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The racism of .gender equity ?
Bennett, Jane
Bennett, Jane
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dbennet.pdf
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"Policy approaches to identity have historically segregated gender from race . The reasons for this can, in part, be located in the complexities of particular contextual moments through which issues of discrimination and injustice have catalysed political attention. While this paper recognizes the importance of careful historicization, I would argue that the separation of race from gender (or sometimes, sex ) within policy development targeted at changing discrimination against people gendered as women largely fails to change the life circumstances of those suffering discrimination, and in so doing effects an inevitable racism. While it is possible and sometimes useful - to trace the effects of racialization and gender as those these were separable forces within South Africans lives, most people s heterosexual, reproductive, lives have yoked the operation of their gender into intimate identification with apartheid s categories of racialization (or into understandings of ancestry and community consciously resistant to, and therefore cogniscent of, these categories). Where a South African woman, therefore, is offered new opportunity through policies which seek to prevent discrimination against her because she is gendered as a woman, it is very likely that her situation will be as full of challenges rooted in a legacy of racialization. A gap therefore opens between the notion of a new access (because she is a woman ) and her capacity to make strong use of the opportunity (because racialization has located her within poverty, poor education, the experience of a lethally-intentioned state, and so on). If racism can, in part, be defined as the systemmatic obliteration of some people s access to all resources because their lives are circumscribed through racialization, then policy formation which addresses gendered realities as possible sources of discrimination without locating the process of becoming gendered within South African race/class history can only be described as contributing to the on-going systemic racism in the country. For several years, discussions of U.S.-based jurisprudential approaches to equity have illuminated the dangers of theories which imagine a universal female as a starting point towards legal reform and policy-making. As early as 1989, Kimberle Crenshaw, for example, argued that legal thinking and policy initiatives have created, and sustained single-axis thought, segregating gender from race, and in the process erasing the material realities of those most in need of recognition by policies seeking to redress historical disadvantage. Debates initiated through the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism in 1990 have come to constitute a body of work known as critical race theory , which explores from multiple angles the fact that epistemological approaches to redress that imagine rights through single-lensed identity should probably be understood simply as the late twentieth century s discursive rehearsal of the spirit-murder (Patricia Williams, 1995) of black people, especially black women-people."(pg 4)
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2001-09-03
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With permission of the license/copyright holder