Performativity and ‘raced’ bodies

Abstract

Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993) groundbreaking work has led to the permeation of performativity into other theorisations of difference. This chapter engages with the (im)possibilities of the black body’s ‘race’ performativity as it comes up against the ‘race empire’. It does this by focusing on the question of whether ‘mixed-race’ naming as black, as well as performances of blackness, can unsettle ‘the certainties of race’. Using data on identification and beauty drawn from British black ‘mixed-race’ women, the chapter shows that they performatively construct identities as black by drawing on hypodescent – the one-drop rule. It also shows that, as discursively constructed categories, the black–white binary is made mobile through everyday acts of resistance such as naming oneself as black and practices on/of the body – such as fake tanning – which question identity positionings in those racialised hierarchies in which the visual is central to recognition. The fact that black–white remains the binary that keeps the black social skin in place points to the continuation of a ‘race empire’ that draws its certainties from both master signifiers – blackness and whiteness. This ‘race empire’ has instituted an informal and extra-legal anti-miscegenation regime (Thompson 2009) based on hypodescent – from at least the time of slavery and colonialism – that continues in twenty-first-century Britain. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how Frantz Fanon’s (1967) racial epidermal schema and its racialising technology of dissection (Haritaworn 2009) continue to operate at the levels of the psyche, the social and the nation as ‘race’ haunts performativity’s (im)possibilities. Let us now consider what constitutes ‘race’ performativity before looking at the ‘race empire’ and how ‘race’ performativity can help us to theorise ‘race’ in the twenty-first century. Race performativity ‘“Race” is a social construct’ is somewhat of a twentieth-century mantra. However, we know that it continues to very powerfully weave its discontents, desires and exclusions into people’s lives. Lola, who, at the time of her interview, was a 38-year-old social worker, deals with the commonplace assumption that ‘mixed-race’ people are confused about their identities in the following extract. She also shows that, for a black ‘mixed-race’ girl child, racialised criteria of beauty can be very effective in shaping a wish to be white. This is especially so for her as someone who grew up in 1970s Britain, when there were no black beauty role models: