"Destabilizing Black/White and Male/Female Binary Systems in Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half"

Abstract

This qualitative study, based on content analysis within the theoretical frameworks of Louis Miron and Jonathan Inda's racial performativity and Judith Butler's undoing gender, locates the destabilization of black/white and male/female binary systems in Brit Bennett's novel, The Vanishing Half. The constructedness of race and gender are reduced to a form of individual choice and floating signifiers. That racial and gender interpellation undergo a radical transfiguration in the novel is the central argument of this paper. A univocal political signification of the binary systems and the power relation in which it is determined and mobilized turn into an equivocal and fluctuating or fluid signification. The conceptualization and construction of racially and sexually differentiated bodies cease to be predetermined, thereby falsifying that very construction. Through Stella, Reese, and Barry's performances, the novelist shows how the binary systems are destabilized.