004), and The Situated Politics of Belonging (Sage, 2006). Her most recent monograph is The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations (Sage, 2011).

Introduction: Why Contesting Recognition? Janice McLaughlin, Peter Phillimore and Diane Richardson

Introduction Recognition lies at the heart of multiple contests around citizenship rights, identity politics, claims for material redistribution and demands for past harms to be acknowledged and redressed. Our view is that this is an opportune time, perhaps a necessary time, to think through the contemporary dynamics around recognition found in various contests across the globe. This is for two reasons. First, there is a noticeable shift in such contests from earlier demands for the recognition of difference, to more recent concerns with the recognition of shared characteristics, of valuing sameness alongside, or indeed instead of, difference. Second, the mechanisms and institutional responses to recognition appear to be producing new or altered forms of ‘conditionality’ within rights and citizenship. In other words, groups and individuals need to ‘prove’ that they should be recognised by the state in certain ways in order to claim resources and legitimacy. Therefore, this book seeks to consider where various contemporary contests over recognition are taking us. By looking at disputes around disability, race and ethnicity, nationalism and ownership of the past, class and sexuality, it explores the contemporary significance of recognition claims. This task encompasses the role underlying patterns of injustice and inequality play in the shaping of such claims, the modes and articulations through which claims are made, the significance of institutional responses and their implications for new boundaries around both definitions of belonging and the ‘good citizen’. In reflection of the global contexts of such disputes, the book draws on accounts from Europe, the United States, Latin America, the Middle East and Australasia. The field of interest expressed within the book is also captured via the scope 1

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of disciplinary approach, drawing on both anthropology and sociology in the examination of these themes and the underlying research the conceptual debates are based upon. In doing so the book explores the following questions: Do we live in a moment where recognition is opening up to allow for greater space for varied or hybrid forms of living and mutual valuation, provided with rights and protection? Or is recognition paradoxically a means to narrow down options to more restrictive categories of acceptable ways of living and legitimate access to rights?

Conceptualising recognition The modern roots of recognition as a political principle are associated, in the West, with the identity politics that emerged in the 1960s. Prior to this, there are antecedents that are important to remember: recognition politics did not begin in the 1960s, though that is the time when such politics became truly self-conscious. What changed was the naming of these dynamics, the political reflexivity which came to recognise recognition itself as salient to ideas about justice, citizenship and nationhood in many contexts around the world. Established and emergent claims gained a new language in which to express themselves (Seidman 1997). Acknowledgement shifted from being about those previously marginalised, proving they were capable of the same attributes as those who sat at the centre. Instead, in the still-valued words of Audre Lorde (1984), the ‘master’s tools’ were rejected in order that difference would be celebrated. Alongside the desire to have difference recognised as both positive and legitimate sat an equally strong demand that previous harms and injustices carried out by the powerful be recognised and compensated for (Young 1990; Phillips 1991; Phillips 1993). This was influenced, globally, by the post-World War II establishment of the United Nations and the strong articulation of a demand for human rights to be recognised and an appreciation of dignity and respect to all individuals regardless of background or social position. Finally, recognition claims were seen in requests that the state and others recognise the legitimacy of varied patterns and imaginaries of intimate life (Cornell 1998). Since the emergence of explicit recognition contests in the 1960s, the list of groups seeking recognition for past historical wrongs and ways of living has grown ever wider. In Western contexts (or perhaps specific Western contexts) we have seen debates around sexuality, race and ethnicity, and increasingly disability and age take precedence over more traditional class politics. However, intriguingly we are now seeing a return to questions of class (as part of a wider argument that material

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politics requires greater attention (Jackson 2001)) as an aspect of recognition. Equally important, over this period we have also witnessed nationalist aspirations and claims (whether postcolonial or not) presented in terms of the right to recognition: the trauma surrounding Biafra’s brief history provides an exemplary instance of the potency of recognition politics around nationhood in the late 1960s, while Paulo Freire (1972) and Frantz Fanon (1967) were two of the most well-known intellectual precursors of theorising recognition in a postcolonial context. These examples remind us that the politics of recognition has been truly global from the outset. The ever-evolving forms of recognition contestation we are seeing within political and social arenas has generated new theoretical considerations, which still continue over how recognition should be understood and evaluated. One of the key writers who have responded to the growth of recognition politics is Axel Honneth, and his proposal that social justice must include the provision of a space within which the individual self can ‘appear in public without shame’ (2004: 355). Honneth argues that questions of equality cannot be separated from the development of a self capable of recognition, because that development is a socially embedded process. A good, modern, liberal society, he contends, is one where growing numbers of its members are provided with both social recognition and the opportunity to develop as autonomous individuals. As individuals develop in this context, through the space afforded to them, they also recognise that ‘rights and duties are reciprocally distributed’ (2002: 501). They sign up to both rights and responsibilities because this provides for their individuality. This level of social accountability holds in check ‘anti-social striving for independence’ (2002: 504), and lies at the heart of Honneth’s (1996) notion of struggles over recognition. Such struggles emerge from a shared sense that as individuals and as members of a group we have not had our uniqueness recognised or respected and that within existing modes of recognition there is a lack of space to ‘recognize certain aspects of who one is’ (2002: 504). These ideas developed into a debate in social theory over the authenticity of identity and the requirement that social relations, as well as the state, provide a space for recognition of the authentic self, however differentially realised, as a feature of justice. One of the writers most closely associated with this approach is Charles Taylor, in his key essay, ‘The Politics of Recognition’ (1994). Like Honneth, Taylor sees recognition as a core feature of questions of justice: ‘Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in

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a false, distorted, reduced mode of being’ (1994: 25). His focus on the self and authenticity does not deny the relational emergence of the sense of self, for Taylor sees that emergence as a dialogical one, done in the company of others, and via a shared language. Therefore, for Taylor, what should be incorporated into the politics of justice and rights are issues of group recognition. Writers associated with the postmodern or cultural turn in social theorising have sought to explore the cultural dynamics which enable and disable recognition. Of vital importance here is work which explores the dynamic of the ‘stranger’ or the ‘strange encounter’ in contemporary space. This debate owes much to Zygmunt Bauman (1993) and his interest in how we come to know or not know the other in cognitive, aesthetic and moral spaces.1 Another way of framing this concern is to ask who is seen as belonging in a particular location and who and what gets to frame the boundaries of belonging. It is easiest to recognise and ascribe belonging to those similar to us by how they look, speak and how they live and construe their values. In a postmodern world of uncertainty, blurred boundaries between different ‘communities’ or ‘cultures’ and complex spaces, which bear the mark of their inhabitants, it can be argued that misunderstanding (misrecognition) is easier, with potentially dangerous consequences. If contact with strangers is anxiety provoking, we may seek ways to categorise and position them to ease our discomfort at the cost of further marginalising or excluding them. At the same time those positioned as ‘strange’ may experience a ‘longing’ to be recognised and valued, however ‘different’ or ‘other’. The main alternative to misrecognition of the stranger in postmodern times is to exoticise the stranger, turning them into a character of play and fascination to be consumed at the mainstream’s leisure (cf. Said 1978). This is a theme picked up by Sara Ahmed (2000) and her interest in the fetishisation of the stranger; however, part of the process of fetishisation she explores is that produced by social theory itself. That is the way in which theoretical accounts of the other play with and in the end construct the figure of the stranger in order to keep the mainstream – the ‘we’, the ‘normal’ – at the centre of the analysis. It is we – whether the West, the heterosexual, the non-disabled, the middle class – who deny, reject, accept and name the ‘stranger’ and therefore ‘we’ who retain the power and privilege of belonging. For Ahmed, the stranger ‘is an effect of processes of inclusion and exclusion, or incorporation and expulsion, that constitute the boundaries of bodies and communities, including communities of living (dwelling and travel), as well as epistemic communities’ (2000: 6). The era of globalisation and

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multiculturalism carries with it traces and memories back to colonialism through the continued forms of strangerhood (cf. Appiah 2006) marked in contemporary practices such as the experiences of migrant labour in the service and care industries of the West (Hennessy 2006). Contemporary relations may make it feel as if the stranger is closer, is in ‘our proximity’, but only because such encounters ‘reopen prior histories of encounter’ (Ahmed 2000: 13, original emphasis). Increasingly, writers are also debating whether the politics of recognition is a politically useful path for social justice to take (Brown 1995). There are two problems which we think are of particular significance. The first is that contests over recognition bring with them the risk of policing the identities they seek to have validated. Claims to have cultural or political identities articulated around disability, or sexuality, or race or ethnicity, or nation, or class risk prescribing which cultural or political values should be articulated by those who claim to belong to those categories. Shared articulations of identity are important sources of self-understanding and belonging, but if they are framed too tightly, space is lost for the creative self to develop their own ‘story’. Instead too readily an expectation emerges that ‘The story – my story – should cohere in the way appropriate by the standards made available in my culture to a person of my identity’ (Appiah 1994: 158). The tension becomes most acute when different aspects of our identity and the stories associated with them clash; as Kwame Anthony Appiah points out ‘there are some scripts that go with being an African-American or having same-sex desires’ (1994: 162) and these scripts do not always take the person in the same direction. The way out is for the individual self to have the space to make such scripts meaningful to them. But when the politics of recognition becomes the ‘politics of compulsion’ that space can disappear: The politics of recognition requires that one’s skin color, one’s sexual body, should be acknowledged politically in ways that make it hard for those who want to treat their skin and their sexual body as personal dimensions of the self. And personal means not secret, but not too tightly scripted. (Appiah 1994: 163) When the recognition demand circulates around previous harm, the danger for Wendy Brown (1993) is that what may be inadvertently produced are ‘wounded attachments’. In articulating rights to recognition at one point in time, unintended obstacles may be created for the

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future, as the terms of controversy become fixed, leaving those who come later trapped in the symbols of an earlier political moment. Such ‘wounded attachments’ do not easily allow for ambiguity, flexibility and reinvention, as contests over recognition change. By acknowledging an identity, recognition defines it and closes off opportunities to articulate it in different ways. The language of identity and recognition can become the ‘language of unfreedom’ (Brown 1995: 66) within the categories used to mark it. The second problem is most strongly associated with Nancy Fraser and her analysis of the implications she sees when ‘cultural recognition displaces socioeconomic redistribution as the remedy for injustice and the goal of political struggle’ (1997: 11). Redistribution and recognition, she argues, take us in contrasting directions because one – redistribution – seeks to eradicate the sources of group difference – inequality, while the other – recognition – seeks to secure group difference via validation. Therefore in the context of gender inequality, ‘Whereas the logic of redistribution is to put gender out of business as such, the logic of recognition is to valorize gender specificity’ (1997: 21). Her critique does not propose the rejection of recognition as a component of social justice contests, but instead argues for greater consideration for the politics of redistribution and the links that it has to the politics of recognition. This points to a need to consider when recognition supports demands for redistribution and when it does not.

Contemporary recognition It is notable how the scope and dynamics of recognition politics have evolved over time, in response to wider political, economic and technoscientific developments. New developments generate new problematics and questions; here we highlight five which will be explored in the book. First, given recognition’s roots in identity politics it is most often associated with the demand that citizenship rights incorporate difference. This difference can be and has been articulated as essential (as women, we have different ethical and moral values to men and these should be recognised as legitimate in the public sphere (Gilligan 1993)), cultural (as queer, we wish to create the space within which we can explore different ways to imagine, perform and live sexualities (Butler 1990)), political (as black, we make a demand that the state recognise the legacy of colonialism and systemic nature of racism (Gilroy 2002), or material (as working class, we make a claim that economic redistribution occurs as compensation

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for the inequalities embedded in capitalism (Savage 2000)). These four are hardly exhaustive, for we might add that religion provides a further source of identity around which groups mobilise their differences and demand recognition: mobilisations that produce a very different form of contestation and implications for both the state and social cohesion. Of course these different claims to recognition overlap – the politics of race incorporates both cultural and material versions of recognition, while class is no longer limited to disputes over material recognition/ redistribution, but is also seen as necessitating recognition of the cultural validity of different class positions and values (Skeggs 1997). However, difference can no longer be seen as the only value from which people seek recognition. The language and values of sameness and universality, associated with the classic liberalism of John Stuart Mill (1974, originally published 1869) and the contemporary liberalism of John Rawls (1993) and Martha Nussbaum (1999) has taken on increased presence within claims that regardless of differences what actors seek is recognition as equal and similar citizens with the same rights to work, marry, be educated and live ‘ordinary’ lives. To the extent that such an approach to sameness draws on homogenising and universalising notions of citizenship, one concern is that cultural/material differences and complex social locations are obscured and intersecting inequalities such as those of gender, class, race and disability are at risk of being overlooked. A further reason to explore this interpretation of recognition is that the emphasis on shared norms and inclusivity raises questions in relation to what constructions are mobilised in order that such equality claims are recognised and responded to: How can sameness be rendered intelligible and the grounds for ‘equality’ thereby established? Who is it that gets to live ‘ordinary’ lives? Has the emphasis become the politics of normalisation and the requirement that actors overcome or look past their sources of difference? For instance, both feminist and queer writers have been highly critical of the normalising politics that forms the basis of mainstream lesbian and gay movements organised around claiming ‘equal rights’ (e.g. Warner 1999; Richardson 2000a). These include criticisms of a model of citizenship that reinforces both normative assumptions about sexuality and gender, and the desirability and necessity of marital-style sexual coupledom, privileged over different forms of relationships of care and support, as a basis for many kinds of rights entitlements. Related to this are the questions of what counts as ‘equal’ recognition; what are the values and norms through which recognition as the ‘same’ takes place? Again in the case of the recent changes to citizenship status of lesbians and gay men, critics have questioned the extent to

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which the model of citizenship being generated reinforces normative assumptions about sexuality and gender (Warner 1999; Bell and Binnie 2000; Richardson 2000b). The problem identified here is that a particular version of what it is to be lesbian or gay (as well as heterosexual) is privileged in demands for ‘equality’, with the potential for creating ‘new social, economic and moral divisions between lesbians and gay men, between heterosexuals and across the heterosexual/homosexual divide’ (D. Richardson 2004: 405). Second, the recognition of difference and distinctiveness is routinely connected to the provision of rights and compensation by the state, in response to current need, or as formal acknowledgement of previously inflicted harm. However, the modes through which states are responding to and producing recognition claims now needs to be placed within the contemporary dominance, in much of the world, of neoliberal models of governmentality. The emphasis in neoliberal approaches is on individual freedom and rights, and the importance of self-surveillance and regulation over direct state control and intervention. Central to such modes of governance is normalisation, the means by which norms of behaviour are identified, encouraged and (re)produced within populations. The primary goal is to establish the self-regulating ‘responsibilised’ citizen, who has internalised the norms and goals of neoliberal governments (Lupton 1999). In addition, within the contexts of welfare rights, the spotlight is now on state mechanisms used to recognise groups and individuals in order to limit (rather than provide for) their rights and access to welfare resources. One way of interpreting such shifts, therefore, is that they represent new forms of social regulation as well as recognition. The neoliberal state is associated with increasingly elaborate governmental techniques through which people are categorised into different groups with specific and conditional rights and entitlements. One concrete example of this, in the UK, is the processes involved in disabled people claiming benefits. One of the key benefits is the Disability Living Allowance (DLA), which provides funds for people to use to aid their care and support. The form and assessment process requires minute detail being provided and evaluated according to medical criteria of just how disabled and ‘in need’ the person is. The person seeking support must first prove, according to set criteria, their worth before support is provided. The implication of processes such as the DLA is the medically mediated and state-sanctioned production of ‘entitled bodies’ (Kelly 2005: 197) alongside the un-entitled. Institutional forms of recognition bring with them the power to validate and invalidate different identities, values, ways of

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living and demands for redistribution. This raises vital questions about which forms of recognition claims are acknowledged? What methods and practices are used to construct categories of recognition? What new boundaries around normalising and normative identities do such responses create, and how useful are they are in dealing with disputes over justice and material inequality? It is possible to argue that recognition has transformed into a dynamic of bureaucratic conditionality (Dwyer 2004a, 2004b), which has the potential to undermine, rather than support social justice. Conditionality requires and institutes practices of recognition in order for citizens to access resources, which previously would have been seen as entitlements. In doing so it validates and invalidates different identities, values, ways of living and demands to redistribution. Third, a range of new technologies and associated practices are enabling new forms and practices of recognition. One example concerns the profound significance of new communication technologies, most obviously the World Wide Web and the mobile phone, which are creating opportunities to form new kinds of virtual community or assisting forms of transnational political mobilisation inconceivable even a quarter of a century ago. Modes of political activism around recognition are changing as a consequence, in campaigns and disputes around the world concerning social justice or demands for political rights, environmentalism and economic exploitation. The way in which Bhopal has been kept in the public eye globally since the chemical disaster of 1984 is a case in point (Fortun 2001). In a separate context, and one which is generally (though not invariably) under the regulatory eye of the state, new technological possibilities within the life sciences and medicine are generating new questions for recognition. For example, the growth of ‘new’ reproductive technologies has helped produce new versions of family relationship that challenge the presumption that the heterosexual nuclear family is the only form of family life to be recognised as an intimate moral life (Thompson 2001). New medical innovations that produce new ways to avoid bringing disabled children into the world, or to categorise human variation into genetic code or to enable people with complex disabilities to live and participate in social life, generate new complex ethical questions ( Jennings 2000; Kittay 2006; Rose 2006; Scully 2008) about what is recognised as a life worth living, saving or bringing into the world? Who can (or should) decide how as a society we respond to end of life dilemmas? What do we understand as being the boundaries between human and animal or human and technology in an era of xenotransplantation and other medical innovations?

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Novas and Rose (2000) propose that these innovations, particularly in genetics, have given birth to the ‘biological citizen’, who within the broader contexts of neoliberalism is charged with taking individual responsibility for knowing their own genetic risk and adapting their behaviour appropriately. However, it is always important when considering the significance of new technologies to place them in their social and political context. This can be seen in the varied responses of disability groups to the new possibilities genetics appears to promise. Some groups appear to have taken on the mantle of the biological citizen, campaigning around the need for stem cell science to cure such conditions as Parkinson’s and spinal paralysis. However, other groups argue it is important to be wary of such promises and possibilities and focus their politics instead on the demand that disabled people be ‘positively incorporated into the social body’ (Rapp and Ginsburg 2001: 535). In the focus on cure, such groups see a danger that we may narrow our understanding of the kinds of life we consider ‘worth living’ (Rapp and Ginsburg 2001). Fourth, memories of previous harms and demands for those to be acknowledged continue to be an important aspect of recognition politics. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up in 1995 to bear witness to the atrocities of apartheid, provides an exemplary case. In a multiplicity of contexts, groups have challenged states – or major actors such as corporations or religious institutions – to remember history and recognise their accountability for past injustice, often accompanied by demands for compensation or some kind of restitution or atonement. The current controversies encircling the Catholic Church provide a striking example. Currently, the Catholic Church faces fierce challenges to its legitimacy in many countries over the way in which it has had to be dragged towards reluctant recognition of the voice of the victims of case after case of sexual abuse by those in positions of authority, as well as recognition of its own institutional failings in denying claims and covering up for perpetrators. Similarly, the long effort to make major German corporations like Volkswagen, or the chemical industry giants like Bayer or BASF, acknowledge their own complicity in the use of forced or concentration camp labour in the Nazi period is a case in point, and one subsidiary facet of the larger project of Holocaust recognition (Hayes 2004; Plato et al. 2010). That larger project has, however, been as much an initiative of states as of citizen groups – arguably as part of the pan-European settlement after 1945. It is a reminder that while the politics of recognition is often seen as an achievement of citizen activism and agency, that task is also frequently co-opted by states

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and governments, which themselves take on the task of seeking recognition. They do so with the institutional capacity to orchestrate history and memory all the more persuasively. The involvement of the state and institutions generates important questions about what purpose (and in whose interest) do such state sanctioned forms of memory and recognition serve? Who has the authority and on what basis to approve what versions of past harms are ‘the truth’? How should contestations over claims to the past be scrutinised and resolved? Finally, while global migration is hardly new, it has over the last 50 years taken so many different forms, and extended to so many parts of the world, that there is hardly any place now where one would not encounter difference and hybridity. Gupta and Ferguson evoke ‘a world of diaspora’ to describe the simultaneous absence and presence created by global migration and its legacies (1992: 10); and numerous writers, such as Anzaldúa (1999), explore what it means to live lives perpetually on the frontiers of identities and disputed territories. Whether such differences are constructed as cultural, ethnic, racial or religious, one corollary has been negotiation and argument in pursuit of recognition, both informally in local accommodations and formally in engaging the state (see Englund and Nyamnjoh 2004; Yuval-Davis, this volume). These negotiations, for some, have brought to the fore the ‘rigidities of procedural liberalism’ (Taylor 1994: 61), unable to deal with the complexity and at times conflicting nature of such recognition claims. Movements of people across varied boundaries have also fostered intense awareness of the ways in which majorities or minorities construct themselves – implicitly or explicitly, defensively or defiantly – in relation to one another (Anderson 1991; Appadurai 2006). We can see these processes at work in current debates over the many inconsistent meanings attached to a European identity. Out of this history has come, to give one example, the recent political preoccupation in several countries, largely but not exclusively on the political right, with the dress and veiling of Muslim women, epitomised in France’s current acrimonious debates about whether the burqa can be ‘tolerated’ in its secular public arena, which is an apt example of conditionality in current recognition politics. There are many questions here, about what such disputes generate, but they include the following: To whom will the state open its doors, what conditions will it make on entry and what rights will it provide for those who are given access? At the level of everyday life and politics, how do people live alongside each other in contexts of contested past histories, enactments of cultural differences, acts of xenophobia and disputes over limited material resources?

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Contesting recognition The chapters in this collection draw on one or more of the five areas discussed earlier, to produce new thinking about the different locations, actors and processes involved in contests around recognition. The book begins with two normative explorations of how to understand contemporary claims to the right to belong and be valued – and thus recognised – as citizens who are different. Yuval-Davis takes ‘belonging’ as her lens, but through it we are reminded how arguments about the politics of belonging are also arguments about the politics of recognition. She outlines an analytical framework for understanding belonging and the politics of belonging, using British examples to illustrate her arguments. It is, she argues, important at the start to distinguish between the two. Belonging is about ‘emotional attachment’, feeling ‘safe’, ‘at home’, whereas the politics of belonging, whether it be about debates about nation, racism or sexuality for instance, ‘comprises specific political projects’ aimed at ‘constructing belonging’ to particular collectives. Yuval-Davis identifies three interrelated levels on which belonging is constructed and experienced, each of which is germane to a focus on recognition: social locations, identifications and emotional attachments to various collectives and groups, and ethical and political values which persons use to judge their own and others’ belonging/s. The second part of the chapter focuses on the politics of belonging and how this relates to the politics of citizenship, entitlement and status. Her discussion usefully highlights the fact that the politics of belonging is also about the struggle around the determination of what is involved in belonging, what counts in being recognised as a member of a community and what part social location and specific narratives of identity play in this. And in the context of a politics of recognition that emphasises sameness, she explores the (problematic) extent to which differences may be acknowledged, anticipating the concern with the conditionality of recognition which we mentioned earlier. Jackie Leach Scully uses the specific context of disability politics to consider what makes it possible to produce a collective identity, from which to make a claim to be recognised, compensated and valued. Disability is a theme returned to in several chapters in the book because, while relatively underexplored in theoretical debates about recognition, it is a particularly useful example to work through. Owing to some of the contemporary contexts discussed before, particularly medical innovation in the treatment of impairment, alongside the emergence of disability movements across the globe, disability provides a vital example

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of how challenges to ‘stranger’ status fuel recognition politics and the dilemmas that then ensue. Hughes (2002) indeed argues that disabled people are a core example of a group positioned as strangers in both modernity and postmodernity. In postmodern spaces of consumption and play, the disabled still do not fit: ‘the post-modern celebration of difference seems to be swallowed up by the modern penchant for aesthetic normalisation and the valorisation of ideal standards of beauty’ (2002: 580). Landsman suggests that some forms of disability and, by association, disabled people are rejected because they are framed as ‘outside the range of human acceptability’ (2003: 1980). Those ascribed such ‘damaged identities’ (Lindemann Nelson 2001) experience a ‘serious wound’ (Kittay 2006: 103) in the public reluctance to recognise their right to exist and to participate, however different. One response is to seek to minimise the disability via drugs or therapy in order that the disabled person is ‘recognized as who we wish to be recognized as’ (Kittay 2006: 104). An alternative is to seek to fit within modernist notions of the hero able to overcome their tragic circumstances and still climb a mountain or run a marathon. The dilemma there is that the notion of the heroic individual testifies to the tenacious hold of others’ definitions of who is acceptable enough (C. Levine 2005). Scully explores what a group and/or individual needs to possess, articulate and keep silent about in order to frame itself or oneself as having a particular identity. She asks: ‘can or should disability be taken as ontologically identity forming, analogous to accepted axes of identity such as gender, class or ethnicity?’ (38). The articulation of a collective and political identity around disability has enabled counter narratives to become available to disabled individuals, which challenge the ‘stranger’ version of disability as an identity to be pitied or made heroic. The discussion incorporates a consideration of the ‘ethics of transformation’, in particular recognition of the spaces and ‘semantic and epistemic authority’ individuals and groups require in order to make sense of and lay claim to the identities they produce. Furthermore, Scully considers what the production of a collective identity around disability has also made problematic, in particular that the collective disability identity may require certain silences about differences within that identity and personal stories of pain and suffering. None of these dilemmas appear unique to disability: instead, they are likely to be played out – in different ways – across the varied axes of difference encountered in this book and in the social world. As we have highlighted and the first two chapters exemplify, seeking to have particular collective identities recognised is now a central aspect

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of contemporary citizenship debates. The book now moves on to consider, in light of this, how the political and the cultural come together in claims to citizenship. Collective claims cannot be removed from the narratives of shared values, norms and allegiances they are generated through. A prominent definition of citizenship is ‘the capacity to participate effectively, creatively and successfully within a national culture’ (Turner 2000: 12). That is, cultural rights, institutionalised through cultural industries such as the mass media, include the right to participate in the culture of a particular society in ways that allow for recognition. Pakulski (1997), in his analysis of claims to cultural space and recognition, highlights this in defining cultural citizenship in terms of the right to symbolic presence and visibility (versus marginalisation), the right to dignifying representation (versus stigmatisation), and the right to propagation of identity and maintenance of lifestyles (versus assimilation). Steph Lawler in her chapter examining classed identities – working, middle and aristocratic – in a (British/English) context, and their connections to normality, morality and taste, links to these debates in examining classed struggles around cultural space and recognition. The establishment of an English middle class, she argues, is linked to claims to cultural ownership, morality and modernity that have solidified into middle-classness becoming the ‘benchmark of normality’ against which other groups are measured – ‘its cultural capitals marked as the “right” ones’ (56). Within this symbolic and cultural economy, following Pakulski’s argument, we may observe the possibilities of mis/non-recognition. Along with politics and the academy, Lawler claims that it is the culture industries which have strengthened this classed positioning in which ‘middleclass’ is (re)produced as the privileged norm ‘against which other positions are deficient’. To illustrate her argument, Lawler draws on a case study of the press coverage of the break-up of the relationship between a prominent member of the British royal family Prince William and his ‘commoner’ girlfriend Kate Middleton in 2007. In these stories, Lawler claims, a recognition is produced of (at least) two understandings of class – as a property of a person and as an artificial system – and that it is in relation to both the working classes and the aristocracy that the middle classes have succeeded in claiming the normative ground within the cultural imaginary. Rose (2006) and others have explored the contemporary cultural significance of genetics to modes of individual and collective citizenship. The dynamics of this, in particular the emergence of the ‘biocitizen’, is the central theme of the contribution by Ruth P. Fitzgerald, who places

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it also within the cultural context of citizenship understandings and disputes in New Zealand. Her chapter focuses on parents campaigning for medical cures for their children with rare genetic conditions, women screened for the genes that are associated with heightened risk of breast cancer, the moral work of geneticists and finally varied Ma¯ori engagements with genetics. Fitzgerald explores how genetics and geneticists can turn the human subject into an object of medical science, particularly those who are identified as genetically flawed. Equally, she considers how such human subjects respond upon discovering that they carry a gene that puts them at risk of developing cancer in the future: whether through incorporating a medicalised perspective on risk and illness into their own self-understanding, or alternatively through resisting such a framing of themselves and those sharing the same genetic risk. The chapter also considers the relationship between knowledge and culture as factors in the scope particular groups are provided with in order to act as citizens. For example, Fitzgerald explores how Ma¯oris’ local knowledge of their environment is misrecognised in order that their arguments are falsely positioned as ‘a type of cultural essentialist argument over spirituality rather than effective science’ (92). However, in another context, she explores how scientists work with Ma¯ori knowledge to explore the relationship between genetic inheritance and the risk of stomach cancer; in this context, through respect for both culture and local/‘lay’ knowledge, a partnership is created and a space made within which people can be active citizens. Across the varied examples, Fitzgerald shows how the language and framings of genetics have become resources in battles over collective recognition of need and difference, pointing to its incorporation into cultural modes of contested recognition. Cultural modes of negotiating recognition belong to the public life of the street or the workplace as much as the newspaper, home or the clinic. In the public arenas of everyday life, recognition contests play out in subtle and unsubtle ways which may enlarge or reduce human possibilities. One of the insights of Steven Seidman’s chapter is to depict the ways in which different kinds of claim to recognition jostle together in Beirut, an uneasy mix of obligations and aspirations, generally left deliberately implicit in a context where explicit articulation as formal claim may be too provocative, given Lebanon’s recent history. Such are the conflicting pressures of competing loyalties in a context where ‘neither reconciliation with a violent, disturbing past, nor forgetting, are possible’ (101) that Seidman speaks of ‘an almost studied indifference to

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others’ – a psycho-social tactic of avoidance revealing the pitfalls of recognition or misrecognition in a fraught environment. His chapter teases out the delicacy of self-conscious assertions of a fragile cosmopolitanism in a neighbourhood where the insistent demands of kin and sect – what he terms ‘the uncivil politics of paranoia’ – which prevail elsewhere, can to some degree be kept at bay. Overshadowed by the ubiquitous recognition given to Beirut’s sectarian divisions, Seidman explores two examples of otherness where claims for recognition gain limited traction and have to be negotiated with deft sensitivity to the likelihood of repudiation. Framed in terms of ‘the boundaries of tolerance’, this core to his analysis considers the micro-politics of women’s inferiorisation and the limited spaces for sexual dissent in this unconventional Beirut neighbourhood, in the process teasing out the paradoxical tenacity and fragility of self-conscious assertions of cosmopolitanism. Seidman’s discussion of the silences and evasions around which certain kinds of recognition work in Beirut has parallels in Mónica Moreno Figueroa’s exploration of silences and evasions around the recognition (or more appropriately the non-recognition) of race in Mexico. Her theme is the invisibility of race in what she calls the ‘raceless’ nation. Mestizaje conjures multiple meanings. A term which valorises the historical process creating the mestiza majority of the Mexican population, ostensibly mestizaje fosters an egalitarian ideal of national inclusiveness, based on a shared history of ‘mixed’ descent. Yet Moreno Figueroa shows how this ‘raceless’ narrative of national identity denies any language for expressing experiences of racism, which are themselves generated from the connotations of mestizaje itself. Therefore the category is far from benign, and the women she spoke with express a view of mestizaje as deeply problematic. The contributions by Seidman and Figueroa usefully serve to remind us of the ethnocentrism of reading the politics of recognition through a narrowly ‘Western’ lens, with their attention to Lebanon and Mexico respectively. Important as recognition may have become in claims over identity and citizenship in Europe and North America, these two case studies point us towards the numerous parallels around the world in which either the very principle of recognition, or the terms of recognition (conditionality), are at stake for particular groups. India alone offers a wealth of examples, the complexities of pluralism there being perpetually renegotiated and revealed through arguments over recognition, especially around caste, religion and language (Das 1995; Ruparelia 2008). The final theme of the book is the issues emerging from state practices of recognition. Our first concern is the modes through which the

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state recognises the legitimacy of varied forms of living and relationship. Yvette Taylor highlights in her chapter how civil recognition of domestic partnerships, including the right to marry, has emerged as a primary concern of lesbian and gay movements not only in the UK but elsewhere in Europe and other parts of the world, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US. This has led to an increasing number of Western states responding to such demands by enlarging the right to marry to include same sex couples, or by providing, as is the contested case in the UK, alternative arrangements. Taylor’s chapter draws upon findings from research with lesbian and gay parents from workingclass and middle-class backgrounds, and considers the significance of class to the versions of sexual citizenship made possible or impossible through such modes of state recognition. The specifically classed – and classifying – nature of legal recognition is explored, where critiques of ‘new homonormativities’ is extended in focusing upon material, symbolic and subjective classed intersections within new conditionalities of inclusion, belonging and recognition. This chapter situates these as intersecting both class and sexuality, suggesting caution about the ‘world we have won’ (Weeks 2008), where state recognition (re)produces classed-sexual subjects in institutionalising ‘ordinary’ families and ‘legitimate subjects’. Rayna Rapp and Faye Ginsberg draw out other forms of social and political intersection in their accounts of battles over recognition from state institutions in the context of learning disability in New York. They explore the implication of new forms of medical categorisation of such disabilities emerging out of neuroscience, private provision of education in New York State and the importance of advocacy groups in demands for state support. Through ethnographic fieldwork, the authors highlight different battle sites around learning disability, battle sites within which the intersections of class, religion, and race and ethnicity inform the claims made to the state and the forms of response produced. The chapter also explores the consequences of framing disability in particular ways in order that the state will respond for a child’s broader social identity and position. They note historical and contemporary structures of recognition whereby ‘while the rights of children with diverse learning needs were being expanded, a social hierarchy that ranked them near to the bottom was vigorously reinscribed’ (170). This is subsequently contrasted with alternative approaches which support different forms of learning without positioning such children as charity cases; instead, the response is one that replaces ‘beneficence’ with the rights of ‘belonging’.

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The final aspect of state recognition we look at is when the state becomes involved in contests over recognition in attempting to secure what it regards as ‘legitimate’ recognitions of the past and present. We have alluded already to the pivotal importance of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Anselma Gallinat’s chapter, based on research in eastern Germany, examines a process which has certain parallels with the South African example, although it would be unwise to push these too far. In the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), the process of Aufarbeitung, or the ‘re-working’ of the Communist-era past, was initiated after the German reunification in 1990 by the unified German state. Aufarbeitung, as Gallinat shows, is at its heart a process of fostering what the post-1990 state recognises as ‘legitimate’ recollections of the GDR, through reminding its citizens about the injustices of life in the former state and the ‘crimes’ perpetrated by that state. This is more than an official exercise in remembering, for such reckoning with the past is integral to a conception of nation building, which involves remaking former citizens of the GDR as citizens of a different kind of state. What Gallinat also shows in her ethnography, however, is that the new state’s version of the past is by no means uncontentious: former citizens of the GDR do not invariably take kindly to having ‘their’ past appropriated and re-presented in ways which are seen to skate over crucial nuances of their former everyday life. And this matters because it is perceived to patronise and diminish those it is tacitly aimed at, those who were there and knew themselves what the old regime and the old life was like. Thus an exercise that ostensibly sought to remember, and thus recognise, on the model of efforts to remember what Nazism meant has ironically proved unexpectedly divisive: one person’s recognition is another’s misrecognition.

Looking forward What the authors produce across these rich and compelling accounts is a glimpse into just some of the current contests over recognition occurring across the globe. The accounts provide testimony to the importance of recognition as an aspect of social justice, while highlighting that access to material resources, and hierarchies of inequality, citizenship and belonging remain integral to such disputes. They also provide evidence, if evidence is required, of the value of research engagement with often ignored or marginalised groups and locations within and outside the global north. It matters from where, as well as by whom, claims to recognition are made. Our belief is that the next step is for

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further research, in partnership with such marginalised voices, to occur in order that conceptualisations of the meaning of recognition are done with their participation.

Note 1. Of course, writings regarding ‘the stranger’ can be traced back to the roots of sociology, particularly in Georg Simmel’s highly influential essay ‘The Stranger’, originally published in 1908 and reproduced in various texts, including Simmel (1950).

