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Reﬂections on Intersectionality: Gender, Class, Race and Nation
Heidi GottfriedThis article argues for several shifts in perspective in order to advance acomparative, transnational account of how gender, race, ethnicity, class andnation align in practice to overcome insularity and particularism inherent tomany extant intersectional theories. An extensive review of feminist theories
finds that much US scholarship decontextualizes intersectionality, taking‑for‑granted the national and the transnational. Complexity of relationships
between social inequalities cannot be studied as if contained within national
borders. A theoretical shift takes the analysis of complexity beyond thenation‑state, and argues for social practice theory to examine how complex
social relations are reproduced as well as resisted in a globalizing economy.
Then introducing the concept of geographies of power shifts the analysis
to the transnational to historicize and contextualize categories of analysis.
Historicizing Japanʼs past and present international entanglements can lift
the veil shrouding the national narrative of class and racial homogeneity anddeconstruct the boundaries of the racial category of Asian. A substantive
shift to study transnational migration, particularly women migrants involved
in reproductive labor, complicates categories and frameworks for analyzing
the intersection of class, gender, race and nation.

Key Words: social reproduction, inequality, power, practice, reﬂexivity

Introduction
This comparative, transnational examination of migrant labor changing the reproductive bargain in Japan highlights the historical and cultural variability of gender relations as they intersect1

with class, race and nation. The intersections of these relationships are presented as shapedby uneven processes based upon older social formations as well as new subjects and practices.
Scholarship on intersectionality, while unsettling monolithic categories used to organize meaning,has theorized the nexus of gender, class and race as if contained within the narrow conﬁnes of national borders and as derived from experiences in the West, particularly in the US. To go beyond
this spatial insularity, I explore class, gender and race in Japan, allowing for critical reﬂection on
the missing subjects in national political projects.
This article argues for several shifts in perspective in order to advance a comparative,

23

Heidi GottfriedReﬂections on Intersectionality: Gender, Class, Race and Nationtransnational account of how gender, race, ethnicity, class and nation align in practice to overcome
insularity and particularism inherent to many extant intersectional theories. An extensive review
of feminist scholarship in the ﬁrst section suggests the need for a geographic shift in the focus
away from the US. All too often US feminist theories decontextualize intersectionality, taking‑for‑granted the national and the transnational. Complexity of relationships between social inequalities
cannot be studied as if contained within national borders.
Next, a theoretical shift takes the analysis of complexity beyond the nation‑state. Social
practice theory provides an approach for examining how complex social relations are reproduced
as well as resisted in a globalizing economy. The second section pushes forward this theoreticalshift from micro‑level studies of particular groups to analysis of social practices at multiple levels.
Updating social practice theory extends the perspective to consider shifting hegemonies andrestructuring of complex power relationships across time and space. The third section introduces
the concept of geographies of power to shift the analysis to the transnational. A comparative,
transnational approach historicizes and contextualizes categories of analysis. Meanings andstructures, particularly of race and ethnicity in relationship to gender and class, diﬀer when theperspective shifts to other countries and regions of the world beyond the US and Europe.
The category of Asian is itself relational, constructed and conﬁgured diﬀerently depending onsocial location, for example, whether viewed from perspectives in Japan or in the US. To uncoversources of relationality, the fourth section shifts to an historical register. It presents a condensed
political‑economic history of Japan over the past thirty years to deconstruct the imaginary Asia(n).
Reading this historical narrative reveals how the structure of gender and class relations within
racialized relationships is tied to geographies of power, not only to the Japanese stateʼs modernization project fostered in the cradle of United Statesʼ occupation forces, but also to Japanʼs colonial
domination and economic dominance of other countries in the region. Historicizing Japanʼs pastand present international entanglements can lift the veil shrouding the national narrative of classand racial homogeneity, bring “foreign” others out of the shadows and deconstruct the boundariesof the racial category of Asian. Hegemonic rule in “modern” Japan has relied on absences no longer tenable with the increasing presence of workers from other countries, particularly from otherparts of Asia. Finally, a substantive shift to study transnational migration, particularly women
migrants involved in reproductive labor, complicates categories and frameworks for analyzing theintersection of class, gender, race and nation.

Unsettling Categories in Theories of Intersectionality
This literature review reveals current feminist theorists coming to terms with challenges fromthe recent past. Postmodern and multi‑racial feminisms unsettled the certainties of old categories,
destabilizing and diﬀusing conceptualizations of power and̶more signiﬁcantly̶the very conceptof gender at the heart of feminism as a critical theory of society. Identity politics and movements

