The Color of Sex

Whiteness, Heterosexuality, and the Fictions of White Supremacy

Mason Stokes, Donald E. Pease

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780822326205, 9780822326267
• eBook ISBN: 9780822380870
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In The Color of Sex Mason Stokes offers new ways of thinking about whiteness by exploring its surprisingly ambivalent partnership with heterosexuality. Stokes examines a wide range of white-supremacist American texts written and produced between 1852 and 1915—literary romances, dime novels, religious and scientific tracts, film—and exposes whiteness as a tangled network of racial and sexual desire. Stokes locates these white-supremacist texts amid the anti-racist efforts of African American writers and activists, deepening our understanding of both American and African American literary and cultural history.
The Color of Sex reveals what happens when race and sexuality meet, when white desire encounters its own ambivalence. As Stokes argues, whiteness and heterosexuality exist in anxious relation to one another. Mutually invested in "the normal," they support each other in their desperate insistence on the cultural logic of exclusion. At the same time, however, they threaten one another in their attempt to create and sustain a white future, since reproducing whiteness necessarily involves the risk of contamination
Charting the curious movements of this "white heterosexuality," The Color of Sex inaugurates a new moment in our ongoing attempt to understand the frenzied interplay of race and sexuality in America. As such, it will appeal to scholars interested in race theory, sexuality studies, and American history, culture, and literature.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: White Fictions
• 1. "De White Man in Season"
• 2. Sympathy and Symmetry: The Romance of Slavery in Metta V. Victor's "Maum Guinea and Her Plantation 'Children'"
• 3. Someone's in the Garden with Eve: Race, Religion, and the American Fall
• 4. Charles Chesnutt and the Masturbating Boy: Onanism, Whiteness, and "The Marrow of Tradition"
• 5. White Sex: Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Erotics of White Supremacy
• 6. Becoming Visible: I'm White, Therefore I'm Anxious
• Epilogue: The Queer Face of Whiteness
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index