Race Ethnicity and Gender Midterm

Social Construction of Race

Sociohistorical process wherein racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed through human political action, policy, and social practice rather than biological traits.

Racial Formation

Omi and Winant's theory defining the continuous sociohistorical process by which racial identities are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed across society.

Racial Project

Omi and Winant's concept linking representations and meanings of race directly to the institutional distribution of social, political, and economic resources.

Master Category

Omi and Winant's characterization of race as a fundamental, overarching template of power and difference that structures all other social relations in the United States.

Racial Hegemony

The historical shift from overt racial domination (force) to subtle institutional rule maintained through everyday cultural norms, political ideology, and common sense.

Colorblind Racism

Ideological framework that ignores structural racial hierarchies, treating race as irrelevant while maintaining white institutional dominance and racial inequality.

Settler Colonialism as a Structure

Evelyn Nakano Glenn's framework treating colonial dispossession not as a past event, but as an ongoing institutional structure centered on land acquisition and white sovereignty.

Logic of Elimination

Patrick Wolfe and Glenn's concept that settler colonialism requires the physical, territorial, or cultural elimination of Indigenous populations to secure land for white settlement.

Triadic System of Settler Colonialism

Glenn's structural model linking white settlers, dispossessed Native land, and coerced Black labor as the foundational matrix of American capitalism and state formation.

Exogenous Others

Glenn's term for racialized migrant populations (e.g., Mexican and Chinese Americans) managed through spatial containment, legal exclusion, and labor exploitation to enrich white settlers.

Relational Approach

Glenn's framework analyzing race and gender as mutually constructing systems that organize ongoing social relationships of labor, authority, belonging, and property between groups.

Co-Constitution of Race and Gender

The theoretical principle that race and gender cannot be analyzed separately because institutional power structures define racial categories through gendered logics and vice versa.

Masculine Whiteness

The historical normative baseline of American citizenship, property ownership, political sovereignty, and legal personhood established through settler colonial expansion.

Decolonization vs. Liberal Inclusion

Glenn's argument that true justice requires dismantling and restructuring colonial state/property foundations rather than merely incorporating marginalized groups into existing systems.

Innate-Essence Identity Model

Sonny Nordmarken's term for the dominant cisnormative assumption that gender is an unchangeable biological essence fixed at birth.

Coming Into Identity

Nordmarken's concept defining gender identity formation as an active, interactional social process wherein individuals exercise agency to claim new self-understandings over time.

Expansive Gender-Identity Discourse

Alternative linguistic and conceptual frameworks mobilized by gender minorities to challenge rigid cisnormative and transnormative expectations.

Epistemic Authority

Nordmarken's concept of holding an individual's self-determined gender knowledge above external normative attributions or medical/legal gatekeeping.

Transnormativity

Social pressure on gender minorities to conform to binary, medicalized, or lifelong "wrong body" narratives in order to achieve social and legal legitimacy.

Cisnormativity

Structural assumption that all individuals align with their sex assigned at birth and that non-cisgender identities are deviant, temporary, or illegitimate.

Reorganizing Doing Gender

Nordmarken's argument that "coming into identity" shifts the accountability structure of gender interaction from external enforcement to self-determined identity.

Four Social Mechanisms of Identity Change

Nordmarken's empirical findings: (1) exposure to models/info, (2) gender experimentation, (3) processing emotional hardship/trauma, and (4) supportive conversations.

Racialized Access to Discursive Resources

Nordmarken's finding that BIPOC gender minorities face segmented access to role models, supportive networks, and gender language due to racism in trans spaces and broader systemic inequality.

Interlocking Oppressions

Combahee River Collective's foundational concept that race, gender, class, and sexuality operate as integrated, mutually constructing systems of domination.

Black Feminist Identity Politics

Combahee River Collective's principle that political engagement springs from Black women's material realities and self-love, asserting that liberating Black women requires destroying all oppression.

Integrated Struggle

Combahee's refusal to isolate anti-racism from feminism or anti-capitalism, insisting that liberation requires fighting racism, sexism, heterosexism, and capitalism simultaneously.

