Securing the Subject

Hundreds of thousands of foreigners have died or been displaced by America's efforts to defend or avenge a post-9/11 subject regressively constructed as happy, patriotic, and collectively vulnerable. Re-traditionalized images of America have been circulated by politicians and media (either cynically or uncritically) as open to enemies both without and within whose presence requires violent response, producing a newly militant national subjectivity which is rhetorically powerful even as it may be at odds with what the people actually believe or desire. Now more than ever there is a need for the advancement of a non-militarized and perhaps non-masculinized subject, a subject whose weak boundaries (personal and collective) can be celebrated rather than despised, a subject not taken in by the interpellations of national trauma put about by the dominant discourses

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