I have studied Gender and Women’s Studies, and throughout those courses the focus is on race and gender. However, it was never really explained why those two subjects were addressed together so often, which is odd because the college is not called “Gender, Race, and Women’s Studies;” the connection was not self-explanatory. Before, it seemed to me that race was stuck in with gender haphazardly, but after reading Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, I finally have an explanation for why the subjects are addressed together.

In the book, Ania Loomba says, “what we call race does not indicate natural or biological divisions so much as social divisions which are characterized as if they were natural or biological.” and that “gender difference was equally crucial to the development of race as a concept. Racial difference was imagined in terms of an inversion or distortion of ‘normal’ gender roles and sexual behavior”

Loomba’s arguments drew my attention to the fact that people of different races and women were both made subordinate to white men because they were believed to be fundamentally lessor naturally. Women differed from men in terms of their sex, and it was believed that men were naturally superior to women. Sandra Bem’s theory of gender enculturation (1993) provides an explanation for this mentality. The theory includes three lenses: gender polarization, androcentrism, and biological essentialism. Gender polarization refers to the fact that males and females are different fundamentally and those differences are a principle for organizing social society. Androcentrism is the idea that males are superior to females and that male is the normative standard to which females are judged. Biological essentialism claims that the differences between males and females as well as male superiority are natural byproducts of the biological differences between the sexes. Bem’s theory reveals the reasons behind women’s subordination, which could easily be applied to subjugation due to race. As such, the way that white men saw women as inferior due to their differences was easily applied to people of other races because they too were different from the male normative standard. Neither difference, due to sex or race, was founded on natural inferiority, but socially any difference from white men was normalized to give those who differed lessor status. Therefore, race and gender are studied together because both women and race were subject to the same scrutiny because of their differences from white men, and were subordinated because of it.