Acting Out of View of the Public: On the Idea of Homely Citizenship

What is the space, or territory, of citizenship? What if the challenge to the traditional, nation-based model of citizenship stems not from contestations on various political levels (such as the EU), but cuts across the nation? In this paper, I want to reflect on these questions, and suggest that their answer is not so much a matter of scale, but rather of place. Traditionally, key words in the study of citizenship are community and public sphere; I want to propose investigating the dimension of the home, or the private sphere, in relation to citizenship as an act. Even though the concept of acts of citizenship (Isin and Nielsen, 2008), in its moving away from citizenship as status attentive to the location of the performance through which people position themselves as claimants (Andrijasevic, 2013), seems promising, it ultimately limits its viewpoint to the public sphere. Occasionally, the home is explicitly excluded from the realm of citizenship, as in Kofman (1995), who argues for separating the home from the world. From a different viewpoint, however, this distinction does not hold. When Bhabha (1992) develops Freud’s concept of the “uncanny” into the “unhomely,” he refers to the confusion of the home and the world: those moments when the one intrudes on the other and the boundaries between the two become blurred. In this paper, I want to take some first steps in exploring what happens when citizenship studies is brought into contact with cultural studies. After surveying the literature on the location and acts of citizenship, I will analyze the novel Wolfstonen (2003) on issues of inclusion and exclusion, inside and outside, private and public. Ultimately, I hope to provide some ideas of how we can understand the position of acts of citizenship in the private sphere.