Intersectionality

Patricia Hill Collins, Sirma Bilge

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509539697
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

The concept of intersectionality has become a central topic in academic and activist circles alike. But what exactly does it mean, and why has it emerged as such a vital lens through which to explore how social inequalities of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and ethnicity shape one another? In this fully revised and expanded second edition of their popular text, Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge provide a much-needed introduction to the field of intersectional knowledge and praxis. Analyzing the emergence, growth, and contours of the concept of intersectionality, the authors also consider its global reach through an array of new topics such as the rise of far-right populism, reproductive justice, climate change, and digital environments and cultures. Accessibly written and drawing on a plethora of lively examples to illustrate its arguments, the book highlights intersectionality's potential for understanding complex architecture of social and economic inequalities and bringing about social justice-oriented change. Intersectionality will be an invaluable resource for anyone grappling with the main ideas, debates, and new directions in this field.

1
What Is Intersectionality?

In the early twenty-first century, the term “intersectionality” has been widely taken up by scholars, policy advocates, practitioners, and activists in many places and locations. College students and faculty in interdisciplinary fields such as women’s studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, American studies, and media studies, as well as those within sociology, political science, and history and other traditional disciplines, encounter intersectionality in courses, books, and scholarly articles. Human rights activists and government officials have also made intersectionality part of ongoing global public policy discussions. Grassroots organizers look to varying dimensions of intersectionality to inform their work on reproductive justice, antiviolence initiatives, workers’ rights, and similar social issues. Bloggers use digital and social media to influence public opinion. Teachers, social workers, high-school students, parents, university support staff, and school personnel have taken up the ideas of intersectionality with an eye toward transforming schools of all sorts. Across these different venues, people increasingly claim and use the term “intersectionality” for their diverse intellectual and political projects.

If we were to ask them, “What is intersectionality?” we would get varied and sometimes contradictory answers. Most, however, would probably accept the following general description:

Intersectionality investigates how intersecting power relations influence social relations across diverse societies as well as individual experiences in everyday life. As an analytic tool, intersectionality views categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, ability, ethnicity, and age – among others – as interrelated and mutually shaping one another. Intersectionality is a way of understanding and explaining complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences.

This working definition describes intersectionality’s core insight: namely, that in a given society at a given time, power relations of race, class, and gender, for example, are not discrete and mutually exclusive entities, but rather build on each other and work together; and that, while often invisible, these intersecting power relations affect all aspects of the social world.

We begin this book by recognizing the tremendous heterogeneity that currently characterizes how people understand and use intersectionality. Despite debates about the meaning of this term, or even whether it is the right term to use at all, intersectionality is the term that has stuck. It is the term that is increasingly used by stakeholders who put their understandings of intersectionality to a variety of uses. Despite these differences, this broad description points toward a general consensus about how people understand intersectionality.

Using Intersectionality as an Analytic Tool

People generally use intersectionality as an analytic tool to solve problems that they or others around them face. Most colleges and universities in North America, for example, face the challenge of building more inclusive and fair campus communities. The social divisions created by power relations of class, race, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, sexuality, and ability are especially evident within higher education. Colleges and universities now include more college students who formerly had no way to pay for college (class), or students who historically faced discriminatory barriers to enrolment (race, gender, ethnicity, indigeneity, citizenship status), or students who experience distinctive forms of discrimination (sexuality, ability, religion) on college campuses. Colleges and universities find themselves confronted with students who want fairness, yet who bring very different experiences and needs to campus. Initially, colleges in the US recruited and served groups one at a time, offering, for example, special programs for African Americans, Latinx groups, women, gays and lesbians, veterans, returning students, and persons with disabilities. As the list grew, it became clearer not only that this one-group-at-a-time approach was slow, but that most students fit into more than one category. First-generation college students could include Latinos, women, poor whites, returning veterans, grandparents, and transgender women and men. In this context, intersectionality can be a useful analytic tool for thinking about and developing strategies to achieve campus equity.

Ordinary people can draw upon intersectionality as an analytic tool when they recognize that they need better frameworks to grapple with social problems. In the 1960s and 1970s, African American women activists confronted the puzzle of how their needs concerning jobs, education, employment, and healthcare simply fell through the cracks of antiracist social movements, feminism, and unions organizing for workers’ rights. Each of these social movements elevated one category of analysis and action above others; for example, race within the civil rights movement, or gender within feminism, or class within the union movement. Because African American women were simultaneously black and female and workers, these single-focus lenses on social inequality left little space to address the complex social problems that they face. Black women’s specific issues remained subordinated within each movement because no social movement by itself would, or could, address the entirety of discriminations they faced. Black women’s use of intersectionality as an analytic tool emerged in response to these challenges.

