Mixed Race Studies

Biracial-Bisexual Individuals: Identity Coming of Age

International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies
Issue Volume 5, Number 3 (July, 2000)
Pages 221-253
ISSN 1566-1768 (Print) 1573-8167 (Online)
DOI: 10.1023/A:1010137025394

J. Fuji Collins, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Student Health & Wellness – Vice Chancellor
University of California, Merced

There is considerable controversy regarding the means by which bisexual and biracial individuals achieve a sense of identity. In this paper, the concepts of bisexual and biracial identity are reviewed, and the literature on identity developmental models are critiqued. Further, a qualitative study is presented that explored the complexity of biracial identity development in Japanese-Americans. It is based on the constant comparative method of analysis, or grounded theory. The study focused on how Japanese-Americans perceived themselves in relation to other individuals, groups, and/or their environment. Findings related to initiating explorations of identity and perseverance in pursuing a biracial identity, which depended on the degree of support or negative experience within their social networks. Participants explored identity options attempting to develop their own meaning of identity, to develop a confident sense of themselves and secure a positive ethnic identity. Based on research and dialogue, there appears to be parallels between bisexual and biracial identity development. A model is proposed that suggests that individuals who are bisexual or biracial go through four phases in their development of their positive identity. These phases are: Phase I—Questioning/Confusion; Phase II—Refusal/Suppression; Phase III—Infusion/Exploration; and Phase IV—Resolution/Acceptance. These phases describe people who have two distinct identities that place them in a position of self-devaluation. From there they move to a position where there is a positive perception of identity based on the coexistence of their identities.

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A Knock Out: A film by Tessa Boerman and Samuel Reiziger

Women Make Movies
Netherlands, 2004
53 minutes
Color, VHS/DVD
Subtitled
Order No. W05882

Boxing champion Michele Aboro grew up in South London, where life for a girl was never easy, let alone for a mixed-race lesbian girl. Thanks to her tenacious spirit and an uncanny talent for combat sports, she put her difficult past behind her and managed to sign a contract with the biggest boxing promoter in Europe. She won all 21 fights, 18 of them with a knockout – an exceptional achievement in women’s boxing. But despite her spectacular record in the ring, her career came to a sudden halt when her promoter broke her contract under the belief that she was not “promotable.”

Refusing to vamp up her image and pose naked in magazines, this undefeated world champion was abandoned by an industry more interested in selling sex than sport. A Knock Out interweaves Aboro’s personal story with interviews with boxers whose wild success strikes a painful contrast with Aboro’s struggles. Searching for logic behind Aboro’s case, this poignant documentary captures a universal story of fighting for one’s identity and offers a probing look at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and the increased commercialization of women’s sports.

Deconstructing Binary Race and Sex Categories: A Comparison of the Multiracial and Transgendered Experience

San Diego Law Review
Volume 39, Number 3 (2002)
pages 917-942

Julie A. Greenberg, Professor of Law
Thomas Jefferson School of Law, San Diego

This Article explores the potential difficulties that exist as legal institutions develop a classification of transgendered people, and suggests that an examination of how legal institutions have classified race and sex in the past can help shape the way that legal institutions shape transgendered classifications in the future. The article summarizes the development of race classifications for multiracial people. The author then examines the development of sex classifications for various legal purposes like marriage, identity, and the right to pursue discrimination claims. The author also examines how the medical community contributes to the stereotypical definitions of sex as binary and biologically determinable. The author then proceeds to evaluate some of the challenges that face the development of multiracial classifications, and how those challenges may affect the development of transgendered classifications. The author argues that in developing sex classification systems, legal institutions should be aware of the problems that can arise when seeking to adopt a single unified standard for determining sex, because where in some instances the acceptance of sex as a sociopolitical construct can promote greater acceptance of sexual minorities, it might also further contribute to discrimination.

