Body politics, citizenship and women’s movement contestation in the Netherlands

Body politics involve a broad range of issues. Women’s movement organisations and groups have been politicising many of these in the course of the past decades, such as abortion, violence against women, and sexuality. In mainstream political science, such issues have often been classified as ‘moral politics’, but feminist scholars have redefined them in new terms, such as reproductive rights, family law politics or (sexual) violence. This paper examines how women’s movement organisations, arguing in terms of autonomy, contested and changed problem definition and public discourse on the issues of abortion and prostitution in the Netherlands. This challenges the category of ‘moral politics’. The paper also argues that women’s body issues should be differentiated into ‘position’ and ‘valence’ issues, the first covering issues such as abortion and prostitution, where the goal of the policy itself is contested, and the second covering issues where there is political consensus on the goal but the debate is about the means to achieve it, such as fighting sexual violence. This distinction has consequences for theories on issue typologies, but also can make the case for separating bodily citizenship from intimate citizenship as defined in recent gender research.