Graduation Year

2017

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Legal Studies

Second Department

Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Reader 1

Mark Golub

Reader 2

Kim Drake

Terms of Use & License Information

Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2017 Jacqulin L Givelber

Abstract

When Donald Trump took the stage as the Republican presidential nominee at the Republican National Convention in July 2016, he made a historical appeal to LGBTQ Americans: to the boisterous applause of a Republican audience, he promised "to protect LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology." Utilizing this historical moment as an indicator of shifting political views around LGBTQ rights in the Republican Party and the US nation-state as a whole, this paper links contemporary iterations of the War on Terror to the legalization of same-sex marriage in June 2015. Connecting same-sex marriage to the US nation-building project, I argue that the "dignity" newly available to certain queer folks via the institution of marriage makes possible an articulation of queer-defensibility that services a Republican investment in the aging War on Terror and the sustained targeting and hyper-surveillance of Muslims globally.

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