Composing Vulnerability: Proposition 8, Paradise Absent, and Apocalypse When

Elaborating upon Fineman et al.'s influential analysis of vulnerability, this paper critically considers 21^st century conservative mobilizations of bodily risk and need as the ontological basis for social welfare policy. If bodily differences such as race or gender were historically used to construct women and people of color as weak and in need of paternalistic protection, then vulnerability has been reappropriated as a productive site of analysis through which to take into account structural asymmetries in power and dependency. As a countercurrent, this paper assesses how the Yes on Proposition 8 campaign mobilizes embodiment and performance to construct family, intimacy and nation as at risk. It then considers how these compositions of vulnerability are reflected in public policy and the law. Because conservative social movements persuasively argue that they are retaining and restoring tradition, they are more easily able to deploy bodily metaphors to construct abstract entities ranging from family, to citizenship, to personhood as at risk and in need of protection. This case study points to how heterosexual, militarized masculinity is updated as the ideal form of this protectionism. More broadly, my study of conservative organizations’ activist repertoires suggests that the oft-championed potential of “body politics” and “vulnerability” is subverted when they are presumed to assert a moral irrefutability less susceptible to rhetorical manipulation. When this happens, abstraction – masquerading as corporeal specificity – risks a form of corporeal determinism that threatens the very political projects that progressive vulnerability politics hope to further.