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Race, Gender, and Sexuality Bibliography
Bernstein, Sharon. “Feminist Intentions: Race, Gender and Power in a High School Classroom.” NWSA 7 (Summer 1995): 18-34. (Read the article)
Race, Gender and Sexuality
Comments(1)August 9, 2006
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion interrogates the ways that emotions work on and through us socially–to the point where “we” become social and individual beings precisely through this work. Using a model of the “sociality” of emotions,” Ahmed shows that “it is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others” (10). A detailed analysis of emotions is therefore central to a proper understanding of individuals as well as collective groups–and, in fact, such an analysis reveals the way in which individuals and groups form each other. (Read the article)
Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005.
Gayatri Gopinath ends the first chapter of Impossible Desires with a disclaimer of sorts regarding the cultural texts through which she analyzes queerness and diaspora: these “objects of inquiry,” she writes, “appear to be excessive, tangential, or marginal to recognized traditions” (28). She focuses on the margins because, she goes on to write, it is precisely at those margins where representations and ideologies of sexuality and diaspora are created and negotiated. Yet these marginal, tangential objects are often, she argues, parts of largue, more traditional texts–music, films, and novels (to name a few cultural forms) that represent and thus work to sustain “conventional gender, sexual, and nationalist ideologies” (28). Impossible Desires is indebted to the diasporic cultural studies work of Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, and in keeping with this strain of cultural studies, Gopinath bases her analysis of queerness and diaspora on mainstream cultural objects and activities.
Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Perverse Modernities Ser. Ed. Judith Halberstam and Lisa Lowe. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005.
M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred is a collection of essays, each of which in some way addresses–as primary critical focus or as implicit methodology–one or several aspects of transnational feminism. Alexander writes on subjects as varied as the criminalization of gay sex in the Bahamas; the neocolonial marketing of white gay tourism; the relationship between the academy and the political mobilization of female factory workers; the connection between fiscal and curricular conservatism in the academy; the connection between colonialism, neocolonialism, and neo-imperialism and the way each is configured according to a logic of heteropatriarchy; the benefits of memory as a means of fighting the effects of domination; and the role of the Sacred as a politically efficacious model for rethinking the self outside frameworks such as secular postmodern alienation. (Read the article)
February 7, 2006
Connolly, Clara and Pragna Patel. “Women Who Walk on Water: Working across ‘Race’ in Women Against Fundamentalism.” The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. Ed. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997. 375-95.
Clara Connolly and Pragna Patel’s “Women Who Walk on Water: Working across ‘Race’ in Women Against Fundamentalism” articulates the authors’ dissatisfaction with religious fundamentalism and argues that British multiculturalism—frequently seen as a liberal and progressive project—is ill-equipped to mediate the inequalities facing minority groups both within their cultures and within British society at large. Using the examples of their involvement in the feminist organizations Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF) and Southall Black Sisters (SBS), Connolly and Patel describe their personal participation in the struggle against racism and gender oppression, using these narratives to then analyze and critique multiculturalism. Their focus on gender, racism, fundamentalism, and multiculturalism leads them to frequently note the way these issues yoke together in complex and, at times, seemingly contradictory ways. For instance, Patel becomes involved in SBS in order to join “struggles against forced arranged marriage that many women faced within the family, and the struggles against racism […] where other non-Asian children and teachers reminded us of our marginal positions within British society” (376). While thus beginning the essay with a critique of fundamentalism, Connolly and Patel explain that fundamentalism’s negative effects are exacerbated and even institutionalized in a multiculturalist British society that endorses an ostensible “mutual tolerance of difference” between majority and minority groups, and which is loathe to intercede on the behalf of those oppressed (i.e. women) within those groups (388). In fact, this so-called “celebration of diversity” silences the subjugation of women within fundamentalist-dominated minority groups while simultaneously maintaining an us/them racist mentality: multicultural policies assume the minority group is internally cohesive. The policies are therefore “ultimately based on essentialist constructions of culture/religion that tend to homogenize both minority and majority communities” (392). Both communities are fixed, through multiculturalism, in an unequal relation to one another, so that “far from being tolerant, the modern British state in fact practices a form of secularism that is intolerant of minority communities even where it appears to permit and maintain their cultural autonomy” (392). The state’s offered democracy is as unsatisfactory to women as the fundamentalist communities of which they are subjugated members. (Read the article)
January 4, 2006
West, Cornel. “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” Race, Identity and Representation in Education. Ed. Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow. New York: Routledge, 1993.
