Intersectional insights and frameworks are put into practice in a multitude of highly contested, complex, and unpredictable ways. We group such engagements with intersectionality into three loosely defined sets of practices: applications of an intersectional framework or investigations of intersectional dynamics; debates about the scope and content of intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological paradigm; and political interventions employing an intersectional lens. We propose a template for fusing these three levels of engagement with intersectionality into a field of intersectional studies that emphasizes collaboration and literacy rather than unity. Our objective here is not to offer pat resolutions to all questions about intersectional approaches but to spark further inquiry into the dynamics of intersectionality both as an academic frame and as a practical intervention in a world characterized by extreme inequalities. At the same time, we wish to zero in on some issues that we believ...

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Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis

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The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class

The condition of the working class in England.

Power And Powerlessness Quiescence And Rebellion In An Appalachian Valley

The purpose of this study is to examine the Chinese confrontation, on the Pacific Coast, as it was experienced and rationalized by the white majority. For reasons which will be evident in what follows, the main body of the work (chapters 3 through 11) will focus on the Democratic party and the labor movement of California through the forty-year period after the Civil War. The two opening chapters turn back to explore aspects of the Jacksonian background which appear crucial to an understanding of what occurred in California. The final chapter looks beyond the turn of the century to trace certain results of the sequence of events in the West for the labor movement as a whole, and to suggest the influence of those events upon the crystallization of an American concept of national identity.

The Indispensable Enemy Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California.

The history of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) in Oakland and San Jose, California, over nearly three decades provides a vivid illustration of social movement intersectionality in action and illuminates the relationships that link social theory to social movements. Serving the interests and aspirations of low-wage immigrant women workers with limited English-language skills, AIWA confronts diffuse and differential forms of interlocking oppression and deploys intersectionality to help activists change multiple states of subordinated voicelessness and devaluation into an empowered sense of self-representation and self-activity. For AIWA, an intersectional optic on social movement struggles creates insurgent identities that are dynamic and dialogic, more fluid and flexible than single-axis approaches. AIWA does not embrace intersectionality simply because its members have been wounded by racism, sexism, imperialism, class exploitation, and language discrimination but because each realm of thes...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669575

Intersectionality as a Social Movement Strategy: Asian Immigrant Women Advocates

Excerpt] What might the striking convergence in the trajectories of the South Korean and US labor movements mean for the dynamics of change taking place for labor on a global scale? To what extent does the embrace of marginalized groups of workers such as immigrants and women by previously exclusionary labor movements signal the development of more inclusive and democratic forms of labor politics? How can workers subject to overlapping forms of social, economic, and political marginality actually transform the unequal relations of power and domination that underpin downgraded forms of employment? The answers to these questions constitute the heart of this book What unfolds is a story about a sea change in the dynamics of labor politics and organization South Korea and the United States have two different paths of industrial development, histories of class formation, and positions in the larger world economic system, yet both labor movements are experiencing profound shifts in who the "working class" is and how to build collective power under processes of globalization

Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States

Organizing at the Margins

Low-wage, nonstandard service work is an expanding sector of employment in today’s global economy Although scholars document its effects on increasing poverty and inequality, few studies examine how peripherally employed workers respond to the erosion of their living and working conditions under new forms of employment-centered poverty Through comparative ethno-graphic case studies of university janitors in South Korea and the United States, the author analyzes how one group of low-wage, nonstandard service workers is transforming their structural marginality into new sources of moral and material leverage The author argues that unions are staging public dramas that redefine a particular labor dispute into broader violations over justice Two factors are key to this process: cultivating associational power and symbolic leverage

Public Dramas and the Politics of Justice Comparison of Janitors’ Union Struggles in South Korea and the United States

Irregular employment (bij[ocheck]nggyujik) has become the dominant form of employment in South Korea, with upwards of 70% of women employed in this sector. This transformation has not only affected the demographics of the labour market, but it has also fundamentally reshaped how unions can organise workers and build collective power. In particular, irregular workers are faced with a state of legal liminality in which workers are neither fully protected by nor fully denied the rights of formal employment, resulting in classification struggles over the terms and conditions of irregular employment. Drawing from recent cases, this paper discusses the limits of masculinised forms of labour militancy and the prospects for developing more inclusive forms of unionism across gender and employment status. Interrogating how workers and their collective organisations are challenging the ‘legal liminality’ associated with downgraded forms of irregular employment is crucial for understanding the new dynamics o...

Jennifer Jihye Chun

Papers

Intersectionality as a Social Movement Strategy: Asian Immigrant Women Advocates

Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States

Organizing at the Margins

Public Dramas and the Politics of Justice Comparison of Janitors’ Union Struggles in South Korea and the United States

Legal Liminality: the gender and labour politics of organising South Korea's irregular workforce