Hybrid Border-Crossers? Towards a Radical Socialisation of 'Mixed Race

Bibliographic Data

ID3628510
AuthorsJ Haritaworn (0000-0001-5036-9402, North-West State Technical University, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume35
Issue1
Pages115-132
Publication date2009-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew Community (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0047-9586 • E-ISSN: 1469-9451
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13691830802489275
OpenAlexW2000624873
LanguageEN
Citations received16
References cited20

The celebration of ‘mixed race’ as the model ‘transgressive’ (post-)identity obfuscates the ambivalence at the root of this construct. Far from ‘abolishing’ race or throwing it into crisis, ‘mixed-race’ bodies and minds continue to be evaluated as disparate, unwholesome and non-belonging, and appear to invite dissective reading practices such as stares, intrusive questions and comments which are commonly treated as a ‘normal reaction to abnormal bodies’. In this article I examine semi-structured interviews with 22 people of Thai and non-Thai parentage in Britain and Germany. Drawing on Fanon's existential phenomenology, I theorise interviewees’ everyday confrontations with intrusive reading practices of their bodies, origins, loyalties and families. The persistence of pathologising discourses and practices on ‘mixed race’ renders celebratory notions of ‘hybrid border-crossers’ problematic. Rather than a pre-social property of particular bodies which trigger intrusive labelling attempts, ‘ambiguous phenotype’ is socially produced in biologistic race discourses and violent reading practices. ‘Mixed race’ should be more aptly theorised as a dissective racialising technology which mobilises essentialised forms of knowledge and entitles some to gaze at and define others. It is constituted in power relations which are socially produced and, hence, also open to contestation and change

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Existentialism · Political science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

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