As noted significantly by Carter (2013), one of the principal benefits of sociolinguistics’ engagement with contemporary social theorizing has been the ability to overcome a false dichotomy between “structure” and “agency” in analysis. This means that we do not have to view linguistic practices of creativity and commodification either as a reflex of predetermined social categories and forces or as resulting from the autonomous actions of individuals behaving solely in accordance with their own beliefs and desires. Rather, socially meaningful practices of linguistic creativity and language commodification are determined by both the various predispositions about language and social life to which we have been socialized (i.e., our “speech community norms”) and the agentive choices we make about how to negotiate these normative expectations (e.g., Bourdieu, 1991; Bell, 2001; Coupland, 2007). Analysis of creative linguistic practices, however, tends to remain relatively beholden to explanations grounded in unitary categories of lived experience (e.g., Carter, 2004; Maybin and Swann, 2007; Jones, 2012). Thus, while we have developed sophisticated accounts of how particular linguistic forms come to take on social meanings, for example, and of how those meanings are then recruited by speakers in interaction, we have been somewhat less attentive to the fact that those social meanings of linguistic practices are also simultaneously interconnected and intertwined with other social categories and that, when applying these forms in communication, interactants draw upon all of these underlying social connotations together. In order to capture the need to escape the predefinition of a language user, it is useful to refer to the notion of “metrolingualism” (Otsuji and Pennycook, 2010), a term developed from Maher’s (2005) metroethnicity. Including a much broader view of contexts of translingual practices across communities, metrolingualism seeks to explore the contingencies of language, culture, ethnicity, nationality, and geography instead of assuming connections between these categories. This seems particularly applicable to the creative use of English as a local language (Pennycook, 2010). Emerging from the ongoing discussion is the suggestion to consider the often irreducible intersection of creative and innovative English practices with other social categories including identity and/or language commodification for a more robust account of socioculturally meaningful practices of the English language across the world.

Invoking the idea of interconnections, mutual engagement and relationships, the term “intersectionality” was first coined by legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) in a discussion about the inadequacy of non-discrimination protections available to black women. In emphasizing the importance of an intersectionality approach to identity, Crenshaw (1989, p. 140) claimed that “the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, and analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which black women are subordinated”. Since its inception, an intersectional perspective had been adopted and developed more as a nodal point than as a closed system—a gathering place for open-ended investigations of the overlapping and conflicting dynamics of race, gender, class, sexuality, nation, and other inequalities—by Black feminist scholars and others working on the sociology of gender and ethnic divisions (e.g., hooks, 1981; Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1983). What were once diffuse ideas about the interconnectedness of gender, sex, race, class, and other systems of power in language, gender, and sexuality research are now central to intersectionality as a new way of looking at social inequalities and possibilities for social change. The idea of intersectionality, it is worth highlighting, offers varied strands of thought and is very intricate and complicated (see Cho et al., 2013 for an overview). Hiramoto (2019) compared the mainstream media coverage of two female tennis players at the 2018 US Open incident, Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka, who can be labelled with the racial signifier “Black”. She found that the very intersectional nexus points through which they are represented were adopted differently by the media. Specifically, in contrast to Williams, Osaka’s blackness is trumped by her Japaneseness in media presentations. Thus, as suggested by Carastathis (2016, pp. 3–4; see also Cho et al., 2013, p. 795), it is more appropriate for intersectionality to be framed “as an analytical sensibility, a disposition, or a way of thinking, … as opposed to a determinate resolution of cognitive essentialism, binary categorization, and conceptual exclusion”. For purposes of the present chapter, I abstract away from some of this theoretical complexity and focus exclusively on the basic principles that all forms of intersectional analysis share.