Julia
McKenna
Introduction
Interracial same-sex relationships face a unique set of circumstances as
the combination of a relationship that defies both race and gender boundaries. Further,
many racialized sexualities go unexamined in the dominant white queer movement.
These racialized and sexualized formations of “the other” are often ignored
under the guise of “colorblind” rhetoric with individuals declaring their “preferences”
as if they are innate and formed within a cultural vacuum. Additionally, white
queers, being a stigmatized group themselves may foolishly/naively believe that
they and people of color are “all in the same boat” and dealing with similar
oppressions, and as such they couldn’t possibly be acting in racist ways or
perpetuating racialized stereotyping and fetishization of people of color. Same-sex
interracial relationships are a unique target of scrutiny and the people within
the relationship are objectified and sexualized in racialized ways and their
relationship itself is “sexualized”. I would like to examine the intersectional
construction of identities as it pertains to same-sex interracial coupling and
desire. My primary lenses of analysis are race, gender, and sexuality.
Sociological
Perspective
People operate within a system of simultaneous, interrelated social
relationships, what Andersen & Collins (2013) terms matrix of domination 1. Socially
constructed categories of race,
class, gender, and sexuality are often articulated as binaries “man/woman, Black/White, rich/poor,
gay/straight, or citizen/alien” 2.
These categorizations allow for “the
other” to be identified as these socially constructed categories map out onto
individual lives in the form of identities. These identities are built into
society and are a result of social and historical processes 3.
It is through these categories that are
tied to systemic forms of inequality that we may examine their impacts
intersectionally, in their many combinations. These intersecting identities are
ubiquitous, present in the realms of ideas (symbols, language, images),
interactions (norms, behaviors), and institutions (government, law, education) 4.
To examine some of the complexities of
how these identities intersect in same-sex interracial coupling and desire, I
will examine popular racialized and sexualized images in the media as well as
the historical context of colonialism featuring genocide, slavery, and ongoing
wars.
First, we can examine the media, where race, gender, and sexual
stereotypes intertwine in different ways. In the popular media African American men are
stereotyped as hypermasculine and oversexed, and African American women are
stereotyped as promiscuous. Latinos are stereotyped as “macho” and sexually uncontrollable
and passionate. Latinas are stereotyped as either “hot” or virgin-like. White
women are sexually stereotyped in dichotomous terms as “madonnas” or “whores”. These
dominant images of sexuality are “part of the architecture of race, class, and
gender oppression, revealing the interlocking systems of race, class, gender,
and sexuality” 5.
Second, we can examine the historical context in which these categories
are forged. Through the action of colonial
discourses, the bodies of Native women and men are queered and racialized as
disordered, unreproductive, and therefore nonheteronormative 6.
Similar imaginaries are formed around the Orient and people of color from
Africa. The Orient is cast as a “site of carefully suppressed animalistic,
perverse, homo-and hypersexual instincts” and a space of “illicit and dangerous
sex”7. African Americans have also faced oversexualized portrayals
of black sexuality as primitive, wild, forbidden, and exotic. In United States Culture “Black male
genitalia have but one meaning (rapacious, threatening, titillating lust) and
one size (BIG)”8. In this way, racial others are always in some way
queered, their sexualities marked as perverse which is used as a justification
for violent attacks. Not including narratives and histories woven into and
making up the present formation of socially constructed groups in the U.S.
allows us to overlook the structure of white supremacy and the logics of
slavery, genocide, and Orientalism delineated by Andrea Smith (2001) that are
at play 9.
Third, we can examine the complexity of intersecting identities in
interracial couples and same-sex couples by examining the meaning that families
and society place on these unions. Interracial
couples exist on the color-line in societies “borderland” between white and
black and the racialized/sexualized stereotypes, perceptions of difference,
familial opposition, and lack of community acceptance should not be looked at
as individual problems but as a reflection of the larger racial issues that
reflect contemporary race relations 10. Mixed race
relationships have been “sexualized”, meaning they have been viewed as
essentially sexual, and are not seen to be about commitment, communication, or
love. In the way mixed-race love was/is viewed as
something pornographic and essentially different from mono-race love, same-sex
relationships are similarly sexualized 11. A black
person and a white person coming together “has been given many names-miscegenation,
amalgamation, race mixing, and jungle fever-conjuring up multiple images of
sex, race, and taboo” and responses to black-white couples “have ranged from disgust
to curiosity to endorsement, with the couples being portrayed as many things-among
them, deviant, unnatural, pathological, exotic, but always sexual” 12.
