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Gendering Racial Formation Priya Kandaswamy

Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States has had a profound effect on the development of the fi eld of ethnic studies. The most important insights of the book—that race is not reducible to ethnicity, class, or nation; that racial categorization shifts and changes over time; and that the state is a preeminent site of racial struggle—have become well-established truths amongst critical race theorists. In staking out the signifi cance and meaning of terms like race, racism, the racial project, and racial formation itself, Omi and Winant developed a vocabu- lary that enabled discussion of how race comes to be as it is and how race and the meanings associated with it change over time. In addition to delin- eating the racial formation framework, Omi and Winant’s work identifi ed why the study of race and processes of racialization matters. Dem- onstrating that race was neither an essential fact nor an illusion, they argued that it was best understood as the sedimentation of a vast array of racial projects, as a category produced and reproduced every day at scales ranging from quotidian interactions to macro-level social and political processes. By shifting the question from What is race? to How does race come to be? they emphasized that racial politics happens in the very con- stitution of race, not just as political struggle between already existing racial groups.

Its infl uence on ethnic studies notwithstanding, Omi and Winant’s work has, however, received far less attention within women’s and gender studies. Despite the fact that within the last two decades the fi eld has increasingly recognized the social construction of race as an impor- tant component of understanding both women’s experiences and gen-

24 • priya kandaswamy

dered structures of power, Racial Formation as a text has still not found a place within women’s and gender studies curriculum and scholarship.1 This is no doubt partly because the neglect of gender and naturalization of sexual difference is a signifi cant shortcoming of the book. However, it may also indicate that, despite the increasing recognition of the importance of thinking about race and gender together, theoretical frameworks that examine the processes by which race and gender are historically produced have not suffi ciently engaged each other (Glenn 1999). The critique of the lack of attention to gender in Omi and Winant’s work has been part of a more generalized acknowledgement of the tendency of ethnic studies as a fi eld to center men of color in its analysis and of women’s studies to center white women. Both of these fi elds have struggled to suffi ciently account for the experiences of women of color and the articulations of race, gender, and other forms of difference. In recent years, “intersectionality” has emerged as a concept that both names this absence and signifi es the development of a growing arena of scholarship that theorizes the relation- ship between race and gender as simultaneous and interacting structures of power.

This essay seeks to put Omi and Winant’s theoretical framework of racial formation into conversation with intersectional analysis by high- lighting the ways that attention to gender and sexuality might alter the key terms of Omi and Winant’s theory, and the ways that Omi and Winant’s understanding of processes of racialization might enrich approaches to intersectionality. I suggest that racial formation is fundamentally a gen- dered and sexualized process and argue that viewing race as unstable, historically produced, and changing in the ways that Omi and Winant demonstrate complicates the meaning of intersectionality. Specifi cally, I focus on two different aspects of Omi and Winant’s theory—the racial project itself (what Omi and Winant term the building block of racial formation) and the trajectory of racial politics (what Omi and Winant call the relationship between the state and social movements). I argue that these two concepts provide important openings through which to elaborate the historical embeddedness of race, gender, sexuality, and class in each other. To illustrate these points, I fi rst place Omi and Winant’s work within the context of the development of scholarship on intersectionality and then turn to the specifi c example of the historical development of the U.S. welfare state, a site where the contradictions of the racialized and gendered state are particularly apparent.

gendering racial formation • 25

racial formation at the intersections

Omi and Winant defi ne race as “a concept which signifi es and sym- bolizes social confl icts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (Omi and Winant 1994, 55). In Omi and Winant’s formulation, race is a category grounded not in biological difference but rather in what perceived bodily differences come to mean in the context of particular social struggles. To emphasize this point, Omi and Winant make a telling comparison to gender. In one of the few men- tions of gender in the book, they argue, “In contrast to the other major distinction of this type, that of gender, there is no biological basis for distinguishing among human groups along the lines of race” (Omi and Winant 1994, 55). This statement is elaborated in the footnotes with the explanation that gender is a social construct that is grounded in a natural biological division between the sexes. In contrast to race, which has no legitimate biological basis, Omi and Winant write, “the biological divi- sion of humans into sexes—two at least, and possibly intermediate ones as well—is not in dispute” (Omi and Winant 1994, 181n4). While Omi and Winant’s analysis politicizes the very construction of bodily differ- ence as the basis for racial categories, it relegates gender politics to the struggle over the social meaning of categories fi rmly anchored in natural sexual difference.

Often cited as evidence of the text’s failure to adequately engage feminism, this brief discussion of gender reveals fundamental problems with how Omi and Winant theorize gender and its relationship to race. Although inaccurate, Omi and Winant’s understanding of sex and gender in fact mirrors the dominant strand of second wave feminist thinking at the time the book was written. Second wave feminists employed the term gender to challenge biological determinism, not by calling into question the naturalness of sex categories per se, but by shifting the debate to the terrain of the cultural meaning of those categories. In doing so, these feminists took for granted that there was a natural category of women who were the subjects of feminism, an assumption that has since been thoroughly chal- lenged. A number of theorists have pointed out that this approach failed to recognize the ways that biological categorization of people into sexes is a cultural and political practice inseparable from social relations of gender. Rather than seeing sex as the real foundation for a socially constructed gender, these theorists argue that beliefs about gender play a fundamental

26 • priya kandaswamy

role in constituting how the naturalized sexed body materializes (Butler 1993; Fausto-Sterling 2000).