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of the late‑1960s and early‑1970s inspired race and gender consciousness infusing theoreticaldebates in the US. This new theoretical wave advanced intersectional analysis of diﬀerences toforge a way forward. Inhabiting categories of diﬀerence enriched the experiences represented inresearch, sensitizing feminists to explore their own social locations more critically. In so doing,
this scholarship etched finely grained experiences from the standpoint of particular groups ofwomen in speciﬁc times and places. Such analyses so closely limning experiences often lost sightof social structures buried in the details of group embellishment and isolated from the wholesystem of diﬀerences (Bourdieu 1990, 8).
The subject of feminism came under critical scrutiny when postmodernists cast suspicion
on social theory writ large, undermining master categories and meta‑narratives. Postmodern
feminists turned away from theories privileging gender and broadened the terrain of analysis toaccount for more ﬂuid and complex social relationships. As Crenshaw suggests, “indeed, one ofthe projects for which postmodern theories have been very helpful̶is thinking about the way
power has clustered around certain categories and is exercised against others” (1991, 1296‑7).
This project raised a fundamental question lurking below the surface: What remains of feminism
in the wake of postmodernism? Analyzing the French political campaign for electoral parity, “TheContentious Subject of Feminism” by Elenore Lepinard (2007) incisively identiﬁes real politicalas well as theoretical stakes in trying to construct a robust conceptualization of gender diﬀerence
after the fall from grace. She succinctly poses the dilemma at the heart of the postmodern critique,as follows: “Crucial to feminismʼs understanding of difference is the theoretical and politicalstatus given to the category of women, which has been altogether the term that made possible thevoicing of feminismʼs political claims, the inescapable ﬁgure of feminist identity, and the elusive
subject of the feminist struggle” (Lepinard 2007, 377). More specifically, to heed Braidottiʼsstrategic call for abandoning “feminism founded on shared oppression or on the female subject”(Ibid., 394) would deprive feminism of its political subject. Pluralizing diﬀerence without recourse
to theoretical prioritizing of structures can lapse into relativism and particularism, and thus cannot
easily diﬀerentiate which diﬀerences matter and why. This question remains a central challenge
to feminist theory and politics taken up by women of color.
Rooted in the experiences of women of color, multiracial feminists also noted the gaps in bothfeminist and anti‑racial theories to “advance the telling of that location” (Crenshaw 1991, 1242).
Black feminists criticized second wave feminist discussions of the interrelationship between
gender and class for failing to integrate an analysis of race, and rendering black women invisible,
just as traditional social science had, by and large, rendered all women invisible (Collins 1990,
1999; Spelman 1988). Theories of race were not immune from similar charges of giving primacy
to one overarching category. Anti‑racial and feminist discourses had articulated parallel streamsof thought (Crenshaw 1991); neither theories of gender nor theories of race adequately addressed
the experience of race and gender as “simultaneous and linked” social identities (Browne andMisra 2003, 488) and “structures of domination” (Zinn and Dill 2007, 71). “Because women of25

Heidi GottfriedReﬂections on Intersectionality: Gender, Class, Race and Nation

color experience racism in ways not always the same as those experience by men of color andsexism in ways not always parallel to experiences of white women, anti‑racism and feminism arelimited, even on their own terms” (Crenshaw 1991, 1252). Intersectional analysis not only was a
retrospective corrective to race and gender theories, but also was a prospective revision of substantive knowledge on the ground.
These intersectional theories share a social constructionist perspective that categories andmeanings are historically contingent and situational. Inﬂuential ethnomethodological approaches
conceptualized gender, along with race and heterosexuality, as on‑going, methodological, andsituated accomplishments (West and Fenstermaker 1995). What became known as the “doing
gender” approach emphasized on‑going negotiations and interactions in the social‑order. One of
the most far‑reaching theories by Yuval‑Davis (2006) concerned the intersection of diﬀerent social
divisions “concretely enmeshed and constructed by each other and how they related to politicaland subjective constructions of identity” (Lenz 2007, 103). But as Lenz concisely summarizes
in her critique of Yuval‑Davisʼs work, the cultural construction of identities based on discourses“classifying persons and collectivities” is disconnected from the social structure; it locates classin economy, distancing gender from the division of paid and unpaid labor. These theories complicated analyses and troubled the categories, yet moved the agenda too far in one direction foranalyzing complexity.
Despite recent proliferation of scholarship on intersectionality, few key texts, as discussed
above, focused on theorizing complexity, that is, the patterning of inter‑relationships betweensocial divisions. In “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” McCall (2005) details alternative methodologies used in this pursuit and identiﬁes the inherent problems in many of these approaches.
She argues in favor of adopting a methodology capable of analyzing “inter‑categorical complexity,”taking into account “the potential for both multiple and conﬂicting experiences of subordinationand power” (McCall 2005, 1780). McCall suggests that theorists “...provisionally adopt existing
analytical categories to document relationships of inequality among social groups and changing
configurations of inequality along multiple and conflicting dimensions” (Ibid., 1773). Such
strategic essentialism oﬀers one methodological solution to overcome the theoretical impasse. Essentialism conveys a strong sense of “identity politics” (Laclau cited in Lepinard, 394) that restores
women to the position as collective subject of feminism without totalizing the category of woman.
Strategic analysis grounds womenʼs oppression contextually and allows for historical contingency,
which can avoid the tendency to ﬁx the category of women in an essential diﬀerence, and thus
can restore the political subjects of feminism.
To study complexity, analytical categories should be theoretically driven, but derived from thestudy of speciﬁc social formations in historical context. “Complexity derives from the fact that
diﬀerent contexts reveal diﬀerent conﬁgurations of inequality in this particular social formation”(McCall 2005, 1773). The nature and extent of diﬀerences should not be assumed a priori (Ibid.,1791). Put another way, Browne and Misra (2003, 491) suggest asking questions such as: Do

