Boatca & Roth - Unequal and Gendered

614781
research-article2015
CSI0010.1177/0011392115614781Current SociologyBoatcă and Roth
Article CS
Current Sociology
Unequal and gendered:

1–22
© The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions:
Notes on the coloniality sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0011392115614781
of citizenship csi.sagepub.com
Manuela Boatcă
University of Freiburg, Germany
Julia Roth
Centre for Inter-American Studies, Bielefeld University, Germany
Abstract
An entire Occidentalist tradition of citizenship theory viewed citizenship as a modern,
progressive institution that helped overcome particularities of unequal social origin.
Contrary to the claims of this (mainly male) Western scholarly tradition, the article
argues, first, that the institution of citizenship has developed in the West through
the legal (and physical) exclusion of non-European, non-White and non-Western
populations from civic, political, social and cultural rights; these exclusions, and thus
citizenship as such, have historically been (en)gendered. Second, the article maintains
that citizenship and gender are the most decisive factors accounting for extreme
inequalities between individuals in rich and poor countries in the twenty-first century.
Forms of racialization, sexualization and precarization to which the acquisition of
citizenship and the corresponding gain in social mobility are linked today are illustrated
with examples of practices to subvert citizenship law through marriage or childbirth in
countries relying primarily on jus sanguinis and jus soli, respectively.
Keywords
Citizenship, coloniality, gender, global inequalities, migration, social mobility
Time and again, canonical sociology has presented and analysed citizenship as a counter-
balance to social inequalities. From Max Weber through Talcott Parsons and up to Bryan
Turner, the institutionalization of citizenship was seen as part of a sequence of social
Corresponding author:
Manuela Boatcă, Institut für Soziologie, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Rempartstr. 15, 79098 Freiburg
im Breisgau, Germany.
Email: manuela.boatca@soziologie.uni-freiburg.de
Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

2 Current Sociology
change characteristic of the West, which entailed progress from bondage to freedom and
from ascribed to achieved positions in the inequality structure, ultimately defining the
alleged transition from tradition to modernity. By contrast, the present article argues that
a global perspective on citizenship reveals that its institutionalization in the West has
gone hand in hand with the legal (and physical) exclusion of non-European, non-White
and non-Western populations from civic, political, social and cultural rights. Both within
and outside the West, women have been granted such citizenship rights only gradually,
while populations of other regions have been gendered along colonial lines. On the one
hand, the article draws on recent legal and sociological scholarship on global inequalities
which has pointed to the ascribed character of citizenship and its key role in maintaining
high inequalities between countries in the modern world (Korzeniewicz and Moran, 2009;
Shachar, 2009). On the other hand, it builds on the literature on coloniality (Lugones,
2008; Mignolo, 2000; Quijano, 2000) in order to reveal the structural distribution of
unequal and gendered citizenship rights as a crucial component of modernity/coloniality,
or what we call the coloniality of citizenship.
En-gendering freedom and the public sphere1

Beginning in the fifteenth century, the Christian Reconquista of Islamic Spain and
the European ‘discovery’ of the Americas in 1492 set the stage for a reconfiguration of
the Western European Christian identity around notions of religious difference (Mignolo,
2006). While Christians defined themselves as people with the ‘right’ religion, Jews and
Moors were gradually racialized from a Western Christian point of view as people of the
‘wrong’ faith. At the same time, the indigenous populations in the West Indies, display-
ing no religious allegiance known to the Christian colonizers, were classified as ‘people
with no religion’, and as such as a type of tabula rasa in terms of subjectivity, on which
any religious outlook could be inscribed (Maldonado-Torres, 2008: 210; Stam and
Shohat, 2012: 5). As the argument about the need to Christianize the indigenous peoples
gained ground, the racial logic which denied humanity to ‘peoples with no religion’ and
legitimized their enslavement as a consequence was transferred to other non-European
populations, chiefly sub-Saharan Africans (Grosfoguel and Mielants, 2006: 3). As a
result, massive imports of enslaved Africans served to replace Native Americans on the
early colonial plantations, who were increasingly employed in the encomienda system.
There gradually emerged a set of hierarchies internal to the colonized territories to which
Stam and Shohat refer as a ‘racial/colonial order’ (2012: 5) and Vilna Bashi Treitler as
‘the racial paradigm’ (2013; and 2015). Briefly, the creation of the capitalist world-econ-
omy as a modern and colonial system went hand in hand with the establishment of a racial
matrix having Western European Christians at its centre, Jews and Moors as internal
Others (i.e. Europeans but non-Christians) and ‘Indians’ and ‘Blacks’ (non-Europeans,
non-Christians) as external Others (Mignolo, 2006: 20).
On the other hand, the creation of a racial hierarchy in the Occident and its New World
extension echoed the reorganization of the various gender relations on the European
continent into a comprehensive gender hierarchy. This subsequently became the norm
against which the – starkly different – social realities of the colonial peripheries were
assessed. As Carolyn Merchant (1980) has amply demonstrated, parallel to the debate on

Boatcă and Roth 3
the humanity of the Native Americans in the ‘New’ World, a theological, scientific and
scholarly debate on the nature of women took place in Europe, at the end of which the
view that women were essentially passive, sensual, fragile and mentally inferior prevailed.
As in the case of Amerindians and Black Africans, this shift was related to the capitalist
transformation of economic roles: to the degree that the economy was being geared
towards commodity production, women’s role as economic resource for their families’
subsistence turned into the one of emotional resource for their husbands (Merchant,
1980: 155). As a consequence, marriage was resignified as the social form which allowed
controlling women’s ‘unbalanced nature’ and which was therefore the most adequate
(i.e. desirable) social arrangement. Orthodox theologians began upholding the family,
centred around the authoritative figure of the father, as the institution capable of main-
taining social order on the basis of Christian values: ‘To this end, the authority of the
father was equated with the authority of God, and God with that of an absolute monarch.
By implication, this legitimated all other authorities – kings, nobles, landowners, priests’
(Pelizzon, 1998: 250).
Besides marking the religious celebration of motherhood and domesticity, the key
role attributed to the (holy) family as a social ideal entailed an entire range of norms and
regulations. They included the urban authorities’ enforcement of the ‘conjugal order’, the
normative upgrading of domestic violence towards women as a socially desirable means
of maintaining said order, and – most importantly – the gradual criminalization of contra-
ception, abortion, infanticide and unwed motherhood (Federici, 2004; Pelizzon, 1998:
238ff.) – in short, of all forms of sexual independence.2 Thus, 1492 was also the year in
which the first ordinance forbidding women under the age of 50 to live alone and stipulating
that they instead go into service until they were married was passed in Coventry, England
– soon to be followed by stricter ones all over Western Europe (Pelizzon, 1998; Peters,
2004). Although exceptions to this norm still remained socially acceptable a century later,
economic independence for single women was rendered increasingly difficult, while
marriage became associated with economic prosperity and status in the community
(Merchant, 1980; Peters, 2004). These trends were reinforced after 1550, when state
policies were more specifically aimed at excluding women from skilled craft, guilds and
high-status occupations, and Protestant theology reinterpreted marriage and the house-
hold – rather than outside employment or political issues – as the main concern of women
(Pelizzon, 1998: 243). By 1600, the gradual banning of unmarried women and widows
from most crafts and of all women from entering apprenticeships in many trades had
limited employment opportunities for lower-class women to unskilled work, especially
service activities, and to low-paid wage labor such as spinning (Merchant, 1980; Pelizzon,
1998). Prostitution, increasingly present in the cities both in the wake of the influx of
pauperized peasants and of the declining work alternatives for women, was gradually
stigmatized as morally reprehensible and its exercise restricted to special ‘women’s
houses’ (Mies, 1996: 81). Although women still figured in the public sphere throughout
the sixteenth and well into the seventeenth century, this tended to concern only those
public arenas ultimately linked with the household, such as markets. As Sheila Pelizzon
notes, ‘What the domestic ideology denied women in the end, was a right to freedom of
movement – i.e., women were never supposed to be unsupervised by some man, or not
under the immediate authority of some man. For example, this abbreviated the right to

