values, and they limit their public displays of affection. The history of interraciality may tell us, in short, that heteronormative heterosexuality is today “constituted as much by the ‘other’ being incorporated in a subordinate position within the dominant category as by the ‘other’ being excluded.”67 Even though the division may no longer be solely between same-race/interracial or hetero/homo, heteronormativity in this reading still creates a hierarchy between “good sexual citizens” and those “bad” sexual citizens who engage in erotic behaviors unmoored from intimacy and monogamy.68
Or—and this final possibility seems as likely to me as the others—the legalization of interracial marriage and at least a lessening of the taboo against interracial relationships may signal that we are near the end of the sexual regime known as heterosexuality. Jonathan Ned Katz ends his book about the invention of heterosexuality with evidence that the sexual regime was already becoming less stable beginning in the 1970s and 1980s. Katz points to increasing divorce rates, falling marriage rates, less distinction between “gay” and “straight” sex acts, and a general convergence of gay and straight lifestyles.69 While Katz does not include anything about race on his list, the growing number of interracial couples might be yet another indicator that the era of heterosexual supremacy is coming to an end.
Whatever the future holds for heterosexuality, it is clear that its past is inextricably linked to interraciality. Yet these links remain woefully unexplored. Scholars of sexuality rarely identify monoraciality as a key prerequisite to heterosexual privilege, while scholars of interracial relationships have failed to recognize heterosexuality and heteronormativity as important influences on heterosexual interracial intimacy. In other words, heterosexuality remains an area where monoraciality is assumed, while interraciality is an area of intellectual inquiry where heterosexuality is assumed.70 But as this chapter has attempted to demonstrate, neither interraciality nor heterosexuality can be fully understood without reference to the other.
Notes
1. Rebecca Ann Bach, “17th and 18th Century Othello and Desdemona: Race and Emerging Heterosexuality,” in Feminisms and Early Modern Texts: Essays for Phyllis Rackin, ed. Bach and Gwynne Kennedy (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2010), 81–98.
2. Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality (Boston: Beacon, 2012), xvi.
3. Bach, “17th and 18th Century Othello and Desdemona,” 81.
4. Quoted in Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 92.
5. Katz, Invention of Heterosexuality.
6. Kevin Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), xi, xii.
7. See Siobhan B. Somerville’s seminal work, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Her argument about the ways in which race served as a key reference point for understanding homosexuality is discussed in more detail later in the essay.
8. For more on the process of constructing whiteness as a space of “purity,” see Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Joanne Nagel, Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Interactions, Forbidden Frontiers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 37–62.
9. The 1661 Maryland law mandated that a “free-born” English woman who married a black slave serve the same master during the life of her husband and that any children of the couple would be slaves as well. There is a large literature on the history of antimiscegenation laws in the United States and the role such laws played in shaping racial and gender hierarchies. See, for example, Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). A good introduction is Peter Bardaglio, “‘Shamefull Matches’: The Regulation of Interracial Sex and Marriage in the South before 1900,” in Sex, Love, and Race: Crossing Racial Boundaries in North America, ed. Martha Hodes (New York: NYU Press, 1999), 112–40.
10. Governor and Council of Virginia, “Statutes (1630–70),” in Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion, ed. Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 229.
11. Theodore Bilbo, Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization (Poplarville, MS: Dream House, 1947), 57–58.
12. Bilbo, 57–58.
13. Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997), 20; Mason Stokes, The Color of Sex: Whiteness, Heterosexuality, and the Fictions of White Supremacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 16.
14. For more on this, see Katz, Invention of Heterosexuality, 88.
15. Mason Stokes, “White Heterosexuality: A Romance of the Straight Man’s Burden,” in Thinking Straight: The Power, Promise, and Paradox of Heterosexuality, ed. Chrys Ingraham (New York: Routledge, 2005), 133.
16. For a good overview of racial sexual stereotypes and their social implications, see Nagel, Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality.
17. Stokes, Color of Sex, 17.
18. Stokes, 18.
19. Robert C. Young, Colonial Desire (1995), quoted in Stokes, “White Heterosexuality,” 146.
20. Stokes, “White Heterosexuality,” 146.
21. Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. Griffith, based on the novel by Thomas Dixon Jr. (Triangle Film Corp., 1915).
22. Stevi Jackson, “Sexuality, Heterosexuality, and Gender Hierarchy: Getting Our Priorities Straight,” in Ingraham, Thinking Straight, 18.
