In her book The Gender Binary and the Invention of Race (Routledge, 2024), philosopher Sally Markowitz argues that "the practice of first dividing people into the sharply binary categories of male and female, and then judging how well they conform to those categories, has served as a crucial anchor for an idea of Whiteness and the racial hierarchy that it establishes": systems of racist ideology have historically been constituted through the idea that supposedly more advanced races are more gender dimorphic. In this segment, Dr. Markowitz talks with Frann Michel about this co-constitution of categories of race and sex/gender and the ways the racial-gender-binary has been manifest historically and in current racism and sexism. The book is available in paper at Powell's, as an e-book through the Multnomah County Library, and via open access.
Image: Cover of The Gender Binary and the Invention of Race, Sally Markowitz, Routledge; white lettering on black background with torn brown paper.
The cover did not include the photo of segregated bathroom doors marked "Ladies," "Men," and "Colored" from the photo of Segregated public rest rooms in rural South Carolina, 1965.
