| Description |
Within the U.S., particular anxieties surrounding racially and ethnically marked "others" reflect particular historical moments, and today ours are prompted by contemporized fears of immigration and terrorism. In this dissertation, I take up these issues, focusing on contemporary instantiations and negotiations of hybridity within U.S. culture. While hybridity has been examined at length, the ways in which hybridity is mobilized in distinctive ways through or by various bodies have been relatively overlooked. Thus, I examine the ways in which hybridity is rhetorically embodied and mobilized within contemporary mainstream media. I take up these issues with a focus on two questions: (a) How is hybridity mobilized in distinctive ways in, through, or by various bodies, particularly as reflective of historical context? (b) How does "the body"-in particular, specific deployments of the body-feature in contemporary articulations of hybridity? I answer these questions through a critical analysis of texts, drawing from both critical rhetoric and critical performance studies. I focus on two competition-style reality dance shows, So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD) and Dancing with the Stars (DWTS); the competition-style reality show America's Next Top Model (ANTM); and three Food Network cooking shows, Simply Delicioso with Ingrid Hoffmann, Aarti Party, and Everyday Italian. Analysis of these texts suggest that hybridity is mobilized in varied and distinctive ways by, through, and on variously marked bodies. Ultimately, this study refines extant theorizing on hybridity: While borders are inevitably critical to any conceptualizations of hybridity, this project reveals nuance and complexities of how borders are accomplished and navigated across these various embodied mobilizations and illuminate particularized contemporary anxieties regarding race/ethnicity. Hybridity in a current context appears to be articulated as-conflated with-individual uniqueness and authenticity, the expression of which is encouraged and celebrated, but only within very specific contexts or confines. Ultimately, then, via its location in and deployment by particular bodies, hybridity is articulated as a feature and expression of the unique, authentic self, as opposed to a politics of identity, in ways that justify discipline of race/ethnicity if and when hybridity "crosses the line." |
