Racial Imperatives

Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles Against Subjection

Bibliographic Data

ID3027571
AuthorsLadelle Mcwhorter (0000-0001-7071-3311, University of Richmond, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume1
Issue2
Pages242-247
Publication date2013-07-01
Open AccessNo
TypeREVIEW
Review ofRacial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection, Nadine Ehlers, 2012
VenueCritical Philosophy of Race (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2165-8684 • E-ISSN: 2165-8692
PublisherThe Pennsylvania State University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.5325/critphilrace.1.2.0242
OpenAlexW4244714078
LanguageEN

Racial Imperatives does something no other book has yet done: it takes on the task of explaining, directly and in detail, how Judith Butler's conception of gender performativity articulates with Michel Foucault's account of normalizing disciplinary practices and techniques of selfhood in the process of constructing and maintaining racial identities. Given how influential both these bodies of theoretical work are, this project fills a major gap in both Critical Race and Foucault studies. It will undoubtedly be cited and engaged for years to come.Regardless of the immense size of the theoretical mouthful this book has bitten off, its historical scope is tightly constrained by the author's choice of narrative frame. Perhaps that was advisable. New ground is broken here, but there is plenty of work left to do for those who wish to cultivate it further.Ehlers frames her analysis around a 1925 court case, Rhinelander v. Rhinelander, in which Leonard Rhinelander, the son of a wealthy New York society family, charged his wife Alice, née Jones, with fraud and requested annulment of their marriage. Allegedly, Alice had concealed her true racial identity. Some of her ancestors and some living members of her family were black, which, of course, meant that Alice herself was black under the law, despite her light skin and European features. Miscegenation was not illegal in New York, Ehlers points out, but obviously fraud was. Ehlers uses the details of this case to illustrate a number of key points throughout the book, and it serves her purposes very well.The central issue in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander, Ehlers makes clear in the book's compelling introductory chapter, is racial identity-not, however, whether Alice Rhinelander was a Negro but whether her husband Leonard could have known that she was before he married her. If he had or should have known, then Alice was not guilty of fraud, and the marriage could not be annulled. However, if he could not have known, if nothing in Alice's appearance or comportment bespoke her racial identity-if Alice was indeed guilty of fraud-then the supposedly naturally given racial distinction between Negro and white would be thrown into jeopardy. This latter possibility was particularly troublesome for the court, because there was extensive evidence, including Leonard's letters to Alice, that Leonard had visited Alice's parents' home, met her relatives, socialized with her for an extended period before proposing, and had repeated premarital sex with her. It is hard to imagine a more intimate physical connection between the two. Leonard had every opportunity to “see” Alice for what she was, if such seeing was indeed possible. And if it was, after all, impossible?To sort out this complex of issues, Ehlers brings two analytic tools to bear: Foucault's notion of discipline and Butler's notion of performativity. However, in each case some adaptation is necessary. Butler's notion applies, in Butler's analysis at least, to gender, not race. Ehlers must argue that race, too, is performative, and not only when someone is attempting to pass as a member of a race to which their society or the law says they do not belong, but always. Butler claims that all individuals' gender identities are effects of performance. Ehlers argues for the analogous claim that all individuals' racial identities are effects of performance. The difficulty she faces in using Foucault's notion of discipline is that in explaining it, Foucault frequently contrasts it with juridical power; disciplinary power establishes and deploys around norms, whereas juridical power establishes and deploys around laws. Ehlers must show that Foucault's conception of disciplinary power is not by virtue of that fact inapplicable in analysis of a legal case. These two difficulties are addressed in chapters 1 and 2, respectively.Taking them in reverse order, chapter 2 argues that Foucault never drew a hard line between law and norm. His distinction served his genealogical analysis-at a certain point, there was a break between law conceived as prohibition and disciplinary norms that served as benchmarks for development-but subsequently, as Foucault demonstrates in Discipline and Punish, the carceral system absorbed and was transformed by normalizing disciplinary practices. Ehlers is surely right to insist that anti-miscegenation laws, for example, are essentially normalizing: The “intention” of the various and often contradictory racial purity laws may have seemingly been to classify, codify, or define racial status (in ways that reflect “fact” or “truth”), but they have functioned in more complex ways to become a core component in the political technology that is discipline. For in a Foucauldian understanding where technology means “to make,” law has contributed to the (disciplinary) making of racial subjects: it has conditioned the production of racial subjectivities in line with the dominant extra-legal dictates of racial discipline (37). Not only in carceral practice, then, but also in written law we see the operations of disciplinary strategies. Racial purity laws-anti-miscegenation laws as well as various laws requiring certification and enforcing various forms of segregation-helped to create a racially charged environment in which subjects emerged as raced, knowable through the category of race, and constrained and informed by that knowledge.The case Ehlers makes in chapter 2 is solid. Foucault's concept of normalizing discipline is surely applicable-and fruitfully so-to racial discourses and practices, including legal codes and practices. A more difficult case to make is that race, like gender, is performative in Butler's sense, which is the task of Ehlers's chapter 1. Certainly passing as white-which is what Leonard Rhinelander accused his wife, Alice, of having done-could be understood as a kind of performance. Ehlers argues that doing so would involve