Interracial Sex Research Articles

Miscegenation Madness

Abstract In this article, I examine how the fear of miscegenation developed as a raison d’être for the construction and maintenance of apartheid. I argue that despite its efficacy at reproducing racial-caste formations, miscegenation taboo ultimately undermined its own hegemonic mythology by constructing contradictory erotic desires and subjectivities which could neither be governed nor contained. I consider how miscegenation fears and fantasies were debated in public discourse, enacted into law, institutionalized through draconian policing and punishment practices, culturally entrenched, yet negotiated and resisted through everyday intimacies. While crime statistics show that most incidences of interracial sex involved White men and women of color, the perceived threat to “White purity” was generally represented through images of White women—volks-mothers and daughters—in the Afrikaner nationalist iconography. White women’s wombs symbolized the future of “Whiteness.” This article offers a critique of the prevailing South African “exceptionalism” paradigm in apartheid studies. Detailed analyses of government commission reports (1939, 1984, 1985) and parliamentary debate records (1949) reveal considerable American influence on South Africa’s “petty apartheid” laws, and especially the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and Immorality Amendment Act (1950). While these “cornerstone” policies of apartheid developed from local socio-political conflicts and economic tensions, they were always entangled in global racial formations, rooted in trans-oceanic histories of slavery, dispossession, and segregation. This historical anthropological study of race/sex taboo builds on interdisciplinary literatures in colonial history, sociology, postcolonial studies, literary theory, art history, cultural studies, feminist theory, queer studies, and critical race theory.

“The Worse Element”

Abstract This article offers an example of how the convergence of discourses on “white slavery” and social hygiene led to the disproportionate criminalization, displacement, and detention of Black sex workers by authorities in early twentieth-century San Diego. The city’s large military presence, proximity to the US-Mexico border, and interracial sociality (between white, immigrant, and nonwhite communities) led to the regulation of its interracial sex tourism industry. As the city prepared for its first major military project, the Panama-California Exposition of 1915, public health officials demolished tenement housing for plumbing violations and followed with the compulsory quarantining of sex workers, couched in concerns about venereal disease. The sexual policing of Black sex workers by local, state, and military authorities was underpinned by discourses that imagined Black women as risks to public health and white women’s virtue in the US-Mexico border town.

Reinterpreting the Historical Memory of the Black Peril in South Africa

Abstract This article employs a critical Black Atlantic frame to re-examine, re-evaluate and reinterpret the historical memory of the Black Peril in South Africa. It exposes the Black Peril as a wide-ranging racist discourse that demonised Black men as potential rapists of white women. This racist narrative was vehemently expressed in early twentieth-century South Africa. A key finding of this work is that the Black Peril was a highly successful racist campaign because it not only led to the criminalisation of interracial sex between Black men and white women but was also used to justify racist laws that had far-reaching effects on social relations in the broader society – eventually yielding a white supremacist state (apartheid) – which proceeded to use the Black Peril discourse to mobilise an aggressive racialisation process for both whites and Blacks.

‘A sin against our civilisation’: South Africa’s 1927 Immorality Act and the Criminalisation of Interracial Love, 1920–1948

ABSTRACT In 1927 South Africa passed the Immorality Act prohibiting miscegenation. The act was distinctly gendered in its composition and implementation, codifying a double standard against women. The Immorality Act not only policed miscegenation but consensual interracial sex and sex work, tacitly acknowledging that love could exist across racial lines. Almost immediately a pattern emerged where different convictions occurred for the same crime. Men and women were charged separately, resulting in disproportionate prosecution of black women. Courts were hesitant to accept black women’s evidence in white men’s trials, leading to biased outcomes. This article explores the gendered implementation of the act from 1920 to 1948 using archival documents and newspaper articles. The voices of women are not accurately represented in the colonial archive, and instances of love and intimacy even less so. The article assesses the impact of the act on the creation of South African legal culture.

