Grims Dungeon

On a winter day in 1892, in the broad daylight of downtown Memphis, Tennessee, a middle way woman named Alice Mitchell slashed the throat of her lover, Freda Ward, killing her instantly. Local, nationwide, and global newspapers, medical and scientific publications, and well-liked fiction writers all clamored to cover the subsequent “girl lovers” murder trial. Lisa Duggan locates in this sensationalized occasion the emergence of the lesbian in U.S. mass culture and demonstrates how newly “modern” notions of normality and morality that arose from this sort of cases even now haunt and distort lesbian and gay politics to the existing day.
Situating this tale alongside concurrently circulating lynching narratives (and its resistant variations, this kind of as these of Memphis antilynching activist Ida B. Wells) Duggan reveals how tales of intercourse and violence were vital to the enhancement of American modernity. Even though cautious to position out the variations among the public reigns of terror that led to many lynchings and the rarer cases of the murder of 1 woman by one more privately motivated woman, Duggan asserts that dominant variations of the two sets of tales contributed to the marginalization of African People in america and females while solidifying a distinctly white, male, heterosexual kind of American residency. Obtaining explored the role of turn-of-the-century print media—and in distinct their trend headed for sensationalism—Duggan moves following to a assessment of sexology literature and to novels, most notably Radclyffe Hall’s The Properly of Loneliness. Sapphic Slashers concludes with two appendices, a single of which presents a detailed summary of Ward’s murder, the trial, and Mitchell’s eventual institutionalization. The other presents transcriptions of letters exchanged among the two women prior to the crime.
Combining cultural historical past, feminist and queer concept, narrative analysis, and compelling storytelling, Sapphic Slashers offers the initial background of the emergence of the lesbian in twentieth-century mass culture.