Sensational Nation and the Minutemen: Gendered Citizenship and Moral Vulnerabilities

Abstract

The U.S. anti-immigrant groups collectively known as the Minutemen use a theatrical repertoire of tactics, including vigilante border controls, video monitoring, cross-country “freedom rides,” and even colonial and pioneer costuming to endow abstracted tropes of citizenship, patriotism, and national insecurity with emotional and material salience. Their cultural potency relies on conjugating a series of nostalgic American icons—the frontiersman, the militia, and the moral masculine citizen rebelling against tyranny—with contemporary themes of terrorism, identity theft, and civil rights to reactivate well-worn racist and gendered tropes of a vulnerable nation at risk from infectious aliens. As the name “Minutemen” implies, the groups rely on pop-historical narratives, remember some historical accounts, and dismember others in their quest to position the documented American citizen and national body politic as an aggrieved, authentic victim deserving of moral outrage, justice, and protection. A nativist feminism and a militarized masculinity are licensed as the ideal forms of this protectionism, acting out of a compassionate patriotism in the stead of a negligent state. As surrogates for the nation, the Minutemen attempt to invest the United States’ past and present military actions with renewed virtue and success. Juxtaposed against the aged, white bodies of the Minutemen, these fantasies are haunted by their personal sense of gendered, professional, and cultural obsolescence—a vulnerability that traverses many white American resentments. As a cultural phenomenon, the Minutemen’s sense of displacement reminds us that logics of morality, citizenship, and justice still depend on unmarked tropes of masculinity, whiteness, and individualism.