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18. Interracial Intimacy on the Commodity Frontier
- Rutgers University Press
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228 v A couple of years ago, as my daughter and I were watching television, an ad for the telecommunications company Verizon appeared featuring the Elliot Family. In its depiction of family life, the ad was not at all unusual—a teenage girl chatted on the phone with her friend while a young boy helped his father navigate the Internet. In its depiction of the family itself, however, the ad was not at all typical. While the father appeared to be a white man, his darker-skinned, curlyhaired children did not. Upon seeing the ad, my daughter remarked, “Well you don’t see that everyday!” Raised in an interracial extended family, my daughter in fact does see that everyday. What she meant was seldom does she see such families depicted in mainstream commercial space. The Elliots ad, however, is part of a discernible trend in which interracial families—and interracial intimacy more broadly—are becoming part of the commercial landscape. Browse in any store, real or virtual, watch any television channel, and flip through the pages of a magazine, and chances are good that you will find at least one advertisement, product, or show depicting interracial intimacy in some form. In the contemporary commercial landscape, you can purchase shampoo for mixed race women and girls, T-shirts displaying your mixed ethnic pride, and biracial dolls. You can buy children’s stories and coloring books with interracial families and “multicultural markers” to color them with. Interracial couples can buy wedding cake toppers for their big day and watch television shows about interracial families like the one they may soon create. Increasingly, cereal, makeup, laundry detergent, pain reliever, furniture, and Interracial Intimacy on the Commodity Frontier Kimberly McClain DaCosta Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief. —Leo Burnett c h a p t e r 1 8 even phone service is pitched to you by mixed race models and interracial families (both real and fictitious). And with an Internet connection, you can purchase interracial intimacy itself by joining interracial dating Web sites and buying or viewing interracial pornography.1 Each of these products, services, or media offerings represents the various ways in which interracial intimacy is being commercialized. By “interracial intimacy ,” I mean explicit depictions of racially different bodies in romantic, family, or caring contexts; but also depictions of mixed race people, the proof as it were, of that intimacy. Since the advent of the new race question in the 2000 Census that allowed respondents to mark one or more racial categories, the commercialization of interracial intimacy has accelerated as marketers and entrepreneurs have set about attempting to understand the putative needs of this new category of consumer while developing products designed to meet those “needs.” At the same time, images of interracial families and mixed race people are increasingly being used in advertisements. As someone who teaches about family life and how concepts of race change over time, the commercialization of interracial intimacy is especially interesting to me. For most of U.S. history, interracial intimacy in the form of sex, marriage, and domesticity has been a taboo practice, largely hidden from view, highly stigmatized, or made invisible by the unwillingness of public authorities to recognize or legitimize it. Today interracial intimacy is increasingly practiced, tolerated, and acknowledged. The ascendancy of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States is a good indicator of such a shift (and the public discussion of his biography is a catalyst for its continuation). So, too, is the increasing visibility of images of interracial intimacy on the consumer culture landscape. I am interested in what the commercialization of interracial intimacy can tell us about the cultural understandings of race in America. Admittedly, I am not writing about work in the usual sense (as paid and unpaid labor), nor about how families cope with the changing nature of such work. Rather, I am writing about cultural work; specifically, the work that the commercialization of a specific kind of family relationship (interracial intimacy) does to express and contain racial change. In this chapter I examine interracial intimacy in the context of the “commodity frontier.” According to Arlie Hochschild, the commodity frontier describes both a market condition and a cultural condition (2003). In market terms, on the commodity frontier, time-starved and stressed families increasingly purchase the care that family members need, be it meals, childcare, or emotional support. In cultural terms, the commodity frontier de...