著者

兼子 歩

出版者

ジェンダー史学会

雑誌

ジェンダー史学 (ISSN:18804357)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.3, pp.5-18, 2007 (Released:2011-11-01)

参考文献数

49

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Lynchings and race riots symbolize the most offensive and tragic aspect of racism in the American South at the turn of the 20th century. Many historians and sociologists have researched the motivations behind lynching in American history and discovered complicated political, social and economic contexts for this phenomenon. Yet, however significant these contributions may be toward deepening our understanding of lynching, they tend to focus excessively on the cause of lynching, thereby ignoring the truly unique characteristics of lynching.This essay pays less attention to the causes of lynching than to the effects of the actions of lynchers and the discourses produced by those who justified lynching of black people. In casting light on the Black Rapist Myth, in which black men were considered to be growing more brutally lustful toward white women and more inclined to rape them, we can discover complex effects of lynching practices in terms of gender, sexuality, race and class.The Black Rapist discourse functioned in four ways: to justify disenfranchisement of African- American citizens; to terrorize and drive a dividing wedge into the solidarity of the Black community; to elevate white women onto the pedestal of "white chastity and purity," thereby containing them within the regime of white patriarchal supremacy; and to undermine interracially cooperative political and social movements such as the Readjusters, the Greenback-Labor Party, the Knights of Labor and the Populists.The discourse of the Black Rapist and lynching suggests that gender and sexuality historically interact with other socially constructed categories such as race and class. Further, the Black Rapist Myth implies that gender and sexuality are truly constitutive of racial formations in American history.