“It’s Like we are the Show at the Circus”: Dissecting Multiraciality in Online Dating

• In Event: 3107 - Multiracial Classification

Abstract

In this paper, I draw from a qualitative data set of 82 interviews with single-race and mulitiracial online and argue that online daters reinforce and reaffirm racialized and gendered categorical differences through the examination of the mixed race body. Drawing from a growing numbers of studies that link embodiment with racialization (Ahmed 2002; Newman 2017; Waring 2013), I refer to this process as “multiracial dissection,” a racialization process which invests bodies with racial and gendered meanings assigned to multiraciality. Multiracial dissection may lead to feeling racialized, gender and sexual interest on the part of the observer, but I illustrate how it is also a form of racialized and gendered othering. Further, the excitement that others feel when they encounter mixed racial ancestry in online dating not only tells multiracial daters that they are racially “unique” – which, I argue, is an extension of a racialization process– but it is also couched in racial, gender and sexual fetishization that reinforces stereotypes about racialized “monoracial” femininities and masculinities. This work thus goes beyond a consideration of how, if at all, mixed-race individuals “blur” boundaries and rather illustrates how multiraciality in itself is a social construction and reliant on a racialized system embedded in the logics of a racial binary.

Author

• Celeste Curington, North Carolina State University