Body Race Research Articles

Mining, Racialisation and the Utopia of Desedimentation in Pedro Castera's Geological Writings

This article examines the close interrelation between racialisation and mining in Pedro Castera's Las minas y los mineros (1882) and Los maduros (1882). Castera's writings critically render mining as a profit‐driven extractive practice that relies on the stratification of inorganic and organic matter across racial lines. Minerals and racialised bodies are conceptualised as inert matter endowed with valued properties in the service of resource extraction. Simultaneously, Castera's ‘El Tildío’ conjures the utopian possibility of destabilising the racial stratification that upholds extractive colonialism and its legacies in the nineteenth century.

Beyond the Dichotomy: Toward Decolonial Eco-Queer Theories, Imaginaries, and Praxes in Clinical Social Work Education and Practice

ABSTRACT At this pressing historical juncture, where escalating violence against queer and racialized bodies runs concurrently with the specter of wide-scale planetary collapse, social work is in dire need of reconceptualizing the moral parameters of its imagination. Recognizing that changes in thought both precede and extend from changes in behavior, this article advocates for a profound unlearning of supremacist modes of thinking wedded to hierarchical orderings, dichotomous and essentialist views, and categorical oppositions. By engaging de/coloniality and eco-queer feminisms, this article draws connections between the discursive violences targeting queer and racialized bodies and the parallel destruction of the animate Earth—bodies circumscribed, exploited, and rendered disposable by the power-logics of coloniality/heteropatriarchy/modernity and the untenable demands of global capitalism. With the interest of re-situating clinical social work within the broader context of planetary health, this article considers the criticality of decolonial eco-queer thought, praxis, and imaginaries as vital responses to the multidimensional power structures constraining our transformative potential. Ultimately, this paper discusses four tenets vital for a more holistic and revolutionary social work education and practice.

Crafting the unsayable: Making meaning out of racialised maternal health-care encounters.

There are persistent and profound racialised inequalities in maternal and reproductive health in the UK. Yet in multiple settings, these disparities have been blamed on class or ethnicity, individuals and communities rather than the structures within which they live. In this study, we draw on narratives told within a 'slow-stitch' craft workshop, organised in southern England for racialised women with reproductive trauma, to show how processes of racialisation and racism shape experiences of maternal and reproductive healthcare. Experiences of reproductive trauma were multiple and cumulative. The burden of knowledge of racialised disparities was carried into health-care spaces, with plans made in advance to self-manage in risky spaces. The constant management of racialised stereotypes and subsequent strategies of bodily and emotional containment ultimately was not protective and there was little agency over levels of care received in health-care spaces. Perceptions surrounding racialised bodies shaped treatment, whilst proximities to whiteness afforded alternative realities. Taking a phenomenological approach we analyse race as a sensory, spatial and relational constellation haunted by long-standing histories of fraught inequality. Bringing together in the crafting circle a group of women racialised in different ways enabled the sharing of "unspeakable" stories surrounding racism and reproductive trauma, and allowed raceto be brought into being as a form of solidarity and connection.

Playing (& Smoking) by the Rules: Sport Media’s Racialized Coverage of Athlete Drug Use

Sports media research has often found that athletes are depicted differently based on stereotypes attached to their racialized bodies, and often along a Black/white racial binary. Furthermore, Black men often receive more and harsher penalties for drug use compared to all other racial and gender categories. Using critical discourse analysis, this study explores how NFL athletes who either openly admitted to using illicit drugs or failed National Football League (NFL)-mandated drug tests were covered by sports media. Four NFL athletes (two Black, two white) were selected based on their prominence — Josh Gordon, Randy Gregory, Chris Long, and Aaron Rodgers. The findings tell us that the selected Black athletes were often demonized in coverage by being portrayed as addicts or criminals and objectified as commodities whose value rose and fell with each suspension/return. Additionally, journalists often deployed neoliberal logics to both criticize and defend Black and white athletes. The white athletes in the study were portrayed as intellectuals looking to challenge the NFL’s authority, “good person(s),” and went unpunished for their drug admittance. This study finds that monolithic coverage of athletes is not fair, however the stereotypical notions of the Black/white binary are present when analyzing media discourse on athletic drug use.

