Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Women's History
Episode: Caroline Séquin, "Desiring Whiteness: A Racial History of Prostitution in France and Colonial Senegal, 1848-1950" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Description: 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: A Racial History of Prostitution in France and Colonial Senegal, 1848-1950 (Cornell UP, 2024) traces the...