4 Current Sociology
travel, or to live alone or assemble freely’ (Pelizzon, 1998: 3). In the meantime, a woman’s
sex had become a better predictor of her sphere of activity than her class membership
(Merchant, 1980: 150).
It was with the emergence of the European institution of citizenship – understood as
an expression of liberty, i.e. the opposite of slavery – that the subsuming of women’s
rights under male authority was formally codified and their mobility rights further
curtailed. In the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, citizenship rights were
only granted to male property-owners, whose ability to pay taxes and military tribute, i.e.
contribute to the maintenance of social order, qualified them as ‘active citizens’. Women,
foreigners and children were in turn defined as ‘passive citizens’ and denied all political
rights (Blackburn, 1988: 198; Wallerstein, 2003: 653ff.). While, in the case of white
Western European women, this was considered a temporary provision, to be remedied by
further educational measures, the reduction of enslaved Africans to commodities and
‘pure flesh’ also deprived them of a gender status compared to that of citizens.3 Both
Olympe de Gouges’s 1791 ‘Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen’
and Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 ‘A Vindication on the Rights of Women’ pointed to the
male dividend of the human rights and citizenship discourse – to no immediate avail.
The French Constitution of 1793 extended active citizenship to all adult (not necessarily
propertied) males, thus leaving women to derive their membership in the social community
from their relationship to men (Hanagan, 2002: 167). Additionally defined as vulnerable
through the exclusion from the military and as close to nature on account of their repro-
ductive capacity, women would now find themselves increasingly outside the male
domain of culture, in turn associated with wage work and the tasks to protect and provide.
The culturally and normatively binding female ideal of the time found its expression in the
social role of the housewife (and mother), whose consignment to the private sphere of the
household entailed the simultaneous construction of the unpaid work done there as a natural
resource and therefore as ‘non-work’. Thus, the gendering of the private and the public
spheres, although only legally sanctioned in the wake of the French Revolution, in fact
built on the social definition of reproduction as a non-economic activity and as an exclu-
sively female one, which had been initiated with the degradation of women’s social and
economic standing in the sixteenth century.4 Werbner and Yuval-Davis describe the exclu-
sion of women from citizenship as ‘an intrinsic feature of their naturalization as embodi-
ments of the private, the familial and the emotional’ and as such ‘essential to the construction
of the public sphere as masculine, rational, responsible and respectable’ (Werbner and
Yuval-Davis, 1999: 6). By relegating women, children and foreigners in the (however
recent) past of the civilizing process that adult men had supposedly accomplished, the
implementation of allegedly universal principles was thus constantly creating racialized
and gendered particularisms. The corresponding exclusions ranged historically ‘from
colonial subjects to women, particular classes and racialized minorities, to people with
different sexualities and abilities’ (Dobrowolsky and Tastsoglou, 2006: 9ff.).
In the French colony of Saint-Domingue, where the revolution of the enslaved led by
Toussaint L’Ouverture resulted in the abolition of slavery in 1794, the racially constructed
notion of skin colour took precedence over property as a criterion for the granting of
citizenship. Since not all whites were property-owners, but relatively many free ‘mulattos’
were, the colonial assembly included the former in the right to vote even before this was

Boatcă and Roth 5
accomplished in continental France. However, it excluded both slaves and ‘mulattos’

from franchise after a series of heated debates (Blackburn, 1988: 183ff.). The argument
used by both the white planters and the poor whites of Saint-Domingue at the close of the
eighteenth century was that enslaved people and free ‘mulattos’ were not part of ‘the
nation’ and could therefore not become citizens.5 Thus, according to Sylvia Wynter
(1990), colonization shifted the primary form of legitimizing peoples’ regulation and
expropriation from religion to a ‘natural’ colonial (ethnic/racial) difference. The under-
pinning logic – strikingly similar to the one that, in the sixteenth century, had questioned
whether the Amerindians had souls that would allow them to be Christianized by the
colonizers – attests to the coloniality out of which the institution of citizenship emerged.
En-gendering racialization in the colonies

As long as the importation of enslaved Africans had been cheaper than the natural repro-
duction of the labor force on the plantations, enslaved women in the Caribbean had been
systematically prevented from forming families and having children (Mies, 1996: 91ff.).
In turn, after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the ‘local breeding’ of the labor
force became a more lucrative option. According to the colonizers’ civilizing mission,
the adequate policy against the alleged primitivity of indigenous gender relations was
the introduction of the European model of the bourgeois marriage. The ex-slaves’ resist-
ance to the sudden imposition of the colonizers’ monogamy norm, the nuclear family
pattern, or both6 came with high economic costs for the colonial administration. Especially
active birth strikes by enslaved women – such as occurred in the British Caribbean in the
beginning of the nineteenth century and in German South West Africa at the turn of the
twentieth – seriously affected the planters’ designs for the supply of cheap labor power.
At the same time, state legislation against racially mixed marriages, varying widely in
scope across the colonial world,7 came to include the loss of citizenship and voting rights
for both partners and their offspring in Germany’s African colonies in 1908; in turn,
informal sexual relationships between white male colonists and black women were
encouraged as long as they did not produce offspring (Mamozai, 1982: 129). Both
measures were primarily aimed at preventing the non-White population from acquiring
property and thus from receiving voting rights; their most salient side effect, however,
was forcing black women into concubinage and prostitution, while reducing white
women to housewifery and motherhood (Alexander, 1991; Bush, 1981). What Maria
Mies described as ‘the double-faced process of colonization and housewifization’ (1996:
97) entailed a causal link between the emergence of bourgeois marriage and family as
protected institutions, on the one hand, and the disruption of clan and family relations of
the ‘natives’, on the other:
… not only did the few European women who went to the colonies as wives and ‘breeders for
race and nation’ rise to the level of proper housewives on the subordination and subjection of
the colonized women, so too did the women ‘back home’; first those of the bourgeoisie, later
also the women of the proletariat, were gradually domesticated and civilized into proper
housewives. For the same period which saw the expansion of colonialism and imperialism also
saw the rise of the housewife in Europe and the USA. (Mies, 1996: 101)

6 Current Sociology
Consequently, to the extent that subsistence production outside Europe was declared
a ‘backward’ and ‘underdeveloped’ labor form, the bourgeois family model propagated
in Western Europe made it possible to stigmatize female housework as ‘non-work’ and
to define women into the norm of non-wage work altogether. Not only the naturalization
of women, but also that of peasants and slaves in the colonies thus occurred temporally
and (ideo)logically parallel to the process of housewifization of bourgeois women and to
that of the proletarianization of male non-wage workers in the industrial centres. Both
were conceived as dimensions of the larger civilizing process (Mies, 1996; von Werlhof
et al., 1983). Gender, revealed to be a colonial construction by a number of scholars
(Lugones, 2007; McClintock, 1995; Stoler and Cooper, 1997), has informed the modern/
colonial institution of citizenship from its emergence. Gender and citizenship have been
embedded in highly complex ways with other dimensions of stratification and inequality
such as racialization and enslavement, placing men, women and transgender persons at
very different positions in racialized colonial hierarchies. In her 1975 essay ‘The traffic
in women’, feminist scholar Gayle Rubin described the ‘sex/gender system’ as a ‘set of
arrangements’ through which sex is translated into gender and which serves as a prototype
of all social and economic relations. In this system, men exchange women among
themselves on a continuum ranging from prostitution to marriage (Rubin, 1975). Rubin
considered the sex/gender system to pertain not only to a capitalist economy but to con-
stitute the very fabric of culture throughout human history, while Jean Franco argued that
particular forms of the ‘exchange’ of colonized women – such as enslaved indigenous
women given as a gift to the Spanish conquerors or being exchanged between Aztecs
and Spanish men – were already part and parcel of the conquest (Franco, 1999: 71ff.).8
Bridging instead world-systems and decolonial analyses of the capitalist world-economy
(Mignolo, 2000; Wallerstein, 1974) with feminist perspectives, María Lugones coined
the term ‘modern/colonial gender system’ to refer to the co-constituency of gender,
modernity and coloniality under capitalism:
Colonialism did not impose precolonial, European gender arrangements on the colonized.
It imposed a new gender system that created very different arrangements for colonized males
and females than for white bourgeois colonizers. Thus, it introduced many genders and gender
itself as a colonial concept and mode of organization of relations of production, property
relations, of cosmologies and ways of knowing. (Lugones, 2007: 186)
To this unequal and gendered mode of organization corresponded a structural distribution

of unequal and gendered citizenship rights that shaped the modern/colonial institution of
citizenship from its inception and that gets continuously rearticulated in new forms
and understandings of citizenship today. The main lines of rearticulation that ensure the
coloniality of citizenship rights are outlined in the following.
Constructing a universal Occidental norm