Recourse to a natural category of sex has also grounded the category of women in an essential sameness that has enabled the claim that women share a set of common experiences and a common oppression. Feminists of color have critiqued the ways that this idea of “universal sisterhood” has been used to center the concerns of white, economically privileged women and to justify imperialism and racism within feminist movements.2 They have argued that the category of women is in fact marked by internal dif- ferences rather than by any fundamental sameness amongst women. At the time Racial Formation was written, these critiques had not necessarily gained the attention they deserved within predominantly white women’s studies programs, but they had already been substantially made. Ironi- cally, in uncritically employing second wave white feminists’ theorization of gender, Omi and Winant actually reproduced the marginalization of women of color within both women’s studies and ethnic studies.

The deeper problem refl ected in Omi and Winant’s discussion of gender lies in the framing of the question itself. In the above-quoted statement, Omi and Winant focus on how race is like or not like gender. This posi- tioning of race and gender as potentially analogous represents them as distinct categories to be compared rather than as imbricated categories that are constructed simultaneously and that gain their meaning in and through each other. This is not a problem unique to Omi and Winant’s work, but rather one that can be seen within efforts to theorize race within women’s and gender studies, as well. As Evelyn Nakano Glenn notes, the fact that much of the scholarship on race and gender developed on independent trajectories has meant not just the exclusion of the experiences of women of color but also a failure to seriously consider the co-constitutive nature of categories such as race, gender, class, and sexuality (Glenn 1999). In relation to Omi and Winant’s theory of racial formation, this oversight suggests a diffi culty more fundamental than that of simply examining how a socially constructed category of race intersects with an equally socially constructed category of gender. Rather, thinking about race and gender as constituted in and through each other challenges Omi and Winant’s assertion that race is an independent and distinct category of analysis that can be thought about in isolation from other kinds of difference. While Omi and Winant’s insistence that race is not reducible to anything else is still useful (particularly in revealing the limits of ethnicity theory, eco-

gendering racial formation • 27

nomic reductionism, and nation-based ideas of race), in the contemporary moment it seems necessary to recontextualize race in relation to other axes of power and difference. In other words, the irreducibility of race should not be taken to mean that race develops in isolation from other categories of difference. Rather, race must both be seen as an important entity in its own right but also as fundamentally inseparable from the gendered, sexualized, and classed contexts in which ideas of race and racial categories develop.

In recent years, the rubric of intersectionality has emerged as the most prominent sign under which work that attempts to theorize race and gender together happens within ethnic studies and women’s and gender studies. The language of intersectionality has its origins in women of color feminism. While this feminist tradition has a long history, texts such as the Combahee River Collective’s groundbreaking statement of black feminist politics (Combahee River Collective 1983); Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith’s edited collection All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave (Hull, Scott, and Smith 1993); and Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s edited collection This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981) articulated a women of color feminist politics out of which the concept of intersectionality in its con- temporary incarnation emerged. These texts emphasized the inseparability of race, class, gender, and sexuality, powerfully arguing that social move- ments that grappled with only one of these forms of inequality effectively negated the existence of women of color. Within academic feminism, critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality just a few years after the fi rst publication of Racial Formation in order to elucidate the very specifi c ways that women of color were rendered invisible in activist and legal frameworks that centered either on race or gender. In her work on discrimination law, for example, Crenshaw made visible the unrecognizability of black women within a legal structure that required them to frame their claims as individuals who were either black or female (Crenshaw 1991a; see also Crenshaw 1991b).

Despite the profound impact that intersectionality has had upon ethnic studies and women’s and gender studies, a number of tensions and dif- fi culties surround the current usage of the term. Within women’s and gender studies, the language of intersectionality is often appropriated to mean putting together already existing theoretical frameworks, or includ- ing the experiences of those “left out” of white feminist projects, in a way

28 • priya kandaswamy

that evades theoretical consideration of race altogether. Thus, grappling with intersectionality is often mistakenly reduced to a call to include the experiences of women of color. Sidestepping the challenge to feminism inherent in the theoretical and political project of intersectionality, this framework of inclusion fails to confront racism for a number of reasons. First, to include women of color into women’s and gender studies leaves the core concepts of the fi eld intact and suggests that the lives of women of color are just another area of study that can be analyzed in the same way that white women’s experiences have been. Rather than take seriously the theories of race and gender and the feminist politics that emerge when the experiences of women of color are centered, inclusion simply invites women of color into a project that has already been defi ned in relation to the experiences of white women (Alarcón 1991; A. Smith 2004). Instead of taking intersectionality as a call to fundamentally transform (or abandon) frameworks that cannot grapple with racial difference, inclusion frequently preserves those frameworks as they are by simply adding to them. Second, inclusion often fails to take into account the relationality of different women’s experiences and instead repositions white women’s experiences as the norm from which experiences of women of color differ. As Elsa Barkley Brown notes, the point is not just that women of color and white women have different experiences but rather that racism is a structure of power in which “white women live the lives they do in large part because women of color live the ones they do” (E. Brown 1992, 298). Finally, including the experiences of women of color does not require the development of theoretical approaches that demonstrate how race is gendered and gender is raced beyond the scale of individual experiences. What emerges from inclusion is a focus on accounting for different identities rather than on critically interrogating the mechanisms of power by which particular iden- tities are produced as such.

