Book Talk: Desiring Whiteness

Monday, March 16, 2026 | 3:30pm – 4:30pm ET | ICC 425 (McCarthy Space), Georgetown University Main Campus | No registration needed

Hosted by Department of French and Francophone Studies
Co-sponsored by Gender⁺ Justice Initiative, Women’s and Gender Studies Program, and African Studies Program at Georgetown University, and the French Embassy in the United States.

Join us for a book talk with Caroline Séquin, Associate Professor of History at Lafayette College, to discuss her first book publication, Desiring Whiteness: A Racial History of Prostitution in France and Colonial Senegal, 1848-1950 (Cornell University Press, 2024).

Desiring Whiteness uncovers the intertwined histories of commercial sex and racial politics in France and the French Empire. Since the French Revolution of 1789, the absence of laws banning interracial marriages has served to reinforce two myths about modern France—first, that it is a sexual democracy and second, it is a color-blind nation where all French citizens can freely marry whomever they wish regardless of their race. Caroline Séquin challenges the narrative of French exceptionalism by revealing the role of prostitution regulation in policing intimate relationships across racial and colonial boundaries in the century following the abolition of slavery.

About the Author:

Caroline Séquin is an Associate Professor of History at Lafayette College and earned her PhD in Modern European History from the University of Chicago. Séquin is a social and political historian of modern France and the French Empire who is interested in questions related to race, gender, sexuality, and migration. She is now working on the history of binational marriages, family migration, citizenship, and belonging in the twentieth century.