The Queen of America Goes to Washington City Quotes

“I found, when circulating chapters from this book, that some readers feel I am too hard on heterosexuality. I do not mean to be coming out against it. I simply do not see why the nation has to have an official sexuality, especially one that authorizes the norm of a violent gentility; that narrows the field of legitimate political action; that supports the amputation of personal complexity into categories of simple identity; that uses cruel and mundane strategies both to promote shame for non-normative populations and to deny them state, federal, and juridical supports because they are deemed morally incompetent to their own citizenship. This is the heterosexuality I repudiate.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“Additionally, using the forms of publicity that capitalist culture makes available for collective identifications, some of these sex publics have exposed contradictions in the free market economics of the right, which names nonmarital sex relations as immoral while relations of economic inequality, dangerous workplaces, and disloyalty to employees amount to business as usual, not provoking any ethical questions about the privileges only some citizens enjoy.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“From the beginning, entire populations of persons were excluded from the national promise which, because it was a promise, was held out paradoxically: falsely, as a democratic reality, and legitimately, as a promise, the promise that the democratic citizenship form makes to people caught in history. The populations who were and are managed by the discipline of the promise— women, African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, homosexuals— have long experienced simultaneously the wish to be full citizens and the violence of their partial citizenship.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“Advertising makes explicit the routes by which persons might individually and collectively give a name to their desire. It does not tell the truth about desires that already exist, although it does not merely invent desires for people. But advertising helps bring to consciousness a will to happiness that transcends any particular advertisement or commodity, but which becomes authorized by them.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“Americans experience themselves as national through public sphere accounts of what is important about them: this is why the manufacture of public opinion is crucial both for producing citizens and seeing how citizens are produced.21”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“In addition, many radical social theorists see the political deployment of intimacy crises as merely ornamental or a distraction from “real” politics. They have become alienated by the intensities of the sex and identity wars, which seem to be disconnected from more important and public questions of equity, justice, and violence in political life in general.18 But they have been misdirected by a false distinction between the merely personal and the profoundly structural.19 These forms of sociality too often appear to be in separate worlds of analysis and commitment, with catastrophic political consequences for critical engagement with the material conditions of citizenship.20 It is the purpose of The Queen of America to challenge both the terms of the Reaganite revolution and the ways it has been opposed.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“Questions of intimacy, sexuality, reproduction, and the family—the concerns of this book—are properly interrelated with these questions of identity, inequality, and national existence.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“As discussions of the politics of sex and bodily identity in the United States have become so fascinating and politically absorbing, a concern with the outrages of American class relations has been made to seem trite and unsexy. It is my view that a critical engagement with what ought to constitute the social privileges and obligations of citizenship must be reorganized around these questions —of national capitalism, metropolitan and rural poverty, environmental disintegration, racist thinking and ordinary concrete practice, and other banalities of national evil.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“The third consequence of the Reaganite cultural revolution involves the way intimacy rhetoric has been employed to manage the economic crisis that separates the wealthy few from everyone else in the contemporary United States.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“With political ideas about the nation sacrificed to the development of feelings about it, nationality has become a zone of trauma that demands political therapy.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“First, it has helped to create some extremely limiting frames for thinking about what properly constitutes the practice of U.S. citizenship. One famous example of this process is Peggy Noonan and George Bush’s image of the American people as “a thousand points of light.”11 This brightly lit portrait of a civic army of sanctified philanthropists was meant to replace an image of the United States as a Great Society with a state-funded social safety net.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“Condensed into the image/hieroglyph of the innocent or incipient American, these anxieties and desires are about whose citizenship — whose subjectivity, whose forms of intimacy and interest, whose bodies and identifications, whose heroic narratives—will direct America’s future.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“It asks why the most hopeful national pictures of “life” circulating in the public sphere are not of adults in everyday life, in public, or in politics, but rather of the most vulnerable minor or virtual citizens—fetuses, children, real and imaginary immigrants — persons that, paradoxically, cannot yet act as citizens. It asks why acts that are not civic acts, like sex, are having to bear the burden of defining proper citizenship.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“In contrast, the intimate public sphere of the U.S. present tense renders citizenship as a condition of social membership produced by personal acts and values, especially acts originating in or directed toward the family sphere.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“In the patriotically-permeated pseudopublic sphere of the present tense, national politics does not involve starting with a view of the nation as a space of struggle violently separated by racial, sexual, and economic inequalities that cut across every imaginable kind of social location. Instead, the dominant idea marketed by patriotic traditionalists is of a core nation whose survival depends on personal acts and identities performed in the intimate domains of the quotidian.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“For this paradoxical feeling to persist, such that a citizen of the Dream can feel firmly placed in a zone of protected value while on the move in an arc of social mobility, the vulnerability of personal existence to the instability of capitalism and the concretely unequal forms and norms of national life must be suppressed, minimized, or made to seem exceptional, not general to the population. This sets the stage for a national people imagining itself national only insofar as it feels unmarked by the effects of these national contradictions.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“the fantasy of the American Dream is an important one to learn from.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“then, a reactionary response grew dominant, which claimed that, in valuing national criticism over patriotic identification, and difference over assimilation, sixties radicals had damaged and abandoned the core of U.S. society.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“My first axiom is that there is no public sphere in the contemporary United States, no context of communication and debate that makes ordinary citizens feel that they have a common public culture, or influence on a state that holds itself accountable to their opinions, critical or otherwise. By “ordinary citizens” I mean ones without wealth and structural access to brokers of power.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“One response is to desire that the nation recommit itself to the liberal promise of a conflict-free and integrated world. Another is to forge a scandal, a scandal of ex-privilege: this can include rage at the stereotyped peoples who have appeared to change the political rules of social membership, and, with it, a desperate desire to return to an order of things deemed normal, an order of what was felt to be a general everyday intimacy that was sometimes called “the American way of life.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“This exhaustion of cultural struggle over the material and symbolic conditions of U.S. citizenship is a desired effect of conservative cultural politics, whose aim is to dilute the oppositional discourses of the historically stereotyped citizens-people of color, women, gays, and lesbians.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“The experience of social hierarchy is intensely individuating, yet it also makes people public and generic: it turns them into kinds of people who are both attached to and underdescribed by the identities that organize them.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“Now everywhere in the United States intimate things flash in people’s faces: pornography, abortion, sexuality, and reproduction; marriage, personal morality, and family values.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship