The Gender Binary and the Invention of Race

The Gender Binary and the Invention of Race explores a fundamental and often overlooked connection between modern European conceptions of gender and race. Starting in the eighteenth century, these conceptions have intermeshed through a racialized gender-binary ideal for the male-female couple that, supposedly, only Europeans embody.

Through an exploration of various expressions of this racial gender-binary ideal, this book illuminates the deep connections between categories of race, sex/gender, and sexuality and the social hierarchies they support. This book also explores how the racial gender-binary ideal has both shaped fin-de-siècle arguments for the respectability of male homosexuality and informed the mid-twentieth-century feminist analysis of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Finally, this book compares its approach to understanding the race/gender connection to that of intersectional theorist Kimberle Crenshaw.

The Gender Binary and the Invention of Race is an accessibly written book that will be of interest both to undergraduate and graduate students of Gender Studies, as well as to a general audience wishing to learn more about the relationship between the categories of race, gender, and sexuality.

Sally Markovitz is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Willamette University. She has taught philosophy and gender studies for many years, and her articles and reviews in the fields of aesthetics and gender studies have appeared in a variety of academic journals.