While the metaphor of intersectionality has been a critical fi rst step that has enabled a wealth of scholarship that both brings together theories of race and gender and draws attention to the experiences of women of color, it is also limited by the fact that it implies discrete axes of oppression that intersect in particular locations. This limitation of the intersection meta- phor perhaps contributes to the misreading of the term noted above. The tendency has often been to see the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class as static locations (usually embodied in women of color) where the otherwise independent trajectories of racism, patriarchy, heterosex-

gendering racial formation • 29

ism, and capitalism converge rather than seeing these intersections as cuts that completely fracture the imagined singularity of these structures. In her reading of the work of women of color feminists of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Grace Kyungwon Hong defi nes intersectional analysis as “an analytic mode that does not privilege one site of identifi cation over another, but insists on the importance of race, class, gender, and sexuality as interlocking and mutually constitutive” (Hong 2006, ix–x). In Hong’s formulation, intersectionality is not an area of study but rather a methodological approach or “a reading practice, a ‘way of making sense of ’ that reveals the contradictions of the racialized and gendered state” (Hong 2006, x). Such an intersectional reading of Omi and Winant’s work potentially elaborates both how racial formation is a gendered and sexualized process and how the theoretical framework of intersectional- ity might better account for the dynamic processes through which racial categories are constructed. Two particularly useful concepts emerge from Omi and Winant’s framework as openings for this kind of reading: the racial project and the trajectory of racial politics.

First, as the “building block” of racial formation, a racial project “is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines” (Omi and Winant 1994, 56). A key element of Omi and Winant’s theory of racial formation, racial projects link what race means in particular contexts to how social life is racially organized in rela- tion to those meanings. This approach to theorizing the social construction of race moves away from both a purely discursive analysis of racial mean- ings and a strictly structural analysis that takes already established racial categories as simply the basis of hierarchical social organization. Instead, Omi and Winant’s framework stresses that the shape and meaning of racial categories evolve in conjunction with struggles to organize resources through those very categories. As such, racial categories can neither be taken for granted as stable constructions nor divorced from the social contexts in which they develop. Racial formation is the accumulation of both macro-level and everyday racial projects through which race itself is constantly produced and reproduced. Omi and Winant’s formulation suggests a different way of thinking about racial politics, not as a struggle between already existing racial categories but rather as a struggle over the very meaning of race and the forms of social organization those meanings enable.

30 • priya kandaswamy

However, despite these invaluable insights, Omi and Winant’s frame- work presumes that race and racial politics evolve in isolation from other axes of power and difference. The absence of consideration of gender and sexuality is particularly striking given how centrally the regulation of the reproduction of racialized populations has fi gured in the making of race. In addition, examination of the ways that ideas of gender have developed in relation to practices of colonialism, slavery, racialized labor exploitation, and defi ning national identity suggests that the process of constructing and regulating gender often works as (though perhaps not exclusively as) a racial project. Omi and Winant trace the origins of modern ideas of race to European colonization of the Americas, arguing that the processes of conquest and enslavement consolidated Western concepts of racial differ- ence (Omi and Winant 1994, 61–62). However, conquest was also a process through which modern ideas of gender and heterosexuality were consoli- dated and imposed on colonized peoples as a technique of domination (Lugones 2007). Not only did colonists frequently employ sexual violence to secure their domination, but patriarchal hierarchies of gender were used as a reference point through which racial hierarchy could be naturalized (A. Smith 2005). The making of race and the making of gender were thus inseparable rather than isolated processes, suggesting the importance of analyzing the gendered and sexualized dynamics of racial formation more broadly. This insight is particularly valuable because it moves away from the idea that these axes of differentiation develop independently and then intersect in particular bodies or locations. Instead, it locates gender and sexual politics fi rmly within the terrain of racial politics.

A second concept that provides a useful starting point for elaborating the relationship between racial formation theory and theories of intersec- tionality is what Omi and Winant call the “trajectory of racial politics,” or the relationship between the racial state and social movements. Omi and Winant argued that the state is structured by race, that the state doesn’t intervene in racial confl ict but rather is a site of racial confl ict (Omi and Winant 1994, 82). They identifi ed the trajectory of racial politics as shaped by both the racial state and by social movements that engage the state in efforts to rearticulate the terms of racial discourse. Particularly in the post–civil rights era racial hegemony, the racial state secures its legiti- macy not simply through repression but also through the incorporation and containment of social movements’ demands. Not only does the state absorb dissent, it insulates itself from challenges to the racial organiza-

gendering racial formation • 31

tion by limiting the terms in which political claims can be made (86–87). In thinking about how hegemony is constituted in relation to multiple constructions of difference, Omi and Winant suggest that “race, class, and gender (as well as sexual orientation) constitute ‘regions’ of hegemony, areas in which certain political projects can take shape.” They note that “it is crucial to emphasize that such ‘regions’ are by no means autonomous. They overlap, intersect, and fuse with each other in countless ways” (68).

