Abject choices? Orientalism, citizenship, and autonomy

What are the conditions under which the promise of citizenship after orientalism could be fulfilled? This rather ambitious question, which has haunted our work together for some years in myriad manners and continues breathing through this volume, is the point of departure of this chapter. Of course, such a question cannot be answered in all its dimensions. In fact, this is an open question whose value rests less in the definite answers it could deliver than in the orientation that it proposes, one that indicates the need to question basic assumptions inherited from Western political thought. As an entry point to this question, then, here I focus on the need to rethink the entanglement between the imaginaries of autonomy and citizenship. This entanglement becomes perhaps most apparent when we look at it along the lines of gender.