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Jan. 9 | Call for papers: Identities and Technocultures
A 2-day conference about American culture and technologies that examines how new technologies dominate and define Americaness in the US and abroad. Co-sponsored by the University of Iowa Center for Ethnic Studies and the Arts (CESA) and the Mid-America American Studies Association (MAASA).
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Streeter, Caroline Anne. "Ambiguous Bodies, Ambivalent Desires: The Morphing Mulatta Body in U.S. Culture, 1965-1999," Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2001.
“Ambiguous Bodies, Ambivalent Desires: The Morphing Mulatta Body in U.S. Culture, 1965-1999” investigates the labile relationship between textual and political representation to argue that the mulatta, long interpreted as the color line’s tragic victim, has been critically reimagined in late twentieth century American cultural texts. In the wake of the emancipatory struggles of the civil rights movement, second wave feminism, and gay/lesbian liberation the figure of the mulatta begins to be transformed into a crucible within which multiple signs of difference can be recast. In each particular textual configuration analyzed, I identify a mulatta as a boundary condition situated at the threshold of relations of race, class, gender and sexuality. The emergence of political identities based upon mixed-race during the past decade has revalorized the mulatta, often imagining her as triumphantly rejecting the limiting strictures of racial classification. However, the narratives of racial mixing in which she figures frequently reinforce the dominant focus on interracial sex and the multiracial family as the primary sites for race mixing. This focus centers heterosexuality as a privileged mode of racial identity formation and situates the nuclear family as the primary arena in which racial boundaries are troubled. Against this presumption, my dissertation explores the mulatta’s racialized sexuality to examine how normative heterosexuality constitutes an acknowledged hinge that articulates racialized genders and gendered races.
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