A Critical Understanding of Inclusion in Oral Microbiome Research through the Lens of Racial Capitalism.

There are important calls for greater inclusion of Indigenous and racialised communities in oral microbiome research. This paper uses the concept of racial capitalism (the extractive continuity of colonialism) to critically examine this inclusion agenda. Racial capitalism explicitly links capitalist exploitations with wider social oppressions e.g., racisms, sexism, ableism. It is not confined to the commercial sector but pervades white institutions, including universities. By using the lens of racial capitalism, we find inclusion agendas allow white institutions to extract social and economic value from relations of race. Racially inclusive research is perceived as a social good, therefore, it attracts funding. Knowledge and treatments developed from research create immense value for universities and pharmaceutical companies with limited benefits for the communities themselves. Moreover, microbiome research tends to drift from conceptualisations that recognise it as something that is shaped by the social, including racisms, to one that is determined genetically and biologically. This location of problems within racialised bodies reinforces racial oppressions and allows companies to further profit from raciality. Inclusion in oral microbiome research must consider ways to mitigate racial capitalism. Researchers can be less extractive by using an anti-racism praxis framework. This includes working with communities to co-design studies, create safer spaces, giving marginalised communities the power to set and frame agendas, sharing research knowledges and treatments through accessible knowledge distributions, open publications, and open health technologies. Most importantly, inclusion agendas must not displace ambitions of the deeper anti-oppression social reforms needed to tackle health inequalities and create meaningful inclusion.

Between race and animality: European borders, ‘colonial dogs’, and the policing of humanity

Abstract Europe’s (post-)colonial borders have been recently marked by a profusion of cases of violence against racialised migrants with the use of police dogs, following a continual process of integration of canines into the border apparatus of violence. Engaging simultaneously with the recent post-colonial literature on border and migration security and the incipient domain of animal studies, this article investigates the colonial and racial origins and effects of this phenomenon. Contextualising the weaponisation of dogs at Europe’s borders today within a much longer history of racial violence, the article shows how canines have been systematically deployed by colonial and white supremacist powers against racialised bodies as tools to enact and secure racial order. Attentive to the ways in which modern humanness has been predicated upon its removal from the food chain, the article argues that the use of police dogs at Europe’s borders operates by reinforcing the non- or less-than-human status of racialised migrants by marking them as ‘animal-like’ and ‘edible’ bodies. Conceptualising this method as ‘the politics of edibility’, the article then shows how the exposure of migrants to the threat of ‘dog bites’ functions as a form of reinforcing racial hierarchies in a Europe traversed by racial anxieties.

Entangled Vulnerabilities: Gendered and Racialised Bodies and Borders in EU External Border Security

ABSTRACT The notion of vulnerability is gaining traction in EU border protection. On the one hand, the concept refers to vulnerable migrants and their affectedness by insecurity and violence. On the other, it indicates the susceptibility of borders to irregular crossings and cross-border crime. Both forms of vulnerability are assessed through dedicated procedures under the umbrella of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency Frontex. To make sense of these seemingly contradictory conceptual and practical uses of vulnerability, we draw on feminist postcolonial scholarship in security studies and political geography. We argue that a shared colonial matrix of gendered and racialised meanings and problematisations enables analogies between borders and bodies as (un-)deserving of protection. In a discourse-theoretical analysis of Frontex documents, we show how the ambiguous use of vulnerability legitimises the EU border regime and its security practices by constructing EU bordering as neutral and objective and EU borders as objects of care. We conclude that vulnerability becomes increasingly important for normalising the EU’s violent borders in the context of the EU’s broader claims to liberal values of freedom, protection, and human rights.

Pride Body: Racialized Gay and Queer Men’s Physique Preparation for Canadian Pride Events

This research explores why racialized queer and gay men work out prior to Pride events in Pride Toronto and Fierté Montréal. The findings show that muscular aesthetics are a type of gay social capital, and participants acknowledge that this may also increase undesired attention and limitations because of their racialized bodies. Participants voice the paradox of the “unspoken rule,” which derives from ideas of authenticity and superficiality. To be one’s most genuine self, racialized queer and gay men must achieve a high physical bodily aesthetic but may lose identity and agency. Yet, they transform their bodies as a daily dedication to their own well-being. Most seem to be aware of the contradictions and tensions in developing a muscled body, which is a personal journey each of them went through to find their own understanding and meaning.

