Deviant and Respectable Violence Within Performative Citizenship

• In Event: Challenging Pluralism: Political Violence and Sabotage

Abstract

Less than a week after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a gathering of Arab and Muslim Americans in New York City publicly marched towards Ground Zero to renditions of “God Bless America”, “Allah Bless America”, and the ‘Star-Spangled Banner”. What drove a mass of Arab and Muslim Americans to carry out such a performance?

During the few days between this, people who appeared to be Middle Eastern or South Asian were subject to verbal and physical attacks across the United States. Without this context, a gathering of Arab and Muslim Americans singing patriotic songs would seem self-explanatory: They did it because they wanted to; they had a desire to be, and be recognized as, Americans. Post-9/11 Islamophobia is but one example of how non-white abject individuals are coerced into performing citizenship through displays of respectability. This paper demonstrates how such performances are the result of a performative citizenship that continues ethnocentric violence through new “benign” means. Although U.S. citizenship today no longer parades its ethnocentrism like it once did, I demonstrate how its performative function achieves the same effect through both the deviant violence and respectable violence which surrounds performance.

In terming deviant violence, I label the exclusion and elimination of individuals who fail to meet the respectable expectations of performative citizenship. Through distinctions of who or what constitutes a proper citizen, performative citizenship justifies deviant violence against threats to its respectable uniformity. This meant that South Asian and Middle Eastern bodies were eligible to be harassed, assaulted, and killed following 9/11 not because of their racial abjectivity, but because their performance was in question. Performative citizenship then applies disparate expectations and enforcement of performance against abject individuals, yet avoids explicit ethnocentrism by disciplining performances than bodies. As blatantly ethnocentric as deviant violence might seem, performative citizenship maintains its benign guise because abjectivity is now framed as a choice. Abject individuals can choose to outperform their abjectivity via displays of respectability.

By naming respectable violence, I describe the violence that pressures abject individuals into performing respectable citizenship. While some individuals may willingly choose to perform respectability for the purposes of becoming and being recognized as American, respectable violence nonetheless demands that abject individuals to perform respectability to be eligible for citizenship. This can be understood in respect to the Muslim American march, where participants must have performed respectable patriotism, if they were to avoid the physical threats that they faced as abject individuals. By labelling the need to perform as a form of violence, I build on past claims that individuals do not necessarily conform out of a desire to assimilate, and that respectability actually demands an involuntary reworking of oneself.

The purpose of this paper then is not to only label the ethnocentrism behind performative citizenship’s operation, but to illuminate the way its use of deviant violence and respectable violence is condoned through voluntarist narratives. Although it appears obvious enough that post-9/11 Islamophobia was racist in both intent and effect, performative citizenship’s basis intimates that the violence was justified. Rather than a jubilant caricature of patriotic devotion or a desperate longing for American citizenship, I argue that abject individuals often have no choice but to perform under performative citizenship, and continue to experience violence regardless of ‘choosing’ a respectable or deviant path. Following this, performances of citizenship do not simply condone nor legitimize the violence from a citizenship which must be performed.

Past readings of respectability and deviance may appear at odds, but actually converge in reifying performative citizenship as something which abject actors strive for, and therefore desire. By continuing to accept this conclusion, academics and non-academics alike uphold a performative citizenship that perpetuates violence against abject individuals who either reject citizenship’s performances or who are forced to exalt a citizenship that continually threatens them. This paper demonstrates how expectations that citizenship be performed have produced undue violence, and asserts that rather than expanding citizenship’s performative inclusivity, citizenship must be re-theorized in order to meaningfully abandon its ethnocentric legacies.

Author

• Owen Gunehame Fite, University of Colorado Boulder