Manufacturing Marginality among Women and Latinos in Neoliberal America

Intersectionality is the study of how categorical distinctions made on the basis of race, class, and gender interact to generate inequality, and this concept has become a primary lens by which scholars have come to model social stratification in the United States. In addition to the historically powerful interaction between race and class, gender interactions have become increasingly powerful in exacerbating class inequalities while the growing exclusion of foreigners on the basis of legal status has progressively marginalized Latinos in U.S. society. As a result, poor whites and immigrant-origin Latinos have increasingly joined African Americans at the bottom of American society to form a new, expanded underclass.