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1998

The Race to Innocence: Confronting Hierarchical Relations among

Women
Mary Louise Fellows
University of Minnesota Law School, [email protected]

Sherene Razack
University of Toronto, Department of Social Justice Education, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation
Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack, The Race to Innocence: Confronting Hierarchical Relations
among Women, 1 J. GENDER RACE & JUST. 335 (1998), available at https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/
faculty_articles/274.

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 The Race to Innocence: Confronting
Hierarchical Relations among Women

Mary Louise Fellows*and Sherene Razack**

INTRODUCTION

We came to write this Article after reflecting on the many times that
feminist political solidarity has failed because of what we identify below as the
problem of "competing marginalities." These moments of conflict and political
immobility seem to center around the deeply felt belief that each of us, as
women, is not implicated in the subordination of other women. When we view
ourselves as innocent, we cannot confront the hierarchies that operate among
us. Instead, each woman claims that her own marginality is the worst one;
failing to interrogate her complicity in other women's lives, she continues to
participate in the practices that oppress other women. We have named the
process through which a woman comes to believe that her own claim of
subordination is the most urgent and that she is unimplicated in the
subordination of other women as the "race to innocence."
Our contention is that any theory, strategy, or practice based on competing
marginalities and the race to innocence will inevitably fail because it ignores
the relationships among hierarchical systems. Systems of oppression
(capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy) rely on one another in complex ways.
This "interlocking" effect means that the systems of oppression come into
existence in and through one another so that class exploitation could not be
accomplished without gender and racial hierarchies; imperialism could not
function without class exploitation, sexism, heterosexism, and so on.' Because

* Everett Fraser Professor of Law, University of Minnesota.

** Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, Ontario

Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.

1. Patricia Hill Collins, writing about African American women, is one of the first scholars to use
the term "interlocking" in the way we are using it in the text:
Additive models of oppression are firmly rooted in the either/or dichotomous thinking
of Eurocentric, masculinist thought.... This emphasis on quantification and categorization
occurs in conjunction with the belief that either/or categories must be ranked. The search for
certainty of this sort requires that one side of a dichotomy be privileged while its other is
denigrated. Privilege becomes defined in relation to its other.
Replacing additive models of oppression with interlocking ones creates possibilities
for new paradigms. The significance of seeing race, class, and gender as interlocking systems
of oppression is that such an approach fosters a paradigmatic shift of thinking inclusively
about other oppressions, such as age, sexual orientation, religion, and ethnicity....
Placing African-American women and other excluded groups in the center of analysis
opens up possibilities for a both/and conceptual stance, one in which all groups possess
varying amounts of penalty and privilege in one historically created system....
Embracing a both/and conceptual stance moves us from additive, separate systems
approaches to oppression and toward what I now see as the more fundamental issue of the
 The Journalof Gender, Race & Justice [1:1998]

the systems rely on one another in these complex ways, it is ultimately futile
to attempt to disrupt one system without simultaneously disrupting others.
When a woman fails to pursue how she is implicated in other women's
lives and retreats to the position that the system that oppresses her the most is
the only one worth fighting and that the other systems (systems in which she
is positioned as dominant) are not of her concem, she will fail to undo her own
subordination. Attempts to change one system while leaving the others intact
leaves in place the structure of domination that is made up of interlocking
hierarchies. Because the problem has been that we, as women, often know the
futility of the race to innocence but seldom feel it, this Article asks how
interlocking systems that secure the power of the dominant group produce and
sustain our feelings of innocence.
In Part I, we describe the problem of competing marginalities and the race
to innocence. We draw the conclusion that the systems of domination that
position white, middle-class, heterosexual, nondisabled men at the center
continue to operate among all other groups, limiting in various ways what
women know and feel about one another. Feeling only the ways that she is
positioned as subordinate, each woman strives to maintain her dominant
positions. Paradoxically, each woman asserts her dominance in this way
because she feels it is the only way she can win respect for her claim of
subordination. We describe this practice as securing a "toehold on
respectability."
Building on the idea that each woman tries to secure justice by making the
dominant claim that she is not like other women, Part II explores the pursuit of
"respectability" itself-a descriptive term for how the dominant group secures
its position of dominance through the margins. How groups on the margins are
positioned in relation to one another on the disrespectable, or more aptly, the
degenerate side of the divide, is of central importance to understanding how the
dominant group produces and sustains feelings of innocence for itself and
groups on the margin. The analysis of respectability in Part II focuses on
nineteenth-century Europe and the making of the middle class.
In Part III, we look at the continuing vitality of the concept of
respectability in the late twentieth century. Relying on the contemporary
feminist debate about prostitution, we show how the race to innocence and the
related practice of securing a toehold on respectability currently serve to
reinforce systems of domination and maintain hierarchical arrangements among
women. In the Conclusion, we reiterate the reasons why feminists committed
to social change must feel compelled to transcend the race to innocence, and

social relations of domination. Race, class, and gender constitute axes of oppression that
characterize Black women's experiences within a more generalized matrix of domination.
Other groups may encounter different dimensions of the matrix, such as sexual orientation,
religion, and age, but the overarching relationship is one of domination and the types of
activism it generates.
PATRICIA HILL COLLINS, BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT: KNOWLEDGE, CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE POLITICS
OF EMPOWERMENT 225-26 (1990) (emphasis added).
 The Race to Innocence

we suggest some strategies for how they might begin the process of feeling less
innocent.

I. THE PROBLEM OF COMPETING MARGNALITIES AND THE RACE TO

INNOCENCE

Many feminists have gained an intellectual understanding of

complicity-how we, as women, participate in the oppression of one another.2
Yet in political encounters, many of us find it difficult to take actions built on
the recognition that we are both oppressors and oppressed. Although we know
we are complicitous in the oppression of other women, we seldomfeel this to
be true. Thus there have been, and there continues to be, destructive and
painful moments in feminist politics, moments of failed conferences, coalitions,
and dialogues. There are, of course, many moments when identity politics
based on a solidarity as women has prevailed and effective political action has
ensued. Yet even these moments are often beset with incidents of high conflict.

