The Color of Sex: Whiteness, Heterosexuality, and the Fictions of White Supremacy (review)

Mason Stokes's The Color of Sex: Whiteness, Heterosexuality, and the Fictions of White Supremacy is a smart and provocative book, much more than simply the study of a handful of novels and a smattering of films and popular theology. In this work, Stokes offers a compelling and sensitive probing of the fraught and often circuitous connections between race and sexuality and, more particularly, between whiteness and heterosexuality in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America. I wish that The Color of Sex were more mindful of the cultural and historical specificities of its arguments, but Stokes's formulation of heterosexuality and whiteness as sharing an ambivalent relationship is the kind of germinal insight that makes a book, including this one.

The Color of Sex uses popular literature (and, to a much lesser extent, film) as a vehicle for a broader analysis of the connections between sexuality and white supremacy. The author's decision to examine five literary works that, in his words, "move quietly beneath our contemporary critical radar" is a welcome one. Instead of returning to the shopworn American canon, Stokes analyzes works that are overtly white supremacist, are artistically dubious, and were enormously popular in their day. He does so by mining the critical insights of African American writers and activists, a step, he argues, that is necessary if we want to deprive whiteness of "the very tautology and exclusivity that it needs to survive" (5). These are the critical tools, along with queer studies, examinations of race and sexuality (sometimes international but more often American), and occasional dips into psychoanalysis that inform and animate Stokes's careful reading of popular culture.

Between a wide-ranging and schematic introduction and a similarly wide-ranging and schematic conclusion, The Color of Sex treats four novels in four chapters and gives a chapter apiece to a collection of theological writings and a film. Stokes begins with Charles Jacobs Peterson's The Cabin and Parlor; or, Slaves and Masters, published in 1852. He tracks how whiteness was produced as a racial category out of, and not in opposition to, crises of class and gender in the pre-Civil War South. Stokes moves on to argue that Metta V. Victor's 1861 dime novel, Maum Guinea and Her Plantation Children, raises but ultimately subsumes antislavery sensibilities and, in doing so, comments on the Union's increasing inability to manage the tensions generated by the competing claims of slavery and nation.

Chapter 3 departs from novels by analyzing a handful of theological writings but concentrating on Charles Carroll's ambiguous (racially and otherwise) The Tempter of Eve, published in 1902. Stokes suggests that the enabling relationship between whiteness and heterosexuality became increasingly unstable in the early years of the twentieth century.

In chapter 4 Stokes argues that Charles Chesnutt's The Marrrow of Tradition (1901) uses the figure of the masturbating white man to show white supremacy as degenerate and, ultimately, culturally impotent. In chapter 5 he turns to Thomas Dixon Jr.'s The Leopard's Spots (1902) and argues that Dixon's text suggests the complicated relationship to whiteness of both heterosexuality and homoeroticism. Heterosexuality is the force that creates whiteness but also imperils it because, he explains, it breaks the closed circuit of white reproduction (153). In the final substantive chapter, Stokes shifts to the medium of modernity, motion pictures. Here he analyzes The Birth of a Nation (1915) as a characteristically doomed attempt to visualize whiteness as a coherent collective identity.

The Color of Sex's conclusion turns to the burgeoning industry of whiteness studies. Stokes makes clear that he is both a critic of and a part of this scholarship. He registers deep and compelling questions about both the "abolitionist" and "pedagogy of whiteness...