Intimate investments: Homonormativity, global lockdown, and the seductions of empire

Radical History Review

Volumn , Issue 100, 2008, Pages 120-143

  Agathangelou, Anna M ^a,b   Bassichis, M Daniel ^c   Spira, Tamara L ^d  

^a YORK UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

^b Global Change Institute   (Greece)

^c BROWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^d UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 38749139906     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2007-025     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. The idea of seductions of empire comes from a larger project that Agathangelou is co-authoring with L. H. M. Ling and is (forthcoming) Empire and Insecurity in World Politics: Seductions of Neoliberalism (Routledge).
2. For a definition of seductions see more specifically Anna M. Agathangelou and Kyle D. Killian "Electronic Attachments: Desire, the Other, and the Internet Marital Trade in the Twenty-First Century," in Cross-Cultural Couples: Transbordered Relationships in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Terri Karris and Kyle D. Killian (Binghampton, NY: Haworth, forthcoming).
3. The idea of promises and non-promises comes from a larger book project that Agathangelou is working on. It is more specifically on the terror-necrotic practices of "empire" and the "rewards" promised to participate in the formation and reconsolidation of such projects. Please see Anna M. Agathangelou, "Ontologies of Desire, Empire, and Capital: Recolonizations, "Security" and the 'Near East.'" Invited by the Institute of Political Science, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan. Presented at the International Academic Conference, "Asian Security Facing Hegemony: Nationalism, Immigration and Humanity:" June 2, 2006.
4. Lambda Legal, "Seismic Shift," www.lambdalegal.org/our-work/ Publications/impact/2003/fall/pagejsp?itemID=31989920 (accessed May 9, 2007).
5. ibid.
6. Sodomy Laws, "Lawrence and Garner v. State of Texas," www.sodomylaws.org/lawrence/lawrence.htm (accessed May 9, 2007).
7. We place "benefit" in quotes not to underscore the contradictory material acquisition and privilege gained by this (whiteried) class of queers or to understate the violence performed, but to suggest that this so-called membership in the new world order is indeed precarious. In this neoliberal content of instrumentality and competitive advantage, anyone can be used as a friend or an enemy, as friends and allies of yesterday become the enemy to be hunted and killed today. one need only look at the history of U. S.-backed regimes and the state-sponsored coups in Argentina, Chile, and Central America of the 1980os and 1990s. Saddam Hussein and the Taliban are good contemporary examples of friends turned enemies of the U.S. state. On the other side of this, for example, is the ongoing persecution of Assata Shakur, who currently has a 1 million dollar price on her head, and the recently rearrested so-called San Francisco 8. These are figures who are persistently produced as enemies of the state and as threats to public safety. See Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, "FBI Hunting the Dead: Can John Bowman Ever Rest in Peace?" www.cdhrsupport.org/ what_to_do.html (accessed May 9, 2007);
8. and New Jersey State Police, "New Jersey's 12 Most wanted," www.state.nj.us/njsp/want/Chesimard.html (accessed May 16, 2007).
9. Matt Foreman, "National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Welcomes Supreme Court Sodomy Decision - Calls Opinion Major Advance for Individual Liberty," National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, www.thetaskforce.org/ press/releases/Pr551_062603 (accessed May 9, 2007).
10. For a more in-depth discussion of these contradictions, see Dean Spade and Craig Willse, "Freedom in a Regulatory State? Lawrence, Marriage, and Biopolitics," Widener Law Review 11 (2005): 309.
11. Sentencing Project, "Facts about Prisons and Prisoners," www.sentencingproject.org/Admin/Documents/publications/ inc_factsaboutprison.pdf (accessed May 16, 2007).
12. Julia Sudbury, "Introduction: Feminist Critiques, Transnational Landscapes, Abolitionist Visions," in Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex, ed. Sudbury (New York: Routledge, 2005), xxii.
13. ibid.
14. By referring to "empire" we in no way see this as a complete project, but one whose heterogeneous consolidation is both continually in the (un)making. See also Neferti X. M. Tadiar, "Cultures of Empire" (keynote address presented at the "Convening US Empire Conference," University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, January 8-20, 2004), cffsc.focusnow.org/NT-cultures.html.