2. There is substantial literature mapping white women's participation in the subordination of

women of color, a position of dominance they occupy while remaining subordinate to the men of their
class and race. For examples of discussions of racial hierarchies among women in a historical context,
see JENNY SHARPE, ALLEGORIES OF EMPIRE: THE FIGURE OF WOMAN INTHE COLONIAL TEXT (1993);
VRON WARE, BEYOND THE PALE: WHITE WOMEN, RACISM AND HISTORY (1992); Antoinette M. Burton,
The White Woman's Burden, in WESTERN WOMEN AND IMPERIALISM, COMPLICITY AND RESISTANCE 137
(Nupur Chadhuri & Margaret Stroebel eds., 1992). For examples of similar discussions in a
contemporary context, see BELL HOOKS, TEACHING TO TRANSGRESS 77-92 (1994); AUDRE LORDE,
SISTER OUTSIDER 114-23 (1984); Patricia Hill Collins, What's in a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism
and Beyond, 26 BLACK SCHOLAR 9 (1996); Maria C. Lugones, Hablando cara a cara/SpeakingFace
to Face: An Explorationof EthnocentricRacism, in MAKING FACE, MAKING SOUL HACIENDO CARAS:
CREATIVE AND CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES BY WOMEN OF COLOR 46 (Gloria Anzaldfia ed., 1990)
[hereinafter MAKING FACE, MAKING SOUL HACIENDO CARAS]; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Under
Western Eyes, in THIRD WORLD WOMEN AND THE POLITCS OF FEMINISM 51 (Chandra Talpade Mohanty
et al. eds., 1991).
Feminists have shown how heterosexual women gain privilege by engaging in practices that
subordinate lesbians. See, e.g., LORDE, supra, at 114-23; CHERRiE MORAGA, LOVING IN THE WAR
YEARS: Lo QUE NUNCA PASO POR SUS LABIOS XX (1983); Patricia Cain, Feminist Jurisprudence:
Grounding the Theories, 4 BERKELEY WOMEN'S L.J. 191, 205-14 (1989); Audre Lorde, I Am Your
Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities, in MAKING FACE, MAKING SOUL HACIENDO
CARA, supra, at 321; Adrienne Rich, Compulsory Heterosexualityand LesbianExistence, 5 SIGNS 631,
657-60 (1980).
For how nondisabled women are implicated in discrimination against women with disabilities, see
JENNY MORRIS, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: TRANSFORMING ATTITUDES TO DISABILrrY 169-93 (1991); Yvon
Appleby, Disability and "Compulsory Heterosexuality," in HETEROSEXUALITY: A FEMINIST AND
PSYCHOLOGY READER 266 (Sue Wilkinson & Celia Kitzinger eds., 1993); Sherene Razack, From
Consent to Responsibility,from Pity to Respect: Subtexts in Cases of Sexual Violence Involving Girls
and Women with Developmental Disabilities,19 L. & Soc. INQUIRY 891, 899-903 (1994).
Aboriginal women also have traced the role non-Aboriginal women have played in the genocide
and continuing colonization of Aboriginal peoples. See, e.g., JANICE ACOOSE/MISKO-KSKAwiHKWA
(RED SKY WOMAN), ISKWEWAK-KAH'KI YAW NI WAHKOMAKANAK. NEITHER INDIAN PRINCESSES
OR EASY SQUAWS 47-49 (1995); BETH BRANT,WRITING AS WITNESS 25-34 (1994); JANET CAMPBELL
HALE, BLOODLINES, ODYSSEY OF ANATIVE DAUGHTER 109-40 (1994); LEE MARACLE, I AM A WOMAN
180-83 (1988); PATRICIA MONTURE-ANGUS, THUNDER INMY SOUL: A MOHAWK WOMAN SPEAKS 169-
88 (1995); Chrystos, Interview, in THE COLOUR OF RESISTANCE: A CONTEMPORARY COLLECTION OF
WRITING BY ABORIGINAL WOMEN 263 (Connie Fife ed., 1993).
 The Journalof Gender,Race & Justice [1:1998]

A failed conference brought us together and led to our exploration of

hierarchies among women?
At a conference on law and feminism, when a woman who is a survivor of
prostitution challenged participants to take the violence in prostitution
seriously, and not to deny it by calling prostitution "an expression of our sexual
autonomy," or ajob like any other, some participants insisted that some women
viewed their involvement in prostitution not as violence but as a job. She felt
the need to leave the conference because she believed that once again feminists
had erased the violence in prostitution. The next day, during a discussion about
race discrimination and racial subordination in feminist publishing, Sherene
considered how to ensure that each of us is challenged at the sites of our
dominance. At that moment Mary Lou noted that we had all failed to challenge
ourselves the day before when many of us had resisted the idea of prostitution
as violence. Her statement tumed the discussion away from race and feminist
publishing toward how people in the audience and panel participants felt about
what had happened the previous day. Neither prostitution nor racism was ever
discussed, and a fracture developed between us as co-organizers of the event.
The conflict between us emerged because Sherene viewed Mary Lou's
statement as putting an end to an important discussion on racism led primarily
by women of color. She considered Mary Lou's intervention to have come
either from a desire to shut down a discussion about racism, or from a
perception that challenging racism was not as important a political goal as the
goal of acknowledging and ending the violence of prostitution. Mary Lou
remained frustrated that few women present, including Sherene, seemed able
to acknowledge the violence of prostitution or to see that their resistance came
out of their positions of privilege as women who had something to gain from
denying the violence of prostitution. Our first response to the conflict, which
felt like competing marginalities, was to call it a breakdown in communication.
Viewed in this light, we imagined that, if we had each had more information,
we could have avoided the conflict between us. If Mary Lou had more
information about how women of color experience the interruption of a
discussion of racism by a white woman as part of the widespread denial of
racism, and Sherene knew more about how prostituted women experience the
widespread denial of the violence of prostitution and how that denial serves to
maintain the violence, we would not have come to the impasse at which
dialogue ends. To cast the problem, however, as one of information and
comparable ignorance (white supremacy versus prostitution) reduces the
impasse to a temporary interruption easily solved through education. It fails to
recognize the connection between what we know and the interests we protect
through our ignorance. Had we had the information, perhaps Mary Lou would
not have intervened and Sherene would have said more about prostitution, but
we still would not have transcended the impasse. That is, each of us would

