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  • Reproducing Sexuality in the Postwar United States
  • Jennifer Brier (bio)
Heather Murray. Not in this Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. vii + 289 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8122-4268-3 (cl).
Carolyn Herbst Lewis. Prescription for Heterosexuality: Sexual Citizenship in the Cold War Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. ix + 228 pp.; ISBN 0-8078-3425-1 (cl).
Marc Stein. Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. vii + 364 pp.; ISBN 0-8708-3412-2 (cl).

Heather Murray’s Not in this Family, Carolyn Herbst Lewis’s Prescription for Heterosexuality, and Marc Stein’s Sexual Injustice provide us with new evidence to understand how three institutions—the family, the medical profession, and the Supreme Court—shape and define both LGBT and straight people through the production and maintenance of normative notions of sexuality and reproduction. Murray studies the intricacies of how lesbian and gay people develop in heterosexual families from the 1940s to the 1990s. She asks how growing up in a heterosexual space informed postwar lesbian and gay political activism and efforts for social change. Lewis also focuses on family dynamics by exploring, in wonderfully graphic detail, the relationship between heterosexual men and women in the immediate postwar era. The homosexual haunted Lewis’s historical subjects, serving as the perfect foil to the heterosexual dyad being produced and propped up by the medical profession in the 1950s and 1960s. Stein shifts our attention to the state, recalibrating how we think about the Supreme Court’s decisions on sexual and reproductive freedom during the 1960s and 1970s. Instead of seeing this as a period when liberalism took hold, shifting fundamentally the relationship between sexual and reproductive citizens and the state, Stein points to the limits of this moment in legal history. Examining how heteronormative supremacy emerged during this period, Stein describes the process through which a system of exclusion developed under the veneer of liberation.

Given their breadth and depth, these texts intersect well with recent work in queer history that has considered how the production of the deviant [End Page 207] and the homosexual has been grounded historically in actual individual bodies as well as state practices.1 Considering these works in conversation with one another, we begin to see the historical relationship between the evolution of the “normal” and the “deviant” through the lens of institutional history. As Regina Kunzel so aptly puts it in her history of same-sex sex in prison, we need “to illuminate questions about the cultural and ideological making of the normal.”2 While Kunzel does this by looking to society’s so-called marginal spaces, the books reviewed here look at its alleged centers to explicate how sexuality is reproduced in postwar America.

Considering these texts alongside the emergent state-based history of same-sex desire and gender non-conformity also provides new evidence for assessing the evolution of a gay liberal project over the last several decades. Much recent gay and lesbian political rhetoric and activism focuses on procuring rights for same-sex couples such as the right to marry, leaning toward what historian Lisa Duggan has called “homonormativity,” rather than radical transformation of the dominant system of inequality.3 The scholarship discussed here lends archival and historical perspective to how the emergence of this individual rights-based activism, including its reliance on “traditional” definitions of marriage, came to be. Most interestingly, the work does this by showing how particular facets of modern heterosexuality became tradition and in the process came to undergird modern politics. Readers of these titles will have the opportunity to learn more about and interrogate the relationship between postwar liberalism and conservatism through the lens of sexuality and reproduction.

Each author recasts LGBT history’s relationship to political history by moving beyond narratives of social movements to consider how memory matters to a queer historical analysis of both same- and opposite-sex desire. Building upon the evidence provided by numerous individual stories and recollections, these studies all express concern for how heterosexuality is remembered and reified through the complex processes of memory and...

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