Does the rug match the carpet? Race, gender, and the redheaded woman

Amanda Third, Diane Negra

    Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapter

    Abstract

    ![CDATA[Anglo cultures understand redheaded women in a very particular, ambivalent set of ways, largely as a consequence of the English colonization of Ireland and the subsequent racialization of the Irish. Historically, England’s colonial project in Ireland, a form of colonialism which entails the subordination of a group that is, as Luke Gibbons puts it, both “native” and “white,” has been complicated by the lack of a readily available visible marker of difference by which to construct the Irish as other and as subaltern. As Anne McClintock, quoting Clair Wills, notes, “the difficulty of placing the pale-skinned Irish in the hierarchy of empire was ... the absence of the visual marker of skin color difference which was used to legitimate domination in other colonized societies.” In the context of a form of colonization where chromatism as a category of difference was not easily deployed to construct the colonial other, red hair became one clear physical marker, among others, of Celtic or Irish difference. As Nira Yuval-Davis states, “every racist construction has at least some dimension of a mythical embodiment of the ‘other.’ This can relate to any part of the body.” In the absence of a difference of skin color, then, red hair was a distinguishing feature within the problematic category of whiteness that enabled the singling out of the Irish and Celts as inferior, and as other, that was necessary in order for English imperial expansion into Ireland to take place. That is, red hair was constructed as one characteristic of Irish otherness - in the colonial imaginary, it signaled their “off-whiteness” or their “not-quite-whiteness.” It is this process of othering that overdetermines the construction of redheaded women in English-speaking cultures. Redheads are produced, to use Bhabha’s phrase, as “almost the same, but not quite.” Redheaded women have a much more strikingly visible presence in the representational spaces of Anglo cultures than redheaded men. Indeed, while redheaded men are not entirely invisible, the image of the redheaded man doesn’t circulate in the same kinds of ways, and with the same kind of sexualized and spectacular prominence, as the image of the redheaded woman. For example, Hollywood has given us an impressive number of iconic female redheads: Nicole Kidman, Lucille Ball, Rita Hayworth, and Bette Midler, to name but a few. On the other hand, redheaded male celebrities are rather more thin on the ground. Redheaded masculinity, it seems, simply does not have the same kinds of currency; it does not evoke the powerful mythologies that female redheadedness does. Red hair on a woman speaks in Anglo cultures, and very loudly at that.]]
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationThe Irish In Is : Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture
    Place of PublicationU.S.A
    PublisherDuke University Press
    Pages220-253
    Number of pages34
    ISBN (Print)9780822387848
    Publication statusPublished - 2006

    Keywords

    • femininity
    • redheads
    • Irish
    • women
    • national characteristics
    • popular culture

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