What's Intersectional about Intersectionality Now? (original) (raw)
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Since its inception, the concept of 'intersectionality' -the interaction of multiple identities and experiences of exclusion and subordination -has been heralded as one of the most important contributions to feminist scholarship. Despite its popularity, there has been considerable confusion concerning what the concept actually means and how it can or should be applied in feminist inquiry. In this article, I look at the phenomenon of intersectionality's spectacular success within contemporary feminist scholarship, as well as the uncertainties and confusion which it has generated. Drawing upon insights from the sociology of science, I shall show how and why intersectionality could become a feminist success story. I shall argue that, paradoxically, it is precisely the concept's alleged weaknesses -its ambiguity and open-endedness -that were the secrets to its success and, more generally, make it a good feminist theory. keywords critical race theory, difference, feminist methodology, postmodern feminist theory, theoretical closure, theory generalists and specialists
Revisiting intersectionality: reflections on theory and praxis
2015
It is impossible to be familiar with the contemporary field of feminism and gender studies and not be aware of the massive intellectual influence of intersectionality. Having emerged in the late 1980s, intersectionality has now come to be not only the way to do feminist research, but has also been exported to other fields and disciplines. Many believe intersectionality has brought about a paradigm shift within gender studies. However, this supposed shift has taken on a performative rather than concrete form. The use of intersectionality today does not necessarily produce critical research that is vastly distinguishable from previous liberal approaches to gender studies. Instead, the claim to intersectionality is often only a performance of both something new and something critical that has increasingly reproduced older approaches to gender research, most notably liberal approaches. In this article, we address this performativity as emerging forms of identity politics that are distin...
INTERSECTIONALITY: Mapping the Movements of a Theory
Very few theories have generated the kind of interdisciplinary and global engagement that marks the intellectual history of intersectionality. Yet, there has been very little effort to reflect upon precisely how intersectionality has moved across time, disciplines, issues, and geographic and national boundaries. Our failure to attend to intersectionality's movement has limited our ability to see the theory in places in which it is already doing work and to imagine other places to which the theory might be taken. Addressing these questions, this special issue reflects upon the genesis of intersectionality, engages some of the debates about its scope and theoretical capacity, marks some of its disciplinary and global travels, and explores the future trajectory of the theory. To do so, the volume includes academics from across the disciplines and from outside of the United States. Their respective contributions help us to understand how intersectionality has moved and to broaden our sense of where the theory might still go.
Hypatia Reviews Online
Using an interdisciplinary approach to examine a widely influential theoretical and political framework for the understanding of identity and power, Pursuing Intersectionality: Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries offers a thorough and comprehensive analysis of the complexities of intersectionality and explores how its potential may be enhanced and maximized. To do so, Vivian May, grounding intersectionality in the historical context of US Black feminist and feminist of color traditions, synthesizes the major concepts, practices, and politics associated with intersectionality. Approaching social identity as lived and interlocking, intersectionality deploys important concepts, such as the subjective, nonsummative, political, and mutually reinforcing character of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability, among other social categories, for the examination and understanding of identity in the context of power and oppression in society. Such concepts challenge "single-axis" analytical orientations (that is, those that focus solely on race to understand the lived realities of people of color in the United States without paying attention to other aspects of their identity) in favor of a "matrix" worldview (that is, one that focuses simultaneously on race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and so on, to understand the lived realities of this group), which has become the hallmark of intersectional practice. The matrix worldview provides an orientation to politics that highlights the multidimensionality of power, privilege, and oppression; challenges hierarchies of oppression as "divide-and-conquer" strategies that ultimately favor those in power; and offers inclusive models of social transformation to eradicate social inequality at individual and systemic levels. Through her analysis, May convincingly demonstrates that intersectionality has been resisted, misunderstood, and misapplied by both supporters and critics of the framework. Calling this pervasive issue an "intersectional backlash," the author offers strategies to maximize-indeed actualize-the potential power of intersectional tools in multiple domains of social and political life.
European Journal of Women's Studies, 2006
As we were editing this special issue we learned of four international conferences on intersectionality as well as of discussions of it in other national forums and in print. While it would be far fetched to suggest that everyone is talking about intersectionality, it is certainly an idea in the process of burgeoning. Indeed, the idea of focusing a special issue on intersectionality was generated from the European Journal of Women's Studies 10th anniversary conference where Kathy Davis and Pamela Pattynama stimulated a discussion so animated that it seemed obvious that we should open the pages of the journal to debating it with a view to establishing areas of agreement and points of contention in intersectional theory and practice.
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
The roots of intersectionality: saving intersectionality from racism.
2022
Feminist scholars have glorified intersectionality, yet intersectionality suffers from internal contradictions. Considering various articles from feminist literature, I analyse the problem of racism in the academy. I focus on the birth of intersectionality and the relationship between black women and white women, investigating the connection between the ideas of family and women's sexuality in different cultures and history. The emerging problem is that intersectionality is rooted in black feminism, yet black feminists are being excluded from it; this process is defined as the 'whitening of intersectionality'. The adjective 'white' does not indicate the colour of the skin, but it refers to power relationships and white ethnocentrism. I'm not saying that white scholars should be excluded from the intersectional debate, but I underline the need for 'self-reflexivity' and 'racial sedition' to save intersectionality from racism.