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.
#801014 in Books Princeton University Press 2008-01-15Original language:EnglishPDF # 1 9.21 x .72 x 6.14l; 1.02 #File Name: 0691136319320 pages
Review
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Fascinating bookBy A. ColganGoldstein paints a vivid picture of Jews' original indifference to racial dynamics in America and their subsequent efforts to be endorsed as 'belonging to the white family of races.' He then tracks later Jewish attempts to disassociate from whiteness and the cultural difficulties that result. Really interesting.5 of 6 people found the following review helpful. the price of whitenessBy Silvia R. PetuchowskiAn excellent chronological and logical overview of the development and complexity of Jewish Identity in the history of the United States; specifically as the immigrants from Europe attempt to end their own history of discrimination. The book introduces those who are first time readers in the subject to the name of the many Jewish organizations that have formed through the history of the US; representing different Jewish group interests. The book gives a beginning of an understanding to the complex relationship between Jews and Blacks; but leaves this topic barely on the surface. The book suffers from lack of depth in its analysis of this history but gives us from where to begin the study of this fascinating topic.17 of 30 people found the following review helpful. Original and problematicBy Seth J. FrantzmanThis book deals with a number of different issues sourounding Jewish identity in America at least partly as it realtes to the white majority and the black minority between which they found themselves in New York City and during the civil rights movement.The most original and inishgtful argument here is that Jews attached themselves to the white melieu and abandoned their 'coloured' identity of belonging to the minorities; such as Blacks; Asians and Hispanics. However this is where the major problem begins. It is not just Jewish identity that became connected to 'white; european western civilization' but rather a process whereby European-white civilization decided to craft the Jews into a white identity in the post-Holocaust period. Under the guise of arguing that Hitlers racial theories were lies there was a drive to create a 'new Jew' whereby Jews had to be assimilated into the white majoirty; thus the Jews became 'white'. But this book doesnt see the two sided process. It also doesnt ask the central question: "is race merely a contrived fake idea; created in the 19th century and perhaps worth abandoning?" The author assumes that whites see themselves as seperate from the 'others' but this is a ludicrous idea that only exists among the leftist-white upper classes who see everything in AMerica based on varying degrees of skin color. Logical people realize ethnicity and race are mostly self identity frauds.Seth J. Frantzman
