Modern Feminism Defined

Ian F. Haney Lopez “The Social Construction of Race,” IWS 52-57

Legal Scholar Ian Lopez describes the way that biological arguments about race continue to be used in the legal system even though scientific research has concluded that there is no biological basis for race. The concept of race remains powerful and becomes perpetuated through legal, scientific, and political institutions.

One’s race has no genetic basis because greater genetic variation exists within the population’s labeled Black and White than between these populations. The social rather than scientific origin of race is rooted in the European imagination fo the Middle Ages.

The author argues that race but be viewed as a social construction continued by human interaction.

Ex: Mexican emergence of race with advent to the Anglo-Mexican conflicts.

Gail Bederman, “Remaking Manhood through Race and ‘Civilization’,” IWS 190- 193

The author, a feminist cultural historian, maintains that manhood is created by changing ideologies rather than universal biological ideas. In “remaking manhood,” Bederman looks at how, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the American middle class fashioned masculinity along racial and gender lines in order to establish the white middle class male as the exemplary citizen of the American nation. This author views gender as a historical ideological process. Whiteness was linked to male power. Middle class men simultaneously construct powerful manhood terms of both “civilized manliness” and “primitive masculinity” . These seemingly contradictory strategies drew on powerful discourse about civilization to construct male dominance. Social Darwinism supported this ideology in that it assumed that white races were at the civilized stage of evolution in which they have evolved a high degree of sexual differences( civilized men were self-controlled and protectors of women and children and civilized women were delicate, and dedicated to the home). The middle class’s doctrine of separate spheres were assumed to be absent in savagery, but to be an intrinsic and necessary aspect to higher civilization

Frank Dikotter, “Race Culture: Recent Perspectives in the History of Eugenics,” IWS 66-69
In this article the author describes how the concept of race gained power through the scientific theory of eugenics. Although Nazi ideology was the most extreme example of so-called social eugenics, the author argues that population control in the poorer part of the world today is still based on similar assumption and ideas.

Eugenics gave scientific authority to social fears and moral panics, lent respectability to racial doctrines, and provided legitimacy to sterilization acts and immigration laws. Powered by the prestige of science, it allowed modernizing elites to represent their prescriptive claims about social order as objective statements irrevocably grounded in the laws of nature.

Genetics to justify social inequalities or to pass certain legislation still exists today. Eugenic legislation passed in the People’s Republic of China in 1988 proscribes marriage for mentally retarded people until they have undergone sterilization surgery. In The People’s Republic, Eugenic discourse permeates every field related to human reproduction.

Patricia Hill Collins, “Black Sexual Politics,” FF 318-332

The author describes how contemporary sexual politics in the United States presents African American women and men to have an uncivilized, animalistic, “wild” sexuality. Furthermore, this association is used as an example of racial difference.

Yen Le Espiritu, “We Don’t Sleep Around Like White Girls Do’: Family, Culture, and Gender in Filipina American Lives,” FF 160-173

This article argues that gender is a key to immigrant identity and a vehicle for racialized immigrants to assert cultural superiority over the dominant group. In Immigrant communities, culture is the base from which immigrants stake their political and sociocultural claim on their new country. The author explains how cultural reconstruction has been critical to Filipino immigrants because it has been formed in opposition to racial, class, and gendered subordination. The author also points out that Filipinos are viewed as hyphenated foreigner as opposed to unhyphenated-whites who have culturally assimilated (despite the fact that Filipinos have been in the U.S since the late 1800’s). In this paper, the author explores ways racialized immigrants claim through gender the power denied them by racism.

Main points:
Filipino women are conceptualized in relation to white women. This juxtaposition has historical roots by the ways racialized women have been demonized by colonialism and/or racism. The critique of white woman and Filipina chastity is a strategy of resistance but it at the expense of reinforcing patriarchal power. By asserting moral superiority, young women in immigrant families face restriction on autonomy, mobility, and personal decision making.