3. See Mary Louise Fellows & Sherene Razack, Seeking Relations: Law and Feminism Round
Tables, 19 SIGNs 1048 (1994).
 The Race to Innocence

continue tofeel that our truth was the right one and our sense of superiority (as
the possessor of truth) would have remained unshaken. What remains in place
is the separation of prostitution from racism as if they were independent
systems-as if they were competing parallel narratives.
A parallel narrative precludes an interrogation of prostitution as a practice
that develops out of, and simultaneously sustains, racism. Similarly, it prevents
tracing how racism is upheld by and upholds prostitution. Race must be
understood not simply as complicating prostitution but as enabling it. Further,
ablism, economic exploitation, heterosexism, and sexism also are upheld by
and uphold prostitution. In other words, competing parallel narratives ignore
the interlocking nature of systems of domination and the complex ways in
which they simultaneously secure relations and sites of domination.
In retracing the steps at the conference on law and feminism, we noticed
that two moves were routinely made by many of the participants, including
ourselves: 1) many of us viewed the places on the margin as unconnected and
2) many of us felt it imperative to secure our own places on the margin; not to
do so felt like erasure. We name the process initiated by competing
marginalities as the race to innocence. Women challenged about their
domination respond by calling attention to their own subordination. The
impasse that results depends on the idea that if a woman is subordinate herself,
she cannot then be implicated in the subordination of others. The race to
innocence confines us to an additive model for understanding oppression,
where we try to add up oppressions and to gauge whether a white disabled
heterosexual woman is more or less subordinate than a Black nondisabled
lesbian, and so forth. Measuring who is most oppressed is unproductive. The
rancor and dissension that it sows, as well as the political immobility, make
clear the urgency of abandoning positions of innocence-the belief that
because we are ourselves in a subordinate position, we are unimplicated in the
oppression of others.
The frequency with which the race to innocence happens demands that we,
as women, inquire into the forces that lead us so often into the trap of
competing marginalities. Why does our intellectual understanding of
hierarchies among women not enable us to acknowledge how we oppress other
women? One reason we feel compelled to secure our own place on the margin
as the most oppressed is that not to do so is to risk erasure. If lesbians, for
example, do not insist that the strategies of resistance explicitly address the
oppressive force of heterosexuality, heterosexual women may, as lesbians fear,
leave heterosexism unexamined. In other words, the oppressive practices that
regulate the lives of lesbians will remain invisible if they themselves do not
raise the issue.
A second reason why we are trapped in the framework of competing
marginalities is that it is productive for us. Recognizing one's own specific
position on the margin is the first step toward liberation. Once we understand
and act from the site of our own marginality, we can begin to protect ourselves
 The Journalof Gender, Race & Justice [1:1998]

and take actions for change. Focusing exclusively on one's own subordination
is a productive defensive response to oppression.
Yet a third reason why we pursue a place on the margin for ourselves and
discount the narratives of subordination of others is that we hear these
narratives in the same way as dominant groups hear the stories of subordinate
groups. Because we do not experience the specific forms of oppression that
other women do, and are in fact privileged in that respect, we are likely to
consider their claims as unfounded. In essence, we view other women through
the lenses of our own superiority and utilize dominant explanatory frameworks
to explain to ourselves the meaning of their lives. Although we may be able to
resist these frameworks when they concern our own particular marginalized
positions, they effectively regulate how we view women who are marginalized
in different ways. Each of us has a stock of dominant representations of the
Other (prostitution is simply work not violence; women with disabilities suffer
from their disabilities and not from the systems that are organized to benefit
nondisabled women) that we draw from to convince ourselves why the Other's
claim is not as legitimate as our own. The fact that each of us knows and feels
the inaccuracy and injustice of the dominant group's representations of
ourselves does not immunize any of us from giving credence to the
inferiorizing constructs applied to others.
Given the benefits and necessity of concentrating on the sources of our
own subordination, it is not surprising that each of us does not easily endanger
our place on the margin by an examination of our complicity in the oppression
of others. To acknowledge that we oppress other women not only feels like a
risk; it is a risk. Our own claim for justice is likely to be undermined if we
acknowledge the claims of Others-competing claims that would position us
as dominant. The compelling reasons, then, for our race to innocence have to
do with how the systems of domination operate among subordinate groups,
limiting both what we can know and feel and what we can risk acknowledging
about one another and about ourselves.
The race to innocence depends on the idea that the systems of domination
are separate. This leads to women making a truth claim that they are
subordinate in one system and failing to see their domination in another.
Failing to see one's domination in another system, however, and acting from
that basis not only leaves the systems that privilege us intact, but it leaves the
system that subordinates us intact as well. Although we may believe we are
advancing our own claim for justice by distinguishing ourselves from other
women, we are assuring injustice for all.
One possible way to stop racing to innocence is to examine how all the
systems operate simultaneously, not only to make the center, but also to
structure us, as women, hierarchically and thus to condition our responses to
one another. This is, of course, an intellectual solution to a problem that is
clearly beyond the cognitive. If we start, however, from the premise that what
underlies the race to innocence are, as Jane Flax suggests, "motives and desires
(including unconscious ones) [that] drive us to make the kinds of claims about
 The Race to Innocence

ourselves" that we do, 4 perhaps we can push intellectual inquiry further to ask
why we feel consistently innocent of one another's oppression.' This question
is addressed in Part II through a consideration of how the center is made
through the margins (dominance through difference).

