ABSTRACT
This chapter compares Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional framework for understanding the race/gender connection to the framework this book develops. Crenshaw starts with separate categories of race and gender and focuses on the combined sexism and racism suffered by those, especially Black women and other women of color, marginalized by both race and gender. This book, by contrast, addresses how the categories themselves intermesh, on the very categorial level, through the racial gender-binary ideal. This chapter also suggests how an analysis based on the racial gender-binary ideal can help bridge Crenshaw’s view with that of the feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon, a bridge Crenshaw finds both possible and desirable. Finally, the chapter explores a challenge for both an intersectional framework and one based on the racial gender-binary ideal: how might an analysis of gender focused on the modern West, as both frameworks are, also allow for talking about gender more generally – for example, across cultures and historical periods?
