The politics of forbidden liaisons: Civilization, miscegenation, and other perversions

Frontiers

Volumn 26, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 168-198

  Wickstrom, Stefanie ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33645154296     PISSN: 01609009     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/fro.2006.0010     Document Type: Review

References (110)

1. Stephanie Wood, "Sexual Violation in the Conquest of the Americas," in Sex and Sexuality in Early America, ed. Merril D. Smith (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 9.
2. Tim Edwards, Erotics & Politics: Gay Male Sexuality, Masculinity and Feminism (London: Routledge, 1994), 37 (emphasis mine). In contrast, according to Edwards, "sexual politics" is the study and practice of or opposition to gender oppression.
3. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, translated by James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), 6.
4. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, Ibid., 42.
5. Paul A. Robinson, The Freudian Left: Wilhelm Reich, Geza Roheim, Herbert Marcuse (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 196.
6. Paul A. Robinson, The Freudian Left: Wilhelm Reich, Geza Roheim, Herbert Marcuse, (1969), 196. Ibid.
7. Paul A. Robinson, The Freudian Left: Wilhelm Reich, Geza Roheim, Herbert Marcuse, Ibid., 203.
8. See Else L. Hambleton, "The Regulation of Sex in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts: The Quarterly Court of Essex County vs. Priscilla Willson and Mr. Samuel Appleton," in Sex and Sexuality in Early America, ed. Merril D. Smith (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 89-115. Hambleton points out that exercise of sexuality by either gender outside the confines of marriage threatened the "orderly transmission of property" and uses that argument to explain prohibitions against fornication in Puritan culture. She also explains that it was the relatively powerless women who were typically convicted and punished for fornication. The lives of married women were forever transformed by the stigma associated with the convictions. It was unusual for any Puritan man to take financial responsibility for a condemned woman and her illegitimate child. Men accused of fornication could usually successfully deny paternity and avoid the obligation to care for an illegitimate child. I contend that this means that most men were spared any risk of investing in another man's progeny. Puritan men avoided the risk and Puritan women shouldered the burden of sustaining the patriarchal arrangement.
9. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents.
10. Alice B. Child and Irvin L. Child, Religion and Magic in the Life of Traditional Peoples (Prentice Hall: New Jersey, 1992).
11. Trevor Burnard, "The Sexual Life of an Eighteenth-Century Jamaican Slave Overseer," in Sex and Sexuality in Early America, ed. Merril D. Smith (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 163-189.
12. According to Sizer, the term miscegenation was invented and first used in 1863 to describe interbreeding between Anglos and non-Anglos. It now applies to sexual relations between any presumably distinct races. For an interesting discussion of how Democrats created the term in 1863 and used it in a pamphlet extolling the virtues of miscegenetic unions in an effort to scare voters away from President Lincoln, see Lyde Cullen Sizer, "Still Waiting: Intermarriage in White Women's Civil War Novels," in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed. Martha Hodes (New York: New York University Press, 1999).
13. Rebecca Blevins Faery, "Legacy Profile: Mary Rowlandson (1637-1711)," Legacy 12, no. 2 (1995): 127.
14. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 36.
15. June Namias, White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 97.
16. Gary L. Ebersole, Captured by Texts: Puritan to Post-Modern Images of Indian Captivity (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 17.
17. Also see Gordon M. Sayre, ed., American Captivity Narratives: Selected Narratives with Introduction/Olaudah Equiano, Mary Rowlandson, and Others (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000).
18. Rebecca Blevins Faery, "Legacy Profile: Mary Rowlandson (1637-1711)," 127.
19. Swarton's narrative was written for her by Protestant Minister Cotton Mather, who was the son of Increase Mather, the Puritan clergyman who sponsored Mary Rowlandson's narrative.
20. Sayre, American Captivity Narratives, 187-88.
21. Sayre, American Captivity Narratives.
22. Sayre, American Captivity Narratives. Ibid., 12.
23. In Annette Kolodny, "Among the Indians: The Uses of Captivity," Women's Studies Quarterly 21, nos. 3 and 4 (1993): 184-195.
24. Hambleton, "The Regulation of Sex in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts," 104.
25. Namias, White Captives, 94.
26. Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, ed., Women's Indian Captivity Narratives (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).
27. Derounian-Stodola asserts that the 1799 story's giant "certainly possesses Indian attributes" and can be tied to "Native American lore about the ritual killing of a fertility god." See Derounian-Stodola, Women's Indian Captivity Narratives, 84.