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race and gender always intersect? Does intersection necessarily create multiple disadvantages for
women of color and multiple privileges for White men? Using socio‑historically informed middle‑
range theories can consider the complexity of intersections more systematically.
During the 1980s feminists engaged in critical inquiry over and self‑reﬂection on the representation and exclusion of subjects from Anglo‑American feminist theories. Postmodern and multi‑
racial feminists unsettled categories by problematizing the category of women and theorizing theintersection of race and gender. Several problems marred otherwise rich intersectionality accounts.
Particularism often followed from analysis that took the standpoint perspective of oneʼs own group,
which limited their ability to “envisage complexity of social structures” (Lenz 2007, 101). Further,many reserved social structure for class analysis then switched to social constructivism for analysisof race and gender relations. Mapping complexity requires a multi‑dimensional theory integrating
micro‑level interactions with meso‑level institutions.

A Theory of Social PracticeThis section reprises my theory of social practice to bridge agency and structure fordiscerning subjects in historical context (Gottfried 1998). Written in the waning years of the last
millennium, the original piece saw the spectre of abstract‑structuralism as the main antagonist
haunting feminist debates. At the time, discussions of globalization and gender were still in theirinfancy. Now, almost a decade into the 21st century, the pendulum has swung back to theoretical
propositions with considerations of large‑scale institutions and structural explanations. Flirtingwith postmodern dissolution of stable categories and the abandonment of class has led both todissatisfaction with theories of diﬀerence and to revisiting early second wave feminist debates on
the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism in order to salvage social structures and agency.
Yet, social practice theory requires updating in order to take into account newer scholarship onintersectionality. This section lays out the logic of practice to develop a dynamic account of thecomplex relations of gender, class and race as embedded and embodied, elaborating on Gramsciʼsnotion of hegemony.
Impoverished notions of patriarchy motivated the initial intervention whereby feminists moved
theory beyond abstract categories and functionalism. The alternative theory of social practice gave
feminists tools for the excavation of lived experiences without sacriﬁcing reference to social structures. An excavation of the logic of practice made visible the gendering process and grounded
speciﬁc forms of male power in relationship to class and other hierarchies. Class and gender wereconceptualized as mutually constituting but representing two analytically diﬀerent types of irreducible social relationships. Mutually constituting conveyed that there were “no ungendered classrelations and no gender without class dimensions” (Acker 2004; Ibid., 2006). A feminist historicalmaterialism informed both method and theory to capture tensions, contradictions and oppositions
within social processes (Pollert 1996). Theoretical and methodological injunctions directed27

Heidi GottfriedReﬂections on Intersectionality: Gender, Class, Race and Nation

attention to ʻthe institutional embeddedness of diﬀerent forms of male powerʼ and the ways theseʻtwo dynamics (class and gender) enmesh in practiceʼ (Ibid., 653‑4). The phrasing of “enmesh
in practice” denoted a kind of “doing” intersectionality, insisting on the distinction between theempirical experiences of simultaneity and the mutual constitution of relationships analytically.
My formulation of social practice theory borrows centrally from Gramsciʼs problematic. Whilethe economic moment is a fundamental aspect of Gramsciʼs problematic, his non‑reductionist
theory, giving centrality to politics and ideology with its area of hegemony, dissolves the static opposition of agency and structure. In the struggle for hegemony, ruling groups make concessions ofa material kind in order to secure consent of subordinate groups. Goran Therborn (1999) ampliﬁes
Gramsciʼs understanding of “consent to the system of rule [as] generated by the dual operation of
the marginalization of alternatives and the partial accommodation of oneʼs own material interests
and normative concerns.” Hegemonic rule predisposes agentsʼ tacit acceptance of a preferred
picture of the world, but the continual reconfiguration of cultural and ideological elements
unsettles such assurances. As a consequence, the dominant culture is never pure but becomes ʻamobile combination of cultural and ideological elements devised from diﬀerent locationsʼ (Bennett
1994, 225). Gramsci presciently observed that, “hegemony...requires for its exercise only a minutequantity of professional political and ideological intermediaries” (1978, 285). Hegemony is not anexternal force primarily enforced by coercion, but rather operates on the basis of active consent.
Although Gramsci penned his Prison Notebooks before social practice theory had a speciﬁc name,his approach is well suited for analyzing the logic of practice.
The logic of practice inscribes gender, race and class relations in the principles guiding social
action. These principles are not reducible to “a set of conscious, constant rules” (Bourdieu 1990,
12). Rather hegemonic forms of rule are embedded and embodied in the norms governing everyday interactions and formal institutional structures; institutions structure the conditions of social
practices. Embedded refers to how relationships of inequalities become normalized in the way
institutions are organized. Embodied refers to “modes of being in bodies” (Morgan 1998, 655);
ʻgender [sexuality, race and class] rests not only on the surface of the body, in performance and doing, but becomes̶becomes deeply part of whom we are physically and psychologically[and socially]ʼ (emphasis in the original)(Martin 1998, 495). To say that hegemonic forms of ruleare embedded and embodied suggests that historical legacies of past practices “calls into existence
speciﬁc patterns (or conﬁgurations) of practice” (Connell 2007, 86), but also can be called into
question. As social practices, subjects engage in both habitual enactment and reﬂexivity, suggesting the possibility of discerning subjects who can take action against prescribed and proscribed
conduct. Hegemony occurs not only by virtue of the subjects addressed but also by the subjects
excluded and unmarked. Subjects are ʻgenerated and adjusted in a complex interplay of current
contingencies and historical legaciesʼ (Dyson 1992, 3‑4). “Historical knowledge” tells us where
to look and what is the “relative weight, the embeddedness and the historical relationality of theelements which constitute it” (Knapp 2007).

