Intersectionality

Gender & Society in the Classroom: Intersectionality

Organized by: Kyla Walters, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Updated by: Erielle Jones, University of Illinois – Chicago

Intersectional feminist scholarship moves beyond issues solely focusing on gender and sexuality in order to address the complex realities that we embody and experience. Race, ethnicity, class, nationality, age, ability, and other dimensions of difference or social locators do not exist apart from gender and sexuality. Instead, these aspects of individual identity, interpersonal relationships, social institutions, policies, politics, and cultures intersect to form myriad experiences and power arrangements. In pursuit of greater understanding of multiple perspectives and increased social equality, we must examine the most salient social locations in a given case or study.

Thornton, Courtney, & Jennifer A. Reich. 2022. “Black Mothers and Vaccine Refusal: Gendered Racism, Healthcare, and the State.” Gender & Society 36 (4): 525–551.
Vaccine refusal has increasingly been the focus of public health concern. Rates of children who are up to date on vaccines have declined in recent years, and vaccine refusal has been implicated in disease outbreaks. Most research on children who are not fully immunized identifies white affluent mothers as most likely to opt out by choice and Black mothers as more likely to face structural barriers that limit access to vaccines for their children. In this paper, we analyze social media posts and online discussions among Black mothers to better understand their concerns about vaccines. Unlike white women who reject vaccines as a personal choice, Black mothers express unique concerns about the role of the state in their lives. Specifically, some Black mothers using social media view vaccines as a white technology and claim that white women have greater freedom in opting out of vaccines without the same risks to their families. They describe efforts to strategize interactions with pediatricians and other healthcare providers who can report them to social service agencies or block access to welfare and nutritional benefits for their families if they refuse vaccines. Black women’s experiences with structural gendered racism in interactions with healthcare and education systems shape vaccine decisions and should be taken seriously.

Hill, Marbella Eboni. 2022. “Do the Marriageable Men want to Protect and Provide? The Expectation of Black Professional Hybrid Masculinity.” Gender & Society 36 (4): 498–524.
Gender ideologies are embedded in intersecting race, class, and gender systems. Yet Black masculinity is often defined one-dimensionally, without attention to class variation in gender enactment. Particularly, with regard to heterosexual partnering, representations of Black masculinity most often involve men enacting compensatory displays to account for having too little masculine capital to meet the dominant culture’s protector–provider prerequisites for accomplishing marital masculinity. Drawing from interviews with 42 never-married Black professional men, I explore their ideas about how masculinity ought to be done within the marital relationship—a critical site for the reproduction of gender inequality. Findings reveal that these men construct “Black professional hybrid masculinity” around a simultaneously racialized and classed compensatory strategy of masculine protection and equitable spousal sharing, resisting simple classification as either hegemonic or counterhegemonic. Rather, it is a distinctly hybrid masculine strategy. These men cherry-pick hegemonic gender norms to reconstruct gender identities that reaffirm their sense of manhood and idealize their future wives as symbols of hybrid femininity—work-devoted women who are also femininely in need of masculine protection. This research offers an intersectional extension of hybrid masculinity and illustrates the need for heterogeneous and context-varied theories of how Black men do gender.

Kan, Man-Yee; Muzhi Zhou; Kamila Kolpashnikova; Ekaterina Hertog; Shohei Yoda; and Jiweon Jun. 2022. Revisiting the Gender Revolution: Time on Paid Work, Domestic Work, and Total Work in East Asian and Western Societies 1985–2016”. Gender & Society, 36(3): 368-396
We analyze time use data of four East Asian societies and 12 Western countries between 1985 and 2016 to investigate the gender revolution in paid work, domestic work, and total work. The closing of gender gaps in paid work, domestic work, and total work time has stalled in the most recent decade in several countries. The magnitude of the gender gaps, cultural contexts, and welfare policies plays a key role in determining whether the gender revolution in the division of labor will stall or continue. Women undertake more total work than men across all societies: The gender gap ranges from 30 minutes to 2 hours a day. Our findings suggest that cultural norms interact with institutional contexts to affect the patterns of gender convergence in time use, and gender equality might settle at differing levels of egalitarianism across countries.

