Lesbians and White Privilege

There are three overarching themes that connect the chapters: interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, and identity. This interdisciplinary compilation includes contributions from scholars in cultural studies, social work, English, psychology, anthropology, and education. Essays include empirical research, making use of both quantitative and qualitative methods as well as personal reflections and interpretation. Each chapter makes central the critical significance of intersectionality, locating privilege and oppression within larger social systems and institutional structures, as an ‘interlocking matrix of relationships.’

These chapters challenge, recognize, and question whiteness, with the intention that they encourage us to do the same, in our own lives, practices, behaviors, and disciplines. By taking whiteness seriously, we might begin to move toward explicit antiracist efforts, dismantling those structures and hierarchies that enable only some to speak as ‘just humans.’

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies.

Andrea L. Dottolo is associate professor of psychology at Rhode Island College, Providence, USA. Her research focuses on social identities, and she teaches Gender and Women’s Studies, and Queer Studies. Dottolo’s scholarship on race interrogates white racial identities, including psychological features of whiteness and privilege.