1 Belonging and the Politics of Belonging Nira Yuval-Davis

Belonging and the politics of belonging My aim in this chapter is to outline an analytical framework for the study of belonging and the politics of belonging. It is important to differentiate between the two. Belonging is about emotional attachment, about feeling ‘at home’ and, as Michael Ignatieff (2001) points out, about feeling ‘safe’. In the aftermath of 7/7, the 2005 bombings in London, such a definition takes on a new, if problematic, poignancy. Belonging tends to be naturalised, and becomes articulated and politicised only when it is threatened in some way. The politics of belonging comprises specific political projects aimed at constructing belonging in particular ways, to particular collectivities that are, at the same time, themselves being constructed by these projects in very particular ways. An analytical differentiation between belonging and the politics of belonging is, therefore, crucial for any critical political discourse on nationalism, racism or other contemporary politics of belonging (see Yuval-Davis 2011). In this chapter, there is only space to outline some of the central features of such an analytical framework. As I have mentioned elsewhere (Yuval-Davis 2004), belonging and the politics of belonging have been among the major themes out of which both classical psychology and sociology have emerged. Countless psychological and even more psychoanalytic works have been devoted to the fear of separation felt by babies and children, separation from the womb, from the mother, from the familiar, as well as the devastating – often pathological – effect on them when they cannot take belonging for granted (for a more elaborate account, see, for example, Bowlby 1969, 1973; Rank 1973). Similarly, much of the literature of social psychology

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has been dedicated to studying individuals’ need to conform to the groups they belong to out of fear of exclusion, and the ways individuals’ interpersonal relationships are deeply affected by their membership or lack of membership in particular groups, as well as their positions in these groups (see, for example, Lewin 1948; Billig 1976; Tajfel 1982). In sociological theory as well, since its establishment, many writings have focused on the different ways people belong to collectivities and states, as well as on the social, economic and political effects of moments when such belongings are displaced as a result of industrialisation and/ or migration. Some classical examples are Ferdinand Tönnies’ (1940) distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Emile Durkheim’s (1997) categories of mechanical and organic solidarity, and Karl Marx’s (1975) notion of alienation. Anthony Giddens (1991) has argued that, with modernity, people’s sense of belonging becomes reflexive, and Manuel Castells (1996, 1997, 1998) claims that contemporary society has become a ‘network society’ in which effective belonging has moved from the civil societies of nations and states into reconstructed defensive identity communities. This chapter does not attempt to sum up this vast literature in any way. Instead, it attempts to differentiate and identify some of the major building blocks a comprehensive analytical framework for belonging and the politics of belonging would require. To do so, it is divided into three interconnected parts. The first explores the notion of ‘belonging’ and the different analytical levels on which it needs to be studied: social locations, identifications and emotional attachments, and ethical and political values. The second part focuses on the politics of belonging and how it relates to the participatory politics of citizenship as well as to that of entitlement and status. The third part illustrates, using British examples, some of the ways particular political projects of belonging select specific signifiers of belonging from different analytical levels in order to construct their projects.

Belonging People can ‘belong’ in many different ways and to many different objects of attachments. These can vary from a particular person to the whole of humanity, in a concrete or abstract way. Belonging can be an act of self identification or identification by others, in a stable, contested or transient way. Even in its most stable ‘primordial’ forms, however, belonging is always a dynamic process, not a reified fixity, which is only a naturalised construction of a particular hegemonic form of power relations.

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To simplify our understanding of the notion of belonging, it would be useful to differentiate between three major analytical levels on which belonging is constructed. The first level concerns social locations, the second relates to individuals’ identifications and emotional attachments to various collectivities and groupings, and the third relates to ethical and political value systems with which people judge their own and others’ belonging/s. These different levels are interrelated, but cannot be reduced to each other, as so many political projects of belonging tend to assume. Social locations When it’s said that people belong to a particular gender, or race, or class or nation, that they belong to a particular age group, kinship group or a certain profession, what is being talked about is people’s social and economic locations, which, at each historical moment, have particular implications vis-à-vis the grids of power relations in their society. A man or a woman, black or white, working class or middle class, a member of a European or an African nation: these are not just different categories of social location, but categories that also have a certain positionality along an axis of power, higher or lower than other such categories. Such positionalities, however, tend to be different in different historical contexts and are often fluid and contested. Some differences, as Sandra Harding (1991) and Nancy Fraser (Fraser and Honneth 1998) have commented, do not necessarily have differential power positionings but are only markers of different locations. This, again, can only be related to specific kinds of differences in particular historical moments and contexts. Social locations, however, even in their most stable format, are virtually never constructed along one power axis of difference, although official statistics – as well as identity politics – often tend to construct them in this way. This is why the intersectional approach to social locations is so crucially important. There is no space here to discuss in detail the various intersectional approaches to social divisions (see, for example, Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1983, 1992; Crenshaw 1989, 1993; Essed 1991; Brah and Phoenix 2004; Yuval-Davis 2006, 2007). However, there are three points relating to intersectional analysis that are important to mention here in relation to issues concerning the analysis of belonging and the politics of belonging. First, while people can identify exclusively with one identity category (i.e. only as Blacks, only as women, only as gays, etc.), their concrete social location is constructed along multiple axes of difference, such as gender, class, race and ethnicity, stage in the life cycle, sexuality, ability and so on. Second, the intersecting social divisions cannot be analysed as

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items that are added up, but rather as constituting each other. Although discourses of race, gender, class, etc. have their own ontological bases that cannot be reduced to each other, there is no separate concrete meaning of any social division. To be a woman is different if you are middle class or working class, a member of the hegemonic majority or a racialised minority, living in the city or in the country, young or old, straight or gay. Third, the question of describing social location in terms of certain specific grids of difference is far from simple. In Gender Trouble (1990: 143), Judith Butler mocks the ‘etc.’ that often appears at the end of a long list of social divisions mentioned by feminists (as was done earlier in this chapter) and sees it as an embarrassed ‘sign of exhaustion as well as of the illimitable process of signification itself’. As Axeli Knapp (1999: 130) makes clear, such a critique is valid only within the discourse of identity politics in which there is a correspondence between social locations and social groupings. This is the way the additive/fragmentation model of social divisions operates. When no such conflation takes place, Knapp finds rightly that Butler’s talk ‘of an “illimitable process of signification” can be reductionist if it is generalised in an unspecified way … [and] runs the risk of levelling historically constituted “factual” differences and thereby suppressing “differences” on its own terms’. Knapp’s critique of Butler clarifies again the crucial importance of the separation of the different analytical levels in which social divisions need to be examined. Nevertheless, the question remains whether there are, or are not, in any set of particular historical conditions, a specific and limited number of social divisions that construct the grid of power relations within which the different members of the society are located. There are two different answers to this question and they are not mutually exclusive. The first is that while, in specific historical situations and in relation to specific people, there are some social divisions that are more important than others in constructing individuals’ specific positionings, there are some social divisions – such as gender, stage in the life cycle, ethnicity and class – that tend to shape most people’s lives in most social locations while other social divisions – such as membership in particular castes or status as indigenous people or refugees – tend to affect less people universally. At the same time, for those who are affected by those and other social divisions not mentioned here, such social divisions are crucial and rendering them visible needs to be an important political project, as this is a case in which recognition – of social power axes, not of social identities – is of crucial emancipatory importance.

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The second answer relates to what Cornelius Castoriadis (1987) called the ‘creative imagination’ (see also Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis 2002), which underpins any linguistic or other social categories of signification. Although certain social conditions may facilitate this, the construction of categories of signification is, in the last instance, a product of human creative freedom and autonomy. Without specific social agents who construct and point to certain analytical and political features, the other members of society would not be able to identify them. Rainbows include the whole spectrum of different colours, but how many colours we distinguish depends on our specific social and linguistic milieu. It is for this reason that struggles for recognition always also include an element of construction and it is for this reason that studying the relationships between positionalities, identities and political values is so important (and impossible if they are all reduced to the same ontological level). The discourse on social locations, complex as it is, cannot be conflated with the belonging discourse on identifications and emotional attachments, and any attempt to do so is essentialist and often racialised. Identifications and emotional attachments Identities are narratives, stories people tell themselves and others about who they are (and who they are not) (Martin 1995). Not all of these stories are about belonging to particular groupings and collectivities; they can be, for instance, about individual attributes, body images, vocational aspirations or sexual prowess. However, even such stories often relate, directly or indirectly, to self and/or others’ perceptions of what being a member in such a grouping or collectivity (ethnic, racial, national, cultural, religious) might mean. The identity narratives can be individual or they can be collective, the latter often a resource for the former. Although they can be reproduced from generation to generation, this reproduction is always carried out in a selective way. The identity narratives can shift and change, be contested and multiple. They can relate to the past, to a myth of origin; they can be aimed at explaining the present and, probably above all, they function as a projection of a future trajectory. Constructions of belonging, however, cannot/should not be seen as merely cognitive stories. They reflect emotional investments and desire for attachments: ‘Individuals and groups are caught within wanting to belong, wanting to become, a process that is fuelled by yearning rather than positing of identity as a stable state.’ (Probyn 1996: 19). Elspeth Probyn, as well as Anne-Marie Fortier (2000), constructs identity as transition, always producing itself through the combined processes of being and becoming, belonging and longing to belong. This duality is often

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reflected in narratives of identity. Of course, not all belonging/s are as important to people in the same way and to the same extent. Emotions, like perceptions, shift in different times and situations and are more or less reflective. As a rule, the emotional components of people’s constructions of themselves and their identities become more central the more threatened and less secure they feel. In most extreme cases, people would be willing to sacrifice their lives – and the lives of others – in order for the narratives of their identities and the objects of their identifications and attachments to continue to exist. After a terrorist attack, or after a declaration of war, diasporic people often seek to return to a place that is less ‘objectively’ safe, as long as it means they can be near their nearest and dearest, and share their fate. As Vikki Bell (1999) and Fortier (2000) argue, following Butler (1990), constructions of belonging have a performative dimension. Specific repetitive practices, relating to specific social and cultural spaces, which link individual and collective behaviour, are crucial for the construction and reproduction of identity narratives and constructions of attachment. It is in this way, as Sara Ahmed (2004) points out, that free floating emotions ‘stick’ to particular social objects. As feminist standpoint theorists like Dorothy Smith (1990) and Harding (1991) have commented, there is no necessary connection between social location and a particular social identity and/or particular political views. They both emanate as a result of specific social practices. Constructions of self and identity can, however, in certain historical contexts, be forced on people. In such cases, identities and belonging/s become important dimensions of people’s social locations and positionings, and the relationships between locations and identifications can become empirically more closely intertwined. This still does not cancel the importance of the differentiation between these analytical levels in analysing belonging. On the contrary, without this differentiation, there would be no possibility of struggle and resistance, and biology – or belonging – would become destiny. As Frantz Fanon (1967) crucially argued, such politics of resistance needs to be directed not only at the oppressed people’s social and economic locations but also against their internalisations of forced constructions of self and identity. Ethical and political values Belonging, therefore, is not just about social locations and constructions of individual and collective identities and attachments but also about the ways these are valued and judged. Closely related to this are specific attitudes and ideologies concerning where and how identity and

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categorical boundaries are being/should be drawn, in more or less exclusionary ways, in more or less permeable ways. It is in the arena of the contestations around these ethical and ideological issues and the ways they utilise social locations and narratives of identities that we move from the realm of belonging into that of the politics of belonging.

The politics of belonging John Crowley (1999) defined the politics of belonging as ‘the dirty work of boundary maintenance’. The boundaries that the politics of belonging is concerned with are the boundaries of the political community of belonging, the boundaries that separate the world population into ‘us’ and ‘them’. Benedict Anderson defined nations as ‘imagined communities’. They are imagined communities, according to Anderson, ‘because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (Anderson 1991: 6). Such an abstract form of community is necessarily based on an abstract sense of imagined simultaneity. However, the national imagination also includes former and future generations. The inability, therefore, to meet all members of the nation is not just a result of the size of the nation, but is inherently impossible. Perhaps even more importantly for our understanding of the politics of belonging, as Ross Poole (1999: 10) comments, Anderson’s definition seems to assume that, if all the members of the nation could meet face-to-face, imagination would be redundant. Nonetheless, any construction of boundaries, of a delineated collectivity, which includes some people – concrete or not – and excludes others, involves an act of active and situated imagination (Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis 2002). Could the Jews be included in the boundaries of the German nation? Is there ‘black in the Union Jack’ (Gilroy 2002)? Do Québécois form a separate nation from Canadians, one with its own boundaries? The different situated imaginations that construct these national imagined communities with different boundaries depend on people’s social locations, people’s experiences and definitions of self, but probably even more importantly on their values. They do not come into existence just because of the inability of people to meet all the other members of their nation. On the contrary, this ‘dirty business of boundary maintenance’ that underlies the politics of belonging is all about potentially meeting other people and deciding whether they stand inside or outside the imaginary boundary line of the nation and/or other communities of belonging, whether they are ‘us’ or ‘them’.

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However, the ‘us’, of course, is never really imagined as homogeneous or even as homogeneously incorporated into the community of belonging, and the ways the ‘them’ is imagined are even more differential and varied, as are the ways that are considered proper for relating to them. The politics of belonging involves not only the maintenance and reproduction of the boundaries of the community of belonging by the hegemonic political powers, but also their contestation and challenge by other political agents. It is important to recognise, however, that such political agents struggle both for the promotion of their specific position in the construction of their collectivity and its boundaries and, at the same time, use these ideologies and positions in order to promote their own power positions within and outside the collectivity. The politics of belonging also includes struggles around the determination of what is involved in belonging, in being a member of a community, and of what roles specific social locations and specific narratives of identity play in this. As such, it encompasses contestations both in relation to the participatory dimension of citizenship as well as in relation to issues of the status and entitlements such membership entails. Citizenship and the politics of belonging There have been many definitions of and debates about citizenship. Although in political theory many focus on the debate between the liberals and the republicans and/or communitarians as being the most important (see, for example, Oldfield 1990; Avineri and de-Shalit 1992; Peled 1992; Daly 1993), in recent years a number of theoretical and sociological debates have focused, in different ways, on the extent to which citizenship should be understood primarily, or even at all, in relation to the nation state (see, for example, Yuval-Davis 1991; Soysal 1994; Kymlicka 1995; Rosaldo 1997; Yuval-Davis and Werbner 1999; Parekh 2000; Kabir 2005). In liberal theory, citizenship is basically constructed as a reciprocal relationship of rights and responsibilities between individuals and the state. In republican theories, the political community mediates between the individual citizen and the state, and loyalty to that political community, the nation, and its preservation and promotion are the primary duties of the citizen (who is required, when necessary, to sacrifice his – and it is usually ‘his’ – life to it). Communitarian theories of citizenship go even further as they see citizens not only as owing loyalty to the political community but also as its products, as organic parts of that community, in stark contrast to the classical liberal model of an atomised society. T. H. Marshall (1950, 1975, 1981), the most famous British communitarian theorist of citizenship, does not even mention the state in

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his classical definition of citizenship as being ‘full membership of the community, with all its rights and responsibilities’. As Stuart Hall and David Held had pointed out already in 1989, although the state was assumed in Marshall’s definition, the fact that it was not actually mentioned opened the gate for definitions of citizenship that were not only related to the nation state but that considered the nation state as only one of the layers of people’s citizenship, which could relate also to other political communities, sub-, cross- or supra-state, such as local, ethnic, religious, regional and international political communities (Yuval-Davis 1991, 1997, 1999). Citizenship originally, as Jean Cohen (1999) pointed out, was not born in the nation state but in a city, the Greek polis. It was there that Aristotle defined citizenship as being about ‘ruling and being ruled’ (although, of course, in the Greek polis itself, most of those who were being ruled were not allowed to be among those who ruled, as they were women, slaves or denizens). This participatory character of citizenship, comprising full and legitimate belonging, has become the focus of the political struggles of many marginalised and excluded groupings. For instance, feminists in Latin America have adopted citizenship as their major political tool in the post-dictatorship period (Alvarez et al. 1997), as have many others in the developing world, such as villagers in Pakistan and Bangladesh (for this and other related case studies, see Kabir 2005). While, for civil rights activists in the United States, registering African Americans to vote was one of their main signifiers of belonging, the Chicanas, 20 years later, have developed what Renato Rosaldo (1997) and others have called ‘cultural citizenship’, which focuses on community activism as the main signifier of belonging. The relationship between citizenship and the state has remained a thorny issue, even when there is a recognition that the nation state is historically specific and constitutes only one of several layers of people’s citizenship. Moreover, there has never been a complete overlap between the boundaries of the national community and the boundaries of the population that lives in a particular state, which is where the inherently exclusionary character of republican and communitarian theories of citizenship lie (Yuval-Davis 1997, 1999). Even the supposedly universalist character of liberal citizenship has proved to be exclusionary, usually reflecting hegemonic, majoritarian and ‘westocentric’ positions, as Étienne Balibar (1990), for example, has shown. It is for this reason that some anti-racist and feminist political theorists have tried to develop alternative theories of citizenship that encompass difference (see, for example, Pateman 1988; Kymlicka 1995; Yuval-Davis and Werbner 1999; Parekh 2000; Lister 2003). What is common to all these approaches is

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that rather than ignoring the differences among citizens, which would result in assimilationism or exclusion from belonging to the political community, they suggest ways in which these differences can be recognised and responded to, similar to the ways the welfare state has responded to the differential social needs of its citizens. This, however, brings us to an ongoing debate about who ‘deserves’ and who does not, who is entitled and who is not, to receive aid from the state (and/or other political communities, whether it is the United Nations, the European Union, the local council or the religious community). As Jean Cohen (1999) reminds us, after being born in a city, the notion of citizenship was historically transformed in an empire – the Roman Empire – where, from a mode of political participation, it became a legal status of entitlements and responsibilities. Cohen argues that, in the nation state, these two dimensions of citizenship have come together. However, as will be illustrated in the third part of this article, entitlements and belonging do not always automatically constitute features of citizenship. Much of contemporary debates on the politics of belonging surround that question of who ‘belongs’ and who does not, and what are the minimum common grounds – in terms of origin, culture and normative behaviour – that are required to signify belonging. In the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings in London, when it became known that the suicide bombers not only had formal British citizenship but were also born and educated in Britain and involved in various strands of British public life, this question has been the focus of much political – and emotional – discourse in contemporary Britain. The situation is similar in many other countries. As Francis B. Nyamnjoh (2005: 18) points out: ‘in Africa, as elsewhere, there is a growing obsession with belonging, along with new questions concerning conventional assumptions about nationality and citizenship.’ Status, entitlement and the politics of belonging As mentioned earlier, T. H. Marshall defined citizenship not just as membership in the (political) community but also as including associated rights and responsibilities. Political theory has tended to discuss civil and political rights and, around the notion of the twentieth century welfare state, social rights. Many of the debates concerning citizenship and belonging have been focused on which rights, which responsibilities and whether or not the two should be related (see, for example, Esping-Andersen 1990; Holmwood 2000). In recent years, there has also been a growing body of literature on the thorny issue of cultural rights and the associated question of individual versus collective rights (see, for example, Jayasuriya 1991; Kymlicka 1995; Parekh 2000). As I have

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pointed out elsewhere (Yuval-Davis 1991), however, before we consider these different kinds of citizenship rights, we need to consider another kind of rights – spatial rights – namely, the right to enter a state or any other territory of a political community, and, once inside, the right to remain there. Much of the energy of different political projects relating to the politics of belonging focus on these issues: the right to migrate, the right of abode, the right to work and, more and more recently, the right to plan a future where you live (since people who have been granted full residence rights as refugees can be told after many years of living and working in a state, no matter what their life projects are, that their country of origin is now ‘safe’ and therefore they are obliged to return there). In terms of the responsibilities of membership, here also there has been much debate. Common duties have been the paying of taxes, either via having property or working, and obeying the law. The ultimate citizenship duty, however, at one time was the readiness to sacrifice one’s life – and to kill others – for the sake of the political community. This, until relatively recently, has generally been a gendered demand: it was the responsibility of male members. Women have been asked to re/produce the next generation of citizens and soldiers (Yuval-Davis 1997). During the twentieth century, with the construction of the welfare state and the expansion of citizenship to women and other racialised and disenfranchised groups, the link between citizenship rights and duties has been weakened, including, in many states, the professionalisation of the military. In recent years, with the growing neo-liberal attacks on the welfare state, the link between work and the right to welfare has again been strengthened (Peck 2001). When it comes to membership rights and responsibilities in the arena of the politics of belonging, the duties involved become much more ephemeral and actually become requirements, rather than just duties. The central question here is what is required from a specific person for him/her to be entitled to belong, to be considered as belonging, to the collectivity. Common descent (or rather the myth of common descent) might be demanded in some cases, while in others it might be a common culture, religion and/or language. Loyalty and solidarity, based on common values and a projected myth of common destiny, tend to become requisites for belonging in pluralist societies. In other words, in different projects of the politics of belonging, the different levels of belonging – social locations, identities and ethical and political values – can become the requisites of belonging. Requisites of belonging that relate to social locations – origin, ‘race’, place of birth – would be the most racialised and the least permeable. Language, culture and sometimes

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religion are more open to voluntary, often assimilatory, identification with particular collectivities. Using a common set of values, such as ‘democracy’ or ‘human rights’, as the signifiers of belonging can be seen as having the most permeable boundaries of all. However, these different discourses of belonging can be collapsed together or reduced to each other in specific historical cases. Moreover, some political projects of belonging can present themselves as promoting more open boundaries than they actually do. In the next section, I shall illustrate this by briefly outlining three different political projects of belonging in the United Kingdom that have utilised discourses relating to different levels of belonging. British political projects of belonging Enoch Powell was the first major political figure in Britain to try and establish boundaries to British or, rather, English belonging in the postimperial era.1 He understood before others that the empire was a lost cause and called for a return to and a strengthening of the homeland itself: ‘Englishman, go home!’ (see Barker 1981). Although, as a minister in the Conservative government of the day, he was responsible for the importing of black British citizens from the Caribbean islands to work in England, he excluded them by definition from any possibility of belonging to the English national collectivity. He argued that ‘the West Indian does not by being born in England, become an Englishman’ (quoted in Gilroy 1987: 46). For Powell, descent is the ultimate criterion of belonging. Moreover, he collapsed descent and cultural and political identification. He was eventually expelled from the Conservative Party when he argued that, unless those who did not belong were returned to their ‘proper’ countries, there would be ‘rivers of blood’ in England, as people who originated in different countries and cultures could not, by definition, become part of the same integrated society. About ten years after Powell was expelled from the Conservative Party, another Conservative minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government, Norman Tebbit, promoted another political project of belonging that is popularly known as the ‘cricket test’. One of the Conservative election posters under Thatcher presented a picture of a young black man with the subtitle ‘Labour claims he is Black, we claim he is British’. In this way, the Thatcherite political project of belonging distinguished itself from Labour’s multiculturalism, but also from the skin colour, descent-based racism of the extreme right; although, during her original election campaign, Thatcher did speak about her worry that newcomers would ‘swamp’ the local people and their culture. However, as the Thatcherite neo-liberal

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project crystallised, its discourse opened the door, at least rhetorically, to black middle-class assimilationism. Norman Tebbit’s contribution was to establish the boundary of belonging not only in terms of assimilation and economic contribution but also in terms of identification and emotional attachment. In 1990, he claimed that if people watched a cricket match between Britain and the team of the country from which they or their family originated and cheered that latter team, it meant that those people did not really ‘belong’ to the British collectivity. David Blunkett, as Home Secretary in Tony Blair’s New Labour government a decade later, was careful not to use the cricket metaphor, but football matches were mentioned often in his various papers, as New Labour distanced itself as well from the multiculturalism that had become the official policy of the Labour Party since the 1960s. The multiculturalist political project of belonging was basically aimed at post-imperial Britain and the non-assimilatory integration of coloured British citizens who came to live and work in post-war Britain from its previous colonies.2 Over the years there has been a growing critique of multicultural policies not only from the right but also from the left. Multiculturalism has been accused of neglecting issues of power between and within the minority ethnic communities, of reifying and essentialising boundaries of difference and of excluding the growing number of migrants and asylum seekers who come from outside the former British empire (see, for example, Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992; Rattansi 1992; Modood and Werbner 1997; Parekh 2000; McLennan 2001). New Labour attempted to tackle multiculturalism after the 2001 riots in Northern England when the Cantle Report basically claimed that multiculturalist policies had gone too far and had effectively caused, at least in Northern England, social segregation between the English and the ethnic minority communities, mostly Muslim South Asians (Home Office 2001a). Multiculturalism was declared ‘dead’, and social and community integration became the new goals of the British politics of belonging. The British people, in this political project, so often articulated by David Blunkett, are not constructed out of common descent or a common culture, but their solidarity and loyalty have to be to the British state and society. In his White Paper, Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Blunkett even encouraged people from South Asian communities to find partners for their children from other families living in Britain rather than in their countries of origin, so that such cultural and social cohesion would be easier to achieve (Home Office 2001b). Learning English becomes a requirement for attaining formal citizenship under the new legislation, again in order for such social cohesion to be facilitated. Although this

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political project of belonging is primarily based on the identificatory and emotional level, it also assumes adherence to specific political and ethical values that are seen as inherent to good democratic citizenship.3 The emphasis on democracy and human rights becomes much stronger with British involvement in the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq,4 and becomes not only a signifier of British belonging for its citizens but also its mission in the world. This political project has been promoted mostly by Gordon Brown, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister (2007–2010). For example, he suggested the establishment of a ‘Patriotism Day’ to cement British political loyalty and, significantly, proposed ‘Liberty, Responsibility, Fairness’ as the British equivalent to the French political values of ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’. Although many in the media saw in this politics of belonging project a way for the Scottish Brown to strengthen overall British identity at a time when the devolution of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland had weakened it and thus legitimise his claim to becoming the next prime minister of Britain, this political project is linked much more centrally to the overall political project of New Labour. In several speeches, Brown emphasised values, rather than origins or social and political institutions, as constituting ‘the sense of shared purpose, an idea of what your destiny as a nation is’. For Brown, the ‘common qualities and common values that have made Britain the country … [are] our belief in tolerance and liberty which shines through British history. Our commitment to fairness, fair play and civic duty’ (Newsnight, BBC2, 14 March 2005). This view of Britishness and British history led him to declare, on other occasions, (see, for example, his speech during 2005’s African tour, quoted in the Daily Mail on 15 January 2005) that ‘the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over’ and that ‘we should be proud … of the Empire’ (Speech at the British Museum, quoted in the Daily Mail, 14 September 2004). In New Labour’s politics of belonging, human rights and democratic civic values are parts of what Britain has to offer not only to its citizens but also to the world at large. The reelevation of the British Empire to an occasion for British national pride, in spite of all the terrible chapters in its history (for a quick summary, see Seumas Milne, ‘Britain: imperial nostalgia’, Le Monde diplomatique, May 2005), goes hand in hand with the contemporary ‘civilizing mission’ of the humanitarian militarism in which Britain, alongside the United States, is playing a central role (Chandler 2002) and which has often had terrible consequences for the people it is supposed to liberate. This is an issue that all human rights activists – as well as all those who promote, unproblematically, a cosmopolitan world government

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in which the moral values of human rights are dictated from the top down – have to confront these days (see, for example, Held 1995; Kaldor 2003). Emancipatory ethical and political values can be transformed, under certain conditions, into inherent personal attributes of members of particular national and regional collectivities (Britain, the West) and thus, in practice, become exclusionary rather than permeable signifiers of boundaries.

A concluding remark The different British political projects of belonging mentioned here are but small examples in one country of the ways different states and societies are trying to grapple with what Stuart Hall (2004) has called ‘the multicultural question’: What are the terms for groups of people from different cultural, religious, linguistic, historical backgrounds, who have applied to occupy the same social space, whether that is a city or a nation or a region, to live with one another without either one group [the less powerful group] having to become the imitative version of the dominant one – i.e. an assimilationism – or, on the other hand, the two groups hating one another, or projecting images of degradation? In other words, how can people live together in difference? According to Hall, beneath multiculturalism lies the issue of globalisation: the multicultural question is ‘the question that globalisation has unconsciously produced’. Beneath it also lies the question of the contemporary politics of belonging. In these post-9/11 (and, in Britain, post-7/7) times, ‘strangers’ are seen not only as a threat to the cohesion of the political and cultural community, but also as potential terrorists, especially the young men among them. And who is ‘a stranger’ is continually being modified and contested with growing ethnic, cultural and religious tensions in, as well as in between, societies and states. The politics of belonging has come to occupy the heart of the political agenda almost everywhere on the globe, even when reified assumptions about ‘the clash of civilizations’ are not necessarily applied (Huntington 1993). As the examples from Britain show, however, a lot of both political and analytical work is still required for fully permeable politics of belonging to gain hegemony in the ‘West’ – let alone the ‘Rest’.

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Notes 1. In his pre-European Union, pre-devolution time, Englishness was so hegemonic it virtually equated with Britishness (at least in England, though not in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). 2. They were usually known then as NCWP countries (New Commonwealth and Pakistan). 3. For this, Blunkett’s main inspiration has been Professor Bernard Crick who wrote a report on citizenship studies in schools when Blunkett was Education Secretary; for the Crick Report, see Advisory Group on Citizenship (1998). 4. Although, paradoxically, at the same time, the fear of terrorist attacks after 9/11 in New York and, especially in London, 7/7 has also brought the suspension of some human rights legislation and a growing political struggle around the wish of the government to suspend even more of it.

2 Disability and the Pitfalls of Recognition Jackie Leach Scully

Recognition in the context of disability Within the last 20 years, recognition has emerged as a central theme within social and political theory. Recognition can be understood in this context as the processes by which a person’s or group’s claims to and about their identity are acknowledged. As novel identity groups organise around the belief that they have been subjected to injustice because of features that have historically marked them out, two distinct questions are involved: (i) the status of the claim to have experienced injustice, and (ii) the legitimacy of the group identity itself (Young 1990). It seems only logical that the basic prerequisite for recognising a collective identity is that the group should exist in the first place, and the most controversy (and therefore some of the most interesting thinking) has centred on questions raised about claims to identity by groups that are unfamiliar and potentially more contested. So it is no coincidence that the rise of recognition as such a significant social and political concept has coincided with the emergence of emancipatory movements based on gender, sexual orientation and most recently disability, as these political movements have called into question many taken for granted assumptions about ‘real’ social identities.1 As well as raising awareness of the particular practical difficulties encountered by disabled people, the work of activists and theorists within the global disability movement has opened up a wider range of possible meanings of ‘disability’. To see impairment as a form of oppression or exclusion, or as a question of minority rights, are radical shifts away from the traditional view of it as a punishment for moral transgression, or its more recent conceptualisation as a purely biomedical issue. Theories and models that understand disability as a distinctive experience constituted 36

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by bodily anomaly, and by societal reactions to anomaly, attend to it as a form of difference. Since disability is also a difference that usually entails disadvantage, it seems reasonable to place it alongside other features that, by virtue of the way they mark people out as deviating from an accepted norm, predispose them to social or political disadvantage. These are the sorts of features around which the claims of identity politics have been made. The recognition of disability as a political identity – that is, being able to make statements beginning with ‘disabled people want/demand/claim/ expect’ – raises some provocative questions both about the ontology of disability itself and the ethics of recognition. The simplest ethical claim about identity politics made by some theorists is that recognition of a historically neglected minority group is a prerequisite for putting right the longstanding injustices group members have suffered. Being recognised as a group with legitimate political claims is an ethical imperative not necessarily because it is ontologically true, but because such recognition has important beneficial effects on historically disadvantaged people. In this sense, recognition is largely an instrumental good, because it makes possible the appropriate political responses to damaging structural inequalities. But for other theorists, among them Charles Taylor (1994) and Axel Honneth (1996), sociocultural recognition does much more than simply enable the redistribution of economic or other material goods. Rather, they argue, persistent denial of a group identity (or its denigration or stigmatisation) does fundamental ethical wrongs to the moral agency of the group’s members. Drawing on a Hegelian model in which subjectivity is not self-constituting but is formed through continual dialectical engagement with social ‘others’, these theorists see recognition by a community as crucial to the proper formation of the individual self. Nonrecognition or misrecognition constrain the development of individual subjectivity, which in turn fatally compromises the self’s capacity for moral and political agency. And as Michael Kenny notes, this means that ‘obstacles to the self-development of individuals, and to the formation and exercise of their agency, emerge in complex cultural and psychic forms, as well as through more familiar kinds of socio-economic inequality’ (2004: 40). In this chapter, I want to consider the implications of this second view for ‘recognising’ disability as an element of identity. I will concentrate on why doing so is ethically important, looking both at the prerequisites for recognition and its consequences for agency. Most writing within disability studies2 has focused on political recognition. In this chapter, I will concentrate on the meaning of recognition for disabled individuals,

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although it will become clear that the two processes are intertwined. First, I consider the ongoing debate about whether there really is a ‘disabled identity’ to be recognised, before turning to the ethical implications of recognition for the experienced subjectivity of disabled people.

Disability as an identity I have already indicated that there is now wider acceptance that, for practical reasons, disability can be accommodated alongside other social categories – so that disabled people form another class of persons for whom structural changes in policy and practice can minimise the barriers to full participation, for example. But the more contested question remains: can or should disability be taken as ontologically identityforming, analogous to accepted axes of identity such as gender, class or ethnicity? Interestingly, resistance to the notion of there being a distinct disability identity can be found as much within disability theory and activism as outside it. The commonest, most fundamental critique is that there simply is no meaningful identity to be recognised in disability (Shakespeare 2006; Williams 1999). Existence of a collective identity presupposes some distinguishing feature or set of features that allows us to draw a line separating those in the group from those outside, and that is related to distinctive identity-forming experiences characteristic of all members of the group. But deciding on such a feature proves peculiarly difficult for disability, a problem reflected in the fact that the attempts to construct a comprehensive and coherent theory of disability have been only partially successful. For medicalised approaches, disability can be defined in terms of individual deviations from a norm of physical or mental structure and function; they therefore see the unifying feature of disability as the bodily deviation itself. But both the sheer heterogeneity of impairments and the difficulty in agreeing on unambiguous limits to normality mean that bodily deviation by itself is a problematic basis for a shared identity. Other theories of disability look beyond morphology to some form of common, defining experience. The most influential version of these approaches, sometimes called the strong social model, is a distinctively materialist structural analysis that formulates disability as a form of oppression, exerted by societies that put up barriers to disabled peoples’ full participation, especially their participation in the labour market (Abberley 1987; Oliver 1990; Barnes 1998). Advocates of the strong social model argue that if the right modifications were made to modes of production, buildings, transport, access to education and so on, then,

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although physical or mental impairments would still exist, they would not be real impediments to people’s lives because the barriers that create disablement would have gone. The strong social model therefore sees the experience of social oppression as the common feature of a disability identity. The universality of oppression as the single invariant disability attribute has been questioned by what are sometimes called second wave disability theorists (Corker 1999; Shakespeare 2006; Thomas 2007; Scully 2008). For instance, some disabled people deny that what they have experienced can be called oppression, while others want to say that their identity as disabled includes more positive experiences, or a complexity of experience that cannot be subsumed under the heading of ‘oppression’ (e.g. see accounts by Hockenberry 1995; Johnson 2006). The question of whether the lived experience of disability can be constitutive of individual identity, rather than a collective, appears less problematic. It is plausible that the subjective experience of being/having an anomalous body can affect how people perceive and make sense of their bodies, their surroundings, and the events of their lives (Scully 2008), and the sense that someone makes of her life is inextricably bound up with who she thinks she is – her identity. This sense-making activity need not be identical for all disabled people. In a study I carried out together with colleagues in Switzerland a few years ago (Scully et al. 2004), participants who were chronically ill (with multiple sclerosis and cystic fibrosis), or disabled (with achondroplasia or deafness) were asked how they perceived the relationship between ‘their condition’ and ‘their self’. Some respondents stated that their impairment influenced what they described as their identity, but the effect was not straightforward or uniform across impairments. The single most determining feature here seemed to be whether the condition was progressive or stable. Participants with more stable conditions (in our study, achondroplasia or deafness3) tended to agree with the statement ‘my impairment is a part of me’. By contrast, participants with multiple sclerosis (MS) indicated it was ‘something that has happened to me’ or ‘a negative part of my identity’. Since the person with MS must continually adapt to changes in symptom severity, energy levels, capacities and so on, it may be that such constant change prevents any current state from being fully assimilated into a sense of self. Our cystic fibrosis (CF) respondents were the most ambivalent of all towards their illness. CF is also a progressive condition, but here the constantly changing health status has itself been part of the CF patient’s experience from early childhood. There is other social scientific and anecdotal evidence to suggest that a growing number (although probably

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still a minority) of disabled people are willing to claim disability as part of their self-determined identity as well – that is, to demand recognition as rather than despite being disabled people. The integration of the experience of impairment into a person’s identity or ‘ontological existence’, even in cases where the label of disability itself or any identification with a political disability movement is explicitly rejected, has also been observed by Watson (2002). While the existence of some kind of shared or common disability identity, then, is currently still open to debate, it is likely that impairment, alongside other axes of identity, contributes to the formation of individual subjectivity. The question I want to raise now is: what effect does explicit recognition by others of a person as disabled have on the construction of individual disabled subjectivities?