Spitting at Jim Crow

Spitting at Jim Crow

CONFLICT, TRAGEDY, AND INTERRACIALITY: BOB THOMPSON PAINTS VERGIL'S CAMILLA

In The Death of Camilla (1964), Black American painter Bob Thompson fascinates, disturbs, and provokes enduring questions about race in the United States. In this painting (Figure 1), multicolored nudes clash in battle around two figures frozen in a moment of anguish: a light-skinned female warrioress dying in the arms of a dark-hued male opponent. The power of this painting lies not only in its raw emotion, symbolism, and color, but also in Thompson's daring signification upon the story of Camilla from Vergil's Aeneid and on a seventeenth-century drawing by Nicolas Poussin. While a relatively ‘underknown’ artist, during his life Robert Louis Thompson (1937–1966) received extensive recognition for his compelling reconfigurations of the European old masters and their Classical (Greco-Roman) subjects. Thompson, according to his early biographer, Judith Wilson, may also be ‘the first American artist to put the nation's interracial sex life/sex fantasies on public view.’ In many of his works of reception, Thompson combines these two artistic preoccupations into compelling pieces that foreground tragic contradictions around interraciality in the United States. In his The Death of Camilla painting, I argue, Thompson expands upon the symbolic trajectory of Vergil's story and ‘colors’ Poussin in such a way as to re-present Camilla as collateral damage of the sort of nation building that necessitates interracial conflict.

Lose Your Father

Lose Your Father

Interracial Sex as Taboo: The New Imperialism, Christian Victorian Values, Nationalism, and the Legacies of Intimacy in the Colony of Sierra Leone, 1861–1914

ABSTRACT This article examines the dynamics of interracial sexual relationships in the Colony of Sierra Leone during the era of the new imperialism between 1870 and 1914. Although British anxieties about interracial sexual relationships and mixed-race progeny were evident before the era of the new imperialism, it was in the late nineteenth century that British imperial and colonial authorities created more rigid racial hierarchies that hardened the delineations between colonisers, intermediary proxy groups, and the colonised. However, it was not only Europeans who disapproved of interracial sex during the new imperialism, and the adoption of a Victorian sexual ethos and cultural nationalism among the Creole population contributed to their social disapproval of interracial sex. These attitudes had an impact on race relations that resulted in the clandestine nature of interracial sex in colonial Sierra Leone from the late nineteenth century and the shame attached to mixed-race ancestry in colonial society. This article examines the shifting attitudes of social disapproval towards interracial sexual relationships displayed by both Europeans and Creoles in colonial Sierra Leone and analyses the impact these attitudes had on the dynamics of interracial sexual relationships and on the mixed-race heritage of the Creole ethnic group during the era of the new imperialism.

“The Selling of American Girls”

This article examines how white slave narratives in California helped inscribe social, cultural, and institutional divides at the U.S.-Mexico border during the Progressive Era. The predicament of American prostitution in Mexicali and Tijuana amplified fears of interracial sex, which readily translated into hysteria over white slavery throughout California. Consequently, concerned citizens decried the so-called trafficking of American girls at the border and contributed to growing demands for a more rigid international boundary. As such, this panic over white slavery and the “protection of white womanhood” helped construct both figurative and literal borders between the United States and Mexico between 1910 and 1930, an era recognized by scholars as a critical moment in the social reordering of California’s nonwhite inhabitants. Analysis of local newspapers, club records, vice reports, reformers’ correspondence, and government documents reveal that the ascription of racial difference rested upon lurid portrayals of sexual deviance in border towns—particularly among African Americans and the Chinese. Such representations colored the Mexican border, and perhaps Mexicans themselves, as menacing to both American women and the nation itself. These stories galvanized support for closing and fortifying the U.S.-Mexico line early in the century.

A Pantheology of Pandemic: Sex, Race, Nature, and the Virus

A Pantheology of Pandemic: Sex, Race, Nature, and the Virus

Impure at the Origins

ABSTRACTAlthough race mixing is often treated as a marginal matter or a transgression against dominant racial logic, this article argues that mixed-race bodies and interracial sexuality are central to the invention of whiteness and the origin of the white settler state in several ways. Race mixing is at the foundation of the modern conception of race; at the material and political origin of the white settler state; and serves as the grounding against which cultural and legal categories of race are articulated. The conceptual history of race looks to mixed-race bodies as the means to define race and delimit races. The colonization and economic success of the white settler state in the United States depended on mixed-race individuals who served as emissaries and interpreters, while interracial sexuality was central to the economy of slavery. Dominant conceptions of whiteness, and of the identity of the white settler state, rely on the scrutiny of mixed bodies as a means of racial demarcation. Mixed race histories and subjects are of central interest to studies of the invention of whiteness and processes of racialization.

