The Racial Contract: a feminist analysis

Abstract

This essay provides a feminist analysis of Charles Mills' The Racial Contract. I begin by describing how The Racial Contract simultaneously embraces and challenges key feminist understandings of the “male gaze” and the corporeal inscription of power. I also illuminate how feminist conceptions of intersectionality inform Mills' theorizing and discuss what an expanded intersectional account of the racial contract might look like. The rest of the essay demonstrates that both The Racial Contract and Mills' more recent “Intersecting Contracts” raise important questions about the relationship between interrogating intersectional experience and fostering progressive politics. I draw on these texts to conclude that social groups who interrogate their experience of oppression are frequently motivated to embrace progressive politics and that these groups' process of interrogation is often informed by anti-progressive politics.