Performing an ethos of a dominant Black woman in Paris through body and language: passing at the intersection of race, gender, and class

Abstract

This article aims to illuminate the social meanings of passing experiences through the practice of whitization (or whitening, i.e. speaking and behaving like a White person) among upper-class African Black women in postcolonial France at the intersection of race, gender, and class. I analyze the role of body and language in the process of political emancipation in a Cameroonian female activist, who is a consultant in the field of African fashion and luxury in Paris. After defining whitization as a form of passing, the article analyzes the phonetic and bodily markers of whitening processes among the Black female subject in three interactions in front of different audiences. I show how multiple semiotic forms are used by the doubly minoritized subject to perform simultaneously a dominant Black woman ethos and a cosmopolitan Black beauty, which partially conforms to Western canons of beauty so as to subvert race, gender, and class power structures.

Specters of excess: Passing and policing in the Malay‐speaking archipelago

“…Regarding the first of these phenomena, passing, I follow John L. Jackson Jr. and Martha S. Jones's “more expansive definition” of passing as “includ[ing] the intersubjective angst and uncertainty at the center of all canonical forms of storytelling, including the stories we tell ourselves about who and what we think we are” (Jackson and Jones, 2005, 9). Passing, the authors continue, “is an attempt to shore‐up social intelligibility (for an externalized or internalized audience of judges) through particular empirical details, and any representation or understanding of self is predicated on just such operationalized variables” (Jackson and Jones, 2005, 11; see also Garfinkel, [1967] 2013; Ke‐Schutte, 2023; Makoni, 2020; Telep, 2021, 2022; Yeh, 2018). Regarding the second of these phenomena, policing, I follow Jacques Ranciére's understanding of the police not as a constituted, uniformed body of enforcers but as “an organizational system of coordinates that establishes a distribution of the sensible [ partage du sensible ] or a law that divides the community into groups, social positions, and functions” (2004, 3, my emphasis).…”