Publics, Sex, and the History of Sexuality

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This session brings together three scholars interrogating the meanings and uses of public sex -- and its corollary elevation of private sex – to consider the meanings of sexuality in American history. For each of these scholars, the history of sexuality is complicated by the boundaries of private vs. public, the discourse of criminality, and the policing of sex acts that exceed the boundaries of the home. For Nikita Shepard, cruising public toilets challenges key assumptions about the history of sexuality by suggesting a more nuanced and historically informed sexual politics that emerges between the respectability of disavowal and the pastoralism of reclamation. For Kevin P. Murphy, tearoom sex at universities offers a space to interrogate differential treatment of students and non-students as a lens into understanding the role of sexuality and sexual danger in the shaping of the modern urban university. For Aaron S. Lecklider, peepholes in hotel rooms reveal historical processes connecting sexuality with the calcification of domesticity, narrowing definitions of the normative, and policing of the public, each of which corresponded with the nation’s transition to late capitalism. This panel will place sex that occurs in the margins at the center of a conversation about the meanings of sex and sexuality in American history.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Ungrievable Intimacies: What the History of Cruising in Public Toilets Tells Us About the Contingency of Sex - Nikita Shepard, Elon University

• ‘Observations on the Tearoom Controversy’: Universities and the Policing of Sexuality in the Late 20th Century - Kevin P Murphy, University of Minnesota

• “The Distance between Two Eyes”: Peepholes in American History - Aaron Lecklider, University of Massachusetts-Boston

Chair

• Patrick T McKelvey, University of Notre Dame

Biographical Information

Nikita Shepard is an Assistant Professor of History at Elon University and a scholar of gender, sexuality, race, and social movements in the modern United States. Their dissertation, "Embodied Politics: A Social Movement History of the Public Bathroom," examines toilets as sites and symbols of political conflict in the US over the past century. Their research has explored the politics of public sex and historical memory; intertwined histories of US radicalism and queer life; queer youth culture in the post-World War II US; data, surveillance, and privacy in the early gay and lesbian movement; the history of lesbian police officers; and nonbinary gender and the carceral state. Their writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Washington Post, Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, GLQ, Journal of the History of Sexuality, the Oral History Journal, Spectrum South, RFD, and the 2023 anthology Queer Data Studies.

Kevin P. Murphy is Northrop Professor, Professor of History, and affiliate Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota.  He also co-founded UMN’s Heritage Studies
and Public History graduate program, a collaboration with the Minnesota Historical Society, which has received support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Murphy has published in
the fields of public history, gender history, and queer studies.  He is the author of Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform (Columbia,
2008) and, with the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project, Queer Twin Cities (Minnesota, 2010). His work appears in academic journals including The Oral History Review, Critical
Ethnic Studies, and the Radical History Review.  He has co-edited a number of anthologies and special journal issues on the history of sexuality including, most recently, The Routledge History
of American Sexuality (2020). Murphy has been involved in a number of community-collaborative and curatorial endeavors, including The Renewal Project, Minnesota Transform
and the Climates of Inequality, Guantánamo Public Memory Project, and States of Incarceration Project of the Humanities Action Lab, for which he serves on the steering committee.

Aaron S. Lecklider is Professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is the author of Love's Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture (University of California Press, 2021) and Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). He has published essays in many journals and edited collections, and he writes regularly for media outlets such as Slate, Abusable Past, and The Washington Post.