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 interracial sex was especially crucial since the same racialized sexual stereotypes that developed as a way to differentiate nonwhites from whites could also serve to generate cross-racial desire. Even as white men insisted that black men posed a threat to white women because of their ostensibly heightened sexual appetite, their alleged lack of self-control, and their supposedly enormous penises, they worried that white women freed to explore their own sexual satisfaction might find such men appealing. Sexual racism—or ideas of racial difference articulated through constructions of sexual difference—had perhaps the unintended consequence of turning many racial “others” into attractive sexual partners; stereotypes about black men particularly threatened whiteness since they portrayed them in ways that emphasized their sexual prowess and that could, theoretically, make them attractive to white women, the guardians of white racial purity.16 The emergence of heterosexuality, Stokes thus argues, led white men to focus obsessively on the dangers of racial mixing, to engage in a “compulsive imagining of interracial sex” between black men and white women.17
Given the threat that heterosexuality posed to whiteness, it seems perhaps inevitable that Stokes finds that American literature from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demonstrates the importance of white male homosociality to the project of white supremacy. It was relationships between white men—who took on the project of controlling white womanhood—that served to protect whiteness, Stokes suggests. Homosocial kinship between white men was far safer for whiteness than was the heterosexual desire of men for women—or, even worse, of women for men of their choice. Even relationships between white men that blurred the line between the social and the sexual were thus less of a threat to the existing racial and social order than differently sexed interracial relationships were. As Stokes writes, in turn-of-the century American literature, “homoeroticism becomes, paradoxically, the only structure of desire that can keep whiteness white.”18 Robert Young, in his 1995 work Colonial Desire, makes the same point more explicitly. Same-sex sex, he writes, “posed no threat because it produced no children; its advantage was that it remained silent, covert, unmarked. . . . In fact, in historical terms, concern about racial amalgamation tended if anything to encourage same-sex play.”19 Heterosexual interraciality, given its ability to blur racial lines through the birth of mixed-race children, proved more threatening than homosexuality to a racial system predicated on notions of white purity.
Reproducing the Nation
It was not just white racial purity that heterosexuality threatened; its new “pleasure-centered dispersal of sexual energy” had within it the seeds “of the fall of the white state,” Stokes concludes, a possibility brought to the screen in the famous 1915 silent film Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. Griffith.20 Birth of Nation dramatized Griffith’s version of the history of Reconstruction, as the South sought to rebuild after the Civil War. In Griffith’s version, based loosely on Thomas Dixon’s novels The Klansman and The Leopard’s Spots, the threat to white southerners was both the mentally and socially inferior freed blacks who no longer accepted their rightful place as subordinate to whites and the northern whites who falsely believed that blacks could ever be equal to whites. The political drama focuses on the birth of the Ku Klux Klan and its efforts to restore white supremacy in the South, but its romantic drama focuses on two heterosexual couples, each involving one child of the pro-Union white northern Stoneman family and one child of the pro-Confederacy white southern Cameron family. For the Stoneman-Cameron couples to achieve their happy ending, the white northern partners must both come to recognize the threat that blacks present to the social order and to realize the danger posed by interracial relationships. Here the most conniving blacks are those who are racially mixed themselves, and what black men really want as the symbol of their newfound freedom is a white wife. In Birth of a Nation, interracial sex threatens not only white racial purity—indeed, the character presented as the paragon of white female purity, a teenager known only as “Little Sister,” jumps to her death rather than face defilement at the hands of a black man—but also the fledging post–Civil War national order. The white northerners can only be happily united in matrimony with their white southern lovers when they realize how threatening black political, social, and sexual equality really is. As one of the intertitle cards in a climactic scene near the end of the silent film reads, “The former enemies of North and South are united again in defense of their Aryan birthright.”21 Birthing a nation, the film makes quite clear, required promoting certain kinds of relationships while prohibiting others.
Heterosexuality is not simply the sexual desires and practices that are socially defined as “normal.” Rather, as Stevi Jackson writes, “the coercive power of compulsory heterosexuality derives from its institutionalization as more than merely a sexual relation.”22 Heterosexuality is institutionalized through laws and public policy that privilege certain kinds of relationships and familial arrangements over others. Government policies that promote marriage, that encourage male-headed households, that link government benefits to one’s marital status, and that view marriage and family creation as a solution to poverty or juvenile delinquency have all worked to portray the ideal citizen as heterosexual. As Joane Nagel explains in her work on the intersections of race, sexuality, and ethnicity, “Implicit in the idea of the nation . . . are certain prescriptions and proscriptions for sexual crossings—what good citizens should and should not do sexually, and whom they should and should not have sex with.”23 Gender plays a vital role in this nation building, with women given responsibility for reproducing the nation and men for running and defending it. As a result, nationalist politics goes “hand-in-hand” with forms of “hegemonic masculinity” that promote and affirm a patriarchal, heteronormative social order that justifies monitoring and controlling women’s sexuality. Nationalist discourse across the globe, Nagel concludes, defines “proper places for men and women,” “valorize[s] the heterosexual
