Bordering the Civic Imaginary: Alienization, Fence Logic, and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps

Abstract

Current figurations of the “immigration problem” in the United States challenge our understanding of the rhetoricity of contemporary bordering practices. The public discourse of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps serves to chart the alienization of undocumented migrants and the enactment of alien abjection on the U.S.–Mexico border. Alienization promises an antidote to majoritarian anxieties regarding national disunity in the form of a shoring-up of cultural boundaries that border-crossing subjects render troublesome. Ultimately, the fence logic engendered by groups such as the Minutemen reveals how struggles over the boundaries of citizenship both enable and limit an affect-charged civic imaginary.