Margot Canaday’s The Straight State offers a history of the institutionalization of heterosexuality within the United States as witnessed primarily through policies of welfare, immigration, and the military during the twentieth century. Homosexuality and nonconforming bodies were increasingly policed during this time, especially after the Second World War, as homosexual acts gave way to homosexual status in marking the sexual deviant. Sexual identities, especially when conceived of as part of a rigid homo-hetero binary, were not named and recognized as existing a priori but were co-constitutive and came into being during the bureaucratization of the state. In fact, the constituting of an “abject” to delineate exclusions in the construction of the ideal citizen involved weaponizing state mechanisms such as surveillance and distribution of welfare benefits in order to define and control sexual minorities that were ultimately unified as “homosexual” regardless of gender or sexual diversity. In order to construct and maintain an institutionalized heterosexuality, rituals of state-sponsored humiliation needed to be enacted, which both abjected the sexually deviant “other” and upheld the familial, productive man as the ideal citizen-soldier.
The notion of abjection is very compelling and relevant to Canaday’s research into the exclusion of sexual minorities within the United States. Abjection was first articulated by Julia Kristeva as the loathing, revulsion, and rejection of that which is intolerably impure and improper, such as excrement expelled from the body and rendered alien to the body from which it has just emerged. The abject is therefore “radically excluded” in attempts to preserve precious boundaries between inner and outer, and yet it threatens those very boundaries (and thereby the subject, too) by revealing their contrived and unstable nature.[1] Thus, the abject becomes the object of painstaking repression. It is Iris Marion Young who then proposes that abjection can be applied to the definition of particular bodies and social groups as ugly and loathsome, therefore allowing a resultant “border anxiety” to take hold.[2] These notions of abjection, anxiety, and constituted boundaries can be read in the “degraded status,”[3] a term borrowed from Disch,[4] that Canaday describes was enacted through humiliation and second-class citizenship faced by those perceived as sexual deviants within the military, welfare, and immigration contexts in the twentieth century. If abjection, then, is the result of opposing “unviable (un)subjects” against “viable subjects,”[5] then humiliation necessarily is a contributing process by which abjection can be achieved. Gopal Guru describes humiliation as “the discursive power that is available to both the tormentor, who has capacity to assign differential moral worth to individuals, and the victim, who acquires power to question and complain against humiliation,”[6] further speaking to the entanglements between abject and subject.
The vexed and unstable separation between abject and subject is exemplified by the boundary that is put at risk by sexual minorities. Young alludes to this unsettling proximity of abject to subject by explaining, “the abject is other than the subject, but is only just the other side of the border. So the abject is not opposed to and facing the subject, but next to it, too close for comfort.”[7] Fear of losing this boundary is what drives attempts at control and rituals of humiliation; it demands a continuity of abjection. Canaday provides numerous examples of such border anxiety, particularly in the military’s attempt at preserving its “moral integrity,” which was felt to be “contaminated” by civilian perversion and absence of discipline.[8] The invocation of contamination here is telling and highly indicative of the association of sexually deviant behavior with an abject that is located outside of the military and pollutes the institution by association. Additionally, Canaday explains that “men who reported being sodomized were not allowed to eat with other men,” with men making such statements as, “I didn’t want to eat off the same plate that he did.”[9] This speaks to an association of the abject with filth in a physical sense that can be transmitted through touch. Even in cases of sexual assault that appeared before a court-martial, both the survivor and the perpetrator could be penalized. This points to the abjection that was extended to survivors by virtue of the assault on their bodies.[10]
Gatekeeping practices are also suggestive, as federal work programs served to actively “deter work-adverse hoboes (and their perverse culture) from entering the camps.”[11] Moreover, the fear of spreading the impurity of the abject is apparent in the unwillingness to merge the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Federal Transient Program (FTP).[12] In fact, the CCC/FTP division was emblematic of a multitude of binaries that sought to exclude the abject — not only hetero/homo, but also youthful/aging, productive/unproductive, and soldier/civilian, or in other words militarized citizenship against dangerous and deviant burdens upon the state.
