Gender troubling critical whiteness studies in education

Abstract

Gender is gaining more attention as a category of analysis in educational scholarship; however, much misunderstanding of gender remains, especially in how sex and gender are often treated as synonymous analytics. Additionally, gender and race are often treated as wholly separate despite their ongoing entwined epistemic and ontological genealogies. While critical studies of whiteness hold the potential to interrogate how gender itself is a violent imposition of white supremacy (Ozias & Nicolazzo, 2021; Spillers, 1987), the present study uncovers substantively different findings. Specifically, our content analysis of the past decade of CwS literature in higher education demonstrates what we identify as an investment in technologies of whiteness; a commitment that reinforces reductive, harmful, and inaccurate knowledge/power regimes of race/gender. In doing so, much of the CwS scholarship (including our own) undermines its intended goals by furthering, rather than dismantling, the effects of white cisheteropatriarchy.

Keywords:

• Whiteness
• gender
• critical whiteness studies
• content analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Differences and hierarchies based on phenotype, geographic location, and physical appearance have existed through millenia and have intersected in varying ways with conceptions of gender. Modern understandings of race, however, are widely understood to have been developed in direct relation to and as a result of the kidnapping and trade of African people from their homelands to the Western hemisphere to increase the wealth of European property owners (Kendi, 2016; King, 2019; Painter, 2011). Connectedly, gender scholars who interrogate the intersections of racialization and gender recognize the concurrent and connected processes of the Middle Passage and colonization as violently creating and enforcing modern ideologies of gender, including the gender binary, as well as white, middle class, settler notions of womanhood and manhood (Lugones, 2016; Smythe, 2021; Snorton, 2017; Spillers, 1987).

2 Here we recognize the role of anti-Blackness in structuring white supremacy; we take the view that white supremacy and anti-Blackness work in tandem to frame Black people as unhuman (Whitehead, forthcoming) and that white supremacy uses the un/human as a lever against which to rank, target, and marginalize all communities of color (Gómez, 2022). Gender also becomes a lever of racialization such that white domination works through and on definitions of “man” and “woman” (Gossett, 2017; Ozias & Nicolazzo, 2021; Snorton, 2017).

3 It is important to note that most of the quantitative pieces that were a part of our initial pull of articles were removed from our study for not using critical whiteness frameworks to structure their analyses. As a result, most of our findings focus on qualitative studies.

4 Both mixed methods studies that were a part of our dataset also used gender as an identity marker only.

5 When we mention variance within monolithic groups, what we mean to signal here is that the category of ‘man’ could actually include people who identify in various ways, including but not limited to nontrans men, trans men, and masculine/butch women, for example. It may also not include some people who others may surmise it would, but who might not identify as men themselves, including but not limited to: fae and effeminate people, bois, and nonbinary people who are masculine-of-center. As Sedgwick (2008) famously noted in regard to gender and sexuality, “People are different from each other” (p. 22), and as a result, it behooves those doing race/gender scholarship to not occlude or elide those differences, especially the intragroup differences that belie the presumably naturalized, normative categories of gender that then are used to denote variable and identity markers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Moira Ozias

Moira Ozias is an assistant professor in the Center for the Study of Higher Education. Her research focuses on equity in higher education practice, especially investigating white women’s racism and processes for creating educational spaces and curricula that resist racism and work toward racial justice.

Z Nicolazzo

Z Nicolazzo is an associate professor of Trans* Studies in Education in the Center for the Study of Higher Education and a member of the Trans* Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona.