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Notice: This article has been published in a book on Race, Gender & Class Studies entitled: "Introduction to Sociology: A Race, Gender & Class Perspective," 1999, Race, Gender and Class Publications. The book is a collaborative RGC project in which many different sociologists, with expertise in their particular subfield areas, have written a chapter introducing the topic from a race, gender, and class perspective. There are 9 Units, composed of 24 chapters, covering major subfields in sociology. Each introduces basic theories, concepts, and research on the topic as well as provides thought questions, suggested readings, and extensive bibliographies useful to students and professors. Reprinting this article from the book will provide a better idea about trace, gender and class studies.
Race, gender and class represent the three most powerful organizing principles in the development of cultural ideology worldwide. Jiven though each culture constructs views of race, gender and class differently, there is always some social construction around these three particular differences/similarities, and mus far, that construction has almost always resulted in structured inequality (see Young and Mandy's chapter). With the increased presence of women of color and working class men and women in the academy following the political mobilizations of the African American civil rights movement and other movements for social change (eg., Chicano, Native American, Asian American and women) and affirmative action programs in the 1960s and 1970s, research by and about women of color expanded in the early 1980s. This expansion generated critiques of exclusionary practices in new Ethnic studies and Women's studies fields as well as traditional academic canons in mainstream disciplines. It created a new field of scholarship dedicated to the study of women of color, who were marginalized in scholarship. This marked the beginning of what is now known as the integrative "race, gender, and class" scholarship (see Cuádraz and Uttal's chapter and Barnett's chapter). What emerged was distinct from race or class scholarship and white feminist scholarship. The complexity of this race, class and gender paradigm generated a broad range of scholarship by researchers from different disciplines engaged in examining how race, class, and gender simultaneously influence and structure tthe lives, issues, identities, and experiences of toe people whose multiple statuses cannot be separated or prioritized (see Cuádraz...