not merely capitalizing on one's physical appearance in contrast to one's ancestry, but it would also involve careful cultivation of a set of manners, a way of speaking even down to the exclusion of certain locutions and vocabulary (79), and a way of comporting oneself. Further, Alice Jones was not only descended from Negroes, she was also raised in a working-class household. Although Ehlers does not discuss this aspect of her situation, Alice would have had to pass not only as white but also as socially refined beyond her class in order to be a candidate for marriage to Leonard Rhinelander.Alice's effort-if she really made any effort to pass as white-could be easily identified as a performance in contrast to her “true” identity and way of being in the world. But Ehlers's point, building on Butler, is not that such projects of passing are performances but that race itself is performative. Racial identities are marked out, and individuals are required to occupy those sites; race is, thus, normative (18). But no individual ever perfectly coincides with the identity imposed, despite its being through this imposition of identity that subjects emerge as such. An individual must maintain itself, to the extent possible, at a site of identity in order “to maintain discursive intelligibility” (22). This self-maintenance is essentially performative.Ehlers illustrates this point by focusing not so much on Alice but on Leonard in both chapter 1 and chapter 5 (the latter of which is given over to analysis of Leonard almost exclusively). Leonard, too (or perhaps instead of Alice), was passing as white, Ehlers maintains, not because his ancestry was not exclusively European (it probably was) but because, like everyone in a racially stratified society, he lived under an injunction to comport himself as appropriately raced. Leonard had to perform his whiteness in order to remain discursively intelligible. And this, Ehlers insists, he failed to do.The Rhinelander court needed to find for Alice in order not to upset their society's existing racial arrangements. If the court had decided that, in the context of an intimate long-term relationship, it was possible for Alice to pass as white (as Leonard maintained), they would in effect acknowledge that racial identity is not necessarily written on the body, that it is ultimately an entirely non-natural phenomenon. Much was at stake for the twelve white men on the jury.Ehlers describes the court's procedure for making this determination. Alice's attorney Lee Parsons Davis requested a closed session so that he could enter Alice's body into evidence. “Davis had Alice parade before them with her breasts, back, and legs exposed” (80). He then exhorted the jury to bear witness to Alice's obvious racial identity. There was no way that a competent man could have been fooled by this body, he concluded; either Leonard knew that Alice was a Negro, or he did not have the discerning power of a “boy of twelve” (80).The jury found for Alice, ruling that she did not commit fraud because it was physically impossible for her to have done so. Further, Leonard's letters showed not only his extensive physical knowledge of Alice but also his own degenerate nature. He had declared to Alice in writing that remembering their time together provoked him to masturbate (97), which was both an indication and a further cause of degeneracy, and his letters revealed that the couple had engaged in cunnilingus, an act of sodomy under New York law with a penalty of up to twenty years in prison (100). After losing his suit, Leonard was removed from New York's Social Register, and his father disinherited him. He left for Nevada, although whether voluntarily or under compulsion from his family is unclear (104). In short, he lost his place in society. According to Ehlers, this loss is evidence that Leonard had failed to perform white masculinity adequately, failed to maintain discursive intelligibility; he was excised from his race, class, and gender.I am inclined to agree with Ehlers's thesis that racial identity emerges and is maintained through practices, many of which are performative in Butler's sense. I am not sure that Leonard Rhinelander's fate adequately secures that thesis, however. A simpler account of Leonard's fall is that his actions made him unacceptable in his social milieu. The forces that led to his expulsion were not all triggered by his racial and gendered performances, however. He was punished as a disobedient son, an unsuitable heir to his father's fortunes, and a sexual deviant. But these labels did not render him nonwhite or nonmasculine so much as they branded him abnormal and criminal. Is it necessary to use the apparatus of performativity to explain what happened to Leonard? That apparatus could be valuable for analyses of racial identities generally, I believe, but I do not think Ehlers has made as strong a case as she might have if she had drawn on a wider range of historical evidence. Nevertheless, the analysis she does is extremely suggestive.Chapter 6 offers another suggestive discussion, this one on the nature of agency. Could anyone in 1925 America have actually altered their racial identity by altering their racial performance? It would seem not, but Ehlers argues that this fact does not leave us trapped in oppressive racial identities. Although, drawing again on Butler, she argues that agency cannot be attributed to subjects-“rather, a slippage occurs between the structure that demands racial designation and the manner in which the subject takes up this command” (118)-it does exist. Agency is structural, not individuated. Structures are never absolutely stable.Chapter 7 explores ways people might contest what Ehlers calls the racial imperative (126), but she insists that disassembly must be accompanied by reassembly. It is not enough to critique the status quo; we must build an alternative future. She points to the practice of signifying, which she sees as an effort to re-story identity (127) and not merely to destabilize it. One might wish that Ehlers had continued this line of thought and offered more examples, but she concludes with the suggestion that we (especially white people) might create incentive for this work if we first rework our notion of pleasure (141). Might not transforming ourselves through challenges to racial identity in our racial performances give pleasure?Racial Imperatives offers much food for thought. The fact that it leaves readers wishing for more surely indicates that Ehlers has found-if not the right track-at least a promising path

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