The Intersection of Race and Sexuality

• Pages: 309-332
• Author: Khiara M. Bridges

309

Chapter 14

THE INTERSECTION OF

RACE AND SEXUALITY

What does it mean to analyze the intersection of race and

sexuality? The answer to this question might depend on who you ask.

Some folks would say that analyses of the intersection of race and

sexuality focus on the intersection of racial identities and sexual

identities in individuals. Studies in this vein might interrogate how

heterosexuality impacts the experience of whiteness in straight white

men. Or they might interrogate how a person’s identity as an Asian

American impacts her experience as a trans woman. Analyses in this

genre explore the intersection of race and sexuality on a micro level.

Other folks might say that studies of the intersection of race and

sexuality focus on the intersection of racial and sexual discourses.

Investigations of this type might, for example, interrogate how race

and racism have been sexualized—as when white lynch mobs

castrated their black male victims in the course of killing them. Or

they might explore how pundits in the nineteenth century once

argued that immigration from Mexico ought to be restricted because

Mexican “greasers” posed a sexual threat to U.S.-born white women.

Analyses in this genre explore the intersection of race and sexuality

on the macro level.

This chapter will move from the micro to the macro—first

exploring the intersection of race and sexuality in individuals, and

then at the level of discourse.

I. The Intersection of Race and Sexuality in

Individuals

Scholars who have explored the intersection of race and

sexuality at the micro level have underscored the importance of such

inquiries. Most of the early studies that employed the

intersectionality framework as put forward by critical race theorist

Kimberlé Crenshaw neglected to interrogate matters of sexuality.

1

1

However, if intersectionality is understood more broadly—if it is disconnected

from Crenshaw’s particular articulation of the concept and understood as generally

referring to scholarship or advocacy that is interested in the myriad ways that multiple

systems of oppression (e.g., racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity) impact differently

situated individuals differently—then it is wrong to say that intersectionality was at

any time uninterested in matters of sexuality. Consider that the Combahee River

Collective, a group of black feminists, issued a statement in 1977 in which they

emphasized that thinking about matters of s exuality alongside matters of race and

gender was paramount if social justice were ever to be achieved. They wrote:

310

THE INTERSECTION OF

RACE AND SEXUALITY

Ch. 14

As Chapter 13 discusses, the concern that prompted Crenshaw to

articulate the theory was black women’s experiences of having been

ignored both within feminist and antiracist organizing. This led

Crenshaw to be most interested in the intersection of race and

gender. She, as well as the scholars who followed her intersectional

call to arms in the early years, were not attentive, at least not

significantly so, to matters of sexuality. Because of the failure to

interrogate sexuality explicitly—and because heterosexuality tends

to be presumed when sexuality is not explicitly indicated—many of

these studies concerned themselves with (implicitly) straight black

women.

But, as Professor Darren Hutchinson has argued, an explicit

interrogation of sexuality in intersectional studies actually improves

intersectionality as a theory. In addition to making visible another

system of oppression that impacts individuals’ lives—

heteronormativity—it destabilizes concepts of privilege and

subordination. He notes that intersectionality has assumed that

women are unprivileged relative to men; consequently, it has

assumed that all black women are unprivileged relative to black men.

However, he argues that if we fold sexuality into the mix, it would

call “into question the construction of men of color as privileged,

relative to women of color.”

2

Indeed, straight black women might be

privileged relative to gay or bisexual black men in many important

respects. In this way, analyzing sexuality in intersectional studies

might add a necessary complexity to the theory.

A. The Erasure of LGBTQ People of Color

Investigations of intersectionality on the micro level have tended

to focus on individuals who are marginalized along both the axes of

race and sexuality. That is, they tend to center LGBTQ people of

color.

3

And these studies have observed, time and again, this group’s

erasure.

The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be

that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual,

heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the

development of integrated a nalysis and practice based upon th e fact that

the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these

oppressions creates the conditio ns of our lives. As Black women we se e

Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold

and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.

Combahee River Collective, Combahee River Collective: A Black Feminist Statement,

OFF OUR BACKS, June 1979, at 6, 6.

2

Darren Lenard Hutchinson, “Gay Rights” for “Gay Whites”?: Race, Sexual

Identity, and Equal Protection Discourse, 85 CORNELL L. REV. 1358, 1367 (2000).

3

Note the discussion in Chapter 13 of the claim that intersectionality is not

necessarily or inherently “about” multiply subordinated individuals. The claim is that

intersectionality is just as capable of describing the lives of singly subordinated or