In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She not only provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde, but she shows the importance of self-defined knowledge for group empowerment. In the tenth anniversary edition of this award-winning work, Patricia Hill Collins expands the basic arguments of the first edition by adding (...) several important new themes. A new discussion of heterosexism as a system of power, an expanded treatment of images of Black womanhood, U.S. Black feminism's connections to Black Diasporic feminisms, and more attention to the importance of social class and nationalism all appear in the new edition. In addition, the new edition includes recent developments in black cultural studies, especially black popular culture, as well as recent events and trends such as the Anita Hill hearings and the backlash against affirmative action. (shrink)

Where society is viewed as an association of equal and autonomous persons, the work of caring for dependents, "love's labors", figure neither in political ...

The author uses census data to assess the consequences of two alternative theoretical formulations of care work for understanding the intersections of gender, race, and economic inequalities in paid care. The nurturance conceptualization focuses on care as relationship while the reproductive labor framework includes both relational and nonrelational jobs that maintain and reproduce the labor force. An empirical application of both models to the labor market shows that placing increasing theoretical emphasis on nurturant care privileges the experiences of white women (...) and excludes large numbers of very-low-wage workers from consideration. (shrink)

Advocates of culture-change management suggest that the right sort of managerial philosophy can transform nursing homes from impersonal institutions into safe, caring communities. However, participant observation carried out at Heartland Community, a nonprofit culture-change nursing home, suggests that culture change founders on the structural problem of inadequate staffing. Resource limitations imposed by Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement rates mean that even nonprofit facilities desiring to maximize staffing cannot afford to hire enough staff to live up to basic care standards. Thus, above-average (...) staffing notwithstanding, Heartland's nursing aides could not complete their work on time without compromising the quality of care by breaking important care rules. Resource limitations also forced management to adopt a series of punitive personnel policies that actively undercut the rhetoric and aims of culture change, turning culture change into a rhetorical device for shifting blame for care problems fromstructural resource limitations onto the attitudes of nursing aides. (shrink)