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GENDER THROUGH THE PRISM OF DIFFERENCE

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GENDER THROUGH THE PRISM OF DIFFERENCE

S I X T H E D I T I O N

e d i t e d b y

N E W Y O R K O X F O R D

O X F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

Maxine Baca Zinn m i c h i g a n s t a t e u n i v e r s i t y

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo u n i v e r s i t y o f s o u t h e r n c a l i f o r n i a

Michael A. Messner u n i v e r s i t y o f s o u t h e r n c a l i f o r n i a

Stephanie J. Nawyn m i c h i g a n s t a t e u n i v e r s i t y

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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Zinn, Maxine Baca, 1942– editor. | Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette, editor. | Messner, Michael A., editor. | Nawyn, Stephanie J., editor. Title: Gender through the prism of difference / edited by Maxine Baca Zinn, Michigan State University, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, University of Southern California, Michael A. Messner, University of Southern, California, Stephanie J. Nawyn, Michigan State University. Description: Sixth Edition. | New York : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Revised edition of Gender through the prism of difference, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2019009447| ISBN 9780190948559 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780190948566 (e-book) Subjects:  LCSH: Sex role. Classification: LCC HQ1075 .G4666 2019 | DDC 305.3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009447

Printing number: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed by LSC Communications, Inc., United States of America

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W e d e d i c a t e t h i s e d i t i o n t o A m y D e n i s s e n , w h o s e l e g a c y c o n t i n u e s t h r o u g h h e r s c h o l a r s h i p a n d t h e l o v e o f h e r

f a m i l y   a n d f r i e n d s .

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v i i

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p r e f a c e x i i i a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s x v i n t r o d u c t i o n : Sex and Gender through the Prism of Difference 1

*Denotes a reading new to this edition.

PA R T I P E R S P E C T I V E S O N S E X , G E N D E R , A N D D I F F E R E N C E 13

1. Anne Fausto-Sterling, The Five Sexes, Revisited 1 7

2. Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill, Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism 2 2

*3. Stephanie A. Shields, Gender: An Intersectionality Perspective 2 9

4. Raewyn W. Connell, Masculinities and Globalization 3 7

*5. Bandana Purkayastha, Intersectionality in a Transnational World 50

PA R T I I B O D I E S 57

6. Laurel Westbrook and Kristen Schilt, Doing Gender, Determining Gender: Transgender People, Gender Panics, and the Maintenance of the Sex/Gender/ Sexuality System 61

*7. Georgiann Davis, Medical Jurisdiction and the Intersex Body 7 7

CONTENTS

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c o n t e n t s

8. Betsy Lucal, What It Means to Be Gendered Me: Life on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous Gender System 9 2

9. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Yearning for Lightness: Transnational Circuits in the Marketing and Consumption of Skin Lighteners 102

*10 . Heidi Safia Mirza, “A Second Skin”: Embodied Intersectionality, Transnationalism, and Narratives of Identity and Belonging among Muslim Women in Britain 11 7

PA R T I I I . S E X U A L I T I E S A N D D E S I R E S 131

11. Rashawn Ray and Jason A. Rosow, Getting Off and Getting Intimate: How Normative Institutional Arrangements Structure Black and White Fraternity Men’s Approaches toward Women 1 3 3

*12. Karen Pyke, An Intersectional Approach to Resistance and Complicity: The Case of Racialised Desire among Asian American Women 1 50

13. Jane Ward, Dude-Sex: White Masculinities and “Authentic” Heterosexuality among Dudes Who Have Sex with Dudes 1 6 0

*14. Hector Carrillo and Jorge Fontdevila, Border Crossings and Shifting Sexualities among Mexican Gay Immigrant Men: Beyond Monolithic Conceptions 1 7 2

15. Kirsty Liddiard, The Work of Disabled Identities in Intimate Relationships 1 8 4

PA R T I V. I D E N T I T I E S 193

16. B. Deutsch, The Male Privilege Checklist: An Unabashed Imitation of an Article by Peggy McIntosh 1 9 5

17. Audre Lorde, Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference 1 9 8

18. Tristan Bridges and C. J. Pascoe, Hybrid Masculinities: New Directions in the Sociology of Men and Masculinities 20 4

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Contents

19. Sanyu A. Mojola, Providing Women, Kept Men: Doing Masculinity in the Wake of the African HIV/AIDS Pandemic 21 7

*20. Joelle Ruby Ryan, From Transgender to Trans*: The Ongoing Struggle for Inclusion, Acceptance, and Celebration of Identities beyond the Binary 2 31

*21. Aída Hurtado and Minal Sinha, More Than Men: Latino Feminist Masculinities and Intersectionality 2 41

PA R T V. F A M I L I E S 253

22 Patricia Hill Collins, The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black Mother–Daughter Relationships 2 5 7

23. Lisa J. Udel, Revision and Resistance: The Politics of Native Women’s Motherwork 2 6 8

*24. Roberta Espinoza, The Good Daughter Dilemma: Latinas Managing Family and School Demands 2 8 2

25. Stephanie Coontz, Why Gender Equality Stalled 2 9 2 26. Michael A. Messner and Suzel Bozada-Deas, Separating

the Men from the Moms: The Making of Adult Gender Segregation in Youth Sports 2 9 6

27. Kathryn Edin, What Do Low-Income Single Mothers Say about Marriage? 310

*28. Nicole Civettini, Housework as Non-Normative Gender Display among Lesbians and Gay Men 3 2 8

*29. Emir Estrada and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Intersectional Dignities: Latino Immigrant Street Vendor Youth in Los Angeles 3 4 4

PA R T V I . C O N S T R U C T I N G G E N D E R I N T H E W O R K P L A C E A N D T H E L A B O R M A R K E T 361

30. Christine L. Williams, The Glass Escalator, Revisited: Gender Inequality in Neoliberal Times, SWS Feminist Lecturer 3 6 5

31. Amy M. Denissen and Abigail C. Saguy, Gendered Homophobia and the Contradictions of Workplace Discrimination for Women in the Building Trades 3 7 8

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c o n t e n t s

32. Adia Harvey Wingfield, The Modern Mammy and the Angry Black Man: African American Professionals’ Experiences with Gendered Racism in the Workplace 3 9 0

33. Miliann Kang, “I Just Put Koreans and Nails Together”: Nail Spas and the Model Minority 4 01

*34. Rebecca Glauber, Race and Gender in Families and at Work: The Fatherhood Wage Premium 41 5

*35. Stephanie J. Nawyn and Linda Gjokaj, The Magnifying Effect of Privilege: Earnings Inequalities at the Intersection of Gender, Race, and Nativity 4 2 8

PA R T V I I . E D U C AT I O N A N D S C H O O L S 443

36. Ann Arnett Ferguson, Naughty by Nature 4 4 5 *37. Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Laura T. Hamilton, and

Elizabeth M. Armstrong, and J. Lotus Seeley, Good Girls: Gender, Social Class, and Slut Discourse on Campus 4 5 3

*38. Dolores Delgado Bernal, Learning and Living Pedagogies of the Home: The Mestiza Consciousness of Chicana Students 4 6 9

PA R T V I I I . V I O L E N C E 483

39. Cecilia Menjívar, A Framework for Examining Violence 4 8 5

40. Victor M. Rios, The Consequences of the Criminal Justice Pipeline on Black and Latino Masculinity 501

*41. Natalie J. Sokoloff and Susan C. Pearce, Intersections, Immigration, and Partner Violence: A View from a New Gateway—Baltimore, Maryland 50 9

*42. Roe Bubar and Pamela Jumper Thurman, Violence against Native Women 51 8

PA R T I X . C H A N G E A N D P O L I T I C S 531

43. Kevin Powell, Confessions of a Recovering Misogynist 5 3 3

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Contents

44. Dorothy Roberts and Sujatha Jesudason, Movement Intersectionality: The Case of Race, Gender, Disability, and Genetic Technologies 5 3 8

*45. Maylei Blackwell, Líderes Campesinas: Nepantla Strategies and Grassroots Organizing at the Intersection of Gender and Globalization 5 51

*46. Sarah Jaffe, The Collective Power of #MeToo 5 7 3

g l o s s a r y 5 7 9 r e f e r e n c e s 5 8 5

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PREFACE

Over the past forty years, texts and readers intended for use in women’s studies and gender studies courses have changed and developed in important ways. In the 1970s and into the early 1980s, many courses and texts focused almost exclusively on women as a relatively undifferentiated category. Two developments have broadened the study of women. First, in response to criticisms by women of color and by lesbians that heterosexual, white, middle-class feminists had tended to “falsely universalize” their own experiences and issues, courses and texts on gender began in the 1980s to systematically incorporate race and class diversity. And simultaneously, as a result of feminist scholars’ insistence that gender be stud- ied as a relational construct, more concrete studies of men and masculinity began to emerge in the 1980s.

This book reflects this belief that race, class, and sexual diversity among women and men should be central to the study of gender. But this collection adds an important new dimension that will broaden the frame of gender studies. By including some articles that are based on research in nations connected to the United States through globalization, tourism, and labor migrations, we hope that Gender through the Prism of Difference will contribute to a transcendence of the often myopic, US-based, and Eurocentric focus on the study of sex and gender. The inclusion of these perspectives is not simply useful for illuminating our own cultural blind spots; it also begins to demonstrate how, early in the twenty-first century, gender relations are increasingly centrally implicated in current pro- cesses of globalization.

N E W T O T H I S E D I T I O N

Because the amount of high-quality research on gender has expanded so dramatically in the past decade, the most difficult task in assembling this collection was deciding what to include. The sixth edition, while retaining the structure of the previous edition, is different and improved. This edition includes nineteen new articles and discusses material on gender

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p r e f a c e

issues relevant to the college-age generation, including several articles on college students as well as the contemporary #MeToo social movement. We have also included articles on trans- gender identities and public policies, additional chapters on Native and Muslim women, policing and incarceration, the intersection of gender and immigration, and gender and dis- abilities. Our focus for selecting chapters is to include readings that cover important topics that are most accessible for students, while keeping the cost of the volume down.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank faculty and staff colleagues in the Department of Sociology and the Gender Studies program at the University of Southern California, and the Department of So- ciology and the Center for Gender in Global Context at Michigan State University for their generous support and assistance. Other people contributed their labor to the development of this book. We are grateful to Amy Holzgang, Cerritos College; Lauren McDonald, California State University Northridge; and Linda Shaw, California State University San Marcos, for their invaluable feedback and advice. We thank Heidi R. Lewis of Colorado College for her contri- butions to the book’s ancillary program, available at www.oup-arc.com/bacazinn.

We acknowledge the helpful criticism and suggestions made by the following reviewers:

Erin K. Anderson, Washington College Kathleen Cole, Metropolitan State University Ted Coleman, California State University, San Bernardino Keri Diggins, Scottsdale Community College Emily Gaarder, University of Minnesota, Duluth Robert B. Jenkot, Coastal Carolina University Amanda Miller, University of Indianapolis Carla Norris-Raynbird, Bemidji State University Katie R. Peel, University of North Carolina Wilmington Jaita Talukdar, Loyola University New Orleans Billy James Ulibarrí, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Kate Webster, DePaul University

We also thank our editor at Oxford University Press, Sherith Pankratz, who has been encouraging, helpful, and patient, and Grace Li for her assistance throughout the process. We also thank Tony Mathias and Jennifer Sperber for their marketing assistance with the book. We also thank Dr. Amy Denissen, whose contributions to the fifth edition of this book laid invaluable groundwork for the current edition.

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a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

Finally, we thank our families for their love and support as we worked on this book. Alan Zinn, Prentice Zinn, Gabrielle Cobbs, and Edan Zinn provide inspiration through their work for progressive social change. Miles Hondagneu-Messner and Sasha Hondagneu-Messner continually challenge the neatness of Mike and Pierrette’s image of social life. Richard Hellinga was always ready to pick up slack on the home front, Henry Nawyn-Hellinga pro- vided encouraging words at the least expected moments, and Zach Nawyn-Hellinga helped Stephanie experience firsthand life on the borders of gender. We do hope that the kind of work that is collected in this book will eventually help them and their generation make sense of the world and move that world into more peaceful, humane, and just directions.

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GENDER THROUGH THE PRISM OF DIFFERENCE

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INTRODUCTION

s e x a n d g e n d e r t h r o u g h t h e p r i s m o f d i f f e r e n c e

“Men can’t cry.” “Women are victims of patriarchal oppression.” “After divorces, single moth- ers are downwardly mobile, often moving into poverty.” “Men don’t do their share of house- work and child care.” “Professional women face barriers such as sexual harassment and a ‘glass ceiling’ that prevent them from competing equally with men for high-status positions and high salaries.” “Heterosexual intercourse is an expression of men’s power over women.” Sometimes, the students in our sociology and gender studies courses balk at these kinds of generalizations. And they are right to do so. After all, some men are more emotionally expres- sive than some women, some women have more power and success than some men, some men do their share—or more—of housework and child care, and some women experience sex with men as both pleasurable and empowering. Indeed, contemporary gender relations are complex and changing in various directions, and as such, we need to be wary of simplistic, if handy, slogans that seem to sum up the essence of relations between women and men.

On the other hand, we think it is a tremendous mistake to conclude that “all individuals are totally unique and different,” and that therefore all generalizations about social groups are impossible or inherently oppressive. In fact, we are convinced that it is this very complexity, this multifaceted nature of contemporary gender relations, that fairly begs for a sociological analysis of gender. In the title of this book, we use the image of “the prism of difference” to illustrate our approach to developing this sociological perspective on contemporary gender relations. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “prism,” in part, as “a homogeneous trans- parent solid, usually with triangular bases and rectangular sides, used to produce or analyze a continuous spectrum.” Imagine a ray of light—which to the naked eye appears to be only one color—refracted through a prism onto a white wall. To the eye, the result is not an infinite, disorganized scatter of individual colors. Rather, the refracted light displays an order, a struc- ture of relationships among the different colors—a rainbow. Similarly, we propose to use the prism of difference in this book to analyze a continuous spectrum of people to show how gender is organized and experienced differently when refracted through the prism of sexual, racial-ethnic, social class, ability, age, and national citizenship differences.

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g e n d e r t h r o u g h t h e p r i s m o f d i f f e r e n c e

e a r ly w o m e n ’ s s t u d i e s : c at e g o r i c a l v i e w s o f “ w o m e n ” a n d “ m e n ”

Taken together, the articles in this book make the case that it is possible to make good generalizations about women and men. But these generalizations should be drawn care- fully, by always asking the questions “which women?” and “which men?” Scholars of sex and gender have not always done this. In the 1960s and 1970s, women’s studies focused on the differences between women and men rather than among women and men. The very concept of gender, women’s studies scholars demonstrated, is based on socially defined difference between women and men. From the macro level of social institutions such as the economy, politics, and religion to the micro level of interpersonal relations, dis- tinctions between women and men structure social relations. Making men and women different from one another is the essence of gender. It is also the basis of men’s power and domination. Understanding this was profoundly illuminating. Knowing that difference produced domination enabled women to name, analyze, and set about changing their victimization.

In the 1970s, riding the wave of a resurgent feminist movement, colleges and universities began to develop women’s studies courses that aimed first and foremost to make women’s lives visible. The texts that were developed for these courses tended to stress the things that women shared under patriarchy—having the responsibility for housework and child care, the experience or fear of men’s sexual violence, a lack of formal or informal access to educa- tion, and exclusion from high-status professional and managerial jobs, political office, and religious leadership positions (Brownmiller 1975; Kanter 1977).

The study of women in society offered new ways of seeing the world. But the 1970s ap- proach was limited in several ways. Thinking of gender primarily in terms of differences be- tween women and men led scholars to overgeneralize about both. The concept of patriarchy led to a dualistic perspective of male privilege and female subordination. Women and men were cast as opposites. Each was treated as a homogeneous category with common charac- teristics and experiences. This approach essentialized women and men. Essentialism, simply put, is the notion that women’s and men’s attributes and indeed women and men them- selves are categorically different. From this perspective, male control and coercion of women produced conflict between the sexes. The feminist insight originally introduced by Simone de Beauvoir in 1953—that women, as a group, had been socially defined as the “other” and that men had constructed themselves as the subjects of history, while constructing women as their objects—fueled an energizing sense of togetherness among many women. As col- lege students read books such as Sisterhood Is Powerful (Morgan 1970), many of them joined organizations that fought—with some success—for equality and justice for women.

t h e v o i c e s o f “ o t h e r ” w o m e n

Although this view of women as an oppressed “other” was empowering for certain groups of women, some women began to claim that the feminist view of universal sisterhood ignored and marginalized their major concerns. It soon became apparent that treating women as a group united in its victimization by patriarchy was biased by too narrow a focus on the experiences and perspectives of women from more privileged social groups. “Gender” was

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treated as a generic category, uncritically applied to women. Ironically, this analysis, which was meant to unify women, instead produced divisions between and among them. The concerns projected as “universal” were removed from the realities of many women’s lives. For example, it became a matter of faith in second-wave feminism that women’s liberation would be accomplished by breaking down the “gendered public-domestic split.” Indeed, the feminist call for women to move out of the kitchen and into the workplace resonated in the experiences of many of the college-educated white women who were inspired by Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. But the idea that women’s movement into workplaces was itself empowering or liberating seemed absurd or irrelevant to many working-class women and women of color. They were already working for wages, as had many of their mothers and grandmothers, and did not consider access to jobs and public life “liberating.” For many of these women, liberation had more to do with organizing in communities and workplaces—often alongside men—for better schools, better pay, decent benefits, and other policies to benefit their neighborhoods, jobs, and families. The feminism of the 1970s did not seem to address these issues.

As more and more women analyzed their own experiences, they began to address the power relations that created differences among women and the part that privileged women played in the oppression of others. For many women of color, working-class women, lesbi- ans, and women in contexts outside the United States (especially women in non-Western societies), the focus on male domination was a distraction from other oppressions. Their lived experiences could support neither a unitary theory of gender nor an ideology of univer- sal sisterhood. As a result, finding common ground in a universal female victimization was never a priority for many groups of women.

Challenges to gender stereotypes soon emerged. Women of varied races, classes, national origins, and sexualities insisted that the concept of gender be broadened to take their differ- ences into account (Baca Zinn et al. 1986; Hartmann 1976; Rich 1980; Smith 1977). Many women began to argue that their lives were affected by their location in a number of dif- ferent hierarchies: in the United States as African Americans, Latinas, Native Americans, or Asian Americans in the race hierarchy; as young or old in the age hierarchy; as heterosexual, lesbian, bisexual, or queer in the sexual orientation hierarchy; and as women outside the Western industrialized nations, in subordinated geopolitical contexts. Books like Cherríe Moraga’s and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back (1981) described the experiences of women living at the intersections of multiple oppressions, challenging the notion of a monolithic “woman’s experience.” Stories from women at these intersections made it clear that women were not victimized by gender alone but by the historical and systematic denial of rights and privileges based on other differences as well.

m e n a s g e n d e r e d b e i n g s

As the voices of “other” women in the mid- to late 1970s began to challenge and expand the parameters of women’s studies, a new area of scholarly inquiry was beginning to stir—a critical examination of men and masculinity. To be sure, in those early years of gender stud- ies, the major task was to conduct studies and develop courses about the lives of women to

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begin to correct centuries of scholarship that rendered invisible women’s lives, problems, and accomplishments. But the core idea of feminism—that “femininity” and women’s sub- ordination is a social construction—logically led to an examination of the social construc- tion of “masculinity” and men’s power. Many of the first scholars to take on this task were psychologists who were concerned with looking at the social construction of “the male sex role” (e.g., Pleck 1976). By the late 1980s, there was a growing interdisciplinary collection of studies of men and masculinity, much of it by social scientists (Brod 1987; Kaufman 1987; Kimmel 1987; Kimmel and Messner 1989).

Reflecting developments in women’s studies, the scholarship on men’s lives tended to develop three themes: First, what we think of as “masculinity” is not a fixed, biological es- sence of men, but rather is a social construction that shifts and changes over time as well as between and among various national and cultural contexts. Second, power is central to understanding gender as a relational construct, and the dominant definition of masculin- ity is largely about expressing difference from—and superiority over—anything considered “feminine.” And third, there is no singular “male sex role.” Rather, at any given time there are various masculinities. R. W. Connell (1987, 1995, 2002) has been among the most articulate advocates of this perspective. Connell argues that hegemonic masculinity (the dominant and most privileged form of masculinity at any given moment) is constructed in relation to femininities as well as in relation to various subordinated or marginalized masculinities. For example, in the United States, various racialized masculinities (e.g., as represented by African American men, Latino immigrant men, etc.) have been central to the construction of hege- monic (white middle-class) masculinity. This “othering” of racialized masculinities, as well as their selective incorporation by dominant groups (Bridges and Pascoe in this volume), helps to shore up the privileges that have been historically connected to hegemonic mascu- linity. When viewed this way, we can better understand hegemonic masculinity as part of a system that includes gender as well as racial, class, sexual, and other relations of power.

The new literature on men and masculinities also begins to move us beyond the simplis- tic, falsely categorical, and pessimistic view of men simply as a privileged sex class. When race, social class, sexual orientation, physical abilities, immigrant, or national status are taken into account, we can see that in some circumstances, “male privilege” is partly—sometimes substantially—muted (Kimmel and Messner 2010; Kimmel in this volume). Although it is unlikely that we will soon see a “men’s movement” that aims to undermine the power and privileges that are connected with hegemonic masculinity, when we begin to look at “mas- culinities” through the prism of difference, we can begin to see similarities and possible points of coalition between and among certain groups of women and men (Messner 1998). Certain kinds of changes in gender relations—for instance, a national family leave policy for working parents—might serve as a means of uniting particular groups of women and men.

g e n d e r i n g l o b a l c o n t e x t s

It is an increasingly accepted truism that late twentieth-century increases in transnational trade, international migration, and global systems of production and communication have diminished both the power of nation-states and the significance of national borders. A much

Introduction 5

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more ignored issue is the extent to which gender relations—in the United States and else- where in the world—are increasingly linked to patterns of global economic restructuring. Decisions made in corporate headquarters located in Los Angeles, Tokyo, or London may have immediate repercussions on how people thousands of miles away organize their work, community, and family lives (Sassen 1991). It is no longer possible to study gender relations without giving attention to global processes and inequalities. Scholarship on women in de- veloping countries has moved from liberal concerns for the impact of development policies on women (Boserup 1970) to more critical perspectives that acknowledge how international labor and capital mobility are transforming gender and family relations (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Mojola 2014). The transformation of international relations from a 1990s “post–Cold War” environment to an expansion of militarism and warfare in recent years has realigned international gender relations in key ways that call for new examinations of gender, violence, militarism, and culture (Enloe 1993, 2000; Okin 1999). The now extended US military presence in the Middle East has brought with it increasing numbers of female troops and, with that, growing awareness of gender and sexual violence both by and within the military.

Around the world, women’s paid and unpaid labor is key to global development strate- gies. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that gender is molded from the “top down.” What happens on a daily basis in families and workplaces simultaneously constitutes and is constrained by structural transnational institutions. For instance, in the second half of the twentieth century young, single women, many of them from poor rural areas, were (and continue to be) recruited for work in export assembly plants along the US–Mexico border, in East and Southeast Asia, in Silicon Valley, in the Caribbean, and in Central America. Although the profitability of these multinational factories depends, in part, on management’s ability to manipulate the young women’s ideologies of gender, the women do not respond passively or uniformly, but actively resist, challenge, and accommodate. At the same time, the global dispersion of the assembly line has concentrated corporate facili- ties in many US cities, making available myriad managerial, administrative, and clerical jobs for college-educated women. Women’s paid labor is used at various points along this international system of production. Not only employment but also consumption embod- ies global interdependencies. There is a high probability that the clothing you are wear- ing and the computer you use originated in multinational corporate headquarters and in assembly plants scattered around third world nations. And if these items were actually manufactured in the United States, they were probably assembled by Latin American and Asian-born women.

Worldwide, international labor migration and refugee movements are creating new types of multiracial societies. Although these developments are often discussed and analyzed with respect to racial differences, gender typically remains absent. As several commentators have noted, the white feminist movement in the United States has not addressed issues of im- migration and nationality. Gender, however, has been fundamental in shaping immigration policies (Chang 1994; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994). Direct labor recruitment programs gener- ally solicit either male or female labor (e.g., Filipina nurses and Mexican male farm workers), national disenfranchisement has particular repercussions for women and men, and current

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immigrant laws are based on very gendered notions of what constitutes “family unifica- tion.” As Chandra Mohanty suggests, “analytically these issues are the contemporary met- ropolitan counterpart of women’s struggles against colonial occupation in the geographical third world” (1991:23). Moreover, immigrant and refugee women’s daily lives often chal- lenge familiar feminist paradigms. The occupations in which immigrant and refugee women concentrate—paid domestic work, informal sector street vending, assembly or industrial piecework performed in the home—often blur the ideological distinction between work and family and between public and private spheres (Hondagneu-Sotelo2001; Parreñas2001). As a number of articles in this volume show, immigrant women creatively respond to changes in work and family brought about through migration, innovating changes in what were once thought to be stable, fixed sexuality practices and mores.

f r o m pat c h w o r k q u i lt t o p r i s m

All of these developments—the voices of “other” women, the study of men and mascu- linities, and the examination of gender in transnational contexts—have helped redefine the study of gender. By working to develop knowledge that is inclusive of the experiences of all groups, new insights about gender have begun to emerge. Examining gender in the context of other differences makes it clear that nobody experiences themselves as solely gendered. Instead, gender is configured through cross-cutting forms of difference that carry deep social and economic consequences.

By the mid-1980s, thinking about gender had entered a new stage, which was more carefully grounded in the experiences of diverse groups of women and men. This perspec- tive is a general way of looking at women and men and understanding their relationships to the structure of society. Gender is no longer viewed simply as a matter of two opposite categories of people, males and females, but as a range of social relations among differently situated people. Because centering on difference is a radical challenge to the conventional gender framework, it raises several concerns. If we think of all the systems that converge to simultaneously influence the lives of women and men, we can imagine an infinite number of effects these interconnected systems have on different women and men. Does the recog- nition that gender can be understood only contextually (meaning that there is no singular “gender” per se) make women’s studies and men’s studies newly vulnerable to critics in the academy? Does the immersion in difference throw us into a whirlwind of “spiraling diver- sity” (Hewitt 1992:316) whereby multiple identities and locations shatter the categories “women” and “men”?

Throughout the book, we take a position directly opposed to an empty pluralism. Although the categories “woman” and “man” have multiple meanings, this does not reduce gender to a “postmodern kaleidoscope of lifestyles. Rather, it points to the relational char- acter of gender” (Connell 1992:736). Not only are masculinity and femininity relational, but different masculinities and femininities are interconnected through other social structures such as race, class, and nation. The concept of relationality suggests that “the lives of dif- ferent groups are interconnected even without face-to-face relations (Glenn 2002:14). The

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meaning of “woman” is defined by the existence of women of different races and classes, with social stratification shaping the experiences of those different women. Being a white woman in the United States is meaningful only insofar as it is set apart from and in contra- distinction to women of color.

Just as masculinity and femininity each depend on the definition of the other to produce domination, differences among women and among men are also created in the context of structured relations between dominant and subordinate groups. Situating women’s lives in the context of other forms of inequality makes it clear that the privileges of some groups are directly tied to the oppression of others. “Powerful groups gain and maintain power by exploiting the labor and lives of others” (Weber 2010:6). They may even use their race and class advantage to minimize some of the consequences of patriarchy and/or to oppose other women. Similarly, one can become a man in opposition to other men. For example, “the relation between heterosexual and homosexual men is central, carrying heavy symbolic freight. To many people, homosexuality is the negation of masculinity.  .  .  . Given that as- sumption, antagonism toward homosexual men may be used to define masculinity” (Con- nell 1992:736). This relationship is revealed in Jane Ward’s study of straight identified men who engage in “dude sex,” or sex with other straight-identified men (this volume).

In the past two decades, viewing gender through the prism of difference has profoundly reoriented the field (Acker 1999, 2006; Andersen 2005; Glenn 1999, 2002; Messner 1996; West and Fenstermaker 1995). Yet analyzing the multiple constructions of gender does not just mean studying groups of women and groups of men as different. It is clearly time to go beyond what we call the “patchwork quilt” phase in the study of women and men—that is, the phase in which we have acknowledged the importance of examining differences within constructions of gender, but to do so largely by collecting together a study here on African American women, a study there on gay men, a study on working-class Chicanas, and so on. This patchwork quilt approach too often amounts to no more than “adding difference and stirring.” The result may be a lovely mosaic, but like a patchwork quilt, it still tends to overemphasize boundaries rather than highlight bridges of interdependency. In addition, this approach too often does not explore the ways that social constructions of femininities and masculinities are based on and reproduce relations of power. In short, we think that the substantial quantity of research that has now been done on various groups and subgroups needs to be analyzed within a framework that emphasizes differences and inequalities not as discrete areas of separation, but as interrelated bands of color that to- gether make up a spectrum.

A spate of sophisticated sociological theorizing along these lines has introduced some useful ways to think about difference in relational terms. Patricia Hill Collins (1990, 1998, 2004) has suggested that we think of race, class, and gender as a socially structured “matrix of domination”; Raewyn Connell has pressed us to think of multiple differences not in simple additive ways, but rather as they “abrade, inflame, amplify, twist, negate, dampen, and complicate each other” (Kessler et al. 1985). Similarly, Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill (this volume) have suggested that we consider a body of theory and practice they call “multiracial feminism” as a means of coming to grips with the relations between

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various systems of inequality. Scholarship linking the interactive effects of race, class, gender, and sexuality has emerged into a new feminist paradigm (Andersen 2005:443). Today, “intersectional” frameworks foster a more complete view of the different experiences of women, men, and gender nonbinary people across and within varied groups.

These are the kinds of concerns that we had in mind in putting together this collection. We sought individual articles that explored intersections or axes in the matrix of domina- tion by comparing different groups. We brought together articles that explored the lives of people who experience the daily challenges of multiple marginality (e.g., black lesbians, im- migrant women) or the often paradoxical realities of those who may identify simultaneously with a socially marginalized or subordinated identity (e.g., gay, poor, physically disabled, Latino) along with a socially dominant identity (e.g., man, white, professional class). When we could not find articles that directly compared or juxtaposed categories or groups, we at- tempted to juxtapose two or three articles that, together, explored differences and similarities between groups.

To this end, we added a fifth dimension to the now commonly accepted “race/class/ gender/sexuality” matrix: national origin. Reflecting a tendency in US sociology in general, courses on sex and gender have been far too U.S. focused and Eurocentric. Focusing on the construction of gender in industrializing societies or the shifting relations of gender among transnational immigrant groups challenges and broadens our otherwise narrow as- sumptions about the constraints and possibilities facing contemporary people. But it is not enough to remain within the patchwork quilt framework, to simply focus on people in other nations as though they were somehow separate from processes occurring in the United States. Again, the metaphor of the prism better illustrates the dual challenges we face in integrating analyses of national inequalities. A central challenge facing scholars today is to understand how constructions of masculinities and femininities move across national borders. In this regard, we need to acknowledge two distinct but interrelated outcomes. In the process of moving across national boundaries—through media images, immigration, or global systems of production—gender inequalities are reconstructed and take new shape. At the same time, global movements of gender transform the gendered institutions with which they come into contact. Although it may seem ironic to focus on the nation in this era that some commentators have termed “postnational,” we believe that we need to focus more on national difference precisely because of the increasing number and intensity of global con- nections and interdependencies.

The sixth edition of this book continues with all of these themes, strengthening them with new articles on age/generation, popular culture, challenges to binary thinking, con- structing gender in the workplace, and social movements and social change. We also included a new article on Native women in the United States, transnationalism and con- texts outside of the United States, and expanded the section on the workplace to also include attention to macro-dynamics in the labor market. As in the last edition, this one also includes a glossary where readers may find key definitions for concepts that appear in bold type.

We continued the attention in the last edition of Prism to differences of age and genera- tion. Pundits have employed the terms “Generation X” and “Generation Y” (or “Millennials”)

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to refer to the vast and diverse group of “thirty-something” and “twenty-something” popu- lations. Although celebrated by some as a new market for new products and condemned as spoiled slackers (Gen X) or as entitled and lazy (Gen Y) by others, Generations X and Y are, in fact, more heterogeneous than the pundits would allow. In addition, boys, girls, and young women and men tend to relate to gender and sexuality issues in somewhat differ- ent ways than did the older generation of writers and activists who made up the “second wave” of feminism. “Third-wave” feminism is a generational sensibility that is beginning to have an impact on college campuses and in popular culture in recent years (Snyder 2008). The articles on youth culture and generational differences are sprinkled throughout the various sections of this volume including new readings by Roberta Espinoza, Estrada and Hondagneu-Sotelo, and readings on young women by Elizabeth A. Armstrong and colleagues and Dolores Delgado Bernal. The gendered character of these generational com- munities is, in many instances, defined by differences of race, class, sexuality, and nation. Yet these constituencies are also deliberately constructed by young people in ways that underline their distinctiveness, and sometimes oppositional stances, to other groups and older generations. The structuring of youth culture—and the agency of youth groups—can be seen in various contexts.

The sixth edition presents a section entirely devoted to gendered and sexual violence. Previously included as a subsection under “Bodies,” this new section provides a more fo- cused reading on examinations of gendered violence across a range of racial/ethnic, class, and nativity intersections. The new “Violence” section contains previously included chap- ters by Cecilia Menjivar and Victor M. Rios along with a new chapter by Natalie Sokoloff and Susan C. Pearce that examines immigrant women’s particular experiences of domestic violence, and a chapter by Roe Bubar and Pamela Jumper Thurman that focuses on violence against Native women.

In recent years, an emergent trend in gender studies questions the limits of simplis- tic binary thinking: male–female, masculinity–femininity, gay–straight, and so on. As many of today’s college students point out to their professors, people do not neatly fit into these binary boxes. Instead, people’s gender and sexual performances and identi- ties vary across a wide-ranging spectrum. In the sixth edition of the book, we continue to emphasize this refracting prism of sexual and gender differences with articles on the historical development of trans identities (Joelle Ruby Ryan) and transgender policies (Laurel Westbrook and Kristen Schilt), in addition to one new article on intersexuality by Georgiann Davis.

Finally, social movements and efforts for change are ever-shifting, and in recognition of that changing terrain we updated the final section, “Change and Politics.” The sixth edi- tion includes a chapter by Maylei Blackwell on cross-border feminist organizing by women farmworkers that demonstrates the possibilities for change by women existing in the “bor- derlands” of identities. We have also added a chapter by Sarah Jaffe on the #MeToo move- ment, an effort for social change started by the feminist activist Tarana Burke that has taken on global significance.

We hope this book contributes to a new generation of scholarship in the study of sex and gender—one that moves beyond the patchwork quilt approach, which lists or catalogs

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difference, to an approach that takes up the challenge to explore the relations of power that structure these differences and identify sources of solidarity. The late Gloria Anzaldúa (1990), a Chicana lesbian and feminist, used the border as a metaphor to capture the spatial, ethnic, class, and sexual transitions traversed in one’s lifetime. She states in a poem that “To survive the borderlands you must live sin fronteras” (without borders). Breaking down, reas- sessing, and crossing the borders that divide the patches on the quilt—both experientially and analytically—is key to the difficult task of transforming knowledge about gender. Look- ing at the various prisms that organize gender relations, we think, will contribute to the kind of bridge building that will be needed for constructing broad-based coalitions to push for equality and social justice in the twenty-first century.

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PERSPECTIVES ON SEX, GENDER, AND DIFFERENCE

I P A R T

Are women and men or boys and girls really different, or do we just think and act as though they are different? In other words, are gender differences and inequalities rooted in biology or are they socially constructed? This is a key question that has occupied much of the scholarly debate on gender and gender relations. Today, these questions are rarely an- swered with simplistic, pat answers. And the questions that gender scholars are asking have also grown more complex. Are these differences constant over time, and under what social conditions do they vary and how? If women and men are different, then are women—as a group—similar to one another? Do white women share experiences similar to those of women of color? To what extent do women in various parts of the world share commonali- ties, or are their differences more important? What are the consequences of a scholarly focus on gender differences? For example, could the very focus on difference inadvertently rein- force and naturalize commonly held perceptions rather than problematize the very notion of gender differences? How do we understand gender differences beyond a gender binary— what do we miss when we focus on just two genders? What does it mean to be gender fluid? The chapters in this opening section reflect a sampling of gender scholarship on the remark- able variability of gender. They tackle tricky questions related to differences across sex and gender categories, including thinking about more than two genders.

Difference has always preoccupied feminist thought. Not long ago, difference between women and men was a primary concern. “Difference feminism” rested on the notion that

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women’s distinctive characteristics required a special approach to overcome discrimination. Unlike feminist demands that women and men receive “the same” treatment, difference feminists sought women’s equality by appealing to the logic of a gender dichotomy. By acknowledging and sometimes even underscoring biological, emotional, and social differ- ences between women and men, they argued that women should rely on women’s, rather than men’s, strategies to achieve equality. In the context of patriarchal societies, where wom- en’s experiences are overlooked and suppressed, difference feminists argued that a reasser- tion of women’s perspectives is central to combating oppression.

s e x e s , g e n d e r s , a n d d i m e n s i o n s o f d i f f e r e n c e

Today, scholars have transformed perspectives on gender difference. It is clear that although women and men everywhere are constructed in opposition to each other, the categories “women” and “men” have wide-ranging meanings. Gender is always complicated by the complex stratification of intersecting power systems. More important, gender operates with and through other systems of opportunity and oppression, which give rise to a variety of dif- ferent, yet sometimes overlapping, gender experiences among women and among men. The chapters in this section move beyond dichotomous simplifications of women and men and show how gender differences are contingent on other dimensions of difference. Collectively, the chapters provide a foundation for seeing gender through a prism of difference.

In the first reading, Ann Fausto-Sterling takes up a subject of much current debate—the relationship between sex and gender. By deconstructing the “making” of the two-sex system of male and female, she disputes the division of the world into only two genders based simply on genital differences. This raises provocative questions about gender and about sex and whether the relationship between them is a given. Our conceptions of gender begin to look very different, and our assumptions about gender differences begin to break down, if the human sexes are viewed as multiple.

Continuing our exploration of gender difference, Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thorn- ton Dill argue that a focus on race and class makes it clear that there can be no unitary analy- sis of women as a category. They analyze the development of multiracial feminism, noting both the tensions and the benefits, as they explore the theories and concepts in the growing body of scholarship on the intersections of race, class, and gender. In particular, they iden- tify six themes that distinguish and guide multiracial feminist work. A key insight here is recognition of the ways in which the differences among women are historically and socially constructed and grounded in diverse locations and interconnected inequalities.

In the third reading in this section, Stephanie A. Shields defines some of the basic termi- nology used in intersectionality, such as identity and mutually constitute. Shields describes some of the history that led scholars to pay greater attention to women’s experiences, and then to ask “which women’s experience?” Understanding different women’s experiences as merely “different” is an oversimplification, as different experiences often arise from dif- ferences in social power and oppression or privilege. Intersectionality is about more than examining differences; it focuses on different social locations embedded in power relations.

The next reading considers issues of gender and difference in relation to globaliza- tion. Raewyn W. Connell untangles key strands in the world gender order to reveal

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how masculinities are reconfigured by transnational power relations. Connell begins by introducing a relatively new area of gender scholarship on men and masculinities and its central concept, hegemonic masculinity, which refers to the dominant form of masculinity in any sociohistorical context. The article traces the development of hegemonic masculinity across three time periods: the early colonialism of conquest and settlement, the late colo- nialism of empire, and the current period of postcolonialism and neoliberalism. Connell concludes with a discussion of transnational business masculinity, the hegemonic mascu- linity of our time, and its relationship to subordinate masculinities. In particular, she consid- ers the development of fundamentalist masculinities as contenders for hegemony and gay masculinities as potential forms of opposition to hegemonic masculinity.

Continuing the thread on globalization, Bandana Purkayastha’s chapter on intersection- ality and transnationalism explores how intersections of race and gender work within trans- national spaces. Hierarchies of race in the Global North do not translate easily to racial hierarchies in the Global South. In some countries, hierarchies of religion, ethnicity, or caste might be just as or more salient as race, and the term “women of color” might not have the same meaning or resonance in non-Western countries. Purkayastha also emphasizes the importance of considering different kinds of barriers to building affirming identity-based communities that might be more prevalent in the Global South, such as a lack of English proficiency (which inhibits participation in English-dominant virtual spaces) and extreme government surveillance.

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Ann Fausto-Sterling, “The Five Sexes, Revisited,” from The Sciences, July/August, 2000, Volume 40, Issue 4, pp. 18–24. Reproduced with permission of John Wiley & Sons.

A N N E FA U S T O - S T E R L I N G

As Cheryl Chase stepped to the front of the packed meeting room in the Sheraton Boston Hotel, ner- vous coughs made the tension audible. Chase, an activist for intersexual rights, had been invited to address the May 2000 meeting of the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society (LWPES), the largest organization in the United States for specialists in children’s hor- mones. Her talk would be the grand finale to a four- hour symposium on the treatment of genital ambiguity in newborns, infants born with a mixture of both male and female anatomy, or genitals that appear to differ from their chromosomal sex. The topic was hardly a novel one to the assembled physicians.

Yet Chase’s appearance before the group was remarkable. Three and a half years earlier, the American Academy of Pediatrics had refused her request for a chance to present the patients’ view- point on the treatment of genital ambiguity, dismiss- ing Chase and her supporters as “zealots.” About two dozen intersex people had responded by throwing up a picket line. The Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) even issued a press release: “Hermaphrodites Target Kiddie Docs.”

It had done my 1960s street-activist heart good. In the short run, I said to Chase at the time, the picketing would make people angry. But eventually, I assured her, the doors then closed would open. Now, as Chase began to address the physicians at their own conven- tion, that prediction was coming true. Her talk, titled “Sexual Ambiguity: The Patient-Centered Approach,” was a measured critique of the near- universal prac- tice of performing immediate, “corrective” surgery on thousands of infants born each year with ambiguous genitalia. Chase herself lives with the conse- quences of such surgery. Yet her audience, the very

endocrinologists and surgeons Chase was accusing of reacting with “surgery and shame,” received her with respect. Even more remarkably, many of the speakers who preceded her at the session had already spoken of the need to scrap current practices in favor of treat- ments more centered on psychological counseling.

What led to such a dramatic reversal of fortune? Certainly, Chase’s talk at the LWPES symposium was a vindication of her persistence in seeking attention for her cause. But her invitation to speak was also a watershed in the evolving discussion about how to treat children with ambiguous genitalia. And that discussion, in turn, is the tip of a biocultural iceberg—the gender iceberg—that continues to rock both medicine and our culture at large.

Chase made her first national appearance in 1993, in these very pages, announcing the formation of ISNA in a letter responding to an essay I had written for The Sciences, titled “The Five Sexes” [March/April 1993]. In that article I argued that the two-sex system embedded in our society is not adequate to encom- pass the full spectrum of human sexuality. In its place, I suggested a five-sex system. In addition to males and females, I included “herms” (named after true hermaphrodites, people born with both a testis and an ovary); “merms” (male pseudohermaphro- dites, who are born with testes and some aspect of female genitalia); and “ferms” (female pseudoher- maphrodites, who have ovaries combined with some aspect of male genitalia).

I had intended to be provocative, but I had also written with tongue firmly in cheek. So I was sur- prised by the extent of the controversy the article unleashed. Right-wing Christians were outraged, and connected my idea of five sexes with the United

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Nations–sponsored Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in September 1995. At the same time, the article delighted others who felt con- strained by the current sex and gender system.

Clearly, I had struck a nerve. The fact that so many people could get riled up by my proposal to revamp our sex and gender system suggested that change—as well as resistance to it—might be in the offing. Indeed, a lot has changed since 1993, and I like to think that my article was an important stimu- lus. As if from nowhere, intersexuals are material- izing before our very eyes. Like Chase, many have become political organizers, who lobby physicians and politicians to change current treatment practices. But more generally, though perhaps no less provoca- tively, the boundaries separating masculine and fem- inine seem harder than ever to define.

Some find the changes underway deeply disturb- ing. Others find them liberating.

Who is an intersexual—and how many intersexu- als are there? The concept of intersexuality is rooted in the very ideas of male and female. In the idealized, Platonic, biological world, human beings are divided into two kinds: a perfectly dimorphic species. Males have an X and a Y chromosome, testes, a penis, and all of the appropriate internal plumbing for deliver- ing urine and semen to the outside world. They also have well-known secondary sexual characteristics including a muscular build and facial hair. Women have two X chromosomes, ovaries, all of the internal plumbing to transport urine and ova to the outside world, a system to support pregnancy and fetal devel- opment, as well as a variety of recognizable second- ary sexual characteristics.

That idealized story papers over many obvious caveats: some women have facial hair, some men have none; some women speak with deep voices, some men veritably squeak. Less well known is the fact that, on close inspection, absolute dimorphism disintegrates even at the level of basic biology. Chro- mosomes, hormones, the internal sex structures, the gonads, and the external genitalia all vary more than most people realize. Those born outside of the Pla- tonic dimorphic mold are called intersexuals.

In “The Five Sexes” I reported an estimate by a psychologist expert in the treatment of intersexuals,

suggesting that some 4 percent of all live births are intersexual. Then, together with a group of Brown University undergraduates, I set out to conduct the first systematic assessment of the available data on intersexual birthrates. We scoured the medical literature for estimates of the frequency of various categories of intersexuality, from additional chro- mosomes to mixed gonads, hormones, and genitalia. For some conditions we could find only anecdotal evidence; for most, however, numbers exist. On the basis of that evidence, we calculated that for every 1,000 children born, seventeen are intersexual in some form. That number—1.7 percent—is a ballpark estimate, not a precise count, though we believe it is more accurate than the 4 percent I reported.

Our figure represents all chromosomal, anatomi- cal, and hormonal exceptions to the dimorphic ideal; the number of intersexuals who might, potentially, be subject to surgery as infants is smaller—probably between one in 1,000 and one in 2,000 live births. Furthermore, because some populations possess the relevant genes at high frequency, the intersexual birthrate is not uniform throughout the world.

Consider, for instance, the gene for congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). When the CAH gene is inherited from both parents, it leads to a baby with masculinized external genitalia who possesses two X chromosomes and the internal reproductive organs of a potentially fertile woman. The frequency of the gene varies widely around the world: in New Zealand it occurs in only forty-three children per million; among the Yupik Eskimos of southwestern Alaska, its frequency is 3,500 per million.

Intersexuality has always been to some extent a matter of definition. And in the past century physicians have been the ones who defined children as intersexual—and provided the remedies. When only the chromosomes are unusual, but the external genita- lia and gonads clearly indicate either a male or a female, physicians do not advocate intervention. Indeed, it is not clear what kind of intervention could be advocated in such cases. But the story is quite different when infants are born with mixed genitalia, or with external genitals that seem at odds with the baby’s gonads.

Most clinics now specializing in the treatment of intersex babies rely on case-management principles

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developed in the 1950s by the psychologist John Money and the psychiatrists Joan G. Hampson and John L. Hampson, all of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Money believed that gender identity is completely malleable for about eighteen months after birth. Thus, he argued, when a treat- ment team is presented with an infant who has ambiguous genitalia, the team could make a gender assignment solely on the basis of what made the best surgical sense. The physicians could then simply encourage the parents to raise the child according to the surgically assigned gender. Following that course, most physicians maintained, would elimi- nate psychological distress for both the patient and the parents. Indeed, treatment teams were never to use such words as “intersex” or “hermaphrodite”; instead, they were to tell parents that nature intended the baby to be the boy or the girl that the physicians had determined it was. Through surgery, the physi- cians were merely completing nature’s intention.

Although Money and the Hampsons published detailed case studies of intersex children who they said had adjusted well to their gender assignments, Money thought one case in particular proved his theory. It was a dramatic example, inasmuch as it did not involve intersexuality at all: one of a pair of iden- tical twin boys lost his penis as a result of a circumci- sion accident. Money recommended that “John” (as he came to be known in a later case study) be surgi- cally turned into “Joan” and raised as a girl. In time, Joan grew to love wearing dresses and having her hair done. Money proudly proclaimed the sex reassign- ment a success.

But as recently chronicled by John Colapinto, in his book As Nature Made Him, Joan—now known to be an adult male named David Reimer—eventually rejected his female assignment. Even without a func- tioning penis and testes (which had been removed as part of the reassignment) John/Joan sought mas- culinizing medication, and married a woman with children (whom he adopted). Colapinto’s book was first published in 2000. Reimer died by suicide in 2004 at the age of 38.

Since the full conclusion to the John/Joan story came to light, other individuals who were reassigned as males or females shortly after birth but who later

rejected their early assignments have come forward. So, too, have cases in which the reassignment has worked—at least into the subject’s mid-twenties. But even then the aftermath of the surgery can be problematic. Genital surgery often leaves scars that reduce sexual sensitivity. Chase herself had a com- plete clitoridectomy, a procedure that is less fre- quently performed on intersexuals today. But the newer surgeries, which reduce the size of the clitoral shaft, still greatly reduce sensitivity.

The revelation of cases of failed reassignments and the emergence of intersex activism have led an increasing number of pediatric endocrinologists, urol- ogists, and psychologists to reexamine the wisdom of early genital surgery. For example, in a talk that pre- ceded Chase’s at the LWPES meeting, the medical ethi- cist Laurence B. McCullough of the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medi- cine in Houston, Texas, introduced an ethical frame- work for the treatment of children with ambiguous genitalia. Because sex phenotype (the manifestation of genetically and embryologically determined sexual characteristics) and gender presentation (the sex role projected by the individual in society) are highly vari- able, McCullough argues, the various forms of inter- sexuality should be defined as normal. All of them fall within the statistically expected variability of sex and gender. Furthermore, though certain disease states may accompany some forms of intersexuality, and may require medical intervention, intersexual condi- tions are not themselves diseases.

McCullough also contends that in the process of assigning gender, physicians should minimize what he calls irreversible assignments: taking steps such as the surgical removal or modification of gonads or genitalia that the patient may one day want to have reversed. Finally, McCullough urges physicians to abandon their practice of treating the birth of a child with genital ambiguity as a medical or social emergency. Instead, they should take the time to per- form a thorough medical workup and should disclose everything to the parents, including the uncertain- ties about the final outcome. The treatment mantra, in other words, should be therapy, not surgery.

I believe a new treatment protocol for intersex infants, similar to the one outlined by McCullough,

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is close at hand. Treatment should combine some basic medical and ethical principles with a practical but less drastic approach to the birth of a mixed-sex child. As a first step, surgery on infants should be per- formed only to save the child’s life or to substantially improve the child’s physical well-being. Physicians may assign a sex—male or female—to an intersex infant on the basis of the probability that the child’s particular condition will lead to the formation of a particular gender identity. At the same time, though, practitioners ought to be humble enough to recog- nize that as the child grows, he or she may reject the assignment—and they should be wise enough to listen to what the child has to say. Most important, parents should have access to the full range of infor- mation and options available to them.

Sex assignments made shortly after birth are only the beginning of a long journey. Consider, for instance, the life of Max Beck: Born intersexual, Max was surgically assigned as a female and consistently raised as such. Had her medical team followed her into her early twenties, they would have deemed her assignment a success because she was married to a man. (It should be noted that success in gender assignment has traditionally been defined as living in that gender as a heterosexual.) Within a few years, however, Beck had come out as a butch lesbian; now in her mid-thirties, Beck has become a man and mar- ried his lesbian partner, who (through the miracles of modern reproductive technology) recently gave birth to a girl.

Transsexuals, people who have an emotional gender at odds with their physical sex, once described themselves in terms of dimorphic absolutes—males trapped in female bodies, or vice versa. As such, they sought psychological relief through surgery. Although many still do, some so-called transgen- dered people today are content to inhabit a more ambiguous zone. A male-to-female transsexual, for instance, may come out as a lesbian. Jane, born a physiological male, is now in her late thirties and living with her wife, whom she married when her name was still John. Jane takes hormones to femi- nize herself, but they have not yet interfered with her ability to engage in intercourse as a man. In her mind Jane has a lesbian relationship with her wife, though

she views their intimate moments as a cross between lesbian and heterosexual sex.

It might seem natural to regard intersexuals and transgendered people as living midway between the poles of male and female. But male and female, mas- culine and feminine, cannot be parsed as some kind of continuum. Rather, sex and gender are best con- ceptualized as points in a multidimensional space. For some time, experts on gender development have distinguished between sex at the genetic level and at the cellular level (sex-specific gene expression, X and Y chromosomes); at the hormonal level (in the fetus, during childhood, and after puberty); and at the anatomical level (genitals and secondary sexual characteristics). Gender identity presumably emerges from all of those corporeal aspects via some poorly understood interaction with environment and experience. What has become increasingly clear is that one can find levels of masculinity and feminin- ity in almost every possible permutation. A chromo- somal, hormonal, and genital male (or female) may emerge with a female (or male) gender identity. Or a chromosomal female with male fetal hormones and masculinized genitalia—but with female pubertal hormones—may develop a female gender identity.

The medical and scientific communities have yet to adopt a language that is capable of describing such diversity. In her book Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, the historian and medical ethicist Alice Domurat Dreger of Michigan State University in East Lansing documents the emergence of current medical systems for classifying gender ambiguity. The current usage remains rooted in the Victorian approach to sex. The logical structure of the commonly used terms “true hermaphrodite,” “male pseudohermaphrodite,” and “female pseudohermaphrodite” indicates that only the so-called true hermaphrodite is a genuine mix of male and female. The others, no matter how confusing their body parts, are really hidden males or females. Because true hermaphrodites are rare— possibly only one in 100,000—such a classification system supports the idea that human beings are an absolutely dimorphic species.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, when the variability of gender seems so visible, such a position is hard to maintain. And here, too, the

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old medical consensus has begun to crumble. Last fall the pediatric urologist Ian A. Aaronson of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston organized the North American Task Force on Inter- sexuality (NATFI) to review the clinical responses to genital ambiguity in infants. Key medical associa- tions, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, have endorsed NATFI. Specialists in surgery, endocri- nology, psychology, ethics, psychiatry, genetics, and public health, as well as intersex patient-advocate groups, have joined its ranks.

One of the goals of NATFI is to establish a new sex nomenclature. One proposal under consider- ation replaces the current system with emotionally neutral terminology that emphasizes developmental processes rather than preconceived gender categories. For example, Type I intersexes develop out of anoma- lous virilizing influences; Type II result from some interruption of virilization; and in Type III intersexes the gonads themselves may not have developed in the expected fashion.

What is clear is that since 1993, modern society has moved beyond five sexes to a recognition that gender variation is normal and, for some people, an arena for playful exploration. Discussing my “five sexes” proposal in her book Lessons from the Inter- sexed, the psychologist Suzanne J. Kessler of the State University of New York at Purchase drives this point home with great effect:

The limitation with Fausto-Sterling’s proposal is that . . . [it] still gives genitals . . . primary signifying status and ignores the fact that in the everyday world gender attributions are made without access to geni- tal inspection. . . . What has primacy in everyday life is the gender that is performed, regardless of the flesh’s configuration under the clothes.

I now agree with Kessler’s assessment. It would be better for intersexuals and their supporters to turn everyone’s focus away from genitals. Instead, as she suggests, one should acknowledge that people come in an even wider assortment of sexual identities and characteristics than mere genitals can distinguish. Some women may have “large clitorises or fused

labia,” whereas some men may have “small penises or misshapen scrota,” as Kessler puts it, “phenotypes with no particular clinical or identity meaning.”

As clearheaded as Kessler’s program is—and despite the progress made in the 1990s—our society is still far from that ideal. The intersexual or trans- gendered person who projects a social gender—what Kessler calls “cultural genitals”—that conflicts with his or her physical genitals still may die for the trans- gression. Hence legal protection for people whose cultural and physical genitals do not match is needed during the current transition to a more gender- diverse world. One easy step would be to eliminate the category of “gender” from official documents, such as driver’s licenses and passports. Surely attri- butes both more visible (such as height, build, and eye color) and less visible (fingerprints and genetic profiles) would be more expedient.

A more far-ranging agenda is presented in the International Bill of Gender Rights, adopted in 1995 at the fourth annual International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy in Hous- ton, Texas. It lists ten “gender rights,” including the right to define one’s own gender, the right to change one’s physical gender if one so chooses, and the right to marry whomever one wishes. The legal bases for such rights are being hammered out in the courts as I write and, most recently, through the establishment, in the state of Vermont, of legal same-sex domestic partnerships.

No one could have foreseen such changes in 1993. And the idea that I played some role, however small, in reducing the pressure—from the medical community as well as from society at large—to flatten the diversity of human sexes into two diametrically opposed camps gives me pleasure.

Sometimes people suggest to me, with not a little horror, that I am arguing for a pastel world in which androgyny reigns and men and women are boringly the same. In my vision, however, strong colors coexist with pastels. There are and will continue to be highly masculine people out there; it’s just that some of them are women. And some of the most feminine people I know happen to be men.

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Women of color have long challenged the hegemony of feminisms constructed pri- marily around the lives of white middle-class women. Since the late 1960s, US women of color have taken issue with unitary theories of gender. Our critiques grew out of the widespread concern about the exclusion of women of color from femi- nist scholarship and the misinterpretation of our experiences,1 and ultimately “out of the very dis- courses, denying, permitting, and producing dif- ference.”2 Speaking simultaneously from “within and against” both women’s liberation and antira- cist movements, we have insisted on the need to challenge systems of domination,3 not merely as gendered subjects but as women whose lives are affected by our location in multiple hierarchies.

Recently, and largely in response to these chal- lenges, work that links gender to other forms of dom- ination is increasing. In this article, we examine this connection further as well as the ways in which dif- ference and diversity infuse contemporary feminist studies. Our analysis draws on a conceptual frame- work that we refer to as “multiracial feminism.”4 This perspective is an attempt to go beyond a mere rec- ognition of diversity and difference among women to examine structures of domination, specifically the importance of race in understanding the social con- struction of gender. Despite the varied concerns and multiple intellectual stances which characterize the feminisms of women of color, they share an empha- sis on race as a primary force situating genders differ- ently. It is the centrality of race, of institutionalized

racism, and of struggles against racial oppression that link the various feminist perspectives within this framework. Together, they demonstrate that racial meanings offer new theoretical directions for feminist thought.

T E N S I O N S I N C O N T E M P O R A RY D I F F E R E N C E F E M I N I S M

Objections to the false universalism embedded in the concept “woman” emerged within other discourses as well as those of women of color.5 Lesbian feminists and postmodern feminists put forth their own versions of what Susan Bordo has called “gender skepticism.”6

Many thinkers within mainstream feminism have responded to these critiques with efforts to con- textualize gender. The search for women’s “univer- sal” or “essential” characteristics is being abandoned. By examining gender in the context of other social divisions and perspectives, difference has gradually become important—even problematizing the univer- sal categories, “women” and “men.” Sandra G. Hard- ing expresses the shift best in her claim that “there are no gender relations per se, but only gender rela- tions as constructed by and between classes, races, and cultures.”7

Many feminists now contend that difference oc- cupies center stage as the project of women studies today.8 According to one scholar, “difference has replaced equality as the central concern of feminist theory.”9 Many have welcomed the change, hailing it as a major revitalizing force in US feminist theory.10 But if some priorities within mainstream feminist

This article is reprinted from Feminist Studies, Volume 22, Number 2 (Summer 1996), pp. 321–331, by permission of the publisher, Feminist Studies, Inc.

2. THEORIZING DIFFERENCE FROM MULTIRACIAL FEMINISM

M A X I N E B A C A Z I N N , B O N N I E T H O R N T O N D I L L

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thought have been refocused by attention to differ- ence, there remains an “uneasy alliance”11 between women of color and other feminists.

If difference has helped revitalize academic feminisms, it has also “upset the apple cart,” and introduced new conflicts into feminist studies.12 For example, in a recent and widely discussed essay, Jane Rowland Martin argues that the current preoccupa- tion with difference is leading feminism into danger- ous traps. She fears that in giving privileged status to a predetermined set of analytic categories (race, eth- nicity, and class), “we affirm the existence of nothing but difference.” She asks, “How do we know that for us, difference does not turn on being fat, or religious, or in an abusive relationship?”13

We, too, see pitfalls in some strands of the dif- ference project. However, our perspectives take their bearings from social relations. Race and class differ- ence are crucial, we argue, not as individual char- acteristics (such as being fat) but insofar as they are primary organizing principles of a society which lo- cates and positions groups within that society’s op- portunity structures.

Despite the much-heralded diversity trend within feminist studies, difference is often reduced to mere pluralism; a “live and let live” approach where prin- ciples of relativism generate a long list of diversities which begin with gender, class, and race and con- tinue through a range of social structural as well as personal characteristics.14 Another disturbing pat- tern, which bell hooks refers to as “the commodifica- tion of difference,” is the representation of diversity as a form of exotica, “a spice, seasoning that livens up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.”15 The major limitation of these approaches is the fail- ure to attend to the power relations that accompany difference. Moreover, these approaches ignore the in- equalities that cause some characteristics to be seen as “normal” while others are seen as “different” and thus, deviant.

Maria C. Lugones expresses irritation at those feminists who see only the problem of difference with- out recognizing difference.16 Increasingly, we find that difference is recognized. But this in no way means that difference occupies a “privileged” theoretical status. Instead of using difference to rethink the

category of women, difference is often a euphemism for women who differ from the traditional norm. Even in purporting to accept difference, feminist pluralism often creates a social reality that reverts to universalizing women:

So much feminist scholarship assumes that when we cut through all of the diversity among women created by differences of racial classification, ethnicity, social class, and sexual orientation, a “universal truth” con- cerning women and gender lies buried underneath. But if we can face the scary possibility that no such certainty exists and that persisting in such a search will always distort or omit someone’s experiences, with what do we replace this old way of thinking? Gender differences and gender politics begin to look very different if there is no essential woman at the core.17

w h AT I S M u lT I R A C I A l F E M I N I S M ?

A new set of feminist theories have emerged from the challenges put forth by women of color. Multiracial feminism is an evolving body of theory and practice informed by wide-ranging intellectual traditions. This framework does not offer a singular or unified femi- nism but a body of knowledge situating women and men in multiple systems of domination. US multi- racial feminism encompasses several emergent per- spectives developed primarily by women of color: African Americans, Latinas, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, women whose analyses are shaped by their unique perspectives as “outsiders within”— marginal intellectuals whose social locations provide them a particular perspective on self and society.18 Although US women of color represent many races and ethnic backgrounds—with different histories and cultures—our feminisms cohere in their treatment of race as a basic social division, a structure of power, a focus of political struggle and hence a fundamental force in shaping women’s and men’s lives.

This evolving intellectual and political perspec- tive uses several terms. While we adopt the label “mul- tiracial,” other terms have been used to describe this broad framework. For example, Chela Sandoval refers to “U.S. Third World feminisms,”19 while other schol- ars refer to “indigenous feminisms.” In their theory text-reader, Alison M. Jagger and Paula M. Rothen- berg adopt the label “multicultural feminism.”20

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We use “multiracial” rather than “multicultural” as a way of underscoring race as a power system that interacts with other structured inequalities to shape genders. Within the US context, race, and the system of meanings and ideologies which accompany it, is a fundamental organizing principle of social re- lationships.21 Race affects all women and men, al- though in different ways. Even cultural and group differences among women are produced through interaction within a racially stratified social order. Therefore, although we do not discount the impor- tance of culture, we caution that cultural analytic frameworks that ignore race tend to view women’s differences as the product of group-specific values and practices that often result in the marginalization of cultural groups which are then perceived as exotic expressions of a normative center. Our focus on race stresses the social construction of differently situated social groups and their varying degrees of advantage and power. Additionally, this emphasis on race takes on increasing political importance in an era where discourse about race is governed by color-evasive lan- guage22 and a preference for individual rather than group remedies for social inequalities. Our analyses insist upon the primary and pervasive nature of race in contemporary US society while at the same time acknowledging how race both shapes and is shaped by a variety of other social relations.

In the social sciences, multiracial feminism grew out of socialist feminist thinking. Theories about how political economic forces shape women’s lives were influential as we began to uncover the social causes of racial ethnic women’s subordination. But socialist feminism’s concept of capitalist patriarchy, with its focus on women’s unpaid (reproductive) labor in the home, failed to address racial differences in the orga- nization of reproductive labor. As feminists of color have argued, “reproductive labor has divided along racial as well as gender lines, and the specific charac- teristics have varied regionally and changed over time as capitalism has reorganized.”23 Despite the limita- tions of socialist feminism, this body of literature has been especially useful in pursuing questions about the interconnections among systems of domination.24

Race and ethnic studies was the other major social scientific source of multiracial feminism. It provided

a basis for comparative analyses of groups that are socially and legally subordinated and remain cultur- ally distinct within US society. This includes the sys- tematic discrimination of socially constructed racial groups and their distinctive cultural arrangements. Historically, the categories of African American, Latino, Asian American, and Native American were constructed as both racially and culturally distinct. Each group has a distinctive culture, shares a common heritage, and has developed a common identity within a larger society that subordinates them.25

We recognize, of course, certain pitfalls inherent in an uncritical use of the multiracial label. First, the perspective can be hampered by a biracial model in which only African Americans and whites are seen as racial categories and all other groups are viewed through the prism of cultural differences. Latinos and Asians have always occupied distinctive places within the racial hierarchy, and current shifts in the composition of the US population are racializing these groups anew.26

A second problem lies in treating multiracial feminism as a single analytical framework, and its principle architects, women of color, as an un- differentiated category. The concepts “multiracial feminism,” “racial ethnic women,” and “women of color” homogenize quite different experiences and can falsely universalize experiences across race, eth- nicity, sexual orientation, and age.27 The feminisms created by women of color exhibit a plurality of in- tellectual and political positions. We speak in many voices, with inconsistencies that are born of our dif- ferent social locations. Multiracial feminism embod- ies this plurality and richness. Our intent is not to falsely universalize women of color. Nor do we wish to promote a new racial essentialism in place of the old gender essentialism. Instead, we use these con- cepts to examine the structures and experiences pro- duced by intersecting forms of race and gender.

It is also essential to acknowledge that race itself is a shifting and contested category whose meanings construct definitions of all aspects of social life.28 In the United States it helped define citizenship by ex- cluding everyone who was not a white, male prop- erty owner. It defined labor as slave or free, coolie or contract, and family as available only to those men

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whose marriages were recognized or whose wives could immigrate with them. Additionally, racial meanings are contested both within groups and be- tween them.29

Although definitions of race are at once his- torically and geographically specific, they are also transnational, encompassing diasporic groups and crossing traditional geographic boundaries. Thus, while US multiracial feminism calls attention to the fundamental importance of race, it must also locate the meaning of race within specific national traditions.

T h E D I S T I N g u I S h I N g F E AT u R E S O F   M u lT I R A C I A l F E M I N I S M

By attending to these problems, multiracial feminism offers a set of analytic premises for thinking about and theorizing gender. The following themes distinguish this branch of feminist inquiry.

First, multiracial feminism asserts that gender is constructed by a range of interlocking inequalities, what Patricia Hill Collins calls a “matrix of domina- tion.”30 The idea of a matrix is that several funda- mental systems work with and through each other. People experience race, class, gender, and sexuality differently depending upon their social location in the structures of race, class, gender, and sexuality. For example, people of the same race will experience race differently depending upon their location in the class structure as working class, professional mana- gerial class, or unemployed; in the gender structure as female or male; and in structures of sexuality as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual.

Multiracial feminism also examines the simulta- neity of systems in shaping women’s experience and identity. Race, class, gender, and sexuality are not re- ducible to individual attributes to be measured and assessed for their separate contribution in explain- ing given social outcomes, an approach that Eliza- beth Spelman calls “pop-bead metaphysics,” where a woman’s identity consists of the sum of parts neatly divisible from one another.31 The matrix of domi- nation seeks to account for the multiple ways that women experience themselves as gendered, raced, classed, and sexualized.

Second, multiracial feminism emphasizes the in- tersectional nature of hierarchies at all levels of social life. Class, race, gender, and sexuality are compo- nents of both social structure and social interaction. Women and men are differently embedded in loca- tions created by these cross-cutting hierarchies. As a result, women and men throughout the social order experience different forms of privilege and subordi- nation, depending on their race, class, gender, and sexuality. In other words, intersecting forms of domi- nation produce both oppression and opportunity. At the same time that structures of race, class, and gender create disadvantages for women of color, they provide unacknowledged benefits for those who are at the top of these hierarchies—whites, members of the upper classes, and males. Therefore, multiracial feminism applies not only to racial ethnic women but also to women and men of all races, classes, and genders.

Third, multiracial feminism highlights the re- lational nature of dominance and subordination. Power is the cornerstone of women’s differences.32 This means that women’s differences are connected in systematic ways.33 Race is a vital element in the pat- tern of relations among minority and white women. As Linda Gordon argues, the very meanings of being a white woman in the United States have been af- fected by the existence of subordinated women of color; “They intersect in conflict and in occasional cooperation, but always in mutual influence.”34

Fourth, multiracial feminism explores the inter- play of social structure and women’s agency. Within the constraints of race, class, and gender oppression, women create viable lives for themselves, their fami- lies, and their communities. Women of color have re- sisted and often undermined the forces of power that control them. From acts of quiet dignity and steadfast determination to involvement in revolt and rebellion, women struggle to shape their own lives. Racial op- pression has been a common focus of the “dynamic of oppositional agency” of women of color. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty points out, it is the nature and orga- nization of women’s opposition which mediates and differentiates the impact of structures of domination.35

Fifth, multiracial feminism encompasses wide- ranging methodological approaches, and like other branches of feminist thought, relies on varied

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theoretical tools as well. Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani identify three guiding principles of inclusive feminist inquiry: “building complex analyses, avoid- ing erasure, specifying location.”36 In the last decade, the opening up of academic feminism has focused attention on social location in the production of knowledge. Most basically, research by and about marginalized women has destabilized what used to be universal categories of gender. Marginalized lo- cations are well-suited for grasping social relations that remained obscure from more privileged vantage points. Lived experience, in other words, creates al- ternative ways of understanding the social world and the experience of different groups of women within it. Racially informed standpoint epistemologies have provided new topics, fresh questions, and new under- standings of women and men. Women of color have, as Norma Alarcon argues, asserted ourselves as sub- jects, using our voices to challenge dominant concep- tions of truth.37

Sixth, multiracial feminism brings together un- derstandings drawn from the lived experiences of di- verse and continuously changing groups of women. Among Asian Americans, Native Americans, Latinas, and blacks are many different national cultural and ethnic groups. Each one is engaged in the process of testing, refining, and reshaping these broader cat- egories in its own image. Such internal differences heighten awareness of and sensitivity to both com- monalities and differences, serving as a constant re- minder of the importance of comparative study and maintaining a creative tension between diversity and universalization.

D I F F E R E N C E A N D T R A N S F O R M AT I O N

Efforts to make women’s studies less partial and less distorted have produced important changes in aca- demic feminism. Inclusive thinking has provided a way to build multiplicity and difference into our analyses. This has led to the discovery that race matters for ev- eryone. White women, too, must be reconceptualized as a category that is multiply defined by race, class, and other differences. As Ruth Frankenberg demonstrates in a study of whiteness among contemporary women,

all kinds of social relations, even those that appear neutral, are, in fact, racialized. Frankenberg further complicates the very notion of a unified white iden- tity by introducing issues of Jewish identity.38 There- fore, the lives of women of color cannot be seen as a variation on a more general model of white American womanhood. The model of womanhood that feminist social science once held as “universal” is also a product of race and class.

When we analyze the power relations constitut- ing all social arrangements and shaping women’s lives in distinctive ways, we can begin to grapple with core feminist issues about how genders are socially constructed and constructed differently. Women’s difference is built into our study of gender. Yet this perspective is quite far removed from the atheoreti- cal pluralism implied in much contemporary think- ing about gender.

Multiracial feminism, in our view, focuses not just on differences but also on the way in which dif- ferences and domination intersect and are histori- cally and socially constituted. It challenges feminist scholars to go beyond the mere recognition and in- clusion of difference to reshape the basic concepts and theories of our disciplines. By attending to wom- en’s social location based on race, class, and gender, multiracial feminism seeks to clarify the structural sources of diversity. Ultimately, multiracial feminism forces us to see privilege and subordination as inter- related and to pose such questions as, How do the existences and experiences of all people—women and men, different racial-ethnic groups, and differ- ent classes—shape the experiences of each other? How are those relationships defined and enforced through social institutions that are the primary sites for negotiating power within society? How do these differences contribute to the construction of both in- dividual and group identity? Once we acknowledge that all women are affected by the racial order of soci- ety, then it becomes clear that the insights of multira- cial feminism provide an analytical framework, not solely for understanding the experiences of women of color but for understanding all women, and men, as well.

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N O T E S

1. Maxine Baca Zinn, Lynn Weber Cannon, Elizabeth Higginbotham, and Bonnie Thornton Dill, “The Costs of Exclusionary Practices in Women’s Studies,” Signs 11 (Winter, 1986): 290–303.

2. Chela Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World,” Genders (Spring, 1991): 1–24.

3. Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani, “Cross Currents, Crosstalk: Race, ‘Postcoloniality’ and the Politics of Location,” Cultural Studies 7 (May, 1993): 292–310.

4. We use the term “multiracial feminism” to convey the multiplicity of racial groups and feminist perspectives.

5. A growing body of works on difference in feminist thought now exists. Although we cannot cite all of the current work, the following are representative: Michèle Barrett, “The Concept of Difference,” Feminist Review 26 (July, 1987): 29–42; Christina Crosby, “Dealing with Differ- ence,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992): 130–43; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Difference, Diversity, and Divisions in an Agenda for the Women’s Movement,” in Color, Class, and Country: Experiences of Gender, ed. Gay Young and Bette J. Dickerson (London: Zed Books, 1994): 232–48; Nancy A. Hewitt, “Compounding Differ- ences,” Feminist Studies 18 (Summer, 1992): 313–26; Maria C. Lugones, “On the Logic of Feminist Pluralism,” in Feminist Ethics, ed. Claudia Card (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991), 35–44; Rita S. Gallin and Anne Ferguson, “The Plurality of Feminism: Rethinking ‘ Difference,’” in The Woman and International Development Annual (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), 3: 1–16; and Linda Gordon, “On Difference,” Genders 10 (Spring, 1991): 91–111.

6. Susan Bordo, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Skepticism,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (London: Routledge, 1990), 133–156.

7. Sandra G. Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives (Ithaca: Cor- nell University Press, 1991), 179.

8. Crosby, 131. 9. Fox-Genovese, 232. 10. Faye Ginsberg and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Introduction to Uncertain Terms, Negotiating Gender

in American Culture, ed. Faye Ginsberg and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 3.

11. Sandoval, 2. 12. Sandra G. Morgan, “Making Connections: Socialist-Feminist Challenges to Marxist Scholar-

ship,” in Women and a New Academy: Gender and Cultural Contexts, ed. Jean F. O’Barr (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 149.

13. Jane Rowland Martin, “Methodological Essentialism, False Difference, and Other Dangerous Traps,” Signs 19 (Spring, 1994): 647.

14. Barrett, 32. 15. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 21. 16. Lugones, 35–44. 17. Patricia Hill Collins, Foreword to Women of Color in U.S. Society, ed. Maxine Baca Zinn and

Bonnie Thornton Dill (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), xv. 18. Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black

Feminist Thought,” Social Problems 33 (December, 1986): 514–532. 19. Sandoval, 1.

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20. Alison M. Jagger and Paula S. Rothenberg, Feminist Frameworks: Alternative Theoretical Accounts of the Relations between Women and Men, 3d ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993).

21. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994).

22. Ruth Frankenberg, The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

23. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs 18 (Autumn, 1992): 3. See also Bonnie Thornton Dill, “Our Mothers’ Grief: Racial-Ethnic Women and the Maintenance of Families,” Journal of Family History 13, no. 4 (1988): 415–31.

24. Morgan, 146. 25. Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill, “Difference and Domination,” in Women of Color

in U.S. Society, 11–12. 26. See Omi and Winant, 53–76, for a discussion of racial formation. 27. Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins, Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology (Belmont,

Calif.: Wadsworth, 1992), xvi. 28. Omi and Winant. 29. Nazli Kibria, “Migration and Vietnamese American Women: Remaking Ethnicity,” in Women of

Color in U.S. Society, 247–61. 30. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empower-

ment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990). 31. Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Women: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon

Press, 1988). 32. Several discussions of difference make this point. See Baca Zinn and Dill, 10; Gordon, 106; and

Lynn Weber, in the “Symposium on West and Fenstermaker’s ‘Doing Difference,’” Gender & Soci- ety 9 (August, 1995): 515–19.

33. Glenn, 10. 34. Gordon, 106. 35. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of

Feminism,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 13.

36. Frankenberg and Mani, 307. 37. Norma Alarcon, “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo American

Feminism,” in Making Face, Making Soul, Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990), 356.

38. Frankenberg. See also Evelyn Torton Beck, “The Politics of Jewish Invisibility,” NWSA Journal (Fall, 1988): 93–102.

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i n t r o d u c t i o n

Intersectionality, the mutually constitutive relations among social identities, has become a central tenet of feminist thinking, one that McCall (2005) and others have suggested is the most important contribu- tion of feminist theory to our present understanding of gender. Indeed, at the level of theory, intersec- tionality has transformed how gender is discussed. Feminist theorists reveal and challenge the taken for granted assumptions about gender that underlie con- ventional theoretical and methodological approaches to empirical research as, for example, psychology’s homogenization of the category of gender. The inter- sectionality perspective further reveals that the indi- vidual’s social identities profoundly influence one’s beliefs about and experience of gender. As a result, feminist researchers have come to understand that the individual’s social location as reflected in intersecting identities must be at the forefront in any investigation of gender. In particular, gender must be understood in the context of power relations embedded in social identities (Collins 1990; 2000).

Understanding that social location is important and discerning how to apply that knowledge in the course of conducting research, however, are not the same. Despite recognition of the significance of in- tersectionality, empirical application of this perspec- tive has lagged behind, particularly in psychology and related disciplines that prize methodological approaches that do not easily lend themselves to em- pirical study of intersectionality. . . .

Before I turn to the substance of this intro- ductor y piece, I first want to say a bit more about

definitions of intersectionality and the standpoint from which I have approached development of this special issue.

Most important, by identity I mean social catego- ries in which an individual claims membership as well as the personal meaning associated with those categories (Ashmore et al. 2004). Identity in psycho- logical terms relates to awareness of self, self-image, self-reflection, and self-esteem. In contemporary American society, identity is emphasized as a quality that enables the expression of the individual’s authen- tic sense of self. The specific definition of intersection- ality varies by research context, but a consistent thread across definitions is that social identities, which serve as organizing features of social relations, mutually constitute, reinforce, and naturalize one another. By mutually constitute I mean that one category of iden- tity, such as gender, takes its meaning as a category in relation to another category. By reinforce I mean that the formation and maintenance of identity cat- egories is a dynamic process in which the individual herself or himself is actively engaged. We are not pas- sive “recipients” of an identity position, but “practice” each aspect of identity as informed by other identities we claim. By naturalize I mean that identities in one category come to be seen as self-evident or “basic” through the lens of another category. For example, in the contemporary United States, racial categories are construed as containing two genders. This suggests that gender categories are always and everywhere similarly understood and employed, thus “natural” and without other possibilities (e.g., multiple genders; “temporary” gender categories). To this definition we

S T E P H A N I E A . S H I E L D S

3. GENDER: AN INTERSECTIONALITY PERSPECTIVE

Reprinted by permission from Springer Nature. Stephanie Shields, Gender: An Intersectionality Perspective, © 2008.

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might add the acknowledgment that these meanings are historically contingent. See, for example, Shields and Bhatia (in press).

It is also widely agreed that intersections create both oppression and opportunity (Baca Zinn and Thornton Dill 1996). In other words, being on the advantaged side offers more than avoidance of disad- vantage or oppression by actually opening up access to rewards, status, and opportunities unavailable to other intersections. Furthermore, an intersectional position may be disadvantaged relative to one group, but advantaged relative to another. The White lesbian may be disadvantaged because of divergence from the heterosexual norm and standard, but relative to other lesbians she enjoys racial privilege. Last and not least, identities instantiate social stratification. That is, identity, such as gender or social class, may be experienced as a feature of individual selves, but it also reflects the operation of power relations among groups that comprise that identity category.

[ . . . ]

i n t e r s e c t i o n a l i t y o f s o c i a l i d e n t i t i e s : a b r i e f h i s t o r y

When second wave academic feminism began to shine light on women’s experience as women in the early 1970s, a companion question soon arose: “Which women’s experience?” The origins of the in- tersectionality framework grew out of feminist and womanist scholars of color pressing the position that most feminist scholarship at that time was about middle-class, educated, white women, and that an inclusive view of women’s position should substan- tively acknowledge the intersections of gender with other significant social identities, most notably race (e.g., Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981; Hull et al. 1982; Dill 1983).

These specific critiques were strong voices in a widely expressed concern that feminist scholarship should more explicitly acknowledge the ways in which social positions and group membership over- lap and change the experience of social identity. An early solution was the development of a model of lay- ered oppressions. In general, it was a more or less ad- ditive model of the effects of marginalized identities

based on the idea that the more marginalized statuses that the individual identified with (or was identified as occupying), the greater the oppression (Purdie- Vaughns and Eibach 2008). Empirical research born of this view focused on urging inclusivity of topics and populations previously overlooked, but transfor- mation of research processes themselves came later.

The theoretical foundation for intersectionality grew from study of the production and reproduction of inequalities, dominance, and oppression. The evolution of intersectionality as a theoretical frame- work has been traced to Black feminist responses to the limitations of the accumulated disadvantage model (e.g., Mullings 1997; Nakano Glenn 1999) and the recognition that the intersections of gender with other dimensions of social identity are the starting point of theory (Crenshaw [1994] 2005). A fundamental assumption in every influential theo- retical formulation of intersectionality is that in- tersectional identities are defined in relation to one another. That is, intersectional identities, as Spel- man (1988) famously observed, are not a “pop bead metaphysics,” that is, not a set of discrete identities like beads on a string, but, rather, they are relation- ally defined and emergent (e.g., Anthias and Yuval- Davis 1983; Collins 1990).

Since the 1980s, feminist critique of essential- ist assumptions about gender increasingly has em- ployed an intersectionality perspective to understand gender in relation to other social identities, such as race, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. In con- trast to models that suggest for each minority status there is a simple accumulation of disadvantage, such that the Black woman is doubly disadvantaged com- pared to the Black man, the intersectionality frame- work emphasizes the qualitative differences among different intersectional positions. For example, “the very meaning of manhood may vary when applied to one’s own racial group as compared to another group; similarly the meaning of a given racial cat- egory may vary for men and women” (Mullings and Schulz 2006, p. 5).

In sum, the construct of intersectionality has assumed a significant position in thinking about gender. As the foundation for theory it promised a more accurate and tractable way of dealing with

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two issues. First, it promised a solution, or at least a language for the glaring fact that it is impossible to talk about gender without considering other di- mensions of social structure/social identity that play a formative role in gender’s operation and meaning. In the United States, the most obvious, pervasive, and seemingly unalterable are race and social class. Second, intersectionality seemed a generally appli- cable descriptive solution to the multiplying features that create and define social identities. It is not race- class-gender, but also age, ableness, sexual orienta- tion, to name the most salient.

Risman (2004) sums up the impact that con- cern with intersectionality has had on feminist work: “there is now considerable consensus growing that one must always take into consideration mul- tiple axes of oppression; to do otherwise presumes the whiteness of women, the maleness of people of color, and the heterosexuality of everyone” (p. 442). Indeed, Knapp (2005) asserts that the rapidity with which ideas of intersectionality gained purchase was “the political and moral need for feminism to be inclusive in order to be able to keep up its own foundational premises” (p. 253). At the same time, the impulse toward inclusivity was challenged by the “postfeminist” controversies of the late 1980s and early 1990s which either threatened to fragment fem- inism in a re-radicalized identity politics or reject the meaningfulness of identity categories (Knapp 2005). Butler’s (1990) Gender Trouble, for example, posed a challenge to “theories of feminist identity that elabo- rate predicates of color, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and able-bodiedness” which “invariably close with an embarrassed ‘etc.’, at the end of the list” (p. 143). Indeed, Butler and others critique the very notion of “woman” as a stable category.

The intellectual and moral imperatives of in- tersectionality notwithstanding, the prevailing ap- proach to understanding individuals in the context of groups is to focus on comparison of group differences and similarities. The naturalization of gender catego- ries has fostered an approach to gender research in psychology in which the goal is to identify gender differences (and occasionally, similarities). Within this gender-as-difference framework, the status of gender as a category remains outside the  spotlight.

the question “In what ways do women and men differ?” does not seem that it will ever go away. Sim- plistic catalogs of difference resist theory’s demon- stration that focus on the descriptions of difference and similarity do not aid us in understanding when and how gender operates as a system of oppression or as an aspect of identity.

We have long known that “difference” is a seduc- tive oversimplification (e.g., Hare-Mustin and Marecek 1988; Bacchi 1990; Eagly 1998). Gender-as-difference predominates in lay and popular culture discourse on gender and thereby demands its attention and in- clusion in scientific and scholarly discourse. The end result is further reification of gender-as-difference which, in turn, endows it with the status of expla- nation (difference-as- explanation). One need look no further than recent neuroscience publications on gender differences in fMRI responses for examples of this process. Difference-as-explanation, in turn, reaffirms the legitimacy of gender stereotypes. (See also Richards 2002.) In the case of racial categories, a similar misattribution to the category occurs. For example, Helms et al. (2005) point out that the com- bination of imprecise definition of racial categories with their easy quantification leads researchers to attribute more meaning to race categories than is merited.

Moving from the description of difference/simi- larity to explanation of processes is a challenge for most researchers. In adopting an intersectionality perspective, the question of how to approach em- pirical work without falling back into the status quo approach of testing for difference takes enormous effort. After all, conventional quantitative research designs and statistical analyses are constructed to test for differences between groups. It is neither an automatic nor an easy step to go from acknowledging linkages among social identities to explaining those linkages or the processes through which intersecting identities define and shape one another.

Conversations by feminist researchers with dif- ferent disciplines of origin are as difficult here as in any other situation that bears on theory and the methods to test those theories or otherwise estab- lish truth claims. While there may be broad agree- ment as to the fundamental features of a definition

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of “intersectionality,” the relation of the construct to research practice varies considerably. Different ways of construing “intersectionality” within and between disciplines and individual investigators make it dif- ficult to establish that the conversation begins from the same point of reference. . . .

i n t e r s e c t i o n a l i t y a s a p e r s p e c t i v e o n   r e s e a r c h

Most behavioral science research that focuses on in- tersectionality, especially research using quantitative techniques, employs intersectionality as a perspec- tive on research rather than as a theory that drives the research question. That is, intersectionality is con- strued in terms of multiple group membership, but its emergent properties and processes escape attention. Gamson and Moon (2004), for example, point out that sociologists of sexuality were attending to inter- sections of sexuality and gender in the 1990s, but only recently have begun to ask “how” questions. Thus, work that aims to take an intersectionality perspective often does not succeed in fully integrating the idea of mutually constituted categories into the work, and “intersectionality” looks much more like independent factors within a conventional factorial research design. This is not to say that the researchers fail to grasp the idea, but available methodological tools can impede a view of just how radical a transformation of thinking about research processes is needed to incorporate in- tersectionality meaningfully (Bowleg 2008). Psychol- ogy is not alone. Other fields are similarly grappling with incorporating an intersectionality perspective into a tradition of empirical work (e.g., Barker 2005 on feminist economics; Kennedy 2005 on feminist sci- ence and technology studies).

i n t e r s e c t i o n a l i t y : f r o m fa c t o f   i d e n t i t y t o t h e o r y

Intersectionality first and foremost reflects the reality of lives. The facts of our lives reveal that there is no single identity category that satisfactorily describes how we respond to our social environment or are responded to by others. It is important to begin with this obser- vation because concern about intersectionality from a theoretical or research perspective has grown directly

out of the way in which multiple identities are experi- enced. Identities are fluid in that they can change over time; at the same time, however, they are experienced as stable, giving the self a sense of continuity across time and location. Some identity categories, perhaps most notably gender, are found in all historical peri- ods and cultures, though how and to whom the iden- tity category applies can vary as do the social meanings attached to the category.

Which components of intersectionality are in the foreground and which in the background and how those constituent identities are seen to articulate is, to some degree, dependent on the investigator’s level of analysis. In her landmark paper on intersectional- ity and violence against women of color, for example, Crenshaw (1994/2005) differentiated structural in- tersectionality from political intersectionality. Struc- tural intersectionality reflects the ways in which the individual’s legal status or social needs marginal- ize them, specifically because of the convergence of identity statuses. Crenshaw cites the example of rape counseling for women of color, noting that the spe- cific convergence of socioeconomic status, race, and gender makes it less likely that poor women of color will receive the assistance they need if resources are allocated according to the standards of need of ra- cially and economically privileged women. Political intersectionality, in contrast, highlights the different and possibly conflicting needs and goals of the re- spective groups from which an individual draws her or his identity. Crenshaw here uses the example of Black women whose political energies are often split between social action agendas based on race and on gender—neither of which alone may adequately ad- dress the specific concerns or most pressing needs of Black women themselves. Crenshaw’s analysis reminds us that the nature of the experience varies by domain. Her analysis also highlights the fact that the individual’s experience of intersecting identi- ties must be distinguished from the ways that inter- section is broadcast in the larger culture. (See also Nakano Glenn 1999, and Weber 2004.)

Another way to conceptualize intersecting identi- ties emphasizes the unique form of identity created out of intersections. From this point of view emer- gent identity is experienced as a uniquely hybrid

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creation. The concept of hybridity grew out of postco- lonial studies emphasizing the impact of colonizing influences on indigenous cultures. The idea is that at any point where cultures make contact, whether this is involuntary as through colonization or voluntary as through immigration, new cultural forms are cre- ated. Applying this idea to identity emphasizes the impact that invading, colonizing, or dominant cul- tures can have on group identity and the individual’s simultaneous and innovative expression of these new intersections. The notion of hybridity further sug- gests that there is stability in this newly formed in- tersectional category. Interviews of first-generation, middle-class Indian immigrants to the United States, for example, reveal how this group made up primar- ily of skilled professionals, through the specific racial dynamics of American society, as a group, have been transformed into “people of color” (Bhatia 2007).

[ . . . ]

a n i n t e r s e c t i o n a l i t y p e r s p e c t i v e o n   g e n d e r : b e s t p r a c t i c e s i n b e h av i o r a l r e s e a r c h

There is clearly no one-size-fits-all methodological solution to incorporating an intersectionality per- spective. A both/and strategy both pragmatically and conceptually seems the best way forward (Collins 1998; Risman 2004). The both/and strategy entails both comparing individual identities to each other as well as considering intersections and their emergent properties. An intersectionality perspective requires that identity categories be studied in relation to one other—the facts of intersectionality at the individual, interpersonal, and structural level compel us to. At the same time, however, we must be mindful of the spe- cific historical and contextual features of individual identity categories.

Some research questions may be more usefully addressed by an intersectionality model than others. We should not, however, expect that the processes underlying systems of inequality will be equiva- lent when examined at a structural level. Risman (2004), for example observes that race and socioeco- nomic status, for example, always intersect as axes of domination, but the social processes that create and

maintain them are not necessarily identical. This is true for gendered intersections as well:

Gendered images support racial domination, but racial domination can hardly be attributed to gender inequality. For example, Black men’s inferiority gets promoted through constructions of hypersexuality (Collins 2004), and Black women’s inferiority gets promoted through sexualized images such as Jeze- bel or welfare queen (Collins 2000). Similarly, Asian American men’s autonomy and even citizenship rights were abrogated by constructions of effeminacy (Espiritu 1997). Yet it is implausible to argue that racial domination is nothing but a product of gender oppression. (Risman 2004, pp. 443–444)

In other situations, forms of intersectionality create unique situations of disadvantage and margin- alization, yet gender may be a significant explanatory through-line. For example, different mechanisms may be at work to depress the wages of working poor women compared to men, and women professionals compared to men, and the experience of marginal- ization may be quite different for the two groups of women. The end result of different local mechanisms, however, is the fact that women across occupations are paid, on average, less than men of comparable training, skill, productivity, and seniority.

As a social structural institution, gender con- structs and maintains the subordination of women as a group to men as a group across time and culture (Lorber 1994). This is the primary reason that we use gender as the starting point in our analysis of inter- sectionality. We do not suggest that gender is always and everywhere the most important social identity, but it is the most pervasive, visible, and codified.

[ . . . ]

w h y i n t e r s e c t i o n a l i t y i s a n u r g e n t i s s u e

Naomi Weisstein is a psychologist whose work on the basic processes of visual perception is highly regarded by peer scientists. Among feminists, however, she is far better known for her influential paper, first deliv- ered in 1968, which jump-started contemporary femi- nist psychology. “Kinder, Küche, Kirche, The Fantasy Life of the Male Psychologist” (Weisstein 1968) was

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an exposé of experimental psychology’s reliance on androcentric theory and white, male college student research participants to map the “facts” of human be- havior. Her paper was a powerful call to change fun- damentally the questions that academic psychology identified as important. Nearly 25 years later she la- mented that the wave of feminist research of the 1970s had been tamed (Weisstein 1993). Adopting an unre- formed feminist empiricist position, she argued for the revival of feminist activist science (Shields 1998). As- serting that good scientific method is the way forward, she urged a “return to an activist, challenging, badass feminist psychology” (1993, p. 244). Intersectionality is an urgent issue because it is critical to the effective, activist science that feminist psychology should be.

The goal of activist science itself is not to create policy, but to inform it. Research undertaken from an intersectionality perspective does originate from a point of view which includes an agenda for posi- tive social change, but the agenda requires data to support it. This approach reflects a belief that science can be beneficial to society and that it is our obliga- tion to study scientifically those problems and issues that bear on real people’s lived experience. Inter- sectionality has consequences for how social issues are construed and the construction of systematic explanation, including empirical strategies with a foundation in scientific method. Bograd (1999), for example, describes how focusing on gender alone

as the central issue in domestic violence hindered theory development and empirical research. In an- other vein, Burman (2005) shows how prevailing research approaches to cultural psychology, such as multiculturality, each in their own way marginalize or erase gender.

Intersectionality is urgent because it gets us as researchers to go beyond the individually informed perspective that we each inevitably bring to our scholarship and science. Walker (2003) points out that “the attempt to understand intersectionality is, in fact, an effort to see things from the worldview of others and not simply from our own unique stand- points” (991). The intersectionality perspective is thus an invitation to move beyond one’s own re- search comfort zone.

The intersectionality perspective is especially relevant to enhancing those research methods that seem to be least amenable to adopting it. Labora- tory experiment and large-scale survey research, as removed as they are from tapping the subjectivity of participants, can benefit from ways to formulate research questions that allow for and can reveal the responses of individuals as a reflection of the identi- ties that form them. If one adopts an intersectional perspective, one will look at research problems from that perspective and not be satisfied until some sort of research strategy is developed that enables one to answer the question. That’s what scientists do.

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

Special thanks to Sex Roles editor, Irene Frieze, for her enthusiasm and support for this special issue. I thank Matthew Zawadzki and Leah Warner for their insightful comments on a draft of this introduction.

R E F E R E N C E S

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The current wave of research and debate on mascu-linity stems from the impact of the women’s lib- eration movement on men, but it has taken time for this impact to produce a new intellectual agenda. Most discussions of men’s gender in the 1970s and early 1980s centered on an established concept, the male sex role, and an established problem: how men and boys were socialized into this role. There was not much new empirical research. What there was tended to use the more abstracted methods of social psychology (e.g., paper-and-pencil masculinity/femininity scales) to measure generalized attitudes and expectations in ill-defined populations. The largest body of empiri- cal research was the continuing stream of quantitative studies of sex differences—which continued to be dis- appointingly slight (Carrigan, Connell, and Lee 1985).

The concept of a unitary male sex role, however, came under increasing criticism for its multiple over- simplifications and its incapacity to handle issues about power (Kimmel 1987; Connell 1987). New conceptual frameworks were proposed that linked feminist work on institutionalized patriarchy, gay theoretical work on homophobia, and psychoanalytic ideas about the person (Carrigan, Connell, and Lee 1985; Hearn 1987). Increasing attention was given to certain studies that located issues about masculinity in a fully described local context, whether a British printing shop (Cockburn 1983) or a Papuan moun- tain community (Herdt 1981). By the late 1980s, a genre of empirical research based on these ideas was developing, most clearly in sociology but also in an- thropology, history, organization studies, and cul- tural studies. This has borne fruit in the 1990s in what is now widely recognized as a new generation of social research on masculinity and men in gender relations (Connell 1995; Widersprueche 1995; Segal 1997).

Although the recent research has been diverse in subject matter and social location, its characteristic focus is the construction of masculinity in a particu- lar milieu or moment—a clergyman’s family (Tosh 1991), a professional sports career (Messner 1992), a small group of gay men (Connell 1992), a bodybuild- ing gym (Klein 1993), a group of colonial schools (Morrell 1994), an urban police force (McElhinny 1994), drinking groups in bars (Tomsen 1997), a corporate office on the verge of a decision (Messer- schmidt 1997). Accordingly, we might think of this as the “ethnographic moment” in masculinity research, in which the specific and the local are in focus. (This is not to deny that this work deploys broader struc- tural concepts, but simply to note the characteristic focus of the empirical work and its analysis.)

The ethnographic moment brought a much- needed gust of realism to debates on men and mas- culinity, a corrective to the simplifications of role theory. It also provided a corrective to the trend in popular culture where vague discussions of men’s sex roles were giving way to the mystical generalities of the mythopoetic movement and the extreme simpli- fications of religious revivalism.

Although the rich detail of the historical and field studies defies easy summary, certain conclu- sions emerge from this body of research as a whole. In short form, they are the following.

Plural Masculinities A theme of theoretical work in the 1980s, the multiplicity of masculinities has now been very fully documented by descriptive research. Different cultures and different periods of history con- struct gender differently. Striking differences exist, for instance, in the relationship of homosexual practice to dominant forms of masculinity (Herdt 1984). In

Raewyn W. Connell, Masculinities and Globalization Volume: 7 issue: 4, page(s): 347-364 Issue published: April 1, 2005. SAGE Publications.

R A E W Y N W. C O N N E L L

4. MASCULINITIES AND GLOBALIZATION

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multicultural societies, there are varying definitions and enactments of masculinity, for instance, between Anglo and Latino communities in the United States (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Messner 1994). Equally im- portant, more than one kind of masculinity can be found within a given cultural setting or institution. This is particularly well documented in school studies (Foley 1990) but can also be observed in workplaces (Messerschmidt 1997) and the military (Barrett 1996).

Hierarchy and Hegemony These plural masculinities exist in definite social relations, often relations of hier- archy and exclusion. This was recognized early, in gay theorists’ discussions of homophobia; it has become clear that the implications are far-reaching. There is generally a hegemonic form of masculinity, the most honored or desired in a particular context. For West- ern popular culture, this is extensively documented in research on media representations of masculinity (McKay and Huber 1992). The hegemonic form need not be the most common form of masculinity. Many men live in a state of some tension with, or distance from, hegemonic masculinity; others (such as sport- ing heroes) are taken as exemplars of hegemonic mas- culinity and are required to live up to it strenuously (Connell 1990a). The dominance of hegemonic mas- culinity over other forms may be quiet and implicit, but it may also be vehement and violent, as in the im- portant case of homophobic violence.

Collective Masculinities Masculinities, as patterns of gender practice, are sustained and enacted not only by individuals but also by groups and institutions. This fact was visible in Cockburn’s (1983) pioneering re- search on informal workplace culture, and it has been confirmed over and over: in workplaces (Donaldson 1991), in organized sport (Whitson 1990; Messner 1992), in schools (Connell 1996), and so on. This point must be taken with the previous two: institu- tions may construct multiple masculinities and define relationships between them. Barrett’s (1996) illumi- nating study of hegemonic masculinity in the US Navy shows how this takes different forms in the different subbranches of the one military organization.

Bodies as Arenas Men’s bodies do not determine the patterns of masculinity, but they are still of great

importance in masculinity. Men’s bodies are ad- dressed, defined, and disciplined (as in sport; see The- berge 1991), and given outlets and pleasures by the gender order of society. But men’s bodies are not blank slates. The enactment of masculinity reaches certain limits, for instance, in the destruction of the industrial worker’s body (Donaldson 1991). Masculine conduct with a female body is felt to be anomalous or transgres- sive, like feminine conduct with a male body; research on gender crossing (Bolin 1988) shows the work that must be done to sustain an anomalous gender.

Active Construction Masculinities do not exist prior to social interaction, but come into existence as people act. They are actively produced, using the resources and strategies available in a given milieu. Thus the exemplary masculinities of sports professionals are not a product of passive disciplining, but as Messner (1992) shows, result from a sustained, active engagement with the demands of the institutional setting, even to the point of serious bodily damage from “playing hurt” and accumulated stress. With boys learning masculinities, much of what was previously taken as socialization appears, in close- focus studies of schools (Walker 1988; Thorne 1993), as the outcome of intricate and intense maneuvering in peer groups, classes, and adult–child relationships.

Contradiction Masculinities are not homogeneous, simple states of being. Close-focus research on mas- culinities commonly identifies contradictory desires and conduct; for instance, in Klein’s (1993) study of bodybuilders, the contradiction between the hetero- sexual definition of hegemonic masculinity and the homosexual practice by which some of the bodybuild- ers finance the making of an exemplary body. Psy- choanalysis provides the classic evidence of conflicts within personality, and recent psychoanalytic writing (Chodorow 1994; Lewes 1988) has laid some em- phasis on the conflicts and emotional compromises within both hegemonic and subordinated forms of masculinity. Life-history research influenced by exis- tential psychoanalysis (Connell 1995) has similarly traced contradictory projects and commitments within particular forms of masculinity.

Dynamics Masculinities created in specific histori- cal circumstances are liable to reconstruction, and

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any pattern of hegemony is subject to contestation, in which a dominant masculinity may be displaced. Heward (1988) shows the changing gender regime of a boys’ school responding to the changed strategies of the families in its clientele. Roper (1991) shows the displacement of a production-oriented masculin- ity among engineering managers by new financially oriented generic managers. Since the 1970s, the re- construction of masculinities has been pursued as a conscious politics. Schwalbe’s (1996) close examina- tion of one mythopoetic group shows the complexity of the practice and the limits of the reconstruction.

If we compare this picture of masculinity with earlier understandings of the male sex role, it is clear that the ethnographic moment in research has al- ready had important intellectual fruits.

Nevertheless, it has always been recognized that some issues go beyond the local. For instance, mytho- poetic movements such as the highly visible Promise Keepers are part of a spectrum of masculinity politics; Messner (1997) shows for the United States that this spectrum involves at least eight conflicting agendas for the remaking of masculinity. Historical studies such as Phillips (1987) on New Zealand and Kimmel (1996) on the United States have traced the changing public constructions of masculinity for whole coun- tries over long periods; ultimately, such historical reconstructions are essential for understanding the meaning of ethnographic details.

I consider that this logic must now be taken a step further, and in taking this step, we will move toward a new agenda for the whole field. What happens in localities is affected by the history of whole coun- tries, but what happens in countries is affected by the history of the world. Locally situated lives are now (indeed, have long been) powerfully influenced by geopolitical struggles, global markets, multinational corporations, labor migration, transnational media. It is time for this fundamental fact to be built into our analysis of men and masculinities.

To understand local masculinities, we must think in global terms. But how? That is the problem pursued in this article. I will offer a framework for thinking about masculinities as a feature of world society and for thinking about men’s gender practices in terms of the global structure and dynamics of gender. This is by no means to reject the ethnographic moment in

masculinity research. It is, rather, to think how we can use its findings more adequately.

t h e w o r l d g e n d e r o r d e r

Masculinities do not first exist and then come into contact with femininities; they are produced together, in the process that constitutes a gender order. Accord- ingly, to understand the masculinities on a world scale, we must first have a concept of the globalization of gender.

This is one of the most difficult points in cur- rent gender analysis because the very conception is counterintuitive. We are so accustomed to thinking of gender as the attribute of an individual, even as an unusually intimate attribute, that it requires a considerable wrench to think of gender on the vast scale of global society. Most relevant discussions, such as the literature on women and development, fudge the issue. They treat the entities that extend internationally (markets, corporations, intergovern- mental programs, etc.) as ungendered in principle— but affecting unequally gendered recipients of aid in practice, because of bad policies. Such conceptions reproduce the familiar liberal feminist view of the state as in principle gender-neutral, though empiri- cally dominated by men.

But if we recognize that very large scale institu- tions such as the state are themselves gendered, in quite precise and specifiable ways (Connell 1990b), and if we recognize that international relations, in- ternational trade, and global markets are inherently an arena of gender formation and gender politics (Enloe 1990), then we can recognize the existence of a world gender order. The term can be defined as the structure of relationships that interconnect the gender regimes of institutions, and the gender orders of local society, on a world scale. That is, however, only a definition. The substantive questions remain: what is the shape of that structure, how tightly are its elements linked, how has it arisen historically, what is its trajectory into the future?

Current business and media talk about global- ization pictures a homogenizing process sweeping across the world, driven by new technologies, produc- ing vast unfettered global markets in which all par- ticipate on equal terms. This is a misleading image. As Hirst and Thompson (1996) show, the global

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economy is highly unequal and the current degree of homogenization is often overestimated. Multi- national corporations based in the three major eco- nomic powers (the United States, European Union, and Japan) are the major economic actors worldwide.

The structure bears the marks of its history. Modern global society was historically produced as Wallerstein (1974) argued, by the economic and po- litical expansion of European states from the fifteenth century on and by the creation of colonial empires. It is in this process that we find the roots of the modern world gender order. Imperialism was, from the start, a gendered process. Its first phase, colonial conquest and settlement, was carried out by gender-segregated forces, and it resulted in massive disruption of indig- enous gender orders. In its second phase, the stabi- lization of colonial societies, new gender divisions of labor were produced in plantation economies and colonial cities, while gender ideologies were linked with racial hierarchies and the cultural defense of empire. The third phase, marked by political decolo- nization, economic neocolonialism, and the current growth of world markets and structures of financial control, has seen gender divisions of labor remade on a massive scale in the “global factory” (Fuentes and Ehrenreich 1983), as well as the spread of gendered violence alongside Western military technology.

The result of this history is a partially inte- grated, highly unequal, and turbulent world society, in which gender relations are partly but unevenly linked on a global scale. The unevenness becomes clear when different substructures of gender (Con- nell 1987; Walby 1990) are examined separately.

The Division of Labor A characteristic feature of colo- nial and neocolonial economies was the restructuring of local production systems to produce a male wage worker–female domestic worker couple (Mies 1986). This need not produce a “housewife” in the Western suburban sense, for instance, where the wage work involved migration to plantations or mines (Moodie 1994). But it has generally produced the identification of masculinity with the public realm and the money economy and of femininity with domesticity, which is a core feature of the modern European gender system (Holter 1997).

Power Relations The colonial and postcolonial world has tended to break down purdah systems of patriar- chy in the name of modernization, if not of women’s emancipation (Kandiyoti 1994). At the same time, the creation of a westernized public realm has seen the growth of large-scale organizations in the form of the state and corporations, which in the great majority of cases are culturally masculinized and controlled by men. In comprador capitalism, however, the power of local elites depends on their relations with the met- ropolitan powers, so the hegemonic masculinities of neocolonial societies are uneasily poised between local and global cultures.

Emotional Relations Both religious and cultural missionary activity has corroded indigenous homo- sexual and cross-gender practice, such as the native American berdache and the Chinese “passion of the cut sleeve” (Hinsch 1990). Recently developed West- ern models of romantic heterosexual love as the basis for marriage and of gay identity as the main alterna- tive have now circulated globally—though as Altman (1996) observes, they do not simply displace indig- enous models, but interact with them in extremely complex ways.

Symbolization Mass media, especially electronic media, in most parts of the world follow North Amer- ican and European models and relay a great deal of metropolitan content; gender imagery is an important part of what is circulated. A striking example is the re- production of a North American imagery of feminin- ity by Xuxa, the blonde television superstar in Brazil (Simpson 1993). In counterpoint, exotic gender imag- ery has been used in the marketing strategies of newly industrializing countries (e.g., airline advertising from Southeast Asia)—a tactic based on the long-standing combination of the exotic and the erotic in the colo- nial imagination (Jolly 1997).

Clearly, the world gender order is not simply an extension of a traditional European-American gender order. That gender order was changed by colonialism, and elements from other cultures now circulate glob- ally. Yet in no sense do they mix on equal terms, to produce a United Colours of Benetton gender order. The culture and institutions of the North Atlantic

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countries are hegemonic within the emergent world system. This is crucial for understanding the kinds of masculinities produced within it.

t h e r e p o s i t i o n i n g o f m e n a n d t h e r e c o n s t i t u t i o n o f m a s c u l i n i t i e s

The positioning of men and the constitution of mas- culinities may be analyzed at any of the levels at which gender practice is configured: in relation to the body, in personal life, and in collective social practice. At each level, we need to consider how the processes of globalization influence configurations of gender.

Men’s bodies are positioned in the gender order, and enter the gender process, through body-reflexive practices in which bodies are both objects and agents (Connell 1995)—including sexuality, violence, and labor. The conditions of such practice include where one is and who is available for interaction. So it is a fact of considerable importance for gender relations that the global social order distributes and redistrib- utes bodies, through migration, and through politi- cal controls over movement and interaction.

The creation of empire was the original “elite mi- gration,” though in certain cases mass migration fol- lowed. Through settler colonialism, something close to the gender order of Western Europe was reassem- bled in North America and in Australia. Labor mi- gration within the colonial systems was a means by which gender practices were spread, but also a means by which they were reconstructed, since labor migra- tion was itself a gendered process—as we have seen in relation to the gender division of labor. Migration from the colonized world to the metropole became (except for Japan) a mass process in the decades after World War II. There is also migration within the pe- riphery, such as the creation of a very large immigrant labor force, mostly from other Muslim countries, in the oil-producing Gulf states.

These relocations of bodies create the possibility of hybridization in gender imagery, sexuality, and other forms of practice. The movement is not always toward synthesis, however, as the race/ethnic hierarchies of colonialism have been re-created in new contexts, in- cluding the politics of the metropole. Ethnic and racial conflict has been growing in importance in recent

years, and as Klein (1997) and Tillner (1997) argue, this is a fruitful context for the production of masculinities oriented toward domination and violence. Even with- out the context of violence, there can be an intimate interweaving of the formation of masculinity with the formation of ethnic identity, as seen in the study by Poynting, Noble, and Tabar (1997) of Lebanese youths in the Anglo-dominant culture of Australia.

At the level of personal life as well as in relation to bodies, the making of masculinities is shaped by global forces. In some cases, the link is indirect, such as the working-class Australian men caught in a situ- ation of structural unemployment (Connell 1995), which arises from Australia’s changing position in the global economy. In other cases, the link is obvious, such as the executives of multinational corporations and the financial sector servicing international trade. The requirements of a career in international business set up strong pressures on domestic life: almost all multinational executives are men, and the assump- tion in business magazines and advertising directed toward them is that they will have dependent wives running their homes and bringing up their children.

At the level of collective practice, masculinities are reconstituted by the remaking of gender mean- ings and the reshaping of the institutional contexts of practice. Let us consider each in turn.

The growth of global mass media, especially electronic media, is an obvious “vector” for the glo- balization of gender. Popular entertainment circu- lates stereotyped gender images, deliberately made attractive for marketing purposes. The example of Xuxa in Brazil has already been mentioned. Inter- national news media are also controlled or strongly influenced from the metropole and circulate Western definitions of authoritative masculinity, criminality, desirable femininity, and so on. But there are limits to the power of global mass communications. Some local centers of mass entertainment differ from the Hollywood model, such as the Indian popular film industry centered in Bombay. Further, media re- search emphasizes that audiences are highly selective in their reception of media messages, and we must allow for popular recognition of the fantasy in mass entertainment. Just as economic globalization can be exaggerated, the creation of a global culture is a more

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turbulent and uneven process than is often assumed (Featherstone 1995).

More important, I would argue, is a process that began long before electronic media existed, the export of institutions. Gendered institutions not only circulate definitions of masculinity (and femi- ninity), as sex role theory notes. The functioning of gendered institutions, creating specific conditions for social practice, calls into existence specific patterns of practice. Thus, certain patterns of collective vio- lence are embedded in the organization and culture of a Western-style army, which are different from the patterns of precolonial violence. Certain patterns of calculative egocentrism are embedded in the work- ing of a stock market; certain patterns of rule follow- ing and domination are embedded in a bureaucracy.

Now, the colonial and postcolonial world saw the installation in the periphery, on a very large scale, of a range of institutions on the North Atlantic model: armies, states, bureaucracies, corporations, capital markets, labor markets, schools, law courts, trans- port systems. These are gendered institutions, and their functioning has directly reconstituted mas- culinities in the periphery. This has not necessar- ily meant photocopies of European masculinities. Rather, pressures for change are set up that are inher- ent in the institutional form.

To the extent that particular institutions become dominant in world society, the patterns of mascu- linity embedded in them may become global stan- dards. Masculine dress is an interesting indicator: almost every political leader in the world now wears the uniform of the Western business executive. The more common pattern, however, is not the complete displacement of local patterns but the articulation of the local gender order with the gender regime of global-model institutions. Case studies such as Hol- lway’s (1994) account of bureaucracy in Tanzania illustrate the point; there, domestic patriarchy artic- ulated with masculine authority in the state in ways that subverted the government’s formal commitment to equal opportunity for women.

We should not expect the overall structure of gender relations on a world scale simply to mirror patterns known on the smaller scale. In the most vital of respects, there is continuity. The world gender order is unquestionably patriarchal, in the sense that

it privileges men over women. There is a patriarchal dividend for men arising from unequal wages, un- equal labor force participation, and a highly unequal structure of ownership, as well as cultural and sexual privileging. This has been extensively documented by feminist work on women’s situation globally (e.g., Taylor 1985), though its implications for masculinity have mostly been ignored. The conditions thus exist for the production of a hegemonic masculinity on a world scale, that is to say, a dominant form of mas- culinity that embodies, organizes, and legitimates men’s domination in the gender order as a whole.

The conditions of globalization, which involve the interaction of many local gender orders, certainly multiply the forms of masculinity in the global gender order. At the same time, the specific shape of globalization, concentrating economic and cultural power on an unprecedented scale, provides new re- sources for dominance by particular groups of men. This dominance may become institutionalized in a pattern of masculinity that becomes, to some degree, standardized across localities. I will call such pat- terns globalizing masculinities, and it is among them, rather than narrowly within the metropole, that we are likely to find candidates for hegemony in the world gender order.

g l o b a l i z i n g m a s c u l i n i t i e s

In this section, I will offer a sketch of major forms of globalizing masculinity in the three historical phases identified above in the discussion of globalization.

m a s c u l i n i t i e s o f c o n q u e s t a n d   s e t t l e m e n t

The creation of the imperial social order involved peculiar conditions for the gender practices of men. Colonial conquest itself was mainly carried out by segregated groups of men—soldiers, sailors, traders, administrators, and a good many who were all these by turn (such as the Rum Corps in early New South Wales, Australia). They were drawn from the more seg- regated occupations and milieux in the metropole, and it is likely that the men drawn into colonization tended to be the more rootless. Certainly the process of con- quest could produce frontier masculinities that com- bined the occupational culture of these groups with an

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unusual level of violence and egocentric individualism. The vehement contemporary debate about the geno- cidal violence of the Spanish conquistadors—who in fifty years completely exterminated the population of Hispaniola—points to this pattern (Bitterli 1989).

The political history of empire is full of evidence of the tenuous control over the frontier exercised by the state—the Spanish monarchs unable to rein in the conquistadors, the governors in Sydney unable to hold back the squatters and in Capetown unable to hold back the Boers, gold rushes breaking boundar- ies everywhere, even an independent republic set up by escaped slaves in Brazil. The point probably ap- plies to other forms of social control too, such as cus- tomary controls on men’s sexuality. Extensive sexual exploitation of indigenous women was a common feature of conquest. In certain circumstances, fron- tier masculinities might be reproduced as a local cultural tradition long after the frontier had passed, such as the gauchos of southern South America and the cowboys of the western United States.

In other circumstances, however, the frontier of conquest and exploitation was replaced by a frontier of settlement. Sex ratios in the colonizing population changed, as women arrived and locally born gen- erations succeeded. A shift back toward the family patterns of the metropole was likely. As Cain and Hopkins (1993) have shown for the British empire, the ruling group in the colonial world as a whole was an extension of the dominant class in the metro- pole, the landed gentry, and tended to reproduce its social customs and ideology. The creation of a set- tler masculinity might be the goal of state policy, as it seems to have been in late-nineteenth-century New Zealand, as part of a general process of pacifica- tion and the creation of an agricultural social order (Phillips 1987). Or it might be undertaken through institutions created by settler groups, such as the elite schools in Natal studied by Morrell (1994).

The impact of colonialism on the construction of masculinity among the colonized is much less documented, but there is every reason to think it was severe. Conquest and settlement disrupted all the structures of indigenous society, whether or not this was intended by the colonizing powers (Bitterli 1989). Indigenous gender orders were no exception. Their disruption could result from the pulverization

of indigenous communities (as in the seizure of land in eastern North America and southeastern Austra- lia), through gendered labor migration (as in gold mining with Black labor in South Africa; see Moodie 1994), to ideological attacks on local gender arrange- ments (as in the missionary assault on the berdache tradition in North America; see Williams 1986). The varied course of resistance to colonization is also likely to have affected the making of mascu- linities. This is clear in the region of Natal in South Africa, where sustained resistance to colonization by the Zulu kingdom was a key to the mobilization of ethnic-national masculine identities in the twentieth century (Morrell 1996).

m a s c u l i n i t i e s o f e m p i r e

The imperial social order created a hierarchy of mas- culinities, as it created a hierarchy of communities and races. The colonizers distinguished “more manly” from “less manly” groups among their subjects. In British India, for instance, Bengali men were supposed effemi- nate while Pathans and Sikhs were regarded as strong and warlike. Similar distinctions were made in South Africa between Hottentots and Zulus, and in North America between Iroquois, Sioux, and Cheyenne on one side, and southern and southwestern tribes on the other.

At the same time, the emerging imagery of gender difference in European culture provided general symbols of superiority and inferiority. Within the imperial “poetics of war” (MacDonald 1994), the conqueror was virile, while the colonized were dirty, sexualized, and effeminate or childlike. In many co- lonial situations, indigenous men were called “boys” by the colonizers (e.g., in Zimbabwe; see Shire 1994). Sinha’s (1995) interesting study of the language of political controversy in India in the 1880s and 1890s shows how the images of “manly Englishman” and “effeminate Bengali” were deployed to uphold colo- nial privilege and contain movements for change. In the late nineteenth century, racial barriers in colonial societies were hardening rather than weakening, and gender ideology tended to fuse with racism in forms that the twentieth century has never untangled.

The power relations of empire meant that in- digenous gender orders were generally under pres- sure from the colonizers, rather than the other way around. But the colonizers too might change. The

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barriers of late colonial racism were not only to pre- vent pollution from below but also to forestall “going native,” a well-recognized possibility—the starting point, for instance, of Kipling’s famous novel Kim ([1901] 1987). The pressures, opportunities, and profits of empire might also work changes in gender arrangements among the colonizers, for instance, the division of labor in households with a large supply of indigenous workers as domestic servants (Bulbeck 1992). Empire might also affect the gender order of the metropole itself by changing gender ideologies, divisions of labor, and the nature of the metropoli- tan state. For instance, empire figured prominently as a source of masculine imagery in Britain, in the Boy Scouts, and in the cult of Lawrence of Arabia (Dawson 1991). Here we see examples of an impor- tant principle: the interplay of gender dynamics be- tween different parts of the world order.

The world of empire created two very different settings for the modernization of masculinities. In the periphery, the forcible restructuring of economics and workforces tended to individualize, on one hand, and rationalize, on the other. A widespread result was masculinities in which the rational calculation of self-interest was the key to action, emphasizing the European gender contrast of rational man/irrational woman. The specific form might be local—for instance, the Japanese “salaryman,” a type first recognized in the 1910s, was specific to the Japanese context of large, stable industrial conglomerates (Kinmonth 1981). But the result generally was masculinities defined around economic action, with both workers and entrepreneurs increasingly adapted to emerging market economies.

In the metropole, the accumulation of wealth made possible a specialization of leadership in the domi- nant classes, and struggles for hegemony in which masculinities organized around domination or vio- lence were split from masculinities organized around expertise. The class compromises that allowed the de- velopment of the welfare state in Europe and North America were paralleled by gender compromises— gender reform movements (most notably the women’s suffrage movement) contesting the legal privileges of men and forcing concessions from the state. In this context, agendas of reform in masculinity emerged: the temperance movement, compassionate marriage, homosexual rights movements, leading eventually

to the pursuit of androgyny in “men’s liberation” in the 1970s (Kimmel and Mosmiller 1992). Not all re- constructions of masculinity, however, emphasized tolerance or moved toward androgyny. The vehe- ment masculinity politics of fascism, for instance, emphasized dominance and difference and glorified violence, a pattern still found in contemporary racist movements (Tillner 1997).

m a s c u l i n i t i e s o f p o s t c o l o n i a l i s m a n d   n e o l i b e r a l i s m

The process of decolonization disrupted the gender hierarchies of the colonial order and, where armed struggle was involved, might have involved a deliber- ate cultivation of masculine hardness and violence (as in South Africa; see Xaba 1997). Some activists and theorists of liberation struggles celebrated this, as a necessary response to colonial violence and emascula- tion; women in liberation struggles were perhaps less impressed. However one evaluates the process, one of the consequences of decolonization was another round of disruptions of community-based gender orders and another step in the reorientation of mas- culinities toward national and international contexts.

Nearly half a century after the main wave of decol- onization, the old hierarchies persist in new shapes. With the collapse of Soviet communism, the decline of postcolonial socialism, and the ascendancy of the new right in Europe and North America, world politics is more and more organized around the needs of trans- national capital and the creation of global markets.

The neoliberal agenda has little to say, explicitly, about gender: it speaks a gender-neutral language of “markets,” “individuals,” and “choice.” But the world in which neoliberalism is ascendant is still a gendered world, and neoliberalism has an implicit gender politics. The “individual” of neoliberal theory has in general the attributes and interests of a male entrepre- neur, the attack on the welfare state generally weakens the position of women, while the increasingly un- regulated power of transnational corporations places strategic power in the hands of particular groups of men. It is not surprising, then, that the installation of capitalism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has been accompanied by a reassertion of dominating masculinities and, in some situations, a sharp worsening in the social position of women.

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We might propose, then, that the hegemonic form of masculinity in the current world gender order is the masculinity associated with those who control its dominant institutions: the business executives who operate in global markets, and the political execu- tives who interact (and in many contexts, merge) with them. I will call this transnational business masculinity. This is not readily available for ethnographic study, but we can get some clues to its character from its re- flections in management literature, business journal- ism, and corporate self-promotion, and from studies of local business elites (e.g., Donaldson 1997).

As a first approximation, I would suggest this is a masculinity marked by increasing egocentrism, very conditional loyalties (even to the corporation), and a declining sense of responsibility for others (except for purposes of image making). Gee, Hall, and Lanks- hear (1996), studying recent management textbooks, note the peculiar construction of the executive in “fast capitalism” as a person with no permanent commitments, except (in effect) to the idea of accu- mulation itself. Transnational business masculinity is characterized by a limited technical rationality (management theory), which is increasingly separate from science.

Transnational business masculinity differs from traditional bourgeois masculinity by its increasingly libertarian sexuality, with a growing tendency to commodify relations with women. Hotels catering to businessmen in most parts of the world now rou- tinely offer pornographic videos, and in some parts of the world, there is a well-developed prostitution industry catering for international businessmen. Transnational business masculinity does not require bodily force, since the patriarchal dividend on which it rests is accumulated by impersonal, institutional means. But corporations increasingly use the exem- plary bodies of elite sportsmen as a marketing tool (note the phenomenal growth of corporate “sponsor- ship” of sport in the last generation) and indirectly as a means of legitimation for the whole gender order.

m a s c u l i n i t y p o l i t i c s o n a w o r l d s c a l e

Recognizing global society as an arena of masculinity formation allows us to pose new questions about mas- culinity politics. What social dynamics in the global

arena give rise to masculinity politics, and what shape does global masculinity politics take?

The gradual creation of a world gender order has meant many local instabilities of gender. Gender instability is a familiar theme of poststructuralist theory, but this school of thought takes as a univer- sal condition a situation that is historically specific. Instabilities range from the disruption of men’s local cultural dominance as women move into the public realm and higher education, through the disruption of sexual identities that produced “queer” politics in the metropole, to the shifts in the urban intelligen- tsia that produced “the new sensitive man” and other images of gender change.

One response to such instabilities, on the part of groups whose power is challenged but still dominant, is to reaffirm local gender orthodoxies and hierar- chies. A masculine fundamentalism is, accordingly, a common response in gender politics at present. A soft version, searching for an essential masculinity among myths and symbols, is offered by the mythopoetic men’s movement in the United States and by the re- ligious revivalists of the Promise Keepers (Messner 1997). A much harder version is found, in that country, in the right-wing militia movement brought to world attention by the Oklahoma City bombing (Gibson 1994), and in contemporary Afghanistan, if we can trust Western media reports, in the militant misog- yny of the Taliban. It is no coincidence that in the two latter cases, hardline masculine fundamentalism goes together with a marked anti-internationalism. The world system—rightly enough—is seen as the source of pollution and disruption.

Not that the emerging global order is a hotbed of gender progressivism. Indeed, the neoliberal agenda for the reform of national and international econom- ics involves closing down historic possibilities for gender reform. I have noted how it subverts the gender compromise represented by the metropolitan welfare state. It has also undermined the progressive-liberal agendas of sex role reform represented by affirmative action programs, anti-discrimination provisions, child care services, and the like. Right-wing parties and governments have been persistently cutting such programs, in the name of either individual liberties or global competitiveness. Through these means, the patriarchal dividend to men is defended or restored,

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without an explicit masculinity politics in the form of a mobilization of men.

Within the arenas of international relations, the in- ternational state, multinational corporations, and global markets, there is nevertheless a deployment of mascu- linities and a reasonably clear hegemony. The transna- tional business masculinity described above has had only one major competitor for hegemony in recent de- cades, the rigid, control-oriented masculinity of the mili- tary, and the military-style bureaucratic dictatorships of Stalinism. With the collapse of Stalinism and the end of the cold war, Big Brother (Orwell’s famous parody of this form of masculinity) is a fading threat, and the more flexible, calculative, egocentric masculinity of the fast capitalist entrepreneur holds the world stage.

We must, however, recall two important conclu- sions of the ethnographic moment in masculinity research: that different forms of masculinity exist to- gether and that hegemony is constantly subject to chal- lenge. These are possibilities in the global arena too.

Transnational business masculinity is not completely homogeneous; variations of it are embedded in differ- ent parts of the world system, which may not be com- pletely compatible. We may distinguish a Confucian variant, based in East Asia, with a stronger commitment to hierarchy and social consensus, from a secularized Christian variant, based in North America, with more hedonism and individualism and greater tolerance for social conflict. In certain arenas, there is already con- flict between the business and political leaderships embodying these forms of masculinity: initially over human rights versus Asian values, and more recently over the extent of trade and investment liberalization.

If these are contenders for hegemony, there is also the possibility of opposition to hegemony. The global circulation of “gay” identity (Altman 1996) is an im- portant indication that nonhegemonic masculinities may operate in global arenas, and may even find a certain political articulation, in this case around human rights and AIDS prevention.

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s o c i a l l i v e s i n t r a n s n at i o n a l s pa c e s

Over the past decade, a rapidly growing literature has described how individuals and groups main- tain connections across countries so that social lives are constructed, not only in single countries but in transnational spaces. Transnational spaces are com- posed of tangible geographic spaces that exist across multiple nation-states and virtual spaces. With im- provements in personal and media communication and travel technology, the ability to move money easily across the globe, and the marketing and ease of consuming “cultural” products—including fash- ions, cosmetics, music, foods, and art—have made it easier for many groups to create lives that extend far beyond the boundaries of single nation-states. We now know about first-generation immigrant “trans- national villagers” who build lives in more than one country by traveling back and forth regularly, orga- nizing family lives across countries, and remitting and investing money, as well as engaging in politics in “homelands” (e.g., Guevarra 2009; Hondagneu- Sotelo and Avila 1997; Levitt 2001; Purkayastha 2009). We also know about postimmigrant genera- tions who actively maintain links with their parents’ homelands (e.g., Purkayastha 2005); cyber migrants who work for Northern employers but are geograph- ically based in the South (e.g., Abraham 2010); and participants in web-based communities, some of whom seek community, while others try on less es- sentialist, choice-driven, multiple, fragmented, and

hybrid identities on the web and thus dilute the consequences of gendering, racialization, class, and other social hierarchies to which they are subjected in their tangible lives (e.g., Diamandaki 2003; Igna- cio 2006; Lee 2003; Mitra 1997; Mitra and Gajjala 2008; Narayan and Purkayastha 2011). Other schol- ars have analyzed web-based transnational linkages that enable geographically dispersed groups to form close-knit political networks (e.g., Earl 2006; Na- rayan, Purkayastha, and Banerji, 2010; Pudrovska and Ferree 2004). As a rapidly growing number of people are tied to transnational spaces—that is, they build lives that combine intersecting local, regional, national, and transnational spaces—single nation- states no longer wholly contain their lives.

At the same time, nation-states have responded in a variety of ways to control social lives in trans- national spaces. For instance, the literature on im- migration shows how nation-states are creating gendered categories of “overseas citizens” in order to attract remittances from migrants (e.g., Gue- varra 2009) or to draw on the expertise or lobbying power of people settled in other countries (Purkay- astha 2009). Equally important, nation-states have attempted to expand their ability to control people across transnational spaces; ideologies, interac- tions, and institutions that have sustained raced/ gendered/classed and other hierarchies within na- tions have expanded in new ways across nations.1 For most of the twentieth centur y, nation-states maintained separate apparatus for controlling groups within nations (e.g., police, prisons) from

B A N D A N A P U R K AYA S T H A

5. INTERSECTIONALITY IN A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD

Purkayastha, Bandana, Intersectionality in a Transnational World, Gender & Society, Vol. 26, No. 1 (February 2012), pp. 55-66 copyright © 2012. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications, Inc

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the apparatus used to dominate and control groups/ states outside nations (e.g., the militar y, foreign in- telligence agencies, facilities to house prisoners of wars). Now, these tools of control are increasingly blurred within nations; for instance, policies such as the PATRIOT Act and organizations such as Home- land Security have blurred the distinction between foreign sur veillance and national sur veillance in the United States. Security agreements across na- tions have created transnational security regions, where profiles developed in one powerful countr y are likely to be rapidly disseminated and acted on in other countries within the transnational security regime (Purkayastha 2009; Vertovec 2001). A suspect in a terrorism case in Scotland or Spain can, almost immediately, be arrested in Australia or the United States.2 The profile of a “turbaned terrorist” or the suspicions against “Muslim-looking” people have generated contemporar y racial profiles so that Sikh men—who wear turbans to comply with their reli- gious tenets—and a range of people of Middle East- ern and South Asian origin are profiled as potential security threats. They are searched more stringently at airports, subject to extra questioning at national borders, subject to sur veillance for communicating with people in “enemy countries,” frequently visit- ing these countries, or sending money to “suspect” organizations through institutional arrangements as they travel through security regimes (see Iwata and Purkayastha 2011; Purkayastha 2009). These new global security arrangements intersect with other processes for controlling racially marked pop- ulations within nations.

Overall, then, transnational spaces are com- posed of tangible and virtual social spaces that exist through and beyond single nation-states. In- dividuals, groups, corporations, and nation-states continue to expand their pur view into such spaces.3 At the same time, those who cannot access trans- national spaces—for a variety of reasons, including the digital divide and stringent government con- trol over travel and internet access—are margin- alized in new ways within this expanded context. Contemporar y discussions of marginalization and privilege have to take these new developments into account.

i n t e r s e c t i o n a l i t y i n t r a n s n at i o n a l s pa c e s

While her earlier work on black feminist thought was focused on the United States, in her recent writings Professor Hill Collins recognizes the expansion of social life beyond the nation-state (e.g., Collins 2010). She discusses the dispersion and consumption of cul- tural products, such as hip-hop, around the globe and the cultural familiarity this engenders among consum- ers, and the possibilities for “creat(ing) shifting pat- terns of face-to-face and mediated interactions . . . (as) new technologies create organizational opportunities for new sorts of political communities” (2010, 18). She discusses the ways in which people imagine local and far-flung political communities using new technolo- gies, and the ways in which these multiple communities somewhat dilute concentrated power of the privileged. Despite this recognition of other worlds of experience, Professor Hill Collins has not, as far as I am aware, discussed the structures of domination and control in transnational spaces. As a result, it is not clear how our current conceptualization of intersectionality— including the expanded version of race/class/gender/ age/ability/sexuality/ethnicity/nation—might change if we incorporate social life in transnational space.

Professor Hill Collins has offered a powerful cri- tique of the “race-neutral” scholarship on gender, and her discussions of racism (and the ways this racism interacts with other axes of domination) led to the visibility of concepts such as “controlling images” and “women of color.” Her references to Black women and other people of color in the United States continue to serve as a reminder of their continuing marginalization and open up some space to include their experiences in developing theory. But she does not discuss the deviations from Euro-American or- ganization of racial hierarchies in different countries around the globe, which coexist with global-level Euro-American racialization processes. As a result, it is not always clear when and how we are to conceptu- alize “race” within the intersectionality matrix if we study transnational social lives.

I will begin with a simple example that focuses on women of color. A Ugandan Black immigrant and a Ugandan Indian immigrant—whose family lived

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for many generations in Uganda before being forc- ibly evicted by Idi Amin—are both racially marginal- ized, though in different ways, in the United States. While both share the effects of gendered/racialized migration policies that would prohibit or slow the process through which they might form families in the United States, their experiences differ in other ways. The Ugandan Black migrant is likely to ex- perience the gamut of racisms experienced by Afri- can Americans, while the Indian Ugandan is likely to experience the racisms faced by Muslims and “Muslim-looking” people in the United States, and they may share other structural discriminations ex- perienced by Asian Americans (Narayan and Purkay- astha 2009). These similarities and differences are consistent with racist ideologies, interactions, and institutional arrangements in the United States. But if both return to their home country Uganda, they would encounter a different set of privileges and marginalization in this Black-majority country; the Black Ugandan migrant is advantaged here (though the other intersecting factors would together shape her exact social location). If both visit or temporarily live in India, the Indian-origin Uganda-born person may experience the privileges associated with the dominant group in the country. However, if she is a Muslim or a low-caste Hindu, she might experience a different set of social hierarchies. Similarly, Japanese- origin people from Brazil who returned to Japan, or Japanese-origin Americans who were forced to return to Japan, encountered different sets of social hierar- chies.4 A broadly similar argument could be made about the relative position of Blacks and Indians under the different historical circumstances, for in- stance, during the apartheid regime and after apart- heid in South Africa (see Govinden 2008).

There are variations of who is part of the privi- leged majority versus the marginalized minor- ity within a countr y, and these hierarchies do not always fit the white-yellow/brown-Black hierarchy extant in Western Europe and North America. Thus concepts such as “women of color”—which act as an effective framework for indicating the social location of these women in Western Europe and North America, and continuing global hierarchies

between countries in the global North and South— do not work as well if we wish to track the array of the axes of power and domination within coun- tries along with existing global-level hierarchies. Yet considering these multiple levels is important if in- tersectionality is to retain its explanator y power in an increasingly transnational world where within- countr y and between-countr y structures shape peo- ple’s experiences.

The possibility of forming community on virtual spaces and using the web to maintain meaningful connections with people in other countries also em- phasizes the need to consider transnational spaces. A South African Black female immigrant in the United States who is able to maintain active connections with her friends, family, and political networks in her home country (via phone, e-mail, and a variety of web-based media) may be able to minimize some of the toll of racism she experiences by making her South African relationships most salient in her life. The Indian-origin post-immigrant-generation American who regularly participates in a religio-social Hindu online community and visits India regularly is also able to position herself as a member of the majority group in India (and the Indian diaspora) even as she experiences the deleterious effects of structural racism in the United States. In other words, people who can access transnational social spaces attempt to balance their lack of privilege in one country (their raced/ classed/gendered/ability/sexual/age/nationality status in one nation-state) by actively seeking out privilege and power in another place and/or in virtual spaces.

While many of the axes Professor Hill Collins identified—race, gender, class, sexuality, age, ability, and nation—remain relevant, they may not work in the same way as “women of color” constructs suggest. Being able to build transnational lives—the ability of groups to live within and beyond single nation- states—suggests that it is quite possible for groups to be part of the racial majority and minority simulta- neously (Purkayastha 2010). Indeed, in places where caste and religious or ethnic hierarchies—with their own set of ideologies, interactions, and institutional structures—are more salient, we should consider the relative importance of these axes of domination

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within those countries (and the extent to which these structure transnational social lives) as we use inter- sectional frameworks.

I do not intend to suggest that we stop consider- ing racial hierarchies. Along with variations in who makes up the racial majority or minority within dif- ferent countries, hierarchies among nation-states continue to promote Western hierarchies of race and whiteness, yellowness, and Blackness across the world in ways that are broadly similar to the period of colonialism (see, e.g., Gilroy 1989; Kim 2008; Kim-Puri 2007; Nandy 2006; Sardar et al. 1993). Such racial hierarchies are maintained through ide- ologies, actions, and institutional arrangements associated with political and economic control. As Evelyn Nakano Glenn and her colleagues have documented, color-based hierarchies continue to structure people’s lives in many countries around the globe, especially as “fairness as beauty” is marketed to places where the majority of the people are non- white (Glenn 2008).

Since Professor Hill Collins’s discussions focus on the United States and minority groups within the boundaries of this nation-state, the ideas about race she discusses are built upon the structures that are particularly relevant to the United States and Western Europe. While intersectionality remains an important framework, we need to encapsulate mar- ginalization structures that are salient in other lo- cales and the ways in which these hierarchies play out in transnational spaces.

i n t e r s e c t i o n a l i t y a n d a n o t e o n r e l i g i o n

In her earlier work, Professor Hill Collins treats religion as a separate axis of the matrix of domination, one that operates independent of the structures of race. As she challenged the additive approach to conceptualizing gender, race, and class, she said, “Instead of starting with gender and then adding other variables such as age, sexual orientation, race, social class, and religion, Black feminist thought sees these distinctive systems of oppression as being part of one overarching structure of domination” (1990, 222).

This understanding of race as separate from reli- gion has persisted in the intersectional framework. Discussions of racism continue to rely on assump- tions about marked phenotypes and cultures, and the ideologies, interactions, and institutional ar- rangements that sustain such marking. Religious oppression has mostly been conceptualized in terms of gendering within a religion within feminist scholarship, even though transnational feminists have pointed to the use of religion in colonial con- structions of the racialized other (for critiques see Bulbeck 1993 and Narayan and Purkayastha 2009).

It is important to think further about our as- sumptions of religion within the framework of intersectionality. As I mentioned earlier in this essay, religion (i.e., the idea that certain religions promote tendencies toward violence and terrorism) is being used to create racial profiles within na- tions and across nations. Professor Hill Collins has noted the expansion of powers of Homeland Secu- rity within the United States (Collins 2010). How- ever, undocumented immigrants are not the only ones who have been targeted; government agencies and organized groups have targeted “Muslims” ir- respective of the state of documentation.5 Such sur veillance extends to transnational spaces—for example, communications in virtual spaces can now be monitored by several countries for security purposes; people originating from several countries of the world now need transit visas to touch down in airports in Western Europe—so that it seems im- portant to consider these religion-based forms of racialization at national and transnational levels. As Evelyn Nakano Glenn described in her work Unequal Freedom (2002), the construction of the categor y “American” is predicated on the ability to create and sustain hierarchies between Christians and non-Christians, native and foreign, and white and nonwhite.6 A similar process is under way again in our times. We have understood that culture and phenotype form the bases of racism structures. Now, we have to pay attention to the ways in which processes of marking religions, that is, marking phenotypes, cultures, and nationalities, acts in the ser vice of racism.

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l a s t r e m a r k s

As a scholar who continues to use intersectionality as my primary theoretical framework, I can enumer- ate many ways in which the work of Professor Hill Collins and others who have developed this frame- work have improved our ability to study social lives. The framework remains important, but we have to pay attention to and elucidate the complexities of using this framework beyond Euro-American societ- ies. Understanding and attending to the complexi- ties of transnationalism—composed of structures within, between, and across nation-states, and virtual spaces—alerts us to look for other axes of domination and the limits of using “women of color” concepts, as we use them now, to look across and within nation- states to understand the impact of transnationalism. My examples here were focused on those who can access transnational spaces. A focus on transnational intersectionality should alert us to the position of

those who are unable to afford access to technology to build virtual communities, to participate in a medium because they are not proficient in English, which has become the dominant language in virtual spaces, or to build transnational social lives because of active government surveillance and control of their lives or because they are too poor and isolated to access trans- national tangible and virtual spaces.

While I focused on “race” in this brief essay, the other axes of domination are likely to show some variations if we analyze multiple and simultaneous social locations to develop a better understanding of intersectionality. The organization of power and pro- cesses of marginalization has continued to change in this century. We need to further elucidate the theoret- ical implications and methodologies for adequately capturing different mechanisms of domination and how these meld with the ones with which we are most familiar within Euro-American scholarship.

N O T E S

1. The existence of global matrices of domination is not new—colonialism sustained the power and privilege of white Euro-America over Africa, Asia, and Latin America for centuries—but the contemporary organization of economic/social/political power, privilege, and marginalization reflects the development of transnational social spaces.

2. I deliberately picked Scotland and Spain because an Indian doctor in Australia was charged with complicity in the Glasgow bombings, while an American lawyer was charged with the Spanish bombings. Both were proven innocent (see Armaline, Glasberg, and Purkayastha 2011 for fur- ther details).

3. Individuals and groups need not participate in two or more countries (or virtual commu- nities) equally. Indeed, their node of experience is often their country of residence. Other countries or virtual communities are often part of a larger field of experience, and the salience of these other spaces is likely to vary. My point here is that we need to seriously consider the node and the field, as these contribute to the experiences of privilege and marginalization that shape our lives in more complex ways than the model of intersectionality, based on single nations, suggests.

4. For a quick history of Indians in East Africa, see Joseph (1999). For work on Japanese Brazilians, see Tsuda (2003). For work on Japanese Americans who were forced to go to Japan, see Weglyn (1976). For a classical discussion on caste, see Kothari (1970). For a contemporary discussion on caste/class/gender/sexuality, see Rege (2008).

5. Among the many new policies within the United States over this decade, people of several Muslim-majority nations have been asked to register with Citizenship and Immigration Services, and airlines now report the details of passengers before they board planes to the United States,

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including passengers who are transiting from the United States to other countries. Human rights scholars and activist groups have written about people who were arrested/captured at US air- ports on suspicion that they were terrorists, and sent to other countries where they were tortured (see Armaline, Glasberg, and Purkayastha 2011, and Center for Constitutional Rights 2011).

6. These religio-racist hierarchies are actively maintained by generating and sustaining gendered/ racialized ideologies of superiority and inferiority of religions; nation-states and religious groups are complicit in maintaining these hierarchies. The globalization of religious groups that are dedicated to converting others promotes religion-based hierarchies, just as these “others” actively resist often using the web to challenge their marginalization (see Narayan, Purkayastha, and Banerji, 2010).

R E F E R E N C E S

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Armaline, William, Davita Glasberg, and Bandana Purkayastha, eds. 2011, Human rights in our own backyard: Social justice and resistance in the U.S. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Bulbeck, Chilla. 1993. Reorienting western feminisms: Women’s diversity in a post-colonial world. Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press.

Center for Constitutional Rights. 2011. No justice for Canadian rendition victim Maher Arar. http:// www.commondreams.org/newswire/2009/11/02-8 (accessed July 22, 2011).

Collins, Patricia Hill. 2010. The new politics of community. American Sociological Review 75:7–30. Diamandaki, K. 2003. Virtual ethnicity and digital diasporas: Identity construction in cyber-space.

Global Media Journal. http://lass.calumet.purdue.edu/cca/gmj/sp03/graduatesp03/gmj-sp03grad- diamandaki.htm (accessed June 15, 2010).

Earl, Jennifer. 2006. Pursuing social change online: The use of four protest tactics on the internet. Social Science Computer Review 24:362–77.

Gilroy, Paul. 1989. There ain’t no black in the Union Jack. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 2002. Unequal freedom: How race and gender shape American citizenship. Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 2008. Shades of citizenship. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Govinden, Devarakhsnam. 2008. Sister outsiders: The representation of identity and difference in selected

writings by South African Indian women. Pretoria: University of South Africa Press. Guevarra, Anna. 2009. Marketing dreams, manufacturing heroes: The transnational labor brokering of

Filipino workers. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierette, and Ernestine Avila. 1997. I’m here, but i’m there: The meanings of

Latina transnational motherhood. Gender & Society 11:548–71. Ignacio, Emily. 2006. Building diaspora: Filipino community formation on the internet. New Brunswick,

NJ: Rutgers University Press. Iwata, Miho, and Bandana Purkayastha. 2011. Reflections on cultural human rights. In Human rights in

our own backyard: Social justice and resistance in the U.S., edited by William Armaline, Davita Glas- berg, and Bandana Purkayastha (pp. 113–124). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Joseph, May. 1999. Nomadic identities: The performance of citizenship. Minneapolis: University of Min- nesota Press.

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Kim, Nadia. 2008. Imperial citizens: Koreans and race from Seoul to LA. Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni- versity Press.

Kim-Puri, H.-J. 2007. Conceptualizing gender/sexuality/state/nation: An introduction. Gender & So- ciety 19:137–59.

Kothari, Rajni. 1970. Caste in Indian politics. New Delhi, India: Orient Longmans. Lee, Rachel. 2003. Asian America.net: Ethnicity, nationalism, and cyberspace. New York: Routledge. Levitt, Peggy. 2001. The transnational villagers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mitra, Ananda. 1997. Virtual commonality: Looking for India on the internet. In Virtual culture:

Identity and communication in cybersociety, edited by S. Jones. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mitra, Rahul, and Radhika Gajjala. 2008. Queer blogging in Indian digital diasporas: A dialogic en-

counter. Journal of Communication Inquiry, originally published online July 16, 2008. Nandy, Ashis. 2006. The intimate enemy: Loss and recovery of self under colonialism. New Delhi, India:

Oxford University Press. Narayan, Anjana, and Bandana Purkayastha. 2009. Living our religions: South Asian Hindu and muslim

women narrate their experiences. Stirling, VA: Kumarian Press. Narayan, Anjana, and Bandana Purkayastha. 2011. Talking gender superiority in virtual spaces. Jour-

nal of South Asian Diasporas 3:53–69. Narayan, Anjana, Bandana Purkayastha, and Sudipto Banerji. (2010). Constructing virtual, transna-

tional identities on the web: The case of Hindu student groups in the U.S. and UK. Special issue on virtual ethnicities. Journal of Intercultural Studies 32:495–517.

Pudrovska, T., and M. M. Ferree. 2004. Global activism in “virtual space”: The European women’s lobby in the network of transnational women’s NGOs on the web. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society 11:117–43.

Purkayastha, Bandana. 2005. Negotiating ethnicity: Second-generation South Asian Americans traverse a transnational world. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Purkayastha Bandana. 2009. Another word of experience? South Asian diasporic groups and the transnational context. Journal of South Asian Diasporas 1:85–99.

Purkayastha, Bandana. 2010. Interrogating intersectionality: Contemporary globalization and racial- ized gendering in the lives of highly educated South Asian Americans and their children. Journal of Intercultural Studies 31:29–47.

Rege, Sharmila. 2008. Writing caste/writing gender: Narrating Dalit women’s testimonies. New Delhi, India: Zubaan.

Sardar, Ziauddin, Ashis Nandy, Merryl Wyn Davies, and Claude Alvares. 1993. The blinded eye: 500 years of Christopher Columbus. New York: Apex Press; Goa, India: The Other India Press.

Tsuda, Takeyuki. 2003. Strangers in the ethnic homeland: Japanese Brazilian return migration in transna- tional perspective. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Weglyn, Michi. 1976. Years of infamy: The untold story of America’s concentration camps. New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks.

