Genealogy, Volume 6, Issue 2 (June 2022) – 33 articles

This article examines the ways in which parenting practices of refugee parents are the object of concern for the Danish welfare state. Emphasis is placed on how interventions of daycare institutions and other welfare professionals have been experienced by refugee families who live in a context of radical uncertainty since they hold temporary residence permits in Denmark. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with families spanning several years, I analyze the experiences of a number of refugee families from Syria and Iran. Drawing on what has been called “the spectral turn” or “hauntology” in anthropology, I argue that welfare state belonging causes ambiguity for families who appreciate protection and sometimes family-like care from state agents but also fear its repercussions. As a result, I argue that relationships between refugee parents and agents of the welfare state are characterized not only by “fear of proximity” but also by “intimate distance”, since refugee parents experience “the system” as being nowhere in particular but potentially everywhere. Full article

TikTok is the fastest growing short video application and immensely popular with younger generations to express their thoughts, ideas, and most relevant to this issue, their identities including mixed-race identity. This paper asks: How did young mixed-race people choose to express their identity on TikTok in the #wasian trend and how does the app shape these mixed-race identity expressions? The answer lies in how the emotional affordances of TikTok app itself shape how it is used by creators in mimicking and mimetic ways and how people respond, through video and text. The article argues that the #wasian trends reinforce the racial and genealogical legacy of mixedness, often through showing parents or blood relatives, which is in creative tension with simultaneously remixing and asserting racial multiplicity. The claim to wasianess moves the private sphere (bedroom culture, family and notions of race) into the public and in so doing creates new potentialities for the creation of a global #wasian community on TikTok. Full article

Nietzsche’s sparse remarks on genealogy have left open significant questions as to what it is and where it stands in relation to philology, history, critique, and philosophy. By tracing Nietzsche’s associated conceptions of philology; critical, monumental, and antiquarian history; genesis; and Entstehungsgeschichte; as well as his genealogical practices, I show that, with certain key limitations, Nietzschean genealogy emerges from out of the synthesis of critical, monumental, and antiquarian history for the purposes of life that Nietzsche develops in On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life. The importance of this practice lies in the fact that, at various times, it appears to be a part, a precondition, or even the totality of philosophy. Full article

With the onset of the Coronavirus and racist statements about the origins of COVID-19 in 9 China there has been a surge in anti-Asian discrimination in the United States. The U.S. case is worthy of special focus because of former President Trump’s explicit racist rhetoric, referring to the 11 Coronavirus as the “China virus” and “Kung-flu”. This rise in anti-Asian discrimination has led to 12 a heightened awareness of racism against Asians and a corollary increase in AAPI activism. Based 13 on survey and in-depth interview data with Asian-White multiracials, we examine how recent 14 spikes in anti-Asian hate has shifted Asian-White multiracials to have a more heightened awareness 15 of racism and a shift in their racial consciousness. We theorize how multiracials intermediary sta-16 tus on the racial hierarchy can be radically shifted at any moment in relation to emerging racist 17 racial projects, which has broader implications for the status of mixed people globally. Full article

A focus on ‘mixed race’ and mixedness in Britain has revived a debate around the central question of whether the decennial census and other official data collections should be capturing ‘race’ rather than ethnic group and producing ‘racial’ outputs. The British practice may seem out of step by some commentators, given that ‘mixed race’ is the term of choice amongst those it describes, and given scholarly interest in interracial unions. Moreover, the resurgence of interest in ‘race’ and racisms in the context of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement and concern over the down-playing in a UK Government-commissioned report of the role of structural racism has enlivened the debate. However, this paper argues against a shift to ‘race’ in official data collection and for continued use of the conceptually preferable ‘ethnic group’ in the census question title, the section label ‘mixed/multiple ethnic groups’, and the ongoing provision of data on unions at the pan-ethnic and granular levels. A measure of socially constructed ‘race’ is already available in all but name in the pan-ethnic section labels (White, Asian, Black, Mixed, and Other) and the tick boxes under the ‘mixed/multiple’ heading. Ethnic group has been the conceptual basis of the question since the field trials for the 1991 Census, and its position has been strengthened by the increasing granularity of the categorisation (19 categories in the 2021 England and Wales Census) and by substantial distributed free-text provision that underpins the question’s context of self-identification. The wider understanding of ‘race’ identifications invokes ascription, imposition, and social categorisation rather than self-identification and subscription. There is also evidence of the unacceptability of ‘race’ in the context of the census amongst the wider society. Full article

