Ingenious citizenship : recrafting democracy for social change / Charles T. Lee.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lee, Charles T., 1976- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Democracy--United States--Citizen participation.

Democracy.

Marginality, Social--Political aspects--United States.

Marginality, Social.

Social change--United States.

Social change.

Marginality, Social--Political aspects.

Political participation.

United States.

Political participation--United States.

Political culture--United States.

Political culture.

Democracy--Citizen participation.

Physical Description:

xiii, 298 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2016.

Summary:

In Ingenious Citizenship Charles T. Lee centers the daily experiences and actions of migrant domestic workers, sex workers, transgender people, and suicide bombers in his rethinking of mainstream models of social change. Bridging cultural and political theory with analyses of film, literature, and ethnographic sources, Lee shows how these abject populations find ingenious and improvisational ways to disrupt and appropriate practices of liberal citizenship. When voting and other forms of civic engagement are unavailable or ineffective, the subversive acts of a domestic worker breaking a dish or a prostitute using the strategies and language of an entrepreneur challenge the accepted norms of political action. Taken to the extreme, a young Palestinian woman blowing herself up in a Jerusalem supermarket questions two of liberal citizenship's most cherished values: life and liberty. Using these examples to critically reinterpret political agency, citizenship practices, and social transformation, Lee reveals the limits of organizing change around a human rights discourse. Moreover, his subjects offer crucial lessons in how to turn even the worst conditions and the most unstable positions in society into footholds for transformative and democratic agency. Book jacket.

Contents:

Ingenious citizenship : appropriating the liberal citizenship script

Migrant domestic workers, hidden tactics, and appropriating political citizenship

Global sex workers, calculated abjection, and appropriating economic citizenship

Trans people, morphing technologies, and appropriating gendered citizenship

Suicide bombers, sacrificial violence, and appropriating life itself

Conclusion: Politics without politics : democracy as meant for ingenious appropriation.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780822360216

0822360217

9780822360377

0822360373

9780822374831

0822374838

OCLC:

906010732