Summary Of The Queen Of America Goes To Washington City

In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, the author Lauren Berlant, evaluates a pilgrimage to Washington with the purpose of defining citizenship. More specifically, she uses a Simpson’s episode “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington” to exemplify her theory of Infantile Citizenship. According to Berlant, an idealized infantile-citizen has a desire for the country as well as love similar to their love for their family, share a uniform, shared and understood history but participate in nostalgia, a purposefully forgetting that preserve innocence. Thus, form a consolidated site of belonging. Hence, it produces citizens as children-like but that do recognize the pain of actual children. This definition is rather complex. “Central to the narrative

Through Girl Scouts, these young girls are taught normative norms of girlhood, a blueprint for being a “normal” girl. “Girl Scouting is for YOU and every girl, everywhere! Girl Scouts of today become [the] leaders of tomorrow. Lead the life you always imagined! In Girl Scouts, you get to choose your own adventure as you develop your leadership skills, earn badges, hike, camp, sell cookies, and much more. Improve your neighborhood, protect the planet, or design a robot. It is up to you!” Girl Scouts are highly stigmatized as young white girls, this picture depicts just that. In addition, they all were awarded with princess-like crowns for winning, a normative item that only girls wear. President Obama enhances the girls innocence by wearing a crown too. This is okay because he is the leader of our nation, a heterosexual male, who supports their achievements. Also, it is important to note that this picture breaks the normative view of girls/woman in science. There are not a lot of women who represent this professional field, in which the male predominantly dominate. Overall, the girl’s achievement creates a sense of innocence, anyone viewing this picture would pause in awe and would make them congratulate this group of young girls on

Innocence can be described as the flexibility of childhood. However in contrast, Indian schools turned to a different approach to discipline children. In Indian schools, the cult of domesticity was strongly enforced in boarding schools where children were sent to be transformed based on the government’s interest, thus were segregated by gender. Very strict rules led the children to fight oppression by subdividing based on different categories. Since authorities of the boarding school were primarily repressive, they could not enforce power, according to Michel Foucault, a French philosopher. “Power is strong because it is creative--it ‘produces’ effects, knowledge, habits, discourse” (Lomawaima 228). This is well exemplified in the picture of president Obama with the Girl Scouts. From the power bestowed in the Girl Scouts faculty, teachers, mentors and the president himself included, they applied the right type of power to discipline the way they want them to act. Girl Scouts enforces a particular way of dressing and acting. Certain morals are are also embedded to idealize the young girls to create an ideal girlhood through Girl Scouts. Thus, instilling a culture that paves the way to creating a national culture of the nation, in hand, creating a desire for the