sexuality and citizenship in twentieth-century America
- Categories
- Book/Boek
- Creator
- Canaday, Margot
- Publish Year
- 2009
- Shelfmark
- VS 3 2009
- Thesaurus
- homoseksualiteit, seksualiteit, immigratie, militaire beroepen, recht, Verenigde Staten, 20e eeuw
- Description
- Using new evidence from the National Archives, Canaday shows how the state came to penalize homosexuality, giving rise to a regime of second-class citizenship that sexual minorities still live under today. She 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. She 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 but the culmination of longer process of state-building during which the state came to know and to care about homosexuality across many decades