A Companion to Global Gender History. Группа авторов
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a male and female spirit rather than the more common single spirit (Rifkin, 2011).
To questions about the category “woman” that come from intersex and trans individuals are those that come from other categories of difference. As feminist scholars put increasing emphasis on differences among women, Butler and others have wondered whether it made sense to talk about “women” at all (1990: 14). Similarly, Mohanty argues against the notion that women constitute a “coherent group with identical interests and desires regardless of class, ethnic or racial location, or contradictions” since that implies “a notion of gender or sexual difference, or even patriarchy, which can be applied universally and cross‐culturally” (2003: 55). The problem with this essentialist thinking is that women are constituted prior to entry into specific social, cultural, and historical contexts. Like race, women, sex, and gender are thus terms whose meanings are unstable and murky. Nonetheless, activists could argue that the contention that gender, or even “women,” are merely cultural constructs erases the very real oppression that many women experience. They have extended Higgenbotham’s idea of race as a discursive tool for liberation and Spivak’s of strategic essentialism to gender, recognizing that this is essential for understanding intersectional oppression, and using this knowledge as a basis for engaged scholarship or activism.
The Inseparable Nature of Race and Gender
The key insight of intersectionality is that no one identity or category of oppression should be considered apart from other identities, and although feminist theorists considered race and gender separately, they also increasingly considered them together. “By understanding how race is a gendered category, we can more systematically address the structural underpinnings of why women’s experiences differ so radically and how these differences are relationally constituted” (Liu, 1991: 269).
Many African American and Native American scholars draw attention to the ways race often operated historically to unify women and men in categories that divided women. After emancipation, black women, regardless of class, were denied entrance to train cars designated for women as a safe space. Feminist writer bell hooks (2000) asserts that during the Civil Rights movements in the United States, race unified black men and women, dividing women along color lines as white women sought to protect their privilege and dominance over black women. In examples such as these, Maynard argues, race “does not simply make women’s subordination greater; race makes it qualitatively different” (in Bhavnani, 2001: 125). Women in traditional Native American cultures, for example, often enjoyed gender equity not available to European women settlers in the dominant white culture who were subordinated within patriarchal hierarchies. The system was not without contestation. In pre‐Columbian Andean societies, women held considerable influence in religious practices and within a pantheon of deities, which was considered totally unacceptable to Catholic priests and Spanish conquerors. In each of these examples, race operates as a distinct category of analysis, but intersects with gender.
According to Tessie Liu, racial principles based on boundaries of lineage are necessarily closely linked to reproductive politics and control over women. Colonial rule was “contingent on the colonists’ ability to construct and enforce legal and social classifications for who was white and who was native, who counted as European and by what degree, which progeny were legitimate and which were not” (1991: 272). Particularly in Latin America, secular authority was always in conflict with the clergy, since the latter sought to sanctify marriage between “unequal” partners if the couple insisted or the woman was pregnant. For their part, parents and the colonial authorities viewed marriages that crossed lines of race, status, and class as a threat to “racial purity” and the consolidation of wealth in the hands of the elite.
Kim Hall associates the development of modern concepts of race – and the link between race and gender – with geographical exploration and colonization. In her literary study of tropes of lightness and darkness, she argues that the binaries between black and white, pervasive in literature of the early modern period, “might be called the originary language of racial difference in English culture” (1995: 2). While the binarism in tropes of light and dark certainly predates the Renaissance, Hall says, “during this period it becomes increasingly concerned with skin color, economics, and politics,” which conflate race and gender (3). In the context of master/slave and property relations, Higgenbotham, too, sees race and gender as inseparable and constructed within cultural contexts, resulting in racialized concepts of women’s bodies and experiences. European women were seen as guardians of social order and civilization, and reproducers of the ruling elite whose daily activities came under group scrutiny. In contrast, native and enslaved women were sexualized as targets of rape and “as reproducers of the labor force and valued property,” but also not seen as women at all. They worked in the fields alongside enslaved men and were never accorded the respect or leisure granted white women. Post‐abolition the “lynching of black men [accused of rape of white women], with its often attendant castration,” situated white women as tropes for sexual purity (Higgenbotham, 1992: 264).
Native American scholars have drawn attention to US government policies affecting women’s bodies. As Paula Gunn Allen, among others, has pointed out, healthcare workers estimate that “over 25 percent of [American] Indian women … have been sterilized without their consent,” a practice that also occurred in Canada, and among women of all races in Puerto Rico (1998: 38). Legal theorist Dorothy E. Roberts has highlighted an “alarming trend toward greater state intervention into the lives of pregnant women suspected of drug abuse, the majority of whom are poor and black” (1995: 383). These women are primary targets for punitive prosecution, Roberts states, “not because they are more likely to be guilty of fetal abuse, but because they are poor and black” (388; emphasis added). The term “fetal rights” arose after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, but the movement grew rapidly in the 1990s with the racist (and false) fear that crack‐addicted black mothers in inner cities were giving birth to damaged and vicious children. More recently it has expanded to erode the rights of all women to take medications their doctors prescribe, and even leading some women who miscarry to be charged with crimes (“A Woman’s Rights,” New York Times, December 2018). Around the world policies based on gender and race work together in restricting access to contraception. The Mexico City Policy, enforced under several US Republican presidents, imposed a global gag rule, denying funds for women’s health to organizations that even mention abortion (https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/89/12/11‐091660/en).
The primary trope of nationalism has been the family, evident in such terms as fatherland, motherland, fathers of our nation, or first family. Anne McClintock explains the paradox that women are acknowledged as the bearers or mothers of the nation; however, the militancy of the fathers is generally recognized and remembered over the contributions of women. Consequently, nationalisms have typically sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation, and masculinized hope (1995: 380). Operating within this gendered discourse of nationalism is the metalanguage of race, Higgenbotham’s term. Both the limits and legitimations of the nation‐state specifically serve interests of racial power and privilege. For example, in the historical development of Afrikaaner identity and nationalism in South Africa, white women were disempowered within a gendered hierarchy, but they nonetheless actively asserted their role in motherhood to legitimate white domination. Similarly, Scott Richard Lyons (2000) outlines the shifting meanings of the term sovereignty as applied to Native American nations. Initially tribes were recognized as equal and independent nations, but later in the imperialistic discourse of nation, based on the assumed “natural” trope of the family, American Indians were represented as children. They were called the Red children of the Great White Father and thereby dispossessed of land and authority. In this national discourse, American Indian women were not recognized as women at all (even in cases of gender equality within tribes), nor as bearers of the nation. That role was reserved for white women. Mark Rifkin points to a similar phenomenon whereby European Americans sought to “insert American Indians into the ideological system of heterosexuality,” with special emphasis on the monogamous conjugal couple, which denied countervailing cultural patterns such as polygamous