Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Interactions, Forbidden Frontiers.(Book Review)

Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Interactions, Forbidden Frontiers. Joane Nagel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

In this fine book, Joane Nagel examines the ways in which ethnicity, race, and sexuality intersect in the construction of individual and group identities and in the organization of social life. She adopts a social constructivist approach developed in studies of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Since the 1970s, anthropology and history have joined efforts to investigate variations across time and places of the ways in which human beings experience, represent, and organize sexuality. These recent studies of sexuality are not concerned with biological or physical differences per se; rather, they focus on assertions and beliefs that structure people's lives and relationships to understand the economic, political, and cultural contexts that influence sexuality.

Defining sexuality as a social construct, Nagel develops a methodological apparatus to systematize evidence in social life. She locates sexuality in depictions, beliefs, fantasies, and fears of men and women of various races, ethnicities, and nationalities, and in the rules governing contact between men and women from different groups. She examines a range of popular culture sources such as movies, music, magazines, television, literature, and the Internet, as well poetry, fieldwork, interviews, pictures, ethnographies, historical texts, biographies, personal accounts, and the census. In "Constructing Ethnicity and Sexuality," Nagel develops a conceptual framework to inquire into the ways in which sexuality/ethnicity and race are constructed. Building upon scholarly work on ethnicity, she takes the concept of boundaries to be crucial in identity creation. According to this view, identities are always negotiated according to "subject positions" (40) and in the interaction between individuals and groups in given contexts. Ethnicity (and she sees race as one manifestation of ethnicity) is constructed through boundaries evident in various spheres of social life and its organizations such as economic affiliations, churches, clubs, and political parties. In addition, she argues, ethnic boundaries are reflected in notions of self and the ways of relating to others, in patterns of friendship and dating, childbearing, marriage, and sexual relations, and in cosmologies, attributes, practices, preferences, and perversions (46).

The first chapter provides examples of locations and times in which erotic contact across ...