When I say that sexual domination is embedded in racial domination, I am thinking of gender and sexuality in a particular way. bell hooks notes that it is the “merging of [hetero]sexuality with male domination within patriarchy that informs the construction of masculinity for men of all races and classes. . . masculinity [is made] synonymous with the ability to assert power-over through acts of violence and terrorism” (59). Under this definition, masculinity is enacted in racial domination, and all racial domination can be thought of in gendered terms (or, as sexual domination). 

My argument is not, however, that the problems of constructed ideologies and spaces are rooted in gender; but that gender hierarchy is rooted in a model of sexual dominance, and its imagery is descriptive of a socially pervasive dominant/subordinate split that is spatially and sexually produced and represented. The gender paradigm I seek to employ is not in the first place descriptive of males and females in any biological sense, for this leaves out a host of other realities and identifying characteristics; I rather draw on gender as the site of a power hierarchy that articulates and prescribes societal relations from a culturally enforced perspective of sexual difference. In this view, gender power does not remain an exclusive contest between men and women. For example, Jesse’s violent domination of a young black man can be read as an enactment of gender power; it is therefore “sexual” and must be understood as such, especially because this understanding problematizes heterosexuality. Explicit representations of a male-female hierarchy can, correspondingly, manifest signs of other power differentials. As it is my specific project to read a racial power differential in de-raced gender criticism, I want to elaborate my point of view by asking: What is the place of race in the construction of gender? How does racial hierarchy and gender hierarchy interact? How does race function in/for gender, and how does gender function in/for race? 

One way to approach these questions is to explain what might be called gender disenfranchisement. Although it might appear that gender categories do not discriminate on the basis of race, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, access to the spaces of “masculinity” and “femininity” depend on factors other than just “sexual organs.” Both masculinity and femininity are elite spaces designed for occupation by particular and privileged subject positions; the famous speech given by Sojourner Truth in 1851 in which she asks, “Ain’t I a Woman?” suggests how the categories of gender are designed for white elite occupation, and how in inventing masculinity and femininity as white elite spaces, patriarchal power affords none of the social benefits of these categories to men and women of color (as people of a lower class stratification). 

It is because gender does not designate its categories as race-specific —even though, in terms of advantages, they function as such—that we can understand how it constructs and utilizes race to map masculinity and femininity. The sexualized construction of the racial “other” is necessary to the construction of gender ideals: To secure a constant economy of visibility concerning the precise embodiments of masculinity and femininity, a constant economy of visibility must be secured for the negative embodiments of these categories. (“Negative embodiments” primarily refers to the white supremacist manipulation of sexual ideologies so that the person of color is assigned, and thus readily signifies, an uncontrollable, irresponsible, and “uncivilized” sexuality.) In constructing space to serve its interests, masculinity is dependent not only on the construction of the feminine per se; it is also dependent on the construction of the male and female racial other as visual representations of uncontrollable sexualities. 

Of course, as dominant feminist theory has noted (perhaps from a Freudian standpoint), female sexuality in general represents an enigma and a threat in patriarchal culture, and therefore it must be controlled. All women are subordinated by and identified with sexuality to the extent that they are identified as, or by, their subordinated bodies. However, in constructing femininity, white supremacist ideology divides female subjectivity so that elite white women (“ladies”) embody the categorical gender ideal of sexual purity, while women who are poor and nonwhite visibly embody the space reserved in the female gender for licentious female sexuality. In the construction of gendered space, the place of race, as a sexual scapegoat for gender ideology, is then a sexual space for or in gender itself—race helps gender map (itself through) sexuality: The construction of the racial “other” shapes and reinforces the ideal categories of gender to the extent that the racial “other” is forced outside of these ideals by sexual ideology. We can find this dynamic written into architectural theory and, in turn, produced by constructions of space. 

In the fifteenth century, architectural theorist Leon Battista Alberti argued that a woman who ventures “outside the home” cannot be considered “a lady of unblemished honor” (Book III, 209). It is then the occupation of actual space that can either establish femininity (sexual purity) or call attention to its absence. In his contribution to the symposium volume, Mark Wigley paraphrases this aspect of architectural theory when he tells us that, according to Alberti, “The woman on the outside is implicitly sexually mobile. Her sexuality is no longer controlled by the house” (335). What, then, can be said of women who are forced to function “on the outside?” How can we read the manifestations of race and class (and not just male domination) in this architectural theory? 

