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The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship QUOTES

The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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