Destruction of Triple Oppression

The Combahee River Collective's thesis that Black women's liberation necessitates the total elimination of capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy.

Single-Axis Analysis

Kimberlé Crenshaw's critique of legal and political frameworks that isolate race OR gender, concealing the unique structural discrimination faced by multiply marginalized individuals.

Intersectionality

Crenshaw and Brittney Cooper's analytical account of structural power, institutional illegibility, and systemic dominance (not an affirmative theory of personal identity).

Structural Power vs. Subjectivity

Brittney Cooper's defense clarifying that intersectionality measures how institutions distribute power and render subjects illegible, rather than mapping individual psychological identity.

Postintersectional Critique

Contemporary academic arguments critiqued by Cooper that dismiss intersectionality as outmoded, essentialist, or overly focused on identity categories.

Genealogical Trace of Black Feminism

Cooper's historical outline linking proto-intersectional thought from Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Pauli Murray, Frances Beale, and Combahee to Crenshaw.

Paradigmatic Subjecthood of Black Women

Cooper's argument that centering Black women in intersectional theory expands a generalizable structural analysis rather than narrowing it.

Institutional Illegibility

Cooper and Crenshaw's concept describing how single-axis legal standards render the specific discrimination faced by multiply marginalized subjects invisible in court and policy.

Structural Intersectionality

Crenshaw's dimension of intersectionality examining how the location of women of color at the intersection of race and class makes their actual life experiences qualitatively different.

Political Intersectionality

Crenshaw's dimension analyzing how feminist and anti-racist political agendas frequently marginalize or erase women of color by prioritizing single-issue goals.

Representational Intersectionality

Crenshaw's dimension examining how cultural imagery and media representations reproduce intersecting racial and gender stereotypes against women of color.

Rural Consciousness

Katherine J. Cramer's concept of a place-based identity combining perceptions that rural communities are ignored by decision-makers, denied fair resources, and disrespected by urban elites.

Politics of Resentment

Cramer's term for directing economic anxieties toward fellow citizens perceived as undeserving state beneficiaries (e.g., urbanites, public workers) rather than corporate or political elites.

Distributive Injustice

Cramer's concept explaining how rural citizens evaluate government size and policy fairness based on moral judgments of "who gets what, who has power, and who is undeserving."

Resentment Toward Public Employees

Cramer's observation that rural voters view public workers as an undeserving elite class receiving unearned state pensions and taxpayer support.

Erasure of Indigenous Sovereignty

Kennan Ferguson's critique that political science erases Native nations by treating them as minor interest groups within a settler-state framework rather than independent sovereign polities.

Settler-State Presumptions in Political Science

Ferguson's thesis that political science implicitly prioritizes liberal individualism, majoritarian democracy, and state sovereignty, delegitimizing Indigenous governance models.

Treaty Sovereignty

Legal and political framework emphasized by Ferguson recognizing Native nations as sovereign entities with binding international treaties with the U.S. government.

Candidate Emergence Pipeline

Richard Fox's thesis that political gender bias operates primarily in ambition, recruitment, and fundraising long before Election Day, explaining female underrepresentation despite equal win rates.

Political Ambition Gap

Fox's finding that qualified women are significantly less likely than men to consider running for office due to early gender socialization and psychological self-perception.

Primary vs. General Election Bias

Fox's distinction showing that while female candidates win general elections at equal rates, structural and bias barriers concentrate heavily in early recruitment and primary stages.

Partisan Disparity in Female Representation

Fox's finding that the vast majority of women in modern U.S. legislative bodies are Democrats, reflecting deep ideological and organizational differences between parties.

Latino Politics and Pluralism Critique

Fraga et al.'s argument that empirical data on Latino political behavior challenges traditional pluralist assimilation models in political science.

Panethnicity

Espiritu / Fraga et al.'s concept of a politically constructed umbrella identity bridging distinct national-origin groups (e.g., Latino or Asian American) for collective mobilization.

Voting Rights Act Expansion and Mobilization

Fraga et al.'s historical trace showing how 1975 VRA language protections fueled institutional representation and civic participation among Latinos.

Critique of Race as Exogenous Variable

Hutchings and Valentino's critique of political science for treating race as an isolated, fixed variable rather than a dynamic, socially constructed power dynamic.

