Shannon Sullivan on White Affect—Approaching White Hipness

Now, it’s been a month or so since the conference, but I did take some decent notes. I’m going on these notes, so any and all errors are the fault of my secretarial skills and poor memory.

Shannon completely re-thought her approach to white guilt and shame, and gave an entirely different paper than the one she gave at SPEP in November (and which I discuss here). By “different” I mean David Lee Roth to November’s Sammy Hagar. This metaphor is also evaluative: just as Diamond Dave was a far better frontman for Van Halen than Hagar was, this new version of Shannon’s paper was, IMHO, much improved from the previous draft. I’ll list a few reasons why/some of this paper’s more interesting claims.

· The approach is different: Shannon is still concerned about the centrality of guilt and shame amongst “good” liberal white anti-racists. However, instead of arguing that whites shouldn’t be guilty and shameful (which was how November’s version came across), this version gives an account of how and why guilt and shame, as white approaches to anti-racism, re-center white people, white privilege, and whiteness. Which brings me to my next point:

· “Good white liberal” anti-racism is really all about white people, and thus not very anti-racist: “Guilt and shame,” she argues, “turn anti-racist movements into quests for white moral salvation” (take those quotation marks with a grain of salt—remember my poor secretarial skills!). In other words, (some) whites approach anti-racism primarily as a means of demonstrating their own moral, ethical, or intellectual superioriority over other whites (I’ll return to this itallicized point in the next bullet). Guilty/shameful white liberals look to POC to affirm that, because they demonstrate appropriate levels of guilt and shame, they are “good” people. “Good” white liberal anti-racists “turn to POC for redemption” and thus “use [POC] to generate whites’ sense of goodness.” Obviously not all anti-racist whites who feel guilty and shameful about racism/white hegemony necessarily instrumentalize POC in the way that Shannon describes. However, I do think she is right in identifying a general trend among “good white liberals”. Why do I think she’s correct? Well…

· White hipness strikes again: In this version of her paper, Shannon critiques supposedly “anti-racist” whites’ instrumentalization of POC in order to prove/demonstrate their elite status among or superiority over other whites. This logic (or “style” of instrumentalization) is not unique to “good white liberal” politics—it’s also characteristic of “good white liberal” aesthetics. Or, more directly, I think Shannon has identified another instance or type of white hipness. I’ve written extensively about white hipness here, here, and here. Briefly, white hipness is the attempt by whites to dis-identify with mainstream whiteness and demonstrate one’s elite status among whites. This disidentification often takes the form of racial cross-identification. So, for example, Clapton, Jagger, Cobain, etc., dis-identify with bourgeois white masculinity by appropriating stereotypical black masculinities. In so doing, they assert their superiority over the merely “average” white men who wear suits, work regular jobs, and generally follow the rules. Their liking of or affinity with black culture actually instrumentalizes both it and the black people who otherwise produce and consume it. Similarly, Shannon argues that “‘goodness’ is not about taking responsibility for racism; it’s more a white class marker than a response to racism”. So, the point is not for whites to actually either be or do “good”; rather, it’s to negotiate status among other whites. The problem with “good” white liberal anti-racism is that it’s still all about white people, and not at all anti-racist (either in intent or in effect). The logic of hipness shows us that the underlying motivations for “good” white liberals have nothing to do with improving the situations of actual POC, and everything to do improving their own situation vis-à-vis other whites. I think Shannon is on to something here, if only because she’s affirming my own research (if I may be so immodest).