“Moving Through and Beyond ”: Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies

Abstract: For decades, Theatre Journal has deeply engaged with different aspects of Asian American theatre and performance. This essay surveys a range of Theatre Journal articles published from the 1990s in order to map out this distinctive area of theatre and performance studies. Key articles by James Moy, Karen Shimakawa, and Daphne Lei grapple with the legacy of racial stereotypes and the aesthetics and reception of contemporary Asian American performance. Essays by Angela Pao, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Sean Metzger, and Ju Yon Kim emphasize the racialized bodies of actors and the history of yellowface and brownface acting, while Christopher Eng, Christine Mok, Megan Shea, and Dan Bacalzo emphasize the intersectional and transnational dimensions of Asian American expression. These and other scholars of Asian American theatre and performance continue to engage with new aspects of immigrant and refugee performance as well as gender and sexuality in Asian American theatre. At a time of changing demographics and cultural visibility, this essay helps us see how scholars have addressed the enormous diversity of Asian American experiences and perspectives as well as common preoccupations about visibility and representation, the persistence of orientalist typecasting, and the dynamic and complicated nature of Asian American identity.

Racialized spatial attachments

Danish high school’s rising ethnic/racial diversity and tendencies of segregation call for explorations of students’ educational experiences of racialized differentiation. This article unfolds methodological reflections on this endeavor, by focusing on researcher access. Not only is space a medium through which racial relations materialize – space is also interconnected with access. If researchers depend on relations for access to sites of inquiry, which depends on how researchers are read by actors in the field, it is critical to scrutinize the spatial dimensions to such readings and what knowledge is (allowed to be) produced. Unfolding two ethnographic vignettes, the researcher’s positionality of passing is analyzed to explicate the relationship between racialized bodies and racialized spaces. I propose the notion of spatial attachments as an analytical lens for explaining such body–space conflations to illuminate the interconnectivity between educational spaces and the broader external world, and to expand the language to address racialization in the colorblind context of Danish high schools.

Controlling (Mental) Images and the Aesthetic Perception of Racialized Bodies

Aesthetic evaluations of human bodies have important implications for moral recognition and for individuals’ access to social and material goods. Unfortunately, there is a widespread aesthetic disregard for non-white bodies. Aesthetic evaluations depend on the aesthetic properties we regard objects as having. And it is widely agreed that aesthetic properties are directly accessed in our experience of aesthetic objects. How, then, might we explain aesthetic evaluations that systematically favour features associated with white identity? Critical race philosophers, like Alia Al-Saji, Mariana Ortega, Paul C. Taylor, and George Yancy, argue that this is because the perception of racialized bodies is affected by the social structures in which they are appreciated. The aim of this paper is to propose how social structures can affect aesthetic perception. I argue that mental imagery acquired through the interaction with aesthetic phenomena structures the perception of non-aesthetic properties of bodies, so that aesthetic properties consistent with racist stereotypes are attributed to individuals.

Co-creating knowledge on bicycling: a decolonial feminist participatory action research approach to arts-based methods

ABSTRACT The colonising tendencies of Western research — in which Indigenous and racialised bodies are deliberately misrepresented — has justified the exploitation and violence towards these communities. Within the field of qualitative sport research, there is a need for research methodologies that relinquish power from the researcher, into the hands of the research communities . This paper aims to demonstrate the utility of a decolonial feminist participatory action research (PAR) approach to arts-based methods for sport research through an exploration of fieldwork with a Toronto-based bicycle organisation. A combination of data collection methods were used, including: 1) arts-based methods; 2) semi-structured interviews; and 3) reflexive journal notes. The results of this project demonstrated that a decolonial feminist PAR approach to arts-based methods can: 1) illuminate the non-human actors within art and bicycling; 2) help research colleagues critique systems of oppression; and 3) facilitate research colleague agency. Taken together, these findings demonstrate the importance of co-creating knowledge within sport scholarship to illuminate the diverse knowledges of those vulnerable to systemic oppression and erasure. This is a novel direction for challenging power relations within sport research and within sociological research more broadly.

