Legally Straight

I’ve spent the day with Joe Rollins’s recently published (and excellent) Legally Straight: Sexuality, Childhood, and the Cultural Value of Marriage (NYU). Rollins weaves a number of interesting texts together to make an important cultural intervention in the legal debates concerning same-sex relationships. His ultimate argument is that the evolution of legal recognition for same-sex couples was less about recognizing the limitations of existing family law and more about expanding the category of who counts as a (already heterosexist) family. Rather than remake the very nature of family to encompass nonnormative sexual behaviors or partner arrangements, however, the decisions leading up to 2015’s Obergefell ruling effectively rendered gay people “legally straight”– that is, capable of the same care functions expected from their heterosexual brethren.

He writes, “the homosexual has become a normalized, domesticated subject/citizen who, with increasing movement into full citizenship, now enters the domestic sphere and, like heterosexuals, may build a familial foundation for the socialization of children into a neoliberal, twenty-first-century nation” (38). We are moving, in other words, toward an straight society peopled by increasingly non-hetero relationships. As this quote highlights, the figure of the child plays prominently in Rollins’s analysis, and my favorite elements of the book are his attempts to bring the queer theory of Edelman and Halbertstam to bear on social scientific and legal interpretation. I have always had an affinity for the razor-sharp insights of cultural theory, but the empirics (Hitchcock films for Edelman, children’s films–among other things–for Halberstam) have always left me cold.

Rollins focuses on Supreme Court opinions and dissents to comprehend how law had evolved in the post-Obergefell context. The sanctioning of same-sex unions has done little to curb what he calls the “marital fantasy”: “a script that we are conditioned to believe in and strive for throughout our lives, one founded on the idea that there is one perfect mate in the world and that eventually we will find that person, fall in love, and live happily ever after” (24). By further solidifying this fantasy, same-sex marriage has effectively confirmed heterosexism’s most enduring mythology. This is familiar stuff from queer and feminist scholarship, to be sure, but Rollins’s efforts at locating this fantasy in SCOTUS rulings joins cultural and legal analysis nicely, adding institutional heft to this critical literature.

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Antisemitism and the White House

The president needs to read bell hooks.

At his raucous and accusatory press conference yesterday, the president used every opportunity to deflect questions about Russia and blame “The Media” for the cascade of bad news coming from his administration. The president scanned the room looking for a “friendly reporter.” He called on Jake Turx from Ami Magazine, a weekly publication for the Orthodox Jewish community.

The New York Times describes what happened next:

“Despite what some of my colleagues may have been reporting, I haven’t seen anybody in my community accuse either yourself or anyone on your staff of being anti-Semitic. We understand that you have Jewish grandchildren. You are their zayde,” which is Yiddish for “grandfather” and often a word of great affection.

At that Mr. Trump nodded slightly, and said, “thank you.”

“However,” Mr. Turx continued, “what we are concerned about and what we haven’t really heard being addressed is an uptick in anti-Semitism and how the government is planning to take care of it. There’s been a report out that 48 bomb threats have been made against Jewish centers all across the country in the last couple of weeks. There are people committing anti-Semitic acts or threatening to——”

At that, Mr. Trump interrupted, saying it was “not a fair question.”

“Sit down,” the president commanded. “I understand the rest of your question.”

As Mr. Turx took his seat, Mr. Trump said, “So here’s the story, folks. No. 1, I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life. No. 2, racism, the least racist person.”

Notice how Trump took a question about antisemitism, which is on the rise in America, and turned it into an accusation that he was an antisemite.

Trump also directed Turx to revisit the comments of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who just the day before had to defend the president against a similar question. “I’ve known President Trump for many years,” Netanyahu said. “I’ve known the president and his team for a long time. There is no greater supporter of the Jewish people and the Jewish state than President Donald Trump.” Again, the question about antisemitism gets refigured as an accusation that the president is an antisemite.

Trump really wants the world to think he’s not an antisemite. In so doing, he’s clearly misunderstanding the difference between being an antisemite and antisemitism as an ideology of hate.

This distinction reminds me of a bell hooks essay in which she argues that those who care about justice are better to say “I advocate feminism” rather than “I am a feminist.” This argument is more than just a semantic distinction. Portraying feminism as an identity (I am a feminist) misconstrues the nature of power relations that feminism seeks to undo. hooks’ point is clearly much more concerned with liberation than anything coming out of the Trump White House. The underlying claim about possessing a feminist identity, however, has lessons for thinking about the president’s response. The claim of being “the least racist person” is absurd, but its danger comes in  characterizing racism as an identity rather than an ideology that permeates all elements of American politics, society, and culture. Racism and antisemitism are not identities that one can just slip on like a white robe (although the increasing numbers of people who voluntarily don these robes are alarming in themeselves). Rather, antisemitism as an ideology of hate permeates culture and impacts the way people understand the world. On the campaign trail, our well-meaning president spoke of a “global power structure” that had clear links to antisemitism. He posted–then quickly took down–a photo of Hillary Clinton with a pile of money and a star of David calling Clinton the “most corrupt candidate ever.”

