The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America) [Hardcover]

Margot Canaday (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 6, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0691135983 | ISBN-13: 978-0691135984

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

It is not really news that inhabitants of the United States are governed by what historian Margot Canaday calls, in the title of her excellent book, a 'straight state.' For some time now, scholars of sexuality (following in the footsteps of those who have studied and challenged the race and gender hierarchies embedded in state policies and actions) have professed the analytical goal of what historian Lisa Duggan, writing in 1994, called 'queering the state.' These scholars have argued that the supposed naturalness of the heterosexual couple, and the unnaturalness of alternatives, is presumed and reinforced in the ordinary workings of government. Canaday's substantial contribution is to trace, in gripping and at times horrifying detail, exactly how the United States came to operate in this fashion over the course of much of the twentieth century. The Straight State provides a compelling history of the designation of 'the homosexual as the anticitizen.' . . . The Straight State is a captivating, engagingly written work of social, political, legal and sexual history, and the fruit of an extraordinary attention to archival documents. -- Steven Epstein, Nation

[Canaday] succeeds in . . . contributing brilliantly both to understandings of the relationship between state practices and the construction of identity and to the story of the rise of the modern bureaucratic state as a sexual state. . . . [This] book . . . presents a fascinating reframing of a familiar story and opens substantial new space for related research. -- Julie Novkov, Perspectives on Politics

[The Straight State] is a pathbreaking, riveting historical study. . . . [Canaday's] brilliant book is revelatory. -- David A. J. Richards, Law and History Review

Princeton Professor Margot Canaday has presented us with a superb and groundbreaking analysis of the role of federal institutions in shaping the LGBT identity over the course of the 20th Century. . . . Professor Canaday's work satisfies in a way all too rarely encountered in contemporary historical writing. The Straight State opens our eyes to the role of evolving federal policies in immigration, welfare, and the military in defining homosexuality and the gay persona. . . . The Straight State is indispensable to the student of modern queer history. -- Toby Grace, Out in Jersey

Canaday contends that the emergence of state bureaucracy in the 20th-century US may be tracked through its developing definition and regulation of homosexuality. . . . While some scholars may debate the author's particular inferences from her evidence, this volume opens new ground in gender research. -- Choice

The Straight State makes three outstanding contributions: it delineates the state as a whole fresh category in the formation of gay identities; elite reform becomes more important than bottom up revolution; while she moves gay history, convincingly, right into the mainstream of historical inquiry. Canaday has, therefore, produced an extremely important book. -- Kevin White, Journal of Social History

Canaday offer[s] a much more complete record than has previously appeared in print of the law of gay-straight discrimination and its meaning in people's lives. -- Felicia Kornbluh, Law & Social Inquiry

[An] absorbing account of federal policies, [this study] makes an important intervention by showing why historians of sexuality need to pay more attention to questions of citizenship and the practices of the administrative state. -- George Chauncey, American Historical Review

[This] book contributes to an ongoing body of lesbian, gay, bi, and transgender theoretical, historical, and social research in fascinating new ways, revealing the extent to which normative critiques continue to inform queer theory and structure queer lives. -- Jaime Cantrell, Feminist Formations

From the Inside Flap

"A groundbreaking study that wholly revises our understanding of sexuality, citizenship, and the state. Canaday asks how and why the emerging federal bureaucracy came to define, regulate, and exclude gay men and lesbians, and her answers take us into the inner workings of the state's policing machinery. This is an important book."--Joanne Meyerowitz, author of How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States

"In this brilliant retelling of the making of American citizenship, Margot Canaday links changing understandings of national identity to changing understandings of sexuality. Her indefatigable research and wise analysis demonstrate that political judgments about immigration, military service, and welfare have been soaked with judgments about what counts as normal--or 'degenerate'--sex. The history of federal bureaucracy is suddenly a page-turner."--Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship

"This is a terrific, complex, highly original, revelatory book. Canaday very effectively argues that the powers of the federal state and the definition of 'a homosexual' as a person grew up in dynamic relation to one another in the first half of the twentieth century. Every chapter contains fascinating new material, superbly shaped to advance her narrative. I am sure this will be an influential book."--Nancy F. Cott, author of Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 296 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (July 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691135983
• ISBN-13: 978-0691135984
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #747,794 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Impressive, detailed study of 20th Century federal laws and policies justifying discrimination against gays and lesbians, September 13, 2009

By 

Bob Lind "camelwest" (Phoenix, AZ United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America) (Hardcover)

Though I've never been much of an activist, I consider myself fairly well informed about the challenges faced by gay and lesbian individuals in dealing with federal laws and bureaucracies that have long chosen to ignore us, if not directly put obstacles in our path to equal rights under the law. I believed most of the latter policies were enacted since World War II, and had no idea - until I read this book - that such blatant discrimination was a part of federal policies since the beginning of the 20th Century, at least as regards homosexual males (Lesbians were not a priority, it seems, until around World War II.)

Ms Canaday, an assistant professor of history at Princeton, provides an exceptionally detailed and complete study of federal policies dealing with homosexuality, focusing on three areas: immigration, the military and social benefit programs. The information is provided in a clearly cohesive and logical order, despite the fact that the laws and policies she discusses were neither. The book contains copious footnotes, not just cites but detailed explanations of items mentioned in the main text, making the book accessible to the casual reader as well as for scholarly research. It is shocking to read about some of the longstanding policies of screening immigrants for "homosexual tendencies," and very interesting to read how early attitudes toward gays and lesbians in the military have evolved in the latter half of the century, eventually giving way to the faulted "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy we live with today. The inclusion of social programs in the analysis is important, as the entitlement to such programs was frequently used to justify the exclusion of homosexuals from the military or immigration.

An impressive, important work, valuable to anyone who wants a better understanding about where our fight for equal rights has been, in order to better plot a course from here. Five scholarly stars out of five.

- Bob Lind, Echo Magazine

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Important but flawed account, August 7, 2011

By 

RobConway (USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America) (Paperback)

Distilling an impressive amount of archival research, this book traces the gradual refinement (if that is the appropriate term) of antihomosexual policies on the part of the US federal government over the course of the twentieth century. Three areas are addressed: immigration, the military, and welfare. Not discussed are the baneful effects of state and local governments, as seen in such areas as entrapment and compulsory treatment of perceived mental disorders. In addition, the author offers only a brief discussion of the McCarthyite persecution of federal employees of the 1950s, holding that that has been covered in David K. Johnson's book.

Now in my seventies, I remember the horrendously homophobic atmosphere of mid-century America all too well. To be sure,"the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church"; that is, many of us became activists because we wanted to bring an end to these practices. That said, it is mistaken to suggest, as Canaday does, that the homophobic climate of the era was unique to the US. To be sure, some European countries, such as France and Italy, benefiting from the Code Napoleon, did better. But the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China were worse. Probably, the atmosphere that we endured was a special characteristic of the English-speaking peoples. While England and Wales decriminalized in 1967, over forty Commonwealth countries are still saddled with antisodomy legislation introduced by British colonialism. In countries like Jamaica and Uganda this heritage is accompanied by truly frightening popular outbreaks of bigotry and repression.

Another problem is the residue of the special creationism of the Social Construction trend of the 1990s. "The state . . . did not merely implicate but c o n s t i t u t e d homosexuality . . . (p. 4). This claim is simply untrue to the experience of myself and many others in that period. Prior to becoming acquainted with any theory, we first became imbued with a powerful attraction to a member of the same sex. Some of us thought that we were the only such people in the world. Theory did not "constitute" us.

A possibly revealing mistake, suggesting the limitations of the author's perspective, is the term "puppen-hungen" for a young man who was seeking to emigrate from Berlin in 1909 (p. 19). The actual term is "puppenjunge," a common German-language term for a young hustler at the time.

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing, February 10, 2012

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K_Love - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America) (Paperback)

This book is fascinating. With a ground-breaking argument about government control of sexuality, pristine organization, and a plethora of interesting sources, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of sexuality in America.