critical thinking questions about intersectionality

sociology for the public

Quicklit: 5 questions you need intersectionality to answer.

Inequality between groups is everywhere. Women are still paid less than men and the racial wealth gap is growing . Millions of Americans live on $2 a day . Beyond race/ethnicity, class, and gender, researchers are paying more attention to nationality, age, sexuality, and ability. Analyzing any one mechanism or pathway to inequality limits our ability to grasp the complexity people actually experience. Clearly, the problems Black men and women experience cannot be reduced to race and racism; neither can the issues of poor and middle class women be reduced to gender and sexism. Intersectionality is a framework for understanding and acting on different kinds of inequality and privilege for overlapping social groups simultaneously.

Here, I spotlight some recent empirical sociology that explicitly employs an intersectional lens, providing new insights on well-known social issues. (Feel free to add other insightful pieces in the comments.)

1. How does inequality manifest in the workplace?

Minorities who work in settings with largely majority group members can become tokens for the organizations they work in. These minorities tend to represent an organization’s commitment to diversity. Sociologists have expanded our understanding of tokenism to explain how the intersections of race, gender, and class inform the experience of tokens. Adia Harvey Wingfield’s (2009) uses the idea of partial tokenism to explain Black men’s experiences in professional occupations. They reap some benefits as males in male-dominated professions, but experience challenges as racial minorities.  For instance, heightened visibility results in increased social support for some of these men, while some are careful to maintain professional presentations so they will not be stereotyped as dangerous. In another case, Flores ( 2011 ) introduces the term “racialized tokens” to highlight the interactions and experiences of Latina teachers in a racial environments with high and low percentages of minorities in California. Compared with Latina teachers working in predominantly White environments, Flores found that Latina teachers in schools with a higher percentage of minority teachers feel less like tokens.  They are less segregated within the teachers’ lounges and feel more comfortable with expressing Latino culture whether in the form of familism, speaking Spanish, or wearing clothing with famous Latino icons.

2. How does social context influence our perceptions of race, class, and gender?

How we think, discuss, or see things when it comes race, class, and gender depends on our experiences.  Recently, Penner and Saperstein ( 2013 ) find that survey interviewers sometimes classify the same person in a different racial group over time, depending on their other social statuses. Women are more likely to be reported as Black if they have received welfare. Having been incarcerated makes men more likely to be perceived as Black, but a suburban residence leads interviewers to identify people as white. (The effects are small, but statistically significant.)

Place also matters for how people construct and understand race, class, and gender identities. Robinson’s ( 2014 ) work introduces region as an important social category.  Black Southerners understand and experience race, class, and gender through regional lens.  For instance, the Black southerners in her study view Southern Blackness as more authentic than Northern Blackness and expect racism from Whites, but attempt to deal with it in a calm and composed manner.

3. How does discrimination work?

Discrimination is not simply about race or gender or class. Harnois and Ifatunji ( 2011 ) report that racial discrimination against Blacks also has gender-specific components that affect Black women but not Black men and vice versa. That means it’s helpful to sue for intersectional discrimination in court, right? Not really. Best et al. ( 2011 ) show that when a person files a discrimination lawsuit on the basis of two or more ascriptive categories (e.g., race, gender, nationality), they are about half as likely to win as people filing for one dimension of discrimination. Still, Grollman ( 2014 ) shows that experiencing multiple forms of perceived discrimination results in young people reporting higher levels of depressive symptoms and worse self-rated mental health than those who report experiencing only one form of (or no) discrimination.

4. How do people experience their age?

Sociologists using intersectionality have recently focused on age. Slevin ( 2010 ) demonstrated the complexities in how older people manage ageism and give meaning to their bodies. She shows that race and sexuality intersect with gender to produce different image strategies. Women are more concerned about looking old than men are; lesbians and Black women are less concerned than straight White women. Meanwhile, Estrada and Hondagneu-Sotelo ( 2011 ) tell the story of poor, immigrant Latino children who work as street vendors. These youths, who do not experience a “normative” childhood, develop “intersectional dignities” to counter the stigmas of their status, using inversions of common stereotypes related to race/ethnicity, immigration, and gender.

