Intersections Of Class Research Articles

Re-thinking Violence, Everyday and (In)Security: Feminist/Intersectional Interventions

This special gender issue brings to the fore a renewed focus on the importance of feminist intersectional analyses in understanding violence and (in)security in the everyday. It does so through the examination of several cases across the globe. The first set of articles examines how gender is understood in the context of police reform initiatives in post-conflict contexts, where despite political peace agreements, many forms of violence and insecurity continue in the everyday. The second set of articles focuses on gender in populist movement, and particularly foregrounds an intersectional lens. The intersections of race, religion, class, caste, geographies and gender raise important questions when analyzing populist projects, including how the rise of populism may indicate a growing dissonance between the domestic and international, and how this is relevant to understanding the changing nature of violence and (in)security in this changing global era. Taken together, the two sets of articles give a rich account of the significance of incorporating a more complex understanding of gender in gaining better insight into contemporary societal processes.

Intersections of caste, class, and gender in healthcare sanitation work in India: Social work imperatives for restructuring marginalized women's care work

AbstractHousekeeping and sanitary workers are crucial for the functional efficiency and hygiene of healthcare facilities. In India, women from oppressed castes and backward classes are predominantly recruited in these occupations. The work, regarded as “polluting,” is stigmatized, devalued, and lies at the historical and sociocultural intersections of caste, class, and gender. In the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic, this paper utilizes the concepts of “feminization of labor” and “care ethics” to read caste into an intersectional theoretical analysis of the organization of marginalized women's labor in such essential, yet invisibilized healthcare work. An exploratory narrative review of literature focusing exclusively on marginalized healthcare housekeepers and sanitation workers in India is undertaken and supplemented with a critical analysis of labor laws and policies to trace the sustained reproduction of the caste‐based sexual division of labor in these occupations. I propose that their exploitative terms and conditions are sustained by what I refer to as the “feminine caste contract” – a complex sociopolitical and legal arrangement of precarious, casteist, and gendered work conditions. Recognizing the exploitation inherent in this contract, recommendations are made for social work education and practice to play a key role in restructuring marginalized women's labor in essential care work.

Accessible Green Spaces? Spatial Disparities in Residential Green Space among People with Disabilities in the United States

This article presents new quantitative results on the distribution of residential green space for people with disabilities in the United States, building on and bridging scholarly research in two distinct domains: one involving approaches that quantify disparities in green space access among racialized minorities and socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, and the other using qualitative methods that demonstrate that most green spaces remain inaccessible and unwelcoming to disabled visitors. Using generalized additive models (GAMs) that controlled for demographic factors and climatological characteristics, we find that residential areas with more green space generally have a higher proportion of disabled residents. The statistical results run counter to expectations from the literature, thus complicating the prevailing narrative and indicating a need for mixed-methods research to examine multiple dimensions of access and environmental justice. Using cluster analysis to assess spatial trends, we detect residential clusters of high disability and low green space and find that they are located in predominantly non-White, urban, and more socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods compared to clusters of high disability and high green space. Cluster analysis results suggest that there are inequities in green space access at the intersection of disability, race, and class, as well as across the urban–rural continuum.

Everyday Life in extremis

Everyday Life <i>in extremis</i>

Battle of the Classes. Social Class and Work Status in Determining Women Director Appointments

The literature on women on board of directors provides limited insights on how the social class origins of the women executives influence their selection on corporate boards and their career trajectories. Gender research in management has narrowly focused on the disadvantages women experience in the workplace. However, women's unique and complex social identities with multiple group memberships, such as social class and work status, can lead to paradoxical experiences in the workplace, with women experiencing both advantages and disadvantages. To shed new light on the role of multiple identities for women executives in gaining board directorship, I leverage the social classification based on “caste” in India. I develop a theoretical model to show the influence of social class, work status, and social class mobility in director selection market for women executives. The model predicts four distinct profiles of women executives and their outcomes in the director labor market. By using the intersectionality of social class and work status, I propose that women executives with high work status and low social class will be able to display their authority and dominance in the workplace and craft credible professional executive images at work, and hence will be buffered from the stereotypic bias of incompetence due to gender and social class. In contrast, for women directors with high social class but low work status, high social class will mitigate the adverse effects of low work status by signaling their high social capital through their homophilic kinship ties. Moreover, the director appointments of women executives with lower work status will allow upward mobility of these director profiles and improve their future career prospects in the corporate elite.

