Theorizing Intersectionality
Other approaches to intersectionality have been less materialist in their epistemology or politically routed in their intellectual conception and theoretical direction of travel. Although black feminist thought in the United States led the way with critical thinking on intersectionality, it is worth stressing that it was not a lone voice for very long. For example, deconstructive postmodern scholars working in such fields as diaspora studies (Brah 1996) and postcolonial studies (Mani 1989) have long regarded intersectionality as a useful tool in furthering the battle with what is viewed as an unhealthy and uncritical regard for essentialism and universalism in examining identity, as well as rendering binary oppositions as unhelpful, static dichotomies of the modernist past (Phoenix and Pattynama 2006). In other words, knowledge is situated and what could be positioned as being central within postmodern accounts is a focus on self-aware reflexivity in terms of advancing theory and, in particular, the way intersectional identities could transgress universalist thought vis-à-vis the practices of both researched and researcher. This is in keeping with a body of work located within both postmodern feminist and postcolonial ethnic and racial studies.
At the heart of both modernist and postmodernist interpretations and uses of intersectionality, however, is a shared concern with how the concept can be employed to examine, in a critical light, matters of difference and diversity. However, this connection has given rise to a questioning of once trusted and certain foundations. What is the continued relevance of separate, but connected, feminist and antiracist projects that aim to be universalist and inclusive in nature? Are such notions, almost by definition, pro-Western, homogenizing, and potentially even imperialistic?
Questions arise here of organization, practices, and platforms—in a way the paradigmatic question is this: How can the intersectionality ship best be prevented from sinking into an ocean of ideas, internal contradictions, and argumentative tensions whereby even basic aims and objectives cannot be agreed upon and there are no more conceptual ports left to dock at? Intersectionality can address issues of difference and diversity in a way that does not throw the baby out with the bathwater: Inclusivity does not have to mean a “one size fits all” approach to challenging oppressive practices and, at one and the same time, the concept can challenge the ethnocentric assumptions of “white” Western feminist and antiracist thinking.
Additionally, intersectionality can position itself to give solid foundations to, for example, the study of ethnicity, class, and gender as common and connected sites of discrimination, whether concerned with how individual agency reacts against oppressive practices or with structural barriers to liberation and equality. Intersectionality does offer some reassurances to scholars working in the fields of ethnic and racial studies, or gender studies for that matter, that such traditional modernist theories are not redundant. If anything, intersectionality helps illustrate the fact that scholars of whatever persuasion within the social sciences have a job to do—theoretically, methodologically, and, one hopes, in terms of engaging with activists to help enact progressive social change.
But such ideas and arguments do sound familiar, and it is important to remember that most of the initial thinking and writing that was generated around intersectionality was not exactly new when Crenshaw first proposed the term in the late 1980s (see, for example, the seminal collection edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith titled All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies [1982]). Multiple oppressions on the grounds of “race,” gender, sexuality, disability, and class have long been recognized and explored in sociological circles, as well as by activists, who in the late 1960s and 1970s sought to advance the cause of, for example, a multiracial approach to so-called “revisionist” feminist thinking (hooks 1984).
One of the best examples of such progressive social movements was developed in the 1970s by the Combahee River Collective in Boston, Massachusetts. Members of this group advanced the notion of simultaneity—that is, the idea that their lived experiences and everyday realities, as well as their challenges to oppression, were all guided by the combined influences of class, “race,” gender, and sexuality. The collective actively critiqued and challenged black male perspectives, as well as white, heterosexual, middle-class feminist views, regarding the social, economic, and political conditions they faced. Indeed, the anti-essentialist, antiracist problematizing of women as a homogeneous category was crucial to the recognition that not all women shared the same situations or experiences, and that factors such as social class and ethnicity, for example, had an impact on life chances and social mobility.
To be sure, not all feminists were white and middle-class, nor were they all antiracists: The “voices” of poor, disabled, and gay activists within some feminist and antiracist circles were being drowned out or just ignored by those intellectuals and activists, theoretically, who were on their “side” (Becker 1967). McCall (2005) has argued that one of the reasons intersectionality has been so important to the social sciences is the fact that it can be positioned as a political project: It fundamentally sets out to address and understand what happens when multiple forms of oppression and subordination work against particular individuals and communities. Although it had echoes with developments in the 1960s and 1970s, intersectionality took new approaches and perspectives to old problems.
Clark, Colin. "Intersectionality." Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, edited by Patrick L. Mason, 2nd ed., vol. 2, Macmillan Reference USA, 2013