Complicating Categories: Gender, Class, Race and Ethnicity

The volume seeks to explore the interrelationships between race, class and gender.

Eileen Boris (Edited by), Angelique Janssens (Edited by)

9780521786416, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 30 March 2000

176 pages
22.9 x 15.3 x 1.2 cm, 0.279 kg

This volume focuses on complicating central concepts in the understanding of economic and social history: class, gender, race and ethnicity. Only recently have historians begun to ask how gender, race, and ethnicity as categories of analysis change narratives of class formation and working-class experience. While all three concepts refer to systems of inequality, it remains unclear how these systems of difference relate to each other. Despite a growing body of empirical literature, authors more often connect dyads rather than consider historical phenomenan from the tryad of class, race and gender. This volume highlights attempts to write a richer history that complicates categories, suggesting how class, gender, race and/or ethnicity combine across a wide range of economic and social landscapes.

1. Complicating categories: an introduction Eileen Boris and Angélique Janssens
2. Family concerns: gender and ethnicity in pre-colonial West Africa Sandra E. Greene
3. Narratives serially constructed and lived: ethnicity in cross-gender strikes 1887–1903 Ileen A. DeVault
4. Competing inequalities: the struggle over reserved legislative seats for women in India Laura Dudley Jenkins
5. 'The black man's burdens': African Americans, imperialism and notions of racial manhood 1890–1910 Michele Mitchell
6. Sex workers or citizens? Prostitution and the shaping of 'settler' society in Australia Raelene Frances
7. From muscles to nerves: gender, 'race' and the body at work in France 1919–1939 Laura Levine Frader
8. 'Blood is a very special juice': racialized bodies and citizenship in twentieth-century Germany Fatima El-Tayeb.

Subject Areas: Ethnic studies [JFSL], Gender studies, gender groups [JFSJ], Social & cultural history [HBTB]