Voting rights,anti-intersectionality,and citizenship as containment |
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| Authors: | V Jo Hsu |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Rhetoric and Writing, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA vjohsu@uark.edu |
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| Abstract: | ABSTRACT This piece argues that dominant histories of U.S. suffrage have misremembered the history of voting rights legislation as one of steady social progress and multicultural inclusion. By contrast, I consider landmark legislation affecting voting rights such as the 19th Amendment and the Dawes and Magnuson Acts as strategies of containment that that expand but also continue to police the racialized gender norms of U.S. citizenship. These legal reforms, while providing potential channels for redistributions of power and resources, also perpetuate anti-intersectional (Brandzel) vocabularies that impose single-axis frameworks (Crenshaw) onto understandings of citizenship and civic inclusion. While acknowledging the partial and contingent gains made by suffrage movements, I offer a counternarrative of U.S. voting rights as means of managing and maintaining colonial dominance. I argue that the settler-colonial nation state continues to restrict the decision-making capacities of those marginalized by race, indigeneity, gender, sexuality, and/or disability through a vast network of administrative practices that must be analyzed in concert with voting rights. |
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| Keywords: | Citizenship intersectionality settler colonialism decoloniality voting |
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