Intersectionality: Early Years
(1970s)
Patricia Hill Collins & Sirma Bilge. 2016. Intersectionality (Key Concepts). Polity Press.
Chapter Three - On Not Getting the History of Intersectionality Straight
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A Black Feminist Statement,
Combahee River Collective (1977)
“…see as our particular task the development of
integrated analysis and practices based on the fact that
major systems of oppression are interlocking”
“we find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression
because in our lives they are most often experienced
simultaneously.”
• Extending Marx’ theory (the worker is racialized, gendered…)
• Expanding the feminist principle that the personal is political.
“In our consciousness-raising sessions, for example, we have
in many ways gone beyond white women's revelations
because we are dealing with the implications of race and
class as well as sex.”
• Examining the multi-layered texture of Black women’s lives
• Biological determinism is particularly dangerous
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One of the scholar-activist members of the Combahee River Collective, drawing attention to how
oppression and struggles against oppression are connected in her own work:
Audre Lorde (1934 – 1992)
• First coining of the term ‘identity politics’
• Embedded in a Marxist/socialist/materialist way of thinking
(>< current neoliberal understanding of identity politics)
• Interviews with original founding members
Professor of African-American Studies, Northwestern University
Angela Davis (1981) “integrative race, gender, and class studies”
Women, Race & Class
Gloria T. Hull, “The concept of the simultaneity of oppression is
Patricia Bell Scott & still the crux of a Black feminist understanding of
Barbara Smith (eds.) political reality and, I believe, one of the most
(1982) All the Women significant ideological contributions of Black
are White, All the feminist thought.” (Smith)
Blacks are Men. But
Some of Us are
Brave.
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Acacemic Consolidation
(1990s)
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Patricia Hill Collins
• Distinguished University Professor
of Sociology Emerita University of
Maryland
• 100th President of the American
Sociology Association (2009)
• 1990 Black Feminist Thought
▸ interlocking nature of oppression
Patricia Hill Collins (1986) Learning from the Outsider Within:
The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,’ Social
Problems, vol. 33, n. 6, pp. S14-S32.
Patricia Hill Collins (1990) Black Feminist Thought.
Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment.
Boston: UnwinHyman.
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1. Epistemological ground
Patricia Hill Collins (1986) – “Outsider within” :
tapping into the standpoint of Afro-American women to produce a distinctive
analysis of race, class, and gender.
~ (standpoint epistemology) Thinking from Black women’s lives
2. Contribution to social scientific knowledge
• “Bringing this group – as well as others who share an outsider within status vis-
à-vis sociology – into the center of analysis may reveal aspects of reality
obscured by more orthodox approaches.” (Hill Collins 1986: S15)
• Interlocking nature of oppression = one of the crucial contributions of Black
feminism to sociology
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Kimberlé Crenshaw
• Professor of Law at the Colombia Law School, NY
• Coins the term ‘intersectionality’ in 1989
• Part of the legal team of Anita Hill (1991)
“Without a lens focused on the interactive nature of
subordination we function with a partial view of what sexism,
racism, homophobia etc. really look like.” (Crenshaw 1989)
Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1989) “Demarginalizing the Intersection of
Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination
Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of
Chicago Legal Forum. 140: 139–167.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1991) “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality,
Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford
Law Review. 43 (6): 1241–1299.
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Anita Hill
Testifying about sexual
harassment during 1991
confirmation hearings for U.S.
Supreme Court nominee
Clarence Thomas
Crenshaw’s point of departure:
Anti-racist and feminist theories and practices relegate the identity of women of
color to a location that resists telling. Objective: to advance the telling of that
location by exploring race and gender dimensions of violence against women of
color. (Crenshaw, p. 179)
By doing so, develop a methodology that will disrupt the tendencies to see race and
gender as exclusive or separable.
Important:
- Legal context
- Violence against women (anti-racism: tendency to see violence against women of
color as just another manifestation of racism | feminism: tendency to insist that
violence against women equally effects all women)
- Analogy of the intersection
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Analogy of the intersection
“Consider an analogy to traffic in an
intersection, coming and going in all four
directions. Discrimination, like traffic
through an intersection, may flow in one
direction, and it may flow in another. If an
accident happens in an intersection, it can
be caused by cars traveling from any
number of directions and, sometimes,
from all of them. Similarly, if a Black
woman is harmed because she is in an
intersection, her injury could result from
sex discrimination or race discrimination.
