Sapphic Slashers , livre ebook

325

pages

English

Ebooks

2001

Écrit par
Duggan Lisa Duggan

Publié par
Duke University Press

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325

pages

English

Ebooks

2001

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

10 janvier 2001

EAN13

9780822381013

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

On a winter day in 1892, in the broad daylight of downtown Memphis, Tennessee, a middle class woman named Alice Mitchell slashed the throat of her lover, Freda Ward, killing her instantly. Local, national, and international newspapers, medical and scientific publications, and popular fiction writers all clamored to cover the ensuing "girl lovers" murder trial. Lisa Duggan locates in this sensationalized event the emergence of the lesbian in U.S. mass culture and shows how newly "modern" notions of normality and morality that arose from such cases still haunt and distort lesbian and gay politics to the present day.Situating this story alongside simultaneously circulating lynching narratives (and its resistant versions, such as those of Memphis antilynching activist Ida B. Wells) Duggan reveals how stories of sex and violence were crucial to the development of American modernity. While careful to point out the differences between the public reigns of terror that led to many lynchings and the rarer instances of the murder of one woman by another privately motivated woman, Duggan asserts that dominant versions of both sets of stories contributed to the marginalization of African Americans and women while solidifying a distinctly white, male, heterosexual form of American citizenship. Having explored the role of turn-of-the-century print media-and in particular their tendency toward sensationalism-Duggan moves next to a review of sexology literature and to novels, most notably Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. Sapphic Slashers concludes with two appendices, one of which presents a detailed summary of Ward's murder, the trial, and Mitchell's eventual institutionalization. The other presents transcriptions of letters exchanged between the two women prior to the crime.Combining cultural history, feminist and queer theory, narrative analysis, and compelling storytelling, Sapphic Slashers provides the first history of the emergence of the lesbian in twentieth-century mass culture.

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Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

10 janvier 2001

EAN13

9780822381013

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

S E X , V I O L E N C E , A N D A M E R I C A N M O D E R N I T Y

L I S A

D U G G A N

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Durham and London



©  Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Typeset in Joanna by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

For Marinelle Green, –

   

  

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments, ix

Introduction, 

Part I Murder in Memphis

Girl Slays Girl, 

A Feast of Sensation, 

Habeas Corpus,  Inquisition of Lunacy, 

Part II MakingMeanings

Violent Passions,  Doctors of Desire,  A Thousand Stories, 

More Than Love: An Epilogue, 

Appendix A: Hypothetical Case, 

Appendix B: Letters,  Notes,  Bibliography,  Index, 

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

This book wandered through my life, laced with ambivalence, for years be-fore I was prepared to publish it. I won’t say how many years, or give the reasons for my ambivalence. But I will use this proﬀered space to oﬀer thanks to those who persuaded me that I could publish this southern gothic tale of violence and despair as something other than a repetition, with a politically redemptive as well as elegiac force. This project began as a Ph.D. dissertation, aided and abetted by the histori-cal imaginations, productive provocations, and support of Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Judith R. Walkowitz, and Jonathan Ned Katz, whose pioneer-ing research provided the foundation upon which to build. I reinvented it during an endlessly surprising and personally revolutionizing postdoctoral year plus visiting faculty semester at the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Drinking at the Fiesta Cafe and driving through the Imported Swine Research Area at mid-night, I found reasons to forge ahead. In the company of Paula Treichler, Amanda Anderson, Sonya Michel, Carol Neely, Cary Nelson, Janet Lyon, Alan Hance, Peter Garrett, Michael Bérubé, Robert McRuer, Kirsten Lentz, Linda Baughman, Lee Furey, and other faculty members and students, I packed a decade’s worth of intellectual stimulation and transformation into three semesters. I also met two people, also visitors to the cornﬁelds that year, who changed me utterly and made the completion of this particular project imaginable—Kathleen McHugh and Cindy Patton. After Illinois, I am grateful for a fellowship semester spent at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities—in my home state, the scene of so many resonant crimes—where I ﬁnally submitted the ﬁrst piece of this research for publication inSIGNS.Then, as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Depart-ment of American Civilization at Brown University for two years, I learned more than I wanted to about the challenges of forging an academic career while trying to make research, writing, and teaching matter both within and beyond the classroom. I am deeply grateful to David Savran, Carolyn Dean,

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