28. Annette Kolodny suggests that the giant's ethnicity is intentionally "unidentified" (emphasis in original). Kolodny argues that the giant represents the "uncivilized brutality of wilderness." She claims the symbolic oppositions in the story "are not so much between civilized European associations and the Indianized wilderness as they are between different ways of being in and relating to the vast American landscape," which are represented by the female cultivator and the male hunter. See Annette Kolodny, "Turning the Lens on "The Panther Captivity': A Feminist Exercise in Practical Criticism," Critical Inquiry 8 (Winter 1981): 338, 343.
29. Derounian-Stodola, Women's Indian Captivity Narratives, 88.
30. Derounian-Stodola, Women's Indian Captivity Narratives;
31. Kolodny, "Turning the Lens on 'The Panther Captivity.'"
32. Kolodny, "Turning the Lens on 'The Panther Captivity'";
33. Greg Sieminski, "The Puritan Captivity Narrative and the Politics of the American Revolution," American Quarterly 42, no. 1 (1990): 35-56.
34. The text of "The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon, Formerly a Hunter; Containing a Narrative of the Wars of Kentucky" is available at the Archiving Early America website at http://earlyamerica.com/lives/boone/ (accessed May 1, 2005).
35. Namias, White Captives, 94.
36. It is important to note that throughout the course of telling his story, Filson does not once use the term "man" or "men" to refer to Indians. He calls them "Indians" or uses derogatory or hostile descriptors including "savages" and "the enemy." Filson does, however, refer to the Negro as a "Negro man" once when he introduces him.
37. As slavery became an integral part of the colonial enterprise, Anglo men in North America exerted increasing control over the sexuality of the women of color they dominated. As slaveholders (and, earlier, encomenderos - the grantees that received the right to exploit Indian labor in colonial Spanish America from the crown under the encomienda system, which lasted from 1503 into the late eighteenth century) took advantage of their female captives, white male sexual fantasies became focused on colored women rather than white women. See, for example, Burnard, "The Sexual Life of an Eighteenth-Century Jamaican Slave Overseer," 165.
38. Namias, White Captives.
39. Rebecca Blevins Faery, Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race, and Sex in the Shaping of an American Nation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999).
40. According to Blevins Faery, inspired popular fiction includes Eastburn and Sand's epic poem, Yamoyden: A Tale of the Wars of King Phillip (1820),
41. Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827),
42. and Cooper's The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish (1829).
43. Kolodny, "Among the Indians," 191.
44. Sayre, American Captivity Narratives.
45. Derounian-Stodola, Women's Indian Captivity Narratives, 147.
46. Namias, White Captives.
47. Namias, White Captives. Ibid., 156.
48. Neil Schmitz, "The Senecas' Captive Voice," review of A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, by James E. Seaver, Buffalo News, May 7, 1995.
49. Neil Schmitz, "The Senecas' Captive Voice," review of A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, Ibid.
50. Blevins Faery, Cartographies of Desire.
51. Blevins Faery, Cartographies of Desire. Ibid., 186.
52. Blevins Faery, Cartographies of Desire. Ibid.
53. Carolyn L. Karcher, ed., Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians by Lydia Maria Child (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), xxx.
54. Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians by Lydia Maria Child, Ibid., xxxi-xxxii.
55. Renée L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000), 74-75.
56. Sayre, American Captivity Narratives.
57. Sayre, American Captivity Narratives. Ibid., 378.
58. The Indians involved were known as Dakotas, Santees, or Eastern Sioux and comprised four divisions: Sissetons, Wahpetons, Wahpekutas, and Mdewakantons. See Namias, White Captives.
59. Blevins Faery, Cartographies of Desire, 214.
60. Namias, White Captives.
61. Namias, White Captives. Ibid.
62. Namias, White Captives. Ibid.
63. Namias, White Captives. Ibid., 231.
64. Karcher, Hobomok and Other Writings.
65. Kolodny suggests that in the Panther captivity story, the "male wilderness adventure (precursor of the later Western tale) is displaced by a narrative of female adventure; the now standard narrative of female captivity turns instead - and for the first time in American literary history - toward acculturation and accommodation to the wild" (emphasis mine). See Kolodny, "Turning the Lens on 'The Panther Captivity,'" 335.
66. John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
67. John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd ed. Ibid., 107.
68. See Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (New York: Viking, 2000) for a comprehensive overview of the women's movement in the United States.
69. Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, http://www.m-w.com/.
70. Aída Hurtado, "The Politics of Sexuality in the Gender Subordination of Chicanas," in Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1998), 383.
71. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 73.
72. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 49. (According to Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, polymorphous means "having, assuming, or occurring in various forms, characters, or styles.")
73. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1966), 49. Ibid.
74. Robinson, The Freudian Left.
75. Robinson, The Freudian Left. Ibid., 216-17.
76. Robinson, The Freudian Left. Ibid., 237.
77. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 158.
78. Robinson, The Freudian Left, 240.
79. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
80. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, Ibid., 91.
81. Rodríguez Milanés explains that she allowed the editor to make the changes because she was "unpublished, the youngest female faculty member, thinking about my contract renewal, the sole income earner for my small family, remembering the unemployment checks and Medicaid cards." See Rodríguez Milanés, "A Journey toward Voice; or, Constructing One Latina's Poetics," in Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and U.S. Women of Color, ed. Sandra Kumamoto Stanley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 334.
82. Chicano, like any label applied to any group, is sometimes a problematic term. It "connotes the proletarian Mexican immigrant experience and later the militancy and celebration of indigenous ancestry" of the Chicano movement, which became especially prominent during the civil rights era. See Patricia Zavella, "Feminist Insider Dilemmas: Constructing Ethnic Identity with 'Chicana' Informants," in Situated Lives: Gender and Culture in Everyday Life, ed. Louise Lamphere, Helena Ragoné, and Patricia Zavella (New York: Routledge, 1997), 47. Thanks to that ongoing movement, Latinos in the United States who are not Mexican Americans sometimes consider themselves to be Chicanos. The label is not, however, universally accepted by all Mexican Americans. I use it here to refer to self-described Chicana writers. I use the much more general term "Latino" when discussing people of Latin American heritage and/or Hispanic ethnicity. I use "Mexican" or "mexicano/a" to describe a person from Mexico or of Mexican heritage.
83. Diana Rebolledo Tey, Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995).
84. Sandra Cisneros, "Down There," in The Sexuality of Latinas, ed. Ana Castillo Norma Alarcón and Cherríe Moraga (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1993), 22-23.
85. Monica Palacios, "Tomboy," in Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1998), 209.
86. Patricia de La Fuente, "Ana Castillo," in Chicano Writers: Second Series, ed. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research, 1992), 63.
87. Marta A. Navarro, "Interview with Ana Castillo," in Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1991).
88. Ana Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (New York: Plume, 1994);
89. June Nash, "Aztec Women: The Transition from Status to Class in Empire and Colony," in Women and Colonization: Anthropological Pespectives, ed. Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey Publishers, 1980).
90. Héctor A. Torres, "Gloria AnzaldÚa," in Chicano Writers: Second Series, ed. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research, 1992), 8-16.
91. Christine Weiland, "'Within the Crossroads: Lesbian/Feminist/ Spiritual Development," An Interview with Christine Weiland (1983)," in Gloria AnzaldÚa: Interviews Entrevistas, ed. AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2000), 81.
92. Cherríe Moraga, "Algo Secretamente Amado," In The Sexuality of Latinas, ed. Ana Castillo, Norma Alarcón, and Cherríe Moraga (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1993).
93. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinters/Aunt Lute Book Company, 1987), 150-151.
94. McDowell's is an artist colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
95. Christine Weiland, "'Within the Crossroads: Lesbian/Feminist/ Spiritual Development,' An Interview with Christine Weiland (1983)," 115.
96. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, "Cherríe Moraga," in Chicano Writers: First Series, ed. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research., 1989), 165.
97. Yarbro-Bejarano, "De-Constructing the Lesbian Body: Cherríe Moraga's Loving in the War Years," in Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1991), 143.
98. Cherríe Moraga, "Refugees of a World on Fire: Foreword to the Second Edition," in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 2nd ed., ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga (New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983), unnumbered page.
99. Cherríe Moraga, "Refugees of a World on Fire: Foreword to the Second Edition," in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 2nd ed., (1983), Ibid.
100. Gloria Anzaldúa, "La Prieta," in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 209.
101. Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers, 134.
102. Rebolledo Tey, Women Singing in the Snow, 202.
103. Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers, 128.
104. Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers, Ibid., 132.
105. Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers, Ibid., 133.
106. Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers, Ibid., 135.
107. Cherríe Moraga, "La Güera," in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 30.
108. Gloria Anzaldúa, "La Prieta," in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 207.
109. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation.
110. Robinson, The Freudian Left, 196.