Published Paper Details:

The discourse around the concept of citizenship has been a center of discussion in both the liberal and the neo-liberal states. The theoretical discussion is primarily dominant in the civic republican and liberal debates. The civic republican notion of citizenship emphasizes the community participation while advocating active citizenry, political participation, and civic virtue. The emphasis is more on active participation in civic life. The liberal notion of citizenship believes in the capacity of the individuals themselves as an active citizen by emphasizing individual rights and private interests. The question arises as to whether these two concepts can encompass the marginalized sections of society, especially women. And is there a possibility of reaching a milieu of formal and substantive rights of a citizen? These are some of the issues in the concept of citizenship that demand a revision of the current definition of citizenship. However, there has been an attempt at re-theorization of the concept by recent scholars whose work focuses on the binary of the concept of citizenship. The binary of public-private gives space for discussion on women and their claim to citizenship. There is a notion that men are active participants in the public domain while women are mostly confined to the private domain (the insider-outsider debate). Therefore, in this context, the paper tries to look at the relationship between the concept of citizenship and how the concept is contested and negotiated when it comes to women. Women's oppression is exemplified in the way women experience citizenship rights. On the one hand, the state guarantees citizenship rights and on the other, it is the nature of the society to determine the extent to which citizenship rights can be exercised. The paper is an attempt to look at citizenship as a concept from the lens of women's experience and will mainly outline the theoretical implications of the concept of citizenship in the context of women in India while giving a general view of how discrimination and social exclusion can undermine the benefits of citizenship. The method used in this paper is qualitative and analytical while relying on theoretical discourse analysis and secondary research.