Intersectionality, Inequality and Bordering Processes

Traditional sociological stratification theories privileged class and equated societal boundaries with national boundaries. The challenge for contemporary Sociology is to establish a theoretical framework which would go beyond the limitations of the traditional paradigm. Such a framework would recognize specific spatial and temporal as well as other situated locations of social actors and will incorporate their structural as well as epistemological effects, but would not be contained by them.

In order to do so, the paper presents an intersectionality stratification theoretical framework in which the different axes of social power, including gender, race/ethnicity, stage in the life cycle, sexuality, ability etc, are being considered when discussing systems of inequality. At the same time this theoretical framework also recognizes that in the contemporary world state boundaries often do not overlap national boundaries and neither of them necessarily overlap societal and market boundaries. At the same time, such a framework would also recognize that any simplistic notion of boundariless global society can be just as misleading.

The paper, therefore, focuses on constructions and processes of bordering as often borders and borderzones separate as well as combine social systems of inequality and provide exclusionary as well as permeable boundaries of political projects of belonging. Their constructions, which are often shifting and contested, affect and are affected by structures/processes of unequal social, economic, cultural and symbolic relations of power and thus can provide an important site to examine the framework presented in the paper.