Connexions

"In this innovative, interdisciplinary collection of essays, Downs, Morgan, and Brier update the insights and methods of intersectionality for a new generation of scholars whose questions interrogate the heteronormative and racial practices that have marginalized black female and queer historical subjects."--Kathleen Brown, author of Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America "This is a timely and important volume that encourages temporal conversations about the intersection of race and sexuality. The essays are bold and thought provoking and consider underexplored areas of historical inquiry. The editors and contributors should be commended for doing a superb job of drawing connections over three centuries, thereby inviting readers to critically interrogate this contested history. The multi-disciplinary scope of this anthology will generate a body of new scholarship in the field of race, gender, and sexuality studies."--Daina Ramey Berry, author of Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia This volume takes its readers on a sweeping journey from American plantations to the U.S. Supreme Court, from southern households to brothels in Barbados, from the Bible to the Silver Screen, from college campuses in the 1950s to mass marches in the 1990s, and from journal entries to African American popular print magazines to propose new methodologies to more deeply understand the vexed relationships between race, gender, class, and sexuality. At each turn, the authors urge readers to reconsider the roles of fantasy and history in the construction of beauty, same-sex desire and relationships, kinship, and property. This collection's greatest achievement is to broaden readers' approaches to intersectional identities and to enable readers to re-imagine the humanity of the actors in this volume.--Allyson Hobbs, author of A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life "The contributions are first rate. Connexions would be an important book to assign in graduate seminars on race or sexuality in several disciplines. For undergraduates, a lighter sampling of the essays might be appropriate. However Connexions is used, readers will agree that the project of seeing 'race and sexuality as driving forces of historical research' is necessary."--Journal of American History "A superb collection of essays [that] models an intelligent and effective approach to teaching historically about sensitive topics, like race and sex, through its meticulous attention to language and its commitment to close reading."--Journal of American Studies "This volume takes its readers on a sweeping journey from American plantations to the U.S. Supreme Court, from southern households to brothels in Barbados, from the Bible to the Silver Screen, from college campuses in the 1950s to mass marches in the 1990s, and from journal entries to African American popular print magazines to propose new methodologies to more deeply understand the vexed relationships between race, gender, class, and sexuality. At each turn, the authors urge readers to reconsider the roles of fantasy and history in the construction of beauty, same-sex desire and relationships, kinship, and property. This collection's greatest achievement is to broaden readers' approaches to intersectional identities and to enable readers to re-imagine the humanity of the actors in this volume."--Allyson Hobbs, author of A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life

Jennifer Brier is an associate professor of history and of gender and women's studies, and director of the Program in Gender and Women's Studies, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis . Jim Downs is an associate professor of history at Connecticut College and the author of Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction . Jennifer L. Morgan is a professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Department of History at New York University and the author of Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery .

CoverTitleCopyrightContentsIntroduction Jennifer Brier, Jim Downs, and Jennifer L. MorganPart 1. Deep Connections1. With Only a Trace: Same-Sex Sexual Desire and Violence on Slave Plantations, 1607-1865 / Jim Downs2. Historical Methods and Racial Identification in U.S. Lesbian and Gay History / Julian B. Carter3. Race, Class, and the U.S. Supreme Court's Doctrine of Heteronormative Supremacy / Marc SteinPart 2. Beauty and Desire4. Early American Bodies: Creating Race, Sex, and Beauty / Sharon Block5. Making Racial Beauty in the United States: Toward a History of Black Beauty / Stephanie M. H. Camp6. The Soul of the Boy Was . . . Aztec: Race and Sexuality in Ramon Novarro's Self-Narrative / Ernesto ChavezPart 3. Subjectivities7. Power and Historical Figuring: Rachael Pringle Polgreen's Troubled Archive / Marisa J. Fuentes8. The Curse of Canaan; or, A Fantasy of Origins in Nineteenth-Century America / Brian Connolly9. Mapping Sex, Race, and Gender in the Corps of Discovery Expedition / Wanda S. Pillow10. If We Got That Freedom: "Integration" and the Sexual Politics of Southern College Women, 1940-1960 / Susan K. Cahn11. Strange Love: Searching for Sexual Subjectivities in 1950s Black Print Popular Culture / Leisa D. Meyer12. Out and on the Outs: The 1990s Mass Marches and the Black and LGBT Communities / Deborah Gray WhiteAbout the ContributorsAcknowledgmentsIndex