Nazareno, Jennifer; Cynthia Cranford; Lolita Lledo; Valerie Damasco; and Patricia Roach. Between Women of Color: The New Social Organization of Reproductive Labor” Gender & Society, 36(3): 342-367
In this article, we examine citizenship inequalities in paid reproductive labor. Through an analysis of elder care in Los Angeles, California, based on interviews with Filipina home care agency workers and owners, we delineate citizen divisions made up of two interlocking dimensions. The longstanding U.S. welfare state abdication of responsibility for elder care for its citizens generates a racialized, gendered citizenship division that facilitates another citizenship division between women of color. The outsourcing of elder care by the government to the private sector including small business in the ethnic economy allows Filipina immigrants with legal citizenship to become middle-women minorities who hire undocumented Filipinas to provide care for white, middle-class, older adult women and their families. Through this new social organization of reproductive labor, responsibility is directed away from the state and generating tensions between women of color with different legal statuses. Our findings show how racialized, gendered inequalities are reinforced through this new social organization of reproductive labor but also demonstrate potential for undermining intersecting inequalities.

Rose, Ariana. 2022. “‘Dutch Racism is not Like Anywhere Else’: Refusing Color-Blind Myths in Black Feminist Otherwise Spaces”. Gender & Society, 36(2), 239–263.
Despite myths of color-blindness in the Netherlands, Black women are marginalized by mainstream expectations of racial and cultural homogeneity. I use Amsterdam Black Women as a case study to illustrate the lived experiences of women affected by this exclusion. In this space, women freely critique Dutch society through mundane moments of truth-telling, venting, and joking, which enable individual problems to rise to a community level. I explore how subtle configurations of Black feminist organizing can be key sites of healing, experimentation, and political engagement. This research complicates how we understand experiences of misogynoir when race consciousness is blended in a transnational context and how Amsterdam Black Women has made possible the refusal of Dutch norms that require members to accept their oppression silently and support false narratives of progressiveness and color-blindness.

Andrejek, Nicole, Tina Fetner, and Melanie Heath. 2022. “Climax as Work: Heteronormativity, Gender Labor, and the Gender Gap in Orgasms”. Gender & Society, 36(2), 189–213.
Gender scholars have addressed a variety of gender gaps between men and women, including a gender gap in orgasms. In this mixed-methods study of heterosexual Canadians, we examine how men and women engage in gender labor that limits women’s orgasms relative to men. With representative survey data, we test existing hypotheses that sexual behaviors and relationship contexts contribute to the gender gap in orgasms. We confirm previous research that sexual practices focusing on clitoral stimulation are associated with women’s orgasms. With in-depth interview data from a subsample of 40 survey participants, we extend this research to show that both men and women engage in gender labor to explain and justify the gender gap in orgasms. Relying on an essentialist view of gender, a narrow understanding of what counts as sex, and moralistic language that recalls the sexual double standard, our participants craft a narrative of women’s orgasms as work and men’s orgasms as natural. The work to produce this gendered narrative of sexuality mirrors the gender labor that takes place in the bedroom, where both women and men engage in sexual behaviors that emphasize men’s pleasure to a greater extent than women’s.

Ray, Ranita. 2022. “School as a Hostile Institution: How Black and Immigrant Girls of Color Experience the Classroom.” Gender & Society, 36(1); 88–111.
The paradox of girls’ academic gains over boys, across race and class, has perplexed scholars for the last few decades. Through a 3-year longitudinal ethnography of two predominantly economically marginalized and racially minoritized schools, I contend that while racially marginalized girls may have made academic gains, school is nevertheless a hostile institution for them. Focusing on the case of Black girls and recent immigrant girls of color, I identify three specific ways in which school functions as hostile institution for them: (1) gendered racial harassment from teachers, (2) erasure of intellect, and (3) estrangement within their communities. Furthermore, the denigration of immigrant girls becomes the conduit for misogynoir. I find that the gains of some racially marginalized girls in school often justify hostility against all of them. Bringing into conversation a feminist analysis of schooling that rejects girls’ educational gains as ubiquitous evidence of a gender revolution with a Black-colonial education framework that emphasizes schooling as a technology of oppression, I explore the current role of school as a hostile institution for Black girls and immigrant girls of color.

