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-si-e 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 In