Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity

by Lisa Duggan

On a winter day in 1892, in the broad daylight of downtown Memphis, Tennessee, a middle class woman named Alice Mitchell slashed the throat of her lover, Freda Ward, killing her instantly. Local, national, and international newspapers, medical and scientific publications, and popular fiction writers all clamored to cover the ensuing “girl lovers” murder trial. Lisa Duggan locates in this sensationalized event the emergence of the lesbian in U.S. mass culture and shows how newly “modern” notions of normality and morality that arose from such cases still haunt and distort lesbian and gay politics to the present day.
Situating this story alongside simultaneously circulating lynching narratives (and its resistant versions, such as those of Memphis antilynching activist Ida B. Wells) Duggan reveals how stories of sex and violence were crucial to the development of American modernity. While careful to point out the differences between the public reigns of terror that led to many lynchings and the rarer instances of the murder of one woman by another privately motivated woman, Duggan asserts that dominant versions of both sets of stories contributed to the marginalization of African Americans and women while solidifying a distinctly white, male, heterosexual form of American citizenship. Having explored the role of turn-of-the-century print media—and in particular their tendency toward sensationalism—Duggan moves next to a review of sexology literature and to novels, most notably Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness . Sapphic Slashers concludes with two appendices, one of which presents a detailed summary of Ward’s murder, the trial, and Mitchell’s eventual institutionalization. The other presents transcriptions of letters exchanged between the two women prior to the crime.
Combining cultural history, feminist and queer theory, narrative analysis, and compelling storytelling, Sapphic Slashers provides the first history of the emergence of the lesbian in twentieth-century mass culture.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Queer, LGBT, True Crime, Lesbian, Historical

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Lisa Duggan is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Duggan was president of the American Studies Association from 2014 to 2015, presiding over the annual conference on the theme of "The Fun and the Fury: New Dialectics of Pleasure and Pain in the Post-American Century."

Duggan earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Duggan is also one of the editors of queer commentary website, Bully Bloggers, developed with José Esteban Muñoz, Jack Halberstam, and Tavia Nyong’o. Duggan has described herself as a "commie pinko queer feminist". She was written on topics including feminist responses to pornography and homonormativity.

Reviews

[Katherine Addison · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is so much better than its atrocious title, it isn't even funny.

Duggan is talking about the cultural work that stories do. In particular, she's talking about the way that stories were mobilized in late nineteenth century America to protect the status quo, i.e., the power and privilege of white men. The story she focuses on is what she calls the "lesbian love murder" (a phrase which, I admit, only gets more awkward each time you read it). In particular, the murder of Freda Ward by Alice Mitchell in Memphis, January 1892. Duggan counterpoints the story of the murder and its aftermath with another important story in Memphis in 1892: the beginning of Ida B. Wells' anti-lynching campaign.

Duggan is candid and straightforward about her book's limitations. It's not a study of lynching in the South, nor a study of the anti-lynching movement. Nor is it really about sexual identity or gender performance. It's about why Alice Mitchell was judged insane and committed for life to the Western Hospital for the Insane in Bolivar, Tennessee, and how that trajectory shaped the way stories about women loving women would be told. It's about how stories get mobilized and why and how they persist despite their poisonous untruthfulness; she traces the effect of the "lesbian love murder" through both the medical literature (Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis) and fiction (up to The Well of Loneliness).

Duggan is more interested in the cultural work of the story than in the historical people, but she doesn't give me the feeling, as Amy Gilman Srebnick did, that she finds the historical people inconvenient. It's clear Duggan has done her best to represent Alice Mitchell and Freda Ward accurately, and that she worked to uncover as much of their lives as she could. She respects them, and I respect her for that.

And I think she makes an important point in juxtaposing Alice Mitchell and Ida B. Wells, that nothing happens in a vacuum. The lynching story and the "lesbian love murder" story are not isolated from each other. They're part of the same cultural matrix, and they illuminate different aspects of the same fiercely, ruinously oppressive drive: the drive of white men to maintain their economic, political, social, and sexual power.

[soap]

1/31/23

DNF pg 82

The material was rather dry and the book itself wasn’t really what I was expecting.

[Laura]

DNF pg 62

This is 100% my own nonfic focus issues. The intro mentions this started as a dissertation or something, and it shows. It’s dense to read and while I’m interested in the subject, especially as Duggan compares and contrasts lynching at the same time with the Mitchell-Ward Murder and how the media presented both events/phenomena. I just am having difficult processing what I’m reading and retaining it.

[kaye clam · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little too wordy in places that it wasn’t needed as if the paragraphs needed to be fluffed up. Otherwise it’s an interesting read, I just started to lose interest in the middle of every chapter trying to search for each connection between the endless newspaper recitations and run on sentences. It’s a good book don’t get me wrong, but it’s a thick read and takes effort to get through despite interesting points on racial and queer history being manipulated in the news.

[Gillian · Rating 3 out of 5]

wow, dense. but good and very helpful in understanding sapphic relationship of american modernity.

[Danielle · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise of this book was intriguing. In her introduction, Lisa Duggan says that she'll explain how newspaper coverage of the Alice Mitchell-Freda Ward murder and southern lynchings covered by Ida Wells intersect to expose the development of American modernity during the 1890s. The remainder of the book, however, seemed comprised mainly of extensive reproductions of newspaper articles absent the clear and relevant analysis I expect from professional historians. To be fair, this was published in 2000 and clearly adapted from her dissertation, so probably not Duggan's strongest work. But having to spend page after page, chapter after chapter, trying (and largely failing) to figure out exactly what Duggan's argument was, let alone decide whether she proved it, absolutely exhausted me. I still have no idea what her "original contribution" was supposed to be, other than that she said the lesbian love murder story posed a threat to traditional white domesticity (or perhaps more precisely, that lesbianism as an alternative domesticity threatened 19th-C white familial order). Given that Mitchell (the murderer) was promptly determined insane and carted off to the asylum, I found very little evidence of white male anxiety vis-a-vis the Mitchell-Ward case. Duggan did not cite letters, diary entries, or other original archival sources to prove the existence of white male anxiety over masculine women generally or Alice Mitchell specifically. The newsprint she cited did not (to my mind) prove anything other than that the case was sensationalized and understandably drew significant attention from contemporaries.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

fascinating.

[Cookie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lisa Duggan is my academic idol. A hot older femme who researches and writes about lezzies, sex, and pop culture in American history. Read all about the Memphis "lesbian love murder" of 1892!

[AJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

this b00k rulez!

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

too wordy, but a good treatment of race/white privilege intersecting with the construction of leztory in the US and morality in the court system