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My formulation of social practice theory utilizes Gramsciʼs notion of hegemony. An excavation of the logic of practice reveals particular structures of domination, illuminates the taken‑for‑granted assumptions orienting practical activity, and thus makes them available for feminist criticism and political action. The theory of social practice initially focused on the mutual constitutionof gender and class relations, yet this iteration neglected race and nation.

Geographies of Power and Mapping Intersectionality
With the exception of post‑colonial theories and recent scholarship on gender and globalization, feminism has not consistently integrated the nation and the transnational into accounts ofintersectionality. Tracing the lineage of current feminist literature on globalization to women anddevelopment research shows both the continuities and distance traveled from the previous terrainof debate and the uncharted territories still in need of mapping (Acker 2004; Fernandez‑Kelly
and Wolf 2001; Chow 2003). The construction of national subjects and subjects within nations
involves political cartography not readily captured by extant theories of intersectionality. For thisreason, I adopt the spatial language of geography, differentiating the concept of geographies ofpower from cartographies of struggle (Mohanty 2006) and the international division of labor toprovide a conceptual mapping of social inequalities shaped at multiple scales.
One of the major advances in feminist theory comes under the microscope of Joan Ackerʼs(2004) keen analysis when she examines gender as embodied and as embedded in the logic and(re)structuring of globalizing capitalism. She extends her earlier pioneering research on gender
relations being embedded in the organizing principles of major institutions (Acker 1990). For the
study of globalization, Acker posits that the gendered construction (and cultural coding) of capitalist production separated from human reproduction has resulted in subordination of women inboth domains. Despite corporate claims to non‑responsibility for reproduction of human life andof the natural environment, “the ability of money to mobilize labor power for ʻproductive workʼ
depends on the operation of some non‑monetary set of social relations to mobilize labor powerfor ʻreproductive workʼ (Elson cited in Acker 2004). This archeology enables Acker to uncover
the historical legacy of a masculine‑form of dominance associated with production in the money
economy that was exported to and embedded in colonialist installation of large‑scale institutions.
By the late 20th Century large‑scale institutions promoted images and emotions that expressed
economic and political power in terms of hegemonic masculinities, characterized by Acker either
as “hyper‑masculinity,” (i.e., aggressive, ruthless, competitive, and adversarial) or as ʻtransnational
business masculinity” (i.e., ego‑centrism and conditional loyalties to country of origin and even to
the company that employs them). The construction of hegemonic masculinities is shaped in large‑
scale institutions and everyday practices.
Several studies showcase a social practice approach to examine intersectionality as embedded
and embodied in organizations. An exemplary case study by Linda McDowell (1997a) examines

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The City, the ﬁnancial district in London, through the lens of the daily social practices, careers,and interactions between individual men and women working in merchant banks. Focusing on theworkplace level, although neither denying nor neglecting structural and institutional factors that sortmen and women into diﬀerent occupations, McDowell (1997b, 182) suggested that ʻuncovering thesocial construction of diﬀerent masculinities and the relations between them is...a crucial element
in revealing how the structural order of gender is maintained, reproduced or challengedʼ. Merchantbankers constructed a dominant version of hegemonic masculinity revolving around a variant of anembodied, manly, heterosexualized, class‑based masculinity that disempowers a range of “Others,”
not only women but men from diﬀerent class, ethnic and educational backgrounds. Organizational
practices are tied to embodied characteristics of gender, class, age and race, and to notions ofappropriate behavior and style and embedded in institutional rules and regulations (Halford andSavage 1997, 116; Gottfried 2003).
Despite the insistence on multi‑scalar accounts, these rich studies lack a vocabulary formapping the contours of power relations at multiple and shifting scales. The ﬁeld of geography
oﬀers a spatial language to map systematic power relationships in localities and between countries
within regions and across the world. “[While] world atlases mainly tracked the shifting of borders
and changes in the names of cities and countries determined by politics, diplomacy or war” (Revkin2007, 2), the ﬂat surface of maps renders the structure of power relations unintelligible. Not surprisingly, post‑colonial feminist thought appropriates the language of geography to explain bordercrossings and unequal power relations and exchanges affecting social divisions of gender, race,class, and sexuality within and across nations. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, who entitles one of her
inﬂuential essays, “Cartographies of Struggle,” lays out the remit of “feminism without borders”;
and with rhetorical ﬂourish, she argues that global feminism should study ʻa world deﬁnable only
in relational terms, a world traversed by intersecting lines of power and resistance....” (Mohanty
2006, 42‑43). Cartographies of struggle mark the hidden histories of resistance, whereas thealternative conceptualization of geographies of power seeks to map shifting hegemonies.
The concept of geographies of power surveys different analytical ground than the concept
of international division of labor. The latter speciﬁes power relationships between classes acrossʻclassesʼ of countries, that is, the structural architecture girding the links in commodity/supplierchains that stretch beyond geographical borders. This compelling metaphor illuminates theinterconnections tying the economic fate of both men and women in diﬀerent regions of the world.
The concept of international division of labor, however, seems best suited for analyzing economic
structure, eclipsing political and cultural dimensions that encompass how statesʼ (including de‑regulation and re‑regulation), international organizationsʼ (including unions and NGOs), andagentsʼ practices affect patterns of inequality. Yet, the international division of labor remains
useful for diagramming economic structure of hierarchical social relations. The alternative conceptof geographies of power charts the rise of new subjects within and beyond the nation.
Using the concept of geographies of power can map the operation of power at multiple