So far, Croatian migrant families have been predominantly studied within the scope of theoretical questions oriented toward ethnicity and their role as the guardians of ethnic/national identity. Going beyond the ethnic lens of those studies, the article focuses on an exploration of family structures and the social functioning of wider kinship networks in the migration context as well as an understanding of how migrants conceive of ethnic/national identity. By highlighting the complex entanglements of traditional family patterns (patrilocality, seniority, and gender roles), transnational kinship networks and “a little tradition of ethnic/national identity” held by migrants, this article seeks to establish autonomous research into family processes among Croatian migrants and to make a rapprochement between classical anthropological research of family and kinship and migration studies. Full article

We are accustomed to thinking of identities—racial, ethnic, often religious—as if they were permanent, unalterable features of individuals and groups. The theory enunciated here is directed to illumine individuals and groups whose lives are more complicated than that. Such people are shape shifters. At different times in their lives, or over generations in their families and communities, their identities have changed from one group to another. This article sets out an agenda for understanding the phenomenon of racial or other primary identity change. It seeks to understand what kinds of circumstances produce racial change, what sorts of people and groups are likely to change identities, what processes facilitate identity change, and what kinds of work that change is doing. It describes three major intertwined processes at work. Sometimes it is mainly a matter of changes in context and the menu of identities that are available. Sometimes changes in identity are imposed by governments, by institutions, or by society at large. And sometimes it is an individual’s, a family’s, or an entire ethnic group’s choice to make a change. The complexity and contingency of these processes may tend to diminish our commitment to the very idea of social inquiry as science. Full article

While marginalized as a juvenile medium, comics serve as an archive of our collective experience. Emerging with the modern city and deeply affected by race, class, and gender norms, comics are a means to understand the changes linked to identity and power in the United States. For further investigation, we turn to one such collective archive: the MSU Library Comics Art Collection (CAC), which contains over 300,000 comics and comic artifacts dating as far back as 1840. As noted on the MSU Special Collections’ website, “the focus of the collection is on published work in an effort to present a complete picture of what the American comics readership has seen, especially since the middle of the 20th century”. As one of the world’s largest publicly accessible comics archives, a community of scholars and practitioners created the Comics as Data North America (CaDNA) dataset, which comprises library metadata from the CAC to explore the production, content, and creative communities linked to comics in North America. This essay will draw on the Comics as Data North America (CaDNA) dataset at Michigan State University to visualize patterns of racial depiction in North American comics from 1890–2018. Our visualizations highlight how comics serve as a visual record of representation and serve as a powerful marker of marginalization central to popular cultural narratives in the United States. By utilizing data visualization to explore the ways we codify and describe identity, we seek to call attention to the constructed nature of race in North America and the continuing work needed to imagine race beyond the confines of the established cultural legacy. Full article

This paper explores the composite of elderly immigrants, self-appointed helpers (selvudpegede hjælpere) and care managers (visitatorer) in Danish municipalities. Free elderly care is a common good in the Danish welfare state. Instead of using the homecare service provided by the municipality, many elderly citizens with a Muslim immigrant background prefer to have a family member contracted as their self-appointed helper. The self-appointed helper is often a spouse, daughter or daughter-in-law, who ends up having the dual role as both a caring, loving family member and a professional care worker. Due to the special setup with self-appointed helpers working in their private homes, it is difficult for the care managers to follow standard rules and procedures. Instead, it seems to be a public secret that there is a gap between what we are supposed to do (according to the law) and what we actually do. We suggest seeing this gap as a silence agreement, where care managers, self-appointed helpers and elderly citizens refrain from asking all the critical questions (regarding the provision of care, the quality of care, working conditions, etc.) that no one wants to know the answers to. However, when the silence agreement from time to time breaks down, the relationship between the self-appointed helper and the care manager is haunted by a widespread phantasm where Muslim immigrants are cast as welfare scroungers. Basically, we argue that care managers and self-appointed helpers share a silent agreement but when it is neglected or violated, the latter end up in a vulnerable and marginalized position. The dynamic highlights the ambiguous intimate belonging of Muslim immigrant families and questions to what extent they were seen as legitimate subjects under the state in the first place. Full article