As seen above, the nineteenth century saw Europe’s expansion into Asia and Africa,
Darwinian evolutionism and theories of the racial superiority of the white male (having
the ‘beastliness’ of the African woman as a counterpart) eventually coalesce into scientific
racism (Mies, 1996: 95; Quijano and Wallerstein, 1992: 551). The mechanisms of othering

Boatcă and Roth 7
thus employed blended the logic of gendering into that of racial and ethnic inferiorization
by equating primitiveness and exoticism with femininity and puerility. What Edward
Said had identified as the set of features used in describing the Orient as Other – ‘its
eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine
malleability’ (1979: 206) – applied to slightly varying degrees to African women, Oriental
men and the non-Western more generally.9
The social construct of race had gradually replaced religious denomination as an
identity marker and also as an indicator of a person’s position within the hierarchy of
methods of labor control outside Europe. At the same time, citizenship, initially defined
in relation to (male) gender, property status, literacy, and not least social and ethnic
extraction, fulfilled the same function in the newly emerging secular nation-states of
Western Europe. While the typologies thus established legitimated the hierarchy of
labor payment according to a person’s degree of proximity to this standard of citizen-
ship, institutional mechanisms ensured the normalization of the resulting ‘Others’. The
work of the Africans and Native Americans in the colonies, such as that of women and
children in the entire world economy, was treated as inferior, and that of housewives as
‘non-work’, and was therefore either non-wage or unpaid labor. National constitutions,
schools, hospitals, prisons and guidebooks were in charge of emphasizing the universal
norm, isolating or treating deviation, and preparing the young generation for the role of
the citizen as defined by Occidental standards. As decolonial philosopher Santiago
Castro-Gómez has argued for Latin America, the disabled, homosexuals and dissidents
fell just as short of the economically profitable and socially compliant national subject,
as women, the illiterate, non-whites, or the enslaved:
The acquisition of citizenship is … a filter through which only those are allowed to pass, whose
profile fits the type of citizen required by the project of modernity: male, White, paterfamilias,
Catholic, property-owner, literate and heterosexual. Those who do not meet these requirements
(women, servants, the mentally ill, the illiterate, Blacks, heretics, slaves, Indians, homosexuals,
dissidents) remain outside the ‘lettered City’ … sentenced to punishment and therapy by the
same law that excludes them. (Castro-Gómez, 2000: 149, our translation)
Especially in those parts of Latin America that had previously been central to the
Spanish empire before the eighteenth century, and which still had a sizable indigenous
population – such as Mexico, Central America and the Andean region – the inculcation
of Western norms through public education was part of extensive policies of cultural
assimilation that largely built on modified versions of the former colonial policies.10
In contrast, in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, but also in the United States, the virtual
physical extermination of the natives and the conspicuous absence of Blacks from state
discourse silenced the question of the political participation and social enfranchisement
of the non-White population (Quijano, 2006: 199ff.). Thus, the civilizing mission brought
about a dual pattern of hierarchization of difference according to racial and ethnic criteria,
both of which were moreover gendered (e.g. depicting indigenous men as feminized and
lacking Occidental masculinity, while positioning enslaved Africans as hypermasculine,
threatening, and thus to be controlled). In turn, the respective gender positions have been
racialized and ethnicized along colonial patterns, creating the image of the white virtuous

8 Current Sociology
woman and ‘mother’ of the race/nation – and later housewife – to be monitored and
protected from black male aggression, or of the sexually threatening, eroticized and
permanently available black female body, accordingly deprived of (the right to) protection
and motherhood. It is at this juncture of gender, race and ethnicity as products of the
colonial crucible that the institution of citizenship is revealed to be a key element in the
maintenance of the coloniality of power of the modern world-system. It is to the specific
mechanisms of its functioning throughout the history of the system that we refer as the
coloniality of citizenship.
Global perspectives on citizenship

More recently, legal and sociological analyses of global inequalities have pointed to the
ascribed character of citizenship and its key historical role in distributing unequal oppor-
tunities on a global scale (rather than its levelling effects within the boundaries of nation-
states). In her 2009 book The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality, legal
scholar Ayelet Shachar has traced the Western institution of citizenship back to the feudal
entail, a legal means of restricting future succession of property to the descendants of a
designated estate-owner practised in medieval England. The entail of property offered a
tool to preserve land in the hands of dynastic families by entrenching birthright succession
and forbidding future generations to alter the estate inherited from their predecessors.
It was this feudal institution that, according to Shachar’s analysis, shaped the modern
principle of citizenship allocation of Western European states in both jus soli or jus san-
guinis arrangements. The entail of citizenship helps preserve the state’s wealth in the
hands of designated ‘heirs of membership titles’ – the state’s citizens – by allocating
political membership at birth in dramatically different opportunity structures and exclud-
ing non-citizens from the same opportunities (Shachar, 2009: 38ff.).
In Shachar’s gripping comparison, for a girl born in 2001 in Mali, one of the poorest
countries in the world, the chances of surviving to age five, having access to clean water,
or getting an education were incomparably lower than for a baby born at the same
time in the United States, where chances for boys and girls on all these counts are nearly
identically high. Contrary to an entire Western tradition of citizenship theory from Max
Weber through TH Marshall and Talcott Parsons to Bryan Turner, citizenship and gender,
the most decisive factors accounting for these extreme inequalities between individuals
in poor and rich countries in the twenty-first century, are both statuses ascribed at birth.
Thus, citizenship functions as a kind of inherited property that restricts membership in
well-off polities to a small part of the world population, additionally divided along gen-
dered lines (Shachar, 2009). Moreover, both inherited property and birthright citizenship
are automatically transferred from one generation to the next according to ascriptive
principles – either descent from citizen parents in the case of jus sanguinis or birth in the
national territory in the case of jus soli. Both findings contradict an even more entrenched
Western tradition of social science scholarship which equates tradition with ascription
and modernity (as its overcoming) with achievement. For individuals without birthright
privilege in a wealthy state, international migration accordingly becomes a ‘lifeline’, ‘a
possible way to attain the precious and globally scarce good of citizenship in a stable and
well-off polity’ (Shachar, 2009: 83).

Boatcă and Roth 9
At the same time, solid evidence for the fact that national citizenship represents the
best indicator of an individual’s position within the world’s inequality structure has come
from sociological analyses of the global income distribution. Using the Gini coefficients
of 96 countries, Korzeniewicz and Moran (2009) have shown that national inequality
patterns can be grouped into two distinct global clusters. In the high inequality cluster
(above a Gini of 0.5), containing the bulk of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa,
systematic exclusion on the basis of ascriptive criteria such as race, ethnicity and gender
has historically served to limit access to economic, social and political opportunities to a
tiny elite. In turn, the low inequality cluster (below a Gini of 0.3), which encompasses
the whole of Western Europe and parts of Eastern Europe, as well as Australia, Japan and
Canada, has involved widespread relative inclusion of the population through the extension
of property and political rights increasingly derived from achieved (rather than ascribed)
characteristics, such as education, and has facilitated the development of welfare states.
The authors find that membership in both clusters goes back in time to the eighteenth
century and they clearly trace the origins of the institutional arrangements typical of high
inequality patterns back to colonial slavery (Korzeniewicz and Moran, 2009: 31). The
long-term stability of low inequality levels, they argue, has been safeguarded by restricting
physical access to these regions on the basis of ascribed categories, especially national
identity and citizenship, through the control of immigration flows – not of achieved
characteristics such as one’s level of education or professional position, or the economic
growth of the country or region itself.
In this case, too, the logical (and radical) conclusion is that international migration,
which entails gaining access to at least the average income of the poorer country deciles
of a much richer nation-state, becomes the ‘single most immediate and effective means
of global social mobility for populations in most countries of the world’ (Korzeniewicz
and Moran, 2009: 107). Thus, migration not only represents a strategy of upward mobility
for populations of ex-colonial countries possessing metropolitan citizenship, but also a
means of eluding the ascribed position derived from the national citizenship of a poor
state for populations able and willing to risk illegal, undocumented or non-citizen status
in a rich state.11
The possession of citizenship of the former metropole remains to this day a crucial
factor deciding the timing and the destination of ex-colonial subjects’ emigration as well
as the striving for independence in the remaining colonial possessions. This has been
documented for the postcolonial migration flows between several Western European
countries and their former colonies or current overseas departments, as well as for the US
and its ‘protectorates’: thus, fear of losing Dutch citizenship has led to an unparalleled
increase in Surinamese emigration to the Netherlands in the years preceding Surinam’s
independence from the ‘motherland’ (1974/1975) and is the main reason behind the lack
of political pressure for independence in the Dutch Antilles and Aruba in recent times
(Van Amersfoort and Van Niekerk, 2006). Likewise, the extension of US citizenship
rights to the populations of all Caribbean colonies after the Second World War triggered
a massive transfer of labor migrants from the Caribbean to the US (Cervantes-Rodríguez
et al., 2009).
This world-systemic reconceptualization sheds new light on the workings of the institu-
tion of modern citizenship from its very emergence in the context of the French Revolution.

