Intersectionality

12 Key excerpts on "Intersectionality"

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  Situating Intersectionality

  Politics, Policy, and Power

  • Angelia R. Wilson(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Privilege and marginalization are central to studies of Intersectionality. While many might assume that these two categories are mutually exclusive, Intersectionality scholarship has focused on their coexistence. One can experience oppression along one axis and privilege along another. Intersectionality focuses on power across categories and in relation to one another understanding that power is not equal across categories. Patricia Hill Collins (1990) situates race, class, and gender as interlocking systems that create an overarching “matrix of domination” in which actors can not only be victimized by power but can also exercise power over others. Collins highlights the contradictory nature of oppression suggesting that few “pure victims” or “pure oppressors” exist. Penalty and privilege are distributed among individuals and groups within the matrix of domination such that none are marked exclusively by one or the other.

  5.  Changing Conditions

  Julia Jordan-Zachery (2007) reminds us that from the earliest conceptualizations of Intersectionality, embedded in the theory is a liberatory agency possessed by those experiencing the effects of life at the intersection. The imperative to change existing conditions and take action from their location at the intersection toward impacting the lives of those both within and between social identity categories is an important theme woven throughout. So as much as researchers categorize Intersectionality as a descriptive framework or research paradigm, it is very much a political concept grounded in an emancipatory politics with social justice-based outcomes as the goal. Intersectionality is understood as rooted in efforts to change societal conditions that create and maintain oppressive power hierarchies. In addition to recognizing the differences that exist among individuals and groups, Intersectionality is invested in modes of institutional change designed to remedy the effects of inequalities produced by interlocking systems of oppression.

  In summary, the version of Intersectionality to which I subscribe is informed by a plethora of scholarly thinking on the parameters of Intersectionality. It can apply to everyone, as we all have a race, gender, sexuality, and social class, whether we experience our social locations as inequalities or privileges. However, Intersectionality is at its best when used to uncover patterns of privilege and marginalization as opposed to focus on familiar understandings of privilege. Our social locations are not fixed such that we are construed permanently as oppressors or the oppressed.6 Intersectionality is context specific; structural and dynamic (Weldon, 2006). The relevant axes of power for investigation are determined by the situation and site under study. As Hancock (2007a) surmises, the intersectional approach “changes the relationship between the categories of investigation from one that is determined a priori to one of empirical investigation” (2007a, 67). It asserts that categories are relevant and have an impact on understanding material lives and at the same time it is interested in disrupting the impetus to render categories as fixed and mutually exclusive. Intersectionality offers a means to contest the power arrangements between categories and even embraces and envisions a futuristic intellectual politics in which categories are stripped of any deterministic powers.7

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  Reconfigurations of the Bildungsroman

  Taking Refuge from Violence in Kincaid, Danticat, hooks, and Morrison

  • Gonçalo Cholant(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  (14) Intersectionality is a theory that evolved from these preoccupations and is based on an analysis of the interaction between different categories, such as race, class, gender, sexual identity, among others, as co-formative, and hence inextri- cable from one another, with implications that go beyond the addition of a se- 46 2 From Intersectionality to an Ecology of Knowledges quence of oppressions, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. The inter- sectional approach derived from the legal field; however, many different areas of social thinking have adopted the grammar of intersectional thinking. Crenshaw approachers three cases concerning the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. She hoped to demonstrate how the judicial system failed at understanding the relevance of the intersection of sex and race. In one of them, a suit against General Motors, five plaintiffs accused the company of dis- crimination against black women, since all black women lost their jobs due to a seniority-based layoff in 1970. General Motors did not hire any black women be- fore 1964, and claimed that no sex discrimination took place, since they hired women, all white, since before 1964. The court suggested a new suit should be constituted, based solely on racial discrimination, and “[t]he plaintiffs respond- ed that such consolidation would defeat the purpose of their suit since theirs was not purely a race claim, but an action brought specifically on behalf of black women alleging race and sex discrimination” (“Demarginalizing the Inter- section” 142). Crenshaw successfully demonstrates how the court ruling consid- ered that these plaintiffs’ claims were only valid inasmuch as they coincided with that of black men, regarding racism, or white women, regarding sexism. In- tersectionality is the lens through which these claims could be made visible.

