On the containment of race in ethnicity. A feminist intervention

In his article "Resolving the trouble with 'race'", Loic Wacquant suggests treating race as a "paradoxical subtype of ethnicity." In doing so, he raises the important question of the theoretical status of this insubstantial category as well as of the theoretical architecture within which problems of racism can be addressed. Nevertheless, the commentary follows the assumption that the price that we pay for the containment of race in the field of ethnicity is too high: first, because class and gender are thereby substantialized, and second, because the subsumption of race under ethnicity is not quite so plausible after all. As an alternative, it is suggested that race and gender should be narrowly defined purely as concepts for observation (exclusively in order to understand doing race and doing gender), insofar as both constructions are based on bodily inscriptions and are thus distinguishable from the construction mode of class and ethnicity.