Forms Of Privilege Research Articles

White in all the wrong places: white rural poverty in the postbellum US South

Many examinations of whiteness have proceeded on an unacknowledged equation of whiteness with various forms of privilege. I suggest that when differences within whiteness are brought into consideration, a more nuanced engagement with such representations and constructions becomes possible. This argument I make through an analysis of post-Civil War travel accounts of the US South, to demonstrate how prising open the presumed links between a white identity and privilege allows movement beyond a whiteness-as-power framework. In this way, I show that a textual analysis which holds at arm’s length such assumptions facilitates a more engaged understanding of constructions of whiteness in the US South and elsewhere.

Inequality as temporal process

How is inequality related to time? This article explores some temporal coordinates of newly emerging unequal land distributions inTransylvania (Romania), in the wake of socialism's collapse. Building on a notion of temporally based strategies, it examines both temporal conceptions and temporally based practices to describe how time entered into the initial conception of the land restitution process, how achieving ownership was itself a time-intensive activity, and how the government's economic policy has inadequately supported the time-horizons appropriate for new owners. In each respect, time tends to work to the advantage of the former holders of political and social capital as they seek to convert those forms of privilege into control over land.

Using Feminist Classroom Rules to Model Empowerment for Social Work Students

This paper describes a set of feminist classroom rules adapted for the undergraduate social work classroom. The rules were utilized to help students examine and practice interactions which underscored empowerment principles aimed at ending discrimination, enhancing the capacity of clients to meet their needs, and promoting social justice. The rules provide a framework for examining racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and other institutional forms of oppression and privilege in American society. The paper examines the feminist rules in the context of a project designed to teach empowerment to students. Implementation strategies for social work educators and implications for researchers are discussed.

Realism, Universalism, and the Science of the Human

Realism, Universalism, and the Science of the Human Amanda Anderson (bio) Satya P. Mohanty. Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997. Martha C. Nussbaum. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. It is arguably a peculiar fact that a book announcing itself as a defense of objectivity and realism would begin by assuring readers of the political efficacy of its theories. After all, the critique of objectivity and realism within progressive cultural criticism of the past several decades has taken for granted that claims to objectivity and realism are suspicious in part because of their pretense to value-neutrality. But Satya P. Mohanty’s ambitious and wide-ranging Literary Theory and the Claims of History joins with other recent attempts to lay claim to a refurbished realism that not only overcomes variously construed limitations of postmodernism but fully answers to the charges leveled against “traditional” objectivity or “naïve” realism [see Alcoff; Livingston]. Such a project can in part be analyzed against a broader critique of postmodernism and poststructuralism advanced through reconsideration of Enlightenment ideals, including, most prominently, the ideals of universalism and its less abstract cousin, cosmopolitanism [see Anderson]. The reconstructions of both universalism and realism have claimed a greater intellectual integrity and coherence than the forms of postmodernism that they challenge and a more promising ethico-political vision, one that more convincingly acknowledges the place and claims of marginalized others. These reconstructive projects thus fundamentally challenge the familiar postmodernist idea that claims to universalism or objectivity themselves enact forms of privilege or exclusion that inherently disable any properly egalitarian or nonviolent relation to others. Mohanty would appear to combine the universalist and realist ambitions, insofar as he asserts a moral position based on Kantian notions of autonomy and dignity at the same time that, in epistemological terms, he elaborates a “postpositivist realist alternative.” Maintaining that the critique of objectivity within postmodernism is propped up by an outdated understanding of scientific method and theory, he argues that the more sophisticated theories within current philosophy of science elaborate epistemological models that are fully compatible with a generalized hermeneutical method, precisely because they acknowledge both the theory-laden nature of all inquiry and the larger social and historical contexts of knowledge and experience. Before elaborating this realist alternative, however, Mohanty situates his project by forwarding a number of critiques of “constructivist postmodernism,” critiques that enable us to better gauge the motivations behind his work. Foregrounded at the start are what Mohanty sees as the [End Page 3] harmful political and ethical consequences of relativism, skepticism, and constructivism. According to Mohanty, while the claims for diversity and difference in the 1960s “had a political edge,” at this historical moment they are used primarily for conservative ends, via a state-sponsored bland multiculturalism that diverts attention from the blunt material issues of race politics [17]. In broader ethico-political terms, moreover, relativist arguments that display skepticism toward the possibilities for rational exchange between variously construed collectivities and cultures lead not to a proper respect for the other but rather to indifference. As Mohanty puts it, to deny the possibility of “general criteria” for “interpretive validity” is “to assert that all spaces are equivalent, that they have equal value, that since the lowest common principle of evaluation is all that I can invoke, I cannot—and consequently need not—think about how your space impinges on mine or how my history is defined together with yours. If that is the case, I may have started by declaring a pious political wish, but I end by denying that I need to take you seriously” [131; Mohanty’s emphasis]. Beyond these harmful consequences, however, lies a more fundamental problem. In its monolithic assault on Western Reason and the unified subject of humanism, constructivist postmodernism has deprived itself of any coherent account of human agency and rationality. Without a philosophical anthropology establishing the “capacities, tasks, and limits that might make up a specifically human existence,” Mohanty argues, it becomes impossible to account properly for cultural practices and historical agency, for the self-understanding of cultures and the historical transformations they enact [138...

