The Concept of Intersectionality in Feminist Theory (original) (raw)

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

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...

Recent Feminist Outlooks on Intersectionality

With its recognition of the combined effects of the social categories of race, class and gender intersectionality has risen to the rank of feminism’s most important contribution to date. Though the first intersectional research (American and British) gave visibility to the social locus of women who self-identified as “black” or “of colour”, current research goes beyond the confines of the English-speaking world and aims increasingly to develop an intersectional instrument to deal with discrimination. This project gives rise to two kinds of debate: one related to producing intersectional information and to ways of carrying out research in this area, the other to do with the use of this information in the political struggle for equality. The current paper, which is confined to the first debate, attempts to bring out the main tension points in present theorizations of intersectionality. Its objective is twofold: to demonstrate certain limits to the explanatory power of intersectionality, and to suggest ways forward in the light of discussions already in train. In order to do so four points are tackled: intersectionality as a research paradigm, the issue of levels of analysis, the theoretical difference of opinion on the ontological status of categories of difference and the issue of widening the theoretical scope of intersectionality

Review of *Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory* by Patricia Hill Collins

Hypatia, 2023

Patricia Hill Collins's long-awaited monograph on intersectionality does something remarkable. It issues an invitation to form a community: to engage with, and thereby transcend the "definitional dilemmas" (to use Collins's own term) in which the field of intersectionality studies has been mired for the past decade, and to reconstitute intersectionality as a "broad-based, collaborative intellectual and political project with many kinds of social actors" (5).

Intersectionality Undone: Saving Intersectionality from Feminist Intersectionality Studies

Du Bois Review (10:2, pp. 405-424), 2013

This article identifies a set of power relations within contemporary feminist academic debates on intersectionality that work to “depoliticizing intersectionality,” neutralizing the critical potential of intersectionality for social justice-oriented change. At a time when intersectionality has received unprecedented international acclaim within feminist academic circles, a specifically disciplinary academic feminism in tune with the neoliberal knowledge economy engages in argumentative practices that reframe and undermine it. This article analyzes several specific trends in debate that neutralize the political potential of intersectionality, such as confining intersectionality to an academic exercise of metatheoretical contemplation, as well as “whitening intersectionality” through claims that intersectionality is “the brainchild of feminism” and requires a reformulated “broader genealogy of intersectionality.”

Intersectionality: old and new endeavours?

Gender Place and Culture, 2018

This short comment on intersectionality raises three points for further thought and discussion: The first has to do with the rich tradition of feminist interventions in academe and in political struggles which adopted intersectional approaches before a field of 'intersectionality studies' was developed. The second is a note about the difficult and complex passage from individual subject formation to the constitution of collective identities, following the logic of intersectional analysis and theorizing, Finally, the third point puts forward some thoughts on positionality as 'perspective' from which to interpret the complexities of intersectional analyses and seek to forge solidarities and alliances beyond individual identification.