Racialized Femininities

R argues that in precolonial Yoruba society, power was not determined by gender because different genders were not binarily opposed; rather, the binary gender system was introduced through the violence of colonialism. Postcolonial Studies has also revealed how colonial discourse described colonized women as exotic and orientalized in relation to white women’s virginal innocence. For example, Gayatri Spivak unveils how canonical European novels like Jane Eyre capitalize on the contrast between the savage, mad, and hypersexual colonized woman of color and the pure white woman. While many colonized men were also portrayed as savage and barbaric in colonial discourse, they were simultaneously feminized to show their “failed” masculinity. Moreover, many representations of African and Asian geography in European literature feminize the colonized land, exposing the Western premise that “masculine” colonial forces should plunder and control “feminized” land. These historical impacts of colonialism continue today, as neocolonial and imperialist forces continue to use gendered militarism and orientalism to justify Western and white dominance. RACIALIZED FEMININITIES The modern binary gender system is a historical product of colonialism, moderated and informed by whiteness. Therefore, people who are outside of modernity and coloniality experience gender differently than white people. Black and brown people’s genders are also marked and perceived differently than white binary genders because of the effects of racial stereotypes. Racialized femininities refers to the various manifestations and perceptions of femininity embodied by Black and brown people; the term takes into account how gender intersects with racism and colonialism. An examination of the racialization of femininities reveals how “true” femininity is defined by whiteness and how racism and colonialism rob or impose femininity on people of color to dominate and control them. Colonial Gender Systems Scholars in Indigenous Studies have illustrated how gender as a modern construct was socially constructed by coloniality. María Lugones outlines how coloniality naturalized the gender binary and therefore naturalized sexual differences between men and women. Binary and hierarchical gender (“man versus woman”) did not operate as a concept for many precolonial societies. Rather, European colonial forces imposed the cisheteropatriarchal binary gender system as a tool of domination in order to destroy Indigenous belief systems. For example, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí Ungendering Under Enslavement Scholars in Black Studies and Decolonial Studies have outlined how the modern understanding of humanness is based in Western and colonial knowledge production. They have also outlined how Black people were cast outside of the category of human and rendered less than human or nonhuman 685 686 Racialized Femininities under coloniality and enslavement by forcibly being transformed into commodities or rendered beastly in the Western imagination. Sylvia Wynter argues that the notion of the Western Human is rooted in a cisgender, heterosexual man. Frantz Fanon also argues that Black people were forced into the “zone of nonbeing,” since the white colonial gaze rendered them less than human. Since binarily opposed genders are a requirement of the human, to be excluded from humanness also means an exclusion from the binary gender system. Therefore, those rendered nonhuman under enslavement were also forced out of colonial gender norms. Hortense Spillers delineates how Black people were “ungendered” during slavery because of their violent transformation by the white gaze into commodities. Since Black people were “thingified,” or turned into “things,” all the traits that came along with the notion of the human, such as gender and kinship, were stolen from them. According to Spillers, the captive female body was unnamed and ungendered because it existed without the potential for family roles and kinship bonds. Distinguishing between the sentient “body” and the contained “flesh,” Spillers shows that the body is the privilege of the free, while flesh is all that remained for Black people who were “thingified” by white enslavers. Since flesh is nameless and, therefore, ungendered materiality, it becomes a tool to racialize Black people. Flesh emerges when the idea of the full breathing body is stolen from Black people. Therefore, the concept of womanhood or femininity was denied to Black women because the white colonial gaze perceived them as flesh. This concept of the ungendering of Black people under enslavement has been used in Black Trans Studies to examine what Marquis Bey calls the Blackness of transness and the transness of Blackness. C. Riley Snorton argues that “Black” and “trans” are not distinctly separate categories. Since both Blackness and transness are excluded from the Western binarily gendered human, these categories constitute each other. Snorton shows that the fungibility of Black flesh under enslavement created conditions of gender manipulation and rearrangement, hence giving birth to different forms of trans experiences. Black women who were ungendered or rendered flesh, therefore, occupied a trans space. Since Black and trans identities are interrelated and co-constitutive, Black feminism and trans feminism are also interrelated. According to Kai M. Green and Marquis Bey, Black feminism offers a trans feminist perspective because it challenges