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Sapphic Slashers - Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Paperback)
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Sapphic Slashers - Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Paperback)
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On a winter day in 1892, in the broad daylight of downtown Memphis,
Tennessee, a middle class woman named Alice Mitchell slashed the
throat of her lover, Freda Ward, killing her instantly. Local,
national, and international newspapers, medical and scientific
publications, and popular fiction writers all clamored to cover the
ensuing "girl lovers" murder trial. Lisa Duggan locates in this
sensationalized event the emergence of the lesbian in U.S. mass
culture and shows how newly "modern" notions of normality and
morality that arose from such cases still haunt and distort lesbian
and gay politics to the present day.
Situating this story alongside simultaneously circulating lynching
narratives (and its resistant versions, such as those of Memphis
antilynching activist Ida B. Wells) Duggan reveals how stories of
sex and violence were crucial to the development of American
modernity. While careful to point out the differences between the
public reigns of terror that led to many lynchings and the rarer
instances of the murder of one woman by another privately motivated
woman, Duggan asserts that dominant versions of both sets of
stories contributed to the marginalization of African Americans and
women while solidifying a distinctly white, male, heterosexual form
of American citizenship. Having explored the role of
turn-of-the-century print media--and in particular their tendency
toward sensationalism--Duggan moves next to a review of sexology
literature and to novels, most notably Radclyffe Hall's "The Well
of Loneliness." "Sapphic Slashers" concludes with two appendices,
one of which presents a detailed summary of Ward's murder, the
trial, and Mitchell's eventual institutionalization. The other
presents transcriptions of letters exchanged between the two women
prior to the crime.
Combining cultural history, feminist and queer theory, narrative
analysis, and compelling storytelling, "Sapphic Slashers" provides
the first history of the emergence of the lesbian in
twentieth-century mass culture.
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