Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920-1945 (review)

Pippa Holloway begins her book with a deceptively simple premise-that interrogating the ways in which Virginia legislators sought to regulate sexuality (including marriage, reproduction, sexual behavior, and sexual images) during the first half of the 20th century can tell us a great deal about the development of southern government during that same period. From this premise the author moves to a sweeping and detailed investigation of the meanings of state governance, its relation to conventional hierarchies of race, class, and gender, and the critical part played by sexual regulation in Virginia leaders' vision of a "modern" commonwealth. Holloway's book both adds to our understanding on the micro level of how states approached the vital early 20th century, and makes abundantly clear the critical place the history of sexuality occupies in the larger American historical narrative. As significantly, Holloway's work intervenes directly to revise the models of state action that have emerged from studies that have focused predominantly on the Northeastern and Midwestern United States and argues against those that have suggested that the southern governments were characterized by unabated hostility toward centralized state authority.¹ The most powerful aspect of this book is Holloway's scrutiny of the ways in which Virginia's white elites used their statutory authority and community influence to reproduce their specific culture by reinscribing and maintaining existing relations of race, class, and gender through sexual regulation. To do so Holloway builds on the work of cultural theorist Siobhan Somerville to interrogate the ways in which the policing of racial boundaries informed the construction of categories of sexual identity (and vice versa) and how in general sexual regulation operated as a means of protecting the preexisting boundaries of race and class.² As Holloway states in her introduction, the "distinction between sexually 'normal' and 'dangerous' followed and justified the distinction between 'citizen' and 'non-citizen' " and such distinctions more broadly configured and maintained the boundary demarking the "governing classes" from the "class that was governed." (p. 6)

Holloway's persuasively argued and well-researched study is situated at a moment when Virginians embraced some limited expansion of centralized state government power in the name of economic growth, and utilized sexual regulation as the means to promote such growth. Through movie censorship, anti-interracial marriage provisions, involuntary sterilization of "mental defectives," and statewide venereal disease control efforts, Virginia's General Assembly, its storied governor Harry Byrd, and a coalition of "business progressives" targeted sexuality as the main means of regulating and controlling those populations that they believed offered the greatest threat to a "modern" Virginia: lower class and poor whites and African Americans. In doing so, Virginia's governing classes "built a state that reflected their commitment to political dominance based on race and class." (p. 1). This massive undertaking was by no means monolithic or uncontested. One of the main strengths of Holloway's study is her detailed analysis of how the governing class resolved differences in its ranks through the enactment of public policy. In one example, the author details the debate between censorship board members over whether any representations of interracial marriage in films were acceptable to make visible the deep connections between Virginia's Racial Integrity Act, depictions of sexuality in film, and film censorship.(pp. 71-72)

Holloway also draws on the work of philosopher Michel Foucault to call attention to the ways in which social regulation as social control was not only prohibitive but also productive. Thus, a growing taxonomy of sexual deviance worked to shore up and more precisely define sexual normativity in ways that served the interests and supported the power base of Virginia's elites at the same time that it presented possibilities for intervention into this system by and for non-elites.³ (p. 5) Multiple actors participated in producing and maintaining this expanding classification system, including a growing professional class whose "expertise" was critical in the crafting and implementation of regulatory policies. Here...