10 Current Sociology
On the one hand, the gradual extension of citizenship rights from propertied white males to
all white males and to white women (although to a large extent restricted until well into the
twentieth century) accounted for the development of low inequality within continental
France as of the eighteenth century. On the other hand, the categorical exclusion of Saint-
Domingue’s black and ‘mulatto’ population from French citizenship, irrespective of their
property status, ensured the maintenance of high inequality between France and Saint-
Domingue/Haiti, as well as between other Western colonial powers and their colonial
possessions more generally. It thus becomes clear that the entail of property that Shachar
used as an analogy to the entail of citizenship was a colonial entail, and that both helped
preserve inherited property, in the form of material goods proper and of rights to goods,
state support, social services and infrastructure in the hands of the (racially, ethnically and
geopolitically) designated heirs to the Western colonial enterprise for several centuries.
The commodification of citizenship

The global perspectives detailed above reveal the ascribed characteristic of citizenship to
be as important for worldwide stratification as class, and international migration as crucial
for worldwide social mobility. Yet (upper) class membership at the global level comes
with the significant benefit of being able to sidestep both ascription and the actual migra-
tion. Whether or not the social mobility achieved through gaining legal status in a wealthy
country counts as or actually constitutes migration depends not only on one’s citizenship
status, but essentially also on one’s financial resources. Resorting to market mechanisms
in order to elude the ascription of citizenship is therefore an increasingly visible, yet rare
option available only to the wealthy few, whose mobility however is seldom described as
migration. They are instead referred to as ‘global investors’, ‘expats’, or ‘foreign residents
for tax purposes’, while their migration process is more often referred to as ‘relocation’
or qualified as ‘business migration’. The growing commodification of citizenship rights
across the world in recent years, i.e. the possibility of literally purchasing residence and
citizenship in certain countries, not only makes the similarity between citizenship and the
entail of property particularly salient, it also prompts the realization that the ascription of
citizenship represents no exception to a modern trend away from ascriptive mechanisms,
but is a core principle of global stratification in the capitalist world-economy.
Conferring citizenship to investors who reside on a country’s territory has been common
practice in a number of states, including the UK, the US, Canada, Belgium and Australia.
A by far less common, but recently growing practice consists of extending citizenship
status to investors without them even having to set foot in the country. Firmly imple-
mented in St Kitts and Nevis and the Commonwealth of Dominica since 1984 and 1993,
respectively, the so-called citizenship by investment programmes have recently prolifer-
ated in Southern and Eastern Europe (Boatcă, 2015). For the first states implementing
them, the programmes were meant to bridge the transition from the export monoculture
of the colonial economy to more diversified production after independence: St Kitts and
Nevis, a federation of two islands in the Caribbean, established its programme one year
after the islands gained independence from the UK in 1983. Similarly, the Commonwealth
of Dominica, which gained independence from the UK in 1978, established an investor
citizenship programme after adverse weather conditions and the decrease in the world

Boatcă and Roth 11
price of bananas, the country’s primary crop, had seriously damaged its economy (Dzankic,
2012). Within Southern and Eastern Europe, citizenship and residency programmes have
emerged especially as a result of the 2008 financial crisis. A real estate investment rang-
ing from €250,000 to €1,150,000 buys foreigners residency rights and, in some cases,
full European Union citizenship in Latvia, Hungary, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Greece,
Cyprus, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Malta, whose investment programmes have all been
implemented since 2010 (BBC News, 2013; CNN Money, 2013). Visa-free travel to core
countries, citizenship of a Schengen zone state, or even the right to work in the European
Union thereby become available for the (moderately or very) wealthy, consequently link-
ing the inequality of income and property to the access to property commodified in the
form of citizenship. However, the commodification of citizenship does not represent a
viable option for most of the world’s population. Instead, it is either an option purposely
designed for a very select few or – more frequently – is scandalized, stigmatized and,
ultimately, criminalized when it threatens to become available to a wider number of people.
In most cases, the declared goal of economic citizenship programmes is to attract wealthy
investors, especially from China, but also, and increasingly, from Russia and the Middle
East. Yet it is only the citizenship of a few states that lends itself to being commodified
by virtue of being a scarce good awarding (relatively) rare benefits. From this point of
view, states whose citizenship includes the advantage of the above-mentioned visa-free
travel to Western countries or even the right to legal employment in them, offer what we
have elsewhere called ‘premium citizenship’ (Boatcă, 2014) that is attractive to investors.
States that are not part of the wealthy core, may, as in the case of St Kitts and Nevis, use
the residual benefits of having been a British colony and that today consist of being a
member of the Commonwealth of Nations – which share, among other things, a visa-free
travel area. This, however, hardly compares to the rights accruing from EU citizenship.
The European Union is home to eight out of the ten countries worldwide whose citizens
enjoy the most freedom of visa-free travel (International Business Times, 2013). At the
same time, it is the historic heir to Western colonial states whose colonial possessions
covered almost half of the inhabited surface of the non-European world as late as the
1930s and who today control 28 out of the remaining 58 colonial possessions (Böröcz
and Sarkar, 2005; Dependencies and Territories of the World, 2013). In accordance with
the worldwide division of labor, wealthy individuals in high positions through which
they enjoy access to ‘buying into’ a privileged citizenship are predominantly male.
The colonial entail of property thereby helps perpetuate the colonial entail of premium
citizenship for Western states alongside the gender dividend of citizenship worldwide.
Tourism, marriage and motherhood as (fast) tracks to

citizenship
As investor citizenships and visas proliferate, naturalization and visa requirements for
the majority of the world’s migrants become more restricted, are criminalized as well as
met with gendered forms of racialization and precarization. This double standard runs
through the global logic of the coloniality of citizenship. While both investor citizenship
and labor migration are geared towards more people gaining access to premium citizen-
ship, the racial criminalization of migrants to core regions – most prominently, the

European Union and the United States – only targets the latter: for labor migrants, inher-
ited citizenship and lengthy naturalization procedures are legally (re)inforced as the only
legitimate options. In addition, the curtailment of women’s rights, mobility and access to
capital, which has historically made them more vulnerable to physical and sexual violence
in Western societies and all the more so in the context of colonialism and enslavement,
continues to do so today. Currently, non-Western women – and other marginalized per-
sons of non-conforming gender performance – still are the most vulnerable migrants.
Their precarious position at the crossroads of multiple axes of inequality requires them to
negotiate their options for global mobility along the continuum ranging from prostitution
to marriage into which they have been defined since the sixteenth century. The title of
Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book Global Woman: Nannies, Maids,
and Sex Workers in the New Economy (2004) keenly summarized the main options that
the increasing feminization of migration offered to racialized women. Elaborating on
Rubin’s concept of ‘traffic in women’, Anca Parvulescu argues that, today, East European
women and women from the global South are ‘ “exchanged” so that they can do a lot of
the physical household work and the immaterial, caring labor traditionally performed by
a wife within the institution of marriage’ (Parvulescu, 2014: 2).
Unlike predominantly male wealthy investors, who can achieve global mobility in
exchange for a check, predominantly poor women, transgender persons and racialized
Others exchange themselves, i.e. offer their bodies, their emotional labor, housework, or all
of the above, for upward mobility through citizenship. Since marriage to the owner of a
Western passport provides one of the few legal and comparatively easy means of access
(as opposed to life-threatening illegal border-crossings), in some regions, tourism serves as
platform of options for all parties. Yet North–South tourism – and sex or ‘romance’ tour-
ism in particular (Pruit and LaFont, 1995) – is based on deeply unequal power structures.
Who can be a tourist and where to, and by whom s/he is being served, is related to highly
asymmetrical and colonial axes of stratification, deeply marked by racial and gendered
dimensions. Owners of a Western passport (with a medium or high income) can use their
citizenship privilege to travel to racially eroticized ‘fantasy islands’, e.g. to the Caribbean
(O’Connell Davidson and Sánchez Taylor, 1999; see also O’Connell Davidson, 2001).
In most formerly colonized regions, highly dependent on the tourism industry, romance
and/or sex are often part and parcel of the package dream holiday of Western tourists of all
genders.12 Against the backdrop of a long tradition of exoticizing and sexualizing the colo-
nial ‘Other’ (McClintock, 1995), Western men and women’s disadvantageous age, gender
and/or class positions are crisscrossed with the ‘cultural/racial capital of whiteness’ (Stam
and Shohat, 2012: 191) derived from their class and citizenship privilege as sex tourists to
a poorer country. Sex workers in the Caribbean, in turn, can transform their class and
citizenship disadvantage into erotic capital rooted in colonial and racialized erotic imagina-
tions of the black body and thereby gain financial advantage in a structurally unequal
encounter (Roth, 2013). In many places, tourism provides one the few ways of access to
hard currency, consumer goods or luxury products. In some cases, encounters with tourists
even result in such global mobility prospects as a holiday abroad through a tourist visa,
permanent residence, up to marriage and a Western passport. However, the non-Western
partners are highly dependent on their privileged passport partners, and women are, again,
particularly vulnerable to physical, psychic or sexual violence.13

