Ambiguities in black: a Black feminist analysis of the post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse

My thesis analyses how mainstream racial discourses respond to transgressive – and transient – racial identities; I explore how racial ambiguity (and ambivalence) serve as sites where Blackness is defined, policed, and “protected”. I interrogate the discourses that emerged following the 2015 Rachel Dolezal “transracialism” affair, asking “what does the post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse do to the theorisation of Blackness?” This project is a Black feminist enquiry, which I understand as indexing an ontological rebellion fundamentally challenging the category Woman and the facticity of Blackness. My sites of analysis are popular media and academic texts taken from the post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse, which I analyse using methods drawn from cultural studies textual analysis and feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis; I also incorporate a reflexive practice in which I examine my affective responses to the texts. I pursue four themes: analysing racialised narratives and figures used to make sense of post-Dolezalian transracialism, I argue the discourse recycles tropes that uphold hegemonic racial orders; I ask why there is so much interest in what Rachel Dolezal looks like and find the discourse reinvests in Blackness as a visually located/locatable property, which I argue is a white supremacist tactic used to assuage racial anxiety; I interrogate the discourse’s mobilisation of “trans-” and find it relies on and perpetuates the abstraction of Blackness from trans (conceptual and ontological) space, becoming a site where hegemonic definitions of Blackness and transness are reaffirmed; finally, I theorise the discourse’s interest in Dolezal’s familial relationships, arguing the fetishisation of biological relatedness functions to define race as biologically determined. Together, the analyses argue the discourse produces a conceptualisation of Blackness that remains captive to hegemonic, anti-Black racial logics. In its final thoughts, the thesis expresses a desire for more Black feminist engagement with the problematics of transracialism towards a different, more hopeful Black future.