ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a brief overview of pre-Darwinian conceptions of race and racial hierarchy and argues that the racial gender-binary ideal had already taken shape in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, although historians have sometimes overlooked this. Before Darwin, gender-binary aesthetic standards for male and female bodies, along with a conception of marriage, gave content to this ideal; after Darwin, the ideal was expressed more directly and succinctly. This chapter analyzes how an evolutionary framework allowed Havelock Ellis to formulate a version of the racial gender-binary ideal, which he then used to resolve paradoxes arising from cross-cutting categories of race and gender. It also discusses how Sigmund Freud’s theory of gender difference managed to block some aspects of the gender-binary ideal’s use to racialize Jewish men.
