Thursday, May 31—1:30–4:30 p.m.
Identities and Inequalities:
Exploring the Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, & Sexuality
For centuries, academics have been trying to explain the myriad ways in which race/ethnicity, class, gender—and more recently, sexuality—shape our lives and determine our access to important life chances. In my field, sociology, these concepts are the bread and butter of the discipline. You’d be hardpressed to find a sociologist who would deny their weight or completely ignore them in his or her courses.
But in the interests of expediency and ease, most of us still tend to teach race/ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality as independent, mutually exclusive concepts. Unfortunately, that’s not the way we live our lives. We don’t perceive the world and our place in it through the lens of one social identifier at a time. Rather, we experience all of them simultaneously. Sure some are more prominent than others depending on the social situation in which we find ourselves. But it’s how they intersect and disengage that determines who we are, how we live, and where we fit in a society stratified along several different paths. All of us at some point derive varying amounts of penalty and privilege from the systems of inequality that frame our social world. The key to overcoming structures of disadvantage, therefore, is to recognize the multiple intersecting dimensions of inequality: race/ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. It is only by acknowledging their simultaneity that we can come to see ourselves and others as advantaged in some ways and disadvantaged in others.
In this session, I will explore this complex reality and examine these intersections as both elements of personal identity and sources of social inequality. I will pay particular attention to the difficulties intersectionality presents in college courses, not only in terms of the social identifiers students (and faculty) bring with them, but in terms of substantive course material and classroom conversation. How can we avoid the modular “this week is gender, next week is race” pedagogical approach and effectively teach our students to understand the intersections of race/ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality in their everyday lives? At the same time, how do we overcome students’ sometimes paralyzing unwillingness to raise, address, and critically examine these issues? To set the stage for this discussion, I will draw from my book, Identities and Inequalities, as well as my own experiences teaching for almost 25 years at a small, private, liberal arts college. I envision this session being more of a dialogue than a monologue – interactive, informal, and, above all pragmatically helpful in our collective search for ways to engage our sometimes resistant, sometimes complacent, and sometimes angry students.
 David M. Newman, Ph.D.,
Professor of Sociology
Sociology and Anthropology
DePauw University
Greencastle, Indiana
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