Journal of Women, Politics & Policy ISSN: 1554-477X (Print) 1554-4788 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wwap20 Resisting Citizenship: Feminist Essays on Politics, Community, and Democracy by Martha A. Ackelsberg Jennet Kirkpatrick To cite this article: Jennet Kirkpatrick (2012) Resisting Citizenship: Feminist Essays on Politics, Community, and Democracy by Martha A. Ackelsberg, Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, 33:1, 88-90, DOI: 10.1080/1554477X.2012.640619 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1554477X.2012.640619 Published online: 10 Feb 2012. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 97 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=wwap20 Download by: [Arizona State University Libraries] Date: 06 November 2017, At: 16:08 Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, 33:88–90, 2012 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1554-477X print/1554-4788 online DOI: 10.1080/1554477X.2012.640619 Downloaded by [Arizona State University Libraries] at 16:08 06 November 2017 Book Review Ackelsberg, Martha A. (2010). Resisting Citizenship: Feminist Essays on Politics, Community, and Democracy. New York: Routledge, 288 pp., $41.95, ISBN 978-0415935197. Readers familiar with the work of Martha A. Ackelsberg will welcome her latest work. Resisting Citizenship, a collection of 12 essays written by Ackelsberg over the course of 25 years, contains her well-known essays from the 1980s, including “Communities, Resistance, and Women’s Activism” and “Women’s Collaborative Activities and City Life.” In addition to nine previously published essays, there are three new essays. The more recent works reveal Ackelsberg’s growing interest in policy, her focus on care, families, and care work, and her development of communalist anarchist thought. “Broadening the Study of Women’s Participation” and “Rethinking Anarchism/Rethinking Power” stand out as particularly thought-provoking contributions. Ackelsberg provides a candid and personal introduction that charts the trajectory of her scholarship and explains her awakening insight that her activism within feminism and social justice movements could and should inform her scholarship within political theory. This is a short but compelling piece of writing that will be of particular interest to young feminist scholars. Ackelsberg evocatively conveys her early frustration with political science, a field which hewed to overly narrow definitions of key political terms like participation, citizenship, and democracy and which focused primarily on the contributions of men and male thinkers. Ackelsberg sets out to correct these failures by examining what has been persistently overlooked: a grassroots, community-oriented form of political participation that is largely the province of women. In so doing, Ackelsberg embarks on an ambitious and influential project of constructing a new methodology within political theory. Taking novel and unusual approaches, Ackelsberg effectively inverts traditional political theory methodology. Rather than beginning with the theories of men, Ackelsberg begins with practices of women. Thus, instead of turning to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, or John Locke to better understand a fundamental political concept like citizenship, Ackelsberg gains insight into citizenship by turning to women involved in contemporary or historic struggles. She focuses, for example, on the National Congress of Neighborhood Women 88 Downloaded by [Arizona State University Libraries] at 16:08 06 November 2017 Book Review 89 in Brooklyn, New York; the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina; the antilynching campaign in the American South; the bread riots in Barcelona, and the anarchist Mujeres Libres in Spain. These movements are Ackelsberg’s “texts.” With the experiences, actions, and thoughts of these women in mind, she then turns back to theory, exploring the ways in which the collective endeavors of women complicate dominant conceptions and frameworks. This unconventional methodology yields numerous insights. Politics, Ackelsberg persuasively argues, ought not to be limited to branches of government, constitutions, electoral offices, and voting alone. It should be understood to include a range of domestic, economic, and social concerns that have been championed by women acting collectively. The slogan “the personal is political” gets close to Ackelsberg’s position, but it is not quite there. For Ackelsberg, the collective is political. The dichotomization of the private and the public, she argues, is misguided and inaccurate. Public and private are mutually constituted terms and the boundary between them “is anything but firm or impermeable” (75). The essay “Privacy, Publicity, and Power” with Mary Lyndon Shanley lays out this argument particularly well. Turning to citizenship, Ackelsberg argues that dependence is the norm, not independence, and thus she raises critical questions about the wisdom of theories or policies that strive to fashion self-supporting individuals. “Dependence or Mutuality,” which focuses on American efforts to reform welfare policy, offers the clearest statement of Ackelsberg’s argument that citizens ought to be understood as interdependent, not independent. The essays are most persuasive when they focus in on a single movement or event—on one “text,” as it were. This restriction allows Ackelsberg to give a fuller account of the political or historic context, to provide more quotations from the women themselves, and to draw out the full theoretical implications of her research. Incorporating two cases, as Ackelsberg and Shanley do in “Gender, Resistance, and Citizenship,” proves problematic. In this essay, Ackelsberg and Shanley argue that two seemingly disparate cases of women’s activism, the antilynching campaign in the United States and the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo, are related because in both cases women redefined what had been seen as private, familial matters (torture, lynching) as public injustices. The space devoted to lynching is limited and, as a result, this complex and varied historical phenomenon is rendered flat. Crucial debates among scholars about the cause of lynching’s demise are occluded, and much of the best historical and social science scholarship on lynching and the antilynching campaign is not addressed (E. M. Beck and Stewart Emory Tolnay, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Nancy MacLean). This lack of historical detail creates problems for the argument that antilynching activists like Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell were responsible for bringing what was seen as a private matter, lynching, to the public’s attention. While some lynch mobs in the post-Reconstruction South were private affairs consisting of family members seeking vengeance, the Downloaded by [Arizona State University Libraries] at 16:08 06 November 2017 90 Book Review most well-known, horrific killings—the kind that Wells focused on—were conducted by more than 50 individuals who were typically unmasked and operated in broad daylight. These mass lynchings attracted large crowds, they could be quite ceremonious affairs, and they garnered widespread local and regional attention. Some mass lynch mobs sought out publicity by posing for photographs with the corpse or by sending picture postcards commemorating the murder far and wide. If “public” means awareness by the people of a community, then these mass lynchings were public affairs. This error of supplying too many cases highlights the tension inherent in any theoretical work that strives to incorporate history in a meaningful way. But, more important, it underscores the particular challenges that Ackelsberg has faced in innovating a feminist methodology within political theory. To take on an ambitious project of methodological innovation, as Ackelsberg has, is to court the possibility of errors and missteps. Ackelsberg has refined her approach in response, giving political theory a glimpse of a new methodology—sometimes called “applied democratic theory” or, more evocatively, “lay political theory”—which has influenced feminist political theorists as well as their nonfeminist counterparts. Political theory is a more exciting and creative discipline as a result. Jennet Kirkpatrick University of Michigan, Ann Arbor