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Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race
A groundbreaking new analysis of the making of modernity, sexuality and race
If race is increasingly understood to be socially constructed, why does it continue to seem like a physiological reality? The trickery of race, Sita Balani argues, comes down to how it is embedded in everyday life through the domain we take to be most intimate and sexuality. Modernity inaugurates a new political subject made legible as an individual through the nuclear family, sexual adventure and the pursuit of romantic love. By examining the regulation of sexual life at Britain's borders, in colonial India, and through the functioning of the welfare state, marriage laws, education, and counterterrorism, Balani reveals that sexuality has become fatally intertwined with the making of race.
If race is increasingly understood to be socially constructed, why does it continue to seem like a physiological reality? The trickery of race, Sita Balani argues, comes down to how it is embedded in everyday life through the domain we take to be most intimate and sexuality. Modernity inaugurates a new political subject made legible as an individual through the nuclear family, sexual adventure and the pursuit of romantic love. By examining the regulation of sexual life at Britain's borders, in colonial India, and through the functioning of the welfare state, marriage laws, education, and counterterrorism, Balani reveals that sexuality has become fatally intertwined with the making of race.
- GenresPoliticsNonfictionRace
225 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 16, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 7, 2025
loved this so much it was like fireworks in my brain
April 14, 2025
In Deadly and Slick, Sita Balani offers a trenchant and uncompromising analysis of the racial logics that underpin modern regimes of sexuality in Britain. Drawing on Marxist feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial critique, Balani argues that race and sexuality are not discrete identities that intersect but are co-constitutive formations that structure the very grammar of liberal modernity. The book is centrally concerned with how sexuality operates as a mechanism through which racialized subjects are rendered visible, legible, and governable—often under the guise of intimacy, protection, and liberation.
Balani’s core contention is that sexual modernity—marked by the celebration of individual autonomy, sexual freedom, and liberal intimacy—functions as a racial project. Far from offering refuge or emancipation to minoritized subjects, it delineates the limits of their inclusion. Figures such as the “dangerous brown woman,” the “sexually repressed Muslim man,” or the “queer refugee” are not simply symptomatic of media hysteria or political scapegoating; they are produced within and through the state’s commitment to liberal sexual norms. In this sense, Balani insists, race and sexuality are not accidents of policy but infrastructures of governance.
The strength of Deadly and Slick lies in its refusal to isolate sexuality from broader political economies. Balani situates her analysis within the terrain of British counterterrorism, border control, welfare regulation, and education policy, demonstrating how each of these arenas mobilizes sexuality to delineate normative citizenship. The book foregrounds how the intimate is not merely personal or affective, but a site through which empire continues to reassert itself—often through the disciplining of familial structures, reproductive autonomy, and gender performance. This argument is especially resonant in Balani’s discussion of how the figure of the child and the family are repeatedly racialized and weaponized within discourses of risk, protection, and national security.
Balani’s writing is at once lucid, exacting, and politically urgent. Her theoretical commitments are clear, yet she avoids academic abstraction in favor of grounded analysis. The genealogy she offers is not linear but recursive, attending to the afterlives of British imperialism as they sediment in contemporary institutions and cultural logics. She reads the racialization of sexuality not as a residue of the past, but as a constitutive feature of the present.
What is particularly compelling about Deadly and Slick is its challenge to both liberal multiculturalism and progressive sexual politics. Balani critiques the assimilationist demand placed on racialized subjects to perform “correct” sexual modernity—what she terms the "slickness" of affective legibility, compliance, and visibility. In this critique, the book resonates with works by Sara Ahmed, Roderick Ferguson, and Jasbir Puar, yet it offers a distinct contribution through its attention to how these dynamics manifest specifically within Britain’s racial state.
While Balani’s primary archive is contemporary Britain, her analysis holds broader implications for how we understand the racial-sexual order of postcolonial liberalism more generally. Her engagement with the figure of the deadly woman—overdetermined, racialized, and hyper-visible—invites reflection on how empire continues to shape the conditions of political subjectivity through the domain of intimate life.
In sum, Deadly and Slick is an essential contribution to the fields of critical race studies, feminist theory, and sexuality studies. It challenges the analytic sufficiency of intersectionality by foregrounding the mutually constitutive relationship between race and sexuality, and it demands that we reckon with the intimate as a central site of political formation and imperial continuity. For scholars concerned with the mechanics of modern governance, the afterlives of empire, and the disciplining force of liberalism, Balani’s work is indispensable.
Balani’s core contention is that sexual modernity—marked by the celebration of individual autonomy, sexual freedom, and liberal intimacy—functions as a racial project. Far from offering refuge or emancipation to minoritized subjects, it delineates the limits of their inclusion. Figures such as the “dangerous brown woman,” the “sexually repressed Muslim man,” or the “queer refugee” are not simply symptomatic of media hysteria or political scapegoating; they are produced within and through the state’s commitment to liberal sexual norms. In this sense, Balani insists, race and sexuality are not accidents of policy but infrastructures of governance.
The strength of Deadly and Slick lies in its refusal to isolate sexuality from broader political economies. Balani situates her analysis within the terrain of British counterterrorism, border control, welfare regulation, and education policy, demonstrating how each of these arenas mobilizes sexuality to delineate normative citizenship. The book foregrounds how the intimate is not merely personal or affective, but a site through which empire continues to reassert itself—often through the disciplining of familial structures, reproductive autonomy, and gender performance. This argument is especially resonant in Balani’s discussion of how the figure of the child and the family are repeatedly racialized and weaponized within discourses of risk, protection, and national security.
Balani’s writing is at once lucid, exacting, and politically urgent. Her theoretical commitments are clear, yet she avoids academic abstraction in favor of grounded analysis. The genealogy she offers is not linear but recursive, attending to the afterlives of British imperialism as they sediment in contemporary institutions and cultural logics. She reads the racialization of sexuality not as a residue of the past, but as a constitutive feature of the present.
What is particularly compelling about Deadly and Slick is its challenge to both liberal multiculturalism and progressive sexual politics. Balani critiques the assimilationist demand placed on racialized subjects to perform “correct” sexual modernity—what she terms the "slickness" of affective legibility, compliance, and visibility. In this critique, the book resonates with works by Sara Ahmed, Roderick Ferguson, and Jasbir Puar, yet it offers a distinct contribution through its attention to how these dynamics manifest specifically within Britain’s racial state.
While Balani’s primary archive is contemporary Britain, her analysis holds broader implications for how we understand the racial-sexual order of postcolonial liberalism more generally. Her engagement with the figure of the deadly woman—overdetermined, racialized, and hyper-visible—invites reflection on how empire continues to shape the conditions of political subjectivity through the domain of intimate life.
In sum, Deadly and Slick is an essential contribution to the fields of critical race studies, feminist theory, and sexuality studies. It challenges the analytic sufficiency of intersectionality by foregrounding the mutually constitutive relationship between race and sexuality, and it demands that we reckon with the intimate as a central site of political formation and imperial continuity. For scholars concerned with the mechanics of modern governance, the afterlives of empire, and the disciplining force of liberalism, Balani’s work is indispensable.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 25, 2024
After seeing her speak about the book with blistering intelligence, we had to get it. I only wish it were longer :)
Balani stitches a dense, if brief, history of the rise of sexual modernity - the promise of self realisation through sexual choice and fulfilment - into an analysis of modern Britain. Focusing on the British-Asian experience she traces how the creation and mutation of racial and sexual categories facilitate state-making activities, justified by the supposed high ground and promise of sexual modernity.
While Balani argues that we can recognise elements of sexual modernity as hugely positive, allowing for sexual liberation, gender self-identification etc, these don’t come without a ‘dark underbelly’. This underbelly is steeped in colonial history, and, using India as one of many examples, she illustrates how race and gender are constructed in order to further the aims of empire.
For example, solving the ‘problem’ of homosexuality amongst British soldiers, exclusive brothels were set up which only they could attend, which were meant to prevent the spread of venereal disease. These served as a means to extract sexual labour from Indian women while maintaining racial hygiene, preventing children being born in stable mixed race relationships which had been prevalent. The practice also rigidified conceptions of white men as less sexually deviant than their Indian counterparts, and at the same time relied on a perception of submissive sexuality in Indian women, who could be subjected to sexual examinations regardless of whether they worked in brothels or not. What is particularly fascinating about examples like this, is how we see them mirrored in the modern day, for example in assumptions about Asian women attempting to enter the UK, who were subjected to very similar examinations due to the same enmeshing of race and sex - if you are really here to marry your husband you must of course be a virgin.
With wages now too low to support the nuclear family as the ideal unit of capitalistic engagement, the promise of sexual modernity, in this form at least, begins to crumble. Perhaps it’s time to stop adding your marital status to your cv and start adding your polycule’s address.
Balani stitches a dense, if brief, history of the rise of sexual modernity - the promise of self realisation through sexual choice and fulfilment - into an analysis of modern Britain. Focusing on the British-Asian experience she traces how the creation and mutation of racial and sexual categories facilitate state-making activities, justified by the supposed high ground and promise of sexual modernity.