Agarwal, Bina. 2021. “Reflections on the Less Visible and Less Measured: Gender and COVID-19 in India.” Gender & Society 35 (2): 244-255.
The gender effects of COVID-19 are complex, and extend much beyond the issues of care work and domestic violence that have captured global attention. Some effects have been immediate, such as job losses, food shortages, and enhanced domestic work burdens; others will emerge in time, such as the depletion of savings and assets and pandemic-related widowhood, which would make recovery difficult. I use examples from India to outline the complexity of such outcomes, the limitations of the many telephone surveys conducted during the pandemic, and the importance of anticipating both the immediate and the sequential effects.
We can anticipate these effects by drawing on our knowledge of preexisting gender inequalities and people’s coping strategies under crises, as well as real-time media alerts. Prior conceptualization can help us design better surveys for capturing both the visible and less visible impact of the pandemic, as well as formulate more effective policies for mitigating the adverse effects. I also highlight the advantages of group-based approaches for protecting women’s livelihoods during such crises, and emphasize the need to create a synergy between feminist theory, evidence gathering, and policy formulation.

Flores, Glenda M., and Maricela Bañuelos. 2021. Gendered Deference: Perceptions of Authority and Competence among Latina/o Physicians in Medical Institutions. Gender & Society 35 (1): 110-135.
Prior studies note that gender- and race-based discrimination routinely inhibit women’s advancement in medical fields. Yet few studies have examined how gendered displays of deference and demeanor are interpreted by college-educated and professional Latinas/os who are making inroads into prestigious and masculinized nontraditional fields such as medicine. In this article, we elucidate how gender shapes perceptions of authority and competence among the same pan-ethnic group, and we use deference and demeanor as an analytical tool to examine these processes. Our analysis underscores three main points of difference: (1) gendered cultural taxation; (2) microaggressions from women nurses and staff and; (3) the questioning of authority and competence to elucidate how gendered racism manifests for Latina/o doctors. Taking demonstrations of gendered deference and demeanors are vital to transforming medical schools and creating more inclusive spaces for all physicians and patients. Conclusions are based on experiences reported in interviews with 48 Latina/o physicians and observation in their places of work in Southern California.

Frizzell, Laura C., Mike Vuolo, and Brian C. Kelly. 2021. “Integrating Theories of Gender and Sexuality with Deviance: The Case of Prescription Drug Misuse During Sex.” Gender & Society 35 (5): 691-718.
Social scientists have expended substantial effort to identify group patterns of deviant behavior. Yet beyond the ill-conceived treatment of sexual minorities as inherently deviant, they have rarely considered how gendered sexual identities (GSIs) shape participation in deviance. We argue for the utility of centering theories of gender and sexuality in intersectional deviance research. We demonstrate how this intentional focus on gender and sexuality provides important empirical insights while avoiding past pitfalls of stigmatizing sexual minorities. Drawing on theories of hegemonic masculinity, emphasized femininity, and minority stress together with criminological general strain theory, we demonstrate how societal expectations and constraints generate strains among GSI groups that may lead to distinctly patterned deviance, using the case of prescription drug misuse during sex. We employ thematic analysis of 120 in-depth interviews with people who misuse prescription drugs, stratified by GSI. We identify six themes highlighting distinct pathways from strain to misuse during sex for different GSI groups: intimacy management, achieving sexual freedom, regulating sexual mood, performance confidence, increased sense of control, and managing sexual identity conflict. In this article, we demonstrate the empirical and theoretical importance of centering gender and sexuality in deviance research and provide a roadmap for theoretical integration.

