The Gender of Racial Politics and Violence in America: Lynching, Prison Rape, and the Crisis of Masculinity / Edition 1

by William F. Pinar

Overview

Perhaps not since Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 classic An American Dilemma has a book appeared as synoptic and unsettling as The Gender of Racial Politics and Violence in America. Here William F. Pinar elucidates the great «American dilemma», that «peculiar» institution of racial subjugation, especially its gendered – and specifically «queer» – psychosexual dynamics. Explicating in detail two imprinting episodes in American racial history – lynching and prison rape – Pinar argues that the gender of racial politics and violence in America is in some fundamental sense «queer». This book will be of interest to students in education, cultural studies, African American studies, women’s and gender studies, and history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820451329
Publisher:	Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
Publication date:	04/26/2001
Series:	Counterpoints: Studies in Criticality , #163
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	1272
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.06(h) x (d)

About the Author

The Author: William F. Pinar received his Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 1972. He teaches curriculum theory at Louisiana State University, where he serves as the St. Bernard Parish Alumni Endowed Professor, appointed to the faculties of education and of women and gender studies. Dr. Pinar has also served as the A. Lindsay O’Connor Professor of American Institutions at Colgate University and the Frank Talbott Professor at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Autobiography, Politics, and Sexuality (Peter Lang, 1994), Understanding Curriculum (Peter Lang, 1995), and the editor of Contemporary Curriculum Discourses: Twenty Years of ‘JCT’ (Peter Lang, 1999).

