A Critique of Interracialism: White Ga(y)ze and Racial Desire

• In Event: 50661 - Section on Sociology of Sexualities Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3: Theorizing Sexualities

Abstract

The sphere of love, romance, attraction and “preference” are treated as opaque and unknowable constructs: immune to both the social ideologies that would shape them and the scientific methods that would understand them; However, this presumption obscures the reality that desire emerges as a product of the social world. Previous research on interracial dating practices within the LGBTQ+ community has exposed that sexual “preference” is not nearly as natural and apolitical as might be suggested, and, further, that sexual desire is shaped by larger social ideologies. This article engages desire and race literature to critique an emerging post-racial regime of romance, one that presents patterns of sexual attraction and “preference” as natural, normal, and inevitable, immune to scientific understanding, and obscures the structural implications of desirability politics. The author situates sexual desire within racialized sexuality—or sexuality as it emerges under racial modernity—contending that, in a world subsumed by coloniality, desire is never free from race and its consequences. Using ethnographic methods and semi structured interviews with gay men, the author argues that racial desire underpins romance and filters who is and is not able to access otherwise segregated Queer spaces. The author also considers the effects of racial desire on Black masculinities, constructing Black men as undesirable, “down-low,” or incestuous. It is argued that the post-racial regime of romance obscures racial desire and the segregation practices it engenders, burying them under language of “preference.” Thus, the logics of racial desire becomes opaque and, worse still, it becomes “racist” to critique them.

Author

• Hasan A Henry, University of California-Berkeley