This racial flexibility is itself very scandalous, and makes his relationship with Joanna, who is white, horrifying to a community in which sexual relations between black men and white women are the greatest taboo. Although in Jefferson Joe lives as a white man, he believes that he has black ancestry and at other points in his life has identified as black and lived within black communities. Of the many acts of transgression in the novel, the sexual relationship between Joanna and Joe is the most scandalous, in part because it involves both racial and gender transgression. The novel indicates that it is better to accept and forgive supposed transgressions, as Byron Bunch does at the end of the narrative when he takes care of Lena and her baby despite the fact that the child is not his.

Indeed, insisting on policing gender and racial categories will only lead to more chaos and brutality, as is shown by the many gruesome murders and other acts of violence that take place in the novel. The novel ultimately shows that the attempt to uphold strict gender/racial roles and categories is doomed because these categories are arbitrary inventions, which makes it inevitable that real people will transgress them. Indeed, the novel shows that anxieties about racial and gender transgression are inherently intertwined, as racism is deeply rooted in fears about gender and sexuality-particularly the fear of white women having sex with black men. Meanwhile, the meaning of gender is also in flux during this period, and many of the characters betray a similar hysteria about changing gender roles, particularly female sexuality.

Many of the characters in the novel are desperate to uphold race as a fixed and essential quality, yet other characters, like Joe Christmas-who believes he has black ancestry yet passes as white-show that race is actually an arbitrary invention. Light in August is set in the fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi, at the beginning of the Jim Crow era, and chronicles white people’s intense anxiety about preserving white supremacy during this period of transition.

A light in august