- Intimate States: Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern US History ed. by Margot Canaday, Nancy F. Cott, and Robert O. Self
The adage "the personal is political" has been with us for a half century. But this rich anthology suggests that it has never been taken sufficiently seriously by historians, particularly historians of the state, who have often dismissed matters of sex, gender, and domesticity as sideshows to the more ostensibly weighty processes of state-building. Intimate States offers a powerful rejoinder to that oversight, making the case that "intimate governance" is not only central to state-building in the United States but also a fertile site of broader insights about the operations of the law. Consisting of fourteen chapters from scholars at a range of career stages, as well as a rich introduction by the editors and a thoughtful afterword by a final contributor, it traces the myriad ways the state has wound its way into intimate life, from family and employment law to criminal law and immigration restrictions to land-use ordinances to limits on reproductive autonomy. Taken as a whole, the contributions are excellent, and some are quite exceptional.
Although the editors wisely avoid trying to fit these many chapters into a single lesson about governance, they offer an overarching two-part thesis: first, that the state—broadly defined as an apparatus of public agents and private allies in all jurisdictions and at all levels of government—has profoundly structured those realms of desire, sexual practice, and domestic life sometimes imagined to stand outside state power; and second, that the work of American governance cannot be understood without accounting for the regulation of gender and sexuality, not as a corollary to but as a key engine of state-building since the Civil War. Which is to say, Intimate States places sex at the center of the expansion of government power in the United States as both a core target and a core driver of that trend.
These twin claims are amply borne out by the chapters, which consistently illuminate intimacy's role in fueling developments reaching well beyond intimate regulation. William J. Novak puts concerns about sex, and about women's sexuality in particular, at the center of the rise of American "social policing," as the fulcrum around which coalescing concerns about poverty, disease, morality, and cultural difference became targets of sustained regulation. Grace Peña Delgado takes the life of Lucille de Saint-André as a study of how the Mann Act and the Immigration Act of 1907, long credited with expanding federal power, harnessed women's citizenship rights and freedom of mobility to the regulation of intimate conduct. Tera Eva Agyepong explores the intersections of sex and race in Chicago's juvenile justice system in the early twentieth century, demonstrating how racist presumptions about Black girls' aggressive sexuality both entrenched deeply racialized [End Page 415] understandings of "delinquency" and ultimately undermined the law's rehabilitative ideal for all youth, white and Black. Regina Kunzel's account of so-called sexual psychopath laws at midcentury reveals how concerns about nonnormative sexuality drove an expanding edifice of surveillance, detention, and criminalization justified through the "humane" patina of medical treatment. And Anne Gray Fischer's excellent chapter identifies the policing of Black women's sexuality, a topic frequently sidelined in histories of law enforcement foregrounding Black men, as a central engine of both deepening racial divides in US law enforcement and the simmering tensions that drove the racial uprisings of the late 1960s.
Why this central role of sex? Although offering no single answer, Intimate States makes a powerful case that much is owed to the unique appeal of sex as a subject of both ideological moral judgment and pragmatic fiscal policy. Just as laws structuring marriage have long tracked concerns about privatizing dependency, Intimate States reveals how moral instincts about sex have alternately reinforced, disguised, rubbed against, and sometimes given way to...