With reference to femininity, discuss the ways in which gender norms intersect with ideas about race and ethnicity.

The first 200 words of this essay...

With reference to femininity, discuss the ways in which gender norms intersect with ideas about race and ethnicity.

In this essay I aim to examine how ideological and cultural assumptions and standards of femininity influence the construction of racial identity with regards to black feminine identity.

As Cuomo and Hall identify, the concept of race, like gender, is a socially constructed phenomena; 'Racial categories are socially constructed and contextually defined. These deconstructive and reconstructive academic strategies help undermine popular acceptance of biological and other naturalistic understandings of race.' (1999:2) and is therefore subject to the changing currents of attitude among social acceptance, desirability and respectability as well as shame, embarrassment and unacceptance.

The construction of an ideal form of femininity while shrouded in sexist stereotypes and outdated assumptions about the ability of women, is also constructed with ideas of racial identity with whiteness being celebrated in what is called white privilege or white solipcism and alternative racial identities facing gendered, sexualised oppression.

Mamma in Beyond the Masks (1995) discusses the way in which black women face 'tripple oppression' at the intersection of race, gender and class by the hand of dominant cultural ideology favouring