II. DOMINANCE THROUGH DIFFERENCE

Identity, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,is derived from the

Latin word idem, meaning the same.' Its various dictionary meanings focus on
sameness. Yet in our social, political, economic, and legal worlds, the word
identity is far more likely to be heard and read as connoting difference. Those
who can be simply human, or simply women, Marfa Lugones reminds us, are
not allotted specific identity boxes Their membership in the human
community or the category "woman" assured, dominant groups are not
specifically labeled. White people need not and do not define themselves as
members of a race; heterosexual people do not define themselves as having a
sexual orientation. Thus identity comes to bear an intrinsic relationship to
subordination. Identity boxes contain those excluded from the dominant group.
Conversely, to be unmarked or unnamed is to belong to the dominant group!
The marking of subordinate groups and the unmarking of dominant groups
leaves the actual processes of domination obscured, thus intact. Subordinate
groups simply are the way they are; their condition is naturalized. To be
unmarked or unnamed is also simply to embody the norm and not to have
actively produced and sustained it. To be the norm, yet to have the norm
unnamed, is to be innocent of the domination of others.
Innocence as intrinsic to the making of the dominant group has yet to be
formally investigated, although some feminist scholars have explored how
innocence, domination, and a sense of self are all connected.9 How do the

4. Jane Flax, The End of Innocence, in FEMINISTS THEORIZE THE POLmCAL 445, 446 (Judith
Butler & Joan Scott eds., 1992).
5. See RAYMOND WILLIAMS, POLmCS AND LETrERS: INTERVIEWS WITH NEW LEFT REVIEW 182
(1979) (suggesting we ask how the repressions each individual experiences as an individual are in fact
socially produced out of material realities).
6. OxFoRD ENGLISH DICTIONARY 1368 (compact ed. 1971).
7. Lugones, supra note 2, at 49.
8. As George Lipsitz comments with respect to whiteness, as "the unmarked category against
which difference is constructed, whiteness never has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge its role
as an organising principle in social and cultural relations." George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment
in Whiteness: RaciahzedSocial Democracy and the "White'" Problem in American Studies, 47 AM. Q.
369, 369 (1995); see also Richard Dyer, White, 29 SCREEN 44, 46 (1988); Cheryl Harris, Whiteness as
Property,106 HARv. L. REv. 1707, 1777-81 (1993).
9. See, e.g., MARY LOUISE PRATI, IMPERIAL EYES: TRAVEL, WRITING, AND TRANSCULTURATION
7 (1992); Flax, supranote 4; Donna Haraway, SituatedKnowledges: The Science Question in Feminism
andthe Privilege of PartialPerspective, 14 FEMINIST STUD. 575,579 (1988).
 The Journalof Gender, Race & Justice [1:1998]

identity boxes into which subordinate groups are placed secure innocence and
power for the dominant group? Put another way, how do those who are most
unmarked-white, middle-class/elite, heterosexual, nondisabled men-come
to know themselves through the containment or marking of others, both
symbolically and materially? Ultimately, this question leads to another with
which we are concerned: How do identity boxes continue to operate among
subordinate groups (where any one group is simultaneously marked and
unmarked) so that subordinate groups come to know themselves as innocent?
To answer these questions, we examine the marking of subordinate groups and
the process of securing the center through the margins as it first emerged in
liberal democratic states.
In making the transition from feudalism to liberal democracies, Europeans
began in the eighteenth century to develop new ideologies to legitimate the
power of the emerging middle class. The Enlightenment idea of the rational
man unconnected to a bloodline or community was a central idea required to
rationalize the rule of the bourgeoisie, and thus the cornerstone of liberalism.
A man was defined by his capacity to reason; all men were equal by virtue of
possessing this trait, hence equally entitled to participate in govemance.' 0 The
contradiction between the belief in the fundamental equality of men and the
structures of domination required to create the middle class produced what
David Goldberg has termed the paradox of liberalism, where all is race, but
race is irrelevant." Linda Alcoff, commenting on the paradox, describes its
consequences: "The universal sameness that was so important for the liberal
self required a careful containment and taxonomy of difference."' 2 Brutal
colonial regimes, the extermination and enslavement of subject peoples, the
exploitation of the working class in Europe, and the gender hierarchies that
enabled the new Enlightenment man to participate as a citizen in the new social
order had to coexist in the bourgeois imagination with the philosophy of liberal
equality.
The problem for the Enlightenment man, the European bourgeois male, is
how to reconcile the exclusion of those who are not equal-all people with
disabilities; lesbians, gays, and bisexuals; women; racial minorities;
nonprotestants; and people who are poor-within a framework of the
fundamental equality of all human beings. The solution, as Alcoff observes, is
that "[w]here rights require sameness, difference must be either trivialized or
contained in the Other across a firm and visible border."' 3 Physical and spatial
markers of those who are not human, including skin color, physical features,
persons found in certain locations, persons unaccompanied by more respectable

10. See DAVID THEO GOLDBERG, RAcIST CULTURE: PHILOSOPHY AND THE POLITICS OF MEANING
2-6(1993).

11. Id. at4.

12. Linda Alcoff, Philosophy andRacialIdentity, 75 RADIcAL PHIL. 5, 5 (1996).

13. Id.
 The Race to Innocence

persons (for example, women alone), all help to draw the firm and visible
border between those who are different and those who are unmarked. Equality,
in its liberal meaning, could not be attained by those who were physically or
spatially marked as different.
The containment of the Other is a making of the dominant self. To exclude
Others from membership in the human community, that is, to name, classify,
and contain the Other through a number of representational and material
practices, assures the material basis for domination while enabling the
members of the dominant group to define themselves. Patricia Hill Collins
makes this point in the context of the marginalization of African American
women, showing how identifying the Other concurrently identifies the
dominant group. "As the 'Others' of society who can never really belong,
strangers threaten the moral and social order. But they are simultaneously
essential for its survival because those individuals who stand at the margins of
society clarify its boundaries. African-American women, by not belonging,
emphasize the significance of belonging."' 4 Although the symbolic and
material practices used to exclude are not the same for all groups designated
as Other, the various strategies collectively enable the formation of the
dominant group.
As Hill Collins observes, without the contrast the dominant group would
not know itself. 5 The way in which the dominant group imagines the Other "is
not merely looking or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the other.
It is ...becoming."'6 The dominant group makes itself through imagining itself
as everything the Other is not. As David Roediger has commented about race,
there is no content to whiteness outside of domination: whiteness is the "empty
and terrifying attempt to build7 an identity based on what one isn't and on
whom one can hold back."'
When dominance is contested, dominant group members experience an
engulfinent, a literal loss of self that can feel extremely destabilizing. It is this,
among other things, that we see exhibited in the race to innocence when an
intellectual understanding of how women oppress women competes with an
emotional attachment to innocence. What cannot be admitted, what is, in other
words, repressed but always feared, is the permeability of the boundaries, the
fact that they are never securely in place and have to be made and remade until
the difference between the self and the subordinate Other appears natural and
thus fixed.

