What's sex got to do with race? With ethnicity? With nationalism? What do race, ethnicity, and nationalism have to do with sex? Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality addresses these questions, exploring the intimate intersections and forbidden frontiers where ethnicity and sexuality meet face-to-face. Through numerous examples from the U.S. and beyond-and from the past and the present-the book illustrates the power of sex to shape ideas and feelings about race, ethnicity, and the nation. It shows how sexual images, fears, and desires help form racial, ethnic, and national stereotypes, differences, and conflicts.

In this unique work, Joane Nagel demonstrates how ethnicity and sexuality join hands to fashion new, hybrid identities, communities, and cultures; how the volatile mixture of race and sex can spark ethnic violence; and how ethnosexual encounters can simultaneously resist and reinforce racial, ethnic, and national boundaries. She skillfully blends styles of inquiry and interpretation from the social sciences and the humanities to craft a convincing and illuminating account using images, poetry, fieldwork, Internet postings, interviews, literature, ethnographies, historical texts, archival documents, biographies, census data, journals, and personal accounts. Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality is an ideal text for undergraduate courses in race and ethnicity; sexuality; race/gender/class; gender studies; ethnic studies; multicultural and diversity studies; or globalization studies.