Digesting Race, Class and Gender: Sugar as a Metaphor

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Dig e sti ng Race, Cl a ss, and Gender

10.1057/9780230115385 - Digesting Race, Class, and Gender, Ivy Ken

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Sugar as a Metaphor

Ivy Ken

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Dig esti ng Race, Cl ass, and Gender

DIGESTING RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER

Copyright © Ivy Ken, 2010.

Parts of this book have been previously published. Pieces of chapter 2 first appeared in the journal Gender Issues 24, no. 2 (2007) 1–20 as “Race-Class-Gender Theory: An Image(ry) Problem,” used by permission of Springer. Material in Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 appeared in the journal Sociological Theory 26, no. 2 (2008) 152–72 as “Beyond the Intersection: A New Metaphor for Race-Class-Gender Studies,” and is used by permission of the American Sociological Association. Cover art by Jennifer Oliver © 2010. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-60093-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: December 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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All rights reserved.

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For Johnson, who made space for this book on his shelf.

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Acknowledgments

ix

Preface

xi

Part 1

A Conceptual Reorientation

1

Metaphor and the Organization of Social Life

2

Race, Class, and Gender as Organizing Principles

Part 2

3 15

Using Food to Identify Relationships Among Race, Class, and Gender

3

Producing Race, Class, and Gender

55

4

Mixing Race, Class, and Gender

77

5

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

Part 3 6

105

Searching for Evidence of Relationships at Specific Sites

The Multirelational Character of Race, Class, and Gender

127

References

149

Index

161

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Contents

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One day, long before kids and tenure, I had a crazy idea while I was sitting at the laundromat watching my clothes dry, feeling hungry: maybe the relationships among race, class, and gender are akin to the relationships among different foods. That was the first day of what became years and years of discussions with my partner, Ken, that had to have sounded bizarre to anybody who might have heard a little bit of them. The early discussions often took place over meals— sometimes expensive meals—in which I redirected what might have otherwise been romantic conversations with topics like how the beurre rouge on the striped bass so poignantly revealed the workings of race, class, and gender. As the days and the conversations continued, while we walked our kids around the streets of Capitol Hill or sat at Murky Coffee in the early hours after they awoke, Ken engaged with me with unwavering enthusiasm. He truly never tired (or never showed me that he tired) of helping me think through things like whether gender is more like beet pulp than beet sugar or how the metabolism of class and race together might cause indigestion. He can summarize my ideas better than I can when we are getting to know people at parties, and he has always reminded me this work is valuable. When, in the last days, I wavered and almost opted not to complete this project, Ken would not let me quit. He rearranged our family’s schedule, took time away from his own job and interests so that he could increase his already heavy share of childcare, meal preparation, and housework, and coached me over the final hurdles. He generously offered his special blend of encouragement and ideas throughout this intellectual and culinary quest, and my work is better—in fact, my work exists— because of that. Ken: Thank you. I love you. My children, Io and Idris, were born in the years this project was developing. They are so cool. My love for them is boundless, and I am so grateful that I get to hang out with them every day. I cared about the relationships among race, class, and gender long before they were born, but my search for answers has greater immediacy

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Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

because I see how much those answers really matter in the lives of these precious people. My father, Mike Kennelly, suffered a stroke while I worked on this book, and he lived through it and thrives. My father-in-law, Jerry Johnson, suffered a pulmonary embolism while I worked on this book, and he did not live. Both have been champions of my intellectual contributions, and their confidence in me has propelled me on. I am also enormously grateful for all the ways my bonus mother, Jeri, has enhanced my life and the lives of my family and for the joy she so readily shares with us. I have a deep reserve of people who have supported me, either by asking me about this project a lot or not asking me about this project a lot (thank you for knowing which one I needed!): Courtney Foster, Brandon Foster, Marina Karides, Kamau Bobb, Gregory Squires, Fran Buntman, Cynthia Deitch, Steven Tuch, Twila Novak, Marilyn Larson, Linda Grant, Margaret Andersen, Julie Keavney, Michael Dobson, Elizabeth Diaz, Susanne Beechey, Sarah Benetar, and Claire Whitlinger. I have also benefited from the very close reading of chapters by Michelle Beadle, Leah Curran Moon, and Joya Misra. I am humbled to have received your wisdom, advice, and encouragement, and I am deeply appreciative of it. Thank you to Jennifer Oliver for her amazing cover art and illustration; to William “Buzz” Baldwin, Donald Wisk, and Jason Lowry of American Crystal Sugar for helping me understand the sugar beet process; to Brynne Sasha Madway for voluntary research assistance and support; and to Liz Lemon, Barista Supreme, and Strawberry Shortcake at Murky Coffee, Amy at Atomic, and Frank and crew at Sova for heavenly, delicious coffee. Meta DuEwa Jones is my writing partner, my constant source of positivity, and my model of excellence. I wrote this book with her by my side, word after word after word. Meta, the bright light you have shown on me has allowed me to grow like green leaves spreading over a sugar beet field. You make the process of writing enjoyable, and your support has made this book possible. Thank you, all.

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x

I am humbled by this project. In it, I explore the relationships among race, class, and gender. Despite the years I have dedicated to this exploration, I continue to struggle with the fundamental puzzle that lies beneath every word here within. That puzzle is this: how can race, class, and gender be inseparable but still be distinctive enough to have separate, traceable dynamics? In other words, if everything is organized by race, class, and gender (and so even race is organized by race, class, and gender; and gender is organized by race, class, and gender; and class is organized by race, class, and gender) then how could any one thing simply be race (or class, or gender)? There is a frustrating circularity in the logic we use in this field when we simultaneously argue that class (or race, or gender) can stand on its own, and class (or race, or gender) is never unintwined with the others. Let me provide an example. In her astute book on lynching and antilynching activities, historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (1993, 131) contextualizes her discussion of this unbearably heinous “systematic weapon of terror” that white southerners in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries waged primarily against black men by considering a more recent reference to the topic. In 1991, Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas remarked that by taking the testimony of Anita Hill into consideration, the Senate Judiciary Committee subjected him to a “high-tech lynching.” He was, of course, ultimately confirmed, in part because the committee took deliberate discursive action to denigrate and discredit Anita Hill and to minimize the importance of sexual harassment. These events, Hall (1993, xviii) says, were conceived early on by women’s groups “as a gender story. White feminists saw Hill not as a woman of color but as Everywoman.” African American feminists, though, “never shared that illusion. They were all too painfully aware that this was also a racial drama: white inquisitors; white viewers/jurors filtering the action through racial stereotypes; a powerful black man . . . a black woman, bravely but dangerously putting ‘her private business in the street.’” In

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Preface

preface

addition, nobody looking out for the interests of workers successfully framed Thomas’s workplace harassment of Hill as a labor issue, and Hill was, instead, painted as an “elite” and “careerist” woman whose treatment must not have been very bad because it did not cause her to leave her job. It is clear that the events of this confirmation hearing are organized simultaneously by gender, by race, and by class. It makes sense to take all of these influences into consideration, as complicated as that may be, rather than making the mistake of framing this only as “a gender story” or “a racial drama” or “a labor issue” to the exclusion of the others. But here is the problem with that. If we take this confirmation hearing as a “social thing,” as an event that was shaped by race, class, and gender, we also have the opportunity to consider how that thing influences “things” that come after it. How does this event affect future events? In the 2009 confirmation hearing of Sonia Sotomayor, for instance, or in the 2010 hearing of Elena Kagan, does Thomas’s 1991 hearing influence the proceedings as a race thing? Or a gender thing? Or a class thing? Or a race-class-gender thing? In the odd call Virginia Thomas (Justice Thomas’s wife) made to Anita Hill 19 years later asking for an apology, how does the original hearing function? How do we classify it? Being a conscientious student of the field, I want to answer, “Of course it’s a race-class-gender thing.” But if this is the case—if Thomas’s hearing is a race-class-gender thing and it influences things to come as a race-class-gender thing—where, oh where, might we ever find something that is simply a gender thing? Or a class thing? Or a race thing? For this was only one hearing, only one set of events, one social thing. The social order is shaped by zillions of these “things,” and each of them has been shaped by race, class, and gender. So which one is gender, which one is race, and which one can we discretely and concretely identify as class? For many, the answer seems obvious. If a thing shapes the life conditions of women and transgender individuals differently than men’s and intersexed individuals’ life conditions, it is a gender thing. If it affects race relations for years to come, it is a race thing. If the lives of the poor are made worse by it and the lives of the rich made better, it is a class thing. Right? This seems very straightforward and to the point, but it leaves us with the important questions that race-class-gender scholars have long been asking: Which women? And what race relations? And are we talking about all the poor or patterned segments of people who are poor? Calling something “gender,” based on the way it differentiates between women and men, of course, presumes homogeneity

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xii

xiii

among women and among men. And part of what race-class-gender scholarship has been so powerful in demonstrating is that the same social phenomenon may affect poor women and rich women differently; it might somehow pit the interests of Latinos and white women against elite black men. In other words, here is yet another reason why it is difficult or even impossible to say that something is “gender”: because the life conditions of any socially located group are patterned but rarely identical. We have, then, at least two reasons why it seems nearly impossible to call any thing, simply, “gender” (or “race” or “class”). First, any thing we could call “gender” has actually been shaped and influenced by a myriad of race, class, and gender dynamics. The Thomas hearing is one example of this. Regardless of whether this event ultimately shapes the life conditions of women and men differently, it has been formed by race, class, and gender to such a degree that no one of these influences can be untangled and set apart. How, then, could we simplify it as just “gender”? Second, even if we did focus only on the ways an event like this affects the life conditions of men and women, and we therefore call it a “gender issue,” we should be troubled by the homogeneity this imposes on “women” and “men.” The Thomas hearing may, indeed, have provoked some important reexaminations of women’s and men’s relations of power, especially at work. But the hearing did not, in fact, affect black and white men identically. It also did not affect all gay men the same way, or all American men, or all Jewish men, or all men without disabilities, or all middle-aged men, or all Spanish-speaking men, or all fathers. Saying that something has “gender effects” takes a great deal for granted when differences and similarities of race, class, sexuality, nation, religion, body ability, age, ethnicity, and family relations are obscured. In short, any single thing—any event that happens, any pattern that emerges, any relationship, any interaction, any form of resistance, any discursive construction, any institution, or any other social thing— that we can identify (1) has race-class-gender influences and (2) has effects with race-class-gender contours. In these two important ways, everything is “race-class-gender” rather than just “race” or just “class” or just “gender.” How, then, can we ever isolate what gender has to do with anything? Or race? Or class? What is it that makes something just “gender”? And if we are untroubled by not being able to come up with an answer to what gender (or race, or class) alone has to do with a given thing, then how can we claim it has race-class-gender dimensions (when we cannot isolate what those, individually, are)? My head

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spins as it goes around in this circle again and again, and there seems to be no satisfactory answer. And yet, as I have worked on this puzzle over many years, with the influences of many, many people’s writings and testimonies and my own analyses of countless social situations, I have begun to make use of a conceptual solution that became apparent in the description of the issues themselves. We have two problems, and I articulate two partially satisfactory answers. Let me take the first part first. The ways race, class, and gender all influence any social thing are very important to identify. Race really did affect the Thomas hearings in many different forms, including the fact that the Senate Judiciary Committee that heard the testimony of Anita Hill, and ultimately confirmed Clarence Thomas, was completely composed of white people. Just as a very basic fact, we have a group of only white people deciding who will sit on the nation’s Supreme Court. That, in itself, is a startling way that race influenced the event of the hearing. There are many more ways that race influenced that event, along with multiple ways gender and class influenced it. The Thomas hearing, as a social thing, then, was greatly influenced by race, class, and gender. These influences are related to, but conceptually distinctive from, the ways the Thomas hearing functions as a factor in subsequent social things. What I believe that we, as a field, need to differentiate when we argue about the importance of race, class, and gender in every social thing are influences and functions. Race, class, and gender can influence a social thing in enormously complicated ways. But then that social thing goes on to shape other things in ways that may best be characterized as gender, or as race, or as class. That social thing— constructed through race, class, and gender—comes to function as a dynamic of race, or a dynamic of gender, or a dynamic of class. It can function as more than one of these, and it can function as more than one of them at the same time, but at least here—in a social thing’s functions1—we can comfortably (or at least less uncomfortably) isolate gender from race from class. Just because race, class, and gender

1 Stepping away from the Parsonian conceptualization of functions as different from effects (and attempting to reclaim the term “function”), I use them synonymously here simply to reflect a focus on how a social thing operates. What does it do? A social thing functions, or operates, to shape, influence, and possibly construct what comes after it (or not to), and the ways it shapes, influences, and constructs are its effects. If “effects” belies a reliance on a scientific paradigm, I use it here only as a way of talking about what happens because of something.

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have irrevocably worked together to construct a social thing, then, does not mean we cannot distinguish the race effects of that thing from its gender effects and its class effects. What this acknowledges is that race, class, and gender are themselves social institutions. Just like the media (another social institution) is shaped by race, class, and gender, gender-as-an-institution is shaped by race, class, and gender. Just as families (another social institution) are shaped by race, class, and gender, class-as-an-institution is shaped by race, class, and gender. Analyzing the ways the media shape, influence, and construct a presidential race, a confirmation hearing, or anything else is an essential activity, and we can do that in a way that takes into account how race, class, and gender have shaped, influenced, and constructed the media. But the ways the media function need attention. So, too, do the ways race functions. And class. And gender. We can analyze their functions even while we acknowledge that each of them was itself shaped, influenced, and constructed by race, class, and gender. So first, I argue that our field needs to differentiate influences and functions. I cannot imagine a scenario in which race, class, and gender have not influenced something. I can imagine a scenario, though, where that thing goes on to influence other things in ways we can identify as “race,” and in ways we can identify as “class,” and in ways we can identify as “gender.” In the influences, race, class, and gender are intertwined. In the functions, we need to conceptually separate race, class, and gender from each other—at least temporarily—to discern how they work. Even when functions are separated from influences, though, something that is called a “class effect” (or a “race effect” or a “gender effect”) has its own set of problems, not solved quite as neatly as the first problem. Using one set of conceptual tools, we may argue that something is a “race issue,” say, because it has been discursively constructed as such. Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearing is able to function as a race issue because he “successfully” related it to lynching, for example. As Michel Foucault (1990)and others would argue, the ability to frame a social thing is powerful because when we accept that framing, we construct the character of the social thing. Many would argue that Thomas’s hearing was in fact not a high-tech lynching, for instance, but because that framing has been introduced and used, we either come to understand it that way or we have to fight against that understanding—and in all this, the hearing becomes a “race issue” that can then affect future events and shape other social institutions in ways that are related to race. The construction of a social thing

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through discourse, then, is one of the ways that social thing can be said to operate, or function, and allow us to trace its effects. I have argued here, though, that in addition to its discursive construction, a social thing may be said to have “race effects” if it shapes the common conditions of black men’s lives differently than it shapes the common conditions of white men’s lives (as one example). In other words, we know what kind of social thing it is by who and what it affects. But who are these “black men” and these “white men”? Black feminists (P. Collins 1991), postcolonial feminists (Mohanty 1988; Oyewùmí 1997), borderland feminists ˘ (Anzaldúa 1987), and so many more have articulated how even the act of naming somebody “black” or “men” is an enormously presumptuous enterprise because it almost invariably involves constructing everybody’s situations around the norms evident among the most powerful. Their work has primarily focused on the naming of “women,” although any such category is similarly problematic. When people’s lived realities get erased or ignored because they do not conform to the patterns of the “black” “men” who are defined as such, then anything that is called a “race effect” can be so limited as to have little real value in our understanding of the social. Using this “race effect” in our analyses can even cause more problems than it solves by skewing our understanding of how race operates. This problem has been so well expressed by so many that the best I can do is advocate the solutions they pose. In two words, they demand that we contextualize and localize (Mohanty 1988). The nuances of class relations are not necessarily the same in Lusaka, Zambia, and Raipur, India, or even in Fargo (North Dakota), compared to rural North Dakota. Working those nuances in, rather than obscuring or ignoring them, should be the goal in our analyses of any of the functions of what must—in an admittedly problematic way—be called race and class and gender. This imperative also reminds us that studying “gender” is not as fruitful as studying really specific dynamics “of gender” (and “of race” and “of class”): specific stereotypes, specific family relationships, specific habitus, specific playground dynamics, specific policy changes, specific confirmation hearings, specific microenterprise loans, specific bachelorette party rituals, specific compositions of science departments, specific lending practices, specific disease responses, specific iPod playlists. The researchers studying these important dynamics do the field of race, class, and gender studies a great service by providing us with the opportunity to observe, both within and across these studies, what gender (or race or class) is in these very contextualized social situations.

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These two solutions—distinguishing influences from functions and attempting to meet the imperative to contextualize and localize— guide my efforts here. Although I have taken readers on the long ride around the barn in explaining all of this, it is important to me to use the concepts of “race” and “class” and “gender” with integrity and as little fuzziness as possible. These words get thrown around a lot, but I use them in very precise ways in this book. I argue in the pages ahead that race, class, and gender are like foods that get produced, used, and consumed, and I could not explore how a dynamic of “gender” gets produced, for instance, if I did not believe that the dynamic I was talking about was really “gender” rather than “race-class-gender.” I want the boundaries I have put around these concepts to be clear. I also really want to figure out what the relationships among them are, which is the project that follows.

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preface

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4

A Conceptual Reor ientation

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Pa rt 1

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4

Metaphor and the Organization of Social Life

Th e Pat ter ned Char ac ter of S oc i al L i fe

L

ife is organized. When you are rushing from place to place or chaotically trying to accomplish an imposing list of tasks, it may not seem like it is. But even in the midst of frenzy, there is an order to things, which is to say, there is structure to our lives. Some really wonderful things help provide that order, like happiness: the “pursuit of happiness,” or, better yet, the actual experience of happiness. One of the ways that happiness may be said to organize life is through rituals constructed to celebrate it: weddings, graduation ceremonies, coming-of-age rites, and retirement parties, for example. These events provide us with something to look forward to, something wonderful to experience, or something that ushers in the happiness accompanying the next phase of life. Of course not every person who gets married, graduates, comes of age, or retires is happy, either while the event is happening or after the celebration of it ends. And many people are not allowed to marry, do not have access to education, are not noticed to have come of age, or are not ever able to retire, but they may be extremely happy. My point is not that life is about absolutes. Rather, life is generally organized. We live in ways that are patterned by things we may or may not even realize are there. For instance, norms of education currently pattern many people’s lives. My grandfather, born in a farmhouse in North Dakota in 1911, attended the nearest town’s one-room school through the eighth grade. He was then able, and expected,

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Chapter 1

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

to participate in the family’s farming operation so that he would be skilled and experienced enough to run it himself one day. This sort of expectation and experience organized his life: his actual days, his hopes and ambitions, his choice of sexual partners, his home’s location, his thoughts, his friendship networks, his political views, and nearly everything else about him. In contrast, my daughter is in competition with the other yuppie kids in our gentrifying urban neighborhood to get into public preschool at three years of age. Parents of potential preschoolers line up outside the most popular school the night before the admissions lottery to ensure that their children will have a chance to attend the “best” school. On the playground, mothers and fathers of four-year-olds tell parents of newborns that they should start thinking about schools and putting in face time right away—“It’s never too early!” This competition will continue through elementary school, junior high, high school, college, and beyond. In ways that are quite different from those in my grandfather’s life, these expectations and experiences will organize my daughter’s life: her actual days, her hopes and ambitions, her choice of sexual partners, and everything else. Life is organized. I do not argue here that any one thing, like happiness or educational norms, fully determines any individual’s life. I am simply saying that things like these organize our lives. What is complicated about this is that a lot of things organize our lives, and, simultaneously, there are a lot of things about our lives to be organized. How do people interpret the way you speak? Who do you desire and what do you desire to do with them? When will you get sick, what will you get sick with, and who—if anyone—will take care of you through it? How much control does the state have over your choices? What makes up your memories? These are all some of the aspects of our lives that are organized. Further, we tend to experience such things in patterned ways. We think some ways of talking sound “classy” while other strings of words sound ridiculous—that is a pattern. From an early age we are implicitly and repeatedly compelled to feel lust for people whose reproductive organs are different from our own—that is a pattern. While the unique aspects of any individual are important components of these dynamics, we are subject to a host of organizing forces that are longer lasting and more powerful than any individual. In this book, I am interested in three things in particular that organize our lives: race, class, and gender. I argue that these are not simply items we have to check off on census forms but are, rather,

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fundamental ways of organizing life (of organizing the ways we talk, the people we love, the options the state provides for us, our relationships, and anything else about “life” that could be named). Because of the ways they organize life, race, class, and gender also become the sources of many forms of oppression (such as violence and deplorable living conditions) and of privilege (such as the ability to make decisions for one’s self and others). Something great, like happiness, may contribute to the ways our lives are organized, but the insidious forces that divide people rather than unite them, stifle the imagination rather than nurture it, and incite shame and hatred in people’s outlooks rather than health and common interest are at least as big and as powerful. Lots of folks have studied, painted, written about, performed, and articulated both the harmful and beneficial ways that race, class, and gender organize life, and I draw on their work throughout the book as I explore the one fundamental question I have about these sources of oppression and privilege. This question is, how are the various elements that provide order to our lives related to one another? In other words, how are the ways that gender organizes life related to the ways that race and class organize life? What do they have to do with each other? How do they conflict or work together? Where can we see evidence of the combined effects of their manners of organization? I am interested in the relationships among race, class, and gender as organizing principles of life. We already know a bit about these relationships. According to the prevailing scholarship that takes care to analyze the Interrelationships among these sources of oppression and privilege (Andersen and Collins 2010; P. H. Collins 1991), the ways that race organizes life intersects with the ways that gender and class do. This is the launching point for my own analysis, since the logic of intersection has been the catalyst for some of the most compelling revelations about social life over the last forty years. As I take this logic apart in order to consider the premises on which it relies, I also try to nudge those of us who are interested in the relationships among race, class, and gender in some different directions. I have become convinced that in order to more fully understand these relationships, we need some analytical tools that are more specific and systematic than “intersection”—tools that require us (and make it somewhat easier for us) to investigate how and when and under what circumstances race, class, and gender intersect, if they in fact intersect at all.

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In addition, I am devoted to producing analyses that focus on race, class, and gender as ways of organizing life rather than as demographic categories of individuals or groups. When many of us say that race, class, and gender intersect, what we tend to mean is that in a specific person, or in a particular social group, race, class, and gender are present: in a poor Anglo boy, in rich African American women, in Latinos in the health care system. Race, class, and gender come together as a cluster in these bodies and social groups (McCall 2005). Analyses that home in on the experiences of any particular demographic group are really quite valuable, especially when they are accomplished through the feminist aim of giving voice to the members of those groups and when they help to reveal, as fictions, the presumptions of universal experience as told through the impressions of the privileged. In part because these studies have been such a compelling part of my understanding of race, class, and gender, I make heavy use of them, but I privilege the ones that uncover the structural, organizing elements that shape the various experiences of anyone who may be subsumed in a demographic category. This is all to say that I seek to understand how the ways that class organizes people’s lives builds on, springs from, contradicts, and changes the ways race and gender organize their lives. I attempt to understand this in very particular sorts of contexts as revealed through things like what music teenagers listen to and what opportunities middle-class kids at working-class schools have, as well as in the more general patterns that shape our thoughts, behaviors, relationships, and life chances. The way I aim to accomplish this are experimental and truly somewhat whimsical. In this book, I present an attempt to think through these relationships by making use of some other relationships with which we are much more familiar. I like food. I am interested in food, interested in food, and in the relationships among foods—between lemons and sugar, between cornmeal and soda water, between avocados and limes. We implicitly know a lot about food relationships like these. We know that trying to make a tortilla by just stirring a little salt with some dry cornmeal will fail; the tortilla must be made by pouring boiling, salted soda water over the cornmeal and shaping the mixture into small, flat circles. That is one sort of “relationship” that foods have with each other—they combine to produce something different than what would have otherwise existed. Throughout the book, I make simple relationships like this one more explicit to see

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if they can tell us anything about the relationships I am truly interested in: those among race, class, and gender. Although I took on this task to clarify and simplify the concepts, it has turned out to be fairly complicated, requiring me to explain a lot about food that may not be common knowledge. That said, the relationships among different foods—between sugar and the juice squeezed from lemons, for instance—give us much to work with as we try to understand the relationships among organizing mechanisms like race, class, and gender and are worth exploring in depth. The first characteristic of food that makes it appealing to me for this project is that food has to be produced. Crops have to be grown, chemicals have to be manufactured, and substances have to be processed, which is all to say, the things we eat are produced. Even the water that dilutes sugar and lemon juice enough to make it into lemonade is not typically caught directly from the sky in a rain bucket and poured into the pitcher. Rather, it is harvested and processed much like any crop. Just like these things we eat and drink, race, class, and gender have to be produced (or, in common sociological parlance, “socially constructed”) in the interactions, the social institutions, and the values and norms that shape our lives and relationships. Likening this social production process to the process of creating food—taking a seed, putting it in the dirt, and caring for it in a way that helps it grow into a plant of green, leafy tops and sugar beet roots—makes it impossible to ignore the work that goes into creating and recreating race, class, and gender so that they may be available to organize our lives in particular ways. Considering the parallels between the production of food and the production of race, class, and gender then leads me straight to their use. When a sugar beet seed has been planted and cultivated and the roots have been harvested and processed, its sugar is then used in the kitchen of somebody who wants to eat it or feed it to his family. And while plain sugar may hold culinary appeal for some, most cooks are likely to use that sugar along with some other foods—lemon juice, coffee, a roasted pig, or even just water. Here is where the “intersection” of race, class, and gender may seem most obvious: they are mixed together the ways that class organizes our lives is mixed together with the ways that gender and race do, and this active mixing characterizes an important aspect of their relationships with each other. When foods are poured into a pan and cooked, the mixture does not typically just sit on the stove, however. We eat it. We consume

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it and experience it, and then it comes to affect the body that has taken it in. Similarly, we digest race, class, and gender, as the title of this book announces. These things that have been socially produced, mixed up together in millions of different ways, and experienced as forms of oppression and privilege shape us. These are the aspects of food I work with in order to help isolate what race, class, and gender have to do with each other. Let me say more about them in what follows.

Fro m Fiel d to Body Have you ever thought about what makes something a food? Think about grass, for example. Grass grows quite plentifully across many American landscapes, but we do not usually go out to our yards, dig up a hunk of grass, and sauté it for dinner. Cows and other animals eat grass, so it is food to them. It must have some important nutrients and filling power if it is able to nourish a body as substantial as a cow’s. Why is it not food for us? In fact, it is. We do not eat our lawns, but we eat other grasses—such as wheat, corn, even sugarcane—without thinking about it twice. These types of plants are technically grasses because of their structure, shape, and function. The lawn variety of grass tends to be more suitable for animals whose digestive systems can break down the cellulose that houses most of its nutrients, but human beings in Ireland, North Korea, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have resorted to eating ground-cover grass in times of extreme economic hardship. Grass can be a food, then. For typical human consumption, though, more effort has been put into producing grasses like rice and rye, making these very easily recognizable to us as “food.” These production processes and choices make something a food. They change it from something you walk on to something you put in your mouth. Before you eat a food, though, a lot of things may happen to it. Even rice and beets straight out of the ground usually have to be organized, packaged, shipped, and displayed in order to reach the people who will consume them, and they must also be prepared somewhere along the way, either as ready-to-eat items (think candy) or as ingredients in the individual kitchens of the people who have bought them for use in particular dishes (think freshly squeezed lemonade). Before these food products are consumed, I argue, they have no flavor. We have fairly accurate expectations about what particular products will taste like when we put them in our mouths,

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which would explain why a farmer would go to the length of hilling her potatoes on the third round of cultivation to prevent them from getting sunburned and producing bitter potato chips. But those potatoes do not carry flavor around with them. Rather, the flavor occurs, and it occurs in interaction with the person whose teeth masticate the chip to prepare it for distribution among the taste buds. A food product becomes a flavor when a person experiences it, and people are likely to experience it differently. The flavor lasts only a short while, however, compared to the effects the item will have on the body of the person who tasted it. One potato chip, one spoonful of rice, one glass of lemonade will travel through various parts of the body to be absorbed as nutrients, broken down into amino acids that will be carried to organs in need of repair, stored as fat, and expelled as waste. These “foods”—the sugar in the lemonade, for example—are first produced and then combined in a recipe, experienced as flavor, and finally, as a collection of nutritional substances, they structure the body that interacts with them. Race, class, and gender are also produced, combined, experienced, and digested. Each of these is a “product” that must be planted, watered, fed, cultivated, and harvested season after season, just like fields of sugar beets. Imagine that we stopped planting sugar beet crops. How would our lives change? What difference would this make in what we ate each day? When sociologists talk about race, class, and gender as “social constructions,” this is exactly what they mean—imagine that we stopped planting “gender crops.” Imagine that teachers in elementary schools stopped asking children to queue up in girls’ lines and boys’ lines. Imagine that physicians did not dismiss women’s chronic headaches as some form of uniquely female mental illness. Imagine that dress codes at private schools did not stipulate that girls can wear dresses and boys cannot. Imagine that the president did not address us as “ladies and gentlemen.” Imagine that Viacom did not feel pressure to make its star cartoon character, Dora the Explorer, “more feminine.” Imagine that it would not even occur to radio disk jockeys to call former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice a “bitch.” Imagine that a man who changed his last name to his wife’s when they got married was not castigated by his family, shunned by his best friend, and asked, time after time, “Why would you do that?” The crop of gender takes a lot of work to maintain. It is produced, just like the crops of race and class, in social life, and great care goes into farming it and ensuring a bountiful harvest. In this book, I explore how the

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production of crops of gender is related to the production of crops of race and class. But production is only the first part. The relationships among foods also exist in other “sites,” such as in the things we actually eat: guacamole, corn tortillas, lemonade, or any other dish. In these dishes we get close to something like “intersections” because products like avocados, lime juice, and salt quite plainly come together in a bowl to form guacamole. This is similar to what black feminist sociologists have described as race, class, and gender’s “coming together.” Each one is produced in separate but related ways, and then, for a variety of reasons, they all come together in particular situations, institutions, interactions, and relationships. Those who study race, class, and gender tend to begin with such situations— foster-care caseloads disproportionately full with children of poor black women (Roberts 2002), professional occupations organized around the typical life situations of affluent white men (J. Williams 1999), boarding schools designed to turn young Lakota girls into Christian maids (Crow Dog 1990). This is akin to taking guacamole and figuring out what is in it, working backward from the finished entity to the elements that went into making it the way it is. How many avocados go into the recipe? How does the salt enhance its smooth flavor? What acid brightens it up? In foster care, what stereotypes do white caseworkers use to interpret black women’s family situations? Why are 45 percent of children in the child welfare system black? How is the state involved in poor women’s opportunities to raise their children? An analyst starts with a given situation and traces back the ingredients that have been mixed up to create it, and this tells us something about race, class, and gender’s relationships to each other—both in this particular situation and, possibly, if the relationships are patterned in particular ways, in general. This practice reveals the influences race, class, and gender have on any particular social thing. Finally (in this explanation, if not in any actual sequence of events), like food that has been produced, combined, and experienced as flavor and texture, race, class, and gender get to work on our social bodies and institutions. Just as a bite of guacamole gets mashed up in the mouth and its constituent nutrients are separated out and recombined in ways that both help and harm the body, combinations of race, class, and gender get into our social bodies and institutions in ways that fundamentally shape, construct, and organize the functions of those bodies and institutions. We become

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what we have “eaten,” and when we are eating race-class-gender combinations that are infused with difference—good and bad, ugly and beautiful, worthless and valuable, stupid and smart—we become different: different from each other and different from what we would have otherwise been. We identify race, class, and gender combinations in social things to determine the influence they have had on those social things, but we identify the functions of those social things—their effects on the world—by understanding how race, class, and gender are digested. A big part of what this metaphor demonstrates is that race, class, and gender do not intersect or interlock in any one, overarching way—there is no single relationship among them. I hope that by acknowledging this, researchers will be better equipped to find the multiple relationships that actually do exist. Race, class, and gender come together in different ways and different forms under different circumstances, generating different experiences with different results. The task of researchers, then, is to trace the particular path a “food” takes through the production process and combination stage, onto someone’s tongue, and into the cells of her body. Studies of race, class, gender, and any other form of oppression may investigate how they are related at each crux; that is, production, combination, and digestion.

S ugar I develop the contours of the conceptual tools that can guide such investigations of race, class, and gender by concentrating on one particular food: sugar. I explore how sugar is produced and combined, how it can be experienced, and how it comes to shape the entities with which it interacts in order to illustrate some of the primary points of relationship among race, class, and gender. Sugar serves as a metaphor, not for race or class or gender in their entirety but for any big or small part of any one of them. Sugar may be a compliant form of femininity or an unruly one. Sugar may be racially integrated schools or middle-class anomie, or it may be men’s access to pianos. What is important about sugar is that it is produced, combined, consumed, and digested in ways that help illustrate how elements of race, class, and gender are produced, combined, consumed, and digested. Since these processes, for sugar, are intimately linked with the production, combination, consumption, and digestion of other “foods,” dissecting how a beet root turns into packets of tiny white

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Metaphor and the Organization of Social Life

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granules that contribute to an eater’s diabetes reveals something about its relationships to limes and avocados and corn, which is to say, unruly women’s relationships with racially integrated schools and middle-class anomie and men’s access to pianos. What this means is that sugar itself simply represents any single dimension of the organization of life. Sugar, by itself, does not reveal much about relationships. But sugar is never by itself, any more than race, class, gender, or any other organizing mechanism is. Sugar is produced in fields using techniques borrowed from the production of coffee and carob trees. Sugar is mixed in pans with water and lemon juice and then consumed on a hot summer day. And sugar is consumed and digested along with proteins, complex carbohydrates, and other elements that break down and recombine to have specific effects. What sugar gives us is material to understand relationships because sugar’s relationships with other items are so multifaceted. Why sugar, specifically? The metaphor I develop here is really about food—about what the production of a food has to do with the production of other foods; about what happens when foods are mixed and consumed together; and about what transpires because we have eaten particular combinations of foods. These processes can tell us a great deal about race, class, and gender as organizing mechanisms in our lives and institutions. In order to examine this with some consistency, I have found it necessary to make heavy use of one particular food with all its complexities and nuances. I was initially inspired to use sugar as a metaphor upon reading Sidney W. Mintz’s classic book Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985), and I have borrowed heavily from Mintz’s focus on the processes of production, consumption, and power. This clever and revealing history of sugar provides important context for the heavy use of sugar in contemporary American diets, and all this gives me a great deal of metaphorical scaffolding to stand on. For sugar to be useful as a metaphor here, its examination needs to reveal aspects of the relationships among race, class, gender, and other organizing mechanisms that are obscure(d), and provide real methodological guidance for a field that most sociologists agree is vital but that few agree about how to concretely approach. This metaphor demands that we acknowledge, in both theory and method, that there is no one, single relationship among forms of oppression (such as an intersection). These relationships emerge in different— and sometimes very similar—ways because of how oppression is

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produced, what people and institutions do with it once it exists, why we consume it, and how it then comes to shape us and our social world. Only by examining very context-specific relationships, like these and hopefully using framework like this to establish some of the major relationships in ways that future work can build on, will our studies of race, class, and gender flourish. The larger theoretical framework on which this work relies has been generated and honed by race-class-gender scholars for more than three decades. In the chapter that follows, which will be of most interest to race-class-gender scholars, I synthesize these theoretical premises and interrogate the metaphors that have supported them. Following that, I give each of the “sites” of relationships among race, class, and gender—production, combination, and digestion— its own chapter, fully exploring the nuances of what food can teach us about the organization of social life.