Boatcă and Roth 13
In numerous European states – among them Germany, Greece, Denmark, Estonia,

Lithuania and Latvia – the legal residence permit of both partners is the precondition for
marriage or same-sex partnership in case one partner is a EU citizen and the other is not.
Nevertheless, in most Western countries, bi-national couples have to face permanent
suspicion, control and illegalization for years after marriage – measures which patently
violate international human rights standards, especially the right to family life and privacy
(Messinger, 2013: 377). Under the headline ‘Heiraten für den deutschen Pass’ (Getting
married for a German passport), the German daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel recently
reported the case of a Jamaican woman who came to Germany on a tourist visa and got
married to a German citizen, thus obtaining permanent residence for herself and Schengen
tourist visas for her two daughters in Jamaica. The Tagesspiegel reporter accordingly
compared the German husband to the winning of the global mobility ‘jackpot’: ‘From
waitress or maid in Jamaica to fully provided-for housewife – social ascent on the fast
track, overtaking all the refugees who often have to dwell in barracks for years and cannot
work’ (Wermter, 2015, our translation).14 For the Jamaican woman, who successfully
combined the strategy of international migration with the use of the racial and sexual
capital of Western colonial fantasies, the ascription of citizenship through the ‘birthright
lottery’ (Shachar, 2009) is transformed into the achievement of citizenship through the
marriage lottery. For the (white) German man, what Parvulescu labelled ‘the commodi-
fication of his marital options’ (2014: 115) is a combined effect of EU immigration poli-
cies, centred around family values and of German citizenship law, largely based on the
right of blood. The report thus provides an exemplary case of the workings of citizenship
under jus sanguinis arrangements, which offers low-income migrants few possibilities to
take up residence and in which seeking asylum is rarely successful. In this context, getting
married or having a child with a EU passport holder provides a more secure option. ‘The
German authorities downright force us to get pregnant or married’, Tagesspiegel quotes
the Jamaican woman.
It is however precisely such strategies of social mobility through marriage that become
the object of state sanctions and are criminalized as a type of ‘forged descent’ (from a
bloodline community of citizens) in jus sanguinis arrangements (Boatcă, 2014). In
Germany and Austria, matrimonies between EU- and non-EU citizens with the objective
of obtaining a residence permit are pejoratively referred to as ‘Scheinehe’ (sham marriage).
The fact that the term is never applied to pragmatic unions between two Western passport
holders – who might aim to save taxes or enjoy other privileges provided to married
couples by the state – reveals a high level of institutionalized racism (Messinger, 2013:
386)15 made possible by the double standard of the coloniality of citizenship. Suspected
matrimonies are likely to be exposed to degrading controls by the state – e.g. in the form
of unannounced visits to prove the ‘real’ nature of the relationship. Irene Messinger’s
(2013) analysis of the Austrian case draws a clear connection between the tightening of
migration controls in many EU states and the legal situation of bi-national couples in
which one is a non-EU citizen, noting that a clause on ‘marriages of convenience’ was
included for the first time in the 2005 Austrian Alien Law Act. The deeply gendered,
racialized and class-biased dimension of such state surveillance of bi-national marriages
that serves to reinforce immigration controls is blatantly obvious: most suspected couples
are Austrian women of low income married to African men who did not enter the country

legally, while the equally large group of Austrian men married to Asian women is not
listed as suspicious and is hardly exposed to observation and intrusion. Moreover, age
difference is only listed as suspicious when the Austrian woman is considerably older
than her partner, revealing a deeply patriarchal bias. The fact that, since 2006, the couple
has to prove a regular income of more than €1200 per month lowers the chances for low-
income groups.
If Germany and Austria provide examples of the criminalization of migrant practices
to subvert jus sanguinis arrangements, the Americas, where jus soli has historically under-
pinned colonial settlement, offer a different set of possibilities to migrants. Marriage is a
particularly attractive option for women in border regions, such as those crossing the south-
ern border to Mexico from Guatemala. Many of them eventually abandon their initial plan
to continue all the way to the US along highly insecure paths and therefore increasingly are
exposed to sex crimes and enforced prostitution. Women stuck in the border region between
Guatemala and Mexico often work as ‘ficheras’ in bars, which not only offers them more
money than other available jobs to pay for their further journey or send remittances to their
families back home, but also increases the possibility of meeting a potential husband with a
Mexican passport (Quintino et al., 2011: 107). A number of women stuck in a migrant shelter
in this border region get pregnant, as a baby born on Mexican soil promises permanent
residency for the mother (and the father), as well as access to health care and education
(Guevara González, n.d.; Guevara González, 2015). In the US, the same strategy is currently
subject to sanctions and criminalized through the ethnic and racial profiling of immigrants
who come to the country to give birth, and are accused of having abused the right of soil.
Immigration hard-liners describe a wave of migrants crossing the Mexican–US border in the
advanced stages of pregnancy to have what are dismissively called ‘anchor babies’ (Lacey,
2011). The term refers to the automatic granting of US citizenship, in virtue of the 14th
Amendment, to children born on US soil, who can in turn secure citizenship for their parents
upon reaching the age of 21. Contrary to their media depiction as a monstrous ‘threat to the
nation’, many immigrants arriving to give birth in the United States are frequent border
crossers with valid visas who travel legally in order to take advantage of better medical care.
Moreover, although the total US immigration population continues to grow, unauthorized
immigration has slowed in the past decade (Pew Research Center, 2013). Nevertheless,
several Republican attempts at amending the US Constitution since 2010 have mobilized
terms like ‘anchor babies’, ‘birth tourism’ and ‘accidental citizens’ in order to end the auto-
matic granting of citizenship, arguing that the provision attracts high numbers of unauthor-
ized migrants (Feere, 2010; Huffington Post, 2013). In 2014, the state of Texas stopped
issuing birth certificates to children born on its territory to undocumented migrants and
bearers of a Mexican passport without a valid US visa, making it impossible for parents to
authorize medical treatment for their children or enrol them in daycare or school (Texas
Observer, 2015). States are highly active and creative in restricting immigration – often
abusively, as shown in the case of the violation of the right to family life and privacy for
bi-national couples in Austria and Germany or of existing citizenship law for Mexican
mothers in the US. By withholding social protection, health services and other rights from
undocumented migrants and other non-citizens, states perpetuate the colonial entail of citi-
zenship rights for their own nationals, while the highly unequal global system of social
reproduction keeps producing ‘stratified workers and stratified mothers’ (Herrera, 2010).

