Multidimensionality Is to Masculinities What Intersectionality Is to Feminism (original) (raw)

Legal scholar Devon Carbado, as well as Russell Robinson, flatly disagreed. Carbado boldly and bluntly argued that anything that could be analyzed using multidimensionality could also be effectively analyzed through intersectionality theory. 6 In a lively conversation that followed, 7 he ardently and persuasively made his case. Nevertheless, at one point, scholar Juliet Williams, committed to intersectionality theory in her feminist work, expressed a sentiment to where she thought Carbado's argument might lead. This sentiment was that, perhaps, "multidimensionality is to masculinities theory, what intersectionality is to feminism." 8 This Article largely concedes the point that much of what can be analyzed by employing the multidimensionality framework can also be analyzed through intersectionality theory, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw. 9 It does so by suggesting that previous critiques of intersectionality had been implicit in the original theory and/or were absorbed later by it. In other words, it suggests that intersectionality, a powerful metaphor and analytical framework that has matured and gone global, 10 is both broad and flexible enough to have absorbed the later insights generated by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered legal scholars of color (LGBT) and masculinities legal scholars who participated in further developing multidimensionality. Further, multidimensionality employs intersectionality as part of its methodology and is, in part, based on it. 11 Nevertheless, this Article argues that early interpretations of intersectionality theory, its groundings in the analyses of women's lives, and the way in which women's lives were both understood and examined, limited intersection-6 This sentiment was expressed in private conversations and in the discussion on the second