Styles of pledging allegiance: Practicing youth citizenship in the United States

•Students performed various styles of citizenship when pledging allegiance.•‘Preps’ performed patriotic, lawful, and neoliberal styles.•‘Non-preps’ valued alternative transnational, dissenting, and cool styles.•Alternative citizenship styles potentially complemented students’ patriotic beliefs.

This article examines the meaning of pledging state and national allegiance at a multiethnic public school in Texas. An analysis of students’ metapragmatic discourses about various ‘styles of citizenship’ illustrates how female ‘preps’ typically viewed the Pledge as a seamless part of their white, middle-class, neoliberal lifestyles, thus positioning themselves, in accordance with institutional definition, as lawful and patriotic citizens. Yet institutional conflations of patriotic, lawful, and neoliberal citizenship styles were challenged by non-preps, who valued alternative transnational, dissenting, and cool styles of political membership. At the same time, hegemonic modes of belonging were not wholly dismantled; alternative citizenship styles sometimes complemented, rather than conflicted with, students’ patriotic stances.