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Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis

Author(s): Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and Leslie McCall

Source: Signs , Vol. 38, No. 4, Intersectionality: Theorizing Power, Empowering Theory (Summer 2013), pp. 785-810

Published by: The University of Chicago Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669608

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https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669608

Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies:

Theory, Applications, and Praxis

S u m i C h o

K i m b e r l é W i l l i a m s C r e n s h a w

L e s l i e M c C a l l

s intersectionality has emerged in a number of discursive spaces, the

A projects and debates that have accompanied its travel have converged

into a burgeoning field of intersectional studies. This field can be use-

fully framed as representing three loosely defined sets of engagements: the

first consisting of applications of an intersectional framework or investiga-

tions of intersectional dynamics, the second consisting of discursive debates

about the scope and content of intersectionality as a theoretical and meth-

odological paradigm, and the third consisting of political interventions em-

ploying an intersectional lens.

The first approach applies an intersectional frame of analysis to a wide

range of research and teaching projects. Aggregated together in this cat-

egory are undertakings that build on or adapt intersectionality to attend

to a variety of context-specific inquiries, including, for example, analyzing

the multiple ways that race and gender interact with class in the labor mar-

ket; interrogating the ways that states constitute regulatory regimes of iden-

tity, reproduction, and family formation; developing doctrinal alternatives to

bend antidiscrimination law to accommodate claims of compound discrimi-

nation; and revealing the processes by which grassroots organizations shape

advocacy strategies into concrete agendas that transcend traditional single-

axis horizons.

A second field of inquiry focuses on discursive investigations of inter-

sectionality as theory and methodology. This approach includes ðbut is not limited toÞ questions and debates about the way intersectionality has been

developed, adopted, and adapted within the disciplines. It considers what in-

tersectionality includes, excludes, or enables and whether intersectionality’s

contextual articulations call either for further development or for disavowal

and replacement. Within this framework are debates about whether there is

an essential subject of intersectionality and, if so, whether the subject is stati-

cally situated in terms of identity, geography, or temporality or is dynamically

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constituted within institutions and structures that are neither temporally

nor spatially circumscribed.

786 y Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall

A third category of intersectional projects reflects the reality that while

intersectionality has been the subject of disciplinary travel, it is far from

being only an academic project. Both in its earliest articulations and in

its subsequent travels, praxis has been a key site of intersectional critique

and intervention. We define praxis as encompassing a wide range of phe-

nomena, from society- and work-centered movements to demand greater

economic justice for low-income women of color ðe.g., Carastathis 2013; Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin 2013Þ; to legal and policy advocacy that seeks to

remedy gender and racial discrimination ðe.g., Carbado 2013; Verloo

2013Þ; to state-targeted movements to abolish prisons, immigration re-

strictions, and military interventions that are nominally neutral with re-

spect to race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and nation but are in fact

disproportionally harmful to communities of color and to women and

gays in those communities ðe.g., Spade 2013Þ. As part of these efforts,

scholars and activists illustrate how practice necessarily informs theory,

and how theory ideally should inform best practices and community or-

ganizing. These concerns reflect the normative and political dimensions

of intersectionality and thus embody a motivation to go beyond mere

comprehension of intersectional dynamics to transform them.

All of these three dimensions represent well-established patterns of

knowledge production, and the schematic suggested here reflects the fluid

divisions among them. As such, it is more a heuristic device than a catego-

rical one. Nonetheless, we might broadly differentiate projects along these

provisional lines of demarcation by highlighting the ways that some practi-

tioners mobilize intersectionality as a tool to interrogate and intervene in

the social plane while others seek to interrogate intersectionality as a theo-

retical framework through the formal requirements of social theory and

methodology. In naming and working across these subfields, we do not

mean to imply that the practical applications lack theory, nor do we mean

to suggest that the discursive dimensions of intersectionality are either prior

to or fully independent of the practical. Yet in thinking somewhat expan-

sively about the potential ways that these different inquiries might constitute

the field, we are interested in exploring these various sites of intersectional

production both on their own terms and in relation to one another. We

come to this assessment, of course, as participants who are not without our

own views about the merits of a variety of projects and claims made under

the broad umbrella of intersectionality. That we disagree with some of the

arguments and inferences while finding others quite compelling does not

detract from our sense that interrogating the many engagements that inter-

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sectionality has fostered can inform our thinking about future directions for

research, scholarship, and action.

S I G N S Summer 2013 y 787

Our discussion here moves from the central question—what is inter-

sectionality?—to a proposed template for fusing the three levels of engage-

ment with intersectionality into a field of intersectional studies. Our sketch

of the theoretical and applied segments of the field is also sensitive to the

disciplinary contours of studies of intersectionality and the shaping of the

field by political questions. In our section “Articles in This Issue: Key

Themes and Central Questions,” we focus in greater detail on the politi-

cal dimensions of intersectionality, with an emphasis on questions of how

intersectionality is implemented—literally put into practice in policies and

social movements around the world.

Engaging intersectionality

We begin by recognizing the remarkable degree of theoretical and meth-

odological engagement that the concept of intersectionality has invited

among feminist and antiracist scholars around the globe. Intersectionality

was introduced in the late 1980s as a heuristic term to focus attention on

the vexed dynamics of difference and the solidarities of sameness in the con-

text of antidiscrimination and social movement politics. It exposed how

single-axis thinking undermines legal thinking, disciplinary knowledge pro-

duction, and struggles for social justice. Over the intervening decades, inter-

sectionality has proved to be a productive concept that has been deployed

in disciplines such as history, sociology, literature, philosophy, and anthro-

pology as well as in feminist studies, ethnic studies, queer studies, and legal

studies. Intersectionality’s insistence on examining the dynamics of differ-

ence and sameness has played a major role in facilitating consideration of

gender, race, and other axes of power in a wide range of political discussions

and academic disciplines, including new developments in fields such as ge-

ography and organizational studies.

As intersectionality has traveled, questions have been raised regarding a

number of issues: the utility and limitations of its various metaphors, includ-

ing the road intersection, the matrix, and the interlocked vision of oppres-

sion; the additive and autonomous versus interactive and mutually constitut-

ing nature of the race/gender/class/sexuality/nation nexus; the eponymous

“et cetera” problem—that is, the number of categories and kinds of subjects

ðe.g., privileged or subordinate?Þ stipulated or implied by an intersectional

approach; and the static and fixed versus the dynamic and contextual orien-

tation of intersectional research. Intersectional work has also reflected dif-

ferent orientations toward the relative importance and centrality of various

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layers of society, ranging from the individual to the institutional, and has also

revealed different sensibilities regarding the ontological and epistemological

788 y Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall

premises of the intersectional approach and its disciplinary limits and poten-

tial.1 Some of the tensions set forth above revolve around intersectionality’s

capacity to do any work other than to call attention to the particularities of

Black women. The historical centrality of American Black women and Black

feminism as subjects of intersectionality theory grounds reservations about

intersectionality’s usefulness as an analytic tool in addressing other margin-

alized communities and other manifestations of social power.2 These and

related questions about intersectionality’s subject have underwritten several

interventions.

