Heterosexual Histories. Группа авторов
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the history of heterosexuality. And it explores what a focus on heterosexuality might reveal about the history of interracial sexuality, too. My analysis takes seriously the historian Kevin Mumford’s call that we consider interraciality as a category of analysis. In his book Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century, Mumford contends that “interracial relations on the margins” are “central to understanding the character of modern American culture.”6 What does heterosexuality look like when we move interraciality from the margins to the center? What do we learn about the power and limits of heterosexuality, as well as how it became and has served as a normative category that structures politics, society, and culture, when we focus on the history and experience of interracial couples?
Drawing on both my own work on black-white interracial marriage and a wide scholarship on interracial sexual and marital relationships throughout US history, I argue that interraciality and heterosexuality have a complicated and ambivalent relationship, one that ensures that the experiences of heterosexual interracial couples differ not only from white heterosexual couples but also from same-race nonwhite ones. Interraciality magnifies and overdetermines heterosexual interpretations of male-female interactions. As a result of the intense sexualization of the color line, all kinds of cross-racial male-female interactions are presumed to be sexual. Heterosexual interracial couples are thus hypervisible, while same-sex desire across racial lines is frequently invisible and culturally illegible. Yet even as cross-race male-female relationships are incessantly read as heterosexual, they are not heteronormative and have not been accorded the full privileges of heterosexuality.
While we know, thanks to the work of Siobhan Somerville, that race played an important role in shaping cultural conceptions of the emerging category of homosexuality, scholars have paid less attention to how race has worked to construct the boundaries of what constituted “proper” heterosexuality.7 Yet for much of US history, cross-race different-sex relationships have been as “queer” in their challenge to heterosexuality as homosexuality has. Heterosexual interracial relationships have historically threatened notions of white racial purity. They have challenged a social and national order constructed to maintain white supremacy and white male patriarchal privilege. Stigmatized as illicit and deviant, they served as an “other” against which the heterosexual norm could define itself. In many ways, different-sex interracial couples, especially those involving a white woman, have proved as much of, or even more of, a threat to the heteronormative social order as same-sex couples have.
Reproduction
Without the regulation of different-sex interracial relationships, it would have been nearly impossible to build a race-based society where privileges and opportunities were granted based on a racial hierarchy. Colonial and later state prohibitions against different-sex interracial relationships helped construct and define racial boundaries and categories and in particular allowed for the imagining of whiteness as a space of racial “purity,” uncontaminated by the taint of “blood” of racial groups that were rapidly being defined in opposition to whiteness. If European settlers to the Americas had freely mixed with both the indigenous people and the Africans imported as laborers, race as we know it today may not have ever developed. But the colonies and later states chose a different course, passing laws that had two major functions: to create a sharp division, especially between those considered white and those of African descent; and to ensure that race would correspond first with slave status and later with privilege.8
The web of antimiscegenation laws that marked the American landscape in some form or another for over three hundred years (from the passage of the first law targeting interracial sex in Maryland in 1661 to the 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia that declared all remaining state antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional) sought to create and protect a mythic “pure” whiteness from the contamination of interracial mixing.9 Virginia’s 1662 law decreed that “any Christian” who fornicated with a black man or woman would have to pay double the fines typically incurred for such an act. That law also announced a profound break with English common law because it ruled that a child’s legal status would follow from that of its mother rather than its father. The law laid out the reasons for the change quite clearly. “Whereas some doubts have arrisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or free, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.”10 White men, in other words, could have sex with enslaved women, and any resulting children would inherit their mother’s slave status. But mixed-race children of white women would be born free. Thus, all interracial relationships between white women and black men potentially threatened the system of racial slavery, as well as the authority of white men.
These regulations and social customs helped create the astounding racial fiction that mixed-race children born to white women would “pollute” the white race, while those born to women of color would not affect whiteness, as long as the white father did not try to legitimate them through marriage or some other legal means. The greater policing of white women’s reproductive capacities reflected a patriarchal perspective on heterosexual sex: men were the active partners, who through the sex act transferred their semen—and metaphorically their blood—to women. But the passive female partners did not have the same potential to pollute men. Thus, a white man “injected” his white blood into nonwhite races when he had sex with a woman of color. But a white woman was polluted and tainted by nonwhite blood if she had sex with a man of color. The segregationist Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo starkly acknowledged this gendered construction of interracial sex in a 1947 screed against integration. “We deplore the conditions which have poured a broad stream of white blood into black veins,” Bilbo wrote, “but we deny that any appreciable amount of black blood has entered white veins. As disgraceful as the sins of some white men may have been, they have not in any way impaired the purity of the Southern Caucasian blood.”11
Bilbo reassured his readers that southern white women had “preserved the integrity of their race” so that no one could “point the finger of suspicion in any manner whatsoever at the blood which flows in the veins of white sons and daughters of the South.”12 Yet his seeming need to defend white female purity reflects the fundamental insecurity that heterosexuality causes for whiteness: even as whiteness must be reproduced to ensure a secure future for the white race, the very process of reproduction carries within it the seeds of the destruction of whiteness itself. Concepts of race are inherently linked to the body; race offers a mechanism to categorize bodies in a way that reproduces itself. Heterosexual reproduction thus operates as both the mechanism to ensure the maintenance of racial difference and the site that endangers the production of race.13
Cross-racial sex, especially that between white women and nonwhite men, had to be policed in order to construct racial categories and then later to maintain them. The late nineteenth-century emergence of heterosexuality as a sexual system only intensified fears about the dangers that different-sex interracial relationships could pose to white racial purity. Heterosexuality both placed erotic satisfaction at the core of modern sexual identity and revalued women’s sexuality in a positive way.14 As the literary scholar Mason Stokes explores, this shift to a pleasure-driven sexuality increased anxiety about racial mixing. Heterosexuality “located desire outside family, race, and nation,” Stokes argues, thus bringing with it a heightened possibility for perversion and corruption.15
Regulating