Between class, race and gender: In search of a grand category of analysis

“The litany of class, race, and gender suggests a parity for each term, but, in fact, that is not at all the case” – Joan W. Scott

We have come a long way since Joan W. Scott penned her seminal essay on ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.’ [1] A number of analytical concepts and theories have been advanced or refined in response to her intervention. The purpose of this paper, however, is not to review her influence. Rather, it is to engage afresh with her groundbreaking take on gender as an analytical category in comparison to class and race. My approach is informed by a quest for an overarching category of analysis.

Scott opened her treatise with an apt critique of those who codify words. Words like gender, she pointed out, have a history just like the ideas and things they are meant to signify. As such one has to engage with them historically in terms of the shifts and contestations over their meanings. It is a deterministic fixation on the word ‘sex’ as a biologically determined reality that tends to make essentialists conflate it with gender.

She hence observed, in this regard, that it was only then that feminists were beginning to use the term “gender” in a new way – way too novel then to have found its way into codifying dictionaries and Encyclopedias – “as a way of referring to the social organization of the relationship between the sexes” (p. 1053). To her, gender was thus full of unexamined possibilities, at least grammatically, not least because “in many Indo-European languages there is a third category – unsexed or neuter” (p. 1054).

This observation resonates with the struggles the native speakers of my national language, Swahili, experience when they learn English and French. In Swahili there are no gendered pronouns such as ‘She’ and ‘He’ hence even some very good English speakers find themselves once in a while mixing them. Of course this does not mean that an absence of such grammatical gendering implies that a society is not gendered.

One thus has to delve deeper into a language to decipher the history of a word in relation to that of a society to make sense of its contextual meanings across time and space. Scott attempted to do so, albeit with a primary focus on ‘Western societies’. “In its [then"> most recent usage”, she noted, “ ‘gender’ seems to have first appeared among American feminists who wanted to insist on the fundamentally social quality of distinctions based on sex” (Ibid.) Apart from denoting “a rejection of the biological determinism implicit in the use of such terms as ‘sex’ or ‘sexual difference’, gender “also stressed the relational aspect of normative definitions of femininity” (Ibid.)

Understandably, as Scott observed, those “who worried that women's studies scholarship focused too narrowly and separately on women used the term ‘gender’ to introduce a relational notion into our analytic vocabulary” (Ibid.) “According to this view”, she further elaborated, “women and men were defined in terms of one another, and no understanding of either could be achieved by entirely separate study” (Ibid). Yet currently, as members of Tanzania Gender Networking Programme (TGNP) would attest, in conventional discourses the term ‘gender’ invokes ‘women’ instead of social relations between men and women in the gendered context of patriarchy. As we shall see shortly, TGNP’s attempts to come up with a ‘grand theory’ of transformative feminism and move away from the ‘gender-women’ conflation resonates with Scott.

As a historian what is particularly relevant to me is her attempt to include, or rather center, gender as a category of analysis in the discipline of history. “In addition, and perhaps most important”, she historicizes, “‘gender’ was a term offered by those who claimed that women's scholarship would fundamentally transform disciplinary paradigms” (Ibid.) “Feminist scholars”, she went on, “pointed out early on that the study of women would not only add new subject matter but would also force a critical reexamination of the premises and standards of existing scholarly work” (Ibid.) Scott thus hailed this attempt at a methodology as implying “not only a new history of women, but also a new history ” (Ibid.) It is this novelty that concerns me the most.

In my attempts at historicizing Tanzania I have often been critiqued for totalizing the historical account(s) in terms of “we” and “us”, as if it is inclusive of both ‘men’ and ‘women’, rather than showing the ways ‘women’ and ‘men’ have experienced – in terms of shaping and being shaped by – that history. This has been a difficult critique to accept and work on given that my analytical worldview of Africa in general and Tanzania in particular is informed by the intersection of class, race and gender. On reading Scott, however, it is becoming clearer why anything less than centering gender – even alongside class and race – in historical analyses runs the risk of telling half of the story and presenting a skewed history. In this regard she thus aptly noted:

“The way in which this new history would both include and account for women's experience rested on the extent to which gender could be developed as a category of analysis. Here the analogies to class (and race) were explicit: indeed, the most politically inclusive of scholars of women's studies regularly invoked all three categories as crucial to the writing of a new history. An interest in class, race, and gender signaled first, a scholar's commitment to a history that included stories of the oppressed and an analysis of the meaning and nature of their oppression and, second, scholarly understanding that inequalities of power are organized along at least three axes” (Ibid.)

But as Scott was quick to note, these three categories of analysis are not in parity in any case. “While ‘class’ most often rests on Marx's elaborate (and since elaborated) theory of economic determination and historical change”, she pointed out, “‘race’ and ‘gender’ carry no such associations” (p. 1055). Despite the glaring lack of unanimity among Weberians and others in the ways we employ the term class, when we do so, as she noted, “we are working with or against a set of definitions that, in the case of Marxism, involve an idea of economic causality and a vision of the path along which history has moved dialectically” (Ibid.) Such “a clarity or coherence for either race or gender”, she then observed, was missing (Ibid.) “In the case of gender”, she thus lamented, the usage had up to then “involved a range of theoretical positions as well as simple descriptive references to the relationships between the sexes” (Ibid.) Hence her proposal for a theory of gender that puts it at the heart of any historical analysis.