Identity, recognition and agency Recognition of a person’s identity is closely connected to her capacity for agency, including moral agency. As Hilde Lindemann Nelson argues, ‘my freedom to act [i.e. my agency] depends on others’ recognition … and also on my own sense of worthiness to act’ (2001: 69). This view has seemed less obvious to an older, ‘heroic’ vision of identity whereby selfhood is found by ‘looking into one’s heart and asserting oneself to be what one finds there’ (Strauss 2003: 37), and presumably going on to assert one’s right to agency as well. Contemporary thinking favours a model of identity as something more constructed and fundamentally relational than this: less a singular possession that is presented to the world, and more the outcome of (often unvoiced and unacknowledged) negotiations, or even struggles, between the self and others. So the apparently autonomous project of generating and maintaining a self-understanding is crucially dependent on how others agree to see you, because that shapes who you then (can) see yourself to be. Individual selfhood in this formulation is firmly tied to the claims of identity politics, not so much through the construction of particular social roles or the satisfaction of overt political claims, but through innumerable micro- and macro-level effects on the possibilities of who people can say they are. Lindemann Nelson sees having what she calls an ‘undamaged’ identity as vital to moral agency, for two reasons. The first is that a person’s freedom of action can be constrained through oppression by others who accept a damaging master narrative (Lindemann Nelson 2001), script (Appiah 1994) or figuration (Meyers 1994) of how that person should be. The second, more subtly, is because a person’s own consciousness can

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be infiltrated so that they no longer believe themselves to be capable of responsible action. When she writes that ‘freedom of agency requires not only certain capacities, competencies and intentions that lie within the individual, but also recognition on the part of others of who one is, morally speaking’ (2001: 24, original emphasis), Lindemann Nelson denotes, first, the limits to agency that accompany the internalisation of a version of identity that depletes a person’s subjectivity, and second, the effect of the kind of agency that others will allow someone with that identity to have, as when a child with an impairment is considered a waste of educational resources and denied access to schooling. Both of these processes interact with each other in subtle and complex ways, so that others’ ascriptions form part of what someone internalises, while self-belief leads to patterns of behaviour and response that others then accept as typical for that kind of person. This is why the processes of collective recognition and individual recognition cannot be cleanly separated except for the purposes of analysis. Collective recognition is about respect for previously marginalised or despised groups or cultures; recognition of individuals is about acknowledging their capacity for self-determination and self-description. But identity politics’ recognition that there is a ‘there’ there, that the group exists at all, is what then makes it possible for the individual to incorporate some of the narratives of that group as a component of her identity. In addition to identity being a focus around which political activity can assemble, it offers one framework for personal self-understanding that can be incorporated into the scripts and stories of individual identity too. Recognition of individual disability identities means acknowledging the right and the capacity of, say, a woman with a visual impairment to articulate her selfhood to others in ways that are in keeping with her own experience, rather than someone else’s understanding of it. To refuse recognition means refusing her this right and capacity, and so inflicts harm by holding her to a false, distorted or reduced mode of being (Taylor 1994: 25). Note that nonrecognition and misrecognition, while having some of the same effects, are different. What we have been talking about so far is the harm caused by misrecognition: figurations, images, scripts or narratives that limit possible identities and thereby also limit the opportunities open to members of certain groups, or that infiltrate their consciousness to compromise their moral agency. In misrecognition, the identity is acknowledged to exist but the description of the life is false. This is particularly damaging when the description is actively harmful – for example, the disabled person as a cripple to be despised or

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a monster to be feared. It is equally damaging, however, to have formative experiences that are simply not there in the repertoire used by your social world. Not having a socially mandated identity available, even one that is oppressive and self-undermining (Appiah 2004: 190), means there will be no language or images through which to make sense of events and perceptions, or to articulate experience to yourself and others. At a most basic level, this means the absence of a framework into which selfdetermined evaluations and exercise of agency can be placed without distortion.

Passing As an example, let me consider the harm to identity (and therefore agency) of the practice of ‘passing’. Passing has been discussed in the context of other social marginalities of ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity (Ahmed 1999; Hemmings 1999; Leary 1999; Johnson 2002). Marginal people pass ‘when they take up the [dominant] group’s norms for themselves, even though they do not “really” conform to those norms’ (Lindemann Nelson 2001: 126). In other words, the dominant norm steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that these marginal people don’t fit this particular reality, and disabled people who try to pass collude, deliberately or unconsciously, with the dominant rejection of the realities of their lives. People with various kinds of impairment will try, often for compelling practical reasons, to ensure that their bodily form and function match the social norm. ‘Function’ here means both straightforward physical acts – walking, picking objects up – and social functions, such as being able to work an eight-hour day, communicate with others in certain ways and so on. The demands of passing are stringent: the accommodations are all on the side of the disabled person; their impairments must be not, or only minimally, apparent to other people; and they must not disturb conventional social arrangements (see Scully 2010 for further discussion). The aim is to fit the false descriptions well enough to be taken for nondisabled. Internalised by the disabled person, this becomes the (self-imposed) demand that nothing about the impairment should ‘show’. It could be argued that there is nothing actively wrong about the desire to pass, since it is ostensibly a common, even ubiquitous one: we all want to fit into our surroundings, and disabled people, like anyone else, want to be perceived and valued in terms of things like their skills or personal characteristics without a hyperawareness of their impairment

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getting in the way. Yet the urge to pass often goes beyond a reasonable desire for acceptance, respect or even autonomy of self-presentation. Can an identity in which fitting oneself to someone else’s norm is of overriding importance be morally exemplary? What does such a demand do to a person’s moral agency, or to society’s capacity to recognise authentic forms of agency?

Consequences of recognition Following on from the preceding discussion about the negative effect of refusing recognition, and the way in which the formation of individual subjectivity draws on the possibilities of collective identity, in this section, I want to consider what might be the consequences for disabled people if disability were to be uncontested as an identity, both on the collective and individual levels. I say ‘consequences’ in the plural in order to highlight that a politics of recognition is not just about being accepted as a player on the political terrain, but also about processes of self-definition. Self-transformation Being able to redescribe and redefine what one has experienced as a disabled person around alternative narratives provided by a collective identity can be life changing. Indeed, many published accounts by disabled people attest to the transformative impact of being able consciously to align themselves with new narratives made available by the political disability movement. Looking at disability history, the rise of the disability movement, and personal accounts by disabled people, provides one answer to the counterargument raised by Strauss (2003: 44): Can’t we separate the negative impact of nonrecognition on subjectivity from the positive need for recognition to form a subject? That is, shouldn’t a person be able to develop something like an adequate sense of self and self-agency, irrespective of whether others recognise them as having the right to do so? Many disability memoirs show convincingly the sheer difficulty of crafting a sense of a self in which impairment is anything other than a constraint on one’s agency or a deformation of what is held to be one’s authentic, agential self.4 These authors demonstrate the transformative effect that the availability of a more nuanced general account of disability has on how individual disabled people can think of who they are, and hence on the sorts of self-determined choices it is possible for them to make. Robert Murphy, a disabled sociologist, put it neatly when he wrote that ‘the most lasting benefits of any struggle

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against perceived oppression are not the tangible gains but the transformations of consciousness of the combatants’ (1987: 157). It is worth noting also that these accounts are shot through with the labour of inventing one’s identity as a disabled person (or re-inventing it, after late onset impairment). Authors like John Hockenberry detail ‘the hard work and painstaking efforts’ (1995: 27) demanded not just for a newly disabled person to learn new ways of accomplishing everyday activities, but to restructure their conceptual framework as well: ‘Finding a personal concept of normal in a place where nurses patrolled your urethra was the main task in the hospital’ (1995: 30). In the disability memoirs by Hockenberry, Simi Linton (1998), Michael Chorost (2005) and others, readers are presented with a strong sense of the psychic as well as physical challenge that comes with being differently embodied. Social transformation The transformative effect of generating novel ‘kinds of human beings’, however, goes beyond changing the self-consciousness of members of the group. That is to say, collective political identification acts not only on disabled people’s own understandings of the moral significance of (their own and others’) impairment, but on nondisabled society’s understanding as well. Nancy Fraser has argued that the goals of recognition should be more socially ambitious than just helping a group affirm its identity. In the context of disability, a more comprehensive politics of disabled recognition could aim to change ‘societal patterns of representation, interpretation and communication in ways that would change everybody’s sense of [the selfhood of disabled people]’ (1996: 15), and not just the consciousness of disabled people themselves. This is an ambitious ethical programme since it maintains that true recognition of disability involves more than just making ‘reasonable accommodations’ of bodies that look or work differently.

Productive as well as reflective The intertwining of labour/struggle and transformation underlines the fact that recognition is productive as well as reflective of both the private and the political subject. Arguments about the reality of disability identity politics tend to start, as I did earlier, from the commonplace view that there first needs to be a group (a collective identity), in order for it to make political claims about injustices. This is a model that sees disability identity politics as acting to express the demands of a preconstituted identity (Lloyd 2005: 36) made up of characteristics that the

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individual disabled subject shares with others. By this account, subjectivity is a capacity that subjects have, and which they then exercise in moral, political and social orders. Other accounts of subjectivity, however, offer alternative ways of looking at moral and political agency and the role of political identification in it. Rejecting any notion of the subject as unitary or stable, or the idea that the subject exists before it is brought into speech, many post-structuralists would say that identity is best thought of as an effect of politics rather than its source. Moya Lloyd, for example, suggests that feminist identity politics has fallen into the trap of reversing its order of priority (2005: 39), and that feminists who draw on a traditional concept of identity use it to define who or what women are in terms of pre-given attributes or experiences (2005: 38). In other words, and contradicting the assumption that we should be able to find an existing identity that all disabled people possess and that we can form a basis for the legitimacy of disability politics around, post-structuralists like Lloyd see the disabled self as having no real ontological status of its own, but as being primarily produced through the making of political claims. Theorists who argue along these lines take the operation of agency to be ontologically prior, so that it is agency that then generates either the subject or the collective. I want to suggest a more dialectical and recursive interaction between identity and acts of agency. In other words, cultural and political identity is not created through agency (i.e. the struggle for recognition), but it is consolidated by it. The operation of agency itself is therefore not always straightforwardly prior to identity: it is more that there is an interactive and self-constitutive process between identity and those acts of agency that call for recognition. And importantly, individual moral agency is not solely about obvious choices and acts, but also includes the interior capacities for reflection and discernment, and the self-construction of an individual identity around emerging collective ones.

Ethics of transformation The suggestion I have just made, that a contested identity can be consolidated through the struggle for recognition, has some important implications for ideas about the ethics of recognition (and the consequential ethical harms of nonrecognition). If a minority identity first exists, and then makes a claim for recognition, the moral harm that Taylor and others worry about lies in denying recognition to the self of what it is, and therefore hampering its expression of agency as that pre-existing self.

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But nonrecognition can also cause harm through denying a group the social space in which to make the political and moral claims that are a necessary part of the emergence of the collective identity itself. From this point of view, the argument which is sometimes used – that the notion of a disability identity did not exist before some disabled people decided to start talking about it – is not a criticism, but just a description of the process through which all social identities appear. As Ian Hacking has said, ‘numerous kinds of human beings and human acts come into being hand in hand with our invention of categories labelling them’ (1986: 236) and the social or political activities that represent the category as real. For disabled people to have the possibility of constructing a more authentic account of their lives, one that makes better sense of their experiences than the images, narratives or scripts currently available, depends on them having both epistemic and semantic authority in the eyes of the relevant community. Epistemic authority is the authority to make knowledge and truth claims about one’s life, if necessary contradicting others’ descriptions if they are less true. Semantic authority, in this context, is being afforded the right to have a say in defining what a characteristic or experience means for one’s identity. Having epistemic and semantic authority indicates that a person is being taken seriously as a contributor to the mutual creation of the ‘shared conceptual space’ in which societies think about things that are important to them. The contributors to what goes on in this space influence social structures, roles and practices, sometimes generating radically new ones. None of this should be taken as suggesting that those calling for recognition (disabled people) are the sole authoritative voices with credibility to form the cultural figurations of disability. Other perspectives, including those of nondisabled people, are needed to generate the fullest, least distorted and self-serving picture. (How pluralist societies should respond to the claims to authenticity and authority of any one non-dominant identity is not a question I want to address here.) But explicitly inviting disabled people to contribute their own lived experiences as the grounding for cultural understandings of disability must, I think, follow inevitably from the basic ethical step of treating them as agents with equivalent moral and ontological status as nondisabled people. Being given epistemic and semantic authority signifies both that the community respects a disabled person sufficiently to give her the power to help create shared conceptual space, and that the disabled person’s own self-understanding is taken seriously, even if it cannot be comfortably housed within accepted modes of thinking.

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So the harm of mis/nonrecognition lies, at least in part, in what that denial says about the semantic and epistemic authority of disabled people, causing as a result a fundamental kind of damage to the subject: if the accounts that could be given of a life are rejected, and if the person giving the account of that life is deprived of authentic language or narratives to do so, then that person’s capacity to be the subject of her own life is also restricted. And on top of that, if it really is the case that this process of restructuring and reinterpreting one’s experience generates a new version of subjectivity, owned collectively and individually, then some of the ethical wrong of mis/nonrecognition lies in the denial of the epistemic space in which to make the political and moral claims that ultimately help consolidate the identity in question.

Problems of recognition It might seem, then, that there is a pretty irrefutable ethical imperative in favour of recognising disability as an identity-forming feature. Before concluding that, however, I want to consider whether the peculiar nature of disability means that there are particular pitfalls for the unwary on the road to recognition. Earlier, I noted that scholars both within and outside disability studies agree that disability is heterogeneous and hard to define. There is a risk, then, that trying to theorise a disability identity will lead to the false essentialising and homogenising of a phenomenon that is really much more constructed and diverse. Political theorists of recognition have discussed extensively the problem of what Seyla Benhabib calls a ‘reductionist sociology’ (2002: 4) in which internal differences in a group are smoothed away for theoretical and bureaucratic convenience. Those outside the group (in this case, those holding the power to accept or reject claims to disability identity) tend to be less able to see internal inconsistency and fragmentation, and therefore more inclined to impose a false coherence. This is a matter of acute concern at the point where new social identities are emerging. As any new grouping becomes established, it is increasingly held in place by an array of institutional forces (political, economic and so on) that are not under the control of the group’s own members. Moreover, those outside the group (nondisabled people) will often have their own professional and emotional investments in promoting the disability identity that they want to recognise. From within, a group’s own members are generally better able to see the fracture lines of internal diversity and conflict (Kenny 2004: 101). But it is also true that the group’s members may have overtly political

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or other reasons for wanting to project a false front of coherence to the outside world. Many critics have argued that something like this has happened in parts of the disability movement. The strong social model organises disability identity primarily (and sometimes exclusively) around the experience of oppression; therefore, if people with impairment do not perceive themselves as oppressed, then they may not be acknowledged as ‘genuinely’ disabled, or may be accused of having a ‘false consciousness’ and being in denial about the realities of their lives. Then, a disability identity based solely on the consciousness of material oppression becomes the only valid form of collective identification. This exemplifies the potentially disastrous normative thrust postulated by other critics. According to Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Demanding respect for people as blacks and as gays requires that there are some scripts that go with being an African-American or having same-sex desires. There will be proper ways of being black and gay, there will be expectations to be met, demands to be made’ (1994: 162–3). Historically, the parameters of ‘proper ways of being disabled’ have been imposed by outsiders to that state rather than disabled people themselves. But growing political self-assertion, and the concomitant need to have a coherent identity to bring into the political arena, increases the likelihood that the same pressures of expectation operate within the group itself. To some observers the disability movements in the UK and US have already gone too far towards ‘establishing what is or is not permissible for [disabled people] to be and do’ (Lloyd 2005: 25). For a disabled person to be found authentic within that discourse, she must present in a recognisable way, or risk having her claim to belonging rejected and so lose out on the material, psychic and moral benefits of being able to invoke disability as part of her own narrative of identity. At the turn of the century, Fraser (2000) made this point when she argued against the conflation of recognition with identity politics, fearing that identity politics, narrowly understood, lays too great an emphasis on getting the identity ‘right’ before efforts at redistribution are made, and at the same time creates pressure to reify group identities that are not really up to bearing that weight. As noted earlier, Fraser’s view of recognition was of something that moves beyond (what she sees as) a fixation about defining identity in order to acknowledge a group’s ‘cultural specificity’ (Benhabib 2002: 70). This claim, that recognition holds the possibility of transforming wider social patterns, is in keeping with the argument of part of the disability movement, that true recognition of disability ultimately requires a radical reengineering of the conceptual frames through which normal bodies and normal social organisations are understood.

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As well as questioning the empirical validity of organising disability identity solely around oppression or discrimination, some disability scholars are also wary of taking impairment as the only characteristic of relevance in a properly nuanced, empirically valid theory of disability identity: contemporary sociology, after all, suggests that all subjects participate in more than one social identity at any one time. Hence other axes of identity than disability will always be present, intersecting to modulate the experience of impairment, and at times taking precedence in terms of subjectivity. In our daily lives, we are skilled at negotiating the moment-by-moment shifts in their salience. Consequently, any theory of groups making common political cause around identity must take into account that groups are made up of people with multiple, simultaneous, sometimes even antagonistic commitments and allegiances (Whitebrook 2001: 137). The political claims and goals of disability activism need to be modified in order to reflect the fragmented reality that, for many people with impairment, there will be periods of their lives or certain circumstances when the defining features of their identity, and/or the community to which they want to prioritise allegiance, will be something other than being disabled. However, acknowledging that identification with disability is not always primary in disabled people’s lives does not render the identification that does happen, to the degree it does, morally or politically insignificant. If that were the case, it would mean that one identification has to override all others, at all times, in order to count for anything, and this is empirically and experientially not true for most people. With increasing recognition that no subject’s identity may be explained wholly in terms of one category, recent work in disability studies has begun to explore the experience of impairment from within other minority perspectives such as feminism (Wendell 1996; Meekosha 1998; Thomas 1999), ethnicity (Ahmad 2000; Hernandez 2005; Hussain 2005) and sexual orientation (Axtell 1999; Whitney 2006). Finally, I want to turn to what many disability theorists, myself included, would argue is the single feature that sets disability apart as an embodied and social experience, and that therefore makes thinking about disability identity uniquely problematic: unlike the other categories of social identity with which it gets lumped, disability is not a neutral characteristic. By this I mean that it is possible to imagine social reorganisations in which the structural disadvantages associated with being a woman, or a black man, or a lesbian are removed. Social rearrangements could in principle render being a woman, black, or lesbian or gay a neutral characteristic, with no consistent negative effect on the chances of living a flourishing

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life. By contrast, there are many impairments for which social reorganisation, eradication of prejudice, provision of supports and so on would still leave behind pain, fragility, shortened lifespan, or various kinds of physical and mental distress: sensations or experiences which are incompatible with equality of opportunity to flourish. At least some forms of disability so severely constrain the possibilities open to the person that it is almost inconceivable that anyone would choose that disability, for themselves or for their child, if the alternative of no impairment were available.5 They therefore involve a high level of what I call intrinsic disadvantage that cannot be eradicated by any kind of social, economic, environmental or political revamping. It is important to emphasise that this is not true for all impairments, not even for every aspect of any one impairment. Equally important, in many cases removing social and attitudinal barriers would turn a seriously disadvantageous impairment into a triviality, or even remove it altogether; and until societies have made serious efforts to do this, we have little empirical basis on which to state exactly how much of the disadvantage of any impairment is intrinsic. The question of whether or not impairment can ever be intrinsically neutral, in the way that other categories of social identity are, is clearly of central importance to theories of disability. However, it is not necessary to know the answer to this question in order to acknowledge that disability can influence subjectivity. Disability becomes a component of identity through the ways in which being disabled affects the experiences a person can have, and how those experiences are understood by the person herself and by others. If we want to analyse, and ultimately recognise, these effects as part of identity, we do not need to evaluate the quality of the lived experience in terms of whether it is better, worse or just the same as it would have been if the person were not disabled. (We might still want to do this kind of evaluation, but it would be an exploration of the metaphysics of disability, not the ethics of recognition.)

Knowing the realities of disabled identity Recognition of contested disabled identities, then, also means recognising the semantic and epistemic authority of disabled people’s own identity accounts. One obvious implication of this is the need for more, and more varied, empirically and experientially based accounts of disabled lives; and this is not as easy as it sounds. For one thing, it demands a significant investment of time and research funding, in competition with

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other research and policy priorities. It means acknowledging that the general lack of interest shown by the nondisabled world about the reality of disabled lives is unacceptable, partly because the resulting paucity of knowledge hampers any efforts at interventions that genuinely do make disabled people’s lives better, but also because a rejection of or disinterest in their self-understanding has the harmful consequences already discussed for disabled people’s status as fully self-determining moral agents. Paradoxically, however, recognising disability as an identity could lead to a different kind of failure to pay attention to disabled lives. In the politics of recognition, there is always a danger (although not an unavoidable one) of mistaking acceptance for recognition: that is, using the apparent acknowledgement of disability as an identity category to sidestep the effort of being really attentive to the lived realities of disabled subjectivities. Too facile an acknowledgement of the identity and historic disadvantage of the group called ‘disabled people’ can slide over some important, unexplored details of who exactly is contained within this category and why or how the impersonal forces that create disadvantage are played out in everyday embodied social reality. In practical terms, this could result in the failure to examine what constitutes intrinsic versus extrinsic disadvantage in each case, and to make appropriate changes to improve disabled people’s lives. For theory, it would also mean that any conceptualisation of disability continued to be impoverished because of its lack of firm empirical and experiential grounding. It would be ironic if both the refusal to recognise disabled identity, and its over-facile recognition, had the same consequence of allowing the nondisabled world to look away from the sometimes discomforting perspectives of disabled lives. Disability is a peculiar and peculiarly complex phenomenon, and so it is not surprising that the experience of disability is integrated into people’s subjectivities in ways that are both similar to, and quite unlike, the experience of other forms of social marginality. Still, none of the peculiar problems associated with individual or collective disability identity are, I think, compelling arguments against its recognition. It seems incontrovertible that the ethical imperative is strongly in its favour, because of what recognition ultimately expresses about the status of disabled people as moral agents. But the continuing ambiguity of disability as a concept, and as lived experience, suggests that it will be some while before a disability identity can be recognised as anything other than contested.

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Notes 1. However, it must be emphasised that these social groups are distinct and divergent both in terms of their histories and their claims to existence as identities. 2. Very little attention has so far been paid to disability by political theorists of recognition. 3. Note though that all our hearing impaired participants had been deaf from birth or early childhood. Responses from people who had lost their hearing in later life might well have been different. 4. For the sake of the argument here, I’m leaving aside many vexed questions about the meaning of ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ in the context of identity. 5. It is still important to leave open here the possibility that the apparently obvious undesirability, the feeling that no one in their right mind would choose to be disabled, is historically contingent, just like the conviction that no one would choose to be born a woman, black or gay. The undesirability of disability might be a function of the limits of our moral imaginations: that we simply cannot currently imagine a social organisation in which being blind or paralysed is the same sort of characteristic as being black or gay.

3 ‘Normal people’: Recognition and the Middle Classes Steph Lawler

[T]he ‘middle class’ in England can be seen as a preeminently historical category, the result of accumulated ‘middles’ or spaces between – between aristocracy and working class, land and labour, highbrow and lowbrow, provincial marginality and metropolitan power – the balance of which has altered over time. The categories through which classes have been classified in England are political and economic, yet also profoundly cultural. (Gunn 2005: 61–2) [M]embers of the privileged classes are naturally inclined to regard as a gift of nature a cultural heritage which is transmitted by a process of unconscious training. But, in addition, the contradictions and ambiguities of the relationship which the most cultured among them maintain with their culture are both permitted and encouraged by the paradox which defines the ‘realization’ of culture as becoming natural. (Bourdieu 1993: 234, original emphasis)

Introduction ‘Recognition’ has come to be seen as an important axis of political struggle (Honneth 1996; Fraser 2000, 2001). Claims to recognition are about demands for the conferment of value on certain forms of group identity and modes of existence. As Nancy Fraser (2001) has argued, recognition is crucial, not because people may experience hurt at lack of recognition 53

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(though they may), but because social justice demands both recognition and redistribution of resources. Leaving aside the analytic viability of Fraser’s distinction between recognition and redistribution, it is clear that one important way in which power operates at the current time is through the absence – one might say the social and cultural refusal – of recognition of the value of certain (subaltern) identities. In this sense, the analytical-political task may be the charting of forms of nonrecognition, coupled with demands for the recognition of the worth of devalued, unrecognised groups. However, there are clear cases where ‘recognition’ has been successfully achieved, such that the group in question is able (implicitly or explicitly) to claim its own existence as intrinsically and legitimately valuable and even normative. All ‘unmarked’ categories do this and it is important to remember (though this itself is often ‘unmarked’) that their successfully ‘recognised’ status derives from political struggles over symbolic and material goods. This chapter is concerned with one such case. It is based on an analysis of press coverage during 2007 of the break-up of the relationship between Prince William, the elder son of Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana, and Kate Middleton, an upper-middle-class non-Royal.1 Through this analysis, I consider how an apparent challenge to middleclass identities, behaviours and dispositions led to some interesting attempts to make and remake claims for a recognition of the value of those identities, behaviours and dispositions. These are claims to ‘legitimacy and entitlement’ (Savage et al. 2000: 107) that are part of the stakes in contemporary class struggles. The chapter, then, is an attempt to consider English middle-class identities and their relationship to ‘the right ways of being and doing’ (Bourdieu 1986a) in the context of a dispute about recognition. Although most class analysis has focused on working-class existence (and indeed the working class has been seen as the archetypal class (Savage 2000)) my focus here is on the middle classes because I want to consider the symbolic legitimation, discussed in more detail later, of their positions and dispositions. This legitimation is theorised by Bourdieu (1986b) in terms of ‘symbolic capital’, itself the gateway to symbolic power. ‘Symbolic capital is “denied capital”; it disguises the underlying “interested” relations to which it is related by giving them legitimation’ (Swartz 1997: 43). The social effects of its accumulation (e.g. through familial inheritance) becomes ‘magically’ converted into an appearance of ‘natural’ status, as if the bearer has acquired such

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status, not from history, but from something innate in their character. For this group, successful recognition (in Fraser’s terms) has become, over time, transformed into misrecognition (in Bourdieu’s terms): that is, into an occlusion of the social origins of the middle classes’ legitimate and normative status. Further, and as Mike Savage et al. (2000), glossing Bourdieu, have argued: [S]ince the intellectual middle classes have always sought to define popular and working-class culture from outside, in the process helping define their own cultural identity, it is actually far more challenging to criticize middle-class culture from the inside. (Savage et al. 2000: 109) However, no class can be seen in isolation. I have written elsewhere about middle-class self-formation in the face of assumed working-class otherness (Lawler 2005). Here I am concerned with the way a different group – the aristocracy (together with royalty) – works as a ‘constitutive outside’ (Hall 1996) to middle-class identity. Class, in this context, has to be seen as both dynamic and relational: dynamic, because it is, in Bourdieu’s words, ‘not … something given but … something to be done’ (Bourdieu 1998: 12, original emphasis); and relational, because part of the logic of class relies on the making of distinctions between classes and class fractions. Such distinctions can be seen as cultural boundaries that work to demarcate classes as social groupings (Warde 2008: 324), marking who ‘belongs’ and who does not. My focus in this chapter is on some of the ways in which class is done: made and remade through processes of recognition and claims to belonging. Its specific focus centres on how manners – broadly defined as codified systems of correct behaviour – operate as classed shibboleths within the cultural imaginary of middle-class existence. As Alan Warde (2008:329) has pointed out, ‘manners are particularly strongly embodied (and are perhaps one of the most persistent survivals from childhood) and are expressed and improvised upon in multiple social situations.’ In the context of an informalisation of social relations (Wouters 2007) and of explicit rules of conduct, the ability to carefully improvise the correct forms of behaviour may take on a heightened significance. I aim to show, through the case study of media coverage of the Kate–William split, how manners may form part of the stakes in a rhetorical contest over how the English middle classes shore up their recognition in the face of a perceived attack on their legitimacy.

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The middle classes and their others The English middle classes can be seen as having been brought into being through a series of ‘classification struggles’ (Gunn 2005). That is, their emergence as a class depended on a differentiation from both the aristocracy (and royalty) and the ‘labouring poor’. It is important to note that the emergence of this class was associated with struggles, not only around political representation (as in the extension of the franchise to male property owners enshrined in the 1832 Reform Act); but also around the ownership of cultural and moral distinction: ‘Culture’ in England was … constitutive of both educated and popular understandings of class as these evolved over time. … [C]ultural definitions and assumptions came to inform understandings of class in England at both the societal level and that of the state. For much of the nineteenth and the twentieth century, ‘culture’ was understood to be a significant – if not indispensable – part of what it meant to be ‘middle class’. (Gunn 2005: 54) If culture came to be the property of the new middle classes, then culture had to be conceptually removed from the classes who came to constitute their others. This chimes with the Kantian distinction, critiqued by Bourdieu (1986a), between ‘the court’ (over-cultivated) and ‘the people’ (under-cultivated) against which, he suggests, an emergent European middle class came to define themselves as holding a cultural monopoly. Struggles around cultural ownership, then, were a staple of the emergent middle class’ attempts to establish itself. And since culture has long discursive and conceptual links with morality (Bourdieu 1986a), claims to cultural ownership could easily be translated into claims of moral correctness. Along with these came claims to being a new, reforming social force (Davidoff and Hall 1987; Joyce 1994; Gunn 2005) as indeed the embodiment of ‘modernity’. These three aspects of middle-class self-formation – culture, morality and modernity – have solidified into an identity that has come to silently occupy a ‘normal’ ground. Middle-classness has become the benchmark of ‘normality’ against which other groups are measured (Walkerdine and Lucey 1989; Skeggs 1997; Walkerdine et al. 2001). Middle-class dispositions come to be marked as ‘good taste’, middle-class values and cultural capitals marked as the ‘right’ ones. To question these values, dispositions and tastes, to suggest that what the middle classes know, or value,

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or want, might not be naturally and universally the right things, is to undermine an entire symbolic and cultural economy. Furthermore, this positioning of the middle class as normal and normative has been strengthened, in England, by a cultural hegemony within politics, academia, the media and the culture industries in which ‘middle class’ is taken as the norm (albeit not without some limited contestation) against which other positions are deficient (see, for example, Walkerdine et al. 2001; Skeggs 2004). In short, it is middle-class claims to normality and universality that give class in contemporary England so much of its force and its impetus. At this point, it is important to acknowledge the heterogeneity of all class classifications and to note the difficulty of definition. Middleclassness can prove difficult to define, and can mean different things in different contexts. In this context, I am using it as a conceptual category which is distinguished from both the upper class/aristocracy and the working class. It is a signifier that ‘real’ empirical persons will approximate, or not, and in which they may or may not make investments.2 It is, of course, linked with material conditions, but it is not the same as simply having money. While clearly there are important differences within the category ‘middle class’, these differences may or may not be mobilised. Sometimes, as in the press representations I discuss later, appeals are made on behalf of a middle class that is cast as relatively homogeneous. This, I would suggest, is because the immediate reference points, in this context, are not intra-class distinctions, but distinctions against another class grouping (the aristocracy). In this respect, the term is predominantly used to denote a normatively desirable and indeed ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ status. ‘The aristocracy’, similarly, is difficult to straightforwardly categorise. Historically, and together with royalty, they have constituted a landowning class that has held power in feudal societies. With the rise of capitalism, the power of these groups has undoubtedly diminished, and indeed they can be seen as representing a ‘problem’ within the modernist project, since their existence relies on ties of birth. Their basis in hereditary ties and hereditary privilege undercuts a modernist rhetoric of ‘self-making’ and their continuing existence has been seen in terms of a failure of a bourgeois revolution (Nairn 1988, but see also Chaney 2001). However, the focus of my argument is not aristocracy/royalty itself, but rather on the ways in which they function – however implicitly – as an ‘other’ to middle-class existence, as its constitutive outside. Workingclass people (likewise, not an undifferentiated category) also form an other to this existence, of course, and seem to be a more immediate

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reference point (at least judging by the class hatred exhibited against them in public discourse). The aristocracy, together with royalty, however, appears to engender a different set of criteria against which middle-class existence is imagined. This may be because there is sufficient politicalrhetorical space in which the aristocracy can assert its own superiority, and because there are few, if any, public narratives of aristocrats aspiring to be middle class, or of social institutions enabling or encouraging such a move. They appear to have been able to retain value. In this respect, to reduce class to a status hierarchy would be to lose class’ relational aspect, and indeed to lose the complexity of current classed relations (Reay 2005). The aristocracy are not straightforwardly ‘at the top’, but neither do they occupy the same abjected position as poor whites.3 They are not straightforwardly admired or looked up to. Rather, their existence and their apparent self-confidence work to trouble a normative and normalised middle-class position. As I discuss later, real or imagined attacks on the normality of middle-class existence, when coming from the aristocracy, give rise to panicked and defensive reactions in public discourse. Yet these reactions hinge on a reassertion of the intrinsic desirability of middle-classness.

