C. Winter Han

If someone expresses a greater sexual interest in one racial group over another, are they being racist? Are our erotic preferences and attractions innate, or are they created by the culture in which we live? These are some of the questions explored in this thought-provoking sociological study. In its most basic form, sexual racism is sexual rejection based on race and/or race-based fetishizing and objectification of another. According to author C. Winter Han, associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College, the problem is larger than just who desires whom as a sex partner. It is “rather the structural conditions promoted by gay communities and the gay media that leads to white men coming to have more erotic worth than men of color.” By judging men of color less desirable, “the true danger of sexual racism isn’t that gay white men don’t find men of color sexually desirable, but the hierarchy that it creates affects many other areas of life for gay men of color.” Racial Erotics contends that our erotic preferences are not ‘natural’, but rather are formed by larger structural factors that make some traits – and people – desirable or not desirable. “Sexual desires are often influenced by larger social constructions of race, ethnicity, age, and class, and the social meanings given to race has always played a critical role in the construction of desire and desirability.” This socially constructed ‘erotic habitus,’ as Han calls it, creates a hierarchy of sexual worth, an erotic economy where some men are considered more valuable than others. In Han’s analysis, white men have the greatest value in the gay male world. “Exploring sexual racism among gay men demonstrates that constructions of racialized desires…cannot be separated from the larger project of constructing the ‘good’ gay.” While readers may be concerned by the relatively small number of men in some of the studies the author relies on, Racial Erotics will have them looking at gay media and culture more closely and questioning where their desires come from.… (altro)