Queering Abolition

Abstract

In ways that have not been significantly explored, abolitionist media is animated by ideological presuppositions about the inevitability of domestic familial life and the naturalness of gender roles. This chapter argues that abolitionist media is a significant agent for the nineteenth-century in the development of what comes to be called heteronormativity in the twentieth century. By focusing queer critique on a domain like abolition, whose established historiography has been little focused queer sexuality, this chapter wagers that we can rethink and reimagine the stakes of even our most familiar archives in critical terms.