Intersexions

Addresses some of the key issues in contemporary society. Do writings about ethnicity, class and gender form a "holy trinity" or challenge previous unidimensional analyses as suggested by current scholarship? "Intersexions" accepts the triple perspective but goes further still.

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"Intersexions" addresses some of the key issues in contemporary society. Do writings about ethnicity, class and gender form a "holy trinity" or challenge previous unidimensional analyses? Current scholarship provides a strong justification to challenge boundaries and to stress inter-relationships rather than divisions between ways of knowing. "Intersexions" accepts the triple perspective but goes further still. One aim is to understand the processes by which relations of power are maintained, reproduced and resisted. "Intersexions" also examines modes of representation: within social theory, feminism, development theory and discussions of capitalism and post-colonialism, as well as dominant ideological notions of caste, domesticity and "success". The writers' approaches in "Intersexions" are all critical but are also concerned with providing alternatives: by combining comparative and specific analyses, paying attention to the written and spoken material by the people "represented" and by examining their own positions as commentators.
Topics range from discussions of family ideology and the inter-relations between paid work and domestic work in Australia, through the writings of Aboriginal and Vanuatuan women and of second-generation Greek Australians, to critiques of development paradigms and the cultural construction of gender and ethnicity in Bangladesh, India and Indonesia. Themes recur and overlap, and are discussed from several perspectives, bringing the reader back to the central debates. Unitary categories are questioned and the processes are demonstrated by which relations described as "class", "ethnic", "cultural" and "gender" intersect and interact with each other in complex and specific ways. Gill Bottomley is the author of "After the Odyssey" and co-editor of "The Family in the Modern World". Marie de Lepervanche is the author of "Indians in a White Australia" and co-editor of "Crossing boundaries: Feminisms and the Critique of Knowledges". Gill Bottomley and Marie de Leparvanche also co-edited "The Cultural Construction of Race" and "Ethnicity, Class and Gender in Australia. This book is intended for students and researchers in sociology, anthropology and women's studies.