Description
Book SynopsisIn
Ingenious Citizenship Charles T. Lee centers the daily experiences of migrant domestic workers, sex workers, transgender people, and suicide bombers in his rethinking of models of social change to show how ingenious and subversive acts disrupt traditional practices of liberal citizenship in order to exercise political agency.
Trade Review"[Lee] recrafts not only democratic notions of agency, but also what we mean when we say 'political theory' and think about its relationship to how we act in the world." -- Bogdan Popa * Contemporary Political Theory *
"Lee draws one into the text through his provocative, outside the box exploration of social change. All in all, Lee has laid the groundwork for a new theory of everyday resistance as a potential force of radical social change. . . . ." -- Michael T. Rogers * New Political Science *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction. Ingenious Agency: Democratic Agency and Its Disavowel 1
Part I. Beginning
1. Improvising Citizenship: Appropriating the Liberal Citizenship Script 37
Part II. Episodes
2. Migrant Domestic Workers, Hidden Tactics, and Appropriating Political Citizenship 61
3. Global Sex Workers, Calculated Abjection, and Appropriating Economic Citizenship 101
4. Trans People, Morphing Technologies, and Appropriating Gendered Citizenship 149
5. Suicide Bombers, Sacrificial Violence, and Appropriating Life Itself 191
Part III. (Un)Ending
Conclusion. Politics without Politics: Democracy as Meant for Ingenious Appropriation 247
Notes 257
Works Cited 269
Index 287