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BODIES

II P A R T

In Part I, we learned that the essentialist dictum “biology is destiny,” is rather simplistic and deterministic. Women’s and men’s different social positions and practices are not simply reflections of “natural” differences between the sexes. The articles in this section further dem- onstrate that such naturalizing beliefs do not stand up to critical scrutiny. First, even when we acknowledge the fact that there are some average differences between women’s and men’s bodies (for instance, on average, men are taller than women), average differences are not categorical differences (e.g., some women are taller than some men). Second, average bodily differences between women and men do not necessarily translate into particular social rela- tions, structures, or practices.

In fact, recent research in the sociology of the body shows a dynamic, reciprocal rela- tionship between bodies and their social environments. For example, boys and men have been encouraged and rewarded for “building” muscular bodies, whereas girls and women have been discouraged or punished for this. Even among today’s fitness-conscious young women, most feel that “too much muscle” is antithetical to feminine attractiveness. Critiques of women athletes for being too muscular can take racial tones as well, as when professional tennis star Serena Williams’s physique is compared to an ape. All kinds of food products and dietary supplements, from high-protein “muscle milk” to low-calorie diet foods, are marketed in gendered ways. These social beliefs, practices, and products result in more muscular male bodies and “slimmed and toned” female bodies that appear to reflect natural differences.

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Part II examines the relationship between the body and the larger social context that our bodies inhabit. The articles in this section complicate the idea of women as uniformly dis- empowered body objects and men as empowered body subjects. They show how the reality of gendered embodiment, as a site for social control and as a resource for resistance, is more complicated and nuanced.

In the first article, Laurel Westbrook and Kristen Schilt provide an intersectional analysis of how gender is determined for transgender people. They refer to the practice of placing others into gender categories as determining gender. One fascinating element of this prac- tice is that the criteria for determining gender vary across social situations. Thus, Westbrook and Schilt describe practices that appear to be contradictory, such as the rule that “no athlete with a penis can compete as a woman, [but] athletes are not required to have a penis to com- pete as a man.” In addition, Westbrook and Schilt consider the relationship between how we determine other people’s gender and how the sex/gender/sexuality system is changed or maintained. Although we might assume that official recognition of transgender people chal- lenges a dichotomous sex/gender/sexuality binary, Westbrook and Schilt show the surprising ways that the sex/gender/sexuality system is able “to adapt to and reabsorb trans-people” so that cisgender people continue to be privileged.

The second article, by Georgiann Davis, is based on her work exploring medical deci- sions about how normality and abnormality are constructed through medical decisions regarding intersex people. In this excerpt from her book Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis, Davis illustrates how the medical profession plays a role in institutionalizing gender by either challenging or maintaining traditional gender ideologies. Medical professionals make decisions about how to treat (or not to treat) intersex bodies, they develop frame- works for defining bodies as normal or abnormal, and they adopt as a profession certain positions on what aspects of gender are influenced by biology and what aspects can be altered through socialization. Through those decisions, the medical profession structures gender in powerful ways.

The third article in this section also focuses on the topic of cultural norms and expectations for binary gendered bodies, as Betsy Lucal offers a fascinating glimpse into her lived experiences with gender bending. What is it like, Lucal asks, to be a person whose physical appearance does not neatly “fit” into one of US culture’s two acceptable sex categories? Lucal is a woman who is regularly mistaken as a man, yet she chooses nonparticipation in the accoutrements of femininity, in part, to begin to dismantle patriarchal culture. Taken together, it is interesting to reflect on the similarities and differences between Lucal’s experiences as androgynous or genderqueer and Westbrook and Schilt’s description of the experiences of trans-people.

The article by Evelyn Nakano Glenn shifts the focus to skin bleaching and beauty. Around the globe, but particularly in the Global South, the consumption of skin-lightening prod- ucts is growing among young, urban, and educated women. Rather than focusing only on individual consciousness, Nakano Glenn shows the role of transnational pharmaceutical and cosmetics companies in fueling the desire for lighter skin and the association of light skin with feminine beauty.

The final article in this section by Heidi Safia Mirza explores how Muslim women embody the intersection of gender, race, and religion. Muslim women’s dress has come to

BODIES 5 9

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signify essentialist notions of ethnicity and tradition. The personal decision they make to wear or not wear hijab becomes terrain for a public debate about women’s rights, Islamo- phobia, and citizenship/belonging. Mirza uses the concept of “embodied intersectionality” to understand the stories that women in her study tell of about how their identities intersect with gender, race, religion, and national and transnational discourses.

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In 1989, Christie Lee Cavazos married Jonathon Little-ton, a marriage that lasted until Jonathon’s untimely death in 1996. Christie filed a medical malpractice suit against the Texas doctor she alleged had misdiagnosed her husband. What might have been an open-and-shut case, however, was complicated by her biography: In the 1970s she had undergone what was then termed a surgical “sex change” operation. Before consider- ing her case, the court first examined the validity of her marriage as a transgender woman to a cisgender man. At the center of this case was the determination of her gender. Christie had undergone genital surgery, legally amended all of her government documents to categorize her as “female,” had a legal marriage, lived as a woman for 20 years, and had medical experts who testified that she was, physically and psychologically, a woman. Yet, the court ruled that she was, and would always be, chromosomally male and, therefore, could not file a malpractice suit as a spouse. Musing about the nature of gender in his ruling, Chief Justice Hard- berger wrote, “There are some things you cannot will into being. They just are” (Littleton v. Prange 1999).

The Littleton case illustrates two competing cul- tural ideologies about how a person’s gender1 is to be authenticated by other people. The judge’s ruling that gender is an unchangeable, innate fact illustrates what we term a “biology-based determination of gender.” In contrast, the validation of Littleton’s iden- tity as a woman by others highlights what we term an “identity-based determination of gender.” Such

Laurel Westbrook, Kristen Schilt, Doing Gender, Determining Gender: Transgender People, Gender Panics, and the Mainte- nance of the Sex/Gender/Sexuality System, Gender & Society, Volume 28, issue 1, pages 32-57. Reprinted by Permission of SAGE Publications, Inc.

Transgender People, Gender Panics, and the Maintenance of the Sex/Gender/Sexuality System

L A U R E L W E S T B R O O K , K R I S T E N S C H I LT

6. DOING GENDER, DETERMINING GENDER

a premise does not mean seeing gender identity as fluid, or as an “anything goes” proposition. Rather, under an identity-based gender ideology, people can be recognized as a member of the gender category with which they identify if their identity claim is accepted as legitimate by other people determining their gender—in the Littleton case, her husband, friends, and medical experts.

We term this social process of authenticat- ing another person’s gender identity “determining gender.” In face-to-face interactions, determining gender is the response to doing gender. When people do gender in interactions, they present information about their gender. Others then interpret this in- formation, placing them in gender categories and determining their gender. Yet, the process of gender determination does not always rely on visual and be- havioral cues. Expanding upon interactional theories of gender attribution (Kessler and McKenna 1978; West and Zimmerman 1987), we examine gender de- termination criteria in policy and court cases, where a great deal of biographical and bodily knowledge is known about the person whose gender is in question, as well as how gender is determined in imagined interactions—namely, cis-people’s imagined interac- tions with trans-people, where the knowledge about the person’s body and identity are hypothetical. We use “determining gender” as an umbrella term for these diverse practices of placing a person in a gender category. Additionally, we explore the consequences

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of gender determination, an exploration that goes beyond “How is gender socially attributed?” to an analysis of “How does gender attribution challenge or maintain the sex/gender/sexuality system?”

We examine the criteria for gender determina- tion in moments of ideological collision. As we have previously argued (Schilt and Westbrook 2009; West- brook 2009), many people use genitalia (biological criteria) to determine another person’s gender in (hetero)sexual2 and sexualized interactions. Yet, since the advent of the “liberal moment” (Meyerow- itz 2002), a cultural turn in the 1960s toward values of autonomy and equality, there has been more ac- ceptance of a person’s gender self-identity in spaces defined as nonsexual,3 such as many workplaces (Schilt 2010). When questions of access to gender- segregated locations arise, however, identity-based and biology-based determinations clash. We center our analysis on three such moments: (1) federal and state proposals made between 2009 and 2011 to pro- hibit discrimination based on gender identity and ex- pression in the arena of employment, housing, and public accommodations (often called “transgender rights bills”); (2) a 2006 proposed policy in New York City to remove the genital surgery requirement for a change of sex marker on birth certificates; and (3) controversies over trans-people participating in com- petitive sports.

Our cases address different social milieux: sports, employment, and government documents. Yet, each case is, at its core, about upholding the logic of gender segregation. In these ideological collisions, social actors struggle with where actual and imagined trans-people fit in gender-segregated spaces, such as public rest- rooms. These struggles provoke what we term “gender panics,” situations where people react to disruptions to biology-based gender ideology by frantically re- asserting the naturalness of a male–female binary. When successful, this labor, which we term “gender naturalization work,” quells the panics. In our cases, enacting policies requiring surgical and hormonal criteria for admission into gender-segregated spaces ends the panic. As in sexual and sexualized interac- tions, genitals determine gender in gender-segregated spaces, as it is often fear of unwanted (hetero)sexuality that motivates gender identity policing.

These cases demonstrate that criteria for de- termining gender vary across social situations. In gender-integrated public settings, such as the work- place, identity-based criteria can suffice to determine a person’s gender. However, in interactional situ- ations that derive their form and logic from gender oppositeness, such as heterosexual acts and gender- segregated sports competitions, social actors tend to enforce more rigid, biology-based criteria. Yet, gender-segregated spaces are not evenly policed, as the criteria for access are heavily interrogated only for women’s spaces. Exploring the implications of this difference, we posit that bodies (mainly the pres- ence or absence of the penis) matter for determining gender in women’s spaces because of cultural ideolo- gies of women as inherently vulnerable and in need of protection ( Hollander 2001) that reproduce gender inequality under the guise of protecting women. We argue that, in the liberal moment of gender, access to gender-segregated spaces is not determined by unchangeable measures such as chromosomes but, instead, by genitals—a move that suggests a greater acceptance of an identity-based determination of gender. However, as we show, by using changeable bodily aspects to determine gender, the basic premises of the “sex/gender/sexuality system” (Seidman 1995) are maintained, as the system repatriates those whose existence potentially calls it into question, thereby naturalizing gender difference and gender inequality.

c o n c e p t u a l f r a m e w o r k

Sociologists of gender emphasize the social, rather than biological, processes that produce a person’s gender. Focused on the interactional level, such theo- ries illustrate how people sort each other into the cat- egory of “male” or “female” in social situations on the basis of visual information cues (such as facial hair) and implicit rules for assigning characteristics to par- ticular genders (women wear skirts; men do not). Such visual cues act as proxies for biological criteria invis- ible in many interactions. This categorization process, termed “gender attribution” (Kessler and McKenna 1978, 2) or “sex categorization” (West and Zimmer- man 1987, 127), is theorized as an inescapable but typically unremarkable hallmark of everyday social

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interactions—except in instances of ambiguity, which can create an interactional breakdown, generating anx- iety, concern, and even anger (Schilt 2010; West and Zimmerman 1987).

This theory is a useful counterpoint to essential- ism. Yet, the focus on face-to-face interactions can be analytically limiting. Kessler and McKenna note, “The only physical characteristics that can play a role in gender attribution in everyday life are those that are visible” (Kessler and McKenna 1978, 76). West and Zimmerman, too, see characteristics that are visible in interaction as paramount to sex categorization, argu- ing, “Neither initial sex assignment (pronouncement at birth as female or male) nor the actual existence of essential criteria for that assignment (possession of a clitoris and vagina or penis and testicles) has much— if anything—to do with the identification of sex cat- egory in everyday life” (West and Zimmerman 1987, 132). While such propositions may hold in many non- sexual interactions, genitals play a much more key role in gender determination in sexual and sexualized interactions (Schilt and Westbrook 2009). In addition, as the Littleton case demonstrates, invisible character- istics, such as chromosomes, can override visual cues as the appropriate criteria for determining gender when legal rights are at stake.

We seek to expand these theories beyond face- to-face interactions by proposing a broader con- ceptualization, offering “determining gender” as an umbrella term for the different subprocesses of attributing or, in some cases, officially deciding an- other person’s gender. Gender determination does occur at the level of everyday interaction, a process already well documented in the literature. Both cis- and trans-women, for instance, may find their biological claim to use a public women’s restroom challenged by other women if they do not present the expected visual cues warranted for access (Ca- vanagh 2010), while both groups may have their gender self-identity affirmed in gender-integrated in- teractions. Gender determination also occurs at the level of legal cases and policy decisions, where social actors with organizational power devise criteria for who counts as a man or a woman (and therefore who gains or is denied access to gender-specific rights and social settings) (Meadow 2010). In addition, gender

determinations occur at the level of the imaginary. Il- lustrating this point, as trans-inclusive policies and laws are discussed in the media, opponents and supporters often draw on hypothetical interactions with trans-people in gender-segregated spaces, such as bathrooms. In these imagined interactions, hypo- thetical knowledge of the person’s genitals or their self-identity, rather than visible gender cues, is used to determine their gender.

When social actors officially or unofficially deter- mine another person’s gender, accepted criteria differ across contexts. Face-to-face interactions rely mostly on implicit, culturally agreed on criteria. Imagined interactions and legal or policy decisions, in con- trast, often demand more explicit, officially defined criteria. Such a focus on developing explicit criteria for determining gender has grown alongside new surgical possibilities for gender transitions (Mey- erowitz 2002). To receive legal and medical gender validation, trans-people have had to follow particu- lar protocols, such as genital reconstructive surgery, that symbolically repatriate them from one side of the gender binary to the other. These criteria, which reflect dominant understandings of sex/gender/sexu- ality, allowed liberal values of self-determination to co-exist with beliefs about the innateness of the gender binary (Meyerowitz 2002).

This co-existence faced greater challenges in the 1990s, when the hegemony of the “stealth model” of transitioning (Schilt 2010) began to dissipate, and transsexual, intersex, and transgender groups orga- nized in an effort to gain greater cultural recognition and civil rights (Stryker 2008). With this push came wider coverage of trans-people in the media, includ- ing debates about where trans-men and trans-women fit in institutions, such as legal marriage, and in public gender-segregated spaces, such as bathrooms, prisons, and sports competitions. Policy and lawmakers began to grapple with how to balance trans-inclusivity in a social system predicated on clear, fixed distinctions between men and women, and how to address some cis-gender concerns that the cultural validation of trans-people was a direct challenge to a biologically- determined and/or God-given gender binary.

Cultural beliefs about the sanctity of gender bi- narism naturalize a sex/gender/sexuality system in

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which heterosexuality is positioned as the only natu- ral and desirable sexual form. Showing the interrelat- edness of ideas about (hetero)sexuality and gender difference, men and women’s assumed psychologi- cal and embodied distinctions are widely held to be complementary and to require particular relation- ships with one another (Connell 1995). In nonsexual interactions, in contrast, men and women sometimes are physically segregated on the basis of those same assumed differences in their bodies, capabilities, and interests (Fausto-Sterling 2000; Goffman 1977; Lorber 1993), as well as widely shared beliefs about what activities are normal and appropriate for each gender. While men and women freely interact in many social settings, such as the workplace, the cre- ation of “men’s space” and “women’s space” “ensure[s] that subcultural differences can be reaffirmed and re- established in the face of contact between the sexes” (Goffman 1977, 314). In these spaces, gender differ- ences are highlighted, though the same differences are minimized in other settings.

Media coverage of transgender people in the late 2000s provides a useful case study for how gender is determined in various social spaces, what larger cul- tural beliefs motivate deployment of biology-based and identity-based criteria, and how such criteria are forged in moments of gender ideology collision. We develop the concept of gender determination beyond face-to-face interactions through an analysis of policy and law debates and imagined interactions, situations that often display a call for explicit crite- ria for deciding who counts as a man or as a woman. At stake in such determinations are the criteria by which trans-people’s gender identities are recognized and their rights defined and protected.

m e t h o d s

Our data come from a textual analysis of newspaper coverage gathered from LexisNexis. Such a focus is warranted, as the media tend to both reflect and shape prevailing understandings (Gamson et al. 1992; Mac- donald 2003). Investigating beliefs about an issue presented in the news media allows researchers to map out the existing dominant viewpoints within the marketplace of ideas, as news is a commodity for

attracting audiences who can then be sold to advertis- ers (Gamson et al. 1992), and, as such, it has to make cultural sense to its audience (Best 2008). Mainstream journalists write stories that reflect commonsense un- derstandings held by (college educated, middle-class, usually white and heterosexual) journalists and their similarly socially situated audience. While there is no single understanding of gender in our society, the dominant views are visible in the mainstream news.

Media scholars have demonstrated that the media do not only represent reality, they also participate in constructing it (Berns 2004; Gamson et al. 1992; Jansen 2002; Macdonald 2003). The mainstream news media do this by providing audiences with narratives, frames, and belief systems that shape in- terpretations of the world as well as actions within it. While media do not determine the audience viewpoint (Gamson et al. 1992), they greatly influ- ence it, particularly for people with little preexisting knowledge of an issue (Berns 2004). Examining news coverage allows us to see what ideas might be dis- seminated to readers who had never before thought about transgender people changing their birth cer- tificates, competing in sports, or seeking protection from employment discrimination.

To explore the criteria for determining gender in nonsexual contexts, we sought out instances in which biology-based and identity-based gender ideologies collided. As the visibility of transgender lives increased broadly in the 2000s, we centered our search in that decade. We looked for moments where who counts as a man or a woman was openly discussed, thus making the process of determining gender more visible. We identified five possible mo- ments of ideological collision surrounding trans- people: sports inclusion, prison housing, inclusion of transgender children in schools, employment rights, and altering of government documents. All of these cases provided instances of cis-people grappling with how trans-people “fit” into previously unquestioned systems and locations. We chose not to examine schools or prisons because we wanted, respectively, all cases to have a comparative focus on adults and to not involve penal settings. Our three remaining cases generated substantial public debate and represented, on our initial selection, different issues: employment

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nondiscrimination laws, birth certificate alteration policies, and sports participation. We did not focus solely on cases of gender-segregated spaces; however, it is these locales that emerged as salient points of focus.

Birth certificate laws usually get amended with little fanfare. By contrast, a New York City proposal allowing people to change sex markers on their birth certificates without requiring genital surgery gener- ated extensive media coverage. We gathered all the available stories that mentioned “New York” and “birth certificate” and included coverage of the pro- posed change in policy during 2006–2007, the time period when the amendment was proposed, dis- cussed, and abandoned (a total of 42 articles).

Transgender employment nondiscrimination laws have been debated since the 1990s. Because we were interested in analyzing current criteria for determining gender, we limited our focus to a two- year period (January 1, 2009, to December 31, 2010). We searched for articles that mentioned “transgen- der” and “nondiscrimination” and were about trans- rights legislation. After a preliminary analysis of the articles, we also searched “bathroom bills,” an often applied moniker. We compiled all news stories on the three bills proposed during this time: a federal bill and state-level bills in New Hampshire and Massa- chusetts (a total of 57 articles).

Since scholars have extensively analyzed most of the major controversies over trans-people in sports, we employ this literature in our analysis. Because this scholarship focuses almost exclusively on trans- women, we supplemented it with media coverage of two cases about transmen from 2009 to 2011: Kye Allums, a transman who played women’s basketball, and “Will,” a transman who played Australian men’s football (a combined total of 92 articles).

We thematically coded each of the 191 articles for beliefs about gender, with a focus on gender determi- nation criteria (such as chromosomes, genitals, or self- identity), and the types of spaces that generated panic (gender-integrated or gender-segregated). We each coded articles from all three of the cases, ensuring intercoder reliability through extensive discussions about themes. Through this preliminary analysis, we recognized the importance of gender-segregated

social spaces to each of our three cases. Upon this analytic shift, we further coded the rationales of- fered in these moments of gender panic for block- ing trans-people’s access to gender-segregated spaces (such as safety, privacy, and fairness), the final crite- ria adopted for determining gender (biology-based, identity-based, none), and the gender of the trans- people at the center of these panics. This second wave of analysis revealed the greater policing of transwomen’s access to women-only spaces, and the greater ability of biology-based criteria, rather than identity-based criteria, to quell gender panics.

f i n d i n g s

Messages in news stories are rarely homogeneous (Gamson et al. 1992). To avoid accusations of biased coverage, journalists typically try to provide at least two sides to a story (Best 2008) that typically represent dominant understandings of a particular topic. In our cases, reporters regularly presented the perspectives of people who supported identity-based determination of gender as well as the views of people who positioned biological criteria as essential for determining gender. These inclusions suggest that, in the late 2000s, the identity-based model and the biology-based model represent the two most dominant and competing understandings of gender. An examination of these ideologies provides a deeper understanding of the sex/gender/sexuality system in the liberal moment of gender, the criteria for determining gender, and how gender determination (re)produces inequality.

i d e o l o g y c o l l i s i o n , g e n d e r pa n i c s , a n d g e n d e r n at u r a l i z at i o n w o r k

Modern athletic competition, like all gender-segregated spaces, rests on and reproduces an idea of two oppo- site genders (Lorber 1993). Because of its influence on other athletic organizations, we focus here on poli- cies enacted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that determine under what circumstances and in what categories transgender and intersex athletes can compete. In the modern Olympics, almost all events are gender-segregated (Tucker and Collins 2009). To maintain this segregation, IOC officials have devised policies on coping with athletes who do not fit easily

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into this binary. This question of where to place trans- gender athletes first gained national attention in 1977, when the New York Supreme Court ruled that Dr. Renee Richards, a postoperative transsexual woman, could participate in the US Women’s Open Tennis Tournament because her testes had been removed and her body was physically “weakened” by the resulting loss of testosterone (Birrell and Cole 1990; Shy 2007). Following similar logic, in 2003 the IOC adopted the Stockholm Consensus, which allows trans-athletes to compete as the gender they identify as if they have un- dergone bodily modifications that “minimize gender related advantages” (Ljungqvist and Genel 2005). Ac- cording to the IOC Medical Commission (2003), the criteria for appropriate transgender bodies are:

Surgical anatomical changes have been completed, in- cluding external genitalia changes and gonadectomy.

Legal recognition of their assigned sex has been conferred by the appropriate official authorities.

Hormonal therapy appropriate for the assigned sex has been administered in a verifiable manner and for a sufficient length of time to minimize gender- related advantages in sport competitions.

In June 2012, the IOC added an additional set of criteria, stating that athletes competing as women cannot have a testosterone level “within the male range” unless it “does not confer a competitive ad- vantage because it is non-functional” (IOC Medical and Scientific Department 2012), thus minimizing what is viewed as an unfair hormonal advantage. These explicit criteria allow the IOC to incorporate trans and intersex athletes, and thus to validate the liberal moment of gender, without challenging the premise that modern competitive athletics rests on: the presumption that there are two genders and all athletes must be put into one of those two categories for competition.

These biology-based criteria quieted a slow-burning gender panic that resurfaced with each new case of a trans or intersex athlete (for discussion of intersex athletes, see Buzuvis 2010; Dreger 2010; Fausto-Sterling 2000; Nyong’o 2010). These cases raised questions about whether or not it is fair for cis- and trans-people to compete against one another (Cavanagh and Sykes 2006). The answer hinged on

which gender ideology is given primacy (i.e., fair to whom?). While transwomen might self-identify as women, people who subscribed to biology-based ide- ologies of gender view these athletes as males who carry a size and strength advantage over females. The official goal of the IOC policies is to be fair to all athletes, which means that trans-athletes could com- pete as the gender with which they identify, but only if they met the aforementioned criteria. With such explicit criteria, cis-gender people could have con- fidence that only transwomen who were as “weak” as cis-women were able to compete, a move that dif- fused gender panic and upheld the logic of gender segregation in the arena of sports.

In the New York birth certificate case, a policy proposal intended to improve the lives of transgen- der people set off a rapid gender panic. Since many trans-people do not have genital surgery, they are often unable to have a sex marker that reflects their self-identity and gender presentation on their official documents (Currah and Moore 2009). In 2006, the City of New York proposed legislation that validated identity-based determination of gender by removing the genital surgical requirement for a change of sex marker on the birth certificate if applicants were over 18 years of age, had lived as their desired gender for at least two years, and had documentation from medi- cal and mental health professionals stating that their transitions were intended to be permanent. Under this amendment, trans-people were still regulated by the medical institution but their genital configu- rations would not determine their gender. The New York City Board of Health worked closely with other officials and trans-rights advocates in writing the new policy, and politicians and transgender activists lauded the amendment, which was, by all accounts, expected to pass (Caruso 2006b; Cave 2006a).

Journalists initially presented the amendment in positive terms (e.g., Caruso 2006a; Colangelo 2006; Finn 2006). However, the proposed policy resulted in an intensely negative public reaction. The Board of Health was inundated with calls and e-mails from people asking how this policy change would affect access to gender-segregated spaces, such as rest- rooms, hospital rooms, and prison blocks (Currah and Moore 2009). To quell the panic, the Board of

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Health withdrew the proposal and quickly amended it to maintain emphasis on genitals as the criteria for determining gender. Transgender people in New York could change their sex marker, but like the require- ment to compete in the Olympics, they would have to provide proof of genital surgery. In this way, the Board of Health attempted to balance biology-based and identity-based gender models that had come into collision, doing the gender naturalization work of symbolically restoring the primacy of bodies (here, genitals) for determining gender while still validat- ing the possibility for gender transitions.

The “transgender rights” bills we analyzed also re- sulted in gender panics by embracing identity-based determination of gender. At both the federal and state level, these bills typically offer protections for “gender identity and gender expression” or “transgender ex- pression” in the realms of employment, housing, and public accommodations. In an attempt to make such protections widely inclusive, there is no definition of “expressions” or explicit bodily criteria for trans-people. The resulting gender panics center on this lack of defi- nitional criteria. In response to the proposed bill in New Hampshire, some opponents worried that the bill “did not adequately define transgender individuals” (The Lowell Sun 2009). A similar argument was raised about the Massachusetts bill, with concerned citizens worrying that “transgender identity and expression” was too vague (Letter to the Editor 2009a) and created “dangerous ambiguity” over who was legally transgen- der (Prunier 2009) and therefore had access to men’s or women’s bathrooms. Highlighting this concern about bathroom access, one opponent in Massachu- setts noted, “This bill opens the barn door to every- body. There is no way to know who of the opposite sex is using the [bathroom] facility for the right purposes” (Ring 2009). In these cases, what appears to critics as too much validation of identity-based determination of gender sets off panic, panic that is quelled if the bills do not pass into law. When the bills do pass, oppo- nents continue to raise concerns about the potential for danger to women and children in public restrooms, a point we return to in the following sections.

By enforcing explicit bodily criteria for determin- ing gender, the IOC and New York City policies shore up the fissures created in the strict two-category

model of gender by the visibility of trans-people while also allowing for some degree of identity-based determination of gender. Similar to judicial rulings permitting name and sex marker changes on govern- ment documents (Meyerowitz 2002), policies about birth certificates and athletes work to balance liberal values of autonomy with the belief that there are two genders and that all people (trans or cis) can be put into one category or the other. A lack of bodily cri- teria, in contrast, appears as a threat to the gender binary. An editorial opposing federal protections for trans-people highlights this fear clearly: “The Left seeks to obliterate the distinction between men and women. This distinction is considered to be a social construct. . . . For those of us who believe that the male–female distinction is vital to civilization, the Left’s attempt to erase this distinction is worth fighting against” (Prager 2010). Similarly, Shannon McGinley, of the conservative Cornerstone Policy Research group, worried that the goal of transgender rights bills was “to create a genderless society” (Dis- taso 2009). These concerns illustrate our concept of “gender panic,” as public debate centers on the ne- cessity of culturally defending a rigid male–female binary that is simultaneously framed as stable and innate. These concerns further underscore the exten- sive naturalization work that goes into legitimating the current sex/gender/sexuality system. Yet, this work did not evenly center on gender-segregated spaces, or on all biological characteristics that could be used as criteria for determining gender. Rather, opposition gathered around “people with penises” in spaces designated as women-only.

g e n i ta l s = g e n d e r : d e t e r m i n i n g g e n d e r   i n w o m e n - o n ly s pa c e s

In our three cases, concerned citizens and journalists posed many questions about what genitals would be allowed in which gender-segregated spaces. This over- whelming focus on genitalia as the determinant of gender is interesting when considered against other possible criteria. Within biology-based gender ide- ology, gender is determined at birth by doctors on the visible recognition of genitalia. However, such gender categorization is assumed by many to be the result of other, less visible, biological forces, namely,

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chromosomes and hormones. While genitalia and hormones can be modified, chromosomes are static— meaning, on some level, XY and XX could be the best criteria for maintaining a binary gender system. Within the transgender rights case, opponents to such bills occasionally drew on chromosomes to further their case for why such bills would be problematic. As one man wrote to a newspaper in Michigan: “Your DNA is proof of your genetic code and determines race [and] sex.  .  .  . There is also one fact that transgender individuals cannot deny: your DNA proves if you are a man or a woman. It does not matter what changes you have made to your sexual organs” (Letter to the Editor 2009b). Yet, such responses comprise a very small part of the discourse in our cases.

That less weight is given to chromosomes in these cases of gender determination is interesting. In everyday interactions, chromosomes are poor criteria for gender attribution, because they are not visible (Kessler and McKenna 1978). Athletes can be tested for chromosomal makeup. Yet, the IOC did not include chromosomes as part of the criteria for competition, as such a requirement would bar trans-athletes from competition. Similarly, our other cases do not use chromosomes as gender determina- tion criteria, because such rigid genetic criteria would effectively invalidate the possibility of gender tran- sitions. Where we saw a call for chromosomal cri- teria was in cis-people’s imagined interactions with trans-people, scenarios that sought to delegitimize calls for identity-based determination of gender. That chromosomes did not figure widely in policy deci- sions, in contrast, suggests that identity-based gender ideologies have gained some degree of cultural legiti- macy. To balance both ideologies, institutions cannot use unchangeable criteria, such as chromosomes, to determine a person’s gender.

Genitalia are the primary determiner of gender in all of our cases. Starting with the sports case, which has the most clearly defined criteria for determin- ing gender, the IOC permits transwomen (who are assumed to have XY chromosomes) to compete as women as long as they undergo the removal of the testes and the penis.4 While testes are a source of tes- tosterone, which is a central concern in sports com- petition,5 the IOC does not state why transwomen

athletes must undergo a penectomy to compete as women, since penises themselves do not provide ad- vantages in sports. Such a requirement may be par- tially due to deep cultural beliefs that a person with a penis cannot be a woman (Kessler and McKenna 1978), and so they cannot compete with women in athletics. Moreover, this requirement may be a result of a widely held belief that people with penises pres- ent a danger to women, a question we take up later in this article.

This emphasis on determining gender through hormone levels and genitalia is applied only to ath- letes attempting to compete as women. If an athlete competing as a woman has her gender called into question (usually for performing “too well” for a woman), her hormone levels are tested for “irregu- larities.” In contrast, people who want to compete as men (cis or trans) are allowed to inject testosterone if their levels are seen as lower than “those naturally occurring in eugonadal men” (Gooren and Bunck 2004:151). Thus, in this sex/gender/sexuality system, testosterone is a right of people claiming the category of “men.” Further, while no athlete with a penis can compete as a woman, athletes are not required to have a penis to compete as men. Highlighting this point, “Will,” an Australian transman who played football on a men’s team, was required to undergo a hysterec- tomy in order to change his sex marker, but he was not required to have phalloplasty (Stark 2009). More- over, his use of testosterone was not seen as an unfair advantage because his levels did not exceed those of an average cis-gender man.

The heightened attention to the presence or ab- sence of a penis in spaces marked as “women only” was reflected in all of our cases. In news stories about the New York City birth certificate policy and the transgender rights bills, opponents frequently hinged their concerns on “male anatomies” (Cave 2006b) or “male genitalia” (Kwok 2006) in women’s spaces. A common imagined interaction that generated gender panic was transwomen with “male anatomies” being housed with female prisoners (Cave 2006b; Staff 2006; Weiss 2006; Yoshino 2006), or transwomen “who still have male genitalia” using women’s bath- rooms (Kwok 2006; Yoshino 2006). While several articles included interviews with transmen activists

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who emphasized how hard it would be for them as people with facial hair to be forced to use a wom- en’s restroom on the basis of the sex marker on their birth certificates, only one opponent cited in the same articles used the example of transmen in the bathroom rather than transwomen.6 Thus, biology- based gender ideologies were more likely to be de- ployed when debating transgender access to women’s spaces. Those debates suggest that it is penises rather than other potential biological criteria that are the primary determiner of gender because male anato- mies are framed as sexual threats toward women in gender-segregated spaces.

s e pa r at e a n d u n e q u a l : r e p r o d u c i n g   g e n d e r i n e q u a l i t y i n   g e n d e r - s e g r e g at e d s pa c e s

Women-only spaces generate the most concern in these moments of gender ideology collision. In the resulting gender panics, ideas about “fairness” and “safety” work to naturalize gender difference and to maintain unequal gender relations. In these mo- ments of ideological collision, two persistent ide- ologies about womanhood are deployed to counter identity-based determination of gender: Women are weaker than men, and, as a result, women are always at (hetero)sexual risk. This construction produces “woman” as a “vulnerable subjecthood” (Westbrook 2008), an idea that what it is to be part of the category of woman is to be always in danger and defenseless.7 Conversely, men, or more specifically, penises, are imagined as sources of constant threat to women and children, an idea that reinforces a construction of het- erosexual male desire as natural and uncontrollable. Women-only spaces, then, can be framed as andro- phobic and, as a result, heterophobic, due to the as- sumed inability of women to protect themselves from men combined with the assumption that all men are potential rapists. These ideas carry enough cultural power to temper institutional validation of identity- based determination of gender. What people are attempting to protect in these moments of ideological collision, we suggest, is not just women, but also the binary logic that gender-segregated spaces are predicated on and (re)produce.

Within the sports case, the IOC focused on the issue of fairness when determining when a trans- woman can compete against cis-women. Attempting to maintain both the values of identity-based deter- mination and the logic of gender difference that jus- tifies gender-segregated athletic competitions, sports officials put transwomen athletes into a peculiar situ- ation: In order to gain access to the chance to com- pete in tests of strength and endurance, they must first prove their weakness (Buzuvis 2010; Shy 2007). This equation of women with weakness also ac- counts for the regulation of women’s, but not men’s, sports: If women are inherently weak, they must be protected from competing with stronger bodies (e.g., men). Cis-men, in contrast, should not need such protection from people with X X chromosomes.

Gender panics around the issue of trans-athletes also focus on the question of safety. The United King- dom’s 2004 Gender Recognition Act, a law intended to grant more rights to transgender people, includes a provision that prohibits trans-athletes’ competition in cases that endanger the “safety of competitors” (Cavanagh and Sykes 2006). Discussion of safety in this case revolved around regulating access to con- tact sports. Yet, during debate around this act, an- other meaning of safety surfaced. Lord Moynihan is reported as saying that “many people will be greatly concerned at the idea of themselves or their children being forced to share a changing room with a trans- sexual person” (Mcardle 2008, 46). The allusion is that transgender people present a sexual danger to vulnerable others, conflating transgenderism and sexual deviance.

This portrayal of transgender people as potential sexual dangers in gender-segregated spaces appeared repeatedly in our other two cases. People advocat- ing biology-based determination of gender worried about protecting women and children, another group generally vested with vulnerable subjecthood, from sexual risk from people with penises who would, with the new policies, be legally able to enter women-only spaces. When opponents to the New York City birth certificate policy worried about “male anatomies” in women’s prisons (Cave 2006b), they were hinting at the possibility that those “male anatomies” would sexually assault the women with whom they shared

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prison space. While most articles about the New York City proposal merely suggested this possibility, some were more explicit. An opinion piece argued that one of the dangers of the proposed law was “personal safety: Many communal spaces, like prison cells and public bathrooms, are segregated by sex to protect women, who are generally physically weaker than men, from assault or rape” (Yoshino 2006). Explain- ing his opposition to the transgender rights bill, New Hampshire Representative Robert Fesh similarly noted, “Parents are worried about their kids and sexual abuse” (Macarchuk 2009). In these imagined interactions, opponents to identity-based criteria for determining gender both rely upon and shore up an idea that women are uniquely susceptible to assault. Moreover, they position transwomen as dangerous, a perspective that is often used in other contexts to justify violence against them (Westbrook 2009).

Since the panics produced in these moments of ideology collision focus on the penis as uniquely ter- rifying, “gender panics” might more accurately be termed “penis panics.” In these hypothetical interac- tions, opponents give penises the power to destroy the sanctity of women’s spaces through their (pre- sumed natural) propensity to rape. The imagined sexual threat takes three forms in the news stories we examined. Most commonly, the threat is stated in general terms, such as opponents claiming that pas- sage of transgender rights bills in New Hampshire and Massachusetts would put “women and children at risk” (Love 2009) in public restrooms. Second, some opponents imagined cis-men pretending to be transwomen in order to gain access to women’s restrooms for sexually nefarious purposes. Contest- ing the vague criteria of who counts as transgender, Representative Peyton Hinkle of New Hampshire stated his opposition to the bill by calling it an “in- vitation  .  .  . to people with predatory tendencies to come and hide behind the fact that they are having a transgender experience” (Fahey 2009). A spokes- person for the Massachusetts Family Institute told a reporter that the anti-discrimination bill allowed sexual predators to enter women’s restrooms under the “guise of gender confusion” (Nicas 2009). Finally, transwomen themselves (not cis-men pretending to be trans) are imagined as the potential threat. Dr.

Paul McHugh, chair of the psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins University, is reported to have writ- ten an e-mail protesting the proposed New York City policy that stated: “I’ve already heard of a ‘transgen- dered’ man who claimed at work to be ‘a woman in a man’s body but is a lesbian’ and who had to be expelled from the ladies’ restroom because he was propositioning women there” (Cave 2006b). In these imagined interactions, transwomen have legal permission to enter gender-segregated spaces with- out the proper biological credentials. As such, their presence transforms a nonsexual space into a danger- ously (hetero)sexual one. Within this heteronorma- tive logic, all bodies with male anatomies, regardless of gender identity, desire female bodies, and many of them (enough to elicit concern from the public) are willing to use force to get access to those bodies.8

That these imagined sexual assaults occur only in women-only spaces is worth further analysis, as women share space with men daily without similar concerns. We suggest that women-only spaces gener- ate intense androphobia because, by definition, these spaces should not contain bodies with penises. If women are inherently unable to protect themselves, and men (or, more specifically, penises) are inher- ently dangerous (Hollander 2001), the entrance of a penis into women’s space becomes terrifying because there are no other men there to protect the women. The “safe” (read: gender-segregated) space is trans- formed into a dangerous, sexual situation by the entrance of an “improper body.” These fears rely on and reproduce gender binarism, specifically the as- sumption of strong/weak difference in male/female bodies, as opponents assume that people who could be gaining access to women’s space (people with pe- nises) are inherently stronger than cis-women and easily able to overpower them.

This emphasis on the sexual threat of penises in women-only spaces shows that gender panics are not just about gender, but also about sexuality. In the sex/gender/sexuality system, all bodies are pre- sumed heterosexual. This assumption makes gender- segregated spaces seem safe because they are then “sexuality-free zones.” Because there are only two gender categories, gay men and lesbians must share gender-segregated spaces with heterosexual men and

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women, respectively, an entrance that is tolerated as long as such entrants demonstrate the appropri- ate visual cues for admittance and use the bathroom for the “right” purpose (waste elimination). The use of public restrooms for homosexual sex acts can, of course, create a panic (Cavanagh 2010). Gender- segregated spaces, then, can be conceived of as both homophobic and heterophobic, as the fear is about unwanted sexual acts in supposedly sex-neutral spaces. Unlike normative sexual interactions, where gender difference is required to make the interaction acceptable (Schilt and Westbrook 2009), in gender- segregated spaces, gender difference is a source of discomfort and potential sexual threat and danger. Rhetoric about women and children as inherently vulnerable to sexual threats taps into cultural anxiet- ies about sexual predators and pedophiles, who are always imagined to be men (Levine 2002); such fears have been repeatedly successful in generating sex panics. Because unwanted sexual attention is seen as a danger to women and children, but rarely, if ever, as a danger to adult men (Vance 1984), men’s spaces are not policed. This differential policing of gender- segregated spaces illustrates the cultural logics that uphold gender inequality and heteronormativity— two systems whose underlying logic necessitates male–female oppositeness.

c o n c l u s i o n

In this article, we examine the process of determining gender. We argue that collisions of biology-based and identity-based ideologies in the liberal moment have produced a sex/gender/sexuality system where the cri- teria for determining gender vary across social spaces. Many people have long assumed that biological factors, such as chromosomes, are always the ultimate deter- miner of gender. Contrary to the dominant assump- tion, we suggest that the sex/gender/sexuality system is slowly changing. As it has encountered liberal values of self-determinism, the criteria for determining gender have shifted away from pure biological determinism. In nonsexual gender-integrated spaces, identity can be used to determine gender, as long as that identity is as a man or a woman (Schilt and Westbrook 2009). By contrast, in gender-segregated spaces, a combination

of identity and body-based criteria is used, allowing someone to receive cultural and institutional support for a change of gender only if they undergo genital surgery. Finally, in heterosexual interactions, biology- based criteria (particularly genitals) are used to deter- mine gender (Schilt and Westbrook 2009).

While most cis-gender people keep the same clas- sification in all spaces, transgender people may be given different gender classifications by social actors depending on the type of interaction occurring in the space. Thus, one could speak of a trans-person’s “social gender,” “sexual gender,” and “sports (or other gender-segregated space) gender.” To illustrate this point, Kye Allums, a trans-man who played college basketball on a woman’s team, has a social gender of “man” and a sports gender of “woman.” Within the criteria for trans-athletes, he can continue to play basketball with women as long as he does not take testosterone or have genital surgery (Thomas 2010), a modification that would change his sports gender from “woman” to “man.” Another way to conceptual- ize this point is to say that access to gender-integrated social spaces is determined by identity while access to gender-segregated spaces is mostly determined by biology, a point we summarize in Table 1.

The criteria for gender determination vary across social spaces because of the different imagined pur- poses of interactions that should occur in these set- tings. Heterosexual encounters and gender-segregated spaces both justify and reproduce an idea of two op- posite genders. In spaces in which a higher level of oppositeness is required from participants, visual and behavioral gender cues often are not consid- ered sufficient for determining gender and, instead, the participants must also demonstrate bodily op- positeness. Because heterosexual interactions and gender-segregated spaces rely on (and reproduce) gender binarism, it is these spaces where valida- tion of identity-based determination of gender pro- duces panics and biology-based gender ideologies reign. In contrast, validation of identity-based de- termination of gender is more likely to occur when it cannot be framed as endangering other people, particularly others seen as more worthy of protec- tion than trans-people (cis-women and children). In gender-integrated workplaces, for example, coworkers

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may not feel endangered by working with a trans-man who has the “cultural genitals” to support his social identity as a man, such as facial hair, particularly if he identified himself as crossing from one side of the gender binary to the other (Schilt and Westbrook 2009). It is important to add, however, that, in these spaces, identity-based determination of gender is more likely to be accepted by others when the person in question is, in the social imagination, “penis free” (all trans-men as well as “post-op” trans-women), as the penis is culturally associated with power and danger. These attitudes have profound consequences for transgender rights.

The criteria for determining gender also differ for placement in the category of “man” or “woman.” Here, we have focused on the criteria for accessing women-only spaces because it is those spaces that produced the most panic in our media sources and that have the clearest criteria for admission. This focus of cultural anxiety on trans-women is unsur- prising. We have detailed how the mainstream media portrayed transwomen as dangerous to heterosexual men because they use their feminine appearance to trick men into homosexual encounters (Schilt and Westbrook 2009; Westbrook 2009). In these cases, it is again trans-women who are portrayed as danger- ous, yet this time they are positioned as endangering women and children.

We do not take the lack of attention to trans-men in men-only spaces to mean that trans-men are more ac- cepted by people who vocally oppose trans-women. In

contrast, we suggest that trans-men and trans-women are policed differently. Trans-men’s perceived lack of a natural penis renders them, under the logic of vulnera- ble subjecthood, unable to be threatening (and, there- fore, unlikely to generate public outcry). Cis-gender men, the group who would share a bathroom or locker room with trans-men, also are not seen in the public imagination as potential victims of sexual threat, as such an image is contradictory to cultural construc- tions of maleness and masculinity (Lucal 1995). Trans- men enter a liminal state, in some ways, as they cannot hurt men (making them women), but are not seen as needing protection from men (making them part of a “pariah femininity” [Schippers 2007] that no longer warrants protection). Thus, because of gender inequal- ity, the criteria for the category “man” are much less strict than those for the category “woman,” at least for access to gender-segregated spaces.

But why do genitals carry more weight in de- termining gender in these segregated spaces? Our research hints at three possible answers for further ex- ploration. First, genitals are changeable criteria, unlike chromosomes, which allows for some validation of liberal values of self-determination. Second, male and female genitals are imagined to be opposite, so using them as the criteria for determining gender maintains a binaristic gender system. Finally, genitals play a cen- tral role in gender panics because gender and sexu- ality are inextricably intertwined. The social actors opposed to identity-based determination of gender assume that all bodies, regardless of gender identity,

TABLE 1 CRITERIA FOR DETERMINING GENDER ACROSS CONTEXTS

Nonsexual, gender-integrated Nonsexual, gender-segregated Heterosexual

Trans-men Identity-based criteria determine gender.

Identity-based criteria determine gender. Biology-based criteria determine gender.

Changes to genitalia are not typically required to establish legiti- macy of their gender.

Changes to genitalia are not typically required to gain access to men’s spaces.

Changes to genitalia required. This criterion is not typically enforced in a violent way.

Trans-women Identity-based criteria determine gender.

A combination of identity-based and biology-based criteria determine gender.

Biology-based criteria determine gender.

Changes to genitalia are more typically required to establish legiti- macy of their gender.

Changes to genitalia are required to gain access to women’s spaces.

Changes to genitalia required. This criterion is often enforced in a violent way.

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are heterosexual. Although genitals are not supposed to be used in interactions in gender-segregated spaces, a fear of their (mis)use drives the policing of bodies in those spaces, making sexuality a central force in decid- ing which criteria will be used to determine gender.

By using genitals as the criteria for determin- ing gender, the sex/gender/sexuality system is able to adapt to new liberal ideals of self-determination and to withstand the threat that trans-people might pose to a rigid binary system of gender. Although the existence of transgender and genderqueer people is seen as capable of “undoing gender” (Deutsch 2007;

Risman 2009), the binaristic gender system tends to adapt to and reabsorb trans-people (Schilt and West- brook 2009; Westbrook 2010).

Rather than being undone, gender is constantly “redone” (Connell 2010; West and Zimmerman 2009). Like all other norms and social systems, people create gender. Challenges to the gender system modify rather than break it. Gender crossing can receive some vali- dation in the liberal moment, but only when a binary remains unquestioned. By providing criteria for who can transition and how they can do it, the sex/gender/ sexuality system is both altered and maintained.

N O T E S

1. Following Kessler and McKenna (1978), we highlight the social construction of both “sex” and “gender” by using the term “gender” throughout this article, even in moments where most people use the term “sex” (e.g., “gender-segregated” rather than “sex-segregated”). We reserve “sex” for references to intercourse, unless using a specific term such as “sex marker.”

2. We use the term “(hetero)sexuality” to highlight that when many social actors speak of “ sexuality” they are inferring heterosexuality.

3. As sexuality and sexualization are social processes, it is difficult to draw a conceptual line between a sexual and nonsexual space. Workplaces, for example, can contain sexualized interactions, though the dominant understanding of a workplace might be nonsexual. We use this term to refer to settings in which the commonly agreed on purpose is nonsexual. Sexual interactions do, of course, occur in these settings, but many see such interactions as a violation of the expected purpose of these spaces.

4. It is notable that women athletes do not have to possess what would be considered female genitals in order to compete. The criteria for determining gender in sports are thus very similar to Kessler and McKenna’s findings that “penis equals male but vagina does not equal female” (1978:151) when determining gender.

5. This use of “sex hormones”—mainly the levels of testosterone—to determine gender emerged only in the sports case because of the belief that testosterone provides a competitive advantage.

6. The image of a trans-man in men-only spaces was referenced by opponents only once in our analy- sis. A conservative activist told a reporter that allowing “men” to go into women’s bathrooms legally would create discomfort for women and put them at sexual risk. The reporter asked what bathroom transgender men should use, as their male appearance could also make ciswomen uncomfortable in the bathroom. The activist replied, “They [trans-men] should use the women’s bathroom, regard- less of whom it makes uncomfortable because that’s where they are supposed to go” (Ball 2009).

7. Often, it is actors with good intentions, such as antiviolence activists, who, in their attempt to protect a particular group, unintentionally (re)produce an idea that the group is constantly prone to attack and unable to protect themselves (Westbrook 2008).

8. The ability to harm others attributed to trans-people in these narratives should be problema- tized. The trans-people described by biological determiners function as monstrous specters, so there is often little nuance in these portrayals of trans lives. By contrast, arguments made for trans rights bills and for access to gender-segregated spaces often include descriptions of trans- people as victims of violence and harassment rather than as perpetrators.

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Georgiann Davis, Medical Jurisdiction and the Intersex Body, from Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis, pp. 55-86. NYU Press.

G E O R G I A N N D AV I S

It was a beautiful fall day and I was in a major US pediatric medical center, practically running down a hospital stairwell. I was following Dr. I., a world- renowned expert on intersex, who was on her way to her DSD (Diagnosis of Sex Disorder) team’s meet- ing, which was already in session. Dr. I. had agreed to an interview months earlier, but on the scheduled morning she had a family emergency that left her run- ning late. Understanding that I had traveled across the country to interview her, Dr. I. was determined to help me in any way she could, so she graciously invited me to accompany her to the meeting. Though Dr. I.’s interview was one of the shortest I conducted during this entire project, she did her best to answer as many questions as possible, addressing several as we flew across the hospital.

It had been four years since the publication of the “Consensus Statement on Management of Intersex Disorders” (Houk et al. 2006; Hughes et al. 2006; Lee et al. 2006), and DSD terminology had replaced intersex language, at least in the medical profes- sion. When we entered the room, I saw a dozen or so medical professionals in white lab coats and hos- pital scrubs. Most were in-house DSD experts, and the rest appeared to be medical residents. They had convened to discuss the medical management of their DSD patients. Dr. I. told the team that she had invited me because I was “doing really great work” and then asked if I would say a few words about my research. I did so, a bit nervously, as I hadn’t been prepared for such an opportunity. One reason for my nervousness was that I didn’t know whether I should disclose that I had been born with an intersex trait. I feared that once these medical experts knew my per- sonal connection to the topic, they would no longer

be willing to be interviewed, but I was wrong. In the heat of the moment, I decided to disclose, and the group still received me warmly. One medical profes- sional, who was not yet scheduled to meet with me, even asked for my contact information so that he could schedule an interview while I was still in town. My experience with Dr. I. and her DSD team was not unusual. I found that most medical professionals I invited to participate in my study were not only sup- portive and helpful throughout data collection but also determined to provide the best possible medical care in their treatment of intersex.

[ . . . ] In this chapter, I argue that the medical profes-

sion holds a unique position at the institutional level of gender structure, where it can either perpetuate or challenge traditional gender ideologies and, in so doing, use its authority either to harm or to help intersex people. I construct this argument on two foundation blocks: the literature on the sociology of diagnosis, in particular the relationship between naming and treating medical traits (see, e.g., Jutel 2011, 2009); and current knowledge about the medi- cal management of intersexuality. The medical com- munity did not always have a framework for defining abnormalities. The ancient Greeks practiced medi- cine without diagnostic names, simply describing diseases (Veith 1969). This practice continued until the eighteenth century, when medical professionals adopted a botanical model of linguistic classification that identified and labeled a wide range of medical traits (Fischer-Homberger 1970). Although some medical professionals resisted the naming of dis- eases, the “classificatory project” prevailed as “medi- cine shift[ed] its focus from individual symptoms to

7. MEDICAL JURISDICTION AND THE INTERSEX BODY

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groups and patterns of symptoms that doctors could reliably recognise” (Jutel 2009:280–281; see also Jutel 2011). This new approach centered on classify- ing conditions under defined diagnoses. Of course, defining conditions depends upon context, including time, place, and available technology. For example, twentieth-century technological advances led to the discovery that males were allegedly distinguish- able from females by their sex chromosomes: XY for males and X X for females (Moore and Barr 1955; Moore, Graham, and Barr 1953; Barr and Bertram 1949). Chromosomal testing introduced a new, albeit ultimately problematic, marker of sex and in turn a new way to identify intersex traits.

Sociologist Phil Brown (1990) argues that the diagnostic process involves two components: diag- nostic technique and diagnostic work. Diagnostic technique “involves formalization of classification, including the specific tasks, techniques, interviews, and chart recording necessary to make the formal- ized classification,” whereas diagnostic work “con- sists of the process by which clinicians concretely proceed with their evaluation and therapeutic tasks” (Brown 1990:395). This distinction helps us better understand intersexuality, as the discovery of sex chromosomes became a new formal way to legiti- mize sex classification. Although providers were per- forming the diagnostic work of surgical intervention on intersex bodies before sex chromosomes were discovered (Mak 2012; Reis 2009; Dreger 1998a), sex chromosomal testing offered a new way of classify- ing intersex traits that further justified existing surgi- cal procedures.

These insights from the sociology of diagnosis are useful in understanding the contemporary medi- cal management of intersex traits. They enhance our understanding of the institutional level of gender structure in ways that enable us to see: (1) how di- agnosing intersex is connected to the belief that sex, gender, and sexuality are clear and correlated bina- ries; (2) how medical professionals’ definitions of intersex sometimes have unintended negative con- sequences, notably the justification of medically unnecessary interventions on healthy bodies; and (3) how the renaming of intersex as a disorder of sex development allowed medical professionals to reclaim

their authority and jurisdiction over intersex, which had come under fire from intersex activism, feminist critiques of intersex medicalization. . . .

t h e r i s e o f j o h n m o n e y Intersex people had been subjected to medical inter- ventions since the nineteenth century (see Mak 2012; Reis 2009; Dreger 1998a), if not earlier (Warren 2014). However, the twentieth century was noticeably dif- ferent because of John Money, a psychologist at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Money’s work influenced gender scholars across disciplines, but his most impor- tant impact was on the medical treatment of intersex traits. Money and his colleagues initially published their work on gender socialization in the Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry in the late 1950s (Money et al. 1957). In 1972, Money and one of his students, Anke A. Ehrhardt, expanded upon these ideas in Man & Woman, Boy & Girl: Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity. Although Money and Ehrhardt argued that the human brain was at least somewhat influenced by hormonal exposure during gestation (see, e.g., their chapters “Fetal Hor- mones and the Brain: Human Clinical Syndromes” and “Gender Dimorphism in Assignment”), they main- tained that childhood gender socialization was the most significant factor in explaining an adult’s gender identity. They suggested that, regardless of their geni- talia, babies could live happy and healthy lives if they were strictly gender socialized (Money et al. 1957; see also Money and Ehrhardt 1972). They supported their argument with their clinical data, mostly on intersex people, and concluded, “So much of gender-identity differentiation remains to take place postnatally, that prenatally determined traits or dispositions can be in- corporated into the postnatally differentiated schema, whether it be masculine or feminine” (Money and Eh- rhardt 1972, 103).

Gender scholars across disciplines used Money and Ehrhardt’s empirical support for their gender socialization thesis to refute claims that gendered behaviors were biologically determined. Although gender scholars in nonclinical social sciences used different terminology, notably “sex role theory,” their ideas about gender were in line with Money’s theory.

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Sociologist Barbara Risman concisely summarizes sex role theory: “Sex role theory suggests that early childhood socialization is an influential determinant of later behavior, and research [under this theoreti- cal framework] has focused on how societies create feminine women and masculine men” (1998:14). Money’s research, offering empirical evidence from a clinical setting, served as “hard” evidence for the sex role thesis.

In 1966, working with other medical profession- als, Money established the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins. Although the Clinic is now defunct, for decades it remained the state-of-the-art medical center for the treatment of intersexuality and trans- sexuality, and Money and his team received refer- rals from doctors across the country (Distinguished 1986). In 1985, the American Psychological Associa- tion awarded him its Distinguished Scientific Award for the Applications of Psychology. The April 1986 issue of American Psychologist summed up his “un- paralleled contributions to theoretical analysis and clinical treatment in human sexuality”:

He originated the seminal concepts of gender iden- tity and gender role which form a cornerstone in all modern theories of sexuality. His extensive con- tributions to theory and research are characterized by a biosocial perspective which combines animal experiments with ethnological reports, and by a lon- gitudinal approach extending from prenatal sex de- termination to gender role changes during old age. His clinical contributions include effective hormonal treatments of male sex offenders, hypogonadal impo- tence, and of virilism in congenital adrenal hyperpla- sia. He has excelled in psychological management of families having children with symptoms of intersexu- ality. (Distinguished 1986, 354)

t h e f a l l o f j o h n m o n e y In the late 1990s, Money and his team faced their harsh- est critic, a former patient by the name of David Reimer. In Man & Woman, Boy & Girl, Money and Ehrhardt relied on an unprecedented case study of identical twins to support their gender socialization argument. Unlike the majority of patients treated by Money and his team, the twin boys highlighted in the case study

were biologically “normal” males, born on August 22, 1965. Their parents did not consider circumcision until months later, when their mother noticed they were having difficulty urinating because of a treatable foreskin complication known as phimosis. On April 27, 1966, the twin boys were scheduled for circumci- sion. However, a surgical mishap left one of the boys, who would eventually be known as David Reimer, with a penis severely burned beyond repair. Worried that this tragedy would prevent David from living a normal life, his parents contacted Money for medical advice. Money assured them that he had a solution. He and his team would surgically remove what was left of David’s penis and construct a vagina in its place. As long as the parents socialized their sex-reassigned child as a girl, their problem would be solved:

In particular, [the parents] were given confidence that their child can be expected to differentiate a female gender identity, in agreement with her sex of rearing. They were broadly informed about the future medi- cal program for their child and how to integrate it with her sex education as she [grew] older. They were guided in how to give the child information about herself to the extent that the need arises in the future; and they were helped with what to explain to friends and relatives, including their other child. Eventually, they would inform their daughter that she would become a mother by adoption, one day, when she married and wanted to have a family. (Money and Ehrhardt 1972, 119)

The baby was surgically modified, and, with Money’s encouragement, the parents engaged in extreme gender socialization in an effort to reinforce the sex reassign- ment. Money published extensively on what became known in academic literature as the John/Joan case, which was used for decades as sound empirical evi- dence to support the gender socialization hypothesis.

In 1997, Diamond’s longstanding critique of Money gained traction, and the credibility of the John/Joan case, and ultimately of Money himself, was challenged throughout the media including in Rolling Stone magazine by journalist John Colap- into. In a feature article, Colapinto reported: “For 25 years, the case of John/Joan was called a medical triumph—proof that a child’s gender identity could

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be changed—and thousands of ‘sex reassignments’ were performed based on this example. But the case was a failure, the truth never reported. Now the man who grew up as a girl tells the story of his life, and a medical controversy erupts” (Colapinto 1997, 54).

In a revelation that dramatically validated essen- tialist claims, David Reimer told Colapinto that he was incredibly unhappy with his sex reassignment and imposed gender identity: He had never felt com- fortable as a girl during his childhood and adoles- cence and always knew something wasn’t right: “For when Joan daydreamed of an ideal future, she saw herself as a 21-year-old male with a mustache and a sports car, surrounded by admiring friends. ‘He was somebody I wanted to be,’ [Reimer] says today, reflect- ing on this childhood fantasy. By now Joan was ever more certain that submitting to [further vaginal sur- gery to complete the sex change] would lock her into a gender in which she felt increasingly trapped” (Colap- into 1997, 70). The story earned Colapinto the presti- gious American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) award. In 2000, he published a book-length account of Reimer’s story, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl. Colapinto quotes Reimer:

My childhood. It comes to me. I don’t go and think about it. . . . Memories of how I used to look. Memo- ries of being belittled by my classmates. Memories of just trying to survive. If I had grown up as a boy with- out a penis? Oh, I would still have had my problems, but they wouldn’t have been compounded the way they are now. If I was raised a boy, I would have been more accepted by other people. I would have been way better off if they had just left me alone, because when I switched back over, then I had two problems on my hands, not just one, because of [their] trying to brainwash me into accepting myself as a girl. So you got the psychological thing going in your head. When I’m intimate with my wife it sometimes haunts me. (2000:261–262)

In 2004, at the age of thirty-eight, David Reimer com- mitted suicide.

Although David Reimer’s life course seems to be strong evidence against Money’s gender socialization thesis, another case suggests otherwise. As Katrina Karkazis (2008) notes in Fixing Sex, the John/Joan

situation was one of two cases during the same time period wherein a “normal” male underwent sex re- assignment because of a penis injury. However, the John/Joan case is the one that “received enormous at- tention” because it was the failed case: David Reimer was unhappy with his sex reassignment. In the other case, a seven-month-old baby boy was reassigned to female after his penis was destroyed in an acci- dent (Bradley et al. 1998). At the age of twenty-six, this individual “was described as a bisexual woman with a female gender identity”—in other words, the gender socialization thesis was supported, not re- futed (Karkazis 2008:70). The latter case received little to no attention, which “points to the influence of journalism, the importance of a ‘speaking’ subject (Reimer), and the desire to reaffirm male-female dif- ferences as ‘natural’ more broadly in society” (Karka- zis 2008:70).

m e d i c a l c r i t i q u e s f r o m i n t e r s e x a c t i v i s t s a n d f e m i n i s t s c h o l a r s As the flaws in John Money’s approach to intersex medical management were being exposed profession- ally by Milton Diamond and other medical skeptics and publicly by journalist John Colapinto, intersex activists and feminist scholars were also critiquing intersex medicalization, specifically medically unnec- essary treatments and the lies and deception that too often accompanied them. Money’s gender theory le- gitimized the surgical interventions that ISNA founder Cheryl Chase and her supporters were organizing to end. In a 1998 GLQ publication, Chase theorized the movement’s focus on the physical alteration of inter- sex bodies: “Pediatric genital surgeries literalize what might otherwise be considered a theoretical operation: the attempted production of normatively sexed bodies and gendered subjects through constitutive acts of vio- lence. Over the last few years, however, intersex people have begun to politicize intersex identities, thus trans- forming intensely personal experiences of violation into collective opposition to the medical regulation of bodies that queer the foundations of heteronormative identifications and desires” (1998a, 189). Millarca, a longtime intersex activist, described the early days of intersex activism in more practical terms: “We all had

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a purpose, we all had a vision, and we worked hard for that vision. Our vision was to get rid of genital mutila- tion surgery. We wanted to get rid of genital mutilation surgery on newborn kids that were having unnecessary surgery. That was the goal of the entire intersex com- munity and we fought hard for it.”

Feminist scholars were also criticizing intersex medical care, in similar terms but within a larger context of gender structure. For example, relying on Judith Butler’s (1993, [2006]1990) theoretical ideas, in 2001, sociologist Sharon Preves offered a sharp critique of the medical profession’s treatment of in- tersex traits: “[T]he majority of these infants are med- ically assigned a definitive sex, undergoing surgery and hormone treatments to ‘correct’ their variation from the anatomies expected by the designations of female and male. The impetus to control intersexual ‘deviance’ stems from cultural tendencies toward gender binarism, homophobia, and fear of differ- ence” (524). As psychologist Suzanne Kessler pointed out, “[I]n order for physicians to adopt a new stance [in approaching intersex traits], they would need to examine their own gender-related assumptions in the context of a major cultural shift in gender be- liefs” (1998:130). Preves even suggested that medical professionals have a professional responsibility to act differently: “Given the injunction ‘do no harm’ and the lack of data conclusively demonstrating the efficacy of more cosmetically based medical inter- ventions, clinicians should opt for the least invasive treatment procedures and not conduct any irrevers- ible surgical or hormonal intervention without the patient’s direct consent” or, in the case of a young child, until he or she is able to contemplate all of the  factors involved  in the permanent decision for him- or herself (2001, 545).

In 1996, Morgan Holmes, an interdisciplinary scholar with an intersex trait, shared her personal perspective with a room full of medical profession- als and gave them some advice about how to move forward in a less damaging way:

Parents and doctors must give up ownership of the sexual future of minors. Children are no longer the property of their parents; we are not chattel. Our sex- ualities do not belong to the medical profession. It

may be that if surgery had not happened when I was young I would have still chosen it. It is equally pos- sible that I would have chosen to keep my big clito- ris; the women I know who escaped surgery are quite grateful to have their big clits. That decision should have been mine to make. Without retaining that de- cision as my personal right, all other aspects of my sexual health have been severely limited. . . . The medical profession can’t give back what was taken from me. But it can listen to me. I was asked to ad- dress you today from my heart, at an informal level, not primarily as an academic, but as a person who has lived through the nightmare of early childhood surgery. But I want to remind my audience that I am an academic, that I do hold a graduate degree in this area of research, and that I am a doctoral candidate specializing in this field. . . . I believe the medical profession really does want our lives to be better. Please listen to us as we tell you how to meet that goal.

In voicing these critiques, intersex activists and femi- nist scholars (and intersex activists who are feminist scholars, like Holmes and several others) ventured a serious challenge to medical authority and jurisdiction over intersex traits.

t h e w h i t e c o at g e n d e r e s s e n t i a l i s t s John Money had been publicly and professionally ex- posed as a fraud by the time Dr. Peter Lee of the then- named Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society (LWPES) and Dr. Ieuan Hughes of the European So- ciety of Paediatric Endocrinology (ESPE) co-organized the now infamous 2005 Chicago conference that re- sulted in the 2006 “Consensus Statement on Manage- ment of Intersex Disorders.” It was also the heyday of intersex activism and feminist scholarship that cri- tiqued the medical profession’s treatment of intersex traits. This confluence of actions and events were chal- lenging medical authority, apparently successfully. Dr. C. explained to me that

anyone who ever heard the [John/Joan] story [which was often presented alongside narratives from inter- sex activists], physicians, especially parents, and pa- tients [was] extremely suspicious of everything we do, and rightfully so. I mean, it was all coming out. Your

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integrity is the one thing that you work the longest to get and with just one slight infraction, results in total dismissal of integrity. And I’m trying to teach [my kids this] all day long, that authority is the one thing you have to guard like your jewels. . . . Now, it came under great suspicion, and I think that the only way to make it right is to make it now more clear.

The strategy for making medical authority “more clear” was to adopt DSD, a term that had not (yet) been politicized by activists (although Chase and her allies were secretly responsible for getting the DSD terminology on the Chicago conference agenda, those in the medical profession weren’t aware of this back- ground when they formally introduced it).

In Deviance and Medicalization, sociologists Peter Conrad and Joseph Schneider ([1980] 1992) intro- duce a five-stage model of medicalized deviance, into which, as I’ve argued elsewhere, the history of intersex fits nicely. This model allows us to under- stand how “medical claims are couched in terms that attempt to conceptualize deviance as a medical problem and may be presented as a medical diag- nosis or etiology and/or treatment for the deviance and the deviant’s behavior” (Conrad and Schneider [1980]1992, 266). In Stage 1, a behavior or condition is identified as deviant. In this stage, intersex was viewed as a negative deviation from the sex binary. Stage 2 is medical discovery, which for intersex in- volved doctors’ reporting in medical journals on their discovery of intersex traits. These discoveries evolved over time, as technology and biological un- derstanding advanced, sometimes emphasizing hor- mones, sometimes emphasizing chromosomes, and, at earlier stages, even focusing on social traits. In Stage 3, medical and other stakeholders make claims about the behavior or condition in question. In the case of intersex, doctors established their expertise, even during moments of medical uncertainty, by claiming that intersex was a medical problem they could fix. Meanwhile, intersex activists mobilized to change how doctors view and treat intersex. Stage 4 highlights legitimacy and securing medical turf. In the case of intersex, this stage played out as a battle over diagnoses, as doctors reasserted their authority over both the diagnosis of intersex and people with intersex traits. This leads to Stage 5, the final stage,

in which the behavior or condition institutionally reaches medicalized deviance status. This is the cur- rent stage for intersex, which the widespread medical adoption of the DSD nomenclature has turned into an officially recognized “abnormality.” In the rest of this chapter, I focus on this stage.

Dr. D. described the usefulness of DSD termi- nology, in particular the opportunity it offered to medically redefine intersex: “[DSD] makes clarifi- cation much easier. It removes some of the stigma- tizing words. It’s actually easier to teach. . . . Saying DSD makes it absolutely clear as a bell . . . you have an enzyme disorder in this pathway or you have a structural disorder from that pathway, this was an accidental birth defect and you were born without this part. It makes it so much easier and less threat- ening. . . . Physicians need taxonomic terms, and it’s been tremendously helpful for medicine.” Though Dr. A. was not quite as enthusiastic, he still em- braced the new language: “DSD is a somewhat more complete and accurate term . . . DSD is a perfectly fine term; I now use it in my own work. I don’t worry about it. Several of us wrote a paper about support- ing that change [laughs].” Although Dr. Courtney Finlayson, a pediatric endocrinologist, was advocat- ing on the Huffington Post blog for “acceptance and kindness” for intersex people, she still used DSD, knowing that her terminological choice was contro- versial. She explains:

As I write this article, I worry that I will err in my wording and cause offense. In the past, terms like her- maphrodite and pseudohermaphrodite were used. These were considered pejorative, and an effort was made to adjust terminology, which led to the term DSD. Even this term, however, may brand these con- ditions as a disorder rather than a variation of human development. I chose to use the [abbreviation] DSD here as it is the currently accepted medical term and thus as a physician, it is the term I use. I am sensitive that even this word, chosen to refer to an embryologic process, can be upsetting.

As the article was circulated on social media, I wit- nessed a number of intersex people criticize Dr. Fin- layson on private social media sites for using DSD, despite the fact that she herself acknowledged the con- troversy over its use.

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DSD nomenclature enables medical profession- als to reframe intersex as a medical disorder that necessitates medical attention, an “embryologic pro- cess” gone wrong. According to Dr. C., this change was long overdue: “First [are] the terms of the word intersex. Again, the word sex is highly emotion- ally charged, whether it’s your gender, whether it’s having sex, or anything else. And so moving away from a highly charged word like that which can mean a thousand different things to a thousand different people is what we should absolutely get away from right away . . . and I think no one would disagree . . . it’s amazing it took so long to get rid of the word intersex.”

Some doctors clearly wanted to see the shift as one that made the diagnosis less threatening, but even they used terminology like defect. Dr. G. explained:

I think it’s so helpful to have such a broad category. So “disorders of sex development,” that’s a pretty broad category, and it doesn’t imply judgment, it doesn’t imply that one’s more severe than another, because underneath that umbrella are many, many different diagnoses. So I think parents, if they’re being seen by the disorders of sex development clinic, they start appreciating that all of this has to do with how our sex develops . . . that there is genetic and hormonal factors. We often use the analogy of . . . there are many different types of heart defects. Well, our bodies are complex—how we’re put together—and there are many differences in body shapes and sizes, and there are differences in how genitals have grown and developed.

Others went so far as to compare intersex traits to dangerous diseases, despite the fact that most inter- sex traits have minimal, if any, health risks. Dr. C., for instance, viewed DSD terminology as “an analogy. It’s like talking about skin cancer and brain cancer.” The comparison is even clearer in a 2014 publication by David Sandberg and Tom Mazur, two well-known medical providers in the intersex community, who propose “an integrated team care model that is patient and family centered and attempts to balance the domi- nating perspective that focuses almost exclusively on gender-related aspects of DSD with one that conceptu- alizes DSD as a congenital and chronic condition, akin to other pediatric conditions” (93, emphasis added).

The linguistic shift from intersex to DSD served as a perfect vehicle for medical professionals to reassert their authority and maintain their exclusive jurisdic- tion over intersex traits. It allowed medical profes- sionals simultaneously to move beyond the John Money debacle and to respond to intersex activism and feminist critiques that were successfully claim- ing intersex was not a medical problem. It no longer mattered, in short, that Money’s gender theory had been exposed as neither empirically nor ethically supportable. It also didn’t matter that intersex activ- ists and feminist scholars were questioning surgical intervention. None of this mattered because medical professionals had a new group of traits to treat: disor- ders of sex development.

My interviews with doctors made it immediately clear that most reject Money’s gender theory. In fact, seven of the ten medical experts I spoke with hold narrow essentialist beliefs about gender: They believe that gender is biologically determined, and their de- scriptions of it evoked Western, white, middle-class understandings of femininity and masculinity. These beliefs, in turn, had significant implications for how they justified their treatment of intersex traits. When I asked Dr. D., a well-respected endocrinologist, if gender was ever incorrectly assigned, her answer was unequivocal:

Yes. When an individual who’s been raised as a female gender assignment comes to the office having totally cut off all her hair, wearing army combat boots and fatigues . . . it sounds very stereotypical, but it really happens . . . wearing combat boots and fatigues, saying, “Oh God, I hate having periods, it doesn’t make any sense for my life, I don’t like this.” Or they threaten to commit suicide or they’re institutional- ized with substance abuse, and part of what comes out of their therapy through that substance abuse is that they don’t know who they are or they think they weren’t assigned to the way they feel now. And those are not always permanent, by the way . . . one of my fatigues-wearing persons came in a couple weeks later, wearing a miniskirt, makeup, and having dyed her hair.

Although Dr. D. seemed to recognize that gender can be fluid, her basic position was still essentialist, founded on biology, or, as she put it, “hardwired”:

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My experience with girls with [congenital adrenal hyper- plasia, or CAH] suggests to me that it’s pretty hardwired. A lot of the CAH girls are significant tomboys . . . hey, I was a tomboy, it’s not a slap, it’s a description. They’re more of a risk taker, like at age 5 or 6, they’ll leap off the porch because they think they can fly kind of things. They wanna take their skateboard and turn it into a hang-glider and take off from a cliff. . . . Whether it’s only with DSDs, or whether it’s in folks where you couldn’t find a DSD with a microscope, I think some of those behaviors are absolutely hardwired.

Dr. D., like many of the medical providers I spoke with, identified masculine behaviors as risk-taking ac- tivities tied to potentially dangerous actions. This line of thinking moves beyond biological sex differences to the assumption that our gendered behaviors are bio- logically prescribed.

Many doctors believed that gendered behaviors resulted, at least in part, from hormonal exposure during gestation. Dr. A., an endocrinologist, said, with no hesitation: “I think there’s no question, again, based upon the [CAH] experience, or the experience of kids who are exposed to androgens externally during pregnancy, that there’s very good reason to believe, and there’s probably experimental data about this, to suggest that androgen levels during fetal development produce male-typical behavior later on, there’s just no question about that.” Consistent with the binary logic that neatly correlates sex, gender, and sexuality, most doctors used these terms interchangeably when justifying their views. When I asked Dr. A. if he could clarify what he meant by “male-typical behavior,” he elaborated by discussing sexuality: “Like in primates, where they’ve used high levels of androgens during fetal development in chromosomally female fetuses, those female monkeys are engaged in humping behav- iors and things like that, which are much more typi- cal of what male primates do as immature, and later sexually mature, individuals . . . how they engage in intercourse.” Here, “humping behaviors” are associ- ated with assumptions about males—specifically, that they are more sexually aggressive.

Medical professionals are trained to look at in- tersex through a biological rather than a social lens. A biological lens necessitates an essentialist view of gender to justify the medicalization of intersexuality

and, more specifically, to justify the validity of the disorder of sex development diagnosis itself. Gender essentialism maintains that gender is—and should be—neatly correlated with a binary sex, and that the bodies of individuals who deviate from the pattern require modification for the sake of normalcy and consistency. I also believe that sexuality is a key com- ponent of gender essentialist logic, as in the field of medicine, sexuality, like gender, tends to be viewed as biologically prescribed. Most of the medical pro- fessionals I interviewed believe that intersex is typi- cally a visible abnormality of the body that warrants and justifies treatment. When I asked Dr. D. whether a person with a DSD would be recognizable in a crowd, her response surprised me:

Some of them, yes. Because some have some very spe- cific phenotypic [external appearance] features . . . It’s as if you’re trained to look for them. [Interviewer: “And what are some of these big, obvious character- istics?”] Okay, well, Turner Syndrome. So there are phenotypic features of women with Turner Syndrome. And if you know what you’re looking for . . . short stature, droopy eyes, very prominent ears, a webbed neck, there are characteristic features of the fingers, and Klinefelter’s Syndrome, not always, but some of the forms of where folks are just agonadal, they have long, thin body proportions with big, long arms, and a high-pitched voice, and not much facial hair or facial musculature or shoulder musculature, you can sort of go, “That person looks like they might have a DSD.”

It’s not surprising, then, that several of my research par- ticipants with intersex traits expressed genuine concern that their diagnosis was visible in public settings. Yet, during my ethnographic observations at meetings of in- tersex social movement organizations, I found it impos- sible to determine who had an intersex trait and who did not (as I discuss below, a few outliers in the medical profession agree with me). As a sociologist, I view inter- sex through a social rather than a biological lens.

Medical professionals, with their biological lens, often rely on essentialist views about gender to justify the medical tests they use to reach definitive gender assignments—which they interchangeably call sex as- signments, usage that further underscores their belief in the interchangeability of sex and gender. According to Dr. Mariam Moshiri and her colleagues: “The first

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step in the management of DSD is sex assignment, which is based on factors such as the genotype; the presence, location, and appearance of reproductive organs; the potential for fertility; and the cultural background and beliefs of the patient’s family. The pri- mary goal of sex assignment is to achieve the greatest possible consistency between the patient’s assigned sex and his or her gender identity. Once the sex is assigned, the next step in management might be surgery, hor- mone therapy, or no intervention at all” (2012, 1599). Involving psychiatrists only peripherally, medical pro- fessionals assign gender almost exclusively within the biomedical paradigm (a model that relies on biology to make sense of traits, without taking psychological or social factors into account). As Dr. C. explained:

We do all the biochemical information . . . we do all the morphometrics, radiologic assessment, and then we sit down—the endocrinologist, myself, sometimes a general surgeon—really, surprisingly, within our setting, very rarely, a psychiatrist. And we’ll discuss primarily—in all discussions that I’ve had input into— who the child thinks they’re going to be later. Which seems to be a fairly simple thing, which is did the child have significant testosterone exposure . . . in utero? And then once that’s been established, discuss the issues such as fertility and functional success of surgery.

Framing the gender assignment recommendation within the biomedical paradigm leaves its validity un- challenged and establishes the rationalization of surgi- cal intervention.

I found further confirmation of the medical profession’s commitment to biological explana- tions when I asked medical professionals how they might explain gender variation. They commonly cited poor parenting, rather than question their as- sumptions that gender is biologically prescribed. Dr. B.’s response to a question about gender vari- ant intersex kids was fairly typical: “I have worked with kids who’ve decided to kind of move forward in an opposite gender [from] the one that they were originally assigned to. But the cases that I’ve worked with where that happened were predominantly very poorly controlled kids with congenital adrenal hy- perplasia, who were very masculinized by [that] time. I worked with one young boy, adolescent male,

who was really a genetic female, had been born in another country, very poorly controlled, very mascu- line.” Dr. B.’s response illustrates the commonly held belief among medical providers that individuals are “really” either female or male, a longstanding ideol- ogy in medicine, though it has long been subjected to critique. In his Introduction to Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth- Century French Hermaphrodite, Michel Foucault (1980) problematizes binary sex and questions the reasons behind sex categorization. He argues, more specifically, that sex, understood as a biological truth, is a fabrication perpetuated by juridical and medical processes. In Bodies in Doubt, Elizabeth Reis (2009) offers us a specific historic account of doc- tors’ attempting to impose their understanding of sex onto a resistant body:

In the late nineteenth century, one thirty-four-year-old who had been living as a woman refused a recom- mended lengthening of her urethra and correction of what the doctors saw as a curved penis because sur- gery would necessitate [her] entering the hospital as male. . . . [Dr. James Little, a professor of surgery at the University of Vermont and the New York Post-Graduate Medical School] recommended the operation, most likely because he saw the patient as a man and assumed that he would want the curvature fixed. But the patient refused. . . . In part, this person’s decision to forgo sur- gery was based on her history of living as female. . . . For this particular person, considerations of practicality, convenience, and the possibility of surgical damage merged with the sheer logic, for her, of switching gen- ders at age thirty-four. Yet, throughout his account, Dr. Little referred to the patient as male, although Little knew that she was, and planned to continue, living as female. . . . In Dr. Little’s view, this patient was merely “passing” and had been doing so for years. The doctor had learned that the family suspected something was amiss years earlier. Though the child was proclaimed a girl at birth and had been reared as a girl, between the ages of twelve and fourteen, the child noticed “that he differed from other girls of his acquaintance, and calling his mother’s attention to it, she consulted a physician, who, after making an examination, informed her of the nature of the deformity, and assured her that the child was a male.” The parents continued to raise their child as a girl.

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According to Little, they were “too ignorant to properly comprehend the difficulty . . . and in con- sequence made no change to his apparel.” In his patronizing attitude toward the parents and patient, Little was typical of nineteenth-century doctors who saw such patients as misguided in not adhering to medical advice. The idea of mistakes would come to have profound implications. Doctors interpreted those with unusual genitals as either “really” male or female and understood patients’ own reading of their external genitalia as evidence of naïve foolish- ness at best and willful obstinacy or perversion at worst. (75–76)

I quote this story at length because it shows multiple doctors pushing against an individual’s gender prefer- ences, and her family’s support of such preferences, re- flecting the practical and ideological insistence of the medical profession and an iteration of the belief that gender variation among intersex children is a result of their being “poorly controlled” by parents, a belief that gives those parents a tremendous amount of responsi- bility for policing their children’s behaviors in gender- stereotypical ways.

Medical professionals tend to assume minimal, if any, responsibility for the consequences of their med- ical interventions. For example, in a 2012 long-term outcome study of six individuals born with intersex traits published in Pediatric Endocrinology Reviews, Dr.  Peter Lee and Dr. Christopher Houk conclude that outcomes “var[ied] from poor to good” (140) but shift responsibility for the less successful outcomes onto parents, although they do acknowledge other factors such as psychosocial support. In the first case they present, Lee and Houk note that “[w]hile the procedure was explained to the parents, the mother indicated later [that] she felt forced to sign the con- sent form because of the urgency of the situation even though she was not convinced of a female assign- ment” (141). The child, who was assigned female at birth and underwent “[f]eminizing surgery at 6 weeks of age” (141), decided to gender transition at the age of eleven. When he was fifteen, he “underwent a two- staged surgery to create a penis” (142). Currently, this man is living with a relative, but for some time he was involuntarily “committed into a residential psy- chiatric treatment facility” because of “[c]onsiderable

family turmoil” (143). Despite noting that the mother “felt forced” into surgical intervention, Lee and Houk conclude that “It also seems clear that if parents of example #1 had not agreed with the reassignment to female that outcome would have been better” (149). In short, their essentialist biomedical paradigm not only allows medical professionals to justify their sur- gical interventions but also enables them to evade blame if those interventions don’t work out.

t r o u b l i n g t h e t e a m The 2006 “Consensus Statement on Management of Intersex Disorders” envisioned a team approach to treating individuals with intersex traits:

Optimal care for children with DSD requires an expe- rienced multidisciplinary team that is generally found in tertiary care centers. Ideally, the team includes pe- diatric subspecialists in endocrinology, surgery, and/ or urology, psychology/psychiatry, gynecology, genet- ics, neonatology, and, if available, social work, nurs- ing, and medical ethics. Core composition will vary according to DSD type, local resources, developmen- tal context, and location. Ongoing communication with the family’s primary care physician is essential. The team has a responsibility to educate other health care staff in the appropriate initial management of af- fected newborns and their families. For new patients with DSD, the team should develop a plan for clinical management with respect to diagnosis, gender assign- ment, and treatment options before making any rec- ommendations. Ideally, discussions with the family are conducted by one professional with appropriate communication skills. Transitional care should be or- ganized with the multidisciplinary team operating in an environment that includes specialists with expe- rience in both pediatric and adult practice. Support groups can have an important role in the delivery of care to patients with DSD and their families. (Lee et al. 2006, 490)

The medical professionals I interviewed supported this recommendation. As Dr. A. put it, “I think it’s pretty clear that the best care is care that includes people with expertise from endocrinology, from urology, from psy- chology and psychiatry, from ethics, etc., etc. There are only half a dozen places in the country that have

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them, if that.” While there are only a few established DSD teams across the United States (including Seattle, Oklahoma City, Denver, Ann Arbor, Chicago, and Cin- cinnati), medical providers tend to point to such cen- ters as the gold standard of DSD care.

I’m left wondering, however, whether the mul- tidisciplinary team becomes an uncontested space in which medical professionals can assert their ex- pertise and enhance their authority over the inter- sex body, rather than disperse that authority. When medical professionals operate in a team, the assump- tion is that multiple opinions will be heard. Dr. C. articulated this assumption:

We take solace in the fact that we’re operating as a team; it’s not generally blame, but the better way to look at that would be to say we’re showing the fami- lies as clearly as possible just how much we’re wres- tling with the situation ourselves, and I think that’s very important. . . . We generally speak among all five pediatric urologists here as a group, telling the family we’ve had four second opinions without even need- ing anybody else here. But I think we take solace in that. I think it’s a very important thing for the family to see, just how much we’re wrestling with the choice ourselves.

The problem with “telling the family we’ve had four second opinions” is that it tamps down any potential doubt parents might have about proceeding with the team’s recommendations, even to the point of disem- powering them from seeking their own second opinion. The existence of a team doesn’t guarantee “four second opinions”—everyone on the team could easily have had the same opinion, or a vocal medical expert on the team could be dominating the decision-making process.

Furthermore, because we know that the composi- tion of decision-making groups can affect policy out- comes, including voices from outside of medicine, such as psychologists or even bioethicists or sociol- ogists, on DSD medical teams needs to be the rule and not the exception. Above, Dr. C. explained that his DSD team makes recommendations by “sit[ting] down—the endocrinologist, myself, sometimes a general surgeon—really, surprisingly, within our set- ting, very rarely, a psychiatrist.” A recent experimen- tal study published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine

showed that subjects randomly assigned to play the role of parents of an intersex child were less likely to grant consent for surgery when a psychologist pre- sented the intersex trait in a demedicalized fashion than when an endocrinologist presented it in a medi- calized fashion.22 Imagine what the outcome might be if a sociologist or scholar of gender and sexualities studies did the presentation.

DSD teams work together to reach a diagnosis before deciding on what they believe is the best re- sponse. Dr. I. described her team’s composition and process: “Number one, the child is referred to as ‘baby’ until we have a ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ status. . . . Once we have the [karyotype] data, we meet as a team—a pediatric urologist, a psychologist, a geneticist, an endocri- nologist, and a genetic counselor, for example, that’s the makeup of the team, with the possibility that we have utilized the ethics team for ethics consultation.” All of the professionals at medical institutions that had teams in place described them similarly, but the fact that many teams included psychologists does not remediate their medical emphasis, for these were generally hospital-based psychologists who worked in medical environments. Consistent with gender es- sentialist logic, teams tend to order diagnostic tests that include assessments of hormonal levels, karyo- types, and other biological signs of sex, suggesting that gender can be uncovered biologically. According to Dr. C.: “[The team] need[s] to figure out hormon- ally if the child makes testosterone. We need to figure out genetically what the chromosomes are and then discuss what little knowledge we have in 2010, how we think this child’s going to think. Not in terms of gender preference or [whom] they’re attracted to, of course, but for gender identification, who they think they are.” These descriptions of how teams work can help us understand the medical profession’s rela- tively quick implementation of DSD nomenclature. If medical professionals view gender as something that should function properly alongside sex, gender that doesn’t neatly match sex is taken as a sign that an individual hasn’t been correctly sexed rather than as possible proof that sex and gender are social con- structions. DSD terminology aligns with this vision and gives medical professionals the authority to define and treat bodies as they see fit.

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Although the medical professionals in my study were aware of the 2006 consensus statement’s rec- ommendation that surgical intervention should be avoided unless it promotes a “functional outcome rather than a strictly cosmetic appearance” (Lee et al. 2006, 491), medically unnecessary surgery has contin- ued. Dr. A. said, “I think surgical intervention is still quite common, even in a relatively enlightened place [such as this hospital].” Although Dr. I. explained that her hospital’s medical team “take[s] the decision for sur- gery pretty seriously,” she went on to say that they still performed surgery but “probably have moved towards less surgery early on.” Essentialist views of gender likely play a role in the continued prevalence of surgery, as we can see in Dr. C.’s explanation of how he presents surgery to the parents of children who are newly di- agnosed with intersex traits: “I always talk about it as, nature . . . just about got it right, but just this is the last few steps or last step, and we can complete that for you, and then we take lots and lots of questions.”

All of the medical professionals I interviewed stated that parents approach the intersex diagnosis with many questions, an observation supported by the parents I interviewed. The medical professionals believed that parents usually welcome their profes- sional opinions with little resistance or hesitation. However, this is not always the case. Dr. C. recounted a recent consultation with a family that was very crit- ical of his recommendations:

The father said, “[Doctor], can I ask you a question?” I said, “Absolutely, this is your forum. I’m at your dis- posal. You’re hiring me.” He said, “Why should we do anything?” And I acted physically surprised, I’m sure I did. And I said, “Well, I’m concerned that if you raise this child in a male gender role without a straight penis, he’s not going to see himself as most other males and he’s not going to certainly be able to func- tion as most other males.” And the father said, “Well, in our family we like to celebrate our differences and not try to all be the same and feel the social pressure to do everything like everyone else does.” . . . I said, “I do have to say one thing, and I think it’s of key impor- tance, that you both see a psychiatrist.”

Clearly Dr. C. did not provide much space for parents to question his medical recommendations, and he was

not alone. Indeed, this passage shows that, despite the 2000 and 2006 medical statements, Dr. C., like other medical professionals I interviewed, continues to be in- vested in surgical modifications on intersex bodies that are often cosmetic but always irreversible. As demon- strated . . . , parents still tend to yield to the power and expertise of medical professionals and consent to these modifications, but later they express decisional regret.

d o c t o r s c r i t i q u i n g d o c t o r s While the 2000 and 2006 medical statements have not put an end to unnecessary surgical interventions on intersex bodies, they have instigated a critical dis- cussion about the necessity of surgery. Medical pro- fessionals are not a monolithic group of individuals but hold different views about the dominant medical treatment of intersexuality. As Dr. A. explained, “Some urologists are sort of gung-ho about doing early sur- gical procedures, and there are others who are now very reluctant.” Dr. A. went on to acknowledge that “the vast majority of surgical interventions that have been proposed or practiced in early childhood have no proven physical advantages, although there may be some arguments for the technical feasibility of doing some things earlier, rather than later, but that’s a gen- eral matter.” When I asked Dr. F. to share her thoughts about the discrepancy between the 2006 consensus statement and actual practices, she explained, “It’s better than what existed before, but I think it didn’t go as far as it could go . . . in terms of redirecting away from surgical approaches.” Dr. F. also issued a plea to her professional colleagues around the country: “Don’t do surgery . . . just leave this child as is at least until sometime later in the child’s life when it’s clear what this child’s gender identity appears to be.” In her memoir Reclaiming My Birth Rights, Dr. Adrienne Car- mack, a urologic surgeon, had this to say about inter- sex medical care: “The approach by medical doctors to assign a gender, and then administer irreversible treatments to support that gender, is fundamentally flawed! No matter the original logic behind this treat- ment model, it is now apparent that in many cases it was a mistake. Yet, surgeries are still being done based on what is thought to be the gender a child will relate to” (2014, 67–68).

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I interviewed three medical professionals (out of ten) who were critical of the binary biomedical ac- count of sex, gender, and sexuality, but finding them required intensive purposeful recruitment strategies. Influenced by feminist scholarship, Dr. E., Dr. F., and Dr. H.24 held very different views from those of the majority of medical experts on intersex. For example, when I asked Dr. E. if she thought gender was bio- logically predetermined, she grounded her response in feminist scholarship: “Well, here I’m gonna prob- ably diverge from any biological explanations for this, ’cause I don’t know if you’ve read any of Anne Fausto-Sterling’s stuff . . . she’s very convincing to me . . . gender, sexual orientation, hormones, pheno- type . . . I think has to do with the way nature works, and nature loves variety . . . maybe there’s some way testosterone tends to make people act more boyish. But I think it’s the way we then interpret that boyish- ness.” Dr. F. offered her own criticism of the binary logic, which didn’t rely on feminist scholarship but revealed a broader social vision: “So we still have this dichotomous society that thinks in black and white, male and female, and there’s nothing . . . you can’t be anything but one or the other. It’s some of these social constructs that seem to exist in the United States that maybe don’t exist in other countries.”

As noted above, the majority of the experts on intersex I interviewed believed that a person with a DSD could be visually recognized in a crowd of people, an assumption which highlights that pro- viders are looking at intersex through a biological rather than a social lens. However, I spent hundreds of hours at intersex organizational meetings where it was impossible, with my social lens, to distinguish intersex people from their “normally bodied” par- ents and significant others, and the remarks of these three outliers in the medical profession support my ethnographic observations. I asked Dr. E. whether an individual with an intersex diagnosis could be easily recognized in a room full of people, and, rather than cite alleged physical markers of sex, she spoke of gender, quickly replying, “No! [laughing]. . . . In my experience, intersex people are so raised to conform to a gender role that they do.”

Medical professionals often cited fertility as an important determinant of gender assignment. For

example, when I asked Dr. F. to describe the process involved in assigning gender to individuals born with externally ambiguous genitalia, she explained:

Basically the outward appearance. To some extent, what structures the child has internally, as well, can affect that . . . [Interviewer: “What do you mean by structures?”] Well, like a uterus for example. If a child does have part of a uterus, that can be a guide. . . . Physicians tend to go toward the female sex of rearing [female gender assignment], because that has the po- tential for carrying a child. This is kind of the holy grail of being able to bear a child and carry a pregnancy. So that does tend to drive sex rearing towards female, if there’s a uterus present.

Dr. F. was the one who implored her colleagues, “Don’t do surgery,” but even she was unable to entirely escape hegemonic ideologies about gender. When I asked her whether any child’s gender identity could ever be “clear,” given her personal view that gender is a “social construct,” she explained:

I think there’s . . . yes, but I think there’s plasticity in that, I think it’s malleable. I think we’re endowed with this certain level of masculinity or femininity at birth, due to whatever prenatal influences we’re exposed to, but I think there can be postnatal influences that may modify that, whether they’re hormonal influences, or whether they’re external, environmental influences. I’m not entirely sure how environmental influences would change that, I think it’s probably more biological than so- ciological, from my perspective. But I do think there are probably cases where it’s malleable. And transgender individuals are kind of those examples, which are not part of this discussion. (Emphases added)

As Dr. F. illustrates, even the most progressive provid- ers may not move entirely beyond essentialist under- standings of gender.

The progressive medical professionals I inter- viewed acknowledged that their medical peers pres- sure parents to consent to medical intervention, particularly surgery, and to police gender. Describing one case, Dr. F. explained: “Surgeons want to do a surgery to repair the hypospadias and make the child look more typically male now, and the mother is con- cerned that if she does that, . . . the child may some- how later in life reject that, or may want to change to

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a female sex of rearing, and [will] have gone through all this surgery unnecessarily. So the mother is dis- inclined to do any surgery, and the surgeon is trying to hint her into the direction of doing surgery.” Dr. E. also described parents’ being pressured by medi- cal professionals, in this case to police gender perfor- mance: “I think parents are really pressured . . . from doctors. Yeah, because part of the outcome was that [intersex children are] supposed to adopt that gender role. I was talking today about a [person] whose mother wouldn’t let her wear tomboy clothes, wouldn’t let her join the girls’ softball team ’cause these were activities of men.”

Dr. E. expressed real concern for intersex children. As a parent herself, she also understood the desire of parents to raise “normal” children, especially be- cause some medical professionals rely on gender con- formity to confirm that the sex assignment (to which the parents consented) was made “correctly.” She did her best to help parents understand that gendered behaviors do not necessarily correlate with sexual- ity: “When I talk with parents, for whom this is an issue . . . it’s a somewhat easier issue now, because twenty or thirty years ago, the beliefs about what gender roles/stereotypes were, were a lot stricter than they are now; most parents now don’t have trouble with their girls’ or daughters’ being athletes . . . but I really try to normalize that for them. There are lots of feminine, heterosexual adult women who were tom- boys when they were little girls; this is not an omi- nous sign.” Although Dr. E. framed the queer lifestyle as less desirable than the heterosexual lifestyle, she did so as a political strategy, not a value judgment. As a lesbian medical professional, she understood the heterosexism involved in the treatment of inter- sex children: “I think homophobia is always under this. Absolutely, in the medical community . . . and for a lot of parents there’s a big anxiety . . . they don’t know [whom] they’re supposed to marry or have sex with. . . . That feels rough on some parts of me.” She objected to homophobic views but chose to bite her tongue in order to advocate for children expressing their gender as they see fit. Because society gener- ally does not view children as sexual beings, this ap- proach made the most sense to her.

Although Dr. E., Dr. F., and Dr. H. are open- minded medical professionals, they are pessimis- tic about the possibility of change. Dr. F. believed that moving beyond binaries was “almost a dream of utopia, to think about our society even getting to that point,” because “urologists would have less work [and therefore less income], so there would probably be some . . . you know. . . .” Many urolo- gists who are experts on intersex surgically modify a child’s genitalia regardless of medical necessity, if in their judgment the modification means the child will be able to fit gendered expectations more com- fortably, such as the expectation that men should be able to urinate comfortably while standing. Dr. G. shared: “Some of the babies are born where the base of the penis is really where they’re urinating from. If the baby is going to be raised as a girl, that’s an okay place. But if they’re gonna be raised as a boy, then it may be that they’re really needing to create the urethra tube and have the urine come out of the penis’s tip. [But] some of the surgeries that are done on older children, you really get terrible outcomes.” Dr. F. was critical of such surgical intervention based solely on social norms: “Why do [men] have to be able to urinate standing up? What’s wrong with sit- ting down? Women sit down to urinate, so why can’t a boy sit down to urinate? There’s nothing physically wrong with sitting down to urinate.”

Professionals like Dr. E., Dr. F., and Dr. H. are rare in the medical world of intersexuality. They disagree with the norms held by their peers because they have been influenced by feminist scholarship and under- stand the social construction of gender. However, although almost all of the providers I interviewed had been exposed to feminist scholarship, most had not been influenced by it. In fact, one medical profes- sional went so far as to joke that “feminist scholar- ship is great for a rage-filled feminist agenda . . . in medical practice, not so much.”

c o n c l u s i o n

The medical profession is a powerful institution in the gender structure, which makes the medical manage- ment of intersex traits a unique access point for the

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study of diagnostic processes, specifically the process of naming. In 2006, DSD was formally introduced by the medical profession. By 2010, it had come to replace intersex language in virtually all corners of medicine.25 Today, in the United States, medical experts on inter- sex traits rarely use intersex language.26 Why did they so quickly abandon intersex language in favor of DSD ter- minology? We might assume that the 2006 consensus statement had something to do with it, because it both introduced the new nomenclature and was produced by an influential consortium of experts on intersex from around the world. Yet even as the statement’s recom- mendations for nomenclature and medical manage- ment teams have been implemented successfully, other recommendations, such as avoiding medically unneces- sary surgical interventions, have been far less successful, making the statement itself an inadequate explanation.

In this chapter, I have argued that when DSD was introduced, medical authority and jurisdiction over in- tersex traits were in jeopardy, as a consequence of both the John Money debacle and criticism from intersex activists and feminist scholars. Intersex, in short, was being framed as a social rather than a medical prob- lem, which in turn was fracturing the institutional level of gender structure as reinforced by the medical profession. DSD terminology offered a unique oppor- tunity for medical professionals, now working in sup- posedly well-intentioned medical teams, to reassert their authority, reclaim their jurisdiction over inter- sexuality, and reaffirm the gender structure.

DSD nomenclature reifies the essentialist un- derstandings of sex, gender, and sexuality held, as I’ve shown here, by many medical experts on inter- sex traits. It does so by constructing sex as a binar y phenomenon explained by science, which in turn increases the credibility of the medical profession. At a crucial moment of potential transformation, the DSD framework enabled medical experts to bring intersexuality back into the domain of science and place it neatly on medical turf, where surger y, among other treatments, could be justified against its activist and feminist critics. Although some pro- viders today seem to be more careful about genital surgeries, at least in writing, acknowledging, for ex- ample, that “one should [proceed] cautiously before

considering irreversible surger y,” there is still “no agreement regarding the criteria for early or late genital surger y, particularly vaginoplasty,” suggest- ing that surger y itself continues to hold sway (Lee and Houk 2013, 4–6). Medical professionals, par- ticularly surgeons, appear to have reclaimed their authority over the intersex body and, in the process, their capacity to perpetuate ideologies which main- tain that sex, gender, and sexuality are essentialist, binar y, and correlated characteristics. However, a handful of the medical professionals I inter viewed were critical of these narrow ideas about sex, gender, and sexuality held by their peers, which is potentially promising for the medical management of intersex traits and, more generally, the instability of the institutional level of gender structure. Surely, the medical management of intersexuality would be ver y different today if challenges to essential- ist ideas about sex, gender, and sexuality were the norm rather than the exception. [ . . . ]

The medical management of intersex traits clearly demonstrates that diagnoses are defined through other social constructions. In the case of intersex, the dominant construction has been the biomedical paradigm with its essentialist—and deeply problematic—understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality as binar y and correlated characteris- tics. Expanding DSD teams to include, at the ver y least, a gender expert taken seriously by other team members would likely lead to different recommen- dations to parents of intersex children, especially pertaining to surgical inter vention. Changing medical policy and practice will be a long-term endeavor, as the progressive medical professionals suggested, but this is one concrete step in that di- rection. The medical profession may perceive it as yet another challenge to their authority and, ulti- mately, their jurisdiction over intersexuality. Yet if these teams continue to ignore the gender structure and its pernicious consequences, the medical man- agement of intersexuality will remain exclusively on medical turf, and intersex people will continue to face surgical inter vention, gender policing, and unnecessarily stigmatized lives.

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Betsy Lucal, What It Means to be Gendered Me: Life on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous Gender System Gender & Society, Volume13, issue 6, pages 781-797, December 1, 1999. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications, Inc.

I understood the concept of “doing gender” (West and Zimmerman 1987) long before I became a sociolo- gist. I have been living with the consequences of inap- propriate “gender display” (Goffman 1976; West and Zimmerman 1987) for as long as I can remember.

My daily experiences are a testament to the rigid- ity of gender in our society, to the real implications of “two and only two” when it comes to sex and gender categories (Garfinkel 1967; Kessler and McKenna 1978). Each day, I experience the consequences that our gender system has for my identity and interac- tions. I am a woman who has been called “Sir” so many times that I no longer even hesitate to assume that it is being directed at me. I am a woman whose use of public rest rooms regularly causes reactions ranging from confused stares to confrontations over what a man is doing in the women’s room. I regularly enact a variety of practices either to minimize the need for others to know my gender or to deal with their misattributions.

I am the embodiment of Lorber’s (1994) osten- sibly paradoxical assertion that the “gender bend- ing” I engage in actually might serve to preserve and perpetuate gender categories. As a feminist who sees gender rebellion as a significant part of her contribu- tion to the dismantling of sexism, I find this possibil- ity disheartening.

In this article, I examine how my experiences both support and contradict Lorber’s (1994) argu- ment using my own experiences to illustrate and reflect on the social construction of gender. My anal- ysis offers a discussion of the consequences of gender for people who do not follow the rules as well as an

examination of the possible implications of the exis- tence of people like me for the gender system itself. Ultimately, I show how life on the boundaries of gender affects me and how my life, and the lives of others who make similar decisions about their par- ticipation in the gender system, has the potential to subvert gender.

Because this article analyzes my experiences as a woman who often is mistaken for a man, my focus is on the social construction of gender for women. My assumption is that, given the gendered nature of the gendering process itself, men’s experiences of this phenomenon might well be different from women’s.

t h e s o c i a l c o n s t r u c t i o n o f g e n d e r

[ . . . ] We apply gender labels for a variety of reasons; for example, an individual’s gender cues our interac- tions with her or him. Successful social relations re- quire all participants to present, monitor, and interpret gender displays (Martin 1998; West and Zimmerman 1987). We have, according to Lorber, “no social place for a person who is neither woman nor man” (1994, 96); that is, we do not know how to interact with such a person. There is, for example, no way of addressing such a person that does not rely on making an assumption about the person’s gender (“Sir” or “Ma’am”). In this context, gender is “omnirelevant” (West and Zimmer- man 1987). Also, given the sometimes fractious nature of interactions between men and women, it might be particularly important for women to know the gender of the strangers they encounter, do the women need to be wary, or can they relax (Devor 1989)?

Life on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous Gender System

B E T S Y L U C A L

8. WHAT IT MEANS TO BE GENDERED ME

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According to Kessler and McKenna (1978), each time we encounter a new person, we make a gender at- tribution. In most cases, this is not difficult. We learn how to read people’s genders by learning which traits culturally signify each gender and by learning rules that enable us to classify individuals with a wide range of gender presentations into two and only two gender categories. As Weston observed, “Gendered traits are called attributes for a reason: People attribute traits to others. No one possesses them. Traits are the product of evaluation” (1996, 21). The fact that most people use the same traits and rules in presenting genders makes it easier for us to attribute genders to them.

We also assume that we can place each individual into one of two mutually exclusive categories in this binary system. As Bem (1993) notes, we have a po- larized view of gender; there are two groups that are seen as polar opposites. Although there is “no rule for deciding ‘male’ or ‘female’ that will always work” and no attributes “that always and without exception are true of only one gender” (Kessler and McKenna 1978, 158), we operate under the assumption that there are such rules and attributes.[ . . . ]

Not only do we rely on our social skills in attrib- uting genders to others, but we also use our skills to present our own genders to them. The roots of this understanding of how gender operates lie in Goff- man’s (1959) analysis of the “presentation of self in everyday life,” elaborated later in his work on “gender display” (Goffman 1976). From this perspective, gender is a performance, “a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 1990, 140, emphasis removed). Gender display refers to “conventionalized portrayals” of social correlates of gender (Goffman 1976). These displays are culturally established sets of behaviors, appearances, mannerisms, and other cues that we have learned to associate with members of a particu- lar gender. [ . . . ]

A person who fails to establish a gendered appear- ance that corresponds to the person’s gender faces challenges to her or his identity and status. First, the gender nonconformist must find a way in which to construct an identity in a society that denies her or him any legitimacy (Bem 1993). A person is likely to want to define herself or himself as “normal” in the face of cultural evidence to the contrary. Second,

the individual also must deal with other people’s challenges to identity and status—deciding how to respond, what such reactions to their appearance mean, and so forth.

Because our appearances, mannerisms, and so forth constantly are being read as part of our gender display, we do gender whether we intend to or not. For example, a woman athlete, particularly one participat- ing in a nonfeminine sport such as basketball, might deliberately keep her hair long to show that, despite actions that suggest otherwise, she is a “real” (i.e., feminine) woman. But we also do gender in less con- scious ways such as when a man takes up more space when sitting than a woman does. In fact, in a society so clearly organized around gender, as ours is, there is no way in which to not do gender (Lorber 1994).

Given our cultural rules for identifying gender (i.e., that there are only two and that masculinity is assumed in the absence of evidence to the contrary), a person who does not do gender appropriately is placed not into a third category but rather into the one with which her or his gender display seems most closely to fit; that is, if a man appears to be a woman, then he will be categorized as “woman,” not as something else. Even if a person does not want to do gender or would like to do a gender other than the two recognized by our society, other people will, in effect, do gender for that person by placing her or him in one and only one of the two available categories. We cannot escape doing gender or, more specifically, doing one of two genders. (There are exceptions in limited contexts such as people doing “drag” [Butler 1990; Lorber 1994].)

People who follow the norms of gender can take their genders for granted. Kessler and McKenna as- serted, “Few people besides transsexuals think of their gender as anything other than ‘naturally’ obvi- ous”; they believe that the risks of not being taken for the gender intended “are minimal for nontrans- sexuals” (1978, 126). However, such an assertion overlooks the experiences of people such as those women Devor (1989) calls “gender blenders” and those people Lorber (1994) refers to as “gender bend- ers.” As West and Zimmerman (1987) pointed out, we all are held accountable for, and might be called on to account for, our genders.

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People who, for whatever reasons, do not adhere to the rules, risk gender misattribution and any in- teractional consequences that might result from this misidentification. What are the consequences of misattribution for social interaction? When must misattribution be minimized? What will one do to minimize such mistakes? In this article, I explore these and related questions using my biography.

For me, the social processes and structures of gender mean that, in the context of our culture, my appearance will be read as masculine. Given the common conflation of sex and gender, I will be as- sumed to be a male. Because of the two-and-only-two genders rule, I will be classified, perhaps more often than not, as a man—not as an atypical woman, not as a genderless person. I must be one gender or the other; I cannot be neither, nor can I be both. This norm has a variety of mundane and serious con- sequences for my everyday existence. Like Myhre (1995), I have found that the choice not to partici- pate in femininity is not one made frivolously.

My experiences as a woman who does not do fem- ininity illustrate a paradox of our two-and-only-two gender system. Lorber argued that “bending gender rules and passing between genders does not erode but rather preserves gender boundaries” (1994, 21). Although people who engage in these behaviors and appearances do “demonstrate the social construct- edness of sex, sexuality, and gender” (Lorber 1994, 96), they do not actually disrupt gender. Devor made a similar point: “When gender blending females re- fused to mark themselves by publicly displaying suf- ficient femininity to be recognized as women, they were in no way challenging patriarchal gender as- sumptions” (1989, 142). As the following discussion shows, I have found that my own experiences both support and challenge this argument. [ . . . ]

g e n d e r e d m e

Each day, I negotiate the boundaries of gender. Each day, I face the possibility that someone will attribute the “wrong” gender to me based on my physical appearance.

I am six feet tall and large-boned. I have had short hair for most of my life. For the past several years, I

have worn a crew cut or flat top. I do not shave or otherwise remove hair from my body (e.g., no eye- brow plucking). I do not wear dresses, skirts, high heels, or makeup. My only jewelry is a class ring, a “men’s” watch (my wrists are too large for a “wom- en’s” watch), two small earrings (gold hoops, both in my left ear), and (occasionally) a necklace. I wear jeans or shorts, T-shirts, sweaters, polo/golf shirts, button-down collar shirts, and tennis shoes or boots. The jeans are “women’s” (I do have hips) but do not look particularly “feminine.” The rest of the outer garments are from men’s departments. I prefer baggy clothes, so the fact that I have “womanly” breasts often is not obvious (I do not wear a bra). Sometimes, I wear a baseball cap or some other type of hat. I also am white and relatively young (30 years old).1

My gender display—what others interpret as my presented identity—regularly leads to the misattribu- tion of my gender. An incongruity exists between my gender self-identity and the gender that others per- ceive. In my encounters with people I do not know, I sometimes conclude, based on our interactions, that they think I am a man. This does not mean that other people do not think I am a man, just that I have no way of knowing what they think without interacting with them.

l i v i n g w i t h i t

I have no illusions or delusions about my appearance. I know that my appearance is likely to be read as “mas- culine” (and male) and that how I see myself is so- cially irrelevant. Given our two-and-only-two gender structure, I must live with the consequences of my ap- pearance. These consequences fall into two categories: issues of identity and issues of interaction.

My most common experience is being called “Sir” or being referred to by some other masculine linguis- tic marker (e.g., “he,” “man”). This has happened for years for as long as I can remember, when having en- counters with people I do not know.2 Once, in fact, the same worker at a fast-food restaurant called me “Ma’am” when she took my order and “Sir” when she gave it to me.

Using my credit cards sometimes is a challenge. Some clerks subtly indicate their disbelief, looking from the card to me and back at the card and checking

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my signature carefully. Others challenge my use of the card, asking whose it is or demanding identifi- cation. One cashier asked to see my driver’s license and then asked me whether I was the son of the card- holder. Another clerk told me that my signature on the receipt “had better match” the one on the card. Presumably, this was her way of letting me know that she was not convinced it was my credit card.

My identity as a woman also is called into ques- tion when I try to use women-only spaces. Encoun- ters in public rest rooms are an adventure. I have been told countless times that “This is the ladies’ room.” Other women say nothing to me, but their stares and conversations with others let me know what they think. I will hear them say, for example, “There was a man in there.” I also get stares when I enter a locker room. However, it seems that women are less con- cerned about my presence there, perhaps because, given that it is a space for changing clothes, shower- ing, and so forth, they will be able to make sure that I am really a woman. Dressing rooms in department stores also are problematic spaces. I remember shop- ping with my sister once and being offered a chair outside the room when I began to accompany her into the dressing room.

Women who believe that I am a man do not want me in women-only spaces. For example, one woman would not enter the rest room until I came out, and others have told me that I am in the wrong place. They also might not want to encounter me while they are alone. For example, seeing me walking at night when they are alone might be scary.3

I, on the other hand, am not afraid to walk alone, day or night. I do not worry that I will be subjected to the public harassment that many women endure (Gardner 1995). I am not a clear target for a poten- tial rapist. I rely on the fact that a potential attacker would not want to attack a big man by mistake. This is not to say that men never are attacked, just that they are not viewed, and often do not view them- selves, as being vulnerable to attack.

Being perceived as a man has made me priv y to male–male interactional styles of which most women are not aware. I found out, quite by acci- dent, that many men greet, or acknowledge, people (mostly other men) who make eye contact with

them with a single nod. For example, I found that when I walked down the halls of my brother’s all- male dormitor y making eye contact, men nodded their greetings at me. Oddly enough, these same men did not greet my brother; I had to tell him about making eye contact and nodding as a greeting ritual. Apparently, in this case I was doing mascu- linity better than he was!

I also believe that I am treated differently, for ex- ample, in auto parts stores (staffed almost exclusively by men in most cases) because of the assumption that I am a man. Workers there assume that I know what I need and that my questions are legitimate requests for information. I suspect that I am treated more fairly than a feminine-appearing woman would be. I have not been able to test this proposition. However, Devor’s participants did report “being treated more respectfully” (1989, 132) in such situations.

There is, however, a negative side to being as- sumed to be a man by other men. Once, a friend and I were driving in her car when a man failed to stop at an intersection and nearly crashed into us. As we drove away, I mouthed “stop sign” to him. When we both stopped our cars at the next intersec- tion, he got out of his car and came up to the pas- senger side of the car, where I was sitting. He yelled obscenities at us and pounded and spit on the car window. Luckily, the windows were closed. I do not think he would have done that if he thought I was a woman. This was the first time I realized that one of the implications of being seen as a man was that I might be called on to defend myself from physical aggression from other men who felt challenged by me. This was a sobering and somewhat frightening thought.

Recently, I was verbally accosted by an older man who did not like where I had parked my car. As I walked down the street to work, he shouted that I should park at the university rather than on a side street nearby. I responded that it was a public street and that I could park there if I chose. He continued to yell, but the only thing I caught was the last part of what he said: “Your tires are going to get cut!” Based on my appearance that day—I was dressed casually and carrying a back- pack, and I had my hat on backward—I believe he thought that I was a young male student rather than a

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female professor. I do not think he would have yelled at a person he thought to be a woman—and perhaps especially not a woman professor.

Given the presumption of heterosexuality that is part of our system of gender, my interactions with women who assume that I am a man also can be viewed from that perspective. For example, once my brother and I were shopping when we were “hit on” by two young women. The encounter ended before I realized what had happened. It was only when we walked away that I told him that I was pretty certain that they had thought both of us were men. A more common experience is realizing that when I am seen in public with one of my women friends, we are likely to be read as a heterosexual dyad. It is likely that if I were to walk through a shopping mall holding hands with a woman, no one would look twice, not because of their open-mindedness toward lesbian couples but rather because of their assumption that I was the male half of a straight couple. Recently, when walk- ing through a mall with a friend and her infant, my observations of others’ responses to us led me to believe that many of them assumed that we were a family on an outing, that is, that I was her partner and the father of the child.

d e a l i n g w i t h i t

Although I now accept that being mistaken for a man will be a part of my life so long as I choose not to participate in femininity, there have been times when I consciously have tried to appear more feminine. I did this for a while when I was an undergraduate and again recently when I was on the academic job market. The first time, I let my hair grow nearly down to my shoul- ders and had it permed. I also grew long fingernails and wore nail polish. Much to my chagrin, even then one of my professors, who did not know my name, insistently referred to me in his kinship examples as “the son.” Perhaps my first act on the way to my cur- rent stance was to point out to this man, politely and after class, that I was a woman.

More recently, I again let my hair grow out for several months, although I did not alter other aspects of my appearance. Once my hair was about two and a half inches long (from its original quarter inch), I realized, based on my encounters with strangers, that

I had more or less passed back into the category of “woman.” Then, when I returned to wearing a flat top, people again responded to me as if I were a man.

Because of my appearance, much of my negotia- tion of interactions with strangers involves attempts to anticipate their reactions to me. I need to assess whether they will be likely to assume that I am a man and whether that actually matters in the context of our encounters. Many times, my gender really is ir- relevant, and it is just annoying to be misidentified. Other times, particularly when my appearance is coupled with something that identifies me by name (e.g., a check or credit card) without a photo, I might need to do something to ensure that my identity is not questioned. As a result of my experiences, I have developed some techniques to deal with gender misattribution.

In general, in unfamiliar public places, I avoid using the rest room because I know that it is a place where there is a high likelihood of misattribution and where misattribution is socially important. If I must use a public rest room, I try to make myself look as nonthreatening as possible. I do not wear a hat, and I try to rearrange my clothing to make my breasts more obvious. Here, I am trying to use my secondary sex characteristics to make my gender more obvious rather than the usual use of gender to make sex obvi- ous. While in the rest room, I never make eye contact, and I get in and out as quickly as possible. Going in with a woman friend also is helpful; her presence le- gitimizes my own. People are less likely to think I am entering a space where I do not belong when I am with someone who looks like she does belong.4

To those women who verbally challenge my pres- ence in the rest room, I reply, “I know,” usually in an annoyed tone. When they stare or talk about me to the women they are with, I simply get out as quickly as possible. In general, I do not wait for someone I am with because there is too much chance of an unpleas- ant encounter.

I stopped trying on clothes before purchasing them a few years ago because my presence in the changing areas was met with stares and whispers. Exceptions are stores where the dressing rooms are completely private, where there are individual stalls rather than a room with stalls separated by curtains,

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or where business is slow and no one else is trying on clothes. If I am trying on a garment clearly intended for a woman, then I usually can do so without hassle. I guess the attendants assume that I must be a woman if I have, for example, a women’s bathing suit in my hand. But usually, I think it is easier for me to try the clothes on at home and return them, if necessary, rather than risk creating a scene. Similarly, when I am with another woman who is trying on clothes, I just wait outside.

My strategy with credit cards and checks is to anticipate wariness on a clerk’s part. When I sense that there is some doubt or when they challenge me, I say, “It’s my card.” I generally respond courteously to requests for photo ID, realizing that these might be routine checks because of concerns about increas- ingly widespread fraud. But for the clerk who asked for ID and still did not think it was my card, I had a stronger reaction. When she said that she was sorry for embarrassing me, I told her that I was not embar- rassed but that she should be. I also am particularly careful to make sure that my signature is consistent with the back of the card. Faced with such situations, I feel somewhat nervous about signing my name— which, of course, makes me worry that my signature will look different from how it should.

Another strategy I have been experimenting with is wearing nail polish in the dark bright colors cur- rently fashionable. I try to do this when I travel by plane. Given more stringent travel regulations, one always must present a photo ID. But my experiences have shown that my driver’s license is not necessarily convincing. Nail polish might be. I also flash my pol- ished nails when I enter airport rest rooms, hoping that they will provide a clue that I am indeed in the right place.

There are other cases in which the issues are less those of identity than of all the norms of interaction that, in our society, are gendered. My most common response to misattribution actually is to appear to ignore it, that is, to go on with the interaction as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Unless I feel that there is a good reason to establish my cor- rect gender, I assume the identity others impose on me for the sake of smooth interaction. For example, if someone is selling me a movie ticket, then there

is no reason to make sure that the person has accu- rately discerned my gender. Similarly, if it is clear that the person using “Sir” is talking to me, then I simply respond as appropriate. I accept the designation be- cause it is irrelevant to the situation. It takes enough effort to be alert for misattributions and to decide which of them matter; responding to each one would take more energy than it is worth.

Sometimes, if our interaction involves conver- sation, my first verbal response is enough to let the other person know that I am actually a woman and not a man. My voice apparently is “feminine” enough to shift people’s attributions to the other category. I know when this has happened by the apologies that usually accompany the mistake. I usually respond to the apologies by saying something like “No problem” and/or “It happens all the time.” Sometimes, a misat- tributor will offer an account for the mistake, for ex- ample, saying that it was my hair or that they were not being very observant.

These experiences with gender and misattribu- tion provide some theoretical insights into contem- porary Western understandings of gender and into the social structure of gender in contemporary soci- ety. Although there are a number of ways in which my experiences confirm the work of others, there also are some ways in which my experiences suggest other interpretations and conclusions.

w h at d o e s i t m e a n ?

Gender is pervasive in our society. I cannot choose not to participate in it. Even if I try not to do gender, other people will do it for me. That is, given our two-and- only-two rule, they must attribute one of two genders to me. Still, although I cannot choose not to participate in gender, I can choose not to participate in femininity (as I have), at least with respect to physical appearance.

That is where the problems begin. Without the decorations of femininity, I do not look like a woman. That is, I do not look like what many peo- ple’s commonsense understanding of gender tells them a woman looks like. How I see myself, even how I might wish others would see me, is socially ir- relevant. It is the gender that I appear to be (my “per- ceived gender”) that is most relevant to my social

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identity and interactions with others. The major consequence of this fact is that I must be continually aware of which gender I “give off ” as well as which gender I “give” (Goffman 1959).

Because my gender self-identity is “not displayed obviously, immediately, and consistently” (Devor 1989, 58), I am somewhat of a failure in social terms with respect to gender. Causing people to be uncer- tain or wrong about one’s gender is a violation of taken-for-granted rules that leads to embarrassment and discomfort; it means that something has gone wrong with the interaction (Garfinkel 1967; Kessler and McKenna 1978). This means that my nonre- sponse to misattribution is the more socially appro- priate response; I am allowing others to maintain face (Goffman 1959, 1967). By not calling attention to their mistakes, I uphold their images of themselves as competent social actors. I also maintain my own image as competent by letting them assume that I am the gender I appear to them to be.

But I still have discreditable status; I carry a stigma (Goffman 1963). Because I have failed to participate appropriately in the creation of meaning with respect to gender (Devor 1989), I can be called on to account for my appearance. If discredited, I show myself to be an incompetent social actor. I am the one not follow- ing the rules, and I will pay the price for not provid- ing people with the appropriate cues for placing me in the gender category to which I really belong.

I do think that it is, in many cases, safer to be read as a man than as some sort of deviant woman. “Man” is an acceptable category; it fits properly into people’s gender worldview. Passing as a man often is the “path of least resistance” (Devor 1989; Johnson 1997). For example, in situations where gender does not matter, letting people take me as a man is easier than correcting them.

Conversely, as Butler noted, “We regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right” (1990, 140). Feinberg maintained, “Masculine girls and women face terrible condemnation and brutality—including sexual violence—for crossing the boundary of what is ‘acceptable’ female expression” (1996, 114). People are more likely to harass me when they perceive me to be a woman who looks like a man. For example, when a group of teenagers realized that I was not a

man because one of their mothers identified me cor- rectly, they began to make derogatory comments when I passed them. One asked, for example, “Does she have a penis?”

Because of the assumption that a “masculine” woman is a lesbian, there is the risk of homophobic reactions (Gardner 1995; Lucal 1997). Perhaps surpris- ingly, I find that I am much more likely to be taken for a man than for a lesbian, at least based on my interac- tions with people and their reactions to me. This might be because people are less likely to reveal that they have taken me for a lesbian because it is less relevant to an encounter or because they believe this would be unacceptable. But I think it is more likely a product of the strength of our two-and-only-two system. I give enough masculine cues that I am seen not as a devi- ant woman but rather as a man, at least in most cases. The problem seems not to be that people are uncertain about my gender, which might lead them to conclude that I was a lesbian once they realized I was a woman. Rather, I seem to fit easily into a gender category—just not the one with which I identify.

In fact, because men represent the dominant gender in our society, being mistaken for a man can protect me from other types of gendered harassment. Because men can move around in public spaces safely (at least relative to women), a “masculine” woman also can enjoy this freedom (Devor 1989).

On the other hand, my use of particular spaces— those designated as for women only—may be chal- lenged. Feinberg provided an intriguing analysis of the public restroom experience. She characterized women’s reactions to a masculine person in a public restroom as “an example of genderphobia” (1996, 117), viewing such women as policing gender bound- aries rather than believing that there really is a man in the women’s restroom. She argued that women who truly believed that there was a man in their midst would react differently. Although this is an in- teresting perspective on her experiences, my experi- ences do not lead to the same conclusion.5 Enough people have said to me that “This is the ladies’ room” or have said to their companions that “There was a man in there” that I take their reactions at face value.

Still, if the two-and-only-two gender system is to be maintained, participants must be involved in

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policing the categories and their attendant identities and spaces. Even if policing boundaries is not explic- itly intended, boundary maintenance is the effect of such responses to people’s gender displays.

Boundaries and margins are an important com- ponent of both my experiences of gender and our theoretical understanding of gendering processes. I am, in effect, both woman and not-woman. As a woman who often is a social man but who also is a woman living in a patriarchal society, I am in a unique position to see and act. I sometimes receive privileges usually limited to men, and I sometimes am oppressed by my status as a deviant woman. I am, in a sense, an outsider-within (Collins 1991). Posi- tioned on the boundaries of gender categories, I have developed a consciousness that I hope will prove transformative (Anzaldúa 1987).

In fact, one of the reasons why I decided to con- tinue my nonparticipation in femininity was that my sociological training suggested that this could be one of my contributions to the eventual dismantling of patriarchal gender constructs. It would be my way of making the personal political. I accepted being taken for a man as the price I would pay to help subvert patriarchy. I believed that all of the inconveniences I was enduring meant that I actually was doing some- thing to bring down the gender structures that en- tangled all of us.

Then, I read Lorber’s (1994) Paradoxes of Gender and found out, much to my dismay, that I might not actually be challenging gender after all. Because of the way in which doing gender works in our two- and-only-two system, gender displays are simply read as evidence of one of the two categories. Therefore, gender bending, blending, and passing between the categories do not question the categories themselves. If one’s social gender and personal (true) gender do not correspond, then this is irrelevant unless some- one notices the lack of congruence.

This reality brings me to a paradox of my experi- ences. First, not only do others assume that I am one gender or the other, but I also insist that I really am a member of one of the two gender categories. That is, I am female; I self-identify as a woman. I do not claim to be some other gender or to have no gender at all. I simply place myself in the wrong category according

to stereotypes and cultural standards; the gender I present, or that some people perceive me to be pre- senting, is inconsistent with the gender with which I identify myself as well as with the gender I could be “proven” to be. Socially, I display the wrong gender; personally, I identify as the proper gender.

Second, although I ultimately would like to see the destruction of our current gender structure, I am not to the point of personally abandoning gender. Right now, I do not want people to see me as genderless as much as I want them to see me as a woman. That is, I would like to expand the cate- gory of “woman” to include people like me. I, too, am deeply embedded in our gender system, even though I do not play by many of its rules. For me, as for most people in our society, gender is a substantial part of my personal identity (Howard and Hollander 1997). Socially, the problem is that I do not present a gender display that is consistently read as feminine. In fact, I consciously do not participate in the trap- pings of femininity. However, I do identify myself as a woman, not as a man or as someone outside of the two-and-only-two categories.

Yet, I do believe, as Lorber (1994) does, that the purpose of gender, as it currently is constructed, is to oppress women. Lorber analyzed gender as a “pro- cess of creating distinguishable social statuses for the assignment of rights and responsibilities” that ends up putting women in a devalued and oppressed posi- tion (1994, 32). As Martin put it, “Bodies that clearly delineate gender status facilitate the maintenance of the gender hierarchy” (1998, 495).

For society, gender means difference (Lorber 1994). The erosion of the boundaries would problem- atize that structure. Therefore, for gender to operate as it currently does, the category “woman” cannot be expanded to include people like me. The maintenance of the gender structure is dependent on the creation of a few categories that are mutually exclusive, the members of which are as different as possible (Lorber 1994). It is the clarity of the boundaries between the categories that allows gender to be used to assign rights and responsibilities as well as resources and rewards.

It is that part of gender—what it is used for—that is most problematic. Indeed, is it not patriarchal—or, even more specifically, heteropatriarchal— constructions of

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gender that are actually the problem? It is not the dif- ferences between men and women, or the categories themselves, so much as the meanings ascribed to the categories and, even more important, the hierarchi- cal nature of gender under patriarchy that is the prob- lem (Johnson 1997). Therefore, I am rebelling not against my femaleness or even my womanhood; in- stead, I am protesting contemporary constructions of femininity and, at least indirectly, masculinity under patriarchy. We do not, in fact, know what gender would look like if it were not constructed around het- erosexuality in the context of patriarchy.

Although it is possible that the end of patriarchy would mean the end of gender, it is at least conceiv- able that something like what we now call gender could exist in a postpatriarchal future. The two-and- only-two categorization might well disappear, there being no hierarchy for it to justify. But I do not think

that we should make the assumption that gender and patriarchy are synonymous. . . .

. . . In a recent book, The Gender Knot, Johnson (1997) argued that when it comes to gender and patriarchy, most of us follow the paths of least re- sistance; we “go along to get along,” allowing our ac- tions to be shaped by the gender system. Collectively, our actions help patriarchy maintain and perpetuate a system of oppression and privilege. Thus, by with- drawing our support from this system by choosing paths of greater resistance, we can start to chip away at it. Many people participate in gender because they cannot imagine any alternatives. In my classroom, and in my interactions and encounters with strang- ers, my presence can make it difficult for people not to see that there are other paths. In other words, fol- lowing from West and Zimmerman (1987), I can sub- vert gender by doing it differently. [ . . . ]

N O T E S

1 I obviously have left much out by not examining my gendered experiences in the context of race, age, class, sexuality, region, and so forth. Such a project clearly is more complex. As Weston pointed out, gender presentations are complicated by other statuses of their presenters: “What it takes to kick a person over into another gendered category can differ with race, class, religion, and time” (1996:168). Furthermore, I am well aware that my whiteness allows me to assume that my experiences are simply a product of gender. For now, suffice it to say that it is my privi- leged position on some of these axes and my more disadvantaged position on others that com- bine to delineate my overall experience.

2 In fact, such experiences are not always limited to encounters with strangers. My grandmother, who does not see me often, twice has mistaken me for either my brother-in-law or some un- known man.

3 My experiences in rest rooms and other public spaces might be very different if I were, say, Af- rican American rather than white. Given the stereotypes of African American men, I think that white women would react very differently to encountering me.

4 I also have noticed that there are certain types of rest rooms in which I will not be verbally chal- lenged; the higher the social status of the place, the less likely I will be harassed. For example, when I go to the theater, I might get stared at, but my presence never has been challenged.

5 An anonymous reviewer offered one possible explanation for this. Women see women’s rest rooms as their space; they feel safe, and even empowered, there. Instead of fearing men in such space, they might instead pose a threat to any man who might intrude. Their invulnerability in this situation is, of course, not physically based but rather socially constructed. I thank the reviewer for this suggestion.

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R E F E R E N C E S

Anzaldúa, G. 1987. Borderlands/La frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Bem, S. L. 1993. The lenses of gender. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Butler, J. 1990. Gender trouble. New York: Routledge. Collins, P. H. 1991. Black feminist thought. New York: Routledge. Devor, H. 1989. Gender blending: Confronting the limits of duality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Feinberg, L. 1996. Transgender warriors. Boston: Beacon. Gardner, C. B. 1995. Passing by: Gender and public harassment. Berkeley: University of California. Garfinkel, H. 1967. Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Goffman, E. 1959. The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Goffman, E. 1963. Stigma. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Goffman, E. 1967. Interaction ritual. New York: Anchor/Doubleday. Goffman, E. 1976. Gender display. Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 3:69–77. Howard, J. A., and J. Hollander. 1997. Gendered situations, gendered selves. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kessler, S. J., and W. McKenna. 1978. Gender: An ethnomethodological approach. New York: John Wiley. Johnson, A. G. 1997. The gender knot: Unraveling our patriarchal legacy. Philadelphia: Temple Univer-

sity Press. Lorber, J. 1996. Beyond the binaries: Depolarizing the categories of sex, sexuality, and gender. Socio-

logical Inquiry 66:143–59. Lucal, B. 1997. “Hey, this is the ladies’ room!”: Gender misattribution and public harassment. Per-

spectives on Social Problems 9:43–57. Martin, K. A. 1998. Becoming a gendered body: Practices of preschools. American Sociological Review

63:494–511. Myhre, J. R. M. 1995. One bad hair day too many, or the hairstory of an androgynous young feminist.

In Listen up: Voices from the next feminist generation, edited by B. Findlen. Seattle, WA: Seal Press. West, C., and D. H. Zimmerman. 1987. Doing gender. Gender & Society 1:125–51. Weston, K. 1996. Render me, gender me. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Yearning for Lightness: Transnational Circuits in the Marketing and Consumption of Skin Lighteners. Gender & Society, Volume 22, issue: 3, pages 281-302, June 1, 2008. Reprinted by Permission of SAGE Publications, Inc.

With the breakdown of traditional racial catego-ries in many areas of the world, colorism, by which I mean the preference for and privileging of lighter skin and discrimination against those with darker skin, remains a persisting frontier of intergroup and intragroup relations in the twenty-first century. Sociologists and anthropologists have documented discrimination against darker-skinned persons and correlations between skin tone and socioeconomic status and achievement in Brazil and the United States (Hunter 2005; Sheriff 2001; Telles 2004). Other re- searchers have revealed that people’s judgments about other people are literally colored by skin tone, so that darker-skinned individuals are viewed as less intel- ligent, trustworthy, and attractive than their lighter- skinned counterparts (Herring, Keith, and Horton 2003; Hunter 2005; Maddox 2004).

One way of conceptualizing skin color, then, is as a form of symbolic capital that affects, if not de- termines, one’s life chances. The relation between skin color and judgments about attractiveness affect women most acutely, since women’s worth is judged heavily on the basis of appearance. For example, men who have wealth, education, and other forms of human capital are considered “good catches,” while women who are physically attractive may be consid- ered desirable despite the lack of other capital. Al- though skin tone is usually seen as a form of fixed or unchangeable capital, in fact, men and women may attempt to acquire light-skinned privilege. Some- times this search takes the form of seeking light- skinned marital partners to raise one’s status and to

achieve intergenerational mobility by increasing the likelihood of having light-skinned children. Often, especially for women, this search takes the form of using cosmetics or other treatments to change the ap- pearance of one’s skin to make it look lighter.

This article focuses on the practice of skin light- ening, the marketing of skin lighteners in various societies around the world, and the multinational corporations that are involved in the global skin- lightening trade. An analysis of this complex topic calls for a multilevel approach. First, we need to place the production, marketing, and consumption of skin lighteners into a global political–economic context. I ask, How is skin lightening interwoven into the world economic system and its transnational circuits of products, capital, culture, and people? Second, we need to examine the mediating entities and processes by which skin lighteners reach specific national/ ethnic/racial/class consumers. I ask, What are the media and messages, cultural themes and symbols, used to create the desire for skin-lightening products among particular groups? Finally, we need to exam- ine the meaning and significance of skin color for consumers of skin lighteners. I ask, How do consum- ers learn about, test, and compare skin-lightening products, and what do they seek to achieve through their use?

The issue of skin lightening may seem trivial at first glance. However, it is my contention that a close examination of the global circuits of skin lightening provides a unique lens through which to view the workings of the Western-dominated global system as

Transnational Circuits in the Marketing and Consumption of Skin Lighteners

E V E LY N N A K A N O G L E N N

9. YEARNING FOR LIGHTNESS

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it simultaneously promulgates a “white is right” ide- ology while also promoting the desire for and con- sumption of Western culture and products.

s k i n l i g h t e n i n g a n d g l o b a l c a p i ta l

Skin lightening has long been practiced in many parts of the world. Women concocted their own treatments or purchased products from self-styled beauty experts offering special creams, soaps, or lotions, which were either ineffective sham products or else effective but containing highly toxic materials such as mercury or lead. From the perspective of the supposedly enlight- ened present, skin lightening might be viewed as a form of vanity or a misguided and dangerous relic of the past.

However, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the search for light skin, free of imperfec- tions such as freckles and age spots, has actually accelerated, and the market for skin-lightening prod- ucts has mushroomed in all parts of the world. The production and marketing of products that offer the prospect of lighter, brighter, whiter skin has become a multi-billion-dollar global industry. Skin lighten- ing has been incorporated into transnational flows of capital, goods, people, and culture. It is implicated in both the formal global economy and various infor- mal economies. It is integrated into both legal and extralegal transnational circuits of goods. Certain large multinational corporations have become major players, spending vast sums on research and devel- opment and on advertising and marketing to reach both mass and specialized markets. Simultaneously, actors in informal or underground economies, in- cluding smugglers, transnational migrants, and petty traders, are finding unprecedented opportunities in producing, transporting, and selling unregulated lightening products.

One reason for this complex multifaceted struc- ture is that the market for skin lighteners, although global in scope, is also highly decentralized and seg- mented along socioeconomic, age, national, ethnic, racial, and cultural lines. Whether the manufactur- ers are multi-billion-dollar corporations or small entrepreneurs, they make separate product lines and use distinct marketing strategies to reach specific

segments of consumers. Ethnic companies and en- trepreneurs may be best positioned to draw on local cultural themes, but large multinationals can draw on local experts to tailor advertising images and mes- sages to appeal to particular audiences.

The Internet has become a major tool/highway/ engine for the globalized, segmented, lightening market. It is the site where all of the players in the global lightening market meet. Large multinationals, small local firms, individual entrepreneurs, skin doc- tors, direct sales merchants, and even eBay sellers use the Internet to disseminate the ideal of light skin and to advertise and sell their products. Consumers go on the Internet to do research on products and shop. Some also participate in Internet message boards and forums to seek advice and to discuss, debate, and rate skin lighteners. There are many such forums, often as part of transnational ethnic Web sites. For example, IndiaParenting.com and sukh-dukh.com, designed for South Asians in India and other parts of the world, have chat rooms on skin care and lightening, and Rexinteractive.com, a Filipino site, and Candy- mag.com, a site sponsored by a magazine for Filipina teens, have extensive forums on skin lightening. The discussions on these forums provide a window through which to view the meaning of skin color to consumers, their desires and anxieties, doubts and aspirations. The Internet is thus an important site from which one can gain a multilevel perspective on skin lightening.

c o n s u m e r g r o u p s a n d m a r k e t n i c h e s

a f r i c a a n d a f r i c a n d i a s p o r a

In Southern Africa, colorism is just one of the negative inheritances of European colonialism. The ideology of white supremacy that European colonists brought included the association of Blackness with primitive- ness, lack of civilization, unrestrained sexuality, pol- lution, and dirt. The association of Blackness with dirt can be seen in a 1930 French advertising poster for Dirtoff. The poster shows a drawing of a dark Af- rican man washing his hands, which have become white, as he declares, “Le Savon Dirtoff me blanchit!” The soap was designed not for use by Africans but, as the poster notes, pour mechaniciens automobilises et

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menagers—French auto mechanics and housewives. Such images showing Black people “dramatically losing their pigmentation as a result of the cleansing process,” were common in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century soap advertisements, according to art historian Jean Michel Massing (1995, 180).

Some historians and anthropologists have argued that precolonial African conceptions of female beauty favored women with light brown, yellow, or reddish tints. If so, the racial hierarchies established in areas colonized by Europeans cemented and generalized the privilege attached to light skin (Burke 1996; Ribane 2006, 12). In both South Africa and Rhodesia/Zim- babwe, an intermediate category of those considered to be racially mixed was classified as “coloured” and subjected to fewer legislative restrictions than those classified as “native.” Assignment to the coloured cat- egory was based on ill-defined criteria, and on arrival in urban areas, people found themselves classified as native or coloured on the basis of skin tone and other phenotypic characteristics. Indians arriving in Rhode- sia from Goa, for example, were variously classified as “Portuguese Mulatto” or coloured. The multiplication of discriminatory laws targeting natives led to a grow- ing number of Blacks claiming to be coloured in both societies (Muzondidya 2005, 23–24).

The use of skin lighteners has a long history in Southern Africa, which is described by Lynn Thomas and which I will not recount here (2009). Rather, I will discuss the current picture, which shows both a rise in the consumption of skin-lightening prod- ucts and concerted efforts to curtail the trade of such products. Despite bans on the importation of skin lighteners, the widespread use of these products cur- rently constitutes a serious health issue in Southern Africa because the products often contain mercury, corticosteroids, or high doses of hydroquinone. Mer- cury of course is highly toxic, and sustained exposure can lead to neurological damage and kidney disease. Hydroquinone (originally an industrial chemical) is effective in suppressing melanin production, but ex- posure to the sun—hard to avoid in Africa— damages skin that has been treated. Furthermore, in dark- skinned people, long-term hydroquinone use can lead to ochronosis, a disfiguring condition involving gray and blue-black discoloration of the skin (Mahe,

Ly, and Dangou 2003). The overuse of topical steroids can lead to contact eczema, bacterial and fungal in- fection, Cushing’s syndrome, and skin atrophy (Mar- gulies n.d.; Ntambwe 2004).

Perhaps the most disturbing fact is that mercury soaps used by Africans are manufactured in the Eu- ropean Union (EU), with Ireland and Italy leading in the production of mercury soap. One company that has been the target of activists is Killarney En- terprises, Ltd., in County Wicklow, Ireland. Formerly known as W&E Products and located in Lancashire, England, the company was forced to close following out-of-court settlements of suits filed by two former employers who had given birth to stillborn or severely malformed infants due to exposure to mercury. How- ever, W&E Products then secured a 750,000-pound grant from the Irish Industrial Development Author- ity to relocate to Ireland, where it changed its name to Killarney Enterprises, Ltd. The company remained in business until April 17, 2007, producing soaps under the popular names Tura, Arut, Swan, Sukisa Bango, Meriko, and Jeraboo (which contained up to 3 percent mercuric iodide). Distribution of mercury soap has been illegal in the EU since 1989, but its manufacture has remained legal as long as the product is exported (Chadwick 2001; Earth Summit 2002, 13–14). These soaps are labeled for use as antiseptics and to prevent body odor; however, they are understood to be and are used as skin bleaches. To complete the circuit, EU- manufactured mercury soaps are smuggled back into the EU to sell in shops catering to African immigrant communities. An Irish journalist noted that the very same brands made by Killarney Enterprises, includ- ing Meriko and Tura (banned in both the EU and South Africa) could easily be found in African shops in Dublin (De Faoite 2001; O’Farrell 2002).

As a result of the serious health effects, medical researchers have conducted interview studies to de- termine how prevalent the practice of skin lightening is among African women. They estimate that 25 per- cent of women in Bamaki, Mali; 35 percent in Preto- ria, South Africa; and 52 percent in Dakar, Senegal, use skin lighteners, as do an astonishing 77 percent of women traders in Lagos, Nigeria (Adebajo 2002; del Guidice and Yves 2002; Mahe, Ly, and Dangou 2003; Malangu and Ogubanjo 2006).

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There have been local and transnational cam- paigns to stop the manufacture of products contain- ing mercury in the EU and efforts to inform African consumers of the dangers of their use and to foster the idea of Black pride. Governments in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and Kenya have banned the import and sale of mercury and hydroquinone prod- ucts, but they continue to be smuggled in from other African nations (Dooley 2001; Thomas 2004).

Despite these efforts, the use of skin lighteners has been increasing among modernized and cos- mopolitan African women. A South African news- paper reported that whereas in the 1970s, typical skin lightener users in South Africa were rural and poor, currently, it is upwardly mobile Black women, those with technical diplomas or university degrees and well-paid jobs, who are driving the market in skin lighteners. A recent study by Mictert Marketing Research found that 1 in 13 upwardly mobile Black women aged 25 to 35 used skin lighteners. It is pos- sible that this is an underestimation, since there is some shame attached to admitting to using skin lighteners (Ntshingila 2005).

These upwardly mobile women turn to expen- sive imported products from India and Europe rather than cheaper, locally made products. They also go to doctors to get prescriptions for imported lighten- ers containing corticosteroids, which are intended for short-term use to treat blemishes. They continue using them for long periods beyond the prescribed duration, thus risking damage (Ntshingila 2005). This recent rise in the use of skin lighteners cannot be seen as simply a legacy of colonialism but rather is a consequence of the penetration of multinational capital and Western consumer culture. The practice therefore is likely to continue to increase as the influ- ence of these forces grows.

a f r i c a n a m e r i c a

Color consciousness in the African American commu- nity has generally been viewed as a legacy of slavery, under which mulattos, the offspring of white men and slave women, were accorded better treatment than “pure” Africans. While slave owners considered dark- skinned Africans suited to fieldwork, lighter-skinned mulattos were thought to be more intelligent and

better suited for indoor work as servants and artisans. Mulattos were also more likely to receive at least ru- dimentary education and to be manumitted. They went on to form the nucleus of many nineteenth- century free Black communities. After the civil war, light-skinned mulattos tried to distance themselves from their darker-skinned brothers and sisters, form- ing exclusive civic and cultural organizations, frater- nities, sororities, schools, and universities (Russell, Wilson, and Hall 1992, 24–40). According to Audrey Elisa Kerr, common folklore in the African American community holds that elite African Americans used a “paper bag” test to screen guests at social events and to determine eligibility for membership in their organiza- tions: anyone whose skin was darker than the color of the bag was excluded. Although perhaps apocryphal, the widespread acceptance of the story as historical fact is significant. It has been credible to African Americans because it was consonant with their observations of the skin tone of elite African American society (Kerr 2005).

The preference and desire for light skin can also be detected in the longtime practice of skin lightening. References to African American women using pow- ders and skin bleaches appeared in the Black press as early as the 1850s, according to historian Kathy Peiss. She notes that American Magazine criticized Af- rican Americans who tried to emulate white beauty standards: “Beautiful black and brown faces by ap- plication of rouge and lily white are made to assume unnatural tints, like the vivid hue of painted corpses” (Peiss 1998, 41). How common such practices were is unknown. However, by the 1880s and 1890s, deal- ers in skin bleaches were widely advertising their wares in the African American press. A Crane and Company ad in the Colored American Magazine (1903) promised that use of the company’s “wonderful Face Bleach” would result in a “peach-like complexion” and “turn the skin of a black or brown person five or six shades lighter and of a mulatto person perfectly white” (Peiss 1998, 41, 42).

Throughout the twentieth century, many African American leaders spoke out against skin bleaching, as well as hair straightening, and the African Ameri- can press published articles decrying these practices. However, such articles were far outnumbered by ad- vertisements for skin bleaches in prominent outlets

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such as the Crusader, Negro World, and the Chicago Defender. An estimated 30 to 40 percent of advertise- ments in these outlets were for cosmetics and toilet- ries including skin bleaches. Many of the advertised lighteners were produced by white manufacturers; for example, Black and White Cream was made by Plough Chemicals (which later became Plough- Shearing), and Nadolina was made by the National Toilet Company. A chemical analysis of Nadolina Bleach conducted in 1930 found it contained 10 percent ammoniated mercury, a concentration high enough to pose a serious health risk. Both brands are still marketed in African American outlets, although with changed ingredients (Peiss 1998, :210, 212).1

The manufacture and marketing of Black beauty products, including skin lighteners, provided op- portunities for Black entrepreneurs. Annie Turnbo Malone, who founded the Poro brand, and Sara Breed- love, later known as Madam C. J. Walker, who formu- lated and marketed the Wonder Hair Grower, were two of the most successful Black entrepreneurs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Malone and Walker championed African American causes and were benefactors of various institutions (Peiss 1998, :67–70; see also Bundles 2001). Significantly, both refused to sell skin bleaches or to describe their hair care products as hair straighteners. After Walker died in 1919, her successor, F. B. Ransom, introduced Tan-Off, which became one of the company’s best sellers in the 1920s and 1930s. Other Black-owned companies, such as Kashmir (which produced Nile Queen), Poro, Overton, and Dr. Palmer, advertised and sold skin lighteners. Unlike some white-produced products, they did not contain mercury but relied on such ingredients as borax and hydrogen peroxide (Peiss 1998, 205, 212, 213).

