Resumen de "Miss La La's" Teeth: Reflections on Degas and "Race"
In the representation of “race” in Edgar Degas’s Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, the precarious positioning of the acrobat’s teeth gives extraordinary embodiment to a historical moment of white masculine anxiety. Degas portrayed the mulatto performer at a time when scientific racism was attempting to police the boundaries between whites and blacks while fixating on the hybrid product of their sexual contact. Operating within this framework, “Miss La La” became an unstable focus for Degas’s contradictory projections of creativity and identity.
