“Mostly with White Girls”: Settlement, Spatiality, and Emergent Interracial Sexualities in a Canadian Prairie City

In Winnipeg, a midsize city in the Canadian Prairies undergoing social and demographical transformations, male African newcomer youth face challenges in their settlement experiences relating to conflicting and heterogeneous norms around sexuality, sex, and dating. With its diverse population, the city is a space in which both racialization of blackness occurs and “multicultural” ethno‐racial diversity is imagined. In this spatiality of youths’ everyday lives, interracial sexuality emerges as transgression. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with heterosexual male youth from sixteen to twenty‐five years of age who have recently emigrated from various African countries, we examine how interracial sexuality was constituted through what our interlocutors said and did. We trace and analyze how sexual transgression associated with the desirability and taboo of white femininity was played out through social‐spatial networks and practices within the changing urban landscape. The formation of sexuality within global, transnational, and urban contexts of settlement is not simply a matter of global forces affecting the local or local affecting the global. By ethnographically situating interracial sexuality in a diverse urban locale where migrant youth are navigating multiple boundaries of race, nation, and sexuality in the transformation of their identities and subjectivities, we offer one story of how interracial sexualities are constituted in a specific time and place. Within Canada, newly arrived immigrant and refugee African young men are mired in the histories of taboo over sexual relations with white women while being key actors in transformations of heterosexuality, masculinity, blackness, and whiteness occurring through immigration and settlement processes. [Sexuality; Race and Space; Interracial Sexuality; Immigrant Youth; African Youth; Urban Youth Subculture; White Femininity]