Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First-Century America

Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies

by Inderpal Grewal

In Saving the Security State Inderpal Grewal traces the changing relations between the US state and its citizens in an era she calls advanced neoliberalism. Marked by the decline of US geopolitical power, endless war, and increasing surveillance, advanced neoliberalism militarizes everyday life while producing the “exceptional citizens”—primarily white Christian men who reinforce the security state as they claim responsibility for protecting the country from racialized others. Under advanced neoliberalism, Grewal shows, others in the United States strive to become exceptional by participating in humanitarian projects that compensate for the security state's inability to provide for the welfare of its citizens. In her analyses of microfinance programs in the global South, security moms, the murders at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and the post-9/11 crackdown on Muslim charities, Grewal exposes the fissures and contradictions at the heart of the US neoliberal empire and the centrality of race, gender, and religion to the securitized state.

Genres: Politics, Academic, Theory

336 pages, Hardcover

Published November 29, 2017

About the author

Inderpal Grewal is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She is the author of Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms and Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel, and coeditor of Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism, all also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

[Sohum · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was okay. Most of the analysis of neoliberal subjecthood was well-done, but I think greater emphasis could have been placed on the cultivation of moral consensus as a mode of implementing neoliberalism into the modern (withering away of) functions of the state.

I also disagreed with Grewal's decision to paint the state as the best (if not the only) alternative agent for providing welfare. I understand the political constraints she is working within, but I would have preferred to see an analysis that does not "claim to know too much too soon" as Kathi Weeks has framed it in the precise context of socialist feminists (which appears to be where Grewal falls), and that understands the future as a hopeful horizon that might include an anarchic future, a communistic one, a society of direct mutual aid relationships.