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Metaphor and the Organization of Social Life

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4

Race, Class, and Gender as Organizing Principles

Race, C l a s s, and G ender : What A re They?

Think of all the people using electricity right now: a teenager

drying his hair in the locker room after a game; an elderly couple driving their hybrid car to the grocery store; someone writing the great American novel on her computer in the coffee shop; a father switching on his daughter’s night-light. These electricity users are like the bus riders and radio listeners that philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre uses to illustrate his distinction between two different and interrelated types of social collectives: groups and series. A group of people, for Sartre (2004), is self-consciously formed around something its members have in common, while people in a series have a relationship to some material thing but hold little else in common. If electricity users comprised a group, they might wear T-shirts that say “Electricity Rocks!” or send out monthly newsletters noting electricity users’ birthdays and anniversaries. They would identify with each other because they would believe themselves to be alike. A series of people, though, has no such identification. Electricity users all depend on the electricity staying on, so they all have a common relationship to that material issue. Bus riders, too, face a common condition together: at any given bus stop, some of them stand waiting for the bus, which will either get them to their destinations on time or make them late. Radio listeners may comprise doctors, childcare providers, camping enthusiasts, rappers, coal miners, dog lovers, and anybody else, and their relationship with the radio

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indirectly places them in a relationship with each other. Each of these “ensembles” of people makes up a series. Sartre used this notion of seriality to understand the dynamics of social class. He recognized that there are people who consciously form groups—not just series—around their class status. Karl Marx advocated for such “class consciousness,” and present-day unions are one example of such an intentional grouping. But Sartre explained that what fundamentally unites people as a class is not a conscious grouping but the fact that they face common conditions, as here explained by Iris Marion Young, “A person is born into a class in the sense that a history of class relations precedes one, and the characteristics of the work that one will do or not do are already inscribed in machines, the physical structure of factories and offices, the geographic relations of city and suburb” (1994, 727). The conditions already exist (even as they continually change), and the individuals who make up a class series are similarly constrained and supported by them. Identifying what sets one series apart from another is important. On the topic of social class, scholars have many different perspectives on how one series is demarcated from another. Classical theorist Karl Marx believed that sets of people in a capitalist economic system are united in what Sartre would call a series by their relationship to the means of production: owners of these means make up one set, while those who only have their own labor power to sell make up another. For Sartre, these sets are series, and he, too, understood the importance of the bourgeoisie’s ownership of the means of production and the concomitant orientation of production around the bourgeoisie’s interests as the primary realities that sort individuals into series (see also Brosman 1985; Caws 1979). The common relationship that a series of people has to the means of production indicates—importantly—that they also face common conditions in life. The kinds of work that individuals in that series do will span a similar range, the quality of the schools their children will have the opportunity to attend will be similar, the food available for them to eat will be similar, and their access to health care will be similar. Exposure to these conditions may ultimately produce people who enjoy the same kinds of music or spend their free time in similar ways, but to Sartre’s way of thinking, it is not these interests that originally united them. People’s attributes, personalities, and quirks are incidental in seriality—a single series may include people who are interested in bluegrass music and people who listen to jazz; people

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who sneak away from work to watch movies and people who race motorcars; people who have six children and singles. Ensembles of people who make up a class series are not united by the commonality of their attributes any more than people who use electricity are. People in a class series are united by the commonality of the conditions they face. Establishing the priority of the common relationship and the resulting common conditions that a series of people faces is important because it helps us understand that people do not experience the advantages and disadvantages of class simply because they are alike. Rich people are not rich because they are smarter or harder working than poor people, for instance. Poor people are not poor because they lack initiative and drive. They are poor because they have a common relationship to the means of production—they do not own any. And this relationship, rather than any attributes they may share, comes first in determining the kinds of conditions they, as a series, will face. So the relationship results in the living conditions, but theorist Pierre Bourdieu then helps us piece together the way these common conditions themselves produce similar attributes in ensembles of people. His extensive study of members of the full range of class ensembles in France in 1963 led him to observe that, for instance, those in higher income brackets eat more lamb than others, while those who have moved up from lower to middle brackets subsequently increase their consumption of sugar. What he says, essentially, is that people facing common conditions come to behave alike. He describes French women’s orientations to the rooms in their homes as another example: “Nothing is more alien to workingclass women than the typically bourgeois idea of making each object in the home the occasion for an aesthetic choice, of extending the intention of harmony or beauty even into the bathroom or kitchen, places strictly defined by their function, or of involving specifically aesthetic criteria in the choice of a saucepan or cupboard” (1984, 379). Working-class women, he says, make “realistic choices” that become their preference, as though the women were truly choosing from all available options. Their tastes resemble those of others who are similarly structurally located and contrast with the preferences of members of other series. In the contemporary American context, where Wal-Mart sells women the opportunity to buy five-packs of holiday washcloths for their bathrooms at a price of $1.49, people can make choices about what to place around their homes—choices

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Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

that are aesthetic but that are also economically realistic and practical. In this way, they are able to remain within the limits of their budgets while they emulate the diffuse ideal Bourdieu calls “bourgeois,” even while wealthy home decorators would likely never buy themed towels from a big-box store. In either context, people who have a common relationship to the means of production and the occupational structure, and therefore face common conditions, begin to resemble each other. They do not become working class because they are united by a similar appreciation for holiday washcloths at Wal-Mart; they buy the washcloths because the chance to decorate their bathrooms with goods from Wal-Mart rather than with handmade silk imports from Italian artisans is one of the common conditions that shapes their behaviors, choices, perspectives, and preferences. “Habitus” is the term Bourdieu uses to refer to these preferences and orientations that are held in common by people who face similar conditions. With this term he acknowledges that what we like and what we do—even how we move our bodies—are heavily shaped by the organizing structures that place us into relationships with one another. Simply put, “different conditions of existence produce different habitus” (1984, 170). But our orientations and practices also influence those organizing structures (the washcloths at WalMart may not sell, prompting the store to stop selling decorative bathroom items, thus changing what is available for consumers to use to communicate their domestic aesthetic and their practicality). Where Sartre emphasizes how a series of people gets created despite those people’s dissimilarities, and without those people’s effort or will, Bourdieu extends this lack of orchestration to the practices and preferences—the habitus—that such series of people come to share because of the common situations they continually face. The activities of each member of a class (in Bourdieu’s terms) or a series (in Sartre’s terms) “are objectively harmonized among themselves, without any deliberate pursuit of coherence, and objectively orchestrated, without any conscious concentration, with those of all members of the same class” (Bourdieu 1984, 173). Not Just Bodies

Jean Paul Sartre and Pierre Bourdieu stand among a long line of theorists and philosophers for whom class is the central concern.

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Iris Marion Young introduced Sartre’s notion of seriality to a wider audience of inequality scholars in her 1994 Signs piece as a way of pushing our understanding not only of class but also of gender and race. What this concept provides, for Young, is a way of thinking about the common conditions facing people that neither carelessly assumes nor arrogantly demands that all people with female bodies or “white” bodies or any other kind of bodies actually share any preexisting and determining set of common attributes. A great deal of evidence and narrative reveals that “women,” for instance, do not share objectives around the world or even across the street. The idea that men make up a series means not that they have gotten together to affirm their status (“We are men! Let’s take over the world!”) but that they face common conditions: compared to women, men—at different points in the United States context—will have an easier time finding good-paying jobs, be less likely to clean the toilets in their homes, be more able to translate education into labor-market position, have their written work published more often and read by more people, be unlikely to pursue or obtain positions as daycare providers, get to keep the name they were given at birth without question, have to fight in wars, get to watch a wide range of representations of themselves on television, be encouraged to learn how to fix their cars, be admired for their independence, and so on. These are some of the common conditions men, as a series, face. Similarly, in her popular piece on white privilege, Peggy McIntosh (1990, 2) details a list of the things she can easily do as a silk imports from Italian artisans is one of the common conditions white people in the United States face: 1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time. 2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me. 3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live. 4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me. 5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed. 6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.

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Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

By focusing our understanding of race, class, and gender on series, what becomes clear is that our attention should be drawn not to categories of people (such as whites or blacks), as though such categories demarcate meaningful differences among human beings, but to categories of conditions that affect series of people. It is the conditions that are racialized, gendered, and class-infused (which is to say, structured). This is ridiculous, you may think. There are meaningful differences among human beings, such as the ability to give birth, the ability to run fast, the ability to drive well. Young acknowledges that for gender, bodies do have something to do with the construction of series, but she explains that bodies are not the only things—or even the most significant things—that position people in gender series: A vast complex of other objects and materialized historical products condition women’s lives as gendered. Pronouns locate individual people, along with animals and other objects, in a gender system. Verbal and visual representations more generally create and reproduce gender meanings that condition a person’s action and her interpretation of the actions of others. A multitude of artifacts and social spaces in which people act are flooded with gender codes. Clothes are the primary example, but there are also cosmetics, tools, even in some cases furniture and spaces that materially inscribe the norms of gender. I may discover myself “as a woman” by being on the “wrong” dorm floor. (Young 1994, 729–30)

In addition to these objects—which she, following Sartre, calls “practico-inert necessities” because they are the “inert” products of “practical” human action—social structures such as the gendered division of labor, in which men and women largely do different kinds of work, comprise the conditions individuals must deal with. In line with the notion of habitus, Young would argue that the compelling similarities that exist among people who face common conditions are the products, rather than the motivators, of their grouping. With this, Young moves our focus from the attributes of

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7. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is. 8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

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individuals onto the attributes of the conditions with which people have to deal. This distinction is very important to social scientists, primarily because we have found little evidence that the differential opportunities that race, class, and gender create stem from any kind of traceable, identifiable “natural order.” Women’s and men’s bodies, for instance, are not different enough to warrant the long-standing domination some men have attempted to perpetrate (which, when “successful,” tends to indirectly benefit most men). In fact, many differences that can currently be observed between some women’s and some men’s bodies, such as muscle mass, size, and chemical fluctuation patterns, are the result of social dominance rather than the cause or rightful justification for it. Similarly, what we believe we know to be different races of people are little more than fuzzy demarcations that loosely correspond with the long-term permutations of environmental adaptations human beings have undergone as they have traveled from the present-day continent of Africa around the rest of the globe. And a striking example of a class difference in people’s bodies are the early deaths of miners around the world relative to the life expectancies of people in safer and better-paying jobs like banker and biologist. This is all to say that many differences in bodies result from, rather than drive, social arrangements. Thus, we must focus on conditions rather than on individual people when we try to understand how life is organized. While individuals do have different bodies—different ear lobe shapes, different leg lengths, different abilities and capacities, different skin tones, different internal organs, different relationships to space, different genes—by and large it is not these body differences that organize people’s lives. The presence or absence of a prostate does not tell us much about one’s ability to climb a tree—and yet children with prostates (otherwise called boys) receive more encouragement to climb trees than girls. The level of melanin in the skin does not tell us much about one’s ability to become a physician—and yet individuals with lower levels of melanin (otherwise called whites) receive more scholarship money to attend medical school than blacks. Something here is organizing people’s lives, but it is not things that are innate, “natural,” or truly rooted in bodies. In fact, bodies are one of the many things that race, class, and gender organize, and more and more research is being devoted to uncovering exactly the ways that the organization of social life results in the different sizes, shapes, and types of movement that have differentiated our bodies.

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Race, Class, and Gender as Organizing Principles

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

In addition, the ways bodies experience, create, manipulate, and remember the organizing mechanisms of race, class, and gender are recently being given more focus (for examples, see Burkitt 1999; Kim 2003; Puri 1999; Sullivan 2001). This new work appropriately complicates our understanding of how bodies interact (or, to use Sullivan’s term, transact) with societies, and reinforces the assertion that race, class, and gender are not simply physical characteristics. Not Just Identities

Race, class, and gender, then, are things that organize our lives, in part by shaping the common conditions that series of people face. Race, class, and gender are not a simple reflection of physical characteristics, and here I must also set my work apart from that of some psychologists, women’s studies scholars, philosophers, and even sociologists who define race, class, and gender as “aspects of identities.” Identities are important, if confusing, things. An enormous amount of work in the humanities has attempted to track, trace, define, demarcate, and even just describe what identity is. Even Sartre is ultimately concerned with the project of identity formation. Such a focus is important because identity is believed to motivate us, to reflect what is important to us, to represent how we see ourselves and how the world sees us, or, in short, to be us. Humanities scholars are joined by many others in this quest to pin down identity. A special issue of the psychology journal Sex Roles, for instance, published in September 2008, is titled “Intersectionality of Social Identities” and provides this definition in the description of its contents: “Intersectionality, the mutually constitutive relations among social identities, is a central tenet of feminist thinking” (emphasis mine). In The new social theory reader, edited by sociologists Steven Seidman and Jeffrey C. Alexander (2008), the topics of globalization and postmodernity are grouped under the “Societies and World Order” heading, while race and gender are lumped under “Identities.” The negotiation of identity is central in understandings of race, class, and gender such as these. Having to check a box on a census questionnaire or answer questions like “What are you?” makes race, class, and gender seem like fundamental characteristics of our beings. Indeed, most people do “identify” as a particular race, class, and gender with others who have been similarly placed, although this identification rarely occurs as the result of free choice and is inherently unstable (Minh-ha 1989).

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Identities can allow individuals to influence the ways they are treated and the ways they think about themselves. Yet dealing with race, class, and gender as identities, within a genetics-obsessed climate, generally reifies mainstream notions about “essential” characteristics rather than emphasizing the social processes through which those characteristics are noticed, interpreted, and used as the basis for relegating people to different social locations. Identities tend to invoke the “unified coherent subject of the Enlightenment” (Elenes 1997, 369), even if that coherence is constructed from complicated and “intersecting” entities such as race, class, and gender. And the prioritization of identity individualizes people, leading to many an unending innerdirected quest for people to “find” and identify themselves so that they may lead the most “authentic” lives possible. The project of using race, class, and gender to understand identity is a vital and revolutionary one, with important implications for social life, but it is not my project here. I understand the organization of the conditions of our lives to occur in sites that cannot be fully subsumed by “identities.” Race, class, and gender do organize our identities (and, conversely, our identities organize and shape race, class, and gender), but race, class, and gender also organize our laws, our labor markets, our educational institutions, our economy, our living arrangements, our bodies, our families, our conceptions of time, our forms of violence, our media, our built environments, our health care systems—which is all to say, our social structures (Andersen 2005; Browne and Misra 2003; Lorber 1994; P. Martin 2004; Risman 2004). Race, class, and gender influence these social structures in ways that make some opportunities available for some people and restrict those opportunities from other people. As Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill reiterate, what makes race, class, and gender important to understand is not that they mark individual differences or identities but that “they are primary organizing principles of a society which locates and positions groups within that society’s opportunity structures” (1996, 322–23). For the purposes of this book, then, I treat race, class, and gender as social structures that organize our life conditions. By calling them “social structures,” I am stressing the order and predictability they bring to the organization of social life. As I detail below, along with life conditions, race, class, and gender organize our social practices, our perspectives, our institutional arrangements, and our relationships. Having established these premises, this book’s ultimate aim is to then better articulate how each of these social structures organizes

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Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

each other—that is, how race and class organize gender, how class and gender organize race, and how race and gender organize class.

Race, class, and gender are social structures that organize our life conditions, our perspectives, our actions, our institutional arrangements, and our relationships. While scholars of race, scholars of class, and scholars of gender have argued this point individually, it was women of color (some economically stable, some poor) who, in theorizing their own locations within these structures, made it clear that race, class, and gender are connected in the activities required to organize life and society (Beale 1970; P. H. Collins 1991; Combahee River Collective 1982; Cooper 1892; hooks 1984; Jones 1995; Truth 1878, in Gilbert 1968). The stance of these women of color has substantially advanced feminist analyses, race analyses, and interrogations of class in its insistence on simultaneity in the organization of social life. Perspectives

In 1892, founding social theorist Anna Julia Cooper wondered which train station rest room she should enter: the one “FOR LADIES” or the one “FOR COLORED PEOPLE” (1998, 95). Black women’s invisibility, still apparent over one hundred years later in the common use of phrases like “women and minorities” has been the catalyst for the deliberate study of race, class, and gender (P. H. Collins 1991; hooks 1984). One of the most fundamental principles that race-class-gender scholars have demonstrated is that this invisibility is structural and systematic rather than a result of happenstance. Black women, Latinas, Arab American women, American Indian women, and Asian American women (all of innumerable ethnicities) have faced conditions of erasure—some unique, some similar—which generates distinctive perspectives that others would benefit from learning. Predating Karl Mannheim’s (1968) articulation of this general theoretical premise in his “sociology of knowledge” by almost half a century, Cooper makes this point by analyzing the specific situations of black women in the 1800s who had been restricted from directly participating in many facets of political, economic, and social life and who were ignored, like many others, by white men but also by black men and white women. This

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Rac e , Cl a s s, a nd G ender : What D o They Do?

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group—or series, in Sartre’s terms—faces these common conditions and therefore has a unique perspective that, if heard, would benefit not just black women but all of society: “To be a woman of the Negro race in America, and to be able to grasp the deep significance of the possibilities of the crisis, is to have a heritage, it seems to me, unique in the ages” (1998, 117). As caretakers, educators, nurturers, actors, and observers of the political dramas of the nineteenth century, black women have been able to see what others have not, which, Cooper argues, has made their voices vital to the country’s progress. Bell hooks, 93 years later (in 1984), described this premise using the metaphor of a circle, with power concentrated in the center and diffused on the margins. She argued that the view is better from the outer rings. Those who have been oppressed not just by gender but also by race and class must “recognize the special vantage point our marginality gives us and make use of this perspective to criticize the dominant racist, classist, sexist hegemony” (1984, 15). One “privilege” attached to social locations in the center, according to hooks, is inhabitants’ ability to organize their lives with fairly severe disregard for the ways their advantages impinge on the lives of those who face other conditions. Her model specifically criticizes the obliviousness and carelessness that characterize the powerful center locations and highlights the keen perspectives of those who have little choice but to be aware. Feminist standpoint theorists like Nancy Hartsock, working from Karl Marx’s assertion that the proletariat is positioned to construct a distinctive critical perspective of capitalism, have taken pains to point out that this perspective is not “natural” but something those who face oppressive structural conditions must struggle to develop (Hartsock 1998; Macdonald 2002, 113–14; Marx and Engels 1955). Similarly, some race-class-gender theorists, such as Patricia Hill Collins (1991, 207), have argued against the assertion that “black women have a more accurate view of oppression than do other groups.” Race, class, and gender, she says, work simultaneously in the organization of everybody’s lives rather than as quantities that add up for a better understanding. Thus, while we must consider the unique vantage points that women of color may adopt, it is also important to acknowledge that those whose common conditions are characterized by severe disadvantage do not necessarily have all-knowing perspectives. In fact, a limited view is often one of the consequences of structural oppression: the “cheap

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Race, Class, and Gender as Organizing Principles

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

seats” around any kind of performance venue cost less because they make it harder to clearly see (some of) what is going on. In varying degrees, those with privilege do understand how their privilege is derived from the disadvantages of those who face dissimilar life conditions, and historical evidence of the active perpetuation of the structures of division that maintain that privilege abounds. Indeed, race-class-gender divisions may be created and perpetuated solely in order to uphold and rationalize a series’ power (see, for example, Du Bois 1994). Those in disadvantageous structural locations may not fully understand how they came to be there, how they are willfully being kept there, and how it is harmful to them to accept their conditions. Much of the power that results in inequitable life conditions for various series of people is hegemonic and therefore obscured from the people most disadvantaged by it. As Lynn Weber has argued, “One of the greatest obstacles to understanding the system of race, class, gender, and sexuality oppression is that its continuation depends on ensuring that it is not clearly seen or understood” (2001, 15). People try to make sense of their situations as well as they can. Without the benefit of outside perspectives or institutional knowledge, they may rely on whatever information seems salient, which, since the sociological imagination is not always accessible, often consists of everyday, individual-level matters. This may be part of the reason why oppressed groups have wisely struggled to institutionalize many ways of passing on their historical knowledge—as Patricia Hill Collins (1991) and others have documented, many who have been denied participation in the formal educational transfer of knowledge have expressed their perspectives in other lasting ways: through poetry, novels, plays, oral narratives, and jazz, for example. As a theoretical premise, whether disadvantaged structural locations confer blinders on inhabitants or the “gift of second sight” (Du Bois 1994, 5)—or, more likely, both—the common conditions people face do shape their perspectives. In a dialectical way perhaps best described by Bourdieu (2003) in his concept of habitus, these perspectives then come to shape the structural forces of race, class, and gender. People’s orientations to the world—their general dispositions, their somewhat unconsciously developed perspectives—are both structured and structuring, which is to say that they come to influence the very forces that contributed to their own formation. Bourdieu focuses on how habitus generally reinforces existing

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Activities

Unlike theorists of class who argue that capitalists exploit workers, unlike race theorists who argue that whites oppress people of color, unlike feminists who argue that men dominate women, studies of race, class, and gender have demonstrated that relationships among these dimensions do not fall along simple either-or, hierarchical lines. Being structurally situated in social locations that have been built by the ideologies and material realities of race, class, and gender is sufficiently complex that it would be impossible for any individual in any social location to face conditions that are either all-oppressed or all-oppressing. Studies of race, class, and gender reveal tangled situations, such as people who are economically disadvantaged because they face employment discrimination (possibly on the basis of race and gender) and shop at Wal-Mart because they can get the best price on shampoo there, making them complicit in the exploitation of men and women workers of almost innumerable races, nationalities, and ethnicities around the world. Patricia Hill Collins (1991) uses the imagery of a “matrix of domination” to untangle situations like this, setting us on the course of charting race-class-gender advantage and disadvantage along the dimensions of personal experience and cultural and institutional contexts. Consistent with the focus on common conditions rather than physical or identity categories, attention to the activities in which people and institutions engage rejects race, class, and gender as dimensions of “who people are” and instead highlights actions and opportunities through which oppression is perpetuated. R. W. Connell provides a succinct description of gender, which also holds for race and class: “Gender is a way in which social practice is ordered” (2008, 369). In our activities or “practices,” as Connell and Pierre Bourdieu would call them, the organization of social life is particularly apparent. Our bodies move in particular ways and are unfamiliar with, or even incapable of, moving in other ways, for instance. Contrast the movement of a ballerina’s body (Wainwright and Turner 2006) and the movement of a boxer’s body (Wacquant 2004). These

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(class) structures, but race-class-gender scholars have been quite attuned to the power that the “voices” (Cooper 1892) of people in disadvantaged structural locations can have on the practices and discourses of oppression because their perspectives have been shaped by the structural knowledge of its harms.

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

ways of moving reflect the bodies and values that are infused into the practices: five-year-old white girls from wealthy families do not typically box, and poor, 25-year-old African American men do not typically use their bodies in balletic form—these facts shape the typical movements of the practices. Millions of other practices are organized by race, class, and gender as well. There are patterns in the jobs in which people work, the hobbies people cultivate, the beatings people inflict on other people, the families people assemble, the television shows people watch, the sex people have, the resistance people enact. As one example, a recent study by Shows and Gerstel (2008) calls attention to the practices of fathering in two groups: physicians and emergency medical technicians (EMTs). In class-linked ways, the physicians in their study performed public elements of fatherhood, such as coaching soccer teams and going trick-or-treating on Halloween. The working-class EMTs, on the other hand, practiced both the public and private day-to-day routines of fatherhood. They refused overtime so they could spend time with their families, stayed home with their children when they were sick, and adjusted their work schedules to be available when their children got home from school. Shows and Gerstel explain this difference in part by the different structure and demands of these two classes of professions and also by the activities of these men’s wives and extended families. In this example, physician fathers form a series and EMT fathers form a series since each has a relationship to the material issue of their children’s need for care. They do not have national meetings of “proud physician fathers” groups or specifically organize their activities around the idea that they, as individuals, are the same. The physicians simply share common life conditions, and the EMTs, too, share life conditions that are different from the physicians.’ Class orders these fathers what they are able to do. Charting and analyzing the ways that organizing structures like gender, class, and race pattern the practices in which people like these fathers engage—not just their attitudes and perspectives but their actual activities—is an important part of the study of these sources of oppression and privilege. Institutions

Along with practices and perspectives, institutions, too, are organized by race, class, and gender. Although Shows and Gerstel

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(2008) focus on the practices of fathering (the actual things fathers do), fatherhood itself is also an institution. Institutions are enduring social patterns of activity that both enable and constrain people’s behavior (P. Martin 2004). They change constantly over time, even while their work in meeting the needs and solving the problems of society allows them to persist (Berger 1963). Fatherhood incorporates an enduring but dynamic pattern of activity that can somehow tolerate the range of approaches from physicians’ to EMTs’ and activities (or lack of activities) beyond even those boundaries. Part of what fathers in the United States are expected to do, of course, is contribute to their families financially and, within some configurations, to provide emotional and physical care and support for other members of their families. Race, class, and gender organize our institutional arrangements. In that fathering is a set of activities that we understand men, rather than women, to accomplish, the institution is gendered. Even in a situation where a woman raises her children without a man’s assistance—and we hear the common refrain of how she had to be “both mother and father” to those children—we understand fatherhood as an institution to incorporate a set of activities and expectations that set it apart from the institution of motherhood. Class and race also organize the institution of fatherhood. Most of the physicians in Shows and Gerstel’s study were white and earned over $200,000 a year, for example, and they had very little to do with their children’s day-to-day lives. Yet it is black men who “are often publicly portrayed as irresponsible or peripheral fathers” (Glauber 2008, 8). We do not expect fathers to be involved in children’s care so much as we expect fathers to pay, so the trope of black men who contribute to black women’s poverty through their absence and failure to provide financial support depicts a forceful breach to this institution’s norms. A recent study by Rebecca Glauber, though, reveals that the institution of fatherhood is shaped by race and class dynamics that this popular narrative omits. Using longitudinal survey data, Glauber confirms the rarely told detail that many black men are, of course, married to their children’s mothers and are present, available, and providing financial support for them. Yet these men’s experiences of fatherhood are patterned differently than the normative experiences of white and Latino married fathers. In particular, when married white men and married Latinos have children, their earnings tend to go up (the “fatherhood premium”), as do their hours at work. When married black men have children, their earnings also go up less, and

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Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

their hours at work do not increase. In part, this is because white couples tend to have a less equitable division of labor than black couples, Glauber reports, so while many white wives experience a “motherhood penalty” in their paid jobs, requiring their husbands to work more and earn more, black fathers are neither under the same pressure nor able—given persistent forms of racial discrimination in the labor market—to parlay their new status as fathers into better work experiences. Dynamics like these shape what practices fathers are able to enact and thereby shape the institution of fatherhood, including what we expect fathers to do, what needs they can meet, and what problems they can solve. Along with fatherhood, every institution is shaped by race, class, and gender. The media, medical research, the law—these are but some of the patterned ways of meeting society’s needs that are, themselves, subject to shaping. One recent study examines the ways race, class, and gender shape another very specific kind of institution—advocacy—that is supposed to solve the systemic problem of marginalization within the United States’s allegedly democratic society. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Organization for Women (NOW), and other organizations like these are constructed with the explicit aim of representing marginalized groups that do not have the same opportunities to raise concerns and exert influence within political processes as more privileged groups. Interestingly, Dara Z. Strolovitch (2006) finds that “in spite of sincere desires to represent disadvantaged members” and their issues, the organizations in her study “downplay the impact of such issues and frame them as narrow and particularistic in their effect” (2008, 894). This means that the common concerns of privileged subgroups, such as white, straight, middle-class women in NOW and Black straight, middleclass men in the NAACP, get the most focus in these organizations’ agendas. This is the case even when these privileged subgroups are not the majority of the organizations’ memberships. Because these organizations “provide an institutionalized voice” for members of groups whose individual voices tend not to be heard, this lack of representation is especially damaging for the needs of people who are “intersectionally marginalized” (Crenshaw 1989). Race, class, and gender shape the contours of advocacy as an institution by implicitly informing advocacy organizations’ agendas, even as these organizations attempt to upset mainstream political agendas that already disadvantage their constituents. The power of race, class,

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Relationships

Joan Scott defines gender as “a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes” (1986, 1067). I have already argued that race, class, and gender are social structures that organize our common life conditions, our perspectives, our actions, and our institutional arrangements. In addition, Scott and others make it clear that one other set of things race, class, and gender organize is our relationships. What this means is that we do not have completely unpatterned relationships with other people. We have mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, lovers, job competitors, acceptable marriage partners, unacceptable marriage partners, bosses, underlings, and any other number of “positions” that reflect patterns in our relationships with people. These relationships are not rooted in some kind of natural order; rather, they have been constructed in part through the organizing mechanisms of race, class, and gender. On this point I am heavily influenced by ˇ the work of Oyèrónké Oyewùmí (1997), who has studied Yoruba language practices in precolonial Nigeria. Prior to European colonization, the Yoruba language included no separate words for the concepts “aunt,” “uncle,” “son,” or “daughter,” among others. Rather, there was a single word for what English speakers would call aunts and uncles (akin to “parent’s siblings”) and a single word for sons and daughters (akin to “children”). These positions and many others were not gendered then in the way they currently are in English, and this both reflected and constructed some of the gender dynamics among people in this country. The absence of gender, in this instance, affected the relationships people had with each other in terms of lineage, social privileges, and related things, just as the presence of gender among “sons” and “daughters” affects relationships. But the definition of race, class, and gender as “constitutive element(s) of social relationships” also extends past those who somebody already knows. When you see a group of strangers in a restaurant, you are already in a relationship with them that has been

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and gender as organizing mechanisms is impressive when we consider the work they do to shape not just our perceptions of reality, not only our actions but also the very institutions we have set up to counteract the damaging effects race, class, and gender can create in our lives.

