Using a gender-sensitive political economy approach, this book analyzes the emergence of new migration patterns between Central Mexico and the East Coast of the United States in the last decades of the twentieth century, and return migration during and after the global economic crisis of 2007. Based on ethnographic research carried out over a decade, details of the lives of women and men from two rural communities reveal how neoliberal economic restructuring led to the deterioration of livelihoods starting in the 1980s. Similar restructuring processes in the United States opened up opportunities for Mexican workers to labor in US industries that relied heavily on undocumented workers to sustain their profits and grow. When the Great Recession hit, in the context of increasingly restrictive immigration policies, some immigrants were more likely to return to Mexico than others. This longitudinal study demonstrates how the interconnections among class and gender are key to understanding who stayed and who returned to Mexico during and after the global economic crisis. Through these case studies, the authors comment more widely on how neoliberalism has affected the livelihoods and aspirations of the working classes. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners in migration studies, gender studies/politics, and more broadly to international relations, anthropology, development studies, and human geography.

Explanations of how identities are constructed are fundamental to contemporary debates in feminism and in cultural and social theory. Formations of Class & Gender demonstrates why class should be featured more prominently in theoretical accounts of gender, identity and power. Beverley Skeggs identifies the neglect of class, and shows how class and gender must be fused together to produce an accurate representation of power relations in modern society. The book questions how theoretical frameworks are generated for understanding how women live and produce themselves through social and cultural relations. It uses detailed ethnographic research to explain how ′real′ women inhabit and occupy the social and cultural positions of class, femininity and sexuality. As a critical examination of cultural representation - informed by recent feminist theory and the work of Pierre Bourdieu - the book is an articulate demonstration of how to translate theory into practice.

This book examines the structures of power and hierarchies within the agrarian political economy in India, with a focus on gender. It analyses various forms of inequalities within rural structures while situating the position of women and Dalit agriculture labourers within these discriminate networks of social exclusion, political marginalisation and poverty. The book maps the impacts of neoliberal capitalist globalisation on agrarian relations to identify who labourers are and how rural diversification is shaped by class, caste and gender hierarchies specifically in the villages of eastern Uttar Pradesh. It looks at occupational patterns of women workers, labour relations and reconceptualisation of labour. The book documents the experiences of exploitation as well as forms of resistance and collective action of rural women labourers. In doing this, the book deals with processes witnessed across the global South – rural distress, depeasantisation, migration, feminisation of agriculture as well as identity-based inequalities in rural labour markets. Rich in empirical data, the book will be useful for scholars and researchers of labour studies, women’s studies, political economy, agrarian economy, agrarian sociology, rural sociology, sociology, development studies and political studies.

Originally published in 1992, this book places Cypriot migration to Britain within the context of New Commonwealth migration as a whole and within developments in the field of racial and ethnic relations. It provides an account of the economic and social position of Cypriots in British society, paying particular attention to a number of central theoretical and political debates relating to class, ethnicity, racism and gender. The book argues that migrant groups have to be understood in terms of the interaction between the internal cultural and social differentiations within the group and the wider structural, institutional and ideological processes of the country of migration. Gender divisions and the family are seen as central in understanding the forms of settlement and the economic and social placement of a migrant group.

Joseph F. Healey’s Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Class, Sixth Edition builds upon the bestselling status of the prior editions, praised for the author’s writing style and the various effective pedagogical features that ensure students engage with core concepts in a meaningful way. With many updates and revisions, this edition once again uses sociological theory to tell the story of race and other socially constructed inequalities in the United States with consistency and clarity. Chapter-ending current debates based on the writings of prominent scholars spark classroom discussion on important issues, and first-person accounts, “Narrative Portraits,” are threaded throughout the text to bring life to a variety of topics.

