Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative by Amy L. Brandzel (review)

At the center of Against Citizenship is a question that many scholars and activists have examined: how does advocacy for inclusion in citizenship reproduce the violences of the terms of citizenship itself? Brandzel sheds new light on this inquiry through a mobilization of critical paradigms from several radical intellectual traditions and the use of particularly demanding sites of investigation. The result is a book that exposes some of the most straining tensions these questions place on social movements seeking transformation. As Brandzel describes in the preface, many scholars who take up the critique of inclusion-focused efforts by activists undertake that critique aggressively, taking precious little time to inquire about the nuances of decisions to pursue such aims and sometimes openly mocking the naïveté of inclusion-focused advocates. Brandzel refuses such an approach, raising an important set of ethical inquiries for critical scholars and suggesting that a more careful examination of inclusion advocacy can accompany rigorously critical engagement rather than undermine it. Taking seriously the pressures that propel social movement actors toward inclusion strategies, and examining how those actors navigate them closely, can provide a more full account of the causes and results of such strategic choices. Brandzel's humility and care is refreshing and significant, bringing nuance and reflection at every turn to the application of various critical tools to moments of purported inclusion that reveal vital insights about the shape and operations of US citizenship. Brandzel convincingly argues that citizenship is an exclusionary project, and efforts at including more types of people in it inevitably reify its exclusive nature and undermine opportunities to practice coalition among populations targeted for exclusion. They make this argument with careful attention to the reasons why advocates and movements seeking liberation are relentlessly attracted to harmful inclusion-seeking tactics. Brandzel argues that in the wake of September 11, 2001, an anxious nationalism stirred long-present anxieties about the possibility of retaliation by nonnormative subjects. They describe, with great clarity, the discourses of normative citizenship and justified exclusion of the nonnormative that have shaped recent decades and come into particularly sharp relief in the last year. They use the term "cultural defense" as a way of understanding connections between a range of racist and colonial discourses that produce logics justifying the exclusion of non-normative populations from citizenship and the targeting of those populations with state violence. They write,

[T]he cultural defense utilizes the fear that the violent machinations of citizenship and the privileges they afford the normative will create the conditions in which the nonnormative will rise in retaliation for their experience. This fear is rarely described directly, as if naming it would bring it into fruition; rather, this fear is … [c]ouched in terms of tendencies (such as the tendency for criminality, the tendency for dependency on state resources, the tendency for border crossing, the tendency for sexual lasciviousness, and so forth).

(4)

Brandzel argues that "the ever-lingering promise of citizenship has been one of the most resourceful tools for producing and maintaining anti-intersectional, anti-coalitional politics" (4).¹ They assert that intersectional, coalitional politics is what is "most threatening" to violent systems of control (4). The US nation state maintains these systems by requiring "that challenges to the norms of citizenship be articulated in simple, single-axis formulations" (5). Brandzel suggests that left organizations and academics also reproduce anti-intersectionalities. In particular, academic work focused on citizenship frequently, even when engaging some critique, maintains an investment in the idea of an inclusive citizenship that prevents a necessary rupture with the anti-intersectional approaches that such inclusion requires.

Against Citizenship's chapter on hate crime legislation mobilizes the concept of "anti-intersectionality" to closely examine the historical conditions, Congressional proceedings and legislative developments related to hate crime legislation that demonstrate "anxiety about the recognition of violence and citizenship" (67). The chapter on same-sex marriage advocacy deftly engages anti-colonial critique to examine the...