Queering the Color Line transforms previous understandings of how homosexuality was \u201cinvented\u201d as a category of identity in the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing a range of sources, including sexology texts, early cinema, and African American literature, Siobhan B. Somerville argues that the emerging understanding of homosexuality depended on the context of the black\/white \u201ccolor line,\u201d the dominant system of racial distinction during this period. This book thus critiques and revises tendencies to treat race and sexuality as unrelated categories of analysis, showing instead that race has historically been central to the cultural production of homosexuality. At about the same time that the 1896 Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson decision hardened the racialized boundary between black and white, prominent trials were drawing the public\u2019s attention to emerging categories of sexual identity. Somerville argues that these concurrent developments were not merely parallel but in fact inextricably interrelated and that the discourses of racial and sexual \u201cdeviance\u201d were used to reinforce each other\u2019s terms. She provides original readings of such texts as Havelock Ellis\u2019s late nineteenth-century work on \u201csexual inversion,\u201d the 1914 film A Florida Enchantment, the novels of Pauline E. Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson\u2019s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, and Jean Toomer\u2019s fiction and autobiographical writings, including Cane. Through her analyses of these texts and her archival research, Somerville contributes to the growing body of scholarship that focuses on discovering the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality. Queering the Color Line will have broad appeal across disciplines including African American studies, gay and lesbian studies, literary criticism, cultural studies, cinema studies, and gender studies.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Queering the Color Line transforms previous understandings of how homosexuality was \u201cinvented\u201d as a category of identity in the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing a range of sources, including sexology texts, early cinema, and African American literature, Siobhan B. Somerville argues that the emerging understanding of homosexuality depended on the context…<\/p>","protected":false},"featured_media":5469,"template":"","meta":[],"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[48,47],"product_tag":[],"class_list":["post-5468","product","type-product","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","product_cat-akademik-yayinlar","product_cat-kitaplar","first","outofstock","shipping-taxable","purchasable","product-type-simple"],"yoast_head":"\n