‘Culture becoming natural’ Part of the dynamism of class involves the creation of classed identities. Class in this sense is ‘folded’ into the self so that it is, in Annette Kuhn’s now-famous comment, ‘beneath your clothes, under your skin, in your psyche, at the very core of your being’ (Kuhn 1995: 98). Bourdieu’s concept of habitus – while not the only resource for analysing the relationship between large-scale social relations of class, and personal and quotidian pleasures and pains – represents, in my view, the most systematic and most convincing analysis of classed identities and subjectivities. Habitus provides a means of seeing the ways in which personhood is produced within the crucible of social relations, and also forces an analysis of people’s history (both personal history and the inheritance of familial history). No one lives in an eternal present and indeed we are classed long before we enter a workplace (Walkerdine and Lucey 1989). Yet much class theory has been unconcerned with how people come to be the way they are, and indeed how the way they are, may operate as means of approving and disapproving others. For Bourdieu, habitus is ‘embodied history, internalised as a second nature and so forgotten as history’ (Bourdieu 1990: 56). In this generative forgetting, the training received to be a certain way – to be disposed

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towards specific things and against others; to know and to value certain things, and not others; to speak in a particular way – all come to seem an intrinsic part of the person: their ‘nature’ rather than their social training. Furthermore, part of the ‘hidden training’ embodied in the habitus is the ability to pass judgements on others (although only some judgements will matter). The notion of habitus provides a way to think about the ways in which class (an artificial, artefactual system) becomes naturalised (into a property of persons). As Bourdieu (1993) suggests, the middle classes’ hold on what is to count as ‘taste’, as ‘culture’, correct behaviour and so on must somehow be legitimated. Yet the middle classes cannot claim the right of birth, since that would be to cede the ground to aristocratic principles. On the other hand, neither can they rely on a naturalised universalism, since to do so would remove the grounds of their legitimation: if everyone’s position were equally tenable, then there would be nothing special about a middle-classed position and tastes and dispositions coded as working class would be equally acceptable. Hence a privileged middleclass position vis-à-vis morality, the appreciation of culture, etc. would be lost. The difficulty is managed, Bourdieu argues, through a magical conversion of culture into ‘nature’. The formal and informal education that goes into learning the specifics of a culture becomes forgotten. Instead, tastes, knowledges and dispositions come to seem ‘natural’ and innate. We need to remember, of course, that only some knowledges, tastes and dispositions (those of the middle classes themselves) get to ‘count’. Thus, bourgeois culture becomes nature, though it is of course a strange notion of ‘nature’ since some people are seen to lack it. Bourdieu writes of The paradox which defines the ‘realization’ of culture as becoming natural. Culture is thus achieved only by negating itself as such, that is, artificial and artificially acquired, so as to become second nature, a habitus, possession turned into being. (Bourdieu 1993: 234, original emphasis) Echoing his earlier argument in Distinction that The ideology of natural taste owes its plausibility and its efficacy to the fact that … it naturalizes real differences, converting differences in the mode of acquisition of culture into differences of nature [in a] new mystery of immaculate conception. (Bourdieu 1986a: 68)

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While Bourdieu is referring here to ‘culture’ and ‘taste’ in the sense of aesthetic competence and appreciation, there is a broader point to be made. That is, culture and taste in the sense of the ‘right ways of being and doing’ has been claimed as a right by the middle classes, and this includes an understanding of the right ways to behave that is codified as manners and etiquette. These are not represented as a set of skills that anyone might have, but as an innate sense of what is important to know, to do and to value. They are, as Bourdieu (1986a) suggests, understood as being known instinctively, rather than through learning (this is why generative forgetting is so crucial). There must be no apparent effort since this would be to undermine claims to ‘nature’. The ability of some persons to move across class categories and to learn new codes does not undermine this argument since their ‘successful’ movement across categories depends on their being able to display an apparently natural set of dispositions. When their effort shows, they can be ridiculed as ‘petit bourgeois’ or ‘pretentious’ (Bourdieu, 1986a) or ‘nouveau riche’. Or a vicious humour may be used to police the boundaries: the character of Hyacinth Bucket in the British TV comedy Keeping Up Appearances is a prime example of a female character made grotesque through the ‘exposure’ of the gap between her carefully learned dispositions and her ‘true self’. This is the gap between being and seeming that gives rise to charges of pretension (Bourdieu 1986a; Lawler 1999). In short, then, even though the ‘correct’ codes have to be learned at some point by everyone middle class, that learning ought not to show. This is the paradox of culture becoming nature. Of course, the mondain aristocracy similarly makes claims to ‘instinctive’ understanding and ‘natural’ appreciation, so we might expect conflicts to arise if the aristocracy apparently asserts that their understanding and appreciation is superior to that of the bourgeoisie. This, indeed, is at the heart of the representations I discuss here.

Aristocratic imaginings At this point, I want to introduce the case study to illustrate my argument. I want to use this case study to point to ways in which class works as a differentiating process (in this case, the middle class differentiating itself from the aristocracy) that at the same time references a collectivity (through conjuring up a fictive middle-class ‘we’). As noted earlier, the case study is that of press coverage, within British ‘broadsheet’ national newspapers, of the reported split, in April 2007, between Prince William,

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the older son of Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana, and Kate Middleton, his partner of (then) four years. Prince William has been widely characterised as a ‘modern’ royal, but he nevertheless lives a life of immense privilege and will (if all goes to plan) take the throne after the death of his father (the current heir to the British throne). Kate Middleton is privately educated and, by all accounts, from a wealthy upper-middleclass family. She, too, is immensely privileged. As we will see, however, her status as a commoner – and, moreover, as from a specific type of ‘commoner’ family – was crucial to representations of this split. I am interested in the extraordinary level of press attention to this event, and, in particular, to the ways in which press stories work to establish a normative middle-classed identity, and with their use of notions of ‘nature’, ‘natural’ and ‘ordinary’ to ‘manage’ class. In considering these representations, I am not attempting to claim that they can definitively encapsulate the entirety of middle-class identity and selfrepresentation. They are produced by and in response to specific class fractions. I would, however, claim that their use of specific classed symbols indicates something interesting about contemporary class relations and class identities in England. As Bev Skeggs (2004: 117) has argued: Representation works with a logic of supplementarity, condensing many fears and anxieties within one classed symbol. It is the central mechanism for attributing value to categorizations. (Skeggs 2004) The press stories can be seen as an attempt to re-attribute value in response to a real or imagined threat to middle-class normality, to re-state its symbolic capital. Although representations of the aristocracy contain little of the bile, disgust and contempt present in representations of poor whites (Skeggs 1997; Haylett 2001; Lawler 2005), both groups are portrayed by a specific (and influential) middle-class fraction – journalists, social commentators, MPs – as the other to middle-classness. The analysis that follows is based on a close thematic reading of all the stories within British broadsheet newspapers, which referenced ‘Kate Middleton’ between April 2007 and August 2007 (193 in total).4 The newspapers in question were The Guardian, The Observer (sister paper of The Guardian), The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph. The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent and The Independent on Sunday are broadly ‘left-liberal’ papers, while The Times and The Daily Telegraph

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(and their Sunday versions) can be characterised as ‘centre-right’ in terms of editorial policy. Reportage was roughly equal across the titles, with the exception of The Independent, which has a policy of giving no special prominence to royal stories, though even this title carried some pieces, albeit largely (though not exclusively) satirical ones. Defences of the middle classes, however, which I discuss more fully next, were more likely to be carried by The Times, The Daily Telegraph and their Sundays. I analysed broadsheets because they are usually understood as providing ‘serious’ news and comment, and they are disproportionately read by people in occupations normally regarded as ‘middle class’5 (National Readership Survey 2007). Hence they provide a way (albeit an imperfect one) to consider how the middle classes talk to and about themselves. In April 2007, the British tabloid, The Sun broke the story of the breakup of the relationship between Prince William and Kate Middleton. The story of the split was repeated throughout the press, but early versions in the UK national broadsheet papers were low-key, and included quotes from ‘sources’ or ‘friends’, attributing the split variously to William’s army career, the strains of press intrusion, or William’s unwillingness to marry young. Very quickly, however, another story broke, and it is this story that is the focus of my attention here. In the subsequent story, it was claimed that the real reason for the split was the unsuitability of Kate Middleton’s bourgeois family. They were, it was suggested, simply too déclassé for one of their members to marry into the Royal Family (and no doubt particularly to marry an heir to the throne). Allegedly, William’s friends whispered ‘doors to manual’ when Kate was around – a reference to her mother, Carole Middleton’s, former career as an airline stewardess. Furthermore, Carole Middleton herself was said to have committed a number of social gaffes, including saying ‘Pleased to meet you’ instead of ‘How do you do?’ on meeting the Queen (Her Majesty assumes that everyone will be pleased to meet her); chewing gum at William’s passing out parade at the military academy, Sandhurst; saying ‘pardon?’, rather than ‘what?’; and referring to the lavatory as the ‘toilet’. She was, according to one ‘royal insider’ quoted in the Daily Mirror (and then re-quoted in all of the broadsheets) ‘pushy, rather twee and incredibly middle-class’. I think the gum chewing is a matter of record, although of course we have no way of knowing whether the other allegations are accurate. There might, indeed, be reason to be suspicious of the claims since they constitute Carole Middleton as an almost textbook case of non-U (i.e. non-upper class) language and manners as characterised in Alan

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Ross’s (1954) essay, ‘U and non-U: An Essay in Sociological Linguistics’ and popularised through its inclusion in Nancy Mitford’s 1956 book, Noblesse Oblige. What this later story seems to have done, however, is to generate a quasi-sociological gloss on the couple’s break-up, providing a springboard for wider reflections on class.6 The bulk of the press coverage took the form of comment and opinion pieces, and it is important to note that, overall, the tone of many (though not all) of these pieces was one that might be characterised as playful. Several stories were explicitly satirical, including a guide on ‘how not to be common’ (The Daily Telegraph) and a quiz to determine your level of poshness (The Independent). Others employed an ironic distancing. Some used an explicit discussion of class to bemoan the continuing salience of class in Britain. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that these moves can be understood as ways for journalists to suggest that they themselves are at some distance from those who care about such things, serious points emerge that tell us something about the self-understanding of the English middle classes. The representations considered here can be understood in terms of self-definition – not in terms of what the middle classes are, not even in terms of what they are not, but in terms of how they characterise themselves in the face of how another group might imagine them to be. As we will see, this leads to some interesting attempts both to resist a placing as ‘inferior’ and to assert or reassert middleclass ‘normality’.

‘Admirable’: Defending the bourgeoisie Throughout the press coverage, two principal and linked themes emerged: a defence of middle-classness, and a critique of an attention to class, in particular to classed markers such as manners and language use. The coverage itself was sometimes vague on who exactly were those ‘others’ who seemed to be attacking the Middleton family (and thus, it is suggested, attacking bourgeois values and existence). Most references were to aristocrats/the aristocracy/the upper classes, but they were also referred to as ‘the House of Windsor/Royalty’, ‘toffs’, or simply ‘snobs’. In contrast, almost every story explicitly referenced the Middleton family itself as middle class. So while ‘they’ may not be clearly or systematically defined, their alleged targets were clearly coded as middle class or bourgeois. Press coverage centred on making the Middletons textbook cases of (assumed) middle-class values: this is the positive foil to reportage of Carole Middleton’s apparently non-U behaviour. Again and again, they

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were characterised in terms of hard work, thrift, stable and ‘normal’ family life, the production of ‘good’ children. For example: Few commentators have given the Middletons credit for their solid English bourgeois qualities. They have made a lot of money entirely through their own efforts, running a successful mail-order company, and they appear to be a close and stable family. (Hamilton The Times, 17 April 2007) Yet this is hardly borne out by the evidence, since press coverage was filled with credit for the Middletons’ ‘bourgeois qualities’: If I had to choose a family for my daughter to marry into, it would be the Middletons, not the Windsors: self-made, unassuming, dignified, silent. (Miles The Times, 18 April 2007) All those commentators trying to pigeonhole Kate’s mother are saying far more about themselves, far more damningly, than anything they reveal about this admirable, entrepreneurial and really incredibly good-looking-for-her-age Berkshire mother [Carole Middleton]. (Gove The Times, 18 April 2007) What offence have they committed, except working hard, showing enterprise and rearing a brood of glossy, pony-limbed, polite children who do them credit? (Moir The Daily Telegraph, 18 April 2007) As well as this explicit iteration of the values of enterprise, hard work and family life, there were references to Michael and Carole Middleton’s ‘humble’ roots. Carole Middleton was frequently and approvingly written of as a ‘descendant of Durham miners’. What is interesting here is that Carole Middleton can be viewed with approval, not despite but because of her allegedly proletarian origins. Yet this is not to suggest that working-classness is itself understood as an admirable state. Rather, what makes her so admirable is her ‘escape’ from such origins. The fact that she has made such an escape is understood as being a measure of her hard work and determination – values which have come to be seen as synonymous with middle-class existence – as well as of her recognition of the value of middle-classness itself (that is, she could only escape to the middle class by understanding such an escape as a worthy enterprise).

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In this way, she is the embodiment of the worth of middle-classness: an ‘outsider’ who fought her way in, thus confirming the belief that fighting one’s way in is worthwhile. She is (or her precursors are) represented as accruing value, then, by showing sufficient ‘enterprise’ to have escaped.7 The narrative ‘reads time backwards’ (Ricoeur 1980), implicitly endowing her ancestors with middle-class dispositions even before becoming middle class. Yet Carole Middleton can be deemed more worthy of her wealth and social position because (it is suggested) she has not inherited them. In this way, an apparently self-made and ‘open’ middle class is contrasted with an aristocracy/royalty which relies on hereditary privilege and closes ranks to outsiders. This looks very like a moral distinction between the deserving and the undeserving rich. (A section of) the aristocracy is represented here as ‘excluding’ the (deserving) middle classes through classed shibboleths including knowing the right words to use and the right ways to behave. This section is represented in derogatory terms, characterised as ‘boozy half-wits’ (Moir The Daily Telegraph, 18 April 2007), as ‘throwbacks’ (suggesting a very un-modern category), and as ‘an unthinking clique that might be called yobbish if it were not so monied’ (Gerard The Daily Telegraph, 17 April 2007). The defence of middle-classness mounted here attempts to pathologise such attempts at exclusion. Yet ignorance and lack of taste are exactly the terms in which middle-class commentators have distinguished the middle class itself from working-class people (Skeggs 2004; Lawler 2005). As Savage argues: In some respects it appears that anyone can become part of the middle class given the right ‘perspective’ or ‘outlook’, yet the distribution of the relevant traits is in fact highly unequal, and thereby social inequality is reproduced. … [D]irect reference to class is effaced at the same time that class inequalities are more powerfully reproduced. (Savage 2000: 158) So, there is an apparent contradiction here between the claimed openness of the middle classes (since everyone can be self-made, anyone can be middle class, or so it is claimed) and the ways in which the middle classes retain their position vis-à-vis the working class through accumulating wealth (passed through the generations), paying relatively little tax and having access to various material and cultural assets – but also through arrogating to themselves ‘desirable’ dispositions and character traits. Hence working-class people are castigated, not primarily for being

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poor, but for being ignorant, immoral and out of control (Skeggs 1997, 2004; Haylett 2001). One way to resolve this contradiction would lie in the implicit claims that those who are middle class ‘naturally’ possess the appropriate characteristics, not only of hard work and thrift, but of good taste and good manners. Indeed, this invocation of ‘admirable’ character traits suffuses press coverage, through words such as ‘unassuming, dignified, silent’. Yet this is disrupted when these natural characteristics are implicitly or explicitly called into question – in other words, when the authority of the middle classes to define what counts as right or wrong in terms of taste, knowledge and characteristics, is (seen as being) challenged. This is one of the contradictions which is being managed through this press reportage. The next section considers how notions of nature and ordinariness are used to defuse the threat implicit in these stories.

‘Normal people’: Displacing class through ‘nature’ When I was at university and thinking of going into journalism, an older, well-meaning student advised me to add an ‘e’ to my name. ‘It will look a bit more refined on your byline,’ she said. A tutor who overheard was appalled. ‘Ugh, how bourgeois,’ he said. Normal people, of course, couldn’t give two hoots either way. (Carol Midgley The Times, 21 April 2007) The defence of middle-class existence discussed in the preceding section took place within the context of a series of variations on a theme that while class does matter to some people, it ought not to; and, furthermore, that to notice ‘class’ (in the sense of social distinctions) is to display a lack of ‘class’ in the sense of a set of personal characteristics.8 This leads to the interesting suggestion that it is not ‘classy’ to notice class9 and, further, that an attention to issues of ‘etiquette’ (in Bourdieu’s terms, ‘the right ways of being and doing’) is inauthentic, as in Jane Shilling’s comment that ‘Natural behaviour is more authentic than the mannerist contortions of etiquette’ (Shilling The Times, 20 April 2007). If it is not ‘classy’ to notice class, then what is it? One way in which the alleged attacks on the Middletons were devalued was through a characterisation of a concern with manners and etiquette, not as aristocratic (despite coming, allegedly, from members of the aristocracy), but as bourgeois. Here ‘bourgeois’ shifts its meaning to reference an overconcern with ‘correct behaviour’. Michael Gove, for example, writing in The Times, reminisces about an editor on the Tatler, trying to disguise

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her middle-class, suburban (‘Metro-land’) origins by using the correct, ‘U’ words and expressions, only to find that her (presumably upper class) co-workers undermined her by reverting to non-U phrases. Characterising her behaviour as ‘pretentious’, Gove continues: What she failed most of all to grasp, however, and what so many commentators in the wake of the Great Kate Break-Up have failed to grasp, is that those with the most class mind least. It is, in short, rather vulgar to notice someone’s class background, let alone to refer to it or to judge someone on that basis. … To be too decorous or euphemistic [is] to be that fretful, frightful thing, a bourgeois, and therefore of less distinction than a couldn’t-give-a-toss, call-a-spade-a-spade aristo. (Gove The Times, 18 April 2007) So, the ‘aristocratic’ attacks on a bourgeois woman come from people who reveal themselves to be more bourgeois than she herself is. ‘Bourgeois’ here is cast adrift from any notion of social division or social privilege to indicate an over-concern with social indicators. This usage of the term ‘bourgeois’ is somewhat different to its use through other stories, where it is used interchangeably with ‘middle class’, usually to confer value. Here, it references an anxious concern to ‘get it right’. Crucially, it shows the effort of learning which, as I noted earlier, ought to be disavowed in favour of suggestions of innate knowledge. This use of ‘bourgeois’ is similar to Bourdieu’s analysis of the petit-bourgeois habitus: In a whole host of markets … the cultural productions of the petitbourgeois habitus are subtly discredited because they recall their acquisition in matters in which, more than anywhere else, the important thing is to know without ever having learnt. (Bourdieu 1986a: 330) The aristocrats represented here become bourgeois – or even petit bourgeois – through their concern with social nuance. In contrast, the ‘real’ bourgeoisie is ‘natural’, ordinary and unconcerned with social nuance, having instead an innate and essential relationship with good taste. What is being claimed here is that the middle classes embody both the conventional elements of thrift and accumulation (in contrast to their assumed lack in the aristocracy) and the easy familiarity with manners and taste (uncontaminated by learning) claimed by the aristocracy (Bourdieu 1986a).

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To press the point home, the Royal Family10 (or at least ‘senior royals’) are represented as unconcerned with social distinction, often in interesting, if not quite believable, ways: I don’t believe for one moment that the senior royals, and the Queen in particular, would look down their noses at good people such as Michael and Carole Middleton. (Moir The Daily Telegraph, 18 April 2007) [T]he Queen is far too kind and wouldn’t have given a stuff about how Mrs Middleton introduced herself. She and the royal family don’t know anything about social nuance and all the things we run around with at the lower levels. (Cooper The Sunday Times, 22 April 2007) They’re the most un-snobbish of anyone in the country, the Royals. (Mary Killen (author of The Spectator’s etiquette column) quoted in Harris The Guardian, 17 April 2007) So, while William’s friends and courtiers might be characterised as odious, the Royal Family itself – or at least ‘senior royals’ – are exempt from what becomes characterised as ‘snobbishness’ and ‘social pretension’ – not because they themselves are bourgeois (although there are one or two attempts to portray the Queen as an elderly middle-class housewife), but because they are properly classy and it is not ‘done’ – it is not classy – to notice class. To notice class is a breach of the etiquette that (in part) instantiates class. This leads to the awkward contradiction in which the really classy are not classed at all. Yet this cannot be maintained: The irony is that the Royal Family – which has met more non-U folk than any clan in Britain – has a pretty good record on class. … The Windsors have an instinctive understanding that they must connect with the people and share their values. […] I find it hard to believe [the Queen] would turn against anyone for committing the supposed calumny of saying ‘pleased to meet you’. If Carole Middleton … did employ such a greeting, the Queen would surely have taken it as it was meant: a friendly courtesy from one not sufficiently privileged to have enjoyed an expensive education. (Gerard The Daily Telegraph, 17 April 2007)

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Note that Jasper Gerard does not claim that it does not matter what kind of greeting Carole Middleton deployed. He is not claiming that such classed shibboleths do not exist: merely that the well bred are prepared to overlook the ‘wrong’ usage from their social inferiors. So, there is a move here from social nuance not mattering to a suggestion that the really classy won’t mind about classed ‘mistakes’. This suggestion, however, can only work if class and social nuance do matter after all, and if classed mistakes are possible. To an extent, the stories can be read as an attempt to strip value (Skeggs, 2004) from the aristocracy. A fictive ‘we’ (the middle class) are constituted as ordinary and act ‘naturally’: ‘they’ (the aristocracy) are ‘snobbish’ and work on the basis of artificial, socially made distinctions. As an added twist, the Royal Family can be incorporated into this fictive ‘we’ since they too, it is claimed, operate without regard for artificial distinctions. This is also apparent in the attribution of ‘class’ to Kate Middleton: As for Kate herself, she obviously has tremendous poise, natural beauty and a loving family. Having been through the fire of media pressure she has retained her cool in a way that proves she is a class act. (Gove The Times, 18 April 2007) And surely [Prince William] could silence these vicious royal backroom boys who reach for their phones and their media contacts, keen to put an appropriately haughty gloss upon this very ordinary story. She said toilet! She said pardon! She wore a cheap suit! While Kate reaches for a silent smile and her tennis racket. Now which is more classy? (Miles The Times, 18 April 2007) So Kate Middleton, while not aristocratic (that is the point), is constituted as more aristocratic than the ‘real’ aristocracy. Her classiness is characterised as a ‘natural’ attribute, her ‘aristocracy’ innate.

Culture becoming natural To recap, then, nature (together with ordinariness or normality) is used within these stories in two ways: first, to suggest that those who are truly ‘upper class’ act naturally and hence take no notice of status distinctions; and secondly, to suggest that true classiness is itself natural and is not – and cannot be – learned.

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‘Class’ here is used to refer to a property of the person, something natural and embodied: a personal characteristic (as in ‘classiness’). But class in the more conventional – we might say sociological – sense is also invoked. This is class as an artificial system, a system which, as Sayer (2002) observes, everyone agrees is socially rather than naturally produced: a system which relies on artificial (i.e. ‘made’) social distinctions. So two meanings of class are circulating here as, I’d argue, they circulate more widely. It might be tempting to argue that the second meaning is ‘really’ about class, while the first is not (that is, to impose a sociological definition on lay actors’ understandings), but I think this would be to miss the point about the ways in which the two meanings slide into each other. That is, when claims to middle-class normality and universality are at stake, class as a system of social differentiation and social distinction can be eclipsed by a notion of class as a natural property of the person. I would suggest that this attribution of class as a natural category is especially marked in the case of women. Hence, it is no accident that the focus here is on Kate Middleton’s mother and not her father (who hardly gets a mention). Historically, women played a specific role in the emergent bourgeoisie (Gunn 2005): responsible for overseeing the acculturation of the next generation, they were also understood as embodying the cultural capital of the household. As Simon Gunn argues, by the second half of the nineteenth century, ‘[w]omen, especially married women, represented embodied cultural capital; they were arbiter and proof of distinction (or of its vulgar other)’ (Gunn 2005: 55). Women, then, had to incorporate the proof of ‘class’ within their persons. The persistence of this gendered dynamic into the present time can be seen in the representations under discussion here, but also (in its reversed form) in the vilification of poor white women who are seen to embody distinction’s ‘vulgar other’ (Skeggs 2004; Lawler 2005; Tyler 2008). This is intensified by mythic stories of social mobility (marrying the prince!) found in contemporary fairy stories such as is represented in the film Pretty Woman, in which the woman’s ‘true’ classiness is seen by her male social superior and allowed to emerge through the ‘mask’ of her diminished class status. Again, women are the bearers of a class that is made inherent, a part of the self, in ways that appear to apply less intensively to men (see Johnson and Lawler 2005). What this suggests is that ‘class’ – for everyone but perhaps especially for women – can be naturalised, since it can be held to rely on personal characteristics which are ‘naturally’ acquired. The existence of these two understandings of class – as a property of the person and as an artificial

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system – provides a way to see why people are not necessarily embarrassed and evasive when it comes to class, as Andrew Sayer (2002) claims they are. Sayer argues that class is recognised as a morally unjust system and that this recognition generates an unease. But I think the potential of class always to be naturalised is a reason why we find that people are frequently able to talk about class without any embarrassment or evasion – because what they seem to be talking about are natural, personal properties, rather than artificial (and unjust) social categorisations. Yet in these stories, a recognition is forced that characteristics exhibited even by the solidly middle class (sufficiently privileged to mix with the Royal Family!) can be subject to hostile scrutiny. Hence the takenfor-granted ‘nature’ of bourgeois culture is challenged. A recognition of different ways of talking, acting and being (importantly, excepting those of the working classes) forces an acknowledgment that a naturalised ‘culture’ may, after all, have been learned.

Concluding remarks If these stories indicate a class struggle, it is a struggle about normative value: about what is to count as good, as well as who gets the goods (Sayer 2002, 2005). It hinges, in other words, on recognition. It is about who has the power to name certain tastes dispositions and manners as the ‘right’ ones. The whole language of U and non-U stands as a recognition of this symbolic economy, whether it is being deployed to ridicule the use of the word ‘toilet’, or, as in these representations, to condemn those who notice who does and who does not use the word ‘toilet’. But this very language – and this recognition that certain things are done, said and noticed and certain things are not – undermine the notion that such tastes and dispositions and knowledges are universal – a claim to universalism which, as Bourdieu has argued, underwrites bourgeois existence. Notions of ‘nature’ and of ‘ordinariness’, then, while used to critique the use of classed judgements or to cast them as ‘snobbish’, simultaneously reinstate class, since they are used as critiques of people and practices who/which bring to light and make explicit the social conditions through which a classed habitus is produced. In these stories, to reveal the work it takes to acquire ‘classiness’ is immediately to show that one lacks ‘classiness’. Yet these are precisely the terms on which Carole Middleton – descendant of Durham coal miners – could be condemned, so press coverage here has to manage multiple contradictions and ultimately journalists’ invocation of nature is bound to fail.

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It may be that the concerns expressed within this press coverage are specifically English obsessions: certainly, more comparative work is needed before any wider claims could be made. However, my aim in this chapter has been, not to generalise from the substance of the accounts, but to highlight the relationality and dynamism of class itself. An important dynamic of class in the English context – but no doubt also in others – lies in the successful achievement, through historical struggle, of recognition for middle-class values and modes of existence. This becomes most apparent when claims for recognition have to be reasserted in the face of a perceived challenge. In the historical struggle that is the emergence of the middle classes, these (middle) classes have succeeded in achieving recognition and in myriad ways are the ‘privileged class’. Through highlighting some of the ways in which this privileged class makes claims for recognition, I hope to have challenged its claims to a hold on all that is normal, natural and desirable, precisely through showing that the recognition it claims for itself is not an effect of its ‘natural’ characteristics, but of social and cultural modes of distinction manifest in classification struggles.

Notes 1. The couple subsequently resumed their relationship, and married in April 2011, though that does not affect my analysis of the initial split. 2. This is not to argue that anyone could be ‘classless’, not least because people are classed by social relations, as well as by other people. It is, rather, to highlight the ways in which no class could be seen as a unitary actor. 3. It is worth noting that, while recent representations of white working-class people in the British press tend to stress their (problematic) whiteness and to ‘hyper-whiten’ them (see Haylett 2001; Lawler 2005), ‘race’ is not apparent in any of the discussions analysed here. 4. Articles were accessed from LexisNexis. There were 563 stories on ‘Kate Middleton’ between April 2004 and August 2007 (193 since the split in April 2007 and 93 in April alone); 39 stories since the split and 84 in total explicitly contained the word ‘class’. Almost all others implicitly referenced ‘class’. 5. Between 86 per cent and 91 per cent of the readership of these titles is in ‘professional or managerial’ occupations (ABC1) (NRS 2007). 6. The press stories were often internally confused and repetitive. None of the parties involved being available for comment, journalists had to rely on unattributed quotes from royal ‘insiders’, or on comment from experts on etiquette and/or on the upper classes. 7. Hate figures like the ‘chav’ by contrast, do not try to escape their milieu and thus are assumed to confirm their own lack of worth since they do not recognise that they ought to be escaping it. 8. The OED defines class in its informal meaning as ‘an impressive stylishness in appearance or behaviour’. Concise OED 10th edition (2002).

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9. It is worth noting that such a critique of an attention to class was entirely absent from earlier representations I analysed, the focus of which was working-class women (see Lawler 2002). 10. I became aware, during the writing of this chapter, of the importance of distinguishing between aristocracy and royalty. However, there is not space here to explore these differences and, in any case, within these stories, both groups largely function in similar ways, as a negative foil to the bourgeoisie. This quotation is from a rare story in which they do not.

4 Biological Citizenship in Aotearoa/ New Zealand Ruth P. Fitzgerald

Aotearoa/New Zealand1 is a country in which equality in access to the political, civil and social rights of citizenship are formed from the recognition of difference. The contemporary governance of this difference is a partnership between the indigenous people and the incoming colonisers that is referenced back to the Treaty of Waitangi – a founding expression of the special relationship between Ma¯ori (tangata whenua – the people of the land) and Pa¯keha¯ (tangata tiriti – the people of the treaty). Its contemporary prominence results from the continued and effective political protest by Ma¯ori at the dishonouring of the treaty by successive governments, the creation of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975 by the state to investigate claims of Treaty infringements since 1840 and the slow incorporation into New Zealand parliamentary legislation of Treaty references since 1986. The document remains controversial, however, and the object of much scholarship and debate with the result that citizenship is an unusually weak thread in the national identity of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Citizenship’s lack of relevance to national identity and belonging has been studied empirically by Louise Humpage (2008) who drew on focus groups with a variety of New Zealand citizens in an effort to discover the meaning of citizenship for them. Humpage argued that her participants exhibited a far stronger sense of belonging and shared nationhood through reference to a shared sense of place. She notes the reasons for this as historical – for example, the bitterly contested meaning of the Treaty for Ma¯ori. However, even the Pa¯keha¯ population derive little sense of belonging to the nation state through citizenship for, as Humpage observes, New Zealand citizenship emerged only in the 1940s from under the wing of British citizenship which many relinquished regretfully. Even so, it is to citizenship that I now turn to discuss the 74

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entanglements of various groups of New Zealanders in the lived experiences of geneticised identities. My particular focus will be biological citizenship and the various forms of recognition, belonging and obligation that it entails. Threaded through this discussion, I will also present an alternative and indigenous term for belonging, shared rights and identity – tu ¯ rangawaewae – which provides a more local explanation of the various moral, medicalised and expert agencies which geneticised identities produce in Aotearoa/New Zealand. My discussions are based on empirical research in Aotearoa conducted over the last seven years by myself, my graduate students and other New Zealand-based colleagues. Their approach has been ethnographic involving long-term observation, varying degrees of participation and extended in-depth interviewing. Such a qualitative analysis cannot claim to represent the entire population of Aotearoa/New Zealand. However, this chapter can serve as an introduction to the astonishing variety and forms of the enactment of ‘biological’ citizenship that coexist in a country of only four million people located on the periphery of the world system, but plunged into the globalised realm of geneticised medicine.

Geneticised recognition and belonging: Explaining biological citizenship and tu ¯ rangawaewae I begin with some background definitions. Biological citizenship has been increasingly used to describe the active process of working out political rights and moral claims through shared belonging to a specific and highly biologised identity (Petryna 2002; Rose 2007). In this manner, citizens form new collectivities organised not around shared location, lines of kinship or government-mandated moral worthiness, but rather on some shared biological attribute (such as exposure to radiation, HIV-positive status, a cancer diagnosis or a common dependency upon a specific drug etc.). Nickolas Rose (2007) notes that such a process of claiming citizenship rights works from the ground up rather than the top down citizenship projects of past eras in which the state advanced the development of groups of certain ‘desirable’ citizens. The experience of such connection creates new ways for biological citizens to relate to themselves often through a biologically soaked language of predispositions, tendencies and biochemical pathways, which cloaks aspirations for health or release from experiences of suffering. Such citizens are expressly required to be active members of the scientific knowledge community or, as Rose frames it, they become ‘responsibilised’. This occurs in ways quite contrary to public health education of previous decades.

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Newly biologised patients, according to Rose, must nowadays shop expertly for the best information to aid their recovery direct from the pharmaceutical company websites and, in the process, create new networks of knowledge and expertise which changes the social experience of biomedicine. Furthermore, Petryna’s earlier (2002) account of biological citizenship highlights the manner in which such citizens consciously mobilise their suffering into public view in order to strengthen their claims for inclusion in the state. Deborah Heath et al. (2007) have used the term genetic citizenship to note a similar process. Tu¯rangawaewae is another term, however, which is relevant to this discussion – most particularly in a New Zealand context. From the Ma¯ori language it translates as ‘a place for feet to stand’ (Mead 1997: 266). It is a term that is used not only by Ma¯ori, but increasingly by Pa¯keha¯ too when it is used to emphasise a particular moral standpoint and physical location which they consider sums up the character of their lives. For Ma¯ori, tu¯rangawaewae is defined through geographical landmarks but also through shared recognition and experience of both the sacred and social worlds expressed through kinship, history and political leadership. The term thus links an individual or group to a location. However, it means more than the English language equivalent of a sense of place (Smith 2004), because for those with the appropriate whakapapa (genealogy), tu¯rangawaewae can be expressed in political terms as a person’s birthright (Mead 1997). The tu ¯ rangawaewae is the one space on earth where a person may stand in a site redolent with their history looking backwards to past generations and forward to future generations and know that one’s right to be in this location can never be challenged. The term combines notions of belonging, identity, entitlement, expertise and worthiness expressed via a relationship to the material world and those elements of the sacred which coexist with the material world. Smith (2004: 13) defines the political concepts of this right succinctly as ‘the right to speak concerning that place and be judged an authority’. Along with this right then come obligations, and the engagement with these obligations and knowledge of them forms part of the interconnecting social, material and sacred threads of Ma¯ori identity (Mead 2003: 43). The term conveys some of the notion of responsibilisation in Rose’s arguments for retaining tu ¯ rangawaewae, which requires that a person must keep the home fires burning in order to retain those ties of ancestral knowledge that underwrite the claim to authority. While the term biological citizenship suggests a globalising effect from geneticised identities and subsequent social action, the following examples suggest that citizens in New Zealand can ‘belong’ to many different

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types of biological citizenry. For example, the biologised identity of race is significant in discussions of citizenship in New Zealand. For Ma¯oridom’s persistent fight from 1840 to have the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi upheld speaks of a bottom up approach to biologised citizenship beginning a century earlier than Rose imagines. Tu ¯ rangawaewae is thus in part my attempt to broaden out the narrow and specific worldview of one piece of social science terminology with another narrow and specific worldview, but a view that comes from the Other of social science theorising – the periphery, a bicultural knowledge tradition, an indigenous philosophy.

