Gender and Race, Intersection of

Structural Locations Rather than Physical Characteristics

In 1892, classical sociological theorist Anna Julia Cooper wondered which train station restroom would be most appropriate for her to enter—the one “for ladies” or the one “for colored people.” Black women's invisibility, still apparent more than 100 years later in the common use of phrases such as “women and minorities,” has been the catalyst for the deliberate study of the intersections of race, class, and gender. One of the most fundamental principles race-class-gender scholars have demonstrated is that this invisibility is structural and systematic rather than a result of happenstance. With ideological mortar, race, class, and gender are built as social locations to which individuals are relegated. Much as a dwelling that can be rented in one part of town comes with a garbage disposal, hot water, and air-conditioning, whereas a dwelling across town lacks these amenities, social locations “come with” a variety of (continually varying) advantages and disadvantages that give structure to inhabitants' opportunities to meet their material and emotional needs.

Race, class, and gender, then, are not simply ways of describing people's bodies. Rather, they are organizing principles that maintain differences and separation between groups—between Black men and Latinos, between Asian American women and White men, between working-class and middle-class Arab American women. Focusing on social locations rather than on biology shows that what happens in people's lives is not simply a manifestation of any innate characteristics they may have. Rather, their lives get shaped by the amenities available to people in their social locations. The Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Movement, and the Labor Movement are examples of people working to expand access to those amenities (e.g., voting rights, fair pay) to people who had previously been restricted from them.

According to intersection theorists, those who occupy social locations that provide them with opportunities to express political, economic, and social power may systematically ignore or deliberately deemphasize the conditions attached to the social locations of disadvantaged groups such as the consequences of racism for mothers in the labor market and the disproportionate care work expected of women of color. The lack of attention to issues like these results in laws, policies, literature, history, science, patterns of production, media representation, and other living arrangements structured around the life situations of those in advantageous social locations. This structural invisibility is alternately structural hypervisibility when it meets the interests of those in more powerful social locations such as when Latinas are portrayed as “illegal aliens” or Black men are portrayed as dangerous criminals. These coin sides make up one set of advantages and disadvantages that come with the social locations shaped by the intersections of race, class, and gender.

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