Introduction: Intersectional Dynamics of Gender, Family, and Work

Abstract

Analyses focusing on the intersecting forces of race, class, and gender have been around much longer than theorists in the traditions of social science and the humanities have acknowledged. As early as the 19th century, Sojourner Truth and Anna Julia Cooper began to voice many of the sentiments that continue to shape the discourse around race, gender, and class that is occurring in this new millennium. They anticipated today's debate over the inadequacy of reliance on single categories of race, gender, or even class, to capture the complexities of lived experience (Lemert & Bahn, 1998; Painter, 1990). Their awareness of the importance of the intersection between race, gender, and class made their spoken perspectives on gender inequality unique at a time when the “cult of true womanhood” reigned supreme. Despite this fact, much of the literature utilizing this intersectional framework of analysis emerged just after the Civil Rights and Women's Liberation movements of the 1960s. Memorable pioneers of this paradigm of analysis are Angela Davis’ Women, Race & Class (1981), Audre Lorde's Sister-Outsider (1984), and Paula Giddings’ When and Where I Enter (1984). These crucial texts and speeches call for us to be mindful of the intersections of experience that are instrumental in the formation and maintenance of families and that are so often ignored in discursive theory and research, which treats race, gender, and class, sexuality, etc. as mutually exclusive social forces.

Citation

Kohlman, M.H. and Krieg, D.B. (2013), "Introduction: Intersectional Dynamics of Gender, Family, and Work", Kohlman, M.H., Krieg, D.B. and Dickerson, B.J. (Ed.) Notions of Family: Intersectional Perspectives (Advances in Gender Research, Vol. 17), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. ix-xxv. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1529-2126(2013)0000017003