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Two or Three Spectacular Mulatas and the Queer Pleasures of Overidentification

Camera Obscura
Volume 23, Number 1 67 (2008)
pages 113-143
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-2007-026

Hiram Perez, Assistant professor of English
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Building on feminist and queer scholarship on the relationship of film spectatorship to subjectivity, this essay conjectures subaltern spectatorships of the two US film adaptations of Fannie Hurst‘s 1933 novel Imitation of Life as a means of tracing the impossibly entangled discourses of race and sexuality, as well as of formulating “queer of color” as a kind of critical modality. Much like Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s Uncle Tom’s Cabin functions, according to Sigmund Freud, as a cultural artifact prized in the form of an idealized beating fantasy by the Victorian (white) child, Imitation of Life stages for black and queer of color spectators originary traumas, in particular the formative (and compounded) experiences of racial and sexual shame. This essay seeks to reconcile the dissonant emotions evoked by Imitation of Life by reading the overidentifications of subaltern spectators with the figure of the tragic mulatto as instances of queer pleasure, both self-shattering and subject forming. In so doing, the essay pays tribute to that tragic mulatto as a spectacular mulata and diva. The spectacular mulata diva summons queer subjectivities; furthermore, she betrays larger national and colonial secrets, locating the racially hybrid genealogies of the classic diva and the universalized subject of psychoanalysis, heretofore presumably white (European).

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Counseling Multiple Heritage Individuals, Couples and Families

American Counseling Association
2009
235 pages
Order Number: 72883
ISBN: 978-1-55620-279-7

Written and edited by:

Richard C. Henriksen Jr., Associate Professor of Education
Department of Educational Leadership and Counseling
Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas

Derrick A. Paladino, Assistant Professor of Counseling
Department of Graduate Studies
Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida

This book examines the strengths of and the challenges facing multiple heritage individuals, couples, and families and offers a framework for best practice counseling services and interventions specifically designed to meet their needs. Topics covered include historical and current racial classification systems and their effects; identity development; transracial adoptions; and counseling strategies for children, adolescents, college students, adults, couples and families, and GLBT individuals. Poignant case studies illustrate important concepts and techniques throughout the book, and chapter review questions provide a starting point for lively classroom discussion.

Table of Contents

• Foreword. Patricia Arredondo
• Prologue. Richard C. Henriksen Jr. and Derrick A. Paladino
• Preface xiii
• About the Authors
• About the Contributors
• Chapter 1: History of Racial Classification. Richard C. Henriksen Jr. and Derrick A. Paladino
• Chapter 2: History of Antimiscegenation. Richard C. Henriksen Jr. and Derrick A. Paladino
• Chapter 3: Identity Development in a Multiple Heritage World. Richard C. Henriksen Jr. and Derrick A. Paladino
• Chapter 4: Counseling Multiple Heritage Children. Henry L. Harris
• Chapter 5: Counseling Multiple Heritage Adolescents. Michael Maxwell and Richard C. Henriksen Jr.
• Chapter 6: Counseling Multiple Heritage College Students. Derrick A. Paladino
• Chapter 7: Counseling Multiple Heritage Adults. Derrick A. Paladino and Richard C. Henriksen Jr.
• Chapter 8: Counseling Multiple Heritage Couples and Families. Kelley R. Kenney and Mark E. Kenney
• Chapter 9: Navigating Heritage, Culture, Identity, and Adoption: Counseling Transracially Adopted Individuals and Their Family. Amanda L. Baden, Laura A. Thomas, and Cheri Smith
• Chapter 10: Intersecting Socially Constructed Identities With Multiple Heritage Identity. Andrew C. Benesh and Richard C. Henriksen Jr.
• Chapter 11: Bridging the Margins: Exploring Sexual Orientation and Multiple Heritage Identities. Tiffany Rice and Nadine Nakamura
• Chapter 12: Multiple Heritage Case Studies, Analysis, and Discussion
  • What’s in a Name? An International Adoption Case Study. L. DiAnne Borders and Christine E. Murray
  • The Case of Michael: Searching for Self-Identity. Nancy J. Nishimura
  • Family Case Study: Identity Lost. Jose A. Villalba and Derrick A. Paladino
  • Working With a Multiple Heritage Couple: A Couple’s Case Study. Mary G. Mayorga
  • The Balancing Act of Multiple Heritage Family Counseling. Leigh H. de Armas and Amanda K. Bailey
  • Working With a Multiple Heritage Client With Indigenous Roots. Janet Windwalker Jones
• Appendix
• Resources
• Index

Read the front matter of the book here.