How is monoracialism un/learned from generation to generation? In this duoethnography, the co-authors engage in reflexive letter writing to purposefully connect their personal relationships with Aeriel’s daughter, Azaelea, to their academic ideas as poststructural scholars. In doing so, they practice letting go of inherited dichotomies (such as mother versus scholar), lean into expansive ontoepistemological possibilities informed by their both/and positionalities as mama-scholar and auntie-scholar, in order to dream of expansive, healing, and liberatory futures that can emerge from connecting across difference, listening with raw openness, and pursuing radical interrelatedness. Full article

Macedonia is a region in the Balkans with traditional boundaries at the lower Néstos (Mesta in Bulgaria) River and the Rhodope Mountains to the east; the Skopska Crna Gora and Shar mountains, bordering Southern Serbia, in the north; the Korab range and Ohrid and Prespa Lakes in the west; and the Pindus Mountains and the Aliákmon River in the south. Illyrian heraldry consists of manuscript collections with coats of arms—armorials that appeared on the Dalmatian coast, and in Italy, Spain, and Austria, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The two Stematographias of Pavle Ritter Vitezovich and Hristofor Zhefarovich are traditionally added to this group, as well as a number of other documents directly or indirectly related to the armorials. There is a possibility of a third: two different sources with relatively similar blazons, resulting in the simplification and inverse coloring of the both coats of arms. This would mean that it is quite possible that the Macedonian coat of arms was taken over by Capaccio, who took it from another older source. First of all, the coats of arms with a lion attributed to Alexander the Great should be taken into consideration. Full article

In the medieval to early modern eras, legal manuals used visual cues to help teach the church laws of consanguinity and affinity as well as concepts of inheritance. Visual aids such as the trees of consanguinity or affinity helped the viewer such as a notary, law student or member of the clergy to do the ‘computation,’ or reckon how closely kin were related to each other by blood or by marriage and by lines of descent or collateral relations. Printed riddles in these early legal manuals were exercises to test how well the reader could calculate whether a marriage should be deemed incest. The riddles moved from legal textbooks into visual culture in the form of paintings and cheap broadside prints. This article examines a riddle painting ‘devoted’ to William Cecil when he was Elizabeth I’s principal secretary, before he became Lord Burghley and explores the painting’s links to the Dutch and Flemish kinship riddles circulating in the Low Countries in manuscript, print and painting. Cecil had a keen interest in genealogies and pedigrees as well as puzzles and ciphers. As a remarried widower with an eldest son from a first marriage and children from his longer second marriage, Cecil lived in a stepfamily typical of the sixteenth century in England and Europe. The visual kinship riddles in England and the Low Countries had a common root but branched into separate traditions. A shared element was the young woman at the centre of the images. To solve the riddle the viewer needed to determine how all the men in the painting were related to her as if she were the ego, or self, at the centre of a consanguinity tree. This article seeks to compare the elements that connect and diverge in the visual kinship riddle traditions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Low Countries and England. Full article

Based on a qualitative interview study, this article focuses on the everyday organization of family life in Denmark among ethnic minority parents with Pakistani, Turkish, Palestinian and Iraqi backgrounds, with a particular view to the quotidian resource management of time and money within intimate parent–child relationships. Through this focus on how the parents prioritize their everyday time and financial resources from an intergenerational perspective, the article explores the motivations and reasoning behind such arrangements of family life—including how they reflect parents’ visions for their children’s future lives. While it applies a time-use and consumption perspective to examine mundane family lives, as opposed to, for instance, a social integration perspective, the analysis nonetheless reveals how Danish policy and public debate on the “integration” of ethnic minorities directly and in detail shapes the quotidian orchestration of family life and its intimate relations. This translates into a highly concrete, everyday concern with and attentiveness towards “integration” among the parents. This attentiveness towards the Danish integration debate haunts the parents’ sense of self. Moreover, I argue that it materializes in routinized family life practices, strongly shaping the innermost private sphere of mundane parental choices regarding the day-to-day management of time and money, and in the everyday strategies for the next generation’s future belonging in Denmark expressed in this management. Full article