Thoughts on philoSOPHIA 2011 #3: Nietzsche, Beauvoir, and Repetition

Elaine Miller gave a super-interesting paper on repetition in Nietzsche and Beauvoir. She finds in both a contrast between inauthentic, lazy conceptions of repetition (I’ll call this lazy repetition), and rigorous, accurate accounts of repetition (I’ll call this real repetition). Lazy repetition is the idea that repetition is the lack of progress; it is a distinctly Enlightenment, European notion of repetition. Real repetition is like the eternal return: it acknowledges that repetition happens, but repetition is not seen as a hindrance, but a necessity. What is particularly interesting to me is the way this lazy/real distinction mirrors distinctions that African-American Studies scholars make between Western and Afro-diasporic concepts of repetition. Tricia Rose talks about this in Black Noise, where she summarizes James Snead’s work on the topic. Western culture tends to, in Rose’s words, “secret” repetition: it disguises repetition as development, as progress towards some goal. So, for example, in sonata form, the recapitulation, er, repeats, the exposition, but because it concludes on a root-position tonic in obligatory register, it is seen as somehow a “development” on/from the exposition. Afro-diasporic cultures privilege repetition as a site of creativity, agency, and, well, the creation (rather than the lack of) difference and development. Hence the importance of looping, for example, in 20^th C black musics like disco, house, techno, and hip hop. Miller’s paper shows that Nietzsche and Beauvoir make a similar critique of traditional Western (mis)conceptions of repetition, and offer European-based theories of repetition that are complimentary to those found in Afro-diasporic musical practices. Interestingly, especially in Beauvoir’s mid-20^th-c case, it is perhaps the increasing influence of Afro-diasporic “soft power” on Euro-Western culture that makes such a critique more plausible?

Freedom Sounds and The Conjectural Body: Some (more) intersections between my work and Ingrid Monson’s

I am a huge admirer of Ingrid Monson’s work, and find it hugely influential on my own work (see, for example, my article on hipness in Contemporary Aesthetics). I recently completed Freedom Sounds, her book on the racial politics of jazz in the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. I was both super fascinated pleased by the fact that FS and my own recently-published book, The Conjectural Body, seemed to be asking similar questions. So here I want to spend some time clarifying the similarities and differences between my project in CB and Monson’s in FS—both to help me clarify my own argument, but also to help ground (and even validate) my argument. I think it’s sorta cool that I can say “See, I’m right! Somebody else thinks these questions are important, and comes to somewhat similar conclusions (but in a different context).” I’m also using this post as a sort of first stab at describing the book to a general audience. I’m going to be giving a college-sponsored “book talk” in the fall, and the target audience is the general public. I need a way of explaining what the project is and why it’s interesting to people with no background in philosophy, and probably an interest in music, but likely no expertise in it. Soooo, if you have comments or suggestions to that end, I’d really appreciate your feedback!

Broadly, Monson’s book investigates the slippage between racial-political discourses and jazz-aesthetic discourses in the 1950s and 1960s. At the most general, abstract level, she is interested in the relationships between race and music aesthetics. She asks questions such as:

• How did certain sounds or styles come to be thought of as “black” or “white” sounds?
• Relatedly, why do we (and what is at stake when we) make aesthetic claims in racial terms? Why do we (and what is at stake when we) make racial claims in aesthetic terms? For example, Monson finds that “many” mid-century debates about jazz aesthetics “were about race and racism, even when the ostensible subject of discussion was something else, like harmonic choices or swinging” (5).
• What is the relationship between politics and aesthetics? Does an avant-garde politics imply or necessarily coincide with/require an avant-garde aesthetics? Or vice versa: does an avant-garde aesthetic imply or require an avant-garde politics?
• “How do the structural and symbolic aspects of the music combine?” (176)

My book asks many of these same questions—sometimes exactly the same questions, sometimes more abstract or generalized versions of Monson’s more historically-specific ones. I address the second bullet above in my introduction, where I analyze a more contemporary example of the same phenomenon: Why does music critic Sasha Frere-Jones frame his critique of indie rock aesthetics in racial terms (i.e., as the absence of black people or “blackness”)? I use this question to introduce one of the book’s more fundamental, philosophical questions: Why does it make sense to talk about race (or other forms of embodied social inequality, like gender) via music aesthetics? How is this discursive move even possible? Why is it so easy to shift back and forth between race (and gender) and music aesthetics?

It is possible, I argue, because of the way Western political philosophers and music theorists understand the answer to the fourth bulleted question above. Which is to say: Western philosophy—especially European political philosophy—tends to conceive of social identities (like race or gender) and of music in similar terms. More specifically, it understands race, gender, and music in terms of embodiment.

I first realized this when I was reading Rousseau’s early musical writings (for the work that would become Chapter 2). Because Rousseau was critiquing music theorist Jean-Phillipe Rameau, I decided it would be a good idea to read some of Rameau’s responses to Rousseau. Rameau sometimes describes music as the product of resonating bodies. Music isn’t just “like” a body, it is a body. What does it mean to say that music is a “resonating body”? And not just music in general, but European tonality (or functional tonal harmony)? So why does Rameau, author of the definitive treatise on functional tonal harmony, conceive of music as a body?

Why? Because right at the same time that Rameau is codifying tonal harmony, European political philosophers are inventing the idea of race and transforming older models of gender difference into more Modern notions of gendered social identities. These attempts to theorize raced, gendered, and resonating bodies all share a common logic or problematic: they all attempt to ground evaluative differences (the different harmonic functions of, say, tonic, dominant, and sub-dominant, or masculinity and femininity) in the nature of bodies themselves. So, for example Rameau defends the position (contra Rousseau) that Western tonality is the best way of organizing sound because it is supposedly grounded in the nature of sounds themselves (i.e., acoustics). Similarly, Kant and Hegel will argue that Europeans are the most civilized, rational, best race of people because of either (1) the differences in European, African, and Asian bodies, and/or (2) the differences in cultural practices derived from the exigencies of living in European, African, or Asian geographies. All these discourses share the attempt to naturalize hierarchies by grounding differences in the immutable properties of bodies themselves.

This slippage among raced, gendered, and resonating bodies is actually quite obvious in some canonical works in political philosophy, feminist theory, and postcolonial theory. It is actually quite common for political philosophers, feminist theorists, and PoCo theorists to turn to music as an example, especially when they are examining embodied social inequality (i.e., race, gender, etc.). The first part of the book looks at some instances of this use of “resonating bodies” to theorize raced and gendered embodiment. Chapter 1 looks at the use of popular music in millennial postcolonial theory; Chapter 2 examines Rousseau’s notion of “conjecture” as developed in his early musical writings; Chapter 3 reads Kristeva’s use of Schoenberg. In all three of these chapters, I rework Rousseau’s concept of “conjecture,” and argue that it is a helpful way of theorizing the (perhaps untheorizable) material dimension of embodiment. Philosophers from Kant to Lacan have held that materiality is, to a greater or lesser extent, invisible to the theoretical gaze: for example, the very idea of “nature” is itself a socially-produced concept, so we can never analyze “nature” in and of itself. However, we really need to account for materiality, especially because we Western philosophers are constantly working with and against a tradition that denies, devalues, and elides embodied materiality.

This idea of conjecture helps frame and qualify our analyses of materiality, allowing us to be aware of the limitations of our theoretical apparatuses in ways that don’t prohibit us from attending to and valuing embodied materiality. In Monson’s terms, my idea of a “conjectural body” explains how the “structural” and “symbolic” aspects of the music combine (the fourth bullet point above). How do they combine? Taking “structural” to mean “material” or “natural,” and “symbolic” to mean “constructed” or “contextually dependent,” they combine in a recursive way (as Monson repeatedly argues). Symbolic elements are practiced and repeated, and eventually become structural—or, specific musical techniques are practiced until they appear to be “second nature”. Our abilities to hear and perform “music” are in no way “structural” features of our bodies; we learn them, but we learn them so well that we use these knowledges without having to consciously concentrate on them. As Monson explains, that’s the point of practicing:

Playing and inventing materials that were then practiced…turned intellectual knowledge into embodied knowledge, which in turn fed the discovery of new ideas both mental and physical. It is thorugh a continual process of dialogue among the senses, intellect, and body that the great jazz improvisers of the 1950s and 1960s were able to play intuitively and passionately with materials of great complexity that they had themselves devised (295)

Practicing turns new ideas into “second nature”—so what was once “symbolic” is now “structural”. Monson calls this internalization or “in-corporation” of ideas “recursive.” I use the term “conjecture” to describe this recursion. I picked the term “conjecture” because it emphasizes that what appears to be “natural” or “structural” only appears that way for us, who are theorizing based on our observations of a well-rehearsed performance. As Monson explains, “the embodied knowledge so cultivated [in practicing] becomes the basis of the ability to perform intuitively and responsively without the conscious overintrusion of intellectual interventions during performance” (295). We need to be able to theorize “embodiment” as something that is both learned and experienced unreflectively. My idea of “conjecture” is an attempt to do just that: we understand embodiment “as if” it were immediate, even though it’s highly mediated (or well-rehearsed).

This idea of conjecture also helps me: (1) understand what is intended by the term “intersectionality” more accurately; (2) argue why the musical context of Rousseau’s Essay On The Origin of Languages is key in understanding its philosophical argument (and thus show that Derrida gets the latter wrong because he totally overlooks the former); and (3) critique some supposedly “feminist” re-inscriptions of gendered serious/pop culture hierarchies (especially as manifest in Kristeva’s later work). So the first part of the book examines political philosophers’ use of music in order to develop this idea of a “conjectural body.”

