The Color of Monogamy

Abstract

This chapter examines how an ideal of monogamy helps sustain intersecting gendered and racial hierarchies. Woman of color feminism has long censured the association of female sexual respectability with whiteness and social privilege, but this work generally dates the advent of that association to the establishment of modern slavery and colonialism. William Shakespeare’s sonnets, however, register the development of a fiction of somatic, heritable whiteness as a correlate of respectable sexuality, one disseminated in classical discourses celebrating male friendship and in imperial allegories of sexual conquest. Yet in their depiction of a three-way affair between the poet, a “fair” young man, and a “black” mistress, the sonnets conspicuously fail to cordon off rational and mutual “fair” male friendship from the humiliating enslavement of “black” female appetite. Instead, drawing on the Pauline theory of sin and grace that influenced thinkers from Martin Luther and John Calvin to Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, the sonnets dissolve the oppositions ostensibly embodied by the poet’s “two loves”—agency and passivity, mastery and submission, fidelity and promiscuity, purity and pollution—to imagine intimacies beyond the couple.