Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Series Q) | 
 enlarge | Author: Siobhan Somerville
Creators: Michèle Barale, Jonathan Goldberg
Publisher: Duke University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
Buy New: $20.00
You Save: $2.95 (13%)
New (16) Used (10) from $13.84
Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 662890
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9 x 5.8 x 0.7
ISBN: 0822324431
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.30973
EAN: 9780822324430
ASIN: 0822324431
Publication Date: 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
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.
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Toward a history of sexuality AND race August 22, 2006
This is a very inspiring book on historical relations between the formation of "homosexual/heterosexual" identities and the drawing of color line in American history, especially in the early Twentieth Century.
We know many books and articles on the invention of sexual identities and on the construction of racial distinctions. However, we hardly know about INTERACTIONS between these historical processes.
This book picks up pioneering sexologists, early cinemas, and African-American writers such as Pauline Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson, and Jean Toomer. It is not a comprehensive inquiry of race and sex in Twentieth-Century America, but makes great contributions to initiating studies on the interactive history of race and sexuality.
 Very disappointing June 1, 2002
The chosen gay jargon of the "closet" is so woefully inadequate to the historical condition of gays dealing with passing for straight. I hoped this book might have really seized on the similarities in the dilemma of passing as it affected Blacks and gay people, but unfortunately this isn't the case.The author seems to begin with those intentions, but after presenting some interesting thoughts she simply follows them up with a set of four jargon-laden book reports on works of fiction and that's that. What she has produced could be a text for yet another multicultural lit course, but it sadly misses as a discussion of the phenonmenon of gay passing. The survivors of the era in which gay passing was a norm for homosexuals are fewer and fewer. And the passive imagery of "the closet" remains in place, misleading and inappropriate as is to much of the gay past. It is a shame that there are not traditionally-oriented gay historians dealing with the actual dynamics of gay passing as it affected the lives of millions of men and women. This doesn't come close to being that book.
Queer theory gets a dose of history June 4, 2000
13 out of 14 found this review helpful
Queering the Color Line is a successful attempt to integrate (no pun intended) queer theory with a historically-based cultural studies methodology, which makes it all the more interesting. Somerville has done an admirable job taking popular texts and showing how they reflected contemporary medical and sexological discourses about race and homosexuality. I would have liked her to build more historical arguments--which is something I think the previous reviewer was hinting at--rather than doing these textured readings, but I think Somerville is pointing the way toward something very exciting. My one criticism is that she doesn't say anything about the amazing photograph on the book's cover! Who is it, where was it taken (it's from a Yale archive, but we don't know anything else about it!), and in what way(s) is Somerville using it! It's too good to not remark on.
New Queer Studies March 30, 2000
14 out of 16 found this review helpful
This book is a largely successful attempt to blend together two of the most interesting theoretical innovations--queer theory and critical race theory. When I first purchased this book, I was expecting to struggle with a difficult theorectical text but found the book as a whole to be accessable. The first three chapters in particularly offer careful nuanced readings of scientific, literary and movie texts. As the author states, however, her readings require that the reader accept different models of historical proof as a queer reading generally examines the spaces in between texts. While as a somewhat old fashioned historian, I would have liked to have seen better connections; i.e. a more precise cause and effect relationship between the texts she examines but in fairness it is not her intention to establish such relationships. I nonetheless found her analysis provacitive--I really mean this word and am not simply using it to dismiss the work as some academics do--and suitable for the classroom. My hope is that her work will provoke more study and that the relationship between queer theory and critical race theory will continue to produce books like this one.
|
|
|
