Chapter 57 - The Racial and Sexual Contracts

The Racial and Sexual Contracts: Unmasking Domination in Liberal Political Theory

The ostensibly neutral and universal foundations of modern Western political philosophy rest upon hidden agreements of domination. While classical social contract theory from Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant purports to establish political legitimacy through the voluntary consent of free and equal individuals, two groundbreaking works of critical political theory reveal that these foundational texts systematically exclude and subordinate vast segments of humanity. Carole Pateman's The Sexual Contract (1988) and Charles W. Mills's The Racial Contract (1997) demonstrate that beneath the celebrated social contract lies a sexual contract establishing patriarchal domination over women and a racial contract instituting white supremacy over non-white peoples. Together, these analyses expose how the supposed universality of liberal democratic principles masks specific structures of gendered and racialized oppression that remain deeply embedded in contemporary political, economic, and social institutions.^[1][2]

The Classical Social Contract and Its Silences

Traditional social contract theory imagines a transition from a pre-political "state of nature" to civil society through an agreement among free and equal individuals who consent to establish political authority in exchange for protection of their rights and liberties. This narrative, which has dominated Western political thought since the seventeenth century, presents itself as a universal account of legitimate political order applicable to all human beings. The social contract ostensibly transforms abstract individuals into citizens with equal standing before the law, establishing governments whose authority derives solely from popular consent.^[3][4][5]

Yet this seemingly universal and egalitarian framework systematically conceals profound exclusions. Classical contract theorists wrote during the era of European colonial expansion, transatlantic slavery, and entrenched patriarchal social arrangements, yet their theories largely ignored or naturalized these systems of domination. The apparent contradiction between Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality and the reality of racial slavery, colonial conquest, and women's legal subordination was not an unfortunate accident or mere hypocrisy among imperfect men. Rather, as Pateman and Mills demonstrate, these exclusions and subordinations were constitutive features—not bugs but essential design elements—of the social contract itself.^[6][7][1]

The Sexual Contract: Patriarchy Through Consent

Carole Pateman's The Sexual Contract reveals that the celebrated story of the social contract, which supposedly replaced patriarchal authority with consensual political obligation, actually perpetuates male domination through modern contractual mechanisms. Pateman argues that the social contract presupposes a prior sexual contract—an agreement among men to establish their patriarchal right over women. This sexual contract establishes what Pateman calls "the law of male sex-right," ensuring that men as a fraternity maintain access to and control over women's bodies, labor, and reproductive capacities.^{[2][8][9][10][11]}

The sexual contract creates a fundamental paradox at the heart of liberal political theory. Classical contract theorists maintained that only individuals with full rational capacity and self-ownership could legitimately consent to contracts. Yet women were deemed to lack these capacities and were therefore excluded from the original social contract that established civil society. However, women were simultaneously required to consent to marriage contracts, prostitution contracts, and other agreements that subordinated them to male authority. As Pateman observes, the marriage contract requires that women momentarily gain civil personhood expressly for the purpose of signing away their autonomy to husbands—they must be capable of consent in order to consent to their own subordination.^[12][13][2]

Pateman demonstrates how this logic pervades multiple contractual relationships in modern society. In the marriage contract, women ostensibly freely agree to relationships that historically granted husbands legal authority over their wives' property, labor, and bodies, including a "sex-right" that made marital rape legally impossible. The prostitution contract similarly presents the monetization of women's sexual access as a free labor exchange, but Pateman argues it actually affirms patriarchal status by legitimizing male sex-right and treating women's bodies as purchasable commodities. The surrogacy contract provides yet another avenue for men to gain access to and control over women's reproductive capacities, with working-class women disproportionately providing gestational labor for wealthier parties.^[11][14][2]

Central to Pateman's critique is the concept of "property in the person"—the liberal fiction that individuals can alienate specific capacities or services while retaining ownership of themselves. Pateman argues this notion fundamentally misunderstands human embodiment. When a woman contracts her sexual or reproductive capacities, she cannot alienate these from her person; the contract necessarily subordinates her whole self to another's control. Employment contracts similarly cannot truly separate labor power from the laboring person, creating hierarchical relationships of domination despite their ostensibly voluntary character.^{[10][15][16][17][13][11]}