Boatcă and Roth 15
Outlook
Investor citizenships and the commodification of marital options detailed above are
similar strategies of eluding the ascription of citizenship through recourse to the market.
Attempts to beat the ascriptive logic of citizenship at its own game – i.e. by undermining
the institution of birthright citizenship through migration or transnational marriage – meet
with critique, sanctions and criminalization from supra-state and financial institutions,
encounter legal countermeasures, and are policed along racial, ethnic and gender lines.
Citizenship, based on colonial racial and ethnic constructs, and gender, which has been
reconfigured during colonialism, are key components of the persistence of global in-
equalities today. As affluent middle-class families in the global North come to depend on
migrants from poorer regions to provide childcare, domestic work and sexual services,
Ehrenreich and Hochschild contended, ‘a global relationship arises that … mirrors the
traditional relationship between the sexes’ (2004: 11). Through the corresponding gender-
ing of globalized domestic work and globalized social reproduction, the global North
takes on ‘the role of an old-fashioned male, provider and successful in the public sphere
but in need of care in every other way, while countries of the South take on the role of the
traditional female, caring and nurturing and even sexually available, filling in the “care
deficit” that has emerged in the North’ (Dobrowolsky and Tastsoglou, 2006: 17). This was
the process that, in the 1970s, subsistence theorists had described as ‘housewifization’,
whose prototypical worker was the world-housewife or the worldwide ‘industrial reserve
army’, the ‘marginal mass’ – not, however, the proletarian. For analysing the continuities
of such junctures with regard to processes today, Floya Anthias has suggested a ‘trans-
locational lens’ that shifts attention away from fixed social positions, usually conceived
within a nation-state framework, and points to the transformation of interdependent and
mutually reinforcing inequalities over time and space (see Anthias, 2015).
The birthright transmission of citizenship and the gendered division of labor
(reinforced in the form of global care chains, transnational adoption, surrogacy and
sex tourism) are therefore no striking exceptions to a trend away from ascription, but
key mechanisms of global stratification. It is in the context of global colonial capital-
ism and its corresponding logic of accumulation that the institution of citizenship
emerged; the economic and political interests of the main European colonial powers
that pioneered it were essential in defining its central features, particularly its gen-
dered and racialized dimensions. As long as the gendered and racial dividend of citi-
zenship allocation still translates into the systematically unequal allocation of life
chances, the modernity of the institution of citizenship will be the very proof of its
coloniality.
Funding
Preliminary research for the argument unfolded here benefited from fellowship support to both
authors from desiguALdades.net, a Research Network on Interdependent Inequalities in Latin
America funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
Notes
1. The following two sections summarize and build on arguments previously published in
Chapters 2 and 6 of Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism (see Boatcă, 2015).

2. Silvia Federici (2004) additionally sees the progressive delegitimization of abortive and con-
traceptive practices as part of a strategy of containing unproductive sexuality and thus sub-
jecting the female body to the capitalist dictate of the reproduction of labor power. Through
the control of women’s reproductive capacity, ‘the proletariat was expropriated from its body
as it had been expropriated from the land, where expropriation refers both to the destruction
of specific faculties and their subordination to the aims of the nascent system of production’
(Federici, 2004: 16). For a similar argument, see also Linebaugh and Rediker (2000: 92).
3. Sabine Broeck describes the process as follows: ‘enslaved African-origin female beings
never qualified as women (because of their non-humanness, it followed logically) in the
Euro-American modern world, and therefore were not interpellated to partake in the ongo-
ing social construction and contestation of gender … – a category that would have enabled a
black female claim on social negotiations did not apply to “things”, to what was constructed
as and treated as human flesh. Moreover, that very category gender emerged in western
transatlantic rhetoric precisely in the context of creating a space for white women, who
refused to be treated like slaves, like things’ (Broeck, 2008: 15).
4. For views according to which the Enlightenment ideal of female passivity and domesticity
was a result of the rise of scientific, especially medical knowledge of the human body and of
the subsequent naturalization of sex differences in the eighteenth century, see Nye (1993) and
Schiebinger (2004). For the counterargument that traces the naturalization of women’s repro-
ductive role back to the sixteenth century, and sees eighteenth-century science as a latecomer
to this task, see Federici (2004) and Pelizzon (1998).
5. Tellingly, Saint-Domingue’s first constitution as the independent republic of Haiti aimed at
erasing precisely the racial differences that had made such hierarchization by skin colour
possible. To that end, it ruled that all Haitians, including white women and members of natu-
ralized ethnic groups such as Germans and Poles, were to be referred to by the generic term
‘black’, thus turning the term into a political rather than a biological category (see Fischer,
2004: 233). The constitution thus seized upon the above-mentioned mechanism of deriving a
universal term by generalizing from a particular one, but in so doing reversed the prevailing
hierarchy. As Fischer (2004: 233) cogently remarked, ‘Calling all Haitians, regardless of skin
color, black … both asserts the egalitarian and universalist institutions and puts them to a test
by using the previously subordinated term of the opposition as the universal term.’
6. Practices and laws concerning the marriage of enslaved persons varied widely, in the US
slaves were, for example, denied legal marital status (see Goring, 2006). Being considered the
property of their owners and excluded from the social and even human (including gender) status
of the slave societies, enslaved persons were exposed to often arbitrary rules and practices.
7. For a recent comparison of taboos and legislation against interracial unions in nineteenth-
century Cuba, Brazil and the United States, see Morrison (2010).
8. Depicting ‘exchanged’ women like the Malinche in Mexico as representing ‘the incorporation of
the Conquest’ – the Other as feminized – Franco argues that such colonial practices of traffic in
women provided the ‘necessary services both sexual and practical’ for peopling the New World
and founding a mestizo population (Franco, 1999: 76). She also sees these practices as ‘the begin-
ning of the end of the gift economy’ and the transition to contract exchange (Franco, 1999: 74).
9. ‘Along with all other peoples variously designated as backward, degenerate, uncivilized, and
retarded, the Orientals were viewed in a framework constructed out of biological determinism
and moral-political admonishment. The Oriental was thus linked to elements in Western soci-
ety (delinquents, the insane, women, the poor) having in common an identity best described
as lamentably alien. Orientals were rarely seen or looked at; they were seen through, analyzed
not as citizens, or even people, but as problems to be solved or confined’ (Said, 1979: 207).
10. As Quijano notes, these policies were not straightforwardly assimilationist but retained their
colonial overtones: ‘However, said strategy never ceased to alternate and combine with

Boatcă and Roth 17
discriminating policies against the “indio” as well as with the othering of the “indio”. In this
way, de-Indianization could not encompass the majority of the “Indian” population, which
could only incorporate itself or be incorporated to a partial, precarious and formal extent in the
process of nationalizing society, the culture, and the state’ (Quijano, 2006: 201, our translation).
11. Using the inequality data for six countries interlinked through considerable migration flows,
Korzeniewicz and Moran are able to show how anyone in the poorest seven to eight deciles of
Bolivia or Guatemala can move up several global income deciles by migrating to Argentina or
Mexico, respectively, and gaining access to the average income of the second poorest decile
there. Even more strikingly, anyone but people in the wealthiest decile in both Argentina
and Mexico is able to skip several global income deciles by entering Spain or the United
States’ second poorest decile through migration (Korzeniewicz and Moran, 2009: 108ff.).
In all these cases, the upward mobility of migrant populations is considerably higher than
either the within-country educational attainment or the economic growth of one’s country
of origin would have allowed during a lifetime (judging by the most successful examples of
economic growth, such as South Korea in the 1980s or China today).
12. See Sánchez Taylor (2010) on sex tourism research and sex tourism and inequalities.
13. There are also marriage agencies offering the ‘racial, erotic’ capital of (mostly) females from
poor countries in exchange for the ‘citizenship’ capital of men (and women) in the global
North who do not easily find a partner back home or are looking for specific characteristics
in a partner (e.g. a decisively younger, devoted, caring, sexy partner to be chosen from the
agencies’ catalogues).
14. Dobrowolsky and Tastsoglou underscore the experience of gender exclusion shared by women
despite ‘women’s multiple, intersecting identities (such as race, ethnicity, class, ability, sexual
orientation, age, religion and so on)’. For migrant women in particular, these exclusions come
with limited citizenship rights: ‘women (im)migrants frequently find themselves in citizen-
ship limbo, or with various kinds of “partial citizenship” as is the case for temporary workers
… with very few if any rights to draw upon. This, in turn, can lead to further deprivation
and impoverishment, and an array of abuses or forms of exploitation. … They are affected
by structural processes (global, transnational, national and local) as they seek safe passage
across borders, or eke out an existence in borderlands, or struggle to re-establish professional
careers in new contexts when immigration regulations construct them as dependents on a
male breadwinner’ (Dobrowolsky and Tastsoglou, 2006: 5, 6).
15. Interestingly, marriages between German (or other) citizens and persecuted Jews (who were
deprived of their citizenship) are now being referred to as ‘Schutzehe’ (‘protective marriage’)
(see Messinger, 2012).
References
Alexander JM (1991) Redrafting morality: The postcolonial state and the Sexual Offences Bill of
Trinidad and Tobago. In: Mohanty CT, Russo A and Torres L (eds) Third World Women and
the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Anthias F (2015) Interconnecting boundaries of identity and belonging and hierarchy-making
within transnational mobility studies: Framing inequalities. Current Sociology. Published
ahead of print. DOI: 10.1177/0011392115614780.
Bashi Treitler V (2013) The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bashi Treitler V (2015) Dynamics of inequalities in a global perspective: An introduction. Current
Sociology. Published ahead of print. DOI: 10.1177/0011392115614752.
BBC News (2013) EU shrugs off European race to woo rich foreigners. 18 November. Available
at: www.bbc.com/nws/world-europe-24940012 (accessed 2 April 2014).

