Feminist theory provides means for unshackling ourselves from restrictive cultural and social rules and practices, when it comes to gender relations and identities. But it can sometimes deflect on the question of exactly which rules and practices it is fashioned to critically address. For if we choose to ignore the way in which the violent histories of racial slavery and colonialism have conditioned the emergence of contemporary gender norms, then our struggles for gender liberation will not achieve their projected goals. In this regard, prioritizing (or indeed exploiting) the concept of gender for a revolutionary praxis apart from anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle will fail in the fight to vanquish gender oppression.
To change course in philosophical theorizing on gender entails centering the Black feminist scholarship of writers such as Angela Davis, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman, to name a few. The Black feminist theories and concepts they offer more precisely articulate how the fact of racialized gender oppression challenges the notion of gender as a distinct category. This perspective demands much more than a footnote or auxiliary reference to anti-Black terror, colonial racism, and/or modern slavery. In brief, “race” and its historicity cannot simply be reduced to a discrete dimension of a pre-existing category of gender (either essentialized or socially constructed), nor can it be seamlessly equated with other categories.
Certainly, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, first published in 1990, provides the most widely held (Western) account of gender as performative. Butler’s concept of gender ontology allows us to reconceptualize gender outside biologically reductionist categories, by viewing normative constraints, not as unchangeable, but open to performative reconfigurations. While this work remains a landmark in feminist theory, it must still be critiqued for its inadequate engagement with the constitutive effects of the histories of racial slavery and colonialism, since the improvisational time allotted to performative subversions is curtailed in the longue durée of racial slavery and colonialism. Hence, Butler’s inaugural point on performativity does not grasp the way that it is already sedimented with racial and colonial pasts.
Moving beyond the elisions in mainstream philosophical views on gender normativity and performativity is the conceptual work of Black feminism, especially that of Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman, who develop the concept of “ungendering” to explicate the violent removal of all forms of gendered experience under the conditions of the structural violence of slavery and colonialism. Ungendering results in the loss of gender, conceived as a complex historical locus of meanings and experiences. This type of gender loss takes place during the period of slavery, a historical event that goes on to condition successive iterations of gender and sexuality.
Spillers provides us with distinct theoretical tools to illuminate the effects of ungendering on Black existence in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987). Her concept of ungendering moves beyond dominant philosophical understandings of gender ontology by demonstrating how racial slavery renders gender distinctions unimportant. Drawing on the formidable 1932 multi-volume Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America (Elizabeth Donnan), Spillers unveils the fact that the enslaved “cargo” were pressed into inhumane spatial allotments, according to their physical dimensions, not gender or sex role distinctions. In Spillers’s words, “we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuvers, not at all gender-related, gender-specific.”
It may appear that slavery has a gender category because of the sexual and reproductive uses of the Black body. But Spillers and Hartman attest that gender cannot be the proper category for understanding the commodification of sexual reproduction, which instead makes the Black reproductive body a “prime commodity of exchange.” In the capitalist marketplace, the reproductive body, and the “goods” that it produces, mark a disjuncture of worlds. The non-relational anti-Black world does not abide by the normative arrangements of domesticity and kinship, which typically structure gender relations.
Ungendering, Spillers writes, is made possible by the theft of body and the resulting separation of body from flesh: “before there is body, there is flesh, that zero degree of social conceptualization.” Hence, the body is separated from itself in the process of becoming dehumanized material to be extracted and exploited. The “high crimes against the flesh” comprise both the effacement of African normative frameworks for gender relations and the retraction of white gender norms. When the body is reduced to units of flesh, it no longer resembles the human form. No longer held together via the social arrangements of life and death, the body fragments, and its past practices of gendering with their specific kinship rituals are lost.
Racial and colonial power in the Americas exercised against Black and Indigenous peoples led to genocidal violence. As Spillers writes: “[The New World], with its human sequence written in blood, represents for its African and indigenous peoples a scene of actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile.” Further developing theoretical perspectives on “ungendering” will call for a more expansive consideration of its historical uses in both settler colonialism and racial slavery.
The trans-Atlantic slave trade demanded that the Black body lose its status as human in the eyes of the white world. According to Spillers, the historical event of the slave trade began with the Black body being forcefully transfigured into flesh in the Middle Passage. This transfiguration served the interests of “racial capitalism” during its initial phase of “primitive accumulation” (Cedric Robinson). Hence, the enslavement of the Black body became woven into the fabric of the burgeoning global economy.
Saidiya Hartman, in “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors” (2016), underscores the prevalence of gender violence in the time of slavery. Gender ceases to be an operative category on the plantation, where Black women are forced to participate in both productive labour (farm work, etc.) and reproductive labour (sexual reproduction). Hartman proposes that the uses of the Black female body can be understood, not in terms of gender, but in terms of reproductive labour, where “birth” is delinked from mothering or parenting, playing no role in determining kinship structures. In perpetuating the status of the enslaved through “birthing,” Hartman concludes that the Black woman becomes the mark of dispossession handed down to future generations. The legal precept demarcating the transfer of dispossession from mother to offspring was inscribed in law as partus sequitur ventrem (Jennifer Morgan). It is this past form of racialized gender violence that permeates contemporary views of Black women and motherhood.
