The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America, and: The Un-Natural State: Arkansas and the Queer South, and: Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism (review)

This past November, Indiana University in Bloomington hosted a queer studies conference that drew together senior and junior scholars from London and across the United States and Canada to queer the countryside. There, it became clear to me that work in the field has coalesced over the past few decades to break out of city-based master narratives of queer life. ¹ Research into queer identity and subculture has conventionally clustered around the urban metropolises—namely, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—marginalizing the existence of small-town lesbian, gay, bi, and transgender peoples and creating what Robert McRuer (1997) has termed a "regional elision in queer theory" (69). Interdisciplinary readings and paradigms have turned to focus on representative contributions of rural and regional queer sexualities and genders, evidenced by Scott Herring's Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism and Brock Thompson's dissertation-turned-book The Un-Natural State: Arkansas and the Queer South. As access to equal rights in the United States increasingly becomes a matter of the state in which one resides, one is principally compelled to examine dynamic texts negotiating nonnormative sexualities in spatially specific surroundings as Margot Canaday does in her The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America—not within a scarcity-model, but as a promise for future action. While two of the books reviewed here especially address rural queer visibility and resistance, all three texts construct sexuality-based discourses through engagements with diverse perspectives, including cultural studies, American history, southern studies, English, and political science. Most importantly, each book contributes to an ongoing body of lesbian, gay, bi, and transgender theoretical, historical, and social research in fascinating new ways, revealing the extent to which normative critiques continue to inform queer theory and structure queer lives.

The regulation and policing of homosexuality in present-day America is directly related to the rise of the bureaucratic state, from its fledgling emergence at the turn of the century to the full-service, post-World War II era, argues Canaday in The Straight State. An assistant professor of history at Princeton University, she traces state-development growth and its interest in both identifying and regulating homosexuality across several venues, questioning why the United States is so sophisticated in its homophobic policies and dogmatic procedures. This book is organized around three powerhouses of American bureaucracy: Immigration, welfare, and the military, with chapters layered thematically. These institutions consistently maintained records on perversion at a time when the state was gathering forces to police homosexuality in explicit terms and laws—a period that rapidly drew to a close as the growth of American bureaucracy emerged into adulthood from adolescence, evidenced by the demarcation of boundaries that worked to exclude and surround modern national citizenship. Canaday's approach is genealogical, although less concerned with the state's definition and regulation of homosexuality at any historically specific moment and more focused on the process of how and what homosexuality became through state-building. As the state came into contact with nonnormative sexualities in each of these institutional venues, federal policies began to engage with sexual behaviors and identities by separating federal citizenship into hetero-homo binary categories, although the definitions, terms, encounters, and eventual regulations differed drastically and evolved into a greater degree of cohesiveness over time. In short, the state itself was constructed by sexuality, even as it sought to constitute citizenry through sexual regulation (4).

One of the earliest documents evidencing state interest in homosexuality can be found in the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization Service's records. At the turn of the...