TITLE:
How “Commonsense” Notions of Race, Class and Gender Infiltrate Families Formed across the Color Line
AUTHORS:
Eileen T. Walsh
KEYWORDS:
Gender Performance; Multiracial Family; Racial Formations; Social Class Performances
JOURNAL NAME:
Sociology Mind,
Vol.2 No.1,
January
9,
2012
ABSTRACT: This research presents data from in-depth interviews of sixty adults in Southern California who have formed families across the black/white color line. In a societal context where normative family formation remains mono-racial, many adults in multiracial families manage their social performances to mitigate the stigma associated with their unusual family pattern or to challenge social expectations associated with race, class, and gender. Their stories reveal how they deploy strategic exaggerations of gender and stereotypes of social class in their day to day lives. These deployments operate to manage social interactions when confronting commonsense expectations about what it means to be a man or woman who trespasses the color line in family formation.