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  Feminist Theory Reader

  Local and Global Perspectives

  • Carole McCann, Seung-kyung Kim, Emek Ergun, Carole R. McCann, Seung-kyung Kim, Emek Ergun, Carole McCann, Carole R. McCann, Seung-kyung Kim, Emek Ergun(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  One point of general agreement among intersectional scholars is that the experiences and texts of traditionally marginalized groups were not considered knowledge thirty years ago. Yet the writings, ideas, experiences, and perspectives of people whose lives were once considered unimportant are increasingly influencing traditional disciplines. In the field of sociology, for example, intersectional analysis has extended and combined traditional subareas of stratification, race and ethnicity, and family by drawing on conflict theory, theories of racialization (Massey & Denton, 1993; Omi & Winant, 1994; Oliver & Shapiro, 1995) and gender stratification (Lorber, 1994, 1998; Myers et al., 1998; Kimmel, 2000; Gardiner, 2002). These subareas, combined with ideas drawn from ethnic studies, critical legal theory, and postmodernism, explore the ways identity flows from and is entangled in those relationships and how systems of inequality (race, ethnicity, class, gender, physical ability, and sexuality) are embedded in and shape one another. Intersectionality is both a reflection of and influence upon some of the newer directions in fields such as history, sociology, legal studies, and anthropology to name a few. It does this by examining relationships and interactions between multiple axes of identity and multiple dimensions of social organization—at the same time.

  … [W]e treat Intersectionality as an analytical strategy—a systematic approach to understanding human life and behavior that is rooted in the experiences and struggles of marginalized people. The premises and assumptions that underlie this approach are: inequalities derived from race, ethnicity, class, gender, and their intersections place specific groups of the population in a privileged position with respect to other groups and offer individuals unearned benefits based solely on group membership; historical and systemic patterns of disinvestment in nonprivileged groups are major contributors to the low social and economic position of those groups; representations of groups and individuals in media, art, music, and other cultural forms create and sustain ideologies of group and individual inferiority/superiority and support the use of these factors to explain both individual and group behavior; and individual identity exists within and draws from a web of socially defined statuses, some of which may be more salient than others in specific situations or at specific historical moments.

  As Weber (2001) points out, intersectional analysis operates on two levels: at the individual level, it reveals the way the intermeshing of these systems creates a broad range of opportunities for the expression and performance of individual identities. At the societal/structural level, it reveals the ways systems of power are implicated in the development, organization, and maintenance of inequalities and social injustice. In both writing and teaching, scholars engaged in this work are challenged to think in complex and nuanced ways about identity and to look at both the points of cohesion and fracture within groups (Weber, 2001; Dill & Johnson, 2002) as they seek to capture and convey dynamic social processes in which individual identities and group formations grow and shift in continuous interaction with one another, within specific historical periods and geographic locations.

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  Solidarity Politics for Millennials

  A Guide to Ending the Oppression Olympics

  • A. Hancock(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Categorical Intersection: The Central Metaphor of Intersectionality I’ve mentioned that categories of race, gender, class, and sexual ori- entation all present equal but not identical threats to our democ- racy as one nation with liberty and justice for all. Work produced by Intersectionality researchers has characterized the relationship between categories in a variety of ways. Faced with the incompati- bility of the additive oppressions approach with existing civil rights jurisprudence, legal theorists like Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, 17 Mari Matsuda, Adrien Katherine Wing, Patricia Williams, and Margaret Montoya identified numerous gaps in the American and international legal frameworks left unaddressed after mid-twentieth- century movement activism on behalf of women and racial/ethnic minorities. Within the legal domain, these women argued that a gap persists between the lived experience of women of color and the opportunity for legal remedy against discriminatory pay structures, work rules, or protection from domestic violence. Their convincing explanations of a relationship among political categories of difference such as race, class, and gender preserved the claims for justice based on Categorical Multiplicity, but on substantively different grounds than multicultural feminist theory. Categorical Intersection empha- sized the invisibility of women’s lived experiences in a legal system that constructed race and gender as mutually exclusive. Characterizing the relationship between categories as intersectional rather than additive turned these scholars away from the Oppression Olympics and toward the possibilities for transformative politics. Crenshaw, recognizing this “tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis,” 18 coined Intersectiona l it y to the R escue 39 the metaphor of intersecting streets to describe the legal location of women with multiple marginalized identities.

