Interracial Intimacy Research Articles

Interracial Unions and Racial Assortative Mating in an Age of Growing Diversity, Shifting Intimate Relationships, and Emerging Technologies

While racial assortative mating and interracial unions have been a central interest in the study of race relations and family demography since the early twentieth century, there have been marked changes in the social contexts in which these processes have taken place in recent decades. This review article examines three important shifts: (a) the rise of population diversity and its impact on traditional views of racial integration, (b) the changing institution of marriage in American life, and (c) the increasing centrality of technology. We discuss how these societal shifts have challenged traditional understandings of preferences, opportunities, and intermediaries in the mate selection process, as well as new opportunities for interracial intimacy that these changes have introduced. We conclude with a discussion on conceptual issues and promising future research directions.

The Architecture of Desire: How the Law Shapes Interracial Intimacy and Perpetuates Inequality, Solangel Maldonado [NYU Press, 2024, 240pp, £29.99 (hardback)

Review of The Architecture of Desire: How the Law Shapes Interracial Intimacy and Perpetuates Inequality, Solangel Maldonado [NYU Press, 2024, 240pp, £29.99 (hardback)]

“Hot hoes” and “dirty whites”: racial contestation and fetishization of multiracial and contested white women

The fear of race-mixing through procreation has been strategically propagated in the Unites States as a force for social control, even though interracial intimacies have taken place since the 1600s. Fetishization can be considered an inversion of that fear. In contemporary times, the college and graduate school years constitute seasons wherein individuals learn from interpersonal, romantic, and sexual relationships, and both fear of race-mixing and fetishization show up in this arena. This manuscript considers the narratives of 14 contested white cis women students at a predominantly white postsecondary institution and delineates the construction of the paradoxical “Hot hoe/Dirty white” subjectivity through discourse. The discourses of white supremacy shape the experiences of postsecondary students, ordering romantic and sexual possibilities and engendering subjectivity. Considering racialized subjectivity through discourse illuminates the role of hegemonic norms and adds important insights to contemporary, widespread developmental models of racial identity extant in social science literature.

“Undisputed Masculine Supremacy”: A Subversive Imagination of Moral Masculinity in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie

19th-century female author Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s 1827 novel, Hope Leslie, or Early Times in the Massachusetts, portrays the eponymous Heroine, Hope Leslie, who is born and orphaned in England and comes to a Puritan community in Massachusetts, New England. Hope’s trans-Atlantic experience allows her a peculiar position between a Native American community and a white settler one, and this trope has been popular in Hope Leslie criticism. While many critics focus on the female characters and their interracial intimacy, this paper attempts to explore peripheral male characters and undiscussed themes in the novel by shedding more light on Mr. William Fletcher, Hope’s uncle, delving into a reading of Hope Leslie as a blueprint for a uniquely American form of manhood, in reaction to traditional English values, and established norms of masculinity that do not apply in the New World, on American soil. Sedgwick’s critique on masculine ideals as problematic in terms of spirituality and morality, as the author champions women in the domestic sphere as occupying an ideal space. Looking more closely at the unconventional American father figure as a symbol of moral masculinity, this paper examines how Sedgwick’s radical vision of alternative masculinity is manifest in her fiction.

Unlawful Intimacy: The Criminalization of Interracial Relationships in Progressive-Era Chicago

This article shows how Progressive-Era state actors in Chicago employed open-ended, low-level criminal charges directed at regulating the moral health of the community to criminalize interracial relationships—even though interracial marriage had been legal in Illinois since 1870. Capacious legal definitions of offenses like vagrancy, disorderly conduct, adultery, and fornication allowed police officers and judges to delineate moral and immoral relationships along racial lines. Using newspaper articles, writing from contemporary social reformers, and court reports, this article reconstructs the treatment of interracial couples in the Chicago legal system to show how discretion in criminal law can reinforce racial hierarchy. I offer three historical arguments: first, that individual arrests and prosecutions of interracial couples labeled lawful, interracial relationships as a form of unlawful “vice,” second, that large-scale raids on spaces for interracial socialization reinforced the criminality of interracial intimacy in a segregated city, and third, that singling out interracial couples allowed the state to exercise control through intrusive forms of punishment like probation and institutionalization.

