Notes
1. Rebecca Ann Bach, “17th and 18th Century Othello and Desdemona: Race and Emerging Heterosexuality,” in Feminisms and Early Modern Texts: Essays for Phyllis Rackin, ed. Bach and Gwynne Kennedy (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2010), 81–98.
2. Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality (Boston: Beacon, 2012), xvi.
3. Bach, “17th and 18th Century Othello and Desdemona,” 81.
4. Quoted in Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 92.
5. Katz, Invention of Heterosexuality.
6. Kevin Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), xi, xii.
7. See Siobhan B. Somerville’s seminal work, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Her argument about the ways in which race served as a key reference point for understanding homosexuality is discussed in more detail later in the essay.
8. For more on the process of constructing whiteness as a space of “purity,” see Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Joanne Nagel, Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Interactions, Forbidden Frontiers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 37–62.
9. The 1661 Maryland law mandated that a “free-born” English woman who married a black slave serve the same master during the life of her husband and that any children of the couple would be slaves as well. There is a large literature on the history of antimiscegenation laws in the United States and the role such laws played in shaping racial and gender hierarchies. See, for example, Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). A good introduction is Peter Bardaglio, “‘Shamefull Matches’: The Regulation of Interracial Sex and Marriage in the South before 1900,” in Sex, Love, and Race: Crossing Racial Boundaries in North America, ed. Martha Hodes (New York: NYU Press, 1999), 112–40.
10. Governor and Council of Virginia, “Statutes (1630–70),” in Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion, ed. Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 229.
11. Theodore Bilbo, Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization (Poplarville, MS: Dream House, 1947), 57–58.
12. Bilbo, 57–58.
13. Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997), 20; Mason Stokes, The Color of Sex: Whiteness, Heterosexuality, and the Fictions of White Supremacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 16.
14. For more on this, see Katz, Invention of Heterosexuality, 88.
15. Mason Stokes, “White Heterosexuality: A Romance of the Straight Man’s Burden,” in Thinking Straight: The Power, Promise, and Paradox of Heterosexuality, ed. Chrys Ingraham (New York: Routledge, 2005), 133.
16. For a good overview of racial sexual stereotypes and their social implications, see Nagel, Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality.
17. Stokes, Color of Sex, 17.
18. Stokes, 18.
19. Robert C. Young, Colonial Desire (1995), quoted in Stokes, “White Heterosexuality,” 146.
20. Stokes, “White Heterosexuality,” 146.
21. Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. Griffith, based on the novel by Thomas Dixon Jr. (Triangle Film Corp., 1915).
22. Stevi Jackson, “Sexuality, Heterosexuality, and Gender Hierarchy: Getting Our Priorities Straight,” in Ingraham, Thinking Straight, 18.
23. Nagel, Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality, 141. See also Diane Richardson, Rethinking Sexuality (London: Sage, 2000), 80.
24. Nagel, Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality, 159, 166.
25. See Pascoe, What Comes Naturally.
26. Steven Seidman, “From the Polluted Homosexual to the Normal Gay: Changing Patterns of Sexual Regulation in America,” in Ingraham, Thinking Straight, 40.
27. Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 11.
28. Stetson Kennedy, Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was (Boca Raton: Florida Atlantic University Press, 1990), 67; originally published as Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1959). Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally explores this issue of wills, estates, and miscegenation law in great depth.
29. Leti Volpp, “American Mestizo: Filipinos and Antimiscegenation Laws in California,” in Loving v. Virginia in a Post-racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage, ed. Kevin Noble Maillard and Rose Cuison Villazor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 71.
30. While relationships between white women and black men were deemed particularly threatening, other kinds of interracial relationships also challenged the social and patriarchal order. As Mary Ting Yi Lui has shown, the murder of a white