Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race

(Paperback)

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Deadly and Slick examines the historical emergence of race, gender, sexuality and nationality. Balani shows that gender and sexuality do not 'intersect' with race but form the discursive, legislative, and experiential material of race. We all know that racial conflicts express themselves through the language of culture, but the role of sexuality and gender in these conflicts has been woefully under theorised. The overarching promise of sexual modernity has been that we can live fulfilling, happy lives through the successful pursuit of romantic love, conjugal families, and sexual pleasure. But sexual modernity has a dark underbelly. In Deadly and Slick, Sita Balani examines the regulation of sexual life in colonial India, at Britain's borders, and through the functioning of the welfare state, marriage laws, education, and counterterrorism. These practices don't merely reflect or reinforce pre-existing racial difference, she shows, but are actively productive of racial regimes.

Reviews

Through an astounding display of Sita Balani's skill and care with the craft of writing, Deadly and Slick collapses the binary categories of race, gender and sexuality to show how they are co-constitutive of each other. Read this book if you want to break through the myopia of more shallow discussions about how identity interacts with politics and follow Balani into deeper analytical realms. -- Kojo Koram, author of Uncommon Wealth
Smart, lucid and funny - an urgently needed account of the colonial histories and troubling presents that shape the politics of racism and sexuality. How can we understand how the powerful mobilise our desires and affinities in ways that deplete all our lives Reading Balani will help you understand why we want the things we want, and also how we can start to see what we really need. -- Gargi Bhattacharya, author of Rethinking Racial Capitalism
A fascinating, well-researched read. Balani not only throws a retrospective spotlight on the mercurial fluidity of race, gender, class, sexuality and culture in the colonial project, she digs into the crevices to expose every lethal outcome. -- Stella Dadzie, author of A Kick in the Belly
An essential and lucid analysis of the long-standing but changing relationship between sexuality and race. A must read. -- Maya Goodfellow, author of Hostile Environment
Deadly and Slick is a coruscating history of marriage, empire, racecraft, the capitalist family, and the rise of 'affective individualism,' distilling the very best of contemporary anti-colonial, queer and marxist theorizing, while weaving together stories about 'inchoate fascists' ranging from Lord Kitchener to Priti Patel, and from Raj-era memsahibs to QAnon. Sita Balani has distilled complex ideas about the Mbius strip of race and sex into clear and pleasurable prose that takes the reader on a grim tour of the taxonomical imagination in colonial societies, all the way from Carl Linnaeus to Jordan Peterson, with important albeit discomfiting conclusions for contemporary feminist politics. -- Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family and Full Surrogacy Now
Deadly and Slick is admirably nimble in navigating social and historical moving parts, all the while unfolding a compelling and coherent view of how racialisation has clung to the 'common sense' in contemporary Britain. Balani does the difficult and sometimes unglamorous intellectual work of wading through the rubble of the everyday and is rewarded with an original explosion and synthesis of high concepts. The book's excavation of subjectivity shuns pat psychologisation; its structural analysis moves beyond the stale and inert. Exciting reading for anyone who has been seeking new tools for understanding some of of the enduring ugliness of 'sexual modernity'. -- Amber Husain, author of Replace Me and Meat Love: An Ideology of the Flesh

Author Bio

Dr. Sita Balani is a lecturer in contemporary literature and culture at King's College London. She is the co-author of Empire's Endgame. She has published in Vice, Tribune, the White Review, Novara, Salvage, Ceasefire, Five Dials, Boundless, Feminist Review, Identity Theory, and Open Democracy. She has appeared on BBC 3 and Novara Media, and is a regular speaker at events on anti-racism, feminism, education, sexuality, and colonial history.