Crimes of Love, Misdemeanors of Passion The Regulation of Race and Sex in the Colonial South

Controlling Bodies: The Punishment of Multiracialized Sexual Relations

“…Slavery was predicated on a rigid separation of black and white sexual relations. In order to maintain the plantation economy, it was necessary to maintain a division of race (Finkelman, 1997).…”

“…Stemming from this act, the social construction of multiracialized sexuality had important regulatory functions that were grounded in material concerns. Real advantage was gained by the plantation owners through an increase in the number of slaves; rather than discouraging multiracialized sexual relations, white plantation owners would derive additional labor by sexually exploiting black female slaves (Mencke, 1976;Finkelman, 1997).…”

“…As such, these children threatened the race-based system of slavery. In 1691, therefore, Virginia enacted a law that any free "English" woman who bore a mulatto child would pay a fine of fifteen pounds or be sold as a servant for five years; the child would be a servant until age thirty (Finkelman, 1997). This further criminalization of multiracialized sexual relations offered a second material advantage for the white plantation class.…”

“…Selective enforcement (re)affirmed that if white males engaged in these acts, a blind eye was turned; if white women engaged in these same acts, severe penalties would follow (Mencke, 1976;Finkelman, 1997). As Winthrop Jordan notes, by the turn of the century, English settlers in many of the continental colonies felt revulsion toward interracial sexual contact (1969).…”

“…Although there is a substantial body of work on interracial relations (Sickles, 1972;Davis, 1991;Frankenberg, 1993;Zack, 1993Zack, , 1997Ferber, 1995;Finkelman, 1997;Hodes, 1997Hodes, , 1999, little research has undertaken the task of analyzing racialized sexual relations explicitly from a materialist standpoint. Doing so requires a strategy that deconstructs the depiction of raced and gendered identities in naturalistic terms.…”