| Despite the increasing body of citizenship scholarship, most work has presumed the preeminence of particular lines of affiliation and attachment without a clear explanation of how that arrangement is forged. I initiated this project as a response to my concerns about this tendency and, more specifically, about how fascination with the global possibilities of citizenship appeared to make the role of the nation-state, or more local configurations of collective membership, seem irrelevant. In this dissertation, I consider the post-9/11 American national scene as a way to accent the value of rhetoric's contribution to the work of citizenship studies through closer attention to the context of citizenship.; I trace how individual gestures of engagement appear as a welcome solution to national anxiety and failures and change the relations of contemporary United States citizenship through three key motifs: innocence, propriety, and a valuable sense of self. The call of the AMBER Alert child abduction notification system shows a public ready and willing to engage, produced as a vigilant community with new responsibilities to partner in policing in the name of the innocent child. The discourse of Extreme Makeover Home Edition appears as an exciting community-based system of social care, assured through the production and display of heightened standards for propriety. The threat of anonymity perceived through the new global relations of citizenship makes the returns promised through post-mortem body donation for scientific research resonate with new mattering by promising to satisfy the seemingly irreconcilable desires to mark the self as a valuable citizen. I conclude that this contemporary devolution in United States citizenship defies a unidirectional model of citizenship and places new emphasis and responsibility on the value of the individual. |
