Abstract
Sexualities scholarship in sociology and the social sciences often leaves sexuality, as an axis of power, uninterrogated, inadvertently sustaining the power it seeks to critique. Even the scholarship that weaves sexuality with race, class, or/and gender tends to operate disconnected from questions of the body. In this article, we unearth historically relevant aspects of how sexualities became implicated in sustaining a single lens, then survey current scholarship on the racialized embodiment, revealing how approaches to studying racialized embodiment that do not center whiteness or operate from an unwittingly “race-neutral” location offer us with nuanced accounts of the body as implicated in, and produced by, the social world. We also consider the instrumentalization of the erotic in current empirical work, deploying erotic capital in erotic labor today. We close with implications for future work based on our review of the field.
Introduction
Sexualities scholarship in sociology and the social sciences has typically considered sexuality as an uninterrogated central axis of power, with, at best, unintentional ignorance of patterns of social marginalization beyond its borders and, at worse, an explicit omission of power in all its multiple forms, including race (Khan 2019; Vidal-Ortiz, Robinson, and Khan 2018). Moreover, even the scholarship that weaves sexuality and race together (alone, or along with class and gender) tends to operate disconnected from questions of the body and in general, of embodiment, as it reflects the very patterns of social marginalization sexualities studies seek to pursue. This disconnection may be, in part, because sociological and social scientific studies often privilege identity and the individual, and not processes, dynamics, and the function of the erotic itself, which in many ways exceeds identity categorizations. Racialized groups of people, as we understand them through socially shared/defined meanings, take precedence over racialized bodies as matter—a distinctive matter with socially attributed “value” in a hierarchy either across ethnoracial categories (whites and people of color) or within the same ethnoracial group. This occurs, for instance, in discussions about how, when considering skin color variations within Blackness, individuals with light-skinned Black tones get more sexual attention than dark-skinned ones (Robinson and Vidal-Ortiz 2013). The study of racial and sexual connections is often circumscribed by identity-based markers (as in Black gay/queer) or in relation to which of those identifiers/social markers are more important to a person (Winder 2024) or whether one can reconcile Blackness with gayness (see the introduction to Smith and Winter Han 2020). Yet, some practices fall outside of sexuality-based identity parameters, such as when people do not self-categorize in terms of sexual orientation (Vidal-Ortiz and Robinson 2016). The frameworks that fuel the study of sexuality are inherently racialized. What we mean is that sexuality studies have originally been produced through centering an invisible, racially “neutral” center, through a lens of whiteness as the field’s norm (Ferguson 2018). In doing so, it has also constituted its margins: oppositional racial-cultural frameworks emergent from people of color communities and scholarship are often read as homophobic in response (not to the presence of homophobia, but) to a reading of gayness as always already white (Almaguer 1991; Cantú 2009; Guzmán 2006); similar oppositional takes emerge when addressing issues of sexuality for (cis) women of color vis a vis white women (Espiritu 2001).
Furthermore, the erotic is often less accounted for in scholarship about sexualities (Khan 2019). This omission takes place in part because, while social identities are references to institutions and patterns of access to privilege or discrimination, differences between identity markers and lived experiences and practices are often reduced, in neoliberal times, to rigid conceptions of identities (although we understand how identities came to be foundational to LGBT social movements, and feminist theorizing—see Ahmed 2014; Britt and Heise 2000). At certain junctures of the social scientific study on sexualities, the field of sexualities has served as a proxy or stand-in for other markers—in this discussion, namely body and embodiment. This conceptual, theoretical piece contributes to conversations about the field’s state and future directions by shifting our sense of identity to the vessels through which we operate and the erotic power embedded in us. We start with a background of the body, race, and sexuality to better understand the bridges between these categories of social analysis and the groups of people directly impacted by its regulation or pathologization.
The body sits at the nexus of biologized accounts of race. A short socio-historical account will help us to understand the situation. Historically, features of the body became imbued with racialized meaning, which was then deployed as evidence to legitimize the existence of race as a category (Kirsh 2009; Magubane 2001; Nagel 2003—see also Glenn 2002). The racist logics that undergird this deployment suggest race is something that can be seen on and within the body and is, therefore, self-evident and real (Silva 2023). Used as a means of justifying structural and institutional inequality, biologized interpretations of race both depend on and produce the social body in real time. Treating the body as a social production rather than a purely physiological one reveals that the physical body does not precede the social order but bears meaning because of it (Butler 1993; Grosz 1994; Moraga 1981).
