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Confirming Pages
Under Western Eyes | CHANDRA TA LPADE MOHANTY 53
but rather are the framework that guides all of our
actions. To achieve this, we need to remind ourselves
of the dual politics of possibilities in our individual
and collective lives.
NOTES
1. I defi ne both as plural processes, the former refl ecting
the diversity of gendered realities around the world
and the latter in terms of economic, political, and
cultural processes. While both the multiple feminisms
and globalizations are mutually constitutive, they are
also distinct.
2. In addition to serving global capital through eco-
nomic means, Eisenstein (2005) argues that the U.S.
administration has used feminism for its imperial
policies via the war on terror.
3. Cross-border traders are those who buy food and
other consumer items in one country and sell it
another. In some regions, women take goods from
their home country to another and return with
goods from the foreign country to their own. Such
cross-border trade by women has been facilitated by
the economic globalization that has opened borders
between countries that previously did not allow such
easy fl ow of people and goods across borders.

REFERENCES
Acker, Joan. 2006. Class questions feminist answers. The
gender lens. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefi eld.
Beneria, Lourdes. 2003. Gender, development and global-
ization: Economics as if all people mattered. New York:
Routledge.
Desai, Manisha. 2007. The global women’s rights
movement and its discontents. President’s Message:
SWS Network News 24 (1): 2.
———. 2009a. From a uniform civil code to legal
pluralism: The continuing debates in India. In Gender,
family, and law in the Middle East and South Asia,
edited by Ken Cuno and Manisha Desai. Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press.
———. 2009b. Rethinking globalization: Gender and
the politics of possibilities. Lanhan, MD: Rowman &
Littlefi eld.
Eisenstein, Hester. 2005. A dangerous liaison? Feminism
and corporate globalization. Science & Society 69 (3):
487–518.
Nederveen Pieterse, Jan. 2004. Globalization and culture:
A cultural melange. Lagham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefi eld.
Pearson, Ruth. 2003. Feminist responses to economic glo-
balization. In Women reinventing globalization, edited
by Joanne Kerr and Caroline Sweetman. Oxford, UK:
Oxfam.

Simon-Kumar, Rachel. 2004. Negotiating emancipation:
Public sphere, Gender, and critiques of neo-liberalism.
International Feminist Journal of Politics 6 (3):
485–506.
R E A D I N G 4
Under Western Eyes
Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984)
What I wish to analyze is specifi cally the production
of the “third world woman” as a singular monolithic
subject in some recent (Western) feminist texts.
If one of the tasks of formulating and under-
standing the locus of “third world feminisms” is
delineating the way in which it resists and works
against what I am referring to as “Western feminist
discourse,” an analysis of the discursive construction
of “third world women” in Western feminism is an
important fi rst step.
Clearly Western feminist discourse and political
practice are neither singular nor homogeneous in
their goals, interests or analyses. However, it is pos-
sible to trace a coherence of effects resulting from the
implicit assumption of “the West” (in all its com-
plexities and contradictions) as the primary refer-
ent in theory and praxis. My reference to “Western
feminism” is by no means intended to imply that
it is a monolith. Rather, I am attempting to draw
attention to the similar effects of various textual
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54 CHAPTER 1 | Transnational Feminisms
strategies used by writers which codify Others as
non-Western and hence themselves as (implicitly)
Western. It is in this sense that I use that term West-
ern feminist.
My critique is directed at three basic analytic
principles which are present in (Western) feminist
discourse on women in the third world.
The fi rst analytic presupposition I focus on
is involved in the strategic location of the cat-
egory “women” vis-à-vis the context of analysis.
The assumption of women as an already consti-
tuted, coherent group with identical interests and
desires, regardless of class, ethnic or racial loca-
tion, or contradictions, implies a notion of gen-
der or sexual difference or even patriarchy which
can be applied universally and cross-cultur-
ally. (The context of analysis can be anything
from kinship structures and the organization
of labour or media representations.) The sec-
ond analytical presupposition is evident on the
methodological level, in the uncritical way “proof”
of universality and cross-cultural validity are pro-
vided. The third is a more specifi cally political
presupposition underlying the methodologies and
the analytic strategies, i.e., the model of power and
struggle they imply and suggest. I argue that as a
result of the two modes—or, rather, frames—of
analysis described above, a homogeneous notion

of the oppression of women as a group is assumed,
which, in turn, produces the image of an “average
third world woman.” This woman leads an essen-
tially truncated life based on her feminine gender
(read: sexually constrained) and her being “third
world” (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradi-
tion-bound, domestic, family- oriented, victimized,
etc.). This, I suggest, is in contrast to the (implicit)
self- representation of Western women as educated,
as modern, as having control over their own bodies
and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own
decisions.
“WOMEN” AS CATEGORY OF ANALYSIS,
OR: WE ARE ALL SISTERS IN STRUGGLE
By women as a category of analysis, I am refer-
ring to the crucial assumption that all of us of the
same gender, across classes and cultures, are some-
how socially constituted as a homogeneous group
identifi ed prior to the process of analysis. This is
an assumption which characterizes much feminist
discourse. The homogeneity of women as a group
is produced not on the basis of biological essentials
but rather on the basis of secondary sociological and
anthropological universals. Thus, for instance, in any
given piece of feminist analysis, women are charac-
terized as a singular group on the basis of a shared
oppression. What binds women together is a socio-
logical notion of the “sameness” of their oppression.
It is at this point that an elision takes place between
“women” as a discursively constructed group and
“women” as material subjects of their own history.1
Thus, the discursively consensual homogeneity of
“women” as a group is mistaken for the historically

specifi c material reality of groups of women. This
results in an assumption of women as an always
already constituted group, one which has been
labeled “powerless,” “exploited,” “sexually harassed,”
etc., by feminist scientifi c, economic, legal and soci-
ological discourses. (Notice that this is quite similar
to sexist discourse labeling women weak, emotional,
having math anxiety, etc.) This focus is not on
uncovering the material and ideological specifi ci-
ties that constitute a particular group of women as
“powerless” in a particular context. It is, rather, on
fi nding a variety of cases of “powerless” groups of
women to prove the general point that women as a
group are powerless.
This mode of defi ning women primarily in terms
of their object status (the way in which they are
affected or not affected by certain institutions and
systems) is what characterizes this particular form
of the use of “women” as a category of analysis.
In the context of Western women writing/study-
ing women in the third world, such objectifi ca-
tion (however benevolently motivated) needs to be
both named and challenged. As Valerie Amos and
Pratibha Parmar argue quite eloquently, “Feminist
theories which examine our cultural practices as
‘feudal residues’ or label us ‘traditional,’ also portray
us as politically immature women who need to be
versed and schooled in the ethos of Western femi-
nism. They need to be continually challenged . . . ”
(1984, 7).
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Under Western Eyes | CHANDRA TA LPADE MOHANTY 55
WOMEN AND THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
The best examples of universalization on the basis of
economic reductionism can be found in the liberal
“Women in Development” literature. Proponents
of this school seek to examine the effect of develop-
ment on third world women, sometimes from self-
designated feminist perspectives. At the very least, there
is an evident interest in and commitment to improv-
ing the lives of women in “developing” countries.
For instance, Perdita Huston (1979) states that
the purpose of her study is to describe the effect of
the development process on the “family unit and
its individual members” in Egypt, Kenya, Sudan,
Tunisia, Sri Lanka and Mexico. She states that the
“problems” and “needs” expressed by rural and
urban women in these countries all center around
education and training, work and wages, access to
health and other services, political participation and
legal rights. Huston relates all these “needs” to the
lack of sensitive development policies which exclude
women as a group or category. For her, the solution
is simple: implement improved development policies
which emphasize training for women fi eldworkers,
use women trainees, and women rural development
offi cers, encourage women’s cooperatives, etc. Here
again, women are assumed to be a coherent group
or category prior to their entry into “the develop-
ment process.” Huston assumes that all third world
women have similar problems and needs. Thus, they