Pateman's analysis extends beyond individual contracts to interrogate the structural division between public and private spheres that undergirds liberal political theory. The social contract establishes a public political realm of freedom, equality, and rights while simultaneously naturalizing a private domestic sphere where patriarchal authority reigns. Women are relegated to this private realm—associated with reproduction, emotion, particularity, and dependence—which disqualifies them from full participation in the public sphere of rationality, universality, and citizenship. This division is not an unfortunate oversight but a necessary structural feature of the sexual contract, which requires women's domestication to justify their exclusion from political power.^[18][19][2]

Pateman concludes that the sexual contract cannot be reformed or made truly egalitarian through better contracts or expanded rights. The logic of contract itself, when applied to fundamental aspects of human relationships and embodiment, inevitably produces relations of domination. For Pateman, genuine freedom and equality between the sexes requires moving beyond the contractual framework altogether to establish social conditions that enable authentic autonomy for all.^{[8][13][20][2]}

The Racial Contract: White Supremacy as Political System

Charles W. Mills's The Racial Contract parallels Pateman's analysis while focusing on racial rather than gendered domination. Mills argues that white supremacy is not a deviation from Enlightenment ideals or an unfortunate prejudice afflicting otherwise sound political institutions, but rather a comprehensive political system that has structured the modern world for over five hundred years. The racial contract is an agreement, both explicit and tacit, among those designated as "white" to establish themselves as full persons with complete moral and political standing while categorizing non-white peoples as "sub-persons" with subordinate or no standing.^{[7][21][22][1]}

The racial contract fundamentally divides humanity into two ontological categories. White people are recognized as full persons entitled to rights, freedoms, and the protections of law. Non-white people are constructed as sub-persons whose subordination, exploitation, and even extermination can be justified or ignored. This division was not merely ideological but was instantiated in legal codes, property regimes, citizenship requirements, and political institutions throughout the colonized world. From papal bulls authorizing European conquest to constitutional provisions protecting slavery to Jim Crow segregation laws, the racial contract has been continuously written and rewritten to maintain white dominance.^{[21][23][24][1][6][7]}

Mills emphasizes that the racial contract is simultaneously political, moral, and epistemological. Politically, it establishes racial polities—states explicitly or implicitly organized to privilege white people and subordinate non-whites. Rather than the neutral state of classical social contract theory, the racial state's purpose is to maintain the racial order, securing advantages for white citizens and enforcing the subordination of people of color. This political structure enabled the massive global transfer of wealth, land, and resources from non-white peoples to white people through slavery, colonization, land theft, and exploitative labor regimes.^{[22][23][25][26][1][6]}

Morally, the racial contract creates different ethical standards for interactions between white people versus interactions involving non-whites. The moral and juridical rules that supposedly regulate behavior among white people either do not apply to dealings with non-whites or apply only in qualified form. This explains how European philosophers could simultaneously champion universal human rights while defending or ignoring slavery, colonial violence, and racial hierarchy. The racial contract resolves this apparent contradiction by excluding non-white peoples from the category of full humanity to which universal moral principles apply.^{[1][3][21][22]}

Epistemologically, the racial contract prescribes norms for cognition—ways of perceiving and understanding the world that support white supremacy. Mills describes this as an "epistemology of ignorance" or "white ignorance"—a systematic pattern of not-knowing about racial realities that is functional to maintaining white privilege. White ignorance involves false beliefs about non-white peoples, gaps in understanding racial domination, selective memory that erases histories of racial violence, and testimonial injustices that dismiss non-white peoples' accounts of their own experiences. This ignorance is not merely individual prejudice but a socially produced and maintained cognitive orientation that allows white people to not see the racial contract that structures their world.^{[25][27][28][29][30]}

The racial contract emerged through specific historical processes: the European "discovery" and conquest of the Americas, the development of the transatlantic slave trade, the colonization of Africa and Asia, and the construction of settler colonial states. Each of these developments involved explicit agreements—treaties, laws, property regimes—that established white dominance. The slavery contract made Black people property rather than persons, with elaborate legal codes regulating every aspect of their subjugation. The colonial contract justified European sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and the appropriation of their lands through doctrines like terra nullius (empty land) and the "Doctrine of Discovery," which declared lands not occupied by Christians as available for European claiming. These were not violations of the social contract but specific instantiations of the racial contract that determined who counted as a contractor and who would be the object of contracts.^{[23][31][32][33][34][6][22][1]}

