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Full-Text Articles in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Attempted Book Bans: The Censorship Of Queer Themes In The 1950s, María J. Quintana-Rodriguez
Attempted Book Bans: The Censorship Of Queer Themes In The 1950s, María J. Quintana-Rodriguez
Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal
This article aims to explore queer book banning during the 1950s in response to Cold War national defense tactics. The decade witnessed the formation of the first public LGBTQ+ rights organizations in the United States as well as a rise in queer literature and publications. This publicization of queerness in society was seen as a rejection of traditional societal norms and threatened the Cold War-imposed gender ideology. In addition, the fear of Communist expansion led to the conflation of homosexuals and Communists, categorizing queerness and queer-related themes as immoral and as an interference in the United States' fight for democracy. …
Panic At The Picture Show: Southern Movie Theatre Culture And The Struggle To Desegregate, Susannah L. Broun
Panic At The Picture Show: Southern Movie Theatre Culture And The Struggle To Desegregate, Susannah L. Broun
Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal
This paper explores the complex desegregation process of movie theatres in the southern United States. Building off of historiography that investigates regulations of postwar teenage sexuality and recent scholarly work that acknowledges the link between sexuality and civil rights, I argue that movie theatres had a uniquely delayed desegregation process due to perceived sexual intrigue of the dark, private theatre space. Through analysis of drive-in and hardtop theatres, censorship of on-screen content, and youth involvement in desegregation, I contend that anxieties of interracial intimacy and unsupervised teenage sexuality produced this especially prolonged integration process.