Although many social analysts recognize the intertwined relationship between race and
sex subjugation, racial liberation and women’s rights have emerged as separate movements. In
this paper, I argue that the privileging of race over gender in race liberationist social movements,
and the privileging of gender over race in the women’s liberation movement, reifies patriarchy.
My argument is two-fold. One, the positioning of racism as an anchor of all forms subjugation
(evident in the rationale that gender liberation will naturally follow from race liberation)
contradicts the end-goal of race liberation because it reinforces the same hierarchy within which
racism operates. Two, I advocate “cyborg citizenship” as a theoretical tool to reconcile the
popular understanding of race and gender as competing interests.
This paper proceeds in three steps. First, I discuss how the race and gender subjugation
are conceptualized as unrelated systems of oppression in the practices of race liberation
movements. Second, I review four bodies of theory that speak to the relationship between
subjugation and hierarchy: multiculturalism, animal liberation theory, feminist intersectionality,
and cyborg feminism. These theoretical approaches adopt understandings of hierarchy that speak
to what I will call “cyborg citizenship.” Donna Haraway (1991) employs the cyborg, the literal
embodiment of organism and machine in one being, as a metaphor that allows for the
deconstruction of the binary oppositions she argues forms the foundations of hierarchy in
Western thought. In the third step, I argue that cyborg citizenship provides activists with an
alternative lens through which to view race and gender relations.
Race and Gender as Competing Interests
That gender and race liberation emerged as separate movements in the 1960s and 1970s
is a product of the historical and political contexts within which the race liberation movements of
the 1960s and 1970s took place. The positioning of racism as the foundation of all oppression
within race liberation movements is shaped in part by the construction of racism and sexism as
unrelated systems of oppression by 19
th
century feminists. In spite of the fact that many women
active in the suffrage movement were also active in the anti-slavery cause, the issues that the
first-wave women’s liberation movement pressed as central to women’s liberation (the vote and
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Convention