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This paper examines family planning in Brazil as biopolitics and explores how the democratization of the State and of reproductive health services after two decades of military dictatorship (1964–1984) has influenced health professionals’ and family planning users’ discourses and practices. Do health professionals envisage family planning as a ‘right’ or do they conceive it, following the old neo-Malthusian rationale, as a ‘moral duty’ of poor people, whose ‘irrational’ reproduction jeopardizes the family's and the nation's well being? And how do their patients conceptualize and embody family planning? To answer these questions, this paper draws on 13 months of multi-sited ethnographic research undertaken between 2003 and 2005 in two public family planning services in Salvador da Bahia, where participant observation was undertaken and unstructured interviews were conducted with 11 health professionals and 70 family planning users, mostly low income black women. The paper examines how different bio-political rationalities operate in these services and argues that the old neo-Malthusian rationale and the current, dominant discourse on reproductive rights, gender equality and citizenship coexist. The coalescence of different biopolitical rationalities leads to the double stigmatization of family planning users as ‘victims’ of social and gender inequalities and as ‘irrational’ patients, ‘irresponsible’ mothers and ‘bad’ citizens if they do not embody the neo-Malthusian and biomedical rationales shaping medical practice. However, these women do not behave as ‘docile bodies’: they tactically use medical and non-medical contraceptives not only to be good mothers and citizens, but also to enhance themselves and to attain their own goals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the role of kinship and ethnicity in the designation of Canadian citizenship. Using the phenomenon of Lost Canadians - people whose citizenship status is ambiguous due to conflicting laws, unfamiliarity with requirements to maintain citizenship and quixotic enforcement of these requirements - the paper offers evidence for the kinship basis of a contemporary liberal democracy and reveals the degree to which a Canadian ethnic identity is operative in this settler society. But the objective of the analytical exercise is not to rest at the observation that Canadian nationalism is ethnic. Rather, by examining the ways in which the complex rules of Canadian citizenship define or exclude people from citizenship, we see how thoroughly rule-bound the status of national belonging really is. It thus might be observed that Canadian nationalism, indeed, all nationalisms, are civic since they rest on rules for belonging. Once we notice the rule-boundedness of belonging it becomes possible to disentangle these rules - kinship rules - from their connections to nature and biology and thus to appreciate their social character. From this vantage we might begin to think about alternative, and potentially more democratic, forms of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzesLittle Mosque on the Prairie, its characters and themes within the context of post-9/11 discourses of nationalism and citizenship. Against the backdrop of the Canadian national narrative, I argue that the sitcom foregrounds a ‘moderate Muslim’ that demarcates the boundaries of the multicultural nation-state, especially when juxtaposed against the racially and sexually coded Muslim ‘other’ on the global landscape. The moderate Muslim is represented as ‘liberal’ and ‘modern’, one who seeks to integrate her faith into the multicultural fabric of society. Such a figure, represented both as a ‘good’ Muslim/immigrant and a ‘good’ Canadian citizen-subject, illuminates the boundaries of ‘acceptability’ within the Canadian national imaginary. The figure of the moderate Muslim reinforces the racial coding embedded in this imaginary, while enabling the state to proclaim its ‘multicultural tolerance’ and benevolence. Building on previous scholarship on race, citizenship, and nation-building, I argue that the moderate Muslim – as exemplified inLittle Mosque on the Prairie– serves important ideological functions in (re)defining the internal (and racially coded) borders of the nation. WhileLittle Mosque on the Prairiemakes an important contribution to the representation of Muslims, challenging some stereotypes, I argue that it does not deliver on its considerable potential to articulate nuanced representations of Muslims. Through its foregrounding of the figure of the moderate Muslim, the sitcom reaffirms key norms, engages in a politics of authenticity, and reinforces hegemonic messages, both within Muslim communities and in Canadian society. Thus, the moderate Muslim becomes a key player in enabling the state to render invisible its exclusion of the ‘Muslim Other,' while maintaining its non-racist credentials. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The emergence of private military and security companies (PMSCs) is one of the most important developments in warfare over the past two to three decades. Employing a critical feminist perspective, this paper argues that the privatization of military security is not so much about the weakening of the state's monopoly over legitimate force as it is about the transformation of how military work is organized and tied to citizenship, and by extension to race, class, and gender. Focusing on the USA, my argument is twofold: first, that the remaking of militarized citizenship through the termination of male conscription was instrumental in paving the way for the increased privatization of military security, and second, that the outsourcing of military security functions to private companies allows for a global rescaling of recruitment that geographically extends the spatial and social determinants of who works for or in support of the military. In particular, US PMSCs operating in Iraq and Afghanistan have heavily relied on racialized workers from the global South. Recruiting workers beyond the boundaries of the US citizenry relies on, and reinforces, the global inequalities of citizenship that simultaneously intersect with gendered, racialized, and classed inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the magazine Muslim Girl (started publication 2007) and explores how the representations on the magazine's pages construct a particular type of identity for Muslim women: an 'idealized' Muslim woman who is both North American/Western and Muslim. Such a woman is portrayed as liberal, educated, fashionable, a 'can-do' woman, who is also committed to her faith. This 'ideal' woman is situated squarely as a neo-liberal subject in an increasingly consumerist world: she is 'marketable' (and marketed) as the 'good Muslim' (Mamdani, 2004) and is positioned as the 'familiar stranger' (Ahmed, 2000) in North America. This so-called 'modern' Muslim (read: 'good Muslim') is juxtaposed both against the 'fundamentalist' Muslim (read: 'bad Muslim') and the 'normalized' white North American subject. Against the discourse of post 9/11 nationalism and within the context of (gendered) Orientalism, this article argues that such idealized representations present easily recognizable tropes, which serve important political, ideological and cultural purposes within North American society. An analysis of these representations - and the purposes which they serve - provides an important window into the nuances of the structured discourses that seek to control and discipline the gendered Muslim body. On the one hand, the representations in Muslim Girl focus on the so-called 'integrated North American Muslim' - a 'modern' or 'good' Muslim - within the context of the multicultural, neo-liberal and post 9/11 nation-state. On the other hand, these representations also highlight examples of Muslim women, who seemingly remain committed to their faith and community. Such representations of hybridized North American Muslims speak powerfully to the forces - ideological, cultural, political and social - that are at play in the post 9/11 world. In analyzing the representations found in Muslim Girl, this paper provides an insight into some of these forces and their implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study of the land restitution process and the return of, or compensation for, land taken for racial reasons since 1913, explores how the South African ANC government balances the search for economic growth and undoing historical and social injustices underpinned by efforts to balance universal citizenship with recognition of difference. Land restitution, the third leg of South Africa's land reform, has entered a critical phase, with the planned restoration of hundreds of highly developed commercial farms in Limpopo Province to claimant communities in the face of substantial landowner resistance and government over-commitment. The combination of productive land, substantial export revenues, pervasive restitution claims and past disappointments has led the government to embrace a new model of restitution. Successful claimant communities will form a joint venture company with a private entrepreneur and with a small share reserved for farm workers. This new modified business model raises a series of fundamental questions about how the South African government balances its responsibility for providing economic and social development while achieving social justice. A related question is how it equalises the three sources of inequality: race, gender and class. The paper, based upon fieldwork in northern Limpopo Province, analyses these emerging tensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the racialisation and gendering of a collective subject described as 'Middle Eastern or Muslim' in the US media in the aftermath of 9/11. It examines how this category came to be visible and prominent through the workings of disciplinary power and forms of governmentality through the binary of freedom and unfreedom, necropolitics and the politics of security and freedom. Multiculturalism in the US, as it was articulated in consumer culture through the national spectacle of the flag, emerged as an example of this new form of governmentality that is both regulative and productive of American nationalism and transnationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]