Race and Gender in Feminist Theory

It is necessary to know that women may have different demands and problems depending on the society they belong to, the family and religious structure they belong to, and their economic status, and it is necessary to look at the women’s perspective most importantly without generalizing. For example, while 1st wave feminism includes very basic rights such as the right to education, the right to divorce, the right to go to the public sphere and to take part in politics, the most important wishes of upper and middle class women, while the wishes of women living in the lower class and in difficult working conditions can vary greatly. These women make such requests based on their needs such as more rest hours, a safe workplace working environment, or organization of working hours. Assuming that the women’s movements emerge with a white perspective, we are faced with a much more racist women’s approach, and this results in a large proportion of the wrong results in research. It is not possible to say that the liberation struggle of women of all races, their achievements and their ongoing struggle against all kinds of oppression are the same, it varies according to the social status and economic status of women. I think it is very important to find ways to transcend racial and cultural boundaries and to understand how in women’s perspective, feminism movements and any definitions to be made. Because, as a woman, I do not think that such terms as Western women, Third World women, Native American women, Black women, White women, Women of Color, African women, Asian women never reflect us. The combined effects of racism and gender discrimination, particularly on immigrant, indigenous, minority and marginalized women around the world, have had devastating consequences for their full enjoyment of equality and fundamental human rights in both the public and private spheres. While there are many perspectives on women, it should be noted that terms form the way we think about and talk about women. More importantly, we cannot achieve real social change, which is the ultimate goal of all feminist endeavors, without finding terms with which we can talk about women’s lives and our differences. Before we go into detail about Gender and Race, we need to look at the definition of the word race. Race has been important since the beginning of history, as opposed to being a nascent word or a modern phenomenon. For example, Judeo-Christian observances assumed a monogenetic view that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve and therefore represent a divinely appointed race. This religious tradition reconciled the fact of racial difference according to the scriptures by associating blacks with Ham, the cursed son of Noah, or the children of God, who dispersed the different races after Babylon. For centuries, both science and religion have linked behavioral differences to physical differences; the first suggested divine intervention, while the second added the influence of nature. In the context of European domination, both religion and science have produced theories of racial superiority and inferiority. Scientific theories of evolution have done a lot of research to explain racial differences, and as a result, the modern concept of race has advanced. Native Americans and Africans, for example, were viewed as embryonic races or underdeveloped races, in the context of colonization, for example. ‘’Whether they located racial difference in the body or in the body politic, or whether they accounted for racial difference by divine appointment or natural selection, all of these theories were created, codified, and institutionalized by men. Feminism, however, reconstructed the ways we think about race.’’ Wharton,(2005).

Recalling their experiences as women emigrating from India and the Caribbean to the United States, M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty write, “We were not born women of color, but became women of color here” (1997: 492). These observations show that race is not a basic biological condition, a fixed category of predetermined meaning, but a concept constructed within social contexts. for Ruth Frankenberg’s students, unmindful of race, whiteness masquerades as universal and “white dominance is rationalized, legitimized, and made ostensibly normal and natural” (1997: 3). The effects of concepts of race, whether overt or covert, are often violent and

always ideological because they are constructed and distributed through operations of power. Race, then, like gender, “must be seen as a social construction predicated upon the recognition of difference and signifying the simultaneous distinguishing and positioning of groups vis-a-vis one another” (Higgenbotham, 1992: 253) These concepts of race, such as gender, recognize the instability of categories and their formation in power relations that are constantly redefined and transformed in particular historical and cultural locations. for example, “blood quantum” remains “the most common tribal requirement for determination of citizenship” in American Indian communities, as a measure imposed by both tribal and federal authorities (2001: 224–5). Thus, even here where racial identity is biologically determined, it is also constructed because the term blood division has no fixed or fixed meaning. In addition, individuals and groups, regardless of permissible blood ratio, identify themselves as racially Native American based on family ancestry and traditions passed down from generation to generation, excluding others without cultural ties to their tribal heritage on this basis. Black people claim the language of the other and resignify race as a site of liberation, thereby dissociating it from its hegemonic signification as “biological inferiority,” oppression, and powerlessness (Higgenbotham, 1992: 267–8). Similarly, Lee acknowledges that although race is often used to subordinate, it can also be deployed as an affirmative category around which people can organize to assert power (Crenshaw, 1995: 443).

