UBC: Sapphic Slashers

[truepenny]

Duggan, Lisa. Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000

---

This book is so much better than its atrocious title, it isn't even funny.

Duggan is talking about the cultural work that stories do. In particular, she's talking about the way that stories were mobilized in late nineteenth century America to protect the status quo, i.e., the power and privilege of white men. The story she focuses on is what she calls the "lesbian love murder" (a phrase which, I admit, only gets more awkward each time you read it). In particular, the murder of Freda Ward by Alice Mitchell in Memphis, January 1892. Duggan counterpoints the story of the murder and its aftermath with another important story in Memphis in 1892: the beginning of Ida B. Wells' anti-lynching campaign.

Duggan is candid and straightforward about her book's limitations. It's not a study of lynching in the South, nor a study of the anti-lynching movement. Nor is it really about sexual identity or gender performance. It's about why Alice Mitchell was judged insane and committed for life to the Western Hospital for the Insane in Bolivar, Tennessee, and how that trajectory shaped the way stories about women loving women would be told. It's about how stories get mobilized and why and how they persist despite their poisonous untruthfulness; she traces the effect of the "lesbian love murder" through both the medical literature (Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis) and fiction (up to The Well of Loneliness).

Duggan is more interested in the cultural work of the story than in the historical people, but she doesn't give me the feeling, as Amy Gilman Srebnick did, that she finds the historical people inconvenient. It's clear Duggan has done her best to represent Alice Mitchell and Freda Ward accurately, and that she worked to uncover as much of their lives as she could. She respects them, and I respect her for that.

And I think she makes an important point in juxtaposing Alice Mitchell and Ida B. Wells, that nothing happens in a vacuum. The lynching story and the "lesbian love murder" story are not isolated from each other. They're part of the same cultural matrix, and they illuminate different aspects of the same fiercely, ruinously oppressive drive: the drive of white men to maintain their economic, political, social, and sexual power.

Comments

[mastadge.livejournal.com]

This book sounds interesting but probably won't make it onto my reading pile anytime soon. But now I'm scratching my head trying to figure out why the name Lisa Duggan is so familiar to me.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

She's a professor at NYU (http://as.nyu.edu/object/lisaduggan.html), with a focus on gender studies. GoogleScholar (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=lisa+duggan&hl=en&as_sdt=1%2C50&as_sdtp=on) has several pages of links to articles (which are mixed with those of an L. Duggan who works in radiologic medicine).

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, what counts as evidence, and what counts as proof, that a trajectory shapes how stories are told? What counts as disproof that there is a causational relationship?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Alice Mitchell was a case study starting with the tenth edition of Psycopathia Sexualis.

Other than that, please don't think that my four paragraph review does justice to Duggan's research.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Alice Mitchell was a case study? Was she not a person? You mean she was the subject of a case study? How does that fact, in in itself, establish a causational relationship between the events of her life, or the relating of them, and the maintenance of the privilege of white men?

Meanwhile, I'm not questioning Duggan's research, I am asking on what basis, by what understanding of evidence, or proof, (and more importantly, disproof) it justifies drawing the kinds of conclusions you attribute to her.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

So read the damn book.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but I'm already skeptical of the standards of discourse, proof, and argumentative rigor likely to be in evidence based on the title and your claims of what she shows. If you can't actually justify your claims, I'm happy to remain an ignorant bigot on the subject. I don't really lack for things to do with my time without sharpening my skills in book flinging.

[coffeeem.livejournal.com]

Aw, I kind of like the title. *g* (Just a sucker for alliteration, I guess.)