Global weds local

Globalization is frequently understood in terms of social, political, economic, and cultural processes, but there is, given the epistemological critiques raised by postcolonial theory, a need to address it as a representational practice as well. This article attempts to broaden the notion of globality in audience research and cultural studies by examining the investment media audiences make in certain kinds of meaning, and by posing the global as not only ‘what the world means’, in certain contexts, but ‘what means the world’ to viewers as well. A reception study in India of the immensely successful Hindi film Hum Aapke Hain Koun(1994), a festive celebration of weddings and family life, indicates how the family emerges as a category of such a notion of globality in the context of liberalization in India, and the broader historic context of the fragmentation of families under modernity. This article argues that, while the reception of this film indicates the articulation of consumerism and tradition in the context of the meeting of global capitalism and local forms of privilege, the audience’s investment in the family as a category of globality represents the possibility of epistemic opposition to hegemonic notions of the global. This possibility highlights the need for cultural studies to address the family as a site of struggle in modernity and globalization.

Liberalism, Feminism, and the Promise of Lovibond's Moral Realism

As Alison Jagger showed in her masterful overview of feminist politics,1 the political liberalism of most early feminists has been attacked on many fronts. Despite the universal acceptance of the rhetoric of equal opportunity, the persistence of "glass ceilings" in Western democracies2 reveals at least the inadequacy and arguably the deceptive abstractness of liberalism's focus on equal rights. Nor is merit the most significant criterion of success even in the academy, despite its historical commitment to Enlightenment ideals and despite the public perception that it is a haven for feminists, liberals, and possibly even socialists. In the empirical sciences, for instance, the availability of "hard" results might have seemed proof against gender discrimination. But even there, as a study in the prestigious journal Nature has shown, women really do have to be twice as good as men to be considered their equals.3 And if such political objections might merely provide evidence that liberal principles have been ignored, others have raised more radical challenges to the principles themselves. By revealing power relations within the home, the technique of "consciousness-raising" bolstered the insight that "the personal is political," thereby breaching the line between private and public life-the historic core of liberal theory. One alternative was to retain that theory by extending the notion of rights within the family. But soon Carol Gilligan's work gave empirical support to the suspicion that the "thin" self of liberal anthropology reflected a distinctively Western and male understanding of moral reasoning as abstract, principled, and universal.4 But if liberalism has failed, what can replace it? Its virtue had been the hope it offered: that all rational people could recognize universal rights and responsibilities as the core of a working political accord. But if we cannot now justify this "thin" universal moral and political theory, or if-what amounts to the same-the thin theory is too abstract to give us substantive guidance in concrete conflicts, how can we resist the apparently inevitable slide into parochialism and irrationalism? Must we revert to resolving difficult conflicts "the old fashioned way"-by gender, class, race or ethnic war? In epistemology, "standpoint theories" raise parallel problems.5 The "standpoint of women," for example, is not gender neutral; it attributes to women an epistemic privilege. Exposed through oppression to experiences from which men are sheltered, women gain insights inaccessible to men. One virtue of a standpoint epistemology is that it can be generalized: other kinds of oppression generate other forms of experience and corresponding counter-narratives. But just as clearly, its generalizability produces a theoretical and practical problem: what happens when different kinds of oppression overlap? Black women are doubly disadvantaged, as are gay women and the disabled. Must we rank forms of epistemic privilege, awarding highest honors to the most victimized? Most recoil before the one-up(man)ship that this presupposes, yet it is suggested by the logic of the theory; and worse, it is a practical concern when belligerent or resentful fragmentation threatens the reconciliation sought through institutional commitments to "multiculturalism." Can we admit the plausible claim that oppression may produce characteristic insights without at the same balkanizing the discursive community? Can we recognize how hard it is to hear another-particularly when our hearing is impaired by interference which amplifies some voices at the expense of others-while still maintaining the possibility of communication across divisions of race, culture, and gender? In this essay I will draw attention to the under appreciated resources that Sabina Lovibond has brought to the table. I will then point out two puzzles in Lovibond's account. My aim is to point a way through these problems in an attempt to bolster its overall adequacy. …

A General Theory of Gender Stratification

tion. While both biological and ideological variables are taken into account, the emphasis is structural: It is proposed that the major independent variable affecting sexual inequality is each sex's economic power, understood as relative control over the means of production and allocation of surplus. For women, relative economic power is seen as varying-and not always in the same direction-at a variety of microand macrolevels, ranging from the household to the state. A series of propositions links the antecedents of women's relative economic power, the interrelationship between economic and other forms of power, and the forms of privilege and opportunity into which each gender can translate its relative power.

The Rent Concept, Narrowed and Broadened

Manufacture and agriculture may be reduced to a common denominator; manufacture is merely a more highly intensive form of utilizing the forces and products of nature, while land plays the same role in each form of industry, 48–50.—Rent depends upon absolute and relative position as to a market, and is sharply differentiated from interest, 51–53.—Land rent is, however, only one kind of rent; the various forms of economic privilege also give rise to rents, 54–61.