ABSTRACT
Joane Nagel’s Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers (2003) discusses the intersections of race, ethnicity, and sexuality at sites she calls ethnosexual frontiers, “where ethnicity is sexualized, and sexuality is racialized, ethnicized, and nationalized” (p. 14). She categorizes those who choose to cross these frontiers based on their intentions and classifies them into four categories: ethnosexual settlers are those “who establish long-term liaisons, join and/or form families, and become members of ethnic communities ‘on the other side”’ (p. 14); ethnosexual sojourners are those who “arrange for a brief or extended stay, enter into sexual liaisons, but eventually return to their home communities” (p. 14); ethnosexual adventurers “undertake expeditions across ethnic divides for recreational, casual, or ‘exotic’ sexual encounters, often more than once, but who return to their sexual home bases after each excursion” (p. 14); and ethnosexual invaders “launch sexual assaults across ethnic boundaries, inside alien ethnic territory, seducing, raping, and sexually enslaving ethnic Others as a means of domination and colonization” (p. 14). Nagel briefly mentions that all sex is inherently political and even passively makes mention of “ethnosexual resisters, innovators, and revolutionaries” (p. 261), but she fails to flesh out these categories and misses an excellent opportunity to describe sex that attempts to be subversive.