15. Highlighting the symbolic work that 9/11 does in the imperial imagination does not mean to trace it as the source of instability and conflict in the Middle East, as most U.S. narratives would report. For instance, Anna M. Agathangelou argues that 9/11 becomes a "fetish object" within discussions of democracy and that the war on terror forecloses the possibility of asking other questions that (i) locate historically the attacks on the World Trade Center towers; and (2) engage with conflicts and tensions globally, including with what come to be constituted as civilizational clashes. See Anna M. Agathangelou, "A Transborder Feminist Critique of the Epistemologies of Militarized Neoliberalism: Solidarities and Practices of Substantive Democracy" (paper presented at the International Studies Association, Chicago, February 28, 2007; conference was held from February 28 to March 3, 2007).
16. For important analyses of the conflations between the racially and sexually aberrant within the post-9/11 landscape, see Jasbir K. Puar and Amit S. Rai, "Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots," Social Text 20:3 (2002): 117-48.
17. For a more detailed analysis of desire and the production of the other in the war on terror, please see Anna M. Agathangelou and L. H. M. Ling, "Power, Borders, Security, Wealth: Lessons of Violence and Desire from September 11," International Studies Quarterly 48 (2004): 517-38.
18. It is precisely the mobilization of victim's rights and rehabilitation that California legislators recently used to justify the most recent of the state's ongoing prison expansion efforts - the biggest in the history of the world - agreeing to spend over $7.3 billion to build nearly fifty-biggest thousand more prison beds to address the state-pyoctored crisis of prison overcrowding and the lack of rehabilitative programs. To look at the history of prisons in the United States is to see this logic of the "bigger, friendlier" prison behind almost every prison-building project. As a state with one of the highest imprisonment rates annually in the country, California is a testament to the seductive slippage between supposed safety and carnage.
19. See Anna M. Agathangelou and Kyle D. Killian, "Epistemologies of Peace: Poetics, Globalization, and the Social Justice Movement," Globalizations 34 (2006): 453-83;
20. and Achille Mbembe, "Necropolitics," Public Culture 15 (2006): 11-40.
21. Anna M. Agathangelou, The Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence, and Insecurity in Mediterranean Nation States (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
22. Angela P. Harris, "From Stonewall to the Suburbs? Toward a Political Economy of Sexuality," William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal 14 (2006): 1539-82.
23. The full advertisement is available online at www hrc.org/ millionformarriage/hrc_adcenter/keith.pdf (accessed May 9, 2007).
24. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon 2004), 50.
25. Martin F. Manalansan IV, "Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Spatial Politics in the Global City," Social Text 23:3-4 (2005): 141-55.
26. M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogics of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 234.
27. Ibid.
28. The emergence of the HRC follows much of the logic we trace. Founded in the 1980s as an advocacy organization primarily around issues of decriminalizing homosexuality and HIV/AIDS, the HRC was instrumental in such struggles as barring insurance firms from denying coverage to those testing HIV positive. Now the largest and most well-funded LGBT advocacy organization in the United States, the HRC has shifted its agenda since the early 1990s to focus almost solely on measures that bolster neoliberal privatization and militarization: military entrance, hate crimes legislation, same-sex marriage rights, and adoption. As many activists and theorists have articulated, this professionalizing and neoliberalizing impulse has gained increased fervor and support in queer politics over the past two decades.
29. Sonia E. Alvarez, "Latin American Feminisms 'Go Global': Trends of the 1990s and Challenges for the New Millennium," in Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Revisioning Latin American Social Movements, ed. Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997), 293-324. INCITE! Women of Color against Violence, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Boston: South End, 2007).