Trump may well be the least antisemitic person in the history of the world, but that observation clearly misses the important role that antisemitism plays in his unlikely political career. Senior Advisor Steve Bannon advocates a white nationalism that colludes with antisemitic sentiments. The White House is full of end-of-culture conspiracy theorists who view the United States and the Middle East as engaged in an ideological battle for the future of the world. This  dovetails seamlessly with a Republican Party that has spent fifty years pushing against the advances made to improve the life chances of minorities. Voting rights and the final threads of the social safety net are just the policy elements of a Republican worldview singularly focused on protection of the white race. Ten thousand character witnesses like Netanyahu cannot obscure the ideologies of racism and antisemitism that permeate Trump’s White House.

Trump and the Transparency Trap

American political science is in the throes of yet another identity crisis over research methods. Over a decade since the Perestroika challenge to the dominance of quantitative methods in the discipline, a similar debate has emerged about the importance of transparency and replicability. The American Political Science Association, our major professional organization, has passed a series of new ethics guidelines that are ostensibly meant to promote transparency in research. Known among political scientists as DA-RT (data access and research transparency), these new guidelines require researchers to make their data available via public repositories and to present all aspects of the research process for scrutiny. This is the latest attempt by the discipline to distance itself from the dangers of academic laziness associated with events like the Sokal hoax. As per usual, the increased scrutiny unduly burdens those who employ qualitative methods more harshly than others. Thankfully there has been some vocal opposition to these developments, including an online community for mixed method researchers to air their concerns. These discussions have been fruitful. I am left pondering the larger political significance of this will to transparency, and I wonder how we might think Trump and transparency together.

It is an understatement to say that political science has been left with much to ponder in the aftermath of Trump’s election. Fundamental questions about the state of liberal democracy and the values of democratic citizenship have to be reevaluated. It seems a shame, then, amidst this existential quandary, that the discipline that should be most capable of addressing these questions has decided to double-down on the over reliance on scientism that is at least partially responsible for this mess. Consider the following passage from POLITICO’s recent damning account of the Clinton campaign’s missteps in Michigan:

Michigan operatives relay stories like one about an older woman in Flint who showed up at a Clinton campaign office, asking for a lawn sign and offering to canvass, being told these were not “scientifically” significant ways of increasing the vote, and leaving, never to return.

Hillary Clinton built the most sophisticated campaigning apparatus in American political history, packed to the gills with statisticians whose regression analyses predicted voter behavior block-by-block across America. And she lost. Political analysts lacked the skills to make sense of the cultural factors at work in the election. Meanwhile, a billionaire reality TV star understood exactly how to manipulate the political system and bend the electorate to his will. The methods of cultural analysis and comprehending meaning were sidelined in favor of hard numbers to disastrous effect. In other words, the dynamics behind the Trump win are partially attributed to the hegemony of positivist thinking, dynamics also at work at the heart of the discipline of political science.

Transparency is fine as a goal for academic research. I worry instead about the underlying positivist suspicion of cultural analysis that subtends the move towards DA-RT. Some scholars are sounding similar alarms. It seems like the world has never so badly needed political science that can address itself to the real challenges playing out daily in the Trump transition. With its internecince squabbling, our discipline built on the pillars of American political ideals of democracy and free thought risks fiddling while Rome burns.

#PreRefRacism

It being Christmas and all, my husband and I recently participated in the British holiday tradition of going to a pantomime. This year’s offering was Aladdin, featuring a handful of C-rate celebrities and some really explicit racism from the outset. The curtain opened on a caricatured chaotic Chinese street scene. Signs abounded advertising “Flute and Veg” and (sigh)”Flesh Flute.” Children came out in black wigs and pointy straw hats. The black genie spoke entirely in rhyme and thanked Aladdin for “setting him free” at the end. It was the sort of overt racism that one attributes to previous eras, a pastiche whose stereotypes are inconsistent with liberal narratives of progress and inclusion. And it was all part of a kids’ Christmas pageant.

Racist? “Oh yes you are!”