must have similar interests and goals. However, the
interests of urban, middle-class, educated Egyp-
tian housewives, to take only one instance, could
surely not be seen as being the same as those of their
uneducated, poor maids? Development policies do
not affect both groups of women in the same way.
Practices which characterize women’s status and
roles vary according to class. Women are constituted
as women through the complex interaction between
class, culture, religion and other ideological institu-
tions and frameworks. They are not “women”—a
coherent group—solely on the basis of a particular
economic system or policy. Such reductive cross-
cultural comparisons result in the colonization of
the specifi cs of daily existence and the complexities
of political interests which women of different social
classes and cultures represent and mobilize.
Thus, it is revealing that for Perdita Huston,
women in the Third World countries she writes
about have “needs” and “problems,” but few if any
have “choices” or the freedom to act. This is an inter-
esting representation of women in the third world,
one which is signifi cant in suggesting a latent self-
presentation of Western women which bears look-
ing at. She writes: “What surprised and moved me
most as I listened to women in such very different
cultural settings was the striking commonality—
whether they were educated or illiterate, urban or
rural—of their most basic values: the importance
they assign to family, dignity and service to others”
(1979: 115). Would Huston consider such values
unusual for women in the West?
What is problematical about this kind of use of
“women” as a group, as a stable category of analy-

sis, is that it assumes an ahistorical, universal unity
between women based on a generalized notion of
their subordination. Instead of analytically demon-
strating the production of women as socio-economic
political groups within particular local contexts, this
analytical move limits the defi nition of the female
subject to gender identity, completely bypassing
social class and ethnic identities. What characterizes
women as a group is their gender (sociologically,
not necessarily biologically, defi ned) over and above
everything else, indicating a monolithic notion of
sexual difference. Because women are thus consti-
tuted as a coherent group, sexual difference becomes
coterminous with female subordination, and power
is automatically defi ned in binary terms: people who
have it (read: men), and people who do not (read:
women). Men exploit, women are exploited. Such
simplistic formulations are historically reductive;
they are also ineffectual in designing strategies to
combat oppressions. All they do is reinforce binary
divisions between men and women.
What would an analysis which did not do this
look like? Maria Mies’s work illustrates the strength
of Western feminist work on women in the third
world which does not fall into the traps discussed
above, Mies’s study of the lace makers of Narsapur,
India (1982), attempts to analyze carefully a sub-
stantial household industry in which “housewives”
produce lace doilies for consumption in the world
market. Through a detailed analysis of the structure
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56 CHAPTER 1 | Transnational Feminisms
of the lace industry, production and reproduction
relations, the sexual division of labor, profi ts and
exploitation, and the overall consequences of defi n-
ing women as “non-working housewives” and their
work as “leisure-time activity,” Mies demonstrates
the levels of exploitation in this industry and the
impact of this production system on the work and
living conditions of the women involved. In addi-
tion, she is able to analyze the “ideology of the
housewife,” the notion of a woman sitting in the
house, as providing the necessary subjective and
sociocultural element for the creation and mainte-
nance of a production system that contributes to the
increasing pauperization of women, and keeps them
totally atomized and disorganized as workers. Mies’s
analysis shows the effect of a certain historically and
culturally specifi c mode of patriarchal organization,
an organization constructed on the basis of the defi -
nition of the lace makers as “non-working house-
wives” at familial, local, regional, statewide and
international levels. The intricacies and the effects of
particular power networks are not only emphasized
but form the basis of Mies’s analysis of how this par-
ticular group of women is situated at the center of a
hegemonic, exploitative world market.
This is a good example of what careful, politi-
cally focused, local analyses can accomplish. It illus-
trates how the category of women is constructed in
a variety of political contexts that often exist simul-
taneously and are overlaid on top of one another.

There is no easy generalization in the direction of
“women” in India, or “women in the third world”;
nor is there a reduction of the political construction
of the exploitation of the lace makers to cultural
explanations about the passivity or obedience that
might characterize these women and their situation.
Finally, this mode of local, political analysis which
generates theoretical categories from within the situ-
ation and context being analyzed, also suggests cor-
responding effective strategies for organizing against
the exploitation faced by the lace makers. Narsapur
women are not mere victims of the production pro-
cess, because they resist, challenge and subvert the
process at various junctures. Here is one instance
of how Mies delineates the connections between
the housewife ideology, the self- consciousness of
the lace makers, and their inter-relationships as
contributing to the latent resistances she perceives
among the women.
The persistence of the housewife ideology, the self-
perception of the lace makers as petty commodity pro-
ducers rather than as workers, is not only upheld by the
structure of the industry as such but also by the delib-
erate propagation and reinforcement of reactionary
patriarchal norms and institutions. Thus, most of the
lace makers voiced the same opinion about the rules
of purdah and seclusion in their communities which
were also propagated by the lace exporters. In partic-
ular, the Kapu women said that they had never gone
out of their houses, that women of their community
could not do any work other than housework and lace
work etc. but in spite of the fact that most of them still
subscribed fully to the patriarchal norms of the gosha
women, there were also contradictory elements in their

consciousness. Thus, although they looked down with
contempt upon women who were able to work outside
the house—like untouchable Mala and Madiga women
or women of other lower castes—they could not ignore
the fact that these women were earning more money
precisely because they were not respectable housewives
but workers. At one discussion, they even admitted
that it would be better if they could also go out and do
coolie work. And when they were asked whether they
would be ready to come out of their houses and work
in one place in some sort of a factory, they said they
would do that. This shows that the purdah and house-
wife ideology, although still fully internalized, already
had some cracks, because it has been confronted with
several contradictory realities. (p. 157)
It is only by understanding the contradictions
inherent in women’s location within various struc-
tures that effective political action and challenges
can be devised. Mies’s study goes a long way toward
offering such analysis. While there are now an
increasing number of Western feminist writings in
this tradition,3 there is also, unfortunately, a large
block of writing which succumbs to the cultural
reductionism discussed earlier.
As discussed earlier, a comparison between West-
ern feminist self-presentation and Western feminist
re-presentation of women in the third world yields
signifi cant results. Universal images of “the third
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Confirming Pages
Under Western Eyes | CHANDRA TA LPADE MOHANTY
(1991) 57
world Woman” (the veiled woman, chaste virgin,
etc.), images constructed from adding the “third
world difference” to “sexual difference,” are predi-
cated upon (and hence obviously bring into sharper
focus) assumptions about Western women as secu-
lar, liberated and having control over their own lives.
This is not to suggest that Western women are secu-
lar, liberated and in control of their own lives. I am
referring to a discursive self-presentation, not neces-
sarily to material reality. If this were a material real-
ity, there would be no need for political movements
in the West. Similarly, only from the vantage point
of the West is it possible to defi ne the “third world”
as underdeveloped and economically dependent.
Without the overdetermined discourse that creates
the third world, there would be no (singular and
privileged) First World. Without the “third world
woman,” the particular self-presentation of Western
women mentioned above would be problematical. I
am suggesting, then, that the one enables and sus-
tains the other.
NOTES
Terms such as third and fi rst world are problemati-
cal both in suggesting over-simplifi ed similarities
between and among countries thus labeled, and in
reinforcing implicitly existing economic, cultural
and ideological hierarchies which are conjured up
using such terminology. I use the term “third world”
with full awareness of its problems, only because this
is the terminology available to us at the moment.

1. Elsewhere I have discussed this particular point in
detail in a critique of Robin Morgan’s construction of
“women’s herstory” in her introduction to Sisterhood
Is Global: The International Women’s Movement
Anthology (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984).
See my “Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of
Experience,” Copyright 1, “Fin de Siecle 2000,” 30–44,
especially 35–7.
2. These views can also be found in differing degrees
in collections such as Wellesley Editorial Committee
(ed.), Women and National Development: The
Complexities of Change (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1977), and Signs, Special Issue,
“Development and the Sexual Division of Labor,” 7,
no. 2 (Winter 1981). For an excellent introduction
of WID issues, see ISIS, Women in Development:
A Resource Guide for Organization and Action
(Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1984). For
a politically focused discussion of feminism and
development and the stakes for poor Third World
women, see Gita Sen and Caren Grown, Development
Crises and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s
Perspectives (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987).
3. See essays by Vanessa Maher, Diane Elson and
Ruth Pearson, and Maila Stevens in Kate Young,
Carole Walkowitz, and Roslyn McCullagh (eds), Of
Marriage and the Market: Women’s Subordination
in International Perspective (London: CSE Books,
1981); and essays by Vivian Mota and Michelle
Mattelart in June Nash and Helen I. Safa (eds), Sex
and Class in Latin America: Women’s Perspectives on
Politics, Economics and the Family in the Third World
(South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1980).