Fuller, Sylvia, and Yue Qian. 2021. “Covid-19 and the Gender Gap in Employment Among Parents of Young Children in Canada.” Gender & Society 35 (2): 206-217.
Economic and social disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic have important implications for gender and class inequality. Drawing on Statistics Canada’s monthly Labour Force Survey, we document trends in gender gaps in employment and work hours over the pandemic (February–October 2020). Our findings highlight the importance of care provisions for gender equity, with gaps larger among parents than people without children, and most pronounced when care and employment were more difficult to reconcile. When employment barriers eased, so did the gender–employment gap. The pandemic could not undo longer-standing cultural and structural shifts motivating contemporary mothers’ employment. The pandemic also exacerbated educational inequalities among women, highlighting the importance of assessing gendered impacts through an intersectional lens.

Kamran, Sidra. 2021. “A Patchwork of Femininities: Working-Class Women’s Fluctuating Gender Performances in a Pakistani Market.” Gender & Society 35 (6): 971–94.
Scholars have studied multiple femininities across different spaces by attributing variation to cultural/spatial contexts. They have studied multiple femininities in the same space by attributing variation to class/race positions. However, we do not yet know how women from the same cultural, class, and race locations may enact multiple femininities in the same context. Drawing on observations and interviews in a women-only bazaar in Pakistan, I show that multiple femininities can exist within the same space and be enacted by the same individual. Working-class women workers in Meena Bazaar switched between performances of “pariah femininity” and “hegemonic femininity,” patching together contradictory femininities to secure different types of capital at the organizational and personal levels. Pariah femininities enabled access to economic capital but typically decreased women’s symbolic capital, whereas hegemonic femininities generated symbolic capital but could block or enable access to economic capital. The concept of a patchwork performance of femininity explains how and why working-class women simultaneously embody idealized and stigmatized forms of femininity. Furthermore, it captures how managerial regimes and personal struggles for class distinction interact to produce contradictory gender performances. By examining gender performances in the context of social stratification, I explain the structural underpinnings of working-class women’s gendered struggles for respectability and work.

Kukreja, Reena. 2021. “Colorism as Marriage Capital: Cross-Region Marriage Migration in India and Dark-Skinned Migrant Brides.” Gender & Society 35 (1): 85-109.
This article, based on original research from 57 villages in four provinces from North and East India, sheds light on a hitherto unexplored gendered impact of colorism in facilitating noncustomary cross-region marriage migrations in India. Within socioeconomically marginalized groups from India’s development peripheries, the hegemonic construct of fairness as “capital” conjoins with both regressive patriarchal gender norms governing marriage and female sexuality and the monetization of social relations, through dowry, to foreclose local marriage options for darker-hued women. This dispossession of matrimonial choice forces women to “voluntarily” accept marriage proposals from North Indian bachelors, who are themselves faced with a bride shortage in their own regions due to skewed sex ratios. These marriages condemn cross-region brides to new forms of gender subordination and skin-tone discrimination within the intimacy of their marriages, and in everyday relations with conjugal families, kin, and rural communities. Because of colorism, cross-region brides are exposed to caste-discriminatory exclusions and ethnocentric prejudice. Dark-skin shaming is a strategic ideological weapon employed to extract more labor from them. The article extends global scholarly discussion on the role of colorism in articulating new forms of gendered violence in dark-complexioned, poor rural women’s lives.

Laster Pirtle, Whitney N., and Tashelle Wright. 2021. “Structural Gendered Racism Revealed in Pandemic Times: Intersectional Approaches to Understanding Race and Gender Health Inequities in COVID-19.” Gender & Society 35 (2): 168-179.
The pandemic reveals; the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has brought the historically rooted inequities of our society to the forefront. We argue that an intersectional analysis is needed to further help peel back the veil that the pandemic has begun to reveal. We identify structural gendered racism—the totality of interconnectedness between structural racism and structural sexism in shaping race and gender inequities—as a root cause of health problems among Black women and other women of color, which has been amplified during the pandemic. We show that women of color occupy disadvantaged positions within households, occupations, and health care institutions, and therefore face heightened risk for COVID-19 and lowered resources for mitigating the impact of the deadly virus. Intersectional analyses and solutions must be centered to also reveal, we hope, a new way forward.