In the aftermath of the Brexit vote the UK witnessed a rise in hate crimes, spawning the Twitter hashtag #PostRefRacism. #PostRefRacism was an attempt to document and draw attention to incidents wherein individuals used the referendum outcome to justify racist intimidation. From my very unscientific reading of the public mood, this interest in postrefracism has receded somewhat, though incidents of racist violence persist. For me, Aladdin served as an important reminder that the focus on #PostRefRacism must always also take into account the historical production of whiteness, or what we might call #PreRefRacism.

My foray into pantomime recalled how this country got itself into the mess of Brexit in the first place. The type of racial othering on display in a show aimed at children primes those children to understand different cultures as unidimensional, funny, foreign, and quintessentially Oriental. Obviously this type of cultural programming goes much deeper than Aladdin. One could write volumes on the cultural imperialism of Disney princesses, and despite its use of irony I’m still not 100% comfortable reading Huck Finn. As the “Chinese dance” in The Nutcracker reminds us, there is also something about Christmas that makes audiences particularly receptive to anti-Chinese racism.

As I sat in the audience that night I thought about this country’s long history of racist violence and its recent decision to leave the EU (a decision predicated on excluding the undesirable “others” of Eastern Europe and Turkey). I was reminded of The Black and White Minstrel Show, a BBC show featuring white dancers performing in black face, that was canceled in 1978 (!!), but that continued as a stage production into the 1990s. I was reminded of the names of landmarks that dot my husband’s hometown of Bristol, a city built on slavery: the Black Boy Inn; White Ladies Road; and Colston Hall, named for Edward Colston, a 17th century slave trader.

And of course, I was reminded of similar landmarks in my home country. America has its own history of racial violence and racist cultural depictions, rooted in the mother country’s Enlightenment and its attendant dichotomies of racial characteristics. This history does not excuse America by foisting all responsibility on British shoulders. Instead it reminds us that racism in both countries (and the Trump and Brexit phenomena that are its contemporary iterations) stem from the same pernicious ideology of whiteness that must be naturalized from a very young age. Consider Fox News’s Megyn Kelly’s assertion that “Santa Claus just IS white.” The intensity and conviction subtending Kelly’s claim derive from the innocence of her target audience: children. The need to defend the racial purity of a fictional figure demonstrates just how fragile whiteness really is.

Racial thinking shapes the way that people see the world, and the Aladdin panto experience reminded me that creating race entails actual work. This observation opens possibilities for a positive interpretation of agency. After all, if racial thinking is produced through practices, then changing those practices can result in changed thinking. Of course, changing practices is not as simple as altering the actions one does. Pantomimes in their modern form became popular during the Victorian era, a time that has given us so many of the institutions that shape our understandings of how the world works. Reporting from the front lines I can confirm that 19th century racist thinking is alive and well in the genre. Indeed, racism in cultural production is always lurking “right behind us.”

 

 

In Defense of “Identity Liberalism”

Mark Lilla’s recent essay in the New York Times, titled “The End of Identity Liberalism,” continues a long tradition of blaming minorities and ostracized communities for the failures of American liberalism. Many people have pounced on the piece, and deservedly so; it traffics in tired accusations about the sensitivity of contemporary leftism its “omnipresent rhetoric of identity.” Critics are right to point out that the first, hardest, most brutal from of identity politics in the history of the country was and remains white supremacy. Indeed, if the recent election teaches us nothing it should teach us that white identity politics are alive and well.

The critique of identity politics also misses the fundamentally economic dimension of identity, and therefore fails to grasp the problem intersectionally. If Lilla is right about anything, he is right that voters felt alienated by the political discourse propounded by the Democratic Party. But I venture a guess that voters were less turned off by the focus on diversity than they were by the lip service paid to issues of economic justice. Voters angry about a recovery that wasn’t were perhaps more peeved at Clintonian Third Wayism and free trade policies than they were about preferred gender pronouns.

 

I don’t know many people who profess an “identity politics” that is divorced from issues of economic, environment, or redistributive justice. Groups agitating for prison reform, against DAPL, and for Black Lives do not dice their movements into a plethora of “diversity issues.” Instead, they understand their issues as interconnected and identify injustices stemming from common sources.

Lilla promotes a “post-identity liberalism” that “emphasize[s] that democracy is not only about rights; it also confers duties on its citizens, such as the duties to keep informed and vote.” I would argue that the nameless, faceless identity politics warriors that he vilifies are performing duties that are also essential for life in a democracy: standing up for human rights, promoting basic human dignity, and securing a better future for all of us. What could be more American than that?

