Routledge International Handbook of Race, Class, and Gender

Shirley Jackson, Shirley A. Jackson, Shirley Jackson, Shirley A. Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134178766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge International Handbook of Race, Class, and Gender chronicles the development, growth, history, impact, and future direction of race, gender, and class studies from a multidisciplinary perspective. The research in this subfield has been wide-ranging, including works in sociology, gender studies, anthropology, political science, social policy, history, and public health. As a result, the interdisciplinary nature of race, gender, and class and its ability to reach a large audience has been part of its appeal. The Handbook provides clear and informative essays by experts from a variety of disciplines, addressing the diverse and broad-based impact of race, gender, and class studies.

The Handbook is aimed at undergraduate and graduate students who are looking for a basic history, overview of key themes, and future directions for the study of the intersection of race, class, and gender. Scholars new to the area will also find the Handbook's approach useful. The areas covered and the accompanying references will provide readers with extensive opportunities to engage in future research in the area.

Part I

Theorizing race, class, and gender studies

Shirley A. Jackson

For many scholars, the dialogue on the intersection of race, class, and gender begins with Deborah King’s essay “Multiple Jeopardies, Multiple Consciousness: the Context of a Black Feminist Ideology” (1988) and Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990). These two works address not only Black feminist thought, but they also bring to the fore the awareness that the existing scholarship has continued to ignore the nuances of race, class, and gender as they intersect and veer into their own directions depending on time, place, context, and identity.

Exploring the interlocking system of oppression of race, class, and gender is best approached from a variety of disciplines and spaces. This investigation must also take into consideration the ways in which race, class, and gender are distinctly unique, nonetheless peculiarly related. Historical and contemporary conditions have a direct impact on one’s life choices and life experiences. In this section, Chapter 1 by Leek and Kimmel and Chapter 2 by Wallace offer overviews and critiques of the theoretical underpinnings of the intersection of race, class, and gender by expanding upon how we have commonly learned to think about them.

In Chapter 1, Leek and Kimmel investigate the superordination found in the intersection of race, class, and gender studies. Rather than focusing on subordination in the study of intersectionality (i.e., minorities, the poor, and women), the authors propose an exploration into the superordinate (i.e., whiteness, the elite, masculinity). The authors aim to investigate the ways in which the superordinate maintain and reproduce their privileged status. Indeed, they take what has become the “norm” in examining the intersection of race, class, and gender through the study of those who are the subordinate and force a re-examination and broadening of the scope of this intersection by offering a different field of inquiry, superordinate studies.

Wallace’s discussion of identity politics and the politics of studying identity in Chapter 2 provides a much needed investigation into the ways in which identity politics continue to play a pivotal role in society. Wallace presents an overview of the research on Black feminist thought by discussing its roots and then moves into a discussion of the study of informal and formal politics and women’s political agency. She proposes an expansion beyond African American epistemology where religion and non-Western women are included in the dialogue.

While Wallace discusses the marginalization of women, particularly, African American women, her essay provides, in a sense, a point of divergence from previous research. Both Wallace and the work of Leek and Kimmel provide frameworks for further exploration into power arrangements and their relationship to intersectionality. Together, the authors propose expanding upon those themes that have been commonplace in theorizing intersectionality.

1

Conceptualizing intersectionality in superordination

Masculinities, whitenesses, and dominant classes

Cliff Leek and Michael Kimmel

Introduction

In this critical review of the literature we consider what we identify as two positive movements in the examination of race, class, and gender before proposing a third. In the last thirty years, scholars of race, class, and gender have, to varying degrees, included both intersectionality and studies of the superordinate within their categories of analysis. We will explore how the historical trajectories of these fields shape their movement to explore the superordinate and their movement to incorporate intersectionality in their analysis before detailing what it would mean for all three fields to truly embrace intersectionality within the superordinate.

Superordination

Efforts to conceptualize superordination in the studies of race, class, and gender have manifested in complex ways. In regards to race, superordinance is understood as whiteness, while in gender studies it is understood as masculinity. In studies of class, superordination can be understood as the dominant class, elites, the wealthy, or a range of other terms with similar connotations. Efforts to conceptualize and interrogate whiteness and masculinity as axes of dominance and identity have grown exponentially over the last three decades while analysis of the dominant class, which once waned, is now returning.

Investigations of masculinity, born out of feminist studies of gender, found their home in the contested fields of men’s studies and critical studies on men under the care of scholars such as Rubin (1984), Connell (1985), and Brod (1987) in the 1980s. The Men’s Studies Task Group, which later became the American Men’s Studies Association, was founded around 1982 and today the American Men’s Studies Association continues to hold large annual meetings and is associated with over a dozen scholarly journals and magazines. The scholarly journal, Men and Masculinities, founded in 1990, is the premier journal in the field, and ranks consistently among the most competitive journals in gender studies and received an A rating (top 10 percent of all journals) from both the British and Australian journal ranking systems. Studies of men and masculinity arose from a need for more critical discourse around the nature of dominance and privilege in relationship to gendered ideologies. Before the rise of this line of inquiry, men and masculinity had been neglected not as subjects, but as sites of critical study.