Intersectionality as an analytic tool is neither confined to nations of North America and Europe nor a new phenomenon. People in the Global South have used intersectionality as an analytic tool, often without naming it as such. Consider an unexpected example from nineteenth-century colonial India in the work of Dalit social reformist Savitribai Phule (1831–97), regarded as an important first-generation modern Indian feminist. In an online article titled “Six Reasons Every Indian Feminist Must Remember Savitribai Phule,” published in January 2015, Deepika Sarma suggests:

Here’s why you should know more about her. She got intersectionality. Savitribai along with her husband Jyotirao was a staunch advocate of anti-caste ideology and women’s rights. The Phules’ vision of social equality included fighting against the subjugation of women, and they also stood for Adivasis and Muslims. She organized a barbers’ strike against shaving the heads of Hindu widows, fought for widow remarriage and in 1853, started a shelter for pregnant widows. Other welfare programmes she was involved with alongside Jyotirao include opening schools for workers and rural people, and providing famine relief through 52 food centers that also operated as boarding schools. She also cared for those affected by famine and plague, and died in 1897 after contracting plague from her patients.

Phule confronted several axes of social division, namely caste, gender, religion, and economic disadvantage or class. Her political activism encompassed intersecting categories of social division – she didn’t just pick one.

These examples suggest that people use intersectionality as an analytic tool in many different ways to address a range of issues and social problems. One common use of intersectionality is as a heuristic, a problem-solving or analytic tool, much in the way that students on college campuses developed a shared interest in diversity, or African American women used it to address their status within social movement politics, or Savitribai Phule advanced women’s rights. Even though those who use intersectional frameworks all seem to be situated under the same big umbrella, using intersectionality as an analytic tool means that it can assume many different forms because it can accommodate a range of social problems.

In this book, we examine multiple aspects of intersectionality but, for now, we want to show three uses of intersectionality as an analytical tool. In line with Cho et al.’s argument that “what makes an analysis intersectional is not its use of the term ‘intersectionality,’ nor its being situated in a familiar genealogy, nor its drawing on lists of standard citations,” our focus is on “what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is” (2013: 795). Our cases of how intersecting power relations characterize international football, the growing recognition of global social inequality as an intersectional phenomenon, and the emergence of the black Brazilian women’s movement in response to specific challenges of racism, sexism, and poverty illustrate different uses of intersectionality as an analytic tool. Specifically, they suggest how intersectional analyses of sports illuminate the organization of institutional power, how intersectionality has been used to diagnose social problems, and how intersectional responses to social injustices enhance activism. These cases both introduce important core ideas of intersectional frameworks and demonstrate different uses of intersectionality as an analytic tool.

Power plays: the FIFA World Cup

Across the globe, there is no way of knowing exactly how many people play football. Yet surveys by the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) provide a good guess: an estimated 270 million people are involved in football as professional soccer players, recreational players, registered players both over and under age 18, futsal and beach football players, referees, and officials. This is a vast pool of both professional and amateur athletes and a massive audience that encompasses all categories of race, class, gender, age, ethnicity, nation, and ability. When one adds the children and youth who play football but who are not involved in any kind of organized activity detectable by FIFA, the number swells considerably.

Intersectionality’s emphasis on social inequality seems far removed from the global popularity of this one sport. Yet using intersectionality as an analytic tool to examine the FIFA World Cup sheds light on how intersecting power relations of race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality organize this particular sport, as well as sports more broadly. Rich nations of the Global North and poor nations of the Global South offer different opportunity structures to their youth to attend school, find jobs, and play sports, opportunity structures that privilege European and North American nations, and that disadvantage countries in the Caribbean, continental Africa, the Middle East, and selected Latin American and Asian nations. These national differences align with racial differences, with black and brown youth from poor countries, or within neighborhoods within rich ones, lacking access to training and opportunities to play. Girls and boys may want to play football, but rarely get to be on the same teams or compete against one another. As a sport that highlights physical ability, football brings a lens to the phrase “able-bodied” that underpins analysis of ability. At its foundation, football is big business, providing financial benefit to its backers as well as to a small percentage of elite athletes. Differences of wealth, national citizenship, race, gender, and ability shape patterns of opportunity and disadvantage within the sport. Moreover, these categories are not mutually exclusive. Rather, the patterns of their intersection determine which individuals get to play football, the level of support they receive, and the kinds of experiences they have if and when they play. Using intersectionality as an analytic tool illuminates how these and other categories of power relations interconnect.

