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12. Do Civil Rights Have a Face? Reading the Iconography of Special Rights
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231 12 Do Civil Rights Have a Face? Reading the Iconography of Special Rights Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller this ChaPtEr ExPlorEs the aesthetics of an emergent movement in the United States that has most recently politicized,opposed,and limited same-sex marriage. Organized by conservative religious groups and Republican politicians, its call for law reform has become increasingly popularized through new political themes designed to modulate the value of rights and the place of law in efforts to roll back or prevent advances in gay rights. Seen broadly, the effort to reign in the courts seeks to rearrange the very scheme of government in favor of one with fewer legal restrictions on majority power, and it builds and motivates its majorities in its voiced outrage over excessive rights. This movement’s reflexive and sovereign logic linking marriage rights to democratic authority—and social movement activists to a broader electorate—is my focus. I suggest that this linkage has a significant aesthetic dimension evident in its public campaigns that has given civil rights a new face. Aesthetics underscores the ways in which legal and political norms are assimilated and performed by activists as a commitment to a new ideal of justice embedded in a fundamental common sense. Exposing more than a tactical and rhetorical politics, aesthetics situates the scholar’s gaze beyond the collective dynamics of, or the resource bases for, social movement development. Aesthetics concerns itself with the forms of life in which this popular sovereignty is invested and the broad cultural contexts surrounding movement efforts to create and control these worlds of meaning. Aesthetics involves the“images, tropes, perceptions, and sensibilities that help shape the creation, apprehension, and even identity of human endeavors, including . . . law” (Schlag 2002, 1050), or what the political theorist Jacques Rancière has called“the distribution of the sensible.” Aesthetics . . . is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. (Rancière 2004b, 13) Aesthetics can be understood in this sense to have always been a part of the legal imagination, for what makes law legitimate to many is the patterning of 232 Jonathan GoldBerG-hiller time, space, speech, and silence that makes law look enduring and just. Despite law’s naturalization through these frameworks, divergent constellations or aesthetic regimes have often been caught up in larger political projects, resuscitating the importance of aesthetics for new forms of popular sovereignty. Aesthetics is significant for social movements but not only as a tactic for political change. The aesthetic realm “is not political owing to the messages and feelings that it conveys on the state of social and political issues. Nor is it political owing to the way it represents social structures, conflicts or identities. It is political by virtue of the very distance that it takes with respect to those functions” (Rancière 2004a), a distance that allows new political schemas and competing arrangements of democratic sovereignty to become cognizable. The contemporary politics of distancing associated with the anti-same-sex-marriage movement, I argue in this chapter, increasingly relies upon an iconography to authorize what can be said and seen and known, and it is around the icon that it discovers its limit. It is an aesthetic of rights that has hovered in the very recent past on the borders between life and death, citizenship and private life, the married family and Terri Schiavo. In what follows, I discuss and then further illustrate the relationship between the mobilization of popular sovereignty and aesthetics.My illustrations are mostly drawn from advertisements and public discourse involved in the campaigns around federal and statewide amendments against same-sex marriage in 2004 and are selected here for their representation of dominant themes that emerge from my national research. I add a discussion of the political struggles to end the state court jurisdiction over the case of Terri Schiavo in 2005 in order to explore where such aesthetics begin to fail in their efforts to create a sovereign form of life. I find the reason for this failure in the particular iconography of marriage that has been propounded in the same-sex-marriage campaigns, and I use this to speculate on the weakness of...