Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/804835

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Title
Citizenship in the "homeland": families at war?
Author/Creator
Cowen, Deborah;  Gilbert, Emily
Description
It is this wartime "familialization" of political discourse and policy and the shifting contours of citizenship and national political space, that is the focus of this chapter. We begin by outlining how a normative nuclear family has become a central focus of U.S. politics in recent decades, with increasing intensity since the War on Terror. We then examine the familial metaphor of "homeland" that has gained currency in the context of this war. We consider how "homeland" provides a provocative counterpoint to the "monstrous" construction of the nation-state more typical of neoliberal antagonism toward central government in the early 1990s. We investigate how a familial imaginary has helped constitute an expanded "paternal" U.S. state, while also serving to naturalize hierarchal relations between states. We ask how metaphors of families and homelands may fix particular spaces and spatial relations. How does this familial discourse render some people familiar and intimate, while others are made foreign, perverse, and even disposable? We suggest that the family is emerging (again?) as an increasingly important sovereign political "body." Contemporary U.S. politics, we argue, demonstrates not simply an inclination to govern through the family, but also reinstatement of the family as a model for government. The spatial fixing of the familial makes possible the management of pain for globally privileged forms of injury but fuels the infliction of tremendous violence and suffering at "home" and abroad.
Relation
War, Citizenship, Territory p. 261-279
Relation
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415955133
Date
2008
Publisher
Routledge
Keyword(s)
homeland;  war on terror;  terrorist;  citizenship;  political discourse;  families;  U.S. politics
Resource Type
book chapter
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/804835
Identifier
ISBN:9780415955133
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"Citizenship in the "homeland": families at war?"
 
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