Movies beyond the scope of Hollywood and entertainment have shaped notions of race in American culture since the early decades of cinema. A range of nontheatrical sponsors and creators in the US made films to serve practical functions in society—to inform, to organize, to persuade, to promote, etc. The US federal government was a major sponsor of many of these films, which provided American and foreign audiences depictions of race that differed considerably from popular commercial images. For example, Men of the Forest, a film made in 1952 by the United States Information Service focuses on the Hunters, a Black family who owns land and a forestry business in rural Georgia. A documentary of sorts, the film highlights Black life, work, and land ownership in the South in ways not seen in popular feature films of the day. Yet, in the film and others like it, histories of institutional racism are woven into cinematic form and content in ways that are distinct from the entertainment industry. The creators of Men of the Forest omit details of segregation in the South to emphasize the Hunter family as examples of American democracy, a choice suited to the film’s Cold War purpose: to counter the anti-American message of Soviet propaganda for foreign audiences. On one hand, by producing and distributing the film, the federal government acknowledged Black farmers and landowners in the Jim Crow South. On the other hand, it avoided the structural inequality surrounding the Hunters to frame their reality as an example of American democratic progress for international circulation. Today, government films like Men of the Forest prompt contemporary reflection on the institutional histories they represent and their evolution into the present. The film and many others are available online due to the digitization of collections from the National Archives, Library of Congress, and elsewhere. With this increase in access, contemporary scholars have the ability to investigate how the federal government and its various internal entities mediated racial ideologies with moving image technologies. As an example of such research, this essay examines Men of the Forest by focusing on the past and present contradictions that arise from its depiction of a Black family with land and an agricultural business in rural Georgia. Two recent events shed light on the histories reflected in the film and their contemporary significance. In 2018, Descendants of Men of the Forest, The Legacy Continues—a documentary created by family members of the film’s original participants—contextualized the original production as evidence of the Hunter family’s legacy in the community of Guyton, Georgia. Underlying this local effort, Men of the Forest serves as an important historical event and record of the family and the community. On a broader scale, in March 2021, Congress passed a large relief package for disadvantaged minority farmers, intended to help alleviate decades of systemic racism in government agricultural programs. Lawsuits from white farmers and conservative organizations followed quickly, challenging the provision of government aid based on race. In this federal context, Men of the Forest exposes an institutional image of individual success that downplays the structural racism facing people of color, especially those with agricultural livelihoods. Even as politics and legislation evolve, this vision of democracy once exported by the federal government has widespread currency and accumulating effects. The connections between Men of the Forest and these recent events reveal the racial politics at play in government films and the ways in which they take shape in the real world beyond the screen. Full article

This article examines the ways that Danish gang exit programs engage police officers and gang defectors in a pervasive work on belonging between gangs, kinship networks and the state. In urban Denmark, the majority of gang exit candidates are of ethnic-minority background and form part of the street-gang environment in marginalized migrant neighborhoods. This is an intimate social environment constituted by diasporic kinship networks, where gang formations are entangled with kinship formations. Hence, when gang defectors leave their gang, they also often leave their family and childhood home for a life in unfamiliar places and positions. As I show, gang desistance is thus a highly dilemmatic process in which gang defectors find themselves “unhinged” from meaningful social and kinship relationships and in search of new ways of embedding themselves into a social world. Based on an ethnographic study of gang exit processes in Denmark’s second largest city, Aarhus, this article shows how police officers and gang defectors seek to (re)shape ties of belonging between gangs, kinship networks and the state. The process, I argue, illuminates the intimate aspect of the notion of belonging, in which kin and state relatedness is deeply rooted in interpersonal spaces and relationships. Full article

