Heart of Whiteness , livre ebook
231
pages
English
Ebooks
2007
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231
pages
English
Ebook
2007
Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus
Publié par
Date de parution
08 juin 2007
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9780822389583
Langue
English
In this groundbreaking study, Julian Carter demonstrates that between 1880 and 1940, cultural discourses of whiteness and heterosexuality fused to form a new concept of the "normal" American. Gilded Age elites defined white civilization as the triumphant achievement of exceptional people hewing to a relational ethic of strict self-discipline for the common good. During the early twentieth century, that racial and relational ideal was reconceived in more inclusive terms as "normality," something toward which everyone should strive. The appearance of inclusiveness helped make "normality" appear consistent with the self-image of a racially diverse republic; nonetheless, "normality" was gauged largely in terms of adherence to erotic and emotional conventions that gained cultural significance through their association with arguments for the legitimacy of white political and social dominance. At the same time, the affectionate, reproductive heterosexuality of "normal" married couples became increasingly central to legitimate membership in the nation.Carter builds her intricate argument from detailed readings of an array of popular texts, focusing on how sex education for children and marital advice for adults provided significant venues for the dissemination of the new ideal of normality. She concludes that because its overt concerns were love, marriage, and babies, normality discourse facilitated white evasiveness about racial inequality. The ostensible focus of "normality" on matters of sexuality provided a superficially race-neutral conceptual structure that whites could and did use to evade engagement with the unequal relations of power that continue to shape American life today.
Voir
Publié par
Date de parution
08 juin 2007
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9780822389583
Langue
English
h e a r tw h i t e n e s s The of
heartwhiteness The of Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940
Duke University Press
|
j u l i a n b. c a r t e r
Durham and London
|
2 0 0 7
∫2007 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$ Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Dante by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.
Portions of chapter 3 originally appeared in ‘‘Birds, Bees, and Venereal Disease: Toward an Intellectual History of Sex Education,’’Journal of the History of Sexuality10.2: 213–49. Copyright∫2001 by the University of Texas Press. Reprinted by permission.
c o n t e n t s
Acknowledgments
vii
Introduction: The Search for Norma1 The Sexual Reproduction of Civilization and the Political Innocence of Whiteness | From Civilized Nervousness to Modern Marriage | Sources and Methods, Boundaries and Centers | On ‘‘Normality Studies’’ | Where Whiteness and Sexuality Intersect: Discursive History and Racial Ideals
1. ‘‘Barbarians Are Not Nervous’’42 Whiteness as Weakness: Nervous Exhaustion as a Racial Asset | Neurasthenia and the Racial Body | Sexual Weakness as Civilization’s Sign | Di√erential Diagnosis: The Problem of Illegitimate Culture | Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction | Conclusion: From Nervousness to Normality
2. The Marriage Crisis75 ‘‘Is Marriage Breaking Down?’’: Modernity and the State of (the) Union | American History as Marital History: The Frontier Narrative | ‘‘The Ever-Quickening Tempo of Our Times’’ | Heterosexuality: Sexual Di√erence and Simultaneous Orgasm | The Normalization of Whiteness | Conclusion: The Future Made Flesh
3. Birds, Bees, and the Future of the Race: Making Whiteness Normal118 Sexual Knowledge and Normal Adjustment | Frank Reticence | The Tragic Tale of Venereal Contagion | ‘‘How Shall We Teach?’’: Strategies of Reticence | The Birds and the Bees: Indirect Education | Conclusion
Epilogue: Regarding Racial/Erotic Politics Notes161 Bibliography195 Index211
153
ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s
For financial support I would like to thank the School of Humanities and Department of History at the University of California, Irvine. Additional support came from the James J. Harvey Memorial Dissertation Fellowship; Southern California Women for Understanding; The UnCommon Legacy Foundation; and Fellowships in the Humanities at both Stanford University and New York University. At the University of California, Irvine, a truly outstandingillsta√ located many rare and ephemeral primary source materials on sex education, while the administrator of the History Department, Carol Roberts, winked at my extensive and unauthorized use of the Xerox machine. The archive sta√ at Harvard University’s Countway Library of Medicine directed my attention to Robert Latou Dickinson’s scrapbooks, where I first made Norma and Normman’s acquaintance. Healthspace Cleveland has graciously granted permission to use their photographs of the statues. The intellectual, personal, and collegial debts I’ve incurred during the process of this research have been enormous. Since 1992, Cornelia Hughes Dayton has paid kind and meticulous attention to my professional develop-ment and to the placement of commas, while Alice Fahs has urged me to keep my arguments firmly rooted in my sources. Yong Chen and the under-graduates in our 1994 and 1995 Asian American history seminars shared the intensity and joy of their work in a way that challenged me to pursue my desire to write and teach about race. R. Colin Fisher and Peter Catapano provided close to a decade of shared food, drink, and friendship; it is impossi-
ble to specify the influence their conversation has had on my work and on my ethical and political development. Edward Goehring and Carol Queen provided balance when my approach to sexuality got too abstract. Cathy Opie taught me how to talk about images and bought me glasses so I could see them clearly. Much of this book reflects Susan Harris’s loving insistence that it is important to name things felt and intuited but not easily admitted into language. Two more recent friends and colleagues, Marcia Klotz and Leerom Medovoi, encouraged me to stop fetishizing my primary sources and to focus instead on interpreting them. Their argumentative skills and personal a√ection were especially important in helping me write the article that eventually became chapter 3. Gail Bederman o√ered sharp criticism tem-pered with immense enthusiasm for the ideas buried in several chaotic early drafts of chapter 1. She had faith in this project when no one else, including me, could imagine where it was going. Heather Lee Miller commented on multiple versions of several chapters and also guided me through the early stages of the publication process. Lisa Duggan summarized the core argu-ment of the dissertation in terms that forced me to confront the centrality of love to the meaning of modern whiteness. Her insight into the argument I had not at that time quite succeeded in making proved definitive for the direction this book eventually took. Richard White commented on chapter 1 and was instrumental in securing my academic employment at Stanford for a crucial postdoctoral year. An anonymous reader for Duke University Press prodded me to define my archive and to devote more room to discussing theory and methods. At an earlier stage, a reader for a di√erent press wanted to know why the manuscript wasn’t funnier, since so much of the material on which it rested was transparently absurd. Though I’ve pushed most of my jokes into the footnotes, I found this question immensely helpful in clarify-ing my own reactions to the primary sources. Robin Nagle, director of the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in the Humanities and Social Thought at New York University, deserves special mention for her ongoing e√orts to secure adequate pay and research funding, subsidized housing, o≈ce space, up-to-date computers, manageable teaching loads and departmental duties, and other essential supports for the postdoctoral teaching fellows she oversees. Without her commitment to the well-being of the temporary employees who so often fall by the academic wayside, this book would never have seen print.
viii
acknowledgments
The last few years of writing were sustained by Lisa Montanarelli and nico grey, queer scholars and creative writers whose shared commitment to strong prose has made this a much more focused book than it would other-wise have been. Their generosity is as outstanding as their literary skill. Lisa read the entire manuscript at least three times; nico edited out thousands of unnecessary words and spent hours talking with me about the political deployment and e√ects of normality. Each kept me company through more fits of overca√einated and loquacious authorial misery than I care to recall. Lynley Wheaton provided childcare and commented on the introduction. Finally, Allen Meyer picked up the slack when the process of rewriting kept me from carrying anything like my fair share of the labor of running our household. It is still more important that he counseled me to keep revising the manuscript long after I stopped imagining that this work could secure me a tenure-track academic job. My thanks are a small measure of my gratitude.
acknowledgments
ix
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