By Ximena Machicao Barbery (1)
December 2006
Some thoughts on this issue:
Women’s citizenship in Latin America and the Caribbean gained much strength within the process towards the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 and was turned into a very strong focal point for the proposals put forward by women in the region during the post-Beijing period. This is not implying that the issue failed to be put on the table at debates and historical liberation struggles of women’s and feminist movements, but rather it has been given a new political meaning that constantly travels across the different thoughts and actions, thus relating citizenship and its exercise to power and the way it is distributed and organized in our societies.
"We want to be entitled to the exercise of all rights" was among the main slogans for the promotion of a series of actions and proposals aimed at changing the explicit legal, social, cultural and political privileges in those societies that have been historically structured on the basis of exclusion. Said exlusion and discrimination have given rise to a substantial critical and theoretical production which questions the sexist, racist and elitist biases as well as the masculine vision of universal rationality which has ruled the world for centuries.
Undoubtedly, in the last 20 years, we, women, have been conquering, discovering and incorporating fundamental rights, although constrained in their exercise. As citizenship fails to have the same value for the different social sectors, the complexity of concepts giving rise to structural inequalities such as class, race, gender, age, sex options, etc. cannot be just solved by means of changes to the so-called “egalitarian” legal frameworks of the representative and agreed-upon democracies in the region. This is because these democracies fail to assume both diversity and the objective and subjective differences as well as their dimension in the production and reproduction of existing inequalities and inequities in our societies.
Besides, these societies are becoming increasingly marked by poverty, polarizations and authoritarianisms in a globalized world, where the solution of conflicts lies in making war, in militarism and the imposition of political, economic and religious fundamentalisms.
Within this framework, Gina Vargas would tell us that "although democratic systems should be the adequate field to build and reach full citizenship, there is no direct relationship between democracy and citizenship. The development and expansion of citizen rights can take place by decision of dominant elite groups (top-down) or by pressure (bottom-up) or by a combination of both.
The aim for full citizenship refers to the fullness existing at a specific historical moment; that is to say, all citizen rights being enjoyed by the most privileged people within a society and all guarantees of the rights that are being conquered, discovered, incorporated and exercised by those sectors with restricted citizenship in their struggle to expand it, will always be constrained since hardly ever do guarantees precede the discovered and demanded rights".
This reflection, together with many others developed within the feminist theory and its criticism of the law, are not intended to minimize the progress achieved in the acknowledgement of rights, but to warn about the role played by law in the reproduction of inequalities between men and women and in the opression of the latter. To deconstruct those power relations that give support to the ideology of male superiority – which finally allows for and ligitimizes the violation of women’s rights – is not an easy task, being its results neither ensured by national laws or regulations nor by Conventions and/or International Agreements.
History shows us that all this is not enough, that strong institutional and democratic mechanisms are needed to ensure the fulfillment of regulations and to severely punish those who violate them. It is necessary to assume that changes to political, social and cultural structures should lie in a profound transformation within all of us – men and women – as individual and collective beings in our identity and subjectivities.
The construction of democracy and citizenship is part of a certain historical transition representing a field of struggle, tensions and disputes, that as pointed out by Giroux, "is above all forms of knowledge, social practices and values that make up the critical elements of that tradition. Once we acknowledge the concept of citizenship as a socially constructed historical practice, it becomes all the more imperative to recognize that categories such as citizenship and democracy need to be problematized and reconstructed for each generation".
In this context, new citizenships require new subjectivities and inter-subjective relations and education can play a strategic role to this effect. However, the current formal or informal education systems fail to offer the minimum conditions needed to address this challenge. Therefore, it becomes necessary to design and put into practice new education proposals aimed at the acquisition of ethical principles, attitudes and aptitudes which may allow all subjects to play a more active and participative role. Such a role should go beyond the exercise of voting rights in the election of representatives, or the limited concept of citizens as consumers or users.
According to ECLAC, "contemporary training for citizenship is not exhausted in the political sphere of voting and the formal equality before the law; rather, people need to be trained in ethical values and principles and to develop their abilities and skills". In this sense, the education for citizenship in the formal education system becomes of particular relevance in order to counteract neoliberal education policies, which redefine public education under the logic of competitiveness, individualism, the discredit of democratic institutions and restoration of certain essentialist and conservative values in the family environment and the characterization of the subject. Such a policy is opposed to a pluralistic and solidary vision, which recognizes the historicity and power relations that are implicit in all social processes.
María Hortencia Coronel helps us to reflect on this issue, stating that "the globalizing, synthesizing and simplifying approach characterizes the unilateral thought in which most human beings have been educated". She refers to the classroom as a “mined field” where all kind of personal and inter-personal situations take place, being such a field covered by positive and negative stories, comprising agreements, tensions and conflicts of all kinds, and being an unknown and dangerous field if one lacks the adequate strategies to walk across it and head towards the recognition of a privileged area, comprising the most diverse crossroads which call for a multiple thought so as to turn education strategies into tools capable of recognizing that such a “mined field” represents an opportunity to give sense to the diversity and the different forms of being, thinking or feeling characteristic of each social subject in the construction of his/her identity.
Citizen training implies much more than the formal teaching of regulations, laws and political and institutional guidelines, since it plays an ideological role in forming images, space and time, thus contributing to shape – at each historical moment – a particular type of domination and submission relationship as well as the possibility of criticism and decision-making. Therefore, to plan an education for citizenship implies much more than incorporating certain formal contents; it implies encouraging autonomy, critical thinking, acknowledgement of the other, capacity to deconstruct knowledge and crystallized power and, along with all the above, it is essential to arise in students the desire to be part of a broader, more diverse and changing world. It is necessary to question the existing social narcissism and ethnocentrism in order to understand that exclusion and discrimination are not simple but complex processes owing to the combination of factors and elements that increasingly complicate and strengthen certain inequalities.
The World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination and Related Intolerance held in Durban in 2001 established that “intersectionality” is to assume the forms undertaken by combined, double or multiple discrimination. As pointed out by Fanny Gómez, "it is not about adding or substracting; it is about considering how exclusion is strengthened when racism, sexism, xenophobia, constraints posed by virtue of migrant status or national origin or any other form of discrimination converge on the same person".
Discrimination hides in educational environments when access to schools is made universal under the assumption that we are all equal. This concept has been used by several women authors to analyze the relationship between gender and race and has been debated by women to disclose the fact that many forms of combined, double or multiple discrimination are unnoticed or not openly discussed.
In spite of the fact that the interaction between race, gender and class has been analyzed and is found in many feminist political discourses, there is still a long way to go to turn this concept into a real political practice, thus contributing to the active struggle against all kinds of discrimination without fragmentation in a globalized world that aggravates and strengthes exclusion and makes the roads towards change and social transformation uncertain and complex.
Finally, from REPEM, we would also like to enhance the concept of gender approach or perspective both in formal and informal education processes. This is because we believe that apart from having been deprived of its transforming character aimed at making it operative in the current state of affairs, this concept – which is a tool of political analysis for disclosing the situation of inequality between men and women – has mainly been used in recent years to do everything but what States had to do in the struggle against discrimination, poverty and social injustice in a timely and sustained way, involving political will, resources and democratic institutions, so as to ensure the fulfillment of already achieved human rights and, above all, to promote their exercise as a sine qua non requirement and principle of the constrained and deficient democracies currently existing in the region.
(First published in July 2006)
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(1) General Coordinator of REPEM
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