An edition of Queering the Color Line (2000)

Queering the Color Line

Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Series Q)

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February 3, 2023 | History
An edition of Queering the Color Line (2000)

Queering the Color Line

Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Series Q)

  • 22 Want to read
  • 1 Have read

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.

Publish Date
Language
English
Pages
259

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Previews available in: English

Edition Availability
Cover of: Queering the Color Line
Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture
2012, Duke University Press
in English
Cover of: Queering the Color Line
Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture
2000, Duke University Press
in English
Cover of: Queering the Color Line
Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Series Q)
December 2000, Duke University Press
Hardcover in English
Cover of: Queering the color line : race and the invention of homosexuality in American culture
Cover of: Queering the Color Line
Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Series Q)
December 2000, Duke University Press
Paperback in English

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Book Details


First Sentence

""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."

The Physical Object

Format
Hardcover
Number of pages
259
Dimensions
9.3 x 6.4 x 1 inches
Weight
1.3 pounds

Edition Identifiers

Open Library
OL9574559M
ISBN 10
0822324075
ISBN 13
9780822324072
LibraryThing
683959
Goodreads
2797519

Work Identifiers

Work ID
OL17371695W

Source records

amazon.com record

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History

Download catalog record: RDF / JSON / OPDS | Wikipedia citation
February 3, 2023 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
July 31, 2019 Edited by MARC Bot associate edition with work OL17371695W
August 12, 2010 Edited by IdentifierBot added LibraryThing ID
April 24, 2010 Edited by Open Library Bot Fixed duplicate goodreads IDs.
April 30, 2008 Created by an anonymous user Imported from amazon.com record