Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Against Citizenship
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.unm.edu/~brandzel/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://americanstudies.unm.edu/people/faculty/brandzel.html * http://www.unm.edu/~brandzel/Brandzel_CV_Spring_2011.pdf
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2015055342
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2015055342
HEADING: Brandzel, Amy L., 1970-
000 00719cz a2200193n 450
001 9960864
005 20160624075232.0
008 150914n| azannaabn |n aaa
010 __ |a n 2015055342
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca10269946
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |d ViRU-L
046 __ |f 1970-02-17 |2 edtf
100 1_ |a Brandzel, Amy L., |d 1970-
372 __ |a United States–Study and teaching |a Women’s studies |2 lcsh
373 __ |a University of New Mexico |2 naf
374 __ |a College teachers |2 lcsh
375 __ |a female
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a Against citizenship, 2016: |b title page (Amy L. Brandzel) galley (born Feb. 17, 1970) page 4 of cover (assistant professor of American studies and women studies at the University of New Mexico)
PERSONAL
Born February 17, 1970.
EDUCATION:University of California at Santa Cruz, B.A. (honors), 1992; New York University, M.A., 1999; University of Minnesota, Ph.D., 2006.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Historian, educator, and writer. Oberlin College, visiting assistant professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program, 2006-07; University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, assistant professor of american studies and women studies, 2007–.
WRITINGS
Contributor to professional journals, including GLQ, Journal of Asian American Studies, and Journal of the History of Sexuality.
SIDELIGHTS
Amy L. Brandzel is a historian and scholar who works across the disciplines of American studies, women’s studies, and LGBT/queer studies. Her areas of specialization include the intersections of queer, critical race, postcolonial, and feminist theories; cultural, legal, and historical constructions of citizenship in U.S. empire; and feminist theories of identity, knowledge production, and social justice. Other interests include postcolonial queer studies and critical legal studies focusing on critical race, queer, postcolonial, and feminist jurisprudence.
A contributor to professional journals, Brandzel is also the author of Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative. Drawing from political and legal debates in the areas of same-sex marriage, hate crime legislation, and anti-racist and decolonial activism in Hawaiʻi, Brandzel presents her case that citizenship leads to the disenfranchisement of those who are not citizens. Furthermore, Brandzel writes that citizenship is actually a dehumanizing way to lead people to believe that the comparative devaluing of human lives is not only logical but also necessary.
“When normative citizen-subjects are exposed as normative, as privileged, and as natural beneficiaries to the benefits of citizenship, they go on the defense,” Brandzel writes in the introduction to Against Citizenship. Brandzel goes on to note that, as people try “to restore themselves to normative citizen-status and the privilege of unaccountability,” they go on to create a “narrative of sorrow and injury [that] justifies the need for a ‘cultural defense,’ in which the violence against immigrants, Natives, queers, people of color, and gender-variant others is legitimized in the name of protection.” Brandzel also notes that, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, “the cultural defense of normative citizenship became and especially violent and hegemonic feature.”
To substantiated her claims about citizenship, Brandzel presents three legal case studies. They focus on same-sex marriage law, hate crime legislation, and Native Hawaiian sovereignty and racialization. In examining these cases, Brandzel presents her case that citizenship leads groups to compete against each other for recognition and for what they believe to be scarce resources.
According to Brandzel, the idea of normative should be completely rejected. She examines how legislating hate crimes ultimately lead to the very brutalizations that the legislation is trying to prevent and further pits people against each other in terms of identity. Even the passage of same-sex and other marriage equality laws may benefit some people, but these laws also bolster the idea of status as defined by the state. In terms of U.S. Supreme Court rulings concerning native Hawaiians and their rights has, according to Brandzel, tried to apologize for past U.S. imperialism but fails to address current problems concerning native Hawaiians status and their own sovereignty.
Against Citizenship presents the case “for a reclaiming and reframing of difference, a ‘queering’ of normative faith in inclusive citizenship,” which leads to a “path to justice,” wrote Choice contributor E.R. Gill. Amos Lassen, writing for the Reviews by Amos Lassen Web site, remarked: “Brandzel presents [an] incisive, critical analysis of normativity that is crucial to understanding how power works today. We see clearly that multiple bodies of scholarship demonstrate how the anti-intersectional strategies of the state work against any real address of inequality.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Brandzel, Amy L., Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 2016.
PERIODICALS
Choice, October, 2016, E.R. Gill, review of Against Citizenship, p. 287.
ONLINE
Reviews by Amos Lassen, http://reviewsbyamoslassen.com/ (May 4, 2016), Amos Lassen, review of Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative.
