Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

TRANSCENDING BLACKNESS

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

PREFACE From Biracial to Multiracial to Mixed-Race to Critical Mixed-Race Studies...........................................................ixINTRODUCTION Reading Mixed-Race African American Representations in the New Millennium......................................................11. Televising the Bad Race Girl: Jennifer Beals on The L Word, the Race Card, and the Punishment of Mixed-Race Blackness.....................372. The Sad Race Girl: Passing and the New Millennium Mulatta in Danzy Senna's Caucasia.......................................................673. Transitioning to the Exceptional Multiracial: Escaping Tragedy through Black Transcendence in Mixing Nia..................................954. Recursive Racial Transformation: Selling the Exceptional Multiracial on America's Next Top Model..........................................125CONCLUSION Racist Jokes and the Exceptional Multiracial, or Why Transcending Blackness Is a Terrible Proposition............................155NOTES........................................................................................................................................173BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................................................201INDEX........................................................................................................................................219

Chapter One

Jennifer Beals on The L Word, the Race Card, and the Punishment of Mixed-Race Blackness

From 2004 to 2009, the premium cable channel Showtime aired a groundbreaking nighttime television program, a "lesbian soap opera" that featured a cast of beautiful, and almost exclusively white, young women, whose love, friendship, family, and work lives provided much (melo)dramatic fodder for the show's many loyal fans. At The L Word's inception, its two bankable, big-name stars were women of color both famous for earlier cult-classic films: Jennifer Beals, most notable for her breakout "racially ambiguous" welder/dancer Alex in Flashdance (1983), and Pam Grier, celebrated for her "sassy supermama" roles in the Blaxploitation films Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974). For a certain segment of viewers hungry to see mixed-race actresses and images in popular culture, extra-textual information conveniently provided by press coverage about how Beals "really" is mixed-race (the daughter of an African American man and a white woman) paved the way for her multiracial iconicity. From her first film role to The L Word, Beals's race(s) can be seen multiply according to the viewer's differential readings of race; she becomes variously white or racially ambiguous in the films The Bride (1985), Vampire's Kiss (1988), Troubled Waters (2006), and The Book of Eli (2010), but she is singularly multiracial and African American in the film Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), the television movie A House Divided (2000), and the miniseries The Feast of All Saints (2001). With this multiply racialized representational past, Beals entered The L Word as the feisty "power lesbian" Bette Porter, a role the writers made mixed-race at Beals's request.

The best way to understand The L Word's depiction of Bette is to enter into one of her characteristic scenes. In season 2, as in every season of the show, Bette endures emotional punishment. In this particular episode, Bette transitions from scenes of personal strife to workplace strife. She works at a starkly white, modern, and metal-infused museum as a curator. Light-brown-skinned Bette sits at a board meeting, with her dark hair long, loose, and curly. Her white, tailored pinstriped shirt, replete with silver and black cufflinks, peeks out from her snug brown pinstriped vest; she stands out among the gray-haired, pink-skinned, suit-and-tie-wearing men (see fig. 1). In this scene the only people shown talking are Bette and the man seated directly across the table from her, her boss Franklin, the straight white chair of the board. Franklin makes the mistake of casually describing a lesbian museum associate as "one of your people." Bette immediately understands that Franklin is talking about the associate's sexuality, but as she has already endured a punishing day and as her explosive personality has been written, she dives headfirst into conflict. Her eyes flash with anger and her voice quivers just slightly as she questions, "What are you referring to? What, is she a Yale graduate? Is she an art history major? Is she a mulatto gal? Is that what you're trying to say?" (2.3).

The movement in Bette's questions is telling: her descriptors traverse from two elite markers, an Ivy League degree and a prestigious college major, to a racialized identity of the past. "Mulatto" is an antiquated and, to many, derogatory term. It is not neutral. Paired with "gal," a demeaning and antebellum South-sounding way of describing black women, it seems racist and frozen in the past. Bette's twenty-first-century deployment of the phrase "mulatto gal" in a Los Angeles-area art gallery board meeting is so out of place with "Ivy League" and "art history major" that any discussion of her race is exposed as inappropriate, incongruous, and even laughable. Sexual orientation remains the structuring force in Bette's questions, so large and present that she does not have to name it. Bette constantly and explicitly highlights her sexuality, gender, and class (the show manages to drop the phrase "Ivy League" into a surprising number of episodes), so her lesbian identity, womanhood, and privileged status are understood to be integral, constitutive parts of herself. But by dismissing mixed-race blackness as outdated, The L Word makes any racialized identity inappropriate for Bette to apply to herself. By inserting race talk through the phrase "mulatto gal" into the show's progressive, post-racial ideological space, the character of Bette uncomfortably "plays the race card," or, through the erroneous and post-racial logic of the phrase, drops racialized meaning into a situation where race supposedly does not exist. By her actions, Bette, a primary signifier for multiracial African American women on television, constantly oversteps her bounds. She is the "bad race girl," the volatile new millennium mulatta who uses race, or, more specifically, uses blackness, when she needs it. The message remains: if Bette would just silence all references to her mixed-race African Americanness, that is, metaphorically transcend her blackness, the entire show would become more functional (and, admittedly, for some viewers, less deliciously dramatic).

Through six seasons of The L Word, Bette is written as a character whose multiple, intersectional identities are celebrated in all of their complexity, except when race surfaces. While the show presents Bette's identities of gender, sexuality, and class as imbricated, it compartmentalizes race as a separate, nonintersectional, and ultimately damaging add-on. The treatment of race as a single-axis distraction produces an anti-intersectional "elision of difference," in the words of the critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw. This scene showcases a persistent narrative element of The L Word: the attempted boxing...