Sexual Underworlds: Notes towards the Coloniality of Desire

Hasan Henry, University of California: Berkeley

Scholars of sexuality have only just begun to consider how thoroughly race and desire have been entangled. Recent work on sexual racism and racialized desire has documented how Whiteness is consistently prized on the dating market and how Black and other racialized peoples are often fetishized or overlooked in the sexual field. This literature has also revealed that who is desired is often connected to who is allocated social resources; but even as these dynamics are interrogated, sexual racism literature remains unconnected to a larger critical theoretical framework of race and fails to historicize the origins of desire’s racialization. Similarly, frameworks in the history of race, particularly Du Boisian Sociology, have neglected the hand of sexuality in the emergence of racialized modernity. In this article, the author unites these segregated schools of thought to offer a historical account of the colonial encounter as it was made possible by desire and sexuality. Through a historical archival reading of colonial government documents, travel journals, and ethnology, the author argues that the exchange of racialized bodies as desirable non-human sexual objects is the historical process that instilled pre-modern sexual desire with its racialized character and laid the necessary conditions for the establishment of colonial dominion. This intervention emphasizes the racialization of desire not as a tangential side-effect of a newly racialized world; but, rather, as central to the construction of the new racialized world-system. Thus, scholars of sexuality are encouraged to historicize modern practices of sexual racism as part of a larger genealogy of domination that extends back to the colonial encounter.

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 Presented in Session 218. Race and Space