Omi and Winant’s theorization of the state and social movements provides a crucial opening for elaborating intersectional analysis. In thinking about the racial state, it is vital to recognize that Marxist and feminist theorists have made similar observations about the state as structured by capitalism and patriarchy. However, theorizations of the racial state, the patriarchal state, and the capitalist state have not suffi ciently engaged each other. For example, within scholarship on the U.S. welfare state, Marxists have explored how the welfare state emerges as a means of regulating the working class, while antiracist scholars point to the ways that welfare policy was structured to maintain racial segregation, thereby ensuring the continued exploitation of African American labor. At the same time, feminist scholars have argued that the U.S. welfare state is organized around gendered ideas of citizenship that defi ne women primarily in terms of their roles as mothers and relegate them to programs within a two-tiered welfare state that are seen as charity rather than entitlements.3 These three different theories of the welfare state have developed largely in isolation from each other despite the fact that they are in effect seeking to describe the same sets of state practices and interrelated dimensions of the meaning of citizenship.4

What Omi and Winant call absorption and insulation have been impor- tant areas of inquiry within intersectional analysis as well. One of the most valuable contributions of intersectionality has been to highlight how the separation of race, gender, and sexuality within social movements has frequently provided the ground for state absorption and insulation against more radical claims. For example, Cathy Cohen persuasively argues that the black community has gained certain forms of recognition and inclu- sion in U.S. political structures by marginalizing gays and lesbians. This “secondary marginalization” constitutes a kind of absorption and insula- tion in that black leaders gain access to certain forms of power on the condition that they adhere to dominant norms of respectability and police their own communities’ demands. As a result, the fact that only some

32 • priya kandaswamy

concerns can legitimately count as black issues insulates the state from a more multidimensional critique (Cohen 1999). Similarly, the mainstream feminist movement has adopted an approach to violence against women that emphasizes criminalization. Because it effectively employed the terms of the state, this approach has enabled the movement to gain national recognition to the extent that major legislation has been passed and an Offi ce on Violence Against Women has been created within the Depart- ment of Justice. However, feminists of color have shown that this strategy stemmed from a failure to center the experiences of women who by virtue of their race, class, sexuality, and/or immigration status might experience the state not as a protector of women but rather as a perpetrator of violence (Crenshaw 1991b; Richie 2005; Incite!: Women of Color Against Violence 2006). On the one hand, absorption into the state prevents a deeper cri- tique of structural violence against women. On the other hand, the fact that the state recognizes only political claims made in its own terms such as through the rubric of criminalization means that social movements that seek recognition from the state are encouraged to frame their demands in ways that benefi t only the most privileged members within a category.

racial formation, intersectionality, and the u.s. welfare state

To illustrate the value of developing an intersectional understanding of racial formation, I now look specifi cally at the restructuring of the U.S. welfare state in the mid-1990s and the practices of the Freedmen’s Bureau in the Reconstruction South. When read in relation to this historical case, more contemporary debates about “welfare reform” present some interesting problems for thinking about racial formation and the racial state. First, race, in particular, operated as a kind of absent presence in the discourse about “welfare reform.” While the welfare legislation adopted in 1996 was the culmination of decades of highly racialized debate and had clearly racialized impacts, race as such is never explicitly mentioned in the law and is diffi cult to pin down in the discourse surrounding the law. Instead, representations of gender deviance (for example, “sexual promis- cuity” or what were deemed “bad mothering practices”) were often what marked a subject as racialized in a context in which political discourse strove to remain formally colorblind. This suggests that representations

gendering racial formation • 33

of gender work to signify and constitute racial categories, or, in Omi and Winant’s words, that gender itself operates as a racial project. Second, to remedy the threat that women on welfare supposedly posed to the nation’s foundational “family values,” the law forced welfare recipients to work outside of the home while measuring their value as citizens by their ability to conform to dominant ideals of the heteronormative family. This contradiction reveals the ways that the state’s patriarchal interests in regulating women as wives and mothers within the family and its interests in regulating women as a racialized workforce do not necessarily neatly align. This example forces us to consider both how the same bodies can be simultaneously subject to different regulatory impulses and how the contradictory investments of the state are displaced or sutured over so that state power might appear unifi ed when it is not. Finally, the political popularity of a policy that had severe consequences for women, working- class populations, people of color, immigrants, and particularly those who occupy more than one of those categories begs the question, Why did oppositional social movements largely fail to substantially challenge the law? Putting racial formation theory in dialogue with a more intersectional approach provides some insight into how consent for the dismantling of the welfare state was secured and how a state built around and through multiple forms of inequality maintains itself.

