SOCI 210: Sociological perspectives

Agenda

Intersectionality

  1. Administrative
  2. Intersectionality in
    the social sciences
  3. Conflict theory

Administrative

Lecture recordings for Jan 29

  • Due to wireless network issues in the classroom, the lecture recording for last Wednesday, Jan 29 was interrupted
  • Two recordings on the same topic from 2023 have been uploaded Teams -- find them in the "Lecture Streams and Recordings" channel

Synthesis essay 1

  • Due next Wednesday, February 12 by 11:59pm
  • The structure of the essay is completely up to you
  • Fitting all of this into 800-1,000 words can be hard, but it is also a good way to gain understanding

Exam Reference sheets ("cheat sheets")

  • The midterm exam is in class on Feb 21.
  • Reference sheets must be finalized by Feb 19 at 11:59pm
  • I will print them and bring them to class

Reference sheets

Logistics

  • Groups of 7-8 students
  • Teams channel for submission and collaboration
  • Each group must choose one member who will collect the sheets from me on the day of the exam and distribute them to group members.

Format

  • Max 2 pages, 8.5x11" (printed double sided)
  • Minimum 7-point font
  • Margins minimum 0.5 inches
  • List all group member names on top of first page

Suggested content

  • I am not interested in testing rote memorization; the reference sheets are meant to help you focus on the "big picture"

  • For each "scholarly" reading:

    • Author/year
    • Type of document (e.g. summary chapter, empirical article, …)
    • Primary research questions
    • Methods (focus on relevant details)
    • Findings and implications
    • Other notable aspects or concepts

  • For each class period:

    • Main topics (headers) and relevant textbook content
    • Relation to the reading(s)
    • Focus of any in-class discussions or activities

  • Broadly: How does the content fit together?

Intersec­tionality

Black and white photo. Small group of Black women stand on a small platform. One holds a megaphone to her mouth. Another holds a sign by her feet that reads 'NOT ANOTHER BLACK WOMAN KILLED!

Barbara Smith with the Combahee River Collective in 1979

Intersectionality

A screenshot of a website with dropdown menus for ethnicity, ethnicity sub-category, and race. The ethnicity sub-category menu is open and lists many ethnicities.

Social categories

  • Race, gender, disability, ethnicity, sexuality …
  • Central to sociological research
  • Used to explain differences in outcomes, role expectations, etc.
  • Key explanations of inequality and discrimination

Often studied separately

  • Disciplinary framework encourage categorical separation
  • E.g. “Sociology of race and ethnicity” or the journal "Gender and Society"

Intersectionality

  • Intersectional sociology maintains that studying social categories (like race, disability, class, gender, sexuality, …) separately impedes our understanding of those categories

Intersectionality

DeGraffenreid v. General Motors (1976)

  • Term “intersectionality” coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to explain the outcome of a workplace discrimination lawsuit at General Motors filed by Black women employees (among other legal cases)
    Crenshaw, Kimberlé. "Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics." u. Chi. Legal f. (1989): 139.
  • GM had many Black men working in their factories, and many white women working in their offices, so the court found no evidence of racial or gender discrimination
Black and white photo. A Black man in an auto factory lowers an engine into a car. Black and white photo. A white woman sits in front of a large typewriter in an office.

Intersectionality

Social categories are not independent

  • “Rather than examining gender, race, class, and nation as distinctive social hierarchies, intersectionality examines how they mutually construct one another.”
    Collins, Patricia Hill. “It’s All In the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation.” Hypatia 13, no. 3 (August 1998): 62–82.
  • The experiences of, e.g., Black women is not just the experiences of being Black “plus” the experience of being a women

Intersectional analyses

  • Look at the way that multiple, overlapping social categories affect a social outcome
  • E.g. How can the intersection of gender, race, and class help us explain why Black women are 360% more likely to die during pregnancy than white women in the United States?
    https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternal-mortality/pregnancy-mortality-surveillance-system.htm
  • E.g. “The intersectional/interlocking nature of racism, sexism, classism, and colonialism compound the vulnerabilities faced by Aboriginal women in Canada.”
    Gilchrist, Kristen. 2010. “‘Newsworthy’ Victims?” Feminist Media Studies 10 (4): 373–90.
Screenshot of a Vox article. title: What Serena William's scary childbirth story says about medical treatment of black women. Features a photo of Serena Williams.

Three theoretical traditions

Throughout the semester, we will be be using three broad theoretical lenses to make sense of social phenomena:

1. Structural functionalism

2. Symbolic interactionism

Today

3. Conflict theory

Conflict theory

A large square labeled 'Society'. The interior of the square is broken up into several irregularly shaped regions.

Conflict theory

A large of a hippo labeled 'Society'. The interior of the hippo is broken up into several irregularly shaped regions. There is a large, prominent 'X' crossing out the whole image

Conflict theory

A large square labeled 'Society'. The interior of the square is broken up into several irregularly shaped regions. The regions at the top are labeled 'capital', and the regions at the bottom are labeled 'labor'. There are arrows pointing from each of the 'capital' regions to adjoining 'labor' regions.

Conflict theory

Some major themes from conflict theory:

Alienation (Karl Marx)

  • Humans relate to the products of their work in a very real way
  • Capitalism disconnects workers from the goods they produce
  • This necessarily yields feelings of alienation, dehumanizing workers
Photo of a board game box with large text 'Ms Monopoly'. Image is a cartoonish illustration of a woman in a blazer holding a cup of coffee standing on a busy commercial street.

Ideology (Karl Marx)

  • The ideology of the oppressors is adopted by oppressed
  • Ownership of means of production yields material and ideological power
  • Unified ideology of a culture is not due to a sense of collective belonging (as in Durkheim) but the imposition of that ideology by those in power

Conflict theory

Some major themes from conflict theory:

Authority (Max Weber)

  • Domination does not always come from a direct use of force
  • Government authority based on monopoly on “legitimate” means of force
  • Authority is given as much as taken
  • Weber: rational-legal, traditional, and charismatic authority

Multi-faceted (Weber, Du Bois, …)

  • Conflict is not just about capital versus labor
  • Many dimensions of society are defined by conflict within and between them
    Class, status, party stratification (Weber) Race, “Double consciousness” (Du Bois)
  • Many contemporary theoretical approaches can be thought of in the tradition of conflict theory (or critical theory)

Image credit

Black and white photo. Small group of Black women stand on a small platform. One holds a megaphone to her mouth. Another holds a sign by her feet that reads 'NOT ANOTHER BLACK WOMAN KILLED!

Barbara Smith at a 1979 rally. Photo by Ellen Shub, via The New Yorker

A screenshot of a website with dropdown menus for ethnicity, ethnicity sub-category, and race. The ethnicity sub-category menu is open and lists many ethnicities.

Image from teachingstrategies.my.site.com

Black and white photo. A Black man in an auto factory lowers an engine into a car.

Bettmann/Corbis via The New York Times

Black and white photo. A white woman sits in front of a large typewriter in an office.

FPG/Archive Photos/Getty Images via CNN

Screenshot of a Vox article. title: What Serena William's scary childbirth story says about medical treatment of black women. Featerus a photo of Serena Williams.

Screenshot from Vox

Combahee River Collective: Black lesbian socialist feminist colletive active in the 1970s Pointed out that the dominant Feminist movement was anti-Black, and civil rights movements were often sexist.

Williams: history of pulmonary embolisms, reported symptoms directly after childbirth and reported that she needed a CT scan and meds. Nurses first tried to dismiss as confusion from the medication, then tried an ultrasound of her legs before she insisted on getting the CT scan.