Racial Ideas and Gendered Intimacies

The Regulation of Interracial Relationships in North America

Bibliographic Data

ID12283249
AuthorsDebra Thompson (0000-0001-6191-4461, University of Toronto, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume18
Issue3
Pages353-371
Publication date2009-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial & Legal Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0964-6639 • E-ISSN: 1461-7390
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0964663909339087
OpenAlexW2133199511
LanguageEN
Citations received29
References cited35

This article compares the regulation of interracial intimacies in North America, contending that anti-miscegenation laws in the United States and Canada’s Indian Act regimes are both striking and comparable examples of the state’s regulation of the intimate sphere. The author argues that the social signifiers of race and gender, tied together with sexuality, are interlocking sets of power relations and these intersecting discourses are integral to understanding the comparative regulation of interracial intimacy in North America. In the circumstances of anti-miscegenation laws and the Indian Act, the transgression of gendered/raced social boundaries, the control of raced/gendered sexualities, the interlocking and mutually reinforcing nature of patriarchal, white supremacist and capitalist systems of domination, the threat of non-white access to white capital, and the predicament of racial categorization exist as a corollary of the state’s regulation of interracial intimate life. This article reveals the law and state as important sites of the creation and manipulation of racial boundaries, acting as producers and reproducers of racial ideas, and demonstrates that the interracial transgressions of sexual space were also perceived as transgressions of social, economic, and political boundaries between races, posing a threat to the dominant white and masculine hegemony in North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

Hegemony · Human sexuality · Masculinity · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Race (biology · Social capital · Social reproduction · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science · White (mutation · Australian History and Society · Gender Studies · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Race, History, and American Society