Comments on: The Limits of the Virtuoso

By: The body Richard Armitage is currently occupying, or: Thoughts on Hannibal 3.10 [spoilers] | Me + Richard Armitage

Sat, 08 Aug 2015 05:11:22 +0000

[…] desires and the voices in his head, against his secret knowledge that he will fail, to be a Bordieuian virtuoso and coming up against his limits. He’s a twisted but honest Lebenskünstler. The body that he […]

By: Abraham

Abraham — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 12:09:42 +0000

Very informative comparison between US and Brazil Matt 🙂 I think this is an interesting piece to go with what your saying then as well http://africasacountry.com/neymar-and-race-in-brazil/

By: Matt Thompson

Matt Thompson — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 20:37:08 +0000

There’s this classic undergrad anthro reading called “Mixed Blood” in the Spradley and McCurdy reader wherein the author compares and contrasts the racial definitions of race in Brazil and the U.S. Its a great piece to trot out before students because it clearly illustrates how people in different cultures have different constructions of race such that a person who may be used to being perceived as belong to one race in the US is in fact perceived as belonging to a different race in Brazil.

Anyways, one of the conclusions the author, I think its Jeffery Fish, comes to is that in the US racial definitions are always bound up with inheritance whereas in Brazil it is based entirely on appearance. In this way I think many people in the US are more apt to accept the performativity of gender over race. Caitlin Jenner still has a Y-chromosome, but for all intents and purposes she is a woman; however, Rachel Dolezal’s parents are white and even though she passes as black she’s still really white. So I think when it comes to interpreting the public debate around the two cases (which resonate with each other in really interesting ways, as you’ve shown here), we must take into consideration the peculiar folk taxonomies of race in the US as a major contributing factor.

“It’s not the color of the skin, but the color of your kin” in the United States.

By: Abraham

Abraham — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 18:07:14 +0000

Thanks for the post, your raising of bourdieu in relation to this and the lack of academic commentary on what is obviously an academically half-baked and unethical defense by dolezal inspired me share a thought stream 🙂 So thanks for tackling the topic. Someone once said an idea half understood can be more dangerous than no idea (especially in an egoists hands)

By: Abraham

Abraham — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 18:00:16 +0000

My question is whether identity performance on a stage, is allowed (by social norms) to imagine that difference is performative (or a possible future utopia)? Versus identity performance in ‘reality’ is allowed to ‘be’ (rather than act in theatrical sense) in light of the historical nature of any given moment ‘in reality’? I ask because I think at least a little of Dolezals self-justification on the Today programme seemed to be an academic confusion. She imagines a utopia in which the complexities of difference dont result in negative discrimination that can summed up as the idea of ‘performing identity’. But the reality of difference is historically situated and alive in the present and thus identity is not something to be performed by an actor or super-flexible in an ahistorical utopia. Instead a better idea is personhood which is integrally historical, non-dual and doesnt suffer from the half baked postmodernist idea that everything is hyper-flexible and subjective (which is the bogus outcome of accepting objective/subjective divude in deconstructing only the former) I.e. identity performance.

By: Kerim

Kerim — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 15:14:20 +0000

Thanks! Regarding your second comment, this is from the end of that paragraph: “As a society we understand that gender and ethnicity are performances, but in doing so we have not yet let go of the biological determinism which underlies how we evaluate such performances.”

By: dannahdennis

dannahdennis — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 14:27:26 +0000

Enjoyed the piece, and the cover image is amazing. I do have one question though: do you really think that “most people understand that ethnicity and gender are performances”? I think your assessment may be too optimistic. I’d be willing to speculate that many (if not most) people understand that ethnicity and gender have performative aspects or elements, but see those performative aspects as rooted in some kind of underlying biological “reality.”