Colonial white womanhood was constituted through race, not gender alone

Evidence

As Radhika Mohanram asks for the Algerian colonial context: ‘Did French women in Algeria come into being only within the context of race and not within gender?’ Mohanram answers this question affirmatively, recalling Fanon’s description of a French woman’s excitement over the capture and anticipated castration of five members of the Algerian National Liberation Front. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 564 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Despite the predominance of patriarchal rule in American society, America was colonized on a racially imperialistic base and not on a sexually imperialistic base. No degree of patriarchal bonding between white male colonizers and Native American men overshadowed white racial imperialism. Racism took precedence over sexual alliances in both the white world’s interaction with Native Americans and African Americans, just as racism overshadowed any bonding between black women and white women on the basis of sex. — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 356 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Bodies are governed, colonially and postcolonially, through their constitutive positioning as racially engendered and in the gendering of their racial configuration. White men enacted the “dirty” governance of colonialism; white women, excluded from the formalities of colonial governance almost altogether, in very large part were excluded also from the colonies, or from those colonial spaces least like Europe. Largely ripped from traditional forms of labor, “non-European” men were put to work manually, where they were employed at all, under grueling, debilitating, ultimately crippling conditions. Under historicist regimes, namely, those colonial forms of governance predicated on seeing the local inhabitants not as inherently inferior but historically immature and so in principle capable of development, the more educated indigenous middle and educated classes of men would be employed at lower levels of local colonial administration, their sons ultimately becoming the nationalist leaders of the decolonizing movements a half century or more later. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1661 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: White English identity formed simultaneously with othering of domestic and colonial populations; White women defended racial hierarchy because it mediated their own gender subordination. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 186; Minority status never makes colonial whites feel inferior. (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial women materialized as subjects through race, not gender. #corroborates (0.98) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 564
• Race, not sex, formed the foundational axis of American colonial oppression #corroborates (0.92) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 356
• Colonial governance positioned subjects through intertwined racial and gendered classification. #complicates (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1661
• Colonialism assigned distinct reproductive roles to white women by class #complicates (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 50
• Colonial racial ideology shaped gendered relations under colonial capitalism. #complicates (0.75)