“The Distance between Two Eyes”: Peepholes in American History

• In Event: Publics, Sex, and the History of Sexuality

Abstract

In March 1990, Deborah and Michael Whaley checked into the Holiday Inn in Waterboro, South Carolina. Sometime in the middle of the night, the couple awoke to find a ray of light streaming into their room from behind the room’s bathroom mirror. Peering into the light, they discovered a clear sightline of the maintenance corridor behind the wall, producing a vantage point from which, they imagined, one could easily peep into their room. Upon further examination, a private investigator discovered up to 100 peepholes in this one hotel. Because Holiday Inn was a chain that used the same blueprint for roughly 1/3 of their motels, this architecture was imagined to have created a perfect climate for peeping, an act facilitated by a mid-century yearning for corporate efficiency that dovetailed with a stepped up policing of sexual deviance. Reading backwards from a vast array of cases within media accounts and American courts that cropped up in the 1990s, this paper studies the underexamined relationship between peepholes and the navigation of public and private sexualities in U.S. history. Whereas the nineteenth century had seen courts admitting evidence of lewd acts observed by peepers through windows and holes in doors in order to prosecute other sex crimes (such as adultery and sodomy), the porous boundaries of public versus private spaces over the next century were increasingly plugged up through the calcification of domesticity, narrowing definitions of the normative, and policing of the public, each of which connected with the nation’s transition to late capitalism. This paper examines several case studies to suggest how sexuality, capitalism, and criminal justice were transformed into strange bedfellows over one hundred years of American history.

Author

• Aaron Lecklider, University of Massachusetts-Boston