For examples of excellent, self-conscious work by
feminists writing about women in their own historical
and geographical locations, see Marnia Lazreg (1988)
on Algerian women, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “A
Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman’s
Text from the Third World,” in her In Other Worlds:
Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen,
1987), 241–68, and Lata Mani’s essay “Contentious
Traditions: The Debate on SATI in Colonial India,”
Cultural Critique 7 (Fall 1987), 119–56.
REFERENCES
Amos, Valerie, and Pratibha Parmar. 1984. “Challenging
Imperial Feminism,” Feminist Review 17: 3-19.
Huston, Perdita. 1979. Third World Women Speak Out.
New York: Praeger.
Mies, Maria. 1982. The Lacemakers of Narsapur: Indian
Housewives Produce for the World Market. London: Zed.
57 2/1/10 12:57:05 PM2/1/10 12:57:05 PM
Unequal Freedom
H o w R a c e a n d G e n d e r
S h a p e d A m e r i c a n C i t i z e n s h i p
a n d L a b o r
• •

Evelyn Nakano Glenn
H A RVA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
Copyright © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard
College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2004
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano.
Unequal freedom : how race and gender shaped American
citizenship and
labor / Evelyn Nakano Glenn.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-00732-8 (cloth)
ISBN 0-674-01372-7 (pbk.)
1. Alien labor—United States—History. 2. Women alien labor—
United
States—History. 3. Minorities—Employment—United States—
History.
4. Citizenship—United States—History. 5. Immigrants—
Economic

conditions—United States. 6. Immigrants—Social conditions—
United
States. I. Title: How race and gender shaped American
citizenship and
labor. II. Title.
HD8081 .A5 G57 2002
323.6!0973—dc21 2002020531
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 Integrating Race and Gender 6
2 Citizenship: Universalism and Exclusion 18
3 Labor: Freedom and Coercion 56
4 Blacks and Whites in the South 93
5 Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest 144
6 Japanese and Haoles in Hawaii 190
7 Understanding American Inequality 236
Notes 267
Index 301

• 1 •
Integrating Race
and Gender
To e x a m i n e h o w labor and citizenship constitute—and are
consti-
tuted by—race and gender, we must conceptualize race and
gender as
interacting, interlocking structures and then consider how they
are in-
corporated into and shaped by various social institutions.1 Thus
the
first challenge is to bring race and gender within the same
analytic
plane.
In the past, gender and race have constituted separate fields of
schol-
arly inquiry. By studying each in isolation, however, these
fields have
marginalized major segments of the communities they claimed
to rep-
resent. In studies of “race,” men of color stood as the universal
racial
subject, while in studies of “gender,” white women were
positioned as
the universal gendered subject. Women of color were left out of
both
narratives, rendered invisible both as racial and as gendered
subjects.2
In the 1980s women of color began to address their omission
through detailed historical and ethnographic studies of African
Ameri-

can, Latina, and Asian American women in relation to work,
family,
and community.3 These scholars not only uncovered overlooked
di-
mensions of experience, they also exposed the flaws in
theorizing from
a narrow social base. For example, explanations of gender
inequality
based on middle-class white women’s experience focused on
women’s
encapsulation in the domestic sphere and economic dependence
on
men. These concepts by and large did not apply to black
women, who
historically had to work outside the home.
6
Initial attempts to bring race into the same frame as gender
treated
the two as independent axes. The bracketing of gender was in
some
sense deliberate because one concern of early feminism was to
un-
cover commonalities that could unite women politically.
However, if
we begin with gender separated out, we have to “add” race in
order
to account for the situation of women of color. This leads to an
additive model in which women of color are described as
suffering
from “double” jeopardy (or “triple” oppression if class is
included).
Women scholars of color expressed dissatisfaction with this

model. Af-
rican American, Latina, Asian American, and Native American
women,
they said, did not experience race and gender as separate or
additive,
but as simultaneous and linked. They offered concepts such as
“inter-
sectionality,” “multiple consciousness,” “interlocking systems
of op-
pression,” and “racialized gender” to express this simultaneity.4
Yet, de-
spite increased recognition of the interconnectedness of gender
and
race, race remained undertheorized. In the absence of a “theory”
of
race comparable to a “theory” of gender, a comprehensive
theory of
both has proven elusive. Especially needed is a theory that
neither sub-
ordinates race and gender to some broader (presumably more
primary)
set of relations such as class nor substantially flattens the
complexity
of these concepts.5 Building on the valuable work of such
scholars as
Tessie Liu, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Amy Kaminsky, and
Ann
Stoler, I argue that a synthesis of social constructionist streams
within
critical race and feminist studies offers a framework for
integrated anal-
ysis.6 Social constructionism provides a common vocabulary
and set of
concepts with which to look at how gender and race are
mutually con-
stituted—that is, at the ways in which gender is racialized and

race is
gendered.
Gender
Social constructionist theory has had somewhat different
trajectories
with respect to gender and to race. In both fields social
constructionism
arose as an alternative to biological and essentialist conceptions
that
rendered gender and race static and ahistorical, but it achieved
central-
ity earlier and has been elaborated in greater detail in feminist
schol-
arship on women and gender than in race studies. This is so
even
though—or perhaps because—gender seems to be rooted more
firmly
than race in biology: in bodies, reproduction, and sexuality.
Indeed,
Integrating Race and Gender 7
feminist scholars adopted the term “gender” precisely to free
our
thinking from the constrictions of naturalness and biological
inevitabil-
ity attached to the concept of sex. In the mid-1970s Gayle
Rubin pro-
posed the term “sex-gender system” to capture the idea of
societal ar-
rangements by which biological sexuality was transformed into
socially

significant gender.7
Since then, gender has emerged as the closest thing we have to a
uni-
fying concept in feminist studies, cutting across the various
disciplines
and theoretical schools that make up the field. Many feminist
histori-
ans and sociologists use gender as an analytic concept to refer
to so-
cially created meanings, relationships, and identities organized
around
reproductive differences.8 Others focus on gender as a social
status and
organizing principle of social institutions detached from and
going far
beyond reproductive differences,9 and still others focus on
gender as a
product of everyday social practice.10 The concept of gender
thus pro-
vides an overarching framework from which to view historical,
cultural,
and situational variability in definitions of womanhood and
manhood,
in meanings of masculinity and femininity, in relationships
between
men and women, and in their relative power and political status.
If one
accepts gender as variable, then one must acknowledge that it is
never
fixed but is continually constituted and reconstituted.
By loosening the connection to the body, the notion of socially
con-
structed gender freed us from thinking of sex/gender as solely,
or even

primarily, a characteristic of individuals. By examining gender
as a con-
stitutive feature and organizing principle of collectivities, social
institu-
tions, historical processes, and social practices, feminist
scholars have
shown that major areas of life, including sexuality, family,
education,
economy, and state, are shot through with conflicting interests
and hi-
erarchies of power and privilege along gender lines. As an
organizing
principle, gender involves both cultural meanings and material
rela-
tions. That is, gender is constituted simultaneously through
deploy-
ment of gendered rhetoric, symbols, and images and through
alloca-
tion of resources along gender lines. Thus an adequate account
of any
particular phenomenon from the perspective of gender requires
look-
ing at both representation and material arrangements. For
example,
understanding the persistent gender gap in wages involves
analyzing
cultural evaluations of gendered work, such as caring, and
gendered
meanings of concepts, such as “skill,” as well as divisions of
labor in
8 Unequal Freedom
the home, occupational segregation, and labor market

stratification.
Recent theoretical work is moving toward imploding the
distinction
between sex and gender. The distinction assumes the prior
existence
of “something real” out of which social relationships and
cultural
meanings are elaborated. Poststructuralist feminist critics have
problematized the distinction by pointing out that sex and
sexual
meanings are themselves culturally constructed. The sociologist
Judith
Lorber carefully unpacks three concepts and shows that they are
all so-
cially constructed: biological sex, which refers to either genetic
or mor-
phological characteristics; sexuality, which refers to desire and
orienta-
tion; and gender, which refers to social status and identity. One
result
of this kind of work is to undermine categoricalism, the idea
that there
are “really” two sexes or two genders or two sexual
orientations. At
present, the conceptual distinctions among sex, sexuality, and
gender
are still being debated, and new work on the body is revealing
the in-
tertwining and complexity of these concepts.11
Race
Scholars have been slower to abandon the idea of race as rooted
in
biological markers, even though they recognize that social
attitudes