Creating t¯urangawaewae through biological citizenship NZORD (New Zealand Organisation for Rare Disorders) is a group that exemplifies the process of biological citizenship. It is an activist group that works for the benefit of families with extremely rare medical disorders often of a genetic nature, and also for their clinicians and the wider research community. Generally, the families involved suffer from a condition so rare that they may be one of only two or three affected families in the entire country. The political genius of NZORD has been their coalition into an umbrella organisation, in doing so they represent to politicians and government departments an organised voting base of 5–10 per cent of the New Zealand population. Had the members chosen to remain as isolated families participating in a globalised US- or UK-based rare diagnosis group, then the modified population-based funding model on which New Zealand’s health care operates would disadvantage individual families with such rare conditions. Thus it is only through its coalition that the group can gain political leverage to access the social citizenship rights of health care afforded to others without such catastrophic illnesses. With a complex website, a well-functioning organisational structure, corporate donations, excellent networking and the industrious pursuit of appropriate charity and government funding, NZORD is in a position to ably fulfil its aims of service and in doing so unites diverse families in a variety of economic circumstances through the shared experience of the extreme suffering of their children (Fitzgerald 2008) and the search for its relief. A significant proportion of NZORD activism directs biomedical and scientific interest to the many orphan illnesses2 of their membership resulting in a complex relationship with biomedicine. For example, the public webpage of NZORD creates an orthodox modernist view of biomedicine as saviour; however, group member’s long-term exposure

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to medical care creates specific and intimate knowledges of one’s condition referred to as ‘expert patienthood’ (Petersen 2006). In clinical situations, this expertise demands a medical presence that is ‘biddable’ and limited to the provision of technical services as requested by the families. However, NZORD’s persistent hope of medical cures for their children’s conditions has the effect of aligning them publicly with a view of disability which focuses strongly on medical models of disability (in opposition to Disability3 support groups). This is despite many of the parents recognising that they had practised the ‘social’ model of disability for years until the continued deterioration of their child’s health made them understand their child as having ‘a diagnosis rather than a disability’. This alignment with modernist medicine did not stop many families from working to advance local council and national government’s support for the disabled, such as wheelchair access, or from encouraging their children to participate as spokespeople for disability issues. The belief in a medical cure for their children was what placed them at odds with the Disability activist groups. For example, NZORD succeeded in their political efforts to increase New Zealander’s uptake and access to a widening variety of genetic testing technologies, and foetal and embryonic selection tools such as amniocentesis and PreImplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD). For the Disability community such a political programme was an attempt to remove the disabled from society and the differing views were reflected in oppositional submissions to Parliament on changes to relevant legislations (DPA 2003, NZORD 2003), in newspaper interviews, or face to face in public meetings as invited speakers on the topic of genetic testing and its implications. PGD is now available in Aotearoa, although the reasons for engaging in the procedures are monitored, but the presence of marked genetic difference in the embryo is an acceptable reason for rejecting it for implantation. Part of the forcefulness with which NZORD was able to mobilise its position in favour of increased access to PGD was its explicit reference to direct experiences of human suffering within the children of its family members – using a specific expression of difference to highlight their plight. In contrast, the Disability community’s mobilisation of the experience of difference did not focus on its pathos but rather on their abilities as individual citizens. The oppositional moral position which NZORD created around the topic of genetic testing through their successful lobbying was all the more interesting because in subsequent interviews with its members, the group position was found to obscure the sentiments of individual families within NZORD (Fitzgerald 2009). There were quite significant

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variations in how people imagined what their own uptake of such testing procedures might be. These varied from complete agreement to a commitment to never use them. The result was a complicated and often internally contradictory understanding of disability within the group in private that was never expressed in public (Forman 2004; Norrish 2005). In justifying their position, group members noted how the ‘extreme’ members of disability groups rarely mentioned the caregiving of their family in a discussion of their support, nor that folk suffering with mental health disorders were often very much in favour of medical relief of symptoms and the removal of their impairment, that spokespeople of Disability activist groups were the more ‘well’ of the ‘disabled’ and finally that such people tended to regard their disability as an intrinsic part of their identity. With colleagues, I am now conducting research with selected New Zealand-based Disability groups and families living with disabilities. The aim is to gather the array of perspectives on genetic testing held by members of these groups; however, the depth of feelings which the public debate around these issues raise is already visible and significant. For example, an in-depth case study based on an honours dissertation by Liz Martin (2007) provides an insight into the pleasures of parenting for a family who have a child with Rett Syndrome – a condition often cited in abstract scenarios as being of such severity that some people would argue it is impossibly cruel to allow a child to live with it. They provide an articulate account of the pro-disability line of argument against genetic testing testifying to the joys their daughter brings to the family, the value of her life, and its particular value to her as an individual, while also noting the importance in their minds of committing to caring for others and the unexpected joys that genetic differences may bring. In terms of tu¯rangawaewae, NZORD has reached the political space where it is judged an authority on the topic that is in its bones, its family, and its landscape of hopes for cures – but there are many models and forms of activism to reach it. The Disability community’s lack of success in opposing them suggests hierarchies of moral authority and belief within the diverse conceptual places that serve to call forth one’s tu¯rangawaewae and the intensely politicised nature of its expression.

Seeking t¯urangawaewae through biological citizenship The biologising of identity that marks entry into biological citizenship does not always translate into the authority to claim the space to speak

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on its behalf. The two groups to which I now turn have struggled to find a public voice in which their views on geneticised identity can be expressed. These are a group of women living with high familial and personal risk associated with BRCA1 and BRCA24 mutations in Southern New Zealand and the professional scientists called cytogeneticists who interpret genetic profiles and in doing so assist the state to ‘make up’ geneticised biological citizens. Living with BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations and ‘going-to-have-cancerness’ State governments continue in the genomic age to ‘make up’ citizens through educational projects aimed at creating new ways for citizens to view their own identities and act in responsible ways to promote the state’s interests. Thus, while biological citizenship can present opportunities for emancipation and the promotion of individual rights via group cohesion, at another level it serves to individuate citizens into the categories of worthy and unworthy through their own responses to this need for accountability in their lifestyles. In New Zealand, government providers of genetic counselling services provide such a framework. Access to these services is rationed according to strict criteria of likelihood of genetic difference. For example, those suspected of holding the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes must have strong family histories of similar cancers before entering the waiting list for genetic testing and counselling. Crump et al.’s three year study of six family members from five Southern New Zealand families who were living with either high personal or familial risk of the inherited BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes are just such a group who were in receipt of such services (Crump et al. 2010). The women in this study were interviewed in depth about their experiences on two occasions separated by an interval of three years. For more than a decade now, the genes described as BRCA1 and BRCA2 have been known to produce a higher than average risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer in both women and men. While the outcome for each individual carrying the BRCA1 or BRCA2 variation is not certain, it is known that around 5–10 per cent of breast cancers develop from these genes and that breast cancer is (in New Zealand) the most commonly occurring female cancer. Thus the availability of a test for the gene’s presence created a flurry of referrals by general practitioners of patients with ‘suspicious’ family histories of cancer. Only one of the six women in Crump’s study had cancer at the beginning of the project, although a second had developed cancer by the study’s close. The rest form the newly created biological citizenship category of the

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‘at risk well’ and the study set out to investigate what it was like to live with this high-risk identity. Although recommended for testing and counselling by their GPs to ‘put their minds at rest’, over the three years of the study, these women described their situation of living with high familial and/or personal risk of breast5 and ovarian cancer in increasingly anxious and fatalistic terms as one of ‘going-to-have-cancerness’. We could understand the women as saturating themselves in the biologised references that Rose (2006) notes is typical of biological citizenship. However, their sources for these references were less from medicine and more from their own studies of other family members who had a cancer diagnosis. Women recounted paying minute comparative attention to their own and their affected relative’s life cycle such as the onset of menopause, breastfeeding and ‘stress’ levels and physical characteristics such as the shape of their breasts. The women then used these measures to judge their own genetic risk and the presence or otherwise of the gene within their own bodies. In another sense, however, the women became deeply medicalised for while initially they spoke of preferring oophorectomy to mastectomy as a preventative strategy, by the time they had lived for three years with their risk status, they had moved towards considering bilateral mastectomies6 as a self-care option. All of them reported a continuing search for more information on their risk status through the Internet and local libraries and newspapers, which reflects Rose’s (2006) suggestion that biological citizenship ‘responsibilises’ people into selfeducation of their circumstances. However, their resultant understandings of screening, risk and prophylaxis differed markedly from standard biomedical accounts. Rather than creating new synergies of research groups involving cutting-edge biomedical science and activist patients, these women adopted peculiarly passive engagements with biomedicine despite their deep medicalisation. For example, the women tended to ‘layer’ a variety of screening procedures such as mammography, breast self-exam, and ultrasonography together into what they viewed (erroneously from a biomedical perspective) as a cumulative ‘protective’ benefit against developing cancer. Co-constituent of this was the fact that they also reported being told inappropriate and incorrect information about basic genetic science by their GPs. Because the majority did not ‘have’ cancer, they were ineligible to join the local Cancer Society (an NGO providing material, social and spiritual support for those living with cancer). Neither were they eligible to join various small patient-organised support groups for people living with a cancer diagnosis, again because they had no diagnosis. Most of

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them, because of their age, were not entitled to the annual mammograms (which the government offers to women from the ages of 45 to 69). Such services are restricted at the lower age because the density of women’s breasts when they are premenopausal renders the screening procedure diagnostically useless. Finally, although anxious, they were not physically unwell, meaning that they had no reason to make an appointment for their doctor’s surgery. The opportunity to join any self-identified group for those with inherited predispositions was also outside of their reach, for it would immediately plunge their relatives into dilemmas of unwanted and unasked for self-knowledge – a situation with which the women were all too familiar. Thus their opportunities for support were minimal. The new relationship with themselves which Rose (2007) describes as part of the experience of biological citizenship – one ushered in through ‘voluntarily’ participating in genetic testing – is expressed through these women’s narratives as a sense of biographical disruption (Bury 1982). Abandoned (all except one) by the medical system that recommended they be tested in order to ‘relieve any anxiety’ in the first place, the women increasingly medicalised their lives and over the years, moved to higher and higher levels of invasive prophylaxis unaware of the biomedical literature which simultaneously has been calculating a confusing but generally downwards trend in their lifetime risk of developing cancer (Pharoah et al. 1997; Press et al. 2005). Instead of an active partnership in care, in which genetic responsibilisation forges new links and networks for self-help, the women search actively but translate this agency into the passivity of talisman-like accretion of additional screening procedures and prophylactic surgery to avert their ‘fate’ in a personally isolated world in which bilateral mastectomies for a healthy woman becomes an increasingly ‘rational’ solution to geneticised anxiety. Cytogeneticists: the moral lives of middlemen (and women) The category of professional biological scientists may not be quite so easily understood as a group with geneticised identities, although they participate in the new networks of scientific democracy and expressions of citizenship that health activism can produce. Heath et al. (2007), for instance, in their US examples, cite genetics laboratories as the field in which activism and funding allocations collide. As such, laboratories form one node in an emerging and public ethic of care that creates associations and links between activists, scientists and funders mediated via Internet discussion forums and databases.

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Within New Zealand society, biological scientists operate within different funding arrangements such that direct pressure on legislators does not increase or ‘reallocate’ scientific research funding. Aotearoa/New Zealand is also a remotely located point of immersion into globalised genetic medicine and with only four million people its population does not support the exposure to wide genetic variation that larger capital cities of the world may offer. Even so, cytogeneticists are an important group of scientists who both labour to create geneticised identities for others and yet are themselves quite highly geneticised. These folk are trained in a variety of areas of expertise, one of which is the culturing of embryonic tissue (obtained from amniocenteses and other tests) to a quantity sufficient for the karyotype of the foetus to be ‘read’ and interpreted for signs of normal and unusual genetic difference. The spillover of their professional geneticised knowledge and language into their everyday lives is frequent, such that they may regularly pass the time of day during tea and lunch breaks ‘spotting chromosomals’ from among their surrounding café patrons, or are called upon to counsel other family members about aspects of genetic difference or walk a tightrope of anxiety around amniocentesis for themselves because of their hyper specialised knowledge of genetic risks. While New Zealand-based cytogeneticists are active researchers and contribute to international conferences and journals, their work is also an embedded part of the biological science platform that sustains contemporary hospital diagnosis and treatment. As such, they form a part of the expanding group of practising scientists who are also health-care workers and whose hubs of active biological science are essential components in the contemporary practice of biomedicine. Working in shifts like other hospital workers, the metronome like quality of the industrial time of their rostered days on and off duty while they culture the foetal material collides with the rhythmic biological time of women’s gestational cycles as the foetus itself continues to grow in its uterine environment. This creates complicated experiences of morally conflicted temporality for the scientists, as the 18–20 days required by them to culture foetal cells and ‘read’ the resulting karyotype sits very close to the limit for New Zealand women to access surgical abortions up until 20 weeks of gestation. Later abortions may be authorised but are far more difficult to arrange and a further complication is that facilities for the termination of a pregnancy in the second trimester are only available in the two largest cities in New Zealand, which are both in the North Island (Report of the Abortion Supervisory Committee 2008).

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In these circumstances, the workers juggled three aspects of care in order to provide a professionally desirable and ethically scrupulous service. These were the meticulous attention to perfect scientific technique along with the practice of the utmost professionalism in a distractionfree environment, in addition to individualised and tiny ‘magical’ rituals to ensure a timely success for the culturing of the foetal cell samples, while attempting to retain empathy for their patients whom they never met but whose progression through their pregnancy created the moral pressure of timeliness within their work. The simultaneous resolution of all of these processes marked the practice of what Susanna Finlay et al. (2004) have termed ‘distanced care’ for these workers. This was not at all the same process as the ‘ethics of care’ described by Heath et al. (2007) for the genetics laboratories in the US. Instead, it was a more intimate ethical professional practice of ‘how I would like to be treated myself’, rather than any outward directed pressure to change or inform government policy on testing. In 2005, Finlay went on to complete a national study of all five cytogenetics laboratories to ascertain their views of the ethical implications of their work – in a job that one worker described as ‘99 per cent good and 1 per cent sheer terror’ for the personal responsibility which it entailed. In every venue, workers expressed a troubled concern for the consequences of their work once they passed results across to be interpreted by others. The poor quality of general practitioners’ knowledge of genetics was discussed in the previous section and indicates that the scientists’ qualms were well founded. In all cases, however, the cytogeneticists adhered to their self-described role of middle men (and women) – concerned that ambiguous results were being interpreted incorrectly or that women acted to terminate pregnancies for what appeared to the scientists to be trivial examples of ordinary genetic variation, while refusing to make public comment in any ongoing public debates around the significance of genetic testing. They deferred instead to public ‘experts’ on geneticised identity and genetic testing – professional bioethicists – and restricted their public input solely into correcting errors of facts as published in the press or as imagined in bioethical scenarios used in public debate. To an outside observer, these scientists might be perceived to have failed to recognise themselves as moral agents within the processes that they co-created. Finlay et al. (2004), however, suggest their moral agency became redirected into professional practice. For example, they fell upon the well-worn phrase ‘the woman’s right to choose’ as a protective mantra for the moral ambiguities of the consequences to which their work was put. They chose

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to work extra hours to track down an obscure diagnosis rather than comment publicly on what many perceived to be a less than perfect command of genetic language by practitioners advising women on termination of pregnancy decisions, thus protecting their moral identity through the imposition of distance between themselves and the wider social debates. To extend the analogy with tu¯rangawaewae further, the cytogeneticists can be understood as folk who have failed to tend the fires on the ancestral lands of their moral imaginations – instead by deliberately leaving them to turn to ash, they lose the right of residence and occupation (ahi kaa) (Evison 1993: 8) and so can no longer speak on this topic nor expect to be heard.

Retaining t¯urangawaewae Of all the segments of New Zealand society, it is only within Ma¯oridom that citizens of Aotearoa/New Zealand hold uncontested rights to tu¯rangawaewae via reference to their specific status as ta¯ngata whenua, and as original partners to the Treaty of Waitangi. However, this status has not always facilitated the expression of their citizenship rights particularly within the framework of genetic testing and geneticised identities. New Zealand’s recent history has included a powerful and complex political process of consultation and deliberation over the national uses of genetics and many Ma¯ori have contributed to these debates as wha¯nau-7, iwi-, hapu ¯ - or urban marae-based groups, via reference to a Pan-Ma¯ori cultural affiliation or through their individually held positions as scientists, prominent social commentators, politicians or as expert witnesses. Some of these groups have conformed to Rose’s (2006) notion of biologically based activist groups who have organised collectively around specific genetic-based health concerns such as the Kimihaurora Health Centre. A much broader grouping of Ma¯ori, however, have organised themselves along the lines of opposition to the increased use of genetic testing and genetic research (particularly transgenic creations). For example, Cheryl Smith and Paul Reynolds (2000: 3) cite the following view in their work entitled Ma¯ori Genes and Genetics: What Ma¯ori should know about the new biotechnology: One of the loudest arguments against genetics and biotechnology is coming from our Kaumatua (elders) who are saying very clearly that no one should corrupt or interfere with whakapapa (genealogy). The sanctity and respect for whakapapa is to be maintained. Both mauri (life principle) and wairua (spirit) of living things are sacred.

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The responsibility falls on us to protect the legacy of our future generations and this includes the guardianship (kaitiakitanga) of whakapapa. In taking up such stands, many Ma¯ori have placed themselves in direct opposition to expert lobbying groups such as NZORD and powerful national corporations with vested interests in biotechnology in general such as the Federated Farmers Union, Fonterra (representing dairy interests) and some practising biological scientists in private and governmentaffiliated agricultural research centres. As Reynolds (2007: 4–5) points out in the next quote, Ma¯oridom paved the way for disputing the adequacy of community consultation on transgenic experimentation, forcing government bodies such ERMA (Environmental Risk Management Authority) to re-examine its previous ‘tick the box’ mentality towards community consultation. He cites Bevan Tipene-Matua’s assessment of the pioneering activism of Ngati Wairere’s objections to the production of transgenic cows at the Ruakura Research Centre in Hamilton: This was the first application to be opposed by an iwi, the first public submission received from a Ma¯ori, and the first time an application (or at least the human gene aspect) was deferred for six months. More importantly, the AgResearch proposal to produce a herd of GM [genetically modified] cattle raised stakes considerably in determining the nature and extent of the impact on Ma¯ori of GMOs [genetically modified organisms]. Te Kotuku Whenua, an environmental group representing Hamilton-based hapu Ngati Wairere, consistently argued that the production of GM cattle on their ancestral lands would cause a spiritual imbalance within that community and result in serious adverse psychological impacts on the Ngati Wairere. This claim raised the ante on the impacts of GMOs on Ma¯ori. These arguments were played out in 2000 through the public consultation and submission processes supporting New Zealand’s Royal Commission into Genetic Modification in which many of the anti-GM lobby placed their hopes in a Ma¯ori-led rebuttal of genetic modification. While the anti-GM submissions were eloquent, the final recommendations of the Royal Commission were to allow somewhat curtailed and slightly better monitored work on GM to continue in New Zealand. Moana Jackson (2001) saw this as Ma¯ori concerns being listened to with ‘exquisite politeness’ by the members of the Royal Commission but then ignored. The specific mechanism employed to dismiss their views,

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he argued, was the reduction of Ma¯ori concerns about biotechnologies to issues of spirituality and cultural sensitivity rather than arguments based on the heritage and current practice of Ma¯ori science. Leda Sivak’s interviewing of key witnesses who appeared in the Commission revealed a similar cultural essentialising process in operation with accompanying exclusionary effects for views not supporting orthodox western scientific notions of risk calculability (Sivak 2006). Jackson’s frustration with the commission’s lack of engagement with Ma¯ori traditions of science is echoed in the meticulous study by Mere Roberts et al. (2004) on the scientific underpinning of the Ma¯ori concept of whakapapa. As Roberts suggests, Ma¯ori have worked as biological scientists themselves for centuries cataloguing, ordering and classifying similarities and differences between species, and creating vast repositories of orally recalled traditional scientific and moral knowledge on the environment (Roberts et al. 2004). Reynolds (2007: 8) gives a specific example of the marginalisation of ‘harder’ scientific concerns from Ngati Wairere in their submission to ERMA (which was heard prior to the Royal Commission) using the words of Jacqui Amohanga: So some of the physical things that we addressed were the intergenerational problems, which is a physical thing. The impact on the underground water table and the potential for organisms to regenerate themselves in the soils and also in the underground water tables with the effluent from the genetically modified cattle. So all those physical things they didn’t address. They turned the whole hearing, the whole argument around, and this is the media portrayal that we came out with too, they turned it into a public perception that Ngati Wairere were only interested in the spiritual things. The thing is, if they focussed on just the spiritual, it means that they can ignore the physical things. They sidetracked everything to the spiritual side, even through the whole court process. Ma¯oridom’s complex engagement with the issue of genetic testing and genetic research over the last decade illustrates the limitations of a notion like biological citizenship when it is applied to indigenous populations. These limitations arise for two reasons. First, indigenous ‘identity’ is a far more fluid and nuanced entity unfolding through time than can be adequately expressed in the notion of a shared ‘group’ identity of certain citizens with similar concerns. The responsibilities associated with maintaining, elaborating and expanding traditional knowledges in relation to new technologies such as genetic testing are expressed in a

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variety of different ways, which may be vibrantly contradictory rather than through a single homogenising focus on increasing uptake of such technology. Also, indigenous peoples from a variety of traditions have, in historical terms, had their biological identities invoked far more frequently in exclusionary terms in any discussions of citizenship. This means that indigenous political allegiances formulated through notions of accessing citizenship rights can appear somewhat counterintuitive to affected individuals. Reflecting this, many contemporary Ma¯ori scholars note ambivalence and concern within many of their respective communities in relation to the topic of geneticised identity (Roberts and Fairweather 2004; Tipene-Matua 2006). Spurious associations around certain ‘geneticised tendencies’ in certain Ma¯ori populations are, for instance, still regularly reported in the media – a well-known and roundly rebutted case being the supposed discovery of the ‘warrior gene’ in a group of 17 Ma¯ori males widely reported in local newspapers in 2006 following a conference presentation. The talk was reported to have suggested that the risk taking of early Polynesian navigators could somehow be translated in the contemporary world into a genetic tendency towards risk taking in order to explain antisocial behaviour in certain Ma¯ori males. The researcher later attempted an apology and clarification of the meaning of his injudicious phrasing in the local medical journal (Lea and Chambers 2007), which in the same edition carried stinging attacks on the quality of the researcher’s science (Merriman and Cameron 2007) and also his lack of ethical judgement and political naïveté (Crampton and Parkin 2007). The warrior gene fiasco is only one example of the disempowering uses of geneticised identity to cast aspersions on an indigenous community. The Kimihauora Health Centre In some cases, however, it has been noted by both Ma¯ori and Pa¯keha¯ social scientists in recent surveys of certain Ma¯ori groups that genetic testing and even perhaps transgenic medicines can become more attractive when the stakes are high for family members. This is explored by Bevan Tipene-Matua (2006) when he quotes Benita Wakefield’s words – a participant in a workshop organised for the Constructive Conversations project at Kaikoura in the South Island in May of 2005: I know that if it comes down to it and I see somebody that I love suffer I would do everything in my power to alleviate that suffering and that’s what really determines my decisions at the end of the day…. It makes it really personal. And if it is somebody I love and genetic testing is going

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to help then I would do everything in my power to convince them to take that track if it is going to alleviate their suffering. It was exactly such a set of circumstances which faced a North Island based wha¯nau being treated at the Kimihauora Health Centre in 1995. Representatives of the wha¯nau approached the Health Research Council and asked for a list of geneticists who had the expertise to investigate if their family was suffering from a type of genetically linked stomach cancer. Concern had been prompted by members of the family in which members as young as 14 had been diagnosed with the illness and the general understanding within the wha¯nau was that it was hereditary. Indeed, the presumed genetic link to the disease had been noted in a local medical journal as early as the 1960s. After meeting face to face with several possible workers, the wha¯nau chose to work with a group from the University of Otago and the following working relationship developed as one of the junior Otago scientists recounts (the scientists’ names are designated by initials in upper case): The researchers from the family instigated the project, collected samples, and recorded all of the genealogical relationships. AER was the first point of contact for the family and by winning their trust, enabled the lab research to begin. PG was the director of this project and main provider of technical expertise, PG along with AER were successful in obtaining funding for the project. (Campbell 2004: 104) Gathering the genealogical data was difficult as many family members were of the Ra¯tana8 faith and (because of this) investigating the backgrounds of ancestors was not appropriate. However, the local minister on the Marae sought a spiritual blessing for this section of the project to proceed, which involved creating a covenant between the wha¯nau and God to use the research only to relieve suffering (Campbell 2004: 121). The research collaboration that the wha¯nau then initiated was successful beyond everyone’s hopes with the location for the genetic mutation identified after only three years of work and results jointly published under the Otago researchers’ and the wha¯nau health workers’ names and appearing in Nature (Guilford et al. 1998). From the wha¯nau’s perspective, the gains associated with organising the research project were significant. The identification of the risk factor via a simple blood test now made it possible to reassure those family members who did not carry the mutation, while also identifying those at high risk who could

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then decide if they would like to engage in a screening programme which required an endoscopy once a year. The project could then expand to providing screening and counselling procedures within the local health clinic on the local marae where the Ma¯ori health workers spoke of the holistic caring that such an approach could give to the affected family members. Describing their deep involvement and commitment in the broader network of care, they noted: [W]e do our natural ways. We’re the genetic counsellors, we’re the gastroenterologists. We know so much about it now; we’re part and parcel of the whole thing with the people. We go in with them when they have their scopes, we go in with them just before they have their ops. Yeah, we’re everything now. (Campbell 2004: 104) From the scientist’s perspectives the collaboration was eye opening for the wha¯nau’s confidence and fierce desire for self-determination over the running of the project. As one scientist noted ‘the biggest lesson to learn was that these people did not want to be told what to do – there’s no room to say “that’s how it is” ’ (Campbell 2004: 108). For another scientist, the experience has profoundly altered how he now handles DNA – making him extremely wary of releasing DNA to another worker unless he can personally vouch for its safe storage and appropriate subsequent use. The Kimihaurora Health Centre then demonstrates the new types of networking and research collaborations that can arise as a result of geneticised identities particularly with regard to the control and management of the research process which, in this instance, was entirely attuned to the wha¯nau’s value system. In the 50 years from when the family were first mentioned in the local medical journal (in disparagingly racist terms of understanding their affliction as a ma¯kutu or spell and the corresponding unlikelihood of their seeking help through medicine ( Jones 1964)), the family’s researchers went on to become co-authors and active researchers into their illness and have been featured in one of the most prestigious international scientific journals.

Conclusion At the societal level, Heath et al. (2007: 152) have spoken of biological citizenship in its geneticised form as a social process that involves the knitting together of ‘complex networks of association linking activists,

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scientists, politicians, and corporate interests in the collective transformation of the public sphere’. Some of these New Zealand studies support this argument and activist groups have certainly contributed to dynamic transformations of the moral and legislative framework for understanding the new genetics. However, the forms of recognition that accompany these newly created networks of common experience vary markedly. For example, not all of New Zealand’s biological citizens choose to express themselves through activism nor have all activist groups been equally well heard. There is therefore room to consider how the individual orientations of such groups vary and also the agency of individual members themselves. In Rose’s view, the biological citizen is ‘prudent yet enterprising individual(s), actively shaping his or her life course through acts of choice, activities that extend to the search for health in face of the fear of illness, and the management of the risk – now the genetic susceptibilities – of disease’ (Rose 2007: 154). But the accounts discussed in this chapter display more variation in subject positions. In other words, while biological citizens may recognise themselves as such, the consequences of this recognition vary with the specific context in which they grapple with their newly biologised selves. When faced with the specific anxieties and opportunities which belonging to these biologised selves entail, the New Zealand actors with whom I have studied have taken up quite specific medicalised, moral and expert identities. For example, the women struggling with their personal or familial high risk for BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes are more easily described as passively medicalised rather than Rose’s examples of prudent or enterprising. Recognition of their risk and the need to manage it has seen them draw deeper and deeper into a medicalised view of their lives in which choice has given way to belief in screening and surgery as a talisman. Constrained by the wish to ‘not upset others’ with knowledge of a potential inherited position, their anger and political will cannot be mobilised into a specific support group. Any enterprise they have is directed at their own bodies in increasingly intrusive prophylactics treatments. In terms of the themes of the book, they remain ‘good’ biological citizens only by personally carrying the very significant distress that comes with that responsibility and they elect to do so in private. The public recognition of their collective identity as the ‘at risk well’ is double-sided. On the one hand, it singles them out to bear the responsibility of knowing their status, but simultaneously, it ignores the personal consequences for these women that such knowing entails. Similarly, the cytogeneticists struggle to respond in Rose’s terms to the experience of recognising their biologised identities – namely to exercise

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prudence and choice. While certainly they are acting with prudence in their professional careers, it is a type of prudence that is quite specifically without choice, for they are tightly bound by professional codes of conduct, which allow them no opportunities to speak in public on their individual concerns over the interpretation of genetic tests. This lack of choice then constrains their exercise of moral action into the sphere in which they work, in which it manifests as distanced care that offers others choice. By focussing always on individuals and their test results, they can avoid addressing the population effects of their work. Thus, as a group, they sidestep public recognition of the disabled citizens whom they help to create via their test results and ethical practice becomes the meticulous attention to scientific practice. It is in fact only the activist umbrella group NZORD who mirror the ‘classical’ expression of biological citizenship in which biologised identity becomes a source of expertise. This expertise is based on a lifetime of exposure to the suffering of family members with recognised genetic differences. Belonging to NZORD also entails the public endorsement of a modernist style of medicine and the promotion of the increased uptake of all forms of genetic medicine albeit in the recognition that medical care is provided through fallible individuals. Within the family, there is still scope for even more complex moral identities as families pick and choose which aspects of medicine to make use of and which to avoid, recognising that their life experience with illness provides a viable alternative source of expertise in the moralities of medical decision-making. The wide array of positions within Ma¯oridom on the utility of genetic testing and genetic and transgenic medicine has also developed through a far more complex pathway than genetic or biological citizenship alone. While offering the most potential to be recognised as an alterative scientific and moral line of commentary, the array of Ma¯ori views have been sidelined by the non-Ma¯ori into a type of cultural essentialist argument over spirituality rather than effective science. However, there are also examples which appear to be a closer fit to the emancipatory aims of biologised citizenship and in which new relationships are being forged with medicine and science. The Kimihauora Health Centre is such a case. Even while demonstrating such newly geneticised subjectivities, however, it must be noted that the wha¯nau have also organised and identified throughout the entire process via the enduring bonds of their shared whakapapa – quite the opposite social collectivity supposed by biological citizenship.

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In conclusion, the lived experience of biological citizenship in Aotearoa/ New Zealand around geneticised identity is exceedingly complex. A bicultural response to these issues would suppose that the Treaty of Waitangi provides a foothold for the recognition of distinctively Ma¯ori approaches to geneticised identity and its consequences. Pa¯keha¯ citizens, on the other hand, could be understood to have their interests in geneticised identity accommodated through conventional biomedically based accounts of the meanings of genetics. In reality, however, both groups continue to struggle for social recognition both with and against medical and bioethical interpretive dominance over the meanings and significance of genetic identity. Sometimes these struggles occur via recognisable frameworks of biological citizenship but just as frequently through different types of social collectivity with different and less than emancipatory outcomes. For this reason, I have also suggested that the relationship between New Zealand-based geneticised identities might also be explained by tu¯rangawaewae – something that for Ma¯ori arrives through birthright but which a group like NZORD can create through the endurance of great suffering and the practice of political acumen. Tu¯rangawaewae may be lost through lack of attention to one’s lines of descent and the neglect of one’s obligations to engage with cultural history. However, in such cases, it rests in latent form until the moment when an individual recognises once again their links to the moral landscape of their community. The cytogeneticists and the BRCA1 and BRCA2 women discussed in this chapter have yet to secure a political and discursive space from which to articulate their geneticised identities and resulting moral authorities. In terms of tu ¯ rangawaewae, they can find no place in the social landscape for feet to stand.

Notes 1. Aotearoa is in common use now as the Ma¯ori name for the state of New Zealand reflecting the state’s embrace of a bicultural national identity, its endorsement of two official languages – English and Te Reo (the Ma¯ori language), and the spread of many Ma¯ori words into regular English language usage by non-Ma¯ori speakers. Either term identifies the state; they are used interchangeably within the text. The word has also been used within Ma¯oridom as the geographical name for the North Island of New Zealand while Te Waipounamu is the name for the South Island. The degree to which contemporary New Zealand society recognises prior Ma¯ori sovereignty in these lands is unusual among contemporary postcolonial settler societies and the accepted use of the name Aotearoa is one example of this.

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2. An ‘orphan’ disease when used in this sense refers to a type of illness that occurs so rarely within the general population that drug companies and research units do not ‘adopt’ the disease as an object of intensive study. 3. The use of a capital letter here for ‘Disability’ reflects the political meaning given to the term by those within the Disability movement. 4. BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations in the sense in which they are referred to in this chapter are harmful changes to genes responsible for aspects of cancer suppression in the human body, which increase the potential of an affected person (over their lifetime) to develop breast cancer, and in some cases ovarian cancer and a variety of other forms of cancer. Not all changes to BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes are harmful, and not all people who bear harmful mutations to these genes will develop cancer; furthermore, those who do not have BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations can still develop cancer. 5. During the time of the study, three women had been tested and found positive for BRCA1 or BRCA2. One had been tested with an inconclusive result although she understood herself to bear the mutation. Two remained undecided over whether to be tested. 6. Oophorectomy is the surgical removal of an ovary or ovaries, mastectomy is the surgical removal of a breast, while a bilateral mastectomy is the removal of all breast tissue. 7. Wha¯nau – the Ma¯ori name for an extended family group, iwi – the Ma¯ori word for tribe (or the common descendants of one ancestor, a nation), hapu ¯– the Ma¯ori word for a smaller kinship grouping such as a subtribe or clan, marae – the Ma¯ori word for the courtyard associated with the tribal meeting house and often referring to the whole associated collection of buildings and structures. 8. The Ra¯tana Church was founded by Tahupo ¯ tiki Wiremu Ra¯tana, a visionary and healer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whose religious movement was based on moral reform and biblical preaching within Ma¯oridom. The movement was also a political power for advancing Ma¯ori concerns over alienated land and continues to be influential as both a church and a political force in contemporary New Zealand society.

5 From the Stranger to ‘the Other’: The Politics of Cosmopolitan Beirut Steven Seidman

Introduction The heightened awareness of social diversity that has accompanied globalisation and the politics of multiculturalism has provoked a wideranging reconsideration of the notion of cosmopolitanism (Vertovec and Cohen 2002). This concept speaks to the ways selves negotiate diversity, to the possibility of multiple forms of belonging and citizenship and to the emergence of international practices of political regulation in a world still dangerously in the throes of national conflicts. Scholars distil two core meanings: cosmopolitanism as ‘habitus’ or as a cluster of dispositions and orientations favourably disposed towards social diversity (Hannerz 1996), and cosmopolitanism as marking a status as a ‘world citizen’ (Held 1995; Cheah and Robbins 1998). The specific juxtaposition of cosmopolitanism and cities has a notable history (Jacobs 1961; Sennett 1970). Still, this thematic focus has recently taken on a new salience among social critics, policy-makers, and researchers. For example, the recent publication of two collections of original essays underscores the current prominence of the cosmopolitan theme in urban studies. Cosmopolitan Urbanism (Binnie et al. 2006) presents conceptual and research-based essays addressing chiefly Anglo-European cities, whereas Cairo Cosmopolitan (Singerman and Amar 2006) invokes cosmopolitanism as an innovative way to investigate changes in this historically iconic Arab city. The appearance of the latter volume by a new wave of Arab and European urbanists is important for another reason: it disarms critics who might otherwise challenge the appropriateness of extending this seemingly ‘Western’ concept to non-Anglo-European contexts. These two volumes, and others (e.g. Sandercock 2003; Mayaram 2010), suggest that cosmopolitanism is today recognised as a key thematic focus 95

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for analysing urban dynamics across the globe. In this chapter, I engage this theme in three ways. First, while there is broad agreement that cosmopolitanism refers to a cluster of dispositions and skills (e.g. openness to difference, capacity to hear dissonant perspectives), there is little research analysing the social formation of such dispositions and orientations. In the first section, I explore the way urban topography intersects with socio-historical conditions to shape dispositional sensibilities. In a case study of a neighbourhood in Beirut, I sketch an account of the formation of dispositions that are inimical to the kind of ‘empathetic and edifying exchanges’ that would be considered crucial in a robust cosmopolitan urban culture. Second, there is considerable research addressing the kinds of urban environments which invite robust exchanges among people of diverse backgrounds and identities. The notion of urban spaces where people of different social backgrounds and statuses meet and mix was at the heart of Jane Jacobs’ critique of the hard-edged verticalism of urban modernists (1961). However, all too often researchers rely on unstated assumptions about the meaning of tolerance. In the second section, I outline a multidimensional approach to the dynamics of difference and tolerance. A pair of abbreviated empirical case studies will make plausible my analytical points. Third, researchers have understood cosmopolitanism as a collective representation, for example, as a state or corporate strategy of branding or as a class ideology. In the third section, I propose an alternative, less instrumental view of the way cosmopolitanism is enmeshed in struggles over Lebanese national identity. Specifically, I argue that liberals enlist cosmopolitanism to defend a liberal national project against sectarian loyalists and Arab nationalists. My intent in the ‘set pieces’ is not so much to juxtapose an ideal of urban cosmopolitanism to Beirut realities. Rather, I’m wagering that cosmopolitanism is a productive way to explore how urban topography intersects with history and social structure to shape the way selves recognise and approach the many strangers that populate city life. In effect, I propose a series of studies addressing a central dynamic of modern urban life: the encounter between the self and other (Tonkiss 2005). In particular, I aim to consider the symbolic transformation of anonymous others or strangers into status differences and polluted Others. Whereas the former category refers to non-normative, typically subordinate statuses (gender, sexual, sectarian), the latter (the Other) speaks to a condition of social and symbolic exclusion. As much as cosmopolitanism is about recognition, tolerance and inclusion, it is also, and necessarily, about misrecognition, intolerance and exclusion. Beirut proves a compelling place to stage this discussion. Located at the intersection of the Arab

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and ‘Western’ world, Beirut – like Dubai, Cairo, Tel Aviv or Shanghai – confronts the challenges of blending its cosmopolitan aspirations with historically embedded cultural traditions. Hamra, a neighbourhood in Beirut The chief site of my research was a predominantly (Sunni) Muslim neighbourhood in West Beirut. Historically, Hamra has been home to internationally recognised universities (American University of Beirut and Lebanese American University) and a refuge for persecuted and marginal cultural producers, minorities and immigrants. Before the civil war (1975–90), its young, educated, middle-class population helped Hamra prosper as an essentially service oriented, white-collar economy. Hamra’s considerable Anglo-American immigrant population and its secular, professional and youthful population produced a dynamic public culture of cinemas, cafes, theatres and bookstores (Khalaf and Kongstad 1973). Long-time residents and visitors recall Hamra in the 1960s and the early 1970s as a magnet for adventurers, tourists, intellectuals, political activists and writers and artists from across the Middle East (Sawalha 2010). It was also Hamra’s good fortune to have avoided becoming a key battleground during the war years. In fact, as merchants and bankers abandoned the ruins of the Central Business District (the centre of government and the Souks), Hamra benefited. Its educated, affluent population and its proximity to the Central District and to the sea attracted waves of capital and human investment through the 1990s. Today, as the reconstruction of the downtown continues, Hamra is as much the social and cultural hub of Beirut as is possible in a city lacking an undisputed centre. Despite a series of political crises (political assassinations, the July 2006 Israeli assault and prolonged government paralysis), the recent arrival of high-end stores such as Vero Moda and GS, new cafes such as Costas and Linas catering to a global middle class and the construction of high-end residential and commercial buildings suggests a neighbourhood confident of its future. The restless, dynamic public culture of Hamra impressed me upon my arrival. As I got to know other neighbourhoods, my perception of Hamra was sharpened. Hamra strikes me as distinctive because of its sectarian and ethnic diversity and its culture of personal and social experimentation. Indeed, in the course of conversations and interviews with residents, shop owners and intellectuals, Hamra’s culture of individualism and cosmopolitanism was repeatedly celebrated as unique in Beirut. Between September 2007 and June 2008, and between January and June 2009, I lived in Hamra. I spent countless hours walking its streets,

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attending cultural events, frequenting cafes, observing and taking notes and speaking with dozens of residents, workers, artists, intellectuals and shop owners. Additionally, in my classes at the American University, I trained students in the skills of urban research. They mapped Hamra’s streets, observed public spaces and collected and transcribed roughly 100 interviews, which supplemented my own interviews. As an outsider to Beirut, I have been mindful of trying to avoid imposing ‘problematics’ and conceptual strategies that may reflect narrowly Anglo-European considerations. I have tried to stay close to the life-world of Beirut’s residents in order to challenge and revise my categories and viewpoints. I have sought an ‘embedded interpretation’, recognising that my situated standpoint both enables and angles my interpretive claims. There is no escaping the hermeneutic circle.

