The project’s historical part looked at the regulation of ‘mixture’ in four European countries: France (Rebecca Franco), Italy (Andrea Tarchi), the Netherlands (Betty de Hart), and the United Kingdom (Nawal Mustafa), through archival research. This was the first project in Europe to explore in such a comprehensive way the regulation of mixture in four European countries. We have been able to determine that, contrary to common and academic understandings, the regulation of mixture was of central concern not only to state authorities in the colonies, but also in mainland Europe. Furthermore, we have been able to demonstrate that in spite of the official rejections of race-thinking after the Second World War in Europe, regulations of mixture have not disappeared and were maintained or introduced by state legislators, civil registrars, immigration services, police, churches and embassies in various policy fields, such as immigration, housing and urban planning, social work action, and sex work. The implementation of seemingly colour-blind regulations and legislation targeting mixed couples or (post)colonial migrants had racialized and gendered outcomes. The project demonstrated that ‘mixed intimacies’ were problematized through intersections of race, class, and gender, resulting in a focus on the relationships of white women and racialised men.
Hence, the regulation of mixture was not alien to the European context, and continues to inform laws and regulations today. It exemplifies that the existence of ‘mixed couples’ should not be understood as a sign of a post-racial or color-blind area, but rather, a sign of the persistence of couples and families in spite of social forces and institutional structures trying to prevent them. The project hopes to have contributed to a change in the thinking of the role of law and legal scholars in race-thinking, both in academia (especially legal scholars) and in larger society.
The contemporary part explored whether and how, in spite of norms of formal equality and colour-blindness, ‘race’ and ‘monoracial family norms’ still play a part in the lived experiences of ‘interracial’ couples with law in their everyday lives. A multi-sited ethnography with interviews with ‘mixed couples’ in the Netherlands, Italy and the UK (Elena Zambelli) explored whether and how being a ‘mixed couple’ mattered in different domains (housing, education, mobility, and safety), and how partners’ differently racialised subjectivities reflect or challenge the enduring legacy of Western colonialism and imperialism. Finally, the project explored the understudied meanings and regulations of mixed intimacies in contemporary Europe and traced their genealogies (Guno Jones). Using colonial constructions and regulations of 'mixed intimacies' as a point of departure, it studied the external boundaries and internal frontiers that are drawn in contemporary European regulations of intimacies, and how these are connected with European citizenship and the construction of European identity.
