Ivy Ken

The United States pork sector generates billions of pounds of food and billions of dollars of sales and tax revenue per year. This industry has also generated hundreds of workers’ deaths from covid infections, thousands of workers’ injuries from hazardous working conditions, economic and environmental depletion of communities near production sites, and the massive decline of small hog farming operations – not to mention over a billion tons of fecal waste per year. Although pork companies, like most firms in the food industry, portray state regulation as a burden for commercial interests, we identify how the pork industry enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the state to create favorable conditions for three interrelated processes: 1) monopoly and monopsony power; 2) hyper-efficient but injurious working conditions; 3) union busting. Using structural contradictions theory, we explain the failure to protect workers, farmers, and communities as a feature of the fundamental contradictio...

The coronavirus pandemic has magnified the interdependence of the state and corporations in the pork packing industry. In 2020, when over 67,000 meatpacking and processing workers were infected with the virus, the state allowed and encouraged this industry to coerce a racialized workforce to risk their health and lives to slaughter pigs. While it would seem reasonable to call for more regulation to protect labor in this industry, we find by analyzing the state’s actions in 2020 that its interests are too far aligned with corporations’ interests to expect one to police the other. Our analysis underlines the state as a symbiotic partner of corporations, and places workers’ illnesses and deaths in a necropolitical framework that demands attention to the state’s tacit approval of inhumane working conditions, use of law to keep packing plants open, and attempts to limit the liability of corporations for any deaths or illnesses they have caused.

The term ‘mutual constitution’ appears with regularity in scholarship on intersectionality, but what does it mean? We could not easily answer this question in the usual way – by reading books and articles about it – because the term has not received direct, widespread or sustained engagement in feminist theory. This led us to analyse a wide range of feminist scholarship – the entire set of 379 articles in women’s studies journals that consider both intersectionality and mutual constitution – to determine whether there are patterns and commonalities in the ways this important theoretical term is used. Our analysis reveals that while there is widespread agreement that mutual constitution does not allow for an additive or binary approach, this is the only major point of shared understanding of this term. Scholars disagree over whether mutual constitution is, in fact, the same thing as intersectionality, and in practice, clusters of disciplines use the term with different norms and leve...

Corporations rarely prioritize healthy communities over healthy profit margins, but their profits depend on community acceptance. This article reveals that in their quest to be perceived as legitimate citizens, some corporations co-opt the rhetorical tactics typically associated with social movement organizations to frame their profit-maximizing practices as the solution to the problem of childhood obesity. In this framing, explored here in an ethnography of the activities of two organizations called the Partnership for a Healthier America and the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, obesity is the result of communities’ failure to work together and the cumulative effect of individuals’ bad choices. By framing corporations as vital community partners poised to “work together” across sectors to solve the childhood obesity “crisis,” these organizations hope to inspire the public to participate in this imagined community in one predominant way: by buying their products. Despite the app...

The Professional Guinea Pig belongs to a social science growth area investigating the pharmaceutical industry in contemporary health care. This literature is united by a prevailing consensus that views the drug industry as the villain du jour in health policy. After focusing on unbridled professional power and the for-profit insurance industry, the critical social gaze is turned to Big Pharma. Consequently, most social scientists see it as their job to expose the scientific manipulation, the chase of profit margins, the dehumanization, the ethical transgressions, and the inequities that flow from drug industry involvement. In engaging prose, Roberto Abadie delivers the expected social science message. Abadie conducted an eighteen-month ethnography of a group of healthy people who made a living as research subjects in Phase One clinical trials in Philadelphia. Most trial participants are African-American and Latino, but Abadie spent time with a group of young, non-Hispanic white anarchists who enrolled in clinical trials. He compares these trial participants with people enrolling in HIV trials. The book examines the motivations, reflections, and practices of professionalized clinical trial participation. What does Abadie make from this data? He highlights the ‘‘commodification’’ (p. 15) of the trial subjects’ bodies in a ‘‘slow torture economy’’ (p. 46). He pays attention to the ‘‘revolt’’ (p. 54) of the professional research subjects when they felt underpaid and threatened to walk out. Instead they received an $800 bonus. He notes the ‘‘resistance of the weak’’ (p. 60), when ‘‘guinea pigs’’ (p. 21) smuggle in forbidden foods or engage in other acts of ‘‘sabotage’’ (p. 61). Abadie also examines the risk-management strategies of the trial subjects: they weigh money against potential long-term effects but tend to believe that drugs wash out of their bodies in a couple of days. He then compares the professional trial participants to those involved in HIV trials and argues that the latter are motivated by deeper existential concerns but, of course, they also have a disease and participate in different kinds of trials. In a final empirical chapter, Abadie examines the professional trial subject’s limited understanding of informed consent procedures, and argues that the drug industry deliberately uses the consent form to obfuscate the commodified relationship with research subjects. Abadie’s book has two glaring weaknesses. First, he brings much rhetorical bluster to his study but the interview quotes and observations do not bear out the core themes of ‘‘alienation’’ (p. 6) and ‘‘exploitation’’ (p. 154). The fascinating empirical puzzle of his study is that anarchists are willing to swallow their principles and vegan diet to take money from this most controversial industry. In the conclusion, Abadie pays attention to the paradox between anarchist politics and pragmatics, but throughout most of the book he tries to rationalize the anarchists’ justifications for the blood money that sustains their lifestyle of leisure. Some of his friends even minimize the trial risk because they assume that strong government oversight protects them from harm! Abadie writes: ‘‘[these] views of governmental regulation are not totally at odds with their radical [anarchist] beliefs’’ (p. 143). Really? Rather than reconcile the dissonance between what anarchists do and belief in theoretical constructs of exploitation, the explanation seems more mundane. People end up in trial after trial by choice or circumstances because it is easy money. Compared to flipping burgers, cleaning toilets, or being homeless, testing pills is extremely attractive. The job stinks, but the money is good. Abadie also wrote the wrong book. While he lived in the anarchist community, he never participated along with his research subjects in the trials. Abadie’s information comes largely from casual conversations

