Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality » (New Edition)

Regina Kunzel is professor of history, professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies, and the Paul R. Frenzel Land Grant Chair in Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945.

Sex behind bars has long elicited intense scrutiny, fascination, and anxiety. In Criminal Intimacy, Regina Kunzel tracks these varying responses and reveals their foundational influence on modern thinking about sexuality and identity. By exploring the sexual lives of prisoners and the sexual culture of prisons over the past two centuries-along with the impact of a range of issues, including race, class, and gender; sexual violence; prisoners' rights activism; and HIV/AIDS-Kunzel discovers a world whose surprising plurality and mutability reveals the fissures and fault lines beneath modern sexuality itself.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, including physicians, psychiatrists, sociologists, correctional administrators, journalists, and prisoners themselves-as well as depictions of prison life in popular culture-Kunzel argues for the importance of the prison to the history of sexuality and for the centrality of ideas about sex and sexuality to the modern prison. In the process, she deepens and complicates our understanding of sexuality in America.

Winner of the American Historical Association's John Boswell Prize, the Modern Language Association's Alan Bray Memorial Book Award, the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality's Bonnie and Vern L. Bullough Award, and the Lambda Literary Award

Times Higher Education

"Criminal Intimacy successfully conveys the continued sidelining of the complexities of sex in prisons. For even in the face of the constant fear of violence in so many American prisons, Kunzel depicts a world in which sexual love between men, or between women, once it is given the attention it deserves, can still threaten to unsettle dominant conceptions of stable sexual identities. It is this that makes Kunzel''s book essential reading for anyone interested in learning more about the multifarious exchanges between sexuality and identity, in any context."-Times Higher Education

Introduction 1

1 "An Architecture Adapted to Morals" 15

2 "Every Prison Has Its Perverts" 45

3 The Problem of Prison Sex in Mid-Twentieth-Century America 77

4 "The Deviants Are the Heterosexuals" 111

5 Rape, Race, and the Violent Prison 149

6 "Lessons in Being Gay" 191

Epilogue 225

Notes 239

Bibliography 311

Index 355

Illustrations follow page 190