Presented By: Institute for Research on Women and Gender
Hidden in Plain Sight: Not-So-Secret Sexual Histories and the Political Paradox of Race in Imagining Post-Emancipation Citizenship
In retrospect, the centrality of 'race' to the citizenship struggles of the post-Emancipation period seems commonsensical. Yet, historians of slavery, and of gender and sexuality, have revealed extensive evidence of interracial reproduction that belies the neat division of the population into 'black' and 'white.' While these complex and often disturbing stories of sex "whether rooted in compulsion, coercion or consent" usually remain divorced from political history, they beg the question of how racial meaning and identity was assigned and deployed in the citizenship debates that ensued after emancipation.
This talk is based on a project that seeks to reconnect the social history of interracial reproduction "a not-so-secret history of sex" with the political history of citizenship, in particular the debate over the racialization of citizenship after Emancipation.
The political paradox was embodied in the confrontation between those who sought to bifurcate the newly expanded political terrain by imposing explicitly racial divisions onto citizenship, and those who sought to eliminate race as an operative political category. The former were quick to highlight the dangers stemming from the "miscegenation" of the body politic, while stubbornly disavowing the obvious realities of sexual history. The latter, in an attempt to forge a political body freed of distinctions, called out the sexual history that had already foreclosed the fantasy of racial purity.
Ann Holder is an Associate Professor of History at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, where she was also the Coordinator of Pratt's Critical and Visual Studies Program. Holder received her Ph.D. in History from Boston College. She has been a fellow at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University, where she also taught in the History and Literature Program. A social and cultural historian of the United States focusing on African American, urban, and gender and sexuality, studies, she is currently completing a book entitled MAKING THE BODY POLITIC: REMAKING RACE, SEX, AND CITIZENSHIP, 1863-1910.
This lecture is part of IRWG's Gender, Race and History program area. It is free and open to the public.
This talk is based on a project that seeks to reconnect the social history of interracial reproduction "a not-so-secret history of sex" with the political history of citizenship, in particular the debate over the racialization of citizenship after Emancipation.
The political paradox was embodied in the confrontation between those who sought to bifurcate the newly expanded political terrain by imposing explicitly racial divisions onto citizenship, and those who sought to eliminate race as an operative political category. The former were quick to highlight the dangers stemming from the "miscegenation" of the body politic, while stubbornly disavowing the obvious realities of sexual history. The latter, in an attempt to forge a political body freed of distinctions, called out the sexual history that had already foreclosed the fantasy of racial purity.
Ann Holder is an Associate Professor of History at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, where she was also the Coordinator of Pratt's Critical and Visual Studies Program. Holder received her Ph.D. in History from Boston College. She has been a fellow at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University, where she also taught in the History and Literature Program. A social and cultural historian of the United States focusing on African American, urban, and gender and sexuality, studies, she is currently completing a book entitled MAKING THE BODY POLITIC: REMAKING RACE, SEX, AND CITIZENSHIP, 1863-1910.
This lecture is part of IRWG's Gender, Race and History program area. It is free and open to the public.
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