M. Jacqui Alexander, The New Militarization, The State and the Making of the Citizen

Sexuality studies and transnational feminism have developed largely

along separate disciplinary tracts. Alexander offers an analytic path

out of this disciplinary segregation by way of an examination of this

contemporary moment of U.S. militarization and empire building, to show

how these are racialized, sexualized processes in which the state has

mobilized a new figure--the citizen patriot--as one of the anchors for

the success of empire. Since no war can be waged without the creation

of an enemy, we will examine how both external and internal enemy

production are crucial in consolidating the ideological work of empire.

It is an urgent time for these fields to wrestle with the political,

ethical and intellectual commitments they must confront if transnational

feminism is to take on more explicitly the sexual dimensions of

globalization at the same time that sexuality studies takes seriously

the transnational dimensions of sex and empire.