This text critically examines, argues, and demonstrates how the sex-positive movement is complicit in the perpetuation of White Supremacy and anti-black bias in the field of human sexualities, offering white sexuality professionals embodied ethical antiracist strategies for sexual inclusion and transformational change.
In a world where whiteness is considered the sexual and bodily norm, Carole Clements proposes that the sex-positive movement has failed to examine how it maintains White Supremacy through the guise of inclusivity, and how the lack of a critical understanding of what "sex-positive" means has caused harm to black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) individuals and communities alike. Pivoting away from a sex-positive/sex-negative binary, this book establishes a sex-critical discourse by introducing and operationalizing the term "White-sex Supremacy" to produce a racially just and embodied sexual ethic. Chapters begin by looking at sexual science and its racial origins, recounting how both the science of sex and that of race strived for positivist legitimacy in the same historical moment. Moving from the social construction of racial and sexual hierarchies, chapters look at eugenics and sexology’s early "sex-positive" pioneers, such as Margaret Sanger and Havelock Ellis, before examining the establishment of a race-evasive yet distinctly white sexual normality reliant on sex-positive framing. It shows how sex positivity became a popularized term without a clear definition other than "good," and how the legacy of white fragility leads to complicit white silence and the erasure of Black sexualities. Theoretical, practical, and accessible, it offers tangible methods for white sexuality professionals and scholars to learn accompliceship (over allyship) to promote antiracist sexual justice activism.
This book is essential reading for white sexuality professionals, including sex educators, sex therapists, marriage and family therapists, licensed professional counselors, psychotherapists, gynecologists, and nurses, who are committed to examining their whiteness in the context of their commitment to sex positivity.
Author(s): Carole Clements
Series: Leading Conversations on Black Sexualities and Identities
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 159
City: New York
Cover
Endorsements
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Preface
Whitepeople
Broaching Whiteness
Splacetime
Multiculturalism’s Failure
Black Lives Matter
Sex Positivity
What Is White?
Turning White
Hiding in Plain Sight
Ethnic Underground
Racial Bypass
Dead Futures
Introduction: Privilege, Power, and Play
What Is (White)
Why Whiteness? Why Here?
Tabbing Conversations
Critical Reflexivity
Superficially Sex-Positive
Do No Harm
Reviewer C
Dysconscious Racism
Always-Already in the Room
Blondie
Up-Power, Down-Power
Personal, Status, Role, and Collective Power
Performing Power
White Actor-Spectators
White Passivity
One Race-Gender-Sex
Performing Gender
Norm Versus Normal Versus Normative
Gender Versus Genre
Being a Non-being
Queering
Queering as Verb
Radical Play
Unsettling Settlers
1 White Supremacy and Sex: Historicity and Home
Regimes of Awareness
Unsanitizing History
Traces of Trauma
Defining White Supremacy
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome
White-Body Supremacy
Homing Device
Color of Sex
White-Sex Supremacy
Sexual Trauma
White Standpoint
Pathological Discourse
Vested Interest
Mirror of Self-Sameness
White Fragility
Pillars of Whiteness
White Gaze
Sexual Science
2 Ghosts in the Kitchen: The Present Absent of Whiteness
Present Absence: Plastic Pilgrims
Absent Presence: Mama and Daddy Neal
Framed
Symbiosis
Mutualism, Commensalism, Parasitism
Sexual Discourse
Sexual Scripts
Intrapsychic
Interpersonal
Cultural
Presence as Being
Superiority of Presence
Pure Presence
Presence as Belonging
Absence as Not Belonging
Embodied Absence
Ghosts in the Kitchen
Absent Presence of Rape
Theater of Whiteness
Studium and Punctum
3 Failure and Freedom, Erasure and Endurance
Meaningful Endurance
Fallacy of Choice
Neoliberal Freedom
Sexual Consent
White Feminisms
Transgressive Versus Mainstream
Always-Already Negative
Black Feminisms
Intersectionality
Blackness as Hereditary Pollutant
Pillars of Sexual Whiteness
Freedom of Choice
Erased
Epigenetic Inheritance
Racialized Trauma, Racialized Grief
Visceral Loss
Somatic Awareness
Dismemberment
Keeping On
From Safe to Brave
Mechanism of Protest
Safety Bubbles
Law and Order
Capacity for Discomfort
Somatic Dissonance and Failure
Staying Power
Desire Differential
Points of Balance
Cultivating Willingness
Fail Well, Fail Again
Queer Art and Failure
4 Positivity and Time
Temporality
Relative and Absolute Time
Spacetime
Modern Versus Postmodern
Heteronormative Time
Gendered Time
Civilized Time
Chaos and Eros
Sex Time
White Time
Fast Forward
Synchronous Nonsynchronicity
Different Nows
Central Park Ramble
Racial Trauma and Time
Trauma Bonding
Devaluation and Positive Reinforcement
Race-Based Emotions
White Guilt
Sexual Positivity and Optimism
At All Costs
Up by the Boot Straps
Surveillance of Negative Threats
Waves of (White) Sex Positivity
First Wave
Second Wave
Third Wave
Noxious Positivity
Sexual Consent
Three-Fifths Consent
White Talisman
Liberation or Freedom?
Sex Critical
Freedom From Versus Freedom To
And Pleasure?
Radical Honesty
Optimal Sexuality
Shame of Shame
5 The Making of White Sex
One Sex
Homologous Structure
From One Sex to Two Sexes
Bodily Fixity and Consciousness
White Disembodiment
From Bodily to Discursive Identity
From One (Human) Race to Racial Hierarchy
Scientific Racism
Aesthetics of Representation
Between Bodies
Bodily Science: Sex and Race
Human Taxonomies
Difference in kind
Personal Not Social, Disordered Not Diseased
Science of Sex
Science of Race
Threat of Rape
Rape, Not Sex
6 White-Sex Theater: Corporal Theatrics in Splacetime
Heterosexual Whiteness
Structural, Not Natural
Sex-Positive Discourse
Naming Whiteness
Civilization Discourse (1800s–1850s)
Normality Discourse (1860s–1940s)
Erotic Love and Marriage Discourse (1950s–Present)
Sexual Health and Betterment Discourse (1980s–Present)
Sex Positivity Then and Now
Corporeal Theatrics
Performing Whiteness in Sex
Made White
White-Sex Scripting
White Splacetime
White Sex in the Ramble
Manufactured Wildness
Racist Trope
Sex Spot
Dislocation: Mourning Home
Rage and Outrage
Black Rage
White Outrage
Gianna
Utopian Dreams
Chocolate Brownies
Bottom Up, Top Down
7 Cultivating Playmind
Interbeingness
Playmind
Sympathetic Joy
We-ness
Crazy Wisdom
Writing Red
Aimless Wandering
Unsettling Actor, Ally, Accomplice
Actors
Allies
Accomplices
Antiracist
White Freedom
Playmind as Presence
Seeing Our Seeing
Theory U
Five Eye Practices
Closed Eyes
Infant Eyes
Peripheral Seeing
Looking Between Things
Seeing Behind
Direct Looking
Conclusion: Shall We Stay?
References
Index
