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

The cover of Amy L. Brandzel's Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative bears a spray-painted image of the Statue of Liberty, head in hands and without the famous torch meant to enlighten the world. The cover captures Brandzel's argument against the promise represented by the Statue of Liberty to extend freedom to all citizens of the United States. After the Civil War, Lady Liberty was erected, standing on a broken chain, to symbolize that universal freedom could become a reality and oppression could be overcome. If book covers can communicate the tenor of a text, then Against Citizenship delivers on its promise to draw searing illustrations of U.S. citizenship built not on progressive waves of inclusion, but on the perpetual exclusion of non-normative groups.

A must-read for scholars and students interrogating U.S. policies and power, Against Citizenship presents three case studies to examine how the United States uses anti-intersectional logics to divide and concretize identities and identity politics. Focusing on hate crime legislation, same-sex marriage, and Native Hawaiian sovereignty, Brandzel argues that inclusion into citizenship secures some rights for nonnormative groups, but requires anti-intersectional trade-offs that set categories of race, gender, indigeneity, and sexuality in opposition to each other (34). According to Brandzel, U.S. citizenship enacts a "perpetual refusal to allow for, consider, or acknowledge the mutuality and contingency of these categories of difference" and requires "challenges to the norms of citizenship be articulated in simple, single axis formulations" (4–5). Thus, Brandzel tracks anti-intersectional logics and strategies across three chapters to show how single axis formulations undermine intersectional identities and shore up staggered inclusion as the bedrock of U.S. citizenship. Against Citizenship provides the analysis we now need to fight the spike in hate crimes, attacks on reproductive rights, the immigrant travel ban, and so much more under President Donald Trump. For example, undergraduates in my classes, who claimed to be afraid or "allergic" to theory, readily drew on Brandzel's concept of "anti-intersectionality" to grapple with the killing of nine black people in a Charleston church, discriminatory bathroom bills, and the normalization of sexual violence in this time of nostalgic rhetoric to "Make America Great Again."

Against Citizenship's introduction announces its central thesis that U.S. citizenship is founded on and continues to operate as a normativizing project and the "process of demanding inclusion reproduces and extends the violent subjugations of exclusion" (15). To support these claims, chapter 1 details how hate crime legislation recognized violence based on race or sexual orientation, but initially excluded the category of gender because its inclusion risked flooding the system with sexual violence cases. This anti-intersectional logic frames homophobic violence as exceptional and warranting legal intervention, yet violence against women is seen as not exceptional enough to meet the standard of a "hate crime." Furthering their inquiry into how one category of difference can be deployed to dismiss another, Brandzel turns to governmental debates on hate crime and the depiction of violence against African Americans as bygone and benchmark, at once invoking a narrative of racial progress and referencing blacks as America's emblematic hated group. This anti-intersectional logic frames violence against gays and lesbians as a contemporary problem, whereas racist violence becomes a relict that only occasionally rises again. Thus, Brandzel contends, hate crime legislation protects some groups, but also reproduces the normative violence of citizenship: groups are forced to compete for protection and the state-as-protector maintains a "dangerous discontinuum" that detaches hate crime from state violence against people it is called upon to protect (28). These anti-intersectional trade-offs constitute U.S. citizenship, ensuring its endurance and enabling the state to claim the inclusion of nonnormative groups.

The second chapter focuses on same-sex marriage and anti-intersectional anxiety that gender, sex, and sexuality are not divisible categories the state can...