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

patterned by race, class, and gender: you may ignore them because race, class, and gender have marked them as uninteresting to you; you may saunter by them slowly because race, class, and gender have constructed them as potential sexual partners for you; you may give them your business card in an attempt to facilitate an economic exchange related to your job; you may listen to what they order and request the same thing yourself because race, class, and gender have distinguished them and their practices as desirable. You are in relationships not just with your sibling and parent but with people you do not even know, because of race, class, and gender. That is to say, your relationships in the world start from an organized, orderly place. Where they go from there is also patterned, although it would be absurd to say we could predict exactly how the course of any single relationship would proceed. The point is, the social structures of race, class, and gender organize not just our chances to get a mortgage and our representation in medical studies but also our relationships with other people—strangers and intimates. Structural Work: Race, Class, and Gender Organizing Each Other

Among the many things race, class, and gender organize in our lives, then, are our life conditions, perspectives, activities, institutions, and relationships. It is important to understand these as social structures organizing our lives, and we must also understand the place of race, class, and gender as social structures in relation to other social structures such as families, religions, and legal systems. If we take just families as an example, we can ask important questions about the ways race, class, and gender (social structures themselves) organize our life conditions, perspectives, activities, institutions, and relationships within families (a social structure). We may start with life conditions: Are we under threat of violence within our homes? How tired or refreshed are we from the amount of care work we are expected to do? How highly are our paid jobs prioritized? How do we deal with the white people marrying into the family? Our perspectives within families are similarly shaped: What do we believe the men in the family should be doing in their spare time? How guilty or proud do we feel when we backhand our children at the grocery store? Which parent’s advice means the most to us? Evidence of the ways race, class, and gender organize our activities is also available within the social structure of families:

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How carefully do we control our children’s behavior in efforts to prove racial stereotypes about our families wrong? What do we eat for breakfast? How many after-school activities do we drive our children to? How much encouragement did we receive to play with dolls while growing up? In families’ relationships with other institutions we can also find evidence of race, class, and organizing power: How likely is it that our children will be taken out of our care by the state? Are we able to get married to who we want? Who in our families has served in the military? Have representations of families like ours received positive coverage in the media? Finally, within families, race, class, and gender shape our relationships: With whom are we closest? Who has abused us? For whom do we do laundry? Who pays our bills? These examples of the ways race, class, and gender shape and organize our family lives are meant to demonstrate that these organizing principles operate on the same level as all other social structures. Families shape race, class, and gender; and race, class, and gender shape families. The question of real interest to me throughout this book, however, is how race, class, and gender shape each other. Race, class, and gender organize our relationships to, and locations within, every social structure. This does not tell us exactly what kind of demeanor a person will have or whether and when any individual will conform to the expectations of these social structures or resist them. As Young (1994, 733) remarks, “Saying that a person is a woman may predict something about the general constraints and expectations she must deal with. But it predicts nothing in particular about who she is, what she does, how she takes up her social positioning.” Nonetheless, race, class, and gender do shape and influence how we are placed within social structures such as the legal system, the political system, and the health care system. In addition, they shape and influence the social structures themselves. Here is where things get complicated. Race, class, and gender shape social structures like the ones I have named, but race, class, and gender are also social structures themselves. When I say that race, class, and gender “organize our lives,” in fact, this is really what I mean. Social structures, in their most basic form, are those entities that add order and predictability to our lives. They literally structure—order—our chances in life, our days, our relationships with each other, our bodies, our identities, and the common

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conditions we face. More specifically, in William Sewell’s (1992) account, social structures are the particular combinations of “schemas and resources” that produce and shape people’s practices. The schemas include sets of (usually binary) categories, such as men and women, black and white, rich and poor, which he calls “tools of thought,” in addition to “the various conventions, recipes, scenarios, principles of action, and habits of speech and gesture built up with these fundamental tools” (Sewell 1992, 7–8). Resources include exactly what one would expect: knowledge, raw materials, social capital, or anything that “can be used to enhance or maintain power” (Sewell 1992, 9). When sets of schemas and resources are combined in ways that “mutually sustain each other over time,” they constitute social structures. While the field has long acknowledged The American class structure (to borrow the title of a classic text by Gilbert and Kahl [1993]), it has taken longer to recognize the structural character of race and gender. Barbara Risman (2004) argues it is important to understand gender as a structure in itself because its effects cannot be eliminated even when gender differences are effectively “neutralized” within other social structures. Thinking specifically about families and labor markets, Risman finds that even when social scientists are able to conceptually “take gender away” by observing settings in which men mother and women are primary breadwinners, gender still matters. Inequality does not magically go away in these situations; in fact, it is, in some ways, enhanced. Like gender and class, race, too, is a social structure. In his understanding of societies as “systems that articulate different structures” (1997, 476), Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues that race is one of the “organizing principle on which sets of social relations are systematically patterned” (1997, 476) Work such as his and Risman’s points us to the schemas and resources that pattern our social relationships, perspectives, activities, and institutions along the lines of race and class and gender. Importantly, it also helps us understand the relationships among race, class, and gender as being located somewhere other than, or at least in addition to, the identities of individual people. If we only focus on the intersections among race, class, and gender in people’s identities, we miss the relationships among gender as a structure, race as a structure, and class as a structure. The best ideas in the field about what characterizes these relationships are what Evelyn Nakano Glenn (1998), Patricia Hill Collins (1991), and others call

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“mutual constitution” and “dependence.” I describe these aspects of race, class, and gender’s relationships in what follows. If race, class, and gender are social structures that shape social structures, as I have argued here, then we must consider the ways race, class, and gender shape and influence each other. This is the purpose of this book. I seek to isolate and illustrate some of the general forms that the relationships among race, class, and gender take. While my focus is on how these social structures organize each other, most other race-class-gender scholars have focused not on the entirety of their social structural properties but more specifically on their categories. I first explicate this concentration on categories as I explain the field’s concepts of mutual constitution, dependence, and relationality. I then explore what it would mean for race, class, and gender’s social structural properties (not just categories) to be mutually constituting and dependent. Categories—or binary “tools of thought” (Sewell 1992)—tend to dominate our understanding of what the social structures of race, class, and gender are. This is related to both the identity focus of the field and the popular misunderstanding of race, class, and gender as generated from bodies. We understand very well that being a poor Asian woman is different in many ways from being a rich white man, and race-class-gender scholars have made remarkably rapid progress in getting the voices of those who inhabit marginalized categories heard by the mainstream. This focus on categories has helped groups organize around common identities and has led to the important, ongoing identification of who is being left out of what. The relationships among race, class, and gender categories have been the subject of a great deal of scholarship, which has pushed the field to consider very complicated dynamics of human existence. The terms that have been attached to these relationships include “relational,” “mutually constituting,” and “dependent.” While the distinctions among these three terms are not overwhelmingly clear, the concepts together help us comprehend much of what race, class, and gender have to do with one another. In my reading, I see at least are three implicit definitions of this cluster of terms—two that deal with categories and one that deals with the larger structures or “systems” of which those categories are but one part. First, the most basic idea is that within race, or within gender, or within class, the categories that constitute these entities are “relational”: black is related to white; woman is related to man; and poor

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is related to rich. As Mao Tse-tung (1999, 264) articulated in 1937, “All opposite elements are like this: because of certain conditions, they are on the one hand opposed to each other and on the other hand they are interconnected, interpenetrating, interpermeating and interdependent.” The meanings of any one of these categories do not stand alone, uncontested, with nothing to do with each other. Rather, they depend on each other for their meaning. In her work on the ways women are defined not as autonomous beings but only in relation to men—as men’s “Other,” as she famously put it—Simone de Beauvoir (1952, 267) reminds us of the philosopher Aristotle’s precious quote, “The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities . . . we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness.” To be female is to lack maleness. These categories are “relational” because one is meaningless without the contrast of the other. Erik Olin Wright (1993, 33) agrees on the topic of class: “Class categories arenot only qualitatively distinct; they have a determinate social relation to each other. Employers do not simply acquire income in a different way than employees; they acquire income by hiring employees . . . In short, the nominal class categories are inherently relational categories.” Edward Said (1978) similarly argues that “the Orient” is the creation of “Western” or “Occidental” minds and practices, which can only establish their superiority by setting themselves apart from something that must be inherently different and inferior. Although relationships like these are clearly constructed to perpetuate and maintain power differentials, the presumption of “inherent” difference and inferiority is necessary to underwrite the advantages these belief systems bring. The relational character of entities such as these has long been established. The way Evelyn Nakano Glenn (1992) and others have refined this concept is to demonstrate that just as the category of “man” depends on the category of “woman,” “man” is also related to “Occidental” and “poor.” The meanings of poor, Occidental manhood, for instance, are constructed against the meanings of rich, Occidental manhood. This is the second meaning of the “relational” concept. Again we are focusing on categories, but rather than isolating gender as its own set of categories and class as its own and race as its own, we are combining these to come up with more specific and complicated categorization schemas in order to demonstrate how even those are constructed in relation with their “others.” As one example, Glenn articulates that “to represent race

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and gender as relationally constructed is to assert that the experiences of white women and women of color are not just different but connected in systematic ways” (1992, 34). They gain meaning in relation to each other; therefore, they are largely meaningless without each other. Meanings are important here—the meanings of categories, which depend on and mutually constitute each other. When Glenn (1992, 1999, 2002) says race and gender mutually constitute each other, she means that “each develops in the context of the other” (1992, 33). The meaning of manhood for elite African Americans, for example, is structured and constituted within the contexts of the (constantly changing) meaning of womanhood for elite African Americans, by the meaning of manhood for elite Latinos, and by the meanings attached to all other combinations of race-classgender social locations. Glenn’s term, perhaps borrowed from Mao Tse-tung’s description of categories’ “mutual sustenance of each other’s existence” (1999, 264), demands that we account for the continual changes that the meanings of gender categories produce in race and class categories; that the meanings of race categories produce; and that the meanings of class categories produce. The term “mutually constituting” indicates movement, development, change, and time, and reminds us that race, class, and gender categories are under continual construction (Salzinger 2003; Anderson 1996). These meanings are constantly changing, responding to being changed and “constituted,” and constituting other meanings. The development of these two meanings of “relational,” “dependent,” and “mutually constituting” have been vital for the field. But it is very important to conceptually distinguish between race, class, and gender, on one hand, and the categories that are part of them, on the other hand. If we accept that race, class, and gender are social structures, and reach back to Sewell to be reminded that all social structures are made up of schemas and resources and that those schemas are rooted in “tools of thought”—oppositional categories that distinguish one group from another—then we must acknowledge that while categories are a very important part of race, class, and gender, they are not the only part or even the most important one. Race, class, and gender could not exist without these categories, but they also cannot be wholly subsumed within them. Race, class, and gender are social structures that provide order and predictability to our lives. They shape our life conditions, our perspectives,

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our actions, our institutions, and our relationships. This order and predictability is continuously challenged and resisted, and the ways these structures shape different aspects of our lives are typically very problematic. But the challenge and the resistance is aimed not just at the categories. The challenge and resistance is just as often directed at the limitations these categories produce in our opportunities and life chances. They are directed at the ways our lives and institutions are ordered, or, in other words, at race, class, and gender as social structures. This brings us to a third possible meaning of the concepts of relationality, dependence, and mutual constitution. Hints of this third meaning appear in both Collins’s and Glenn’s work, although considerable confusion among those of us in the race-class-gender field regarding the differences among these three meanings persist. Glenn (1992, 31) has articulated that race and gender are “socially constructed systems of relationships—including symbols, normative beliefs, and practices— organized around perceived differences.” She calls race and gender “systems” here—systems that include categories, to be sure, but systems more broadly. Similarly, she says race and gender are “mutually constituted systems of relationships” (2002, 12). Again, in this phrase, we have systems. Even more strongly, Patricia Hill Collins (1991, 222), also using the language of “systems,” points out, “Assuming that each system needs the others in order to function creates a distinct theoretical stance that stimulates the rethinking of basic social science concepts.” I do not read these statements as arguments that only the categorical aspects of the social structures race, class, and gender are related to each other (or mutually constitute each other or depend on each other). Many scholars use the word “systems” to describe the larger entities constituted by the categories, forms of power, institutional processes, and organizing activities of race, class, and gender. I read the word “system” to mean that an entity is the word “system” that is patterned, organized, and it operates according to an identifiable logic. It is orderly. It contains components that have the same general properties as the components in other systems, which is how we can identify all such entities as systems. This language is fine, but I prefer the language of “social structures” because it keeps us rooted in the social, rather than allowing any presumptions about natural properties of systems, and it focuses us on the active ways race, class, and gender shape our life conditions and chances. I will, then, take the liberty of thinking through Glenn’s and Collins’s arguments in terms of social structures as I proceed. 10.1057/9780230115385 - Digesting Race, Class, and Gender, Ivy Ken

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If the social structures race, class, and gender “need the others in order to function,” this is much different than saying that the meaning of a category (be it an artificially isolated category such as “rich” or a complex—but no less artificial—category such as “rich, gay Latina”) is related to the meaning of another category. Rather, this statement means that the ways race shapes our life conditions and chances will not work unless they have the support of the ways gender and class shape our life conditions and chances. Some excellent empirical work demonstrates this principle nicely. Much of it has shown most directly how capitalism (that is, the “system” of class or, in my formulation, the source of oppression and privilege that results in, and is perpetuated by, the divisions of class) has been able to flourish and expand because of race and gender divisiveness. Karen Hossfeld’s (1994, 68) research on immigrant women working in Silicon Valley, for example, finds that “hiring patterns that are informed by racism, national chauvinism, and sexism increase class stratification and labor control, and decrease potential unity among workers.” These “divide and conquer” tactics of capitalists are legendary (e.g., Cobb 1993; Glenn 2002; Reich 1977; TomaskovicDevey and Roscigno 1996; Wright 2000). In conceptualizations like these, which are quite nuanced and identify one of the fundamental ways race and gender as social structures are related to class as a social structure, capitalists are able to increase profits because they can oppress people by gender and race. A social structural property of class depends on social structural properties of race and gender. In a metaphor involving food, the concept of mutual constitution may be easily applied to the chemical processes involved when ingredients come together in a recipe or when foods combine in the body during digestion. The related concept of dependence is also important, as it allows me to uncover what really relies on what. of this exploration are not completely in line with the way we have come to understand these concepts thus far. In short, I reveal that the entities that race, class, and gender combine to form are the things that depend on them. That is to say, if race, class, and gender combine to construct a particular type of family, that type of family is what depends on race, class, and gender. Furthering this logic, if race, class, and gender combine to construct a dynamic of race (or class or gender), then this is the way that race depends on race, class, and gender. That dynamic of race would not exist without the ordering influence and operation of race, class, and gender. Race, class, and gender do depend on each other a lot, then, for changes in each other’s structures, for new entities that develop between them when they are 10.1057/9780230115385 - Digesting Race, Class, and Gender, Ivy Ken

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Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

combined, for institutions that would not exist without them, as well as for their internal categorical logics. I have argued, then, that race, class, and gender are structural in nature—they provide order to our lives in ways that generate advantage and disadvantage for people. Those people are not simply born black or men or middle class; rather, they participate in relationships with each other as they deal with the common conditions that affect them as both passive members of series and active members of groups. The meanings of the race, class, and gender categories that characterize their common conditions are relational and constantly changing, and their social structural properties depend on each other. This descriptive definition of race, class, and gender accomplishes a few important things. It refocuses us on structural conditions rather than innate or identity-based essences. It helps us understand people, categories, and social structures as being in relationships with each other, and it makes us attuned to the ways that the meanings attached to those things are dynamic, changing over time. There are also a couple of other things it does, though, which I must address in what follows: it makes it seem like race, class, and gender are either the same or interchangeable, and it also makes it seem like race, class, and gender are the only structural systems of relationships worth attending to. I address these two points in what follows and, having made my positions clear, I move in the next chapter into the metaphor of sugar, which is intended to help us better identify the relationships among organizing mechanisms such as race, class, and gender.

Rac e, C l a ss, and G end er : Iden ti cal, I nterc h a ng ea bl e, P r imary, or D i s ti ncti ve? Strong arguments can be presented to answer two important questions: (1) in work that seeks to address and analyze sources of oppression and privilege, should we focus only on race, class, and gender, and (2) in conceptual work such as this, should we assume that race, class, and gender are interchangeable? While I find myself arguing both sides of both issues on a regular basis, in this book I have had to take sides, and the decisions I have made are primarily practical. On the first issue, I have reluctantly chosen to focus specifically on race, class, and gender rather than other organizing mechanisms simply for ease. On the second, I have chosen to position

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Race, Class, and Gender Only?

Race, class, gender, body ability, age, religion, time, nation, sex, ethnicity, space, and sexuality are among the most theorized structural organizing mechanisms of social life. I limit my focus here primarily to race, class, and gender, but I do not mean to assert or imply, by doing so, that these are “primary” or more important than any other source of oppression and privilege. The phrase “race, class, and gender” has come to serve as a cumbersome shorthand that is sometimes meant to communicate a focus on race and class and gender, specifically, and is sometimes meant to denote the practice of simultaneously taking into account any multiple organizing mechanisms. I invoke the phrase to signal the place of my work within the arena of what has been established as race-class-gender studies and also to acknowledge that my own studies to date have, in fact, focused more on these three organizing mechanisms than others. In these pages I do not discuss sexuality and religion as much as race and gender, so in that respect the phrase is accurate. What remains unknown, both in this project and in the larger body of work in which this project fits, is whether the theoretical principles I explore here are only germane to these particular sources of oppression or whether they are, in fact, more broadly applicable. The strongest assertion I can make on this point is that this is an exploration of the theoretical principles that specifically relate to race, class, and gender, and I hope readers will consider this an invitation to continue to explore oppression in ways that either demonstrate the elements of that triad to be unrelated to each other or articulate the patterned ways that they are, in fact, related to other sources of oppression. A related issue that must be addressed is whether any one of these dimensions is, in any localized or global social circumstance, more important than the others. Noteworthy scholars have weighed in on this: Du Bois (1994, 12) argued that “that problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line”; Marx and Engels (1955, 5) argued that “the whole history of mankind . . . has been a history of class struggles”; and for Gilman (1898, 52), the primary form of

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race, class, and gender as interchangeable in this work because I seek to understand general relationships among organizing mechanisms such as these. I present the logic for these decisions in what follows.

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

inequality is “excessive sex-distinction.” It is not uncommon to hear scholars talk about how one dimension “trumps” the others as a more salient feature of a particular dynamic. Among those who do find one of these dimensions more important in the organization of social life than the others, most— following the preoccupation of late-twentieth-century sociology with class analysts like Karl Marx and also the structural locations of most of the recognized sociologists on whose work the discipline has been built—begin and end from the assumption that class is primary. This assumption is often unproblematically worked into guiding theoretical frameworks, including even the most basic definitions of terms. For example, the term “stratification” has long been treated primarily as an economic class dynamic, with its focus on the distribution of “scarce values” (Lenski 1966, x) and “goods and assets” (Grusky 1994, 3). Even Lynn Weber (2001, 17), who has arguably produced the most synthesized race-class-gender theoretical framework to date, centers the definition of race-class-gender oppression on the distribution of “productive assets (wealth, property, information, and political power)” on the basis of the previous work in the field. Some scholarship attempts to empirically demonstrate, rather than simply assume, the primacy of class. Yet the proliferation of scholarship that assumes or even demonstrates the class structure’s dependence on race and gender structures is not enough to allow us to conclude that class is, indeed, the most important of the three in the absence of scholarship that investigates the full range of dependencies. Class may seem primary in its relationship with gender and race in part because it provides both the metaphorical language and a quantifiable way for social scientists to determine the effects of oppression. Race and gender “inequality”—itself a quantum concept—is often “measured” in terms of earnings and hiring differentials. In this conceptualization, class becomes a sort of “outcome variable”—a way of demonstrating how bad gender and race oppression are or how much they have changed.1 This kind of equation vaults class and 1

It is important to note that studies of income or wealth inequality as an outcome of gender and race have not been well received (or even understood) in traditional theory circles. In his hagiographic article on Gerhard Lenski, for example, Randall Collins (2004, 223) asserts, “Most research focused on stratification,” by which he means

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makes race and gender seem merely instrumental in perpetuating it. Race and gender oppression, though, are observable in dynamics that, while possibly related to the mode of production, are not simply class metrics: How likely is it that someone’s children will be taken out of her care? Who has the luxury of being modest, knowing that people will probably assume the best of them even if they do not publicize their accomplishments? Who is allowed to get married? Who will be the victim of violence? Whose interpretation of events will be second-guessed? Whose poetry will sixth graders read? We can observe class oppression along each of these dimensions as readily as gender and race oppression, but class is not necessarily primary in any of them. The implicit assumption that makes class seem primary is that gender and racial oppression can result in an individual’s placement in a disadvantageous class location, whereas it does not appear evident that class oppression can result in an individual’s being placed in a disadvantageous gender position or a disadvantageous race position; one can end up working class instead of rich because of her race, but one cannot, it seems, end up black instead of Latina because of her class. This parallels the typical (and problematic) mainstream sociological characterization of “sex” and race as “ascriptive statuses” and class as an “achievement status” (e.g., Blau and Duncan 1967; Lieberson 1994; Reskin 2003, 2000).2 Here, though, is a striking example of why we cannot reduce race, class, and gender to biological or identity categories. Class, in fact, does shape how people end up socially located on the basis of race and gender. Many “white” Americans initially viewed Irish immigrants to the United States as “Negroes,” for example, because of their “otherness”: their distinctive manner of dress, language, religion, and relative poverty class inequality, “as an independent variable, as a cause of something else: politics, lifestyle, or cultural differences. In recent years, there are theories that take the form of asserting that inequality is due to sexism or racism (that is, deep-seated cultural attitudes of discrimination that need to be rooted out), but in effect these are analytically feeble theories—mostly a form of exhortation to do something about these inequalities while implying that the solution is within our grasp if only we had the willingness to change our culture.” 2 Indeed, Stanley Lieberson (1994, 653–54; emphasis mine) even notes, “Since one’s gender, ethnicity, age, and other ascribed features are permanent (short of such procedures as passing as a member of another race or ethnic group, undergoing radical surgery, or alteration of appearance through face-lifts or hair transplants), disadvantages stemming from membership in subordinated strata are of great significance.”

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Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

(Ignatiev 1995). When white, proslavery Democrats realized how much of an economic and political threat alliances between Irish Americans and free Northern African Americans were creating, they gradually conferred upon Irish Americans the benefits of “whiteness,” (in Du Bois’s terms, a “racial wage” [1995]) winning their allegiance and their votes. In another of many similar scenarios, native Hawaiians originally used the word “haoles” to simply mean “strangers” to the islands, including anybody from black sailors to white missionaries (Glenn 2002, 207). Yet as English and AngloAmericans there increasingly attained political power and worked to create social distance between themselves and laborers to cement their own economic dominance, the term “haole”—now racialized—came to signify only them, while they designated and treated German, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Naichi, Cantonese, Tagalog, and other immigrant plantation laborers racially as nonhaoles (Glenn 2002, 207–8; Lind 1969, 45–56). The history of formal political power in the United States is premised on denying people access to a valuable resource—white, propertied manhood— sometimes regardless of the markers, like skin color, on which people assume “race” is based. Class also affects not simply whether people get categorized as one race instead of another, or as “men” or “women,” but the gendered and racialized processes that pervade social life. The aspects of social life that get associated with girlhood, boyhood, manhood, and womanhood are quite class-dependent, for example. “Girl culture” in one California high school, for example, means, in part, wearing makeup in a “natural” style for white and Mexican American girls whose teachers appreciate them and assume they are on trajectories to college. For Mexican American and white girls who reject what they interpret as white, middle-class norms of femininity and feel they already are adults, “girl culture” means applying dark shades of lipstick and nail polish during class and not submitting to other adults’ authority (Bettie 2003). It seems ironic to argue that one of the ways we can determine that class is not primary is to acknowledge the ways it affects race and gender. But the argument is that class is not simply the outcome variable, that is, the structure that gets affected by the other two. Thus, while capitalism feverishly shapes the lived experiences of anybody in the purview of the economically imperial United States, and the mode of production is a major factor around which people must organize their lives, it would be only speculative to assert that

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class is more important than gender or race in shaping people’s lives in light of the absence of studies that have systematically used dimensions of each to understand oppression in the others. Trying to rank dimensions of oppression reifies them; instead, social analysts must recognize how structures like race, class, and gender create, shape, and influence each other. For example, at Gallaudet University in Washington DC, which serves deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing students, the groups in which students commonly interact appear much more mixed by race than groups of students from other schools in the area. This may make it seem as though body ability, in this instance, “trumps” race—that race matters less to students with hearing impairments than it does to other students. Yet this posits race as a solid, static “thing” that has a variable level of importance based on context. In fact, an element like body ability shapes how race gets constructed through the processes of communication within marginalized and privileged communities. Structures of oppression do not come together fully formed and engage in sword fights for dominance. They form each other, and our task as social scientists is to determine how that happens and what the resulting (constantly shifting) relationships among them are. To only focus on race, class, and gender is, regrettably, to limit possibilities for analysis and therefore our understanding of the social world. The possibility it opens up, however, is the chance to study simultaneity in the organization of life generally. Many examples of simultaneity that are not limited to race, class, and gender in social phenomena exist, and my hope is that an investigation like this one will provide something either to use or fight against as we continue to incorporate other forms of simultaneity in our examinations of social life. Specific or Interchangeable?

The ways race has operated to organize social life is very distinctive, and this has been well documented. Whiteness, Cheryl Harris (1993) reminds us, has provided the basis for the arrangement of many social benefits, and as such, has functioned in American law as property, “Whiteness is, fundamentally, a legal concept that white people constructed to grant themselves protections under the law that they denied to nonwhite people. Whiteness is something that white people own, in effect, and as long as they own it, it protects them” (Stubblefield 2008, 194).

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Race, Class, and Gender as Organizing Principles

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994) have masterfully documented the ongoing “racial projects”—those activities that link what race means with the ways social life is organized—that Americans have perpetuated and endured, including slavery, imperial conquest, and immigration policy. The analysis of race in United States societal arrangements has grown enormously since Anna Julia Cooper’s analysis of race in education (1892) and W. E. B. Du Bois’ study of The Philadelphia negro (1899) to where we now seek to understand phenomena like racism without racists (Bonilla-Silva 2003) and the dismantling of race through the recognition of race. Social class, too, has proven to be complicated enough to fascinate social researchers since even before the days of Karl Marx. Marx’s (1967) analysis of the alienation of labor in industrial capitalism has been interpreted, debated, rejected, ignored, reframed, augmented, and usurped, but it has never totally gone away. The notion that what determines our life chances is our ability to own anything beyond our own labor power has enormous resonance, and while analysts continue to clash on the details, they agree on the fundamental fact that the economy structures our lives in ways that produce relative advantages and disadvantages. And so it is with gender. Whether we are talking about gender as opposed to sex, or gender as the same as sex, or gender/sex as an incomplete and purposely incoherent discursive structure, we have an enormous set of resources to consult. The state of gender research and theory is particularly exciting right now, as we debate not simply whether women and men are really as different as popular culture and state policy make them seem but whether sexuality constructs gender or vice versa (Butler 1999); how social constructionist frameworks must incorporate the transactional construction of bodies and environments (Sullivan 2001); and how to synthesize the ways that the collective and disparate lived realities of genderqueer, transgender, and intersex individuals both reinforce and shatter previously existing gendered social order(s) (Fausto-Sterling 2000; Bornstein 1994). This is all to say that race, class, and gender are quite distinctive social entities. They have each operated and functioned in ways that are not reducible to one another. The ways that Chinese dance production reinforces the racialization of Chinese Americans (Wilcox 2007) is a different kind of conceptual problem than the reasons why one out of four children in New Mexico lives in poverty (Annie E. Casey Foundation 2010). Many scholars take umbrage to the idea that we could come up with some kind of

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theoretical formula with an open, interchangeable spot for the dynamics of race or class or gender when these organizing mechanisms clearly have such distinctive histories, manifestations, and functions. Ellen Feder is one such scholar. In her treatment of Michel Foucault’s concept of “biopower” (2004, 2007), she masterfully investigates the mechanisms through which power constructs race and gender, and she argues that these mechanisms, and therefore the results, are different. Gender, she says, is a function of “disciplinary power,” through which bodies—especially women’s bodies—are disciplined into particular forms. This activity requires not only media depictions and pressure from social institutions such as the law; it is successful because women internalize it and police themselves, their own bodies. Women themselves embark on the continuous project of correcting themselves. Race, though, is different. Race is produced, Feder argues, through a form of power—biopower—that has a common origin with that of disciplinary power but is distinctive. Both forms of power are rooted in the acquisition of knowledge, which can be used to construct subjects (both bodies and categories) as good, inferior, diseased, even dangerous. The number a woman sees when she weighs herself on the scale and the information she reads in a magazine about “good carbs” and “bad carbs” are all bits of knowledge that are used to “help” her discipline her body. This woman understands herself as fat, as healthy, or as having “problem areas” based on her internalization of this knowledge. Race, too, is constructed through the acquisition of knowledge about things like IQ scores, crime rates, employment rates, and athletic ability. The material Feder analyzes to argue this point is a society’s active collection of knowledge about violence, or more specifically, about violent individuals. Who is violent, and what makes them violent? Scientists who collect information in order to study these questions construct people as violent in the very act of studying them, which is to say they demarcate the boundaries of violence and have the authority to identify who fits within them. Should the individuals who fit within those boundaries happen to be racially coded as black, this is incidental to the scientists, they tell us. These scientists simply, in what they claim is a deracialized way, want to study the “problem” in order to eradicate it. The biopower at work in this process has to do with protection—from groups of people or bodies that must be regulated. Biopower works to define bodies as problematic, and

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Race, Class, and Gender as Organizing Principles

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

rather than influencing people to try to fix themselves, as disciplinary power would with the woman on the scale, this form of power serves to open the doors to regulatory intervention from the state. This is less about internalization than about external control. The control happens, in part, through the discourse of science in which “violent” individuals and their “pathological” families of origin are constructed, studied, and objectified. Gender and race, then, Feder argues, are largely the products of different sorts of processes—those that compel individuals to police themselves and those that legitimate external control. It is controversial to brush aside the ways race, too, is internalized (for example, Du Bois’ [1994] notion of the “double consciousness”), as well as the external control that enforces gender (for example, employment restrictions). But the project of identifying what is specific to gender and specific to race, rather than supposing that they operate identically, is laudable. In her work on performativity, Judith Butler (1999) also makes an argument for treating gender and race as distinctive, which I quote here at length: I would note here not only that racial presumptions invariably underwrite the discourse on gender in ways that need to be made explicit, but that race and gender ought not to be treated as simple analogies. I would therefore suggest that the question to ask is not whether the theory of performativity is transposable onto race, but what happens to the theory when it tries to come to grips with race. Many of these debates have centered on the status of “construction,” whether race is constructed in the same way as gender. My view is that no single account of construction will do, and that these categories always work as background for one another, and they often find their most powerful articulation through one another. Thus, the sexualization of racial gender norms calls to be read through multiple lenses at once, and the analysis surely illuminates the limits of gender as an exclusive category of analysis. (Butler 1999, xvi)

Along with these very specific reasons not to treat race, class, and gender as analogous or interchangeable, there is a more general, theoretical reason to resist the temptation as well. Jeffrey Alexander (1991), like many social theorists, has argued that in order for a theory to have any value it needs to be able to make claims to truth. The ability of theory to bring our imaginations farther than any one particular lived experience is only plausible, Alexander

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and his cohorts would say, if a theory’s claims have some basis in reason and some attachment to a larger truth. But skepticism with the presumed “universality” of such truth claims is quite warranted (Seidman 1997). Queer theorists and other postmodern scholars, along with some others, are very suspicious of attempts at “grand theorizing,” which claims to be able to synthesize social phenomena in a way that results in more complete and accurate representations of reality precisely because of its all-encompassing nature. In a project like mine, a reader could easily come away with the idea that I am participating in my own brand of grand theorizing. I am taking very broad and complicated concepts like “race” and coming up with a framework that is supposed to uncover its relationships with other broad and complicated concepts. The assumption undergirding my work—that we can treat the elements of race, class, and gender as interchangeable in the framework I present—seems similarly “grand” and universal in scope, and I am admittedly uncomfortable with this. But Steven Seidman’s framework (1997) urges social theorists to conduct situated, socially relevant projects, and I believe a case can be made that mine is that. Specifically, he advises what he calls a “pragmatic” approach to social theory, in which the purveyor of any discourse reflexively and critically stipulates at least two important dimensions of that discourse: its aims and its consequences. Rather than arguing that mine is a general, generalizable, grand, and universal theory, then, I wish to situate my work in this book as one context-specific, socially grounded discourse among many and to identify its aims and speculate about its consequences and implications. The aim of this framework is to uncover relationships. I want to know how the ways that race and class and gender organize our lives, perspectives, actions, institutions, and relationships are related to each other. This requires the examination of specific situations and specific social phenomena so that we can determine what is going on with race, what is going on with gender, and what is going on with class, and then see what those three things have to do with each other. I am not arguing at the outset that gender is always going to operate and function exactly like class does. If I could argue that, there would be no need to explore their relationships in this work. I suspect that if we use the framework I propose (or some variation of it) over a period of time long enough to generate many studies of social life, we will definitely

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Race, Class, and Gender as Organizing Principles

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

find patterns in the ways race operates and functions that are dissimilar to the ways gender and class operate and function. I look forward to that day. But in order to get there, we must first seek to identify the potential character of these relationships. We must reveal how class mutually constitutes race and gender in specific social phenomena, for instance, and see if this relationship is consistent across other social phenomena. All I propose here are some sites where such relationships might be evident. The potential consequences of using this framework in this way may include perpetuating a fallacy that race, class, and gender could possibly operate and function in the same way. If we are looking for relationships in the way I suggest here, we may blind ourselves to the ways that gender, specifically, does not fit it, or race specifically does not, or class specifically does not. The possibility exists that class does not depend on gender in some social phenomenon, and that lack of dependence may be hard to see using this framework. But another potential consequence is that we find something out about the relationships among life’s organizing mechanisms that we might not otherwise discover. I argue here that we can examine specific cruxes in the processes that result in oppression. As a starting point, difficult as it may be to uncover, I propose we ask how—and under what conditions, for what purposes—the forms of race, class, and gender under consideration were produced and what ties their production together. This is the topic of Chapter 3, where I specifically focus on the production of one tiny dynamic of gender in order to fully elaborate the production (or “social construction”) process. Then, in Chapter 4, I address what people and institutions “do” with the forms of race, class, and gender that have been produced. I illustrate how the form of gender whose production I describe in Chapter 3 comes together with products of race and class, and I address how the combinations they create depend on those products. Finally, in Chapter 5, I explore what happens to race, class, and gender when we, as people and institutions, consume and digest them. I describe how they, in new combinations, affect who people become, how our institutions get shaped, and what we and our institutions are able to do in the social world. Readers who begin this book will hope to find in its pages an answer to the question, how are elements of race, class, and gender related? Some of the most accessible imagery they will find is that race, class, and gender come together like ingredients in a cook’s bowl. But it is more than that. Before that, they are related like

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crops that are irrigated using the same technology, or crops that cross-pollinate each other. Later, they come together like particular flavor combinations on the tongue. And finally, and always, they come together like protein and carbohydrates in the digestive tract, shaping the bodies that consume them and the social world in which those bodies exist. This metaphor pushes us to recognize that we will never find one simple, generalizable relationship among forms of oppression. In our investigations, we may encounter particular relationships more than once, but we will not find those same relationships everywhere we look. Sugar, as a metaphor, helps us look beyond what is immediately apparent, behind what is there, in and through the entities we seek to understand. And it forces us to use our metaphorical taste buds as well as our Enlightenment-emphasized powers of sight. In its examination of the relationships among sources of oppression and privilege, Digesting race, class, and gender opens the cupboard door to a selection of theoretical material that allows for a reorientation of studies of race, class, and gender.

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Race, Class, and Gender as Organizing Principles

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4 U si ng Food to Identi fy Rel ati onships Among R ace, Cl a ss, a nd Gender

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Pa rt 2

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Producing Race, Class, and Gender

Lemonade 1 cup sugar 1 cup water 1 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice ___________________________________

Combine water and sugar in small sauce pan over medium-low heat. Stir until sugar is dissolved. Cut off the heat. Combine lemon juice and sugar water in a large pitcher. Add water until it tastes right. Serve over ice. (Recipe from Gerald Ken.) Guacamole 2 avocados 2 limes 2 teaspoons sea salt ___________________________________

Gently mash avocados in a medium sized bowl with a fork, or use a mortar and pestle. Squeeze the juice from the limes and add to the mash with salt. (Recipe adapted from Rick Bayless.)

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Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

1 cup cornmeal 1 cup soda water 1 teaspoon salt ___________________________________

Boil soda water and add salt. Pour boiling salted soda water over cornmeal. Mix first with a spoon, then with hands once the mixture is cool enough. Shape into balls. Flatten. Cook in a hot pan until browned. (Recipe adapted from The Cooking Post.)

Race, class, and gender are products. As factors that characterize

the common life conditions of series of people, the forms they take do not exist consistently over time. They are constructed out of the social material that comes before them, creating and constraining the possibilities that can emerge once they are constructed. In this way they are like plants that grow from the soil in which they are planted and the water and farmyard manure they are fed. A sugar beet plant, for instance, may grow in a field that has been fertilized by the leaves and stems that are turned back into the soil during cultivation each year. Once the plant reaches maturity, it is harvested and processed until it takes the shape of millions of tiny, white granules. Those granules may get mixed into a batch of lemonade in somebody’s kitchen and then consumed by his child. In a sense, that child is consuming everything that went into sustaining the life of that sugar beet: the soil, the water, the decomposed leaves, the earthworms’ casting, the sunlight, and even the lime in the processing plant. And, of course, the sugar is not the only thing she drinks: she also consumes the water that is boiled in order to dissolve the sugar crystals and the lemon juice that is squeezed and added to that simple syrup. Those lemons and cups of water are products, too. And if this child enjoys her lemonade with a lunch of guacamole on a hot corn tortilla, we introduce even more combinations of ingredients—more products (cornmeal, table salt, soda water, avocados, lime juice, sea salt), each with its own history and set of life-sustaining influences. When she enjoys this snack, she is not, of course, eating one separate bite of cornmeal and one separate bite of sugar. Rather, she is eating the entities that are constructed from those separate ingredients, and some of those entities are so

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institutionalized that we know them simply as “lemonade” instead of “an interesting concoction made of the juice of eight lemons, a sugar-water reduction, and plenty of freshly frozen ice.” As she eats this snack, her body starts breaking it all down, from the lemonade into the atoms combined through the ingredients: hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon from the sugar, for instance. These atoms then float around in her body in newly freed form until they join forces with other floating atoms to create new forms. These new combinations make the child’s body what it is: they repair her cells and make energy available for all her bodily processes. Everything she is able to do is dependent on the material her body has to work with. A “product” like sugar, then, has a fairly complex relationship with other products and with the entire life cycle. It is produced, it is mixed with other products to make food, it is consumed in its altered form, it is broken down within the bodies of those who consume it, and it comes to shape those bodies and, through those bodies, our world. Race is also a product, as are class and gender. Each of these is produced, mixed with other social products, consumed, and digested within our social bodies and institutions. As a result, race, class, and gender shape our social selves and our institutions, and through these, our social world. In this chapter I focus specifically on the process of production: the production of race, class, and gender. The story I tell throughout the book gets complex fairly quickly, though, so here I simply tell the story of the production of one simple, small dynamic of gender. Namely, I describe the production of what Kathleen Rowe (1990) calls “the unruly woman.” If we think of this archetype as having a similar pathway to that of sugar, we can ultimately trace the way it is produced, the way it may come together with other products to make combinations (some of which become institutions), the ways people experience and “digest” the archetype within those combinations, and the ways our habitus, and therefore our social worlds, are shaped by it. Who knew unruly women could have such influence. In order to concretize this process, I must tell a story with actual people and institutions in it. The story starts either in families or in schools, depending on your perspective. The families are “omnivorous,” as I explain below, which allows us to imagine how someone can “eat” a social institution and come to be shaped by the factors that constructed that social institution. But first: production.