The objectives of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 were rooted in the belief that welfare enabled a cultural degeneracy amongst recipients that under- mined two of the defi ning institutions of American citizenship—work and marriage. Replacing a federal entitlement with the state-run Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program, PRWORA established a fi ve-year lifetime limit on welfare assistance, mandatory work require- ments including workfare programs, stricter paternity identifi cation and child support enforcement practices, and narrower eligibility criteria that denied or limited assistance to legal immigrants, unwed teenage mothers, and individuals convicted of felony drug crimes. Notably, the text of the law opens with the proclamation that “marriage is the foundation of a successful society,” and within public discourse the law was largely pack- aged as an effort to restore the “family values” that had supposedly been undermined by a welfare system thought to promote single motherhood. However, while the law cast marriage promotion as a policy goal, it pri- marily focused on forcing women on welfare into the low-wage labor

34 • priya kandaswamy

market either through mandatory work programs as a condition of aid or by denying them welfare assistance altogether. The desire to shore up the heteropatriarchal family was in effect employed to force low-income mothers to work outside the home.

To understand this contradiction, it is necessary to examine how race, gender, sexuality, and class have structured anti-welfare discourse in the post–civil rights era. The “welfare queen,” a fi gure central to this dis- course, illuminates the way that racial projects often gain their meaning through gender and sexuality. Popularized in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan and taken up by proponents of welfare reform, the mythic welfare queen is most frequently imagined as a black woman who both lives in a state of hyperdependency on government assistance and, in doing so, aggres- sively threatens to undermine national well-being. Seen as lazy and sexu- ally irresponsible, she is often depicted as having children in order to increase her welfare check and as eschewing labor discipline, preferring to live off of hardworking taxpayers instead. Transmitting her corrupt values intergenerationally, she is held responsible for the perpetuation of a degenerate culture that keeps her and her children trapped in poverty.5 In the mid-1990s, this representation was further elaborated to include Latina immigrants who were portrayed as coming to the United States in search of welfare benefi ts and bringing with them a culture of poverty that undermined American family values such as hard work and sexual restraint (Chang 2000). The antithesis of both the good mother and the good worker, the “welfare queen” embodies excesses of sexuality, entitlement, immorality, dependency, and irresponsibility that justifi ed state austerity in particularly racialized and gendered ways. These representations defi ned the problem to be solved as undeserving black women whose dependency on welfare threatened national morality, and thus displaced the question of economic, racial, and gender inequality almost entirely.

Scholars have responded to these overwhelming and omnipresent narratives about women on welfare through a wide range of sociologi- cal research that disproves common myths about welfare recipients. For example, Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein have painstakingly documented the ways that most single mothers on welfare were forced to supplement their welfare checks with various forms of paid labor in order to survive even prior to the institution of mandatory work requirements in 1996 (Edin and Lein 1997). Similarly, Kristin Luker has demonstrated that the moral panic over teenage pregnancy in the 1980s and 1990s was over-

gendering racial formation • 35

blown and that teenage pregnancy by no means causes poverty (Luker 1996). Dorothy Roberts demonstrates how popular myths about welfare recipients are fl awed, such as the idea that welfare encourages women to have children and causes dependency and the notion that marriage can solve the problem of single mothers’ poverty (Roberts 1997). Amidst the endless debates about immigrants’ use of social services, many scholars have argued that welfare benefi ts are not a signifi cant factor in shaping migration patterns (Sassen 1998), and a number of studies have docu- mented how immigrants use relatively few social services and as a group contribute more in taxes than they use in services.6 The above-mentioned critiques of common myths about welfare receipt are hardly obscure. They have all surfaced within public debates about the welfare system at some point, but despite the fact that these are rational, well-supported, and even somewhat obvious social scientifi c arguments, they have failed to stick within public discourse about welfare.

Omi and Winant’s concept of the racial project suggests the importance of assessing representations such as the “welfare queen” not just in terms of their veracity but also in terms of the work they do to reiterate and reart- iculate racialized social structures. This theoretical approach moves beyond simply thinking of racial stereotypes as fl awed representations and instead asks where these representations come from, why the public believes them, and how these representations come to appear as truths diffi cult to dis- lodge within a particular constellation of power relationships. Politically, this shift suggests a way of moving the terrain of political struggle away from questions about the truthfulness of representations, where it often gets mired (i.e., struggles over whether welfare recipients are deserving or not, whether immigrants are useful members of society or not, or whether criminalized people are innocent or not), to a more critical interrogation of the ways that the language of deservingness, usefulness, and innocence is always already connected to racialized structures of power.

A look at history reveals that the “welfare queen” is not so much a recent invention as it is a rearticulation in a particular historical context of a set of paradoxes that have defi ned black women’s formal inclusion in the institu- tions of citizenship. These paradoxes derive from black women’s unique location in relation to regimes of labor discipline, sexual regulation, and racial exclusion. The articulation of these regimes of power in historical moments of crisis often presents ideological and material contradictions for the state. As discussed below, these contradictions are frequently displaced

36 • priya kandaswamy

onto black women’s bodies by exacting an impossible set of obligations as the defi ning feature of their formal inclusion in citizenship. In juxtaposing the contemporary racial project of the welfare queen against an older his- torical example, I suggest that these contradictions are central to processes of racial formation and that the articulations of race, gender, and sexuality that inhere in the development of the very terms of citizenship continue to shape contemporary racial politics.

