Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper explores sexual racism by analysing white people’s perceptions of beauty and desire towards Black people in contemporary Catalonia. Drawing on fieldwork, Critical Whiteness Studies and colonial history, it shows how racialised and gendered hierarchies reproduce in the intimate sphere.

Paper long abstract

This paper investigates the role of racialisation in intimate relationships and desire in contemporary Catalonia (Spain). Informed by Critical Whiteness Studies, it centres on white people’s perceptions of desirability and attraction towards Black people, exploring how power dynamics intersect with "race" and gender in the intimate sphere. Moreover, it explores whether patterns of sexual racism that continue to shape contemporary racialised hierarchies of intimacy can be traced back to Spanish colonial history.

Drawing on literature on the representation of Black bodies and racialised desire in the Spanish colonial period, alongside contemporary accounts of racism and interracial relationships in Catalonia, the paper combines historical analysis with ethnographic multimodal methodology. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews, visual surveys and experiential surveys, integrating qualitative and quantitative data, the research identifies trends of sexual racism among the white Catalan population. These manifest both in the penalisation of Black people as potential partners and in their prioritisation through practices of fetishisation, objectification and hypersexualisation, and can directly be correlated to colonial remnants of gendered and racialised patterns.

By focusing on the intimate sphere, the paper critically examines the construction of whiteness through interpersonal relations and prevailing notions of beauty and desire, while simultaneously challenging the construction of race as a social category.