Project WHITENESS

Un/Doing Whiteness:
Weißsein als Prozess in amerikanischen Fernsehserien
seit den 1990er Jahren

Based on Rogers Brubaker’s idea of an “ethnicity without groups,” this sub-project investigates the category of “whiteness,” central equally for historical and contemporary America, not as a form of group membership, but instead as a social dynamic that can only be understood in its processual nature. An investigation of the supposedly “white mainstream” or, rather, the supposed white Mainstream of American society can concentrate on “whiteness” as an oscillation between being marked and unmarked: in this sense, it is much less about the question of “being white,” as has been the focus of all multi-ethnic-oriented American research since the 1980s, but rather much more about “doing whiteness.” The practice of “doing” and “undoing” whiteness, as it has been presented and enacted in American television series since the 1990s, is the focus of this investigation.