Misra, Joya, Alexandra Kuvaeva, Kerryann O’meara, Dawn Kiyoe Culpepper, and Audrey Jaeger. 2021. “Gendered and Racialized Perceptions of Faculty Workloads.” Gender & Society 35 (3): 358-394.
Faculty workload inequities have important consequences for faculty diversity and inclusion. On average, women faculty spend more time engaging in service, teaching, and mentoring, while men, on average, spend more time on research, with women of color facing particularly high workload burdens. We explore how faculty members perceive workload in their departments, identifying mechanisms that can help shape their perceptions of greater equity and fairness. White women perceive that their departments have less equitable workloads and are less committed to workload equity than white men. Women of color perceive that their departments are less likely to credit their important work through departmental rewards systems than white men. Workload transparency and clarity, and consistent approaches to assigning classes, advising, and service, can reduce women’s perceptions of inequitable and unfair workloads. Our research suggests that departments can identify and put in place a number of key practices around workload that will improve gendered and racialized perceptions of workload.

Frenkel, Michal, and Varda Wasserman. 2020. “With God on their Side: Gender-Religiosity Intersectionality and Women’s Workforce Integration.” Gender & Society 34 (5): 818-843.
On the basis of a case study of the integration of Haredi Jewish women into the Israeli high-tech industry, we explore how gender–religiosity intersectionality affects ultra-conservative women’s participation in the labor market and their ability to negotiate with employers for corporate work–family practices that address their idiosyncratic requirements. We highlight the importance of pious women’s affiliation to their highly organized religious communities while taking a process-centered approach to intersectionality and focusing on the matrix of domination formed by the Israeli state, employers, and the organized ultra-orthodox community. We dub this set of actors “the unholy-trinity” and argue that it constructs a specific, religion-centric inequality regime that restrains women’s job and earning opportunities. At the same time, the “unholy trinity” also empowers women in their struggle to create a working environment that is receptive to their religiosity and what that commitment demands of them.

Mishel, Emma, Paula England, Jessie Ford, and Mónica L. Caudillo. 2020. “Cohort Increases in Sex with Same-Sex Partners: Do Trends Vary by Gender, Race, and Class?” Gender & Society 34 (2): 178-209
We examine change across U.S. cohorts born between 1920 and 2000 in their probability of having had sex with same-sex partners in the last year and since age 18. Using data from the 1988–2018 General Social Surveys, we explore how trends differ by gender, race, and class background. We find steep increases across birth cohorts in the proportion of women who have had sex with both men and women since age 18, whereas increases for men are less steep. We suggest that the trends reflect an increasingly accepting social climate, and that women’s steeper trend is rooted in a long-term asymmetry in gender change, in which nonconformity to gender norms is more acceptable for women than men. We also find evidence that, among men, the increase in having had sex with both men and women was steeper for black than for white men, and for men of lower socioeconomic status; we speculate that the rise of mass incarceration among less privileged men may have influenced this trend.

Robinson, Brandon Andrew. 2020. “The Lavender Scare in Homonormative Times: Policing, Hyper-incarceration, and LGBTQ Youth Homelessness.” Gender & Society 34 (2): 210-232
Scholars have identified policing and hyper-incarceration as key mechanisms to reproduce racial inequality and poverty. Existing research, however, often overlooks how policing practices impact gender and sexuality, especially expansive expressions of gender and non-heterosexuality. This lack of attention is critical because lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people disproportionately experience incarceration, including LGBTQ youth who are disproportionately incarcerated in juvenile detention. In this article, I draw on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 40 in-depth interviews with LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness to address this gap in the literature by documenting how police and other agents of the state use their discretion to regulate youth’s gender expressions, identities, and sex lives. I posit that current policing patterns of discrimination operate primarily not through de jure discrimination against LGBTQ people but as de facto discrimination based on discretionary hyper-incarceration practices that police gender, sexuality, and LGBTQ people. I contend that policing is not only about maintaining racial inequality and governing poverty but also about controlling and regulating gender and sexuality, especially the gender and sexuality of poor LGBTQ people of color.

