Race, Sex, Marriage, and the State

Abstract

book to win so many major awards from so many different fields, but Pascoe's brilliant and fascinating study is that kind of book. It is historical in its over one-hundred-year sweep of laws banning interracial marriage in the United States, with sophisticated read ings of legal cases in various regions across the country. At the same time, Pascoe's anal ysis is richly informed by sociological, anthropological, and feminist theories of race-making, the state, law, and the intersec tions of race, class, and gender: it is an inter disciplinary book that deserves serious attention from many audiences. Although Pascoe was alive to receive awards for What Comes Naturally, she died over a year later after a long struggle with ovarian cancer. The paired essays here (one by an historian and legal scholar and the other by a sociolo gist and scholar in American Studies) were written to highlight the multiple contribu tions this book makes to history, sociology, legal studies, ethnic studies, and feminist studies, and as a tribute to Pascoe's consider able intellectual legacy. What Comes Naturally traces the criminali zation of miscegenation—laws that banned not only interracial marriage, but interracial sex—from the Reconstruction era to the