Hide the Outcasts: Isaiah 16:3–4 and Fugitive Slave Laws

AbstractIsaiah 16:3–4, part of an obscure prophecy about ancient Moab, appeared frequently in nineteenth-century writings about slavery in the United States, particularly in the context of opposition to fugitive slave laws. The verses were linked with other biblical passages to create a network of proof texts to justify assisting persons who escaped slavery. Eventually, the line “hide the outcast” from verse 3 took on a life of its own as an abolitionist slogan, largely independently of its biblical context. Rebuttals of these uses of the texts by anti-abolitionist writers, which began to appear in the 1850s, criticized the decontextualization of the verses, and one novel response attempted to link the text to interracial intimacy. Despite these rebuttals, the use of the text continued apace throughout the 1850s–1860s in response to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and the execution of John Brown.

Affective Chemistries of Care: Slow Activism and the Limits of the Molecular in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous

In this article, I explore care work outlined and performed as emotional and erotic support labor in Ocean Vuong’s novel, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous (2019). The illnesses around which Vuong stages salient scenes of care work are not those easily addressed by surgery or a course of antibiotics. Instead, the novel focalizes those who are “[sick] in the brains” (122)— formally diagnosed with a mood disorder like bipolar, observed for behaviors of PTSD, addicted to narcotics, or grieving the loss of a body part. The unique contribution of Vuong’s novel to those interested in health and environmental humanities, disability studies, and reproductive labor, I argue, requires noticing that its portraits of care work come interleaved with its depictions of atmospheric dangers. Those atmospheric dangers include weather effects as well as sequelae from military weapons deployment and the un(der)regulated circulation of slowly violating chemicals. In relation to the theme of molecular intimacies, I introduce several heuristic terms: molecular entreaty, affective chemistries of care, hypo-interventions and intimate or slow activism, the latter two building on the work of science and technology scholars. Drawing out On Earth’s focalization of irruptions of care in atmospheres dense with chemistry, this essay both models a humanistic, decolonial and intersectional method that (re)values crip practical knowledge, and limns the novel’s provocation as to the political limits of queer interracial intimacy.

The Anglo-Indian Household: Paradoxes of Hierarchy and Intimacy in Imperial Domestic Space

This article subjects the personal narratives about the domestic spaces of expatriate Britons in India, or Anglo-Indians, to close scrutiny. The households of expatriate Britons were intended to mirror the racial distance of the formal imperial spaces, like clubs, parks and gymkhanas. But far from being an extension of public spaces that separated the colonised and the coloniser, the households embodied the multiplicity of social spaces. Interpersonal relations in these households complicated this bifurcation substantially. Space played a crucial role in the construction of a hierarchy–intimacy paradox in the households, where interracial intimacies existed in tandem with imperial hierarchies.

Compulsory interracial intimacy: Why does removing the ethnicity filter on dating apps not benefit racial minorities?

This paper reflects on the impact of dating apps’ removal of ethnicity filters on racial minority users. Many scholars, mass media, and dating app users believe that ethnicity filters mark an institutional endorsement of racism which is embedded in digital infrastructure. Accordingly, they have called for the removal of these filters. This advocacy is based on the assumption that expressions of racial preference are inherently racist. In the summer of 2020, many dating apps removed ethnicity filters to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. However, I argue that racial minorities often express intra-racial desires through ethnicity filters to valorize their own sexual capital, evade discrimination or fetishization, and gain sexual opportunities. Consequently, removing the ethnicity filter makes it harder for racial minorities to connect. Even worse, it creates a culture of compulsory interracial intimacy, exposing minority users to more vulnerability and racial trauma. Moreover, the lack of discussion on whether to remove filters other than ethnicity reveals the negligence of intersecting oppressions on dating apps. Thus, this paper highlights the need to be more attentive to racial minorities’ alternative uses of filters for self-empowerment, and to intersectional oppressions that should be tackled in designing inclusive dating apps.