The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier

SAGE Publications
1995
512 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780803970595

Edited by Maria P. P. Root

In her bold new edited volume, The Multiracial Experience, Maria P. P. Root challenges current theoretical and political conceptualizations of race by examining the experience of mixed-race individuals. Articulating questions that will form the basis for future discussions of race and identity, the contributors tackle concepts such as redefining ethnicity when race is less central to the definition and how a multiracial model might dismantle our negative construction of race. Researchers and practitioners in ethnic studies, anthropology, education, law, psychology, nursing, social work, and sociology add personal insights in chapter-opening vignettes while providing integral critical viewpoints. Sure to stimulate thinking and discussion, the contributors focus on the most contemporary racial issues, including the racial classification system from the U.S. Census to the schools; the differences between race, ethnicity, and colorism; gender and sexuality in a multicultural context; ethnic identity and identity formation; transracial adoption; and the future of race relations in the United States. The Multiracial Experience opens up the dialogue to rethink and redefine race and social relations in this country. This volume provides discussions key to all professionals, practitioners, researchers, and students in multicultural issues, ethnic relations, sociology, education, psychology, management, and public health.

Table of Contents

The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as a Significant Frontier in Race Relations – Maria P. P. Root

PART ONE: HUMAN RIGHTS

• A Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People –  Maria P. P. Root
• Government Classification of Multiracial/Multiethnic People – Carlos A. Fernandez
• The Real World – Susan R. Graham
• Multiracial Identity in a Color-Conscious World – Deborah A. Ramirez
• Transracial Adoptions: In Whose Best Interest? – Ruth G. McRoy and Christine C. Iijima Hall
• Voices from the Movement: Approaches to Multiraciality – Cynthia L. Nakashima

PART TWO: IDENTITY

• Hidden Agendas, Identity Theories, and Multiracial People –  Michael C. Thornton
• Black and White Identity in the New Millenium: Unsevering the Ties That Bind – G. Reginald Daniel
• On Being and Not-Being Black and Jewish – Naomi Zack
• An `Other’ Way of Life: The Empowerment of Alterity in the Interracial Individual – Jan R. Weisman

PART THREE: BLENDING AND FLEXIBILITY

• LatiNegra Lillian: Mental Health Issues of African –  Lillian Comas-Diaz
• Race as Process: Reassessing the `What Are You?’ Encounters of Biracial Individuals – Teresa Kay Williams
• Piecing Together the Puzzle: Self-Concept and Group Identity in Biracial Black/White Youth – Lynda D. Field
• Changing Face, Changing Race: The Remaking of Race in the Japanese American and African American Communities – Rebecca Chiyoko King and Kimberly McClain DaCosta
• Without a Template: The Biracial Korean/White Experience – Brian Chol Soo Standen

PART FOUR: GENDER AND SEXUAL IDENTITY

• In the Margins of Sex and Race: Difference, Marginality, and Flexibility – George Kitahara Kich
• (Un)Natural Boundaries: Mixed Race, Gender, and Sexuality – Karen Maeda Allman
• Heterosexual Alliances: The Romantic Management of Racial Identity-  Francine Winddance Twine
• Ambiguous Bodies: Locating Black/White Women in Cultural Representations – Caroline A. Streeter

PART FIVE: MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION

• Making the Invisible Visible: The Growth of Community Network Organizations – Nancy G. Brown and Ramona E. Douglass
• Challenging Race and Racism: A Framework for Educators – Ronald David Glass and Kendra R. Wallace
• Being Different Together in the University Classroom: Multiracial Identity as Transgressive Education – Teresa Kay Williams et al
• Multicultural Education – Francis Wardle