 

Trump Family Values

During the campaign, the president-elect tweeted a thirty-second campaign ad outlining some of his plans to help families (transcript below, or you can watch the full clip here). The spot features Ivanka Trump, “a mother, a wife and an entrepreneur,” explaining how her father will work to help families as president. Though ostensibly about families, the ad is almost exclusively framed around issues to help women balance career and the responsibilities of raising children.We can, then, begin to glimpse the state of Trump’s family politics in this video.

What are Trump’s family values? President Obama made light of Trump’s personal life as evidence that the GOP had abandoned its traditional mantle of family values. The Donald kept his kids close on the campaign trail, and it seems that they will play important roles in his administration (within, we may hope, the legal ambit of nepotism laws). Many have noted the importance of his family in preparations for the White House, but what will President Trump do with more traditionally Republican positions on family policy? Since the 1970s, the Party has tended to regard any policy proposal for helping families as a government intrusion into the family. But as this clip makes clear,  President Trump plans to revisit issues like childcare and maternity leave.

Discursively, the clip demonstrates an old theme: women=family. Though the clip was tweeted as an example of Trump’s “family first” approach, Ivanka Trump speaks exclusively of women, flattening women’s needs into the needs of the family. Childcare and eldercare are portrayed as issues that only affect women. This is a departure of sorts from recent discourse on family policy that has tended to focus on the needs of parents and of getting fathers to play a more active role in the lives of their children. The recent announcement that Melania Trump would be staying in NYC to raise their son indicates that presidential life might be mirroring policymaking art.

But by focusing on the needs of mothers as workers, this ad officially abandons an archetype that has been in decline for decades: the stay-at-home mom. Ivanka tells us that her father “will provide tax credits for childcare, paid maternity leave, and dependent care savings accounts.” In embracing working women, Donald Trump seeks to accommodate “have-it-all” liberal feminism in its calls for greater supports for women to be professionals and mothers. While the suggestion of tax breaks and “dependent care savings accounts” are a far cry from the free childcare, wage increases, and universal health care that will actually help most parents (especially single mothers), focusing on the needs of women as workers and embracing redistributive family policy recalls Nixonian Republican policy priorities. I venture a guess that the “Lean In” share of the vote for Hillary Clinton was somewhere in the 80% range, so it is clear that Donald has a way to go to appeal to this crowd. This clip highlights an aspect of Trump’s populist nationalism that could alter the policy stances of the parties in coming years.

 

 

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Transcript:

“The most important job any woman can have is being a mother, and it shouldn’t mean taking a pay cut. I’m Ivanka Trump, a mother, a wife, and an entrepreneur. Donald Trump understands the needs of the modern workforce. My father will change outdated labor laws so that they support women and American families. He will provide tax credits for childcare, paid maternity leave, and dependent care savings accounts. This will allow women to support their families and further their careers.”

Trump and Kim Davis

There has been much commentary recently about the potentially disastrous implications of the Trump candidacy on the evangelical vote in America and the ability of the GOP to rely on evangelicals as a voting bloc. Despite debates within evangelism itself, including a grassroots movement of students and faculty at Liberty University to distance the Baptist college from its president’s endorsement of and campaigning for Trump, there appears to be little doubt that the GOP candidate will do better than his rival with evangelical voters.

More interesting are the ramifications of Trump’s candidacy on Republican voting blocs in upcoming elections when the billionaire is (presumably) not the party’s nominee. How has Trump impacted issues that evangelicals care about within the Republican Party? In terms of gay marriage, an central social issue in just twelve years ago, Trump’s campaign seems to offer evangelicals remarkably little.

Consider the case of Kim Davis, the unlikely face of conservative opposition to gay marriage for a brief moment in September 2015. At the time, a number of Republican candidates for president, men with much stronger ties to the evangelical community, came out in support of Davis. Governor Mike Huckabee went so far as to say that officials should lock him up in jail instead of Davis, for reasons that remain unclear. For his part, Trump was not overwhelmingly supportive of Davis. He told Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, “It was too bad she had to be put in jail. I’m a very very strong believer in Christianity and religion, but I will say that this was not the right job for her. Because we had a ruling from the Supreme Court, and we are country of laws…you have to go along with the Supreme Court.” His statement echoed sentiments expressed a few days before on MSNBC: “I hate to see her being put in jail, I understand what they’re doing, it would be certainly nice if she didn’t do it but if other people in her office did it, but from what I understand she won’t allow people in her office to do it.”

Trump’s position can hardly be described as courting the evangelical vote on gay marriage. Of course, the Republican Party would go on to adopt a platform in 2016 that was far to the right of many of Mr Trump’s stated positions, including on the issue of gay marriage. But as a politician, Trump made it clear in the primaries that this was not an issue where he and evangelicals shared much common ground.

a politics of the family

In a recent dissertation committee meeting, an adviser pushed me on what I mean by “the politics of family.” This person, a historian, asked if this formulation referred to a set of policies, a series of discourses, or social norms of behavior and custom. My response: yes.

