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to differentiate nonwhites from whites could also serve to generate cross-racial desire. Even as white men insisted that black men posed a threat to white women because of their ostensibly heightened sexual appetite, their alleged lack of self-control, and their supposedly enormous penises, they worried that white women freed to explore their own sexual satisfaction might find such men appealing. Sexual racism—or ideas of racial difference articulated through constructions of sexual difference—had perhaps the unintended consequence of turning many racial “others” into attractive sexual partners; stereotypes about black men particularly threatened whiteness since they portrayed them in ways that emphasized their sexual prowess and that could, theoretically, make them attractive to white women, the guardians of white racial purity.16 The emergence of heterosexuality, Stokes thus argues, led white men to focus obsessively on the dangers of racial mixing, to engage in a “compulsive imagining of interracial sex” between black men and white women.17
Given the threat that heterosexuality posed to whiteness, it seems perhaps inevitable that Stokes finds that American literature from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demonstrates the importance of white male homosociality to the project of white supremacy. It was relationships between white men—who took on the project of controlling white womanhood—that served to protect whiteness, Stokes suggests. Homosocial kinship between white men was far safer for whiteness than was the heterosexual desire of men for women—or, even worse, of women for men of their choice. Even relationships between white men that blurred the line between the social and the sexual were thus less of a threat to the existing racial and social order than differently sexed interracial relationships were. As Stokes writes, in turn-of-the century American literature, “homoeroticism becomes, paradoxically, the only structure of desire that can keep whiteness white.”18 Robert Young, in his 1995 work Colonial Desire, makes the same point more explicitly. Same-sex sex, he writes, “posed no threat because it produced no children; its advantage was that it remained silent, covert, unmarked. . . . In fact, in historical terms, concern about racial amalgamation tended if anything to encourage same-sex play.”19 Heterosexual interraciality, given its ability to blur racial lines through the birth of mixed-race children, proved more threatening than homosexuality to a racial system predicated on notions of white purity.
Reproducing the Nation
It was not just white racial purity that heterosexuality threatened; its new “pleasure-centered dispersal of sexual energy” had within it the seeds “of the fall of the white state,” Stokes concludes, a possibility brought to the screen in the famous 1915 silent film Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. Griffith.20 Birth of Nation dramatized Griffith’s version of the history of Reconstruction, as the South sought to rebuild after the Civil War. In Griffith’s version, based loosely on Thomas Dixon’s novels The Klansman and The Leopard’s Spots, the threat to white southerners was both the mentally and socially inferior freed blacks who no longer accepted their rightful place as subordinate to whites and the northern whites who falsely believed that blacks could ever be equal to whites. The political drama focuses on the birth of the Ku Klux Klan and its efforts to restore white supremacy in the South, but its romantic drama focuses on two heterosexual couples, each involving one child of the pro-Union white northern Stoneman family and one child of the pro-Confederacy white southern Cameron family. For the Stoneman-Cameron couples to achieve their happy ending, the white northern partners must both come to recognize the threat that blacks present to the social order and to realize the danger posed by interracial relationships. Here the most conniving blacks are those who are racially mixed themselves, and what black men really want as the symbol of their newfound freedom is a white wife. In Birth of a Nation, interracial sex threatens not only white racial purity—indeed, the character presented as the paragon of white female purity, a teenager known only as “Little Sister,” jumps to her death rather than face defilement at the hands of a black man—but also the fledging post–Civil War national order. The white northerners can only be happily united in matrimony with their white southern lovers when they realize how threatening black political, social, and sexual equality really is. As one of the intertitle cards in a climactic scene near the end of the silent film reads, “The former enemies of North and South are united again in defense of their Aryan birthright.”21 Birthing a nation, the film makes quite clear, required promoting certain kinds of relationships while prohibiting others.
Heterosexuality is not simply the sexual desires and practices that are socially defined as “normal.” Rather, as Stevi Jackson writes, “the coercive power of compulsory heterosexuality derives from its institutionalization as more than merely a sexual relation.”22 Heterosexuality is institutionalized through laws and public policy that privilege certain kinds of relationships and familial arrangements over others. Government policies that promote marriage, that encourage male-headed households, that link government benefits to one’s marital status, and that view marriage and family creation as a solution to poverty or juvenile delinquency have all worked to portray the ideal citizen as heterosexual. As Joane Nagel explains in her work on the intersections of race, sexuality, and ethnicity, “Implicit in the idea of the nation . . . are certain prescriptions and proscriptions for sexual crossings—what good citizens should and should not do sexually, and whom they should and should not have sex with.”23 Gender plays a vital role in this nation building, with women given responsibility for reproducing the nation and men for running and defending it. As a result, nationalist politics goes “hand-in-hand” with forms of “hegemonic masculinity” that promote and affirm a patriarchal, heteronormative social order that justifies monitoring and controlling women’s sexuality. Nationalist discourse across the globe, Nagel concludes, defines “proper places for men and women,” “valorize[s] the heterosexual family as the bedrock of the nation,” and condemns “those considered outside the sexual boundaries of the nation.”24
Peggy Pascoe’s sweeping history of the United States’ antimiscegenation regime highlights just how much energy has been expended to place heterosexual cross-race relationships outside the “sexual boundaries of the nation.” Legislation regulating interracial relationships were among the first racial laws passed in the colonies, and they were the last segregation laws to fall in the civil rights era. Antimiscegenation laws, which existed in some form from 1661 to 1967, proved the most pervasive and enduring forms of legal racial discrimination. The antimiscegenation regime, Pascoe reminds us, was a national one, not just a southern one. Laws prohibiting interracial marriage existed in all but nine of the fifty states at one time or another. They targeted relationships not only between blacks and whites but also between whites and Asians, Malays, and, in some cases, Native Americans. Antimiscegenation laws thus grouped together all nonwhites as a threat to white purity and made clear that preventing interracial marriage was a vital part of constructing a system of white supremacy and building a stable nation.25
The sexuality scholar Steven Seidman insists that critical sexuality studies must focus more attention on “analyzing the way in which regimes of normative heterosexuality create hegemonic and subordinate forms of heterosexuality.”26 If so, then exploring the antimiscegenation regime needs to be at the top of the priority list. The widespread and intense regulation of interracial relationships suggests that different-sex cross-race relationships were among the most deviant forms of heterosexuality, viewed by authorities as highly threatening to the state. Institutionalized heterosexuality typically promotes monogamous, marital relationships, with marriage being so important