Panel. History Makes Faulkner: Manufacturing a Mid-Century Reputation

Mr. Cowley\u27s Southern Saga: Cowley, Faulkner, and Canon-Building at Mid-Century / Sarah E. Gardner, Mercer UniversityMob Fury: Paperbacks and the Popular Politicization of Faulkner / David M. Earle, University of West FloridaReading Faulkner\u27s Readers: Reputation and Postwar Reading Revolution / Anna Creadick, Hobart and William Smith College

The sexuality of Malcolm X

This article engages the controversy over whether Malcolm Little, who would become Malcolm X, had same-sexual encounters. A minute sifting of all evidence and claims, augmented by new findings, yields strong indication that Malcolm Little did take part in sex acts with male counterparts. If set in the context of the 1930s and 1940s, these acts position him not as a “homosexual lover,” as has been asserted, but in the pattern of “straight trade”—heterosexual men open to sex with homosexuals—an understanding that in turn affords insights into the black revolutionary's mature masculinity

Disability’s Other

The notion of “disability” relies on the concept of “normal.” Like disability, normality has a traceable history as an epistemological category. The mobilization of soldiers during World War II and, to a lesser degree, World War I, meant thousands of minds and bodies could be, and were, measured. A curious obsession with defining “normal” took hold, as doctors, scientists, and anthropologists gathered and applied statistical data to try measure “normal” bodies and describe “normal” character. Enlistees were subjected to psychological testing; sexologists used anthropometric methods to map the “normal” American body; and an interdisciplinary team at Harvard launched a longitudinal study of “normal men.” Taken together, such pursuits of “normality” were inextricable from midcentury anxieties about mental health, embodiment, masculinity, and the nation. By illuminating and gendering the “normal,” such forces functioned both to evoke and then exclude “disabled” bodies from the social body.</p