Ethnic and Racial Studies

ISSN: 0141-9870 (Print) 1466-4356 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rers20

The racial body is gendered: a comment on

Emirbayer and Desmonds The Racial Order

France Winddance Twine

To cite this article: France Winddance Twine (2016): The racial body is gendered: a
comment on Emirbayer and Desmonds The Racial Order, Ethnic and Racial Studies, DOI:
10.1080/01419870.2016.1202435

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2016.1202435

Published online: 10 Jul 2016.

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Download by: [Weill Cornell Medical College] Date: 18 July 2016, At: 04:06
 ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2016.1202435

The racial body is gendered: a comment on Emirbayer

and Desmonds The Racial Order
France Winddance Twine
Department of Sociology, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

ABSTRACT
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In The Racial Order, Emirbayer and Desmond offer a systematic theory of race.
The social psychology of race is central to the theoretical framework of this
book. In their discussion of bodily aesthetics, bodily cognition, and bodily
morality, they neglect the important theoretical insights and empirical
contributions of feminist sociologists who have studied the racialized and
gendered body. The exclusion of the intersectional research of feminist
sociologists weakens their analysis of relational social epistemology.
Intersectional research conducted by feminist sociologists during the past
decade should be central to any theoretical discussion of the social
psychology of race in North America, which is their primary focus.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 13 May 2016; Accepted 9 June 2016

KEYWORDS Race; gender; bodily aesthetics; intersectionality; social epistemology; social psychology

The Racial Order is an ambitious book and constitutes a critical intervention in

the sociological literature on race. Mustafa Emirbayer and Matthew Des-
monds goal is to provide a comprehensive and systematic theory of race.
Their stated goals are:
We need new words, a new theory, with which to address the complexities of
the current racial order. A comprehensive and rigorous approach to theorizing
race is long overdue, one that avoids the pitfalls of grand theorizing and the
middle-range theorizing alike and that pursues creative problem-solving in a
pragmatic spirit, reconceptualizing racial life and unpacking its inner logic and
dynamics. (25)

Emirbayer and Desmond achieve their goals. They draw heavily from the
theoretical insights and arsenal of Pierre Bourdieu, John Dewey, and Emile
Durkheim to provide a new set of concepts and a theoretical vocabulary
that advances racial theory and studies of race. Emirbayer and Desmond

CONTACT France Winddance Twine winddance@soc.ucsb.edu

2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 2 F. WINDDANCE TWINE

also renovated Pierre Bourdieus concepts of a eld to a racial eld and

racial habitus.
In their rigorous review of the theoretical and empirical research on race,
which is U.S.-centric, Emirbayer and Desmond argue that epistemological
obstacles in the constructions of objects of racial investigation have
restricted theory building in race studies. They remind us that
race scholars are deeply affected in their ways of thinking by their location in
specic social universe; their approaches and even the questions they ask or
fail to ask often are predetermined by their location in a particular disciplinary
universe.

They are critical of orthodox approaches that

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depicted race as a xed essence that acts in the work or as a variable that must
be isolated or controlled for. Their solution is to draw upon the philosophical
traditions and insights of John Dewey, Pierre Bourdieu and is book draws upon
the concept of relational social epistemology.

As a Black and Native American race scholar, I was impressed with the wide
range of concepts and themes addressed in The Racial Order. I found the
concept of racial elds, relational social epistemology, and practical evalu-
ation to be theoretically useful. They dene a racial eld as a space of
social forces and a conguration of power relations (85). However, the role
of gender and sexuality as a central analytic in the dynamics and structure
of the U.S. racial order was missing.
Gender and sexuality are two social processes that, in my view, are central
to the dynamics, social psychology, and structure of the U.S. racial order.
Throughout the theoretical discussion of the dynamics of the racial order
(Chapter four) and interactions, institutions, and interstices (Chapter ve),
and the social psychology of the racial order (Chapter six), gender and sexu-
ality is often neglected as a social force. The classication and collective social
production of gendered differences are embedded in the racial order. White
male bodies have symbolically and collectively represented free labour and
citizenship in the United States.
The signicance of a gendered analysis of the racial body received little
theoretical attention in the chapter on the sociology psychology of race.
The racial eld is a visual eld so the classication of bodies has always
been central to its structure and yet often unreliable. The white body can
also be a form of contingent capital, depending upon ones presumed
gender, age, class status, and appearance. The body is crucial in racial classi-
cation schemes and in classication struggles. In Chapter six which dis-
cusses the Social Psychology of the Racial Other, there is a section titled
The Racialized Body (245). In their discussion of white habitus (246249),
the authors did not detail how gendered bodies constitute a form of white
 ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 3

