Class And Its Others

J.K. Gibson-Graham

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Year: 2000
• eBook ISBN: 9780816691784
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A surprising and innovative look at class that proposes new approaches to this important topic

While references to gender, race, and class are everywhere in social theory, class has not received the kind of theoretical and empirical attention accorded to gender and race. A welcome and much-needed corrective, this book offers a novel theoretical approach to class and an active practice of class analysis.

The authors offer new and compelling ways to look at class through examinations of such topics as sex work, the experiences of African American women as domestic laborers, and blue- and white-collar workers. Their work acknowledges that individuals may participate in various class relations at one moment or over time and that class identities are multiple and changing, interacting with other aspects of identity in contingent and unpredictable ways.

The essays in the book focus on class difference, class transformation and change, and on the intersection of class, race, gender, sexuality, and other dimensions of identity. They find class in seemingly unlikely places-in households, parent-child relationships, and self-employment-and locate class politics on the interpersonal level as well as at the level of enterprises, communities, and nations. Taken together, they will prompt a rethinking of class and class subjectivity that will expand social theory.

Contributors: Enid Arvidson, U of Texas, Arlington; Jenny Cameron, Monash U, Australia; Harriet Fraad; Janet Hotch; Susan Jahoda, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; Amitava Kumar, U of Florida; Cecilia Marie Rio; Jacquelyn Southern; Marjolein van der Veen.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword: In Class
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Class in a Poststructuralist Frame
• 1. "This Job Has No End": African American Domestic Workers and Class Becoming
• 2. Domesticating Class: Femininity, Heterosexuality, and Household Politics
• 3. Exploitation in the Labor of Love
• 4. Spring Flowers
• 5. Beyond Slavery and Capitalism: Producing Class Difference in the Sex Industry
• 6. Classing the Self-Employed: New Possibilities of Power and Collectivity
• 7. Los Angeles: A Postmodern Class Mapping
• 8. Blue Collar, White Collar: Deconstructing Classification
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index