Introduction Intersectionality: Legacies and Controversies (original) (raw)

The Potential and Pitfalls of Intersectionality in the Context of Social Rights Adjudication

Intersectionality and Human Rights Law, 2020

Crenshaw's analysis of the impact of such 'intersectional discrimination' harkened back to the earlier insights of Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith and others involved in the Combahee River Collective, whose 1977 Statement had affirmed that 'the major systems of oppression are interlocking…[t]he synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives'. 3 It was itself subsequently further developed by Crenshaw herself, as well as by other critical race feminists, such as Patricia Hill Collins. Over time, Crenshaw's original insightsfocused primarily on the intersection of race and sex discrimination within the specific US contexthave morphed into a cross-disciplinary conceptual/analytical framework, used by scholars and activists across the world to critique the reproduction of social inequalities. This critique emphasises: (i) the porous and mutually-constituting nature of social identities such as gender, class, race, age, disability and sexual orientation; (ii) the intersecting impact of the various forms of discrimination that play out across this complex web of identities; (iii) the way in which such 'intersectional discrimination' reinforces existing structural power hierarchies; and (iv) the limitations of anti-discrimination strategies structured around a single-axis approach, in particular those which adopt a particular 'baseline' identity as their de facto 'central case' and thus constrain their capacity to engage in any meaningful way with intersectional discrimination (e.g. Crenshaw's examples of white women/black men for sex/race discrimination respectively). 4 More generally, it calls into question the traditional

The Time and Context-Contingent Nature of Intersectionality and Interlocking Oppressions

Affilia-journal of Women and Social Work, 2009

This article addresses the theoretical paradigm of intersectionality and interlocking oppressions, focusing on its evolution over time and place and application to the everyday lives of women. The objective is both to honor the roots of intersectional scholarship and to demonstrate the temporal and spatial nature of oppression and privilege. Theoretical concepts are illustrated by narratives from women who have crossed different sociocultural contexts and phases of the life course. This dialectical and self-reflexive intersectional analysis focuses not only on oppression but also on privilege and demonstrates that intersectionality and interlocking oppressions are time and context contingent, rather than fixed and ahistorical.

Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory

Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 2021

As its title indicates, Patricia Hill Collins' Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory intervenes into significant conversations about intersectionality as a theoretical framework for looking at social problems in the global west. The term 'critical' in the title could take the reader on two different interpretive paths. On one hand, it announces that intersectionality is part of the field of noteworthy contemporary social theory. On the other hand, it signals intersectionality's belonging with strands of social theorising which have had co-constitutive genealogies with social movements, thus mutually shaping each other's analytical terms and political agendas. Collins' scholarship has been crucial to the study of oppression as an interlocking system of power relations, which she termed the 'matrix of domination' in her seminal 1990 work Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Throughout her work, she has consistently foregrounded the relevance of knowledge production in the study of social issues, calling attention to differential lines of access to epistemic privilege, particularly with regard to black women's knowledge, experiences, and politics. Intersectional modalities of social analysis are rooted in the work of civil rights activists such as Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells, and later on to black lesbian feminists like Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and the Combahee River Collective. By asking how, when, and toward what ends categories of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, age, nation, and citizenship are deployed, intersectional analyses unearth complex structures of social, economic, and political inequality and power which shape experiences of multiple, interdependent, and simultaneous oppression. Collins' volume is an analytical tour de force of remarkable depth which astutely demonstrates that intersectionality must remain connected to resistive knowledge production projects and social justice movements. In arguing for intersectionality's place within the field of critical social theories, Collins engages with vast and varied sources in an effort to map and elucidate its critical theoretical possibilities, objectives, modes of analysis, and context-specific practices. Her theoretical work and secondary analysis reach across social theories and sociopolitical practices, and in doing so, she foregrounds important dialogues that are crucial to theorising through social action, and most importantly, to bringing about social change. The analytical category of intersectionality was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to account theoretically and methodologically for violence experienced by women of colour and migrant women at the confluence of USA race and gender regimes. It soon crossed the disciplinary boundaries of legal studies into all the disciplines and inter-disciplinary areas clustered into the larger field of social studies. Over the course of the past three decades, intersectional analysis has become the preferred framework of inquiry into inequalities structured by race, class, and gender violence. Its influence is also evidenced by the expansion of its geographical Lovin / Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory

Intersectionality: Crossing the Theoretical and Praxis Divide 1

The particular vulnerability to sexual assault that is experienced by women who are Aboriginal, disabled, or Black was discussed by the Coalition in its factum in O"Conner (paragraphs 17 to 24). Other cases will expose the particular operation and intersection of more inequalities that continue not to be acknowledged or challenged by a legal system that fails to invoke the guarantees of section 15. It is material to acknowledge that neither the O"Conner case nor the present appeal represent all the dynamics of power and institutionalized oppression to which women are subject. 3

Intersectionality: Crossing the Theoretical and Praxis Divide

Journal of Critical Race Inquiry

The particular vulnerability to sexual assault that is experienced by women who are Aboriginal, disabled, or Black was discussed by the Coalition in its factum in O’Conner (paragraphs 17 to 24). Other cases will expose the particular operation and intersection of more inequalities that continue not to be acknowledged or challenged by a legal system that fails to invoke the guarantees of section 15. It is material to acknowledge that neither the O’Conner case nor the present appeal represent all the dynamics of power and institutionalized oppression to which women are subject.

