Valdespino on Séquin (2024)

European imperial authorities and colonists alike made managing sex foundational to imperial rule. In her wonderful new book, Desiring Whiteness: A Racial History of Prostitution in France and Colonial Senegal, 1848–1950, Caroline Séquin adds to the large body of literature on this topic by examining one particular site: brothels. Moving between colonial Senegal and France from 1848 to the 1950s, Séquin argues that brothels served as “gatekeeper of whiteness” that various parties used to reproduce white vitality and prestige.

Séquin deftly combines archives from France and Senegal to argue that colonial authorities, madams, and sex workers themselves tried to facilitate or limit certain men’s access to commercial sex to reproduce French whiteness. These gatekeepers, however, operated in distinct ways depending on where they stood. In Senegal, white French women worked in brothels in Dakar that catered exclusively to white colonists. In France by contrast, military and civilian authorities encouraged similarly white-staffed brothels to cater to colonial migrants. French and Senegalese brothels became mirror images of one another, providing white women to men on opposites sides of the color-line to maintain this very divide.

Séquin argues the brothel’s role as a gatekeeper of whiteness began when the French Republic abolished slavery for the second time in 1848. Chapter one explains why colonial administrators established regulationist policies, as France’s system of legal brothels was called, across the empire after 1848, including their Senegalese outposts of Saint-Louis and Gorée. Administrators hoped this regulationist approach would make sure recently freed enslaved people followed the forms of marriage and wage-labor seen as essential to productive capitalist societies. While limited in their impact, these policies cemented a belief that regulationism was key to maintaining colonies’ moral, economic, and racial order. Chapter two demonstrates how this belief materialized in Dakar by the early twentieth century. Séquin shows that several white-only brothels operated in the city, which authorities hoped would keep white French male colonists’ from having sex with Senegalese women. Rather than rooted in legal mandates, Séquin argues that brothel keepers and to an extent sex workers themselves maintained this racial exclusivity to sell a particular vision of luxurious and pure white femininity. Chapter three traces the “Road to Dakar” to explain how French authorities and third parties actively undermined international efforts to manage the “white slave trade” to facilitate this flow of white women to Dakar. Over several decades, scattered authorities and madams created and broke laws as they saw fit to maintain Dakar’s white-only brothels.

The next two chapters show how a similar belief in brothels’ power to reproduce racial hierarchies led to very different outcomes in metropolitan France. In Chapter three, Sequin argues that during and after World War I, military and civilian authorities promoted colonial soldiers’ access to brothels staffed largely by white women to prevent reproductive interracial sex. Brothels, she claims, ideally provided outlets for colonial men’s sexual energies that would not produce children or spread venereal disease. Chapter four takes us into these brothels to explain how people subverted and enforced this arrangement. Brothel’s accessibility to non-white men depended on madams, sex workers, and clients who often had their own romantic, sexual, and economic desires. These competing interests increasingly undermined brothels’ role as a gatekeeper of whiteness by the end of World War Two.

Séquin’s final chapters explain how the brothel’s role as gatekeepers of whiteness changed when the Marthe Richard Law ended France’s regulationist system after Liberation. Chapter six demonstrates that French military leaders continued to believe they needed to give their colonial soldiers’ brothels to prevent sexual violence increasingly associated with North African men. Officials managed bordels militaires de campagnes (BDC) across France staffed by North African women, which Sequin argues reinforced a belief that North Africans could not participate in a postwar French sexual culture defined by marital and romantic sex. Chapter seven explains why French West Africa, unlike other colonies with vibrant commercial sex industries, closed their brothels. In a postwar context where outright discrimination came under increasing scrutiny, Sequin argues colonial leaders felt that maintaining these brothels would foster interracial sex that undermined the very racial prestige they were initially supposed to maintain. She then concludes by examining the afterlives of these colonial policies and the ways policing sexuality and race have gone together in late twentieth and early twenty-first century France.

Desiring Whiteness combines extensive archival research, theoretical rigor, and an attention to everyday life to reveal how people tried to use commercial sex to reinforce white supremacy. Among Séquin’s many accomplishments is her powerful use of comparative history to show how a uniform goal, maintaining French white prestige, resulted in far different policies across the Empire. She grounds this powerful transnational argument by skillfully showing that in the absence of explicit racial laws, brothels’ racial work depended on peoples’ everyday economic, sexual and romantic decisions, an argument that helps ground the often-abstract study of colonialism and sexuality in concrete material realities. Finally, her reconstruction of Dakar’s largely forgotten white-only brothels provides exciting new insights for historians of this unique metropolis. It would be interesting, however, to see if and how brothels operated beyond Dakar, particularly in Saint-Louis, one of whose brothels provides the book’s cover. Expanding this view could help resolve a lingering question: was Senegal an exception or a rule? Séquin mentions that Indochina and Algeria had brothels staffed by non-white women. Far from undermining Sequin’s argument, examining commercial sex outside this unique colonial capital could reinforce her central claim that even if brothels took distinct forms across the Empire, they served the shared goal of reproducing white French authority.

Desiring Whiteness will interest scholars of sexuality, imperialism, modern France and Senegal, and race. By moving across imperial boundaries and in and out of the brothels that tried to maintain them, Sequin explains the power people imbued into sex work. At the heart of this system sat white French women, whose own desires mixed unevenly with the interests of people dedicated to using their bodies to gain profit and power.