The Specter of Sex, livre ebook

Genealogy of the formation of race and gender hierarchies in the U.S.

Genealogy of the formation of race and gender hierarchies in the U.S.

Top Three Finalist for the 2010 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize presented by the American Studies Association

Theories of intersectionality have fundamentally transformed how feminists and critical race scholars understand the relationship between race and gender, but are often limited in their focus on contemporary experiences of interlocking oppressions. In The Specter of Sex, Sally L. Kitch explores the "backstory" of intersectionality theory-the historical formation of the racial and gendered hierarchies that continue to structure U.S. culture today. Kitch uses a genealogical approach to explore how a world already divided by gender ideology became one simultaneously obsessed with judgmental ideas about race, starting in Europe and the English colonies in the late seventeenth century. Through an examination of religious, political, and scientific narratives, public policies and testimonies, laws, court cases, and newspaper accounts, The Specter of Sex provides a rare comparative study of the racial formation of five groups-American Indians, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and European whites-and reveals gendered patterns that have served white racial dominance and repeated themselves with variations over a two-hundred-year period.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The "Purloined Letter" of Gendered Race

Part I: Roots
As the Twig is Bent

1. "Women are a Huge Natural Calamity": The Roots of Western Gender Ideology

2. The First Races in Society: Gendered Roots of Race Formation

3. Gendered Racial Institutions: World Slavery and Nationhood

Conclusion: From Gender to Race

Part II: Bodies
Whose Too, Too Solid Flesh?

4. The American "Body Shop": Gendered Racial Formation in the Colonies and New Republic

5. Enslaved Bodies and Gendered Race

6. Sexual Projection and Race: Science, Politics, and Lust

Conclusion: Embodying Race

Part III: Blood
"Off Women Com Owre Manhed"

7. Defining, Measuring, and Ranking Racial Blood: The Ungendered Surface

8. Hardly Gender Neutral

9. Gendered Anti-Miscegenation: Laws and Their Interpretation

10. Preserving White Racial Blood: Rape Accusations and Motherhood

Conclusion: Miscegenation as Racial Reconciliation?

Part IV: Citizenship
"My Folks Fought for This Country"

11. What is Citizenship?: Gender and Race

12. Engendering Citizenship: Dependency and Sex

13. "No Can Do" Men and Their Others: Dependency and Inappropriate Gender

14. Mixed Race, Suspect Gender: Both White and... Whatever

Conclusion: Homosexual Citizenship: A Gendered Racial Oxymoron

Part V: Implications
Patterns for a New Bridge

15. Implications for Feminist Theories of Racial Difference and Antisubordination Politics

16. Gender Implications for Theories of Racial Formation

Conclusion: Interdependence

Notes
Index