"You Just Never Can Know What's Up the Road": An Interview with Cecil Brown

"You Just Never Can Know What's Up the Road":An Interview with Cecil Brown Zachary Manditch-Prottas (bio) and Cecil Brown In 1969, Cecil Brown's provocatively titled debut novel The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger made quite a splash on the literary scene. From legend of hardboiled letters Chester Himes, to liberal outlet The New Leader, reviewers noted that Brown's prose was as knowing as his subject matter was titillating; the mixture of the erotic and uproarious made for a novel of uniquely sophisticated parody. Jiveass relates the satiric odyssey of a classic trickster figure named George Washington (one of several aliases) who, fed up with American bigotry, lands in Denmark on a quest of self-discovery. Washington, in the midst of the many entangled social revolutions of the 1960s, traverses the streets and sheets of Copenhagen finding his shrewd sexual allure to be his greatest asset—but also his greatest impediment—during his curious journey. Insofar as the many women he beds are permissive blondes among the well-to-do, the story negotiates the underbelly of white America's greatest anxiety: interracial sex. Indeed, the novel can be read as a sardonic rejoinder to the phallocentrism of a certain strand of Black Power and to a much longer legacy of white phallic anxiety.1 Thus, the thematic imperatives that pushed the novel's evocative wit were both timely and timeless, making it all the funnier, all the more biting, and its author all the more difficult to peg. Undoubtedly, a new voice had arrived in African American literature, but reviewers were unsure if that voice was jocular or scathing. Fellow satirist of Black life Charles Wright christened Brown the "literary superman of the year." The New York Times dubbed him a "born pornographer gone straight."2 As we settle into our chairs to begin our interview, I mention this particular Times review; Brown knowingly grins. He later explains that he did actually begin with the provocative title and then, his grin widening into his eyes, "went about filling in the rest from there." Brown has a skill for leading with allure, drawing readers close with a story so compelling that it may be some time before they realize they have wandered into something more serious. Brown tells me that while living in Copenhagen himself, he wrote the novel so that he "could laugh at himself." On the other hand, his story's hero, Washington, says toward the conclusion of his riotous adventure that he would like to write a "serious book." Jiveass is, in the blues tradition, both. Indeed, for Brown, laughter and seriousness are longtime traveling companions of African American expression. Across Brown's forty-year writing career, in novels like the hilarious, although often tragic story of Black comedians in Hollywood, Days Without Weather (1983), his moving autobiography of his rural coming-of-age, Coming Up Down Home (1995), and his thorough folk history Stagolee Shot Billy (2003), he has always maintained a particular interest in "the trickster." He tells me that he "revels" in those who have the ability to "get out of situations using their wit." He has known more than his fair share of (in)famous tricksters. He is a folklorist whose life, by his own account, is somewhat folkloric. Behind his writing is a tapestry of tales featuring a Who's Who of mid-twentieth-century African American cultural history. Brown may refer nostalgically to Eldridge Cleaver as his Berkeley "running buddy" in one breath and taking "Jimmy's" [James Baldwin's] car out for late-night joyrides in the South of [End Page 275] France in the next. He relates his encyclopedic knowledge of the legend of Stagolee to a passing gesture Miles Davis made backstage that had him, Paul Mooney, and Richard Pryor in stitches. The stories keep coming, each full of that liveliness that only legends contain, and, as you wait for the next punchline, storyteller Cecil Brown knows that he's got you, right there where amusement and seriousness meet. Zachary Manditch-Prottas: How did you get started writing? Cecil Brown: Well, I grew up in North Carolina, by Cape Fear River. In the...

Soho Typescripts: handmade obscene books in post-war London bookshops

ABSTRACT Soho Typescripts were a distinctive type of handmade pornography associated with London’s Soho in the 1950s and 1960s. Thousands were produced, but only a proportion survive today. This article presents the first dedicated study of Soho Typescripts based on examination of 50 typescripts from the British Library, a private collection and recent acquisitions by the Museum of London. The article summarizes their distinguishing characteristics and discusses their circulation within an alternative economy regulated though informal alliances between bookshop owners and police. Retail innovations allowed a widening cross-section of men to purchase illustrated home-produced books from post-war bookshops. Retailers positioned Soho Typescripts within a spatial hierarchy, categorizing them with folk-sexological labels: ‘Fladge’, ‘Straight’, ‘B/W’, ‘Les’ and ‘Fem Dom’. Common themes of typescript fiction included teenage girls, lesbianism, sadomasochism and interracial sex. Soho Typescripts are under-represented in institutional collections. Consequently, the significance and reach of these hand-crafted commercial products may have been underestimated.

