The Love Jones Cohort

This book provides a structural understanding of how identities of race, class, gender, and singleness reconfigure the Black middle class.

Drawing from stratification economics, intersectionality, and respectability politics, The Love Jones Cohort centers on the voices and lifestyles of members of the Black middle class who are single and living alone (SALA). While much has been written about both the Black middle class and the rise of singlehood, this book represents a first foray into bridging these two concepts. In studying these intersections, The Love Jones Cohort provides a more nuanced understanding of how race, gender, and class, coupled with social structures, shape five central lifestyle factors of Black middle-class adults who are SALA. The book explores how these Black adults define family and friends and decide on whether and how to pursue romantic relationships, articulate the ebbs and flows of being Black and middle class, select where to live and why, accumulate and disseminate wealth, and maintain overall health, well-being, and coping mechanisms.

This book examines, for perhaps the first time, singlehood at the intersections of race, media, language, culture, literature, space, health, and life satisfaction. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach, borrowing from sociology, literary studies, medical humanities, race studies, linguistics, demographic studies, and critical geography to understand singlehood in the world today. This collection of essays aims to establish the discipline of Singles Studies, finding new ways of examining it from various disciplinary and cultural perspectives. It begins with laying the field and then moves on to critically look at how race has shaped the way we understand singlehood in the West and how class, age, gender, privilege, and the media play a role in shaping singlehood. It argues for a need for increased interdisciplinarity within the field, for example, analyzing singlehood from the perspective of medical humanities. The volume also explores the role workplace, living arrangements, financial status, and gender play in single people’s life satisfaction. With an interdisciplinary and transnational approach, this interdisciplinary volume seeks to establish Singles Studies as a truly global discipline. This pathbreaking volume would be of interest to students and researchers of sociology, literature, linguistics, media studies, and psychology.

From The Real Housewives of Atlanta to Flavor of Love, reality shows with predominantly black casts have often been criticized for their negative representation of African American women as loud, angry, and violent. Yet even as these programs appear to be rehashing old stereotypes of black women, the critiques of them are arguably problematic in their own way, as the notion of “respectability” has historically been used to police black women’s behaviors. The first book of scholarship devoted to the issue of how black women are depicted on reality television, Real Sister offers an even-handed consideration of the genre. The book’s ten contributors—black female scholars from a variety of disciplines—provide a wide range of perspectives, while considering everything from Basketball Wives to Say Yes to the Dress. As regular viewers of reality television, these scholars are able to note ways in which the genre presents positive images of black womanhood, even as they catalog a litany of stereotypes about race, class, and gender that it tends to reinforce. Rather than simply dismissing reality television as “trash,” this collection takes the genre seriously, as an important touchstone in ongoing cultural debates about what constitutes “trashiness” and “respectability.” Written in an accessible style that will appeal to reality TV fans both inside and outside of academia, Real Sister thus seeks to inspire a more nuanced, thoughtful conversation about the genre’s representations and their effects on the black community.

Every student taking Introduction to Sociology is a member of a population (male, female, Black, white), exists within a collectivity (sociology class, concert member, crowd), belongs to a social class (upper, middle, lower), interacts in a group (peer group, work group), comes from a family (two parent family, single parent family, blended family), lives in a community (small town, urban center, hometown), goes to an association (university, hospital, military), communicates through a network (MySpace, political networks), and lives out their life in a society (America, Iraq, Sweden). By examining each of these levels of social organization, the social world suddenly becomes alive, real, and understandable. "I get it" is a common reaction to this approach. The Social Context View of Sociology provides a solid foundation upon which new students can fully understand the discipline of sociology. The approach is different from other introductions to sociology in that it helps students order their knowledge in a unified manner by examining nine levels of social organization and provides an immediate insight into the relevance to their lives. The Teacher's Manual is available electronically on a CD or via email. Please contact Beth Hall at [email protected] to request a copy.