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Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas (Series Q) Paperback – November 22, 2000
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Newton’s provocative essays detail a queer academic career while offering a behind-the-scenes view of academic homophobia. In four sections that correspond to major periods and interests in her life—”Drag and Camp,” “Lesbian-Feminism,” “Butch,” and “Queer Anthropology”—the volume reflects her successful struggle to create a body of work that uses cultural anthropology to better understand gender oppression, early feminism, theatricality and performance, and the sexual and erotic dimensions of fieldwork. Combining personal, theoretical, and ethnographic perspectives, Margaret Mead Made Me Gay also includes photographs from Newton’s personal and professional life.
With wise and revealing discussions of the complex relations between experience and philosophy, the personal and the political, and identities and practices, Margaret Mead Made Me Gay is important for anyone interested in the birth and growth of gay and lesbian studies.
- Print length360 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateNovember 22, 2000
- Dimensions6 x 0.89 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100822326124
- ISBN-13978-0822326120
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From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
“Esther Newton’s work . . . has changed anthropology, feminist studies, and queer studies in remarkable ways. . . . Newton’s methodological innovation has less to do with crafting new empirical tools and more to do with a creative and inspired mode of listening and participating in the cultures she studies.”—from the Foreword by Judith Halberstam
“I was looking for any way out, some Mad Hatter to lead me down a rabbit hole into a world where I didn't have to carry a clutch purse and want to be dominated by some guy with a crew cut and no neck...So that when I read Coming of Age in Samoa, my senior year in college, I was, to put it mildly, receptive."”—from the Introduction by Esther Newton
“This is a wonderful collection. Newton is a powerful intellectual whose reflections on her own work not only illuminate her life but also the relation between the academy and the social movements of the last thirty years.”—Elizabeth L. Kennedy, author of Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community
“[Margaret Mead Made Me Gay] is honest, moving on the personal level and provocative on the academic level.”―Toni McNaron, Women's Review of Books
“[A] collection of highly readable, aways provocative essays.”―Michael Schwartz , Gay & Lesbian Review
“[G]roundbreaking. . . . Newton has contributed a brilliant collection that will enrich and promote the field of gender studies.”―B. Medicine , Choice
“This butch can write! Ranging from the witty and playful to the most seriously analytical, her prose is always precise, rich, felicitous, never marred by postmodern neologisms or other jargon. . . . Not only anthropologists, but historians, sociologists, and psychologists, all thos who value gay studies, will find much to delight and to ponder in this stimulating volume.”―Jeffrey M. Dickemann , CLGH Newsletter
“This collection of essays by cultural anthropologist Esther Newton can be considered an intellectual autobiography. . . . Always thought provoking and interesting, Newton never descends into the dryness of academic writing like many others, which makes it accessible to everyone.”―Lambda Book Report
“A welcome collection of Esther Newton’s research and personal essays . . . . This volume is both provocative and accessible enough to be used successfully in undergraduate courses on field methods, women’s movements, and gay and lesbian studies. It may also be a stimulating resource in a graduate course on professional socialization in anthropology or sociology. This book can serve as a compelling example of the epistemological complexities of feminist memoir projects. . . . Overall this book will be of benefit to anyone who is interested in queer and/or feminist ethnography . . . .”―Jane Ward, Gender & Society
“This collection—an intellectual genealogy of Newton’s work from the last 30 years—reveals the prescience and durability of her earliest writings. . . . Her newer pieces prove just as stimulating and vital.”―Publishers Weekly
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Esther Newton is Professor of Anthropology and Kempner Distinguished Professor at State University of New York at Purchase. She is the author of several books, including Mother Camp, a groundbreaking study of American drag queens, and Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town. Among other distinctions, she was Scholarly Advisor for the documentary film Paris Is Burning, a founding member of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, and member of the Advisory Group for Stonewall History Project.
Product details
- Publisher : Duke University Press Books; First Edition (November 22, 2000)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 360 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0822326124
- ISBN-13 : 978-0822326120
- Item Weight : 2.11 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.89 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,061,887 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #310 in Physical Anthropology (Books)
- #1,641 in LGBTQ+ Demographic Studies
- #102,698 in Biographies (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Esther Newton is a writer, scholar and retired college professor. She was born in New York City in 1940 to Virginia Bash, who was the only child of a novelist and a US Army General. Newton's father, William H. Miller, who was a "Jewish hunk" according to Virginia, refused to marry her and left the scene. In 1945 Virginia married Saul Newton, who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Esther was a so-called "red diaper baby" because all these parents had met in and were members of the Communist Party in the 1930s.
In 1948 Saul and Virginia divorced and Virginia moved to California and became a noted breeder of Papillon dogs. Esther was miserable in California and after five years left home to finish her senior year in high school at the Stockbridge School in Massachusetts. During high school she began to think she might be a lesbian, but not until 1965 did she finally come to peace and self acceptance, so great was the social pressure against homosexuality at that time. She did not come out publicly as a lesbian until 1974, when she got the job security of a tenured professorship.
After majoring in history and the University of Michigan, Newton attended graduate school in Anthropology at the University of Chicago, receiving her Ph.D. in 1968. Her dissertation was on drag queens and their performances in Chicago and Kansas City, which was published as a book, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America, which ultimately became a foundational text in sexuality and gender studies. She taught some of the earliest courses on lesbian and gay history while teaching at Purchase College for thirty-five years. She finished out her teaching career at the University of Michigan in the Women's Studies Department, retiring in 2016.
Her work has has been translated into a number of other languages and received honors including the Ruth Benedict Award of the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists of the American Anthropological Association, and a lifetime achievement award from the same organization. Her latest work, My Butch Career: A Memoir, has been favorably reviewed in the LA Review of Books, Curve Magazine and the New Yorker among others, and she has done a number of interviews and readings, including one at Manchester University in England. Her memoir is a finalist in the Lesbian Memoir Biography category of the Lambda Literary Society (Lammys).
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Whether you find yourself rooting with liberals or conservatives there is no level of scholarship to be found anywhere the truth has been subdued.
Many of these essays were written early in the second wave of feminism, so the issues they engage point up the degree to which Newton has been ahead of her time. That she narrativizes the essays as the historical life of an academic (herself) attests to the fact that she is still ahead of her time: everything-- political, academic, social, sexual--is lived. There are no categories which happen outside of the people who make them.
Because of Newton's autobiographical, comfortable style, it should be noted that the book, although clearly academic, is a fairly easy read.