and arrangements, not biology, maintain white dominance. As
Barbara
Fields points out, historians were reluctant to accept the
conclusion,
reached by biologists by early in the twentieth century, that race
did
not correspond to any biological referent and that racial
categories
were so arbitrary as to be meaningless. Race was exposed as a
social
creation—a fiction that divided and categorized individuals by
pheno-
typic markers, such as skin color, which supposedly signified
underly-
ing differences. Nonetheless, as Peggy Pascoe notes, historians
contin-
ued well into the 1980s to study “races” as immutable
categories, to
speak of race as a force in history, and to view racism as a
psychological
product rather than as a product of social history. Pascoe
suggests that
the lack of a separate term, like “gender,” to refer to “socially
sig-
nificant race” may have retarded full recognition of race as a
social con-
struct. In sociology, liberal scholarship took the form of
studying “race
relations”—that is, examining relations among groups that were
al-
ready constituted as distinct entities. Quantitative researchers
treated
race as a preexisting “fact” of social life, an independent
variable to be

correlated with or regressed against other variables. How
categories
such as black and white were historically created and
maintained was
not investigated.12
Only in the late 1980s did historians and social scientists begin
to
systematically study variation and change in the drawing of
racial cate-
gories and boundaries. The greatest attention has been paid to
the con-
struction of blackness. In an influential pair of essays, Fields
examined
shifts in the definition and concept of blackness over the course
of slav-
ery, Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era. Slaveowners created
the
category “black” from disparate African groups, and then
maintained
the category by incorporating growing numbers of those of
“mixed”
parentage. Concerned with maximizing the number of slaves,
slave-
owners settled on the principle that a child’s status followed
that of
the mother, in violation of the customary patriarchal principle
of inher-
itance. Exploring the “one-drop rule” for defining blackness in
the
United States, James Davis shows it to be peculiar in light of
the wide
variation among Latin American, Caribbean, and North

American so-
cieties in the status of people of mixed ancestry. Competing
under-
standings of racial categories may even coexist in the same
society. In
Louisiana, Virginia Dominguez found that the “Creole”
designation
was claimed both by people of mixed black-white ancestry (to
distin-
guish themselves from darker “blacks”) and by white
descendants of
original French settlers (to distinguish themselves from later
Anglo in-
migrants). By the 1970s, however, white “Creoles” had ceded
the label
to the mixed population and relabeled themselves as
“French.”13
Whiteness has also been problematized. Historians have looked
at
the shift from an emphasis on “Anglo-Saxon” identity to a more
inclu-
sive “white” identity and the assimilation into the white
category of
groups that had been considered separate races, such as the
Irish, Jews,
and Italians.14 These groups achieved “whiteness” through a
combi-
nation of external circumstances and their own agency. State
and so-
cial policies organized along a black-white binary required
individuals
and groups to be placed in one category or the other.
Individuals and
groups also actively claimed whiteness in order to attain the
rights and

privileges enjoyed by already established white Americans.
Because of
the association of whiteness with full legal rights, scholars in
the field of
critical legal studies have scrutinized the concept of whiteness
in the
law. Cheryl Harris, for example, argues that courts have
protected ra-
10 Unequal Freedom
cial privilege by interpreting whiteness as property, including
the right
to exclude others deemed to be nonwhite.15
Only a few scholars have looked beyond the black-white binary
that
dominates conceptions of race. Yen Espiritu examined the
forging of
a pan–Asian American identity in the late 1960s when Chinese,
Japa-
nese, and Filipino student activists came together to organize in
“third
world” solidarity with African American and Latino students.
Activ-
ists asserted both essentialist grounds (similarities in culture
and ap-
pearance) and instrumental grounds (a common history of
discrimina-
tion and stereotyping) as the basis for the new identity. Yet
scholars
have pointed to tensions and divisions among Asian American
groups
along ethnic, class, generational, and political lines, for

example be-
tween longer-settled Japanese and Chinese and more recently
arrived
Filipinos, South Asians, and Southeast Asians. Also, Aihwa Ong
argues
that among new Asian immigrants, rich and poor groups are
being dif-
ferentially “racialized” within the black-white binary in the
United
States: Well-educated professional and managerial Chinese
immi-
grants are “whitened” and assimilated into the American middle
class,
while poor Khmer, dependent on welfare, are “blackened.”16
Many of these studies on shifting racial categories and
meanings
have been influenced by the pathbreaking theoretical work of
the so-
ciologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant. Their model of
racial
formation is rooted in neomarxist conceptions of class
formation, but
they specifically position themselves against existing models
that sub-
sume race under some presumably broader category such as
class or na-
tion. They assert that in the United States “race is a
fundamental axis
of social organization,” not an epiphenomenon of some other
category.
At the same time, they see race not as fixed but as “an unstable
and
‘decentered’ complex of social meaning constantly being
transformed
by political struggle.” The terrain on which struggle is waged

has var-
ied historically. Just as social constructionism arose as an
alternative to
biologism or essentialism in the twentieth century, the concept
of bio-
logical race arose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to
replace
religious paradigms for viewing differences between Europeans
(Chris-
tians) and “others” (non-Christians) encountered in the age of
con-
quest. With the waning of religious belief in a god-given social
order,
race differences and the superiority of white Europeans to
“others”
came to be justified and legitimated by “science.” Omi and
Winant
note that the “invocation of scientific criteria to demonstrate the
natu-
ral basis of racial hierarchy was both a logical consequence of
the rise of
[scientific] knowledge and an attempt to provide a subtle and
more
nuanced account of human complexity in the new ‘enlightened’
age.”17
After World War II, liberal politics emphasized equality under
the
law and an assumption of sameness in daily encounters. In the
1960s
and 1970s identity politics among civil rights activists

emphasized dif-
ferences but valorized them with such ideas as Black Power and
“La
Raza.” The 1980s and 1990s saw a questioning of the
essentialism and
solidity of racial and sex/gender categories and a focus on
structural
concepts of racial and patriarchal social orders. Paralleling the
struc-
tural approach to gender, Omi and Winant assert that race is a
central
organizing principle of social institutions, focusing especially
on the
“racial state” as an arena for creating, maintaining, and
contesting ra-
cial boundaries and meanings. Their concept of the racial state
is akin
to feminist conceptions of the state as patriarchal.18
An Integrated Framework
There are important points of congruence between the concept
of ra-
cial formation and the concept of socially constructed gender.
These
convergences point the way toward a framework in which race
and
gender are defined as mutually constituted systems of
relationships—
including norms, symbols, and practices—organized around
perceived
differences. This definition focuses attention on the processes
by which
racialization and engendering occur, rather than on
characteristics of
fixed race or gender categories. These processes take place at

multiple
levels, including
representation—the deployment of symbols, language, and
images to
express and convey race/gender meanings;
micro-interaction—the application of race/gender norms,
etiquette,
and spatial rules to orchestrate interaction within and across
race/
gender boundaries; and
social structure—rules regulating the allocation of power and
re-
sources along race/gender lines.
Within this integrated framework, race and gender share three
key
features as analytic concepts: (1) they are relational concepts
whose
12 Unequal Freedom
construction involves (2) representation and material relations
and (3)
in which power is a constitutive element. Each of these features
is im-
portant in terms of building a framework that both analyzes
inequality
and incorporates a politics of change.
Relationality

By relational I mean that race and gender categories (such as
black/
white, woman/man) are positioned and therefore gain meaning
in re-
lation to each other. According to post-structural analysis,
meaning
within Western epistemology is constructed in terms of
dichotomous
oppositions or contrasts. Oppositional categories require
suppressing
variability within each category and exaggerating differences
between
categories. Moreover, since the dichotomy is imposed over a
complex
“reality,” it is inherently unstable. Stability is achieved by
making the
dichotomy hierarchical, that is, by according one term primacy
over
the other. In race and gender dichotomies, the dominant
category is
rendered “normal” and therefore “transparent” while the other is
the
variant and therefore “problematic.” Thus white appears to be
race-
less19 and man appears to be genderless. The opposition also
disguises
the extent to which the categories are actually interdependent.
One can accept the notion of meaning being constructed through
contrast without assuming that such contrasts take the form of
fixed
dichotomies. In the United States “white” has been primarily
con-
structed against “black,” but it has also been positioned in
relation
to various “others.” For example, the category “Anglo” in the