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Children in the United States tend to be educated in class- and race-segregated schools. This happens primarily because neighborhoods are similarly segregated, and school funding draws on local resources. This pattern has been in evidence for so long, with such dire consequences, it would be remarkable if no one were engaging in activities to change the trend or at least resist it. Public policies; local, state, and federal legislation; court decisions; grassroots activism—each of these has addressed the issue of segregated schools and has influenced the current configuration of the education system. One fairly well-founded assumption that is often made regarding segregated schools is that parents—who often have limited opportunities to make decisions about the schools their children attend— are complicit in maintaining school segregation. Parents of children in poor school locales are assumed to be complicit because they do not do enough to fight bad conditions, while parents of children in wealthy school locales actively erect and maintain borders that keep their children in and “other” children out. A novel study in Britain (Reay et al. 2007), where some of the same class and race processes are in place, reveals an overlooked dimension of the segregated schools issue by focusing not on the parents who maintain race and class boundaries but on white middle-class parents who deliberately send their children to “multicultural” schools. We do not hear much about such parents. We assume parents with these forms of privilege will work hard to get their children into the “best” schools, which has become shorthand for schools that are well resourced and predominantly white. In the age of Obama, it may (or may not) be easier than it was before to imagine that all white people are not working tirelessly to maintain their race privileges, but we still know little about those who position themselves as antiracist or about the practices in which they engage. The parents in Diane Reay and her colleagues’ study are put off by the “soft,” “arrogant” white middle-class children who attend selective, segregated schools. Although most of these parents were educated in segregated settings themselves, and continue to travel in segregated circles, they came of age in a context in which messages of diversity and multiculturalism prevailed, and they want to be active in “putting rhetoric into practice . . . living as well as espousing democratic, civic values” (2007, 1045). They understand

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that they have to swim against the tide if they truly want their children to participate in creating, and being part of, a more inclusive, tolerant, and culturally literate society, so they send their children to schools with white and black working-class students. While there is something to applaud about this practice, which deliberately resists the perpetuation of privilege and rejects the spoils of segregation, Reay et al. (2007, 1044) also call attention to the “white middle-class omnivorousness” it represents. Omnivores eat everything, a bit indiscriminately. They are opportunistic, devouring whatever is available, which allows them to survive in different kinds of environments. Reay and her colleagues call these families omnivores because even while their decisions seem virtuous and commendable, the decisions are also made on the basis of providing their children with more than other children (other privileged children) have, in the form of this at-home-everywhere orientation. The children in these families acquire unique credentials by attending diverse schools, and their parents plainly speak of their motivation to help their children attain forms of social and cultural capital that children in segregated settings lack. The “cultural omnivore . . . can access, know, take part in, and feel confident about using, a wide variety of cultures from high to low” (Reay et al. 2007, 1046), and parents in this study proudly describe how their children display these cultural competencies. The parents seem unbothered, though, by the fact that the working-class students— who provide the necessary “other” to their own children—do not receive the benefits and privileges of the white middle-class social networks from which they remain largely excluded. As “omnivores,” these parents and children provide us with a situation to think about as we consider how race, class, and gender are produced, used, experienced, and digested in our social and institutional bodies. Reay et al. (2007, 1053) name the “future-projected, strategizing, capital-accruing self that epitomizes middle-class subjectivity.” Even in a situation in which they seem to be sacrificing privilege by not segmenting themselves into an exclusive arena with distinctive experiences and opportunities, these middle-class families are acquiring: poaching, colonizing, using “the other”—as the category is defined and used in race-, gender-, and class-mixed schools—to become better themselves. My interest in this situation is in the relationships among race, class, and gender that are evident at specific points: in the production of forms of race, class, and gender that omnivores consume; in

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the combinations those products take in the construction of institutions and everyday processes; in the omnivores’ experience of consuming them; and in the production of this acquisition-oriented sort of subjectivity through the omnivores’ “digestion” process. I focus on these omnivores even though the framework I present is applicable more broadly. Every institution, group, and individual, I argue, “eats” the forms of race, class, and gender that are produced and combined, and each of those entities is shaped by that process. In naming these families “omnivores,” though, the authors have provided us with a situation that makes it easy to imagine race, class, and gender being consumed. Reay et al. (2007, 1046) present a great deal of data to substantiate their argument, including the story of “Sophie”—a white, middleclass student who has been able to add cultural competencies from school onto the strengths she has gained growing up in her particular family. With apologies to Reay and her collaborators for possibly taking their brief description of Sophie’s life too far, I use Sophie here as one example of a race, class, and gender omnivore, and I spend the entire book dissecting the “foods” she consumes and “digests.” Her situation allows us to focus on specific issues, institutions, and processes in isolating the relationships among race, class, and gender: “Sophie is a classic middle-class omnivore. She is an accomplished pianist, loves classical music and the theatre but also enjoys Black music and clubbing and has many friends from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds. She has also been predicted four As at ‘A’ level and intends to study English at Oxford. Sophie, like many of the other white middle-class young people in the study, is ‘a real multicultural kid’ ([says her parent] Marcus Smedley, bank manager) but also one who, through her cultural activities, remains firmly embedded in white middle-class social networks” (Reay et al. 2007, 1046). Here we have classical music and “black music.” We have theater and clubbing and a wide range of friends. We have good grades and intentions of attending Oxford University. With these items, institutions, and processes in mind, we can start to focus on the production of just one small part of one of the things Sophie the omnivore consumes.

Lunc h Before we get to a description of the production of that one small part of Sophie’s meal, though, let me, in short order, explain the

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entire story I tell through the course of this book. (Readers may refer to the figure for a depiction of the elements of this story.) What I describe in these pages is one simple scenario, with lots of components. I am leading up to describing what makes Sophie who she is. What has shaped her habitus?1 Reay et al. tell us that she has eaten “black music” and classical piano norms, among many other things. I also imagine, in the pages ahead, she has consumed a form of “fierceness”—an attitude of unapologetic rejection of oppressive norms. Each of these things—fierceness, classical piano norms, and “black music”—is simultaneously a form of race or of class or of gender, and a product that has been constructed through particular combinations of race, class, and gender dynamics. In this way, race (“black music”), class (classical piano norms), and gender (fierceness) are each shaped and influenced by the dynamics of race, class, and gender. Taking one of them, fierceness, as an example, I explore what aspects of race, class, and gender have constructed it. To keep an already complicated story simple, I focus on how just one dynamic of gender—the archetype of “the unruly woman”—may get produced like sugar beets in the fields of the Red River Valley and then come to be combined with the products of race and class to construct this fierceness (this form of gender). To reiterate, from production forward, specific dimensions of race, class, and gender (gender in the form of the unruly woman archetype) get produced. Those dimensions then combine within particular activities (such as hanging out with friends, listening to music) to construct a form of gender (gender in the form of fierceness). That form of gender (fierceness) then combines with at least one form of race (“black music”) and one form of class (classical piano norms) in the typical lunch that Sophie the omnivore consumes. That lunch shapes who she is—in Bourdieu’s terms, it constructs her habitus, which she is then in a position to use to shape the world around her. While I would enjoy describing the production of all the dimensions of race, class, and gender that go into producing fierceness (and then all the race, class, and gender dimensions that produce 1

I do not stop with Sophie’s habitus because I think the construction of the individual is the most important social dynamic here. Rather, in order to get to Sophie’s habitus, we simply first have to understand the complex production, interaction, and experience of race, class, and gender.

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“black music” and all the race, class, and gender dimensions that produce classical music norms), in this chapter I must focus on one, single thing that gets “produced.” I take on the production of “the unruly woman,” who is someone who enjoys behaving and existing in ways that disrupt specific aspects of the gendered social order. I spend the rest of this chapter describing the production of this gender issue so that the reader can imagine how any social dynamic related to gender (or race or class) may get produced. I am calling “the unruly woman” a gender issue because of one of the ways it functions in Sophie’s situation. In Chapter 4, I suggest that the unruly woman comes together with the race-related dynamic of the defiant sort of “linguistic agency” that African Americans adopted en masse in the 1950s, and the class-related dynamic of rejecting middle-class propriety, to construct this demeanor of fierceness. Then, I argue, this fierceness combines with other things. I describe how a particular kind of posture—the posture of the typical classical pianist—is constructed through race, class, and gender. And I describe how listening to that thing that Reay and her colleagues call “black music” is constructed through race, class, and gender. With lots of shared understanding about the limitations of doing so, I ultimately call fierceness a gender dynamic, classical piano posture a class dynamic, and listening to “black music” a race dynamic: each is constructed through race, class, and gender. I liken fierceness to lemonade, classical piano posture to a corn tortilla, and listening to “black music” to guacamole, and then I consider what happens when they are all consumed together. While in this chapter and the next I focus on dynamics of race, class, and gender that come together to construct these edibles, in Chapter 5, I go in reverse and describe how each of the “foods” Sophie eats break down in the process of social “digestion.” Sugar, water, and lemon juice had to come together to make lemonade, but when that lemonade hits the gut along with the guacamole and the tortilla, their molecules start to break down and roam around until those atoms recombine with other atoms. Something that got produced as a fairly stable gender element, like the unruly woman, breaks down when it is socially digested and its parts combine with parts of listening to “black music” and parts of sitting properly at the piano, and they form new combinations that construct Sophie as a subject along with our social world—a powerful lunch, indeed.

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Source: Jennifer Oliver for the author, 2010.

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I now turn to the production of one, single ingredient in the recipe that ultimately becomes lemonade: sugar. Here I call the production of the unruly woman archetype “sugar” so that we can trace what happens to this sugar when it is simply a beet plant in the field, when it combines with hot water and lemon juice to make lemonade, when an eater—an omnivore, no less—consumes it, and when it breaks down into little atoms in her social body and combines with other atoms to construct the eater’s habitus and, in that new combination, to shape our social world. At each of these points, sugar is related to other products—other foods—and it is this fact that allows us to better isolate the many sources and dimensions of the relationships among race, class, and gender.

The U nruly Woman Women are not supposed to demand what they like or to even articulate it. They are supposed to behave, fit in, do what is expected of them, get along. To some extent, we all are, but women’s lives tend to be patterned in ways that reflect particular constraints—even as those constraints constantly change and contradict each other. For instance, women are supposed to enjoy revealing their breasts in some public circumstances, such as on television, and be embarrassed of their breasts and hide them in others—while breastfeeding, for example. Women are now encouraged to be ambitious but not too ambitious; smart but not too smart; tall and fit but not too tall or too fit. We disdain women who go to college to obtain their “Mrs. degrees,” while we are also leery of happily single adult women. Women are supposed to enjoy jobs as dental assistants and medical records technicians and paralegals but to feel out of place as automotive service technicians and carpet installers and firefighters. We are to comport ourselves in ways that bring favor. We are supposed to keep our homes clean and be delighted by gifts of red roses. We are supposed to stand quietly next to men who speak for us and to giggle when they tell jokes that demean us. If we are ill we should be gracious about it. We should value serving others. The list of femininity’s tropes goes on. Kathleen Rowe (1990, 410) has written extensively about the woman who thwarts these expectations, “the unruly woman.” The unruly woman and especially her body “are considered excessive—too fat, too mouthy, too old, too dirty, too pregnant, too sexual (or not sexual enough) for the norms of conventional gender

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representation.” She disobeys and does so gladly, which makes her both an object of scorn and a strange source of delight. We want to see how far she will push it, even while we revile her for doing so. She is out of place, she makes us uncomfortable with her comfort there, and she laughs at our discomfort. The unruly woman exists only as a response to “ruliness.” If expectations about women’s demeanor and boundaries did not exist, no unruly women would spring up to challenge them. Perhaps we could imagine that unruly women exist in the purest state, as all women would without constriction (and would there, then, even be “women”?). But since we cannot ever know what that state is, we must understand the unruly woman as a product. That is to say, this is a type of person who is characterized by her rejection of the social norms and expectations that would otherwise oppress her—norms and expectations that are, themselves, social products. No message was found, written on a mountaintop, that women should love red roses. Such ideas have been socially constructed, and the women who reject them have socially constructed their response to them. The unruly woman is socially produced. But how? As a brief analogy, let me return to the topic of sugar, for sugar, even in its most “natural” state, as the juice of a plant in the ground, is a product—it is something that must be made. I sketch one form of sugar production here in order to highlight the process through which this one, specific dynamic of gender—the unruly woman—comes into being.

Th e P ro duc tio n of S ugar Sugar has to get from the cane or beet into the little packets available at coffee shops. The planting, cultivating, and harvesting—that is, the production—of sugar is an ongoing, deliberate, institutionalized enterprise. There was a first time, to be sure. Somebody, possibly somewhere in New Guinea, perhaps about ten thousand years ago (Mintz 1985, 19), broke open a stalk of cane, or, maybe in Greece or Germany or Egypt, noticed when an animal dug past the chard-like leaves of the sugar beet plant to the root below, and was then able to make use of the sweet substance he discovered. Somebody somewhere also decided to take a “naturally” occurring plant like a sugar beet and deliberately grow it in order to be able to use the resulting product on a larger scale than would otherwise be possible. What is important in this part of the story is the deliberateness of the production enterprise. Walking by a plant, investigating it,

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and making use of it constitute one kind of activity. Turning that plant into a crop is another. It is as if you can imagine somebody, taken by the taste he experiences when she puts the broken cane to her mouth, thinking, “Now here’s something!” And then she plans and experiments and flails and refines until she isable to capture that something in a deliberate process, rather than simply hoping to come upon a plant like that again in his travels across the ground. For sugar to be produced, people have to decide to make it happen. For them to decide this, they have to believe there is some use in what they are going to produce—there has to be a need for it (or, as is more often the case, they have to construct one). The production of race, class, and gender is, at times, no less deliberate and requires no less human ingenuity. It is almost impossible to track the first time these were produced, especially because they have taken such different forms in different historical-cultural contexts throughout the world. Indeed, searching for the origins of their production assumes that we share a common understanding of what race, class, and gender are, which, as scholars such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1988) and Oyèrónké Oyewùmí (1997) have ˇ argued, is quite presumptuous. These universal concepts are amalgamations of many, many smaller dynamics: everyday interactions, the construction and maintenance of social institutions, people’s relationships with each other, forms of state regulation, rationales that are constructed to oppress and exploit people, pride and connection within communities, and on and on. The reasons why we call any one of these dynamics race or class or gender are important, but so, too, is the fact that we do. I do not attempt to trace the original production of gender or race or class here. Rather, keeping Mohanty’s imperative in mind, to analyze social dynamics with as much context as possible, I focus simply on the production of one small dynamic of gender, namely, the unruly woman. Part of what unites the production of the unruly woman with the production of other dynamics of race, class, and gender is that the production is ongoing. There is no moment when—“Poof!”— gender appears. Rather, in light of, and in response to, other social dynamics, something like the unruly woman begins to emerge— maybe in just one person’s attitude toward her job or in the confidence two friends give each other while they prepare for the day together. Maybe many activities like these go on at the same time, without anybody really taking notice. But with a keen eye, a social analyst like Kathleen Rowe (1990; 2007), or someone before

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her like Nathalie Zemon Davis (1975), is able to see a pattern in some women’s demeanors. She notices that in a television sea of skinny, blond, compliant white women, up pops Roseanne Barr with her brown hair, round body, unmodulated voice, and sardonic wit. In this context, “Roseanne,” as she calls herself, seems like an anomaly, and her success can be explained (away) by her novel but unsustainable difference from the norm. Yet she does not go away, even when she receives what are supposed to be harsh rebukes from “respected” commentators (even including the president of the United States). She stays, and she keeps challenging what we have to acknowledge we think is “appropriate.” Rowe argues that Roseanne’s simple presence is enough to make her an unruly woman, as she carries her heavy body with complete awareness that she is read as lacking self control, discipline, and dignity. She has the gall to be happy while fat. She also makes fun of men—an activity that women are not supposed to be interested in or dare to do. In her performance at a 1990 baseball game in San Diego, Roseanne (hired in this instance as a comic, not a singer) yelled the lyrics of the “The Star Spangled Banner” off-key, grabbed her crotch, and flipped off the crowd, all with a self-amused gleam in her eyes. This is not a “nice girl” who plays by the rules. For Rowe, the unruly woman is “an ambivalent figure of female outrageousness and transgression with roots in the narrative forms of comedy and the social practices of carnival” (2007, 263). Different from the “femme fatale,” the “madonna,” or any other gender archetype, the unruly woman “represents a special kind of excess”—an insistence on not fitting in and laughing at those who think she should. The Medusa is one example of the unruly woman, as she boasts of her own beauty and laughs in a way that men can apparently not comprehend. Another example—Sarah, in the Old Testament—is depicted as someone who laughs at her god. Like Sarah and the Medusa, Roseanne mocks and laughs. These “roots” in comedy and carnival tell us something about the production of this sugar plant. Jane Arthurs (1999) describes the production of the unruly woman as a response to the new norms of confinement ushered in with modernity in Europe. “The maintenance of bodily decorum became a sign of being ‘civilized’” during this time, she argues, summarizing the historical work of Norbert Elias (Arthurs 1999, 139). The new bourgeoisie constructed novel standards of bodily behavior that would effectively distinguish them from the toiling classes. As the bourgeoisie was

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composed of white families, these norms also differentiated them in a racialized way from the people they colonized and enslaved. The value the bourgeoisie placed on rationality, including the rational control of physical activities, meant that people’s normal bodily functions now had to be expressed privately—a luxury that required separate spaces and the knowledge and internalization of these new rules of appropriateness: “Bodily functions such as eating, sleeping and excretion became increasingly regulated so that individuals in general were much more physically separate from each other. Communal eating with the fingers out of a central dish and communal sleeping ceased to be the norm; increasing emphasis was placed on keeping sexual activity hidden from children. Activities which in the medieval period would have been performed quite openly on the street or in a room full of company (such as urinating, farting, defecating, spitting or clearing the nose) were privatized completely or made more discreet” (Arthurs 1999, 137–38). While the bourgeoisie created these norms of bodily decorum for themselves, using others’ freedom from such norms as a mark of their inferiority, bourgeois men were able to impose even more intense restrictions on the bodies and behaviors of respectable—that is, white, bourgeois—women. Being delicate, restrained, cautious, fearful, and generally out of touch with any spontaneous physical or emotional desire was the mark of the “civilized” woman. She should speak quietly, wrap up her body thoroughly, move meekly, eat sparsely, and laugh only at socially sanctioned moments. Women’s loud, raucous laughter is an important form of rejection of these body restrictions. Arthurs, building on the work of Michael Bakhtin (1984), places the model for women’s mocking refusal to conform to these restrictions in the activities of medieval carnivals. In these days-long communal celebrations of the pleasures of the flesh, women and men participated revelrously in violence, sexual activity, and debaucherous eating and drinking. Carnivals did not disappear with modernity, even though their activities were frowned upon by the upper classes, in part because their contrast helped define respectability. Unruly women, like the women who participate in these carnival activities, laugh. They make fun of the way the social order has been set up, and they refuse to fit in. “The unruly woman” is more than an individual person or a group of people, then. It is an archetype—a model of behavior and attitude, constructed in response to restrictive body norms, available as a form of action for those

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who would dare to critique, in this loud, visceral way, the race-classgender social order. This unruly woman archetype is available to use like the sugar that is produced from sugar beet plants is available to use. White, bourgeois men worked very hard to construct a form of femininity that differentiated men from women, upper classes from lower classes, and whites as a series from enslaved and colonized people as series. We might say that these men were like early imperial industrialists who set up a very elaborate infrastructure that crossed oceans and continents to produce the new calorie delivery system we know of as cane sugar. Like bourgeois femininity, cane sugar as a commodity has not always existed—it had to be discovered, transported, and adapted, and a need for it had to be created. Sidney Mintz’s (1985) history of sugar reveals that a thousand years ago, cane sugar was not available for everyday use around the world. Its production first developed on a large scale in the Mediterranean, but it was hundreds of years before wealthy European households would begin to use it sparingly as a spice for meats, fish, and vegetables; physicians would use it medicinally; and the nobility would commission elaborate decorations to be made from it. Sugar’s substantial use as a food was only established in Europe in the late 1700s, and in the United States in the mid-1800s, after production had ceased in the Mediterranean but spread via colonization into the Caribbean and Latin America. This “spice” was originally very expensive and only became the cheap staple we are familiar with once England, France, and the Netherland’s imperialist activities decimated cultures, ways of life, and many, many people in service to the production of cane crops and refineries around the world. The production of sugar from beets emerged as a response to this wildfire-like spread of cane sugar. Sugar cane grows best in hot, humid environments such as in the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Jamaica, and Louisiana in the United States. Sugar beets can grow in the short summers of cool and cold climates, such as those in the midwestern United States. Rather than relying exclusively on cane sugar produced by imperialist European corporations, some farmers in the United States, who adapted early beet development accomplished in Germany, facilitated additional United States access to sugar by supplementing cane sugar with locally grown beet sugar. Perhaps we can imagine the women whose activities produce the unruly woman archetype as being like the farmers who produce beet sugar in response to the enormous supply of, and demand for, cane

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sugar. The kind of femininity that bourgeois men popularized in early modernity (with bourgeois women’s cooperation) continues to “flood the market” within the gender social order. Women who have small bodies, who get things done in quiet ways, and who go along with the way things are receive adoration and commendation for these things (but not necessarily high wages, good health care, or respect), in contrast to women who eat to excess, ask inappropriate questions, and loudly laugh and mock. This “appropriate” sort of femininity (that is, the sort of femininity that supports the agendas of men, of whites, and of the upper classes) was produced and introduced to people just as cane sugar was. People, with enormous infrastructural support, had to produce it, and its ongoing production came to be expected and even welcomed and heralded. While “the unruly woman” archetype is another form of femininity, just like the sweet substance that is pressed, boiled, and spun from beets is another form of sugar, it is a form of femininity that rejects gender distinction. The Medusa is one of its farmers. Sarah in the Old Testament grew a crop. Carnival performers, Roseanne, and women like them have continued the beet crop’s production, making beet sugar available for use right alongside cane sugar. Anyone who is unruly within the gendered social order—drag queens, feminist men, genderqueers, and loud, snotty women, among many others—cultivates this form of antifeminine femininity, producing for us a product that we can mix into our glasses of lemonade, sip, and digest.

S u g a r in Rel atio n to Other C rops In the history of the unruly woman archetype, we can observe the nuances in the production of this dynamic of gender. The unruly woman is not normal, she is not found in nature, and she does not exist in all environments. Neither is the Victorian woman, or the “woman boss,” or “Suzie homemaker,” or the “goth girl,” or any other gender archetype available for people to use, challenge, and appropriate. The unruly woman is a social production. She is a response to conditions that exist in a particular temporal and spatial set of contexts, and she contributes to the way life is organized by shaping some of the common conditions that different series of people, like women and men, face. Like the unruly woman, every aspect of gender is socially produced, and so, too, is every aspect of class and every aspect of race. However and wherever the

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production of any aspect of gender, class, or race started, it continues, in old and new forms, with old and new aims, using old and new infrastructural supports. It takes a lot of work to produce race, class, and gender, which indicates a deliberateness to the enterprise. This deliberateness may seem to contradict the passivity that Sartre describes among members of any given series. It is only groups, he says, that consciously identify with each other and work in concert to influence their common conditions. Yet the conditions under which many series of people live have, indeed, been constructed by someone—in both individual actions and institutionalized forms. The white, bourgeois men who were able to impose conditions on proletarians, women, and enslaved and colonized people worked very hard to construct this social order. They needed both force and cooperation to accomplish this structural arrangement, and if the persistence of the order they constructed is any evidence, they were quite “successful.” Yet unruly women, too, enact an important dimension of deliberateness. They refuse and rebel, and this is not done by accident. It takes a lot of work to establish and maintain a race-class-gender social order, and it also takes deliberate action to resist and reorder it. In emphasizing its deliberateness, I am not arguing that the production of these structures of oppression and privilege is rational. It is not simply “a choice,” as the economic paradigm of “rational man” would indicate. The production process is also, importantly, institutionalized. As the production of sugar has continued on since its inception, it has occurred without the need for conscious and constant decision making along the lines of, “Yes, today, the plantation I have established will continue to grow sugar cane, and in the factory I have built workers will continue to extract the juice from those stalks of cane.” Some degree of decision making is required along the way, when a genetically modified variety of beet seed that is “Roundup Ready” becomes available, say, or when sugar loses value on the world market because of the introduction of other sweeteners. Decisions on issues like these are the very things that keep sugar’s production institutionalized because they provide this living institution with the flexibility needed to adapt to a changing environment. But underneath day-to-day decisions, the process of production itself has a force of its own. Similarly, when we consider the production of race, class, and gender, we must be attentive to both its deliberate and institutionalized dimensions (while also

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making very small allowances for some accidental forces in the production process). Just as I have described the social production of one small dynamic of gender here, we can imagine the social production of other dynamics of gender and of large and small dynamics of race and class as well. Because my primary concern is the relationships among these organizing structures, we must consider how they are related to each other in their production. That is, how is the production of the unruly woman related to the production of the appropriate woman, and to the production of the amount of deference with which people speak to each other, and to the production of the voluntary adoption of class-signifying activities, and to the production of any other race, class, or gender dynamic? I have already indicated that the production of the unruly woman is related to the production of other race, class, and gender dynamics in that this production tends to be both deliberate and institutionalized. That is, their production is all characterized by these dimensions, and because the processes of their production are similar, they are, in that way, related. In addition, the unruly woman is related to the appropriate woman in that she is a response. Just as beet sugar may be produced as a response to cane sugar, the unruly woman emerges because existing products do not sit well on every person’s tongue. Work on the appropriate woman seems to have happened first, and this puts the unruly woman in relation to her as a counterpoint, a response. The production of specific dynamics of race, class, and gender could be related in other ways as well. Thinking back to the production of the appropriate woman, we may consider how the techniques of the production of cane sugar are related to the techniques of the production of other foods, including bananas, rice, citrus fruits, sorghum, and olives. Sidney Mintz (1985) argues that early sugar production was spread most rapidly by Arabs who brought it from Northern Africa to the Mediterranean in the seventeenth century and westward to Spain decades later. Documentation of the Arab agricultural revolution (Glick 1970, 1974; Idrisi 2005; Watson 1974) reveals that, in Mintz’s words, “Everywhere, the Arabs showed a lively interest in irrigation, water use, and water conservation. They took with them, wherever they went, every watering device they encountered” (1985, 26). Irrigation techniques that had been in use for centuries in the Mediterranean for cereal crops and carob trees, for instance, were the basis of the technological

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innovations that enabled Arabs to introduce sugar cane into dry parts of the area and on into Spain (Glick 1974). This history can help us understand another of the mechanisms that relate race, class, and gender to each other, namely, the techniques used to produce them. Carob trees had long been irrigated using a particular technique, and then new people came along, saw how the technique worked, shaped it up a bit, and used it in new ways, including in the production of sugar cane. Examples of how the techniques used to produce race or class or gender inequality are borrowed to produce other kinds of inequality abound. Nancy Leys Stepan (1996, 122), for example, argues that the “science” that was used in the nineteenth century to rationalize racial inequality wasthen used for the same purpose regarding gender inequality: Thus it was claimed that women’s low brain weights and deficient brain structures were analogous to those of lower races, and their inferior intellectualities were explained on this basis. Women, it was observed, shared with Negroes a narrow, childlike, and delicate skull, so different from the more robust and rounded heads characteristic of males of “superior” races. The relationship between race and gender here is evident in the commonalities and uses of one of the techniques that produce them: science. This technique in particular, along with many others, can be used to produce many forms of inequality not limited to race and gender, just as the same borrowed and enhanced irrigation techniques allowed farmers to grow crops such as cane in addition to carob and then oranges and olives in addition to cane (Glick 1974; Idrisi 2005). Much like efforts to construe a scientific basis for race and gender, activities to map a “gay gene” with science have followed an analogous path. We might also consider the direct ways that elements from one crop are introduced into other crops. When a sugar beet field is harvested, for example, farmers typically dig up the beets (that is, the roots), but their machines allow them to turn the plants’ leaves and stems back into the soil so that they can decompose and provide nutrients for the next crop that will be planted on those acres. In this way, something like the unruly woman archetype is related to its own subsequent production, as each season of harvesting and planting builds on another. After the leaves and stems are turned back into the soil, though, it is also possible that a crop other than sugar beets may be planted there in the following planting season. Perhaps potatoes come next, or wheat, or soybeans. If

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potatoes, wheat, and soybeans each represent another race, class, or gender dynamic, then we can imagine how the actual material that makes up “the unruly woman” can feed and provide nutrients for other products such as “the renaissance man” or “the uppity Negro” (to mention just two examples). Another similar issue in the relationships among crops has to do with cross-pollination. If one crop is planted near enough to another crop, pollination particles from the first crop may blow into the second. This is currently an issue with sugar beets because the company Monsanto has developed a genetically modified sugar beet seed that is “Roundup Ready,” which means that it is resistant to the herbicide called Roundup. Some conventional and organic sugar beet seed growers are concerned that the genetically modified crops will cross-pollinate with nongenetically modified sugar beet, table beet, and swiss chard crops, and possibly even completely eliminate nonmodified species altogether. Because the use of the genetically modified seeds invites the heavy use of the herbicide, increased herbicide residues are also present in the sugar that results from these beets. Dried sugar beet pulp—the leftovers from the sugar production process—are also fed to livestock, and the herbicide persists in this form as well, which has implications for yet another set of food products: dairy and beef. Examples of “cross pollination” among dynamics of race, class, and gender are almost limitless. How might the pollen from the unruly woman archetype blow over and “contaminate” other race, class, or gender crops? Her pollen might blow into the houses of Congress where gender is being produced both through the norms of behavior among their disproportionately men members and through the legislation they enact. It might blow into a human resources cubicle where race is being produced through a white manger’s decision to hire the person he is most comfortable with, based on their shared interests and backgrounds. Or perhaps it will float over to a gentrifying urban neighborhood where longtime homeowners not only have to put up with loud, new bars and $80 bottles of wine on their old bodega shelves but also with property taxes they can no longer afford to pay. The potential influence of the unruly woman on each of these situations—on the production of gender, race, and class in these situations—may completely change their dynamics. Herein lies yet another aspect of the relationships

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among the production of race, the production of class, and the production of gender. In summary, the production of different, specific dynamics of race, class, and gender are related in a number of ways. First, they are related in that their production processes share certain attributes, such as deliberateness and some institutionalization. Second, the production of one dynamic may be related to the production of another dynamic in that the second is a response to the first. The referent dynamic, then, gives meaning to the subsequent dynamic. Third, the techniques that are used to produce one dynamic of race, class, or gender may also be used to produce other race, class, or gender crops. Science is one such particularly well-established technique. Fourth, the material from one race, class, or gender crop may actually feed the growth of another race, class, or gender crop, like beet leaves in a field of potatoes. Fifth, one race, class, or gender crop may contaminate another through cross-pollination. The unruly woman may taint the otherwise orderly proceedings of race, class, or gender being produced in confirmation hearings or elementary school classrooms or doctors’ offices. The list of relationships like these could continue as far as our imaginations and the details of different crops’ production processes will allow. Perhaps the production process for one crop is similar enough to the production process of another crop so that the same infrastructure can be used, such as for sugar beets and swiss chard. The seeds for these crops are typically grown at the same site because of the similarity of the conditions under which they thrive, and their full crops can easily be grown right next to each other because their soil and climate requirements tend to be the same. Or perhaps we can imagine that trade and transportation routes have been established for one crop of race, class, or gender, and then other products can be transported along the same paths, perhaps even from the same suppliers to the same customers. The details in the production of any crop give us boundless examples of the ways race, class, and gender may be related as they, like crops, are socially produced. The theoretical contributions that the story of beet sugar makes to our understanding of the production of race, class, gender, and other structural sources of oppression and privilege are considerable. Why, though, do race, class, and gender get produced? They certainly would not come into being if they were not going to be used. I discuss the use of race, class, and gender in the next chapter.

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Producing Race, Class, and Gender

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4

Mixing Race, Class, and Gender

I

n the previous chapter on production, I described how one element of gender—the unruly woman archetype—is socially produced, and I likened this process to the production of beet sugar. In this chapter I bring this sugar together with hot water and lemon juice to make lemonade. Like these ingredients, specific elements of race, class, and gender come together in ways that are both common and idiosyncratic, and in so coming together, they create something. In this case, they create a glass of lemonade that did not exist before, even while we recognize the form and taste of this drink because it has been institutionalized among us for so long. What may be difficult to understand is that in this example, race, class, and gender come together to form gender. That is, I am likening beet sugar to an element of gender, water to an element of race, and lemon juice to an element of class, and what these all make when they meet in the pitcher is an element of gender. This is not some strange form of logic. Rather, it simply acknowledges the ongoing influence race, class, and gender have in the organization of all aspects of our lives, including race and class and gender. The unruly woman archetype is a dynamic of gender that has been shaped and influenced by dynamics of race, class, and gender. “Fierceness” as an attitudinal characteristic is something that functions in the scenario I present as a dynamic of gender, even while its construction was shaped and influenced by race, class, and gender. It bears repeating that it makes sense, in this metaphorical project as well as in our studies of race, class, and gender generally, to differentiate influences from functions. Race, class, and gender are

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Chapter 4

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

busy influencing things all the time. Any single social thing we can point to—the Lily Ledbetter Act, the social movements populated by Gulf War veterans, the exposure of young children to computers, or any other social thing—has been constructed, patterned, maintained, and changed in ways that have something to do with race, and with class, and with gender. It is strange, then, that some social things seem to function as “race” while other things seem to function as “gender” or as “class,” even though those things have the full complement of race, class, and gender influences. Some social thing may function as race if it shapes the common conditions faced by series of people who are “Asian” differently from the ways it shapes the common conditions faced by series of people who are “black,” for example. In addition, some social thing may be discursively constructed as a “race issue” or a race-related thing regardless of the ways it actually organizes people’s lives. In that sense, too, a social thing may function as race. I maintain that a social thing can function as race and as class and as gender at the same time. Here, for simplicity, I focus on these separately. I do not argue that what I outline here is the only possible story about how race, class, and gender may come together to form something that functions as race, for example. Rather, this is a sketch that communicates some of the possible dynamics of how race, class, and gender come together to produce things—things including race and class and gender. In our lemonade, then, we have three ingredients: sugar, water, and lemon juice; or gender, race, and class; or the unruly woman archetype, the linguistic agency of African Americans, and the rejection of middle-class trappings. The lemonade functions in this story as a dynamic of gender—a “fierceness” in attitude and demeanor that some women specifically adopt. I am ultimately working up to a scenario in which middle-class omnivores like Sophie, who I introduced in the last chapter, consume this lemonade along with guacamole and a corn tortilla. Just as the lemonade was made from the ingredients of race, class, and gender, so, too, were the guacamole (race) and the tortilla (class). In this chapter I explore how one element of gender was constructed through race, class, and gender; how one element of race was constructed through race, class, and gender; and how one element of class was constructed through race, class, and gender. And then Sophie eats and drinks her lunch.

