Troubling the Family

<div> <p><i>Troubling the Family</i> argues that the emergence of multiracialism during the 1990s was determined by underlying and unacknowledged gender norms. Opening with a germinal moment for multiracialism-the seemingly massive and instantaneous popular appearance of Tiger Woods in 1997-Habiba Ibrahim examines how the shifting status of racial hero for both black and multiracial communities makes sense only by means of an account of masculinity.</p> <p>Ibrahim looks across historical events and memoirs-beginning with the <i>Loving v. Virginia</i> case in 1967 when miscegenation laws were struck down-to reveal that gender was the starting point of an analytics that made categorical multiracialism and multiracial politics possible. Producing a genealogy of multiracialism's gendered basis allows Ibrahim to focus on a range of stakeholders whose interests often ran against the grain of what the multiracial movement of the 1990s often privileged: the sanctity of the heteronormative family the labor of child rearing and more precise forms of racial tabulation-all of which when taken together could form the basis for creating so-called neutral personhood.</p> <p>Ibrahim concludes with a consideration of Barack Obama as a representation of the resurrection of the assurance that multiracialism extended into the 2000s: a version of personhood with no memory of its own gendered legacy and with no self-account of how it became so masculine that it can at once fill the position of political leader and the promise of the end of politics.<br> <br></p> </div>