ABSTRACT
In terms of press coverage as well as academic debates, talk of global inequalities is currently in full swing. The early sociology of social inequality was linked to the socioeconomic context of Western European industrial society, in which class divisions, labour migration, and mass poverty constituted the main social questions. The European modernity's repertoire of promises is usually drawn from key moments in Western history and their symbolic role within a linear trajectory intended to disseminate to the entire world. Acceptable indicators of modernity thus defined range from industrial to post-industrial societies, from liberal to neoliberal market economies and political regimes, and from enlightened to postmodern worldviews. On the basis of postcolonial and Third World feminist positions, the chapter complements the decolonial perspective's focus on racialisation and ethnicisation by an analysis of the corresponding strategies of gendering as underlying the logic of Occidentalism.
