This project examines how interracial eroticism has a complex, ambivalent relationship to the law and social taboo. Understanding this relationship requires an awareness of how the concept of “interracial” is both legally and culturally constructed, the contexts within which it operates, and the ways cultural and artistic texts influence, echo, and ratify prohibitions against interracial desire. By focusing on moments when the ulterior stakes of the law are visible with an emergent erotics, this project traces the law's role, which would seem to be central, as an effect of other forces which the law both masks and suppresses. Some of these other forces are simultaneously present in contemporaneous literatures as well as public scandals, political pamphlets, and other cultural phenomena. In analyzing these erotic events, generated from deeply entrenched prohibitions, my project examines the intersections of prohibition and desire to expose the spectacular phenomenon of regulating interracial sex.

In this project, narrative and psychoanalytic theory provide the foundation for examining texts and cultural forms of interracial desire. Peter Brooks' analysis of the middle of the text and Freud's work on improper aim/object offer insights into how narratives of interracial eroticism are both constructed and consumed.