the limitations of the (white) gender binary and ruptures the category of “womanhood,” exposing how “true” womanhood and femininity are available only to white cis women. Racial-Gender Stereotypes Since we live in an anti-Black global system that operates through a colonial framework, the white gaze conceptualizes the genders of women and femmes of color as excessive, failed, exotic, or underdeveloped. Racialized people are often perceived by the white gaze as monstrous; this monstrosity is particularly attached to women and femmes of color who refuse to embody the ideals of white womanhood. For example, Black and brown Muslim women who wear attire that white society deems abnormal, such as hijabs or burqas, are often considered monstrous or dangerous. Furthermore, Black women in general are often stereotyped as angry, loud, and excessive and thus rendered monstrous by the white colonial gaze. Different women of color are also sexualized differently on the basis of race. Black and Latina women are often perceived as hypersexual or sexually excessive. This leads to a larger perception of a lack of Black innocence, due to which Black girls are often robbed of their girlhood because white society prematurely renders them grown sexual women. The white cultural perception of Latina women as exotic and oriental is also revealed in many contemporary cultural productions that fetishize Latina women as simultaneously othered and desirable. In contrast, Asian women are considered undersexual or passively sexual, and they are therefore infantilized. Arab and South Asian Muslim women are also perceived as undersexual or sexually repressed, based on stereotypes of Islam. The violent stereotyping of Black women as hypersexual results in a colonial need to police, control, and regulate Black feminine bodies, while the harmful stereotyping of brown Muslim women as undersexual results in a white savior complex, or an effort to “save” these women from their socalled repressive cultures. Racialized femininities are not only produced through negative stereotypes but are also co-opted Racialized Femininities and tokenized by imperialism. Erica Edwards argues that the binary of normativity and antinormativity is inadequate to understand the paradoxical position of Black women’s sex and sexuality in the post–World War II U.S. nationalist and imperialist imaginary. Edwards argues that in the contemporary moment, Black sexuality is not only made monstrous, but it is also incorporated into the U.S. imperial imaginary. The co-optation of Black women by the United States often perpetuates imperialist feminism and homonationalism, which refers to the state’s appropriation of liberal gender and sexual politics solely for the purpose of justifying the “War on Terror” and other neocolonial missions. Coercively Assigned Femininities While ungendering and commodification have historically robbed Black women of femininity, coloniality has often imposed femininity on Asian men. Discussing the “racial castration” of Asian cis men, David Eng contends that under the white gaze, the Asian American penis is rendered invisible. Because the Asian man is racially castrated and feminized, he is also queered, hence perpetuating the notion that colonized societies are queer, while white Western societies are heterosexual. Eng ties the feminization of Asian American men to migration and economic histories, showing how many Asian men traditionally worked in professions that were stereotypically perceived as feminine, such as laundries and tailors’ shops. Furthermore, Chinese exclusion laws that prohibited the migration of Chinese women to the United States also contributed to the stereotype that Asian communities were homosocial queer communities, where men could substitute for women. Therefore, Asian American men were excluded from heterosexual reproduction and normative kinship bonds. Since masculinity is normatively understood to be dominant and violent, and femininity is conceptualized as weak and passive, the perception of Asian men as passive feminizes them. Scholars in queer Asian studies, such as Nguyen Tan Hoang, contend that since Asian men are feminized, they are believed to be “forever bottoming” during gay sex, an idea that is based on the premise that bottoming equals passivity, and passivity means feminine. Hence, sexuality is always intertwined with racialized gender. In such instances, there is a clear 687 link between oriental passivity, racial castration, and sexual bottoming. Oriental fantasies and fears of brown femininity also extend to brown Muslim or Sikh men, who are likewise considered a failure of masculinity. Jasbir Puar demonstrates how the “War on Terror” produced the notion of the feminized brown man. Puar discusses how the image of the feminized, turbaned man was created in order to justify the anal raping of imprisoned cis men in Abu Ghraib. For example, after 9/11, feminized and sexualized images of Osama bin Laden were frequently circulated to demonize racialized Muslims and transform them into the sexual “bottom” during acts of military rape. The “War on Terror” constructed Muslim and immigrant communities as sexually repressive and exceptionally homophobic, as well as created the perception of the Muslim/terrorist body as a demonic kind of queer by representing it through perverse femininity. While perverse queerness has historically been associated with many communities of color, contemporary imperialism also portrays the West as liberal