Dangerous Embodiments: Segregating Sexual Perversion as Contagion in US Penal Institutions

This article examines the history of the segregation of gender nonconforming homosexual or sexually perverted prisoners in US men's jails and prisons in the early and mid-twentieth century. Examining the practice's discursive and material infrastructure through a crip trans analytic, the article argues prison administrators in the early and mid-twentieth century constructed sexually perverted bodies as sick, contaminating, and contagious, and, in doing so, produced sexual perversion as disability. This framing of sexual perversion as disability helped substantiate their claims that sexually perverted prisoners were dangerous and threatening to both more normal prisoners and to penal institutions' security.