Against “Transracialism”: Revisiting the Debate

Abstract

This article critically reflects on some of the themes and assumptions at stake in the "transracialism" controversy, and connects them to important works in critical race theory: namely Rey Chow's notion of "coercive mimeticism" and Sara Ahmed's critique of white liberal multiculturalism. It argues that the analytic account of "race" that Tuvel draws upon in her article-Sally Haslanger's-is politically problematic, both on its own terms and in light of broader reflections on racialized and gendered power relations. In particular, I critique Haslanger's assumption that all racial identities exist on the same conceptual plane: that a single variable definition of "race" can be applied to any particular racialized group-including white and nonwhite racial identities. This erases racialized power relations, especially where, in liberal "multicultural" nations, whiteness constitutes the implied standard against which an appearance of "racial difference" is conjured. Finally, I extend my argument to the issue of treating "race" and gender analogously. Rejecting this move, I propose an alternative way of conceptualizing these as analytically distinct, yet constitutively interdependent, phenomena. In order to situate the debate historically, I consider an example of "racial transgression" from twentieth-century China.Rarely has the academic community seen a controversy spread so quickly through its ranks. After Hypatia's publication of Rebecca Tuvel's essay "In Defense of Transracialism," which attempted to derive the philosophical legitimacy of "transracialism" from the "permissibility" of transgender identities (Tuvel 2017), the responses were many-and they were vehement: an open letter calling for the retraction of the article garnered a great number of signatories; Hypatia's editorial board issued a public letter of apology, promising to swiftly review their peer-review process; some of its editors resigned. Given the speed and violence of the debate, Tuvel very quickly became the target of a great deal of unwanted, hateful-and perhaps undeserved-attention. As often tends to be the case with controversies, much of its energy evaporated soon after.