Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina

Read this for a 400 level history class. I gave it 4 stars, not b/c I loved reading it, after all I don't really care about gender adn sexual history very much, but it was well researched and well written. The author was a bit repetitive and it could have been a number of pages shorter as a result, but the information that is inhere is good and documneted. While the author tries to draw clear conclusions, she is only looking at it from one point of view adn there is plenty of debate to be had on the importance of these histories.

Kirstin Fischer, in her book Suspect Relations, has offered the reader an intriguing portrait of racial relations in colonial North Carolina based on sex. Many readers will treat the concept of sex and race with some suspicion; how can these two items be related unless you're talking (much like Foucault) about power? Fischer certainly does talk about power relationships, but she focuses on gender and social responses to sexual behaviors to construct her argument about creating the definition of "race". Fischer has mined lower court records to garner an understanding about societal responses in this era to sexual behaviors, including deviance. She breaks this down into 5 well crafted chapters, each focusing on a different aspect of racial/gender relations. Her chapters cover the gamut, from rebellious women to slaveowners engaging in sexual relations with their slaves to craft her argument. In the end, she claims that race is a biological construct defined by sexual behaviors. It is an interesting argument, and usually supported well by her evidence. The one problem I had with this book is that we have no idea how widespread some of the cases she cites are. The evidence she provides is for a few individual scenarios, but she does not really put this into context of the entire population in most cases. Despite this drawback, the argument is compelling and the book is well worth reading for anyone that has an interest in 18th century America.