Contemporary articles citing Rubin G (1975) Anthr Women

women's, gender, recent, feminist, politics, concept, contributions, mainstream, second, understanding

Shiao, Jiannbin, Thomas Bode, Amber Beyer & Daniel Selvig. 2012. "The Genomic Challenge to the Social Construction of Race." Sociological Theory. 30:2 67-88. Link

Recent research on the human genome challenges the basic assumption that human races have no biological basis. In this article, we provide a theoretical synthesis that accepts the existence of genetic clusters consistent with certain racial classifications as well as the validity of the genomic research that has identified the clusters, without diminishing the social character of their context, meaning, production, or consequences. The first part of this article describes the social constructionist account of race as lacking biological reality, its main shortcomings, and our proposed solution: the concept of clinal classes. The second part discusses the character of the group differences that would be consistent with clinal classes and introduces the concept of genomic individualism, which extends an emerging model for understanding biosocial causation to include the genetic effects of ancestry. The third part develops the argument for a ``bounded nature'' reformulation of racial constructionism that reconceptualizes racial and ethnic categorization as the social perception of ancestry. The final part summarizes the article's contributions and outlines implications for future research.

Orloff, Ann. 2009. "Gendering the Comparative Analysis of Welfare States: an Unfinished Agenda." Sociological Theory. 27:3 317-343.

Can feminists count on welfare states-or at least some aspects of these complex systems-as resources in the struggle for gender equality ? Gender analysts of ``welfare states'' investigate this question and the broader set of issues around the mutually constitutive relationship between systems of social provision and regulation and gender. Feminist scholars have moved to bring the contingent practice of politics back into grounded fields of action and social change and away from the reification and abstractions that had come to dominate models of politics focused on ``big'' structures and systems, including those focused on ``welfare states.'' Conceptual innovations and reconceptualizations of foundational terms have been especially prominent in the comparative scholarship on welfare states, starting with gender, and including care, autonomy, citizenship, (in)dependence, political agency, and equality. In contrast to other subfields of political science and sociology, gendered insights have to some extent been incorporated into mainstream comparative scholarship on welfare states. The arguments between feminists and mainstream scholars over the course of the last two decades have been productive, powering the development of key themes and concepts pioneered by gender scholars, including ``defamilialization,'' the significance of unpaid care work in families and the difficulties of work-family ``reconciliation,'' gendered welfare state institutions, the relation between fertility and women's employment, and the partisan correlates of different family and gender policy models. Yet the mainstream still resists the deeper implications of feminist work, and has difficulties assimilating concepts of care, gendered power, dependency, and interdependency. Thus, the agenda of gendering comparative welfare state studies remains unfinished. To develop an understanding of what might be needed to finish that agenda, I assess the gendered contributions to the analysis of modern systems of social provision, starting with the concept of gender itself, then moving to studies of the gendered division of labor (including care) and of gendered political power.

Friedland, R. 2002. "Money, Sex, and God: the Erotic Logic of Religious Nationalism." Sociological Theory. 20:3 381-425. Link

God is once again afoot in the public sphere. Politics has become a religious obligation. For a new breed of religious nationalist the nation-state is a vehicle of the divine. This essay seeks to accomplish four things. The first is to argue for an institutional approach to religious nationalism in order both to interpret and explain it. Second, I argue that religion and nationalism partake of a common symbolic order and that religious nationalism is therefore not an oxymoron. Third, the essay seeks to explain why religion has become such a potent political force in our time. And fourth-the task that will take up the bulk of the text-it seeks a principle of intelligibility in the ``semiotic order of religious nationalism that can comprehend its preoccupation with both women's erotic bodies and monies out of national control.

Thistle, S. 2000. "The Trouble With Modernity: Gender and the Remaking of Social Theory." Sociological Theory. 18:2 275-288. Link

There is continued frustration over the failure of established social theory to be altered despite dramatic developments in women's lives and feminist theory. I argue that this process has been blocked by an overly static conception of society and gender itself. Close examination of the actual circumstances of African American and white women in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States reveals the relationship between gender and economic and political development has been a dynamic historical one, culminating recently in a radical transformation of women's lives and work. I develop the implications of this argument for older analytic divisions between work and home, or productive and reproductive labor, and for recent shifts in theory. Coherent grasp of the events currently altering women's lives provides a clear way to join gender with earlier theoretical concerns, as another moment of social transformation brought about by a still-infolding process of economic and political development.

Bernstein, Elizabeth. 2012. "Carceral Politics as Gender Justice? the ``traffic in Women'' and Neoliberal Circuits of Crime, Sex, and Rights." Theory and Society. 41:3 233-259. Link

This article draws upon recent works in sociology, jurisprudence, and feminist theory in order to assess the ways in which feminism, and sex and gender more generally, have become intricately interwoven with punitive agendas in contemporary US politics. Melding existing theoretical discussions of penal trends with insights drawn from my own ethnographic research on the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States-the most recent domain of feminist activism in which a crime frame has prevailed against competing models of social justice-I elaborate upon the ways that neoliberalism and the politics of sex and gender have intertwined to produce a carceral turn in feminist advocacy movements previously organized around struggles for economic justice and liberation. Taking the anti-trafficking movement as a case study, I further demonstrate how human rights discourse has become a key vehicle both for the transnationalization of carceral politics and for the reincorporation of these policies into the domestic terrain in a benevolent, feminist guise. I conclude by urging greater and more nuanced attention to the operations of gender and sexual politics within mainstream analyses of contemporary modes of punishment, as well as a careful consideration of the neoliberal carceral state within feminist discussions of gender, sexuality, and the law.