We name these debates not because we find these tensions unresolv-

able or each of the questions compelling. Indeed, our sense is that some of

what circulates as critical debate about what intersectionality is or does

reflects a lack of engagement with both originating and contemporary lit-

eratures on intersectionality. Moreover, the widening scope of intersectional

scholarship and praxis has not only clarified intersectionality’s capacities; it has

also amplified its generative focus as an analytical tool to capture and engage

contextual dynamics of power. In consequence, we think answers to ques-

tions about what intersectional analysis is have been amply demonstrated by

what people are deploying it to do. The collection of articles in this issue of

Signs illustrates the considerable creativity that practitioners have exercised

in how they interpret the scope of intersectionality, representing the wide

variety of projects that make up the field. Intersectionality has, since the

beginning, been posed more as a nodal point than as a closed system—a

gathering place for open-ended investigations of the overlapping and con-

flicting dynamics of race, gender, class, sexuality, nation, and other inequal-

ities ðLykke 2011Þ. This seems to us to be a more apt description of in-

tersectionality’s starting point than one that frames intersectionality as only

categorically, spatially, or temporally rooted in specific relations or superfi-

cially preoccupied with “difference.”

To be sure, theoretical and methodological questions will continue

to mark the unfolding of intersectionality, particularly as opportunities to

engage in cross-disciplinary, cross-sectoral, and international exchanges

grow. Yet we do not consider the survival of or further development of in-

1 There are far too many authors who have done important work on these subjects to cite

here, so we mention just a few: King ð1988Þ, Collins ð2000Þ, McCall ð2005Þ, Yuval-Davis

ð2006Þ,Hancock ð2007Þ,Walby ð2007Þ, Nash ð2008Þ, Cole ð2009Þ, Choo andFerree ð2010Þ, and Lykke ð2011Þ.

2 See, e.g., Carastathis ð2008Þ and Puar ð2011Þ; cf. Coogan-Gehr ð2011Þ and Alexander-

Floyd ð2012Þ.

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tersectionality to turn on any final reconciliation of the many theoretical

and methodological debates that its travel has engendered. One could look

S I G N S Summer 2013 y 789

to analogous approaches to the definition of class ðor gender or raceÞ and realize that such debates are lively to this day and likely to never end. There

are, for example, several different schools of class analysis coexisting in

reasonable harmony ðe.g., Lareau and Conley 2008Þ, and the same is true

with respect to race as well as gender. Likewise, assessing intersectionality’s

value against the expectations of a grand theory seems off the mark since

we do not understand intersectionality’s use or objectives to be realized

only through a full-fledged grand theory or a standardized methodology

ðCrenshaw 2011Þ. Recognizing intersectionality’s historical contingencies, we also want to

take the opportunity to address the tendency to receive and assess inter-

sectionality entirely apart from the temporal and contextual dynamics of in-

terpretation that are themselves intersectionally constituted. Intersectionality

has traveled into spaces and discourses that are themselves constituted by

power relations that are far from transparent. The debates that ensue around

the essential subject of intersectionality epitomize this process. Many of our

contributors draw attention not only to the institutional politics of knowl-

edge production that shape the context in which insurgent projects are

formed but also to the way such projects are received, historicized, and en-

gaged. Both the ideas at issue and the responses that insurgent ideas engen-

der reflect structural relations that are dynamically constituted by the very

forces being interrogated. As the early histories of intersectionality reveal, its

production was not located somewhere outside the field of race and gender

power but was an active and direct engagement with issues and dynamics

that embodied such power. In fact, intersectional texts in the early years of

critical legal studies were virtual transcripts of active contestations set within

institutional formations that both shaped what was talked about and es-

tablished templates—discursive conventions and recognizable methods—

for making visible the dynamics that were at play ðCrenshaw 2011Þ. These conditions of possibility, as well as the debates they initially engendered,

are relevant not only to intersectionality’s discursive history but to thinking

through how intersectionality currently travels and develops as a field.

Contextualizing the articulation of intersectionality in the legal acad-

emy draws out the conditions of its possibility, and its discursive relations

to legal subjectivity—a matter of some import in its interdisciplinary and

international travels. The material circumstances that occasioned the emer-

gence of intersectionality were shaped by social transformations that were

playing out within the profession and within law itself. The legal academy,

for instance, began to diversify itself in terms of race and gender from the

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1980s to the mid-1990s. Made possible in part by the national movements

for faculty diversity in law schools, a window of hires created a small but

790 y Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall

critical mass of scholars of color, many of whom came to the law with activist

backgrounds and progressive politics around race, class, and gender. Influ-

enced by intellectual traditions arising from Black feminism, ethnic studies,

and community activism, these scholars took these sensibilities into sites, such

as critical legal studies, where law and its relationship to social power were

being theorized, interrogated, and contested ðPeller 2011Þ. The intellectual and institutional methodologies that shaped the in-

terventions made by critical legal studies were grounded in the practice of

subjecting existing doctrines to trenchant critique, a practice predicated on

the belief that uncovering the rationalizations that reinforce social power

is a necessary, though not sufficient, step toward transformation. Legal

scholars found ample material for such critiques as the legitimating logics

of American antidiscrimination law became increasingly apparent in the

doctrinal obstacles and outright reversals of modest legal reforms. As the

various disjunctures between gender and race discourses played out in these

contexts, feminists of color saw connections between the rigid structuring

of law that rationalized narrow and mutually exclusive approaches to in-

tersecting patterns of subordination, on the one hand, and the single-axis

frameworks within progressive, antiracist, and feminist discourses that were

being contested by feminists of color elsewhere, on the other.

Reflecting the critical methodologies of doctrinal critique that circu-

lated within critical legal studies, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of

Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine,

Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” ðCrenshaw 1989Þ was an expli-

citly interventionist response to the institutional and political discourses

that largely ignored these issues. “Demarginalizing the Intersection” ana-

lyzed a collection of legal cases in which Black female claimants were un-

successful both in their attempts to articulate a compound claim of dis-

crimination ðspecifically, their having been excluded from the workforce

both as women who are Black and as Blacks who are womenÞ and in their

efforts to represent all women or all Blacks in subsequent cases. The problem

these cases seemed to represent was not simply the judges’ failure to rec-

ognize particularity per se but their greater failure to uncover the para-

doxical dimension of the sameness/difference rationales that undergirded

antidiscrimination law more broadly. By these logics, Black females are

both too similar to Black men and white women to represent themselves

and too different to represent either Blacks or women as a whole ðsee Car- bado 2013Þ. Although Black male and white female narratives of discrimi-

nation were understood to be fully inclusive and universal, Black female

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narratives were rendered partial, unrecognizable, something apart from

standard claims of race discrimination or gender discrimination. “Demar-

S I G N S Summer 2013 y 791

ginalizing the Intersection” sought to reverse those assumptions by uncov-

ering law’s myopic conceptualization of discrimination.

