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Delores P. Aldridge has served as the Grace Towns Hamilton Professor of Sociology and African American Studies since 1990 at Emory University. Her career has focused on racial, ethnic, gender, family, and educational issues. She provided the seminal work on Black Women and the Labor Market in the Journal of Social and Behavioral Sciences (1975). For her scholarly contributions and social activism in and beyond the academy, she has received countless awards including the Cox, Johnson, Frazier Lifetime Achievement Award, the American Sociological Association(2010); Charles S. Johnson Award for Professional and Scholarly Achievement on Race and the South, the Southern Sociological Society (2006); and, the W. E. B. Du Bois Award (distinguished scholar, social activist, humanitarian), the Association of Social and Behavioral Sciences (1986).

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.

Purpose – Using a framework of intersectionality, this chapter makes visible the realities of women of color who try to form relationships through the use of personal advertising.Methodological/approach – A discursive analysis of race and social class in personal ads using Phrase Tokens, and in-depth interviews with 14 women of color who participated in various forms of personal advertising, present the synergism of race and racism, sex and sexism, and sexuality and heteronormativity, and how these systems continue to pervade interpersonal relations.Finding – Patterns found in both texts and narratives illustrate how establishing relationships among women who are members of heterogeneous collectivities continues to be located in systems of inequality. These data also illustrate how ad placers are unique individuals whose markers of race, class, gender, and sex identity, produce commonalities, yet how their narratives reflect diverse goals, experiences, and responses to those experiences. Women of color convey how personal advertising remains rooted in modern society where people choose their individual affiliations and continue to be defined by their group affiliations.Originality/value of chapter – Though the structural factors and social processes involved in personal advertising are relevant to the formation of interpersonal and social relationships, the phenomenon of personal advertising as a form of courtship has received relatively little attention by sociologists. In rethinking the intersections of race, gender, and social class in personal advertising this chapter includes participants’ voices to more fully understand the motivations for personal advertising, how women ‘do’ identity, and how they experience personal advertising.

This study aims to further investigate the relationship between perceived adherence to gender norms and binge drinking in college students. Thus, researchers examined college students’ perceptions of adherence to masculine and feminine gender norms when gender and alcohol consumption of a vignette character were manipulated.

Undergraduate participants (N = 368) were randomly assigned to one of four vignette conditions: female moderate drinker, female binge drinker, male moderate drinker, male binge drinker and then surveyed regarding perceptions of the vignette character.

The results of this study indicate that there are significant relationships between the vignette character’s alcohol consumption and perceived adherence to feminine gender norms. The character’s gender, as well as the participant’s own alcohol consumption patterns, also related to perceived adherence to feminine gender norms.

College students’ perceptions of binge drinkers are influenced by gender norms, which has important implications for safe consumption of alcohol. When young men (or young women) are encouraged to drink to avoid appearing too feminine, negative consequences may be more likely. In this study, perceptions of the vignette character’s safety were also found to be related to alcohol consumption of the vignette character, as well as the alcohol consumption of the participant, suggesting that a heavy drinker might not show as much concern for another’s heavy consumption.