Beyond the Shadow

Abstract

AbstractThis essay examines racial scripts as indicators of differentiated gender–race formations, expressed through a double-voiced discourse. White feminists deploy scripts to disaffiliate from a universalized gender but at the same time deny racial difference in order to maintain a coherent narrative of oppression based on gender. Feminists of color, on the contrary, adopt a double-voiced discourse in order to dismantle a false unity that depends on discursive processes of exclusion of a racialized ‘other.’ The implementation of a ‘conjunctural approach,’ one that systematically brings together intersectionality and whiteness studies frameworks as well as the scripts they generate, models a critical pedagogy that exposes race–gender constitution as a relational dynamic, characterized by racialized discursive struggle. The intentional juxtaposition of incompatible perspectives and political commitments that emerge in real-lived interactions enhances our understanding of how power accrues, how it is contested, and how it can be dismantled within feminist thought and practices.