Abstract

This chapter examines the set of relational dynamics that produce the “wages of gender,” namely the economic, social, political, and psychological “privileges”/“benefits” one gets from identifying with, aspiring to, and manifesting dominant racialized and heteronormative conceptions of sex/gender. Rather than frame the benefits reserved for heterosexual, middle-class, white females as “privileges” and emphasize women of color’s systematic exclusion from those “privileges,” it instead homes in on the inextricable relational and intimate violence woven into those “privileges.” Building on the political work of women of color, indigenous, and decolonial feminists who argue that gender was reconstituted and racialized in and through colonial/imperial practices, this chapter tracks the sets of “wages” that undermine efforts to organize across difference by underscoring what is politically at stake for differently situated bodies. It concludes with a list of ingredients and orientations that contribute to decolonizing feminist methodologies.