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Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity. By Lisa Duggan. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. xii, 310 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8223-2609-4. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8223-2617-5.)
In Sapphic Slashers, Lisa Duggan offers a cultural study of the lesbian love murder narrative as a product that depoliticized and trivialized the struggle of women for political equality, economic autonomy, and alternative domesticities. The focus is the murder of Freda Ward by her "girl lover," Alice Mitchell, on January 25, 1892, in Memphis, Tennessee. Juxtaposed to the murder is the lynching in Memphis less than two months later of Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart. The African American men were operators of the People's Grocery Company, which had drawn the wrath of a competing white grocer. The lynching narrative is used as a secondary...