14. COLLINS, supranote 1, at 68.

15. Id.

16. TONI MORRISON, PLAYING IN THE DARK: WHITENESS AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION 4
(1992).

17. DAVID ROEDIGER, TOWARD THE ABOLITION OF WHITENESS: ESSAYS ON RACE, POLITICS AND
WORKING CLASS HISTORY 13 (1994).
 The JournalofGender, Race & Justice [1:1998]

Identity as lack of dominance through difference occurs in specific

historical contexts. Below we trace the process through which the European
middle class first legitimated its power and began to consolidate it in liberal
democratic states. In doing so, we are confining our observations to a specific
historical context, contending that this context is an important historical
moment for tracing the hierarchical arrangements among women with whom
we are concerned." In addition to being sustained by colonial capitalism, the
making of the middle class as a class distinct from the aristocracy, the working
class, and colonial Others required the class, gender, and race arrangements in
which North Americans now live.
We recognize the dangers inherent in transposing to North American soil
the making of the European elite in the nineteenth century. Although the
histories of European and North American nations differ, a powerful argument
can be made for their interconnectedness both in the nineteenth century and
today. With European empires expanding to link vast sections of the globe,
nineteenth-century imperialism laid the groundwork for today's global world.' 9
As Edward Said observes, "[I]n Europe itself at the end of the nineteenth
century, scarcely a comer of life was untouched by the facts of empire."2' The
American experience, he continues, was from the beginning founded on
imperialism; as the century progressed, the extermination of native peoples, the
enslavement of Africans, and the displacement of populations the world over
through American interventions, both direct and indirect, continued apace.2
Although legitimating ideologies vary from one period to the next, and from
one locale to another, they all bear the hallmarks of these arrangements
founded in imperialism.
What then were the specific hierarchical arrangements required to allow
the European middle class to legitimate and consolidate its power in liberal
democratic states, and how did these arrangements structure relations among
women? The middle-class home and the respectability attained through the
making of the middle-class home are key concepts to understanding the
hierarchical arrangements used to legitimate and consolidate middle-class
ruling power. Michel Foucault's pathbreaking work in the History of Sexuality
traces the making of the bourgeois subject as an identity rooted in the sexual
politics of the home. Foucault began by rejecting the hypothesis that European
sexuality in the nineteenth century was repressed. Foucault concluded that
sexuality-much talked about during this period even as it was ostensibly

18. See 1 MICHEL FOUCAULT, HIsToRY OF SEXUALITY: AN INTRODUCTION 17-35 (Robert Hurley
trans., Vintage Books 1979); GOLDBERG, supra note 10, at 43-46; ANNE MCCLINTOCK, IMPERIAL
LEATHER: RACE, GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN THE COLONIAL CONTEXT 21-61 (1995); PRATT, supranote
9, at 9-10.

19. See EDWARD W. SAID, CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM 6, 8 (1993) (stating that by 1914 Europe
had laid claim to roughly 85% of the globe).

20. Id.at 8.

21. Id.
 The Race to Innocence

repressed-was only a manifestation of a larger project: to bring "life and its

mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and [make]
knowledge/power an agent of transformation of human life."22 '
The home was central to the emerging social order of "explicit
calculations." Close control over the manner of living made the bourgeois
home the site of self-control, self-discipline, and order. Leonore Davidoff
reminds us that in the nineteenth century, domesticity "as a concept as well as
the home as an actual space were coined and elaborated beyond recognition on
a much wider scale and further down the social hierarchy than ever before, in
the countryside as well as in towns." The home came to mean much more
than a place where a family resided. It marked the site where a class was
produced and reproduced and where the life of the individual was connected
to the making of a liberal democratic social order that replaced feudalism.
Disciplined, self-regulating bourgeois bodies were emboldened to claim the
right to participate as citizens in the body politic.
The power of the king was being replaced in this period by the rule of the
middle class. Seeking to justify its right to rule, the middle class engaged in
activities that would distinguish it from both the aristocracy (the ruling class
in feudalism) and the lower social orders. These activities, involving the
discipline of individuals and a close regulation of social life, consolidated the
right of the bourgeoisie to hold political and social power.24
The middle-class home, the middle class, and ultimately the nation all had
to be protected from the contamination of the lower orders. Society had to be
cleansed of degeneracy, abnormalcy, excess-in short, all the "internal
enemies," to use Foucault's terms, 25 that would weaken the vigorous bourgeois
individual and by extension, the state. George Mosse elaborates on how the
intellectual construct of middle-class respectability, the term that described the
ordered, self-regulating state of bourgeois homes and persons, came to
distinguish bourgeois life:

22. FOUCAULT, supranote 18, at 143; see also ANN LAURA STOLER, RACE AND THE EDUCATION
OF DESIRE 3 (1995) (further explaining the ties between the nineteenth-century bourgeois order and
sexuality).

