Dis-embedding the Sexual/Social Contract: Citizenship and Gender in Nepal

Abstract

Carole Pateman's work has been central to feminist critiques of the social contract, revealing it to be better understood as the sexual/social contract in which not only is the contracting individual male, but constructed through the active exclusion of women from the pact. These gendered roles are argued to be the result of the restructuring of society in the advent of modernity. The ramifications for the relationship between gender and citizenship in the non-West where modernity has taken a different trajectory are unclear. By mapping out the nature of citizenship as it evolves in its historical form in Nepal, this article argues not only that citizenship comes to be gendered in historically and culturally specific ways, but that the specific manner in which Nepal has been inserted in the late capitalist global economy--via 'development'--has resulted in de-politicized forms of citizenship with local and global constraints on the enlargement of its political potential.

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