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
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.
Recommended Citation
Givelber, Jackie, "Is Love a Battlefield? The New Politics of Marriage Equality in the Aging War on Terror" (2017). Scripps Senior Theses. 1026.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1026