Love is Not Colorblind: An Investigation of the Racial Hierarchy of Mate Preferences

Not my type is the usual invocation when rejecting potential lovers who don’t align with the racial hierarchy of mating preferences. The largely unchallenged norm of interracial intimacy aversion, particularly how the desire for some racial groups and rejection of others reinforces existing racial inequities, is inconsistent with the blanket notion of greater interracial acceptance. Our investigation assessed the openness of monoracial and multiracial individuals to form interracial romantic relationships. We partially replicated an interracial mate preference known as the Multiracial Dividend Effect, finding that most monoracial groups equally preferred same-race lovers and interracially dating multiracials, and they preferred interracially dating someone multiracial over any monoracial group, whereas Multiracials were more open to interracially dating any monoracial group than monoracials were to interracially date each other. In addition, Hispanic-White and East Asian-White multiracials were more open to interracially dating White individuals than their respective monoracial in-group members, and East Asian-White multiracials were more open to interracially dating all monoracial minority groups than monoracial East Asian participants. Finally, half-White multiracials are more likely to be in partial-racial couples (e.g., former President of the United States Barack Obama is Black-White multiracial and the former First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, is Black) whereas interminority multiracials are more likely to be in 100% interracial/non-overlapping couples (e.g., Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris is interminority Tamil Indian and Black whereas the Second Gentleman of the United States, Doug Emhoff, is White).

Fantasy States: Nationalism, Intimacy, and Transgression in South African Women’s Political Memoirs

This article reads a set of South African women’s political memoirs as both propaganda pieces and fantasy texts. Inspired by Joan W. Scott’s recent explorations of feminist fantasy, the article draws attention to a set of scenes that recur across diverse political memoirs: scenes of interracial physical and domestic intimacy and scenes of collective national voyaging. Reading these depictions as fantasies, this article argues, lets us understand these women memoirists as propagandists for a national liberation cause. In their texts, these women espouse a particular and gendered nationalism that insists on public and private intimacy as a key component of a (fantasized) free South Africa, even as they acknowledge the unease inherent in seeking out these intimacies. This reading disrupts scholarly accounts that have tended to marginalize women as contributors to nationalist discourses, and it enables a deeper analysis of the tensions of race and interracial intimacy that beset the antiapartheid movement.

Contributors

Contributors

Panic at the Picture Show: Southern Movie Theatre Culture and the Struggle to Desegregate

This paper explores the complex desegregation process of movie theatres in the southern United States. Building off of historiography that investigates regulations of postwar teenage sexuality and recent scholarly work that acknowledges the link between sexuality and civil rights, I argue that movie theatres had a uniquely delayed desegregation process due to perceived sexual intrigue of the dark, private theatre space. Through analysis of drive-in and hardtop theatres, censorship of on-screen content, and youth involvement in desegregation, I contend that anxieties of interracial intimacy and unsupervised teenage sexuality produced this especially prolonged integration process.

Panic at the Picture Show: Southern Movie Theatre Culture and the Struggle to Desegregate

This paper explores the complex desegregation process of movie theatres in the southern United States. Building off of historiography that investigates regulations of postwar teenage sexuality and recent scholarly work that acknowledges the link between sexuality and civil rights, I argue that movie theatres had a uniquely delayed desegregation process due to perceived sexual intrigue of the dark, private theatre space. Through analysis of drive-in and hardtop theatres, censorship of on-screen content, and youth involvement in desegregation, I contend that anxieties of interracial intimacy and unsupervised teenage sexuality produced this especially prolonged integration process.

