From foes to friends? Fighting against women’s ‘half-citizenship’ through gender-mainstreaming citizenship

Abstract

As a complex concept, translating the formal and practical relationship between individuals and the state, citizenship reveals gender-based foundations. A clear result of this foundationalist division of human nature was the exclusion of women from the public sphere. This article theorizes gender-blind citizenship as a long-standing problem of women’s ‘half-citizenship’ system. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with women in Turkey, this study proposes to analyzes women’s citizenship from three angles: full access to democracy, economic participation, and intimate and sexual rights, while challenging mainstream presumptions about the public/private divide. Instead, gender-mainstreaming citizenship, as we call it, emerges to relaunch the debate on feminism and citizenship, moving forward on the quest for gender equality.