South-
west, which is constructed in contrast to “Mexican,” and the
category
“haole” in Hawaii, which is constructed in contrast to both
Native Ha-
waiians and Asian plantation workers, are not identical in
meaning to
the category “white” in the South and the Northeast. Similarly,
the
meaning of dominant masculinity has varied as it has been
contrasted
to historically and regionally differing subordinate
masculinities and
femininities.
The concept of relationality is important for several reasons.
First, as
in the above examples, it helps problematize the dominant
categories
of whiteness and masculinity, which depend on contrast. The
impor-
tance of contrast is illustrated by the formation of “linked
identities” in
the cases of housewives and their domestic employees,
reformers and
the targets of reform, and colonizers and colonized peoples.20
In each
of these cases the dominant group’s self-identity (for example,
as moral,
rational, and benevolent) depends on casting complementary
qualities

(such as immoral, irrational, and needy) onto the subordinate
“other.”
Second, relationality helps point out the ways in which
“differences”
among groups are systematically related. Too often “difference”
is un-
derstood simply as experiential diversity, as in some versions of
multi-
culturalism.21 The concept of relationality suggests that the
lives of dif-
ferent groups are interconnected, even without face-to-face
relations.
Thus, for example, a white person in America enjoys privileges
and a
higher standard of living by virtue of the subordination and
lower stan-
dard of living of people of color, even if that particular white
person is
not exploiting or taking advantage of a person of color.
Third, relationality helps address the critique that social
construc-
tionism, by rejecting the fixity of categories, fosters the
postmodern
notion that race and gender categories and meanings are free-
floating
and can mean anything we want them to mean. Viewing race
and gen-
der categories and meanings as relational partly addresses this
critique
by providing “anchor” points—though these points are not
static.
Representation and Material Relations

The social construction of race and gender is a matter of both
material
relations and cultural representation. This point is important
because
a social constructionist approach, which eschews biology and
essen-
tialism, could be interpreted as concerned solely with language
and im-
ages. This is particularly tempting in the case of race, where it
can be
argued that there is no objective referent. Indeed, Barbara
Fields has
argued that race is a category without content, unrooted in
material re-
ality; race is pure ideology, a lens through which people view
and make
sense of their experiences.22 However, Fields seems to be
conflating bi-
ology and material reality. It is one thing to say that race and
gender are
not biological givens, but quite another to say that they exist
only in the
realm of representation or signification. Race and gender are
organiz-
ing principles of social institutions. Social arrangements, such
as labor
market segmentation, residential segregation, and stratification
of gov-
ernment benefits along race and gender lines, produce and
reproduce
14 Unequal Freedom
real-life differences that cannot be understood purely in

representa-
tional terms.
Conversely, other theorists view meaning systems as
epiphenom-
ena and maintain that race and gender inequality can be
understood
through structural analysis alone. But historical evidence
suggests that
a materialist approach alone is not sufficient either. As
historians of
working-class formation have pointed out, one cannot make a
direct
connection between concrete material conditions and specific
forms of
consciousness, identity, and political activity. Rather, race,
gender, and
class consciousness draw on the available rhetoric of race,
gender, and
class. In nineteenth-century England skilled male artisans
threatened
by industrialization were able to organize and articulate their
class
rights by drawing on available concepts of manhood: the dignity
of
skilled labor and family headship. Symbols of masculinity were
thus
constitutive of class identity. Their counterparts in the United
States
drew on symbols of race, claiming rights on the basis of their
status
as “free” labor, in contrast to black slaves, Chinese contract
workers,
and other figures symbolizing “unfree labor.”23 Class formation
in the
United States was then and continues to be infused with racial

as well
as gender meanings.
In the contemporary United States, the paucity of culturally
avail-
able class discourse seems to play a role in damping down class
con-
sciousness. Lillian Rubin found that white working-class men
and
women whose incomes were stagnating or declining were
strikingly
silent about class. Instead they drew on a long tradition of racial
rheto-
ric, blaming immigrants and blacks, not corporations or
capitalists, for
their economic anxieties. By constructing immigrants and
blacks as un-
worthy beneficiaries of welfare and affirmative action, they
articulated
their own identities as whites, rather than as members of an
economic
class.24
The preceding examples suggest a dialogical relation between
mate-
rial conditions and cultural representation. The language of
race, gen-
der, and class formation draws on historical legacy but also
grows out
of political struggle. Omi and Winant’s concept of
rearticulation—the
investment of already present ideas and knowledge with new
mean-
ings—is relevant here. For example, the black civil rights and
women’s
liberation movements in the 1960s and 1970s drew on existing

symbols
and language about human rights, but combined them in new
ways and
gave them new meanings (“the personal is political,” “Black
Power”)
that fostered mass political organizing.
Power
The organization and signification of power are central to the
con-
structionist framework, despite the frequent charge that this
approach
elides issues of power and inequality. For Joan Scott, gender is
a pri-
mary way of signifying relations of power; for R. W. Connell,
gender is
constituted by power, labor, and cathexis. Power and politics
are also
integral to Omi and Winant’s definitions of race and racism,
when they
describe race as constantly being transformed by political
struggle and
racism as aimed at creating and maintaining structures of
domination
based on essentialist conceptions of race.25
The concept of power as constitutive of race and gender draws
on
an expanded notion of politics coming from several sources.
One is

the feminist movement, where activists and scholars have
exposed the
power and domination, conflict and struggle that saturate areas
of so-
cial life thought to be private or personal: sexuality, family,
love, dress,
art. Another is Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, the
taken-for-
granted practices and assumptions that make domination seem
natural
and inevitable to both the dominant and the subordinate. Social
rela-
tions outside the realm of formal politics—art, literature, ritual,
cus-
tom, and everyday interaction—establish and reinforce power;
for this
reason, oppositional struggle also takes place outside the realm
of for-
mal politics, in forms such as artistic and cultural production. A
third is
Michel Foucault’s work on sexuality and scientific knowledge.
Power in
these loci is often not recognized because it is exercised not
through
formal domination but through disciplinary complexes and
modes of
knowledge.26
In all of these formulations, power is seen as simultaneously
perva-
sive and dispersed in social relations of all kinds, not just those
con-
ventionally thought of as political. This point is particularly
relevant
to race and gender, where power is lodged in taken-for-granted
as-

sumptions and practices, takes forms that do not involve force
or threat
of force, and occurs in dispersed locations. Thus contesting race
and
gender hierarchies may involve challenging everyday
assumptions and
16 Unequal Freedom
practices, take forms that do not involve direct confrontation,
and oc-
cur in locations not considered political.
T h e f r a m e wo r k I have laid out makes race and gender
amenable to
historical analysis so that they can be seen as mutually
constitutive. If
race and gender are socially constructed, they must arise at
specific mo-
ments under particular circumstances and will change as these
circum-
stances change. One can examine how gender and race
differences
arise, change over time, and vary across social and geographic
locations
and institutional domains. Race and gender are not
predetermined but
are the product of men’s and women’s actions in specific
historical con-
texts. To understand race and gender we must examine not only
how
dominant groups and institutions attempt to impose particular
mean-
ings but also how subordinate groups contest dominant

conceptions
and construct alternative meanings.
ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Integrating Race and
Gender2. Citizenship: Universalism and Exclusion3. Labor:
Freedom and Coercion4. Blacks and Whites in the South5.
Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest6. Japanese and Haoles in
Hawaii7. Understanding American InequalityNotesIndex
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T1iEORIZING DIFFERENCE FROM
MULTIRACIAL FEMINISM
MAXINE BACA ZINN and BONNIE THORNTON DILL
Women of color have long challenged the hegemony of femi-
nisms constructed primarily around the lives of white middle-
class women. Since the late 1960s, U.S. women of color have
taken issue with unitary theories of gender. Our critiques grew
out of the widespread concern about the exclusion of women of
color from feminist scholarship and the misinterpretation of
our experiences,1 and ultimately "out of the very discourses,
de-
nying, permitting, and producing difference."2 Speaking simul-
taneously from "within and against" both women's liberation
and antiracist movements, we have insisted on the need to
challenge systems of domination,3 not merely as gendered sub-
jects but as women whose lives are affected by our location in

multiple hierarchies.
Recently, and largely in response to these challenges, work
that links gender to other forms of domination is increasing. In
this article, we examine this connection further as well as the
ways in which difference and diversity infuse contemporary
feminist studies. Our analysis draws on a conceptual frame-
work that we refer to as "multiracial feminism."4 This perspec-
tive is an attempt to go beyond a mere recognition of diversity
and difference among women to examine structures of domina-
tion, specifically the importance of race in understanding the
social construction of gender. Despite the varied concerns and
multiple intellectual stances which characterize the feminisms
of women of color, they share an emphasis on race as a primary
force situating genders differently. It is the centrality of race, of
institutionalized racism, and of struggles against racial op-
pression that link the various feminist perspectives within this
framework. Together, they demonstrate that racial meanings
offer new theoretical directions for feminist thought.
Feminist Studies 22, no. 2 (summer 1996). ? 1996 by Feminist
Studies, Inc.
321
192.168.52.69 on Fri, 30 Nov 2012 11:51:07 AM
Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill
TENSIONS IN CONTEMPORARY
DIFFERENCE FEMINISM
Objections to the false universalism embedded in the concept

