Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Although “transracialism” became a trending topic within the last decade, there is a lack of scholarship on the subject. Both public and current academic discourses on “transracialism” discuss the possibilities of racial fluidity in correspondence with transgender scholarship and experiences. This analogous approach contributes to a conceptual collapse of race and gender, and thus this dissertation argues that careful attention must be paid to how race and gender are mobilized and operated both separately and intersectionally through an interrogation of whiteness. This dissertation examines a notable pattern of white women and gender non-conforming people racially self-identifying as non-white through three prominent case studies of Rachel Dolezal, Oli London, and Jessica Krug. In consideration of the people harmed by Dolezal, London, and Krug, this dissertation traces how whiteness prioritizes and maintains its status as the peak of racial hierarchies in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Dolezal, the first person to claim “transracial” as an identity outside of adoption, manipulates racial, gendered authenticity to position herself outside of normative whiteness while remaining complicit in white supremacy. London, who identified as both “transracial” and genderqueer, actively argued race and gender to be equivalent social constructs. Krug, who did not identify as “transracial,” demonstrates how social justice organizing rhetoric can be used to police and exclude people of color from conceptualizing terms of liberation and justice for their communities.

Committee: Treva Lindsey (Advisor); Guisela Latorre (Committee Member); Jian Chen (Committee Member); Mytheli Sreenivas (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Asian American Studies; Asian Studies; Black Studies; Ethnic Studies; Gender Studies; Womens Studies