Scientific racism, which is rooted in the notion that race is essential to the body, advances a polygenist logic suggesting racial categories denote distinctive (and inherently unequal) species among humans. While pseudoscientific claims relative to the field of craniometry (here, we refer to eugenicist correlations between skull size and disposition) or the notion of blood quantum (a system imposed on Native nations by the U.S. government to measure so-called “Indian blood” as a requirement for tribal membership) represent explicitly colonialist and racist epithets, naturalized invocations of race as something of and in the body exist more subtly today (Epstein 2004; Garroutte 2003; Gould 1980; St Louis 2003). We begin by situating the historical context of how the body was treated as a naturalized attestation of racist logic to reveal that, like other social formations, the meanings attached to bodies have varied across time and space and continue to evolve.
Where race is operationalized as a marker of difference, sexualized pathologization follows. Race, gender, and sexuality are biologized axes that concurrently get taken up in the regulation of sexual behavior (Ferguson 2004). Travel narratives describing Indigenous populations as sexually depraved (Patil 2008), the imposition of colonial orders enforcing sexual restrictions (Puri 2016), and in the United States, the inferred hypersexuality of Black populations (Collins 2004) are just a few examples of how this co-constitution manifests across the sociopolitical landscape. More insidiously, embodied expectations in dance skill/ability (Craig 2012), athleticism (St Louis 2003), and the corporeal habituation of excess associated with women of color (Strings 2019) frame racialized embodiment discourse today.
As a discipline, sociology brings not only race, gender, and sexuality as social formations to the fore but explicitly features the body as a vessel implicated in and produced by the social world. Racialized embodiment does more than shed light on how racial meaning gets attached to the physical; it reveals how such meanings are consequential financially (Brooks 2010; Jones 2020), emotively (Kang 2013), and structurally (Silva, Newton-Francis and Vidal-Ortiz 2022). In this paper, we advocate for an approach to studying racialized embodiment that does not center on whiteness, or operate from an unwittingly “race-neutral” location.
State of the Field
This section links contemporary explorations of embodiment’s relationship to race and sexuality within sociology. We begin by exploring the work of Sabrina Strings and Tressie McMillan Cottom in tandem, as both scholars locate beauty as a form of embodied capital withheld from Black women.
Strings (2019) traces the origins of the racialized sexualization experienced by Black women to the 18th-century slave trade, in which she notes that writings by French philosophers argued that African slaves were “sensuous,” gluttonous (and therefore overweight) and highly libidinous, thus exhibiting a lack of “rational self-control.” Notably, the concept of rationality invokes a mind/body split, in which Black women became approximated to the corporeal in contrast to Whiteness, which is ancillary to ventures of the mind. Strings (2019) argues that body size and shape became a new ordering system after skin color could no longer be leveraged as quickly because of biracial identity. She uses the term “thin privilege” to refer to how white racialized constructions of beauty carry material and social consequences for women in their everyday lives. She locates the treatment of Sarah Baartman, colloquially referred to as the “Hottentot Venus,” as exemplary of how the physical body, in terms of color, size, shape, girth, and weight, is affixed with dually racialized and sexualized meaning. Notably, White women’s bodies became ascribed with fluctuating meanings depending on the socio-historical moment. For example, Strings (2019) notes that fatness as embodied by White women would eventually come to represent the “vigor” of the nation—or the capacity of the nation (read: White man) to feed/care for White women. This representation of embodied vigor was never attributed to Black women, for whom fatness could only represent sexual deviance and gluttony.
Beauty and embodiment are taken up by Cottom (2019) as a method for absolving the makeup, skincare, and fashion industries from the racism inherent to them. In particular, Cottom (2019) notes that if beauty exists as a tangible goal that women are coerced to achieve through purchases that modify the body, their financial investment within the industry is guaranteed. But because beauty is racialized as white, this investment is not only unrealizable for Black women but also the industry can absolve itself of its racism by interchanging “Black” for “ugly,” thereby masking the racist underpinnings that produce beauty as white and thin. For Cottom (2019), beauty is an interchangeable currency that enables White women to obtain economic and social mobility. The bodies of Black women in the U.S. American context are constructed as desirable when they align with broader essentialist racialized and sexualized cultural imaginaries. The reception such stereotypes receive in the mainstream is fluid and context-specific, as is shown by Chou (2012) in her tracing of the racialization of Asian men and women.