The practices and discourses that evolved in relation to black women’s citizenship during Reconstruction resonate strongly with contemporary debates about welfare and reveal how gender functions in the production of racialized exclusion from citizenship rights. As one of the fi rst institu- tions of the U.S. welfare state, the Freedmen’s Bureau was charged with the task of incorporating newly emancipated populations in the institutions of U.S. citizenship. Many contradictions emerged in efforts to include black women in institutions of citizenship that to that point, had denied the humanity of black subjects, and the practices of the Freedmen’s Bureau toward freedwomen were defi ned by these contradictions. On the one hand, freedwomen were seen as an essential source of labor in the south- ern economy, and vagrancy laws and mandatory labor contracts applied to freedwomen replaced slavery with a regime of forced labor that bears a striking resemblance to contemporary workfare programs. On the other hand, in a society where white women’s roles as citizens had been under- stood primarily as maintaining the sanctity of domestic space and raising future citizens, entrance into citizenship also meant that freedwomen were expected to adhere to norms of domesticity. Freedwomen were frequently the targets of civilizing projects as the freedwoman’s home was seen as the measure of freedpeople’s preparedness for citizenship. State and nongov- ernmental efforts to prepare freedpeople for the responsibilities of citizen- ship emphasized teaching freedwomen how to be good wives and mothers, and the emphasis the bureau placed on marrying freedpeople refl ected deep anxieties about controlling black women’s sexuality in much the same way that marriage promotion within the welfare system does today.7 Resonating strongly with contemporary welfare policy, the dual emphasis on forced labor and domesticity produced an impossible mandate for black women by defi ning their potential as citizens through contradictory obligations that were in practice impossible to meet.

The emphasis that the bureau placed on cultivating domesticity and marriage highlights the fact that for freedpeople entrance into citizenship

gendering racial formation • 37

and freedom was simultaneously entrance into a regime of gender regula- tion in which compliance with heteropatriarchal family norms was the measure of one’s worthiness for inclusion in the nation (Franke 1999). The American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission’s report to the U.S. secretary of war in 1863 strongly recommended marriage as vital to mediating the transition from slavery to citizenship and stressed that entering into the marriage contract carried with it gendered responsibilities that had to be enforced amongst freedpeople. The commission argued that the marriage ceremony, “while it legitimizes these relations, imposes upon the husband and father the legal obligation to support his family” (American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission 1863, 6). In addition, the commission noted: “This obligation, and the duties connected with the family relation of civilized life, should be carefully explained to these people, and, while they remain under our care, should be strictly maintained among them” (6).

Heteropatriarchal family norms were frequently invoked to undermine public assistance for freedpeople. The idea that providing material assis- tance to freedpeople would promote “pauperization” and “demoralization” was a theme that surfaced repeatedly in debates about the Freedmen’s Bureau (Bentley 1974; Farmer 1999). Equating freedom with self-suffi - ciency and adherence to a masculine ideal of independence, the Freed- men’s Bureau asserted that “no greater harm can be done to the negro, than supporting those who can support themselves.”8 The purpose of the Freedmen’s Bureau was not to “create a race of paupers or to encourage idleness” but rather, as the Virginia Freedmen’s Bureau’s assistant com- missioner, Orlando Brown, argued, “to make the Freedmen into a self- supporting class of free laborers, who shall understand the necessity of steady employment and the responsibility of providing for themselves and [their] families.”9 In these ways, marriage and the gender hierarchies inher- ent in it offered a vehicle for simultaneously constructing freedpeople as in need of cultural reform (particularly reform of sexuality), restructuring household economies, and rationalizing state austerity toward them. The gendering of institutions of citizenship worked as a means of perpetuating racial inequality in the post-emancipation period.

The bureau’s promotion of marriage predicated entry into citizenship on the performance of heteronormative gender roles while at the same time reiterating the compulsion that black women work outside the home, which made that performance in many ways materially impossible. While marriage promotion was rooted in the belief that conforming to het-

38 • priya kandaswamy

eronormative gender roles was fundamental to freedpeople’s entry into the nation, these beliefs did not extend into the realm of labor. Black women who chose caring for their families over wage work were cited as embodying the “evils of female loaferism” ( J. Jones 1992, 45). Bureau offi cials expressed contempt for “lazy and idle” black women who “played the lady” by staying home and expecting their husbands to support them. For example, South Carolina Freedmen’s Bureau agent John William De Forest wrote that “myriads of women who once earned their own living now have aspirations to be like white ladies and, instead of using the hoe, pass the days in dawdling over their trivial housework, or gossiping among their neighbors” ( J. Jones 1992, 59).

Securing labor contracts in both agricultural and domestic labor for freedwomen was a regular practice of the bureau, and freedwomen who did not have labor contracts could be charged with vagrancy just as freedmen were (Frankel 1999). In a context in which freedpeople were forced into yearlong labor contracts and were paid at the end of their contract for the entire year’s labor, payment was frequently withheld from women for labor time “lost” in caring for their families. In addition, as the vast majority of freedwomen worked as domestics or as agricultural workers, they did not even have access to privatized domestic space because of their labor conditions. Domestics most frequently lived in their employers’ homes, while agricultural workers were often paid in the form of room and board on the plantation. In the absence of land redistribution, the ideals of domesticity were in practice unachievable, yet freedwomen were frequently held accountable as individuals and as a race for the impossibility of the obligations on which their citizenship was contingent.

