Julia M. Noveske
ASA Submission, 1/18/05
773-426-2134
“Listening to the Man”: Gender, Class, and the Dynamics of Racial Transformations
among Whites in Black-White Interracial Relationships
Julia M. Noveske
University of Illinois-Chicago
Feminist theorists in the intersectionality of race and gender tell us that every story about race is
a story about gender and vice versa. However, intersectionality as it shapes the life experiences
of whites and individuals belonging to other dominant categories remains comparably
unexplored. Gender is almost completely absent from theoretical models of white racial identity
and consciousness. How does gender shape white racial identity/consciousness dynamics? To
answer this question, the author conducts an exploratory analysis of qualitative in depth
interviews with whites in black-white interracial relationship. Gender is found to shape
formations of white racial identity/consciousness, and also plays a critical role in mitigating the
processes through which various modes of white racial identity/consciousness take hold. Future
research is needed in order to develop a model of white racial identity/consciousness that takes
the intersectionality of race, class and gender into account.
Whiteness is a slippery concept (Lewis 2004). The elusiveness of whiteness as the
normative, unmarked, and unarticulated racial category is evident in the delayed historical
emergence of scholarship about white racial identity and ideology in comparison to comparable
studies about blackness, the defined, marked, and easily articulated category against which whites
define their own consciousness (Warren and Twine 1997). The invisibility of whiteness has had
a profound effect in the history of feminist theory (Collins 2000, Zinn 2000). White feminists
have traditionally treated white women as prototypical women. Its strategies, tenants, and
assumptions about women have been heavily rooted in the middle class white female experience,
even when purporting to represent women as a group (Collins 2000, Zinn, 2000). The rise of
multiracial feminism has been marked by the growth of work in intersectionality, which analyzes
how axes of stratification such as race, class, gender, and sexuality act together to shape
individuals’ life experiences (Cohen 1997, Collins 2000, 2005, Zinn 2000). Multracial feminists
have made great feats in redressing feminism’s subjective uniformity and systemic omission of
nonwhite women’s voices and experiences. However, explorations of how the intersecting forces
of race, class, gender and sexuality shape the lives of those belonging to the dominative
categories (e.g. whites) remains comparatively stunted (Brown 1992). This is not to say that
whiteness is underrepresented; whiteness has long constituted the silent and invisible (to some)
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