Bandana Purkayastha

Interrogating Intersectionality: Contemporary Globalisation and Racialised Gendering in the Lives of Highly Educated South Asian Americans and their Children

This paper examines the fit of the intersectionality framework for understanding transnational lives. The data for this paper is drawn from my research on South Asian migrants to America and their children, the 1.5 and 2nd generation. I focus on these highly educated migrants and their children and their efforts to maintain meaningful family ties and live religions in a context that spans the USA and selected South Asian countries. I use this data to assess whether the intersectionality approach is able to explain lives that span ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ social worlds. I show that the intersectionality approach needs to be deepened to capture simultaneous experiences of privilege and marginalisation across national and transnational contexts.

Intersectionality in a Transnational World

As a late entrant into the world of sociology, I read Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990) in a graduate seminar on gender. Amidst the rapidly growing scholarship on gender, this book served as my introduction to the literature on the intersections of race/class/gender within the United States. I eagerly read the work of Cheryl Gilkes, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Maxine Baca Zinn, Elizabeth Higgenbotham, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, and Himani Banerji to find out more about this stream of knowledge. Over the years, insights of many other scholars have helped me to understand intersectionality. As Hae Yeon Choo and Myra Marx Ferree (2010) have recently pointed out, these diverse work on intersectionality have highlighted the importance of “including the perspectives of multiply marginalized people, especially women of color; an analytic shift from addition of multiple independent strands of inequality toward a multiplication and thus transformation of their main effects into interactions; and a focus on seeing multiple institutions as overlapping in their codetermination of inequalities to produce complex configurations” (2010, 4). Nonetheless, I remain grateful to Professor Hill Collins for moving the conversation on intersectionality, in the early 1990s, to a more visible level. Professor Hill Collins’s work has remained dynamic, expanding far beyond the original idea of power relations organized through intersecting axes of race/class/gender (Collins 1990) to her recent articulation of the “intersecting power relations of race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age, ability, nation” (Collins 2010, 8). In this brief essay, I touch upon two related aspects of intersectionality that require additional clarification as we study social lives in the twenty-first century. My observations are focused on the ways in which we understand “race” even as our lives expand onto transnational—including virtual—social spaces. I also com-

Beyond Asian American: Examining Conditions and Mechanisms of Earnings Inequality for Filipina and Asian Indian Women

Theories of intersectionality encourage scholars to look at how “gender” experiences are forged through race, particularly in the labor market. This study uses data from the 2000 1-percent Public Use Microdata on 23,852 Filipina, Asian Indian, and non-Hispanic white women living in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles to examine additive and interactional influences on earnings. A detailed analysis of interaction effects by race-ethnicity reveal several important differences across the three groups of women. The results of this study show that popular stereotypes about Asian-origin groups, such as “model minority,” mask significant barriers in achieving full equality in the labor market. The study also highlights the importance of immigration context and occupational race segregation in understanding earnings for non-white immigrant women.

Linking research, policy and action: A look at the work of the special rapporteur on violence against women

This article focuses on the achievements and challenges in linking research, activism and policy in the making of a comprehensive international regime on women’s human rights with a particular focus on the work of the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women. The impact of violence against women as an international policy agenda not only opened the private sphere to public scrutiny but it has also challenged mainstream human rights practice and State doctrine, and broadened and diversified feminist theorizing thereby facilitating the augmentation of the transnational women’s movement. The article argues that preventing violence against women requires a holistic approach beyond the often hierarchical treatment of rights, the selective response to the problem as belonging to the ‘other’ and the narrow perception of violence as harm done. It concludes that unless women’s agency is recognized and their capabilities supported through social, economic and political empowerment, and violence is located within the web of relations of inequality at local, national and global levels, the rights contained in international conventions, declarations and policy documents will remain unattainable for the majority of the world’s women.

Liminal Lives: South Asian Youth and Domestic Violence

This article examines domestic violence experiences among South Asian youth in the United States. The paper uses a broad definition of violence, a continuum which includes aggression, coercion, control, intimidation, assault, to accommodate the meanings suggested by the youth. The main argument of this paper is that the youths experiences cannot be adequately explained with reference to individual deviance or traditional cultural norms of ethnic groups. Based on a sociological perspective of gender, this paper argues that these youth are placed between mainstream and ethnic gender regimes and their experience of domestic violence depends on how these regimes work in relation to each other. Thus their liminal social structural position emerges as a significant factor in their experiences of violence.