Currently, a plethora of brands is marketed es- pecially to African Americans, including Black and White Cream, Nadolina (sans mercury), Ambi, Palm- er’s, DR Daggett and Remsdell (fade cream and facial brightening cream), Swiss Whitening Pills, Ultra Glow, Skin Success, Avre (which produces the Pallid Skin Lightening System and B-Lite Fade Cream), and Clear Essence (which targets women of color more generally). Some of these products contain hydroqui- none, while others claim to use natural ingredients.

Discussions of skin lightening on African Ameri- can Internet forums indicate that the participants seek not white skin but “light” skin like that of Af- rican American celebrities such as film actress Halle Berry and singer Beyonce Knowles. Most women say they want to be two or three shades lighter or to get rid of dark spots and freckles to even out their skin tones, something that many skin lighteners claim to do. Some of the writers believe that Halle Berry and other African American celebrities have achieved their luminescent appearance through skin bleach- ing, skillful use of cosmetics, and artful lighting. Thus, some skin-lightening products, such as the Pallid Skin Lightening System, purport to offer the “secret” of the stars. A Web site for Swiss Lighten- ing Pills claims that “for many years Hollywood has been keeping the secret of whitening pills” and asks, rhetorically, “Have you wondered why early child- hood photos of many top celebs show a much darker skin colour than they have now?”2

i n d i a a n d i n d i a n d i a s p o r a

As in the case of Africa, the origins of colorism in India are obscure, and the issue of whether there was a privi- leging of light skin in precolonial Indian societies is far from settled. Colonial-era and postcolonial Indian writings on the issue may themselves have been influ- enced by European notions of caste, culture, and race. Many of these writings expound on a racial distinction between lighter-skinned Aryans, who migrated into India from the North and darker-skinned “indige- nous” Dravidians of the South. The wide range of skin color from North to South and the variation in skin tone within castes make it hard to correlate light skin with high caste. The most direct connection between skin color and social status could be found in the paler hue of those whose position and wealth enabled them to spend their lives sheltered indoors, compared to the darker hue of those who toiled outdoors in the sun (Khan 2008).

British racial concepts evolved over the course of its colonial history as colonial administrators and settlers attempted to make sense of the variety of cultural and language groups and to justify Brit- ish rule in India. British observers attributed group differences variously to culture, language, climate,

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or biological race. However, they viewed the English as representing the highest culture and embodying the optimum physical type; they made invidious comparisons between lighter-skinned groups, whose men they viewed as more intelligent and marital and whose women they considered more attractive, and darker-skinned groups, whose men they viewed as lacking intelligence and masculinity, and whose women they considered to be lacking in beauty (Arnold 2004).

Regardless of the origins of color consciousness in India, the preference for light skin seems almost universal today, and in terms of sheer numbers, India and Indian diasporic communities around the world constitute the largest market for skin lighteners. The major consumers of these products in South Asian communities are women between the ages of 16 and 35. On transnational South Asian blog sites, women describing themselves as “dark” or “wheatish” in color state a desire to be “fair.” Somewhat older women seek to reclaim their youthful skin color, describing themselves as having gotten darker over time. Younger women tend to be concerned about looking light to make a good marital match or to appear lighter for large family events, including their own weddings. These women recognize the reality that light skin constitutes valuable symbolic capital in the marriage market (Views on Article n.d.).

Contemporary notions of feminine beauty are shaped by the Indian mass media. Since the 1970s, beauty pageants such as Miss World–India have been exceedingly popular viewer spectacles; they are a source of nationalist pride since India has been highly successful in international pageants such as Miss World. As might be expected, the competitors, although varying in skin tone, tend to be lighter than average. The other main avatars of feminine allure are Bollywood actresses, such as Isha Koopikari and Aiswarya Rai, who also tend to be light skinned or, if slightly darker, green eyed (see http://www.indianin- dustry.com/herbalcosmetics/10275.htm).

Many Indian women use traditional homemade preparations made of plant and fruit products. On various blog sites for Indians both in South Asia and diasporic communities in North America, the Caribbean, and the United Kingdom, women seek

advice about “natural” preparations and trade reci- pes. Many commercial products are made by Indian companies and marketed to Indians around the globe under such names as “fairness cream,” “herbal bleach cream,” “whitening cream,” and “fairness cold cream.” Many of these products claim to be based on ayurvedic medicine and contain herbal and fruit ex- tracts such as saffron, papaya, almonds, and lentils (Runkle 2004).

With economic liberalization in 1991, the number of products available on the Indian market, including cosmetics and skin care products, has mushroomed. Whereas prior to 1991, Indian con- sumers had the choice of two brands of cold cream and moisturizers, today, they have scores of products from which to select. With deregulation of imports, the rise of the Indian economy, and growth of the urban middle class, multinational companies see India as a prime target for expansion, especially in the area of personal care products. The multination- als, through regional subsidiaries, have developed many whitening product lines in various price ranges that target markets ranging from rural villagers to white-collar urban dwellers and affluent profession- als and managers (Runkle 2005).

s o u t h e a s t a s i a : t h e p h i l i p p i n e s

Because of its history as a colonial dependency first of Spain and then of the United States, the Philip- pines has been particularly affected by Western ide- ology and culture, both of which valorize whiteness. Moreover, frequent intermarriage among indigenous populations, Spanish colonists, and Chinese settlers has resulted in a substantially mestizo population that ranges widely on the skin color spectrum. The business and political elites have tended to be dispro- portionately light skinned with visible Hispanic and/ or Chinese appearance. In the contemporary period, economic integration has led to the collapse of tra- ditional means of livelihood, resulting in large-scale emigration by both working-class and middle-class Filipinos to seek better-paying jobs in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and North America. An estimated 10 mil- lion Filipinos were working abroad as of 2004, with more than a million departing each year. Because of the demand for domestic workers, nannies, and care

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workers in the global North, women make up more than half of those working abroad (Tabbada 2006). Many, if not most, of these migrants remit money and send Western consumer goods to their families in the Philippines. They also maintain transnational ties with their families at home and across the diaspora through print media, phone, and the Internet. All of these factors contribute to an interest in and fascina- tion with Western consumer culture, including fashion and cosmetics in the Philippines and in Filipino dia- sporic communities (Parrenas 2001).

Perhaps not surprising, interest in skin lighten- ing seems to be huge and growing in the Philippines, especially among younger urban women. Synovate, a market research firm, reported that in 2004, 50 per- cent of respondents in the Philippines reported cur- rently using skin lightener (Synovate 2004). Young Filipinas participate in several Internet sites seeking advice on lightening products. They seek not only to lighten their skin overall but also to deal with dark underarms, elbows, and knees. Judging by their en- tries in Internet discussion sites, many teens are quite obsessed with finding “the secret” to lighter skin and have purchased and tried scores of different brands of creams and pills. They are disappointed to find that these products may have some temporary ef- fects but do not lead to permanent change. They dis- cuss products made in the Philippines but are most interested in products made by large European and American multinational cosmetic firms and Japanese and Korean companies. Clearly, these young Filipi- nas associate light skin with modernity and social mobility. Interesting to note, the young Filipinas do not refer to Americans or Europeans as having the most desirable skin color. They are more apt to look to Japanese and Koreans or to Spanish- or Chinese- appearing (and light-skinned) Filipina celebrities, such as Michelle Reis, Sharon Kuneta, or Claudine Baretto, as their ideals.3

The notion that Japanese and Korean women rep- resent ideal Asian beauty has fostered a brisk market in skin lighteners that are formulated by Korean and Japanese companies. Asian White Skin and its sister company Yumei Misei, headquartered in Korea, sell Japanese and Korean skin care products in the Phil- ippines both in retail outlets and online. Products

include Asianwhiteskin Underarm Whitening Kit, Japanese Whitening Cream Enzyme Q-10, Japan Whitening Fruit Cream, Kang Tian Sheep Placenta Whitening Capsules, and Kyusoku Bhaku Lightening Pills (see http://yumeimise.com/store/index).

e a s t a s i a : j a pa n , c h i n a , a n d k o r e a

East Asian societies have historically idealized light or even white skin for women. Intage (2001), a market research firm in Japan, puts it, “Japan has long idol- ized ivory-like skin that is ‘like a boiled egg’—soft, white and smooth on the surface.” Indeed, prior to the Meiji Period (starting in the 1860s), men and women of the higher classes wore white-lead powder makeup (along with blackened teeth and shaved eye- brows). With modernization, according to Mikiko Ashikari, men completely abandoned makeup, but middle- and upper-class women continued to wear traditional white-lead powder when dressed in formal kimonos for ceremonial occasions, such as marriages, and adopted light-colored modern face powder to wear with Western clothes. Ashikari finds through observations of 777 women at several sites in Osaka during 1996–1997 that 97.4 percent of women in public wore what she calls “white face,” that is, makeup that “makes their faces look whiter than they really are” (2003, 3).

Intage (2001) reports that skin care products, moisturizers, face masks, and skin lighteners account for 66 percent of the cosmetics market in Japan. A perusal of displays of Japanese cosmetics and skin care products shows that most, even those not ex- plicitly stated to be whitening products, carry names that contain the word “white,” for example, facial masks labeled “Clear Turn White” or “Pure White.” In addition, numerous products are marketed specifi- cally as whiteners. All of the leading Japanese firms in the cosmetics field, Shiseido, Kosa, Kanebo, and Pola, offer multiproduct skin-whitening lines, with names such as “White Lucent” and “Whitissimo.” Fytokem, a Canadian company that produces ingre- dients used in skin-whitening products, reports that Japan’s market in skin lighteners topped $5 billion in 1999 (Saskatchewan Business Unlimited 2005). With deregulation of imports, leading multinational firms, such as L’Oreal, have also made large inroads

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in the Japanese market. French products have a spe- cial cachet (Exhibitor Info 2006).

While the Japanese market has been the largest, its growth rate is much lower than those of Korea and China. Korea’s cosmetic market has been grow- ing at a 10 percent rate per year while that of China has been growing by 20 percent. Fytokem estimates that the market for skin whiteners in China was worth $1 billion in 2002 and was projected to grow tremendously. A 2007 Nielsen global sur vey found that 46 percent of Chinese, 47 percent of people in Hong Kong, 46 percent of Taiwanese, 29 percent of Koreans, and 24 percent of Japanese had used a skin lightener in the past year. As to regular users, 30 percent of Chinese, 20 percent of Taiwanese, 18 per- cent of Japanese and Hong Kongers, and 8 percent of Koreans used them weekly or daily. However, if money were no object, 52 percent of Koreans said they would spend more on skin lightening, com- pared to 26 percent of Chinese, 23 percent of Hong Kongers and Taiwanese, and 21 percent of Japanese (Nielsen 2007).

l at i n a m e r i c a : m e x i c o a n d t h e m e x i c a n d i a s p o r a

Throughout Latin America, skin tone is a major marker of status and a form of symbolic capital, despite national ideologies of racial democracy. In some countries, such as Brazil, where there was Af- rican chattel slavery and extensive miscegenation, there is considerable color consciousness along with an elaborate vocabulary to refer to varying shades of skin. In other countries, such as Mexico, the main intermixture was between Spanish colonists and in- digenous peoples, along with an unacknowledged admixture with African slaves. Mestizaje is the of- ficial national ideal. The Mexican concept of mes- tizaje meant that through racial and ethnic mixture, Mexico would gradually be peopled by a whiter “cosmic race” that surpassed its initial ingredients. Nonetheless, skin tone, along with other pheno- typical traits, is a significant marker of social status, with lightness signifying purity and beauty and dark- ness signifying contamination and ugliness (Stepan 1991:135). The elite has remained overwhelmingly light skinned and European appearing while rural

poor are predominantly dark skinned and Indig- enous appearing.

Ethnographic studies of Mexican communities in Mexico City and Michoacan found residents to be highly color conscious, with darker-skinned family members likely to be ridiculed or teased. The first question that a relative often poses about a new- born is about his or her color (Farr 2006:chap. 5; Guttman 1996:40; Martinez 2001). Thus, it should not be a surprise that individuals pursue various strategies to attain light-skinned identity and privi- leges. Migration from rural areas to the city or to the United States has been one route to transforma- tion from an Indian to a mestizo identity or from a mestizo to a more cosmopolitan urban identity; an- other strategy has been lightening one’s family line through marriage with a lighter-skinned partner. A third strategy has been to use lighteners to change the appearance of one’s skin (Winders, Jones, and Higgins 2005, 77–78).

In one of the few references to skin whiten- ing in Mexico, Alan Knight claims that it was “an ancient practice  .  .  . reinforced by film, television, and advertising stereotypes” (1990, 100). As in Africa, consumers seeking low-cost lighteners can easily purchase mercur y-laden creams that are still manufactured and used in parts of Latin America (e.g., Recetas de la Farmacia–Crema Blanqueadora, manufactured in the Dominican Republic, contains 6000 ppm of mercur y) (NYC Health Dept. 2005). The use of these products has come to public atten- tion because of their use by Latino immigrants in the United States. Outbreaks of mercur y poison- ing have been reported in Texas, New Mexico, Ari- zona, and California among immigrants who used Mexican-manufactured creams such as Crema de Belleza–Manning. The cream is manufactured in Mexico by Laboratories Vide Natural SA de CV., Tampico, Tamaulipas, and is distributed primarily in Mexico. However, it has been found for sale in shops and flea markets in the United States in areas located along the US–Mexican border in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. The label lists the ingredient calomel, which is mercurous chlo- ride (a salt of mercur y). Product samples have been found to contain 6 to 10 percent mercur y by weight

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(Centers for Disease Control 1996; US Food and Drug Administration 1996).

For high-end products, hydroquinone is the chemical of choice. White Secret is one of the most visible products since it is advertised in a 30-minute, late-night television infomercial that is broadcast nationally almost nightly.4 Jamie Winders and col- leagues (2005), who analyze the commercial, note that the commercial continually stresses that White Secret is “una formula Americana.” According to Winders, Jones, and Higgins, the American pedigree and English- language name endow White Secret with a cosmopolitan cachet and “a first worldliness.” The infomercial follows the daily lives of several young urban women, one of whom narrates and explains how White Secret cream forms a barrier against the darkening rays of the sun while a sister product transforms the color of the skin itself. The infomer- cial conjures the power of science, showing cross sections of skin cells. By showing women applying White Secret in modern, well-lit bathrooms, relaxing in well-appointed apartments, and protected from damaging effects of the sun while walking around the city, the program connects skin lightening with cleanliness, modernity, and mobility (Winders, Jones, and Higgins 2005, 80–84).

Large multinational firms are expanding the mar- keting of skin care products, including skin lighten- ers, in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. For example, Stiefel Laboratories, the world’s largest pri- vately held pharmaceutical company, which special- izes in dermatology products, targets Latin America for skin-lightening products. Six of its 28 wholly owned subsidiaries are located in Latin America. It offers Clariderm, an over-the-counter hydroquinone cream and gel (2 percent), in Brazil, as well as Clasifel, a prescription-strength hydroquinone cream (4 per- cent), in Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, and other Latin American countries. It also sells Claripel, a 4 percent hydroquinone cream, in the United States.5

m i d d l e - a g e d a n d o l d e r w h i t e w o m e n i n   n o r t h a m e r i c a a n d e u r o p e

Historically, at least in the United States, the vast majority of skin lightener users have been so-called white women. Throughout the nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries, European American women, es- pecially those of Southern and Eastern European origins, sought to achieve whiter and brighter skin through use of the many whitening powders and bleaches on the market. In 1930, J. Walter Thomson conducted a survey and found 232 brands of skin lighteners and bleaches for sale. Advertisements for these products appealed to the association of white skin with gentility, social mobility, Anglo-Saxon su- periority, and youth. In large cities, such as New York and Chicago, some Jewish women used skin lighten- ers and hair straighteners produced by Black com- panies and frequented Black beauty parlors (Peiss 1998:85, 149, 224).

By the mid-1920s, tanning became acceptable for white women, and in the 1930s and 1940s, it became a craze. A year-round tan came to symbolize high social status since it indicated that a person could afford to travel and spend time at tropical resorts and beaches. In addition, there was a fad for “exotic” Mediterranean and Latin types, with cosmetics de- signed to enhance “olive” complexions and brunette hair (Peiss 1998, 148–49, 150–51).

However, in the 1980s, as the damaging effects of overexposure to sun rays became known, skin light- ening among whites reemerged as a major growth market. Part of this growth was fueled by the aging baby boom generation determined to stave off signs of aging. Many sought not only toned bodies and up- lifted faces but also youthful skin—that is, smooth, unblemished, glowing skin without telltale age spots. Age spots are a form of hyperpigmentation that re- sults from exposure to the sun over many years. The treatment is the same as that for overall dark skin: hydroquinone, along with skin peeling, exfoliants, and sunscreen.6

m u lt i n at i o n a l c o s m e t i c a n d p h a r m a c e u t i c a l f i r m s a n d t h e i r ta r g e t i n g s t r at e g i e s

Although there are many small local manufactur- ers and merchants involved in the skin-lightening game, I want to focus on the giant multinationals, which are fueling the desire for light skin through their advertisement and marketing strategies. The

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accounts of the skin-lightening markets have shown that the desire for lighter skin and the use of skin bleaches is accelerating in places where moderniza- tion and the influence of Western capitalism and culture are most prominent. Multinational biotech- nology, cosmetic, and pharmaceutical corporations have coalesced through mergers and acquisitions to create and market personal care products that blur the lines between cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. They have jumped into the field of skin lighteners and correctors, developing many product lines to advertise and sell in Europe, North America, South Asia, East and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East (Wong 2004).

Three of the largest corporations involved in developing the skin-lightening market are L’Oreal, Shiseido, and Unilever. The French-based L’Oreal, with €15.8 billion in sales in 2006, is the largest cosmetics company in the world. It consists of 21 major subsidiaries including Lancome; Vichy Laboratories; La Roche-Posay Laboratoire Phar- maceutique; Biotherm; Garnier; Giorgio Armani Perfumes; Maybelline, New York; Ralph Lauren Fragrances; Skinceuticals; Shu Uemura; Matrix; Redken; and SoftSheen Carlson. L’Oreal is also a 20 percent shareholder of Sanofi-Synthelabo, a major France-based pharmaceutical firm. Three L’Oreal subsidiaries produce the best-known skin-lightening lines marketed around the world (which are especially big in Asia): Lancome Blanc Expert with Melo-No Complex, LaRoche-Posay Mela-D White skin lightening daily lotion with a triple-action formula, and Vichy Biwhite, contain- ing procystein and vitamin C.

A second major player in the skin-lightening market is Shiseido, the largest and best-known Jap- anese cosmetics firm, with net sales of $5.7 billion. Shiseido cosmetics are marketed in 65 countries and regions, and it operates factories in Europe, the Americas, and other Asian countries. The Shiseido Group, including affiliates, employs approximately 25,200 people around the globe. Its two main luxury lightening lines are White Lucent (for whitening) and White Lucency (for spots/aging). Each product line consists of seven or eight components, which the consumer is supposed to use as part of a complicated

regimen involving applications of specific products several times a day.7

The third multinational corporation is Unilever, a diversified Anglo-Dutch company with an annual turnover of more than €40 billion and net profits of €5 billion in 2006 (Unilever 2006). It specializes in so-called fast-moving consumer goods in three areas: food (many familiar brands, including Hellman’s Mayonnaise and Lipton Tea), home care (laundry detergents, etc.), and personal care, including de- odorants, hair care, oral care, and skin care. Its most famous brand in the skin care line is Ponds, which sells cold creams in Europe and North America and whitening creams in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.

Through its Indian subsidiary, Hindustan Lever Limited, Unilever patented Fair & Lovely in 1971 following the patenting of niacinamide, a melanin suppressor, which is its main active ingredient. Test marketed in South India in 1975, it became available throughout India in 1978. Fair & Lovely has become the largest-selling skin cream in India, accounting for 80 percent of the fairness cream market. According to anthropologist Susan Runkle (2005), “Fair and Lovely has an estimated sixty million consumers throughout the Indian subcontinent and exports to thirty-four countries in Southeast and Central Asia as well as the Middle East.”

Fair & Lovely ads claim that “with regular daily use, you will be able to unveil your natural radiant fairness in just 6 weeks!” As with other successful brands, Fair & Lovely has periodically added new lines to appeal to special markets. In 2003, it in- troduced Fair & Lovely, Ayur vedic, which claims to be formulated according to a 4,500-year-old Indian medical system. In 2004, it introduced Fair & Lovely Oil-Control Gel and Fair & Lovely Anti-Marks. In 2004, Fair & Lovely also announced the “unveiling” of a premium line, Perfect Radiance, “a complete range of 12 premium skin care solutions” containing “international formulations from Unilever’s Global Skin Technolog y Center, combined with ingredients best suited for Indian skin types and climates.” Its ads say “Experience Perfect Radiance from Fair & Lovely. Unveil Perfect Skin.” Intended to compete with expensive European brands, Perfect Radiance

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is sold only in select stores in major cities, including Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Bangalore.8

Unilever is known for promoting its brands by being active and visible in the locales where they are marketed. In India, Ponds sponsors the Femina Miss India pageant, in which aspiring contestants are urged to “be as beautiful as you can be.” Judg- ing by photos of past winners, being as beautiful as you can be means being as light as you can be. In 2003, partly in response to criticism by the All India Democratic Women’s Association of “racist” advertisement of fairness products, Hindustani Lever launched the Fair & Lovely Foundation, whose mission is to “encourage economic empow- erment of women across India” through educa- tional and guidance programs, training courses, and scholarships.9

Unilever heavily promotes both Ponds and Fair & Lovely with television and print ads tailored to local cultures. In one commercial shown in India, a young, dark-skinned woman’s father laments that he has no son to provide for him and his daughter’s salary is not high enough. The suggestion is that she could neither get a better job nor marry because of her dark skin. The young woman then uses Fair & Lovely, becomes fairer, and lands a job as an airline hostess, making her father happy. A Malaysian tele- vision spot shows a college student who is dejected because she cannot get the attention of a classmate at the next desk. After using Pond’s lightening mois- turizer, she appears in class brightly lit and several shades lighter, and the boy says, “Why didn’t I notice her before?” (BBC 2003).

Such advertisements can be seen as not simply responding to a preexisting need but actually creat- ing a need by depicting having dark skin as a pain- ful and depressing experience. Before “unveiling” their fairness, dark-skinned women are shown as unhappy, suffering from low self-esteem, ignored by young men, and denigrated by their parents. By using Fair & Lovely or Ponds, a woman undergoes a trans- formation of not only her complexion but also her personality and her fate. In short, dark skin becomes

a burden and handicap that can be overcome only by using the product being advertised.

c o n c l u s i o n

The yearning for lightness evident in the widespread and growing use of skin bleaching around the globe can rightfully be seen as a legacy of colonialism, a manifestation of “false consciousness,” and the inter- nalization of “white is right” values by people of color, especially women. Thus, one often-proposed solution to the problem is reeducation that stresses the diversity of types of beauty and desirability and that valorizes darker skin shades, so that lightness/whiteness is dis- lodged as the dominant standard.

While such efforts are needed, focusing only on individual consciousness and motives distracts at- tention from the very powerful economic forces that help to create the yearning for lightness and that offer to fulfill the yearning at a steep price. The man- ufacturing, advertising, and selling of skin lighten- ing is no longer a marginal, underground economic activity. It has become a major growth market for giant multinational corporations with their sophis- ticated means of creating and manipulating needs.

The multinationals produce separate product lines that appeal to different target audiences. For some lines of products, the corporations harness the prestige of science by showing cross-sectional dia- grams of skin cells and by displaying images of doc- tors in white coats. Dark skin or dark spots become a disease for which skin lighteners offer a cure. For other lines, designed to appeal to those who respond to appeals to naturalness, corporations call up nature by emphasizing the use of plant extracts and by dis- playing images of light-skinned women against a background of blue skies and fields of flowers. Dark skin becomes a veil that hides one’s natural lumines- cence, which natural skin lighteners will uncover. For all products, dark skin is associated with pain, rejec- tion, and limited options; achieving light skin is seen as necessary to being youthful, attractive, modern, and affluent—in short, to being “all that you can be.”

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N O T E S

1 Under pressure from African American critics, Nadolina reduced the concentration to 6 percent in 1937 and 1.5 percent in 1941.

2 Discussions on Bright Skin Forum, Skin Lightening Board, are at http://excoboard.com/exco/forum. php?forumid=65288. Pallid Skin Lightening system information is at http://www. avreskincare.com/ skin/pallid/index.html. Advertisement for Swiss Whitening Pills is at http://www.skinbleaching.net.

3 Skin whitening forums are at http://www.candymag.com/teentalk/index.php/topic,131753.0 .html and http://www.rexinteractive.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=41.

4 Discussion of the ingredients in White Secret is found at http://www.vsantivirus.com/hoax- white-secret.htm.

5 I say that Stiefel targets Latin America because it markets other dermatology products, but not skin lighteners, in the competitive Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and European countries. Information about Stiefel products is at its corporate Web site, http://www.stiefel.com/why/ about.aspx (accessed May 1, 2007).

6 Many of the products used by older white and Asian women to deal with age spots are physician-prescribed pharmaceuticals, including prescription-strength hydroquinone formulas. See information on one widely used system, Obagi, at http://www.obagi.com/article/homepage. html (accessed December 13, 2006).

7 Shiseido Annual Report 2006, 34, was downloaded from http://www.shiseido.co.jp/e/annual/html/ index.htm. Data on European, American, and Japanese markets are at http://www. shiseido. co. jp/e/story/html/sto40200.htm. World employment figures are at http://www. shiseido.co.jp/e/ story/html/sto40200.htm. White Lucent information is at http://www.shiseido.co.jp/e/whitelu- cent_us/products/product5.htm. White Lucency information is at http://www.shiseido.co.jp/e/ whitelucency/ (all accessed May 6, 2007).

8 “Fair & Lovely Launches Oil-Control Fairness Gel” (Press Release, April 27, 2004) is found at http:// www.hll.com/mediacentre/release.asp?fl=2004/PR_HLL_042704.htm (accessed May 6, 2007). “Fair & Lovely Unveils Premium Range” (Press Release, May 25, 2004) is available at http://www. hll.com/mediacentre/release.asp?fl=2004/PR_HLL_052104_2.htm (accessed on May 6, 2007).

9 The Pond’s Femina Miss World site is http://feminamissindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/ 1375041.cms. The All India Democratic Women’s Association objects to skin lightening ad is at http://www.aidwa.org/content/issues_of_concern/women_and_media.php. Reference to Fair & Lovely campaign is at http://www.aidwa.org/content/issues_of_concern/women_and_media. php. “Fair & Lovely Launches Foundation to Promote Economic Empowerment of Women” (Press Release, March 11, 2003) is found at http://www.hll.com/mediacentre/release.asp?fl=2003/ PR_HLL_031103.htm (all accessed December 2, 2006).

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Heidi Safia Mirza, ‘A Second Skin’: Embodied intersectionality, transnationalism, and narratives of identity and belonging among Muslim Women in Britain.” Reprinted from Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 36, January-February 2013 Pages 5-15. Copyright 2013, with permission from Elsevier.

i n t r o d u c t i o n : m u s l i m w o m e n , m i g r at i o n a n d i s l a m o p h o b i a

In this article I explore how the intersection of race, gender, and religion is written on and experienced within the body. Drawing on the black feminist framework of “embodied intersectionality,” the paper examines the narratives of three professional transnational Muslim women of Turkish, Pakistani, and Indian heritage living and working in Britain. As an Indo-Caribbean woman of Muslim heritage also living and working in Britain, I am particularly interested in how the internal subjective world of transnational professional Muslim women is produced by and performed through the external affec- tive Islamophobic discourses that circulate in the West. I explore how Muslim women who are externally seen as embodying a “dangerous” or “oppressed” religious gen- dered identity subjectively “live out” what it means to be a “Muslim woman” when working and living in a trans- national context. I draw on three professional Muslim women’s narratives of “self” and survival to reveal multiple layers of power, both seen and unseen in the making of the female Muslim “self.” In particular I focus on her religious, racial, and ethnic identity as manifested through her subjective expressions of faith, home, and belonging. The women, who were of Pakistani, Indian, and Turkish heritage, are part of the transnational edu- cated mobile classes whose families have moved from South Asia and the Middle East to study and work in Europe—and as in these women’s cases, in transglobal industries such as universities and international NGOs.

Embodied Intersectionality, Transnationalism, and Narratives of Identity and Belonging among Muslim Women in Britain

H E I D I S A F I A M I R Z A

10. “A SECOND SKIN”

[ . . .] In this article I ask what the consequences are for

transnational professional Muslim women who are caught up in the Islamophobic space occupied by the postcolonial Muslim diaspora in Britain. Muslim women who migrate to the “West” are at the conflu- ence of many competing claims and counter claims in the ensuing discourse of terror and securitization produced by the global threat from Islamic extrem- ism. In the West’s ideological “war against terror” the “Muslim woman” has come to symbolise the “barbaric Muslim other” in our midst. This is artic- ulated through Muslim women being pathologised as voiceless victims of their “backward” communi- ties who are in need of “saving” by the enlightened “West” (Abu-Lughod, 2002; Zahedi, 2011). The vis- ibility of patriarchal community and group cultural practices such as forced marriage and honour crimes conveniently contribute to the Western “Oriental- ist” construction of the racialised “other’s” barbaric customs and cultures (Said 1985). Muslim women’s dress has become interchangeable with essentialist notions of ethnicity, traditionalism, and religion. In these constructions the veil is given a symbolic meaning far greater than its religious and social status. The Muslim women’s private reasons for wear- ing the headscarf (hijab) or niqab (full face veil) have become public property, a “weapon” used by many different competing interests, from male politicians in France to white feminists in Belgium to argue their

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cases for and against assimilation, multicultural- ism, secularism, and human rights (Coene & Long- man 2008; Killian, 2003; Scott, 2007). However as the Islamic feminist Haleh Afshar (2008) poignantly points out, a woman’s right to wear the veil should be a matter of choice whether it be a personal, religious, or political one.

As this study reveals the three transnational pro- fessional Muslim women were bound, not by terri- tory or nationality, but by embodied practices of contingent and reconfigured “Muslimness” such as the wearing or not of the hijab, going to the Mosque, eating halal food, and other acts of gendered resis- tance and accommodation. The notion of “embod- ied intersectionality” which I now turn to enables an understanding of how power comes to be written through and within the raced and sexed body. More- over it provides a theoretical framework illuminating Muslim women’s agency which, as the women’s nar- ratives reveal, continually challenges and transforms hegemonic discourses of race, gender, and religion.

“ e m b o d i e d i n t e r s e c t i o n a l i t y ” : a c o n c e p t u a l f r a m e w o r k f o r u n pa c k i n g r a c e , g e n d e r , a n d r e l i g i o n

It could be argued that transnational Muslim women coming to Britain from particular postcolonial histo- ries, ethnicities, cultures, and nation states, are each positioned within the dominant and intersecting mo- dalities of race, class and gender in very different ways. Thus in order to investigate how the intersectional dy- namics of race, gender, and religion shape their ethnic identity and sense of self it is important to develop a conceptual framework for analysis which looks at the situated ways racialised and gendered boundar- ies are produced and experientially “lived through” a faith based Muslim female subjectivity. As an analytic framework intersectionality provides a complex ontol- ogy of “really useful knowledge” which has been used to systemically reveal the everyday lives of black and postcolonial ethnicised women who are simultane- ously positioned in multiple structures of dominance and power as gendered, raced, classed, colonized, and sexualized others (Mirza, 2009a). Intersectionality, a term developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989, 1991)

rearticulated the scholarship of black feminists such as the Combahee River Collective, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, and Patricia Hill Collins, who were concerned with understanding the matrix of domination in which cultural patterns of oppression are not only interre- lated, but are bound together and influenced by the intersectional systems of society (Collins, 1990: 222).

[ . . .] Embodied intersectionality not only seeks to

theorise the complexities of race, gender, class, and other “positional” social divisions as lived reali- ties (i.e., how the women experience the world ho- listically as a “Muslim, middleclass, heterosexual woman”) but also interrogates how this experience is affectively mediated by the body and lived through Muslim female subjectivity (Mirza, 2009b). [ . . .]

The embodiment of power and disempower- ment written through and within the sexed, raced, and classed body is particularly important if we are to understand how religious identity is performed, experienced, and articulated through the women’s sense of self in the context of the all consuming he- gemonic racist and sexist discourses such as Western Islamophobia and patriarchal Islamic dominance. Thus for the Muslim women in this study, their dress, religious disposition (piety), cultural attachments— such as food, ethnic pride, speech, and style, show not only their ethnic identity (as performed) but how such embodied practices need to be understood as meaningful signs and expressions of a reflexive female Muslim agency. The Muslim female voices in the autobiographically articulated narrative inter- views reveal the ways in which regulatory discursive power and privilege are “performed” or exercised in the everyday material world of the socially con- structed “Muslim woman” in the “West.”

[ . . .]

m e t h o d o l o g y : m a p p i n g t h e i n t e r s e c t i o n a l n a r r at i v e s o f m u s l i m w o m e n

The aim of this paper is to explore the embodied in- tersection of race, gender, and religion and how the internal subjective world of transnational profes- sional Muslim women is performed by and produced

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through the external affective Islamophobic discourses that circulate in the West. The interviews with the three Muslim professional women whose narratives inform this analysis were undertaken in 2009 as part of the larger study for the cognitive testing for the ethnic- ity boost of the UK Longitudinal Household Survey, Understanding Society1 (Nandi & Platt, 2009). For this larger study in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 respondents to help inform the design of the main survey questions for the ethnicity strand of the survey. The 13 interviewees were both male and female, from various ethnic heritages, such as African Caribbean, Middle-Eastern, South Asian, and European and included the three Muslim women discussed here. The interviewees were in their 30s, edu- cated to at least Master’s level and were in professional occupations or studying for a higher degree.

The interviews were carried out by a team of four ethnically diverse female interviewers includ- ing myself.2 They were conducted in English and adhered to the University of Essex ethical codes of consent and confidentiality. The respondents were selected through the researchers’ networks and work place contacts in several universities located in cities in the south east of England. In a 60- to 90-minute face-to-face interview with a researcher, each in- terviewee was asked the same structured questions about their ethnic identity across several different dimensions traditionally associated with ethnic af- filiation. This included country of birth, parental country of birth, region of upbringing, language, re- ligion, and skin colour (Phinney 1992). However to probe the salience of these domains we also asked semi-structured questions interrogating deeper ex- pressions of ethnicity focusing on “group belong- ing” and “sense of self.” This included questions such as pride in one’s heritage, importance of ancestors, future wishes for their children, importance of food and language, as well as core values and principles with regard to faith and belief. [ . . .]

The narratives of the three Muslim women of Turkish, Pakistani, and Indian heritage were selected for this study as they raised interesting issues about the complexity of race, gender, religion, and transna- tional identity pertinent to a black feminist analysis of embodied intersectionality. The in-depth interviews

interrogating “group belonging” and “sense of self ” brought to the fore issues of religious identity, subjec- tivity, and the body for Muslim women. As a transna- tional postcolonial woman of colour I recognised the auto-biographical stories they told of border-crossing, journeys of the “self ” and their relationship to the wider Muslim female diaspora. I felt compelled to look deeper and unravel the “identity affects” emerg- ing within the women’s narratives. [ . . .]

t h e w o m e n : s h a r i n g n a r r at i v e s o f t r a n s n at i o n a l i s m a n d b e l o n g i n g

In this introduction to the women in the study, their names are anonymised, as are the places of work and any other identifiable details, such as local place names. All three women were highly educated pro- fessionals with strong cross-national affiliations and had either dual citizenship or permission to work in the UK. Yet they all expressed a strong sense of being rooted in their ethnic cultures and religious identity through attachments to place, which was expressed through language, dialect, food, memories, and family.

Mehrunissa is in her 30s and a lawyer from Bombay in India. She came to Britain in 2006, and works in a charitable organisation within a university in a major city in the south east of England. She is applying for British citizenship and lives with her husband who is also from India. She describes herself as “ . . . a for- eign lawyer from India.” But she loves living in the city because it is like Bombay “ . . . loads of people, fast.  .  .  . I love buildings, tall buildings, sky scrap- ers and people all around, I like the crowd and noise around.” She sees herself as a “Bombayite” which she says is “ . . . Like you’re from Essex but you’re in the UK.” For her, place and nation are very important to her sense of self which is simultaneously articulated, as she explains,

.  .  .  Bombay it’s very important because I was born and brought up and if I go somewhere then people would know—Oh you’re from Bombay—not from India  .  .  . that’s very important, your language, your dialect  .  .  . but in my mind I will always be Indian. There’s a saying that you can take away Indians from India but you can’t take away Indianness from an Indian!

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Fatima is a lecturer in a university in a major city in the south east of England. She is a Dutch citizen with the right to work in UK. She is in her mid 30s and sees herself as “very international” a “new Euro- pean.” She is the daughter of a migrant worker who came to live in the Netherlands thirty years ago, but never returned to Turkey. She was born in Turkey in a rural mountain region, but from 7 she grew up in a town in the north east of the Netherlands. She went to school and attended a university in Istanbul from age 13. She came back to finish her degree and then worked in the Netherlands. Her husband is also Turk- ish, but moved to be with her in the Netherlands. He stays in the Netherlands because as a third country national he has many problems travelling to and from UK and entering the Netherlands—so reluc- tantly they are separated.

She explains she feels most at home in the small town in the Netherlands where she grew up and where friends and family still live—“it is a very im- portant city for me. We bought our house there where I was growing up and it was—that neighbourhood was between two rails, one train rail going to (my home town) and the other going to Utrecht so if you come from the airport entering the city you will see our house. So when I enter (this town) and see my ex- house I see myself walking there and going to school, playing, having arguments with my parents—was very interesting. It gives you a nice feeling and sad feeling because you see that life is going on—this is a sad feeling, it could be nice—it depends which mood you are. Many of my memories are there, but I shouldn’t forget to mention that the city or the village or the mountain (in Turkey) where I was born is also very important for me.”

Amina is in her mid 30s, and a researcher at a rights based NGO in a large metropolis in south east England. She is single and has dual citizenship— Canadian and British. Though born in Britain she left UK at age 4 because her parents found it “too racist.” Now her home is in Toronto, Canada, where her family lives. She is emphatic that she is not British (“they speak funny over there and have a queen!”). However she describes herself to others as a Cana- dian, or British Canadian if she is in other places like Nigeria. Being born in the UK is important to her

sense of self only when in Canada. Amina has a strong sense of a South Asian identity which comes from her parents. Her mother is Indian but lived in Ban- gladesh and her father is from Pakistan. She has no real close experiences of those places except through her parents and grandparents. She rationalises her- self as being more generally “South Asian” as she says her history is “kind of made up” because of partition. Thus being South Asian is for her, “ . . . more about a cultural thing than a place thing.” She explains,

I’d probably have more in common with a white Canadian than I would with a South Asian Indian. I mean I think you know, basically, I’m Canadian, I’m not Indian. That’s how I think, how I value it, how I kind of move round in the world. We used to joke that about if you show up in India, like within about three seconds they’ll figure out you’re not from there just by the way you stand, the way you put the same clothes on that they’re wearing, they can just spot it— it’s the same kind of thing.

Turning to the analysis of the Muslim women’s narratives in the following section, three emerging themes frame the discussion. First is our consider- ation of the women’s embodied reality as raced and gendered Muslim women in Britain and their emer- gent racialised consciousness post 9/11. Second is the theme of embodied modesty articulated through the women’s religious agency and the gendered discourse of the hijab. Third is their “nomadic disposition” as a transnational subject which is embodied and articu- lated through her sense of belongingness to diasporic and other Muslim communities.

p o s t c o l o n i a l d i s j u n c t i o n s : r a c i s m a s a “ k i n d o f g a u z e ”

Bodies that are visually recognised as religiously raced and gendered clearly carry unequal value depending on their position in space and place (Skeggs, 1997). The embodied experience of being a transnational woman “out of place” is articulated by the postcolo- nial feminist writer Lata Mani. She writes, “The dis- junctions between how I saw myself and the kind of knowledge about me that I kept bumping into in the West opened up new questions for social and political inquiry” (Mani, 1989: 11). The women in the study

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were conscious of the “disjunction” between how they saw themselves as Muslim women and how they were racially constructed as a “female Muslim other” in Brit- ain. As Mehrunissa explains:

A white person may call us black but I would never call myself . . . you can see your skin and visible char- acteristics, for instance the dressing, the physical ap- pearance. That would not be of so much importance to you as it would be for others—like, for me, ok I’m Indian but the person sitting opposite me—what impact will it have after he looks at me. . . . So when I go for an interview they will look at me as a nation. I will be going for an interview but they will say— “This girl is a nation”—so that character, physical ap- pearance, my skin will affect others. Discrimination always comes from the other. (Mehrunissa)

Mehrunissa talks about being seen as a “girl who is a nation.” As a “raced” transnational Indian migrant she is knowingly no longer just an “I”—an individual, Mehrunissa—but a homogenous, collec- tive “Us”—that is, a representation of a “brown” alien invader nation. She describes the way in which her “character, physical appearance, my skin will affect others.” The Muslim female body, like the black body in the Frantz Fanon classic analysis of racialisation is “sealed in to the crushing object hood of the skin.” As Fanon writes,

Not only must the black man be black, he must be black in relation to the white man. The Black man does not know at what moment his inferiority comes into being through the other. In the white world the man of colour encounters difficulties in the develop- ment of his bodily schema—a slow composition of me as a body in the middle of a spatial and tempo- ral world-such seems to be the schema. It does not impose itself on me; it is rather a definitive structuring of the self and the world—definitive because it cre- ates a real dialectic between my body and the world. (Fanon, 1986: 11)

Mehrunissa examines her relationship with her body when understanding the world as an embodied “other.” As an Indian middle class Muslim woman, her identifiable dress and national markers (colour and accent) become an extension of her skin. Her embodied intersectional identity is both chosen

(in the context of her habitus as a Muslim female Indian) and imposed (she is known and racialised as a Muslim female Indian). Her multi-layered habitus is thus “given and given off ” through her skin colour, speech, dress, and body disposition. Bourdieu sug- gests that one’s habitus—that is ways of standing, speaking walking, feeling, and thinking—shows how the body is in the social world but also how the social world is in the body (Bourdieu, 1990). Habi- tus, as a personalised embodied experience is not only classed but also deeply racialised. Simmonds, the black feminist writer explains,

As a black woman, I know myself inside and outside myself. My relation to this knowledge is conditioned by the social reality of my habitus. But my socialised sub- jectivity is that of a black woman and it is at odds with the social world of which I am a product, for this social world is a white world . . . in this white world I am a fresh water fish that swims in sea water. I feel the weight of the water on my body. (Simmonds, 1997: 226–7)

Like Mehrunissa, Amina was also conscious of her body being encountered as a racialised object. Amina also talks of the weight of the heavy “gauze” of racism which she has to “work through” in Britain but feels the lightness of “nothing” in her home town of Toronto where she feels accepted.

. . . I feel more “raced” here than I felt in Canada. . . . Yeah, and it’s like a kind of gauze you’re trying to work through when you meet people—it’s just heavy—it’s just not there in Toronto I can just walk around, it’s just nothing. And here there are different layers of it too. I’ve been told that I need to, like specifically say certain things in an interview because my accent is going to put them off. So if I’m speaking on race and gender I need to make a point of the fact that I’m “of colour” so that on radio they’ll know otherwise they’re going to think I’m American and they’ll think I’m white and therefore not an authority on my topic. (Amina)

In her narrative Amina describes being seen and not seen through “different layers” in different places. In Britain she has to actively make adjustments to ac- commodate others. This work Amina must do to legit- imate her authority over her topic (minority women’s rights). She is asked to prove her “authentic” credentials

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to speak on behalf of her own when she can’t be vis- ibly seen on the radio. Sara Ahmed talks eloquently on the way black subjects are expected to “happily” per- form essentialised otherness in white organisations so those places can claim to be diverse through em- bodying the “diversity” of others. She writes, “What does diversity mean for those of us who look different, and who come, in the very terms of our appearance, to embody diversity? . . . through diversity, the organ- isation is represented “happily” as “getting along,” as committed to equality, as anti-racist. . . . But you must smile—you must express gratitude for having been re- ceived. If your arrival is a sign of diversity, then you are a success story” (Ahmed, 2009: 46).

Like Amina, Fatima was also a “success story.” “Success,” as Bradford and Hey (2007: 600) explain, is a neoliberal discourse of our time in which a person’s psychological capital, “is constituted in practices of self-esteem, confidence and self-belief . . . producing desires and emotions including rage, shame, resent- ment and pain as well as power and pleasure.” As a sociologist and lecturer in a high status university Fatima understood that her success was predicated upon her psychological capital to negotiate the mark- ers of her difference in her professional life, such as skin colour, language, and her headscarf. She talks here about the visual and social “disjunctions” that her presence creates in racialised places.

I see myself different because I have a different religion than the majority religion and I have a different culture. I use different languages. They could see me as differ- ent but I do not see myself as different. I never think of this, like I would think well they didn’t offer me the job because of discrimination because I’m wearing a headscarf, because this is different. I won’t know what I would think if I were not wearing a headscarf. I was surprised actually, as a sociologist I was studying race and colour and bla, bla, bla and when I came to the UK I faced this—skin colour is very important here. Very interesting actually, in the Netherlands it’s not that—well, we have Sudanese for instance very much discussed is headscarves and moustaches of Turkish man for instance (laughter). (Fatima)

Both Amina and Fatima manage their racialised experiences in Britain by expressing nostalgia for

“home.” In the countries where they grew up, Canada and Netherlands, they see racism as less rife than in Britain. Theories of identity describe the self-in- process of becoming, which is always by its nature incomplete, unstable, and potentially transformative (Hall, 1992). The women’s reflections of a “better place back home” encapsulate the transnational mi- gratory process where cross border mobility disrupts definitions of cultural identity and unsettles associa- tions between people and place (Song, 2005). This, as Butcher (2009) argues can lead to a re-evaluation of identity in which people seek to re-find points of comfort in order to manage difference. In this sense the women’s “knowing nostalgia” for a non-racist utopia back home (they admit “home” is also racist) is about recreating spaces of comfort and safety through re-memory (Reynolds, 2005) in order to sur- vive working and living in new hostile racist spaces.

d i a s p o r a s pa c e s : i s l a m a s “ a s e c o n d s k i n ”

For the women in the study being a Muslim was a cru- cial aspect of their sense of self and ethnic belonging. In contrast to the more outwardly collective masculine expressions Muslimness, in which Islam has been mo- bilised as a political and nationalistic power resource in civil society (Balzani, 2010; Werbner, 2007), the women expressed their faith as a private transcenden- tal spiritual space from which they derived an inner strength. As Fatima explains, being a Muslim is very important to her sense of who she is. She describes her belief as a “second skin” which extends to her dress. She cannot imagine not having a headscarf, which is as much about her inner spiritual life as well as a natu- ralised external way of being.

Being religious or a Muslim is very important for me, it shapes and gives the power for me and when I feel weak, normally I do not feel weak, well I’m not a weak person but many times I could feel weak, then religion is very important for me. I pray and I take time for myself. I have this feeling that a power bigger than me protects me. Having this religious feeling and this religious belief gives you the look to see the life. I mean the very thin line through the life, you connect things with each other and you make sense

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of everything and that’s why religion is so important for me. (Fatima)

Saba Mahmood (2005) seeks to explain this form of embodied gendered religious agency through the understanding of acts of piety or taqwa. She argues on Muslim women’s religious disposition, such as obedience to God brings spiritual rewards in and of itself to the women. The Egyptian women she studied in the mosque movement produced “virtuous selves” through conscious acts of “shyness” in which the female body is used as an instrument to attain a state of embodied piety. Mahmood suggests that in order to understand the Islamic female forms of moral sub- jectivity and embodied spiritual interiority, we must move beyond Western Imperialist notions of libratory emancipation and the deterministic binaries of resis- tance/subordination by which Muslim female sub- jectivity and agency are so often judged. Thus rather than seeing Fatima’s practices and beliefs through the Western normative assumptions about Muslim female docility, complicity, and resistance to patri- archal conservative cultural values, we must under- stand her agency and acts of faith within the broader political and social environment. As Manal Hamzeh (2012) points out the hijab is a socially constructed gendering discourse that has hegemonised women’s ways of thinking and acting for centuries. As she ex- plains, the “hijab is a multidimensional embodiment of interwoven subtle values and practices—the visual, spatial, and ethical” (Hamzeh, 2011:2). Fatima’s ethi- cally derived transcendental identity was not unlike the spatially situated young Bangladeshi women in Halima Begum (2008). Begum describes the ways in which the second generation British born Bangla- deshi women preferred to express their visually ap- parent “Muslimness” as an embodied inner private belief when situated within and excluded from the physically unsafe male dominated nationalistic Ban- gladeshi streets of the East End of London.

While it has been shown that some Muslim women choose to veil in order to reassert their Mus- limness as a political statement in the wake of 9/11 (Buitelaar, 2006; Housee, 2004; Killian, 2003), Amina and Mehrunissa still articulated a strong sense of “Muslimness” though they themselves did not wear

a headscarf. In her study of Pakistani Muslim women in Glasgow, Siraj (2011) shows how Muslim conserva- tive ideology pervasively produced an idealised view of Muslim femininity even among those who chose not to wear the hijab. This commitment to modesty and the “idea” of the hijab need to be understood in relation to the identity choices that are available for Muslim women in Islamophobic contexts. Buitelaar (2006: 260) argues that having to respond to essen- tialist images of “the Muslim” has a strong impact on how intersectionality is experienced by those who among other many identifications see themselves as Muslims. She writes, “They (Muslim women in the Netherlands) are left with few generally accepted nar- ratives to communicate the ways in which their vari- ous identifications are simultaneously (in)formed by prevailing conceptions about gender, ethnicity, reli- gion, class, nationality, etc.” Thus Amina, who also saw herself as primarily a South Asian Canadian, still expressed a strong affinity with other Muslims, like going to festivals and celebrations in the Mosque, which she talked about as being an “unconscious and innate” experience. When asked if she feels a sense of belonging with other Muslims, she replies,

Yeah, it is important to who I am but what I assert will be different at different times so I’m Muslim that’s the easiest for most people but I’m a particular sub-set of a minority and so it depends on how specific you want to get on what that means. A lot of people think they know something about me by knowing that I’m Muslim and so I’ll employ that if it’s needed in the context but they, in my eyes, they don’t particularly know anything additional about me just because I’ve said Muslim other than I’ve chosen to ally myself with that identity for a particular reason. (Amina)

Mehrunissa explains that it is not just the “ap- pearance” of the headscarf but also her name and her Asian culture, and in particular eating halal food that are identifiers of her Muslimness. For her being a Muslim is,

 . . . Very, very important, not only important to me, also it should be, appearance-wise. When you look at a Muslim girl, all covered, you can immediately iden- tify them because Islam says that you should have the identity of your religion. But I’m not covering my

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head so maybe people will not think of me in the first place that she’s Muslim—they can see Asian—but later on if I introduce myself they would know by my name that I am. (Mehrunissa)

For all the women, Islam was a conscious site of memory and belonging—a “second skin” through which their ethnic and religious identity was embod- ied and lived out through their subjectivity and sense of self. Like the Muslim American women activists in Zahedi (2011) the women were constantly rede- fining themselves in relation to hegemonic Islamo- phobic and patriarchal discourses. In this context Islam and being a Muslim meant different things to each woman. Amina used the physical space of the Mosque as her site of contestation. For Mehrunissa it was through her culture and food, for Fatima it was her headscarf and Islamic practices. Brah (1996) talks about the ways in which transnational migration cre- ates “diaspora spaces” in new places of settlement. Here culture, class, and communities become con- tested “sites” which are reshaped when “individual and collective memories and practices collide, re- assemble and reconfigure” (Brah, 1996: 193). The women could be seen to be dialogically constructing “diaspora spaces” by both listening to and negotiat- ing dominant external discourses about Islam and Muslims and then using them to re-construct their own shifting and contingent narratives of what it is to be a “Muslim woman.”

Such narratives, however, are deeply disrupted by the heightened political sentiment against Muslim women. Naima Bouteldja (2011) shows how the Is- lamophobic political discourse in France legitimated a public free-for-all “witch hunt” against women wearing the veil. The persecution of women extended to internally colonized Muslim and Arab communi- ties living in France who accused their own women wearing the burqa (full dress including the face) of “shaming” the entire community, and “dirtying the religion” (Open Society Foundations, 2011). Killian (2003) shows the power of dominant cultural reper- toires and political and policy structures in shaping Muslim women’s views of themselves. In her study of North African Muslim women’s response to the French “headscarf affair” she found that older poorly

educated women in France drew on traditional Is- lamic discourses from the Maghreb, while younger well educated Muslim women drew on French secu- larism to defend the headscarf as a matter of personal liberty and cultural expression.

As well educated and professional women, Amina, Mehrunissa, and Fatima all distanced them- selves from “the imagined other Muslims” who were “not like them.” Fatima explains, “there are many Muslims which I do not want to belong to. But I am a religious person which is a very important part of my life.” Mehrunissa talks about Muslims having dif- ferent ideologies which for her would bring about “conflicts of interest.” While religion was important to Amina’s sense of self she does not want to be, “paralysed or suffer guilt” about being a Muslim, she explains,

I know quite a few Muslims who are, I mean, partly just because of the current context, but quite defen- sive, lack confidence as far as the ease that they feel about the world. I know a lot of people who are just bunkered down in their “Muslimness” and have a very narrow understanding of what it is to be Muslim and that kind of thing. (Amina)

Amina’s statement that “I know a lot of (other) people who are just bunkered down in their “Mus- limness” is articulated against an essentialist notion of authenticity—i.e., what it is to be a “real” Muslim. Buitelaar (2006) argues that to understand the ac- counts of Muslim women’s intersecting identifica- tions we need to employ the theory of the “dialogical self.” She suggests that the Moroccan Muslim woman living in the Netherlands whose life-story she tells, orchestrates multiple voices within herself that speak from different I-positions. Fatima’s statement that “there are many Muslims which I do not want to belong to” points to her social positioning and re- ligious and ethnic identification. Buitelaar explains, “Identity is the temporary outcome of our responses to the various ways in which we are addressed on the basis of our positions in power relations in and between the different social and cultural fields in which we participate (Buitelaar, 2006: 261). Thus for Amina, Mehrunissa, and Fatima, their ambivalent relationship to “other Muslims” speaks to the racially

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inscribed religious and political voices that intersect and inform their I-positions in their narratives.

n e g o t i at i n g m o d e r n i t y : t r a n s n at i o n a l “ c h a m e l e o n s ”

Transnational mobility across national sites engenders a process of identity re-evaluation as the familiar cul- tural frames of reference that underpin identities are disrupted in new and different places (Butcher, 2009; Song, 2005; Zine, 2007). Indeed these transnational women dislocated from their real and “imagined” homelands and positioned as a Muslim minority in Britain occupy transnational spaces in which the mo- dalities of race, class, and gender intersect with hostile anti-immigrant British nationalism and globalized anti-Islamic discourses. In these diasporic spaces they negotiate this disruption through a range of raced, classed, and gendered identity strategies which they embody through language and culture.

Amina, who is of Canadian, Pakistani, Indian, British, and Bangladeshi heritage, sees herself as “worldly” and “nomadic.” She is like a chameleon, a “shape-shifter,” with many layers of national and cultural identity that she employs simultaneously as the need arises. She explains,

A lot of my social identity is basically bound up in an idea of being worldly and nomadic and that’s what I take from being me. So what it means to be Canadian, what it means to be South Asian, what- ever, they’re quite different and they’re interesting in their own ways. If I could I’d get passports for, you know—have all five passports—go around travelling everywhere. (Amina)

However it is within the negating discourse of multiculturalism and virulent discourses of Islamo- phobia that Amina’s search for multiple and shifting identities must be located (Mirza, 2012). Anita Fábos (2012) argues the British discourse regarding the limits of multiculturalism has been framed in terms of home, family, and belonging, which has striking implications for migrant and refugee women who are seen as embodying an “unhomely” threat to British- ness. In her study of Muslim Arab Sudanese women in Britain, Fábos talks about the impact these negative

connotations have on the women. She explains, “The reactions to these ascribed identities include a dis- tancing from the assumptions that Sudanese form part of the “black” community, development of strategies of belonging that rely on transnational net- works, and a commitment to Islamic “authenticity” (2010: 224). Resisting being “named” by employing multiple identities that link outward toward a global transnational identity constitutes an embodied reac- tion to endemic racism and exclusion faced in Britain. As Amina Mama writes, “Black women do not simply accept these images of themselves but over time use collective histories within oppressive social orders to counteract racism and sexism” (Mama, 1995).

One such embodied act of resistance is to use powerful hegemonic symbols such as language to negotiate modernity. Fatima who speaks 3 languages fluently—Turkish, Dutch, and English expresses her determination to “become” universal through speak- ing English. She explains,

English is the language where I express my univer- sal identity. I mean, with English I can express my identity and share my thoughts, my ideas with this language and that gives me a refreshed feeling that I know English. (Fatima)

While Fatima is aware of colonial subjugation through language from her schooling “back home,” in her statement there is an implicit acceptance of the hegemony and power of English as a way to express herself and be understood. Frantz Fanon (1990: 27) calls for the “decolonising of the native intellectual” as a means to “change the order of the world” in the wake of the violent colonial suppres- sion and destruction of indigenous knowledges and culture in the Western Imperial project (Smith, 2008; Young, 1990). Spivak (1990) describes the necessar y process of decolonisation for “third world” Asian/Indian postcolonial intellectuals working in universities in the West, which includes strategically positioning themselves in the academy. As Mehrunissa explains, this involves speaking the colonizers’ language.

English speaking is more important than your own lan- guage, than your national language. Why?—Because

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in India, the communication, the mode of study is in English; when you go out anywhere you will not be speaking your language—here people don’t know any other language other than English whereas in our country people know various, many Asian languages, so those people get used to so many languages. (Mehrunissa)

Though they all spoke English fluently the women were still strongly rooted to their ethnic and cultural “belonging” through a strong sense of place. They consciously created meaningful diasporic communi- ties, across a number of nation-states which they re- called through gendered memories of childhood and family. These were strongly recalled through cultur- ally specific smells, hearing, touch, and particularly the taste of food. Fatima who feels most at home with friends and family in her home town in the Nether- lands still holds on to emotional memories of grow- ing up in Turkey.

I was born in a village and this village is a mountain village where the houses are situated very far from each other, so if you have a gun and shoot from a gun, the next house won’t hear the sound—so very far from each other. And my mother used to live in this mountain with me, my sister two years older than me and my brother 12 years older than me. When the time comes, it’s May here, spring time and they cut the grass and it dries and gives a smell, so if I first smell this smell I have to immediately think of those villages where I grew up because that is the smell of those villages. My mother can’t read or write, she’s illiterate because they didn’t have schools there but she’s very tough. She lived there without my father for eight years and she saved money by selling cheese, meat and that kind of things. She bought very nice gold for us. Gold is very important in Turkey; people save gold, not money. So yeah, I think I have some features from that region too. (Fatima)

Fatima’s feelings of longing and belonging are embodied personal geographies that are shaped by people, place, and time. Louise Ryan (2008: 300) in her study of working class Irish women nurses who came to Britain describes the “emotional terrain of transnational journeys.” She suggests that through global care chains migrant women manage their

families and expectations of support and obligation. She argues that migrant women’s emotional reac- tions are rooted in bodily processes, such as feelings of homesickness and the stoical need to conform to the ideal of the successful migrant. This insight into the “psychic landscape” (Reay, 2005) of postcolo- nial transnational Muslim women reveals the ways in which the shared identification of race, class, and gender is embodied and lived out through a collec- tive consciousness and memory.

c o n c l u s i o n : m u s l i m w o m e n at t h e c r o s s r o a d s o f r a c e , g e n d e r a n d r e l i g i o n

In this article I explored the intersectional dynamics of race, gender, and religion by looking at the relation- ship between the gendered Islamophobic discourses that circulate in the “West” and the embodied identity of transnational professional young Muslim women living in Britain. The three Muslim professional women’s subjectivity and narratives of “self” were ex- pressed firstly through “the gauze” of their racialised consciousness borne of living in Britain, secondly through the “second skin” of their faith and embodied modesty, and thirdly, as “transnational chameleons” with tangible embodied memories of “home.” In their dialogic conversations of gendered religious racialisa- tion the women’s voices revealed how the intersection- ality of race, gender, and religion was lived out on and within the Muslim female body.

I began by asking what the consequences are for transnational professional Muslim women of being caught up in the Islamophobic space occu- pied by the postcolonial Muslim diaspora in Brit- ain. Framing the analysis was the macro discourse of anti-Islamic hostility in Britain and its production of the raced and gendered Muslim female body. In her essay on the construction of the racially objec- tified “Muslim woman,” the postcolonial Muslim feminist anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod argues that we must be vigilant of West’s reifying tendency “to plaster neat cultural icons like “the Muslim woman” over messy historical and political dynamics” (Abu- Lughod, 2002: 784). The transnational professional Muslim women in the study were indeed caught

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up in the messy historical and political dynam- ics of the post-9/11 Islamophobic media discourse and its overwhelming preoccupation with the “em- bodied” Muslim women in British public spaces. While Muslim women and Islamic feminists (Abu- Lughod, 2002; Badran, 2009; Mernissi, 1996) have taken issue with the simplistic cultural constructions of Muslim women in the media, it nevertheless re- mains a macro regulatory discourse that framed the Muslim women’s daily lived reality. In what Haw (2009) describes as the “mythical feedback loop,” the media’s emphasis on signifying stories of “back- ward” Muslim practices, such as veiling, impacts on the identity of the wider British Muslim community, which in turn affects Muslim women’s internal felt world and sense of self.

In the study Fatima’s veiled Muslim body was vi- sually recognised and marked as religiously raced and gendered in Britain. As a Turkish, (now) middle class Muslim woman, her identifiable dress (hijab) and racialised national markers (skin colour and accent) determined how she was seen and thus “known” as an “other.” As Sara Ahmed (2004) explains the figure of the veiled Muslim woman challenges the values that are crucial to the multicultural nation, such as freedom and culture, making her a symbol of what the nation must give up to be itself. Thus being visibly “non-assimilated” in a multicultural society invites a certain type of benign surveillance as “standing out” invokes deep feelings of need, rejection and anxiety within the majority “white other” culture. The Muslim woman’s demand to be “different” (i.e., wear the veil) is seen as a rejection of the welcoming embrace or “gift” of the multicultural “host” society. The “disjuncture” that this racialisation engendered within Fatima produced her as a “knowing subject.” Fatima was conscious of how her Muslim body was encountered as racialised object (Lorde, 1984). How- ever it was through her religious disposition that she expressed her embodied gendered religious agency. Her headscarf was experienced as a “second skin,” and personal embodied acts of piety such as wearing the hijab became an “identity affect” which enabled her to move beyond the simplistic cultural construc- tions of Muslim women in the media that negates Muslim female agency.

As transnational subjects the professional Muslim women were able to draw on meaningful diasporic communities of belonging across a number of nation-states based on a continuing shared iden- tification and sense of consciousness of kind (Bilge & Denis, 2010: 3). Such transcendental diasporic situatedness challenges classic notions of the mobile transnational migrant as rational strategic agents (Butcher, 2009; Ley, 2005). The alternative geog- raphies of the women’s new emergent “diasporic” spaces were bounded not by territory or nationality but by embodied practices of contingent and recon- figured gendered “Muslimness,” as manifested in the wearing or not of the hijab, going to the Mosque, eating halal food, and other acts of postcolonial resistance and accommodation such as speaking English. For them “home” was powerfully recalled through “other knowledges” (hooks, 1991; Smith, 2008). These “other knowledges” invoked decolo- nised spaces which the women “felt” through their embodied sensory memories of childhood, shaped by people and places, and spatially articulated through a rooted sense of belonging to the “land of their ancestors.” However dialogically, the women’s embodied lived reality as raced and gendered Muslim women was also marked by the affective racist immi- gration and Islamophobic discourses of hate and fear in which they were now embedded as transnational female migrants.

The notion of “embodied intersectionality,” as I have developed here, enables us to move beyond the limitations of modernist “capacity endowed” cat- egories of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability which have “gridlocked” feminist theorising on dif- ference (Anthias, 2011; Puar, 2011). The framework of embodied intersectionality enables us to see not only how the women were constructed as recognisa- ble visible Muslim others in discourse, but how that affective representation is signified and mediated by the body and experienced as a lived reality. The embodiment of power and disempowerment writ- ten through and within the sexed and raced body is particularly important if we are to understand how religious identity is performed, experienced, and ar- ticulated through the women’s subjectivity and sense of self. [ . . .]

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N O T E S

1 Understanding Society is a world leading study of the socio-economic circumstances and attitudes of 100,000 individuals in 40,000 British households. It is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), University of Essex. See http://www.understandingsociety.org.uk/.

2 The team members on this project were Lucinda Platt, Heidi Safia Mirza, Alita Nandy, and Punita Chowbey. I thank my colleagues for their kind permission to use the data and take full responsibility for the analysis developed here.

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SEXUALITIES AND DESIRES

III P A R T

Are sexual relations a realm of pleasure, empowerment, danger, or oppression? The wom-en’s movement reawakened during the late 1960s and 1970s during a sexual revolution that told youth, “It if feels good, do it!” In this context, an initial impulse of second-wave feminism began to argue that “sexual liberation” had simply freed men to objectify and exploit women more completely. As studies began to illuminate the widespread realities of rape, sexual harassment in workplaces, and sexual exploitation of women in sex work, it became clear that for women, sexuality was too often a realm of danger rather than pleasure. As a result, by the mid- to late 1970s, radical feminist activists focused more and more on antirape and antipornography efforts.

By the mid-1980s, other feminists—often younger women, women of color, and lesbian, bisexual, and pansexual women—began to criticize the preoccupation of some radical femi- nists with the centrality of male heterosexuality and pornography in women’s oppression. By the 1990s, many younger feminists sought to reclaim sexual pleasure as a realm of empower- ment for women, renewing the efforts of some radical feminists such as Adrienne Rich and Charlotte Bunch, who came before them. Today, feminists across the theoretical spectrum tend to see sexuality in complicated ways—as a potential source of both pleasure and danger, both empowerment and oppression. And many feminists now critique radical feminist positions that essentialize the category of women to the exclusion of transgender people and support the rights of people to engage in sex work, referring to those positions as TERF (Trans Exclusion- ary Radical Feminism) and SWERF (Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminism), respectively.

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Moreover, research now indicates that the experience of sexuality is not determined solely by gender; rather, race, age, sexual orientation or sexual identity, religion, culture, and national- ity also shape sexual experiences and attitudes. This includes the experience of feeling asexual.

In the first article in this section, Rashawn Ray and Jason A. Rosow analyze the distinctive approaches to sexuality exhibited by white and black fraternity men. Relying on data from interviews and focus groups, they argue that normative institutional arrangements on col- lege campuses shape sexuality in ways that encourage black fraternities to be more gender egalitarian than their white peers. The black men are held more accountable, and the black fraternity system promotes more consciousness of the dangers of objectifying women than does the white fraternity system. What might other college campuses and student organiza- tions learn from this article regarding gender egalitarianism in their own institutions?

Karen Pyke examines the sexual desires of Asian American women, exploring their attrac- tion to white men. Using interviews with second generation Korean and Vietnamese American women, Pyke asks if these women’s romantic preference for white men is a result of a racial hi- erarchy in masculinities that positions white men as more masculine than Asian men, a belief that white men are more gender egalitarian than Asian men and thus resistance to gender op- pression, or some combination of the two. For Asian American women who preferred white men, they either described it as a personal preference or that Asian men were more patriarchal. However, the women failed to recognize the ways that white men exhibited gender oppres- sion. Pyke argues that intersecting systems of inequality require complex analysis, and that efforts to resist one form of oppression can inadvertently reproduce another form.

As Jane Ward shows, not all of those who enjoy sexual relations with same-sex partners identify as homosexual. Ward studied the Craigslist advertisements of “str8 white dudes” (straight white men) who are looking for sexual encounters with other straight men. The ads reveal how these men use elements of white racial identity and gender misogyny to demonstrate their heterosexual identification. Ward argues that rather than defining sexual identities on the basis of sex acts (for example, by claiming that str8 white dudes are, in fact, closeted gay men), it is important to recognize how identities communicate our member- ship in political and cultural communities. Thus, rather than a challenge, the sexual identi- ties practiced by str8 white dudes reinforce heteronormativity and homophobia.

Héctor Carrillo and Jorge Fontdevila use interviews with gay and bisexual Mexican migrant men living in San Diego to challenge the assumption that the same-sex sexual experiences and interpretations of Latino migrants is limited by class and confined to binary passive/active roles. Rather, global gay identities are shared across not only national boundaries but class and urban/ rural boundaries. The men in Carrillo’s and Fontdevila’s study had quite diverse sexual experi- ences prior to migration, and their identities post-migration are equally diverse. Carrillo and Fontdevila argue that their findings have important implications for understanding the global dynamics of gay identity, and of crafting policies such as HIV prevention programs for migrants that can accommodate diverse experiences and interpretations of what it means to be gay.

Finally, Kirsty Liddiard explores the private and emotional dimensions of disability in the intimate lives of couples. She focuses on the emotion work or emotional labor that sustains these partnerships despite an ableist culture that treats disabled people as sexually undesirable. Her research shows how the emotion work performed by disabled partners simultaneously benefits the couple while reproducing inequalities.

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Despite the proliferation of research on collegiate gender and sexual relations (Martin and Hummer 1989; Boswell and Spade 1996; Armstrong, Hamilton, and Sweeney 2006), we know little about one of the key groups within this institutional arrangement— fraternity men. Meanwhile, we know even less about differences and similarities in Black and White high- status men’s relations with women (Brandes 2007; Peralta 2007; Flood 2008). Because fraternity men typ- ically are situated on top of the peer culture hierarchy, a comprehensive understanding of the organization of collegiate social life must take into account how these specific enclaves of men understand and perceive gender relations and sexuality, and whether these un- derstandings and perceptions vary by race.

Scholars have offered three competing expla- nations regarding racial differences in men’s ap- proaches toward women: (a) Black and White men objectify women similarly; (b) Black men objectify women more than White men; (c) White men objec- tify women more than Black men. The first possibil- ity contends that most men, irregardless of status or race, sexually objectify women in the same manner. Thus, Black and White men’s performances in mas- culinities are expected to be similar. In patriarchal societies, men control sexual and romantic environ- ments by promoting sexually aggressive behavior among men (Clark and Hatfield 1989; Hatfield et al. 1998; Flood 2008). Through the emphasis of the importance of sexual prowess, cultural mandates

Ray, R., & Rosow, J. A. (2010). Getting Off and Getting Intimate: How Normative Institutional Arrangements Structure Black and White Fraternity Men’s Approaches Toward Women. Men and Masculinities, 12(5), 523–546. https://doi. org/10.1177/1097184X09331750. Reprinted with permission of SAGE Journals.

How Normative Institutional Arrangements Structure  Black and White Fraternity Men’s Approaches toward Women

R A S H A W N R AY, J A S O N A . R O S O W

11. GETTING OFF AND GETTING INTIMATE

concerning gender encourage men to “sexually objectify” women and appear “sexual.” However, such mandates encourage women to stress relation- ship viability and appear “romantic” (Hatfield et al. 1998). Hence, men are often authorized to express themselves sexually, while women who act this way are shunned. This possibility suggests that gender trumps race and status concerning men’s interactions with women.

A second possibility is that Black men exhibit more sexually objectifying approaches toward women than do White men. This explanation is most in line with scholarship on Black men’s relations with women. More specifically, cultural motifs like the “cool pose’’ (Majors and Billson 1992) portray Black men as culprits of sexual violence (Majors and Billson 1992; Anderson 1999). However, this per- spective, which is echoed with public discourses and much scholarly research, gives the impression that all Black men are part of the same cultural spaces, thereby neglecting the fact that Black men may be part of different sociocultural1 spaces that yield dis- tinctly different structural consequences for their treatment of women. It should also be noted that the stereotypical nature of Black men as the Mandingo— overly aggressive, sexually promiscuous, physically superior yet intellectually inferior—has long been purported in mainstream discourses (Hunter and Davis 1992; Collins 2004). Race scholars assert this is a problematized, dramatized, and monolithic

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perception of Black men that is often exacerbated in the media (Staples 1982; Hoberman 1997).

Finally, the third possibility asserts that White men are more sexually objectifying than Black men. By virtue of their presumed greater status and esteem, White men are more likely to control social envi- ronments and accept, and even normalize, sexual objectifications of women (Connell 1987; Kimmel and Messner 1989; Kimmel 2006). This perspective echoes the sentiments of women who claim sexual harassment in high-status institutions such as law, academia, and corporate America where White men are typically the controllers of social environments (Kanter 1977). In contrast to the aforementioned “cool pose,” some extant literature finds that Black men’s gender attitudes, compared to their White counterparts, are more supportive of gender equal- ity because of a shared oppression and subordination with women (Millham and Smith 1986; Konrad and Harris 2002).

In this article, we assess these three predictions by analyzing 30 in-depth, individual interviews and surveys and two focus group interviews with Black and White high-status fraternity men. We find evi- dence that White men are more sexually objectify- ing than their Black counterparts, in support of the third prediction. However, we also find that the rea- sons behind this pattern go beyond the explanations typically asserted by this prediction and the first two predictions. Collectively, the three explanations noted above neglect the extent to which cultural and social norms are embedded within and shaped by the structure of institutions, and in turn, how structure shapes men’s approaches toward women and the per- formances of masculinities. Accordingly, we contend that “normative institutional arrangements” are one of the key factors that underlie racial differences re- garding how men interact with women romantically and sexually on college campuses.

n o r m at i v e i n s t i t u t i o n a l a r r a n g e m e n t s i n h i g h e r e d u c at i o n

Normative institutional arrangements are boundar- ies that shape social interactions and establish con- trol over social environments (Gerson and Peiss

1985; Hays 1994; Britton 2003), and one structural mechanism that should be of importance to scholars interested in intersectionality research. Normative in- stitutional arrangements identify social contexts (e.g., social environments in fraternity houses), whereby cer- tain behaviors are more or less acceptable and certain structures hold individuals more or less accountable for their treatment of others. Such arrangements rep- resent taken-for-granted assumptions that are external and exist outside of individuals, “social, durable, and layered” (Hays 1994), and constraining and enabling. Normative institutional arrangements focus on the accepted arrangement of relationships within social institutions. In this article, normative institutional arrangements draw attention to the ways in which performances of masculinities are legitimized across different sociocultural categories of men, and the role structure plays in men’s approaches toward women. Here, we showcase the implications of the intersecting forces of race and status by examining two normative institutional arrangements that are common themes in Black and White men’s understandings and percep- tions of gender and sexual relations: (a) small Black student and Greek communities; (b) living arrange- ments including a lack of on-campus fraternity houses.

The Black student community at most Predomi- nately White Institutions (PWIs) is small and insular. There is also a limited amount of social interac- tion between Black and White fraternities and be- tween Black and White students overall (Allen 1992; Massey et al. 2003). Similar to patterns at the societal level, interracial dating is infrequent (Joyner and Kao 2005). As a result, even high-status Black fraternity men are mostly invisible in White social arenas.

In contrast, the relatively small number of Black students and limited interactions with Whites indi- cate that Black fraternity men are much more visible in the Black community. In fact, this group of Black men aligns with the ideals of what DuBois (1903, 1939) conceptualized as the “Talented Tenth.” Such members of the Black elite are expected to sacrifice personal interests and endeavors to provide leader- ship and guidance to the Black community (Battle and Wright 2002). However, being part of the Tal- ented Tenth signifies the monitoring of this group’s behavior, particularly actions that are inconsistent

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with a greater good for the Black community. This monitoring by others on Black fraternity men is in- tensified in a structural setting with a small commu- nity size, and in turn, increases the likelihood that their treatment of women will be publicized and scrutinized by members of their own social commu- nity and the broader college and off-campus commu- nities. Although White fraternity men may also be visible, the sheer number of White students leads to them being held less accountable, and consequently, able to perform masculinity in a manner that Black fraternity men cannot.

Not only is the Black community relatively small but Black Greeks have very different on-campus living arrangements than White Greeks. There is a historical legacy of racial discrimination, both within and external to the university, that has traditionally precluded Black fraternities and sororities from gain- ing equal access to economic resources such as Greek houses and large alumni endowments (Kimbrough and Hutcheson 1998). To date, most Black Greek Letter Organizations (BGLOs) do not have fraternity or sorority houses on university property (Harper, Byars, and Jelke 2005). If they do, these houses nor- mally are not the same size or stature of those of their White counterparts. To the extent that the structure of living arrangements facilitates a certain treatment of women, racial differences in access to housing on- campus may have implications in potential racial dif- ferences in approaches toward women.

In sum, the claims by masculinities, sexuali- ties, and race scholars suggest that culture provides a portal whereby men view women as physical objects. However, research in this area suffers from three important shortcomings. First, the structural mech- anisms by which normative institutional arrange- ments promote women’s subordination have been underemphasized. Most recently, scholars have called for a resurgence of such research and have pointed to the exploration of contextual and structural factors to uncover these mechanisms (Reskin 2003; Epstein 2007). Second, the perspectives of high-status men remain absent in the literature. Hence, this study seeks to understand how elite men decipher their worlds and how privileged statuses influence the pro- cesses underlying gender dynamics. Third, research

largely has not explored the potential for racial dif- ferences in men’s gender relations. Consequently, gender and sexuality research has portrayed men as homogeneous proponents of gender inequality, irre- gardless of race and/or social context.

Our work offers an opportunity to address these gaps in the literature by reporting on interviews with Black and White high-status men. Some high-status Black men (e.g., Black fraternity men) may have at- titudes and beliefs that are similar to their White male counterparts. However, due in part to a hyper level of visibility and accountability, Black men may be unable to perform hegemonic masculinity similar to their White male counterparts.2 Actually, because of a relative lack of accountability and visibility af- forded to high-status White fraternity men in this structural setting,3 it is White men’s performances of masculinities that may be closer to that of the “cool pose.” Therefore, we hypothesize that Black men will exhibit less sexually objectifying approaches toward women than their White counterparts.

Accordingly, we pose two essential questions: (a) Regarding high-status fraternity men’s relations with women, are there racial differences in roman- tic versus sexually objectifying approaches? (b) How do “normative institutional arrangements” structure men’s approaches toward women? Because there has been limited empirical research on elite men, we privilege their accounts and voices to gain an insid- er’s perspective into the intersections of masculini- ties, status, sexuality, and race.

s e t t i n g a n d m e t h o d

We conducted 30 in-depth individual interviews and surveys, along with two focus group interviews, from 15 Black and 15 White fraternity men at a PWI that we call Greek University (GU). Enrolling approximately 30,000 undergraduates, GU is ideal for this study because of its strong academic reputation, vibrant social life, and party scene. GU’s emphasis on Greek life facilitates the examination of gender relations among high-status men. About 20% of GU under- graduates are members of Greek letter organizations, which is larger than similar universities.4 For mem- bers, the Greek system normally offers a home away from home, friendships, and social and philanthropic

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activities. There are approximately 25 White fraterni- ties with memberships around 100, some with on- campus and some with off-campus status, and five Black fraternities with memberships around 10 and all hold off-campus status.5 Although approximately 25% of White students are members of Greek organiza- tions, less than 10% of Black students are members of Greek organizations.6 Black and White fraternities are operated by two different governing bodies, the Na- tional Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC)7 and the Inter- fraternity Council (IFC), respectively. Although none of these fraternities appear to explicitly discriminate on the basis of race, there is virtually no overlap in race among members of these organizations.

d ata c o l l e c t i o n

To select our sample, we used a reputational approach (Boswell and Spade 1996) to identify high-status fra- ternities. Relying on rankings of fraternities by mem- bers of sororities and fraternities, students in sociology classes, informants in Greek Affairs, and the Assistant Dean of Students that rank fraternities based on popu- larity, academic and philanthropic events, and athletic prowess, three White fraternities consistently ranked high on all lists. We include all three in our study. Because only five historically Black fraternities are rec- ognized by the NPHC, membership in any of these fraternities normally conveys a certain high-status, par- ticularly at GU because the Black population is only about 4% (1,524). We interviewed members from four of the five Black fraternities. We attempted to interview all five and gained entry to four. The sampling strategy enables us to check for commonalities and differences within and between race. Participants were recruited by emailing the fraternity presidents to see if the in- vestigators could attend a chapter meeting to make an announcement about the study, invite members to participate, and leave detailed study flyers.

As a Black and White team of male researchers, we note that gender may elicit certain responses with participants de-emphasizing romanticism. We also conducted interviews with the authors matched with participants by race to elicit candid responses about the other racial group. Based on the data presented throughout this article, we are confident that we lim- ited methodological biases. For example, one White

respondent states, “Blacks will fuck anything.” An- other says, “Yeah, my friends at home are Black. They like to put it in girls’ asses.” Based on our experiences interacting with these respondents, we believe they would not have made these comments if they were being interviewed by a Black interviewer. (See “The Fraternity House” section for a Black quotation about Whites.) These quotations show that respondents did not hesitate to make derogatory statements about the other group.

All the men in our study report being family- oriented and having lofty career goals. Most partic- ipants are active on campus and have higher GPAs than non-Greeks. However, a substantial class dif- ference exists between Blacks and Whites. The Black men’s self-reported family household income is lower middle class, whereas the White men’s self- reported family household income is upper middle class. Many of the Black fraternity men have scholar- ships, student loans, and/or jobs to pay for tuition and housing costs, whereas most of the White frater- nity men have scholarships and/or their parents pay a substantial portion of their tuition and living ex- penses. All respondents self-identify as heterosexual (see Table 11.1).

i n t e r v i e w p r o c e d u r e

Most of the data presented come from the individual in- terviews. In-depth interviews are useful for developing a broad understanding of students’ experiences in vari- ous aspects of college life and for exploring the mean- ings students attach to these experiences (Denzin and Lincoln 1994). Similar to Armstrong, Hamilton, and Sweeney (2006), we used an 8-page, semistructured interview guide to ask participants about many topics including the Greek system, race relations, partying, hooking-up, dating, sexual attitudes and experiences, and their goals for the future. With interviews averag- ing 2 hours, we aimed to obtain a holistic perspec- tive of these men’s collegiate lives. All interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed using pseudonyms to ensure personal and organizational anonymity. Fol- lowing the interviews, we recorded ethnographic field notes to capture aspects of the interview interactions that might not be evident in the transcripts (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995). At the end of each interview,

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we asked respondents to complete a paper-and-pencil survey. Data from this survey on sociodemographics, family background, sexual attitudes and experiences, and relationship history provide contextual informa- tion about each respondent.

The focus groups were conducted after the indi- vidual interviews were completed to support the in- dividual interviews. Most focus group respondents were part of the 30 individual interviews. The focus groups were used to triangulate the data and focused on themes that evolved from the individual inter- views. They also allowed us to interrogate emerging propositions. Because shared discourses are docu- mented to occur in peer groups, the unique envi- ronment generated in focus groups was well suited to this project (Morgan 1997; Hollander 2004). Al- though focus groups have been criticized for their lack of ability to elicit truthful views about gender and sexuality from young men, the interviewers had preexisting knowledge of the men and could ques- tion specific accounts and perspectives.

a n a ly t i c a l s t r at e g y

We use deductive and inductive reasoning as analytic approaches to “double fit” the data with emergent theory and literature (Ragin 1994). We initially al- lowed analytical categories to emerge as we searched for similarities and differences in how Black and White fraternity men interact with women. Guided by these themes and patterns, we then used deduc- tive reasoning to look for evidence and theories to

make sense of the data. We used ATLAS.ti, a quali- tative data analysis software package, to connect memos, notes, and transcriptions. After establishing patterns in the coding, we searched the interviews thoroughly again looking for examples that both confirmed and contradicted emerging patterns. Our emerging propositions were then refined or elimi- nated to explain these negative cases (Rizzo, Corsaro, and Bates 1992).

r a c i a l i z i n g g e n d e r r e l at i o n s o n   c a m p u s

The interviews suggest that Black fraternity men exhibit more romantic approaches than White fraternity men. Although both groups sexually objectify women, Black men emphasize romanticism more than their White counterparts. They indicate that women are physical objects of enjoyment but should also be respected. White fraternity men make few romantic references and primarily view women as sexual objects.

The following quotations exemplify sexually ob- jectifying approaches. This participant suggests that romance is unnecessary in the quest for gratification.

Pretty much you do not need to do all that wine and dine them and all that. You can skip all that and just bring them back to the house and do what’s impor- tant to you. (White)

In two different parts of the interview, a participant explains which factors affect how far he will go with a woman.

TABLE 11.1 DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS OF SAMPLE BY RACE

Variable Range Variable description White = 15 Black = 15 Total = 30

Age 18–24 Years 20.11 21.27 20.69

Classification 1–4 1 = Freshman, 2 = Sophomore, 3 = Junior, 4 = Senior 2.22 3.73 2.98

GPA 0–4 Cumulative grade point average 3.31 2.92 3.12

Living situation 0–1 0 = Lives off campus, 1 = Lives in a fraternity house 0.87 0.00 0.45

Years in fraternity 1–5 Years respondent has been a fraternity member 1.94 2.00 1.97

Religiosity 1–4 1 = Not at all, 2 = Slightly, 3 = Moderately, 4 = Very 2.00 3.07 2.54

Family’s social class 1–6 1 = Poor, 2 = Working, 3 = Lower-middle, 4 = Middle, 5 = Upper-middle, 6 = Upper

4.56 3.87 4.22

Relationship status 0–1 0 = Single or dating, 1 = Committed relationship 0.33 0.67 0.50

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R : If they [women] were decent or just okay, I’ll just mess around with them. . . . Get head.

I : When she gives you head, do you go down on her? R: Honestly, I don’t like that. . . . I do it every once in

a while. Honestly depends how hot the girl is. If I’m drunk and into the girl, I probably would. But other girls, I just make out with them for a little bit.

R : We were talking for about a week and we started messing around. She starts giving me head, and when I took her shirt off, I put my hand on her stomach and this girl had abs. I think that’s the most disgusting thing. Like, girls with abs, it’s like . . . too masculine. So that like turned me off and I couldn’t get off and I never called her again. (White)

Nine of the 15 White participants report engaging in sexual behavior that they do not prefer including performing oral sex because of a woman’s desirable physical characteristics. They also rarely describe “hot girls” in terms of social competence and popu- larity. Reports from Black men also contain sexually objectifying approaches. While describing what he desires in a woman, a participant compares women to cars as he explains why his standards for sexual encounters are lower than for relationships.

I : Are your standards lower for a hookup than a com- mitted relationship?

R : I use this analogy. Some people say it’s corny, but whatever. When you have the title of a car, you want it to be nice, but you’ll jump in your friend’s car. You’ll ride, you’ll ride anything because it’s not your title. But if I’m going to have the title to you, you’ve got to be nice because you represent me! But now I’ll ride in a pinto, but I just won’t buy one. (Black)

Although both groups exhibit sexually objectify- ing approaches, romantic approaches in quality and content are far more prevalent among Black men. They respond when asked to “describe ways you or your friends respect women on campus.”

I definitely think my fraternity brothers do a lot of stuff that make them [women] feel appreciated like getting them flowers; whether write them a poem, whether it’s just tell them they look beautiful. (Black)

I think you have to treat women with respect. I think because of how society is I think a lot of males have been misshapen to be like the world leader; the domi- nant figure in the relationship. They wear the pants in the relationship. I feel like I would treat a woman the way that I would want to be treated. (Black)

Conversely, many White men describe a very different notion of respecting women.

We respect women. We won’t take advantage of them if they’re wasted. If she’s puking in our bathroom, one of the pledges will get her a ride home. (White) One way that I respect women? A lot of ways. I’ll never ask if she needs a ride home after we hookup. I’ll let her bring it up or let her spend the night. You respect a girl more if you let her stay. (White)

Black and White differences are also evident in re- sponses to “what do you consider a serious relation- ship?” White men understand a serious relationship primarily in terms of physical monogamy, whereas Black men define serious relationships in terms of so- cioemotional exchanges.

R : If you’re in a serious relationship, you shouldn’t be making out . . . that’s wrong.

I : So serious relationships are when you don’t cheat on a girl.

R : No. You shouldn’t be making out in front of people. If you have a girlfriend you can’t be like all over girls at parties. (White)

Serious relationship is pretty much a basic under- standing that two people are together. You have some- body to talk to; somebody who is going to be there on the other end of the phone call. When you leave that message they’re calling back. Maybe at night you got somebody to cuddle with. Somebody that could pos- sibly cook for you. Somebody that might be taking you out, picking you up. Somebody that is worrying about what you’re doing. (Black)

Twelve of the 15 Black fraternity men explain that having someone to “share” and do “special” things with is the best thing about being in a serious relationship.

I’d say you get the companionship, the love. You’ve got somebody there in daytime hours, not just in night- time hours. The nine to five hours they’re going to be

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there to go out with you. They might send you out with some stuff, take you out to eat, go see a movie, and like it’s that constant companionship. (Black)

Comparatively, only 7 of the 15 White fraternity men mention that this is a benefit of a committed rela- tionship. Instead, 12 of them explain that having a “regular hookup” is the best thing about being in a relationship.

Lots of sex. You can have it every day without having to go out and get it. It’s a lot easier, but you do have to put up with shit occasionally. (White) The best thing is you don’t have to use a condom. It feels better and you can go right to it. And you got someone to call that you know what they want and knows what you like. (White)

In contrast, only 3 of the 15 Black men mention sexual convenience as a benefit of being in a committed relationship.

Perhaps most revealing are the responses to “describe a romantic evening.” Black men volunteer specific details without hesitation and reveal inti- mate knowledge of their partners, thoughtful plan- ning, and intricate execution.

I try to do romantic things on occasion, not just on occasions. On her birthday I surprised her. I told her we were going out to dinner. There is a whole day of events. I left a dozen roses in front of her door. I have a key to her apartment just because she likes to have that kind of security just in case I need to go over there and do something for her. When she came home I had prepared a dinner for her. I cooked her fa- vorite dinner which was spaghetti and she was really surprised. It was a candlelight dinner, lights were off, food all served, salad, and spaghetti. She really liked that and I gave her some more gifts, but the last thing I got her was a ring that she loves. (Black)

Of course, “romantic” does not necessarily imply equi- table gender relations. “Romantic” can also have nega- tive connotations for gender relations (e.g., women need to be taken care of, pampered, put on a ped- estal). Comparatively, most White men’s narratives imply less thought and planning. Only three of them could describe a romantic evening, two of which were

descriptions encompassing “dinner and a movie,” preferably an “expensive establishment.”

I clean up, shave, put on a nice shirt with a nice pair of pants, you come out of the car, you wait for her, open the door for her. Nice expensive restaurant; something with a good reputation. Maybe some- where someone’s parents would take them, because that lets them know you’re dropping some cheddar, you know, you’re dropping some money. Have some easy conversation, then come back have a few more drinks, and then, you know, {laughs}. (White)

Another White participant says, “Well, on her birthday I got her an iPod. She loved it. I took her out to dinner, an expensive dinner.’’

Finally, the language used by White fraternity men to describe women in gender interactions sug- gests sexually objectifying approaches, whereas the language exhibited most frequently by Black frater- nity men implies more romantic approaches. White men commonly refer to women as “chicks,” “girls,” and other belittling terms. Conversely, Black men generally use more “respectful” terms like “women,” “ladies,” and “females” or refer to individuals by name.8 As seen in many quotations throughout the article, the examples below illustrate the role of lan- guage regarding gender relations.

I know this one time I was real drunk, a little too flirtatious with a female who was actually a friend of mine. I did—I was not trying to hook up with her. Ac- tually, she was trying to hook up with me. And when the alcohol mixed with the flirtatious lady, mixing with me not driving having to be at her house that night. I did regret it when I woke up the next morning {laughs}. (Black) When the booze settles in you can make mistakes and you’ll screw up with a “frat rat” or something. (White)

Collectively, Black excerpts normally acknowledge women’s agency, whereas the White accounts typically display the use of the passive voice, whereby a woman is always acted on and never acting. Black men empha- size more romanticism in their accounts regarding ex- periences with and attitudes about women. However, these differences are not solely related to race.

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n o r m at i v e i n s t i t u t i o n a l a r r a n g e m e n t s s t r u c t u r e a p p r o a c h e s t o w a r d w o m e n

We find that differences in men’s approaches toward women are structured by normative institutional ar- rangements centering on community size and living arrangements. Participant accounts suggest that the size of their respective racial communities on campus and the presence or absence of a fraternity house un- derlie racial differences in romantic versus sexually ob- jectifying approaches toward women.

g r e e k a n d r a c i a l ly b a s e d c o m m u n i t i e s

Fraternity men are concerned about their individual and group reputations when making gender relation choices. Thus, they aim to steer clear of certain social scenes to preserve their status as elite men. In the fol- lowing accounts, participants indicate that to maintain their reputations they normally will not “hookup” with low-status women. We asked, “Are there any women you wouldn’t hookup with?”

Fat girls. I stay away from them. Sluts too. They’re dis- gusting. I don’t need to hookup with that, that’s not our [his fraternity] style. (White) Everyone has the one, two, or three girls that they’re like what the hell was I doing? But you don’t want to have too many. I mean it’s good to hookup, but you don’t want to do it with a girl that’s easy. If it’s a girl that every guy wants and you bring her back it’s like, “Wow! You hooked up with that girl? That’s impres- sive!” It feels good. If you hookup with an ugly girl, your friends will give you shit for it. (White) Yes. They’re not attractive [laughs]. That might sound mean, but that’s what they are. Not attractive girls. I don’t think there’s no woman here that’s higher than what we think we can reach. And then lower, yes there is a group of people that you should just not touch. I hear a lot of guys in other fraternities say, “Man I wish I could get a girl like that.” Instead, we just get the girl like that. (Black)

White fraternity men indicate that the “word” gets around easily within the Greek community regarding gender interactions. They normally engage in a variety of unspoken rules to preserve their reputations. The following White participant describes the “card” rule.

R : You got one card to play. You can hookup with two girls in the same house [sorority organiza- tion] and you might be alright. As long as you don’t piss off the first one. If you do, you’re done. You won’t have a chance with any other girls in that house. But you can’t play the card unless some time has passed.

I : How much time do you need? R : It can’t be the same weekend for sure. Probably

after a week or so you should be okay. (White) The Greek community seems to hold White fra-

ternity men accountable to sorority women. As the quotation above alludes, it is only for reasons of saving face that will allow them access to other women in the same sorority. Another White par- ticipant describes how cheating could result in a bad reputation if he got caught.

I : What would happen if you got caught cheating? R : The way I could see it [cheating] affecting some-

thing is if it’s a sorority girl you fuck over. I : You can’t screw with a sorority sister? R : You could, but you could get the name, you’re an

asshole, you’re a player, or something like that. I mean it might. It could spread around the [her sorority] house. Then you’re Blacklisted. (White)

Although repercussions exist with soror- ity women, there are an abundance of non-Greek women with no reputational constraints. The large number and high percentage of White students give White fraternity men an ample pool of women not connected to the Greek community. When relating with non-Greek women or GDIs,9 White fraternity men do not have to worry about “the word” getting around. Moreover, White fraternity men can disas- sociate from the fraternity, blend into the crowd, and interact as they please.

R : GDIs come here and it’s like sensory overload. They are like in awe. If you’re in awe, it’s like so easy. {laughs} You can say anything to a GDI. Adam makes girls cry.

I : He wouldn’t do that to a sorority girl? R : You make a sorority girl cry she’s going to tell all

her friends. “I was at XYZ [fraternity] and this guy made me cry and he’s such an asshole.” If you say it to a GDI, she’s going home and you’re probably

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never going to see her again and she’s not going to tell all of XYZ [sorority] that you said this and you’re not going to have a whole sorority that hates you. (White)

Black fraternity men face a different organiza- tional structure. These men feel that they cannot “do things like other guys.”

Because there’s only seven [Black Greek] organiza- tions on campus, we have a huge impact on the Black race here. Where there’s like 750 different [White] organizations, their impact is not as severe. It’s not as deep, especially cause they have more people than our race. (Black) It’s kind a like being on the basketball team or being on a football team. You know what I’m saying? It’s kinda like “Eta” [his fraternity name] puts you on the next level. Like you’re Black Greek but you are like the . . . you are supposed to be representing the Black Greek. It’s kinda hard to get that out, but when we do something we are supposed to be setting the bar for everybody else. It’s like a known thing that we suppose to be setting a bar. You know what I mean? (Black)

Black fraternity men, and many Black students, cannot overcome the reputational constraints of the small Black population. Black men report being very conscious of their behavior when interacting with women. Although White fraternity men can generally be anonymous and “get off” safely, Black fraternity men perceive themselves to be constantly visible and therefore continuously held accountable for their treatment of women.

t h e f r at e r n i t y h o u s e

The organizational structure of “the house” facilitates sex, discourages intimacy, and is used as a resource, which affords White fraternity men control of sexual environments. For instance, these men report that women normally engage in relationships to be associ- ated with a particular fraternity and to have access to fraternity functions and/or alcohol.

I know I’m Jack “B” [“B” represents his fraternity’s name], and there’s probably a Jack “C,” but I don’t care. I know she just wants to come to our parties and know someone there. (White)

College-aged women younger than 21 years old seem to rely on fraternities for basic ingredients of the mainstream version of the college experience— big parties and alcohol. In fact, an interview with a White participant was interrupted twice because of orders for alcohol placed by an ex-girlfriend and an- other woman from the dorm.

“The house” also facilitates a convenient means of engaging sexual behavior. A participant discusses the difference between living in “the house” and living off-campus.

You meet a lot more girls in the house. The frat [house] is easier, a lot easier too in that sense cause coming back from the bars, it’s not necessarily like “let’s go back to my place.” Instead it’s like, “Let’s go back to the frat [house] and have a couple more drinks.” It’s like you don’t sound like you’re trying to hook up with them. “Let’s go back to my house and just . . . get it on” . . . [laughs] . . . It’s easier. (White)

“The house” also constrains men’s gender rela- tions. Although the fraternity houses at GU are im- pressive mansion-like structures, they are chaotic, nonprivate spaces that promote nonromantic activi- ties. Most White fraternities require a “live-in” period. In the first year, members sleep in cold dorms, which are rooms composed of dozens of bunk beds.

It’s like fifty of us sleep together. But you put your beds together and have all these sheets and stuff. It’s like a bungalow. But sometimes you can hear other people having sex. (White)

If members earn enough “house points” for represent- ing the fraternity well through activities like philan- thropy or sports, they then typically live with three roommates in a tiny bunk-style room.

White fraternity men indicate that they could never “get away” with having romantic time. A White participant says, “There’s so many people running around that house, someone’s bound to see or hear something.” The public nature of frater- nity living arrangements is also confirmed in our field notes. While entering a fraternity room to do an interview, the interviewee and interviewer in- terrupted a roommate who was masturbating. The interviewer reported surprise that the masturbator

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seemed only slightly uncomfortable with the inter- ruption. This suggests that interruptions like these are commonplace.

Although privacy would intuitively be linked to more sexually objectifying approaches, in the context of Greek social life, a lack of privacy facilitates these approaches by preventing intimacy. While having other people as witnesses should reduce the degree of exploitation, Greek social life is a normative insti- tutional arrangement structured by hegemonic mas- culinity with sexual prowess as one of its essential ideals. Thus, men who engage in public displays of sexual objectification are applauded. A participant describes one evening in the cold dorm.

Lunch on Fridays are the best. It’s like all the stories from Thursday night. It’s pretty funny. It’s a good time. For instance, Tom came into the cold dorm and he was with his girlfriend and they were really drunk. And he’s like, “We’re having sex.” I was like, “You should have heard him. He punished her.”10 (White)

Romantic displays, because they are not in concert with hegemonic ideals, are sanctioned. For example, participants indicate that men who make romantic displays like saying “I love you” or opting for alone time with a woman over “hanging with the guys” will quickly be referred to as “pussy-whipped.”

You don’t want to be known as pussy-whipped. Guys that are pussy-whipped are wimps. They just let their girl tell them what to do. You can’t count on them. They’ll tell you one thing, but if the girl says some- thing different, they’re doing what she says. (White)

Another White participant characterizes how public displays of romanticism are considered to be uncool by the general Greek community.

I don’t know how romantic it gets. Am I like going to set up a table in my frat room and light a candle? It’d be cool, if I had the balls to do it. (White)

When asked directly “why don’t you and your friends have romantic evenings,” a White participant explains.

Frat houses aren’t the place for that [romantic behav- ior]. Have you looked around? The place is filthy and you have no privacy. None. I shower with five guys;

people always coming in and out. You’re never alone. I used to feel weird about it [sex], but now I don’t. Like I used to try to be quiet, but I’m having sex less than four feet from where my roommate, whose having sex with his girlfriend. You’re going to hear something. So you don’t worry about it. (White)

Conversely, Black fraternity men’s off-campus status offers private space for romantic relations. Most mem- bers are scattered across two- to four-person apart- ments and rental houses. Interviews conducted in bedrooms at Black residencies were devoid of inter- ruptions, whereas interviews with Whites had three to four interruptions, on average. Field notes docu- ment that Black men’s rooms are frequently decorated with expressions of personal achievement and style, whereas White men’s rooms are often decorated with mainstream posters and sexually objectifying appeals. Consider the following field notes.

We conducted the interview in E3’s room. He had mafia posters around his room from the movies God- father and Scarface. He also had a Dr. Seuss book and a pimp poster in his room as well. E3 is a martial arts champion and has several of his large trophies in his room and around the house. (Black) The room was filthy. It felt dirty like it hadn’t been disinfected in a while. There were many posters and artifacts on the walls of beer or liquor companies and one wall decoration was of some Dr. Dre records. The coffee table had three Playboy magazines laid out in a fan-like shape and the windows had two suction cup Playboy Bunnies hanging off of them. (White)

A Black participant comments on his interactions with the decoration styles of White men.

I go through some of these [White] male’s rooms and that’s all they got—they got posters. I mean I just can’t have no posters of naked women just all around my room. Like when you walk in you see nothing but nude! (Black)

In sum, normative institutional arrangements—the presence or absence of a fraternity “house” and the size of the Greek and racially based community in the larger student population—afford Blacks and Whites different opportunity structures for romantic and sexual relations. The small, highly visible and insular

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Black communities normally force Black fraternity men to be conscious about their positions as leaders and role models, thus affecting their experiences with and treatment of women. This consciousness often leads Black fraternity men to conveying more romantic approaches toward women. Because of the size of the White student population, White fraternity men often find relief from reputational constraints. “The house” facilitates White fraternity men’s relations with women by putting them in control of sexual environments. At the same time, however, the “public” nature of frater- nity houses constrains gender relations by providing only nonprivate and unromantic spaces, thereby pro- moting more sexually objectifying approaches.

c u lt u r e m e d i at i n g n o r m at i v e i n s t i t u t i o n a l a r r a n g e m e n t s

Although we have emphasized the importance of struc- ture in approaches toward women, some may assert that maturation or relationship status may be factors. Black fraternity men are one year older and further along in college. Because of different recruitment prac- tices between Black and White fraternities, most Blacks do not become members until their sophomore or junior years, whereas Whites primarily “rush” during their freshman year. Hence, the number of years Blacks and Whites have been fraternity members is roughly the same. So this 1 year age difference should not be overstressed. More importantly, we compared the re- sponses of older White fraternity men with those of their younger counterparts. We find their approaches toward women to be similar. Because Black men tend to be in more committed relationships, it could be argued that higher relationship rates result in more romantic approaches. Our data do not offer much support for this argument. White men in committed relationships still report more sexually objectifying approaches than Black men. Comparatively, Black men who are not in committed relationships report similar romantic ap- proaches to Black men in committed relationships.

Religiosity, however, seems to play a factor in approaches toward women, albeit mediating norma- tive institutional arrangements. A White participant explains why he is still a virgin. He says, “Well, be- cause I’m a Christian. I’m waiting to share that with

my wife. It’s a faith thing.’’ While explaining how he manages to be a virgin, he explains that “they [women] just have to understand. I don’t do that [in- tercourse]. It’s been tough because girls say ‘are you serious?’” He continues to explain his frustrations with the Greek community’s emphasis on sexuality.

I’m sure you’re not going to find too many twenty- two-year-old virgins around. It’s kind of funny too, because it is almost frowned upon around here. It’s almost like you’re the Black sheep of the crew, be- cause it’s socially acceptable to have sex and stuff like that. You see me, nobody ever believes it. But it’s almost like a stigma that you’re kind of labeled with people that know. Always when people find out it’s a surprise to them. (White)

Another participant explains why he does not hookup as often as his fraternity brothers.

Not as much as some of the guys in this house. I’m not that way. It’s a conscious decision. I need to really like the girl and feel comfortable. My parents have been together forever. You don’t just do that kind of stuff with just anybody. (White)

Although the two negative cases highlighted above demonstrate the significance of cultural values, they also stress the importance of normative institutional arrangements for approaches toward women. These men feel uncomfortable and are frequently ridiculed and scrutinized by their fraternity brothers and women for not adhering to the hegemonic ideals reinforced by the normative institutional arrangements of Greek social life. Moreover, they are the exceptions that prove the rule.

As an added point of emphasis, focus group and ethnographic field note excerpts highlight partici- pants’ own awareness of the importance of normative institutional arrangements. When Black men were asked in a focus group if things would be different if GU was not a PWI, and instead a Historically Black College or University (HBCU), they unanimously responded, “Yes.” If Black men had a house, they think their behavior would be similar to their White counterparts. They perceive “the house” as a place to socialize in large groups that is free from police contact and potentially hostile strangers. If they were

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the “majority,” they perceive being free from the in- cessant scrutiny of the general campus community. Black men explain how “nice it would be” to not have to represent “every Black man on the planet.” An eth- nographic field note is fitting here.

While attending Etas step practice, the members began discussing their Spring Break plans. They planned to go “road tripping” to Panama City Beach. I asked why Panama City? They replied that it was cheap and a place where they could go and meet new women who do not go to GU. I asked why this was so important. They replied because the new women cannot come back to school and tell everyone else what they did and who they were with. One member replied, “We can just wild out!” (Black)

When White men were asked in a focus group to imagine life without “the house,” they replied, “It would be like being a GDI.” They further explained that “the house” is “like a face” which enables them to “meet girls.” White men also mirror issues of safety indicated by Black men. For instance, they are con- cerned that if they lose “the house,” they would have to go to bars, small house-parties, or third-party ven- dors and would then have to worry about drinking and driving, public intoxication, and police breaking up parties. In other words, White fraternity men per- ceive that losing “the house” would make them “just like everybody else.”

d i s c u s s i o n a n d c o n c l u s i o n

We have explored whether there are racial differences in men’s approaches toward women. By characteriz- ing elite Black and White fraternity men’s understand- ings of their sexual and romantic relationships, this research fills three critical empirical gaps. First, we ex- plore the perspectives and insights of a group that is often implicated in mainstream discourses in roman- tic and sexual relations on college campuses—high- status fraternity men. Second, we explicitly compare Black and White men. Third, we examine how the normative institutional arrangements of institutions shape the performances of masculinities.

Our findings suggest that both Black and White fra- ternity men sexually objectify women; however, Black fraternity men exhibit more romantic approaches in

their perceptions of their relations with women. Black college social scenes, particularly Black Greek scenes, are often more gender egalitarian. Although the small size of the Black community and the organizational structure of the Black Greek system generally force Black men to be more conscious about their treatment of women, the organizational structure of the White Greek community facilitates sexually objectifying ap- proaches toward women. White fraternity men also have a larger pool of non-Greek women to engage; therefore, they are held less accountable for their re- lations with women because of a hyper level of ano- nymity. Although the presence of a fraternity house enables White fraternity men to be in control of sexual environments, it also constrains gender relations by offering nonprivate and nonintimate spaces.

Unlike the lower-class men in studies by Majors and Billson (1992) and Anderson (1999), Black men in this study are more affiliated with DuBois’s (1903, 1939) Talented Tenth and double-consciousness con- cepts.11 For Black men who identify as or with this elite group, the racialization of high-status institu- tions holds them more accountable for their treat- ment of women and constrains their approaches. As a result, some may assert these Black men’s attitudes and values about the treatment of women are differ- ent from other Black men and their White fraternity male counterparts. Although there is support for this perspective, particularly because Black frater- nity men stress more holistic qualities of women and tend to perceive more aspects of romanticism to be masculine, we argue the influential effects normative institutional arrangements have on shaping racial and status differences in men’s gender scripts sur- faces in the behavior or at the performance level of these men. To save face and status, Black fraternity men have to be more concerned about how their in- teractions with women are perceived by others. This leads to a unique set of reputational boundaries and constraints for Black fraternity men not exhibited by White fraternity men.

Our emphasis on normative institutional arrange- ments does not deny the presence of other factors that may be implicated in racial differences. For example, Black men in this study report being more religious than White men. Therefore, we would still expect for

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them to have cultural values that buffer sexually ob- jectifying approaches. Less religious Black men, how- ever, still exhibit more romantic approaches than the White men in the sample. Thus, we contend these patterns are an artifact of the racialized level of ac- countability and visibility within the normative in- stitutional arrangements of campus social life. Our research confirms that when normative institutional arrangements are in concert with mainstream hege- monic ideals, sexual objectifications are more likely to occur.

Our findings offer an interesting parallel to Armstrong, Hamilton, and Sweeney’s (2006) ethno- graphic examination of women who reside on a wom- en’s floor in a “party dorm.” They find that female college students, especially those in their first year and under the legal drinking age, rely on fraternities for parties and alcohol, and consequently, relinquish power and control of social and sexual environments to these men. They conclude that individual, organi- zational, and institutional practices (e.g., prohibiting alcohol in dormitories) contribute to higher levels of sexual assault.

Our research further argues that structural set- tings shape how actors perceive others (e.g., as sexual, romantic, and/or holistic others) and reflect the racial and gender dynamics of college campuses including racial segregation and skewed gender ratios. Along these lines, hegemonic masculinity is about much more than gender beliefs and masculine perfor- mances. Hegemonic masculinity is also about nor- mative accountability structures and the preservation of normative personal, social, and institutional re- sources. Privileges across gender, race, and status di- vides afford White fraternity men less accountability when performing a hegemonic masculine self during interactions with women. As shown here, under cer- tain institutional arrangements, racial disadvantage, as with Black fraternity men, can decrease gender inequality and reduce a traditional hegemonic style of engagement toward women. However, race and/or class advantage, as with White fraternity men, and disadvantage, as with the Black men in Majors and Billson’s (1992) and Anderson’s (1999) studies, can increase gender inequality and propel a hegemonic presentation of self such as the “cool pose.”

Now that we have a greater understanding of the importance of not just being a racial/ethnic minor- ity but also being a numerical minority or majority and how these normative institutional arrangements structure the gender relations of high-status men on campus, future research should investigate how common these patterns are among individuals across a range of institutional settings. Specifically, our re- search has implications for masculinities and its rela- tionships with White men at small colleges, or where they are the minority group, and men of other racial/ ethnic groups in institutional settings where they are the majority group. Although these propositions cannot be sufficiently answered in this study, it does provide a blueprint for how scholars should approach research in this area.

Particularly useful in extrapolating the findings presented here is DeLamater’s (1987) recreational- centered approach,12 whereby approaches toward others are facilitated by contextual and structural fac- tors. Applied here, the recreational approach assumes that actors can exhibit both romantic and sexually objectifying approaches based on the dynamics of the structural setting. Men and women do not fit into monolithic groups. Although the literature has tra- ditionally established a gender dichotomy whereby men exhibit sexual prowess and women cling to romantic ideals, we find men exhibit both sexually objectifying and romantic approaches. By integrat- ing the recreational approach into the discourse on romantic and sexual relations, scholars will be better equipped to extrapolate the interconnections be- tween masculinities, sexualities, gender inequality, and race.

Taken together, our findings suggest that efforts to increase gender equality on college campuses should center on increasing the perceived accountability of men by offering social spaces that enable commu- nicative and intimate gender relations. For example, Boswell and Spade (1996) find that fraternity houses and commercial bars that are low-risk for sexual as- sault encourage men and women to get acquainted. Although the data implicate the presence of a frater- nity house in unequal gender relations, they do not necessarily suggest that the elimination of fraternity houses is required to accomplish gender equality.

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Many sorority houses do not seem to have these prob- lems because they have strict guidelines regarding gender ratios, parties, alcohol, and overnight guests (Armstrong, Hamilton, and Sweeney 2006). Thus, the normative institutional arrangements that afford men—in this context White fraternity men—a lack of accountability to exploit hegemonic prowess must be

restructured to alter the level of accountability that encourages gender inequality. Our study concludes with an optimistic suggestion: by promoting nor- mative institutional arrangements that facilitate ac- countability structures and romantic and equitable approaches, improvements toward gender equality are possible.

N O T E S

1. Allport (1954) uses “sociocultural” to refer to the intersection between class (status) and caste (race).

2. Previous research has suggested that Black men’s performances of masculinities are constrained by their marginalized status within the racial paradigm (Connell 1987, 1995; Kimmel 1987, 2006; Kimmel and Messner 1989; Hearn 2004). We advance this thesis by focusing on the inter- sections of race and status within a specific institutional structure (e.g., fraternity house).

3. Edwards (2008) states, “White structural advantage is Whites’ disproportionate control or in- fluence over nearly every social institution in this country. This affords Whites the ability to structure social life so that it privileges them. White normativity is the normalization of Whites’ cultural practices . . . their dominant social location over other racial groups as accepted as just how things are. White normativity also privileges Whites because they, unlike nonwhites, do not need to justify their way of being.”

4. The statistics concerning GU come from Student Activities and Greek Affairs. 5. On-campus status means the fraternity has a fraternity house on university property, whereas

off-campus status means the fraternity does not. 6. Since the founding of Phi Beta Kappa (now an honor society), Greek organizations have been

an integral part of colleges and universities for more than 200 years (Brown, Parks, and Phillips 2005). Fraternities are national organizations composed of college students that are men, usually designated by Greek letters. Most fraternities were founded on principles such as scholarship, community service, sound learning, and leadership and are distinguished by highly symbolic and secretive rituals. Greek fraternities and sororities are normally high-status organizations on collegiate campuses. Members of Greek fraternities and sororities are often members of student government and honor societies, are frequently some of the most recognizable student leaders on campus, and have higher grades and graduation rates than other students (Kimbrough and Hutcheson 1998).

7. Some of the most influential and celebrated African American leaders—Martin Luther King, W. E. B. DuBois, Thurgood Marshall, and Maya Angelou—became members of nationally recog- nized African American fraternities and sororities. Having such a distinguished lineage of past members often makes members of African American fraternities and sororities feel that they must uphold an esteemed legacy (Kimbrough and Hutcheson 1998).

8. Throughout the duration of the project, women were categorized as many sexually objectify- ing and derogatory terms by Black and White fraternity men including “bitch,” “hoe” (whore), “skank,” “freak,” and “tramp.” Most of these names are given to fraternity groupies or women who are perceived to be sexually promiscuous.

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men: A comparison between African-Americans and European Americans. Sex Roles 47:259–72. Majors, Richard G., and Janet Billson. 1992. Cool pose: The dilemmas of black manhood in America.

New York, NY: Lexington Books. Martin, P. Yancey, and R. A. Hummer. 1989. Fraternities and rape on campus. Gender and Society

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Massey, Douglas S., Camille Z. Charles, Garvey F. Lundy, and Mary L. Fischer. 2003. The source of the river: The social origins of freshmen at America’s selective colleges and universities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Millham, J., and L. E. Smith. 1986. Sex role differential among Black and White Americans: A com- parative study. The Journal of Black Psychology 7:77–90.

Morgan, David L. 1997. Focus groups and qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Peralta, Robert L. 2007. College alcohol use and the embodiment of hegemonic masculinity among

European American men. Sex Roles 56:741–56. Ragin, Charles C. 1994. Constructing social research: The unity and diversity of method. Thousand Oaks,

CA: Sage. Reskin, Barbara F. 2003. Including mechanisms in our models of ascriptive inequality: 2002 presi-

dential address. American Sociological Review 68:1–21. Rizzo, Thomas A., William A. Corsaro, and John E. Bates. 1992. Ethnographic methods and inter-

pretive analysis: Expanding the methodological options of psychologists. Developmental Review 12:101–23.

Staples, R. 1982. Black masculinity: The black males’ role in American society. San Francisco, CA: Black Scholar.

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K A R E N P Y K E

Karen Pyke (2010) An Intersectional Approach to Resistance and Complicity: The Case of Racialised Desire among Asian American Women, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 31:1, 81-94, DOI: 10.1080/07256860903477704. Reproduced with permis- sion of Taylor & Francis.

A romantic preference for white men among Asian American women is a perennial topic of con- troversy, anger, and pain among Asian Americans. In 1993, the US magazine Asian Week posed the question “Are Asian American Men Wimps?” While the ques- tion is disturbing enough, the response from readers was even more so. One Asian American man described a dinner discussion prompted by the question:

The Asian American women in the room proceeded, one after another, to describe how Asian American men were too passive, too weak, too uncertain, too boring, too traditional, too abusive, too domineering, too ugly, too greasy, too short, too . . . Asian. Several described how they preferred white men, and how they never had and never would date an Asian man.

This study explores the power of racialised gender discourses and controlling images of Asian American masculinity in shaping the racialised romantic de- sires of heterosexual Asian American women. Based on interviews with unmarried, heterosexual, second-generation Korean and Vietnamese American women, I find widely circulating discourses that glo- rify white masculinity and denigrate Asian masculin- ity inform many respondents’ romantic preference for white men. Relying on the concepts of resistance and complicity, I pose the following questions: Should we interpret Asian American women’s romantic preference

for white men as compliance with white (male) supe- riority and the reproduction of a hierarchy of racialised masculinities? Or, since the belief that white men are more gender egalitarian than Asian ethnic men often motivates this racial preference, should we interpret it as resistance to gender oppression? Or are both resis- tance and complicity at play? My inquiry focuses on the limits of resistance given recent feminist work that interprets women’s cross-racial desires for white West- ern men as resistance.

r e s i s ta n c e a n d c o m p l i c i t y

Discussion in the social sciences and humanities of gender, racial, class, and colonial oppressions, in- cluding their intersections, is rife with reference to resistance. Resistance has much intuitive appeal to lib- eration scholars as it accords agency to the subjugated, inspires oppositional politics and is a powerful re- source in identity politics (Pyke “Defying the Taboo”). Attention to resistance also corrects for Western femi- nism’s depiction of Third World women as the epitome of the passive, oppressed, gendered subject (Narayan “Essence of Culture”; Ong). Indeed, the current fixa- tion with resistance reflects a shift from an earlier view of the oppressed as passive victims, which many scholars attacked for portraying the subordinated as helpless dupes. As Chappell (210–11) observes, victim

12. AN INTERSECTIONAL APPROACH TO RESISTANCE AND COMPLICITY

The Case of Racialised Desire among Asian American Women

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was inseparable “from its hitchhiking adjective, pas- sive,” which, by implying the inadequacy and pathol- ogy of the oppressed, easily expanded to blaming the victim. In correcting this tendency, liberation schol- ars bestowed “the gift of agency” upon the oppressed (Chappell 207). The resulting conflation of agency and resistance transformed the subordinated from passive victims to active resistors. Hence, for the oppressed, to act is to resist: “I am, therefore I resist” (Mohanty 208). The result is what I call the model resistor stereotype— the oppressed are now treated as super resistors “able to leap tall” structures of inequality “in a single bound” (Preamble to Superman, US radio show 1940; Pyke “Defying the Taboo”). This is not a benign stereotype, however. Take, for example, the case of black women who comply with controlling images that cast them as strong and ever-resilient by denying their hardships and depression, thus their oppression. As a result, they are more likely to suffer alone in silence and less likely to seek help and retribution (Beauboeuf-Lafontant). The shift from an emphasis on women’s victimisation to “agency in contemporary feminist scholarship un- derestimates the role of power in shaping social rela- tions. This error discounts the significance of class and race (and other social structural forms of inequality) in shaping the experiences of different groups of women” (Andersen 443). Particularly disconcerting is how this fixation on resistance normalises domination (Bordo). Even worse is how the glorification and celebration of resistance can inadvertently pay tribute to the oppres- sive conditions that make resistance necessary (Pyke “Defying the Taboo”).

By criticising the current emphasis on resistance, I am not recommending a return to the passive victim approach. Rather, we need to shift from the West- ern penchant for either/or thinking (Collins), as in seeing either resistance or complicity. Further, when we interpret individual action as resistance and agency, we must be careful not to forget larger power structures or “what people do to women” (Andersen 443). When we define as resistance any individual act designed to increase the mobility of the oppressed, we risk overlooking how such actions can rely on and reproduce larger structures of domination. We need to consider how structures of power can direct and

co-opt resistance, rendering it ineffective, or worse, obscuring how it reproduces the very structures it in- tends to oppose. Given the simultaneity of systems of domination, like gender, race, class, colonialism, and sexuality (Collins; Crenshaw), liberation schol- ars must reflect on how actions that resist one form of oppression (e.g., gender) can be complicit with domination on intersecting fields of oppression (e.g., race and/or class), and how resistance can be compro- mised by the complex relations of power it confronts.

For these reasons, I approach actions and ideolo- gies characterised as resistance with circumspection. I do so by adapting Matsuda’s method for under- standing the intersectionality or “interconnection of subordination” by “asking the other question” (64). Matsuda explains: “When I see something that looks racist, I ask, ‘Where is the patriarchy in this?’ When I see something that looks sexist, I ask, ‘Where is the heterosexism in this?’” (64–65). And so on with other forms of oppression. I adapt Matsuda’s method for examining the limits of resistance by asking: Where is the complicity with racial oppression in this resis- tance to gender oppression? Where is the resistance or challenge to gender inequality in this complicity with racial domination? Asking the other question(s) to uncover the simultaneity of oppression takes us beyond ill-fitting either/or models of resistance and accommodation (agency and structure). Applying this method to the intersectional study of cross-racial and international romantic and sexual relationships can enhance that literature which, as I discuss next, has often relied on binary models of resistance and complicity.

f e m i n i s t r e s e a r c h o n g l o b a l c r o s s - r a c i a l r o m a n c e

Feminist scholars have long studied the effects of global inequalities on relationships and sexual exchanges be- tween Western males and non-Western women. This research initially framed Western men’s romantic and sexual liaisons with (putatively impoverished) non- Western women through tourism, the “mail-order bride industry” and international matchmaking ser- vices as exploitation (Glodava and Onizuka; Narayan

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“‘Male-Order’ Brides”). Globally circulating imaginar- ies that cast Asian, Latin American, Caribbean, and East European women as more subservient than their allegedly liberated white counterparts in the USA and Western Europe drives Western men’s demand for non-Western women. Fed up with the independence, career-orientation, materialism, assertiveness and egalitarian expectations associated with white Western women, Western men pursue traditional, subservient wives from abroad, or immigrant populations in their own country (Constable; Schaeffer-Grabiel “Planet- Love.com”; “Cyberbrides”).

Early feminist work focused on the motivations of the men and the stereotypes shaping their de- sires while ignoring the women’s subjective experi- ences and racialised desires, treating them simply as passive victims. More recent scholarship considers how idealised images of white Western masculin- ity influence the romantic desires and strategic liai- sons of women in non-Western countries (Brennan; Hirakawa; Kelsky; Schaeffer-Grabiel “Planet-Love. com”; “Cyberbrides”; Yuh), and among immigrant groups in the West (Kim; Nemoto). Women who pursue white Western romantic partners through travel, immigration, the Internet, matchmaking ser- vices, and sex tourism are now cast as strategically engaging with white hegemonic masculinity to resist the “patriarchy” of their homeland or co-ethnic men in the immigrant communities of the West, at the same time that they are re-generating discourses that support white Western men’s global dominance. These women view Western men as romantic, gender egalitarian “white knights in shining armour” who can rescue them from a so-called “ethnic patriarchy” (Nemoto 5) and provide economic security, access to careers, cosmopolitanism and an elevated status (Brennan; Kelsky; Kim; Nemoto; Schaeffer-Grabiel “Planet-Love.com”; “Cyberbrides”; Yuh). While this research focuses on cross-border imagining, Nemoto also finds Asian American women who have married or dated white American men invoke this imagery in describing white men as offering greater mobility and gender egalitarianism than Asian American men.

The argument that non-Western and/or women of colour deploy discourses glorifying white Western masculinity to resist co-ethnic male dominance is

largely without empirical examination of the local patriarchies and gender arrangements being resisted. Indeed, the presumption of “ethnic patriarchy” is troublesome given its origin in the very same West- ern ideological notions that cast Western men as egalitarian Prince Charmings who will save women of non-Western origins from the ensconced patriar- chy of co-ethnic men. Another problem in casting this as a resistance strategy of mobility is the implica- tion that it is successful. Many women who pursue Western partners in search of a better life never suc- ceed in finding a partner, or, if they do, do not receive the expected rewards (Brennan; Narayan “‘Male- Order’ Brides”). The over-emphasis on individual resistance in this literature gives too little attention to the project of collective uplift. These concerns inform my analysis of Asian American women’s in- terview accounts of their romantic preference for white American men or for men who display charac- teristics associated with white men. I suggest this is a limited resistance strategy as it complies with oppres- sive ideologies that maintain the racialised hierarchy of masculinities.

m e t h o d s

This study consists of intensive interviews with 61 Korean American women and 67 Vietnamese Ameri- can women, all of whom identify as heterosexual. These data are from a larger study of adaptation, family, and racial and gender experiences among 429 male and female Korean and Vietnamese American children of immigrant parents. The interview guide for the current analysis included open-ended questions about respondents’ ideal partner, dating experiences, racial preferences for dating and marriage, and their parents’ racial preferences for their future spouse. Ad- ditional probes about the reasons for their preferences were asked to uncover respondents’ racial assump- tions. The author, who is white, trained student assis- tants, a majority of whom are second-generation Asian Americans, to conduct the face-to-face interviews, which were tape-recorded, transcribed, and coded into thematic categories for ease of analysis. The analysis focused on interviews in which respondents describe a romantic preference for white males and/or the traits

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they associate with white and Asian American men. Most interviews lasted from 45 to 60 minutes, and a smaller number from two to three hours.

Respondents range in age from 18 to 34, and aver- age 22 years. All respondents were either born in the USA to immigrant parents or immigrated at an aver- age age of five years. When designing the larger study of adaptation, I chose second-generation Vietnamese and Korean Americans as they constitute relatively new ethnic groups in the USA and have very different pathways of immigration. In 1996, when this study began, most in-depth study of immigrant adaptation examined only one ethnic group, contributing to a tendency to generalise the experience of one eth- nicity to all Asian ethnics. So as not to reiterate this shortcoming, I included two ethnic groups in this sample (for more on methods, see Pyke “The Normal American”).

Koreans and Vietnamese constitute a large pro- portion of recent Asian immigrants to southern Cali- fornia, the site of the study. More ethnic Vietnamese live in southern California than anywhere outside of Vietnam (Collet), and Los Angeles is home to the largest population of Korean Americans in the USA (Yu). The majority of respondents are students at two southern California universities where Asian Americans compose the largest racial group (over 40 per cent). Additional respondents were referred by students at these universities. Given the large local Asian American population, respondents who state a preference for white males are not responding to a lack of available heterosexual Asian American partners.

The analysis revealed a recurring and un- prompted tendency to glorify white masculinity and denigrate Asian masculinity in explaining a romantic preference for white men, or to describe difficulties in finding a compatible Asian American partner. The re- peated use of this discourse suggests its centrality as an interpretive frame in understanding racialised ro- mance. While many respondents did not invoke ste- reotypes of racialised masculinities, I focus on those who did as the goal of the current analysis is not to gauge the frequency of this phenomenon or make ethnic comparisons but, rather, to examine how this discourse is invoked and what its use suggests about

resistance and complicity. Thus my findings should not be misunderstood to suggest that this discourse informs the romantic desires of most respondents.

The stereotypes of Asian masculinity apply to both Asian and Asian American men, and respon- dents often refer to Asian American men simply as “Asian.” Rather than repeatedly referring to both Asian and Asian American men, I switch back and forth as do the respondents. In the findings, I pres- ent quotes that reflect broader patterns and identify respondents with pseudonyms.

f i n d i n g s

d i s c o u r s e o f r a c i a l i s e d m a s c u l i n i t i e s

Respondents, including many who do not prefer to date white men, regularly invoke stereotypes in con- structing Asian American men as the inferior inverse of white men. They describe Asian American men as “dominant,” “mean,” “dictators,” “not liking a girl who has too many opinions,” “treating women like property,” and “wife beaters.” They depict white men, on the other hand, as attractive, romantic, loving, sen- sitive, communicative, and gender egalitarian—traits they claim are lacking in Asian American men. Inah, a Korean American, observes, “Korean American men are very unaffectionate to their wives from what I see, and American [meaning white] men are more caring and they tend to love their wife a lot more than Korean American guys would” (emphasis added1).

Respondents commonly juxtaposed images of despotic, unloving Asian men against those of white men as romantic liberators in constructing two dif- ferent forms of racialised masculinity. As Mimi, a Korean American, states:

Most Asian guys have this expectation that Asian women belong at home and they shouldn’t go out at night, whereas I think a white person feels that a woman has a more equal status with the man, and she can do whatever she wants.

Similarly Jennifer, also Korean American, says:

Let me go ahead and make one comparison. I know I’m judging all the white guys from this one white guy [I dated], but white guys are very chivalrous. Maybe they don’t open doors and stuff like that, but they do

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what you would expect to only happen in fairy tales. Asian guys don’t do that. They don’t really give a shit.

Even though Jennifer acknowledges drawing on her experience with only one white man, she nonetheless uses him as confirmatory evidence of white and Asian men as polar opposites. Such over-generalisation is common in these narratives. Some respondents who have not dated or interacted much with Asian Ameri- can or white men admit their racialised assumptions are not based on actual contact. Mimi, who has never dated a white man, says:

So I was thinking maybe I should go for a Caucasian to marry because I’ll be happier, you know? [Inter- viewer asks: Why do you think marrying a Caucasian would make you happier?] Well, I’ve never really dated a Caucasian before, but I hear that most of them don’t treat their women like a possession. Like they want communication instead of the woman always doing what the man wants. Like in Korea, or actually many Asian cultures, the girl is expected to be like submissive and real quiet, not talk back to the hus- band, be the husband’s slave. I don’t think a white guy would be like that. If I married a white guy, then of course he would be nontraditional. But with a Korean guy, well, you do anything the guy says pretty much. It’s like they have this power over you that you can’t do anything about because it is not our place to [em- phasis added].

What Mimi “hears” and believes about racialised mas- culinities is based on the widely circulating imagery perpetuated by the white dominated society, shaping her expectations of white and Asian American men, rather than actual contact. As I describe next, these be- liefs also shape respondents’ interactions with men, affecting how they “see” Asian and white American men.

i n t e r n a l i s e d r a c i a l o p p r e s s i o n i n c o n s t r u c t i o n s o f a s i a n m a s c u l i n i t y

Several women refer to domineering fathers as epit- omising the despotism they associate with Asian American males, and to explain why they will not date co-ethnic males. In so doing, they assume Asian American men’s gender attitudes do not differ across generations, between men raised in Asia and the USA,

nor among Asian American male peers. They view co- ethnic males as bound to the gender dictates of their upbringing in immigrant families, which they pre- sume to be entirely male-dominated. This is another site where respondents construct Asian masculinity as monolithic and invariable. As Star, a Korean American, says:

I think my dad turned me off to Korean men. I don’t find them attractive and, like with my Korean friends, there is no way I could picture myself with someone like that. Because they are still into that old Korean thing where they want their women to be submissive and stuff. I mean, they won’t say it but you can tell.

Similarly, Jen, who is Vietnamese, states:

I am not attracted [to Vietnamese males] because I am thinking of the way my dad is. I love my dad but I would never marry someone like him. So that is probably why I tend to not look that way [toward Vietnamese males]. [ . . . ] My dad doesn’t understand why I am so outspoken, which is why someone like him would be very incompatible because we would always be arguing. You think that a Vietnamese guy was raised by [Vietnamese] parents so they must have given him their values. That is the way I think of it and that is why I don’t look that way.

In these examples, the attributes of one Asian man (their father) are generalised to all Asian men expand- ing a negative trait to the entire group. It is difficult to imagine white heterosexual women referring to their father’s dominance as a reason they prefer to date or marry a man who is not white. White male domination and privilege means that white men are not subjected to stereotypes based on the “bad” behaviour of a few white males. Racial oppression, on the other hand, including that which has been internalised by the oppressed, encourages the over-generalisation of the “bad” behaviour of a few men of colour to the entire group. In fact, respondents do not generalise the male dominance of their fathers to all males, but only to Asian males. Male dominance is not regarded as part of a cross-racial system of gender inequality but a ra- cialised feature of Asian masculinity. Meanwhile, in the case of white men, the positive traits of egalitarian- ism and chivalry associated with one white boyfriend are generalised to the entire group. This illustrates the

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power of white racial domination in winning the con- sent of the oppressed through the perpetuation and in- culcation of racist images. It is not a matter of “seeing is believing,” but rather, the racialised assumptions the dominant society teaches the oppressed shape how and what they see (Pyke and Johnson).

Latina scholar Laura Padilla observes that critical race theorists have yet to explore the sensitive topic of internalised oppression and white privilege in the selection of white spouses by people of colour. She admits her choice of a white husband may be due to associating infidelity with Latinos, even though she knows male infidelity has no racial boundaries.

I never believed that all Latino males were unfaithful, but my family history made me nervous. [ . . . ] When I experience this unease, am I unconsciously suc- cumbing to internalized racism by believing negative stereotypes about Latino men? My need to ask this question reveals one of the dangers of internalized oppression—we frequently do not even realize when or how we are prejudiced against ourselves. (Padilla)

Some respondents say they avoid interacting with co- ethnic males precisely because they believe the stereo- type of Asian male dominance. They thus have fewer opportunities to meet males who violate their assump- tions. As Jen comments:

I have never met a Vietnamese guy that I have ever been attracted to. I don’t know why. I think I look at one race more than the other. I look at white guys more. I think they are really cute. But then I haven’t seen very many Vietnamese men either. Like I told you I don’t interact with very many so that might be why.

By juxtaposing images of controlling Asian American men with those of egalitarian white men, respondents re-construct a racialised hierarchy of masculinities that privileges whiteness. This discourse is grounded in the presumption of essential differences between racial groups of men. These accounts draw on and reproduce two fundamental components of an ideology of white racial domination: (1) a belief that race is an essen- tial human feature that determines behaviour; and (2) the belief in white supremacy. I am not suggesting that these respondents are creating or causing racism.

Rather, white racial domination is so pervasive and in- sidious that it shapes our common-sense understand- ings of everyday life and is thus easily internalised by the racially subordinated. Indeed, all systems of in- equality not maintained by overt repression depend upon some degree of complicity from the oppressed (Pyke “Defying the Taboo”). This is an important point, as discussion of internalised racial oppression has sometimes given way to blaming the victims rather than the system of racism.

i n t e r n a l i s e d o r i e n ta l i s m a n d p r o - a s s i m i l at i o n i s m i n c o n s t r u c t i o n s o f a s i a n m a s c u l i n i t y

Not all who engage a discourse of racialised mas- culinity overlook variation within racial categories. Some consider acculturative differences among Asian American men and regard the more ethnically identi- fied as the most domineering of co-ethnic males. Some respondents refuse to date men with a strong ethnic identity. As Sandra, a Vietnamese American, remarks:

I won’t date [someone who is not assimilated] be- cause I think they’d expect me to be like the tradi- tional Vietnamese girl, like cook for the husband. That’s not me. That’s a role I could never fulfil. And in some ways, I think they’d probably look down on me because maybe they’d think, “Oh she’s bad be- cause she goes out. She’s outspoken. She talks back.” That’s one of the reasons why I wouldn’t date some- one who’s not assimilated.

Similarly some respondents associate ethnic pride with male dominance. Angela, a Korean American says, “Simply put, [Korean American men are] short- tempered, controlling, dominant, hard-headed and lacking in communication skills. You know they’ve got this like Korean pride.” Angela suggests that Asian American men who embrace and uphold their ethnic- ity are unable to engage in any gender practice other than male dominance. One cannot be strongly identi- fied as Korean or Vietnamese and gender egalitarian. Thus ethnic culture and patriarchy are conflated and assimilation to US society is the only path to gender egalitarianism (see Pyke and Johnson). These assump- tions reveal two additional ways that some respondents

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have internalised a discourse of white domination: (1) They reiterate Orientalist assumptions of the West that dichotomise the East as monolithically backward, gender traditional, and impervious to change, and the West as modern and gender progressive (Said). (2) By presenting ethnic pride and a strong ethnic iden- tity as inherently detrimental, respondents fashion an implicitly pro-assimilation narrative. They thus echo the disdain of the white-dominated society toward im- migrants who do not cast off their foreign ways and eagerly adopt white American values and traits.

i n t e r n a l i s e d s t e r e o t y p e s a n d s e l f - f u l f i l l i n g p r o p h e c i e s

The racialisation of Asian masculinity as solidly gender traditional can create self-fulfilling prophecies when respondents expect white and Asian American men to comply with the stereotypes in their interactions. For example, Mimi offers as evidence of Asian American men’s traditionalism the domestic tasks that she and a girlfriend performed in the home of a male Korean friend:

I remember once when we were in my guy friend’s house, and we started doing the dishes and doing the laundry. We were like, “What the heck are we doing?” So it’s weird because I see how I’m acting now, and that is not even my husband. So I know that with my husband, he would probably expect that from me, and I don’t want to do that. Although I guess I was doing it at this guy’s house, but it wasn’t like I was pressured this time. Whereas I know it would be like that if I were married to someone with more tradi- tional beliefs.

Admitting her friend did not pressure her to do house- hold chores, Mimi nonetheless performs them, as- suming that as a Korean American he expects that of her. She thus complies with a generalised expectation she has of what constitutes appropriate gender ar- rangements when in the presence of Korean American males. Mimi poignantly reveals how racial stereotypes that drive certain social expectations can encourage a romantic preference for white men. Because male dominance and female submission are so tightly bound with notions of traditional ethnic society, some

females engage a form of femininity that they believe is expected when interacting with co-ethnic males, even when such behaviour is not overtly demanded or expected, and may actually be unwanted. They place blame for this behaviour on the gender traditionalism they associate with co-ethnic males and thus under- estimate the feasibility of successfully resisting male power and privilege in ethnic settings (see Pyke and Johnson).

Meanwhile, those who expect white males to be gender progressive are likely to behave in egalitarian ways when interacting with them, and credit this to an egalitarianism they project onto white men. Ra- cialised expectations that white males are egalitarian while co-ethnic males are not could prompt a gross misreading of the gender arrangements individual men actually prefer. Women might engage in an egalitarian, assertive femininity with white males, including those who prefer traditional gender hier- archies, and a submissive femininity with co-ethnic males, including those who prefer gender egalitari- anism (Pyke and Johnson). By engaging in gendered behaviour that conforms to racialised notions of white and Asian American men, these women might be participating in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Further, by behaving in a more servile manner with co-ethnic males, they re-construct the stereotype of Asian American women as submissive, including in the eyes of co-ethnic males.

Such dynamics reproduce white male hetero- sexual privilege. The racial myths that glorify white masculinity and denigrate Asian masculinity can dissuade Asian American women, and women of all racial groups, from regarding Asian American men as desirable romantic partners, and encourage them to turn their gaze toward white men. This makes het- erosexual Asian American women more available to white men; as well, heterosexual white women are less inclined to view Asian American men as romanti- cally appealing (Pyke and Nemoto). These dynamics help to explain gender differentials in racial out- marriage rates. Asian American women out-marry at nearly double the rate of Asian American men, and, when they do, are most likely to partner with white men (Lee and Fernandez; Nemoto). Hence the

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reiteration of ideologies of racialised masculinities bolsters the power and privilege of white men over Asian American men on the marriage market.

c o n c l u s i o n

When respondents mimic the racialised gender ste- reotypes perpetuated in the larger racist society, Asian masculinity is constructed as the opposite of white masculinity—it is the “other” against which white masculinity is defined as superior. This juxtaposition locates the subordination of Asian masculinity in its racialness; suggesting it is an essentialised racial com- ponent of one’s blood, body, and culture. As such, Asian masculinity is unalterable and invariable. This objectification of Asian masculinity is part of the larger racial project that accords superiority to white males over Asian males, as well as over women in general.

By framing their lack of attraction to Asian males as a matter of personal preference, respondents pres- ent as normal and acceptable the anti-Asian racism and glorified imagery of white masculinity they have internalised. In a real sense, many are unaware of the underlying reasons behind their lack of attraction to Asian males. While they provide lists of derogated stereotypical traits as reasons, few offer a critique of these stereotypes or suggest white gendered racism informs their desires. When racism is so fully woven into the fabric of society that it informs common- sense thought, it becomes normalised and more difficult to resist, resulting in phrases like “I’m not attracted to Vietnamese males for some reason” and “I don’t know what it is.”

Through the re-generation of racialised discourses of masculinity, male dominance is configured as uniquely Asian rather than a pan-racial problem. Re- spondents focus their resistance of gender inequality on that form linked with Asian males, whom they

construct as monolithically male domineering, over- looking those committed to gender egalitarianism. This racialised construction of Asian masculinity ob- scures the patriarchal practices of white men. I have suggested that by “asking the other question,” we can see how the resistance of male dominance in these ac- counts reproduces white (male) racial and gender dom- inance. Respondents’ reiteration of racial discourses of masculinity reproduces the racial and gendered power of white men, including over Asian males, and chal- lenges the interpretation of Asian American women’s preference for white men as a way of resisting “ethnic patriarchy.” Nonetheless, there are components of re- sistance here worth mentioning. When respondents denigrate Asian American men as domineering, they implicitly denigrate its counterpart, the stereotype of the Asian American women as submissive, slavishly dutiful, and gender traditional (see Pyke and John- son). By deriding traditional gender attitudes associ- ated with Asian American men, these respondents can distance themselves from stereotypes of Asian femi- ninity and forge a gender egalitarian identity. That they do so by reiterating rather than challenging the stereotypes, however, points to the limits of such resis- tance (see Pyke “Defying the Taboo”; Pyke and Dang). While it is understandable that scholars who study the oppressed are eager to emphasise resistance, this study cautions that by failing to consider the simultaneity of various forms of domination, what might look like resistance and result in some individual gains for the oppressed can, when examined through the prism of intersectionality, reveal dynamics of complicity at play as well. That is, we need to consider the larger re- productive aspects of situated forms of resistance by deploying an intersectional frame of analysis which requires “asking the other question” so as to uncover the interconnections and limits of resistance and com- plicity within the matrix of oppression.

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

I thank Rebecca Klatch and Joseph Childers for their encouragement of this work. I am also grateful to the guest editors and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions.

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1. In this account, “American” is juxtaposed against “Korean American” highlighting how “Ameri- can” implies whiteness. The common use of “American” as a code word for “White” reveals the deep-seated assumption that to be Asian means one can never be American (Pyke and Dang). This reflects the perpetual foreigner stereotype attached to Asian Americans in the dominant so- ciety as well as a belief in racial/ethnic essentialism of Asian immigrant parents who commonly tell their children that they can never really be “American” as being Korean or Vietnamese is “in their blood” (Kibria).

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Ward, J. (2008). Dude-Sex: White Masculinities and `Authentic’ Heterosexuality Among Dudes Who Have Sex With Dudes. Sexualities, 11(4), 414–434. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460708091742. Reproduced with permission of SAGE Journals.

“Closeted” men of color have increasingly become the focus of public health research and media exposés, with these accounts pointing to the likelihood that straight “men who have sex with men” (MSMs)1 may explain rising rates of HIV infec- tion among heterosexual women of color (Boykin, 2005; Denizet-Lewis, 2003). People of color—and particularly Black men on the “down low” (DL) and Latino MSMs—are newly central figures in discussions regarding internalized homophobia, sexual repres- sion, HIV/AIDS, the betrayal of unsuspecting wives and girlfriends, and the failure to come out of the closet (Boykin, 2005; Hill Collins, 2004; King, 2004; Denizet-Lewis, 2003; Mukherjea and Vidal-Ortiz, 2006). To make sense of the factors that would prevent men of color from being “honest” about their “real” lives and desires, analyses of MSMs have drawn heavily on theories of the closet and its racialized underpin- nings (Boykin, 2005; Hill Collins, 2004; King, 2004). Black men on the DL, in particular, have been described as “a new subculture of gay men” for whom “mascu- linity that is so intertwined with hyper-heterosexuality renders an openly gay identity impossible” (Hill Collins, 2004: 207). Similarly, Latino MSMs have been implicitly characterized as closeted gay or bisexual men for whom cultural barriers, rigid ideas about gender, and strong ties to family and religion prevent public identification as gay or bisexual (Diaz, 1997).

Critics of these discourses have argued that the lack of discussion about white men on the DL has reinforced stereotypes about Black male sexual- ity as dangerous and predatory, as well as provided

“evidence” that African Americans are more homo- phobic than other racial groups (Boykin, 2005). Others have shown that the down low has the all too familiar ingredients of moral panic: “concealed non- normative sexualities, a subaltern genre of expressive culture (Hip-Hop), a pandemic caused by a sexually transmitted agent, innocent victims (heterosexual women), and a population often accused of misbe- havior (men of color)” (González, 2007: 27, empha- sis in original). In sum, dominant narratives about the DL reveal a new set of fears about uncontrollable male bodies of color, or the volatile intersections of masculinity, race, and sexuality.

In addition to the racial components of down low rhetoric, the characterization of straight-identified MSMs as closeted also exemplifies the persistent ten- dency to view sex acts as meaningful and objective indicators of a true sexual self hood and to gloss over larger questions about the gendered and racialized construction of heterosexual and homosexual cate- gories (Foucault, 1978; Katz, 1996; Sedgwick, 1992). According to the logic of the closet, same-sex sexual practices among heterosexuals signify sexual repres- sion, or a failure to be honest about who one is, and the sexual community or culture in which one be- longs. The recent insistence that MSMs are actually closeted gay men constrained by racially-specific or culturally-internal forms of homophobia has helped to solidify a narrow and essentialist conceptualiza- tion of homophobia. At the individual level, “inter- nalized homophobia” is believed to arise from the unwillingness of MSMs to recognize and/or celebrate

White Masculinities and “Authentic” Heterosexuality among Dudes Who Have Sex with Dudes

J A N E W A R D

13. DUDE-SEX

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their essential nature, or “who they really are.” At the cultural level, and akin to “culture of poverty” arguments used to pathologize African Americans, mainstream down low and MSM discourses imply that homophobia stems from essential, ethno-racial cultures of sexual repression.

As I will argue, however, a more productive read- ing of homophobia views the disavowal of gay iden- tity and culture as one of the constitutive elements of heterosexual subjectivity—or a primary means of ex- pressing heterosexual self hood in a sexually binary world. While down low discourse implies that same- sex sexuality reveals a homosexual self hood and that homophobia is an expression of culture, this article explores the theoretical insights that emerge from a reversal of this logic, or from viewing gay and straight as cultural spheres, and homophobia as a subjectify- ing practice (or a struggle to construct heterosexual self hood).

Based on examination of an online community in which white “str8”-identified men assert that sex with other white men bolsters their heterosexual mas- culinity, I highlight the heterosexual and racialized meanings that white MSMs attach to their same-sex behaviors. I argue that while some men who have sex with men prefer to do so within gay/queer cul- tural worlds, others (such as the “straight dudes” de- scribed here2) indicate a greater sense of belonging or cultural “fit” with heterosexual identity and hetero- erotic culture. For the latter group, homophobia, or the need to strongly disidentify with gay men and gay culture, is less a symptom of the repression of a “true self,” but rather an attempt to express a “true self ”—or one’s strong sense of identification with heteropatri- archal white masculinity—in the context of having sex with men.

