Kathleen M Blee
Biographic Data
| ID | 86705 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kathleen M Blee |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kathleen M |
| FAMILY NAME | Blee |
| SIGNATURE | BLEE K M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pittsburgh |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 70 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 628 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 68 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Methodological lessons from four decades of close-up research on racial extremism
This article discusses methodological issues in my close-up interviewing and observational research on how participants joined, acted in, and broke away from racist groups in four waves of extremist white supremacism in the US: the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, the resurgence of racial extremism in the 1990s, and organized racism in the 2010s and 2020s. Rather than offer a smooth roadmap, it describes the mistakes and problems that hindered, and sometimes,…
Gender and the Far-Right
The role of gender in far-right parties and movements received little attention until the twentieth century, when feminist and masculinity studies began to draw attention to women's participation in these politics and the gendered nature of men's far-right activism. In the past decade, research in this area has flourished, creating a distinct subspecialty. This review focuses on recent scholarship on the discourse and practices of femininity/wome…
Fair Share: Senior Activism, Tiny Publics, and the Culture of Resistance
Women in the White Supremacist Movement
A small but growing body of literature highlights the roles of women in White supremacist movements in the United States. This chapter reviews the diverse findings of this work by showing when, why, and how women participate in White supremacist movements. It begins by analyzing the interlocking ideologies of race and gender that shape women’s participation. Most White supremacist movements glorify stereotypical gender norms for both men and wome…
Understanding Racist Activism: Theory, Methods, and Research
White supremacist groups are highly secretive, so their public propaganda tells us little about their operations or the people they attract. To understand the world of organized racism it is necessary to study it from the inside by talking to their members and observing their groups. Doing so reveals a disturbing picture of how fairly ordinary white people learn to embrace the vicious ideas and dangerous agendas of white supremacism. This book ta…
How the Study of White Supremacism Is Helped and Hindered by Social Movement Research
Scholars of white supremacism adopted the framework of social movement research later and less completely than did scholars of progressive movements. Although the shift to considering racist groups as a social movement had many analytic benefits, it also nudged analysis away from some of the most central aspects of white supremacism. This article suggests how social movement research and scholarship on organized racism can benefit from a more ref…
How Racial Violence Is Provoked and Channeled
This paper seeks to explain the extraordinary violence of modern-day organized white supremacism in the United States. We begin on a conceptual level by distinguishing the racial ideologies and violence associated with modern racist movements from the racism and racial violence expressed in daily life in highly racialized and racially unequal societies. We then move to an empirical level by using our interviews with a broad set of former racist a…
Manufacturing Fear: Muslim Americans and the Politics of Terrorism
Racist Movements
Racist movements organize against certain racial, ethnic, national, religious, and social groups, especially Jews, Muslim, immigrants, and people of color. Modern racist movements include White Power skinheads, neo‐Nazis, and Aryan supremacists and separatists. Some of the groups and movements are linked to larger right‐wing political parties, while others are small and politically marginal. Many emerge as the result of competition, real or imagi…
Racist Movements
Racist movements are organized, collective efforts to create, preserve, or extend racial hierarchies of power and privilege. Such movements explicitly espouse the ideologies of white supremacism and/or anti‐Semitism (anti‐Judaism or hatred of Muslims or Arabs) that were consolidated in the western world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Intergroup antagonisms in earlier times, even conflicts that cross what later would be regarded as ra…
Methods, Interpretation, and Ethics in the Study of White Supremacist Perpetrators
Interpretive and ethical frameworks circumscribe how we study the perpetrators of politically motivated violence against civilian populations. This article revisits the author's studies of two eras of white supremacism in the United States, the 1920s and 1980s-1990s, to examine how these were affected by four frameworks of inquiry: the assumption of agency, the allure of the extraordinary, the tendency to categorical analysis, and the presumption…
The Place of Race in Conservative and Far-right Movements
This paper explores current understandings and proposes new directions for research on the place of race in rightist social movements in the contemporary United States. We examine two broad categories of rightist movements. The first is white-majority conservative movements that deny their participation in racialized politics but in which race is implicit in their ideologies and agendas, such as the Tea Party. The second is far-right movements th…
