From the American Lebensraum to the American Living Room: Class, Sexuality, and the Scaled Production of ‘Domestic’ Intimacy

Abstract

In this paper I interrogate the powerful brand of intimate nationalism that has permeated American political discourse since the initiation of the ‘war on terror’. I consider how a strategic collapse of scales in articulations of ‘domestic’ life simultaneously defines public cum national and private cum familial belonging, with material force. This scaled production of domestic intimacy entails a concurrent restructuring of the spatiality of social reproduction and of norms of desirous identification. My analysis draws on the combined insights of scalar theory and sexuality studies, and argues that in order to benefit from both fields of inquiry we need to return to and rethink class. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, I posit class as embodied social-group relations of production, consumption, reproduction, and desire in order to highlight the scaled and strategic hinging of normative sexualities to modes of social reproduction. This approach questions how people become invested in, and desirous of, norms of sociality that constitute militarist imperial capitalism. It suggests that identification with, and desire for, this nation at this moment is fundamentally dependent on actual configurations of private, intimate life. A consideration of these shifting normative desires and geographies of domestic life, as manifest across a range of cultural, political, and economic terrains and at a variety of spatial scales, provides insight into why people continue to consume and be consumed by the American empire.