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One of the dominant phrases our field uses to describe the activities of race, class, and gender is some form of “coming together”: “Class relations do not function in the same way as gender relations; race relations are still another matter. Yet all of these come together in cross-cutting ways for particular individuals at particular historical moments” (Acker 1992, 566; emphasis mine); “Race, class, and gender come together in the cultural image of the ‘bad’ mother” (Morgen and Maskovsky 2003, 330; emphasis mine); “The junction where race, class, and gender meet and intersect is fraught with political challenges” (Rich 2007, 152; emphasis mine); “Race, class, and gender are simultaneous and intersecting systems of relationship and meaning” (Andersen and Collins 2010, 13; emphasis in original). I am ambivalent about “coming together” since it first relies on race, class, and gender’s “staying apart.” But, in fact, there are situations and sites where things happen—where middle-class families start deliberately sending their kids to working-class schools, for instance—and while those schools and those families have always been influenced by race, class, and gender, the particular dynamics of race, class, and gender that “come together” because these families and these schools interact are worth investigating. These sites of “coming together” are easy conceptual spaces for this food metaphor to account for: What comes together more easily than sugar, water, and lemon juice in a big glass pitcher? Whether workers on an industrial shop floor dump bulk containers of a lemonade recipe’s ingredients into huge vats to be combined and packaged, or one person in her own kitchen carefully measures out the two cups of sugar to be added and slowly stirred into boiling water and then mixed with freshly squeezed lemon juice, the process has similarities. Ingredients come together to form something new. The sugar dissolves in the hot water, creating a simple syrup that, after it cools, is added to the lemon juice and stirred. What is in that pitcher is no longer a separate section of sugar, one of water, and one of juice; it is a drink—a new cohesive entity that is different than any of the single ingredients that made it. By cooking these ingredients, cooling them, and mixing them, a cook has made lemonade; she has combined ingredients in a way that results in the construction of something that did not exist before—an emergent form of food.

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Stir r ing U p Rac e, C l as s, a nd G ender in the Pi tc he r

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

We may think of race, class, and gender intermingling like the sugar, water, and lemon juice in this pitcher. Like ingredients in recipes, these organizing mechanisms come together in very particular combinations with both predictable and surprising results. In order to demonstrate the ingredient-like qualities of race, class, and gender in this chapter, I describe how race, class, and gender come together to form fierceness; how race, class, and gender come together to form classical piano posture; and how race, class, and gender come together to form the practice of listening to “black music.” I use three simple three-ingredient recipes to illustrate these processes: one for lemonade, one for tortillas, and one for guacamole. The reader should note that although I call the ingredients in each recipe “race, class, and gender,” I am highlighting the important notion that race (or gender or class) is not always the same ingredient—each specific dynamic of race is its own ingredient (as each dynamic of gender is its own ingredient, and each dynamic of class is its own dynamic). This is why race, class, and gender can “come together”—because we are thinking about them as very particular dynamics rather than as the entirety of the common conditions that entire series of people face, or simply as the categories into which individuals can be grouped. The ingredients in these recipes are important, but so are the lemonade, tortillas, and guacamole. These foods represent entities that race, class, and gender have combined to create, and which depend, for their existence, on that combining. In all this, I demonstrate a fundamental principle of race-class-gender theory, namely, that “dependence” is an important aspect of the relationships of these sources of oppression and privilege. As noted, however, dependence in this instance means something different than what Patricia Hill Collins (1991), Glenn (1999), and others have articulated. While they have argued that race, class, and gender depend on each other, I argue here that any entity that race, class, and gender combine to create depends on them for its very existence. More in line with Collins and Glenn, though, I do explore the ways that the “molecular structures” of race, class, and gender are altered within the sites of their mixing and, in this way, depend on each other for the characteristics of their structures.1 While I focus here on lemonade, 1 At least two other scholars have suggested this chemical analogy in prior work: Patricia Williams in The alchemy of race and rights (1992) and Fran Buntman in her 1993 master’s thesis, “African-American men as threat and hope.”

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tortillas, and guacamole, I hope readers will imagine other recipes, concoctions, and ingredients that reveal other aspects of the relationships among sources of oppression and privilege. Let us, then, move through these three examples of how different dynamics of race, class, and gender sometimes coalesce at the same point, in the same pitcher, like the sugar, water, and lemon juice required to make lemonade. Fierceness: The Race, Class, and Gender Elements of Fierceness as a Gender Issue

You become fierce when you have to fight for something. Maybe you have overcome a personal obstacle and emerged victorious, or maybe, like the standers in Sartre’s bus line, you share common oppressive conditions with others and have figured out a way to collectively address, resist, and change those conditions. Race, class, and gender can be mixed together in particular situations to create fierceness as a state of being. While injustice does not have to breed fierceness (since it can also breed depression, violence, quiet dignity, critical thought, and a variety of other responses), it can and it does. In this section I describe how. The word “fierce” is often paired with either “competition” or “advocate.” Susan Scott writes of a homeless woman in Canada who is a “fierce advocate” (2007, 46) for marginalized women, for instance. This is a woman who was so nervous about receiving radiation treatment for cancer that she had a heart attack. Yet she recognizes the injustices that homeless women face and boldly asks strangers for things like new bras and underwear for the women she knows. Or to take another example, Lori Peek and Alice Fothergill (2008) talk about New Orleanean mothers who, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, had to enact “fierceness” to ensure care for their children and their communities. One mother said she became a fierce “mama bear” who evacuated soon before the storm to protect her infant and young child. Another mother—“a fierce and protective advocate” (2008, 87) who created a shelter at her church—used her resources and networks to make sure every adult got a job in the church, every child got free day care in the church nursery, and every family got housed in a FEMA trailer when her shelter closed. Fierceness requires passion and an unapologetic character, and it suggests a fight. As Farah Jasmine Griffin (2004, 103) notes about the fierce black women like Mahalia Jackson and Fannie Lou

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Hamer, who have sung at important historical moments of social upheaval, it is about making “demands, not requests.” Fierceness comes in many forms and is used for different purposes. Here, let me dwell on a form of fierceness that is borne of a specific gendered context, a specific class context, and a specific race context. Marcyliena Morgan (2005, 441) describes the “refreshing, kick-ass fierceness” that characterizes the work of hip-hop artists such as Queen Latifah and MC Lyte. The cadence of hip-hop in general, Morgan argues, rejects the diminutive, compliant interactional style that whites demanded of blacks prior to the black power movement and replaces it with discourse that is “aggressive, impolite, direct, and in-your-face threatening” (2005, 431). While men in hip-hop have generally experienced a greater degree of freedom to enact this directness, the genre has been sustained, in part, by women who have used it to claim their own resistant, forceful, unapologetic delivery style. Let me break down the ways race, class, and gender—like sugar, water, and lemon juice—have been mixed together to construct this form of “fierceness.” Race Morgan herself explains the importance of race for the emergence of this distinctive “fierceness” of style. From the time of United States slavery through the 1960s, she says, African Americans were rarely able to “exhibit linguistic agency” (2005, 429) or even initiate conversations with whites for fear of severe retribution. “Since discursive practices of all black people were regulated by white supremacists,” she says, “all black communication with whites in general was performed as powerless, agentless, childlike, and thus feminine” (429). Along with “stepping aside when a white person approaches, keeping one’s head lowered, and not looking someone directly in the eye” (429), African Americans had to stay quiet—voiceless—in ways demanded within the white-dominated social order. As part of the political and collective response to these forms of degradation, a new linguistic style emerged. “The new discourse annihilated the old and considered it a symbol of a slave and self-hate mentality” (Morgan 2005, 430). This style did not accept the rules whites had written and instead “asserted a black presence on its terms” (430). Hip-hop is an expression of this unapologetic, assertive, “fierce” discursive style. A racialized social order in which African Americans discursively demand space where whites had once tried to silence them is the

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Gender Fierceness, as it relates to race in this example, is about responding to, and ultimately rejecting, the norms and expectations that constitute the common conditions African Americans in the United States, as a series, have faced. And so it is with gender. The norms and expectations that construct women, men, and transgender individuals as series are both extremely pervasive and ripe for resistance. One form of oppression that forms the basis of these constructions is the expectation that women present themselves appropriately. Women should not be too loud, too big, too smart, or too powerful, lest they offend or threaten individual men or the social order that upholds men’s series positions. (Interestingly, the work of maintaining these boundaries is often done, and often done most effectively, by women themselves.) As described in the previous chapter, she who does not respect these expectations is “the unruly woman,” in Kathleen Rowe’s terms (2007, 264): “Ideology holds that the ‘well-adjusted’ woman has what Hélène Cixous has described as ‘divine composure’ (2007, 246). She is silent, static, invisible—‘composed’ and ‘divinely’ apart from the hurly burly of life, process, and social power. Such is not the case with the unruly woman. Through her body, her speech, and her laughter, especially in the public sphere, she creates a disruptive spectacle of herself.” Women who comport themselves in a manner that does not do service to the common expectations of appropriateness that women as a series face may be said to have a “fierceness.” In this rendition of resistance, women—unruly women—present themselves with something closer to honesty, even if (or perhaps specifically because) that honesty causes offense. Hairy body parts, loud voices, unsculpted figures, a desire to laugh at our jokes about ourselves rather than others’ jokes about us: these are the marks of fierce women. In the music Morgan describes, women come off as fierce in their lyrics, their tone, even their general attitude. An MC Lyte (1993) lyric to a sexual partner springs to mind, “Yeah, we did it. You didn’t call. But that’s aight ‘cuz I’m doin’ your boy, Paul.” Queen Latifah (1993) grills, “Who you callin’ a bitch?” Boss (1994) sums it up, “I don’t give a fuck, not a single fuck, not a single solitary fuck, not

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ingredient of lemon juice. Of course lemon juice is an ingredient in many recipes; here I highlight it within the concoction that ultimately becomes lemonade: “fierceness.”

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

a fuck, mother fucker.” Some may find these lyrics and attitudes as juvenile and unrefined as Roseanne Barr’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.” That is the point. These are not women who are (as) concerned with fitting into notions of dignified womanhood in this problematically gendered social order. They have carved their own space. In their rejection of appropriate femininity, these women enact another ingredient—sugar—in the lemonade that tastes “fierce.” Class Fierceness is about rejection, then: rejecting the conditions that bind individuals into series. The common conditions that construct class series are also available for rejection, and that rejection can work with elements of race and gender to produce a quality of fierceness. In many of the examples described here, low socioeconomic standing is part of the story: African Americans, disallowed from even speaking freely, let alone participating fully in economic activities, come to publicly voice their self definitions in ways that include jabbing critiques of their forced economic disenfranchisement; women, quietly held to restricting standards that frame them as either appropriate or shameful, understand that middle-class acceptability demands their allegiance to slim figures, pressed clothes, moderated voices, and laughter at only the right kind of joke. Jokes about poor women are encouraged. Jokes about rich women are also encouraged, so long as they solidify the participants’ insider status in their prestigious class series. Those who mock and reject these straightjackets of normativity may, in their defiance, enact the type of “fierceness” discussed here. Julie Bettie (2003) talks about how class differences are performed among young women in a California high school she studied. “Understanding group differences as differences of style” was one way these women dealt with the common conditions of their series, “as when working-class performers rejected school-sanctioned femininity for various racially specific dissident femininities” (2003, 195–96). Women who refer to themselves as las chicas, for instance, clearly rejected the mostly white, middle-class norms of the “preps” who wore pastel colors, “natural” makeup, and “French manicures.” The preps received admiration and approval from adults in the school for enacting this form of femininity, while the same adults understood las chicas to be “troubled” and assumed they were deep into gang activity, even though few were. Las chicas

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wore their hair scrunched up with lots of “stuff” (gel) in it and big, baggy pants. They applied their makeup in dark colors during their classes and spoke derisively to substitute teachers or ignored them altogether. In their attitudes, their demeanors, their activities, and their appearance, they communicated that they were not trying to represent themselves as poorer clones of the preps with their nice cars, expensive fashions, trendy haircuts, and athletic-club memberships. They resisted these paid-for advantages by enacting their own norms and styles. By demanding that anybody who was paying attention would notice that they did not approve of, or emulate, norms of preppy respectability, las chicas enact the kind of rejection of class restrictions that could contribute to a fierceness of attitude and demeanor. The class-based defiance that women like las chicas exemplify is a final ingredient in this lemonade of fierceness: the water that runs through it. Fierceness, then, is not something that could somehow exist prior to, or outside, the purview of race, class, or gender. It is a way of being that has been constructed through distinctive social processes, from the rejection of white supremacy to the mocking of middle-class acceptability. Race, class, and gender have combined in particular ways to construct fierceness, just as sugar, water, and lemon juice combine to make a pitcher of lemonade. Because fierceness can function as a gender issue for an omnivore like Sophie, it is also the case that race, class, and gender have combined to create gender. When that gender item is consumed, and the H2O, the C12H22O11, and the H3C6H5O7 break down within the social body, these molecules may then attach to the molecules of other items that have been consumed to construct new possibilities and constraints in the life of the omnivore. A social being’s habitus is constructed through that digestion and recombination process, so it matters what is consumed, and it matters what ingredients go into the lemonade in the first place. The same is true for the ingredients in the tortillas and guacamole available for omnivores to consume. Posture: The Race, Class, and Gender Elements of Posture as a Class Issue

The way one holds her body is enormously revealing. Slouching can communicate a lack of confidence or an attitude of disregard; a straight back and controlled walking gait can indicate that one is at ease, comfortable, and confident. These postures, as part of habitus

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in Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptualization, are both “structured” and “structuring,” meaning that they reflect the life circumstances people face, while they also communicate styles, attitudes, and norms that can be referenced, copied, and appropriated, influencing things from the moment of their enactment. This happens in patterned (organized, structured) ways. In his ethnography of boxers, Loïc Wacquant (1995, 65) argues that “the newer sociology of the body has paid surprisingly little focused attention to the diverse ways in which specific social worlds invest, shape, and deploy human bodies.” Wacquant details how the practice of boxing, like activity in any “social world,” constructs specific kinds of bodies. Boxers eat 5,000-calorie meals, ingest supplements, and exercise strenuously for months in their efforts to gain weight, even as their levels of body fat dwindle through this process. Their shoulders, abdominals, and biceps provide protection in the boxing ring, so they train fastidiously to bulk up the muscles there. Even their bodies’ ability to withstand punishment is acquired; Wacquant recalls how he noticed that his own body was reshaped by years of being hit repeatedly: “One day, after a particularly lively sparring session during which I withstood the aggressive attacks of my partner, my coach remarked, ‘Your hooter don’t bleed or don’t get red no more like it used to . . . You’re beginning to look like a real figher, Louie’” (1995, 71). A nose that does not bleed when it gets hit is part of a body that has been constructed according to the needs and norms of a very specific social world. Similarly, the distinctive social world of classical music must generate a patterned set of physical dispositions. A cellist’s body is likely to move differently from a marimba player’s body, which is likely to have been shaped according to different social patterns than a jazz clarinetist’s body. Consider the posture of classical pianists, specifically. A description of a piano master class in The New Yorker magazine includes this back-and-forth between the master and the student: [Barnatan, the student] had been playing with exceptional stylishness; he obtained a hypnotic tone from the piano. But in his hands the Andante felt a little too finished, too smooth; the main theme didn’t sing out enough against the accompaniment, which consists only of C-sharps slowly rising by octaves. Fleisher [the master] changed his tack. “O.K., try playing these C-sharps as if you were a conductor giving a beat. You are making a

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grid underneath the music. It has to stay exactly the same. The melody can sway this way and that, it can come in a little before the beat or a little after it, but the C-sharps must be unbending.” Barnatan resumed playing. The C-sharps chimed in clockwork patterns. Suddenly, the melodic line was freer, more sensual; its shape was framed by the grid. “Good,” Fleisher said. Barnatan added a few accents of passion and began swaying from side to side. “Not so good,” Fleisher said. “When you get louder, the character changes. Your plaintive, yearning creature, your nymph or naiad, is turning into some horrible, saliva-dripping alien.” (Ross 2004)

This master classical pianist does not want his student’s body to sway even while the melody does. The student’s movements need to be controlled, passion elided, bass notes “unbending.” If the student gives in to the desire to abandon the restraints on his body, the sweet, little thing he creates turns into a disgusting monster. If classical piano composes a social world, the posture of a classical pianist must be produced and reproduced by the demands and opportunities experienced within that world. Here, reminded of Sophie’s life experiences and influences, I consider how the posture of a classical pianist can have been constructed from one gender dimension, one race dimension, and one class dimension, like the cornmeal, soda water, and salt of a corn tortilla recipe. Again, with recipe variations in mind, I remind readers that these are not the three but rather three of the many possible dynamics of how a classical pianist’s posture becomes a recognizable and institutionalized thing. Gender Typical classical pianist posture has been shaped by gender in that the piano has been one of very few instruments that (some) women and men have both been encouraged to play. Even though pianos are large, technically complex, and potentially loud (Green 1997), which might have prohibited anybody from encouraging women to interact with them early on, “women played most of the keyboards found in middle-class homes throughout Europe and the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (Kallberg 1992, 106). The association of the piano or harpsichord with the home is an important part of the story of women’s access to it. The affluent white women who learned to play in those centuries “were the ones who had the most time and the most opportunity. The instrument was a house furnishing, and they [the women] were mostly

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Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

at home” (Green 1997, 64). Keyboards allowed women to provide domestic musical entertainment, children’s musical education, and accompaniment for women singers, which were all interpreted as gender-appropriate activities for this race- and class-specific set of women (Green 1997). In addition to this context of the instrument within middle-class homes, we must also consider the manner in which a person interacts with a piano to understand how gender has come to construct the typical classical pianist’s posture. Importantly, one plays a keyboard while sitting down. “Keyboard instruments are played in a demure, which is to say ‘feminine,’ seated position” (Green 1997, 59). “Indeed,” Tia DeNora (2002, 28) argues, “the keyboard was a woman’s province because of the demands, or lack of demands, that that instrument made upon the body, and its ability to afford the demonstration of a quiet body in performance.” Women who sit down to play an instrument do not “interrupt” their femininity with the technology, in Lucy Green’s (1997) terms. While a man pianist can be seated but still masculine (because he is mastering a technology), a woman pianist can be mastering a technology but still feminine (because she is seated). The presence of both women’s and men’s bodies in keyboard history has shaped typical posture for players of this class of instrument, then. Referencing one specific social context, DeNora (2002, 28–29) argues, for example, that prior to Ludwig von Beethoven’s appearance on the Viennese music scene in the late 1700s, piano performance there was not gender specific: “This factor is key: there were no means by which, once seated at the keyboard, men could be distinguished from women in terms of pianistic, or more broadly, keyboard practice.” Recent studies confirm that men and women pianists do not differ in finger ability (for example, see Aoki, Furuya, and Kinoshita 2005), which supports the idea that because women and men have both had the opportunity to participate in this practice, their equally capable fingers have been the result. When an activity is restricted to one socially classified type of body, it tends to take on the characteristics and connotations of that type: baseball seems “masculine” and “physical”; knitting seems “feminine” and “detail-oriented” (never mind all the “nimble-fingered” men of late who, despite their alleged lack of digit dexterity, are somehow able to interact very confidently with their texting devices). Because playing classical music on the piano has been allowed for both men and

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women, these strong gender connotations to the pianist’s posture have not been as cleanly assigned. Only in contexts in which women or men have been excluded have the processes of gender differentiation and characterization crept in. For instance, Beethoven shook things up a bit in the late 1700s by composing music that required different motions from the body than were required to play the sonatas and nocturnes that had otherwise been popular. “When Beethoven arrived,” DeNora (2002, 29) tells us, “the predominant aesthetic of piano performance celebrated a quiet, unobtrusive performing body.” Enter Beethoven: Chords rather than “pearly” passage work, leaps from one range to another, double octave statements of themes, extreme dynamic contrasts, legato articulation, abrupt changes of mood or tempo, startling rhythmic figures and broken phrases, Beethoven’s music called upon a pianist to engage in often abrupt, changeable and disconnected physical activities, activities that entailed and routinised suddenness of movement and surprise, movements which were the very antithesis of aristocratic corporeality and pianistic femininity but which were linked to an idea and imagery of the sublime and to an idea of the musical Genius as purveyor of that musical sublimity. That genius was masculine in conception, and Beethoven’s music was hailed as possessing “an earnest, manly style.” (DeNora 2002, 30)

The “manliness” of this physical orientation to the music did not come first. Rather, DeNora says, the music came to be understood as manly because women were restricted from playing it: “While women were highly active on the piano concert stage in every sense, including in the performance of concertos, they most overwhelmingly did not perform Beethoven’s concertos” (DeNora 2004, 217). Their absence can be explained in part by the limitations that the constricting clothes that were fashionable at the time put on their range of motion, along with prevailing notions of propriety in movement. The physical requirements of this music directly contrasted with the postures expected of middle- and upper-class white women of the time: “It was a matter of almost equal pride that the wealthier middle-class women be relieved of heavier physical labor. To make all this unmistakably evident in public, their appearance was expected to exhibit a meticulous personal daintiness, their gestures an absence of violent muscularity” (Loesser 1991, 65; emphasis mine).

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Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

With women’s bodies absent, men’s bodies—and the physicality they were able to exhibit—filled the void. “Beethoven came to be associated with masculinity,” DeNora (2002, 31) argues, “because the event of his music was increasingly appropriated by men; it was increasingly performed by men . . . and performed by men as a gesture of strength and heroism.” This strength was explicitly conceptualized as “muscularity”—directly linking the activities of the body with a dynamic of gender: “Performances of Beethoven’s piano music—its ‘manly style’ as one observer put it—involved a more visible and more ‘muscular’ body at the piano. In this way they [critics] sketched the lineaments or external markings of new ways of being a piano-performing subject—a particular type of energetic, strong and surprising performer” (DeNora 2004, 217; emphasis mine) A great deal has happened with classical music outside the time and place of nineteenth-century Vienna, to be sure, but this is one example of how gender shapes typical classical pianists’ posture, like cornmeal shaping the flavor of a corn tortilla. With both women and men present and visible, the posture of a classical pianist reflects the sameness of their bodies—the activities of arms and fingers rather than “women’s arms” or “masculine fingers.” When women’s or men’s bodies are artificially restricted, the music and the posture with which it is played come to take on gendered connotations. Race and class, too, shape this posture. Race While white women and men have had centuries of access to the piano, the development of classical pianists’ posture has occurred in a way that depends on black women and men’s lack of access to the instrument and the genre and their development of other genres. Typical classical pianist posture has been shaped by race in a relational manner. Recall the gender-focused work of Simone de Beauvoir (1952), who describes men as “the One”: “the One” who matters, “the One” who acts, and “the One” who does important, public, significant things. Women, then, are “the Other.” They help, they support, and they are ultimately understood to be “lesser than.” It is as though women do not exist but in relation to “the One.” In our contemporary imaginations, classical music may be another example of “the One,” with the genre of jazz as its “Other.” Classical pianists do not need to be “jazz trained” in

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order to be received as legitimate, but the credential of “classical training” allows us to believe that a jazz musician has worked hard to attain technical proficiency before stumbling into something more “fun” (read, less hard and less valuable; M. Jones, personal communication). We understand jazz to be a response— a response to the blues, to gospel, to classical music, to racism. But somehow classical music seems to be capable of existing on its own, untouched, outside of dialogue. If this were true, it would be interesting. But of course classical music’s norms are developed and enacted in response to social forces as much as men’s—that other “One”—are. In fact, it is because of the creation of an “Other” in jazz that classical music is able to maintain its stature, and this has not happened outside the purview of race. A comparison of the styles—and perceptions of the styles— of two jazz pianists, Thelonius Monk and Bill Evans, is instructive on this point. The pianist Thelonius Monk is believed to be one of the true greats of jazz, and his style is often described as “eclectic” and even “weird.” In a biography of Monk, Robin D. G. Kelley (2009, 284) describes how one critic (William Balliett) loved how Monk, when conducting, would “wind his body sinuously from side to side in half time to the beat and, his arms horizontally crooked, slowly snap his fingers—a dancer gracefully illustrating a difficult step in delayed motion.” The dance continued at the keyboard where he might “suddenly bend backward, bring his elbows in, shoot out his forearms, and pluck handfuls of notes from either end of the keyboard, as if he were catching trout with his bare hands” (2009, 284n31). Most who saw Monk observed a freedom in his physical movements—both at the piano and when he would get up from the piano to dance and direct. This contributed to an impression of him as “authentic” and “pure,” motivated solely by some sort of magical black “intuition.” These characterizations of Monk’s body rely directly on the primitivism that operates to uphold white racist orientations, as in white music writer Albert Goldman’s description of the pianist (in Kelley 2009, 232-3n79): Listen to [music writer] Albert Goldman’s paean to Monk: “Monk’s brand of thinking comes from the sound and the blood rather than the mind, tapping into a well of racial memory that keeps the music pure, authentic, and black. No matter how gone he gets with his atonal jazz, he never loses a strong racial sound. You see, most of the modern

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As part of its enormous offensiveness, this passage refers to the common practice of setting jazz and classical music apart from each other. So common is this practice that it makes sense to ask what meaning classical music even has without its jazz “Other.” Interestingly, in light of the gender discussion above, jazz pianists’ playing is often described as “muscular,” where classical pianists are “restrained,” “graceful,” and “controlled.” The muscular men who were able to use their bodies to play Beethoven clearly had the upper hand (and posture) in comparison to the restrained women who had to stick to their nocturnes (Kallberg 1992). And yet the same characteristic of muscularity is hurled as a largely racespecific slur on jazz pianists. For example, the white jazz pianist Bill Evans is set apart from African American jazz artists in part through his bodily approach to his music. One critic describes how Evans “abandons, to a great extent, the muscular excellence” of black jazz pianists’ performances “and gives expression to the more romantic side of his nature. He reveals himself as an Impressionist . . . influenced by the English pastoral composers” (Ake 2002, 95; emphasis mine). These influences, “with their very delicate sonorities,” are contrasted with the “hustle and bustle of urban America,” or, in other words, with the “muscularity” of black jazz performers (Ake 2002, 95). David Ake (2002, 100) makes the argument that Evans cultivated this distinction deliberately, wanting “an identity that was to be perceived as apart from—and ideally better than—the one then beginning to generate significant attention. He cultivated allegiances with a genre already established as ‘good’ and ‘sophisticated,’ that is, with ‘classical music.’” The typical classical pianist’s posture is marked by its distinction from the typical jazz pianist’s posture and has, in this way, been shaped by race, like the flavor and texture of corn tortillas are shaped by the hot soda water that mixes with the cornmeal. Underlying these race and gender components of classical posture are dynamics of class.

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[white] cats are pretty well hung up between jazz and the classical stuff. They all took a little vacation up at Juilliard after the war, and before they got away they were hooked on Bach and Debussy. Now, a man like Monk is good for these cats. He’s like some old oil well that keeps pumping up the good black stuff, when all the new rigs have gone dry.”

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Class Typical classical pianist posture has been shaped by class in that norms of proper bodily comportment that upper- and middle-class Europeans and Americans enacted have been imposed onto the field. The class dimensions of classical piano posture have less to do with the class of the pianist himself than with the class-related associations of the genre. Classical music is primarily consumed by the affluent, and it is used as a barrier to entrée into their social world. In their classic article on culture and art, Paul DiMaggio and Michael Useem (1978, 144) argue, “The upper class can be expected to make efforts to exclude other classes from acquiring its artistic interests as a means of preserving elite boundaries and dominance from generation to generation.” The pianist’s posture must be distinctive, then, communicating the Victorian sensibility of repression and propriety as set apart from the vulgarity of the rest of the world. Being part of a classical music world has become an important way of denoting membership in the exclusive class. This may mean pursuing a life of performance or cultivating an extremely detailed interest in classical music, or it may even simply mean enacting the norms of the field within the otherwise mundane aspects of life. Pierre Bourdieu takes very seriously this adoption of “high” artistic tastes and mannerisms as a class-constructing device: “For Bourdieu, in other words, the aesthetic sensibility that orients actors’ everyday choices in matters of food, clothing, sports, art, and music—and which extends to things as seemingly trivial as their bodily posture— serves as a vehicle through which they symbolize their social similarity with and their social difference from one another” (Weininger 2005, 130; emphasis in original). One can gain cultural capital by performing music within the norms of propriety designated by the upper class or even by simply upholding the hierarchy of appropriate musical posture in criticism, attitude, and discourse. This table salt, together with the cornmeal of gender and the soda water of race, work together to construct the thing we understand to be classical piano posture. It is not as though corn tortillas just sit on the shelf, having been made of nothing but ready to be consumed in ways that have race-, class-, and gender-specific patterns. Rather, race, class, and gender are parts of what made these corn tortillas taste and smell and feel the way they do. They come together in the cornmeal recipe and then break apart again when

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“Black Music”: The Race, Class, and Gender Elements of Listening to Hip-Hop as a Race Issue

What is “black music”? I have captured it in quotation marks throughout this discussion because the term strikes me as having great potential for misappropriation. Is something “black music” if black musicians perform it? What if white musicians write it, produce it, package it, and distribute it—is it still “black music”? Why? What if black musicians do everything from the writing to the performing, but it is primarily heard and consumed by white audiences—still “black music”? Or, apart from the racialized bodies of the key actors, is it something about the sound of the music itself that makes it “black”? Does the music need to descend in a traceable way from the sounds of music from West Africa? Does it need to reference pentatonic scales instead of heptatonic scales? Does it have to have been marginalized or commodified in some systematic way? Or is the subject matter of the music the important part? What is the magic formula? Many black musicians and writers use the term “black music,” and we seem to understand what they mean. White musicians, commentators, and others also use the term, and again, we seem to know what they mean. I, myself, do not know what the term really means, but since it shows up as a notable point in Diane Reay et al.’s description of the things middle-class, white omnivores consume, it seems important to address it. The easy answer is that “black music” is music that relies on distinctive African American vernacular and musical traditions (Potter 1995). It presumably includes jazz, hip-hop, reggae, R&B, soul, gospel, rap, and the blues, among other forms. Since most of the music that high school students listen to is produced and processed commercially, though, often by wealthy white executives, it is a bit of a stretch to argue that we can easily identify what those “distinctive” vernacular and musical traditions are or that popular “black music” is somehow more authentic for black listeners than for white listeners. To Ronald Michael Radano (2003, 2–3), “black music, like all Western musical practices, is patently intermusical as it is intermediated and, finally, interracial . . . Neither pure lyric nor

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the omnivore digests them. Another set of race, class, and gender ingredients they may combine with, upon digestion, are those in the guacamole of listening to “black music.”

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unadulterated racial sound, the voice of black music may best be likened to a ‘soundtest,’ to a sonic palimpsest that accumulates tales on those already written.” “Black music” is specifically “interracial,” then, as it “derives neither from a simple African origin nor from an inherently ‘spiritual nature’ that seemingly ‘jes grew.’ It emerges instead from the alchemy of modern racial logic and the ironic differences that logic produces” (Radano 2003, 13). Sounds and texts that are called “black music” have emerged within a system of relations between, at least, those who understand themselves to be “white” and those who understand themselves to be “black.” Forms of these racial negotiations and relations appear in “black music,” even as “black music” cannot be separated from the rest of social experience as though it were a dependent variable. “Black music” “proposes a ‘unity’ within the disunity and discontentment of the modern” (Radano 2003, 23), supposedly making it clear what “blackness” is prior to the music but really constructing that “blackness” itself. It is a problematic concept, to be sure, even while it is a social thing that many—with whatever understanding of it they have—take enormous delight in. I use the term here with the understanding that for some, its meaning is clear, and for others, it is almost impossibly complex. Because of this complexity, it seems to make sense to narrow it down for the purposes of this discussion, so I only speak to the genres of hip-hop and rap here, with full understanding that these neither encompass all of “black music,” nor, for some, are they “black music” at all. Since much, though, has been written about hip-hop and rap as “black music,” I proceed with these forms in what follows. (Let me, then, take “black music” out of quotation marks from this point on to reflect this understanding.) It is particularly serendipitous, as Imani Perry (2004, 44; emphasis mine) points out, that “hip hop figures in many lyrics as a nourishment essential for survival. It feeds the community of listeners. KRS-One announced, ‘I got the hip hop juice with the hip hop food.’ Digable Planets rhymed, ‘Brewin’ funk inside my soul kitchen, pull up a chair, here’s a bit, have a listen’ . . . Lines such as these construct hip hop as life-sustaining.” Since I could not possibly explore the entirety of this life-sustaining force, here I focus on just one specific and important dimension of it: listening to it. Who listens to rap and hip-hop, in what settings, and for what reasons? I argue here that the practice of listening to black music is constructed

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Race Angela Davis (1990) argues that music is a particularly important site where we can “look for the collective consciousness of black Americans” (Rose 1994, 153). “Music has long permeated the daily life of most African-Americans,” she says. “It has played a central role in the normal socialization process; and during moments characterized by intense movements for social change, it has helped to shape the necessary political consciousness” (A. Davis 1990, 3). If black music is something that is primarily performed by black artists, something that black students hear in their homes growing up, something the parents of these students value and participate in, something that has helped construct their own “blackness” by delineating norms of acceptability and unacceptability, we may imagine that something about black music may resonate more directly with some black listeners than with some white listeners. It is more likely to be what black students simply understand as “music,” while the genres of orchestra, folk music, and country could, for the same reason, be set apart as “white music.” This does not, though, mean that listening to black music is a wholly segregated enterprise. White teenagers and adults have supplied a market for music written, produced, and performed by black artists for decades. How, then, has race shaped the practice of listening to black music, if white and black teenagers and adults alike consume it? In Young’s (1994) concept of the series, we are reminded that race is something that organizes the common conditions that characterize the lives of white families and black families, among others. Race shapes the practice of listening to black music, then, in the conditions that would inspire black teenagers to listen to it and in the conditions that would inspire white teenagers to listen to it. At least some of these conditions are likely to be different. “White America has always had an intense interest in black culture,” says Tricia Rose (1994, 5) in her book on rap. “Like generations of white teenagers before them, white teenage rap fans are listening in on black culture, fascinated by its differences, drawn in by mainstream social constructions of black culture as a forbidden narrative, as a symbol of rebellion” (1994, 5). Where black teenagers, in Angela Davis’s conceptualization, are listening to music like rap to learn about themselves, to better understand their families’ positions in the social world, and to identify the contours of their opportunities to participate in political discourse (or to resist these same constructions), white 10.1057/9780230115385 - Digesting Race, Class, and Gender, Ivy Ken

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through race, class, and gender like guacamole that comes into being upon the mixing of avocados, lime juice, and sea salt.

