Punishing Queer Sexuality in the Age of LGBT Rights by Scott De Orio A
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Punishing Queer Sexuality in the Age of LGBT Rights by Scott De Orio A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (History and Women’s Studies) in The University of Michigan 2017 Doctoral Committee: Professor Matthew D. Lassiter, Chair Professor David M. Halperin Professor William J. Novak Associate Professor Gayle S. Rubin Scott De Orio [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0002-4631-6241 © Scott De Orio 2017 To my parents ii Acknowledgments Support from several institutions and fellowships made it possible for me to complete this project. At the University of Michigan, the Department of History, the Department of Women’s Studies, the Rackham Graduate School, and the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies funded the research and writing of my dissertation and provided me with the ideal intellectual culture in which to do that work. Elizabeth Wingrove got me thinking about gender as a category of analysis in the Community of Scholars seminar that she directed at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Fellowships from Cornell University’s Human Sexuality Collection, Princeton University’s Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, and the U-M Department of History funded archival research for the project. While I was in the revision stage, Mitra Shirafi and the Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History exploded my thinking about the law and politics in ways that I’m just beginning to process. When I was in high school, my favorite English teacher Deanna Johnson introduced me to the art of analyzing pop culture, and I’ve been hooked ever since. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, I chose to study German more or less at random, but it opened up new worlds of intellectual curiosity for me that I never could have anticipated at the time. Karein Goertz, my German professor in the Residential College learning community at U-M, gave me the exhilarating experience of learning a complex new skill relatively quickly in our intensive German classes. My iii partner in crime Annie O’Connor provided excellent company in those classes as well as during the year we spent studying abroad in Freiburg; I still haven’t forgiven her for beating me for best honors thesis in the German Department the year after. In Freiburg, the Introduction to Gender Studies course I took with Claudia Münzing made my eyes light up more than any other subject had ever done before. Her passion and commitment to the feminist principle that “the personal is political” continue to inspire me. After college, when I moved to Philadelphia to pursue a Ph.D. in German Literature at Penn, I made some of my most treasured and lasting friendships that have continued to sustain me. I met Rafael Walker, another Ph.D. student in English, soon after I moved to Philadelphia. I was immediately attracted to his fun-loving personality and silly sense of humor, and for a time we were virtually inseparable. Rafael is really good at writing, and alongside all the laughs, one of the biggest gifts I have gotten from him is learning how to become a better writer, too. Caroline Henze-Gongola’s wit and dry sense of humor helped me to weather the stress of our first year of grad school. So did Kristen Faeth with her prodigious knowledge of indie-electronica music and constant readiness to go out dancing. Kathy Brown and Heather Love supported me emotionally and intellectually while I was in the process of trying to defect from my German program in favor of History. And it turned out that, at the same time as I discovered I would be moving back to Ann Arbor for my Ph.D. 2.0, Roger Grant, a musicology graduate student I had been acquainted with at Penn, was also moving to Michigan for a postdoc. In addition to providing me with boundless friendship and love, Roger helped me learn how to manage the workload in grad school, and to give myself deadlines. We also spent several iv unforgettable summers in Berlin together, where I met Tilman Buchholz, who has been my one lifeline to speaking German consistently since then. I grew up in Michigan my whole life, and I had been looking forward to realizing my destiny of moving in a big city and bathing in a sea of thousands upon thousands of other queer people, forever. This dream was postponed, but that was okay, because my social and intellectual life in Ann Arbor after I moved back was an embarrassment of riches. I got to spend seven happy years living with my brother, Andrew DeOrio (happy in spite of the fact that we still can’t agree whether there is a space in our last name), and his girlfriend-turned-fiancé-turned-wife Halley Crissman. The two of them taught me many important skills, including fiscal responsibility and raising urban chickens. Drew not only tolerated but actively helped me to throw monthly “homo potlucks” at our house. Long before they did any of that, my dad, Tony De Orio, equipped me with a non- judgmental attitude and a healthy suspicion of moralism. My mom, Janet DeOrio, helped me become the person I wanted to be by allowing me play with baby dolls when I was little and encouraging me to find my own way in college without coercing me into studying any preordained subject. It has been so great to get the opportunity to hang out with my little sister, Allison De Orio, and help her find a career that she wanted, too. And then there were all of the smart and interesting graduate students who I got to call my friends and who helped me to grow and change in countless ways. I learned more than I ever thought I would about Russia and Central Europe from my crunchiest friend, Eli Feiman, who also cooked me countless vegetarian meals and taught me how to screen print. Jeremy Johnson shared his rich YouTube life with me, introducing me to the joys of women’s gymnastics, Bulgarian sitcoms, and Border Security: Australia’s Front Line. v Jeremy’s husband, Levani Papashvili, grew up in Georgia (in Eurasia), and he didn’t speak much English yet when he first moved here, but we nonetheless connected quickly over our mutual love for early 2000s R&B. As a gay computer scientist who is also into daddies, Matt “Booty Matt” Burgess was the perfect fit to be roommates with me and my computer-scientist brother. The countless hours that Katie Rosenblatt spent negotiating our graduate student union contract and engaging in sundry other activist activities alongside her scholarship inspired me to want to become a scholar-activist like her. I am also grateful to Nora Krinitsky, who spent a great deal of time and energy working to improve the social and material conditions of graduate students in the History department. Ann Arbor was an amazing place to do queer scholarship. I met Cookie Woolner when I was a senior in college, when she was my Graduate Student Instructor for Gayle Rubin’s Introduction to LGBTQ Studies class. Cookie later became my colleague when I joined her same PhD program. My first year, after getting an ‘A-’ in a class threw me into a crisis of confidence, Cookie convinced me to not drop out by buying me a book and telling me she believed in me. Valerie Traub believed in my project back when I was afraid few people would. Scott Spector guided me through the writing of my honors thesis my senior year of college and helped shepherd me into Michigan’s History and Women’s Studies program (which I almost didn’t apply to until he told me I had to). Trevor Hoppe and I were both members of the “David Halperin reverse diaspora” cohort of graduate students at Michigan. The 2012 Sex and Justice conference that Trevor and David organized played a key role helping me consolidate the focus of this project. vi David Halperin wasn’t even my advisor, but it was amazing how much time and energy he spent on helping me launch this project. He carefully examined my prose line- by-line, helping me to understand where I was making mistakes and logical errors and how to improve them. He is also a great and supportive friend. I want to be a mentor to somebody someday just as he has been to me. I learned a lot about religion from Ben Hollenbach when we weren’t singing Ariana Grande songs at the top of our lungs or thinking through something that his advisor Gayle Rubin told one of us. It has been a distinct pleasure to get to work with Gayle over the last eight years. My senior year of college, in 2008, I took another course with Gayle called “Sex Panics in the US and UK since 1890” in which she expertly guided me in a term paper I wrote about youth liberation, the man-boy love movement of the 1970s and ’80s, and the age of consent. Gayle helped me get so excited about the topic that I ended up expanding it into a whole dissertation. Matt Lassiter, my advisor, was the person most responsible for helping me transition into becoming a historian of the modern U.S. The evenings that Matt and I spent at Old Town Tavern over the years were an education in how to think about American politics. As an advisor, he had a great sense of how far to push me without making me feel overwhelmed.