{"id":13998,"date":"2011-05-29T01:44:57","date_gmt":"2011-05-29T01:44:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=13998"},"modified":"2019-01-21T19:04:08","modified_gmt":"2019-01-21T19:04:08","slug":"racial-imperatives-discipline-performativity-struggles-against-subjection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=13998","title":{"rendered":"Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, & Struggles against Subjection"},"content":{"rendered":"

Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, & Struggles against Subjection<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Indiana University Press<\/a>
\n2011-12-23
\n236 pages
\nPaper 6 x 9
\nISBN: 978-0-253-22336-4<\/p>\n

Nadine Ehlers<\/a><\/strong>, Professor
\nDepartment of Sociology and Social Policy
\nUniversity of Sydney, Sydney, Australia<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Nadine Ehlers examines the constructions of blackness and whiteness cultivated in the U.S.<\/a> imaginary and asks, how do individuals become racial subjects? She analyses anti-miscegenation<\/a> law, statutory definitions of race, and the rhetoric surrounding the phenomenon of racial passing<\/a> to provide critical accounts of racial categorization and norms, the policing of racial behavior, and the regulation of racial bodies as they are underpinned by demarcations of sexuality, gender, and class. Ehlers places the work of Michel Foucault<\/a>, Judith Butler\u2019s<\/a> account of performativity<\/a>, and theories of race into conversation to show how race is a form of discipline, that race is performative, and that all racial identity can be seen as performative racial passing. She tests these claims through an excavation of the 1925 \u201cracial fraud\u201d case of Rhinelander v. Rhinelander<\/a><\/em> and concludes by considering the possibilities for racial agency, extending Foucault\u2019s later work on ethics and \u201ctechnologies of the self\u201d to explore the potential for racial transformation.<\/p>\n

Table of Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n