This research focuses on how children negotiate gender boundaries in middle childhood play. Over a nine-week period, children were observed creating, defining, and altering gender codes in a summer day camp. When girls and boys disregarded pre-described boundaries, they entered an area we refer to as the gender transgression zone. This area of activity, where boys and girls conduct heterosocial relations in hopes of either maintaining or expanding gender boundaries in child culture, is where gender transgression takes place. The study revealed that high-status boys used hegemonic masculinity to regulate both girls' and boys' boundaries by reserving the authority to sanction all gender transgressions. While race and class were salient for girls' homosocial organization and behavior, within this age group they did not appear to influence the boys' status system.
Using Black women's responses to same-race sexual assault, I demonstrate how scholars can use interpersonal violence to understand social processes and develop conceptual models. Specifically, I extend the concept of racial appraisal by shifting the focus from how indirect victims (e.g., family and friends) use race to appraise a traumatic event to how survivors themselves deploy race in the aftermath of rape. Relying on 111 interviews with Black women survivors in four cities, I analyze how race, gender, and class intersect and contour interpretations of sexual assault. I argue that African Americans in this study use racially inscribed cultural signifiers to root their understandings of rape within a racist social structure (i.e., a racial appraisal)-which they also perceive as sexist and, for some, classist-that encourages their silence about same-race sexual assault. African and Caribbean immigrants, however, often avoid the language of social structure in their rape accounts and use cultural references to distance themselves from African Americans. Last, I discuss the implications of my findings for Black feminist0intersectional theory.
Intersectionality has contributed to the ongoing deconstruction of dichotomous and essentializing categories of identity and oppression. As some scholars have noted, however, intersectionality has debunked a sociobiological, single-node paradigm and unintentionally codified a deterministic form of social cognition. I suggest one mechanism for understanding how to untangle this intersectional dilemma: disclosure practices. Disclosure of stigmatized statuses can illuminate how macro level inequalities manifest in individual thought processes. This study adds to emerging research by showing how social actors rely on intersectional experiences to understand, think about, and frame complex social problems. I examine this topic via 197 interviews with 102 Black participants who identify as LGBT about their views on same-sex marriage as a civil rights issue before and after same-sex marriage was nationally legalized. Specifically, I argue that the Black LGBT participants’ experience with intersectional discrimination and their levels of sexual and gender identity disclosure account for their personal views on same-sex marriage and Black civil rights. Further, the majority of Black participants across disclosure practices viewed marriage equality as primarily benefitting the property interests of White gays and lesbians. Last, I discuss the implications of my findings for LGBT politics and the connections between self-interest and political perspectives.
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