Criticism as Proposition

What is possible when empire is uncertain about its authority? This essay looks to West Indian Emancipation, a moment of crisis, for a method. As emancipated peoples of African descent became wage laborers, and set the terms of their work, the sugar industry required free—unbonded—labor. With the arrival of Asian indentured labor, however, it became more difficult to manage the imbrications of race, gender, sexuality, capital, and labor. Proposition takes advantage of this epistemological and enunciative quandary. By dwelling in cultural and historical archives, proposition offers new possibilities about emancipation’s present and the futures that might follow. This essay considers this matrix through an 1871 correspondence between the secretary of state for the colonies and Governor Rawson William Rawson of Barbados and the Windward Islands. The question at hand: “the increasing disposition of Creole women to form connection with Chinese and Indian immigrants.” This question does not compel a fantasy of interracial intimacy. Rather, it suggests that good work and the racial family were crucial to the life of the plantation—and that unsanctioned “connection” might hasten its demise. Proposition is a critical mode of speaking back, a mode of testing alternative timelines and scenes of freedom.

Marginal Citizens: Interracial intimacies and the incarceration of Japanese Canadians, 1942–1949

AbstractFollowing Japan’s 1941 attacks on Hawai’i and Hong Kong, Canada relocated, detained, and exiled citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry. Many interracial families, however, were exempted from this racial project called the internment. The form of the exemption was an administrative permit granted to its holder on the basis of their marital or patrilineal proximity to whiteness. This article analyzes these permits relying on archival research and applying a critical race feminist lens to explore how law was constitutive of race at this moment in Canadian history. I argue that the permits recategorized interracial intimacies towards two racial ends: to differentiate the citizen from the “enemy alien”; and to regulate the interracial family according to patriarchal common law principles. This article nuances received narratives of law as an instrument of racial exclusion by documenting the way in which a new inclusive state measure sustained old exclusions.

Ishtyle : Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife by Kareem Khubchandani

Reviewed by: Ishtyle : Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife by Kareem Khubchandani Sony Coráñez Bolton (bio) Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife by Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Xxiv + 262 pp. $34.95 paper. ISBN: 978-0-472-07421-1. Kareem Khubchandani's Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Night Life is a performance studies ethnography centering the subcultural lives of queer South Asian (mostly) men in Bangalore and Chicago. Using an innovative form of participant observation that speaks to Khubchandani's positioning in these communities as a drag artist (whose nom de guerre is LaWhore Vagistan), he elicits spectacularly rich ethnographic descriptions that read against the presumed heteronormativity of "Bollywood tropes, narratives, and choreographies" (xiv) while also embracing the queer meanings that are inherent to them as they [End Page 507] play out Indian nightlife—indeed, "drag [is the] research method" (xiv). His is a refreshing study written with verve and rigor that should be widely read and embraced in Asian American and queer of color studies. Khubchandani defines "ishtyle" as a "form of vernacular performance" or "accented style" emerging in response to the social normalizations of multinational capitalism. Ishtyle "enables alternative affective, erotic, and social transactions by accenting the night with vernacular articulations of Indianness" (2). Such "accents" are so conceptually powerful because they "not only wield the performative force of history they have acquired in repetition to conjure gender, race, and class, but [also] their kinetic force physically 'punctures' space and time to bring bodies into new proximity and relation" (9). In other words, ishtyle is a repertoire of stylized acts, speech, and sartorial flair that forges queer community through its ontological difference from mainstream cultural formations shaped by Orientalism and white supremacy. At base, this is a book about subjectivity and agency—subjecthood that you cannot miss (and wouldn't want to) for how flamboyant, queer, jocular, witty, and irreverent it is. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the politics of accented styles under respectability regimes in Bangalore. Chapter 1 analyzes the contradictory cultural impulses of Hindutva normativity that draw on British colonial antecedents and the anxieties around westernization under economic modernization. Chapter 2 takes up the unenviable though brilliantly ironic task of analyzing the politics of social dance under legal mandates in Bangalore outlawing it between 2006 and 2014. Chapter 3 speaks to the complicated politics of interracial desire centered on the Boystown "gayborhood" in Chicago. A centerpiece chapter of the study in general, it substantiates the overall claim that Indianness and its queer brownness are a performative node around which we can come to a more nuanced understanding of race, sexuality, nation, and desire not limited to South Asian diasporic subjects. I was struck by the attention given to the fungibility of brownness that causes misrecognitions between Latinx and Indian bodies—an interchangeability that was a welcome and profound contribution that exceeds the seemingly narrow parameters of "gay Indian nightlife." I found this so valuable because it provided a deep and powerful justification to foreground interracial encounter rather than perpetually affixing queer subject-making to a central signifying whiteness. Through vim, humor, and candor emblematic of an intellectually rigorous "ishtylized" ethnography, Khubchandani implores us to prioritize "axes of desire" that "center queer interracial intimacies" that displace the "sexual racism and unrequited desire from white men" (100). Sign me up. Chapter 4 speaks to the author's own grassroots efforts to build queer Desi community in Chicago through the serialized party Jai Ho! Here the analytical framing of ishtyle is extended to theorize its "capacity … to unsettle whiteness [End Page 508] and its accompanying Orientalism in gay nightlife" (111). While I do not doubt ishtyle's ability to potentiate such a critique, I was curious about a tendency to overly romanticize queer migrant cultures, particularly vis-à-vis settler colonialism. The author reflects on the "ability to emplace migrant subjects, not as settlers with possessive attachment to land but as performers who have permission to feel at home every once in a while" (111, emphasis mine). This opens up a productive conversation on the ways that queer migrant culture generally in settler colonial countries might present implicit and deeply structural contraventions to indigenous sovereignty. I wish...

