The Gender Binary and the Invention of Race

<p><i>The Gender Binary and the Invention of Race</i> 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.</p><p>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 <i>fin-de-siècle </i>arguments for the respectability of male homosexuality and informed the mid-twentieth-century feminist analysis of Simone de Beauvoir’s <i>The Second Sex</i>. Finally, this book compares its approach to understanding the race/gender connection to that of intersectional theorist Kimberle Crenshaw.</p><p><i>The Gender Binary and the Invention of Race </i>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.</p>