Post-Colonial Feminist Movements

We can say that feminist organization at the international and internationalist level has a long history. We should also note that just as it is not possible to talk about a singular globalization, it is not possible to talk about a singular feminism. It should be underlined that, as in many global struggles, there are multiple approaches in feminism. Robin Morgan’s book Sisterhood is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anhotology is considered the most important source written on the understanding of global sisterhood (Naghibi, 2007: 76). Because the book in question is the only text that defines itself as an anthology of the international women’s movement (Mohanty, 2008: 159). In the text that Morgan wrote as the introductory part of the book in question, he aims to develop dialogue and solidarity among women everywhere (Morgan, 1996: 8). Such a goal opens up the possibility of sisterhood based on common goals. Global sisterhood is an understanding that Radical Feminists focus more on within the Western Feminist International Relations Theory. In other words, global sisterhood is the idea of ​​fighting masculine oppression through dialogue and solidarity of women, who are seen as a culturally singular and homogeneous group with the same interests, perspectives, goals and similar experiences (Siegel, 2007: 51). According to the theory in question, these oppressions experienced by most women in the world reveal the possibility of women gaining political power worldwide against the patriarchal system in the USA, Western and Eastern Europe, China, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America (Mohanty, 2008: 160). Thus, a desire for peace that transcends racial, class and national differences among women emerges. Thus, on the basis of sisterhood, the differences in material and ideological power between First and Third World women are effectively disappearing. What the study did not directly confront were the ways women are so very different and the ways differences in women’s experiences are not solely a function of patriarchy but also a function of relationships of power between and among women.’’(Wharton, 2005), So, it means that the concept of global fraternity has, in a sense, rejected the category of race and other differences that distinguish women. Such universal narratives of femininity ignore different forms of oppression/exploitation. Postcolonial Feminism, which is among the deconstructive theories, in this sense, has made statements that are destructive of the “common experience” denominator that Western Feminists have been expressing for a long time (Waller and Marcos, 2006: 313). Due to her efforts to dismantle the generally accepted understandings in today’s world, she has taken her place among the deconstructive theories by underlining that the demands of the Third World Women are not what the Western Feminists describe, rather than what they are. Feminists, who came to the fore in the 1980s, focused on the problems of Third World women. Because, according to them, mainstream Feminist Theory was limited to addressing the problems of white, middle-class and English-speaking women (Jackson et al., 1998: 98). For example; Hazel Carby (1982) pointed to the “limits of sisterhood” drawn by the differences in understanding the role played by race in understanding women’s experience, and the “limits of sisterhood” as an analytical category in feminist thought (Loomba, 2000: 191). Men are not the only source of black women’s oppression. ; race and class are also very effective in the process of oppression (McEwan, 2001: 93–111). Postcolonial Feminists call this situation ‘double colonization/colonialization’ (Loomba, 2000: 192). In other words, women of color were excluded from anti-colonial rhetoric and Western Feminism. Therefore, they remained far from being a subject in the aforementioned discourses and continued to be the ‘other’ (Bulbeck, 1997: 45). Nawal El Saadawi has pointed to the arrogance of some Western feminists who presume to mediate others’ experience. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and Karen Swisher, among others, challenge the ability of non-Natives to understand the experiences of Native American women. Sisterhood, Mohanty argues, cannot be assumed on the basis of gender because “beyond sisterhood there are still racism, colonialism, and imperialism” (68).

Race and gender

While early feminist work recognized the constructed nature of race and gender, these concepts functioned separately, although they were overlapping, similar categories of analysis. Criticisms of Western feminism have made race a mandatory consideration in all gender studies so that we can better understand the power relations not only between women and men, but also between women. ‘’Higgenbotham notes, for example, that after emancipation, black women, regardless of class, were denied entrance to train cars designated for women as a safe space (1992: 261).’’ In other words, he sees race as a tool that makes women different. Race operates as a separate category of analysis that intersects with gender to differentiate women’s experiences. “By understanding how race is a gendered category,” Tessie Liu argues, “we can more systematically address the structural underpinnings of why women’s experiences differ so radically and how these differences are relationally constituted” (1991: 269). In the European context, “race” was not a biological sign but a culturally constructed concept within hierarchies of power. Race, then, does not imply any fundamental difference in skin color or blood ties (even if it means “a natural order”); rather, race works as a metaphor for inclusion and exclusion in a system of privilege. Liu argues that racial principles based on boundaries of lineage are necessarily closely linked to “reproductive politics,” and that “the centrality of reproduction and birth to social entitlements allows us to see the gendered dimensions of race” (1991: 271). This concept of race, Liu asserts, necessarily focuses on women and “necessitated control over women . . . not only in one’s own group but in differentiating between women according to legitimate and illegitimate access and prohibition” (271). Colonial rule was “contingent on the colonists’ ability to construct and enforce legal and social classifications for who was white and who was native, who counted as European and by what degree, which progeny were legitimate and which were not” (272). Colonial authority and privilege, Liu concludes, was “based on racial distinction and therefore fundamentally structured on gendered terms” (272). native or colonized women obtained an ambiguous status: not seen as women at all, for they were, “spared neither [the] labor or punishment” imposed on men as white women were, but “as reproducers of the labor force and valued property” (272). Thus, Liu argues, native women were simultaneously exoticized as prohibited but available (272). Here, while the black woman is systematically abused and raped, the phenomenon of the white woman settles in people’s minds with the image of a chaste woman. While expressing these, the opinion of black women is not taken, and the opinions of white women on black women, that is, a European and white-centered perspective are presented. Certain individuals construct race and gender in the political terms they want, and from that comes a suffering group. This situation, especially with colonialism, has turned into an environment where it is easier to interfere with a group of people and where others decide about their lives with biopolitics, not themselves. Native American scholars have drawn attention to United States government policies affecting women’s bodies. As Paula Gunn Allen among others has pointed out, health care workers estimate that “over 25 percent of [American] Indian women . . . have been sterilized without their consent” (Allen, 1998: 38). In conclusion, all these examples show how the development and consolidation of the concepts of race and gender divides women, empowers control of their bodies, and continues to determine women’s different experiences within hierarchies of power.

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