In terms of American history, Jacqueline Jones notes that “To most black women . . . work seemed to form an integral part of the female role . . . Economic hardship compelled black wives and mothers to seek employment outside the home” (269). Kimberle Crenshaw observes, moreover, that “the history of white women’s exclusion from the workplace might permit the inference that Black women have not been burdened by this particular gender-based expectation. Yet the very fact that Black women must work conflicts with norms that women should not” (Crenshaw, 68). 

The fact that “black women must work” means that racist ideologies and policies force black women out of patented “feminine” space in ideological and actual ways. The space that black women are forced into is then a distorted gender position, a sexually “impure” space. This arrangement, established in slavery, made racial domination and sexual domination inextricable in the experience of black women, for during slavery the sexual abuse of black women by white men was customary. Even after emancipation, black women were forced to function outside of their own homes as domestic servants; in effect, for the black woman, “her employer’s home remained the source of her greatest fears” (Jones, 150). To work inside a white employer’s house made black women “uniquely vulnerable to sexual harassment and rape” (Harris, 246). The spatial arrangement that black women are forced into secures their sexual violation, which, in (reverse) turn, secures their construction as “implicitly sexually mobile.” Exploited by a range of coercive economic circumstances, black women become viciously manipulated by economically based spatial politics so that they reflect the uncontrolled sexuality imposed on them. It is the sexuality of elite white women that is controlled, for they are on the “inside”—in the home—and their femininity, their “unblemished honor,” is secured by this spatial arrangement (which is economically afforded and maintained). 

Although it is true that “the attempt to regulate the sexuality of white women placed unchaste women outside the law’s protection,” Crenshaw points out how “racism restored a fallen white woman’s chastity where the alleged assailant was a Black man. No such restoration was available to Black women” (Crenshaw, 68). This is because stereotypes and myths justified the sexual abuse of black women, and continue to do so. Black female subjectivity is historically sexualized according to (or by) the mythical construction of the black woman as always sexually available and immoral. As I have pointed out, gendered spatial arrangements help to secure and produce this mythical construction. Summarizing Alberti’s theory on women who transgress the boundaries of feminine space, Wigley writes: “If the woman goes outside the house she becomes more dangerously feminine rather than more masculine” (335). To become “more dangerously feminine” is to become a more noticeable sign of female sexuality. The spatial location of black women then situates them in their gender as the dangerous, negative embodiment of it. Paula Giddings is noting this system when she says, “Black women were seen having all of the inferior qualities of white women without any of their virtues” (82). 

Gender disenfranchisement works to exclude black women from the space of the feminine in a particular way, for their exclusion is based in part on their presence. In this view, black women have a space in their gender category, but it is a room in which they are put; it is built for them according to a racist-sexist blueprint, and locked from the inside. This is not to say that black women have not fashioned themselves a key with which leave this room, for it would be historically inaccurate to merely present a theory of victimization; the problem is that the room still exists and is continually renovated by white supremacist patriarchal ideology.¹⁰ 

The predicament of gender disenfranchisement, as complex as it is violent, also affects black men.¹¹  In considering black men and the negative embodiment of masculinity, we can find the cultural construction of black male subjectivity in sexual stereotypes as well. If, as noted by bell hooks, “the primary stereotypical image of black men in the white supremacist imagination is that of rapist” (72), the construction of black male identity is clearly based on myths of irresponsible, uncontrollable, uncivilized sexuality. The sexualization of the black male as rapist highlights white male subjectivity as civilized and genteel, while at the same time justifying white racial terrorism by labeling the black man a threat to the safety of white women. This ideological network also renders invisible the rape of black women by white men. Sexual stereotypes during slavery represented the black male as a sexual threat to the white woman, when in fact, as I have noted, it was white men who were raping black women. The discrepancy between the representation of white male subjectivity as civilized and the violent reality of white male domination is a typical finding of any investigative work focusing on the ideologies and practices of masculinity.¹²  My point is that contradictions and discrepancies like these bespeak the deployment of masculinity (and femininity) as racially inflected concepts.