Because it is a global phenomenon, the FIFA World Cup is a particularly suitable case to unpack in order to show how intersecting power relations underpin social inequalities of race, gender, class, age, ability, sexuality, and nation. Power relations rely on durable, albeit changing, organizational practices that, in this case, shape the contours of FIFA World Cup soccer regardless of when and where the games occur and who actually competes. Four distinctive yet interconnected domains of power describe these organizational practices – namely, the structural, cultural, disciplinary, and interpersonal. These domains of power are durable across time and place. FIFA’s organizational practices have changed since its inception and have taken different forms in Europe, North America, continental Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. Yet FIFA is also characterized by tremendous change brought on by new people, changing standards, and a growing global audience. Using intersectionality to analyze the FIFA World Cup sheds light on specific intersections of power relations within the organization; for example, how gender and national identity intersect within FIFA writ large, as well as the specific forms that intersecting power relations take within distinctive domains of power. Here we briefly discuss intersecting relations within each domain of power within FIFA, thereby laying a foundation for analyzing intersecting power relations.

The structural domain of power refers to the fundamental structures of social institutions such as job markets, housing, education, and health. Intersections of class (capitalism) and nation (government policy) are key to the organization of sports. In this case, ever since its inception in 1930, the World Cup tournament has grown in scope and popularity to become a highly profitable global business. Headquartered in Switzerland, FIFA enjoys legal protection as an international nongovernmental organization (NGO) that allows it to manage its finances with minimal government oversight. Managed by an executive committee of businessmen, FIFA wields considerable influence with global corporations and national governments who host the World Cup. For example, for the 2014 games in Brazil, FIFA succeeded in having the Brazilian parliament adopt a General World Cup Law that imposed bank holidays on host cities on the days of the Brazilian team’s matches, cut the number of places in the stadiums, and increased prices for ordinary spectators. The law also allowed beer to be taken into the stadiums, a change that benefited Anheuser-Busch, one of FIFA’s main sponsors. In addition, the bill exempted companies working for FIFA from Brazilian taxation, banned the sale of any goods in official competition spaces, immediate surroundings, and principal access routes, and penalized bars that tried to schedule showings of the matches or promote certain brands. Finally, the bill defined any attack on the image of FIFA or its sponsors as a federal crime.

Hosted by different nations that compete for the privilege years in advance, FIFA events typically showcase the distinctive national concerns of its host countries. Brazil’s experiences illustrate how national concerns shape global football. Fielding one of the most successful national teams in the history of the World Cup, Brazil has been one of a handful of countries whose teams have played in virtually every World Cup tournament. In 2014, the potential payoff for Brazil was substantial. Hosting the World Cup signaled its arrival as a major economic player on the global stage, minimizing its troubled history with a military dictatorship (1964–85). A victorious Brazilian football team promised to enhance Brazil’s international stature and foster economic policies that would help its domestic population. Yet the challenges associated with hosting the matches began well before the athletes arrived on the playing fields. Brazil estimated having to spend billions of US dollars in preparation for the event. The initial plan presented to the public emphasized that the majority of the spending on infrastructure would highlight general transportation, security, and communications. Less than 25 percent of total spending would go toward the 12 new or refurbished stadiums. Yet, as the games grew nearer, cost overruns increased stadium expenses by at least 75 percent, with public resources reallocated from general infrastructure projects.

In several Brazilian cities, the FIFA cost overruns sparked public demonstrations against the increase in public transportation fares and political corruption. On June 20, 2013, 1.5 million people demonstrated in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest metropolitan area, protesting the exorbitant cost of stadiums, the displacement of urban residents, and the embezzlement of public funds (Castells 2015: 232). As the countdown to the kickoff began, Brazilians took to the streets in more than 100 cities, with slogans expressing objections to the World Cup, such as “FIFA go home!” and “We want hospitals up to FIFA’s standards!” “The World Cup steals money from healthcare, education and the poor. The homeless are being forced from the streets. This is not for Brazil, it’s for the tourists,” reported a Guardian article (Watts 2014). This social unrest provided the backdrop for the games in which, despite making the semifinals, Brazil suffered a historic loss to Germany.

Because FIFA is unregulated, it should come as no surprise that for years it has been accused of corruption. Disputes over where to hold the event, the competition of nations and their financial backers, have characterized the World Cup since it...