Yu, Sojin. 2020. “Gendered Nationalism in Practice: An Intersectional Analysis of Migrant Integration Policy in South Korea.” Gender & Society 34 (6): 976-1004.
In this article, I investigate how gendered nationalism is articulated through everyday practices in relation to immigrant integration policy and the intersectional production of inequality in South Korea. By using ethnographic data collected at community centers created to implement national “multicultural” policy, I examine the individual perspectives and experiences of Korean staff and targeted recipients (marriage migrants). To defend their own “native” privileges, the Korean staff stressed the gendered caretaking roles of marriage migrants and their contribution to the nation as justification for state support. The migrants, while critical of the familial responsibilities imposed on them in Korea, underscored their gendered value to the nation (as mothers to “Korean” children) to offset their subjugated position. The diverging perspectives of the two groups are informed by “everyday” nationalism, generated through constantly gendered terms and effects. Bringing together the literature on nationalism and migration through a focus on reproductive labor, I expose how national boundaries are drawn through quotidian practices of gendered nationalism, with significant implications for gender and ethnic hierarchies.

Miller, Candace, and Josipa Roksa. 2019. “Balancing Research and Service in Academia: Gender, Race, and Laboratory Tasks” Gender & Society 34 (1): 131-152
Our study highlights specific ways in which race and gender create inequality in the workplace. Using in-depth interviews with 67 biology PhD students, we show how engagement with research and service varies by both gender and race. By considering the intersection between gender and race, we find not only that women biology graduate students do more service than men, but also that racial and ethnic minority men do more service than white men. White men benefit from a combination of racial and gender privilege, which places them in the most advantaged position with respect to protected research time and opportunities to build collaborations and networks beyond their labs. Racial/ethnic minority women emerge as uniquely disadvantaged in terms of their experiences relative to other groups. These findings illuminate how gendered organizations are also racialized, producing distinct experiences for women and men from different racial groups, and thus contribute to theorizing the intersectional nature of inequality in the workplace.

Lépinard, Éléonore. 2014. “Doing Intersectionality: Repertoires of Feminist Practices in France and Canada.” Gender & Society 28 (6): 877-903.
Lépinard applies the intersectionality framework to women’s rights organizations, looking to see if and how this concept has been adopted by various women’s rights organizations.  Doing qualitative and quantitative data analysis, the author draws from interview data with activists working in various women’s rights organizations in France and Canada. The author demonstrates how intersectionality is used and understood by these organizations (how they fail and succeed with the intersectional challenges), which she calls repertoires, as a way to understand the social experience and the political interests of women in various intersectional positionalities. There are also national differences across France and Canada that bring in notions of citizenship and immigration. This is a great piece for addressing issues in social movements and academic versus activist understandings of concepts relevant to both groups. 

Flippen, Chenoa A. 2013. “Intersectionality at Work: Determinants of Labor Supply Among Immigrant Latinas.” Gender & Society 28 (3): 404-434.
This interesting piece by Flippen uses the intersectionality framework to examine how legal status, labor market position and family shape the labor supply of Latinas in Durham, North Carolina, which is a new immigrant destination. The author uses data from a local, representative survey of Latino immigrants and interviews in Durham/Chapel Hill metro area. The initial survey, conducted between 2001 and 2002, included 209 women between the ages of 18 and 49. In 2006 and 2007, an additional 910 were interviewed, for a total sample size of 1,119 women. The author shows, for instance, that Latina women’s position in the economy constrains their labor supply. For example, human capital (e.g., education) does not translate into significant gains in labor market participation. English language skills and time work better at shaping whether women work and work full-time. However, legal status and family status are disadvantage for immigrant Latina’s labor market experiences. This is a good article to introduce to students because legal status and national origin seem to be an important piece in the intersections framework, and this study also cuts across other important arenas – family and work, and transnationalism. 

