Race and Sexuality

Abstract

Pioneering work on the relationship between race and sexuality can be dated from the late 1970s. Early academic, political, and artistic work by women of color in particular gave voice to women’s simultaneous experiences of heterosexism, racism, sexism, and so on. Queer of color work broadly theorized the role of race and racism in knowledge, politics, and concepts of sexualities. Historical work on empire, slavery, and colonialism further demonstrated this fact, while contemporarily focused transnational work does the same for early-21st-century processes. Given the importance of intersectional and transnational analysis, research on race and sexuality has become a growing and central feature of sexuality studies. Such research does not treat “whiteness” as a taken-for-granted category of analysis, but instead unpacks how sex, sexuality, and race are always co-constituted. With emerging theoretical lenses such as Queer of Color Critique, the study of racialized sexualities has become crucial to any exploration of sexuality. In addition, studies of race and sexuality look at how they have historically informed and continue to inform one another, in ways that include thinking about empire, Racisms, carcerality, surveillance, criminology, deviance, desire, and changing understanding of the erotic. Both intersectional and transnational work consider multiple racial formations and take into account the multiple genealogies of sexuality studies, centralizing work that is informed by women of color feminisms, transnational feminisms, queer theory, and black feminist thought. To best understand racial and sexual formations, race and sexuality studies allow us to think of the two as always informing one another. Thus it shifts our attention from primarily thinking about stable identity categories and culture to centralizing people’s relations to power.