5. How does sexuality relate to home, work, and family?

In the United States, we’ve witnessed increasing support for members of the LGBT community to have basic human rights. Intersectional approaches remind us that members of the LGBT community face pressures associated with their race, class, and gender identities. For instance, Kazyak’s ( 2012 ) research shows that rurality, gender, and sexuality converge to privilege masculine performances of sexuality over feminine ones for White gays and lesbians.  Participants talk about effeminate gay men not being compatible with rurality while more masculine lesbians are more likely to fit in.  For example, White lesbian women who present themselves more masculine do not suffer from the same distancing and boundaries people draw against effeminate gay men in their small town.  

Moore’s ( 2011 ) study on Black lesbian families details how Black culture, institutions, and history influenced their family formation patterns as well as their family lives. For example, Black lesbian mothers struggled with Black politics of respectability, and valued financial independence in their relationships; most of the couples have separate bank accounts and a joint account.  Logan ( 2010 ) found links between wage disparities among male escorts and sexual stereotypes. Black men receive premiums for sexually dominant services, but suffer severe wage penalties for being sexually submissive.

These are wonderful questions to bring up and look more closely at intersectionality. I am currently putting together a presentation for my workplace on using intersectionality to be more inclusive of our program, and am also working on an article regarding the matter. This is a wonderful and well written article and definitely helps bring up some important questions.

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This commentary touches on an essential aspect of our societal structure: the pervasive nature of inequality across various groups. It's vital to recognize that disparities exist not just based on gender or race, but also encompass factors like nationality, age and ability. The concept of intersectionality emerges as a powerful tool to understand these complexities, acknowledging that people belong to multiple overlapping social groups, each influencing their experiences. Understanding these intersections is crucial in addressing systemic injustices. If you need further insights, feel free to write my essay!

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• Recognizing Identity and Intersectionality in the Classroom

Some of our students experience racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and other oppressions every day. Sometimes, they experience more than one of those oppressions at the same time. In the classroom, a student might experience classism when an instructor requires an expensive textbook and does not provide any alternative options. A student who is a woman of color may experience racism and sexism when someone assumes they are not a STEM major. Students may also face barriers within the institution (like financial aid, advising, and other spaces) because of their identities.

A big part of creating a safe classroom and facilitating the learning process for diverse groups of students is tailoring your approach to who is in the room. This can be tricky, as students often have multiple identities that intersect in ways that can allow them different access to power and privilege at UConn. In this article, you’ll read about a helpful and impactful concept called intersectionality and some strategies for teaching students with multiple identities.

What Is Intersectionality?

Intersectionality is a concept Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined in her work in the early 1990s. As Crenshaw worked with the law, she found that Black women were often erased or excluded from legal progress. In her landmark essay, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Crenshaw describes how challenging it was for women of color to get help in domestic violence cases. She describes feminist groups as fighting primarily for white women and in white communities and anti-racism groups as fighting against the tendency for men of color to be criminalized. Between these two groups, no one was looking out for women of color.

Within Black feminism, intersectionality describes how oppression can multiply when a person embodies intersecting marginalized identities.

Crenshaw saw that because Black women existed at the intersection of racial oppression and gender oppression, their experience of both those kinds of oppression multiplied.

She describes this more below in this 1-minute, student-friendly video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViDtnfQ9FHc&t=3s

While the term intersectionality did not arise until the 1990s, the concept of intersecting identities and oppressions has existed in Black feminism and women of color feminisms for a long time. Black feminist scholar bell hooks preferred the term “ imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy .” hooks saw that intersectionality could sometimes be used to refer just to intersecting identities and not the associated power dynamics. With “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” the intersecting oppressions are hard to ignore.

Intersectionality is one way to understand the structures of our society. Race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability (to name a few) are all connected, so the discriminations and oppressions connected to each of these identity groups are also connected. For instance, Asian women have been much more likely to experience anti-Asian violence than Asian men . This is in part because they exist at the intersection of both racial discrimination directed at Asian people and gender discrimination that marks women as more vulnerable than men.

