Mixed Race Studies

Irish and white-ish mixed “race” identity and the scopic regime of whiteness

Women’s Studies International Forum
Volume 27, Issue 4, October–November 2004
pages 385-396
DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2004.10.007

Angeline D. Morrison
Falmouth College of Arts, Falmouth, Cornwall, United Kingdom

When speaking about the paradoxical “invisibility” of whiteness, I am referring in particular to Richard Dyer’s project to “make whiteness strange”, to hold it up for inspection and to question the tacit association of whiteness with unquestioned normality with the human condition Dyer points out that the unspoken understanding that whiteness is not a “raced” condition has very specific implications for the balance of power. “There is no more powerful position than being ‘just’ human. The claim of power is the claim to speak for the commodity of humanity. Raced people can’t do that—they can only speak for their race. But non-raced people can, for they do not represent the interests of a race” (Dyer, 1997, p. 2). Like blackness, whiteness is not reducible to a matter of simple visual appearance. However, when historical and political circumstances allow the conflation of the so-called “ideals” of whiteness–Enlightenment ideals such as literacy, civilisation, artistic creativity, scientific excellence, power, dignity, assumed superiority and so on—with a particular “race” or skin color (here, “white”), things start getting dangerous. The visual becomes vital, and the optical surface of the “raced” subject is imbued with I hyper-significance that can be very uncomfortable to wear. When this subject is of mixed “race” and thus occupies a range of different possible positions within, without, around and between the binary categories, difficulties can arise.

I use the term “mixed race” mindfully, aware that the term is contested by some, while others warn against its reference to die unscientific non-sense of “race” (Gilroy, 2000). Therefore, for the purposes of this article only, I want to define “mixed race” people as the offspring of one white and one non-white parent. If racialized society relies on the false foundational Logocentric binary “black white”, then it follows that it will taxonomize its subjects accordingly. Sander H. Gilman points out that, “. . .in this view of mankind, the black occupied the antithetical position to the white on the scale of humanity.” (Gilman, 1985, p. 231).

Concentrating on the visual, this article intends to use the figure of the mixed “race” subject to investigate the particular scopic regime of whiteness. I wish to consider some of the things that the dominant scopic regime accords visibility to, and some of those it does not. Clearly, what ends up being seen and the various interpretations the afforded depend largely on cultural registers, power relations, and epistemologies that continually shift the white phenotype of Irish people, for example, was all but “invisible” to the white scopic regime of the 19th Century Britain. The racist caricaturing of the Irish that is now so well documented…

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Lone mothers of mixed racial and ethnic children in Britain: Comparing experiences of social attitudes and support in the 1960s and 2000s

Women’s Studies International Forum
Volume 34, Issue 6, November-December 2011
Pages 530-538
DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2011.06.007

Rosalind Edwards, Professor of Sociology
University of Southampton

Chamion Cabellero, Senior Research Fellow
Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

This article places side-by-side the views from lone mothers bringing up children from mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds in mid-1960s and early 2000s Britain, to consider whether the sorts of social attitudes and support these mothers experienced have changed or persisted over the past half century. The analysis compares and contrasts the general social and official attitudes that lone mothers of mixed children feel that they encounter, the support they receive from the fathers of their children, and their relationships with their own and the father’s wider family, the neighbourhood and friendship networks they draw on, and the formal supports available to them across time. The article concludes by considering some indicative trajectories of change and constancy that looking at these social attitudes and supports reveals, around negative assessments and their social expression, expectations of fathers, the availability of wider family, and the importance of informal daily support from other mothers in the same situation.

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Beautiful beasts: Ambivalence and distinction in the gender identity negotiations of multiracialised women of Thai descent

Women’s Studies International Forum
Volume 30, Issue 5 (September-October 2007)
Pages 391-403
DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2007.07.003

Jin Haritaworn, Assistant Professor in Gender, Race and Environment at the Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University, Canada

This qualitative analysis of interviews with women of Thai and non-Thai parentage throws into question the current celebration of Eur/asianness and multiraciality.  The study describes multiracialisation as an ambivalent and differential process of categorisation which mobilises essentialist ideas of ‘stock’ and ‘breeding’.  A far cry from historical notions of ‘mixed-race degeneracy’, interviewees emerged from this process the ‘best of both worlds’. However, beside the ‘good mix’ there ran the spectre of the ‘bad mix’, and some had more access to celebratory identities than others. Celebratory notions of Eur/asian femininity were further qualified by the competing discourse of the ‘Thai prostitute’.  The precariousness with which interviewees could access normative ideals of desirability was especially visible in narratives of masculinity, non-white parentage, gender variance and childhood.  The article ends by advocating, in the place of a power-evasive celebration, challenges to the multiple overlapping power relations which underlie all acts of evaluation.

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