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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.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the Indigenous activists, scholars, and organizations whose insights and labor inform this essay. I am grateful to learn from them and to be led by them in struggles against colonialism. Thank you, also, to Lisa King for her guidance and accomplicehood, and to Kari Anderson for the work of assembling and facilitating this conversation.
Notes on contributor
Jo Hsu is an assistant professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Their work focuses on the interrelations of storytelling and struggles for social change. They are guided by the trans, crip, and queer of color scholars and activists who have enabled their survival, and they strive to further the forms of mutual care and collaborative worldbuilding that they have learned from these mentors and kin.
Notes
1 Joanne Barker, Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 5.
2 Corinne Porter, “Rightfully Hers: Who Decides Who Votes,” U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, January 2020, https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/vwLyqKXsyHA6Ig.
3 Porter, “Rightfully Hers.”
4 “Rightfully Hers Pop-up Exhibit,” U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, n.d., https://www.archives.gov/files/exhibits/nates/rightfully-hers-popup-poster-04.pdf.
5 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, no. 1 (1989): 139–67. Combahee River Collective, The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties (Albany: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1986), Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000); Jennifer C. Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
6 David L. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 38.
7 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Aihwa Ong, Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America, California Series in Public Anthropology 5 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Eithne Luibhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Eithne Luibhéid, “Sexuality, Migration, and the Shifting Line Between Legal and Illegal Status,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, no. 2–3 (January 1, 2008): 289–315, https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2007-034; Leti Volpp, “Divesting Citizenship: On Asian American History and the Loss of Citizenship Through Marriage,” UCLA Law Review 52 (December 16, 2005).
8 Alexandra Witkin, “To Silence a Drum: The Imposition of United States Citizenship on Native Peoples,” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 21, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 353–83; Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford M. Lytle, American Indians, American Justice, 1st ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); Vine Deloria Jr., “Conquest Masquerading as Law,” in Unlearning the Language of Conquest : Scholars Expose Anti-Indianism in America: Deceptions That Influence War and Peace, Civil Liberties, Public Education, Religion and Spirituality, Democratic Ideals, the Environment, Law, Literature, Film, and Happiness, ed. Donald Trent Jacobs, 1st ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 94–107; Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Amy. E. Den Ouden and Jean M. O'Brien, eds., Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles, and Indigenous Rights in the United States (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
9 Joanne Barker, ed., Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination, Contemporary Indigenous Issues (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).
10 Amy L. Brandzel, Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 4.
11 Barker, Native Acts, 17.
12 American Bar Association Standing Committee on the Law Library of Congress, 100 Years After the 19th Amendment: Their Legacy, and Our Future, August 2019 – December 2020.
13 Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898, E-Book Edition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 28.
14 Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 28.
15 Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 28.
16 David Kaufman, “The Root: The Misjudged Black Vote on Gay Marriage,” NPR, March 4, 2011, https://www.npr.org/2011/03/04/134257733/the-root-the-misjudged-black-vote-on-gay-marriage; Jonathan Capehart, “Don’t Blame Blacks for Obama’s Reticence on Same-Sex Marriage,” Washington Post, May 8, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/dont-blame-blacks-for-obamas-reticence-on-same-sex-marriage/2012/05/08/gIQAb9IyAU_blog.html.
17 Perry Bacon Jr., “What’s Really Behind Pete Buttigieg’s Lack Of Support Among Black Voters?,” FiveThirtyEight, December 3, 2019, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/whats-really-behind-pete-buttigiegs-lack-of-support-among-black-voters/.
18 Witkin, “To Silence a Drum,” 361.
19 Catherine Lee, “Family Reunification and the Limits of Immigration Reform: Impact and Legacy of the 1965 Immigration Act,” Sociological Forum 30, no. S1 (2015): 541, https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12176.
20 Witkin, “To Silence a Drum,” 359.
21 Donald Trump, “Modernizing Our Immigration System for a Stronger America” (speech, Rose Garden, Washington D.C., May 16, 2019). https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-modernizing-immigration-system-stronger-america/.
22 Lola Fadulu and Mark Walker, “Trump Attaches Severe Restrictions to Puerto Rico’s Long-Delayed Disaster Aid,” New York Times, January 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/15/us/politics/trump-puerto-rico-disaster-aid.html; Katy O’Donnell, “Trump to Lift Hold on $8.2B in Puerto Rico Disaster Aid,” Politico, January 15, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/15/trump-to-lift-hold-on-82b-in-puerto-rico-disaster-aid-099139.
23 Barack Obama, “‘Don’t Boo. Vote’: Barack Obama’s 2016 Democratic Convention Speech in Full,” Guardian, July 28, 2016, sec. US news, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/28/dont-boo-vote-barack-obamas-2016-democratic-convention-speech-in-full.
24 Paraphrased from Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), xii.
25 Andrea Smith via David Lloyd and Laura Pulido, “In the Long Shadow of the Settler: On Israeli and U.S. Colonialisms,” American Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2010): 795–809; Byrd, The Transit of Empire; Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).