Making a difference: Linking research and action in practice, pedagogy, and policy for social justice: Introduction

The origins and chronology of linking research and action are complex and cannot be attributed to any single discipline or any part of the world. People within and outside academe have linked research and action. In this introductory article, we begin by briefly tracing the methodological background to linking research and action, focusing particularly on action research, participatory research, and feminist research in order to situate the research presented in this monograph issue of Current Sociology. We then provide an outline of the articles that showcase through specific case studies how sociologists link research and practice in diverse contexts including health, culture, education, labor, migration, violence against women, and polling. We end by commenting that linking research and action has important implications for knowledge creation, distribution, shifting power relations for achieving social change, and, ultimately, challenging social structures for social justice.

On the Edges of Belonging: Indian American Dalits, Queers, Guest Workers and Questions of Ethnic Belonging

Questions of assimilation and belonging remain as important themes in the immigration and ethnicity literature. Most research focuses on ethnic groups and their sense of belonging to the societies they live in, with less attention given to processes that affect belonging among ethnic subgroups. Using primary and secondary data, we examine cases of three Indian-origin groups – Dalits, Queers and Guest Workers – in the USA to discuss the structures that shape belonging of Indian Americans, particularly those in these subgroups. Drawing on the notion of dynamic multi-layered ethnicities, we discuss the intersections of race/class/caste/sexuality/gender that structure their belonging. We argue that focus on the entire ethnic group is insufficient for analysing the factors that shape belonging; instead, we posit that examining how the social location of the main ethnic group intersects with the structural positions of subgroups is crucial to discussions of the concept of belonging.

Another world of experience? Transnational contexts and the experiences of South Asian Americans

Despite discussions about freely circulating people, ideas, media images, money, technology in a flat world in the popular media, new political, economic, and technological formations continue to construct restrictive social hierarchies that disproportionately affect socially marked groups. This paper focuses on South Asian Americans to systematically examine how these forces have created a transnational context that works through and across multiple nations to shape the lives of diasporic groups today. Drawing on a meta analysis of three previous studies, the paper examines three dimensions of this transnational context: the role of global security blocs, companies that market cultures as products, and the World Wide Web as a social space. It shows how ideologies, institutions, and interactions in coalescing real and virtual transnational spaces adds another layer of experience that, in turn, intersects with the multi‐layered diasporic experiences extant within nations.

‘I am only half alive’: Organ trafficking in Pakistan amid interlocking oppressions

This article delves into the gendered/classed phenomenon of organ trafficking based on ethnographic and archival data from Pakistan. Drawing upon experiences of victims of organ trafficking, the authors situate trafficking for organ trade within a global–national–local political economy of human trafficking. They argue that the theoretical focus on women in discussions of gendered sex trafficking, and a separate discussion on labor trafficking contribute to the relative invisibility of organ trafficking which mostly targets poor men. Yet, organ trafficking is located within the same interlocking set of oppressions that perpetuate other forms of trafficking. The authors argue that, as sociologists, we have to shift our focus from the organs to the people whose organs are harvested and trafficked in order to develop a framework that views different forms of trafficking as a continuum.

Constructing Transnational and Virtual Ethnic Identities: A Study of the Discourse and Networks of Ethnic Student Organisations in the USA and UK

This paper draws on the experiences of Indian-origin groups in the USA and UK to examine transnational forms of ethnicity. It focuses specifically on ethnic organisations that are engaged in constructing transnational ethnic identities, using religion as a means for constructing new, virtually linked communities. Based on web-based data of Hindu student groups in the USA and UK, this study examines transnational ethnic identities these groups deploy on their websites, and to what extent these are similar across the USA and UK. As Hinduism is a religion with no uniform sets of practices (chosen religious texts, practices and beliefs are culturally, regionally and family dependent), it provides a good basis for examining whether the identities constructed by these groups are transnational, that is, the same elements are emphasised by groups in the two countries to construct ethnic identities that transcend the specificities of the national and local contexts. It also examines the structure of links between websites to show whether websites that appear to be nation-specific are actually linked to each other to create a transnational network. The findings of this study suggest that the study of transnationalism needs to be extended beyond the current focus on ‘home’ and ‘host’ countries to consider what happens in multiple ‘host’ countries. It also shows that organised groups promote homogenised versions of virtual ethnicity as they build transnational networks across countries.