PART SIX: THE NEW MILLENIUM

• 2001: A Race Odyssey – Christine C. Iijima Hall

Earthquake Weather

University of Arizona Press
1996
87 pages
5.5 x 8.5
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8165-1630-8

Janice Gould

It’s unmistakable, that strangely calm air and sky that signals big change ahead: earthquake weather. These are familiar signs to Janice Gould, a poet, a lesbian, and a mixed-blood California Indian of Koyangk’auwi Maidu descent. Her sense of isolation is intense, her search for identity is relentless, and her words can take one’s breath away. Sometimes accepting, sometimes full of anger, Gould’s work is rare, filtered through the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of a lesbian of Indian heritage. Over and over again, she speaks as an outsider looking in at the lives of others–through a doorway, out of a car window, or from the shambles of a broken relationship. Showing a steady courage in the midst of this alienation, her words are also stark testimony to the struggle of an individual caught in social and emotional contexts defined by others. In Earthquake Weather, as in an evolving friendship, Gould opens herself to the reader in stages. “I did not know how lonely I was / till we began to talk,” she writes in an opening section, setting the introspective tone of what’s to come. She begins with a focus on those universal truths that both bind us and isolate us from each other: the pain of loss, the finality of death, our longing to see beneath the surface of things. Next, the poet turns to her growing-up years during the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. She describes a family in turmoil and an Indian heritage that, oddly, was one of the factors that made her feel most disconnected from other people. And she writes poignantly about her increasing alienation from prescribed sexual roles. “What’s wrong with me? / Where do I belong? Why / am I here? Why can’t I / hold on?” Finally, as in a trusting friendship, Gould offers the reader vivid word portraits of relationships in her life–women she has loved and who have loved her. Erotic and deeply personal, these poems serve as both a reconciliation and affirmation of her individuality. “Yet would you deny / that between women desire exists / that in our friendship a delicate / and erotic strand of fire unites us?” The poems in this book, says critic Toby Langen, are most powerful for their “courageous drawing on experience and feelings.” They will speak to many general readers as well as anyone interested in questions of gender and identity, including students of literature, lesbian/women’s studies, social/cultural studies, or American Indian studies.

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Third Edition)

Aunt Lute Books
1987
ISBN: 1879960125

Gloria Anzaldúa

• Chosen one of the “Best Books of 1987” by Library Journal.
• Selected by Utne Reader as part of its “Alternative Canon” in 1998.
• One of Hungry Mind Review’s “Best 100 Books of the 20th Century”

Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa’s experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the groundbreaking essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenge how we think about identity. Borderlands/La Frontera remaps understandings of what a “border” is, seeing it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us.

New to this edition:

Includes an Introduction by Sonia Saldívar-Hull; an interview with Gloria Anzaldúa; and contributions by Norma Alarcón, Julia Alvarez, Paola Bacchetta, Rusty Barcelo, Norma Elia Cantú, Sandra Cisneros, T. Jackie Cuevas, Claire Joysmith, and AnaLouise Keating.

Interracial Relationships in the 21st Century

Carolina Academic Press
2009
160 pp
Paper ISBN: 978-1-59460-571-0
LCCN: 2009001612

Earl Smith, Professor of Sociology and Rubin Professor and Director of Ethnic Studies
Wake Forest University

Angela J. Hattery, Professor of Sociology
Wake Forest University

Interracial Relationships in the 21st Century is a unique set of essays—both personal and research based—that explore a variety of issues related to interracial couplings in the 21st Century United States. Edited by Earl Smith and Angela Hattery, professors of sociology at Wake Forest University, this volume brings together the leading scholars in both the social sciences and the humanities who explore interracialities.

