GSS 110A Midterm

State

• Machinery (Nation is the story)

  • Government

  • Legal institutions

  • Corporations

  • Military/Police

  • Bureaucracies

• Territorially defined

  • Borders 

• State → monarchy

  • Sovereign 

Reason Why We Confuse the Nation and the State

The nation and the state emerge at the same time, or rather, ideas about the nation are. So the state precedes the nation, but the ideas of the nation come into development at a time when the nation-state is developing as a forum.

While States had already emerged as a form of organization before this, Westphalia has two important effects:

1. “States emerged as virtually the sole form of substantive constitutional authority in Europe, their authority no longer seriously challenged by the Holy Roman Empire”

2. Westphalia brought an end to a long era of intervention in matters of religion

Nation-state

National groups (what we’ve been calling imagined communities) which have sovereignty over their physical territory and can wield the powers of the government

Ethnicity

“As a rule, ethnic groups often specify membership as a ‘natural’ right of being born into them, although there may be other ways of joining. They are usually premised on an assumption concerning a unity of origin among the subjects, whether cultural, historical, or biological.”

Civil Society

• institutions which interact with the state, but are formally outside of it

  • The family

  • Social strata

  • Ethnic and national groupings

  • Education, trade unions

  • The media

The Relationship between the state and Civil society

Civil society “produces its own ideological content as well as being subject to those of the state. In this way ideology does not reside (in a privileged sense) in either civil society of the state nor is it monolithic

• Machinery bureaucracy

• Police

• Military

• Courts

• Laws, government

Ethnicity and Ethnonationalism

Relationships between Citizenship and Sovereignty

• Legal framework

• State protects citizens (with machinery)

• Citizenship

  • Required for states to be sovereign

• “As a citizen, you have sovereignty over your body” (Bodily Sovereignty)

• Territorial sovereignty

  • Border 

• Bodily sovereignty

• Jus Solis

  • Soil 

• Public element expression

  • Access to public life

Citizenship as Intimacy between Strangers

• “Citizenship’s legal architecture manifests itself and is continually reshaped in the space of transactions between intimates and strangers” (p. 44)

• What does being able to eat in a restaurant or work somewhere have to do with citizenship?

Citizenship and Bodily Sovereignty

• “This term presupposes a relation between the nation’s legal control over what happens in its territory and the presumption that citizens should have control over their lives and bodies, a condition of limited personal autonomy that the state has a responsibility to protect.”

Heteronormativity

• Heterosexuality

  • Privileged 

  • Coherent 

  • “Right”

National Heterosexuality

The mechanism by which a core national culture can be imagined as a sanitized space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behavior, a space of pure citizenship

Citizenship

• Actualize perform citizenship against the state’s wishes

• Infrastructure

  • Tangible, physical spaces

  • Accessibility

  • Not dependent on the state

The Cost of a Heterosexual National Culture

“People feel that the price they must pay for social membership and a relationship and a relation to the future is identification with the heterosexual life narrative; that they are individually responsible for the rages, instabilities, ambivalences, and failures they experience in their intimate lives, while the fractures of the contemporary United States shame and sabotage them everywhere.” (p.557)

The Meaning of “Sex in Public”

• “The queer project we imagine is not just to destigmatize those average intimacies, not just to give access to the sentimentality of the couple for persons of the same sex, and definitely not to certify as properly private the personal lives of gays and lesbians.”

• Rather, it is to support forms of affective erotic, and personal living that are public in the sense of accessible, available to memory, and sustained through collective activity” (562).

“Sex in Public” Requires Infrastructure

• Writing about this period in NYC, the science fiction writer Samuel Delaney argued that these bathhouses, gay porn movie theatres, truck stops, and cruising areas fostered interclass contact.”

• “I am not interested in being ‘gay’ without any of the existing gay institutions or without other institutions that can take up fulfilling functions” (Delaney, 193).

Communitas

Safe/normal

Transnational feminism

• Pay attention to the movement of capital, ideas, and symbols across borders

• Focus on political economy; tracking how institutions and policies produce and intervene in the production of women

• Understand that the nation is a fictive construct and its borders are porous. They are routinely defended through the use of gender and sexuality

• Examine how power relations are constituted by capital, empire, racism, and sexism

• Interrogate how knowledge production is part of this process and must be examined

• Advocate for a movement of international solidarity that recognizes the links between

