An impassioned history of the politics of oppression

Does the black struggle for civil rights make common cause with the movement to foster queer community, protest anti-queer violence or discrimination, and demand respect for the rights and sensibilities of queer people? Confronting this emotionally charged question, Ladelle McWhorter reveals how a carefully structured campaign against abnormality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries encouraged white Americans to purge society of so-called biological contaminants, people who were poor, disabled, black, or queer. Building on a legacy of savage hate crimes—such as the killings of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd—McWhorter shows that racism, sexual oppression, and discrimination against the disabled, the feeble, and the poor are all aspects of the same societal distemper, and that when the civil rights of one group are challenged, so are the rights of all.

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[This book] is a powerful fact-based philosophical epic of oppression in Anglo-America along its two central axes—racism and sexuality.Vol. 23.4 2009

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. . . an important book on the study of race and sexuality studies. . . . By using definition, theory, and discussion of 'normality' and 'abnormality' as put forth by Foucault, McWhorter is able to highlight issues of sexual discrimination within the Anglo-American world. This text offers many insights into the topic of homophobia and discrimination in the US. . . . Highly recommended.September 2009

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McWhorter's expanded conception of racism is a path-breaking and far-reaching contribution to critical race theory, disability theory, queer theory, and Foucault scholarship that complicates some of the most accepted understandings of these fields and shows how these understandings have at different times, in unexpected ways, enhanced relations of subjection, domination, and control.