In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880-1940
  • Andrew Sargent
Carter, Julian B. 2007. The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880-1940. Durham: Duke University Press. $79.95 hc. $22.95 sc. ix + 219 pp.

Early in his book The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880-1940, Julian B.Carter poses the kind of methodologically self-conscious question that has appeared in nearly every work of "whiteness studies" in recent years: "Why do we need another representation of whiteness in conversation with itself?" (44). Carter's question echoes the anguished soul-searching that whiteness studies scholars have engaged in ever since the field's 1990s heyday, in which the valid critical project of "making whiteness visible" is nonetheless seen to risk reinforcing the white privilege that the field seeks to challenge.

If The Heart of Whiteness does not completely avoid such methodological tripwires-more on these in a moment-it is certainly not held back by them. On the contrary, this complex, richly textured book reaffirms the ongoing value of carefully researched, theoretically informed historical scholarship on American whiteness. In particular, it offers a powerful example of the productive new directions taken by scholars participating in what might be called the sexual turn in whiteness studies, or, perhaps more accurately, the racial turn in queer theory. As a queer theorist and historian of sexuality, Carter makes use of queer theory's challenge to heteronormativity in order to "elucidate normative meanings of whiteness" (158). In the process, he makes a significant contribution to the intertwined history of race and sexuality in America.

Carter's central aim in The Heart of Whiteness is to chart the emergence of the concept of "normality" in the early twentieth-century United States. For Carter, discourses of the "normal" in this period were in fact covert means of enshrining whiteness and heterosexuality as twin cornerstones of what it meant to be a socially acceptable American. Carter shows that while upper-crust Anglo-Americans in the Gilded Age used relatively explicit racial language to trumpet what they saw as the superiority of white civilization, the normality discourse that emerged in the ensuing decades became increasingly "race-evasive" (154); that is, it tended to express white superiority in the race-neutral terms of monogamous, heterosexual marriage in a way [End Page 152] that made such lifestyles seem universal to all. This evasiveness enabled whites to think of themselves as inclusive, egalitarian, and loving, while avoiding accountability for the very real forms of exclusion and inequality that normality discourse fostered.

Carter anchors his argument in often brilliant analyses of three sets of print materials that gained wide circulation between 1880 and 1940: medical literature on nervousness, marital advice manuals, and sex education guides for schoolchildren. In his first chapter, Carter argues that discussions of neurasthenia in the Gilded Age tended to construct "whiteness as weakness" (72) in a way that paradoxically reinforced belief in white superiority. While the recurrence of "nervousness" among elite Anglo-Americans suggested their inability to cope with the demands of a rapidly modernizing society, doctors who diagnosed this condition also tended to characterize nervousness as a sign of heightened sensitivity absent from less "civilized" populations.

Carter next examines popular marital advice manuals that sought to address the so-called "marriage crisis" of the early twentieth century. Noting that life in the machine age was hampering sexual intimacy between men and women and driving up the divorce rate, the manuals preached the value of a self-disciplined adherence to monogamous sexual fulfillment that could enable white civilization to perpetuate itself. While the literature prescribed mutual pleasure between husband and wife (symbolized by the simultaneous orgasm) as the key to this enterprise, Carter shows that even this seemingly progressive vision masked lingering power hierarchies between men and women, and between whites and other racial groups.

In his final chapter, Carter reads sex education literature in much the same way, arguing that training in "the birds and the bees" served as a way not just to teach schoolchildren about sex but to indoctrinate them in the "normal" virtues of monogamous heterosexuality that educators saw...

pdf

Share