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 field 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 significance and meaning of terms like race, racism, the racial project, and racial formation itself, Omi and Winant developed a vocabulary 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 delineating the racial formation framework, Omi and Winant's work identified why the study of race and processes of racialization matters. Demonstrating 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 constitution of race, not just as political struggle between already existing racial groups.

Its influence 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 field has increasingly recognized the social construction of race as an important component of understanding both women's experiences and gendered structures of power, Racial Formation as a text has still not found a place within women's and gender studies curriculum and scholarship. This is no doubt partly because the neglect of gender and naturalization of sexual difference is a significant 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 sufficiently 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 field to center men of color in its analysis and of women's studies to center white women. Both of these fields have struggled to sufficiently 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 signifies the development of a growing arena of scholarship that theorizes the relationship 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 highlighting 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 gendered 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. Specifically, 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 first place Omi and Winant's work within the context of the development of scholarship on intersectionality and then turn to the specific 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.

Omi and Winant define race as "a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts 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 mentions 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 division of humans into sexes—two at least, and possibly intermediate ones as well—is not...