Marie Piquemal, the "Colonial Madam": Brothel Prostitution, Migration, and the Making of Whiteness in Interwar Dakar

This article reconstructs the life of Marie Piquemal, a French woman turned colonial madam, to explore the world of white prostitution in colonial Dakar, Senegal, in the first half of the twentieth century. White brothel prostitution required the migration of white French women from the metropole to supply these institutions. By providing white French men with sexual access to white sex workers, brothel keepers like Piquemal helped to curb the development of interracial intimacy at a time when sexual-conjugal unions across the color line were becoming increasingly controversial. This article thus argues that brothel keepers played a key role in reifying racial boundaries upon which colonial rule rested, especially within an empire that claimed to be race blind. Although French authorities were aware of the migration of French women for sexual labor between metropole and colony, they condoned this process in an effort to maintain the racial status quo.

Review of Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race

Interracial relationships have served as prime ground for exploring how race and racism influence interpersonal interactions. Social scientists studying the West—the United States in particular—have dedicated many years of research to documenting the frequency and contours of interracial friendships, interracial marriage, and the manifestation of sexual racism across racial lines. Despite the tendency of Western “multicultural” settler societies using interracial intimacy as a barometer for societal advances, the number of studies exploring interracial intimacy in other international contexts is not as extensive as such in the United States. Even fewer studies have engaged in cross-cultural comparisons of interracial relationships. It is for this reason, among others, that Chinyere Osuji’s Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race makes an incredibly needed contribution to the study of the social construction of race and how this social construction shapes, and is shaped by, one of our most important social institutions: the family.

Multiracial Categorization, Identity, and Policy in (Mixed) Racial Formations

This article examines recent developments in the literature on multiracial categorization, policy, and identity—one that has grown as data on multiracial populations have become widely available, particularly in the United States since the enumeration of multiple race responses was instituted in Census 2000. Significant new research takes advantage of the data generated by the Census providing new insights to questions and claims about the meanings of mixedness and racial boundaries in the United States that were largely speculative even a decade ago. Though this review focuses primarily on issues related to how state enumeration of mixed race populations reflects and engenders particular identity and group configurations, I also discuss emerging research on interracial intimacy—intermarriage and interracial births—the phenomena from which contemporary attention to multiracial categorization and identity arise. An increasingly internationalist discussion is challenging long-held interpretations of the meaning of intermarriage and multiracial identification for understanding emergent racial formations.