‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

The concept of hegemonic masculinity has influenced gender studies across many academic fields but has also attracted serious criticism. The authors trace the origin of the concept in a convergence of ideas in the early 1980s and map the ways it was applied when research on men and masculinities expanded. Evaluating the principal criticisms, the authors defend the underlying concept of masculinity, which in most research use is neither reified nor essentialist. However, the criticism of trait models of gender and rigid typologies is sound. The treatment of the subject in research on hegemonic masculinity can be improved with the aid of recent psychological models, although limits to discursive flexibility must be recognized. The concept of hegemonic masculinity does not equate to a model of social reproduction; we need to recognize social struggles in which subordinated masculinities influence dominant forms. Finally, the authors review what has been confirmed from early formulations (the idea of multiple...

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Hegemonic Masculinity Rethinking the Concept

This article conceptualizes community cultural wealth as a critical race theory (CRT) challenge to traditional interpretations of cultural capital. CRT shifts the research lens away from a deficit view of Communities of Color as places full of cultural poverty disadvantages, and instead focuses on and learns from the array of cultural knowledge, skills, abilities and contacts possessed by socially marginalized groups that often go unrecognized and unacknowledged. Various forms of capital nurtured through cultural wealth include aspirational, navigational, social, linguistic, familial and resistant capital. These forms of capital draw on the knowledges Students of Color bring with them from their homes and communities into the classroom. This CRT approach to education involves a commitment to develop schools that acknowledge the multiple strengths of Communities of Color in order to serve a larger purpose of struggle toward social and racial justice.

/pdf/whose-culture-has-capital-a-critical-race-theory-discussion-4r42kxnce1.pdf

Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth

Since critics first allegedthat feminism claimed tospeak universally for all
women, feminist researchers havebeen acutely aware ofthe limitations of 
genderas a single analyticalcategory. In fact, feministsare perhaps alone in
the academy in theextent to which theyhave embraced intersectionality – the 
relationshipsamong multiple dimensions andmodalities of social relations
and subject formations – as itselfa central category ofanalysis. One could 
evensay that intersectionality isthe most important theoreticalcontribution 
that women’s studies,in conjunction with relatedfields, has made sofar.1

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/426800

The Complexity of Intersectionality

Black women have long occupied marginal positions in academic settings. I argue that many Black female intellectuals have made creative use of their marginality—their “outsider within” status–to produce Black feminist thought that reflects a special standpoint on self, family, and society. I describe and explore the sociological significance of three characteristic themes in such thought: (1) Black women's self-definition and self-valuation; (2) the interlocking nature of oppression; and (3) the importance of Afro-American women's culture. After considering how Black women might draw upon these key themes as outsiders within to generate a distinctive standpoint on existing sociological paradigms, I conclude by suggesting that other sociologists would also benefit by placing greater trust in the creative potential of their own personal and cultural biographies.

Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought

Affirmations of Freedom Angela Y. Davis (bio) Karl Marx's insistence that "the weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses,"1 clearly applies to the role of Ruth Wilson Gilmore's theoretical interventions in promoting the entrance of antiprison and antipolice abolitionist ideas into mainstream discourse. During a crucial moment of the COVID-19 pandemic, defined, in part, by the May 2020 uprising, radical critiques of structural racism—including in health care, carceral institutions, policing, and other putative state guarantors of public security—began to be taken seriously for the first time in our memories. While the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor served as the catalyst for a collective prise de conscience expressed in massive demonstrations, the important historical provocations leading to the largest public protests ever to occur in the US (and which quickly spread to other countries) were related to consistent abolitionist organizing as well as the circulation of scholarly and popular ideas in what has now come to be called the era of Black Lives Matter. Gilmore's contributions to abolitionist practices of organizing and theorizing have offered us conceptual and practicable alternatives to prevailing carceral approaches to public safety that require us to understand and transform the larger economic, political, and social contexts. Her work always urges people to contextualize immediate problems within larger frameworks that compel us to think about the work of the state. In these lectures and articles written over the last two decades and now brought together under the rubric Abolition Geography: Essays toward Liberation, we witness the development of Gilmore's ideas as we are introduced to some of the organizers, scholars, and artists who have influenced them, and we see some of the ways they have unfolded dialectically in relation to antiprison (and antipolice) praxis. From the women who are the driving force of the LA organization Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (Mothers ROC) to thinkers like Stuart Hall and David Harvey, to musicians like Ornette Coleman and his theory of harmolodics, we witness the unique ways in which theorists, activists, and artists help her to enter and transform theories and methods grounded in geography into a material force with revolutionary potential. [End Page 391] One aspect of Gilmore's work that I most appreciate is her refusal to capitulate to those anti-intellectual tendencies sometimes expressed within radical social movements, often calling for substantially dumbed-down versions of complicated ideas as the only way to ensure mass engagement. Relatedly, she also rejects the notion that effective analysis necessarily involves increasing levels of simplification, thus rendering problematic the assumption that "academic" approaches necessarily entail difficulties that are definitely beyond the grasp of those who are not in possession of the methods, techniques, and terms embraced by academic disciplines and fields. She relentlessly argues for holding on to complicated ideas as she translates them into terms that are recognizable and knowable by those who do not necessarily have the same formal preparation. If complexity is not intellectually embraced—by professional thinkers and organic intellectuals alike—the very possibility of revolutionary transformation is foreclosed. Given the public circulation of simplistic and thus easily dismissible notions of abolition, especially during and in the aftermath of the summer 2020 uprisings, it is important to emphasize, as Gilmore does, that the dismantling implied in the concept of abolition is inexorably, and indeed also dialectically, linked to the creation of something new and more effective than that which was disestablished. In attempting to counter the partial and thus entirely misleading assumptions that have been attached to ideas of defunding the police and abolishing prisons, we have been greatly assisted by her call for increased attention to the new "presence" abolition implies rather than focusing exclusively on the "absence" that is denoted by the term. The complexity on which she insists moves us away from commonsense notions as well as disciplinary approaches that embrace the idea that such institutions as police, courts, bail bond, jails, and prisons can be effectively analyzed in isolation from other institutional and ideological... 

Angela Davis

Papers

Affirmations of Freedom