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Canaday, Margot

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

Princeton (Princeton)

2009



OUR SYNOPSIS: Margot Canaday examines how the regulation of sexuality developed in tandem with the American bureaucratic state in the twentieth century. She argues that sexuality was one of the central regulatory categories in how the federal government constructed United States citizenship, especially in the postwar era. She demonstrates this by focusing on immigration regulation, the military, and welfare assistance. In this framing, homosexuality is both constructed and constituted by the state. Where the state meets its citizens or potential citizens becomes a space of negotiation and identity-creation. Bureaucrats either observed non-conforming sexual behavior or inspected people’s bodies for signs of such behavior. Policy provisions were then applied malleably to justify exclusion from the country, military, or welfare assistance.

BIG QUESTIONS:

  • To what extent did the U.S. state use economic measures to construct sexuality?

  • Why do immigration regulation, the military, and welfare assistance provide strong examples for Canaday’s arguments? How do these types or realms of regulation relate to sexuality?

  • How could individuals resist against state regulation of their sexuality?

FEATURE QUOTES:

  • “This study examines three of the ‘engines’ of the twentieth-century state—the Bureau of Immigration, the military, and the federal agencies that administered welfare benefits—to demonstrate how federal interest in homosexuality developed in tandem with the growth of the bureaucratic state. In emphasizing the relationship between state formation and homosexual identity, I not only seek to put the history of sexuality into closer dialogue with political and legal history, but to complicate what has now become a standard interpretation within the field of gay and lesbian history as well.” (2)

PRIMARY SOURCES:

BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:

  • N/A

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