A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING RACE, CLASS, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY

Since the mid-1980s, scholarship and college courses that address multiple dimensions of inequality under the rubric of race, class, gender, and (recently) sexuality studies have grown rapidly. Most courses now employ a set of readings, many of which are drawn from a growing number of anthologies. A strength of this approach is its presentation of the diversity of human experiences and the multiplicity of critical perspectives. A weakness is its failure to convey the commonalities in race, class, gender, and sexuality analyses of social reality. To aid in teaching and research on race, class, gender, and sexuality, this article presents six common themes that characterize this scholarship. Race, class, gender, and sexuality are historically and globally specific, socially constructed power relations that simultaneously operate at both the macro (societal) and micro (individual) levels of society. Scholarship in this tradition emphasizes the interdependence of knowledge and activism.     

Invited commentary on the interview with Jan Stensson

Abstract

The potential of psychoanalysis as social criticism is explored in the context of the major social divides of gender, sexual orientation, race, social class, and ethnicity. It is argued that these divides play central roles in constructing individual psyches, and that their influence is inseparable from other social/ familial forces. Further, analyst and patient alike, inevitably enact the imperatives of class, race, gender, and sexuality in the analytic dyad. It is crucial that psychoanalytic theory be extended to account for the formative power of these cultural categories both in the construction of individual identity, and on the course of analytic work. Further, individual psychoanalysts must be aware of cultural countertransference in the analytic engagement. Finally, as a profession we have an obligation publicly to oppose the destructive imperatives of our economic, political, and social systems in the interest of individual and community psychic well-being.     

Corrupting Conversations with the Marquis de Sade: On Education,Gender, and Sexuality

In this essay, the author joins a conversation started by Martin (Reclaiming the conversation: the ideal of the educated woman. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1985) regarding gender and education seeking to extend the conversation to address sexuality. To do so, the author brings a reading of the Marquis de Sade to challenge the emphasis on reproduction in education as it relates to gendered and sexual norms. The author, following Martin’s approach in Reclaiming the Conversation, reads one particular text of Sade’s—Philosophy in the Bedroom—to argue for queer possibilities that Sade brings to the conversation around gender and sexuality within twenty-first century education. The Marquis de Sade may viscerally seem an inappropriate choice to return to and use to join the conversation, but his novelic imagination incites complications in the conversation. Following in the footsteps of Martin’s re-reading of historic philosophical texts the author offers not only another layer of thinking about “female education,” but also opens up space for engaging gender and sexuality in the history and philosophy of education. As issues around gender and sexed bodies become ever more present and contested in educational discourses, does Sade continue the conversation in ways that corrupt the reproductive aims of education?     

WOMEN AND POWER Definition, Dualism, and Difference

This article reviews the discussions of power and of women and power in United States psychology. Although the field has had difficulty dealing with power, feminist psychology has focused attention on the topic and has advanced the discussion significantly. There are three problems in the literature: definition; person/society dualism; and the need to deal with race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and other social differences besides gender. This article describes components needed for a good definition, criticizes the reduction of power to two modes, and discusses issues involved in improving the analysis of social differences and moving towards resolving person/society dualism. Several nondualistic concepts and potentially useful directions are proposed.     

Moral Imperatives for the Millennium: The Historical Construction of Race and Its Implications for Childhood and Schooling in the Twentieth Century

This essay argues strongly that racism in the United States hurts thefuture of all children. To eradicate this pernicious mindset inits institutional forms requires that we understand that race,as an idea that shapes social organization in this country,is a unique historical product dating from the colonial periodof the southern colonies of mainland British North America.Further, the mythology about American history, as it is taughtin school, excuses and legitimates continued inequality,oppression, and racism today. This essay traces the historyof class oppression from the 17th century, when the institutionof slavery was invented as a means of securing the unpaidchattel bonded labor of Anglo-Europeans, to the emergenceof unfree labor as a form of racial oppression, and subsequently the institutionalization of racial slavery inthe 18th century. Racial slavery, which elevated whitesupremacy and privilege, was still not synonymous with themodern form of pseudo-scientific racism that emerged as adefense of slavery in the antebellum period and its aftermathin the Civil War and Reconstruction. Racism and the legacyof white privilege is still used as a means of social controlto mask class relations and to thereby control and diminishcollective social action that potentially would occurin the absence of the color line. Knowledge of race as anhistorical construct created by human beings in particularcircumstances raises the possibility that race, racism, and its effects can also be changed by human beings acting in opposition to the conditions that artificially separate us.     

