Anthony S. Chen

LIVES AT THE CENTER OF THE PERIPHERY, LIVES AT THE PERIPHERY OF THE CENTER: Chinese American Masculinities and Bargaining with Hegemony

A decade ago, the “new sociology of masculinity” (NSM) emerged as an exciting new paradigm for understanding gender, emphasizing the study of “hegemonic power relations” among men and women. However, subsequent research has not fully redeemed the promise of the NSM, failing to seriously engage the theoretical implications of studying hegemony. This article addresses the lacunae by presenting a theoretically informed analysis of life history interviews with Chinese American men. Its chief empirical question is how Chinese American men “achieve” masculinity in the face of negative stereotypes. This is accomplished, it is found, through four possible gender strategies: compensation, deflection, denial, or repudiation. The author then fashions a theoretical account of these strategies to show how they can reproduce the social order by striking a hegemonic bargain, which occurs when a Chinese American mans gender strategy involves consciously trading on—or unconsciously taking advantage of—the “privileges” of his race, gender, class, generation, and/or sexuality for the purposes of elevating his masculinity.

The party of Lincoln and the politics of state fair employment practices legislation in the north, 1945-1964

From 1945 to 1964, more than a score of northern states passed laws mandating nondiscrimination in employment. Why did some states pass such fair employment practice (FEP) laws much more slowly than other states? This article presents archival and statistical evidence that partisan control of policy‐making institutions—namely, Republican control of “veto points” in the legislative process—is associated with a substantial reduction in the likelihood that a state would pass FEP legislation, even when controlling for potentially confounding variables. This finding casts doubt on the leading account of the electoral realignment that began in the mid‐1960s and culminated in the Reagan‐Bush years. Well before the advent of affirmative action, key numbers of GOP officeholders—allied with organized business and motivated by a free‐market, antiregulatory ideology—worked successfully to block the adoption of color‐blind laws mandating formal racial equality.

The Origins of Race-conscious Affirmative Action in Undergraduate Admissions: A Comparative Analysis of Institutional Change in Higher Education

What explains the rise of race-conscious affirmative action policies in undergraduate admissions? The dominant theory posits that adoption of such policies was precipitated by urban and campus unrest in the North during the late 1960s. Based on primary research in a sample of 17 selective schools, we find limited support for the dominant theory. Affirmative action arose in two distinct waves during the 1960s. A first wave was launched in the early 1960s by northern college administrators inspired by nonviolent civil rights protests in the South. A second wave of affirmative action emerged in the late 1960s, primarily as a response to campus-based student protests. Most late-adopting schools were those most favored by the Protestant upper class. Our findings are most consistent with a theoretical perspective on institutional change in which social movements’ effects are mediated by the moral and ideological beliefs of key administrators.

Explaining the Contemporary Alignment of Race and Party: Evidence from California's 1946 Ballot Initiative on Fair Employment

Why do most African Americans and other racial liberals vote Democratic, while most racial conservatives (largely whites) vote Republican? To what extent is this alignment of race and party attributable to the strategic choice of GOP elites to take the party in a racially conservative direction during the mid-1960s? This paper exploits a little-known ballot initiative in postwar California to shed light on the question. Proposition 11, as it was known, would have outlawed discrimination in employment if it had passed. Instead, it failed by more than a two-to-one margin. Drawing on archival and statistical evidence, including the ecological analysis of precinct-level election returns, we find that Republican voters were much more likely than Democratic voters to oppose Proposition 11, despite Republican governor Earl Warrens well-known support for fair employment practices legislation. We conclude that many Republican voters tended strongly toward racial conservatism well before Republican elites decided to pursue racially conservative policies in the mid-1960s. We suggest that the emergence of the contemporary alignment of race and party may have been less contingent on elite strategy and more structurally determined than the conventional wisdom allows.

Beyond Modernism and Postmodernism: Working Notes Towards an Asian American Legal Scholarship

The author argues that if Asian American legal scholarship should not stake itself exclusively on anti-foundationalist poststructuralist epistemology because it places specific political and epistemological limits on the capacity of racialized and minoritized communities to pursue social justice. He further suggests that the zone of critical discourse located at the intersection of radical Enlightenment thought and poststructuralisim offers better epistemological support for a narrative Asian American legal scholarship. To illustrate his thesis the author discusses Neil Gotandas critique of colorblind constitutionalism as an example of poststructionalist criticism practiced while remaining true to the imperatives of racial critique.

Affirmative Action, Sociology of

The sociology of affirmative action is a strongly interdisciplinary subfield within sociology. It is concerned with understanding the causes and consequences of policies that use membership in certain social groups to determine the allocation of resources or opportunities. It is also concerned with understanding the level and sources of public support and opposition to such policies. This article summarizes developments in these areas and identifies the areas that seem most promising for future researchers.