Mills stresses that the racial contract persists in the contemporary world, though in modified form. While explicit legal racial classifications have largely been abolished in Western democracies, structural white supremacy continues through residential segregation, wealth disparities, mass incarceration, educational inequalities, and differential treatment by police and courts. The racial contract's epistemological dimension helps explain why these patterns remain largely invisible or are misattributed to non-racial factors by white people and by mainstream political philosophy, which continues to theorize justice while ignoring the realities of racial domination.^{[28][24][35][7]}

Unlike Pateman, Mills believes contract theory can be salvaged for progressive purposes if radically reconstructed to acknowledge rather than conceal domination. He proposes developing "non-ideal theory" that starts from actual unjust social conditions rather than imagining perfectly just societies. This approach foregrounds the realities of racial domination and centers the need for corrective justice—reparations for historical and ongoing racial injustices. For Mills, acknowledging the racial contract is the first step toward dismantling it.^{[36][16][37][38][39][40]}

The Intersections: Toward a Racia-Sexual Contract

Both Pateman and Mills recognized that their analyses, while illuminating, treated gender and race somewhat separately. In their collaborative work Contract and Domination (2007), they explore the intersections of the sexual and racial contracts. Mills proposes the concept of a "racia-sexual contract" to capture how racial and gendered domination interact in complex ways.^[41][42][43]

The racia-sexual contract creates a hierarchical structure with four main categories of contractual status. White men occupy the position of full contractors and persons, possessing complete political standing and authority. White women are "subcontractors" with real but inferior power relative to white men; they are subordinated through the sexual contract but privileged through the racial contract. Non-white men are also subcontractors, though Mills controversially argues that "race generally trumps gender" such that non-white men's position differs from white women's. Non-white women are "noncontractors" and nonpersons, dominated by all three other groups and positioned at the bottom of the hierarchy.^[42][43][44]

This intersectional analysis reveals complexities obscured by single-axis frameworks. The history of slavery in the United States, for instance, involved not only racial domination of Black people by whites but also gendered domination within both racial groups and across racial lines. Enslaved Black women were subjected to sexual violence by white men, serving both the economic function of reproducing the enslaved labor force and the psychosexual function of affirming white male domination. Antimiscegenation laws prohibited marriage between white women and Black men while tacitly tolerating sexual exploitation of Black women by white men, revealing how the racia-sexual contract sought to control both racial boundaries and patriarchal privilege.^{[45][46][47][42]}

The settler contract provides another example of intersecting domination. In establishing settler colonial societies in North America and Australia, European colonizers entered into what Pateman calls settler contracts—agreements among themselves to claim sovereignty over Indigenous lands through the fiction of terra nullius. These contracts were both racial (excluding Indigenous peoples from political standing) and gendered (establishing patriarchal family structures and property relations as the basis of settler society). Indigenous women faced dual subordination: their lands were expropriated through the racial dimensions of settler colonialism while their persons were subordinated through the gendered dimensions of European patriarchy.^{[31][48][49][45]}

Contemporary manifestations of the racia-sexual contract appear in phenomena like the differential treatment of sexual assault claims based on the race and gender of victims and perpetrators, the racialized and gendered patterns of mass incarceration, and the intersecting stereotypes that shape both opportunities and constraints for people occupying various positions in the racia-sexual hierarchy. Black feminist scholars have emphasized that Black women's experiences cannot be understood by simply adding together separate analyses of racism and sexism; rather, they face distinctive forms of oppression that arise from their position at the intersection.^{[50][46][51][52][45]}

Critiques and Debates

The racial and sexual contract theories have generated substantial scholarly debate. Some critics argue that Pateman's rejection of contract theory is too sweeping, that contracts can be reformed to be genuinely egalitarian if the background conditions of contracting are made fair. Others contend that Mills's racial contract, while historically accurate, does not adequately account for how racism intersects with other forms of oppression beyond race.^{[16][53][2][45]}

A significant debate between Pateman and Mills concerns whether contract theory itself can be redeemed for progressive ends. Pateman maintains that contract as a model of social relations is inherently hierarchical and cannot be separated from its historical role in legitimating domination. For her, the very notion of property in the person—essential to modern contract theory—inevitably produces subordination when applied to intimate and embodied relationships. Mills, by contrast, argues that contract can be used metaphorically to represent socially created political relationships and can be reformulated to acknowledge rather than conceal domination, making it useful for theorizing justice and reparations.^{[17][38][53][10][16]}