Two typical responses from conventional historians illustrate how using gender as a side, rather than a central, category in historicizing major events also blind them and bias their accounts. It simply renders gender an appendage. Scott thus captured them:

“It has not been enough for historians of women to prove either that women had a history or that women participated in the major political upheavals of western civilization. In the case of women's history, the response of non-feminist historians has been acknowledgment and then separation or dismissal (“women had a history separate from men’s, therefore let feminists do women's history, which need not concern us”; or “women's history is all about sex and the family and should be done separately from political and economic history”). In the case of women's participation, the response has been minimal interest at best (“my understanding of the French Revolution is not changed by knowing that women participated in it”)” (Ibid.)

Ironically, even male historians who attempt to take feminism seriously also have to grapple with this challenge. For instance, my attempt to historicize citizenship in Tanzania whereby I argue that the majority of Tanzanians, implying both men and women, provoked this response from Marjorie Mbilinyi, a theorist of transformative feminism: “someone ought to explore what the whole issue of citizenship means to women, who have historically been defined as second class citizens; continue to be treated as inferior second class citizens today… for whom the whole question of citizenship may be perceived very differently from that of men …this would help to moderate any effort to universalize the 'we' stance you take on anti-colonial struggles over citizenship past, present and future…” [2] In other words, the critique is saying that even in this unfolding historical process there was/is a (gender) struggle within a struggle.

My response was hardly different, by way of analogy, from the typical responses from non-feminist historians that Scott referred to. For me, the national struggles could still be historicized inclusively, in terms of gender, hence my failure to address Mbilinyi’s follow-up question: “What relevance does the 'national' project you use as your reference point have for the excluded masses of Tanzania, and women in particular?”

“The challenge posed by these responses is”, concluded Scott and I agree, “in the end, a theoretical one” (Ibid.) It indeed “requires analysis not only of the relationship between male and female experience in the past but also of the connection between past history and current historical practice” (Ibid.) As she pointed out, this involves addressing questions such as: “How does gender work in human social relationships? How does gender give meaning to the organization and perception of historical knowledge?” (Ibid.) According to her, answers to these questions “depend on gender as an analytic category” (Ibid.). But does it suffice when gender is competing with class and race as a useful analytical category in historicizing multifaceted events?

The relatively recent emergence of gender as a crosscutting issue in academic and policy discourse has not helped to center it as an analytical category. In fact this contributes to its marginalizing when academic courses tend to throw in an article or two on gender in a litany of prescribed texts that address a given theme without integrating gender as an analytical category in its own right or as constitutive of an overarching analytical category. Having a separate section on gender does not help either as this continues the tradition of relegating it to something that needs to be addressed to meet demands of political correctness. Scott’s attempt at theorizing gender provides an avenue for transcending this impasse. It is centered on a proposal of defining gender as “a primary way of signifying relationships of people” (1069).

Such an encompassing yet flexible definition enables one to see that even racial and class relations are constructed in relation to gender. One is not simply racialized as black or classed as a working class but as a black man/women and a working class man/woman respectively. Scott put it modestly when she stated that her sketch “of the process of constructing gender relationships could be used to discuss class, race, ethnicity, or, for that matter, any social process” (Ibid.) In a more bold move to center it, she thus stated: “It might be better to say, gender is a primary field within which or by means of which power is articulated” (Ibid.). Wavering with this primacy is also evident in transformative feminism’ attempts to unmask the centering via patriarchy.

By transformative feminism, TGNP means a concerted gender conscious movement for social change, based on equality, in all aspects of our society that has historically been characterized by patriarchy and its allied oppressive orders such as racism and imperialism. According to its Notes on Transformative Feminism in Tanzania, this approach of feminism is at the cutting edge of all revolutionary conceptions and social movements. [3] This is because it links struggles against all major forms of oppression, discrimination and exploitation. For example, it links the struggles for ownership and control of bodies or minds in the context of patriarchy with those for ownership and control of labor or land in the context of capitalism and imperialism. It is anchored on the belief that change must come about in both the public and the private spheres of life, be it at home or in the ‘office’. In other words, patriarchy is a gendering, classing and racializing system of domination that one has to historicize when analyzing any form of power relations in a society. Thus gender is also at the heart of this approach:

“While recognizing the significance of class struggle and identifying capitalism as a major cause of women’s oppression and exploitation, transformative feminists reject the prioritization of any one ‘structure’ or set of relationships over the other. Instead, they examine the dynamic way in which class and gender relations interact with each other, and with race and imperial relations. At any one ‘moment’ in time and space, one of these social relations may appear to be the most dominant and have top priority – however, transformative feminist struggles link all forms of oppression/exploitation together in order for real transformation to take place, and real women’s emancipation to be achieved.” [4]

