The Violence of the Normative

Abstract

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book argues that citizenship is not only the central structure for reifying the norms of whiteness, heterosexuality, consumerism, and settler colonialism within the United States, but that these norms are brutally enforced against nonnormative bodies, practices, behaviors, and forms of affiliation through oppositional, divide-and-conquer logics that set up nonnormative subjects to compete against each other in order to gain the privileged access to citizenship. The book examines the complex nature of the violence of normative citizenship by offering a comparative analysis of three case studies, namely same-sex marriage law, hate crime legislation, and Native Hawaiian sovereignty. The remainder of the chapter discusses the notion of citizenship as a form of disciplinary and biopolitical power, and the anti-intersectionality of citizenship discourses in the United States.

Hateful Subjectivities: Using Intersectionality to Inform a Critical Hate Studies Perspective

“…This analysis informs what we decide to do about it in a way that fails to acknowledge that we are, first of all, each members of the same moral society (Coleman, Deutsch and Marcus, 2014) and therefore each capable of instigating hate as harm on one another in pursuit of individually framed success. Thus a politics focussed on inclusion in this sense not only poses challenges associated with who should be included and who is left excluded but also and, most importantly for the quest of critical hate studies, what are we seeking to be included within (Brandzel, 2016;Duggan, 2012). Inclusion within a system that normalises harms by its alignment to, and promotion of, competitive individualism has resulted in the commodification of the self and unattainable notions of the ideal citizen as a hard working individual who is project and risk manager of their own lives.…”

National subjects and subversive subjectivity: Deportation and the paradox of the anarchist citizen in the era of theFirst Red Scare

“…Historian Mae Ngai (2004, p. 4) observes, “Immigration restriction produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject , whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility—a subject barred from citizenship and without rights.” But a transnational examination of deportation reveals the creation of an inverse, and undeportable, category of “impossible subject”: The undesirable citizen. “In” but not “of” the nation, these repatriates and home‐grown anarchists belonged to a larger category of “nonnormative citizen‐subjects,” whose presence would “haunt the narrative of citizenship and its reliance upon the promises of democracy, equality, and inclusion” (Brandzel, 2016, p. 2). Ironically, even in the midst of its unprecedented campaign to expel foreign‐born radicals, the United States itself was obligated to accept American‐born radicals simultaneously being deported from Canada and elsewhere (Roberts, 1988, pp.…”

Internationalization, Whiteness, and Biopolitics of Higher Education

“…In teacher preparation, biopower manifests itself in defining a good teacher of color as a role model who overcame deficiencies of their race and ethnicity, thereby re-centering normative whiteness (Phillips & Nava, 2011). Through educational discourses at all levels from primary to postsecondary, biopolitical logics and governmentality shape, describe, and prescribe what it means to be a U.S. citizen, a construct that beyond nationality and democratic participation includes the normative attributes of a citizen-subject: whiteness and masculinity (Cary, 2001) as well as middle classness, heterosexuality, and ablebodiedness (Brandzel, 2016).…”