23. LEONORE DAVIDOFF, WORLDS BETWEEN: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON GENDER AND CLASS
9(1995).

24. As Ann Laura Stoler writes, Foucault saw the making of life and the manner of living as
central to how the bourgeoisie justified its control, its right to rule, and indeed its very existence as a
social class:
In the History of Sexuality, he has already described this "how to live" as central to the
cultivation of the bourgeois self. It is through the technologies of sexuality that the
bourgeoisie will claim its hegemony, its privileged position, its certified knowledge and
jurisdiction over the manner of living, over the governing of children, over the civilities,
conduct and competencies that prescribe "how to live."
STOLER, supranote 22, at 83.

25. See id. at 10 (discussing Foucault's use of the term in his College de France lectures).
 The Journalof Gender,Race & Justice [1:1998]

Through respectability, they [the middle class] sought to maintain

their status and self respect against both the lower classes and the
aristocracy. They perceived their way of life, based as it was upon
frugality, devotion to duty, and restraint of the passions, as superior to
that of the "lazy" lower classes and the profligate aristocracy.26
Mosse, echoing Foucault, notes that once national survival begins to be defined
in terms of physical and moral health, and manliness comes to describe those
who can possess these qualities, the concept of degeneration emerges as its
antithesis. Degeneracy, for Benedict Augustin Morel, who first formulated the
concept in medical terms in 1857, is a process of destruction that is brought on
by moral and physical poison.' Mosse writes:
This deviance from the norm, as Morel called it, could be brought
about by such poisons as alcoholism and the use of opium, by
debilitating diseases like malaria, but also by the social environment,
a nervous temperament, diseased moral faculties, or inherited bodily
and mental weakness. Several of these poisons usually combined in
order to begin the relentless process of degeneration.2"
Respectability and its converse, degeneracy, were part of the nineteenth-
century ideological language expressing relations of domination and
subordination. Respectability became an assertion of membership in the middle
class and the basis on which one had the right to dominate others, those
classified as degenerate. The pursuit of respectability, that is, the pursuit of
domination through difference, required the simultaneous operation of all the
systems of domination. Respectability and degeneracy marked not only class
distinctions, but also gendered and raced social arrangements.
The middle-class home-the emblem of respectability-required a gender
hierarchy and a colonial economic order to finance it. A number of discursive
arrangements sustained these interconnections. As Ann Laura Stoler argues in
her examination of Foucault's work, nineteenth-century bourgeois sexuality
was situated on an imperial landscape. One could know a healthy bourgeois
person only in contrast to that person's racial opposite, first encountered in
colonization and later projected onto the working class at home.29 In Imperial
Leather, Anne McClintock has convincingly shown the crucial relation
between middle-class domesticity and empire. In contrast to bourgeois males,
women were featured as primitive and archaic; the female body itself was
thought to inhabit anachronistic space, space inherently out of time with

26. GEORGE MOSSE, NATIONALISM AND SExUALITY: RESPECTABILITY AND ABNORMAL

SExUALITY 5 (1995).

27. Id.at 34-35.

28. Id at 35 (footnote omitted).

29. STOLER, supra note 22, at 5.

 The Race to Innocence

modemity. Women who transgressed the boundaries of Victorian respectability30

"became increasingly stigmatized as specimens of racial regression."
McClintock shows the depiction of female domestic servants in Victorian times
as "plagues," "black bodies," "slaves," and "primitives,"3 ' and concludes:
By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the analogy between race
and gender degeneration came to serve a specifically modem form of
social domination, as an intricate dialectic emerged-between the
domestication of the colonies and the racializing of the metropolis. In
the metropolis, the idea of racial deviance was evoked to police the
"degenerate" classes-the militant working class, the Irish, Jews,
feminists, gays and lesbians, prostitutes, criminals, alcoholics and the
insane-who were collectively figured as racial deviants, atavistic
throwbacks to a primitive moment in human prehistory, surviving
ominously in the heart of the modem, imperial metropolis.32
Her argument suggests a second feature of respectability and its role in the
making of the middle class. Respectability not only signified the simultaneous
operation of social hierarchies, but also structured relations among women.
One way that the respectable middle-class home was distinguished from
the degenerate slum was through women. To be a slum, an area had to be
inhabited by prostituted women (among other members of the degenerate
classes), and the women in slums had to be prostituted women. Both the slum
and the women in it were further defined in opposition to the home and the
"lady" in it. Davidoff demonstrates the relation between the home and the slum
and the relation between ladies and prostituted women when she states:
Prostitutes, who were seen as the potential source of both physical and
moral contagion for middle-class men, were also cast into this region
[the slum]. Defenders of prostitution saw it as a necessary institution
which acted as a giant sewer, drawing away the distasteful but
inevitable waste products of male lustfulness, leaving the middle-class
household and middle-class ladies pure and unsullied. None of the
inhabitants of this twilight zone could ever aspire to be included in the
"body politic" but had to be hidden and controlled wherever
possible.33
While prostituted women epitomized degeneracy, domestic workers were
another class of women used to distinguish the lady and her home from the
slum. Bourgeois households could not be maintained as the clean, ordered
spaces of respectability without Others to do the work. Domestic workers

30. MCCUNTOCK, supranote 18, at 42.

31. Id

32. Id. at 43,

33. DAvIDOFF, supra note 23, at 105.

 The Journalof Gender, Race & Justice [1:1998]

absorbed "dirt and lowliness into their own bodies" and thus made it possible
to mark the distinction between classes.34 As Davidoff remarks, "The shining
brass ornaments and daily whitening of doorsteps, the variety and upkeep of
furniture, crockery and dozens of other household items, the servants in neat,
clean uniforms to open the front door to visitors, were part of elaborated codes
of gentility and respectability."35
' It was not possible to achieve respectability
without domestic workers. Yet, the domestic worker represented the very
degradation that the respectable home was by definition not supposed to
contain. The domestic worker knew the truth that middle-class life was
designed to eradicate-she knew its dirtiness. To make it not matter that she
saw and knew intimately middle-class dirt, she had to be stripped of the ability
to know. She had to be stripped of her subjectivity. By degrading her and her
work, the middle-class family transformed her from a knowing subject into an
invisible object and in the process made the reality of its dirt a nonreality' 6
The nineteenth-century dichotomy of respectability/degeneracy allows us
to trace the hierarchical relations among ladies, domestic workers, and
prostituted women. Ladies who, as McClintock observed, were distinguished
from men by being characterized as primitive and archaic, pursued
respectability by distancing themselves from dirt and degradation. That
distancing could not occur either in the lady's imagination or in her middle-
class home without the economic and sexual exploitation of domestic workers
and prostituted women. She achieved and maintained her toehold on
respectability through the economic and sexual exploitation of other women,
and that exploitation was itself the product of class, gender, and racial
hierarchies. The pursuit of respectability undoubtedly provided the lady some
protection from economic and sexual exploitation. Freedom from economic
and sexual exploitation for the lady, however, is only made possible by her
complicity in maintaining class, gender, and racial hierarchies that resulted in
the economic and sexual exploitation of other women.