University of New Mexico American Studies Website, http://americanstudies.unm.edu/ (August 30, 2017), author faculty profile.
University of New Mexico Website, http://www.unm.edu/ (August 30, 2017), author faculty profile.*
I am an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women Studies at the University of New Mexico. As an intersectional, interdisciplinary scholar, my scholarship works across the connections and contradictions within feminist, GLBT/queer, postcolonial, and critical race theories on identity, citizenship, law, history, and knowledge production. I utilize discourse and rhetorical analysis, historical analysis, and cultural analysis in order to comb through a variety of archives, especially legal cases, popular media representations, and academic scholarship, in order to tease out the contradictions and anxieties of the various forms of normativities. A central thematic of my scholarship is the examination of the relationship between normative knowledges and normative identities and how these function in law, citizenship, culture, and in academe.
Alongside a number of faculty here at UNM, I am working to build our offerings in postcolonial, feminist and queer studies. Moreover, I work closely with the LGBTQ Resource Center here on campus, and we are currently working to build an LGBTQ Course Guide that will, hopefully, lead the way towards the formation of a Queer Studies minor. I also work with a number of graduate and undergraduate students interested in these fields, as well as students that are invested in questioning and dismantling gender, sexuality, nationalisms, citizenship, normative knowledges and identity formations.
I was trained as an interdisciplinary scholar at the University of Minnesota in their Feminist Studies Phd. Program, and was part of their second class of students in the PhD program I was lucky enough to forge a somewhat unusual path by having three co-advisors: Jigna Desai and Richa Nagar (both in the Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies Department), and Barbara Welke (History Department). I continue to benefit from their guidance and intellectual energies, and have had the pleasure of formulating a collaborative relationship with Jigna Desai. I can only hope to follow their lead, and forge similar relationships that can inspire and challenge my own advisees the way my advisors challenge(d) and inspire(d) me.
Please see my curriculum vitae and other pages for more information on my research, publications, teaching, amazing graduate students, and recommended links on radical queer and decolonial projects.
My contact information is at the bottom of the page.
Amy L. Brandzel
Associate Professor of American Studies and Women Studies
Amy L. Brandzel [article image]
Email:
brandzel@unm.edu
Office Location:
Humanities 454
Website: http://www.unm.edu/~brandzel
Research Interests:
Queer Theory, Feminist Theory, Critical Indigenous Studies, Legal Studies, Citizenship
I serve as a joint-appointed Associate Professor of American Studies and Women Studies at the University of New Mexico, and received my PhD in Feminist Studies with a minor in History from the University of Minnesota. I am an interdisciplinary scholar working within the disciplines of American Studies, Women’s Studies, and LGBT/Queer Studies. While I am most readily identified as a queer theorist, and was hired at the University of New Mexico to focus on gender and sexuality, my teaching and research is avowedly intersectional in that it utilizes and intervenes in queer, feminist, postcolonial, critical Indigenous, and critical race theories of subject-formations, institutional power, and coalitional resistance for marginalized and abjected communities. In particular, I utilize rhetorical, historical, cultural, and discourse analysis of legal cases, popular culture, and academic scholarship, in order to examine the relationship between hegemonic epistemologies and normative identities and how these function in law, citizenship, culture, and in academe.
My first book, Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative (University of Illinois Press, 2016) brings together a diverse set of political and legal debates, namely same-sex marriage, hate crime legislation, and anti-racist and decolonial activism in Hawaiʻi, in order to showcase the sheer resistance by the U.S. institutions to recognize or even consider the mutual processes of settler colonialism, racism, sexism and heterosexism. Merging feminist, postcolonial, decolonial, and queer theories, the book demonstrates how the U.S. nation-state 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. The agenda, in the end, is to reorient queer practice by directing it against citizenship, showcasing how to denaturalize and make strange (i.e. queer) the perpetuation of racial, sexual, gender, and colonial normativities that are integral to U.S. narratives of democracy and empire.
My second book project, tentatively titled Queer Knowledge: The Law of Difference in Academe, further explores how academic institutions engage with and address issues of power, identity, and constructions of difference. Merging scholarship in critical university studies with interrogations of field formations across Critical Ethnic Studies, Feminist Studies, Queer Studies, and Critical Indigenous Studies, Queer Knowledge analyzes how diversity, difference, and complex subjectivities are produced, managed, and disciplined within academic institutions.
Brandzel, Amy L.: Against citizenship: the violence of the normative
E.R. Gill
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 54.2 (Oct. 2016): p287.
