Embodied Interpellation: Racist Bodily Interactions and Racialized Subject Formation

Louis Althusser shows how interpellation functions as a mechanism for the constituting of subjects delineated through ideology. While Althusser focuses his analysis on verbal interpellation, critical theorists have shown that interpellation need not be limited to vocative hails. In this article, I show how one can interpellate with their bodily motility, comportment, and even physiological functions. In particular, I argue that racist ideologies can become naturalized onto bodies in such a way that individuals can interpellate racialized others as inhabiting inferior social positions. Racist embodied interpellations call racialized subjects to see themselves occupying stereotypical images which can fundamentally impact identity shaping processes. However, it is not the case that this subject formation is ontologically totalizing. Rather, embodied interpellations can cause the hailed racialized subject to confront the conflict between their own self-image and the dominant stereotypical perception of them. Quill Kukla offers a systematic overview of interpellation and describes two features of a successful interpellation. I utilize a concrete example that illustrates the importance of this topic from the literature in philosophy of race and show how the example entails the features of a successful interpellation as outlined by Kukla.