This exciting new text for courses in the sociology of gender brings together the multiple strands of gender and associated research reaching from local and everyday manifestations of masculinity and femininity to the gendered global forces that lie beneath today's political and social crises.To do so, each chapter builds upon four principles:*Theory and empirical data are woven together throughout each chapter, rather than relegating theories of gender into a separate, single chapter. The book gathers together much of the empirical scholarship-mainly sociological, but also interdisciplinary-that has accumulated around a long list ofsubstantive areas. Students will learn about the mass of research on violence, families, media, sports, politics, sexuality, religion, education, and bodies that ground knowledge about gender relations and structures of gender. *The authors connect local events with large-scale organizations, institutions, and global phenomena to show how power operates at the narrowest and at the broadest levels of society and how the two levels are connected. They offer both social constructionist and social structural approaches toexplain the production of inequality in face-to-face interaction within constraining institutional structures. They ask how the gendered features of our everyday lives are given life and shape by the larger institutional and organizational structures which contain them and how, in turn, we act backon those forces, shaping new forms of gendered relationships, remaking gendered worlds, and perhaps even eliminating gendered differences. *Coverage is focused on gender and gendered relationships between men and women. The authors have taken special care to make sure that readers are provided with evidence and ways of understanding how gender touches everyone's lives: both men and women. *Finally, this book takes seriously the understanding that there are important differences among women and among men. The "intersectionality" that differentially locates individuals and groups in what black feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins called a "matrix of domination" (Collins 2000) is acore feature of each chapter. There is no way to understand gender inequality as a thing in itself, as a phenomenon that can be separated from the multiple cross-cutting inequalities of class, race, sexuality, and nation. The theory of intersectionality and the matrix of domination are conceptsthat help to show how race ethnicity, class, sexuality, and national identity shape gender identities and experiences and how gender differences contribute to differences in the impact of racial ethnic, sexual, class, and national experience.