Benita Roth

The macrosociology of paid domestic labor

This article poses the question: What explains variation in the proportion of the labor force employed in paid domestic labor? In contrast to an older, modernization-theory-based literature that argued that paid domestic labor declines and ultimately disappears in the course of economic development, the authors note the occupations recent expansion in southern California and the wide variations among rich, developed countries in the proportion of the female workforce employed in it. The authors argue that a crucial, neglected factor in explaining such geographic variations is the extent of economic inequality. This factor is overlooked not only in the modernization-theory-based literature but also in recent microsociological studies of paid domestic labor, which highlight the ways in which race, ethnicity, and citizenship status are implicated in interactions between employers of domestics and the workers themselves, while ignoring the enduring significance of class in the employer/domestic relationship. By analyzing 1990 census data for the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the United States, the authors show that income inequality (as well as, but independent of, the proportion of the female labor force made up of African Americans and Latinas, the proportion of the female labor force that is foreign born, and maternal labor force participation), is a significant predictor of the proportion of the female labor force employed in domestic labor.

FEMINIST BOUNDARIES IN THE FEMINIST-FRIENDLY ORGANIZATION The Women's Caucus of ACT UP/LA

In this article, I argue that members of the Womens Caucus (WC) of ACT UP/LA (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) formed a boundary between themselves and male members to increase the WCs power within the feminist-friendly organization. The WCs boundary-making strategies—formalizing womens space and reinscribing gender difference—combatted “slippage” of ACT UP/LAs focus away from womens issues precipated by mens greater numbers in the group. ACT UP/LAs feminist-friendly politics, legitimated WC efforts, and caused male members to defer to the WC; the WC became “official women,” gaining control over their agenda, over their participation within ACT UP/LA, and over male contributions to the WC itself. Boundary making had an unintended effect, compartmentalization, whereby womens issues became the sole responsibility of the WC. I conclude that the WCs boundary making in ACT UP/LAs feminist-friendly milieu was at once successful and problematic, and that the efforts of feminists in such organizations deserve greater scrutiny.

Learning from the Tea Party: The US Indivisible Movement as Countermovement in the Era of Trump

In this article, I chart the origins of the Indivisible movement in the United States, which began online as a response to the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in November of 2016. The Indivisible movement’s founders explicitly modeled their countermovement structurally after the Republican Tea Party that arose to obstruct Obama’s agenda, consciously using the Tea Party’s combination of decentralized organizing made possible by the Internet, its focus on local political races, and its general willingness to work with an established political party. I consider what the case of Indivisible has to tell us about some of the dynamics that movements in the Internet age will likely encounter, namely, the importance of virality and branding for mobilization and social media’s capacity for aggregating the like-minded. I conclude that while it is hard to predict whether Indivisible will be successful in obstructing the conservative Trump agenda, the movement bears watching as an example of movement mobilization in the Internet age.

Making Their Place: Feminism After Socialism in Eastern Germany

The Professional Guinea Pig belongs to a social science growth area investigating the pharmaceutical industry in contemporary health care. This literature is united by a prevailing consensus that views the drug industry as the villain du jour in health policy. After focusing on unbridled professional power and the for-profit insurance industry, the critical social gaze is turned to Big Pharma. Consequently, most social scientists see it as their job to expose the scientific manipulation, the chase of profit margins, the dehumanization, the ethical transgressions, and the inequities that flow from drug industry involvement. In engaging prose, Roberto Abadie delivers the expected social science message. Abadie conducted an eighteen-month ethnography of a group of healthy people who made a living as research subjects in Phase One clinical trials in Philadelphia. Most trial participants are African-American and Latino, but Abadie spent time with a group of young, non-Hispanic white anarchists who enrolled in clinical trials. He compares these trial participants with people enrolling in HIV trials. The book examines the motivations, reflections, and practices of professionalized clinical trial participation. What does Abadie make from this data? He highlights the ‘‘commodification’’ (p. 15) of the trial subjects’ bodies in a ‘‘slow torture economy’’ (p. 46). He pays attention to the ‘‘revolt’’ (p. 54) of the professional research subjects when they felt underpaid and threatened to walk out. Instead they received an

