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Performativity: The Upstander Vs. Rhinelander Case

Decent Essays

In her theory of performativity and race, Ehlers discusses race and the law in length; in an attempt to explain this further she uses the example of a racial fraud case from 1925, the Rhinelander v. Rhinelander case. In said case Alice Rhinelander, a ‘light skinned woman’ was described as being racially ambiguous when it came to her identity – she was accused of passing as white and wilfully misleading her husband, Leonard Rhinelander, into entering an interracial marriage. According to Leonard, Alice ‘misrepresented’ her racial origins through her refusal to perform her ‘Black racial identity’ (Ehlers, 2012). Ehlers argues that the fact that the case even made it before a court indicated that Alice’s racial identity was not tolerated by the …show more content…

The rest of this essay will look at Black Woman, aiming to explore how performativity has impacted their identities and how society views them. As woman account for half of the human race, they also account for half of black history; if one looks at this history they are able to see a culture of beauty, shame, performativity and objectification. But what exactly is the link between Beauty and the Black female identity? Looking back through history, one can see that ever since the era of colonialism, black woman’s bodies have been sexualized within the historical narrative of both the United States and the UK; the sexual ‘debasement’ of black bodies and black women can be seen to have been maintained through socialisation, social stereotypes and even laws (Holmes, 2016). The bodies of black women have been managed and controlled throughout history, particularly in the context of the United States, this can be seen from the times of the slave trade to the modern era. While the tactics and legal frameworks have shifted to adapt to modern standards of political correctness, some claim that black bodies are still perceived as having inherently inferior value within the context of the twenty first century (Holmes, 2016). In American history, black women have always been sexually degraded and their identities

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