and gay-affirming, hence demonizing communities of color as homophobic to produce and perpetuate homonationalism. Homonationalism espouses the false narrative that the United States promotes the “right” kind of queerness by abiding by Western notions of masculinity and femininity, while racialized Muslims stand outside the “right” kind of queer identity because of their presumed perverse femininity and pathologically homosocial culture. Take-Aways Since Black and brown women and femmes are differently located from white women, racialized femininities should be examined through the power structures of the modern-colonial gender system. The white colonial gaze dictates that “true” femininity must correspond to the qualities embodied by white cis women, and “true” masculinity must correspond to the qualities embodied by white cis men. Therefore, Black and brown women and femmes are often perceived by the white gaze as inadequately feminine for being outside of the white binary gender system. Black women and femmes are perceived as masculine by the white gaze and ungendered in the afterlife of slavery because of the forced “thingification” of 688 Racialized Masculinities Blackness. At the same time, Asian, Arab, and brown Muslim men and masculine people are often forcibly rendered feminine by colonialism. Therefore, different markers of gendered excess or lack thereof are attached to people based on the complex and, at times, contradictory ways in which they are racialized. Spillers, H. J. (1987). Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book. Diacritics, 17(2), 65–81. http:// links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0300-7162%28198722%2917 %3A2%3C64%3AMBPMAA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-B Spivak, G. C. (1985). Three women’s texts and a critique of imperialism. Critical Inquiry, 12(1), 243–261. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343469?origin=JSTOR-pdf Aqdas Aftab See also Asian American People, Black People; Femininities and Femme; Indigenous People; Intersectionality in Research; Muslim People; Racialized Masculinities Further Readings Bey, M. (2017). The trans*-ness of blackness, the blackness of trans*-ness. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 4(2), 275–295. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3815069 Collins, P. H. (2002). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York, NY: Routledge. Edwards, E. R. (2015). Sex after the black normal. Differences, 26(1), 141–167. Eng, D. L. (2001). Racial castration: Managing masculinity in Asian America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin, white masks. New York, NY: Grove Press. Green, K. M., & Bey, M. (2017). Where Black feminist thought and trans* feminism meet: A conversation. Souls, 19(4), 438–454. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 10999949.2018.1434365 Lugones, M. (2016). The coloniality of gender. In W. Harcourt (Ed.), The Palgrave handbook of gender and development: Critical engagements in feminist theory and practice (pp. 13–33). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. McKittrick, K. (Ed.). (2015). Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nguyen, T. H. (2014). A view from the bottom: Asian American masculinity and sexual representation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Oyěwùmí, O. (1997). The invention of women: Making an African sense of Western gender discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Puar, J. K. (2018). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Snorton, C. R. (2017). Black on both sides: A racial history of trans identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. RACIALIZED MASCULINITIES The term racialized masculinities describes the intersection of masculinity and race. The phrase is often used by scholars and others to describe the behaviors, styles, and identities of cisgender men of color. Yet, trans masculinities taken on by a broader range of individuals who are not cis men are also racialized. A critical examination of whiteness indicates that white masculinities are racialized masculinities as well. Resources and privilege that often accrue to masculinity in a heteropatriarchal culture play out differently according to race, as well as class, sexuality, and ability. Differential experiences of safety in public spaces and material outcomes in the workplace illustrate how Black and Latinx trans masculinities, as well as other trans masculinities of color, do not necessarily confer the same advantages of white trans masculinity. This entry uses the concept of intersectionality to define and provide examples of racialized trans masculinities, mostly in the United States, and illustrates how these masculinities differently shape experiences of privilege and safety for transmasculine people. Defining Racialized Masculinities The phrase racialized masculinities refers to a specific, interconnected relationship between socially constructed categories of masculinity and race. Masculinities are practices and styles that are associated with men in a given time and place. Referring to masculinities, instead of a singular masculinity, is a reminder that there are multiple ways to express masculinity and a range of categories of masculinity. It would be easy to think that everything men do is masculinity, but people who are not men or who are not assigned male at birth can be masculine, and femininity is not the sole arena of women. Race is a social construct and