Whose voice counts? Gender,power, and epistemologies in the seminary classroom

This article wrestles with the question “whose voice counts?” as an entrée into a discussion of the challenges students encounter in learning to value different epistemologies and that professors encounter in attempting to teach for inclusion of voices. The essay reflects on an experience teaching a graduate seminar on gender and epistemology in which students encounter challenges reflecting on readings that present theology in the form of personal narratives, rather than in a more abstract or theoretical form. Course content and genres of writing are both gendered and subject to power dynamics associated with the uneven treatment of different types of knowledge. The paper focuses primarily on the lens of gender but notes as well the intersectional nature of gender – and the ways in which the course dynamics are complicated by the race, sexuality, and even the class of the authors, students, and teacher. The paper makes two substantial arguments. First, it names a pedagogical meta‐question at the intersection of gender and pedagogy: Even when women are on the syllabus, how are educators ensuring that the epistemologies at work in their classrooms allow for equal authorial authority in the classroom? Second, the paper challenges educators to make changes in their classrooms to allow students time to engage and employ epistemologies they discuss and to see the importance of these practices for wider systemic change in institutions and society.     

Sport,Girls, Trouble and Humour: Black and Indian Boys Negotiating Gender,Race and Class in a Formerly White Single Sex School in South Africa

This article reports on an interview study conducted by Deevia Bhana and Rob Pattman of Grade 11 (16–17 year old) boys attending different kinds of public schools in the Durban, South Africa. It investigated their accounts personal lives and identities as young men and women in and outside their schools. We conducted semi-structured interviews with the participants to determine how they experienced school and how they presented themselves in the interviews, their interests, aspirations, relations with other boys and girls in and out of school, and the kinds of identifications they made. The data for this are from two interviews conducted with black and Indian boys at Elmsdale, a formerly white boys' high school near Durban with an excellent academic and sporting reputation. We analyzed the data using narrative and discourse analysis. Concerns about being marginalised in school were expressed by both the black and the Indian boys. Issues of gender, race, class, sexuality and power were prominent in the interviews, notably when the boys were discussing sport, trouble, being funny and girls.     

Gendered Organizations and Inequality Regimes: Gender,Homosexuality, and Inequality Within Religious Congregations

Building upon Acker's ( 1990 . Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. Gender and Society 4(2):139–58; 2006. Inequality regimes: Gender, class, and race in organizations. Gender and Society 20(4):441–64) theory of gendered organizations and inequality regimes, this study investigates the extent to which inequality in gender and sexuality are linked within religious congregations. Using a nationally representative sample of congregations in the United States, the results demonstrate that a congregation's stance toward allowing women to serve as head clergyperson is significantly associated with its acceptance of gays and lesbians as members or leaders within the congregation. This research extends existing literature in three ways. First, it offers support for the utility of the concept of inequality regimes for investigating dimensions of inequality in addition to gender. Second, it provides evidence of the intersection of gender and sexuality within religious congregations, thereby contributing to the growing dialogue on congregational responses to homosexuality. Finally, these findings propose a number of avenues for future research regarding gender, sexuality, and organizations.     

“I’m Just Trying to Find my Way Like Most Kids”: Bisexuality, Adolescence and the Drama of One Tree Hill

This essay offers a narrative reading of the representation of bisexuality on One Tree Hill by examining the character Anna Tagaro. Grounding this reading in observations about bisexuality, media representation and adolescent identity formation processes, the essay exposes Anna’s representation as both a viable coming out story for an adolescent audience and a systematic erasure of bisexuality as a valid social identity. The displacement of political activism with friend and ally Peyton creates a representation that functions both as liberating and constraining simultaneously. Moreover, Anna’s inclusion as the only Latina character in an all white, all heterosexual cast offers an intersectional representation of race and sexual identity. This conflict between progress and constraint in the representation of youth identity choices offers scholars ample data for future studies in teen television and sexuality.     

The Gendered Nature of Discriminatory Experiences by Race, Class, and Sexuality: A Comparison of Intersectionality Theory and the Subordinate Male Target Hypothesis

Three competing theoretical approaches to social inequalities by gender, race, class, and sexuality are examined. The additive approach assumes that people possessing multiple subordinate-group identities experience the oppressions associated with them as distinct phenomena. The intersectionality-inspired approach suggests that subordinate-group identities such as non-White, lower class, and non-heterosexual interact with gender in a synergistic way, occasioning inordinately pernicious experiences of discrimination for women possessing one or more additional subordinate-group identities. The subordinate male target hypothesis (SMTH) claims that the discrimination experienced by the men of subordinate groups—primarily at the hands of men of dominant groups—is greater than that experienced by the women of the same subordinate groups. In 2009, telephone survey data was collected from 414 women and 208 men in Toronto, Canada and 521 women and 245 men in Vancouver, Canada. Negative binomial regression techniques are applied to these data to determine whether and how gender (male or female), race (White or non-White), educational attainment, household income, and sexual orientation (heterosexual or non-heterosexual), as well as two-way interactions between gender and the other variables, predict scale measures of self-reported major experiences of discrimination and self-reported chronic, routine discriminatory experiences. High levels of both kinds of discrimination reported by men in general are at odds with the additive and intersectionality-inspired perspectives which accord women the gender identity most vulnerable to discrimination. Inordinately high levels of routine discrimination reported by men with a high school diploma or less are consistent with the SMTH-inspired perspective.     