"woman" emerged within other discourses as well as those of
women of color.5 Lesbian feminists and postmodern feminists
put forth their own versions of what Susan Bordo has called
"gender skepticism."6
Many thinkers within mainstream feminism have respond-
ed to these critiques with efforts to contextualize gender. The
search for women's "universal" or "essential" characteristics is
being abandoned. By examining gender in the context of other
social divisions and perspectives, difference has gradually be-
come important-even problematizing the universal categories
of "women" and "men." Sandra Harding expresses the shift
best in her claim that "there are no gender relations per se, but
only gender relations as constructed by and between classes,
races, and cultures."7
Many feminists now contend that difference occupies center
stage as the project of women studies today.8 According to one
scholar, "difference has replaced equality as the central concern
of feminist theory."9 Many have welcomed the change, hailing
it
as a major revitalizing force in U.S. feminist theory.10 But if
some priorities within mainstream feminist thought have been
refocused by attention to difference, there remains an "uneasy
alliance"" between women of color and other feminists.
If difference has helped revitalize academic feminisms, it
has also "upset the apple cart" and introduced new conflicts
into feminist studies.12 For example, in a recent and widely dis-
cussed essay, Jane Rowland Martin argues that the current
preoccupation with difference is leading feminism into danger-
ous traps. She fears that in giving privileged status to a prede-
termined set of analytic categories (race, ethnicity, and class),
"we affirm the existence of nothing but difference." She asks,
"How do we know that for us, difference does not turn on being
fat, or religious, or in an abusive relationship?"13

We, too, see pitfalls in some strands of the difference project.
However, our perspectives take their bearings from social rela-
tions. Race and class differences are crucial, we argue, not as
individual characteristics (such as being fat) but insofar as
they are primary organizing principles of a society which lo-
322
192.168.52.69 on Fri, 30 Nov 2012 11:51:07 AM
cates and positions groups within that society's opportunity
structures.
Despite the much-heralded diversity trend within feminist
studies, difference is often reduced to mere pluralism: a "live
and let live" approach where principles of relativism generate
a long list of diversities which begin with gender, class, and
race and continue through a range of social structural as well
as personal characteristics.14 Another disturbing pattern,
which bell hooks refers to as "the commodification of differ-
ence," is the representation of diversity as a form of exotica, "a
spice, seasoning that livens up the dull dish that is main-
stream white culture."'5 The major limitation of these ap-
proaches is the failure to attend to the power relations that ac-
company difference. Moreover, these approaches ignore the in-
equalities that cause some characteristics to be seen as "nor-
mal" while others are seen as "different" and thus, deviant.

Maria C. Lugones expresses irritation at those feminists
who see only the problem of difference without recognizing dif-
ference.l6 Increasingly, we find that difference is recognized.
But this in no way means that difference occupies a "privi-
leged" theoretical status. Instead of using difference to rethink
the category of women, difference is often a euphemism for
women who differ from the traditional norm. Even in purport-
ing to accept difference, feminist pluralism often creates a so-
cial reality that reverts to universalizing women:
So much feminist scholarship assumes that when we cut through
all of the
diversity among women created by differences of racial
classification, eth-
nicity, social class, and sexual orientation, a "universal truth"
concerning
women and gender lies buried underneath. But if we can face
the scary
possibility that no such certainty exists and that persisting in
such a
search will always distort or omit someone's experiences, with
what do we
replace this old way of thinking? Gender differences and gender
politics
begin to look very different if there is no essential woman at the
core.'7
WHAT IS MULTIRACIAL FEMINISM?
A new set of feminist theories have emerged from the chal-
lenges put forth by women of color. Multiracial feminism is an
evolving body of theory and practice informed by wide-ranging
intellectual traditions. This framework does not offer a singu-
lar or unified feminism but a body of knowledge situating
323

192.168.52.69 on Fri, 30 Nov 2012 11:51:07 AM
women and men in multiple systems of domination. U.S. mul-
tiracial feminism encompasses several emergent perspectives
developed primarily by women of color: African Americans, La-
tinas, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, women whose
analyses are shaped by their unique perspectives as "outsiders
within"-marginal intellectuals whose social locations provide
them with a particular perspective on self and society.18 Al-
though U.S. women of color represent many races and ethnic
backgrounds-with different histories and cultures-our femi-
nisms cohere in their treatment of race as a basic social divi-
sion, a structure of power, a focus of political struggle, and
hence a fundamental force in shaping women's and men's lives.
This evolving intellectual and political perspective uses sev-
eral controversial terms. While we adopt the label "multiracial,"
other terms have been used to describe this broad framework.
For example, Chela Sandoval refers to "U.S. Third World femi-
nisms,"19 while other scholars refer to "indigenous feminisms."
In their theory text-reader, Alison M. Jagger and Paula M.
Rothenberg adopt the label "multicultural feminism."20
We use "multiracial" rather than "multicultural" as a way of
underscoring race as a power system that interacts with other
structured inequalities to shape genders. Within the U. S. con-
text, race, and the system of meanings and ideologies which ac-
company it, is a fundamental organizing principle of social re-
lationships.21 Race affects all women and men, although in dif-
ferent ways. Even cultural and group differences among wom-

en are produced through interaction within a racially stratified
social order. Therefore, although we do not discount the impor-
tance of culture, we caution that cultural analytic frameworks
that ignore race tend to view women's differences as the prod-
uct of group-specific values and practices that often result in
the marginalization of cultural groups which are then per-
ceived as exotic expressions of a normative center. Our focus on
race stresses the social construction of differently situated so-
cial groups and their varying degrees of advantage and power.
Additionally, this emphasis on race takes on increasing politi-
cal importance in an era where discourse about race is gov-
erned by color-evasive language22 and a preference for individ-
ual rather than group remedies for social inequalities. Our
analyses insist upon the primary and pervasive nature of race
324
192.168.52.69 on Fri, 30 Nov 2012 11:51:07 AM
in contemporary U.S. society while at the same time acknowl-
edging how race both shapes and is shaped by a variety of oth-
er social relations.
In the social sciences, multiracial feminism grew out of so-
cialist feminist thinking. Theories about how political economic
forces shape women's lives were influential as we began to un-
cover the social causes of racial ethnic women's subordination.
But socialist feminism's concept of capitalist patriarchy, with
its focus on women's unpaid (reproductive) labor in the home

failed to address racial differences in the organization of repro-
ductive labor. As feminists of color have argued, "reproductive
labor has divided along racial as well as gender lines, and the
specific characteristics have varied regionally and changed
over time as capitalism has reorganized."23 Despite the limita-
tions of socialist feminism, this body of literature has been es-
pecially useful in pursuing questions about the interconnec-
tions among systems of domination.24
Race and ethnic studies was the other major social scientific
source of multiracial feminism. It provided a basis for compar-
ative analyses of groups that are socially and legally subordi-
nated and remain culturally distinct within U.S. society. This
includes the systematic discrimination of socially constructed
racial groups and their distinctive cultural arrangements. His-
torically, the categories of African American, Latino, Asian
American, and Native American were constructed as both ra-
cially and culturally distinct. Each group has a distinctive cul-
ture, shares a common heritage, and has developed a common
identity within a larger society that subordinates them.25
We recognize, of course, certain problems inherent in an un-
critical use of the multiracial label. First, the perspective can
be hampered by a biracial model in which only African Ameri-
cans and whites are seen as racial categories and all other
groups are viewed through the prism of cultural differences.
Latinos and Asians have always occupied distinctive places
within the racial hierarchy, and current shifts in the composi-
tion of the U.S. population are racializing these groups anew.26
A second problem lies in treating multiracial feminism as a
single analytical framework, and its principle architects, wom-
en of color, as an undifferentiated category. The concepts "mul-
tiracial feminism," "racial ethnic women," and "women of
color"

