‘The Kind that All White Men Want’: Race and the Role of Subtle Status Characteristics in an Urban Gay Setting

Abstract

The relationship of social status to the patterning of health and illness is a fundamental concern of medical sociological and social epidemiological research programmes. Yet, despite the utility of the concepts of status and status structure for health research, status typologies run the risk of homogenizing heterogeneous characteristics, thereby obscuring aspects of status and status hierarchy which, in effect, fall ‘below the radar screen’ of core categories of people – including those captured by the categories of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. This paper uses qualitative data from a sample of urban black homosexual men to introduce the concept, ‘subtle status characteristic’ and propose a middle-ground between the ‘universalizing’ and ‘essentializing’ tendencies of social epidemiological and biomedical research and the ‘relativizing’ tendencies of poststructural and postmodern approaches. By situating race in a specific urban gay setting, I advance an analysis of ‘difference-within’ race, identifying a finer subset of contextualized status characteristics, while retaining the analytic significance of classificatory typologies. The paper concludes with a discussion of the relevance of the concept for health research on race and sexuality, and for the analysis of status and health more generally.