Bose, Christine E. 2012. “Intersectionality and Global Gender Inequality.” Gender & Society 26 (1): 67-72.
In a symposium on the work of Patricia Hill Collins, Bose describes global approaches to intersectional scholarship. Intersectional research plays an important role in social policy worldwide, particularly useful because this lens does not pit oppressions against one another. Scholars may choose from a variety of interpretations of what intersectionality is and how to employ it methodologically. Bose discusses group-centered, process-centered, and system-centered practices of intersectionality. She argues that researchers can amend a system-centered approach to study salient intersecting inequalities within and across nations.

Wingfield, Adia H. 2009. “Racializing the Glass Escalator: Reconsidering Men’s Experiences with Women’s Work.” Gender & Society 23 (1): 5-26.
Building on the “glass escalator” concept of how men tokens enjoy advantages in women-dominated occupations, Harvey Wingfield argues that black men do not enjoy the same ride as their white counterparts. The author examines racialized aspects of the gendered mechanisms that move white men upward in traditionally female occupations that mitigate these effects for black men. These “glass barriers” include racist stereotypes about black men, acts of blatant discrimination, and white supremacist perceptions of occupation suitability. Another glass barrier involves black men as unwilling to dissociate from feminized aspects of their occupation, which points to a caring self that men of color adapt as a tactic to combat racial inequality and reject white hegemonic masculinity. These findings suggest efforts to promote equality in the workplace should combine undoing gender by blurring the boundaries between femininity and masculinity with upsetting systems of racial inequality that marginalize men of color. 

Andersen, Margaret. 2005. “Thinking about Women: A Quarter Century’s View.” Gender & Society 19 (4): 437-55.
Andersen provides a thorough overview of feminist sociology, advocating for an incorporation of power, historical, and structural analyses in studies of gender and sexuality. Gender and sexuality, however, cannot and should not be extracted from the web of social locations (or flavors or whatever metaphor you prefer) in which they exist. This intersectional view understands gender as a piece of larger puzzles of social realities including race, class, sexuality, and nationality. This theoretical perspective allows us to conceptualize how gender (and other locators) shape symbols, interactions, structures, and other social phenomena. This article analyzes central debates in feminist sociology, giving helpful background information alongside detailed critiques. These key focuses of feminist scholarship include structure and agency, power, sexuality, intersectionality, and inequality. Everyday realities, privileges, hardships as well as diverse experiences and practices form a social world chock full of complexities for us to examine. 

Duffy, Mignon. 2005. “Reproducing Labor Inequalities: Challenges for Feminists Conceptualizing Care at the Intersections of Gender, Race, and Class.” Gender & Society 19 (1): 66-82.
Using U.S. census data, Duffy identifies and examines two different conceptualizations of care work from an intersectional perspective. The way we define care work shapes how apparent and problematic we understand the racial and class inequalities within this labor force. Care work’s central characteristic is the dependency of care receivers (like children, disabled people, the elderly). The nurturance conceptualization of care work focuses on the emotional and relational aspects of the work. The reproductive labor framework considers the service activities of care work as well as the emotional and relational aspects emphasized in the nurturance conceptualization. Duffy traces the historical evidence of racial divisions of reproductive labor, which include occupations in the service sector. The expansion of reproductive labor to include service sector occupations allows us to see the racial stratification of these forms of labor, which are largely performed by working-class black women. Findings suggest that using the nurturance conceptualization of care work excludes large numbers of black and poor women. 

Hanser, Amy. 2005. “The Gendered Rice Bowl: The Sexual Politics of Service Work in Urban China.” Gender & Society 19 (5): 581-600.
Using ethnographic fieldwork collected in three urban Chinese retail settings and interviews with various service workers and retailers, Hanser explores how naturalized meanings or essentialized discourses of gender connote class distinctions on the sales floor. Grounded in historical and political understandings of Chinese gender, class, and service work, this article reveals how local ideals of femininity and sexual identity embody class status in retail work. Store managers seek and hire less sexualized, young, attractive women as service workers in luxury, privately owned stores. Their youthful bodies and nonthreatening, helpful dispositions help form a commercialized space that upper-class clientele find appealing and appropriate. Middle-aged, desexualized women work in state-owned retail stores. These women perform a femininity fitting with a pre-cultural reform socialist ideology valuing hard work (not youthfulness and attractiveness). Lastly, Hanser finds hyper-sexualized, less educated, young, attractive women working in the least prestigious retail markets. These women perform a lower-class coded femininity as they embody sexual and moral deviance and lack cultural capital to secure sales positions in luxurious stores. Importantly, Hanser connects gender and sexuality with class meanings as well as the service managers’ organizational practices producing social inequalities among female bodies in the post-Mao service sector. 

