The Connection Of Ethnicity And Sexuality

Ethnosexual frontiers is where race, ethnicity, and nationality intersect with sexuality to enforce inequality. Differences of color, culture, country, ancestry, language, and religion are the materials out of which ethnic, racial, and national identities, and boundaries built. Ethnicity and sexuality blend together to form sexualitzed perimeters. Ethnic and sexual boundaries coverage to mark the edges of ethnosexual frontiers. One example of the connection from the readings was the Vietnam war from 1960s and 1970s.

This was was staged in a gendered, sexualized battle theatre. The war was a site of masculinities in conflict as various race, classed, and ideologically divided American manhoods engaged other races, classed, and ideologically divided Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian manhoods. During the war there were other sexual encounters between American GIs and Asian women. It was said that “real men” fight wars, and they often fight them against pansies and perverts. During these times enemy men commonly are depicted as wimps or racist, and they are hypo, homo, or heterosexualized. “Good citizenship” relies on appropriate sexual behavior and proper gender performance. This examples from the readings, including Andersons poem about the price to be paid by woman who cross the line and violate the partisans rule of celibacy each illustrates the boundaries that divide male and female, romantic longing and reviled loathing. They present racial, ethnic, and national sexual images of us and them.

According to Goffmans theory of social theory, a stigma is an attribute, behavior, or reputation which is socially discrediting in a particular way. It causes an individual to be mentally classified by others in an undesirable, rejected stereotype rather than in an accepted, normal one. If someone has a physical disability and is visibly seen by other people that is called discredited.

Black women were hard workers, they did manual labor like men. Black men hard manual labor justified the harsh conditions forced upon them objectified their bodies as big, strong, and stupid. Apparently whites found African men to be more threatening than women because they believed that black men were naturally violent. Black women were seen as mules, working like animals. They’re sexuality and reproductivity presented opportunities for forms of sexual exploitation and sexual slavery. The institutionalized rape of Black women spawned the controlling image of Jezebel or sexually wanton. The representation of women bodies were defined as wild, unrestrained sexuality that could be tamed but never completely subdued. Within the all black communities gender operated in distinctive ways, like women who had many children. Social practices such as lynching and institutionalized rape became deeply embedded in the fabric of American society required ideological justifications. Gaining black male protection certainly helped defend black women against interracial rape.

During slavery slave masters would rape their slaves because they believed their bodies were unclean and not pure. This relates back to Sarah Baartman who was viewed as a form of ethosexual frontier, because of the shape of African American women bodies and how different their genitals were than European women, Europeans saw them as non humans or freaks Because Sarah Baartman had a different body than the European norm, she was blantandly expolided. The Koi Koi women were not viewed as women but more so inhuman sexual slaves, and sexual deviance. This is how the stereotype begin that women were animals. The illness was the belief that this form of misogynoir was okay, along with illness and disease that came being exploited raped and abused.