Desiring Whiteness: A Racial History of Prostitution in France and Colonial Senegal, 1848-1950

by Caroline Séquin

Overview

Desiring Whiteness uncovers the intertwined histories of commercial sex and racial politics in France and the French Empire. Since the French Revolution of 1789, the absence of laws banning interracial marriages has served to reinforce two myths about modern France—first, that it is a sexual democracy and second, it is a color-blind nation where all French citizens can freely marry whomever they wish regardless of their race. Caroline Séquin challenges the narrative of French exceptionalism by revealing the role of prostitution regulation in policing intimate relationships across racial and colonial boundaries in the century following the abolition of slavery.

Desiring Whiteness traces the rise and fall of the "French model" of prostitution policing in the "contact zones" of port cities and garrison towns across France and in Dakar, Senegal, the main maritime entry point of French West Africa. Séquin describes how the regulation of prostitution covertly policed racial relations and contributed to the making of white French identity in an imperial nation-state that claimed to be race-blind. She also examines how sex industry workers exploited, reinforced, or transgressed the racial boundaries of colonial rule.

Brothels served as "gatekeepers of whiteness" in two arenas. In colonial Senegal, white-only brothels helped deter French colonists from entering unions with African women and producing mixed-race children, thus consolidating white minority rule. In the metropole, brothels condoned interracial sex with white sex workers while dissuading colonial men from forming long-term attachments with white French women. Ultimately, brothels followed a similar racial logic that contributed to upholding white supremacy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501777042
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	10/15/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Caroline Séquin is Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Lafayette College. She received her PhD in History from the University of Chicago.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Abolishing Slavery, Instituting Prostitution
From Mariages à la Mode du Pays to Commercial Sex
The Road to Dakar
"Colonisation the Wrong Way Round"
Subversive Desires
Breaking the Marthe Richard Law
Extending the Marthe Richard Law to the French Union
Epilogue

What People are Saying About This

Kathleen Keller

Desiring Whiteness is an important book that advances our understanding of the history of prostitution, race, and sexuality in the French empire. Séquin vividly brings forward colonial voices (sex workers, brothel keepers, soldiers, notables) that rarely appear in colonial histories to show how sex and race interacted in surprising ways.

Carolyn J. Eichner

Desiring Whiteness sheds new light on historical and spatial specificities of gender, class, and race to illuminate the centrality of commercial sex within both metropole and colony. With an impressively broad and deep range of sources, Caroline Séquin deftly weaves together a fascinating analysis of this complex and contradictory milieu.

Jennifer Anne Boittin

Desiring Whiteness reveals how France's regulation of brothel sex along, around, and across the color line reinforced colonial hierarchies. Séquin's dynamic and elegantly argued book highlights women's stories of gender control and racial policing to expose sexuality as a critical feature of Frenchness.

Alice L. Conklin

Caroline Sequin's wonderful study is part of a burgeoning literature on the construction of whiteness in modern France and its empire. By focusing on the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in the regulation of commercial sex in the colony of Senegal and the metropole for over a century, she uncovers complex patterns of embodied racial policing that other historians have missed. Prostitutes, their managers, and the state all figure prominently in this deeply researched and beautifully written history of one kind of French racial politics.