1.

Record Nr.

UNISA996248171303316

Autore

Canaday Margot

Titolo

The Straight State : Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America / / Margot Canaday

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Princeton, NJ : , : Princeton University Press, , [2009]

©2009

ISBN

0-691-25157-6

1-282-93563-1

9786612935633

1-4008-3042-7

Edizione

[Course Book]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xiv, 277 pages) : illustrations

Collana

Politics and Society in Modern America ; ; 64

Disciplina

323.32640973

Soggetti

Political rights - United States - History - 20th century

Homosexuality - Political aspects - United States - History - 20th century

Homosexuality - United States - History - 20th century

United States Social policy 1980-1993

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Immigration. "A new species of undesirable immigrant" : perverse aliens and the limits of the law, 1900-1924 -- Military. "We are merely concerned with the fact of sodomy" : managing sexual stigma in the World War I-era military, 1917-1933 -- Welfare. "Most fags are floaters" : the problem of "unattached persons" during the early New Deal, 1933-1935 -- Welfare. "With the ugly word written across it" : homo-hetero binarism, federal welfare policy, and the 1944 GI Bill -- Military. "Finding a home in the Army" : women's integration, homosexual tendencies, and the Cold War military, 1947-1959 -- Immigration. "Who is a homosexual?" : the consolidation of sexual identities in mid-twentieth-century immigration law, 1952-1983.

Sommario/riassunto

The Straight State is the most expansive study of the federal regulation of homosexuality yet written. Unearthing startling new evidence from the National Archives, Margot Canaday shows how the state systematically came to penalize homosexuality, giving rise to a regime



of second-class citizenship that sexual minorities still live under today. Canaday looks at three key arenas of government control--immigration, the military, and welfare--and demonstrates how federal enforcement of sexual norms emerged with the rise of the modern bureaucratic state. She begins at the turn of the twentieth century when the state first stumbled upon evidence of sex and gender nonconformity, revealing how homosexuality was policed indirectly through the exclusion of sexually "degenerate" immigrants and other regulatory measures aimed at combating poverty, violence, and vice. Canaday argues that the state's gradual awareness of homosexuality intensified during the later New Deal and through the postwar period as policies were enacted that explicitly used homosexuality to define who could enter the country, serve in the military, and collect state benefits. Midcentury repression was not a sudden response to newly visible gay subcultures, Canaday demonstrates, but the culmination of a much longer and slower process of state-building during which the state came to know and to care about homosexuality across many decades. Social, political, and legal history at their most compelling, The Straight State explores how regulation transformed the regulated: in drawing boundaries around national citizenship, the state helped to define the very meaning of homosexuality in America.