Racial glass ceiling

According to the neoliberal mantra, anyone who is willing to work hard can get ahead in our society. In an era when belief in the myth of meritocracy has become widespread, greater social mobility would represent the promise of escape from rising social inequality. This paper challenges this myth and offers insight into the fallacy of individualized explanations of the role of merit in social ascension. Drawing on 103 interviews with first-in-family (FIF) minority Roma graduates in Hungary, and using the lens of intersectionality, it explores the hidden barriers to career advancement for those Roma professionals whose parents do not have a degree. The paper shows how the intersections of class and racialised minority status matter in relation to what career one has in the labour market. It illuminates why FIF Roma professionals can rarely enter elite occupations and why, career wise, they tend to concentrate in jobs dealing with Roma issues. It explores the effect of the dynamic interaction of structural hidden mechanisms and the Roma’s response/adaptation to them that contribute both to Roma professionals’ labour market segmentation and to the phenomenon of the glass ceiling. The paper calls these two characteristics of the labour market situation of the FIF Roma graduates the racial glass ceiling.

Gendered Citizenship: A Post-structural and Critical Analysis of the Citizenship Curriculum Regarding Gender

This study aims to analyze primary school students’ experiences from a gender-based perspective throughout the primary school curriculum taking the curriculum as a phenomenological construct and an apparatus to reproduce orthodoxies in a diverse context in the Southern region of Turkey. Via utilizing a multi-phase embedded case study, this research included the qualitative data that obtained from 4th grade textbooks and 11 schools, including site visits, classroom observations, and semi-structured interviews with 27 teachers, 10 managers, and 10 counselors. Thick data were subjected to inductive qualitative analysis and triangulated for trustworthiness. Findings revealed the gendered character of citizenship and the reproduction of gender roles through formal education, in which boys had more space to act flexible and free compared to girls. Findings also manifested the intersections of class, ethnicity, and nationality with gender, leading to girls’ diverse experiences from different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. In addition, the existence of resistance was also apparent in a few participants’ discourses through which education could be defined as a ‘praxis’ rather than ‘reproduction.’

A Convergent Mixed Methods Study of Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors among Young Black Men in the United States.

An understanding of the factors that influence cardiovascular (CVD) risk among young Black men is critically needed to promote cardiovascular health earlier in the life course and prevent poor outcomes later in life. To explore how individual (eg, depression, racial discrimination) and environmental factors (eg, neighborhood resources) are associated with CVD risk factors among young Black men. We conducted a convergent mixed methods study (qualitative/quantitative, QUAL+quant) with Black men aged 18 to 30 years (N = 21; 3 focus groups). Participants completed a self-administered electronic survey immediately prior to the focus groups. Participants (M age = 23) reported: two or more CVD risk factors (75%; eg, high blood pressure); racial discrimination (32%); and depressive symptoms in the past 2 weeks (50%). Five themes emerged: 1) emergence and navigation of Black manhood stressors; 2) high expectations despite limited available resources; 3) heart disease socialization: explicit and vicarious experiences; 4) managing health care needs against fear, avoidance and toughing it out; and 5) camaraderie and social support can motivate or deter. The integrated qualitative and quantitative analyses highlight race, gender, and class intersectionality factors that are relevant to what it means to be young, Black, male and of lower socioeconomic status in the United States. Our findings help to identify modifiable, culturally specific and contextually relevant factors that relate to CVD risk factors among young Black men. Such work is crucial to inform interventions, primary prevention efforts, policies, and social-structural changes to thwart the development of CVD and advanced disease stages.