-Dynamics of gender. Restrictive gender roles.
-Use term American to refer to white.
-Author argues that female morality is defines as women’s dedication to their families and sexual restraint.
-Respondents constructed their “ethnic” culture as principled and “American culture as deviant.
-stereotypes of Filipino women as “prostitutes” submissive “mail-order brides” emerged out of colonial process. Europeans used male power to dominate and all Filipina women were sexual commodities.
- Parents place restrictions of women to construct ideal Filipina women who is chaste, modest, nurturing, and family-oriented/
-immigrant parents have the authority to determine if their daughters are “authentic
members of their racial/ethnic community.
-overall, many Filipinas desire new gender norms and practices
-gendered discourse about morality in attempt to elevate the Filipinas above dominant group, demonizing white people in the process.



Sara Graham-Brown, Excerpt from Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East, IWS 324- 328

The author describes how information about women in the Middle East is seen through the lens of nineteenth-century European colonization. Western travelers drew on their cultural and racial biases to produce descriptions and histories that highlighted European superiority. Western women were quite active in this process, measuring women they met against their own values and ideas. A good example of this Eurocentric knowledge can be found in the descriptions of female segregation or seclusion found in affluent households in the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia. Western outrage over such “harems’ sensationalized these domestic arrangements and created harmful images of the women who lived in them that continue to exert influence even today.

Many western women travelers were unable to disentangle their feelings about women’s status in their own societies from their assessments of women’s conditions elsewhere. In the 1920’s the feminist movement in the middle east was underway and women, by attending international conferences, were made more aware of their needs for rights to education and work, improved legal status within family and women’s enfranchisement.

Seclusion and separation: the word haram has a double meaning of forbidden, or sacred and protected. Elites in the Middle East segregated space of women and controlled their public visibility. This patriarchal control is based on the assumption that women are powerful and dangerous beings and must be controlled. Poorer women were less secluded because they had to work outside the home, and also, their home was too small to allow strict seclusion.

Evelynn M. Hammonds, “New Technologies of Race,” IWS 69-74

Physicist and feminist scholar of science and technology Evelynn Hammonds shows us that the new techniques of morphing and other computer-generated visuals of racial mixing draw upon the ideologies of eugenics and biologically based notion of race and gender to imagine the future.

In this article describes that these cybergeneticists reveal their own preferences, assumptions or implications underlying the choices they make when morphing. Norm regarding morphing parallel late-nineteenth century rhetoric against interracial unions, which claimed that hybrid persons were unnatural.

France Winddance Twine “browned-skinned white girls” FF 174-187

This article analyzes the social construction of identity of African American females who, as children acquired white identities in their middle class suburban communities. These African descent firls in the absence of a politicized African American residential communities acquired white cultural identity and not a black consciousness before leaving the home to attend college. This article describes racialized gender identities.
Key terms
Social construction of race/ racial constructs- human interaction rather than natural differentiation must be seen as the source and continued basis for racial categorization. The process by which racial meaning arise is racial formation. In this formulation, race is not a determinant or residue of some other social phenomenon, but rather stands on its own as an amalgamation of competing societal forces. Four important facets of this fabrication is
1) humans rather than abstract social forces produce races
2) as human constructs, races constitutes an integral part of a whole social fabric that includes gender and class relations
3) the meaning-systems surrounding race change quickly rather than slowly
4) traces are constructer relationally, against one another, rather than in isolation

Representations of black sexuality- Wild, animalistic

Hegemony and counter hegemony-
Hegemony- dominant form of power
Counter- hegemony- against dominant forms of power

Eugenics thought/ practice- Eugenics gave scientific authority to social fears and moral panics, lent respectability to racial doctrines, and provided legitimacy to sterilization acts and immigration laws. Powered by the prestige of science, it allowed modernizing elites to represent their prescriptive claims about social order as objective statements irrevocably grounded in the laws of nature.


Cultural reconstruction- a way to counter the cultural Americanization, to resists the assimilative and alienating demands of U.S. society, and reaffirm to themselves their self-worth in the face of colonial, racial, class, and gendered subordination.

Unhyphenated whiteness- economic mobility and cultural assimilation, not foreign