Utilising interviews with immigrant women and frontline workers, this article discusses the role of the state in relation to immigrant women’s divorces. The article argues that the state has a Janus face when it comes to such women’s “intimate belonging”. On the one hand, state legislation both legally enables female-initiated divorce and supports divorced mothers economically. Accordingly, frontline workers generally back immigrant women who seek to leave troubled marriages. On the other hand, different parts of Danish legislation may place divorcing women at risk of losing their residency rights—a risk which has increased in recent years. Furthermore, while divorce may improve a woman’s life situation if she remains in Denmark, it may jeopardise her life if she returns to her country of origin. What constitutes “good help” for women who are facing the vital conjuncture of potentially divorcing their husbands is, thus, entangled with the increasingly unpredictable issue of where such women’s futures will come to unfold. This unpredictability challenges how social work should be carried out—a conundrum which Danish frontline workers seemingly have not fully realised. Presently, the situation means that such workers in reality may endanger the lives of the women whom they seek to support. Full article

Nietzsche develops three important genealogies of central aspects of Christianity: one concerning a certain syncretism between Judaism and the cult of Dionysus; a second concerning a “slave revolt in morality”; and a third concerning doctrines about an otherworld (God, an afterlife, etc.). In each case, his genealogy appears implausible or even perverse at first sight, but on closer examination turns out to be very historically plausible, indeed correct. Full article

Men commit violence against Native American women at higher rates than other racial or ethnic groups. When violence against Indigenous women is discussed and written about, it is often in passive voice. Several scholars note the problem of using passive voice to talk about violence against women, but there is little research on how women themselves understand passive voice as connected to the violence perpetrated against them, and we found no literature on how Native women understand passive voice. This research asks how urban Native and Indigenous women understand passive language in relationship to violence. The authors, who are all members of the Red Earth Women’s Society (REWS), took up this conversation with urban Indigenous women in San José, California, in a year-long series of meetings that culminated in three focus-group discussions (FGD)/talking circles (TC) where Native women expressed their understanding of passive language and violence against Native women. From these exploratory talking circles, we found that Native women’s understanding of passive voice aligned with previous research on passive voice, but also contributed new insights. Full article

In this paper, I hope to shed light on the social and institutional transformation processes in Brazil in the 21st century, contrasting what can be understood as two populist waves. The first is the one led by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, as a left-wing leader whose government has been internationally recognized for implementing distributive economic policies (inclusion of the poorest majority) and inclusive social policies (inclusion of racial and sexual minorities). The second is the right-wing wave led by Jair Bolsonaro, internationally recognized, but rather for embracing a discourse contrary to the inclusive practices adopted by their predecessor. Thus, the question I want to answer is: How can the same concept fit into such different phenomena? My hypothesis is that we are facing two patterns of representative relations. An inclusive one that aims to expand the number of groups that can be properly represented within the political collectivity, increasing its pluralism, and an exclusive one that aims to restrict them, shortening the plurality of groups and identities that forms the people. In both, the theme of racial and sexual minorities becomes a priority. Through this discussion, I want to emphasize the substantive and existential quality of the differences between these two representative patterns that are sometimes neglected or reduced by those who use the concept of populism to attribute some kind of symmetry or ideological convergence between them. Full article

This scholarly essay explores some techniques that multiracial Korean Americans employ to trouble traditional notions of cultural authenticity as markers for racial/ethnic identity construction. I position multiracial individuals as foils to the common assumptions that cultural authenticity requires “native” lived experience, “full bloodedness”, or a particular level of linguistic competency, in favor of cultural competency, analyzing the web community, HalfKorean.com. The site is a U.S.-based community of multiracial Korean Americans, where narrations of food and Korean motherwork play roles in many elements of the site, and in different ways work to reinforce new and adaptable forms of authenticity. Paying particular attention to the ways that cultural knowledge on the individual level becomes a marker for shaping community, I position Korean motherwork and household practices as vehicles of analysis. These embodied cultural practices inform community building practices, becoming critical variables for multiracial Korean Americans to exert cultural knowledge and expertise, authenticating flexible racial/cultural identities, which is an act of embodying what I term “plastic authenticity”. Multiracial bodies are inherently perceived as racially in-authentic; however, plastic authenticity is a framework that allows for expressions of identity and memory that resist this notion, grounded in their proximity to Korean women/motherhood. Full article

