Umut Erel By explicitly enshrining the earned nature of citizenship, the government implicitly regulates and calls to order existing citizens. The experience of migrant women from Turkey offers an alternative. The British Home Office’s website announces that new earned citizenship laws, will come into effect in late 2009, if agreed by parliament. The idea of earned citizenship combines the management migration regime where entry is based on a points system, allowing mainly those defined as skilled migrants entry. This is combined with a three stage system of acquiring citizenship, so that anyone living in the UK is required to earn the right to stay and in the different stages of acquiring British citizenship will be entitled to different degrees of social citizenship. This is problematic in many ways: Presenting British citizenship as a privilege, in Brown's words a ‘prized asset’ that must be earned, calls on the ‘newcomers’ who want to acquire citizenship or even the right to permanent residence to demonstrate their ability to belong to Britain by speaking English, knowledge of the UK, being in employment, bringing up acceptable, i.e. non-criminal, children, and demonstrating active citizenship and an engagement with the wider society. If, and only if they can prove they fulfil these requirements they qualify for British citizenship. One aspect of presenting this long (6-10 years) and arduous route to citizenship for newcomers is to inculcate in those who already are British citizens a sense of how privileged they indeed are to already have this prized possession. In particular against the backdrop of frustrations with citizens’ ability to affect political decision making, most recently scandalized in the outcry over MPs expenses claims, emphasising how much migrants must do to get what existing citizens are thought to already possess, is a revalorization of citizenship. However, by explicitly enshrining the earned nature of citizenship, the government implicitly also, of course, regulates and calls to order existing citizens. This affects in particular ways racialized citizens who, in everyday situations, are still required to prove that indeed they are citizens rather than non-entitled immigrants. Questions about citizenship, and how long one has been in the country, say, when registering for a doctor’s surgery, activate and keep active the assumption that some citizens have more to prove than others that they belong. Indeed, the question of shared values is presented as at the heart of the citizenship agenda. And while these values are presented as universalistic rather than narrowly national or ethnic, the underlying assumption is that some citizens (non-Muslim, white, educated, economically active) are more predisposed than others to embrace and embody these shared values. Indeed, in some ways the universalistic discourse of equality and democracy is claimed as a national British or European property. At the same time that these changes to the meanings of citizenship and possibilities of accessing citizenship are taking place, the academic field of citizenship studies is burgeoning. Yet, there is a disjuncture between academic debates on inclusive citizenship attempting to mobilize ‘citizenship’ as a concept to democratize an ever widening range of social relations on one hand and current governmental attempts in Europe to increasingly construct citizenship as a privilege. One way in which academic debates on inclusive citizenship can connect effectively with political debates on citizenship practices is by taking seriously and making relevant the experiences of citizenship of those that have been excluded or marginalized. Here, I suggest some ways in which the experiences of migrant women from Turkey who arrived from the 1970s to late 1980s can be harnessed for an understanding of citizenship that can address the promise of citizenship as a democratizing practice rather than a privilege. I am not suggesting that this particular group of migrant women can contribute the most incisive insights on the relation between migration, gender and citizenship. Indeed, I’d like to caution against homogenizing the category of migrant women and, of course, new and diverse forms of mobility and migrant incorporation (say of migrants with temporary residence, of undocumented migrants, of accession country migrants) generate not just different, stratified statuses of citizenship but also different citizenship practices. Thus, what I provide here is not an ‘exemplary’ account of how to ‘do’ citizenship more critically. But it is a situated account of how (some) migrant women’s practices can help us reconceptualise notions of citizenship. By bringing in these particular migrant women’s experiences, I do not claim that their practices are the most advanced or that this group of migrant women should be regarded as the privileged political subject for deconstructing citizenship as a privilege. However, they are the group that I have done extensive research with. Rather than developing generalized ideas on what citizenship (should) mean, I want to make a case for a situated account of citizenship practices as contestations of participation, belonging and legitimacy, highlighting here issues of gender, class and ethnicity. Migrant women are laying claim to citizenship practices. Though marginalized from the nation as legal or cultural outsiders, they create new meanings of belonging. While there has been considerable debate on the changing meaning of belonging to a national society with accelerating transnational relations, migrations and the experience of ‘new ethnicities’, there has been little, if any, attention paid to how migrant women themselves re-define the concepts of postnational, multicultural or transnational citizenship. Migrant women as emerging subjects create new, counter-hegemonic citizenship practices across boundaries of class, gender, ethnicity and nation. Just consider the following examples: Pınar, a single mother in Germany carefully builds a cross-ethnic family of choice. While she wants her daughter to learn Turkish language and cultural practices, cultural pluralism is the core value she wants to transmit to her daughter. Selin challenges community representatives’ and leaders’ lack of democratic accountability. She incisively critiques that the British multicultural system’s reliance on community organizations reproduces intra-community power relations of gender, class and ethnicity. These women’s lives, both through their actions and as life-stories, help us to theorize the meaning of citizenship. Migrant women’s citizenship practices can serve as evidence that alternatives to exclusionary practices of citizenship are possible and exist, though they might not be readily