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to be part of a “common-law marriage” even when they have made no legal contract with each other. But in the case of interracial pairings, marriage actually made a relationship more threatening to the state, not less. Interracial marriages had to be regulated in order to prevent the transfer of wealth and assets from whites to nonwhites. They needed to be prohibited to ensure that any children born of interracial sex would be considered illegitimate. And they needed to be stigmatized as a way to promote a construction of a stable national order where whites held a privileged place.
Indeed, the regulation of interracial marriage was so important to states that even white men would find their rights limited. While the regulation of interracial sex sought to control the actions of white women while allowing white men to freely engage in sex with nonwhite women, the prohibition of interracial marriage affected both men and women alike. While Pascoe notes that this impingement on the rights of white men was among the “hardest won—and most unstable—achievement” of the antimiscegenation regime, the fact that patriarchal privilege did not extend to white men’s rights to legitimize their mixed-race children or to leave their assets to their nonwhite partners demonstrates that interraciality could, to put it crudely, trump heterosexuality.27 Courts regularly denied nonwhite long-term partners of white men the status of common-law wives, which would have granted them the right to their partner’s estates and legitimacy for their children. Many of the miscegenation cases that reached the courts concerned the disposition of property or estates after the death of a white spouse. Some states designed laws specifically to prevent this kind of wealth transmission. Mississippi law awarded inheritances to any white descendant, regardless of legitimacy and no matter how remote, over any mixed-race descendant.28
Yet while the antimiscegenation regime placed some limits on white men’s freedom for the sake of the nation, it was white women who had the power to truly disrupt the national order through engaging in interracial relationships. Women, perceived as the guardians of the purity of their communities, have been charged with reproducing and upholding the identity of racial nations. As the legal scholar Leti Volpp argues, “Nationalism entwines with race so that women are subjected to control in order to achieve the aim of a national racial purity.”29 White women who explicitly chose nonwhite men challenged not only the white men in their own lives but also the entire edifice of a racial system justified by the need to defend white women’s racial purity. White men defended segregation, the denial of political equality, and the practice of lynching on the grounds that they needed to protect precious white womanhood from nonwhites, and especially black men, who might come to see themselves as equal to whites if not confined to a subordinate racial status.30 It is no wonder that white women who became involved in interracial relationships were frequently portrayed as mentally ill and even institutionalized by their parents.31 “But would you want your daughter to marry one?” the famous “final” question, invoked as late as the 1960s as a way to silence critiques of segregation, made clear the ways in which interracial relationship between white and nonwhite men directly threatened white male patriarchal authority. “A Negro having relations with a white man’s daughter, his own precious virgin, is in effect a storming of the castle, the penultimate act of castration,” a 1966 magazine article colorfully explained.32
And what is castration but the ultimate denial of patriarchal power? While feminist scholarship tells us that heterosexuality has served as an institution of male control over women, interracial heterosexuality instead threatened white male patriarchal control over white women. In a seminal 1980 essay, Adrienne Rich argued that women’s emotional, economic, and physical bonds with each other represented the most powerful threat to compulsory heterosexuality and male control over women. But white men’s response to the possibility of relationships between white women and nonwhite men suggests that heterosexual interraciality could be as threatening to patriarchal power as lesbianism was.33 Interraciality, like same-sex relationships, challenged the stability of a heterosexual national order.
While nonwhites have not had an equal place to whites in the nation, they have at least had the possibility of inclusion if they adhered to heteronormative conventions through same-race marriages and nuclear family formation. Indeed, understanding how “regimes of normative heterosexuality create hegemonic and subordinate forms of heterosexuality” requires that we also explore how blacks, Asians, and other racialized communities viewed cross-racial relationships. Communities of color participated in the construction of a heteronormative order that stigmatized interracial relationships even if their full inclusion in that order remained elusive. That has been the case whether they have sought to further themselves on the basis of their similarity to white Americans or whether they have sought power and purchase in the nation on the basis of their differences from whites.
For racialized groups stigmatized as sexually deviant and licentious, embracing the respectability politics associated with heteronormativity—monogamy, marriage, and middle-class cultural practices—has long served as one path toward racial equality. Both blacks and Asian Americans, for example, promoted images of their own family life as “normal” in order to further their claims for cultural and political inclusion. As Judy Wu has argued, the experience of being defined as sexually deviant as a result of racial discrimination “reinforces the value of heteronormativity” for nonwhite groups.34 Of course, since the entire antimiscegenation regime marked nonwhites as inferior to whites, people of color did not necessarily support or advocate bars on intermarriage themselves. Indeed, they feared that such bans would only serve to make it easier for white men to sexually exploit women of color. But, like whites, many associated interracial relationships with exploitative and illicit sex, characterized those who would engage in such relationships as degraded, and feared that open involvement in or support for such relationships would tarnish the entire community as lacking in respectability. In 1868, all eight of the black delegates to the Arkansas Constitutional Convention joined white delegates in voting to condemn “all amalgamation . . . legitimate or illegitimate.”35 Black club women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promoted “ladylike” behavior and sexual self-control as a way for black women to challenge the “myth of black promiscuity,” a myth fueled by even consensual interracial relationships.36 The impulse to associate interracial relationships with immorality and to condemn them as detrimental to the race continued well into the twentieth century. “All decent colored people disapprove of mixed marriages,” a self-described “Loyal American Negro Mother” wrote in 1949, while the black sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton Jr. found in their 1945 study of black Chicago that having a white spouse could hurt blacks’ social position with other blacks.37 Blacks or other racial groups who sought to normalize their racial difference by publicly performing heteronormativity tended to be wary of cross-racial relationships.38
This common ground between whites and nonwhites again highlights the deviant nature of heterosexual interracial relationships. These relationships have been sexualized to the extent that respectability politics has proven a limited avenue for advancement for interracial couples. The antimiscegenation legal regime had the effect of stigmatizing all kinds of interracial relationships as immoral and licentious even if the relationship was stable, long term, monogamous, or resulted in a marriage.39 Marriage, in other words, did not normalize heterosexual interraciality; it did not confer respectability on an interracial couple as long as there were laws barring intermarriage. Even in states where intermarriage