"Perverted Justice: (Homo)Sexuality and Female Juvenile Delinquency in U.S. Popular Culture, 1920-1940"

In this paper, I interrogate the racialized dimensions of conceptions of homosexuality amongst female juvenile delinquents in interwar U.S. popular culture. I argue that these “wayward” young women were popularly considered heterosexual in behavior and impetus: their stories, frequently spooled out in the nation’s periodicals and tabloids, were seen as tales of romance gone (terribly) awry. Despite this uneasy consensus, l lesbianism in female reformatories and prisons was considered widespread, and it garnered considered public debate over the meaning of social progress and female normalcy. Significantly, this was a debate split along racial lines. African-American community leaders understood homosexuality in mixed-race female reformatories as emblematic of problems in institutional management or, conversely, as cheap justification for racist practices, especially segregation. Conversely, white female prison authorities generally approached lesbianism amongst “their” inmates as a relatively benign manifestation of the female warmth and nurturance inherent to the rehabilitative process.

Drawing upon archival records and accounts in the popular press, I show how the resulting series of scandals, public controversies, and institutional shakedowns both shaped and reflected popular perceptions of sexual deviancy, criminality, racial divisions in the era, as well as in ensuing decades. Highlighting the significance of race within queer history and the history of carcereality, this paper offers a provocative rereading of “the prison lesbian,” resituating the entwinement of race, gender, and sexuality in the solidification of modern queer categories.