On the eve of the Democratic convention, I started to wonder what would happen if Kerry hired some of my old professors as speechwriters…
My fellow Americans, in simply addressing you that way, “hailing” you in the Althusserian sense, I am reinscribing the normative masculine trope of ‘fellow’ while ironically appropriating the discourse of fellow-ship in a frankly hegemonic context; yet still acknowledging the rhetorical power of the nation-state even as attempting to recast it, despite its always-already being implicated in relations of power and domination, as a liberatory force on behalf of those subaltern who bother to vote, ‘voting’ itself as the performance of an idea of ‘citizenship’ built on the denial of same to those ‘others’ who are not hailed in my introduction...
