Sapphic Slashers

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Sapphic Slashers

In "Sapphic Slashers," Lisa Duggan masterfully examines two very distinct, yet both highly influential narratives that modernized the American values of race, class, gender, and sexuality well into the 20th century. Prior to her analysis of both the lynching and lesbian identity narratives, Duggan stresses that her intention is not to find direct connections between them. "The goal of the study is not to persuasively demonstrate an empirical link between lynching and lesbian love murder. The lesbian love murder story and the lynching narrative were not simply analogous or parallel tales of sexual pathology leading to political disfranchisement; they thematized different antagonisms and motivated different forms of social action that cannot be represented as equivalent."1 Though it is evident both narratives do not contextually share many similarities, it is clear that black men and white women did share many similarities in terms of the circumstances endured, the obstacles overcome, the unjust outcomes, and more importantly the yearning for political, economic, social, and sexual freedoms- freedoms that were out of their grasp from the force that had grappled them for an entire century, the white male patriarch cal society.

Despite the successes following the Civil War