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scales. Mapping intersectionality in terms of geographies of power foregrounds international
entanglements and transnational relations, but also is capable of examining intimate practices inevery day life. The fruitfulness of intersectional analysis integrating the transnational becomes
more apparent when studying women migrants. Women migrants problematize and destabilize
categories of gender, race, class and nation2. Tracking the migration trail of “pioneering” women
can highlight the contradictory effects on and complexity of gender and class relations in andbetween both home and host countries. Theorizing the intersection of gender, class, race andnation is unavoidable when studying nannies, maids, and home‑health care workers who toil
invisibly in the intimate sphere of someone elseʼs household and who create transnational “carechains” linking families from Third to First Worlds (Hochschild 2003, 18). Like women of color
whose experience of race and class domination was documented for an earlier period in the US,
women migrating from the Third World perform domestic work cast‑off by affluent women in
the First World. First World womenʼs increased labor market participation and ability to combine
work and family, to some extent, relies on Third World womenʼs cheap reproductive labor3. The
increasing presence of migrant women involved in reproductive labor results in “new geographiesof centrality and marginality” (Sassen 1996, 17). Studying women migrants involved in caretaking
shows the intersection of class and race in the transnational “work transfer system of reproductive
labor among women” (Parreñas 2001, 78).
Feminist theories of the global and of postcolonial subjects highlight spatial and temporaldimensions of intersectionality. These studies call attention to the ways gender, class and race are
embodied and embedded in everyday practices at multiple scales and note how globalization has
altered the sites, the subjects, and the ways of doing politics. Geographies of power can be used
to conceptualize the spatial dynamics in which micro‑and meso‑practices produce and reproduce
gender, class and race within and across nations.

Out of the Shadows: Historicizing Japan from the Imaginary “Asia(n)”In Japan a national(ist) narrative has filtered modern subjects through the binary of Japanese/non‑Japanese. To sustain this juxtaposition, the state invented a tradition of an authentic
monolithic culture4. Thus, any attempt to analyze the intersection of class, gender, race/ethnicity
and nation requires unpacking monolithic categories to uncover the historical erasures of ethno‑
cultural groups in Japan. Intersectional analysis can bring these excluded others out of the
shadows in some cases quite literally for those who live in makeshift domiciles or who workoutside of legal conﬁnes. The inﬂux of women migrants, particularly from other parts of Asia,
renders geographies of power structuring and restructuring complex relationships between race,class, gender and nation more visible to reveal the historical construction of the imaginary Asia(n).
Historicizing Japanʼs relationship to other countries in the region can deconstruct this imaginary.
A political cartography mapping geographies of power elucidates the missing subjects in Japan31

