When we had made love I slowly recovered my wits . . . ‘Don’t you think we ought to find out more about each other? How we live, how we think, what we are? I know your geography pretty well now, all your hills and valleys. Hadn’t we better study each other’s sociology and anthropology?’
(English colonial officer to his Anglo-Indian lover; John Masters 1956: 261, 264) In the last chapter, we examined how transnational movement could radically alter the personal, cultural, economic and political meanings and value of sexual intimacy, as well as how it is culturally represented and understood. In this chapter we develop the focus on how perceived differences of race, ethnicity and nation can shape experiences of sexual intimacy, influencing reactions to it by encouraging the stimulation or the suppression of inter-ethnic erotic desire. We concentrate here on everyday relations at these racial, national and ethnic boundaries – at what is sometimes called the ‘ethnic frontier’ – in order to understand how sexual relationships are negotiated and regulated in a zone that is perhaps more often analyzed in terms of its political and economic significance in studies which marginalize sex as colourful or spicy anecdote. Accounts of the expansionist injustices and brutalities of the American ‘Wild West’, for example, occasionally allude to the capture and sexual incorporation of young, white female settlers by the Native Americans whose land was being appropriated, but they do little to probe the role of sexuality in this contact or to portray these women’s voices (Courtwright 1996; Wickstrom 2005). Similarly, Linda Colley’s (2003) historical overview of ‘captivity narratives’ in the seventeenth to mid-nineteenth century Mediterranean is generally brief and reserved in its treatment of inter-ethnic sexual involvements when compared to her elucidation of their political ramifications. In this work we are often left wondering how such liaisons were regarded, how they worked out and with what consequences for those involved and their offspring. What did it mean for people to push against a politico-moral code that discouraged sex with those of another race or nation? For the individuals engaged in these relationships, how did they and those around them feel about it and react? And what does this tell us about wider issues of social and cultural order and disorder? The growing body of studies on which we focus below strives to answer such questions by showing how sex is central to many other aspects of the mixing and non-mixing at the frontier, forming the basis of elaborate and shifting moralities
that determine behavioural standards, everyday practice and representations of the Other. The chapter is therefore concerned with exploring the dialectic between personal intimacy and the global flows and interconnections that both featured in the colonial past and pervade the increasingly mobile present.
As we noted earlier, sexual representations of the ethnic and racial Other are a common feature of ethnic frontiers, which provide rich and fertile ground for the sexual fantasies that seem easily to take root in the gaps that national and ethnic differences open up. Edward Said (1978) has shown how images of the East as seductive and voluptuous systematically misrepresented it in ways that legitimated the West’s understanding of itself as a civilizing, rationalizing and modernizing force, images that both reflected global inequalities of power and were constitutive of them. The product of the Orientalists’ own ideological and cultural prejudices, such imagery became a means to subordinate and dominate as well as titillate. Although perhaps less visible now than they once were, similar images continue to inform popular culture. For example, one instalment of the French comic-book adventure series ‘Insiders’ features a naked female captive bound and immobilized at the mercy of a group of bearded Afghans with unsheathed phallic blades in hand (Garreta and Bartoll 2005). So too the sexual possibilities generated by the uncertainties and edginess of life along the frontier were used as an exotic backdrop to stoke the passions of young men in America between the 1950s and 1970s in the so- called ‘sweat magazines’ which graphically depicted full-bodied and barely clad young white women in the clutches of a succession of grossly stereotyped imagined ethnic Others. One can only speculate on the view of the world beyond America held by young men raised on titles like ‘Sex and the Leopard God’, ‘Mufti Marshouk’s Pleasure Dome of 29 Nudes’, ‘Blonde Captive in Tibet’s Torture Temple’, ‘Love Queen of the Pygmies’, ‘The Sex-Crazed Kidnap Cult of the Tanganyika Lion Men’ and ‘The 1000 Sex Slaves of the Whip-Mad Sheik’ (see Collins and Hagenauer 2008). Yet tantalizing and provocative as these storylines were clearly intended to be, it seems likely that they functioned more as cautionary tales about the perils of crossing ethnosexual lines than as a licence and invitation to those who might be tempted to transgress in this way.
Certainly, the personal risks and penalties implied or graphically depicted are grim, both in these men’s magazines and in other works of popular culture. A well-worked theme of anglophone fiction on both sides of the Atlantic is sex with someone from ‘the wrong side of town’, a narrative device that is used to strike fear into middle-class hearts by drawing together characters from diverse backgrounds in explosive meetings that blow social worlds apart, revealing the power of unbridled sexual passion and the precariousness of the moral, cultural and political principles designed to contain it. Rules and regulations may proliferate, but sex seems always at risk of breaking out. In this chapter we explore the forbidden frontiers where ethnic and racial lines are crossed and the efforts made to redress or prevent this.1 Many factors can complicate the management
and negotiation of sexual intimacy at the ethnic frontier. Relations across ethnic and racial boundaries may be qualified by those of age and class as well as by the political- economic context in which they occur, and while we sometimes touch on these latter
factors below, it is the former that are our principal focus here. We begin by looking at the regulation of and response to sexual intimacy in war and violent conflict, when, as we shall also see in many of the other examples that follow, ethnosexual intimacy may paradoxically reaffirm and strengthen the very barriers it might otherwise appear to transcend.