By a “politics of the family” or just a “family politics,” I have in mind a constellation of policies, discourses, relationalities, and norms rooted in conceptions of familial relationships. Focusing solely on any one of these elements fails to comprehend how they feed into one another and condition political possibility. Family policy, such as AFDC/TANF welfare or  child support enforcement, is both shaped by norms of family life and shapes familial relations for those who interact with policy enforcement mechanisms. Similarly, discourses of “good” or “bad” parenting “choices” influence voters on the appropriate policy responses to issues affecting families. These elements can be variously described as liberal, radical, conservative, or neoliberal. Characterized as the interplay between policies, norms, relationships, and discourses, a politics of the family is a complex but pervasive element of American political culture.

Government Grants for Families of Previously Incarcerated Persons

The language of family impact is an important theme for activists who work for reform of America’s incarceration system. Since the mis-1990s, groups like Justice for Families and Families Against Mandatory Minimums have worked to publicize the problems of solitary confinement and long sentences by pointing out the effects of these policies on families. This messaging taps into older, typically conservative discourse about the negative impacts of government action on families, repurposing that argument for a reform agenda.

There is evidence that the federal government has become receptive to the message. Earlier this year the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) held grant competitions for programs that would address the specific challenges that incarceration poses for families. Included as part of 2008’s Second Chance Act*, these grants fund efforts to improve familial relationships and decrease recidivism. As part of SCA funding, the federal government targeted over $4million to addressing familial impact through two grants:

• SCA Strengthening Relationships Between Young Fathers and Their Children: A Reentry Mentoring Project, seven awards totaling $2,939,067;
• SCA Strengthening Families and Children of Incarcerated Parents, three awards totaling  $1,239,276

These grants reflect reception of the social movement argument that prison hurts families, as well as the message that families should be part of the solution to preventing recidivism.

 

*A good summary of the SCA and its impact on criminal justice can be found here.

A Statement of My Research

My research documents the development of a progressive family politics in America from the Reagan era to the present. Conservatives have based claims in favor of “traditional” gender roles, deregulation, and lower taxes on a defense of the traditional family for the for more than four decades. In recent years this conservative capture of the family has given way to an emergent Left politics that emphasizes familial diversity, exemplified in part by President Barack Obama’s outreach programs targeting fatherless men of color and references to his own family life in speeches. My research on presidential rhetoric, federal policy, and social movements reveals that conservative “family values” politics laid the groundwork for a more liberal and democratic family politics now unfolding.

The family is at once an element of speech and an object of policymaking, and using an interpretive mixed method approach allows me to explore these multiple facets. I historicize the emergence of a left politics of the family by comparing the evolution of social policy, including welfare programs and child support enforcement, with political speeches mentioning family life. This approach demonstrates how themes emerge out policy reform, influence public debate, and then interchange among political actors over time. I also compare social movement activism around the family from 1980s to the present, including conservative anti-gay activism and movements against mass incarceration. Attention to social movement activity provides an account of non-elite politics and gestures to future possibilities in family politics.

Each chapter of my doctoral dissertation, entitled “Re-Focus on the Family: The development of a liberal family politics 1980-2015,” focuses on one aspect of the shifting terrain of family discourse and social policy. The first chapter examines “personal responsibility” rhetoric as a central element of welfare reform policy debates. Over the late-20^th century, conservatives reframed the liberal call for greater community responsibility in addressing familial breakdown as a demand for more personal responsibility among people of color and the poor. The second chapter analyzes the history of child support enforcement to show how the federal government rationalizes increased scrutiny of men’s lives in a process I call “the responsibilization of fatherhood.” Chapter three is a case study of President Barack Obama, who has adopted conservative family themes and redeployed them for liberal purposes. Obama demonstrates both the dialogic process of articulating political messages and the pitfalls of reshaping themes. Chapter four focuses on conservative anti-gay discourse to show how the mantra of “family values” is no longer culturally resonant. By comparing Anita Bryant’s activism from the 1970s with Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis’s recent protest against same-sex marriage, I show that conservative anti-gay rhetoric has shifted toward personal religious freedom away from defending the traditional family. The final chapter considers three social movement organizations that work for criminal justice reform by highlighting the impact of tough sentencing laws on families. These organizations rework familial political discourse by applying the theme of family impact, first promoted by conservatives in the Reagan White House, for liberal ends. In the conclusion I argue that progressive groups can win public favor by framing their issues with reference to family, but these references must confront the historical legacy of conservative familial politics.