My Current Interests

Karen J. Taylor
Department of History

My current interests are theories about identity, popular culture, and semiotics or discourse. I see those three things as fundamentals of human interaction and thus extremely important in our understanding of American (or any other) history. We construct our identities from the discourses around us in what I think of as social nexuses. A social nexus is an arena where we define who we are and what our experiences mean. It is made up of all the voices (vocalities) which participate in the definition of meaning, from our families, to our friends, to our colleagues at work or school, to our perception of ourselves as members of communities and nations. In those social nexuses the most powerful voices we listen to as we construct our identities are our parents and siblings, our friends, and the media as it is represented in popular culture. Because our identities determine who we want to perform ourselves as, and therefore how we act, they are central to how we both read and tell our histories. Those interests have shaped my current research.

Works in progress

Articles

"Why the Marlboro Man Has That Far-away Gaze: Gay Cabillaros and Colorful Cowboys."

An essay on the recently uncovered fact that many American cowboys were gay and/or African American, and how that changes our understanding of American History, based on secondary research and film and literary criticism. Forthcoming in Black Que(e)ries, ed. Joseph Dorsey, 2000.

"Homosexuals, Irishmen, and Jews: The Marginal Centers of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Savannah Society."

An examination of Savannah elites reveals that some of its most prominent men were, stereotypically, the Others whom reformers in northeastern cities blamed for social decline. Their achievements demonstrate the ways liminality could facilitate personal gain. Based on original research.

"Soap Operas, Gothic Novels, and the Romance of the Rapist."

An essay on the propensity of "women's" fiction to portray appealing men as rough, mysterious, and quite possibly dangerous, based on film and literary criticism.

Books

Sex, Vows, and Obligations: A History of Women and Men in America

The juxtaposition of the histories of men and women suggests that American history is about men and women attempting to work out the contradictions between two inherited values systems by, ironically, continually re-invoking the gender roles in which those contradictions reside. My argument is based on the following conclusions. The pre-historic birth of gender created two competing political economies: those that dispersed wealth (usually egalitarian, matrilineal societies), and those that accumulated wealth (usually hierarchical, dominating, patrilineal societies). The colonization of America brought together advanced egalitarian, surplus-dispersing societies and expansive, hierarchical empires, the competing values of which became embedded in American society. Gender roles, the basis of social order in both political economies, provided a means of accommodating both systems, men taking on the role of accumulation and women dispersal, but, because the values of those systems conflicted, gender roles themselves became oppositional. Self-interest, liminality, hierarchies of race, class, nationality, occupation, and age, and tensions between conformity and non-conformity, reinforced both systems, but the fact that conflicting values are embedded in men's and women's identities has made it impossible for either system to prevail.

Patriarchy, Fraternity, and Hard Work: A Tale of Men in Three Cities.

A detailed study of the ways patriarchy structured men's lives in Boston, Denver, and Savannah from the 1840s to WWI, based on original research. Men in these cities in some ways represent a cross-section of American manhood in the nineteenth century, and therefore offer us an opportunity to explore regional permutations of discourses about manhood. These men had much in common, from the pressure to provide for their families and exhibit manly prowess to their beliefs in the necessary evil - and inherent even-handedness - of capitalism, but their geographical, political, and social environments, the heroes they modelled, and the ways they borrowed and used each others's heroes, shaped them in distinctly different ways. The variety of their understandings of themselves, their relationships to women, and their place in the economic and political life of America, created the stereotypes and identites from which we have structured the twentieth century.

Ideologies of Suffering and Deprivation: A History of Our Participation in Our Own Oppression.

Since the emergence of the major religions of the world people have rationalized - and formulated elaborate ideologies about - human suffering and humanity's inability to peacefully exist. Neither beliefs in a better hereafter nor a conviction that those more fit to survive can help those less able, nor even the sustained fight for equality which has characterized American history, have managed to prevent our seduction by, or submission to, the hierarchies of status which keep us in thrall. We have developed powerful critiques of our past and present situations, and persuasive visions of our possible futures, but have failed to construct a convincing plan for the bridge from here to there. Community action is a necessary beginning, but we need to revaluate the distribution of wealth and the sharing of political responsibilities in ways that recognize and build upon the importance of time and personal well-being as sites of power, liberty, and status.