From Capitalist Aspirations to the National Project. The Inter-Imperial Transylvanian Compromise

In the present article, I address two novelistic productions set in late 19th century and early 20th century Transylvania, discussing the different intersections of class, ethnicity, and culture underlying the constructed image of Empire in the periphery. Drawing on Manuela Boatcă and Anca Pârvulescu’s work on Transylvanian inter-imperiality – borrowed, in turn, from Laura Doyle –, the paper discusses Ioan Slavici’s Mara and Liviu Rebreanu’s Forest of the Hanged as stages of imperial downfall. The main argument is that, whereas Mara and other similar works present the interclass and interethnic conflict as negotiable compromise functioning as narrative momentum for the novelistic plot, the compromise comes undone in Forest of the Hanged, where the capitalist aspirations of the former work is put aside in the forging of national identity.

Tapestries of Epistemologies: Intersectional and Transnational Feminist Understandings of Caribbean and African Women Faculty’s Influence as Researchers

In this article, the authors explore how their intersectional identities as Black immigrant/immigrant descendent women academics inform their research epistemologies in relation to who they are, what they research, and how they perform research. Through the intersections of race, migration, gender, and class they explore four key themes: (1) crossing borders (2) body as text (3) living with and between the contradictions and (4) working in community as researchers.

Power, Belonging, and Respectability

Power, Belonging, and Respectability

H16: The complex history of the motivations behind skin lightening: an intersection of sex, class, race and colonialism

H16: The complex history of the motivations behind skin lightening: an intersection of sex, class, race and colonialism

Cultural Hybridity, Discordant Relationships, and Critical Perspectives

Cultural Hybridity, Discordant Relationships, and Critical Perspectives

Raced to Death in 1920s Hawai‘i: Injustice and Revenge in the Fukunaga Case

Raced to Death in 1920s Hawai‘i: Injustice and Revenge in the Fukunaga Case

Alone in Paradise: Exploring the Intersections of Gender, Ethnicity, Single Motherhood, Social Class, and Immigration

There is a paucity of research that is centred on cross-cultural transitioning for single mothers who immigrate to Canada. Focusing on the intersections of gender, ethnicity, social class, single motherhood, and immigration increases the understanding of challenges affecting single, immigrant mothers. As part of a qualitative description study, we examined the complex experiences of immigrant women who had navigated cross-cultural transitions and single motherhood through the lens of their intersecting cultural identities and social locations. Purposeful sampling was used to recruit single, immigrant mothers from multiple counselling agencies in a western Canadian city. Content analysis of six semi-structured interviews elucidated the women’s experience experiences of gender and mothering discourses within various social contexts, the impact of intersectionality on their acculturation processes in Canada, their relationships with their children, and the challenges of economic and psychosocial acculturation. One overarching theme that was related to the contrasts between the women’s former world and new world formed a lens through which they made meaning of their lived experiences. Implications for counselling and social services are provided.

Placing the Dalit Women at the Intersections: A Sociological Study of Dom Women of Kolkata

This article uses Crenshaw’s ( Standford Law Review, 1989, vol. 43, pp. 1241–1299) concept of intersectionality to understand the everyday experiences at the workplace of the lower-caste Dalit women belonging to the manual scavenging community (Dom community) of Kolkata, West Bengal. This article tries to map out and understand the concept of intersectionality by placing the Dalit women at the intersections of caste, class, and gender oppression and see how these structures play out in her everyday life. This article will attempt to place the experiences of the Dalit women vis-à-vis their male and upper-caste lower-class female counterparts to understand how their experiences are similar or different from them. This article is based on the narratives collected through interviews and tries to explore how lying at the intersections produces everyday instances of violence and humiliation for Dalit women. This article highlights how structures of oppression often overlap in various ways to produce our everyday lives.