Intersectional Identities,Identity Dimensions,and Academic Contingencies of Self-Worth

Many people rely on academic performance as an important part of their self-concept, or have academic contingencies of self-worth. We compared academic contingencies of self-worth in three groups of participants, who varied in their feelings about two minority identities: sexual minority Asian/Pacific Islanders, straight Asian/Pacific Islanders, and sexual minority Whites. Comparing pairs of groups that shared one marginalized social identity, we confirmed our hypothesis that participants’ feelings about their racial identity related to contingent self-worth differently based on their sexuality; in contrast, participants’ feelings about their sexual identity related to contingent self-worth in the same way regardless of race. The group defined by the intersection of two minority social identities (Asian/Pacific Islander and sexual minority) is of particular interest.     

Intersectionality and ameliorative analyses of race and gender

This discussion of Sally Haslanger’s recent book, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (Oxford 2012), investigates how her theory of race and gender handles the problem of intersectionality; that is, the problem of how to understand the ways in which one’s location in multiple socially constructed categories affects one’s lived experiences, social roles, and relative privilege or disadvantage. Haslanger defines race and gender as locations within hierarchical social structures. This high-level structural analysis allows her to find commonality without claiming that, for example, all women share social roles or psychological characteristics. However, race-based oppression seems sometimes to cancel out gender-based privilege; thus raising the question of how, on Haslanger’s model, we are to understand race and gender working together.     

Class in psychodynamic theory,research and practice

Class is a generally neglected topic within the psychotherapeutic and counselling worlds, and has not benefitted from the psychoanalytic and psychodynamic thought arising from contemporary critiques concerning gender, sexuality, and race. The article presents an overview of my researches over many years in an attempt to formulate the different ways in which considerations of class may impinge on practices and theories in the therapeutic professions. I use a clinical vignette to identify class related issues that may arise within the consulting room, and relate these to wider aspects of the intersections of class with therapy and counselling.     

Feminists who flaunt it: exploring the enjoyment of sexualization among young feminist women

The phenomenon of women enjoying sexualized male attention has recently been operationalized and found to be related to primarily traditional and sexist beliefs, but some argue that enjoying sexiness can be a feminist act. This study assessed the extent to which 326 self‐identified heterosexual feminist women reported that they enjoyed sexualization and how this related to beliefs about the need for social change. Results indicated that enjoying sexualization was related to a mix of feminist and traditional beliefs. Paradoxically, feminists who enjoyed sexualization felt empowered but were less likely to notice personal social injustice or continued gender inequity. Whether embracing empowered sexuality is related to a more general gender empowerment is discussed.     

Intersectional Masculinities and Gendered Political Consciousness: How Do Race,Ethnicity and Sexuality Shape Men’s Awareness of Gender Inequality and Support for Gender Activism?

Gendered political consciousness refers to having an awareness of gender inequality, viewing this inequality as illegitimate, and supporting collective efforts to bring about greater gender equality. The present study draws from social psychology, theories of masculinities, and intersectionality to assess the factors associated with men’s political consciousness of gender. Multivariate regression analyses of data from the U.S.-based 2012 Evaluations of Government and Society Study (N?=?598) (American National Election American National Election Study 2012) highlights how social statuses of race/ethnicity and sexuality—along with beliefs about racial/ethnic and sexuality-based inequalities—correlate with men’s awareness of gender inequality and support for women fighting for greater gender equality. Results show that Non-Hispanic Black men and married men are significantly more likely than are non-Hispanic White men and unmarried men to see high levels of gender inequality. Men who see high levels of racial/ethnic and sexuality-based inequalities are also significantly more likely to perceive high levels of gender inequality. Bivariate analyses show that Non-Hispanic Black men, as well as men who see high levels of other inequalities, are also more likely than are other men to support women fighting for greater gender equality, but in multivariate regression models these effects are eclipsed by political ideology—the single best predictor of men’s support for women fighting for gender equality. Results underscore the need to differentiate awareness of gender inequality and support for efforts to challenge gender inequality, and they highlight the potential of intersectionality for conceptualizing men’s gendered political consciousness.     

Dharma Diversity and Deep Inclusivity at the East Bay Meditation Center: From Buddhist Modernism to Buddhist Postmodernism?

Through an ethnographic study of the East Bay Meditation Center (EBMC) in Oakland, California, this paper examines recent attempts to diversify meditation-based convert American Buddhism. Celebrated as the ‘one of the most diverse Buddhist sanghas in the world’, EBMC opened its doors in January 2007 with the goal of offering a more diverse alternative to the predominantly white, middle-class populated American Buddhist groups in the Bay Area. The EBMC is rooted in a ‘gift economy’ and offers weekly meditation groups for People of Color, LGBTQI populations, and people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. While the EBMC houses separate identity-based groups, it is its attention to the multiple axes of difference—race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and disability— what I identify as ‘dharma diversity’—that mark it as unique. In conclusion, I suggest that EBMC's diversity culture might indicate the emergence of a new postmodern stage in the assimilation of Buddhism in America.