The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America in Our Shared Shelf

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Nov 01, 2011 Ashley rated it liked it

Shelves: women-s-studies, history, what-i-study

In The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America Margot Canaday elegantly demonstrates the ways in which an expanding federal bureaucracy both shaped and reacted to the emergence of a homosexual-heterosexual binary. The emergence of this binary came to function as an important method of inclusion and exclusion from the benefits of citizenship. By creating the category of the homosexual, government policies also created the closet. Canaday examines both what the gover In The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America Margot Canaday elegantly demonstrates the ways in which an expanding federal bureaucracy both shaped and reacted to the emergence of a homosexual-heterosexual binary. The emergence of this binary came to function as an important method of inclusion and exclusion from the benefits of citizenship. By creating the category of the homosexual, government policies also created the closet. Canaday examines both what the government laid out as official policy and how bureaucrats at all levels enacted or enforced those policies. She is more concerned with what the state actually did than with what it purported to do. At the core of the state’s evolving understanding of homosexuality is the shift toward homosexual as a status rather homosexual acts. The military and other agencies initially punished acts but, over the course of the 20th century, shifted to policing the homosexual person regardless of their behavior. The book focuses specifically on the Bureau of Immigration, military, and the various federal agencies that administered welfare benefits between roughly the turn of the last century through the Cold War. At the end of the book, she turns to a discussion of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and contemporary debates about same-sex marriage.

This book strikes me as more of an American Studies text than, for example, Mae Ngai’s book. Although The Straight State is only barely more interdisciplinary on the level of methods than Impossible Subjects, Canaday engages with gender issues in a deeper way than many historians. The book’s introduction highlights how little attention historians have given to issues of gender, sexuality, and the emerging bureaucratic state. She also does more with her source material, primarily archival documents and court proceedings, than the average historian. By combining the quantitative and qualitative readings of court cases, Canaday explores ambiguity and ambivalence on the part of the state. Her presentation of these cases and memos reveals not just what happened, but ventures into the symbolic and the level of meaning. This is especially the case with her reading of women’s confessions to homosexual acts (see p. 203-205). A brief discussion of popular culture’s response to the emerging homosexual identity or government policies could have added a bit of nuance to her work. Similarly, the illustrations that she does include could have been dealt with in greater detail. That said, the book is not weaker for these choices.

I appreciated that Canaday presents an academically written, thoroughly researched argument, in a manner similar to Mae Ngai, while nevertheless maintaining a clear, passionate political stance. Canaday herself speaks directly to the reader in the conclusion, offering her thoughts on contemporary gay-rights strategies on the local, state, and federal level. Throughout the book her enthusiasm and belief in the subject is clear. By ending the book with a statement of her politics, rather than including them in the introduction as a kind of “disclaimer” in the name of transparency, Canaday manages to leave the reader with a way forward based on the history that she presented. Although this conclusion certainly is not a rallying cry in the same way as Schmidt-Camacho’s afterward in Migrant Imaginaries, Canaday ties the past to the present, states clearly the injustice of contemporary policy, and advocates for action. ...more

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Oct 22, 2011 Ashley added it · review of another edition

Shelves: what-i-study, history

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