Critics have also questioned Mills's claim that "race trumps gender" in the racia-sexual hierarchy, arguing that this oversimplifies complex intersectional dynamics and risks marginalizing the specific experiences of women of color. Black feminist scholars note that while Mills's framework represents an advance over single-axis analyses, it may still inadequately capture how non-white women experience overlapping oppressions that are irreducible to either race or gender alone.^[43][51][44]

Another line of critique addresses the relationship between ideal and non-ideal theory. Mills criticizes mainstream political philosophy, particularly John Rawls's theory of justice, for engaging in ideal theory that abstracts away from realities of racial and gender oppression. He argues that ideal theory functions ideologically to obscure domination and that political philosophy should focus on non-ideal theory addressing actual injustices. Tommie Shelby and others respond that ideal theory remains necessary to identify what counts as injustice and to guide efforts at social transformation. Without principles of justice articulated through ideal theory, they argue, we cannot determine which aspects of society require change or what a truly just society would look like.^[35][39][40]

Contemporary Relevance and Implications

The racial and sexual contracts remain powerfully relevant for understanding contemporary social and political dynamics. The Black Lives Matter movement, which emerged in response to police killings of unarmed Black people, can be understood through the lens of the racial contract. The persistent devaluation of Black lives by state authorities and the epistemology of white ignorance that renders police violence invisible or justifiable to many white Americans reflect the ongoing operation of the racial contract in contemporary policing and criminal justice.^{[54][55][56][28]}

The #MeToo movement similarly illuminates dimensions of the sexual contract, particularly how patriarchal structures enable sexual harassment and assault while silencing victims. The movement has revealed how powerful men use their positions to access women's bodies while institutional structures protect perpetrators and discredit accusers, demonstrating Pateman's argument that the sexual contract pervades both public and private spheres.^[46][2]

Debates over reproductive rights, including restrictions on abortion and the growth of commercial surrogacy, raise questions about women's bodily autonomy that Pateman's analysis of property in the person helps illuminate. Similarly, ongoing disparities in wealth, education, health, and incarceration between racial groups reflect the persistent structural effects of the racial contract, even absent explicit legal discrimination.^{[24][57][14][58][2][7]}

The framework of domination contracts also sheds light on contemporary issues like immigration policy, voting rights restrictions, and economic inequality. Immigration restrictions that privilege certain nationalities while excluding others can be understood as mechanisms for maintaining racial boundaries. Voter suppression efforts targeting communities of color represent attempts to exclude people from the political contractor class. And extreme wealth concentration among a predominantly white elite reflects the ongoing expropriation of value from racialized and gendered subordinate groups.^{[59][60][57][36]}

Conclusion: Toward Recognition and Transformation

The racial and sexual contracts reveal that modern liberal political theory, far from being universal and neutral, was designed to legitimate specific structures of domination. The celebrated principles of individual freedom, equality, and consent were never meant to apply to all human beings but rather to establish hierarchies among those deemed full persons (white men), subpersons (white women and non-white men), and nonpersons (non-white women). These hierarchies were not unfortunate deviations from otherwise sound principles but constitutive features of the political, economic, and social order established through European colonialism, slavery, and patriarchal arrangements.^{[2][7][42][1]}

Recognizing the racial and sexual contracts requires abandoning the fiction that Western democracies are or ever were based on universal consent among free equals. It demands confronting the historical realities of racial genocide, slavery, colonization, and patriarchal subordination that created contemporary distributions of wealth, power, and opportunity. And it necessitates developing political theory that acknowledges rather than obscures domination, centers the perspectives and demands of those who have been subordinated, and works toward genuine freedom and equality for all.^{[55][36][1][2]}

Whether contract theory can be salvaged for this emancipatory project, as Mills argues, or must be abandoned altogether, as Pateman contends, the exposure of the racial and sexual contracts fundamentally challenges mainstream political philosophy to reckon with the systems of domination it has historically legitimated and continues to obscure. Only by bringing these hidden contracts into view can we begin the work of dismantling them and creating truly just and egalitarian social arrangements.^{[53][41][1][2]}

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