Democracy in the MakingHow Activist Groups Form: How Activist Groups Form
Does Gender Matter in the United States Far-Right
This article examines how scholarly templates shape what is studied about women in the far-right, using data about women in the 1920s Ku Klux Klan and contemporary organized racism. First, it presents two templates that historically made women and gender issues invisible to scholars of the US right: the template of the rightist as male and the template of Nazi Germany as the prototype of far-right. Second, it considers three templates that exist …
Ethics Beyond the IRB: An Introductory Essay
Conservative and Right-Wing Movements
In recent years, the right has become a powerful force in many parts of the world. This review focuses primarily on the United States, with comparisons to rightist movements elsewhere. Our focus is movements, not political parties or intellectual trends. The article begins with terms and definitions and distinguishes conservative from right-wing movements. We then review changing theoretical orientations and the major findings on ideologies and c…
Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s
Ignorant. Brutal. Male. One of these stereotypes of the Ku Klux Klan offers a misleading picture. In Women of the Klan, sociologist Kathleen M. Blee dismantles the popular notion that politically involved women are always inspired by pacifism, equality, and justice. In her new preface, Blee reflects on how recent scholarship on gender and right-wing extremism suggests new ways to understand women's place in the 1920s Klan's crusade for white and …
Aryan Cowboys: White Supremacists and the Search for a New Frontier, 1970-2000
Aryan Cowboys: White Supremacists and the Search for a New Frontier, 1970–2000 Aryan Cowboys: White Supremacists and the Search for a New Frontier, 1970–2000. By Schlatter Evelyn A.. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. xv + 250 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $50.00, cloth; $19.95, paper.) Kathleen M. Blee Kathleen M. Blee University of Pittsburgh Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Wester…
Racist Movements
Racist movements are organized, collective efforts to create, preserve, or extend racial hierarchies of power and privilege. Such movements explicitly espouse the ideologies of white supremacism and/or anti‐Semitism (anti‐Judaism or hatred of Muslims or Arabs) that were consolidated in the western world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Manifestations of intergroup antagonism in earlier times, even conflicts that cross what later would …
Working-Class White: The Making and Unmaking of Race Relations
The Microdynamics of Hate Violence: Interpretive Analysis and Implications for Responses
By examining the link between attitudes and actions by perpetrators of hate violence and interpretation of hate violence by its victims, this article demonstrates how interpretive analytic strategies can illuminate aspects of the microdynamics of hate crime violence that are difficult to understand with variable-centered analysis. Data on the relationship between perpetrator motive and actions are from semistructured interviews of female rank-and…
Ethnographies of the Far Right
Despite the gains of far-right and racist movements in many parts of the world, they have been the subject of relatively little ethnographic research. This volume assembles work by prominent scholars on right-wing extremist movements in various places across the globe. Despite significant differences in the agendas and contexts of these groups, close-up examination of their dynamics and the motivations of their activists suggests that emotionalit…
How Local Social Movement Groups Handle a Presidential Election
Women and Organized Racial Terrorism in the United States
Racial terrorism—violence perpetrated by organized groups against racial minorities in pursuit of white and Aryan supremacist agendas—has played a significant role in U.S. society and politics. Women have been important actors in much of this violence. This article examines women's involvement in racial terrorism from the immediate post-Civil War period to the present. Although organized racial violence by women has increased over time, this tren…
There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence
Conservative and Right-Wing Movements
In recent years, the right has become a powerful force in many parts of the world. This review focuses primarily on the United States, with comparisons to rightist movements elsewhere. Our focus is movements, not political parties or intellectual trends. The article begins with terms and definitions and distinguishes conservative from right-wing movements. We then review changing theoretical orientations and the major findings on ideologies and c…
Racial Differences in Men's Attitudes about Women's Gender Roles
The attitudes that men and women hold toward appropriate gender roles have a significant influence on many aspects of marital and family dynamics. They also help to perpetuate gender-differentiated opportunities in employment, education, politics, and other areas. For women and girls, a substantial body of literature has documented the formation of gender role attitudes, the transmission of attitudes across generations (especially from their moth…