McGuffey, C. Shawn. 2005. “Engendering Trauma: Race, Class, and Gender Reaffirmation after Child Sexual Abuse.” Gender & Society 19 (5): 621-43.
This article examines parental coping strategies with child sexual abuse using interviews with a racially and socioeconomically diverse sample of 60 parents. McGuffey finds that mother-blame is a consistent strategy parents employ to cope with the trauma ensuing their child’s sexual abuse. Mother-blaming involves reinforcing traditional gendered family dynamics, like women being primary caregivers and remaining outside of the paid labor force. Homophobic reactions are discussed in relation to normative performances of masculinity. The authors points out the ways race, class, and gender shape parental responses to child sexual abuse, noting that race and class shape familial expectations, makeup, and larger structural forces around the family. Women are negatively affected with gender reaffirming coping strategies. 

Kang, Miliann. 2003. “The Managed Hand: The Commercialization of Bodies and Emotions in Korean Immigrant-Owned Nail Salons.” Gender & Society 17 (6): 820-39.
Kang’s ethnographic study of six New York City Korean-owned nail salons provides insight into the intersections of gendered beauty service work, race, and class. Building on Arlie Hochschild’s (1983) concept of emotional labor in service work, Kang conceptualizes how service workers not only perform certain kinds of emotions and feelings for customers but also how workers perform body labor. Body labor, a concept broken down into three types, connects gendered work to racial and class aspects of physical and emotional services customers expect and receive. Nail salon workers touch and talk to clients as part of their job. But the types and amounts of these physical and emotional interactions and services vary by the luxuriousness of the salon and the class and racial status of regular customers. The differences between high-service body labor, expressive body labor, and routinized body labor reinforce structural and ideological notions of differences between women. 

Bahati, Kummba, M. 2002. “’You’ve Struck a Rock’: Comparing Gender, Social Movements, and Transformation in the United States and South Africa.” Gender & Society 16 (4): 504-23.
Women civil rights and anti-apartheid activists endured and organized against multiple forms of oppression within the broader social movements in their respective countries. Bahati compares primary and secondary sources from antiracist movements in the US and South Africa. In using a gendered lens of racial justice and liberation social movements, the author examines the structural and ideological ways gender intersects with race and class to shape activist opportunities, experiences, and outcomes. African/Black women occupy unique social locations in society, shaping their experiences and their perspective of oppressive systems. It follows that these women of color also occupy unique and important positions within social movement organizations that dominant narratives often overlook. 

Moller, Stephanie. 2002. “Supporting Single Mothers: Gender and Race in the U.S. Welfare State.” Gender & Society 16 (4): 465-84.
Moller’s quantitative analysis measures black-white racial disparities in welfare generosity single-mother families received in the continental U.S. This study looks at amounts of welfare given to single-mothers at three intersections of the U.S. welfare state: 1970, 1980, and 1990. The U.S. welfare system is split into two basic tiers, a system subject to much feminist and class-based sociological critique. Moller moves these critiques forward in two important ways. Firstly, she looks at the American Families with Dependent Children Act (a second-tier welfare program) payments to single-mother families using quantitative measures. Secondly, she asks how welfare policies play out in patriarchal ways with intersections of racism and classism, showing that gender, race, and class locations converge to form different treatment for black mothers and for white mothers. Findings show that single-mother families received uneven support from welfare programs across the three time periods. White single mothers enjoyed higher levels of welfare support than black single mothers. These findings support previous arguments that state policies institutionalize racism and perpetuate white privilege.