Abstract
Many scholars, including Lisa Duggan, Siobhan Somerville, and Sander Gilman, note that the development of discrete sexual categories in the late nineteenth century coincided with the discursive and legislative deployment of racial theories to support coercive regimes of racebased social stratification between black and white citizens at the turn of the twentieth century.2 Discourses of racial and sexual pathology contributed significantly to juridical measures (like legal segregation) and acts of racial terrorism (like lynching) that prevented black Americans from accessing the full entitlements of citizenship after slavery's formal end.