Columbia's orient: Gender, geography, and the invention of sexuality in rural America.

Abstract

This dissertation addresses two separate but interrelated aspects of the history of sexuality in non-metropolitan America between 1900 and 1945. First, it considers how men and women living in small towns and decidedly rural areas gradually came to share a common sense about the nature and meaning of sex and gender with others nationwide. Second, it demonstrates that this process---this geographic expansion of what Michel Foucault has called the discourse of sexuality---occurred unevenly across the American landscape, and in conflict with other already extant sex and gender ways. Building on Foucault's contention that the two major innovations in the technology of sex during the late nineteenth century were the rise of eugenics and the creation of a medicine of perversions, the dissertation begins by examining two means by which normative ideas about sex and gender circulated through non-metropolitan space during the early twentieth century. These include programs in eugenics that grew out of more traditional programs in plant and animal breeding at U.S. Agricultural colleges and farmers' institutes, as well as sex education campaigns organized by rural reformers affiliated with organizations like the Young Men's Christian Association and the American Country Life Association. By way of contrast, the dissertation then turns its attention to subject of non-normative sexualities by documenting the existence of two enormous, and enormously important non-metropolitan milieus where same-sex sexual behavior and gender non-conformity were relatively common aspects of everyday life. The first of these is the homosocial world of hoboes, tramps, migrants, agricultural workers, and other casual laborers between roughly 1900 and 1920. The second is the homosocial world of the Civilian Conservation Corps between 1933 and 1942. Although it upholds the basic idea that sexuality is an historically contingent formation, the dissertation contests certain tenets of traditional social constructionist methodology---especially that aspect of it which designates identity and its pre-modern others as the proper framework for organizing any account of sexuality's history. Rather, it suggests that the history of sexuality can, and in many cases must be understood as a history of discursive dissemination.