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Flow is it that people know when they belong and to what they belong? This question, about the epistemology of belonging, carries a particular complexity for mixed-race women. How is it that mixed-race women create a sense of identification with others? What are the unities and disjunctures? What can we understand about epistemologies of belonging through examining how mixed-race women create belonging? Through qualitative work based on the life stories of women of mixed heritage, in this paper I examine how the navigation of hybridity, as it is experienced in the lives of six "hybrid" mixedrace women, illuminates the complexities of identity construction and epistemologies of belonging.1 I use the term epistemology to signify the nature of knowledge, how we come to know things, in this case knowledge, or knowing, related to belonging. Belonging in human relations is connected to identity, both self-identification and identification with others.
Stuart I IaII argues that identities are constituted discursively. FIe states:
I use "identity" to refer to the meeting point, the point of suture, between, on the one hand, the discourses and practices which attempt to "interpellate", speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be "spoken". Identities are thus points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us.2
I Ie contends that because identities are constructed through discourse, they are strategic, positional, multiple, intersecting and antagonistic, and increasingly fragmented and fractured. * Identities as "points of temporary attachment" are thus fluid yet bound by discourses and practices, both our own and those of other people. This point is particularly salient for mixed-race women who are often hailed, and thus identify, in a variety of ways. Identification with particular subjectivities related to race, nonetheless, creates or severs opportunities for belonging; these notions of belonging are further complicated by gender role expectations related to, for example, heteronormative assumptions of dating and parenting. These women's stories of (dis)identification disrupt essentialized notions of family, reveal oppressive patriarchal norms, overtly destabilize constructions of fixed racial categories, and highlight epistemologies of belonging and exclusion.
Wanting to collect the stories of mixed-race women for a...