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teenagers are voyeurs. White teens listen with curiosity, although this curiosity is not characterized by childlike innocence. It is the consequence of years of white dominance over racial affairs and white teenagers’ concomitant belief in their social right to access nearly any object they choose. White teens feel entitled to listen to black music, whether or not it directly relates to their life experiences or resonates with them as sound. It is an object they feel they can take for their own. This happened in the 1920s when white entertainers and fans made “extensive efforts . . . to imitate jazz music, dance styles, and language” (Rose 1994, 5). It has happened throughout the history of rock ‘n’ roll and in the development of the genre of “country” in counterpoint to “soul.” White appropriation is almost as much a part of black music as black performers. I am arguing here, then, that part of the way race has shaped the practice of listening to black music is through the historically constructed conditions that have allowed white teenagers to access any cultural forms of interest to them. These are the same conditions that have operated to deny black teenagers and adults access to or participation in many white cultural practices and that have required and ultimately inspired black musicians to construct musical forms of their own. Because of any linkage that exists between black music and black responses to whites’ attempts to oppress them, black music may resonate in black families differently than in white families. This motivation for listening (as an opportunity to relate to others who are similarly socially located versus an opportunity for appropriation) influences how black and white teenagers hear and relate to the many genres of black music. Allow these differences that are borne of the historical realities of race relations, and that now exist in the common conditions of white families’ and black families’ everyday lives, stand for a race dimension of the practice of listening to black music like hip-hop and rap. As such, let us understand these differences to taste like the mashed avocados that form the base of guacamole. Gender Guacamole is not made of avocados alone, however, nor is the practice of listening to hip-hop and rap solely constructed of the ingredient of race. This practice is also constructed through the work of gender. The advantages given to men in these genres result in their artificial dominance of the fields. That is, men do not write better than women or rhyme better or perform better, but it is much easier to access men’s writing, rhymes, and performances because so many more men are given writing and recording deals. As Kyra D. Gaunt 10.1057/9780230115385 - Digesting Race, Class, and Gender, Ivy Ken

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(2004, 260–61) explains, “Most rap artists signed to major recording labels are men, most disk jockeys are men, and most fans have been characterized as men. The culture has been documented almost exclusively by men, through male experience, which has led to obvious assumptions that hip-hop culture is exclusive to African-American urban men (erasing not only women’s contribution to its origins but also that of Latinos, West Indians, and whites).” This misconstruing of the genre is important in the consideration of who listens to rap and hip-hop. If we understand rap and hip-hop to be done and owned by men, and we also assume that part of the reason why people listen to particular kinds of music is that they relate to it in some way, then what explains women’s practice of listening? Kyra Gaunt addresses the notion that women who listen to hip-hop do so as a form of internalized gender oppression: “This masculinized view of rap places female participants in rap and hip-hop culture in the precarious position of being attracted to a musical expression that is apparently ‘bad’ for them, that ‘talks bad’ about them, and therefore diminishes their social capacity and respectability as African-American women. Therein, silence is golden. Women appear as mute and unconscious daughters of the hip-hop revolution” (Gaunt 2004, 261). When women do talk about listening to hip-hop, though, they throw these assumptions and understandings into question. Many women love it and feel themselves to be part of it. Susan Weinstein (2006) talks about rap as a form of pleasure—as something people participate in and bind themselves to in ways that are enormously engaging, sustaining, and enjoyable. Although she focuses on young people who write lyrics, she notes how important their membership in rap discourse, as expressed through listening, is to their practice: There is a particular element of pleasure that comes through again and again as the Maniacs [a rap group composed of young women and men] talk about their craft: a deep connection to the rap genre within which they work, and to the larger culture of which it is a part. This connection is what makes hip hop so powerful for youths: They know and care about it because it’s theirs. They have grown up listening to rap (for many years now the most public component of hip hop), and that connection between fans’ personal histories and the history of the musical form creates a special bond. (Weinstein 2006, 275; emphasis in original)

Pleasure is an important theme in the practice of listening to hiphop, for women and for men. In a very interesting take on the genre, Gaunt (2004) links African American girls’ jump rope games of “double 10.1057/9780230115385 - Digesting Race, Class, and Gender, Ivy Ken

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Dutch” with hip-hop culture. In both these games and the improvisational nature of much rap, pleasure and play are central. “Play,” says Gaunt (2004, 252), “is considered an experience or an act that is performed for its own sake, for pleasure or reward known as flow. The rewards for flow experience are said to be intrinsic, often marked by imaginative creativity, improvisation, and adventurousness.” This pleasure is not only men’s, despite the ways hip-hop has been interpreted and represented. If we can imagine that the flow and delivery of rap lyrics are related to the physical and aural activities of a double-Dutch game (including jumping, clapping, snapping, slapping, singing, chanting, repeating, and rhyming), we see girls as important progenitors of the genre. Women who listen to hip-hop, then, and take pleasure in it are not simply attracted to something that is “bad” and “bad for” them. Rather, “women’s reception of rap might serve as a vehicle for remembering (consciously or subconsciously) their own distinctly female-oriented musical experiences. This explains women’s participation as the recovery of a distinctly female mode of expression within a ‘male’ domain of commercial production” (Gaunt 2004, 261). This is one of many contexts within which women listen to, and therefore participate in, hip-hop and rap. Listening to rap and hip-hop is a gendered activity. While women and men both engage in this activity, they may do so in different ways, recalling different experiences, in ways that can (but do not always) bring them together in the experience of pleasure. Allow these distinctive pathways to stand for one gender dimension (among many) of the practice of listening to hip-hop, and be represented by the lime juice in our guacamole. Class It was hip-hop that was sullying the pure and white moral values of American youth. “If you look at some rap videos, they’re barbarous,” Bennett [former education secretary] declared in an interview with Newsweek magazine in 1994. “We know what happens to children with a steady diet of this sort of thing, particularly when they aren’t offered—as an alternative—things good, positive and uplifting. We’ve seen a phenomenal increase in social pathologies, crime, broken families and so on. There are a lot of things going on here, but to me one of them is a culture that’s become increasingly trashy.” —Kitwana, Why White Kids Love Hip Hop, 20–21; emphasis mine

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In the early 1990s, cultural critics could not help but to notice and analyze the substantial pushback that rap was receiving. In what Richard Shusterman (1991, 613) calls rap’s expression of “militant black pride and thematizing of the ghetto experience,” people sensed a threat to the status quo. This “threat” is not the one that people like William Bennett described and the media pounced on, though. It is not a threat of a violent social order or a threat of corrupting young minds. “The threat,” Shusterman says, “is of course far more audible and urgent for the middle-brow public who not only interact more closely and competitively with the poor black population, but who rely on (and thus compete for) the same mass-media channels of cultural transmission, and who have a greater need to assert their socioculture (and ultimately political) superiority over black America” (1991, 613). That is, the middle class understood rap to be a threat to their own cultural dominance. Control over the definition and creation of culturally desirable forms of art has long been a way of maintaining class boundaries (DiMaggio and Useem 1978), and in rap the middle class found an art form they could not control. Their very feeling of being “threatened” by it implies its legitimacy as art. Part of the way the middle class dealt with this threat was to attempt to delegitimize rap. The easiest way to do this was to not acknowledge it. “In a number of ways, rap has followed the patterns of other black popular musics,” notes Tricia Rose (1994, 6), “in that at the outset it was heavily rejected by black and white middle-class listeners.” Aesthetically, it did not fit with middle-class tastes, so they ignored it (possibly hoping to ignore it away). Yet it quickly became clear that hip-hop was not going anywhere. Although attempts at delegitimation steadily continued, the middle-class response came to take on more of a character of objectification. The subject matter of rap and its commodifiable cultural accessories became things the middle class could buy and appropriate in a manner akin to “buying Navajo blankets at a reservation roadstop,” according to Henry Louis Gates Jr. (quoted in David Samuels 1992, 364). Gates describes the relationship of the middle class to rap in harsh terms, arguing, “A lot of what you see in rap is the guilt of the black middle class about its economic success, its inability to put forth a culture of its own. Instead they do the worst possible thing, falling back on fantasies of street life” (Samuels 1992, 364). From delegitimation and differentiation to objectification and fantasy, the middle-class audience’s response to hip-hop has shaped the genre, even as the

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genre has worked to configure the boundaries around the middle class. Allow these dimensions of the relationship of the middle class to rap to stand for a class dimension of the practice of listening to black music, and be represented by the sea salt in the guacamole recipe. These elements of class, gender, and race all, in some way, address the question: Who has the right to listen to hip-hop? The boundaries around these listening practices seem to be both very heavily contested and vigorously policed. The implicit assumption seems to be sameness, as in if a young, financially struggling, black woman performs a rap, that song is supposed to appeal exclusively to other young, financially struggling, black women. This sameness in the demographics of performer and audience is assumed but is rarely accurate, and that marks an interesting fissure. This fissure reveals the problems with making assumptions about people’s tastes and activities based on their placement within race, class, and gender categories, to start. It calls the entire enterprise of categorizing people into question, more broadly, and it also demonstrates the messiness and fluidity of the practices that are supposed to define who we are. We are talking about listening here—listening to sound, hearing messages, being moved by the experience. In some ways it seems enormously simple: as easy as it is for me to hear rustling leaves, I can hear a woman sing a melody. Hearing, experiencing, being part of—these are some of the basic elements of life, the pleasures of life. And yet they are infinitely complex. Our experiences of them are patterned and organized, in ever-changing ways that correspond with the bugbears of race, class, and gender. In listening to black music we have made guacamole. We have separately tasted the avocados, lime juice, and sea salt that are crushed together in a cold marble mortar, but when they come together they construct something beyond their individual selves. When the life conditions that would make rap appeal to black teenagers is mixed together with the origins of the genre in African American girls’ double-Dutch games and spiced with black middleclass anomie and appropriation, we have got quite a concoction.

L emo na de, To rtil l as, and Guac amole Sophie the omnivore must be hungry because in taking even a single bite of food she is ingesting a complicated mash-up of ingredients and flavors that have all, themselves, come into being with

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their own complex social histories. In this chapter I have described three things Sophie eats: bites of race, bites of class, and sips of gender; or, corn tortillas, guacamole, and lemonade. In describing just three foods that she eats, I have demonstrated the complicated nature of identifying race, class, and gender’s influences on her. Like lemonade is made of sugar, water, and lemon juice, gender is made of race, class, and gender, which is, in this single example, to say, fierceness is made of black linguistic agency, the rejection of class-based notions of propriety, and the unruly woman archetype. The unruly woman archetype, as an element of gender, is itself a social product—something that needed to be planted, cultivated, harvested, and processed like sugar beets in a field. When we consider the amount of social food we “eat” every day—the enormous number of social factors that we come in contact with on a regular basis—and the fact that each one of these social foods has ingredients that have had to be socially produced before being combined, the project of isolating race, class, and gender’s influences on us seems overwhelming. I have demonstrated here, though, that by taking each food apart and identifying the ingredients that make it taste the way it does, it can be done. I have obviously simplified matters here so that each food Sophie eats has only three ingredients. Of course we could add cranberry juice to the lemonade, and tomatoes, onions, chili peppers, yogurt, and garlic to the guacamole. These ingredients may be additional forms of race, class, and gender, or they may be dynamics of sexuality, body ability, nation, ethnicity, age, religion, sex, time, space, or other organizing principles. The important thing is to identify the ingredients and to then articulate their processes of social production and combination. Only through this articulation, rather than through simple statements of race’s, class’s, and gender’s effects, will we be able to better understand the relationships among race, class, and gender in any social thing. In addition, it is important to understand the relationship of dependence among these ingredients and between them and the entity they create. Patricia Hill Collins has argued that the systems of race, class, and gender are dependent on each other, “Assuming that each system needs the others in order to function creates a distinct theoretical stance that stimulates the rethinking of basic social science concepts” (P. H. Collins 1991, 222; emphasis mine). Race, then, would not organize the social world the way it does if it were not for gender and class. Race cannot function—cannot

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do its organizing work—without the others. This is an important insight, and I come back around to it. But first we must consider not how race, class, and gender depend on each other but how the food these ingredients mix up to create depends on them. There is no lemonade without sugar, water, and lemon juice. There is no guacamole without avocados, lime juice, and sea salt. And there is no corn tortilla without cornmeal, soda water, and table salt. If these ingredients were never brought together, this lunch would not exist. So the thing that race, class, and gender come together to create is really the ultimate item in need. “Fierceness” is what I have been calling “lemonade.” Fierceness is certainly a characteristic that exists in society, although I would not go so far as to say it is, in itself, an institution. Grumpiness is an institution. Generosity is an institution. But I do not think fierceness rises to the level of institutionality. It occurs from time to time and place to place, and I believe it even occurs in patterned ways. So it is not a completely unique, one-time thing, and neither is it an everyday kind of characteristic. What race, class, and gender have combined to create in fierceness is an occasional drink. Sometimes race, class, and gender ingredients come together in a way that is never replicated: Jackie Robinson breaks the race barrier in professional baseball, for instance. Sometimes they come together in a way that is recognizable and sort of “usual” or expected: a comedian like Roseanne Barr yells something like “The Star Spangled Banner,” for instance. She does not do this every day, but comedians typically make sacred things profane, and we find humor in that. And sometimes race, class, and gender come together in ways that become institutionalized because we experience them over and over again: a man is elected president of the United States, say. Each of these things—rare occurrences, occasional events, and institutions— depends on particular combinations of race, class, and gender for their existence. The reason this is important is because we have to analyze what effects these things have in the world. What effect did Jackie Robinson’s feat have? How did Roseanne’s comedy routine come to function in future events? Why does it matter that another man is elected president? As I explained in the preface to this book, these effects can be characterized along the lines of race, class, and gender. Jackie Robinson’s entry into professional baseball may have race effects, it may have class effects, and it may have gender effects. Ditto for Roseanne’s routine and the last 44 executive office holders.

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Mixing Race, Class, and Gender

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

These social phenomena may function in ways that we can, using shorthand, call “race” and “class” and “gender.” One of the things race, class, and gender combine to create, then, is race. Another is class, and another is gender. Whether race, class, or gender in this (temporarily) ultimate form is an institution, an occasional event, or a rare occurrence, race, class, and gender have combined to produce it. I focus throughout this book on the structural properties of race, class, and gender, so the production of them as institutions is the most interesting to me. But regardless of what form they take, their existence depends on the prior combination of race, class, and gender and, in this way, depends on those organizing mechanisms. One more interesting part of this entire process is the transformation that race, class, and gender dynamics undergo when they come together in particular social events or phenomena. When someone drinks a glass of lemonade, she is not drinking separate water molecules and lemon juice molecules. These have all been combined in the drink with the sugar. When sugar and the other ingredients come into the pitcher, they are transformed, and, in this way, the structure of the lemonade reflects the new arrangement that has been constructed from the previously separate ingredients. These ingredients (not beet sugar as a whole but the cup of beet sugar in the simple syrup) are forever changed because of the way they have come together. In the construction of the characteristic of fierceness, specific dynamics of race, class, and gender, too, are forever changed because of their combination, and in this way, each of these ingredients depends on the others. We have Sophie’s lunch laid out, then, in a way that calls up the race, class, and gender elements that have organized it. What we are now able to do is explore what effects this lunch has on Sophie and on the social world. For this exploration, we must turn to the process of digestion.

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Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

D ig estio n as Metaphor

Digestion is often used as a way of describing the experience of life,

the consideration of ideas, or even the understanding of a god. One eats, or “takes it all in,” and may be forever changed by the experience. Some food for thought: David Gibbons, who studies alimentary metaphors—those that refer to nourishment—in the work of thirteenth-century Italian poet Dante, reveals countless instances of the characters in Paradiso referring to taste, hunger, and digestion to represent “the desire to understand” (2001, 697). Dante, who wrote this third piece of his Divine comedy after being exiled from Florence for political reasons, “finds himself wondering whether or not he should recount all he has seen to a world which will find his message difficult to swallow” (2001, 696; emphasis mine). An ancestor encourages him to do so indeed, reminding Dante that while the initial reception may be chilly, the nourishment his words contain “will be of use to them once they have been digested” (2001, 696). The Christian Bible or Hebrew Torah, Gibbons shows, is also packed with food-related metaphors: Moses famously reminds the Israelites that “man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Deut. 8:3). God’s word, too, is referred to as bread, milk, and even meat. The otherwise dominant use of sight as a metaphor (e.g., “I see your point,” “Let me shed light on this,” “It’s still a bit hazy to me”), which is based on European Enlightenment-influenced discourses, suggests “at least some distance between subject and object” (Gibbons 2001, 693). That is, the seer is located in one space apart from

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Chapter 5

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

the object she is looking at, and they remain two separate things. Digestion as a metaphor, though, is different: “tasting, eating, and drinking all involve an internalization of the object” (693). The object literally enters the subject and becomes the subject. The digestion of actual food and the likening of this to the digestion of ideas (and the transformation of the subject that results from that digestion) are straightforward enough. But what does digestion mean as a metaphor for the workings of race-class-gender combinations? In this chapter, I illustrate what happens when someone like Sophie the omnivore consumes race-class-gender combinations like lemonade, tortillas, and guacamole, and then I describe the process through which they become her. These combinations “feed” Sophie—they nourish her. But as with Twinkies or bacon cheeseburgers, what they do to her, or what she becomes as the result of having taken them in, is not only the nice, neat, or even beautiful process of digestion described in biology textbooks, which introduce the topic by detailing the helpful and necessary reparation of cells that results from digestion and delivery of nutrients to organs in need. The combinations Sophie takes in may facilitate the growth of cancerous cells along with healthy ones. They may promote yeast growth or bacterial imbalance. Our bodies certainly need nourishment to live, but much of what is available for us to take in, in terms of food, actually does not do much to help us live. It weakens our immune systems, contributes to the clogging of our arteries, and promotes disease and illness. We have choices to make about what to eat, much in the same way we have some choice in the matter of what particular combinations of race, class, and gender to consume, but these choices are quite severely constrained. And like french fries, the convenience foods of race-class-gender stereotypes and tropes sometimes taste so good we crave and devour them. In this chapter, then, I lay out some of the details of the digestion of food combinations in the body in order to better illustrate the consumption and internalization of race-class-gender combinations in both people and institutions. I first introduce the process of physical digestion. In doing so, I highlight four important aspects of that process, namely, that the food we eat gets broken down, that this breaking down process is influenced by what foods are eaten together, that the broken-down food combinations interact with what is already in our bodies, and that the makeup of our bodies is the result of these consumption and digestion processes. Having explained how these processes work in actual bodies, I

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D ig estio n in th e Body To imagine what physical digestion can teach us about race, class, and gender, we must first establish some details about the act and process of digesting food in the body. In digestion, food typically enters the mouth and proceeds, in continuously modified forms, through the organs and processes of the digestive system. The large molecules of food taken into the mouth are disaggregated first by teeth and then primarily by acids, enzymes, and other substances in the stomach. These stomach-based substances, such as hydrochloric acid, also strip bacteria from the food molecules and, with the help of the enzyme pepsin, untwist and cut the bonds of some protein chains. The material that travels from the stomach to the small intestine is quite different in form than the food taken into the mouth: large molecules have been broken down into smaller ones, chemical bonds have been broken, and the substance has been mixed with acids and enzymes, readier to be absorbed through the small intestine. More is added to it there, including pancreatic juice full of enzymes that further break down chemical bonds and ready the nutrients for absorption. Absorption is quite interesting. The body, having miraculously assessed its own needs, selects the appropriate nutrients from this material in the intestine, and then protein carriers come and take the nutrients through the intestinal walls to the blood, which transports them to the liver. The liver is the monitoring and regulating agent in the digestive system. It is the site where what has been taken in is matched up with what the body needs. Blood sugar maintenance is one of the major responsibilities of the liver. If the body needs more glucose than has been taken in, for example, the liver will convert amino acids to glucose to maintain the optimum blood sugar level. Other conversions take place as well: excess proteins and carbohydrates turn into fatty acids here, if need be. The liver is even able to convert toxins and other harmful substances into molecules that can be expelled (The George Mateljan Foundation 2010). This process does not operate the same way regardless of what is eaten. Each combination of foods is digested slightly differently.

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then use the processes to think through the relationships among race, class, and gender as they are internalized in both social selves and social institutions.

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

For instance, some nutrients block the digestion (or full digestion) of other nutrients. Fat blocks the absorption of sugar, sugar impedes the absorption of calcium, and calcium blocks the absorption of iron. Conversely, some nutrients enhance the digestion of other nutrients. A spinach salad with bell peppers is different from a spinach salad with goat cheese because the calcium in the cheese blocks the absorption of some of the iron from the spinach while the vitamin C in the peppers enhances the absorption of that same iron. Sugar plays a fairly prominent role throughout the entire digestion process. First, most kinds of foods are broken down into sugar molecules at some point. That is one “kind” of sugar. But also, refined sugar blocks the digestion of most things it is eaten with. “When refined sugar is eaten with other foods, both the other foods and the sugar will be poorly digested. The end result is the formation of toxins and the increased absorption of caloric content” (Levy 2001, 25). This complicated process gives us a lot of metaphorical material to work with. I want to remind readers that I do not propose that the internalization of race, class, and gender combinations works exactly like the digestion of sugar, water, and lemon juice, and I spend a good deal of space in the final discussion chapter detailing some of the ways this process precisely does not fit what we know about race, class, and gender. But even with those caveats, there is a lot here. Let me highlight four things about this process before I go on to describe the details of what happens to nutrients that are effectively moved from Sophie’s lemonade into her cells. First, what is quite clear throughout this whole process is that food gets broken down into its constituent parts, which means that a distinct thing called lemonade ultimately changes forms—many times. In fact, once lemonade hits the tongue, we may still think about it as a thing later on (for example, “Ugh, that lemonade upset my stomach”), but it really ceases being a coherent thing in a body quite quickly. The tongue gets to work on the sugar and other potential sugar sources (such as the glucose from the lemon juice) immediately, separating those molecules out, moving them along, converting them almost instantaneously into other forms. A food that seems very stable, then—in part because we see it very regularly and have assigned it boundaries (a pickle is not a glass of lemonade) and meanings (thirst-quenching treat; inappropriate indulgence)—is not a stable thing anymore once Sophie digests it. When she drinks it and the process of digestion begins, it ceases to

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exist inside her in its previously known and understood form. The ingredients that went into the recipe transformed themselves and each other in the process of combining to create the new entity— the lemonade—and that new entity itself then changes forms in the process of digestion. Second, these little broken-down nutrients and energy sources influence each other a lot in the process of digestion. In some combinations, nearly everything is used, where in other combinations, different molecules block each other and end up being expelled or turned into toxins. What any nutrient by itself is able to provide for the body is largely only a hypothetical matter since few nutrients are consumed by themselves. More typically, molecules are digested in combinations, as in the form of lemonade, which means that the specific combinations taken into the body really matter for what the body is able to do. The third point to highlight is that the food that is consumed interacts with the tissues, organs, cells, digestive juices, enzymes, and other things in Sophie’s body that are already there. Those substances did not get there by magic; they, too, are the result of foods previously taken in. The enzymes that do much of the work of breaking down food into its constituent molecules, for example, are made of proteins. Enough of the right kinds of amino acids must be consumed, isolated, and then combined in order to create those enzymes and enable them to do their work. In this way, the present depends on the past. The body is only able to do what has previously been made possible. Each cell of Sophie’s body—whether “healthy” or in need of repair—is that way in part because of the food this body has already processed. The lemonade she drinks interacts with, is acted on by, and also shapes what has come before. This remarkable, complex process, which is constantly going on, typically occurs without anyone taking the least bit of notice. And finally, the result of all this is that Sophie becomes what she has consumed. It is not a simple one-for-one transfer: she does not become a bowl of guacamole because she has eaten one. But what she is, what she is capable of, what she is limited by, and what she does in the world are all, in part, the product of what she has consumed and digested. Eating different combinations of foods will produce different results—a different body, different moods, different ailments, different energy levels, and different abilities. This is true for individuals, for series of people, and

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Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

for institutions that digest the combinations of race, class, and gender that are available to them. In what follows I explore each of these four points by linking the process of physical digestion to the processes of social internalization and institutionalization. I link these four aspects of digestion to the social processes through which human beings acquire habitus and through which ways of doing things become institutionalized.

Ap p ly ing the Metaphor We have established Sophie the omnivore’s typical lunchtime fare: a glass of lemonade drunk with a bite of guacamole spread over a corn tortilla. Diane Reay and her colleagues (2007) describe Sophie and other white, middle-class teenagers like her as having an acquisition-oriented subjectivity—a cultivated ease in situations that are dissimilar to their own family or neighborhood dynamics. Sophie is shaped by the situations she encounters in her race-, class-, and gender-mixed high school; she takes something with her from her interactions with her friends there and from the activities they engage in together. Taking some liberties with Reay et al.’s (2007) description, we can imagine that when Sophie spends time with her friends from school, they talk, they listen to music, they study, and they do all the other simultaneously frivolous and enormously meaningful things teenagers do together. She loves both the theater and going clubbing, so perhaps she and her friends do those activities together. Sophie must spend a considerable amount of time by herself as well, if she is an “accomplished” classical pianist. What I have argued in the last two chapters is that these are some of the things Sophie the omnivore eats. Practicing the piano day by day, and weekly being encouraged or reprimanded into sitting properly, placing her hands appropriately, and restraining herself: this is the typical classical pianist’s posture that Sophie eats like a corn tortilla. But because she is a “real multicultural kid,” classical music is not the only genre Sophie enjoys. She and her friends also listen to hip-hop. Sophie would not be sure what songs or what artists to listen to without observing her school friends as closely as she observes the posture of her piano teacher. Like the piano teacher rapping her pupil’s fingers, Sophie’s friends laugh when she says she likes the wrong song, and Sophie gets the message. She eats this like a serving of guacamole. Many of Sophie’s friends like women rappers. They think the lyrics

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are funny, like when old-school rapper MC Lyte (1993) tells someone to “Fuck that mother fucking bullshit,” and he tells her to “Kiss my mother fucking ass.” This goes down for all of them as easily as lemonade on a hot day. Sophie consumes it all: she ingests classical pianist posture, listening to hip-hop, and fierceness in the attitudes she hears among women rappers. In all this, she eats class and race and gender. We must keep in mind, though, that these forms of race, class, and gender were each constructed through events or processes that brought specific dynamics of race, class, and gender together. As depicted in the figure in Chapter 3, classical pianist posture is the corn tortilla that was made from the corn meal, soda water, and table salt of women and men’s mutual access to pianos, classical music’s contrast with jazz, and the practice of maintaining class boundaries through artistic choices. Listening to hip-hop is the guacamole that was made from the avocados, lime juice, and sea salt of black and white teens’ motivations of relating versus appropriating, women’s relation to hip-hop through its origins in double Dutch, and middle-class audiences’ inability to condemn, ignore, or objectify hip-hop away. Finally, fierceness is the lemonade that was made from the sugar, water, and lemon juice of the unruly woman archetype, public rejection of constraining class norms, and truth-to-power speech patterns. In a bite of her lunch and a drink of lemonade, Sophie the omnivore takes all this in, and even while these foods each exist in different a form from all of the individual ingredients that went into them, the elements of those ingredients are present in the lunch. From this lunch, I move, in this chapter, to its digestion. Because it is easiest to imagine a person (rather than an institution) eating and digesting food, I again make use of Sophie and consider the production of her habitus. How, that is, has Sophie come to be the way she is? How have the multifarious influences on her combined to produce her particular orientation to the world? And what possibilities are opened and closed to her because of the habitus that race, class, and gender have combined to produce? As an institutionalized practice, what does omnivorousness yield? Although these are all issues focused on one person’s habitus, I want to caution that individual subjectivity is not the end point of this story. The purpose of specifying the relationships among race, class, and gender in any social thing is not to better equip individuals to gaze at their own navels (or their own intestines, in this case). Rather, I have described the production of race, class, and gender;

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Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

the mixing and use of race, class, and gender; and the experience and digestion of race, class, and gender as processes that shape the common conditions shared by series of people. I am ultimately concerned with the ways social structures shape people’s life chances, and the construction of habitus is only part of that. Although I give it short shrift here, the digestion processes I describe in this chapter are also applicable to institutions. Institutions, too, digest forms of race, class, and gender. In that the word “institution” (erroneously) brings to mind a building, and it is hard to imagine a building “eating,” I stick with Sophie the omnivore as a symbol of individuals, series of people, and institutions, which can all digest race, class, and gender in the way I describe. Using the digestive framework introduced in this chapter, we can analyze the relationships among race, class, and gender in the digestion of Sophie’s lunch. I noted earlier that (1) one of the most fundamental processes that occurs in digestion is that food enters the body, gets broken down, and changes forms; (2) the ways it breaks down are dependent on the combinations that are ingested near the same time; (3) the food molecules get mixed together in the gut with substances that are already there; and (4) food in its altered and mixed form becomes our bodies. In what follows I explore each of these four dimensions of the social digestion process using the example of Sophie the omnivore. Breakdown

Ingesting something in liquid form is one of the fastest ways for it to be digested. When Sophie takes a drink of her lemonade, in which sugar molecules have combined with water molecules and lemon juice molecules, enzymes very quickly start separating hydrogen atoms from oxygen atoms and carbon atoms. Holding those atoms together requires energy, so when the bonds between the atoms are broken apart, energy becomes available for use in another process. This is the basic work of the body—breaking ingested substances down, making their energy and components available, and then using the freed energy to join components together to serve some other purpose. The foods we ingest do not exist in a form our bodies can use as nourishment: “Food and drink must be changed into smaller molecules of nutrients before they can be absorbed into the blood and carried to cells throughout the body. Digestion is the process by which food and drink are broken down into their

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smallest parts so the body can use them to build and nourish cells and to provide energy” (National Institutes of Health 2008). Of course, the lemonade Sophie is really consuming is the characteristic of demeanor I have called “fierceness.” This fierceness has been made up of race, class, and gender molecules in the forms of truth-to-power speech patterns, a rejection of constraining forms of class propriety, and the unruly woman archetype. As I explained in the previous chapter, Sophie does not consume these molecules separately (unless she were to drink a glass of water, or stomach a spoonful of plain sugar, or tilt back her head and squeeze the juice of a lemon right into her mouth). Rather, they get all mixed up within the lemonade of fierceness, and she ingests them in their new molecular composition. Although the lemonade owes its existence, and therefore depends on, this particular mixture of molecules, Sophie’s body comes to be constructed by the opposite process: the molecules’ separating and recombining. What was once sugar breaks down and becomes part of lemonade, and what was once lemonade breaks down and becomes part of Sophie. What was once the unruly woman archetype breaks down and becomes part of fierceness, and when Sophie experiences that fierceness in interactions with her school friends and in the things they do together, what was once fierceness becomes part of her. In this process, we again come to see how the ways race, class, and gender influence any particular social thing need to be distinguished from the race, class, and gender effects any social thing has. Race, class, and gender combine to construct institutions and unique or unusual forms, here represented by foods like lemonade. Because specific dimensions of race, class, and gender have come together in the form of lemonade, they cannot influence things in the forms in which they previously existed anymore. They do not exist in the same way anymore, just as a cup of sugar does not exist in the same way it did prior to being dumped into the lemonade pitcher. They exist in a newly constituted form, and the ways this form influences things may have race, class, and gender characteristics. So lemonade constructs Sophie’s habitus in ways that will have particular race, class, and gender dimensions, and the resulting effects of Sophie’s habitus on the social world will have particular—but not identical— race, class, and gender dimensions. What really gets broken down, and what might it get recombined into? For this, we must turn to the second aspect of the process of digestion, namely, that the ways food molecules separate and rejoin

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Combinations

Some combinations of race, class, and gender “take,” while others do not. It is possible for race, class, and gender to come together in a way that is quite inconsequential, has little effect on anything, and garners hardly any notice. Conversely, some combinations of race, class, and gender are enormously potent. They cause uproar, they change the direction of history, they open new possibilities for people. In the body, some elements that have been ingested are simply expelled. They are not needed for anything, so the body simply lets them go. But there are also supercombinations: the simultaneous ingestion of elements that enhance each other and make each other more effective. If we keep Sophie in our imaginations, we can think about how the combinations of race, class, and gender that have constructed her habitus, and her levels of cultural and social capital in the world may either enhance or inhibit each other. First, though, let us consider the corollary in the body. Nutrition scientists are very excited right now about the emerging study of what they call “food synergy.” Food synergy is the notion that specific components in food interact to produce different health outcomes, and because nutrition scientists are particularly interested in disease protection (see, for instance, Magee 2008), they have primarily studied and publicized the interactions among minerals, vitamins, phytochemicals, fats, and fiber that may result in enhanced disease protection (rather than on interactions that are harmful). The absorption of some nutrients from tomatoes is enhanced if the tomatoes are eaten with olive oil, for instance, and iron from spinach is absorbed more easily in the presence of vitamin C from foods like oranges or bell peppers. The focused study of these interactions is quite new, and nutrition scientists themselves admit that much more work is required to conclusively support the wide range of health claims that have been prematurely generated from the limited findings that do exist. But even with journalist and food advocate Michael Pollan’s (2008) caveat in mind that nutrition science today is at about the same level of maturity as the science of surgery was three hundred years ago, the general notion that nutrients from

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in new combinations are dependent on the combinations that are ingested near the same time. That is to say, the specific combinations of race, class, and gender matter for what is metabolized and what is simply eliminated as waste.

