France Winddance Twine

Inequality and Opportunity in Silicon Valley

Geek Girls

Kathleen M. Blee

This interdisciplinary anthology bridges gaps between feminist and antiracist theories and practices by providing original empirical studies of feminist antiracist organizing in Australia, Canada, India, Italy, France, Japan, South Africa, the United States, Yemen, and Zimbabwe. International scholars and activists examine how the local and national context shapes the ways that feminists engage in antiracist practices, how women in various regions counter the perception that feminism is a "Western" ideology, and how globalization creates new opportunities for organizing.

International Struggles for Justice

Feminism and Antiracism

In Racism in a Racial Democracy, France Winddance Twine asks why Brazilians, particularly Afro-Brazilians, continue to have faith in Brazil's "racial democracy" in the face of pervasive racism in all spheres of Brazilian life. Through a detailed ethnography, Twine provides a cultural analysis of the everyday discursive and material practices that sustain and naturalize white supremacy. This is the first ethnographic study of racism in southeastern Brazil to place the practices of upwardly mobile Afro-Brazilians at the center of analysis. Based on extensive field research and more than fifty life histories with Afro- and Euro-Brazilians, this book analyzes how Brazilians conceptualize and respond to racial disparities. Twine illuminates the obstacles Brazilian activists face when attempting to generate grassroots support for an antiracist movement among the majority of working class Brazilians. Anyone interested in racism and antiracism in Latin America will find this book compelling.

The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil

Racism in a Racial Democracy

A nuanced understanding of state violence and gender (in)equalities must consider the varied and contradictory experiences of armed civilian women, female soldiers, and opponents of gun possession. How is ‘feminism’ and ‘femininity’ negotiated in the early 21st century by civilian and military women in a nation that fetishizes guns? This book addresses this social problem by offering a comparative analysis of the particular dilemmas that gender inequality, class inequality, race/racism and U.S. nationalism generate for women of diverse backgrounds who are struggling to balance conventional gender roles, femininity and gendered violence in the United States.

Firearms, Feminism, and Militarism

Girls with Guns

Through case studies, Outsourcing the Womb, Second Edition provides a critical analysis and global tour of the international surrogacy landscape in Egypt, India, China, Japan, Israel, Ukraine, the European Union and the United States. By providing a comparative analysis of countries that have very different policies, this book disentangles the complex role that race, religion, class inequality, legal regimes, and global capitalism play in the gestational surrogacy market. This book provides an intersectional frame of analysis in which multiple forms of social inequality and power differences become institutionalized and restrict the access of some individuals and families while privileging others, and concludes with a discussion of "reproductive justice" and "reproductive liberty." It is an ideal addition to courses on social problems, race, gender, and inequality.

Race, Class and Gestational Surrogacy in a Global Market

Outsourcing the Womb

An inside account of gender and racial discrimination in the high-tech industry Why is being a computer “geek” still perceived to be a masculine occupation? Why do men continue to greatly outnumber women in the high-technology industry? Since 2014, a growing number of employment discrimination lawsuits has called attention to a persistent pattern of gender discrimination in the tech world. Much has been written about the industry’s failure to adequately address gender and racial inequalities, yet rarely have we gotten an intimate look inside these companies. In Geek Girls, France Winddance Twine provides the first book by a sociologist that “lifts the Silicon veil” to provide firsthand accounts of inequality and opportunity in the tech ecosystem. This work draws on close to a hundred interviews with male and female technology workers of diverse racial, ethnic, and educational backgrounds who are currently employed at tech firms such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, and at various start-ups in the San Francisco Bay area. Geek Girls captures what it is like to work as a technically skilled woman in Silicon Valley. With a sharp eye for detail and compelling testimonials from industry insiders, Twine shows how the technology industry remains rigged against women, and especially Black, Latinx, and Native American women from working class backgrounds. From recruitment and hiring practices that give priority to those with family, friends, and classmates employed in the industry, to social and educational segregation, to academic prestige hierarchies, Twine reveals how women are blocked from entering this industry. Women who do not belong to the dominant ethnic groups in the industry are denied employment opportunities, and even actively pushed out, despite their technical skills and qualifications. While the technology firms strongly embrace the rhetoric of diversity and oppose discrimination in the workplace, Twine argues that closed social networks and routine hiring practices described by employees reinforce the status quo and reproduce inequality. The myth of meritocracy and gender stereotypes operate in tandem to produce a culture where the use of race-, color-, and power-evasive language makes it difficult for individuals to name the micro-aggressions and forms of discrimination that they experience. Twine offers concrete insights into how the technology industry can address ongoing racial and gender disparities, create more transparency and empower women from underrepresented groups, who continued to be denied opportunities.

Bradley Gardener

How are social inequalities experienced, reproduced and challenged in local, global and transnational spaces? What role does the control of space play in distribution of crucial resources and forms of capital (housing, education, pleasure, leisure, social relationships)? The case studies in Geographies of Privilege demonstrate how power operates and is activated within local, national, and global networks. Twine and Gardener have put together a collection that analyzes how the centrality of spaces (domestic, institutional, leisure, educational) are central to the production, maintenance and transformation of inequalities. The collected readings show how power--in the form of economic, social, symbolic, and cultural capital--is employed and experienced. The volume’s contributors take the reader to diverse sites, including brothels, blues clubs, dance clubs, elite schools, detention centers, advocacy organizations, and public sidewalks in Canada, Italy, Spain, United Arab Emirates, Mozambique, South Africa, and the United States. Geographies of Privilege is the perfect teaching tool for courses on social problems, race, class and gender in Geography, Sociology and Anthropology.

Geographies of Privilege

Helena Ragoné

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Race, Class, Sexuality, Nationalism

Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood

Jonathan Warren

A white woman studies upper-class eighth grade girls at her alma mater on Long Island and finds a culture founded on misinformation about its own racial and class identity. A black American researcher is repeatedly assumed by many Brazilian subjects to be a domestic servant or sex worker. Racing Race, Researching Race is the first volume of its kind to explore how ideologies of race and racism intersect with nationality and gender to shape the research experience. Critical work in race studies has not adequately addressed how racial positions in the field--as inflected by nationality, gender, and age--generate numerous methodological dilemmas. Racing Research, Researching Race begins to fill this gap by infusing critical race studies with more empirical work and suggesting how a critical race perspective might improve research methodologies and outcomes. The contributors to the volume encompass a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds including anthropology, sociology, ethnic studies, women=s studies, political science, and Asian American studies.

Methodological Dilemmas in Critical Race Studies

Racing Research, Researching Race

A White Side of Black Britain explores the racial consciousness of white women in the United Kingdom who have had children with black men, primarily British-born men of Caribbean heritage. Contending that social scientists do not adequately understand how white members of black families negotiate race, France Winddance Twine describes the everyday lives of white women raising children of African Caribbean descent in a racially diverse mid-size British city. Varying in age, income, and education, the women at the centre of Twine's ethnography share moving stories about how they met the fathers of their children, how they incorporate ideas about race and racism into their parenting, and how their thinking about race and social relations changed over time. Interviewing and observing more than forty multiracial families over the span of a decade, Twine discovered that the white women's sense of belonging and racial consciousness was derived as much from their interactions with their partner's family and friends as it was from their romantic relations with black men. In addition to the white birth mothers, Twine interviewed their children, partners, and extended families, and her book can be read in part as a dialogue about race among black and white members of the same families. It includes intimate photographs of the women and their children, partners, extended families, and community.

France Winddance Twine

About

Books

Join the club