Who is the subject? Queer theory meets oral history

Journal of the History of Sexuality

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 177-189

  Boyd, Nan Alamilla ^a  

^a SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; ETHNOLOGY; FEMALE; GENDER IDENTITY; HISTORY; HOMOSEXUALITY; HUMAN; INTERVIEW; LEGAL ASPECT; LESBIAN; MALE; MEMORY; METHODOLOGY; PERCEPTION; PHYSIOLOGY; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; PUBLIC OPINION; SEXUAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL CHANGE; SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY; SOCIAL STATUS; UNITED STATES; VERBAL COMMUNICATION;

ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL; FEMALE; GENDER IDENTITY; HISTORIOGRAPHY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 21ST CENTURY; HOMOSEXUALITY; HOMOSEXUALITY, FEMALE; HOMOSEXUALITY, MALE; HUMANS; INTERVIEWS AS TOPIC; MALE; MEMORY; NARRATION; PREJUDICE; PUBLIC OPINION; RESEARCH DESIGN; SEXUAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL CHANGE; SOCIAL CONDITIONS; SOCIAL PERCEPTION; STEREOTYPING; UNITED STATES;

EID: 63249096873     PISSN: 10434070     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. I use the phrase "gay, lesbian, and queer" rather than the more familiar "gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender" as a shorthand that collapses bisexual and transgender projects into the umbrella category "queer." I do this because (while there are notable exceptions) most bisexual and transgender projects-and many gay and lesbian projects-interrogate the limits of identity politics in ways that produce a queer analysis, that is, an analysis of the social construction of identity that contests fixed categories of identification. However, there are still a number of projects that investigate "gay" and "lesbian" subjectivity exclusively, so it is important to retain these categories of historical investigation.
2. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 370. Peter Boag, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
3. Shulamit Reinhardt, Feminist Methods in Social Research (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
4. John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
5. Allan Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free Press, 1990).
6. Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993).
7. Esther Newton, Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America's First Gay and Lesbian Town (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).
8. Chauncey, Gay New York; and John Howard, Men like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
9. Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
10. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978).
11. Michel Foucault, introduction to Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall (New York: Pantheon, 1980).
12. David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1989).
13. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1991).
14. For a review of the impact of D'Emilio's 1983 text on the production of U.S. gay and lesbian history see Marc Stein, "Theoretical Politics, Local Communities: The Making of U.S. LGBT Historiography," GLQ 11, no. 4 (2005): 605-25.
15. Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire, x.
16. Ibid., xi.
17. Ibid.
18. Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, 21.
19. Ibid., 22.
20. Ibid., 25.
21. Newton, Cherry Grove, 302.
22. Ibid.
23. Esther Newton, "My Best Informant's Dress: The Erotic Equation in Fieldwork," in Margaret Mead Made Me Gay (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 243-57.
24. Howard, Men like That, 5.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 28.
27. Ethel Whitaker (pseud.), interviewed by Nan Alamilla Boyd, tape recording, San Francisco, 30 August 1992, Wide-Open Town History Project, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society, San Francisco, Calif. (hereafter GLBTHS).
28. George Mendenhall, interviewed by Nan Alamilla Boyd, tape recording, San Francisco, 13 November 1991, Wide-Open Town History Project, GLBTHS.
29. Marilyn Braiger, interviewed by Nan Alamilla Boyd, tape recording, Berkeley, 2 December 1991, Wide-Open Town History Project, GLBTHS.