My research combines argumentative, queer, and critical legal approaches to rhetoric to examine the role that public arguments play in the constitution of legitimate forms of subjectivity in U.S. legal and public culture. I am currently writing a dissertation on the Fourteenth Amendment rhetoric of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. I believe that the judicial rhetoric of constitutional law plays a significant role in delimiting the grounds on which a subject’s claim to existence and legitimacy in the U.S. polity can rest. Judicial doctrinal arguments from and about the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution currently play a final arbitration role in the statist constitution of those forms of queer/racialized identity and relation that are eligible for normal and recognized status before U.S. law. My case studies consist of close readings of judicial opinion in several federal and Supreme Court cases—including Lawrence v. Texas and Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District No. 1––that are significant to Kennedy’s Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence. I argue that Kennedy’s constitutional rhetoric is a significant component of a broader Fourteenth Amendment discourse of substantive due process and equality that is constitutive of a peculiar and newly legitimate post-racially queer subject position before the law.

As a second-year graduate student of Sociocultural Anthropology, my research interests are in criminalization and the state. I am developing a proposal to conduct multi-sited ethnographic research of the institution of parole in the United States. I am interested in how parole operates according to a liberal conception of the human being (as a productive citizen with rights and responsibilities specifically in her relation to the state), and according to an ideal of the possibility of rehabilitation that began to shape penal ideology in the mid-19th Century in Western Europe and the U.S. – an ideal that has been in decline since the 1970’s. My questions address the transformations of the state and of notions of personhood in neoliberalism, the political economy of punishment and rehabilitation, the possibilities and limitations of social movements, the solidification of social categories through entextualization and intertextuality, and processes of racialization. I seek to ground these questions in one field of the U.S. criminal justice system, in the context of mass incarceration and imbrication with transnational security regimes.

My dissertation explores the changing borders of the U.S. nation-state throughout the 19th century. In particular, I explore how the practices of annexation and statehood served as the preferred scale for expansion and empire-building. My project looks at four key sites read as racially “other” but economically desirable by the U.S. – present-day Florida, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Cuba. These locations, and the statehood debates that surrounded them, challenged the U.S. to determine who and what to include within its borders. I look at how print helped shape understandings of these places as exotic and desirable, but also threatening to the narratives of Manifest Destiny and U.S. empire.