34. Id.
at 5.

35. Id.at 4.

36. See DEBORAH VALENZE, THE FIRST INDUSTRIAL WOMAN 158 (1995) (stating that hierarchical
dimensions associated with the cult of the lady "depended absolutely on the denigration of household
tasks"). McClintock expands on the ideological implications of dirt:
Dirt was a Victorian scandal because it was the surplus evidence of manual work, the visible
residue that stubbornly remained after the process of industrial rationality had done its
work. . . . Dirt is by definition useless, because it is that which belongs outside the
commodity market.
...[D]irt was the memory trace of working class and female labor, unseemly evidence
that the fundamental production of industrial and imperial wealth lay in the hands and bodies
of the working class, women and the colonized. Dirt, like all fetishes, thus expresses a crisis
in value, for it contradicts the liberal dictum that social wealth is created by the abstract,
rational principles of the market and not by labor.
MCCLINTOCK, supranote 18, at 153-54.
 The Race to Innocence

Domestic workers' toehold on respectability was more tenuous than it was

for the lady because of their close connection to dirt and other degeneracies,
but a toehold nevertheless was possible for those domestic workers
demonstrating devotion to duty, restraint of passions, and hard work. 7 The
means by which a domestic worker claimed respectability was, in the context
of the home and slum, a disavowing of prostituted women. While such a
disavowal could not provide her complete protection from economic and
sexual exploitation, it meant that sexual exploitation might be only one
condition rather than the entire substance of her working life. Her protection
from the prospect of continual sexual violence was made possible by her
complicity in maintaining class, gender, and racial hierarchies that resulted in
other women paying the price for her protection.
A study of respectability in the nineteenth century not only allows us to
identify the hierarchical relations among women, but it also allows us to
appreciate how much a woman had invested in notfeeling complicit in the lives
of other women. What she had invested was her own self, and her self
depended in material and symbolic ways on disavowal of membership in other
degenerate groups. The question yet to be addressed is how can we use the
concept of toehold on respectability, and the related notion of disavowal, in the
twentieth century to explain why we, as women, do not feel complicit in one
another's lives. In effect, how do we disavow our connections to other women
and secure for ourselves a toehold on respectability today?

III. TOEHOLDS ON RESPECTABILITY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Respectability has continuing vitality in the twentieth century in sustaining

hierarchical arrangements. Respectability in the twentieth century, Mosse
concludes, "provided society with an essential cohesion that was as important
in the perceptions of men and women as any economic or political interest.
What began as bourgeois morality in the eighteenth century, in the end became
everyone's morality."3 Mosse, through his study of national socialism in
Germany up to World War II, shows that respectability has had a continuing
role in the twentieth century. 9 It marks the boundaries between those who are
included in the body politic and those who are not, just as it did in the
nineteenth century.4" As long as it continues to determine who has a rightful

37. See DAVIDOFF, supranote 23, at 22,27.

38. MOSSE, supranote 26, at 191.

39. See id at 181-91.

at 133-52.
40. See id.
 The Journalof Gender, Race & Justice [1:1998]

claim to citizenship, the construct of respectability remains important in

uncovering practices of domination. 4'
We suggested at the beginning of this Article that women are able to
discount other women's claims for justice when they believe that the systems
of domination are essentially unconnected and when they understand their own
claims to be more just than the claims of other women. Both beliefs sustain
respectability because each woman fails to see how her own subordination
depends on the subordination of another woman. She is thus unable to
challenge the structure of domination that is supported by multiple women in
various subordinate roles. If, as women, our liberation leaves intact the
subordination of other women, then we have not achieved liberation, but only
a toehold on respectability.42 The political lesson to be drawn from the idea of
a toehold on respectability is that a claim for justice cannot be transformative
if it depends for its success on marking the distinction between ourselves and
other women who can then be labeled degenerate. An exploration of current
feminist understandings of prostitution demonstrates how the race to innocence
and the related act of pursuing a toehold on respectability reinforce systems of
domination and maintain hierarchical arrangements among women.
Contemporary Western feminists generally have two irreconcilable
analytical frameworks for understanding prostitution.43 For some feminists,

41. In using the construct of respectability to chart domination, however, we must be wary of
positing a straightforward correspondence between the hierarchical arrangements of the nineteenth
century and those of the twentieth. As Anita Levy writes, the contemporary task is to trace the
nineteenth-century middle-class power that has in the twentieth century "vanished into the common
sense norms of self and identity." ANITA LEVY, OTHER WOMAN: THE WRITING OF CLASS, RACE AND
GENDER, 1832-1898, at 5 (1991), cited in RENA LEwis, GENDERING ORIENTALISM: RACE, FEMININITY
AND REPRESENTATION 27 (1996). in other words, the practices of domination that established the middle
class in the nineteenth century have become everyone's morality today. Although the goal of identifying
hierarchies remains constant across time and location, the arrangements that mark the distinction
between respectability and degeneracy-thus maintaining the dominant group--change from one period
to the next and from one locality to another.