More specifically, this study points to the role of whiteness—including white archetypes and images—in the process of establishing heterosexual “realness,” or believable straight culture. In contrast with the media’s recent efforts to locate tensions between sexual identity and practice within African American and Latino cultures, my findings suggest that whiteness is also a commonly used resource for bridging the gap between heterosexual identi- fication and same-sex desire. Previous research has

pointed to various institutional contexts in which straight-identified men have sex with men, such as “tearooms,” prisons, and the military (Humphreys, 1978; Kaplan, 2003; Schifter, 1999). These studies have demonstrated how men leverage hyper- masculinity, socioeconomic success, and the “need” for quick and easy sex to preserve heterosexual identity and moral “righteousness” (to use Humphrey’s term). Building upon this research, the present study con- siders how race (including racial identification) and racialized culture (including racialized images, cloth- ing, language, and “style”) are also used to bolster claims to heterosexuality and to reframe sex between men as a hetero-masculine and “not-gay” act. Similar to the assertion of feminist theorists that gender is always an intersectional accomplishment—or a con- struction that takes forms in and through race, class, and sexuality (Bettie, 2002; Hill Collins, 2004; Hull et al., 1982)—I show that the appearance of “authentic” heterosexuality is also accomplished in interaction with race, socioeconomic class, and gender. While recent research has begun to critically explore these intersections for men of color (González, 2007), this article marks the often-invisible significance of race and culture for white dudes who have sex with dudes.

r a c e , c u lt u r e , a n d t h e s o c i a l c o n s t r u c t i o n o f h e t e r o s e x u a l i t y

While other research has examined the historical rela- tionship between racial ideologies and the invention of homosexuality (Ferguson, 2004; Somerville, 2000), limited attention has been given to the role of race in the routine and daily accomplishment of heterosexu- ality and homosexuality. In this article, I argue that the ongoing construction of authentic or believable male heterosexuality is reliant upon racial codes that signify “normal” straight male bonding, “average” hetero- sexual masculinity, and lack of interest in gay culture. Whiteness—and more specifically the use of white masculine archetypes for example frat boys, surfers, skaters, jocks, and white “thugs”—can play a central role in the production of an authentic and desirable heterosexual culture distinct from gay male culture.

In this article I do not make claims about the “actual” sexual and racial identities of men who

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place advertisements for sex online, instead I am interested in the sexualized and racialized cultures these advertisements draw upon and reproduce. Indeed, a growing body of queer scholarship has pointed to the significance of culture in the construc- tion and regulation of the heterosexual/homosexual binary. Following Foucault’s assertion that “homo- sexuality threatens people as a ‘way of life,’ rather than a way of having sex,” Halberstam (2005) has argued that “queer subjects” might be redefined as those who “live (deliberately, accidentally, or of ne- cessity) during the hours when others sleep and in the spaces (physical, metaphysical, and economic) that others have abandoned,” including, “ravers, club kids, HIV-positive barebackers, rent boys, sex workers, homeless people, drug dealers, and the unemployed” (2005: 10). Halberstam expands the boundaries of queerness to include subjects often not thought of as queer, and in a distinct but simi- larly motivated move, other queer scholars have “disidentified” with mainstream or “homonorma- tive” lesbian and gay politics and its focus on mo- nogamy, domesticity, and prosperity (Duggan, 2003; Muñoz, 1999). Queer, in each of these approaches, is less about sexual practices than about a “way of life” that defies the rules of normative, respectable adult citizenship. Transcending long-held debates about whether to privilege sexual identification or sexual practice in the study of sexuality, this conceptualiza- tion of queerness is de-linked from both. Instead, because queer sexual culture or “way of life” is what most violates social norms, culture becomes the ma- terial of queer resistance.

This article offers support for the argument that the lines between queerness and normativity are marked less by sexual practices and identities than by cultural practices and interpretive frames. In con- trast with recent work that has expanded queer sub- jectivity or disavowed “normal” gays and lesbians, I take a different empirical approach by demonstrat- ing how whiteness and masculinity interact to offer heterosexual culture to white men who have sex with men. At the end of this article, I return to the ques- tion of culture and to my own queer disidentifica- tion with the hetero-erotic culture produced by str8 dudes online.

m e t h o d : s t u d y i n g d u d e - s e x

 . . . As I will argue, the production of heterosexual culture on Craigslist is accomplished not only through what is arguably a “homophobic” and hyper-masculine rejec- tion of queer culture; it is also dependent upon racial archetypes and images that invoke “real” heterosexual white masculinity. For this study, I collected and ana- lyzed all ads placed on Craigslist Los Angeles by “str8” self-identified men during May through July of 2006.3 Of the resulting 125 “Casual Encounters” ads collected and analyzed, 71 per cent made reference to race—either the racial identification of the person placing the ad or a specific racial preference for a sex partner. Among the ads that made reference to race, 86 per cent were placed by men who either identified themselves as white, or in- cluded a photo of themselves in which they appeared to be white (though I recognize that the latter is a flawed indicator of racial identity and that race itself is socially and historically constructed).4 In order to capture all ads placed by straight-identified men seeking men, I searched for ads containing either the terms “DL” or “str8,” the latter of which was more commonly used on Craigslist. In “Casual Encounters,” self-identified white men placed approximately 85 per cent of the ads, regard- less of whether the term “str8” or “DL” was used. . . .

r e g u l a r d u d e s , c a s u a l e n c o u n t e r s

Before describing how whiteness was deployed in Casual Encounters, I begin with a general description of str8 dudes’ heteroerotic culture. In contrast with the logic that gay and straight are at opposite ends of a behavioral and biologically-determined binary, the str8 dudes who post on Craigslist construct “gay” as a chosen identity that is not particularly linked to who is having sex, or what sexual acts are involved. Instead, being gay is about how sex is done—the language that is used, the type of “porn” films that are watched, the beverages consumed, and the motivation that drives the sex itself. The following ads, representative of dozens of others, illustrate how str8 dudes lay claim to “straightness” while soliciting sex with other men:

Straight Dude Drunk and Horny  .  .  . Any str8 bud wanna jack?—27. Here’s the deal. Went out drinking and clubbing, thought I’d hook up with a chick, but

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didn’t pan out. I’m buzzed, horny, checking out porn. Is there any other straight dude out there who would be into jacking while watching porn?  .  .  . I’d rather hook up with a chick, but none of the CL [Craigslist] chicks ever work out.

What happened to the cool bi/str8 dude circle jerks?—33. What happened to a group of masc[uline] dudes just sitting around stroking, watching a game, drinking some brews, jerking, showing off, swapping college stories, maybe playing a drinking game and see what comes up?

Str8 guy wants to try BJ tonight—27. Ok, I’ll make this short. I’m up late tonight. I have a girlfriend. But I’m at home by myself now. I watch porn and I like when the women suck on big cocks. I’ve been thinking about it, and I think I’d like to suck one. I’m not attracted to guys so I’d rather not look at you much. Just suck your cock. I have a Polaroid and would like to take a pic with cum on my face. But this is really only for tonight cuz I’m horny! . . . I am Caucasian and prefer Caucasian.

$300 Bucks Cash if You’re STR8 & Goodlooking!!—27. Hey, are you str8, goodlooking and broke? Are you Under 30 and hella cool? Like watching porn and talking bout pussy? You’re in luck. 300 bucks every time we hangout. Be under 30. Honestly STR8. I’m mostly str8, great looking chill bro.

Str8 jackoff in briefs outside male bonding edging stroke— 34. I am a tall blond built packin’ jockman with a big bulge in my jockeys. Dig hanging in just our briefs man to man in the hot sun workin’ my bulge freely . . . If you are into jackin’ and being free to be a man, let’s hang. If you have a pool or a yard to layout and jack freely smoke some 420 [marijuana] and just be men, hit me up. No gay sex, I am looking for legit male bonding, masturbating in the hot sun only.

Unlike in similar websites for gay men, women are a central part of str8 dudes’ erotic discourse. As these ads illustrate, str8 dudes often describe sex be- tween dudes as a less desirable, but “easy,” alterna- tive to sex with women, or suggest that dude-sex is a means of getting the kind of sex that all straight men want from women, but can only get from men— uncomplicated, emotionless, and guaranteed. Str8 dudes get drunk, watch heterosexual porn, talk about “pussy,” and maintain a clear emotional boundary between each other that draws upon the model of

adolescent friendship, or the presumably “harmless,” “proto-sexual” circle jerk. References to being “chill bros” and “male bonding” help to reframe dude-sex as a kind of sex that bolsters, rather than threatens, the heterosexual masculinity of the participants. Only those who are “man enough” and “chill enough” will want dude-sex or be able to handle it.

In some cases, misogyny and references to vio- lence against women are used to reinforce the link between dude-sex and heterosexual male bonding:

Whackin Off to Porn: STR8 porn. Gang bang. STR8, bi- curious masculine white guy lookin’ for a masculine guy. Get into stroking bone with a bud, talkin’ bout pussy and bangin’ the bitch.

Any Straight/Bi Guys Want to Help Me Fuck My Blow-up Doll???: Come on guys . . . we can’t always pick up the chick we want to bone right??? So let’s get together and fuck the hell out of my hot blow-up doll. Her mouth, her pussy, and her ass all feel GREAT. Just be cool, uninhibited, horny, and ready to fuck this bitch. It’s all good here . . . lates.

Such ads suggest that dude-sex is a sexual and often violent expression of heterosexual masculin- ity and heterosexual culture, distinct from gay male culture in which misogyny typically manifests as the invisibility, rather than the objectification, of women (Ward, 2000). Marilyn Frye (1983), in her analysis of drag queens, argues “What gay male affectation of femininity seems to be is a serious sport in which men may exercise their power and control over the feminine, much as in other sports. . . . But the mas- tery of the feminine is not feminine. It is mascu- line.” I draw on Frye’s analysis to suggest that while dude-sex makes use of and “masters” homosexual or non-normative sex practices, this deployment of non-normative sexuality in the service of “str8” cul- ture is perhaps not best understood as “queer.”

w h i t e d u d e s , r a c e , a n d c l a s s

Str8 dudes draw on the imagery of male bonding and the symbols of straight male culture, including refer- ences to sports, beer, fraternity membership, smoking pot and being “chill,” “buds,” or “bros.” Yet “dude speak” and “dude style” is not simply masculine and

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heterosexual, it is also racialized. Recent studies of Black and Latino men on the down low have emphasized the importance of shared urban culture, and particularly hip hop, to the construction of down-low masculinity and sexuality (González, 2007). González explains that culture (and not public or politicized identity) is what is at stake for Latinos on the down low: “gay is not an option; Hip Hop is” (2007). Here I argue that racial cul- tures are also a central player in how white str8 dudes make sense of their str8 sexuality. In some cases, white dudes appropriate the symbols of Black and Latino down-low masculinity; in other cases, they foreground symbols of white masculinity (surfers, frat guys, jocks, and so on) or synthesize the former with the latter.

a p p r o p r i at i n g h i p h o p m a s c u l i n i t y : w h i t e b r o s a n d t h u g s o n t h e d l

White str8 dudes—like a growing number of young white men in general—bolster their masculinity through the appropriation of terms and gestures used by Black and Latino men, especially within rap lyrics and culture. Writers critical of the mainstreaming and white ownership of rap have pointed to the ways in which its consumption by white youth has bled into other forms of racial and cultural appropriation (Kitwana, 2005). Young white men, in particular, have turned to rap for a new model of masculinity, male rivalry/violence, and heterosexual male bonding— resulting in white males giving each other “daps,” wear- ing hip hop clothing, and “affectionately” referring to one another using the term “nigga” (Kitwana, 2005). While the appropriation of Black culture is rarely this explicit on Craigslist, str8 dudes nonetheless con- struct a masculine and heterosexual culture through a complex synthesis of white masculinity (e.g., surfer dudes) and masculinities of color (e.g., bros, thugs, and the DL). Str8 dudes commonly use phrases iden- tified by African American studies scholars as “Black slang,” such as “sup?,” “hit me up,” and “thugged out” (Smitherman, 2000), such as in the following ads:

23 y/o white dude party in Hollywood—Hey guys, I’m partyin right now at home and have plenty of stuff to share. . . . I’m lookin to meet a cool str8 thugged out white dude around my age, who would wanna come over, kick back, watch a lil porn, smoke a lil,

and stroke off together. I might even be down to deep-throat some cock so if you love getting awesome head you should definitely hit me back! I’m lookin for someone chill & masculine so hit me up if this sounds like you . . . LATE

Str8 curious on the DL. Lookin’ to chill—23. Sup? Just looking to chill with another str8/bi dude, into young or older bros type . . . to mess around, not into per- verted shit. Also not into fatty, femm guys. If you’re a guy, please be in shape. I’m sort of skinny, curious here and haven’t really acted on it. Just regular sane dude. Discretion a must. Aiite, late.

In an effort to convey that the sexual encounter will be casual, meaningless, and embedded in het- erosexual male culture, white str8 dudes rely upon “urban” slang derived from Black culture to represent heterosexuality. However, as with many forms of cultural appropriation, the slang used by str8 dudes is fast becoming associated with whites, and white masculinity in particular. For instance, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, “bro,” a term commonly used by str8 dudes, is a slang term for “brother” with etymological roots in African Ameri- can vernacular English. However, its popular and contemporary usage by young white men in Califor- nia has transformed its local and contextual mean- ing. Bloggers on urbandictionary.com, for example, define “bros” as: “white frat guys,” “stupid white trash guys,” and “usually white young males, found commonly in places like San Bernardino County in California, as well as Orange County.”

It may be most accurate to describe the racialized heterosexuality of str8 dudes as a kind of Eminem- inspired white working-class “thuggery,” constructed through an in-your-face reclamation of “white trash” and homophobic, or anti-gay, sexuality. While some ads express desire for “average” working-class men (e.g. “carpenters, carpet layers, plumbers, construc- tion workers, mechanics, truckers, cable guys, de- livery guys, overall just a hard working guy as I am. NO GAYS sorry”), others eroticize aggressive “white trash” masculinity, such as in the following ad:

Str8 fuck a guy in his briefs, masc(uline) man to man fuck, hiv neg only. Hey fucks. I need to fuckin lay the pipe in some tight manhole today. I am hiv neg fuck

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with rubbers only. I want to have a hot packin guy in some tighty whities bent over and on all fours takin my dick like a champ. No fems or tweeking pnp [“party and play”] dudes. I hate that shit. Only 420 and a hot packin butt. Hit me up with your pix and your contact info.

Ads such as this amplify the appearance of hetero- sexuality through a synthesis of working-class culture, whiteness, and what is arguably the subtle appropria- tion of Black masculinity through hip hop slang (“hit me up”) and “thug” masculinity. Other ads produced similar images of “rough” white masculinity through reference to skinheads and other archetypes of white male rebellion historically rooted in white racist, sexist and homophobic violence—“lookin for str8, bi, surfr, sk8r, punk, military, truckers, skinhead, rough trade. . . . I’ll give you the best head ever, buddy.”

Though being on the DL has been sensational- ized in the media as a rejection of white gay culture specific to Black men living “otherwise heterosex- ual lives” (Denizet-Lewis, 2003), a few white str8 dudes on Craigslist claimed DL identity as their own (though “str8” was used far more commonly):

STR8 DUDES  .  .  . White boy lookin for a NO CHAT suck  .  .  . u lemme suck u  .  .  . —29. Hot dude on ur dick  .  .  . u fuck my throat and bust it  .  .  . we never talk. Come over, kick back, pull ur cock out and get a kick ass wet deepthroat BJ. Love to deepthroat a hot str8 dude on the DL . . . bust ur nut and split. I’m a very goodlooking in shape white dude . . . totally on the DL . . . just wanna suck a hot str8 dude off, take ur nut . . . that’s all. My place is kewl.

SECRET SERVICE HEAD—28. Sup? Looking for bi/ str8 bud who is just looking to crack a nut. . . . Just walk in kick back watch a porn and get blown.  .  .  . Cum and go. . . . That’s all I am looking for. . . . Be white, under 30, masculine and discreet. This is on the DL. . . . Have a girlfriend . . . but new to town.

Black gay writer and activist Keith Boykin has argued that there is a racist stigma and double standard associated with the “down low.” Referring to the white characters in the hit film Brokeback Mountain, Boykin contends,

the reason why we don’t say they’re on the down low is simple—they’re white. When white men engage in

this behavior, we just call it what it is and move on. But when black men do it, then we have to pathol- ogize it into something evil called the “down low.” (Boykin, blog on keithboykin.com, May, 2006)

Indeed, the stereotypical image of the DL is that of partnered, heterosexual, masculine Black men having quick and deceitful sexual relations unconnected to mainstream gay culture. As such, the DL is a useful shorthand available to white str8 dudes wishing to affirm their own heterosexuality, as well as to invoke the perhaps fetishized imagery of deceitful, immoral, or “evil” sex (to use Boykin’s term).

s u r f e r s , s k at e r s , a n d f r at g u y s : a r c h e t y p e s o f w h i t e h e t e r o s e x u a l m a s c u l i n i t y

Archetypes of youthful, white, heterosexual masculin- ity are also popular among str8 dudes on Craigslist, who commonly include a list of desired “male types” in their ads. Many str8 dudes express an explicit pref- erence for other white dudes, and this preference is strengthened by naming specific forms of hegemonic masculinity, such as jocks, skaters, surfers and frat dudes (Connell, 2005):

Any HOT White jocks lookin to get sucked off???—23. Hey guys, I’m just a chill good looking dude head- ing down to the area for a BBQ and I’m looking for any other HOT Str8 or bi white dudes looking to get sucked off. Just sit back and relax and get drained. I’m especially into sucking off hot jocks, skaters, surfers, and frat dudes. If you’re hot and if you’re into a hot no strings blow job, then hit me up.

Seeking a MASCULINE JACK OFF BUD to STR8 PORN— 29. Hot masculine white dude here . . . looking for an- other hot white dude to come by my place, and work out a hot load side by side. Straight Porn only. Prefer str8, surfer, etc. Not usually into gay dudes.

In such ads, the heterosexual culture of dude-sex is established by drawing upon available typologies of white heterosexual masculinity. Others make reference to specific white ethnicities, such as one ad seeking “blondes, Italian(s), Jewish types, fat dick heads, hairy, white and/or Latin dudes . . . suit and tie types.”5 Just as the appropriation of Black and white working-class

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masculinities helps construct an authentic “hetero- erotic” culture, so too does the image of a normative middle-class or professional whiteness (i.e., dudes who go to college, participate in sports, wear suits and ties, and so on). In both cases, race and socioeconomic class play a central role in making heterosexuality legible in the context of men’s sexual seduction of other men.

In addition to naming racialized archetypes, some ads include long and detailed accounts of the exact clothing, dialogue, sex acts, and erotic mood required to maintain the heteroeroticism of dude- sex. For instance, the following ad was placed by a “str8 guy” who “lives a very str8 life” seeking some- one to enact a “role play” in exchange for $400. The ad included a much longer script from which I have excerpted only a small segment:

  .  .  . You come to the hotel in loose shorts with no underwear on, a tank top and flip flops, and when you get there we just kick back and maybe have a few beers and shoot the shit to get to know each other a little bit and feel more comfortable, then we start talking about our girlfriends and girls that we have fucked before or the best blow jobs we have had, etc., the whole time acting like we are just good friends that are horny. I am kind of dumb and don’t have a lot of experience with chicks and you want to teach me and help me learn more. You then tell me that you are getting really horny thinking about all the hot sex you have had and ask me if I have any porn we can watch. I put one on and as we watch the porn, you are constantly grabbing your dick and playing with it as it gets harder and harder. . . . Then you sit down right next to me and you say, “dude, you gotta hear this story about this one chick that I made suck my dick until I blew my load in her,” then you tell me the story about it. While you are telling me the story you act it out with me . . .

While whiteness is not explicitly named in the role play, the script mirrors the white surfer/frat dude fetishism common in the “Casual Encounters” sec- tion of Craigslist–Los Angeles. As stated in a web ar- ticle on “frat fashion” (published by the New York hipster website blacktable.com in 2005): “From out of the shower or off the lacrosse field and right into happy hour, flip-flops take [frat guys] every place they want to go. Flip-flops suggest sand and SoCal-cool

[southern-California-cool]  .  .  . !” Thus, some of the ad’s references—such as the “costume” of flip flops, shorts and a tank top—possibly hint at white surfer/ frat masculinity, exemplifying the ways in which erotic fantasies may be implicitly or unintentionally racialized. Yet the glorification of surfers and frat dudes also illustrates the way in which the racial- ized construction of heterosexual and homosexual cultures are locally or regionally specific. Many of the references to white masculinity on Craigslist–Los Angeles—surfers, bros, dudes—appear to be rooted in southern California lifestyles, or at least the imagi- nation of them.

l e s s s t r 8, m o r e d l : d e s i r i n g b l a c k m e n ?

In addition to self-identifying with the DL, a small number of white str8 dudes expressed desire for “no strings” sex with “hung” Black men on the DL. These ads, in contrast with the ads in which white dudes used Black slang and style to seduce one an- other, produced a distinct cultural effect. While many “white on white” ads implied sameness, reciprocity or egalitarianism (let’s stroke together, watch porn to- gether, “work out a hot load side by side” and so on), “white seeking Black” ads typically emphasized differ- ence, hierarchy, and service. The majority of such ads were placed by white men looking to perform “blow jobs” for big, muscular Black men. Many of the ads in “Casual Encounters” mention the importance of being “hung,” but ads seeking Black men placed par- ticular emphasis on the relationship between race and body size (e.g., “big BLACK cock,” “nice big meaty Black guys”):

Discreet White Deep Throat 4 DL Black—Size Matters—44. Discreet 44 yr old white guy lookin’ to service hot Black guys on the DL. I’m hairy, good shape. I’m lookin’ for very hung Black guys who love to kick back, watch porn and get their cocks serviced. I really like to deep throat big BLACK cock. If you are interested, hit me back with your stats and a pic if you have one. . . . I really love very tall skinny men, hung huge.

Looking to suck off big black men, on the DL—White guy here looking to suck off big muscular black guys. I like them big, over 250lbs and muscular. No strings attached. Hoping to meet some men on the DL. Got

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my own place, it’s private and discreet, no strings, no hassles, etc. Just want to suck off some nice big meaty black guys.

Ads placed by white guys seeking Black men on the DL were less likely to focus on authenticating heterosexu- ality through reference to women, straight porn, and friendship (male bonding, “being buddies”) and more likely to focus on “the DL” as pre-formulated code for impersonal sex across racial difference.

White submission and Black dominance was also a central theme in these ads. In the following ad, an image is included that reverses the master/slave re- lationship (a dominant Black male, and a shackled white male) and has likely been taken from BDSM- themed gay porn:

Muscled Guy Looking for Str8 or Bi to Service on the Down Low—Meet me at the construction site. I will be there waiting for you [in the?] dark, service you and leave anonymous. . . . Send pic must be hot like me.

While race is not mentioned in the text of this ad, the figure of the dominant Black male (and the submissive white male body) is used to represent the queerer—or less normal and natural—white fantasy of the down low. This and similar ads suggest that in the Black–white encounter, Black men are always dominant; they receive sexual service, but they don’t provide it. Friendship, equity, and “normal and natu- ral male bonding” are represented as either undesir- able or impossible across racial lines. In some ads, class differences also pervade the encounter. In the foregoing ad, the “construction site”—in contrast to the reference to white “suit and tie types”—invokes manual labor and the type of job more likely to be held by men of color. The DL requires anonymity, discretion, and meeting in “dark” places like the construction site. In the Craigslist representation of the Black–white encounter, cross-racial sex is not an organic expression of “male bonding” or “just being men.” Instead, the presence of (or desire for) race and class difference produces a darker, less natural and less straight encounter.

Because of its association with men of color and the closet (or hidden homosexuality), the term “DL” was less likely to be associated with authentic white

heterosexuality in “Casual Encounters” (“str8” was preferred by white dudes) and was more likely to be used by men of color in the “Men Seeking Men” sec- tion of Craigslist. In fact, though beyond the scope of this study (which focuses on white men), I noticed during data collection that ads placed by men of color appeared more frequently in the “Men Seeking Men” section than in the “Casual Encounters” section. I can only speculate about why men of color would not have chosen to post ads in “Casual Encounters,” but it seems likely that they were deterred by the predom- inance of white dudes seeking other white dudes. Conversely, it makes sense that white dudes uninter- ested in gay identification would be drawn to “Casual Encounters,” given that its moniker makes no refer- ence to gender identity (or identity at all), while “Men Seeking Men” makes gender identity primary.

While reference to the symbols of Black mas- culinity and style helped in the production of authentic heterosexuality, reference to actual sexual contact with Black men generally did not. Instead, cross-racial sex was permeated with difference and inequality, becoming itself somewhat queer. This finding mirrors the findings of the study more broadly—for straight-identified white men seeking men, maintaining a heteroerotic culture was largely reliant upon specifically white forms of heterosexual masculinity (including those that appropriate some elements of Black culture).

d i s c u s s i o n : d i s av o w i n g s t r 8 d u d e s

Str8 dudes who seek sex with men draw upon a wide variety of conceptual resources to assert a heterosexual male identity, including the use of racialized arche- types and images intended to signify authentic het- erosexuality. While other research has highlighted the ways in which racial binaries were used to construct the heterosexual/homosexual binary in the late 19th century (Somerville, 2000), the ads placed on “Casual Encounters” suggest that race continues to play a cen- tral role in the daily accomplishment of heterosexual “realness,” particularly when authenticity is likely to be called into question. This deployment of race to signify heterosexuality included both cross-racial identifications and the preservation of white racial

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boundaries. In some cases, white str8 dudes appropri- ated the symbols/language of Black heterosexual mas- culinity to construct a culture of male bonding that is arguably recognizable as the antithesis of gay male culture. In other cases, white str8 dudes invoked the “DL” as a means of eroticizing deceitful and “evil” sex or expressing desire for closeted Black men looking to be “serviced.”

However, most commonly, white str8 dudes drew on archetypes of white heterosexual masculin- ity to provide evidence of being an average, normal dude. The majority of white str8 men who posted in “Casual Encounters” expressed a preference for men like themselves, or men who fit the paradigmatic image of the straight middle-class white male (i.e., frat dudes, suit and tie types, surfers, skaters, and so on). While being gay has often been stereotyped as a “white thing” (Muñoz, 1999), the figure of the “straight white man” symbolizes both financial and cultural power as well as the average man, the “everyman,” the “regular dude.” Given the ways in which systems of white racial dominance construct whiteness as natural, invisible, and non-racialized (Frankenberg, 2001; Lipsitz, 1998), sex between white men is likely to be experienced as deracialized and “natural,” pos- sessing none of the “difference” or racial fetishism expressed in cross-racial sexual encounters. Thus, for white str8 dudes, whiteness played a key role in pro- ducing evidence of normal/average male heterosexu- ality. This may be because desire for the ostensibly deracialized (but white) “everyman” is less threaten- ing than the desire for men of color, who are coded as both hypermasculine and hypersexual within US popular culture (Hill Collins, 2004).

However, despite the ways in which the empha- sis on whiteness may be experienced as the absence of racial fetish, the erotic culture of “Casual Encoun- ters” was rife with white fetishism. In addition to simply declaring oneself a white str8 dude, detailed descriptions of white male bodies, white male life- styles (“looking for surfers, [and other] LA-types”), and white male bonding helped to create and main- tain the heteroerotic culture of dude-sex. Surfers, for example, were a particularly desired type, not be- cause of the importance of surfing skills or the desire to actually surf together, but more likely because of

the white, hetero-masculine script associated with southern California surf lifestyle—flip flops, chillin’, just being bros and talking about chicks. In sum, racial markers are not used only to identify one’s physical “type,” they also provide an entire cultural universe from which to draw heterosexual costumes, scripts, and countless other codes for heterosexual masculinity.

At a broader level, this and other studies indicate that racial categories are always already sexualized and that sexuality categories are always already raced (González, 2007; Muñoz-Laboy, 2004; Somerville, 2000). Though I have focused on the intersections of whiteness and heterosexuality, my aim is not to posi- tion whiteness simply as one of several possible and equivalent examples of the racialization of heterosex- uality. Instead, the ads on Craigslist suggest that in a culture constituted by both a racial and sexual binary (white/other and heterosexual/other), whiteness and heterosexuality become “natural” bedfellows. Both whiteness and heterosexuality simultaneously sig- nify the “really, really normal, nothing out of the or- dinary” subject. For the str8 dudes on Craigslist, it appears that the most average and normal of male heterosexualities is white heterosexuality, even when it engages in same-sex practices and appropriates Black culture. In the context of white male bond- ing, Black bodies disrupt the staging of normalcy and occupy a distinctly queerer space “down low.”6 Building on sociological analyses of hegemonic and marginalized masculinities (Connell, 2005), future research might also reveal the range and hierarchy of heterosexualities by conceptualizing white hetero- sexuality as “hegemonic” and heterosexualities of color as “marginalized.”

In addition to highlighting the racialization of heterosexuality and heteroerotic culture, the ads placed by str8 dudes also confirm the importance of giving as much consideration to sexual culture as has been given to sexual practice. When queer femi- nist colleagues and I first read an ad placed by a str8 dude in “Casual Encounters”—“nothing gay here at all, just two guys, watching hot porn, stroking until the point of no return”—we marveled at the sugges- tion that the ad was anything but gay. Later, I mar- veled that my colleagues and I had been so invested

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in owning (as queer) a cultural space that is so de- cidedly intent on identifying with heterosexuality. In Casual Encounters, sex practices are not useful guides for delineating the boundaries of queer and non-queer, or establishing political alliances with queer stakeholders. While the white str8 dudes who post ads in Casual Encounters express their desire for sex with other men, their desire takes form within the context of heterosexual identification and het- erosexual erotic culture (in other words, the use of heterosexual pornography, the disavowal of gay cul- ture, misogynistic discussions of women and their bodies, insistence on “normal” heterosexual male bonding as the organizing principle of the sexual encounter).

To de-queer the sex described on Craigslist is to give up the epistemological pleasure of self- righteous knowing, owning, outing, and naming. In the face of homophobia and heterosexism, honing one’s “gaydar” and revealing that “we are everywhere” have been among few queer luxuries. Yet as others have argued (Halberstam, 2005; Duggan, 2003), political solidarity built primarily around sex acts misrecognizes what is most threatening, and sub- versive, about queerness. Queer culture—including a collective rejection of the rules associated with normal, adult, reproductive sexuality and (noncon- sensual) heterosexual power relations—may better help scholars and activists determine the meaning of queer. On the one hand, str8 dudes exemplify sexual rule-breaking and the defiance of respectable sex behavior. On the other hand, their reliance on misogyny and homophobia to interpret and orga- nize their sexual practices suggests a greater degree

of cultural alignment with heterosexual traditions of same-sex sexuality, in which male sexual bonding is interconnected with violence against women and gay men. This complexity reveals the permeability of the categories “straight” and “queer,” which signify not only the divide between normal and abnormal sexual practices but also the divide between normal and abnormal interpretive frames for understand- ing these practices. Str8 dudes have abnormal sex, but they invest in ideologies of racial and sexual normalcy. Thus, str8 dudes’ “erotic culture of nor- malcy” also suggests the need to rethink the ways in which repression and “internalized homophobia” are mapped onto all straight-identified same-sex be- haviors. Rather than a symptom of repression, pas- sivity, or lack of self-awareness, str8 dudes’ rejection of queerness may be more accurately understood as agentic acts of identification with heterosexual culture.

This article has pointed to the value of viewing queer and straight as cultural spheres that people choose to inhabit in large part because they experi- ence a cultural and political fit. Such an approach highlights the intersections of queer and straight cultures, identities, and practices, and suggests that some intersections may be formed by queer sexual practices and straight cultural and political invest- ments. Redefining queer and non-queer as cultural affiliations also implies that queer “rights” serve to protect not everyone who engages in same-sex sexu- ality, but all those who cannot or will not invest in hegemonic str8 culture—gender freaks, kids in gay– straight alliances, and all people who are or are will- ing to be part of this thing we call “queer.”

N O T E S

1. MSM is a term first adopted by epidemiologists to classify men who have sex with men, regard- less of whether they identify as gay, bisexual, or heterosexual.

2. “Dude” is a vernacular term used by young white men in the USA to refer to one another. It was originally popularized by young, primarily white, surfers and skaters (or skateboarders) in California, but has since achieved popularity throughout the USA. “Jock” is a slang term used to refer to young male athletes, and “frat” is an abbreviation for a college fraternity.

3. There is disagreement on the web regarding the meaning of the term “str8.” In some online com- munities, “str8” functions simply as internet slang for “straight,” and it has also been used as an

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abbreviation for “straight” in rap lyrics. However, others, such as contributors to “urbandictionary. com,” argue that “str8” is used almost exclusively by gay and bisexual men “in the closet.”

4. See González (2007) for a discussion of the distinction between “cyberdata” and real time ob- servations in “cyberethnography.”

5. Thank you to Rachel Luft for clarifying this point. 6. I note here that the association between light skin and whiteness is not specific to the research

context, but is an aspect of racial hegemony that arguably exists independent of data selection methods and over-determines the analysis of visual images.

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Carrillo, H., & Fontdevila, J. (2014). Border crossings and shifting sexualities among Mexican gay immigrant men: Beyond monolithic conceptions. Sexualities, 17(8), 919–938. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460714552248. Reproduced with permis- sion of SAGE Publications.

Beyond Monolithic Conceptions

H É C T O R C A R R I L L O , J O R G E F O N T D E V I L A

14. BORDER CROSSINGS AND SHIFTING SEXUALITIES AMONG MEXICAN GAY

IMMIGRANT MEN

i n t r o d u c t i o n

[San Diego] has helped me a lot, because it’s helped me live my sexuality as I wanted  .  .  . It’s changed me because it’s helped me be more open, accept my homosexuality more, and realize that I am not doing anything wrong as long as I am not harming anyone. . . . The notion that I had in Mexico [is] that it [homosexuality] is something sinful, something bad, something seen badly by society, and simply not accepted.

Teodoro1 explained in these terms how his attitudes about his sexuality had shifted after migrating from Guadalajara, Mexico, to San Diego, California. His view is broadly consistent with that of other lesbian, gay, bi- sexual, or transgender (LGBT) immigrants who moved to the USA. In general, prior work on LGBT immigrants has shown that sexuality-related motivations propel their international relocation—that they leave their countries of origin believing they will be able to live their sexualities more freely. They expect that migration will provide them a space to enact their sexualities far from the gaze of families, in a place that they imagine as more sexually liberal (Acosta, 2008; Bianchi et al., 2007; Cantu Jr., 2009; Carrillo, 2004, 2009; Manalansan, 2003; Thing, 2010; Vasquez del Aguila, 2012).

Linked to these ideas is a sense that LGBT immi- grants’ understandings of same-sex desires, sexual identities, and sexual practices also change after

migration. Indeed, the popular discourse on LGBT immigrants from the so-called global south tends to assume that they consistently acquired suppos- edly “pre-modern” interpretations of same-sex de- sires in their home countries—interpretations that treat gender difference, and not the heterosexual/ homosexual binary, as the organizing principle of sexual life, thus inhibiting the development of LGBT identities, communities, and rights.2 These immi- grants are then expected to shift post-migration toward more “modern” or “global” interpretations deemed to be prevalent within American urban LGBT cultures. In the case of Latin America, some studies have confirmed this idea. Working respectively with Peruvian and Dominican male immigrants, Vasquez del Aguila (2012) and Decena (2011) found that their participants uniformly adopted in their home countries interpretations sustained by secrecy and/ or informed by a highly gendered model of male ho- mosexuality commonly known as the “pasivo/activo” model. As we will see in more detail later, this model dichotomizes men who engage in sex with other men into effeminate, socially-stigmatized pasivos, and their stereotypically masculine partners, or activos. These authors conclude that their participants were exposed to gay identity models only after migrating to the USA.

By contrast, other studies characterized immi- grant gay men’s pre-migration interpretations of

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same-sex desires as more diverse (Cantú Jr., 2009; Thing, 2010), a finding that is consistent with the re- sults of recent studies of male same-sex desires con- ducted in Mexico (Carrillo, 2002; Gallego Montes, 2010; Laguarda, 2011; List, 2005; Nuñez Noriega, 2007). For instance, among Cantú’s (2009: 155) par- ticipants, several recognized the pasivo/activo labels but “explained that the terms were somewhat archaic, especially as identity labels, and that one might ask a prospective sexual partner what ‘they liked’ but that they expected a partner in a committed relationship to be more versatile in his sexual repertoire.” Yet, de- spite their important insight that challenged reign- ing stereotypes, Cantú’s and Thing’s studies were limited by their small sample sizes, which inhibited systematic analyses of intragroup diversity pre- and post-migration.

Beyond a general sense that LGBT immigrants’ sexualities change after relocation, what those changes specifically entail has not been system- atically investigated. Bianchi et al. (2007: 512) suc- cinctly note that immigrants “reported exposure to sexual practices that they had not encountered in their countries of origin,” which “were added to the sexual repertoire of the participants.” Similarly Vasquez del Aguila (2012) describes immigrants who became more open to having a steady male lover or to recognize that they may be bisexual. However, detail on the post-migration sexual changes of Latin American gay immigrants is scant.

Based on in-depth interviews with 80 men who moved from Mexico to San Diego, we build on pre- vious research and provide a systematic analysis of pre- and post-migration patterns of interpretation of same-sex desires. We find that these immigrant men are diverse in terms of their interpretations and practices pre-migration. We also find that while some experience profound shifts in sexual interpretations and practices post-migration, others more superfi- cially adapt pre-migration interpretations to their new sexual contexts, and still others resist chang- ing styles of sexual interaction that they learned and experienced in Mexico. We argue that these findings, which reveal the complexity and diversity of sexual interpretations among immigrant gay and bisexual men, pose a challenge to proposed systems

of classifying same-sex desires as well as to conven- tional understandings of the impact of international migration on gay sexuality.

pat t e r n s o f i n t e r p r e tat i o n a n d   p r a c t i c e o f s a m e - s e x d e s i r e s

Our approach synthesizes separate developments in comparative studies of same-sex desires, as well as in the study of global gay identities. We consider published descriptions of various patterns of sexual categorization and interpretation; overlaps and con- tinuities among them; and cultural, social, historical, and geographic factors that may influence detected variations. A central tenet of cross-cultural analyses of homosexuality has been the perception that interpre- tations of same-sex desires vary across time and loca- tion, albeit within a limited range of possibilities that make comparisons across cultural groups or historical moments possible (Adam, 1986; Murray, 1995). The difficulty, however, is that such comparisons often pre- suppose the existence of a stable set of interpretations and practices that can be applied to characterize a whole cultural group, region, or nation. Such assump- tions have resulted in “models” of homosexuality that have become somewhat reified, which, as Murray (2002) has observed, comes at the cost of our develop- ing more dynamic analyses that attend to difference and change both within and between nations.3

In relation to Latin America, in spite of marked achievements in LGBT rights in the region, a popu- lar sense prevails that interpretations of male same- sex desires remain primarily informed by the highly gendered pasivo/activo model. This model was first identified by American anthropologists working in Mexico in the late 1960s and 1970s (Carrier, 1972; Taylor, 1978), and was later adopted by other schol- ars (Almaguer, 1991; Murray, 1995; Vidal-Ortiz et al., 2010). According to this model, men who engage in sex with men are strictly dichotomized into two groups: (1) those who are socially stigmatized because they are perceived as effeminate and assumed to be the recep- tive partners during anal intercourse (the pasivos); and (2) those assumed to be masculine and the insertive partners, who avoid social stigma by maintaining identities as “regular” or “normal” men (the activos).4

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These highly gendered interpretations are per- ceived as contrasting greatly with less gendered and more egalitarian interpretations and practices as- sumed to inform American and global gay identities (Adam, 1986; Murray, 1995), which are often labeled “object-choice” (a borrowing from psychoanalytic theory). According to object-choice or gay interpreta- tions, all men who engage exclusively in sex with men are presumed to be “gay” or “homosexual” regardless of their femininity or masculinity, or whether they are receptive or insertive during anal intercourse. These interpretations are often also characterized as containing expectations of sexual versatility and reci- procity between sexual partners.

The applicability of the pasivo/activo model as the only one appropriate for explaining Latino/ Latin American male homosexualities has rightly been challenged, however, as several scholars have highlighted the adoption and adaptation of so- called global or gay interpretations in Latin Ameri- can countries (Cantú Jr., 2009; Carrillo, 1999, 2002; Fontdevila, 2012; Guzmán, 2006; Parker, 1991, 1999; Vidal-Ortiz et al., 2010). . . .

Moreover, rather than treating these various forms of interpretation and practice of same-sex de- sires as discrete and incompatible, in our analysis we consider flexibilities that allow individuals to adapt different interpretations of same-sex desires to their own social realities—according to specific sexual sit- uations and contexts—and even to move back and forth across them. . . .

Finally, our analysis attends to a general sense provided by the scholarship on global gay identities that variations of interpretation of same-sex desires are influenced by factors such as social class position and urban/rural origin. In this view, the adoption of gay interpretations is perceived as being favored by a middle-class position that is coupled with an urban origin (Binnie, 2011; Heaphy, 2011; Valocchi, 1999). As we will see, our findings partially confirm this per- ception, but also challenge it by noting that rural and working-class Mexican men have adopted gay inter- pretations prior to migrating to the USA.

Thus by comparison to existing scholarship, we argue for recognition of even greater flexibility and fluidity in how same-sex desires are understood and

acted upon. And we therefore emphasize the limits of classification schemes, even as we describe dis- tinctive patterns of interpretation and practice that our own participants demonstrated but also moved between and sometimes combined. We also argue that the process of migration provides a particularly helpful lens for understanding such sexual variation because of the abruptness of the change in sexual contexts that migration often brings about. We now turn to presenting our findings . . . .

[ . . . ]

i n t e r p r e tat i o n s a n d p r a c t i c e s p r e - m i g r at i o n

Our analysis yielded three distinct pre-migration pat- terns of interpretation and practice of same-sex de- sires, which roughly correspond to the three patterns identified by the literature on Mexican sexualities. As shorthand, we have labeled the three patterns “highly gendered,” “homosocial,” and “object choice/gay.” As we will see, however, a considerable number of partici- pants cannot be neatly located in any single pattern, and this has important implications for the study of diversity among gay men and the potential fluidity of their sexual experiences. We must also clarify that this typology is not meant to represent universally appli- cable types of homosexuality (as suggested by Adam, 1986), nor a set of terms used by the men we inter- viewed, nor merely a cluster of sexual behaviors. Rather, it represents distinctive analytically derived patterns of meaning and practices (“sexualities” for want of a better term) that emerge in our interviewees’ narratives. Regardless of their interpretations and practices, most participants self-identified as “homosexuales,” “gay,” or “bisexuales” while living in Mexico, meaning that they managed to match these identities to the logics of in- terpretation and practice within all three patterns.

Highly Gendered Interpretations and Practices Pre-Migration

Before migrating, the interpretations and enactments of same-sex desires on the part of 12 participants (15%)5 can be described as conforming to the highly gendered pasivo/activo model.6 These participants describe in- terpretations and forms of sexual interaction between

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men that seem informed by what Risman (2009: 82) al- ternatively calls “traditional gender scripts” and “doing gender traditionally” (see also West and Zimmerman, 1987). Most had sexual (and even some romantic) rela- tions with straight-identified men whom they regarded as masculine,7 who Mexican gay men often call “may- ates.” These partners commonly enforced highly gen- dered expectations during sex. For instance, Emilio, a 24-year-old from a small town in Nayarit, described his partners as men who “don’t really like to suck [perform oral sex] . . . they like only to get sucked. And when you finish sucking them off, they bend you over [in English in the original] and they want to stick it in.” Our par- ticipants typically adopted a receptive role with these partners. They were also often labeled with derogatory terms such as maricón or joto (both roughly equivalent to “fag”), which marked them as effeminate.8 All but one grew up in small towns or rural areas or in working- class urban neighborhoods.

Object-Choice/Gay Interpretations and Practices Pre-Migration

In contrast with the previous pattern, the interpre- tations and practices of 41 participants (51%) are consistent with contemporary views of Mexican gay identities, which we label “object-choice/gay” for short. Their sexual/romantic interactions in Mexico involved

other men who identified as gay or homosexual (both Spanish-language terms). These men attended a con- stellation of above-ground and underground gay venues.9 Although some report that they or their part- ners had specific preferences penetrating or being pene- trated, they generally thought of those roles as a choice and their relationships often operated with expecta- tions of reciprocity and versatility. Some in fact strongly rejected highly gendered interpretations and saw them as old-fashioned. For example, Raimundo, a 36-year- old from Sonora, stressed that “I was never one to go to cantinas [straight bars]. . . . I always was more gay.” Here cantinas represent working-class spaces where straight- identified men seek sex with effeminized men.

Most of these men lived in urban areas, primar- ily, although not exclusively, in Mexico’s largest cities. Contrary to the stereotype, however, not all are middle class. For instance, Marcelo, a working- class 34-year-old from Mexico City, discovered gay sex and cruising in the Metro, Mexico City’s subway system. Contact with gay men there led him to other gay spaces; and participation in leftist organizing led him to becoming a gay activist. Marcelo recalls:?

[An activist] who . . . realized that I was gay—I don’t know how—invited me to . . . the 1988 [Mexico City gay] march, and I agreed to go for the first time  .  .  . and also to join a [gay] group that no longer exists.

Pre-migration

N = 8

N = 1 N = 3

N = 20 N = 3

N = 2

N = 2

N = 41

Highly gendered (N = 12)

Combined (N = 23)

Homosocial (N = 2)

No same-sex experiences in Mexico (N = 2)

Object choice/gay (N = 41) Object choice/gay (N = 68)

Combined (N = 4)

Highly gendered (N = 8)

Post-migration

F I G U R E 1 . Patterns of interpretation and practice of same-sex desires pre- and postmigration.

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Around the same time, he was also defining his whole life around his gay identity:

That was the beginning of my social gay life and of my farewell from a straight social life, because in the ’90s my life centered completely on gay society. . . . Even the jobs that I got . . . little by little were more with people from the gay ghetto. [My] last job . . . was in a gay friend’s art gallery.

Homosocial Interpretations and Practices Pre-Migration

By the time they left Mexico, only two men (2.5%) ex- clusively expressed their same-sex desires in ways that are consistent with the “homosocial” pattern. Both were teenagers when they left. As we will see in the next section, others relied on homosocial practices in some sexual situations, and on highly gendered or object-choice/gay ones in others.

As we have reported elsewhere, the homosocial pattern was common at the time of our participants’ sexual initiation, which typically took place during their adolescence, as they were exploring same-sex desires with neighborhood friends (Carrillo and Fontdevila, 2011).10 Indeed, 38 Mexican men in the sample experienced homosocial sexual initiations. Most among them, however, later acquired identities as “gays” or “homosexuales,” aligning their interpreta- tions and practices with those of the object-choice/ gay pattern.

A Combined Pattern of Interpretations and Practices Pre-Migration

Finally, 23 participants (29%) cannot be classified dis- cretely into any one of the three patterns described. Their interpretations and enactment of same-sex de- sires varied according to specific sexual contexts, situ- ations, or sexual partners. Most typically, they shifted back and forth between the highly gendered pattern and one of the other two (homosocial or object- choice/gay), or among all three. We have labeled this subgroup “combined.” The ability of these participants to seamlessly move back and forth from one pattern to another suggests that participation in the Mexican gay world allows considerable fluidity and flexibility of in- terpretation and practice.

Justo, a 32-year-old from a town in Jalisco, ini- tially engaged in both homosocial and highly gen- dered relations. He participated in sexual games with cousins and neighbors, and later had a highly gendered relationship with a straight-identified man. This man had a girlfriend, whom he eventually mar- ried. Except for one occasion, Justo’s boyfriend was the one who penetrated during anal intercourse. Justo also accessed a local network of gay-identified men in his town, who in turn introduced him to the well-developed urban gay life of nearby Guadalajara. In Guadalajara he fulfilled his dream of dating a gay man, and he also started having casual sexual en- counters with gay men.

i n t e r p r e tat i o n s a n d p r a c t i c e s p o s t - m i g r at i o n

After migrating, practically all participants came into contact with San Diego’s visible gay community, whose geographical point of reference is the middle- class Hillcrest neighborhood. (This is not surprising, given that we recruited men who self-identified as gay or bisexual and we did not seek out non-gay-identified men who have sex with men). At the time of their in- terviews, the interpretations and practices of 68 (85%) aligned with the “object-choice/gay” pattern, eight (10%) exclusively retained interpretations consistent with the “highly gendered” pattern, and 4 (5%) re- mained in the “combined” pattern (see Figure 1, right column). Several moved into Hillcrest or into adja- cent, more affordable areas. How long it took them to discover gay venues in San Diego varied consider- ably (from no time to years), depending on their prior knowledge about San Diego’s gay community. Their sources of information included friends, co-workers, acquaintances, neighbors, the internet, local service agencies, adult bookstores, and gay magazines.

At first glance, our data indicate an overall post- migration shift toward interpretations and practices that are consistent with American, urban, gay life- styles. However, the changes that these men experi- enced after migrating are not uniform. After migrating, our participants’ lives took different paths: (1) Some underwent profound shifts in interpretation as a result of contextual shifts from Mexico to the USA, and they

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moved altogether from one pattern of interpretation to another (e.g., from the highly gendered to the object- choice/gay pattern). (2) Others stayed within the same pattern of interpretations that informed their same- sex desires in Mexico, but underwent a contextual shift in practices (e.g., they remained in the object- choice/gay pattern but adopted new sexual repertoires post-migration). (3) Finally, some stayed within the same pattern that informed their same-sex desires in Mexico, and resisted the contextual pressures to rede- fine their interpretations or practices post-migration (e.g., some kept highly gendered interpretations and practices post-migration, or gay scripts of sexual inter- action that they had learned in Mexico). In the sec- tions that follow, we describe how change—and the absence of change—plays out within each of the pat- terns of interpretation that we identified.

Object-Choice/Gay Interpretations and Practices Post-Migration

The 68 participants whom we classified in this pattern include the 41 who previously adopted object-choice/ gay interpretations while in Mexico, 20 who shifted from the combined pattern, three who shifted from the highly gendered pattern, two who shifted from the homosocial pattern, and two who previously had no same-sex experiences in Mexico (see Figure 1). Among these men, change was typically more pronounced for participants who shifted to the object-choice/gay pattern from other patterns. The others—those who arrived with and retained object-choice/gay interpreta- tions and practices—either adapted them to their new context or maintained them unchanged.

pa r t i c i pa n t s w h o s h i f t e d t o t h e o b j e c t - c h o i c e / g ay p at t e r n . Several participants abandoned highly gendered interpretations and practices upon arrival in San Diego, including Armando, a 21-year-old from rural Oaxaca. In his hometown his sexual life had gravitated around highly gendered sexual encounters with straight-identified men. “For most [such men, sex with men] is just a pastime, something temporary,” said Armando. “They’re always heterosexual in their own eyes.” Armando had been involved in an 11-year relationship with a neighbor that ended when the man married. In San Diego, a friend took Armando to

Hillcrest and he started attending gay bars and having sex with gay men (although one partner turned out to be married to a woman). Armando also began seeking sex in gay bathhouses. Cases such as Armando’s suggest that shifts in sexual contexts sometimes produce significant changes in sexual interpretations, practices, and desires, particularly when international migration involves moving between two very different local sexual cultures (for instance from a rural to an urban sexual culture).

Some of these men expressed that their change was motivated by a profound dissatisfaction with the highly gendered encounters they had experienced in Mexico. They described those encounters as sordid or clandestine, and their partners as rough and un- interested in expressing emotions during sex. These men assess that American (mostly meaning “white”) gay men are comparatively more affectionate, caring, and respectful. For that reason, in San Diego they tend to seek sex with white gay men.

For example, Plutarco, a 29-year-old from Oaxaca, typically was penetrated by straight-identified men while in Mexico. When asked why he liked American men, he responded:

Why? I feel they are more tender, more passionate, and more considerate. Mexicans are rougher and tend not to kiss you or touch you. Well, I lived that with many Mexicans who didn’t touch me or kiss me. . . . Americans are tender  .  .  . when they penetrate you, they don’t hurt you. Mexicans don’t care. Whether they are hurting you or not, they keep doing it. And [Americans] don’t, [they ask you] “are you OK”?

Plutarco went on to say that his white American boyfriend possessed everything he ever looked for in a man, and that there is not a day in which his part- ner “will not bring me a glass of juice in bed in the morning, and he even opens and closes the door for me. Listen, I‘ve been delighted!” While highly gen- dered encounters could be intensely erotic to some of our participants (as we will see later), they were dissatisfying to those who, like Plutarco, sought overt expressions of affection.

p a r t i c i p a n t s w h o a d a p t e d t h e i r o b j e c t - c h o i c e i n t e r p r e tat i o n s a n d p r a c t i c e s . Other participants who had previously adopted exclusively object-choice/gay

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interpretations and practices in Mexico retained them, but they also experienced significant changes after migration. They discovered that gay life in San Diego differed considerably from what they had known in Mexico—that being gay in Mexico and being gay in San Diego was not quite the same thing. Many were previously unfamiliar with the notion of American gay neighborhoods or with the existence of institutionalized gay bathhouses where sex between men is not clandestine, unlike some urban steam baths in Mexico (Teutle López, 2007). They were particularly surprised by the sexual directness of American, middle- class gay men, and by their sexual adventurousness, to which they often alluded by referring to kink, BDSM, and the use of sex toys. For example, Leopoldo, a 36-year-old from Sonora, said:

Mexico is more about one-on-one sex, sex without much variation  .  .  . Here it’s more about toys and other things, no?—fetishes and that sort of thing that people here like more. It’s a great difference that I see—it’s not all, I am not generalizing . . . but here you come across it and in Mexico it’s harder to find.

In San Diego, some of these gay Mexicans ea- gerly adopted forms of sexual interaction that were either new to them or that they had craved before mi- grating. Some had also previously fantasized about having sex with American white men. They also per- ceived Mexicans as less sexually adventurous, and their sexual repertoires as more limited. Thus, they preferred to seek sexual partners within so-called mainstream American gay venues, which in San Diego tend to be primarily white.

Raimundo, whom we quoted before, expressed liking American-style sexual experimentation and sex toys, including leather fetishes and fisting. He claims that “Latinos have a lot of hang-ups about that,” and therefore he typically associates with white American gay men who share his desires. He adds, “I am more into whites. . . . What I don’t like about Latinos is that we are still very repressed. So I came fleeing from that. To come and do the same; I don’t see the point of that.”

Raimundo found himself fitting nicely into the new gay sexual cultures that he accessed, but for other

Mexicans it took some effort to adapt to what they saw as unconventional sexual practices with more ex- ploratory American gay partners. Gerardo, a 32-year- old from Tijuana, described how difficult it was for him to comply with his white boyfriend’s request to open their monogamous relationship: “I’m not good at going to bed and then goodbye. So at first it was difficult. But I’ve overcome that [laughter]. Now I’ll almost become an expert in that.  .  .  .” Ultimately, Mexican men who adopted new practices that they saw as more American viewed them as a welcome di- versification of their own sexual repertoires.

p a r t i c i p a n t s w h o r e s i s t e d a lt e r i n g t h e i r o b j e c t - c h o i c e i n t e r p r e tat i o n s a n d p r a c t i c e s . Other men, however, disliked what they saw as American gay practices and resisted changing forms of gay interaction that they favored in Mexico. Instead of shifting their practices, they sought to meet men who would agree with them, often within Latino gay venues. In Mexico, they had learned that sex between gay men, including casual sex, should be about deep communication, passion, and surrender. Upon arrival they became critical of the forms of sexual interaction that they perceived are common among American gay men, which they considered “mechanical” and “cold,” like just going through the motions. For instance, Gonzalo, a 44-year-old from Sinaloa, remarked:

The American is more open. He addresses you di- rectly, and some are very practical. They tell you: . . . “I’m such and such. Are you a top or a bottom? I’m a top. Let’s go to my house.” They leave you cold. In Mexico one doesn’t do that.  .  .  . To go and say, “Are you activo or pasivo? Let’s go home,” would be syn- onymous with prostitution. It’s really offensive.  .  .  . [Americans] are colder, not really romantic, and we are more romantic, corny [cursis].

These opinions about American gay men contrast greatly with those of participants such as Plutarco, quoted earlier, who viewed American gay men as more affectionate than Mexican men. The difference is that men like Plutarco had participated in highly gendered encounters, where they felt that their straight-identified partners sought only their own pleasure and were uninterested in them as people. In other words, these opposing opinions about whether

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American gay men are more or less affectionate re- flect different points of reference for making cross- cultural comparisons.

Some of the Mexican men who saw American white gay men as less affectionate were nonetheless physically attracted to those men, experiencing as a result some tension between their sexual attraction and the realities of sex with those partners. Efraín, a 37-year-old from Mexicali, said:

I like whites . . . but only to look at, because Latinos are hotter. . . . They touch you and they know where to touch you. They kiss you and they know where to kiss you. They tell you things; and whites are colder. They just do what they came for, you know? . . . For sex, Latinos; as eye candy, whites. That’s the truth [laughter]. They are very pretty and very handsome, but they are very cold.

Finally, challenging the perception that the urban gay cultures of large US cities are by definition “on the cutting edge” of so-called global gay cultures, some men from large cities in Mexico found San Diego’s gay life provincial by comparison. That was the case of Marcelo, whom we quoted before. Having participated extensively in Mexico City’s gay life, he felt that San Diego’s gay community lacked the size or visibility that he desired. For that reason, he some- times goes to gay clubs in Los Angeles, which he finds more exciting, or Tijuana, where he feels he under- stands the cruising rituals better.

Highly Gendered Interpretations and Practices Post-Migration

After migrating, no participants shifted to the highly gendered pattern from other patterns. However, eight (67%) retained highly gendered interpretations and practices in San Diego (see Figure 1). Their cases raise questions about the common assumption that all gay Latino immigrant men shift toward object-choice (gay) sexualities post-migration.

These men generally felt a strong sexual attrac- tion for “real men,” as they themselves put it, and dismissed American gay men as effeminate. They felt comfortable about their experiences with straight- identified Mexicans and did not think of them as abusive. Some even experienced romantic feelings

toward straight-identified partners, but did not expect the latter to fall in love with them. In contrast, again, with men such as Plutarco, this category includes men who enjoyed the highly gendered encounters that they experienced in Mexico, most commonly within urban working-class neighborhoods or in rural Mexico. After migrating, they sought straight- identified Mexican men in local neighborhood bars (cantinas) or crossed the border into Tijuana to meet such partners. They might socialize with gay men, but could not imagine having sex with them. In fact, they could not fathom how sex was possible between two gay-identified men.

For example, Ubaldo, a 57-year-old from Ensenada, had a difficult time connecting with American gay men. He had tried, but also recognized that:

The system here . . . I don’t like it . . . because both are jotos. . . . You have to penetrate him. . . . That’s not for me. I mean, I can’t understand it. Maybe I’m wrong. But no  .  .  . I don’t like them to ask me to penetrate them. . . . Since I was young I became used to always play the part of the woman . . . I feel protected [pro- tegida, in the feminine form of the word], I feel like a woman. But, of course, I’m not a woman.

Similarly, Humberto, a 29-year-old from Nayarit, remarked:

Here in the disco . . . most are gay. They’re gay because they like to be penetrated. . . . And they behave very effeminately. I don’t like to have sex with these men. Sometimes I meet them and they seem so formal [se- riecitos, implying masculine], but when I try . . . Oh, no! They disappoint me.

Finally, Ezequiel, a 33-year-old from a small town in Nayarit struggled between his desire for “güero” (blond) Americans and his perception that they are effeminate. He said:

I don’t have many preferences, but my dream has been [to be with] an American. But American men are more women than us [nosotras, in the feminine form of the word]. ¡Qué horror! Latinos are more men than Americans; always.

Ezequiel’s gay friends in San Diego encouraged him to meet Americans and avoid the dilemmas of falling in love with straight-identified men. However,

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as his comment suggests, he perceived American gay men as lacking in essential masculinity.

While these men continue to demonstrate highly gendered interpretations and practices, that does not mean that their sexual lives in San Diego were un- changed. Indeed, some started taking an insertive role during anal intercourse, which is indicative of an interesting adaptation that they implement post-migration: They realize that within the com- plex equations of masculinity/femininity they may not always be the ones on the “more feminine” side. Ezequiel, for instance, likes straight men “because they give me my pleasure,” meaning that they pen- etrate him. However, in San Diego gay bars, “I always end up with someone who is more of a woman than me . . . more joto than me.” He explains: “When I am with a man, I behave like a woman for him. I assume my place. But if it’s [with] someone like me, who wants me to be the man, then I am always the man.”

This change could be interpreted as a shift toward the expected versatility of object choice/gay interpre- tations. However, for participants such as Ezequiel, highly gendered dichotomizations remain unchal- lenged. At the same time, that does not necessarily mean that rigid gender performances remain intact: These participants may be reflectively “undoing gender” (Risman, 2009) by transforming highly gen- dered expectations in the context of sex between men into a choice and a preference—one among several options within the broader gay world.

Combined Interpretations and Practices Post-Migration

Four men are included in this pattern post-migration: Three of the original 23 participants in the combined pattern pre-migration, plus one who shifted from the highly gendered to the combined pattern. Among them, the case of Prado, a 31-year-old from a medium- sized city in Sonora who later moved to Tijuana, is especially interesting: In San Diego Prado seamlessly moves back and forth between a gay world and a world of Mexican straight-identified men who seek sex with men. Prado has a strong preference for socializing with gay men and attending gay clubs. However, when it comes to sex, his predilection is to seduce straight men

in Mexican cantinas (“bares de mayates,” as he calls them). Prado provides the most graphic description of the seduction strategies in these venues:

You sit at the bar, order a beer, a sangría or what- ever you want to drink. . . . I start doing like this [he demonstrates pulling his hair back in a feminized manner], even if I don’t have long hair. You get it? How many men have you seen who would do that? None. I pull my little hair and things like that. Then, casually, when he goes to the bathroom, you put on an act and suddenly you also need to use the bath- room. So you follow him. . . . While you’re washing your hands, you start with whatever: “How’s your eve- ning so far?” or “Are you drunk already?” . . . Simple things. Then they answer you or they don’t.

By participating in San Diego’s gay life, Prado dis- covered that gays need not be effeminate. “I saw . . . that they were different. They didn’t have to look gay; because in Tijuana you had to look gay.” Having been called names in Mexico for being effeminate, in San Diego he realized he could act in ways that he consid- ered more masculine and was also inspired to be in- sertive if he assessed that a mayate partner was “medio gay” (“half gay,” meaning “not completely mascu- line”). He now enjoys his acquired versatility and the ability to pass as a chacal (“a jackal,” a Mexican term for working-class young men who are perceived as masculine). Prado thus takes advantage of the flex- ibilities afforded by back and forth movement across different patterns of interpretation and practice and, like other participants, has also adapted those inter- pretations and practices to specific contexts and situ- ations in the USA.

C O N C L U S I O N

Our findings challenge the common perception that LGBT immigrants from Latin American countries are homogeneous in terms of their interpretations of same-sex desires. On the contrary, our participants’ understandings before migration are diverse, and our data suggest that their diversity is related to a variety of interpretations that are available in Mexico even among people of the same social class or from the same kinds of geographic backgrounds. Our findings

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further confirm that LGBT immigrants often experi- ence changes in relation to their interpretations of same-sex desires, practices, sexual lifestyles, and part- ners post-migration. However, contrary to what is often assumed, those changes are by no means uni- form or even consistent for the same individuals.

We thus find it crucial to avoid viewing LGBT immi- grants from countries such as Mexico as a monolithic group, in terms of either their sexualities pre-migration or the changes that they experience after migrating. Our conclusion has important social policy implica- tions. For instance, in relation to HIV prevention pro- grams, our findings suggest that a one-model-fits-all approach may have very limited success in addressing the needs of a group as diverse as this one.

[ . . . ] By avoiding such characterization, we may be in a

better position to understand the LGBT immigrants’

own perception that migration does change them in terms of their sexuality. In some ways that should not be surprising since individuals who move from one social context to another inevitably encounter different forms of social and sexual interaction, and are exposed to new sexual institutions that differ from those in their home countries. What they do about their new possibilities post-migration seems to depend, at least in part, on their own preferences— what they want to keep or change in relation to what they knew before. Our findings thus point to the need to further investigate how pre-migration expe- rience, and the nature and extent of the perceived gap between pre- and post-migration contexts, influence the post-migration outcomes for individuals, in part by structuring the set of preferences among which those individuals choose and act upon.

[ . . . ]

F U N D I N G

This work was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), award number R01HD042919. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of NICHD or the National Institutes of Health.

N O T E S

1. All participant names are pseudonyms. 2. These two ways of thinking about the expression of same-sex desire correspond to two of four

broad patterns identified by Adam (1986). See also Murray (1995). 3. Murray’s point is also broadly consistent with the critique raised by cultural sociologists of ear-

lier approaches to comparative cultural analysis (Lamont and Thévenot, 2000). 4. The literature has found that in reality this model is somewhat flexible in terms of its prescribed

sexual roles. See Murray (1995) and Taylor (1978). 5. Given that this is a qualitative, non-random sample, we offer percentages only for illustration

purposes, and we do not mean to make any claims of generalizability. 6. As Figure 1 indicates, two participants (2.5%) began interacting sexually with men only after

migrating to the USA. 7. Their assessments imply a sense of normative masculinity that reflects: (1) a perceived ab-

sence of effeminacy, emphasized by terms such as varonil (virile), hombre (man), and the doubly-emphatic hombre-hombre (man-man); (2) a generic expectation that “more masculine” men are the insertive partners (even when this is not always experientially confirmed); and (3) a presumption that those partners are essentially heterosexual (in spite of their involvement in sex with men). There is, however, some interpretive variation, and at least one participant distin- guished between being masculine, as a positive trait, versus being “macho,” defined by violence

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and the domination of women. On Mexican masculinities, see Gutmann (1996). On normative, hegemonic, and other masculinities, see Connell and Messerschmidt (2005).

8. The sexual role of one participant was consistent with that of a mayate. He had a girlfriend, pene- trated gay men or transgender partners, and feared that being penetrated would turn him effeminate.

9. These ranged from gay groups, bars, and clubs, to widely recognized public sex venues in parks, theaters, steam baths, and mass public transit.

10. Our participants report that some of these partners moved on to exclusively having sex with women. The research by Nuñez Noriega (2007) suggests, however, that some such men might continue having sex with men later in life in the context of homosocial relations with friends.

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Kirsty Liddiard (2014) The work of disabled identities in intimate relationships, Disability & Society, 29:1, 115-128, DOI: 10.1080/09687599.2013.776486. Reproduced with permission of Taylor & Francis.

K I R S T Y L I D D I A R D

i n t r o d u c t i o n

The oppressions experienced by disabled people in their sexual and intimate lives have long been over- shadowed by wider rights for their rightful place within civil and public life (Shakespeare, Gillespie-Sells, and Davies 1996). The consequences of this, Shakespeare (1999, 54) argues, have been the marginalisation of disabled people’s sexual politics and the omission of the “personal and individual dimensions of oppres- sion.” Feminist authors within disability studies have challenged these important omissions, and have at the same time located gender and other social categories within analyses of disability (Baron 1997; Thomas 1999). Much of this critical scholarship has been through writing openly about their own embodiment, intersectional identities, and lived experiences of im- pairment (see Morris 1989; Wendell 1996; Thomas 1999), causing what Sherry (2004, 776) called a cru- cial “deconstruction of the public/private divide.”

While social model orthodoxy holds the psy- chological “as epiphenomenal, diversionary, and potentially misappropriated in the buttressing of pa- thologising accounts of disablement” (Watermeyer 2009, iii), feminist authors—markedly Thomas (1999), and later Reeve (2002)—have argued for the inclusion of the psychological and emotional dimen- sions of disability and impairment within disability studies (see also Goodley 2011). For example, in her social relational model of disability, Thomas (1999, 60; emphasis added) redefines disability as “a form of social oppression involving the social imposition of restrictions of activity on people with impairments and the socially engendered undermining of their

15. THE WORK OF DISABLED IDENTITIES IN INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS

psycho-emotional well-being.” Thus, “disability” is reimagined to have political, material, economic, structural, emotional, intimate, and personal di- mensions. Redefining disability along these lines contextualises that “the oppression disabled people can experience operates on the ‘inside’ as well as on the ‘outside’” (Thomas 2004, 40); or, as Reeve (2004, 84; original emphasis) articulates, “operates at both the public and personal levels, affecting what people can do, as well as what they can be.”

Psycho-emotional disablism is defined by Thomas (1999, 60) as “the socially engendered un- dermining of emotional well-being.” Reeve (2004, 86) proposes that this form of social oppression occurs through “the experience of being excluded from physical environments” (which, she argues, in- stigates a feeling of not belonging); through routine objectification and voyeurism perpetrated by (but not exclusive to) non-disabled others; and through internalised oppression, which she defines as when “individuals in a marginalised group in society in- ternalise the prejudices held by the dominant group” (Reeve 2004, 91). Thus, psycho-emotional disablism is a relational form of disablism embodied through experiences of “hostility or pitying stares, dismis- sive rejection, infantilisation, patronising attitudes, altruism, help and care on the part of non-disabled people” (Goodley 2010, 96), which “frequently re- sults in disabled people being made to feel worth- less, useless, of lesser value, unattractive, a burden” (Thomas 2006, 182).

Building upon existing knowledge of psychoemo- tional disablism, particularly its potential impact

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within the personal, intimate and sexual spaces of disabled people’s lives, I present findings from a rele- vant empirical study that explored disabled men and women’s lived experiences of sexuality and intimate relationships. To clarify, my use of the term “intimate relationship” refers to a (non-commercial) shared in- timacy with another person, which my informants identified as significant and a source of sexual, physi- cal and/or emotional intimacy. The doctoral research, which took place in England between 2008 and 2011, examined disabled people’s management and nego- tiation of their sexual and intimate lives, selves and bodies in the context of ableist cultures where they are, as Brown (1994, 125) states, assigned the para- doxical social categories of “asexual, oversexed, in- nocents, or perverts.” This article draws upon the sexual stories of 25 disabled people, detailing a the- matic analysis of their accounts of intimate relation- ships that reveal the—often routine— carrying out of considerable emotional work (Hochschild 1983), as well as other forms of (gendered) work, such as sex work (Cacchioni 2007). By making visible their work of “telling, hiding, keeping up, waiting, teach- ing, networking and negotiating” (Church et al. 2007, 10), I explore the ways in which informants’ work was shaped by their lived experiences of gender, sexuality, impairment and disability. Crucially, I critically question such work, suggesting that, while it was often strategically and consciously employed to manage competing intimate oppressions, for the most part, the requirement of informants to carry out forms of work within their sexual and intimate lives constituted a form of psycho-emotional disablism (Thomas 1999).

l e a r n i n g t o l a b o u r : e m o t i o n a l w o r k a n d d i s a b i l i t y p e r f o r m a n c e

Church et al. (2007, 1) state that “complex invisible work is performed by disabled people in every day/ night life.” In their research on disabled employees’ ex- periences of corporate settings, Church et al. (2007, 1) uncovered multiple kinds of work that employees rou- tinely utilised within the workplace in order to “stay corporately viable.” Types of work included hiding impairment and its effects; being extra productive to

counter employers’ negative assumptions; and car- rying out informal teaching around disability issues for co-workers and managers (Church et al. 2007). Similarly, Wong (2000) has documented the multiple forms of (emotion and other) work employed by dis- abled women in reproductive and sexual health care; she states that “work has become an umbrella code that encompasses both the barriers women face and the agency they exercise in dealing with them” (2000, 303). Likewise, Goodley (2010, 92) has identified the performances disabled people are expected to give: “disabled people learn to respond to the expectations of non-disabled culture—the demanding public— in ways that range from acting the passive disabled bystander, the grateful recipient of others’ support, the non-problematic receiver of others’ disabling attitudes.”

However, while the psycho-emotional dimen- sions (Reeve 2002; Thomas 1999) and “work” and “performances” of the “disabled” identity have been explored within disability studies (Church et al. 2007; Goodley 2010), the concepts of “emotional work” and “emotional labour” have seldom been ap- plied to disabled people’s experiences (Wilton 2008). The little empirical work that has taken place has related to work settings and public spaces and sys- tems (see Church et al. 2007; Wilton 2008; Bolton and Boyd 2003; Wong 2000). To clarify, “emotional work” and “emotional labour” are terms coined by Arlie Hochschild (1983, 7) to represent the “labour [which] one is required to induce or suppress feel- ing in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind to others.” Emo- tional labour is mostly required within employment settings and refers to the “management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily dis- play  .  .  . [that] is sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value” (Hochschild 1983, 7; original em- phasis). In contrast, “emotional work” or “manage- ment” are forms of work that are required in private settings, such as the family or home, and which have “use value” (Hochschild 1983, 7; original emphasis). “Emotional work,” then, is a better-fitting conceptual framework for explorations of disabled people’s lived experiences of their intimate relationships. My defi- nition of the term follows that of Exley and Letherby

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(2001, 115; emphasis added) and refers to the “effort and skill required to deal with one’s own feelings and those of others within the private sphere.”

Emotional work takes many forms and serves a variety of functions; for example, work can be on or for the self (Hochschild 1983); on or for others (Exley and Letherby 2001); have both positive and negative consequences (Wilton 2008); and be both a collective and individual labour (see Korczynski 2003). Pre- dominantly, women, “as traditionally more accom- plished managers of feeling” (Hochschild 1983, 11), have been found to carry out the majority of emo- tional work in the private sphere (Strazdins 2000)— largely because they take prime responsibility for the emotional wellbeing of other family members (Devault 1999). Identifying this work serves impor- tant functions. Early work by Blumer (1969, 148) argues that identifying the “invisible” work carried out as part of our daily lives can act as a “sensitising concept,” in that it can thrust previously neglected activities (e.g. childcare, caring for relatives) onto the public agenda. Furthermore, Devault (1999, 62) suggests that identifying the customary emotional work that takes place within family life is invaluable towards providing “fuller, more accurate accounts of how family members work at sustaining themselves as individuals and collectivities,” an understanding that, she argues, provides “an essential foundation for equitable policy aimed at enhancing the well- being of all citizens.”

Before outlining the research methodology, I must stress that by utilising the concept of emo- tional work (Hochschild 1983), I am not individu- alising, pathologising or psychologising disabled informants’ emotional experiences. The psycho- emotional, psychological and now psychoanalytic (see Goodley 2011) aspects of disability remain con- tentious within disability studies for fear that they encompass a return to early “individual, medical, bio-psychological, traditional, charity and moral models of disability” (Goodley 2011, 716), which “locate social problems in the head and bodies—the psyches—of disabled people” (Goodley 2011, 716). On the contrary, through deconstructing informants’ work I highlight the very social, cultural, political and material processes through which their work is produced.

r e s e a r c h f i n d i n g s a n d d i s c u s s i o n

t h e s t r at e g i c w o r k o f s tay i n g

In keeping with western conceptualisations of couple- dom, all informants who had been in an intimate relationship before (n = 21) reported it as having con- siderable benefits. For example, the intimate relationship was narrated as a “safe space” from a range of oppres- sions, discrimination and prejudices experienced in the “outside world,” and as a powerful means to challenge ableist discourses of disabled people as sexless and as not being “prospective” partners ( Gillespie-Sells, Hill, and Robbins 1998). It was further described as a space where gender and sexual selves could be confirmed and (re)built. For example, Rhona,1 a 21-year-old recently-single woman with a congenital impairment, said: “being in a relationship is a constant reassurance in my worth as a person and a woman.” Therefore, the intimate relationship could serve as a space to embody (gendered) desirability, contradicting dominant cul- tural representations of disability and the impaired body as both degendered (Shakespeare 1999) and monstrous (Shildrick 2002).

However, a common theme centred on infor- mants residing in intimate relationships for reasons beyond (romantic) feelings for a partner, and exac- erbated by a disabled identity within an ableist het- eronormative sexual culture. For example, Robert, a 26-year-old wheelchair user with congenital impair- ment, said that “having” or “being with” an intimate partner was an important symbol to others:

I’ve discussed with my [disabled] best friend, how we need a girlfriend to show “Look a real girl likes me, I have sex with her and we are in love—I must be ok, world.” (Robert)

Robert’s strategy openly acclaims a sexual identity and thus, he feels, “puts right” the dominant ableist assump- tions of asexuality and sexual inadequacy cast upon im- paired male bodies (Shakespeare, Gillespie-Sells, and Davies 1996). This indicates that, as DeVault (1999) suggests, merely surviving oppression is a form of work in itself.

However, for others, residing in intimate rela- tionships, even where informants had expressed they were often unfulfilled and/or unhappy, was a means through which to avoid oppressive dimensions

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of dominant sexual cultures; for example, “being single” once again (and thus losing many of the benefits listed above); being rejected on the “dating scene” (because of disability and impairment); and negotiating the (often risky) disclosure of disability and impairment to prospective partners. Notably, this strategy required the employment of consider- able emotional work (Hochschild 1983):

Because of my disability I thought “oh well, I need to stick with this because I might not find anybody else.” . . . (Shaun)

Because I am disabled, it gives you the worry about getting a girlfriend, you hold onto it for dear life, until it’s like flogging a dead horse and that’s no good for anybody. (Tom)

The accounts of Shaun, a married man who acquired spinal injury at the age of 11, and Tom, a single man with congenital physical impairment, show how their choices to stay in (former) unfulfilling intimate rela- tionships were shaped by the potential difficulties of finding a partner as physically impaired men within a gendered sexual culture that privileges hegemonic masculinities—from which disabled men are largely excluded (Shakespeare 1999). Further, I suggest that phrases like “sticking with it” and “flogging a dead horse” emphasise their emotional efforts. For example, Shaun said that in previous intimate relationships with (non-disabled) women he had painfully and silently worked past partners’ infidelities because he desperately “wanted to be in a relationship and wanted to have a partner.” Therefore, Shaun had to employ an acute form of what Hochschild (1983, 33) calls (emotional) “mental work,” whereby he not only had to perform the appropriate “display work” of a contented part- ner (Hochschild 1983, 10), but carry out significant “mental work” on his emotional self to really feel like— or become—a contented partner (Hochschild 1983, 6).

Another common chapter in many informants’ sto- ries (n = 23) related to the way that they felt that a rela- tionship, love and sex were “out of reach” as a disabled person—a form of sexual oppression internalised through ableist constructions of disabled people as lacking sexual agency and opportunity (Siebers 2008). For those with congenital impairments, such thoughts were reported as having been internalised from a young age and had often been confirmed by

(usually, well-meaning) family members; for ex- ample, telling them “not to get their hopes up.” This was narrated to have substantial impact upon sexual self-confidence and esteem (and thus constituted sig- nificant sexual oppression) and supports the notion that psycho-emotional disablism can be at its most acute when carried out by known agents (Reeve 2002). Graham, a 52-year-old single male who acquired phys- ical impairment at age 20, told of how he had been in intimate relationships with women to whom he was not attracted and did not like because he saw them as the “only opportunity” to have a relationship; but also because these relationships provided an (albeit, tem- porary) solution to his isolation and loneliness:

I didn’t like her . . . my attitude was entirely “I’ve got no choice  .  .  . she likes me for some reason and it’s her or nothing.”  .  .  . Never liked her; never fancied her. I didn’t like her touching me. . . . It’s horrible but there’s no other option. You either just spend your life entirely alone or try and be with someone who’s willing to be with you. (Graham)

Graham spoke at length of the multiple emotional performances that such relationships required. For ex- ample, he talked about performing emotional displays of sincerity, honesty and authenticity when “pretend- ing” to like these intimate partners. The abhorrence Graham reveals in the above account shows that these situations required routine surface acting (Hochs- child 1983). Rather than becoming an intimate partner through what Hochschild (1983, 33) defines as “deep acting” or “mental work,” the emphasis for Graham was upon imitating the “correct” emotional behav- iours synonymous with love, intimacy and affection. To add context, Graham reported experiencing significant marginalisation and isolation, which many disabled people experience: he lived alone, said he had no real friends or family, and rarely went out. Using Thomas’ (1999) social relational model of disability, Graham’s marginalisation and feelings of loneliness sit at the nexus of structural, psycho-emotional and material dimensions of disability: he dropped out of university upon acquiring impairment because, he said, his in- stitution could not cater adequately for a disabled stu- dent; a lack of qualifications combined with having to negotiate a disabled identity within an ableist labour market and capitalist economy led to both long-term

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underemployment and unemployment, which has in turn impacted upon his social mobility and his access to material resources (see Oliver 1990). Graham described these structural oppressions, then, as having significant impact upon his self-esteem and confidence (especially with women), denoting to him the feeling that he did not belong in, or did not have the attributes to attain, a meaningful intimate relationship (see Reeve 2004).

“ w o m e n ’ s w o r k ”

The carrying out of emotional work could also be couched within particular forms of gendered work, most notably “sex work” (Cacchioni 2007, 299). In her exploration of heterosexual women’s perceptions of their sexual problems, Cacchioni (2007, 301) found that women carried out “sex work,” which she defines as “the unacknowledged effort and the continuing monitoring which women are expected to devote to managing theirs and their partners’ sexual desires and activities.” Of my informants, while it was not uncom- mon for both men and women to openly question their role as a sexual partner, particularly their abil- ity to sexually “fulfil” partners (in ways fitting with heteronormative sexual practices), three women (of 10 in total) in the sample took it further and were ex- plicit about the ways in which they consciously (sex) “worked” to “compensate” non-disabled male partners in order to “make up” for having an impaired body.

For example, Jenny, aged 64, who acquired spinal injury at the age of 11, talked about how she would “get involved in every aspect of sex you could think of, any way that was pleasurable to him [her ex-husband].” She said: “I would put myself out to give him that pleasure even if I wasn’t getting any that particular time.” Jenny carried out this sex work in order to not be perceived as “sexually inadequate” by her hus- band in comparison with his non-disabled ex-wife. The sacrificing of her own sexual pleasure shows the “entwined nature of embodied and emotional perfor- mance work” (Wilton 2008, 367). Similarly, Lucille, 36, who became tetraplegic at age 23 (when she was al- ready married), told how following her injury she had offered her non-disabled husband multiple chances to be unfaithful: “I felt so bad about not wanting sex that I kept telling him to have an affair.” Lucille and Jenny’s actions cannot be separated from their identi- ties as disabled women; their sex work is indicative of

the low sexual self-esteem that is widespread among disabled women generally (Gillespie-Sells, Hill, and Robbins 1998), and more likely to occur in women with severe impairment who “tend to be furthest away from cultural constructions of ideal feminine beauty” ( Hassouneh-Phillips and McNeff 2005, 228).

However, while Jenny and Lucille talked very matter of factly about their sex work, acknowledg- ing that their labour was conscious towards embody- ing desirability for their non-disabled male partners, most women in the sample spoke about hiding bodily difference during sexual encounters—but seldom questioned such practices. Hiding was described by women to take place through a complex (yet remark- ably routine) organisation of duvets, bed sheets, cloth- ing, and lighting in a bid to both perform and embody the highly gendered role of the seductress. I suggest that this hiding can be seen as a private form of “aes- thetic labour,” which Wolkowitz (2006, 86) defines as “employers’ attempts to make the body more visible in customer service work through a focus on the body’s aesthetic qualities.” Carrying out some form of aes- thetic labour, whether private or public, is, undoubt- edly, a likely reality for all women due to the ways in which heterosexist and patriarchal constructions of femininity instil, as Bartky (1990, 40) suggests, an “infatuation with an inferiorised body” against which women will always feel inadequate. However, for the disabled women in my research this was undoubtedly compounded by (impaired) bodily difference being wholly intolerable within the rubric of the normative body. Actively hiding the body in this way affirms that disabled informants fear that their departure from bodily normalcy can be a basis for rejection (even from intimate partners), and thus the need to “pass” (and all of the work that goes with this) remains.

t h e e m o t i o n a l w o r k o f t h e c a r e r e c e i v e r

Emotional work through surface acting (Hochschild 1983) took place most explicitly when informants received care from partners within intimate relation- ships. Of 10 informants who said they regularly re- ceived care and assistance from a partner, all said that this arrangement could be a site of tension that required emotional management (see Morris 1989). Many narrated care from partners as something they

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had to “put up with,” in that partners did not carry out tasks correctly or in preferred ways. Even though this could be a central source of frustration—and often anger—it was a situation where the disabled partner had to show incredible tolerance and grace, and be grateful through surface acting (Hochschild 1983), often when they fervently felt the opposite. Thus, in order to manage the “feeling rules” present within the caring relationship (Hochschild 1979, 552), rules that “govern how people try or try not to feel in ways ap- propriate to the situation,” disabled informants had to show emotions that were “appropriate” for those receiving care (see Morris 1989). Importantly, this extensive emotional work was crucial towards simul- taneously maintaining functioning care relationships alongside intimate partnerships.

For example, Helen, who is 21 years old and has a congenital and progressive impairment, emphasised the extensive emotional work required in having to “teach” her new partner how to care, which involved “smiling through” what she called “bad care” while he learned her preferred way of doing particular caring tasks. She warned that this meant always ap- pearing “tolerant” and “grateful,” for fear that “he could just tell me to get stuffed!” Often these difficult dynamics increased when the disabled partner had an increasing level of need; for example, on becom- ing ill or through impairment progression. Gemma, a 42-year-old lesbian who has immunity impairment, told how a cancer diagnosis meant she had to be cared for full-time by her then-partner. Gemma spoke of the ways in which she had to manage her partner’s anxiety around her cancer, even when she was the one who had it. Notably, this emotional work had to be carried out at a time of significant personal emo- tional anxiety, emphasising the ways that emotional work is often on or for others (Exley and Letherby 2001). Some informants (n = 4) said that receiving care from a partner affected the way in which they dealt with conflict within their intimate relationship. Thus, caring was often conceptualised as something a non-disabled partner could offer, rather than a re- quirement. As such, it was also something that could be denied. For example, Robert, age 26, and Terry, age 20, who both have a congenital physical impair- ment, said that they avoided conflict or arguments with a partner, as a strategy to ensure continued care:

If an argument arose, could I really defend my point even if I’m right, but then ask for help knowing they’re annoyed with me? (Robert)

With a girlfriend, I know that I can’t be easily irritated by things they do, because I’ve got to rely on them to help. In the past I haven’t had an argument with a girlfriend unless it’s been at a time where I don’t need them for any help. (Terry)

Robert and Terry’s actions to purposefully avoid conflict are evidence that receiving care from an intimate partner can mean having to consciously mediate and manage these complex relationships through very careful strate- gies. Such strategies undeniably required various forms of emotional work, management and performance— notably, tolerance; “submission”; graciousness; the as- sessment of when and when not to assert oneself; and the general management of a very problematic set of power relations, in order to continue to receive the re- quired care or assistance from intimate partners.

d r a w i n g s o m e c o n c l u s i o n s

The stories (re)told throughout this article have un- covered the work and labours of disabled men and women within multiple locations of their intimate relationships. Throughout their stories, informants cast themselves as active subjects, revealing their diverse roles as teacher, sex worker, negotiator, manager, me- diator, performer and educator. Paradoxically, much of the skilled emotional work disabled informants car- ried out is highly valued within western labour mar- kets (Hochschild 1983), from which they are largely excluded. Irrespective, recognising and labelling the work of disabled people within their sexual and in- timate lives is important. Firstly, doing so provides fuller, more accurate and inclusive descriptions of the complex ways that disability, impairment, gender and sexuality interact within sexual and intimate life—as well as of the potential psycho-emotional dimen- sions of such interactions. Secondly, by identifying informants as skilful managers of their intimate and sexual lives—regardless of the outcome or efficacy of their work—their labour challenges dominant ableist constructions of the disabled sexual identity and sub- jectivity as passive and lacking agency (Siebers 2008).

However, clearly evident within informants’ stories and in the analysis of their feelings was the

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extent to which they devalued their (sexual) selves, revealing the ways in which low sexual self-esteem and self-worth, feelings of inadequacy (in relation to heteronormative discourse), and low body confidence can be common parts of the disabled (sexual) psyche in ableist heteronormative sexual cultures. Despite exercising a form of sexual agency as active “emo- tional workers,” then, the requirement of informants to carry out forms of work within their sexual and intimate lives, I argue, constituted a form of psycho- emotional disablism (Thomas 1999). For example, rather than overt transgressive resistance, much of the (invisible) work uncovered in this research was carried out largely through necessity—in order to survive; to be loved; to be human; to be included; to be “normal”; to be sexual; and to be valued. Thus, it is crucial not to underestimate the sizeable extent to which work was rooted in and thus indicative of the oppressive and inherent inequalities of ableist culture.

Further, analysis has shown that informants’ work was both located and produced at the intersections of disability, gendered and sexual identities, emphasis- ing the value of appreciating relational and psycho- emotional dimensions of disability (Reeve 2002, 2004; Thomas 1999) when exploring the sexual lives of disabled people. The fact that much of informants’ work was routinely employed for the benefit of others supports Goodley’s (2010, 92) notion of disability per- formances that fit with “expectations of non-disabled culture.” Significantly, where emotional and other work did take place on or for the self, it extended only to emotional and/or bodily management; typi- cally, either through a conscious and rigid policing (or hiding) of emotional responses or bodily difference— forms of work that seldom bought informants plea- sure or personal fulfilment. For example, surface and “deep” acting within intimate relationships; engaging in forms of sex work; and providing “appropriate” per- formances of gratitude and gratefulness when receiv- ing care, were markedly detrimental to a positive sense of (sexual) self in most cases and constituted a distinct form of psycho-emotional disablism that operated at a level which required informants’ complicity.

In certain spaces, typically gendered performances that affirmed dominant constructions of masculin- ity and femininity were offered; notably seen within the different strategies men and women employed to

sexualise themselves, either in their own eyes or in the eyes of others. Thus, disabled male informants’ em- ployment of forms of emotional work within intimate spaces challenges the idea of the male identity as privi- leged within emotional working (Hochschild 1983) and sheds light on the ways in which alternative (non- hegemonic) masculinities interact with emotional work and labours. Moreover, women’s employment of nor- matively gendered labours such as sex work ( Cacchioni 2007) and “private” aesthetic labour (Wolkowitz 2006) reveals how emotional work is rooted in their social and political positioning as disabled people and—as with the motivations of non-disabled heterosexual women—by normative notions of womanhood, femi- ninity and (hetero)sexuality. This emphasises the similarities between the experiences of disabled and non-disabled women, who occupy analogous subor- dinate positions within heteronormativity and hetero- sexuality. It also illustrates—as other disabled feminists already have (Morris 1989; Wendell 1996; Thomas 1999)—the need for mainstream hegemonic feminism to be more inclusive of all types of women and thus broaden its contextualisation of the female experience that, while diverse, is unified by women’s suppression under patriarchy and male (sexual) power.

In sum, the analysis detailed in this article sup- ports feminist contributions to disability studies— particularly those that have called for inclusion of the gendered and psycho-emotional dimensions of disability (Thomas 1999; Reeve 2004). Crudely, a “pure” social model analysis would simply not have bared the intimate, personal and gendered oppres- sions central to informants’ lived experiences. As Thomas (1999, 74) points out, rather than psycholo- gising disabled people’s emotions, applying a (femi- nist) disability studies or social relational lens to disabled people’s emotional lives removes these from being “‘open season’ to psychologists and others who would not hesitate to apply the individualistic/ personal tragedy model to these issues.” In this vein, then, revealing linkages between structural and psycho-emotional forms of disablism can actually serve to de-pathologise disabled people’s experiences in ways advocated by social model politic, at the same time as theorising and reframing disability in ways that best attends—most importantly—to the emotional well-being of disabled people.

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N O T E

1. All informant names used within this article are pseudonyms.

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IDENTITIES

IV P A R T

Our sense of who we are as gendered people is not likely to remain the same over the span of our lives, but how are our identities formed and contested? How do our gen- dered identities change as they feed into our identities as members of religious groups, na- tions, or social movements? There is nothing automatic about identities. Identities are fluid rather than primordial, socially constructed rather than inherited, and they shift with chang- ing social contexts. As the world grows more complex and interconnected, our identities, or self-definitions, respond to diverse and oftentimes competing pulls and tugs.

Identities are both intensely private and vociferously public. Identities are also funda- mentally about power and alliances. Racial-ethnic, religious, national, and sexual identities are at the core of many of today’s social movements and political conflicts. Intertwined with these emergent and contested identities are strong ideas—stated or implicit—of what it is to be feminine and masculine. The articles in this section examine how gender interacts with the creation and contestation of multifaceted identities. Together, the authors suggest some of the ways that identities are actively shaped and defined in contradistinction to other iden- tities and the ways in which identities are sometimes imposed from above or resisted. In this view, identities involve a process of simultaneously defining and erasing difference and of claiming and constructing spheres of autonomy.

This section opens with a spin-off inspired by a classic article on white privilege by Peggy McIntosh. In the original, McIntosh suggests that privileged identities—white, male, heterosexual, middle or upper class—are often invisible as identities. This is a key way in

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which power operates, by rendering invisible the very mechanisms that create and perpetu- ate group-based inequities. McIntosh created the first “privilege checklist” that helped read- ers become aware of the many manifestations of white privilege. In this section, we include B. Deutsch’s “Male Privilege Checklist.” Perhaps after completing the male privilege checklist you will be inspired to create an intersectional “Privilege through the Prism of Difference” checklist.

The second article is another classic. Here, the poet and lesbian activist Audre Lorde draws on her own experience to argue that age, race, class, and sex are all simultaneous as- pects of one’s identity that cannot be easily separated out. Lorde argues that embracing these intertwined differences can offer opportunities for personal and collective growth and can point the way toward peaceful and just changes in the world.

The next article reviews recent developments in the growing research on men and mascu- linities. Tristan Bridges and C. J. Pascoe focus on hybrid masculinities, a contemporary form of masculinity among privileged men who incorporate selective elements from subordinate masculinities and femininities into their gender identity. The central question of their article asks whether these hybrid masculinities are simply new ways of concealing power and in- equality or whether they are taking gender in a more liberating direction.

In the fourth article in this section, Sanyu A. Mojola shows how the HIV/AIDS pan- demic has upended gender relations in Africa in ways that appear to challenge patriarchal masculinities, but that ultimately fail to improve conditions for women. Mojola’s fieldwork in Western Kenya examines a new gender relationship between older women who become “providers” for younger men who have few employment options. Mojola shows that despite taking on the traditionally feminine practice of being “kept” or provided for, these young men refashion “provider” masculinities for themselves, and also maintain the larger patri- archal system, through co-optation of the older women’s inheritance money. Importantly, Mojola’s analysis shows how women’s and men’s efforts to create valued identities and rela- tionships for themselves, within a changing and uncertain patriarchal system, reproduce the patriarchal system in new ways.

Trans studies as a subfield within gender studies has developed rapidly, with growing awareness of transgender people among the general public. Celebrity figures like the actress Laverne Cox, the former athlete and current advocate Caitlyn Jenner, the activist Janet Mock, and the filmmaker siblings Lana and Lilly Wachowski have pushed trans-people in the public spotlight. Joelle Ruby Ryan’s article in this section details some of the history for how trans- gender issues were previously thought of, and how the vocabulary to describe transgender people and their identities have changed. She describes the tensions around trans-people “passing” as their preferred gender identity and the privileges involved for people who can access hormone treatments and who have more privileged bodies (in terms of race but also bodies that are more able, more slender, more muscular, etc.).

The final chapter in this section is by Aida Hurtado and Minal Sinha, who explore the conceptions of manhood among working-class Latino men who self-identify as feminist. Hurtado and Sinha describe different categories for defining manhood (such as ethical or relational), and explain how the Latino men in their study used some aspects of hegemonic masculinity positively while rejecting others aspects in their efforts to outline their own definitions of ideal manhood.

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B. Deutsch, The Male Privilege Checklist: An Unabashed Imitation of an Article by Peggy McIntosh

In 1990, Wellesley College professor Peggy McIntosh wrote an essay called “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” McIntosh observes that whites in the US are “taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.” To illustrate these invisible systems, McIntosh wrote a list of 26 invisible privileges whites benefit from.

As McIntosh points out, men also tend to be un- aware of their own privileges as men. In the spirit of McIntosh’s essay, I thought I’d compile a list similar to McIntosh’s, focusing on the invisible privileges benefiting men.

Due to my own limitations, this list is unavoid- ably US centric. I hope that writers from other cul- tures will create new lists, or modify this one, to reflect their own experiences.

Since I first compiled it, the list has been posted many times on internet discussion groups. Very help- fully, many people have suggested additions to the checklist. More commonly, of course, critics (usu- ally, but not exclusively, male) have pointed out men have disadvantages too—being drafted into the army, being expected to suppress emotions, and so on. These are indeed bad things—but I never claimed that life for men is all ice cream sundaes.

Obviously, there are individual exceptions to most problems discussed on the list. The existence of individual exceptions does not mean that general problems are not a concern.

Pointing out that men are privileged in no way denies that bad things happen to men. Being privileged does not

mean men are given everything in life for free; being privileged does not mean that men do not work hard, do not suffer. In many cases—from a boy being bul- lied in school, to soldiers selecting male civilians to be executed, to male workers dying of exposure to unsafe chemicals—the sexist society that maintains male privilege also immeasurably harms boys and men.

However, although I don’t deny that men suffer, this post is focused on advantages men experience.

Several critics have also argued that the list somehow victimizes women. I disagree; pointing out problems is not the same as perpetuating them. It is not a “victimizing” position to acknowledge that in- justice exists; on the contrary, without that acknowl- edgment it isn’t possible to fight injustice.

An internet acquaintance of mine once wrote, “The first big privilege which whites, males, people in upper economic classes, the able bodied, the straight (I think one or two of those will cover most of us) can work to alleviate is the privilege to be oblivious to privilege.” This checklist is, I hope, a step towards helping men to give up the “first big privilege.”

t h e m a l e p r i v i l e g e c h e c k l i s t

1. My odds of being hired for a job, when competing against female applicants, are probably skewed in my favor. The more prestigious the job, the larger the odds are skewed.

2. I can be confident that my co-workers won’t think I got my job because of my sex—even though that might be true. . . .

An Unabashed Imitation of an Article by Peggy McIntosh

B . D E U T S C H

16. THE MALE PRIVILEGE CHECKLIST

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3. If I am never promoted, it’s not because of my sex. 4. If I fail in my job or career, I can feel sure this won’t

be seen as a black mark against my entire sex’s capabilities.

5. I am far less likely to face sexual harassment at work than my female co-workers are. . . .

6. If I do the same task as a woman, and if the mea- surement is at all subjective, chances are people will think I did a better job.

7. If I’m a teen or adult, and if I can stay out of prison, my odds of being raped are relatively low. . . .

8. On average, I am taught to fear walking alone after dark in average public spaces much less than my female counterparts are.

9. If I choose not to have children, my masculinity will not be called into question.

10. If I have children but do not provide primary care for them, my masculinity will not be called into question.

11. If I have children and provide primary care for them, I’ll be praised for extraordinary parenting if I’m even marginally competent. . . .

12. If I have children and a career, no one will think I’m selfish for not staying at home.

13. If I seek political office, my relationship with my children, or who I hire to take care of them, will probably not be scrutinized by the press.

14. My elected representatives are mostly people of my own sex. The more prestigious and powerful the elected position, the more this is true.

15. When I ask to see “the person in charge,” odds are I will face a person of my own sex. The higher-up in the organization the person is, the surer I can be.

16. As a child, chances are I was encouraged to be more active and outgoing than my sisters. . . .

17. As a child, I could choose from an almost infi- nite variety of children’s media featuring positive, active, non-stereotyped heroes of my own sex. I never had to look for it; male protagonists were (and are) the default.

18. As a child, chances are I got more teacher atten- tion than girls who raised their hands just as often. . . .

19. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether or not it has sexist overtones.

20. I can turn on the television or glance at the front page of the newspaper and see people of my own sex widely represented.

21. If I’m careless with my financial affairs it won’t be attributed to my sex.

22. If I’m careless with my driving it won’t be attrib- uted to my sex.

23. I can speak in public to a large group without put- ting my sex on trial.

24. Even if I sleep with a lot of women, there is no chance that I will be seriously labeled a “slut,” nor is there any male counterpart to “slut-bashing.” . . .

25. I do not have to worry about the message my ward- robe sends about my sexual availability. . . .

26. My clothing is typically less expensive and better- constructed than women’s clothing for the same social status. While I have fewer options, my clothes will probably fit better than a woman’s without tailoring. . . .

27. The grooming regimen expected of me is relatively cheap and consumes little time. . . .

28. If I buy a new car, chances are I’ll be offered a better price than a woman buying the same car. . . .

29. If I’m not conventionally attractive, the disadvan- tages are relatively small and easy to ignore.

30. I can be loud with no fear of being called a shrew. I can be aggressive with no fear of being called a bitch.

31. I can ask for legal protection from violence that happens mostly to men without being seen as a selfish special interest, since that kind of violence is called “crime” and is a general social concern. (Violence that happens mostly to women is usu- ally called “domestic violence” or “acquaintance rape,” and is seen as a special interest issue.)

32. I can be confident that the ordinary language of day-to-day existence will always include my sex. “All men are created equal,” mailman, chairman, freshman, he.

33. My ability to make important decisions and my capability in general will never be questioned de- pending on what time of the month it is.

34. I will never be expected to change my name upon marriage or questioned if I don’t change my name.

35. The decision to hire me will not be based on as- sumptions about whether or not I might choose to have a family sometime soon.

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36. Every major religion in the world is led primar- ily by people of my own sex. Even God, in most major religions, is pictured as male.

37. Most major religions argue that I should be the head of my household, while my wife and chil- dren should be subservient to me.

38. If I have a wife or live-in girlfriend, chances are we’ll divide up household chores so that she does most of the labor, and in particular the most repetitive and unrewarding tasks. . . .

39. If I have children with my girlfriend or wife, I can expect her to do most of the basic childcare such as changing diapers and feeding.

40. If I have children with my wife or girlfriend, and it turns out that one of us needs to make career sacrifices to raise the kids, chances are we’ll both assume the career sacrificed should be hers.

41. Assuming I am heterosexual, magazines, bill- boards, television, movies, pornography, and virtually all of media is filled with images of

scantily-clad women intended to appeal to me sexually. Such images of men exist, but are rarer.

42. In general, I am under much less pressure to be thin than my female counterparts are.  .  .  . If I am fat, I probably suffer fewer social and economic consequences for being fat than fat women do. . . .

43. If I am heterosexual, it’s incredibly unlikely that I’ll ever be beaten up by a spouse or lover. . . .

44. Complete strangers generally do not walk up to me on the street and tell me to “smile.” . . .

45. Sexual harassment on the street virtually never happens to me. I do not need to plot my move- ments through public space in order to avoid being sexually harassed, or to mitigate sexual harassment. . . .

46. On average, I am not interrupted by women as often as women are interrupted by men. . . .

47. I have the privilege of being unaware of my male privilege.

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Audre Lorde’s, chapter “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” from Sister Outsider, Copyright © 1984 Crossing Press

Much of western European history conditions us to see human differences in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/ down, superior/inferior. In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the de- humanized inferior. Within this society, that group is made up of Black and Third World people, working- class people, older people, and women.

As a forty-nine-year-old Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two, including one boy, and a member of an interracial couple, I usually find myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant, infe- rior, or just plain wrong. Traditionally, in American society, it is the members of oppressed, objectified groups who are expected to stretch out and bridge the gap between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness of our oppressor. For in order to sur- vive, those of us for whom oppression is as Ameri- can as apple pie have always had to be watchers, to become familiar with the language and manners of the oppressor, even sometimes adopting them for some illusion of protection. Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them. In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppres- sors their mistakes. I am responsible for educating teachers who dismiss my children’s culture in school. Black and Third World people are expected to edu- cate White people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are

expected to educate the heterosexual world. The op- pressors maintain their position and evade responsi- bility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.

Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.

Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our re- fusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation.

Racism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance. Sexism, the belief in the inherent su- periority of one sex over the other and thereby the right to dominance. Ageism. Heterosexism. Elitism. Classism.

It is a lifetime pursuit for each one of us to ex- tract these distortions from our living at the same time as we recognize, reclaim, and define those

Women Redefining Difference

17. AGE, RACE, CLASS, AND SEX

A U D R E L O R D E

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differences upon which they are imposed. For we have all been raised in a society where those distor- tions were endemic within our living. Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and explor- ing difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all. This results in a voluntary isolation, or false and treacherous connections. Either way, we do not de- velop tools for using human difference as a spring- board for creative change within our lives. We speak not of human difference, but of human deviance.

Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows “that is not me.” In Amer- ica, this norm is usually defined as White, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure. It is with this mythical norm that the trap- pings of power reside within this society. Those of us who stand outside that power often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that to be the primary cause of all oppression, forgetting other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be practicing. By and large within the women’s movement today, White women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differ- ences of race, sexual preference, class, and age. There is a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist.

Unacknowledged class differences rob women of each others’ energy and creative insight. Recently a women’s magazine collective made the decision for one issue to print only prose, saying poetry was a less “rigorous” or “serious” art form. Yet even the form our creativity takes is often a class issue. Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years, writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the major voice of poor, working-class, and Colored women. A room of one’s own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and

plenty of time. The actual requirements to produce the visual arts also help determine, along class lines, whose art is whose. In this day of inflated prices for material, who are our sculptors, our painters, our photographers? When we speak of a broadly based women’s culture, we need to be aware of the effect of class and economic differences on the supplies avail- able for producing art.

As we move toward creating a society within which we can each flourish, ageism is another distor- tion of relationship which interferes without vision. By ignoring the past, we are encouraged to repeat its mistakes. The “generation gap” is an important social tool for any repressive society. If the younger members of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they will never be able to join hands and examine the living memories of the community, nor ask the all important ques- tion, “Why?” This gives rise to a historical amnesia that keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread.

We find ourselves having to repeat and relearn the same old lessons over and over that our mothers did because we do not pass on what we have learned, or because we are unable to listen. For instance, how many times has this all been said before? For an- other, who would have believed that once again our daughters are allowing their bodies to be hampered and purgatoried by girdles and high heels and hobble skirts?

Ignoring the differences of race between women and the implications of those differences presents the most serious threat to the mobilization of women’s joint power.

As White women ignore their built-in privilege of Whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become “other,” the outsider whose experience and tradition is too “alien” to comprehend. An example of this is the signal absence of the experience of women of Color as a resource for women’s studies courses. The literature of women of Color is seldom included in women’s literature courses and almost never in other literature courses, nor in women’s studies as a whole. All too often, the excuse given is that the literatures of women of Color can only be taught by Colored

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women, or that they are too difficult to understand, or that classes cannot “get into” them because they come out of experiences that are “too different.” I have heard this argument presented by White women of otherwise quite clear intelligence, women who seem to have no trouble at all teaching and re- viewing work that comes out of the vastly different experiences of Shakespeare, Molière, Dostoyefsky, and Aristophanes. Surely there must be some other explanation.

This is a very complex question, but I believe one of the reasons White women have such difficulty reading Black women’s work is because of their re- luctance to see Black women as women and different from themselves. To examine Black women’s lit- erature effectively requires that we be seen as whole people in our actual complexities—as individuals, as women, as human—rather than as one of those prob- lematic but familiar stereotypes provided in this soci- ety in place of genuine images of Black women. And I believe this holds true for the literatures of other women of Color who are not Black.

The literatures of all women of Color re-create the textures of our lives, and many White women are heavily invested in ignoring the real differences. For as long as any difference between us means one of us must be inferior, then the recognition of any differ- ence must be fraught with guilt. To allow women of Color to step out of stereotypes is too guilt provok- ing, for it threatens the complacency of those women who view oppression only in terms of sex.

Refusing to recognize difference makes it impos- sible to see the different problems and pitfalls facing us as women.

Thus, in a patriarchal power system where White- skin privilege is a major prop, the entrapments used to neutralize Black women and White women are not the same. For example, it is easy for Black women to be used by the power structure against Black men, not because they are men, but because they are Black. Therefore, for Black women, it is necessary at all times to separate the needs of the oppressor from our own legitimate conflicts within our communities. This same problem does not exist for White women. Black women and men have shared racist oppression and still share it, although in different ways. Out of that

shared oppression we have developed joint defenses and joint vulnerabilities to each other that are not duplicated in the White community, with the excep- tion of the relationship between Jewish women and Jewish men.

On the other hand, White women face the pitfall of being seduced into joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power. This possibility does not exist in the same way for women of Color. The tokenism that is sometimes extended to us is not an invitation to join power; our racial “otherness” is a visible reality that makes that quite clear. For White women there is a wider range of pretended choices and rewards for identifying with patriarchal power and its tools.

Today, with the defeat of ER A, the tightening economy, and increased conservatism, it is easier once again for White women to believe the dan- gerous fantasy that if you are good enough, pretty enough, sweet enough, quiet enough, teach the chil- dren to behave, hate the right people, and marry the right men, then you will be allowed to co-exist with patriarchy in relative peace, at least until a man needs your job or the neighborhood rapist happens along. And true, unless one lives and loves in the trenches it is difficult to remember that the war against dehu- manization is ceaseless.

But Black women and our children know the fabric of our lives is stitched with violence and with hatred, that there is no rest. We do not deal with it only on the picket lines, or in dark midnight alleys, or in the places where we dare to verbalize our resis- tance. For us, increasingly, violence weaves through the daily tissues of our living—in the supermarket, in the classroom, in the elevator, in the clinic and the schoolyard, from the plumber, the baker, the sales- woman, the bus driver, the bank teller, the waitress who does not serve us.

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our chil- dren will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.

The threat of difference has been no less blinding to people of Color. Those of us who are Black must

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see that the reality of our lives and our struggle does not make us immune to the errors of ignoring and misnaming difference. Within Black communities where racism is a living reality, differences among us often seem dangerous and suspect. The need for unity is often misnamed as a need for homogene- ity, and a Black feminist vision mistaken for betrayal of our common interests as a people. Because of the continuous battle against racial erasure that Black women and Black men share, some Black women still refuse to recognize that we are also oppressed as women, and that sexual hostility against Black women is practiced not only by the White racist so- ciety, but implemented within our Black communi- ties as well. It is a disease striking the heart of Black nationhood, and silence will not make it disappear. Exacerbated by racism and the pressures of power- lessness, violence against Black women and children often becomes a standard within our communities, one by which manliness can be measured. But these woman-hating acts are rarely discussed as crimes against Black women.

As a group, women of Color are the lowest paid wage earners in America. We are the primary targets of abortion and sterilization abuse, here and abroad. In certain parts of Africa, small girls are still being sewed shut between their legs to keep them docile and for men’s pleasure. This is known as female circumcision, and it is not a cultural affair as the late Jomo Kenyatta insisted, it is a crime against Black women.

Black women’s literature is full of the pain of frequent assault, not only by a racist patriarchy, but also by Black men. Yet the necessity for and history of shared battle have made us, Black women, particu- larly vulnerable to the false accusation that anti-sexist is anti-Black. Meanwhile, womanhating as a recourse of the powerless is sapping strength from Black com- munities, and our very lives. Rape is on the increase, reported and unreported, and rape is not aggressive sexuality, it is sexualized aggression. As Kalamu ya Salaam, a Black male writer points out, “As long as male domination exists, rape will exist. Only women revolting and men made conscious of their responsi- bility to fight sexism can collectively stop rape.”1

Differences between ourselves as Black women are also being misnamed and used to separate us from

one another. As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many different ingredients of my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual free- dom from oppression, I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclips- ing or denying the other parts of self. But this is a destructive and fragmenting way to live. My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed defini- tion. Only then can I bring myself and my energies as a whole to the service of those struggles which I embrace as part of my living.

A fear of lesbians, or of being accused of being a lesbian, has led many Black women into testifying against themselves. It has led some of us into destruc- tive alliances, and others into despair and isolation. In the White women’s communities, heterosexism is sometimes a result of identifying with the White patriarchy, a rejection of that interdependence be- tween women-identified women which allows the self to be, rather than to be used in the service of men. Sometimes it reflects a die-hard belief in the protective coloration of heterosexual relationships, sometimes a self-hate which all women have to fight against, taught us from birth.

Although elements of these attitudes exist for all women, there are particular resonances of het- erosexism and homophobia among Black women. Despite the fact that woman-bonding has a long and honorable history in the African and African- American communities, and despite the knowledge and accomplishments of many strong and creative women-identified Black women in the political, social and cultural fields, heterosexual Black women often tend to ignore or discount the existence and work of Black lesbians. Part of this attitude has come from an understandable terror of Black male attack within the close confines of Black society, where the punishment for any female self-assertion is still to be accused of being a lesbian and therefore unworthy of the attention or support of the scarce Black male. But part of this need to misname and ignore Black

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lesbians comes from a very real fear that openly women-identified Black women who are no longer dependent upon men for their self-definition may well reorder our whole concept of social relationships.

Black women who once insisted that lesbianism was a White woman’s problem now insist that Black lesbians are a threat to Black nationhood, are consort- ing with the enemy, are basically un-Black. These ac- cusations, coming from the very women to whom we look for deep and real understanding, have served to keep many Black lesbians in hiding, caught between the racism of White women and the homophobia of their sisters. Often, their work has been ignored, triv- ialized, or misnamed, as with the work of Angelina Grimke, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Lorraine Hans- berry. Yet women-bonded women have always been some part of the power of Black communities, from our unmarried aunts to the amazons of Dahomey.

And it is certainly not Black lesbians who are as- saulting women and raping children and grandmoth- ers on the streets of our communities.

Across this country, as in Boston during the spring of 1979 following the unsolved murders of twelve Black women, Black lesbians are spear-heading movements against violence against Black women.

What are the particular details within each of our lives that can be scrutinized and altered to help bring about change? How do we redefine difference for all women? It is not our differences which separate women, but our reluctance to recognize those dif- ferences and to deal effectively with the distortions which have resulted from the ignoring and misnam- ing of those differences.

As a tool of social control, women have been en- couraged to recognize only one area of human dif- ference as legitimate, those differences which exist between women and men. And we have learned to deal across those differences with the urgency of all oppressed subordinates. All of us have had to learn to live or work or coexist with men, from our fathers on. We have recognized and negotiated these differences, even when this recognition only continued the old dominant/subordinate mode of human relationship, where the oppressed must recognize the masters’ dif- ference in order to survive.

But our future survival is predicated upon our ability to relate within equality. As women, we must

root out internalized patterns of oppression within ourselves if we are to move beyond the most super- ficial aspects of social change. Now we must recog- nize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each others’ difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles.

The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new def- initions of power and new patterns of relating across difference. The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us. The old patterns, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to cosmetically altered repetitions of the same old exchanges, the same old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and suspicion.

For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppres- sion, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

As Paulo Freire shows so well in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed,2 the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships.

Change means growth, and growth can be pain- ful. But we sharpen self-definition by exposing the self in work and struggle together with those whom we define as different from ourselves although shar- ing the same goals. For Black and White, old and young, lesbian and heterosexual women alike, this can mean new paths to our survival.

We have chosen each other and the edge of each other’s battles the war is the same if we lose someday women’s blood will congeal upon a dead planet if we win there is no telling we seek beyond history for a new and more possible meeting.3

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N O T E S

1. From “Rape: A Radical Analysis, an African-American Perspective” by Kalamu ya Salaam in Black Books Bulletin, vol. 6, no. 4 (1980).

2. Seabury Press, New York, 1970. 3. From “Outlines,” unpublished poem.

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Tristan Bridges and C.J. Pascoe, Hybrid Masculinities: New Directions in the Sociology of Men and Masculinities from Sociol- ogy Compass, Vol. 8, Issue 3, March 2014, pages 264-258. Reproduced with permission of Wiley.

i n t r o d u c t i o n

A growing body of sociological theory and research on men and masculinities addresses recent trans- formations in men’s behaviors, appearances, opin- ions, and more. While historical research has shown masculinities to be in a continuous state of change (e.g., Kimmel 1996; Segal 1990), the extent of con- temporary transformations as well as their impact and meaning is the source of a great deal of theory, research, and debate. While not a term universally ad- opted among masculinities scholars, the concept of “hybrid masculinities” is a useful way to make sense of this growing body of scholarship. It critically high- lights this body of work that seeks to account for the emergence and consequences of recent transforma- tions in masculinities.

The term “hybrid” was coined in the natural sciences during the 19th century. Initially used to refer to species produced through the mixing of two separate species, by the 20th century, it was ap- plied to people and social groups to address popu- lar concern with miscegenation. Today, scholars in the social sciences and humanities use “hybrid” to address cultural miscegenation—processes and practices of cultural interpenetration (Burke 2009). “Hybrid masculinities” refers to the selective incor- poration of elements of identity typically associ- ated with various marginalized and subordinated masculinities and—at times—femininities into

privileged men’s gender performances and identities (e.g., Arxer 2011; Demetriou 2001; Messerschmidt 2010; Messner 2007). Work on hybrid masculini- ties has primarily, though not universally, focused on young, White, heterosexual-identified men. This research is centrally concerned with the ways that men are increasingly incorporating elements of vari- ous “Others” into their identity projects. While it is true that gendered meanings change historically and geographically, research and theory addressing hybrid masculinities are beginning to ask whether recent transformations point in a new, more liberat- ing direction.

The transformations addressed by this litera- ture include men’s assimilation of “bits and pieces” (Demetriou 2001: 350) of identity projects coded as “gay” (e.g., Bridges, forthcoming; Heasley 2005; Hen- nessy 1995) “Black” (e.g., Hughey 2012; Ward 2008), or “feminine” (e.g., Arxer 2011; Messerschmidt 2010; Schippers 2000; Wilkins 2009) among others. A cen- tral research question in this literature considers the extent and meaning of these practices in terms of gender, sexual, and racial inequality. More specifi- cally, this field of inquiry asks: are hybrid masculini- ties widespread and do they represent a significant change in gendered inequality?

In reviewing contemporary theorizing and empir- ical research on masculinity, we suggest that hybrid masculinities work in ways that not only reproduce

New Directions in the Sociology of Men and Masculinities

18. HYBRID MASCULINITIES

T R I S TA N B R I D G E S , C . J . PA S C O E

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contemporary systems of gendered, raced, and sexual inequalities but also obscure this process as it is hap- pening. We argue that hybrid masculinities have at least three distinct consequences that shape, reflect, and mask inequalities. Hybrid masculinities may place discursive (though not meaningful) distance between certain groups of men and hegemonic mas- culinity, are often undertaken with an understanding of White, heterosexual masculinity as less meaning- ful than other (more marginalized or subordinated) forms of masculinity, and fortify social and symbolic boundaries and inequalities. As Coston and Kimmel write, “The idealized notion of masculinity operates as both an ideology and a set of normative constraints” (2012: 98). We argue that the emergence of hybrid masculinities indicates that normative constraints are shifting but that these shifts have largely taken place in ways that have sustained existing ideologies and systems of power and inequality. Each of the con- sequences of contemporary hybrid masculinities we address here represents elaborations on the processes by which meanings and practices of hegemonic mas- culinity change over time in ways that nonetheless maintain the structure of institutionalized gender re- gimes to advantage men collectively over women and some men over other men. Indeed, hybrid masculini- ties may be best thought of as contemporary expres- sions of gender and sexual inequality.

t h e o r i z i n g c h a n g e s i n m a s c u l i n i t y

The question driving the bulk of the literature on hybrid masculinities1 is whether (and how) they are perpetuating and/or challenging systems of gender and sexual inequality. Scholars answer the question in three ways. (i) Some are skeptical of whether hybrid masculinities represent anything beyond local varia- tion (e.g., Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). (ii) Others argue that hybrid masculinities are both cul- turally pervasive and indicate that inequality is lessen- ing and possibly no longer structures men’s identities and relationships (e.g., Anderson 2009; McCormack 2012). (iii) The majority of the research and theory supports the notion that hybrid masculinities are widespread. But, rather than suggesting that they are

signs of increasing levels of gender and sexual equal- ity, these scholars argue that hybrid masculine forms illustrate the flexibility of systems of inequality. Thus, they argue that hybrid masculinities represent signifi- cant changes in the expression of systems of power and inequality, though fall short of challenging them (e.g., Demetriou 2001; Messerschmidt 2010; Messner 1993, 2007).

While not necessarily challenging the notion that hybrid masculinities exist, Connell and Mess- erschmidt (2005)—in their analysis of “hegemonic masculinity”—question the extent of hybrid mascu- line practices, their meaning, and influence. “Clearly, specific masculine practices may be appropriated into other masculinities, creating a hybrid (such as the hip-hop style and language adopted by some working- class White teenage boys and the unique composite style of gay ‘clones’). Yet we are not convinced that the hybridization . . . is hegemonic, at least beyond a local sense” (2005: 845). Here, Connell and Messer- schmidt (2005) suggest that while hybrid masculine forms may exist and might promote inequality in new ways, they are unconvinced that hybrid masculini- ties are illustrative of a transformation in hegemonic masculinity beyond local subcultural variation. Thus, they argue that hybrid masculine forms have not significantly affected the meanings of masculin- ity at regional or global levels.2 Significantly, while Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) are critical of the extent and reach of hybrid masculinities, they agree that, while these new identities and practices blur social and symbolic boundaries, they are not neces- sarily undermining systems of dominance or hege- monic masculinity in any fundamental way.

Anderson’s (2009) theory of the rise of “inclu- sive masculinities” challenges Connell and Mess- erschmidt’s (2005) perspective. He argues that contemporary transformations in men’s behav- iors and beliefs are widespread and are best under- stood as challenging systems of gender and sexual inequality. Studying a variety of young, primar- ily heterosexual-identified, White men, Anderson finds that masculinity among these groups is char- acterized by “inclusivity” rather than exclusivity (what Anderson terms “orthodoxy”). In this model

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masculinities are organized horizontally, rather than hierarchically. As such, men are increasingly adopting practices characterized by acceptance of diverse mas- culinities, opening up the contemporary meanings of “masculinity” in ways that allow a more varied selec- tion of performances to “count” as masculine. This “inclusivity”—like hybridity—is part of a process of incorporating performances that are culturally coded as “Other.” Anderson argues that these practices in- dicate “decreased sexism” and “the erosion of patri- archy” (2009: 9). Thus, Anderson theorizes hybrid masculinities (which he calls “inclusive masculini- ties”) as endemic and as a fundamental challenge to existing systems of power and inequality.

To account for this transformation, Anderson (2009) argues that what he calls “homohysteria” is decreasing (see also McCormack 2012). Broadly de- scribed as a “fear of being homosexualized” (2009: 7), the term considers three issues: popular awareness of gay identity, cultural disapproval of homosexual- ity, and the cultural association of masculinity with heterosexuality. While awareness of gay identity has increased, Anderson argues that disapproval of ho- mosexuality is diminishing3 as is the cultural asso- ciation of masculinity with heterosexuality. Unyoked from compulsory heterosexuality, he argues that contemporary masculinities are characterized by in- creasing levels of equality and less hierarchy.

The majority of the research concerning hybrid masculinities supports Anderson’s (2009) claim that hybrid masculinities are extensive but frames the meanings and consequences of hybrid masculine practices and identities differently. Rather than il- lustrating a decline in gender and sexual inequality, scholars suggest that hybrid masculinities work in ways that perpetuate existing systems of power and inequality in historically new ways (e.g., Demetriou 2001; Messner 1993, 2007). Thus, this body of re- search is at odds with Connell and Messerschmidt’s (2005) analysis of the significance of hybrid mascu- linities and with Anderson’s (2009) consideration of the consequences.

Messner (1993) analyzes transformations among American men toward more “emotionally expres- sive” performances of masculinity and critiques scholarly investigations of these transformations

precisely because they tended to focus primarily on “styles of masculinity, rather than the institutional position of power that men still enjoy” (732). Messner examines the cultural impact of these shifts in men’s behavior by analyzing the mythopoetic men’s move- ment, men’s increasing involvement as parents, and an increase in the number of high-status men crying in public.

Messner’s framing of hybrid masculinities as “more style than substance” (1993: 724) represents a dominant approach in scholarship discussing the meanings and consequences of hybrid masculinities. This body of work discusses hybrid masculinities as

represent[ing] highly significant (but exaggerated) shifts in the cultural and personal styles of hege- monic masculinity, but these changes do not neces- sarily contribute to the undermining of conventional structures of men’s power over women. Although “softer” and more “sensitive” styles of masculinity are developing among some privileged groups of men, this does not necessarily contribute to the emancipa- tion of women; in fact, quite the contrary may be true. (Messner 1993: 725)

This shift is complex and not unidirectional. In fact, new gendered practices and identities often work in ways that either produce new forms of inequality or conceal existing inequalities in new ways.

Messner’s (2007) analysis of changes in the public image of Arnold Schwarzenegger, e.g., illustrates what he calls an “ascendant hybrid masculinity” combining toughness with tenderness in ways that work to obscure—rather than challenge—systems of power and inequality (Messner 2007). Similar phenomena have been documented within various “men’s movements” like the Promise Keepers and the Ex-gay Movement (e.g., Donovan 1998; Gerber 2008; Heath 2003; Wolkomir 2001), new ways of perform- ing heterosexuality while engaging in “gay” styles, practices, and sex (e.g., Bridges forthcoming; Pascoe 2007; Schippers 2000; Ward 2008; Wilkins 2009), the masculinization of concerns with hygiene and ap- pearance (e.g., Barber 2008), presidential discourses surrounding militarism (Messerschmidt 2010), and throughout popular culture more generally (e.g., Carroll 2011; Jeffords 1994; Pfeil 1995; Savran 1998).

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Contemporary transformations in masculinity have primarily been documented among groups of young, heterosexual-identified, White men. This fact evidences the flexibility of identity afforded privileged groups. Indeed, ignoring intersectional distinctions that inequitably distribute access to specific hybrid masculine forms risks presenting contemporary changes as indicative of transformations in systems of inequality that may still exist—albeit in new forms. Messner (1993) argues that, “framing shifts in styles of hegemonic masculinity as indicative of the arrival of a New Man [often situates] marginalized men (especially poor black men, in the United States) as Other” (1993: 733). Men of color, working-class men, immigrant men, among others, are often (in)directly cast as the possessors of regressive masculinities in the context of these emergent hybrid masculinities. That said, young, straight, White men are not the only ones with hybrid masculinities. Research also illustrates the ways that groups of marginalized and subordi- nated Others craft hybrid gender identities—though often with very different consequences and concerns.

Demetriou (2001) coins the term “dialecti- cal pragmatism” to theorize the consequences of the changes Messner (1993) described. Dialectical pragmatism refers to the ability of hegemonic mas- culinities to appropriate elements of subordinated and marginalized “Others” in ways that work to re- cuperate existing systems of power and inequality. Dialectical pragmatism speaks to the transformative capacities of systems of power inequality. Demetriou suggests that what makes hegemonic masculinities so powerful is precisely their ability to adapt. He suggests that hegemonic masculinity is better un- derstood as a “hegemonic masculine bloc” capable of appropriating “what appears pragmatically useful and constructive for the project of domination at a particular historical moment” (2001: 345). Deme- triou argues that Connell’s initial conceptualization of hegemonic masculinity fails to account for the ways that subordinated and marginalized mascu- linities affect the formation, style, look, and feel of hegemonic masculinity. Thus, Demetriou’s frame- work illustrates how the meanings and consequences of hybrid masculinities are much more complicated than they might initially appear.

Demetriou focuses primarily on one example of hybridity: the assimilation of elements of “gay male culture” into heterosexual masculinities. He illus- trates how this hybrid masculinity might be better understood as a contemporary expression of—rather than challenge to—existing forms of gender and sexual inequality. Demetriou shows how hetero- sexual men incorporate “bits and pieces [of gay male culture,] . . . [producing] new, hybrid configurations of gender practice that enable them to reproduce their dominance over women [and other men] in his- torically novel ways” (2001: 350–351). Like Messner (1993, 2007), Demetriou shows how hybrid mascu- linities blur gender differences and boundaries in ways that present no real challenge to existing sys- tems of power and inequality.

The theorizing of hybrid masculinities as illus- trated by Demetriou (2001) and Messner (1993, 2007) challenges the analyses set forth by Anderson (2009) and Connell and Messerschmidt (2005). Anderson’s (2009) theory of “inclusive masculinity” argues that these new configurations of identity and practice are best understood as resistance to gender and sexual inequality, while Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) argue that these challenges to hegemonic masculinity have not been significant. The research in the follow- ing section, however, broadly supports Demetriou’s (2001) conceptualization of “dialectical pragmatism” and Messner’s (1993, 2007) analysis of transforma- tions in masculine style but not substance of con- temporary masculinities. This work illustrates how contemporary performances of masculinity are part of a transformation in the practices, identities, and discourses through which contemporary inequalities are being perpetuated and expressed. In connecting with a much more diverse body of literature than ex- isting work on “hybrid masculinities,” we illustrate the depth and breadth of the meanings and conse- quences of gendered hybridization and comment on the origins of contemporary transformations.

r e s e a r c h o n h y b r i d m a s c u l i n i t i e s

Research on hybrid masculinities highlights sev- eral consequences associated with these gender projects and performances. First, hybrid masculine

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practices often work in ways that create some dis- cursive distance between young, White, straight men and hegemonic masculinity, enabling some to frame themselves as outside of existing systems of privi- lege and inequality. Second, hybrid masculinities are often premised on the notion that the masculinities available to young, White, straight men are some- how less meaningful than the masculinities of vari- ous marginalized and subordinated Others, whose identities were at least partially produced by collec- tive struggles for rights and recognition. Third, hybrid masculinities work to fortify symbolic and social boundaries between (racial, gender, sexual) groups— further entrenching, and often concealing, inequality in new ways.

d i s c u r s i v e d i s ta n c i n g

The gender flexibility of postmodern patriarchy is pernicious because it casts the illusion that patriarchy has disappeared. (Hennessy, 1995:172)

Hybrid masculine practices often work in ways that create some discursive distance between White, straight men and “hegemonic masculinity.” How- ever, as men are distanced from hegemonic mascu- linity, they also (often more subtly) align themselves with it. Research on men’s pro-feminist, political, and grooming activities illustrates how hybrid mas- culinities can work in ways that discursively distance men from hegemonic masculinity.

Bridges (2010) highlights this distancing in his documentation of men’s participation in Walk a Mile in Her Shoes marches—an event to raise awareness about domestic violence. In it, men wear high-heeled shoes and walk one mile. This practice of standing with women and wearing women’s clothing seem- ingly distances them from the sexism and gendered dominance that partially constitutes hegemonic masculinity. As Bridges points out, however, the men in this march can reproduce gender inequality even as they actively work against it. The way men interact during this march reiterates forms of gender inequality that undergird domestic violence. The male participants joke about wearing women’s cloth- ing, about their ability to walk in heels, and about

same-sex sexual desire. These jokes discursively align participants with hegemonic masculinity even as their practices might seem to distance them from it.

The “My Strength Is Not for Hurting” campaign—one of the few anti-rape campaigns di- rected at men—also acts to distance men from he- gemonic masculinity by framing men “as a unitary group” made to look bad by rapists (Masters 2010). Non-rapist men are simultaneously aligned with hegemonic masculinity through framing “real” and “strong” men as fundamentally different from (pre- sumably weak and unmanly) rapists. Campaigns like this discursively separate “good” from “bad” men and fail to account for the ways that presenting strength and power as natural resources for men per- petuates gender and sexual inequality even as they are called into question (see also Murphy 2009). Both Walk a Mile in Her Shoes marches and the My Strength Is Not for Hurting campaign create some distance between these (good) men and (bad) he- gemonic masculinity. Yet, in challenging men’s vio- lence against women, they simultaneously reaffirm many qualities that  typify hegemonic masculine forms and dominance.

Similarly, men can embrace political stances that seem to distance them from hegemonic masculinity. Such stances allow public male figures to disguise toughness with tenderness. For instance, Arnold Schwarzenegger forged an identity that Messner (2007) refers to as the “kindergarten commando,” representing a masculinity “foregrounding muscle, toughness and the threat of violence” followed with “situationally appropriate symbolic displays of com- passion” (Messner 2007: 461). Schwarzenegger’s “sexy, hybrid mix of hardness and compassion” is a “configuration of symbols that forge a masculinity that is useful for securing power among men who al- ready have it” (Messner 2007: 473). This same shift is reflected in mediated depictions of idealized mascu- linities in action films of the 1980s and 90s (Jeffords 1994) and more recently as well (Carroll 2011). For  instance, while action films in the 90s seem to implicitly critique or satirize the masculine “hard bodies” of the 80s, they do so in ways that Jeffords suggests “[do not reject] that body so much as [refig- ure] it” (1994: 191).

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Messerschmidt (2010) illustrates a similar dy- namic at work in international arenas. Analyzing speeches surrounding the “War on Terror” spanning the presidencies of George Bush and George W. Bush, he finds that both presidents mobilized discourses of rescue to justify military action. As Messerschmidt argues, “Bush Senior’s and Bush Junior’s inclusion of humane, sensitive, and empathic aspects in their masculine rhetoric shows how hegemonic masculin- ity at the regional and global levels is fluid and flexi- ble. . . . Such an appropriation of traditionally defined ‘feminine’ traits blurs gender difference but does not undermine gender dominance” (2010: 161). Messer- schmidt illustrates the fluid properties of hegemonic masculinities and the ways in which masculinities are capable of incorporating elements of “feminin- ity” to obscure gender boundaries, while reproducing existing systems of power and authority. These mas- culinized strategies allow trust to be gained “in times of fear and insecurity” and “[project] a veiled femi- nized stigma onto more liberal candidates” (Messner 2007: 461). Messerschmidt’s findings also imply that hybrid masculinities have attained ideological power and influence on a global stage, suggesting— contrary to Connell and Messerschmidt’s (2005) earlier assessment—that they are implicated in global-level processes and relations.

This kind of “feminization” has been docu- mented in very different locations as well. For in- stance, Kristen Barber’s (2008) study of White, middle-class, heterosexual men in professional men’s hair salons illustrates one way that some men engage in beauty work formerly coded “feminine.” Barber finds that these men rely on a rhetoric of ex- pectations associated with professional-class mas- culinities to justify their participation in the beauty industry while simultaneously naturalizing distinc- tions between themselves and working-class men, framing the latter as misogynistic and reproducing gender inequality. While these men are engaging in a practice that might be labeled “feminine,” Barber highlights the ways they avoid feminization and create some distance between themselves and mas- culinities they associate with reproducing gender and sexual inequality. Similarly, Wilkins (2009) ad- dresses the ways that both goth and young Christian

men engage in boundary-blurring gender projects that ultimately work to recuperate existing systems of power and privilege. Navigating “masculine” norms surrounding heterosexual interest and participation in different ways, Wilkins finds that both groups reit- erate existing structures of gender power and author- ity much more than challenge them.

As this research illustrates, contemporary hybrid masculinities create space between men and hege- monic masculinity while reiterating gendered rela- tions of power and inequality. While this process is happening in diverse ways, this research shows it is occurring at local, regional, national, and interna- tional levels.

s t r at e g i c b o r r o w i n g

If there is one aspect that separates the current crisis of masculinity from those that have come before, it is white masculinity’s turn to the representational politics of identity.  .  .  . [W]hite masculinity places itself in other identity locations (white trash, queer, blue-collar, Irish) in order to disavow that it is norma- tive. . . . [O]nce it has become visible . . . it reworks the meaning of that visibility by locating itself elsewhere. (Carroll 2011:6–7)

Hybrid masculinities are often premised on the notion that the masculinities available to young, White, straight men are meaningless when compared with various “Others,” whose identities were forged in struggles for rights and recognition. Indeed, cul- tural appropriation is a defining characteristic of hybrid identities. Research on hybrid masculinities documents the way that men who occupy privileged social categories strategically borrow from Others in ways that work to reframe themselves as symboli- cally part of socially subordinated groups. Through this process, White men frame themselves as victims (Messner 1993: 77) and inequality becomes less easily identified. Like Waters’ (1990) research document- ing White people’s relative ignorance of the ethnic flexibility they are afforded, the hybrid identities available to young, straight, White men may be very different from those available to marginalized and subordinated groups. As Patricia Hill Collins argues, “Authentic Black people must be contained—their

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authentic culture can enter White controlled spaces, but they cannot” (Collins 2004: 177). By strategically borrowing elements of the performative “styles” as- sociated with various marginalized and subordi- nated “Others,” research has documented the more pernicious consequences of these hybrid practices.

Demetriou (2001) charts this process by examin- ing the incorporation of elements of gay culture by heterosexual-identified men. Rather than illustrating a fundamental challenge to systems of inequality, Demetriou theorizes the ways that culturally domi- nant models of masculinity assimilate elements from subordinated “Others” in ways that fundamentally alter the shape (but not structural position of power) of contemporary performances of gender and gender relations. Similarly, by theorizing the aesthetic ele- ments of sexuality, Bridges (forthcoming) analyzes the causes and consequences of heterosexual men subjectively identifying aspects of themselves as “gay” in ways that preserve their heterosexuality and simultaneously reinforce existing boundaries be- tween gay and straight individuals and cultures.

Arxer’s (2011) study of interactions between heterosexual men at a college bar documents an analogous practice. Extremely different from the competitive, emotionally detached, sexually objecti- fying performances of masculinity that characterize straight men’s interactions with each other in Bird’s (1996) or Grazian’s (2007) research, Arxer (2011) examines these men’s assimilation of aspects of gay masculinity, but simultaneous maintenance of exist- ing systems of power and dominance.

These men seem to perceive a sense of intersectional deprivation wherein heterosexual masculinity (as de- fined traditionally to be aggressive and emotionally detached) is devalued relative to gay masculinities. In response to this “crisis” in hegemonic capital, the men agree to a hybridized model of masculinity that affords them a new framework to assess who (“gay people”) has profited from being labeled as “sensi- tive” and how they can claim a slice of the dividend. (Arxer 2011: 408)

Yet, in the process of drawing on the emotionality presumably displayed by gay men, these men reassert gender inequality by using it to increase their chances

of sexually “scoring” with women (Arxer 2011: 409). Thus, while a dramatically different collective perfor- mance of masculinity from “the girl hunt” that Gra- zian (2007) documents or Bird’s (1996) “men’s club,” the consequences of these performances are strik- ingly similar in terms of sustaining existing systems of power and inequality.

Research has also analyzed racialized strategic borrowing—a process which works in similar ways. Similar to the research on men’s appropriation of el- ements of gay culture, research on the cultural ap- propriation of and identification with hip-hop music among young White men finds that their incorpora- tion of elements of “black culture” is often not as- sociated with recognition of the consequences of this practice (e.g., Hess 2005; Hughey 2012; Rodriquez 2006). Rodriquez’s (2006) research on young White hip-hop music fans documents these men justify- ing their interest in and identification with hip-hop utilizing “colorblind” discourses (e.g., Bonilla-Silva 2001) that enable them to conceal race (and racial inequality) as a significant element of this cultural form.

White appropriation of cultural forms is cer- tainly not a new cultural phenomenon (e.g., Lott 1993; Deloria 1998) nor is the appropriation neces- sarily confined to boys and young men (e.g., Wilkins 2004, 2008) or the United States (Garner 2009). Yet, reasons behind and consequences of contemporary men’s “borrowings” are historically novel. As Cutler points out with respect to White appropriation of African-American linguistic patterns and style, “Its origins are complex, its consequences can be serious, and although its representativeness can’t be stated systematically, it is not an isolated instance” (1999: 439).

Hughey’s (2012) research with anti-racist and White nationalist groups composed primarily of men places these practices in a larger cultural per- spective. Hughey refers to this appropriation as a reliance on what he terms “color capital” by Whites. He argues that Whites engage in these practices in an effort to assuage feelings of “culturelessness” as- sociated with White identity (see also Perry 2001 and Wilkins 2004). In very different ways, the two groups in Hughey’s study struggled to both relate to

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and distance themselves from color capital in ways that illustrated their cultural affiliation with racial- ized identities that they saw as bloated with meaning when situated alongside their own racial identities— which most understood as devoid of “culture.” Yet, while working to alleviate feelings of meaningless- ness associated with White identity, Hughey finds that these practices simultaneously promote more destructive racial consequences.

Messner (1993) argues that when we frame young, straight, White men’s new performances of masculinity solely as indicators of a decline in gender and sexual inequality, already marginalized groups of men often end up situated as playing a greater role in perpetuating inequality. By framing middle-class, young, straight, White men as both the embodiment and harbinger of feminist change in masculinities, social scientists participate in further marginalizing poor men, working-class men, religious men, under- educated men, rural men, and men of color (among others) as the bearers of uneducated, backwards, toxic, patriarchal masculinities. Even as young White men borrow practices and identities from young, gay, Black, or urban men in order to boost their mascu- line capital, research shows that these practices often work simultaneously to reaffirm these subordinated groups as deviant, thus supporting existing systems of power and dominance.

f o r t i f y i n g b o u n d a r i e s

The outward styles of masculinity may appear to be more enlightened and egalitarian while the underly- ing basis of male privilege and power remains fun- damentally unquestioned, reminding us that “softer” forms of masculinity are not inherently emancipatory for women and can, in fact, mask usurpation of wom- en’s rights. (Donovan 1998:837)

By co-opting elements of style and performance from less powerful masculinities, young straight, White men’s hybridizations often obscure the sym- bolic and social boundaries between groups upon which such practices rely. Through this process, sys- tems of inequality are further entrenched and con- cealed in historically new ways, often along lines of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Hybrid masculinities may, for instance, compli- cate claims about and understandings of relationships between normative masculinity and homophobia. In recent history, homophobia has been a hallmark of adolescent masculinity (Kehler 2007; Levy et al. 2012; Pascoe 2007; Poteat et al. 2010). However, re- search indicates that such sentiments are on the de- cline among young men (McCormack 2012). While fear or dislike of actual gay people may be declining, what Pascoe (2007) calls a “fag discourse” continues to structure the socialization practices of boys and young men. Simply put, boys socialize each other into normatively masculine behaviors, practices, at- titudes, and dispositions in a way that has little rela- tionship with boys’ fear of actual gay men (Corbett 2001; Kimmel 1994). Indeed, many boys who would never insult a gay person by calling him “gay” do not hesitate to use these words to tease each other (Mc- Cormack 2012; Pascoe 2007). While McCormack argues that homophobic jokes—when not directed at gay boys—have been stripped of their discrimi- natory meanings, Pascoe’s work illustrates that “fag discourse” is a potent form of gender policing for contemporary young men. Thus, while seemingly non-homophobic masculinities are proliferating (Anderson 2009; McCormack 2012), a closer look at the gendered meanings of homophobia complicates these claims (Bridges forthcoming; Pascoe 2007).

Even when men engage in sexual practices that challenge the relationship between norma- tive masculinity and homophobia, they may reify inequality. Jane Ward’s (2008) research on White straight-identifying men who have sex with men il- lustrates how their sexual practices may initially seem to transgress traditional notions of heterosexual mas- culinity but simultaneously work to reify gendered, sexual, and raced boundaries. Ward documents the ways that, in their search for sexual partners, these men objectify women, reject effeminacy among men, and hyper-eroticize men of color. They talk about hooking up with other men while watching “pussy porn,” say they do not want to have sex with men who are feminine “sissy la las,” and use exotic and stigmatizing language to describe their ideal men of color sex partners. Ward calls this particular configu- ration of practices “dude sex.” Though violating the

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“one-act rule” (Schilt and Westbrook 2009) of male homosexuality by participating in same-sex sex, these men simultaneously reinforce gendered and raced inequality. Their identity projects consist of presenting themselves as having a better “cultural fit” with heterosexuality, relying on stereotypes and gen- dered and racialized performances of masculinity as proof of heterosexual masculine identities.

Ward’s participants in some ways both reflect and invert Connell’s (1992) and Levine’s (1998) analysis of gay men’s assimilation of elements of straight mas- culinities into some gay men’s identity projects. Con- nell’s discussion of gay Australian men who identify with elements of “straight” masculine performances and identities finds that the practices ultimately shore up gender and sexual boundaries. Connell (1992) argues that these performances are primarily undertaken out of an interest in gender identification (as “masculine” men) and concerns with safety (due to the threat of violence against men performing ef- feminate gay identities). Ward’s participants take this a step further. Not only do they perform het- erosexual masculinities—often relying on racialized performances associated with hip-hop and/or surfer culture—they also identify as “straight” because of their affiliation with straight culture, in spite of their participation in same-sex sexual behavior. In some ways, this research is also an example of “strategic borrowing,” illustrating how, in practice, the three consequences of hybrid masculinities we address here often work in congress and overlap.

Men’s practices that initially appear to be femi- nist can also reify gender inequality even as they obscure it. Recent changes in the ideologies and prac- tices of fathering may seem progressive—such as in- creasing levels of emotionality and time spent with children. But upon closer investigation they also entrench gender inequality. Messner (1993) makes clear that the new fathering movement was not nec- essarily about challenging gender inequality in the family, but about a particular style of male parenting, that, as Stein (2005) indicates, may draw boundar- ies around male heterosexuality. In her study of the Promise Keeper movement, Melanie Heath (2003) examines the ways that men embody “new father- ing” by playing larger roles in their children’s lives

and being more emotionally available while simul- taneously enforcing gender inequality by espousing a “biblical” notion of “the family” in which women are instructed to submit to their husbands. Dono- van (1998) refers to this process as “masculine re- scripting,” and also argues that such a process does not necessarily challenge existing systems of power and inequality. Schwalbe (1996) discusses similar ideological shifts as “loose essentialism”—a process that acknowledges and supports change in men and allows them to redefine traits formerly associated with femininity as “masculine.”4

Groups of evangelical Christian men may be the quintessential example of “loose essentialism” as research has documented their engagement in “mas- culine rescripting” practices when talking about sex in ways that are seemingly progressive, but simul- taneously homophobic and working to reify gender inequality (Gerber 2008; Wilkins 2009). Gerber’s (2008) analysis of the Ex-Gay Movement highlights some of the ways that ex-gay identities and perfor- mances of masculinity are often non-normative. In the interest of creating “a livable space” for Christian men grappling with same-sex desires, hybrid mascu- line options offer resources for alternative masculini- ties that illustrate a great transformation in styles of masculinity, but do little to challenge the boundar- ies between “gay” and “straight,” or “masculine” and “feminine.”

While all of this work illustrates the diverse ways in which contemporary performances of masculin- ity are playing with social and symbolic boundaries (gendered, raced, sexual, etc.), this body of scholar- ship also illustrates the ways that much of this play is best understood as superficial. While the young White men participating in “dude sex” (Ward 2008) are certainly blurring gender and sexual boundar- ies by discursively playing with the qualities that “count” when identifying sexualities, they are also reestablishing boundaries between gay and straight and gendered, racialized, and sexual systems of power and inequality. Similarly, Heath’s (2003) study of Promise Keeper masculinities finds signifi- cant changes in masculine norms surrounding par- enting, but—like Messner’s (1993) analysis of the fathers’ rights movement more generally—argues

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that these changes have done little to disrupt existing gendered power relations in the family. Thus, a great deal of research finds that hybrid masculine practices often work in ways that fortify symbolic and social boundaries, perpetuating social hierarchies in new (and “softer”) ways.

c o n c l u s i o n

Connell (1995: 84) argued that the gender order con- tinually tends toward crisis, but also suggests that such “crisis tendencies” have intensified recently. “They have resulted, clearly enough, in a major loss of legitimacy for patriarchy, and different groups of men are now ne- gotiating this loss in very different ways” (1995: 202). Hybrid masculinities research has primarily examined this process of transformation among groups of men who hold concentrated constellations of power and authority in the current gender order (young, White, heterosexual, etc.).

Privilege works best when it goes unrecognized. Indeed, as Johnson notes, “Perhaps the most efficient way to keep patriarchy going is to promote the idea that it doesn’t exist.  .  .  . Or, if it does exist, it’s by reputation only, a shadow of its former self that no longer amounts to much in people’s lives” (2005: 154). Research on hybrid masculinities suggests that recent changes—sparked by feminist critique and

reform—have shed light upon masculinity and mas- culine privilege in historically unprecedented ways. When privilege becomes visible, however, this re- search illustrates how it does not necessarily cease to exist. But, the experiences of privilege by privileged groups do change, as do the “legitimating stories” or justifications for existing systems of power and in- equality. Hybrid masculinities are one illustration of what Johnson (2005) refers to as the “flexibility of patriarchy.” This is not to say that men’s aware- ness of privileges associated with masculinity causes their privileges to cease to exist. Rather, research on hybrid masculinities illustrates another possibility— experiences and justifications of privilege have trans- formed. And this transformation has led to a host of new identity projects as different groups of men ne- gotiate this change in different ways.

Hybridization is a cultural process with incred- ible potential for change. Research on hybrid mascu- linities has primarily documented shifts in—rather than challenges to—systems of power and inequal- ity. The question that remains concerns how we can recognize meaningful change in systems of gender inequality when we see it. Questions about how and when real—not just stylistic—change happens in the gender order remain to be answered by gender scholarship.

N O T E S

1. It should be noted that while we refer to what these authors are writing about as “hybrid mas- culinities,” the term is not used by all of these scholars. Demetriou (2001); Connell and Mess- erschmidt (2005), Messner (2007), Arxer (2011), Messerschmidt (2010), and Bridges (2014) all explicitly use the term. But, the identity projects, practices, and discourses to which they refer are present in a great deal of scholarship that does not explicitly use “hybrid masculinity” to make sense of ideas and findings. We use the term to bring together lines of theorizing and claims- making that have not, historically, been in dialog with one another.