“You can call me Susan!” Doing gendered class work in luxury service encounters

PurposeWith a focus on service encounters in the luxury segment of hospitality and tourism, the authors analyse how inherent social class distinctions and status differences are (re-)produced and which role gender plays in this process of “doing class”.Design/methodology/approachThe authors combine concepts of class work and inequality regimes with a focus on intersections of class and gender. The empirical study is based on interviews in Germany with first-class flight attendants, five-star hotel employees, and luxury customers on how they perceive and legitimize luxury services, working conditions and status differences.FindingsThe authors identify perceptions and practices of status enhancement and status dissonance among luxury service workers, as well as gender practices and meanings such as specific feminized roles service workers take on. The authors also conceptualize these intersecting patterns of inequality reproduction as “gendered class work”.Originality/valueThe study broadens empirical accounts of labour relations in the service industries. The concept of organizational class work is extended towards worker–customer interactions. With the concept of gendered class work, the authors contribute to research on the intersectionality of class and gender and the reproduction of inequalities.

Intersections of class, lifestyle and politics. New observations from Norway

Although social class was once central to political sociology, it has become increasingly less so; many analysts now believe that one’s class position is less important in determining political attitudes and political party preferences. Simultaneously, more attention has been paid to what might be called the culturalization of politics, as epitomized by the US culture wars and stereotypes like the “latte-drinking liberal.” Here, political attitudes are regarded as primarily structured by people’s lifestyles and broader way of life. But do political preferences have to be explained by either relations of sociomaterial conditions (e.g. class) or cultural orientations (e.g. status and lifestyles)? In this article, we argue in favor of an approach that aims to reconcile these factors, allowing for the empirical mapping of whether and how they intersect in shaping political party preferences. We investigate this by using detailed Norwegian survey data to measure the extent to which intraclass heterogeneity in political party choices can be accounted for by the interaction between class and lifestyle. We employ a novel combination of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) and Chi-Squared Automatic Interaction Detection (CHAID). In drawing on constructed models of the social space and the space of lifestyles, we show that there are important correspondences between these spaces and that their interaction may help account for party choices. The results highlight the need for a more complex account than that suggested in recent works of cultural stratification research.

Whose rights? Intersections of class, race, and gender in Sara Burgerhart (1782) and The wrongs of woman (1798)

Whose rights? Intersections of class, race, and gender in Sara Burgerhart (1782) and The wrongs of woman (1798)

The Inequality of Intersectionalities in Chicago’s First-Wave Women’s Movement

The women’s movement wing of the Progressive Era—the wave of widespread activism spanning the 1890s to the 1920s—was defined by two important but often conflicting dynamics. The movement was built around coalitions, with women collaborating across organizations to advocate for multiple reforms, including those related to gender, class, immigration, and race. At the same time, there were deep divisions and debates among women from different backgrounds, leading to conflict and mistrust within the movement. This article uses network and text analyses methods to reexamine the intersections of race, class, gender, and ethnicity in first-wave feminist organizations in Chicago during the Progressive Era, from 1860 to 1920. Using intersectionality as a theoretical lens, the article takes a bird’s-eye view of organizational connections and discourse across this movement. By comparing three different identities that intersected with gender—class, ethnicity, and race—I reexamine both collaboration and conflict within Chicago’s first-wave movement by mapping the precise empirical contours of intersectionality within it. I find that class and ethnicity were both an organizational core and a persistent public focus of the movement. While the intersection of race and gender was also an important aspect of this movement, race was never fully integrated into the movement to the extent that class and ethnicity were. In other words, Chicago’s first-wave women’s movement was foundationally intersectional, but not all of its intersections were treated equally in the core of the movement. This analysis lends fresh empirical evidence to historians’ observations of both coalition and conflict within first-wave feminist organizations. As the women’s movement continues to grapple with anti-Black racism, we can reflect on the inequality of intersectionality during the first wave to inform and frame our attention to intersectionality today.