PART I: RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER AS ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES Introduction Race, Class, and Gender: What They Are, What They Do PART II: USING FOOD TO IDENTIFY RELATIONSHIPS AMONG RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER Digesting Race, Class, and Gender Producing Race, Class, and Gender Baking Race, Class, and Gender Tasting Race, Class, and Gender PART III: SEARCHING FOR EVIDENCE OF RELATIONSHIPS AT SPECIFIC SITES The Multi-Relational Character of Race, Class, and Gender

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and ...

Sharon Zukin’s Naked City takes us on an intriguing tour of several New York City neighborhoods, parks, and gardens to illustrate the ways in which culture patterns neighborhood development and urban life. The book is an insightful analysis of gentrification, and the role that culture and authenticity play in sparking the redevelopment of Williamsburg, Harlem, the Lower East Side, and Red Hook. In addition to these neighborhoods, there is an examination of how consumer-driven change has altered and influenced the developmental trajectory of Union Square Park, the World Trade Center redevelopment site, and community gardens scattered throughout the city. The theme that Zukin uses to unite these diverse landscapes is the quest for and competition among gentrifiers, city planners, political officials, long-term residents, real estate developers, and bloggers to define the authenticity of space, and thus who has the rights to certain places. For Zukin, urban transformation is driven largely by cultural consumption patterns. She argues that, “Our tastes as consumers – tastes for lattes and organic food, as well as for green spaces, boutiques, and farmers’ markets – now define the city” (27). In a postindustrial New York, the new tastes and preferences of the new middle class direct and guide development patterns. For the new middle class, it’s not lofts that attract the urban professionals to the central city, it’s Ann Taylor Loft. The consequence of these preferences and consumption patterns is the death of the authenticity of the past—the crime, the edge, and the spontaneous interactions that come from the unpredictability of events when people of different races and classes mix in places, such as the “old” Lower East Side. Middle class preferences for particular amenities, such as Starbucks, lead to a metropolis that is sanitized, predictable, and consumer oriented. The authentic city has become the authentic suburb, with Home Depot in the Bronx, IKEA in Red Hook, and Barnes & Noble abutting Union Square Park. The book duly acknowledges that cultural consumption patterns alone are not the sole driver of urban transformation. For instance, Zukin details how the city government’s failure to provide basic city services led to a reliance on corporate action, through Business Improvement Districts, to manage urban space when local budget shortfalls prevented adequate public services. Zukin tactfully incorporates New York’s political and economic forces within her cultural paradigm.