Heidi GottfriedReﬂections on Intersectionality: Gender, Class, Race and Nationfrom analysis of contradictory tensions that originated prior to but became increasingly apparent
during the 1990s. Just as many have celebrated the 1980s as the culmination of the economic
miracle, the 1990s has become known retrospectively as the “lost decade.” Both instances,
however, treat respective periods in isolation from their historical antecedents. The essays inremind theorists of the imperative to historicize contemporary social life. Morespeciﬁcally, the editors, Tomika Yoda and Harry Harootunian (2006, 6‑7) suggest, “approaching
the decade in relation to broader historical trends of globalization and postmodernization that
followed completion of Japanʼs postwar high‑speed economic growth.” This section briefly
chronicles the stateʼs modernization project and its impact on representation and structuration ofclass and gender within racialized categories.
After the end of the Second World War the Japanese state embarked on an ambitious
modernization project to rebuild the war‑torn nation. The state promoted rapid industrialization,
accelerating the shift from agriculture to manufacturing and fueling the exodus from rural areas tofactories and oﬃces in sprawling urban areas. The farming class contracted at a fast pace aroundthe same time that the blue‑collar working class and white‑collar jobs expanded (Ishida 2005).
Economic expansion that followed during the 1960s stabilized employment relationships for many
men who moved into more secure employment in core industrial sectors, while many working
class women toiled in low‑wage jobs crucial to the textile and consumer electronics industries. A
feature of Japanese capitalism in this period was that job security of regular employees working
in large Japanese companies was underwritten by inferior working conditions further down thejob hierarchy and the production chain. Men and women in the manual working class occupied
positions in different industrial sectors and in different size firms. The modernization project
entrenched gender divisions of labor cross‑cutting the class structure.
By the beginning of the 1970s, the sources of labor from the countryside had largely dried up
during the fast‑paced economic transformation over the preceding two decades. “The early 1970s
hit Japan hard, coming at a time when it had depleted the resources of cheap labor extracted
from rural areas and agricultural sectors through process of industrialization” (Yoda 2006a, 30).
In response to spiking oil prices from the mid‑1970s onward, employers incorporated “ﬂexible”
nonstandard employment, chieﬂy among women, as a cheap labor buﬀer to manage high personnel costs associated with the lifetime employment system and the embedded male breadwinner
reproductive bargain. Strict immigration policies foreclosed the possibility of employers ﬁlling thelarge and growing volume of nonstandard employment with low‑wage migrant labor.
State‑led modernization was a cultural as well as an economic and political project. “The national operated through a broad conﬁguration of disciplinary institutions, hegemonic rule throughcreation of social consensus and normativity, and forcing of individual and collective identities
in complex relation to one another” (Ibid., 35). In particular, the construction of Japanesenesserased the recognition of other subject positions, including hyphenated identities such as Korean‑
Japanese, left little room for imagining multiethnic identities and fostered a kind of historical32

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amnesia for forgetting Japanʼs colonial past. Through restrictions on migration the state further
enforced the conception of Japan as a homogeneous nation. The rupture evident during the
1990s and the anxiety fueling pro‑natalist political rhetoric of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party(LDP) in the early years of the next decade made visible contradictions buried beneath the smoothsurface glossing the narrative of cultural homogeneity. This condensed political‑economic historyof Japan encourages further reﬂection on the imaginary Asia(n).

Reﬂections on Intersectionality
Feminist theories of intersectionality need to pay more attention to intra‑categorical diﬀerences as well inter‑categorical relationships. Categories such as Asian assume internal coherence
and imply homogeneity. Contiguous nations bound together in Asia share more than a common
physical space; they occupy diﬀerent positions of power relative to one another and against otherregions in the world. These international entanglements shaped conﬁgurations of inequality. In
this case, Asia signiﬁed the naming practice given to racially diﬀerentiate the East from the West.
The concept of geographies of power is a tool to map the establishment of political and ideologicalborderlines racializing national groupings and to call attention to shifting hegemonies. Meanings
of Asia(n) diﬀer when viewed by others

the constellation of countries composing this so‑called region. Shifting our gaze to focus on missing subjects in Japan makes visible the relationality of constituent parts to unsettle how we think about categorical diﬀerences.
Uncertainties in economic and political arenas led to a loss of confidence in and to aquestioning of the uniﬁed national subject hegemonic in Japan. Most notably from the mid‑to‑late 1990s, a surge of interest in class analysis, gender and race matters reﬂected on these missing
subjects in scholarship as well as in public discourse and policy. A new scholarly literature on
Japanese minorities contested the untenable view of Japan as a culturally homogeneous nation(Weiner 1997; Roberts 1999; Ching 2006; Lie 2001). It became increasingly impossible to ignore
ethnic and racial diﬀerences with the growing numbers of “foreign” laborers working in Japan.
Tracking transnational migrant ﬂows between countries in Asia, especially cross‑border migrationof women who perform care work illuminates already existing diﬀerences relatively hidden fromview and restructuring of relationships between class, gender, race and nation.
In Japan, the question of care arose in the context of demographic shifts imperiling the former
reproductive bargain. At the time, conditions of the old reproductive bargain began to show signs
of wear. The state could no longer rely on unpaid labor of women in the private sphere to fullycare for children and elderly parents. Moreover, projected labor shortages due to the declining fertility rate and the aging population prompted the conservative government to discuss recruitmentof workers from abroad. This was the background against which the LDP liberalized immigration
policy to recruit migrant labor on short-term visas to fill specific job categories. New short‑term programs for industrial training in 1990 and technical internships in 1993 created a pool of33