Citizenship and Consumption

• Gay identity originates with capitalism

• Travel  

  • Freedom 

  • Bodily sovereignty

  • Out of the private sphere

  • Go and find exotic utopias elsewhere

Capitalism, Sexuality, and Identity

• Only when individuals began to make their living through wage labor, instead of as parts of a family unit, was it possible for homosexual desire to coalesce into a personal identity-an identity based on the ability to remain outside the ability to remain outside the heterosexual family, to construct a personal life based on attraction to one’s own sex” -John D’Emilio

Reproductive Racial Capitalism

The commodification of women’s bodies and abilities to procreate, particularly women of color

The Emergence of a “Procreational economy”

• “The tensions that drew men back to the rural countryside were constructed with heteropatriarchal desires and responsibilities for family and household. Those desirings and pairings were rewarded with a virtuous wife held immobile by a draconian state” Glen Elder

Reproductive

• “A bodily process.. A vital individual experience”

• “A visceral, biological, and highly intimate object of study” (8). 

Slavery and the Commodification of the Reproducing Body

• “For black women, maternity wrenched parenting out of the realm of the domestic and into the marketplace.”

• Enslaved people had to be understood as dispossessed, outside of the normal networks of family and community, to justify the practice of mass enslavement”

Reproductive Dispossession

Partus sequitur ventrem, or, literally, “offspring follows belly”

“Reproductice Insurgency”

• “Reproduction as the principal site and stake when racial capitalism is contested, challenged, or radically refused by those whose reproductive labor and products are exploited, extracted, and dispossessed" (Morgan and Weinbaum, 11).

Commercial Surrogacy and Reproductive Labor in the Present Day

“How might a focus on reproductive labor require us to rethink the relationship between gender and labor, public and private, paid, and unpaid work?”

Queering Migration

• “Legal”/ “Illegal”

  • Distinctions are produced by the state, nation, etc

“National Heterosexuality”

“National heterosexuality is the mechanism by which a core national culture can be imagined as a sanitized space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behavior, a space of pure citizenship.” (Warner and Berlant)

Why Does the State Care about Sex and Reproduction?

• It is one way to control access to citizenship and define the boundaries of the imagined community

• “Jus soli” citizenship refers to citizenship conferred through palace of birth

Nation and State

• Nation

  • The story

• State

  • The machinery

• Citizenship

  • Protects 

    • Social welfare

  • Punishes 

• Sovereignty

Welfare and Neoliberalism

• Social welfare regimes, a product of post-World War 2 economic growth and labor activism across the West provided citizens with benefits and a “safety net”

• Under neoliberal economic policies of the late 20th and 21st century, these benefits have been greatly reduced and are under constant attack

Race, Gender, and Sexuality Collide

Heterosexual sex and reproduction become sites of anxiety since they produce new racially “undesirable” citizens who can claim resources from the state

Migration, Gender, and Sexuality in the Irish State

• Emigration

  • People going out of the country

    • “While the state never promoted emigration, individuals resorted to it as a way to negotiate the pain and penalties that they faced as a result of nonconformity to the dominant gender and sexual order.” (37)

• Immigration 

  • People coming into the country 

    • “Growing in-migration meant that sexual encounters across lines of race, ethnicity, nationality, and legal status became everyday possibilities and often realities in villages, towns, and cities throughout Ireland” (38).

Asylum Law

• Originates from the increase in refugees in the aftermath of World War 2

• The right to asylum is enshrined in the 1951 Refugee Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees

• A refugee is defined as a “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion”.

Asylum and Birthright Citizenship in Ireland

• All of the narrative deployed different combinations of social actors in a drama around heterosexual sex. They compulsively repeated the founding national narrative, that participation in heterosexual reproduction makes one a member of the national community. Yet they displayed great unease with migrants becoming members in that way” (P. 41).

Race and the Irish Nation

• “Irish racism has been formed at the juncture of distinct processes:

1. The racialization of Irishness by outsiders, particularly the British colonial state and

2. Majority Irish people’s racialization of both ‘internal’ others within the nation-state and of indigenous and minority groups encountered during experiences of diaspora”

White Irish Women

• “The narratives implicitly ‘whitened’ the Irish women involved while constructing white womanhood as a condition of vulnerability for which protection was needed” (p. 40).

• How did class play a factor in this ‘whitening’?

African Men

• “The pervasive image of asylum-seeker men ‘preying’ on naive or insecure Irish women and girls prompted a young white woman to suggest to me that Irish culture had absorbed what she described as ‘the American myth of the Black rapist” (p. 39)

• Why is the interracial sex that Irish men are having not considered a problem

Queerness as Opposition to Reproductive Futurism

“Queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children,’ the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism”

Reproductive Futurism

Children used to make political decisions