While Balani argues that we can recognise elements of sexual modernity as hugely positive, allowing for sexual liberation, gender self-identification etc, these don’t come without a ‘dark underbelly’. This underbelly is steeped in colonial history, and, using India as one of many examples, she illustrates how race and gender are constructed in order to further the aims of empire.
For example, solving the ‘problem’ of homosexuality amongst British soldiers, exclusive brothels were set up which only they could attend, which were meant to prevent the spread of venereal disease. These served as a means to extract sexual labour from Indian women while maintaining racial hygiene, preventing children being born in stable mixed race relationships which had been prevalent. The practice also rigidified conceptions of white men as less sexually deviant than their Indian counterparts, and at the same time relied on a perception of submissive sexuality in Indian women, who could be subjected to sexual examinations regardless of whether they worked in brothels or not. What is particularly fascinating about examples like this, is how we see them mirrored in the modern day, for example in assumptions about Asian women attempting to enter the UK, who were subjected to very similar examinations due to the same enmeshing of race and sex - if you are really here to marry your husband you must of course be a virgin.
With wages now too low to support the nuclear family as the ideal unit of capitalistic engagement, the promise of sexual modernity, in this form at least, begins to crumble. Perhaps it’s time to stop adding your marital status to your cv and start adding your polycule’s address.
July 15, 2024
An interesting, if not entirely convincing read, in which the author argues that race is made under the conditions of sexual modernity - the arrangement of sexual life, gender and kinship through which capitalist social relations are secured.
Highlights include:
How the personification of plants and animals through the metaphor of human sexuality in turn justified human kinship arrangements through their apparent analogues in nature
Observing the national family in the UK, South Asian women coming to join their husbands or fiancés were seen as key to a strategy of containment. Their sexual labour was required to preserve racial boundaries, containing the desires of South Asian men and acting as a barrier - at least in Britain's racially ordered imaginary - between South Asian men and white women. As their immigration status was dependent on their sexual labour, it was as gendered and sexual subjects that their legitimacy was assessed.
How the racial regime of contemporary Britain relies on the ideological work of the idea of an identity crisis, that is that the children of immigrants (and resulting generations) are caught between the traditional culture of their parents and the freedoms offered in Britain, which is then used to justify and extend Britain's extensive counterterrorism architecture.
A compelling critique of liberal antiracism, which views Priti Patel's violent policies through the prism of identity, as the result of "internalised racism", that she is, somehow, overcompensating for the racial prejudice she has apparently received and attempting to seek the favour of her oppressors, as well as Shamima Begum's defection to IS, when viewed through the lens of identity, suggests that Begum, unable to manage the conflict between Western sexual freedoms and the more conservative values of her parents, has instead opted for the apparently nihilistic certainties of IS.
These interpretations view political choices as psychologically determined, a view that derives from the individuations of sexual modernity. The author posits that this approach offers a simple psychological fix, obscuring what may be most disturbing: that people use their agency in ways that are cruel, contradictory, violent, or unintelligible to us. The case of Begum encapsulates a particularly thorny contradiction: though sexual modernity demands that we make use of our agency, it sanctions only very limited forms of self-realisation.
Highlights include:
How the personification of plants and animals through the metaphor of human sexuality in turn justified human kinship arrangements through their apparent analogues in nature
Observing the national family in the UK, South Asian women coming to join their husbands or fiancés were seen as key to a strategy of containment. Their sexual labour was required to preserve racial boundaries, containing the desires of South Asian men and acting as a barrier - at least in Britain's racially ordered imaginary - between South Asian men and white women. As their immigration status was dependent on their sexual labour, it was as gendered and sexual subjects that their legitimacy was assessed.
How the racial regime of contemporary Britain relies on the ideological work of the idea of an identity crisis, that is that the children of immigrants (and resulting generations) are caught between the traditional culture of their parents and the freedoms offered in Britain, which is then used to justify and extend Britain's extensive counterterrorism architecture.
A compelling critique of liberal antiracism, which views Priti Patel's violent policies through the prism of identity, as the result of "internalised racism", that she is, somehow, overcompensating for the racial prejudice she has apparently received and attempting to seek the favour of her oppressors, as well as Shamima Begum's defection to IS, when viewed through the lens of identity, suggests that Begum, unable to manage the conflict between Western sexual freedoms and the more conservative values of her parents, has instead opted for the apparently nihilistic certainties of IS.
These interpretations view political choices as psychologically determined, a view that derives from the individuations of sexual modernity. The author posits that this approach offers a simple psychological fix, obscuring what may be most disturbing: that people use their agency in ways that are cruel, contradictory, violent, or unintelligible to us. The case of Begum encapsulates a particularly thorny contradiction: though sexual modernity demands that we make use of our agency, it sanctions only very limited forms of self-realisation.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews