Embodying citizenship: images of the woman citizen

Abstract

Professor Berns' lecture examines the legal and social processes involved in 'constituting citizens'. She argues that, from the outset, the image of the citizen which grounds Australian institutions has been both gendered and raced. She examines the tension between an intellectual tradition which posits a notion of the citizen as an abstraction, a shadowy boundary rider stripped of every tatter of race, of class, of ethnicity, and a legal and cultural practice in which the body of the citizen is foregrounded, as body, specifically as gendered and raced body.