| This project merges feminist, queer, critical race and postcolonial analyses in order to interrogate the production of normative citizenship and two common strategies used to contest this normativity, namely demands for historical revision and legal redress. In order to investigate the intersectional, normative constructions of U.S. citizenship within the context of U.S. empire and the role of law and history in these constructions, "Queering the Subject(s)" deploys a comparative analysis of four case studies: same-sex marriage law, hate crime legislation, Native Hawaiian sovereignty and legalized racial status, and Women's Studies curriculum. In the first three case studies, I offer critical readings of the related court cases, national legislation, congressional debates, media coverage, and position papers from activist groups. While each of these case studies focuses on different aspects of normative citizenship---such as the heteronormative within marriage law, or the white-normative and colonial-normative in regards to the status of Native Hawaiians---by examining these different claims in relationship to each other I work to expose the intersectional nature of the norms of citizenship as well as the sheer resistance by the U.S. legal system to recognize the mutual processes of colonialism, racism, sexism and heterosexism. As the codependencies between history, law, and citizenship emerge again and again throughout these legal debates, my work demonstrates that these codependencies are also reproduced in the academy. In my final chapter, I examine the relationship between history, law and citizenship within Women's Studies curriculum. Reading pedagogical practice together with feminist historiography, I demonstrate how the discipline reproduces the narrative of white-normative, progressive citizenship. Throughout these case studies, "Queering the Subject(s)" showcases the tension between the call to deploy multiple historical narratives in order to transform legal subordinations versus the critiques of history as a form of normative citizenship production. The final objectives are to call attention to the uses and limits of law and history as sites for emancipatory politics and intellectual recovery projects, and to offer alternative, critical practices that work to queer---that is, disrupt and make strange---the productions and naturalizations of normative citizenship, law and history. |