Scholars most often adopt qualitative data-gathering methods, notably interviews, to access the lifeworld of “mixed” families. Nonetheless, when research questions require vivid details about their lives, other data-collection techniques may be needed. “Intimate” research methods, characterised by proximate contacts and interactions with “mixed” couples and their families, appear particularly useful in this regard. Drawing from ethnographic studies of mixed families of Filipino and Thai migrant women in Belgium and The Netherlands, the present paper unveils the heuristic value of three intimate methods—homestays, sleepovers, and commensality—in perceiving the realities of these women’s couple and family lives. Homestays and sleepovers allow an in-depth understanding of ways of life within homes, interpersonal interactions, and their intricacies. Commensality (i.e., eating together) offers “snapshots” of the lives of mixed families, providing insights complementary to other methods such as interviews. Hence, the three intimate methods explored in this paper are social sites in which one can view details, otherwise invisible or unspoken, of the lives of mixed families, ranging from power dynamics to intergenerational relations, from the family’s social class status and cross-border social ties to emotional situations. Full article

Along with other types of racially mixed families, families built through transracial adoption in the United States have solidified as an increasingly recognized family form. Along with this increasing acknowledgement, transracial families must also contend with narratives that formulate transracial adoption as an act of humanitarianism on the one hand and as a replication of systemic racism and colonialism on the other. This article explores how members of transracial families respond to these contradictory narratives through interviews with 30 transracial adoptees and their white siblings. Their experiences highlight three responses that transracial family members have regarding the idea of their families being classified as a humanitarian project: recreating transracial adoption as humanitarianism within their own lives, reclaiming their identity and family as separate from humanitarianism, and resisting the humanitarian aspects of transracial adoption altogether. Specifically, this study adds nuance to the question of how mixed families navigate the enduring power of humanitarianism within their own lives. Full article

Research on mixed racial and ethnic identities has developed rapidly over the past decades, increasing in theoretical scope and depth, and exploring mixedness across a growing range of national and social contexts. Recent research has highlighted the huge variations and shifts in conceptions of mixedness around the world, and the different pathways to understanding what it means to be mixed through migration, development, postcolonialism and different forms of nation-building. This paper seeks to connect theory to practice, approaching mixedness through the lens of clinical sociology, applying sociological theory on the ground and exploring the utility of critical mixed race studies in everyday life. Clinical sociology as a practice is first outlined, juxtaposed against the development in theorizing around mixed racial and ethnic identities on an international level. The paper then looks at some possibilities for practical impact: by acknowledging the complexity of mixedness and everyday life, research on mixed identities can go beyond the development of theory and case description, with applied and clinical impacts ranging from the level of the individual to the level of the state. Research on mixedness worldwide illustrates the diversity inherent within ideas of mixing, and the micro, meso and macro applications and potential outcomes of such theories. This paper draws on new and shifting conceptions of mixedness, emphasizing that the sociology of mixedness can have considerable value in effecting positive social change: positioning the (mixed) individual within the (mixed) society and allowing sociology to become action. The development and use of theories around mixedness emphasize the importance of clinical sociology as a practice: a reason for theory, connecting the abstract to the everyday. Full article

International adoptions have rarely been studied from the angle of racial mixedness in France, as opposed to the way the adoption debate is shaped in the United States and the United Kingdom. However, a large majority of adopted children in France come from countries colonized by Europe in the past, and are very likely to be racialized as non-white. Adoptive parents, for their part, belong overwhelmingly to the majority population, racialized as white. As such, adoptive families usually involve, like families formed by mixed-race couples, white parents raising non-white kids. These two types of families can thus provide valuable insights on racial boundaries and how they are negotiated at the microsociological level. Moreover, as whiteness is generally characterized by invisibility and unspeakability, white parents of non-white children occupy a singular and heuristic position. They also experience an atypical whiteness: the norm of intrafamilial racial homogeneity being disrupted in their families, they experience racial alterity in a very intimate way—inaccessible to most whites. Drawing upon an ethnographic study conducted between 2015 and 2017, this article explores what racial mixedness does to the whiteness of white parents raising non-white kids in the French colorblind context. Investigating the different ways their whiteness is not only rendered unusually visible, but also questioned, reshaped, and—partially—disrupted, the article considers the socializing power of racial mixedness. As such, it considers parents not only as socializing agents but also as (re)socialized individuals, arguing that parenthood is a site of racial socialization. Full article