As far as the category of race is concerned, in a sense, it is close to the ‘Theory of Gendered Prejudice’, an offshoot of the ‘Theory of Social Dominance (SDT)’, which concludes that the psychology of racial prejudice – and of intergroup bias in general – is fundamentally a gendered phenomenon. [5] However, it is a far cry from SDT’s presupposition that generally women do not suffer the ‘double jeopardy of race and gender’ when compared to men of the same ‘race and class’. In this regard it is akin to Scott’s theorization and the black feminist perspective on ‘intersecting oppression’ or ‘matrix of domination’ that implies that when one simultaneously belongs to what is stereotypically regarded, and structurally located, as the ‘lower’ class, race and gender she suffers domination more than those regarded and structured as/in ‘higher’ levels. [6]

Scott, however, was also not bold enough to go a step further to categorically argue that it is all about patriarchy and its systemic structuring of gender in relation to class and race as well as age and ethnicity, among other politically, socially and culturally constructed categories. Reverting back to a modest ascription of its centrality in history, probably in anticipation of criticisms for inventing another grand theory, she added this disclaimer: “Gender is not the only field” (Ibid.). After insinuating that it is the primary field within which or by means of which power is generally articulated she hence retreated to imply that there are more fields of primacy. Yet for her, gender seemed to “have been a persistent and recurrent way of enabling the signification of' power in the West, in Judeo-Christian as well as Islamic traditions” (Ibid.) It is this universal persistence and recurrence that renders gender a primary point in the matrix of domination that includes other useful categories of analysis such as class and race.

It is thus useful to look at gender as constituting patriarchy in order to transcend its limits as a stand-alone category. But for historians, Scott noted in agreement, such a theory is problematic not least because it asserts “the primacy of that system in all social organization” (p. 1058). For them it seemed incapable of “explaining how gender inequality structures other inequalities or, indeed, how gender affects those areas of life that do not seem to be connected to it” (p. 1058-1059). Its alleged resting “on the single variable of physical differences poses problems for historians” as it ostensibly assumes “a consistent or inherent meaning of the human body – outside social or cultural construction – and thus ahistoricity of gender itself” (p. 1059).

To be fair to Scott, hers was only work in progress. As her concluding remark pointed out, she was opening the doors for further theorizations. The new history with gender as a useful analytical category, she noted, “will leave possibilities for thinking” about the then current feminist “political strategies and the (utopian) future, for it suggests that gender must be redefined and restructured in conjunction with a vision of political and social equality that includes not only sex, but class and race” (p. 1075).

Such a redefinition, I argue as a historian of capitalism, needs to shift the axis from class to gender for at the heart of modes of production and productive forces is the question of gendered power relations. Indeed the history of gender, as a relation predicated on sex, predates that of class and race hence its primacy in relation to the constitutions of the latters especially in the context of capitalism and racism. People indeed became men/women before they were white or black let alone bourgeoisies or proletariats. And as Scott aptly observed, the three analytical categories are not at par.

Wavering between these three axes leave gender hanging, conceptually, and easy to subsume under other categories. When theorists stress that transformative feminism “struggles against all forms of male domination/supremacy (often referred to as ‘patriarchy’); class exploitation on the basis of capitalism, the dominant economic structure today; imperial domination and growing supremacy of the G7 countries (often referred to as corporate globalization); oppression on the basis of race/ethnic differences; and fundamentalism and traditionalism” yet insist that “other social relations and structures support and strengthen male supremacy” they are, in fact, acknowledging that gender is overarching. [7] So did Scott in noting that hierarchical “structures rely on generalized understandings of the so-called natural relationship between male and female” and that attention “to gender is often not explicit, but it is nonetheless a crucial part of the organization of equality or inequality” (p. 1073).

* Chambi Chachage is a history doctoral candidate at Harvard University.

END NOTES

[1] Joan W. Scott (1986). Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis. The American Historical Review. 91 (5): 1053-1075.

[2] Response in an online debate on: Chambi Chachage (2008). When does a native or settler become a dual citizen? The Citizen (10/03/08) cf.

[3] Demere Kitunga and Marjorie Mbilinyi (2006). Notes on Transformative Feminism in Tanzania. CODESRIA Bulletin No. 1&2: Special Issue: African Woman, pp. 46-49.

[4] Ibid., 47.

[5] Melissa M. McDonald, Carlos D. Navarrete and Jim Sidanius (2011). Developing a theory of gendered prejudice: An evolutionary and social dominance perspective. In R. Kramer, G. Leonardelli & R. Livingston (eds.), Social Cognition, Social Identity, and Intergroup Relations: A Festschrift in Honor of Marilynn Brewer (pp. 189-220). New York: Psychology Press.

[6] Patricia Hills Collins (1990). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman.

[7] Kitunga and Mbilinyi, 46.

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