1 Critical Introduction to the Fields

There was a time when it seemed all knowledge was produced by, about, and for wealthy, white men. This was true from the physical and social sciences to the canons of music and literature. Looking from the angle of mainstream education, studies, textbooks, and masterpieces were almost all authored by wealthy white men. It was not uncommon for college students to complete entire courses reading only the work of white men in their fields, what some critics summarized as “male, pale, and stale.”

Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (RGSS) is an interdisciplinary field that challenges the white and androcentric production of knowledge. Androcentrism is the privileging of male- and masculine-centered ways of understanding the world.

Critical race and feminist scholars argue that the common assumption that knowledge is produced by rational, “impartial” scientists (and other researchers) often obscures the ways that scientists create knowledge through gendered, raced, and classed cultural perspectives (e.g., Scott 1991). Critical race feminism studies how social institutions, such as science, or the law, are not in fact neutral institutions, but rather have historically privileged the experiences and worldviews of the powerful group, which, historically and to this day, tends to be wealthy, straight, able-bodied white men (Crenshaw et al. 1995). Critical race and feminist scholars include biologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, chemists, engineers, economists, and researchers from just about any identifiable department at a university, and beyond. Disciplinary diversity among scholars in this field facilitates communication across the disciplinary boundaries within the academy, and ventures beyond the academy, building from the lived experiences of everyday people and social movement activists, to more fully understand the social world. This text offers a general introduction to the fields of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, including critical studies of class(ism) and (dis)ability. As most authors of this textbook are trained as sociologists and interdisciplinary feminist scholars, we situate our framework, which is heavily shaped by a sociological lens, within larger interdisciplinary feminist debates. We highlight some of the key areas in the field rather than comprehensively covering every topic.

The Women’s Liberation Movement and Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century U.S. called attention to these conditions and aimed to address these absences in knowledge. Beginning in the 1970s, universities across the United States instituted Women’s and Ethnic Studies departments (African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Latin American Studies, Native American Studies, etc.) in response to student protests and larger social movements. These departments reclaimed buried histories and centered the knowledge production of marginalized groups. As white, middle-class, heterosexual women had the greatest access to education and participation in Women’s Studies, early incarnations of the field overemphasized their relatively privileged experiences and perspectives. In subsequent decades, studies and contributions of women of color, immigrant women, women from the Global South, poor and working class women, and lesbian, queer, and trans women became integral to Women’s Studies. More recently, analyses of disability, sexualities, masculinities, religion, science, gender diversity, incarceration, indigeneity, and settler colonialism have become centered in the field. As a result of this opening of the field to incorporate a wider range of experiences and objects of analysis, many Women’s Studies department are now re-naming themselves “Gender and Sexuality Studies”; at UWL, a merger of the departments of Ethnic and Racial Studies and Women and Gender Studies in 2022-23 led to the current “Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies” department, which also includes faculty experts on disability and class.

Critical race feminist scholars recognize the inextricable connections between notions of race, gender, and sexuality in various societies, not only for women but also for men and people of all genders, across a broad expanse of topics. In an introductory course, you can expect to learn about the impact of stringent beauty standards produced in media and advertising, why childrearing by women may not be as natural as we think, the history of the racial and gendered division of labor and its continuing impact on the economic lives of men and women, the unique health issues addressed by advocates of reproductive justice, the connections between women working in factories in the Global South and women consuming goods in the United States, how sexual double-standards harm us all, the historical context for racial justice and feminist movements and where they are today, and much more.

More than a series of topics, Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies offers a way of seeing the world differently. Scholars in this field make connections across institutional contexts (work, family, media, law, the state), value the knowledge that comes from lived experiences, and amplify, rather than suppress, marginalized identities and groups. Thanks to the important critiques from transnational, post-colonial, queer, trans, and feminists of color, most contemporary RGSS scholars strive to see the world through the lens of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989). That is, they see systems of oppression working in concert rather than separately. For instance, the way sexism is experienced depends not only on a person’s gender but also on how the person experiences racism, economic inequality, ageism, and other forms of marginalization within particular historical and cultural contexts.

By recognizing the complexity of the social world, the interdisciplinary fields of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies advocate for social justice and provide insight into how this can be accomplished.