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  Sexuality, Equality and Diversity

  • Diane Richardson, Surya Monro, Linda Diane Richardson(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  2 Intersectionality Why include intersectional approaches in the study of LGBT equalities? Intersectionality theory has been around for many years, emerging initially from Black womens’ critiques of white feminists’ failure to understand iden-tity complexity. Intersectionality approaches can be used to examine the way in which we are not just defined by sexuality, or gender, or ethnicity, or social class, or ability; we are each a unique mixture of different social characteris-tics. Because society is structured by many forms of inequality, some people – and groups of people – have identities that combine two or more marginalized or stigmatized characteristics. Importantly, these marginalized identities do not just add onto each other, but rather intersect in particular ways. What is Intersectionality theory? Like many concepts, the term ‘Intersectionality’ is a rather slippery one. US scholar Crenshaw (1991) intro-duced the term to mean a crossroads or intersection, where different identities (in this case, race and gender) intersected. However, other theorists have subse-quently explored Intersectionality as an axis of difference (Yuval-Davis 2006) or as a dynamic process (Staunaes 2003, cited in Davis 2009: 68). There are tensions within the field of Intersectionality studies, relating to broader debates within sexuality studies and feminisms, concerning whether to pursue category-based analysis (in other words, whether to focus on specific social categories such as sexuality or race) or to develop analysis along a range of category axes (see Walby 2007; Weldon 2008). One of the fundamental problems is that if we focus only on the intersections our analysis becomes very individ-ualistic because, as suggested above, each person is a unique combination of different intersecting characteristics.

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  Beyond Gender Binaries

  An Intersectional Orientation to Communication and Identities

  • Cindy L. Griffin(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  For example, we all have bodies and minds that work in specific ways; we all are expected to identify with particular genders and races; we all are affected by our economic status, our religions, our cultures, our ages, our families. This means that we are never just one identity, because no person can be explained and understood by a single trait. Instead our identities are complex matrices of traits informed by our bodies, minds, genders, races, economic opportunities and resources, religions, sexualities, cultures, and families, and all these influ-ence how we are perceived by others and how we perceive ourselves. Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge define Intersectionality as “a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences.” Communication scholars April Few-Demo, Julia Moore, and Shadee Abdi explain that “Intersectionality is a theoretical framework” that helps us “consider how individuals and groups—who are situated in Figure 1.2 Consider the complex identities of these three women. How might you be similar or different from them? How many different social locations can you identify in this photo and in your own identities? (Source: iStock. Credit: Ridofranz) 8 Conceptual Foundations of Intersectionality multiple social locations and whose social identities may overlap or conflict in specific contexts—negotiate systems of privilege, oppression, opportunity, con-flict and change.” Intersectionality has the power to transform our thinking about identities and our understanding of those identities in relation to power.

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  Theorizing Intersectionality and Sexuality

  • Y. Taylor, S. Hines, M. Casey, Y. Taylor, S. Hines, M. Casey(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  These themes are central to the work of the editors, who have researched ‘intersections’ of – and gaps between – sexuality and class (Taylor, 2005, 2009a), sexuality and gender (Hines, 2007) and sexuality and space (Casey, 2007, 2010). One dissatisfaction, for example, has been the heteronormati- vity of the literature on class, alongside the frequent absence of class within sexuality studies. In this context ‘Intersectionality’ potentially becomes a hope, even if a loaded one, of bridging literatures and concepts, and in seeking to understand interviewees’ lives beyond an academic ‘gap’. Beyond editorial perspective, a key strength of this collection is the diversity of back- grounds and positions, across different national, institutional and discipli- nary contexts, from which the authors write. Empirical, methodological and theoretical concerns are often complexly woven together throughout the chapters, serving to demonstrate contemporary intersections as imagined by researchers in questioning and desiring intersectional frames. Included here are autobiographical reflections (and disruptions or ‘fictions’), policy suggestions, applicable to the European and US context, as well as more widely, and scrutiny of contemporary sexual connections across a range of social spheres and methodological approaches. In the first part, ‘Complexities and Complications – Intersectional (Re)Runs’, contributors note the ways that such inclusions do not result in resolutions; thus ‘Intersectionality’ cannot be simply seen as settled. Indeed, in ‘Me, Myself, and I’ Kath Weston offers a critique of the list-like notion of intersections and proposes ‘renditions’ as a concept better suited to the task of grasping the varied ways that identities are brought into play in the course of everyday life. The chapter is based on empirical data collected in San Francisco from 1985 to 1991 (Weston, 1996), situating intersectional research efforts and lived experiences across time and place.