In her exploration of how racialized and sexualized imaginaries have evolved and changed over time among Asian men and women, Chou (2012) traces the emasculation of Asian men as a contemporary phenomenon, preceded by oppositional stereotypes akin to those ascribed to Black men, which marked them as sexually depraved and hypersexual. The subsequent stereotypes of emasculation and symbolic castration are relatively newer occurrences, which Chou (2012) contextualizes through migration and assimilationist narratives. She locates orientalism as the root of Asian emasculation while finding that Asian women have historically been seen as docile and sexually submissive. Docility and sexual submission are rooted in a victimizing logic that positions Asian women as existing in need of White (re: Western) rescue, of which the bodies of Asian women become framed as the literal vessels requiring protection from Asian men. The notion of White men as “civilized” or advanced and in possession of ideal masculinity operates on an interactional level that dictates how bodies are seen as “made for” particular activities.
Addressing “why many men do not dance,” Craig (2012) interrogates the naturalization of bodies that dance as ethno-racially coded to mean non-white broadly. The construction of bodies that dance as oppositional to “rational,” normative whiteness reifies marginalized masculinities attributed to men of color. For Craig (2012), the idea that dance comes naturally to some men at the exclusion of others suggests a mind/body split from which White men benefit, further marking Black and Latino men as reduced to their bodies. The idea that some bodies are naturally akin to dance as a hobby or skill further removes dance from being seen as a craft that one might master through practice, thus moving mastery away from an accomplishment into racialized devaluation.
While the differentiation between bodies that do and do not dance falls along racialized lines that are invoked to subjugate men of color, Kang (2013) explores embodied differentiation among Filipina women who deploy such contrast to mark themselves as righteous compared to White women. For Kang (2013), racialized embodiment becomes an instrument of contestation in the lives of Filipina women, who differentiate themselves from White women by claiming a chaste sexual disposition. The patriarchal underpinnings of asserting sexual chastity as a virtue are self-evident, though the deployment of gendered discourse around morality does much to interrogate the centrality of whiteness. Here, the racialized sexualization attributed to Filipina women is challenged by appeals to moral superiority, which is expressed through sexual restraint and the body as sexually inaccessible in comparison to White women.
Racialized Sexualization in the Erotic
Much of the work that links racialized sexualization to the body comes to us from the domain of the erotic, which we highlight in the sections that follow.
Brooks (2010) coins racialized erotic capital to attend to how beauty and sexual desirability’s inflection with race operates within the stripping industry. In particular, she finds that Black women who strip face social and structural racism that leads to lower monetary earnings, the necessity of performing excess emotional labor, and a disadvantage in gaining access to lucrative shifts. The racial formations drawn upon by Brooks define race along the Black/White racial binary, revealing how dark skin, in particular, is constructed as less sexually desirable among customers.
Jones (2020) explores the experiences of Black models who perform in webcam chat rooms. Similarly to Brooks, she finds that Black women experience a structural disadvantage on camming sites, which locate their profiles on online pages that are harder to come across in comparison to those belonging to White or light-skinned models. While camming presents many of the same challenges steeped in racism to those who pursue it as a trade, Jones (2025) also reveals how camming enables models to enact agency in the performance of their labor, finding sexual expression that is both autonomous and liberating.
While much of the previous work on women of color and their experiences across erotic industries tended to assume a “victim by default” approach that erased how women of color exercise agency with erotic performance, newer approaches to race, sexuality, and the body in the erotic challenge this homogenizing perspective, revealing how the racialization participants experience both within and outside of the erotic is instrumentalized (Khan 2020).
One dimension of this instrumentalization consists of “ethnic branding.” Phua and Caras (2008) elucidate how Brazilian nationality is imbued with racialized and sexualized meaning in the labor of male sex workers, who draw on Brazilianness to assert themselves as sexually desirable in a competitive (and ethno-racially discriminatory) market. In particular, the notion of a “Brazilian body” is put forth as a means of what the authors call “ethnic branding,” attributing muscularity, specific hypersexualized or hypereroticized origins, and being well-endowed as inherently “Brazilian” qualities. This ethnic branding alludes to an African-derived, mixed-raced descent, stopping short of pure (or only) Blackness, producing a desire for the Othered, an exotic mixed-race male who will fulfill the client’s fantasies (see also Kempadoo 2004; Waring 2013). Yet rarely does scholarship foreground the erotic capital in non-Whiteness. In reviews of sociological work on sex work, Weitzer (2009) identifies race, locating it as a dimension of clients’ desire when engaging with sex workers, attributing race as part of the “image” or “physical appearance” of the sex workers, equating it to physique; we thus do not see it from the perspective of the sex worker, nor for its potential exotic value. Of course, the irony in these studies is that those racialized bodies tend to be overrepresented in terms of the vulnerabilities they may face while making themselves productive in the sexual market/arena; a switch in focus from their public persona as highly desirable to their lived, material challenges should be a follow-up to the study of those who utilize ethnic branding in their deployment of erotic labor. For instance, male sex work circuits in Spain center Brazilian male sex workers as key to the production of this Otherness (Miranda Alonso and Muñoz Lozada 2023; see also Guasch 2017), with precisely the descriptors self-assigned in Phua and Caras (2008), and elaborated by us.
