Embodied Resistance: Multiracial Identity, Gender, and the BodyPosted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science, United States, Women on 2019-08-20 21:53Z by Steven |
Embodied Resistance: Multiracial Identity, Gender, and the Body
Social Sciences
Volume 8, Issue 8 (August 2019)
Article 221
16 pages
DOI: 10.3390/socsci8080221
Gabrielle G. Gonzales
Department of Sociology
University of California Santa Barbara
This article explores the importance of the physical body in the development of gendered racial and ethnic identities through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 11 multiracial/multiethnic women. From a critical mixed race and critical feminist perspective, I argue that the development of an embodied and gendered multiracial and multiethnic identity is a path to questioning and resisting the dominant monoracial order in the United States. Interviews reveal that respondents develop these embodied identities both through understandings of themselves as gendered and raced subjects and through relationships with monoracial individuals. The process by which these women understand their physical bodies as multiracial subjects illustrates a critical embodied component of the social construction of race and ethnicity in the United States.