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Renee Romano

In 1603, long before there was any category we now know as heterosexuality, William Shakespeare penned Othello, which famously features a love affair and marriage between the beautiful white Desdemona and the “Moorish” Venetian general Othello. That love affair ends badly, as interracial relationships often do in cultural representations, when a jealous Othello kills his wife after being misled by the duplicitous Iago into believing that she is having an affair. In Shakespeare’s tale, Othello’s passionate love and desire for his wife does not make him manly. It does not make him “normal.” Instead, as the literary critic Rebecca Ann Bach has shown, at the time when the play was written, a man’s unbridled desire for a woman made him weak, even effeminate. Othello’s excessive desire for his wife marked him as racially other in the seventeenth century, a degraded Moor who did not exhibit the kind of self-control suitable for a proper man.1

Heterosexuality, Hanne Blank writes in Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, is “like air, all around us and yet invisible.”2 It is the task of this volume to make visible what has been elusively invisible, to make historically specific a category, identity, and norm that have remained stubbornly ahistorical. The changing reception to the character of Othello offers one small clue to the early emergence of what Bach calls the “heterosexual imaginary” over the course of the eighteenth century. If in Shakespeare’s day, Othello’s excessive desire for his wife marked him as a racially inferior man, by the eighteenth century, commentators on the play had begun to laud Othello for his passion as an emerging heterosexual order recoded male sexual desire for women as a key marker of masculinity. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Bach argues, “what was originally part of Othello’s racial stigma became part of the dominant male identity.”3

That transition of course did not reach completion in the eighteenth century. Even in the early twentieth century, a medical dictionary still defined heterosexuality as “abnormal or perverted appetite toward the opposite sex.”4 And while this new category might have helped Othello’s reputation with theater critics, did it really, as Bach’s analysis seems to imply, somehow help legitimize the idea of interracial love? Shakespeare’s problematic characterization of his overly jealous Moor reflected what scholars have recognized as an extraordinarily powerful aspect of the emergence of race: the ways in which ideologies about racial difference and especially the supposed inferiority of nonwhites drew on portrayals of sexual difference and deviance. As race cohered as an ideology for categorizing the people of the world in a hierarchy (especially in slave societies like that which developed in the United States), hypersexuality—or supposedly illicit and excessive, uncontrollable sexual desire—became a key marker of racial inferiority. The changing reception of a character like Othello makes one wonder, might the acceptance of sexual desire signaled by the emergence of heterosexuality somehow diminish the stigma of sexual racism and undercut the opposition to cross-race relationships that served as a foundation of the United States’ racial/sexual system?

Or would history show that as the sexual system evolved in the United States, middle-class whites could legitimate their own more passionate sexual desires as respectable and properly heterosexual by defining them against a stigmatized other, an other that would include not only the new category of “homosexuals,” who engaged in same-sex acts, but also interracial couples, who too engaged in sexual acts with what most saw as an improper object choice? As heterosexuality became decisively normative, shifting from its turn-of-the century definition of a “perverse” desire for the opposite sex to its 1934 dictionary definition of “normal sexuality,”5 was it in part because same-race couples could go to a “black and tan” club, watch interracial mixing, and craft their own more respectable heterosexual identity in opposition to a deviant margin? Othello’s story did not end in the eighteenth century; instead, black men like him who desired and married white women would again end up as outsiders, heterosexuals perhaps but certainly not heteronormative, at least not in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries and, arguably, still not today.

This chapter asks what interraciality, or the experience of interracial couples, can tell us about the history of heterosexuality. And it explores what a focus on heterosexuality might reveal about the history of interracial sexuality, too. My analysis takes seriously the historian Kevin Mumford’s call that we consider interraciality as a category of analysis. In his book Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century, Mumford contends that “interracial relations on the margins” are “central to understanding the character of modern American culture.”6 What does heterosexuality look like when we move interraciality from the margins to the center? What do we learn about the power and limits of heterosexuality, as well as how it became and has served as a normative category that structures politics, society, and culture, when we focus on the history and experience of interracial couples?

Drawing on both my own work on black-white interracial marriage and a wide scholarship on interracial sexual and marital relationships throughout US history, I argue that interraciality and heterosexuality have a complicated and ambivalent relationship, one that ensures that the experiences of heterosexual interracial couples differ not only from white heterosexual couples but also from same-race nonwhite ones. Interraciality magnifies and overdetermines heterosexual interpretations of male-female interactions. As a result of the intense sexualization of the color line, all kinds of cross-racial male-female interactions are presumed to be sexual. Heterosexual interracial couples are thus hypervisible, while same-sex desire across racial lines is frequently invisible and culturally illegible. Yet even as cross-race male-female relationships are incessantly read as heterosexual, they are not heteronormative and have not been accorded the full privileges of heterosexuality.

While we know, thanks to the work of Siobhan Somerville, that race played an important role in shaping cultural conceptions of the emerging category of homosexuality, scholars have paid less attention to how race has worked to construct the boundaries of what constituted “proper” heterosexuality.7 Yet for much of US history, cross-race different-sex relationships have been as “queer” in their challenge to heterosexuality as homosexuality has. Heterosexual interracial relationships have historically threatened notions of white racial purity. They have challenged a social and national order constructed to maintain white supremacy and white male patriarchal privilege. Stigmatized as illicit and deviant, they served as an “other” against which the heterosexual norm could define itself. In many ways, different-sex interracial couples, especially those involving a white woman, have proved as much of, or even more of, a threat to the heteronormative social order as same-sex couples have.