To mark the 109th annual conference of the American Sociological Association, which will feature many Signs authors, Signs is making three articles freely available for a limited period. These recent articles, all written by conference attendees, demonstrate the conceptual and methodological innovations of feminist research on economic inequality published in Signs, as well as its political relevance.
Complementing the conference’s theme, “Hard Times: The Impact of Economic Inequality on Families and Individuals,” Jennifer Jihye Chun, George Lipsitz, and Young Shin’s “Intersectionality as Social Movement Strategy: Asian Immigrant Women Advocates” explores the labor organizing work of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) in Oakland and San Jose, California. The authors argue that the AIWA’s use of intersectional optic in understanding movements for social and economic justice enables low-income immigrant women workers to recognize operations of power and, in response, to create “insurgent identities that are dynamic and dialogic, more fluid and flexible than single-axis approaches.”
Jerry Flores’s “‘Staff Here Let You Get Down’: The Cultivation and Co-optation of Violence in a California Juvenile Detention Center” illuminates “how race, class, gender, and incarceration influence the dynamics of violence and nonviolence.” Flores’s “microanalysis” of the state production of violence demonstrates that correctional practices encourage, condone, and co-opt violence among girls in detention.
Sanyu A. Mojola’s “Providing Women, Kept Men: Doing Masculinity in the Wake of the African HIV/AIDS Pandemic” is based on ethnographic and interview-based fieldwork among the Luo ethnic group in western Kenya. The author explores accounts of intimate relationships between widowed women and poor young men in the context of the current economic crisis and highlights the gendering effects that emerge through these practices.
At ASA 2014, Sanyu A. Mojola will be presenting two papers on August 16: “The Power of Love: Consuming Women and Providing Men” and “HIV after 40 in Rural South Africa.” On August 18, George Lipsitz will participate as a panelist at the thematic session, “Cities in Hard Times: The End of Persistence of the Segregated Century?” and Jerry Flores will preside over the Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance’s “Punishment and Incarceration 2” roundtable session. Jennifer Jihye Chun is a panelist at the “Future of Unions” session, presenting the paper “The Emotional Politics of Unionism: Organizing across Gender and Racial Divides?” on August 19.