This reflection provides at least one example of how the discursive ter-

rain out of which the intersectional frame was constructed informs inter-

sectionality’s complex engagement with the liberal subject. From the start,

intersectionality’s articulations within law challenged the putatively univer-

sal subject of antidiscrimination law and, later, the antiviolence movement

ðCrenshaw 1991Þ. To be clear, however, the ends of problematizing the legal

subject in class-action lawsuits and in anti-domestic-violence interventions

were not limited to securing legal reforms that would grant greater inclusion

to differently defined subjects, such as Black women plaintiffs or battered

immigrant women. Rather, understanding the trajectory of intersectionality

as part of a larger critique of rights and legal institutions reveals how the

intersectional lens looked beyond the more narrowly circumscribed de-

mands for inclusion within the logics of sameness and difference. Instead, it

addressed the larger ideological structures in which subjects, problems,

and solutions were framed. Thus, while the reformist dimensions of inter-

sectionality embodied interventions that addressed the marginalization of,

for example, Black women plaintiffs, these projects were coextensive with a

more radical critique of law premised in part on understanding how it re-

ified and flattened power relationships into unidimensional notions of dis-

crimination.

Antidiscrimination doctrine and political discourses predicated on femi-

nism and antiracism certainly do not exhaust the terrain of intersectional

erasure, marginalization, and contestation. While numerous projects take up

intersectional dynamics within a variety of contexts, it is important to recall

as well that both inside and outside of legal circles, debates over the defi-

nition of intersectionality in general, and its presumed subject position in

particular, reflect an unfolding of scholarly reception and production that

is itself situated within fields of social power. Exactly how intersectionality

and its presumed subjectivities travel across disciplines and national contexts

turns not only on the various theoretical and methodological prisms at

play but also on the race, gender, and other discursive prisms through which

the theory and its originating contexts are read. To state this more concisely,

intersectionality neither travels outside nor is unmediated by the very field

of race and gender power that it interrogates. Thus, interpretations of in-

tersectionality within other discursive fields may not escape the dynamics

that rendered Black female plaintiffs illegible to courts in the cases initially

analyzed. It is far from mere coincidence that current debates about inter-

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sectionality’s capacity to represent anyone other than Black women bear

striking resemblance to courts’ discomfort with centering Black women in

792 y Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall

class-action lawsuits. Our intention herein is not to minimize the debates

that intersectionality’s travel has engendered but instead to situate inter-

sectionality in the face of the diverse and sometimes oppositional readings

that have come to be associated with it.

A template for a collaborative intersectionality

This brief and necessarily partial genealogy suggests that insights and nu-

ances can be gained by attending to the institutional and field-specific ways

that intersectionality is articulated. To build on this foundation and look

ahead, we would like to consider two alternative scenarios through which

intersectionality is, or can potentially be, articulated across and within dis-

ciplines and across and within political spaces. Our main objective is to il-

lustrate the potential for achieving greater theoretical, methodological, sub-

stantive, and political literacy without demanding greater unity across the

growing diversity of fields that constitute the study of intersectionality. Im-

plicit in this aspiration is an understanding of intersectional arenas not as a

rigidly delimited set of subfields, separate fromother like-minded approaches,

but as part and parcel of them.

The first scenario describes something akin to a centrifugal process. In

this sense, intersectionality travels from its groundings in Black feminism to

critical legal and race studies; to other disciplines and interdisciplines in the

humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences; and across countries and

continents as well. It adapts to the different discursive and research protocols

in these environments, perhaps modifying how race, gender, and other social

dynamics are conceptualized and intertwined or, alternatively, how the cen-

tral subjects and social categories of intersectionality are identified ðsee Lewis 2013Þ. Studies of intersectionality also begin to conform to methodological

standards and practices of each field and strive to make central contributions

to those fields. Projects in this vein seek to formalize the methodological

or theoretical foundations of intersectionality within disciplines and to ex-

tend their reach within these disciplines by building from the ground of

empirical research up—that is, by beginning with empirical studies that

subsequently inform theoretical and methodological interventions. Ange-

MarieHancock ð2007Þ in political science,ElizabethCole ð2009Þ andValerie Purdie-Vaughns and Richard Eibach ð2008Þ in psychology, Hae Yeon Choo

and Myra Marx Ferree ð2010Þ in sociology, and Sylvia Walby ð2007Þ in

philosophy are just a few examples of this pathway into and around inter-

sectionality.

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In contrast to the centrifugal process, the second scenario is a more rec-

ognizably insurgent one and describes something more akin to a centripetal

S I G N S Summer 2013 y 793

process. Here, scholars interested in intersectionality strike out mainly in the

margins of their disciplines and are often skeptical about the possibility of

integrating mainstream methods and theories into their intersectional re-

search. As they are less beholden to disciplinary conventions, their projects

may draw on a variety of methods and materials, integrating them into in-

novative insights that might otherwise have been obscured.

These different processes, broadly conceived, may shed light on some of

the challenges that practitioners have encountered in synthesizing intersec-

tional projects across disciplines and contexts. Certainly, it is predictable that

research conventions that are understood and taken for granted within one

discipline may not be well understood by others in the field of intersec-

tionality. The institutional gravity that pulls the attention of practitioners

in their respective disciplines may lead others outside the field to misrecog-

nize or misinterpret intersectional methodologies, or to infer an absence of

method altogether. At the same time, efforts to “discipline” intersectional-

ity within established research practice can sometimes proceed along lines

that suggest that its insurgent dimensions constitute an unruliness that

undermines its utility and future development.

We obviously do not take the position that centrifugal projects are in-

herently misdirected, a position that would be especially unlikely given our

own investments in developing intersectional projects and literacy within our

respective fields. Yet we are mindful that disciplinary conventions import a

range of assumptions and truth claims that sometimes contribute to the very

erasures to which intersectionality draws attention. As practitioners within

certain discursive communities, we note that the multiple ways that analytic

practices rationalize certain relations are not always apparent ðCrenshaw 1989Þ. At the same time, efforts to produce new knowledge cannot dispense

with the apparatuses through which information is produced, categorized,

and interpreted.