Heidi GottfriedReﬂections on Intersectionality: Gender, Class, Race and Nation

temporary labor (Ito 2005, 66). These policy revisions served to induce migration of a relatively
cheap labor force without provoking too much political opposition (Ibid.). For example, recruitment of Filipinas on short‑term visas to perform reproductive labor as trainees guaranteed that
this type of work was gendered as womenʼs work and was established as temporary work. Further,
the status of “trainee” deprived workers of both explicit and implicit contractual commitments forcontinuous employment and denied recognition of workersʼ actual skills and their previous work
experience and educational achievements. Short‑term visas functioned as revolving doors due tolegal requirements that directed workers to return home after a ﬁxed time period.
Other recent provisions of the Japanese immigration law based migrantsʼ entry and access towork and citizenship on class, gender and heritage. The revised Immigration Control Law of 1990
accorded a special status to those with Japanese heritage,, principally Latin Americans

mostly from Brazil and Peru (Roberts 1999, 399). As overseas descendants of Japanese,are allowed to stay in Japan as “spouses or children of Japanese nationals or as ʻlong‑term residentsʼ without limitations on work” (Ito 2005, 56). Similarly, political practices favored Japanesenationals over others as evident in the example of public employment and enfranchisement,
which has been restricted to Japanese nationals, although some municipalities have abolished thenationality requirement (Kibe 2006, 422). The Immigration Control Law regulated the mode ofentry, restricting the terms and conditions of living and working in Japan, shaping the contours of
power relations in Japan.
A transnational comparative perspective on migration of care workers puts in sharp relief
the fault lines of race, gender, class and nation intersecting in practice. Reproductive work by
migrants alters class and gender relations not only in the host country but also at home throughthe “huge transfer of caring and emotional resources globally...” (Pyle 2006, 289). As the stateincreasingly relinquishes responsibility for provision of care services, “much of the burden ofsocial reproduction in the receiving countries [shift] onto women from the sending countries...”(Ibid.). A new reproductive bargain changes the relative weight distributed to public and private
responsibility for social reproduction (health care, childcare and elderly care), that is, how social
reproduction is organized, who bears the cost, who performs the labor and under what conditions(market, state, family): either commodified (paid or unpaid); marketized (formal or informal
employment relations); or socialized (public support for care). From this perspective, we can better see the spatial dynamics in which micro‑level and meso‑level practices produce and reproduce
gender, class and race within and across nations.
New structural configurations anticipate the emergence of new practices. Social practicetheory argues that structure and agency are inextricably linked. Indeed innovative oppositional
politics and practices counter older forms of organization and point to social movements articulating new voices and identities around intersectionality in Japan5. Crafting movements based onintersectionality acknowledges diﬀerences and mobilizes around mobile and multiple communities
and identities. Contestation has involved reﬂexive framing of new subjects and practices critical of34

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traditional class politics.
Class politics have inﬂected and reﬂected asymmetrical gender relations and gender diﬀerences, but this has been an unacknowledged legacy of Japanese trade unions. Japanese enterprise‑based unions protected and projected interests of a male-breadwinner reproductive bargain and awork pattern based on a hegemonic masculinity norm of non‑responsibility for reproductive laborand care work6. In response to established laborʼs perceived ineﬃcacy and in the face of “newmodalities and loci of oppression” (Kohso 2006 cited in Yoda and Harootunian 2006, 14), new
oppositional politics and worker‑based reform organizations have emerged.
Japanese reform eﬀorts largely have been premised on the idea of creating a new, more democratic structure that serves the needs of marginalized workers 7. These new organizations havecoalesced around the intersection of gender and class issues as well as other identities at multiple
levels and scales. In so doing, oppositional reform movements are crafting new political subjects.
For example, organizations “forming solidarities around the identity of ʻwomanʼ have the potential
to destabilize the male full‑time worker norm at the foundation of trade unionism” (Curtin 1999,
7). Yet, these new movements and organizations do not assume “that there exists an overarching
and ﬁxed common interest among women workers” (Ibid., 161). Adopting strategic essentialism
but based on intersectionality, these organizations have challenged the assumption of a singular
working class interest, and the false unity of the national narrative that glosses over diﬀerences,while at the same time they ﬁnd common ground for organizing.

Gender, Class, Race and Nation: Lessons from Japan
This article reviewed literature on intersectionality to extract lessons from archaeology of US
scholarship. It spotlighted the initial impulses critical of feminism for privileging the category of
woman that masked important diﬀerences among women. If women did not share uncomplicatedexperiences, then feminist theories needed new ways of thinking about multiple sources of diﬀerences beyond the singular female subject. Yet, these theories too narrowly based conceptions ofintersectionality on the standpoint of particular groupʼs experiences primarily in the US. Intersectionality theories of diﬀerence were diagnosed as suﬀering from twin maladies of particularism andof relativism, unable to adequately conceptualize social structuring of relationships between social
inequalities at multiple scales, over time and across space.
The second section proposed social practice theory to overcome these problems, and acknowledged the weakness of the approach in its early formulations. Social practice theory enabled the
excavation of power and hegemony as embedded and embodied, but tended to operationalize
concepts without attention to space or scale. To address these limitations, section three turned torecent feminist literature on globalization and postcolonial thought. The concept of geographiesof power mapped the spatial patterning of social divisions ranging over intimate relations localized
in everyday life to economic transactions regionalized in supra-national governance. It theorized

