Structure, agency, and gender: The social reproduction of a discipline

Abstract

In 1965, one year after the publication of the Handbook of Sociology, edited by Robert E. L. Faris, I entered graduate school at the University of Chicago and in 1968 got my first academic job. It was a heady time in American sociology. The first meeting of the Women's Caucus, later Sociologists for Women in Society, was at the 1969 meetings of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco, and challenges to the intellectual hegemony of structural functionalism from political leftists, blacks, gays, and feminists were increasingly evident. By entering the discipline when I did, I was -to use McAdam et al.'s term in their chapter on Social Movements in the 1988 Handbook of Sociology -biographically available to participate in the political and intellectual currents that have helped shape American sociology over the past quarter of a century. Yet what strikes me in reading the new Handbook of Sociology, edited by Neil Smelser, is the unevenness with which these different currents have been integrated into contemporary sociological debate. In contrast to 25 years ago, there now appears widespread recognition of the contributions made by Marxist theory and class analysis. There has been a reemergence of attention to political economy, and a convergence on the centrality of the political for understanding both social organization and social change. Yet despite the explosion of research on gender, sexuality, the sociologies of culture and emotions (all of which have established themselves as sections of the American Sociological Association), these subjects have not been well integrated into mainstream sociological debates. In the presentation to follow, I will elaborate on this observation, suggest some reasons why I think this integration has been illusive, and argue for its inclusion in