Race & Sexuality: Some Perspectives

The comparison of race and sexuality is one fraught with tension. Although falling under the rubric of cardinal master identity categories, such identities are not necessarily transparent or comparable to each other, although as master categories, they operate similarly, in terms of defining ourselves on some powerful and tactile level. Thinking of our discussion in class, yesterday, as well as a recent post on Camren's blog, I thought it might be instructive to have a brief, succinct comparison of the two.

Both of these identity categories are grounded in history, and as such, their meanings shift and change. Both seem to be invested in a sense of difference, as in people (or practices ) that are different from "us," or alternatively, what we consider the norm. A good place to start is in questioning the norm as well as the "us," and how the norm develops or is influenced by by ideology and social needs and perception (as D'Emilio seeks to trace; and in this last place is a clue as to how to locate the "us" ).

Race is one of our most powerful and persistent myths. We believe in race, it strikes us as an objective (innate) category, although race does not exist in any tangible sense in nature, which is to say that there is no scientific basis for the genetic variation that we describe as "race." Yet, race is one of the most prominent markers of human identity. How this comes to be is grounded in history. Different peoples and societies were always aware of phenotypical differences, of course (differences in skin color, hair texture, body structure, etc.). Ancient societies had various conceptions of the meanings of these differences between peoples, and other ways of structuring power and privilege in their societies (class, rank, heredity, etc.). Race, in the way that we understand it, however, is of a much more recent vintage, only emerging during the Enlightenment and triggered by the end of a long period of European socio-cultural isolation. Early modern Europeans began to venture into the larger world, and were confused by the different types of people they encountered, most often characterizing these distinctions along religious lines (Christian vs. Jews, Muslims, and "heathens"). Jews and Muslims of course were familiar to the early modern European. What was challenging was the confrontation with physically different people who had no identifiable spiritual practice. Did they have souls? Were they indeed human?

These questions might strike us today as barbaric, but to Europeans of the period, especially the English, who were culturally parochial and relatively unsophisticated (as opposed to Mediterranean cultures), these were crucial questions because they were linked to the Bible. If Adam and Eve were the father and mother of human society, then there by definition must be but one family of man. How then to explain the different kinds of people Europeans were encountering in their voyages? In short and to cut to the chase, these questions simmered for awhile until an socio-economic imperative forced a convenient answer. The economic exploitation of the western hemisphere demanded and supported new, modern theories of human diffentiation that informed several technological phenomena: the conquest, mass conversion, and destruction and displacement of indigenous communities in the western hemisphere and the Atlantic slave trade, being the two most prominent. Our ideas of race and the meaning of race, therefore, are much more modern than we may believe, if we think about it at all.

Sexuality, in our contemporary understanding, is of even more recent vintage. It is often considered a subjective (chosen) category, although we tend to relate to sexuality both as a subjective and objective category (Respectively and colloquially, "making bad choices" vs. "born this way"). As D'Emilio, Young, and others have observed, LGBT identity does not emerge as a category until the late 19th century and the increasing medicalization of human behavior, a process underwritten by the same empirical practices that inform 19th century European colonization of Africa and Asia (and whose "practice run" had been the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries). So, in some sense, race and sexuality are connected in that they are both related to 19th century positivist science, although racial difference has a longer and more measurably traumatic history. Homosexual sexual acts have a long history of practice (both with social approbation and opprobrium), as Camren notes, but the slide of the act into identity is only secured in the 19th century. Contemporary cultural politics, questions of morality, as well as the longer history of race (no matter how ill informed such a history might be) make an easy comparison between sexuality and race problematic, although not impossible, and indeed, such conversations have the potential to reveal the interconnected nature of discourses of domination and social control.

Above is an image created by Chicana lesbian artist Ester Hernandez, that references the importance of the adoration of the Guadalupe Virgin in Mexican and Mexican American culture, but recasts that adoration as also symbolic of lesbian love and desire by taking a common working class/cholo masculine practice (tattouage of the image of the Virgin on one's body as a symbol of veneration) and recasting it as a veneration of the Sapphic feminine (the rose offered). For this image Hernandez received death threats, as has artist Alma Lopez, partially because it is a homoerotic religious image, and partially because it confirms the presence of LGBT people within racial communities. (NB: some cultural discourses in non-white racial communities associate homosexuality with colonization and whiteness). Sometimes, some white LGBT people will too quickly collapse sexuality into race in a comparative model, while alternatively, some heterosexual people of color will deny the presence and legitimacy of LGBT folks/LGBT people of color by appealing either to religion (generally rightist) or colonization and assimilation (generally leftist).

Obviously, neither response takes into account the similarities and differences in the formation of these identity categories, nor the complex way in which they interact with, again, differing but similar types of ideological domination, heteronormativity and white supremacy, not to mention those who straddle these purportedly distinct lines of identity. But the responses do reveal the extent to which many people think of identity in terms of hierarchy: an either/or model that cannot see how race and sexuality discourses influence each other. The tension between objectivity and subjectivity between the categories obfuscates the fact that both race and sexuality are simultaneously objective and subjective.

This conversation just scratches the surface of the many complexities implicated by race and sexuality. At the very least, it is a place to start.