Somerville Ch. 1 "Queering the Color Line"

This chapter goes into detail about how people in the early 18th century and beyond started to racialize sex. It shows the simularities of how race became what it is today and how being homosexual is following the same progression. The authors main purpose for this chapter is to show how old scientist tried to show how people where inferior or disabled if they liked the same sex. The author tells his readers that "My focus here is on how these writers and thinkers conceptualized sexuality through a reliance on, and deployment of, racial ideologies, that is, the cultural assumptions and systems of representation about race through which individuals understood their relationships within the world" (17). So he just tells his readers that he is using all of the believed methods that were once thought true, to show how people then thought of homosexuals.
The chapter begins with Siobhan explaining some of the early thoughts of sexuality and the people that created them. Havelock Ellis played a vital role studying sex and hinted that the studyn of race is closely related to the study of sex. It was thought that problems in a persons sexuality created the thoughts of homosexuals and were shaped be race as well. Sexology in the US began in the 1880's and then, homosexuality, was considered very abnormal. People like Ellis wrought many book on the study of sexuality and how it was natural, which made many people question there sex. Homosexuals began to be called a discrete group of people, thus just like black people did. But it was medicine that would decide what would be done with these people and not government or anything else. In the Nineteenth Century race was decribe was based on "geography, religion, class, or color" (21). There were two basic ways to understand how race became to be, Monogeny and polygeny. But it was polygeny that thought "blacks were permanently inferior to whites and that racial mixture would have dangerous. . .consequences" (22-23). So the body then became the main focus on determining the difference in race and sexuality. "scientific assertions about racial differences were often articulated through gender"(25). Early scientist tried to make points that the female black woman had a bigger buttocks than a white women (26). That a normal person would be considered a white person. This goes the same for people being homosexual, they were not considered normal and they had physical differences that proved it. It was said that they would be a threat to white people and purity (30). Many people think Homosexual is a bad word to call people. It was said that they were a third sex and hald breeds of what other people were. Then the thought that they were pervesed came along. It was connected that black men were perversed to white women. That lesbians were perversed to have feelings for other women being of the same race or being even worse if it was a different race.

Do you see the simularities of Race and Sex, and do you think they are both very important?

Do you think that race is connected to sex and sex is connected to race, inadvertinatly?

I thought this was an interesting chapter to read. I personally found it to be dry and boring though at the same time. I felt that it was very deep and almost hard to understand in some points but the ones i could see, i thought they were interesting. I do think that race and sexuality are very important in today's society. I feel that being homosexual is a choice in many ways but that is a whole different and long subject. I also can see that race and sex are related but i don't think that they are closely related enough to affect one when the other is affected. I find it a good subject for this class and can't wait to really understand it better after our discussion.