The Theory of Gendered Prejudice: A Social Dominance and Intersectionalist Perspective

Over the last twenty-five years or so, there has been a growing awareness among race and gender scholars that a fully adequate analysis of these two forms of societal oppression cannot be done in isolation from one another. That is, an understanding of racism and sexism is fundamentally incomplete without an appreciation of how race and gender intersect and interact with one another in the creation and maintenance of group-based hierarchy and oppression. This chapter argues that while intersectionalist and critical race theorists have qualitatively (and occasionally quantitatively) drawn attention to the fact that the racial and gender dimensions of oppression are both interactively implicated in the maintenance of group-based inequality, a fully satisfactory empirical analysis of the dynamics of racism and sexism has yet to be achieved. Using the theoretical frameworks of evolutionary psychology and social dominance theory (SDT), this chapter offers an alternative understanding of the intersectional entanglement of racism and sexism. This chapter introduces the theory of gendered prejudice, a derivative of SDT, and posits that a satisfactory account of racism, or what social dominance theorists generalize as “arbitrary-set” oppression, is a deeply gendered phenomenon.