A CONCEPTUAL-FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING RACE, CLASS, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY

Since the mid-1980s, scholarship and college courses that address mult iple dimensions of inequality under the rubric of race, class, gender, and (recently) sexuality studies have grown rapidly. Most courses now employ a set of readings, many of which are drawn from a growing numb er of anthologies. A strength of this approach is its presentation of the diversity of human experiences and the multiplicity of critical pe rspectives. A weakness is its failure to convey the commonalities in r ace, class, gender, and sexuality analyses of social reality. To aid i n teaching and research on race, class, gender, and sexuality, this ar ticle presents six common themes that characterize this scholarship. R ace, class, gender, and sexuality are historically and globally specif ic, socially constructed power relations that simultaneously operate a t both the macro (societal) and micro (individual) levels of society. Scholarship in this tradition emphasizes the interdependence of knowle dge and activism.