The second part of the book addresses the second and third bullets above, but with more of a focus on the gendering of popular music (rather than Monson’s focus on the racialization of jazz subgenres or styles). Feminist musicologists have argued that we use implicitly and explicitly gendred terms to argue for the value (or lack of value) of specific styles of music. Serious/pop hierarchies take many forms, and yesterday’s “pop” can be today’s “serious” music. However, what remains consistent is the gendering of the serious/pop binary: serious music is masculinized, pop music is feminized. Put differently, whatever pop music is, it’s bad because it is feminine—the implicit assumption, of course, is that femininity is bad, undesirable, etc. In Chapter 4 I read Adorno’s writings on popular/commodity music through Irigaray’s critique of Marx’s theorization of commodities. Irigaray argues that women are commodities; this framework helps explain why Adorno always references female body parts, women, stereotypical femininity, etc., when arguing why commodity music is bad, damaging, etc. Unlike Adorno, Nietzsche positively values feminized popular music; I discuss this in Chapter 5. In the second part of the book, I try to give some philosophical grounding to feminist musicologists’ claims about the feminization of “the popular.” I also argue that, given the feminization of the popular, feminists ought to be interested in re-valuing the popular.

In the first part, I explain how and why we make aesthetic claims about music in raced and gendered terms. In the second part, I critique a specific gendered (and raced, but I don’t emphasize that so much in this book; I do flesh this out in some of my subsequent work) aesthetic claims. So I think The Conjectural Body is an interesting and useful compliment to Monson’s Freedom Sounds. It’s nice to know somebody else has similar ideas. And, to shamelessly self-promote, readers of Monson ought to read my book :)

Just as an aside, I’m also interested in Monson’s work for more meta-politico-methodological reasons. We’re both white women working on race and music, and our work primarily addresses music by African-American artists. I often reflect upon (sometimes in the form of “worrying about,” sometimes more critically or philosophically) the politics of me, as a white woman, writing on African-American artists, blackness, and US racial politics. I try to always be cognizant of my own position, be vigilant in my lookout for my own blindnesses and privileges, and generally try to not be part of the very problem I’m trying to critique. I admire Monson’s ability to do these things; if I ever ran into her at a conference, I’d definitely want to ask her advice about/thoughts on these concerns.

White d00ds Posing as Queer WOC—or, postmillennial hipness strikes again

In this post, I want to talk about several recent phenomena that I think are, if not best, at least usefully interpreted through the lens of my concept “postmillennial (black) hipness”. These phenomena include the “Gay Girl in Damascus” fiasco, as well as the official video to Beyonce’s “Run the World (Girls)” and several disparate discussions of raced and gendered appropriation in music.

First, I’ll review what I mean by “postmillennial hipness”:

I’ve posted about postmillennial hipness before on this blog. You can find a more extensive (and academic) discussion of hipness in my article published online at Contemporary Aesthetics. With all this previously published material, I’ll be very brief here. All forms of hipness share a logic: a (relatively) privileged subject identifies with and appropriates (relatively) less privileged/more marginalized identities; the hip subject dis-identifies with some mainstream/norm in order to prove his (or her, sometimes, but mainly his) elite status over and above other relatively privileged subjects. So, for example, white d00ds appropriate stereotypical black masculinity in order to both (1) dis-identify with “square” white culture, and thereby (2) demonstrate their superiority over other, “normal” white d00ds. Postmillenial hipness is an attempt to dis-identify with a newly mainstreamed and normalized image of ghetto black masculinity. So, while traditional hipness is an attempt to disidentify with mainstream white masculinity, postmillennial hipness recognizes that black masculinity is no longer necessarily oppositional. In a context where hip hop is mainstream Top 40 pop, where Ice Cube stars in family comedies and Ice-T has been on Law & Order SVU than he was ever a rapper, and the president publicizes the fact that he likes Jay-Z’s music because this is a more or less uncontroversial, safe choice, “hard” or “ghetto” black masculinity is no longer necessarily or inherently oppositional. It is itself the mainstream. So, in order to dis-identify with this now normative construction of black masculinity, white and black men identify with even less-advantaged identities—mainly non-Western women of color. We see this in artist Shepard Fairey’s early 2000s prints of radicalized non-Western WOC, we see this in Kanye West’s identifications with non-African-American femininities and WOC, and we see this in white Western straight male bloggers trying to pass themselves off as queer non-Western WOC.

