This paper is concerned with the intersection of race and gender in Simone De Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex.’ It will explore this intersection by looking at De Beauvoir’s work and understanding it alongside contemporary understandings of intersectionality. It will take as its mark for the latter the essay ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Gender’ by Kimberly Crenshaw. I will begin by presenting Crenshaw’s understanding of intersectionality and then applying that to De Beauvoir’s reading of race and gender.
Crenshaw mobilises her critique against easy assimilations of discourses surrounding race and gender. At the start of her article she writes of a ‘single-axis framework that is dominant in anti-discrimination law and that is also reflected in feminist theory and antiracist politics.’ (Crenshaw, 1989 139) She clams that by drawing to the ways in which Black woman’s experience falls outside of this axis then it is possible to ‘reveal how Black women are theoretically erased…[and to] illustrate how this framework imports its own theoretical limitations that undermine efforts to broaden feminist and anti-racist analysis.’ (Crenshaw, 1989. 140) By considering several employment cases, Crenshaw concludes that this axis serves to directly obscure the multifaceted nature of experience. A dialectical view is excluded and any commentator is forced to betray either the incommensurability of Black experience with white experience, or the unity of female experience of opression. Crenshaw notes that: ‘It seems that I have to say that Black women are the same and harmed by being treated differently, or that they are different and harmed by being treated the same. One cannot say both.’ (Crenshaw, 1989. 141) This contradiction and the discourse to manifest the experience of the Black woman is seen as symptomatic of its uni-directional nature and this nature is taken to be severely problematic.
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Crenshaw concludes with the thought that a theorizing which takes note of race, and gender must be implemented if it is to become possible to ‘free Black people of the constraints and conditions that characterise racial subordination, then theories and strategies…must include an analysis of sexism and patriarchy.’ (Crenshaw, 1989. 147)
In her analysis of female individuals in ‘The Second Sex’ De Beauvoir makes the claim that woman is consistently and necessarily othered by the patriarchal world in which she finds herself. The othering is total and is not seen to be nuanced in any sense which would take account of the differences in life-world and experiences across white and non white individuals. De Beauvoir writes that; ‘Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself.’ (De Beauvoir, 1956. 54) The process of othering is described as being a necessary and universal consequence of the establishment of a social identity. De Beauvoir suggests that it has been a crucial and decisive feature of world history: ‘Jews are different for the Anti-Semite, negroes are different for the American racist, natives are for colonists….’ (De Beauvoir, 1956. 47) This difference is then taken to be extreme in patriarchal societies relationship to those whom it genders as women. While De Beauvoir’s descriptions do take account of the othering which occurs in the case of non-white individuals, just as they do of those who are gendered as female, there is no attempt to draw an intersection between these two. One is either othered as female, or as Black, one cannot be othered as both and therefore find oneself othered in a way which is different to white women.
In conclusion, it would seem that De Beauvoir’s comparison of white and non-white women is not a good example of intersectionality. While it allows for a degree of understanding of racial and gendered social processes it keeps these two compartmentalised and fails to allow any way of understanding their intersection in a way which would be useful for understanding the differing natures of oppression in each case.
- Crenshaw, Karen. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique od Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Anti Racial Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum. (1989): 139-167.
- De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Translated and Edited by H. M. Parshley. London: Jonathan
