 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | 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. |
Average Customer Rating:  A New Look at Sexuality, Citizenship and the State Canady, Margot. "The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America", Princeton University Press, 2009.
A New Look at Sexuality, Citizenship and the State
Amos Lassen
Margot Canady reminds us that we live in a straight state based upon the supposed naturalness of the heterosexual couple and "the unnaturalness of alternatives". Canady shows us that the homosexual is regarded as the "anti-citizen". We see how federal institutions have a lot to do with the shaping of the GLBT identity and she makes us well aware of the role of federal policies in welfare, immigration and the military plays on the gay persona. She asks how and why the federal bureaucracy is allowed to define, regulate and exclude gay men and lesbians. We go behind the scenes to see the inner workings of the state and its policing machinery to get a detailed look at how 20th century laws and policies have justified discrimination against our community.
Most of you will be shocked to see how blatant this discrimination is and that it has all happened recently. Ms. Canady has done her research well and the book is logical and totally cohesive with extensive footnotes with detailed explanations. This is a very important work and it concerns issues that we must all make ourselves aware of if we want to live in this country. The one thing it showed me as something that I have always believed--there are more pressing issues for us that should come long before we even think about gay marriage. Impressive, detailed study of 20th Century federal laws and policies justifying discrimination against gays and lesbians 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 |  |
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