ABSTRACT
What the women's talk has shown us so far is that we should understand 'race' as an unstable complex of social meanings that nonetheless continues to be salient in their lives. This chapter explores this complex through the prism of gendered readings of 'race' and storied hybridity. It describes the work of Ifekwunigwe, Young, Bhabha, Hall, Gilroy, Spivak and Fanon to draw out hybridity's conceptual threads and discontinuities. The chapter uses examples of a hybridity-of-the-everyday contained in extracts of talk from 'mixed race' women who speak back to their positioning within Blackness, to explicate that hybridity is about the ongoing assemblage of identifications. Women lay bare in their talk and with which they struggle in order to produce identifications. The chapter explains how women deconstruct and re-construct 'race' and, how 'race' as embodiment and cultural practices is itself changed/ maintained in this process. Dialogism and translation become important then in hybridity within the context of the 'raced' habitus.