. . . But it is not always easy to reconstruct
an accident: Sometimes the skid marks
and the injuries simply indicate that they
occurred simultaneously, frustrating
efforts to determine which driver caused
the harm.”
(Crenshaw 1989)
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Intersectionality
in the
Netherlands
Introduction (2001), by Maayke Botman and Nancy Jouwe
• “The multicultural debates”, Islamophobia
• The absence of a good framework to think about this
• BMR women’s movement (Dutch: zmv)
• Metaphor of the kaleidoscope
• Note terminology
Chapter 1 (2001) Gloria Wekker & Helma Lutz
• Imaginary of NL as egalitarian, equality
• Note terminology
• Case-study: diversity campaigns by the police – problematic assumptions in the campaign
• Women’s Studies
• “Ask the other question” method
Institutionalization
(2000s)
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Hill Collins
“The term intersectionality references the critical insight that race, class, gender,
sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually
exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that in turn shape
complex social inequalities.” (Hill Collins, 2015:2)
“Intersectionality faces a particular definitional dilemma – it participates in the very
power relations that it examines and, as a result, must pay special attention to the
conditions that make its knowledge claims comprehensible.” (Hill Collins, 2015: 3)
Important (Hill Collins 2015:5)
- field of study (‘intersectionality studies’)
- analytical strategy
- critical praxis
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Intersectionality as theorical approach
→ how to conceptualize that social forces of race, class, sex, and gender are co-constitutive?
>< not additive (not: “double burden”)
>< interaction effects: joint effect of two variables is significantly
greater (or less) than the sum of both variables
~ articulation (Hall)
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Intersectionality as methodological approach
→ “ask the other question”
“The way I try to understand the interconnection of all forms of
subordination is through a method I call ‘ask the other question.’ When I
see something that looks racist, I ask, ‘Where is the patriarchy in this?’
When I see something that looks sexist, I ask, ‘Where is the heterosexism
in this?’ When I see something that looks homophobic, I ask, ‘Where are
the class interests in this?’” (Matsuda, 1991:1189)
→ Nash (2008) lack of clearly defined methodology
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Critical Engagements
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Critical engagements of various kinds:
• Risk of leveling out these different power relations (making them analogous, loosing specificity…) =>
challenge of accounting for the specificity of each set of power relations
• How many categories of analysis should be included? Age, disability, religion, citizenship status, “etc”
• Risk of a bias towards accounting how power relations shape the individual (~ the oppression of the
individual, identity) and not the systemic nature of power inequalities
• ‘Sticking’ to Black women’s bodies and experiences (essentializing + homogenizing) (Nash 2008)
• Depoliticizing/ ‘Whitening’ (Sirma Bilge 2014, “Intersectionality Undone”)
• Reification of the categories (Jasbir Puar 2012, "I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess": Becoming-
Intersectional in Assemblage Theory”)
• Discussion with postcolonial/Third World feminisms (imperial structures, “single axis framework was
never dominant/unchallenged in our parts of the world”, Nikita Dhawan and María do Mar Castro
Varela, 2023)
• What got lost in the institutionalization? 21
Jennifer C. Nash
• Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and
Feminist Studies at Duke University
• PhD African American Studies from
Harvard University
• 2019: Black Feminism Reimagined.
After Intersectionality
“Intersectionality, the notion that subjectivity is constituted
by mutually reinforcing vectors of race, gender, class, and
sexuality has emerged as a primary tool to combat feminist
hierarchy, hegemony and exclusivity” (Nash 2008:2)
- Most important theoretical contribution of WS
- gold standard / buzz word (‘leading paradigm’)
Nash (2008, 2019)
Time to “engage with its contradictions, absences, and murkiness”:
(1) Lack of clearly defined methodology
(2) Black women as prototypical intersectional subject
(3) Ambiguity inherent to the definition of intersectionality
(4) Coherence between intersectionality and lived experiences