About ten years after the birth of men’s studies, the heyday of another form of superordinate study, critical whiteness studies, emerged both in response to and in partnership with ethnic studies and black studies programs. The first critical studies of whiteness originated with scholars like Du Bois (1903) over a century ago, but it came to flourish as a field of study under the leadership of historians and ethnic studies scholars like Waters (1990), Frankenberg (1997), and Hyde (1995). Just as studies of men and masculinity answered a need for scholarship addressing men and masculinity in relationship to gender and power; critical studies of whiteness answer a need for more scholarship addressing white people and whiteness in relationship to ongoing racial inequality.

Unlike studies of race and gender, studies of class have only recently begun to be institutionalized in academia in the form of a few centers like the Center for Working-Class Studies founded at Youngstown State University in 1995 and the Center for Study of Working Class Life founded at Stony Brook University in 1999. It is important to note that these centers are not for the study of class as a whole, but rather for the study of the working class and working class life. Currently there are no centers, programs, or departments in the United States for the study of class as a whole, and there most certainly are no programs for the study of the dominant class or the elite.

Even as there has been no institutionalization of studies of the dominant class, a small handful of scholars have attempted to take on the identities and practices associated with the dominant class. A few notable examples of scholars doing this work in the 1980s are Ostrander’s analysis of the lives of upper-class women (1986) and Birmingham’s examination of American aristocracy (1987). Recently there has been a resurgence in these studies of the elite which Khan describes well in “The Sociology of Elites” (2012).

These types of studies, studies of the superordinate, whether they be of race, class, or gender, are important because they allow for an examination of the ways in which privilege and dominance are maintained and reproduced. It is through these studies that dominance and its functions become more discernible. According to Pease, “just as feminism challenged men to critically reflect upon their masculinity, so anti-racism challenges white people to reflect upon what it means to be white” (2004: 120). Pease would, most likely, agree that a study of the dominant class or the elite as the superordinate category of class studies would encourage a similarly critical consideration of what it means to be wealthy and the practices through which economic dominance is reproduced.

Intersectionality

Studies of race, class, and gender have addressed the role of other axes of identity and power in their analyses to varying degrees. Mantsios argues that there are two reasons why scholars of class need to examine intersectionality: “On the one hand, issues of race and gender oppression cut across class lines…. On the other hand, class oppression permeates other spheres of power and oppression” (2001: 179). Discourse around the racialization of poverty forced class studies into intersectional thinking long before intersectionality was ever theorized. Thinkers as early as Du Bois (1903) and Debs (1903) recognized the importance of discussing race in conversations of class and that impetus grew throughout the twenty-first century. Considerations of race and class became especially prevalent as scholars sought to analyze urban crime and critique what they called a “culture of poverty” in the 1960s (Harrington, 1962; Lewis, 1966). What has often been called the first wave of feminism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries encouraged scholars to begin considering gender, and women in particular, in their discussions of class.

The most meaningful movement in studies of race and gender towards acknowledging intersectionality came with the rise of multicultural feminism and black feminist thought in the 1980s and 1990s. In this time period, and continuing today, women of color pushed back against the development of a monolithic feminist movement that primarily served the needs of white women. Speaking of black women’s experiences in the civil rights movement and feminist movement, Kimberlé Crenshaw argues that “because of their intersectional identity as both women and people of color within discourses that are shaped to respond to either one or the other, the interests and experiences of women of color are frequently marginalized within both” (1991: 1244). It is this argument, echoed by numerous women of color in a variety of ways, that pushed scholars of both gender studies and ethnic studies to more intersectional approaches to their work (Collins, 1999; Moraga and Anzaldúa, 1981).

Intersectionality in superordination

Even as studies of race, class, and gender have all taken greater account of intersectionality, they have not all applied that intersectional analysis to their superordinate categories. While studies of men and masculinity have recognized that masculinity varies along other axes of identity and power, studies of whiteness and the elite have not. This notion of plurality is operationalized in studies of men and masculinity under the terminology of “masculinities.” Here we propose that studies of race and class are missing parallel notions of “whitenesses” and “elites” in their considerations of the superordinate.

Masculinities

Studies of men and masculinity were still closely tied to gender studies when scholars of multicultural feminism were pushing gender studies to fully recognize plurality among women (Collins, 1999; Crenshaw, 1991). The movement of gender studies to a greater recognition of the ways in which other axes of identity and power interact with gender translated, for studies of men and masculinity, into a pluralized notion of masculinities. Masculinities was the answer of scholars of masculinity to multicultural feminism and an attempt to move studies of men and masculinity beyond its monolithic roots.

