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“Alien” Sexuality: Race, Maternity, and Citizenship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Natalie Cisneros
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Abstract

In this paper, I provide an analysis of the emergence of “problematic of alien sexuality.” I first locate discourses about “alien sexuality,” and the so‐called anchor baby in particular, within other national discourses surrounding maternity, the fetus, and citizenship. I analyze the ways that national political discourses surrounding “anchor babies” and “alien maternity” construct the “problematic of alien sexuality,” thus constituting the “alien” subject as always‐already perverse. I suggest that this production of a sexually deviant and threatening “alien” subject functions in the normative dichotomy that places the sexually pure citizen on the one hand, and the perverse anticitizen on the other, in what I call “backwards uncitizening.” My analysis of this process shows that the perverse “alien” subject, as constituted in significant part by nonjuridical normalizing mechanisms of biopower, resists the juridical discourse that is supposed to determine it.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 28 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Crossing Borders Special Issue , Spring 2013 , pp. 290 - 306
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

I would like to thank José Medina and Jane Wanninger for their valuable comments, and Kelly Oliver, whose graduate seminar inspired this project.

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