Black Presidents, Gay Marriages, and Hawaiian Sovereignty: Reimagining Citizenship in the Age of Obama

On November 4, 2008, the United States elected the first African American/ biracial/nonwhite president, Proposition 8 outlawed gay marriage in California, and Hawai'i rose in national prominence as the childhood home of the new president. While these three simultaneous election moments may seem unrelated, I argue that they each offer productive sites for thinking about how citizenship in this country has long been (re)produced through the violences and exclusions that establish normalcy. Barack Obama's victory has been heralded as the final victory in the achievement of civil rights for Black Americans, the fulfillment of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "dream." Meanwhile in California, Proposition 8 amended the state constitution to limit marriage to a union of a man and a woman. The state and national LGBT leadership cried foul, claiming marriage as a fundamental civil right. Ironically, in the days after the election, many white members of this community rushed to blame Black voters for the Prop 8 win, drawing on citizenship and civil rights analogies as a shaming tactic. And no "state" voted for Obama in higher proportions than Hawai'i. Yet, Hawai'i has a tenuous relationship to the United States given the U.S.-backed illegal overthrow of the monarchy and the subsequent vexed annexation just over one hundred years ago. Many native Hawaiians (who comprise 20 percent of the population) strongly resist any kind of American citizenship, holding firmly to their historical national and genealogical native identities.

Critical studies of U.S. citizenship have generally followed disciplinary lines focusing either on the state (governmental formation) or the nation ("imagined community" formulated via articulations of belonging). This paper draws from the interdisciplinary fields of queer theory, critical race theory, feminist political theory, disability studies, and indigenous studies to explore the interrelation between state and nation in dominant and emergent/nondominant articulations of citizenship. Here I enter into, and draw together, conversations about how dominant narratives regarding citizenship are being reinforced through colorblind notions of a postracial nation (including a reinscription of the myth of meritocracy), emphasis on civil rights claims by gays and lesbians, and resurgent American exceptionalism and assimilationist narratives. These moves work to reinscribe a coherent teleological narrative of U.S. national progress through continual adaptation and flexibility that seek, but never completely succeed at, appropriating and/or nullifying radical transgressive initiatives toward broader, more diverse, nonnormative conceptions of citizenship.

The teleological progress narratives and conceptions of normalcy, which are at the heart of dominant constructions of citizenship, are tied inextricably to blood logics and heterosexual reproduction. Blood logics enable assumptions about "what is natural" and therefore "normal" to obscure the processes through which categories such as race, sexuality, family, disability, and nation are historically produced. Nature doesn't just trump history, it makes it invisible. As Stuart Hall reminds us, "the hope of every ideology is to naturalize itself out of History into Nature, and thus become invisible, to operate unconsciously" (as quoted in Moore, Kosek, and Pandian 2003, 42). "Blood" is a trope, a symbol standing in for all-powerful, yet always innocent Nature. Heterosexual reproduction is fetishized as one of the purist (most "normal") acts of nature and simultaneously one of the most dangerous because of the threats of "contamination" (which assumes something pure to be contaminated) in blood mixing. Feminist theorist Donna Haraway writes, "fascination with mixing and unity is a symptom of preoccupation with purity and decomposition" (Haraway 1997, 214). The dominant narratives that uphold normative constructions of a white, heterosexual, able-bodied, non-native, non-alien citizenry are fortified by bloody notions about purity and decomposition.

In the final part of each section, I explore how these three election events highlight the workings of blood logics in constructing and controlling the parameters of citizenship, foreclosing broader possibilities for "imagined community" and civic membership. I am motivated by questions about how the state is implicated in, and constituted through, normative kinship practices which secure a disciplined, knowable, contained futurity (Stevens 1999; Butler 2004; Somerville 2005; Edelman 2004). I hope to contribute to the consideration of ways...