Drafted early on in this process - return to tidy this up.
Themes: State formation, LGBTQ, bureaucracy
Geographical Scope: U.S.
Chronological Scope: Early-to-mid 20th century
Thesis Summary: Canaday argues that gay and gender nonconforming people were visible at least from the early 1900s, rendering null the popular notion that visibility after World War II triggered spontaneous government oppression. Her logic questions the possibility of such rapid mobilization. Instead, she argues that repression of gay and gender nonconforming people developed hand-in-hand with state formation. She describes a process by which the state becomes aware of behaviors, begins to surveil and police it, then develops policies to define and combat it. While she charts the state’s development of the identity of homosexuality from its roots in various classifications of deviance, her thesis becomes clear. While local policies governed behavior, federal policies targeted personhood. The areas of inquiry she approaches: immigration, the military, and welfare, are helpful tools for developing a multi-valent analysis. Finally, she succeeds in demonstrating how the state is central in the closeting of people by incentivizing (white) middle-class, heterosexual families.
Chapter Outlines:
Organized in an inverted fashion with two chapters per subject, one on nascent and next on specific forms of the development of "homosexual" as a category of person vs. action and how the state built those distinctions.
Part I - Nascent Policing
1. Immigration
It is clear from this chapter that the government was concerned about immigrant labor becoming a financial burden on the state, and the presumption was that a "degenerate" identity would prevent one from locating gainful employment. Describes a dichotomoy of perversion and dependency, not queer/straight. This was clearly a class-based isssue, as those who could afford it could often get out of suits; those who typically came before the court for so-called deviant behaviors were working-class and itinerant folk.
2. Military - Managing Sexual Stigma in the World War I-Era Military, 1917-1933
In order to maintain a certain image, the military blamed "perversion" on civilians. The military policed behavior, but it tended to focus only on sexual acts when they were violent.
3. Welfare
In this chapter, Canaday discusses an exploitative sexual economy within the hobo community. Camps designed for reform end up doing more to stigmatize this working-class subculture.
Part II - Explicit Regulation
4. Welfare
Social Security Act of 1933 offers aid to heteronormative families, but less and less to homeless people. Canaday finds there is a "mobility/settlement" versus an explicitly stated "queer/straight" binary.
5. Military
Discusses women's integration into the military and "female homosexuality" as the Cold War opened. Early on, the military was a viable alternative to marriage, offering independence. Yet, ambitious career women were policed and threatened. Similar to men in the previous chapter, the most obvious cases of "homosexuality" were set upon. In this chapter, the pattern Canaday has been describing of discovery, policing, and policy making seem to come to fruition.
6. Immigration
Discusses the power of naming. Sexuality considered resulting from early trauma and for at least three years it was in the DSM.
Sources/Methodology: Canaday examines the bureaucracy of the state, which allows for a multi-level analysis that does not focus solely on laws or the most powerful leaders. Congressional texts, medical texts, INS records, court records, newspapers form the bulk of sources.
Historiography: This would connect to Julio Capó Jr.'s work, which brought the development of Florida's gay community, and specifically its immigrant gay population back to the late 19th century.
Keywords: bureacratization of homosexuality
The state - Defined by its practices
Citizenship - A legal distinction, but also informed by process and performance
Homosexuality - defined by overlapping and increasing discourses over time
Degeneracy - early cited forms of homosexual behavior dealt with on a local basis.