Valorizing the Mixed-Race Body: From Hybrid Degeneracy to Hybrid Vigor

• In Event: 366 - Open Refereed Roundtable Session II
  In Refereed Roundtable: B. Table 06. Race II

Abstract

Contemporary celebrations of racial mixing valorize the mixed-race body and ascribe to it qualities desired of individuals in an increasingly cosmopolitan, global world. Mixed-race bodies have come to symbolize the values, histories, and composition of a nation within a context of colorblind, multicultural, and post-racial ideologies. However, this shift to a celebratory multiracialism must be viewed in light of notions of hybrid degeneracy and inferiority which long predominated scholarly and popular views of racial mixing. This resignification of the mixed-race body comes at a time in which the reality behind the oppressive circumstances that brought different populations together must be erased or revised in order to present acceptable and progressive attitudes toward race in the modern world. The celebration of the mixed-race body assists this revision by providing the centerpiece around which conquering nations rewrite their histories of racial oppression and exclusion into ones of tolerance and acceptance. This paper highlights the significant transition from notions of hybrid degeneracy to those of hybrid vigor, and attaches the fictions that support capitalist, global, and neoliberal racial projects to this contemporary re-rendering of the mixed-race body. It also unpacks the selective valorization of certain mixed-race bodies, particularly as it occurs through racialized constructions of gender and beauty, in order to draw attention to those bodies that are marginalized or rendered invisible in contemporary celebrations of racial mixing.

Author

• Alyssa Marie Newman, University of California-Santa Barbara