Abstract
This article thinks about mixed raceness as orientation drawing on personal experience, Black feminism and phenomenology. It argues that mixed orientations are not simply about what a body has, or even what a body can do, but involves a material and affective geography: affecting the way we gather, or ‘the we’ of a gathering: bodies, objects and worlds come together as well as break apart. This article in offering a queer and mixed genealogy gives a different angle on how whiteness is reproduced.
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Notes
This essay develops some of the arguments I first made in Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others (2006).
It is beyond the scope of this article to consider the significance of the signifier ‘Muslim’ as a way of signalling the danger of inter-racial intimacy. I have no doubt, however, of the importance of how race and religion can work together to create an inassimilable other. With the figure of the Muslim, a religious difference becomes racialized difference. This is how ‘Muslim’ can be used as a term of abuse to anyone who looks brown, Asian or Middle-Eastern looking at the same time as being used to convey a religious identity. The Muslim has become a very blunt instrument for conveying strangerness.
Some readers might be able to detect here a connection to Heidegger’s argument about equipment. For discussion see Ahmed (2006, pp. 44–51). If it is when the hammer is not working that we apprehend the hammer in a certain way, then when a social relationship is not working, we turn to them in a certain way. We learn about makes from breaks.
For further discussion of the pressures of happiness see Ahmed (2010). I focussed here on how the assumption that queer lives are unhappier lives can create a similar pressure to be happy to show that queer relationships can work. See also discussions on diversity as a happy sign (a way of making an institution appear as it is working) in Ahmed (2012).
By foregrounding race, what I am offering might thus fall short of an ‘intersectional’ analysis. In On Being Included, I noted how intersectionality when it becomes an expectation can be used to de-legitimate work that focuses on race (Ahmed, 2012, p. 195). This happens at least in part as focussing on race can be very difficult as it generate strong resistance (hence, for example, one response to my own work on race is often ‘but what about class?)’. This is not to say that race does not work through its intersections with other forms of social difference, and in this essay, where possible I also make explicit the classed and gendered dimensions of my experience of being mixed race.
I have drawn on Audre Lorde’s extraordinary work throughout the course of my own research, especially her descriptions of racism in both Sister Outsider and Zami. Works that are particularly influenced by Lorde’s use of anecdotal description are Strange Encounters (2000), The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), The Promise of Happiness (2010) and On Being Included (2010).
One of my first publications reflected on the use of autobiography in Black feminist writing (see Ahmed (1997)).
Husserl, Ideas, 110.
One can note here the historical investment in the mixed-race and queer bodies as ‘end points’ via the ‘social belief’ that such bodies are infertile or non-reproductive; such bodies came to embody an anxiety about death, which in turn associates ‘life itself’ with heterosexual whiteness (see Goodman (2001)).
I am drawing on my own experience of mixed-race genealogy, which will not necessarily correspond with the experiences of others. For excellent black British feminist accounts of mixed raceness that draw on empirical research (see Tizard and Phoenix, 1993; Ifegwunigwe, 2000; and Ali, 2003). See also Ifekwunigwe (2004) for a good collection of historical and contemporary articles in mixed-race studies. For a recent discussion on the proliferation of mixed categories in the UK context, see Song (2012).
For a manifesto on the intimacy of mixed race and queer identities see: http://www.theyellowperil.com/manifesto.htm, by Lauren Jade Martin, a mixed-race queer activist and writer. Martin suggests on her Website that mixed-race (multi/bi-racial) identities are queer as they do not inhabit existing racial categories. However, she also suggests that multi- or mixed-race people are more likely to become queer. As she puts it: ‘Almost every person I know of mixed-race background is queer. I don’t think that this is a random coincidence. I’m not saying that there is a direct correlation – that if your parents are of different races then that means you are destined to be a flaming homosexual – but I do think there is a relation here that needs to be explored. There is something in living an interstitial existence – a life between the lines – that creates a certain freedom and fluidity. We are anomalies among anomalies, able to enter multiple worlds at multiple times, as both outsiders and insiders’. Being between lines, she suggests, might open up other kinds of ‘between’. Of course, it might not, as the experience of being mixed or between could also mean we seek support by following other kinds of lines.
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Ahmed, S. Mixed orientations. Subjectivity 7, 92–109 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2013.22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2013.22