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Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. By Siobhan B. Somerville. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. xii, 259 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-82232407-5. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8223-2443-1.)
Broadly interested in the convergences of racial formation and discourses on homosexuality, Queering the Color Line focuses on the extended beginning of the twentieth century. The increasingly policed but contested boundaries between racialized bodies and the emerging categories of homo/heterosexual definition were not simply a historical coincidence, Siobhan B. Somerville argues, but rather crucially intertwined and mutually constitutive across a range of cultural practices-in particular, sexology, cinema, and literature. In Somerville's estimation, her historical project creates a more compelling understanding of discourses on racialized and sexualized corporeal legibility, and it bridges the conceptual and organizational separation between critical studies on race and those on sexuality.
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