Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-5nwft Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-13T08:26:54.058Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Queer Legal History: A Field Grows Up and Comes Out

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Felicia Kornbluh
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay examines recent scholarship on the legal history of sexuality in the United States. It focuses on Margot Canaday's The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Modern America (2009) and Marc Stein's Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe (2010). It also reviews recent work on the history of marriage, including Sarah Barringer Gordon's The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (2010) and George Chauncey's Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate Over Gay Equality (2004), and the history of military law Defending America: Military Culture and the Cold‐War Court Martial (2005), by Elizabeth Lutes Hillman. The essay argues that this scholarship is significant because it offers a different view of sex and power than the one derived from the early writing of Michel Foucault. “Queer legal history” treats the liberalism of the 1960s‐1970s as sexually discriminatory as well as liberatory. It underlines the exclusions that were part of public policy under the federal G.I. Bill and the New Deal welfare state.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , Spring 2011 , pp. 537 - 559
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2011 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Abramovitz, Mimi. 1988. Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present. Boston: South End Press.Google Scholar
Basch, Norma. 1999. Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Baynton, Douglas. 2001. Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History. In The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Longmore, Paul K. and Umansky, Lauri, 33–57. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Berube, Allan. 1990. Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Blackstone, Sir William. 17651669. Commentaries on the Laws of England. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Brown, Wendy. 2005. The Impossibility of Women's Studies. In Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, 103–60. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Canaday, Margot. 2009. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth‐Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Chauncey, George Jr. 1990. Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War One Era. Journal of Social History 19:189–211.Google Scholar
Chauncey, George Jr. 1994. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Chauncey, George Jr. 2004. Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate over Gay Equality. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Cott, Nancy. 2000. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Davis, Madeline, and Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky. 1993. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Routledge Press.Google Scholar
D'Emilio, John. 1983. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Edwards, Laura. 1997. Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1965. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Tran. by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1978. History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley . New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1991. Governmentality. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin, and Miller, Peter, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Frank, Jerome. 1930. Law and the Modern Mind. New York: Brantano's.Google Scholar
Goldberg‐Hiller, Jonathan. 2002. The Limits to Union: Same‐Sex Marriage and the Politics of Civil Rights. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Goldberg‐Hiller, Jonathan. 2003. “Subjectivity Is a Citizen”: Representation, Recognition, and the Deconstruction of Civil Rights. Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 28:139–88.Google Scholar
Gordon, Linda. 1994. Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Sarah Barringer. 2002. The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Sarah Barringer. 2010. The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.Google Scholar
Grossberg, Michael. 1985. Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth‐Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Halley, Janet. 1999. Don't: A Reader's Guide to the Military's Anti‐Gay Policy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Halperin, David M. 1998. Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality. Representations 63:93–120.Google Scholar
Hartog, Hendrik. 1999. Man and Wife in America: A History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hartog, Hendrik. 2004. What Gay Marriage Teaches About the History of Marriage. History News Network, April 5. http://hnn.us/articles/4400.html (accessed August 28, 2010).Google Scholar
Hillman, Elizabeth Lutes. 2005. Defending America: Military Culture and the Cold‐War Court Martial. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Hulse, Carl. 2010. Senate Ends Military Ban on Gays Serving Openly. New York Times, December 19, 1.Google Scholar
Igra, Anna R. 2006. Wives Without Husbands: Marriage, Desertion, and Welfare in New York, 1900–1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Katznelson, Ira. 2005. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth‐Century America. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Kerber, Linda. 1998. “No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies”: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Kessler‐Harris. 2002. In Pursuit of Equity: Men, Women, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth‐Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kornbluh, Felicia. 1994. Welfare Mothers. Women's Review of Books 12 (2): 17–18.Google Scholar
