Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: 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. 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. Cyborg citizenship provides activists with an alternative lens through which to view race and gender relations.