325
192.168.52.69 on Fri, 30 Nov 2012 11:51:07 AM
"homogenize quite different experiences and can falsely uni-
versalize experiences across race, ethnicity, sexual orientation,
and age."27 The feminisms created by women of color exhibit a
plurality of intellectual and political positions. We speak in
many voices, with inconsistencies that are born of our different
social locations. Multiracial feminism embodies this plurality
and richness. Our intent is not to falsely universalize women of
color. Nor do we wish to promote a new racial essentialism in
place of the old gender essentialism. Instead, we use these con-
cepts to examine the structures and experiences produced by
intersecting forms of race and gender.
It is also essential to acknowledge that race is a shifting and
contested category whose meanings construct definitions of all
aspects of social life.28 In the United States it helped define
citi-
zenship by excluding everyone who was not a white, male
property owner. It defined labor as slave or free, coolie or con-
tract, and family as available only to those men whose mar-
riages were recognized or whose wives could immigrate with
them. Additionally, racial meanings are contested both within
groups and between them.29
Although definitions of race are at once historically and geo-
graphically specific, they are also transnational, encompassing

diasporic groups and crossing traditional geographic bound-
aries. Thus, while U.S. multiracial feminism calls attention to
the fundamental importance of race, it must also locate the
meaning of race within specific national traditions.
THE DISTINGUISHING FEATURES OF
MULTIRACIAL FEMINISM
By attending to these problems, multiracial feminism offers a
set of analytic premises for thinking about and theorizing gen-
der. The following themes distinguish this branch of feminist
inquiry.
First, multiracial feminism asserts that gender is construct-
ed by a range of interlocking inequalities, what Patricia Hill
Collins calls a "matrix of domination."30 The idea of a matrix
is
that several fundamental systems work with and through each
other. People experience race, class, gender, and sexuality dif-
ferently depending upon their social location in the structures
326
192.168.52.69 on Fri, 30 Nov 2012 11:51:07 AM
of race, class, gender, and sexuality. For example, people of the
same race will experience race differently depending upon
their location in the class structure as working class, profes-
sional managerial class, or unemployed; in the gender struc-
ture as female or male; and in structures of sexuality as het-

erosexual, homosexual, or bisexual.
Multiracial feminism also examines the simultaneity of sys-
tems in shaping women's experience and identity. Race, class,
gender, and sexuality are not reducible to individual attributes
to be measured and assessed for their separate contribution in
explaining given social outcomes, an approach that Elizabeth
Spelman calls "popbead metaphysics," where a woman's identi-
ty consists of the sum of parts neatly divisible from one anoth-
er.31 The matrix of domination seeks to account for the
multiple
ways that women experience themselves as gendered, raced,
classed, and sexualized.
Second, multiracial feminism emphasizes the intersectional
nature of hierarchies at all levels of social life. Class, race, gen-
der, and sexuality are components of both social structure and
social interaction. Women and men are differently embedded
in locations created by these cross-cutting hierarchies. As a re-
sult, women and men throughout the social order experience
different forms of privilege and subordination, depending on
their race, class, gender, and sexuality. In other words, inter-
secting forms of domination produce both oppression and op-
portunity. At the same time that structures of race, class, and
gender create disadvantages for women of color, they provide
unacknowledged benefits for those who are at the top of these
hierarchies-whites, members of the upper classes, and males.
Therefore, multiracial feminism applies not only to racial eth-
nic women but also to women and men of all races, classes, and
genders.
Third, multiracial feminism highlights the relational nature
of dominance and subordination. Power is the cornerstone of
women's differences.32 This means that women's differences
are
connected in systematic ways.33 Race is a vital element in the

pattern of relations among minority and white women. As
Linda Gordon argues, the very meanings of being a white wom-
an in the United States have been affected by the existence of
subordinated women of color: "They intersect in conflict and in
327
192.168.52.69 on Fri, 30 Nov 2012 11:51:07 AM
occasional cooperation, but always in mutual influence."34
Fourth, multiracial feminism explores the interplay of social
structure and women's agency. Within the constraints of race,
class, and gender oppression, women create viable lives for
themselves, their families, and their communities. Women of
color have resisted and often undermined the forces of power
that control them. From acts of quiet dignity and steadfast de-
termination to involvement in revolt and rebellion, women
struggle to shape their own lives. Racial oppression has been a
common focus of the "dynamic of oppositional agency" of wom-
en of color. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty points out, it is the
nature and organization of women's opposition which mediates
and differentiates the impact of structures of domination.35
Fifth, multiracial feminism encompasses wide-ranging
methodological approaches, and like other branches of feminist
thought, relies on varied theoretical tools as well. Ruth Fran-
kenberg and Lata Mani identify three guiding principles of in-
clusive feminist inquiry: "building complex analyses, avoiding

erasure, specifying location."36 In the last decade, the opening
up of academic feminism has focused attention on social loca-
tion in the production of knowledge. Most basically, research
by and about marginalized women has destabilized what used
to be considered as universal categories of gender. Marginal-
ized locations are well suited for grasping social relations that
remained obscure from more privileged vantage points. Lived
experience, in other words, creates alternative ways of under-
standing the social world and the experience of different
groups of women within it. Racially informed standpoint epis-
temologies have provided new topics, fresh questions, and new
understandings of women and men. Women of color have, as
Norma Alargon argues, asserted ourselves as subjects, using
our voices to challenge dominant conceptions of truth.37
Sixth, multiracial feminism brings together understandings
drawn from the lived experiences of diverse and continuously
changing groups of women. Among Asian Americans, Native
Americans, Latinas, and Blacks are many different national
cultural and ethnic groups. Each one is engaged in the process
of testing, refining, and reshaping these broader categories in
its own image. Such internal differences heighten awareness of
and sensitivity to both commonalities and differences, serving
328
192.168.52.69 on Fri, 30 Nov 2012 11:51:07 AM
as a constant reminder of the importance of comparative study

and maintaining a creative tension between diversity and uni-
versalization.
DIFFERENCE AND TRANSFORMATION
Efforts to make women's studies less partial and less distorted
have produced important changes in academic feminism. In-
clusive thinking has provided a way to build multiplicity and
difference into our analyses. This has led to the discovery that
race matters for everyone. White women, too, must be recon-
ceptualized as a category that is multiply defined by race,
class, and other differences. As Ruth Frankenberg demon-
strates in a study of whiteness among contemporary women,
all kinds of social relations, even those that appear neutral,
are, in fact, racialized. Frankenberg further complicates the
very notion of a unified white identity by introducing issues of
Jewish identity.38 Therefore, the lives of women of color
cannot
be seen as a variation on a more general model of white Amer-
ican womanhood. The model of womanhood that feminist so-
cial science once held as "universal" is also a product of race
and class.
When we analyze the power relations constituting all social
arrangements and shaping women's lives in distinctive ways,
we can begin to grapple with core feminist issues about how
genders are socially constructed and constructed differently.
Women's difference is built into our study of gender. Yet this
perspective is quite far removed from the atheoretical plural-
ism implied in much contemporary thinking about gender.
Multiracial feminism, in our view, focuses not just on differ-
ences but also on the way in which differences and domination
intersect and are historically and socially constituted. It chal-
lenges feminist scholars to go beyond the mere recognition and
inclusion of difference to reshape the basic concepts and theo-
ries of our disciplines. By attending to women's social location

