| My thesis is influenced by such scholars as Lee Edelman, Shane Phelan, and Lauren Berlant, who sit at the intersection of queer theory and citizenship studies, my project undertakes a genealogy of contemporary citizenship subjectivity and practice in the United States. I designate my object "soft citizenship," to separate it from citizenship as defined by the state through civic and electoral practices, and to define a mode of thinking and performing politics characterized by familial-based moralization, child-centricity, sentimentality, and politicized consumption. My use of genealogy is indebted to Michel Foucault and enables a materialist understanding of cultural phenomenon as effects of social forces; for example, my project reveals the process by which the nation began to be imagined through the trope of the heteronormative family, a practice still prevalent today, which reflects the child-centricity and familial-based moralization I attribute to soft citizenship.;Edelman and Berlant, among others, attribute the increased ubiquity of these citizenship characteristics to the rise of the New Right beginning in the late-1960s, but I suggest that classifying this citizenship formation as novel obscures both the historical processes that led to its naturalization and the constellation of variables, economic, cultural, and political, which influenced it's emergence and subsequent development at historical junctures marked by increased symbolic and material strife in US history. I locate the emergence of soft citizenship in the mid-nineteenth century social purity work of white middle-class Protestant women who appropriated public concerns with morality, demonstrated by the popularity of the temperance movement, to create public and political identities for themselves. As I demonstrate, gender, race, and class ideologies, as well as white middle-class women's political disenfranchisement and relative economic empowerment as consumers, influenced the emergence and subsequent development of soft citizenship. The public discourse of morality they forged inaugurated a flexible form that has taken different shapes in the intervening years, but that, as current discourse around marriage equality, family planning, and sex education programs in public schools suggests, has proven both durable and useful.;Cinema censorship is the privileged institutional site of my research since mass culture is a dense transfer point for social values and a historically significant site of social reform agitation. The content moralists demanded censored reflects their moral views on sexuality, including sex acts, family forms, and gender roles; these moral investments reproduced the status quo on race, gender, and class relations, as opposed to providing a substantial critique of social inequalities. The repetition of images and ideas in mass culture, which appeals to a broad audience, naturalizes certain cultural logics and social values. |
