Regulating mixed intimacies in Europe

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Regulating mixed intimacies in Europe

The Euromix research team at ACMRL, part of the Vrije Universiteit Faculty of Law, investigated the regulation of ‘mixture’ (‘inter-racialized’ sex, relationships, and marriage—throughout Europe’s past and present.

The Euromix project explored the historical and contemporary regulation of „interracial mixture“ in Europe. It questioned the common belief that Europe never had laws comparable to the anti-miscegenation laws found in the United States. Through analysing both historical and modern legal frameworks, the project revealed the ways in which race and family norms shaped European societies.

The historical research was conducted by the Principal Investigator, Professor Betty de Hart on the Netherlands and three PhD researchers: Rébecca Franco – France, Andrea Tarchi – Italy, and Nawal Mustafa – the United Kingdom. The contemporary inquiry was carried out by two post-doctoral researchers: Guno Jones researching ‘mixed intimacies’ in European law, and Elena Zambelli researching law in the everyday lives of ‘mixed’ families.

While the Euromix project has ended, its research and conversations about 'mixture' and racial perspectives in Europe remain significant. Scholars and those interested can participate in the ongoing dialogue by subscribing to the Euromix mailing list. The Euromix e-mail list is for all academics and other interested parties in Europe and beyond researching ‘mixture’ (mixed couples and families). This community functions as a platform for sharing related initiatives, new publications, and discussions about mixed couples and families in Europe and beyond. If you want to subscribe, add yourself to the list through this website.

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Researching Past Restrictions

The historical research aspect of Euromix examined the motives, timing, methods, and rationale behind legal and social regulations aimed at preventing or limiting "interracial mixture" in Europe. Betty de Hart, along with PhD students Rebecca Franco, Andrea Tarchi, and Nawal Mustafa, conducted thorough historical investigations to reveal legal and societal views on mixed relationships across various eras and regions. Their findings indicated that, contrary to widespread academic beliefs, the regulation of mixture was a significant issue not just in the colonies, but also in mainland Europe. Despite official rejections of racial ideologies following World War II, regulations of mixture persisted and were implemented or upheld by state authorities, civil registrars, immigration services, police, churches, and embassies in several policy areas, including immigration, housing, and social services.

Identifying Contemporary Regulations

The project investigated the influence of race and monoracial family norms on European legal systems. Two post-doctoral researchers, Guno Jones and Elena Zambelli, examined the regulation of „mixed intimacies“ in European law and their effects on the daily lives of interracial families. Through a combination of archival research, legal analysis, and interviews with contemporary mixed couples and families in the Netherlands, Italy, and the UK, the project assessed how lawmakers, judges, and bureaucrats understood race and mixture, as well as how these perceptions shaped legal practices. The study indicated that the presence of mixed couples should not be interpreted as signaling a post-racial or color-blind era, but instead as evidence of the continued existence of these families in spite of institutional structures designed to regulate them.

*This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 725238. Please find more information on their website.

Publications

PhD Project 1: The regulation of "mixed" intimacies in Colonial Libya and the construction of Whiteness (1911-1942)

Andrea defended his PhD thesis "The regulation of "mixed" intimacies in Colonial Libya and the construction of Whiteness (1911-1942)" at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam on 24 February.

His study is about the regulation of “mixed” intimacies between Italian settlers and people that fell under Italian colonial rule can clarify processes of racialization of subaltern social groups while pointing at the construction of Italian whiteness in the colonial environment. However, research on “mixed” intimacies during Italian colonialism has focused solely on the Eastern African colonial contexts, namely, how such relationships unfolded and were regulated in Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia during Italian colonial rule. With this research, I aim to add to this research landscape the context of the Italian colonization of Libya (1911-1942), to assess whether Italian colonial administrators regulated intimacies between Italians and Libyans and to ascertain whether these regulations played a role in the racialization of Libya and the identification of Italians as white. In order to do so, I deployed a socio-legal approach to the analysis of official archival sources collected in Italian state, Vatican, and Missionary congregations’ archives. Through such an analysis, the regulations of “mixed” intimacies collected in the archives are juxtaposed to the social changes that influenced and were influenced by the policing of intimacy in the Libyan colonial context.

The main finding of this research is that Italian colonial administrators regulated “mixed” intimacies throughout their colonial presence in Libya to establish the category of “whiteness” on the settler population while racializing Libyans as Others. In particular, this research found that the racialization of the colonial Other through the regulation of “mixed” intimacies was a significant factor that allowed a modern, white, European subjectivity to emerge and represent itself as a signifier of Italian identity in the empire. Regulating “mixed” intimacies coincided with keeping control of categorization processes that affected both colonizing and colonized societies, therefore representing an untapped resource in understanding the historical production of racial categories in the Italian colonial context.