The use of ethnic branding by invoking the value of bodies racialized as “other” is also taken up by Raguparan (2024), who coins “diasporic capital” to describe how Canadian sex workers of color draw upon racialized tropes to negotiate sexual desirability within an industry dominated by White racialized standards of beauty and sex appeal. Maia (2012) uncovers how Brazilian exotic dancers challenge these same notions around sexual desirability by negating the depiction of Brazilian women as victims. For Maia and Raguparan, the racialized tropes and stereotypes attributed to the women in their respective studies become drawn upon to assert erotic capital in industries on behalf of women of color whose experiences reflect broader patterns of racial stratification.
On the whole, the signaling of this racialized erotic capital as ethnic branding underscores how Whiteness permeates not just much of the study of sex work (as it did in the origins of sexualities studies within sociology) but also what little is known about the actual lived experiences of those racialized as non-white who engage in sex work (and not of their clients’ desires). It is one of the potential places where scholarship may delve into productive ways next, that is, to center the social, political, and structural conditions that sex workers of color confront in the execution of their labor.
Future Promising Directions
The erotic is a critical area of inquiry for future investigations of racialized sexualities and embodiment. As the central analytical focus of erotic settings, the body’s positionality, negotiations, and ascriptions reveal that the body’s social is produced or “made” and becomes interactionally and structurally consequential. Here are some of how the fields may extend in productive ways:
For the sociology of sexualities, an indication of the work ahead is also connected to the polarities that are often established—in the United States, between whites and others, in terms of sexual identification (Guzmán 2006; Winder 2024); in Europe, between Muslims and non-Muslims (Haritaworn 2015). These oppositional practices of location embed potentially rich discursive readings, suggesting a fruitful area of study for thinking about desire and the erotic in and through racial difference.
Pornography represents a generative area with the potential to connect how categories and racialized classification across visual productions reflect broader socio-political events. In particular, future scholarship should explore how ethno-racial nomenclature is made and remade within the pornographic landscape as a reflection of global events. The first author is engaged in future research that investigates the development of racialized categories within online pornography platforms, such as the “Muslim/hijab” category which manifested post 9/11.
For a sociology of sex and gender that incorporates racialized sexualities, it will be crucial to explore the connections between desire and fear of hypersexualized bodies, such as the tragedy of the Atlanta killings of several Asian women in massage parlors (Ham 2025). The hypersexualization of women of color as a legacy of colonialism explored by Ham (2025) lays the compelling groundwork for centering questions of racialization in broader dialogues on sex worker rights. Because sex work is a domain in which the body is “on the line,” so to speak, we concur with Ham’s (2025) call for more inclusive sex worker rights organizing that draws from empirical studies that center the ramifications of hypersexualization faced by Black, Latina, and Asian women who participate in various forms of sexual labor. Hwang and Parreñas (2021) echo this urgency in their exploration of the gendered racialization of Asian women, which they also trace to a quality of disposability that derives from hypersexualization. In particular, ethnographic and interview-based data would shed light on the challenges faced by women of these ethnoracial groups. This gendered racialization also impacts trans women of color, in spaces where their racial and physiological otherness produces room in the market, even at the risk of falling always already outside constructions of femininity—a femininity that is conceived through Whiteness (Vidal-Ortiz 2008, 2014).
For queer sociology, continuing to decenter Whiteness (Moussawi and Vidal-Ortiz 2020) is a key component of how the field will expand on analyses of power that recognize the impossibility of erotic readings without Whiteness at its core. Even within this sphere, racialized sexualities as a subfield might become the field that pushes sexualities studies to look beyond identities and into matter and the erotic. Where race and racialization remain unmarked or implicit, an inherent White racialized reading exists. We look forward to sociological studies within sexuality that explicitly name the workings of racialization without merely suggesting race is a significant mediator of sexuality. That is—to mark the presence and shaping power of the mythical norm not only in the field, but in our analyses, methods, and theoretical engagements. The field of embodiment has much to offer racialized sexualization—particularly, a confrontation with the materiality of the body as a channel that makes tangible these social formations.
