Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory

“…and homogenous category ‘women’, in valorising sexual difference above all other ontological considerations, elides differences between women, conflating the problems of some women with the problems of all women regardless of age, class, sexuality, race and so on (1988: 3; see also Harris 1990).”

“It therefore fails to incorporate an intersectionality perspective, neglecting the multiple manifestations of inequality (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1983; Harris 1990).”

“…a significant body of work calling attention to the operationalization of injustice and inequality within formal and informal systems (Lawrence, 1987; Harris, 1990; Gotanda, 1991; Matsuda, 1991; Bell, 1995; Valdes, 1997; Crenshaw, 2011; Delgado, 2011; Kanter, 2011; Black Youth Project 100, 2016).”

“On this same basis, our chapter could rightly be criticised for its essentialist treatment of BAME lawyers and aspiring lawyers and their class credentials (see Combahee River Collection, 1994; Harris, 1997).”

“Thus, this formulation implicitly suggests that it is unlikely that a person who holds negative racial views will distinguish between Black men and Black women ~Harris 1990!.”

“As Harris (1995) stated, As long as feminists, like theorists in the dominant culture, continue to search for gender and racial essences, black women will never be anything more than a crossroads between two kinds of domination, or at the bottom of a hierarchy of oppressions; we will always be…”

“…feminism denouncing the privileged position from which white, able, middle class, heterosexual, and Christian-formed feminist scholars conceptualize the concept of gender as it were a neutral one (Lorde 1982, Combahee River Collective 1986, Spelman 1988, Harris 1990, hooks 1990, Hill Collins 1998).”

“In fact, not only is there a history of physical and sexual abuse within domestic work, it is one that continues today (Berg, 2020; Harris, 1990).”

“This multiple consciousness (Wing, 1997; Matsuda, 1989) cannot be accounted for in theories that do not value the intersectionality (Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, and Thomas, 1995) and anti-essentialist (Harris, 1990) perspectives.”

“Feminist scholars have discussed intersectionalities of various social relations producing unique stories (Crenshaw, 1991; Harris, 1990).”

“Certain aspects of social inequality will not be visible so long as we focus on gender, race, and class separately (Collins 1990; Crenshaw 1993 Harris, 1997; Hurtado 1994; Roth 2004).”

“…than orientation; in other situations, class is the most important component of identity; in others, it is the intersection of race and gender—for example, the lived experiences of women of color (Crenshaw, 1991; Harris, 1990; Hutchinson, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2005; Valdes, 1995, 1997, 1998).”

“…multiple discrimination to a problem of arithmetical sum, as if adding racism to sexism could explain the experiences of African American women, or adding racism to sexism and homophobia could give an account of the experiences of African American lesbian women (Spelman, 1988; Harris, 1990).”

“Angela Harris (1990) ‘Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory’ 42 Stanford Law Review 581.”

“As Angela Harris (1990) points out in her critique of Mackinnon (1987), identity is multiply embedded and negotiated; neither gender nor religion are determinative.”

“Harris (1991) has written about the essentializing theories within white feminist writings and she has suggested several ways in which feminist theory could benefit and grow by using black feminist ideas.”

“While some scholars criticize the use of identity categories as essentializing and homogenizing (Harris 1990; Lugones 2007), rendering internal group hierarchies and marginalization invisible (Cole 2009; Nash 2008), other scholars contend that unitary categories are at the very heart of…”

“Speci fi cally, feminist essentialism is based on “ the notion that there is a monolithic ‘ women ’ s experience ’ that can be described independent of other facets of experience like race, class, and sexual orientation ” (Harris, 2013, p. 349).”

“An ameliorative project is a “project that seeks to identify what legitimate purposes we might have (if any) in categorizing people on the basis of race or gender, and to develop concepts that would help us achieve these ends” (Haslanger, 2012, p. 366). For the ameliorative theorist, the goal is to construct or engine…”

“Engel and Munger’s conception of identity, which stems directly from their respondents’ own words, is congruent with the antiessentialist theoretical framework that has become more common in the field of identity theory (Harris 1990; Spelman 1988).”

