American Sexual Politics: Sex, Gender, and Race Since the Civil War.

American Sexual Politics illustrates the problems and some of the solutions in the study of the history of sexuality. While this collection of essays explores only American sexual patterns and concentrates on the issues of gender and race it can serve as a primer to the history of sexuality for two reasons. One, the essays demonstrate the range of approaches to the field and the problematics of each. And two, the volume demonstrates both the choppiness of the field as it now stands and the difficulty of tying changes and patterns in the history of sexuality to anything larger in the social, cultural, or political realms.

The contributors to the collection come from three main disciplines, literary criticism, history, and sociology. Each discipline has its own methodology, its own conception of history, and own justification for the study of sexuality. Despite the supposed development of inter-disciplinary techniques, each essay i clearly marked by the parent doctrine. The essays by historians garner "facts" to chart change and continuities over time, the literary and cultural critics explore meaning, and the sociologists discover models of social interaction. Th historians risk becoming impersonal, losing the human element in the web of forces acting upon human behavior. The literary critics risk obfuscating meanin rather than enlarging it. And the sociologists risk oversimplification. Three o the best essays in the volume manage to transform the weaknesses of their respective disciplines rather than surpass them.

Carole Joffe's work "Portraits of Three 'Physicians of Conscience': Abortion before Legalization in the United States" uses personal histories to dignify pre-Roe v. Wade abortionists. Her aim is straightforward; by personalizing abortionists as physicians of conscience rather than butchers she wants to redirect the pro-choice movement in a positive vein. By doing so, she hopes to call attention to the fact that fewer doctors are being trained to provide abortions. She creates heroes for womens' health care. And the simplicity of he methodology helps her cause rather than harms it. She realigns the health care profession with the women's movement on moral grounds. However, all of her doctors provided abortions immediately before Roe v. Wade. We are given three abortionists who performed illegal abortions for a fairly short period of time. The doctors' experiences come only from their oral histories. They are not put in any greater context. Nonetheless, the essay rectifies the scenario that creates a sisterhood between clients and practitioners under midwifery to an opposition to women's needs during medical professionalization to the rediscovery of women's concerns under feminism. The issues of abortionists and the aims of the feminist movement dovetail nicely enough to give a rosy glow to the health care profession in general. Joffe uses the simplicity of sociologica methodology to create a compelling article.

Robyn Wiegman's essay, "The Anatomy of Lynching," edges toward the other extreme. She uses the methodological sophistication of literary criticism to probe the interrelated meanings of lynching. Lynching is shown to be more than disciplinary act, a symbolic act, or even a demarcating act, but a complex creation that constructs and reconstructs the body, that defines citizenship through the practice of discipline, and that works as a sexual intermediary between race and gender. But the development of fears of black male sexuality cannot be seen in the essay. These fears and powers emerge full blown during Reconstruction and continue unabated until today. Any larger social changes suc as the great migration, women's suffrage, and civil rights, have no impact upon the iconography. For example, Wiegman states that "For the New Masses reader in 1940, the narrative of dismemberment and murder, overseen by the figure of the law marked the repetitiousness of white supremacist discipline that greeted the 'free' black subject in the 1860s and continued to reiterate his or her secondary social condition throughout the twentieth century, including the present day." The period from the 1860s to the 1980s is rendered static and the narrative of lynching becomes a universal in itself. Wiegman negotiates the methodological distinctions of her discipline to examine both icons and actions political meanings and popular ones, but she does so at the expense of her time period. She flattens the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into an undifferentiated mass with few rhythms of its own.

Martha Hodes' essay "The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics" touches on similar issues to Wiegman's, not surprisingly because the issues of race and se during Reconstruction are both well documented and highly evocative. Whereas Wiegman's essay flattens time to explore meaning, Hodes tends to underplay the meaning of sexuality to document the brutality of the KKK's control of it. The issue of why sexuality generates specific methods of discipline which rest upon torture and murder is never addressed. Is female sexuality part of male propert in the culture? Is black male sexuality rendered powerful because of the dearth of property? While Hodes ignores the meanings of sexuality she does an exceptional job of documenting and narrating the developing social and racial hierarchy. The exclusion emphasizes rather than undercuts the growth of methods of control.

Hodes' essay counterbalances Wiegman's. Together they show both meanings behind discipline and changes in social control over time. Interestingly, both Wiegman and Hodes imply continuity in the racial/sexual hierarchy by concluding their essays with recent events, indicating a similar political agenda on both their parts. Joffe, Wiegman, and Hodes all demonstrate their belief that sexuality is imbued with political content that needs to be addressed. While all the essays in the volume emphasize a concern for diversity to a greater or lesser degree, these three stand out for their commitment to exploring the political implications of this concern. They express what other historians of sexuality only edge around, that the history of sexuality has a political foundation that is played out in current events. While the need to dignify diversity seems to b a key ideology behind the history of sexuality, the need to integrate the specific with large patterns remains. The essays in the volume fail to provide cohesive framework or even work under one. The beginning reader would be lost trying to find any common threads among the essays or between this volume and any others they might approach on American history. Sexuality seems fairly unconnected to other aspects of human life. This is not a problem of this book alone. Almost all volumes of essays in the field seem to share this choppiness. However, it still needs to be addressed. We can't rely on Intimate Matters to d all of the work for us.

Lisa Sigel Carnegie Mellon University