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)

The contemporary Women’s Movement has generated major new theories of the social construction of gender and male power. The feminist attack on the masculinist assumptions of cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and most of the other academic disciplines has raised questions about some basic assumptions of those fields. For example, feminist economists have questioned the public/private split of much of mainstream economics, that ignores the social necessity of women’s unpaid housework and childcare. Feminist psychologists have challenged cognitive and psychoanalytic categories of human (...) moral and gender development arguing that they are biased toward the development of male children rather than female children. Feminist anthropologists have argued that sex/gender systems, based on the male exchange of women in marriage, have socially produced gender differences in sexuality and parenting skills which have perpetuated different historical and cultural forms of male dominance. Feminist philosophers and theorists have suggested that we must reject the idea of a gender-free epistemological standpoint from which to understand the world. Finally radical feminists have argued that the liberal state permits a pornography industry that sexually objectifies women, thus legitimizing male violence against women. (shrink)