Overview

In this examination of white and Mexican-American girls coming of age in California's Central Valley, Julie Bettie offers tools for understanding the ways in which class identity is constructed and, at times, fails to be constructed in relationship to colour, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Documenting the categories of subculture and style that high school students use to explain class and racial/ethnic differences among themselves, Bettie depicts the complex identity performances of contemporary girls. The title, ""Women Without Class"", refers at once to young working-class women who have little cultural capital to enable class mobility, to the fact that class analysis and social theory has remained insufficiently transformed by feminist and ethnic studies, and to the fact that some feminist analysis has itself been complicit in the failure to theorize women as class subjects. Bettie's research and analysis make a case for analytical and political attention to class, but not at the expense of attention to other axes of identity and social formations.

Full Product Details

9780520235427

Table of Contents

Reviews

Pathbreaking and original. Bettie's comparative analysis of race, class, and gender performance of the different female peer issues is unparalleled in current scholarship. -Angela Valenzuela, author of Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring

Author Information

Julie Bettie teaches feminist and cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is an Assistant Professor of Sociology

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available