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Social Identities
Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture
ISSN: 1350-4630 (Print) 1363-0296 (Online) Journal homepage:
Thinking outside the rainbow: women of color
redefining queer politics and identity
Sabrina Alimahomed
To cite this article: Sabrina Alimahomed (2010) Thinking outside the rainbow: women
of color redefining queer politics and identity, Social Identities, 16:2, 151-168, DOI:
10.1080/13504631003688849
To link to this article:
Published online: 22 Mar 2010.
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Thinking outside the rainbow: women of color redefining
queer politics and identity
Sabrina Alimahomed*
Sociology Department, University of California, Riverside, USA
( Received 24 October 2008; final version received 3 August 2009 )
This research explores the numerous ways queer Latinas and Asian/Pacific
Islander women are marginalized in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
(LGBT) movement and their racial/ethnic communities in regards to their
intersecting, subordinate identities. Through in-depth interviews with 25 queer
identified women and ethnographic observation at Gay Pride events, this research
examines how the women interviewed make sense of their overlapping oppres-
sions as they affect and frame their experiences and shape their identities. By
integrating Collins’ notion of the outsider-within along with Sandoval’s concept
of differential oppositional consciousness, I assert that queer Latinas and Asian/
Pacific Islander women experience marginality within the mainstream LGBT
movement primarily as a function of invisibility that serves simultaneously as a
source of alienation and empowerment, ultimately serving to challenge hegemo-
nic notions of queer identity and politics.
Keywords: queer politics; women of color; intersectionality; race; lesbians
Introduction
Queer Latinas and Asian/Pacific Islander women experience multiple intersecting
oppressions that position them on the margins of society. As people who
simultaneously experience oppression based upon their gender, race, and sexuality,
it is imperative to examine the ways these women make sense of these overlapping
oppressions as they affect and frame their experiences and shape their identities. In
understanding the pressures to traverse community contexts that are often
conflicting, these women utilize different strategies to voice their marginalization.
Within sociology there is a dearth of empirical research that privileges the
experiences of queer women who are subordinated by intersecting structures of
domination. Schneider and Dalton (1996, p. 186) assert ‘at present, there seems to be
no research by sociologists in the United States that is focused exclusively on lesbians
of color’. The lack of research accorded to studying these women’s experiences