In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America

Author Robert Corber's assertion that homosexual men and lesbians were intentionally excluded from the early-Cold War consensus is not surprising because, in the late 1940s and through the 1950s, the message to gays and lesbians clearly was: Conform or you will be at least marginalized and, perhaps, demonized. What is surprising is Corber's main premise that liberals primarily sought to "manage and contain the demands of women and minorities for greater recognition." This is a provocative thesis, and Corber uses the films made by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1950s "to demonstrate how these liberals achieved and retained hegemony over American society in the 1950s by producing a united cultural front." I disagree with some aspects of Corber's interpretation, but this is very interesting, occasionally exciting, reading. According to Corber, in The Vital Center, "one of the most influential books of the postwar era, when Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wanted to emphasize the conspiratorial nature of the American Communist Party, he compared it to gay male subculture." Corber explains that Schlesinger's purpose was two-fold: "it helped to consolidate the Cold War consensus by making membership in the Communist party and other forms of political dissent seem `unnatural'" and "it helped to insure that gender and nationality functioned as mutually reinforcing categories of identity by suggesting that engaging in homosexuality and other `perverted' sexual practices was un-American." According to Corber: "Americans who thought of themselves as part of the gay and lesbian subcultures that began to emerge in the postwar period in large urban areas...could be seen as disloyal citizens engaged in a conspiracy to overthrow the American government." This is a provocative theory.If, for the sake of this discussion, we accept Corber's thesis that both Communists and gay men and lesbians were perceived in the 1950s as conspiring to overthrow American government, his approach to gender issues in Hitchcock's films, which are at the center of this book, is fascinating. Corber's premise is "to emphasize the extent to which to which the construction of gender and sexual identity was governed by the discourses of national security." According to Corber: "Examining Hitchcock's films in the context of the emergence and consolidation of the national security state suggests that the juridical construction of `the homosexual' and `the lesbian' as security risks provided the American government with a mechanism for containing resistance to the postwar settlement." Corber seeks "to establish the crucial connections between gender, national identity, and national security in postwar American society." According to Corber: "I want to show that in the 1950s the construction of male and female subjectivity was conditioned by the identification of homosexuality and lesbianism as threats to national security." Corber makes his case most effectively in discussing two of Hitchcock's