Full Description
In Ingenious Citizenship Charles T. Lee centers the daily experiences and actions of migrant domestic workers, sex workers, transgender people, and suicide bombers in his rethinking of mainstream models of social change. Bridging cultural and political theory with analyses of film, literature, and ethnographic sources, Lee shows how these abject populations find ingenious and improvisational ways to disrupt and appropriate practices of liberal citizenship. When voting and other forms of civic engagement are unavailable or ineffective, the subversive acts of a domestic worker breaking a dish or a prostitute using the strategies and language of an entrepreneur challenge the accepted norms of political action. Taken to the extreme, a young Palestinian woman blowing herself up in a Jerusalem supermarket questions two of liberal citizenship's most cherished values: life and liberty. Using these examples to critically reinterpret political agency, citizenship practices, and social transformation, Lee reveals the limits of organizing change around a human rights discourse. Moreover, his subjects offer crucial lessons in how to turn even the worst conditions and the most unstable positions in society into footholds for transformative and democratic agency.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Ingenious Agency: Democratic Agency and Its Disavowel 1
Part I. Beginning
1. Improvising Citizenship: Appropriating the Liberal Citizenship Script 37
Part II. Episodes
2. Migrant Domestic Workers, Hidden Tactics, and Appropriating Political Citizenship 61
3. Global Sex Workers, Calculated Abjection, and Appropriating Economic Citizenship 101
4. Trans People, Morphing Technologies, and Appropriating Gendered Citizenship 149
5. Suicide Bombers, Sacrificial Violence, and Appropriating Life Itself 191
Part III. (Un)Ending
Conclusion. Politics without Politics: Democracy as Meant for Ingenious Appropriation 247
Notes 257
Works Cited 269
Index 287
