Mixed-Race Habits: Articulations of Female Asian-Australian Artists

Abstract

ABSTRACT Multicultural societies such as Australia are becoming more diverse, and understandings of mixed race descent experiences are urgently needed. In this paper, we contribute to such understandings by examining how mixed-race Asian-Australian women navigate the complexities of race through their cultural expressions and embodied experiences. Our discussion draws on ethnographic research, interviews and social media analysis conducted with Indonesian-Australian and Filipino-Australian cultural performers and producers. Through their cultural works, these women artists explore and articulate issues of racial, national, gendered and familial identities. Our analysis of their works and lives draws on Ngo’s recent discussion of ‘racist habits’, to examine how mixed-race experiences require them to navigate the embodiment of racialised perceptions from both their maternal homeland and their Australian homeland. Their problematising of habits through cultural practices provides an important opportunity for recasting mixed-race in ways that resist both the valorisation and the demonisation of mixed-race bodies. Rather than being presented as ‘cosmopolitan ideal’ or ‘suspect impurity’, the Eurasian figure is an opportunity for resisting and releasing the embodied habits of race and racialisation.