The Places of
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All things considered, the gendered identities imparted by Alberti’s
theory of the “white skin” were neither imagined nor received by an architectural
tradition in a race-free sense any more than architecture exists in a race-free
world. In light of my analysis, Alberti’s construction of whiteness should
speak for itself at this point as a 
sexual ideology that produces both gender and race hierarchy. Yet my project
is not so much to indicate Alberti as an architect of these hierarchies
as to hold a contemporary essay accountable for silently perpetuating them
as separate concerns. Like Alberti, Wigley discusses a theory of whiteness
without explicitly referring to it as racial ideology. Like Alberti, he
thus participates in the construction of race in a de-raced discourse on
gender. What is most troubling about this repetition is the fact that it
repeats a process of domination.
Because race is a constant subtext in the theories propelling “Untitled: Housing Gender,” constructions of the black woman and the black man silently inform Wigley’s discussions of white gender relations. If feminist theory is engaged at all in his narrative, it is engaged as white; in a dominant and authoritative tone, it is objectified as such. Feminist theory is thus only used to some degree, but never realized. Instead, it is appropriated and neutralized, for it is presented in simplified form as merely a discourse on gender and re-presented as white. In this view, Wigley’s criticism is not feminist analysis. Feminist analysis is not a detached, unpoliticized reading of gender hierarchy; it is not a means by which critics consider theoretical conceptions of woman without accounting for the politics of race and other hierarchies. If we allow such critiques to call themselves feminist, feminist theory is mastered, neutralized, dominated, and finally exploited. To keep this from happening and to achieve the political effectiveness we seek, the task for feminist criticism is to uncover the intersections, for none of us exists outside of an intersectional location. Feminist critics must learn to be antisingular in their approach. As “Untitled: Housing Gender” inadvertently points out, it is, of course, discriminatory to write as if women were only made up of gender. In a white supremacist society, this approach signifies the pathology that characterizes all “white feminist” criticism: it is pathological to insist that the woman’s construction is universally white. The pathology of universalism will persist as long as we allow underlying assumptions of whiteness, heterosexuality, class status, or ethnic background to direct our critical perspectives. As many critics have already pointed out, there is no universal woman’s experience, and it is dangerous to write as though there were. But it is also dangerous to ignore intersections; to let them arise and go unarticulated and unconsidered, for each time this happens the mechanisms of cultural hegemony are quietly perpetuated: Divide and conquer is both the theory and the practice of cultural hegemony. In response to such a tenacious social system, feminist critics must imagine and engage feminist theory as an undividing process that accounts for all kinds of power differentials—out loud.
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Kim Anne Savelson