42. Regina Austin makes reference to a similar idea when she comments that Blacks who are
considered deviant by whites are excluded from standing in the Black community "because they
undermine our claims to greater respect and a larger share of the nation's bounty." Regina Austin, Black
Women, Sisterhood,and the DifferencelDeviance Divide, 26 NEW ENG. L. REv. 877, 878 (1992). She
concludes:
But black women have reason to challenge the appraisals of black female deviants, whether
they are based on the standards of the dominant society or those prevailing in the black
community. In the name of a "black sisterhood," a "community" within "the community,"
we might respond to female deviance with understanding, support, or praise based on the
distinctive social, material, and political interests of black women. In doing so, however, we
risk being labeled deviant ourselves. For this and other reasons, we tend to differentiate
ourselves from those whose conduct falls within traditional definitions of deviance when we
advance our claims for greater esteem and resources.
Id.at 879.

43. For a discussion of the range of views feminists hold on prostitution, see Margaret A. Baldwin,
Split at the Root: Prostitutionand Feminist Discoursesof Lav Reform, 5 YALE J.L. & FEMINISM 47
(1992); Christine Overall, What's Wrong with Prostitution?EvaluatingSex Work, 17 SIGNS 705 (1992);
 The Race to Innocence

prostitution is work and prostitutes are sex-trade workers. They have put their
legal reform efforts into gaining respect for "sex-trade workers" by improving
their working conditions. Although acknowledging that many prostituted
women experience violence, they argue that the violence occurs because
prostitution is illegal and prostituted women are treated as criminals. The
solutions they propose range from decriminalization to unionization. For other
feminists, prostitution is sexual violence. These feminists have put their legal
reform efforts into decriminalizing prostitution for prostituted women and
increasing the criminal and civil penalties for those who purchase sex for
money and for those other than the prostituted woman herself who profit from
prostitution. To debate prostitution as either work or violence leaves the
hierarchical arrangements that sustain prostitution intact, because neither
framework challenges the respectability/degeneracy dichotomy. On the
contrary, both positions share the same goal-achieving respectability for
women used in prostitution.
The historical role of respectability as dominance invites us to trace the
hierarchical arrangements embodied in prostitution through an interrogation of
the sites where prostitution occurs and the women found in those sites. As in
nineteenth-century Europe, the sites of prostitution in the late twentieth century
are places associated with crime, disease, poverty, and deviance. Women in
prostitution, even when in respectable places (such as luxury hotels), carry
these associations. Prostituted women, wherever found, become the place
where men buying sex for money temporarily abandon their routines of duty,
self-control, civility, and obligation. Their temporary abandonment, rather than
weakening these men's claim of respectability, puts the mark of degeneracy on
the women in prostitution, thus reaffirming the men's position within the
dominant group. In this way, prostitution reaffirms not only the hierarchies of
gender, but also of class, race, and sexual orientation.
By seeing respectability as embodying the structures of domination,
prostitution becomes denaturalized. Instead of the "world's oldest profession,"
a benign construct that suggests prostitution's immutability and inevitability,
prostitution is reconceptualized as a practice of domination through difference.
If the very function of prostitution is to affirm the dominant group by marking
the boundary between respectability and degeneracy, then prostitution cannot
be made into a respectable activity, as those feminists advocating it as work
propose to do. If prostitution became respectable, it would not be prostitution.
Those feminists who seek not to legitimate but to end prostitution by
naming the women in prostitution victims of violence essentially are trying to
unmark the women as degenerate; they are seeking respectability for women.
The dominant group is making itself through prostitution; to demand the end
of prostitution is to demand that the dominant group abandon a practice and an
ideological construct that determines its very identity.

Laurie Shrage, Comment on Overall's "What's Wrong with Prostitution?EvaluatingSex Work" 19

SIGNS 564 (1992).
 The Journalof Gender, Race & Justice [1:1998]

Although our analysis seems to lead to the gloomy conclusions that

prostitution can neither be ended nor its violence diminished, it in fact provides
new directions for a politics of antisubordination. Through the concept of
respectability, feminists committed to social change have a way to trace the
stake all subordinate groups have in ending prostitution. Respectability
suggests that none of the systems of oppression can exist without prostitution,
and prostitution cannot exist without these systems. Prostitution is a prominent
feature in urban areas of the world. It is also a prominent feature in areas
surrounding military bases. To identify these sites exposes the class, gender,
and racial hierarchies that sustain and are sustained by prostitution. Our task
as scholars and activists is to trace all the hierarchical connections for the
purpose of developing strategies for change.
Seeing respectability as dominance through difference also suggests that
the goal of any antisubordination strategy cannot be the pursuit of
respectability. Respectability is a claim for membership in the dominant group;
attaining it, even one aspect of it, requires the subordination of Others.
Moreover, because subordinate groups that gain a measure of respectability do
not by definition possess all of the attributes of respectability, they are in an
inherently unstable position. Those attributes that remain classified as
degenerate will always threaten their toeholds on respectability. If a woman
claims respectability on the basis of her formal education, for
example-placing herself in a hierarchical relationship with women who have
less formal education-whatever respectability she attains based on her
education will inevitably be challenged. A stock of dominant narratives based
on her disability, race, sex, sexual orientation, or other construct will be used
to undervalue her accomplishments and highlight her mistakes.

CONCLUSION

The structure of dominance we have been calling respectability shows us

how, as women, we are positioned in hierarchical relation to one another, to
make the dominant group. It is a structure that causes us to secure our own
toehold on respectability by disavowing other women. We are able in this way
to maintain our innocence and to consider that the systems that oppress us are
unconnected from the ones in which we are privileged. If we constantly remind
ourselves of the interlocking structure of dominance, however, and specifically
its powerful inducements to see ourselves as innocent, perhaps we can be better
prepared to recognize and disrupt the discourse of competing marginalities and
the race to innocence. Some of the questions we must ask of ourselves include:
Where have we positioned other women within our strategies for achieving
social justice? What do we gain from this positioning? How are we implicated
in the structures of dominance? Only as we learn to distinguish between a
toehold on respectability and a liberation strategy that truly undermines the
dichotomy of respectability/degeneracy can we begin the process offeeling less
innocent.