Reconfiguring Class and Gender: Identities, Rights, and Social Movements
From September 2002 to May 2003, fourteen Rutgers faculty and doctoral fellows, visiting scholars from Korea, China, central and eastern Europe, and the United States, and other university and community researchers engaged in a year-long conversation exploring the transformation of class structures, experiences, and representations and the implications of these changes for feminist theory, politics, and practice.
The rise of a global, capitalist economy has been accompanied by increasing economic inequality, social dislocation, and political instability. Women as a group are still disadvantaged relative to men, but class inequalities among women are real and are widening. How does this changing economic and social landscape affect theories of gender and class? In what ways should feminist movements rethink their goals and strategies to incorporate class differences and the emergence of new political identities? To what degree are women's labor and gender rights integrated in to governmental, corporate, community-based, and faith-based responses to the new global economic and social order?
