Not Quite Enough Trouble with Normal

Julian B. Carter's Heart of Whiteness sets out to strip from the category of the normal its "mantle of political neutrality" (6) by accounting for the linked discursive production of "whiteness" and "normality" in the United States between 1880 and 1940. The study details how three discourses about sex—popular scientific and medical literature addressing neurasthenia (or nervousness), marital relations, and sexual education—contributed to a racialized nation-building project. Victorian-era Anglo-Saxon hegemony was secured through the cultural imperative that this portion of the citizenry must rein in its passions and model an ideal of civility for both peoples of color and ethnic whites. This mandate generated a cultural strain evident in the eruption of cases of nervousness among privileged white classes, who felt erotic self-management increased their racialized burden for pushing modernity forward. As Carter claims, neurasthenia was, "without question, a reaction to the transformations in the relations of production" and "also a reaction to the loss of exclusive control over cultural capital" (71). By the turn of the twentieth century, Anglo-Saxons began to share the burden of normality with previously hypereroticized European ethnic groups. No longer was eroticism to be feared; rather, it was safely contained within marriage. During the Gilded Age and interwar years, the cultural work of expanding the parameters of who counted as "American" and "white" while limiting legitimate forms of eroticism was accomplished through the discursive technologies of marital literature and sexual education programs. Since attention was focused on disciplining and governing "normal" white straight eroticism and sexuality, for the sake of the nation, the dual process of normalizing changing definitions of race and white married couples' intimacies made it possible "to talk about whiteness indirectly" (3) and thus made whiteness "hard to see" (2).

By presenting "the dynamic interrelationship of sexual and racial normality" in a linear and progressive fashion, The Heart of Whiteness structurally mirrors these discourses' ideological progressivism (157). Although this renders Carter's narrative accessible and teachable, it creates an ultimately limiting and artificial linearity. Treated in separate chapters, each discursive archive seems specially selected to prove a foregone conclusion. This appearance is not mitigated-by the other popular cultural referents that creep into Carter's narrative, including short isolated discussions of popular films (38–40, 86–87, 111) and a lengthy introductory treatment of Normman [sic] and Norma, statues fabricated to embody the mean measurements of young white American men and women for a 1945 exhibit at the Cleveland Health Museum (1–12). The resulting historical picture strips the interrelationship of race and sexuality of much of its dynamism. An actually multivalent social field is flattened to a monolithic, albeit changing, discursive field.

Carter's ambition is to counter antiracist scholars' tendency to empty whiteness of its "central cultural contents" by addressing the racial category merely as a "dangerous and violent" oppressive force (29). As he sees it, this trend is "skating close to complicity in a system that sustains its inequities by denying their existence" (29). Carter does supply some of whiteness's elided erotic and sexual content, but his own methodology risks a similar complicity, since he willfully turns a blind eye to how power operates through material conditions and state-linked institutions. As noted above, he fleetingly remarks that changes in whiteness are linked to changes in the means of production; however, he makes no substantial elaboration on that point. He even describes marital literature as "interpellating" white populations (78); yet, The Heart of Whiteness overlooks how both marriage and education are institutions structurally linked to the state. The hegemonic discursive technologies usefully outlined in The Heart of Whiteness beg to be read in relation to material institutions and practices, via a Marxist class analysis or a stronger Foucauldian analysis of power.

In an endnote, Carter distances his preferred term of "normality" from Michael Warner's own supposedly "racially neutral" examination of normalcy in The Trouble with Normal (166n44).¹ That buried move betrays how Carter...