2. Importantly, Messerschmidt’s (2010) more recent analysis of US presidential discourses mobi- lized during the “War on Terror” indicates that hybrid masculinities may increasingly exist on a global scale.

3. Indeed, public opinions in the United States concerning homosexuality have taken a marked turn in recent history—particularly those of younger men (Loftus 2001; Saad 2010). What these changes mean is more difficult to assess, as other data illustrates the continuance of harassment and bullying utilizing derogatory epithets for homosexuality and gender expression among US

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boys (Kosciw et al. 2012). Opinion polls are also at odds with a great deal of qualitative research among US boys and young men. So, there is some disagreement concerning how we can inter- pret the meanings of this change.

4. Messner (2011) theorizes a similar transformation in discourse through which youth sports leagues are gendered in ways that maintain a separation between boys and girls. He refers to this discourse as “soft essentialism.” Messner argues that the notion that boys are better than girls (more athletic, intelligent, rational, etc.) has been successfully challenged, while the idea that boys are different from girls persists. Because gender inequality is institutionalized, ideologies of difference are sometimes all that is necessary to perpetuate existing inequalities.

R E F E R E N C E S

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relationship between masculinity and homophobia.” Gender & Society 28(1): 58–82. Burke, Peter. 2009. Cultural Hybridity. New York: Polity. Carroll, Hamilton. 2011. Affirmative Reaction. Durham: Duke University Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2004. Black Sexual Politics. New York: Routledge. Connell, R. W. 1992. “A Very Straight Gay.” American Sociological Review 57(6): 735–51. Connell, R. W. 1995. Masculinities. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Connell, R. W. and James Messerschmidt. 2005. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.”

Gender & Society 19(6): 829–59. Corbett, Ken. 2001. “Faggot = Loser.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 2 (1): 3–28. Coston, Bethany and Michael Kimmel. 2012. “Seeing Privilege Where It Isn’t.” Journal of Social Issues

68(1): 97–111. Cutler, Cecilia. 1999. “Yorkville Crossing: White Teens, Hip Hop and African American English.” Journal

of Sociolinguistics 3(4): 428–42. Demetriou, Demetrakis. 2001. “Connell’s Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critique.” Theory and

Society 30(3): 337–61. Donovan, Brian. 1998. “Political Consequences of Private Authority.” Theory and Society 27(6): 817–43. Garner, Steve. 2009. “Empirical Research into White Racialized Identities in Britain.” Sociology Compass

3(5): 789–802. Gerber, Lynne. 2008. “The Opposite of Gay.” Nova Religio 11(4): 8–30. Grazian, David. 2007. “The Girl Hunt.” Symbolic Interaction 30(2): 221–43. Heasley, Robert. 2005. “Crossing the Borders of Gendered Sexuality.” pp. 109–30 in Thinking Straight,

edited by Chrys Ingraham. New York: Routledge. Heath, Melanie. 2003. “Soft-Boiled Masculinity.” Gender & Society 17(3): 423–44. Hennessy, Rosemary. 1995. “Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture.” pp. 142–83 in Social Postmodernism,

edited by Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hess, Mickey. 2005. “Hip-Hop Realness and the White Performer.” Critical Studies in Media Communication

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Jeffords, Susan. 1994. Hard Bodies. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Johnson, Allan. 2005. The Gender Knot (revised and updated edition). Philadelphia: Temple University

Press. Kehler, Michael. 2007. “Hallway Fears and High School Friendships.” Discourse 28(2): 259–77. Kimmel, Michael. 1994. “Masculinity as Homophobia.” Pp. 119–41 in Theorizing Masculinities, edited by

Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kimmel, Michael. 1996. Manhood in America. New York: The Free Press. Kosciw, Joseph G., Emily A. Greytak, Mark J. Bartkiewicz, Madelyn J. Boesen and Neal A. Palmer. 2012.

The 2011 National School Climate Survey: The Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth in Our Nation’s Schools. New York: GLSEN.

Levy, Nathaniel, Sandra Cortesi, Urs Gasser, Edward Crowley, Meredith Beaton, June Casey and Caroline Nolan. 2012. Bullying in a Networked Era. Cambridge: Berkman Center for Internet & Society Research Publication Series.

Loftus, Jeni. 2001. “America’s Liberalization in Attitudes toward Homosexuality, 1973 to 1998.” American Sociological Review 66(5): 762–82.

Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press.

Masters, N. Tatiana. 2010. “‘My Strength Is Not for Hurting’: Men’s Anti-Rape Websites and Their Construc- tion of Masculinity and Male Sexuality.” Sexualities 13(1): 33–46.

McCormack, Mark. 2012. The Declining Significance of Homophobia. New York: Oxford University Press. Messerschmidt, James. 2010. Hegemonic Masculinities and Camouflaged Politics. Boulder: Paradigm

Publishers. Messner, Michael. 1993. “‘Changing Men’ and Feminist Politics in the United States.” Theory and Society

22(5): 723–37. Messner, Michael. 2007. “The Masculinity of the Governator.” Gender & Society 21(4): 461–80. Messner, Michael. 2011. “Gender Ideologies, Youth Sports, and the Production of Soft Essentialism.”

Sociology of Sport Journal 28(2): 151–70. Murphy, Michael. 2009. “Can ‘Men’ Stop Rape? Visualizing Gender in the ‘My Strength Is Not for Hurting’

Rape Prevention Campaign.” Men and Masculinities 12(1): 113–30. Pascoe, C. J. 2007. Dude, You’re a Fag. Berkeley: University of California Press. Perry, Amanda. 2001. “White Means Never Having to Say You’re Ethnic.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnog-

raphy 30(1): 56–91. Pfeil, Fred. 1995. White Guys. New York: Verso. Poteat, V. Paul, Michael Kimmel and Riki Wilchins. 2010. “The Moderating Effects of Support for Violence.”

Journal of Research on Adolescence 21(2): 434–47. Rodriquez, Jason. 2006. “Color-Blind Ideology and the Cultural Appropriation of Hip-Hop.” Contempo-

rary Ethnography 35(6): 645–68. Saad, Lydia. 2010. Gallup Report: Americans’ Acceptance of Gay Relations Crosses 50% Threshold. In Gallup

Politics. Retrieved July 18, 2013, from http://www.gallup.com/poll/135764/americans-acceptance- gay-relations-crosses-threshold.aspx.

Savran, David. 1998. Taking It Like a Man. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schilt, Kristen and Laurel Westbrook. 2009. “Doing Gender, Doing Heteronormativity.” Gender & Society

23(4): 440–64. Schippers, Mimi. 2000. “The Social Organization of Sexuality and Gender in Alternative Hard Rock.”

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Ward, Jane. 2008. “Dude-Sex: White Masculinities and ‘Authentic’ Heterosexuality among Dudes Who Have Sex with Dudes.” Sexualities 11(4): 414–34.

Waters, Mary. 1990. Ethnic Options. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wilkins, Amy. 2004. “Puerto Rican Wannabes.” Gender & Society 18(1): 103–21. Wilkins, Amy. 2008. Wannabes, Goths, and Christians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wilkins, Amy. 2009. “Masculinity Dilemmas: Sexuality and Intimacy Talk among Christians and Goths.”

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Gay and Ex-Gay Christian Men.” Symbolic Interaction 24(4): 407–25.

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Sanyu A. Mojola, “”Providing Women, Kept Men: Doing Masculinity in the Wake of the African HIV/AIDS Pandemic,”” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 39, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 341-363. https://doi.org/10.1086/673086. Reprinted with permission of The University of Chicago Press Journals.”

Socioeconomic change has left men with a patriarchal ide- ology bereft of its legitimizing activities.

—Margrethe Silberschmidt (2001, 657)

This article draws on ethnographic and interview-based fieldwork to explore accounts of relation- ships between widowed women and poor young men that emerged in the wake of economic crisis and a dev- astating HIV epidemic among the Luo ethnic group in western Kenya. I show how the co-optation of widow inheritance practices amid the presence of an overwhelming number of widows during a period of economic crisis has resulted in widows becoming pro- viding women and poor young men becoming kept men.1 I argue that widows in this setting, by perform- ing a set of practices central to what it meant to be a man in this society—pursuing and providing for their partners—were effectively doing masculinity. I also show how young men, rather than being feminized by being kept, deployed other sets of practices to prove their masculinity and live in a manner congruent with cultural ideals.

These arguments draw on literature that under- stands masculinity as a configuration of practices located within a historically situated and shifting system of gender relations and recognizes that mul- tiple configurations of masculinity are at work in a given social system (Connell 1995). Understanding gender as practice, or something that is done rather than merely an identity or something that one is, enables a decoupling of masculinity from male

bodies and makes the idea of women doing mascu- linity possible.2 By showing both women and men simultaneously performing masculinity in the same historically situated space, I understand multiple masculinities as not just limited to relations among (those who identify as) men but rather as encom- passing relations among masculinities, which can be performed by men or women. However, I will show that women’s practice of masculinity in large part seemed to serve patriarchal ends. It not only fa- cilitated their fulfillment of patriarchal expectations of femininity—particularly the expectation that widows be inherited—but also served, in the end, to provide a material base for young men’s deployment of legitimizing and culturally valued sets of mascu- line practices.3

Relationships between older women and young men are rarely the focus of scholarly attention. This is especially true in examinations of cross-generational partnerships in literature on the African HIV pan- demic (briefly discussed later in the article), where the focus has been on those involving older men and young women. Indeed, the data for this article come from a larger study among the Luo, who have faced the worst HIV epidemic in Kenya. It was de- signed to explore young women’s high HIV rates by examining young people’s transitions to adulthood in the context of an ongoing HIV epidemic, with per- spectives from youth, the middle aged, and elderly adults. As fieldwork progressed, however, respon- dents both within and outside of formal interview

19. PROVIDING WOMEN, KEPT MEN

S A N Y U A . M O J O L A

Doing Masculinity in the Wake of the African HIV/AIDS Pandemic

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settings would remark, often as an aside, on relation- ships between widowed women and young men. As I will show, these comments and discussions raise important questions about the effects of the HIV epidemic on shifting gender relations and provide an opportunity to reflect on the implications of these relationships for thinking about masculinity and the persistence of patriarchal systems.

I first begin with a discussion of the crisis of youth masculinity in Africa, examining traditional and contemporary paths to manhood and adult- hood, and the way current economies and popula- tion dynamics are disrupting these pathways across the continent and among the Luo specifically. Next, I discuss the HIV pandemic, its creation of widows, and practices of widow inheritance. I then describe the study setting, data, and methods before discuss- ing the findings. I draw on fieldwork data to focus on the dilemmas of widows who have become providing women and the benefits experienced by youth who have become kept men. I examine the evolution of widow inheritance practices, as well as how young men have co-opted them to forge new pathways to manhood. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these relationships for thinking about masculinity as performed by women and men.

t h e c r i s i s o f c o n t e m p o r a r y a f r i c a n y o u t h m a s c u l i n i t y

For many young African men in patrilineal societies, the primary practices associated with the attainment of manhood and adulthood were provision of land to a wife or wives for subsistence farming, estab- lishing a household, and siring children, as well as gaining authority over one or more women through bridewealth-based marriage.4 The attainment of these goals underpinned the reproduction of patriarchal systems. In a typical illustration of this process, Philip Setel describes Chagga men of northern Tanzania’s transition to adulthood thus: “In the nineteenth cen- tury, undergoing initiation, entering an age grade, establishing a new homestead, and concluding a kihamba [land] based bridewealth marriage were the key cultural institutions and processes through which Chagga men established adult status. . . . These social

institutions surrounded the transition from youth to adulthood, shaped men’s entry into reproductive life, and inculcated values of responsible manhood and adult citizenship within the stratified social schema of Chagga clans and chiefdoms” (1996, 1170). What these traditional patterns implied was not just that a man would have authority over women but also that he would have authority over his sons until they established their own households on land given to them by their father. Among the Luo of Kenya, for ex- ample, a father determined when a young man had reached a sufficient age to build his own simba (bach- elor hut) and assigned him land on which to do so. A young man also had to ask permission from his father to be allowed to find a woman to marry. The father, along with male relatives, provided bridewealth to the woman’s relatives to contract the marriage, and the young man’s simba would subsequently become his marital home.5

The colonial and early postcolonial era provided an opportunity to circumvent these traditional routes to adulthood. Young men’s migration outside of their home area for work, as well as their education, led to semi-skilled and white-collar jobs that enabled them to earn money to set up their own independent households and to finance their own marriages with- out relying on their male elders.6 This was especially salient among the Luo of Nyanza. By the second half of the twentieth century, between a quarter and half of young Luo men were migrating out of the province for work.7 Such large-scale male labor migration and accompanying wages enabled young Luo men to con- tract their own marriages with their bride’s relatives and to establish their own households (Whisson 1964; Cohen and Atieno Odhiambo 1989; Shipton 2007).

However, the stalled, declined, and slow-growth economies of the past two decades, coupled with a burgeoning youth population, have had a number of consequences for young men, and these conse- quences have caused a disruption to contemporary practices demonstrating the attainment of adulthood and manhood. In Kenya, high fertility rates and fall- ing infant mortality rates resulted in a large youth population. The rapid spread of mass education, however, was coupled with an economy that was

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not expanding at a rate that could accommodate the graduates (Buchmann 1999). A substantial increase in educational access has thus been accompanied by growing disillusionment about employment pros- pects among youth and adults in many countries in Africa, with male youth unemployment rates reach- ing as high as 40–50 percent in settings such as South Africa, and more educated youth being especially af- fected.8 This may partly be because if youth reach high school, their aspirations stretch to white-collar jobs. As Thomas Owen Eisemon and John Schwille note, “Parents do not send their children to school to become better farmers or to learn vernacular lan- guages and practical skills that will suit them for rural life. They want an education for their children that affords them an opportunity for a much better life off the farm” (1991, 26). As such, looking for wage employment often involves a more protracted search than is associated with self-employment, agriculture, or other manual labor.

A lack of jobs and subsequent income was par- ticularly problematic because it limited young men’s ability to maintain a girlfriend. Many felt there was “no romance without finance” (Mills and Ssewa- kiryanga 2005).9 A small but growing body of work suggests that some young men instead engaged in transactional sex relationships with older women, or sugar mummies.10 These are nonmarital, non- commercial sexual partnerships in which money and gifts are exchanged but in which issues of love and trust are sometimes also at stake.11 The flow of gift giving is predominantly one way—with older, wealthier partners providing to secure partnerships with younger partners. A rather more extensive litera- ture, however, suggests that the primary participants in these sorts of relationships are young women and older men.12

Unfortunately, even as contemporary routes to adulthood are beginning to falter, young men have increasingly been unable to return to traditional pathways to manhood. Large numbers of youth are becoming landless, especially because of population growth and limited land to split among sons (Setel 1996; Amuyunzu-Nyamongo and Francis 2006). Thus, even though many fathers have died prema- turely from AIDS, there is little left for their sons to

inherit. Having no land or limited land on which a wife could engage in subsistence farming, or having few cattle with which to finance bridewealth, greatly constrains young men’s ability to set up indepen- dent households and marry. Thus, remaining “per- petually poor, perpetually youth,” as Jennifer Cole (2005, 892) has noted of the young Malagasy men ( jaombilo) she studied, they are left in social limbo, unable to transition to adulthood (Amuyunzu- Nyamongo and Francis 2006). The fact that these dilemmas have been documented in several Afri- can countries suggests the structural nature of the problem faced by young men who are unable to ful- fill their end of the patriarchal bargain (Kandiyoti 1988). Indeed among many young Luo men I inter- viewed, these limitations in the ability to achieve manhood—as defined by a configuration in which the key legitimizing activities were the provision of money to girlfriends, bridewealth to a woman’s rela- tives, and a home and land for a wife—have made being a young man a frustrating and in some ways debilitating experience. In order to make ends meet, many worked in itinerant or low-paying jobs, such as transportation (e.g., bicycle taxi work) or agricul- ture, that were not always commensurate with their education. In this article, however, I focus on a par- ticular strategy some young Luo men pursued and how the HIV/AIDS epidemic reconfigured sexual, economic, and domestic partnerships in ways that have provided opportunities for them to forge new pathways to manhood.

t h e a f r i c a n h i v / a i d s pa n d e m i c a n d   w i d o w i n h e r i ta n c e

The HIV/AIDS pandemic is now an indelible part of sub-Saharan Africa, with 69 percent (23.5 million) of the world’s HIV/AIDS victims and 70 percent (1.2 million) of AIDS-related deaths (UNAIDS 2012). Thus far, a key social dynamic underlying the rapid spread and cycling of HIV across genders and genera- tions has been cross-generational marital, extramari- tal, and transactional sex relationships between older men and young women. HIV rates have been particu- larly high among young women in their late teens and twenties and middle-aged men in their late thirties

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and forties (Laga et al. 2001; Clark 2004; UNAIDS and WHO 2005, 2009). A major result of these rela- tionships, given the limited availability of antiretro- viral medication to prolong the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS, has been particularly high mortality among middle-aged men and younger women. Con- sequently, the AIDS pandemic has produced large numbers of widows. Among the Luo of Nyanza Prov- ince, Kenya, one in six women in their thirties and one in five women in their forties were widowed. This extent of widowhood was partly the result of high rates of polygamy among Luo. About a third of Luo women (31 percent) and more than a fifth of Luo men (24 percent) over thirty years of age were involved in polygamous partnerships.13 As such, older men who could afford multiple wives also left multiple widows upon their death.

Many patrilineal African societies, including the Luo of Nyanza Province, practiced and continue to practice widow inheritance.14 After the death of a husband, traditional widow inheritance offered a “corporate safety net for widows and orphans” (Slater 1986, xvi). Among the Luo, a brother of the deceased husband or one of his other male relatives would inherit the widow. While widows were included in deciding who the inheritor was to be, the final de- cision was in the hands of male relatives of the de- ceased husband because they had paid bridewealth for her and therefore felt that she belonged to them and could not be inherited by a stranger or nonrela- tive (Nyambedha, Wandibba, and Aagaard-Hansen 2003). The main benefit of this system for women was that, by remaining within the folds of her hus- band’s lineage, a widow could remain on her de- ceased husband’s land and retain his property, thus enabling her to support herself and her children. Also, especially in the absence of sons, any children resulting from the widow’s sexual partnership with the inheritor would be considered as belonging to the deceased, thus allowing his line to continue and providing heirs to the deceased man’s property. This was especially important because a widow would otherwise have no rights to her husband’s land or property.15 The inheritor was usually a married man who continued to live in his own home with his wife while the widow stayed in her own home with her

children. While the widow and inheritor typically had a sexual relationship, the inheritor had no finan- cial responsibility for her or her children, and she in turn did not have any obligations to cook or per- form other domestic services for him (Potash 1986). Women rarely had the recourse of returning to their natal home because such a move was predicated on a return of bridewealth, which their families could rarely afford.

Many women complied with widow inheri- tance practices because of the immense social pres- sure to conform. Numerous taboos and sanctions were enforced in the event that a woman refused to be inherited. She would eventually become an outcast in her community and could be dispos- sessed from the land. If her house fell apart, no one would rebuild it for her.16 A woman needed to be inherited to be allowed to plant her own farm. If she was not inherited, she would not be allowed to enter certain households, her sons could not marr y, and any deaths of her children would be attributed to her refusal to be inherited (see also Luginaah et al. 2005; Geissler and Prince 2010; Dworkin et al. 2013).17

The HIV/AIDS epidemic, however, radically changed the practice of widow inheritance, primar- ily because the volume of widows began to over- whelm traditional systems. A tragic consequence of the practice was the death of one brother after another as HIV spread throughout a family. Conse- quently, to avoid HIV, some wives began refusing to share their husbands with widows who were being inherited. Widows were thus left with continuing social pressure to be inherited but limited men from their husband’s lineage available or willing to in- herit them. New and, to some, unsettling solutions emerged to deal with the problem of what widows were to do “when the obvious brother is not there,” to borrow Christopher Oleke, Astrid Blystad, and Ole Bjørn Rekdal’s (2005) phrase. In the accounts to follow, I will show how inheritor and transac- tional sex relationships between widows and young men resolved the social and economic challenges that both groups faced.18 I first describe the study setting, data, and methods before presenting the findings. . . .

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p r o v i d i n g w o m e n : t h e e v o l u t i o n o f w i d o w i n h e r i ta n c e

When your husband dies and you are not inherited, you are like a taboo woman, and so nobody will give you something even if your house is leaking. Nobody can do anything for you. They don’t want to touch that house unless they remarry you. So sometimes if you are poor [and] your house is falling apart, they cannot do it for you. And they say they have to re- marry you, otherwise in [the] future, no one will help you. You will have to accept so that you are helped. So this is where custom comes in. You don’t want to do it. You don’t feel like doing it. But here poverty comes in. [If] you were rich, you could do it by yourself by simply leaving [hiring] people to do it for you. But you have nothing to do because you have no money and so you will rely on your brother-in-law to do it for you.

This excerpt from a middle-aged woman in a focus group interview that took place at the beginning of my study was a typical complaint from the Luo widows I encountered during my fieldwork. Widows, especially in rural areas, faced continual pressure from family and community members to be inherited and often succumbed to it despite their profound reluctance. For many, the extent to which they were able to resist was related to their wealth.19 However, in this context, where the majority of widows were poor and most lived below the poverty line, few women felt they were in a position to resist.

As my fieldwork progressed, it became clear that critical changes were occurring to the practice of widow inheritance, with brothers-in-law reluc- tant to inherit widows and with continued social pressure to be inherited. Widows were increas- ingly choosing younger unmarried men to inherit them, and young men were moving in to live with them. This represented a dramatic break with tradi- tion in that, first, the widow rather than her hus- band’s male relatives was choosing the inheritor, and second, the young man did not maintain his own separate residence. One middle-aged female respondent explained:

It is like the woman is the one who has married. Be- cause the first man paid dowry [bridewealth], came

to look for you and paid dowry, you wedded, isn’t that your husband? But this one, you went to look for him because you want a man in this house. So you have to provide for him. You are the one now marry- ing him actually. You are the one marrying him. And there are such that if you don’t do what he wants, he disappears because he doesn’t have love for you. He came for enjoyment, [to] eat and bathe and then lust. (Emphasis added.)

Widows referred to these inheritor relationships as “marriage,” and the relatedness of the young men to women’s deceased husbands was not brought up as important during interviews. They used the term “mar- riage” because, as in marriage, the young man stayed in the widow’s household. (In traditional inheritance, the inheritor stayed in his own household with his own wife.) In addition, as in marriage, widows en- gaged in traditional feminine roles such as cooking and caring for the men. What was striking, however, was that widows were also engaging in traditionally masculine practices by looking for the man and bring- ing him into her house on her land, which she was providing as a husband normally would. A widow’s taking on the masculine roles of pursuing and bring- ing home a partner compelled her to also take on the concomitant role of provider—the final piece of what was a traditional configuration of masculine practice.

Another middle-aged respondent described her aunt’s situation:

I love my aunt. My aunt’s husband died, [she is] an old woman now. She visits me here and I always feel that my aunt is starving. I give her the proper food to eat and even take her to hospital. But my brother called me recently and told me that if you visit her at home, she cooks for some man. Ei! An old woman, you are still bringing a man into your [house], my aunt, what do you want? That I want him to dig for me. And she is the one feeding the man. And this is a young man. So actually with the money I send for her, she feeds this man, so that the man cannot go away. . . . You go and borrow to give him, otherwise he will leave you.

As we can see, an interesting circulation was occur- ring: a woman was sending money to support her older female relative who in turn used that money to

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keep her younger man by providing for him so that he would not leave her. While both women were en- gaging in provision, it was the aunt’s provision in the household, functioning in the masculine provider role for a young “husband,” that was shocking for the re- spondent. Men were supposed to provide a house for women, not the other way round. This point can be further emphasized in examining the gendered lan- guage around particular roles. In the dhoLuo language, men marry and women are married. Indeed, “to cook” and “to get married/be married” are the same word. “Akinyi has gone to cook for Daniel” (Akinyi odhi tedo ne Daniel) means that Daniel married Akinyi. It is lin- guistically incorrect to say the opposite: one cannot say Daniel has gone to cook for Akinyi (Daniel odhi tedo ne Akinyi). Thus, as shown in the quotation above, a woman simultaneously performing the feminized practice of “cooking for” and the masculinized prac- tice of “feeding” (providing for) her male partner was problematic. This was part of the improperness of the practice that respondents were trying to convey in their statements.

As highlighted in both quotations, men’s moti- vations were clear to widows—they would stay with them as long as they were providing. Once the pro- vision ended, the men would leave and sometimes move on to another widow. Many widows resented this evolution of widow inheritance because keep- ing a man was a costly exercise. In addition, they resented the economy that seemed to be at work. That is, the fear of a young man leaving reflected the reality that the large number of widows had essen- tially created a buyer’s market for young men. There was a sense among respondents that richer widows were in a stronger position than poorer ones. They felt that young men made this distinction, preferring homes that were relatively wealthy and that would yield them a good and comfortable life, while turn- ing down poorer widows.20 This is illustrated, for ex- ample, in the following excerpt from a focus group among widows:

r 1 : Even here we can see some women who are widows and are rich, they are okay. If she wants somebody to move with, she will choose a man of her choice because she has money. She can

make a choice. But if you don’t have, how can you choose while you are starving?

r 2 : He can’t even accept you. r 3 : He can’t. Actually the poor they don’t want. They

don’t want. They want to come because they know at the back of their minds, they know that these things are there. They know that they are facing death and so they want to enjoy them- selves. Nice food, you have to feed them, you have to treat them like kids.

i : Who? r 3 : These people who come to inherit. You treat them

better than your own husband. r 4 : He sits like a log of wood, but you feed them,

gives you another burden.

As the interview excerpt illustrates, poorer widows were decidedly less fortunate in these relationships as compared to rich widows. Interviews often re- vealed the lengths that poorer widows would go to, giving their inheritors the best food while splitting what was left with their children, in order to keep a man in the house for as long as possible. A key in- formant working in community health, for example, described the plight of widows in her community: “Another issue with the women who are widows is that they are having problems with the inheritors be- cause when the inheritor comes they don’t want to eat vegetables. They like to eat special food like meat, fish, eggs, things like that. So you find that this lady who is a widow, her children will be eating vegetables, but she will strive to give this man whatever he wants.” In lakeside communities, widows described going to fish-landing beaches to engage in transactional part- nerships with fishermen to get financial support to cater for their families.

The focus group excerpt above also suggests, how- ever, that the richest widows had the most options. The few widows who were independently wealthy, making their own money from lucrative businesses or high-salary jobs (and therefore outside the pur- view of their deceased husband’s relatives), were the most able to opt out of inheritance and engage in- stead in transactional relationships with young men out of choice. Accounts of these widows emerged in the course of interviews among men.

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k e p t m e n : r e c u p e r at i n g m a s c u l i n i t y

Several middle-aged and older men pointed out young men’s pursuit of relationships with older women in the course of my fieldwork. For example, in response to a question on changes among the Luo over time, one older male respondent, in his eighties, replied, “Educa- tion is expensive. After that expensive education there are no jobs. So the children who are educated have lost their way [and] get into different things. We have prob- lems because they are back with us in the house. They come to disturb us parents. You had educated him or her. You have no money. [So] when they can’t support themselves, they get into drugs. From drugs they go after women who are wealthy. An old but rich woman can take your son who is eighteen years old [and] live with him as her husband.” Similarly, a middle-aged district official and a retired older educational official independently described the experience of attend- ing funerals of a prominent contemporary who had likely died of AIDS. Both noted that young men were fighting in the back room over who would inherit the widow. In one case, the chief in attendance went to the back and ordered that the men be arrested, so physi- cal and presumably disruptive was the fighting. As my field notes describe, the older man recounted, “they [the young men] were like ‘this time she is mine, you are always taking them.’”

The accounts were startling not just to my respondents—men remarking on these puzzling and worrying developments among their juniors—but also to me. Why would young men in their prime be pursuing rich older women or fighting over a poten- tially HIV-positive widow?

My fieldwork suggested a number of ways in which young men benefited from inheritor relation- ships with widows. First, by co-opting tradition, young men were able to turn continued social pres- sure on widows to be inherited into commercial ad- vantage. Tom Mboyo Okeyo and Ann K. Allen (1994) and Rose Ayikukwei et al. (2008) document the rise of local commercial industries around widow inheri- tance and other sex-related rites such as sexual cleans- ing (to rid the widow of her husband’s ghost) among the Luo over the past decade and a half. Because there were fewer older men to go around, because wives

were reluctant to share their husbands with widows, and because of the large numbers of widows, fami- lies were starting to pay men (called joter) to inherit widows and perform these rites. Money gained from this payment, in addition to money the widow used to provide for the man, enabled young men to attain the Luo ideal of enjoying the good life (hero raha). Since the widow was now responsible for feeding, clothing, and caring for her inheritor, a young man in such a relationship, especially if the widow or her deceased husband had been rich, could enjoy the high life and gain resources he otherwise would not have had access to, with few or none of the obliga- tions a traditional husband would have. As the ex- cerpts from my interviews with widows highlight, a young man in this position could “eat, bathe, and lust”; “sit like a log”; and experience better treatment than a husband, as a woman worked hard to satisfy her man so that he would not leave her for another widow. This experience provided young men with a stark contrast to their original home, where, as the older man above noted, their parents were unable to provide for them and where parents felt they were disturbing them. They could essentially marry up from their parental home. This explained the attrac- tion to richer widows, who in this setting were fewer in number than poor widows, and why they were worth fighting for.

The same financial and material benefits ex- tended to young men in transactional relationships with rich women who wanted, as a respondent noted, “to dress well, drink, and here is a sugar mummy.” In an interview among young fishermen, they noted that rich widowed fisherwomen, who used to buy fish in bulk from fishermen and then transport and sell it in other parts of the country, would often pursue them and invite them into their homes to keep them. One noted, “You have been offered a soda, you have been welcomed into a house, nice food has been cooked for you, and you have been offered a place to sleep and you find things start happening.” The high male mortality rates in the fishing communi- ties that fishermen traveled to when selling their fish had changed the gender norms around relationships: “It is now opposite—that ladies go for men, but men

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don’t go for ladies. . . . So you find that especially with the young men, most of them are lost. They don’t even come home.” The fisherman went on to note that this had happened to him personally. While for itinerantly employed young fishermen, these rela- tionships provided access to this high life above and beyond their basic needs, for other young men who were unemployed, these relationships helped them deal with the more immediate problem of poverty. For example, in a focus group interview among out- of-school youth, a young man noted:

What I can say is that AIDS is a big problem in this area because there are no jobs and many people are idle because there are no jobs. You find that you will be having an idle mind. So . . . for me I see that why we are getting AIDS is, like right now for me, I try to look for work and don’t find it. So I go and find an old lady with a Pajero [SUV], with money. And maybe she is willing to give me monthly allowances. So I will be like a husband to her. And maybe she is giving me allowances, but she is infected [with HIV]. I don’t go to her because she is beautiful and I admire her but because of hunger.

In the context of widespread poverty where most people lived on less than a dollar a day, older women’s money provided financial support in the face of a lack of jobs and income.

Finally, young men involved in inheritor and transactional relationships with older women were able to use the monetary benefits to engage in at least one of the “legitimizing activities” (Silberschmidt 2001, 657) commonly associated with manhood: being able to provide for women. The amount of money young men earned from being a commercial cleanser or inheritor was enough to pay bridewealth and contract their own marriage (Ayiyukwei et al. 2008; see also Potash 1986). Widows thus provided a means for young men to gain resources needed to provide for a wife and set up their own household. Among the young men who had transactional rela- tionships with fisherwomen, the fact that their older partners migrated to sell fish elsewhere provided opportunities for transactional relationships with younger women. As one fisherman described, “When they get young men like us, she will give them all the

money to carry.  .  .  . These ladies have money. From Mombasa [coastal Kenyan city], she will buy for you some clothes, shoes, your lifestyle really changes. So during the time she is in Mombasa, you look for a young lady and bring her close. So you spend this money with this young lady while she is away. When she comes back, now you kind of tell this young lady to hold on.” In this way, a young man could have a concurrent relationship with an older fisherwoman and one or more younger girlfriends in the commu- nity. Schoolgirls interviewed often mentioned fisher- men as attractive and ideal boyfriends because they had money. In this case, young men were able to use their widowed female partner’s money as a material base with which to perform a providing masculinity with younger girlfriends.

However, this expression came with particular costs in terms of both the risk of acquiring HIV and the risk of passing it on. The danger of young men’s concurrent relationships with widows and younger partners was highlighted in an interview with young out-of-school women, where an HIV-positive respon- dent described how she thought she had gotten in- fected. She said:

r : With me I think I got it from my boyfriend. Be- cause he was unfaithful. He used to have many girlfriends and some women whose husbands had died.

i : So he had relationships with widows? r : Yes. i : So he used to, like, inherit? r : Yes . . . i : And how old was he? r : He was twenty-five. i : And you? r : I was sixteen. i : And how did you find out yourself [that you were

positive]? r : The way I saw him, with the mothers he used to go

with, he is sick.

It was at this point that she decided to go for an HIV test and discovered her positive status.

In light of continued high HIV rates and AIDS- related widowhood in this setting, if these trends are demographically significant, young men, previously

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considered safe compared to young women, might now be facing death as they put themselves at risk of contracting HIV from the widows who are keeping them.

d i s c u s s i o n

Economic crisis and the HIV epidemic have created sig- nificant dilemmas for Luo young men and widows. For young men, unemployment and constrained access to money have limited their ability to achieve man- hood as defined by provision of money to girlfriends, bride-wealth, and a home and land for a wife. Widows faced intense social pressure to be inherited but had a limited number of willing partners from their hus- band’s lineage to inherit them. For some, relationships between widowed women and poor young men were creative solutions to the challenges both faced. These solutions have important implications for thinking about what it means to do masculinity and the persis- tence of patriarchal systems.

In examining the configurations of practices Luo widows and young men engaged in, I have argued that both groups were doing masculinity. Widows, by pursuing and providing for their male partners, were performing what had historically been a key configuration of masculinity in this culture. The richest widows, who were independently wealthy, were able to exercise financial and relational auton- omy by initiating and engaging in relationships with younger men upon whom they could lavish money. Their relative wealth allowed them to opt out of and resist the pressure to be inherited and to engage in transactional relationships with younger men out of choice. However, in this poor setting, many widows were not independently wealthy and subsequently experienced their masculine practice as burdensome and stressful as they struggled to provide for and hang on to their partners. Young men had found a way out of remaining perpetual youth by engaging in relationships with providing widowed women. The relationships enabled them to move out of their pa- rental home, to enjoy the good life, to have a respite from poverty, to pursue romance without laboring for the attendant finance, and, for some, to accumu- late the resources to go on to contract a marriage and

set up their own independent household. In addi- tion, young men in these relationships were referred to using masculine terminology such as “husbands” as opposed to the feminizing term “wives” despite the unconventional and disturbing manner in which they had achieved this status.

Masculinity, then, was no longer in crisis. Indeed, among these young Luo men, it seemed as if rather than sacrificing their manhood by being kept by pro- viding women, they were instead able to better achieve it. They were able to utilize economic crisis and the social changes wrought by the HIV epidemic to craft a configuration of masculine practice that culturally marked and legitimized them as men in ways that af- firmed and maintained rather than destabilized their culture’s patriarchal ideology. Providing women, in turn, were in complex ways propping up patriarchal systems and ways of doing manhood. Widows, rich and poor, provided young men with resources that some used to marry or pursue romance with younger women. Further, for many of these widows, the HIV epidemic did not provide them with a way to opt out of widow inheritance altogether but rather a new way to perpetuate it. By taking on young men as inheri- tors, they were using an unconventional method to meet social demands, but unfortunately they were also participating in the preservation of a system that ultimately burdened them. Indeed, for many widows, young men had the upper hand. Young men’s lever- age was enabled by the high supply of widows and by their ability to co-opt the cultural pressure on widows to be inherited. This leverage enabled them to choose better resourced widows to inherit and to decide how long they were going to stay. The system left the poorest widows worst off, having to borrow money and struggle to entice young men, with their choice of widows, to stay.

Women’s practices and young men’s benefits re- produced and perpetuated this patriarchal system, with striking results. In this case, arguably, women’s masculine practices enabled patriarchal expectations for femininity—to be inherited, and to be provided for by men—to be restored for the next generation of women and provided the material resources for young men to fulfill their end of the patriarchal bargain.

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N O T E S

1. Women in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa have been responsible for the bulk of provision of food for the family through subsistence farming and food gathering, among other things. My ref- erence here and throughout the article to women as “providing women” refers specifically to their engaging in the kinds of provision considered the primary responsibility of men in this culture.

2. See Amadiume (1987), West and Zimmerman (1987), Oyěwùmí (1997), Lindsay and Miescher (2003), and Pascoe (2005).

3. Following the death of her husband, a Luo woman is expected to be inherited by her husband’s brother or his close male relatives. I discuss this practice, and its implications in the age of AIDS, at length later in this article.

4. See, e.g., Moore (1986), Agadjanian (2002), Cornwall (2002), Hunter (2002), Barker and Ri- cardo (2005), Smith (2007), Wyrod (2007, 2008), and Bingenheimer (2010).

5. See Whisson (1964), Cohen and Atieno Odhiambo (1989), Malo and Achieng (1999), Mboya and Achieng (2001), and Shipton (2007).

6. See Setel (1996, 1999), Agadjanian (2002), Lindsay and Miescher (2003), Livingston (2005), and Mutongi (2007).

7. See Whisson (1964), Odinga (1967), DuPré (1968), and Shipton (1989). 8. See Setel (1996, 1999), Silberschmidt (2001, 2004), Barker and Ricardo (2005), Al-Samarrai

and Bennell (2007), and World Bank (2009). 9. See Ashforth (1999), Cornwall (2002), Hunter (2002), and Mills and Ssewakiryanga (2005). 10. See Owuamanam (1995), Meekers and Calvès (1997), Izugbara (2001), Nyanzi, Pool, and Kins-

man (2001), Kuate-Defo (2004), Nyanzi et al. (2004), and Cole (2005). 11. See Mojola (2011). 12. For literature reviews, see Luke and Kurz (2002), Luke (2003), and Chatterji et al. (2004); see

also Poulin (2007). 13. These statistics are drawn from my analysis of 2003 data from the Kenya Demographic and

Health Survey (CBS et al. 2004), calculating the extent of widowhood and polygamy among Luo residents in Nyanza Province.

14. See, e.g., Potash (1986), Cattell (2003), Lugalla et al. (2004), Oleke, Blystad, and Rekdal (2005), Shipton (2007), and Thomas (2008).

15. See Potash (1986), Cohen and Atieno Odhiambo (1989), Nyambedha, Wandibba, and Aagaard- Hansen (2003), and Shipton (2007).

16. Because many houses in rural areas are built of mud, cow dung, and thatched grass roofs, they are not permanent and are in constant need of repair. However, the work is labor intensive and was often seen as requiring male assistance.

17. Widows who resisted inheritance often turned to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or local churches to help them deal with the consequences. For example, churches could provide widows with labor to rebuild or repair their houses, and NGOs provided widows in some areas with mate- rial support. However, these options were not available for many widows as they were not evenly distributed across the province. See also Shipton (2007) and Geissler and Prince (2010).

18. My analysis focuses on the instrumental and material dimensions of these relationships (rather than affective dimensions), as these are what were discussed in interviews.

19. I discuss wealthy widows later in this article. 20. It is worth noting here that while there were clear disparities in wealth among widows, from a

young man’s point of view, the appropriate comparison may have been between his parental

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household and the widow’s household. That is, someone coming from a poor household with unreliable meals would consider a household with regular meals a step up even if the widow considered herself poor. She was comparatively wealthier than the household he was coming from. The wealthiest women mentioned by young men were those who were independently wealthy, and these relationships were most likely to be transactional as opposed to inheritor relationships.

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Wyrod, Robert. 2007. “Bwaise Town: Masculinity in Urban Uganda in the Age of AIDS.” PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago.

Wyrod, Robert. 2008. “Between Women’s Rights and Men’s Authority: Masculinity and Shifting Discourses of Gender Difference in Urban Uganda.” Gender and Society 22(6):799–823.

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Joelle Ruby Ryan, From Transgender to Trans*: The Ongoing Struggle for Inclusion, Acceptance, and Celebration of Identities Beyond the Binary. Reproduced by permission of the author.

In April 2015, Caitlyn Jenner (born Bruce Jenner) sat down with Diane Sawyer on ABC News for an in- depth, two-hour interview about her transition from male to female. The ABC interview was watched by over 17 million people and catapulted not only Cait- lyn into the national consciousness, but the issue of transgender identity, gender transition and the over- all acceptance of gender diversity in our families and communities. The Diane Sawyer interview was fol- lowed up by a cover story in Vanity Fair magazine featuring Caitlyn, for the first time seen dressed as a woman, and shot by well-known celebrity photogra- pher Annie Liebovitz. The cover quickly went viral and garnered widespread support, condemnation, curios- ity and fascination.

The response to Jenner within the transgender community was decidedly mixed. On the one hand, many were excited to have such a famous public figure come out so visibly and give the community a larger platform. With the exception of several other recent high-profile transgender personalities such as Laverne Cox, Chaz Bono and Janet Mock, the media attention given to Jenner has been unprecedented in the modern epoch, and it has generated many con- versations and dialogues around the globe about what it means to be transgender. In fact, local news affiliates across the US seized on Caitlyn’s coming out as an opportunity to publish and televise sym- pathetic portraits of local transgender communities,

further helping to lift up a marginalized population from the shadows of invisibility into the light. How- ever, multiple critics within trans communities were quick to address the case of Caitlyn Jenner with cau- tion due to her overall social location and political orientation. Issues of fame, privilege, wealth, race and whiteness, appearance, medical versus non- medical transitioning, femininity and mass media were among the many topics that surfaced in trans- gender communities in the blogosphere and on social media.

These debates made me think about the topic of diversity within the transgender community, both in terms of reflecting upon my own identities and my many years of transgender activism, as well as to ana- lyzing Caitlyn Jenner and other high profile transgen- der people in relation to the binary gender system. In this chapter, I would like to, in the spirit of the second wave feminist mantra, “combine the personal and the political” in order to analyze the ways in which contemporary iterations of transgender identity have generally failed to expand options beyond the binary of “man” or “woman” in the mainstream culture. De- spite lip service to the contrary, I assert that the “um- brella” formulations of “transgender,” “trans” and most recently “trans*” have often served to relegate those of us with non-binary identities to the margins due to political expediency, internalized oppression within the trans community, and the desire for media

The Ongoing Struggle for the Inclusion, Acceptance, and Celebration of Identities beyond the Binary

J O E L L E R U B Y RYA N

20. FROM TRANSGENDER TO TRANS*

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validation and approval from mainstream culture. Greater acceptance for binary, medically transitioned transsexuals in the mainstream culture has caused GLBT advocacy organizations to center these experi- ences in their political work. The lack of non-binary visibility has often caused trans* folks who don’t or can’t “pass” to internalize dominant messages about their group. The impetus is strong to conform to mainstream narratives of transgender identity if one seeks any kind of socio-cultural acceptance, valida- tion or encouragement.

To begin, I would like to reflect on my own his- tory of coming out as transgender, and how my iden- tities have affected my place within the political and activist spheres. Then, I would like to discuss how the media privileges famous, binary trans people and other privileged social identities in the new, sup- posedly more accepting cultural climate of gender and sexuality. Finally, I would like to proffer ideas for political, social and cultural interventions that move the conversation beyond the stale man/woman divide, to one that deploys an intersectional, queer, feminist approach in the fight for gender and sexual justice and liberation.

t r a n s g e n d e r i d e n t i t i e s i n t h e 1 9 9 0 s : p e r s o n a l a n d p o l i t i c a l a w a k e n i n g s

I creaked open the closet door at age 17 when I told my therapist that I thought I was a transsexual. Back in the early 1990s, there was not yet a “transgender” community, but a “TV/TS” (transvestite/transsexual) community. This meant that you were either a het- erosexual male (“TV”) who cross-dressed on occasion for personal fulfillment, or a transsexual who com- pletely transitioned to the “opposite” gender through hormones and surgery and totally disavowed their as- signed gender role. I knew that my gender identity was in permanent incongruence with my assigned gender and body, and that cross-dressing on occasion would not suffice. Therefore, I came to identify as a transsex- ual, as that was the only other option that was known to me. At the time, a transsexual was widely under- stood as a person who was “trapped in the wrong body”—i.e., a person who needed to make gender identity and body congruent through hormones,

surgery and a seamless transition. As soon as pos- sible, I wanted to jump up onto the nearest operat- ing table to be able to get sex reassignment surgery to make mind and body line up in the expected way. This was more difficult in those early days because there were not as many young people who were transition- ing, nor was the use of hormone blockers even a pos- sibility (blockers were not a possibility until 2007 in the US). When I went to my first transgender support groups and social events in my early 20s, I found that I was the youngest person in attendance and that many of the other transsexual women (there were seldom transsexual men in attendance) that were present were in their 40s, 50s and 60s. I believe that this is because transsexualism was so stigmatized and despised at the time that many people could not truly make the deci- sion to come out as transsexual or to transition until middle-age or older.

In 1992, I first stepped foot onto the campus of my undergraduate institution, and I finally began to deal more intensely with my gender identity issues. I started to attend the GLBT group (which had just become trans-inclusive through my own efforts) and to talk seriously with my new therapist about my identity as a transsexual. However, my journey ended up being quite different than what I had previously thought or anticipated it would be.

In my sophomore year, I declared a Women’s Studies major, and it truly transformed my life. It coincided with my discovery of the new emerging literature about gender diversity. Three of the first books that I discovered in the early to mid-1990s were Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein, Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg and The Apartheid of Sex by Martine Rothblatt. All three of these brilliant authors introduced This “category crisis” may cause too much dissonance for some onlookers, the profound unin- telligibility of our identities ultimately resulting in stigma, discrimination and even violence in the most extreme cases.

In the gay and lesbian community, which often glorifies masculinity, trans women and trans-feminine people in general are particularly stigmatized. Part of what was so powerful for me as a young trans woman coming into feminism and Women’s Studies was that it allowed me to connect

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the dots between my own marginalized identity and the discrimination I had faced my entire life. I was able to see that my identity as a trans-feminine subject was linked to the oppression that cisgender women and queer people face under a patriarchal system of gender and sexuality. Early trans-feminist voices like Susan Stryker, Sandy Stone and Beth Elliott wrote rich and ground-breaking texts that weaved the per- sonal, political and theoretical strands of trans wom- en’s vibrant experiences into the feminist canon.

Becoming a feminist also helped me to begin to link gender oppression to other forms of oppression like racism, classism, and ableism. From my early 20s, intersectional feminism, particularly the work of women of color writers and theorists like Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins gave me critical tools to analyze power dif- ferentials in society and envision ways of mounting efforts for equality and social justice that were inclu- sive of multiple identities and cognizant of multiple axes of oppression. I feel lucky that from the very be- ginning of my feminist education, these authors were front and center. This helped me to see the problem of white, middle-class bias in feminism and Women’s Studies and quickly deduce that there was a similar problem with cisgender privilege and bias. The work of intersectional feminists thus illuminated these ideological and political blind spots, but also dem- onstrated the need to fight on for inclusion of our marginalized groups to change the face of feminism and the future of feminism.

By the mid-1990s, the notion of a distinct “transgender community” started to solidify in a much more visible and systemic way. I think this was important because under the previous medical model of transsexualism, the entire idea was that people were programmed to essentially disappear into their target genders as seamlessly as possible. So, for example, if somebody was assigned male at birth the goal was to completely transition by jump- ing through the required bureaucratic hoops, obtain hormones and surgery, complete the “real life test,” pass well as women and eventually be able to start an entirely new life for themselves, preferably in a new town, with a new job, and even the idea of living beyond the gender binary to me by bravely

defending gender complexity, multiplicity and flu- idity. Through fiction, memoir and theory, they discussed their desire to claim an identity that was neither man nor woman but something else alto- gether. Their texts revolutionized my own thinking as a member of the gender-variant community. Quite quickly, the “T V/TS” community was transforming into the transgender community. And what I found was the idea that there were more than two options (male OR female, cross-dressing OR complete medi- cal transition), which was a startling and joyful rev- elation that prompted me to view my own identity in a very different fashion.

Through reading these and other authors and the- orists, I discovered that it was possible to not identify as a man or as a woman, that there was a continuum and spectrum of infinite possibilities beyond our limited cultural concepts of gender and sexuality. I could take hormones, obtain surgeries or do neither. I could change my mind, and my identity could be fluid, shifting and transgressive. As soon as I read the work of Feinberg, Bornstein, and Rothblatt, as well as other authors writing cutting-edge gender theory like Judith Butler and Riki Wilchins, the idea of genders beyond the binary spoke to me in such an incredibly powerful way. This radical notion resonated with the very core of my being, and I knew that I was, in fact, a non-binary transgender person who melded aspects of masculinity and femininity in one being. Despite my sexed assignment, I knew quite clearly that I was not a man. In this culture, that meant I was then a woman by default. But maybe I was not a woman either but something completely different, a horse of a different color. Understanding non-binary gender identities enabled me to realize that I could express my gender however I wished, and I could customize my own transition in ways that resonated with my own complexity rather than conform to a cookie- cutter formulation of transsexualism created by non- transgender “experts.”

However, what I have learned over time is that there is tremendous resistance to the notion of third, fourth, fifth or any number of genders beyond one and two. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that people cannot “wrap their heads around” identi- ties beyond the gender binary because as genderqueer

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people we continue to be so culturally illegible. While there may be a small amount of space now allotted to trans people who go clearly from one gender to the other, those who are both or neither gender continue to be beyond the scope of many people’s understand- ing. And sadly this misunderstanding and stigma happens in both the heteronormative society and within GLB communities. Non-binary, genderqueer, gender-fluid and neutrois identities, among others, represent a threat to the presumed tidiness of hege- monic categorizations. abandoning previous social relationships. This was often referred to as “going stealth” or “woodworking.” The older medical model of transsexualism essentially wanted people’s trans- ness to be effectively erased. This required going from one closet to another, hardly a progressive po- litical approach to managing gender diversity. The emergence of transgender liberation helped to drive home the idea that the previous model perpetuated shame and self-hatred, and that to be open, visible and “out” as transgender people helped to promote self-acceptance and pride, an idea that completely resonated with who I was as a person, as a feminist and as an emerging activist.

t e a r s i n t h e u m b r e l l a : l i m i t s t o t r a n s d i v e r s i t y a n d i n c l u s i o n

At that hopeful but naïve point in time of the nascent transgender movement, I believed that transgender would emerge victoriously as a truly inclusive move- ment with a “big tent” approach that would encompass all people who were in some way “gender outlaws.” When I did education programs, for instance, I always talked about transgender as an umbrella term that in- cluded diverse gender constituencies like drag queens, drag kings, cross-dressers, transgenderists, transsexu- als, bigender people, genderqueer folks and many more. In the beginning, transgender was very inclu- sive, at least rhetorically, of all of the various oppressed gender identities found in our society. However, even from the beginning, there were people who simply substituted “transgender” for “transsexual.” Now, over 20 years into this social movement, what I find is that the transgender umbrella is seemingly not as inclusive as I had originally hoped, with more and more rips

and tears appearing over time. As we have gotten more attention, and our issues have increasingly been taken up by popular media, the realities of people who live beyond the gender binary have been minimized in a race for trans acceptance and assimilation into main- stream society.

Just recently, my rural state of New Hampshire had an educational event on transgender issues with members of the state assembly. Within my state, I have been very involved with transgender commu- nity building, activism, and education since 1993. We currently do not have a law that prohibits dis- crimination in employment, housing, credit and public accommodations on the basis of gender iden- tity and gender expression in our state. We are the only state in New England that still does not have such protections. In 2009, such a bill was introduced in the state legislature, but right-wing conservative and Christian fundamentalist activists took what was a simple nondiscrimination bill, redubbed it as a “bathroom bill” and made the spurious claim that the bill would enable transgender women to go into women’s restrooms to assault girls and women with impunity. The atmosphere of fear mongering and misinformation was ultimately successful and promptly killed the bill.

In the intervening years, there has been a push to build trans community in the state to promote our visibility and to conduct education efforts at the local and state level to foster acceptance of trans people in the Granite State. When I heard about this educational program, I was excited that the ground- work was being laid once again to go forward with in- troducing a new nondiscrimination bill. I expressed my interest in being on the panel with the organizer, who was a cisgender gay man. As someone who has been involved in transgender politics for such a long time in New Hampshire, I wanted to provide con- text for the history of our community and our ef- forts to end discrimination. After not hearing about whether I was participating, I was finally told that as a non-binary person, my perspective would be too confusing for the people at the session, who were still struggling to understand transgender issues in the most basic sense. This was truly heartbreaking and infuriating to me. Approaches based in political

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expediency are very invested in particular outcomes and have a hyper-practical tactical strategy. Within political expediency, the end justifies the means. Often, the means are not ethical, principled or fair, with the idea being that politics requires constant compromise to reach desired objectives, thus legiti- mizing these problematic strategies. Needless to say, I find both the tactics themselves as well as their jus- tification abhorrent and completely antithetical to the way in which I wish to engage in community and in social justice.

And it also felt like déjà vu. Back in my under- graduate days, many of us GLBT students would sit on educational panels for classes, in residence halls and in various departments across campus. There was a concerted attempt in those panels to put for ward people who were gender conforming or “straight-acting.” This meant that as a transgen- der person, I was frequently not invited. Likewise, my friends who were masculine lesbians, feminine gay men and other queers (including bisexuals) who did not conform to hegemonic gender norms and sexual binaries were also excluded. Sadly, this desire to hide or conceal the gender and sexual variance amongst us has a long histor y in the gay and lesbian community. My idealized notion of a utopic GLBT community was quickly dashed as I experienced the prevalence of biphobia and trans- phobia amongst many gay men and lesbians. “It is hard enough for people to understand being gay; bisexual and transgender people are just too con- fusing” was a frequent refrain that made many of my friends and I feel like outsiders even within the queer community.

Assimilationist politics are not new to the GLBT community, going back to the early days of the homo- phile movement in the US Assimilationism refers to the political strategy of targeted social groups trying to conform as much as possible to the culture of the dominant group. The idea is that adherence to hetero- normative culture and values will make GLBT more acceptable to the dominant society and encourage their integration into the mainstream. Assimilation- ism is also closely related to respectability politics, upholding the idea that if people from marginalized groups act as much as possible like their oppressor,

they will be better treated and more easily accepted. Like political expediency, assimilationism is a deeply flawed tactic that will always leave people behind and implicitly and explicitly endorse the notion that the culture of the dominant group is superior, preferable and universal. The fact that now some parts of the transgender community are engaging in the same sort of assimilationist tactics of manufacturing a lim- ited and conservatizing image of the community has been exasperating to me in so many ways. Clearly, we have not learned the lessons of our history that we can never throw enough people overboard, never jettison enough of the “different” people, to win ap- proval from our enemies. For example, way back in 1973, radical trans woman of color and Stonewall combatant Sylvia Rivera was nearly booed off the stage of New York City Pride because of the assimi- lationist and anti-trans politics of gay and lesbian organizers. As I was completing this essay in June 2015, this tension was again perfectly exemplified by a GLBT Pride event held at the White House. While Obama was giving a speech to a bunch of well-heeled GLBT advocates, a transgender woman of color im- migrant interrupted him to talk about the plight of immigrant transgender women and their horrific treatment in US detention centers designated for men, by other detainees but also by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. The woman, Jennicet Gutiérrez, was shushed, booed, and ulti- mately ejected from the White House. Obama gave her a thorough dressing down, to the applause of the many white, cisgender gays and lesbians present at the event. The media described the woman as a “heckler” rather than a transgender activist taking a principled stand against xenophobic, racist and transmisogy- nistic state-sponsored violence. Mainstream media, including some GLBT media, are complicit with this silencing and desire to erase and hide women like Gutiérrez from the public consciousness.

d o m i n a n t c u lt u r e , m a i n s t r e a m m e d i a a n d t h e p o l i t i c s o f a s s i m i l at i o n

As the above examples of the marginalization of Sylvia Rivera and Jennicet Gutiérrez show, there has to be a unified community, a big tent approach in which no

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one is left behind. Despite working extremely hard for transgender human rights for over two decades, in many ways I find myself on the outside looking in of GLBT politics. As the trans community inches ever closer towards acceptance and civil rights, I find that this acceptance is predicated on certain basic assump- tions, expectations and requirements. And we need only look once again to Caitlyn Jenner, to see how this so-called “acceptance” is actually quite limited and highly conditional.

If we’re going to talk about public acceptance of trans people, I believe that Caitlyn Jenner is a par- ticularly problematic person to focus on. Caitlyn Jenner, other than being a transgender woman, won the “privilege and power sweepstakes” and thus is hardly representative of the vast majority of trans- gender people. Caitlyn Jenner is white, wealthy, a former Olympic athlete, famous, camera-ready, thin, able-bodied, and a Republican. The vast majority of trans people in the United States are markedly dif- ferent from Caitlyn Jenner along multiple vectors of difference. Many trans people in the US are people of color, poor or working-class, liberals, progressives and radicals, people who are unable to access proper medical care, including life-saving surgeries, people who are non-binary or unable or unwilling to “pass” and people whose marginality places them at risk of violence and severe discrimination at every turn.

While I saw many cisgender people seemingly acting like Caitlyn Jenner somehow invented trans- gender identity, it struck me that the desire to extend acceptance to Jenner was also because she was clearly locatable within the binary gender system. In fact, Jenner seemed to want to magically go from being a clearly masculine male to a clearly feminine female as is evidenced by the Diane Sawyer interview versus the Vanity Fair cover and 22-page article. While Jen- ner’s transition has been many years in the making (and in fact the media and the paparazzi did notice that her body and appearance were changing), Jenner seemed to want a very unambiguous arrival to wom- anhood rather than easing into transition from male to female, thus concealing and making invisible any hint of gender ambiguity. This is, of course, her choice, and I do not mean to valorize one mode of transition over another. Rather, I am pointing out

that it is vital to place Jenner’s binary transition in the context of popular media culture, which has always privileged hyper-masculine men becoming hyper-feminine women, and vice versa, complete with the obligatory before-and-after photos. When I went to purchase the Vanity Fair magazine at my local drugstore, several of the employees could not wait to tell me how great they thought Caitlyn looked. While I appreciate that they indeed had something so posi- tive to say about a transgender woman, I find it trou- bling that so much emphasis and attention has been placed upon Caitlyn Jenner’s appearance, including her “passability” as a woman and ability to manifest adequate femininity.

I want to be clear that I unambiguously support every person’s rights to their own unique gender expression. The most masculine man to the most feminine woman, and every unique and fabulous permutation in between and outside of hegemonic gender, should be fully embraced and celebrated. The problem has never been with people’s gender expression, per se, including trans women who are high femme and trans men who are very masculine. The problem is the framing of certain trans identities within the media, within the medical establishment, and within the dominant, popular imagination. I also reject the old radical feminist canard advocated by ideologues like Janice Raymond that transgender folks conserve or reinforce conservative gender roles, as if such a disenfranchised and relatively small mi- nority has the power to do that rather than the cis- gender and heterosexual men and women who make up the bulk of normative gender subjectivities. The problem is not that some people fit into traditional binary gender roles but the assumption that every- one can or should fit into such roles. In addition, the notions that trans women must “pass” as cisgender women to be fully accepted as women and conform to dominant notions of feminine beauty illustrate a conditional acceptance that is hardly transformative.

We need to affirm and accept people’s gender iden- tities, including their names and pronouns, whether or not they are legible to us as members of the gender they identify with. Let me return to my own personal experience to underscore this point. I am a 6’6”, 400 pound, asexual, genderqueer, gender-fluid, disabled,

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visibly trans woman. Due to these intersecting iden- tities, people have perceived me as male, female, and something else throughout my entire life. In ad- dition, I have struggled with self-esteem and with finding role models that affirm my beauty as a fat, non-passing and non-binary trans woman who is not hyper-feminine or high femme. I have already seen some of my trans women friends on social media who are remarking how they feel badly about them- selves because they have not been able to achieve the femininity or the passability of Caitlyn Jenner. They also experience great sadness that hormone blockers or even early transition were not an option for them, further making it much harder to be perceived and accepted as women. The emphasis on passing, beauty and femininity can have a very damaging effect on transgender women, and it also leaves out people who are unable to transition or who do not want to medically transition.

So many trans folks are economically margin- alized, under- or unemployed, and struggle for the most basic dignity and respect in their day-to-day life. In Diane Sawyer’s interview of Jenner, the plight of transgender women of color was very briefly men- tioned but not at all adequately fleshed out or elabo- rated. My hope was that the interview would be used as a kick-off to further the conversation about the experiences of the most marginalized trans people in the US and the violence and oppression they con- tend with each and every day. Unfortunately, as with what often happens in the media, Caitlyn’s personal story took complete precedence over the realities of how our society is constructed in terms of not only gender identity, but race and class as well. It became about personal individual acceptance and acceptance from her family, but failed to look at the realities of systemic, institutional, macro-level discrimination and oppression like the fact that many transgender women must work in the underground economies to survive (sex work, dealing drugs, etc.) or face the vio- lent horrors wrought by being put into men’s units in gender-segregated facilities such as prisons, immigra- tion detention centers, homeless shelters, etc.

I believe that this media interview resulted not only from the fact that Caitlyn Jenner is so incredibly privileged in multiple ways, but also because media

likes to perpetuate the notion that we live in a soci- ety of equality and opportunity rather than one that is rife with bigotry, prejudice and systematic oppres- sion. Emphasis is placed on whether one achieves self-acceptance and approval from one’s family, as well as a “convincing” gendered appearance, rather than on the many societal barriers that lower trans people’s life chances in multiple institutions from cradle to grave.

This new media hype includes trans men as well. Trans man Aydian Dowling recently made a splash by vying to become the first transsexual man on the cover of Men’s Health magazine. This was preceded by a photo circulating of Dowling that features him in a pose that recreates nude photographs of musi- cian and tv personality Adam Levine in Cosmopolitan UK magazine. In the original photo. Adam Levine is completely naked, save two entwined hands sport- ing bright red nail polish covering his genitals. In the new photo, we see a white man in the exact same pose, with similarly manicured and presumably female hands also covering his genital region. Many people might look at the photo and may not even know that Dowling is a trans man. The only possible giveaway might be the faint scars on his chest from chest surgery.

However, once again, as with Caitlyn Jenner, we see Dowling as having privilege in practically every other way except for his trans-ness. He is white, very masculine, medically transitioned through hormones and surgery, passable and he possesses the body and appearance which society considers “hot” (as with Levine) and therefore the confluence of these social identities make him of acceptable value in our patri- archal system. It is also easily understood as a part of assimilationist politics. “Look, he is just like a ‘real man’ except for his genitals!” The photograph also ironically re-centers the genitals and the body more generally as the determinant of gender, a notion that the trans community has been fighting against for de- cades. The media’s love affair with Dowling’s photo homage to Levine and his desire to be on the cover of Men’s Health was capped off by a well-publicized appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

At a workshop I gave on weightism, lookism and appearance in the trans community, we talked about

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how images such as those of Caitlyn Jenner, Aydian Dowling and other high profile trans people like Chaz Bono, Laverne Cox and Janet Mock affect the lives and emotions of everyday trans people. This in- cluded extended discussion about how these images negatively affected self-esteem, self-worth and even hope for the future. Many trans people live in such dire economic jeopardy that they are not even able to access the health care that they need, including hor- mones and surgeries to alter their bodies in ways that can be life-sustaining in the face of persistent gender dysphoria. In addition, people of size and people whose appearance is not considered beautiful, hand- some, “hot,” sexy etc. suffer from these images in that it reinforces the dominant cultural ideal of what con- stitutes attractive people and even who is worthy of dating, love and sex. Weightism, lookism and trans- phobia can combine as a lethal force in trans people’s lives, furthering vulnerability for depression, suicide, exploitation and even violence. This is not to demon- ize Caitlyn Jenner or Aydian Dowling or other public transgender people in any way as it is not really about them as individuals. Rather, it is about a social system that values certain bodies and certain identi- ties while systematically devaluing, erasing and mar- ginalizing other bodies and identities.

From transgender or trans we have now arrived at trans*. Trans* was specifically coined to call at- tention to non-binary identities under the trans um- brella. The desire is to reclaim trans* as a way that is not reducible to transsexuals or medically transition- ing people firmly locatable within the binary gender system. Under the wide spectrum of gender-diverse, gender-expansive and gender-variant people, it was calling attention to and emphasizing those of us who are genderqueer, neutrois, gender nonconforming, multi-gendered, agender, gender fluid, etc. While I often now use trans* in writing and very much like the impetus behind its creation and usage, I once again fear that whatever moniker we use, transgender, trans, or trans*, that we will fail as a movement and as a society to truly be inclusive of non-binary gender identities. Moreover, we come up short of establish- ing gender multiplicity and fluidity as a foundational world view of the culture. Because of the confluence of corporate media culture and “reality” tv, the (often

conservative) medical establishment, and increas- ingly assimilationist transgender politics, including within the GLBT nonprofit world, I am skeptical of genuine inclusion of non-binary genders anytime soon. Those of us who stand outside of male and female or even trans man and trans woman continue to be relegated to the margins. My goal in writing this chapter is to articulate an increasing frustration that I have had as a transgender woman with feeling that even in my own LGBT community, a community which I have fought for and with for two decades, I and many others do not represent those who deserve liberation and civil and human rights because of en- trenched political, social and ideological attitudes that devalue the most marginalized queer and trans* community members among us.

c o n c l u s i o n : t r a n s f o r m i n g t r a n s * p o l i t i c s a n d c e l e b r at i n g q u e e r d i f f e r e n c e s

To conclude, I would like to sketch out a few prelimi- nary ideas for interventions that push back against these trans- and homonormative tendencies and call for a renewed insurgence of queer and trans* mili- tancy and radicalism. While there are no easy answers to these complex problems, I would like to suggest that we question the state of contemporary GLBT politics, and its emphasis on assimilation, normalization and respectability politics (see Warner 1999, for instance). Across the GLBT spectrum, there has been tremendous emphasis on marriage equality, military service, adop- tion of children and other issues that strived to assimi- late GLBT people into mainstream heteronormative institutions and dominant cultural life. While I under- stand the need for these equal legal protections and in- stitutional access, we must continue to stress that often this work benefits the sectors of the GLBT community that already hold the most power and privilege. The “top down” approach to equal rights prioritizes long and protracted political battles that benefit the few at the expense of the many. They privilege moneyed, white, cisgender gay men and lesbians while marginal- izing people of color, poor and working-class queers and trans* folks. Rather than a top down approach, we need a bottom up model that works to empower and

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protect those who are most materially disenfranchised, including non-binary folks. Our visible queerness and gender nonconformity place us at the most risk for dis- crimination, economic jeopardy and violence.

Part of this is moving away from the single-issue, liberal approach that GLBT politics has often clung to. Intersectional, queer transfeminism can advocate for political strategies that are attentive to the hetero- geneity of our communities and that proffer sharp and incisive analyses of power differentials. We need to embrace dissidents, nonconformists and outlaws and lift up their voices rather than rush to showcase the most normative among us to win respectability from our oppressors. From Compton’s, to Stonewall, to Queer Nation, Act-Up and the Lesbian Avengers, we have a rich history of radical queer and trans* re- sistance to oppression to inform our current efforts. We need to acknowledge that while the “incremen- talism” of the mainstream GLBT movement has ben- efit for some, many queers are struggling mightily from class oppression, homelessness, the criminal- ization of HIV/AIDS, the lack of culturally compe- tent medical care, police profiling and violence, the prison system, immigration issues such as detention and deportation, hate crimes and much more.

We need to push back against a media that only allows people like Caitlyn Jenner and Aydian Dowl- ing to narrowly represent the transgender community. In addition to demanding coverage of non-binary identities, we need to challenge the stale media ob- session with medical transition and individualized acceptance from cisgender family members and soci- ety and demand that we look at macro-level societal discrimination and oppression and what we need to do to transform our society to one based in libera- tion and justice. In media and beyond, we need to

push for genderqueer and non-binary inclusion and visibility, but we also need to demand that everyone look at the binary gender system and challenge it in their day-to-day lives. Issues of gender and sexual- ity are not only the province of LGBT people; they are issues for everyone and that matter to everyone. Beginning in kindergarten, we need to teach chil- dren that there is more to humanity than boy and girl, and that whatever their own identity, they can be and do whatever they wish in life. While the current transgender movement has made incredible strides towards creating greater gender and sexual freedom in our society, there is still tremendous work to liber- ate us all from the constraints of hegemonic gender scripts, sexual norms and traditional models of family, relationships and community.

While being an outsider and a misfit can be dif- ficult and even painful, I also see it as the site of radical possibility that will continue to push the en- velope of who we can be as human beings and the kind of world we can create. Too much of society is straitjacketed by gray, unimaginative and crush- ing demands for conformity, muting the potential of humanity. As queer people, we have the rainbow as our international symbol of strength and pride, but we still have tremendous work to ensure that people represented by all of the beautiful and daz- zling colors of the spectrum have the ability to self- actualize and live a life unencumbered by systemic hate, violence and oppression. While I struggle to engender such a world for myself and my comrades in struggle, I take strength from the resolve and per- severance of my trans* and queer warrior ancestors like Sylvia Rivera and Leslie Feinberg. It is up to us to continue their rich and revolutionary legacy. Are you ready to join me?

R E F E R E N C E S

Bergado, Gabe. 2015. “Meet Aydian Dowling, the Trans Hunk Aiming for a ‘Men’s Health’ Cover.” The Daily Beast. 14 April 2015. Web. Accessed 10 July 2015.

Bissinger, Buzz. 2015. “He Says Goodbye, She Says Hello.” Vanity Fair. July 2015. 50–69 and 105–106. Bornstein, Kate. 1995. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us. New York: Vintage Books. Bornstein, Kate and S. Bear Bergman, eds. 2010. Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation. Berkeley, CA: Seal

Press.

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Bornstein, Kate (performer) and Susan Marenco (director). 1993. Adventures in the Gender Trade. Filmmak- ers Library, VHS.

“Bruce Jenner: The Interview.” 2015. 20/20 with Diane Sawyer. ABC News. 24 April 2015. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empower-

ment. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Elliott, Beth. 1996. Mirrors: Portrait of a Lesbian Transsexual. New York: Masquerade Books. Feinberg, Leslie. 1993. Stone Butch Blues: A Novel. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books. Gendernauts: A Journey through Shifting Identities. 1999. Dir. Monika Treut. Perf. Sandy Stone, Susan Stryker,

Texas Tomboy, Annie Sprinkle. First Run Features. Nestle, Joan, Clare Howell and Riki Anne Wilchins, eds. 2002. GenderQueer: Voices from beyond the Sexual

Binary. Los Angeles: Alyson Books. Outlaw. 1994. Dir. Alisa Lebow. Perf. Leslie Feinberg. Women Make Movies. Raymond, Janice. 1979. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. Boston: Beacon Press. Rothblatt, Martine Aliana. 1995. The Apartheid of Sex: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender. New York:

Crown Publishers. Stone, Sandy. 1991. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto.” Julia Epstein and Kristina

Straub, eds. Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity. New York: Routledge. Stryker, Susan. 1994. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing

Transgender Rage.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1.3: 237–254. Warner, Michael. 1999. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life. New York: Free

Press. Wilchins, Riki Anne. 1997. Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender. Ithaca, NY: Firebrands

Books.

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i n t r o d u c t i o n

During this historical moment, hegemonic masculin- ity is embodied at the specific intersections of race, class, and sexuality (Collins 2004). It is currently de- fined as white, rich, and heterosexual. Because these social identities are privileged ones, they interact in ways that exclude specific groups of men from systems of privilege on the basis of their devalued group mem- berships. In other words, being a man of Color, gay, and working class or poor creates various obstacles to accessing the full range of male privilege. . . .

Adhering to hegemonic conceptions of masculin- ity is associated with negative social and psychologi- cal consequences at the same time that it provides material privileges (hooks 1992; Hurtado and Sinha 2005; Messner 1997). A large body of literature has documented the negative consequences of adhering to masculine gender roles on men’s mental health (see Pleck 1981 for a review). These consequences include alcoholism (Lemle and Mishkind 1989), depression (Good and Wood 1995; Good et al. 2004; Mahalik and Rochlen 2006), restriction on expressions of emotion generally (O’Neil 1981, 1998), and within familial relationships specifically (DeFranc and Mahalik, 2002; Mahalik and Morrison 2006). Given the negative consequences associated with adher- ence to hegemonic masculinity, feminist engagement on the part of men can be a more constructive (and social justice oriented) response to the oppressive re- strictiveness of masculinity as a social construct.

The present study explores the definitions of manhood provided by a sample of feminist identi- fied, working class Latino men. . . .

The few qualitative studies with feminist identi- fied men have focused predominantly on the experi- ences of working class and middle class white men. Findings from these projects have indicated four major dimensions associated with feminist masculinities— these include emphases on being an ethical human being, having emotionally healthy relationships with others (both women and men), being involved in ac- tivism and social justice oriented activities, and re- jecting aspects of hegemonic masculinity. The aspects of hegemonic masculinity that participants rejected included male bonding around the objectification of women (Christian 1994; Vicario 2003), physical and sexual domination of women (Vicario 2003; White 2008), and homophobia (White 2008). . . .

The dimensions outlined above are also partially consistent with research conducted with samples of African-American men, both feminist identi- fied (White 2008) and not (Hammond and Mattis 2005; Hunter and Davis 1992). Hammond and Mattis (2005) and Hunter and Davis (1992) found that African-American men of varying social classes defined manhood in ethical and relational ways. Being responsible and accountable for one’s actions was the most frequently endorsed category—almost half of their sample defined manhood in this way (Hammond and Mattis 2005). Findings also indi- cated that all participants constructed the mean- ing of manhood in relationship to self, family, and others. In doing so, they stressed the importance of emotional connections with family and emphasized that the construction of masculinity was an interde- pendent process (Hammond and Mattis 2005). The

21. MORE THAN MEN

Aida Hurtado and Minal Sinha, More Than Men: Latino Feminist Masculinities and intersectionality. From Sex Roles, Springer Nature, January 1, 2008. Copyright © 2008, Springer Nature.

Latino Feminist Masculinities and Intersectionality

A Í D A H U R TA D O M R I N A L S I N H A

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importance placed on interdependence in the con- struction of masculine identity could be a result of the material deprivation historically experienced by African-American communities, where interde- pendence is more than just a tool used to carve out identities, but is a class-specific survival tactic (Fine and Weis 1998). In many ways, the definitions of manhood provided by the feminist and African- American men described above run counter to domi- nant conceptions of what it means to be a man in the USA insofar as they stress characteristics that are in opposition to traditional, negative attributes of he- gemonic masculinity. Levant (1992) has described some of the negative attributes associated with hege- monic masculinities based on his assessment of the empirical literature regarding the gender role strain paradigm. These attributes include emotional restric- tiveness and isolation from others (e.g., family, inti- mate partners), nonrelational attitudes and behavior towards heterosexuality, and inflicting violence upon others. Further, Kimmel (2000) has conceptualized homophobia as a core characteristic of hegemonic masculinity. Masculinity defined as such contrasts in important ways with the responses provided by the feminist and African-American men described in the studies above in that homophobia, violence, physical domination, and emotional isolation were not pres- ent in their definitions of manhood.

Levant (1992) has also identified aspects of hege- monic masculinity worth rescuing in reconstructing manhood. Among the positive attributes described are self sacrifice for the family, ability to withstand hardship and pain to protect others, loyalty, dedica- tion, and commitment. It is interesting to note here that Levant’s (1992) formulation corresponds with two of the overarching themes associated with femi- nist and African-American participants’ definitions of masculinity—ethical and relational definitions (Christian 1994; Hammond and Mattis 2005; Hunter and Davis 1992; Vicario 2003; White 2008).

The present study attempts to contribute to this body of literature by utilizing the concept of inter- sectionality, as postulated by feminists of Color (Crenshaw 1995; Collins 2000; Hurtado 1996), in exploring the varied definitions of masculinity pro- vided by feminist, working class, educated Latino

men. To date, only one qualitative study has exam- ined the experiences of feminist men of Color using an intersectional perspective (White 2008), and none have done so with Latinos, feminist or other- wise. As such, this research seeks not only to address a deficiency in the literature regarding Latino men generally, but seeks to provide insights as to the way that feminist Latino men define masculinity. How do feminist, working class Latino men view manhood as a social construct? Do these views differ from their African-American and white counterparts? What dis- courses do they draw from in defining manhood? . . .

[ . . . ] In this article we address several research ques-

tions based on a study of educated, young Latinos who identify as feminists and come from poor and working class backgrounds. In order to apply the theoretical framework of intersectionality to these participants’ narratives, the first research question asks: To what extent did the participants in this study identify with their gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class background? Second, how do participants apply their consciousness as feminists and working class men in subjectively defining what it means to be a man? Third, if participants include broader defini- tions of being men, what are they?

m e t h o d

pa r t i c i pa n t s

The data for this project come from a larger study of interviews conducted with 105 Latino men (Hurtado and Sinha 2006). The larger study (Hurtado and Sinha 2006) addressed a wide range of topics with a nation- ally non-representative sample of Latinos with some experience of higher education and is a mirror study to research conducted by Hurtado (2003) with a sample of 101 Mexican descent women. The topics addressed in both studies included issues related to early adolescence and dating, sexuality, gender, relationships with parents, political participation, and educational achievement. In this study, we examine only the gender issues portion of the interview. The interviews were semi-structured, utilizing open and closed ended questions, however, participants were encouraged to share experiences that they deemed relevant to the topics addressed.

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Latino was defined as participants who had at least one parent of Latino ancestry. The majority of the participants (72%) were of Mexican descent, 4% were of Puerto Rican descent, 2% were of Central American descent, 7% were of South American de- scent, and 15% were of mixed ancestry. The partici- pants were between the ages of 19 and 33, the average age was 24, and all were attending or had attended an institution of higher education. They were inter- viewed in five southwestern states—California, Col- orado, New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona—as well as in Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, and Washington, DC.

Of the 105 participants, 36 considered them- selves feminist and identified their class background as poor or working class. Because one of the goals of the larger study was to explore definitions of femi- nism (Hurtado and Sinha 2006; Sinha 2007), partici- pants were allowed to identify as feminist according to their subjective understanding of the term. Fur- ther, participants were asked to identify the economic background of their family while they were grow- ing up—for those that identified as working class or poor, this was verified utilizing questionnaire data that was also a part of the larger study from which this data set is derived. The present study explores the responses given by this subset of the larger sample. We chose to examine the responses exclusively from working class, feminist identified participants in order to explore the way that race, class, and gender interacted to influence their subjective definitions of masculinity. . . .

d e s i g n a n d p r o c e d u r e

Participants were contacted using the social networks of counselors, professors, student organizations, and personnel of student affairs offices on various college campuses. Specifically, an electronic message was sent describing the study and outlined the age and ethnic requirements for potential participants. The study was advertised as a follow up study to Hurtado (2003) that wished to explore the experiences and stories of Latino men involved in higher education in a number of different domains. In addition, a brief description of Hurtado’s (2003) study was included in the adver- tisement. All people responding to the advertisement

were interviewed if they met the study’s criteria, were available within the interviewer’s schedule, and arrived at the set interview location. Participants were not compensated for participation in the study.

[ . . . ] All interviews were conducted in English by the

second author of this article (a 30-year old man of East-Indian descent). Because the interviewer shared certain social identities with participants, but not others, there were distinct advantages and disadvan- tages. In terms of advantages, the interviewer was male—this could have implications in that it may have potentially reduced the likelihood of social desirability being a factor affecting participants’ responses. Past research indicates that social desir- ability biases may vary according to the demand characteristics associated with the research context (Hebert et al. 1997). The present study examines manhood as a social construct, and because domi- nation and objectification of women are core com- ponents of hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1995; Kimmel 2000), being interviewed by a woman could potentially have affected participants responses.

In terms of other commonalities, the interviewer was a graduate student and in the same age range as participants. Because many of the participants were also graduate students, and in the same age group, this could have created a sense of comfort in facili- tating participants sharing information. In terms of differences, the interviewer was not of Latin Ameri- can ancestry, thereby limiting his ability to probe at opportune moments due to a lack of “insider” cul- tural knowledge. However, in terms of participants willingness to speak candidly, the differences in eth- nicity may have been ameliorated by the dark phe- notype of the interviewer, which is often associated with Latino ancestry. . . .

[ . . . ]

r e s u lt s

pa r t i c i pa n t s ’ s o c i a l i d e n t i f i c at i o n s — e m b o d y i n g i n t e r s e c t i o n a l i t y

  .  .  .  All 36 participants identified as men and Latino as a prerequisite to be a part of the study. Further, all of the 36 participants considered in this study also

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identified the economic background of their family as working class or poor. In order to further explore the ways in which participants embodied intersec- tionality via identifications with their multiple social groups, we conducted a content analysis of the entire gender issues section of the interviews, providing a count of each time they referenced their race, ethnic- ity, class, and sexuality. The gender issues portion of the interview contained a total of 11 open and closed ended questions. The questions asked about partici- pants’ views on feminism and manhood, whether they felt anyone in their family was feminist, if there were strong women and men in their family, if they could provide examples of people they admired as men (as well as the reasons for admiring them), their views towards male privilege, and whether they considered themselves to be “men of Color.” The frequencies pre- sented below are in relationship to the interview ques- tions outlined above.

Table 21.1 presents the results from the content analysis exploring participants’ identifications with their significant social groups. All 36 participants ref- erenced their race in their narratives. The number of mentions for participants referencing this social iden- tity ranged from 1 to 14 mentions (median number of responses was 4). They talked extensively about being racialized by their families, communities, and society in general based on their phenotype—that is, whether they were light- or dark-skinned and whether they looked “indigenous” or “European” to others. If participants were fair skinned, they were aware how they were often confused as not being Latino both by other Latinos and non-Latinos. Further, a few par- ticipants discussed the ways in which their race had affected their experiences of higher education. This was particularly salient for participants who had at- tended private institutions, as they were many times one of the few working class students of Color in their classes and at graduation ceremonies. In some cases, participants wove references to race throughout their discussions of male privilege. These responses illus- trated the way that their race interacted with their gender to complicate their experience of male privi- lege. Some felt as though their race kept them from being able to access patriarchal privilege in the same way that white men could. Albert Dominguez III,

TABLE 21.1 PARTICIPANTS’ IDENTIFICATIONS WITH SIGNIFICANT SOCIAL GROUPS.

Social Group Number of

participants

Number of mentions

Range Median

Race 36 1–14 4

Ethnicity 32 1–15 6

Social Class 22 1–11 2

Sexuality 8 1–9 2

who was 27-years-old and working as a program co- ordinator at George Washington University, provides an illustrative example:

Let’s not forget we’re Latinos. I am not a white male . . . if I was a white man I could say “Hey, I have certain privileges” in terms of societies I could get into or a certain door you can open a little bit easier . . . I am a Latino male . . . let me give you a better exam- ple of what I am trying to say. It’s as if you are Black, you’re Jewish and you’re gay  .  .  . that’s the ultimate minority right there, right? So I feel like to a certain extent I am a male but I am a Latino male so if I was just a male . . . being of a different ethnicity or a differ- ent nationality there may be a little bit of extra perks.

Albert’s narrative illustrates an awareness of the stigma attached to his racial identity and an understanding of how this stigma intersects with and limits his access to male privilege. He repeatedly brings up the fact that he is “a Latino male” in his discussion of male privilege. In other words, in talking about his gender identity, he also mentions his racial identity, and does so repeatedly in the same passage. Albert also dem- onstrates an understanding of the way that various disparaged social identities (e.g., being Black, Jewish, and gay) can act in combination to limit people’s opportunities. His narrative is illustrative of the way many participants felt about their race as an important (stigmatized) social identity influencing their views of gender. Overall, participants were aware of their subor- dinate status in society based on their racial categori- zation, and viewed this as influencing their experience of being men.

Thirty-two participants mentioned their ethnic- ity in their narratives. The number of mentions for participants referencing this social identity ranged

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from 1 to 15 mentions (median number of responses was 6). Participants discussing their ethnicity talked about speaking Spanish in the home, cultural prac- tices, and their parents’ immigration experiences. Jorge Morales, a 27-year-old doctoral student in com- parative literature at the University of California, Berkeley emphasized the role of culture in the way that masculinity was constructed by saying:

I guess it depends on what kind of manhood you’re talking about, whether it’s manhood as constructed in American culture or as it’s constructed in Mexican culture. I think they’re very different constructions.

Twenty-two participants referenced their class in their narratives. The number of mentions for partici- pants referencing this social identity ranged from 1 to 11 mentions (median number of responses was 2). These participants discussed their parents’ education levels, occupations and the economic hardships their families experienced while growing up. Jose “Nike” Martinez, who was 22-years-old and had graduated from California State University, Monterey Bay with a degree in Computer Science, was unemployed and looking for work at the time of the interview. He de- scribed the struggles his father went through while raising their family:

He went to like the second or third grade and then he had to drop out of school to support his family. Once he gained his own family, which is us, he immi- grated to the United States in search of work . . . back in Mexico, we had it really hard  .  .  . it’s just hard to make a living over there . . . he’s pretty much worked all his life, he’s worked in the fields, like lettuce and strawberries  .  .  . and I’ve seen him get up everyday at like three or four in the morning and come back at like five or six in the evening and everyday doing this backbreaking job all sunburned . . . that’s all he’s done all his life, is work in the fields  .  .  . he’s done that for us.

Jose’s narrative describes the reasons that he admired his father as a man, alluding to the way that ethnic- ity and class have interacted in his life to influence his views of what it means to be a good father (and ulti- mately what it means to be a man). It is interesting to note the way that class and ethnicity, via discussions of the physical hardships his father endured for the sake

of the family, are interwoven throughout his response. As is seen in the above quotation, Jose references his class (via his father’s educational level, occupation, and long work hours) and ethnicity multiple times in talking about why he admires his father as a man. In other words, Jose’s narrative, like many of the other participants in the sample, illustrates the way that his Mexican immigrant background (his ethnicity) is inex- tricably tied to his class background to shape his views towards gender.

Finally, only eight participants referenced their sexuality in their narratives. The number of men- tions for participants referencing this social iden- tity ranged from 1 to 9 mentions (median number of responses was 2). Two participants discussed the fact that they were gay, some talked about their het- erosexuality in unproblematic ways (e.g., their rela- tionships with girlfriends or partners), while others discussed how their heterosexuality complicated their notions of masculinity. This was particularly the case in terms of how heterosexuality bestowed them with unearned structural privilege and was stigmatized in racially specific ways. Issaac, a 25-year old elementary school teacher who obtained a mas- ter’s degree from Colombia University, in discussing his sexuality, said that he had to “fight more stereo- types because” he was not a “macho male of color.” He thought that “in people’s minds” the prototypical “Latino male is Ricky Martin” or “Antonio Banderas,” both of whom were represented in the media as that “suave model.” Issaac felt as though this way of thinking was a “paradigm” that “still exists” and one that his version of heterosexuality did not “fit into.” Issaac’s response illustrates intersectionality in that his discussion of heterosexuality is intimately tied to his membership in a disparaged racial category—his experience of being heterosexual (a dominant social identity) cannot be separated from his experience of being a racialized man of Color (a stigmatized social identity).

These results suggest that participants were aware that they belonged to various social categories, and further, that some of these categories were dispar- aged and problematic. In Tajfel (1981) and Hurtado’s (1997) terms, the way that they identified with these categories was indicative that their social identities

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were linked to their views towards gender. Partici- pants illustrated this link by including discussions of their devalued social identities in their narratives ad- dressing gender. This was particularly the case when considered in light of the way that ethnicity, race, social class, and to lesser degree, sexuality, inter- acted in their views of the way that masculinity was constructed in culturally specific ways, experiences of male privilege, and reasons for admiring men as men. An important finding here was that the social identities that participants discussed most (e.g., race, ethnicity, and class) were ones that were disparaged in certain contexts. This is consistent with the prin- ciples of social identity theory (Tajfel 1981) and inter- sectionality (Anzaldúa 1987; Collins 2000; Hurtado 1997, 2003) outlined above in that problematic social identities are reflected on more often than dominant social identities and require constant negotiation. It is suggestive that the majority of the sample was het- erosexual (i.e., this was a dominant social category) and that this group membership was mentioned the fewest times.

pa r t i c i pa n t s ’ d e f i n i t i o n s o f m a n h o o d

Table 21.2 presents the results from the participants’ answers to the open-ended question “What does the word ‘manhood’ mean to you?” The thematic coding scheme used in analyzing this interview question was developed using prior studies addressing feminist men’s views of masculinity (Christian 1994; Cornish 1999; Vicario 2003; White 2008). The coding scheme was organized around four overarching themes that were derived from the studies outlined above: re- lational definitions, positive ethical positionings, definitions based in political action, and rejection of hegemonic masculinity. Relational definitions included themes that emphasized relationships with family, community, and other groups of people as part of the definition of manhood. Positive ethical positionings included themes that emphasized individuals taking an ethical stand in life and exhibiting values such as respect, being truthful, respecting oneself enough to have confidence in one’s own decisions and identity as a man, and pursuing education to become a better person. The theme definitions based in political action was not endorsed by any participants, and as such was

TABLE 21.2 THEMES MENTIONED BY PARTICIPANTS IN THEIR DEFINITIONS OF MANHOOD (MULTIPLE MENTIONS).

Theme Number of partici-

pants (N=36):

Number of mentions

Range Mode

Relational Definitions

18 1–22 1

Positive Ethical Positioning

22 1–35 1

Rejection of Hegemonic Masculinity

14 1–20 1

dropped from the coding scheme and will not be dis- cussed here. Rejecting hegemonic masculinity included themes that explicitly critiqued dominant definitions of manhood, including equating manhood with bio- logical sex and instead valuing an individual’s person- hood regardless of gender, rejecting dominance and patriarchy, and openly emphasizing positive charac- teristics to counteract the negative aspects of masculin- ity. In the majority of these themes, the participants mentioned their significant social identities such as ethnicity, race, class, and sexuality as influencing their definitions of manhood.

Mean number of mentions per participant was 2.13. Using an intersectional theoretical framework that takes other significant social identities into ac- count (in addition to gender), we conducted a the- matic analysis allowing for multiple mentions. Below we present the results.

d e f i n i t i o n s o f m a n h o o d : r e l at i o n a l

Eighteen participants mentioned relational definitions of manhood in their responses. The number of men- tions for participants referencing this theme ranged from 1 to 22 mentions (modal number of responses was 1). The participants who emphasized this theme gave long elaborate explanations of manhood being a developmental process that unfolded as individuals matured. The end point of the process was when an individual got married and raised children. As Andrés Elenes, a 26-year-old senior at MIT majoring in mana- gerial science indicated:

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The word manhood, it’s when . . . our mind matures enough that you start thinking as a grown adult. . . . It’s a person who from now on instead of thinking about himself is someone who starts thinking about repercussions about his actions for his family and for [his] community.

Andrés emphasis on manhood being a developmen- tal process that culminates in a commitment to the family and community with which one lives is con- sistent with the way that manhood has been defined with middle and working class African-American men (Hammond and Mattis 2005).

A second component of this theme was the notion that manhood can only be understood in relation- ship to cultural and community practices within families and groups of individuals. As Alberto Bar- ragan, a 27-year-old medical student at the University of Michigan stated:

Manhood to me is a culture  .  .  . the ring of men at our family functions—manhood is being able to stand in that ring. And when you stand in that ring that means that you have a job  .  .  . adolescents are able to stand in the ring even though they are low ranking members. You’re a full member of that ring when you’re married and have children.  .  .  . Like I said, the men [in his family] tend to be quiet and passive. You don’t brag about things. Manhood means being able to stand in that ring and talk and be respected, have an opinion . . . my father having all of his children in college is an incredible booster in the manhood ring.

Alberto’s response demonstrates the way that ethnic- ity interacts with gender to influence his definition of masculinity. In particular, the fact that he emphasizes manhood as being constructed in the context of “a culture” and among “the ring of men” at family func- tions highlights the relational and culturally specific nature of such definitions, and echoes the words of Jorge Morales quoted above (that constructions of manhood vary from one cultural context to another). The emphasis on manhood being constructed in the context of relationships with family, culture, and com- munity is also consistent with the findings of studies conducted with African-American men (Hammond and Mattis 2005; Hunter and Davis 1992).

d e f i n i t i o n s o f m a n h o o d : p o s i t i v e e t h i c a l p o s i t i o n i n g s

Twenty-two participants mentioned definitions of manhood based in positive ethical positions in their responses. The number of mentions for participants referencing this theme ranged from 1 to 35 (modal number of responses was 1). This theme was men- tioned the most times across all three themes ad- dressing participants’ definitions of manhood. These participants felt that manhood entailed being ethical and standing behind one’s word and not cheating or being untruthful, being a good human being, and respecting others. For example, Hugo Hernandez, a 21-year-old junior at the University of Arizona, said “manhood would be to work hard to respect people.” Furthermore manhood was a commitment to viewing everyone as equals and honoring people as people and emphasizing their “humanhood.” Issaac, the 25-year- old elementary school teacher quoted above discuss- ing his sexuality, eloquently stated his views on the definition of “manhood”:

It’s coming into one’s own about being open to change and to new ideas but also staying strong to principles or values that you have set out for your- self  .  .  . like Gandhi says, “being the peace that you wish to see”; it’s like being the man that you wish to see in others . . . walking through the world in a way that is open but strong. In that sense, it’s not only men; all people should be [that way]; kind of like a peoplehood, where we all learn to be strong but also collaborative and open to help and conversation, being open to dialogue about those things but also holding strong to whatever it is you bring to the table in whatever conversations you engage in; knowing who you are. . . . To me that’s coming into one’s own about being a man or womanhood or peoplehood or personhood, I guess that’s how I define it.

Issaac’s views towards manhood highlight the influ- ence of his feminist orientation insofar as the ethical characteristics he highlights directly contradict aspects of hegemonic masculinity. Specifically, he emphasizes “being open to change and new ideas” and equates this openness not only as a positive quality that men should strive for, but that all people, regardless of gender, should try and attain. Issaac’s response resonates with

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prior work with feminist men (Christian 1994; Vicario 2003; White 2008) in that he emphasizes a version of masculinity predicated on a version of selfhood that stresses the importance of connections (as opposed to isolation), particularly in terms of being collaborative and receiving help from others.

Participants also felt that part of being a good and ethical person entailed being comfortable with one’s self, being independent, and approaching things more confidently. Jesse Obas, who was 30-years-old and working for the Educational Partnership Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said:

Manhood is when you are comfortable with your identity. I’m not saying complacent or that’s all you want to achieve, I’m not saying it’s the pinnacle of your manliness, but  .  .  . for the longest time I was uncomfortable with who I was as a man and who I was as a person.  .  .  . I feel like right now I’m prob- ably the closest I’ve ever been to the man, the person, the Chicano, the Filipino, that I’ve ever been . . . en- compassing all those identities. . . . I think that’s what manhood is.

Jesse’s response directly connects his views of man- hood with his other, disparaged social identities. In particular, he defines manhood as something that is achieved when one is comfortable with their mem- berships in various social categories—in his case, this amounts to becoming comfortable with his (bi)racial identity as a Chicano, a Filipino, and ultimately as a person of Color. By defining manhood in this way (as intimately connected to his race based social iden- tity), Jesse embodies intersectionality as postulated by Hurtado (1997, 2003) and other feminists of Color (Anzaldúa 1987; Collins 2000, 2004).

d e f i n i t i o n s o f m a n h o o d : r e j e c t i o n o f h e g e m o n i c m a s c u l i n i t y

Fourteen participants provided definitions of man- hood that rejected aspects of hegemonic masculinity in their responses. The number of mentions for par- ticipants referencing this theme ranged from 1 to 20 (modal number of responses was 1). These participants felt that definitions of manhood are in flux because of the intense questioning of gender and sexual roles and, as a result, definitions need to go beyond biology

and the objectification of women as the basis for man- hood. In particular, participants were concerned that hegemonic definitions excluded others from the rubric of manhood if they did not meet the “physical” req- uisites. Some were especially worried about excluding women who had the responsibilities usually assigned to men, such as being the main breadwinners in their families, and gay men because of their sexuality. Jesse Obas, the participant quoted above, also indicated that “manhood to me doesn’t mean heterosexual, educated man  .  .  . it could also mean gay, white or whatever.” Other participants rejected particular behaviors asso- ciated with hegemonic masculinity. Ryan Ramírez, a 20-year-old sophomore majoring in philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, provides an illustra- tive example:

There’s always that whole thing when you are younger  .  .  . the whole virginity thing, you know, if you don’t sleep with someone by the time you’re this age, then you’re not a man and I’m like, well what- ever.  .  .  . I consider myself a man because I’ve done things.

Ryan explicitly rejects the notion that in order to achieve manhood, one has had to have engaged in sexual intercourse with a woman—an indication of heterosexuality. Instead, he considers himself a man because he has “done things.” In so doing, he refers specifically to the fact that he has overcome economic obstacles in order to attain an education. Ryan trav- eled from Denver to Boulder, Colorado by himself, enrolled in courses, and was working his way through school independent of any financial support from his mother because she was the single head of house- hold and had to take care of his sisters. His narrative is illustrative of the ways that participants refused to objectify women in defining masculinity, instead cel- ebrating their educational accomplishments in light of their working class social identities. Ryan’s rejection of the gender-specific, developmental ritual of sex with a woman fundamentally runs counter to one of the core behaviors associated with hegemonic masculinity (Collins 2004).

Furthermore, participants were concerned that hegemonic and normative definitions of manhood reinforced the negative aspects of masculinity. In

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particular they were concerned about personal negative characteristics of manhood that entailed harshness and domination of others. Among the dispositional characteristics enumerated were such things as being rude, aggressive, insulting others’ beliefs, and not listening. Instead of including the negative characteristics as part of their definitions of manhood, participants enumerated the desir- able ones that men should ascribe to, for example, being supportive, being less selfish and expressing emotions.

The last theme mentioned by participants was the rejection of manhood because it is a social construction that has no value—a construction that participants were openly rebelling against by deconstructing its meaning. As Jonathan Rosa, a 23-year-old doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Chicago stated:

[Manhood] means a constructed image of mascu- linity  .  .  . it means an idea that I am trying to fight against; something that I am trying to unsettle per- sonally, and in the world individually, and among the social networks where I occupy different positions . . . manhood is bullshit, basically.

From Jonathan’s perspective, as well as from the perspectives of other participants, manhood was equated with patriarchy and undeserved male privi- leges. Patriarchy hurts everyone and therefore man- hood is a false ideology that should be questioned and eventually obliterated and replaced with more equitable arrangements between people. Jonathan’s views towards manhood, in addition to the other participants endorsing this theme, echo the words of other feminist men (Vicario 2003; White 2008) in that he is not only advocating for a fundamental restructuring and transformation of social relation- ships, he provides an outright rejection of mascu- linity as a social construct. This point is made most poignantly in his summation that “manhood is bullshit, basically.”

d i s c u s s i o n

In considering findings in light of the research ques- tions posed above, we see that participants identified with their significant social identities in various ways,

thereby providing an illustration of how individuals embodied intersectionality via their lived experience. In doing so, they referenced those social identities that were devalued in society more often than those that were unproblematic (e.g., heterosexuality), implying that they reflected on and negotiated these identities in numerous social contexts. Further, participants impli- cated their various social identities as influencing their views of gender and masculinity, thereby indicating an intimate connection between their disparaged group memberships and their dominant ones. Participants illustrated this in the content analysis by weaving refer- ences to their race, ethnicity, social class, and to a lesser degree, sexuality throughout their narratives. These findings are consistent with past qualitative research utilizing an intersectional framework with Mexican descent women (Hurtado 2003), African-American women (Collins 2000, 2004), and feminist African- American men (White 2008).

In defining what manhood meant to them, partic- ipants applied their feminist and class consciousness in complex ways. They wove in and out of definitions that were relational, ethical, and that rejected as- pects of hegemonic masculinity. For example, some participants would discuss relational and ethical definitions of masculinity, while rejecting aspects of hegemonic masculinity in the same narrative. In doing so, they provided definitions of manhood that ran counter to mainstream ideas of what it means to be a man in the USA, while simultaneously drawing on positive aspects of hegemonic masculinity (Levant 1992). This was particularly the case in terms of the relational and ethical definitions of manhood pro- vided by some participants. Aspects of each of these themes (e.g., sacrificing and being committed to the welfare of the family, being respectful and stand- ing up for one’s word), have been conceptualized as positive components of hegemonic masculinity worth rescuing in the reconstruction of masculinity (Levant 1992), and reinforce previous research ex- amining manhood meaning with African-American men (Hammond and Mattis 2005; Hunter and Davis 1992, 1994). Further, participants rejecting aspects of hegemonic masculinity demonstrated the impact of ascribing to feminist ideology by positioning them- selves in direct opposition to dominant conceptions

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of manhood. These definitions resonate with find- ings of past studies with feminist men (Vicario 2003; White 2008), particularly in terms of advocating for a complete restructuring of social relations and reject- ing manhood as a social construct.

Participants provided definitions of manhood that were also influenced by their membership in various social groups. This was especially salient in relationship to their race, ethnicity, social class, and sexuality (although sexuality played a lesser role in the context of this sample). They defined manhood in ways that integrated their cultural background, racial categorizations, social class, and in some cases, the questioning of their heterosexual, male privilege. These findings are consistent with past research con- ducted with feminist identified African-American men (White 2008) that utilized an intersectional analysis.

Finally, it is important to stress the fact that the definitions of manhood endorsed by this sample of educated, feminist identified, working class Latinos expands masculine identity as currently conceptu- alized in the literature (Connell 1995; Pleck 1981). Participants in this sample defined manhood in ways that emphasized emotional connections with others, being open to change and help from others, being collaborative, and being comfortable with one’s mul- tiple (and in some cases, derogated) social identities. In other words, participants redefined masculinity in

ways that allow men to experience the full range of the human experience (e.g., emotional expression, meaningful relationships with family, community, and others) unencumbered by the restrictions im- posed by traditional masculine gender roles (Pleck 1981). They defined manhood in ways that let men be more than men.

The findings described above may not be sur- prising, given the fact that all participants in this sample were educated and feminist identified. What is surprising is the dearth in the literature on this topic—few studies have incorporated an intersec- tional analysis in exploring the experiences of men of Color generally (see White 2008 for an exception), and Latinos specifically. Further, the findings dis- cussed here suggest a number of future directions for research. Gay men were underrepresented in this sample. The fact that the majority of participants were heterosexual inevitably affected the way that manhood was defined. Further, it is important to note here that all three gay men in this sample pro- vided definitions that rejected aspects of hegemonic masculinity. Future studies utilizing intersectional analyses with working class, gay men of Color could yield fruitful results, thereby lending to a more com- prehensive understanding of the way that multiple subordinated group memberships interact to pro- duce group specific conceptions of what it means to be a man.

R E F E R E N C E S

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of Minnesota Press. Collins, P. H. (2000). Black feminist thought. New York: Routledge. Collins, P. H. (2004). Black sexual politics: African-Americans, gender, and the new racism. New York: Routledge. Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Oxford: Polity Press. Cornish, P. A. (1999). Men engaging feminism: A model of personal change and social transformation.

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DeFranc, W., & Mahalik, J. R. (2002). Masculine gender role conflict and stress in relation to parental at- tachment and separation. Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 3, 51–60.

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Fenstermaker, S., & West, C. (Eds.). (2002). Doing gender, doing difference: Inequality, power, and institutional change. New York: Routledge.

Fereday, J., & Muir-Cochrane, E. (2006). Demonstrating rigor using thematic analysis: A hybrid approach of inductive and deductive coding and theme development. International Journal of Qualitative Meth- ods, 5, Article 7. Retrieved 05/09/07 from http://www.ualberta.ca/~iiqm/backissues/5_1/html/fereday. htm

Fine, M., & Weis, L. (1998). The unknown city: The lives of poor and working class adults. Boston, MA, USA: Beacon Press.

Fink, A. (2003). How to manage, analyze, and interpret survey data (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA, USA: Sage Publications.

Good, G. E., Heppner, P. P., DeBord, K. A., & Fischer, A. R. (2004). Understanding men’s psychological distress: Contributions of problem-solving appraisal and masculine role conflict. Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 5, 168–177.

Good, G. E., & Wood, P. K. (1995). Male gender role conflict, depression, and help seeking: Do college men face double jeopardy? Journal of Counseling & Development, 74, 70–75.

Hammond, W. P., & Mattis, J. S. (2005). Being a man about it: Manhood meaning among African-American men. Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 6, 114–126.

Hebert, J. R., Ma, Y., Clemow, L., Ockene, I. S., Saperia, G., Stanek, E. J., et al. (1997). Gender differences in social desirability and social approval bias in dietary self-report. American Journal of Epidemiology, 146, 1046–1055.

hooks, B. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. Boston, MA, USA: South End Press. Hunter, A. G., & Davis, J. E. (1992). Constructing gender: An exploration of Afro-American men’s concep-

tualization of manhood. Gender & Society, 6, 464–479. Hunter, A. G., & Davis, J. E. (1994). Hidden voices of Black men: The meaning, structure, and complexity

of manhood. Journal of Black Studies, 25, 20–40. Hurtado, A. (1996). Strategic suspensions: Feminists of color theorize the production of knowledge. In

N. Goldberger, J. Tarule, B. Clinchy, & M. Belenky (Eds.) Knowledge, difference and power: Essays inspired by women’s ways of knowing (pp. 372–392). New York: Basic Books.

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Hurtado, A. (2003). Voicing Chicana feminisms: Young women speak out on sexuality and identity. New York: New York University Press.

Hurtado, A., & Sinha, M. (2005). Restriction and freedom in the construction of sexuality: Young Chicanas and Chicanos speak out. Feminism & Psychology, 15, 33–38.

Hurtado, A., & Sinha, M. (2006). Social identity and gender consciousness with Latinos. Paper presented at the meeting of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, June–July.

Kimmel, M. S. (2000). Masculinity as homophobia. In E. Disch (Ed.) Reconstructing gender: A multicultural anthology (pp. 132–139). Boston, MA, USA: McGraw-Hill.

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Levant, R. (1992). Toward the reconstruction of masculinity. Journal of Family Psychology, 5, 379–402. Mahalik, J. R., & Morrison, J. A. (2006). A cognitive therapy approach to increasing father involvement by

changing restrictive masculine schemas. Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, 13, 62–70. Mahalik, J. R., & Rochlen, A. B. (2006). Men’s likely responses to clinical depression: What are they and

do masculinity norms predict them? Sex Roles, 55, 659–667. Messner, M. A. (1997). Politics of masculinity: men in movements. Thousand Oaks, CA, USA: Sage Publications. Mirandé, A. (1997). Hombres y machos: Masculinity and Latino culture. Boulder, CO, USA: Westview.

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Morse, J. M., & Richards, L. (2002). Readme first for a users guide to qualitative methods. Thousand Oaks, CA, USA: Sage.

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O’Neil, J. M. (1998). Wade and Gelso’s contribution to the new psychology of men: Male reference group identity dependence theory. Counseling Psychologist, 26, 413–421.

Phinney, J. S. (1996). When we talk about American ethnic groups, what do we mean? American Psycholo- gist, 51, 918–927.

Pleck, J. (1981). The myth of masculinity. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press. Sinha, M. (2007). Intersecting social identities: The (feminist) standpoint(s) of Latino men. Doctoral Disserta-

tion. University of California, Santa Cruz. Solis, J. (2006). Transborder violence and undocumented youth: Extending cultural-historical analysis

to transnational immigration studies. In C. Daiute, Z. Beykont, C. Higson-Smith, & L. Nucci (Eds.) International perspectives on youth conflict and development (pp. 305–319). New York: Oxford University Press.

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Vicario, B. A. (2003). A qualitative study of profeminist men. Doctoral Dissertation. Auburn University. White, A. (2008). Ain’t I a feminist: African-American men speak out on fatherhood, friendship, forgiveness, and

freedom. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

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FAMILIES

V P A R T

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, major transformations in world eco-nomic and cultural systems have affected all families and households and given rise to new patterns of family living. Despite these changes, family life remains shrouded in myth. No matter how much families change, they remain idealized as natural or biological units based on the timeless functions of love, motherhood, and childbearing. “Family” evokes ideas of warmth, caring, and unconditional love in a refuge set apart from the public world. In this image, family and society are separate. Relations inside the family are idealized as nurturant, and those outside the family are seen as competitive. This ideal assumes a gendered division of labor: a husband/father associated with the public world and a wife/mother defined as the heart of the family who is primarily responsible for doing the care work. Although this image bears little resemblance to the majority of family situations, it is still recognizable in cultural ideals and public policies.

In the past four decades, feminist thought has been in the forefront of efforts to demy- thologize the family. Feminist thinkers have demonstrated that family forms are socially and historically constructed, not monolithic universals that exist across all times and all places or the inevitable result of unambiguous differences between women and men. Femi- nist thinkers have drawn attention to myths that romanticize “traditional” families in def- erence to male privilege and to the contradictions between idealized and real patterns of family life. They have directed attention to the close connections between families and other

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institutions in society. Early feminist critiques of the family characterized it as a primary site of women’s oppression and argued in support of women’s increased participation in the labor force as a means of attaining greater autonomy. But this analysis did not apply well to women of color or working-class women, most of whom were employed and keenly aware of inequalities in the workplace, because it falsely universalized the experiences of white upper- and middle-class women.

The first two articles explore the symbolic meanings and lived realities of motherhood and fatherhood. They uncover experiences that are not simply gendered but also shaped by other lines of difference. First, Patricia Hill Collins takes race, class, and history into account as she investigates mother–daughter relations among African Americans. In contrast to Euro- centric views of motherhood, she describes patterns of communal and collective mothering relations. Collins’s concept of “other mothers” is adopted in the reading by Lisa J. Udel, who explains why Native American women are loyal to cultural traditions that puzzle white US feminists.

In the next article Roberta Espinoza addresses the tension for Latinas between individual accomplishments and family obligations. The “good daughter dilemma” emerges when La- tinas try to balance identification with and obligations to family, which gives them a strong foundation of identity and protects them from the psychological harm of discrimination but also competes for their time and attention that they otherwise would spend on school. In her study of Latina graduate students, Espinoza describes the different strategies that women in her study used to navigate this dilemma, and she makes policy recommendations for how colleges and universities can better meet the needs of Latina students.

Feminist thought has explored a more complex understanding of the relationship be- tween family and work by examining differences among women and by taking men’s experi- ences into account. Women’s and men’s new employment trends are transforming family realms. Yet the worldwide entrance of women into the public sphere of employment has not resulted in gender equality, nor has it freed women from the demands of labor in the private sphere. The reading by Stephanie Coontz illustrates the connections among gender attitudes, work experiences, and family arrangements. Whereas media stories often feature contempo- rary women who are “opting out” of the workplace in favor of domesticity, Coontz offers a different explanation. She reveals that most people favor gender equity, but they are forced to act in ways that contradict their ideals because of social policies. Coontz examines a number of these policies in the United States, from labor standards to family-leave policies, demonstrating how they impact couples’ decision-making in ways that reinforce traditional family and gender arrangements.

Gender divisions of labor in families and workplaces often extend to other domains of society, as Michael A. Messner and Suzel Bozada-Deas show in the next reading, a study of youth sports organizations in which most men volunteers become coaches and most women volunteers become team moms. Their findings challenge common-sense ideas about “nat- ural” gender divisions. Although participants say the division of labor between men and women volunteers results from individual choices, Messner and Bozada-Deas uncover infor- mal patterns of socially structured gender disparities that reproduce the work/family divide in youth sports organizations.

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By now, it is a truism that the movement of women into the workforce everywhere affects families. But work and family opportunities vary greatly because they are linked within a larger society that is structured by class, race, and gender. Kathryn Edin addresses the connec- tions between economic marginality and marriage in the lives of low-income single moth- ers. Although the mothers in this study aspire to marriage, they think it is more risky than rewarding. Their stories provide an understanding of the retreat from marriage as it is con- ditioned by men’s employment and women’s desire for marriage with a measure of trust, respectability, and control.

Housework is a familiar topic in gender studies, and the different kinds of housework and who does it matter a great deal in how gender norms play out in families. But how do we understand the gendered division of household labor in same-sex households? Nicole Civettini explores this by thinking about housework as a type of gender display, and ex- amining the association between the division of housework within a same-sex couple and individuals’ adherence to stereotypical feminine or masculine behavior. Civettini’s findings inform how we might think differently about what sociologists refer to as the second shift.

Finally, family and work intertwine in Emir Estrada’s and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo’s chapter on street vending youth in Los Angeles. Street vending is often stigmatizing, and immigrant youth who engage in it to help their families face ridicule from peers and harass- ment from police. Estrada and Hondagneu-Sotelo use ethnographic research to explore how children of immigrant parents in East Los Angeles navigate the challenges of street vending. They feel a moral obligation to help their families, and through hard work they construct a culturally authentic identity that challenges racist stereotypes of “lazy” Latino immigrants.

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PAT R I C I A H I L L C O L L I N S

22. THE MEANING OF MOTHERHOOD IN BLACK CULTURE AND BLACK

MOTHER–DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIPS

Patricia Hill Collins, The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black Mother-Daughter Relationships. Reprinted by permission of author.

What did your mother teach you about men?” is a question I often ask students in my courses on African-American women. “Go to school first and get a good education—don’t get too serious too young,” “Make sure you look around and that you can take care of yourself before you settle down,” and “Don’t trust them, want more for yourself than just a man,” are typical responses from Black women. My students share stories of how their mothers encour- aged them to cultivate satisfying relationships with Black men while anticipating disappointments, to desire marriage while planning viable alternatives, to become mothers only when fully prepared to do so. But, above all, they stress their mothers’ insistence on being self-reliant and resourceful.

These daughters, of various ages and from di- verse social class backgrounds, family structures and geographic regions, had somehow received strik- ingly similar messages about Black womanhood. Even though their mothers employed diverse teach- ing strategies, these Black daughters had all been exposed to common themes about the meaning of womanhood in Black culture.1

This essay explores the relationship between the meaning of motherhood in African-American culture and Black mother–daughter relationships by addressing three primary questions. First, how have competing perspectives about motherhood intersected to produce a distinctly Afrocentric ide- ology of motherhood? Second, what are the en- during themes that characterize this Afrocentric ideology of motherhood? Finally, what effect might

this Afrocentric ideology of motherhood have on Black mother–daughter relationships?

c o m p e t i n g p e r s p e c t i v e s o n m o t h e r h o o d

t h e d o m i n a n t p e r s p e c t i v e : e u r o c e n t r i c v i e w s o f w h i t e m o t h e r h o o d

The cult of true womanhood, with its emphasis on motherhood as woman’s highest calling, has long held a special place in the gender symbolism of White Americans. From this perspective, women’s activities should be confined to the care of children, the nurturing of a husband, and the maintenance of the household. By managing this separate domestic sphere, women gain social influence through their roles as mothers, transmitters of culture, and parents for the next generations.2

While substantial numbers of White women have benefited from the protections of White patriarchy provided by the dominant ideology, White women themselves have recently challenged its tenets. On one pole lies a cluster of women, the traditionalists, who aim to retain the centrality of motherhood in women’s lives. For traditionalists, differentiating between the experience of motherhood, which for them has been quite satisfying, and motherhood as an institution central in reproducing gender inequal- ity, has proved difficult. The other pole is occupied by women who advocate dismantling motherhood as an institution. They suggest that compulsory motherhood be outlawed and that the experience

“

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of motherhood can only be satisfying if women can also choose not to be mothers. Arrayed between these dichotomous positions are women who argue for an expanded, but not necessarily different, role for women—women can be mothers as long as they are not just mothers.3

Three themes implicit in White perspectives on motherhood are particularly problematic for Black women and others outside of this debate. First, the assumption that mothering occurs within the confines of a private, nuclear family household where the mother has almost total responsibility for child-rearing is less applicable to Black fami- lies. While the ideal of the cult of true womanhood has been held up to Black women for emulation, racial oppression has denied Black families suffi- cient resources to support private, nuclear family households. Second, strict sex-role segregation, with separate male and female spheres of influ- ence within the family, has been less commonly found in African-American families than in White middle-class ones. Finally, the assumption that motherhood and economic dependency on men are linked and that to be a “good” mother one must stay at home, making motherhood a full- time “occupation,” is similarly uncharacteristic of African-American families.4

Even though selected groups of White women are challenging the cult of true womanhood and its accompanying definition of motherhood, the domi- nant ideology remains powerful. As long as these ap- proaches remain prominent in scholarly and popular discourse, Eurocentric views of White motherhood will continue to affect Black women’s lives.

e u r o c e n t r i c v i e w s o f b l a c k m o t h e r h o o d

Eurocentric perspectives on Black motherhood re- volve around two interdependent images that to- gether define Black women’s roles in White and in African-American families. The first image is that of the Mammy, the faithful, devoted domestic ser- vant. Like one of the family, Mammy conscientiously “mothers” her White children, caring for them and loving them as if they were her own. Mammy is the ideal Black mother for she recognizes her place. She

is paid next to nothing and yet cheerfully accepts her inferior status. But when she enters her own home, this same Mammy is transformed into the second image, the too-strong matriarch who raises weak sons and “unnaturally superior” daughters.5 When she protests, she is labeled aggressive and un- feminine, yet if she remains silent, she is rendered invisible.

The task of debunking Mammy by analyzing Black women’s roles as exploited domestic workers and challenging the matriarchy thesis by demon- strating that Black women do not wield dispropor- tionate power in African-American families has long preoccupied African-American scholars.6 But an equally telling critique concerns uncovering the functions of these images and their role in explain- ing Black women’s subordination in systems of race, class, and gender oppression. As Mae King points out, White definitions of Black motherhood foster the dominant group’s exploitation of Black women by blaming Black women for their characteristic re- actions to their own subordination.7 For example, while the stay-at-home mother has been held up to all women as the ideal, African-American women have been compelled to work outside the home, typically in a very narrow range of occupations. Even though Black women were forced to become domestic ser- vants and be strong figures in Black households, labeling them Mammies and matriarchs denigrates Black women. Without a countervailing Afrocen- tric ideology of motherhood, White perspectives on both White and African-American motherhood place Black women in a no-win situation. Adhering to these standards brings the danger of the lowered self-esteem of internalized oppression, one that, if passed on from mother to daughter, provides a pow- erful mechanism for controlling African-American communities.

a f r i c a n p e r s p e c t i v e s o n m o t h e r h o o d

One concept that has been constant throughout the history of African societies is the centrality of moth- erhood in religions, philosophies, and social institu- tions. As Barbara Christian points out, “There is no doubt that motherhood is for most African people symbolic of creativity and continuity.”8

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Cross-cultural research on motherhood in Afri- can societies appears to support Christian’s claim.9 West African sociologist Christine Oppong suggests that the Western notion of equating household with family be abandoned because it obscures women’s family roles in African cultures.10 While the arche- typal White, middle-class nuclear family conceptual- izes family life as being divided into two oppositional spheres—the “male” sphere of economic providing and the “female” sphere of affective nurturing—this type of rigid sex-role segregation was not part of the West African tradition. Mothering was not a priva- tized nurturing “occupation” reserved for biologi- cal mothers, and the economic support of children was not the exclusive responsibility of men. Instead, for African women, emotional care for children and providing for their physical survival were interwoven as interdependent, complementary dimensions of motherhood.

In spite of variations among societies, a strong case has been made that West African women occupy influential roles in African family networks.11 First, since they are not dependent on males for economic support and provide much of their own and their children’s economic support, women are structurally central to families.12 Second, the image of the mother is one that is culturally elaborated and valued across diverse West African societies. Continuing the lin- eage is essential in West African philosophies, and motherhood is similarly valued.13 Finally, while the biological mother–child bond is valued, child care was a collective responsibility, a situation fostering cooperative, age-stratified, woman-centered “moth- ering” networks.

Recent research by Africanists suggests that much more of this African heritage was retained among African-Americans than had previously been thought. The retention of West African culture as a culture of resistance offered enslaved Africans and exploited African-Americans alternative ideologies to those advanced by dominant groups. Central to these reinterpretations of African-American institu- tions and culture is a re-conceptualization of Black family life and the role of women in Black family networks.14 West African perspectives may have been combined with the changing political and economic

situations framing African-American communities to produce certain enduring themes characterizing an Afrocentric ideology of motherhood.

e n d u r i n g t h e m e s o f a n a f r o c e n t r i c i d e o l o g y o f m o t h e r h o o d

An Afrocentric ideology of motherhood must recon- cile the competing worldviews of these three conflict- ing perspectives of motherhood. An ongoing tension exists between efforts to mold the institution of Black motherhood for the benefit of the dominant group and efforts by Black women to define and value their own experiences with motherhood. This tension leads to a continuum of responses. For those women who either aspire to the cult of true womanhood without having the resources to support such a lifestyle, or who believe the stereotypical analyses of themselves as dominating matriarchs, motherhood can be oppres- sive. But the experience of motherhood can provide Black women with a base of self-actualization, status in the Black community, and a reason for social activ- ism. These alleged contradictions can exist side by side in African-American communities, families, and even within individual women.

Embedded in these changing relationships are four enduring themes that I contend characterize an Afrocentric ideology of motherhood. Just as the issues facing enslaved African mothers were quite dif- ferent from those currently facing poor Black women in inner cities, for any given historical moment the actual institutional forms that these themes take depend on the severity of oppression and Black wom- en’s resources for resistance.

b l o o d m o t h e r s , o t h e r m o t h e r s , a n d w o m e n - c e n t e r e d n e t w o r k s

In African-American communities, the boundaries distinguishing biological mothers of children from other women who care for children are often fluid and changing. Biological mothers, or bloodmothers, are expected to care for their children. But African and African-American communities have also recognized that vesting one person with full responsibility for moth- ering a child may not be wise or possible. As a result, “othermothers,” women who assist bloodmothers by

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sharing mothering responsibilities, traditionally have been central to the institution of Black motherhood.15

The centrality of women in African-American extended families is well known.16 Organized, resil- ient, women-centered networks of bloodmothers and other-mothers are key to this centrality. Grandmoth- ers, sisters, aunts, or cousins acted as othermoth- ers by taking on child care responsibilities for each other’s children. When needed, temporary child care arrangements turned into long-term care or informal adoption.17

In African-American communities, these women- centered networks of community-based child care often extend beyond the boundaries of biologically related extended families to support “fictive kin.”18 Civil rights activist Ella Baker describes how infor- mal adoption by othermothers functioned in the Southern, rural community of her childhood:

My aunt who had thirteen children of her own raised three more. She had become a midwife, and a child was born who was covered with sores. Nobody was particularly wanting the child, so she took the child and raised him . . . and another mother decided she didn’t want to be bothered with two children. So my aunt took one and raised him  .  .  . they were part of the family.19

Even when relationships were not between kin or fictive kin, African-American community norms were such that neighbors cared for each other’s chil- dren. In the following passage, Sara Brooks, a South- ern domestic worker, describes the importance of the community-based child care that a neighbor offered her daughter. In doing so, she also shows how the African-American cultural value placed on coopera- tive child care found institutional support in the ad- verse conditions under which so many Black women mothered:

She kept Vivian and she didn’t charge me nothin either. You see, people used to look after each other, but now it’s not that way. I reckon it’s because we all was poor, and I guess they put theirself in the place of the person that they was helpin.20

Othermothers were key not only in support- ing children but also in supporting bloodmothers

who, for whatever reason, were ill-prepared or had little desire to care for their children. Given the pres- sures from the larger political economy, the em- phasis placed on community-based child care and the respect given to othermothers who assume the responsibilities of child care have served a critical function in African-American communities. Chil- dren orphaned by sale or death of their parents under slavery, children conceived through rape, children of young mothers, children born into extreme poverty, or children who for other reasons have been rejected by their bloodmothers have all been supported by other-mothers who, like Ella Baker’s aunt, took in additional children, even when they had enough of their own.

p r o v i d i n g a s pa r t o f m o t h e r i n g

The work done by African-American women in pro- viding the economic resources essential to Black family well-being affects motherhood in a contra- dictory fashion. On the one hand, African-American women have long integrated their activities as eco- nomic providers into their mothering relationships. In contrast to the cult of true womanhood, in which work is defined as being in opposition to and incom- patible with motherhood, work for Black women has been an important and valued dimension of Af- rocentric definitions of Black motherhood. On the other hand, African-American women’s experiences as mothers under oppression were such that the type and purpose of work Black women were forced to do had a great impact on the type of mothering rela- tionships blood-mothers and othermothers had with Black children.

While slavery both disrupted West African family patterns and exposed enslaved Africans to the gender ideologies and practices of slaveowners, it simultane- ously made it impossible, had they wanted to do so for enslaved Africans to implement slaveowners’ ideolo- gies. Thus, the separate spheres of providing as a male domain and affective nurturing as a female domain did not develop within African-American families.21 Providing for Black children’s physical survival and attending to their affective, emotional needs contin- ued as interdependent dimensions of an Afrocentric ideology of motherhood. However, by changing the

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conditions under which Black women worked and the purpose of the work itself, slavery introduced the problem of how best to continue traditional Afrocen- tric values under oppressive conditions. Institutions of community-based child care, informal adoption, greater reliance on other-mothers, all emerge as ad- aptations to the exigencies of combining exploitative work with nurturing children.

In spite of the change in political status brought on by emancipation, the majority of African-American women remained exploited agricultural workers. However, their placement in Southern political eco- nomics allowed them to combine child care with field labor. Sara Brooks describes how strong the links be- tween providing and caring for others were for her:

When I was about nine I was nursin my sister Sally— I’m about seven or eight years older than Sally. And when I would put her to sleep, instead of me goin somewhere and sit down and play, I’d get my little old hoe and get out there and work right in the field around the house.22

Black women’s shift from Southern agriculture to domestic work in Southern and Northern towns and cities represented a change in the type of work done, but not in the meaning of work to women and their families. Whether they wanted to or not, the majority of African-American women had to work and could not afford the luxury of motherhood as a noneco- nomically productive, female “occupation.”

c o m m u n i t y o t h e r m o t h e r s a n d s o c i a l a c t i v i s m

Black women’s experiences as othermothers have pro- vided a foundation for Black women’s social activism. Black women’s feelings of responsibility for nurturing the children in their own extended family networks have stimulated a more generalized ethic of care where Black women feel accountable to all the Black com- munity’s children.

This notion of Black women as community other- mothers for all Black children traditionally allowed Black women to treat biologically unrelated children as if they were members of their own families. For example, sociologist Karen Fields describes how her grandmother, Mamie Garvin Fields, draws on her

power as a community othermother when dealing with unfamiliar children.

She will say to a child on the street who looks up to no good, picking out a name at random, “Aren’t you Miz Pinckney’s boy?” in that same reproving tone. If the reply is, “No, ma’am, my mother is Miz Gads- den,” whatever threat there was dissipates.23

The use of family language in referring to mem- bers of the Black community also illustrates this di- mension of Black motherhood. For example, Mamie Garvin Fields describes how she became active in surveying the poor housing conditions of Black people in Charleston.

I was one of the volunteers they got to make a survey of the places where we were paying extortious rents for indescribable property. I said “we,” although it wasn’t Bob and me. We had our own home, and so did many of the Federated Women. Yet we still fell like it really was “we” living in those terrible places, and it was up to us to do something about them.24

To take another example, while describing her increas- ingly successful efforts to teach a boy who had given other teachers problems, my daughter’s kindergarten teacher stated, “You know how it can be—the majority of children in the learning disabled classes are our chil- dren. I know he didn’t belong there, so I volunteered to take him.” In these statements, both women invoke the language of family to describe the ties that bind them as Black women to their responsibilities to other members of the Black community as family.

Sociologist Cheryl Gilkes suggests that commu- nity othermother relationships are sometimes behind Black women’s decisions to become community ac- tivists.25 Gilkes notes that many of the Black women community activists in her study became involved in community organizing in response to the needs of their own children and of those in their communi- ties. The following comment is typical of how many of the Black women in Gilkes’ study relate to Black children: “There were a lot of summer programs springing up for kids, but they were exclusive . . . and I found that most of our kids (emphasis mine) were excluded.”26 For many women, what began as the daily expression of their obligations as community

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othermothers, as was the case for the kindergarten teacher, developed into full-fledged roles as commu- nity leaders.

m o t h e r h o o d a s a s y m b o l o f p o w e r

Motherhood, whether bloodmother, othermother, or community othermother, can be invoked by Black women as a symbol of power. A substantial portion of Black women’s status in African-American communi- ties stems not only from their roles as mothers in their own families but from their contributions as commu- nity othermothers to Black community development as well.

The specific contributions Black women make in nurturing Black community development form the basis of community-based power. Community other- mothers work on behalf of the Black community by trying, in the words of late nineteenth-century Black feminists, to “uplift the race,” so that vulnerable members of the community would be able to attain the self-reliance and independence so desperately needed for Black community development under op- pressive conditions. This is the type of power many African-Americans have in mind when they describe the “strong, Black women” they see around them in traditional African-American communities.

When older Black women invoke this community othermother status, its results can be quite striking. Karen Fields recounts an incident described to her by her grandmother illustrating how women can exert power as community othermothers:

One night  .  .  . as Grandmother sat crocheting alone at about two in the morning, a young man walked into the living room carrying the portable TV from upstairs. She said, “Who are you looking for this time of night?” As Grandmother [described] the incident to me over the phone, I could hear a tone of voice that I know well. It said, “Nice boys don’t do that.” So I imagine the burglar heard his own mother or grandmother at that moment. He joined in the famil- ial game just created: “Well, he told me that I could borrow it.” “Who told you?” “John.” “Um um, no John lives here. You got the wrong house.”27

After this dialogue, the teenager turned around, went back upstairs and returned the television.

In local Black communities, specific Black women are widely recognized as powerful figures, primarily because of their contributions to the com- munity’s wellbeing through their roles as community othermothers. Sociologist Charles Johnson describes the behavior of an elderly Black woman at a church service in rural Alabama of the 1930s. Even though she was not on the program, the woman stood up to speak. The master of ceremonies rang for her to sit down but she refused to do so claiming, “I am the mother of this church, and I will say what I please.” The master of ceremonies later explained to the con- gregation—“Brothers, I know you all honor Sister Moore. Course our time is short but she has acted as a mother to me. . . . Any time old folks get up I give way to them.”28

i m p l i c at i o n s f o r b l a c k m o t h e r – d a u g h t e r r e l at i o n s h i p s

In her discussion of the sex-role socialization of Black girls, Pamela Reid identifies two complementary ap- proaches in understanding Black mother–daughter relationships.29 The first, psychoanalytic theory, exam- ines the role of parents in the establishment of person- ality and social behavior. This theory argues that the development of feminine behavior results from the girls’ identification with adult female role models. This approach emphasizes how an Afrocentric ideology of motherhood is actualized through Black mothers’ ac- tivities as role models.

The second approach, social learning theory, sug- gests that the rewards and punishments attached to girls’ childhood experiences are central in shaping women’s sex-role behavior. The kinds of behaviors that Black mothers reward and punish in their daugh- ters are seen as key in the socialization process. This approach examines specific experiences that Black girls have while growing up that encourage them to absorb an Afrocentric ideology of motherhood.

a f r i c a n - a m e r i c a n m o t h e r s a s r o l e m o d e l s

Feminist psychoanalytic theorists suggest that the sex- role socialization process is different for boys and girls. While boys learn maleness by rejecting femaleness via

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separating themselves from their mothers, girls estab- lish feminine identities by embracing the femaleness of their mothers. Girls identify with their mothers, a sense of connection that is incorporated into the female personality. However, this mother-identification is problematic because, under patriarchy, men are more highly valued than women. Thus, while daughters identify with their mothers, they also reject them, since in patriarchal families, identifying with adult women as mothers means identifying with persons deemed inferior.30

While Black girls learn by identifying with their mothers, the specific female role with which Black girls identify may be quite different than that mod- eled by middle-class White mothers. The presence of working mothers, extended family othermoth- ers, and powerful community othermothers offers a range of role models that challenge the tenets of the cult of true womanhood.

Moreover, since Black mothers have a distinc- tive relationship to White patriarchy, they may be less likely to socialize their daughters into their pro- scribed role as subordinates. Rather, a key part of Black girls’ socialization involves incorporating the critical posture that allows Black women to cope with contradictions. For example, Black girls have long had to learn how to do domestic work while re- jecting definitions of themselves as Mammies. At the same time they’ve had to take on strong roles in Black extended families without internalizing images of themselves as matriarchs.

In raising their daughters, Black mothers face a troubling dilemma. To ensure their daughters’ physi- cal survival, they must teach their daughters to fit into systems of oppression. For example, as a young girl in Mississippi, Black activist Ann Moody ques- tioned why she was paid so little for the domestic work she began at age nine, why Black women do- mestics were sexually harassed by their White male employers, and why Whites had so much more than Blacks. But her mother refused to answer her ques- tions and actually became angry whenever Ann Moody stepped out of her “place.”31 Black daughters are raised to expect to work, to strive for an education so that they can support themselves, and to antici- pate carrying heavy responsibilities in their families

and communities because these skills are essential for their own survival as well as for the survival of those for whom they will eventually be respon- sible.32 And yet mothers know that if daughters fit too well into the limited opportunities offered Black women, they become willing participants in their own subordination. Mothers may have ensured their daughters’ physical survival at the high cost of their emotional destruction.

On the other hand, Black daughters who offer serious challenges to oppressive situations may not physically survive. When Ann Moody became involved in civil rights activities, her mother first begged her not to participate and then told her not to come home because she feared the Whites in Moody’s hometown would kill her. In spite of the dangers, many Black mothers routinely encourage their daughters to develop skills to confront oppres- sive conditions. Thus, learning that they will work, that education is a vehicle for advancement, can also be seen as ways of preparing Black girls to resist op- pression through a variety of mothering roles. The issue is to build emotional strength, but not at the cost of physical survival.

This delicate balance between conformity and re- sistance is described by historian Elsa Barkley Brown as the “need to socialize me one way and at the same time to give me all the tools I needed to be something else.”33 Black daughters must learn how to survive in interlocking structures of race, class, and gender oppression while rejecting and transcending those very same structures. To develop these skills in their daughters, mothers demonstrate varying combina- tions of behaviors devoted to ensuring their daugh- ters’ survival—such as providing them with basic necessities and ensuring their protection in danger- ous environments to helping their daughters go far- ther than mothers themselves were allowed to go.

The presence of othermothers in Black extended families and the modeling symbolized by commu- nity othermothers offer powerful support for the task of teaching girls to resist White perceptions of Black womanhood while appearing to conform to them. In contrast to the isolation of middle-class White mother/daughter dyads, Black women-centered ex- tended family networks foster an early identification

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with a much wider range of models of Black woman- hood, which can lead to a greater sense of empower- ment in young Black girls.

s o c i a l l e a r n i n g t h e o r y a n d b l a c k m o t h e r i n g b e h av i o r

Understanding this goal of balancing the needs of ensuring their daughters’ physical survival with the vision of encouraging them to transcend the bound- aries confronting them sheds some light on some of the apparent contradictions in Black mother–daughter relationships. Black mothers are often described as strong disciplinarians and overly protective parents; yet these same women manage to raise daughters who are self-reliant and assertive.34 Professor Gloria Wade- Gayles offers an explanation for this apparent con- tradiction by suggesting that Black mothers “do not socialize their daughters to be passive or irrational. Quite the contrary, they socialize their daughters to be independent, strong and self-confident. Black mothers are suffocatingly protective and domineering precisely because they are determined to mold their daughters into whole and self-actualizing persons in a society that devalues Black women.”35

Black mothers emphasize protection either by trying to shield their daughters as long as possible from the penalties attached to their race, class, and gender or by teaching them how to protect them- selves in such situations. Black women’s autobiogra- phies and fiction can be read as texts revealing the multiple strategies Black mothers employ in prepar- ing their daughters for the demands of being Black women in oppressive conditions. For example, in dis- cussing the mother–daughter relationship in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, Rosalie Troester catalogues some of these strategies and the impact they may have on relationships themselves:

Black mothers, particularly those with strong ties to their community, sometimes build high banks around their young daughters, isolating them from the dangers of the larger world until they are old and strong enough to function as autonomous women. Often these dikes are religious, but sometimes they are built with education, family, or the restrictions of a close-knit and homogeneous community  .  .  . this

isolation causes the currents between Black mothers and daughters to run deep and the relationship to be fraught with an emotional intensity often missing from the lives of women with more freedom.36

Black women’s efforts to provide for their chil- dren also may affect the emotional intensity of Black mother–daughter relationships. As Gloria Wade- Gayles points out, “Mothers in Black women’s fiction are strong and devoted  .  .  . but  .  .  . they are rarely affectionate.”37 For far too many Black mothers, the demands of providing for children are so demanding that affection often must wait until the basic needs of physical survival are satisfied.

Black daughters raised by mothers grappling with hostile environments have to confront their feelings about the difference between the idealized versions of maternal love extant in popular culture and the strict, assertive mothers so central to their lives.38 For daughters, growing up means developing a better un- derstanding that offering physical care and protection is an act of maternal love. Ann Moody describes her growing awareness of the personal cost her mother paid as a single mother of three children employed as a domestic worker. Watching her mother sleep after the birth of another child, Moody remembers:

For a long time I stood there looking at her. I didn’t want to wake her up. I wanted to enjoy and preserve that calm, peaceful look on her face, I wanted to think she would always be that happy. . . . Adline and Junior were too young to feel the things I felt and know the things I knew about Mama. They couldn’t remember when she and Daddy separated. They had never heard her cry at night as I had or worked and helped as I had done when we were starving.39

Renita Weems’s account of coming to grips with maternal desertion provides another example of a daughter’s efforts to understand her mother’s behav- ior. In the following passage, Weems struggles with the difference between the stereotypical image of the super strong Black mother and her own alcoholic mother, who decided to leave her children:

My mother loved us. I must believe that. She worked all day in a department store bakery to buy shoes and school tablets, came home to curse out neighbors who

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wrongly accused her children of any impropriety (which in an apartment complex usually meant stealing), and kept her house cleaner than most sober women.40

Weems concludes that her mother loved her because she provided for her to the best of her ability.

Othermothers often play central roles in defus- ing the emotional intensity of relationships between bloodmothers and their daughters and in helping daughters understand the Afrocentric ideology of motherhood. Weems describes the women teachers, neighbors, friends, and othermothers that she turned to for help in negotiating a difficult mother/daughter relationship. These women, she notes, “did not have the onus of providing for me, and so had the luxury of talking to me.”41

June Jordan offers one of the most eloquent anal- yses of a daughter’s realization of the high personal cost Black women have paid as bloodmothers and other-mothers in working to provide an economic and emotional foundation for Black children. In the following passage, Jordan captures the feelings that my Black women students struggled to put into words:

As a child I noticed the sadness of my mother as she sat alone in the kitchen at night.  .  .  . Her woman’s work never won permanent victories of any kind. It never enlarged the universe of her imagination or her power to influence what happened beyond the front door of our house. Her woman’s work never tickled her to laugh or shout or dance. But she did raise me to respect her way of offering love and to be- lieve that hard work is often the irreducible factor for survival, not something to avoid. Her woman’s work produced a reliable home base where I could pursue the privileges of books and music. Her woman’s work invented the potential for a completely different kind of work for us, the next generation of Black women: huge, rewarding hard work demanded by the huge, new ambitions that her perfect confidence in us engendered.42

Jordan’s words not only capture the essence of the Afrocentric ideology of motherhood so central to the well-being of countless numbers of Black women. They simultaneously point the way into the future, one where Black women face the challenge of continuing the mothering traditions painstakingly nurtured by prior generations of African-American women.

N O T E S

1. The definition of culture used in this essay is taken from Leith Mullings, “Anthropological Per- spectives on the Afro-American Family,” American Journal of Social Psychiatry 6 (1986): 11–16. Ac- cording to Mullings, culture is composed of “the symbols and values that create the ideological frame of reference through which people attempt to deal with the circumstances in which they find themselves” (13).

2. For analyses of the relationship of the cult of true womanhood to Black women, see Leith Mull- ings, “Uneven Development: Class, Race and Gender in the United States before 1900,” in Wom- en’s Work, Development and the Division of Labor by Gender, ed. Eleanor Leacock and Helen Safa (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1986), pp. 41–57; Bonnie Thornton Dill, “Our Mothers’ Grief: Racial Ethnic Women and the Maintenance of Families,” Research Paper 4, Center for Research on Women (Memphis, TN: Memphis State University, 1986); and Hazel Carby, Re- constructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), esp. chapter 2.

3. Contrast, for example, the traditionalist analysis of Selma Fraiberg, Every Child’s Birthright: In Defense of Mothering (New York: Basic Books, 1977) to that of Jeffner Allen, “Motherhood: The Annihilation of Women,” in Mothering, Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. Joyce Trebilcot (Totowa, NJ: Rowan & Allanheld, 1983). See also Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976). For an overview of how traditionalists and feminists

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have shaped the public policy debate on abortion, see Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1984).

4. Mullings, “Uneven Development”; Dill, “Our Mother’s Grief”; and Carby, Reconstructing Woman- hood. Feminist scholarship is also challenging Western notions of the family. See Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom, eds., Rethinking the Family (New York: Longman, 1982).

5. Since Black women are no longer heavily concentrated in private domestic service, the Mammy image may be fading. In contrast, the matriarch image, popularized in Daniel Patrick Moyni- han’s, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1965), is reemerging in public debates about the feminization of poverty and the urban underclass. See Maxine Baca Zinn, “Minority Families in Crisis: The Public Discussion,” Research Paper 6, Center for Research on Women (Memphis, TN: Memphis State University, 1987).

6. For an alternative analysis of the Mammy image, see Judith Rollins, Between Women: Do- mestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1985). Classic responses to the matriarchy thesis include Robert Hill, The Strengths of Black Families (New York: Urban League, 1972); Andrew Billingsley, Black Families in White America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968); and Joyce Ladner, Tomorrow’s Tomorrow (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971). For a recent analysis, see Linda Burnham, “Has Poverty Been Feminized in Black America?” Black Scholar 16 (1985):15–24.

7. Mae King, “The Politics of Sexual Stereotypes,” Black Scholar 4 (1973):12–23. 8. Barbara Christian, “An Angle of Seeing: Motherhood in Buchi Emecheta’s Joys of Motherhood and

Alice Walker’s Meridian,” in Black Feminist Criticism, ed. Barbara Christian (New York: Pergamon, 1985), p. 214.

9. See Christine Oppong, ed., Female and Male in West Africa (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983); Niara Sudarkasa, “Female Employment and Family Organization in West Africa,” in The Black Woman Cross-Culturally, ed. Filomina Chiamo Steady (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1981), pp. 49–64; and Nancy Tanner, “Matrifocality in Indonesia and Africa and Among Black Americans,” in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 129–56.

10. Christine Oppong, “Family Structure and Women’s Reproductive and Productive Roles: Some Conceptual and Methodological Issues,” in Women’s Roles and Population Trends in the Third World, ed. Richard Anker, Myra Buvinic, and Nadia Youssef (London: Croom Heim, 1982), pp. 133–50.

11. The key distinction here is that, unlike the matriarchy thesis, women play central roles in fami- lies and this centrality is seen as legitimate. In spite of this centrality, it is important not to ideal- ize African women’s family roles. For an analysis by a Black African feminist, see Awa Thiam, Black Sisters, Speak Out: Feminism and Oppression in Black Africa (London: Pluto, 1978).

12. Sudarkasa, “Female Employment.” 13. John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophies (New York: Anchor, 1969). 14. Niara Sudarkasa, “Interpreting the African Heritage in Afro-American Family Organization,” in

Black Families, ed. Harriette Pipes McAdoo (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1981), pp. 37–53; and Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985).

15. The terms used in this section appear in Rosalie Riegle Troester’s “Turbulence and Tenderness: Mothers, Daughters, and ‘Othermothers’ in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones,” SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women 1 (Fall 1984):13–16.

16. See Tanner, “Matrifocality”; see also Carrie Allen McCray, “The Black Woman and Family Roles,” in The Black Woman, ed. LaFrances Rogers-Rose (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1980), pp. 67–78; Elmer Martin and Joanne Mitchell Martin, The Black Extended Family (Chicago: University of Chicago

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Press, 1978); Joyce Aschenbrenner, Lifelines, Black Families in Chicago (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1975); and Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).

17. Martin and Martin, The Black Extended Family; Stack, All Our Kin; and Virginia Young, “Family and Childhood in a Southern Negro Community,” American Anthropologist 72 (1970):269–88.

18. Stack, All Our Kin. 19. Ellen Cantarow, Moving the Mountain: Women Working for Social Change (Old Westbury, NY:

Feminist Press, 1980), p. 59. 20. Thordis Simonsen, ed., You May Plow Here, The Narrative of Sara Brooks (New York: Touchstone,

1986), p. 181. 21. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?; Dill, “Our Mothers’ Grief”; Mullings, “Uneven Development.” 22. Simonsen, You May Plow Here, p. 86. 23. Mamie Garvin Fields and Karen Fields, Lemon Swamp and Other Places, A Carolina Memoir

(New York: Free Press, 1983), p. xvii. 24. Ibid, p. 195. 25. Cheryl Gilkes, “‘Holding Back the Ocean with a Broom,’ Black Women and Community Work,”

in The Black Woman, ed. Rogers-Rose, 1980, pp. 217–31, and “Going Up for the Oppressed: The Career Mobility of Black Women Community Workers,” Journal of Social Issues 39 (1983):115–39.

26. Gilkes, “‘Holding Back the Ocean,”’ p. 219. 27. Fields and Fields, Lemon Swamp, p. xvi. 28. Charles Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934, 1979), p. 173. 29. Pamela Reid, “Socialization of Black Female Children,” in Women: A Developmental Perspective,

ed. Phyllis Berman and Estelle Ramey (Washington, DC: National Institutes of Health, 1983). 30. For works in the feminist psychoanalytic tradition, see Nancy Chodorow, “Family Structure and

Feminine Personality,” in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Rosaldo and Lamphere, 1974; Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1978); and Jane Flax, “The Conflict Between Nurturance and Autonomy in Mother–Daughter Relationships and within Feminism,” Feminist Studies 4 (1978):171–89.

31. Ann Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Dell, 1968). 32. Ladner, Tomorrow’s Tomorrow; Gloria Joseph, “Black Mothers and Daughters: Their Roles and

Functions in American Society,” in Common Differences, ed. Gloria Joseph and Jill Lewis (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1981), pp. 75–126; Lena Wright Myers, Black Women, Do They Cope Better? (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980).

33. Elsa Barkley Brown, “Hearing Our Mothers’ Lives,” paper presented at fifteenth anniversary of African-American and African Studies at Emory College, Atlanta, 1986. This essay appeared in the Black Women’s Studies issue of SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women, vol. 6, no. 1:4–11.

34. Joseph, “Black Mothers and Daughters”; Myers, 1980. 35. Gloria Wade-Gayles, “The Truths of Our Mothers’ Lives: Mother–Daughter Relationships in

Black Women’s Fiction,” SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women 1 (Fall 1984):12. 36. Troester, “Turbulence and Tenderness,” p. 13. 37. Wade-Gayles, “The Truths,” p. 10. 38. Joseph, “Black Mothers and Daughters.” 39. Moody, Coming of Age, p. 57. 40. Renita Weems, “‘Hush. Mama’s Gotta Go Bye Bye’: A Personal Narrative,” SAGE: A Scholarly Jour-

nal on Black Women 1 (Fall 1984): 26. 41. Ibid, p. 27. 42. June Jordan, On Call, Political Essays (Boston: South End Press, 1985), p. 145.

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Lisa J. Udel, Revision and Resistance: The Politics of Native Women’s Motherwork from Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vo. 22, No. 2 (2001(, pp. 43-62. Reprinted with permission of University of Nebraska Press.

