Journal of the History of Sexuality (2009) - The Queer Histories of a Crime: Representations and Narratives of Leopold and Loeb
Details
- article: The Queer Histories of a Crime: Representations and Narratives of Leopold and Loeb
- author(s): David S. Churchill
- journal: Journal of the History of Sexuality (01/May/2009)
- issue: volume 18, issue 2, pages 287-324
- DOI: 10.1353/sex.0.0046
- journal ISSN: 1043-4070
- publisher: University of Texas Press
- keywords: Academy Awards, Alfred Hitchcock, Chicago, Illinois, Frank Lloyd, Grace Kelly, Hyde Park, London, London, England, New York City, New York, Old Bailey, London, Oscar Wilde, Patrick Hamilton, Production Code Administration, Representations (1990) - Anal Rope, Robert J. Corber, Rope (1948), San Francisco, California
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Abstract
Building on the work of literary scholar Sander Gilman, Franklin's argument parallels historical anthropologist Matti Bunzl's insightful assertion that Jews and queers have played similar roles as abject others in the process of modern state formation, in which a national community seeks to reproduce itself as etiinically homogeneous, healthy, and moral. This analysis is productive for understanding the case within the context of the rampant nativism and anti-Semitism of the 1920s, but what is less clear is how central Jewishness was to the operation of narratives of perversion and sexual padiology of the 1930s and the postwar decades. Following the work of historian Gail Bederman, I argue that same-sex sexuality and gender are situated in a "historical ideological process," a process through which people are configured and identified and, as such, receive cultural capital and audiority according to the types of individuals they are seen to be.9 The murder of Franks and the trial of Leopold and Loeb are part of a long tradition of crime stories that have moved easily between newspapers, tabloids, "true crime" accounts, popular fiction, and, more recendy, film and television. The biographies of the murderers, their class backgrounds, the dynamic of their relationship to one another were used to link homosexuality with murder and pathology.
