of interracial male-female sex, and within the very prison systems intended to discipline women who violated the norms of sexual respectability.
Ideas about racial otherness and gendered power, moreover, shaped the ways in which people experienced different-sex desire and/or constructed ideas of the sexually normal. For example, as Pablo Mitchell has compellingly revealed, the perception of an individual who “pushed the boundaries of ‘normal,’ early twentieth-century (hetero)sexual behavior” in territorial New Mexico could be all the more complicated if that person had indigenous, Hispano, and Anglo heritage. Work by Victor Jew and Mary Ting Yi Lui underscores that social anxieties regarding relationships between white women and men of color during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could result in Chinese and black men being demonized in ways that at once overlapped and diverged.45 As much as cross-cultural and interracial sex could facilitate degrees of mobility or even consolidations of power, interracial and cross-cultural sexual encounters could also generate pervasive notions about sexual deviance.
The historians Amy Sueyoshi, Nayan Shah, and Peggy Pascoe have produced rather revealing work on this front. Sueyoshi considers the case of Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet who had love affairs with a white man and with at least two white women after immigrating to the United States in the early twentieth century but who expressed himself as unabashedly heterosexual after he returned to Japan. The white women who loved him did so through the prism of their Orientalist assumptions about Japanese masculinity, Sueyoshi argues, even as Noguchi’s male privilege permitted him a freedom of movement and career mobility unavailable to the educated women he courted. His life story challenges notions of presumed heterosexuality while also undermining accounts that view same-sex affairs as sites of resistance: “Heterosexuality does not simply exist everywhere unless explicitly renounced. Nor are those who resist compulsory heterosexuality necessarily exclusively ‘gay.’ In Noguchi’s case, sexual resistance came in the ‘straightest’ package possible as he insistently declared his heterosexuality after his return to Japan.”46 Certainly, the US legal system cast Asians as sexual deviants. Nayan Shah argues that criminal prosecutions of South Asian men for sex with (usually younger, if still adult) white men produced narratives of “Oriental depravity” that attributed the source of sexual deviance to a foreign “other” and thus shored up the normatively masculine status of white “youth.”47 On another front, by 1940 many states had adopted anti-miscegenation laws that criminalized interracial marriage. As the historian Peggy Pascoe underscores, legislation against such intermarriage at once produced, contained, and reflected “complex and convoluted” definitions of “race.” Those laws, which defined miscegenation in ways that set “Whites” against other racially defined groups, motivated some opponents of these laws to argue that interracial, different-sex attraction was especially natural. Indeed, in making such assertions, black writers such as George Schuyler and J. A. Rogers “played a role in producing a modern culture that increasingly assigned its fears of unnaturality to homosexuality rather than to race mixture.”48 Overall, the sexually normal emerged in the twentieth century as a state of being steadily defined in opposition to a racialized and classed understanding of difference. Notions about the “unnatural” nevertheless shifted away from interracial, different-sex sexuality as the century wore on.
Class, ability, and immigration status are central if often overlooked variables in the operation of ideas about the sexually “normal” and the meaning of heterosexuality. The history of the modern United States is replete with examples of individuals who engage in “heterosexual” relationships yet do not benefit from the cultural esteem afforded to “heteronormative” individuals and their families. Poverty, gender nonconformity, nonmarital pregnancy, undocumented immigration status, medical condition, and other variables produce multiple categories of heterosexuality (or, alternatively, proliferate the varieties of heterosexual perversity) that crisscross the borders of heteronormativity. Scholars of disability studies have offered historians valuable ways of interpreting the meaning of “normal” and tracing its origins. Like the contrasting spectacles of the freak show and the beauty pageant, homosexuality and heterosexuality created hypervisible (and hyperdiscursive) ways of defining the normal through the disparagement and abjection of the “other.”49
The insights and pitfalls of whiteness studies, another field investigating the historical construction of norms that are asserted if not demonstrated to be privileged, may offer a useful comparison for the history of heterosexuality. In an assessment of whiteness studies, the historian Peter Kolchin summarizes scholars’ finding that throughout North American history, “whiteness, even while omnipresent, appears unrecognized except as that which is normal.” Both whiteness and heterosexuality concern social identities that define norms, and both describe positions of social, economic, legal, and political privilege. Yet those norms function in idiosyncratic and unpredictable ways. We should differentiate between different-sex desires and heteronormativity, just as scholars of whiteness differentiate between “color” and “race” in the history of “whiteness.” As Kolchin cautions, “in making whiteness omnipresent, whiteness studies authors risk losing sight of contextual variations and thereby undermining the very understanding of race and whiteness as socially constructed.”50 Attending to the distinction between different-sex desires and heteronorms allows historians to discuss different-sex desires before the advent of “heterosexuality” without resorting to anachronism, and it calls attention to the gendered, racial, and class-based contingencies and exclusions that constitute heterosexuality itself.
We must be much clearer about what heterosexuality is and more willing to employ other terms (among them, different-sex desire, marriage, reproduction, patriarchy) that heterosexuality is too often tasked with presumptively indicating. As Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper have written about the problematically expansive meanings of the term “identity,” we likewise highlight the “definitional incoherence” of heterosexuality. Brubaker and Cooper challenge scholars to recognize that if a term becomes meaningful only when prefaced by a list of its permutations, variability, flexibility, contingencies, or inconsistencies, then the individuals whose analysis includes that term need to consider seriously the possibility that another word or phrase might be more useful. Along those lines, we have asked, When are historians describing heterosexuality, and when are they investigating other forms of power or other operations of gender, marriage, family, or state authority?51 As Berlant and Warner have admonished, “Heterosexuality is not a thing. We speak of heterosexual culture rather than heterosexuality because that culture never has more than a provisional unity. It is neither a single Symbolic nor a single ideology nor a unified set of shared beliefs.” Instead, they argue, “heterosexuality” becomes a facile word to consolidate “widely differing practices, norms, and institutions.”52 In many ways, it is this paradox of heterosexuality, its tendency to produce a superstructural source of power relations that affect gender, race, class, and nation and its fundamental incoherency, that has motivated our project and inspired us to bring it to fruition.
Theory and Heteronormativity
In an article playfully titled “Queer Theory for Everyone,” the literary scholar Sharon Marcus argued for a more expansive interpretation of the insights of queer theory, particularly its emphasis on the instability of gender norms and sexual identities. Marcus urged other scholars not to limit queer theory’s relevance to those individuals who have identified as, or who have been identified as, LGBTQ and instead to deploy queer theory as a tool to understand sexuality more broadly. Such an approach, she suggested, would help the field move beyond an analytically flat contrast between all things “straight” and all things “queer,” and it would enrich
