Mixing: a dialogue between mixedness and hybridity through data examples

This article stages a dialogue between two concepts from different social science traditions, mixedness and hybridity, both concerned with identities as a product of encounters and alliances across ethnic, cultural and racial differences. Applying a psycho-social perspective to empirical data on identity transitions amongst first time mothers in East London, we demonstrate how the reiterative formations, enfoldings and changes in subjectivity, within a broader multicultural setting, can contribute depth to the idea of intermingling in both concepts. Our three case examples derive from the Bangladeshi-heritage sub-sample of new mothers. We draw upon each case to investigate multifarious and differential surfaces of flow, incorporation and excess between the internal and external. The salience of affect and materiality within these processes cannot be preknown, we suggest, but they are variously sustained and constrained in relation to the particularities of the content, extents and the sites of mixing. We show how, when it comes to actual occasions, there is no separating the personal, cultural and material; rather what emerges is a relentless succession of encounters between desire and limit. A limit can be intransigently external and material, but is also a product of biography, with generational antecedents and imaginative acts that come from or through the subject. The paper argues that unconscious intersubjective and intercorporeal dynamics ensure that hybrid subjectivities are never simply a reflection of external hybrid culture. In the third, major, case analysis, we add psycho-social depth to questions of ethics, comfort and discomfort in research relations.