Multiracial Bodies, Multiracial Reproduction

This paper explores the cultural and social dynamics shaping the emergence of a developing phenomenon: the politics of desire shaping an emergent beauty standard appropriated from Blackness, and subsequent fetishization of mixed-race or ethnically ambiguous children. I engage Jared Sexton’s Amalgamation Schemes extensively to theorize contemporary desirability politics which uphold anti-Blackness through promoting a standard of female beauty which is appropriated from but is fundamentally detached from Blackness, and in turn, develop an imaginary of the mixed-race family useful to reifying racial difference. I engage contemporary manifestations of this phenomenon across social media to investigate how the body, the family, desire, and race are constructed relative to the process of multiracial reproduction and the fantasy of multiracialism.