Contemporary Native women of the United States and Canada, politically active in Indigenous rights movements for the past thirty years, variously articulate a reluctance to affiliate with white femi- nist movements of North America. Despite differ- ences in tribal affiliation, regional location, urban or reservation background, academic or community setting, and pro- or anti-feminist ideology, many Native women academics and grassroots activists alike invoke models of preconquest, egalitarian so- cieties to theorize contemporary social and political praxes. Such academics as Paula Gunn Allen, Rayna Green, and Patricia Monture-Angus, as well as Native activists Wilma Mankiller, Mary Brave Bird, and Yet Si Blue (Janet McCloud) have problematized the reformative role white feminism can play for Indig- enous groups, arguing that non-Native women’s par- ticipation in various forms of Western imperialism has often made them complicit in the oppression of Native peoples.1 More important, Native women contend that their agendas for reform differ from those they identify with mainstream white feminist movements. The majority of contemporary Native American women featured in recent collections by Ronnie Farley, Jane Katz, and Steve Wall, for example, are careful to stress the value of traditional, precon- tact female and male role models in their culture.2 One aspect of traditional culture that Native women cite as crucial to their endeavor is what Patricia Hill Collins calls “motherwork.”3 Many Native women valorize their ability to procreate and nurture their children, communities, and the earth as aspects of motherwork. “Women are sacred because we bring

life into this world,” states Monture-Angus. “First Nations women are respected as the centre of the nation for [this] reason.”4 Native women argue that they have devised alternate reform strategies to those advanced by Western feminism. Native women’s motherwork, in its range and variety, is one form of this activism, an approach that emphasizes Native traditions of “responsibilities” as distinguished from Western feminism’s notions of “rights.”

Writing for an ethnically diverse feminist au- dience in the journal Callaloo, Clara Sue Kidwell (Choctaw/Chippewa) warns: “Although feminists might deny this equation of anatomy and destiny, the fact is that the female reproductive function is a crucial factor in determining a woman’s social role in tribal societies. Women bear children who carr y on the culture of the group.”5 Mar y Gopher (Ojibway) explains the analog y of woman/Earth inherent in philosophies of many tribes: “In our religion, we look at this planet as a woman. She is the most important female to us because she keeps us alive. We are nursing off of her.”6 Carrie Dann (Western Shoshone) adds: “Indigenous women, they’re supposed to look at themselves as the Earth. That is the way we were brought up. This is what I tr y to tell the young people, especially the young girls.”7 Gopher and Dann invest moth- er work with religious and cultural authority that they, as elders, must transmit to younger women in their communities. Many contemporar y Native women argue that they must also educate white women in their traditional roles as women in order to safeguard the Earth, so that they will sur vive.

L I S A J . U D E L

23. REVISION AND RESISTANCE

The Politics of Native Women’s Motherwork

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Calling upon traditions of female leadership, Blue (Tulalip) contends:

It is going to be the job of Native women to begin teaching other women what their roles are. Women have to turn life around, because if they don’t, all of future life is threatened and endangered. I don’t care what kind of women they are, they are going to have to worry more about the changes that are taking place on this Mother Earth that will affect us all.8

Blue, like many Native women activists, links women’s authority as procreators with their larger responsibili- ties to a personified, feminized Earth.

Several Native women condemn Western femi- nism for what they perceive as a devaluation of motherhood and refutation of women’s traditional responsibilities.9 Paula Gunn Allen attributes the pronatalist stance articulated by so many Native women to the high incidence of coerced sterilization in Indian Health Service (IHS) facilities. An over- powering awareness of the government’s abduction of Indian children, the non-consensual sterilization of Native women, along with the nation’s highest infant mortality rates, pervades the work of Native writers and activists.10 American Indian Movement (AIM) veteran and celebrated author Mary Brave Bird, for instance, discusses the sterilization of her mother and sister, performed without their con- sent.11 Many women told Jane Katz stories of the forced abduction of their children by social welfare agencies and mission schools that were published in Messengers of the Wind.12 In her autobiography Half- breed, Maria Campbell (métis) tells a similar story of the Canadian government placing her siblings in foster care when her mother died, despite the fact that her father—the children’s parent and legal guardian—was still alive.13

Native women argue that in their marital con- tracts with Euramerican men they lost power, auton- omy, sexual freedom, and maternity and inheritance rights, which precluded their ability to accomplish mother-work. Green observes, for example, that an eighteenth-century Native woman allied to a fur trader relinquished control over her life and the lives of the children she bore from her white part- ner. This lack of control was compounded by the fact

that Native women married to white men gave birth to more children than those partnered with Native men. Furthermore, a Native woman lost the freedom to divorce of her own free will, and the “goods and dwelling that might have been her own property in Indian society became the possession of her white husband.”14 In contrast, within many Native tradi- tions, notes Green:

The children belonged entirely to women, as did the property and distribution of resources. Indian men abided by the rules of society. If a couple separated, the man would leave with only that which had belonged to him when he entered the relationship; if a woman formed an alliance with a European by choice, she had every reason to imagine that her society’s rules would be followed. For Indians, a white man who married an Indian was expected to acknowledge the importance and status of women. . . . In some tribes, adult women were free to seek out sexual alliances with whomever they chose.15

In order to do motherwork well, Native women argue, women must have power.

Euramericans held different ideas about female sexuality and inheritance. Many white men married Indian women who owned land in order to acquire their inheritance. When conflict over property rights inevitably arose, European laws dominated, Native women lost ownership rights to their land and suf- fered diminished economic autonomy and political status. Examples of this phenomenon occurred in the early twentieth century when oil was discovered in Oklahoma; white men married into wealthy female- centered Osage families and inherited the family’s property. “Under Osage practice, the oil revenues would have been reserved for the woman’s family and controlled by her. Common property laws es- tablished by white men gave the husband control,” explains Green. “In a number of notorious instances in Oklahoma, women were murdered so that their husbands could inherit their wealth.”16 Certainly the concept that Indian women suffer through sexual contact with non-Native men is evident in the works of Beth Brant, Green, and Mankiller, as well as in the story of the women of Tobique, who lost their Indian status once they married white men.

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Native women also experienced the loss of eco- nomic and political power through diminished reproductive freedom. Christian ideology recast women’s sexuality, emphasizing procreation, virtue, and modesty. Early records show missionaries’ agi- tation over the sexual autonomy of most unmarried Native women. As Christian-based roles were as- serted, Native traditions of birth control and popula- tion control were forgotten. For example, Cherokee women traditionally held the right to limit popula- tion through infanticide. Similarly, Seneca women were able to limit their families, starting childbear- ing early and ending it early. Seneca society also did not mandate marriage for legitimate childbearing.17

The involuntary sterilization of Native women (as well as Mexican American and African American women) is common knowledge among those com- munities affected but remains largely unknown to those outside the communities. A federal govern- ment investigation in 1976 discovered that in the four-year period between 1973 and 1976 more than three thousand Native women were involuntarily sterilized. Of the 3,406 women sterilized, 3,001 were between the ages of fifteen and forty-four.18 A 1979 report revealed that six out of ten hospitals rou- tinely sterilized women under the age of twenty-one, a clear violation of the 1974 Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (DHEW) guidelines prohibit- ing involuntary sterilization of minors.19 According to Bertha Medicine Bull, a leader on the Montana Lame Deer Reservation, two local fifteen-year-old girls were sterilized when they had appendectomies, without their knowledge or consent.20 Only four out of twelve IHS facilities were investigated; therefore, the estimated number of women sterilized either coercively (often through the illegal threat of with- holding government aid or the removal of existing children), or without their knowledge, during this period is estimated at twelve thousand.21

Green writes that because of “sterilization and experimentation abuse on Native American women and men in Indian Health Service facilities, Native American people have been warier than ever of con- traceptive technologies.”22 Many Native women, re- sponding to the involuntary sterilization cases they have encountered directly and indirectly, blame the

US government for genocidal policies toward Native populations. Connie Uri (Choctaw), for example, observed in 1978: “We are not like other minorities. We have no gene pool in Africa or Asia. When we are gone, that’s it.”23 Activist Barbara Moore (the sister Mary Brave Bird describes) links sterilization with genocide much more explicitly: “There are plans to get rid of Indians. They actually plan different kinds of genocide. One way to do that is through alcohol, another way is birth control, and one of the most cruel ways is to sterilize Indian women by force.”24 Moore recounts the story of her child’s birth, deliv- ered by Cesarean section and reported as a stillbirth, although the autopsy she demanded determined the cause of death as inconclusive. Moore states: “My child was born healthy. Besides this, they told me that I could not have any more children because they have had to sterilize me. I was sterilized during the operation without my knowledge and without my agreement.”25

Native women thus value and argue for repro- ductive autonomy, which they link with empowered mother-work; but, they approach this autonomy from a perspective that they feel differs from mainstream feminism. Given the history of the IHS campaign to curtail Native women’s reproductive capacity and thus Native populations, Native women emphasize women’s ability, sometimes “privilege,” to bear chil- dren. Within this paradigm, they argue, Native wom- en’s pro-creative capability becomes a powerful tool to combat Western genocide. Motherhood recovered, along with the tribal responsibility to nurture their children in a traditional manner and without non- Indigenous interference, assumes a powerful politi- cal meaning when viewed this way.26

w h i t e f e m i n i s m a n d r e p r o d u c t i v e a u t o n o m y

The role of white feminism in the campaign for re- productive autonomy has been a sore point among many Native women who link the American eugenics movement with American birth control movements of the early twentieth century. Both movements, which involved the participation of white feminists of their time, began as an effort to grant women control over their fertility, and thus gain some measure of economic

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and political autonomy, but eventually gave way to eu- genic and population control forces. The focus moved from “self determination” to the “social control” of immigrant and working classes by “the elite.” As histo- rian Linda Gordon explains, eugenics became a domi- nant aspect of the movement to legalize contraception and sterilization, and, eventually, “Birth controllers from the socialist-feminist revolution . . . made accom- modations with eugenists.”27

White-dominated feminism’s historic failure to combat racist and classist ideologies, compounded by promotion of ideologies to gain suffrage in the past, has perpetuated the link between white main- stream feminism to eugenics. The resulting confla- tion of birth control movements with eugenics and population control has had a negative impact both on disadvantaged people vulnerable to external social control and also on the feminist movement. Gordon argues that feminist birth control advocates accepted racist attitudes of the eugenicists and popu- lation controllers, even sharing anti–working-class, anti-immigrant sentiment.28 The population control and eugenics movements dominated early and mid- twentieth-century white feminism, obfuscating the latter’s agenda and efficacy. This history continues to influence theories of birth control today. Accord- ing to Gordon, “Planned Parenthood’s use of small- family ideology and its international emphasis on sterilization rather than safe and controllable contra- ception have far overshadowed its feminist program for women’s self-determination.”29

The public does not distinguish between birth control “as a program of individual rights” and popu- lation control as social policy that strips the individ- ual of those very rights. It is this blurred distinction that Native women criticize. Brave Bird, for instance, points out the irrelevance of abortion rights to Indian women who see tribal repopulation as one of their primary goals. A self-identified Indian feminist, Brave Bird recognizes the value of reproductive rights for women whose bodies have been controlled by others; however, she objects to white feminists who would dictate an Indian feminist agenda to her.30 In 1977 the Hyde Amendment withdrew federal fund- ing for abortions but left free-on-demand surgical sterilizations funded by the DHEW; consequently

some poor women were forced to choose infertility as their method of birth control because pregnancy prevention was also not funded.

Native women employ motherist rhetoric in their critiques of Western feminism as a response to their history of enforced sterilization and also as a defen- sive strategy crucial to marking women’s dignity and contributions to Native cultures. Speaking to a pre- dominantly white audience of feminists at the Na- tional Women’s Studies Association meeting in 1988, Green explained that “models of kinship [mother, sister, grandmother, aunt] are used by Indian women to measure their capacity for leadership and to mea- sure the success of their leadership.”31 Such kinship models of evaluation, however, are not to be read literally. These roles are not biologically determined, Green emphasized; they are symbolic:

Women like me are going to blow it in the role of mother if left to the narrow, biological role. But in Indian country, that role was never understood nec- essarily only as a biological role; grandma was never understood as a biological role; sister and aunt were never understood in the narrow confines of genetic kinship.32

As leaders, Native women must oversee the survival of Native peoples, notes Green. While Green, like Blue and Carrie Dann, sees Native people as the primary redeemers of America, she emphatically refutes the ap- propriation of Native traditions to “heal” mainstream American culture. “We cannot do that,” she explains.

There has been so much abuse of this role that it’s frightening.  .  .  . All Indigenous people have that power, because we speak from the earth. . . . But we cannot heal you; only you can heal yourselves. . . . If we have any model to give, it is an aesthetic model, a cultural model, that works for us.

Green warns that Western appropriation of Indig- enous traditions, rituals, and philosophies (made popular in the New Age Movement, for example) will not provide a “quick fix” for the problems of Western culture. Green’s position is an attempt to clarify the role of Native traditions in the reformative enterprise. Native activists will not perform the service-work of healing Western cultures. Green points out that such

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expectations are embedded in colonial histories; they keep the “sick” Western subject at the center to be tended by the Native “other.”33

Native women’s strategic use of a motherist stance is a conscious act of separation from traditional feminists.34 The women locate their activism not in feminist struggle, but in cultural survival, identify- ing themselves, as Anne Snitow explains, “not as feminists but as militant mothers, fighting together for [the] survival [of their children].” Women become motherists, Snitow writes, when “men are forced to be absent (because they are migrant workers or sol- diers) or in times of crisis, when the role of nurtur- ance assigned to women has been rendered difficult or impossible.”35 A motherist position would apply to Native women living on and off reservations where employment opportunities are scarce for men, as well as for women who lose their mothering capacity to sterilization or their living children to boarding schools. The motherists Snitow describes intuitively relied upon the presence of their female commu- nity because “crisis made the idea of a separate, pri- vate identity beyond the daily struggle for survival unimportant.”36

White feminists and Native motherists endorsed divergent strategies, notes Snitow. Her model per- fectly characterizes dichotomies between Native women’s collective identifications—including their loyalties to traditions that puzzle white women—and non-Native feminists’ individuating theories. “Col- lectivist movements are powerful, but they usually don’t raise questions about women’s work,” she ex- plains. “Feminism has raised the questions, and claimed an individual destiny for each woman, but remains ambivalent toward older traditions of female solidarity.”37 For example, traditional dichot- omies of public and private domains, characteristic of much feminist writing of the 1970s and 1980s, does not work for women of color for whom “those domains are not separate or at least not separate in the same ways as for white women.”38 This is espe- cially true with Native cultures, which are structured along collective rather than individual dynamics characteristic of Western cultures.39 The separation of public and private spheres, along with “the primacy of gender conflict as a feature of the family, and the

gender-based assignment of reproductive labor,” con- stitute three concepts of traditional white feminist theory that ignore the interaction of race and gender and thus fail to account for Native women’s experi- ence of motherwork.40

Evelyn Nakano Glenn observes that for racial ethnic women, the concept of the “domestic” ex- tends beyond the nuclear family to include broadly defined relations of kin and community. Often living in situations of economic insecurity and assault on their culture, racially ethnic women have not been able to rely solely on the nuclear family because it is not self-sufficient, but have relied upon and con- tributed to an extended network of family and com- munity. Thus, work conducted in the domestic, hence “private,” sphere includes contributions to the ex- tended “public” network, where women care for each other’s children, exchange supplies, and help nurse the sick. Racial ethnic women’s work has simulta- neously moved into the public sphere of the ethnic community, in support of the church, political orga- nizing, and other activities on behalf of their collec- tive. Glenn writes that racial ethnic women are “often the core of community organizations, and their in- volvement is often spurred by a desire to defend their children, their families, and their ways of life.”41

Certainly Glenn’s point is relevant to contempo- rary Native women living on and off the reservation. Focused on strengthening Native economies and traditions, contemporary Native women may engage in traditional skills of beadwork or quilting, for ex- ample, in order to earn money and prestige to benefit, feed, and educate their children. Women may engage in activities historically associated with men in order to revise and strengthen tribal culture. Such women drum at local powwows, or are political activists, such as Mary Brave Bird of AIM and, more recently, Winona LaDuke (White Earth Ojibwa), founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, cochair of the Indigenous Women’s Network, and vice presiden- tial candidate for the Green Party in the last two elec- tions. Patricia Hill Collins notes that work and family do not function as separate, dichotomous spheres for women of color, but are, in fact, often overlapping. By linking individual and collective welfare, Collins neatly articulates the philosophy underlying most

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Native cultures. While individual achievement is sought and recognized, it is always within the con- text of the collective that such endeavors are valued. It follows that Wilma Mankiller became Principal Chief of the Cherokee to benefit the Cherokee.42

For women of color, then, motherwork involves working for the physical survival of children and community, confronting what Collins calls the “dia- lectical nature of power and powerlessness in struc- turing mothering patterns, and the significance of self-definition in constructing individual and collec- tive racial identity.” This type of motherwork, while ensuring individual and community survival, can result in the loss of individual autonomy “or the sub- mersion of individual growth for the benefit of the group.”43 The deemphasis on individual autonomy proves troubling to white feminists who have sought to extricate the individual woman’s identity from the debilitating influences of social expectation in order to articulate and celebrate her emergence into what has generally been viewed as a more liberated indi- vidual. Once again we experience the fallout of con- flicting ideas between Western liberalism and Native collectivism.

When feminist theory posits “the family” as “the locus of gender conflict,” focusing on the economic dependence of women and the inequitable division of labor, it inevitably draws upon models of the white, middle-class, nuclear family. Viewed thus, marriage within the white, middle-class, nuclear family oppresses women. In order to gain libera- tion, white feminists have argued, women must be free from the unequal balance of power marriage has conferred. In contrast, Glenn points out, women of color often experience their families as a “source of resistance to oppression from outside institutions.” Within Glenn’s construct, we see that women of color engage in activities to keep their families unified and teach children survival skills. This work is viewed as a method of resistance to oppression rather than gender exploitation. Unified in struggle against colo- nial oppression, family members focus on individual survival, maintenance of family authority, and the transmission of cultural traditions. Economically, Glenn notes, women of color remain less dependent upon men than white women because they must earn

an income to support the family. Both incomes are necessary for a family’s survival. Glenn writes that because the earning gap between women and men of color is narrower than that of whites, “men and women [of color have been] mutually dependent; de- pendence rarely ran in one direction.” Such families may be sustained by members whose relationships are characterized by interdependence and gender complementarity.44

Glenn’s paradigm of the family can be applied in a broader context in order to consider aspects of con- temporary reservation and urban life. For example, Christine Conte’s study of western Navajo women examines how they employ kin ties and cooperative networks to perform tasks, obtain resources, and acquire wealth. Such cooperation typically includes the exchange of labor, commodities, subsistence goods, information, cash, and transportation.45 Sim- ilarly, women featured in Steve Wall’s collection of interviews with tribal elders describe themselves as family leaders, intent on transmitting cultural tra- ditions to the generation that follows them.46 AIM schools of the 1970s, typically run by women, pro- vide one example of offering Native children an al- ternative value system to the mission and boarding schools that many of their parents (such as Mary Brave Bird) experienced.

Like Glenn and Collins, Patricia Monture-Angus points to the differing roles that the family plays for Native women and non-Native women. Citing Marlee Kline, Monture-Angus notes that, while women of color and white women can both experience violence in the family, women of color look to their family as a system of support against violent racism from outside the family. Thus, while the Native family may “provide a site of cultural and political resistance to White supremacy,”47 Native women can also experi- ence contradictory relationships within their fami- lies, requiring that they also revise their families as they go along. Drawing upon networks of kin for support, survival, and pleasure, Native women also combat trends in domestic violence and prescribed gender roles that threaten and constrain them.48

Collins identifies three main themes that com- prise ethnic women’s struggles for maternal em- powerment: 1) reproductive autonomy; 2) parental

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privileges; and 3) the threat of cultural eradication by the dominant culture.49 Many women of color have not known the experience of determining their own fertility. For Native women sterilized without their consent, choosing to become a mother takes on political meaning, an act that challenges, as Angela Davis has said, “institutional policies that encourage white middle-class women to reproduce and discourage low-income racial ethnic women from doing so, even penalizing them.”50 Once a woman of color becomes a parent, she is threatened with the physical and/or psychological separation from her children “designed to disempower racial ethnic individuals and undermine their communi- ties.”51 The Indian boarding and mission schools of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ser ve as an example of this disempowerment, coupled, as they were, with “the per vasive efforts by the dominant group to control their children’s minds” by forbid- ding any use of Native languages and the denigra- tion of “the power of mothers to raise their children as they see fit.”52 For women of color, motherwork entails the difficult tasks of “tr ying to foster a mean- ingful racial identity in children within a society that denigrates people of color” and sustaining a form of resistance.53

For many Native women, motherwork is linked with the authority of leadership.54 Discussing West- ern imperialism’s degenerative effect on female lead- ership, Chief Wilma Mankiller contends:

Europeans brought with them the view that men were the absolute heads of households, and women were to be submissive to them. It was then that the role of women in Cherokee society began to decline. One of the new values Europeans brought to the Cherokees was a lack of balance and harmony between men and women. It was what we today call sexism. This was not a Cherokee concept. Sexism was borrowed from Europeans.55

Mankiller characterizes the resistance she en- countered to her campaign for the position of Principal Chief of the Cherokee as evidence of the erosion of traditional Native political structures under the onslaught of Western influence. Although traditionally matrilineal, the Cherokee adopted

Western configurations of gender that favor patri- archal structures, notes Mankiller. Among recent Cherokee accomplishments, such as addressing issues of poverty and education reform, and the revitalization of cultural traditions, Mankiller in- cludes revised gender roles and the reclamation of women’s power.

The current status of Native women—both on and off the reservations involved in tribal politi- cal, cultural, and religious revitalization—drives many contemporary writers to emphasize the rich- ness of traditional Native women’s lives as models for reform. Just as Green insists on traditions that cultivate women’s leadership, Lakota anthropolo- gist Beatrice Medicine emphasizes the importance women play in Lakota ceremonial and artistic life, along with the status their work garners. Medicine contends that “the traditional woman was greatly respected and revered,” that she hosted feasts and participated in sacred ceremonies, and that women’s societies held competitions in the arts of sewing, beading, and other crafts that proved economi- cally lucrative in trade and were thus prestigious for the winner. Contemporary life on the reservations is very different, Medicine notes. Lakota women suffer diminished prestige, and they are threatened by poor economic conditions, government usurpa- tion of the functions traditionally provided by the family (such as welfare and education), and the loss of traditional values that unify kinship roles and ob- ligations. Where Sioux women formerly used their artistic talents to make a respectable marriage and to earn prestige and wealth, they now continue their artistic work but with diminished economic return. At one time a woman might have earned one horse in exchange for a “skillfully decorated robe”; now she will earn approximately sixty cents an hour for a quilt.56

Many Native women agree with Allen, who contends, “The tradition of strong, autonomous, self-defining women comes from Indians. They [Eu- roamericans] sure didn’t get it in sixteenth-centur y Europe.”57 Monture-Angus explains that the term “traditional” privileges neither “static” nor re- gressive perspectives, but embraces holistic ap- proaches to reform. Monture-Angus points out that

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“traditional perspectives include the view that the past and all its experiences inform the present real- ity.”58 She advocates an interpretation of traditions that is fluid and adaptive, one that will enable Native societies to confront situations of contemporar y life such as domestic violence, substance addiction, and youth suicide. Because many precontact cultures did not condone abuse of women, Monture-Angus argues, a literal interpretation of traditions will fail to provide a contemporar y model of social reform. “What we can reclaim is the values [sic] that created a system where the abuses did not occur. We can recover our own system of law, law that has at its centre the family and our kinship relations. . . . We must be patient with each other as we learn to live in a decolonized way.”59 Monture-Angus articulates a belief in the beauty and efficacy of Native tradi- tions shared by many Native women writing about strategies for battling colonialism and supporting tribal sur vival.

Part of the reclamation of cultural traditions in- volves the recognition of “responsibilities,” a term many Native theorists distinguish from Western no- tions of “rights.” Native women thus articulate their responsibilities in terms of their roles as mothers and leaders, positing those roles as a form of mother- work. “Responsibility focuses attention not on what is mine, but on the relationships between people and creation (that is, both the individual and the collec- tive),” writes Monture-Angus.60 Native activists argue that rights-based theories predispose Western cul- tures to abuse the earth and to oppress other societ- ies that value their relationship to the earth. Renee Senogles (Red Lake Chippewa) notes: “The differ- ence between Native American women and white feminists is that the feminists talk about their rights and we talk about our responsibilities. There is a pro- found difference. Our responsibility is to take care of our natural place in the world.”61 Osennontion and Skonaganleh:rá concur, clarifying the emphasis of Haudenosaunee law on responsibilities within politi- cal and social realms, which include the observance of clan structure and communal ties, and a personal code of honor, integrity, compassion, and strength, linked to the maintenance of a relationship with the natural world.62

One primar y goal of Native activists involves restructuring and reinforcing Indian families. This includes their reevaluation of both women’s and men’s roles. If Native women are to fulfill traditions of female leadership, they argue, Native men must reclaim their responsibilities so that the enterprise supporting Indigenous sur vival and prosperity can move forward. Native women repeatedly fault white feminists for the devaluation of men in their revi- sionar y tactics. Part of a man’s responsibility is to protect and provide for his family, as well as to expe- dite political and social duties. If a man fails in his responsibilities, it falls upon the society’s women to instruct, reeducate, and remind him of his ob- ligations. Native activists fault Western hegemony and capitalism as systems responsible for alien- ating so many Native men from their traditional responsibilities.

In the face of coerced agrarianism and the attend- ing devaluation of hunting, and the consequences of forced removal and relocation, Native men have suf- fered a loss of status and traditional self-sufficiency even more extensive than their female counterparts, argue many Native women.63 Women’s traditional roles as procreator, parent, domestic leader, and even artisan have, to some extent, remained intact. For example, Clara Sue Kidwell obser ves that during early contact, women’s “functions as childbearers and contributors to subsistence were not threatening to white society and were less affected than those of Indian men.”64 In situations of contact, Kidwell points out, women often became the custodians of traditional cultural values, engaging in reproductive labor and motherwork. In contrast, men suffer from an inability to fulfill traditional roles. On the Pine Ridge reser vation of the Lakota, employment oppor- tunities for Lakota men are practically nonexistent. Federal agencies, such as the BIA and IHS provide the majority of the employment available. Ver y few businesses are owned by the Lakota, and, because of the land allotment, less than 10 percent of res- er vation land is actually owned by Native Ameri- cans. Jobs available to men, such as construction, are project-oriented and thus sporadic, whereas job opportunities for women, such as nursing, teaching, clerical, and domestic work, are more consistently

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available.65 Ramona Ford obser ves that contempo- rar y Native women hold down more jobs than do Native men, although they earn inadequate wages.66 It is evident that such cash-based, gender-delimited jobs keep the majority of Native people living below the poverty line in both the United States and Canada.67

Part of their responsibilities then, contend many Native women, is the restoration of traditional male roles, along with the selection and training of ap- propriate male leaders. Once installed in leadership roles, Osennontion and Skonaganleh:rá write, the men are responsible to the women who have em- powered them, and the women ensure that their leaders remain “good men,” mindful of the recip- rocal relationship between leader and subject.68 The definition of their responsibilities—their at- tendance to clan and communal structure through an investment in male esteem—coincides with the taxonomy I discuss in reproductive labor and mother work.

While some Western feminists might recoil from such an investment in the restoration of male psyche, seeing it as a refined form of female abjec- tion, it is important to remember that the majority of Native women writing and speaking today—who are political activists, feminist scholars, anthropolo- gists, law professors, and grassroots organizers—all emphasize the importance of men to the revitaliza- tion of Native communities. Obviously then, these Native women do not prescribe female subjugation, but rather the solidification of a communal, ex- tended network of support that acts as the family. This family takes many forms and rarely resembles the Western model of the nuclear, patriarch-led unit. For example, the two collections Women of the Native Struggle and Wisdom’s Daughters feature vastly extended, matrilineal and matrilocal families, often with single, pregnant women as their members and leaders.69 Such families seek to reintegrate men into communal life, but not within Western patriarchal paradigms. Osennontion and Skonaganleh:rá argue for the necessity of women’s participation on the Band Council, the governing body for many East Coast Canadian tribes, including the Haudeno- saunee: “Women have a responsibility to make sure

that we don’t lose any more, that we don’t do any more damage, while we work on getting our original government system back in good working order.”70 As Monture-Angus notes, an emphasis on Native tra- ditions does not preclude the integration of old and new. While recognizing the value of traditional cul- ture and practice, Native activists and feminists do not blindly embrace behavior simply because it may be called “traditional,” especially if it is oppressive to women. Just who determines what is to be called “traditional” and therefore valuable is also under scrutiny.

Indigenous women activists cite the difficulties that inform their theories and praxes of activism: the widespread violence committed against Native women; the common occurrence of rape; the murder of family members (Brave Bird, Campbell, and Lee Maracle, for instance, all recount such experiences); the murder and mutilation of leaders and friends (such as activist Annie Mae Aquash); the govern- ment’s abduction of Indian children; and sterilization of Native women. It is vital that Native communities retrieve lost traditions of gender complementarity, they argue. The majority of Native American women involved in women’s rights point to their own brand of feminism that calls on obscured traditions of women’s autonomy and power. Such efforts, which are generally grassroots, reflect Native traditions of community-based activism comparable to the para- digm Snitow outlines.

In any discussion of possible coalition between contemporary Indigenous groups and white feminist groups, Native women insist that their prospective partners recognize Indigenous traditions of female autonomy and prestige, traditions that can provide models of social reform in white, as well as Native, America. This proposed coalition suggests a move beyond idealized appropriation, to a shared vision of political and cultural reform. In their eagerness to co- alesce, white feminists have been rightly accused of ignoring or eliding differences between and among women. Native women resist reductionist impulses inherent in Western feminism, insisting that we ex- amine the varying historical contingencies of each group that continue to shape feminist discourses into the next century.

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N O T E S

1. Examples include Paula Gunn Allen, Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting, Border-Crossing, Loose Canons (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), and Spider Wom- an’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Jane Caputi, “Interview with Paula Gunn Allen,” Trivia 16 (1990): 50–67, and “Interview” in Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out, ed. Donna Perry (New Bruns- wick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993); Rayna Green, “American Indian Women: Diverse Leadership for Social Change,” in Bridges of Power: Women’s Multicultural Alliances, ed. Lisa Al- brecht and Rose M. Brewer (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1990), “Review Essay: Native American Women,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 6:2 (1980): 248–67, and Women in American Indian Society (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1992); Patricia A. Monture-Angus, Thunder in My Soul: A Mohawk Woman Speaks (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1995); Patricia A. Monture, “I Know My Name: A First Nations Woman Speaks,” in Limited Edi- tion: Voices of Women, Voices of Feminism, ed. Geraldine Finn (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1993); Wilma Mankiller and Michael Wallis, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993); Mary Brave Bird and Richard Erdoes, Ohitika Woman (New York: Harper Collins, 1993); Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes, Lakota Woman (New York: Harper Collins, 1991); and Janet McCloud, in Women of the Native Struggle: Portraits and Testimony of Native American Women, ed. Ronnie Farley (New York: Orion Books, 1993).

2. Farley, Women of the Native Struggle, Jane Katz, ed., Messengers of the Wind: Native Ameri- can Women Tell Their Life Stories (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995); and Steve Wall, ed., Wisdom’s Daughters: Conversations with Women Elders of Native America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993).

3. Patricia Hill Collins applies the term “motherwork” to the tasks engaged in by women/mothers of color. Collins contends that women of color recognize the embattled nature of their families and identify the most destructive forces as coming from outside their families rather than from within. Part of women’s work, or motherwork, consists of maintaining “family integrity.” The kind of motherwork Collins outlines, and many Native women describe, reflects the belief that “individual survival, empowerment, and identity require group survival, empowerment, and identity” (“Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing About Motherhood,” in Representations of Motherhood, ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994], 59).

4. Monture-Angus, Thunder in My Soul, 49. 5. Clara Sue Kidwell, “What Would Pocahontas Think Now? Women and Cultural Persistence,”

Callaloo 17:1 (1994): 149. 6. Mary Gopher, in Farley, Women of the Native Struggle, 77. 7. Carrie Dann in Farley, Women of the Native Struggle, 77. 8. Yet Si Blue in Farley, Women of the Native Struggle, 83. 9. Monture-Angus, Thunder in My Soul, 210; Paula Gunn Allen, quoted in Caputi, “Interview,” 8;

and Ingrid Washinawatok-El Issa in Farley, Women of the Native Struggle, 48. 10. Allen, “Interview,” in Perry, Backtalk, 17. 11. Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes, Lakota Woman (New York: Harper-Perennial, 1991) 78–79. 12. Jane Katz, ed., Messengers of the Wind: Native American Women Tell Their Life Stories (New

York: Ballantine Books, 1995), 35–37, 60, 80–81.

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13. Maria Campbell, Halfbreed (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), 103–7. 14. Green, Women in American Indian Society, 37. 15. Green, Women in American Indian Society, 37–38. 16. Green, Women in American Indian Society, 38. Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit (New York: Ivy

Books, 1990) is a fictionalized account of this gynocidal episode in Native-Euramerican history. 17. Ramona Ford, “Native American Women: Changing Statuses, Changing Interpretations,” in Writ-

ing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West, ed. Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 58; and Nancy Shoemaker, “The Rise or Fall of Iroquois Women,” Journal of Women’s History 2:3 (1991): 39–57, 51. For further discussion of gender in precontact cultures, see Evelyn Blackwood’s “Sexuality and Gender in Certain Native American Tribes,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 10:1 (1984): 27–42.

18. Janet Karsten Larson, “And Then There Were None: Is Federal Policy Endangering the American Indian Species?” Christian Century 94, January 26, 1977, 61–63; and Mark Miller, “Native American Peoples on the Trail of Tears Once More: Indian Health Service and Coerced Sterilization,” America 139 (1978): 422–25.

19. R. Bogue and D. W. Segelman, “Survey Finds Seven in 10 Hospitals Violate DHEW Guidelines on Informed Consent for Sterilization,” Family Planning Perspectives 11:6 (1979): 366–67.

20. Miller, “Native American Peoples on the Trail of Tears,” 424. 21. Charles R. England, “A Look at the Indian Health Service Policy of Sterilization, 1972–1976,”

Native American Homepage, October 10, 1997, 6. For a fuller discussion of this topic, see Myla F. Thyrza Carpio, “Lost Generation: The Involuntary Sterilization of American Indian Women” (master’s thesis, Johns Hopkins, 1991).

22. Green, “Review Essay,” 261. 23. Connie Uri, quoted in Miller, “Native American Peoples on the Trail of Tears,” 423. 24. Barbara Moore quoted in Fee Podarski, “An Interview with Barbara Moore on Sterilization,”

Akwesasne Notes 11:2 (1979): 11–12. 25. Barbara Moore, quoted in Podarski, “An Interview with Barbara Moore,” 11. 26. Indian status is another aspect of the eradication of Native populations. Both in Canada and

the United States, entire tribes have lost their status as “Indian” or “Native” and are identified instead as “colored.” For an example in early-twentieth-century Virginia see J. David Smith, The Eugenic Assault on America: Scenes in Red, White, and Black (Fairfax, Va.: George Mason University Press, 1993); and for a more recent example pertaining to the Tobique in Canada, see Tobique Women’s Group, Enough Is Enough: Aboriginal Women Speak Out, as told to Janet Silman, (Toronto: The Women’s Press, 1987).

27. Linda Gordon, “Why Nineteenth-Century Feminists Did Not Support ‘Birth Control’ and Twentieth-Century Feminists Do: Feminism, Reproduction, and the Family,” in Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, ed. Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 149.

28. Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976), 281.

29. Gordon, “Why Nineteenth-Century Feminists Did Not Support ‘Birth Control,’” 150. 30. Mary Brave Bird and Richard Erdoes, Ohitika Woman (New York: Harper-Perennial, 1993), 58. 31. Green, “American Indian Women,” 65. 32. Green, “American Indian Women,” 66. 33. Green, “American Indian Women,” 63, 64, 71.

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34. Ironically, early feminists and advocates of “voluntary motherhood” proposed an agenda simi- lar to Native women’s. Both saw voluntary motherhood as part of a movement to empower women (Gordon, “Why Nineteenth-Century Feminists Did Not Support ‘Birth Control,’” 145). Suffragists’ desire to exalt motherhood was a way of creating a dignified, powerful position for women in contrast to popular notions of womanhood that connoted fragility and virtue. By evoking a powerful model, women responded to their sexual subjugation to men and created an alternate arena where they had authority (Gordon, Woman’s Body, 133–34).

35. Ann Snitow, “A Gender Diary,” in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Mariann Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990), 20.

36. Snitow, “A Gender Diary,” 20. 37. Snitow, “A Gender Diary,” 22. 38. Quotation from in Bassin, Honey, and Kaplan, Representations of Motherhood, 5. See, for ex-

ample, Jessica Benjamin, “Authority and the Family Revisited: Or, a World without Fathers,” New German Critique 4:3 (1978): 35–57; Nancy Chodorow, “Family Structure and Feminine Person- ality,” in Women, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 43–66; and Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

39. For more detailed critiques of the limitations of dualistic separation of private and public sec- tors for gender analysis generally, see Susan Himmelweit, “The Real Dualism of Sex and Class,” Review of Radical Political Economics 16:1 (1984): 167–83. For Native women more particu- larly, see Patricia Albers, “Sioux Women in Transition: A Study of Their Changing Status in a Domestic and Capitalist Sector of Production,” in The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women, ed. Patricia Albers and Beatrice Medicine (Lanham, Md. University Press of America, 1983), and Albers, “Autonomy and Dependency in the Lives of Dakota Women: A Study in His- torical Change,” Review of Radical Political Economics 17:3 (1985): 109–34.

40. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “Racial Ethnic Women’s Labor: The Intersection of Race, Gender and Class Oppression,” Review of Radical Political Economics 17:3 (1985): 101; Patricia Hill Collins, “Shifting the Center”; and Bonnie Thornton Dill, “Our Mothers’ Grief: Racial Ethnic Women and the Maintenance of Families,” Journal of Family History 13:4 (1988): 415–31, use the term “re- productive labor” to refer to all of the work of women in the home. Dill describes reproductive labor to include “the buying and preparation of food and clothing, provision of emotional sup- port and nurturance for all family members, bearing children, and planning, organizing, and car- rying out a wide variety of tasks associated with the socialization” (“Our Mothers’ Grief,” 430). I adopt Patricia Hill Collins’s use of the term “motherwork,” which she employs to “soften the di- chotomies in feminist theorizing about motherhood that posit rigid distinctions between private and public, family and work, the individual and the collective, identity as individual autonomy and iden- tity growing from the collective self-determination of one’s group. Racial ethnic women’s mothering and work experiences occur at the boundaries demarking these dualities” (“Shifting the Center,” 59).

41. Glenn, “Racial Ethnic Women’s Labor,” 102, 103. Several recent studies of modern Native house- hold units find that women often head extended families and kinship networks that resist capi- talist models that marginalize them. See Albers, “Autonomy and Dependency in the Lives of Dakota Women,” “From Illusion to Illumination: Anthropological Studies of American Indian Women,” in Gender and Anthropology. Critical Reviews for Research and Teaching, ed. Sandra Morgan (Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association, 1989), and “Sioux Women in Transition”; Martha C. Knack, Life Is with People: Household Organization of the Contem- porary Southern Paiute Indians (Socorro, N. Mex.: Ballena Press, 1980); and Loraine Littlefield,

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“Gender, Class and Community: The History of Sne-Nay-Muxw Women’s Employment” (Ph.D. diss., University of British Columbia, 1995).

42. Collins, “Shifting the Center,” 58. Obviously, personal ambition is usually seen as selfish and suspect for women generally. Women have typically couched descriptions of their ambitions in terms of altruism and collective responsibility. My point here, however, is that leadership within Native paradigms embraces collective more than individual identity.

43. Collins, “Shifting the Center,” 61, 62. 44. Glenn, “Racial Ethnic Women’s Labor,” 103–4. The high rate of single, female-headed households

undermines Glenn conclusions somewhat. As seen in Wall’s Wisdom’s Daughters, for example, con- temporary Native women may not “require” the income of Native men to survive at the subsistence level; however, they argue that women require men’s economic contribution to live well, or above subsistence/poverty level. More important, Native women argue, they require men’s social and cul- tural participation in tribal life in order to ensure survival of specific collective experiences and to perpetuate their traditions.

45. Christine Conte, “Ladies, Livestock, and Land and Lucre: Women’s Networks and Social Status on the Western Navajo Reservation,” American Indian Quarterly 6:1/2 (1982): 105, 116.

46. For example, Wall, Wisdom’s Daughters, 169–70, 224–26. 47. Marlee Kline, cited in Monture-Angus, Thunder in My Soul, 42. 48. Not all Native women experience capitalism equally. Conte’s study shows that while most

Navajo women have been adversely affected by the forces of a market economy, several are able to manipulate elements of capitalism to benefit themselves and their households, while others experience diminished wealth (“Ladies, Livestock, and Land and Lucre,” 120). Albers draws similar conclusions from her research on the Devil’s Lake Sioux, particularly in “Au- tonomy and Dependency in the Lives of Dakota Women,” 124–28.

49. Collins, “Shifting the Center,” 65. 50. Angela Davis, quoted by Collins in “Shifting the Center,” 65. 51. Collins, “Shifting the Center,” 65. 52. Collins, “Shifting the Center,” 66. 53. Collins, “Shifting the Center,” 68. 54. See the proceedings from the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, Mothers of

Our Nations, Indigenous Women Address the World: Our Future—Our Responsibility (Rapid City, S. Dak., 1995).

55. Mankiller and Wallis, Mankiller, 20. 56. Beatrice Medicine, “The Hidden Half Lives,” in Cante Ohitika Win (Brave-Hearted Women):

Images of Lakota Women from the Pine Ridge Reservation South Dakota, ed. Caroline Reyer (Vermillion: University of South Dakota Press, 1991), 5; and Albers and Medicine, The Hidden Half, 134–35. Nonetheless, Albers and Medicine contend that in contemporary life, star quilts remain one of the most prestigious items in the Sioux give-away system. Quilts are displayed or given at honoring ceremonies and when “Sioux return home from military service or college,” at community events of importance such as memorial feasts and naming ceremonies, and during “donations of powwow officials” (Patricia Albers and Beatrice Medicine, “The Role of Sioux Women in the Production of Ceremonial Objects: The Case of the Star Quilt”).

57. Allen, “Interview,” in Perry, Backtalk, 10. 58. Monture-Angus, Thunder in My Soul, 244. 59. Monture-Angus, Thunder in My Soul, 258. 60. Monture-Angus, Thunder in My Soul, 28.

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61. Renee Senogles, quoted in Farley, Women of the Native Struggle, 69. 62. Osennontion (Marlyn Kane) and Skonaganleh:rá (Sylvia Maracle), “Our World: According to

Osennontion and Skonaganleh:rá,” Canadian Woman Studies/Les Cahiers de la Femme 10:2/3 (1989): 7–19, 11.

63. Medicine, “Hidden Half Lives,” 5; and Lindy Trueblood, “Interview,” in Reyer, Cante Ohitika Win, 50.

64. Kidwell, “What Would Pocahontas Think Now?” 150. 65. Trueblood, “Interview,” in Reyer, Cante Ohitika Win, 50. 66. Ford, “Native American Women,” 59. 67. In Canada the 1986 average income for Aboriginal people was $12,899 compared to $18,188

earned by the average non-Native Canadian. The 1990 US census reported the median house- hold income of Indians living on a reservation was $19,865, compared with the US median of $30,056. Thirty-five percent of US Natives live below the federal poverty level (Jo Ann Kauffman and Yvette K. Joseph-Fox, “American Indian and Alaska Native Women,” in Race, Gender, and Health, ed. Marcia Bayne-Smith [Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996], 71).

68. Osennontion and Skonaganleh:rá, “Our World,” 14. 69. Katz, Messengers of the Wind; and Wall, Wisdom’s Daughters. 70. Osennontion and Skonaganleh:rá, “Our World,” 14.

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Espinoza, R. (2010). The Good Daughter Dilemma: Latinas Managing Family and School Demands. Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, 9(4), 317–330. https://doi.org/10.1177/1538192710380919. Reprinted with permission of SAGE Journals.

R O B E R TA E S P I N O Z A

Despite two decades of significant population growth (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2001), the Latina population in the United States remains severely underrepresented in higher education at every level (US Census Bureau, 2001). Al- though Latinas enroll in college at the same rates as their non-Latina counterparts (about 60%), they are less likely to earn college degrees and go on to gradu- ate or professional school (Contreras & Gándara, 2006; Sy & Romero, 2008; Watford, Rivas, Burciaga, & Solórzano, 2006). At the very top level of the educa- tional ladder, Latinas constitute only a fraction of the percentage of PhD degrees that are conferred annu- ally by the nation’s universities. In 2006, only 5.4% of female doctoral recipients in the United States were earned by Latinas, up slightly from 4.1% a decade ago (US Census Bureau, 2001). With so few Latinas successfully navigating the educational pipeline into doctoral education, it is extremely important to un- derstand their personal experiences and strategies for academic success.

Although scholars (Solórzano & Yasso, 2006; Stanton-Salazar, 2001; Valenzuela, 1999b) have documented the numerous structural barriers La- tinas encounter to advancement throughout the educational system (e.g., tracking, under enroll- ment in Honors and Advanced Placement courses, inferior access to academic guidance counselors, being taught by undercredentialed faculty, attend- ing overcrowded and poorly maintained schools, etc.), researchers have not adequately investigated the role families and home life experiences play in their academic achievement. Existing research on

the experiences of Latinas in college highlights their connections to family as a key component to their academic success (Fuligni & Pedersen, 2002; Sy, 2006; Sy & Romero, 2008). Although connections to family enhance educational success, family obliga- tions can sometimes conflict with school demands placing Latinas in a cultural bind (Sy & Romero, 2008). This bind is prevalent for most women in uni- versity environments that seldom legitimate family commitments (Garder, 2008). The culture of aca- demia expects one to be completely devoted to the pursuit of knowledge, often making school–family issues of any kind nearly invisible (Springer, Parker, & Leviten-Reid, 2009). This normative expectation is problematic for graduate women whose iden- tity and sense of belonging is tied to close family connections as is the case for the Latinas in this study. Thus how Latinas pursuing higher education manage the multiple demands of school and family relationships is a theoretical discussion that needs more empirical attention. We know very little about the strategies Latina doctoral candidates employ to manage school and home responsibilities to fulfill the role of a “good daughter.”

fa m i ly i n f l u e n c e s

Understanding the “good daughter dilemma” that Latinas pursuing higher education face requires a discussion of the cultural value of familismo, which emphasizes loyalty, reciprocity, and solidarity (Vega, 1990). Familismo includes strong identification and attachment to the family, both nuclear and extended,

24. THE GOOD DAUGHTER DILEMMA

Latinas Managing Family and School Demands

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and requires members to prioritize family over in- dividual interests. Unlike dominant US culture that values independence and self-sufficiency, familismo emphasizes cooperation and interdependence.

Latinas with a strong sense of familismo have a schema of obligations and reciprocities that is im- portant for them to fulfill in their youth and adult lives. The cultural template of expected obligations in Latina/o families most often cited include language/ cultural brokering (Buriel, Perez, Ment, Chavez, & Moran, 1998; Orellana, 2001), sibling caretaking (Gándara, 1995, 1999; Valenzuela, 1999a), and fi- nancial contributions (Fuligni & Petersen, 2002). Espinoza (2001) also found that Latina/o family obligations include spending time with family and staying close to home. These obligations may hold special significance for females who are more often socialized into a caretaker role within Latina/o fami- lies with a strong familismo orientation (Cammarota, 2004). Studies examining the obligations Latina/o children fulfill consistently find that the responsibili- ties are more likely to fall on girls than boys (Buriel et al., 1998; Raffaelli & Ontai, 2004; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001; Valenzuela, 1999a). The cultural value of marianismo, for example, modeled on the Catholic Virgin Madonna, prescribes depen- dence, subordination, responsibility for domestic chores, and selfless devotion to family (Hondagneu- Sotelo, 1994; Stevens, 1973). This creates an expec- tation that the “good Latina woman” will always prioritize family needs above her own individual needs. However, there is a significant contradiction embedded in this cultural template for Latinas with a strong sense of familismo who pursue higher edu- cation because the time dedicated to school directly competes with time available for family. Parents who still expect daughters to continue contributing to the family while pursuing higher education places a demand on her to fulfill multiple, and often com- peting, obligations at the same time (Sy & Romero, 2008). As a result, Latinas find themselves caught in a cultural bind between meeting the demands of their individualistic-oriented school culture and their collectivist-oriented family culture.

The double-edged sword Latinas with a strong sense of familismo face is that their connections to

family, which undoubtedly compete with school, gives them a sense of belonging which they draw on to do well academically. Latinas with a high collectivist orientation often find the individualis- tic culture of school alienating prompting them to maintain strong ties to family. Thus, although their obligations to family may conflict with school, those connections are very important to their ability to get through successfully. In fact, research has found that family obligations which tie ethnic minority youths to their families have positive academic con- sequences (Fuligni & Pedersen, 2002; Hardway & Fu- ligni, 2006). Hardway and Fuligni (2006) found that Latina/o adolescents were more likely to persist in postsecondary education if they had a stronger sense of family obligation. Latina/o students who placed a great value on their role in the family performed better in school indicating that their connection to family helped them focus on their academics. Other studies (Gándara, 1995; Hurtado, Carter, & Spuler, 1996; Sánchez, Reyes, & Singh, 2006) have found that strong family ties are important not only for aca- demic success but also in the adjustment of Latinas/ os to higher education environments.

Although feeling strongly connected to family may provide a sense of emotional well-being for La- tinas, it is not clear how the obligation to regularly engage in behaviors that support the family affect Latina students’ adjustment to and success in higher education (Sy & Romero, 2008). The requirement to fulfill such family obligations competes with the time demands of their educational pursuits, making the transition to higher education more challeng- ing. Few studies have examined how Latinas with a strong sense of familismo balance school with family roles as they climb up the educational ladder.

b i c u lt u r a l i s m

Biculturalism theory helps us understand how Latinas manage the conflicts and tensions between two differ- ent cultures. Accordingly, a bicultural person is com- petent in two cultures, engages in typical behaviors of both cultures, embraces the opportunity to remain in- volved in practices and lifestyles of both cultures, and feels a sense of belonging to both cultural communities

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(Keefe & Padilla, 1987; La Fromboise, Coleman, & Gerton, 1993). Levels of biculturalism, however, can vary from individual to individual. Berry (1990) has suggested that the position of ethnic minorities can best be described in terms of two independent dimen- sions: (a) retention of one’s cultural traditions and (b) establishment and maintenance of relationships with mainstream society. Those who retain the traditions and values of their culture of origin and also develop and maintain identification with the larger society are said to be “bicultural.”

In behavioral terms, bicultural individuals are competent and active within the contexts of both their native and new culture in which they are im- mersed. These individuals have an extensive role repertoire referring to the range of cultural or situ- ational appropriate behaviors they have developed from being exposed to two cultures (LaFromboise, Coleman, & Gerton, 1993). At the high end of the bicultural scale, an individual is called a “blended bicultural,” and at the low end of the scale, an in- dividual is considered an “alternating bicultural” (Phinney & Devich-Navarro, 1997). A blended bicul- tural blends or integrates their two cultures, whereas an alternating bicultural switches between their two cultures keeping them separate. Although the bicul- turalism framework helps to understand how Latinas negotiate the macro structures of culture, Chicana Feminism informs the daily social ethnic identity management from a more micro perspective.

c h i c a n a f e m i n i s m : m u lt i p l e i d e n t i t i e s

Chicana feminist theory highlights that a necessary survival skill when living between two cultures is learning how to maintain a distinct ethnic or cultural identity while at the same time learning to adapt to the dominant mainstream culture (Vera & de los Santos, 2005). In her theoretically groundbreaking book en- titled Borderlands: La Frontera, Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) proposed a third, hybrid identity that develops from the process of constantly strad- dling two cultures in everyday life called the mestiza identity, “the new mestiza copes by developing a toler- ance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity . . . she learns to juggle cultures.” (p. 79). According to

Anzaldúa (1987), the mestiza identity, which can take on many unique forms, is developed to manage two cultures that are always in direct conflict with one another. The term mestiza has come to mean living with ambivalence while balancing opposing powers (Delgado Bernal, 2001).

Anzaldúa (1987) describes the conflict and ten- sion generated by the polarities experienced when one is torn between the needs of the home or ethnic culture and the demands of the Anglo world such as that which resides within educational institutions; the dual nature of identity in the border culture means learning two ways of thinking, speaking, and sometimes two distinct languages. The duality emerges when Chicanas exist in the all-too famil- iar states called “‘belonging’ and ‘not belonging’” (Elenes, 1997, p. 363). The mestiza identity is charac- terized by a resiliency that allows the Chicana to shift in and out of habitual formations and movement from a single goal to divergent thinking (Anzaldúa, 1987). Cherrie Moraga (1986) also explores the issues of multiple and fluid identities that are based on self-knowledge by asserting the possibility of chang- ing or transforming one’s identity and actively main- taining more than one at any point in time.

These important feminist theories elucidate the borders Chicana/Latina women are forced to cross on a daily basis, constantly shifting in and out of differ- ent social contexts with diverse gender expectations to which they adjust. What is absent from the re- search literature are empirical details of exactly how Chicana/Latina women negotiate these borders, and the diverse strategies they employ, specifically those pursuing higher education. Informed by the bicul- tural and mestiza identity frameworks, this study ex- amines the integrator and separator strategies Latina doctoral students develop to manage and balance family relationships with school demands.

m e t h o d

pa r t i c i pa n t s

Fifteen Latina doctoral graduate students who attend universities in Northern California were interviewed. Only women who were at least in their 2nd year of full-time graduate study were selected. The average

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age of participants was 27 years. Eleven of the women were in the Social Sciences and 4 were in the Human- ities. Twelve participants were Mexican American/ Chicana, one was Puerto Rican, one was Ecuadoran, and one was Salvadoran. Twelve participants were either first- or second-generation in the United States (i.e., either they themselves or both of their par- ents were born in a Spanish-speaking country) and 3 were fifth- or above generation (i.e., both parents were born in the United States). Thirteen participants were first-generation in their families to attend col- lege and 2 had at least one parent with a bachelor of arts degree. None of the participants were married nor had children at the time of the interview. All par- ticipants reported growing up in families with strong familismo orientations which included high levels of familial household responsibilities, expectations of spending time with family over friends, sibling care- taking, doing household chores, and language/cul- tural brokering.

p r o c e d u r e

Participants were recruited from various university- sponsored social events including students of color receptions and student list serves. Once an interest in participating in the study was expressed via email, a time and location for the interview was scheduled. A snowball sampling methodology was utilized by asking participants to refer women they knew matched the research criteria on completion of their interview. Interviews lasted on average 80 min and were audio- recorded and fully transcribed. After each transcript was reviewed, a few participants were selected for a follow-up interview to get clarification on responses that needed further elaboration or were not clear due to poor audio quality. All participants have been as- signed a pseudonym to protect their identity.

i n t e r v i e w p r o t o c o l

Participants were first asked questions about early childhood experiences growing up, then about rela- tionships with family as graduate students. Many of the interview questions focused on family responsi- bilities and care (e.g., caring for others and being cared for). Specific questions that were asked included,

“When you were growing up, what messages did you receive from your family about how you should care for them? What was expected of you when you were young? What was your role in your family growing up?” Participants were also asked about their relation- ship with their parents in graduate school compared to their childhood, with questions including, “What is your role in your family now? How has your rela- tionship with your family changed since you started graduate school? What has been the biggest change? Has the contact with your family (phone or physical) decreased, increased, or stayed the same since you started graduate school?”

A careful systematic analysis of the transcribed interviews was conducted by two different research- ers for validity. Each interview transcript was read in- depth for emerging themes that fell under two main topics: family relationships and responsibilities grow- ing up, and family relationships and responsibilities during graduate school. After all themes under each topic were identified, they were compared across interviews for commonalities, then combined into major thematic categories from which two emerged; integrators and separators.

f i n d i n g s

Latina doctoral students balanced the demands of school and family in graduate school in two different ways. One group of 9 women, the integrators, man- aged family expectations and obligations by explic- itly communicating with family members about their school responsibilities. Integrators blended family and school by first explaining the nature of their school de- mands, then enlisting their family’s support to enhance their academic success. The second group of 6 women, the separators, actively organized their daily lives to keep family and school separate to minimize tension and conflict. Although the separators prioritized family similar to their integrator counterparts, they often felt they had to keep their schooling experiences separate to protect their relationships with family members. Both patterns demonstrate high levels of biculturalism and fluid mestiza identities that helped them juggle the contradictions of their two distinct social worlds as they pursued educational advancement.

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t h e i n t e g r at o r s

Veronica’s decision to attend graduate school 500  miles away from home defied an important ex- pectation of being a good daughter—to stay close to home. The way she explained her decision to her parents reflects the specific strategies many integra- tors employed. Veronica sat her parents down one Saturday afternoon and explained to them that she had been offered an amazing opportunity to attend one of the most prestigious schools in the nation for her doctorate. In her explanation, she mentioned key details that she knew her parents needed to hear. She told them that the university was giving her a mul- tiple year fellowship to pay for her studies and that earning an advanced level education was going to benefit the entire family. Veronica also explained that taking this next step in her education was going to allow her to fulfill their dreams of a highly educated daughter. After all, the main reason her parents im- migrated to the United States was to provide to their children educational opportunities they never had in El Salvador. Veronica skillfully clarified the process to her parents and related it to their expectations of her as a good daughter. Although she knew her par- ents “did not fully understand what doctoral studies entailed,” after her explanation they trusted she was making a good decision.

Veronica continued to successfully manage her relationship with her family throughout graduate school. The strategy of communicating to parents detailed information about heavy school workloads and deadlines was typical of the women who fell into this category. Integrators were very explicit with their families about the demands placed on them at school when they knew it directly conflicted with family expectations that might lead to the perception of being a bad daughter. Veronica recounted a situa- tion her 3rd year of graduate school when a critical school deadline kept her from returning home for the holidays:

My parents always expect me to come home for the holidays even the small ones like Thanksgiving, but last year I couldn’t go because I needed the time to finish my MA paper which was due by the end of the term. When my mom called and asked if I would be

coming home, I had to tell her that I couldn’t come home for Thanksgiving because I had school work to do. She was very disappointed and kept trying to con- vince me to come home. I explained to her that the reason I couldn’t come home was because I needed the extra time to work on my paper. I also explained to her that if I didn’t finish the paper by the end of the term, I would not get my MA degree until May. It was a hard situation for both of us, but eventually she understood.

Veronica explained to her mother why in this one instance she was prioritizing school over family. She told her mother that although she could not make it home for Thanksgiving, she would be home in 3 weeks for winter break which she felt eased her mother’s concerns. Veronica, like other women in this category, made concerted efforts to have discussions with their families about school to introduce them to their school lives which is consistent with a highly bicultural orientation and strong mestiza identity.

For integrators, having good communication with their families allowed them to more easily manage their good daughter reputations which were of great importance to them. Dolores described how she tried to be up-front with her parents who often expect her to come home every weekend by saying things such as, “I would love to come home right now, but instead of coming home Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, can I just come home on Sunday and we’ll spend the whole day together?” Doing this consistently over time has allowed her to establish “really strong communication” with her parents in which “ . . . they trust that I know what I’m doing and that I want good things for myself and will only do things that are healthy.” Learning to balance family expectations and school demands by explaining her educational world to her parents, however, has been a learning process for Dolores. When she was an un- dergraduate student, she did not explain school to her parents, which resulted in being “cut-off from the family for six long months.” Since her parents did not understand her school schedule, and because at that time she did not explain it to them, her par- ents jumped to conclusions calling her a “muchacha librada,” meaning “a woman with loose morals,” which equated to being a bad daughter. Dolores’

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experience highlights the fluidity of her mestiza iden- tity, and overtime, found ways to reconcile her two social spheres of school and family by drawing on her bicultural orientation.

Anna also explained her school life to her parents

to manage their expectations of her as a good daugh-

ter. Beginning in childhood and continuing through

graduate school, Anna had always played a signifi-

cant role in her family taking care of her younger sib-

lings. She recalled a situation early in her doctoral

studies where her parents called her ever y Thursday

night asking, and expecting, her to come home for

the weekend to take care of her younger brothers. Al-

though Anna valued fulfilling this obligation, which

was tied to her strong sense of familismo, it often con-

flicted with her school schedule. After a short time,

she finally explained to her parents how stressful

it was for them to call her ever y Thursday to come

home on Friday because her intense school work-

load required her to study during the weekends. By

explaining her academic workload to her parents,

Anna was able to help them understand her school

responsibilities and ultimately found they were will-

ing to negotiate a schedule with her to come home

the last weekend of ever y month. She explained,

It used to be that they wanted me to come home a lot, but I often had school work to do . . . so now we have this thing figured out where the last weekend of every month, I’ll go home unless there’s something out of the ordinary going on and I absolutely can’t.

Integrators explained school demands to their families to not only negotiate family expectations but also enlist their families’ support in their school endeavors. Kathy, for example, recalled how when she was studying for her oral qualif ying exams, she explained to her mother how stressful the process was and, as it got closer to taking her exams, called on her mother for emotional sup- port. After doing this, her mother came up from Southern California to take care of her the week- end before her exams:

I’ve learned how to ask for support from my family. I’ve been able to call and let them know that I need

their support, that I need them to call me. Like I asked my mom to come the weekend before my orals just to be here with me and that was just very revolution- ary for me  .  .  . it was just an amazing turning point for us . . . and she came and made me like little cup- cakes and made me sopa de pollo (chicken soup) for the week so I would not have to cook and it was so wonderful . . . it was like okay there is a different way of being a graduate student and it could incorporate your mom.

Getting support from her family is how Kathy integrated family with being a doctoral graduate student. Similar to Dolores, being an integrator is something Kathy has learned to do over time as she pursues higher education. In college, she explained that her mother would see the “aftermath of a stress- ful semester” when she would come home and sleep for days and her mother “didn’t understand what got her there,” which always caused many misunder- standings. Now she realizes, “learning how to get support during the process [of graduate school] is im- portant.” Thus explaining school to her parents has allowed Kathy to merge her identities as a good stu- dent and a good daughter; illuminating the unique mestiza identity she has developed to integrate family and school.

The Latinas who used this strategy are highly bi- cultural in their ability to integrate family and school demonstrating mastery of appropriate role behav- iors in both their collectivist Latino home culture and their individualistic Anglo-school culture. Not only do they negotiate conflicts when they occur but they also manage their ethnic identity within each cultural context. As noted by mestiza identity theo- rists, integrators negotiate cultural contradictions by actively using new knowledge from their everyday experiences to transform and fuse their social identi- ties. The integrator strategy often blends being a good daughter with being a good student.

t h e s e pa r at o r s

Another strategy Latina doctoral students described to balance family relationships with graduate school demands is by keeping these two social worlds away from one another. Rosa is an example of an individual

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who managed family and school roles exceptionally well by keeping them completely separate. One of the reasons Rosa chose to keep family and school sepa- rate is because she felt they clashed as she eloquently explained,

Maybe you can think of graduate school in terms of like a culture clash, right where you’ve got this American individualism thing where you’re sup- posed to care about yourself and do what you can to move yourself forward in school, and family kind of disappears from that, as well as family obliga- tions and needs. I think grad school is very, I feel like grad school fits into that right, you’re kind of seen as an individual and you’re not supposed to have too many outside forces pulling at you, but then I’ve also got this family obligation and I don’t feel it’s a bad thing to say it’s obligation, I mean it’s a good thing right, because we support each other, but I feel kind of like this pull between doing what most Ameri- cans do and just kind of doing what I need to do to get ahead, and then also at the same time dealing with something that’s been instilled in me always, you know your family comes first and they’re very important.

Rosa felt that family responsibilities were not le- gitimated by institutions of higher education since the expectation to prioritize her studies and research above all else was very evident. However, family is an important part of Rosa’s life and they often count on her to meet family obligations such as attend- ing life events (i.e., birthdays) and lending support when needed (i.e., helping siblings with homework). She explained a situation in her 1st year of gradu- ate school where she was forced to choose between family and school:

So if my two younger siblings have trouble with their homework and my mom does not understand and my dad is not home, my mom will call me and she’ll be like last year when I was doing Professor Smith’s mid- term I got a call at like about 10:00 o’clock at night and she [her mother] was like “your brother can’t put adjectives in these sentences, can you help him?” and I was like okay . . . and then I did, I helped him.

The decision for Rosa in this instance was easy, family before school, a value tied to her sense of

familismo. In fact, she did not even explain to her mother that she was right in the middle of working on a midterm exam due the next day. Instead, she just put her school work aside, helped her brother, and resumed working on her midterm when she got off the phone with him. This example illustrates how Rosa keeps family separate from school, but still manages to actively prioritize family. Rosa felt that doing this would minimize conflict, which was consistent with her notion of being a good daughter.

Other women who fell into this categor y did not explain school to their families out of concern and to protect them from worr ying. Although Celia has a strong relationship with her mother, she did not ever mention to her in their weekly phone conversa- tions the many stressful aspects of graduate school. Part of the reason Celia did not talk to her mother about school is because she felt guilty for moving far away to attend her graduate program. Celia moved across the countr y for graduate school and felt that she had already defied being a good daughter be- cause she did not stay close to home. She stated, “There’s a lot of sort of guilt feelings because of the distance and sort of thinking about . . . I think that my family is sort of confused about why I need to be so far away for school.” Unlike Veronica who ex- plained to her parents why she was moving away for graduate school, Celia did not discuss the decision with her mother to minimize the stress and conflict. Instead, Celia managed her good daughter repu- tation by keeping her roles within the contexts of family and school separate so as not to worr y her family further.

As a separator, Luciana also alternated between school and family to maintain her status of a good daughter. When her family needed her at home, she did not hesitate to interrupt her school work to make herself available to her family. Recently, when her father had surgery she stopped working on her dis- sertation and made time to go down to Los Angeles to be with him. She explains, “My father just had surgery this past summer and I went down for the surgery. I went down to be with him during and after the surgery and sometimes it is hard to find time to get down there, but I do.” Family is Luciana’s first

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priority and she behaved in ways that demonstrated this to her family. She always made a concerted effort to be physically present when needed at home for critical life events (i.e., health issues) to provide sup- port (i.e., emotional, financial) and show her com- mitment to strong collectivist family values. Like all separators, Luciana sees the clear incongruence between her graduate program and family expecta- tions. As such, she actively employs a strategy for balancing them by keeping them in separate spheres of her life.

Unlike the integrators, the separators’ mestiza identity variant is characterized by a “good daugh- ter” role that is separate from the “good student” role. The separators manage the cultural ambiguities of their social contexts by adapting to role behav- iors differently in each environment as a result of their high levels of biculturalism. While the inte- grators communicate and explain to family the ex- pectations of them in the two worlds in which they are immersed—family and school—the separators employ behaviors that keep them compartmental- ized and separate. Each approach reflects two varia- tions of their distinct cultural and ethnic identity location along the Latino and American cultural continuums.

i m p l i c at i o n s f o r p o l i c y , p r a c t i c e , a n d   r e s e a r c h

The findings from this study have implications for institutions of higher education to support the edu- cational pursuits of Latinas. The first step in this pro- cess is to fully understand how and why Latinas with a strong collectivist familismo orientation manage conflicting family and graduate school demands. This insight will allow institutions to create concrete support programs tailored to Latinas unique educa- tional experiences. To enhance academic success and persistence, support efforts must include institution- ally sanctioned and formalized ways to educate fac- ulty and administrators about Latinas family–school dilemmas.

First, universities should improve their outreach efforts to inform Latina students of the various sup- port services available to them even before they start

graduate school. It is imperative that they are im- mediately connected with supportive organizations, educators, and peers that can help them adjust to their new school environment. Institutions and de- partments need to be proactive in providing Latinas with information and experiences that make them feel a sense of belonging and connectedness to their new academic homes. These efforts will greatly di- minish the balancing act that Latinas engage in, thus freeing them to better engage in school and their departments.

Second, faculty who work the closest with Latina students need to attend informational workshops that highlight the challenges they face on entering the university. It is important for educational agents to understand the positive impact they can have as academic role models by helping Latinas through the various hurdles of graduate school while simultane- ously legitimating their familismo. Faculty often over- looks having a life outside of school, which alienates students who have other obligations and responsi- bilities outside the university. Once these programs are implemented, further research needs to be con- ducted to examine the effect they have on the educa- tional adjustment and overall well-being of Latinas in higher education.

c o n c l u s i o n s

Latina doctoral candidates who grow up with a strong familismo cultural orientation highly value being a good daughter throughout their lives while at the same time they aspire for academic success at the highest educational level. In their pursuit of higher education they may experience the pressure of fulfilling multi- ple, and often competing roles. In an effort to main- tain their statuses of both a good student and good daughter, some Latinas draw on their mestiza identity and bicultural orientation to navigate the cultural bind they face. To effectively navigate the two social spheres of family and school, Latinas may employ strategies of integration and separation as described in this study. Educational institutions must consider these processes as they develop and implement better support programs for Latinas to ensure their overall educational success.

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Sánchez, B., Reyes, O., & Singh, J. (2006). Makin’ it in college: The value of significant individuals in the lives of Mexican American Adolescents. Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, 5(1), 48–67.

Solórzano, D. G., & Yosso, T.J. (2006). Leaks in the Chicana and Chicano educational pipeline (Policy Rep. No. 13). Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles, Chicano Studies Research Center.

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Why Gender Equality Stalled, by Stephanie Coontz. From The New York Times, February 16, 2013. © 2013 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redis- tribution, or retransmission of the content without express written permission is prohibited.

S T E P H A N I E C O O N T Z

This week is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s international best seller, “The Feminine Mystique,” which has been widely credited with igniting the women’s movement of the 1960s. Readers who return to this feminist classic today are often puzzled by the absence of concrete political pro- posals to change the status of women. But “The Femi- nine Mystique” had the impact it did because it focused on transforming women’s personal consciousness.

In 1963, most Americans did not yet believe that gender equality was possible or even desirable. Conventional wisdom held that a woman could not pursue a career and still be a fulfilled wife or suc- cessful mother. Normal women, psychiatrists pro- claimed, renounced all aspirations outside the home to meet their feminine need for dependence. In 1962, more than two-thirds of the women surveyed by University of Michigan researchers agreed that most important family decisions “should be made by the man of the house.”

It was in this context that Friedan set out to transform the attitudes of women. Arguing that “the personal is political,” feminists urged women to challenge the assumption, at work and at home, that women should always be the ones who make the coffee, watch over the children, pick up after men and serve the meals.

Over the next 30 years this emphasis on equaliz- ing gender roles at home as well as at work produced a revolutionary transformation in Americans’ atti- tudes. It was not instant. As late as 1977, two-thirds of Americans believed that it was “much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and

family.” By 1994, two-thirds of Americans rejected this notion.

But during the second half of the 1990s and first few years of the 2000s, the equality revolution seemed to stall. Between 1994 and 2004, the per- centage of Americans preferring the male breadwin- ner/female homemaker family model actually rose to 40  percent from 34 percent. Between 1997 and 2007, the number of full-time working mothers who said they would prefer to work part time increased to 60 percent from 48 percent. In 1997, a quarter of stay-at-home mothers said full-time work would be ideal. By 2007, only 16 percent of stay-at-home moth- ers wanted to work full time.

Women’s labor-force participation in the United States also leveled off in the second half of the 1990s, in contrast to its continued increase in most other countries. Gender desegregation of college majors and occupations slowed. And although single moth- ers continued to increase their hours of paid labor, there was a significant jump in the percentage of married women, especially married women with infants, who left the labor force. By 2004, a smaller percentage of married women with children under 3 were in the labor force than in 1993.

Some people began to argue that feminism was not about furthering the equal involvement of men and women at home and work but simply about giving women the right to choose between pursuing a career and devoting themselves to full-time moth- erhood. A new emphasis on intensive mothering and attachment parenting helped justify the latter choice.

Anti-feminists welcomed this shift as a sign that most Americans did not want to push gender equality

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too far. And feminists, worried that they were seeing a resurgence of traditional gender roles and beliefs, embarked on a new round of consciousness-raising. Books with titles like “The Feminine Mistake” and “Get to Work” warned of the stiff penalties women paid for dropping out of the labor force, even for rela- tively brief periods. Cultural critics questioned the “Perfect Madness” of intensive mothering and heli- copter parenting, noting the problems that resulted when, as Ms. Friedan had remarked about “housewif- ery,” mothering “expands to fill the time available.”

One study cautioned that nearly 30 percent of opt-out moms who wanted to rejoin the labor force were unable to do so, and of those who did return, only 40 percent landed full-time professional jobs. In “The Price of Motherhood,” the journalist Ann Crit- tenden estimated that the typical college-educated woman lost more than $1 million dollars in lifetime earnings and forgone retirement benefits after she opted out.

Other feminists worried that the equation of feminism with an individual woman’s choice to opt out of the work force undermined the movement’s commitment to a larger vision of gender equity and justice. Joan Williams, the founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of Califor- nia’s Hastings College of the Law, argued that defin- ing feminism as giving mothers the choice to stay home assumes that their partners have the respon- sibility to support them, and thus denies choice to fathers. The political theorist Lori Marso noted that emphasizing personal choice ignores the millions of women without a partner who can support them.

These are all important points. But they can sound pretty abstract to men and women who are stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to arranging their work and family lives. For more than two decades the demands and hours of work have been intensifying. Yet progress in adopting family-friendly work practices and social policies has proceeded at a glacial pace.

Today the main barriers to further progress toward gender equity no longer lie in people’s per- sonal attitudes and relationships. Instead, structural impediments prevent people from acting on their egalitarian values, forcing men and women into

personal accommodations and rationalizations that do not reflect their preferences. The gender revolu- tion is not in a stall. It has hit a wall.

In today’s political climate, it’s startling to re- member that 80 years ago, in 1933, the Senate over- whelmingly voted to establish a 30-hour workweek. The bill failed in the House, but five years later the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 gave Americans a statutory 40-hour workweek. By the 1960s, Ameri- can workers spent less time on the job than their counterparts in Europe and Japan.

Between 1990 and 2000, however, average annual work hours for employed Americans increased. By 2000, the United States had outstripped Japan—the former leader of the work pack—in the hours devoted to paid work. Today, almost 40 percent of men in pro- fessional jobs work 50 or more hours a week, as do almost a quarter of men in middle-income occupa- tions. Individuals in lower-income and less-skilled jobs work fewer hours, but they are more likely to ex- perience frequent changes in shifts, mandatory over- time on short notice, and nonstandard hours. And many low-income workers are forced to work two jobs to get by. When we look at dual-earner couples, the workload becomes even more daunting. As of 2000, the average dual-earner couple worked a combined 82 hours a week, while almost 15 percent of married couples had a joint workweek of 100 hours or more.

Astonishingly, despite the increased workload of families, and even though 70 percent of American children now live in households where every adult in the home is employed, in the past 20 years the United States has not passed any major federal initiative to help workers accommodate their family and work de- mands. The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 guaranteed covered workers up to 12 weeks unpaid leave after a child’s birth or adoption or in case of a family illness. Although only about half the total work force was eligible, it seemed a promising start. But aside from the belated requirement of the new Affordable Care Act that nursing mothers be given a private space at work to pump breast milk, the F.M.L.A. turned out to be the inadequate end.

Meanwhile, since 1990 other nations with com- parable resources have implemented a comprehen- sive agenda of “work–family reconciliation” acts. As a

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result, when the United States’ work–family policies are compared with those of countries at similar levels of economic and political development, the United States comes in dead last.

Out of nearly 200 countries studied by Jody Hey- mann, dean of the school of public health at the Uni- versity of California, Los Angeles, and her team of researchers for their new book, “Children’s Chances,” 180 now offer guaranteed paid leave to new moth- ers, and 81 offer paid leave to fathers. They found that 175 mandate paid annual leave for workers, and 162 limit the maximum length of the workweek. The United States offers none of these protections.

A 1997 European Union directive prohibits em- ployers from paying part-time workers lower hourly rates than full-time workers, excluding them from pension plans or limiting paid leaves to full-time workers. By contrast, American workers who reduce hours for family reasons typically lose their benefits and take an hourly wage cut.

Is it any surprise that American workers express higher levels of work–family conflict than workers in any of our European counterparts? Or that women’s labor-force participation has been overtaken? In 1990, the United States ranked sixth in female labor participation among 22 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is made up of most of the globe’s wealthier countries. By 2010, according to an economic research paper by Cornell researchers Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn, released last month, we had fallen to 17th place, with about 30 percent of that decline a direct result of our failure to keep pace with other countries’ family-friendly work policies. American women have not abandoned the desire to combine work and family. Far from it. According to the Pew Research Center, in 1997, 56 percent of women ages 18 to 34 and 26 percent of middle-aged and older women said that, in addition to having a family, being success- ful in a high-paying career or profession was “very important” or “one of the most important things” in their lives. By 2011, fully two-thirds of the younger women and 42 percent of the older ones expressed that sentiment.

Nor have men given up the ideal of gender equity. A 2011 study by the Center for Work and Family at

Boston College found that 65 percent of the fathers they interviewed felt that mothers and fathers should provide equal amounts of caregiving for their chil- dren. And in a 2010 Pew poll, 72 percent of both women and men between 18 and 29 agreed that the best marriage is one in which husband and wife both work and both take care of the house.

But when people are caught between the hard place of bad working conditions and the rock wall of politicians’ resistance to family-friendly reforms, it is hard to live up to such aspirations. The Boston College study found that only 30 percent of the fa- thers who wanted to share child care equally with their wives actually did so, a gap that helps explain why American men today report higher levels of work–family conflict than women. Under the cir- cumstances, how likely is it that the young adults surveyed by Pew will meet their goal of sharing breadwinning and caregiving?

The answer is suggested by the findings of the New York University sociologist Kathleen Gerson in the interviews she did for her 2010 book, “The Un- finished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work, and Family.” Eighty percent of the women and 70 percent of the men Ms. Gerson inter- viewed said they wanted an egalitarian relationship that allowed them to share breadwinning and family care. But when asked what they would do if this was not possible, they described a variety of “fallback” positions. While most of the women wanted to con- tinue paid employment, the majority of men said that if they could not achieve their egalitarian ideal they expected their partner to assume primary responsi- bility for parenting so they could focus on work.

And that is how it usually works out. When family and work obligations collide, mothers remain much more likely than fathers to cut back or drop out of work. But unlike the situation in the 1960s, this is not because most people believe this is the prefer- able order of things. Rather, it is often a reasonable response to the fact that our political and economic institutions lag way behind our personal ideals.

Women are still paid less than men at every edu- cational level and in every job category. They are less likely than men to hold jobs that offer flexibil- ity or family-friendly benefits. When they become

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mothers, they face more scrutiny and prejudice on the job than fathers do.

So, especially when women are married to men who work long hours, it often seems to both partners that they have no choice. Female professionals are twice as likely to quit work as other married mothers when their husbands work 50 hours or more a week and more than three times more likely to quit when their husbands work 60 hours or more.

The sociologist Pamela Stone studied a group of mothers who had made these decisions. Typically, she found, they phrased their decision in terms of a preference. But when they explained their “decision- making process,” it became clear that most had made the “choice” to quit work only as a last resort—when they could not get the flexible hours or part-time work they wanted, when their husbands would not or could not cut back their hours, and when they began to feel that their employers were hostile to their con- cerns. Under those conditions, Professor Stone notes, what was really a workplace problem for families became a private problem for women.

This is where the political gets really personal. When people are forced to behave in ways that contra- dict their ideals, they often undergo what sociologists call a “values stretch”—watering down their original expectations and goals to accommodate the things they have to do to get by. This behavior is especially likely if holding on to the original values would exac- erbate tensions in the relationships they depend on.

In their years of helping couples make the tran- sition from partners to parents, the psychologists

Philip and Carolyn Cowan have found that tensions increase when a couple backslide into more tradi- tional roles than they originally desired. The woman resents that she is not getting the shared child care she expected and envies her husband’s social net- works outside the home. The husband feels hurt that his wife isn’t more grateful for the sacrifices he is making by working more hours so she can stay home. When you can’t change what’s bothering you, one typical response is to convince yourself that it doesn’t actually bother you. So couples often create a family myth about why they made these choices, why it has turned out for the best, and why they are still equal in their hearts even if they are not sharing the kind of life they first envisioned.

Under present conditions, the intense conscious- ness raising about the “rightness” of personal choices that worked so well in the early days of the women’s movement will end up escalating the divisive finger- pointing that stands in the way of political reform.

Our goal should be to develop work–life policies that enable people to put their gender values into practice. So let’s stop arguing about the hard choices women make and help more women and men avoid such hard choices. To do that, we must stop seeing work–family policy as a women’s issue and start seeing it as a human rights issue that affects parents, children, partners, singles and elders. Feminists should certainly support this campaign. But they don’t need to own it.

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Michael A. Messner and Suzel Bozada-Deas, (2009) “Separating the Men from the Moms: The Making of Adult Gender Segre- gation in Youth Sports” Gender & Society 23: 49-71. SAGE Publications.

M I C H A E L A . M E S S N E R , S U Z E L B O Z A D A - D E A S

In volunteer work, just as in many families and work-places, gender divisions are pervasive and persistent. Women are often expected to do the work of caring for others’ emotions and daily needs. Women’s vol- unteer labor is routinely devalued in much the same ways that housework and childcare are devalued in the home and women’s clerical and other support work is devalued in the professions (Hook 2004). Similarly, men tend to do the instrumental work of public leadership, just as they do in the family and the workplace, and their informal work is valued accordingly.

This article examines the social construction of adult gender divisions of labor in a community vol- unteer activity, youth sports. A few scholars have examined women’s invisible labor in sports (Boyle & McKay 1995). In her study of a Little League Baseball league, Grasmuck (2005) estimates that the 111 league administrators, head coaches, and assistant coaches (mostly men) contribute a total of 33,330 hours of volunteer labor in a season—an average of about 300 hours per person. Much of the work women do in youth sports is behind-the- scenes support that is less visible than coaching (Thompson 1999). In a study of Little League Base- ball in Texas, Chafetz and Kotarba (1999, 48–49) obser ved that “team mothers” in this “upper middle class, ‘Yuppie’ Texas community” do gender in ways that result in “the re-creation and strength- ening of the community’s collective identity as a place where, among other things, women are pri- marily mothers to their sons.” As yet, no study has focused on how this gender divide among adults in

youth sports happens. How do most men become coaches, while most women become “team moms”? How do adult gender divisions of labor in youth sports connect with commonsense notions about divisions between women and men in families and workplaces? This is important: Millions of children play community-based youth sports ever y year, and these athletic activities are a key part of the daily lives of many families. It is also important for scholars of gender—studying segregation in this context can reveal much about how gender di- visions are created and sustained in the course of ever yday life.

c o a c h e s a n d “ t e a m m o m s ”

In 1995, when we (the first author, Mike, and his family) arrived at our six-year-old son’s first soccer practice, we were delighted to learn that his coach was a woman. Coach Karen, a mother in her mid- 30s, had grown up playing lots of sports. She was tall, confident, and athletic, and the kids responded well to her leadership. It seemed to be a new and differ- ent world than the one we grew up in. But during the next decade, as our two sons played a few more seasons of soccer, two years of youth basketball, and more than a decade of baseball, they never had an- other woman head coach. It is not that women were not contributing to the kids’ teams. All of the “team parents” (often called “team moms”)—parent volun- teers who did the behind-the-scenes work of phone- calling, organizing weekly snack schedules and team parties, collecting money for gifts for the coaches, and so on—were women. And occasionally, a team had

26. SEPARATING THE MEN FROM THE MOMS

The Making of Adult Gender Segregation in Youth Sports

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a woman assistant coach. But women head coaches were few and far between.

In 1999, we started keeping track of the num- bers of women and men head coaches in Roseville’s1 annual American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO) and Little League Baseball/Softball (LLB/S) year- books we received at the end of each season. The yearbooks revealed that from 1999 to 2007, only 13.4 percent of 1,490 AYSO teams had women head coaches. The numbers were even lower for Little League Baseball and Softball; only 5.9 percent of 538 teams were managed by women. In both AYSO and LLB/S, women coaches were clustered in the younger kids’ teams (ages five to eight) and in coaching girls. Boys—and especially boys older than age 10—almost never had women coaches. These low numbers are surprising for several reasons. First, unlike during the 1950s and 1960s, when there were almost no oppor- tunities for girls to play sports, today, millions of girls participate in organized soccer, baseball, softball, basketball, and other sports. With this demographic shift in youth sports, we expected that the gender division of labor among parents would have shifted as well. Second, today’s mothers in the United States came of age during and after the 1972 institution of Title IX and are part of the generation that ignited the booming growth of female athletic participation. We wondered how it happened that these women did not make a neat transition from their own active sports participation into coaching their own kids. Third, women in Roseville outnumber men significantly in every volunteer activity having to do with kids, such as the Parent and Teacher Association (PTA), Scouts, and school special events. Coaching youth sports is the great exception to this rule. Sport has changed over the past 30 years, from a world set up almost exclusively by and for boys and men to one that is moving substantially (although incompletely) toward gender equity (Messner 2002). Yet, men dom- inate the very public on-field volunteer leadership positions in community youth sports.

This article is part of a larger study of gender in adult volunteering in two youth sports programs in a small independent suburb of Los Angeles that we call Roseville. Both of the sports leagues are local affiliates of massive national and international

organizations. LLB/S and AYSO offer an interest- ing contrast in youth sports organizations, espe- cially with respect to gender. Little League Baseball began in 1938 and for its first 36 years was an or- ganization set up exclusively for boys. When forced against its will by a court decision in 1974 to in- clude girls, Little League responded by creating a separate softball league into which girls continue to be tracked. Today, LLB/S is an organization that boasts 2.7 million child participants worldwide, 2.1 million of them in the United States. There are 176,786 teams in the program, 153,422 of them in baseball and 23,364 in softball. Little League stays afloat through the labor of approximately 1 million volunteers.

When AYSO started in 1964, it was exclusively for boys, but by 1971, girls’ teams had been introduced, Thus, over the years, the vast majority of people who have participated in AYSO have experienced it as an organization set up for boys and girls. AYSO remains today mostly a US organization, with more than 650,000 players on more than 50,000 teams. The na- tional AYSO office employs 50 paid staff members, but like LLB/S, AYSO is an organization largely driven by the labor of volunteers, with roughly 250,000 vol- unteer coaches, team parents, and referees.

The differently gendered history of these two or- ganizations offers hints as to the origins of the differ- ences we see; there are more women head coaches in soccer than in baseball. Connell (1987) argues that every social institution—including the economy, the military, schools, families, or sport—has a “gender regime,” which is defined as the current state of play of gender relations in the institution. We can begin to understand an institution’s gender regime by measur- ing and analyzing the gender divisions of labor and power in the organization (i.e., what kinds of jobs are done by women and men, who has the author- ity, etc.). The idea that a gender regime is character- ized by a “state of play” is a way to get beyond static measurements that result from a quick snapshot of an organizational pyramid and understanding in- stead that organizations are always being created by people’s actions and discourse (Britton 2000). These actions often result in an organizational iner- tia that reproduces gender divisions and hierarchies;

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however, organizations are also subject to gradual— or occasionally even rapid—change.

Institutional gender regimes are connected with other gender regimes. Put another way, people in their daily lives routinely move in, out, and across different gender regimes—families, workplaces, schools, places of worship, and community activities such as youth sports. Their actions within a particu- lar gender regime—for instance, the choice to volun- teer to coach a youth soccer team—and the meanings they construct around these actions are constrained and enabled by their positions, responsibilities, and experiences in other institutional contexts. We will show how individual decisions to coach or to serve as team parents occur largely through nonreflexive, patterned interactions that are infused with an ascen- dant gender ideology that we call “soft essentialism.” These interactions occur at the nexus of the three gender regimes of community youth sports, families, and workplaces.

r e s e a r c h m e t h o d s

The low numbers of women coaches in Roseville AYSO and LLB/S and the fact that nearly all of the team par- ents are women gave us a statistical picture of persis- tent gender segregation. But simply trotting out these numbers couldn’t tell us how this picture is drawn. We wanted to understand the current state of play of the adult gender regime of youth sports, so we developed a study based on the following question: What are the social processes that sustain this gender segregation? And by extension, we wanted to explore another ques- tion: What is happening that might serve to destabilize and possibly change this gender segregation? In other words, are there ways to see and understand the inter- nal mechanisms—the face-to-face interactions as well as the meaning-making processes—that constitute the “state of play” of the gender regime of community youth sports?

Questions about social processes—how people, in their routine daily interactions, reproduce (and oc- casionally challenge) patterned social relations—are best addressed using a combination of qualitative methods. Between 2003 and 2007, we systematically explored the gender dynamics of volunteer coaches

in Roseville by deploying several methods of data collection. First, we conducted a content analy- sis of nine years (1999–2007) of Roseville’s AYSO and LLB/S yearbooks (magazine-length documents compiled annually by the leagues, containing team photos as well as names and photos of coaches and managers). The yearbook data on the numbers and placement of women and men coaches provides the statistical backdrop for our study of the social pro- cesses of gender and coaching that we summarized above.

Second, we conducted field observations of nu- merous girls’ and boys’ soccer, baseball, and softball practices and games. We participated in clinics that were set up to train soccer and baseball coaches and a clinic to train soccer referees. We observed annual baseball and softball tryouts, a managers’ baseball “draft,” and several annual opening ceremonies for AYSO and LLB/S.

Third, Mike conducted several seasons of partici- pant observation—as a volunteer assistant coach or as scorekeeper—of his son’s Little League Baseball teams, ranging from six- and seven-year old co-ed T-ball teams to 13- and 14-year-old boys’ baseball teams. These positions gave him observational van- tage points near the coaches from which he could jot down short notes that he would later develop into longer field notes. Mike’s “insider” role as a com- munity member and a father of kids in these sports leagues allowed him easy access. He always informed the coaches of his sons’ teams that he was doing a study, but like many who conduct participant ob- servation, it seemed that his role as researcher was frequently “forgotten” by others and that he was most often seen as a father, an assistant coach, or a scorekeeper.

Fourth, we conducted 50 in-depth interviews with women and men volunteers—mostly head soccer coaches and baseball or softball managers of both boys’ and girls’ teams but also a small number of assistant coaches and team parents. The interviewees were selected through a snowball sampling method. All but three of those interviewed were parents of children playing in the Roseville soccer, baseball, or softball leagues. Although there were far more men coaches than women coaches from whom to choose,

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we purposely interviewed roughly equal numbers of women (24) and men (26) coaches. Two of the women coaches were single with no children, one was a di- vorced single mother, one was a mother living with her female partner, and the rest were mothers living with a male spouse. One of the men coaches was single with no children, two were divorced fathers, and the rest were fathers living with a female spouse. Most of the men interviewed were in their 40s, with an average age of 45. The women were, on average, 39 years old. Nearly all of the interviewees were col- lege educated, living in professional-class families. They self-identified ethnically as 68 percent white, 18 percent Hispanic, 4 percent Asian American, and 10 percent biracial or other. This ethnic breakdown of our interviewees reflects roughly the apparent ethnic composition of coaches in the annual yearbooks. However, since whites are only 44 percent and Asian Americans are 27 percent of the population of Rose- ville, it is apparent that whites are overrepresented as coaches and Asian Americans are underrepresented (Roseville is 16 percent Hispanic).

We conducted the first three interviews to- gether. Suzel then conducted 38 of the subsequent interviews, while Mike did nine. Mike used his in- sider status as a member of the community and as a parent of kids who had played in the local youth sports leagues to establish trust and rapport with in- terviewees. No doubt his status as a white male col- lege professor with a deep background in sports also gave him instant credibility with some interviewees. Suzel, by contrast, was an outsider in most ways. She was a Latina graduate student, not a resident of Ros- eville, and her own two daughters did not play local youth sports. Moreover, she had almost no sports background. Suzel closed the social distance with her interviewees by enrolling in a coaching clinic and a refereeing clinic and by observing several practices and games to better understand the role that coaches play with the kids. In the interviews, Suzel judiciously used her knowledge from these clinics and her obser- vations of practices and games to ask knowledgeable questions and sharp follow-up probes. This strategy created rapport and it also allowed Suzel to demon- strate knowledge of sports and coaching, thus bridg- ing what might otherwise have been a credibility gap

between her and some of those with deep athletic experience and knowledge. At times, Suzel used her outsider status as a benefit, asking naïve questions about the particularities of Roseville that might have sounded disingenuous coming from an insider.

t h e c o a c h e s ’ s t o r i e s

When we asked a longtime Little League Softball man- ager why he thinks most head coaches are men while nearly all team parents are women, he said with a shrug, “They give opportunities to everybody to manage or coach and it just so happens that no women volunteer, you know?” This man’s statement was typical of head coaches and league officials who generally offered up explanations grounded in individual choice: Faced with equal opportunities to volunteer, men just choose to be coaches, while women choose to be team parents.

But our research shows that the gendered division of labor among men and women volunteers in youth coaching results not simply from an accumulation of individual choices; rather, it is produced through a profoundly social process. We will first draw from our interviews with head coaches to illustrate how gender divisions of labor among adult volunteers in youth sports are shaped by gendered language and belief systems and are seen by many coaches as natu- ral extensions of gendered divisions of labor in fami- lies and workplaces. We next draw observations from our field notes to illustrate how everyday interactions within the gendered organizational context of youth sports shapes peoples’ choices about men’s and wom- en’s roles as coaches or team parents. Our main focus here will be on reproductive agency—the patterns of action that reproduce the gender division of labor. But we will also discuss moments of resistance and disruption that create possibilities for change.

g e n d e r e d p i p e l i n e s

When we asked coaches to describe how they had decided to become coaches, most spoke of having first served as assistant coaches—sometimes for just one season, sometimes for several seasons—before moving into head coaching positions. Drawing from language used by those who study gender in occupa- tions, we can describe the assistant coach position as

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an essential part of the “pipeline” to the head coach position (England 2006). One of the reasons for this is obvious: many parents—women and men—believe that as a head coach, they will be under tremendous critical scrutiny by other parents in the community. Without previous youth coaching experience, many lack the confidence that they feel they need to take on such a public leadership task. A year or two of assistant coaching affords one the experience and builds the confidence that can lead to the conclusion that “I can do that” and the decision to take on the responsibility of a head coaching position.

But the pipeline from assistant coaches to head coaches does not operate in a purely individual vol- untarist manner. A male longtime Little League man- ager and a member of the league’s governing board gave us a glimpse of how the pipeline works when there is a shortage of volunteers:

One time we had 10 teams and only like six or seven applicants that wanted to be strictly manager. So you kinda eyeball the yearbook from the year before, maybe a couple of years [before], and see if the same dad is still listed as a[n assistant] coach, and maybe now it’s time he wants his own team. So you make a lot of phone calls. You might make 20 phone calls and hopefully you are going to get two or three guys that say, “Yes, I’ll be a manager.”

The assistant coach position is a key part of the pipeline to head coaching positions both because it makes people more confident about volunteering to be a head coach and, as the quote above illustrates, because it gives them visibility in ways that make them more likely to be actively recruited by the league to be a head coach. To understand how it is that most head coaches are men, we need to understand how the pipeline operates—how it is that, at the entry level, women’s and men’s choices to become assistant coaches and/or team parents are constrained or en- abled by the social context.

r e c r u i t i n g d a d s a n d m o m s t o h e l p

There is a lot of work involved in organizing a success- ful youth soccer, baseball, or softball season. A head coach needs help from two, three, even four other par- ents who will serve as assistant coaches during practices

and games. Parents also have to take responsibility for numerous support tasks like organizing snacks, making team banners, working in the snack bar during games, collecting donations for year-end gifts for the coaches, and organizing team events and year-end parties. In AYSO, parents also serve as volunteer referees. When we asked head coaches how they determined who would help them with these assistant coaching and other support tasks, a very common storyline devel- oped: the coach would call a beginning-of-the-season team meeting, sometimes preceded by a letter or e-mail to parents, and ask for volunteers. Nearly always, they ended up with dads volunteering to help as assistant coaches and moms volunteering to be team parents. A woman soccer coach told a typical story:

At the beginning of the season I sent a little intro- ductory letter [that said] I really badly need an as- sistant coach and referee and a “team mom.” You know anyone that is keen on that, let’s talk about it at the First practice. And this year one guy picked up the phone and said. “Please, can I be your assistant coach?” And I spoke to another one of the mums who I happen to know through school and she said, “Oh, I can do the team mum if you find someone to help me.” And by the first practice, they’d already discussed it and it was up and running.

We can see from this coach’s statement how the assistant coach and team parent positions are some- times informally set up even before the first team meeting and how a coach’s assumption that the team parent will be a “team mom” might make it more likely that women end up in these positions. But even coaches—such as the woman soccer coach quoted below—who try to emphasize that team parent is not necessarily a woman’s job find that only women end up volunteering:

Before the season started, we had a team meeting and I let the parents know that I would need a team parent and I strongly stressed parent, because I don’t think it should always be a mother. But we did end up with the mom doing it and she assigns snacks and stuff like that.

None of the head coaches we interviewed said that they currently had a man as the team parent. Four coaches recalled that they had once had a man

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as a team parent (although one of these four coaches said, “Now that I think about it, that guy actually vol- unteered his wife do it”). When we asked if they had ever had a team parent who was a man, nearly all of the coaches said never. Many of them laughed at the very thought. A woman soccer coach exclaimed with a chuckle, “I just can’t imagine! I wonder if they’ve ever had a ‘team mom’ who’s a dad. I don’t know [laughs].” A man soccer coach stammered his way through his response, punctuating his words with sarcastic laughter: “Ha! In fact, that whole concept—I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a team dad [laughs]. Uh—there is no team dad, I’ve never heard of a team dad. But I don’t know why that would be.” A few coaches, such as the following woman softball coach, resorted to family metaphors to explain why they think there are few if any men volunteering to be team parents: “Oh, it’s always a mom [laughs]. ‘Team mom.’ That’s why it’s called ‘team mom.’ You know, the coach is a male. And the mom—I mean, that’s the housekeeping—you know: Assign the snack.”

There are gendered assumptions in the language commonly linked to certain professions, so much so that often, when the person holding the position is in the statistical minority, people attach a modi- fier, such as male nurse, male secretary, woman judge, woman doctor. Or woman head coach. Over and over, in interviews with coaches, during team meetings, and in interactions during games, practices, and team parties, we noticed this gendered language. Most obvious was the frequent slippage from official term team parent to commonly used term “team mom.” But we also noticed that a man coach was normally just called a coach, while a woman coach was often gender marked as a woman coach. As feminist lin- guists have shown, language is a powerful element of social life—it not only reflects social realities such as gender divisions of labor, it also helps to construct our notions of what is normal and what is an aber- ration (Thorne, Kramarae, and Henley 1983). One statement from a woman soccer coach, “I wonder if they’ve ever had a ‘team mom’ who’s a dad,” illus- trates how gendered language makes the idea of a man team parent seem incongruous, even laughable. In youth sports, this gendered language supports the notion that a team is structured very much like a

“traditional” heterosexual family: The head coach— nearly always a man—is the leader and the public face of the team; the team parent—nearly always a woman—is working behind the scenes, doing sup- port work; assistant coaches—mostly men, but in- cluding the occasional woman—help the coach on the field during practices and games.

Teams are even talked about sometimes as “families,” and while we never heard a head coach referred to as a team’s “dad,” we did often and con- sistently hear the team parent referred to as the “team mom.” This gendered language, drawn from family relations, gives us some good initial hints as to how coach and team parent roles remain so gender segregated. In their study of self-managing teams, which was intended to break down gender divisions in workplaces, Ollilainen and Calasanti (2007) show how team members’ use of family met- aphors ser ves to maintain the salience of gender, and thus, helps to reproduce a gendered division of labor. Similarly, in youth sports contexts, gen- dered language structures people’s conversations in ways that shape and constrain their actions. Is a man who volunteers to be a team parent now a “team mom”?

g e n d e r i d e o l o g y a n d w o r k / fa m i ly a n a l o g i e s

When we asked the coaches to consider why it is nearly always women who volunteer to be the team parent, many seemed never to have considered this question before. Some of the men coaches seemed especially befuddled and appeared to assume that women’s team-parenting work is a result of an almost “natural” decision on the part of the woman. Some men, such as the following soccer coach, made sense of this vol- unteer division of labor by referring to the ways that it reflected divisions of labor in men’s own families and in their community: “In this area we have a lot of stay-at-home moms, so it seems to kind of fall to them to take over those roles.” Similarly, a man base- ball coach whose wife served as the team parent ex- plained, “I think it’s because they probably do it at home. You know, I mean my wife—even though she can’t really commit the time to coach, I don’t think she would want to coach—uh, she’s very good with that

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[team parent] stuff.” A man soccer coach explained the gender divisions on youth sports teams in terms of people’s comfort with a nostalgic notion of a “tra- ditional family”:

That’s sort of the classical family, you know, it’s like the Donna Reed family is AYSO, right? . . . They have these assigned gender roles . . . and people in Roseville, probably all over the United States, they’re fairly com- fortable with them, right? It’s, uh, maybe insidious, maybe not, [but] framed in the sort of traditional family role of dad, mom, kids . . . people are going to be comfortable with that.

Another man baseball coach broadened the ex- planation, drawing connections to divisions of labor in his workplace:

It’s kinda like in business. I work in real estate, and most of your deal makers that are out there on the front lines, so to speak, making the deals, doing the shuckin’ and jivin’, doing the selling, are men. It’s a very Good Ol’ Boys network on the real estate broker- age side. There are a ton a females who are on the property management side, because it’s housekeep- ing, it’s managing, it’s like running the household, it’s behind the scenes, it’s like cooking in the kitchen— [laughs]—I mean, I hate to say that, but it’s that kind of role that’s secondary. Coach is out in the front lead- ing the squad, mom sitting behind making sure that the snacks are in order and all that. You know—just the way it is.

Having a male coach and a “team mom” just seemed normal to this man, “You know, just the way it is,” because it seemed to flow naturally from divisions of labor in his household and in his workplace—gendered divisions of labor that have the “the Good Ol’ Boys” operating publicly as the leaders “on the front lines  .  .  . shuckin’ and jivin’,” while the women are offering support “behind the scenes . . . like cooking in the kitchen.” Echoing this view, a man soccer coach said, “I hate to use the anal- ogy, but it’s like a secretary: You got a boss and you’ve got a secretary, and I think that’s where most of the opportunities for women to be active in the sports is, as the secretary.”

When explaining why it is that team parents are almost exclusively women, a small number of

women coaches also seemed to see it in essentialist terms—like most of the men coaches saw it.

Many women coaches, however, saw the gender- ing of the team parent position as a problem and made sense of its persistence, as did many of the men, by referring to the ways that it reflects family- and work-related divisions of labor. But several of the women coaches added an additional dimension to their explanations by focusing on why they think the men don’t or won’t consider doing team parent work. A woman soccer coach said, “I think it’s because the dads want to be involved with the action. And they are not interested in doing paperwork and collecting money for photos or whatever it is. They are not in- terested in doing that sort of stuff.” Another woman soccer coach extended this point: “I think it’s prob- ably, well, identity, which is probably why not many men do it. You know, they think that is a woman’s job, like secretary or nurse or, you know.” In short, many of the women coaches were cognizant of the ways that the team parent job was viewed by men, like all “women’s work,” as nonmasculine and thus undesirable. A woman Little League coach found it ironically funny that her husband, in fact, does most of the cooking and housework at home but will not take on the role of team parent for his daughter’s team. When asked if changing the name to “team dad” might get more men to volunteer, she replied with a sigh,

I don’t know. I wish my husband would be a team dad because he’s just very much more domesticated than I am [laughs]. You know, “Bring all the snacks, honey, hook us up,” you know. I think there’s a lot of men out there, but they don’t want to be perceived as being domesticated.

This coach’s comment illustrates how—even for a man who does a substantial amount of the family labor at home—publicly taking on a job that is de- fined as “feminine” threatens to saddle him with a “domesticated” public image that would be embar- rassing or even humiliating. In sum, most coaches— both women and men—believe that men become coaches and women become team parents largely because these public roles fit with their domestic pro- clivities and skills. But the women add an important

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dimension to this explanation: women do the team parent work because it has to be done . . . and because they know that the men will not do it.

f i n d i n g a “ t e a m m o m ”

The interview data give us a window into how people make sense of decisions that they have made as youth sports volunteers and provide insights into how gen- dered language and beliefs about men’s and women’s work and family roles help to shape these decisions. Yet, asking people to explain how (and especially why) things such as gendered divisions of labor per- sist is not by itself the most reliable basis for building an explanation. Rather, watching how things happen gives us a deeper understanding of the social construc- tion of gender (Thorne 1993). Our observations from team meetings and early season practices reveal deeper social processes at work—processes that shaped peo- ple’s apparently individual decisions to volunteer for assistant coach or team parent positions. This excerpt from field notes from the first team meeting of a boys’ baseball team illustrates how men’s apparent resis- tance to even consider taking on the team parent posi- tion ultimately leaves the job in the hands of a woman (who might also have been reluctant to do it):

Coach Bill stands facing the parents, as we sit in the grandstands. He doesn’t ask for volunteers for assistant coaches; instead, he announces that he has “invited” two of the fathers “who probably know more about baseball than I do” to serve as his assistants. He then asks for someone to volunteer as the “team mom.” He adds, “Now, ‘team mom’ is not a gendered job: it can be done by a mom or a dad. But we really need a ‘team mom.’” Nobody volunteers immediately. One mom sit- ting near me mutters to another mom, “I’ve done this two years in a row, and I’m not gonna do it this year.” Coach Bill goes on to ask for a volunteer for scorekeeper. Meanwhile, two other moms have been whispering, and one of them suddenly bursts out with “Okay! She’s volunteered to be ‘team mom!’ “ People applaud. The volunteer seems a bit sheepish; her body-language sug- gests someone who has just reluctantly agreed to do something. But she affirms that, yes, she’ll do it.

This first practice of the year is often the moment at which the division of labor—who will

be the assistant coaches, who will be the team parent—is publicly solidified. In this case, the men assistant coaches had been selected before the meeting by the head coach, but it apparently took some cajoling from a mother during the team meeting to convince another mother to volunteer to be the “team mom.” We obser ved two occasions when a woman who did not volunteer was drafted by the head coach to be the “team mom.” In one case, the reluctant volunteer was clearly more ori- ented toward assistant coaching, as the following composite stor y from field notes from the begin- ning of the season of a seven-year-old boys’ base- ball team illustrates:

At the first practice, Coach George takes charge, asks for volunteers. I tell him that I am happy to help out at practice and games and that he should just let me know what he’d like me to do. He appoints me Assis- tant Coach. This happens with another dad, too. We get team hats. Elena, a mother, offers to help out in any way she can. She’s appointed “co-team mom” (the coach’s wife is the other “team mom”). She shrugs and says okay, fine. Unlike most “team moms,” Elena continues to attend all practices. At the fifth practice. Coach George is pitching batting practice to the kids; I’m assigned to first base, the other dad is working with the catcher. Elena (the “team mom”) is standing alone on the sidelines, idly tossing a ball up in the air to herself. Coach George’s son suddenly has to pee, so as George hustles the boy off to the bathroom, Elena jumps in and starts pitching. She’s good, it turns out, and can groove the pitch right where the kids want it. (By contrast, George has recently been plunking the kids with wild pitches.) Things move along well. At one point, when Coach George has returned from the bathroom, with Elena still pitching to the kids, a boy picks up a ball near second base and doesn’t know what to do with it. Coach George yells at the kid: “Throw it! Throw it to the ‘team mom!’” The kid, confused, says, “Where is she?” I say, “The pitcher, throw it to the pitcher.” Coach George says, “Yeah, the ‘team mom.’”

A couple of years later, we interviewed Elena and asked her how it was that she became a team parent and continued in that capacity for five straight years. Her response illuminated the informal constraints

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that channel many women away from coaching and toward being team parents:

The first year, when [my son] was in kindergarten, he was on a T-ball team, and I volunteered to be man- ager, and of course the league didn’t choose me, but they did allow me to be assistant coach. And I was so excited, and [laughs] of course I showed up in heels for the first practice, because it was right after work, and the coach looked at me, and I informed him that “I’m your new assistant.” And he looked at me—and I don’t know if distraught is the correct word, but he seemed slightly disappointed, and he went out of his way to ask the parents who were there watching their children if there was anyone who wanted to volun- teer, even though I was there. So there was this male who did kind of rise to the occasion, and so that was the end. He demoted me without informing me of his decision [laughs]—I was really enthused, because [my son] was in kindergarten, so I really wanted to be coach—or assistant coach at least—and it didn’t happen. So after that I didn’t feel comfortable to vol- unteer to coach. I just thought, okay, then I can do “team mom.”

As this story illustrates, women who have the background, skills, and desire to work as on-field assistant coaches are sometimes assigned by head coaches to be “team mom.” Some baseball teams even have a niche for such moms: a “dugout coach” (or “dugout mom”) is usually a mom who may help out with on-field instruction during practices, but on game days, she is assigned the “indoors” space of the dugout, where it is her responsibility to keep track of the line-up and to be sure that the boy who is on-deck (next up to bat) is ready with his batting gloves and helmet on. The dugout coach also—especially with younger kids’ teams—might be assigned to keep kids focused on the game, to keep equipment orderly, to help with occasional first aid, and to help see that the dugout is cleaned of empty water bottles and snack containers after the game is over. In short, the base- ball, softball, and soccer fields on which the children play are gendered spaces (Dworkin 2001; Montez de Oca 2005). The playing field is the public space where the (usually male) coach exerts his authority and command. The dugout is like the home—a place of domestic safety from which one emerges to do

one’s job. Work happens in the indoor space of the dugout, but it is like family labor, behind-the-scenes, supporting the “real” work of leadership that is done on the field.

c h a l l e n g e s a n d r e s i s ta n c e

The head coach’s common assumption that fathers will volunteer to be assistant coaches and mothers to be “team moms” creates a context that powerfully chan- nels men and women in these directions. Backed by these commonsense understandings of gendered divi- sions of labor, most men and women just “go with the flow” of this channeling process. Their choices and ac- tions help to reproduce the existing gendered patterns of the organization. But some do not; some choose to swim against the tide. A mother who had several seasons of experience as a head soccer coach described the first team meeting for her youngest child’s team:

At our first team meeting, the coach announced, “I’m looking for a couple of you to help me out as assistant coaches,” and he looked directly at the men, and only at the men. None of them volunteered. And it was really amazing because he didn’t even look at me or at any of the other women. So after the meeting, I went up to him and said, “Hey, I’ve coached soccer for like 10 seasons; I can help you out, okay?” And he agreed, so I’m the assistant coach for him.

This first team meeting is an example of a normal gendered interaction that, if it had gone unchal- lenged, would have reproduced the usual gender di- visions of labor on the team. It is likely that many women in these situations notice the ways that men are, to adopt Martin’s (2001) term, informally (and probably unconsciously) “mobilizing masculinities” in ways that reproduce men’s positions of centrality. But this woman’s 10 years of coaching experience gave her the confidence and the athletic “capital” that allowed her not only to see and understand but also to challenge the very gendered selection process that was taking place at this meeting. Most mothers do not have this background, and when faced with this sort of moment, they go with the flow.

On another occasion, as the following compos- ite story from field notes describes, Mike observed a highly athletic and coaching-inclined woman

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assertively use her abilities in a way that initially seemed to transcend the gender segregation process, only to be relegated symbolically at season’s end to the position of “team mom”:

A new baseball season, the first team meeting of the year; a slew of dads volunteer to be assistant coaches. Coach George combs the women for a “team mom” and gets some resistance; at first, nobody will do it, but then he finds a volunteer. At the first few prac- tices, few assistant coaches actually show up. Isabel, a mom, clearly is into baseball, very knowledge- able and athletic, and takes the field. She pitches to the kids, gives them good advice. On the day when George is passing out forms for assistant coaches to sign, he hands her one too. She accepts it, in a matter- of-fact way. Isabel continues to attend practices, work- ing with the kids on the field.

Though few dads show up for many of the prac- tices, there never seems to be a shortage of dads to serve as assistant coaches at the games. At one game, Coach George invites Isabel to coach third base, but beyond that, she is never included in an on-field coaching role during a game.

End of season, team party. Coach George hands out awards to all the kids. He hands out gift certifi- cates to all the assistant coaches but does not include Isabel. Then he hands out gift certificates to the “team moms,” and includes Isabel, even though I don’t recall her doing any team parent tasks. She had clearly been acting as an assistant coach all season long.

This story illustrates how, on one hand, a woman volunteer can informally circumvent the sorting pro- cess that pushes her toward the “team mom” role by persistently showing up to practices and assertively doing the work of a coach. As Thorne (1993, 133) points out, individual incidences of gender crossing are often handled informally in ways that affirm, rather than challenge, gender boundaries: An indi- vidual girl who joins the boys’ game gets defined “as a token, a kind of ‘fictive boy,’ not unlike many women tokens in predominantly men settings, whose pres- ence does little to challenge the existing arrange- ments.” Similarly, Isabel’s successful “crossing” led to her becoming accepted as an assistant coach during practices but rarely recognized as a “real” coach during games. She was a kind of “token” or “fictive”

coach whose gender transgression was probably un- known to the many adults who never attended prac- tices. So, in the final moment of the season, when adults and children alike were being publicly recog- nized for their contributions to the team, she was labeled and rewarded for being a “team mom,” reaf- firming gender boundaries.

A few coaches whom we interviewed consciously attempted to resist or change this gendered sorting system. Some of the women coaches, especially, saw it as a problem that the team parent job was always done by a woman. A woman softball coach was con- cerned that the “team mom” amounted to negative role-modeling for kids and fed into the disrespect that women coaches experienced:

The kids think that the moms should just be “team moms.” Which means that they don’t take the moth- ers seriously, and I think that’s a bad thing. I mean it’s a bad thing. I think that’s a lack of respect to women, to mothers.

Another woman Little League coach said that most team parents are women because too many people assume

that’s all the women are good for. I think that’s what the mentality is. I made it very clear to our parents that it did not have to be a mother, that it could be a father and that I encourage any dad out there that had time to do what team parents are supposed to do, to sign up and do it. But it didn’t happen.

Such coaches find that simply degendering the language by calling this role team parent and even stressing that this is not a gendered job is unlikely to yield men volunteers. So what some women coaches do is simply refuse to have a team parent. A woman soccer coach said, “I do it all. I don’t have a team parent.” Another said, “I think in general, compared to the men who coach, I do more of that [team parent work].” This resistance by women coaches is under- standable, especially from those who see the phe- nomenon of “team mom” as contributing to a climate of disrespect for women coaches. However, this form of resistance ends up creating extra work for women coaches—work that most men coaches relegate to a “team mom.”

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The very few occasions when a father does volunteer—or is recruited by the coach—to be the team parent are moments of gender “crossing” that hold the potential to disrupt the normal operation of the gender-category sorting process. But ironi- cally, a team parent who is a man can also reinforce gender stereotypes. One man soccer coach told me that the previous season a father had volunteered to be the team parent, but that

he was a disaster [laughs]. He didn’t do anything, you know, and what little he did it was late; it was ineffec- tive assistance. He didn’t come, he didn’t make phone calls, I mean he was just like a black hole. And so that—that was an unfortunate disaster. This year it’s a woman again.

The idea that a man volunteered—and then failed miserably to do the team parent job—may serve ulti- mately to reinforce the taken-for-granted assumption that women are naturally better suited to do this kind of work.

t h e d e va l u at i o n o f w o m e n ’ s i n v i s i b l e l a b o r

The Roseville “team moms” we observed were similar to those studied by Chafetz and Kotarba (1999) in terms of their education, professional-class status, and family structure. The Texasville and Roseville “team moms” are doing the same kinds of activities, simul- taneously contributing to the “concerted cultivation” of their own children (Lareau 2003) while helping to enhance the social cohesion of the team, the league, and the community.

Despite the importance of the work team parents are doing, it is not often recognized as equivalent to the work done by coaches. Of course, the team parent typically puts in far fewer hours of labor than does the head coach. However, in some cases, the team parents put in more time than some assistant coaches (dads, for instance, whose work schedules don’t allow them to get to many practices but who can be seen on the field during a Saturday game, coaching third base). Yet, the team parent’s work remains largely invisible, and coaches sometimes talk about team parents’ contributions as trivial or unimportant. Sev- eral coaches, when asked about the team parent job,

disparaged it as “not very hard to do,” “an easy job.” But our interviews suggest that the women team par- ents are often doing this job as one of many commu- nity volunteer jobs, while most of the men who coach are engaged in this and only this volunteer activity. A field note from a boys’ baseball game illustrates this:

It is the second to last game of the season. During the first inning, Dora, the “team mom,” shows up and immediately starts circulating among the parents in the stands, talking and handing out a flier. The flier announces the “year end party,” to be held in a couple of weeks. She announces that she will supply ice cream and other makings for sundaes. Everyone else can just bring some drinks. She also announces (and it’s on the flier) that she’s collecting $20 from each family to pay for a “thank you gift . . . for all their hard work” for the head coach and for each of the three assistant coaches (all men). People start shelling out money, and Dora starts a list of who has donated. By the start of the next inning, she announces that she’s got to go saying “I have a Webelos [Cub Scouts] parents meeting.” She’s obviously multitasking as a parent volunteer. By the fourth inning, near the end of the game, she is back, collecting more money, and informing parents on details concerning the party and the upcoming playoffs. Finally, during the last inning, she sits and watches the end of the game with the rest of us.

Dora, like other “team moms,” doing work before, during, and after the game—making fliers, commu- nicating with parents, collecting money, keeping lists and records, organizing parties, making sure every- one knows the schedule of upcoming events. And she is sandwiching this work around other volunteer activities with another youth organization. This kind of labor keeps organizations running, and it helps to create and sustain the kind of vibrant community “for the kids” that people imagine when they move to a town like Roseville (Daniels 1985).

s o r t i n g a n d s o f t e s s e n t i a l i s m

In this article, we have revealed the workings of a gender-category sorting process that reflects the in- teractional “doing” of gender discussed by West and Zimmerman (1987). Through this sorting process,

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the vast majority of women volunteers are channeled into a team parent position, and the vast majority of men volunteers become coaches. To say that people are “sorted” is not to deny their active agency in this process. Rather, it is to underline that organizations are characterized by self-perpetuating “inequality re- gimes” (Acker 2006). What people often think of as “free individual choices” are actually choices that are shaped by social contexts. We have shown how women’s choices to become team parents are con- strained by the fact that few, if any, men will volunteer to do this less visible and less honored job. Women’s choices are enabled by their being actively recruited— “volunteered”—by head coaches or by other parents to become the “team mom.” Moreover, men’s choices to volunteer as assistant coaches and not as team par- ents are shaped by the gendered assumptions of head coaches, enacted through active recruiting and infor- mal interactions at the initial team meeting.

This gender-category sorting system is at the heart of the current state of play of the gender regime of adult volunteer work in youth sports in Roseville. There are several ways we can see the sorting system at work. First, our research points to the role of gen- dered language and meanings in this process. The term coach and the term “team mom” are saturated with gendered assumptions that are consistent with most people’s universe of meanings. These gendered meanings mesh with—and mutually reinforce—the conventional gendered divisions of labor and power in the organization in ways that make decisions to “go with the flow” appear natural. Second, we have shown how having women do the background sup- port work while men do the visible leadership work on the team is also made to appear natural to the extent that it reiterates the gender divisions of labor that many parents experience in their families and in their workplaces. Roseville is a diverse community that is dominated culturally by white, professional- class families, who—partly through the language and practice of youth sports—create a culturally he- gemonic (though not a numerical majority) family form in which educated mothers have “opted out” of professional careers to engage in community volun- teer work and “intensive mothering,” of their own children (Hays 1996; Stone 2007).

The women we interviewed who had opted out of professional careers narrated their decisions to do so in language of personal choice, rather than constraint. The husbands of these women say that they support their wives’ choices. This language of (women’s) personal choice also saturates coaches’ discussions of why women become “team moms.” By contrast, when people talk about men, they are far less likely to do so using a language of choice. Men seem to end up in public careers or as youth sports coaches as a matter of destiny. Grounded in the strains and tensions of contemporary professional- class work–family life, this discourse on gender re- casts feminist beliefs in a woman’s “right to choose” as her responsibility to straddle work and family life, while the man continues “naturally” to be viewed as the main family breadwinner. We call this ascendant gender ideology “soft essentialism.”

Youth sports is a powerful institution into which children are initiated into a gender-segregated world with its attendant ideology of soft essentialism (Messner forthcoming).

In the past, sport tended to construct a cate- gorical “hard” essentialism—boys and men, it was believed, were naturally suited to the aggressive, competitive world of sport, while girls and women were not. Today, with girls’ and women’s massive influx into sport, these kinds of categorical assump- tions of natural difference can no longer stand up to even the most cursor y examination. Soft essen- tialism, as an ascendant professional-class gender ideolog y, frames sport as a realm in which girls are empowered to exercise individual choice (re- hearsing choices they will later face in straddling the demands of careers and family labor), while continuing to view boys as naturally “hard wired” to play sports (and ultimately, to have public ca- reers). Girls are viewed as flexibly facing a future of choices; boys as inflexible, facing a linear path toward public careers. Soft essentialism, in short, initiates kids into an adult world that has been only partially transformed by feminism, where many of the burdens of bridging and balancing work and family strains are still primarily on women’s shoul- ders. Men coaches and “team moms” symbolize and exemplify these tensions.

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Time after time, we heard leaders of leagues and some women coaches say that the league leadership works hard to recruit more women coaches but just cannot get them to volunteer. The formal agency here is to “recruit more women coaches.” But what Martin (2001) calls the informal practicing of gender (revealed most clearly in our field-note vignettes) amounts to a collective and (mostly) nonreflexive sorting system that, at the entry level, puts most women and men on separate paths. Martin’s work has been foundational in showing how gender works in organizations in in- formal, nonreflexive ways that rely on peoples’ “tacit knowledge” about gender. In particular, she points out “how and why well-intentioned, ‘good people’ prac- tise gender in ways that do harm” (Martin 2006, 255).

Our study shows a similar lack of “bad guys” engaged in overt acts of sexism and discrimination. Instead, we see a systemic reproduction of gender categorization, created nonreflexively by “well in- tentioned, good people.” The mechanisms of this nonreflexive informal practicing of gender are made to seem normal through their congruence with the “tacit knowledge” of soft essentialism that is itself em- bedded in hegemonic professional-class family and workplace gender divisions of labor. The fact that soft essentialism emerges from the intersections of these different social contexts means that any attempt to move toward greater equality for women and men in youth sports presupposes simultaneous movements toward equality in workplaces and families.

N O T E

1. Roseville is a pseudonym for the town we studied, and all names of people interviewed or ob- served for this study are also pseudonyms.

R E F E R E N C E S

Acker, Joan. 2006. Inequality regimes: Gender, class and race in organizations. Gender & Society 20:441–64.

Boyle, Maree, and Jim McKay. 1995. You leave your troubles at the gate: A case study of the exploita- tion of older women’s labor and “leisure” in sport. Gender & Society 9:556–76.

Britton, Dana. 2000. The epistemology of the gendered organization. Gender & Society 14:418–34. Chafetz, Janet Saltzman, and Joseph A. Kotarba. 1999. Little League mothers and the reproduction

of gender. In Inside sports, edited by Jay Coakley and Peter Donnelly. London and New York: Routledge.

Connell, R. W. 1987. Gender and power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Daniels, Arlene Kaplan. 1985. Invisible work. Social Problems 34:363–74. Dworkin, Shari L. 2001. Holding back: Negotiating a glass ceiling on women’s muscular strength.

Sociological Perspectives 44:333–50. England, Paula. 2006. Toward gender equality: Progress and bottlenecks. In The declining significance of

gender? edited by Francine D. Blau, Mary C. Brinlon, and David B. Grusky. New York: Russell Sage. Grasmuck, Sherri. 2005. Protecting home: Class, race, and masculinity in boys’ baseball. Piscataway, NJ:

Rutgers University Press. Hays, Sharon. 1996. The cultural contradictions of motherhood. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hook, Jennifer L. 2004. Reconsidering the division of household labor: Incorporating volunteer

work and informal support. Journal of Marriage and Family 66:101–17. Lareau, Annette. 2003. Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life. Berkeley: University of Califor-

nia Press. Martin, Patricia Yancy. 2001. Mobilizing masculinities: Women’s experiences of men at work. Orga-

nization 8:587–618.

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Martin, Patricia Yancy. 2006. Practicing gender at work: Further thoughts on reflexivity. Gender, Work and Organization 13:254–76.

Messner, Michael A. 2002. Taking the field: Women, men, and sports. Minneapolis: University of Min- nesota Press.

Messner, Michael A. Forthcoming. It’s all for the kids: Gender, families and youth sports. Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press.

Montez de Oca, Jeffrey. 2005. As our muscles get softer, our missile race becomes harder: Cultural citizenship and the “muscle gap.” Journal of Historical Sociology 18:145–71.

Ollilainen, Marjukka, and Toni Calasanti. 2007. Metaphors at work: Maintaining the salience of gender in self-managing teams. Gender & Society 21:5–27.

Stone, Pamela. 2007. Opting out: Why women really quit careers and head home. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Thompson, Shona. 1999. The game begins at home: Women’s labor in the service of sport. In Inside sports, edited by Jay Coakley and Peter Donnelly. London and New York: Routledge.

Thorne, Barrie. 1993. Gender play: Girls and boys in school. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Thorne, Barrie, Cheris Kramarae, and Nancy Henley. 1983. Language, gender and society. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

West, Candace, and Don Zimmerman. 1987. Doing gender. Gender & Society 1:125–51.

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Kathryn Edin, What Do Low-Income Single Mothers Say about Marriage from Social Problems, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Feb., 2000), pp. 112-133. © 2000 by Society for the Study of Social Problems, Inc.

K AT H RY N E D I N

When marriage rates among the poor plunged during the 1970s and 1980s, the American public began to blame welfare. During that time, an unmarried mother who had little or no income or assets could claim welfare until her youngest child aged out of the program (this was the case until 1996, when welfare became time-limited). If she were to marry, her access to welfare would be restricted. Up until the late 1980s, only about half of the states offered any benefits to married couples. By 1990, all states were required to offer welfare benefits to married couples with children who met certain income and eligibility criteria. Yet these benefits were hard to claim because the husband’s income and assets were counted in de- termining the family’s ongoing eligibility for the pro- gram (all of his income if he was the children’s father, and a portion of his income if he was not), and the couple had to prove the principal wage earner had a recent history of work. One study indicates that few welfare recipients understood these complex rules re- garding marriage; they generally assumed that marry- ing would mean the loss of welfare, food stamp, and Medicaid benefits (Edin and Lein 1997).

Not surprisingly, the public viewed the program as one that discouraged the poor from marrying. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Rec- onciliation Act of 1996 (PRWOR A) has many aims, but one is to increase the costs of non-marriage by decreasing the resources an unmarried mother can claim from the state (see Corbett 1998). To accom- plish this goal, PRWOR A mandates states to ensure that recipients comply with certain requirements and offers them new flexibility to go beyond these mandates and impose further requirements. At

minimum, PRWOR A requires that states limit cash benefit receipt to no more than five years in an adult recipient’s lifetime. A second minimum requirement is that states must impose a 20-hour work require- ment after two years of receipt. States can opt for other requirements such as school attendance for minor children and participation in “work-related activities” like job search or short-term training. Violations of these requirements can result in a full cut-off or a partial reduction of benefits (these are re- ferred to as “sanctions”). These new time limits and participation requirements sharply limit (or make more costly) the resources that single mothers can claim from the state. Meanwhile, the welfare rolls have fallen to nearly half their early 1990s levels. Though some of the decline is a response to improv- ing economic conditions, the decline is much greater than the improvement in the economy would lead us to expect. Some scholars have claimed that the remainder is due to the “signaling effect” of welfare reform (e.g., that PRWOR A has signaled to current and prospective clients that the rules have changed and that welfare is no longer an acceptable or feasible way of life), though there is little clear evidence in this regard.

.  .  .  .  Yet despite this new world of welfare that confronts low-income adults, an analysis of ethno- graphic data from two cities suggests that the large majority of welfare recipients who are experiencing the changes with regard to welfare reform, are not planning on marrying in the near future. Further- more, these recipients report that welfare reform has not changed their views on marriage. This is the case even though recipients said they believed welfare

27. WHAT DO LOW-INCOME SINGLE MOTHERS SAY ABOUT MARRIAGE?

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reform was “real” and would indeed be implemented (Edin, Scott, London, and Mazelis 1999).

. . . . I utilize data drawn from in-depth, repeated ethnographic interviews with 292 low-income Afri- can American and white single mothers in three US cities, to add qualitative grounding to our under- standing of these trends. I seek to explicate the social role that marriage plays in the lives of low-income single mothers more fully. Drawing from these data, I show that though most low-income single moth- ers aspire to marriage, they believe that, in the short term, marriage usually entails more risks than po- tential rewards. Mothers say these risks may be worth taking if they can find the “right” man—and they define “rightness” in both economic and non- economic terms. They say they are willing, and even eager, to marry if the marriage represents an increase in their class standing and if, over a sub- stantial period of time, their prospective husband’s behavior indicates he won’t beat them, abuse their children, refuse to share in household tasks, insist on making all the decisions, be sexually unfaithful, or abuse alcohol or drugs. However, many women also believe they can mitigate against these risks if they forgo marriage until the tasks of early child rearing are completed and they can concentrate more fully on labor market activities (e.g., holding a stable job). These women believe that by forgoing marriage until they can make regular and substantial contributions to the household economy, they can purchase the right to share more equally in economic and house- hold decision-making within marriage. Addition- ally, an income of their own insures them against destitution if the marriage should fail. Mothers often say that they are hesitant to enter into marriage unless they have enough resources to legitimately threaten to leave the marriage if the previously mentioned behavioral criteria are violated. In this way, they be- lieve they will have more control over a prospective husband’s behavior and insurance against financial disaster should the marriage ultimately fail.

l i t e r at u r e r e v i e w

The median age at a first marriage is the highest it has been since the United States began keeping reliable

statistics: twenty-four for women and twenty-six for men (US Bureau of the Census 1991b). The propen- sity to remarry has also declined (Cherlin 1992). Fur- thermore, more women and men are choosing not to marry during the prime family-building years, and thus, more children are living with a single parent. Both non-marriage and single parenthood are par- ticularly common among the poorest segments of American society (US Bureau of the Census 1991a; Schoen and Owens 1992:116). . . .

Both rates of entry into first marriage and remar- riage are far lower for poor women than for their more advantaged counterparts (Bumpass and Sweet 1989). Once a woman has children, her chances of marrying are also lower than a childless woman’s (Bennett, Bloom, and Craig 1991). There are also large differences by race (Bennett, Bloom and Craig 1990, 1989; Staples 1988). Yet it is poor women with children, a dispro- portionate share of whom are African Americans, on whom social welfare policy has focused.

Current theories that attempt to explain the de- cline in marriage have generally focused on four areas: women’s economic independence; the inability of men (particularly minority men) to obtain stable family-wage employment; the role that welfare has played in creating marriage disincentives among the poor; and on what might be called cultural factors, such as the stalled revolution in gender roles (see Luker 1996:158–160).

Many scholars argue that women’s prospects for economic independence through work make it possi- ble for them to raise their children apart from fathers who are wife beaters, child abusers, or otherwise dif- ficult to live with (Becker 1981; South and Trent 1988; Teachman, Polonko, and Leìgh 1987; Trent and South 1989). In the classic version of this argument (Becker 1981), women who specialize in child rearing and household management, while their spouses special- ize in market work, will find marriage very attractive. Women who combine such tasks with work will be less dependent on men to fulfill the bread-winning role. As wages rise, women’s employment also rises, and the attractiveness of marriage declines. . . .

A second argument is that there is a shortage of marriageable men among some groups. Most work in this area has focused on African Americans, since it

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is among blacks that marriage rates are lowest. Some have addressed the question of whether this is due to an insufficient supply of marriageable black men, either because of rising unemployment and incarcer- ation (Wilson 1996, 1987), declining earnings (Op- penheimer 1993), or sex-ratio imbalances (South and Lloyd 1992; Tucker and Mitchell-Kernan 1996). Most analyses show there is some evidence to support each of these variations on the male marriageable pool hypothesis, but the proportion of families headed by a single mother is simply much greater than this approach would predict (Fossett and Kielcolt 1993; Lichter, LeClere and McLaughlin 1991; South and Lloyd 1992).

Third, some have argued that the government may keep poor parents apart by making it more re- warding for the mother to collect welfare benefits than to marry a father with a menial job (Becker 1991; Murray 1984). According to this theory, wel- fare, rather than work, provides the economic inde- pendence that makes it possible, and even profitable, for mothers to eschew marriage. There is little evi- dence that out-of-wedlock birth rates are affected by either state variations in welfare levels or by changes in state benefits over time, though there is a modest negative effect for remarriage (Bane and Ellwood 1994; Hoffman 1997; Moffitt 1995).

Finally, some scholars argue that marriage deci- sions are influenced by what are generally termed “cultural” factors, even though these factors can sometimes be traced back to material realities. One argument points to the stalled revolution in sex roles. Although many men are earning less money than previously, and although wives are much more likely to work, few men truly share the household labor and childcare tasks (Hochschild 1989). Kris- ten Luker argues that when “men are increasingly less able to contribute financially to the household and when they show little willingness to do more work around the house, women will inevitably revise their thinking about marriage, work, and the raising of children” (1996:132). The gender gap in sex-role expectations has grown in recent decades. Scanzoni (1970:148) found that the divergence between hus- bands and wives over what constitutes legitimate male authority is widest at the lowest class levels. He

also found that low status husbands exercised more power in conflict resolution than higher status hus- bands (1970:156). White women’s views tend to be more egalitarian than white men’s, both in terms of work and household duties. Black men and women both hold egalitarian views in terms of women’s work, but black men lag behind their female counter- parts (and white males) in their view of gender roles (Blee and Tickameyer 1995; Collins 1987). No study I know of estimates the strength of the relationship between the gender gap in sex-role expectations and marriage rates. . . .

m e t h o d

I chose to study the social role of marriage among low- income single mothers for three reasons. First, they are the targets of recent legislation that attempts to en- courage marriage. Second, the majority of low-income adult women, for whom the costs of non-marriage and child bearing are presumably the highest, are neither childless nor married (either because they never mar- ried or they divorced), and this trend appears to be growing stronger over time (US Bureau of the Census 1993). . . . Third, it is most appropriate for the method I employ. Qualitative research designs typically focus on a single group or “case” and involve an in-depth investigation of the rich interplay of factors involved in some aspect of that group’s shared experience (Becker 1992:209–210). . . .

These data consist of transcripts and field notes from in-depth, repeated, qualitative interviews with 292 low-income single mothers in three US cities. In each city, my collaborators and I interviewed roughly 100 low-income single mothers: 87 in Charleston, South Carolina, 105 in Chicago, and 100 in Camden, New Jersey/Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In Chicago and Charleston, the sample was evenly divided be- tween African Americans and whites. Interviews were conducted between 1989 and 1992. In Camden/ Philadelphia, the sample is also predominately Af- rican American and white. These interviews were conducted between 1996 and 1999. About half of the respondents in each city and racial group relied on welfare, and about half worked at low-wage jobs (they earned less than $7.50 per hour).

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The cities vary in a number of interesting ways. Chicago offered average welfare benefits ($376 for a three-person family) and had an average labor market in the early 1990s, when we did most of our interviewing there. Charleston, South Carolina had very modest welfare benefits ($205 for a family of three) and a tight labor market. Camden, New Jersey is an industrial suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylva- nia. In both states, residents received better-than- average welfare benefits in the mid-1990s (roughly $420 for three persons) but the labor market in the Philadelphia region was quite slack. . . .

In all three cities, we scheduled conversations with each respondent at least twice to ensure that there was sufficient time to develop adequate rap- port. Within the context of these conversations, we addressed a predetermined set of topics, as well as additional topics brought up by the respondents. The order and precise wording of the questions regarding each topic was not prescribed, but followed the natu- ral flow of conversation.

The primary goal of this analysis is to show what a relatively large, heterogeneous group of low-income single mothers say about the declining propensity of poor mothers and fathers to marry. The analysis is not meant to prove or disprove existing theories of family formation among the poor, but rather to give

an in-depth account of the social role marriage plays in the lives of a relatively heterogeneous (in terms of city and race) group of mothers within a single social category. The analysis will show that much of what poor mothers say supports existing theory, though mothers’ accounts show a greater degree of complex- ity than these theories recognize. The reader will also see that poor mothers’ accounts reveal motivations that existing approaches generally neglect. The result is a complex set of personal accounts that can lend crucial qualitative grounding to other representative studies of the retreat from marriage among the poor.

r e s u lt s

Analysis of the Chicago and Charleston low-income single mothers’ accounts reveals five primary reasons why poor parents do not form or reform a legal union with a man (see Table 27.1). The first line of Table 27.1 shows the percentage of mothers whose transcripts re- vealed positive views toward marriage and hoped to marry in the future. As is true in nationally representa- tive surveys (South 1993), whites are somewhat more positively oriented toward marriage than are African Americans, particularly in our Southern site. There are no differences by city. Lines two through six show the five motivations the Chicago and Charleston women

TABLE 27.1 PERCENT OF LOW-INCOME SINGLE MOTHERS WITH POSITIVE VIEWS REGARDING MARRIAGE, PLANS TO MARRY, AND THE PERCENT WHO DISCUSSED THE IMPORTANCE OF VARIOUS FACTORS ON MARRIAGE ATTITUDES BY CITY AND RACE

Chicago Afri-

can American

Chicago

White

Charleston Afri-

can American

Charleston

White

Sig. of F

Race

Sig. of F

City

Positive Orientation toward

46 60 41 62 *

Marriage Affordability 79 66 55 39 * ***

Respectability 62 50 69 52 *

Control 79 54 55 36 *

Trust 66 94 44 60 ** ***

Domestic violence 21 54 16 48 ***

Notes: *p < .10 **p < .05 ***p < .001

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most often discussed when they talked about these views in depth. Since we asked all of the Camden/Phil- adelphia mothers about each of these motivations, all talked about them, and nearly all felt they were rel- evant in mothers’ decisions regarding marriage (even if they were not relevant to them personally).

a f f o r d a b i l i t y

Men’s income is an issue that matters enormously in poor parents’ willingness and ability to stay together. Though the total earnings a father can generate is clearly the most important dimension for mothers, so is the regularity of those earnings, the effort men expend finding and keeping work, and the source of his income.

One African American mother in Chicago summed her views about contemporary marriage this way: “Men simply don’t earn enough to support a family. This leads to couples breaking up.” When we asked mothers specifically about their criteria for marriage, nearly every one told us the father would have to have a “good job.” One reason was their recognition that the couple would probably not be able to sustain an independent household unless the father made a “decent” living. One African American Camden respondent told us:

You can’t get married and go on living with your mother. That’s just like playing house. She expects your husband to be able to provide for you and if he can’t, what is he doing marrying you in the first place! She’s not going to put up with having him under her roof.

When mothers judge the merits of marriage, they worry a lot about the stability of men’s earn- ings simply because they have to. At the bottom of the income distribution, single mothers who must choose between welfare or low-wage employment to pay their bills face a constant budget shortfall and thus, must continually find ways of getting extra money to pay their bills (Edin and Lein 1997). To generate extra cash, mothers must either find a side job or another adult who can provide regular and substantial economic support. Meanwhile, any given father or boyfriend is likely to have limited skills and a troubled employment history. In sum, while

mothers have constant income needs, the men who father their children often cannot consistently meet these needs.

Mothers said their men often complained that women did not understand how difficult it was for men to find steady work. Yet, even mothers who were inclined to sympathize with men’s employment diffi- culties were in a bind: they simply could not afford to keep an economically unproductive man around the house. Because of this, almost all of the low-income single mothers we interviewed told us that rather than marry the father of their children, they pre- ferred to live separately or to cohabit. In cohabiting situations, mothers nearly always said they enforced a “pay and stay” rule. If a father quit his job or lost his job and did not (in the mother’s view) try very hard to find another one, or drank or smoked up his pay- check, he lost his right to co-reside in the household. Since her name, not his, was generally on the lease, she had the power to evict him. A black mother from the Philadelphia area explained her practices in this regard:

We were [thinking about marriage] for a while, but he was real irresponsible. I didn’t want to be mean or anything, [but when he didn’t work] I didn’t let him eat my food. I would tell him, “If you can’t put any food here, you can’t eat here. These are your kids, and you should want to help your kids, so if you come here, you can’t eat their food.” Finally, I told him he couldn’t stay here either. Right now, I think I would never [get tied to] a[nother] man who is irresponsible and without a job.

Keeping an unemployed man in the house puts a strain on a mother’s, already overstrained, budget. It also precludes a woman’s ability to offer co-residence to an alternative man who is employed. One African American mother from Charleston told us:

I’ve been with my baby’s father for almost 10 years, since high school graduation. He’s talking marriage, but what I’m trying to do now is get away from him. He just lost his job [at the Naval base]. He worked there for 18 years. [Now] he’s in work, out of work, then in work again. Right now he’s just working part- time at McDonalds. I can do bad by myself, I don’t need no one helping me [do bad]. I want somebody

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better, somebody [who can bring home] a regular pay- check. [So] I’m trying to get away from him right now.

If they are not married, she has the flexibility to lower her household costs by getting rid of him, and the possibility of replacing him with another more economically productive man (or at least one who is working at the time).

Women whose male partners couldn’t, or wouldn’t, find work, often lost respect for them and “just couldn’t stand” to keep them around. A white Chicago divorcee told us:

I couldn’t get him to stay working. [T]he kids would be hungry and I’d throw a fit and he’d have a nerve to tell me, “Who cares? You’re always over [at your mother’s], why can’t you ask her for some food?” Talk about a way [to lose someone’s respect]. It’s hard to love somebody if you lose respect.  .  .  . [Finally, I couldn’t take it and I made him leave].

As one can well imagine, men in this situation knew they were purchasing their place in the house- hold and, to some extent, their hold on the woman’s affections. The women we interviewed said this made men feel that their girlfriends “only want me for my money.” They told us their children’s fathers resented their girlfriends’ “materialistic” attitudes. Hold- ing fathers to these standards was often emotion- ally wrenching for mothers. One African American Camden mother expressed her emotional dilemma as follows:

It was like there was a struggle going on inside of me. I mean, he lost his job at the auto body shop when they went [bankrupt] and closed down. Then he couldn’t find another one. But it was months and months. I was trying to live on my welfare check and it just wasn’t enough. Finally, I couldn’t do it any more [because] it was just too much pressure on me [even though] he is the love of my life. I told him he had to leave, even though I knew it wasn’t really his fault that [he wasn’t working]. But I had nothing in the house to feed the kids, no money to pay the bills. Nothing. And he was just sitting there, not working. I couldn’t take it, so I made him leave.

An African American mother from Charleston emphasized the fact that women not only value

earnings, but respect a man who is making his best effort to support his family. She said, “Am I gonna marry him? Of course! If he didn’t have a steady job? No, no. [But] If he’s helping out the best he can, yeah, I would. He drives a truck [right now].” According to these mothers, a man who could not find work in the formal sector had two choices: he could stay home and wait for the children’s mother to kick him out, or he could try to maintain his place in the family by finding work in the underground economy. Some- times this technique worked, but more often, it back- fired. Work in criminal trades was generally easier to get, but mothers said that fathers who engaged in crime for any length of time, generally lost their place in the family as well. When a father began to earn his living by selling drugs, a mother feared that he would bring danger into the household. Mothers worried that fathers’ criminal companions might “come for them” at the house, or that fathers might store drugs, drug proceeds, or weapons in the house. Even worse, mothers feared that a father might start “using his product.” Mothers also felt that a drug-dealing father would be a very poor role model for their children. Thus, mothers did not generally consider earnings from crime as legitimate earnings (they said they wouldn’t marry such a man no matter how much he earned from crime).

Chicago respondents were more likely to discuss economic factors than Charleston mothers were. This difference could be due to the fact that, when the interviews took place, Chicago’s unemployment rate was higher than Charleston’s, or possibly due to more traditional values among Southerners regard- ing marriage. Blacks also discussed economic factors more often than whites. This is presumably because black men’s earnings are lower than those of whites with similar skill levels.

r e s p e c ta b i l i t y

Even within very poor communities, residents make class-based distinctions among themselves. Most of our mothers’ eventual goal was to become “respect- able,” and they believed that respectability was greatly enhanced by a marriage tie to a routinely employed partner earning wages significantly above the legal minimum. However, mothers said that they could not

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achieve respectability by marrying someone who was frequently out of work, otherwise underemployed, supplemented his income through criminal activity, and had little chance of improving his situation over time. Mothers believed that marriage to such a man would diminish their respectability, rather than en- hance it.

Mothers seldom romanticized a father’s economic prospects when it came to marriage (though they sometimes did so when conceiving the man’s child [see Kefalas and Edin 2000]). They generally knew that if they entered into marriage with a lower-class man, the marriage was unlikely to last because the economic pressures on the relationship would simply be too great. Even if they had contemplated marriage to their children’s father “for love” or “romantic feel- ings,” their family members and friends generally convinced poor parents that such a marriage would collapse under economic strain (see also Stack 1974). For these mothers, marriage meant tying oneself to the class position of one’s partner “for life.” Even if a woman could afford to marry a man whose eco- nomic prospects were bleak, her decision would have signaled to her kin and neighbors that he was the best she could do. Mothers expected that marriage should pull them up the class ladder. Community notions of respectability help to explain sentiments like the one revealed by this African American mother in Charleston:

I want to get married. I’ve always wanted to get mar- ried and have a family. [My baby’s father,] he is doing pretty good, but I am not going to marry him until . . . we get some land. [We’ll] start off with a trailer, live in that for about 10 years, and then build a dream house. But I am not going to get married and pay rent to someone else. When we save up enough money to [buy] an acre of land and [can finance] a trailer, then we’ll marry.

Many mothers told us that their children’s fa- thers also said that they planned to marry them, but wanted to “wait ‘till we can afford a church wed- ding, not just a justice of the peace thing.” Marriage made a statement to the larger community about each partner’s current and prospective class stand- ing. Thus, marriage could either confer respectability

or deny it. If a low-income woman had a child with an erratically employed and unskilled man to whom she was not married, she had not tied herself in any permanent way to him or his class position. Most mothers weren’t willing to sign an apartment lease with the man they were with, much less a marriage license. Mothers who remained unmarried were able to maintain their dream of upward mobility. “Mar- rying up” guaranteed the woman the respect of her community, while marrying at her own class level only made her look foolish in the eyes of her family and neighbors. When we asked mothers whether they would marry the erratic or low earners that had fathered their children, the most common response was “I can do bad by myself.”

In addition to the importance women placed on respectability, they also had strong moral (and often- times religious) objections to marrying men whose economic situation would, in their view, practically guarantee eventual marital dissolution. Mothers often talked about the “sacred” nature of marriage, and believed that no “respectable” woman would marry under these circumstances (some spoke of such a marriage as a “sacrilege”). In interview after interview, mothers stressed the seriousness of the marriage commitment and their belief that “it should last forever.” Thus, it is not that mothers held mar- riage in low esteem, but rather the fact that they held it in such high esteem that convinced them to forgo marriage, at least until their prospective marriage partner could prove himself worthy economically or they could find another partner who could. To these mothers, marriage was a powerful symbol of respect- ability, and should not be diluted by foolish unions.

Respectability was equally important for respon- dents in Chicago and Charleston, though it was somewhat more important for African Americans than for whites (and probably for the same reasons that afford-ability concerns were). Respondents’ dis- course in regard to respectability, however, varied quite dramatically by race (Bulcroft and Bulcroft 1993). Many African American respondents who claimed they wanted to marry “up or not at all” knew that holding to such standards might well mean not marrying at all. Whites had less of these anxieties. White respondents typically had sisters, other kin,

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and friends who had married men who earned a “decent” wage, and were somewhat more sanguine about their own chances of finding such a man than were blacks. A handful of white respondents even told us they planned to “marry out of poverty” so they could become housewives. Only one black re- spondent reported such plans.

c o n t r o l a n d t h e s ta l l e d s e x r o l e r e v o l u t i o n at h o m e

In a non-marital relationship, women often felt they had more control than they would have had if they married. Even if the couple cohabited, they nearly always lived with her mother or in an apartment with her name on the lease. Thus, mothers had the power to evict fathers if they interfered with child rearing, or tried to take control over financial decision-making. Mothers said that fathers who knew they were “on trial” could do little about this state of affairs, es- pecially since they needed a place to live and could not generally afford one on their own. One African American Philadelphia-area respondent’s partner quipped, “her attitude is like, ‘it’s either my way or the highway.’”

Why was control, not power, such an impor- tant issue for these women? Most mothers said they thought their children’s fathers had very traditional notions of sex roles—notions that clashed with their more egalitarian views. One white cohabiting mother from Charleston said, “If we were to marry, I don’t think it would be so ideal. [Husbands] want to be in charge, and I can’t deal with that.” Regardless of whether or not the prospective wife worked, moth- ers feared that prospective husbands would expect to be “head of the house,” and make the “final” deci- sions about child rearing, finances, and other mat- ters. Women, on the other hand, felt that since they had held the primary responsibility for both raising and supporting their children, they should have an equal say.

