Struggles for Citizenship: Gender, Sexuality, and the State (Then and Now)

Abstract

Struggles for Citizenship: Gender, Sexuality, and the State (Then and Now) Natasha Zaretsky (bio) Margot Canaday. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. xiv + 277 pp. ISBN 069-113598-3 (cl); 978-0-691-14993-6 (pb). Robert O. Self. All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s. New York: Hill and Wang, 2012. viii + 518 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-8090-9502-5 (cl). Leigh Ann Wheeler. How Sex Became a Civil Liberty. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xiv + 327 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-19-975423-6 (cl). Contemporary gender and sexual politics in the United States are riven by paradox. The Defense of Marriage Act and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” are dead, the fight for marriage equality has advanced more quickly than even the most optimistic forecasters could have predicted, and women continue to make inroads in virtually every arena of public and professional life. Yet queer people remain vulnerable to violence, women’s reproductive freedom is under attack, and the steady march of neo-liberal privatization hurts poor women and women-of-color the most. Even though our Twitter feeds and Facebook pages are filled with online petition drives on behalf of progressive causes, the mass movements of the 1960s feel remote and out of reach. That Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In—a how-to manual for women in the business world—could be hailed as a feminist manifesto highlights a troubling collusion between feminism and corporate capitalism, while also signaling just how straightjacketed our conceptions of emancipation have become. The three books under review shed new light on current issues by placing gender, sex, and sexuality at the center of the modern history of American citizenship. Robert Self asks how the symbol of the breadwinner—once at the heart of mid-century liberalism—became the property of political conservatism after 1968. Leigh Ann Wheeler looks at how and why sexual expression and sexual practices became recognized as fundamental civil rights. Margot Canaday, finally, seeks to understand the American state’s comparative weakness and its heterosexism vis-à-vis other Western [End Page 161] democracies in the early twentieth century. Taken together, all three books accomplish what histories of gender and sexuality do at their best: show how constitutive the ostensibly “private” worlds of sex, masculinity, femininity, queerness, straightness, and family life have been to the ostensibly “public” worlds of American citizenship, politics, and statehood. In All in the Family, Robert Self reveals the centrality of the gendered figure of the breadwinner—a male worker who could support his family—to the mid-century liberal project. The architects of the New Deal and the Great Society hoped to bring this ideal and the financial security that attended it within reach of more and more Americans. Yet by the early twenty-first century, the male breadwinner and the traditional family had become conservative emblems, as politicians on the right replaced an earlier New Deal promise to provide the family with economic security with a promise to protect it from moral threats. The consequence, Self suggests, was the wholesale realignment of American politics after 1968. How did this happen? Self offers a largely compelling answer. By the late 1960s, the liberal incarnation of the breadwinner was under political, economic, and cultural strain. The insurgencies of the era—feminism, gay liberation, and black freedom—demanded a more capacious conception of citizenship. “The breadwinner,” “the soldier,” “the heterosexual,” “the woman”: these were not fixed categories, but instead were open to contestation. As newly politicized constituencies remade the Democratic Party, the earlier liberal fight for economic security was decoupled from the figure of the male breadwinner in light of new demands for women’s equality in the labor market, for reproductive and sexual freedom, and for an end to heterosexism. One consequence was the erosion of a Democratic Party architecture that relied on appeals to the patriarchal male-headed family. According to Self, white men who had once dominated the liberal coalition were becoming its “weak underbelly” (303). By the early 1970s, this shift was compounded by the economic challenges of stagnation, unemployment, and deindustrialization...