Mimesis and Alterity: Representations of Race in Children’s Films

Abstract

In this chapter I use the concept of mimesis (copying and reproduction) to show that contemporary animated children’s films frequently depict race and gender as performative identities, the competent performance of which is learned through copying the child’s intimate others, particularly their mothers/maternal figures and, to a lesser extent, their fathers. The question that guides this analysis is: how do children learn to take on a racialised identity? Work in the performativity of gender has been very important in developing an understanding of gender as a socially constructed subjectivity (Butler 1990, 1993). Empirical work on how children are constituted as gendered subjects has shown how boys and girls are interpellated as gendered subjects. There is nothing subtle about this. Thorne (1993), in her study of a kindergarten in the US, and Connolly (1998), in his study of a primary school in England, have shown how children in putatively progressive (at least about gender equality) institutional settings are constantly asked to identify themselves as boys or girls and to establish the performativity of their gendered identity in opposition to that of the other gender. Whilst race shares with gender this performative character, the interpellation of children as raced subjects cannot be directly compared with their interpellation as gendered subjects. The hailing of children as people with a gender remains normative, notwithstanding shifts in what might be meant by femininity or masculinity.

Film is ‘a new schooling for our mimetic powers’.

(Buck-Morss 1989: 267, cited in Taussig 1993: 20)