Heterosexual Histories
Edited by Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
© 2021 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Davis, Rebecca L., editor. | Mitchell, Michele, 1965– editor.
Title: Heterosexual histories / edited by Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell.
Description: New York: New York University Press, 2021. | Series: Nyu series in social and cultural analysis | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020015866 (print) | LCCN 2020015867 (ebook) | ISBN 9781479878079 (cloth) | ISBN 9781479802289 (paperback) | ISBN 9781479897902 (ebook) | ISBN 9781479852284 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Heterosexuality—History.
Classification: LCC HQ23 .H538 2021 (print) | LCC HQ23 (ebook) | DDC 306.76/609—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015866
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015867
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Also available as an ebook
Contents
Introduction, or, Why Do the History of Heterosexuality?
Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell
Part I: Difference and Desire since the Seventeenth Century
1. Toward a Cultural Poetics of Desire in a World before Heterosexuality
Richard Godbeer
2. The Strange Career of Interracial Heterosexuality
Renee Romano
3. Age Disparity, Marriage, and the Gendering of Heterosexuality
Nicholas L. Syrett
4. “Deviant Heterosexuality” and Model-Minority Families: Asian American History and Racialized Heteronormativity
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu
Part II: Difference, Bodies, and Popular Culture
5. Defining Sexes, Desire, and Heterosexuality in Colonial British America
Sharon Block
6. Spectacles of Restraint: Race, Excess, and Heterosexuality in Early American Print Culture
Rashauna Johnson
7. Heterosexual Inversions: Satire, Parody, and Comedy in the 1950s and 1960s
Marc Stein
Part III: Embracing and Contesting Legitimacy
8. Holding the Line: Mexicans and Heterosexuality in the Nineteenth-Century West
Zurisaday Gutiérrez Avila and Pablo Mitchell
9. Suburban Swing: Heterosexual Marriage and Spouse Swapping in the 1950s and 1960s
Carolyn Herbst Lewis
10. Race, Sexual Citizenship, and the Constitution of Nonmarital Motherhood
Serena Mayeri
Part IV: Discourses of Desire
11. Restoring “Virginal Conditions” and Reinstating the “Normal”: Episiotomy in 1920
Sarah Rodriguez
12. How Heterosexuality Became Religious: Judeo-Christian Morality and the Remaking of Sex in Twentieth-Century America
Heather R. White
13. The Price of Shame: Second-Wave Feminism and the Lewinsky-Clinton Scandal
Andrea Friedman
Acknowledgments
About the Contributors
Index
Introduction, or, Why Do the History of Heterosexuality?
Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell
Josephine A. Jackson (1865–1945) was an exceptional woman. Born in the last year of the American Civil War and raised on a farm in Iowa, she became a medical doctor and nationally renowned health expert. When Jackson was given a diagnosis of tuberculosis and told she had three days to live, she later recalled that she took a train from Chicago to Pasadena and thrived for another forty years. Her first book, Outwitting Our Nerves: A Primer of Psychotherapy (1922), a general interpretation of psychotherapy for lay readers, was widely praised as “the best book on psychotherapy.”1 It and her next book, Guiding Your Life with Psychology as a Key (1937), went through multiple printings. Jackson’s advice column ran in local newspapers from Nebraska to Texas during the 1920s and 1930s.
We might also remember Jackson for teaching Americans the meaning of heterosexuality. Loosely translating Freudian psychology for the masses, she instructed her readers both that different-sex sexual attraction was called “heterosexuality” and that heterosexuality was normal. This understanding marked a decisive shift; as Jonathan Ned Katz shows in his book on the origins and history of “heterosexuality,” early twentieth-century dictionaries defined heterosexuality as a “morbid” sexual interest in the opposite sex.2 In a column dated April 21, 1930, which ran adjacent to the comics, Jackson advised a young man who worried that he was more
