Ideological forms masquerade as knowledge. They simply produce discursivities, incorporating bits of decontextualized ideas, events, or experiences with material consciousness of a practical kind. The modus operandi of these "ruling knowledges" relies on epistemologies that create essentialization, homogenization (i.e., de-specification), and an aspatial and atemporal universalization. Since the most powerful trick of ideology is to sever a concept from its originating and mediating social relations, used in such a way even critical and resisting concepts, such as "class" or the feminist category of "woman," can become occlusive and serve the interest of ruling relations through exclusion and invisibility of power in relations of difference. Struggles that have riven the world of feminist theory reveal that the category of "woman" in its desocialized (class/"race") and dehistoricized (colonialism and imperialism) deployment has helped to smuggle in the political agenda of middle-class, white women and hidden the relationship of dominance that some social groups of women hold with regard to others.
Himani Bannerji (2005, 155), ‘Building from Marx: Reflections on Class and Race’