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The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880-1920. By Julian B. Carter. Durham, N. C: Duke University Press, 2007. Pp. 232. $79.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).
In this provocative new study Julian B. Carter does much to explicate how in certain quarters white, heterosexual, marital love has come to be assumed as the bedrock of the American republic. He seeks to come to grips with how whiteness and heterosexuality became equated with each other and defined as die "normal," hence disappearing as contestable categories during the first half of the twentieth century. Carter's is an ambitious book, for he has undertaken the task of writing the history of what was often left tacit, assumed, and unspoken in the very moment of its ascendancy. Rather than examining challenges to the ruling racial and sexual formations, he seeks to understand whiteness and heterosexuality precisely when their status was rendered invisible under the rubric of innocuous "normality." He quite consciously focuses exclusively on the dominant, normalizing discourses of marital advice, sexology, and sex education in order to have the norm speak its own name and reveal itself as historically particular.
Much of the earlier literature on whiteness argued for the hollowness or blankness of this category, and responding to this problematic stance is one of the major achievements of this book. By focusing on and unpacking the overlapping discourses of sexuality, normality, and modernity, Carter has done much to give whiteness both content and historical concreteness. His lengthy introduction, constituting about a quarter of the book, allows for eloquent reflections on the complex but infrequently overlapping historiographies of whiteness and sexuality. A keyword in his analysis is "elision." The concept allows for the explanation of how elites could silendy refer to whiteness and heterosexuality without mentioning them outright merely by invoking normal, modern persons. Carter seeks to challenge this raceand power-evasive discourse by revealing its troubled past. He persuasively argues that influential popular science accounts of both race and sexuality have been governed by the narrative structure of an evolutionary epic where white, heterosexual love contained within the confines of marriage is read as the success story of human development. In the twentieth century the contested and controversial notion of "civilization" was replaced by the more...