His thesis is available here.

PhD Project 2: Between problematisation and invisibilisation: the regulation of interracialised intimacies and (post)colonial immigration in France (1954-1979)

Rébecca Franco defended her PhD thesis entitled 'Between problematisation and invisibilisation: the regulation of interracialised intimacies and (post)colonial immigration in France (1954-1979)' at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam on 22 March.

Rébecca's dissertation addresses the question of how and why intimacies between the white French population and migrants from the (former) colonies on the African continent were regulated in the French metropole between 1954 and 1979, and how this contributed to the construction of racial boundaries of and within the French community.

During the period of this study, large groups of migrants from the (former) African continent moved to the French metropole, often to do low-paid menial work. Looking at the period of decolonisation and the early postcolonial context, this research demonstrates that the regulation of intimacy is a rich site of analysis to understand racialisation and the construction of racial boundaries of the (post)colonial national community. To this end, this research draws primarily on critical archival research conducted in written and audio-visual archives of state and non-state institutions, as well as interviews with individuals who lived in interracialised relationships during the period under study. By analysing these together, this study produces a critical analysis of the regulations and the construction of discourses about interracialised intimacies. By examining whether and how colonial continuities underlined the regulation of (post)colonial migration, this research helps to uncover racial rationalities underlying colourblind regulations.

The main findings of this research show that different forms of interracialised intimacies were problematised and regulated according to how they transgressed hierarchies of race, gender, class and sexuality within the sexual order. The problematisation of gender, sexuality and intimacy played an important role in the construction of racialised inassimilability of (post)colonial migrants. In particular, durable intimate relationships between white working-class women and African male labour migrants complicated the paradigm of temporary labour migration and the construction of the inassimilability of migrants from the African continent. This shows that the French administration accepted (post)colonial migrants for their cheap labour but did not include them in the French national community.

Therefore, this research contributes to a contextualised and historicised analysis of the construction of racial boundaries of the French community that determined inclusion and exclusion of these (post)colonial migrants.

The thesis is avaiable here

PhD 3: A Class of Undesirables: 'Race', Regulation, and Interracialised Intimacies in Britain (1948-1968)

Nawal Mustafa defended her PhD thesis entitled "A Class of Undesirables: 'Race', Regulation, and Interracialised Intimacies in Britain (1948-1968)" at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam on 7 July.Nawal Mustafa defended her PhD thesis entitled "A Class of Undesirables: 'Race', Regulation, and Interracialised Intimacies in Britain (1948-1968)" at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam on 7 July.

Nawal's dissertation focuses on the period between 1948 and 1968 in the British metropole and examines the regulation of interracialised relationships during this time. The large-scale immigration from Britain's former colonies to the metropole began after 1948, coinciding with the development of the British welfare state and job opportunities. The dissertation highlights the political and public discourse surrounding the settlement of colonial citizens, with employment, housing, and 'miscegenation' being recurring themes in political debates and media coverage. The author specifically explores the national discourse on interracialised relationships, particularly between White women and Black men, which attracted political and media attention. She argues that such relationships posed a threat to the racial order and the construction of a white British nation because they were seen as crossed racialised, gendered and class boundaries thereby challenging societal norms within Britain.

This research expands on legal scholarship by exploring the ways control and regulation occurred across diverse social authorities, including non-governmental institutions. It demonstrates that regulation of interracialized relationships went beyond strict legal codes or the state itself. This dissertation presents a comprehensive analysis of the locations where moral regulation occurred by examining the interconnectedness of various governmental and non-governmental departments and institutions. It highlights how institutions such as the police, the church, and immigration agencies played a role in regulating interracial relationships. By situating the analysis of UK policy and governance within the broader historical context of the British empire, the dissertation aligns with postcolonial and decolonial scholarship. It emphasizes the interconnectedness of colonial and metropolitan spaces and contributes to understanding how interracial relationships were racialized within the empire. Overall, the dissertation contributes to the field of 'mixed race' studies by providing a comprehensive analysis of the regulation of interracialized relationships, situating them within historical, social, and cultural processes, and exploring the nuanced ways in which they were governed.

