Konsta, Anna-Maria --- "Gender and ‘Plastic’ Citizenship in European Social Law" [2011] ELECD 887; in Moreau, Marie-Ange (ed), "Before and After the Economic Crisis" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Before and After the Economic Crisis

Editor(s): Moreau, Marie-Ange

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849809924

Section: Chapter 8

Section Title: Gender and ‘Plastic’ Citizenship in European Social Law

Author(s): Konsta, Anna-Maria

Number of pages: 10

Extract:

8. Gender and `plastic' citizenship in
European social law
Anna-Maria Konsta

INTRODUCTION

This chapter offers a critical discussion of European social law from
a gender perspective. The notion of plastic citizenship is developed. A
process of transsubjectivation occurs in Foucaultian terms, which means
a kind of transformation of the subject that can produce a new self. This
transsubjectivation might be called plasticity.
Plastic citizenship creates plastic subjectivities for women in Europe
today. In order to prove this thesis, selected European Union social policy
areas ­ such as multiple discrimination, working time and migration
policy ­ are treated to critical discussion. The relevant legal framework
constructs the unprivileged legal subject in Europe today. The unprivi-
leged legal subject is the bearer of rights and obligations provided by the
plastic citizenship notion; a citizenship that is fluid and flexible, it changes
according to the interests and needs of the states involved in each law-
making process.


THEORETICAL CONTEXT

Hannah Arendt (1951) defines citizenship as the right to have rights.
Thus, citizenship is a prerequisite for the enjoyment of human rights
(ibid.). The condition of the excluded is defined by Arendt as `stateless-
ness'. And Sommers has established that today `statelessness' does not
mean only non-membership in a national community, but is applied also
to the excluded (the poor, the unemployed), and that de jure citizenship
does not automatically imply de facto citizenship (Sommers, 2008, 26­27).
Giorgio Agamben makes the distinction between People (political body)
and people (excluded bodies). The erasure of ...