Numerous activists and scholars have appealed for rights, inclusion, and justice in the name of "citizenship." Against Citizenship provocatively shows that there is nothing redeemable about citizenship, nothing worth salvaging or sustaining in the name of "community," practice, or belonging. According to Brandzel, citizenship is a violent dehumanizing mechanism that makes the comparative devaluing of human lives seem commonsensical, logical, and even necessary. Against Citizenship argues that whenever we work on behalf of citizenship, whenever we work toward including more types of peoples under its reign, we inevitably reify the violence of citizenship against nonnormative others.

Brandzel's focus on three legal case studies—same-sex marriage law, hate crime legislation, and Native Hawaiian sovereignty and racialization—exposes how citizenship confounds and obscures the mutual processes of settler colonialism, racism, sexism, and heterosexism. In this way, Brandzel argues that citizenship requires anti-intersectionality, that is, strategies that deny the mutuality and contingency of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation—and how, oftentimes, progressive left activists and scholars follow suit.

Against Citizenship is an impassioned plea for a queer, decolonial, anti-racist coalitional stance against the systemized human de/valuing and anti-intersectionalities of citizenship.

|Preface: A Politics of Presence for the Present ix
Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction: The Violence of the Normative 1
1 The Specters of Citizenship: Hate Crimes and the Fear of the Repressed 31
2 Intersectionalities Lost and Found: Same-Sex Marriage Law and the Monstrosities of Alliance 70
3 Legal Detours of U.S. Empire: Locating Race and Indigeneity in Law, History, and Hawai'i 100
Conclusion: In and Out of Time 137

Notes 149
Bibliography 181
Index 203|"This thoughtful, energizing, and inspiring work should be commended for scholars and activists alike who are engaged in sociopolitical critique."—H-Net Reviews
"Recommended."—Choice
"Against Citizenship will be regarded as one of the most important books in queer and feminist theory of its generation. Broad in its intellectual scope, Brandzel's deft skill at bridging feminist and queer studies with critical ethnic studies and critical Indigenous studies offers a model for the kind of intersectional analysis required to understand and challenge the violence of normativities. It is a powerful read."—Karma Chávez, author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities
|Amy L. Brandzel is an assistant professor of American studies and women studies at the University of New Mexico.