White Women in Interracial Families: Reflections on Hybridization, Feminine Identities, and Racialized OtheringPosted in Articles, Family/Parenting, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive on 2010-03-20 18:08Z by Steven |
Gender Issues
Volume 14, Number 2 (June, 1994)
pages 49-72
Print ISSN: 1098-092X, Online ISSN: 1936-4717
DOI: 10.1007/BF02685656
Carmen Luke, Emeritus Associate Professor of Education, and Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies
James Cook University, Queensland, Australia
Interracial unions, biracial and bicultural children are social facts of modern multicultural societies, yet they have been almost completely overlooked by scholars. What little research is available on interracial family formations and identity is largely based in psychological, sociological, social psychological, social work and counselling theories. Interracialism has not been taken up at all by feminists, postcolonial theorists, or multicultural research.
This essay is concerned with race and gender identity politics among white women living in interracial relationships, particularly in families with biracial and monoracial children. I report here on published research on inter- and biracialism, and include some data from pilot interviews I conducted with white women in interracial families with whom I share work relationships and friendships. I discuss, first, the politics of voice and identity in the context of current debate over speaking rights, racial and cultural identities. I then briefly survey recent research on biracial children before turning attention to white women in interracial relationships. Drawing on existing research and my own data, I discuss relationships between interracial couples and their own parents, the politics of managing their biracial children’s schooling, and the often contradictory logics of the cultural and gender regimes women marry into. I conclude that current theories of identity politics are analytically inadequate for describing how racisms operate within a racially unmarked dominant culture because racial identity is theorized exclusively as an identity marker of groups and persons of color…
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