Despite their very different contexts, there are many resonances between this historical example and the representations so fundamental to the restructuring of the U.S. welfare state in the mid-1990s. In the case of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the crisis in the meaning of citizenship engendered by emancipation was in many ways resolved through the deployment of gendered defi nitions of citizenship that made citizenship for freedpeople always contingent on the performance of gendered norms that were mate- rially contradictory and nearly unattainable. The bureau’s defi nition of citizenship in terms of requirements both to work and to conform to domestic ideals created a structure of unachievable obligations for black women that was ultimately employed in the project of reinventing black subordination so that legal emancipation coincided with the persistence

gendering racial formation • 39

of black unfreedom. While discourses that linked the performance of domestic ideals to preparation for citizenship positioned black women as perpetually in need of state-sponsored cultural reform and surveillance, the emphasis on creating independent households justifi ed a policy of state neglect when it came to redistributing social rights and resources.

Not only does the state discourse on marriage and compulsory labor during Reconstruction resonate eerily with the anti-welfare discourse mobilized to secure public consent for “welfare reform” in the mid-1990s, but the more recent promotion of marriage plays much the same role in constructing welfare recipients as culturally inadequate, promoting household economies organized around the rubric of self-suffi ciency, and justifying state austerity. These two examples exhibit a striking articulation of race, gender, nation, and class into a circular and mutually reinforc- ing logic that justifi es exacting the obligations of citizenship from black women without granting any of the privileges. Within this logic, gender difference posited as natural fact functions as the measure of civilization and the precondition for full incorporation into the nation. However, gender difference simultaneously operates as a marker of racial difference, with the failure to perform heteropatriarchal norms serving as a primary sign of racial inferiority. Ultimately, within this circular logic, black women are placed in a position in which they are simultaneously seen as racially inferior because they do gender wrong and as doing gender wrong because of their racial inferiority. As a result, the gendered forms of cultural reform that are often posited as the objectives of social policy efforts prove to be an impossible project in the face of the immutability of racial categories within particular contexts.

Returning to Omi and Winant, what are the implications of these two examples for thinking about racial formation theory and theories of inter- sectionality? First, the interplay between race and gender in these historical examples reveals a great deal about how race appears as an absent presence within contemporary debates about social welfare in the United States. The resonances between the discourse on marriage and citizenship during Reconstruction and contemporary discourse on marriage and citizenship suggests the ways that racism lives in the very language that we use to talk about political and cultural belonging (i.e., terms like individual, respon- sibility, worker, wife, and mother). While in more contemporary debates about welfare the explicit language of race is almost surgically excised from the discourse, the historically developed, racially stratifi ed meanings

40 • priya kandaswamy

that inhere in these terms remain. In particular, the case of the Freed- men’s Bureau reveals the way that heteronormativity and gender differ- ence signifi ed and secured racial hierarchy. In the contemporary context of the ascendancy of colorblind discourses of race (Bonilla-Silva 2003b), the language of gender deviance often stands in for explicit discussion of racial inferiority. This shuttling between race and gender is one of the ways we continue to talk about race without explicitly talking about race and one of the reasons that racism in public discourse on welfare can be so diffi cult to pin down. The case of the Freedmen’s Bureau also demon- strates how heteronormativity is itself a structure of racism and as such suggests the importance of critiquing state racism from a perspective that denaturalizes heteronormative ways of being. Signifi cantly, the ways that the heteronormative family was employed as a mechanism of privatizing inequality in relation to freedpeople foreshadows the use of the discourse of family values to privatize inequality throughout society more generally in current neoliberal state practices.

Second, these two examples illustrate how the state negotiates its invest- ment in structures of race, gender, and capitalism in contradictory ways suggesting that, to understand the workings of the racial state, it is neces- sary to recognize it as inseparable from the patriarchal and capitalist state. Rather than seeing these different dimensions of state power as developing in isolation from each other, it is necessary to center the processes by which divergent state interests become articulated alongside the displacements required to give state power its seeming coherence. In both the case of the Freedmen’s Bureau and that of welfare reform, state interests in regulating women as wives and mothers through the institution of marriage diverged from the state’s investments in maintaining women of color as a low-wage workforce. However, the contradictions inherent in policies that sought to do both at the same time remain obscured because they were articulated and made coherent through a racialized logic of state austerity. In effect, both marriage and forced labor became vehicles for ending state assistance to communities of color. As such, imperatives concerning racial exclusion worked to reconcile contradictory demands regarding work and marriage just as racial exclusion was itself effected through these demands.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, these examples suggest some crucial insights as to why social movements were largely unable to chal- lenge the basic premises of “welfare reform” successfully. Given the imbri- cation of race and gender in the examples put forth here, it is imperative

gendering racial formation • 41

to examine how social movements that seek to address gender inequality might participate in reinforcing racial hegemony in the framing of their claims and vice versa. Evidence of this can be seen in feminist efforts to draw attention to the impact PRWORA might have on victims of domestic violence. Citing research that documented that approximately 60 percent of welfare recipients had been victims of domestic violence and between 15 and 30 percent of welfare recipients were currently in abusive relationships, these activists argued that specifi c provisions of the welfare law such as time limits on aid, work requirements, family caps, and mandatory paternity identifi cation would have excessively harsh effects on victims of domestic violence (Raphael 1996). However, instead of disputing the basic prem- ises of welfare reform itself, anti-violence activists argued that domestic violence victims constituted a special category of welfare recipients who both needed and deserved special treatment. Their intervention resulted in the creation of the Family Violence Option (FVO), an amendment to the welfare law that allows individual states to screen and identify victims of domestic violence within the welfare population, to refer victims to appropriate services, and to grant temporary waivers to domestic violence victims in cases when the aforementioned TANF requirements might put victims at risk.

