Regina Kunzel

Situating Sex: Prison Sexual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States

One of the most important insights in the history of sexuality has been that “sexual identity”—the notion that the direction of one’s sexual desire determines and reveals the truth of the self—is a relatively recent production. Most historians locate the formation of modern Euro-American sexual identities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Around this time, so the argument goes, sexual acts became newly constitutive of identity: what one did, and with whom, came to define who one was. In Michel Foucault’s famous words, “The nineteenthcentury homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, . . . with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. . . . The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”1 During the last fifteen years or so this insight has become a guiding truism, a mantra even, for historians of sexuality, inspiring work that highlights the alterity of sexual systems remarkably different from our own, as well as explorations of the emergence of this new “species” in the relatively recent past. But some sexual acts and actors confound this historical narrative. Practices associated with certain sex-segregated spatial settings—prisons and other carceral institutions, the armed services, boarding schools—and performed by those who understand themselves and are understood by others as “normal” or “heterosexual,” stand in an awkward relationship to sexual identity formation as outlined by historians. Apparently unmoored from identity and resistant to the taxonomic pressures of the twentieth century, these sexual acts and their practitioners can seem curiously outside time. The term that evolved by the mid–twentieth century to describe same-sex practices produced by circumstance, architecture, and environment, situational homosexuality, aimed to distinguish these practices from a “true” or authentic homosexuality, presumed to have a somatic or psychic origin.

The Flourishing of Transgender Studies

For the past decade or so, ‘‘emergent’’ has often appeared alongside ‘‘transgender studies’’ to describe a growing scholarly field. As of 2014, transgender studies can boast several conferences, a number of edited collections and thematic journal issues, courses in some college curricula, and—with this inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly—an academic journal with a premier university press. But while the scholarly trope of emergence conjures the cutting edge, it can also be an infantilizing temporality that communicates (and contributes to) perpetual marginalization. An emergent field is always on the verge of becoming, but it may never arrive. The recent publication of several new edited collections and special issues of journals dedicated to transgender studies makes manifest the arrival of a vibrant,

Queering Archives A Roundtable Discussion

© 2015 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc. “Queering Archives: A Roundtable Discussion” provides a reflection on histories of queer archives studies, while marking out some key directions for the fields future development. As a broad conversation about the career of the queer archival, as both intellectual project and political practice, this discussion focuses on developments and limits within North American queer studies of the archive, which emerges as a central object of analysis and is itself somewhat archived within the terms of the discussion. The roundtable discussion provides a sustained critical engagement with the profile of the queer archive as a site for radical struggles over historical knowledge, offering a renewed sense of the queer archive as a pertinent site for scholarship and politics across an array of orientations and tendencies.