Street life: The anxiety of the other I begin with a topographical analysis of the street. I assume that the formal properties of streets, the ‘cell’ of urban neighbourhoods, structures the contours of personal and collective life, an assumption long held by urbanists (e.g. Lynch 1960; Jacobs 1961). Street topographies are sociologically and historically situated, though. This section asks: how does street topography intersect with history and social dynamics to fashion the dispositions and orientations of Hamra’s denizens? Specifically, does Hamra’s street culture foster a sensibility associated with cosmopolitanism, for example, porous self-boundaries, empathetic engagement, openness to difference and innovation? Street topographies speak to the organisation of street life as a form of public space. For example, streets that are primarily oriented to the circulation of goods, bodies, images and information would aim to minimise obstructions and maximise orderliness, efficiency and speed of flows. As much as streets are spaces of circulation, they are also public arenas where selves or groups claim an identity, forge a sense of belonging and assert their power by establishing boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. With regard to the latter, urban areas may become the exclusive territory of a specific status or class group, whose authority may be projected by street names, private security personnel, flags or posters of notables. Different street topographies shape the contours of the self and his or her disposition towards others. For example, streets that are divided into safe and dangerous quarters would encourage the hardening of selfboundaries as individuals assume a defensive disposition towards outsiders. Suspicion and distancing would likely characterise such encounters.

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If streets become ‘combat zones’ (Sorkin 2003; Warren 2003; Weizman 2003; Misselwitz and Rieniets 2006), neighbourhoods will be divided along the axes of ally and enemy. In allied neighbourhoods, selves would be encouraged to be inviting and expansive towards insiders. But as selves navigate beyond the ‘home territory’, their boundaries would harden; they would perhaps turn inward, projecting indifference if not an edge of hostility to ward off potential aggressors. By contrast, urban streets rich in common spaces that attract people of diverse cultural backgrounds would likely nourish porous self-boundaries and dispose selves to be comfortable with the challenges presented by strangers (Bayat 2010; Guan 2010). Empathy and sympathetic engagement would perhaps form the affective texture of such social exchanges. In any event, since at least Jacobs (1961) and Lynch (1960), the notion that street topographies structure the dispositions and behaviour of selves and shape patterns of social exchanges have been central to urbanists. In the remainder of this section, I offer a sketch of the way urban topography intersects with Beirut’s unique history to shape the emotional texture and contours of the relationship between the self and other in Hamra. Others as strangers and enemies Topographical traces of a one-time robust public culture are suggested by Hamra’s wide sidewalks, stop signs, phone boxes, streetlights, green spaces, squares and its many cinemas and cafes. However, except for Bliss and Hamra streets (the former across from American University, the latter the commercial centre of Hamra), neglect has taken its toll. Sidewalks suddenly break off forcing pedestrians to walk on the street or a dirt walkway; streetlights brighten Hamra and Bliss but other streets stay dark throughout the evening; navigational signs, marked pedestrian crossings, public restrooms and public clocks are either absent or impossible to locate. The soft furnishings that provide urban comfort and aesthetic pleasure have fared worse. Benches, monuments and landmarks are absent; many streets lack any green space while those with planters or trees often betray long-term neglect. On almost every street, there are buildings in various states of disrepair. Many apartment complexes are in frightful shape, some emptied of tenants and others seemingly abandoned by their owners. A cityscape dotted with empty lots, deserted squares, abandoned buildings, vacated galleries and cinemas, and the commercialisation of almost all common spaces underscores a deteriorating public culture. The post-war decline of Hamra’s public space does not extend, however, to circulation. The streets are cleared of debris, garbage is removed,

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mail is delivered and order is more or less maintained. Machines, bodies and goods flow – up, down and across surfaces. Circulation has become the chief priority of this slice of the ‘merchant republic’. In Hamra, there are no traffic lights, and while there are stop signs, no one obeys them. Cars routinely ignore one-way directional traffic rules; motor scooters freely move between crowded streets and sidewalks; parking space is expanded by using sidewalks; vendors use street corners to hawk their goods regardless of pedestrian traffic; grocery stores turn into cafes as tables are squeezed onto sidewalks even as pedestrians are nudged into the street. Zoning laws seem equally optional. Shop owners, residents, real estate speculators and builders rearrange space without concern for the law or the public good (e.g. Fawaz 2003). In the circulatory flows of the streets, and in the cleansing of its surface of unnecessary impediments, an urban topography gives shape to a lean, minimally unencumbered self. This self is not one of temporally layered depths whose thick past, layered into body and psyche, is in play. Instead, this self imagines suspending time itself in order to live intensely in the here and now. This is also not a self whose inner life is to be dwelled upon, examined or shared. Hamra’s streets may be a space of desire, but in a street culture bent to flows and speed, intimacies are not encouraged. To the contrary, this street-savvy self stays close to the body, to the surfaces and facades, and to those desires and impulses that immediately bind the self to the visual and sensual excitements of the street. But, exactly what burdens is this street-savvy, fast-moving self trying to leave behind? To address this question, I shift from a topographical to a sociological line of enquiry. Despite an official narrative that contrasts Lebanon to other Arab nations by its laissez-faire, freewheeling individualism, the Lebanese live in a densely rule-bound order. Kin, village, sect, patriarch and patron, gender code and social class encircle the self in a seamless-like web of rules, customs and rituals (Joseph 1993, 2002). If formal regulations have only a faint presence in the lives of individuals, due to a notoriously weak state, informal controls operate like a spider’s web radiating from the inner layers of the Lebanese self to outer behaviour. Selves are constructed as extensions of kin, and where family leaves off, sect steps in – and at the border of sect are fairly inflexible gender and class norms. As we will shortly see, this is especially true for women for whom respectability leaves just one option: a virginal marriage and virtuous motherhood. Hamra’s street culture then holds out the promise of some release from customary rule, from the layers of social regulation that, at times, may feel like a crushing weight on personal life.

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Release does not of course mean the absence of regulation. In Lebanon, the boundaries between the private and public are fuzzy; the ‘private’ realm of kin and sect bleeds into the public, including the urban street. Still, the codes governing personal and intimate behaviour, from kinship obligations to sectarian-based personal status laws, may be relaxed as the street allows selves some distance from actual kin. Hamra, in particular, invites an ‘unburdening’. There is a fluidity and unruliness to Hamra’s street life that reflects its secular culture and a singularly dynamic public culture of cafes, amusement centres, gambling joints, brothels, pubs and nightclubs, which shield the self from the social censure and control of kin and sect. Something of the freewheeling street culture of Hamra seems also to be fuelled by an almost obsessional flight from history. For many Lebanese, the present is thick with an affective aura of loss, with barely contained feelings of fear, vulnerability and rage and with unresolved feelings of betrayal and shame, as the present remains deeply wedded to the 15-year period of civil violence (e.g. Saghie 2004). For those who came of age during this time, those young men and women who are the face of Hamra, there is perhaps no escaping the formative power of this violence. But also, because this nation has been unable to render the war years coherent and meaningful, and to ritually enact a national drama of forgiveness and reconciliation, it seems unlikely that individuals can do so. In contrast to nations that have found ways to process periods of protracted civil violence, there have been no collective acts of memorialisation in Lebanon, no judicial accountability for killings and massive theft and no public rituals of truth telling and reconciliation that might facilitate a national catharsis. Lebanon’s war years have been met with a numbing silence and a conspiracy of forgetting (Khalaf 1993; Tueni 1998; Sarkis 2006; Yahya 2007). Denial though hardly seems possible. How does one forget the death, exile or betrayal of kin, the loss of home, family and community, or the paralysing shame or rage for deeds done or witnessed? Indeed, how is forgetting possible under conditions in which the very culture of social polarisation and sectarian enmity, which fuelled the collective madness of the war years, has been reproduced by a post-war history of spectacular assassinations, heightened class and sectarian division and political paralysis? If neither reconciliation with a violent, disturbing past nor forgetting are possible, what are the options – and with what implications for the shape of encounters between the self and other? As memories of civil violence are regularly evoked by sectarian rivalries, and indeed as hostilities seem always on the verge of spilling over

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into sectarian violence, as occurred in May 2008, some individuals retreat into the enveloping world of the sect. In a nation in which the state is unable to protect its citizens, and in which the power of the sect is woven into nearly every tissue of personal and social life, the sectarian community serves as a kind of homeland. The main sects (Maronite, Greek Catholic, Orthodox, Druze, Sunni and Shia) have their own political organisations, allotment of civil service positions to dispense, militias, flags, originary myths and narratives of villains and heroes. Sects are virtual mini-states. They provide safety, material well-being, and offer a rich, robust sense of identity and social belonging. Sectarian personal status laws regulate birth, marriage, divorce and inheritance; its charities and social service organisations provide health care and welfare; each sect has its own schools and media. In short, the sect offers security and solidarity for a war-weary, traumatised citizenry. As much as it offers a refuge in an unstable, violence-prone nation, the sect is also condemned for contributing to civil unrest. A critical counter-discourse asserts a causal tie between Lebanon’s confessional order and a social world marked by pervasive mistrust and hostility; sectarian others are approached as enemies. A retreat from sectarianism has often meant abandoning politics and embracing a life of hedonism or career-and-family-making. At the level of urban street life, this turn to the personal and the familial cultivates an inward-looking disposition. Presenting an emotionally neutral, even if glossy (colourful, richly textured) bodily surface allows the self to navigate Hamra’s public terrain with minimal social interference and tension. Underlying the steady, quick circulation of bodies and vehicles is an almost studied indifference to others. This walling off of one’s emotional life is not a disposition of ennui, but has been socially formed because others, all anonymous others, represent potential enemies – selves to be feared and mistrusted. If a disposition of inwardness and indifference is cultivated in their public lives in order to negotiate a world of anonymous enemies, engagement with strangers will bear little of the spirit of empathy, cultural exchange and innovation that is essential to a robust cosmopolitanism. Instead, a disciplined indifference allows easy, unimpeded movement and purposeful engagements which can be relaxed only in the presence of intimates or ethno-religious kin. Residents and regular visitors to Hamra routinely express an expansive neighbourhood pride. It is, they say, a neighbourhood that is singular in its cultural openness and generosity. Perhaps. But, I have also detected a subtle, hard-edged culture of civic indifference and mistrust of virtually

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all strangers. Hamra’s vibrant street life continues to promise a certain release from the burdens of the present and past. This unburdening makes it possible for Hamra to serve as a promising site of improvisation and social dissidence. This neighbourhood remains a fertile ground for creative, unruly impulses. Still, unless I am terribly mistaken, the conjuncture of urban topography and history has conspired to promote cultural strains of a crippling civic indifference and paranoia. Specifically, whereas a heightened sectarianism shapes a disposition of fear and barely contained loathing towards the sectarian other, an urban culture oriented to circulation cultivates a disciplined insularity, as if nothing is owed to others beyond a minimal tolerance and benign indifference. This laissez-faire ethos may give to the streets of Hamra something of its aura of freedom but it is at times freedom as mere release. It is, if you will, a freedom to be indifferent to the other, to approach the other as a potential impediment, if not enemy, to be engaged with minimum psychic and social demands. This insularity and indifference is the antithesis of the ‘empathetic engagement’ that is the spirit of cosmopolitanism.

Boundaries of tolerance: The politics of difference and the other The notion of an unencumbered self is an ideal type. Selves are always thickly layered with social markings and bear the weight of history. In Lebanon, the sect rivals the nation as a terrain of identity, belonging and regulation. Although some 18 sects have found a home within Lebanon’s confessional order, such tolerance has not been true for many non-sectarian statuses. In this section, my query shifts to a central theme of cosmopolitanism: the politics of tolerance. Cosmopolitanism assumes a social field of diverse personal styles and social statuses, but also patterns of interaction encouraging reciprocity, hybridisation and innovation. A culture of diversity and dynamic innovation would not be possible without tolerance. Too often, however, this notion is approached in binary terms, as a flat space of inclusion or exclusion. I suggest a multidimensional analytical approach. The notion of tolerance presupposes a norm in relation to which behaviours and statuses that are non-normative or irregular may or may not be tolerated. For example, tolerating non-heterosexual behaviours and identities assumes the institutional norm of heterosexuality. Sexual

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dissidents may, moreover, be tolerated as equals or as representing an inferior status or excluded as Others. The latter category – the Other – points to the outer edge of tolerance, exposing the limits to the politics of cosmopolitanism. Social tolerance has then two analytically distinct dimensions: inclusion/ exclusion and equality/subordination. The former speaks to whether a social status is recognised as morally legitimate and whether the agent is accorded basic rights and respect. The latter concerns an individual’s access to opportunities and resources and considers whether there are patterned hierarchies along specific status dimensions such as gender or ethnicity. Tolerance can therefore be analysed in terms of whether statuses are symbolically included (accorded rights and respect) and whether they are structurally advantaged or disadvantaged in terms of access to resources and opportunities. A social arrangement in which specific statuses are symbolically excluded and/or structurally subordinated would underscore a restricted form of tolerance. Symbolic exclusion does not, however, always accompany social subordination. It is possible for a status to be symbolically recognised while socially subordinate (postWorld War II American women). Finally, patterns of symbolic exclusion and social subordination may be partial (some social sectors) or systemic (across social sectors). To the extent that a social status is subject to systemic patterns of symbolic exclusion and structural subordination, it may be more appropriate to speak of ‘otherness’ rather than ‘difference’. Whereas difference underscores a condition of subordination but within the imagined community of say a neighbourhood or nation, otherness highlights a symbolic positioning outside of a moral community, or at the edge of tolerance. It is the contrast, if you will, between the normalised but still inferior gay American (difference) and the polluted, closeted homosexual (Other), or between the formally equal but socially inferior Black American and the Negro of Jim Crow America. Identifying the social statuses or populations that are excluded and socially subordinated, and their singular patterns of difference and othering, speaks powerfully to the actual, existing state of a neighbourhood’s or nation’s culture of cosmopolitanism. How are the salient patterns of exclusion and subordination manifest in Hamra’s public space? What space is extended to those who occupy the outer borders of a nation, and what forms of belonging are possible for those who fall on the other side of tolerance? Several populations inhabit the status of the Other in Hamra – Palestinians, migrant labourers and sexual and gender dissidents. These populations are subject to

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multiple strategies of exclusion and inferiorisation – from the denial of access to jobs and schooling to disenfranchisement, territorial sequestration, violence and depersonalisation. These selves inhabit a symbolic space of moral debasement and are often imagined as menacing and polluting. Othering practices are embedded in a culture that draws on rhetorics of psychopathology, racial degeneration, moral depravity and idolatry and sin. I have space to sketch two patterns that mark the outer boundaries of tolerance in Hamra, and arguably Beirut. Inferiorised insiders: The politics of gender The street is no less gendered than the surface of the bodies that navigate it. My concern is less topographical than sociological: how does gender enter into the experience of the street? Who controls the street, and by what means? How does the status of women bear on the politics of tolerance? In Hamra, gender politics are transparent in at least one way. Men rule the streets and do so, it seems, almost effortlessly. They are the ones behind the wheels of the ubiquitous BMWs and Mercedes, driving the taxis, gathered together in front of shops or residences, talking, or playing cards or backgammon. It is men who own the flower, sporting goods, electronic, clothing or grocery shops. And, it is men who are the construction workers, the police and military officers as well as the waiters, dishwashers, street cleaners, newspaper and mail deliverers. Women share the streets with men, but not their power. Women walk the streets of Hamra aware of the blatantly lurid looks and gestures that often follow them. I’ve watched men stare as a woman walks by; comments are passed between companions. They smile, as if acknowledging a brotherhood of male gender power. Women know that they walk the streets alone at night at some risk. Stories circulate of women attacked in front of their apartments or dragged into alleyways or cars (statistics on sexual violence are unavailable, if they even exist). In fact, as darkness descends, women are scarcely seen alone. After 8 p.m., as only cafes remain open, the lights dim in many streets and police are rarely seen. The street exposes women to another equally serious risk: the loss of respectability. As a space where formal controls are relaxed, and where men’s sexuality is more in play, women have to tighten internal controls as they negotiate Hamra’s streets. For at least middle-class women, respectability is wedded to controlling desire. Women step onto the street as bearers of their fathers’ and families’ honour, and as responsible for regulating men’s desire. For many Muslim women the street is a test of piety; public sexual modesty is a condition of claiming respect.

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To surrender to sexual desire risks disrespect and dishonour for her family. Women’s bodies and desires are heavily regulated – by parents, brothers, uncles, cousins, boyfriends, clerics, sheikhs and peers. A dense network of taboos and prohibitions surround her sexuality in ways that has no counterpart for men. Unlike in the US or Western Europe, single women do not have the option of exploring their sexuality and claiming respectability. An honourable Lebanese woman cannot choose to be sexual and single, cannot choose motherhood outside of marriage, cannot choose cohabitation (illegal and would mark her as disreputable), cannot choose another woman as her partner and cannot choose to remain celibate and single without being stigmatised as a failed woman. Marriage is the central event for women, their fate, regardless of class. Gender respectability is linked to a ‘good marriage,’ which, in turn, depends on presenting a virginal status. As a university (female) student confided, ‘A woman … should marry as a virgin … The best thing a woman could offer her husband is her innocence and purity.’ That said, many women surrender to desire. Indeed, some voiced a right to sexual fulfilment. But even these women conceded that surrendering their virginity risks forfeiting respectability. More than a few women navigate the troubled waters of sexual desire by practicing anal sex; others acknowledged that hymenoplasty (the surgical restoration of the hymen to present a virginal status) is widespread. And still other women opted for abortion, despite being illegal (Fathallah nd). Women’s restricted erotic-intimate freedom is paralleled by a stateenforced pattern of gender subordination that includes the lack of political representation (since the Taif Agreement in 1989, there has been just one woman in the ruling governmental institution, the Council of Ministers), the absence of laws criminalising spousal rape, domestic violence and sexual harassment in the workplace, and the lack of a right to confer citizenship on a foreign-born spouse and their children (Khalaf 2002; Zuhur 2002). To date, no social movement, not in Hamra and not in Beirut, has rallied women to challenge their lack of intimate choices as emblematic of an unequal gender order. There are organisations addressing specific and limited forms of gender inferiorisation such as violence against women (Kafa) or women’s disenfranchisement (The Lebanese League for Women’s Rights). They provide services or lobby for legal reform. Some activists explained the absence of a women’s movement by referring to women’s pervasive sense of inferiorisation and powerlessness in a confessional political system hostile to non-sectarian movements. As one activist said: ‘The government is definitely our enemy.

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It will not allow a women’s movement. It would threaten the power of the sect.’ Activists face a dilemma: change must have sectarian support but these groups discount its importance. The prospects for far-reaching gender change are dim (Zuhur 2002). Men’s seemingly seamless public performance of power, from hypermasculine bodily surfaces to the exaggerated bravado of the oratory of male clerics and political leaders, has shaped a culture of inferiorisation among women. Indeed, so powerful are men imagined to be that few women I talked with would even concede that they too are enmeshed in a network of customary rules. Men suffer from the fear of a public shame that would accompany any loss of masculine power. Men must also shoulder the burden of upholding their family’s honour. They too must marry, and marry well; they are expected to create and provide for a family, and defend its honour. Men never escape the duties and demands of the family of origin, including responsibility for the public behaviour and intimate choices of their sisters. They must provide a steady authoritative hand ensuring their sister’s respectability; this obligation continues even after their sisters marry (Joseph 1994). Assuming responsibility for their female siblings is also about acquiring the skills, dispositions and obligations of masculine authority. In the case of divorce or a father’s death, sons are expected to stand in for the father and become the provider and authority figure for the family. This too does not end with establishing their own families. Men’s social power carries its own risks. Masculine success must be repeatedly established in relation to women and men. Only men who are effective in the competitive arenas of masculinity, for example, in sports, in displaying the right body, in heterosexual dating and marriage, or as a figure of firm resolve and steely toughness, are fully rewarded with the authority conferred by masculinity. In this hypermasculine world, any weakness in the armour of masculinity can bring humiliation and potentially dire consequences for the entire family. Accordingly, men and women can be unforgiving towards non-masculine men (Moussawi 2008). Gender is then a central axis of social difference in Hamra. Women are marked as different and occupy an inferior, subordinate status in relation to men and male masculinity. Their subordination may be systemic but, at least for citizens, it is not accompanied by national exclusion. Lebanese women are respected as familial, civil selves; there are no state-legal impediments to their participation in education, work, religious life and the institutions of marriage and the family, even if there is patterned subordination within these civil institutions. Further complicating gender

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politics, women’s subordination is understood by many Lebanese to be fixed by the laws of nature or God. From this perspective, women may occupy a different status than men, but this dichotomous gender pattern is not explained in terms of a politics of justice. There is though an exception to this politics of gender inclusion: gender dissidents. Masculine women and feminine men occupy a space of difference and perhaps otherness. Gender dissidents are threatened with patterns of exclusion that would make it impossible for them to fashion a morally respected, honourable sense of self. Gender dissidents are not alone; as mentioned earlier migrant labourers, ethnic minorities, Palestinians and sexual dissidents also fall on the wrong side of the moral order. I turn now to the last of these. Sexual dissent: Resistance in a post-identity culture Lebanon is a marriage- and family-centred nation. Individuals are understood as extensions of their kin, and marriage is at once a social duty and a condition of self-fulfilment. Lebanon’s intimate norms produce an abundance of denigrated, outsider sexualities – the unmarried, loose, promiscuous women, barren men and women, cohabiting men and women, childless marriages, but, above all, non-heterosexuality. So unequivocally is heterosexuality understood to be the ground and the elementary fact of intimate behaviour that this norm hardly needs to be spoken, much less defended or explained; it is simply the only way to claim a normal sexuality and gender. In this section, I consider how non-heterosexuals negotiate an urban world that leaves no legitimate option beyond heterosexuality. Needless to say, the world of non-heterosexuals in Beirut contrasts sharply with that of the US or UK cities. The tight association of desire and sexual identity, and the formation of identity-based sexual communities, so salient in American and British cities, cannot be assumed in Beirut. In line with other researchers (McCormick 2006; Moussawi 2008), I found that most individuals approach same-sex attraction as a desire or behaviour. A language of sexual identity was exceptional. When individuals did use a vocabulary of identity (e.g. typically using the English terms gay or lesbian or queer since the Arab terms – shaadh, luti, khanit – are denigrating), they mostly did so as a shorthand way to refer to a sexual preference, not as revealing a true core identity (Moussawi 2008). I did though at times talk with individuals who deployed a language of social identity that sounded like their American and British counterparts (Bareed Mista3Jil 2009). Lebanese confront a social world in which same-sex sexuality is publicly disrespected and, in the case of behaviour, criminalised. Although,

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state persecutions seem rare (data is not available), periodic police harassment and sexual violence, the shutting down of public spaces friendly to non-heterosexuals and public scandal remind Beirutis that only heterosexuality grants full rights and respect. Lebanese hardly need such reminders since their kin, sect and peers permit no legitimate alternative to heterosexuality. Lebanese whose desire falls outside of heterosexuality are not necessarily destined to lonely and isolated lives. Informal networks have formed and at times serve as the basis of a sexual dissident community. Through the Internet or friends, or the few public spaces (clubs, bars, cafes and organisations) that exist in Beirut, non-heterosexuals find each other and become sex partners, friends, lovers or long-term partners. At times, these give rise to social networks, which are often porous around the edges and exhibit varying degrees of social density and duration depending on the types of relationships between its members, their age, career status, mobility and so on. They serve though as safe spaces for nonheterosexuals, as spaces of belonging similar to networks in the US and Europe. Between Beirut and Manhattan, London or Manchester there is then some affinity. This is not entirely unexpected since many Lebanese, especially the middle and upper classes, have been exposed to American and British gay, lesbian and queer life through popular culture, academia, the Internet, travel or living abroad. A striking example of Anglo-European influence is the recent formation of a clandestine group of non-heterosexual women called ‘Meem’. Composed of mostly young, educated middle-class women, this collective published a remarkable book of personal narratives titled Bareed Mista3Jil (2009). Noteworthy not only for its frankness and publicness, but also because its stories are organised around themes familiar to Anglo-Europeans such as the struggle with isolation and shame; coming out; affirming a lesbian, gay, bi, trans or queer identity; the migration to cities; the formation of networks and so on. Yet, even as some sexual dissidents create loose communities of belonging, these are different from their counterparts in the US or UK in one important way: sexual dissidents in Beirut have not coalesced, whether purposefully or not, into identity-based public cultures, which would include businesses, social and political organisations; institutionalised cultural production (e.g. newspapers, magazines, fiction, scholarship, art, theatre, music); and territorial enclaves. In Hamra, there is one publicly marked non-heterosexual space, a bar housed in a little-trafficked, dimly lit side street. And in Beirut, a city of well over a million residents, there is just one club and one or two pubs where non-heterosexuals gather.

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Citywide, there is one public political organisation, Helem, which is an NGO. Helem advocates for ‘gay and lesbian rights’, promotes AIDS prevention and offers social support services. It might be tempting to argue that the absence of a public sexual culture in Beirut is a product of a closeted sexual world; if, the argument goes, social controls were to be relaxed, sexual identities and public cultures would likely emerge. Perhaps. It is though telling that Meem, which has a grassroots social base, seems intent on circumventing Helem’s identity political strategy. Meem describes itself as a ‘grassroots movement where women are empowered’ and prefers the post-identity term ‘queer’ to describe its standpoint and politics (Bareed Mista3jil 2009: 2, 28). Arguably, the absence of a public sexual culture, as we know it in the Anglo-European world, speaks less to the ‘underdeveloped’ state of the gay Lebanese than to a non-Western approach to questions of sexual desire, identity and publicness. This is the theme I want to further pursue. Walking the streets of Beirut, I’ve been struck, as a gay man, by my inability to identify non-heterosexuals. Over time, I’ve come to think that there does not exist in Beirut what in Anglo-European societies we might call a gay/lesbian or queer sign system, or a symbolic code for signalling non-heterosexuality. This refers to public practices that are understood by the agent and the public at large to signify a non-heterosexual status. Such sexual signifiers are invented by non-heterosexuals in order to recognise one another and perhaps to claim a public status; they also allow heterosexuals to identify non-heterosexuals and to project a public heterosexual status by avoiding these signifying practices. In the US, gender play has often served as a gay/lesbian or queer signifier. In Beirut, non-heterosexual men seem to embrace conventional masculine styles (Moussawi 2008). Gender bending does not signal sexual status. Neither a hyper-masculine nor a non-stereotypical man will be publicly understood as anything other than heterosexual, unless accompanied by an exaggerated femininity or in the company of suspected non-heterosexuals. It was hardly surprising then that in my almost two years in Beirut I could confidently identify no more than two or three individuals as publicly enacting a non-heterosexual status. In a startling contrast to the US or UK, Beirut’s public life presents a virtually seamless culture of heterosexuality. As one young man remarked, ‘Really, you just don’t see openly gay people.’ Once again, it is possible to read this absence as evidence of a closet drama, but this reading gets shaky when we consider the link between sexual and social dissidence. I made a point of attending a wide range of cultural and political events, and talked with many cultural producers and consumers in

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Hamra. I’ve come to believe that dissent is expressed in ideological, not identity, terms. There is, in fact, a very public style for expressing dissent. An oppositional culture is prominent among bohemes, artists, leftists, secularists and intellectuals. A dissident public culture has formed, whose centre is Hamra and its varied cultural venues. This culture champions, broadly speaking, an ideological agenda that is anti-consumerist, anti-sectarian, leftist and challenges the rigid sexual, gender and class coding of bodies and self-presentations. Some non-heterosexuals and gender dissidents express their sexual difference as part of this dissident public culture. Again, Meem’s statement of purpose captures this nonidentitarian spirit. ‘We are the non-conforming sexual community of Lebanon: the lesbians, the bisexuals, the queer, the questioning women, the transgendered and transsexual men and women, the Muslims, the Christians, the Druze, the atheists and agnostics’ (Bareed Mista3jil 2009: 29). The blending of sexual dissidence into a culture of social dissidence suggests that the absence of sexual identity communities is in no small measure an expression of a resistance to identity-based models of self and politics. This is hardly surprising in a nation in which kin and sect aim to impose enveloping and inflexible identities for the self. To further explore this theme, I considered the sexual organisation of public space in Hamra. As we’ve seen, there are very few exclusively gay/lesbian or non-heterosexual spaces. The heterosexualisation of public space, reinforced by rigid binary gender norms, seems almost seamless. But, in fact, sexual dissidents use and occupy Hamra’s public space. They are regulars in cafes, which are known to be spaces where intellectuals, artists, musicians, activists and non-heterosexuals gather. In these ‘counter-spaces’ (Lefebvre 1991), freed of the surveillance and regulation of kin, sect and state, multiple differences and a robust culture of tolerance provide a space of belonging for all sorts of dissidents who might elsewhere be less welcomed. The owners and managers of these cafes often boast of their space as a haven for dissidents, including non-heterosexuals. With considerable pride, they have offered that such sexual dissidents are tolerated, indeed welcomed, so long as they avoid public affection (also holds for heterosexuals) and remain a thread in the social mosaic of their clientele. No owner wanted their cafe to become known as a homosexual place. As one cafe owner confided: ‘Gay couples sometimes frequent the café. I don’t mind but I do not want this café to be known as their regular hangout … [Also], I don’t mind if they furtively display slight affection but I make sure that it doesn’t go beyond that. If this escalates, I might ask them to stop or leave … I have no judgment against them. However,

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I need to ensure that all my customers are comfortable and at ease.’ Does this anxiety about their cafe becoming known as a homosexual hangout betray a homophobic sentiment? Probably, though it also speaks to a reality in which perceived homosexual businesses are periodically shut down (Merabet 2006). But I also think that this anxiety expresses an unease this owner feels, as a cosmopolitan, with an identitarian social logic or with the notion of an exclusive identity-based space. This cosmopolitan unease surfaced in conversations with two owners of a cafe (a male couple) that is known as welcoming to sexual dissidents. They too were put off by the idea of their cafe being known as an exclusively gay- or lesbian-identified space. They preferred a cosmopolitan framing of their cafe as one that values ambiguity, diversity, and social mixing. ‘I want this to be a place’, said one of the owners, ‘where no one judges you and where everyone feels comfortable to be themselves. Look around, this is a place that welcomes many different kinds of people. That’s what we wanted.’ The desire for a space that values ambiguity and fluidity seems also to be what draws some patrons to this cafe. A heterosexual woman confided, ‘I guess there are a lot of gay and lesbians here but it’s not noticeable … No one shows public affection and nobody wants to offend anyone else. I guess no one really cares. I don’t.’ While a culture that trades on the ambiguity and fluidity of identity provides ‘cover’ for sexual dissidents, this does not mean that it is a closeted accommodation to a regime of compulsory heterosexuality. This would likely be true in Chicago or London or Sydney, but I do not think it is the case in Beirut. In a confessionally based nation in which sectarianism serves as a master identity embedding selves in a thick regulatory order, the resistance to identity and the appeal to cosmopolitan fluidity and ambiguity is a compelling act signalling authenticity and transgression. The status of non-heterosexual desire, and the public status of sexual dissidence, is far from settled in Beirut. There is an uneasy ambivalence among Lebanese, even cosmopolitans, regarding the relation between desire, identity and public life. In part, this ambivalence is rooted in the continued moral and social authority of kin and sect which stigmatises non-heterosexuality. Most non-heterosexuals I talked with felt that at present they have little choice but to present themselves as gender conventional and to organise an intimate life that publicly admits only opposite gendered desires and partners. I did, however, meet individuals who chose to publicly defy this sexual and gender regime. They were open about their dissident status to family

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members (typically female siblings or their mothers, almost never to their fathers), friends and some co-workers. They acknowledged the grave risks and costs of their choices (estrangement from family and friends, threat of violence and public shame) but, as they gained footing in informal networks, their lives took on an integrity and sense of empowerment. Often enough, a sense of crisis loomed as these young men and women reached their 30s; there is enormous pressure from kin, sect and peers to marry and form a family. A graduate student and activist informed me that women who live as lesbians in their 20s often expect to be married by their 30s, or else they leave the country. A student researcher found that all of the 15 young women she interviewed conceded that ‘in the end they would … marry the opposite sex’ (Hachache 2008). For those who have not joined the 14 million or so in the Diaspora, the compulsory status of heterosexuality often leaves sexual dissidents with a stark choice: to live a double life or to live a dissenting life that is often squeezed outside of a moral order of respectability and honour. We’ve covered considerable ground in this section. To summarise, tolerance is, to be slightly reductive, about establishing the conditions of social inclusion. Belonging might be imagined as a series of overlapping social circles, some are cast very wide, being inclusive but thin in human texture (nation, world community, humanity); other social circles are quite circumscribed, being exclusive and socially and emotionally thick. As the circle of belonging widens, the number of groups engaged expands and one’s status is secured as a respected moral, civil person. This suggests a robust cosmopolitanism. Conversely, as the circle of belonging contracts there may come a point in which the self shifts from just an other to an inferior Other. Occupying the latter status means experiencing a withdrawal of rights and respect, diminished access to social opportunities and resources – in short, patterned symbolic exclusion and social inferiorisation. A neighbourhood or nation in which a large number of selves, groups or populations are marked as Other would undermine claims of a robust cosmopolitanism. In Hamra, Palestinians, migrant labourers and sexual and gender dissidents occupy the status of the Other. These populations are subject to multiple strategies of exclusion and inferiorisation, for example, the denial of access to jobs and schooling, disenfranchisement, territorial sequestration, violence and depersonalisation. These selves inhabit a symbolic space of moral debasement and are often imagined as menacing and polluting. How does a neighbourhood or nation that embraces cosmopolitanism manage these apparent contradictory realities?

