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  • Healthy Families, Secure Bodies
  • Liz Montegary (bio)

While the sprawling field of 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls includes an array of platforms ranging from liberal centrist to democratic socialist, there are two issues on which all candidates have adopted a rather progressive position: LGBT rights and health care reform. Across the board, the Democrats seeking the presidential nomination have all expressed a commitment to advancing LGBT rights (with an impressive number emphasizing transgender issues and gender identity protections) and promised to expand health care coverage for people living in the United States (with a significant percentage supporting some version of a single-payer system). Given how these candidates are framed and are framing themselves as building on Barack Obama's legacy, it might serve us well in the lead-up to the primaries to take a look back at the Obama presidency and to ask exactly what this supposedly progressive legacy entails.

To begin, this essay raises a familiar critique and cautions against the romanticization of any administration overseeing the imperial law-and-order enterprise that is the US government. After all, the crowning achievements of Obama's progressivism—namely, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the enactment of federal hate crimes legislation, the repeal of the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, and the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)—took place amid the ongoing Islamophobic wars on terror, the intensified policing of poor and nonwhite communities, and the unprecedented expansion of immigration detention and deportation efforts. That said, the primary focus of this essay is to illuminate the subtler ways in which securitization logics informed Obama's ostensibly progressive sexual politics and his efforts to implement universal [End Page 140] health care. Turning our attention to his administration's LGBT-focused health promotion initiatives, I bring into focus the newly configured standards of citizenship and family life that emerged during the Obama era and the new criteria for distinguishing between "healthy" and "unhealthy" LGBT lives that took hold in this political landscape. Even as the White House professed an investment in developing a sustainable public health care program, the Obama administration's health promotion initiatives were not only organized around the neoliberal mandate of personal responsibility but also emphasized the importance of privatized risk management techniques and preemptive health care strategies. As we watch the primaries unfold and the Democratic presidential platform take shape, it is crucial that we remain aware of how privatizing discourses of security often figure centrally in LGBT equality projects and can easily be incorporated into demands for a more robust national health care system.

Manufacturing Crises

In February 2012 the White House launched a conference series to showcase the Obama administration's "ongoing efforts to ensure health, dignity, security, and justice for LGBT Americans" (White House 2012). At the same time, First Lady Michelle Obama embarked on a nationwide tour to celebrate the second anniversary of her "Let's Move!" campaign and, while not an official goal of the initiative, advanced the president's outreach efforts by inviting LGBT families to join her "war on childhood obesity." In addition to navigating the daytime and primetime talk show circuits and visiting army bases to encourage healthy eating among military families, she also organized pep rallies for civilian parents and their children in Iowa, Texas, and Florida. Shortly after an event held in Orlando, the "Let's Move!" blog featured a picture of the First Lady meeting an infant and his mother, Andrea Smith, the executive director of a nonprofit that organizes community gardens. Although the initial post made no mention of Smith's white lesbian identity or her Black wife who runs Equality Florida, the administration acquired a photograph of the multiracial family and, in early April, posted the stylized picture of family diversity on the "Obama Pride" website. The accompanying text declared the president's commitment to promoting the "health and safety of LGBT families" (O'Leary 2012). Later that month, the White House reiterated its investment in protecting the security of all children by partnering with the national nonprofit organization Family Equality Council to wind down its conference series with a special event on LGBT parents...

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