White-Knuckle Research: Emotional Dynamics in Fieldwork with Racist Activists
Ethnographies of the Far Right
Despite the gains of far-right and racist movements in many parts of the world, they have been the subject of relatively little ethnographic research. This volume assembles work by prominent scholars on right-wing extremist movements in various places across the globe. Despite significant differences in the agendas and contexts of these groups, close-up examination of their dynamics and the motivations of their activists suggests that emotionalit…
Becoming a Racist: Women in Contemporary Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazi Groups
This article examines how women members of contemporary U.S. racist groups reconcile the male-oriented agendas of organized racism with understandings of themselves and their gendered self-interests. Using life history narratives and in-depth interviews, the author examines how women racial activists construct self-understandings that fit agendas of the racist movement and how they reshape understandings of movement goals to fit their own beliefs…
Racial violence in the United States
This article proposes a reconceptualization of racial violence in the United States. Departing from frameworks and definitions of racial violence that have been based largely on assessments of the intent and motivation of perpetrators, this approach incorporates as well the experiences and perceptions of victims and audiences of racial violence. Focusing on the racial fungibility of victims and the consequences of violence to victims makes possib…
Ethics Beyond the IRB: An Introductory Essay
Evidence, Empathy, and Ethics: Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan
Journal Article Evidence, Empathy, and Ethics: Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan Get access Kathleen M. Blee Kathleen M. Blee professor of sociology University of Kentucky Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 80, Issue 2, September 1993, Pages 596–606, https://doi.org/10.2307/2079873 Published: 01 September 1993
How Local Social Movement Groups Handle a Presidential Election
Women and Organized Racial Terrorism in the United States
Racial terrorism—violence perpetrated by organized groups against racial minorities in pursuit of white and Aryan supremacist agendas—has played a significant role in U.S. society and politics. Women have been important actors in much of this violence. This article examines women's involvement in racial terrorism from the immediate post-Civil War period to the present. Although organized racial violence by women has increased over time, this tren…
How the Study of White Supremacism Is Helped and Hindered by Social Movement Research
Scholars of white supremacism adopted the framework of social movement research later and less completely than did scholars of progressive movements. Although the shift to considering racist groups as a social movement had many analytic benefits, it also nudged analysis away from some of the most central aspects of white supremacism. This article suggests how social movement research and scholarship on organized racism can benefit from a more ref…
This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy
Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s
Ignorant. Brutal. Male. One of these stereotypes of the Ku Klux Klan offers a misleading picture. In Women of the Klan, sociologist Kathleen M. Blee dismantles the popular notion that politically involved women are always inspired by pacifism, equality, and justice. In her new preface, Blee reflects on how recent scholarship on gender and right-wing extremism suggests new ways to understand women's place in the 1920s Klan's crusade for white and …
Reconstructing Daily Life in the Past: An Hermeneutical Approach to Ethnographic Data
Traditional sources of sociohistorical data capture only a narrow sense of past lifeworlds. Ethnographic accounts often preserve greater details of social practice but have less clear guidelines for use as data. We evaluate the use of hermeneutical theory as providing guidelines for a method by which ethnographies may be used as sociohistorical data. Hermeneutical analysis of ethnographic "texts" is used to reconstruct patterns of daily life in e…
Black-White Differences in Mother-to-Daughter Transmission of Sex-Role Attitudes
We construct a model of sex-role transmission from mothers to daughters using three survey years from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experiences of Mature Women and Young Women. We develop a series of hypotheses specifying race differences on how mothers' sex-role attitudes and work behavior during daughters' adolescence influence daughter's adult work and sex-role attitudes. The major difference between blacks and whites lies …
How Racial Violence Is Provoked and Channeled
This paper seeks to explain the extraordinary violence of modern-day organized white supremacism in the United States. We begin on a conceptual level by distinguishing the racial ideologies and violence associated with modern racist movements from the racism and racial violence expressed in daily life in highly racialized and racially unequal societies. We then move to an empirical level by using our interviews with a broad set of former racist a…
The Place of Race in Conservative and Far-right Movements