Intersectionality also helps us understand how our students experience power and privilege. Some students may not have access to privilege because of intersecting marginalized identities and knowing that can help us as instructors guide them to appropriate resources.

Identity and Intersectionality Begins with You

Are you wondering how to incorporate the concept of intersectionality into your teaching? Intersectionality can be a helpful addition to any teaching praxis, and the process begins with you.

Consider writing a journal entry or doing a mind map where you list and describe all the different aspects of your identity. Then, journal or think about the following questions: How do these pieces of you intersect in your life? What are some of the ways you have privilege (or not)? How do your identities and life experiences contribute to how you view people of other identities and life experiences?

The last question in that journal prompt encourages you to engage with your implicit biases . Identifying and reducing biases you might have toward your students will help you create a safe classroom space and facilitate learning for all your students.

Feminist pedagogy emphasizes that an instructor’s values and identities contribute to how they think about teaching and learning. By identifying your relationship to power and privilege and reducing implicit bias, you can shape your ideas about teaching and learning in ways that allow you to effectively teach diverse groups of students.

Identity and Intersectionality in the Classroom

Once you have acknowledged your identities and your relationship to power and privilege, you can start to think about how to bring intersectionality into your classroom .

Here are three activities you can incorporate into your classroom to get to know your students’ identities better.

Large lecture class: Exit cards are an excellent way to conduct a formative assessment for students. You can also use them to ask students to share about themselves. First, come up with an identity-based question to ask. You can keep it general like, “What’s one thing you’d like me to know about you?” Or you might choose something more specific. Then, you might give students an index card or generate a QR code that leads to a Google Form where students can answer the question.

Medium-sized class: Icebreakers are a great way to build community at any point in the semester and allow students to get to know each other as you get to know them. One fun icebreaker for a medium-sized class is bingo. Create a bingo table with some fun facts that might apply to your students (and you). You might include some UConn-specific bingo squares, like “Rubbed Jonathan’s nose” or “Had ice cream from the Dairy Bar.” This allows students to reveal things about themselves in a fun, low-stakes way that is not inherently attached to their oppressions.

Small seminar class: After you have already built trust and worked to build a safe/brave space , consider guiding your students through a privilege walk . With a privilege walk, all students start the activity in a single line. Then, as the instructor reads out statements, students step forward or backward depending on whether the statement pertains to them. It is a strikingly visual way to understand the different kinds of privilege your students have access to. You can find detailed instructions for a privilege walk through the Dolores Huerta Foundation.

How does this translate to bringing intersectionality into the classroom?

You may not be able to shield your students from racism and sexism. Still, as you get to know your students better, you can start to see how their overlapping identities impact their access to your course material and the necessary materials. You can direct them to specific resources on campus. You can adjust assignments or materials to be more accessible to your specific group of students. So, keep getting to know your students. Do icebreakers in the middle of the semester, not just at the beginning.

Moreover, learning more about anti-racist pedagogy and accessibility in the classroom will also give you more concrete strategies for how to be more inclusive in your teaching.

More on Intersectionality

“ Teaching at the Intersections ” by Learning for Justice

The Urgency of Intersectionality by Kimberlé Crenshaw (TED Talk)

Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality by The Institute of Art and Ideas

Intersectionality 101 by Learning for Justice

Bibliography

Crenshaw, Kimberlé W.  “From private violence to mass incarceration: thinking intersectionally about women, race, and social control.” UCLA Law Review  59, no.  6 (2012): 1420–1472.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review  43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1299.

Kwak, Jessie. “Promoting Equity in the Classroom with Intersectional Pedagogy.” Every Learner Everywhere. https://www.everylearnereverywhere.org/blog/promoting-equity-in-the-classroom-with-intersectional-pedagogy/ .

Liu, Helena. “All about bell hooks: A Visionary Feminist.” Disorient . https://disorient.co/bell-hooks/#relationship-to-intersectionality-theory .

King, Deborah K. “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society  14, no. 1 (1988): 42–72.

