Showing papers on "Intersectionality published in 1998"

It's All In the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation

Abstract: Intersectionality has attracted substantial scholarly attention in the 1990s. Rather than examining gender, race, class, and nation as distinctive social hierarchies, intersectionality examines how they mutually construct one another. I explore how the traditional family ideal functions as a privileged exemplar of intersectionality in the United States. Each of its six dimensions demonstrates specific connections between family as a gendered system of social organization, racial ideas and practices, and constructions of U.S. national identity. When former vice president Dan Quayle used the term family values near the end of a speech at a political fundraiser in 1992, he apparently touched a national nerve. Following Quayle's speech, close to three hundred articles using the term family values in their titles appeared in the popular press. Despite the range of political perspectives expressed on "family values," one thing remained clear-"family values," however defined, seemed central to national well-being. The term family values constituted a touchstone, a phrase that apparently tapped much deeper feelings about the significance of ideas of family, if not actual families themselves, in the United States. Situated in the center of "family values" debates is an imagined traditional family ideal. Formed through a combination of marital and blood ties, ideal families consist of heterosexual couples that produce their own biological children. Such families have a specific authority structure; namely, a fatherhead earning an adequate family wage, a stay-at-home wife, and children. Those who idealize the traditional family as a private haven from a public world see family as held together by primary emotional bonds of love and caring. Assuming a relatively fixed sexual division of labor, wherein women's roles are defined as primarily in the home and men's in the public world of work, the traditional family ideal also assumes the separation of work and

Child Development: Intersectionality of Race, Gender, Class, and Culture

Abstract: Summary This paper presents a theory of child development which integrates race, class, gender and culture as central factors that structure this development in fundamental ways. Human development evolves within the context of our social roles, which are fundamentally organized and bounded by our position within the class, gender, racial and cultural structure of society. This theory can be used to assess a child's maturity and to guide clinical intervention. Traditional theories of child development have overfocused on discrete tasks and stages in the evolution of a self-defined primarily by a child's level of achievement and autonomy. By contrast, our theory defines maturity by our ability to live in respectful relation to others and to our complex and multifaceted world (Almeida, Woods, Messineo, & Font, 1998). Maturity in this conceptualization requires the ability to communicate (trust), collaborate (interdependence), respect (tolerance as in acceptance of “other”) others who are different, and negot...

Transformations of Gender and Race: Family and Developmental Perspectives

Abstract: Contents Foreword * The Dislocation of Women's Experience in Family Therapy * Child Development: Intersectionality of Race, Gender, Class, and Culture * Evolving Constructs of Masculinity: Interviews with Andres Nazario, Jr., William Doherty, and Roberto Font: Commentary * Traditional Norms of Masculitnity * Finding the Words: Instruments for a Therapy of Liberation * Dialogue: Transformations of Race and Gender * INTERVIEW * An Interview with Lillian Comas-Diaz, PhD * Index

Her body her own worst enemy”: The medicalization of violence against women

Abstract: From the 1960s, when women began working together to end gender-based violence, to well into the twenty-first century, attitudes and practices have shifted in important ways, yet this social justice project is far from complete. While feminist resistance has gone public in unprecedented ways, institutional responses often lag far behind. This chapter focuses on medical contexts, arguing that gendered violence, a neglected topic in bioethics, constitutes an important issue for the field, one urgently in need of intersectional feminist bioethical analysis. Moreover, the chapter argues that this analysis requires intersectionality, such as including transgendered women and genderqueer people in the focus, while addressing race, class, disability, and other vectors of oppression. Complex inegalitarian dynamics persist as pervasive factors in healthcare, compounding the harms of violence itself when treatment is sought. Mainstream medicine often treats the symptoms of violence while ignoring or obscuring the causes. However, a feminist analysis provides guidance based on the tenets and practices of movements against gendered violence. Medical providers have a distinctive opportunity to intervene in the crisis of gendered violence, and movement-based principles point the way to equitable and effective medical responses.