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  Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory

  • Patricia Hill Collins(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  PART I Framing the Issues Intersectionality and Critical Social Theory This page intentionally left blank 1 Intersectionality as Critical Inquiry So much has happened since the 1990s that the case for Intersectionality no longer needs to be made. A surprising array of academics, activists, policy- makers, digital workers, and independent intellectuals recognize intersec-tionality as an important form of critical inquiry and praxis (Collins and Bilge 2016). Both within and outside the academy, administrators, teachers, social workers, counselors, and public health professionals have increasingly used intersectional analyses to shed light on important social problems con-cerning education, health, employment, and poverty (Berger and Guidroz 2009; Dill and Zambrana 2009). Grassroots community activists, social media activists, and social movement participants continue to draw upon Intersectionality’s ideas to shape their political projects. In the United States, for example, intersectional ideas reappear within the social justice move-ments of African Americans; women; undocumented immigrants; lesbian, 22 chapter one gay, bisexual, transgender, queer ( lgbtq ) groups; poor people; and reli-gious minorities (see, e.g., Terriquez 2015). Ironically, white nationalists also draw upon a variation of intersectional analysis in defending their claims that white, working-class American men constitute a neglected minority. Intersectionality’s reach is not confined to the United States. In a global context, grassroots and human rights advocates find that Intersectionality’s focus on the interconnectedness of categories of race, class, gender, sexual-ity, ethnicity, nationality, age, and ability sheds new light on how local social inequities articulate with global social phenomena (Collins and Bilge 2016, 88–113). Since the 1990s, Intersectionality has increasingly influenced scholar-ship, research, and curricular choices in colleges and universities.

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  Identity in Communicative Contexts

  • Kamila Ciepiela(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Group

    (Publisher)

  (2015, 318–9), three different perspectives can be distinguished in Intersectionality research: • “Intercategorical complexity”: categories are accepted as a social given but their intersections are studied in order to move beyond simple mono-category-based analyses and better understand the experience of individuals who simultane- ously face discrimination on several grounds� 4 For more details see Stryker and Burke 2000 or Stryker 2007� The edited volume pu- blished in 2003, under the title Advances in Identity Theory and Research, presents several calls for work looking into simultaneous activation of multiple identities, and the chapter by Linda Smith-Lovin (2003) provides some useful insights, as does an article by Stets and Harrod published the following year (2004) but this work does not seem to have given rise to further publications, either in scientific journals or in the 2009 collective volume Identity Theory published by the OUP (Burke and Stets 2009)�

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  Identity in Adolescence 4e

  The Balance between Self and Other

  • Laura Ferrer-Wreder, Jane Kroger(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This approach would mean that study findings are not over generalized beyond the study sample, interpretations are not just about individuals being fundamentally different from one another, but also consider that differences in psychological outcomes may also be due to differ- ences in life circumstances/opportunities (Cole, 2009). Intersectionality is also very clear about the importance of power and appre- ciating where people find themselves in a social hierarchy due to their identity (Cole, 2009). As stated by Bowleg and Bauer (2016, p. 337), “no attention to power, no Intersectionality.” If a particular combination of social identity com- ponents comes along with social privileges and/or discrimination, then it is vital to understand that unique confluence of benefits and barriers and to recognize that these identity pluses and minuses will not simply be additive or segregated in a person’s life experience, but that they are conflated with one another (Cole, 2009). In terms of research practice, this means that the realities of inequality are recognized as part of the life experience of study participants (Cole, 2009). Structural inequality between people based on their identity is given due consid- eration when researchers attempt to explain the “why” behind their study results (Cole, 2009). Identity integration Identity integration as described by Syed and McLean (2016) is rooted in Erikson’s (1968) descriptions of the role of continuity in identity development across context and time. In Syed and McLean’s (2016) revisiting and elabora- tion of this idea, there are four types identity integration: Contextual, temporal, ego, and person-society. Contextual integration concerns the ways in which people bring harmony or make peace out of who they are across different areas or domains of their lives (Syed & McLean, 2016).

