Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850-2000

THREE: The Transitive Bi-

THREE h The Transitive BiIn its constructions of race, sex, gender, and nationality, the television show Designing Women provides more than a popular feminist message. The main characters of the show are four white southern women and an African-American man (predictably enough, an ex-convict) who works for them. The four women run the gamut of traditionally feminine stereotypes : conceited snob, ditzy blonde, feisty single mom, and seductive southern lady. Yet Anthony, originally the designing women’s van driver and odd-job man, complicates traditional assumptions about black masculinity as he learns to participate in “feminine” activities (including decorating , leg waxing, and Girl Scout camp) and “female” conversations (about bra size, PMS, and menopause). The transformation from ex-con to woman’s best friend is eased by Anthony’s own effeminacy, indicated by his exaggerated gestures and his shrill laugh.1 This effeminacy guarantees his distance from racist stereotypes of the black male sexual threat to southern white womanhood at the same time that his series of girlfriends comforts viewers that his gender flexibility does not challenge his heterosexuality. In one particularly revealing episode (“Foreign Affairs”), the wealthiest of the designing women molds Anthony’s identity to suit her needs. When Suzanne Sugarbaker’s maid, Consuela, a spell-casting Latina immigrant, needs to take the test for U.S. citizenship, Suzanne sends Anthony to take the test in her place because Consuela does not speak English well. [130] The Transitive Bi- 131 “Consuela” thus meets the immigration officers in the body of the crossdressed and semi-Spanish-speaking Anthony. This scenario implies that all nonwhites are somehow the same and that race, nation, and sex are transferable among them. A bad wig, a flowered dress, and a few words of mispronounced Spanish seem to be enough to make a Latina woman out of an African-American man. Not only is Anthony accepted as Consuela, but the white male immigration officer develops a crush on him/her. The interchangeability of Anthony and Consuela reflects the racist character structure of Designing Women. Unlike cross-dressing scenes in William Wells Brown and Michelle Cliff, this costume is imposed by the dominant culture and Anthony has nothing to gain personally from passing. The identities of the people of color in this show are eclipsed by their status as the Sugarbakers’ Other. Indeed, Consuela herself, the real Latina woman, is never seen. Yet this depersonalization also unsettles essentialist notions of race and sex. Anthony is not just the stereotypical black man, and it is not just Latina women who wear flowered dresses and practice “voodoo.” As with the racist studies of racial mixture that I discuss in chapter 1 (Edward Byron Reuter, for example), playing with race and gender can have mixed effects. Racist though the motivations and underlying assumptions behind a particular performance of mixed identity may be, the performance itself may still destabilize racial, sexual, and gendered definition. Although Anthony’s Consuela is almost minstrel-like in its performative excess and visible sexual and cultural duality, stereotypes are undermined as Anthony passes and subverts preconceived ideas about his physical identity. Judith Butler’s analysis of the film Paris Is Burning reflects this ambivalence of gender parody, its simultaneous subversion and “reconsolidation of hegemonic norms.” Butler argues that “drag may well be used in the service of both the denaturalization and reidealization of hyperbolic heterosexual gender norms” (Bodies 125). That is, at the same time that gender crossing appropriates sexist stereotypes, it also denaturalizes those stereotypes and the conventions of gender altogether. The same could be said of Anthony’s racial parody. While imitating racist assumptions about Latina identity, Anthony reworks those assumptions and couples them with black male sexual identity. His performance, like Paris Is Burning, could be read as a critical appropriation of “racist, misogynist, and homophobic norms of oppression” (Butler, Bodies 129). In the case of Anthony/Consuela, racial fluidity coincides with sex/gender fluidity, as he/she defies boundaries between races and sexes and enacts unexpected 132 Mulattas and Mestizas correspondences among race, sex, and gender identities. As Butler argues, “the order of sexual difference is not prior to that of race or class,” but the “norms of realness by which the subject is produced are racially informed conceptions of ‘sex’ ” (Bodies 130). Sexual signification cannot be separated from racial signification in the performance. Wigs, dresses, body shape, and...