Citizenship is an inherently gendered concept with civil, political, social meanings, each of which has formal, substantive and discursive elements. In Gender Equality: Dimensions of Women's Equal Citizenship, the authors make two significant contributions to the study of women, gender and politics. First, they discuss the relevance of T.S. Marshall's foundations of citizenship—civil, political, social—and their gendered implications. Second, they build upon these traditional notions to present a discussion of emergent forms of citizenship: sexual, reproductive and biological. These take on particular significance in a gendered context. This 20-chapter collective volume provides an excellent fusion of theoretical elements with legal and empirical analysis. Case studies range from women's political experiences in Afghanistan to court proceedings in Ontario, to the discursive performance of the US–Mexico border. The volume presents five sections on gender and citizenship: constitutional, political, social, sexual and finally global. The relationship between gender and citizenship is the thread that aligns this rich text, as it weaves its way through formal, substantive and discursive elements of women's citizenship.

To launch this discussion, editors McClain and Grossman remind us that citizenship contains both normative and descriptive elements, each of which has gendered effects. The text begins with a discussion of formal, constitutional–institutional or civic elements of women's citizenship. These include comparative constitutional analyses, gender legislation, political representation in elected arenas and gender quotas. The first two sections discuss elements of civic–formal dimensions of citizenship, as well as political–substantive dimensions. These sections articulate how a constitution provides one of the most formal elements of inclusion and exclusion in a given society and, consequently, functions as the official gatekeeper of a population. Women are affected by both civic and political gate-keeping.

Despite advances in civic–political recognition for women in the formal political sphere, and constitutional commitments to gender equality, the formal–legal, or civic discussion reveals that gender disparity remains a real, tangible issue. There is a gap between formal–constitutional commitments to gender equality and actual representation. To remedy this, Gretchen Ritter, Anne Peters and Stefan Suter offer some structural institutional amendments—revisiting the US Bill of Rights or a quota system—to advance women's representation and equality. However, as Anisseh Van Engeland-Nourai points out, citing the experience of women in Afghanistan, constitutional recognition does not necessarily translate into substantive equality. It becomes clear that equality does not begin and end with formal adjustments. As Roger Smith articulates in chapter 1, struggles for gender equality must go beyond the formal into the substantive terrain of politics and policy making.

Gender equality traverses from the formal civil–political to the substantive. The second theme of the volume on substantive equality explores democratic and social citizenship in detail. The authors make the case for equitable policy making. These policies range from such issues as immigration, stem cell research, disability, abortion, reproductive rights, fertility, marriage tax reform and domestic violence. The chapters addressing these policy issues present an important engagement with the relationship between work and care, an issue that has been, and continues to be, of central concern to feminist thought of many stripes. This section takes us to a discussion of social citizenship and explores the intersection of reproduction and citizenship. For example, Nancy Hirschmann argues that reproductive policies, namely stem cell research, implicate pregnant and disabled women in particular ways, as some citizens are treated as less human than future “virtual citizens.” These discussions of substantive policy making and their gendered effects makes a concerted effort to bring “in” the body, and reveals a few more dimensions of women's citizenship: reproductive, sexual, and biological. Barbara Stark presents a discussion of how women have traditionally been considered as “reproducers of citizens,” and not always as citizens proper. The fourth “dimension” presented in this volume—sexual and reproductive citizenship—make the strong argument that citizenship is and always has been sexual.

Sections on sexual and reproductive citizenship take us to the third theme that we can glean from this comprehensive volume: discursive elements of women's citizenship. Although Kathryn Abrams' discussion of women, bodies and protest falls under the sub-theme of political citizenship, her discussion takes a discursive turn with her presentation of how the protest body deploys, challenges and rearticulates images of the body associated with women and femininity. Discursive constructions of the “angry mother” take on particular meanings—such as the emotional, caring mother—in the anti-war protest movement. Other topics under the rubric of reproductive and sexual citizenship include Brenda Cossman's discussion of becoming a citizen through responsible, privatized, self-governing sex practices. Her analysis raises the issue of how sex practices are generally considered to be a private issue, and sexual “outcasts” —single sexually active women, gay men, lesbians and porn stars—demand public recognition. Her analysis provides and intriguing discussion of the ways in which certain “outlaw” actors are required to manage their bodies and risks, for example, to prevent the spread of disease. Her analysis makes it clear that women's citizenship can be understood through discourses of responsibility and blame for (ir)responsible sex practices.

Finally, chapters by Maxine Eichner, Regina Austin and Deborah Weissman draw our attention to the performative nature of citizenship. Drawing from queer theory, Eichner presents citizenship as a performative concept to contest some of the dominant narratives about heternormativity and citizenship. Regina Austin draws our attention to the performative nature of women living in precarious borderlands, and how these liminal zones place women in vulnerable, violent situations. Ending the volume, Weissman presents human rights as a “global” discourse inherently linked to neoliberalism, which can at times function as a Trojan horse for American imperialism. In sum, this collective volume provides a rich array of theoretical perspectives and empirical analysis, which bring together formal, substantive and discursive dimensions of women's precarious citizenship in a US and international context. Canadian scholarship would benefit from a similar venture to address the multidimensional nature of gendered citizenship in Canada.