The Gender of Racial Politics and Violence in America: Lynching, Prison Rape & the Crisis of Masculinity

Perhaps not since Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 classic An American Dilemma has a book appeared as synoptic and unsettling as The Gender of Racial Politics and Violence in America. Here William F. Pinar elucidates the great American dilemma, that peculiar institution of racial subjugation, especially its gendered - and specifically queer - psychosexual dynamics. Explicating in detail two imprinting episodes in American racial history - lynching and prison rape - Pinar argues that the gender of racial politics and violence in America is in some fundamental sense queer. This book will be of interest to students in education, cultural studies, African American studies, women’s and gender studies, and history.