I have been playing around for some time with visual images to convey the concept of intersecting, overlapping hierarchies based on dimensions of group identity such as gender, race/ethnicity, class, and citizenship. For a while I liked fractal pyramids because sometimes inequalities do seem nested inside one another. But I turned against them because a) they seem too regular, too geometric, too deterministic, and b) they imply that some inequalities fully enclose others.
Then I played around with 3-dimensional pyramids with N facets (and a polygonal base with N sides) where each facet represented membership in a socially assigned group.
This was kind of neat, because I could use each facet to show the distribution of income or wealth and show how women, people of color, wage earners, and non-citizens of the U.S. were arrayed from top to bottom. I actually invested some time and money into this income mapping project, but then decided it was too complicated. Part of the problem was that the pyramid of income in the U.S.–if accurately portrayed in terms of distance between groups–looks very weird, with a kind of flagpole on top representing the vast range of incomes in the top 5%.
In late December, while doodling around on my Ipad to come with an image for the title page of a powerpoint presentation for the Association for Social Economics plenary at the Allied Social Science Meetings in Atlanta, I came up with the image above, vague but somehow evocative. I’ll keep doodling.
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