An Intersectional Exploration: The Experiences of Southern, Rural, Black and White Women Participating in an Empowerment-Based Entrepreneurial Program
Intersectionality is gaining ground as a desired way of deepening our understanding of persisting inequalities engendered by poverty. Combining an intersectional framework and the idea of strategic gender needs developed by Moser (1993), this study explores the experiences and perceptions of empowerment among rural black and white women in the southern U.S. and highlights the significance of intersectionality in exploring such issues. The findings reveal a diversity of experiences and perceptions of empowerment within the broader construction of womanhood. This paper raises the question about the shared identity of womanhood in rural southern communities. Such an understanding compels us to look closer at how oppressive ideologies become embedded within institutional structures and constrain our understanding of rural poverty. Additionally, this understanding calls us to investigate the capacity of anti-poverty and asset development efforts to work for different groups of women. Efforts such as these hold major implications for the social work profession and others who are challenged to understand and adequately address poverty in rural communities.
The politics of becoming bodies: Sex, gender and intersubjectivity in motion
Abstract This paper presents readers with one (research) story about (sexed and gendered) bodies not as objects with inherent boundaries and properties but as material-discursive phenomena. In telling such a story I examine the role that the screendance, Becoming Bodies , has played in knowledge production and argue for a less ontologically ‘old fashioned’ view of what counts as ‘evidence’. Throughout the paper I draw from a range of feminisms: biological, phenomenological, poststructural, psychoanalytical, and post humanist and performative scholarship of sex and gender. These discourses contest nature/nurture, male/female, body/mind dualisms, and take the political and ethical view that bodies are not neutral; that sex and gender, being a woman or a man are both socially and biologically constructed forms of identity (similar to class and race) that are acquired and learned through socio-cultural regimes of discipline and intersubjective bodily practices. Building on this dynamic and developmental bio-psycho-social view I discuss selected aspects of interview data: (1) the material-discursive tensions and contradictions of sexing and gendering bodies and (2) troubling the intersubjective implications of this for clinical practices.
The Impact of Welfare Reform on Men's Violence against Women
Welfare reform is likely to have a profound effect on the lives of poor women who are being abused. This article proposes exchange theory and the feminist “backlash hypothesis” as frameworks with which to assess the impact of welfare reform on violence levels in abusive relationships. Exchange theory suggests that if a woman leaves welfare and obtains employment that increases her economic resources, violence against her will decrease. The backlash hypothesis makes a different prediction: Violence will increase as men attempt to compensate for women's enhanced status or independence. Both approaches are examined in light of current data. As demonstrated here, the incorporation into social policy analyses of feminist thinking about dominance and power will enrich our understanding of the impact of social policy changes on people.