The chapters cover a wide range of topics related to navigating interracial relationships, including a chapter by George Yancey and colleagues that focuses on the tensions around interracial relationships in conservative Christian churches, to the role that racism and patriarchy play in shaping intimate partner violence among interracial couples—Smith and Hattery’s own contribution. Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey A. Laszloffy focus on the children of interracial unions and their attempts to negotiate a racial identity. Wei Ming Dariotis uses a personal narrative to explore the discourse and cooption of the term “Hapa” by a variety of Asian Americans. And, Amy Steinbugler offers an examination of the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in her chapter on interracial, same sex couples. Other contributors include Kellina M. Craig-Henderson, Emily J. Hubbard and Amy Smith.

In light of the recent election of the first African American president, Barack Obama, himself a bi-racial individual living in a multi-racial family, this book could not be more timely.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments

The Blurring of the Lines: Children and Bans on Interrracial Unions and Same-Sex Marriages

Fordham Law Review
May 2008
Volume 76, Number 6
pages 2733-2770

Carlos A. Ball, Professor of Law and Judge Frederick Lacey Scholar
Rutgers University School of Law, Newark

When Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter drove from their hometown of Central Point, Virginia, to Washington, D.C., on June 2, 1958, in order to get married, Mildred was several months pregnant Later that year—a few weeks before the couple pled guilty to having violated Virginia’s antimiscegenation law—Mildred gave birth to a baby girl. Richard and Mildred had two more children, a son born in 1959 and a second daughter born a year after that.

The legal commentary on Loving v. Virginia usually does not discuss the fact that the couple had children. In some ways, this is not surprising given that their status as parents was not directly relevant to either their violation of the Virginia statute, or to their subsequent constitutional challenge to that law. Concerns about the creation of interracial children, however, were one of the primary reasons why antimiscegenation laws were first enacted in colonial America and why they were later adopted and retained by many states. It is not possible, in other words, to understand fully the historical roots and purposes of antimiscegenation laws without an assessment of the role that concerns related to interracial children played in their enactment and enforcement.

The offspring of interracial unions were threatening to whites primarily because they blurred the lines between what many of them understood to be a naturally superior white race and a naturally inferior black race. As long as there was a clear distinction between the two racial categories—in other words, as long as the two categories could be thought to be mutually exclusive—then the hierarchical racial regimes represented first by slavery, and later by legal segregation, could be more effectively defended. The existence of interracial children destabilized and threatened the understanding of racial groups as essentialized categories that existed prior to, and independent of, human norms and understandings. To put it differently, interracial children showed that racial categories, seemingly distinct and immutable, were instead highly malleable. Therefore, from a white supremacy perspective, it was important to try to deter the creation of interracial children as much as possible, and the ban on interracial marriage was a crucial means to attaining that goal.

Although it is possible to disagree on how much progress we have made as a society in de-essentializing race, it is (or it should be) clear that an essentialized and static understanding of race is both descriptively and normatively inconsistent with the multicultural American society in which we live. In fact, it would seem that we have made more progress in deessentializing race than we have in de-essentializing sex/gender. One of the best examples of this difference in progress is that while we no longer, as a legal matter, think of the intersection of race and marriage in essentialized ways, legal arguments against same-sex marriage are still very much grounded in an essentialized (and binary) understanding of sex/gender.

The conservative critique of same-sex marriage is premised on the idea that men and women are different in essential and complementary ways and that these differences justify the denial of marriage to same-sex couples.  One of the most important of these differences relate to the raising of children. The reasoning—which is found in the arguments of conservative commentators, in the briefs of states defending same-sex marriage bans, and in some of the judicial opinions upholding those bans—is that there is something unique to women as mothers and something (separately) unique to men as fathers that makes different-sex couples able to parent in certain valuable ways that same-sex couples cannot.

These arguments continue to resonate legally and politically because our laws and culture continue to think about sex/gender in essentialized and binary ways. In fact, one of the reasons why same-sex marriage is so threatening to so many is that the raising of children by same-sex couples blurs the boundaries of seemingly preexisting and static sex/gender categories in the same way that the progeny of interracial unions blur seemingly preexisting and static racial categories…

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