Immoral Habits: Delinquent White Girls in 1920s Cape Town and the Distribution of Blame

ABSTRACT In much recent historical writing on the history of South African child welfare considerable emphasis has been placed on the poor white problem. The development of child welfare is typically seen as part of the wider project to uplift so-called ‘poor whites’. This article builds on this literature by focusing on one particular aspect of South African child welfare work – the attempt to discipline ‘uncontrollable’ youth. Case histories pertaining to out-of-control young people, I argue, reveal the intensity of the public antipathy towards adolescent female sexuality. This was not only a problem of ‘miscegenation’ or interracial sex. Case histories show how evidence of female sexuality was constructed in the day-to-day – by child welfare agents, state officials, community members and families themselves. Together, these voices worked to distribute blame. Interested parties drew on prevailing eugenicist ideas around mental weakness and moral aberration but these were filtered through a more impressionistic, common-sense vernacular that described how girls looked, what they wore, how they behaved and who they knew. As often as blame was located with bad mothers and bad homes, it was also directed at girls themselves, leading in many cases to long-term institutional confinement.

Women, Love, and the Reform Jewish Mission: Jewish-Christian Marriage in Emma Wolf's Other Things Being Equal and its Literary Successors

Women, Love, and the Reform Jewish Mission:Jewish-Christian Marriage in Emma Wolf's Other Things Being Equal and its Literary Successors1 Jessica Kirzane (bio) In her 1892 debut novel Other Things Being Equal, Emma Wolf depicts a romance between a Jewish protagonist, Ruth Levice, and a white Protestant man, Dr. Kemp, culminating in their decision to marry. Despite Ruth's father's initial disapproval, he comes to assert that "mentally, the woman was of the same stratum as the man. Physically, both were perfect types of pure, healthy blood…Religiously, both held a broad, abiding love for man and God."2 The father's description of the union between these two individuals as one between equals is at the heart of the novel's utopian premise: that equality between (white) Christian and Jew, man and woman, can be conceived of as possible through a liberal, universalizing perspective, and within the privileges of the shared bourgeois society in which the protagonists find themselves. Wolf's novel proclaims this marriage as evidence of the progress that women have made in the era of New Womanhood, as Ruth exceeds her frail mother's capacity and becomes a partner in her marriage. This evolutionary approach toward woman's growing independence mirrors Wolf's attitude toward interfaith relations in the novel. Wolf's narrative is not only one about a young woman's growing independence. It is also a story about a marriage between a Jewish woman and a Christian man, using that [End Page 289] union as a model for the American public sphere, a potential future of equality between Jews and Christians and between men and women.3 In 1896, in direct response to Wolf's novel, Dr. Friedrich Kolbenheyer, a prominent Austrian-born obstetrician, penned a novella, "Jewish Blood," in opposition to Wolf's optimistic stance on marriage between a Jew and a Christian. He intervenes as a voice of male, and medical, authority to warn against what he sees as the tragic loss of Jewish reproductive capacity should Jewish men choose Christian women as their mates. Utilizing a racialized conception of "blood," he participates in a broader American discourse that "trumpeted the grave dangers of interracial sex" as something deleterious to human fertility, a material iteration of a "broader cultural fear of generational discontinuity."4 He makes a case for the preservation of Jewish "blood" through endogamous Jewish marriage and reproduction. In 1908, Bettie Lowenberg, a contemporary of Emma Wolf and a fellow member of the San Francisco Jewish women's literary community, offered another response to Other Things Being Equal in the form of a long novel, The Irresistible Current. Going beyond the marriage Wolf envisions for Ruth and Dr. Kemp, Lowenberg paints a portrait of a cast of characters yearning for and predicting a kind of universal monotheistic utopia. Through her idealistic portraits of romance, she collapses the bounds of Protestant Christianity and Reform Judaism through mutual love and shared universal faith. Placing Kolbenheyer and Lowenberg's responses alongside Wolf's Other Things Being Equal, this essay demonstrates that Wolf's work was central to a national literary conversation about Jewish racial and religious identity within a white Christian American public sphere. Examining these works together uncovers a turn-of-the-twentieth-century literary conversation about white Jewish-Christian romance centered on how new scientific and social movements might revolutionize Jewish life in relation to their Christian neighbors, and the role of Jewish women [End Page 290] in particular in shaping Jewish religious and societal norms and futures in a turn-of-the-twentieth century American context.5 The models of pluralist integration and the potential for assimilation outlined in Wolf's, Kolbenheyer's, and Lowenberg's narratives are predicated upon the perspectives and experiences of "middle-class Jews who have achieved economic stability, and, with that, a degree of social equality," in Lori Harrison-Kahan's description. The readers, writers, and protagonists of these narratives are Jews who do not merely have the "potential to become Americans" through assimilation, but who "can pass effortlessly" proving that they "already are."6 It is precisely the problem of a difficult-to-pinpoint Jewish difference that occupies these narratives...

Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia

Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia

Race, Gender, and the Rape-Lynching Nexus in the U.S. South, 1881-1930

AbstractScholarship has long recognized the centrality of white racial sexual fears in the rhetoric and practice surrounding the lynching of African Americans in the U.S. South in the decades around 1900. The topic has not previously been taken up for systematic study beyond event-level analyses. This article presents theoretical and empirical evidence that whites’ intersecting racial and gender concerns converging in racial sexual fears were conducive to lynching related to interracial sex, but not to those unrelated to interracial sex, under certain conditions. The empirical findings, based on lynchings in 11 southern states from 1881–1930, demonstrate that lynchings related to interracial sex were more likely to occur in contexts characterized by higher levels of white female dependents residing with white male householders, higher levels of white female school attendance, and higher levels of adult black male literacy. These findings suggest that interracial sex-related lynching served to recover and retain white men’s racial and gender status, which postbellum developments had undermined, by oppressing not only African American men and women but disempowering white women as well. White racial sexual fears during the lynching era should, therefore, be seen as constituting a social force in their own right with long-term consequences for race and gender relations and inequalities.

Revising Slavery, ReissuingUncle Tom's Cabin: Interracial Sex and Black Resistance in the Black Power Era Slavery Exploitation Film Cycle

The Journal of Popular CultureVolume 52, Issue 4 p. 862-889 Original Article Revising Slavery, Reissuing Uncle Tom's Cabin: Interracial Sex and Black Resistance in the Black Power Era Slavery Exploitation Film Cycle Jacqueline Pinkowitz, Jacqueline PinkowitzSearch for more papers by this author Jacqueline Pinkowitz, Jacqueline PinkowitzSearch for more papers by this author First published: 16 September 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12823Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume52, Issue4Special Issue: Super Cool, Super Baad!: Considerations of Blaxploitation in Film, Media, and Popular CultureAugust 2019Pages 862-889 RelatedInformation

Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia

Bold in approach and beautifully crafted, Illicit Love is a multi-layered and nuanced account of the intersection between interracial relationships, marriage law and sovereignty centered on the lan...

"Mostly with White Girls": Settlement, Spatiality, and Emergent Interracial Sexualities in a Canadian Prairie City.

In Winnipeg, a midsize city in the Canadian Prairies undergoing social and demographical transformations, male African newcomer youth face challenges in their settlement experiences relating to conflicting and heterogeneous norms around sexuality, sex, and dating. With its diverse population, the city is a space in which both racialization of blackness occurs and “multicultural” ethno‐racial diversity is imagined. In this spatiality of youths’ everyday lives, interracial sexuality emerges as transgression. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with heterosexual male youth from sixteen to twenty‐five years of age who have recently emigrated from various African countries, we examine how interracial sexuality was constituted through what our interlocutors said and did. We trace and analyze how sexual transgression associated with the desirability and taboo of white femininity was played out through social‐spatial networks and practices within the changing urban landscape. The formation of sexuality within global, transnational, and urban contexts of settlement is not simply a matter of global forces affecting the local or local affecting the global. By ethnographically situating interracial sexuality in a diverse urban locale where migrant youth are navigating multiple boundaries of race, nation, and sexuality in the transformation of their identities and subjectivities, we offer one story of how interracial sexualities are constituted in a specific time and place. Within Canada, newly arrived immigrant and refugee African young men are mired in the histories of taboo over sexual relations with white women while being key actors in transformations of heterosexuality, masculinity, blackness, and whiteness occurring through immigration and settlement processes. [Sexuality; Race and Space; Interracial Sexuality; Immigrant Youth; African Youth; Urban Youth Subculture; White Femininity]