This paper explores the connections between ethnicity and sexuality. Racial, ethnic, and national boundaries are also sexual boundaries. The borderlands dividing racial, ethnic, and national identities and communities constitute ethnosexual frontiers, erotic intersections that are heavily patrolled, policed, and protected, yet regularly are penetrated by individuals forging sexual links with ethnic "others." Normative heterosexuality is a central component of racial, ethnic, and nationalist ideologies; both adherence to and deviation from approved sexual identities and behaviors define and reinforce racial, ethnic, and nationalist regimes. To illustrate the ethnicity/sexuality nexus and to show the utility of revealing this intimate bond for understanding ethnic relations, I review constructionist models of ethnicity and sexuality in the social sciences and humanities, and I discuss ethnosexual boundary processes in several historical and contemporary settings: the sexual policing of nationalism, sexual aspects of US-American Indian relations, and the sexualization of the black-white color line. ? 110 NAGEL cross-referencing in the literatures. Disciplinary boundaries sometimes seem more impenetrable than the ethnic and sexual boundaries they describe. For instance, much queer theory fails to cite relevant sociological literature, and much sociological research on sexuality is uninformed by queer theory (for an exception, see Seidman 1996). Similarly, social science and humanities scholarship on racial, ethnic, and nationalist constructions seldom contains common bibliographies. Further hindering communication and shared discourse on ethnicity and sexuality between the social sciences and humanities are the significant differences in the vocabularies used by each, differences substantial enough to make interdisciplinary work a challenge. One goal of this essay is make humanities scholarship on both ethnic and sexual constructions more accessible to social scientists. Constructing Ethnicity Much current research on race, ethnicity, and nationalism in both the social sciences and humanities rests upon a model of ethnicity as a set of socially constructed boundaries in political, economic, cultural, social, and moral time and space (
