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| In feminist theory ‘intersectionality’ has emerged as an analytic strategy
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| to address the interrelation of multiple, crosscutting institutionalized power relations defined by
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| race, class, gender, and sexuality (and other axes of domination).
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| […] If feminism is to become a powerful movement again, working-class women will have
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| to organize across the divides of race/ethnicity and sexuality.
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| Therefore, it is of political importance to understand how class locations,
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| in intersection with race/ethnicity and sexuality, shape women’s survival projects [….]
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| [edit] Class Locations and Intersections
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| Intersectional analysis, developed primarily by feminist women-of-color scholars and writers,
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| demonstrates that race and gender oppressions do not build on each other in any simple additive way.
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| White feminists’ failure to understand this has contributed significantly
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| to missed opportunities for building an inclusive feminist movement. […]
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| Class locations are difficult to define
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| [….] Defining class locations becomes especially fraught for intersectional analysis,
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| because in most instances we are not comparing those who own capital with those who do not,
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| but are trying rather to understand relations of power
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| and relative privilege among those who do wage and salaried work. […]
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| [edit] Capitalist Class Power and the Politics of Resistance
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| The civil rights and feminist movements combined revolutionary and reformist aims,
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| their radical wings seeking to redistribute economic and political power.
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| Though falling far short of this goal, the movements did dismantle
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| the old gender and racial orders and opened the field for other movements against oppression
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| (for example, gay/lesbian rights, disability rights).
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| They have made it possible for a new left challenge, when it develops,
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| to be far more self-consciously and powerfully
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| anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-heterosexist than any that has gone before.
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| On the other hand, by almost any measure, neither racial oppression nor male domination
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| has disappeared from the scene.
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| They have, however, been fundamentally reorganized.
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| Both operate, now, not through an explicit, legally and culturally authorized system of exclusion,
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| but through a process of incorporation that systemically reproduces disadvantage. […]
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| To understand […] both the gains and impasses of the civil rights and women’s movements,
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| their ability to challenge so thoroughly and to change ways of thinking about race and gender
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| and their inability to sustain this challenge,
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| it is helpful to put them in the context of the periods of capitalist economic transformation.
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| The economic changes that were already reshaping
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| the political landscape in the 1970 and 1980 accelerated in the 1990s:
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| the expansion of markets and production, the increase in labor migration both within and
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| across national borders, the flexibility and mobility of investment/production,
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| the penetration of global firms into the U .S. economy not only in goods but in services,
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| the increasing freeing of global firms from control and regulation by national states.
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| The capitalist restructuring that first undermined the conditions of blue-collar workers
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| in core manufacturing industries now threatens security and stability of jobs
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| in many sectors - from middle managers and supervisors to production workers.
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| At the core of these changes are not simply globalization but capital’s increasing
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| flexibility, mobility, and concentrated power, as well as the intensity of capitalist competition
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| and the employers’ drive to squeeze ever more out of the workforce.
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| […] As in the significant periods of capitalist restructuring that preceded this one,
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| the institutions of working-class political and economic defense that had been built up
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| under the old paradigm and that might have worked (although not all that well)
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| previously are now utterly unable to respond to new conditions.
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| Until some alternatives develop, the political hegemony of the modernizing right can be expected to remain in place.
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