35

Heidi GottfriedReﬂections on Intersectionality: Gender, Class, Race and Nationtransnational mobility of reproductive labor and the class within racialized relationships among
women who performed low‑wage domestic labor that released aﬄuent women from these tasks
as part of the reproductive bargain. The changing reproductive bargain, with the increasingpresence of female migrants who supplemented and substituted for womenʼs unpaid labor, madevisible the once absent subjects that had obscured the social divisions of labor in the myth of thehomogeneous nation in Japan.
The fourth section historicized social relationships as they have intersected in Japan from adeconstruction of the imaginary Asia(n). Its historical perspective uncovered the social construction of Japaneseness as based on the exclusion of other identities. Mapping missing subjects inJapan contributes to conceptualization of shifting borders and boundaries relating race, class,gender and nation. An intersectional analysis pointed out the cleavages that otherwise would haveremained under the surface.
The analysis has several implications for consideration by the next generation of comparative,
transnational theories of intersectionality. The concept of geographies of power in particularmoves analysis beyond simple categories and can be used to develop a more systematic treatmentof “trans” as one way forward. Ilse Lenz discusses the theoretical implications of this move,as follows: “Persons with plural identities beyond groups become invisible because they aretranscending these delimitations or crisscrossing between diﬀerences. Transmigrants, transculturalor trans‑desiring/queer persons̶the ʻtransʼ perspective becomes more important, but it cannot be
integrated into concept of essentialized homogenous groups” (Lenz 2006, 101‑2).
Feministsʼ engagements with intersectional analysis grow out of political as well as theoreticalconcerns. Political priorities should be assessed against the needs associated with diﬀerent social
locations that are shaped by intersections of class, race, gender and nation. Without criticalreﬂection on the setting of priorities, we can, and often do, privilege the needs of one group overthat of others. Strategic essentialism provides a means for identifying common bases of inequalities, while at the same time acknowledges possible diﬀerences. Strategic implies the provisional
acceptance of political subjects attuned to historical circumstances and variability. Because
political subjects are not given, politics should be formulated on the basis of strategic interests andsocial locations. New organizing strategies and organizational forms apparent in Japan embody
new sensibilities eschewing singular political subjects. These organizations presage a politics thattransverse old boundaries and reﬂexively forge solidarities across social locations.
A critical feminist theory for our time foregrounds comparative diﬀerences and commonalities
and recognizes linkages and tensions within and across social locations. Through the comparative,
transnational lens we can more clearly see cross‑border relationships.
(Heidi Gottfried, Professor. Department of Sociology,
Wayne State University)36

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2008

Notes
１ I ﬁrst encountered the term “reproductive bargain” in a paper delivered by Ruth Pearson at Ochanomizu
University in 2007. It immediately resonated as an institutional term closely allied with the concept ofgender contract that Jacqueline OʼReilly and I had developed in our collaborative writing projects (seeGottfried and OʼReilly 2002; Gottfried 2000). I deﬁne reproductive bargain as an ensemble of institutions(the relationship between state, families and economy), ideologies and identities around social provisioning
and caring for human beings (including health care, childcare and elderly care).
２

Migration from rural to urban areas in rapidly developing countries oﬀers another example of new geographies of power. Eileen Otisʼs dissertation provides a fascinating case study of the fashioning of bodies
for gender appropriate work in China. In her case study, young women migrants from rural areas represent
the preferred workers for the highly gendered jobs of beauticians in the burgeoning service sector.
Training involves disciplinary practices, imparting moral lessons on the proper conduct of the new socialist/capitalist worker and instructing young women on the use of embodied skills. Spatial dynamics informthe restructuring of class and gender relations in a new geography of the Chinese economy.

３

Globalization means more than the transnational mobility of reproductive labor and the substitution of

women performing domestic tasks. It involves a distinctive type of commodity in which emotional, sexualas well as physical labor capacities are extracted (Hochschild and Ehrenreich 2003). Transnational migration continues to be predicated on gendered assumptions about who is available for what type of work.
４

Glenda Roberts summarizes the new research on “the formation of modern Japanese identity” in Mi“The meaning

chael Weinerʼs introductory chapter fromof ʻJapanesenessʼ was created from the new nation‑state, linking nation, family, and the Japanese way oflife. The next step, linking blood and culture, was made explicit in 1940 by Kada Tetsuji, who argued for abiological or genetic basis for the ʻdistinctiveness and superiority of the Japanese peopleʼ” (1999, 399).
５

It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the inﬂuence of ethnocultural minority groups, particularly

the Ainu and Koreans, on the increasing recognition of intersectionality in local and national state action.
See Kibe (2006) for a fascinating and politically relevant discussion of “diﬀerentiated citizenship” in Japan.
６More recently, the major labor federation, Rengo and some aﬃliated unions, especially in the service

sector (public sector unions and retail), have articulated successive action plans to promote gender equality,
to recruit more women members and to target part‑time worker. These campaigns have not yieldedsigniﬁcant boosts in womenʼs union membership. Their failure to make union strategies and structures
more woman-friendly is in part to blame for the lack of organizing success.
７

The discussion of new unions was developed in collaboration with Anne Zacharias‑Walsh.

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