The thesis is avaiable here

Other Publications

Franco, R. (2023). Policing Commercial Sex in 1970s France: Regulating the Racialized Sexual Order. Social & Legal Studies, 32(1), 96-115. Available here.
Tarchi, A. (2022). The Regulation of ‘Mixed’ Marriages in Colonial Libya: At the Crossroads of Nationalism, Religion, and Race. Politics, Religion and Ideology, 23(4), 497-517. Available here.
Franco, R. (2022). Researching racialisation: the regulation of interracialised intimacies in France (1954-1979), RdW 2022-1, 100-105. Available here.
De Hart, B. (2022). The Odd Couple: Gender, Securitization, Europeanization, and Marriages of Convenience in Dutch Family Migration Policies (1930–2020), Transnational Marriage and Partner Migration, 31-48.
Zambelli, E. (2021). Interracial couples and the phenomenology of race, place, and space in contemporary England. Available here.
De Hart, B. (2021). The obsession with white women and interracialized relationships: The case of political leader Sigrid Kaag. Available here.
De Hart, B. (2021). ‘Ras’ en ‘gemengdheid’ in Nederlandse jurisprudentie, Ars aequi 2021 (4), 359-367. Available here.
Tarchi, A. (2021). A ‘catastrophic consequence’: Fascism’s debate on the legal status of Libyans and the issue of mixed marriages (1938–1939). Postcolonial Studies. Available here.
Hutten, W., & Mustafa, N. (2021). Onderken ook de rol van institutioneel racisme in het migratierecht. Nederlands Juristenblad, 2021(25), 2041-2046.
Tarchi, A. (2021). Mabruchismo: concubinage and colonial power in Italian Libya (1911–1932). Modern Italy, 1-16. Available here.
Zambelli, E. (2020). Racialized Affectivities of (Un)Belonging: Mixed (Race) Couples in the Shadow of Brexit. Genealogy [Special issue of Transnational Families: Europe and the World], 4(3), 83. doi: 10.3390/genealogy4030083 Available here.
Franco, R. (2020, July 24). Dit is er mis met het seksualiseren van zwarte mannen. OneWorld Magazine. Available here.
Mustafa, N., & Westerduin, M. (2020). Exploring New Vocabularies in Conversations About Religion, Race, Politics, and Justice. In C.A.M. van den Berg, L. Schrijvers, J. Wiering, & A.J.A.C.M. Korte (Eds.), Transforming Bodies and Religion: Powers and Agencies in Contemporary Europa. London: Routledge.
Mustafa, N., & Topolski, A. (2020). Race in relation to law and politics. In C.D.J. Bulten, C.F. Perquin-Deelen, M.H.C. Sinninghe Damsté, & K.J. Bakker (Eds.), Diversiteit. Een multidisciplinaire terreinverkenning (Diversity Bundle, Serie vanwege het Van der Heijden Instituut). Deventer: Wolters Kluwer.
De Hart, B., & Jones, G. (2020). (Not) Measuring Mixedness in the Netherlands. In Z. L. Rocha, & P. J. Aspinall (Eds.), The Palgrave International Handbook of Mixed Racial and Ethnic Classification (pp. 367-387). Palgrave MacMillan.
De Hart, B. (2019). Enkele terloopse opmerkingen over ras, gemengdheid en recht door drie Nederlandse juristen. Nederlands Juristenblad, 2019(37), 2804-2810. [2019/2268]. Available here.
De Hart, B. (2019). Some Cursory Remarks on Race, Mixture and Law by Three Dutch Jurists. [Inaugural lecture, delivered on 20 September 2019]. Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Available here.
Franco, R. (2019, September 16). Ook niet-westerse vrouwen hebben last van straatintimidatie. Brief in NRC Handelsblad. Available here.
Franco, R., & Mustafa, N. (2019). Invalidating the Archive: Interpreting Silences and Inconsistencies. Sentio Journal, 1(1), 42-48. Available here.
De Hart, B. (2019). Regulating Dutch–Chinese marriages and relationships in the Netherlands (1920–1945). The History of the Family, 24(3), 539-559. doi: 10.1080/1081602X.2019.1633678 Available here.
Van den Brandt, H. P., Schrijvers, L. L., Miri, A., & Mustafa, N. (2018). White Innocence: Reflections on Public Debates and Political-Analytical Challenges. An Interview with Gloria Wekker. Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies, 5(1), 67-82. doi: 10.11116/digest.5.1.4 Available here.

Would you like more information or have any further questions?

Regulating Interracialized Intimacies

Researching Past Restrictions

Identifying Contemporary Regulations

Inaugural lecture: Some Cursory Remarks on Race, Mixture and Law

Publications

PhD Project 1: The regulation of "mixed" intimacies in Colonial Libya and the construction of Whiteness (1911-1942)

PhD Project 2: Between problematisation and invisibilisation: the regulation of interracialised intimacies and (post)colonial immigration in France (1954-1979)

PhD 3: A Class of Undesirables: 'Race', Regulation, and Interracialised Intimacies in Britain (1948-1968)

Other Publications

Team EUROMIX Research Project

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