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foods function differently in a body when the nutrients are alone than they do when they are together is fairly uncontroversial and provides a great deal for us to work with metaphorically. One striking thing about the food synergy field is the language it uses to provide the rationale for studying foods together rather than in isolation. The lead-in to one recent article on food synergy sounds quite familiar to me as a race-class-gender scholar: Nutrition research has favored a reductionist approach that emphasizes the role of single nutrients in diet-disease (or diet-health) relations. This approach has led to important steps forward, for example, in learning the basic cause of and identifying prevention strategies for vitamin deficiency diseases, or in clarifying the influence of dietary cholesterol and fat intake on serum cholesterol. Nevertheless, the reductionist approach must be seen as a simplification designed to facilitate the understanding of complex diet-disease relations . . . The interrelation of human physiology and of the biological activity of plant and animal foods that humans consume is incredibly complex, replete with checks, balances, and feedback loops, dependent on a myriad of substances that differ only in subtle ways from one another. Therefore, it is likely that there are additive or more than additive influences of foods and food constituents on health—that is, food synergy, though the extent and nature of that synergy are difficult to uncover. (Jacobs and Steffan 2003, 508S)

Race-class-gender scholars have, for decades, made a parallel argument about the deficiencies that result from studying race alone, or class alone, or gender alone. More exciting and accurate, we have argued, is the practice of understanding their combinations and relationships. We want to know what effect one has on the others in the social world, just as nutrition scientists want to know what effect saturated fat and sugar have on iron in the body. Interestingly, much of the story of food combinations relates to sugar—not necessarily the crystal form of sugar in a homemaker’s canister but the basic chemical makeup of sugar. As described above, when a food such as a lemon or a tortilla is ingested, one of the first things to happen is that it is broken down into its constituent chemical parts, and the most primary cluster of atoms among those parts is glucose, the simplest form of sugar. In fact, lemons and all other foods that we classify as carbohydrates are simply bundles of sugar and fiber, and that sugar supplies the body with energy (when the bonds between each of sugar’s chemical components are broken

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Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

apart and the energy that was holding them together is released). Thinking about food combinations, then, means thinking about sugar. In digestion, a body breaks down ingested foods and uses the newly released components for whatever that body needs. If somebody eats a tablespoon of sugar, which comes with no fiber, some things are made possible and hindered within that person’s body. If somebody eats a lemon, which has both sugar and fiber, different things are made possible and hindered within that person’s body. If we get really tricky and add in some amino acid chains in the form of protein from an avocado, eaten with the lemon, another whole set of things can happen. The different combinations of things matter. Sophie’s combinations include guacamole, corn tortillas, and lemonade. She eats these together at the same time, just as she takes in combinations of race, class, and gender at the same time. Fierceness is one such combination. Listening to hip-hop is another. And classical pianist posture is yet another. Each of these is the result of combinations, and each is then combined with the others in her meal. Fierceness breaks down within her, just like hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen break apart from each other when she drinks lemonade. The important part about their being broken down is that they can—they must—be recombined in new ways. Here we may imagine such a way. Again, taking some liberties, let us imagine that Sophie the omnivore grows up and graduates from high school, and her A levels pave her way into Oxford, as planned. From there, let us imagine Sophie does something that very few women have done until recently: she becomes a classical music critic. One real-life classical music critic named Anne Midgette wrote a piece in 2002 about the chilly reception she received as the first woman in her position at The New York Times. The critic exists in a very special sphere, she argues, as an interpreter—a person who has the authority to speak for, about, and on behalf of. Both men and women (but especially the editors of newspapers and magazines) have really only trusted men to do this, and certainly in the sphere of classical music, those men have been affluent and white. A woman who takes on such a task must be quite daring. She must have confidence that her perspective is valid and valuable. She must be able to assert her voice in a rhetorical space that is loud with the sounds of men. While it is difficult to be hired in such a position to start with, “the larger issue,” Midgette (2002) writes, “for all female music critics—akin to that faced by female conductors—is how to

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find and assume the kind of authority they need to help their statements be heard. It seems to me that as music critics, women come in for a certain amount of negative stereotyping: too shrill, too dumb, too ineffective.” She asserts that such perceptions of these interpreters’ work “reflect a vestigial idea that women aren’t supposed to do this sort of thing, that it’s vaguely unladylike to express strong opinions in an unvarnished manner.” Why would anyone want to take on such a chore? And how might she be able to excel in a realm where she is not expected to succeed and where even her successes can be turned against her? For our imaginary Sophie, we can answer these questions by understanding the particular combinations of race, class, and gender she has digested. Along with her formal classical piano training, Sophie received a more informal sort of hip-hop training. In it, she learned that classical music is not the most important, or even the best, musical genre, despite the haughtiness that accompanies it. It has its strengths and its distinctiveness, but in coming to appreciate musical styles that originated in African American traditions (rather than in juxtaposition with them), Sophie figured out many of classical music’s flaws and omissions as well. Sophie and her friends loved and listened to hip-hop a lot, and Sophie sometimes had to defend her right to listen to it against those who would say she, as a middleclass, white teenager, had no right to participate. Even while she defended herself against these claims, she also came to understand that questioning the right of artists to do what they do is a legitimate enterprise, too—in fact, it is a type of boundary maintenance the middle class (with whom she identified) spends a great deal of energy on. And because her friends’ iPods were full of music by women rappers, Sophie got exposure to that in-your-face style these women are not afraid to express. Her friends felt an ease and comfort with hip-hop, which perhaps at least subconsciously drew on the rhythmic jump-rope games that shaped their habitus early on, and although Sophie never played double Dutch as a kid, witnessing her friends’ “ease” made it something she valued and absorbed. Sophie took in this particular combination of race, class, and gender elements, and (at least in this imaginary example) it led to her taking on a difficult challenge: finding her voice in a field dominated by rich white men. Her digestion of these particular race-class-gender combinations enabled her to enact a form of gender in which she reviews classical music with fierceness and boldness. Sophie became the MC Lyte of classical music critique.

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The particular combinations that Sophie digests matter for the ways she is then able to influence the world. We might consider what could happen if she ingested just a slightly different combination. Manipulating part of the “food” Sophie has taken in allows us to reflect on how a different combination of race, class, and gender might produce a different result. Let us imagine that everything is the same: Sophie still studies classical music, and she still listens to hip-hop. But rather than the fierce, aggressive, in-your-face delivery style of women MCs, Sophie gets a lot of exposure to another of hip-hop’s ubiquitous gender elements: the “bitch” and the “ho.” Sophie and her friends watch videos by their favorite hip-hop artists (for an average of 14 hours a week, if they are anything like the African American teenaged girls in a 2007 study on rap by Peterson et al.) and see women in bikinis, women dancing in ways that honor the male gaze, and women making themselves available for sex and exploitation. They hear unbelievably offensive lyrics in which men refer to women as “bitches” and “hoes,” depict women in demeaning and violent situations, and enact and defend rape scenarios. Sophie, then, does not drink the lemonade of fierceness. The activity of the unruly woman archetype floating around in her body and combining with women’s historical proficiency at the piano and the rejection of constraining class norms, among other atoms, never happens. Instead, Sophie drinks a pop. She drinks a combination of high fructose corn syrup, carbonated water, and potassium citrate. In the place of fierceness, Sophie drinks the pop of the “bitch” and the “ho,” which is constructed from a mixture of its own race, class, and gender elements. Where fierceness lemonade depended on the mixing of the unruly woman with the confident African American and the rebellious class warrior, the “ho” is constructed through the man-pleasing woman, the resonance of the image of black women’s bodies being degraded within popular culture as dominated by whites, and the expression of a type of work that gets construed as “agency” within a class-demarcated social system in which the working class has little more than its labor power to sell. These molecules, then, rather than the others, break down into the atoms that combine with the atoms of classical musicians’ class snobbishness and white teenagers’ appropriation of hip-hop. When these elements of race, class, and gender get separated from their “original” context (the context in which they were mixed to make guacamole, tortillas, and pop) within Sophie’s social body, they make themselves ready for use in new combinations, with specific, traceable

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results. Sophie’s bravery in questioning the dominance of men in classical music critic positions, then, never transpires. A demeanor of compliance and acquiescence emerges instead. Unlike the women MCs who reject race restrictions and deplore gender conformity, Sophie becomes somebody who does what she is supposed to do. Her embodiment of class demarcations through her proper classical music-related posture combine with a form of gender that emphasizes the attitudes and activities that men define as desirable. Sophie implicitly comes to understand that everything has its place, and this order must not be upset. This is ultimately what the “bitches” and “hos” of rap are meant to communicate: that women have their place, and men have the right to define that place. The rigidity and exclusivity of classical music practice in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries communicates the same general message: that each class has its place. The commonality in those gender and class messages help them link up when Sophie digests her classical music training and her practice of listening to hip-hop with her friends. What results from that particular combination is different than what results from the combination I initially explored in this chapter. Like the scientists concerned with “food synergy,” we can investigate how the digestion of particular combinations of race, class, and gender produce different results.1 In the world of food, this means it is very important to understand why some foods are available, inexpensive, and popular, while other foods are hard to get, costly, and culturally out of favor (for example, see Pollan 2007). In the world of race, class, and gender, this means the same thing—we have to investigate why some ingredients of race, class, and gender are so easy to come by, while others are so hard to access. In the same vein in which Michael Pollan talks about how Twinkies are cheaper and 1 I understand that this sounds very much like simply switching out variables to determine how much variance they explain. I do not, though, conceptualize race, class, and gender simply as variables. In this scenario, gender is not coded “0” for female and “1” for male. One form of gender is the comfort African American women who played double Dutch as children may have with hip-hop, given the genre’s origins in the game, and another form of gender is the decidedly uneasy and conflictual relationship women may have when they listen to hip-hop that incorporates the stereotypes of the “bitch” and the “ho.” These forms of gender can certainly be operationalized and turned into variables within a model that includes all the other forms of race, class, and gender that have constructed the guacamole, tortilla, and lemonade in Sophie’s lunch, but this is not the sort of activity I propose here.

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Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

easier to obtain than broccoli because the federal government subsidizes the ingredients (like corn) in Twinkies but does not subsidize broccoli, we might consider who and what institutions “subsidize” ingredients like the “ho,” like class snobbery, like white appropriation of hip-hop, and like the degradation of black women’s bodies. Who pays the ultimate price for the easy availability of these ingredients, and what forms of diabetes, obesity, and heart disease in our social order result from our continual digestion of them? Because we tend to ingest a lot of the same ingredients and combinations quite regularly, it is very important to understand the cumulative effects of the digestion of particular combinations.

Th e Past in the Present It is helpful to remember in all of this that race, class, and gender are conditions that people have to deal with. In Sophie’s meal, gender is a set of conditions that makes women feel at ease with hip-hop; it is a relationship to the way one sits at the piano, constructed in part through the historical presence of both women’s and men’s bodies at the instrument; and it is an approach to dealing with oppression that involves breaking the rules, laughing, and experiencing excess. Some of these conditions have been present throughout Sophie’s life, while others are new to her in her multicultural high school. She did not listen to hip-hop prior to entering this high school, for example, so the forms of gender that construct listening to hip-hop did not sit on the tray of her high chair during her toddler years. Classical music, though, did. Perhaps she even watched her own mother play the piano while she sat in that high chair and, slowly and regularly, over time, digested those movements as though they were her own. Bourdieu’s conceptualization of habitus is particularly relevant here, since he acknowledges that we encounter different conditions throughout our lives but notes that early influences on us—as long as they are fairly consistent—do the most to shape our dispositions. Bourdieu scholar Loïc Waquant (in Stones 1998, 220–21) succinctly describes the process: Habitus designates the system of durable and transposable dispositions through which we perceive, judge, and act in the world. These unconscious schemata are acquired through lasting exposure to particular social conditions and conditionings, via the internalization of external

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constraints and possibilities. This means that they are shared by people subjected to similar experiences even as each person has a unique individual variant of the common matrix (this is why individuals of like nationality, class, gender, etc., spontaneously feel “at home” with one another). It implies also that these systems of dispositions are malleable, since they inscribe into the body the evolving influence of the social milieu, but within the limits set by primary (or earlier) experiences, since it is habitus itself which at every moment filters such influence. Thus the layering of the schemata that together compose habitus displays varying degrees of integration.

Early, “lasting” influences, such as the regular piano lessons Sophie took throughout her life, compose the disposition through which her later experiences are filtered. It is like the process through which one’s literal tastes are formed by the continual eating of the same food throughout her childhood—here, the corn tortilla of classical pianist posture. Perhaps corn tortillas taste strange to adults who have never eaten them, but for those who grew up on them, their future exposure to foods is shaped by corn tortillas as a norm against which all other experiences are judged. Classical pianist posture, then, may have more influence in Sophie’s meal than fierceness or listening to hip-hop. This is because Sophie the omnivore is not just ingesting posture and fierceness into a sterile, metal vessel in which all elements are identically processed. She is eating this food into her body, and her body has been constructed by the food she has eaten throughout her life. Classical pianist posture, because she has eaten it for so long, has generated the cells, enzymes, and acids that “break down” fierceness and listening to hip-hop. In this way, race and gender are being filtered through, and broken down by, class. This is, of course, not to say that class is the only thing Sophie has regularly eaten throughout her life. It is just one example of how the present depends on the past. In Bourdieu’s (1990, 60) terms, this is the work of the habitus, “which, at every moment, structures new experiences in accordance with the structures produced by past experiences.” “Early experiences,” he says, “have particular weight because the habitus tends to ensure its own constancy and its defence against change.” In other words, “the habitus tends to favour experiences likely to reinforce it” (1990, 61). One iteration of this process is the phenomenon sociologists call cumulative disadvantage. The study of cumulative disadvantage

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reveals how the opportunities one faces at any moment in her life do not simply exist on their own, without any context. Rather, a person’s ability to get and take advantage of an opportunity is the result of the previous opportunities she has had and been able to take advantage of. If the first job a person gets is as a secretary, this is going to shape the jobs that person will be qualified for (and be perceived to be qualified for) at every subsequent career step (Berryman 1983). Conversely, advantage begets advantage. If Sophie has eaten corn tortillas with other “good” food combinations that promote the healthy regeneration of her cells and tissues throughout her life, her ability to shape and influence the world positively may result. If she is fed a diet of “bitch”-“ho” pop from toddlerhood on, her influence on the world will reflect that. This, again, is why our analyses of race, class, and gender must consider what ingredients are available and desirable, for, as I explain in the next section, we are what we eat.

Th e Co nstruc tio n of H ab i tus In Diane Reay et al.’s study, the “omnivorous practices” of Sophie and her cohort “produce alternative white middle-class identities— streetwise, globally knowledgeable, tolerant, inclusive young white middle-class individuals who, in a number of parents’ words, are better prepared for a global economy” (2005, 1052). Calling them “omnivores” is a bit of an indictment, as is the analysis of the advantages these teenagers get as a result of attending “multicultural” schools. Yet I am not arguing, nor are Reay and her colleagues, that these families are “bad” or have done anything wrong. Rather, I mean to understand how the cultural, political, and economic material that any person (or institution) consumes comes to construct who he (or it) is. For Sophie, the particular “omnivore” I have highlighted here, the first parts of this process are that the race, class, and gender foods she eats are broken down into their constituent parts, in particular combinations that depend, for their digestion, on the recombination of previously broken-down combinations. The important remaining part of this process is that what she has taken in becomes her and shapes the possibilities she is able to introduce into the world. This serves to further illustrate Bourdieu’s work on habitus, as it recalls how social structures get in us and produce the dispositions that we typically and mistakenly tend to interpret as manifestations

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of some kind of authentic properties of our “selves.” We generally fail to recognize our dispositions as products of the ways our lives have been organized and of the social processes and phenomena that are available for us to “eat” because of that organization. Our systems of habitus are produced out of “the conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence” (Bourdieu 1990, 53), which is to say, our dispositions are organized according to the common conditions within which we live. When Sophie’s parents added a school environment with a race-, class-, and gender-mixed student body to her otherwise typical middle-class, white existence, Sophie’s menu options changed. It is not as though she was somehow incapable of eating the guacamole of listening to hip-hop prior to attending this school, but this new school—this new condition of existence—came to organize her life with novel elements of social structures to consume. Had she followed the more typical route and attended a school with an exclusively white, middle-class student body, the combinations of race, class, and gender she would have been able to eat would have been quite different, even if they contained some of the same ingredients. We must remember, though, lest we get caught in the trap of focusing only on Sophie’s “identity” or “subjectivity” as the end point of all of this, that even while the habitus is a “structured” set of dispositions, systems of habitus are also “predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations” (Bourdieu 1990, 53). We eat the social structures of race, class, and gender, which organize our perspectives, our actions, our institutional arrangements, and our relationships. And because of what we have consumed, and the particular ways we have digested it based on the combinations we have taken in, social structures that have operated in one set of ways are subject to revision and reorganization. We, and our institutions, are products of social structures even as we are instruments of change and stability within them. Digestion is that process by which food that is ingested breaks down, recombines in ways that are dependent on the combinations taken in, and works in its newly recombined forms to shape the ingesting body. In the previous chapters, we considered the influences race, class, and gender can have on the metaphorical food that people and institutions eat. In this chapter, we are focused on the effects those food combinations have on our social bodies and institutions. When race, class, and gender are digested, they cease

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Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

to exist in the same form in which they were taken in. And yet their molecules—the dynamics that made them what they are—still do a lot of work in shaping the conditions within which we live. Sophie the omnivore’s menu has included items she loves and items she does not care about; items she will eat again and items she will carefully avoid. She eats so much more than the lemonade, tortilla, and guacamole in this example. And yet even those three “foods” have considerable influence over what is possible for her and, consequently, what ways she will shape the social structures that have enabled and constrained her. If she is like the other middle-class omnivores in Reay et al.’s study, she will emerge from high school with a future orientation, a propensity for strategizing, and a need to acquire capital in any desirable form. These will influence our social world.

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4 S earchi ng for Evidenc e of Rel ati onships at Specif ic Sites

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4

The Multirelational Character of Race, Class, and Gender

D

eane Curtin and Lisa M. Heldke propose a “food-centered philosophy of human being” (1992, xiv). They advocate a philosophical shift away from the assumption of the individual as independent and autonomous to a philosophy of connection and interdependence. A focus on food allows this shift: “Since food is ingested and becomes part of the self, it obliges us to reconceptualize not only the other but also the identity of a self that is so permeable, that it can physically incorporate the other. The fact that food is ultimately excreted, so that (a part of) the self once again becomes other, further complicates the question of identity boundaries and suggests a fundamental instability described by Julia Kristeva as ‘that ambivalence, duplicity, or permanent or potential compound between same and other that all nourishment signifies’” (E. Martin 2005, 28). The food we take in shapes (in the weakest interpretation) or constructs (in the strongest interpretation) us. Our institutions and our bodies—our lives—are different if we take in different foods. Take, for example, the different health outcomes of meat eaters and vegetarians. Meat eaters have long been found to have higher death rates from heart disease than vegetarians (see, for example, Key et al. 1998). Those who eat a Mediterranean-style diet—“characterized by a high intake of vegetables, legumes, fruits and nuts, and cereals . . . a high intake of olive oil . . . a moderately high intake of fish . . . a low-to-moderate intake of dairy products . . . a low intake of meat and poultry, and a regular but moderate intake of ethanol, primarily in the form of wine and generally during meals”—also

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Chapter 6

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have lower death rates than others from heart disease and cancer, and they are less likely than their peers to develop Alzheimer’s disease (Trichopoulou et al. 2003, 2600). The food that is available to us, that we choose to eat, and that we are culturally accustomed to eating continuously affects our bodies and our lives. This makes it really interesting to think about what a body actually is. We tend to think about the body as that thing that is contained by our skin. We understand that a body is a living system, but it may seem to many of us like a collection of parts—a liver, kidneys, eyes, fingers—or, at best, a collection of systems that each have a particular function (digestion, respiration, reproduction). A body would not be alive, however, if not for the processes that it both requires and enables. A person’s digestive system, for instance, is constantly breaking down the food she eats, joining those smaller molecules together with digestive juices and distributing the new combinations to various other places to be used in further processes. The body is an amazing cacophony of processes, organs, and substances working hard at staying alive all the time. Does the body, then, indeed, stop at the skin? We use possessive pronouns on this topic: “my” body, “her” body, “our” bodies, “ourselves.” It is as though there is an entity—some would say a self—that is larger, grander, and more important than the body itself, capable of “owning” the body that houses it. This entity, whether it is consciousness or a self or an ego or a personhood or something else altogether, must be the owning agent. It has the subject position in the grammatical construction “my body.” We do not speak from the point of view of our bodies, as though a body “has” or “owns” a consciousness. Rather, the self owns the body. This is a grammatical indication of the influence of French preEnlightenment philosopher René Descartes’ articulation (following a line developed long before, and a bit differently, by both Plato in Greece and Taoist and Neo-Confucian philosophers in China, among others) of a distinction between the mind, as the power of intelligence and the site of selfhood, and the body, the less important mechanical and corporeal substance. This mind-body split, in part because it allows people to (erroneously) set human beings apart from other animals, took hold in the popular imagination and has worked its way into how we think about what a body is: “stuff,” matter, machine-like organs that do a job and serve a function. Understanding the body to be inferior to, and somehow separate from, “the mind,” though, demands a great deal of willful

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ignorance. Whatever activities and processes the concept of “the mind” includes—brain function, the ability to think, the thoughts themselves, the possibility of self-direction, the more-or-less stable, if inconsistent, and ongoing conception of the self—they seem self-sustaining. Thoughts simply come to a person, it seems, in a way that has little to do with the rest of the body. But these activities are completely dependent on the activities of the organs of the body and the processes made possible within the systems of the body. In addition, they are dependent on the air that seems to exist outside the body, the environment in which plants, animals, and other edibles grow, and the food any “body” takes in. Imagine the activities of “the mind” when you have had coffee and when you have not, for instance, or after a meal with wine. Or, further, what does one think about when oxygen is not available and he cannot breathe? And in terms of nutrition, it may be hard for any individual to detect, but food experts tell us that eating foods rich with omega-3 fatty acids makes us “smarter.” If you get those omega-3 fats from salmon, and the salmon lived in a waterway full of mercury, though, your “power of intelligence” may be adversely affected. Each of these activities of the mind occurs within a very complicated context. Conversely, each of the components of that context can be influenced by the activities of “the mind”: you can decide to eat broccoli instead of carrots; you can care about pollution and limit your participation in it; you can consciously avoid buying plastic toys made with harmful chemicals like phthalates for your children. What this interdependence of “the mind” with “the body” and “the environment” should clearly indicate is that we should, at the least, be skeptical about the sectioning off of the mind as something separate from each of the rest of those elements just named (see, for instance, Sullivan 2001 and Grosz 1994).1 The body is the mind, then, some may argue. When we try to bracket the body as a separate entity from other things, then, we might include those activities of the mind within the brackets. In addition, if we understand the body to comprise not just the mind, and not only organs and substances (like blood, water, enzymes) 1 In addition, it might be said that the brain and other organs of the body “protect” the mind to some degree, since we do not have to “think” about so many of the processes the body does, such as shuffling the food down to the stomach.

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but also processes, it becomes even less clear where “the body” begins and ends. For example, I take a deep breath and let it out. When I breathe out, I release both oxygen and carbon dioxide into the air around me, and the person sitting next to me takes in some of that oxygen (and a tiny bit of the carbon dioxide), which then goes into her lungs, her blood stream, and feeds her heart. Then she breathes it out and I breathe some of it in. Is that oxygen part of my body? When? Always? Is it only part of my body when it is “in” my body, oxygenating my blood—a process required for my body to continue to live? Before I breathe it out and it goes into the body of the person I am sitting by, is it my body? Or is the reach of my body even further: are all the things that come into and go out of the entity that is contained by the skin—things that are floating around, sitting on the counter, being stepped on by someone’s feet—actually my body, too? The reason these questions are compelling for the current project is that I am attempting to equate the digestion of food within the body to the internalization of race, class, and gender in both individual subjecthoods and in institutions, and this is a bit dangerous. The danger it entails is the reification of “the body” as a separate, real, “natural” thing through the equation of it with a separate, real. Food goes into the body, affects it, and that is what the body is. Race, class, and gender are internalized in individual people, groups, and institutions, and that is what those individuals, groups, and institutions then are. New(ish) questions about the boundaries of the body, though, should also remind us to question the boundaries of subjecthood and therefore the boundaries of race, of class, and of gender. One of the things I have struggled with throughout this project is that in order to work through the metaphor, I have had to say class is “x” and then define what “x” is. In order to say that class acts like sea salt in a recipe, in a production process, or in a chemical combination during digestion, I have to say that class is something and is not other things. What I know better, though, is that class is not as fixed as that, and, precisely because it is impossible to analyze class coherently without understanding its racialized and gendered dynamics, it is impossible to set it apart and define it as something separate. The solution I have employed, which I am somewhat satisfied with, is acknowledging that each dynamic of class is an effect that was constructed from the material of race, class, or gender. In this way, race, class, and gender are simultaneously sometimes on

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their own and always together. Perhaps this kind of “both/and” approach (both separate and inseparable)—unsurprisingly advocated in a different way by Patricia Hill Collins (1991) in her first major statement on the relationships among race, class, and gender—is useful not just in the study of race, class, and gender but in the philosophy of bodies as well. Race, class, and gender organize our lives in ways that cannot fully be described as “intersecting.” These sources of oppression and privilege are related to each other in so many ways in their organizing activities that it makes sense to observe them through their lifecycles—from their production to their use and then to the effects they have on our social world. In these pages, I have asked how these elements that provide order for our lives are related to each other. I have found that in some places they support and enhance each other, while at other sites they block or constrict each other’s ability to provide a particular kind of order to some situation. The production and establishment of infrastructure for one may enable the production of another, for instance, that can make use of the support that already exists. Yet once a race, class, or gender dynamic has been produced, it may contaminate other crops, leading to the production of dynamics different than those that were intended. Similar enabling and restricting activities occur when these dynamics are digested. The presence of some nutrients in our regular diets can enhance our ability to absorb others, while particular forms of race, class, or gender may be blocked and expelled because of what they have been mixed with. One thing that may be particularly noticeable in all this is the lack of attention I have paid to the ways people are categorized. As I noted earlier, understanding the relationships among race, class, and gender simply by locating people along a chart of categories is fairly unfulfilling. Instead, I have focused on categories of conditions that affect series and groups of people. I have tried to understand how a small trend among affluent white families of sending their children to “multicultural” schools has produced important effects: not simply for the affluent white children or the rest of the children at these schools but for race, class, and gender themselves. Race, class, and gender will not be produced in exactly the same ways now that Sophie the omnivore and her omnivorous cohorts have started blending hip-hop with classical music. Hip-hop is not the same; classical music is not the same; and race, class, and gender are not the same. And music blending is only one of an enormous array of

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changes these omnivores usher in. Although I have called the white, middle-class kids omnivores, following Reay et al.’s (2007) incisive characterization, I consider all the students in these schools, and all the parents of those students, and all the teachers and administrators there, and all the shop owners around the schools’ grounds, and everybody else in the world to be omnivores. We all “take in” or “eat” dynamics of race, class, and gender all the time. Trying to isolate just a few of these dynamics in this project has almost been overwhelming, and we have covered just one lunch. When Sophie walks down the sidewalk, she takes in more dynamics. When she learns to drive and gets an afternoon job, she takes in more. When she stops being interested in theater and gets into tae kwon do, she takes in more. It happens constantly, every day, in every situation. We cannot help but be presented with social elements that have been constructed through the work of race, class, and gender, and the ways we synthesize these dynamics have a great effect on the shape of what will subsequently be available to consume. Lest we romanticize or unduly castigate these middle-class omnivores (or inadvertently base this concept of social digestion solely or centrally around the activities of a privileged group), then, let us also remember the acquisitiveness that has (and has had to) characterize those who share disadvantaged life conditions. When you do not have much of something important to you—be it a job, access, power, voice, food, standing, autonomy, or anything else— you try to get more. One good example of this comes from Larry Tye’s (2004) book on Pullman porters—a group of dark-skinned African American men who provided service for white passengers on sleeper-train cars in the late 1800s through the mid 1900s. Tye argues that these men established an important foundation for what would become the black middle class in the twentieth century. They were well regarded among their black peers. As porters, they had to make white people’s beds and clean their spittoons, but they also traveled and “saw the world,” which made them very admirable. In the long cross-country trips they shared with them, white businessmen and others on these trains talked to the porters about things like how to invest their money and attain education, providing some of the transfer of the cultural dimensions of affluence from which black men were otherwise sectioned off. The Pullman porters got something from those interactions. They did more than simply observe the white passengers’ attitudes or listen to their advice: they ingested these things. Like a daily serving of oatmeal,

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an oft-repeated bit of advice about the importance of education may have been consumed so regularly by these porters that it combined with the other race, class, and gender dimensions of their meals in a significant way. This advice was, itself, constructed out of innumerable race, class, and gender components, and when the porters consumed the advice, freeing its components to circulate and bind together with the admiration these men received from their families and communities, and the comparatively meager but steady paychecks they earned, the Pullman porters—and race, class, and gender—were shaped by the process. The porters themselves, like the legions of Black women who worked in white families’ homes during this period, were able to observe what a middle-class lifestyle could entail and to shape their visions for their own families’ lives on some combination of these worlds they saw and the worlds they otherwise lived in (including both acceptance and rejection of elements of both). Tye (2004) argues that this exposure, and what I would term these men’s digestion of race, class, and gender dynamics that they would not have otherwise been able to eat, created some of the conditions necessary for the emergence of the new black middle class. This black middle class then, of course, generated new race, class, and gender dynamics available for consumption, shaping the social world from that point on in multifarious ways. Just as Sophie the omnivore eats lunches constructed from the particular mixtures of the ingredients of race, class, and gender, Pullman porters and all the rest of us eat race-class-gender meals in combinations that are both patterned and unique to our particular sets of life experiences. In addition to “Sophie the omnivore” and “Pullman porter the omnivore,” we must keep in mind that “Supreme Court confirmation hearings the omnivore” and “state public school system the omnivore” and “segregated labor market the omnivore” are also constructed out of the race-class-gender meals they eat. Institutions, like individuals, series, and groups, take in combinations of race, class, and gender that both fundamentally shape what they (the institutions) are, and fundamentally shape what race, class, and gender are. While I wrote about the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing in the Preface, a more recent Supreme Court confirmation hearing found Republican Senators castigating Obama nominee Elena Kagan for her admiration of former Justice Thurgood Marshall. “Kagan is a pragmatic centrist,” writes Sherrilyn A. Ifill (2010) in The Washington Post’s daily online magazine, The Root, “admired by a number of high-profile conservatives. She’s not a

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person of color, and she has no track record as a civil rights lawyer or champion.” The only thing that allowed her opponents to construe her judicial potential in the racialized terms that might resonate with their like-minded constituents was her clerkship with Justice Marshall. “Race, class and culture divisions are themes that some Republican senators turn to again and again at confirmation hearings,” Ifill argues. “They do this by invoking the specter of out-of-touch elites, unqualified racial minorities, the dangers of international law, and equal rights for gays and lesbians.” Because they did not have any evidence to criticize Kagan on these issues, these senators engaged in “attack by association.” Ifill purports that “Elena Kagan was, in essence, raced by the committee members, who used Justice Marshall as a racial stand-in for President Obama and a proxy in the ongoing culture wars.” Senate confirmation hearings are institutions—they are ongoing rituals that serve both to enable and constrain possibilities. The people active in these rituals—and therefore the rituals themselves—take in forms of race, class, and gender. They digest Kagan’s record and any evidence it holds of positions she has taken that would curtail or enhance the rights of whites, of men, and of capitalists. They eat the current context in which the nation’s first African American president has had to studiously avoid the appearance that he is any more concerned with the common conditions that African Americans face than with the needs of whites. These senators and their party allies snack on an earlier debate (they initiated) over whether Justice Sonia Sotomayor has a different perspective than white men judges because of her lived experiences as a Latina. In this ritual the fact that all current Supreme Court justices except one (Justice John Paul Stevens) have attended the elite law schools of either Harvard or Yale is like a digestive enzyme that breaks down other food—it is something that has been eaten so many times over such a long period of time that it has come to compose the existing physical makeup of this institutional body, and every other meal gets processed through it. Note here that an institution like these confirmation hearings does not simply consume “a white nominee” or “a man president.” Rather, the institution and its participants are eating Kagan’s record and Obama’s strategies and Sotomayor’s structurally situated perspectives, and all of these are dynamics of race, class, and gender. When they take these things in, the institution is shaped by race, class, and gender, and race, class, and gender are shaped by race, class, and gender.

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Individuals in series characterized by the common condition of privilege, individuals in series characterized by the common condition of oppression, and institutions of every variety all consume race, class, and gender. Through this consumption process, our social worlds are transformed. As the complications and contradictions in specific social situations have increasingly worked their ways into social analyses over the last 30 years, we have come to need frameworks that focus on common conditions rather than essential characteristics or pat categories. The task of understanding the contours of these conditions is not an easy one, though. Even while we have not succeeded in what seems like the simple mission of convincing a wider public that social structures that produce haves and have-nots are neither desirable nor inevitable, we are faced with even murkier distinctions. Rifts in Amsterdam between gay Dutch multiethnics and straight Muslim men must be explained and understood, to provide but one example (Buruma 2009). Tensions between native black Americans and immigrant Caribbean Americans are complicated and difficult to sort out. Alliances between poor, Catholic, Mexican American women and the rich, Republican right provide a great deal of material for analysis. And the list of confusing situations goes on. While theories that reveal how race, class, and gender combine to produce powerful groups and disenfranchised groups are vitally important to our understanding of social life, they are not enough. We must understand how common conditions are constructed through the organizing work of social structures like race, class, and gender and what effects they have.

S u gar is Bad for You Although this very extended metaphor reveals a lot of things about race, class, and gender that have not otherwise received full theoretical elaboration, it is not perfect. Foremost, I understand that there are some possible pitfalls involved in comparing sources of oppression (that we certainly do not need) to the foods that nourish and heal bodies. I wish to address this head-on here. In digestion, race, class, and gender are equivalent to foods. Race has been produced, like a crop, in ways related to the ways class and gender have been produced. They have been combined, like ingredients, in ways that require them to change forms, change each other, and construct something new based on their combination. And they are digested, which is to say, they are changed once again

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as they are broken down in specific combinations and then as they recombine in new forms, all the while interacting with forms of race, class, and gender that have already been internalized. In these ways, they come to constitute the social beings and institutions that consume them. It is imperative to stop here, though, and think through the assumptions underlying a comparison between digested food and internalized race-class-gender combinations. The most prominent of these is the reality that a physical body needs food in order to survive. By focusing on digestion, am I arguing that social entities (individuals, series, groups, institutions) need race-class-gender combinations in order to survive? Although functionalists would have little problem accepting such an argument (for example, see Talcott Parsons’s 1943 piece, “The Kinship System of the Contemporary United States,” which includes his Durkheimian rationale for the separation of “sex roles” between women and men), it certainly stands in contrast to the social justice project of eradicating oppression. Many people have called for the full obliteration of these (and all) sources of oppression, arguing that as long as we systematically mete out social, political, economic privileges on the basis of race, class, and gender distinctions, we will never have just societies. I am inclined to agree with this call. Judith Lorber (2005), for instance, describes a genderless world in which household tasks and labor market positions are not organized by gender, and the similarities between women and men are valued and prized rather than ignored. In the face of exciting possibilities like these, and of the much sadder alternative of maintaining the harm and oppression that race, class, and gender routinely produce, I am repelled by the suggestion that we need race, class, and gender to survive. How, then, to deal with race, class, and gender as the food people eat? Interestingly, this question demands that we consider the forms that different solutions to race-class-gender oppression might take because we are forced to decide, for theoretical purposes, whether it is possible to “eat” “foods” in which race, class, and gender are completely absent. Is there anything—any social entity, any narrative, any historical process—in which race, class, and gender are completely absent? Could there be? If not, then we must consider whether we can, and should, distinguish between “healthy” and “unhealthy” combinations of race, class, and gender. We do, after all, have to eat something, and therefore our habitus and social structures must be shaped by something.