Table of Contents

	Introduction	1
I.	The Queer Character of Racial Politics and Violence	1
II.	A Queer Progressive Dream	19
III.	The Queer Politics of Empathy	34
IV.	Acknowledgements	43
1.	Lynching
1.	Strange Fruit	47
I.	The Lynching of Claude Neal	47
II.	The Rape of the Black Man	50
III.	The Rape Myth	62
IV.	Christianity and Lynching	85
V.	The Lynching of Zachariah Walker	95
2.	To Live or Die in Dixie	117
I.	A Southern Obsession	117
II.	The Yellow Rose of Texas	123
III.	Maryland, Missouri, Alabama	126
IV.	Georgia on My Mind	129
V.	My Old Kentucky Home	133
VI.	The Sunshine State	151
3.	"America's National Crime"	157
I.	Origins	157
II.	The South	167
III.	The Theater of Lynching	173
IV.	A Social Science of Lynching?	183
V.	"Empirical" Studies of Lynching	201
VI.	Literary Research	215
2.	The Destabilization of Gender and the "Crisis" of White Masculinity
4.	The Gendered Civil War in the South	237
I.	A "Stampede from the Patriarchal Relation"	237
II.	White Women, Black Men	242
III.	A Subversion of Gender through Curricular Innovation: Confederate Women's Education	247
IV.	What's a Lady to Do? Desire and Defiance among Southern White Women at War	252
V.	Losing the War, Winning the Peace	261
5.	Christian Feminism and the Destabilization of Gender in the Late Nineteenth Century	271
I.	Masculine Fantasies of Anglo-Saxon Superiority: Protestantism, Manifest Destiny, and the Cult of Domesticity	271
II.	The Advice Book	275
III.	Christian vs. Secular Feminism	282
IV.	Miming: Domestic Slaves, Secret Rebels	285
V.	Feminist Hermeneutics	292
VI.	The Racial Politics of Christian Feminism	296
VII.	Seduction Not Resistance: The Reproduction of Fundamentalism in The Woman's Bible	302
VIII.	A Reactionary Reaffirmation of Masculinity	312
6.	The "Crisis" of White Masculinity	321
I.	The Complexity of "Crisis"	321
II.	The End of "Romantic" Friendship	332
III.	The Homoerotic Politics and Pedagogy of the Settlement House Movement	348
IV.	Divorce and Domestication	361
V.	The Campaign for Women's Suffrage	371
VI.	Boy Culture During the Lynching Era	384
VII.	Golden Age of Fraternity	390
VIII.	Minds, Muscles, and Masturbation	397
3.	Women and Racial Politics
7.	Black Protest and the Emergence of Ida B. Wells	419
I.	The Roar of Silence	419
II.	Black Defiance: Brooks County, Georgia, 1894, and the Darien Insurrection	425
III.	Class Solidarity and Alienation	430
IV.	The Micropolitics of Everyday Life	434
V.	The Southern White Reaction: Radical Racism, Southern Conservatism and Progressivism, and the Beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement	438
VI.	The Emergence of Ida B. Wells	461
VII.	Southern Horrors	470
8.	White Women and the Campaign against Lynching: Frances Willard, Jane Addams, Jesse Daniel Ames	487
I.	Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition: Civilization/Race/Manhood on Display	487
II.	Ida B. Wells's Crusade for Justice	495
III.	The Antilynching Campaign in Britain	500
IV.	Frances Willard and the W.C.T.U.	516
V.	The Addams-Wells Exchange	532
VI.	Jessie Daniel Ames and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching	542
9.	White Women in the Ku Klux Klan	555
I.	Mad Men: The (First) Ku Klux Klan	555
II.	Ordinary People: White Women of the (Second) Ku Klux Klan	563
III.	Gender and Sexuality in the Ku Klux Klan	568
IV.	Simmons, Tyler, Clarke, and Evans: Internal Tensions and the Birth of the W.K.K.K.	573
V.	The Miming of Men's Words	581
VI.	A Womanless Family: Manliness and Womanhood in the K.K.K.	586
VII.	The Indiana Klan	599
VIII.	The Complexities of Motive: Women's Participation in Racial Politics	603
4.	Men and Racial Politics
10.	The N.A.A.C.P. and the Struggle for Antilynching Legislation, 1897-1917	623
I.	Du Bois, Washington, and the Niagara Movement	623
II.	The Committee on the Negro	627
III.	"[E]qual justice ... man as man."	634
IV.	Oppositions	639
V.	John R. Shillady	646
VI.	The Great War	652
VII.	Commission on Interracial Cooperation (C.I.C.)	657
VIII.	James Weldon Johnson	664
IX.	The War Ends ... Another Begins	672
11.	The N.A.A.C.P. and the Struggle for Antilynching Federal Legislation, 1917-1950	683
I.	The Gender of the Law	683
II.	"[A] Very Important Prerogative Reserved for the States?"	689
III.	The Dyer Bill	698
IV.	The Southern Response	705
V.	Antilynching in the 1920s and 1930s	713
VI.	World War II	739
12.	The Communist Party/N.A.A.C.P. Rivalry in the Trials of the Scottsboro Nine	753
I.	The "Nigger Rape Case"	753
II.	"[T]he Communists have the N.A.A.C.P. people licked."	763
III.	"[T]he old way of the rope was better than the new way of the law."	769
IV.	"My God, Doctor, is this whole thing a horrible mistake[?]"	776
V.	"I'd rather die than spend another day in jail for something I didn't do."	788
VI.	"Providing only 50 per cent protection for the 'flower of southern womanhood'."	795
VII.	"[I]s interracial rape ... a national obsession"?	804
5.	The Culture and Racial Politics of Masculinity
13.	The Gender of Violence	815
I.	Straight to Hell	815
II.	Straight Men Rape Women	834
III.	Straight Men Rape Men	841
IV.	Homophobia	847
14.	Black Men: You Don't Even Know Who I Am	855
I.	A "Crisis" of Black Masculinity?	855
II.	Precolonial West African Manhood	861
III.	In the Old Northwest	870
IV.	Black Masculinity Today	876
V.	The Matrifocality Thesis	889
VI.	Compulsive Masculinity	910
VII.	Black Male Feminism	923
VIII.	Black, Male, and Gay	928
15.	White Men: I Don't Even Know Who I Am	939
I.	Strangers to Ourselves?	939
II.	The Sex/Gender System	946
III.	"The Drag Ball Production of Realness"	949
IV.	The Objectification of the Male Body and the Desubjectification of the Male Self	957
V.	The "Money Shot"	963
VI.	"Hey Girl!"	973
16.	It's a Man's World	981
I.	Technologies of Penal Power	981
II.	The Racial Politics of Criminalization in the Nineteenth Century: "New Slaves" and the Convict-Lease System	990
III.	The Racial Politics of Criminalization in the Twentieth Century: The War on Drugs	1003
IV.	The Racial Politics of Sex in Prison	1012
V.	Gee, So Many Queers in Here	1017
VI.	Underground Language: The Gendered Reality of Prisons	1020
17.	Claude Neal's Revenge	1031
I.	How Does It Feel, White Boy?	1031
II.	Boys Just Want to Have Fun	1034
III.	Prisoners of Desire	1041
IV.	Who Will Watch the Guards?	1060
V.	"The White Man Must Pay"	1068
6.	The Gender of Racial Politics and Violence in America
18.	"Into Each Other's Arms"	1075
I.	Neither Gods nor Demons	1075
II.	To the Back of the Cave	1084
III.	Parenthesis: Adrift in Manhattan	1097
IV.	Elopement and Healing? Dream On, White Boy	1101
V.	This Side of Copulation	1107
19.	"I Am a Man": The Queer Character of Racial Politics and Violence in America	1113
I.	Self-Division and the Multiplication of Others	1113
II.	Beasts, Bestiality, and the Historical Imagination	1129
III.	Men in "Crisis" (Again? Still?)	1139
IV.	Homosexual Panic, Latent Energy, and "[t]he Political Unconscious of White Masculinity"	1152
Appendix	"[T]he Great Long National Shame": Selected Incidents of Racial Violence in the United States	1165
	References	1179
	Index	1235

Editorial Reviews

Explicating in detail two imprinting episodes in American racial history (lynching and prison rape), Pinar (women and gender studies, Louisiana State U.) argues that the gender of racial politics and violence in America is in some fundamental sense "queer." He elucidates that great American dilemma, the institution of racial subjugation, especially its gendered and specifically "queer" psychosexual dynamics. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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