In this paper, the subjects of the race and gender would be discussed as two less powerful subject positions within the discourse of a society. Gender as well as race could be considered through a majority-minority perspective, not in numbers of a group but dealing with the amount of power in their hands. Therefore, the term "minority groups" more often refers to type of people with less social power than to any group's actual size.

Race and gender are two key concepts in the contemporary cultural studies and postcolonial studies theories. There are two well-known streams in social sciences, essentialism and anti essentialism. Here the definitions of the race and gender in these two streams are important for my discussion.

Anti-essentialist arguments suggest that social categories do not reflect an essential underlying identity but are constituted in and through forms of representation. Thus, a consideration of ethnicity and race directs us to issues of identity, representation, power and politics. So through the representation, the otherness would be constituted.

The critique of essentialist arguments exposes the radical contingency of identity categories. This helps to combat the reduction of people to race by encouraging us to see all people as multifaceted.

According to Hall, the end of essentialism 'entails a recognition that the central issues of race always appear historically in articulation , and a formation with other categories of class , of gender and ethnicity'(Hall,1996d:444). It seems that defining race, gender, and class essentially is nowadays out of order. They are social constructs and it would notable when both of these attributes gather in one person for example a black woman or further poor black women who have to suffer different inequalities.

As Hooks submits, one of the benefits of casting off essentialism, and thus black absolutism or nationalism, is that black women do not have to subsume their critique of black masculinity. It is not a betrayal of black people to put forward a black feminist critique of black male macho (Wallace, 1979) nor is it a betrayal of women to critique white feminism from the perspective of black women Carby, 1984; Hooks, 1990).

We can conceive of persons as operating across and within multiple subject positions constituted by the intersections of discourses of race, gender, age, nation, class, etc. further we do not have a weave of multiple beliefs, attitudes, language, etc.: rather, we are such a weave. Therefore, each part of these weave has its own role in shaping our identity. Within a dominant patriarchal discourse, a female identity will shape with lack of any source of power, not in private sphere and not in public sphere, which is the continuity of the private sphere.

Gender is a social construct because its role in different societies and also in different ages is changeable according to the social conditions and necessities. For example, women in the Plains Indian tribes of the Midwest did not have farming duties but had a very important place in the tribe as healers, herbalists, and sometimes holy people who gave advice. When bands lost their male leaders, women would become chieftains (Zinn).

It is interesting because most of the people believe that women have a respectable position just and firstly in the westerner societies and cultures and Indians are defined as savage nation who were uncivilized and as a result not respectful to the human rights and specifically women's rights. In their foundational statements, the early ruling elites imagined the United States as a white, European-descended, monolingual nation, leaving outside the contours of Americanness those segments of the population that diverged from the imagined profile. In the other word, the United States was founded and still adheres the dominant ideology of white patriarchal capitalism. The 1790 Naturalization Act restricted citizenship to white land¬owning males.

Thomas Jefferson in a letter suggested women should not read novels "as a mass of trash" with few exceptions. Female education should concentrate, he said on ornaments too, and the amusement of life…. Theses for a female are dancing, drawing, and music." Middle class women barred from higher education (Zinn, 1999).

Another example is that during the revolution, the necessities of war brought women out into public affairs. Women formed patriotic groups, carried out anti-British actions. They organized Daughters of Liberty groups.

The contributions of working-class women in the American Revolution have mostly ignored, unlike genteel wives of the leaders (Dolly Madison, Marth Washington, and Abigail Adams). It happened in a social and cultural context, which had saw women as weak who lack any serious abilities. Their duties had been defined just serving the men emotionally and sexually. In fact, they did not have any independent personality and their existence was dependent to the men existence. Margaret Fuller mentioned that the starting point was the understanding that "there exists in the minds of men a tone of feeling toward women as toward slaves…" (Zinn,1999)

However, the feminist movements started some resistance against this dominant patriarchal discourse to change their subject position from a powerless luxury objects to an independent subjects who seek power and are capable of doing serious jobs. For example, Lucy Stone was the first to refuse to give up her name after marriage. She was "Mrs. Stone."

In the America, women put in enormous work in antislavery societies all over the country, gathering thousands of petitions to congress.

ISAs (Ideological State Apparatuses) act as reinforcements for individuals who have already been inculcated into dominant ideology. Such individuals are said to have internalized ideology, or to have adopted socially constructed ideological assumptions into their own senses of self .Such internalizing can have significant effects on people, especially members of minority groups. (Benshoff-Griffin, 2004)

The representation is a crucial element to define a subject position powerless or powerful. Feminity had been always as an inferior rather than superior masculinity. Throughout this definition, women had been being far and far from the center of power, physically and mentally. This representation had been realized through various paths, from social norms and rules to the cultural texts like literature and in contemporary era mostly through the mass Medias like TV programs and movies.

In this way, a normative American who has complete rights is defined as a white male and it helped the dominants to define other people such as immigrants from different races as inferior. In this sense, Chinese were represented racially inferior; Espinoza describes Chinese men as being both deviant and lacking in masculinity. They were "effeminate men. In addition, the other races had similar conditions during the American history. Taken together, the narratives of these founding mothers of Latina letters legitimate their authors by repressing the other on the margins: savage Indians, lazy Aztecs, and simple peons. I would reiterate that white supremacist reflexes have a debilitating impact on the chances of the various subsections of the US Hispanic community to achieve a politically salutary sense of pan ethnic wholeness.

Recent US census data show Hispanics earning considerably less, suffering greater rates of unemploy¬ment, falling below the poverty line in larger numbers, and having poorer educational attainments than the rest of the US population (Sua´rez-Orozco and Paez, 2002: 25).

I argue that race must be understood as a sui generis social phenomenon in which contested systems of meaning serve as the connections between physical features, faces, and personal character¬istics. In other words, social meanings connect our faces to our souls. Race is neither an essence nor an illusion, but rather an ongoing, contradictory, self-reinforcing, plastic process subject to the macroforces of social and political struggle and the microeffects of daily decisions. As used here, the referents of terms like Black and White are social groups, not genetically distinct branches of humankind' (Haney Lo´ pez, 1995: 193).

Gender like race and other human attributes is a discursive construct which has always generated by the more powerful masculine groups to preserve their interests. When an identity with inferiority is attached to group of people, gradually the members of that group would unconsciously internalize this inferiority. Since then they would identified themselves with those attributes. Therefore, they themselves will be parts of the apparatus to reinforce the discourse and it would take a long time to change the discourse or at least subject positions.

References:

Howard Zinn (1999), "People's History of the United States, 1492-Present", Hraper Perennial

Barker, Chris (2003) 'Cultural Studies, Theory and Practice', London, SAGE Publications

M. Benshoff Harry, Griffin, Sean (2004) "American on Film", Blackwell publishing.

Torres-Saillant, Silvio (2003) "INVENTING THE RACE: LATINOS AND THE ETHNORACIAL PENTAGON", Latino Studies, 1, (123-151)

Lee Erika (2005), "ORIENTALISMS IN THE AMERICAS, A Hemispheric Approach to Asian American History", JAAS OCTOBER2005 • 235-256