Queering citizenship, queering middle east studies

Critical citizenship studies have argued that researchers should not take the myth of the universal unmarked citizen to heart, but rather focus on the distance between the ideal of citizenship and its everyday embodied practices and on what the citizen and the state do rather than on the state's narration of itself. As Partha Chatterjee writes in his critique of Benedict Anderson, to endorse unbound serialities such as the universal and anonymous citizen is to imagine that nationalism and state practices can function without governmentality. In fact, the state's job is to organize and regulate the shared life of its structurally and practically unequal citizens and residents. Normative political theory of citizenship elides the ways that governmentality and biopower produce each citizen (as well as groups of citizens) as a particular derivation from the norm. It is with each iteration of these technologies that the state comes into view as a bounded entity.