categories because they presume that she has ordered her gender and choice of sexual partners along the principle of biological sex.1
Judy Scales-Trent describes herself as a “white black woman” to emphasize that she transgresses boundaries of race, while also identifying as “black.”2 She finds that it makes people, including herself, feel uncomfortable when she moves among the static racial categories of “black” and “white.” Categories, she concludes, “make the world appear understandable and safe.”3 Challenging categories unsettles and frightens people.
Linda Alcoff describes herself as “negotiating” the “gap” between her various racial and ethnic identities and observes that she never fully occupied any one of these identities. She has parents from Caucasian, Latina, and African backgrounds.4 She remarks, “In white society I feel my Latinness, and in Latin society I feel my whiteness, as that which is left out, an invisible presence, sometimes as intrusive as an elephant in the room and sometimes more as a pulled thread that alters the design of my fabricated self.”5 Alcoff has discovered that “peace has come for me by living that gap, and no longer seeking some permanent home onshore.”6
I, too, have found gender and sexual orientation categories to be unsettling. Starting at an early age, I embarrassed my mother when store clerks identified me as a boy. As an adult, however, I feel comfortable wearing both a dress and hiking boots and can even laugh when store clerks politely suggest that I might want to buy a “padded bra.” Unlike Bern, however, I would acknowledge that my gender resistance is only partial. When I decided to have a child, for example, I am sure that some men became more attractive to me due to their ability to facilitate my pregnancy. When my husband and I discussed how to divide childrearing responsibilities after the birth of our child, my ability to lactate obviously affected our division of labor. On a less biological level, living in a married relationship with a man has a tangible effect on my sexual orientation because I am often treated as a heterosexual woman. And, as I raise a daughter, I realize that I often pass on gender rules to her.
Complete resistance to gender and sexual orientation socialization is impossible. Bern, as a woman who has been married to the same man for nearly three decades, has been constructed, at least in part, by dominant society’s view of her sexuality and gender. Nonetheless, such a label as “heterosexual woman” is an incomplete description of some women who are married to men.
The experience of living as a legal hybrid varies across gender, sexual orientation, and disability categories. Scales-Trent describes people responding to her hybrid existence with “fear.” As a bisexual, I have often found that the most common reaction is moral disdain rather than fear. My strabismus (cross-eyedness) which causes me to live between the categories of disabled and able-bodied sometimes makes people feel physically uncomfortable, which they express by avoiding eye contact. (Children and adults frequently cross their eyes to look scary.)
For any given individual, the experience of living within a hybrid category can also change in context. For example, Alcoff observes that her racial and ethnic identity changes depending upon the racial and ethnic identity of her community. At a primarily lesbian event, I acutely feel my status of being married to a man and at a heterosexual event, such as a traditional wedding, I feel uncomfortable as a bisexual.
Two individuals who share the same hybrid status, such as being multiracial, may also experience quite different reactions to that status. For example, law professor Maria O’Brien Hylton, of African-American, Hispanic, and Australian-Irish parentage, was caught in a public controversy concerning whether her appropriate racial category was black, Hispanic, or white when she sought a faculty position at Northwestern Law School in 1994. Hylton has checked off the “black” racial category on employment applications and belongs to black community organizations. Hylton is a political conservative who does not believe that her racial identity should be a consideration in the appointment process. She also identifies with the “law and economics” movement within jurisprudence.
The community at Northwestern Law School engaged in a vigorous debate about whether Hylton’s race should be a “plus” in the appointment process. One African-American member of the faculty concluded that Hylton should not be treated as “black” because of her racial background and political ideology. A Hispanic member of the student body concluded that Hylton should not be treated as “Hispanic” because that was not Hylton’s self-identity. Hylton refused to comment on her “proper” racial identity during this controversy, because she considered such inquiries to be “racist and impolite in the extreme.”7
The discussions of Hylton’s candidacy were racially polarized. She was either “black” or “Latina” and therefore deserving of affirmative action, or “white” and therefore undeserving. No one suggested that she might fit a middle category of “mixed race.” Nor did anyone probe whether individuals who fit into mixed-race categories should be beneficiaries of affirmative action.
Hylton and Scales-Trent share similar physical features (light skin and kinky hair), yet the responses to their ambiguous racial identity have differed radically. Hylton’s conservative politics combined with her refusal to comment on her racial identity evoked strong disapproval from some blacks and Hispanics. Scales-Trent, by contrast, is a law professor who writes books and articles discussing her categoryless racial identity and who strongly supports affirmative action. The difference in treatment accorded Scales-Trent and Hylton was not the result of a difference in multiracial heritage or appearance, but in identity and politics. Nonetheless, their racial ambiguity has clearly affected their treatment by society. Hylton’s background opened her up to political attacks concerning whether she was authentically “black,” whereas her darker-skinned husband (who also seems to share her conservative politics) was not exposed to such racial categorizing when he sought an appointment on the same faculty. His darker skin and family background immunized him from claims that he was not “black” enough to count as black for affirmative action purposes. Clearly, the implications of living between racial categories are complex, acute, and varied.
The experiences of Hylton and Scales-Trent also reveal that racial identity is not always apparent. Our legal system, however, has been built on the assumption that race, unlike sexual orientation, is visually identifiable. Consider the following statement made recently by a three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to justify its failure to invalidate an anti-homosexual initiative: “Because homosexuals generally are not identifiable ‘on sight’ unless they elect to be so identifiable by conduct..., they cannot constitute a suspect class.”8 The three-judge panel (including one African-American female judge) seemed ignorant of the fact that the infamous test case Plessy v. Ferguson9 involved a plaintiff whose skin was so light that he had to be identified as “black” to the railroad conductor so that the lawsuit against segregation could be initiated. Racial civil rights litigation has been premised on the visual identifiability of “blacks”; homosexual civil rights litigation has been undermined by its inability to fit into that illusory visual-identification case law. Exposing the pervasive ambiguity of all categorization schemes, including racial ones, will help destroy some of the distinctions drawn between “genuine” racial civil rights claims and “inappropriate” homosexual civil rights claims. We need to understand that categorization schemes have been developed to pursue political and social policies ranging from the perpetuation of Jim Crow laws to the institutionalization of people with disabilities. No categorization scheme should be accepted as natural and inevitable.
Yet categorization schemes need not be eliminated altogether. Many feminist theorists, such as Bern, suggest that we abandon them because they perpetuate gender polarization and androcentrism (the power dynamic whereby men have more power in society than women). Similarly, law professor Neil Gotanda10 suggests that we abandon racial categories because they perpetuate subordination. Others, such as Scales-Trent, are more open to the use of categories. Although Scales-Trent is certainly aware that racial categories
