Citizen-Spy

Introduction xxxiii
broadcast media scholarship. Anderson’s model has influenced the work of
scholars like Michele Hilmes, who has discussed the ways in which radio and
television have contributed to the formation of national cultures by casting
the immigrant experience as central to a shared American heritage. 34 Similarly,
Nina Liebman and Alan Nadel have shown how postwar American television
bridged the gulf between the private and public spheres—in part by linking
norms of gender and class to national political concerns—and George Lipsitz
has shown how media representations of ethnicity helped ameliorate post–
World War II tensions surrounding suburbanization and consumerism. 35
At stake in these representations is citizenship—that authorized subject
position that is the seemingly natural product of national history and beneficiary
of state institutions and processes. Historically, this privileged position has
been both gendered and racialized, with full agency reserved for white men,
though the specific terms and boundaries of that privilege have continually
shifted. In National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity
of White Men, Dana Nelson charts the influence of race and gender on
ideals of citizenship during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
exploring “how and under what conditions ‘white’ manhood came to ‘stand’
for nation, how it came to be idealized as a ‘representative’ identity in the United
States.” Through an analysis of official political texts, medical journals, and
nineteenth-century ethnographies, she discusses how white masculinity became
established as an American national norm and ideal. “National/‘white’ manhood,”
Nelson writes, “however effective for certain [cultural] purposes, is not
a ‘unified’ identity. It is an impossible identity—impossible in the sense that it
is an always-agonistic position, making it difficult for any human to fit into a
full sense of compatibility with its ideal construction.” National manhood not
only works to exclude women and people of color from full citizenship and
agency; it also is an impossible ideal for white men themselves. 36
It is overly simplistic, then, just to identify the normative impulses within a
particular set of representations or discourses. While dominant norms of citizenship
do largely mirror the race, gender, and class hierarchies that suffuse
American society, the ways in which those norms are articulated—and the
externalized threats against which they are measured—vary considerably. In
Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship, Engin Isin argues that citizenship,
while constituted in discourses of exclusion—of those various strangers and