Blackburn R (1988) The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848. London: Verso.

Boatcă M (2014) Commodification of citizenship: Global inequalities and the modern transmission
of property. In: Wallerstein I, Chase-Dunn C and Suter C (eds) Overcoming Global Inequalities.
Boulder, CO: Paradigm, pp. 3–18.
Boatcă M (2015) Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism. Farnham: Ashgate.
Böröcz J and Sakar M (2005) What is the EU? International Sociology 20(2): 153–173.
Broeck S (2008) Enslavement as regime of western modernity: Re-reading gender studies episte-
mology through black feminist critique. Gender Forum 2. Available at: www.genderforum.
org/issues/black-womens-writing-revisited/enslavement-as-regime-of-western-modernity/
Bush B (1981) White ‘ladies’, coloured ‘favourites’ and black ‘wenches’: Some considerations on
sex, race and class factors in social relations in white Creole society in the British Caribbean.
Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 2(3): 245–262.
Castro-Gómez S (2000) Ciencias sociales, violencia epistémica y el problema de la invención
del otro. In: Lander E (ed.) La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales.
Perspectivas latinoamericanas. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, pp. 145–161.
Cervantes-Rodríguez M, Grosfoguel R and Mielants E (2009) Introduction: Caribbean migrations
to Western Europe and the United States. In: Cervantes-Rodríguez M, Grosfoguel R and
Mielants E (eds) Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States: Essays on
Incorporation, Identity, and Citizenship. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 1–17.
CNN Money (2013) Europe’s golden visas lure rich Chinese. 26 November. Available at: money.
cnn.com/2013/11/26/news/europe-golden-visas/ (accessed 2 April 2014).
Dependencies and Territories of the World (2013) Worldatlas.com. January. Available at: www.
worldatlas.com/dependtr.htm (accessed 8 May 2014).
Dobrowolsky A and Tastsoglou E (2006) Crossing boundaries and making connections.
In: Dobrowolsky A and Tastsoglou E (eds) Women, Migration and Citizenship: Making
Local, National, and Transnational Connections. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 1–35.
Dzankic J (2012) The pros and cons of ius pecuniae: Investor citizenship in comparative perspec-
tive. EUI Working Papers, RSCAS, 2012/14, pp. 1–18.
Ehrenreich B and Hochschild AR (eds) (2004) Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers
in the New Economy. New York: Henry Holt.
Federici S (2004) The Great Caliban: The struggle against the rebel body – Part two. Capitalism
Nature Socialism 15(3): 13–28.
Feere J (2010) Birthright citizenship in the United States: A global comparison. Center for
Immigration Studies Backgrounder, August. Available at: www.cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/
articles/2010/birthright.pdf (accessed 2 May 2014).
Fischer S (2004) Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution.
Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Franco J (1999) La Malinche: From gift to sexual contract. In: Pratt ML and Newman K (eds)
Critical Passions: Jean Franco: Selected Essays. Durham, NC and London: Duke University
Press, pp. 66–82.
Goring D (2006) The history of slave marriage in the United States. Journal Articles. Paper 262.
Available at: digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/faculty_scholarship/262
Grosfoguel R and Mielants E (2006) The long durée entanglement between Islamophobia and
racism in the modern/colonial/capitalist/patriarchal world-system: An introduction. Human
Architecture. Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5(1): 1–12.
Guevara González Y (2015) Migración de tránsito y ayuda humanitaria: Apuntes sobre las casas
de migrantes en la ruta migratoria del pacífico sur en México. Fiar 8(1).
Guevara González Y (n.d.) Transit itineraries: Migrant’s experiences and interactions in Mexico’s
southern border, dissertation project. Unpublished.

Boatcă and Roth 19
Hanagan M (2002) Gewalt und die Entstehung von Staaten. In: Heitmeyer W and Hanagan M
(eds) Handbuch Gewaltforschung. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, pp. 153–176.
Herrera G (2010) Stratified workers, stratified mothers: Migration policies and citizenship among
Ecuadorian immigrant women. In: Chavkin W and Maher JM (eds) The Globalization of
Motherhood: Deconstructions and Reconstructions of Biology of Care. New York: Routledge,
pp. 55–76.
Huffington Post (2013) Steve King introduces bill to stop ‘anchor babies’. 4 January. Available at:
www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/04/steve-king-anchor-babies_n_2411989.html (accessed
5 July 2013).
International Business Times (2013) The best passports to have for unrestricted travel around
the world. Available at: www.ibtimes.com/best-passports-have-unrestricted-travel-around-
world-1422038 (accessed 1 May 2014).
Korzeniewicz RP and Moran TP (2009) Unveiling Inequality: A World-Historical Perspective.
New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Lacey M (2011) Birthright citizenship looms as next immigration battle. New York Times, 4 January.
Available at: www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/us/politics/05babies.html?pagewanted=all&_
r=0 (accessed 5 May 2015).
Linebaugh P and Rediker MB (2000) The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and
the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. London: Verso.
Lugones M (2007) Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system. Hypatia 22(1):
186–209.
Lugones M (2008) The coloniality of gender. Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise 2: 1–17.
McClintock A (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Class and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New
York and London: Routledge.
Maldonado-Torres N (2008) Religion, conquête et race dans les fondations du monde moderne/
colonial. In: Mestiri M, Grosfoguel R and El Soum Y (eds) Islamophobie dans le monde
moderne. Saint Ouen: IIIT Editions, pp. 206–238.
Mamozai M (1982) Herrenmenschen: Frauen im deutschen Kolonialismus. Reinbeck: Rororo.
Marshall TH (1977) Class, Citizenship and Social Development: Essays. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Merchant C (1980) The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. New
York: Perennial Library.
Messinger I (2012) Schein oder nicht Schein. Konstruktion und Kriminalisierung von ‘Scheinehen’
in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Reihe Kritik & Utopie. Vienna: Mandelbaum.
Messinger I (2013) There is something about marrying … The case of human rights vs. migration
regimes using the example of Austria. Laws 2: 376–391.
Mies M (1996) Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. London: Zed Books.
Mignolo W (2000) Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and
Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mignolo W (2006) Islamophobia/Hispanophobia. The (re)configuration of the racial/imperial/
colonial matrix. Human Architecture. Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge V(I):
13–28.
Morrison KY (2010) Slave mothers and white fathers: Defining family and status in Late Colonial
Cuba. Slavery & Abolition 31(1): 29–55.
Nye RA (1993) Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France. New York: Oxford
University Press.
O’Connell Davidson J (2001) The sex tourist, the expatriate, his ex-wife and her ‘other’: The
politics of loss, difference and desire. Sexualities 4(1): 5–24.

