Hello and welcome to Navara FM, I'm your host, Eleanor Penny.

From the race science of the 1600s to the taxonomies of the British Empire to the diversity

checkboxes of today, racial categories shift all the time, from place to place, across

moments in history.

So why do so many people still think of these categories as natural?

According to writer Cieta Balani, the answer lies in how the making of race, gender and

sexuality are all closely tied together in the efforts to make all of them seem biological,

authentic and inescapable.

Discourses of sex are always already about race and racial differences are constructed

along sexual lines.

Cieta Balani is a fellow of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences and a lecturer

at Queen Mary University of London.

Her new book Deadly and Slick, Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race charts this entangled

history.

It takes in sex work in colonial India, anti-missedination laws, man camps surrounding mining projects,

modern moral panics about jihadi brides and the work of an 18th century Swedish botanist.

In this episode we unpick those stories and asked how we find new understandings of sexuality

and deviance in a time of global upheaval.

Cieta, thank you for being here.

Thanks so much for having me.

So tell me how you came to this sort of central dilemma that you outlined in your book of,

I guess, what is so robust and sticky about the way in which we think about race as this

...