Hartman traces the status of the Black woman on the plantation to the establishment of “a regime of racialized sexuality” in the present, which exposes Black women to greater levels of precarity, associated with poverty and low-income irregular employment (primarily domestic work in white households), sexual abuse and exploitation, incarceration, and murder. Hence, the historical abuses of the Black female body and sexual slavery have resulted in economies and social structures that continue to inflict harm on Black women.
Spillers critiques the 1965 Moynihan Report for pathologizing Black women’s positive influence on Black liberation. The report seeks to show that Black women’s ability to lead family units harms the patriarchal structure, with negative outcomes for Black men, whom it is assumed should have that power. Spillers associates the report’s conclusions with the histories of violent unnaming and ungendering, which continue to shape how Black women are viewed in dominant culture. Following Spillers, Hartman calls the resurgent Black female subject “fugitive,” tracing the loss of our understanding of the Black woman’s role in resisting enslavement in the past to our misrecognition of her pioneering role in establishing new forms of familial and social organization that depart from patriarchal relations. In the “afterlife of slavery,” ungendering reemerges in the many exclusions of Black women’s liberatory struggles, during slavery and post-slavery, from dominant feminist discourse and theory, as well as from widely held views of Black liberation, and liberation movements in general.
The invention of new kinship and family structures, which were not patriarchal in practice, indeed began when enslaved persons were faced with the destruction of their ancestral bonds to their lands and histories, including their associated kinship rituals. Spillers calls the changed style of kinship under the conditions of slavery the “revised Black Family of enslavement.” But, because this invention received no social or legal standing in dominant white society, it remained unrecognized, unlike white family and gender relations. And there has been a continual non-recognition of new and insurgent gender identities and relations, which have developed outside oppressive white gender norms. In Hartman’s words, the suspension of gendering under slavery has elicited a culture of gender nonconformity and forms of domesticity that differ from those of the white middle class, with its male-controlled households. Both Spillers and Hartman suggest that Black gender and kinship relations have produced a new ungendered “subject,” positioned outside dominant white normativity. Spillers summons us “to make a place for this different social subject.”
The Middle Passage and experience of enslavement resulted in irreversible and permanent “markings” on the body of the enslaved. Spillers elaborates on how the Black past reappears in the present in the form of a “hieroglyphics of flesh,” whose encryption on skin exudes the violence of racial slavery. Skin color becomes a symbolic proxy for those violent pasts, enabling the protraction of power over successive generations in the “wake” (Christina Sharpe). The Black body, still rendered flesh through the process of racialization, now bears a “concentration of ethnicity.” In this regard, experiences of racism today comprise echoes of the terror of ungendering, and the correlative reversion of the dimorphic binary within the borders of white gender relations.
Black feminist understandings of racialized gender are being deployed for new perspectives on queerness and transness. C. Riley Snorton, in Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017), draws from Spiller’s notion of flesh to reflect the linkage between the enfleshed Black body and transness, with its histories of “body theft,” resulting from heterosexual and cisgender constraints, occurring (then and now) at the violent intersection of racism and homo/transphobia. If we follow the theoretical insights of Spillers, Hartman, and Snorton closely, we may conclude that the ungendering of the Black body in the white world—a violent and dehumanizing process—has also been reimagined as insurgent and liberatory. This leads us to query further liberations vis-à-vis queer and trans identities.
Contending with the oppressive legacies of racial slavery and colonialism cannot be peripheral to the evolution of gender theory and movements for gender liberation. Any new concept of gender must measure the expansive possibilities for gendering and ungendering that emerge from Black women’s liberation.
In writing against escalating imperialist aggressions today, academics and writers cannot overlook (nor merely performatively cite) the lived realities of racial and colonialist violence in the present moment. The fact that racialized and gendered oppression, aligned with white patriarchal power, continues to structure identities and social relations must inform theoretical work at a time when “gender” is being exploited by a counterrevolutionary politics, which grows in an air where resistance fails to precisely identify its target and mission. Consequently, “gender” as a philosophical concept and political tool of emancipation cannot be successfully wielded for a feminist revolutionary praxis apart from a fulsome engagement with the anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Elisabeth Paquette or the Associate Editor Shadi “Soph” Heidarifar.
Sujaya Dhanvantari
Sujaya Dhanvantari is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy at Mary Immaculate College (Ireland). Her specializations include French existentialism, critical phenomenology, and social and political philosophy, especially the writings of Frantz Fanon and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as critical race, decolonial and feminist philosophies. She is the author of several articles on anti-colonial concepts and theories, primarily in the work of Fanon.
