UC Santa Cruz

In this dissertation, I use critical discourse analysis of congressional floor statements, Supreme Court case briefs, and related policy and legal texts to examine how gendered, racialized, sexualized, and classed representations of citizenship are articulated across three cases: immigration legislation, adoption proceedings involving an “Indian child,” and legal debates about same-sex marriage. Employing a comparative approach focused on The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act (2013), Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (2013), and Hollingsworth v. Perry/United States v. Windsor (2013), I trace the convergent discourses of law, history, sovereignty, and blood/biology in shaping the terms of national, tribal, and familial inclusion and exclusion. Feminist, critical race, and critical policy perspectives inform my queer intersectional framework for thinking about how seemingly distinct terms of debate may, together, naturalize economic, social, and political inequalities. Analysis reveals the ideological and material conditions upon which the normative forms of social and political organization, (non)citizen-subject identities, and terms of political redress are made possible. I begin by exploring how notions of history, blood/biology, and sovereignty undergird (extra)legal productions of, and struggles for inclusion in, normative citizenship. Then, I track the relational figures – with particular focus on the “criminal (alien),” the “(queer) soldier,” and the “single mother” – that anchor these conceptions of normative citizenship across the three debates. I conclude with an examination of one figure – the “child” – whose symbolic vulnerability and rescue undergirds policy positions ranging from the repeal of the Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA) to support for the DREAM Act and constitutional challenges to the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) and Native sovereignty.