After Hybridity

This article tracks the biological life of the mixed race Asian American child: an uncomfortable attachment to a biological notion of race that manifests for the multiracial subject at odds with models of race as a social construction. I argue that renderings of the mixed race child as a metaphor for assimilation and multicultural progress obscure how racial science continues to shape the very definition of mixed raceness. Instead, I frame the mixed race Asian American child as hybrid matter to explore the slippages between their figuration and other abnormally reproduced objects: the genetically modified food organism and cancer. In framing the mixed race child as biologically reproduced, I account for the mixed race child’s fraught relationship to the family structure, and the negative feelings that accompany the future the mixed race Asian American child is asked to hold.