Product Description

In "The Color of Sex" Mason Stokes offers new ways of thinking about whiteness by exploring its surprisingly ambivalent partnership with heterosexuality. Eschewing the canonical for the popular, Stokes examines white-supremacist American texts written and produced between 1852 and 1915 - literary romances, dime novels, religious and scientific tracts, film - and exposes the perverse infrastructure of whiteness, its 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. They support each other in their desperate insistence on the cultural logic of exclusion, but, given the slippery pathways of race and reproduction, threaten one another in their attempt to create and sustain a white future. 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2679038 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 264 pages

Review
"A stunningly conceived, lucidly written, well supported, nuanced, and absolutely compelling analysis of a culturally repressed and underanalyzed body of important literary materials. Stokes demonstrates with amplifying brilliance the operative interdependence of whiteness and normative heterosexuality."- Dana Nelson, author of National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men "An engaging and well written exploration of nineteenth-century 'fictions' of white supremacy that manages to combine wit and erudition."- Gayle Wald, author of Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth Century U.S. Literature and Culture