In this collection of informative essays, Noralee Frankel and Nancy S. Dye bring together work by such notable scholars as Ellen Carol DuBois, Alice Kessler-Harris, Barbara Sicherman, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn to illuminate the lives and labor of American women from the late nineteenth century to the early 1920s. Revealing the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and social class, the authors explore women's accomplishments in changing welfare and labor legislation; early twentieth century feminism and women's suffrage; women in industry and the work force; the relationship between family and community in early twentieth-century America; and the ways in which African American, immigrant, and working-class women contributed to progressive reform. This challenging collection not only displays the dramatic transformations women of all classes experienced, but also helps construct a new scaffolding for progressivism in general.

Leach and Pini bring together empirical and theoretical studies that consider the intersections of class, gender and rurality. Each chapter engages with current debates on these concepts to explore them in the context of contemporary social and economic transformations in which global processes that reconstitute gender and class interconnect with and take shape in a particular form of locality - the rural. The book is innovative in that it: - responds to calls for more critical work on the rural 'other' - contributes to scholarship on gender and rurality, but does so through the lens of class. This book places the question of gender, rurality and difference at its centre through its focus on class - addresses the urban bias of much class scholarship as well as the lack of gender analysis in much rural and class academic work - focuses on the ways that class mediates the construction and practices of rural men/masculinities and rural women/femininities - challenges prevalent (and divergent) assumptions with chapters utilising contemporary theorisations of class With the empirical strongly grounded in theory, this book will appeal to scholars working in the fields of gender, rurality, identity, and class studies.

During China’s “socio-economic transition period”, stretching from 1978 to the present day, the nation’s social structure underwent enormous changes. The economic restructuring from a centrally-planned economy to a market-oriented one, combined with the retreat of the state administrative sphere from the labour market, gradually transformed the mechanisms of resource allocation. This has given rise to enlarging gaps between different social groups, which have led to an escalation in tensions between the higher and the lower social strata. In addition, the situation of Chinese women has also changed, with those in contemporary China in a quite different position from their “pre-communist”, “traditional” counterparts. Over recent decades, more equalitarian policies have made a great deal of difference, not only to women’s self-identification, but also to their social milieu. However, the female employment rate has gradually declined since the economic reforms began, meaning this period has had a major impact on the social status and conditions of Chinese women. These social transformations and differences between the genders have provided an unusual opportunity for scholars and researchers who are interested in social change. As such, this book examines the social structure of contemporary China, exploring how resources are distributed among the different social strata, and how these strata have transformed with the economic reforms and development. In addition, it also investigates the current socio-economic circumstances of Chinese women, especially since many female workers were laid off (xiagang) by state owned enterprises (SOEs) and collectively owned enterprises (COEs) during the “industrial restructuring”. In confronting an ever more competitive market environment, has the situation of women degraded or progressed? Do all women face a similar situation, or are there discrepancies that exist amongst them? What are the factors contributing to these divisions? In discussing these questions, this book allows readers to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the current Chinese social structure, and how it has transformed, as well as its influence on gender differentiation.

This book interrogates the role of gender and class in shaping women’s everyday leisure practices. Drawing on empirical research in urban Turkey, the book explores how leisure is perceived and practised by women within their communities. The book examines the relationship of women’s leisure to their labour, women’s access to and uses of public leisure spaces, and the dynamics of their everyday sociability within their neighbourhoods. It is the first book to apply Skegg’s concept of ‘respectability’ – socially recognised judgments and standards which label the ‘right’ practices, that hold morality and power in a given context – as a theoretical tool with which to understand leisure in a country in which modernisation and Westernisation have been a central dynamic shaping political, social, and cultural life. This analysis reveals that two measures of gendered respectability – reproductive work and the honour code – and how they mediate with the classed measures of respectability, are essential to understanding women’s leisure practices in the Turkish context. The book argues that these interactions are likely shared in many Global South countries, including Islamic societies. Therefore, this analysis shines important new light on women’s experiences more broadly, and on the social, political, and cultural dynamics of traditional social structures in a modernising world. This book is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in leisure studies, women’s studies, sociology, cultural studies, or Middle East studies.