While the methodological insurgency that characterizes centripetal de-

velopment may open up new pathways of thought, it also comes with po-

tential risks. Pressure to locate a project firmly within a conventional field

when part of the project is directed precisely at that field’s conceptual lim-

itations replicates on an academic level the same constraints that confronted

plaintiffs who challenged the categorical apparatus in antidiscrimination

law. Often, scholars who situate their work against the grain of the standard

protocols of knowledge production are themselves subject to the very in-

stitutional dynamics they are interrogating. Their discovery of new, cutting-

edge methods to identify and articulate intersectional subordination can

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indeed cut both ways. Critical analysis of institutional and discursive power

is rarely a sufficient prophylactic against its reach.

794 y Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall

Innovative thinking at the margins of disciplines may also leave such

scholars isolated, heightening the need for a broader interdisciplinary com-

munity. Such communal networks would serve important functions in that

they would create spaces—discursively and otherwise—for critical masses to

gather and share the resources that are vital in sustaining a burgeoning field.

Networks provide both young scholars and seasoned ones with opportuni-

ties to develop content that is substantively identifiable as part of the field

and to become familiar with the critical tools and archives that are essential

in sustaining a discursive community. The development of insurgent fields

of knowledge such as intersectionality is hampered by the many material and

disciplinary obstacles to forging such networks. For example, there are no

annual conferences and meetings on intersectionality to foster intellectual

interchange, mentorship, and collaboration.

If we recognize that conscious efforts to develop methodological literacy

across disciplines and contexts can be productive, it would seem that the fu-

ture development of intersectionality as a field would be advanced by maxi-

mizing the interface between the centrifugal and the centripetal processes.

Perhaps these sensibilities can point toward ways of synthesizing some of

the tensions that are so frequently reflected in the field. For example, this

collection and the conference from which many of the contributions were

generated are examples of a centripetal solution to such a state of affairs.

The Fourth Annual UCLA School of Law Critical Race Studies Symposium

drew together contributors who might generally be positioned within the

centrifugal tradition as well as those who were more likely to see their work

as straddling divides between strict disciplinary performance and the desire

to build a field across disciplines.3 At that event, and in the many conver-

sations and projects prompted by those exchanges, scholars gained a stron-

ger appreciation of how their work informs and is informed by other work

in the field. Other conferences that have provided sites for scholars and activ-

ists to engage each other—often productively, even if critically—have taken

place in recent years, extending the discursive life of these engagements

through research collaborations and publications ðLutz, Herrera Vivar, and

Supik 2011; Lewis 2013Þ. 3 Many of the articles in this issue of Signs emerged from deliberations and presentations

at this conference, which was titled “Intersectionality: Challenging Theory, Reframing Pol-

itics, and Transforming Movements” ðLos Angeles, March 11–13, 2010Þ. The conference

brought together over three hundred students, scholars, and activists to engage the theme of

intersectionality within and across disciplines, subject positions, research objects, and activist

coalitions.

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Implicit in this broadened field of vision is our view that intersectional-

ity is best framed as an analytic sensibility. If intersectionality is an analytic

S I G N S Summer 2013 y 795

disposition, a way of thinking about and conducting analyses, then 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. Rather, what makes an analysis intersectional—whatever

terms it deploys, whatever its iteration, whatever its field or discipline—is its

adoption of an intersectional way of thinking about the problem of same-

ness and difference and its relation to power. This framing—conceiving of

categories not as distinct but as always permeated by other categories, fluid

and changing, always in the process of creating and being created by dy-

namics of power—emphasizes what intersectionality does rather than what

intersectionality is.

Thus, as conversations about intersectionality traverse the disciplines of

women’s/gender/feminist studies, critical race studies, and women-of-

color feminism in a centripetal fashion, we would hope that bridges will

continue to be built into the centrifugal forces of intersectionality. Here

we have in mind not only the efforts of those referenced above, who ex-

plicitly seek to further the project of intersectionality, but also a broader

range of efforts to specify theoretically the overlapping dynamics of race,

gender, and class.4 Casting the net wider still, we might expand our con-

ception of intersectional methods to include the integration of projects

that bring crucial theoretical, methodological, and substantive resources to

studies of intersectionality. A recent example of this approach is Dorothy

Roberts’s book Fatal Intervention ð2011Þ, which relies heavily on medical

and other scientific research across the disciplines to support her argu-

ment against the use of race in genetic research. Similarly, demographic and

other empirical studies of immigration, incarceration, and welfare reform

have obvious implications for the ambitious intersectional model of free-

dom from “population control” that Dean Spade constructs in his contri-

bution to this issue ð2013, 1031Þ, as do social movement research and

theory ðin politics, sociology, and historyÞ for accounts of intersectional

politics ðCarastathis 2013; Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin 2013Þ. The future of intersectionality studies will thus, we argue, be dependent

on the rigor with which scholars harness the most effective tools of their

trade to illuminate how intersecting axes of power and inequality operate

to our collective and individual disadvantage and how these very tools,

4 For example, Carole Pateman and Charles Mills ð2007Þ compare and contrast the racial

and gender contracts that both intersect and diverge in the practices of philosophy and law.

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these ways of knowing, may also constitute structures of knowledge pro-

duction that can themselves be the object of intersectional critique. Of

796 y Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall

course, efforts to think critically about certain conditions often involve ac-

tive engagement with the analytical conventions and categories that make

up those conditions. That there are always elements of power embedded in

language, disciplinary methods, metaphors, and other signs is by now a basic

understanding that need not stymie the productivity of the field.

As Barbara Tomlinson ð2013Þ reminds us, the search for the new and the

perfect in feminist studies—and in the academy in general—often distracts

us from what are central organizing theoretical and political themes whose

potential lies in their brilliant and rigorous application rather than in theo-

retical rejection, replacement, reduction, and remediation. We do not see

literary or scientific or poststructural or legal or any other kind of method

as inherently antithetical ðor centralÞ to this enterprise, although we do ac-

knowledge that both critics and practitioners have articulated their interven-

tions from each of these traditions. This broad cast of intersectionality prac-

titioners ðand criticsÞ is generative. Indeed, given the widely noted breadth

and complexity of the topic—a complexity that is manifested in the chal-

lenges of specifying a formal theory of multiple social dynamics as much as

in the contingent operation of such dynamics—efforts to articulate a col-

laborative sensibility may be among the most productive iterations of in-

tersectionality that can facilitate its growth as a field.

