The central argument of this article is twofold. First, contemporary feminist gender theory, particularly as it has been used by feminist sociologists in recent years, has been misinterpreted by sexual difference theory in ways that may prevent scholars from fully appreciating current feminist work in the social sciences. Second, gender theory and sexual difference theory rely on different conceptualizations of fundamental concepts in feminist theory, including notions of “gender,”“sexuality,” and “symbolic.” An analysis of three key texts that critique the turn (...) to “gender” in favor of an allegorical notion of “sexual difference” suggests that feminist gender theory is a more useful perspective for feminist theory and research. The article concludes that gender theory allows feminist scholars to ask a wider range of empirical questions that are more readily of use for political action than does a sexual difference paradigm. (shrink)

Research in the area of inequality has not been accompanied by the development of inclusive theory. Despite a growing knowledge base, we are lacking a comparably strong understanding of how gender, race, and class operate simultaneously. In part because of specialization within the discipline, sociologists' call for the analysis of gender, race, and class is largely rhetorical. Any effort to remedy these limitations requires a return to fundamental assumptions. Especially important in this regard is that researchers explore mechanisms that produce (...) inequalities and then integrate these insights into a more comprehensive and dynamic theoretical frame. To this end, the author develops and offers a theory of inequality processes based on two central claims: embeddedness and social relations. By reconceptualizing gender, race, and class inequality as a set of embedded processes that exist only in relationship to each other, avenues for development in sociological theory, research, and practice become more apparent. (shrink)

Using an interactionist approach, this study compares the ways that older preadolescents established and negotiated peer relations by engaging in racialized and gendered age processes at two summer day camps. The camps differed in their racial compositions, their organization of activities by age and gender, and their rules delineating camper behavior. Campers in both settings used notions of modesty and relations of dominance over younger children similarly in organizing their peer relations. They differed, though, in how they used a stance (...) uncooperative toward adults and a stance of being “just kids” together to create racialized, aged, and gendered boundaries. Thus, campers created peer cultures with variably hierarchical cliques using inclusive and exclusionary dynamics that held each other accountable to emergent and racialized conceptions of gender and age in ways that actively and creatively used the adult cultures around them. (shrink)

This article offers a discursive and ethnomethodological approach to analysing the interplay between class, discourse and talk. Drawing on feminist and sociological work that foregrounds the cultural dimensions of class, this article moves beyond the cultural approach by using the insights of discursive psychology and ethnomethodology. Conceptualising class as a ‘doing’, this article analyses empirical examples that emerged from a qualitative study on young women's relationships with feminism. Providing a novel theoretical framework, but also a close, empirically grounded analysis, the (...) article argues that a discursive and ethnomethodological approach can offer useful insights to the study of class in general, and the cultural approach in particular. (shrink)

Building on more than two decades offeminist analysis of the family, this article takes a neoinstitutionalist approach to examine some of the ways that sex, gender, and sexual orientation intersect in lesbianheaded two-parent families, affecting how they construct their roles as mothers. Institutionalist theory tends to de-emphasize how actors deliberately construct social arrangements such as parenting roles within the family. The authors' analysis of interviews from 14 lesbian mothers remedies this deficiency by focusing both on how they draw upon and (...) transform institutionalized scripts, practices, and understandings of family roles and relations. Their findings reveal how these mothers reinscribed gendered understandings while simultaneously challenging heteronormative ones in their efforts to construct and maintain socially viable two-parent families. (shrink)

In feminist and cultural studies, there is a growing body of work concerned with how people’s lives are subjected to multiple, intersecting axes of differentiation and power. There is growing concern that we seem unable to address more than one difference at a time, thus failing to interrogate enactments of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in science, technology, and medicine. This article aims to contribute to the effort to conceptualize the making of and interactions between differences. It explores how (...) differences such as disability, gender, and class are made and unmade in sociotechnical practices. It shows that interactions between enactments of differences are complex, contradictory, unpredictable, and surprising and defy simple conclusions about effects and politics. These patterns of interference need to be investigated in situated practices, and we have to examine carefully how processes of differentiation interact to support and reinforce but also to challenge and undermine each other. (shrink)