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  Undermining Intersectionality

  The Perils of Powerblind Feminism

  • Barbara Tomlinson(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Temple University Press

    (Publisher)

  It has served as a major theoretical resource in the development of Criti-cal Race Theory (Crenshaw 2010, 2011c), in feminist studies (McCall 2005), in an increasing number of academic disciplines, in discussions of social pol-icy, 1 and in popular activism. 2 Intersectionality has become one of the most cited and deployed frames for speaking about all social identities and power. An extraordinary body of work has provided original and generative de-ployments of intersectional thinking to demonstrate how politics defines identi-ties rather than identities defining politics. Drawing on arguments about his-tory, difference, flexibility, fluidity, specificity, and multiplicity, scholars argue that gender- and race-based antisubordination struggles do not flow organi-cally from shared physical features but rather emerge in struggles that seek to imbue complex and complicated embodied identities with dynamic political meanings (see, for example, Barvosa 2008; Blackwell 2011; Cho 2009; Cohen 1997; Connolly and Patel 1997; Crenshaw 1992, 2011a; A. Davis 1997; Frego-so 2003; Fujino 2005; Hawkesworth 2003; Hernández 2010; James 1996; S. Lee 2008; Lowe 1996; Maira 2000; Maxwell 2006; McCall 2001; Reddy 2011; Roberts 2012; Rodríguez 2003; Rose 2008, 2013; Sandoval 2000; Shah 2001; A. Smith 2006; Tapia 2011; Valdes and Cho 2011; Wilkins 2012). Intersectionality has been proposed not as an overarching grand theory but as a politically grounded mid-level theory for antisubordination and social change: in the terms that Stuart Hall used in describing the value of Antonio Gramsci’s theories, a mid-level theory “complexifies” existing theories and problems by connecting large concepts to specific situations (1986, 5), exem-plifying Gramsci’s argument for a middle-range, protracted “war of position” to be waged across many different sites (see Chapter 2 for further discussion of Gramsci’s war of position).

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  Why Race and Gender Still Matter

  An Intersectional Approach

  • Maeve M O'Donovan, Namita Goswami, Lisa Yount(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  cognitive task of constructing new concepts adequate to representing these marginalized experiences still lies before us.

  This interpretation of Intersectionality as a critique of representation also departs from the view that it suffices to point to the convergence of monistic categories to demonstrate their mutual constitution. For instance, Floya Anthias has argued that we should

  interpret [the notion of the intersection] in a dialectical way rather than in a deconstructionist or reductionist way, therefore retaining the existence of categories themselves … [T]he social categories themselves … must therefore be specified before any intersectional analysis can take place.60

  Anthias’s dialectical approach seeks to preserve the ‘autonomous or systemic features’ of the ‘distinct categories’; she contends it is the convergence of these autonomous systems that ‘produces the derivative although specific saliency of intersectional or hybrid categories (such as ethnicised women)’.61

  Yet the argument that the categories of race, gender, sexuality and class are distinct from each other presupposes an analysis of systems of oppression that privileges the experiences of normative subjects unburdened by, and even benefiting from, oppression(s) on the other axes. In other words, the assumption that racial oppression is autonomous from gender oppression actually assumes a view of racial oppression inflected by gender privilege. For ‘ethnicized woman’ to be a hybrid category, what this presupposes is that one is oppressed as an ‘ethnicized person’ to the extent that one is not oppressed as a ‘woman’. So, in fact, our concept of racial oppression is not ‘pure’ of gendered power; it is inflected by gender privilege. But privilege is rendered invisible in the false universalization of that normative experience, making the categories ‘race’ and ‘gender’ seem mutually exclusive because racial and gendered oppressions are constructed as mutually exclusive. In my view, the argument that we should retain the unfused or non-enmeshed categories of ‘race’ and ‘gender’ because of the ontological ‘salience of the distinct categories that produces the derivative although specific saliency of intersectional or hybrid categories’62

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