The Straight Statesexuality And Citizenship In Twentiethcentury America Margot Canaday by Margot Canaday 9780691135984, 0691135983 instant download after payment.

The Straight State is the most expansive study of the federal
regulation of homosexuality yet written. Unearthing startling new
evidence from the National Archives, Margot Canaday shows how the state
systematically came to penalize homosexuality, giving rise to a regime
of second-class citizenship that sexual minorities still live under
today.
Canaday looks at three key arenas of government control — immigration,
the military, and welfare — and demonstrates how federal enforcement of
sexual norms emerged with the rise of the modern bureaucratic state. She
begins at the turn of the twentieth century when the state first
stumbled upon evidence of sex and gender nonconformity, revealing how
homosexuality was policed indirectly through the exclusion of sexually
“degenerate” immigrants and other regulatory measures aimed at combating
poverty, violence, and vice. Canaday argues that the state’s gradual
awareness of homosexuality intensified during the later New Deal and
through the postwar period as policies were enacted that explicitly used
homosexuality to define who could enter the country, serve in the
military, and collect state benefits. Midcentury repression was not a
sudden response to newly visible gay subcultures, Canaday demonstrates,
but the culmination of a much longer and slower process of
state-building during which the state came to know and to care about
homosexuality across many decades.
Social, political, and legal history at their most compelling, The Straight State
explores how regulation transformed the regulated: in drawing
boundaries around national citizenship, the state helped to define the
very meaning of homosexuality in America.