This paper explores current understandings and proposes new directions for research on the place of race in rightist social movements in the contemporary United States. We examine two broad categories of rightist movements. The first is white-majority conservative movements that deny their participation in racialized politics but in which race is implicit in their ideologies and agendas, such as the Tea Party. The second is far-right movements th…
Women in the 1920s' Ku Klux Klan Movement
Working-Class White: The Making and Unmaking of Race Relations
Does Gender Matter in the United States Far-Right
This article examines how scholarly templates shape what is studied about women in the far-right, using data about women in the 1920s Ku Klux Klan and contemporary organized racism. First, it presents two templates that historically made women and gender issues invisible to scholars of the US right: the template of the rightist as male and the template of Nazi Germany as the prototype of far-right. Second, it considers three templates that exist …
Family Strategies in a Subsistence Economy: Beech Creek, Kentucky, 1850-1942
In this study of landownership, life-cycle effects, and household composition in a rural Appalachian community, we examine the nature of family strategies in a subsistence-oriented economy. Baseline ethnographic data from 1942 are linked through genealogical information to data on households from the manuscript agricultural and population censuses of 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900, and 1910. The great variability in household composition over this …
There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence
Violence and Local State Formation: A Longitudinal Case Study of Appalachian Feuding
We investigate the causes of protracted violent conflict by examining the dynamics of a so-called family feud in one Appalachian county in the 19th century. Using data from the civil and criminal court docket and sociohistorical sources, we find that protracted local violence was neither an alternative to dispute resolution through the courts nor a simple function of economic development. Rather, feud violence reflected the social and economic re…
The Microdynamics of Hate Violence: Interpretive Analysis and Implications for Responses
By examining the link between attitudes and actions by perpetrators of hate violence and interpretation of hate violence by its victims, this article demonstrates how interpretive analytic strategies can illuminate aspects of the microdynamics of hate crime violence that are difficult to understand with variable-centered analysis. Data on the relationship between perpetrator motive and actions are from semistructured interviews of female rank-and…
The Velvet Glove: Paternalism and Conflict in Gender, Class, and Race Relations
This landmark study analyzes and compares the ideologies that develop among unequal social groups. Mary Jackman employs a unique national survey to investigate all three of the most prominent relations of inequality in the United States: gender, class, and race. Where other scholars have emphasized conflict as the emblem of intergroup oppression, Jackman proposes a theory in which both dominant and subordinate groups maneuver to avoid open hostil…
Women of the Depression: Caste and Culture in San Antonio, 1929-1939
Mobility and Political Orientation: An Analysis of Sex Differences
Public attention recently has been drawn to the existence of a 'gender gap' in public opinion and electoral politics in the United States. Yet the reasons for this sex difference in politics are unclear. Do men and women have differences of political orientation that are independent of social class differences or do sex differences in politics reflect different class experiences for men and women? This research uses national survey data to compar…
Family patterns and the politicization of consumption relations
There has been little sociological research on the processes of exploitation and the politicization of relations of consumption. This study examines the role that family structure plays in the development of a class‐based politicization of consumption relations in a community. I compare communities of the Lake Superior region at the turn of the 20th century that were settled largely by the male immigrants living without families with structurally…
Immigrant Socialists in the United States: The Case of Finns and the Left
The first comprehensive sociohistorical account of the Finnich-American left, this book reports on a little-known ethnic group that contributed more heavily to political radicalism in the United States than any other ethnic group
The Question of Needs
Women, Work, and Protest: A Century of U. S. Women's Labor History
Teaching a Theory-Based Sociology of Gender Course
Sociology of gender courses typically are organized around research findings rather than around theoretical frameworks. However, a theory-based course organization may be more suitable than a research-based sociology of gender course at the undergraduate and the graduate level. I discuss the advantages of structuring a course on gender around the classical and contemporary sociological theories from which feminist theories are derived. Techniques…
Reconstructing Daily Life in the Past: An Hermeneutical Approach to Ethnographic Data
Traditional sources of sociohistorical data capture only a narrow sense of past lifeworlds. Ethnographic accounts often preserve greater details of social practice but have less clear guidelines for use as data. We evaluate the use of hermeneutical theory as providing guidelines for a method by which ethnographies may be used as sociohistorical data. Hermeneutical analysis of ethnographic "texts" is used to reconstruct patterns of daily life in e…