based on race, class, and gender, multiracial feminism seeks to
clarify the structural sources of diversity. Ultimately, multira-
cial feminism forces us to see privilege and subordination as
interrelated and to pose such questions as: How do the exis-
tences and experiences of all people-women and men, different
329
192.168.52.69 on Fri, 30 Nov 2012 11:51:07 AM
racial-ethnic groups, and different classes-shape the experi-
ences of each other? How are those relationships defined and
enforced through social institutions that are the primary sites
for negotiating power within society? How do these differences
contribute to the construction of both individual and group
identity? Once we acknowledge that all women are affected by
the racial order of society, then it becomes clear that the in-
sights of multiracial feminism provide an analytical frame-
work, not solely for understanding the experiences of women of
color but for understanding all women, and men, as well.
NOTES
1. Maxine Baca Zinn, Lynn Weber Cannon, Elizabeth
Higginbotham, and Bonnie
Thornton Dill, "The Costs of Exclusionary Practices in Women's
Studies," Signs 11
(winter 1986): 290-303.
2. Chela Sandoval, "U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory

and Method of
Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World," Genders
(spring 1991): 1-24.
3. Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani, "Cross Currents, Crosstalk:
Race, 'Postcol-
oniality,' and the Politics of Location," Cultural Studies 7 (May
1993): 292-310.
4. We use the term "multiracial feminism" to convey the
multiplicity of racial
groups and feminist perspectives.
5. A growing body of work on difference in feminist thought
now exists. Although
we cannot cite all the current work, the following are
representative: Michele
Barrett, "The Concept of Difference," Feminist Review 26 (July
1987): 29-42; Chris-
tina Crosby, "Dealing with Difference," in Feminists Theorize
the Political, ed.
Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992),
130-43; Elizabeth
Fox-Genovese, "Difference, Diversity, and Divisions in an
Agenda for the Women's
Movement," in Color, Class, and Country: Experiences of
Gender, ed. Gay Young and
Bette J. Dickerson (London: Zed Books, 1994), 232-48; Nancy
A. Hewitt, "Com-
pounding Differences," Feminist Studies 18 (summer 1992):
313-26; Maria C.
Lugones, "On the Logic of Feminist Pluralism," in Feminist
Ethics, ed. Claudia Card
(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991), 35-44; Rita S.
Gallin and Anne
Ferguson, "The Plurality of Feminism: Rethinking 'Difference,"'
in The Woman and
International Development Annual (Boulder: Westview Press,
1993), 3: 1-16; and

Linda Gordon, "On Difference," Genders 10 (spring 1991): 91-
111.
6. Susan Bordo, "Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender
Skepticism," in Femin-
ism /Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (London:
Routledge, 1990), 133-56.
7. Sandra G. Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?
Thinking from Women's
Lives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 179.
8. Crosby, 131.
9. Fox-Genovese, 232.
10. Faye Ginsberg and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Introduction to
Uncertain Terms,
Negotiating Gender in American Culture, ed. Faye Ginsberg and
Anna Lowenhaupt
Tsing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 3.
11. Sandoval, 2.
12. Sandra Morgan, "Making Connections: Socialist-Feminist
Challenges to Marx-
330
192.168.52.69 on Fri, 30 Nov 2012 11:51:07 AM
ist Scholarship," in Women and a New Academy: Gender and
Cultural Contexts, ed.
Jean F. O'Barr (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989),
149.
13. Jane Rowland Martin, "Methodological Essentialism, False

Difference, and
Other Dangerous Traps," Signs 19 (spring 1994): 647.
14. Barrett, 32.
15. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston:
South End Press,
1992), 21.
16. Lugones, 35-44.
17. Patricia Hill Collins, Foreword to Women of Color in U.S.
Society, ed. Maxine Ba-
ca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1994), xv.
18. Patricia Hill Collins, "Learning from the Outsider Within:
The Sociological Sig-
nificance of Black Feminist Thought," Social Problems 33
(December 1986): 514-32.
19. Sandoval, 1.
20. Alison M. Jagger and Paula S. Rothenberg, Feminist
Frameworks: Alternative
Theoretical Accounts of the Relations between Women and
Men, 3d ed. (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1993).
21. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the
United States: From
the 1960s to the 1980s, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994).
22. Ruth Frankenberg, The Social Construction of Whiteness:
White Women, Race
Matters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
23. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, "From Servitude to Service Work:
Historical Continui-
ties in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor," Signs
18 (autumn 1992): 3.
See also Bonnie Thornton Dill, "Our Mothers' Grief: Racial-
Ethnic Women and the
Maintenance of Families," Journal of Family History 13, no. 4
(1988): 415-31.
24. Morgan, 146.

25. Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill, "Difference
and Domination," in
Women of Color in U.S. Society, 11-12.
26. See Omi and Winant, 53-76, for a discussion of racial
formation.
27. Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins, Race, Class,
and Gender: An
Anthology (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1992), xvi.
28. Omi and Winant.
29. Nazli Kibria, "Migration and Vietnamese American Women:
Remaking Ethni-
city," in Women of Color in U.S. Society, 247-61.
30. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge,
Consciousness, and
the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990).
31. Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Women: Problems of
Exclusion in Feminist
Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 136.
32. Several discussions of difference make this point. See Baca
Zinn and Dill, 10;
Gordon, 106; and Lynn Weber, in the "Symposium on West and
Fenstermaker's
'Doing Difference,'" Gender & Society 9 (August 1995): 515-19.
33. Glenn, 10.
34. Gordon, 106.
35. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Cartographies of Struggle:
Third World Women
and the Politics of Feminism," in Third World Women and the
Politics of Feminism,
ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres
(Bloomington: In-
diana University Press, 1991), 13.
36. Frankenberg and Mani, 306.
37. Norma Alarcon, "The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge
Called My Back and
Anglo-American Feminism," in Making Face, Making Soul,

Haciendo Caras: Crea-
tive and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, ed. Gloria
Anzaldia (San Fran-
cisco: Aunt Lute, 1990), 356.
38. Frankenberg. See also Evelyn Torton Beck, "The Politics of
Jewish Invisibility,"
NWSA Journal (fall 1988): 93-102.
331
192.168.52.69 on Fri, 30 Nov 2012 11:51:07 AM
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jspArticle
Contentsp. 321p. 322p. 323p. 324p. 325p. 326p. 327p. 328p.
329p. 330p. 331Issue Table of ContentsFeminist Studies, Vol.
22, No. 2 (Summer, 1996), pp. 247-474Front MatterPreface [pp.
247 - 250]Death and the Mainstream: Lesbian Detective Fiction
and the Killing of the Coming-Out Story [pp. 251 - 278]"This
Evil Extends Especially... to the Feminine Sex": Negotiating
Captivity in the New Mexico Borderlands [pp. 279 - 309]Art
EssayJoyce J. Scott's Mammy/Nanny Series [pp. 311 -
320]Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism [pp. 321
- 331]FictionIn Celebration and Remembrance [pp. 333 -
344]Review Essay"This Past Was Waiting for Me When I
Came": The Contextualization of Black Women's History [pp.
345 - 361]The Disappearance of Susan Daniel and Henderson
Cooper: Gender and Narratives of Political Conflict in the
Reconstruction-Era U.S. South [pp. 363 - 386]FictionSoldiers
and Sailors [pp. 387 - 396]The Prison Lesbian: Race, Class,
and the Construction of the Aggressive Female Homosexual,
1915-1965 [pp. 397 - 423]Women at Farah Revisited: Political
Mobilization and Its Aftermath among Chicana Workers in El
Paso, Texas, 1972-1992 [pp. 425 - 452]Notes and Letters [pp.
455 - 457]Publications Received [pp. 458 - 474]Back Matter

[pp. 453 - 454]
Cit r125_c202:1: Cit r128_c208:1: Cit r136_c219:1: Cit
r141_c224:1: Cit r146_c229:1:
This assignment asks you to analytically respond to the main
idea(s) introduced in course readings and may be submitted in
response to readings assigned. Your ARR should identify a main
theme or idea and discuss that theme or idea as it relates to each
of the assigned readings. Your ARR should clearly reflect the
different contributions made by each author. Direct quotes are
strongly encouraged and must be cited (see example below).
Specifically, each ARR should:
Identify a theme or idea that can be related to each reading
assigned for that day Discuss the contribution each author
makes to the theme/idea Be at least 3, but no more than 5
paragraphs
In-Text Citation Format
Direct quotes and paraphrased ideas should be cited in-text as
follows: “Feminist and disability theory also share a deep
concern about the body and bodily difference” (Hirschmann
2012: 397)

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