Response to Barbara Foley’s “Intersectionality: A Marxist Critique” (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
2021
The macro-level of society consists of the relationships among its institutional structures and how such patterned relations change in systematic ways over time. Considering intersectionality at this level implies asking how global systems that produce inequality operate together. The challenge for macro-level thinking about intersectionality is to resist the long history of treating capitalism, class relations and the global economy as the most fundamental set of global relations. Intersectional theorizing at this level combines analysis of the emergent and relational properties of inequality-producing systems with an equally critical attitude to all of these structural inequalities. However, in contrast to top-down theorizing about abstract systems, intersectional macro-theorizing incorporates a focus on experience that enlarges the meaning of developing critique. This chapter situates the development of intersectional theory at the macro-level and highlights its contributions.
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 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 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.