30. See Agathangelou, Global Political Economy of Sex.
31. Anna M. Agathangelou, "Militarizations and Neoliberalism(s): Empire, Terror-Necrocies, and Death," forthcoming.
32. Our analysis of the often contradictory and antagonistic histories of torture(s) both within and outside of the U.S. borders draws from Dylan Rodriguez, "(Non)Scenes of Captivity: The Common Sense of Punishment and Death" Radical History Review, no. 96 (2006): 9-32.
33. For more on this, see Anjali Aronde-kar, "Border/Line Sex: Queer Postcolonialities or How Race Matters outside the U. S.," Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 7 (2005): 235-49.
34. United States Court of Appeals, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Appellee v. Donald H. Rumsfeld, United States Secretary of Defense, et al., Appellants, www.asil.org/pdfs/Hamdanv.Rumsfeld.pdf (accessed May 9, 2007).
35. See Bob Egelko, "Roberts' Ruling in Bush's Favor Debated: Terrorism Case Came as White House Was Interviewing Him," San Francisco Chronicle, September 22, 2005,
36. Ibid.
37. Lawrence V Texas, wwwlaw.cornell.edu/supct/html/02-102.ZD.html
38. See Agathangelou, "Militarizations and Neoliberalism(s)."
39. In Thomas's dissenting opinion, he wrote that were he a member of the Texas legislature, he would vote to repeal the antisodomy law.
40. See Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (London: Zed, 1998).
41. See Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983);
42. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003);
43. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995);
44. A. M. Agathangelov, "Colonising Desires: Bodies for Sale, Exploitation and (In)Security in Desire Industries," in Cyprus Review 18, no. 2 (2004): 37-73;
45. and A. M. Agathangelou, "Gender, Race, Militarization, and Economic Restructuring in Former Yugoslavia and the US - Mexico Border," in Women and Globalization, ed. Delia D. Aguilar and Anne E. Lascamana (New York: Humanity Press, 2004), 347-86.
46. See Anna M. Agathangelou and Kyle D, Killian, "Electronic Attachments: Desire, the Other, and the Internet Marital Trade in the Twenty-First Century," in Cross-Cultural Couples: Transbordered Relationships in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Terri Karris and Killian (Binghamton, NY: Haworth, forthcoming).
47. Sudbury, Global Lockdown, xxii.
48. Ibid.
49. Guyora Binder, "The Slavery of Emancipation," Cardozo Law Review 17 (1996):2063-102.
50. Please see Linda Evans and Evan Goldberg, The Prison Industrial Complex and the Global Economy (San Francisco, CA: AK Press Distribution, 1998);
51. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007);
52. and Christian Palenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (New York: Verso, 1999).
53. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? 191.
54. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Globalization and U.S. Prison Growth," Race and Class 40 (1998): 171-88.
55. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? 191.
56. This discussion of gratuitous (sexualized) violence as paradigmatic of antiblack racism and the production of civil society's prison regimes is hugely informed by Jared Sexton, "Racial Profiling and the Societies of Control," in Warfare in the American Homeland: Prisons and Policing in a Penal Democracy, ed. Joy James (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007);
57. Frank B. Wilderson III, "Gramsci's Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Society," Social Identities 9 (2003): 225-40;
58. and Dylan Rodriguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
59. Davis, Are Prisons obsolete? 16.
60. A number of radical and transformative political formations challenging the intersections of the prison industrial complex and racist heteropatriarchal capitalism have emerged in the wake of these double-edged gains made by many activists fighting for prison reform and LGBT rights, including the Audre Lorde Project, Critical Resistance, FIERCE!, Justice Now, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and the Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project. In their struggles for collective self-determination, many of these formations explicitly work to develop and nourish alternative intimacies that might counter neoliberal empire's seductive offerings of individualization, commodification, and corporatization as the only models for building social justice. This paper is deeply indebted to the political and social praxes produced through and within these formations.