While seemingly a success in reforming the law, in practice, the FVO has done little to improve the situations of women on welfare. This is largely because the activists who fought for the provision developed an analysis of domestic violence and welfare receipt that focused exclusively on gender in isolation from other structures of oppression. Advocates of the FVO made their case by arguing that victims of domestic vio- lence were innocent victims who wanted to work but were unable to do so because of their abusive partners. By stressing that domestic violence impeded the ability of women on welfare to work, advocates of the Family Violence Option, like supporters of the welfare reform law, uncritically accepted the assumptions that women on welfare did not already work and that entry into the low-wage labor market was the solution to women’s economic inequality. In addition, in suggesting that domestic violence victims were innocent, they implicitly contrasted this group with other welfare recipients who were presumably guilty of all of the things that anti-welfare discourse charged them with and therefore deserved harsh treatment from the law (Kandaswamy 2010). This strategy was fl awed because in practice victims of domestic violence did not appear as a distinct

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category of innocent victims but were in fact part of the same population as the rest of welfare recipients, who were depicted as undeserving within anti-welfare discourse.10 As a result, the FVO, while successfully adopted, remains dramatically underutilized (Hearn 2000; Spatz and Katz 2005). I would argue that this underutilization has a great deal to do with the fact that the dominant discourse about welfare recipients as undeserving, promiscuous, lazy, and aggressively cheating the system makes it diffi cult for most women on welfare to qualify for a provision designed to help innocent victims.

I point to this example not simply to critique these feminist activists. In fact, similar observations might be made about other groups’ efforts to challenge PRWORA, such as immigrant rights groups that often asserted their political claims by invoking their deservingness on the grounds of having a strong work ethic or strong family values. Instead, I think this example and others like it demonstrate that the constitution of hegemony through complicated and often contradictory articulations of race, gender, sexuality, and class makes it diffi cult to build political coalitions across these differences. The feminist activists discussed above chose to engage the state with a particular critique of patriarchy within the home but, in doing so, fell back on the language of compulsory work in an effort to make their political claims. Given the way that preserving the heteropa- triarchal family structure and promoting compulsory labor outside the home for welfare recipients are articulated in the service of a larger project of racialized state austerity within anti-welfare discourse, it would appear that confi ning the political claims of oppositional groups to the language of work or family is one strategy by which state power insulates itself. In effect, the contradictions in state practices as they relate to work and marriage secure consent for policies such as welfare reform by enabling a structure in which even those who opposed the law end up supporting it.

These examples illustrate the importance of applying an intersectional lens to Omi and Winant’s theory of racial formation, and of integrating an analysis of processes of racialization into intersectional approaches. Not only does such an approach provide greater insight into the working of the racial state, but it critically revamps how we approach contemporary racial politics. Drawing attention to how gender works to signify and constitute racial difference suggests one way colorblind discourse operates as a dis- course on race that does not use the explicit language of race. Therefore, if gender is one of the languages through which we talk about race, engaging

gendering racial formation • 43

gender seems a vital course for racial politics. Rather than thinking about the racial state as developing in isolation from other modalities of state power, it is necessary to explore how racism is produced in and through other forms of differentiation such as gender and class. In particular, if it is the articulations of these sometimes contradictory structures that secures hegemony and insulates the state from critique, it seems that racial politics must take on the rearticulation not just of racial meanings but also of how race gains its meaning through reference to other forms of hierarchy.

notes

1. This is not to imply that women and gender studies is a homogenous fi eld. Many scholars and departments within the fi eld have certainly made race central to their work and, in doing so, engaged Omi and Winant. Rather, I seek to draw attention to the fact that concern with processes of racialization remains marginalized within the fi eld as a whole.

2. For examples of this critique, see Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981 and Mohanty 1988.

3. For representative presentations of these arguments, see Piven and Cloward 1971; Quadagno 1994; and L. Gordon 1994.

4. Some notable exceptions that have looked at the welfare state from an intersectional perspective include Mink 1995; Chang 2000; and Roberts 1997.

5. For further discussion of the representation of the welfare queen, see Collins 1990, 67–90, and Roberts 1997, 202–245.

6. For an overview of these arguments, see Grace Chang, “Breeding Ignorance, Breeding Hatred,” in Chang 2000, 21–54.

7. For discussion of the role the obligation to work and the obligation to marry played in defi ning black women’s citizenship during Reconstruction, see Kerber 1998, chapter 2; Edwards 1997; Frankel 1999; and Hartman 1997, chapters 4 and 5.

8. Quoted in Farmer 1999, 165–166. 9. Quoted in Farmer 1999, 167. 1 0. For further discussion of the categorization of victims of domestic violence,

see D. Davis (2006).