Race as Personality "Genre"? (Reading/Screening Response)

In reference to the Berry chapter, personality can be cultivated through a unique employment of various fashion and styling techniques. The clothing industry’s creation of the “fashion type” translated itself well through Classical Hollywood’s numerous star vehicles promoting a “style conscious consumerism” that encouraged spectatorial emulation. However, when one thinks of these “types” or “genres” of femininity that invariably act as behavioral rubrics that personal specificities must adhere to, the categorical question of race is glaringly invisible. In what ways are racialized femininities expected to conform to or reproduce these dominant “generic” (heterosexual, white, female) codes? Does ethnicity become a personality trait that can be cultivated in certain ways? Granted Berry is engaging a particular configuration of the star system within Classical Hollywood cinema that privileged particular forms of white femininity, but how might we situate performers like Dorothy Dandridge, Carmen Miranda, Anna May Wong, and especially Hattie McDaniel in reference to this idea of generic fashion/style persona, femininity, and class transgression? How do they fit, or do they? Fashion, style, and class becomes deracinated here as these performers are lumped into a discourse of stardom and production/consumption practices that imagine predominantly white, middle class, female spectators. Also, in what ways could these imagined spectators be consuming race as a particular “generic” category of style and personality?

Berry also discusses the ways in which working class female characters transgress class boundaries via modes of performative sociality or “image management”. The act of “passing” performed by the female impostor successfully denaturalizes the social space characterized by elitism and exclusion, the strict sartorial and behavioral codes act as a form of restrictive conditioning. The makeover portion of this image management becomes the site of this possible transgression, however, often the success of this transformation is gauged by the subject’s relative deracination. In thinking about Maid in Manhattan, the character of Marissa can be seen to enact much of Berry’s conceptualization of this kind of class transgression, with all of its implications. Can we think of Marissa’s performance of upper class status as not only a deconstruction of class but also perhaps of whiteness and its constituent performative behaviors?

Stepping outside of the text, it might be productive to examine Jennifer Lopez (her incarnations as J.Lo/JLO), her connections to fashion, stardom and her particular star text, and her strategies of performative authenticity that are meant to possibly diffuse her status as a global/corporate brand (clearly Kate’s post points to the ways in which her iconicity connects to certain formulations of and fascinations with Hollywood spectacle and its reproduction). How has her entry into the upper echelons of the Hollywood elite enforced a form of insidious body politics, resulting in the self-disciplining of Lopez’s body in accordance with white standards of physical beauty (the changing size and configuration of Lopez’s rear end throughout her career was/is a major topic of discussion)?