O’Connell Davidson J and Sánchez Taylor J (1999) Fantasy islands: Exploring the demand for sex
tourism. In: Kempadoo K (ed.) Sun, Sex and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean.
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 37–54.
Parsons T (1971) The System of Modern Societies. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Parvulescu A (2014) The Traffic in Women’s Work: East European Migration and the Making of
Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pelizzon S (1998) But can she spin? The decline in the social standing of women in the transition
from feudalism to capitalism. PhD Dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton.
Peters C (2004) Women in Early Modern Britain, 1450–1640. New York: Macmillan.
Pew Research Center (2013) Unauthorized immigrants: How Pew Research counts them and what
we know about them. 17 April. Available at: www.pewresearch.org/2013/04/17/unauthorized-
immigrants-how-pew-research-counts-them-and-what-we-know-about-them/ (accessed 6
May 2014).
Pruit D and LaFont S (1995) For love and money: Romance tourism in Jamaica. Annals of Tourism
Research 22(2): 422–440.
Quijano A (2000) Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from
South 1(3): 533–574.
Quijano A (2006) El ‘movimiento indígena’ y las cuestiones pendientes en América Latina,
Review. Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center XXIX(2): 189–220.
Quijano A and Wallerstein I (1992) Americanity as a concept, or the Americas in the modern
world-system. International Journal of the Social Sciences 134: 549–557.
Quintino F, Chong F, López R et al. (2011) Trabajadoras sexuales en la frontera México-
Guatemala: Migración y salud sexual y reproductiva en la frontera sur de México, vulnera-
bilidiad y acceso a servicios de salud sexual y reproductivo. Instituto Nacional de Saludos
Pública, pp. 107–126.
Roth J (2013) Entangled inequalities as intersectionalities: Towards an epistemic sensibilization.
desiguALdades.net Working Paper No. 43. Available at: www.desigualdades.net/bilder/
Working_Paper/43_WP_Roth_Online.pdf?1367229865
Rubin G (1975) The traffic in women: Notes on the ‘political economy’ of sex. In: Reiter R (ed.)
Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 157–210.
Said E (1979) Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Sánchez Taylor J (2010) Sex tourism and inequalities. In: Cole S and Morgan N (eds) Tourism and
Inequality: Problems and Prospects. Wallingford and Cambridge, MA: CAB International.
Schiebinger L (2004) Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Shachar A (2009) The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality. Cambridge, MA and
London: Harvard University Press.
Stam R and Shohat E (2012) Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic.
New York: New York University Press.
Stoler AL and Cooper F (1997) Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Texas Observer (2015) Children of immigrants denied citizenship. Available at: www.texasobserver.
org/children-of-immigrants-denied-citizenship/
Turner BS (1996) Introduction: Marx and Nietzsche. In: For Weber: Essays on the Sociology of
Fate. London: Sage.
Van Amersfoort H and Van Niekerk M (2006) Immigration as a colonial inheritance: Post-colonial
immigrants in the Netherlands, 1945–2002. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 32:
323–346.

Boatcă and Roth 21
Von Werlhof C, Mies M and Bennholdt-Thomsen V (1983) Frauen, die letzte Kolonie. Reinbek
bei Hamburg: Rowohlt.
Wallerstein I (1974) The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the
European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press.
Wallerstein I (2003) Citizens all? Citizens some! The making of the citizen. Comparative Studies
in Society and History 45(4): 650–679.
Weber M (1978) Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Volume One, ed.
Roth G and Wittich C. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Werbner P and Yuval-Davis N (1999) Introduction: Women and the new discourse on citizenship.
In: Werbner P and Yuval-Davis N (eds) Women, Citizenship, and Difference. New York and
London: Zed Books.
Wermter B (2015) Heiraten für den deutschen Pass [Getting married for the German passport].
Der Tagesspiegel 24 July. Available at: www.tagesspiegel.de/weltspiegel/sonntag/die-
geschichte-einer-jamaikanerin-in-berlin-heiraten-fuer-den-deutschen-pass/12007890.html
Wynter S (1990) Afterword: Beyond Miranda’s meanings. Un/silencing the ‘demonic ground’ of
Caliban’s women. In: Boyce Davies C and Savory Fido E (eds) Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean
Women and Literature. Trenton, NJ: African World Press, pp. 355–372.
Author biographies
Manuela Boatcă is Professor of Sociology with a focus on macrosociology at the Albert-Ludwigs-
University Freiburg, Germany. She was Visiting Professor at IUPERJ, Rio de Janeiro in 2007/2008
and Professor of Sociology of Global Inequalities at the Latin American Institute of the Freie
Universität Berlin from 2012 to 2015. Her work on world-systems analysis, postcolonial and deco-
lonial perspectives, gender in modernity/coloniality and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern
Europe and Latin America has appeared in the Journal of World-Systems Research, Cultural
Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, Political Power and Social Theory, Berliner Journal für
Soziologie, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte and Theory,
Culture and Society. She is author of Global Inequalities beyond Occidentalism (Ashgate, 2015)
and co-editor (with E Gutiérrez Rodríguez and S Costa) of Decolonizing European Sociology:
Transdisciplinary Approaches (Ashgate, 2010) and of Handbuch Entwicklungsforschung (with
K Fischer and G Hauck) (Springer, 2015).
Julia Roth is postdoctoral researcher and instructor of the BMBF project ‘The Americas as Space
of Entanglement(s)’, Centre for Inter-American Studies, Bielefeld University, Germany. Among
her research interests are gender studies, critical race studies, postcolonial and decolonial
approaches, critical whiteness and intersectionality, with a focus on the Caribbean. Her current
research project is titled ‘New Media – Persistent Inequalities? Trans-American Politics of Gender
and Race’. She is author of Occidental Readings, Decolonial Practices: A Selection on Gender,
Genre, and Coloniality in the Americas (WVT, 2014) and editor of Lateinamerikas koloniales
Gedächtnis. Vom Ende der Ressourcen, so wie wir sie kennen [Latin Americas Colonial Memory:
On the End of Resources as We Know Them] (Nomos, 2015).
Résumé
Toute une tradition théorétique occidentale sur la citoyenneté voit cette dernière
comme une institution moderne et progressive aidant à surmonter les particularités
d’une origine sociale inégale. S’opposant à cette vision d’une tradition scientifique occi-
dentale (et principalement masculine), cet article est structuré autour de deux argu-
ments. Le premier est que l’institution de la citoyenneté en Occident se soit développée

par le biais d’une exclusion légale (et physique) de populations non-européennes, non-
blanches et non-occidentales des droits civiques, politiques, sociaux et culturels (ces
derniers ayant, en plus, été filtrés selon le genre des individus). Le deuxième est que la
citoyenneté et le genre soient les facteurs les plus décisifs pour rendre compte des
inégalités extrêmes entre les individus des pays riches et pauvres du 21ème siècle.
L’acquisition de la citoyenneté liée à des formes de racialisation, de sexualisation et de
précarisation est illustrée à partir d’exemples d’allégations d’abus de lois de citoyenneté
concernant des mariages ou des naissances dans des pays dépendants principalement du
droit de sang et droit de sol.
Mots-clés
Inégalités mondiales, mobilité sociale, citoyenneté, genre, colonialité, migration
Resumen
Toda una tradición occidental de la teoría de la ciudadanía ha considerado a la ciu-
dadanía como una institución moderna y progresista que ha ayudado a superar particu-
laridades de orígenes sociales desiguales. Contrario a las afirmaciones de la tradición
académica occidental, que está compuesta principalmente por hombres, el artículo
sostiene, en primer lugar, que la institución de la ciudadanía se ha desarrollado en
Occidente a través de la exclusión legal y física de los derechos civiles, políticos y cul-
turales pertenencientes a las poblaciones que no son europeas, blancas u occidentales.
Estas exclusiones, y por tanto, la ciudadanía como tal, han sido históricamente atrave-
sadas por el género. En segundo lugar, el artículo sostiene que la ciudadanía y el género
son los factores determinantes principalmente responsables por las desigualdades
extremas entre los individuos de los países ricos y pobres en el siglo XXI. Las diversas
manifestaciones de racialización, sexualización y precarización que están ligadas a la
adquisición de la ciudadanía y movilidad social se ilustran con ejemplos de algunas prác-
ticas que subvierten la ley de ciudadanía mediante el matrimonio o el nacimiento en los
países que dependen principalmente del jus sanguinis y el jus soli.
Palabras clave
Desigualdades globales, movilidad social, ciudadanía, género, colonialidad, migración

Boatca & Roth - Unequal and Gendered

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Boatca & Roth - Unequal and Gendered

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

614781

Unequal and gendered:

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

En-gendering freedom and the public sphere1

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

accomplished in continental France. However, it excluded both slaves and ‘mulattos’

En-gendering racialization in the colonies

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

To this unequal and gendered mode of organization corresponded a structural distribution

Constructing a universal Occidental norm

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

Global perspectives on citizenship

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

The commodification of citizenship

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

Tourism, marriage and motherhood as (fast) tracks to

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

In numerous European states – among them Germany, Greece, Denmark, Estonia,

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

Blackburn R (1988) The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848. London: Verso.

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com at CMU Libraries - library.cmich.edu on December 6, 2015

You might also like