Gender ideology and the role of women in the 1920s Klan movement
The 1920s Ku Klux Klan movement defies conventional expectations of the role of women and the use of gender ideology in right‐wing political movements. The male Ku Klux Klan and the female Women of the Ku Klux Klan mobilized millions of white, native‐born Protestant women and men into a conservative, racist movement that supported women's rights and equality in political and economic life. This paper examines the participation of women and the de…
Life and Labor: Dimensions of American Working-Class History
Black-White Differences in Mother-to-Daughter Transmission of Sex-Role Attitudes
We construct a model of sex-role transmission from mothers to daughters using three survey years from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experiences of Mature Women and Young Women. We develop a series of hypotheses specifying race differences on how mothers' sex-role attitudes and work behavior during daughters' adolescence influence daughter's adult work and sex-role attitudes. The major difference between blacks and whites lies …
Engels Revisited: New Feminist Essays
Examines the problematic and divisive attitudes which bourgeois and socialist feminists take to the question of the links between patriarchy and capitalism and the importance of class conflict as a major cause of women's subordination
Women of the New Right. Rebecca E. Klatch
Family Strategies in a Subsistence Economy: Beech Creek, Kentucky, 1850-1942
In this study of landownership, life-cycle effects, and household composition in a rural Appalachian community, we examine the nature of family strategies in a subsistence-oriented economy. Baseline ethnographic data from 1942 are linked through genealogical information to data on households from the manuscript agricultural and population censuses of 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900, and 1910. The great variability in household composition over this …
Women in the 1920s' Ku Klux Klan Movement
Rebuilding the Nest: A New Commitment to the American Family
Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s
Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921-1928
Journal Article Citizen Klammen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928. By Leonard J. Moore. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. xvi + 259 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-8078-1981-6.) and The Dragon and the Cross: The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in Middle America. By Richard K. Tucker. (Hamden: Archon, 1991. xii + 224 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0-208-02310-0.) Get access Kathleen M. Blee Kathleen M. Blee University of Kentucky Search for oth…
The Emergence of David Duke and the Politics of Race
This collection of essays growing out of in-depth research on David Duke examines the controversial Louisiana politician's past, his electoral success, his appeal, and his constituency. The contributors, including political scientists, journalists, historians, and activists, conclude that Duke appeals to a vast group of middle-class, white voters who feel that they have been ignored by the political scene and bypassed in economic terms.Originally…
Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s
Evidence, Empathy, and Ethics: Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan
Journal Article Evidence, Empathy, and Ethics: Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan Get access Kathleen M. Blee Kathleen M. Blee professor of sociology University of Kentucky Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 80, Issue 2, September 1993, Pages 596–606, https://doi.org/10.2307/2079873 Published: 01 September 1993
The Velvet Glove: Paternalism and Conflict in Gender, Class, and Race Relations
This landmark study analyzes and compares the ideologies that develop among unequal social groups. Mary Jackman employs a unique national survey to investigate all three of the most prominent relations of inequality in the United States: gender, class, and race. Where other scholars have emphasized conflict as the emblem of intergroup oppression, Jackman proposes a theory in which both dominant and subordinate groups maneuver to avoid open hostil…
Search for the American Right Wing: An Analysis of the Social Science Record, 1955-1987
Journal Article Search for the American Right Wing: An Analysis of the Social Science Record, 1955–1987. By William B. Hixson, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. xxvii, 357 pp. $49.50, ISBN 0-691-08623-0.) Get access Kathleen M. Blee Kathleen M. Blee University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 81, Issue 1, June 1994, Pages 3…
Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan
Nancy Maclean offers a major new interpretation of the Ku Klux Klan in America, placing the organization in its context of class and gender as well as race and religion
This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy
Sociology (49 works) · Political science (46 works) · Law (34 works) · Race, History, and American Society (27 works) · Gender Studies (26 works) · Law (23 works) · Politics (21 works) · History (17 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · History (13 works)