In examining numerous transcripts of proceedings from court-martials as well as interdepartmental correspondence during the twentieth century, Canaday offers rich depth and illuminating details on the forms of humiliation manifesting to uphold such divides, especially as seen in bureaucratic processes of immigration, naturalization, welfare, and military employment. A poignant example of such humiliation was the intrusive forms of questioning militated against those suspected of homosexuality. Military screening tests included such questions as, “Do you have too many sexual dreams? Have you ever hurt yourself by masturbation (self abuse)? Did you ever make love to a girl? Did you ever think you had lost your manhood?”[13] These questions offer insight into the level of intimate detail to which the state felt entitled, leaving nothing to the privacy of the person being questioned. Physical forms of screening entailed a variant of this invasiveness. For example, immigrants and military recruits would be asked to strip naked and submit to a physical examination of various body parts, including rectums.[14] An image highlighted by Canaday depicts a male recruit who is photographed naked and then described by a medical doctor in a letter using cold detail about his “feminine pelvis” and “feminine distribution of pubic hair,” an example of a gender anomaly, or nonconformity to the sex binary.[15]
The practices of humiliation towards female soldiers suspected of homosexuality is enumerated in painful detail by Canaday, as well. Considered harder to detect than homosexual men, women suspected of sexual deviance were subjected to extreme forms of surveillance and psychological manipulation, which Canaday describes as “individually devastating” but “broadly powerful.”[16] Therefore, humiliation is, as Guru describes, “a feeling that could be carefully cultivated for political purposes.”[17] This is evident especially because such humiliating procedures placed all women in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) who could not prove an absence of homosexual tendencies in a vulnerable, “precarious position” of powerlessness.[18] The degree of scrutiny into the lives of women soldiers, such as through the use of informants, polygraphs, and wiretaps, constituted a form of psychological terror (it should be noted here that even tolerance and sexual curiosity were penalized).[19] Women described their interrogations, for example, as a kind of “psychological rape,”[20] with investigative procedures “calculated to embarrass and humiliate the women involved.”[21]Tearing women’s tampons apart, ostensibly in search of some sort of evidence, could serve no other purpose than to “perpetrate an indignity.”[22] These are very deliberate attempts at demoralizing sexually nonconforming women by subjugating them to demeaning procedures.[23]
Also telling are the ways in which nonconforming bodies were penalized by the state and its accomplices. For example, draft boards and other federal agencies created during the First World War degraded those men who were thought to be evading the military draft and were therefore deemed “slackers.”[24] Described as undergoing public humiliations, men who did not conform to the heterosexual and productive masculine ideal – for example by being neither employed nor married – were subjected to “massive ‘slacker raids’” during which they were emasculated and ridiculed.[25] These forms of institutionalized humiliation engage a rhetoric of failing to fulfill one’s purpose, not only as a heterosexual male, but as a gainful citizen for the state. Public humiliations serve to mark for entire communities those who are ideal subjects and those who are abjects.[26] This is consistent with Guru’s theorization of humiliation as “a means to reassert the old hierarchies increasingly under stress.”[27]
Taken together, these state-building mechanisms and the rise of the bureaucratic state over the course of the twentieth century, with its accompanying ritualized humiliation, led to a stratification of citizenship, with those who did not conform sexually at the bottom of a state-instituted hierarchy. Through federal actions that carried lasting material consequences, the state ultimately succeeded in systemically impoverishing those with homosexual discharges who were not closeted or otherwise passing as heterosexual from a first-class citizenship, which meant losing access to veteran benefits of education, healthcare, and property ownership. The stratification of citizens by the state was clarified not only by who the GI Bill’s beneficiaries would be, but also who would have the right to naturalization and entry. Even in subtle ways, the state ensured stratification through reliance on accomplices among its citizens.[28] With this technique, the state was able to achieve a citizen body that actively distanced itself from sexual minorities for the threat they posed to their own status (by association).[29]
Therefore, the state, through its various agencies, constructed a stratified set of identities even while regulating them.[30] By assigning a stigma that stayed with individuals long after their undesirable discharges, the state ensured an inescapable abjected status for those citizens who did not conform within institutionalized heterosexuality.[31] Thus, it is as Disch writes—“Citizenship has historically served to foster not equality and inclusivity but internal differentiation and hierarchy.”[32]
Bibliography
Blom Hansen, Thomas. "Recuperating Masculinity: Hindu Nationalism, Violence and the Exorcism of the Muslim 'Other'," Critique of Anthropology 16, no. 2 (1996): 137-172.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Butler, Judith. "Imitation and Gender Insubordination." In Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy (1996): 307-320.
