The “male” privilege of White women, the “White” privilege of Black women, and vulnerability to violence: an intersectional analysis of Peace Corps workers in host countries

ABSTRACT

This article is an intersectional analysis of race, gender, and nationality in development work. Using interview, document, and observational data, I situate this inquiry in the context of US women’s work in the Peace Corps, an organization within a field marked by colonialism. I find that White women and women of color have similar and yet instructively different experiences of their gendered identities in field sites, because race and gender differently affect their identities and relative privilege abroad. Specifically, White women volunteers are often afforded some degree of “male” privilege because of their race (though their race may render them vulnerable to sexual violence), while some volunteers of color are afforded a degree of “White” privilege because of their nationality (although their race may also render them vulnerable to violence). However, because the Peace Corps does not challenge conventional race and gender privileges, it lacks the organizational orientation and capacity to effectively address safety and assault among its women volunteers.

KEYWORDS:

• Intersectionality
• development
• race
• gender
• Peace Corps
• women

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Carolyn Chernoff, Ora Szekely, and Mollie Pepper, as well as two anonymous peer reviewers and the editorial team at IFJP for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper, and Rachael Ward for fruitful early conversations on the topic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Meghan Elizabeth Kallman is an Assistant Professor at the School for Global Inclusion & Social Development at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Notes

1 The first groups of volunteers, explicitly recruited as generalists, received training that resembled military basic training far more than it did a field internship at USAID, as it does contemporarily. Volunteers in the 1960s were taught basic survival skills, such as rappelling down the sides of buildings; one had his arms and legs bound and was thrown in a swimming pool and expected to free himself (Kallman 2016).

2 Some of these analyses are subtly intersectional in their approach (cf. Taş, Reimão, and Orlando 2014).

3 There are important strategic and political benefits, of course, to defining “woman” as a single or unitary category. Specifically, Hartsock (1983) has observed that analyzing women’s experiences permits us to learn something about male supremacy and, by extension, capitalism.

4 For Duong (2012, 371), these two patterns of intersectional thought have stymied intersectionality’s potential “world-making” aspect – that is, the piece that makes politicized identities political and calls forth new political collectives, in the way in which some queer theory does. At best, good intersectional analysis can provide new and qualitatively different spaces to open up ways of being.

5 As measured by the Human Development Index (HDI – see http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-index-hdi).

6 These findings resonate with a trajectory of arguments by feminist researchers that feminism has become depoliticized by development institutions, and that feminist concepts have been appropriated and refashioned (Cornwall, Harrison, and Whitehead 2007). In this process, development governmentality has produced new female subjects that policy can more easily address – meaning, in this case, understandings of gender that turn on safety rather than identity.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Division of Social and Economic Sciences: Grant Number 2011111006.