recognized as such. Citizenship is most often viewed primarily as a status of rights-bearing subjects. The formal citizenship rights matter, of course. Stratified statuses of residence or citizenship have far-reaching implications for the ways in which migrant women have access to education, work, choices about their sexual identities and family life and opportunities to social and political activism. Yet, I contend we must consider the idea of rights-claiming in conjunction with 1) migrant women becoming subjects with agency, which includes developing knowledges about themselves and the world in which they live which are often, though not necessarily, critical of dominant forms of knowledge and 2) becoming political/ cultural/ working/ caring/ sexual subjects, so that citizenship is not limited to a formal political arena but extends to the ways in which migrant women claim rights, and produce new ways of linking the cultural, the sexual, the arena of work to aspects of participation and belonging. This can help understand the political culture of migrants and help to achieve accurate representation of migrant collectivities in order to bring about the full democratizing potential of citizenship discourse. Let me clarify the interrelatedness of these aspects through an example: in the 1990s, Birgül, who did not hold formal German citizenship was repeatedly faced with the undermining of her ability to work as a doctor because of the difficulties of obtaining and renewing work, professional and residence permits. It is this experience of lack of status which propelled her into becoming a political subject through establishing anti-racist campaigns. When as a non-citizen she was refused permission to open a surgery, she took the matter to court. She successfully argued that the law foresees health provision for the population (Bevölkerung), not just the nation (Volk). This population encompasses migrant women from Turkey, and Birgül argued that access to a female, Turkish-speaking gynaecologist should form part of their entitlement to healthcare. This can, of course, be read as an instance of Birgül’s rights-claiming, in the sense that she claimed her right to open a surgery while she was a denizen rather than a formal citizen. Yet, I think such a reading would be limited. It misses out on the way in which she becomes a political subject. As a political subject she does more than gain the right to practice her profession in a setting of her choice. She questions the nationally bounded provision of healthcare. This challenges the supposed neutrality of the provision, as she points out that gender, ethnic, linguistic and cultural sensitivity matter to migrant women’s health. In this instance, Birgül’s act went beyond rights-claiming to re-evaluating the substance (culturally and gender-sensitive provision of local health provision) and subject (the ethnically heterogeneous population rather than the ethnically homogeneous nation) of rights. Birgül’s act took place although - indeed because – she did not hold formal citizenship, yet, it constitutes a transformative citizenship practice. I do not suggest that formal rights of migrants, be they formally citizens of the countries of residence or not, are not important. They clearly are. Apart from legal definitions of citizenship, other moments are important for a fuller understanding. We need to explore citizenship practices as bound up with migrant women becoming subjects with agency, and substantiating their capacities and becoming rights-claiming subjects. These three moments are in turn interrelated. Indeed, citizenship practices of becoming subjects with agency and substantiating their capacities as political, cultural, caring etc. subjects enable migrant women to make rights claims. By demanding respect for their practices of education, constructing skills, sexual identities, family relations and political activism, they create a social consciousness that the exclusions they experience are unjust, thus transforming our notions of justice and extending or creating new notions of rights. Migrant women’s life-stories reflect on their position near the boundary of citizenship. At times they claim a view from outside, at times from inside, or, indeed both. These perspectives are empirically significant as they highlight how citizenship as a lived experience is constructed. More than this, such perspectives shed a critical light on how boundaries of belonging and rights are constructed and substantiated (or not). It is in these processes of making and negotiating boundaries, that particular forms of agency are recognized and conferred legitimacy. The negotiation of boundaries furthermore shapes which kind of subjectivities count as properly expressing ‘political’, ‘caring’, ‘working’, ‘cultural’, ‘sexual’ capacities and whether and how these aspects are recognized. Citizenship is one important instance of recognition, not only on the level of national belonging, but as things stand, even in terms of recognition of whether one is seen to properly embody/ enact subjectivity. In this sense, we are faced with a paradox: the ability to go beyond the ‘national’, be it in terms of competences (linguistic, cultural, etc.), emotional orientations, political and ethical subjectivities is valued for those who are recognized as full ‘citizens’. Yet, those who have by virtue of their migration crossed national boundaries are denied recognition as subjects with agency to change the societies in which they live and beyond, as our methodological nationalism fails to view them as subjects with agency. The migrant women’s (political, cultural, caring, working, ethical, etc.) capacities are mis-recognized, most often as a lack thereof. One might, of course, argue that these capacities and ways of being an active agent do not qualify as ‘citizenship’ practices, as they do not engage with the state and rights-claiming activities. I argue that migrant women’s ways of acting politically, socially, culturally and sexually require us to extend the idea of rights and should be seen as citizenship practices. These women engage with the boundaries of citizenship and thus are part of its very constitution. If our current conceptions of citizenship cannot make sense of their lives, ‘citizenship’ risks becoming reified as a national privilege. It ceases to be a momentum concept and turns void of its analytic and political potential to democratize an ever wider range of social relations and socio-political sites. And this can challenge notions of ‘earned citizenship’. The earned citizenship policy undermines practices of citizenship that migrant women already engage in. Yet, making migrant women’s interventions socially visible challenges narrow notions of citizenship as a ‘prize’.