ABSTRACT
This Introduction presents the core idea of the book. Since the eighteenth century, Western ideas of gender and of race have been coordinated through the category of binary sex/gender difference, which I argue should be understood as a racial ideal: the White, European male-female pair – the man perfectly masculine and the woman perfectly feminine – has been taken as the human ideal while other races have been classified and ranked according to how well, supposedly, the males and females of those races meet this ideal – physically, psychically, and socially. Thus, the ideas of sex/gender difference and of racial hierarchy are intermeshed in a systematic, fundamental way. The Introduction describes this intermeshing and explores its implications. It then gives an overview of the book’s later chapters.
