![]() What this rhetoric obscures (in addition to those past decades in which sexuality was rigidly policed and whom one loved mattered very much) is an obsessive discursive focus on a stereotypical “mainstream” that is fast becoming a demographic minority – the white middle class – and a deliberate inattention to people who do not fit that stereotype: people of color and people too economically disadvantaged to lay claim to membership in the elastic category, “middle class.” My intention in this article is to show that the “xenophobic manipulation of women’s rights” that is the thematic focus of this issue appears in American life both as a violence of abstraction at the level of public discourse and as a dismissal of women’s security needs and bodily integrity at the level of everyday individual lives. We see this distorted national self-perception in the newly-adopted cliché used by politicians to express support for marriage equality – that you are American “no matter who you love” 2 – a long overdue attempt to leap out of more hateful elements of homophobic and heteronormative discourse through American exceptionalism’s characteristic appeal to ahistoricity. ![]() 1 Even where there is no explicit contrast being made with other nation-states, this implicit claim that the United States is a society more respectful of the moral value of all of its inhabitants dominates the public-sphere discourse. superiority is asserted inconsistently, and usually without any sign of awareness that it is inconsistent, as a commitment to hyper-individualism and as a commitment to greater inclusion of all people on the grounds of their social value and a deeply-rooted tradition of communitarianism. When explaining the sense in which the United States is exceptional as an advanced economy, however, the other states – European nations in particular – are depicted as less committed to values the articulator of exceptionalism assumes to be necessary conditions of human flourishing. In the case of contrasts with developing nations, exceptionalist pretensions often cast these other societies as less capable of constituting and maintaining effective forms of social organization. ![]()
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