The Color of Joy: Reconsidering Critical Race Visual Culture

In the summer of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged Black and Latinx communities that suffered disproportionate hospitalizations and deaths, the world watched—on repeat—as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. Meanwhile, Asian Americans, conflated with the novel coronavirus outbreak in China then beyond, experienced an exponential rise in hate crimes. Smart phones combined with social media displays enabled instantaneous dissemination of BIPOC pain and violence. These images are constitutive of a long-standing visual culture of suffering that is necessarily gratuitous. Repeatedly, images—still and moving—of racialized bodies in ruin were shown on global news cycles as pundits framed BIPOC communities as endemic to wretchedness. These representations continue a well-established narrative that is essential to the formation of racializing assemblages that produce difference. As a form of ontological violence, this mode of looking interferes with the racialized Other’s agency. However, moments of crisis also give rise to formations of possibility for the oppressed that point to freedom, joy, and pleasure. This forum emerges from a recognition of the disparity between the day-to-day lived experiences of people of color and the unchanging narrative that centers the pain and death of the racialized Other and making her a spectacle.

Lions Attacking a Dromedary: The Verreaux brothers, imperial taxidermy, and postmortem bodily rights

AbstractLions Attacking a Dromedary created at Maison Verreaux brings up a larger discussion about representations of racialized bodies (real and synthetic) in the history of museum display. Looking to the history of racialized bodies on display, I outline how taxidermied animals and racialized mannequins oscillate to reinforce continual colonial projects of the present. I show my reader how the construction of a ‘specimen’ is used in the dehumanizing processes that shapes who and what is human: a recognizable being that is (borrowing from Judith Butler) grievable upon death. Since the discovery of real human remains inside the racialized mannequin, the group is now redisplayed at the Carnegie Museum alongside educational insights that seek to ethically interrupt the colonial violence that the display narrates. In order to push this discussion further, I seek direction from decolonial artists and scholars on the best approaches to take in response to postmortem human rights abuses (past and present) and to show the ways that art can be both a destructive and reparative exchange.

Colonial rhetoric in cinema for didactic use from a transnational view. The Italian epic film Cabiria (1914) at the Indian Industrial School of Carlisle

ABSTRACT The first silent epic Italian film, Cabiria (1914) by Giovanni Pastrone with the screenplay co-written by the director and the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio was used as an educational tool at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1915. The film’s plot unfolds during the Second Punic War (218 to 201 BC). The film’s narrative is pro-empire propaganda for Italy’s recent occupation of Libya (1911–1912). The visual narrative is rich in colonial rhetoric. It shows the viewers the friendship between the enslaved man Maciste, interpreted by a white man wearing blackface, and the Roman soldier and colonizer Fulvio Axilla. This essay analyses the film’s construction of racialized bodies and locates it within the larger context of cultural assimilation through visual technologies applied at the Carlisle school. This analysis focuses on the intermedial imagination of a progressive whitening process in moving pictures, photographs, and lantern slides used at the school.

Azeem and the Witch: Race, Disability, and Medievalisms in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was the second highest-grossing movie of 1991. Its fuzzy version of the Middle Ages invokes the Angevins only in cameo and revises a genre of medievalism I call ‘Robin Hood Times’. This medievalism claims a specific setting, usually during the reign of King Richard I, even while it generalizes that setting enough to comment on contemporary problems. In Prince of Thieves, the characters Azeem and Mortianna serve as opposites, their racialized bodies participating in an individualized discourse about race that ultimately upholds a neoliberal, ‘colorblind’ form of white supremacy. Azeem’s physical competence and ability also contrast sharply with Mortianna’s physical frailty and deformity in a classic example of what Mitchell and Snyder (2000) call ‘narrative prosthesis.’ The intersections of race and disability in the fantasy setting of Robin Hood Times suggest that the solution to social injustice is individual rather than systemic. The return of the ‘good’ King Richard I restores order, virtue, the Locksley lands—and the status quo. The Robin Hood story has revolutionary potential, but this version of Robin Hood Times chooses to reinforce neoliberal ableism and ‘colorblind’ racial tolerance instead of the utopian promises of equity that the forest society could provide.

