Читать книгу Hybrid - Ruth Colker - Страница 19

Critical theorists have offered arguments parallel to, yet different from, my bi perspective. Angela Harris and Kimberlé Crenshaw have questioned how feminists have historically used the word “woman” to mean “white woman” and how civil rights activists have used the word “black” to apply to all persons with any African-American heritage.⁴⁵ They have also questioned how judges have tried to force African-American plaintiffs in discrimination lawsuits to fit the category “woman” or “black” without considering the intersections of race and gender. This is sometimes called “intersectionality” theory. Other critical theorists, such as Scales-Trent, have questioned how lawmakers have created the labels “black” or “colored” to force multiracial individuals to conform to a single racial category.

The Harris and Crenshaw critiques of racial categories are somewhat different from the critique offered by Scales-Trent. Harris and Crenshaw consider how an individual crosses several categories—race, religion, and gender. They accept the fact, however, that such markers as “black” have an intrinsic meaning. They are therefore interested in the special ways in which race, religion, and gender intersect to construct identity. Scales-Trent adds to the discussion by considering the ambiguity of the categorical markers themselves; in particular, she focuses on the ambiguity of racial markers. Scales-Trent’s intersections lie within; they are really intrasections.

The Scales-Trent critique, as opposed to the Crenshaw or Harris views, parallels the bi perspective found in this book, insofar as a bi perspective is an intracategorical perspective rather than an intercategorical perspective. A bi perspective can provide us with special insights that we might attain through an intracategorical perspective that are overlooked in the work of Crenshaw or Harris. Questioning the meaningfulness of the labels that they employ can add to intersectionality theory.

In applying a bi perspective to race, I have asked myself why critical race theorists have not tended to ask the intrasection questions that are central to my perspective as a bisexual. The answer, I believe, depends upon the difference between the constructions of our sexual orientation and our race. One of the first components of our identity is race: are we African-American? Caucasian? Asian-American? We consider it to be a given, an immutable fact. The significance of that racial identity may differ but it is something we “know” like most of us “know” our gender. Our sexual orientation is something that we discover as we grow older. In particular, people who have come to identify with a minority sexual identity have had to grapple with the recognition that they have moved away from the expected category, heterosexuality, to another category such as homosexuality or bisexuality. Intracategorical movement is therefore a typical experience for people who are members of a minority sexual-orientation category but is not a typical experience for people who are members of a minority racial category.

Nonetheless, a bi perspective needs to investigate racial categories because they are, in fact, as socially constructed as sexual orientation categories. Anthropologists, for example, believe that there is insufficient difference between supposed human racial categories to constitute genuine racial categories. In addition, anthropologists agree that the vast majority of people who are labeled as “African-American” have a multiracial background. The fact that most of us do not investigate our race to question whether we belong in a monoracial category reflects the power of socialization rather than any biological reality. Thus, although multiracial existence may be quite different from bisexual or transgender existence, it is worth examining closely, as it reveals the social construction of bipolar racial categories. A bi perspective may therefore enhance our understanding of race by encouraging us to make an intracategorical investigation of racial categories. It is essential that a bi perspective investigate sexual orientation, gender, race, and disability to provide us with a comprehensive understanding of the construction of bipolar injustice in our society.