Kornbluh, Felicia. 1996. The New Literature on Gender and the Welfare State: The U.S. Case. Feminist Studies 22 (1): 171–97.Google Scholar
Kornbluh, Felicia. 2006. Women's History with the Politics Left In: Feminist Studies of the U.S. Welfare State. In Exploring Women's Studies: Looking Forward, Looking Back: New Feminist Scholarship, ed. Berkin, Carol R., Pinch, Judith L., and Appel, Carole S., 236–55. New York: Pearson Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Kornbluh, Felicia. Disability, Anti‐Professionalism, and Civil Rights: The National Federation of the Blind and the “Right to Organize” in the 1950s. Journal of American History (forthcoming).Google Scholar
Koven, Seth. 1994. Remembering and Dismemberment: Crippled Children, Wounded Soldiers, and the Great War in Great Britain. American Historical Review 99:1167–1202.Google Scholar
Krainz, Thomas A. 2003. Transforming the Progressive Era Welfare State: Activists for the Blind and Blind Benefits. Journal of Policy History 15:223–64.Google Scholar
Kunzel, Regina. 2008. Criminal Intimacies: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lunbeck, Elizabeth. 1994. The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Marshall, Anna Maria, Barclay, Scott, and Bernstein, Mary, eds. 2009. Queer Mobilizations: LGBT Activists Confront the Law. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Meyer, Leisa. 1996. Creating G.I. Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women's Army Corps during World War Two. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Murphy, Kevin. 2008. Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Nelson, Barbara. 1990. The Origins of the Two‐Channel Welfare State: Workmen's Compensation and Mothers' Aid. In Women, The State, and Welfare, ed. Gordon, Linda, 123–51. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Ngai, Mae. 2004. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Pascoe, Peggy. 2009. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pedersen, Susan. 2004. Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Rich, Adrienne. 1993. Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Abelove, Henry, Barale, Michele Aina, and Halperin, David M., 227–54. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Rupp, Leila. 1989. “Imagine My Surprise”: Women's Relationships in Mid‐Twentieth Century America. In Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed Duberman, Martin, Vicinus, Martha, and Chauncey, George Jr., 395–410. New York: Penguin/Meridian.Google Scholar
Ryan, R. M. 1996. The Sex Right: A Legal History of the Marital Rape Exemption. Law & Social Inquiry 20:941–99.Google Scholar
Schwartz, John. 2010. The Federal Courts: Movement Is Seen on Gay Rights Issues. New York Times, September 22, 18.Google Scholar
Scott, James. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Self, Robert. 2008. Sex and the City: The Politics of Sexual Liberalism in Los Angeles, 1960–1984. Gender and History 20:288–311.Google Scholar
Servicemembers Legal Defense Fund. 2010. About “Don't Ask, Don't Tell.” http://www.sldn.org/pages/about‐dadt (accessed August 6, 2010).Google Scholar
Shilts, Randy. 1993. Conduct Unbecoming: Lesbians and Gays in the U.S. Military—Vietnam to the Persian Gulf. New York: St. Martin's Press.Google Scholar
Skocpol, Theda. (1992). Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Stanley, Amy Dru. 1998. From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Stein, Marc. 2004. Crossing the Border to Memory: In Search of Clive Michael Boutilier (1933–2003). Torquere 6:91–115.Google Scholar
Stein, Marc. 2005. Boutilier and the U.S. Supreme Court's Sexual Revolution. Law and History Review 23:491–536.Google Scholar
Stein, Marc. 2010. Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Sterett, Susan. 2003. Public Pensions: Gender and Civic Service in the States. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Vaid, Urvashi. 1995. Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. New York: Anchor Books.Google Scholar
Welke, Barbara. 2010. Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Willrich, Michael. 2000. Home Slackers: Men, the State, and Welfare in Modern America. Journal of American History 87 (2): 460–89.Google Scholar
Witt, John Fabian. 2004. The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar

Cases Cited

Baehr v. Lewin, 852 P.2d 44 (Haw. 1993).Google Scholar
Baehr v. Milke, 901 P. 2d 112 (Haw. 1996).Google Scholar
Baird v. Eisenstadt, 405 U.S. 438 (1972).Google Scholar
Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 387 U.S. 118 (1967).Google Scholar
Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986).Google Scholar
Bragdon v. Abbott, 524 U.S. 624 (1998).Google Scholar
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).Google Scholar
Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health, 798 N.E.2d 941 (Mass. 2003).Google Scholar
Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965).Google Scholar
Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003).Google Scholar
Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967).Google Scholar
Perry v. Schwarzenegger, D.C. No. 3:09‐cv‐02292‐VRW (August 4, 2010).Google Scholar
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).Google Scholar
Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996).Google Scholar

Statutes Cited

Public Law No. 103‐160. The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1994, 10 U.S.C. § 654 subtitle G, sec. 574.Google Scholar