In the context of intermarriage, mixedness can take different forms. Most often, it refers to a mix of class, religion, nationality, ethnicity or ‘race’ in a couple. In this article, I go beyond a separate analysis of categories, analyzing the interrelation of these factors. The article discusses how and under which circumstances mixed children become visible in Switzerland and Morocco using a comparative and intersectional approach to mixedness. Based on 23 biographical narrative interviews, I analyze three situations of stigmatization: racialization, language practices and othering due to religious affiliation. Stigmatization processes due to mixedness, it is argued, are a relational phenomenon depending not only on markers such as ‘race’, ethnicity and religion but also on their interplay with gender, class, language and biographical experiences. The results suggest that mixed individuals have found creative ways to navigate their visibility: they normalize their binational origin, look for alternative spaces of belonging, emphasize their ‘Swiss-ness’ or ‘Moroccan-ness’, use languages to influence their social positioning or acquire knowledge about their binational origin in order to confront stigmatizations. The study reveals further that processes of othering due to mixedness are not only an issue in ‘Western’ societies that look back on a long history of immigration and have pronounced migration discourses. Even in Morocco, a country where immigration has so far been a marginal phenomenon, the importance of social hierarchies for the positioning of people of binational origin is evident. Full article

Tracing family lineage through women has unique challenges that are made only more difficult when a woman has resided in a state-run social institution and is Black. This article focuses on six pregnant Black women who were residents at the Tewksbury Almshouse in Massachusetts between 1854 and 1884. I examine the way the women’s names and other aspects of their identities were recorded in the intake records and in state birth and U.S. Census records. I contend that the women were not treated with dignity and respect, such that their names were often misspelled, shortened, and documented incorrectly. Part of my argument is that this was done partially because many of the women were pregnant with a white man’s baby and were poor, domestic Black women carrying a bi-racial baby out of wedlock. All of this has made it challenging to trace the family ties of the women once they left Tewksbury. I argue that the way in which these women were treated and documented (or not) reflects the devaluing of Black women and, especially, Black pregnant women. Full article

The racialization of Mexican Americans in northern Mexico, that is, the U.S. Southwest, following the Anglo-Americanization during the second half of the nineteenth century, is an excellent case study of the historical formations of Anglo-American and Spanish American racial orders. Both racial orders were based on a hierarchy that privileged Whiteness and stigmatized Blackness. Yet Spanish America’s high levels of miscegenation resulted in ternary orders allowing for gradation in and fluidity within racial categories, in addition to the formation of multiracial identities, including those of individuals with African ancestry. Anglo-America was characterized by restrictions on miscegenation and more precise definitions of and restrictions on racial categories. This prohibited the formation of multiracial identities while buttressing a binary racial order that broadly necessitated single-race (monoracial) identification as either White or nonWhite, and more specifically, as White or Black, given their polar extremes in racial hierarchy. Within this order, hypodescent applies most stringently to those with African ancestry through the one-drop rule, which designates as Black all such individuals. This article examines monoracialization through historical processes of Mexican–American identity formations. Over the twentieth century, this shifted from White to Brown, but without any acknowledgment of African ancestry. Full article

The mixed-race family constellation has emerged as a regular feature of the Irish familial landscape. Such a demographic change invariably leads to the increased presence of white women who are mothering across racialised boundaries. Moreover, in the Irish context, the racial category of whiteness is privileged at a structural level and remains a central organising principle of Irishness as a mode of national belonging. This paper, therefore, sets out to address the specific gap in the literature related to the racialised experiences of the white mother of mixed-race (i.e., black African/white Irish) children in contemporary Ireland as these women are, in effect, mothering ‘outsider’ children in a context of white supremacy. More specifically, how does the positioning of these women’s mixed-race children impact their subjectivities as mothers categorised normatively as white and Irish? Framed by critical whiteness literature, this paper draws on in-depth interviews with twelve white Irish mothers. Data analysis broadly revealed three themes as relates to the women’s negotiations of the racialising discourses and practices which impact their family units. Findings suggest that these women no longer occupy the default position of whiteness as a category of racial privilege and a condition of ‘structured invisibility’. Perhaps, most significantly, the lived reality of these women disturbs the hegemonic conflation of the categories white and Irish. This paper, therefore, extends our theoretical understanding of both whiteness and mixed-race studies. Full article