White people and people of color are both given messages from their families
and communities about interracial relationships. White families may discourage
interracial relationships to maintain white privilege while black families may
discourage these unions to maintain strength and solidarity of black
communities and may view interracial relationships as a “loss of individuals to
a white society, weakening of families and communities, and the devaluing of
blackness13. What does it mean then to have same-sex, mixed-race couples? They are
perhaps doubly sexualized and inhabit a unique position of intersecting
identities, both dominant and marginalized.
Theoretical
Ideas
Colorblindness and Colorblind Racism
I would like to
examine how the ideas of multiculturalism and “post-race” logics reinforce what
Jasbir Puar defines as white ascendancy 14. Bonilla-Silva a sociologist describes the
concept of color-blind racism and reports “racism despite our desperate hope,
has not disappeared, but that it has a rhetoric, as style through which it survives”15.
An unexamined “colorblind” approach to
desire allows for the repetition and upholding of sexualization and
racialization of people of color through aligning with a white supremacist
national narrative always contrasting “the other” against a white backdrop
inherently rooted in racial and sexual violence and (operating through) the
intentional silencing, erasing, and forgetting of those violences. Andersen
& Collins explains colorblind racism as “a new form of racism in which dominant
groups assume that race no longer matters-even when society is highly racially
segregated and when individual and group well-being is still strongly
determined by race” 16. To deny the significance of race is to deny
the historical and contemporary realities of people of color and to allow the
perpetuation of racism, unnamed and masked 17.
Horizontal Hostility: Racism in the Queer Community
Narratives that are glossed over and unseen by a
colorblind white queer majority that allow for the replication and continuation
of racialized stereotypes, racialized fantasies and desires to reproduce these
conditions and roles, without being marked as connected to these processes of
violence and control historically. These racial formations and narratives can
be theorized as present but unexamined backdrops to modern queer identities,
especially in light of colorblind and multicultural formations that seek to
nullify past abuses of power and violent deployments of sexuality by erasing
their presence, often through a process of willful forgetting in efforts to escape
the specter, the ghost, of genocide, slavery, and torture. The hegemony of whiteness and white supremacy
is the bedrock on which white queer identities exist. It is so normalized that
it often goes unexamined, “whiteness in the gay community is everywhere, from what we
see, what we experience, and more importantly, what we desire” 18.
The film
Tongues Untied (Riggs 2008) details the theme of white masculinity and its
construction as powerful and desirable or the “ultimate” in maleness, the theme
of black oversexualization and objectification and the stereotypes about size
and physicality. The film critiques subordinate and dominant imagery and
language, the use of “master/slave” and animalistic imagery, the assumptions of
self-hate attached to attraction to the “white other”, and the complicated desire
of attraction to difference 19.
The gay mainstream casts Asian men as feminine and black men as
hyper-masculine while Latino and Native American men are seen as exotic. "No
femmes, no fats, and no Asians" is a common quote found in many gay personal
ads, both in print and online 20. The dilemma of queer people of color can be illustrated by the
following description:
Gay men of
color are told, by both communities, that we are somehow not masculine enough to
be full members in either community. Some of us have tried to attain this
mythical masculine norm. We spend hours at the gym toning our bodies and
building our muscles to fit with the gay masculine norm. Some of us disguise
our speech, alter our style, and watch our steps in an effort to appear more straight
to the untrained eye. And while a few of us may escape the cage of the masculine
abnormality, we leave our brothers behind. "You're pretty masculine for an
Asian guy," we are told. "You don't act like a black guy," they
say. Ironically, both of these betray the cage of acceptable masculinity that
binds us to the mythical man. Asian men are not masculine enough, black men are
too masculine. The narrow range of acceptable masculinity is reserved for white
men------gay or straight-because, ultimately, it benefits them. Rather than see
the explicit racist statement embedded in this compliment, we secretly blush and giggle at the
attention 21.
Darieck Scott (1994)
gives an analysis of the assumed racial dynamics and the divisive tensions
between “gay blacks” and “black gays” and problematizes lines of reasoning that
are sometimes used in support of a strict adherence to Joseph Beams statement
“black men loving black men is the revolutionary act of our time” (featured in
Tongues Untied). Scott points to the
problem of essentialized and politicized identities and Scott declares that
these identities are always conflated and complicated and that power dynamics
exist in all sorts of spheres in relationships. The discussions of black men
hating themselves or being emasculated through the act of being with white men
are complicated and complex and Scott advocates for an examination of how these
essentialized identities and understandings of them in narrow and unyielding
ways leads to further rigidity and restrictiveness (in thought and actions) 22.
