This article draws on Girard's general account of sacrificial violence to elucidate the race-thinking that structures contemporary discourses on security in Western security states, particularly in Canada and the United States. With attention to the relation between collective group formation (as we see, for example, in resurgent nationalisms of the era of "terror") and to the structures and processes of inclusion/exclusion that define them, my discussion unfolds Girard's figure and analysis of "the scapegoat" within and against contemporary theories of racial violence and group-based persecution. It profiles the specter of race in the assemblages of fear that imbue security discourse, to consider how security "works" to foster and consolidate communities against its "foreign" others, in ways that produce the very race distinctions that they are conditioned on. In doing so, it will elucidate how Girard's work on sacrificial violence is productive for critically elucidating the affective politics of security discourse, including those that organize and inform the biopolitical formations of race distinctions and racial hierarchy in contemporary security states.

In this essay, Denike assesses the appropriation of internutional human rights by humanitarian law and policy of "security states." She maps representations of the perpetrators and victims of "tyranny" and "terror," and their role in prowiding a 'f'ust cause" for the U.S.-led "war on terror.'' By examining narratives of progress and human rights heroism Denike shows how human rights discourses, when used together with the pretense of self-defense and preemptive war, do the opposite of what they claim-entrenching the sowereignty of Western imperialist states while eroding the conditions necessary for the recognition of the human rights ofothers.

This paper offers a genealogy of anti-polygamy sentiment in North America, elucidating certain racist and nationalist formations that are implicit in the historical valorization and enforcement of heterosexual monogamy. It tracks the white supremacist and heteronormative logic that conditions the widespread disdain toward polygamy, and that renders it fundamentally different from familial configurations that are associated with national identity. Relating political and philosophical doctrines to the archival documentation and insights of contemporary legal and cultural historians of anti-polygamy sentiment, it elucidates the racial Anglo-Saxonism of Hegel's ruminations on marriage and on the state, and highlights its reverberation within the political philosophy that justified the criminalization of polygamy and its supporting institutions in the nineteenth century and in contemporary immigration policy and same-sex marriage advocacy in Canada and the United States.As we know, the question of whether the state should recognize the civil marital status of same-sex couples has given rise to ongoing homophobic fearmongering, vitriolic anti-gay rhetoric, and notoriously regressive legislative tactics. In the United States, these include what is frequently cast as a ''historically unprecedented'' move to constitutionalize sex discrimination through a series of four proposed federal constitutional amendments between 2003 and 2008, and spate of ''defense of marriage'' acts seeking to prevent state courts from ruling that excluding gays and lesbians from marriage was unconstitutional. The homophobic outbursts have been expressed through costly campaigns that have found millions of fearful backers deeply invested in ''saving marriage'' from queers and expunging them from the sacred institutions and coddled relationships of ''our'' nation. They have also precipitated the rather ironic circumstance that has found feminist and LGBT equality advocates Hypatia vol. 25, no. 4 (Fall, 2010) r by Hypatia, Inc.

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This essay provides an analysis of the terms by which the question of extending civil mamiage to same-sex couples has been posed, advanced, and resisted in Canada and the United States in the past few years. Denike draws on feminist theories of justice to evaluate the strategies and approaches of initiatives to reform the laws governing the state's recognition-and lack thereof+$ personal relationships of dependency and care. She also examines rhe political opposition to such reforms and the chulknges posedfor advancing human rights for gays and lesbians in the face of social and political prejudice against same-sex marriage.While philosophical postmodernity has long celebrated the death of God as a vestige of the modernist past, those of us who are working to advance rights for groups and individuals who are repudiated or despised by certain religions have had to come to terms with the fact that God has staged an unprecedented revival, and religions that invest in His word on sex and related matters have a tenacious hold on the politics of certain liberal constitutional democracies. This hold has invariably constrained the achievement of basic legal recognition of adult personal relationships between sexual minorities, such as gays and lesbians who wish to marry, and for that matter, any other relationship of care and interdependency that doesn't resemble the conjugal and procreative heterosexual model coddled within Western monotheism. The force of these constraints has been particularly evident in the political responses to the simple question of whether legal recognition should be granted to the civil marriages of same-sex couples. This question has occupied the public imagination of God-fearing folk in Canada and the United States, spurred on in part by the fear that it crosses the line drawn by the Vatican between what it calls the Hypatia vol. 22, no. 1 (Winter 2007) 0 by Margaret Denike