UC Berkeley

The consumer DNA ancestry testing industry was estimated to have served two million customers in 2015 (Nelson, 2016). DNA ancestry testing is permeating media outlets and proliferating in forms of social media and popular culture. Viewers see performances of genetic ancestry test results on news programs, talk shows, educational programming, and social media sites. Given how ubiquitous DNA ancestry testing is in American households, and how often test results are being shared on social media sites such as YouTube, I argue that we can use DNA test reveals to ascertain the way race is viewed, performed, and negotiated. My research asks, what do the social media performances of DNA Ancestry tests tell us about how test takers see race and ethnicity? Do test-takers change their identity affiliations or the ways they view themselves after reading the results? If so, do test-takers rely more on the genetic component of identity or are there other criteria that have more weight? The performative, dramatic nature of genetic results being read in front of an audience means we can use these reveals to understand what people consider the appropriate criteria to belong to an ethnic or racial group, and to see what conditions cause people to change identity or reject the test results.