Wendy Brown (1995) deals with the difficulties of overcoming histories of colonization and slavery as central to understanding the intertwining of inequalities of gender and of race. She re-reads Nietzsche’s ideas about resentment being a major part of a dominant modern morality emerging within more democratic societies. He sees that modern morality as a result […]

The cultural turn shifted focus from how colonization and slavery produced material inequalities between the mainly white West and the non-white ‘rest’ to attempts to understand the gendered production of colonized or racialized subjects. Stuart Hall (1997) has provided a useful framework for considering this production, drawing on new approaches to colonization. One of the […]

An emphasis on economics It can be argued that much of the debate about relationships between gender,‘race’, and ethnicity began to shift from the late 1980s into the field of feminist post-colonial theory where the cultural or discursive aspects of colonial processes and their ongoing aftermath were the central issues. However, from the 1970s black […]

The most prominent explanation of inequalities between developed and underdeveloped nations in the 1950s maintained that what was needed was for poorer nations to modernize via the same route as ‘successful’ Western nations. W. W. Rostow’s (2000/1960) modernization theory argued it was tradition that was holding developing nations back. According to this view, aid and […]

If we are to really understand inequalities of ‘race’ and how they relate to gender then it is crucial to know about colonization, which is a process by which an invading people impose their economic and political structures and their cultural beliefs upon the indigenous people. The material changes consequent from economic colonization have been […]

‘Race’ is a highly problematic term. Categorizations of race are usually inflicted upon people in ways that carry judgements about their sup­posed inferiority. Sociologists recognize how ideas about race produce racial inequalities, even if those ideas are wildly inaccurate. Racism is a form of prejudice based on ‘common sense’ and inaccurate beliefs about the differences […]

‘Race’ is not just something black people have; all of us are shaped and indeed gendered by it. ‘Race’ developed primarily as a term to try and explain differences between whiteness and blackness, and to account for the different ways of life of white and black peoples around the world. The majority of the world’s […]

The devaluing of working class (women’s) ways of thinking, doing and being includes a devaluing of their ways of feeling. The term ‘emotional capital’ was coined by Helga Nowotny in 1981 and Reay (2004: 60) explains that it is a variant of social capital ‘generally confined within the bounds of affective relationships of family and […]

Looking at discursive constructions of class is useful to clarify the inter­weaving of class with gender in valuing people. Such an approach helps recognize the hierarchical basis of conceptions of sex/gender/sexuality. To paraphrase George Orwell: some women are more equal than others. In some respects a discursive approach helps answer questions about why women do […]

Many feminists (see for example, Adkins and Skeggs, 2004; Duggins and Pudsey, 2006) wishing to move beyond economistic or structuralist theories of class have turned to the thinking of Pierre Bourdieu, who is highly critical of crude materialist distinctions between the real and the symbolic. He has extended the Marxist understanding of class (for example, […]