ABSTRACT
This essay explores the major processes through which the United States became a modern nation-state, and how these processes interconnect with queers, queerness, and queering. Focusing on colonization, slavery, expanding capitalism, empire, and the modern bureaucratic state, the essay shows that “queer” and “US nation-state” have continually coproduced one another in shifting, contested ways that articulate hierarchies of power at local, regional, national, transnational, and imperial scales.
