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Sapphic Primitivism
Productions of Race, Class, and Sexuality in Key Works of Modern Fiction
Hackett, Robin
Rutgers University Press, 2003

In this book, Robin Hackett examines portrayals of race, class, and sexuality in modernist texts by white women to argue for the existence of a literary device that she calls “Sapphic primitivism.” The works vary widely in their form and content and include Olive Schreiner’s proto-modernist exploration of New Womanhood, The Story of an African Farm; Virginia Woolf’s high modernist “play-poem,” The Waves; Sylvia Townsend Warner’s historical novel, Summer Will Show; and Willa Cather’s Southern pastoral, Sapphira and the Slave Girl. In each, blackness and working-class culture are figured to represent sexual autonomy, including lesbianism, for white women. Sapphic primitivism exposes the ways several classes of identification were intertwined with the development of homosexual identities at the turn of the century. Sapphic primitivism is not, however, a means of disguising lesbian content. Rather, it is an aesthetic displacement device that simultaneously exposes lesbianism and exploits modern, primitivist modes of self-representation. Hackett’s revelations of the mutual interests of those who study early twentieth-century constructions of race and sexuality and twenty-first-century feminists doing anti-racist and queer work are a major contribution to literary studies and identity theory.

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Small Town in Mass Society
Class, Power, and Religion in a Rural Community (rev. ed.)
Arthur J. Vidich and Joseph BensmanForeword by Michael W. Hughey
University of Illinois Press, 2000
First published in 1958, Small Town in Mass Society set community studies on a new course by placing the small town within the framework of large-scale, bureaucratic mass society. Drawing attention to the dynamics of class and ethnicity in relation to economics and politics, this landmark work was among the first to document the consequences of centralized administration on life in American communities.
 
Through a close study of "Springdale, New York," Arthur J. Vidich and Joseph Bensman depict the small town as continuously and increasingly drawn into the central institutions and processes of the total society. Vidich and Bensman based their conclusions on extensive interviews with and close observation of the inhabitants of one community. The original publication of the book caused a sharp response among the town's citizens who felt their trust had been violated and their town misrepresented.
 
The present volume includes the editorials and correspondence evoked by that controversy, the authors' articles describing their methodology, a new foreword by Michael W. Hughey, and a new afterword in which Arthur J. Vidich recounts the creation and history of the book.
 
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Speaking of Race and Class
The Student Experience at an Elite College
Elizabeth Aries
Temple University Press, 2012

In Speaking of Race and Class, the follow-up volume to her groundbreaking Race and Class Matters at an Elite College, Elizabeth Aries completes her four-year study of diversity at a prestigious liberal arts college. Here, the 58 students—affluent, lower-income, black, and white—that Aries has interviewed since they were Amherst freshmen provide a complete picture of what and how each group learned about issues of race and class.

Aries presents the students’ personal perceptions of their experiences. She reveals the extent to which learning from diversity takes place on campus, and examines the distinct challenges that arise for students living in this heterogeneous community. Aries also looks more broadly at how colleges and universities across the country are addressing the challenges surrounding diversity. Speaking of Race and Class testifies to the programming and practices that have proven successful.

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Spectres of 1919
Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro
Barbara Foley
University of Illinois Press, 2002

A look at the violent “Red Summer of 1919” and its intersection with the highly politicized New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance

With the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s was a landmark decade in African American political and cultural history, characterized by an upsurge in racial awareness and artistic creativity. In Spectres of 1919 Barbara Foley traces the origins of this revolutionary era to the turbulent year 1919, identifying the events and trends in American society that spurred the black community to action and examining the forms that action took as it evolved.

Unlike prior studies of the Harlem Renaissance, which see 1919 as significant mostly because of the geographic migrations of blacks to the North, Spectres of 1919 looks at that year as the political crucible from which the radicalism of the 1920s emerged. Foley draws from a wealth of primary sources, taking a bold new approach to the origins of African American radicalism and adding nuance and complexity to the understanding of a fascinating and vibrant era.

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Splintered Sisterhood
Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage
Susan E. Marshall
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997

When Tennessee became the thirty-sixth and final state needed to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment in August 1920, giving women the right to vote, one group of women expressed bitter disappointment and vowed to fight against “this feminist disease.” Why this fierce and extended opposition? In Splintered Sisterhood, Susan Marshall argues that the women of the antisuffrage movement mobilized not as threatened homemakers but as influential political strategists.
    Drawing on surviving records of major antisuffrage organizations, Marshall makes clear that antisuffrage women organized to protect gendered class interests. She shows that many of the most vocal antisuffragists were wealthy, educated women who exercised considerable political influence through their personal ties to men in politics as well as by their own positions as leaders of social service committees. Under the guise of defending an ideal of “true womanhood,” these powerful women sought to keep the vote from lower-class women, fearing it would result in an increase in the “ignorant vote” and in their own displacement from positions of influence. This book reveals the increasingly militant style of antisuffrage protest as the conflict over female voting rights escalated. Splintered Sisterhood adds a missing piece to the history of women’s rights activism in the United States and illuminates current issues of antifeminism.

