In this article we ask what it means for sociologists to practice intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological approach to inequality. What are the implications for choices of subject matter and style of work? We distinguish three styles of understanding intersectionality in practice: group-centered, process-centered, and system-centered. The first, emphasizes placing multiply-marginalized groups and their perspectives at the center of the research. The second, intersectionality as a process, highlights power as relational, seeing the interactions among variables as multiplying oppressions at (...) various points of intersection, and drawing attention to unmarked groups. Finally, seeing intersectionality as shaping the entire social system pushes analysis away from associating specific inequalities with unique institutions, instead looking for processes that are fully interactive, historically co-determining, and complex. Using several examples of recent, highly regarded qualitative studies, we draw attention to the comparative, contextual, and complex dimensions of sociological analysis that can be missing even when race, class, and gender are explicitly brought together. (shrink)

Ideas about community are especially prominent in late-twentieth-century U.S. society. The term community resonates throughout social policy, scholarship, popular culture, and every day social interactions. It holds significance for different populations with competing political agendas (e.g., political groups of the right and the left invoke ideas of community yet have very different ideas in mind). No longer seen as naturally occurring, apolitical spaces to which one retreats to escape the pressures of modern life, communities of all sorts now constitute sites (...) of political engagement and contestation. The new politics of community reveals how the idea of community constitutes an elastic political construct that holds a variety of contradictory mean ings and around which diverse social practices occur. In this address, I analyze how refraining the idea of community as a political construct might provide new avenues for investigating social inequalities. I first explore the utility of community as a political construct for rethinking both intersecting systems of power and activities that are routinely characterized as "political." Next, by examining five contemporary sites where community is either visibly named as a political construct or implicated in significant political phenomena, I investigate how the construct of community operates within contemporary power relations of class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age, ability, nation, and race. Finally, I explore the potential intellectual and political significance of these developments. (shrink)