Race, Mixed Race and ‘Race Work’ in Japanese American Beauty Pageants |
Race, Mixed Race and ‘Race Work’ in Japanese American Beauty Pageants
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Montreal Convention Center
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
2006-08-10
Rebecca King-O’Riain, Senior Lecturer
Department of Sociology
National University of Ireland
Long-standing debates within critical race theory about the efficacy of the concept of ‘race’ have posited the mixed race experience as an illustration of the flexible and multiple nature of this socially constructed concept (Gans 2005). However, mixed race studies (Root 1996; DuBose and Winter 2002) themselves have shown that mixed race does not mean ‘no-race’. There persists, even in mixed race research, the notion of race as a concept where racial meaning is congealed and tied through its supposed association with the body to biology. Using ethnographic fieldwork in Japanese American beauty pageants, this paper illustrates that the mixed race body invites us to examine more carefully race work – a concept that I introduce to explain how people exert effort to try to keep their own biological notions of race (typically references to looks or physical appearance) in line with their thinking about culture (i.e. full blooded people of color have culture, whites don’t). I look at multiple levels of social interaction in order to shed light on how race is socially and politically constructed in a world where race has gone underground and is more difficult to detect and trace – a world where there can be “racial intent without race” (Ignatiev 2004).
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