Mixed Race Studies

The Biopolitics of Mixing: Thai Multiracialities and Haunted Ascendancies

Ashgate Publishing
October 2012
198 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7546-7680-5
ebook ISBN 978-1-4094-2502-1

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

Debates over who belongs in Europe and who doesn’t increasingly speak the language of mixing, but how are the figures commonly described as ‘mixed’ actually embodied? The Biopolitics of Mixing invites us to reckon with the spectres of pathologization past and present, placing the celebration of mixing beside moral panics over terrorism and trafficking and a post-race multiculturalism that elevates some as privileged members of the neoliberal community, whilst ghosting others from it. Drawing on a broad archive including rich qualitative interviews conducted in Britain and Germany, media and policy debates, popular culture, race-based research and queer-of-colour theories, this book imagines into being communities in which people and places normally kept separate can coexist in the same reality.

As such, it will appeal to scholars across a range of sociological and cultural studies, including critical race, ethnic and migration studies, transnational gender and queer studies, German and European studies, Thai and Southeast Asian studies, and studies of affect, performativity, biopolitics and necropolitics. It should be read by all those interested in thinking critically on the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability.

Contents

• Introduction: haunted origins
• Where are you from?
• From monster to fashion model: regenerating racialized bodies
• Is it better to be mixed race?
• Hybrid nations, mixed feelings: from marginal man to Obama
• Exceptional cities, exceptional citizens: metronormativity and mimeticism
• Reckoning with prostitutes: performing Thai femininity
• Conclusion: where do we want to go?
• Bibliography
• Index

Mixed-race theory for everyone

Mixedness & mixing: New perspectives on mixed-race Britons
A Commission for Racial Equality eConference
2007-09-04 through 2007-09-06

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

What insights does mixed-race theory bear for mixed-race people, our allies, and the professionals who work with us? This paper introduces three lessons which are especially relevant in this time and place.

Table of Contents

Lesson 1: Scandalising the ‘What are you?’ encounter
Lesson 2: The good mix and the bad
Lesson 3: A Mongrel Nation?

Mixed-race theory helps us challenge the voyeuristic entitlement which some people feel to find out intimate things about us. Many of us are used to giving unreciprocated information about our identities, origins and families. We endure this treatment as we know from experience that the person asking ‘Where are you from?’ will not be satisfied with ‘Northampton’. We rarely risk challenging this inappropriate ‘smalltalk’, for fear of being labelled irritating.

Read the entire paper here.

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.

Read or purchase the article here.

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

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
Volume 35, Issue 1 (January 2009)
pages 115 – 132
DOI: 10.1080/13691830802489275

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

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.

Read or purchase the article here.

`Caucasian and Thai make a good mix’

European Journal of Cultural Studies
Volume 12, Number 1 (February 2009)
pages 59-78
DOI: 10.1177/1367549408098705

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

This article examines the current celebration of Eur/Asianness in the media and popular culture. It traces representations of the `mixed race’ body, from colonial discourses of degeneracy and monstrosity to capitalist discourses of commercialized exoticism and `beauty’.  It then examines how people of Thai and non-Thai parentage interviewed in Britain and Germany in 2001 and 2002 negotiated gendered and racialized readings of their bodies. Narratives of multi-racialized embodiment brim with racism, as the `valuable’ or `pathological’, `good’ or `bad mixes’, of unlike body parts grafted onto each other. This necessitates a critical re-evaluation of `hybridity’ debates, which treat biological racism as a past phenomenon that can be metaphorized for cultural processes of identification.

Read or purchase the article here.