When we asked single mothers what they liked best about being a single parent, their most frequent response was “I am in charge,” or “I am in control.” Mothers seemed willing to take on the responsibili- ties of child rearing if they were also able to make

and enforce the rules. In most mothers’ views, the presence of fathers often interfered with their paren- tal control, particularly if the couple married. Most women also felt that the presence of a husband might impede their efforts to discipline and spend time with their children. Mothers criticized men for being “too demanding” of their time and attention. A white Chicago mother answered the question, “What is it like being a single mother?” as follows: “It’s great in terms of being independent. I’m just thrilled being away from my ex-husband. The joy of that hasn’t worn off. I feel more freedom to be a parent how I want [to be]. We did not agree on parenting at all.” A white Charleston respondent said, “[Marriage isn’t an option] right now. I don’t want any man think- ing that he has any claim on my kids or on how I raise them.”

Mothers were also concerned about losing con- trol of the family’s financial situation. One African American Chicago mother told us, “[I won’t marry because] the men take over the money. I’m too afraid to lose control of my money again.” Still another said, “I’m the head of the household right now, and I make the [financial] decisions. I [don’t want to give that up].”

Finally, mothers often expressed the view that if they married, their men would expect them to do all of the household chores, plus “cook and clean” and otherwise “take care of ” them. Some described their relationships with their ex-partners as “like having one more kid to take care of.” We asked another di- vorced white Charleston mother whether she would ever consider marriage again. She answered,

I don’t know, I can’t think that far ahead. I can’t see it. This guy I’m with right now, I don’t know. I like being by myself. The thought of having to cook and clean for somebody else? I’m like, “No.” I’m looking for somebody who is going to cook and clean for me!

Concerns over control did not, however, mean that most women had abandoned their plans to marry. But they felt their own situations had to be such as to maximize their chances of exerting control in the marriage relationship. The primary way moth- ers who wanted to marry thought they could main- tain power in a marriage relationship was by working

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and contributing to the family budget. One African American mother living in Charleston told me,

One thing my mom did teach me is that you must work some and bring some money into the house- hold so you can have a say in what happens. If you completely live off a man, you are helpless. That is why I don’t want to get married until I get my own [career] and get off of welfare.

Mothers also wanted to get established economi- cally prior to marriage because men had failed them in the past. This is why they often told us that if they did get married, they would make sure “the car is in my name, the house is in my name” and so on. They wanted to “get myself established first, and then get married” so if the marriage broke up, they wouldn’t be “left with nothing.” One African Ameri- can Camden mother commented, “[I will consider marriage] one day when I get myself together. When I have my own everything, so I won’t be left depend- ing on a man.”

The experience of breakup or divorce and the re- sulting financial hardship and emotional pain fun- damentally transformed these women’s relational views. I heard dozens of stories of women who had held traditional views regarding sex roles while they were younger and still in a relationship with their children’s fathers. When the men for whom they sacrificed so much gave them nothing but pain and anguish, they felt they had been “duped.” Their childhood fantasy of marriage was gone, as was their willingness to be dependent on or subservient to men.

Because of these painful experiences, formerly married white mothers generally placed as high pri- ority on increasing their labor market skills and ex- perience as their black never-married counterparts. They felt that a hasty remarriage might distract them from this goal (possibly because their husbands’ income would make them too comfortable and tempt them to quit school or work). Like the African American mothers who had seldom been married, whites also said that once they remarried, they would keep working no matter what. The “little money of my own” both African American and white mothers spoke of was valued, not only for its contribution to

the household economy, per se, but for the power it purchased them within the relationship, as well as its insurance value against destitution if the marriage should fail.

Mothers told us that the more established they became economically, the more bargaining power they believed they would have in a marital relation- ship. The mothers they knew who were economically dependent on men had to “put up with all kinds of be- havior” because they could not legitimately threaten to leave without serious financial repercussions (due to the fact that they could not translate their home- making skills into wages). Mothers felt that if they became more economically independent (had the car in their name, the house in their name, no common debts, etc.), they could legitimately threaten to leave their husbands if certain conditions (i.e., sexual fidel- ity) weren’t met. These threats would, in turn they believed, keep a husband on his best behavior.

Taking on these attitudes of self-reliance and in- dependence wasn’t always easy. Some formerly mar- ried women whose partner failed them had never lived alone before, having gone straight from their parents’ household to their husband’s. In addition, some hadn’t held a job in years, had no marketable skills, and had no idea about how to make their way in the world of employed women. One white Chi- cago resident was a full-time homemaker until her divorce. After getting no child support from her ex- husband for several months, this mother decided she had better get a job, but the best job she could find paid only minimum wage at the time. Her jour- ney from her first job to her current position (which paid $7 an hour) was a painful one. Giving up this hard-won self-sufficiency for dependence on a man was simply too great a risk for her to take. She said, “I don’t want to depend on nobody. It’s too scary.”

The often difficult life experiences of these moth- ers had convinced them of competencies they might not have known they had before single motherhood. Because of these experiences, their roles expanded to encompass more traditionally male responsibilities than before. The men, in their view, weren’t respect- ful of these competencies. Instead, they expected them to revert to more traditional female roles. When we asked a white Chicago mother whether there were

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any advantages to being apart from the father of her children, she replied:

You’re the one in control. The good thing is that I  feel good about myself. I feel more independent. Whereas when I was with Brian, I didn’t. I had never been out on my own, but I took that step to move out and, since I did, I feel much better about myself as a person, that I can do it.

While it was true that some women were poorer financially than before their relationships ended, the increased pride they felt in being able to provide for themselves and their children partially compen- sated for economic hardship. Another white Chicago mother said “You know, I feel better [being alone] be- cause I am the provider, I’m getting the things that I want and I’m getting them for myself, little by little.”

Concerns about power might explain why child- bearing and marriage have become separated from one another, particularly among the low-income population. Though we did not ask our Chicago and Charleston mothers questions about the ideal time to bear children and to marry, we did ask our Camden/ Philadelphia mothers these questions. Most felt childbearing should ideally occur in a woman’s early 20s, but that marriage should ideally occur in a wom- an’s late 20s or early 30s. These answers are some- what suspect because respondents might simply have been rationalizing past behavior (most hadn’t been married when they had had their children, and half had never married). Even more confusing is the fact that these same respondents generally said that one should be married before having children. When in- terviewers probed deeper, respondents revealed that, though the goal of getting married first and having children second was indeed their ideal, it was hardly a practical choice given their economic situations and those of their partners.

Respondents’ explanations of their views also revealed that many felt that childbearing required at least a temporary or partial withdrawal from the labor market. Childbearing within marriage and the labor market withdrawal it required, made women “dependent” and “vulnerable” and weakened their control. When mothers told us they wanted to wait to marry or remarry until their late 20s or early 30s,

most assumed that, at this point, their youngest child would be in school. Thus, they would be free to more fully pursue labor market activities and, in this way, enhance their potential bargaining and decision- making role in any subsequent marital relationship. One African American Camden mother said:

One guy was like, “marry me, I want a baby.” I don’t want to have to depend on anybody. No way. I [would rather] work. [If I married him and had his baby], I’d [have to quit work and] be dependent again. It’s too scary.

There was no significant difference between cities in the salience of sex roles and power. Blacks were more concerned about these issues than whites, yet the differences are probably smaller than other stud- ies of racial differences in sex-role attitudes would sug- gest. Many of the white women we interviewed had been married in the past and most of them reported that they had begun their marriages thinking that they would stay at home or work part-time (at least while their children were young). Their husbands, they assumed, would be the primary breadwinners, while they specialized in household management and parenting. After the breakup of these relation- ships, white mothers were often shocked by how vul- nerable their withdrawal from the labor market had made them. It was after learning these hard lessons that most white mothers developed the conviction that it was foolish to marry unless they had “estab- lished themselves” first.

t r u s t

For some mothers, the reaction of their partner to an unplanned pregnancy became their first hard lesson in “the way men are.” Mothers said that fathers’ responses ran the gamut from strong negative responses to strong positive ones, but some men were clearly panicked by the prospect of being responsible for a child—particularly those who feared a child support order. Some fathers denied paternity even when they had encouraged the mother to get pregnant and/or carry the child to term. In these situations, fathers often claimed that the child was not theirs because the mother was “a whore.” One partner of a pregnant Camden mother told the inter- viewer (in the mother’s presence), “how do I know the

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baby’s mine? Who knows if she hasn’t been stepping out on me with some other man and now she wants me to support another man’s child!”

Subsequent hard lessons were learned when mothers’ boyfriends or husbands proved unfaith- ful. This experience was so common among respon- dents that many simply did not believe men “could be faithful to only one woman.” This “men will be men” belief did not mean that women were willing to simply accept infidelity as part of the natural course of a marriage. Most said they would rather never marry than to “let him make a fool out of me.” One black Chicago resident just couldn’t conceive of find- ing a marriageable man.

All those reliable guys, they are gone, they are gone. They’re either thinking about one of three things: an- other woman, another man, or dope. . . . [M]y motto is “there is not a man on this planet that is faithful.” It’s a man thing. I don’t care, you can love your wife ‘til she turns three shades of avocado green. A man is gonna be a man and it’s not a point of a woman getting upset about it. It’s a point of a woman accept- ing it. ’Cause a man’s gonna do what a man’s gonna do. . . . [Other] black women, they say “once you find a man that’s gonna be faithful, you go ahead and get married to him.” [They] got it all wrong. Then they gonna [be surprised when they find out] he ain’t faithful. And the wife gonna end up in a nut house. It’s better not to get married, so you don’t get your expectations up.

A white mother from Charleston said, “I was mar- ried for three years before I threw him out after discov- ering that he had another woman. I loved my husband, but I don’t [want another one]. This is a wicked world we are living in.” A black Charlestonian said,

I would like to find a nice man to marry, but I know that men cannot be trusted. That’s why I treat them the way I do—like the dogs they are. I think that all men will cheat on their wives regardless of how much he loves her. And you don’t ever want to be in that position.

Mother after mother told us cautionary tales of married couples they knew where either the man or the woman was “stepping out” on their spouse. They viewed the wounded spouse as either hopelessly

naive (if they did not know) or without self-respect (if they did know). They did not want to place them- selves in a similar position. Demands for sexual fi- delity within marriage had a practical, as well as an emotional dimension. Women often gave examples of married men they knew who “spen[t] all his money on the little woman he [had] on the side.” Mothers often feared that men would promise them and their children “the world” and then abandon them. One African American Camden mother summed up her views as follows: “Either they leave or they die. The first thing is, don’t get close to them, ’cause they ain’t no good from the beginning. When that man ain’t doing right for me, I learn to dump [him].” A white mother from Chicago said: “I’ve been a single parent since the day my husband walked out on me. He tried to come back, but I am not one to let someone hurt me and my children twice. I am living on welfare [rather than living with him].”

Even the most mistrustful of our respondents generally held out some hope that they would find a man who could be trusted and who would stay around. One white Chicago mother said, “I want to meet a man who will love me and my son and want us to grow together. I just don’t know if he exists.” An African American mother living in Chicago said,

Maybe I’ll find a good person to get married to, some- one to be a stepfather to my son. They’re not all the same; they’re not all bad. There are three things in my life: my school, my work, and my son. Not men. At first they love you, they think you’re beautiful, and then they leave. When I got pregnant, he just left. My father is like that. He has kids by several different women. I hate him for it. I say, “I hate you. Why do you do that? Why?”

A white divorcee from Chicago explained her views of the differences between the sexes in this regard as follows:

Men can say. “Well honey, I’m going out for the night.” And then they disappear for two months. Whereas, the mother has a deeper commitment, conscience, or compassion. . . . If [women] acted like men, our kids would be in the park, left. We’d say “Oh, somebody else is going to take care of it.” Everybody would be orphaned.

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An African American mother from the Philadel- phia area told us,

I’m frustrated with men, period. They bring drugs and guns into the house, you take care of their kids, feed them, and then they steal your rent money out of your purse. They screw you if you put yourself out for them. So now, I don’t put myself out there any more.

Because their own experiences and the experi- ences of their friends, relatives, and neighbors has been so overwhelmingly negative, many women reduced the expressive value they placed on their re- lationships over time. Some instrumentalized their relationships with men to the point that they didn’t “give it away anymore,” meaning they no longer had sex without expecting something, generally some- thing material, in return. A white Chicago mother put it this way: “Love is blind. You fall in love with the wrong one sometimes. It’s easy to do. [Now] I am so mean . . . [when] I sleep with a guy I am like, ‘Give me the money and leave me alone.’” Nonethe- less, many of these same women often held out hope of finding a man who was “different,” one who could be trusted.

Chicago mothers were significantly more likely to voice trust issues than their Charleston counter- parts. This difference may reflect regional differences (Southerners may be more trusting than Northern- ers). It may also be true that trust issues are least sa- lient in a tight labor market where jobs for unskilled men are more plentiful. Whites talked about the issue more than African Americans and could reflect differences in spontaneous self-reports of domestic abuse (discussed below).

d o m e s t i c v i o l e n c e

In Chicago and Charleston, we did not ask directly about domestic abuse, yet, a surprisingly high number spontaneously spoke of some history of domestic vio- lence in their childhood or adult lives. In Table 27.1, we include only those mothers for which the abuse had some bearing on marriage attitudes. We see no im- portant differences across cities, but rather startling dif- ferences by race. One white mother living in Chicago decided to have her child with the assumption that she would marry the father, but after a series of physically

abusive episodes triggered by arguments about his drinking and drug use, she changed her mind.

The person I was with wasn’t quite what I thought he was. We were going to get married, [but] I don’t be- lieve in making two mistakes. [There were about] four [big] blowouts before I finally actually [ended it]. The last one was probably the worst. We went to a friend’s house [and] he started drinking, [doing] drugs, and stuff. I said, “please take me home now.” So [we got in the car] and we started arguing about why he had to hang around people like that [who do] drugs and all that sort of stuff. One thing led to another and he kind of tossed me right out of the car.

Many women reported physical abuse during pregnancy. Several mothers reported having miscar- riages because of such abuse. For others, the physical abuse began after the child was born. It was not un- common for women to report injuries serious enough to warrant trips to the hospital emergency room. Two African American women from Charleston ended up in the emergency room following beatings from their boyfriends. One recounted:

My daughter’s father, we used to fight. I got to where nobody be punching on me because love is not that serious. And I figure somebody is beating on you and the only thing they love is watching you go the emergency room. That’s what they love. A lot of these chicks, they think “he [hitting] me because [he loves me and] he don’t want me looking at nobody [else].” Honey, he need help, and you need a little more help than he do because you stand there [and take it].

The other interjected: “Just leave him [if he abuses you], you get over [him]. You will be over [him eventually].”

The fact that women tended to experience re- peated abuse from their children’s fathers before they decided to leave attests to their strong desire to make things work with their children’s fathers. Many women finally left when they saw the abuse begin- ning to affect their children’s well-being. One white Charleston mother explained:

. . . it was an abusive situation. It was physical. . . . [My daughter] saw us fighting a lot. The minute she would see us fighting, she would go into hysterics. It would turn into an all-out brawl. She was terrified. And this

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was what that did to her and I thought. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

But the economic pressures associated with leaving sometimes propelled mothers into another harmful relationship. One white Chicago mother explained:

I married [my first husband] a month after I had [our son]. And I married him because I couldn’t afford [to live alone]. Boy, was that stupid. And I left him [two years after that] when our daughter was five months old. I got scared. I was afraid because my kids were starting to get in the middle. [My son] still to this day, when he thinks someone is hurting me, he’ll start screaming and crying and beating on him. He had seen his father [beat me up]. I didn’t want him to see that. I remarried six months later because I couldn’t make it [financially]. And I got into another abusive marriage. And we got separated before the year was even up. He would burn me [with cigarettes]. He was an alcoholic. He was a physical abuser, mental [too]. I think he would have killed me [if I had stayed].

Another white Chicagoan said, “after being abused, physically abused, by him the whole time we were married, I was ready to [kill him]. He put me in the hospital three times. I was carrying our child four and a half months, he beat me and I miscarried.” A white Charlestonian said, “I was terrified to leave be- cause I knew it would mean going on welfare. . . . But that is okay. I can handle that. The thing I couldn’t deal with is being beat up.” When we asked one black Charleston woman if there were any advantages to being a single mom, she replied, “not living with someone there to abuse you. I’m not scared anymore. I’m scared of my bills and I’m scared of I get sick, what’s going to happen to my kids, but I’m not afraid for my life.”

We are not sure why there is so much domestic violence among poor parents, but our interviews with mothers give us a few clues. First, mothers sometimes linked episodes of violence to fathers’ fears about their ability to provide, especially in light of increased state efforts toward child support en- forcement. This explanation was most often invoked in reference to the beatings women received when they were pregnant. Second, some mothers living in

crime-ridden, inner-city neighborhoods talked about family violence as a carryover from street violence. The Camden/Philadelphia mothers talked at length about the effect this exposure had had on their chil- dren’s fathers’ lives (and their own), and some even described the emotional aftermath of this exposure as “Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.”

d i s c u s s i o n

Since the 1970s, a sharply declining proportion of un- skilled men have been able to earn enough to support a family (US House of Representatives 1997). These trends clearly have had a profound influence on mar- riage among low-income men and women. But even when a marriage might be affordable, mothers might judge the risks marriage entails as too great for other reasons, some of which reflect changes in the econ- omy, but are not economic per se.

In these mothers’ view, wives still borrow their class standing from their husbands. Since a respect- able marriage is one that lasts “forever,” mothers who marry low-skilled males must themselves give up their dreams of upward mobility. In the interim, single motherhood holds a somewhat higher status than a “foolish” marriage to a low-status man. . . .

Beyond affordability and respectability concerns, these interviews offer powerful evidence that there has been a dramatic revolution in sex-role expecta- tions among women at the low end of the income distribution, and that the gap between low-income men’s and women’s expectations in regard to gender roles is wide. Women who have proven their com- petencies through the hard lessons of single parent- hood aren’t generally willing to enter subservient roles—they want to have substantial control and bargaining power in subsequent relationships. Some mothers learned the dangers of economic depen- dence upon men through the pain and financial dev- astation that accompanied a separation and divorce. Others were schooled by their profound disappoint- ment at their baby’s father’s reaction to the pregnancy and his failure to live up to the economic and emo- tional commitments of fatherhood. Both groups of mothers equate marital power with economic power, and believe that the emotional and financial risk

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that marriage entails is only sustainable when they themselves have reached some level of economic self-sufficiency.

The data also show that, though a small number of women want to marry and become housewives, the overwhelming majority want to continue work- ing during any subsequent marriage. Since these mothers generally believe that childbearing and rearing young children necessitate a temporary withdrawal from the labor market, many place the ideal age at which to marry in the late 20s (when their youngest child is school age) and the ideal age to bear children in the early 20s—the age they say is the “normal” time for women to have chil- dren. Delaying marriage until they can concentrate more fully on labor market activity maximizes their chances of having a marriage where they can have equal bargaining power. The income from work also allows them to legitimately threaten to leave the husband if certain behavioral standards are not met and many women believe that such threats will serve to keep husbands in line. These data suggest that the bargaining perspective, which many stud- ies of housework currently employ, may be useful in understanding marriage attitudes and non-marital relational dynamics, as well.

Mothers believe that marital power is crucial, at least partially, because of their low trust of men. I know of no data that demonstrate that gender mis- trust has grown over time, but certainly the risk of di- vorce, and the economic destitution for women that so often accompanies it, has grown. Trust issues are exacerbated by the experience of domestic violence. Many mothers told interviewers that it was these ex- periences that taught them “not to have any feeling for men.” National-level data show that violence is more frequent among those with less income (Ptacek 1998). Presumably, such violence, along with the substance abuse that frequently accompanies it, is a way of “doing gender” for men who cannot ade- quately fulfill the breadwinner role. Though women’s accounts did not always allow me to establish the se- quence of events leading up to episodes of violence, many of those that did showed that violence followed job loss or revelation of a pregnancy. Both are sources of economic stress.

These data also reveal some interesting differ- ences by city and by race, though the sample size is small. Charleston mothers worried less about afford- ability and trust issues than Chicago mothers. The first difference could result from the differences in local labor markets (tight versus somewhat slack) which disproportionately affect the employment of unskilled and minority men (Jencks 1992), or re- gional differences (Southerners might be more tra- ditional than Northerners). The second difference is harder to explain, though regional differences and economic differences between the cities may also play a role. If men behave in an untrustworthy manner (i.e., “unfaithful”) in order to compensate for their inability to fulfil the provider role, we would expect that women in tight labor markets might find it easier to trust male partners than women in slack labor markets. The impact of labor market conditions and regional variations on the marriage attitudes and rates for low-skilled men and women would be fruit- ful topics for further study across a wider range of labor markets and regions.

The analysis also revealed some interesting race difference. In both Charleston and Chicago, African Americans were more likely to name affordability, respectability, and control concerns, while whites mentioned trust and domestic violence more often. Affordability and respectability might be more salient for blacks because their chances of finding a marriage partner with sufficient economic resources to satisfy such concerns are lower than for whites. The salience of trust for whites might reflect higher rates of domes- tic violence, though these figures reflect spontaneous comments and probably underestimate the actual rate of violence for women in the sample. They may also reflect the fact that whites who elaborated on these experiences generally stayed with the violent partner (to whom they were often married) longer than African Americans. Whites’ living arrangements might also have afforded less protection from violent men than blacks’ in that whites were more likely to cohabit with their partner, while blacks were more likely to live in an extended-kin household. Nation- ally representative data also show that low-income whites cohabit significantly more often than compa- rable African Americans (Harris and Edin 1996).

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In relation to theories of the retreat from mar- riage, there is no doubt that economic factors are necessary, though not sufficient, criteria for mar- riage among most low-income women interviewed. Theories that posit the importance of the stalled rev- olution of sex roles and Wilson’s argument that non- marriage among blacks results from very low levels of trust, were both strongly supported, though our analysis revealed that trust was even more impor- tant for whites. Drake and Cayton and Rainwater’s notions of instrumentality in male–female relation- ships also received support. I will say more about the economic independence and welfare disincentives arguments below.

In sum, the mothers we spoke to were quite forth- coming about the fact that the men who had fathered their children often weren’t “worth a lifetime com- mitment” given their general lack of trustworthiness, the traditional nature of their sex-role views, the po- tential loss of control over parental and household decisions, and their risky and sometimes violent be- havior. While mothers maintained hopes of eventual marriage, they viewed such hopes with some level of skepticism. Thus, they devoted most of their time and energy toward raising their children and “getting it together financially” rather than “waiting on a man.” Those that planned on marrying generally assumed they would put off marriage until their children were in school and they were able to be fully engaged in labor market activity. By waiting to marry until the tasks associated with early child rearing and the re- quired temporary withdrawal from the labor market were completed, mothers felt they could enhance their bargaining power within marriage.

This complex set of motivations to delay mar- riage or remarriage (or less frequently, to avoid them altogether) has interesting implications for welfare reform. The authors of PRWOR A explicitly sought to encourage marriage among the poor by increasing the cost of non-marriage (e.g., reducing the amount of resources an unmarried mother can claim from the state). Put in the language of the welfare disin- centives argument, PRWOR A decreases the disin- centives to marry, or, according to the economic independence theory, limits one source of financial independence for women who forgo marriage. If

single mothers have fewer resources from the state, it is reasonable to argue that they might become more dependent on men and men’s income. This may seem particularly likely given the fact that unskilled and semiskilled ex-welfare recipients will probably not be able to make enough money in the low-wage sector to meet their monthly expenses (Edin and Lein 1997) and that the gap between their income and expenses is likely to grow as they move from welfare to work (at least after the increased earned-income disre- gards some states offer elapse at the five year point or sooner). To make matters worse, unless the labor market remains extremely tight, low-skilled mothers’ wages are not likely to increase over time because of a lack of premium on experience in the low-wage sector (Blank 1995; Burtless 1995; Harris and Edin 1996).

If PRWOR A is fully implemented, these new fi- nancial realities might well encourage some couples to marry. However, if men’s employment opportuni- ties and wages do not increase dramatically, these data suggest that mothers might continue to opt for boyfriends (cohabiting or not), who can be replaced if they do not contribute, rather than husbands who cannot be so easily traded for a more economically productive man. Even if mothers believed that they would be no worse off, or even slightly better off, by marrying than by remaining single, these data show that marriage is far more complicated than a simple economic cost–benefit assessment. The women’s movement has clearly influenced what behaviors (i.e., infidelity) women are willing to accept within a mari- tal relationship, and the level of power they expect to be able to exert within the relationship. Given the low level of trust these mothers have of men—oftentimes rooted in the experience of domestic violence—and given their view that husbands want more control than the women are willing to give them, women rec- ognize that any marriage that is also economically precarious might well be conflict-ridden and short lived. Interestingly, mothers say they reject entering into economically risky marital unions out of respect for the institution of marriage, rather than because of a rejection of the marriage norm.

In the light of PRWOR A and the new set of fi- nancial incentives and disincentives it provides, it is likely that cohabitation will increase, given the fact

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that cohabitation nearly always allowed the mothers interviewed to make a substantial claim on the male cohabiter’s income. However, increased cohabita- tion might put women and children at greater risk if their partner is violent. In these situations, a separate residence may be a protective factor, as the race dif- ferences in the experience of domestic abuse I report here may indicate.

c o n c l u s i o n

In short, the mothers interviewed here believe that marriage will probably make their lives more dif- ficult than they are currently. They do not, by and large, perceive any special stigma to remaining single, so they are not motivated to marry for that reason. If they are to marry, they want to get something out of

it. If they cannot enjoy economic stability and gain upward mobility from marriage, they see little reason to risk the loss of control and other costs they fear marriage might exact from them. Unless low-skilled men’s economic situations improve and they begin to change their behaviors toward women, it is quite likely that most low-income women will continue to resist marriage even in the context of welfare reform. Substantially enhanced labor market opportunities for low-skilled men would address both the afford- ability and respectability concerns of the mothers interviewed. But other factors, such as the stalled sex-role revolution at home (control), the pervasive mistrust of men, and the high probability of domestic abuse, probably mean that marriage rates are unlikely to increase dramatically.

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women.” Poverty Research News. Chicago: Joint Center for Poverty Research, 1(2):1–3. Hoffman, Saul D., and Greg Duncan. 1994. “The role of incomes, wages, and AFDC benefits on

marital disruption.” The Journal of Human Resources 30(10):19–41. Jencks, Christopher. 1992. Rethinking Social Policy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

120–142. Kefalas, Maria, and Kathryn Edin. 2000. “The meaning of motherhood.” Unpublished manuscript. Lichter, Daniel T., F. B. LeClere, and Diane K. McLaughlin. 1991. “Local marriage market conditions

and the marital behavior of black and white women.” American Journal of Sociology 96:843–867. Luker, Kristin. 1996. Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy. Cambridge. MA: Harvard

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Nicole Civettini. (2015). Housework as Non-Normative Gender Display Among Lesbians and Gay Men. Sex Roles. 74. 10.1007/ s11199-015-0559-9. Republished with permission of Springer Verlag.

N I C O L E C I V E T T I N I

[   .   .   .   ]

e x p l a i n i n g t h e h o u s e w o r k i n e q u a l i t y

Explanations for and empirical findings on the gender gap in housework either point to gender itself as the main explanatory factor (e.g., Chesters 2013; Lincoln 2008) or are tied up in correlates of gender, such as work hours or income. Some findings indicate that the member of the couple who works the fewest hours of paid labor will do the most house- work (Artis and Pavalko 2003; Bianchi 2000; Bianchi et al. 2000; Coverman 1985; Cunningham 2007; Eng- land and Farkas 1986; Noonan et al. 2007; Wight et al. 2013 for Whites), known as the time availability ex- planation; women do more housework because they work fewer hours than men. Others find that whoever makes the least money will do the most housework, with the higher-earning spouse ostensibly buying out of housework responsibility in a show of covert power (Baxter and Hewitt 2013 (Australia); Bianchi et al. 2000; Cunningham 2007; Mannino and Deutsch 2007; Pinto and Coltrane 2009; Presser 1994; Simister 2013; Spitze, 1986), known as the relative resources ex- planation; women do more housework because they earn less money than men.

Throughout the housework literature, tasks are often divided into routine housework and discretion- ary housework (see Coltrane 2000). Routine house- work is sometimes referred to as female-typed or core housework and includes such tasks as washing dishes, cooking, cleaning, shopping, laundry, and local driv- ing of family members. Discretionary housework is sometimes referred to as male-typed housework, and includes tasks such as outdoor chores, home

repairs, and auto maintenance. Unlike discretion- ary tasks, routine chores must be done on a more regular, often daily, basis and must be completed in a timely manner when the need arises (Barnett and Shen 1997). Within and across the studies summa- rized above, the effects of gender on housework tend to be stronger for routine housework than for total housework or discretionary house-work. This may be because discretionary tasks such as household and automotive repairs are more likely to be outsourced, and discretionary tasks, as the name implies, are not highly time-sensitive and are less impacted by work schedules. Further, because women’s roles are more flexible than men’s (see Bartini 2006; Casper and Rothermund 2012; Hochschild 2012), common discretionary tasks would pose less of a threat to feminine identity (e.g., women who mow the lawn) than routine tasks would to masculine identity (e.g., men who clean the house). Thus, the effects of work hours and income, both correlates of gender, and of gender itself are stronger on the more feminized rou- tine tasks (see Coltrane 2000). A study of same-sex couples and housework begs the question of whether gay men and lesbians, in whose couples biological sex is constant, use gender as a basis for the division of housework, and, if so, are there systematic differ- ences between lesbians and gay men?

That the couple is of the same sex could make gender display an important facet of individuation. On the contrary, gender egalitarianism among lesbi- ans and gay men (Egan and Sherrill 2006; Hertzog 1996) may take gender out of the equation when de- termining who does the housework. This article pres- ents a test of the utility of stereotypical conceptions

28. HOUSEWORK AS NON-NORMATIVE GENDER DISPLAY AMONG LESBIANS AND GAY MEN

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of gender for explaining housework using OLS regres- sion models on survey data from 244  lesbians and gay men residing in the US and evaluates whether this process is different for men and women. Same- sex couples are an ideal group among which to test for the importance of gender display in determining the division of household labor. As sex is held constant within each couple, the intricacies of gender iden- tity and gender display are elucidated. The analyses herein address these questions and explore whether lesbians and gay men differ in their use of housework as a tool for gender display.

h o u s e h o l d l a b o r a n d g e n d e r d i s p l ay : o r i g i n a l t h e o r e t i c a l f o r m u l at i o n

According to the doing gender (Berk 1985; West and Zimmerman 1987) approach, also referred to as gender display or gender performance, housework is a tool in the process by which people create and maintain gen- dered identities (Bianchi et al. 2000; Courtney Walton and Rice 2013; Elliott and Umberson 2008; Erickson 2005; Gupta 1999; Kornrich et al. 2013; Mora 2013; Ono and Raymo 2006; Schneider 2012; Schrock and Schwalbe 2009). As a means of presenting oneself as a wife or husband, one may choose, respectively, to engage in routine housework or avoid it because of its stereotypical, and perhaps still normative, association with femininity.

Housework as means of gender display has been documented repeatedly in different-sex couples, with early, compelling evidence from Brines’s (1994) work with the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) that men who made less money than their wives did less housework than other men. This the oppo- site of what would be expected based on both time availability and relative resources explanations. They would predict, respectively, that a person with more free time and who earns less money would do more housework, not less. This counterintuitive effect also emerged from Greenstein’s (2000) study of both ab- solute and relative housework in nearly 3000 cou- ples, though Greenstein attributes this to deviance neutralization rather than gender display. Bittman et al. (2003) point out that the norms being violated by people in Greenstein’s study are gender norms,

and they suggest that efforts to counteract such devi- ance could more accurately be called gender deviance neutralization. More recently, Thebaud (2010) found that men’s share of housework declined with greater economic dependence, even when the men were un- employed or working fewer hours than their wives. This seemingly illogical pattern can be explained as an effort to manage the display of their masculine identities. To not only fail as the main breadwinner but to take on the duties of a homemaker would be to add insult to injured masculinity. Women who out- earn their husbands, on the other hand, have been shown to continue their contributions to the couple’s housework, rather than decreasing it in response to a time crunch (Tichenor 2005). This may be a means by which to maintain their feminine display in the face of their role as the main breadwinner (Ono and Raymo 2006).

[ . . . ]

g e n d e r d i s p l ay a n d h o u s e h o l d l a b o r i n s a m e - s e x c o u p l e s

Lesbians and gay men are more progressive on social issues than the US population on average (Egan and Sherrill 2006; Hertzog 1996). They may be more con- scious of the way that unpaid labor, specifically rou- tine housework, varies by gender and recognize that housework remains a feminized and feminizing en- deavor. Evidence supports that, even though inequi- ties exist, same-sex couples have a more equal division of housework than different-sex couples (Balsam et al. 2008; Gotta et al. 2011), suggesting a greater push for egalitarianism in the home. It seems likely, then, that lesbians and gay men would not conform to gender norms regarding housework, and there would not any systematic division of household labor by gender or gendered characteristics.

The body of literature on the household labor and gender in gay and lesbian households is substantial, but still burgeoning and evolving, especially regard- ing the role of gender, gender identity, and gender stereotypes. Studies show that gender is an impor- tant factor to consider (Oerton 1997, 1998), and that same-sex couples “may not be as ‘genderless’ as previ- ously depicted” (see Biblarz and Savci 2010, p. 480).

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Carrington (1999) revealed that gender played a nu- anced role in the division of domestic labor among lesbian and gay couples. That both people are of the same sex necessitates that one or both of them per- form housework typically associated with a differ- ent sex. Carrington’s interviewees demonstrated the need to manage gender identity and gender identity disconsonance. Carrington also found that gay and lesbian couples construed their housework division as fair even in the face of glaring inequities, a process also seen among different-sex couples (Hochschild 2012). Similar to Carrington’s findings, Giddings (1998) found great diversity in the ways that same- sex couples divided household labor, and divisions were tied to gender-role ideology and income. As one might expect, couples may have some difficulty deal- ing with inequalities and/or inequities in housework, and Kurdek (1994, 1995) found just that. In fact, same-sex couples reported housework among the top five sources of conflict in their relationships. House- work is likely an important source of stress, despite popular wisdom touting the egalitarianism of same- sex couples.

[ . . . ]

t h e o r y a n d h y p o t h e s e s : av o i d i n g s t e r e o t y p e s , l e g i t i m i z i n g g e n d e r c l a i m s

Early analyses of the current data demonstrated that higher levels of stereotypically feminine traits had a small but consistent negative effect on housework contributions (Civettini 2015), which begged the question of whether this effect might be different for gay men than for lesbians. To be perceived as a woman who possesses stereotypically masculine traits, a woman must convince others of this persona. This could motivate these individuals to avoid routine housework as a means to support the performance of non-normative gender. The same may be true of men who wish to portray characteristics that are stereotypi- cally feminine—they would need to actively cultivate a display of gender. However, people who report higher levels of traits that are stereotypically associated with their sex need not up the ante when it comes to house- work, as they are laying claim to a gendered identity that is socially legitimized.

When it comes to housework, lesbians who express greater masculinity have a motivation to engage in gender display by decreasing their routine housework, as routine housework is normatively associated with femininity. However, combined with a greater aware- ness of, and a likely desire to eschew, stereotypical gender roles that disadvantage women, lesbians who express more femininity may not use routine house- work as a tool for gender display. I expect the reverse pattern from gay men, for the same reasons. Those who report more stereotypically masculine character- istics may not avoid routine housework as a way of as- serting their masculinity; as more gender-conscious, egalitarian men, they may refrain from those mascu- line behaviors that create inequities. However, men who wish to express stereotypically feminine charac- teristics must swim against the current of widespread gender assumptions and may therefore use increased routine house-work as a means of demonstrating their association with the feminine.

In sum, those, and only those, who wish to enact a gender that is incongruent with the stereotypical expectations for their biological sex will utilize rou- tine housework to that end. I hypothesize that:

h 1 : Lesbians who express higher levels of stereotypi- cal masculinity will perform smaller proportions of routine housework than lesbians who express lower levels of stereotypical masculinity.

h 2 : Gay men who express higher levels of stereotypi- cal femininity will perform greater proportions of routine housework than gay men who express lower levels of stereotypical femininity.

In the regression analyses of housework contribu- tions on stereotypical gender traits, I include control measures for alternate explanations for the division of housework, including proportional measures of work hours and income (discussed above). I also included control variables for factors known to impact house- work and gendered behavior more generally. First, the display of gender and the division of housework could vary across ethnic groups, (see Hofman 2010; McLoyd et al. 2000; Sayer and Fine 2011; Wight et al. 2013) so I included controls for ethnicity. Next, edu- cation was included to account for the possibility that couples of different levels of education vary in their

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use of housework as a medium for gender display (see Davis and Greenstein 2004; Evertsson et al. 2009). Age was included because age may be correlated with stereotypical gender traits because of generational differences in the expression of normative and/or non-normative gender, and may also correlate with housework contributions (see Altschuler 2004; Ce- bulla et al. 2007 (UK); Essex and Hong 2005). Older partners may be more likely to outsource housework, which would leave fewer tasks for the couple to split between themselves. If one member of the couple has more available time, and the remaining housework can be completed in a small number of hours, that person may do most of the housework; whereas, if the couple weren’t outsourcing and there was more housework than that person could complete during their “extra” hours, and the overflow work may be shared or placed upon the other partner. In other words, age may come with a reduction in the amount of housework to be done, and smaller amounts of housework may be split in more uneven ways.

Because the respondents’ family background and the gender roles modeled during the respondents’ childhood could affect both their gender display and their house-work contributions, I included a dummy variable for whether the respondent’s mother worked at least part time when the respondent was a child (see Evertsson 2006). Respondents from breadwinner/ homemaker families may be more likely to express both normative and non-normative gender in stereo- typical ways, and they may be more likely to split the housework with their partner in ways that correlate with gender-stereotypical traits. The final two control variables are related to household composition: the number of people in the household, and whether the household included a child under age 6, indicating a dependent child in need of full time care (see Gupta 2007; Nakhaie 2009 (Canada); Parrott 2014; Press and Townsley 1998; Schober 2013 (UK); Zabel and Heintz- Martin 2013 (Western Europe)).

m e t h o d

s u r v e y o v e r v i e w

I conducted a web-based survey consisting of several sets of questions: (1) Background: basic demographics,

children, and employment; (2) Relationship: rela- tionship status, sex of partner, relationship dura- tion, commitment, general and sexual satisfaction, past marriages, and sexual attraction; (3) Household Labor: proportional contributions to housework and childcare; (4) Family: family of origin, composition of the household during respondent’s childhood, and current partner’s employment; (5) Attitudes: gender ideology and stereotypical gender traits.

s a m p l e

I recruited participants between 2007 and 2009 through a variety of methods, including public postings in the Boston area, direct mailings to a random sample of Boston-area residents, snowball samples both through Boston LGB organizations and through academic (fac- ulty and graduate student) contacts across the United States, and email newsletter announcements to subscrib- ers of Edge Publications’ e-newsletter. Edge is an online news sources that publishes “news and commentary; en- tertainment, business, technology, style, health, fitness and travel features to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgen- der (LGBT) communities around the United States and Canada” (Edge Publications 2014). The announcement was sent to people across the United States who had reg- istered to receive announcements about events taking place in Boston and Provincetown. I chose the Boston and Provincetown lists to achieve an oversampling of MA residents and, I hoped, members of same-sex mar- riages, due to the early adoption of same-sex marriage in MA and to the Boston Metropolitan Statistical Area having the ninth highest concentration of gay couples in the U.S (Black et al. 2007). The e-newsletter yielded 217 same-sex attracted respondents. The multi-point snowball sampling yielded 161 same-sex attracted re- spondents; the other 51 same-sex attracted respondents joined the study through the direct mailings and local postings. Of the 429 same-sex attracted respondents, 244 were in a same-sex, co-residential relationship.

These 244 people—116 women and 128 men—in same-sex, co-residential relationships from the across the United States, with an oversampling of Massa- chusetts residents were included in the current analy- ses. Co-residential relationships included cohabiting relationships (n = 77 for women; n = 98 for men),

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civil unions and registered domestic partnerships (n = 15 for women; n = 14 for men), and marriages (n = 24 for women; n = 16 for men). Table 28.1 contains demographic information and descriptive statistics on all variables for the total sample and for the sub- samples of men and women.

The majority of respondents (90 %) were non- Hispanic Whites; Hispanics were the second largest racial/ethnic group (5 %). The mean age was about 43 years, with respondents ranging from 18 to 77 years. People in the sample were better off financially than the nation at large, with the mean annual income

nearing $59,000. This is partially explained by the greater-than-average educational level of the sample. On average, respondents had almost 17 years of edu- cation, or, about one year of schooling past college graduation.

d e p e n d e n t m e a s u r e I measured household labor using items similar to those in the National Survey of Families and House- holds (Sweet et al. 1988), but with an answer set indi- cating relative contributions.

TABLE 28.1 DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS ON DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS FOR FEMALE AND MALE RESPONDENTS IN SAME-SEX, CO-RESIDENTIAL RELATIONSHIPS

Variable Women Men

M (SD) M (SD)

Weekly work hours 35.93 (17.70) 34.87 (34.01)

R’s proportion of household work hours (%) 51.11 (23.92) 52.99 (27.16)

Annual income (in thousands) 49.69 (42.15) 66.79 (76.12)

Household income (in thousands) 98.43 (64.45) 129.71 (109.76)

R’s proportion of household income (%) 41.13* (28.44) 43.67 (31.80)

White (1 = White; 0 = not) .89 (0.32) .91 (0.29)

Black (1 = Black; 0 = not) .01 (0.19) .02 (0.12)

Hispanic (1 = Hispanic; 0 = not) .06 (0.24) .04 (0.19)

Other race (1 = other race; 0 = not) .03 (0.18) .04 (0.19)

Age 40.39** (11.34) 44.90 (12.48)

Education (years) 17.41** (2.47) 16.52 (2.42)

Variable Women Men Women

M (SD) Variable M

Mother worked when R was child (1 = worked; 0 = did not work) .74* (0.44) .62 (0.49)

Number of people in household 2.35*** (0.76) 2.02 (0.12)

Household presence of children age 0–5 (1 = present; 0 = not present) .10** (0.31) .01 (0.09)

Urban residence (0 = not urban; 1 = urban) .69 (0.46) .66 (0.48)

N 116 128

R Respondent

* p < .05; ** p < .01, *** p < .001

Housework as Non-Normative Gender Display among Lesbians and Gay Men 3 3 3

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The response set is derived from Blumstein and Schwartz’s (1983) Wife does all to Husband does all scale, which I modified to be gender neutral. I asked respondents to indicate how they divide the work as- sociated with each of nine tasks involved in maintain- ing a household (cooking, dishes, cleaning, shopping, laundry, driving, bill paying, outdoor tasks, and auto maintenance), using the response set: 1 = I do all the work, 2 = I do most of the work, 3 = We divide the work equally, 4 = My spouse/partner does most of the work, and 5 = My spouse/partner does all of the work. I reversed the numerical values associated with the responses, so that a higher score indicated a larger proportion of the housework and then averaged the respondent’s scores on nine housework tasks. The Cronbach alpha for the full housework scale was .42, illustrating that there was too much diversity within this measure for it to serve a dependent variable in statistical analyses.

I then divided the household tasks into routine housework (cooking, dishes, cleaning, shopping, laun- dry, driving), sometimes referred to as female-typed or core housework (Coltrane 2000), and discretionary housework (outdoor tasks, auto maintenance), some- times called male-typed housework. Research suggests that bill paying is gender-neutral (see Coltrane 2000), so although it was included in the total housework measure, it was excluded from both subsets. Unlike discretionary tasks, routine chores must be done on a more regular, often daily, basis and must be com- pleted in a timely manner when the need arises (Bar- nett and Shen 1997). Routine housework scores were calculated by reversing and averaging the scores for the routine tasks listed above with the exception of cooking, which did not load with the other tasks. This may be because cooking can also be a hobby, regard- less of gender (or the expression thereof; see Szabo 2013). The Cronbach alpha for the routine housework subscale was 0.74, indicating that there was some variation within subjects on their shares of routine tasks. Discretionary housework had a Cronbach alpha of just .53 and could not be included in the analyses.

i n d e p e n d e n t a n d c o n t r o l m e a s u r e s

To test whether the explanatory power of gender dis- play varied between men and women, I first divided the sample into subsamples. I did this using the

question “What is your biological sex?” This question was designed to indicate who was a member of les- bian couple and who was a member of a gay male couples. However, the lack of nuance in this question may have resulted in differential interpretations for intersex people, people who feel that their bodies do not reflect their true sex, and others. I do not have information on how respondents interpreted this question.

I used two indicators of stereotypical gender: stereotypical femininity and stereotypical masculinity. I utilized a short form of the Bem Sex Role Inven- tory (BSRI; Bem 1974) derived by Zhang et al. (2001), which includes eight items indicating stereotypical masculinity (independent, assertive, strong person- ality, forceful, has leader abilities, willing to take risks, willing to take a stand, aggressive) and eight items indicating stereotypical femininity (affection- ate, sympathetic, sensitive to other’s needs, under- standing, compassionate, warm, tender, gentle). Respondents used a point Likert-type scale, similar to the 9-point scale used by Solomon et al. (2005), to in- dicate how much they felt each item applied to them in general. I averaged each respondent’s scores on the eight items in each subscale to capture feminin- ity and masculinity as independent characteristics. The Cronbach’s alphas were .92 for the stereotypi- cal femininity subscale and .82 for the stereotypical masculinity subscale.

Work hours are an important predictor of house- hold labor (Artis and Pavalko 2003; Bianchi et al. 2000; Cunningham 2007; England and Farkas 1986; Lincoln 2008; Noonan et al. 2007; Sutphin 2010), and it is therefore both theoretically interesting and methodologically important to include a measure of work hours in testing the present theory. Proportional work hours was an appropriate measure of time avail- ability given the proportional measure of housework. I computed proportional work hours by combining the respondent’s and the partner’s average weekly work hours, and dividing the respondent’s work hours by the sum. Similarly, proportional income, which also impacts housework contributions (Bian- chi et al. 2000; Blood and Wolfe 1960; Cunningham 2007; Nakhaie 2002, Canada; Pinto and Coltrane 2009; Presser 1994) was the respondent’s income di- vided by the total household income. Proportional

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measures are preferable because they control for the level of cleanliness in a household, the outsourcing of household labor, and the amount of housework the children do and/or create (see Gager et al. 2009).

I included control variables for other factors known to impact housework and gender or gender display. Ethnicity was measured by four categories: Black, Hispanic, other, and White, with White as the excluded category. Education is measured in number of years completed. Age is measured in years. A dummy variable is included for Whether the respon- dent’s mother worked at least part time when the respon- dent was a child. The number of people in the household is measured as the total number of household mem- bers, including the respondent. Finally, I include a dummy variable for whether the household included a child under age 6.

s u b s a m p l e s o f w o m e n a n d m e n

I began by conducting a Chow test for equality of coefficients between the subsamples of lesbians and gay men. The test (F = 2.46

12,221 with F

crit = 1.75) was

significant, indicating that there are in fact differences between the coefficients for lesbians and gay men. Based on these significant findings, I proceeded with estimating separate models for each subsample. Table 1 gives the results of a MANOVA, indicating a statisti- cally significant difference between lesbians and gay men on control variables (Wilk’s ^ = 0.82, F

11,227 =

4.39, p < .001, partial η2 = .18). The MANOVA revealed that 17.6 % of the multivariate variance in the con- trol variables can be explained by differences between women and men.

Several gender differences emerged. Both women and men were out-earned by their partners, but this was true to a significantly greater extent for women than men. Women were significantly younger and had significantly higher education levels compared to men, completing about one year of additional schooling. Women were significantly more likely than men to have had a mother who worked for pay when they were children, the households of women had significantly more people than the household of men, and women were significantly more likely than men to have a young child (age 0–5) living in their household.

TABLE 28.2 DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS ON INDEPENDENT AND DEPENDENT VARIABLES FOR FEMALE AND MALE RESPONDENTS IN SAME-SEX, CO-RESIDENTIAL RELATIONSHIPS

Variable Women Men

M (SD) M (SD)

Relative housework (1–5; 5 = greater share)

3.15 (0.38) 3.20 (0.52)

Relative routine housework (1–5; 5 = greater share)

3.20 (0.48) 3.20 (0.71)

Relative discretionary housework (1–5; 5 = greater share)

3.06 (0.75) 3.21 (0.72)

Stereotypical femininity (1–7; 7 = greater femininity)

5.45 (0.85) 5.35 (0.92)

Stereotypical masculin- ity (1–7; 7 = greater masculinity)

4.67 (0.88) 4.69 (0.88)

N 116 128

R Respondent

* p < .05; **p < .01, ***p < .001

r e s u lt s

Table 28.2 gives the results of a MANOVA, indicat- ing no initial difference between lesbians and gay men on the independent variables and housework measures (Wilk’s ^ = 0.98, F

5,238 = 1.17). Addition-

ally, the correlations presented in Table 28.3 showed no significant correlations between housework and stereotypical gendered traits. For women, however, relative routine housework was negatively correlated with proportional income and positively correlated with identifying as Black; higher education was corre- lated with lower stereotypical femininity; and those who identified with an ethnicity other than White, Black, or Hispanic had fewer years of education. For men, doing a greater share of the housework was cor- related with working fewer hours relative to spouse/ partner. In addition, men’s proportion of household income was negatively correlated with age and with the likelihood that the respondent’s mother worked for pay.

Housework as Non-Normative Gender Display among Lesbians and Gay Men 3 3 5

bac48559_ch28_328-343.indd 335 05/22/19 12:27 PM

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3 3 6

A few correlations were common to men and women. Stereotypical masculinity was positively correlated with age. Higher education was correlated with working a greater proportion of total household work hours and earning a higher proportion of the household income. Working a greater share of hours was correlated with making a greater share of house- hold income. The older the respondent, the less likely they were to have had a mother who worked for pay. The greater the number of people in the household, the more likely the respondent was to have a young child (age 0–5) in the home. Finally, respondents’ sex did not correlate with femininity or masculinity.

To test hypothesis 1, I regressed housework on ste- reotypical femininity, stereotypical masculinity, and control variables. The results appear in Table  28.4. Hypothesis 1 predicted that lesbians who express higher levels of stereotypical masculinity will per- form smaller proportions of routine housework than lesbians who express lower levels of stereotypical masculinity. The hypothesis was supported. Lesbians who expressed greater levels of masculine character- istics reported contributing a smaller share routine housework. The effect size, however, was not large. Consider a hypothetical woman with a stereotypical masculinity score of 2 (on a scale of 1–7) and a rou- tine housework contribution of 4 (on a scale of 1–5), indicating that she does most of the routine house- work. Increasing her stereotypical masculinity score to a maximum score of 7, would decrease her rou- tine housework to 3.6, indicating a value between We divide the work equally and I do most.

Hypothesis 2 was that gay men who express higher levels of stereotypical femininity will perform greater proportions of routine housework than gay men who express lower levels of stereotypical femi- ninity. The results of this hypothesis test appear in Table 28.5. I found, above, that stereotypical femi- ninity was not significantly related to routine house- work for lesbians, but it was significantly related to routine housework for gay men. As predicted in hy- pothesis 2 (Table 4), gay men who expressed more feminine characteristics reported contributing a greater share of routine housework. Again, the effect was not large. For example, consider a man whose

TABLE 28.4 OLS REGRESSIONS OF STEREOTYPICAL FEMININITY AND MASCULINITY ON ROUTINE OUSEWORK FOR WOMEN IN SAME-SEX CO- RESIDENTIAL RELATIONSHIPS (N = 116)

Independent variable Routine

housework

b (s.e.)

Stereotypical femininity (1–7; 7 = greater femininity)

0.01 (.07)

Stereotypical masculinity (1–7; 7 = greater masculinity)

−0.08* (.05)

R’s Proportion of household work hours (%)

−0.005* (.003)

R’s proportion of household income (%) −0.001 (.002)

Black (1 = Black; 0 = not) 1.67** (.60)

Hispanic (1 = Hispanic; 0 = not) −0.10 (.32)

Other ethnicity (1 = other; 0 = not) 0.08 (.28)

Age 0.000 (.005)

Education (years) 0.01 (.02)

Mother worked when R was child (1 = worked; 0 = did not work

0.20* (.12)

Number of people in household −0.10 (.09)

Presence of preschool child in house- hold (1 = present; 0 = not present)

0.02 (.23)

R2 (df = 103) .16*

R Respondent

* p < .05. **p < .01

stereotypical femininity score is a 2 (on a scale of 1–7) and whose routine housework contribution is a 2 (on a scale of 1–5), indicating that his Spouse/partner does most of the routine housework. If his stereotypi- cal femininity score increased to a maximum score of 7, his routine housework would increase to 2.65, a value between We divide the work equally and I do most.

In sum, both hypotheses were supported. The va- lidity of gender display as a predictor of housework varied by the combination of the type of stereotypi- cal traits (masculinity vs. femininity) and by sex.

Housework as Non-Normative Gender Display among Lesbians and Gay Men 3 3 7

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Stereotypical masculinity translated into a decreased housework contribution for lesbians (H1) but not for gay men, and stereotypical femininity translated into an increased housework contribution for gay men (H1) but not for lesbians. The significant ef- fects were of modest size. There is reason to believe that the effects would be larger with a more specific measure of housework contributions. The current measure is rather coarse, with respondents limited to five response categories (My spouse/partner does all, My spouse/partner does most, We divide the work equally, I do most, I do all). If respondents had been allowed

TABLE 28.5 OLS REGRESSIONS OF STEREOTYPICAL FEMININITY AND MASCULINITY ON ROUTINE HOUSEWORK FOR MEN IN SAME-SEX CO- RESIDENTIAL RELATIONSHIPS (N = 128)

Independent variable Routine

housework

b (s.e.)

Stereotypical femininity (1–7; 7 = greater femininity)

0.13* (.07)

Stereotypical masculinity (1–7; 7 = greater masculinity)

0.005 (.08)

R’s proportion of household work hours (%)

−0.008** (.003)

R’s Proportion of Household Income (%) −0.001 (.002)

Black (1 = Black; 0 = not) −0.24 (.49)

Hispanic (1 = Hispanic; 0 = not) 0.13 (.32)

Other ethnicity (1 = other; 0 = not) 0.26 (.32)

Age −0.01 (.000)

Education (years) −0.01 (.03)

Mother worked when R was child (1 = worked;0 = did not work

0.03 (.13)

Number of people in household 1.78** (.72)

Presence of preschool child in house- hold (1 = present; 0 = not present)

−1.80 (1.00)

R2 (df = 115) 0.19*

R Respondent

*p < .05. **p < .01

to indicate a more specific proportion of each house- work task for which she/he is responsible, the effects may not have been muted.

d i s c u s s i o n

I set out to test whether outmoded conceptions of gender were predictive of housework among members of same-sex couples, and whether the effect would vary by gender, such that stereotypical femininity would be predictive for men and stereotypical masculinity would be predictive for women. Both hypotheses were supported, indicating the selective employment of housework as means of non-normative gender display. These findings, combined with the non-significant ef- fects of feminine characteristics among lesbians and of masculine characteristics among gay men, indicate further support for the theory. It seems that house- work is not used as a way to enact gender in a way that is stereotypical for one’s sex, but it is a tool used to enact non-normative gender. This may be due to an increased awareness of gender stereotypes regarding housework among lesbians and gay men.

Though not the focus of this article, it is interest- ing to note that proportionate income was not signifi- cant in the models for men or women. In contrast to consistent evidence that having greater control over the couple’s resources allows one to buy one’s way out of housework in different-sex couples (Baxter and Hewitt 2013 (Australia); Bianchi et al. 2000; Cun- ningham 2007; Pinto and Coltrane 2009; Presser 1994; Simister 2013), there was no evidence in the current sample that relative resources were related to relative housework, net of the effect of time availabil- ity. This mirrors results from other same-sex oriented samples (Blumstein and Schwartz 1983; Solomon et al. 2005), in which greater income did not appear to confer greater power, as indicated by the inability to translate that power into a smaller share of house- work. Higher levels of gender egalitarianism may ex- plain why the effect of income wasn’t replicated in the studies on sample-sex couples.

That stereotypically gendered traits were an or- ganizing factor of housework resonates with Car- rington’s (1999) break-through qualitative work, which revealed inequalities in housework and

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connections to gender display, in the context of a desire for gender equality. This study contributes the novel finding, however, that there are important dif- ferences in the way that gay men and lesbians divide housework, specifically that stereotypical, gendered traits were a factor for both men and women, but in divergent ways. Although both avoided the house- work patterns expected of their sex, gay men used housework as a way to display stereotypical feminin- ity, and lesbians used housework avoidance as a way to display stereotypical masculinity. Effect sizes were small, but this was a quite conservative test of gender construction. Masculinity and femininity were mea- sured as stereotypical concepts, which many would consider out of date in today’s society. That such outdated notions of gender were still somewhat pre- dictive of housework is telling. Despite decades of increasing gender equality, the utility of outmoded gender traits remains, perhaps indicating a diffusion of the stalled, or at least a lagging, gender revolution in the home documented among different-sex couples (see Hochschild 2012), emphasizing the strength of these cultural imperatives and their wide-reaching impact.

Another advancement made in this study is that it provides a true test of gender display, as opposed to a gender ideology or gender role explanation. In research on different-sex couples, sex and gender are confounded. Men are assumed to have masculine traits, women are assumed to have feminine traits, and a measure of sex is used as a proxy. Such stud- ies don’t tell us whether respondents are engaging in gender display or simply conforming to role expec- tations. For lesbians expressing stereotypically mas- culine traits and gay men expressing feminine traits, there is incongruence with role expectations. Role theory does not apply; thus the effect of gender dis- play is isolated in a way not previously accomplished.

The third important contribution of this study is that the design heeds Davis’ (2010) call to focus on the characteristics of people, rather than using self- reports of binary gender, which assumes men and women to be necessarily dissimilar from each other and homogeneous within themselves. I took a gen- eral theory of household labor and incorporated ideas about gendered characteristics and egalitarianism in

the gay and lesbian community to pose a novel, the- oretical elaboration about how gender is and is not performed using household labor among members of same-sex couples. The result is a theory that is in- clusive of gay and lesbian families and that can also be tested among, gender egalitarianism, different-sex couples and couples that include transgender, gen- derqueer, and intersex people.

I must emphasize that my survey respondents are a non-representative sample, and a relatively small sample, which casts a shadow on the validity of the statistical tests. The sample is not representative of same-sex attracted individuals on any geographic level, and I do not have sufficient information to make statements about whether the sample is representa- tive of same-sex attracted internet users, urban resi- dents, or academicians. Although the sample is most likely more representative than the criticized samples in past research that used magazine-readerships or an exclusive snowball sampling approach that snow- balled from one individual or group (see Patterson 2000), is it still important to emphasize the explor- atory nature of the project and highlight the impor- tance of accumulating research with nonprobability samples when better recruitment strategies are not feasible (see Christopher and Sprecher 2000).

Because the vast majority of the sample was re- cruited through e-newsletters and academics-based snowball sampling, the sample is above average on internet literacy, education, and income. The lesbian and gay populations of the US tend to earn more and be more highly educated compared to heterosexual siblings (Solomon et al. 2005), though perhaps not to this extent. In part, higher income levels can also be at- tributed to the oversampling of individuals from Mas- sachusetts, the state with the eighth highest median income in 2009 (US Census Bureau 2014), and the high proportion of urbanites, with over two-thirds of the sample residing in areas with populations greater than 300,000. The higher costs of living in urban areas translate into higher salaries for urban dwellers. Although I did control for education and income, I cannot correct for the fact that I am missing data points at the lower ends of these variables. It is possible that the effect sizes were reduced, because the somewhat greater gender egalitarianism of people with higher

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incomes and higher education (see Bartlett et al. 2013; Brewster and Padavic 2000; Gonsoulin and LeBoeuf 2010) may reduce the extent to which people use housework for gender display. These findings are not representative of any group, particularly those at lower income and education levels. To assess the impact of oversampling of people in or related to academia, I tested a control variable for academic recruitment, but it was not significant and did not change the effects of key variables; I did not include it in the final analyses.

Unfortunately, I did not include a measure of transgender, neither did I include a measure of out- ness, which may have been important factors affect- ing gender display. This is a weakness of the study that should be addressed in future research. As a cross-sectional, quantitative study, this data cap- tured only a wide-angle snapshot of people’s lives. The results support a novel theory of selective gender display, but it is not possible to appreciate whether the patterns that emerged herein are the result of any given motivating factor. If these results are replicated, greater in-depth study of this selective performance process would be appropriate.

The relative importance of stereotypical, gendered traits and behaviors in structuring the relationship be- tween same-sex partners should be a focus for future studies on house-work, alongside more contemporary

conceptions of gender. Lesbians and gay men seem willing to engage in gender-stereotypical housework only when it is used to enact a gender that is not nor- matively associated with their sex. What makes this display more acceptable? Does it seem more purpose- ful or genuine because it goes against norms? Does its non-normative status lend it an air of legitimacy in a counter-culture? The findings bring up questions surrounding contextualized identities. Perhaps, if a person wishes to express an identity that doesn’t co- incide with what society expects, the next logical step is to enact an identity that society expects for some- one else, staying within a script that others can un- derstand. Although gender is a very personal identity, it is also a social identity; one way to convince others of one’s legitimate claim to an identity is to invoke associated stereotypes.

I have offered potential explanations, but fur- ther investigation will be required to assess the pro- cesses by which house-work decisions are made along gender-stereotypical lines. Ideally, future research would use qualitative interviews to explore the affective and ideological responses that lesbians and gay men have to performing certain housework tasks, as well as subjective explications of how each couple decided (or didn’t expressly decide) how tasks would be divided, keeping in mind various conceptions of gender.

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

The data analyzed in this manuscript were collected as part of a larger project funded by a Public Policy Grant from The Williams Institute, UCLA–School of Law.

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Estrada, Emir, and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, (2011), “Intersectional Dignities: Latino Immigrant Street Vendor Youth in Los Angeles”, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40(1): 102-131, SAGE Publications.

E M I R E S T R A D A , P I E R R E T T E H O N D A G N E U - S O T E L O

Like people from school, they’d say, “Oh, look at the hot dog girl,” and I’m like you know what? Mejor callate porque [You better be quiet because] at least  .  .  . I get whatever I want, and I get more money than you.

Nadya (age thirteen)

Latino immigrants are reviving urban public life in many American cities, and in Los Angeles, street vendors are at the forefront of this trend. The cultural geographer Lorena Muñoz (2008) has observed how these vendors utilize nostalgia for familiar foods and memory of place to construct new “urban cultural land- scapes,” and Mike Davis (2000, 65) has noted the ways in which these street vendors are transforming “dead urban spaces into convivial social places,” blending traditions from the mestizaje of the Spanish plaza and the Meso- American mercado. Muñoz estimates that there are 10,000 Latino immigrant street vendors working in LA daily.

Linger in the public parks and street corners near bus stops, schools, and factories, and you begin to notice that children and youth are not only custom- ers, but they are also vendors. On the streets of East Los Angeles, little girls as young as age ten shout out in high-pitched, sing-songy voices, “churros, raspados, tamales,” and their older siblings are making change, taking orders, and serving food. By day, it is not un- common to see thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls and boys working alone, perhaps pushing a shopping cart full of cups of sliced fruit, elotes (steamed corn on the cob), and churros (a type of fried doughnut).

Most of the scholarly literature on informal sector street vending in the United States has not examined

the role of children and teens (Duneier 1999; Mo- rales 2009; Kettles 2007). In their studies of Central American and Mexican immigrant street vendors in LA, Muñoz (2008) and Hamilton and Chinchilla (2001) do observe that many street vendor moth- ers bring their young children with them, blending reproductive, domestic care work with productive, wage-earning work. Yet the role of children and teens as active economic contributors and partici- pants in street vending in the United States remains unacknowledged. In this article, we highlight their agency, voices, and perspectives by drawing from au- diotaped interviews.

While the children and teens actively contrib- ute their labor and earnings to their families, they suffer humiliation and stigma because of the low status, racialization, and illegality of street vending. In response, they devise new narratives of intersec- tional dignity. We argue that an intersectionalities perspective—one that takes into account intersecting inequalities of race, class, gender, and immigration— explains why these kids participate in family income earning. Moreover, examining the moral construc- tions of self-worth that the street vendor youth nar- rate illuminates how they creatively invert widely held negative stereotypes of racial-ethnic minorities, the poor, immigrants, and working children and girls. We refer to this process as the construction of intersectional dignities. These are affirming, restored identities that challenge dominant ideas of what it means to be a Latino/a, poor, foreign-born, youthful street vendor in a major US city.

29. INTERSECTIONAL DIGNITIES

Latino Immigrant Street Vendor Youth in Los Angeles

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t h e i n f o r m a l e c o n o m y a n d s t r e e t v e n d i n g

Observers once believed that street vending—and all forms of informal, unregulated, income-generating activity—would fade away with modernization, but today street vending and informal economic activ- ity are generally recognized as constitutive elements of advanced global capitalism (Castells and Portes 1989; see also Alderslade, Talmage, and Freeman 2006; Cross and Morales 2007). In fact, cosmopoli- tan urbanites and “foodies” are now tracking down the best “authentic” immigrant street food in New York City and Los Angeles (Zukin 2010), and both cities have now celebrated the “Vendy Awards” for the tastiest street food. Formal and informal sectors of the economy are linked (Sassen-Koob 1989) and include industrial informality such as home-based piecework or assembly (Beneria and Roldan 1987; Fernandez-Kelly and Garcia 1990) and informal vending, which traditionally provides the basic con- sumption needs of the working poor (Cross 1998). This article is aligned with a newer body of schol- arship that shines attention on the role of human agency in the informal economy. This “actor ori- ented perspective,” as Zlolniski (2006) has noted, acknowledges historical and macro-structural forces, but focuses analysis on human agency, culture, and social interaction in street vending in contemporary US cities (Dohan 2003; Duneier 1999; Muñoz 2008; Zlolniski 2006). This article adds a focus on children and intersectionality.

Street vending is negatively viewed in many parts of the world (Jansen and Peppard 2003), and in Los Angeles, it is also illegal. Enforcement, however, remains selective, and there have been several organizing and advocacy projects for street vendors.1 Most street vending remains illegal in Los Angeles. Moreover, in the United States, where laws against child labor were enacted during the Progres- sive Era, dominant social norms hold that children should not be working to support themselves and their families and these norms are enforced through law. Discussions of child labor are usually confined to the context of poor, “third world,” developing nations.2

i n t e r s e c t i n g i n e q u a l i t i e s a n d i m m i g r a n t c h i l d r e n a n d y o u t h

Intersectionalities perspective developed to explain the social locations, oppressions, and limited life op- portunities of women of color in US society (Glenn 1985; Collins 1991), but it has also proven useful in analyses of racialized first- and second-generation immigrant children and adolescents (Espiritu 2001; Smith 2006). Childhood is a social construction, and what is deemed appropriate activity for children varies across time and space (Aries 1962) and is situated within relations of race, nation, migration, and gender (Thorne et al. 2003). In her ground-breaking book, Pricing the Priceless Child, the sociologist Viviana Zel- izer (1985) called attention to the historical shift from the preindustrial, agrarian societies, where children are appreciated for their economic utility, to industrial societies where children are seen as emotionally price- less, sentimentalized, innocent, and worthy of paren- tal protection and support. These dual spheres are not absolute (Zelizer 2002, 2005), and what is deemed permissible and forbidden forms of children’s work varies with social relations and context. Some jobs are seen as acceptable and desirable for children and teens in particular contexts (e.g., household chores, babysit- ting, etc.) (McKechnie and Hobbs, 1999). Still, it is now normative to think that children and teens re- quire parental protection and economic support and that if they work, it is for their own pocket money or savings.

Not everyone can uphold these modern childhood expectations. In his book, At Home in the Street, Tobias Hecht (1998) distinguishes between two ways of ex- periencing childhood in Northeast Brazil—nurtured childhoods (a stage of protected freedom and play) and nurturing childhoods, whereby poor children are “expected from an early age to contribute to the pro- duction and income of the household” (Hecht 1998, 81). Nurturing childhoods are common in developing nations like Brazil and Mexico, but they are anoma- lies in postindustrial societies like the United States, where children are defined as “emotionally priceless” (Zelizer 1995). Our study shows that these two types of childhoods also coexist in global, postindustrial, immigrant cities of the global north.

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Intersectionalities underscore that poverty often works in tandem with racial and gender hierarchies, and in this article, we call attention also to intersect- ing inequalities of immigration and age. Non-white children from working-class families are more likely to work and contribute to the family economy, and Latino immigrant children routinely do all kinds of work for their parents that is nonremunerated but that is nonetheless critical for the adult parents and for family livelihood and settlement in the United States. Mexican and Central American immigrant children in LA, for example, take active roles translat- ing written documents at home and often serving as on-the-spot interpreters for their monolingual parents with schools and medical and financial institutions (Valenzuela 1999; Orellana 2001, 2009). They teach their parents how to interface with the school system, public transportation, medical clinics, and landlords, and this has important economic ramifications.

Segmented assimilation theory has focused our attention on intergenerational acculturation pat- terns among immigrant parents and their children, but this body of scholarship has not emphasized the important role that children play in immigrant families’ labor incorporation and settlement (Portes and Zhou 1993; Smith 2006; Portes and Rumbaut 2001, 2006). The pattern of children contributing to the family economy and incorporation is found among many immigrant groups, as studies of Asian American immigrant children have underlined the important role children play in economic survival and mobility through family ethnic enterprise. In a study of children of entrepreneurial Korean and Chi- nese immigrants who operate restaurants and dry cleaners, Lisa Park (2005) finds role reversals, with the children experiencing both the “premature adult- hood” of taking on many responsibilities at a young age and the “prolonged childhood” with the growing children unable to cut free from the family business. Their labor is instrumental to family economic sur- vival and upward mobility. Similarly, in a study of Chinese immigrant children who work in their par- ents’ take-way Chinese restaurants in London, Miri Song (1999, 81) finds that the children’s “labor is not discretionary but required for family survival.” These children, it is important to underline, work

in family-owned shops and restaurants, affording a degree of status and shelter. The Mexican and Cen- tral American immigrant children discussed here are also making critical economic contributions to their family, but there is a difference: They are engaged in criminalized, stigmatized, and “racialized” informal sector work that occurs on public streets and parks and that is typically performed by first-generation undocumented immigrants (Dohan 2003). How does this affect them? Another body of scholarship on work, shame, and stigma provides insight into the processes they encounter.

t h e s t i g m a o f l o w - s tat u s w o r k

Long ago, Erving Goffman (1963) wrote about stigma as a reputation that is socially devalued as a tainted, “spoiled identity.” Since then, sociologists have examined how workers respond when they are socially discredited because of their occupations. In The Hidden Injuries of Class, Sennett and Cobb (1972) introduced the term “injured dignity” to refer to the social humiliations suffered by white male workers. In a study of inner-city black and Latino youth work- ing at fast food outlets, Newman (1999, 86) suggests that “stigma clings to fast food jobs” and that this is also exacerbated by the low status of the workers who do these jobs, typically racial minorities teens, some of whom are immigrants with less than perfect Eng- lish. The teens defend themselves from assaults on their dignity, Newman argues, by seeking moral value in the work and by constructing themselves as self- disciplined, responsible, and mature. They break the stigma and establish their respectability by appealing to “timeless American values” that value hard work and by distinguishing themselves from beggars, drug dealers, and “fast-talkers” (Newman 1998, 98). In The Dignity of Working Men, Michele Lamont (2000) shows how working-class men create a particular morality to defend their self-worth, drawing boundaries between themselves and others. This type of identity forma- tion common among people with disparaged selves including battered women (Dunn 2005) and survi- vors of HIV/AIDS (Sandstrom 1998). Similar moral constructions based on honest work are espoused by black homeless street vendors in Duneier’s (1999) Sidewalk, the homeless recyclers in Gowan’s (2009)

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study, and the homeless in Snow, Baker, and Ander- son’s (1986) study.

How do Latino street vendor kids confront the stigma of doing low-status, highly visible work? We argue that they rely on new moral constructions based on inversions of widely held negative stereo- types of racial ethnic minorities, the poor, immigrant foreigners, and girls and children who work in the street. Intersecting systems of inequality are pivotal here. Racialized identities come into play, as the chil- dren and teens associate whiteness with laziness and the privileges enjoyed by bosses, high-status profes- sionals, and spoiled children. By contrast, they asso- ciate “Mexicanness” and immigrant social locations with hard work. Their subject positions and lived ex- periences allow them to flip-flop the familiar, domi- nant images of “lazy Mexicans” and “meritorious white professionals.” They also counter the images of gender, foreignness, and illegality that also circulate freely, and the girls in particular find that street vend- ing affords them new public spaces of sociability, al- lowing them to escape gendered confinement in the home. As we will see, these new opportunities are counterbalanced by gender obligations.

d e s c r i p t i o n o f r e s e a r c h

This study is based on nine months of ethnographic field observations at a street vending site in East Los Angeles and twenty in-depth interviews with Latina/o adolescents who sell merchandise on the streets or parks of Los Angeles with their parents. The first author, Emir Estrada, accompanied families to street vending sites such as parks, freeway entrance spots, and busy streets with abundant pedestrians. Institu- tional Review Board (IRB) approval was obtained and their protocols were followed.3

Once parents and children agreed to participate in this study, Estrada spent time with each family at their stand. She purchased and ate the food near the stand, and she spent many hours chatting and interacting with them and observing street vending families and customers. Note-taking was limited to key terms to jog the author’s memory as suggested by Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw (1995). Detailed notes were recorded on a digital recorder on the drive back home. These notes were later transcribed.

We designed a semi-structured interview guide that asked primarily open-ended questions about the street vending experiences of these adolescents (e.g., duties, earnings, household responsibilities, relations with parents and siblings, and education/work balance). All interviews were conducted by Estrada, and respondents were encouraged to speak in the language they felt most comfortable, a practice advised by researchers working in bilingual communities (Zinn 2001). Throughout the interview, some respondents switched easily from Spanish to English. Interviews typically lasted between thirty minutes to an hour and a half. Each research par- ticipant filled out a brief “face sheet,” which collected data on age, family, place of birth, length of residency in the United States, grades, and extracurricular activi- ties. We also asked questions about their parents’ work history in the United States. The majority of the chil- dren were not well informed on this topic. Some chil- dren cited street vending as their parents’ only job in the United States while others said their parents had worked as domestic workers, in sewing factories, or as cooks in lunch trucks or restaurants.

All of the interviews were audiotaped and tran- scribed verbatim in the language(s) in which the interviewee spoke. After reading the transcripts and coding the data for themes and analysis, we selected particularly representative quotes as evidence for this article. If they spoke in Spanish, we have chosen to represent their words as they spoke them verbatim, providing our own translation in brackets. The ex- tended case method directed engagement with ex- isting scholarship (Burawoy 1998), and grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin 1994) offered guidelines for coding and organizing the data.

Nearly all of the participants were approached on the street while they were street vending. This was an intimidating process for all involved, for the young street vendors, their parents, and the researcher. Adolescent street vendors were initially fearful of the researcher because street vending is illegal. The researcher explained that she was not connected to local authorities and handed them the bilingual con- sent form that explained the purpose of the research and their rights. She encouraged them to talk to their parents about the study. During follow-up visits, a few parents accompanied their children and said

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“no” to the study. Others kept asking the researcher to come back week after week but never confirmed an interview appointment.

Apparently, some people suspected that this re- search was a cover for a police or health department operation. Some parents insisted that their children did not help them at all and others stated they did not have any children. One family was approached while their ten-year-old daughter helped them with a cash transaction. The child wore a red apron in which she kept loose change and dollar bills from the day’s earnings. The family agreed to an interview for the next day, but they failed to return. Fears were often assuaged when the researcher purchased and ate their goods in front of them. During one interview, the respondent’s mother expressed how nervous she and her daughter had felt when the researcher first asked for an interview. They said they agreed to par- ticipate because a health inspector or police officer would never buy fruit from them. In this context, grounded theory’s idealized procedure of theoretical sampling was simply not possible.

Trust and rapport were enhanced because the pri- mary researcher is Mexican and speaks Spanish with- out an accent (important for the parents, who were all Spanish monolinguals). She sometimes brought her own two-year-old daughter, and bringing chil- dren to the field has proven beneficial in other stud- ies of vulnerable populations (Kaplan 1996). Many parents also softened when they learned that the researcher had attended school up to la preparatoria (high school) in a small rural town in the state of Zacatecas, Mexico.

Adolescent street vendors work long hours on weekends and some work after school during the week. The majority of the interviews (twelve) took place during work hours, in public spaces while the kids sold goods, or while their parents momentarily relieved them. Five interviews took place at the re- spondents’ homes and three interviews took place inside Estrada’s car during the day (in close proximity to their parents who were street vending). Participants were not paid for the study, but the researcher did buy products—mostly food—from nearly all of them.

We did not restrict our sample to a particular ethnic group. Sixteen respondents had parents from

Mexico, three from Guatemala, and one had parents from Honduras and Mexico. Thirteen out of the twenty interviewees were born in the United States. Girls are overrepresented among the interviewees—sixteen of the twenty are girls—but this seems to reflect what we saw in the field: girls are disproportionately repre- sented among these young street vendors. Out of the twenty children interviewed, seventeen had brothers and sisters living at home who did not street vend with the family and more boys than girls were able to “slack off” street vending duties (Estrada and Hondagneu- Sotelo 2013). We interviewed only those children who worked as street vendors, but one of our respondents reported that her brother ran away from home because he refused to continue street vending with his family. We were unable to interview him, but future research should examine entire street vending families, includ- ing the members who do not actively help. Two of the interviewees were ten and twelve, and the eldest was twenty-one years old (we included her because she had been street vending since age eight and because it was so difficult to recruit research participants). All respon- dents, except one, were currently enrolled in school or community college, and three of them attended pri- vate Catholic school. Most of the interviewees (sixteen of the twenty) lived in two-parent households. None were married, but two of the girls had babies (Monica, age eighteen, and Katia, age twenty-one).

We attempted to gather data on street vendors’ income, but this was difficult as earnings vary with hours, seasons, and products. Some kids reported handing over to parents approximately $150 to $240 per day. Others reported making $200 to $700 per week. Half of the children and adolescents in this study live with parents who depend on street vend- ing as their only source of income. The other half have at least one parent who also works full-time in the formal sector of the economy, either as an employee or running a small business. Twelve youth did not receive any direct payment for their work and eight of them reported getting $5 to $30 for each day they worked.

t h e e a s t l a s c e n e

A popular corner on Cesar Chavez Boulevard in East Los Angeles is a fairly unremarkable commercial corner, not unlike the scene in many American working-class

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neighborhoods. A bus stop, a low-cost supermarket, a 99 cents store, clothing shops, a bank, and burger joint fill the storefronts and account for most of the foot traffic. By day, teens and mothers pushing strollers stop to chat, but big groups of people do not congre- gate. Yet every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evening, a one-block stretch just off the boulevard is trans- formed into a lively destination spot for Latino im- migrant families. Customers stroll up and down the sidewalks, choosing from a smorgasbord of seafood cocktail, Salvadoran pupusas, Mexican tacos, tamales, and beverages like fruit-flavored water in the summer and thick, hot, corn-based atole and champurrado in the winter. The smell of beef and pork frying in vats wafts through the air. Vendors advertise their food by shout- ing “tacos, tamales,” while other vendors selling Avon cosmetics, pirated CDs and DVDs, and inexpensive shoes are quieter. The food vendors sell from parked trucks and vans, and they also set up elaborate displays of brightly colored salsas on folding tables. It’s hard to walk down the wide sidewalks because they are so packed with merchandise and customers chewing their food, most of them standing and holding paper plates, but a few sitting on stoops; one vendor has even set up a make-shift dining area with plastic crates as chairs. This was one of the sites where the children and teens work and where we spent most of out time in the field, but they also sold their wares below scorching sun in public parks and in less vendor-congested areas near schools and bus stops.

w h y d o t h e y c o n s e n t ?

Why do these children and teens consent to spend all summer and most of the school year pushing a cart with cut-up fruit through blazing city streets and parks? After all, many of their friends are at home lounging, and the dominant social view is that it is the respon- sibility of parents to work, support, protect, and care for their children (Zelizer 1985). Even in poor Latino immigrant neighborhoods, this is the idealized expec- tation and lived reality. The street vendor kids report that most of their neighborhood and school friends do not work, so they experience themselves to be some- what anomalous in their social circles. We found that the street vendor adolescents explain their consent and

willingness to work two ways, in moral terms and eco- nomic terms. First, we look at the economic.

The youth acknowledge the financial limitations of their families. This involves cognitive recognition of the financial and social difficulties facing their parents as well as empathy for their parents’ plight. Ideals of family reciprocity and collectivity prevail. Most of the children and youth report that they do not receive a wage or even a monetary allowance. They engage in family street vending for both individ- ual consumer items and family economic well-being.

The street vendor kids recognize that their par- ents cannot bring in enough income alone and that they, as children, must contribute too. In contrast to the egocentrism and consumer longings expressed by many American children (Pugh 2009), the street vendor children express empathy for the precarious financial position of their parents. Some of them noted that their parents’ earnings were limited be- cause they lacked legal authorization to work. Others talked about their parents being laid off from jobs or being too ill to work alone. In these remarks, they show that they are fully cognizant of societal dis- crimination and their parents’ limited opportunities, and hence the youth position themselves as indis- pensable contributors to the family economy.

My parents don’t have papers, and now like, the bosses can’t hire people without papers, or else they go to jail too. (Monica, eighteen)

Well, it’s less work for them, ’cause if I weren’t there, then my mom would have to be serving, and she would have to be charging, and she would have to be washing her hands soooo many times because she grabs the money.  .  .  . They [my parents] need me to help. If it is not me, then it’s no one. (Gloria, fourteen)

Pues, mi mama no puede hacer todo ella y pos, esta mala y le tengo que ayudar. [Well, my mother cannot do it all alone, and well, she is not well, so I must help her.] (Edgar, thirteen)

These adolescents express a moral obligation to con- tribute to the family economy. Consider the example of Mariana, age sixteen, who sells fruit on the streets of Los Angeles with her fourteen-year-old sister, Amanda. Typically, the girls are out on the streets every Saturday and Sunday from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m., selling cut-up

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fruit. During the summer, the girls work at least five days a week, including weekends. On weekdays when school is in session, the girls attend school and then come home to do household chores, do homework, and look after their younger siblings. Their mother is out selling fruit on the streets Monday through Friday, while their father operates a small store that sells dis- posable diapers, soap, and shampoo. Mariana says that she does the street vending on weekends because she believes in reciprocity. From her view, the parents are working hard during weekdays to help their chil- dren, so the children should try to do their part. As she put it, “Los ayudamos aunque sea a descansar un dia . . . pues, ellos ya trabajaron mucho para nosotros, y ahora nos toca a nosotros. [We help them, even if it’s just allowing them a day to rest . . . they’ve already worked so much for us, and now it’s our turn.]” Gratitude for parents’ hard work and support was a familiar theme.

Norma, age eighteen, and her thirteen-year-old brother sold barbacoa tacos with their family on week- ends. She related how her mother had been laid off from her job as a garment worker, so she was keenly aware that family economic well-being depended on their collective street vending work. She recalled that she and her brother had initially been reluctant to get involved in the street vending, but she said they felt a duty to help their parents, and they quickly learned to see the family financial benefits. “Entonces dijimos aunque no queramos, tenemos que ayudarles. . . . Ahorita lo veo, y gracias a dios nuestro negocio es que estamos so- breviviendo. [So we said, even if we don’t want to do it, we have to help them. . . . Now I see that thank God, we are surviving due to this business.]”

“ i d o n ’ t a s k f o r m o r e ” : r e m u n e r at i o n

Money is clearly part of the picture. The kids get involved in street vending because they know it is instrumen- tal for family economic survival and for standards of living that included, for some of them, Catholic school tuition and cell phones. We were surprised, however, that few of the street vendor kids reported receiving a wage or even a regular allowance from their parents. They typically hand all the money off to their mother or their father. Why do they do this? The notion of a child’s or teen’s allowance is not a peculiarly American

one. In Mexico, many children receive a domingo, a cash allowance that is paid on Sundays. Less than half of the interviewees (eight out of twenty) said they receive cash regularly from their parents as part of their com- pensation for vending. And when they did, the amount for a day’s work varied between $5 and $30. With this cash they report buying their necessities, items like shoes and school supplies, but also some nice extras that children and teens desire in a consumer-driven so- ciety, things like video games and brand name jeans.

As we saw previously, the street vendor kids recog- nize that family economic survival and well-being de- pends on their contributions. But they also said they do street vending because their parents will buy them anything they want. “I think I earn what they buy me,” said fourteen-year-old Susana. When we asked Susana if her parents ever paid her in cash, or gave her a domingo, she said no, and she explained it this way:

No, I’m not that kind of person, ’cause I don’t ask them, like, “Oh I helped you, so are you gonna pay me or something?”  .  .  . If we work here on Fridays, we’ll go to the mall the next day, and I’ll be like “Okay, can you buy me this?”

Mariana responded that her parents occasionally gave her cash, but she said they almost always bought her the things she needed:

Pero si nosotros le pedimos algo, si nos compra. En veces dicen que no lo merecemos y en veces si. Si nos compran cosas. [But if we ask for something, they buy it for us. Sometimes they say we don’t deserve it, sometimes, yes. Yes, they buy us things.]

Gloria, age fourteen, received $10 to $15 for selling tacos with her family, and she admitted that she had initially wanted more money, but empathy for her parents’ financial situation caused her to diminish her cash expectations:

I wanted more, but then I started seeing that . . . we make like around $200 a day, like $240, around there, and if I take, like most of the money, then my parents are not going to have that much. And with that money, they pay the cell phone bill. And like, one of the phones is mine.

Adriana, age thirteen, expressed a similar sentiment:

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Para mi esta bien eso lo que me dan. Yo no les pido mas. Porque yo a veces tambien me pongo a pensar, no, pos, ellos me dan de comer. Me dan para mi ropa. No les pido mas. [For me, whatever they give me is fine. I don’t ask for more. Because sometimes I think, “No, well, they give me food. They give me clothes.” I don’t ask for more.]

Other teens also explained how their street vend- ing work allowed them to get particular consumer items—Nike Jordans or particular kind of brand name jeans. But these were blended in with necessi- ties, like food. As thirteen-year-old Nadya explained, “If I want some new clothes, I have to earn it, like I have to work. I have to help my mom.  .  .  . What- ever we want my mom buys it for us, like the comida [food], all the clothes, the shoes, so like that’s how it works.”

Economic incentives blended together with the kids’ moral obligations to help support their fami- lies. The obligations went two ways. Some of the kids reasoned that their participation in family street vending meant that their parents would be obligated to purchase big ticket items for them. Samuel, age twelve, said he got a Playstation video game. Martha, age seventeen, spoke with some bravado about ex- pecting a pick-up truck of her own, but she also rec- ognized that her family needed her help:

My mom even tells me if we don’t really work, then we don’t have everything we want. And it’s kinda true because we are a big family. I mean, like, if my dad was working on a simple job and it’s like we’re getting 700 bucks, come on!

In the next phrase, barely skipping a beat, she hastened to add what she was now expecting her father to pro- vide for her:

He [father] needs to get my truck. And that is why I don’t mind working because I know that in a sense, I get anything I want. Anything I ask for—if I do ask for it—I could get it.

Similarly, even a child as young as ten-year-old Juan, a boy who sold homemade jewelry with his father and sister on the weekends, said he was work- ing due to both moral imperatives to help provide needed care for the family and in anticipation of the goodies that he was now expecting:

I like helping my family and all, and because I want them to do me a birthday party that is coming up. That’s why I’m trying to earn money, to do it myself. And to help my grandma because she has cancer and she is almost going to die.

Already at age ten, he was learning that some of his earnings should cover family and household neces- sities. “Sometimes I waste it [money] in games,” he admitted. “Sometimes I help my mom buy stuff, like to wash our clothes, and to buy food.” The theme of “wasting money” came up as a negative value. Kids admitted to doing it, but they already believed they should be budgeting and saving the money they did get and earmarking it for important items. Esmeralda, age fourteen, admitted to having given in to tempta- tion and blowing cash as soon as she got it. But she also added that she now tried to save it and help her mother buy fruit for their street vending business when needed.

c o u n t e r - n a r r at i v e s o f i n t e r s e c t i o n a l d i g n i t i e s

Family financial need and family poverty due to im- migrant status, racialization, and gendered hierar- chies explains why these children and teens work as street vendors. But how do they cope with the responses of others who may tease them or dispar- age them for working as street vendors? Looking at counter-narratives that the children and youth con- struct can tell us something about the broader in- tersecting systems of inequality and the controlling images that circulate in society.

Public humiliations and ridicule from neighbor- hood and school friends fueled shame. Amanda, age fourteen, who sold fruit with her mother, said, “People use to look at me like, ‘Oh, she’s selling fruit,’ like my friends and everything.” And Mariana, her sixteen-year-old sister, admitted “Si, me daba ver- guenza . . . porque era un trabajo vergonzoso. Pensaba que se miraba mal. [Yes, I felt ashamed . . . because it was a shameful job. I thought it looked bad.]” Other kids were brutalized with physical violence. Edgar, now thirteen, had started selling tejuino (a corn-based beverage) with his mother in downtown Los Angeles when he was eleven. Kids at his Catholic school had

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mercilessly teased him as el tejuinero (the tejuino boy) and had beaten him so severely that his mother, who feared for his safety, had sent him to recuperate with relatives in Mexico.

The shame and stigma derived from various sources. First, as we have already seen, street vending is illegal in Los Angeles. The street vendor youth are thus criminalized by selling otherwise lawful items (fruit, beverages, peanuts, etc.), and many had expe- rienced running and hiding from the police or city authorities. These were humiliating, demeaning and frightening experiences.

When the cop stops us we can’t sell that day because they already stopped us. We have to be hiding behind the bushes. Sometimes we even feel like criminals because we have to hide behind the bushes and you know how cars pass a lot here. They’re just looking at us all like weird like running and hiding and looking and ducking from the cops. (Veronica, eighteen)

No mas vimos la troca y nos tiro todo y pos, ya nos tuvi- mos que ir a vender a otro lado. [We just saw the truck, and they (police) threw out everything we had, and well, we just had to go sell at another spot.] (Samuel, twelve)

Second, street vendor kids feel shame because street vending is not seen as a “normal” job. They negatively compared their jobs and their parents’ street vending jobs with formal sector jobs that their friends’ parents might hold (e.g., janitors, truck drivers, factory workers, hotel maids). Street vending also occurs in a site—public streets and intersections—that is associated with crime, beg- ging, dirtiness, and deviance.

Finally, by selling in public venues to earn cash, the adolescents violated dominant cultural values that children should not be working. The kids know that minors are not supposed to be working. Katia said she had imagined customers thinking, “‘Where is your mom? You poor kid.’ I guess people think like that.”

Research on workers doing stigmatized work has shown how workers engage in various techniques to counter oppression (Sennett and Cobb 1972; Newman 1999; Duneier 1999; Lamont 2000; Gowan 2009). In the following, we show how the kids en- gaged narratives of restored dignity, and we call at- tention to the ways in which intersecting systems of

inequalities shaped these narratives. The youth ac- tively resisted the application of dominant control- ling images of gender, Mexicanness, foreignness, and illegality. Instead, they adopted new affirming narra- tives of intersectional dignities.

n o t g a n g s t e r s , a n d n o t f r e s i ta s

The street vendor youth contrasted themselves to nega- tive images of Latino youth that circulate in both the barrio and in the dominant society. These controlling images are of racialized and gendered parasitic Latino youth. Latino boys are portrayed as violent, delin- quent gangsters, and Latina girls as either prematurely pregnant or as spoiled princesses. The street vendors contrasted themselves to these negative images of idle, nonworking Latino youth.

Accordingly, street vendor kids described their peers who did not work as lazy and spoiled. Nadya said her friends who do not work are “ fresitas”—lit- erally little strawberries, but colloquially, in Mexico, the term means spoiled, precious girls. When asked what her friends do, Chayo, age fourteen, who sold homemade jewelry with her father and little brother, said “Nothing. They have their parents, but their parents work for them. Like they get money either way. They don’t have to do anything.” Her ten-year- old brother disparagingly claimed his friends were always “outside eating chips and they are all fat.They just like, always play around and eat junk food all the time.” And Edgar disdainfully said of his Catholic school peers, “They don’t even work. They are lazy.”

Not working was associated with slothfulness, junk food, and being fat.

Familiar and widely circulating racializations of Mexicans as lazy, illegal, and illegitimate were chal- lenged by narratives that allowed the street vendor kids to position themselves as more authentically Mexican or Latino than their nonworking peers. Some of the kids suggested that youth who do not work are not only spoiled, but they act as though they were white. The thinking here is that Latinos work the hardest, and whites work the easiest, or not at all. This is a flip-flop of the neo-colonial image of the “sleepy Mexican,” one disseminated in popular culture representations of a Mexican peasant in sombrero snoozing by a cactus, and one that has continued to fuel anti-immigrant

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policies. The kids contrasted themselves to whites, and to white professionals, who they also saw as lazy and less meritorious. Martha related the example of a girl at her Catholic school who refused to work in her father’s shoe store. This girl, Martha said, “is not liter- ally white but we call her white” because she refused to work with her family. Veronica also suggested this racialized construction of work. “White people,” she said, “don’t even work the hardest.They’re lawyers or stuff like that.” Who works the hardest? “It’s the Mexi- cans and the Hispanics,” she said.

Most of the respondents talked not about whites, but about their Latino peers in their local environ- ment, and they constructed street vending as a virtu- ous alternative to crime and delinquency. The street vendor kids said their nonworking peers had lots of idle time. They reasoned that with all this idle time, their peers were more likely to get in trouble and turn to drugs, stealing, and gangs.

It [vending] gets you tired, but you have like time to do it. And you’re not doing dumb stuff over there, seeing tv, sitting down, I dunno, doing drugs, tu sabes [you know] not doing bad . . . like my cousin, he got into jail like three times already because he’s like stealing and doing drugs and he’s a gangster. I don’t want to be like him. (Nadya, thirteen)

He [neighbor] just sleeps, smokes, drugs and then like he goes and eats and he don’t even help his par- ents. And I feel bad for his parents because one of two no puede caminar [cannot walk]. . . . Like if it was me, I have to help my parents. (Veronica, eighteen)

Es mejor que estés trabajando que te cachen robando. [It’s better to work than be caught stealing]. I mean, that’s the way I see it. I ain’t stealing. (Martha, seventeen)

The street vendor youth also challenged racial- ized notions of illegality and inferiority associated with Mexicans. One young woman, Veronica, had started selling cups of sliced fruit on the streets of Los Angeles with her mother when she was twelve years old. She recalled the teasing she had endured from school friends this way:

They used to tell me, “You sell in the streets? Aren’t you embarrassed? People look at you and you have to tell them to buy your stuff!” So they were making fun of me, like, saying that I’m right here in the street, like a

Mexican person selling in the streets. So they’d be telling me, “Ha! You’re a wetback!” . . . I wanted to cry because they were making fun of me, but then I got over it.

This statement, and the experience of being labeled with an epithet such as “wetback,” underlines the racialized connotations of the job. To be selling on the street is to be “like a Mexican person.” It marks one publicly as marginal, backward, subordinate, and inferior. Another girl also said that she imagined that people who saw her selling on the street probably saw her as “a Mexican,” when in fact, she identified as “Hispanic” as a US-born, US citizen. She thought people would be surprised to learn she was born in the United States. This distinction and the street vendor youths’ contestation suggest the contours of widely circulating notions of racial hierarchy and immigrant inferiority. Notice that in both instances, the girls were selling in public venues where nearly all the customers were of Mexican or Central American origin, yet they initially felt shamed that street vending seemed to mark them as more Mexican than their peers.

g e t t i n g o u t o f t h e h o u s e

Work and pleasure were not altogether separate, and the street vendor girls came to appreciate the ability to get out and about, to find their perch on the street corner. The streets are not generally seen as an appro- priate place for girls, and as research shows, the ado- lescent daughters of many Latino immigrants often experience homebound confinement and “lock down” situations at home (Lopez 2003; Gonzalez-Lopez 2005; Smith 2006).

Many Mexican immigrant parents restrict their adolescent daughters’ spatial mobility beyond home and school in the belief that girls require special pro- tection to maintain virginity (Smith 2006; Gonzalez- Lopez 2005). Moreover, as residents of poor urban neighborhoods plagued with crime and violence, par- ents sought to limit exposure to these dangers by con- trolling their daughters’ whereabouts. The adolescent girls who got into street vending thus enjoyed new op- portunities for spatial mobility and sociability. Adri- ana in particular enjoyed street vending at a local park in East LA on Saturdays. The park served as a popular photography site for quinceañeras (elaborate and highly ritualized fifteenth birthday parties). Every Saturday,

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the park was visited by dozens of young girls dressed in elegant puffy dresses and elaborate hair up-dos adorned with shinny tiaras. Adriana sold alone on Sat- urday afternoons but was often selling next to Nadya (age fourteen), who sold hot dogs with her mother and little brother. Adriana is only thirteen years old, but she enjoyed talking to Nadya about plans for their own quinceañeras. One day, both Adriana and Nadya were evaluating the dresses and shared preferences for a particularly shiny gold dress. Members of the quinceañera parties usually purchased fruit from Adri- ana and hot dogs from Nadya’s family. This was good for the girls, as they made more money on sales, but it also gave them an opportunity to inquire about the party information such as the seamstress who made the dress, cost of party, location, and so on. This was useful information for their own party planning, and it helped pass the time.

For some girls, street vending provided an oppor- tunity to see their own relatives who no longer lived in the same neighborhood. Amanda and Mariana worked with their parents selling fruit, and their business was so prosperous that the family purchased a store and then a home in the Asian and Latino immigrant suburb of El Monte. The girls moved away from their cousins in East LA, but on Sundays, when Amanda and Mariana sold fruit on the streets, they visited with their cousins. One Sunday morning, two of Mariana’s cousins were cheerfully chatting with her, and they grabbed Mariana by her arm and asked her if she wanted to go to McDon- alds across the street, where they were buying breakfast. Mariana looked at Estrada and asked if she could watch the cart. With her assent, she immediately left with her cousins, laughing and joking about the time they went to the beach with their relatives.

The street vendor girls contrasted their current work experiences favorably with the boredom they had experienced at home. Mariana, who sold fruit on weekends, found that street vending could be enter- taining and socially stimulating. “Me empezo a gustar porque te diviertes un poquito . . . me aburro estar alli en mi casa. [I started to like it because you can have some fun . . . I get bored just being at home.”] Monica, who helped her parents sell tamales and fried bananas on weekends, also said that she did street vending for both of these reasons: “You’re doing it because you have to

help your parents out, but it’s fun at the same time, be- cause you have fun seeing different people every day.” Gloria, age fourteen, expressed pleasure in the public sphere that street vending opened up to her: “Before we sold tacos, I was at home Fridays and . . . it would be boring. Like just watching T V, and going on the com- puter and the same thing. . . . [Now] every Friday there is something different going on over there.”

These are adolescent girls, who may otherwise have very few public or social outlets for fun. Street vending thus allowed them to contest particular limi- tations imposed on their spatial mobility and social engagements by gender constructions, the ethnic cul- ture of their parents, and the dangers of an impover- ished inner-city barrio. While it appears that gender inequities are remedied by street vending, the unan- ticipated gains are double-edged as the girls’ new and somewhat measured new freedoms and pleasures are dependent on their willingness to work. Meanwhile, their brothers can move about freely without having to do street vending.

p r e pa r at i o n f o r t h e f u t u r e

The street vendor kids are earnest about their future, and most reported that they planned to pursue educa- tion and seek better employment. They said that street vending is providing with them valuable experience with responsibility, and they believe this experience will help them in their futures while their peers will languish. Street vending, said one girl, “only make me more positive, to be someone better in life.” Others concurred that effort expended at work now would help them in the long run.

You’re learning to work for what you want and you’ll find like a responsibility and you’ll be like you’ll be used to working, so it will help you to grow up. [When] you get a real job, you will be used to it, you won’t have no problems, and you’ll be like a fast learner, so it helps you. (Linda, sixteen)

Selling fruit is like, you know, how to work—how to be in the sun, how to run from the cops, or what- ever. And if you get another job [it will be] like easy, you know. If I was selling fruit, I could do this. . . . And how to get along with people, ’cause you have to talk to people, you know. (Katia, twenty-one)

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We think it’s better for us so we could learn when we are more older, so we could learn, like, what to do and what not to do. (Esmeralda, fourteen)

You can learn something about life . . . You’re not going to be anyone in the world if you do nothing, and well, selling fruit is something. . . . That’s why I always tell my friends, it’s work. (Amanda, fourteen)

Along the way, the street vendor kids build up their self-esteem as they receive praise from adult customers who see them as exemplary youth, and they begin to imagine alternative futures. Lolita, who had been sell- ing churros and raspados alone since age fourteen, felt proud of the comments customers had made. “People will come and they’ll go, ‘I wish my kid was that re- sponsible,’ you know. It feels good when people tell you, ‘Oh, you’re small but you’re already doing this.’” A gendered approbation was generally included in these statements. Veronica said that customers had said they wished they had a daughter like her. But not all street vendors readily embraced the “good girl” narrative that was imposed on them. Martha said of customers:

They are actually very nice. They are like, “I can’t be- lieve you are helping your dad,” and they are like, “Oh, girls like you I would not mind having as a daughter-in-law, a future nuera,” and I’m like [think- ing], “Chillax! I’m gay.”

We offer no bets on whether street vending results in brighter futures, but clearly the youth perceive street vending to be a temporary stage that leads to better options. In the process, they derive a strong sense of efficacy that vitalizes their dignity and self-worth.

va l u i n g c u lt u r a l a u t h e n t i c i t y

The kids know that street vending is seen as “foreign,” “dirty,” “un-American,” and as a holdover from pre- modern Mexico. In a soft voice, Veronica recalled her friends asking, “Why are you guys selling in our coun- try? You know that in America you don’t supposed to be selling in the streets. We’re not in Mexico.” These remarks were not only reminders that street vending is illegal in the United States, but they also served to position street vending as an income-earning activity antithetical to American values and modernity.

Yet these young street vendors reappropriated for- eignness and transformed it from a disparaged value

into positive associations with cultural authenticity. They took pride in the food they helped prepare and sell on the street. They sold food items that are tradi- tional dishes from their parents’ countries of origin, and they were well aware that customers valued it. Moreover, they claimed that when many formal sector restaurants and especially the franchises sold items such as tacos or churros, they sold inferior quality products. The children took pride in the food they sold, knowing that they provided a valued ser- vice and tasty products to other Latino immigrants. This was no sanitized, overprocessed, tasteless Taco Bell fare, and the kids felt good about that. Veronica (quoted earlier) shifted her demeanor when discuss- ing the food items: “Tejuino, like it is really known in Mexico. . . . We sell a lot because . . . they [Mexican customers] like how we make it.”

Similarly, Linda and Susana sold pupusas with their parents and according to them, their pupusas were the best on the block. They reported that the owner of a restaurant around the block had lowered the price of pupusas to $1.50 in order to compete with them. Customers still preferred their pupusas even though priced fifty cents higher, at two dollars, be- cause they were fresher and tastier.

Customers for authentic Mexican and Central American dishes have grown to include whites and other groups as “foodie” culture and the search for authentic ethnic and cosmopolitan dining has taken root in recent years. The street vendor youth recog- nized this, and this too brought them chest-swelling moments of pride. Some of the street vendors were beginning to gain traction with Internet food blog- gers, leading the kids to simultaneously embrace authenticity and modernity of high-tech. For ex- ample, an Internet blogger ranked the pupusas that Linda and Susana’s family sold a nine out of ten and pronounced this East Los Angeles street vending site the best place to have “authentic Mexican and Central American food.” During the final months of fieldwork, the clientele became more numerous and more ethnically diverse. An Asian couple told Estrada that they had discovered the street vend- ing site from an Internet blog. They made their way from stand to stand, holding a printout of the blog as their guide to the different food stands. Knowing

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that their Mexican and Central American dishes were enjoyed by both Latino and non-Latino clientele, and even ranked by outside food bloggers, allowed the street vendor youth to take a disparaged transgres- sion (“We’re not in Mexico”) and transform it into a desirable and valued authenticity. Authenticity can serve as a tool of power and moral superiority (Zukin 2010), and in this case, selling authentic Mexican or Salvadoran food on the streets was transformed from a disparaged activity to a positive one.

k e e p i n g i t s e c r e t

Finally, not all of the street vendor kids took pride in street vending. Some dealt with the stigma by confin- ing their street vending to neighborhoods where their peers and others in their social circle were unlikely to circulate. Lolita, now age sixteen, had been selling elotes, churros, raspados, peanuts, and mangos alone on the streets and public parks since she was fourteen. Still, she felt uneasy about it. “I don’t know,” she ex- plained, “it’s just that  .  .  . I don’t see no other kids doing that, so I feel weird, you know?” When asked if her friends knew about her street vending, she vig- orously shook her head. She realized she needed to contribute financially to her family, and although she could readily accept that obligation, she said she longed for a “normal job . . . [like] Starbucks, McDon- alds, like any store around.”

Some of the adolescent street vendors sell in public places located miles away from their neigh- borhoods. Typically, their parents drive them to these spots, which are deemed to be better for busi- ness. This conveniently allows the adolescents to keep their street vending activities a secret from their friends. Some even keep it secret from their closest friends. Martha, Lolita’s seventeen-year-old sister, re- ported that she had been in a lesbian relationship for nearly two years, yet she refused to tell her girlfriend what she did on the weekends. She said:

I don’t tell her. She always asks me [what I’m doing] and I am like, “Don’t worry about it.” . . . She is kind of used to it. Every time she calls and asks, “Where are you?” [I say] “Not home.” Ok I got that answer. And since they [parents] took my cell phone away, I hardly talk to her. But it is only mainly through My Space.

When asked what would happen if her girlfriend dis- covered that Martha sold corn on the streets, she said, “I don’t know. I am pretty sure she would not judge me . . . but I don’t know.” She claimed they were plan- ning to marry—this was when California momentarily permitted gay and lesbian marriages—yet she was ap- parently taking no chances on revealing her secret in- formation about street vending.

c o n c l u s i o n

Children have never been absolutely segregated from economic life (Zelizer 2002), and this is especially true among the poor in developing nations (Hecht 1998). Children who are not privileged by race, class, nation, and gender are simply under more pressure to work for money. The Latino street vendor children and teens that we interviewed for this article are not working for an allowance, or for personal spending money, but to ensure family economic well-being and advancement. They do so because they recognize the precarious eco- nomic position of their parents, and they feel an obli- gation toward their families, gratitude for their parents’ support, and a shared belief that they should recipro- cate as well. They are realists who recognize the acute economic constraints faced by their low-waged immi- grant parents, who as Mexican and Central American immigrant workers lacking perfect English or legal au- thorization to work experience racial and migration dis- crimination. They know that without their help, their parents will not make ends meet.

Street vending, as we have shown, is an informal economic activity that is illegal yet highly visible in Los Angeles, associated with marginality, illegiti- macy, and backwardness. How do the street vendor children and teens deal with stigma, shame, teasing, and the criminalization of street vending? In this article we have highlighted the kids’ agency in con- structing positive meanings around street vending ac- tivities. None of them had been eager to get involved in street vending, but they managed to persevere by creating new narratives of intersectional dignity that made them feel proud of their work. They did this by reformulating the dominant controlling images of racial ethnicity, class, illegality, and gender that cir- culate in both the dominant society and the barrio.

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The street vendor youth seek to create meanings that attribute positive values to their work and self- worth in much the same way that sociologists have found among other disparaged poor people. In this article, we have underlined how constructions of racialized ethnicity and gender are critical in this process. The Latino street vendor youth in East LA seek to distance themselves from both Mexicans who they label and racialize as inferior (criminal gangsters and lazy fresitas) and white people, who they perceive as lazy, spoiled, and overly privileged. Instead, they align themselves with Mexicans who work hard. Although Los Angeles is a multiracial city, the street vendor kids made no mention of African Americans and Asian Americans. Perhaps this is due to their experience of urban racial segregation and the distinctively Mexican character of the eastside of Los Angeles. Their social world appears in shades of brown and a distant, dominant white.

It is tempting to see the counter-narratives of in- tersectional dignities as cause for heralding a project of resistance, but we stop short of that. Are the street vendor kids really challenging the legitimacy of nega- tive stereotypes and controlling images about Mexi- cans, illegality, poverty, and foreignness? To some extent, they are sustaining these images, insisting that these do not apply to them as street vendors, but per- petuating them by placing them on their peers who do not work. Similarly, they do not challenge local state policies that criminalize street vending, nor do they question the legitimacy of parental lockdowns of girls. Their counter-narratives of intersectional dig- nities will probably help them in the long run, for- tifying self-esteem, but in some ways, the narratives reify negative stereotypes of others, and in doing so, reproduce ideologies that uphold social inequalities.

What are the implications of street vending for the children and teens’ futures? As we have seen, the children and youth are committed to pursuing

education, and some are in Catholic school and headed to college. The old ideas that Latino youth employment detracts from education clearly does not fit here, and our findings raise important questions for future research. Will the added income that the kids contribute to their families, and their develop- ing sense of personal efficacy, work ethic, and dig- nity, lead to beneficial outcomes of social mobility? That question is beyond the scope of this article, but longitudinal research might answer that.

In his acrimonious review, Wacquant (2002) al- leges that the focus on positive moral constructions among the poor and disparaged is a major pitfall of contemporary ethnographic studies, leading to a “neo- romantic” valorization of conventional morality, one that is in line with neo-liberalism, and that ultimately directs our analyses away from power and inequali- ties. In this article, we have strived to underscore how intersecting structural inequalities lead to the condi- tions that prompt child labor in street vending and how in turn, when the youth construct narratives of restored intersectional dignity, they must necessarily draw from a sea of circulating images about racialized ethnicity, gender, foreignness, and illegality. We agree with Gowan (2009) who emphasizes poor people’s concerns with morality and reminds us of the mul- tiple sources that lead to the valorization of manual street labor. As we have shown, these projects are im- portant even to children and teens. Inequalities and moral constructions go hand in hand.

These young people are proud of the money they are earning, and they construct their own identi- ties and street vending activity in a positive fashion. More than just mangos, churros, and tacos are being exchanged on the streets of East LA Among the street vendor youth, we see the development of identities of intersectional dignities as protection from the social injuries that come with performing stigmatized in- formal sector work in public urban spaces.

N O T E S

1. Muñoz (2008, 116) chronicles a complex array of “local-state enforcement” agencies that enforce the illegality of street vending in Los Angeles. This includes the LA County Health Department, the Board of Equalization, the LA City Council Bureau of Street Services (focusing mostly on pirated DVDs), the LA City Council Department of Building and Safety, and the LA Police Depart- ment. In the late 1980s, Central American and Mexican immigrant street vendors responded to

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complaints from merchants and police crackdowns by forming the Street Vendors Association, AVA (Asociacion de Vendedores Ambulantes) (Kettles 2007). AVA worked together with the LA City Council and advocates to legalize street vending, but the process was glacial and the outcome miniscule. A special vending district was finally established in MacArthur Park in 1999, but only fifteen permits were issued (Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001). The program was eventually termi- nated, and illegal street vending not only prevails, but thrives in Latino neighborhoods around Los Angeles. Street vendors are routinely fined and scattered by the authorities, but organizing efforts by La Asociacion de Loncheros LA Familia Unida de California, a group advocating for catering food truck businesses, and the Street Vendor Project of the Urban Justice Center in New York City are currently advocating for street vendors’ rights. Local neighborhood efforts complement these projects.

2. Child labor is well documented and the object of controversy in developing nations, where scholars and commentators see the endurance of child labor as a social problem that is symp- tomatic of poverty (Basu 1999; Basu and Van 1998; Edmonds and Pavcnik 2008). In such condi- tions, child labor facilitates family economic survival, so some have suggested that it should not be condemned and eradicated, but viewed comparatively (Basu and Van 1998; Edmonds and Pavcnik 2008). Child labor may in fact improve poor children’s life opportunities. The earnings of children, for example, may enhance their educational opportunities because it allows them to afford school supplies and tuition (Wahba 2006).

3. This project required two consent forms to be signed before each interview, a detailed one for the par- ents and one with simpler language for the minors. All consent forms were in Spanish and English.

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CONSTRUCTING GENDER IN THE WORKPLACE AND THE

LABOR MARKET

VI P A R T

How much does gender influence one’s status at work? Does the feminization of paid labor around the world place women on a more equal footing with men? Or is paid labor another arena that intensifies women’s disadvantages? Is it an arena that intensifies some women’s disadvantages more than others? Why is gender inequality such a pervasive feature of work? Is it built into the workplace, or is it the outcome of differences in women and men themselves, their socialization, their behaviors, and their interactions? The read- ings in this part rely on studies of people in different work settings to address these ques- tions. They show how the societal patterns of gender, race, class, sexuality, and immigration status shape the work experiences of different groups.

Paid workers are increasingly diverse. Today’s average worker in the global economy may be a person of any gender, age, race, class, sexual orientation, or nationality. The average worker in the global economy may labor virtually unseen inside the home or may work in a public workplace as an assembler, teacher, secretary, or restaurant worker. Yet whatever the average worker does for a living, they are likely to work at a job assigned on the basis of gender. Everywhere, gender organizes workplaces. Even five-year-olds can readily identify what is a “man’s job” and what is a “woman’s job.” Women’s jobs and men’s jobs are struc- tured with different characteristics and different rewards. Seldom do women and men do

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the same jobs in the same place for the same pay. In every society we find a familiar pattern: women earn less than men, even when they work in similar occupations and have the same level of education.

In the United States, the level of occupational gender segregation, as measured by the index of dissimilarity, was .32 in 2012, meaning that approximately one-third (32%) of all men (or all women) would have to change jobs to achieve gender integration. Occupational gender segregation is a significant contributor to the gender wage gap, where women make 77 cents for every dollar their male counterparts make. This represents an average gender pay gap of 19 percent, although the gap varies across industries from nearly zero to 35 percent (Stainback and Tomaskovic-Devey 2012). The gender pay gap is one measure of the devalu- ation of women’s work and it exists even in female-dominated occupations like babysitting, teaching, nursing, and administrative work, where men are paid more. However, much of the pay gap is due to gender segregation and the devaluing of “women’s” occupations. Con- sider, for example, the median wages for a female-dominated occupation, childcare work- ers ($19,510) in comparison to a male-dominated occupation, refuse material collectors ($32,780) (US Department of Labor 2012). Both groups do important and valuable work, but the pay disparity (approximately $400,000 over a thirty-year career) raises questions about the value assigned to the forms of work typically performed by women and men. In addition to the average pay gap between all men and women, greater pay disparities exist when taking race into account: black men earn 73 percent of what white men earn, black women 68 percent, Hispanic men 61 percent, and Hispanic women 59 percent (National Women’s Law Center 2013). Other studies show that gay men earn less than heterosexual men (Sears and Mallory 2011).

What causes occupational gender segregation and the gender pay gap? Whereas some point to women’s preferences or women’s disproportionate responsibility for children and family, a substantial body of research demonstrates that employer discrimination is the main cause. For example, one revealing area of research involves experiments where researchers send identical application materials for an employee who is randomly assigned either a male or a female name (similar studies vary the racial-ethnic identity, parental status, or criminal record). These studies found that male applicants are judged to be significantly more competent and hirable than female applicants, and the male applicants are offered significantly higher salaries than female applicants (Moss-Racusin et al. 2012). Importantly, male and female employers are equally likely to exhibit this gender bias in hiring. Similarly, mothers are penalized on their perceived competence and starting salary although fathers are not penalized, and some even benefit from being a parent (Correll et al. 2007). Yet, not all men benefit from this gender disparity. In a matched pairing of black and white job ap- plicants, Pager (2003) found not only that white male applicants are more likely to receive a callback than black male applicants but also that white male applicants with a felony record are more likely to receive a callback than black male nonoffenders.

In addition to discrimination in hiring, how else does work become so dramatically divided? How is workplace inequality maintained? Can gender boundaries be dismantled? All of the readings in this section speak to these questions. Further, the readings show how the experience of workers is complicated by the interplay of gender and other power systems.

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Women and men of different races, national origins, and immigrant groups become clus- tered in certain kinds of work. Job opportunities are shaped by who people are—by their being women or men, educated or uneducated, of a certain race, sexual orientation, and residents of specific geopolitical settings—rather than their skills, talents, and interests.

For example, many women who work in men’s occupations experience a glass ceiling that blocks their upward mobility, whereas many men who work in women’s professions experience a glass escalator that facilitates their upward mobility within these fields. But many other workers, particularly racial-ethnic minorities and the working class, face alto- gether different working conditions. Women of color often describe a concrete ceiling or sticky floor that present barriers to their ability to move out of low-paying jobs or to reach the top positions in their field.

In the first reading, Christine L. Williams revisits the glass escalator and provides new insights on how it is racialized, classed, and gendered. In addition to reviewing studies showing that racial-ethnic minority and gay men do not benefit from the glass escalator as professional white men do, Williams describes how transformations in the workplace are creating widespread class disparities where there is no opportunity for upward mobility for either women or men, and all but the economic elite suffer job and financial insecurity.

Amy M. Denissen and Abigail C. Saguy further the intersectional analysis of gender in the workplace by looking at the experiences of lesbian and straight tradeswomen in the construction industry. Despite the gains that women have made in many male-dominated occupations, such as in medicine and the law, women account for less than 2 percent of construction workers. Denissen and Saguy explain that gendered homophobia in the work- place harms all women, but it does so in different ways depending on race, gender presenta- tion, and sexual orientation. For example, tradeswomen who are perceived as feminine by their coworkers are more likely to be sexually harassed or treated as incompetent, whereas those perceived as masculine are more likely to be ostracized or subjected to a misogynist work culture. In addition, Denissen and Saguy show how the threat of being labeled a les- bian and becoming a target of homophobia is a mechanism that isolates tradeswomen from each other and limits any collective response to harassment and discrimination.

In her study of African American professionals, Adia Harvey Wingfield explores how racism is gendered for black women and men professionals. She analyzes the controlling images that black professionals encounter at work. Although some of these images are similar for black men and women, such as racist assumptions that they are less intelligent and less capable, other controlling images differ along gender lines such as the “modern mammy,” the “educated black bitch,” and the “angry black man.” Wingfield shows how gen- dered racism makes it difficult for black professionals to confront racism and sexism at work.

The next reading, by Miliann Kang, illustrates one of the central arguments of intersec- tional analysis—the relational nature of dominance and subordination—in her study of Korean nail salons in New York City. Kang examines the emotional and symbolic labor that manicurists perform in response to customer expectations that their “bodies get pampered” and “their feelings [get] massaged as well.” Kang explores how grooming is implicated in the production of “docile bodies,” both in disciplining the customer’s body to meet standards of beauty and in disciplining the worker’s body to meet expectations for service. Further, she

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examines the disciplining of women’s bodies as it reproduces relationships of dominance and subordination through “model minority” stereotypes and expectations of deference that are imposed on Korean manicurists by their white, middle-class customers. Korean mani- curists have a variety of ways of responding to these expectations, including status by asso- ciation, strategic acquiescence, and subtle forms of resistance. Yet, Kang finds that unequal power relationships in the workplace limit the women’s resistance while creating strong pressures to assimilate.

Researchers examining gender wage gaps have long described a motherhood penalty ex- perienced by women with children, but a more recent phenomenon that has been identified is the fatherhood premium. Rebecca Glauber employs an intersectional analysis to deter- mine how the earnings benefits of fatherhood are distributed across different racial/ethnic groups. She finds that non-Hispanic white and Latino married fathers see a sizable increase in their earnings and spend more time at work when they become fathers. Conversely, black married fathers see only a small increase in earnings. Glauber’s findings indicate that while there is a fatherhood premium for many men, it is not experienced by men equally across different racial groups.

The final article in this section is by Stephanie J. Nawyn and Linda Gjokaj, and exam- ines how earnings differ at the intersection of gender, race, and nativity. Using black and white African-born migrants to the United States as the focus, they look at how earnings differ between and within gender, race, and nativity categories. While some would predict that black African-born women would experience a double disadvantage in earnings (being disadvantaged by both gender and race), that was not the experience of African immigrant women. Instead, over time black African immigrant women earned more than both white and black US-born women, and about the same as white African immigrant women. Nawyn and Gjokaj suggest that this is due to the particular kind of work that is drawing African immigrant women to the United States, and that it is important not to think of intersecting oppressions as having additive effects.

R E F E R E N C E S

Correll, Shelley J., Stephen Benard, and In Paik. 2007. “Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?” American Journal of Sociology 112 (5): 1297–1338.

Moss-Racusin, Corinne A., et al. 2012. “Science Faculty’s Subtle Gender Biases Favor Male Students.” Pro- ceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109 (41): 16474–16479.

National Women’s Law Center. 2013. “Closing the Wage Gap Is Crucial for Women of Color and Their Families.” http://www.nwlc.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/2013.11.13_closing_the_wage_gap_is_cru- cial_for_woc_and_their_families.pdf.

Pager, Devah. 2003. “The Mark of a Criminal Record.” American Journal of Sociology 108 (5): 937–975. Sears, Brad, and Christy Mallory. 2011, July. “Documented Evidence of Employment Discrimination and

Its Effects on LGBT People.” Los Angeles: The Williams Institute. Stainback, Kevin, and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey. 2012. “Documenting Desegregation: Racial and Gender

Segregation in Private-Sector Employment since the Civil Rights Act.” Russell Sage Foundation. US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2012. Occupational Outlook Handbook. www.bls.gov/

ooh/

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Christine L. Williams, The Glass Escalator, Revisited: Gender Inequality in Neoliberal Times, SWS Feminist Lecturer from Gender & Society, Volume: 27 issue: 5, page(s): 609-629. Republished with permission by SAGE Publications, Inc.

In 1992, I published an article titled “The Glass Escala-tor” about the “hidden advantages” that men receive in predominately female professions. This article has been reprinted in dozens of textbooks and cited over 500 times in scholarly articles, and there are even flash- cards about it.1 Although I am proud of this acclaim, receiving the SWS Feminist Lecturer Award gives me the opportunity to revisit that work. The world of work has changed considerably in the past twenty years, and so has my understanding of gender inequality. Thanks largely to the scholarship of a new generation of gender sociologists, I now believe that the concept is of lim- ited use in explaining men’s economic advantages over women. In this article, I attempt to further specify the contexts in which the glass escalator applies.

I will begin my discussion by defining the glass escalator and summarizing my original argument. Then I will focus on two major limitations of the concept as I see it today. First, I will argue that the concept lacks an analysis of intersectionality. The glass escalator was based on the experiences of straight, white, middle-class men. I will review three studies that demonstrate the importance of race, sex- uality, and class for understanding gender inequal- ity in the workplace, and that have transformed the way I think about the glass escalator. Second, I will argue that the concept is limited because it is based on traditional assumptions about work organiza- tions, such as the expectation of stable employment, bureaucratic hierarchies, and widespread support for public institutions. These are no longer taken-for- granted features of work organizations. Jobs have become increasingly flexible, project-based, and tem- porary. The metaphor of the glass escalator may no

longer apply in this new economic context. I argue that new concepts are needed to understand gender inequality in the 21st century. I will conclude with some thoughts for a new feminist agenda for the so- ciology of work.

t h e g l a s s e s c a l at o r

When women work in male-dominated professions, they encounter a “glass ceiling” that prevents their as- cension into the top jobs. Twenty years ago, I intro- duced the concept of the “glass escalator,” my term for the advantages that men receive in the so-called women’s professions (nursing, teaching, librarianship, and social work).

When I was working on that project (that culmi- nated in my 1995 book Still a Man’s World), many so- ciologists argued that women’s disadvantages in the workplace were the result of their token status. Very few women occupied top positions, and those who did experienced increased visibility, role encapsulation, and boundary heightening, which marginalized them and excluded them from positions of power and re- sponsibility. The major hurdle facing women aspiring to leadership positions, according to this perspective, was numerical rarity, not gender discrimination.

The experiences of men in the so-called women’s professions offered a powerful critique of this theory of tokenism. I showed that numerical rarity does not have negative consequences for men in these fields. Because men and qualities associated with masculin- ity are more highly valued than qualities associated with women and femininity, men in nursing, teach- ing, librarianship, and social work tend to benefit from their token status.

Gender Inequality in Neoliberal Times, SWS Feminist Lecturer

C H R I S T I N E L . W I L L I A M S

30. THE GLASS ESCALATOR, REVISITED

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Although I was focusing on men in predomi- nantly female professions, my goal was to under- stand men’s advantages in the workplace in general, regardless of where they worked. In my opinion, too much attention had been paid to addressing ques- tions like “What are the deficiencies of women?” and “What are the barriers to women?”; not enough attention was being paid to questions like “What is so great about men?” and “What are the advantages that men receive?” I argued that the mechanisms that privileged men in the workplace would be more ap- parent in these jobs, but that they would be common throughout the labor market.

My research showed that in predominantly female professions, men were assumed to be more competent and better leaders than women. As a result, many were drawn into higher-paying special- ties and administrative positions. Supervisors, co- workers, clients, and the men themselves colluded in this reproduction of masculine privilege. I labeled this pattern the “glass escalator” (to contrast it with the “glass ceiling” experienced by women in male- dominated occupations).2

Some men did encounter discrimination in these professions, especially if they were employed in specialties closely associated with children, such as kindergarten teaching or children’s librarianship. Negative stereotypes about male sexuality aroused suspicions about their possible motives, includ- ing pedophilia. Such discrimination is harmful, I argued, but since these job specialties tended to be lower paying, the consequence was to push men up to higher-paying and more prestigious specialties. Those men who wanted to stay in the most feminine- identified specialties had to struggle to stay in place— hence the metaphor of the moving glass escalator.

The overall patterns of gender inequality in the four professions I studied have not changed much in the intervening twenty years. Table 30.1 shows the distribution of men in nursing, teaching, librarian- ship, and social work from 1975 to 2011.

As Table 30.1 indicates, the percentage of men in nursing has increased, from 5.5 percent in 1990 to 8.9 percent in 2011. Although this increase rep- resents a doubling in the number of men in the profession—the topic of a front-page New York Times

article (Dewan and Gebeloff 2012)—the percentage of men today is, in fact, similar to what it was in 1890 (9%). Nursing remains a highly gender-segregated profession. Regarding the other three professions I studied, Table 30.1 shows that the percentage of men in librarianship and social work has declined over the past 20 years. It is unclear if the represen- tation of men has changed in elementar y school teaching, since middle school teachers are now in- cluded in the statistics.

Just as gender segregation persists, so does the wage gap, with men enjoying an income advan- tage over women in each of these professions (see Table  30.2). The income difference is not large, but that there is a difference at all is notable. (Informa- tion for male librarians is missing because the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does not report income for jobs with fewer than 50,000 workers; nevertheless, one can deduce from the numbers that men make more than women.) Thus, the general patterns of gender inequality in these professions are similar to what I observed when I first explored the issue.

TABLE 30.1 MEN IN THE “WOMEN’S PROFESSIONS”: NUMBER (IN THOUSANDS) AND DISTRIBUTION OF MEN EMPLOYED IN THE OCCUPATIONS, SELECTED YEARS

Profession 1975 1980 1990 2002 2011

Registered nurses

No. of men 28 46 92 164 208

% men 3.0 3.5 5.5 7.1 8.9

Elementary school teachers

No. of men 194 225 223 398 463*

% men 14.6 16.3 14.8 17.0 18.3

Librarians

No. of men 34 27 32 38 21

% men 18.9 14.8 16.7 18.3 13.8

Social workers

No. of men 116 134 179 220 141

% men 39.2 35.0 31.8 26.0 18.4

Note: Year 1975, 1980, and 1990 data from C. L. Williams (1995). Year 2002 data from Bureau of Labor Statistics (2004). Year 2011 data from http://www. bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.pdf (accessed July 2012).

* 2011 data on elementary school teachers includes middle school teachers.

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Since the original article was published, the con- cept of the glass escalator has been evaluated and analyzed by several other researchers. The basic mech- anism has been verified with quantitative studies, and qualitative work has shown that workplace interac- tions in a variety of occupations are consistent with what I found (e.g., Budig 2002; Hultin 2003; Maume 1999; Snyder and Green 2008). To say the least, I am extremely gratified by this scholarly confirmation.

However, a number of studies have re-oriented and refined my thinking about the glass escalator, and to these studies I now turn. The first set of chal- lenges emerged from research on intersectionality.

i n t e r s e c t i o n a l i t y a n d t h e g l a s s e s c a l at o r

When I originally formulated the concept of the glass escalator, I realized that it did not apply to all men. Gay men and racial/ethnic minority men, in particu- lar, seemed to be excluded from the benefits of the

glass escalator. But I didn’t theorize that exclusion—I merely mentioned that the experiences of gay men and nonwhite men were “different” and left it at that. This is an example of what Adrienne Rich (1979) would have called “white solipsism,” the notion that white experience is the norm, the average, and the model for all other groups. To the extent that others vary from the white norm, they are considered “exceptions” that require separate studies to understand their “differ- ences.” Clearly, the concept of intersectionality had yet to influence my thinking on workplace inequality.

Intersectionality is an approach to studying gender that takes race/ethnicity, class, and sexual- ity into account. Many versions of intersectionality have been developed in the past twenty years (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013; Choo and Ferree 2010; Collins 2000; Ridgeway and Kricheli-Katz 2013). Common to all is the notion that gender is not an abstract and timeless essence, but an embodied and historical practice that is structured by other forms of inequality. Applying an intersectional framework in- volves at least two steps: first, sociologists who study gender are encouraged to investigate the experiences of groups who are marginalized by race, sexuality, and class in order to avoid the “unwarranted univer- salizing of white, middle-class American women’s experiences” (Choo and Ferree 2010, 132). Second, we are called upon to explain how the experiences of marginality are produced by the same institutional forces that privilege those in the center. In other words, we must show how social privilege is gained at the expense of social marginality. As Cho, Cren- shaw, and McCall write, “what makes an analysis in- tersectional  .  .  . is its adoption of an intersectional way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power” (2013, 11). Our task, then, is to explain how power operates through socially constructed and historically specific binary oppositions.

Practicing intersectionality is hard. It requires so- ciologists to overcome our “ingrained habits of reduc- tionism” (Choo and Ferree 2010, 147). The second step is especially difficult: as Choo and Ferree (2010, 145) point out, it is “easier to include multiply-marginalized groups than to analyze the relationships that affect them intersectionally.” A further complication is the

TABLE 30.2 MEDIAN WEEKLY EARNINGS OF FULL- TIME PROFESSIONAL WORKERS BY SEX AND RATIO OF FEMALE–MALE EARNINGS, 1990 AND 2011, IN 2011 DOLLARS a

Occupation Both Men Women Ratio

Registered nurses

1990 $1057 $1070 $1057 0.99

2011 $1039 $1081 $1034 0.96

Elementary school teachers

1990 $902 $999 $892 0.89

2011b $974 $1022 $933 0.91

Librarians

1990 $850 __c $833 __c

2011 $850 __c $813 __c

Social workers

1990 $773 $840 $746 0.88

2011 $817 $902 $798 0.88

Source: C. L. Williams (1995, 82); http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.pdf,accessed July 3, 2012.

a. 1990 dollars were converted to 2011 dollars via www.dollartimes.com/ calculators/inflation.htm

b. Includes middle school.

c. The Labor Department does not report income averages for base sample sizes consisting of fewer than 50,000 individuals.

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fact that scholarship on race, class, sexuality, and gender developed as separate literatures with unique histories and politics, and dominant cultural beliefs treat them as “distinct systems of difference and in- equality” even though they intersect in social relations (Ridgeway and Kricheli-Katz 2013, 3). Consequently, intersectionality scholars may feel trapped into utiliz- ing the language of separate systems to analyze essen- tially intertwined processes.

My discussion of intersectionality and the glass escalator reflects but does not resolve these conun- drums, as I discuss race, sexuality, and class sepa- rately. This is not a failure of the studies I reference; each is lodged in an intersectional framework. My goal in separating the discussion into these analytic categories is to illuminate how the experiences of spe- cifically marginalized groups (black men in nursing, gay and lesbian teachers, working-class transmen) can further refine the study of the glass escalator. I do so not to reify these identity categories, which are “fluid and changing, always in the process of creat- ing and being created by dynamics of power” (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013, 11). Rather, my goal is to show how the glass escalator depends not only on gender inequality but on the exclusion and mar- ginalization of those oppressed on the basis of race, sexuality, and class. This exercise of bringing the marginalized into the center, I hope, will illustrate the power of an intersectional analysis and specify the limitations of the glass escalator concept.

b l a c k m e n i n n u r s i n g

Perhaps the best example of the power of the intersec- tional perspective is the work of Adia Harvey Wing- field. In her article “Racializing the Glass Escalator” (2009), Harvey Wingfield examined the experiences of black men in nursing. She found no evidence of the glass escalator in their careers. Unlike white men, black men nurses are often seen as less skilled than women nurses. Many of the white men I interviewed said that patients confused them with doctors, but few black men encountered this assumption; they were often mistaken for orderlies or janitors. Even pa- tients who understood that they were registered nurses treated these men with suspicion. She describes one

white man who prevented his wife from receiving an injection from a black male nurse—an example that reflects sexual stereotypes about black men. Further- more, Harvey Wingfield found that behaviors that denote “leadership” ability in white men are inter- preted as “menacing” behavior from black men. Evi- dently, black men in nursing do not experience warm and congenial relationships with their white women colleagues, nor do they share gendered bonds with their male supervisors that ease their mobility into higher status positions. Instead, they face discrimina- tion in the nursing profession that stymies their career development. In the predominantly white institutions where her respondents worked, they are not pressured to move up into higher-paid and more prestigious specialties.

Harvey Wingfield’s work demonstrates that we cannot fully understand the mechanism of the glass escalator without an understanding of racism. The experience of black men nurses is not simply “dif- ferent” from that of white men—they are two sides of the same coin. Masculine hegemony is based on white privilege. As Harvey Wingfield concludes, the glass escalator relies on the existence of racial in- equality, and will persist as long as racism persists.

g ay a n d l e s b i a n t e a c h e r s

The same is true for homophobia: The exclusion of gay men from the glass escalator is not merely an excep- tion to the rule; it is part of the process of reproducing hegemonic masculinity.

For this insight, I am indebted to Catherine Connell (2012), whose work on gay and lesbian teachers reveals how the glass escalator depends on homophobia. I did my research on men in nontradi- tional occupations from the early 1980s to the early 1990s. During this decade, there were very few legal protections for LGBT workers. These were the years of the Reagan/Bush presidencies; it was the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States; and gays and les- bians were banned from many jobs, including those in the military (it wasn’t until December 1993 that the U.S. military permitted closeted gays and lesbians to serve). Thus the concept of the glass escalator was developed during the heyday of the closet, and its very existence may depend upon it.

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To reveal the impact of homophobia on pro- fessional careers, Connell studied gay and lesbian teachers in two settings—in California and in Texas. These two states have vastly different levels of legal protection, political activism, and cultural accep- tance of LGBT workers. She found that in contexts where homophobia is rife and institutionalized, LGBT teachers face immense pressure to engage in “passing” strategies so as not to draw attention to their sexuality. This means conforming to heteronor- mative appearance standards and behavior—all of which support the glass escalator. For example, lesbi- ans may feel compelled to wear make-up to work and to defer to male authority; gay men may try to avoid the use of certain mannerisms and expressions iden- tified as gay in the classroom or feign an interest in masculine activities like sports. Conforming to these heteronormative practices can easily push men into leadership positions and women into support roles.

What happens in a context where there are legal protections for LGBT workers? Connell shows that in- dividual teachers may be more willing to enact and disclose their sexual identities as LGBT. Granted, gay- friendly workplaces can exact a new “homonormativ- ity.” In a study with Patti Giuffre and Kirsten Dellinger (Williams, Giuffre, and Dellinger 2009), we found that “gay friendly” workplaces may accept gay and lesbian workers only if they conform to conventional gender practices. So legal protections are not enough. Connell’s work demonstrates that antidiscrimination laws in the teaching profession must be accompanied by cultural acceptance made possible through politi- cal organizing, union support, and curricular changes that are LGBT confirming. Under these conditions, I would expect the glass escalator to break down. When men and women are not expected or compelled to con- form to stereotypically masculine and feminine be- havior, a central pillar of the glass escalator is shaken.3

w o r k i n g - c l a s s t r a n s m e n

The four occupations I studied were middle-class jobs; consequently the glass escalator reflects that particular class location. This insight comes from Kristen Schilt (2011). Her study brings an intersectional perspec- tive to bear on the experiences of transmen in the workplace.

The transmen that Schilt interviewed had lived and worked as women before they transitioned to living as men. Many assumed that when they made the switch they would be fired, ridiculed, and harassed. Instead, Schilt found that many transmen actually benefited at work. They experienced more authority, they were assumed to be more competent, and they received greater rewards, recognition, and economic oppor- tunities compared to when they were women. Trans- women, in contrast, do not experience these benefits. All of this is consistent with the glass escalator.

However, not all transmen ride the glass escala- tor. Those who enjoyed the most workplace benefits were white and achieved the most masculine pre- sentation of self. Other transmen either experienced no changes or else more negative treatment at their workplaces. Thus, Schilt draws our attention to the importance of embodiment in the experience of the glass escalator. Those who are unable to achieve a masculine appearance are not as accepted and may face more discrimination in the workplace.

Schilt doesn’t tie this observation to social class, but following Bourdieu, I would argue that class and appearance are linked. Many middle-class occupa- tions privilege a particular habitus—workers have to look right and sound right for the job (Williams and Connell 2010). The aesthetic requirements in these jobs can include physical attributes—such as height—as well as specific mannerisms, styles, and dispositions associated with professional work. Only those who embody the appropriate class-based aes- thetic can ride the glass escalator.

Schilt also discovered that occupational context determines whether or not transmen benefit after transitioning. Those employed in retail jobs, for ex- ample, didn’t accrue benefits. In this case, there was no escalator; in fact, there was no career ladder at all. These dead-end jobs offered no opportunities for ad- vancement, status, or authority to anyone, regardless of gender. Although she did find evidence of gender segregation in these jobs—transmen were relocated from front-of-house positions to the back room stocking jobs, for example—for the most part there was “gender equity” in the treatment of employees. Not a good kind of equality, either: Everyone was treated like crap.

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The glass escalator, then, applies to only certain kinds of jobs—those that contain built-in opportu- nities for advancement. The concept was developed based on the experiences of middle-class profession- als whose jobs offered the possibility of increasing rewards. It is grounded by class just as it is by race/ ethnicity and sexuality. Intersectionality enhances our understanding of gender inequality in the work- place. Without this framework, research isn’t neces- sarily wrong, but it is partial. That’s what I see today when I revisit my work on the glass escalator.

w o r k t r a n s f o r m at i o n a n d t h e g l a s s e s c a l at o r

In addition to being based on the experiences of middle-class, straight, white men, the glass escalator concept is based on a historically specific form of work organization. As I have noted, built into the concept are assumptions about stable employment, job hier- archies, and career ladders. Furthermore, the concept was developed during a period of widespread support for public institutions. These features no longer charac- terize many jobs in the labor market today—not even middle-class jobs. This raises the question of whether the glass escalator is still relevant in workplaces of the 21st century, and whether new concepts are needed to analyze gender inequality.

In traditional work organizations, workers can look forward to a lifetime of loyal service to a single employer. They are rewarded for this loyalty with pro- motions, raises, increased benefits, and retirement pensions. Traditional work organizations are hierar- chical, with entry-level positions at the bottom. Job descriptions, organizational charts, and the labor process are set in advance and controlled by manag- ers. The image of the traditional corporation is the massive skyscraper; inside is a rational bureaucracy (as described by Weber), with power, prestige, and income increasing at each level, up to the executive offices at the top.

This traditional model of work organizations was still very much in place when I conducted my research on the glass escalator. Workers in these four professions were expected to gain their appro- priate credential (through state-subsidized higher

education), obtain an entry-level position, and ac- quire on-the-job training. Through loyal service, hard work, and long hours, individuals could prove their value to their organization and get rewarded with higher pay, status, and positions of authority. In some cases, public unions supported job security and ensured that those with the most seniority would re- ceive the most rewards.

Although these features of jobs and careers appear gender-neutral on the surface, we know that this traditional organizational form is biased in favor of men (Acker 1990; Williams 2001). Rewarding uninterrupted devotion to work implicitly discrimi- nates against women, who typically have competing family obligations that they are forced to accommo- date. Furthermore, managers draw on gendered ste- reotypes when developing organizational charts and job descriptions, which reward characteristics asso- ciated with men and masculinity, and devalue ones associated with femininity. The result is the glass ceiling for women and the glass escalator for men. These metaphors are successful because they can be easily imagined inside that sturdy skyscraper.

This traditional model of work is increasingly anachronistic. In the past thirty years or so, orga- nizations have undergone downsizing, restructur- ing, globalization, and computerization (DiMaggio 2001; Kalleberg 2000). Referred to under the heading of “work transformation,” this general and vast pro- cess of change has impacted the work lives of almost everyone. Figure 1 describes the major features of 21st-century work transformation.

Workers today expect to switch employers fre- quently in search of better opportunities, and in response to outsourcing, mergers, and downsizing. Employers increasingly turn to part-time or tempo- rary workers—or “consultants”—to perform tasks that were previously carried out by workers in-house, in full-time, permanent positions. Instead of loyalty and seniority, employers seek flexibility and adapt- ability in ideal employees. The result is what human relations (HR) and management literatures call the “protean” or “boundaryless” career (Arthur 1994; Hall 2004).

The nature of jobs is changing, too. Under the traditional system, workers carried out narrow and

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Traditional Work

Organization

“Neoliberal” Work

Organization

Loyalty and seniority rewarded Flexibility and adaptability rewarded

Full-time jobs with benefits Temporary and contingent contracts

Lifetime career Boundary-less career

Specialized job descriptions Project based requirements

Hierarchically organized departments

Horizontal interdisciplinary teams

Career ladders Career maps or “I-deals”

F I G U R E 3 0 . 1 Major Features of 21st-Century Work Transformation

specific tasks identified by their job descriptions and they were evaluated and compensated by managers who controlled the labor process. Today, work orga- nizations are flatter and less hierarchical. Layers of management have been removed, and work is in- creasingly organized into self-managed teams. Teams typically work with considerable discretion on time- bounded projects, and are judged on results and out- comes, often by peers. Career “ladders”—with clearly demarcated rungs that lead to higher-paying and more responsible positions—are being eliminated or replaced by career maps or “Ideals,” which are indi- vidualized programs of career development (Babcock and Laschever 2003; DiMaggio 2001; Powell 2001).4

I refer to this new model of work organization as “neoliberal.” Neoliberalism is a world view that ad- vocates minimal government regulation of the econ- omy, privatization of state resources, distribution of social services through the market, and exaltation of the autonomous, self-serving individual (Campbell and Pedersen 2001; Eisenstein 2010). The new orga- nization of work is compatible with this ideological agenda. Corporations designed this new structure with minimal input from workers to shift their eco- nomic risks and responsibilities onto employees, while undercutting the protections of labor law and unions.

This new model has its advocates. The literature in management and HR celebrates these changes for heralding unprecedented opportunities for

professional growth, technological innovation, and personal fulfillment. Even some feminists applaud the new model of work, as its built-in flexibility is considered more compatible with women’s non- linear career paths (Hewlett 2007; see also Xie and Shauman 2005). But in my view, the major benefi- ciaries of work transformation are executives, the fi- nancial industry, and shareholders. Although a few workers do benefit from this new career model— especially high-tech professionals with specialized skills—for most the result is staggering college debt, job insecurity, increased stress and responsibility at work, and salary stagnation (Kalleberg 2000, 2009).

We can see the impact of neoliberalism on the four professions I analyzed. Each of them is depen- dent on the government for support. Public schools, hospitals, libraries, and welfare services are funded by taxes. In keeping with the neoliberal agenda, their budgets have all been slashed in recent years, while the power of their unions has come under attack (e.g., Gabriel and Dillon 2011). As Table 30.2 demon- strates, the incomes of workers in these professions have barely kept pace with inflation. Today, college students pay exorbitant tuition to obtain credentials in these fields; gone are the days of generous state subsidies for higher education. Those in fields requir- ing master’s degrees (social work and librarianship, but increasingly teaching and nursing as well) typi- cally take out loans to fund their education, accumu- lating an average of more than $17,000 per year in debt (College Board 2012, 21). Some evidence sug- gests that women have a higher debt load than men after graduation, which may be due in part to wom- en’s concentration in these professional disciplines (Dwyer, Hodson, and McCloud 2013). Newly minted graduates in some of these fields can no longer count on obtaining jobs in state institutions; they increas- ingly seek employment in private settings, includ- ing corporations and nonprofits, often on a contract basis.

If the old model of work organization is the sturdy high-rise filled with grey-suited bureaucrats, the new model is more like a ship at sea filled with mercenaries seeking adventure and fortune. In my more pessimistic moments, I imagine the ship buf- feted by a powerful storm and in danger of sinking,

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with workers desperately trying to stay on board, or else grasping for life jackets (which they have to pay for themselves), while the executives get first crack at the lifeboats.

Gender inequality characterizes both the tradi- tional and the neoliberal models of work organiza- tion. Women are not calling the shots either in the high-rise or on the ship. But I believe we need new metaphors to capture the workings of gender in- equality in the neoliberal context. The glass ceiling and the glass escalator seem far too static to capture what is going on in our current era of flexible, project- based, horizontal, and contingent employment.

In a recent article I published with Chandra Muller and Kristine Kilanski (Williams, Muller, and Kilanski 2012), we identified new mechanisms that reproduce gender inequality in the neoliberal con- text. That article is based on our research on women geoscientists in the extremely lucrative oil and gas industry. We identified the gender, race, and sexual dynamics of the team structure, career maps, and networking as keys to understanding men’s contin- ued advantages over women in that industry.

To give one example, career maps, which have replaced career ladders in many industries, are indi- vidually negotiated—they are sometimes called “I- deals.” Geoscientists plan out long- and short-term goals with their team supervisors, who are supposed to supply them with the tools and resources needed to achieve their goals. Workers do not know the de- tails of each other’s “I-deals”; in fact, it is against cor- porate policy to even discuss salary and bonuses with others. In this context, where the “rules of the game” are both variable and unknown, biases can freely proliferate. Meanwhile, a corporate embrace of “di- versity” hides the systematic privileging of heterosex- ual white men occurring in the industry (Williams, Kilanski, and Muller, n.d.).

The case of women geoscientists in the oil and gas industry is especially interesting to us because women are graduating with master’s degrees in num- bers equal to men, and anecdotal evidence suggests that they are being hired in numbers equal to men in the major companies. These jobs are highly paid and the hours are reasonable, especially at the mid- career level. But after ten years or so, the women are

virtually all gone. Instead of hitting their heads on a glass ceiling, they seem to be disappearing through a trap door (or, in keeping with the ship metaphor, perhaps they are walking the plank). (In contrast, conservatives have been using the term “opting out” to describe what is happening to these women.) My colleagues and I are trying to ascertain the forces that are pushing and pulling these women scientists out of the industry altogether.

Scientists in the oil and gas industry are among society’s most privileged workers; the women scien- tists we interviewed are in the top one percent of all women income earners. I am also interested in ex- ploring the consequences of work transformation for women at the bottom of the employment spec- trum. Over the past decade, I have been studying low-wage workers in the retail industry, an industry that has exploded in size in recent decades (Williams 2006). Today, the number of retail workers exceeds the number of manufacturing workers in the United States (Jordan 2011).

In low-wage retail work, there are no glass ceil- ings or glass escalators, only revolving doors. Em- ployers routinely hire part-time and temporary “at will” workers whom they “let go” the minute their store staffing needs change. Retail workers are re- quired to work weekends and to change their hours from one week to another, exemplifying the meaning of the word “flexible” in retail. One week you might be scheduled to work 10 hours; the next week, 30. This is exactly the kind of job that is incompatible with doing anything else, such as caring for family members. Note that the problem is not the standard 40-hour work week, which has been identified as biased against women (Acker 1990; Williams 2001). “Flexible” schedules are even worse, because workers have to be available at any time, and erratic hours mean that income fluctuates from week to week (Lambert 2008). As a result of this work organiza- tion, the retail industry has one of the highest turn- over rates in the economy. At the toy stores where I worked, for example, few employees lasted through the three-month probationary period. Employers know this and expect and even cultivate it because churning the labor force prevents worker solidarity from forming and keeps wages low (Williams 2006).

