Prizes

Announcement of Prize Competition Winners: 2004

CLGH 2004 PRIZE ANNOUNCEMENT

Audre Lorde Prize
The Audre Lorde Prize for an outstanding article on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, and/or queer history published in English during 2002 or 2003.

Prize winner: Sharon Marcus (Columbia University) "Reflections on Victorian Fashion Plates" Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14:5 (2003): 4-33

Honorable mention: Henry Abelove (Wesleyan University) "New York City Gay Liberation and the Queer Commuters" in Abelove, Deep Gossip (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 70-101.

Gregory Sprague Prize
The Gregory Sprague Prize for an outstanding published or unpublished paper, article, book chapter, or dissertation chapter on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, and/or queer history completed in English by a graduate student during 2002 or 2003
.
Prize winner: Margot Canaday (University of Minnesota), "Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship under the 1944 G.I. Bill" Journal of American History 90:3 (December, 2003):935-957.

Honorable mention: Terence Kissack (Graduate Center – City University of New York), "‘Urnings,’ ‘Lesbians,’ and other strange topics’: Sexology and the Politics of Homosexuality," Ph.D dissertation chapter.

Citations
Lorde Prize
Sharon Marcus (Prize winner)
Marcus creatively utilizes color plates from Victorian fashion magazines to demonstrate how homoerotic desire pervaded the lives of middle- and upper-class Englishwomen in the period approximately 1840-1880. Her complex readings of fashion illustrations show, with unusual clarity, how different homoeroticism is from lesbian sexuality and how the former by no means always carries a progressive or subversive message. Her article breaks new ground in the study of consumption, pornography, erotic fantasy and the female gaze, greatly furthering our understanding of gender and sexual paradigms in the Victorian period and today. It is also significant methodologically and theoretically. Its use of visual materials is exemplary, and it puts queer theory and feminist theory into creative dialogue with each other, while showing how both need to be rethought and reconfigured.

Henry Abelove (Honorable mention)
By reading the political history of the Gay Liberationists of late 1960s and early 1970s against the writing of some canonical lesbian and gay American writers (James Baldwin, Elizabeth Bishop, Jane Bowles, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and others) Abelove greatly enriches our understanding of the fledgling movement’s political rhetoric and preoccupations. He posits a previously under-explored cultural link between the militant, anti-colonial politics that shattered the closet door after the 1969 Stonewall Riots and a diverse group of writers, all of whom became estranged from the United States during the anti-homosexual hysteria of the Cold War, and all of whom spent large parts of the rest of their lives living abroad. The article is also innovative in positing New York City as part of a larger cultural community whose physical extent might reach as far as Morocco or Brazil.

Sprague Prize

Margot Canaday (Prize winner)
The G.I. Bill of 1944 was the most sweeping piece of social legislation ever passed in the United States. Canaday looks at this landmark legislation from the perspective of the thousands of gay servicemen excluded from its benefits because of undesirable discharges. Using an impressive array of sources she carefully documents the manner in which Veteran’s Administration officials extended to heterosexual (and disproportionately white) male breadwinners the fullest rewards of citizenship, while systematically denying them to those perceived as failing to conform to the postwar ideology of the American family. Her article supplies a new and intimate view of the way post-World War II race, gender and sexual norms were enforced, who was helped by them and who was hurt. It also provides important historical background for current debates about the relationship of gays and lesbians both to military to family life and to military service.

Terence Kissack (Honorable mention)
Through a close reading of Emma Goldman’s correspondence and a range of other sources, Kissack argues for the centrality of a pro-homosexual message to her and other American anarchists’ world view. Some of this story has been told before, but not at this level of detail, or with a sense of how committed many of the anarchists were to rethinking American sexual mores and taboos. Kissack demonstrates the fearlessness with which Goldman and others publically aired their views, and well as their particular enthusiasm for European sexologists and sex radicals such as Magnus Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis, and Edward Carpenter. He also shows the appeal the anarchist movement had for some homegrown lesbians, gays and bisexuals. The chapter revises our understanding of American anarchism at the same time that it casts a more sympathetic eye than some historians have done at the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century sexologists’ attempts to understand homosexuality.


CLGH Prize Committee 2004
Margaret Hunt (Amherst College)
Anne Rubenstein (York University)
Tim Retzloff (University of Michigan)

For further information on CLGH and CLGH prizes, please contact

Leisa D. Meyer, Associate Professor
Lyon G. Tyler Department of History
P.O. Box 8795
The College of William and Mary
Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795
757-221-3737 (w)
757-259-0488 (h)
ldmeye@wm.edu