Articles in this issue: Key themes and central questions

If the foregoing discussion can be framed as an attempt to address inter-

sectionality at large with an aim toward collaboration and literacy rather

than unity, this section attempts to zero in on some issues that we believe

have occupied a privileged place in the field from the very start ðat least in our own mindsÞ as well as on key questions that will define the field in

the future. We seek to foreground the social dynamics and relations that

constitute subjects, displacing the emphasis on the subjects ðand catego-

riesÞ themselves as the starting point of inquiry. Our focus also shifts into

the realm of politics, mostly but not completely outside the halls of aca-

demic knowledge production, as we encounter the various ways that inter-

sectionality is put into practice in human rights law, in antidiscrimination

policy, and in social movements and advocacy organizations. Our ultimate

aim is to further the discussion of some of the theoretical themes raised

above through our discussion of these studies of intersectionality in action

and thereby to critically assess where the workmight need to go over the next

two decades.

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Structural intersectionality: Reclaiming power dynamics

Intersectionality is inextricably linked to an analysis of power, yet one chal-

S I G N S Summer 2013 y 797

lenge to intersectionality is its alleged emphasis on categories of identity

versus structures of inequality. While this theme has surfaced in a variety

of texts, particularly those that might be framed as projects that seek in-

tersectionality’s rescue, in this issue we emphasize an understanding of

intersectionality that is not exclusively or even primarily preoccupied with

categories, identities, and subjectivities. Rather, the intersectional analysis

foregrounded here emphasizes political and structural inequalities.

The recasting of intersectionality as a theory primarily fascinated with

the infinite combinations and implications of overlapping identities from

an analytic initially concerned with structures of power and exclusion is

curious given the explicit references to structures that appear in much of

the early work.5 Within academic as well as political discourse, Black fem-

inism emphasized the role of structures in constituting the conditions of

life in which racially and economically marginalized women were situated.6

“Structural intersectionality” further delineated the “multilayered and

routinized forms of domination” ðCrenshaw 1991, 1245Þ in specific con-

texts such as violence against women. The analysis of the overlapping

structures of subordination revealed how certain groups of women were

made particularly vulnerable to abuse and were also vulnerable to inade-

quate interventions that failed to take into account the structural dimen-

sions of the context ðCrenshaw 1991; Richie 2012Þ. Departing from this work, however, critiques of intersectionality’s sup-

posed reification of categories often reflect distorted understandings of iden-

tity politics. Attentiveness to identity, if simultaneously confronting power,

need not be interpreted so narrowly. As deployed by many intersectional

academics and activists, intersectionality helps reveal how power works in

diffuse and differentiated ways through the creation and deployment of over-

lapping identity categories. As Jennifer Jihye Chun, George Lipsitz, and

Young Shin pithily observe, “½Intersectionality� primarily concerns the way

things work rather than who people are” ð2013, 923Þ. Indeed, as con- tributors herein suggest, the opposition between identity and power is

itself a rigid and nondynamic way of understanding social hierarchy. Cath-

arine A. MacKinnon notes that identities are, of course, “authentic instru-

ments of inequality. And they are static and hard to move” ð2013, 1023Þ. But, addressing the sometimes mystifying relationships between structures

5 We acknowledge that some of our work may have inadvertently fostered this emphasis

by including a discussion of categories within a broader framework ðe.g., McCall 2005Þ.

6 See Dill ð1983Þ, King ð1989Þ, Combahee River Collective ð1995Þ, and Glenn ð2002Þ.

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and identities, MacKinnon further obverses that identities and stereotypes

“are the ossified outcomes of the dynamic intersection of multiple hierar-

798 y Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall

chies, not the dynamic that creates them. They are there, but they are not the

reason they are there” ð1023Þ. Barbara Tomlinson also frames intersectionality as an engagement with

power, repudiating lines of argument that would critique intersectionality as

insufficiently attentive to some subjects and overly attentive to others. For

example, some critiques of intersectionality are premised on the assump-

tion that the failure to give all intersectional subjects their day in the sun

is a fundamental shortcoming of the field, a critique frequently delivered

through the “what about white men?” question. Others defend the absence

of intersectionality in, for example, whiteness studies as a logical extension of

intersectionality’s exclusive focus on subordinated subjects. Both critiques

are premised on understanding identity as the playing field of intersection-

ality and difference as its perpetual dynamic. As Tomlinson notes, however,

“If critics think intersectionality is a matter of identity rather than power,

they cannot see which differences make a difference. Yet it is exactly our

analyses of power that reveal which differences carry significance” ð2013, 1012Þ.

Dean Spade is similarly critical of discourses that confuse the relation-

ship between identity and power. Traditional liberal discourses tend to

frame the problem of discrimination in terms of state failures to transcend

difference, while race- and gender-neutral regimes escape scrutiny. Spade

challenges liberal equality regimes by revealing how allegedly race- and

gender-neutral legal and administrative systems fundamentally produce

and maintain race and gender categories that ultimately distribute life

chances. Like earlier critical race theorists and critical legal scholars, Spade

decidedly rejects formal equality approaches in favor of a “population con-

trol” lens that reveals the legal system’s complicity with the foundational

violences of slavery, genocide, and heteropatriarchy ð2013, 1031Þ. Beyond the critique of formal equality, however, Spade argues that resistance con-

ceived through single-axis frameworks can never transform those condi-

tions. Spade uses intersectionality-informed resistance strategies to reject

legal equality and to emphasize instead a strategy focused on “dismantling

the violent capacities of racialized-gendered systems that operate under the

pretense of neutrality” ð1033Þ. The relation between structural interventions and identity categories is

also central to Mieke Verloo’s contribution, which interrogates European

Union policies that address the ðreÞproduction of inequalities for members

of intersectional groups competing over resources and ðdominantÞ gender- egalitarian norms and laws, as gender equality regimes are the leading tem-

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plate for other equality regimes. While Verloo acknowledges not only the

limitations of policy to “bring forward gender equality” ð2013, 898Þ but also

S I G N S Summer 2013 y 799

the chance that policy may reproduce or sustain inequality instead, her

deeper critique does not reject formal equality per se. Rather, she attributes

the preservation of inequality to the social construction of categorical pairs

that repeatedly classify ðand reclassifyÞ people into “two exclusive and exclu-

sionary groups” ð896Þ—for example, male/female, black/white, citizen/

noncitizen—thus expressing what wemight call a form of structural realism.

Verloo’s essay situates the relationship between power and identity in

intersectionality studies within political processes of inclusion and exclusion.

Specifically, she examines the procedural enactment of intersectional poli-

tics—the point at which states have determined what to do but now must

decide whom to include in the political processes that enact these changes.