Cutrone (2000) responds
to Scott and puts forth arguments as well as poetry/descriptive language that contests
the rigidity of mandates to stick to one’s
own race, stating “all desire is racialized, but only interracial desire is
required to answer for the reification of race” 2,which concisely
states the problems with viewing intimate connections solely in a racial
dynamic, ignoring the personal experiences and attractions, all of which are
within the racial hierarchies and matrixes in the US context. These racial
dynamics are not strictly interpersonal and may manifest as internalized racism
that “makes gay black men see other gay black men as unsuitable sexual partners
and white males as the ultimate sexual partners” 24.
Formations
of Desire
Media representations at
large and within queer communities demonstrate the complexity of racialization
and sexualization of socially constructed categories and their absorption into
the ideas, interactions, and institutions the in the U.S. Dr. Herukhuti articulates this complexity:
Our desires are always our own and emerge from the
rich network of energies swirling within us. But, at the intersection of race,
ethnicity/culture, gender and class, structural inequality (i.e., imperialist
white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy) forges our desires. The ocean of
structural inequality in which we swim hammers away at our emergent desires,
penetrates the boundaries of the Self and seeps into some of the most intimate
recesses of our being. No matter how impenetrable or immune we may think we
are, our tissues have absorbed some portion of this environment 25.
By viewing socially
constructed categories as mere individual identities and the formation of
desire as an individual choice, we “obscure the social context in which
individuals make choices, and discount the ways in which the
state regulates populations, disciplines individual bodies, and exercises control
over sexuality, gender, and reproduction." 26. The system both rewards us in a variety of ways
(social, financial, sexual) for coloring within the lines drawn to structure
our desires and provides “consequences for venturing outside of the confines of
pre-determined options: marginalization, delegitimization, exile, isolation or
death”27.
Conclusion
I hope I was able to articulate the complexity of same-sex interracial
relationships through a sampling of the various intersections involved. Having conversations
about race and situating oneself in the complex system of interrelated socially
constructed categories can allow for greater awareness and integrity within
romantic and social relationships. Further awareness can be gained by examining
“craving the white gaze” while acknowledging the formation of desire as inseparable
from a culture that promotes white European features as the pinnacle of beauty
(for men and women). White European/ European American queers need to examine
the racialized images they have also been exposed to and examine the power dynamics
and abuses involved in those characterizations as well as the historical
violence that has accompanied the sexually abusive structures and subordination
of people of color.
This is a particularly sensitive topic because it involves identities and
relationships that have been sexualized, stigmatized, and violently suppressed by
the broader culture. Desires are complicated and do not need to be shamed, but
their development occurs in relation to categories and boundaries that have a
much deeper history than the lifespan of one person. They have developed over
centuries of colonization and span the histories of genocide, slavery, and
ongoing wars. Ultimately, these topics complicate
our understandings of identities through the avenue of intimacy and
relationships, which not only calls for genuine examination but also acceptance of the fact that all of our
identities exist in the realms of racial contexts (among many others), and we
act, live, and love within and through these multiple contexts.
References
1 Andersen, M. L.,
Collins, P. H. Race, class, and gender:
An anthology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Pub. Co., 2013, 61
2 Andersen &
Collins 63
3 Andersen & Collins
63
4 Andersen & Collins
66
5 Andersen & Collins
76
6 Driskill, Qwo-Li et al. Eds. Queer Indigenous Studies:
Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature.Tucson:
University of Arizona, 2011.
7 Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in
Queer Times. 87
8 Darieck Scott, “Jungle Fever? Black Gay Identity Politics,
White Dick, and the Utopian Bedroom,” GLQ 1 (1994): 303, 318. P.310
9 Smith, Andrea. "Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars
of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing." The Color of
Violence. 70
10. Andersen & Collins 341
11. Andersen & Collins 256
12. Andersen & Collins 344
13. Andersen & Collins 344
14. Puar 90
15. Holland, Sharon
Patricia. 2012. The erotic life of racism. Durham: Duke University Press. 30
16. Andersen & Collins 68
17. Andersen & Collins 68
18. Andersen & Collins 252
19. Riggs, Marlon T., Essex Hemphill, Marlon T. Riggs, and Essex
Hemphill. 2008. Tongues untied.
20. Andersen & Collins 254
21. Andersen & Collins 257
22. Darieck Scott 318
23. Christopher
Cutrone. "The Child with a Lion: The Utopia of Interracial Intimacy."
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6, no. 2 (2000): 249-285. 254
24. Darieck Scott 253
25. Dr. Herukhuti “The Color of Desire: Interethnic Border
Crossing (Part 2 of 3)” June 15, 2014. http://sacredsexualities.org/2014/06/15/the-color-of-desire-interethnic-border-crossing-part-2-of-3/ p. 1
26. Andersen & Collins 435
27. Dr. Herukuti p. 1
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