Content area
Full Text
Michel Foucault elaborates on the concept of heterotopia- a compound term derived from classic Greek meaning other space- in his 1967 lecture "Des espaces autres." He used the term, initially coined in medicine to refer to normal tissues that grow in unexpected places in the body, to denote "real places- places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society- which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted" ("Of Other Spaces" 4). The term's penchant for ambiguity was already present in its medical use, "questioning binary divisions between healthy/normal and sick/abnormal" (Cenzatti 75). Following Foucaults discussion of heterotopia, the concept has attracted widespread interest in social theory, connecting, for example, with Henri Lefebvre's work on the production of space, as Edward Soja remarks when he himself undertakes the study of heterotopias as particular spaces of representation "linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life," retaining "a partial unknowability . . . mystery and secretiveness" (67).
Focusing on Kameleon Man, a first novel by Kim Barry Brunhuber, a CBC reporter and investigative journalist turned fiction writer, I aim to explore the mixed race body as a heterotopia of difference, a third term in the equation normality/deviance on which Foucault based his theory of heterotopias, thereby underlining the relationship between place, positionality, and race. Heterotopias of difference, Marco Cenzatti argues, "are still places in which irreconcilable spaces coexist," but in a context where what constitutes irreconcilability is constantly contested and changing (79). Accordingly, I consider the mixed race body as heterotopic, an irreconcilable, fluid space in constant transformation, which blurs the boundaries between normalcy and deviance, sameness and difference, invisibility and recognition, contested by the gaze of others and contesting received notions of race, class, and even gender and sexuality. Kameleon Man probes the shifting positionality of mixed race subjectivity in terms of the production and consumption of culture, racialization, and identity in the globalization era through the figure of Stacey Schmidt, a twenty-one-year-old part-black college student, turned fashion model. Upon its publication, the book received strong reviews by renowned critics such as George Elliott...