All Work Is Cultural Work: Paid Labor and Cultural Citizenship

Using empirical evidence to examine how Haitian women create and recreate multiple national contexts in the course of their paid labor, my theoretical analysis extends current conceptualizations of cultural citizenship to include paid labor as an important site where cultural citizenship is forged and negotiated. Cultural citizenship is also a product of subjugation by capital, nation-states, and gendered structures of power. More recent scholars have challenged Marshall's theory by arguing that his definition of citizenship focuses on a white middleclass man as the imagined citizen subject and does not account for factors such as race and gender (Bloemraad et al., 2008; Yuval-Davis, 1997). [...]using the ethnographic data provided, I assert the necessity of reframing conceptions of cultural citizenship to include the centrality of paid labor.