Race, Gender, and Other Differences in Feminist Theory

Although Linda Gordon and others call for an analysis that takes economic injustice into account, this chapter focuses on feminist analysis of race and gender, and briefly on sexuality, borderlands identities, and disability, while acknowledging the place of class and the state in effecting those categories. As Europeans developed colonial empires in the sixteenth century, notions of blood became a way of conceptualizing the differences in continent of origin, skin tone, hair type, facial features, and other factors that eventually became associated with “race.” “Women” might at first glance have a more stable meaning than “race,” but here, too, bodily and cultural understandings have clashed and overlapped. Evelyn Brooks Higgenbotham argues that race has come to operate as a metalanguage, with a “powerful, all‐encompassing effect on the construction and representation of other social and power relations, namely, gender, class, and sexuality”.