Thinking About Women Some More

Abstract

When I wrote “Thinking about Women: A Quarter Century’s View,” I hoped the article would not only review some of the development of the sociology of gender but would also stimulate additional thinking about the connections between gender, race, class, and sexuality. I am grateful for the thoughtful comments of the six authors responding here, not only because of the substance of their comments but also because of the tone with which they have furthered this discussion and analysis. I did not have the benefit of having read Joan Acker’s (2006) Class Questions, Feminist Answers when I wrote the article, so I appreciate how she has recast classical analyses of class to ground our understanding of class processes as—at one and the same time—race and gender processes. She reminds us that political economy is not a “thing,” a superstructure standing apart from the practices of human social action. In other words, it is not a “context” per se but is itself constructed from the social actions of race, gender, and class relations. Such a model is distinct from what I would call the discrimination model that characterizes some scholarship on race, class, gender, and sexuality. By the discrimination model, I mean an analysis of inequality (whether gender, race, class, or sexuality) that rests solely on analyzing and describing the behaviors whereby people treat others differently on the basis of presumed and/or observed characteristics. I am not saying that discrimination does not exist. Obviously, it does, as is well documented in empirical research, both in gender and in race and ethnic studies. Scholarship on race shows, for example, how employers’ racial stereotypes influence their employment decisions. There is no doubt that many kinds of visible characteristics affect discriminatory outcomes. But I contend that this is a different phenomenon than the explicit use of particular groups of workers to fill certain market needs, even though both forms of mistreatment

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