“Gay Girl in Damascus” as postmillennial hipness.

Many, many others have written about this and related incidents. Most accounts correctly identify the desire among these white Western straight male bloggers to reinforce their “oppositional cred”. Brian Spears, quoted on Colorlines, explains it pretty clearly and directly:

…I understand how tough it is to get oneself noticed above the din of all the other while male voices out there. We’re so numerous and seemingly unrestrained in our desire to talk about the world at large that sometimes it’s disheartening.

As Spears so clearly puts it, these white d00d bloggers are trying to demonstrate their exceptional status among other, “normal” white Western straight d00d bloggers. And, as many, many others have also noted, the effect of these sorts of appropriations is the silencing of actual non-Western WOC, both queer and hetero. I’m not going to analyze these incedents in any more detail, because others have done this more exhaustively and attentively than I can afford to. However, I do want to suggest that postmillennial hipness is a vauable framework through which to interpret this whole mess. It tells us both why these d00ds do it, and what is harmful about it.

OK, on to Beyonce, with some relatively unpolished initial thoughts:

I’ve written before on “Run the World (Girls),” but I’ve been careful to distinguish the song from its official video. That’s because I think the song signifies in ways beyond the limitations of the video. Many have commented on its orientialism. I’m not going to re-hash the commentary. I want instead to offer an alternative lens for analyzing its appropriations of vaguely non-Western styles and identities. Beyonce, as an African-American woman, is appropriating the styles of radicalized non-Western men and women of color. In other words, whereas postmillennial hipness is most often the province of d00ds, here we have an instance where an American woman of color is appropriating other femininties and masculinities of color in an attempt to demonstrate her superiority over other…who? Seriously, African-American femininity is a privileged, hegemonic norm where? Maybe in R&B, or the entertainment business…maybe. It could be a generational thing: African-American female artists dis-identify with hegemonic representations of black female artists because those are seen as tired and dated. So, Niki Minaj does some Harajuku Barbie orientalism to distinguish herself from Lil Kim, just as Beyonce dons some Beyond the Thunderdome regalia to distinguish herself from…herself, 10 years ago? I think there is certainly something to be said about the relatively privileged place of a multimillion-earning African-American women vis-à-vis men and women in Sudan, Congo, and other African conflict zones. BUT, I still think putting an American woman of color in the position of the hip appropriator changes the logic of hipness somewhat. It might not change the fact that the non-Western POC she’s appropriating are silenced or instrumentalized, but it does make the logic more complex than when it’s a man doing the appropriating.

Moreover, I think we can distinguish Beyonce’s postmillennial hipness from those practiced by white women. The Crunk Feminists have a great post “On Kreayshawn and the Utility of Black Women.” Here, CFs argue that Kreayshawn appropriates stereotypical black masculinity as a way to disidentify with both white and black femininity. This is more like the traditional 20^th c logic of hipness, except instead of a white dude doing the appropriating, it’s a white woman. While Kreayshawn is consistently instrumentalizing women and men of color, Beyonce’s case is more complicated: it’s not just about race, it’s also about empire and the use of African-American music as a dimension of American/Western “globalized” imperialism.

I really, really, REALLY need to think more thoroughly and carefully about these women’s (Minaj, Knowles, Kreayshawn) uses of postmillennial hipness. But, I’ll throw this out there hoping for some feedback to guide my ongoing work.

Beyonce confirms my read of "Run the World (Girls)" is right

In a recent interview, summarized here at Bust, Beyonce was asked if girls really did run the world. She had a fairly long response, but the kicker is:

Sometimes there are certain things that we have to work harder for, that we have to work double the amount for. Sometimes we don’t get the credit. But we’re getting there. (emphasis mine).

In this post, I argued that girls run the world, but patriarchy keeps that quietly bracketed in two main ways: (1) patriarchy runs on the backs of women, not giving them credit for the very, very necessary and foundational work they do do (e.g., a marxist feminist analysis about the role of unpaid domestic labor in the (re)production of the laborer, and thus, eventually, of surplus value); and (2) areas in which women are actually accomplished leaders (e.g., the entertainment industry) are systematically devalued and trivialized.

