Collins, West and Zimmerman Theories Paper Example

Collins (2000)

Collins' main argument is that there is a need to appreciate diversity in different positions that reflect various races, classes and gender junctures. Collins tries to challenge the dominance of the feminist theory among the white feminists. She argues that black women occupy a unique standpoint on their own. It is such that, there are emerging powers of the black women urging them to see their true color interests. She also demonstrates that the feminist theory is a stance that stimulates the rethinking of other basic social science concepts.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Collins suggests that family values are likely to cause harm to African American women. Collins describes family values as having a connection with the gendered system that consists of social organization, racial ideas, and practices as well as the construction of identity in the US. Thus, the intersections of gender, race, and nation with the family values largely contributes to resistance and oppression among these women. The family values have always been traditional with ideal functions of intersectionality. In that case, the African American women remain a historically oppressed group making it difficult to get no empowerment.

There are not many African Americans who benefited from upward mobility because it became clear that the majority of the problems that the black-faced were not a result of racial discrimination. Class factors were considered, and the majority of the blacks endured downward social mobility coming from the working-class center. Hence, these individuals lost their jobs and were unable to find new ones thus joining a growing population of poor blacks. They then constituted an outcome of economic disadvantage such that even when they found work, it was often part-time, low paid and lacked security and benefits.

West and Zimmerman (1987)

Gender and sexuality as discussed by West and Zimmerman are such that the sexuality informs the role of gender in the life of an individual and it also has impacts on the perceptions of others. Thus, gender and sexuality have a relationship where if one belongs to women sexuality, they perform roles of women and the same case applies to men. In that case, these opposite sex are a subject to heterosexuality where the male get attracted to females.

West and Zimmerman demonstrate that gender is comprehensive and cannot be considered with the existing notion of the displayed characters. Thus, there is a need to consider doing gender as an ongoing activity that exists in the everyday interaction which is to mean that gender is more of the roles and relations of individuals in their daily life. The authors consider sex, sex category and gender to give the meaning of it being an ongoing activity.

Resources for doing gender refer to performativity that will help advance the new understanding of gender to be a routine accomplishment in everyday interaction. Resources, in this case, are more of the social concepts that help to determine women and men competence.

West and Zimmerman stress the importance of social change in performing interactions in that there will be better ways to assess behaviors with its basis on the socially accepted conceptions of gender. They put more emphasis on interaction level where gender is invoked and reinforced.