Canaday, Margot. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Disch, Lisa J. Review of Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship, by Engin F. Isin, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21 (June 2003): 380-382.
Federici, Silvia. Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women. Toronto: PM Press, 2018.
Guru, Gopal. Introduction to Humiliation: Claims and Context, 1-19. Edited by Gopal Guru. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Kristeva, Julia. “‘Approaching Abjection,’ From Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.” In Classic Readings on Monster Theory: Demonstrare, Volume One, edited by Asa Simon Mittman and Marcus Hensel, 67-74. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2018.
Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.
[1] Julia Kristeva, “‘Approaching Abjection,’ From Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection,” in Classic Readings on Monster Theory: Demonstrare, Volume One, ed. Asa Simon Mittman and Marcus Hensel (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2018), 68.
[2] Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 146. Young writes on this in a most illuminating manner: “Homophobia is the paradigm of such border anxiety. The construction of the idea of race, its connection with physical attributes and lineage, still makes it possible for a white person to know that she is not Black or Asian. But as homosexuality has become increasingly deobjectified, no specific characteristics, no physical, genetic, mental, or moral ‘character,’ marks off homosexuals from heterosexuals. It thus becomes increasingly difficult to assert any difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals except their choice of sexual partners. Homophobia is one of the deepest fears of difference precisely because the border between gay and straight is constructed as the most permeable; anyone at all can become gay, especially me, so the only way to defend my identity is to turn away with irrational disgust.”
[3] Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 10.
[4] Lisa J. Disch, review of Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship, by Engin F. Isin, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21 (June 2003): 381. She writes, “how can inclusion emancipate if those groups who imagine themselves to be outsiders are already necessary to and presupposed by the citizen body—but in a degraded status?”
[5] Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," in Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy (1996): 307-320. Also see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 142. “Those bodily figures who do not fit into either gender fall outside the human, indeed, constitute the domain of the dehumanized and the abject against which the human itself is constituted.”
[6] Gopal Guru, introduction to Humiliation: Claims and Context, ed. Gopal Guru (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011), 7.
[7] Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 144.
[8] Canaday, The Straight State, 70-71.
[9] Canaday, 83.
[11] Canaday, 109.
[12] Canaday, 123.
[13] Canaday, 67.
[14] Canaday, 88.
[15] Canaday, 63.
[16] Canaday, 184.
[17] Guru, Humiliation, 8.
[18] Canaday, The Straight State, 198.
[19] Canaday, 196.
[20] Canaday, 197.
[21] Canaday, 196.
[22] Canaday, 197.
[23] Canaday often uses the term “witch hunt” to describe the search for homosexuals among women in the WAC, a very poignant metaphor. See Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (Toronto: PM Press, 2018), 23-32, for parallels to the “regime of terror on all women” and the notion that “suspicion of diabolism would accompany a woman every moment of her life.”
[24] Canaday, The Straight State, 60.
[25] Canaday, 60.
[26] See Thomas Blom Hansen, "Recuperating Masculinity: Hindu Nationalism, Violence and the Exorcism of the Muslim 'Other'," Critique of Anthropology 16, no. 2 (1996): 153, for a parallel to the emasculation of Hindu men who did not partake in acts of communal violence against Muslim men. “The fact that women during riots are often seen distributing bangles to men who do not participate in the rioting, ridiculing them for their effeminacy, indicates that the theme of recuperating masculinity has long been a central component in the popular communal common sense.”
[27] Guru, Humiliation, 8.
[28] Canaday, The Straight State, 42.
[29] See Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women, 23, for a comparative look at witch hunting once more. In drawing upon Federici’s observations, it becomes clear that the use of accomplices served a political function of dividing people to circumvent possible solidarities from forming, especially as people increasingly act for their own survival.
[30] Canaday, The Straight State, 188.
[31] Canaday, 197.
[32] Disch, review of Being Political, 381.
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