The fact that Beyonce herself reads the song in the same way I do shows some evidence that (a) she's a lot smarter than the mainstream media--and even feminist blogosphere--gives her credit, because (b) she's consciously using that dual-layered performative practice where the figurative, critical layer of meaning undermines the literal/superficial, hegemonic layer of meaning.

London's Burning: Delete Yoursef, You Got No Chance to Win

As regular readers of the blog know, I've been working on several projects related to the role of music in the queer futurity/relationality debates. I've been thinking specifically about the use of punk and the gestures toward acid house. This fall, I'll be presenting on Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Psychic TV, and Halberstam's political negativity at the Feminist Theory and Music 11 Conference. I'm particularly interested in how P-Orridge's work both bridges the punk and acid house, on the one hand, and incorporates a queer (or rather, pandrogynous) performance practice, on the other.

Given all that, I'm totally surprised and ashamed I forgot about Atari Teenage Riot's "Delete Yourself, You Got No Chance to Win":



Released in 1995 (only a year after Psychic TV's "United 94"!), the track samples the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" and combines it with some Amen Break-beats. I'll post a more fully developed analysis of this later, but right now, there are a couple of things I need to think more carefully about:

1. The shift from the "no future" of ENGLAND's dreaming, to the "no chance to win" in 90s virtual reality. Or: what does the shift to cyberspace do? How does this relate to my work on queer (anti)futurity and Afrofuturism?
a. Speaking of Afrofuturism, what about the jungle-ization of "God Save"? The Amen Break, Jungle as the "dark side" of acid house, Lydon's eventual turn to the more dubby (and jungle precursor) PiL, etc...

2. "Delete Yourself" as an update on James Chance's Downtown No Wave "Contort Yourself"?

3. I need to listen to the music more carefully and figure out what's going on formally/compositionally.


I stumbled on this song at the gym today: I was listening to Gaga's "Born This Way," when I thought, "Huh, this is like Madonna trying to make an Atari Teenage Riot album." So, I then decided to listen to some ATR, and the lightbulb went off when this track came up. That said, I still ought sometime to think about BTW and ATR...

Thoughts on philoSOPHIA 11 #2: Race, Technology, and the Body

Alia Al-Saji’s keynote was, as usual, all-around fabulous. One aspect of it particularly stood out to me, because it responded to this open question that I’ve been carrying around with me this semester. The question is about Falguni Sheth’s Towards a Political Philosophy of Race, which I taught this past Spring semester. In her book, FS shifts from a race-as-identity paradigm (i.e., race as a property, a thing or a what) to a race-as-technology model (i.e., race as a means of accomplishing things, race as a how). The Foucaultian in me of course appreciates the race-as-technology argument, and I think it’s really useful (I’ve argued that elsewhere in this blog). However, it seems that in the move from what to how, we lose the body. Where’s the body in Sheth’s account of race? Ought her account, or any account of race, address the body? Does the body need to be present, somewhere, in the race-as-technology model?

I asked my class these questions, but I was concerned that it was perhaps my feminist training that inclined me to assume that there needed to be an account of the body, that the body ought to be present somewhere in any and every theory of race. (Not that that feminist lesson isn’t valuable or correct—I just wanted to make sure it was warranted and not a merely knee-jerk or habitual reaction.)

Alia’s presentation adopted a race-as-technology framework, but one that centered on the body. She described several ways that discussions of difference that elide or evade the body (biology, phenotype, etc.) do so in order to hide the racial dimensions/stakes of these discussions. For example, claims about “cultural” difference (e.g., Western vs. non-Western, French vs. Muslim) distinguish themselves from “racial” claims by holding that “race” is necessarily biological; they make this move in order to hide the racial logic that motivates and structures the distinctions represented as “merely” cultural and non-biological and non-corporeal. It seems to me that the implication here is that the shift from identity to technology is not necessarily an anti-racist one; Alia shows one way that the race-as-technology framework is used to naturalize and rationalize racism (instead of critiquing it). We lose something analytically/theoretically when we lose the body. So the question now is: Where is the body in the race-as-technology model? It’s likely everywhere, in lots of different ways—but it seems important that we pay attention to corporeality even and especially if we reject the view that race is “just” an identity.