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What I would like to propose here, for the purposes of this project, is that perhaps we should think of solutions to race-class-gender oppression as coming in at least two very broad forms. If we agree that the state of race-class-gender oppression is, and has been, quite bad—“unhealthy”—that means that our social body—our people, series, groups, communities, and institutions—is eating food that is overwhelmingly unhealthy. That is to say, we are regularly taking in the disparate opportunities, the harmful attacks on self-image, the disproportionate exercising of power, and the inequitable social structural arrangements that race, class, and gender combine to produce. One form of solution, then, would be to eat healthier food—to produce and combine race, class, and gender in ways that are not as bad as the combinations we must now choke down. Perhaps, then, another form of solution, assuming some kind of (undeniably false) linear progression from worse to better, would be the eradication of race, class, and gender from our diets altogether. I am uncomfortable with this incrementalist approach, but I believe it is valuable to at least think through it in this circumstance. First, then, let us imagine that a “good” race-class-gender diet is not possible—that any consumption of race-class-gender combinations whatsoever is harmful. Then what do we eat? If race, class, and gender have not tainted our processes of internalization and institutionalization at all, then what are we internalizing and institutionalizing? In this scenario, we would have to imagine that the “foods” we eat—that is, the things we internalize and institutionalize—are social structural arrangements that have nothing to do with race, class, or gender. We must take in social structural arrangements in order to get along socially. Regardless of whether race, class, and gender are present, we need to know how to relate to people, where to go for help, what will be done to ensure or restore justice if it is breached, how to learn things, and all the other forms of regularity and predictability that social structures provide. If race, class, and gender were no longer available to “eat,” social entities would still consume and be made up of other social structural arrangements. We may still have families, communities, governing bodies, institutionalized ways of transferring knowledge, and the like. Our lives and institutions would still be structurally arranged, but without race, class, and gender or any other oppressive organizing mechanism, lives and institutions would presumably be arranged in “healthier” ways that ensured equality and justice, producing “healthy” social entities.

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Presuming we can consume and be shaped by social structures that are not in any way influenced by race, class, or gender, we must also account for the absence of these oppressive organizing mechanisms within social relationships, various social processes, and possibly even systems of categorization. Using Joan Scott’s work as a base for thinking about the consumption of race, class, and gender as “constitutive element[s] of social relationships” (1986, 1067), we would have to wholly imagine that something else is constituting those relationships completely. In Scott’s argument, the element of gender (which I have extended to race and class as well) constitutes social relationships on the basis of perceived differences and operates to signify power in those relationships. It is very difficult to imagine social relationships that are not at all influenced by perceived differences and that are devoid of power. In terms of power, the very words we use to talk to and about each other, according to Foucault (1990), construct the subjects to whom we then know how to relate. Even a statement as simple as “This is my mom” signifies that ownership is an element of family relationships (“my mom”); refers to a type of relationship that is presumably different than a relationship with “my dad” or “your mom”; and reinforces the notion that each person has one mom (the person did not say, “This is one of my moms”). In other words, this simple statement contains a map of some of the social structures that underlie and organize our relationships, and we, as subjects, are constructed on the basis of those social structures. This construction of the subject through the word “mom” is an easy example. Many people strive to make motherhood their own and to inhabit it or perform it in ways they feel are unique to them, but being a “mom” still comes with a lot of social expectations and history. When I introduce a person as “my mom,” this helps others figure out what she means to me, what she has done in my life, and even what kind of person she is. They might be wrong, of course, but many times they will be correct because this “mom” has internalized and enacted the social expectations she knows exist for “moms.” In this way, she has been constructed as a subject. This is a powerful force in people’s lives. Trying to imagine social relationships in which no power is expressed or even signified, then, is very difficult. If race, class, and gender were not present in our structural arrangements or our social relationships, we would also have to imagine them absent in various social processes. People would probably still interact with each other. Children might even still attend schools. Young adults would

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likely still hook up at parties. These would all still be things we would digest. Along with these processes, we may even still eat categories or systems of categories. Imagining the ingestion of categories without race, class, and gender dimensions is difficult, though, because most scholars on the topic agree that the act of categorizing groups of people, and the inevitable hierarchy and inequitable distribution of power among groups that result from this categorization, constitute the fundamental problem of oppression. Would a healthy meal include systems of categorization? A social entity (such as a person or an institution) may need to distinguish between weather that is hot and weather that is cold (that is, two categories of weather), but in order to survive, does a social entity need to distinguish among human beings in any way? Between those who are mean and those who are kind? (Or those who are momentarily behaving meanly or kindly?) Between those who are big and those who are small? Between those who are frail and those who are strong? Between those who are contagious and those who are not? It takes science fiction writers like Octavia Butler to help us imagine worlds where creatures just deal with creatures, guided by no systems of categorization whatsoever. Outside that realm, given what we know about human and institutional psychology, it is hard to imagine (and taste). Herein lie some of the challenges of thinking about how we might eat structural arrangements, social relationships, processes, categories, and the like, that are not shaped in any way by (nonexistent) race, class, or gender. Given how hard it is to imagine families, political systems, interactions, and ways of categorizing that have nothing to do with race, class, gender, or any other source of oppression—at least in the immediate future—perhaps we should chart a middle course. On this course, we have not yet managed to do away with race, class, and gender altogether, but we can think through ways of digesting their combinations that are less harmful—healthier—than others. I understand and share a sense of resistance to this. The main point of resistance for me is that very compelling arguments have been made about the construction of race, class, and gender solely for the purpose of oppression. Oppression is not the accidental by-product of their creation but the main impetus. Any joy, beauty, or honor to be found in them is quite miraculous, but it does attest to the force of social ingenuity that people, groups, organizations, and institutions have been able to use to “find a way out of no way” (as the saying goes). This is olive oil instead of margarine. Baked instead of

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fried. Spinach rather than lettuce. Beet salad rather than tater tot hotdish. It is a compromise position, to be sure, but it may be the difference between dying of social heart disease and living to enjoy social grandchildren. What, then, would constitute “healthier” race-class-gender combinations? Let us take an example from a short interaction: Beverly Daniels Tatum (1997, as pointed out by Dena R. Samuels 2009, 503) asks us to imagine a white preschool child loudly asking her mother, “Mommy, look at that girl! Why is she so dirty?” when they pass a black woman and child in the store. “The white mother, embarrassed by her child’s comment, responds quickly with a ‘Ssh!’” Tatum questions the white mother’s socially constructed inability to respond appropriately. “‘Honey, that little girl is not dirty,’” Tatum suggests the mother could say. “‘Her skin is as clean as yours. It’s just a different color. Just like we have different hair color, people have different skin colors.’” Presumably other, more “appropriate” responses could be crafted for this situation as well. The point here is that we have got a harmful race-class-gender combination that a black child, a black mother, a white child, and a white mother have all had to consume. The harmful combination includes the white mother’s shushing of her child, which reveals the norm for white people of enacting silence about race in public settings. While the racial aspect of this combination is evident, it is less clearly, but still certainly, infused with gender and class as well. Would fathers have handled it the same way? Did the questioning child get beaten or verbally abused in the middle of the store or simply get spoken to in pleasant, hushed tones? In what kind of store and in what part of the world were these families that a preschool-aged white child had so little exposure to black children so as to be compelled to ask such a question? What kind of care had this white child received that she would have never seen a storybook picture or even a television image of a black child? Without knowing the answers to all these questions, and more, it is hard to fully explicate all the pertinent race-class-gender dynamics, but we know they are there to be found. Rather than this harmful race-class-gender combination, then, what would have been healthier for the parties involved? Tatum argues that the white mother should not have shushed the child. She should have explained differences in skin color. Tatum suggests the mother could have even gone into the topic of melanin with the child. Assuming we agree that these responses—or any response—would have been better than the “Ssh!” the white child got, would this not, then, have been 10.1057/9780230115385 - Digesting Race, Class, and Gender, Ivy Ken

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a better race-class-gender combination for them all to digest? Would responses like the one Tatum suggests not produce healthier “bodies”—social entities—than the Big Mac and fries they all got? I am not thrilled with arguing that we can digest healthier race-class-gender combinations because of its reliance on an incremental and linearseeming notion of “progress,” but perhaps it is the most realistic option presently available. Perhaps this kind of thing is the best we can do in terms of “healthy” race-class-gender food. Or, if I push even further, perhaps we should consider another aspect of race, class, and gender as “healthy.” I cannot ignore the joy that some members of oppressed groups have dared to express on the basis of that membership. The Black Arts Movement immediately jumps to mind. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, black artists separated their work from white-dominated Modernist mores, rejected white interpretations of their work, critiqued the power structure, gave young people access to the arts, and resisted assimilation, all in part through the vehicle of expressing what was distinctive about their work and about them as black artists and black people. As the text of a pamphlet from the Black Arts Repertory Theatre from 1965, using the sentiment of Amiri Baraka, says, “The black artist can give his people Truth, Beauty and a sense of themselves as masters of the planet” (in Thomas 1978, 69). Poets like Sonia Sanchez in We a BaddDDD People (1970), wrote poetry that affirmed black women’s distinctiveness, depicting images like a world that is shaken by a woman’s “bamboo/colored blk/berry/face,” which will be remembered by all. Hers is an articulation of resistance to white hegemony, to be sure, as it marks a cultural moment in which the love of “blackness” is articulated publicly and certainly. More recently, artist India Arie (2001) sings a lyric like, “Brown skin, you know I love your brown skin,” reflecting the transmission of Black Arts messages over time to younger artists and even into the white-dominated mainstream. Similarly, the feminist movement involves the simultaneous hatred of oppression and love of womanhood. (Step into a feminist bookstore such as Charis Books in Atlanta, Georgia, and tell me you do not love being a woman or wish you were one.) Even financial instability is romanticized. In these examples—for race, gender, and class—it seems that some measure of true joy and integrity have been reserved for those who, ironically, share oppressive life conditions. This is a difficult argument to make because each of these successful attempts to define and affirm, and delight in selves and groups has been constructed in part through the mechanisms of oppression. 10.1057/9780230115385 - Digesting Race, Class, and Gender, Ivy Ken

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Without the oppression, the categories of conditions would not exist or need to be valued and affirmed. Since race, class, and gender are not “real”—that is, they have been socially constructed—any attempts to revel in them may be strange expressions of false consciousness. But we revel in many social constructions: basketball is a sport that people made up, and people love playing it. Race, class, and gender are things that people made up, and evidence exists that people take pleasure in playing these games—both the winning and losing sides. I am strangely in the position of arguing that blacks, Latina/os, First Peoples, Asian Americans, women, and the poor like being what they are. My point, which I argue only half-heartedly and not well, is that perhaps race, class, and gender can exist in ways that are “healthier” than others. Still, I cannot imagine arguing that we need race, class, and gender to survive. What we must face, however, is that social entities can survive on oppressive race-class-gender combinations. It is possible to live a long time on an extremely bad diet. The healthiness of the typical American diet is a good example of this. One-third of the calories the average American eats come from things like candy, dessert, pop, fruit-flavored drinks, and alcohol (Block 2004). Twothirds of Americans are overweight (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2008). This kind of diet, which also includes heavy doses of red meat and fried foods and is relatively low on raw fruits and vegetables, greatly increases rates of colon cancer, heart disease, and other ailments. Despite this horrendous diet, Americans continue to live. They may not live as long as they could otherwise, but average life expectancies have gone up dramatically when compared with rates at any other time in American history. This is not to say, of course, that poor diet increases life expectancy; many other environmental and public health factors influence these rates. But my point is that even on a diet that almost any nutritionist would call “unhealthy,” most Americans will not, after one day, one week, one year, month, or decade, simply stop surviving. If we think of race, class, and gender as foods—as sugary desserts, high-fructose-corn-syrup-filled sodas, and chicken-fried steaks— we know that these “foods” will not uniformly help a person’s life chances. Those who have little choice but to consume the harmful ways gender shapes their relationships, along with a hearty but subtle sense of white racial rightness and the vulnerability that comes with ever-increasing credit card debt, is not living as healthily as

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possible. A white woman in this situation has food that may taste good—she loves the new outfit she bought on credit; it makes her feel better than the black women who board the daily bus with her and makes her boyfriend think she looks “sexy.” This person is alive on a diet like this. It is not made up of the equivalent of the food pyramid selections the USDA recommends, but there is enough there to keep her going. These foods, though, eaten in heavy proportions over the course of a life, are likely to make her overweight, diabetic, and prone to heart disease and many other ailments. The more invested she becomes in finding ways to buy sexiness and white privilege on credit, the more entangled she becomes in these damaging race-class-gender combinations, and the “sicker” she becomes. These foods may be all she has available to her or all she knows how to prepare. She may not know how to do the hard work of learning how to make a meal of legumes and some inexpensive whole grains but instead grabs pop and candy off the convenience store shelf almost every day. Recognizing how much it puts her at a disadvantage to have to buy high heels and low-cut tops in order to be appealing to her boyfriend is not an easy task. It is like having to remember to soak the dry beans the night before cooking them. And then doing something about it—stopping the shopping for things she cannot afford, talking with her boyfriend about how she wants to know she appeals to him whether she is wearing a borrowed dress or a daily worn set of flannel pajamas, or wondering what she has in common with the black women she encounters rather than assuming she is doing things better than them—is tough indeed. When someone is used to the McDonald’s, convenience store daily diet, it throws a person’s or family’s life into a bit of chaos to have to plan, consider, and prepare healthier meals. The kids rebel—they like their Happy Meals. The boyfriend is not in the mood for chopping vegetables after his long day; he likes the simplicity of her credit-won sexiness without all the talking, hand wringing, and changing. Eating an unhealthy diet of harmful gender relationships spiced with some racial divisiveness and corporate greed is, strangely enough, the easiest way to go at the present moment. Make no mistake—it took a lot of work to get things set up like this. Corporations had to gain the rights that individual people have in this country and lobby hard, and at great expense, to keep Congress from restricting their ability to loan people money who cannot

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afford to pay it back at the high interest rates these companies are allowed to charge. That is work. Men have to see magazine after magazine and porn video after music video of an interchangeable parade of women with the same body types, same looks on their faces, and same manufactured fashion display in order for those men to develop their own sense of what could be “sexy” about a woman. That is a lot of work. McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, 7-11—these convenience food sellers also had to do a lot of work to make junk food so “convenient” for us (meaning convenient to purchase, of course, not convenient to digest, convenient to nourish organs, or convenient to keep bodies healthy). So the work that a woman may feel she has to undertake in order to go counter to any of this and keep herself, her relationships, and her contribution to the social world “healthy” are daunting indeed. In either rejecting this work or not even noticing any need for it, she gets by on a diet that shapes her into the person she is—a person who feels good about herself because she defines herself as different than black women, as sexy because she has the right outfit, and as free because she can buy what she does not have money to pay for. In activities like these, our social body has been living on a diet of unhealthy foods, which accounts for its sick shape. It has survived, but it is not healthy. Just as the production of race, class, and gender require at least some degree of deliberateness, then, the possibilities for “healthiness” in these social structural foods require deliberateness as well.

Chec k , P l ease Sugar, as a substance, is extremely complex. It is generated from a variety of sources. It takes an amazing array of forms. It has innumerable uses. And it affects our bodies, institutions, and cultures in both debilitating and sustaining ways. Just as complex is every minute dimension of race, class, gender, and other sources of oppression and privilege. Clifford Geertz (1983) observed that most theorizing has been generated through metaphor since ordinary situations help us understand the complicated features of social relationships. Metaphors are particularly useful if they yield new insights (Rigney 2001), and while the imagery of race, class, and gender as “intersecting” and “interlocking” have been useful to a point, I have argued here that conceptualizing these structures as intermingling foods that get

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produced, used, consumed, and digested reveals possibilities about their relationships that deserve further empirical elaboration. First, like sugar, race, class, and gender are social phenomena that are continuously in the process of production. These foods that we consume—include everything from the unruly woman archetype to the norms of American fatherhood and the job history of a Supreme Court nominee—are constantly being produced, and they are related to each other in a number of ways in that production. Their production is similar in that it has both deliberate and institutionalized dimensions. A great deal of work goes into this production, and some of that work is done with full intent (such as, strangely, trying to besmirch a relatively mediocre white Supreme Court nominee by emphasizing her association with a very notable and accomplished black Supreme Court justice) while much of it just happens as a matter of course without much critical thought (such as taking a man more seriously at work once he gets married and has children). In production, we may also notice that one form of race, class, and gender is related another in that it is a response to it. The Pullman porters who brought their paychecks and their newly acquired cultural capital home, for instance, undoubtedly provoked responses that, themselves, had race, class, and gender characteristics. In this way the production of race, class, and gender can build on itself, like the crops of a field that has been fertilized by the mulch of the land’s previous crop. Also in these fields, we can imagine race, class, and gender being related to each other in the techniques used to produce them. Like irrigation on sugar fields, the techniques used to produce one dimension of oppression (for example, science) can be transferred to other realms to produce other dimensions. We can also search for empirical examples not only of the ways race, class, and gender products feed each other—like the porters’ beet leaves that are turned into the soil to act as nutrients—but also of the ways they contaminate other race, class, and gender products. Just as genetically modified beet pollen blows from one field to the next, race, class, and gender can infect each other as they are being produced. In the realm of use, or mixing, we can observe some of race, class, and gender’s most obvious relationships. They are actually stirred up together here: middle-class white omnivores come in contact with working-class students, and their music, their styles, their goals, their norms, and everything else about them, and their effects on

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the social world are affected by the contact. Just as sugar is no longer sugar when it dissolves in a pan of hot water, the unruly woman archetype is no longer just the unruly woman archetype when it is dissolved into the distinctive speech patterns among blacks who resist white domination. These ingredients, along with others, combine to produce something that would not otherwise exist if not for the combining—something that is, therefore, dependent on that archetype and those speech patterns. This dependence is an important element of the story, as is the identification of why any one particular set of ingredients, rather than others, come together in that pan. This reveals the importance of the structural relationships between the demand for one ingredient and the availability of another. Finally, in terms of consumption and digestion, race, class, and gender dynamics merge with other race, class, and gender dynamics in the gut. Here, the word “dynamic” is particularly appropriate, since such a great deal of activity is going on. Combinations that came together in the mortar and generated an entirely new entity now break down into yet another set of different forms and mix together to engage in further activities. Double Dutch and white rap consumers and the worries of cultural snobs, which came together in the practice of listening to hip-hop, break down into their constituent components and recombine with classical music’s juxtaposition with jazz and women and men’s access to pianos. This confusing barrage of activities is particularly important in studies of race, class, and gender because it moves us into analyses of the things that happen rather than the characteristics people have. What does it really mean that the practice of black girls playing double Dutch—and this practice’s influence on hip-hop—breaks down within a social body or institution and joins up with men’s access to pianos? That is an interesting question—a hard-to-answer question for sure but a more interesting one to me than the accounting of how much we can predict about white middle-class men’s actions when we hold their age constant. In social digestion, the present depends on the activities of the past, and odd combinations seem more like the norm than the outlier. The combinations a social body takes in really influence the kind of work that social body can do, including the work it needs to do to digest the new combinations that keep being introduced. Where one combination my pass right through us, with little work to do in repairing cells or constructing tissues, other combinations make new things possible. Opportunities to investigate these

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relationships empirically—the way one element blocks or enhances the effectiveness of another, for instance—are particularly exciting. In all of this, there are relationships. My presentation of these relationships may seem very linear, as though there is a moment in time when race, class, and gender are produced, and another in which they are prepared, and so on. In reality, race, class, and gender operate in messy ways that might go back and forth between, for instance, consumption and production. Once some aspects of race, class, and gender have been produced, people do a lot of things to them. They combine them in unique and institutionalized ways. They taste them and spit them out. They try new combinations and then go back to get different ingredients. It is not a simple threestep kind of process. However, the metaphor reveals that it is important to take into account all these aspects of how race, class, and gender come together and more. This metaphor is not meant to be exhaustive. Someone may want to include much more about the distribution process in his investigation of race, class, and gender. Some may say the elimination of waste from the “body” is undertheorized in this account. Others want to hear more about the ways people experience and taste these combinations. It is my hope that this metaphor will spark these kinds of elaborations, so we can find out more about which of the cruxes at which race, class, and gender meet are the most influential (for example, once an element of race, class, or gender is produced, is there much we can really do to influence how people will digest it?). I also hope scholars will investigate the production, use, consumption, and digestion of other foods, since such investigations are likely to reveal even more about how different forms of race, class, and gender intermingle. Hostess Twinkies, challah bread, and sausages may have a lot of similarities in how they are produced, used, consumed, and digested, but my guess is that we will learn a great deal by exploring the dissimilarities in these processes for each of them. This analysis begs the question, what does this add? Especially because I illustrate this framework with examples from data that have already been compellingly analyzed by their gatherers, one may wonder what is to be gained from engaging in an investigation of the ways race, class, gender, and other dynamics of oppression come together in production, use, and digestion. What I believe this “sugar analysis” adds to the study of race, class, and gender is a guiding framework—a way to investigate the social world that will

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open up our understandings of how, where, in what ways, and under what circumstances race, class, gender, and other structural organizing mechanisms are related in any given thing. This theoretical framework does not allow scholars to simply find out demographic information about the people involved in a social activity and then speak convincingly about race, class, and gender in that activity. It demands that we ground our work historically in the production of the dynamics of oppression. It necessitates our focus on the local and institutional ways people actually mix race, class, and gender together. It institutionalizes a place for consumption in the analysis, and it requires us to think about implications. While this covers substantial theoretical ground, some dynamics of the experience of preparing, sharing, eating, and being shaped by meals have gone uncovered here. To what is the aroma of food equivalent here, for example? What might it mean that women tend to work at meal preparation without pay in families’ homes while men who cook are likely to be paid for the activity? How is the realization of flavor in the mouth, rather than the ear, important? How does the eater’s consumption of flavor shape the cook’s subjecthood? How does the aural pop of hot olive oil influence the flavor ˇ of the food cooked in it? This metaphor brings us past merely visual imagery, which has been privileged in Western social theory (Oyewùmí 1997; Smith 2006), and provides analysts with the potential to theorize using taste, tactility, smell, sound, and even other less recognized senses. While this theoretical synthesis should not be precluded from generating testable hypotheses, it stands as a form larger than this reductionist form of scientific theorizing allows. It is my hope that scholars will apply this metaphor to their empirical work for dual purposes: both to reveal aspects of their data that may have otherwise gone hidden, and to provide further elaboration of the nuances of this metaphor to help us characterize and imagine—and taste—the relationships among structures of oppression like race, class, and gender.

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activities, 27–28, 29, 58, 61, 66 assumptions about, 101 class-signifying, 72, 85, 119, 132 gender appropriate, 88, 89, 90 and intersection, 79, 146 organization of, 18, 24, 32–33, 34, 38, 46 See also class; fierceness; middle class; series; unruly woman African Americans, 6, 28, 37, 44, 134 common conditions of, 83–84, 101 and fatherhood, 29–30 invisibility of, 24–25 and linguistic agency, 62, 78, 82 and music, 92, 94–100, 117, 118, 119n1 as Pullman porters, 132–33, 145 Alexander, Jeffrey C., 22, 48–49 American Class Structure, The (Gilbert and Kahl), 34 American Indians, 24 Arab Americans, 24 Arie, India, 141 Aristotle, 36 Arthurs, Jane, 67, 68 Asian Americans, 24, 142 Bakhtin, Michael, 68 Baraka, Amiri, 141 Barr, Roseanne, 64, 67, 70, 84, 103 Beauvoir, Simone de, 36, 90 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 88–90, 92 Bennett, William, 100 Bettie, Julie, 84

Black Arts Repertory Theatre, 141 bodies social construction of, 21–22, 47, 67–78, 86, 88–90, 92–93, 129 Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, 34 Boss, 83–84 Bourdieu, Pierre, 86, 120, 121, 122 and class-constructing devices, 93 and class ensembles, 17, 18 concept of habitus, 26–27, 61 See also habitus bourgeoisie. See middle class Buntman, Fran, 80 Butler, Judith, 48 Butler, Octavia, 139 capitalism, 16, 17, 44 and oppression, 25, 27, 39, 46 See also class; oppression categories of conditions, 20, 131 construction of, 135 See also series Charis Books, 141 Cixous, Hélène, 83 class, 4–6, 7 categories of, 37, 40 dynamics of, 16 and fierceness, 84–85 and life expectancy, 21 and means of production, 16–17, 18 primacy of, 18–19, 40, 41, 42–45 as a structure, 9, 33–34, 35, 40 See also organizing mechanisms; series

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Index

Index

Collins, Patricia Hill, 25, 26, 27 on dependence, 80, 102 on relationships, 34–35, 38, 131 Collins, Randall, 42n1 coming together. See intersection conditions, categories of, 20–21, 131 Connell, R. W., 27 Cooper, Anna Julia, 24–25, 46 cumulative disadvantage, 121–22 Curtin, Deane, 127 Dante, 105 Davis, Angela, 96 Davis, Nathalie Zemon, 67 demographic categories, 6, 20 DeNora, Tia, 88, 89–90 dependence, 35, 37, 39, 50, 146 and functionality, 102–3 and structural characteristics, 80–81 See also relationships Descartes, René, 128 Digable Planets, 95 Dill, Bonnie Thornton, 23 DiMaggio, Paul, 93 Dora the Explorer, 9 Du Bois, W. E. B., 41, 46 dynamics, 29–30, 72, 80 combining of, 61, 66 and cross pollination, 74 nature of, 35 production of, 75 of social class, 16, 110 and universal concepts, 66 education, 3, 133 access to, 26, 132 and labor market position, 19 norms of, 4 and segregation, 59 Elias, Norbert, 67 Engels, Frederick, 41 Evans, Bill, 92

Feder, Ellen, 47–48 feminist analysis, 6, 10, 22 and oppression, 25, 27, 141 and social organization, 24 fierceness, 61, 77, 80, 102–3, 111, 113 definition, 61 as dynamic of gender, 77, 78 elements of, 81–85, 104 See also gender; relationships food production, 8–10 Fothergill, Alice, 81 Foucault, Michel, 47 Gallaudet University, 45 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 100–101 Gaunt, Kyra D., 98–99 Geertz, Clifford, 144 gender, 4–6 and categories, 37, 40 and conditions of erasure, 24, 25 and fierceness, 83–84 primacy of, 40, 46–48 and relationships, 7 as social construction, 9 and social practice, 27–28 as a structure, 33–34, 35, 40 See also organizing mechanisms; unruly woman Gerstel, Naomi, 28, 29 Gibbons, David, 105 Gilman, 41–42 Glauber, Rebecca, 29–30 Glenn, Evelyn Nakano, 34–35, 36–37, 38, 80 Goldman, Albert, 91–92 Green, Lucy, 88 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 81 groups, 16, 25, 40, 45, 130 and advocacy organizations, 30 categories of, 35, 131, 139 common conditions of, 71, 135 definition of, 15 oppressed, 26, 137, 141 positioning of, 23 practices of, 28–29

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identity categories, 27, 43 definition of, 22–23 focus on, 35, 40, 123 Ifill, Sherrilyn A., 133–34 institutions, 7, 10, 12, 47, 50, 103–4 activities of, 27, 50, 112, 134 effects on, 120, 123, 127, 133–37, 144 shaping of, 23, 26, 28–31, 32, 33 See also organizing mechanisms; relationships intersection, 5, 7, 10, 22, 131 limitations of, 12, 30, 34–35 See also intersection; relationships Irish immigrants, 43–44 Jackson, Mahalia, 81 Kagan, Elena, 133–34 Kelley, Robin D. G., 91 Latinas, 24, 39, 43, 44, 134, 142 and las chicas, 85–86 Latinos, 29, 37, 98, 142 Lenski, Gerhard, 42 Lieberson, Stanley, 43n2 life conditions, 23, 24, 26, 28, 101 common, 56, 132 organizing of, 31, 32, 37, 38, 39

Lily Ledbetter Act, 78 Lorber, Judith, 136 Mannheim, Karl, 24 Mao, Tse-tung, 36, 37 Marshall, Thurgood, 133, 134 Marx, Karl, 16, 25 and alienation of labor, 46 analysis by, 41, 42 McIntosh, Peggy, 19 MC Lyte, 82, 83, 117 middle class, 30 and African American music, 100 and bodily decorum, 67–68, 69–70, 88 norms, 64, 84, 87–89, 100 rejection of, 44, 62, 78, 113 omnivorousness, 59–60, 110, 122, 132–33, 145 subjectivity, 59, 110, 124 Midgette, Anne, 116 Mintz, Sidney W., 12, 69, 72 modernity, 67–68, 70, 91, 95, 141 postmodernity, 22, 49 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 66 Monk, Thelonius, 91–92 Monsanto, 74 Morgan, Marcyliena, 82, 83 mutual constitution, 35, 38. See also relationships National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 30 National Organization for Women (NOW), 30 Native Hawaiians, 44 New Yorker, 86–87 New York Times, 116 Obama, Barack, 58, 133, 134 Omi, Michael, 46 oppression, 5, 8, 80–81, 145 and common conditions, 135, 139 definition of, 42–43, 45, 51

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habitus, 18, 20, 26, 120–21 and class structure, 26–27 construction of, 111, 112–14, 122–24 and early influences, 120–21 shaping of, 57, 61, 85–86, 117 See also Bourdieu, Pierre Hamer, Fannie Lou, 81–82 Harris, Cheryl, 45 Hartsock, Nancy, 25 Harvard University, 134 Heldke, Lisa M., 127 Hossfeld, Karen, 39

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oppression (continued) deliberateness of, 71, 72, 139 forms of, 83, 98 obscuring of, 26 and relationships, 12–13, 131 solutions to, 120, 136–37 sources of, 26, 28, 39, 50, 51 and focus of study, 40–41 vantage point of, 25–26 See also capitalism; relationships organizing mechanisms, 7, 12, 33–40 combinations of, 80, 104 focus on, 22, 40–41 lack of, 138, 139 obscure aspects of, 12 power of, 30–31 See also relationships organizing principles, 5, 15–51 theoretical formulas, 46–47 Oyĕwùmí, Oyèrónké, 31, 66 Parsons, Talcott, 136 Peek, Lori, 81 Perry, Imani, 95 Philadelphia negro (Du Bois), 46 Plato, 128 Pollan, Michael, 114, 119 power, 12, 82, 135, 141 biopower, 47–48 labor, 16, 46, 118 maintenance of, 26, 34, 36 marginalization of, 25 obscuring of, 26 and perceived differences, 137–39 political, 42, 44 privilege, 5, 30, 59, 80–81 common conditions of, 19–20, 135 perpetuation of, 59–60, 71 presumptions of, 6 and social location, 25, 26, 132 sources of, 39, 40, 50, 51, 75, 131 See also oppression; power Queen Latifah, 82, 83

race, 4–6 and categories, 37, 40 and environmental adaptation, 21 and fierceness, 82–83 primacy of, 40, 41, 45–48 and relationships, 7 as social construction, 9 as a structure, 33–34, 35, 40 and white privilege, 19–20 See also organizing mechanisms Radano, Ronald Michael, 94 rationality, 26, 68, 73, 136 Reay, Diane, 58–61, 62, 94, 110, 122 and black music, 62 relationships, 5, 23–24, 31–32, 33 common conditions, 40 complexity of, 27 context specific, 12–13 focus on, 35–36 and identity, 37 importance of, 115 and metaphor, 6–7, 10–13 mutually constituted, 37, 38 organization of, 31–32, 33, 38 as organizing principles, 5 and perceived differences, 138 and social production, 74–75 See also groups; habitus; series resistance, 28, 38, 71, 81, 83–85, 96, 139, 141, 146 Rice, Condoleezza, 9 Risman, Barbara, 34 Robinson, Jackie, 103 Rose, Tricia, 96, 100 Rowe, Kathleen, 64–65, 66–67, 83 Said, Edward, 36 Sanchez, Sonia, 141 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 15, 16, 18–19, 20, 25, 71 and identity formation, 22 Scott, Joan, 31, 138 Scott, Susan, 81 Seidman, Steven, 22, 49

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series, 15–16, 18–19 and categories of conditions, 20 and common conditions, 112 and deliberateness, 71 and ensembles, 17 and life conditions, 28, 29 See also habitus Sewell, William, 34 Sex Roles (journal), 22 Shows, Carla, 28, 29 Shusterman, Richard, 100 social constructions, 9–10, 46, 50, 96, 142. See also bodies social dynamics. See dynamics social location, 23, 37 complexity of, 27 and privilege, 25 social order, 68–70, 82, 84, 100, 120 construction of, 71 disruption of, 46, 62, 83 social phenomena, 39, 45, 49, 104, 145. See also fierceness social production, 7–8, 9–10, 11, 50, 56–57, 70 articulation of, 102 deliberateness of, 65–66, 70–72, 144–45 fertilization and cross pollination in, 45, 56, 73–75 influences on, 77–78 institutionalized, 72, 75, 145 techniques of, 72–73, 75, 145 social things, 10, 11 as function, 78 and relationships, 102 Sotomayor, Sonia, 134 Stepan, Nancy Leys, 73 Stevens, John Paul, 134 Strolovitch, Dara Z., 30

165

Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Mintz), 12 systems, 34, 35, 79, 102, 128, 129 definition of, 38, 40 of habitus, 123 Tatum, Daniels, 140–41 theoretical framework, 13, 42, 49–50, 148 Tye, Larry, 132–33 unruly woman, 113 and cross-pollination, 74, 75 and deliberateness, 71 demeanor of, 66–67, 68–69, 70 description of, 64–65 as dynamic of gender, 77 production of, 57, 61, 65, 66 Useem, Michael, 93 Viacom, 9 Wacquant, Loïc, 86, 120 Wal-Mart, 17, 18, 27 Washington Post, 133–34 Weber, Lynn, 26, 42 Weinstein, Susan, 96 Williams, Patricia, 80 Winant, Howard, 46 woman, unruly. See unruly woman Wright, Erik Olin, 36 Yale University, 134 Young, Iris Marion, 16, 18–19, 20–21, 96 and identity, 33 Zinn, Maxine Baca, 23

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Index