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Lebanese exceptionalism: The case for cosmopolitanism Talking with students, residents, shopkeepers and intellectuals, Hamra was regularly described and celebrated as a unique blend of commerce and cosmopolitanism. An owner of a music shop commented: I don’t live in Hamra but I’ve been coming here since the 1960s. I’ve seen it change. During the [civil] war many Christians left... [Even though I’m Christian] I have a business in Hamra. Today it doesn’t matter what [religion] you are. You find people of many different backgrounds, classes, and countries living here. Hamra is the centre of culture, it’s very cosmopolitan… Arabs, French, Armenians, Americans, and people with different politics and lifestyles, they all mix. After living in Hamra for almost two years, I find much truth in the shopkeeper’s account. Its mixed land-use practice, its horizontal, historically layered architecture, its buzzing street life displaying bodies and selves of varied ethnonational, religious and lifestyle backgrounds recalls Jacobs’ description of Manhattan’s West Village (1961). Yet, the sheer repetition of the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism by students, residents, shop owners and intellectuals seemed rather too scripted to be taken entirely at face value. It’s not that I thought it wrong in some fundamental way, but I wondered why this discourse seemed so uncompromising. What especially gave me pause was that this discourse was uncritically voiced by just about everyone I came across, despite being aware of a public reality that denigrated and often excluded non-heterosexuals, gender dissidents, migrant labourers, Kurds and Palestinians. Moreover, with the exception of sexual dissidents, these subaltern populations are not hidden; they are observable on Hamra’s streets, in its cafes, gyms, and shops, and often in the homes of the Lebanese. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that migrant labourers along with Palestinians have built and sustained the infrastructure of Lebanese commercial, recreational and family life. From an American and European standpoint, the cosmopolitan representation seemed obviously contradicted by these patterns of disrespect and exclusion. I was puzzled. Gradually, though, I realised that, even though many of my informants have been exposed to Anglo-European cultures (travelled or lived there, fluent in English and French and consumed its pop culture), they understood the politics of difference chiefly

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in relation to Lebanon and other Arab nations. In a Lebanese and Arab context, the principal measure of tolerance was not gender and sexual variation or respect for ethnic minorities but rather attitudes towards the West and religious diversity. For Hamra residents and shop owners, being receptive to Western pop culture, and its language of individualism and rights, and showing respect for diverse religious sects is the moral baseline for judging tolerance. Indeed, against the cultural horizon of the Arab Middle East, many Lebanese I spoke with appealed to their cosmopolitan respect for cultural and religious diversity as the normative core of Lebanon’s national identity. Only Lebanon, these cosmopolitan nationalists said, weaves together the West and the East, secularism and piety and Christianity and Islam. Lebanon’s confessional, power-sharing polity and society is founded on religious and social pluralism; and this nation, and only this nation in the Arab world, has forged a hybrid identity poised between Europe to the west and the Arab world to the east. Embracing images of the ‘Phoenician nation’ or the ‘Switzerland of the Middle East’ underscores a view of Lebanon as the exceptional Arab nation. Accordingly, the rhetoric of cosmopolitan nationalism assumes a contrast between the ‘modernity’ of Lebanon (forward-looking, individualistic, pluralistic and global) and Arab ‘traditionalism’ (backward-looking, provincial, collectivist, intolerant). The championing of cosmopolitanism by many Lebanese not only signals a geopolitical division between Lebanon and other Arab nations, but also establishes a symbolic division inside Lebanon. Specific social spaces, institutions, figures and movements are said to signify Lebanon’s cosmopolitanism and modernity while other spaces, institutions, figures and movements symbolise Arab provincialism and traditionalism. For example, advocates of a cosmopolitan Lebanon identify figures such as the former Prime Minister Rafiq Harari and the current President Michel Sleiman, documents such as the 1926 Constitution and the 1989 Taif Accord, institutions such as the military, movements such as the ‘Cedar Revolution’ and social spaces such as Hamra and the Central Business District as displaying this nation’s core national culture. Of course, there are conflicts over these core symbols precisely because of their national significance. To the extent that Lebanese nationalist discourses assume an internal division between normatively national and denigrated provincial neighbourhoods, the claim by liberal nationalists that Hamra exemplifies Lebanon’s core national spirit (cosmopolitan and modern) assumes its absence in other neighbourhoods in Beirut. This symbolic division was

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often sounded by informants. Leila, a long-time Hamra resident, insisted that ‘most of Beirut is still back in the day … We’re talking about people who live in another time, … people who are tribal and do not want change … Hamra … is different. It is the most modern, diverse of all Beirut’s neighbourhoods. We [residents of Hamra] live in this century!’ So, what makes Hamra modern and cosmopolitan? Informants emphasised its unique connection to Euro-American culture and its dynamic mix of Western and Arab culture. In particular, they highlighted the pivotal role of the American University and the Lebanese American University, the steady flow of European and Arab tourists, and a history of coexistence between sects and between secularists and the pious. A pub manager boasted that [T]he people … in Hamra accept things that other people in Beirut would not … Today Hamra is even less diverse than what it had been thirty years ago, and still it is the most diverse district in Beirut and Lebanon. Hamra can also be considered a melting pot of identities and backgrounds. People from all over Lebanon live and work in Hamra as well as Arab, Western, African and Asian foreigners from all over the world. In Hamra, Christians, Muslims and Druze live somewhat of a harmonious existence. Apart from the downtown, which is the seat of government and also serves as a common space for social mixing, and perhaps the corniche, which draws diverse people to the seaside, other neighbourhoods in Beirut were said to lack a vibrant culture of diversity. This was explained by the absence of an American and European presence (West Beirut with the exception of Hamra) or the absence of a Muslim presence (East Beirut). The enthusiastic embrace of cosmopolitanism among Hamra’s residents, but also among many Beirutis who think of Lebanon as forwardlooking and worldly, should perhaps also be understood in the context of the intensification of sectarianism during and after the war. In the course of the civil war, religiously mixed neighbourhoods disappeared. Beirut was split between a Christian East and a Muslim West. The territorialisation of sectarian identities reached extreme forms by the war’s end. For example, West Beirut changed from 35 per cent Christian before the war to 5 per cent by its end. Pre-war east Beirut was 8 per cent Muslim, but by 1989 Muslims counted for just 1 per cent (Nasr 2003: 148–150). Apart from Hamra and some marginal areas in West Beirut, especially around the Palestinian refugee camps (in particular, Sabra-Shatila and Burj alBarajneh), there are very few neighbourhoods left in Beirut that have a

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dynamic religious mix. By presenting Hamra as a model of social tolerance and sectarian coexistence, this neighbourhood’s cosmopolitanism can be advanced as an urban and national alternative to sectarian polarisation and conflict. Implicit in the discourse of urban cosmopolitanism is also a normative claim: Beirut should be modelled after Hamra. But is cosmopolitanism a plausible model for Beirut? In important ways, Hamra is sociologically unique. It is a singularly immigrant-based urban neighbourhood. Because of the location of the American University and the American-Lebanese University, a professional, cosmopolitan class of Americans and Americanised Lebanese have shaped Hamra’s public life. And only in Hamra is there a robust culture of personal and social experimentation, including a dissident public culture of activists, artists, musicians, actors, dancers, poets and writers. While this urban culture has not embraced public displays of sexual and gender dissidence, such dissidents are welcomed in many of its cafes, pubs and cultural venues, something inconceivable almost anywhere else in Beirut. Hamra’s diversity and culture of lifestyle experimentation and political dissidence bears a closer affinity with Manhattan’s East Village or East London’s ‘Spitalfields’ than to the rest of Beirut. If Hamra can be described as a version of urban cosmopolitanism, neighbourhoods such as Dahiya (Shia), Tariq al-Jadidah (Sunni) Mazraa or Ashrafiah (Christian) represent a type of ‘urban communitarianism’. These neighbourhoods feature a majoritarian sect, which has enough power to project their aspiration for a sectarian-based public culture. One experiences this sectarian power almost immediately upon entering virtually any Beirut neighbourhood, for example, in its public posters of notable figures, flags or the prominence of its churches or mosques. At the same time, the sectarian aspiration to transform its majoritarian into a hegemonic status has not necessarily been successful. To the extent that sectarian communities lack the state power to enforce neighbourhood dominance – for example, to control who enters and exits a neighbourhood – these hegemonic projects are at best incomplete. The reality is that people of different ethnicities, religions and classes circulate more or less freely across neighbourhoods, encountering few restrictions in terms of work or residence. These neighbourhoods suggest a ‘loose’ or relaxed type of urban communitarianism. Cosmopolitanism and communitarian represent two normative and empirical urban types. Whereas the former highlights a public culture that makes social diversity and lifestyle variation salient, the latter emphasises cultural solidarity. As we’ve seen, some of the conditions that produce

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diversity and cultural experimentation in Hamra are sociologically unique, making it less transferable as a model for all of Beirut’s neighbourhoods. And even if there are compelling political reasons to enhance diversity in some neighbourhoods (e.g. lowering sectarian tensions), this does not necessarily entail abandoning the communitarian organisation of a neighbourhood. It is less the communitarianism of some Beirut neighbourhoods that should give us pause than the brand of sectarian politics that has marked post-war Beirut. It is to this politics that we turn by way of a conclusion.

Cosmopolitan dreams and the uncivil politics of paranoia Recall the originary national myth of Lebanon. Born out of the dualities of sea and mountain, city and village, west and east, this nation was destined to be the exceptional Arab nation – multicultural and dynamic (Hourani 1946; Reed and Ajami 1988). This nation of under four million, graced with natural beauty and a restless enterprising people, imagines itself as having an expansive geopolitical significance: to serve as a model of civic pluralism and cosmopolitanism in the Arab world. At the foundation of this nation is the sect. Lebanon has written tolerance into its Constitution by recognising the political and civil status of some 18 ethno-religious communities. Each sect has its own clerical hierarchy, institutions, personal status laws, media (newspapers, TV and radio programs) and political organisations and leaders. In principle, a social field of multiple sects provides fertile ground for cultural exchange and innovation. Lebanon’s experiment in ethno-religious pluralism has often been championed as a bold alternative to an Arab world otherwise mired in tradition, tribalism and patrimonialism. But, as Max Weber long ago taught us, history is littered with the bad outcomes of the best of intentions. Far from delivering an exemplary model of liberal nationalism, Lebanon’s sectarianism has left a trail of hatred, bloodshed and chaos. A history of civic violence (1958, 1975–90, 2005, 2006 and 2008) has made this country into an iconic symbol of national failure. The civil war officially ended in 1990, but the culture that took shape during the war years did not abruptly come to an end. Memories of these years are still vivid for many Lebanese. Beirut’s post-war topography is a daily reminder. The bombed out buildings and the once stunning Ottoman villas that were claimed by militias or abandoned to squatters and then simply abandoned, bear witness to years of rage and ruin. The landmarks that secured a sense of place, a tree-lined street or the family butcher’s shop, these too are gone and the awareness of their

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absence evokes a past that cannot be easily forgotten. Gone too are the neighbours or the friends of the family who fled to avoid the violence. Closer to home, there is the brother or cousin lost in battle or to a stray bullet, the sister or uncle who chose exile over chaos, the best friend whose leg was lost or psyche traumatised, or the parents who endured the war years but now live in a state of dread. These losses and dislocations evoke a past very much alive in the present, and infuse it with a profound melancholy (Makdisi 1999: 76–7, 258). Some of the most poignant and compelling writing of the past two decades has underscored the point that the culture formed during 15 years of social polarisation, often brutally intimate violence (170,000 dead), and traumatising dislocations (almost one million citizens fled Lebanon while well over one million were internally displaced) has not surrendered its force in the post-war years (e.g. Alameddine 1999; Najjar 2006; al-Daif 2007; Mills 2007). Many Lebanese still live inside a war culture. At its centre is the sect, imagined as a quasi-national homeland. Lebanese may wax eloquent about their national pride, but it is the sect to which they turn for security, jobs, welfare, education and an abiding sense of identity and belonging. But, as is true of many homelands, the world beyond its borders is replete with risks and dangers. Sectarian solidarity is forged in part around a construction of the sectarian other as an enemy, as a threat so immediate and consequential to self, kin, sect and nation that it has the magnitude of a force of evil. It is as if all of the anxieties, resentments and hatreds shouldered by Lebanese have been projected onto the sectarian other. It is perhaps this inflation of the sectarian other into a demonic figure, and the simultaneous purification of one’s sectarian community, which made possible the seeming banality of killing (e.g. Najjar 2006: 56; Younes 2008: 223). To annihilate the sectarian other and to degrade all of her traces (flags, icons, bodies, buildings, property) became an act of personal and collective redemption. With its polarising moral logic of evil and redemption, sectarianism has been sustained by the territorialisation of sectarian identities and the hyper-politicisation of sectarian conflicts in the post-war years. However, the cessation of civil violence has meant that sustaining sectarian allegiance and hatred of the other has relied less on militarisation than on symbolic practices. The appearance of a personality cult around sectarian leaders, public rallies brandishing the emblems of collective identity and the demonisation of outsiders sustains sectarian solidarity but at the cost of the depersonalisation of the sectarian other. As many Lebanese turn to their sect to secure a sense of belonging and to experience self-ennoblement and transcendence, a culture of fear and

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rage towards the other is preserved. Almost two decades after the end of the war, sectarian identity is still the chief axis dividing insider and outsider. In this culture of sectarianism, the sectarian outsider is not just a stranger but is a menacing Other threatening the degradation of the pure self and community. She is imagined as an unrepentant and unredeemable figure eliciting fear and loathing. While acts of collective annihilation are no longer options, symbolic denigration and evisceration are possible. After the assassination of the former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005, Lebanese politics regressed into a war fought on the terrain of symbolic violence. The politics of accommodation and compromise, at the heart of any consociational polity, has been overwhelmed by a politics of rage whose aim is to obliterate political opponents by exposing their evil intentions and nefarious plots. This is a politics that trades on fears of shadowy, haunting schemes and secret manoeuvres; it shapes a political culture of pervasive mistrust and apocalyptic calls for purges and new beginnings. This politics of paranoia is a recipe for a stalled, barely functioning government which has been Lebanon’s fate since the Cedar Revolution. Since the war’s ending, a barely functioning sectarian pluralism has coexisted with what Jean Said Makdisi, in her searing memoir of the war years (1999), once referred to as ‘a generalised rage’. How is this coexistence managed? What sort of defence formation makes this accommodation possible and, to return to the initial impulse of this chapter, how is it manifested in Beirut’s street life? Like other affects such as shame or fear, rage is less a discrete, separable unit than a diffuse energy that structures the psyche’s emotional economy. Rage cannot be easily dissipated, walled off or abandoned to the past. And, if it has not been ‘worked through’ in the form of civic rites of commemoration or reconciliation, it can at least be managed, and indeed must be if this affect is continuously produced by the social order. At the level of street life, rage may be controlled by a self well practiced in the art of disciplining a troubled inner world beneath a glossy surface. This is a self skilled in navigating spaces in ways that neither invite nor repulse anonymous others. This self, at least as he ventures beyond his sectarian world, displays an opaque surface, as if a curtain is drawn around his interior. The private territory of the self can only be pierced if invited inside. The other, effectively all anonymous others since insider/ outsider status is often not outwardly marked, is to be engaged minimally, condensed to sharply compressed gestures of recognition. Eye contact is to be avoided, communicative exchange streamlined to polite,

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highly scripted essentials and expressive embellishments minimised as the self negotiates a terrain populated by enemies. This urban self cultivates an indifference to the other that might appear to the foreigner as a steely self-regard. Such selves are able to move speedily and with apparent ease through urban space as they are relieved of the burdens of performatively thick engagements with others. This cultivated indifference towards others gives to Beirut’s streets something of its speed, its impressive play of form and movement, its fluidity and apparent lightness of being, even if this surface conceals passions fired by fear and loathing. Something of this troubling affective underworld bubbles up now and again, disturbing the slick surface. Amidst the steady flow of bodies and machines, ‘micro-wars’ are taking place, for example, in the all-too-serious jockeying for advantage among drivers, in the rivalry between pedestrians and motorists as they intersect at road crossings, in the sidewalk battles between pedestrians as they manoeuvre to claim its narrow space and in the notorious free-for-all that passes for waiting lines in Beirut. These civic skirmishes, so at odds with a polite culture that places enormous significance on glossy, inviting surfaces, betrays a world in which a generalised rage is still pervasive. This urban self is not to be confused with Simmel’s stranger (Simmel 1950) or the clinically observant gaze of Benjamin’s flaneur (Benjamin et al. 2006). Beirut’s urban dweller assumes the pose of a battle-scarred, war-weary self who still dwells inside a war culture driven by paranoid fantasies of an other plotting to bring about her degradation and (symbolic) annihilation.

Acknowledgements Many thanks to Patricia Clough, Jeff Alexander, Linda Nicholson, Sari Hanafi, Ghassan Moussawi, Samir Khalaf, and the AUB students who contributed significantly to the research and were often a delight to teach.

6 Naming Ourselves: Recognising Racism and Mestizaje in Mexico Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa

Introduction1 Yes, I would say I’m indígena [indigenous], maybe because of all these ideas about nationalism … and the education system in Mexico that makes you recognise yourself as such, but when, for example, you’re out, and you run to cross the street [instead of just walking], and somebody shouts at you, ‘oh, you’re an Indio’. You say: ‘no, don’t call me an Indio because I’m not an Indio’. There is like a problem to acknowledge it … we don’t know how to recognise if we are indígenas, or if we are mestizos, or if we are Spaniards and descend from the Spaniards (Montserrat, 29, Mexico City) Mestiza/o is a racial category that emerged as a key component of the ideological myth of formation of the Mexican nation, namely mestizaje, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In such a project of state formation, Mexican is equivalent to Mestiza. It refers to those who represent Mexicanness and therefore those who are closer to the model of the ideal subjects of the Mexican Mestiza nation. Mestizaje, as this ideological framework, boosts an implied rhetoric of inclusiveness while concealing processes of exclusion and racism ‘based on the idea of the inferiority of blacks and indigenous peoples and, in practice, of discrimination against them’ (Wade 2001: 849). Mestiza is then seen as a term both relatively ‘neutral’ (i.e. all Mexicans are Mestizas/os) but also as highly ‘loaded’ (implying possibilities of inclusion and exclusion to the national myth). To recognise racism is to make a formal declaration of a discriminatory practice. Recognising racism in a context such as Mexico involves 122

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bringing the unrecognised into the boundaries of recognition: Mexican practices of racism are currently unrecognisable. Firstly, this is because of the complexity of their everydayness – the multiplicity of ways racist practices pervade social life. Secondly, the protracted separation of race and nation in social, governmental and academic discourses over the twentieth century has created a situation where racism, as a structuring principle that organises social life and creates ‘racist logics’, is not recognised institutionally or publicly, but is lived as an individual-embodied experience. Such experience is seldom related to the now questionable understandings of ‘race’ and wider power and structural dynamics, but more often perceived as personal fault or ‘just how things are’. This scenario is further complicated, as explained earlier, by the prevalent racial discourse of mestizaje rooted in discourses of national identity and citizenship. Drawing from empirical research on contemporary practices of racism and understandings of the discourse of mestizaje, this chapter presents an examination of the ambiguities of Mestiza identity as an unproblematised but racialised identity. This analysis considers the limits of racial recognition in what could be considered a raceless (Goldberg 2002) context. This context has fostered a process of racial and racist normalisation that allows Mexican people to express and be convinced by the widespread idea that in Mexico there is no racism because ‘we are all mixed’. Mexicans do not recognise themselves as racial subjects, but as national subjects and citizens. In this scenario, recognition of racism is not preceded by the explicit claim of belonging to the specific Mestiza racial identity but a citizenship status. As Montserrat notes previously, while there is ‘like a problem’ of acknowledging ‘what’ Mexicans are and ‘we don’t know how to recognise’, there is a stark claim when specific situations, like crossing a street running, are unavoidably attached to understandings of what Indígena people ‘are’ and ‘do’. Paradoxically, what Montserrat is describing, the shouting in the street, the despising of the uncivilised Indígena, is not commonly understood as racism, rather as ‘just what Indígena people do’ and how they are usually treated. She definitely does not want to be (mis)recognised: ‘I am not an Indio.’ In this chapter, I explore why there is a difficulty in identifying simultaneously as citizens and racialised subjects, and argue that taking on Mestiza identity is a precarious process. On the one hand, as an identity akin to ‘whiteness’ and with the promise of privilege, the space of the Mestiza becomes the unnamed favoured national paradigm. On the other, mestizaje disorients any clear sense of coherence between a racial discourse and a

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discriminatory practice. What are the implications of bringing racism to the fore and recognising its practice in everyday life? This chapter is not about claims of recognition that have not been heard. On the contrary this chapter addresses how, in order to claim recognition of racism as a practice, a sense of belonging to a racial identity might need to be suspended for the Mexican case. The claim to Mestiza, Indígena, Spanish or Afro-Mexican identities would not necessarily bring about, as direct consequence, the recognition of racism as if it were a simple linear process (recognise identity – denounce discriminatory practices – demand rights – defend identity). Rather, it is the recognition of racism, its visibility, which could move the debates and possible solutions forward. Although the variety of racist practices and the specificity of the experience of racism in Mexico have lost their explicit reference to notions of race and racial identity, as I will explain next, they are nevertheless, painfully vivid, ambiguously acknowledged as somehow ‘wrong’, uncomfortable, ‘weird’ (‘I am not an Indio’) but also ‘normal’, common, ‘just how things are’. It is such ambiguity that opens a space of hope and movement. Here I will firstly introduce the empirical research which this analysis is based on and offer an overall context of Mexican racial ideologies and how racism operates. I will then relate this to a discussion of the debate on recognition and the tensions found in the empirical analysis.

Mestiza identity and mestizaje on the agenda of racism This analysis draws on a piece of research that explored opinions and experiences of a group of Mexican women about racism, mestizaje and national identity through focus-group discussions and life-story interviews based on family photographs (Moreno Figueroa 2006). The sample included 40 Mexican women between the ages of 18 and 55, living in three Mexican cities – Huajuapan, León and Mexico City – engaged in a variety of activities, including, for example, academics, civil servants, designers, housewives, journalists, lawyers, photographers, political activists and rural teachers. Their stories give us an exploratory picture of ‘how racism feels’ in Mexico today, what it means in everyday life and how ‘the national’ has been rendered invisible by its own racialised and racialising elements and processes. Furthermore, these women’s accounts point towards the ambivalences and difficulties of racial identification while the experience of racism keeps creeping into their everyday lives. I am interested in doing two things in this section. Firstly, I want once again to put on the agenda the Mestiza population (Wade 2001, 2005),

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the ones who position themselves as ‘the’ Mexicans and the official parameters of difference to all other national, ethnic and racialised groups settled in the country. I am interested in exploring how feasible, desirable and problematic it is for this dominant group to be recognised as such. Secondly, I want to discuss racism in Mexico as an organising principle or core social configuration shaping contemporary social relations. That is, paraphrasing Appiah (1994), understanding racism as the insults to the dignity and limitations to autonomy that people live by but also reproduce and most of the time could or would be able to account for, albeit in a justificatory tone: ‘this is how things are.’ By discussing mestizaje as the prevailing racial discourse of the national state and moreover, as an underlying structuring motif of everyday life, I will also address how such a discourse can be understood as a form of whiteness as privilege, which I have already explored elsewhere (Moreno Figueroa 2010). Mestizaje, a term heavily invested with racial ideologies and discourses of miscegenation, describes both the biological and cultural ‘mixing’ of Spanish and Latin American indigenous peoples. In the Mexican context, mestizaje refers to a historical process that has created the subject of Mexican national identity: the Mestizo. Both categories – mestizaje and Mestizo identity – and their multiple meanings are a direct consequence of the ways in which racial discourses developed in Mexico (for a more detailed discussion see Moreno Figueroa 2008; Vieira Powers 2002). Mestizo is then a polyvalent category that relates to different points in Mexican history and refers simultaneously to a person of mixed European and Latin American indigenous descent; a flexible social identity given to the different racial mixtures that emerged in the colonial period in Latin America by an array of ‘combinations’ between Indígenas, African descendents and European settlers; and to the subject of national identity presented as the embodiment of the ‘promise of improvement through race mixture for individuals and the nation’ (Wade 2001: 849). While I will not go into the details of this history here, I want to stress three important points. Firstly, the extent of ‘racial’ mixing that occurred with the conquest (1521) and colonisation (until 1810) is beyond comparison. While the Mestizo was firstly conceptualised as a bastard, the enormous growth of this population group required an unavoidable shift in its social positioning and perception. Secondly, during the colonial period, the Spanish tried to simulate a particular homogenous version of Spanish society superimposed upon a rather complex and diverse colonial setting. Such efforts emphasised the importance of hierarchy and caste

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with lasting effects in the emerging social order. However, relationships between colonial actors were not clear-cut. The colonial system was both unstable in its social categorisations and weak in terms of laws and social regulations. It was possible to move up or down in a transgenerational fashion using strategies of passing and acculturation. Furthermore, with enough vision and resources anybody could become ‘closer to the white, black or indígena poles in few generations through marriage strategies’ (Lomnitz 1993: 271).2 Finally, throughout the colonial period, it was possible for the Mestiza to gradually become a highly flexible social identity within a caste-like system of social organisation (Chance 1979; Knight 1990). Knight suggests that after the War of Independence in 1810 a transformation of the racial status of Mestiza identity began and that, in a complementary fashion rather than in opposition, Mestiza identity became ‘an achieved as well as an ascribed status’ (Knight 1990: 73). People could acquire by effort the status of Mestiza; they could work on it as a personal project which was both socially accepted and expected. At the same time, they could claim to be a Mestiza because they were ‘born’ one. So, during the colonial and the post-independence periods, instability and imprecision become the characteristics by which the complexity of identity formation acquired sense and meaning. With the Revolution of 1910 and the nation-building rationale already in motion throughout the nineteenth century, Mestiza identity was imagined as the preferred subject of national identity, ideologically reconstructed to create a new sense of nation. The all-encompassing Mestiza identity and its accompanying ideology of mestizaje were now framed in terms of national belonging; it was ‘the’ Mexican and the bonds of Mexicanness that were thereafter persistently (re)created. As I have discussed recently (Moreno Figueroa 2010), mestizaje became the founding cornerstone and ‘trajectory for the formation’ (Wade 2001: 849) of the new Latin American nations. Echoing its earlier colonial use, mostly in biological terms, within nation-building rationales, it also started incorporating cultural and moral processes of inclusion and gave substance to the Mestiza national subject. Mestizaje’s promise of inclusion not only veiled its discriminatory logic but it was paradoxically a racial counter-discourse, promoted by the ruling elites, to ideas of purity and ‘white’ hegemonic discourses emanating from European and US scientific racism, social Darwinism and eugenics at the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries. This is how it is possible to understand that mestizaje offers the subjects of the nation a process of both cultural and physical flexibility, of racial mixing

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that, contrary to the US ‘one-drop rule’, is able to enter in processes of whitening and therefore direct its legacy towards ‘perfection’. Indeed, the one-drop rule, which assigns the child of a mixed race couple to a less privileged status, does not apply in the Mexican context where it is precisely the mixed, the Mestizo, who was promoted as the national subject with the aspiring promise of inclusion. However, this promise brought with it the idea that the ‘race should be improved’, and if it is not, if people’s appearances do not approximate to the ‘white ideal’, their ‘failure’ involved blaming them as individuals for their lack of adequate planning and skills in passing. For example, consider the following account, which I will explore further later on, of Consuelo – one of the participants of this research: My grandmother has a brother who is very, very moreno [dark skinned], and he married a woman who’s got very dark skin, so all their children are really dark. They call them: los morenos. And they’d say: ‘how come he married her? Can’t he see what she looks like?’ (Consuelo, 29, Leon) So while cultural, social and moral uplifting – also key elements of the parameters of whiteness as a form of privilege – were offered as being possible, the body, its colour and features could not easily be dismissed as of lesser importance. While the official government policy that emanated from the Revolution efficiently attempted to homogenise a sense of nation that prioritises shared national/cultural aspects of identity, rather than racial ones, there has been no recognition that racism has a life of its own. Even within recent policies of multiculturalism that have started now to move towards a recognition of ethnic difference (of the others, for example, Indígenas or Afro-Mexicans) (De La Peña 2006; Hale 2006), racist practices have managed to become invisible and normalised due to losing their referent to explicit understandings of race and racial identity. This has created parallels to what Goldberg analyses as ‘racelessness’ (Goldberg 2002; Moreno Figueroa 2010) within state and social organisation. This association between a racial identity and an equality status has been oversimplified in its rationale. Even taking into account the ways in which racial signifiers in Mexico have been transformed by the perception of mestizaje throughout time, as well as by the effect of social stratification along class lines, the colonial importance of hierarchy and caste has had lasting effects. Racial discourses have over time faded away behind national, cultural and economic explanations of social hierarchies.

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As a consequence, their effects have been somehow masked. In this way Mexico has hidden and also grown different forms of racism. So, notions such as ‘passing’ towards ‘whiteness’ remain present alongside a strong equation between Mestiza and Mexican which has denied the dynamics of racism and discrimination that are lived throughout all the society including this population group. De la Cadena, alongside scholars researching racial discourses and practices throughout the continent (Warren and Twine 2002; Wade 2005; Goldberg 2009), argues that in Latin America it is necessary to confront ‘the relative ease with which pervasive and very visible discriminatory practices coexist with the denial of racism’ (2001: 16). For her, it is the racialisation of Latin American culture that has enabled the ‘denied’ reproduction of racist practices. In her terms, modern practices of racism in Latin America appeal to ‘culture’ to make them legitimate and normalised. This is how ‘within this culturalist definition, race could be biology, but could also be the soul of the people, their culture, their sprit and their language’ (2001: 16). The discourse denies racism but upholds cultural differences. This is how we can explain that racist practices actively invade people’s lives despite the professed absence of racism in Mexican culture. The effectiveness of these practices relies on their capacity to normalise certain social conditions as well as ways of thinking and acting.

Bringing racialised life into being The issue is not simply how what is out there can be uncovered and brought to light, though this remains an important issue. It is also about what might be made in the relations of investigation, what might be brought into being. And, indeed, it is about what should be brought into being. (Law and Urry 2004: 396) How is it possible then to discuss the recognition of racial identities in a context such as the Mexican one? Could we claim for recognition of racist practices, say, rather than racial identities? Must we bring Mestiza identity into being? Taylor in ‘The Politics of Recognition’ (1994) argues for the need and demand for recognition, for the urgency to acknowledge the links between recognition and identity, and how identity is not only shaped by recognition, but that ‘misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being’. (Taylor 1994: 25). His claim is then that recognising

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identity is the necessary step towards a possibility of unveiling discrimination due to such an identity, so as to, for example, eliminate racism. Appiah (1994), in his response to Taylor, makes it possible to discuss the complexity of racial politics in Mexico. For Appiah, claims for recognition of collective identities imply an expectation of specific patterns of behaviour and norms as relatively fixed scripts that shape the life plans of those invested in such identities. For him, then it would be logical to argue that if people suffer insults to their dignity and limitations to autonomy due to their identity, it is their right, on the one hand, to recognise such identities as a ‘valuable part of what they centrally are’ and rewrite such negative life-scripts into positive ones, and, on the other, to demand its public and social recognition to stop a seriously wrong situation of denigration and indignity. However, departing from Taylor’s position, Appiah suggests there is a problem with this approach which can very well frame the Mexican case: And if one is to be Black in a society that is racist then one has to deal constantly with assaults on one’s dignity. In this context, insisting on the right to live a dignified life will not be enough. It will not even be enough to require a concession that being Black counts naturally or to some degree against one’s dignity. And so one will end up asking to be respected as a Black. (1994: 161) Here we can see where Appiah is going with his critique of Taylor, and how it can contribute to explain the Mexican context. The recognition of a racial identity, such as Mestiza, black, or Indígena, implies the acceptance of ‘race’ and the specific positioning of such identities in the lower levels of a racial hierarchy with ‘white’ at the top, as an inherent characteristic that actually counts against one’s dignity. While there might be a strategic need to construct and acknowledge such identities, this does not give the individuals that choose or are located there an insurance of a good life in the long run. Identity life-scripts create expectations and demands, as well as a constant reification of the process of proving the authenticity of such identity. Then for Appiah, ‘The politics of recognition requires that one’s skin color, one’s sexual body should be acknowledged politically in ways that make it hard for those who want to treat their skin and their sexual body as personal dimensions of the self. And personal means not secret, but not so tightly scripted’ (1994: 163). Demanding then that the only way to acknowledge the insults to dignity and limitations to a good life is by

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denouncing racism requires people live their life ‘around my “race” or my sexuality’ (1994: 163). This in itself can be thought of as a further insult to the dignity of all human beings. So what are the implications in Mexico of having a scenario where, on the one hand, racial identifications are not acknowledged through the rationale of identity politics, but, on the other, the racialised embodied everyday experience is lived, quite strikingly, as relational, contextual and set within a shifting continuum from Indígenas to Mestizos to the privileged whiter body? A first point to consider is that this has meant that in Mexico there is no clear group with which one (collectively) can, in the dialogical sense that both Taylor and Appiah embrace, create a sense of us and them. As if you were to say, we are all ‘straight’ and ‘gay’, we are all ‘black’ and ‘white’ or we are all Indígenas and Mestizos and ‘white’. In the Mexican case, this contraposition has happened when Indígena peoples have set themselves (and/or have been set by policy makers such as post-revolutionary indigenista officials (Gutiérrez 1999; Saldivar Tanaka 2003, 2004)) as a collective ethnic/racial identity seeking social, cultural and political recognition from the Mexican state and the majority/dominant population. The more recent socially (and academically) recognised Afro-Mexicans or Afro-Mestizos (Hoffmann and Rodríguez 2007) have also been entering this space of collective assertion (although it is still debatable how much this is of their own making or, as has happened to the indigenous peoples, to what extent they have also been ‘named’ externally and framed within specific racialised discourses (Knight 1990)). There is also a growing body of research about other migrant groups (Bonfil Batalla 1993), for example, about Jews (Gleizer Salzman 2000), Gypsies (Pérez Romero 2001), the Chinese (Hu-Dehart 1980) and the Lebanese (Páes Oropeza 1984). I would argue that there even has been a relative ease of recognition towards all of these groups. Such ease is possible under a model where racism is understood as a form of exclusion and interplay of privilege exercised by the dominant group (the Mestizos/as) in opposition to the excluded minorities. This ease is possible from the privileged viewpoint of the Mestizos who are able to go beyond their own racialised position to assign the other as such, as racial being, for example, as Indígena, as black or Afro, as Jew, as Chinese: those identities that really are construed as racially different in an essentialist idiom, which have their ethnic characteristics, their religious practices, their ‘traditions’. This view works within the frame of mestizaje and its homogenising process which allows this judging, powerful, but also limited and contradictory, social group of Mestizos to apparently remain largely invisible. This is why none of those groups are the focus of this chapter. The Mestizas/os have avoided

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reflecting about the ways in which they participate in the workings of racism. While the assumption I present here that there is a majority population core also racialised but usually unnamed might be an unusual claim given the assimilation drive of Mexican nationalism and even within the more recent multicultural trend, I am still willing to push this positioning to its extreme, and evidence how and if the Mestizos have managed to avoid explicit and self-evident racialisation processes.