Pointing to recent developments in Britain and France, Verloo argues that

reforming regimes that build their “analys½es� of intersectionality on the

politics of institutional policy rather than on identity” may limit the space

available for ethnic minorities to “make complex and intersectional social

justice claims” ð2013, 906Þ.7 Here, as Verloo explains it, we see the differ-

ence that a politics driven by recognition and inclusion of cognizable iden-

tities can make in including marginalized persons in the acts of demargina-

lization or, as is the case in Britain and France, once again leaving them ðand, as Spade would argue, all of usÞ behind. In other words, recognition may

be the most effective solution to problems of exclusion, at least in the short

run, even among multiple subordinate communities competing over limited

antidiscrimination resources.

Further exploring the relationship between identity and power, Gail

Lewis’s piece, “Unsafe Travel: Experiencing Intersectionality and Feminist

Displacements,” raises central questions about the structural dynamics at play

in the reproduction of power both within society and within the academy

itself. Lewis takes up the deflection of race within intersectionality’s travels,

specifically arguing that Black women have been displaced from feminist

dialogues about intersectionality in Europe. Lewis argues that a key factor

in this displacement is a sense that race is a meaningful analytic category only

in Britain and the United States and not in continental Europe. While some

feminists point to the relatively marginal role of racial discourse within both

academic discourses and political discourses in Europe as evidence, little at-

tention is directed to the structural and historical conditions that under-

write this erasure. Lewis notes that “the position that race is unutterable

and without analytic utility in the contemporary European context can be

7 Verloo takes the second part of this quotation from Bassel and Emejulu ð2010, 517Þ.

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experienced as an act of epistemological and social erasure—erasure both of

contemporary realities of intersectional subjects ðincluding racialization of

800 y Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall

whitenessÞ and of the history of racial categories and racializing processes

across the whole of Europe” ð2013, 887Þ. Lewis can be read as arguing for retaining race and racial power as

central analytical and political concepts in the study of intersectionality.

Such retention would entail both a structural analysis of race in Europe as

well as the acknowledgment of racialized subjects in society and in the

production of feminist knowledge. Lewis calls for an inclusive and open-

ended definition of the subjects of intersectionality theory and yet, at the

same time, for the centrality of race ðalong with gender, class, etc.Þ as a determinant of social inequality and subordination in Europe and “else-

where” ð2013, 884Þ.

Political intersectionality: Praxis methodology and grounded theory

In the “Engaging Intersectionality” section above, we discussed intersec-

tionality’s deployment as a deconstructive move challenging the sameness/

difference paradigms in law, politics, and civil society. This dimension of in-

tersectionality is sometimes mobilized to repudiate any potential embrace

of social categorization, yet intersectionality has also figured as a recon-

structive move to combat synergistic and formidable structures of subordi-

nation. The reconstructive move challenges the position of privilege that

enables an easy cynicism about all identities per se and, thus, about politics in

general. Key to the reconstructive understanding of intersectionality is the

notion that “all politics are identity politics” ðChun, Lipsitz, and Shin 2013,

937Þ. The concept of “political intersectionality” reflects a dual concern for

resisting the systemic forces that significantly shape the differential life

chances of intersectionality’s subjects and for reshaping modes of resis-

tance beyond allegedly universal, single-axis approaches. Political inter-

sectionality provides an applied dimension to the insights of structural in-

tersectionality by offering a framework for contesting power and thereby

linking theory to existent and emergent social and political struggles. This

praxis orientation demands that the realm of practice always already inform

the work of theorists. Possibilities for fusing the development of theoreti-

cal knowledge and practical knowledge come from several of the articles

in this issue.

MacKinnon’s illustration of intersectionality as a method of legal

analysis in a wide range of cases involving harms to women in minority

communities is one such example with both theoretical and practical im-

plications. MacKinnon’s interpretation of intersectionality as a dynamic

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method of analyzing multiple axes of power and inequality in whatever

form ðtime, placeÞ they happen to be manifested and her compelling dem-

S I G N S Summer 2013 y 801

onstrations of the false dichotomy between the particular and the uni-

versal evince insights that capture and advance the essence of previous work

on intersectionality. For instance, the role that the rape of Bosnian women

played in helping to prosecute war crimes against the Bosnian community

as a whole is an example of how allegedly particular harms to women serve

in fact as harms to the broader community ðMacKinnon 2013Þ. Similarly,

one can think of the women-in-development movement, explored by

Chandra Talpade Mohanty ð2013Þ, which targets women as the optimal

locus of economic, social, and political development projects.

Both of these examples represent hard-fought political battles to bring

women indisadvantagedcommunities “frommargin to center” ðhooks1984Þ while at the same time challenging and elaborating on theoretical distinc-

tions ðsuch as distinctions between the particular and the universalÞ and ex-

tending the community of scholars and scope of scholarship by applying in-

tersectional insights beyond the spatial, temporal, and categorical bounds

of Crenshaw’s earlier work. Yet we think there is no guarantee that all in-

stances of intersectional contestation will evince these same dynamics ði.e., the same instantiation of the tension between the particular and the uni-

versalÞ. Additional theoretical lessons can be gleaned by putting intersectionality

into practice in social movement organizations. One set of questions has to

do with how identities, awareness, and transformation are fostered within

organizations that attend to a diverse array of issues and power differentials

among members. This phenomenon perhaps presents a unique challenge to

intersectionally based social organizations and surely warrants greater em-

pirical and theoretical attention. For instance, what do such organizations

teach us about how social movements shape political action more generally?

Devon W. Carbado argues that explicit attention to multiple dimensions

of privilege and difference is necessary to develop awareness about a whole

spectrum of subordinated histories and struggles and, thus, to form coali-

tions that are potentially broader in impact than those that do not do so.

Coining the term “colorblind intersectionality,” he shows how “framing

whiteness outside intersectionality legitimizes a broader epistemic universe

in which the racial presence, racial difference, and racial particularity of white

people travel invisibly and undisturbed as race-neutral phenomena over and

against the racial presence, racial difference, and racial particularity of peo-

ple of color” ð2013, 823–24Þ. Carbado’s deployment of intersectionality

puts a name on a phenomenon well established within resistance politics,

specifically, the way that a white woman “can simultaneously be just a woman

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and stand in for all women, just as white men can be just men and stand in

for all men, and white gays and lesbians can be just gays and lesbians and

802 y Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall

stand in for all gays and lesbians” ð823Þ. Colorblind intersectionality invites

attention to the privileged intersectionalities among politicized constituen-

cies, providing a conceptual account that attends to the unrecognized in-

tersections that underwrite many of the divisions and competing agendas

within political movements for greater equality.8

Anna Carastathis ð2013Þ incorporates some of this intuition in her analy-

sis of a single organization and a vital player in that organization. In examin-

ing how different fragments of a poor, lesbian, Puerto Rican activist’s iden-

tity emerged and coalesced in the process of working with various women’s

and Central American solidarity groups, Carastathis demonstrates that an

intersectional identity is not ready-made—as could be said of all identities—

and thus opens possibilities for forging connections among these fragments

in myriad ways. She explicitly builds on the notion, expressed in Crenshaw’s

“Mapping the Margins” ð1991Þ, that traditional identity groups might best

be thought of as coalitions. This insight directly imports the idea of sifting

and struggling through difference and privilege vis-à-vis the dynamics in-

volved in movements that cross multiple divides ðe.g., women’s and queer

concerns in Central American solidarity movementsÞ in the process of arriv-

ing at a political higher ground, though not one devoid of ongoing conflict.

Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin similarly reveal the organic nature of identity

formation in an intersectionally based organization dedicated to the needs

of Asian immigrant women. In a more traditional single-axis organization,

potential barriers to organizing—such as child-care responsibilities, house-

hold burdens, language proficiency, and unmet health-care needs—might be

viewed as personal problems that fall within the realm of individual mem-

bers to resolve. In contrast, Asian Immigrant Women’s Advocates ðAIWAÞ embraces the “intersectional optics” of low-wage immigrant women work-

ers’ lives ð2013, 920Þ to develop a model for leadership development and

communal empowerment called the Community Transformational Orga-

nizing Strategy ðCTOSÞ. Through AIWA’s workplace literacy classes, for

example, members may avail themselves of not only basic English-as-a-

second-language instruction but also an innovative curriculum that empha-

sizes workers’, women’s, and immigrants’ rights, allowing them to better

understand the link between language proficiency and workplace discrimi-

8 Carbado also takes up the erasure of racial power in relationship to intersectionality in

an interesting juxtaposition to Lewis’s reflection on how blackness is expelled from certain

European discourses around intersectionality. That is, Carbado excavates the erasure of white-

ness from intersectional consciousness. See Carbado ð2013Þ and Lewis ð2013Þ.

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nation that is exacerbated by employer expectations that limited-English-

speaking, low-income immigrant women will not resist exploitation or ha-

S I G N S Summer 2013 y 803

rassment.

The CTOS approach embraces an important insight of intersection-

ality: that diffuse and differential systems of interlocking oppressions com-

bine to marginalize and silence immigrant women workers by imposing

multiple barriers to those seeking to participate in their own liberation. The

AIWA study reveals not only that structural intersectionality is needed to

understand how such differentiated power works but also that political

intersectionality is needed to negotiate new identity formations in pro-

gressive movements: “Progressive politics do not flow magically from ag-

grieved identities. On the contrary, it is important for progressive politics

that people derive their identities from their politics rather than their pol-

itics from their identities, that activists recognize the need to give progres-

sive new meanings based on political principles to embodied social iden-

tities” ðChun, Lipsitz, and Shin 2013, 937Þ. The strength of the studies by

Carastathis and by Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin lies in their ability to demon-

strate how developing awareness of inequalities along multiple dimensions

is achieved organically over time. These contributions suggest that intersec-

tional prisms can inform connections across privilege as well as subordina-

tion to better facilitate meaningful collaboration and political action.

Finally, in the realm of state policy, our contributors also foster a dialogue

between politics and theory. Verloo’s piece, for instance, complements and

shines light on much of the work being done by Spade in “Intersectional

Resistance and Law Reform.” Within Verloo’s framework, Spade embraces

a reactive approach, invoking a call to arms for those committed to “inter-

sectional politics,” insisting that they refuse to settle for pyrrhic “equality

‘victories’” ð2013, 1047Þ. Spade’s approach identifies how structures in gov-

ernment and society create unequal life opportunities for certain groups or

kinds of people who experience intersectional oppressions, and it calls for

the all-out dismantling of these regimes. As Spade sees it, marginalized and

oppressed people can and should form alliances—tied together by their sim-

ilar experiences of oppression, even where the genesis of these oppressions

does not have a common link—to collaboratively fight to tear down struc-

tural regimes that serve to oppress peoples across multiple axes. “Intersec-

tional politics” does not, for Spade, mean dismantling identities or categories

themselves but, rather, dismantling structures that selectively impose vul-

nerability upon certain bodies. To this end, Spade’s politics and his particular

deployment of the reactive approach are expansive in scope: he does not

merely articulate a means of liberating trans persons from the tyranny of

gender normativity and the gender binary, nor immigrants and others from

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the harshness of racism. Rather, Spade argues that in order for all people to

resist domination, all groups must work to dismantle systems everywhere

804 y Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall

that serve to constitute oppression.

Intersectional knowledge production in women’s and gender studies

Coming full circle to our earlier discussion of the politics of knowledge

production, we can restate now that not only do intersectional prisms

excavate and expose multilayered structures of power and domination by

adopting a grounded praxis approach; they also engage the conditions that

shape and influence the interpretive lenses through which knowledge is

produced and disseminated.

Tomlinson, for instance, explores how “uninterrogated scholarly and

social conventions and habits of argument” combine to distort the power

and potential of intersectionality ð2013, 993Þ. Some of these social con-

ventions include the nature of academic publishing itself, replete with “pro-

fessional pressures, reward structures, and credentialingmechanisms” ð997Þ. Drawing insights from the work of Robyn Wiegman ð2010Þ, Tomlinson

argues that feminist scholarship may be particularly vulnerable to such a

distorting lens. Because feminism cultivates a desire to change the world, it

in turn produces a necessary dissatisfaction with the status quo. Short of

changing the world, this desire/dissatisfaction too often turns inward, to-

ward the feminist community and feminist scholarship in particular. Tom-

linson identifies the rhetorics and tropes framed by this “desire to distance”

ð2013, 998Þ in selected works by authors disappointed or disillusionedwith

intersectionality. Her work is especially important for understanding more

fully the language of and context for such distancing moves, as well as for

learning to take this dynamic into account when strategizing about how

to build a collaborative and progressive epistemic community. It is im-

portant to consider the intersectional project a communal one, one un-

dertaken not in academic silos but in conjunction with fellow travelers with

shared insights, approaches, and commitments, guiding critique and col-

laboration for communal gain ðrather than purely self-gainÞ, as suggested in the template for collaborative intersectionality discussed above.

