Description
Carter builds her intricate argument from detailed readings of an array of popular texts, focusing on how sex education for children and marital advice for adults provided significant venues for the dissemination of the new ideal of normality. She concludes that because its overt concerns were love, marriage, and babies, normality discourse facilitated white evasiveness about racial inequality. The ostensible focus of "normality" on matters of sexuality provided a superficially race-neutral conceptual structure that whites could and did use to evade engagement with the unequal relations of power that continue to shape American life today.
A study of the racialized construction of heterosexual normality based on the analysis of medical pamphlets, marriage manuals, and sex-instructional literature
About the Author
Julian Carter is Assistant Professor of Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts.
Reviews
"The Heart of Whiteness is brilliant; it has the capacity to transform what we thought we knew about both race and sexuality in the twentieth century. Furthermore, in Julian Carter's hands 'normal' takes on a meaning that is so specific, clear, and historically on-target that nobody will be able to see twentieth-century normality in the same way after reading her book."-Gail Bederman, author of Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917
"In this smart and provocative book, Julian B. Carter argues that the concept of 'the normal' in America results from an interlocking though disavowed set of relationships between whiteness and heterosexuality. . . . Carter's source materials are well chosen and consistently interesting. . . . This is a brilliant book, certain to invigorate our understanding of whiteness and heterosexuality as they presided at the birth of American normality." -- Mason Stokes * American Studies *
Book Information
ISBN 9780822339489
Author Julian B Carter
Format Paperback
Page Count 232
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 318g