“Harris (1990) argued that both dominance feminism, as exemplified in Catharine MacKinnon’s work, and cultural feminism, as exemplified in Robin West’s work, essentialize women’s experiences in ways that obscure differences such as race and class.”

“Others have argued that, given the great diversity of forms of oppression and marginalization, insisting on one single “standpoint” unavoidably amounts to committing the very same offence the standpoint theorists have accused mainstream scientists of, merely replacing the old perspective with their own “purportedly un…”

“In opposition to white supremacy, CRF challenges gender essentialism: “the notion that a unitary, ‘essential’ women’s experience can be isolated and described independently of race, class orientation, and other realities of experience” (Harris, 1990, p. 585).”

“Wells noted, “[w] hite men used their ownership of the body of the white female as a terrain on which to lynch the [B]lack male” (Harris, 1990).”

“The findings indicated that the participants’ experiences were compared to the prototype of a woman who is White, middle-class, and European (Espin, 1997; Hancock, 2007; Harris, 1990; hooks, 1994; McCall, 2005).”

“This problem is intensified when race is factored into the equation (Crenshaw, 1988; A. Harris, 1991).”

“…of care and Otherness within the public domain. tM Agenda 54 2002 The dangers of essentialism In recent decades, many feminists, such as Angela P Harris (1991), Audre Lorde (1984) and bell hooks (1989; 1990), have expressed the need to think about issues of gender in conjunction with issues of…”

“…that reduce women to their biological functions, and arguing against the idea that sex (or gender) overrides other self-conceptions, socially ascribed categories or lived experiences (such as race or class) (see for example: Spelman 1988, Mohanty 1988, Crenshaw 1989, Harris 1990, Cho et al .”

“…axes of oppression interact with gender in producing bodies as available for violence, and masks the signi fi cant complicities of white, upper-class, upper-caste women in upholding the very structures that disproportionately expose subaltern women to sexual violence (Harris, 1990; Phipps, 2020).”

“WOC are further marginalized when sentencing scholarship conducts single-axis analyses—or essentialist approaches by controlling for sex or race (Crenshaw, 1991; Harris, 1990).”

“Intersectionality helps to address the problems of universalisation and essentialism that occur from viewing experience as only the product of singular and discrete identity categories (Harris, 1990).”

“…lived experiences of African American women and girls are not the sum of essential experiences of race or gender or class - that these social systems operate in individuals’ lives in a mutually-informing, intersectional manner (Hill Collins and Bilge 2016; Spelman 1988; Harris 1997; Romany 1997).”

“Emerging from the work and resistance of renowned women of color scholars including Crenshaw (1989), Guinier (1994), Harris (1990), Hernandez-Truyol (1999), Matsuda (1986), and Wing (2000), the critical race feminist theory (Bell, 1995; Crenshaw, 1989) offers women of color an authoritative voice…”

“Feminist scholarship debunked the myth of the “rape by a stranger in a solitary alley” (Burt, 1980; Warshaw, 1988), opposed to marital rape exemption (Russel, 1982; West, 1990), uncovered the intersection of rape with racism (Wriggins, 1983; Harris, 1990), exposed rape culture (Sanday, 2004) and denounced victim blami…”

“One of the criticisms of difference feminism was that it implied or asserted that emotional labor and care work belonged naturally to women, thereby embracing the ideological gender binary that accompanied the political economy of domesticity (see Harris, 1990).”

“, Australian Law Reform Commission, 1994; Office of Legal Aid and Family Services, 1994; Graycar & Morgan, 1995) – and the concept of ‘intersectionality’, derived from critical race feminism (e.g., Crenshaw, 1992; Spelman, 1988; Harris, 1990; Grillo, 1995; Hunter, 1996).”

“The well-known problem with the radical feminist picture was that it neglected to recognise other sources of power and privilege which divide women such as race, heteronormativity, and class (Harris 1990, Behrendt 1993, powell 1997: 1494).”