Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: The Kleenexes of Popular Culture?
- PART I TOWARDS A CRITICAL VOCABULARY
- PART 2 SEXED, RACED AND GENDERED IDENTITY IN MUSIC VIDEO
- 4 Music Video in Black and White: Race and Femininity
- 5 That Latin(a) Look: Performing Ethnicity
- 6 Masculinity and the Absent Presence of the Male Body
- Afterword: Music Video Goes Gaga
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - That Latin(a) Look: Performing Ethnicity
from PART 2 - SEXED, RACED AND GENDERED IDENTITY IN MUSIC VIDEO
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: The Kleenexes of Popular Culture?
- PART I TOWARDS A CRITICAL VOCABULARY
- PART 2 SEXED, RACED AND GENDERED IDENTITY IN MUSIC VIDEO
- 4 Music Video in Black and White: Race and Femininity
- 5 That Latin(a) Look: Performing Ethnicity
- 6 Masculinity and the Absent Presence of the Male Body
- Afterword: Music Video Goes Gaga
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the previous chapter we argued that race is not simply the result of biocultural heritage but is rather the product of particular discursive formations which become inscribed upon the body through processes of representation. This, at least in part, explains the confusions in identity set in motion by beautiful liar (2007) inasmuch as its two performers, Beyoncé Knowles and Shakira, appear to both exchange identities and inhabit isomorphic bodies. Even if race cannot be reduced entirely to a set of free-floating signifiers, what this nevertheless does indicate is its arbitrary and contingent relationship to the raced body. This is most apparent in the way that the whiteness of Shakira's body and her Latina identity are disavowed in the production of a ‘black Shakira’ and the blackness of Beyoncé's body and her African American identity are elided in her performance of ‘Latina Beyoncé'. And to a significant extent, this display of malleable raced identity points us towards the political rub in so far as the identities being swapped in beautiful liar, if not straightforwardly black, are decidedly non-white. On one level this can be explained by the different locations black and white occupy in discourse and the concomitant differences in the ways they are constructed through representation. As Dyer notes, ‘in the realm of categories, black is always marked as a colour … and is always particularising’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Music Video and the Politics of Representation , pp. 108 - 121Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011