The Making of Pro-life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works

800 bonus. He notes the ‘‘resistance of the weak’’ (p. 60), when ‘‘guinea pigs’’ (p. 21) smuggle in forbidden foods or engage in other acts of ‘‘sabotage’’ (p. 61). Abadie also examines the risk-management strategies of the trial subjects: they weigh money against potential long-term effects but tend to believe that drugs wash out of their bodies in a couple of days. He then compares the professional trial participants to those involved in HIV trials and argues that the latter are motivated by deeper existential concerns but, of course, they also have a disease and participate in different kinds of trials. In a final empirical chapter, Abadie examines the professional trial subject’s limited understanding of informed consent procedures, and argues that the drug industry deliberately uses the consent form to obfuscate the commodified relationship with research subjects. Abadie’s book has two glaring weaknesses. First, he brings much rhetorical bluster to his study but the interview quotes and observations do not bear out the core themes of ‘‘alienation’’ (p. 6) and ‘‘exploitation’’ (p. 154). The fascinating empirical puzzle of his study is that anarchists are willing to swallow their principles and vegan diet to take money from this most controversial industry. In the conclusion, Abadie pays attention to the paradox between anarchist politics and pragmatics, but throughout most of the book he tries to rationalize the anarchists’ justifications for the blood money that sustains their lifestyle of leisure. Some of his friends even minimize the trial risk because they assume that strong government oversight protects them from harm! Abadie writes: ‘‘[these] views of governmental regulation are not totally at odds with their radical [anarchist] beliefs’’ (p. 143). Really? Rather than reconcile the dissonance between what anarchists do and belief in theoretical constructs of exploitation, the explanation seems more mundane. People end up in trial after trial by choice or circumstances because it is easy money. Compared to flipping burgers, cleaning toilets, or being homeless, testing pills is extremely attractive. The job stinks, but the money is good. Abadie also wrote the wrong book. While he lived in the anarchist community, he never participated along with his research subjects in the trials. Abadie’s information comes largely from casual conversations

A Dialogical View of the Emergence of Chicana Feminist Discourse1

Virtually every academic in the United States, not to mention the reading public, knows too little about Iran (the fact that this is even truer for Iraq explains part of the reasons for that catastrophe). And I would recommend this book to every academic in the United States, especially in the social sciences and humanities. As someone who has undertaken a 500-year history of social change in Iran, who sees social movements through the prism of race, class, and gender, it was eye-opening to encounter so much that I did not know about the country. ‘‘Sexual politics’’ refers in this book to at least three things: (1) the struggle for women’s equality with men, (2) the struggle for gay and lesbian rights, and (3) the relationship of gender to social movements, cultural freedoms, and, in the case of Iran, revolutions. Janet Afary’s accomplishment is to document painstakingly the complexity of sexual politics across 200 years of Iranian history, and to present us with a new take on its surprising, and mixed, record. The author ultimately makes the case that sexual politics is intimately (as it were) connected to politics tout court. She goes far beyond the existing literature (some of it very good indeed) on ‘‘gender and Iran,’’ which has focused till now predominantly on women and almost exclusively on heterosexual matters. As befits a superb historian of Iran—her first book was a history of the 1905–11 Constitutional Revolution—she digs deeply and creatively into the archives for primary materials of all kinds and combs an extensive secondary literature in several languages. As an accomplished theorist who has coauthored with Kevin Anderson a wonderful book, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, she forges a highly original theoretical and conceptual interpretation of this material at the same time, on a scaffolding that includes Foucault’s ‘‘ethics of love;’’ James Scott’s ‘‘hidden transcripts’’; psychoanalytic insights from Freud, Fromm, and Marcuse; and a command of both Western and Third World feminist theory from Simone de Beauvoir to Chandra Mohanty, Deniz Kandiyoti to Minoo Moallem. The book is further graced with 80 valuable illustrations, including seventeenthcentury paintings showing homoerotic scenes, nineteenth-century black-and-white photos and sketches from the shah’s harem and other sites, political cartoons from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 through the turmoil of the 2000s, images from women’s magazines of the last 40 years, political posters and photographs of women’s participation in the Iranian Revolution and after, and portraits of many of the key players on all sides of sexual politics in Iran. The 16-page introduction, which presents the issues and previews the main characteristics of the last two centuries, is alone worth the price of the book. Although the book’s title tells us that it is a study of sexual politics in modern Iran, we are treated in Part One to 100 pages of deep background on ‘‘Premodern Practices,’’ which sensibly provide a baseline for the developments of the past century. These pages focus on nineteenthcentury patterns, meanings, and practices around marriage (including love and divorce), sexuality, law, religion, and resistance in its many guises. A turning point occurs during the authoritarian modernizing reign of Reza Shah, who seized power in a 1921 coup abetted by the British, had himself crowned king in 1925, and thereby started the Pahlavi dynasty. This would consist of himself until 1941, and his son, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (known to us simply as ‘‘the Shah’’) who would be deposed and see the monarchy itself abolished in the course of the 1978–89 revolution. In these chapters, Afary continues to cover all the topics above, and begins to document the changes in gender relations and social and cultural norms as Iran moved

Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America's Second Wave

I argue that a convergent dialogical approach to the understanding of social movement discourse drawn from sociology and feminist studies is best suited for understanding challenges made by dissenters within social movements. I analyze “second wave” Chicana feminism which arose in the 1960s and 1970s. I first discuss two dialogical approaches in social movement and feminist theory to understand the strategies that challengers within already oppositional movements use to confront locally hegemonic discourse. Chicana feminists built their arguments on established Chicano movement practice and values, but transformed/inverted the meanings of movement concepts and appropriated movement practices to their own newly forming feminist ends. In conclusion, I explore what the case of discursive strategies in Chicana feminism tells us about the creation of blind spots in movement discourse and what dialogical approaches can offer vis-à-vis an understanding of discourses role in movement fragmentation.