Mixed Race Life Stories: The Multiracializing Gaze in Canada

The social conception of bodies as mixed race provides insight into the operation of the external racial gaze within ‘multicultural’ Canada. Drawing on multi-staged life story interviews with mixed race adults, Mixed Race Life Stories: The Multiracializing Gaze in Canada examines the lived experience of the racial gaze and provides a new contribution to the Critical Mixed Race Studies field as the first to take a life story approach to mixed race identity. Building on the conceptualization of multiracialization and the racial gaze, Mixed Race Life Stories: The Multiracializing Gaze in Canada combines critical race and life course perspectives to produce new theoretical insights on the multiracializing gaze. Jillian Paragg details how mixed race people’s experiences must be understood within the unfolding history of the Canadian settler state, and the ways that particular configurations of their experiences across their life course illuminate the operations and mechanisms of the racial gaze. Framing a new theoretical analysis in a field with limited data, Mixed Race Life Stories: The Multiracializing Gaze in Canada builds an understanding of the affective lived experiences of mixed race people, the different ways they are racialized and how that may impact a politics of mixed race moving forward.