| Summary: | Chantal Mouffe has proposed a theory of political engagement or
“citizenship” that rejects fixed, essential definitions to “the political”. With her
pluralistic, non-essentialized political subject, she hopes for a means by which different
political struggles can be linked together rather than ordered hierarchically or
exclusively. Here citizens are associated in distinct but related struggles, rather than
by legal status or community membership. A crucial point in her argument is that
political theorists must look for new “spaces” of politics. Since she never expands on
this call, we are left with little more than spatial metaphors that fix the locations where
citizenship might be found. Political theory typically plots three separate spheres to
describe people’s lives: the state, civil society, and the family. By spatializing these
metaphorical locations I have taken up her call and explored the emergence of
citizenship across these spatialized social relations through an ethnography on AIDS
politics in Vancouver, Canada.
For each allegedly discrete space in political theory, I note an ongoing
restructuring that affects and is affected by the articulation of citizenship with the
changes in social relations in place. These restructurings suggest that fixed,
essentialized characterizations of space must also be rejected. I sketch the considerable
overlap between social relations of state, family, and civil society in locations across
Vancouver’s AIDS politics. Radical civil disobedience failed because activists failed to
understand the overlap of state and civil society through AIDS service organizations.
Within those agencies, political engagement is caught between grassroots community
orientations (civil society) and the emergence of a large, rapidly bureaucratizing service
system attached to the state. Volunteers who provide all manner of support (from
social work to kinship) for people living with AIDS likewise complicate any clearcut
distinction between state and family. The overlap of the family with civil society is
illustrated by the Vancouver display of the AIDS Quilt. It was at once a fundraising
event held in civil society, yet it was also a familial space: allowing families and
friends to grieve and mourn their dead. Spatial overlaps enabled (and also constrained)
citizenship, as Mouffe defines it. These hybrid spaces articulate de-centered citizens
with the ongoing restructurings of state, civil society, and family that are concurrent to
the AIDS epidemic. Consequently, I conclude that future work on radical democratic
citizenship consider the contexts in which the citizen engages in political struggle.
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