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Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American
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Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture Paperback - 2000

by Siobhan B. Somerville


From the publisher

Queering the Color Line transforms previous understandings of how homosexuality was "invented" as a category of identity in the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing a range of sources, including sexology texts, early cinema, and African American literature, Siobhan B. Somerville argues that the emerging understanding of homosexuality depended on the context of the black/white "color line," the dominant system of racial distinction during this period. This book thus critiques and revises tendencies to treat race and sexuality as unrelated categories of analysis, showing instead that race has historically been central to the cultural production of homosexuality.
At about the same time that the 1896 Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson decision hardened the racialized boundary between black and white, prominent trials were drawing the public's attention to emerging categories of sexual identity. Somerville argues that these concurrent developments were not merely parallel but in fact inextricably interrelated and that the discourses of racial and sexual "deviance" were used to reinforce each other's terms. She provides original readings of such texts as Havelock Ellis's late nineteenth-century work on "sexual inversion," the 1914 film A Florida Enchantment, the novels of Pauline E. Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, and Jean Toomer's fiction and autobiographical writings, including Cane. Through her analyses of these texts and her archival research, Somerville contributes to the growing body of scholarship that focuses on discovering the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality.
Queering the Color Line will have broad appeal across disciplines including African American studies, gay and lesbian studies, literary criticism, cultural studies, cinema studies, and gender studies.

First line

"I regard sex as the central problem of life," wrote Havelock Ellis in the general preface to the first volume of Studies in the Psychology of Sex, one of the most important texts of the late-nineteenth-century medical and scientific discourse on homosexuality in the United States and Europe.

From the rear cover

""Queering the Color Line "is a groundbreaking study that sets a new agenda for critical investigations of the intersecting histories of race and sexuality in the United States. Siobhan Somerville provides a model of interdisciplinary, politically engaged scholarship that is certain to become required reading in queer studies, race theory, and U.S. history as well as American literature."--Lisa Duggan, New York University

Details

  • Title Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture
  • Author Siobhan B. Somerville
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition 1st
  • Pages 272
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, NC
  • Date 2000-01-13
  • Illustrated Yes
  • Features Bibliography, Illustrated, Index, Table of Contents
  • ISBN 9780822324430 / 0822324431
  • Weight 1.01 lbs (0.46 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.99 x 6.16 x 0.81 in (22.83 x 15.65 x 2.06 cm)
  • Reading level 1660
  • Themes
    • Ethnic Orientation: African American
    • Sex & Gender: Gay
    • Sex & Gender: Lesbian
    • Sex & Gender: Masculine
  • Library of Congress subjects Homosexuality in literature, Homosexuality in motion pictures
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 99033947
  • Dewey Decimal Code 305.309

Media reviews

Citations

  • Choice, 09/01/2000, Page 174
  • Library Journal, 10/15/1999, Page 91

About the author

Siobhan B. Somerville is Assistant Professor of English and Women's Studies at Purdue University.

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