Both Mohanty and Vrushali Patil address, at a global level, problems

that Tomlinson discusses, but in ways that reflect different sensibilities

about intersectionality’s relationship to white feminism and postcolonial

discourse. Mohanty was, of course, among the first to call attention to the

transnational, colonial, and imperial dimensions of first-world white femi-

nism. In this issue, she revisits her earlier contributions in light of the

transformation of academic culture ðand feminist scholarshipÞ under neo- liberalism. She argues that neoliberalism has transformed “material and

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ideological conditions” ð2013, 970Þ in profound ways that negatively af-

fect radical critique and insurgent knowledges: “Radical theory can in fact

S I G N S Summer 2013 y 805

become a commodity to be consumed; no longer seen as a product of

activist scholarship or connected to emancipatory knowledge, it can cir-

culate as a sign of prestige in an elitist, neoliberal landscape” ð971Þ. She maps how her own broadly read and cited works—especially “Under

Western Eyes” ð1986Þ and “‘UnderWestern Eyes’ Revisited” ð2003Þ—have

traveled around the world as a telling example of the pull and force of

contemporary neoliberal material and ideological conditions. Her examples

trace the discursive and analytic moves undertaken to appropriate her work

into hegemonic feminist knowledge production while simultaneously emp-

tying it of its fundamental theoretical commitments to decolonization.

Patil also attends to the knowledge-production processes that can empty

a body of work of its more radical content and prospects. Patil observes that

even critical work on patriarchy has ignored a central dimension: “the po-

tential and actual interrelationships of historically and geographically spe-

cific patriarchies to . . . transterritorial and transnational processes” such as

European imperialism and colonialism and neoliberal globalization ð2013, 848Þ. This being the case, Patil argues that feminist scholarship must chal-

lenge the uncritical acceptance of the nation as the meaningful unit of analy-

sis, unless feminist analysis wishes to remain tethered to the “spatialities and

temporalities of colonial modernity” ð863Þ. While Mohanty interrogates the failures of white feminism, the focus of

Patil’s assessment is certain failures within intersectionality literature, which,

she argues, has eclipsed the discussion of patriarchy in feminist scholarship.

Placing intersectional scholarship within the larger context of postcolonial

studies, a field whose insights have not yet been fully incorporated into what

she terms “domestic intersectionality,” Patil argues that intersectionality

scholarship to date has failed to interrogate how transnational dynamics of

colonialism, imperialism, and neoliberalism structure and constrain life pros-

pects through processes of racialization and gendering ð2013, 850Þ. Closer attention to the manifold ways in which the operations of power at the local

level are constituted through the regional, the international, and the global

is critical if intersectionality studies is to fulfill its radical potential.

Patil’s call to expand intersectional analysis across multiple sites joins

others in seeking to expand intersectionality’s discursive terrain. At the same

time, it invites a reconsideration of rhetorics that might, without more nu-

ance, erase the insurgent history of Black women’s transnational activism

ðCoogan-Gehr 2011; Tomlinson 2013Þ. Problematizing the tendency “to

promote transnational feminism over the work of American feminists of

color—particularly African American women,” Tomlinson suggests that

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feminist scholarship must be wary of practices that render Black women

somehow “complicit with imperial fantasies of difference” ð1001Þ while

806 y Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall

neglecting the documented history of Black women’s activism as transna-

tional feminists working to challenge imperial conquest and exploitation in

the United States and abroad.

More broadly, Mohanty and Patil present sharp illustrations of the chal-

lenges that complicate efforts to develop the field of intersectionality studies

beyond its potentially superficial uptake. Read together, Mohanty and Patil

reflect a particularly compelling example of the contradictory dynamics of

domestication and repudiation that attend insurgent ideas. Intersectionality

figures as a framework that, like Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” ð1986Þ, has been deradicalized and domesticated; in Patil’s view, however, inter-

sectionality has virtually supplanted white feminists’ critique of patriarchy.

While Mohanty resists the presumption that the widespread citation of

“Under Western Eyes” represents a universal engagement with its critical

implications, Patil grants intersectionality a central if not defining role in

grounding contemporary feminism’s disengagement with postcolonial dis-

course. The tensions represented by these critiques are not unique to feminist

discourses; the history of insurgent ideas and rhetorical demands from the

margins is filled with examples of co-optation or repudiation. For example, as

any interrogation of the nearly universal embrace of equal rights discourse

in the mid-twentieth century reveals, institutionalized equality practices are

at considerable odds with the contextualized understandings of power that

gave rise to the demands in the first place. Similarly, efforts to adapt and

institutionalize intersectionality within feminist theory, women’s studies, or

other contexts must be interpreted through an awareness that the institu-

tionalized embodiment of ideas does not necessarily reflect either serious

engagement with them or their inherent limits or potential. One certainly

would not restrict the substantive limits of equality discourse based on the

practices of contemporary institutions, no matter how full-throated their

self-representation as entities committed to equal opportunity might be.

Similarly, intersectionality must be interpreted not only or even primarily

through its rhetorical presence in various institutional and discursive settings

but through its substantive articulation in pursuit of understanding and

intervening against the social reproduction of power.

Conclusion

In this introduction to the present collection of essays, we began by sur-

veying the issues that animate debates about the definition of intersec-

tionality. We focused in particular on claims that intersectionality fosters

a simplistic notion of difference and a narrow rendering of its essential sub-

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ject. We then challenged these claims by considering the interplay of mul-

tiple social dynamics and power relations that motivates intersectional

S I G N S Summer 2013 y 807

studies and that has done so from the start. By focusing on structures of

power that constitute subjects in particular sociopolitical formations, we

locate intersectional dynamics in social space and time. This does not mean,

however, that subjects are simply structural positions. It does mean that

debates in intersectional studies will circulate less around categories and

identities and more around how those categories and identities ðand their

specific contentÞ are contingent on the particular dynamics under study or

of political interest.

We also called attention to the broad spectrum of intersectionality stud-

ies, noting that intersectional insights and frameworks are put into prac-

tice in a multitude of ways, from the top down to the bottom up, and in

highly contested, complex, and unpredictable fashions. We have an enor-

mous amount to learn about these processes and the impact they can have

on future movements and social justice initiatives, as well as on long-

standing theoretical questions.9 Our objective is not to offer pat resolu-

tions to all questions about intersectional approaches but to spark further

inquiry into the dynamics of intersectionality both as an academic frame

and as a practical intervention in a world characterized by vast inequalities.

As many of the contributors herein demonstrate, further elaboration of

intersectionality’s theoretical and practical content can be advanced through

collaborative efforts across and within disciplines, sectors, and national con-

texts. Bringing the centrifugal tendencies of scholars situated firmly within

their disciplines into conversation with scholars working more at the mar-

gins of their disciplines is a vitally important step in developing intersec-

tionality studies as a field and in furthering our understanding of some of

the most important issues facing contemporary society.

College of Law

DePaul University ðChoÞ School of Law

University of California, Los Angeles

and

Columbia University ðCrenshawÞ Department of Sociology, Department of Political Science, and

Institute for Policy Research

Northwestern University ðMcCallÞ 9 For example, it is noteworthy that the first large-scale examination of intersectional

antidiscrimination claims in the courts was just published in 2011 ðBest et al. 2011; see also Nielson, Nelson, and Lancaster 2010Þ.

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