Desiring Whiteness: A Racial History of Prostitution in France and Colonial Senegal, 1848-1950

Winner of the Alf Andrew Heggoy Book PrizeDesiring Whiteness uncovers the intertwined histories of commercial sex and racial politics in France and the French Empire.Since the French Revolution of 1789, the absence of laws banning interracial marriages has served to reinforce two myths about modern France - first, that it is a sexual democracy and second, it is a color-blind nation where all French citizens can freely marry whomever they wish regardless of their race.Caroline Séquin challenges the narrative of French exceptionalism by revealing the role of prostitution regulation in policing intimate relationships across racial and colonial boundaries in the century following the abolition of slavery.Desiring Whiteness traces the rise and fall of the "French model" of prostitution policing in the "contact zones" of port cities and garrison towns across France and in Dakar, Senegal, the main maritime entry point of French West Africa.Séquin describes how the regulation of prostitution c