Regulating Interracialized Intimacies

This book explores the role of the law in the social construction of 'race' and 'mixture' within and beyond the borders of Europe. It focuses on 'interracialized' intimacies, that is, the intimate relations of subjects ascribed and/or perceived to belong to different 'races'. The role of the state in defining boundaries between 'us' and 'them' becomes particularly clear in their regulation. Moving across different times, places and political formations - including the US slavery regime, European colonial empires and metropolises - the book delves deep into how the governments of white-supremacist and white-majority societies have consistently attempted to prevent, discourage or obstruct intimate relationships crossing the colour line. This occurred directly, through prohibitions and anti-miscegenation laws, or indirectly, through citizenship laws, marriage licenses, social care, prostitution laws, housing policies, policing practices and other means. The book further shows that the legacy of these highly gendered and racialized regulations continues to reverberate today, informing norms, hierarchies and perceptions about whose intimacies count as legitimate and ought to be facilitated and whose are deemed suspect and requiring state surveillance. The contributions also shed light on the individuals, couples and families who were targeted by state regulations and how they challenged and disturbed state categorizations and regulations. Highly interdisciplinary in scope, with contributions by pioneering United States and European scholars in this field, this book will be a fundamental read for scholars, researchers and students interested in tracing the genealogy of racial thinking in Europe and beyond, and its enduring operativity.

Elena Zambelli is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Maynooth University. Her research interests pivot on the commodification and regulation of sex and intimacy within and across national and racialized borders. Her publications include the research monograph Sexscapes of Pleasure: Women, Sexuality and the Whore Stigma in Italy. Betty de Hart is Professor of Transnational Families and Migration Law at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She studies the national, European and international rules affecting transnational families, their ideologies and the impact of law on the everyday lives of transnational families, with a particular interest in the genealogy of race thinking.

Introduction - Beyond Marriage Prohibitions: New Directions in The Study of Regulating Relationships Across and Beyond the Colour Line Part I: Prohibition 1. Of Coercion, Consent, And Concubines: The Regulation and Litigation of Interracial Sex and Marriage under Slavery in the U.S. South 2. Regulating Sexual Mixing in the Italian Colonies of the Horn of Africa: A Legal History Perspective 3. Dutch Politics of Intimacy in Colony and Metropole and their Afterlives: Reflections on a Shifting Political Economy of Intimacy 4. 'What Does our Love Have to Do with Politics?' Regulation of Interracialized Couples in East Germany Part II: Legal-spatial segregation 5. Regulating 'Mixture' while Building a Settler-Colonial City: The Case of Benghazi 6. Policing "Zones of Degeneracy": (Post-)Colonial Migrants and Interracialized Sex and Intimacies in France (1954-1979) Part III: Regulation of consequences 7. A "Marriage Between Natives": Race, Religion, Citizenship, and Customary Marriage in Late Colonial West Africa 9. Gender, Citizenship, and Regulating Mixed Intimacies in West Germany 10. Mixed-Race Children, Eugenics and Labels of Defect and Handicap in Britain, 1920s-50s 11. 'The Obvious Dangers of this Relationships': Interracialised Relationships between Underage Swiss Women and Italian Men and the Implementation of the Swiss Child Protection Laws (1960-1980) Part IV: Migration law 12. Regulating Interracialised Intimacies in 1950s-60s Britain through Deportation and Immigration Policies 13. Borders, Intimacy and Colonial Dispossession Part V: Shadow of law 14. Improper Couples, Suspicious Mobilities: Sexuality as Currency and Stigma in Black-White Couples' Everyday Lives in Europe 15. 'How could I have been so Blind?' Love, Money, and Victimhood in Transnational Interracialized Relationships between Dutch Women and Men from MENA Countries 16. Afterword - Love, Domination, and All Things in Between