Racial Priming and Media Framing

Hutchings and Valentino's analysis of how implicit racial cues in political campaign ads activate implicit racial resentments among white voters.

Partisan Realignment and Race

Hutchings and Valentino's historical trace showing how Black electoral alignment and civil rights policies drove the Southern Strategy and modern party polarization.

Racial Triangulation

Claire Jean Kim's field of racial positions where Asian Americans are valorized relative to Black Americans but civicly ostracized as perpetual foreigners relative to White Americans.

Relative Valorization

The process in Kim's racial triangulation where the dominant white group praises an Asian American minority over Black Americans to refute claims of structural white supremacy.

Civic Ostracism

The process in Kim's racial triangulation where the dominant white group constructs Asian Americans as unassimilable foreigners to prevent their full political integration.

Field of Racial Positions

Kim's matrix plotting racial groups along two intersecting axes: superior/inferior (racial hierarchy) and insider/foreigner (civic ostracism).

4-Move Midterm Strategy

Course framework for analytical responses: (1) NAME concept/author, (2) DEFINE precise mechanism, (3) APPLY evidence/scenario, (4) DISTINGUISH from nearby concept.

Name-Define-Apply-Distinguish

The explicit execution sequence required to secure full points on short-answer and essay questions on the GOVT 2412 midterm.

Track A: Representation and Theory

Course track examining whether studying marginalized groups merely adds a new demographic sample or forces a complete overhaul of political science theory.

Track B: Intersectionality as Explanation Shift

Course track demonstrating how intersectionality changes the underlying theoretical explanation of institutional power rather than simply expanding a sample.

Track C: Macro to Micro Dynamics

Course track tracing how macro-historical structures (racial formation, settler colonialism) shape micro-identities and social interactions (coming into identity, rural consciousness).

Biological Essentialism

The discredited belief that race and gender reflect fixed, natural, genetic differences rather than sociohistorical constructs.

Composite Variable / Bundle of Sticks

Methodological concept treating race not as an isolated trait, but as a composite bundle of socio-economic, spatial, historical, and institutional factors.

Pluralist Assimilation Model

Classic political science model assuming all immigrant groups smoothly integrate into American political life over time, critiqued by Fraga et al. and Glenn.

Dawes Act of 1887

Federal land allotment policy cited by Glenn as a settler colonial tool designed to privatize tribal land, destroy Indigenous collective governance, and enforce patriarchal nuclear families.

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)

Historical treaty cited by Glenn that ended the Mexican-American War, transferring northern Mexico to the U.S. and initiating Anglo land dispossession of Mexican Americans.

Page Act of 1875

Federal statute cited by Glenn that barred Asian women under the guise of anti-prostitution, effectively preventing Chinese family formation in the U.S.

Act 10 (Wisconsin 2011)

State legislation curtailing public employee collective bargaining, used by Cramer to illustrate how Governor Scott Walker mobilized rural resentment against public sector workers.

Standpoint Epistemology

Theoretical principle asserting that multiple marginalized individuals possess unique insights into the mechanics of institutional power and oppression.

Neoliberal Diversity Rhetoric

Superficial inclusion strategies focused on individual representation or corporate diversity that leave underlying structural power arrangements intact.

Epistemic Injustice

Harm done to individuals in their capacity as knowers, such as discounting Black women's legal testimonies or non-binary individuals' self-determined gender identities.

Spatial Containment

Policy mechanisms (residential segregation, reservations, immigration detention) used by the settler state to restrict and isolate racialized labor and Indigenous populations.

Convict Leasing System

Post-emancipation legal regime cited by Glenn as a continuation of Black labor exploitation and structural genocide following the abolition of chattel slavery.

Consciousness Raising

Black feminist practice of sharing personal experiences to reveal that individual struggles are systemic political problems requiring collective resistance.

Intercategorical Complexity

Leslie McCall's methodology analyzing relationships of inequality across multiple existing social categories rather than ignoring categories altogether.

Multi-Axis Analysis

Analytical approach examining how multiple systems of power (race, class, gender, sexuality) interact simultaneously rather than analyzing them in isolation.