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Book Review
| Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity, Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Pp. xi + 310. $17.95 (ISBN 0-8223-2617-5).
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| What do lesbian love murders and the lynchings of black men have in common? Why did the story of a shocking crime of same-sex passion and public murders of alleged black rapists capture the imagination of Americans at the end of the nineteenth century? According to Lisa Duggan's book, Sapphic Slashers, both situations produced crucial and interwoven narratives of race, sexuality, and modernity in post-Reconstruction America. While the book is ostensibly about the murder of a young Memphis woman by her jealous, spurned female companion in 1892, Duggan also attempts to make much broader claims about race, sex, and power in fin-de-siècle America. Modern white identity, Duggan argues, was largely formed through public discourses about the sexual domesticity of white women. This racial and gendered ideal, in turn, was constructed partly by the real and imagined transgressions of white lesbians and black men against it. |
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Alice Mitchell murdered her "girlfriend" Freda Ward in Memphis in 1892. Just a few months later, Ida B. Wells, the famous anti-lynching activist, began her public campaign against lynching in the same city. According to Duggan, this temporal coincidence was not accidental. Rather, it is evidence of broader cultural shifts in American history. Over and over, Duggan provides caveats and warnings that she in no way is trying to compare lynching—a campaign of terror, torture, and murder — to the rare cases of lesbian love murder. However, as she devotes more than half of her introductory material to Ida B. Wells, lynching, and the racial instability of 1890s America, it is difficult to take her protests seriously. The sections throughout the book that synthesize recent work on the symbolic, political, and cultural meanings of lynching in the 1890s are excellent. However, as Gail Bederman's work on Wells suggests, lynching and masculinity is a better place to start (Bederman, Manliness and Civilization [Chicago, 1995]). |
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Sapphic Slashers is divided into two parts: the first is about the history of Memphis and the local story of Alice Mitchell and Freda Ward. Chapters 3 and 4 are specifically about the legal and court cases, which would be of particular interest to readers of this journal if the evidence was drawn more from legal documents and less from newspaper accounts. (Here, the methodological approach of Ruth Harris's Murders and Madness [Oxford, 1991] would have been a good model.) The second part of the book is a broader analysis of "nationally circulating narratives of lesbian love murder in newspapers, medical literature and literary and popular culture" (4). As if to prove she isn't making this all up, Duggan reproduces several of these journalistic stories in full. These could have been added as an appendix, rather than comprising so much of chapter 5. |
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The story at the core of Duggan's argument is that of an erotic triangle, between a "normal" male, a "normal" female, and a pathological outsider: in the case of lynchings, this outsider is the bestial black male; in the case of Alice Mitchell, it is a murderous, mannish lesbian. One of Duggan's most insightful points is how the instability of "normal" (white) femininity is at stake in both narratives. Ida Wells' anti-lynching campaign raised the specter of the consensual miscegenistic sexuality of white women; the Alice Mitchell case raised the specter of the normal white woman who could choose to be with a woman instead of a man. In both cases, it is white masculinity that is threatened by the instability of white female sexuality. It is moments like this when Duggan's linkage between lynching and the lesbian love murder is productive, provocative, and very smart, though perhaps under-theorized. |
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When the book focuses on its ostensible aim—to document and explain the "emergence and circulation of the cultural narrative of lesbian love murder" (2)—Duggan's work is terrific. She does a very good job weaving together the various narratives of state institutions, the sensationalist press, literature, law, and medicine, and how they intersected in the case of Alice Mitchell. She argues that violent women necessarily inverted the accepted gender schemes, especially when those violent women were privileged, respectable, and white. Duggan devotes a chapter to the newspaper accounts of similar transgressive episodes, but only mentions the infamous case of Lizzy Borden in passing. This is particularly odd since Borden's trial for murdering her parents took place in the same year as the Mitchell-Ward scandal. A more thorough analysis of Borden's case would have significantly strengthened Duggan's argument about violence and gender transgression, and it is unclear why she chose not to pursue it. |
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Duggan claims that she does not want to connect lynching and lesbian love murders as equal or even parallel cultural events, but rather aims to show "how narrative technologies of sex and violence have been deployed" in political and social programs of exclusionary practices that continue in the present day and to show "how lesbian love murder was racialized ... in relation to other narratives" (3). There are some convincing and intriguing links between these two discourses—especially insightful is the instability of the "normal" white female in both narrative genres, and the congruence of time and place—but beyond that, the parallel is unconvincing at best and trivializing of Duggan's work at worst. |
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Duggan writes beautifully and has produced a book of wide scope. Each chapter—whether it be on the influence of the sensational press at the end of the nineteenth century, the workings of a local inquiry, or the rise of sexology in America—is informative, historiographically synthetic, and a great read. Overall, however, the author makes too much of a good story and ends up undermining the importance of that story by linking it so strongly to lynching. In sum, the book has something for everyone, but perhaps not enough for anyone. |
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| Stephanie H. Kenen
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| Harvard University |
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