In this article West announces the emergence of a new kind of cultural politics, marking “a significant shift in the sensibilities and outlooks of critics and artists” (11). West argues that previous forms of criticism can no longer account for the ethnic, gender and sexual diversity of late twentieth-century society. The new cultural politics that West promotes seeks to “trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general, and universal in the light of the concrete, specific, and particular; to historicize, contextualize, and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting and changing” (11). The new cultural critic, West argues, must work to form alliances with disempowered or disenfranchised groups to enable social action and must learn to critique their immediate work contexts (the academy, museum or gallery) from within (11-12). (Read the article)
December 22, 2005
Paul, Dierdre Glenn. Life, Culture and Education on the Academic Plantation: Womanist Thought and Perspective. Questions about the Purpose(s) of Colleges and Universities, Vol. 2. Ed. Norm Denzin, Josef Progler, Joe L. Kincheloe, and Shirley R. Steinberg. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
“Through the processes of reflexivity and life history, Paul writes, “I attempt to cohere the concentric spheres of race, gender, and class as they play themselves out in my daily living and multiple roles” (xi). A collection of essays not necessarily meant to be read linearly, Life, Culture and Education on the Academic Plantation documents the author’s own social location as a Black woman in “a racially schizophrenic society, a single mother, a former public school teacher, a teacher educator, and an emerging intellectual” (xi). Just as Paul must live each day through multiple and contradictory roles, so too must the reader of this book encounter linguistic, formal, and narrative multiplicity: an “amalgam of genres and writing styles,” the book is written to promote “disequilibrium” (xii). (Read the article)
Kumashiro, Kevin. Troubling Education: Queer Activism and Antioppressive Pedagogy. New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002.
Kumashiro’s book works to formulate a pragmatic and theoretically sound antioppressive pedagogy. To this end, the book describes “four primary approaches to antioppressive education suggested by the current field of research” and, going beyond these frameworks, it also explores “insights and changes made possible by some of the theories and stories that are traditionally marginalized in educational research” (9). Thus, Kumashiro analyzes feminist, critical, multicultural, and queer theoretical perspectives and notes that all four perspectives collectively gesture towards “four ways to conceptualize and work against oppression: education for the Other, education about the Other, education that is critical of privileging and Othering, and education that changes students and society” (30). Reading the first three approaches through poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, Kumashiro notes the value of such frameworks and yet advocates a broader conceptualization of “the dynamics of oppression, the processes of teaching and learning, and even the purposes of schooling” (32). (Read the article)
December 1, 2005
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 17 (1987). 65-81.
The symbolic order structuring American society—America’s “grammar”—is still dictated by the legacy of slavery, Hortense Spillers writes in this psychoanalytically inflected deconstruction of race and gender in the United States. Beginning with stereotypes of African American women, Spillers analyzes the way African American men are denied access to the patriarchal “name of the Father,” the way African American women are then stigmatized as unlawful leaders of African American society, and the way such a disruption of the patriarchal structure leads not to liberation, but to the disempowerment of all African Americans. (Read the article)
Moraga, Cherrie. “From a Long Line of Vendidas.” Loving in the War Years. Boston: South End P, 1983. 90-144.
Cherrie Moraga begins “From a Long Line of Vendidas” with the dedication “para Gloria Anzaldua, in gratitude.” Like Anzaldua’s work, this essay is also a heavily autobiographical account of the way in which gender intersects with race and sexuality. Alternating between journal entries, poetry, and expository writing and combining English with Spanish, Moraga explains how her childhood experiences taught her that as a racial minority and a woman, she was and is doubly marginalized: her brother’s sex, she writes, “was white. Mine, brown” (94). While her brother’s gendered location within the patriarchal system allows him to identify with the white oppressor, Moraga’s gender “fully necessitated my claiming the race of my mother” (94). This identification as a Chicana, however, is complicated. Blending personal narrative with an account of the “historical/mythical” Malintzin Tenepal figure—La Vendida, the native Mexican woman who slept with the Spanish conqueror Cortez and thereby sold out her race—allows Moraga to analyze the cultural prejudice against women and the ways in which women are still coded as “traitors” within Mexican/Chicano culture. (Read the article)