Recognition and belonging So how can we move towards the recognition of a discriminatory practice suspending the demand of acknowledging Mestizo identity? Why is it that some groups can claim recognition and try to challenge exclusion, and another, the Mexican Mestizo, does not engage in such a claim? Recognition and belonging are not two sides of the same coin. It seems that for this context affirming belonging to an identity might not be the expected logical route to be able to claim recognition and therefore demand the eradication of racist practices. What is at stake in the Mexican case is not whether people recognise themselves as Mestizos and then act on this, pursuing a series of rights, but if they are able to understand the racialised and racialising aspects of everyday life and demand that these are made explicit and visible, denouncing, preventing and sanctioning racism. Why is there a difficulty in identifying racialised subjects? The following extract derives from a discussion about the (im)possibility of naming oneself as Mestiza, that is, of racialising Mexican identity: MARÍA:

And why don’t you identify as Mestiza, but you do as Mexican? ROCÍO: It’s not that there’s a difference, they are two things, two different aspects. CARMEN: I didn’t say that, I’ve never said that I don’t identify as Mestiza, of course I identify as Mestiza. MARÍA: But do you name yourself as Mestiza? I mean what are you? Mestiza? CARMEN: I’ve never had the need to name myself. Carmen’s emphasis on her exemption from naming her own racial identity reveals the possibility of the traps of mestizaje and its racist logic. Such a trap is located between, on the one hand, not being required to name oneself and, on the other, living in a social space that names us in other ways that visibly mark us and that has been permeated by

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racist understandings and practices. But who can avoid this naming? As argued before, such a possibility is fragile and contradictory. It requires people be able to locate themselves within the limits of acceptability of the imaginary of the nation, that is, to embody the preferred subject, the Mestiza/o. However, most of the women interviewed in my research did not describe themselves as Mestizas, with the exception of those who knew of close relatives in their recent family history who came from other countries or specific Indígena groups. It seems that calling themselves ‘Mexican’ is more relevant and they think it is also less problematic. This has also been enhanced by the current governmental media campaigns that have re-appropriated nationalist discourse, celebrating the 200th anniversary of Independence from Spain (16 September 1810) and the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution (20 November 1910). However, while many of the participants had not even considered the matter till the moment of the focus-group discussion, they felt that, given the question, they would consider themselves Mestizas. For example, Susana said: I’ve never used the term and it never occurred to me whether I’m Mestiza or not … well, of course … if I think about it then yes, it’s sort of true. (Susana, 29, León) In general, the terms ‘mestizaje’ and ‘Mestiza’ were not in the everyday vocabulary of the participants. All of them were familiar with the terms, mainly because they are used in history courses in elementary and secondary education. However, such terms are not commonly used in the media or even in political or official discourses. Some authors have argued that in general Latin American inhabitants explicitly identify themselves as Mestizas. Chance (1979), for example, argues that ‘Mestiza’ is usually employed as a shorthand descriptive notion that comprises the entire non-Indígena and non-Spanish population. I would agree with him that in popular discourses the terms ‘mestizaje’ and ‘Mestiza’ are sometimes used as a means of identification with Mexican national culture; nevertheless, it is much more common to talk about ‘Mexican culture’ or of being ‘Mexican’ (though this may be related to the 30 years that have passed since Chance’s writing). For example, Lorena explicitly affirms with a sense of surprise: Me … defining myself as Mestiza? Not really, more like Mexican (Lorena, 33, León)

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For other participants, there was also a negative feeling about the word ‘Mestiza’ and its relations to Spanish or indígena cultures. If they ask me in the street if I’m Mestiza, I would say no […] I don’t identity myself like that, I haven’t even asked myself that before. I also think that in our culture […] it is much more valuable to say you are more Spanish than Indígena. I identify myself as Mexican, […] Mestiza? That seems very remote, like something that doesn’t concern me directly. (Lucía, 29, Mexico City) The previous example brings out the problematic use of the term ‘Mestiza’ as a form of identity. The link with either Spanish or Indígena forbears brings out the stereotypes and myths about the diverse explanations of the conquest and the history of the process of building the nation. However, in the following extract, Viviana has a different view: I think that it very much depends how you define the word. What does it mean to be Mestizo? … Being Mestizo is like a betrayal, isn’t it? Not talking about the physical features, about race, etc., I look at myself and there’s nothing Spanish about me … So, beyond the physical, it has more to do with being close to the culture, to your Mexican roots, doesn’t it? And here it seems that anyone who is not close to those roots, regardless of the physical features, seems like a traitor, as if somebody who is Mestizo is the result, the consequence of the conquest … So that’s how I understand it. Do I consider myself Mestiza? I haven’t asked myself this before, but when I look at myself, I say: ‘I’m Mexican and that’s cool’. From the colour of my skin … my features, I say: ‘ok, good’. I mean … I don’t know if it is the result of that combination, Mestiza, Spanish, but well, I see myself, and I say: ‘it’s cool to be of this colour and from here.’ (Viviana, 25, Mexico City) For Viviana, there is a particular perception of mestizaje as an act of betrayal, meaning that if somebody were to accept her mixture, she will be perceived as ‘a traitor’. Viviana is implying that to accept being a Mestiza would mean being disloyal to her ‘Mexican roots’, distancing herself from her culture, and to accept being the ‘result, the consequence of the conquest’. However, she recognises herself as Mexican and has a good feeling about it. She relates this feeling of betrayal to the ignorance of or a lack of awareness of or distance from Mexican culture and roots.

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She locates herself as being close to those roots and for many of the participants such cultural roots are seen as deriving from the Indígena cultures. This is a common understanding which suggests that it is hard to locate Spanish inheritance. However, in the official primary school textbooks, and in relation to an economy of cultural influences, the presentation of Indígena cultures stresses the ‘dead indio’ and abstracts their material culture in a rather distorted and superficial way (Gutiérrez 1999: 77). At the same time, Spanish cultural influences and contributions are discursively produced in contraposition to the ‘backwardness’ of the living Indígena, as in Montserrat’s opening account of this chapter, and are presented in terms of its relevance for the development of the country. It seems as if in the participants’ everyday experience, the links with their cultural roots – the ‘important’ roots – come from Indígena cultures, and the explicit relevance given to Spanish influence is not acknowledged as such. The other aspect to note in this extract is that although most of the participants did relate mestizaje with culture, historical moments and people’s attitudes, there is still a strong straightforward link with physical features, and particularly, with skin colour. For Viviana, her skin colour and her physical features are something she is proud of and that she seems happy with. But it is also apparent that she feels uneasy about the term ‘Mestiza’, as if identifying herself explicitly as such would mean acknowledging the other Spanish ‘part’ that she has not explicitly been taught to deal with. She does not say: ‘I’m Mestiza’; she calls herself Mexican and seems not to care too much about the specifics of ‘racial mixing’. The review of the participants’ extracts makes it clear that they are caught between the difficulty of identifying themselves as Spaniards, as Indígenas, or as Mestizas and would rather just keep their national identification. To claim to be a Mestiza could mean to accept being the product of a very conflictive relationship. This seems difficult because of their perceptions of the contradictory worlds that the Spaniards and Indígenas represent, potentially influenced by popular representations: the Spaniards as the barbaric and violent oppressors of the victimised and oppressed cultured Indígenas. Many of the historical sources and the popular myth of national identity hold that Indígena women were mainly sexually abused and considered inferior, and therefore the children born to them were immediately ‘bastards’. In this way, the same myth that gives substance to the possibility of a Mexican nation seems to make it difficult for women in their everyday experience to accept such accounts and make them their own.

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What is most significant in the accounts discussed here is the surprise, which is not naive, that posing the questions about self-identification generated. This is in itself a powerful sign of the lack of public discourse on racism and how unexamined and critically discussed mestizaje and its implications are. In this difficulty and resistance to recognise Mestiza identity, the experience of racism, its social relevance, is rendered invisible but it does not fade away as was maybe expected by the national project. The (non)relevance of the social organisation of racial hierarchy in Mexico is made possible precisely because it is not recognised as significant. The claim of national identity takes centre stage and subsumes the possibility of race being claimed as significant, therefore making racism irrelevant and unremarked upon. However, this does not make racism disappear. While Mestiza is not a term in everyday use, its absence becomes problematic in terms of a public discourse of racism because there is no clear group that can: (a) recognise that the discrimination they sometimes experience has to do with racism or is structured by it and (b) assume their responsibility and participation in the working of racism. As one of the participants told me: ‘in Mexico nobody is exempt from racism’. Nevertheless, and as I argued earlier, it is not entirely clear if the use of the term in everyday life would effectively address the ways in which racism is produced and expressed.

Recognising racism For racism to be recognised, the complexity of the national discourse as both inclusive and exclusive, homogenous and heterogenous would have to be acknowledged. Simultaneously, the individual, familiar and social pain involved in recognising racism should not be underestimated in its devastation: how can we see beyond racism if firstly we have to admit denigration? Returning to Appiah, how can people join a racial identity politics that will imply organising their life around their ‘race’, conceding that such racial positioning somehow counts against their dignity, instead of embracing an inclusive mestizaje national project which has promised a space for all? Recognising racism will also imply making evident the racist logics that configure social life. A key feature of the workings of racism is the relationship between racist practices and ideas about ‘race’. Racist practices have been discursively separated from the particular understandings of ‘race’ from which they have emanated, acquiring dynamics of their own. I call these complex dynamics ‘racist logics’ and specifically in the Mexican case, ‘mestizaje logics’: a variety of strategies of racial differentiation that permeate social life.

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Such racist logics, when translated into the realm of the everyday in Mexico, have meant that racism is lived as a constant feature that has been normalised. Racism has lost its explicit links with the processes of its formation and has therefore gone unrecognised. An example of this is the following account of Laura: I don’t know if I told you what happened to me once in Santa Fe. I was with Raúl and Teresa, and I was walking in front. I suppose I was a few steps ahead, so that if somebody saw us, he or she wouldn’t think we were together. So I got to the door of the restaurant first and I asked the guy if they had a table and he said no. So I kept walking. Teresa didn’t realise I’d already asked, so she got there and asked the same thing and he said ‘yes’. But Raúl realised what had happened, and he didn’t want us to eat there. I figured out what happened afterwards … Teresa didn’t notice a thing and I needed some time to take in what had happened, because that’s what was really going on. (Laura, 42, Mexico City) ‘That’s what was really going on.’ Effectively, Laura understands that some form of discrimination happened: she was denied a table and this has to do with her and her body. However, the context of her explanation was based on class distinctions. This anecdote brings together more clearly the connections between class and race discrimination. Santa Fe is a very particular site. Once that area comprised one of the rubbish depots in the west of Mexico City as well as one of the roughest and most dangerous boroughs. With growing housing and development demands in the 1980s, a large part of the area was redeveloped, and now it contains one of the wealthier and more expensive neighbourhoods of the city, which exists side by side with the old neighbourhood and the remainder of the rubbish dump. There are corporate offices, private universities, the headquarters of one of the main broadcasting companies in the country (Televisa), luxury-housing and, according to the developers, the biggest commercial centre in Latin America, also called Santa Fe. This is the place Laura mentions. It has exclusive department stores and designer shops as well as many fashionable restaurants. Santa Fe is a place where class distinctions are played out and performed and where notions of class reinforce a discriminatory attitude with a very well-established, although implicit, racist discourse. Laura said later on in the interview that ‘you go to Santa Fe and you see some skin colours, and go to Pericoapa and you see others’. Pericoapa is another commercial

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centre in the southern part of the city, where Laura argues she feels comfortable and, in her words, she feels she moves ‘horizontally’ because the poor go to certain places. I mean if I go to Pericoapa, I don’t feel any different from the other people who go there. But if I go to Perisur, there is a bit of a difference and if I go to Santa Fe, a bigger difference. So the people who are of the same class, who would generally be of a certain colour and with certain features – because it’s not only colour, in fact, I would say that the features are more noticeable than the colour – they would normally socialise in certain places and shop in certain places, and go out in certain places where they know they won’t encounter any hostility. The problem arises when you want to go to the other ghetto, to the other space, doesn’t it? They can tell, it shows – in your face, in your features, in the way you behave, in the way you walk in there. (Laura, 42, Mexico City) Here she mentions another commercial centre, Perisur, also in the south of the city, which through the 1980s was the most exclusive in the capital. Although it has almost the same shops as Santa Fe, Perisur seems to have become more accessible to ‘the people’. Contrary to Perisur, Santa Fe is isolated, far away from the metro system and with minimal public transport access. In this extract, Laura talks about skin colour and features and, though indirect, the reference to these elements works as a way of explaining why she did not get a table in the restaurant in Santa Fe. She again places the responsibility for the conflictual situation in the fact that she is the one stepping into the ‘other ghetto, the other space’; she places the responsibility on herself, on her own sense of displacement. When telling the anecdote of the restaurant, she ended by mentioning that she ‘needed some time to take in what had happened, because that’s what was really going on’. She did not continue the sentence but moved on to another similar experience. In the latter extract given earlier, Laura elaborates on the signs that express the difficulty of stepping into ‘the other space’. She says: ‘They can tell, it shows – in your face, in your features, in the way you behave, in the way you walk in there.’ In this sense, the terms of belonging would need to be reassessed. It is not about identity politics. In a context like Mexico, identity politics would (as happens for the indigenous peoples) obscure the normalising racist logic. What is remarkable is how racism is not remarked upon. Doing this, recognising racism, would also question the nation itself

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and the usual parameters of using class distinctions and economic status to understand discrimination. Here I would argue for a detailed exploration of what we can call the Mexican racialised class system. This is clearly exemplified by one further remark from Laura: It’s still very hard for me to relate to people from other social classes. With my friends of a higher class, if they are real friends, it’s less of a problem. But with other people, for example people I know from my job, it’s very, very, very hard. I never know how much they’ll exclude me or how much I’ll exclude myself. I mean, I assume that if they regard me as being different, this doesn’t mean that they think I’m inferior. But sometimes I feel inferior, and I put myself in that position although I’m not sure whether they are really treating me unequally. I don’t like that … I mean, I don’t know what I’m supposed to expect: should they treat me as an equal, or should I assume that we are not equals? However, I ask myself, in what sense are we different? (Laura, 42, Mexico City) Laura allows us to see the relations between notions of class and race, feelings of inadequacy, and the experience of displacement, through her life story. Her struggle points towards an understanding of class mobility in its intersection with notions of race, that is, towards the racialised class experience of Mexican society. Such an experience is characterised by a ‘racist logic’, exacerbating the tension within Mestiza identity, having both an achieved and ascribed status which has to be continually negotiated. Such negotiation does not depend entirely on what Laura wants to negotiate, but rather on what she can. So while education and economic access might be something achievable (hence the flexibility of the Mestiza identity), skin colour and physical features are seen as ascribed, fixed and unchangeable (although such fixity is still relational, applicable to the specific contexts in which Laura is displaced).

Naming race I know about these things from my mother. She says that her aunts, who she lived with, would say: ‘oh no, he is so ugly, very dark’. I do remember that they thought my father was really dark. Really, both families thought it was terrible to get married to a dark-coloured person instead of improving one’s class. My grandmother has a brother who is very, very moreno, and he married a woman who’s got very dark skin, so all their children are really dark. They call them: los morenos.

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And they’d say: ‘how come he married her? Can’t he see what she looks like?’ And even nowadays, he’s like 70 years old and his kids are in their 30s, my mum’s aunts still ask him: ‘if you can see you’re so dark, why did you marry such a dark woman?’ They ask him why he didn’t think about improving the race. Both families think the same: that becoming lighter means improving, as if all of them were so blond. None of them are blond. I think that’s why I have this thing. (Consuelo, 29, Leon) Apart from the process of whitening supported by the racist logic of mestizaje discussed earlier, two main issues come across in this last extract: on the one hand, the idea of ‘improving’ one’s ‘race’, and on the other, the ways in which language works to reaffirm, first, the belief in the existence of ‘races’ and, second, an essentialist understanding of what constitutes a person. In order to argue that it is possible to ‘improve a race’ there must be an acceptance of the existence of something we can call ‘race’. Race, in Goldberg’s words, is ‘a basic categorical object’ which has meant ‘the establishment of difference’ (Goldberg 1993: 149–50). Naming and evaluating become practices where power is put into effect. The possibility of naming race as an existing fixed ‘reality’ and assessing it in terms of a differentiated other allows anyone to extend their authority, or their sense of authority. However, through the process of observation and judgement, they are not actually seeing themselves, but erasing their visibility to take on the voice of respectability which has the power to deny or confer autonomy (Goldberg 1993: 150). However, in this case, when referring to Consuelo’s uncle and to her family as a whole, it seems as if the term race is understood not as a fixed set of distinguishable characteristics but, again, as a process that has the potential for malleability, transformation and negotiation – regardless of the fact that this version still reifies the existence of race. ‘Why he didn’t think about improving the race?’ is the question, and it refers to the notion that both race and transformation are possible through specific strategies, mainly marriage. If there is an idea of improvement, there is also an idea of something defective, something flawed, something corrupted, that is/was spoiled, that can perhaps simply be ‘better’, ‘refined’, ‘whiter’, and ‘beautiful’. It is not difficult to perceive the implications of the negative perception that being Mestiza has, and at the same time it is also possible to perceive the fluidity of the mestizaje process, which can be thought of as a better option than remaining at

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the ‘other end’ of the continuum: the Indígena and the black. Consuelo says her relatives think that ‘becoming lighter means improving’. But although in those terms there might be ‘hope’ for future generations – if you’re wise enough not to procreate with a darker person – what happens when you can’t lighten yourself? At the same time, isn’t it useful to be able to move within the wide parameter of what is regarded as a Mestiza appearance? Isn’t it, then, useful to exist in a continual state of comparison with others? In terms of the use of language, what is very interesting about the last extract, and which is lost in the translation, are the ways in which the verb ‘to be’ is applied. The verbs ser and estar can both be translated in English as ‘to be’; nevertheless, there are fundamental differences in their usage. In English, the verb ‘to be’ can be used to tell what something is (the essence) and how something is (the condition). In Spanish, a different verb is used to express ‘to be’ depending on whether the speaker intends to address an ‘essential’ quality (es) or a condition (estar). Consuelo uses both verbs interchangeably throughout her interview when she refers to somebody’s skin colour. In the last extract when she says ‘I do remember that they thought my father was really dark’, she is actually using the verb estar, referring to his darkness as if a condition of the person, something that can be changed. On the other hand, when she says ‘My grandmother has a brother who is very, very moreno’, she is using the verb ser, which grammatically refers to an ‘essential’ characteristic of the person, something that constitutes that person’s fundamental being. Lastly, when she says ‘Both families think the same: that becoming lighter means improving, as if all of them were so blond. None of them are blond’, she expresses the first verb (were) using estar (meaning the condition of the skin colour), and the second verb (are) using es (meaning the essential colour of the skin). Without presenting a precise linguistic analysis, I want to underline the evident ambiguity in the perception of skin colour as a feature that can describe either a person’s condition or a person’s ‘essence’. The interchangeable nature of these verbs opens up the option for using language as part of the reproductive machinery of distinctions, which surely imprints both meanings in people’s experiences and perceptions of themselves. In the specific Mexican context, the difference between perceiving individuals as conditionally having or essentially being of a certain skin colour is crucial. Such utterances build on the understanding of mestizaje as conditional, that is, as a cultural process and sets of characteristics that can be learnt and achieved through education, marriage, or adoption of cultural practices. But such remarks also build on mestizaje

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as producer of essential characteristics that fix and ascribe individuals in racial hierarchies that ultimately define and decide their social and moral value. The difference between condition and essence drives us to question the relationship between such different notions of mestizaje and its histories of formation. Mestizaje then simultaneously refers to the ideology of the nation-building project with its cultural rationale, and the colonial biological understanding of mestizaje where bodies, their blood and colour, would be the main criteria in organising social hierarchies. Furthermore, such distinction between condition and essence also relates to what I have been calling ‘racist logics’. As I have argued elsewhere (Moreno Figueroa 2010), the discourse of improving one’s appearance and achieving fairer skin colour occurs without making explicit links to the notions of ‘race’ that underpin it or to how those understandings have come into being. What a racist logic does is to disconnect the personal experience of racism from the broader social context that reproduces it, and also to erase the links with its historical process of formation. In this way, the racist logic distributes the intensity of racism to become bearable and quotidian. When operating through such logic, racism loses its name and its referents; racism is distributed in everyday life becoming ‘just how things are’. It is only within certain ideological contexts, such as the politics of mestizaje and resemblance, that people can become whiter, ‘improve the race’ and possess a long-term vision to change and negotiate what is perceived as essential into something that can be a condition susceptible to transformation. Consuelo’s uncle could have married a fairer woman and improved the race, giving his children the option of also becoming fairer, but he ‘didn’t think’.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have tried to resist the impulse to make racial identities real. In their discussion of the power of social scientific methods, Law and Urry argue that ‘certain kinds of social realities are performed into being in social science, and this does not make them any less real (Law and Urry 2004: 395, original emphasis). By commenting on Mestiza identity, am I making it real? My aim has been to encourage a social and discursive movement towards the recognition of Mestiza identity as the way forward for finally disavowing racism. And here, I insist, I am talking of the racism that all members of Mexican society experience and reproduce and that nobody is exempt from (neither the ‘Mexican’, the Indígena,

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the Afro-Mexican, the Jew, the Gypsy, the Chinese, or the Lebanese). However, I have also outlined ways in which the experience of racism is constantly undermined by the lack of recognition of the racialisation processes all individuals go through, including (and crucially) the individuals who have been subsumed by the national project. My key argument is that investing in identity politics does not appear to be a guarantor of a ‘good life’. I have also demonstrated how the Mexican women in this study do not remark on racial identities, are puzzled by them and prefer the safer and inclusive national discourse. Creating a Mestiza identity life script would generate more demands and expectations and require that people live their lives ‘around their “race” ’ (Appiah 1994: 163), constantly proving the authenticity of their racial ascription (with the insults to human dignity this implies if we are to adhere to the idea that races do not exist). Is the only way to deal with racism for people to live around their ‘race’? Pitcher argues that to be able to develop a ‘meaningful intervention into the politics of race’ unavoidably requires a context where both ‘anti-essentialism and the (albeit “strategic”) recognition of racialised identities’ can be put into dialogue (2006: 536). There is something absolutely clear and simultaneously frustrating about Pitcher’s argument. His analysis and the body of critical race studies where it sits draws from a strong and established academic tradition within the global north, mainly the United States, Australia, the UK and other European countries. Pitcher’s assertion encounters a stubborn check, if not dead end, in the case of Mexico. How can we discuss the racialisation of identities in a context that has attempted – quite successfully, it must be said – to build a strong national identity and an inclusive citizenship framework? Can racial recognition exist out of this project of making ‘race’ readily available? In the Mexican context, both mestizaje and Mestiza identity are deeply ambiguous: they are characterised by being limited, contradictory and conditional. Mestizaje, as De la Cadena (2001) argues, is the process through which Mexican culture has been racialised, enabling the reproduction of racist practices, that is, denying racism but upholding cultural differences. The experience of Mexican racialised everyday life is, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, marked by the flexibility of the mestizaje process. Such flexibility, however, both disguises and allows the policing of the ‘improvement of the race’ (or its failure). The lived experience of mestizaje and its flexibility becomes the instrument to measure the process of whitening and modernisation. In this

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sense, my proposal is to take mestizaje seriously, and to make sense of mestizaje simultaneously as a hegemonic political ideology, a cultural, social and racial promise of equality, and a racialised experience, or a racist logic that distributes privilege and exclusion within everyday life. However, I do recognise that taking mestizaje seriously and unveiling its prevailing racist logics might not be enough in political terms. While in academic and discursive terms adopting these criteria could advance critical analyses of racism and renew understandings of social distinctions and discrimination in Mexico, the question about the public tackling of racism remains. Who will take racism on board and say ‘enough’? Identifying oneself as racialised is problematic, be it Mestiza, Indígena, Afro-Mexican or ‘white’. Nevertheless, the negotiation Pitcher (2006) proposes between anti-essentialism and recognition of racialised identities still needs to be discussed and imagined in Mexico. Moreover, such negotiation cannot be taken lightly, precisely because of the dangers of strategic positioning. We cannot put aside the criticisms and lessons learned in the history of the politics of ‘race’ under the justification of making a meaningful intervention.

Notes 1. I would like to thank Hettie Malcomson, Emiko Saldivar Tanaka and Charles Hale for their comments on this text. 2. For Lomnitz, ‘according to the dominant ideologies of the colonial period, the Indígena’s race was inferior to the Spanish one, but it was also redeemable, not only through Christian faith, but also through procreation with the Spanish race: there was a very well known formula according to which the offspring of Spanish and Indígena was a Mestizo; of Mestizo and Spanish, a Castizo; and of Castizo and Spanish, a Spanish. That is, that the Indígena origins of an individual could be “erased” after a couple of generations of marriages with Europeans’ (1993: 363).

7 Lesbian and Gay Parents’ Sexual Citizenship: Recognition, Belonging and (Re)classification Yvette Taylor

Introduction This chapter draws upon British Academy funded research with lesbian and gay parents from working-class and middle-class backgrounds, and considers the significance of class in the struggle for sexual citizenship, where legal consolidation – such as the Civil Partnership Act (2004) – may be seen as actively materialising family, making that which was sidelined and undervalued, now included and recognised (Taylor 2009). Arguably, the focus on same-sex marriage as the epitome of citizenship inclusion, representing a capacity to belong to and be recognised by the state, has eclipsed other concerns and exclusions, as well as the interconnectedness of status categories with different levels and degrees of (sexual) citizenship. Here, the specifically classed – and classifying – nature of legal recognition will be explored, where critique of ‘new homonormativities’ is extended in focusing upon material, symbolic and subjective classed intersections within new conditionalities of inclusion, belonging and recognition. There are significant legal implications for entering civil partnerships in which the couples are deemed financially responsible for one another and financial assets are shared in, for example, pensions, inheritance tax and social security benefits. While this new ‘responsibilisation’ represented a safety net for many middle-class interviewees (who already had assets to secure and accumulate), for workingclass respondents in this study, such provisions often represented a threat: this occurred financially as state benefits (including housing provision) could be retracted or reduced on the basis of dual (partner), rather than single, incomes. While working-class respondents typically valued being previously ‘under the radar’ and invisible to benefits’ authorities prelegislation, the new visibility of legal ‘gains’ meant that benefits claimants 144

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should now declare their partnership status, whether or not they are civilly partnered. Such threats, safeguards and classed ‘choices’ have material and emotional implications and this chapter situates these as intersecting both class and sexuality, suggesting caution about the ‘world we have won’ (Weeks 2008),1 where state recognition (re)produces classed-sexual subjects in institutionalising ‘ordinary’ families and ‘legitimate subjects’. In this study, working-class respondents spoke of the more central reliance on welfare benefits related but not restricted to personal employment position. They also had more awareness of and vulnerability to welfare surveillance: such regulations and relevancies had been relevant throughout their lives and in intimate and familial associations. Of course, some markers of ‘ordinariness’ might be attached, albeit precariously and very differently, to the ‘respectable working class’ (or those who have bought their council house, for example), or who define themselves in opposition to others because they work and do not rely as much on benefits (Skeggs 1997). Claims on ‘respectability’ from materially and subjectively precarious classed positions are very different from those emanating from middle-class locations and it is these which I hope to pull out here as articulated by the respondents in this study. There is an array of international policies which variously legitimise same-sex partnerships and consequently same-sex family formations through extending the rights of lesbians and gay men to ‘marry’ or to live as a legally recognised couple, which include substantively similar – or the same – rights as marriage. The first national recognition of same-sex partnerships came in Denmark in 1989, allowing registered partnership (as opposed to ‘marriage’). More recently, sexuality has been high on the United Kingdom (UK) legislative and policy agenda, with fresh legislation that explicitly address sexuality within the context of equality issues (Equality Act 2010), including same-sex partnership (The Civil Partnership Act 2004). These moves are mirrored across time and place with countries bringing in policies from full marriage (Netherlands 2001; Belgium 2003; Canada 2005; Spain 2005; South Africa 2006; Sweden 2009; Portugal 2010) to civil unions and registered partnerships (including France’s pacte civil de solidarité in 1999 and New Zealand’s Civil Union in 2004). It is paramount that current theoretical considerations of sexuality resonate with new legal and policy international landscapes where debates are happening in many parts of the world including, for example, Ireland, Japan, Poland, South Korea and Uganda. Equally important is a situationing of such changes within a wider landscape of inequality, where different sexual citizens receive differential levels of recognition.

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This chapter explores such dynamics, aiming to keep in mind the complexity, tensions and ambivalences in middle-class and workingclass respondents’ accounts. Even for middle-class respondents, legal incorporations did not represent easy or wholesale citizenship settlements and were often used strategically in, for example, the avoidance of inheritance tax and the assurance of material benefits as well as the emotional comfort to be gained in being officially deemed ‘next of kin’. Here, middle-class recognition and incorporation can be seen to re-embed and re-constitute classed advantages, which is not to argue for a simple or easy transference of classed resources, but rather of their re-workings in new contexts where middle-classness can be made visible in practicing citizenship status, aiming for material security and symbolic recognition. This frequently works in opposition to those who cannot and do not ‘fit in’. The real and valid concerns of securing property, assets and entitlements sit uncomfortably alongside the fear expressed by others that, rather than accumulating through access to pensions and shared resources, they would be financially at a loss. The intersection between class and sexuality is apparent in the negotiation and materialisation of (dis)advantages, structured by a changing legal context, where the costs of civic acceptance include the social costs of (still) not quite measuring up to friends, family and society in general: new ‘approvals’ are embraced, sometimes uneasily, and advantages tenuously secured – the classing of this lies in the erosion or consolidation of ‘worth’, ‘normality’ and ‘entitlement’, through which claims are made, families are (un)done and citizens are materialised. The following section will introduce academic debates on sexual citizenship via same-sex partnership recognition, which are notable in their frequently dichotomised stances of emphatic success, based on unprecedented legal entitlements, or of implied failure, in assimilating to normative citizenship models (see Bell and Binnie 2000; Binnie 2004; D. Richardson 2004; Weeks 2008). Optimistically, new frameworks may be seen to provide new resources, offering varied realisations of different ways of being; yet such possibilities may edge towards the punitive in re-framing the private domestic sphere as the space of ‘good’ citizenship status. Lesbian and gay parents have, by some accounts, been incentivised to enter this field where the actualisation of new gains is only available to ‘homonormative’ subjects, that is, those with the resources, ‘respectability’ and rights to meet such new requirements. In aiming to go beyond binary non/assimilatory stances, several authors emphasise the lived experience of those negotiating such tensions: rarely are straightforward inside/outside positions inhabited by social actors who may

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both refuse and welcome changes (Clarke 2001; Peel and Harding 2008). But rather than stopping at such a potential awkward inhabitation of sexual citizenship, others have alluded to the intersection of class and sexuality as relevant to such refusals, strategies and (dis)engagements – relevant in the lived experience of sexual citizenship, belonging and being recognised, as well as the structuring socio-legal contexts. This chapter hopes to make such relevancies empirically demonstrable through interviewees’ accounts and experiences; the methodologies section situates respondents as inhabiting both classed and sexual positions against the frequent theoretical and empirical neglect of class in sexualities studies (Taylor 2004, 2007). Having framed the broader context of sexual citizenship, and empirically situating interviewees as inhabiting both classed and sexual positionings, the subsequent data section ‘All legal and above board?’ charts the varied familial (in)validations as expressed by interviewees, many of whom spoke of desiring ‘normality’ and an ability to legally name and validate their families as ‘ordinary’ (D. Richardson 2004). The ability to have a civil partnership then represented a legitimisation of their family structure and relational possibilities, encompassing both their partnership and parenting choices. While such a claim can be fraught for lesbian and gay parents, this claim can be interrogated as specifically classed, where it is more difficult for working-class parents to achieve a recognisably ‘ordinary’, ‘respectable’ status (Skeggs 1997, 2004). Instead, working-class parents may exist on the margins in celebratory times, where the markers of ‘ordinary’ status (property, finances, monetary value, anticipated accumulation and transference) are frequently absent or precariously held. Certain classed and sexual ‘others’ are frequently condemned, positioned on the outside and unable to lay claims either to a symbolic sense of inclusion or to material rights: the material negotiations and effects of same-sex partnership recognition will be explored later in ‘For richer, for poorer’.

Theoretical background Elizabeth Peel and Rosie Harding (2008) argue that theory and research in relation to same-sex legal recognition have often polarised around two distinct and competing positions, which either frame legislation as a positive step towards lesbian and gay equality or, contrastingly, view recognition as an accommodation to heterosexual standards and the loss of distinctive differences, ways of being and relational practices. Legislative changes enforce a reconsideration of family, ever revisited by lesbian

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and gay families who are faced again with naming, creating and challenging, with the weight of success (anticipated from their supporters) and the burden of failure (endlessly declared by the less enthused). In seeking to reinvigorate polarised debates, and get beyond the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, Peel and Harding (2008) seek to highlight the (im)possibilities in fitting in, benefiting from or losing out what is on offer – bringing the structuring climate together with lived-in experiences, where there is evidence of celebration as well as disappointment (Hull 2006; Shipman and Smart 2007). The fight for ‘equal rights’ can itself uphold normative frameworks for inclusion (D. Richardson 2004; Taylor 2009). Andrew Sullivan (1995), for example, claims that the mainstreaming and extension of marriage would ‘normalise’ lesbian and gay relations and would thus solve all political concerns, as ‘ultimately the only reform that truly matters’ (Sullivan in Hull 2006: 81). In a rather different vein to Sullivan, but still echoing the pull of being ‘properly’ included in the mainstream, Amy Agigian (2004) claims that changing rights to ‘marry’ would solve many legal and social problems including, for example, access to reproductive technologies. Claims are also (re)made on marriage as a foundation offering material and emotional stability to its members, also judged in the ‘best interests’ of children (see Stacey and Biblarz 2001). The various problems, solutions and inclusions already involve an awkward negotiation in being and becoming ‘normal’ where such practical gains in accessing rights may be positioned against an erasure of different ways of living and loving (Hull 2006; Naples 2007; Shipman and Smart 2007). Here it is possible to view the UK Civil Partnership Act, and other similar legislation which formally recognises lesbian and gay partnering and parenting rights, as actually materialising family, making that which was sidelined and undervalued included and recognised. Despite the appeal of inclusion and advancement, Kath Weston’s (1991) early expectation highlights the continuation of class and sexual inequalities, rather than a sidestepping of these in new times: ‘If gay people begin to pursue marriage, joint adoptions, and custody rights to the exclusion of seeking kinship status for some categories of friendship, it seems likely that gay families will develop in ways largely congruent with socioeconomic and power relations in larger society’ (Weston 1991: 209). This is not to entirely dismiss the extension of ‘gains’ but rather to question the scope and effect of these (Bell and Binnie 2000; Naples 2007; Kandaswamy 2008). The materialisation of families as they negotiate the UK Civil Partnership Act (2004) as socially located subjects is often neglected, particularly

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so in relation to the classed dynamics of parents’ sexual citizenship. Yet measuring the ‘costs’ of civic acceptance is no easy matter, where these may constitute a rightful entitlement for some, while acting as a severe impediment to others. While partnering, as the focus of same-sex recognition, is distinct from issues of parenting, they are clearly related in the ways that such policies themselves produce families, promising acknowledgement, legal recourse and access to welfare services. The issue of economics is significant, resourcing – or denying – various possibilities; yet class and sexuality may also be seen to intersect in the construction of ‘normal’, ‘ordinary’ citizens now ready for inclusion. Such negotiations are indeed complex as lesbian and gay families seek to survive and thrive to ‘put a floor’ on their social circumstances (Skeggs 1997) and indeed capitalise on such legislative changes. Herein lies a consequential classed difference between those who can afford to conceptualise such changes as beneficial, particularly in relation to finances, property and monetary security, but also in relation to social status, respectability and esteem: to have a new currency may act as a mobilisation and mainstreaming of class privilege, as of sexual status (Taylor 2010a, 2010b). Practical benefits are accorded much importance in, for example, accessing welfare provision and services where such practicalities frequently merge with what should ‘ordinarily’ be expected, provided and welcomed. The ability to consolidate partnerships, in terms of legal, material and emotional ‘unity’ is significant to the naming and doing of family and specifically in doing parenting (Lewin 1993, 1998; Hequembourg 2004). ‘Stable relationships’ may be formally recognised, even welcomed in, for example, adoption or in the everyday spaces of parenting where the ‘other mother’ at the school gates suddenly becomes official and validated (Gabb 2004). Jeffrey Weeks sums up the appeal and importance of ‘ordinariness’ set against a queer critique of assimilation into heteronormativity as an affront to ‘different’ ways of being: ‘at a deeper level surely, what we see here is the wish for recognition for what you are and want to be, for validation, not absorption, a voting with our feet for the ordinary virtues of care, love, mutual responsibility. We should never underestimate the importance of being ordinary. It has helped transform the LGBT and the