CRASSH

The paper presents findings from research on political subjectivity and citizenship with two public-sector trade unions in Buenos Aires. I explore the concepts of ‘militancia’ and ‘contención’ as individual and collective technologies of the self which are fundamental to the construction of political agency and citizenship within these trade unions. The paper begins from the now well-established premise that citizenship is more than the legal status of member of a national political community with certain rights and responsibilities. Accepting this proposition means that the processes and practices that make someone into a full member of a given community become at least as important as the end result itself. Furthermore, we are able to take into account the dynamism (in temporal terms) and particularism of citizenship quality. Citizenship quality is related to the nature of the political agency of different citizens, as can be seen in notions of ‘full citizenship’, or ‘active’ versus ‘passive’ citizenship, all of which turn on the ability of citizens to affect politics. This ability depends both upon the structural conditions for the realization of ‘full’ citizenship and the self-creation of citizens as full citizens. This paper focuses on the latter process, and analyses some of the ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault) that unionists in particular use to create themselves as political actors. I argue that citizenship is a concept that opens analytical space for ethnographic inquiry into a range of aspects of political life; it is a useful optic onto notions of democracy, the state, even the self and subjectivity.