, by Steven Epstein. Excerpts follow:
For some time now, scholars of sexuality (following in the footsteps of those who have studied and challenged the race and gender hierarchies embedded in state policies and actions) have professed the analytical goal of what historian Lisa Duggan, writing in 1994, called "queering the state." These scholars have argued that the supposed naturalness of the heterosexual couple, and the unnaturalness of alternatives, is presumed and reinforced in the ordinary workings of government. Canaday's substantial contribution is to trace, in gripping and at times horrifying detail, exactly how the United States came to operate in this fashion over the course of much of the twentieth century. The Straight State provides a compelling history of the designation of "the homosexual as the anticitizen."
...For Canaday, "the state" is no abstraction. Taking a fine-grained approach, she insists that the state is "what officials do," whether it's worrying about what transient men get up to when the lights go out or deciding which men and women who served in World War II should be issued the "blue discharges" that made them ineligible for benefits. (There were about 9,000 cases of the latter.) In particular, it seems, what officials did was develop elaborate screening mechanisms to police the boundaries of belonging. Early twentieth-century immigration inspectors were warned to watch for what were described as "striking particularities in dress, talkativeness, witticism, facetiousness...flightiness...unnatural actions, mannerisms, and other eccentricities" that might serve as the telltale signs of sexual perversion to be excluded at the port of entry. (The all-too-common "hidden sexual complexes among Hebrews" merited special vigilance, according to the Marine Hospital Service doctors who lent their expert gaze to the task; they also pointed to the "beardless face [and] the high pitched feminine voice" that were so often found among Italian men.) Around the same time, examiners of military recruits were instructed to screen out those males who "present the general body conformation of the opposite sex, with sloping narrow shoulders, broad hips, excessive pectoral and pubic adipose deposits, with lack of masculine [hair] and muscular markings." Especially in these early years of state attention, the array of suspect perversions was diverse and diffuse, but the markers of excludability were written on the skin for the trained observer to detect at a glance. As the bureaucracy grew and officials adopted more varied and sophisticated tools for what anthropologist James Scott has called "seeing like a state," officials strove to recognize forms of abnormality unbecoming to citizens that only gradually came into focus as what are now taken to be gay and lesbian practices and identities.
Canaday's argument is that in the United States, the processes of state-building, the exclusion of sexual minorities from the ranks of citizenship and the definition of a modern concept of homosexuality were mutually reinforcing...
Modern notions of homosexuality and the modern US bureaucratic state grew up together, Canaday argues. And this coincidence of timing, she suggests intriguingly, may even help explain why the state became, and remains, more officially homophobic than many of its counterparts in Europe, where the bureaucracy was already consolidated before homosexuality emerged as a concern to be reckoned with....
The larger argument, however, is that a history of the modern American state is simultaneously a genealogy of what we now take to be homosexuality. In the early period covered by the book, immigration and military personnel spoke not about homosexuals but about perverts, mannish women, men who displayed (in a curious turn of phrase) "feminism," "wolves" who preyed on younger men and the "lambs" who were their prey. This mix of bureaucratic, medical and colloquial lingo described a hodgepodge of varieties of gender inversion and nonnormative sexual practices. Over time, though, homosexuality took shape in its modern guise, defined less exclusively by gender roles and more by what psychoanalysts called "sexual-object choice": the sex of the desired partner. At the same time, "the homosexual" stabilized as a type of person defined by a knowable preference or orientation that was manifested in its "tendencies" even when behavior was absent. The story of this shift has been told before, but Canaday's innovation is to emphasize the role of the state, and not just medical and psychiatric experts, in these redefinitions...
Importantly, though, Canaday does not imagine that the state was in a position simply to etch its categories and meanings onto individuals, as if the latter were blank slates. Instead, she describes a complex process of mutual reinforcement and resistance, similar to what the philosopher of science Ian Hacking calls "looping effects," whereby powerful institutions categorize what they see people doing and present those understandings to the categorized, who may then internalize them, change them or reject them in ways that influence categorization down the line. Canaday describes how many of those caught in the spotlight of state scrutiny ended up reconceiving who they considered themselves to be...
It's worth underscoring the novelty of Canaday's approach. Much recent LGBT history, following in the footsteps of historian George Chauncey's pioneering book Gay New York, has been resolutely local...a focus on the state also allows Canaday to go further in linking the politics of sexuality to those of gender and race. On the one hand, she suggests how state administration of sexuality both resembled and differed from its management of gender and racial categories. On the other hand, she is attentive to the intersections, analyzing, for example, how the treatment of queer immigrants by federal authorities varied according to the immigrants' race or national origin, and considering how the attempts to drum lesbians out of the military accelerated precisely as women began making stronger claims for inclusion in the institution...
A crucial question to ask, however, is, What impact did all of this policing have on those who were not caught directly in its web? After all, most gay people (or people who engaged in homosexual behaviors) never brushed against it, and many of those who could have been trapped were never even spotted by military, immigration or welfare authorities...
What were the ripple effects of state action? Canaday argues, plausibly enough, that what is "individually devastating" can also be "broadly powerful"--that policies about immigration, military service and welfare eligibility sent clear messages that permeated the whole society. Yet she misses opportunities to prove the point or analyze this saturation in any detail...