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The Stamp of Class
Reflections on Poetry and Social Class
Gary Lenhart
University of Michigan Press, 2005
"The Stamp of Class addresses an important area that has not received sufficient attention. Lenhart directly confronts and deeply analyzes these questions while offering readers his clear, informative discussion."
-Lorenzo Thomas


The Stamp of Class explores the nature of reading poetry in the context of class and its themes and sheds new light on how this important yet little-heralded subject affects the poet's life and work.

While numerous works have taken up the question of race and gender as they relate to literary creation, this is the first book of its kind to probe the interplay between class and American poetry. Author Gary Lenhart considers poetry and class across a wide variety of time periods and poetic trends and reflects on a range of influential poets from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries.

The essays in The Stamp of Class deal with the question of class as reflected in the works of Tracie Morris, Tillie Olsen, Melvin Tolson, William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, and others. The work is rooted in the author's own experiences as a working-class poet and teacher and is the result of more than a decade of exploration.

Poet and scholar Gary Lenhart is Lecturer in English at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. His most recent books of poetry are Father and Son Night, Light Heart, and One at a Time. His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including the American Poetry Review, American Book Review, and Exquisite Corpse.
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Strained Sisterhood
Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society
Debra Gold Hansen
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
Why do some feminists advocate male-female equality while others remain committed to gender difference? What are the sociocultural foundations of these seemingly opposing gender constructs and why has the American feminist movement failed to articulate an ideology that encompasses both?

Debra Gold Hansen explores the origins of the equality-versus-difference debate by examining the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, which disbanded in 1840 over this very issue. After establishing a historical framework for women's lives in early nineteenth-century Boston, Hansen analyzes the membership of the Society along the lines of race, religion, and socioeconomic status. Through her findings, she concludes that many of the issues that estranged female abolitionists in antebellum Boston continue to divide women today, testifying not to the strength of the bonds between women but to the fragility of those ties.
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Streetwise
Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community
Elijah Anderson
University of Chicago Press, 1990
In a powerful, revealing portrait of city life, Anderson explores the dilemma of both blacks and whites, the underclass and the middle class, caught up in the new struggle not only for common ground—prime real estate in a racially changing neighborhood—but for shared moral community. Blacks and whites from a variety of backgrounds speak candidly about their lives, their differences, and their battle for viable communities.

"The sharpness of his observations and the simple clarity of his prose recommend his book far beyond an academic audience. Vivid, unflinching, finely observed, Streetwise is a powerful and intensely frightening picture of the inner city."—Tamar Jacoby, New York Times Book Review

"The book is without peer in the urban sociology literature. . . . A first-rate piece of social science, and a very good read."—Glenn C. Loury, Washington Times
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Styling Masculinity
Gender, Class, and Inequality in the Men's Grooming Industry
Barber, Kristen
Rutgers University Press, 2016
The twenty-first century has seen the emergence of a new style of man: the metrosexual. Overwhelmingly straight, white, and wealthy, these impeccably coiffed urban professionals spend big money on everything from facials to pedicures, all part of a multi-billion-dollar male grooming industry. Yet as this innovative study reveals, even as the industry encourages men to invest more in their appearance, it still relies on women to do much of the work.
 
Styling Masculinity investigates how men’s beauty salons have persuaded their clientele to regard them as masculine spaces. To answer this question, sociologist Kristen Barber goes inside Adonis and The Executive, two upscale men’s salons in Southern California. Conducting detailed observations and extensive interviews with both customers and employees, she shows how female salon workers not only perform the physical labor of snipping, tweezing, waxing, and exfoliating, but also perform the emotional labor of pampering their clients and pumping up their masculine egos. 
 
Letting salon employees tell their own stories, Barber not only documents occasions when these workers are objectified and demeaned, but also explores how their jobs allow for creativity and confer a degree of professional dignity. In the process, she traces the vast network of economic and social relations that undergird the burgeoning male beauty industry. 
 
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Sunbelt Diaspora
Race, Class, and Latino Politics in Puerto Rican Orlando
By Patricia Silver
University of Texas Press, 2020

2021 — Silver Medal, Raul Yzaguirre Best Political/Current Affairs Book – International Latino Book Awards, Latino Literacy Now

An in-depth look at an emerging Latino presence in Orlando, Florida, where Puerto Ricans and others navigate differences of race, class, and place of origin in their struggle for social, economic, and political belonging.

Puerto Ricans make up half of Orlando-area Latinos, arriving from Puerto Rico as well as from other long-established diaspora communities to a place where Latino politics has long been about Cubans in Miami. Together with other Latinos from multiple places, Puerto Ricans bring diverse experiences of race and class to this Sunbelt city. Tracing the emergence of the Puerto Rican and Latino presence in Orlando from the 1940s through an ethnographic moment of twenty-first-century electoral redistricting, Sunbelt Diaspora provides a timely prism for viewing how differences of race, class, and place play out in struggles to claim political, social, and economic ground for Latinos.

Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic, oral history, and archival research, Patricia Silver situates her findings in Orlando’s historically black-white racial landscape, post-1960s claims to “color-blindness,” and neoliberal celebrations of individualism. Through the voices of diverse participants, Silver brings anthropological attention to the question of how social difference affects collective identification and political practice. Sunbelt Diaspora asks what constitutes community and how criteria for membership and legitimate representation are negotiated.

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