The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940 (review)

In this smart and provocative book, Julian B. Carter argues that the concept of "the normal" in America results from an interlocking though disavowed set of relationships between whiteness and heterosexuality. The resulting "normality discourse" is made to appear politically neutral because it speaks the language of "love," despite its decidedly political project of buttressing and reproducing a specifically white civilization. As Carter writes, this book tells "the story of how 'normality' came to serve as a sort of discursive umbrella under which white, heterosexual Americans in a formally democratic society could claim both physical and cultural ownership of modern civilization" (31).

Carter's source materials are well chosen and consistently interesting. She examines both clinical and popular representations of nervous illness—neurasthenia—in the 1890s, documenting the ways in which the fragile white body was held up as a sign of potential white sterility. This emphasis on sterility had the ironic effect, Carter argues, of reconsolidating whiteness, of making "white rule" appear "both necessary and benign" (43). Carter also examines popular marital advice literature from the 1920s and 30s, arguing that the increasing gulf between men and women—a gulf created by the machine age—led to the creation of modern heterosexuality as a system that eroticizes sexual difference. The erotically charged though highly disciplined form of marriage that resulted came to stand in for a new model of white citizenship, in which difference is transformed from difficulty to possibility, all under the sign of white heterosexuality as an invisible racial and sexual standard. Finally, Carter turns her attention to early twentieth century sex education as a site where heterosexual whiteness was produced as modern normality. In all of these contexts Carter reveals a subtle understanding of cultural and theoretical contexts, and her analyses are fresh, illuminating, and revelatory, carried along on a prose that is vigorous and readable.

Despite Carter's successes in rendering whiteness and heterosexuality in all of their historical specificity, there's a tendency here for heterosexuality to default to something less historical and more general: in her words, "the investment of sexual difference with erotic desire" (79). This is a far cry from how heterosexuality was defined, to choose just one example, in 1936 in Funk and Wagnall's New Standard Dictionary of the English Language: "depraved feeling toward the opposite sex." This definition emerged from medical and scientific writing in which heterosexuality was birthed not as a norm, but as a pathology, a pleasure system divorced from the legitimating context of reproduction. Carter ignores this definitional history, a strange lapse for a book interested in hetero sexuality as the new "normal."

I also have a concern with Carter's focus on whiteness as a norm solely "in conversation with itself" (21). While I'm intrigued by her claim that "norms appear to be inherently solipsistic" (21), whiteness—like heterosexuality—always exists, it seems to me, in anxious relation to an other. This is, of course, the common sense that Carter fights against here, and her justification for her approach is smart and compelling. Nonetheless, I found myself longing for some consideration of the ways in which the solipsism of the norm is always preceded by an earlier moment, in which the normal stares wide-eyed, in both fear and envy, at the approach of the abnormal.

Neither of these concerns takes away from Carter's success here. This is a brilliant book, certain to invigorate our understanding of whiteness and heterosexuality as they presided at the birth of American normality.