Connell theorizes masculinities in four forms: hegemonic masculinity, subordinated masculinities, complicit masculinities, and marginalized masculinities (Connell, 2005). According to Connell, the relationship between these masculinities is a hierarchical system in which hegemonic masculinity rules, some masculinities are subordinated along the axis of gender, some masculinities are marginalized as a result of their positions on other axes of identity and power, and some masculinities simply exist while failing to challenge the hierarchy. This theorization of masculinities allows scholars not only to consider the role of various masculine practices and identities in maintaining patriarchy and male privilege, but also allows for scholars to analyze the relationships between a range of formations of masculinity. This mapping of masculinities may serve as a framework for constructing pluralized notions of whiteness and the dominant class.

For example, Kimmel’s Manhood in America (1996) begins with the premise that there are multiple class and race-based masculinities available at any moment, and that they often are set in competition. Thus the book traces the dynamics by which a certain iteration – native-born, white, heterosexual, Northern, middle-class (Kimmel calls him the “Self-Made Man”) – emerged as the dominant model of masculinity in the mid-nineteenth century, displacing two earlier class-based forms of masculinity, the Genteel Patriarch (the landed gentry) and the Heroic Artisan (the artisanal worker). As Kimmel argues, there was nothing inevitable about this; it was a historical dynamic of great contestation.

A more recent example can be found in Jackson Katz’s book Leading Men: Presidential Campaigns and the Politics of Manhood (2012). Katz explains how presidential campaigns in the United States can be read as a cultural struggle over the meanings of American manhood. Rather than simply viewing the practices, beliefs, and styles of presidential candidates as more or less conforming to a singular notion of hegemonic masculinity, they can be viewed as separate brands of masculinity in competition with one another. In this way scholars can trace how particular practices, beliefs, and discourses associated with masculinity relate to one another, relate to power, and change over time.

Whitenesses

No concept of pluralized whitenesses has taken root in whiteness studies despite the recognition by many prominent scholars in the field that whiteness is not monolithic (Frankenberg, 1997; Hyde, 1995; Shome, 2000). These scholars, in various ways, acknowledge a range of practices, identities, and formations of whiteness that, if considered critically, should impede conversations of a singular whiteness. Shome and Hyde make the strongest arguments for an intersectional approach to whiteness. According to Shome, whiteness is “constantly made and remade through its participation in other unequal social relations” (2000: 368). And, in Hyde’s view, whiteness is “further complicated with the inclusion of class, sexual orientation or other forms of identity” (1995: 94).

The inclination to move towards a less monolithic notion of whiteness is clear and yet the shift has not yet been made. This avoidance may be a result of the belief that whiteness is, in its very nature, a pluralistic umbrella. According to Leonardo, white culture “is an amalgamation of various white ethnic practices” and “whiteness is the attempt to homogenize diverse white ethnics into a single category for purposes of racial domination” (2002: 32). If whiteness is conceptualized as a homogenized mass of formerly disparate identities then there may seem to be no need to pluralize the term. That being said, the continued use of whiteness in the singular may prevent scholars from truly considering the intersections of other axes of power and identity when they interrogate whiteness.

A movement toward recognizing whitenesses, as formations of identity and practice within a racial order, raises new questions for the field of whiteness studies. Is it possible to identify whitenesses, as Connell does with masculinities (2005), that are hegemonic, subordinated, marginalized, or complicit? What are the relationships between various whitenesses? How are specific whitenesses related to the maintenance of racial inequality?

The recent shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School provides an opportunity to illustrate this notion of whitenesses. On December 14, 2012, a young white man named Adam Lanza opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School and murdered twenty-six people before taking his own life. In the aftermath of the shooting, public discourse placed the victims and the shooter into separate categories; both white, but also fundamentally different.

The victims achieved the status of perfect victims, describable only as angels or examples of pure innocence. There is no parallel outcry over the far too frequent deaths of black and brown skinned children by gun violence in the U.S. or by U.S. drone strikes abroad. Black and brown skinned children’s stories are rarely told in public discourse and they certainly do not get framed as angels. This narrative of angelic innocence serves to uplift the value of white life and white culture over others.

The shooter, on the other hand, was immediately framed as mentally ill, pathological, and, most importantly, an anomaly. Adam Lanza, and every other white shooter, has been dismissed as an exception to the rule. Even as 90 percent of the mass murders at elementary and high schools in the U.S. in the last thirty years have been committed by young white men (Kimmel and Leek, 2012), the public discourse revolves around othering the shoot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• PART I Theorizing race, class, and gender studies
• PART II Conversations on race, class, and gender
• PART III Race, class, gender, and migration
• PART IV Race, class, gender, and sexualities
• PART V Race, class, gender, and education
• PART VI Race, class, gender, and work
• PART VII Cultural contexts and identity
• PART VIII Conclusion: contemporary trends in the intersection of race, class, and gender
• Index