Brandzel, Amy L. Against citizenship: the violence of the normative. Illinois, 2016. 21 Op bibl index afp ISBN 9780252040030 cloth, $95.00; ISBN 9780252081507 pbk, $28.00; ISBN 9780252098239 ebook, contact publisher for price
54-0921
KF4700
CIP
Brandzel (Univ. of New Mexico) argues that the desire for recognition and inclusion as full citizens by those currently excluded is not the neutral aspiration that many imagine. Rather than being a private choice, this desire can increase the disenfranchisement of others who are not full citizens. Groups compete against each other for seemingly scarce resources and recognition, when what is needed is an intersectional analysis that rejects normativity altogether. Hate crime legislation, for example, further empowers a criminal justice system that regularly brutalizes those that such legislation is designed to protect. Moreover, it is anti-intersectional in revealing ways that categories of identity are pitted against one another. Marriage equality may be a gain for some individuals, but it slots more individuals into a heteronormative institution and strengthens the discipline of a state-defined status. Finally, the US Supreme Courts approach to native Hawaiians has been colorblind or an "apologetic liberalism" that apologizes for past wrongs without recognizing present-day infringements on sovereignty and status. Overall, Brandzel calls for a reclaiming and reframing of difference, a "queering" of normative faith in inclusive citizenship as the path to justice. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Graduate students and faculty.--E. R. Gill, Bradley University
Gill, E.R.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gill, E.R. "Brandzel, Amy L.: Against citizenship: the violence of the normative." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Oct. 2016, p. 287. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479869141&it=r&asid=6370b6c78f5b061f3185a8611ca4884a. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.
“Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative” by Amy L. Brandzel— Is Citizenship Redeemable?
Leave a reply
against citizenship
Brandzel, Amy L. “Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative”, (Dissident Feminisms), University of Illinois Press, 2016.
Is Citizenship Redeemable?
Amos Lassen
In “Against Citizenship”, author Amy L. Brandzel shows that despite numerous activists and scholars appealing for rights, inclusion, and justice in the name of “citizenship” there is nothing redeemable about citizenship and nothing worth salvaging or sustaining in the name of “community,” practice, or belonging.
She sees “citizenship as a violent dehumanizing mechanism that brings about the comparative devaluing of human lives”. Her argument is that “whenever we work on behalf of citizenship, whenever we work towards including more types of peoples under its reign, we inevitably reify the violence of citizenship against nonnormative others”. Brandzel’s focuses on three legal case studies–same-sex marriage law, hate crime legislation, and Native Hawaiian sovereignty and racialization and then exposes how citizenship confounds and obscures the mutual processes of settler colonialism, racism, sexism, and heterosexism. By doing so, Brandzel maintains that citizenship requires anti-intersectionality— strategies that deny the mutuality and contingency of race, class, gender, sexuality and nation–and how, as often happens, the progressive left activists and scholars follow suit.
This is a book that will ultimately be regarded as one of the most important books in queer and feminist theory of its generation. I realize that this statement is bold Brandzel is deftly skilled at bridging feminist and queer studies with critical ethnic studies and critical Indigenous studies that present a model for the kind of intersectional analysis needed to understand and challenge the violence of normativities.
Brandzel explores queer, feminist, Indigenous and critical race studies to expose the irredeemable violence of U.S. citizenship. By bringing together case studies rarely considered within the same frame, she shows the kind of intersectional alliance building that is required. The ideas here can be used “as a springboard for building coalitions that reject faith in citizenship and instead create other kinds of affinities and attachments.”
For those who are invested in challenging the limits of inclusion that lie within the normative frameworks of U.S. law, this is a must read. Brandzel documents the violence of anti-intersectional politics, epistemologies, and citizenship practices that exist within cases of hate crime legislation, same-sex marriage, and the tensions between civil rights and indigenous rights.
Brandzel presents a incisive, critical analysis of normativity that is crucial to understanding how power works today. We see clearly that multiple bodies of scholarship demonstrate how the anti-intersectional strategies of the state work against any real address of inequality. The book
reframes what it means to do transnational intersectional analysis and adds to our collective scholarly understanding of transnational critique by tracing settler colonial forces through nuanced examinations of gay marriage law, We are challenged to consider what is required for unsettling, or denaturalizing, the” settler logics of normative citizenship’s racialization, gendering, and sexualizing”. What is most threatening to normative citizenship, occurs when we forge and exercise accountable alliances. By reading this we can more easily understand critiques of the concepts of citizenship (and understandings of sovereignty) from feminist, queer, critical Indigenous, and legal perspectives.
Brandzel presents her arguments clearly and whether we agree or not, we are provoked to think about what she has to say. Most of us have never thought about citizenship in the way that it is presented here and it is time that we did.
Pg. 3 of introduction.