At a moment of heightened public concern over food-related health issues, major corporations in the food industry have found their products and practices under scrutiny. Needing to be understood as socially responsible, these corporations have established partnerships with the state to construct a positive, proactive, and cooperative public image. One major public-private partnership that evolved from former First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move initiative-the Partnership for a Healthier America-serves as a case study in this paper, which analyzes the consequences and social harms perpetuated by a public health campaign bound by the imperative to maximize profit. By using trusted state actors to deliver accurate but deceptive claims about food companies' commitment to public health, this public-private partnership actively misleads the public and potentially exacerbates public health challenges, warranting a skeptical revision of how we understand corporate social responsibility and neoliberal governance on issues of health and nutrition. As a form of fraud, these attempts to mislead the public go beyond the actions of public sector individuals or members of corporate boards, but are structurally incentivized by the legal rights, regulatory privileges, and profit-related incentives central to the modern corporate form. While conventional criminological research tends to underemphasize state and corporate harms, we make use of a critical criminological perspective to analyze state-corporate partnerships in the space between food industry practices and public health policy.

Corporations rarely prioritize healthy communities over healthy profit margins, but their profits depend on community acceptance.  This article reveals that in their quest to be perceived as legitimate citizens, some corporations co-opt the rhetorical tactics typically associated with social movement organizations to frame their profit-maximizing practices as the solution to the problem of childhood obesity.  In this framing, explored here in an ethnography of the activities of two organizations called the Partnership for a Healthier America and the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, obesity is the result of communities’ failure to work together and the cumulative effect of individuals’ bad choices.  By framing corporations as vital community partners poised to “work together” across sectors to solve the childhood obesity “crisis,” these organizations hope to inspire the public to participate in this imagined community in one predominant way:  by buying their products.  Despite the apparent power and reach of their framing, though, these corporations implicitly acknowledge that they are not and cannot be legitimate members of communities unless the public lets them.

Efforts to ensure that people in all neighborhoods have access to healthy, affordable food are essential in the movement for food justice.  An organization called the Partnership for a Healthier America has taken on food access as one of its five core areas, and because this organization has the backing of high-profile state representatives and considerable resources, its efforts matter.  The Partnership’s biggest accomplishments to date involve negotiating “meaningful commitments” from private-sector actors, including the biggest food retailer in the United States, Walmart.  In this paper I examine the terms of Walmart’s pledge to the Partnership for a Healthier America, and question whether the commitment from this massive corporation is likely to contribute to or obstruct actual food justice.  I argue that the relationships this non-profit organization cultivates between the state and the private-sector insulate an entity such as Walmart from regulatory scrutiny, and generate positive publicity and good will for a company that may be doing little more than expanding its market.

Few would argue that race, class, and gender are unrelated, now that scholars of inequality have spent decades making the once devalued but now widely accepted case that structures of oppression like these cannot be understood in isolation from one another. Yet the imagery on which the field has relied—race, class, and gender as “intersecting” or “interlocking”—has limited our ability to explore the characteristics of their relationships in empirical and theoretical work. In this article I build on the gender framework articulated by Leslie Salzinger to articulate new imagery—via a metaphor of sugar—which highlights how race, class, and gender are produced, used, experienced, and processed in our bodies, human and institutional. This metaphor allows us to emphasize structural and individual forces at work in their continual and mutual constitution.

For over 100 years, but particularly since the 1980s, scholars have
heavily relied on images of race, class, and gender as "intersecting" and "interlocking" forms of oppression and disempowerment. This imagery has helped feminists develop the empirically grounded theoretical premises that (1) race, class,
and gender are social structural locations, (2) structural locations shape perspectives, (3) no individual is all-oppressed or all-oppressing, (4) the meanings of race, class, and gender are localized, and (5) race, class, and gender depend on and (6)
mutually constitute each other. In this article I synthesize these premises to reveal some opportunities for theoretical development that may inspire a new generation of race-class-gender scholarship. I argue that while intersection is fairly limited as a
conceptual image, the interlocking imagery can help us identify how the relationships among these structures of oppression have become institutionalized.

To the Council of the District of Columbia:
Committee on Education, David Grosso, Chair

Regarding the Public Hearing on
Public School Food and Nutrition Services Programs and
B21-0315, School Food and Nutrition Services Contract Requirement Act of 2015

How are the ways that race organizes our lives related to the ways gender and class organize our lives? How might these organizing mechanisms conflict or work together? In Digesting Race, Class, and Gender, Ivy Ken likens race, class, and gender to foods – foods that are produced in fields, mixed together in bowls, and digested in our social and institutional bodies. In the field, one food may contaminate another through cross-pollination. In the mixing bowl, each food’s original molecular structure changes in the presence of others. And within a meal, the presence of one food may impede or facilitate the digestion of another. At each of these sites, the “foods” of race, class, and gender are involved in dynamic relationships with each other that have implications for the shape – or the taste – of our social order.