Intersectionality as Theory and Practice

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews

Everybody is talking about intersectionality these days. Whether one is out of the loop and wondering what all the fuss is about or in the inner circle and trying to decide whether and how to use it most effectively as a tool, either of the two books reviewed here-Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons, by Anna Carastathis, and Intersectionality, by Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge-will prove an invaluable guide. Before considering the arguments the authors advance for why the approach they take is particularly useful, it may help to step back and consider what NON-intersectional sociology looked like. In the 1980s, Elaine Hall and I surveyed all the most widely used textbooks in introductory sociology; and, among other things, we found that race, class, and gender didn't, and in some ways couldn't, intersect to inform a basic sociological understanding of inequality. These books captured the prevailing wisdom of their time: class was a macro-structural arrangement organizing societies; race was a group membership defining cultural identities, institutionalized barriers, and political mobilization; and gender was a biosocial characteristic cultivated through childhood socialization and maintained by deep-seated ''traditional'' attitudes (Ferree and Hall 1996). Operating at different levels of social organization, gender, class, and race were understood then as social processes independent of each other and ranked by the priority given them in the ''classics'' of social theory: class was definitely structurally significant, but race and gender were ''identities'' and ''epiphenomenal.'' Since then, this consensus has largely been replaced, not without struggle, by a commitment to understanding these processes as all working at all three levels, as being far from Contemporary Sociology 47, 2

Intersectionality: Beyond Epistemic Anxiety and towards a Radical Politics of Justice

I want to start with a proposition: that we have our own history of being intersectional, only we have never recognized it as such, or sought to rework that history to productive ends. I say this because, we associate intersectionality with the work of Kimberle Crenshaw, and the case she made for intersectional feminism, for what she considered multiple forms of inequality which cohere in the lives of black women. But perhaps we might want to recall the context of her arguments: the nature of anti-discrimination law in the US, which held that all other things being equal, either race or sex based inequality would constitute discrimination. Her concerns had to do with how such an understanding of discrimination was consequential-for feminist and civil rights movements. To quote her: "both feminist theory and antiracist politics have been organized, in part, around the equation of racism with what happens to the Black middle-class or to Black men, and the equation of sexism with what happens to white women." In the event the inequities of race, class and gender as experienced by black women were rendered marginal. In our context, we have for over a century and more grappled with multiple inequalities, and so, if anything, reading Crenshaw ought to make us turn towards this rich history-anchored, not only in anti-colonial and socialist struggles and in the women's movement, but also in various anti-caste movements and ideologies that emerged in colonial India. The question is how do we do this.

Review: Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality

International Sociology, 2018

According to Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality originates from a need to introduce the complexities of intersectionality to a larger audience and provide a guide to the field. Thus, the authors set themselves the task of examining the perspectives, definitions, and controversies that characterize intersectionality through selected moments in its history: beginning in the 1960s and the 1970s social movements, moving forward via the work of Crenshaw and its academic institutionalization in the 1980s and 1990s, and its global dispersion beginning in the 2000s, in particular its relation to human rights approaches, academic adoption, and discussions in digital media. There are also examples taken from different dimensions and/or fields of the social world: from the FIFA World Cup to hiphop, to the black women's movement in Brazil, the Rana Plaza tragedy in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the militarization of nation-states and their neoliberal policies of securitization, and late 20th-century school reforms in the United States, among other examples. Notwithstanding, Collins and Bilge want to tell the story of intersectionality in a selfreflexive way. They feel that telling the story of intersectionality is itself a type of political work that authenticates and legitimizes certain schools of thoughts at the expense of others. They choose the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s as a starting point, pinpointing the importance of intellectual production and activism among African American, Chicana, Asian American, and Native American women in the United States. These groups of women are seen as starting to develop intersectional analyses within social movements, which took into account the fact that the oppression they suffered could not be solved by considering only one axis of social inequality (whether it be race, class, gender, or sexuality). In the early 1990s, the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw became a significant marker through the coining of the term 'intersectionality.' Collins and Bilge try to show how Crenshaw builds on previous work of the 1960s and 1970s social movements to articulate individual and collective identity, maintain a focus on social structures, and highlight social justice as the main objective of intersectionality, among other issues. The authors proceed to explain how during its institutionalizing period in academia in the 1980s and 1990s, intersectionality frameworks, both as a form of critical inquiry and as a form of critical praxis, changed from projects grounded in lived, individual, and/or collective experiences to projects originating from an academic background. A 'normative' history of intersectionality started erasing the heterogeneity of forms of intersectionality of the previous period, eclipsing a group of people and their work, which Collins and Bilge consider to be of great importance to the development of intersectionality. Furthermore, what is seen as particularly perverse by the authors is the fact that by seeking scientific recognition and legitimacy within the Euro-American scientific field, the stories being told about the history of intersectionality helped establish intersectionality as a legitimate