Centering Latina/o Bilingual Teacher Candidates’ Experiences with Marginalizing Figures of Personhood

ABSTRACT This article examines 17 Latina/o bilingual teacher candidates’ experiences with ideologies conflating racialized bodies with linguistic deficiency: raciolinguistic ideologies. Drawing on data from a one-year critical ethnography conducted at a Hispanic-serving institution in Southwest Texas, this article analyzes these teacher candidates’ encounters with spontaneous, implicit/explicit ideological comments—what I call raciolinguistic metacommentary—that draw negative attention to their linguistic repertoires and practices in connection to their ethnoracial positioning. Findings show that instances of raciolinguistic metacommentary not only signal linguistic difference at the individual/interactional level but also mobilize indexical images of U.S. Latina/o bilinguals that reproduce their marginalization, particularly stereotypes of U.S. bilingual Latinas/os as pochas/os, gringas/os, and fresas. Analysis illustrates how these indexical images become ascribed to participating teacher candidates, what these images mean to these participants, and how they inform their sense of linguistic proficiency and identity. Findings have implications for bilingual teacher education, specifically regarding ways to help Latina/o bilingual teacher candidates critically engage these racially charged ideological commentary.

A Gendered Response to a Watchful Gaze

We are constantly under the rays of the spectator’s eyes, an inevitable consequence of modern urban life with high demand for the rhetoric of safety and security under the disguise of omnipresent surveillance systems. Expanding from contributing author Sophia-Rose Diodati’s spatial analysis of “affect arrays” and surveillance of racialized bodies, this response aims to situate Diodati’s analysis alongside nineteenth-century Iranian palatial towers in order to highlight the intersection of gender politics and power relations in the surveilled body.

Cosmopolitanism or Multiculturalism? Towards an Anti-Colonial Reading

Using Multiculturalism as an entry point, the paper interrogates conventional ideas and themes of Cosmopolitanism from an anti-racist and anti-colonial read. The discussion is informed by how the anti-racist and anti-colonial lens has shaped an understanding of multiculturalism and its convergences and divergences with Cosmopolitanism. My goal is to advance a rethinking' cosmopolitanism' from an Indigenist anti-colonial democratic lens highlighting a philosophy of educational practice geared towards new educational futurities for particularly [but not exclusively] Black, Indigenous and racialized bodies in the school system. It is argued that cosmopolitanism is about Land and relationships. This offers possibilities of learning from the ‘geographies of schooling’. The pedagogies of the Land, for example, require examining the narratives and encounters taking place in these 'geographies of schooling' to unravel colonial structures of education and ways we validate contending or competing for multiple knowledges for decolonizing and anti-colonizing education. In the context of the cosmopolitan, institutions like schools, as carceral projects, must acknowledge that anti-Black racism is ‘pervasive throughout the system’ and not simply assert rhetorically that 'anti-Black racism has no place in our school'! Critical educators in their practice of teaching training and preparation, must be able to name institutional silences, erasures, negligence, and complicities around race, anti-Black racism, and Indigeneity in order to create inclusive learning communities and schools as ‘working communities’.

Irrationally Reproducing Reproduction

This research paper traces the history of how the scientific measurement and visualization of sexed and racialized bodies enable them to be regulated in the context of abortion. In Part I, the paper examines how scientific visualization techniques developed in the 19th century prompted the Roman Catholic Church to declare any abortion following conception a sin, despite abortion being previously accepted if it occurred within two to three months of fertilization. This idea is then connected to how anti-abortion protestors use visual rhetoric to flatten narratives about why people seek abortions. They use singular images of aborted fetuses as visual substitutes for complex personal circumstances, and (like the Catholic Church) use these images to present the fetus as a fully formed human being. In Part II, the paper characterizes such visualization techniques as a type of rationalization, the process of turning something (like the body) into units of information, which enables it to be controlled. Part III studies how period-tracking apps rationalize the menstruating body and are used as evidence to penalize individuals for having abortions; however, the data obtained from these apps may be inaccurate because the human body is a complex biological organism that is inherently unpredictable (meaning that it can never be fully rationalized). Part IV examines how rationalization methods are not neutral and draws upon case studies of racialized individuals convicted of having abortions to argue that racialized bodies are perceived as criminal even before information is collected about them.