habitus. I was surprised that there was no reference to a relevant body of

sociological literature on the body produced by feminist and race scholars
including the work of Margaret Hunter and Evelyn Nakano Glenn on colour-
ism. Colourism is a concept that is central to a discussion of habitus, particu-
larly the social practices that alter the appearance of the body (skin whitening
or darkening). The concept of colourism, as well as colour-blindness, is central
to discussions of social psychology of race and the racial structure.
A serious consideration of the racial body as gendered and classed is also
missing from Emirbayer and Desmonds discussion of bodily aesthetics, bodily
cognition, and bodily morality. In the U.S. racial structure, racialized bodies are
imagined and treated as racial borders that shape and structure group mem-
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bership and psychology. Yet there was no serious consideration of the body
that engaged with the insights of twentieth- and twenty-rst-century critical
race feminists including those who have written extensively on the body
(Hunter, a body of work on masculinity and femininity as racialized and embo-
died). This section of the book would have been strengthened if Emirbayer
and Desmond had further elaborated on the racial body and engaged directly
with the theoretical insights of black female and non-black gender scholars.
This issue is also related to the way that masculinity, a class-inected and
racialized form, has been central to the racial order and white habitus of Euro-
pean-American men in the United States.
As a black-Indian feminist race scholar, I wanted Emirbayer and Desmond
to take intersectionality more seriously in the substantive chapters of The
Racial Order. Instead, the reader has to wait until the concluding chapter
where the authors explain why they did not attempt to include gender and
class in their theory of race. They write:
The present work, too, has focused primarily on race and set aside the many dif-
culties and subtleties entailed by its intersections with other societal orders. Yet
surely the racial order and those of class, gender, or ethnicity do not exist sep-
arately in concrete reality, each a microcosm entirely unto itself. Racial domina-
tion does not operate inside a vacuum, cordoned off from other modes of
domination. On the contrary, it interests with them in myriad ways. There is
no ignoring the issue of intersectionality, for a great deal of racial life
perhaps all of it is lived at the point of conjuncture of multiple elds. (346)

The Racial Order is a theoretically rich book that challenges race scholars, who
are working in the twenty-rst century to step back and reect upon how we
can rethink old paradigms and innovate race theory. While The Racial Order
offers new insights, a new vocabulary, it is also often gender-blind. There
are a number of missed opportunities when the authors, rather than embra-
cing the theoretical challenges inherent in doing intersectional theorizing,
return to decades-old scholarship that does not reect the theoretical inno-
vations today in the race, gender, and class eld. I believe that Emirbayer
and Desmond were capable of incorporating an intersectional approaches
 4 F. WINDDANCE TWINE

in their discussions of several of the chapters in this book, including: inter-

actions, institutions, and interstices, the structures of the racial order, and
the dynamics of the racial order. I hope that The Racial Order inspires other
sociologists to join Emirbayer and Desmond to further elaborate new theories
that will help advance how race, racism, and antiracism is theorized. We also
need theories of race that address other dimensions of the racial experience
including skin colour, gender, sexuality, nationality, and religion. Women of
colour theorists and empiricists have much to offer the sociology of race,
yet the theoretical insights and voices of black, Asian, and Latina sociologists
working today remained relatively muted, in this, otherwise, innovative and
rigorous reection upon the racial order.
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Disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the author.