Working Papers
These are long-form, somewhat academic papers in progress:
Anti-Feminist Backlash: Gender, Shifting Coalitions, and the Right-Wing Package
Abstract: The global backlash against feminism is not a secondary cultural phenomenon but a central mechanism through which right-wing coalitions partly based on affinities of gender, class, race, and citizenship are responding to threatened reductions in economic privilege. Building on international feminist perspectives that consider overlapping inequalities among women, this essay outlines long-run economic changes in the U.S. that have enabled anti-feminist ideology to condense anxieties about masculine status, economic inequality, demographic change, and loss of national hegemony into a coherent political push-back that simultaneously disciplines women, offloads care costs onto privatized households, reconstitutes racialized citizenship boundaries, and disrupts solidaristic class politics. Analysis of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the policies of the Trump administration, illustrates these points and leads to the conclusion that feminist counter-politics should prioritize efforts to build new political coalitions.
The Architecture of Hierarchy: Intersectional Feminism and Stratification Economics
Abstract: At first glance, it may seem that gender is to intersectional feminism as race is to stratification economics—a territorial division. However, both intersectional feminist theory and stratification economics challenge the individualistic assumptions of orthodox economics, insisting that group-based inequalities are structural and purposive rather than incidental or cultural. This paper argues that the two frameworks are not merely compatible but mutually reinforcing, sharing a deeper theoretical logic that neither has fully articulated. This logic is demonstrated through attention to the axes of stratification and the architecture of hierarchy — the categorical foundations of compulsory group assignment — by which dominant groups produce and maintain racial, gender, class, citizenship and other categories that pre-structure the terms on which economic and political cooperation proceeds. The resulting theoretical synthesis has direct implications for coalitional strategies: people often find themselves in contradictory positions, challenging other people’s privileges but defending their own. Mounting inequalities of wealth and income magnify class differences. They also increase the potential payoff to a broad subaltern coalition while making such a coalition harder to form and sustain: Concentrated resources amplify dominant groups’ capacity to deploy divide-and-conquer strategies.