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I really like my image of the sinking ship, but all kidding aside, the true “role model” for the US econ- omy today is Wal-Mart (Lichtenstein 2006, 2009). Today, Wal-Mart is the single largest private em- ployer in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. In addition to demanding “flexibility” from its workers, Wal-Mart pays workers as little as possible, encour- ages high turnover, fights off all unionizing efforts, offers few, if any, benefits, and externalizes employ- ees’ health care costs. Meanwhile it touts its com- mitment to “diversity” and to equal opportunity for women, racial/ethnic minorities, and LGBT workers (Wal-Mart has been “gay friendly” since 2003). Its or- ganizational model is taught in business schools and copied by high-end retailers (such as Whole Foods and Apple Computers). Even organizations not in- volved in the retail industry emulate the Wal-Mart model (including the hospitality and tourism indus- try, as represented by that ill-fated cruise ship at sea).

Wal-Mart is notorious for its sexism, despite its commitment to “diversity.” It recently fought off the largest-ever class-action lawsuit brought by women charging gender discrimination in promotions and pay (for updates on the suit, see www.walmartclass. com). But in this regard, the company is hardly unique. Gender inequality is rampant throughout the retail industry. Among retail salespersons em- ployed full time—which is rare—women earn 75 percent of what men earn.5 This is partly the result of stores placing men and women in different jobs. Job- level segregation is just as extreme in low-wage oc- cupations as in the higher-wage labor market (Lovell, Hartmann, and Werschkul 2007), and it helps to account for the gender disparities in pay. Not that men are raking in the dough. At one of the toy stores where I worked, for example, only men were hired in bicycle assembly jobs, which paid $8 to $9 an hour, compared to the $7.50 that I earned as a cashier. This is an advantage, but it is not an escalator. It is more like a higher ring in hell.

In sum, the concept of the glass escalator was de- veloped based on the traditional work organization. It assumes the existence of job security, full-time schedules, the availability of career ladders, and the expectation that workers will be rewarded for loyal service. These assumptions can no longer be taken

for granted in our neoliberal economy. As Steve Vallas (2011) argues, the very concept of a “job” is fast becoming a thing of the past. We need new con- cepts and metaphors to explain gender inequality in neoliberal times.

c o n c l u s i o n

It has been a true honor to have this opportunity to revisit my work on the glass escalator. Since that work was first published, I have learned a great deal from the community of gender scholars. In this article, I explained how the intersectionality framework has enhanced and deepened my understanding of gender inequality in the workplace. I now believe that any dis- cussion of the glass escalator must be attuned to how racism, homophobia, and class inequality advantage some groups of men, and exclude and discriminate against others.

I also argued that my original analysis of the glass escalator failed to take into account the economic context of the era in which it was developed. The concept was based on the assumptions of traditional work organizations, which have been fundamen- tally altered by work transformation. As our study of geoscientists suggests, the concept of the glass es- calator may be of limited use in explaining gender inequality in workplaces today. We need new meta- phors to understand the persistence of male privilege in the flexible, project-based, and flatter neoliberal organization.6

In the case of low-wage jobs, I believe we need a new feminist agenda altogether. Gender inequality is stubbornly persistent at the top and the bottom of the labor market, but class inequality has exploded (Cobble 2007; McCall 2007). Using the paradigmatic case of retail work, I argued that work transforma- tion degrades the quality and pay of jobs in this ever-growing sector of the economy. These jobs are precarious, lack benefits, and do not pay a living wage.

Workers in low-wage service sector jobs need a new employment contract, one that offers security, opportunities for advancement, and a decent living standard for everyone, women and men. Employers can be forced to treat workers better. Although the shrinking number of well-paid manufacturing jobs

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in our economy is lamentable, it is important to re- member that those jobs did not start off as good jobs. At the turn of the 20th century, manufacturing jobs were appallingly dangerous, exploitative, and de- humanizing. They became good jobs only because workers organized, fought, and bled to make them so. That same militancy is needed to upgrade jobs in the retail industry and other low-wage sectors of the economy. Nothing inherent in these jobs makes them low paid. In Sweden, for example, retail jobs pay good wages and are not considered “bleak” jobs at all (Andersson et al. 2011).

However, upgrading these jobs may not be in the interests of all women. I do not assume that the women at the top of the occupational pyramid share common cause with the women at the bottom any more than men do. At ExxonMobil corporate head- quarters in Houston, for example, janitors, who cur- rently earn $8.35 an hour, are fighting for a pay raise. Of course, because of the neoliberal work organiza- tion, they don’t actually work for ExxonMobil; they work for cleaning subcontractors who bid on tempo- rary contracts to provide cleaning services, and who employ legions of women workers on an “as needed” basis. Consequently, the spokesperson for ExxonMo- bil can claim that his company doesn’t “have any- thing to do with” the low wages paid to janitors who clean their offices.7 But there is no question that the immense profits of the oil and gas industry and the high pay of the geoscientists who work for it come from squeezing the workers on the bottom. Out- sourcing, temporalizing, and shifting risk onto work- ers is the essence of the neoliberal business model.

For these reasons, I believe that feminist de- mands for gender equality in the workplace are not enough. Do women janitors deserve to be treated the same as men janitors? Yes, of course they do. But they also deserve more than $8.35 an hour, which will

not happen unless their employers are forced to pay them more. That is why a critique of capitalism must accompany our critique of gender inequality. This is my “new” feminist agenda for the sociology of work.

This “new” agenda is in fact at least 40 years old, harkening back to the “socialist feminism” of the 1970s. That agenda has been lost in recent years, overcome by what Nancy Fraser has called the “femi- nist romance with capitalism” (2009, 110). This is the idea that women’s emancipation requires their entry into paid work. This idea has been used to motivate women around the world to seek dignity and equal- ity in the labor market—even though, for the vast majority of women, paid work is synonymous with extreme exploitation and family hardship. Feminist scholars rightly criticize women’s economic depen- dency on men and the devaluation of women’s caring labor in the home. But we must not ignore the fact that the alternative can be just as bad. Capitalists rely on women’s unpaid work in the home to reproduce the labor force AND they exploit women’s labor to generate enormous profits. In effect, they have har- nessed the dream of women’s liberation to the engine of capitalist accumulation. Feminists have been com- plicit with this insofar as we endorse the model of competitive individualism in the marketplace for women (Collins and Mayer 2010; Eisenstein 2010). I now believe that a feminism that is divorced from a critique of capitalism will only make things worse for most women.

The glass escalator explains the advantages that straight white men receive in professional jobs in traditional work organizations. Because it analyzes male privilege without critiquing capitalist exploita- tion, it loses sight of the diminishing rewards avail- able to most workers. It may be time to retire the concept. We need new metaphors to explain gender inequality in our neoliberal age.

N O T E S

1. http://quizlet.com/2729873/sociology-flash-cards. 2. The mechanisms that reproduce the glass ceiling might also be subject to further specification, a

topic beyond the scope of this article. 3. Work organizations do exist today that celebrate and encourage expressions of nonnormative

gender and queer sexuality. However, in a recent review of the literature (Williams and Giuffre

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2011), we found that most are located in the entertainment and sex work industries. “Respectably queer” organizations are still very rare, even in California (Ward 2008).

4. These categories describe organizational trends that in practice overlap considerably. It is best to treat them as “ideal types” in the Weberian sense.

5. http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.pdf, p. 5. 6. Additional intriguing suggestions include the “glass obstacle course” (De Welde and Larson

2011) and the “glass cliff” (Ryan and Haslam 2005). 7. http://www.marketplace.org/topics/wealth-poverty/houston-janitors-fight-fair-pay-economic-

boom (accessed August 7, 2012).

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labor and social inequality in the retail industry. Work and Occupations 37:349–77. Williams, Christine L., and Patti Giuffre. 2011. From organizational sexuality to queer organizations:

Research on homosexuality and the workplace. Sociology Compass 5/7:551–63. Williams, Christine L., Patti Giuffre, and Kirsten Dellinger. 2009. The gay-friendly closet. Sexuality

Research & Social Policy 6:29–45. Williams, Christine L., Kristine Kilanski, and Chandra Muller. n.d. The problem with corporate

diversity. Williams, Christine L., Chandra Muller, and Kristine Kilanski. 2012. Gendered organizations in the

new economy. Gender & Society 26:549–73. Williams, Joan. 2001. Unbending gender: Why family and work conflict and what to do about it. New York:

Oxford University Press. Xie, Yue, and Kimberlee A. Shauman. 2005. Women in science: Career processes and outcomes.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Amy M. Denissen and Abigail C. Saguy, Gendered Homophobia and the Contradictions of Workplace Discrimination for Women in the Building Trades, from Gender & Society, Volume: 28 issue: 3, page(s): 381-403. Republished with permission by SAGE Publications, Inc.

31. GENDERED HOMOPHOBIA AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF

WORKPLACE DISCRIMINATION FOR WOMEN IN THE BUILDING TRADES

A M Y M . D E N I S S E N , A B I G A I L C . S A G U Y

The effects of double binds, in which femininity and competence are seen as mutually exclusive, are well documented in male-dominated workplaces (Jamieson 1995; Valian 1998). Previous research shows that women resist double binds in part by “finding a variety of ways to do gender” (Pierce 1995, 13–14) that trouble boundaries of gender differ- ence. Women may directly challenge gender dualities by, for instance, demanding respectful recognition as women while performing masculinity (Denissen 2010b). They may also invoke shared identities based on race, class, occupational hierarchy, or culture to de- emphasize gender difference (Denissen 2010b; Jans- sens, Cappellen, and Zanoni 2006). Women workers thereby participate in “gender maneuvering” (Schip- pers 2002; see also Finley 2010), or the manipulation of gender rules to redefine the relationship between femininity and masculinity.

We still know very little, however, about how sexual identity and gender presentation—such as femme, gender-blenders/blending (Devor 1987; Moore 2011), and butch/dyke—shape how dominant groups seek to control women and how the latter respond. Kazyak’s (2012) work suggests that gender presentation—and gender more broadly—shapes the experiences of lesbians and heterosexual women alike. And yet, the gender literature is characterized by an undertheorization of “the relationship be- tween heterosexuality and gender oppression” (Schilt

and Westbrook 2009, 441), or what Chrys Ingraham calls heterogender (Ingraham 1994). Following Val- entine’s (2007) critique of the fusing of gender and sexual categories (e.g., conflating homosexuality and gender variance), as well as attempts to ontologically separate these categories, we conceptualize gender and sexuality as co-constructed and relational fea- tures of social organization whose meanings vary across time and context.

Drawing on interviews with a diverse sample of lesbian and straight women in the construction trades, such as electricians and sheet metal workers, of which women comprise less than 2 percent of the workforce nationwide (Bilginsoy 2009), this article extends our understanding of gender maneuvering by exploring how the meaning of race, body size, and seniority impact the constraints tradeswomen face and the cultural resources available to them for resisting gender boundaries. We argue that the presence of women in male-dominated jobs threat- ens the perception of this work as inherently mas- culine (Collinson 2010; Epstein 1992; Paap 2006). We further argue that branding all tradeswomen lesbians, and thus—in the popular imagination— as not fully women, can partly be understood as an attempt to neutralize this threat. While the lesbian label (whether or not women personally identify as such) offers some degree of acceptance and freedom from performing emphasized femininity, it can place

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demands on tradeswomen to perform a subordinate blue-collar masculinity that may include participat- ing in a misogynistic work culture (Connell 1987; West and Zimmerman 1987).

Moreover, the presence of lesbians (and sexually autonomous straight women whose sexuality is not directed toward tradesmen) threatens heteronorma- tivity and men’s sexual subordination of women, or what Ingraham calls “patriarchal heterosexuality” (Ingraham 1994). By sexually objectifying trades- women, tradesmen, in effect, attempt to neutralize this threat. While tradeswomen, in turn, are some- times able to deploy femininity to manage men’s conduct and gain some measure of acceptance as women, it often comes at the cost of their perceived professional competence and sexual autonomy and—in the case of lesbians—sexual identity.

Those who refuse to be sexually objectified may subsequently find themselves the target of open hos- tility. Certain women—including lesbians and those who present as butch, large, or black—may be less able to access emphasized femininity as a resource and thus more subject to open hostility. We show that tradeswomen navigate among imperfect strat- egies and engage in complex risk assessments (Mc- Dermott 2006). Extending Denissen (2010b), we highlight how tradeswomen reflexively manipulate gender meanings, adding a new emphasis on the in- tersection between sexuality, gender representation, race, and body size. Ultimately, however, we argue that individual strategies are insufficient and show how tradesmen deploy the stigma of lesbianism to discourage solidarity and collective action among tradeswomen. We consider the implications of these findings within the larger debate about the efficacy of interactional forms of resistance for challenging patriarchy and the dominant gender order.

f i n d i n g s

Previous work shows that men working in male- dominated blue-collar occupations accentuate their manliness by distinguishing their work from women’s work (Epstein 1992; Schrock and Schwalbe 2009) and how managers manipulate gender ideology to control workers (Collinson 2010; Epstein 1992; Paap 2006).

For instance, in a coal miner’s protest about being asked to lift too much weight, the foreman asked, “What’s the matter? Aren’t you man enough?” (Epstein 1992, 243). By encouraging workers to identify with their gender and, also, their race, national, and class identi- ties, employers divide workers and distract them from working conditions in order to enhance labor control (Hossfeld 1990). Generalizing from Ramirez (2010), many “macho” masculinities can be understood as working-class men’s “compensatory reactions” to sub- ordination when other sources of masculine identity are blocked (Zinn 1982) or become insecure because of declining wages, job security, union power, and social regard (Paap 2006). When men derive psychic and social rewards and managers derive economic benefits from these identifications, both groups can be expected to resist the entrance of women workers, which undermines the sense that it is, in fact, “men’s work” (Epstein 1992).

We analytically disentangle two related threats that arise when women work on job sites: the mascu- line definition of the building trades as “men’s work” and individual tradesmen’s heteromasculinity. In the first instance, we show how tradesmen reinforce the idea of the construction trades as men’s work by as- suming that tradeswomen must be lesbians. Thus, the lesbian label offers some freedom from gender expectations.

However, we show how the presence of lesbians violates the dictates of compulsory heterosexuality. The idea of an autonomous female sexuality that is not directed at men also undermines understand- ings of masculinity as involving sexual control over women. In an attempt to neutralize this threat, some men sexualize lesbians and straight tradeswomen, especially if they are more feminine in their presen- tation. While providing some degree of integration, such objectification can be unpleasant and even dangerous and reaffirms tradeswomen’s femininity over their competence. Those tradeswomen whose threat to masculinity is not so easily neutralized by heterosexualization, including many lesbians, may avoid the traps of objectification only to find them- selves the objects of direct hostility. We discuss how tradeswomen respond to these constraints, often in creative and artful ways, and how their strategies

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are constrained and enabled by sexual orientation, gender presentation, body size, and race. We then dis- cuss how tradesmen deploy homophobia to stymie the expression of solidarity among women, gay or straight.

n e g o t i at i n g t h r e at s t o t h e m a s c u l i n e d e f i n i t i o n o f t h e w o r k

Tradeswomen report that homophobic comments, jokes, and graffiti are pervasive and that tradesmen regularly use terms like “gay” and “faggot” to publicly establish hetero-masculine identities and to reinforce the masculine definition of the work. For example, Monique says her male coworkers “pick on each other, [saying things] like: ‘The electricians are faggots,’ ‘The carpenters are faggots,’ ‘Because he walks a certain way, he’s gay.’” In this example, tradesmen use homophobic comments to assert dominance over “rival” groups of men (such as men from other trades) and to regulate the gender and sexual behavior of men. Yet, unlike the high school boys studied by Pascoe who claim not to direct fag discourse at boys known to be gay (Pascoe 2005), tradesmen unapologetically use homophobic slurs to repudiate both homosexuality and femininity (in men). This was not lost on the tradeswomen inter- viewed, who attributed the fact that they did not know any openly gay men to their sense that the trades are dangerous for openly gay men.

Similarly, the presence of women on job sites threatens the definition of the construction trades as “men’s work.” One way that tradesmen make sense of tradeswomen’s presence and neutralize this threat is to label them lesbians or likely lesbians. Lynne, an Asian American lesbian, explains, “People think if you’re a tradeswoman, you’re a lesbian. You want to do a man’s job, so you want to be a man, so you’re a lesbian.” Stephanie, a straight white woman, says, “People think I’m gay a lot of the time because  .  .  . I don’t look real feminine.” Holly, another straight white woman, says a fellow apprentice “never dis- cussed her love life at work, and she [then] mentioned having a boyfriend. Everybody looked at her like ‘You have a boyfriend?’ They thought she was gay.” Imagin- ing tradeswomen as lesbians, that is, not fully female, preserves the idea of the trades as “men’s work.”

This opens up the possibility that straight trades- women may be perceived as more of a threat to the masculine definition of the work than lesbian trades- women. Indeed, Loretta, a black lesbian, says that her male coworkers do not “want any women at all,” but that “somebody like me is safer for them because they can ignore me like a guy they don’t like”:

They’re, like, “There’s a chick here, but there’s not really a chick here. It’s Loretta, she’s not really a chick.” But [with] a chick, they’re hitting on them, they’re getting in trouble. They’ve got to be a little bit more on the Ps and Qs about what they say and the way they act. They can be a little freer [with me] because I’m not going to beat them up about their language and scratching their balls and acting like assholes.

Loretta notes that while some tradesmen resent the presence of all women in the trades, straight or les- bian, that she, as a lesbian, is “not really a chick” and her presence does not limit tradesmen’s freedom to perform masculinity as they please. This may be especially true for lesbians like Loretta who present as butch. Indeed, Vicky, a lesbian tradeswoman who describes herself as “a bit girlier” notes that tradesmen are more likely to treat a woman who “doesn’t look as feminine on the outside” as “one of the guys,” while they are more likely to “watch their potty mouth” around more “girly”-presenting lesbians. We also find some evidence that butch lesbians are somewhat less likely to be targeted by sexual advances.

A few tradeswomen claim that, as lesbians, they are fully accepted as “one of the guys.” For example, Toni, a white lesbian, who describes herself as some- one who “used to be extremely feminine” but no longer bothers because “it required too much main- tenance,” describes how she is incorporated into the men’s sex talk:

[My coworker] tells his girlfriend, “She’s like one of the guys, you know, I can tell her anything.” That’s how most of the guys think of me anyways. They just talk about whatever they want to. It’s, like, [I’ll tell the men,] “You should do this [sexual maneuver] or you should try that [sexual position].” [And, later they’ll tell me,] “Oh, that worked! Thanks a lot, Toni.” So it’s all good.

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For Toni, offering advice on women’s sexuality is a “good” form of inclusion because it takes place within a supportive working relationship with coworkers.

At the same time, finding acceptance as “one of the guys” can be fraught with danger. Lori, the Jewish butch lesbian introduced earlier, describes a lunch- time interaction she had as an apprentice, when she was especially vulnerable:

They’re sitting around talking about the Mike Tyson case when he sexually assaulted this woman. For me, rape is no joking matter. So here’s nine of ’em, a foreman, journeymen, apprentices, and one shop steward, and I’m the only woman in this discussion. They’re all sitting there talking about it and joking about it, and I’m, like, “Whoa. I’m feeling really, really violent.” So I said, “The next person who says anything, I’m gonna get really violent.” They all shut the fuck up. Then there was another situation where they were talking about wife beating. I got mad, but sometimes it’s not worth it ’cause it’s, like, “Oh, she’s got no sense of humor.” So then I just don’t eat lunch with them anymore.

As her words illustrate, being “one of the guys” may involve participating in a misogynistic work culture. Lori tells of not being able to tolerate such expectations, becoming angry and removing her- self from the work group. She explains how she cen- sured her own responses out of fear that resistance to the sexist work culture would jeopardize her in- sider status by stigmatizing her as lacking a “sense of humor.” Several of the tradeswomen, including Lori, say that, after completing apprenticeships and be- coming certified, they felt less at risk and, as a result, used more assertive and visible—as opposed to ac- commodative or subtle—strategies.

While lesbians may be more likely than straight women to be accepted as “one of the guys,” and while this can provide some camaraderie and acceptance as a serious worker, they rarely experience full ac- ceptance. Rather, tradeswomen typically emphasize that acceptance as one of the guys is incomplete and conditional. Many tradeswomen say their male co- workers hold them to an exaggerated standard of masculinity, making them carry heavier materials and do dirtier and more dangerous work, in order

to prove they can work “like a guy.” Further, as we discuss ahead, acceptance as one of the guys in some contexts does not exempt them from the ideals of emphasized femininity in others.

m a n a g i n g p e r c e i v e d t h r e at s t o t h e h e t e r o g e n d e r e d o r d e r

While the presumption that tradeswomen are likely lesbians neutralizes threats to the masculine definition of the work, it threatens heteronormativity and the sexual and economic subordination of women to men. In response, tradesmen sometimes direct gendered homophobic comments at lesbian tradeswomen. In other instances, they sexually objectify (lesbian and straight) tradeswomen. We examine tradeswomen’s accounts of this behavior and how they respond to it. Keeping Them Guessing, Keeping It Private, and Other Re- sponses to Gendered Homophobia. Just as they use fag dis- course to police gender noncomformity among men, so tradesmen use the lesbian label to control the gen- dered conduct of tradeswomen. For example, Elena (a Latina heterosexual) says tradesmen single out lesbian tradeswomen as deviant “freaks”: “The guys talk about them really bad, like, she’s trying to play a man role, she likes it rough, men can’t satisfy her, she must be freaky and have freaky needs.” Lauren, a white lesbian who describes herself as tomboyish but not butch, says that she has heard her coworkers make disparag- ing comments about “hardcore dyke lesbians.” She recounts how one tradesman exclaimed, “Damn, I’m working with this guy and next thing I know she turns around and, shit, she’s got tits!” When Lauren asked him if she was a good worker, he responded, “I don’t know, I couldn’t work with her.”

Racial minority status and body size can inter- sect with sexual identity and gender presentation to heighten stigmatization and otherness. Loretta, the black butch lesbian, is large and has a shaved head. An electrician, a trade that historically has had among the lowest number of minority workers (Bilginsoy 2005), Loretta describes job sites as “bas- tions of white male supremacy.” She notes that, in recent years, an influx of Latino workers has height- ened racial tensions and that the prevailing message conveyed to women, “queers,” and people of color is

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“You shouldn’t be here.” She tells of hearing trades- men say, “Now they’re letting animals in the trade.” When asked to whom they were referring, Loretta ex- claims, “Me! Or my crewmember who [was] a person of color.” Loretta speaks of how she is threatening, not just as a woman, but as a large, black, butch lesbian woman with an aggressive personality, a composite that “messes with the whole expectation of what your gender, what your behavior’s supposed to be.”

Loretta says that tradesmen sometimes “picked on” her about her large size, saying things like, “You’re fat” or that her size “ain’t cool for chicks.” Similarly, Lori, who describes herself as a “big butch dyke” (a “three-part package”), says that her cowork- ers’ negative comments about her size are gendered: “They’ll accommodate a big guy where they won’t ac- commodate a big woman.”

Sometimes the label “lesbian” is decoupled from women’s own sexual identity, as when tradesmen target tradeswomen for gendered homophobia be- cause their appearance or behavior does not conform to tradesmen’s gender expectations. For instance, Cheryl, a white heterosexual, explains how one of her coworkers “was mad because I’d showed him up that day,” performing better than he in a work- place task. He asked her, “What’s the matter with you? Are you one of those lesbian women, you know, and you’re not interested in me?” In this example, Cheryl’s coworker accuses her of being a lesbian, and thus unfeminine, because she outperforms him. He thereby conflates her occupational competence and sexual orientation, considering both as signs of gender nonconformity.

In response to gendered homophobia, lesbian tradeswomen engage in complex risk assessments and employ a variety of disclosure options. For ex- ample, Anna, a Latina lesbian who describes herself as tomboyish and “not real girly but not real butchy,” remarks about a coworker, “I’ve heard him make comments about fags and queers and I didn’t want to go there. When he said, ‘Are you married?’ I said, ‘No’ and I didn’t say I have a partner.” Here, Anna speaks a “half-truth to power” (Sullivan 2001). It is true that she is not married, but she conceals the full truth— that she has a same-sex romantic partner—from this coworker because his homophobic comments make

that revelation feel unsafe. Further, Anna says that in situations that feel safer, she selectively discloses her sexual identity:

I don’t totally come out and say, “Okay, I’m gay.” I just ease into it, kind of feel it out. . . . They say, “What’s your boyfriend do?” I’ll say, “I don’t have a boy- friend.” If it’s somebody that I know that I can trust I’ll say, “I’ve got a girlfriend.” As long as I think that it wouldn’t be a bad situation. It’s a judgment call.

Racial minority status often heightens othering and perceived risk, further limiting tradeswomen’s disclosure options. For example, Lori, a self-described Jewish butch lesbian, says she did not disclose her sexual orientation on one job site early in her career because she had heard “a bunch of sexist, racist, and homophobic speech” that made disclosure feel unsafe. While her coworkers were specifically “target- ing the Hispanics,” their behavior “really frightened” her “because they had swastikas and Nazi and KKK- type talk.” Yet, later in her career and on less racist job sites, she developed a strategy of singling out one man with whom she would be more open:

What I do generally is I’d make allies with one dude who I felt was more open-minded or we have a con- nection. I would be honest with him about who I was. As long as I had one person I could be myself with, then I felt okay. Now I’m pretty much out. I de- cided that I’m out in the union as a whole, but I pick and choose how much I say.

Several of the respondents similarly spoke about be- coming more open, but still guarded, regarding their sexuality as they gained more occupational seniority.

Sometimes tradeswomen conceal their sexual identity not simply out of fear of retaliation but also to resist the salience of their sexual identity in workplace interactions. We call this strategy “keeping it private.” Vanesa, a white lesbian, explains that she brought her best friend, rather than her girlfriend, to union picnics both because she wants to keep her “personal life private” and also because she hopes to “keep away from the stigma” and does not “want a guy not to teach me because of who I am.” Anita, a Native Amer- ican lesbian, similarly evokes a concern with both privacy and homophobia, explaining that she was not

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initially out because “it’s nobody’s business, and then going into a man’s field I figured it’s probably not a good idea to advertise.” Yet, she says that “if it came up, I didn’t deny it,” akin to what others have labeled an “open closet door policy” (Reimann 2001). Simi- larly, Lauren, a white lesbian, says, “There’s some guys that don’t know. Maybe that’s my way of blending in without any confrontation. I like to get in there, get my job done, and get out. I’ve had a couple of guys ask me, and if they got the balls to ask me, I’ll tell them.”

Gina, a large, black, straight, married woman, evokes a “keep them guessing” strategy that entails sending mixed messages about sexual identity as part of an attempt to “break that stereotype”:

I had them so fooled there were people that didn’t have any idea what my sexual orientation was. If somebody questioned me, [I’d say,] “I’m gay, leave me alone, I’m a lesbian.” Or [I’d say,] “I’m single,” or “I have two kids,” or “I have a husband.” People would be running around, [saying,] “No, she told me she was gay.” Or “Gina, you’re not gay, I met your husband.” So you’d keep them guessing because the point was that your sexual orientation didn’t matter.

While keeping the men guessing may function partially as an expression of solidarity with lesbian trades- women, a sort of reverse passing intended to challenge stereotypes about lesbians, Gina herself says it is also a way of resisting the salience of women’s sexual identi- ties at work.

Similarly, Alex, a white lesbian, talks about mixing displays of subordinated feminine heterosex- uality with more stereotypically masculine behavior in order to resist homophobia and sexism. She ex- plains that while she used to be mistaken for a man because she “looked completely androgynous,” she has grown her hair since joining the trades because short hair “would be such a red flag” that she is a “dyke” or is “so manly”:

I’d rather act feminine and friendly and cute than get harassed, ignored, or treated worse. But at the same time it’s like I have to be careful that I don’t act overly feminine because they’ll think I can’t work. Some- times I’ll say something that will totally throw them for a spin [or] make them raise an eyebrow because I’ll say it in a masculine way. I’ll say something that’s

really clear, concise, and to the point, and they don’t expect that of me. They think I’m a bubbly person; they stereotype me as a female.

Alex is managing a classic double bind where she is held accountable to conflicting expectations for gen- dered conduct. She is aware that her coworkers may mark (raised eyebrow) and sanction (harassment, isolation) masculine conduct. Alex says she flirts with men and acts “feminine” in an effort to forestall cer- tain forms of harassment and exclusion, but fears that overdoing it may detract from her perceived compe- tence. She performs an intricate gender maneuvering in trying to strike a balance by varying heterofemi- nine displays with more assertive (masculine) actions to transgress dualistic sexual and gender boundaries. While white respondents, straight and gay, were more likely to speak of incorporating displays of empha- sized femininity into their gender maneuvering, black, butch, and large tradeswomen were more likely to emphasize their ability to “hold their own” with the heaviest, dirtiest, and most dangerous tasks.

Turning the Tables: Resistance to Compulsory Heterosexual- ity. Another way that tradesmen neutralize the threat of lesbian/female autonomy is by recasting them as objects of men’s sexual desire. Some lesbian trades- women say tradesmen embrace them through the heterosexual male fantasy of having “fancy sex” with multiple women. For instance, when asked if she ever was directly targeted by homophobia, Anna, the Latina lesbian introduced earlier, responds, “No, because I’m a female. Some guys say, ‘I don’t care about the women. I think that’s great! That’s fancy for me! I just can’t stand the guys.’” Yet, Toni, a white lesbian, sug- gests that this form of acceptance has its costs: “They’ll make innuendos like ‘You should hook up with her and then hook up with me later.’ They know I’m not interested in them. They just continue to do it because they know it bugs me.” In this instance, Toni’s cowork- ers impose heterosexual expectations and meanings onto her and intentionally “bug” her. By redefining lesbian relationships as serving male heterosexual desire, tradesmen neutralize the perceived threat of lesbian desire to heterosexism.

Out lesbian tradeswomen use various strategies to resist their coworkers’ efforts to heterosexualize

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them and, sometimes, to reaffirm their sexual iden- tity as lesbians. Jan, a lesbian of white and Native American descent, who is slim and has long blonde hair, and says she “doesn’t go out of her way to be feminine” but “doesn’t seem butch to the guys,” com- plains about how she has to tell her coworkers that she is not “free porn.” Others speak of resisting tra- ditional gender dynamics by showing a sexually as- sertive interest in their coworker’s women partners. Anna, the Latina lesbian, explains:

[My coworkers] accept me for who I am. [He’ll say,] “That’s cool, girl. Can we get some?” [laughs] I’ll be, like, “Can I get some of yours? I’ll let you talk to my girl if you let me talk to your wife.” And he’ll be, like, “Fuck you.” Guys are cool with me. [They’ll say,] “How’s your girl? She’s pretty hot.” I go, “Yeah, thank you. So is your wife.” [Laughs.]

While Anna describes her interactions with her co- workers as playful and respectful (“They accept me for who I am”), she also experiences counterresistance from her coworker (“Fuck you”). Indeed, it seems that she gets respect, in large part, because she can give as good as she gets, using masculine displays of domi- nance to neutralize efforts to sexually dominate her. We call this strategy “turning the tables.”

Similarly, Lynne, an Asian American lesbian whom we would describe as gender-blending but who is sometimes mistaken for a man, explains how she responded to a coworker who constantly asked her if he could watch her have sex with another woman:

I said, “Why don’t you talk to your girlfriend about it? Bring me a picture; I want to see what she looks like.” He got all defensive: “Who, wait, what’d you mean? I don’t have a picture. She ain’t going for that shit.” He backed off that whole line of conversation after that.

Like Anna, Lynne successfully wards off her coworker’s efforts to sexualize her by turning the tables and sexu- alizing his girlfriend. While this interaction seems to have been successful in curtailing demands to watch Lynne have sex with other women, later in the inter- view Lynne says this incident led to a strained working relationship with this particular coworker.

Moreover, tradeswomen are not equally able to resist their coworker’s efforts to sexualize them. Julia, a Latina lesbian apprentice who described herself as

“looking like a little dude,” describes an extreme case in which a coworker attempted to sexually force him- self on her:

Every day he would bug me, “Hey, you should come over to my house. We should hang out and you should be my girlfriend.” I’m, like, “No, dude. I don’t like guys.” He started telling me sexual stuff like “We should have a threesome.” Every day for, like, three weeks he would tell me, “Watch, I’m going to get you. I always get what I want.” I never said anything be- cause I didn’t believe he would because there were always people around. One day he started getting in my face and walking me back into a unit. He picked me up and took me in there and then, that fool, he turned me around and hugged me from the waist like [he was] kissing his girlfriend. He went down to kiss me and I was laughing because I was scared. I was, like, “Man, what’s wrong with you?” And at that moment one of my coworkers was passing by and they saw each other and this guy let go. I got scared; he could have done anything, you know.

This tradesman disregards Julia’s identity as a lesbian, as well as her resistance to his sexual advances, trying to force himself on her. He responds to her defiance with threats to “get her,” culminating with a sexual assault on the job site. Fearing for her job, she initially refused to report the incident but ultimately did so, upon the urging of the superintendent and the co- worker who witnessed the assault. Julia says she never saw the assailant again.

Other tradeswomen also report being targeted with overt hostility and violence after refusing to engage in sexual banter or feminine displays. Some of the more egregious examples include having electrical wires turned on while they were working on them, having tools dropped on them, or find- ing feces in their hard hat. These sorts of incidents highlight the risks and limitations of individual-level resistance.

How Gendered Homophobia Limits Collective Resistance. While individual strategies have subversive potential, successful “contestation of gender hierarchy is funda- mentally a collective process” (Connell 2009, 109). With typically few allies at work, one might expect tradeswomen to seek each other out for safety and

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support. Yet many of our respondents say they avoid other women both on and off the construction site. In some cases, this stems from their own homophobia, but it is more often described as an effort to protect themselves from homophobic stigma and sexist ste- reotypes. Vanesa, a white lesbian, explains, “Women will tell me they don’t want to be seen with other women or belonging to a women’s group because a lot of the guys say, ‘[If] you women want to be just like us men so much, then why do you have this little wom- en’s group?’” Some tradesmen pressure her and other tradeswomen to avoid associating with other women. Vanesa further describes how tradesmen reframe wom- en’s efforts to support each other as attempts to gain special privileges. For example, her foreman remarked, after seeing her in a tradeswomen’s convention T-shirt, “I don’t think there should be separate organizations, you guys need to be treated the same.”

Loretta, the black butch lesbian, says that she “would never hang out with the girls” and that “the girls on the crew wouldn’t want to hang out with me, because they wouldn’t want the other guys to think that they were gay. Because of that guilt by associa- tion thing it’s, like, ‘Well, if we’re nice to you, they might think we’re like you.’” Loretta’s comments speak to how lesbian stigma is attached not only to joining women’s associations but also to socializ- ing with other women on the job. Similarly, Lori, a Jewish butch lesbian, says, “I wanted to start a les- bian tradeswomen group but not even the lesbians want to start it with me.” Moreover, she says, “Some- times even other women in the trades are afraid to be seen with me because I’m an out lesbian. Like it’ll spill off on them and the guys will see it.” At a con- ference for women in the trades, the women became particularly animated when they heard that trades- men were referring to the conference as a “big lesbian orgy” in what seemed like an attempt to discredit the conference and keep both straight and lesbian trades- women away.

As Lori describes it, tradesmen effectively use the specter of lesbianism to stymie gender solidarity and political activism: “Sometimes there’s solidarity, sometimes not, because the lesbians think they have to align themselves with the men for power and that means turning against other women or a more out

lesbian. They’ll be more closeted or they’re afraid to be seen as lesbian whether they’re lesbian or not.” In distancing themselves from other women in order to protect themselves from the gendered homophobia of their coworkers, both straight and lesbian trades- women are made more vulnerable as they become isolated from each other. Yet, there is also evidence of resistance and change. For example, the tradeswomen conference has grown steadily over time from a state to an international event and active tradeswomen’s groups have formed online, demonstrating organiza- tional success despite these challenges.

c o n c l u s i o n

Drawing on interviews with a diverse sample of lesbian and straight women in the construction trades, this article examines how the cultural meanings of sexual identity, gender presentation, race, and, more tenta- tively, body size and seniority, inform how men seek to control tradeswomen and how the latter respond to these efforts. We show that labeling tradeswomen as lesbians, and thus—in the popular imagination—as not fully women, both makes sense of their presence and reaffirms the perception of the trades as “men’s work.” Some lesbian tradeswomen report being more accepted than their straight women coworkers and claim that the lesbian label offers them some free- dom from performing emphasized femininity. This acceptance is limited, however, and can place them in uncomfortable situations where they are expected to perform misogynist versions of masculinity. Moreover, while lesbians may be less threatening to the notion of the trades as men’s work, their presence threatens heteronormativity and assumptions about the sexual subordination of women. We explain how tradesmen’s efforts to sexually objectify tradeswomen can be un- derstood as attempts to neutralize threats to hetero- normativity and male privilege.

We demonstrate that in response to these con- straints, tradeswomen use gender maneuvering (Schippers 2002) to combine performances of femi- ninity and masculinity, to gain some measure of ac- ceptance as women, and to maintain their perceived competence as workers. While tradeswomen stra- tegically draw upon multiple strategies, we further

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show how the meanings attributed to tradeswomen’s sexuality, gender presentation, race, body size, and seniority influence their preferred strategies. For in- stance, lesbian tradeswomen who are perceived as “like one of the guys” are more likely than straight tradeswomen to report using sexual banter to find commonality with their male coworkers. White re- spondents, straight and gay, are most likely to incor- porate elements of emphasized femininity in their gender maneuvering. In contrast, black, butch, and large tradeswomen are more likely to emphasize that they can “hold their own” with the heaviest, dirtiest, and most dangerous tasks.

Straight and lesbian tradeswomen alike invoke a “keeping them guessing” strategy, which involves giving varying and contradictory cues about sexual identity over time. This strategy is structurally equiv- alent to the gender maneuvering strategies of vary- ing masculine and feminine gender displays (see also Denissen 2010b). In addition, lesbians use various strategies to manage the stigma related to their sexual orientation, including telling half-truths to power, selectively disclosing, and employing an open closet door policy (Reimann 2001; Sullivan 2001). Lesbians also invoke a strategy we call “keeping it private,” in which they conceal their sexual identity on the basis that it is not relevant. This strategy parallels trades- women’s efforts to suppress the salience of gender by emphasizing other commonalities such as race, class, and occupation (Denissen 2010b).

We provide evidence that experienced trades- women are somewhat more comfortable with as- sertive and visible—as opposed to deferential and covert—strategies, such as “turning the tables,” in which tradeswomen sexualize tradesmen’s girl- friends or wives. Future work should examine the extent to which tradesmen’s behavior systematically varies by their age/generation as well. One might expect younger generations to be more inclusive of women and minorities, but this merits systematic examination. More broadly, since men’s cooperation and training is crucial for women’s success in male- dominated contexts, more research that examines men’s role as allies is needed.

While individual tradeswomen are creative and sometimes successful in their efforts to resist men’s

attempts to marginalize and exclude them, our study suggests that individual responses may not be enough to produce widespread or lasting change. Trades- women’s efforts to organize, however, are stymied by insinuations of lesbianism. Thus, gendered ho- mophobia plays a crucial role in isolating and divid- ing tradeswomen, undermining their efforts to create solidarity, engage in collective resistance, and bring about institutional change. The risks of associating with lesbians and other women may be greatest for women of color and other especially vulnerable pop- ulations, a question that merits additional research.

We show how contradictions in the domi- nant heterogender order constrain tradeswomen, while opening up possibilities for—and even necessitating—more reflexive, varied, and strate- gic forms of gender and sexual practices (Denissen 2010b). Since gendered expectations of tradeswomen are intrinsically contradictory (e.g., sufficiently mas- culine to be deemed competent but sufficiently femi- nine to be socially acceptable), tradeswomen must constantly vary the way they “do gender” (West and Zimmerman 1987). Earlier work shows that exclu- sion of women in the building trades is reproduced despite women’s resistance at the level of interaction and identity construction (Denissen 2010b). This article sheds light on one key mechanism whereby women’s strategic agency is limited: the isolation of tradeswomen from other women. Thus, while indi- vidual tradeswomen strategically maneuver among gender and sexual meanings in ways that transgress heterogender boundaries and trouble the heterogen- der order, they face greater counter-resistance when they collectively organize. This study expands on pre- vious research that documents how race, class, and gender identities can be used to divide and control workers (Hossfeld 1990) by showing how tradesmen use gendered homophobia as a means of dividing and subordinating women workers.

These findings speak to debates about the extent to which individual-level resistance disrupts patri- archy or, alternatively, unwittingly reinforces the dominant gender order (Devor 1987; Ridgeway and Correll 2004). According to Finley (2010), trans- formations in gender relations are more likely in women- controlled than male-dominated spaces.

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Finley argues that women’s networks are crucial for transforming the dominant gender order and that women in male-dominated settings are too isolated from other women to be effective. Our findings re- garding women’s isolation from each other and limits to collective resistance are consistent with Fin- ley’s argument.

Yet, we suspect that female- and male-dominated settings each present their own set of struggles. Chal- lenges to a large and powerful sector of the economy, such as the construction trades, are likely to meet strong resistance. Moreover, in male-dominated con- texts, those who have an interest in upholding the dominant gender order have a numerical and nor- mative advantage. In contrast, in women-centered contexts such as roller derbies (Finley 2010) or al- ternative hard rock scenes (Schippers 2002), women may face less resistance. However, these subcultures are themselves marginalized from sites of political

and economic power, limiting the impact of women’s gains. Perhaps the path toward undoing the hege- monic gender order lies in combining “micromaneu- vering” and collective activism (Schippers 2002) with coalition building across contexts. The Internet offers opportunities for tradeswomen wishing to build coalitions, as exemplified by an online forum created by and for tradeswomen that announces to readers, “we encourage guys to work with us and join [name of group] to show men and women working together.” Supportive women-centered spaces are important, yet working-class women and women of color also emphasize the importance of organiz- ing alongside men. As Paap (2006) demonstrates, employers profit from “macho” masculinities at the expense of tradesmen, who work harder, faster, and more dangerously to prove their worth, undermin- ing working conditions for all construction workers while also marginalizing tradeswomen.

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Adia Harvey Wingfield, The Modern Mammy and the Angry Black Man: African American Professionals’ Experiences with Gendered Racism in the Workplace.

Studies of how racism affects African Americans constitute a sizable body of the sociological litera- ture on race relations. Research in this vein has exam- ined how racism affects African Americans at work, in the educational system, and in everyday life, as well as the overall significance (or lack thereof) of racism for Black Americans (Collins, 1998; Feagin, 1991; Feagin & Sikes, 1996; Ferguson, 2000; Wilson, 1988). The over- whelming majority of these studies suggest that racism still shapes many, if not most, facets of life for Black Americans. However, these studies often tacitly assume that race generally impacts Black men and women in the same way or fail to take gender differences into account when analyzing the manifestations and ef- fects of racism. Feminist researchers have attempted to rectify this conceptual limitation by drawing atten- tion to the ways that Black women’s experiences with racism are also intertwined with sexism. Thus, studies of Black women in various settings—community orga- nizations, work, public spaces—carefully delineate the intersecting effects of race and gender, noting that both of these categories interact to shape Black women’s ex- periences (Byng, 1998; Gilkes, 1988; Harvey, 2005; Texeira, 2002). However, among the studies of how racism affects African Americans and studies of how race and gender affect Black women, few specifically address how Blacks’ experiences with racism differ by gender. In this study, I offer a comparative analysis of the ways Black professional men’s and women’s expe- riences with racism in the workplace are gendered.

African American Professionals’ Experiences with Gendered Racism in the Workplace

A D I A H A R V E Y W I N G F I E L D

32. THE MODERN MAMMY AND THE ANGRY BLACK MAN

t h e o r e t i c a l f r a m e w o r k

g e n d e r , r a c e , a n d w o r k

Studies of race in the workplace document the extent to which racism plays a role in shaping minorities’ experi- ences in the labor force (Cose, 1993; Higginbotham & Weber, 1997; Tomaskovic-Devey, 1993). Collins (1998) argues that affirmative action policies have produced essential occupational niches that allowed many Blacks to experience social and economic mobility. Feagin and Sikes (1996) claim that in the middle class workplace Black employees experience stereotypes, discrimina- tion, and pay inequity relative to their white colleagues. At the other end of the class hierarchy, Newman and Ellis (1999) and Neckerman and Kirschenman (1999) consider the stigmas of low wage work available to working class and poor Black inner-city residents, and the ways race affects employers’ perceptions of poten- tial Black inner-city employees, respectively. Finally, in her study of Black women workers in the hair industry, Harvey (2005) finds that among working-class Black women, the absence of occupational opportunities can push them towards entrepreneurial ventures.

In focusing on these issues of race in the labor market, few comparisons are made as to how the in- tersections of race and gender differently shape Black women’s and Black men’s work experiences. Feminist researchers discuss the concept of gendered racism, which posits that racism exists at both the institu- tional and individual levels, but is a phenomenon

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that is experienced differently by men and women (Chavetz, 1997; hooks, 1988; King, 1988; Glenn, 2000; Zinn & Dill, 1996). However, many studies based on the conceptual framework of gendered racism focus primarily on how intersections of racism and sexism impact minority women. Although re- searchers note that “not only Black women, but also Black men are confronted with racism structured by racist constructions of gender role, notable examples being the absent father stereotype or myth of the Black rapist,” very few studies draw a comparative analysis between how Black men and Black women experience gendered racism (Essed, 1991:33).

c o n t r o l l i n g i m a g e s a n d g e n d e r e d r a c i s m

Espiritu (1997) argues that gendered racism helps to explain several predominant stereotypes of Asian Americans. The Dragon Lady and Lotus Blossom ste- reotypes are specifically female images of hypersexual- ized, deceitful women, or docile, subservient geishas, respectively. In contrast, the Fu Manchu and Chinese laundryman stereotypes depict Asian men as evil, villainous, asexual schemers or as eager, willing ser- vants. Espiritu argues that while all of these images are founded in racist stereotypes, they are also explic- itly gendered images which suggest that Asian men and women are ultimately unable to meet dominant ideals of masculinity and femininity. Ultimately, the images are manifestations of gendered racism that provide specific justification for anti-Asian biases and promote hegemonic white masculinity as a norma- tive standard. Collins (1990; 2004) has been particu- larly perceptive in drawing attention to the ways racist images of Blacks are distinctly gendered. Historically, stereotypes of Black men as lustful, brutal rapists were used to justify violent repression and lynching of Black men in order to protect the chastity of white woman- hood (Davis, 1984; Olsen, 2001). Like Espiritu’s anal- ysis of the effects of gendered racism, the stereotype of the lustful Black male rapist served to validate racial inequality but also to contrast Black masculinity with white masculinity as a hegemonic ideal. This image, however, was specific to Black men. In contrast, the “controlling images” of Black womanhood described by Collins (1990) include the asexual Mammy and the castrating matriarch. These racist stereotypes are

also gendered in their portrayal of Black women’s in- ability to fit the dominant ideal of motherhood, and in their implicit messages that as unfit mothers, Black women fall short of the larger ideal of appropriate womanhood.

In a contemporary analysis of a “new racism” that is defined by an increasingly global economy, pro- liferation of mass media images and transnational states where racism is controlled less by local or re- gional governments, Collins (2004) suggests that the images of Black men as lazy Sambos or brutal rap- ists and Black women as mammies, tragic mulattos, or Jezebels have been refined and updated to reflect socio-political and cultural changes. Today, con- trolling images of Black men and women are class- specific and reflect a global economy, unprecedented media reach, and transnational racial inequality as well as the economic, legal, and social changes that have affected Blacks over the last 50–60 years. Ac- cording to Collins, gendered racism now produces controlling images of working-class Black women in the form of the “Bad Black Mother” (often depicted as the “welfare queen”) and the “Bitch” (a material- istic, hypersexual, manipulative figure prevalent in hip-hop culture), while middle-class Black women are depicted as “Black Ladies” whose potentially unrestrainable sexuality is safely confined to hetero- sexual marriage, “educated Black bitches” who are manipulative and controlling, or “modern-day Mam- mies,” who uphold white-dominated structures, in- stitutions, or bosses at the expense of their personal lives. Controlling images of Black men now exist in the form of working-class Black men as irreverent “athletes” or dangerous “criminals,” while middle- class Black men are presented as effeminate “sissies” or nonthreatening “sidekicks” to a white protagonist. Underlying all these images are the same old stereo- types of Black women as treacherous, hypersexual, aggressive, and/or ideal for service, and Black men as dangerous beings whose sexuality is a threat to the natural order and must be curtailed and harnessed.

g e n d e r e d r a c i s m a n d c o n t r o l l i n g i m a g e s i n t h e w o r k p l a c e

The nature of these controlling images has poten- tially devastating consequences for minority men and women at work. While sociologists have yet to engage

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in comprehensive research that examines gendered racism’s effects on minority workers, some studies have acknowledged that racism in the workplace is gendered and takes on different manifestations for minority men and women (Browne & Misra 2003). Woo (1998) argues that gendered racism which emphasizes images of Asian American women as doll-like and dainty has facilitated their entry into broadcast journalism while simultaneously rendering Asian-American men unde- sirable for this work. Similarly, the overrepresentation of Latina women into domestic service suggests a gen- dered racism that presents these women as ideal for low-paying service work in the home, while gendered racism channels Latino men into construction and landscaping work outside of the home.

In their study of the combined effects of racism and sexism on Black women, St. Jean and Feagin (1998) offer a particularly insightful assessment of the mechanisms of gendered racism in the work- place. The authors argue that while Black women ex- perience the “double burden” of racism and sexism, some white employers may view Black women as more desirable coworkers and employees than Black men because they are less threatening. According to these authors, white employers may prefer Black women because their gender makes them more easily controlled through sexist put-downs, whereas Black men’s gender renders them less controllable through these means and thus more of a threat. Following this line of reasoning, in their study of the effects of racism on African Americans, Sida- nius and Pratto (2001) in fact argue that gendered racism disadvantages Black men to a greater degree than Black women. While numerous other data chal- lenges this conclusion (see Browne & Misra, 2003; Browne, 1999; Maume, 1999), these debates under- score the fact that examining racism as a gendered phenomenon reveals a complex picture of its impact on African Americans.

In this article, I examine ways Black profession- als’ experiences with racism in the workplace are gen- dered. I also address how Black workers’ responses to racism are also shaped by gender. By treating racism as a gendered phenomenon, I address the different implications workplace racism has for minority men and women.

m e t h o d o l o g y

Data for this project were collected from semistruc- tured, intensive interviews with 23 African American professionals employed in a variety of occupations. . . . Respondents were all college educated and ranged in age from 24–61. Fourteen had attended predomi- nantly white institutions for undergraduate degrees, and the remaining nine attended historically Black col- leges or universities. Eleven had advanced degrees, and two were in the process of completing an advanced degree. Seven were married, three were divorced, and the remainder had never married. I used a snowball sample to create the data set, beginning with respon- dents that I knew personally, and asking these subjects to refer me to others who fit the criteria for the study. All names were changed to ensure confidentiality.

Most respondents worked in settings where they es- timated that African Americans constituted 10 percent or fewer of the company’s employees. All the respon- dents described themselves as employed in occupa- tions where working effectively with coworkers was an integral factor in their job success, and that interacting with coworkers comprised the majority of their jobs. In other words, these workers stated that some or all of their jobs required them to work closely with col- leagues in interracial groups. As Black professionals continue to integrate predominantly white workplaces and in some cases occupations that were previously predominantly white, I expected that these workplace dynamics would be ones where Black professionals would likely be exposed to expressions of racism.

f i n d i n g s

Grounded theory methods revealed that Black pro- fessionals’ experiences with gendered racism often took the form of combating controlling images. In- terestingly, Black women’s encounters with gendered racism evoked the controlling images Collins (2004) describes in her analysis of the “new racism” that char- acterizes contemporary American society. Specifically, gendered racism in the professional workplace often meant that Black women were expected to conform to controlling images of the modern mammy or that they were sexualized and objectified. For Black professional men, experiences with gendered racism also took the

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form of encounters with controlling images, though not the ones Collins (1990, 2004) describes. Instead, they faced a new controlling image—that of the “angry Black man.” The existence of these controlling images also structures the ways in which Black professionals— both men and women—respond to encounters with gendered racism.

b l a c k w o m e n a n d g e n d e r e d r a c i s m

For Black professional women, the most common controlling image they had to counter was the image Collins (2004) characterizes as the “modern Mammy.” The modern Mammy is expected to sacrifice all vestiges of a personal life in order to demonstrate unshake- able loyalty to the (usually white) boss or institution. This image dovetails with St. Jean and Feagin’s (1998) observation that white employers may perceive Black women, by virtue of their gender, as easily exploited. Many of the women interviewed here stated that they often encountered situations where they were ex- pected to accept unreasonable demands, willingly accept compromising roles, or silently accept disre- spectful treatment to avoid potentially disrupting the smooth inner workings of the organization. In other words, colleagues expected Black women to fit the image of the modern Mammy through a willingness to make enormous personal sacrifices for the sake of the business.

Angie is a higher education administrator who speaks directly to this issue. One of her most pro- nounced experiences with racism involved an un- pleasant interaction with a lower-level staff member who worked in the university dining hall. The dining hall mistakenly charged a dinner to Angie’s depart- ment, and when Angie called to rectify the error:

that woman called me rude and condescending and hung up on me! She filed a complaint. So I had to meet with the dean, who arranged for mediation. When they did the mediation, everyone was trying to support this woman, even though she hung up on me and I am in a much higher position than she is. Even with everyone kissing her ass, this woman got mad, said she wasn’t staying, and walked out! Now can you imagine that happening if I were a white man? There’s no way that woman would have talked to me

like that, and no way the other administrators would have supported her for doing it.

Angie’s experience clearly reflects this aspect of gen- dered racism. Her treatment is that of many Black work- ers who are treated disrespectfully by coworkers, even those in positions with less status. However, the racism Angie experiences is also gendered, in that her status as a woman likely made her more easily disparaged. Even more important, the institutional procedures used to resolve such disputes were instrumental in pressuring Angie to conform to the image of the modern Mammy. The administrators’ tacit support of the lower-level ser- vice employee in the supposedly neutral mediation session suggests that Angie is expected to conform to and accept disrespectful treatment in order to avoid causing trouble. Significantly, Angie herself implies that the discourteous treatment she received in this situation is attributable to gendered racism, when she questions whether the incident would have occurred not only if she were white, but a white man.

Similarly, Simone, a community educator for a non-profit organization, cites experiences with racism that are not neutral but are quite gender- specific. She asserts that during her tenure in the organization, she was frequently asked to do things that she found uncomfortable and compromising. Specifically, she cites an incident where “we had a Black client who had really terrible body odor. I was solicited to deal with this person. “I had to ask, is this because I’m black? It would not look racist for me to tell this other Black person they have BO, but if you all say it, it looks like you’re being racist? Is that what you think?” They all got quiet. I might be the only Black person in the organization, but I will be damned if they’ll put me in situations like that! They were always trying, though.”

Ostensibly, this experience is one of a Black worker being solicited to deal with a Black customer with whom they might (at least theoretically) have greater familiarity and cultural ties. However, when interpreted through the lens of gendered racism, the nature of this request suggests that it is another example of the assumption that Black women are more easily placed in compromising positions or exploited than Black men in comparable positions.

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Like Angie, Simone’s colleagues saw nothing wrong with expecting her to perform a distasteful task on behalf of the organization, even though this task was clearly outside the bounds of her job description as a community educator. Her experiences with gendered racism reflect the struggle faced by Black women who confront colleagues who expect to interact with the modern Mammy.

Gendered racism was also reported in the form of Black women workers feeling uncomfortably sex- ualized and exoticized by white colleagues. Many of the women interviewed described unwelcome sexual tensions shaped by a perception that as Black women, they were exotic, sexually powerful beings. The stereotype of the uncontrollably sexual Black woman has a long history and has, in one form or another, been implicit in controlling images of Black women as welfare mothers, Jezebels, and the Black bitch (Collins, 1990; 2004). In contemporary work spaces, these images remain problematic for African American women.

Marcia, a consultant for a health care firm, de- scribes one disturbing incident of visiting a hospital that was a client of her firm and feeling sexualized by a patient’s relative. During this visit, Marcia endured listening to the patient’s relative reminisce about the “good old days in the South” and how people “knew their place.” At the end of the visit:

he came over and kissed me on the cheek! I was so dumbfounded that I couldn’t figure out what was going on or if I should take my knee and slam him because I’ve never been kissed on the cheek by a little white man who felt that women were . . . (trails off). And I’m the only person he kissed in that room, this man I had never seen before in my life. But that this man would go on and on about the days when people knew their place and then kiss me, out of all the people in the room? I bet I knew exactly what place he—I know what was on his mind.

In Marcia’s role as a health care consultant visiting a client of her firm, a patient’s relative taking the liberty of kissing her is unorthodox at best. However, she as- tutely notes that this advance came after a thinly veiled reference to Southern life when Blacks were openly subjugated and Black women were routinely subjected

to—and often powerless to resist—unwelcome ad- vances from white men. This experience with racism is specifically gendered in that Marcia was unwillingly cast in the role of the sexually available Black woman.

Georgia, an analyst for a nonprofit organiza- tion, also reports gendered racism in the form of being confronted with stereotypes of Black women as exotic sexual beings. Interestingly, this took place in the context of an interaction with a white female coworker. Georgia recounts attending a board meet- ing where she wore a red leather suit:

I had no idea what buzz got created until I talked to a board member who did not participate but her hus- band was there. She called and said, “Georgia, I don’t know what you had on, but it certainly got my hus- band’s attention.” First off, this is a man who wears white socks all the time. Second, I don’t want to know that her husband is checking me out in my suit! And why would she tell me that? We don’t have that kind of relationship.

Given the history of Black women as prey for more powerful white men, the convergence of race and gender here create a situation that renders Georgia particularly uncomfortable with the board member’s uninvited interest.

Gendered racism structures both the nature and scope of the experiences these women recount as well as their reactions to these experiences. When con- fronted with expectations that they would accept un- reasonable demands and/or disrespectful treatment for the sake of the organization, many of the women interviewed openly expressed their irritation, frus- tration, and anger. For instance, Angie recounts her reaction to the administration’s support of the lower- level employee who treated her rudely:

I’m totally disgusted and feeling totally devalued by the situation. After the session was over and she de- cided she wasn’t going to go through it, I basically told them exactly how I felt. I said this is uncalled for, I requested mediation, and this is not a media- tion.  .  .  . [My reaction] was not a controlled thing, they heard exactly how I felt right then and there.

In the meeting with the administration, Angie unequivocally expressed the irritation, frustration,

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and dissatisfaction she felt in response to her experi- ence with gendered racism. However, the availability of this response can also be interpreted as an effect of gendered racism. As St. Jean and Feagin (1998) sug- gest, Black women, because they are women, are gen- erally considered less threatening than Black men. As such, Angie’s vocal expression of discontent was likely less problematic to her white superiors than a similar response coming from a Black man. Gendered racism structures workplace interactions such that Black female respondents were not considered threat- ening and thus had more leeway to vocalize their feelings of frustration. Some women purposely ad- opted a more threatening, intimidating role, because they viewed this as one of few options that allowed them to be taken seriously and to avoid the awkward, uncomfortable situations that accompanied cowork- ers’ expressions of gendered racism. Sherice, a profes- sor of humanities, states:

I sometimes play a no-nonsense role that makes people feel intimidated but not with thinking about it. If I don’t actively work to correct it will happen. People give me more credit for being on top of things and less willing to put me in positions where I feel uncomfortable. It makes people feel intimidated or overly respectful.

Sherice’s statement echoes the view that because Black women are seen as more malleable and controllable because of their gender, they experience gendered racism in the form of being placed in awkward situ- ations. As she indicates, some Black women con- sciously present themselves as tough and intimidating in order to avoid the gendered racism in the form of exploitation.

b l a c k m e n a n d g e n d e r e d r a c i s m

Many Black men experienced gendered racism in the form of countering white colleagues’ perceptions of them as threatening, menacing, or overly aggressive, or as many respondents described, the image of the “angry Black man.” As respondents described it, the angry Black man image is a middle-class, educated Af- rican American male who, despite his economic and occupational successes, perceives racial discrimination everywhere and consequently is always enraged.

Many respondents perceived that white col- leagues and superiors expected them to fit this image. As such, they took pains to avoid engaging in any behavior that might reflect it. Todd is a banker with a major financial institution. He asserts that a constant part of his job involves carefully con- structing his demeanor, actions, and behaviors so that he does not threaten or intimidate his white colleagues:

Most of them haven’t spent too much time around Black people, so what they think they know is usu- ally from TV or some other stupid source. So if they already think most Black guys grow up in the ‘hood and sell drugs and are basically like [popular rapper] 50-cent, then I have to do everything I can not to por- tray that. That means that if they say something to me that reflects that they think that about me, I can’t ever get mad. I have to brush it off, always be the nice guy who’s not too threatening, not too militant, be- cause they’ll lose it if they ever really see me in that way. And that would have serious repercussions for my job.”.

As Todd describes, he is always in a battle to present himself in opposition to this particular stereotype of Black men. Note that he particularly attempts to por- tray himself as someone who is not too “threatening or militant,” since these are the key characteristics as- sociated with the stereotype of the angry Black man. Consequently, he experiences gendered racism at work in that he must constantly show, through his behavior, speech, mannerisms, and general demeanor, that he is in no way this threatening, angry persona often associ- ated with Black masculinity.

Garrett, an accountant for a major sports organi- zation, was one of the respondents who specifically evoked this controlling image by name. Here he de- scribes how he must constantly monitor employees’ treatment of him as well as their reactions to him:

I always have to tread lightly because I know I can’t afford to be seen as that “angry Black man.” You have to always watch how people react to you, and even then it’s like, why wasn’t I invited to that meeting? Or that dinner? And if I say something, I’m always watching, like, how did people take that? How did they respond to it?

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Like Todd, Garrett experiences racism at work in the unspoken pressure to counter coworkers’ con- cerns that he is uncontrollably angry and therefore threatening. Steven is a loan officer for a bank who gives another example of the tension of combating the image of the “angry Black man.”

Being a black male, you’re put in a situation where you have to work twice as hard to prove yourself. Es- pecially in the corporate world, because it’s such a white male dominated field . . . I’ve always put myself in a position where I felt it was my job to represent the race. So I can’t ever be that stereotype that others have of us—loud, angry, I can’t really talk about or acknowledge race at work . . . I can’t be that stereotype of that guy, because that’s just perpetuating the stereo- type. So I’ve sort of taken that on my back in my work environment to prove that whatever you may think about people who look like me, I’m going to open your eyes to a whole other perspective.

Note that Steven describes a stereotype of a loud and angry man who openly addresses racial issues as the image that he must refute through contrasting behav- ior. Like Todd and Garrett, Steven also locates this ste- reotype as one that is present among whites and one that Black men in particular must work to avoid. Gen- dered racism may also be implicit in the lack of close ties and exclusion from social networks that charac- terized many Black men’s interactions at work. Of the workers interviewed for this research, many more Black men than Black women reported that they were often excluded from collegial workplace interactions and that they had fewer friends or close acquaintances (if any) among their coworkers. Garrett describes these feelings of exclusion, stating:

A lot of the guys in the office, they usually get to- gether after work and play poker, I believe. Poker’s their thing. And I’ve never been invited, I don’t know any other black person in the office that’s ever been invited. It kind of seems like a little clique. Not that it necessarily bothers me, but it’s something that I play in the back of mind. Like, I wonder why nobody’s ever asked me to play? Things like that.

Garrett describes this poker group as comprised solely of white men, noting that no other Black colleagues are invited to join. Though some of the Black women

in this study certainly experienced isolation from col- leagues, Black men were much more likely to report being excluded from work-related events and to have few office allies.

Similarly, Ken describes a workplace where he has given up trying to forge ties with his coworkers. He states:

the thing is, my coworkers don’t speak to me. This one guy never speaks to me. I say hello to him in the morning, and the guy just looks at me. The only time he speaks to me is if it’s negative or sarcastic, and we don’t have that kind of relationship where he can be sarcastic with me. It’s like once a week he’ll mess with me. If I was off of the job I’d say something, but since I’m on the job I have to keep it to myself, because he is a manager. He’s not my direct manager, he couldn’t fire me, but he is a manager.

Like Garrett, Ken is not a part of the informal inter- actions that occur at work, and he has not been able to develop a very cordial relationship with many of his colleagues. While Black women were much more likely to state that they were often exploited or placed in uncomfortable, compromising positions, they rarely suggested that they had difficulties interacting with colleagues in general. This difference may also be a re- sidual effect of gendered racism—that Black men expe- rience gendered racism in the presumption that they are intimidating, fearsome people, and this percep- tion makes them people with whom other coworkers would prefer not to regularly interact. Gendered racism also structured Black men’s responses to these affronts, revealing reactions that differed sharply from Black women’s. While Black women, because they were per- ceived as less threatening, could speak out about the treatment they received, Black men had no such luxury. Their attempts to repudiate coworkers’ assessments of them as frightening people meant that they could not afford to actually get angry or vocalize their displeasure at various offenses. They feared that colleagues would perceive such assertions as evidence of the very stereo- typical traits Black men were attempting to downplay. Gendered racism, therefore, structured Black men’s re- sponses to racism such that they tended to repress any emotions, statements, or behaviors that could possibly be construed as militant, angry, or belligerent.

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Roger, an analyst at a nonprofit research orga- nization, reinforces that it is incumbent upon Black men not to reveal any sense of anger at work:

Different black men I’ve seen in my office and grow- ing up and knowing about, we focus so much on not bringing or showing our feelings at the office, but a lot of times the office produces so much stress you bring that back home. It’s difficult to keep them both separate.

Roger’s account emphasizes how gendered racism leaves Black men with few outlets at work where they can express “negative” emotions, and also highlights that this lack of outlets places Black men in a predica- ment where repressing these behaviors and emotions affects their lives outside of work as well.

Black men were also much more likely than Black women to downplay or minimize their feel- ings of irritation or displeasure at their experiences with gendered racism. Recall that because gendered racism renders Black women less threatening, they often were able to immediately vocalize their feelings about being treated as the modern Mammy with- out serious repercussions. In contrast, because gen- dered racism suggests that Black men are inherently threatening, Black men interviewed here perceived a greater risk in drawing attention to their coworkers’ and employers’ gendered racism. Without the option to speak out, Black men frequently became emotion- ally detached at work and minimized their anger at the gendered racism they encountered.

Leon, a community educator, states:

I work with a woman who is a complete racist and culturally clueless. And what do I do when she tells the biracial woman on our team that her hair looks like a poodle’s? Or when she assumes that because I’m Black I know people in [names a predominantly Black part of the city]? I stay calm, change the subject, and get back to work. I have to do this, because how will it look if I curse her out, even when she deserves it? I’ll be the one in the fire, not her.

Leon’s rhetorical question of how he will appear should he respond to his colleagues’ racially insen- sitive remarks underscores the constant burden on these Black professional men to disprove stereotypi- cal images of Black men as angry, out of control,

or bothered by racial issues, and the importance of doing this by displaying the opposite characteristics. Leon’s response is a stark contrast to those of Angie and Donette who took the opportunity to establish themselves as no-nonsense women who could be intimidating.

Nate, for example, is a mortgage loan officer who employs complicated strategies to discourage his co- workers from seeing him as an angry Black man. He describes ignoring racial slurs at work unless they are repeated frequently to him, and even then states that his policy is to “pull someone aside to quietly tell them I may not like what they’re saying.” How- ever, despite the effort he exerts to avoid the possibil- ity that his coworkers might view him as the angry Black man, he still tries to diminish his feelings of irritation at the gendered racism that creates these circumstances:

When I think about it now, I mean, definitely I’m upset but it has to be something really big and overt and serious before I could get really pissed. So you downplay it, contain it like that.

Though Nate assumes a measured, careful reaction to avoid being stereotyped as the angry Black man, he also minimizes his irritation with this situation in ways that Black women in this study did not do. Black male workers’ efforts to remain calm, affable, and genial in order to rebut the image of the angry Black man sharply contrast Black women’s willingness to vocalize and speak up about their colleagues’ and supervisors’ gendered racism.

c o n c l u s i o n

Black men and women in this study both describe ex- periences with racism that are clearly shaped by gender. Black men confront gendered racism at work when they struggle to avoid manifesting any behaviors or attitudes that could possibly reinforce colleagues’ per- ceptions of Black men as threatening or intimidating. Even when Black men attempt to portray themselves as nonthreatening, affable people, coworkers may still find them too daunting and unapproachable for the inter-office friendships and socializing that are often essential to occupational advancement. Black women deal with gendered racism in their encounters with

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the controlling image of the modern Mammy, and in confronting coworkers’ sexualized, exoticized percep- tions of them. Both Black men’s and Black women’s reactions to racism are also structured by gender. Black men have fewer outlets for challenging gendered racism and thus minimize their feelings about it, while Black women’s responses to gendered racism are shaped by its implications that they are fundamentally unthreatening. Drawing attention to gendered racism in the workplace refines sociological understanding of exactly how racism is manifested at work. The results of this study demonstrate that it is erroneous to presume that Black men and Black women experience racism in the same way. While in some ways they experience similar manifestations of racism—assumptions that they are less intelligent and capable, the existence of glass ceilings, institutional discrimination— focusing on gendered racism provides a more nuanced under- standing of the ways in which Black women may ex- perience racism in ways that are inapplicable to Black men, and vice versa.

A particularly significant finding is that while gendered racism contributes to the perception that Black women are easily exploited, particularly for the sake of the workplace, the responses of the women here suggest that this very perception creates a space for them to demonstrate their opposition. In other words, when they know that they are seen as more easily taken advantage of than Black men, they often take the opportunity to assert themselves and dem- onstrate their toughness. This reaction, however, is complex and in some ways potentially problematic. While Black women who assert their refusal to con- form to the stereotypes of the modern mammy may convincingly rebut that stereotype, they run the risk of being alternatively perceived as a version of the “educated Black bitch.”

Collins (2004) describes the controlling image of the “educated Black bitch” as one of Black women with “money, power, and good jobs [who] control their own bodies and sexuality” (145). The Black bitch label is often assigned to Black women who fail to embody the extreme loyalty of the modern Mammy or who cannot uphold the image of the Black lady. With the women interviewed here, their asser- tive refusals to conform and outspoken rejection of

confining workplace norms and organizational cul- tures that rendered them easily exploited or sexually available leave them dangerously subject to gendered racism in the form of being labeled the Black bitch. As such, while gendered racism creates confining norms for Black women, it also may create a space for opposition. Ultimately, however, this opposition can potentially reinforce controlling images like that of the Black bitch, thereby upholding yet another mani- festation of gendered racism.

While Black women face the predicament of avoiding one controlling image by potentially em- bracing another, Black men face a different conun- drum. Their struggle stems from informal workplace norms that pressure them to appear genial and cordial to undermine the controlling image of the “angry Black man.” This issue highlights the fluidity of gender privilege as it intersects with race—while men, in general, receive rewards in patriarchal soci- ety, for Black men, gendered racism may function to minimize male privilege in some settings. Indeed, the Black women interviewed here did not indicate that they experienced the same sense of exclusion and social isolation as their Black male counterparts. For Black men, the dynamics of gendered racism sug- gest that in certain contexts the advantages of mascu- linity are less apparent than in others.

The results of this study do not suggest that gen- dered racism advantages Black women at the expense of Black men, nor that gendered racism eliminates the advantages of male privilege for Black men. Rather, this study reveals a picture of racism that is starkly complicated by gender. As a group, Black men still enjoy gender privileges relative to Black women in occupational, social, political, and economic spheres (Cole & Guy-Sheftall, 2003). However, it is important to consider this gender privilege as a fluid state that is not constant in all environments or social settings. The results of this study clearly indicate that Black men’s gender privilege at work does not cor- relate into an ability to openly address the ways in which racism is manifested for them. Furthermore, the controlling image of the angry Black man, like the controlling images described by Espiritu (1997) and Collins (1990, 2004) should be further explored for its implications for African American men. This

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image, like those of the Fu Manchu, Chinese laun- dryman, sissy, sidekick, and others, ultimately seems to uphold hegemonic white masculinity. This image suggests that Black male rage at racism is inopportune and unfounded, and simultaneously reinforces the perception of Black men as a threat and a danger to the social order. The implications of this in the work- place are seen in many of the respondents’ unwilling- ness to confront racial hostilities at work. Thus, this image controls Black men by presenting their anger at racism as unjustified paranoia that threatens to dis- mantle the social order.

Finally, it is interesting to consider what implica- tions Black men’s responses to gendered racism may have on their interactions outside of the workplace. If Black men learn at work that they should repress their aggravation with gendered racism, what effect

does this emotional control have in other spheres of social life? Does downplaying feelings help Black men to achieve some of the tenets of hegemonic masculinity, specifically those that suggest that men should always control their emotions (Kimmel, 2001; Connell, 1987)? If so, does the practice of repressing emotions benefit Black men in social spheres where conforming to hegemonic masculinity is idealized?

Ultimately, this research suggests that under- standing racism as a gendered phenomenon offers a more nuanced depiction of its impact on African Americans and a more intricate portrayal of their responses to it. This study furthers existing research on gendered racism by addressing the ways gendered racism produces controlling images that impact Afri- can Americans at work and the strategies Black work- ers utilize to counter these images.

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Milian Kang, “I Just Put Koreans and Nails Together”: Nail Spas and the Model Minority

Having them done is a pleasure, a luxury. Doing them myself is tedious, having them done is a treat. It’s the whole idea of going and having something nice done for myself. If I do them myself, it’s just routine upkeep of my body—like washing your hair or keeping your clothes clean.  . . . They do it all day long so they are better at it. The Koreans are usually very good at the massages.  .  .  . I just put Koreans and nails together.

—Kathy, Uptown Nails customer

Let me tell you about you. You come in here with your fin- gernails gleaming and outstretched; you’ve just had them done next door at ajumma’s beauty salon. My mother is jealous of your nails, not because she likes them, but be- cause you have the time to do them.

—Ishle Park, “Anatomy of a Fish Store”

Customer satisfaction in upscale nail spas depends not only on the attractive appearance of their nails but also the enjoyment derived from being pampered, and customers regard Korean women as particularly skillful in this enterprise. Body labor transforms a hygienic process, otherwise equated with washing hair or clothes, into a richly rewarding physical and emotional experience—that is, when it meets custom- ers’ expectations. When it fails to do so, the physical and emotional intimacy of this exchange produces an equal and opposite negative reaction. Appropriate per- formance of this form of “pampering body labor” in- volves extensive physical care, along with attention to the emotional needs of customers, including engaged conversations.

The manicure takes on additional complexities when considered from the other side of the table. The poet Ishle Park depicts a Korean immigrant woman who is eyeing her customer’s manicured nails. In this case the Korean woman is not the manicurist herself but the proprietor of a neighboring fish store. Nonethe- less, this ajumma (literally, “aunt” but used generally to address middle-aged Korean women) expresses jeal- ousy toward women who receive manicures, not neces- sarily because of their appearance but because they can indulge in this kind of self-care. The poem resonates with women working in nail salons, like Jean Hwang, an owner in Brooklyn, who noted, “Grooming one’s feet and nails is unimaginable in Korea. It made me think how Americans enjoy themselves. With twenty dollars they treat themselves and enjoy themselves. I was jealous.  .  .  . I don’t think we have that leisure. We’ve experienced and are still living very rigorous lives.” These women chafe at the differences between themselves and their customers that are manifested in the unequal treatment of their bodies and feelings.

In upscale nail spas the manicure is not simply an economic transaction. It is also a symbolic exchange that involves the buying and selling of deference and attentiveness. In accommodating the various demands of body labor, Asian immigrant women rewrite their own identities to conform to a pamper- ing service demeanor and to the “model minority” stereotype. Customers may profess a belief in Asians as “honorary whites,” but in their face-to-face inter- actions they do not necessarily hold Asians in high

Nail Spas and the Model Minority

33. “I JUST PUT KOREANS AND NAILS TOGETHER”

M I L I A N N K A N G

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esteem. Thus the appearance of cordial intimate re- lations belies underlying tensions, as the gendered practices of pampering body labor uphold the race and class privilege of customers and enforce the sub- servience of manicurists.

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Service interactions between Korean service providers and white middle-class customers reinforce the model minority stereotype, described by Eric Fong, by which “Asian Americans either do not face any discrimina- tion relative to other racial minority groups or, if they did, they have overcome them.” This stereotype permeates public discourse and has been thoroughly critiqued in academic circles. Rather than a single stereotype, the model minority references a constel- lation of factors that frame Asians not only as a laud- able racial group but as proof that the United States is open and egalitarian. The core characteristics used to describe the model minority include hard work, laudable family values, economic self-sufficiency, non- contentious politics, academic achievement, and en- trepreneurial success. Thus it is not simply that Asian Americans are praiseworthy but that this praise is pre- mised on their smooth assimilation into productive but passive citizens who validate the vision of an open meritocratic US society. Academic scholarship has complicated this one-dimensional stereotype, arguing that it is far from a positive representation of Asian Americans. Instead, the stereotype enforces simplis- tic and idealized views not only of Asian Americans but of other racial groups and, more broadly, of race relations in the United States. As Dana Takagi writes: “The concept of the model minority was born in the midst of the tumultuous racial change of the 1960s. Against the backdrop of rioting in black ghettos, the ‘long hot summers’ of the late 1960s, and mass public demonstrations for civil rights, Asian-Americans ap- peared to be a relatively quiescent minority.  .  .  . An- gered by black criticism of the ‘white establishment,’ some whites pointed to Asian-American achievement as evidence that racial minorities could get ahead in America, if only they would ‘try.’” The designation of one group as the “model” thus enforces a hierarchy in which other minorities are judged as lacking. While

ostensibly lauding Asian Americans, this framework chastises other racial and ethnic minorities, particu- larly blacks, for not following in Asians’ footsteps. By emphasizing the success of Asians and their common- alities with whites, the model minority concept serves the dual purpose of holding Asian Americans up as an example for other people of color while also defend- ing the existing US racial order.

The bestowing of honorary white status on Asians simultaneously denigrates other racial and ethnic groups while reinforcing white privilege—and both purposes are enacted through body politics. As David Palumbo-Liu writes, “The image of the Asian in America performs certain ideological functions that serve to secure certain racial and national identi- ties for both Asians and whites,” and these ideolo- gies emphasize the “correlation of the raced body and the national psyche.” He asserts that views of racial- ized Asian bodies, and foreign bodies more gener- ally, as desirable or undesirable emerge as part of a larger project through which nonwhite immigrants and their descendants are welcomed into or excluded from the American nation based on their willingness to support US capitalism and its expansion.

The embrace of Asians as the model minority thereby is premised simultaneously on their em- bodied demonstration of economic productivity and smooth assimilation into mainstream cultural norms, and it is quickly withdrawn when these con- ditions are not met. Laudatory views of Asians can be invoked to discredit the claims of other minority groups and then revoked when Asians emerge as a potential threat to whites. In addition to the fickle and contradictory ways that it is applied, the model minority framing of all Asian immigrants and their children as economically successful and upwardly mobile is itself a fiction, as the category of Asian American encompasses heterogeneous groups and experiences ranging from Hong Kong financiers to Hmong refugees to Amerasian adoptees.

How does gender matter in shaping the ideol- ogy of the Asian model minority, and what new di- mensions does a gender analysis illuminate about this racial framework? The focus on the gendered work processes of body labor expands the study of the model minority beyond a US-centric focus on

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racialized representations to focus attention on work- place interactions shaped by the restructuring forces of global capitalism. Specifically, a gendered analy- sis of Asian women’s work in nail salons reveals new embodied and emotional dimensions of how Asian Americans are constructed as a deserving group based on their willingness to perform deferent and subservient work. As Yen Le Espiritu argues: “Because of their racial ambiguity, Asian Americans have been constructed historically to be both ‘like black’ and ‘like white,’ as well as neither black nor white. Simi- larly, Asian women have been both hyperfeminized and masculinized, and Asian men have been both hypermasculinized and feminized. And in social class and cultural terms, Asian Americans have been cast as the “unassimilable alien,” and the “model mi- nority” (Okihiro 1994). Their ambiguous, middling positions maintain systems of privilege and power but also threaten and destabilize these constructs of hierarchies.”

Drawing on Espiritu’s analysis, I bring a gender perspective to the critique of the ideology of the Asian model minority as an erroneous and politi- cally motivated myth. Specifically, nail salons un- cover forms of interaction that reproduce racialized, classed, and gendered discourses of the Asian model minority, through representations but even more so through material embodied exchanges. Customers, owners, and workers all participate in this reproduc- tion, even as they offer limited forms of resistance.

m a n i c u r i n g t h e m o d e l m i n o r i t y

The model minority stereotype of Asians, and Kore- ans in particular, as successful, servile, and industrious takes on specifically gendered dimensions in the niche of nail services. Pampering body labor intersects with racial discourses in ways that valorize the work ethic of Korean and other Asian immigrants and construct a specifically gendered version of this discourse. The comments and behavior of customers demonstrate that while many adhere ideologically to the laudatory view of Asians as the model minority, their interac- tions with Asian women belie this rhetoric.

Like many customers in this study, Kathy, the white personal trainer whom I quoted earlier  .  .  .  ,

attributed a particular skillfulness in service, espe- cially in the giving of massages, to Asian women, even elevating this understanding to the level of urban lore:

I assume they’re Korean. That’s interesting—I wonder how I first came to know they are Korean. I think it’s one of those urban myth kind of things you just pick up on it when you’re living in New York. . . . Like the delis—everyone says, “I’m going to the Korean deli.” Now that I think about it, they could be Chinese or Japanese or Vietnamese, but I just heard the people who did the nail salons were Korean, and then I see someone who looks Korean enough, so I just assume they’re Korean. It’s like if I had a massage and the person doing it were tall and blond and blue-eyed, I would just assume they were Swedish. . . . [The ste- reotype of Koreans is] willing to work very hard, in- terested in their children’s education. Like, a friend of my husband’s [is] Korean, and his parents worked for thirty years in a Dunkin’ Donuts and sent their kid to Columbia. That kind of captures it. . . . [Regarding nail salons] I agree that they work hard.

Kathy frames Korean women’s skillfulness in mani- cures as similar to equating “Swedish” with massage. However, Swedish massage is a type of massage char- acterized by specific techniques rather than simply an ethnic designation. In contrast, Kathy references cul- tural stereotypes, not specific techniques, to explain why she regards manicuring work as the distinct pur- view of Korean women. Ignoring the forces of immi- gration, racialization, and economic restructuring, she holds to a simplistic gendered version of the model minority stereotype that essentializes Korean women, or women who look “Korean enough,” as possessing intrinsic manicuring skills.

Similarly, many white middle-class respondents explain Asian women’s clustering in nail salon work by invoking their natural ability and innate sense of service. Thus gendered Orientalist tropes of Asian women’s inborn affinity for body services natural- izes their work in nail salons as somehow deriving from inherent biological or cultural traits. As this customer described it, having an Asian manicurist imbues these services with an exoticized quality that enhances their appeal: “The quality of the massage here is much better. I like to go to the Japanese beauty

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salons for the same reason, they do shiatsu on your head, it’s amazing. Culturally, there are things Asians can bring to [this] service that I don’t think others are as sensitive to.  .  .  . This [American] culture doesn’t understand a service. It’s not subservience or being a doormat. It’s just the level to which you are will- ing to accommodate the needs of another, to go out of your way.” Thus Orientalist framings reinforce the notion that Asian women not only are well suited to this work but that they enjoy it.

According to the sociologist Christine Williams, this belief that people end up in certain jobs because they like them is a distinctly “middle-class conceit.” In her study of retail employees in toy stores, she de- bunks the myth that workers select their jobs based on their interests, skills, or preferences—“In the world of low-wage retail work, no one assumes that people choose their occupations or that their jobs re- flect who they are.” However, with regard to Asian women in nail salon work, the assumption that they somehow choose this work because they like it and are good at it is strangely persistent. Yet customers do not apply this same logic of natural affinity to other racial and ethnic women in nail salons. For example, Barbara, an Uptown Nails customer, commented, “I think it’s because they [Asian women] specialize in making the manicure a nice experience, but they also seem to enjoy it and know what they are doing. I used to have my hair, facial, and nails all done at the same place; it was women from Russia or Poland. But they didn’t really want to do manicures.” Thus Bar- bara regards women from Eastern Europe as quickly moving in and out of the salon industry because they are not well suited to it. In contrast, her racial con- struction of Asian women in nail salons positions them not simply as having expertise in this work but as finding the work enjoyable and something they “want to do.”

Consistent with Barbara’s observations, many Russian immigrant women initially worked in the nail salon niche but then moved into other work. However, contrary to Barbara’s assertion that they simply do not enjoy it, the explanation for Russian women’s departure does not lie solely in their indi- vidual proclivities for this work or lack thereof. A trade magazine article suggests one explanation:

although Russian immigrants dominated nail salons before the 1970s, “their education level suggests that once they mastered English, they moved on to other opportunities.” While this explanation is somewhat plausible, it fails to address why Korean women, many of whom also have high levels of education and similar mastery of English, have not been able to move on to other opportunities.

Furthermore, although Russians dominated the niche at one point, the association of Russian women and manicurist did not become a widespread cul- tural stereotype. Why not? The answer lies not only in individual human capital, such as language abil- ity or education, but in racial categorization. Once they acquire basic language fluency, Russians and other recent immigrants from Eastern Europe are able to quickly assimilate as whites—not as “hon- orary whites” or as a “model minority” but simply as whites. Even with heavily accented English, this racial status then gives them greater ability to enter into the US mainstream and gain access to wider employment opportunities. In contrast, Koreans and other Asian immigrants, even those who conform to the stereotype of the upwardly mobile, hardworking model minority, still occupy a marginalized status in which nail salon work remains among the best of the options available to them.

These racial and gender constructions of Asian women as gentle, hardworking, and eager to please normalize their position as willing and able provid- ers of service to higher-status groups. This gendered version of the model minority further disciplines other racial and ethnic women who do not meet the same standards of industrious deferential service. Elizabeth, a social worker in her midfifties whose Russian parents fled the former Soviet Union, lauded the industriousness of Koreans while chiding other groups, particularly blacks, for their supposed ani- mosity toward Koreans. Referring to the boycotts of Korean grocery stores in the early 1990s . . . , she said: “You know, I’m a Russian Jew—so I have a special feeling toward people coming and trying to make a new life in a new country. To attack people based on their ethnicity because they’re trying to earn a living—they [blacks] could have done that too [started small businesses] . . . I admire the ability

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of you Koreans to pull together group resources, to help each other. I’m always open to people who work hard and take care of themselves.” Interest- ingly, many of the white respondents in the study who invoked a sense of affinity with Koreans were Jewish. Thus Jews, who may be considered white but also have a history of oppression, as well as fairly recent immigration, may feel a sense of connection with Asian immigrants that mainstream whites do not necessarily share. In addition, customers like Elizabeth not only emphasize similarities between Asian immigrants and their own Russian Jewish an- cestors but also chastise blacks, whom they regard as unfairly blaming Koreans for blacks’ own lack of re- sourcefulness. Thus Elizabeth attributes the paucity of black women in the ranks of nail salon owners (and owners of other small business enterprises) to African Americans’ own failures, rather than ques- tioning whether Elizabeth or her friends would pa- tronize these businesses if they were black owned. In the post–civil rights era, the employment of blacks in service jobs can evoke feelings of guilt or fear on the part of white customers. Thus white customers’ enthusiasm for Asian manicurists not only repro- duces gendered model minority constructions of Asians but also enforces less desirable views of black and other minority women.

These racial constructions also draw distinctions and hierarchies among different Asian ethnicities. In contrast to the black working-class customers . . . who tended to lump Koreans into a broad category of Asians or “Orientals,” most middle-class white customers specifically identified the nail salons as Korean owned and attached favorable ethnic-specific meanings to Koreans as opposed to other Asians. Clara, a high school teacher in her early forties, iden- tified most nail salons in her affluent neighborhood as specifically Korean run and invoked the model mi- nority framework to describe them:

I know they’re Korean. Different ethnic groups go into different fields—the Chinese have laundries, the Koreans have produce stands and nail salons.  .  .  . I know the stereotypes about hardworking students and close families. Although I took an aerobics class with this young woman who was doing research

about the boycott of the Korean stores. She was an ultra, ultraliberal.  .  .  . Anyway, she completely dis- abused me of those success story stereotypes—but then again, she got her BA from Harvard, and I think she was going to Yale, and now she’s teaching college somewhere.

While Clara claims that she has been disabused of the narrow “success story stereotype” of Koreans, in the end this encounter validates her belief in the model minority. In her mind the Korean American aerobics student’s attendance at Ivy League institutions stands out more than the woman’s arguments refuting the stereotype.

While these ethnic-specific views of Koreans are significant, overall they feed into generalized model minority views of Asian Americans as a group. Some customers, particularly the descendants of white ethnic immigrants such as Jews, assert a sense of affinity with Asians while still asserting their own white privilege. Ignoring the historically and cul- turally heterogeneous experiences that shape Asian Americans as a diverse racial group, the model mi- nority stereotype lumps them all together into a single collective autobiography. In this monolithic story line the much-touted upward mobility of the second generation deflects attention from the diffi- culties confronted by the first generation, as well as from inequalities in US society.

Gendered service interactions in upscale nail spas reflect large-scale social forces, but these forces are often concealed behind racial and gender stereo- types of Asian women as naturally doting and depre- catory. In line with customers’ expectations, upscale nail spas place great importance on physical and emotional attentiveness as crucial components of the service interaction. Rarely do customers, or man- icurists themselves, recognize the influence of dis- crimination or other structural barriers as pushing these women into this niche. Even less do customers acknowledge how they benefit from and participate in the truncated opportunity structures that relegate Asian women to working as their manicurists. In nail spas such as Uptown and Exclusive Nails, the gen- dered expectations of beauty service work combine with the racial stereotype of the model minority to

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produce a style of pampering body labor that is not natural but imposed.

u p t o w n n a i l s

The concentrated faces of six Korean immigrant women sitting in a row of small manicuring tables are visible from the right side of the storefront window beneath the neon cursive letters spelling out “Uptown Nails.” The women are identically attired in matching pink smocks and white pants resembling the uniforms of dental assistants and deftly wield emery boards, cu- ticle pushers, quick-dry sprays, and assorted polishes. From the left side of the window the customers sitting across the manicure tables are visible—five profes- sionally dressed white women and one white man in suit and tie—all with their hands languidly extended before them in a posture suggestive of concert pianists or praying mantises.

“Tuesday is my salon day,” explained Gwen, who was in her eighties and regularly patronized this salon. Her statement was not an exaggeration, as her regular visits were nearly half-day affairs. Dropped off by her professionally dressed daughter in the morning, Gwen would remain for two or three hours before being picked up by a private home healthcare provider. During her stay in the salon this customer received, in addition to a manicure and a pedi- cure, various caregiving services that were taken for granted yet unremunerated. Removing Gwen’s shoes and knee-high panty hose and helping her climb up to the thronelike pedicure chair required two mani- curists. For the next hour these women stooped at Gwen’s feet, preparing a fragrant foot bath, massaging her arthritic feet and legs, clipping her cracked yellow toenails, placing cotton balls between her toes, pol- ishing her nails in pastel pink, sliding on brown paper slippers to prevent smudges, and escorting her as she walked ducklike to the manicuring station. These elaborate processes were then repeated on her hands.

While the degree of care that Gwen demands is beyond what the average customer receives, she none- theless illustrates the intense emotional and physical attention that is common in pampering body labor. Gwen usually needed to go to the bathroom at least twice during her visits, requiring at least two mani- curists to virtually lift her out of her chair and walk

her gingerly to the restroom. After settling her at the drying table, manicurists brought her a magazine and cup of coffee. On one occasion Gwen drifted off to sleep and began to slump sideways in her chair. A manicurist spotted her and carefully slid Gwen’s chair next to the wall to prevent her from falling. When she awakened, Gwen prattled happily about the weather, the comings and goings of her children and grandchildren, and her various ailments and medications. The manicurists attended to her smil- ingly as they indulged her in conversation. “Your grandson is graduating from college already!” “Are you wearing a new dress?” While they were clearly fond of her, the exacting toll of her visits was evident. As Gwen approached the front door one day, Stacey, the manager, sighed and asked, “OK, who wants the ‘famous grandmother’ today?”

Steeped in the discourse of Asians as the model minority, many middle- and upper-class whites like Gwen extol the virtues of their manicurists and ex- hibit comfort with and even a measure of gratitude toward them. At the same time the customers are mostly oblivious to the hardships involved in mani- curing work and are even less aware of the ways that they participate in the maintenance of subtle and not- so-subtle practices of privilege and subordination. For example, Gwen appreciated the care she received at Uptown Nails but seemed blind to the demands she placed on the women who provided this care. In- stead, she claimed, “We have fun together. I like to talk, keep it lively. Some of them don’t understand, which can be frustrating, but I know they try hard. They are very kind, hardworking people and they are very good at what they do. . . . I think this is a good job for them. I’ve heard some of them even get rich doing this.” Glossing over the demanding work that her manicurists performed before her eyes, or rather at her feet and on her hands, Gwen described this as a good, “fun” job and a vehicle for upward mobil- ity. Overlooking the physical and emotional effort of the women who perform this work, she suggested in- stead that she accommodates them by tolerating their limited language ability.

When her caregiver arrived, Gwen thanked her manicurists for their help and left what seemed like a generous tip. But what did this tip cover? How

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much would it cost to pay her home-care provider for the two hours of assistance that her manicurists provide for free as an extension of their manicuring services? How much pay would her daughter forgo if she had to take a morning off from work to care for her mother herself or assist her at the nail salon? None of these hidden costs was reflected in the price of Gwen’s mani–pedi. Instead, the physical and emo- tional care conferred in addition to the actual nail services was invisible, as was the toll of this work on the women who do it.

d i s c r e pa n c i e s i n t h e va l u at i o n o f b o d y l a b o r

The disjuncture in the valuing of a manicure by cus- tomers versus the work invested by manicurists often shows up in the customers’ assessment of tips. Sheila, a white woman in her late twenties who works in ad- vertising, saw herself as a generous and appreciative customer, especially toward Esther, whom Sheila saw often. A seasoned Korean manicurist who had worked at Uptown Nails for nearly ten years, Esther was in high demand for her relaxing and invigorating hand mas- sages. She energetically kneaded, stroked, and pushed pressure points, finishing off the massage by holding each of Sheila’s hands between her own and alter- nately rubbing, slapping, and gently pounding them with a flare that had wooed many a customer into a regular nail salon habit. Sheila appreciated Esther’s ef- forts and said, “I think I’m a good tipper. I usually tip 20 percent regardless, just like in a restaurant.” After she left, Esther commented, “I can’t believe she thinks she’s a good tipper. We should get more than what they tip at a restaurant. This takes more skill, and we are making them look pretty, not just putting food on the table like a waitress. I don’t expect her to tip a lot because she looks like she doesn’t make much money, but I can’t believe she thinks she’s a good tipper.”

Clearly, two different standards for tipping, and for assessing the value of a service, were operating in this exchange. Sheila calculated what she regarded as a big tip, in accordance with the protocols of other service occupations, such as waiting tables. Esther, on the other hand, made a different assessment based on the unique nature of this service and the particu- lar skills and effort it entails. From her perspective a

manicure is not comparable to serving food. In terms of the benefit to the customer, it enables the highly valued accomplishment of looking pretty. In terms of the output by the manicurist, it requires more skill, not only in the physical manicure itself but in attend- ing to the feelings of customers.

Many customers did show appreciation for Es- ther’s hard work. Margie, a white accountant in her midthirties who was single, squeezed Esther’s hand at the end of a hand massage and said, “I swear, I couldn’t stay in my job without this!” Esther recip- rocated with a warm, somewhat shy, smile. This cus- tomer’s compliment acknowledged the benefits she received but did not take into account the wear and tear on Esther’s own hands.  .  .  . [T]he occupational health risks involved in manicuring work . . . include exposure to toxic chemicals, allergies, rashes, carpal tunnel syndrome, and repetitive strain injury. These common health complaints of long-time manicurists like Esther, let alone the effort it takes for manicurists to discipline their own bodies to perform this work, rarely appear on the radar of customers.

d i s c i p l i n a r y t e c h n o l o g i e s o f b o d y l a b o r

From the gentle removal of undernail dirt to the care- ful trimming of cuticles and buffing of calluses to the massaging of hands and feet, Korean manicurists lit- erally rub up against their customers, who are mostly white middle-class and upper-class women. In their efforts to pamper other women’s bodies, the manicur- ists must discipline their own. Like many manicurists at upscale salons, thirty-four-year-old Judy Cha, who emigrated in 1993, told me that attentive body labor was not something that came naturally to her. Instead, her ability to conform to the pampering service expec- tations of her elite clientele was hard won over time. Furthermore, these were not simply voluntary adapta- tions but were dictated by the feeling and body rules of her workplace. She explained:

Three years ago we didn’t give a lot of massages but now customers ask more and more. It makes me weak and really tired  .  .  . I guess because I don’t have the right training to do it in a way that doesn’t tire my body. Some manicurists give massage all the time to

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get tips, but sometimes I don’t even ask [clients if they want a massage] if I’m tired. Owners keep asking you to ask them, but on days I’m not feeling well, I don’t ask. . . . One of my biggest fears working in the salon is, what if I don’t understand what the customer is saying? They don’t really talk in detail, just say, “How is the weather?” But in order to have a deeper rela- tionship, I need to get past that and to improve my English. It makes it very stressful.

Judy had learned not only to give manicures and mas- sages but also to attend to customers’ emotions, espe- cially by engaging in conversation to make customers feel comfortable and relaxed. Learning to perform body labor thus includes both physical and emotional dimensions and the integration of the two.

The physical dimensions of pampering body labor encompass a range of service practices, including the use of high-end salon products and equipment, mas- sages, and creation of a soothing and relaxing atmo- sphere, as well as management of the workers’ own bodies as they perform these services. The attention devoted to creating a pampering environment at Uptown Nails is impressive and included hot cotton towels, bowls of warm soaking solution, and calm- ing background music. The salon also offered special- ized services, such as hot stone massages, lactol and paraffin wax soaks, aromatherapy, and skin refiners. The salon boasted high-end equipment, such as spe- cial drying tables with ultraviolet lights and pedi- cure chairs with hydrotherapy and massage features. These are big-ticket investments—high-end equip- ment costs thousands of dollars—and they are indic- ative of the substantial capital outlay that is necessary to open and sustain an upscale salon. However, while the products and tools are important, the effective delivery of pampering body labor depends mainly upon the performance of the manicurist herself.

Manicurists’ efforts to adapt their bodies to this work are evident in their changed comportment during break times. During lulls in customer flows, manicurists often slip off their shoes and assume relaxed postures. Some women comfortably assume squatting positions, knees together, feet apart, while others sit casually with one leg bent and the foot tucked under the opposite thigh. The moment a cus- tomer walks in, however, they immediately assume

upright positions. These dynamics are certainly not unique to nail salons, as it is not uncommon for service workers in a range of industries to adopt what Erving Goffman calls “frontstage” and “backstage” bodily self-presentations, relaxing when customers are not around, then snapping to attention when someone appears. However, when a customer walks in, mani- curists quickly both abandon their off-duty postures and avoid any bodily arrangements that suggest pre- modernity and ethnic otherness. Furthermore, they do not choose their postures—these are mandated by customers’ expectations and labor management practices in the salons. For example, Grace Lee, a new worker and recent immigrant who was employed at Uptown Nails, prepared for a pedicure by assuming a squatting position at her customer’s feet. Stacey, the manager, slid a stool over to Grace and chastised her, saying, “It doesn’t look good to squat. Sit on this.” At another salon I heard one owner hiss, “Don’t take your shoes off while you’re with a customer,” after spying a manicurist who had slipped her shoes off under the table. Nail salon owners and managers thus pick up on cues from their customers’ embodied norms and then impose these bodily controls on workers.

t h e l a n g u a g e o f s e r v i c e

“Your nails look awesome!” Angela Shin, a perky twenty-seven-year-old receptionist at Uptown Nails, would tell customers, peppering her speech with col- loquial phrases such as “How’s it going?” and “Why don’t you hang out and read some magazines?” While somewhat comical, her conversational style succeeded at putting customers at ease, even though her actual language ability was less advanced than that of some of the other Korean women who worked in the salon. Angela’s conversational ability was the hard-earned outcome of an intensive “accent reduction” class, a cottage-industry that has sprung up to serve recent im- migrants. Later, when I interviewed her, I was surprised that her seeming fluency was mostly artifice, as she did not understand when I ventured outside the vocabu- lary of salon services and asked her questions in Eng- lish that were related to my research.

While a friendly, chatty receptionist can cer- tainly be an asset in a business predicated on making

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customers feel good, Angela’s conversational prac- tices reveal more than just a talkative personality. They reflect the communicative demands of what Robin Leidner in her book Fast Food, Fast Talk refers to as “interactive ser vice work.” While Leidner notes a general expectation of pleasant conversation in ser vice interactions, this dimension of ser vice work is heightened when the ser vice provider and customer do not speak the same language. Korean manicurists thus must learn two new languages— basic English and the language of pampering ser- vice. More important than general fluency are the particular language skills related to the provision of nail ser vices that manicurists must also learn. Cus- tomers expect conversational attentiveness, owners and managers dictate it, and manicurists develop skills to provide it.

Despite the manicurists’ efforts, many customers complain, not only about the manicurists’ limited English ability but also their communication among themselves in Korean. Like Elaine in the Seinfeld epi- sode, many white middle-class customers have strong reactions to their manicurists’ practice of speaking in Korean and are suspicious that clients are the topic of these conversations. Customers are often unaware of the demands that they impose on their manicur- ists for proper and unaccented English and atten- tive conversation. In addition, clients often become upset when they perceive that service providers are intentionally ignoring their requests or talking about them. Many express feelings like those to which this customer attested: “To tell you the truth, I don’t think they really listen, they just do what they want to do. It’s not because they don’t understand me.” Thus some white middle-class customers interpret the lack of response to their service requests, as well as the Korean women’s use of their native language, as signs of willfulness, manipulation, or subversion, and in some cases the customers are right.

e v e r y d ay r e s i s ta n c e t o b o d y l a b o r

Even to maximize their earnings or job security, mani- curists are not solely committed to meeting custom- ers’ needs. Instead, they balance meeting customers’ demands with maintaining a sense of dignity in

accommodating this work. While the manicurists may recognize the value of English fluency as a way of con- forming to model minority expectations in their work, they also develop ways of resisting what they see as ex- cessive demands. The ambivalence that some Korean manicurists express toward improving their language ability hints at the benefits that accrue from the in- ability or perceived inability to understand English. While most manicurists are intent on improving their language ability and want to communicate effectively with customers, some, like Sandy, avoided conversa- tions and requests as a way of rejecting the role of sub- servient model minority member. Unfortunately, this strategy often was double edged, as it both shielded against and increased tensions with customers. Upon completion of her manicure, a customer frowned disapprovingly at the color and asked Sandy, “Since it’s not dry yet, do you think you can just change the color?” Refusing to pick up on the obvious cues of a dissatisfied customer, Sandy responded, “Oh, dry, you want dry, go over there,” pointing to the dryers against the opposite wall and briskly escorting the customer from her seat. In addition to buffering Sandy from dissatisfied or derogatory comments and allowing her to respond in kind, her language strategies enable her to have a modicum of control over the work she performs. However, these strategies also undercut her ability to earn higher tips and acquire skills that could enable her to move into other kinds of work, let alone to feel more at ease in her new country.

Unlike Sandy, most manicurists recognize cus- tomers’ high expectations with regard to standards for communication, and they largely conform to these expectations. At the same time they find ways to subvert these demands, and language can serve as an effective, albeit limited, tool of resistance. The ability to communicate in Korean makes their work- ing conditions more tolerable and serves as a form of resistance to cultural domination. Nancy, who was usually easygoing and soft-spoken, had raised hack- les as she recounted an instance of talking about a customer as a means of retribution for the woman’s insensitive comments:

Once I was with a customer, and she hadn’t said any- thing to me, not even, “Hi, how are you?” but all of

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a sudden she asks me, “Is it true that you eat dogs in Korea?” I didn’t know what to say, so I just acted like I didn’t understand her. Later, when she was drying, I told Esther what she had said. So right in front of her, Esther says in Korean, “Yes, we eat dogs but only raw!” You know how funny Esther can be, she went on and on. I was laughing so hard I can’t remember everything she said, something like we only eat the fat ones that are other people’s pets! I know it’s not right, but I have to admit, I really enjoyed making fun of her.

Whether the customer’s question about eating dogs indicates derision or insensitivity, it taps into a famil- iar motif that placed Nancy in the position of having to defend her culture. The title of Jessica Hagedorn’s novel Dogeaters illustrates the pejorative ways that the consumption of dog meat in particular has been used as a way of denigrating Asian cultures. Such comments call into question the acceptance of Asians as a model minority. With Esther’s help and their ability to talk about the customer, Nancy used humor and camarade- rie to neutralize the sting of the customer’s query. Thus manicurists use language practices both to fend off work requests and to release negative feelings aroused by insensitive or upsetting customer comments. How- ever, these uses of language as resistance are largely symbolic. They help to vent frustrations, but they do not fundamentally challenge relations of power and privilege. Customers’ discomfort with manicurists’ speaking to each other in Korean signals clients’ rec- ognition of this act as subversive, whether intentional or not. In some cases manicurists use Korean to talk about customers, but more often they are simply com- municating about work-related issues or conversing with coworkers. These practices allow them to reestab- lish a sense of identity independent of their work, but they carry a high cost.

Some would argue that speaking in another lan- guage in front of others who do not understand it is simply rude and should be discouraged in all situ- ations. However, this understanding of rudeness is unevenly applied in different contexts. Many English speakers regularly use English in front of those who do not understand it, adopting an “English-only” mentality even in foreign countries or communities

that speak another language. Acknowledging these tendencies, Jiwon Cho, a manicurist at another up- scale nail salon in Manhattan, voiced sympathy for the customers and urged her colleagues to learn Eng- lish and abstain from speaking in Korean. She said:

When you don’t understand and speak English, your job becomes so pitiful. I didn’t realize this in the beginning. For example, if a nervous and difficult customer comes, there is no one who can take care of that customer. When she complains about some- thing, even though it might be a very simple and basic problem, since no one understands, the cus- tomer leaves very upset. . . . Some customers tell me, “Before making money, learn English.” In the begin- ning I thought that it was just a friendly advice, but then as time went on I realized that they really meant what they said. . . . They are frustrated, and they look down on us. I get angry when they say these things, but sometimes I wonder if they are right. If a foreigner was living in Korea and did not speak Korean, I would pity them and look down on them, too.

While Jiwon conjectured that she too would harbor negative feelings toward foreigners in her country who do not learn the native language, the reality is that many foreigners go to South Korea for business or travel and never learn a word of Korean yet usually are treated well or at least are not denigrated. In fact, many US citizens, even when they are visiting or work- ing in another country, expect that others should speak English, rather than that Americans should make an effort to learn the culture and language of the country they are visiting. Given these language dynamics, man- icurists like Jiwon are more likely to see themselves as pitiful for resorting to the use of Korean rather than questioning the customers’ strong reactions to hearing a foreign language.

Similarly, manicurists who remain in nail salon work for the long term mostly conform to customer demands in terms of embodied expectations. At the same time, as with language, the manicurists engage in limited acts of embodied resistance that may ame- liorate but do not change the demands of pamper- ing body labor. At Uptown Nails one form that this takes is poking fun at customers’ serious investment in their nails. One day, close to Halloween, I entered

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the salon during a slow time to find the manicurists festively, and somewhat conspiratorially, painting each other’s nails the colors of M&M candies. They revealed that they also painted hearts on their nails around Valentine’s Day and green clovers for St. Pat- rick’s Day. In their gleefulness they seemed aware that they were doing something mildly subversive by bestowing on each other a semblance of the pamper- ing treatment that they usually reserve for their cus- tomers. At the same time they were doting on each other in a way that undermined the seriousness of the enterprise and instead made it both playful and somewhat ridiculous. However, when the women left the salon at the end of the day, they had removed the candy-colored polish from their nails. Thus these seeds of resistance did not flower into any sustained collective consciousness or action inside, let alone outside, the salon.

Resistance to body labor is further undermined by manicurists’ identification with the needs and status of their customers, wherein they claim status by association with their customers’ racial and class privilege. Some manicurists gain satisfaction and a vicarious sense of status by performing skillful work for customers of a higher social position and earn- ing their appreciation. For example, as the owner of an upscale salon in Manhattan, Lisa Park has a well-established clientele and is in high demand. She is the only manicurist at the salon who sched- ules appointments, and these are reserved for elabo- rate silk or linen wraps. The painstaking process of layering nails with thin strands of delicate fabric to strengthen, lengthen, and smooth them can take well over an hour and generally costs more than $50. After Lisa completed a flawless silk wrap one day, her regular customer exclaimed, “Lisa, you’re the best in the city!” and supplemented her appreciation with an exceptionally generous $20 tip. Lisa beamed and proudly displayed her $20 to her workers and cus- tomers. Later, when asked about her relationship with this high-tipping customer, Lisa did not ac- knowledge any particular fondness for her, saying, “I think maybe she’s a lawyer. Anyway, she’s a very rich and high [status] person, and she only trusts me, so I feel good.” Even when they do not become personally close to their customers, some owners

and manicurists, like Lisa, enjoy helping their well- heeled clients to look good, in addition to realizing the monetary rewards that may accrue as a result. In many salons the more skillful manicurists perform difficult and expensive procedures and mainly attend to regular patrons, thus putting themselves in a posi- tion to receive the biggest tips and most appreciation.

Manicurists thus exhibit a range of responses to the demands of pampering body labor. Some inter- nalize the service ethic and identify with the higher status of their customers, at times deriving a sense of status by association. Others engage in strategic ac- quiescence, outwardly fulfilling service expectations but inwardly rejecting positions of subservience. Fi- nally, some manicurists are able to engage in subtle forms of resistance, by talking about customers or refusing to perform certain tasks. These responses demonstrate their assertion of agency but also reveal the circumscribed parameters in which the manicur- ists exercise resistance. At another upscale salon, Ex- clusive Nails, customers and service providers were able to express genuine caring and connection, but underlying power relations persisted.

e x c l u s i v e n a i l s : t h e l i m i t s o f p e r s o n a l t i e s

Charlie, the owner of Exclusive Nails  .  .  .  , is a gen- erous and proud woman who regarded her relations with customers as based not on servility or economic necessity but on friendship. Her position as owner, the prosperity of her salon, as well as the receptivity of her customers allowed her to validate this more em- powering framing of her work. At the same time this alternative framework was subject to cracks, as even a well-liked and successful owner like Charlie is not immune to the demands that she acquiesce to a posi- tion of subservience as she supplies pampering body labor. Despite the absence of overt discrimination or exploitation, inequalities persist, as does the discourse of the model minority and the expectations that ac- company it.

As she had with many of her customers, Charlie had developed a special relationship with Patti, a hospital social worker and chronic nail biter. These two women had forged a relationship as customer

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and manicurist that was mutually supportive and humanizing, and they attempted to rewrite the dy- namics of service as a story of genuine friendship. However, this alternative narrative did not hold up against structural forces that overrode the terms of their connection. Patti, who was plagued by her nail biting habit, did not take for granted the care that she received. “I always get very anxious and this is my habit. I don’t smoke or overeat, I don’t drink or do drugs, but I bite my nails. . . . So, it is important that [the manicurists] take care of me. They would hurt me unless they are very careful. See? You see what I did to my nails. You see the bottom of the thumb? . . . I would not go anywhere else. It is nice here com- pared to other places where they are not as careful and they do not care. . . . I trust her [Charlie].” Patti frames the intensive body labor that she receives at Exclusive Nails not as a commercialized exchange or as an exercise in racial and class privilege but as a relationship with another woman based on trust, in- timacy, and reciprocity. She was eager to help Charlie with English-language documents and often stepped in as an intermediary with new or disgruntled cus- tomers. Poignantly, Patti told me, “There have been times when the only way I celebrated my birthday was to come here to get a manicure from Charlie.”

In return, Charlie expressed appreciation for Patti and also referred to her as a friend. At the same time Charlie acknowledged the multiple challenges of ne- gotiating their relationship within the constraints of their roles as customer and service provider. Charlie said of Patti, “She is my friend, we help, each other. . . . Really, her nails are in terrible shape—I have to be so careful not to hurt her because all the skin under the nail is exposed.” As Charlie acknowledged, although she appreciated Patti’s patronage and various forms of assistance, working on her gnawed nails was highly stressful. Despite both women’s insistence that they were friends, ultimately, the work of maintaining their relationship fell on Charlie. Patti often refers to Charlie as her “therapist,” which attests to the level of emotional labor that Charlie invested. I noticed that if Charlie was working on another customer when Patti arrived, she hurried to finish or asked another manicurist to take over so that she could attend to Patti promptly. On one occasion Patti had waited for

a few minutes, then apologetically but impatiently pointed to her watch, pressuring Charlie to finish quickly. These interactions do not suggest the equal footing of friends but rather the dictates of a gener- ous but nonetheless demanding customer toward a beholden service provider. Furthermore, while Char- lie and Patti were able to forge some semblance of a friendship within the salon, this relationship did not extend into their lives outside the service setting. When I asked Charlie whether they ever saw each other outside the salon, she took the question liter- ally—“Oh, yes, she always waves when she walks by.”

All this is not to say that the kind of genuinely caring service relationship that Charlie and Patti had nurtured is not meaningful or worth developing. What it does say is that while these positive microinterac- tions can take the sting out of the subservience associ- ated with body labor, they do not fundamentally alter the terms of these exchanges and the relative status and power of the actors involved. These relationships coexist with systemic inequalities, including the hier- archies of service provision and the racial discourses of white privilege and the Asian model minority. They do not erase them. Furthermore, these embodied and emotional dimensions of service provision shape par- ticular patterns of assimilation.

e m o t i o n a l a n d e m b o d i e d a s s i m i l at i o n

Through the performance of pampering body labor, immigrant women service providers like Charlie un- dergo processes of emotional and embodied assimila- tion in order to conform to customers’ expectations, the protocols of their workplace, and racial and gender stereotypes of Asian Americans. I ran into Charlie one day as she was leaving a gourmet deli with a bag of groceries and a bouquet of rainbow tulips. Pointing to the flowers, I asked if she was going to visit some- one, and unlike many immigrant women, who might feel self-conscious or indulgent about such a purchase, she answered unapologetically, “No, I just bought them for myself.” Charlie often brought fresh-cut flowers into the salon, earning customers’ approving comments, and it appears that the attention she put into pampering body labor had rubbed off on the ways she now pampered herself. As a successful nail

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salon owner, Charlie rewarded herself for a hard day’s work in quintessentially American style—through the conspicuous consumption of high-end goods. These small purchases reveal that the day-in, day-out work of conforming to the physical and emotional register of customers reconfigures manicurists’ own identities in small but unalterable increments. The performance of pampering body labor fosters emotional and em- bodied forms of assimilation that draw upon both the racial rhetoric of Asians as the model minority and the gendered framing of Asian women as attentive to ser- vice and aesthetics. These frameworks extend beyond the nail salon into other areas of women’s lives.

At the same time Charlie had not yet internal- ized the service expectations of her customers to the point that she herself would purchase the same kind of high-end manicures that she so expertly provided. When I asked her about this, she curtly replied, “No, that’s what I do for work.” In other words, although Charlie had absorbed certain elements of the ethic of pampering self-care, she drew the line at actually shifting from the seat of the beauty service provider to that of the consumer. Her assimilation into the ethos of pampering body labor redefined her identity and relationships in ways that complemented but did not alter her social position as a manicurist and nail salon owner performing pampering body labor. In the end she conformed to the discourse of the model minority and to the gendered norms of spa-level beauty service.

Sadly, even with this high level of assimilation, Charlie is still viewed and treated by many customers as someone outside the American mainstream. In the following exchange, Alexandra, a regular customer, revealed both her high standards for body labor as well as her sense of privilege over Charlie as a pro- vider of these services. When I asked Alexandra what improvements she might like to see at the salon, she first directed her comments to me, then made a revealing shift in tone as she addressed Charlie in broken English:

Make it more like a spa. Have aromatherapy when you get a pedicure. It is not that expensive, and you can do probably forty–fifty pedicures and use that one same bottle before you run out. I don’t think it is going to be a lot of added cost. . . . They are going to remodel

the place which they really need. The place is so out- dated. [She notices that Charlie is listening and directs her next comments to her, conspicuously switching her tone and grammar.] People come in and see old decoration, they think old store, dirty, not good. So they are more likely to leave. When you have fresh new appearance, people think fresh new look, good stuff!

Later, when I asked Charlie, who had lived in the United States for more than ten years by then and was quite conversant in English, how she felt about Alexandra’s way of speaking to her, she shrugged and said, “They all do it. Maybe they think they are making it easier for us to understand, but it shows how they think we are stupid.”

Alexandra was not intentionally disrespectful of Charlie or the other Korean women in the salon—on the contrary, she prided herself on her knowledge and appreciation of Korean culture and she proudly shared how she taught a unit on the “Asian model minority” in her social studies class. Nonetheless, her social posi- tion as a white middle-class customer gave her the pre- rogative to make recommendations to the salon owner about how to run her business and to do so in lan- guage that replicated stereotypical notions of Asians as foreigners who cannot speak English. Far from el- evating Charlie to a position as an equal, or even as a member of a model minority group, Alexandra spoke to Charlie as if chastising a child. In so doing, she ex- ercised her own racial and class privilege while dimin- ishing Charlie’s social position. Even as a successful, highly assimilated salon owner, Charlie was vulnera- ble to such service exchanges, which reveal to her that customers like Alexandra “think we are stupid.” In ad- dition, such exchanges undermine claims that Asians have triumphed over discrimination and exclusion.

c o n c l u s i o n

Manicuring exchanges in Asian-owned nail spas serv- ing mostly middle- and upper-class whites call into question the “model minority” representation of pas- sive and industrious Asians who easily assimilate into the mainstream and enjoy high socioeconomic and racial status comparable to whites’. Instead, interac- tions in upscale nail spas reveal that derogatory ste- reotypes and unequal power continue to infuse these

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exchanges. The mundane exchanges in Asian-owned nail salons demonstrate that racialized representations, combined with gendered stereotypes of Asian women as subservient and well suited to detailed handiwork, naturalize their concentration in this work. Different patterns of service emerge at different sites, refuting the one-dimensional stereotype. The dominant, albeit not exclusive, pattern in nail spas serving white middle- and upper-class customers is one in which gendered work practices, as enacted through pampering body services, reinforce existing racial and class hierarchies.

At upscale salons such as Uptown Nails, the ser- vicing of some women’s bodies entails the disciplin- ing of other women’s bodies. Manicurists not only must enact embodied practices directly associated with the manicure, such as clipping, polishing, touch- ing, and massaging, but they also must regulate their own bodily comportment and contact, including the ways they sit and the foods they eat. In responding to customers’ feelings about these embodied exchanges, manicurists must learn to speak not one, but two new languages. First, they must acquire basic English- language fluency, and second, they must develop flu- ency in the language of complimenting, coddling, and capitulating to their customers’ needs. Language skills are an essential element of the emotional man- agement involved in body labor, but language skills can also carry the price of increased vulnerability to negative comments and excessive customer demands. At the same time manicurists can use their language skills to resist these demands and unsettle customers by conversing in Korean. However, such subtle acts of resistance carry costs in terms of negative responses from owners and customers, and they do not funda- mentally alter the power dynamics of these exchanges.

At Exclusive Nails the manicurists engaged in fewer of these attempts at resistance because relations with customers were genuinely more authentic and therefore required less ostentatious displays of defer- ence. However, this did not mean that the inequalities in these relations disappeared. Just because women are genuinely nice to each other and treat each other with dignity does not change the vast differences in their lives and resources. At the same time the real measures of caring and respect expressed between them are not insignificant. They enable women who

work in these salons to maintain their self-respect while doing this work. However, the modicum of genuine connection that they forge can easily disap- pear in the face of customer dissatisfaction or insensi- tivity, or simply the pressures of a busy day.

The forms of emotional and embodied assimila- tion that Asian manicurists undergo in performing gendered service work ultimately reinforce dominant racial and gender framings of Asian women as docile, subservient, and well suited to detailed work. At the same time, while the structures of the global service economy channel Asian immigrants into this niche, these women are not mere cogs in the machine of global capitalism. They make choices and give mean- ing to this work, either by embracing their customers and the work itself or by asserting limits on how they perform it. Nonetheless, as Carol Wolkowitz writes in her book Bodies at Work, such “intra-psychic” forms of resistance rarely challenge the “emotional order” of organizations but instead “enable individ- ual workers to distance themselves psychologically without necessarily encouraging more collective ef- forts directed towards transformation rather than survival.” Similarly, customers are not bound to the enacting of scripts of pampering and privilege but can rewrite them, in either more oppressive or more egalitarian ways.

Some customers actively resist the idea that nail salon interactions reflect prejudices and social in- equalities, insisting that their relations with their manicurists are affectionate and mutual. One cus- tomer approached me in a salon and asserted, “I really care about these women, and I think I can say the same for them. How can you not feel something for someone who has done your nails for years?” Indeed, strong emotional bonds between manicur- ists and customers are not uncommon. However, these bonds do not negate the often invisible in- equalities of race, class, and immigrant status that shape body labor. Instead, intimate emotional and embodied contact coexists with and can even further entrench divisions between women. Thus the act of women serving women, even and especially when the purchase of pampering body labor is involved, is not a recipe for forging alliances so much as for reinscribing differences.

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Rebecca Glauber, Race and Gender in Families and at Work: The Fatherhood Wage Premium

t h e o r i e s o f fat h e r s ’ l a b o r m a r k e t a d va n ta g e s

Gender scholars have long argued that family and work are connected, but most studies have ex- plored these connections by focusing on women and on the dilemmas that mothers face in negotiating de- mands of work and families (Gerson 1985; Hays 1996; Hochschild 1989). In an analysis of men’s family and work arrangements, Gerson (1993) argued that men have entered a territory of “no man’s land” where the cultural constructions of masculinity and father- hood are open ended. Others have also noted that men have lost their hold on primary breadwinning status, and they now face new and conflicting con- ceptions of breadwinning and involved fatherhood (Griswold 1993).

Despite the contemporary open-ended meaning of fatherhood, the birth of a child continues to be as- sociated with an increase in men’s time spent at work and an increase in men’s hourly wages. Drawing on longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, Lundberg and Rose (2002) found that the birth of a first child is associated with a 4 percent in- crease in men’s hourly wages and that the birth of a second child is associated with a 7 percent increase in men’s hourly wages. The authors also found that men work about 82 more hours per year after the birth of their first child and another 26 more hours per year after the birth of their second child. Other studies have found that fatherhood is positively correlated

with men’s work hours (Knoester and Eggebeen 2006; Sanchez and Thompson 1997). However, Kaufman and Uhlenberg (2000) found that father- hood is positively correlated with men’s work hours only for those who express a traditional set of gender beliefs. For men who express an egalitarian set of gender beliefs, fatherhood is negatively correlated with work hours.

g e n d e r e d e m p l o y m e n t e x p e r i e n c e s

One explanation for the fatherhood premium pro- poses that gender and cultural conceptions of mother- hood and fatherhood structure employment relations. As Ridgeway and Correll (2004b), Lorber (1994), and Risman (1998, 2004) argued, gender refers to an insti- tutionalized system of organizing social relations and constituting differences between two categories of in- dividuals. Gender is a process rather than an outcome, and conceptions of essential differences between men and women structure modern organizational rewards and relations (Acker 1990; Connell 1987). Theoreti- cally, ideal workers are fully committed because they are free from external family obligations (Williams 2000). Ridgeway and Correll (2004a, 2004b) pro- posed that widely held beliefs of men as instrumen- tal providers and of women as expressive caretakers structure employer–worker interactions and reproduce gender inequalities. Fatherhood signals conformity to hegemonic masculinity, and, as Coltrane (2004, 215)

34. RACE AND GENDER IN FAMILIES AND AT WORK

The Fatherhood Wage Premium

R E B E C C A G L A U B E R

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argued, “When men become husbands and fathers, co- workers and superiors perceive them as being more se- rious and more deserving of career advancement than their single or childless counterparts.”

Many studies have shown that mothers are dis- criminated against in the labor market. Women are viewed as primarily committed to their families and only secondarily committed to their jobs (Hays 1996). Fewer studies have analyzed how employers perceive of and respond to fathers. In one recent ex- ception, Correll, Benard, and Paik (2007) analyzed experimental and audit data and found that moth- erhood is viewed as a devalued status characteristic, which results in biased evaluations of competency and commitment. In contrast, fatherhood signals greater competency, ability, and commitment. They also found that compared to equally qualified child- less men, fathers received a significantly higher aver- age recommended starting salary.

g e n d e r e d fa m i ly e x p e r i e n c e s

An alternative (although not mutually exclusive) ex- planation for the fatherhood wage premium centers on the gender division of household and paid labor. The birth of a child increases the amount of time that women spend in housework and decreases the amount of time that they spend in paid work (Sanchez and Thompson 1997). These changes may free men or mo- tivate them to become more productive in their paid jobs. Many studies have shown that marriage increases men’s work productivity and hourly wages (Cohen 2002; Gray 1997; Korenman and Neumark 1991; Loh 1996), most likely by increasing the amount of time that women spend in household labor (Bianchi et al. 2000) and by decreasing the amount of time that men spend in household labor (Gupta 1999). Wives pro- vide care that directly contributes to men’s well-being.

Decisions surrounding the division of labor re- flect cultural conceptions of gender and economic and power differences between men and women. Studies have found that as the gaps in husbands’ and wives’ earnings and work hours converge, the gap in their household labor also converges. At the point at which wives earn more than their husbands, how- ever, husbands reduce the amount of time that they

spend in household labor to compensate for their di- minished breadwinning status (Bittman et al. 2003; Brines 1994; Tichenor 2005). These findings imply that structural gender inequalities and cultural con- ceptions of differences between women and men shape family experiences. The same processes that underlie the marriage wage premium may also lead to an additional fatherhood wage premium for mar- ried men. That is, men may first earn a premium for marriage and then may again earn a premium for fa- therhood within marriage.

r a c i a l i n e q u a l i t y a n d m e n ’ s e x p e r i e n c e s i n fa m i l i e s a n d w o r k

Despite evidence that family and work experiences are both gendered and racialized, previous research on fa- therhood and men’s earnings has not explored racial variation among men. There are at least two aspects of racial inequality that affect married Black men’s expe- riences as fathers. First, there is a large literature that shows that employers discriminate against Black work- ers in favor of white workers.

Racial inequality also affects men’s experiences within their families. Black men suffer from job insta- bility (Wilson 1996), network disadvantages (Royster 2007), and earnings and wealth inequalities (Conley 1999). Latinos also suffer from racial discrimination and inequality (McCall 2001), but as with white men, they have a relatively higher earnings advantage over their wives than Black men.

Married Black couples tend to divide housework and paid work somewhat more equally than do mar- ried white and Latino couples (Gupta 2006; John and Shelton 1997; Orbuch and Eyster 1997; Shelton and John 1993). This may explain why Black men earn a slightly smaller wage premium for marriage than do white men (Cohen 2002). It may also lead to a smaller fatherhood wage premium for Blacks than for whites and Latinos.

d ata a n d m e t h o d

I draw on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), which is a national probability sample of 12,686 individuals, with an oversample of

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Blacks and Latinos. In 1979, the NLSY fielded surveys to women and men who were between the ages of 14 and 22. The NLSY interviewed these respondents an- nually until 1994 and then biennially from 1994 to 2004. In this article, I restrict the analytic sample to the years 1983 to 2004 for white, Black, and Latino men who are older than 24. This age restriction provides a sample of men who are becoming fathers as adults.

m e a s u r e s

I analyze the association between fatherhood and three employment outcomes: (1) the hourly wage at men’s current or most recent job, (2) men’s total annual labor market earnings, and (3) men’s total annual work hours.

Following previous research, I measure father- hood with the number of biological children born to men rather than the number of biological children who reside in men’s households or the number of biological, adopted, and stepchildren who reside in men’s households. These are important distinctions because children’s residential statuses could osten- sibly affect the gender division of labor, men’s work productivity, or employers’ perceptions of men as fathers.

To analyze the gender division of paid labor, I in- clude a series of categorical variables for wives’ work hours. The models compare wives who work full- time (more than 34 hours per week) to wives who work part-time (fewer than 35 hours per week) and to wives who do not currently work. Results are simi- lar if I define part-time employment as fewer than 30 hours per week. Roughly 63 percent of married Black fathers’ wives work full-time, whereas only 46 percent and 47 percent of married white and Latino fathers’ wives work full-time, respectively.

The control variables used in all models include age, education, labor market experience measured as the sum of weeks worked divided by 52.25, tenure with current employer also measured as the sum of weeks with current employer divided by 52.25, year measured with dummy variables, geographical region (Northeast, North-Central, South, and West), and sector of employment (private, public, and self-employment).

f i n d i n g s

t h e fat h e r h o o d w a g e p r e m i u m f o r w h i t e s , b l a c k s , a n d l at i n o s

The first set of multivariate models leads to two new conclusions about white, Black, and Latino fathers’ labor market outcomes. First, fatherhood is associ- ated with an increase in married men’s hourly wages, and fatherhood is not associated with an increase in never-married men’s hourly wages. This does not mean that the fatherhood wage premium is the mar- riage wage premium. Instead, it implies that men earn two premiums—one for marriage and then another for fatherhood within marriage. Second, the associa- tion between fatherhood and wages for Black married men is smaller than the association between father- hood and wages for white and Latino married men.

Table 1 presents these findings and fixed-effects esti- mates of the wage premium for married, never-married, and previously married men. Budig and England (2001) also used these marital status comparisons in their study of the motherhood wage penalty. In the cur- rent study, each marital status group includes observa- tions only for the years when men meet that marital status qualification. Essentially, the models compare wages for men during the years when they have one child (or two or more) to the years when they had the same marital status and no children. For example, the estimate for a second child shows the increase in men’s wages that is associated with having two children as compared to having no children. Because the wage variable is logged, the coefficients can be interpreted as the percentage increase in men’s hourly wage. Although the tables present associations for men’s wages by their number of children (one, two, and three or more), it is useful to first consider the association between men’s wages and their fatherhood status in general. In models that are not presented, I found that for married Black men, fatherhood is associated with a 7 percent in- crease in wages. This means that married Black fathers earn about 7 percent more per hour during the years when they have any number of children as compared to the years when they have no children. For married white men and Latinos, fatherhood is associated with a 9  percent increase in wages.

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Table 1 presents differences among Black, white, and Latino men with one, two, and three or more children. One child is associated with a 7 percent in- crease in married Black men’s hourly wages relative to the years when they were married with no children and controlling for many other important differences between these two time periods. Married Black men with two children experience a 9 percent increase in their hourly wage relative to the years when they were married with no children. Married Black men with three or more children, however, earn the same hourly wage as they did when they were married with no children.

The pattern is somewhat different for married whites and Latinos, who not only experience a larger increase in their wages for fatherhood but also expe- rience an increase in their wages for each additional child. Although married Black men with more than two children earn the same hourly wage as they did when they were married with no children, married white men with more than two children experience a 16 percent increase in their wages compared to when they were married with no children. Similarly,

married Latinos experience a 15 percent increase in their wages compared to when they were married with no children. Thus, for married Black men, only one and two children are associated with an in- crease in wages, whereas for married white men and Latinos, one child, two children, and three or more children are associated with increases in wages. In analyses that are not shown, I tested these racial dif- ferences using interaction effects, and I found that the Black–white and Black–Latino differences were significant.

Changes to the gender division of paid and unpaid labor may partly explain why married Black men do not experience an increase in their wages for three or more children but do experience an increase in their wages for one or two children. In models that are not shown, I compared the differ- ences between husbands’ and wives’ earnings and work hours. I found that for married white men and Latinos, the relative earnings and employ- ment gaps between husbands and wives increase as their number of children increases. For example, the earnings gap is larger for married Latinos with

TABLE 34.1 FIXED EFFECTS REGRESSIONS PREDICTING LOG HOURLY WAGES, BY RACE, FATHERHOOD, AND MARITAL STATUS

Black White Latino

Married Never Married

Previously Married Married

Never Married

Previously Married Married

Never Married

Previously Married

One child 0.07* −0.01 0.14 0.08** 0.07 0.01 0.08* −0.05 −0.42**

(0.03) (0.03) (0.08) (0.01) (0.05) (0.05) (0.03) (0.06) (0.14)

Two children 0.09* −0.04 0.14 0.14** −0.05 −0.06 0.11** −0.16** −0.30

(0.04) (0.04) (0.08) (0.02) (0.08) (0.07) (0.04) (0.07) (0.18)

Three or more children

0.07 −0.03 0.16 0.16** 0.10 −0.01 0.15** −0.26** −0.34

(0.05) (0.05) (0.10) (0.02) (0.12) (0.08) (0.05) (0.09) (0.20)

Constant 0.22 0.80 −0.88 2.15** 0.77 2.68** 2.13** 1.44* 2.53*

(0.54) (0.84) (0.93) (0.49) (0.48) (0.79) (0.57) (0.65) (1.18)

Person–years 5,005 6,627 2,567 17,530 7,699 3,910 5,144 2,713 1,550

R2 .72 .61 .67 .72 .67 .68 .71 .65 .66

NOTE: Standard errors are in parentheses. Models also control for age, education, experience, tenure, sector, region, and year; previously married includes divorced, separated, widowed.

*p < .05. **p < .01.

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two children than it is for married Latinos with one child. The earnings gap is also larger for married La- tinos and whites with three or more children than it is for married Latinos and whites with two chil- dren. For married Black men, the relative earnings and employment gaps—or simply, the inequality between spouses—increase with the birth of a first and second child but decrease with the birth of a third child. The inclusion of wives’ earnings into the multivariate models, however, does not alter the basic differences between married Black men with one or two children and married Black men with three or more children.

Figure 1 presents racial differences in the father- hood wage premium for married fathers. The graphi- cal bars reflect the dollar increase in men’s mean hourly wage given their wage premium estimate. For example, the top bar shows that for married Black men, one child is associated with slightly less than a dollar increase in their mean hourly wage. Simi- larly, two children are associated with slightly more than a dollar increase in their mean hourly wage. Compared to each other, white and Latino fathers experience a similar wage premium in percentage terms, but the net wage association is larger for white

men who have a higher mean wage to begin with. This figure shows that married Black men not only experience a smaller wage premium but also do not experience any premium for having more than two children.

In terms of the second finding, Table 1 reveals that the positive associations between men’s wages and their number of children are conditional on mar- riage. Never-married Black and white fathers earn the same hourly wage regardless of their number of children. Previously married Black and white fa- thers also earn the same hourly wage regardless of their number of children. Findings are very differ- ent for Latino men who become fathers during the years when they are unmarried. For never-married and previously married Latinos, fatherhood is asso- ciated with reduced hourly wages. It is possible that unobserved factors that change over time account for these negative associations. For example, among previously married men, the onset of a period of low work commitment may increase the likelihood of be- coming a father and decrease hourly wages. It is also possible that for Latino fathers, factors that increase the risk of divorce, such as stress and conflict, also decrease hourly wages.

Black, $0

$0

1 Child

2 Children

3+ Children

$1 $2 $3 $4

White, $3

White, $2

White, $1

Black, $1

Black, $1

Latino, $2

Latino, $2

Latino, $1

F I G U R E 3 4 . 1 The Fatherhood Wage Premium for Married Men, by Race: Compared to the Years When They Are Married and Have No Children, Men Experience This Much of an Increase in Their Hourly Wage When They Are Married with the Following Number of Children

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fat h e r h o o d , w o r k h o u r s , a n d a n n u a l e a r n i n g s

In the following, I consider the association between fa- therhood and men’s annual earnings and annual work hours. Men may make trade-offs in their annual earn- ings, annual work hours, and hourly wages. For exam- ple, men may take on extra work if they are blocked from upward occupational mobility. The findings pre- sented here generally show a consistent pattern across all three labor market outcomes, and I note inconsis- tencies in the text. These associations are presented in Table 2 for married men only.

As with hourly wages, married Black men expe- rience a smaller increase in their annual earnings for fatherhood than do married white men and Latinos. For married Black men, one child is as- sociated with a 9 percent increase in annual earn- ings compared to the years when they were married with no children. For married white men and La- tinos, however, one child is associated with a 14 percent and a 12 percent increase, respectively, in annual earnings compared to the years when they were married with no children. Racial differences are most pronounced for married fathers with three

TABLE 34.2 FIXED EFFECTS REGRESSIONS PREDICTING MARRIED MEN’S LOG ANNUAL EARNINGS AND ANNUAL WORK HOURS, BY RACE AND FATHERHOOD

Black White Latino

Earnings Hours Earnings Hours Earnings Hours

One child 0.09** −16.72 0.14** 64.15** 0.12** 100.27

(0.04) (45.69) (0.02) (18.22) (0.04) (52.44)

Two children 0.16** −44.28 0.23** 85.98** 0.17** 124.99*

(0.05) (59.05) (0.02) (22.36) (0.04) (57.13)

Three or more children 0.15* −84.96 0.29** 120.51** 0.25** 201.06**

(0.06) (82.35) (0.03) (33.61) (0.05) (70.57)

Constant 7.05** 1,460.35 8.85** 789.92 10.95** 1,776.75

(1.53) (1,644.36) (0.74) (413.64) (0.72) (1,536.61)

Person–years 5,005 5,005 17,530 17,530 5,144 5,144

R2 .66 .45 .69 .46 .74 .44

NOTE: Standard errors are in parentheses. Models also control for age, education, experience, tenure, sector, region, and year.

*p < .05. **p < .01.

or more children. Married Black men experience a 15 percent increase in their annual earnings when they have three or more children compared to the years when they were married with no children, but married white men and Latinos experience a 29 per- cent and 25 percent increase in their earnings, re- spectively. These differences are significant, and in light of men’s average earnings, they indicate that married white men with three or more children earn about $11,000 more per year than when they were married with no children, controlling for important changes between the two periods in age, education, tenure, and labor market experience. Married Lati- nos with three or more children earn about $7,800 more per year than when they were married with no children, again controlling for important differ- ences between the two time periods. Married Black men with three or more children earn about $4,700 more per year than when they were married with no children.

Fatherhood is also not associated with married Black men’s annual time spent at work, but father- hood is positively associated with married white men’s and Latinos’ annual time spent at work.

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Married white men with one child experience a 64- hour increase in their work year compared to when they were married with no children. Considering those with three or more children, married white men experience about a 121-hour increase in their work year, and married Latinos experience about a 201-hour increase in their work year compared to the years when they were married with no children. Assuming a 40-hour workweek, these figures imply that for married white men, three or more children is associated with about an extra 3 weeks per year at work, and for married Latinos, three or more chil- dren is associated with about an extra 5 weeks per year at work. Married Black men spend the same amount of time per year at work regardless of if they have children.

One question that these findings raise is why the birth of three or more children is not associated with an increase in married Black men’s wages but is associated with an increase in married Black men’s annual earnings. Wages tend to reflect men’s annual earnings divided by the usual number of hours that men work per year. Men’s annual earnings could increase without a similar increase in their hourly wages if they increased their time spent at work. I noted above that married Black men do not expe- rience an increase in their annual work hours on the birth of a child. In models that are not shown, I found that married Black men with three or more children experience a slight increase in their usual weekly work hours, which likely accounts for the differences between the fatherhood wage and earn- ings premium for Black men with three or more children. Black men with three or more children experience a small increase in their work-week, but they do not experience any increase in their work year, namely, because they spend fewer weeks at work per year.

Another, perhaps more important, question is why married Black men do not experience an in- crease in their annual time spent at work for one, two, or three or more children but do experience an increase in their wages for one and two children. One possibility is that married Black fathers with one or two children experience an increase in their

work productivity, but they either choose to not in- crease their annual time spent at work or experience labor market constraints on their annual time spent at work. Latinos and white men may experience both a change in their labor supply and a change in their work productivity following the birth of a child.

m o t h e r s ’ a n d fat h e r s ’ e m p l o y m e n t pat t e r n s

To summarize the results so far, the fatherhood wage premium is conditional on marriage, but even for mar- ried men, Black fathers experience a smaller increase in their wages on the birth of a child than white and Latino fathers. Black men do not earn a premium for having more than two children, whereas white men and Latinos experience an increase in their hourly wages and annual earnings for more than two chil- dren. Furthermore, fatherhood is associated with a sig- nificant increase in married white men’s and Latinos’ annual time spent at work. Married Black men spend the same number of hours per year at work regardless of if they are fathers. In the final section of this analy- sis, I analyze married men’s hourly wages and annual time spent at work when their wives do not work, work part-time, or work full-time.

Table 3 shows that Black men’s wages are largely unconditional on their wives’ labor supply. Black men earn the same hourly wage regardless of if their wives work part-time, work full-time, or do not work. White men’s and Latinos’ wages, however, are asso- ciated with their wives’ labor supply. For example, married white men experience a 4 percent increase in their hourly wages when their wives do not work as compared to when their wives work full-time. The association is larger for Latinos, who experience an 8 percent increase in their hourly wages when their wives do not work as compared to when their wives work full-time. Wives’ labor market outcomes could be endogenous, and these associations could reflect changes that wives make in their work hours based on their husbands’ wages.

In terms of married men’s time spent at work, there are differences among all three groups of men.

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Married Black men experience about a 114-hour re- duction in their work year when their wives do not work as compared to when their wives work full- time. The pattern is reversed for married white men, who experience a 53-hour increase in their work year when their wives do not work. Married Latinos spend the same amount of time at work regardless of their wives’ work hours. These findings suggest that white married couples experience some degree of gender specialization. In terms of work hours, married Latino couples do not (once other important control variables are included in the models). Married Black couples experience the reverse of gender specializa- tion, as Black men’s time spent at work is positively correlated with their wives’ time spent at work. Most likely, factors that are associated with a racialized labor market, such as blocked opportunities for jobs with full-time work hours, similarly affect both Black women’s and Black men’s work time.

Finally, we can also consider how the fatherhood wage estimates presented in Table 3 differ from the

estimates presented for married men in Table 1. Both tables present identical models, except that Table 3 includes wives’ work hours and Table 1 does not. Thus, differences between the wage estimates indi- cate the extent to which wives’ work hours explain the fatherhood wage premium. We might expect that married men earn more on the birth of a child be- cause their wives work less. For married Black men, this does not appear to be the case. Similarly, Black men’s wives’ earnings are not significantly associ- ated with Black men’s wages once all other important variables are controlled (models are not shown). The wage premium for one and two children is largely un- explained by Black men’s wives’ work hours. Thus, it may be that employer preferential treatment explains married Black men’s fatherhood wage premium. It could also be the case that Black men’s wives’ work hours do not capture the nuances of the gender divi- sion of household and paid labor and its associations with married Black fathers’ hourly wages, annual work hours, and work productivity.

TABLE 34.3 FIXED EFFECTS REGRESSIONS PREDICTING MARRIED MEN’S LOG HOURLY WAGES AND ANNUAL WORK HOURS, BY RACE, FATHERHOOD, AND WIFE’S EMPLOYMENT

Black White Latino

Wages Hours Wages Hours Wages Hours

One child 0.08* −12.26 0.07** 53.39** 0.06 84.35

(0.03) (46.25) (0.01) (18.77) (0.03) (52.93)

Two children 0.09* −32.02 0.12** 68.08** 0.09* 103.41

(0.04) (59.89) (0.02) (23.48) (0.04) (58.22)

Three or more children 0.08 −70.45 0.14** 96.35** 0.12* 176.49*

(0.05) (83.31) (0.02) (35.17) (0.05) (72.35)

Wife’s employment

Not working 0.03 −113.55* 0.04* 52.68* 0.08** −53.05

(0.03) (52.82) (0.02) (23.31) (0.03) (44.51)

Working part-time 0.02 −3.76 0.05** 32.60* 0.04 16.76

(0.02) (32.23) (0.01) (14.26) (0.02) (27.09)

Constant 0.15 1,082.99 1.24** 715.57 3.81** 1,829.23*

(0.91) (953.38) (0.28) (417.68) (1.02) (874.43)

Person–years 5,005 5,005 17,530 17,530 5,144 5,144

R2 .72 .46 .73 .46 .71 .44

NOTE: Standard errors are in parentheses. Models also control for age, education, experience, tenure, sector, region, and year.

*p < .05. **p < .01.

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For married Latino men, one child is associated with an 8 percent wage premium without considering wives’ work hours. This estimate becomes insignifi- cant on the inclusion of wives’ work hours, which im- plies that married Latinos earn more on the birth of their first child because their wives reduce their time spent in the labor market (and likely increase the time that they spend in household labor). For whites, about one-fifth to one-fourth of the fatherhood wage premium is explained by the reduction in their wives’ work hours on the birth of a child. This is a relatively small percentage, which implies either that wives’ work hours do not capture the complexity of the divi- sion of labor including housework and its effects on white men’s work effort or that the gender division of labor does not explain the earnings bonuses that white men experience when they become fathers.

c o n c l u s i o n

Many studies on gender inequality in families and work have focused on women. Fewer studies have fo- cused on men’s family and work experiences, and even fewer studies have asked how gender and race inter- sect to shape men’s experiences. The current analysis extends existing research by providing a descriptive account of differences in fathers’ labor market out- comes among whites, Blacks, and Latinos. I report two new sets of findings. First, there are some similarities among fathers. For all men, the fatherhood wage pre- mium is tied to marriage. Men experience an increase in their wages first when they marry and then again when they have children within marriages. Unmar- ried men do not experience an increase in their hourly wages on the birth of a child. Unmarried men may not appear to conform to cultural ideals of normative, breadwinning fatherhood, and employers may not extend preferential treatment to unmarried fathers. It is also possible that unmarried fathers do not benefit as much as married fathers from a gender division of household labor, or that unmarried fathers do not ex- perience as much of an increase in their commitment to breadwinning status because their children tend to not live with them.

Second, there are three important differences among married fathers. Compared to white men and

Latinos, (1) Black men experience a smaller premium for fatherhood in terms of both hourly wages and annual earnings; (2) Black men do not experience an increase in their annual time spent at work, whereas white men and Latinos do; and (3) Black men do not earn any more or work any more when their wives work less, whereas white men experience an increase in their earnings and time spent at work and Latinos experience an increase in their earnings when their wives work less.

These findings are consistent with the expecta- tions described in the beginning of this study. Mas- culinity, fatherhood, and men’s work experiences are racialized. Employers may be less likely to view Black fathers as committed breadwinners, and Black men may experience less of a labor market bonus for fatherhood. Latino men also suffer from racial discrimination and labor market inequalities, but stereotypes about Latinos do not generally include notions of irresponsible fatherhood. Moreover, be- cause of institutionalized racial inequalities, the gender division of paid and unpaid labor is somewhat more equal in Black families, and Black men may not experience as much of an increase in their work pro- ductivity and annual work hours following the birth of a child. Again, although Latinos also suffer from systematic racial inequality, they tend to divide paid labor and housework with their wives somewhat less equally than do Black men. These mechanisms may lead to greater discrepancies among white and Latino mothers and fathers than among Black mothers and fathers. Studies on racial differences in household labor have found similar results. Namely, although gender differences within married couples are more pronounced than racial differences between married couples, gender inequality is more pronounced in white marriages than in Black marriages (John and Shelton 1997; Orbuch and Eyster 1997; Shelton and John 1993).

For decades feminist scholars have argued that race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect to create unique experiences for all groups (e.g., Baca Zinn and Dill 1996; Collins 1991; Glenn 2002). Browne and Misra (2003) noted that it is possible to analyze both the racialization of the gender stratification system and the gendering of the racial stratification

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The findings presented in the current study chal- lenge contemporar y gender and family politics. Public discussions of race and fatherhood largely focus on unmarried Black fathers and assume that all married Black men experience families in the same way as all married white men. This focus not only conceals the range of Black men’s experiences in families but also reproduces the invisibility of certain gender and race privileges. The findings re- ported in the current study challenge the notion that all married men experience and benefit from hetero- sexual family formations in exactly the same way.

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