Quick Links

• Building Community and Brave Spaces as a Foundation for Equitable Classrooms
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• Supporting and Including International Students
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Intersectionality as critical social theory . patricia hill collins. durham, n.c.: duke university press, 2019 (isbn 9781478005421), review products.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2023

Patricia Hill Collins's long-awaited monograph on intersectionality does something remarkable. It issues an invitation to form a community: to engage with, and thereby transcend the “definitional dilemmas” (to use Collins's own term) in which the field of intersectionality studies has been mired for the past decade, and to reconstitute intersectionality as a “broad-based, collaborative intellectual and political project with many kinds of social actors” (5). For Collins, the “heterogeneity” of intersectionality “is not a liability, but rather may be one of its greatest strengths” (5): “I take the position that intersectionality is far broader than what most people, including many of its practitioners, imagine it to be. We have yet to fully understand the potential of the constellation of ideas that fall under the umbrella term intersectionality as a tool for social change” (2). If, in this community, reaching “consensus” about the meaning of intersectionality “is likely to remain elusive” (23), this book contributes to an approach that grounds intersectional critical social theory in concrete experiences and promotes practices of theorizing that can “accommodate heterogeneous points of view” (23). As such, Collins's “intent is neither to set the story of intersectionality straight . . . nor to defend intersectionality from commodification by academic poachers. Rather, [her] goal is to offer an alternative telling of intersectionality's story that is more closely aligned with the critical traditions of resistant knowledge projects” (124).

Origin stories, conceptual mappings, narratives of “coinage,” possessive investments, and academic citation practices have arguably functioned to distort and conceal as much as they have revealed about intersectionality. When narratives of the trajectory of a concept—or a constellation of ideas—take the form of “academic gatekeeping practices” (3), as Collins argues has happened with intersectionality, and citation substitutes for thoughtful—even passionate—engagement with ideas, arguments, and interpretations, the possibilities of forming this community of intersectional praxis recede far from view. Interestingly, it is precisely these gestures of ownership, gentrification, colonization, totalization, and inflation of originality that are encouraged and rewarded by the academic institutions in which we (some of us) produce knowledge about and through intersectionality.

As intersectionality has become the hallmark of twenty-first-century feminisms, reaching into the future from its “mid-twentieth-century history . . . [i]t has taken on a life of its own . . . Intersectionality has not been business as usual—it has proven itself to be scrappy and resilient under difficult conditions” (18). Tracing the genealogy, trajectory, and potentialities of intersectionality in the present conjuncture, the book is composed of four parts. In part I, Collins analyzes “three processes that people use to produce intersectionality itself,” which she terms, respectively, “metaphoric, heuristic, and paradigmatic thinking” (24). The spatial metaphor of intersectionality “provided new angles of vision” that enabled theorists to concretize intangible systems of oppression and link them to everyday lived experiences (28), while facilitating intersectionality's “travel” (31). As a heuristic (a technique for learning about or solving something), intersectionality enabled critique and problematization of the available categories of race/class/gender and functioned as a provisional, integrative concept that could generate new categories (34–35). Finally, intersectionality effected a paradigm shift in women's, gender, and sexuality studies and in disciplinary fields such as sociology, philosophy, law, psychology, and political science (42–43), away from “conceptualiz[ing] race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, nation, and ability as distinct, separate, and disconnected phenomena” and toward observing, analyzing, and theorizing their interconnections and mutual constitution (43). Here, Collins poses the astute question, “[i]s intersectionality itself emerging as a paradigm in its own right?” and if so, how may we turn “the analytical lens back onto intersectionality itself”? (43). Doing just that, Collins identifies six paradigmatic concepts characterizing intersectionality: relationality, power, social inequality, social context, complexity, and social justice (44–50).

In addition to framing the issues/debates around intersectionality, and foreshadowing the approach developed throughout the book, in part I Collins examines the other titular concept in Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory , namely, critical social theory, posing the following deceptively straightforward questions: what is it? What's critical about it? And: does intersectionality constitute a critical social theory? She arrives at a dual definition: first, critical theory embodies, practices, and enables critique—following intellectual traditions such as the Frankfurt school, British cultural studies, Francophone social theory, examined in part I, as well as critical race theory, feminist theory, and decolonial knowledge projects, discussed in part II. But also, second, critical theory is characterized by the quality of being “essential, needed, or critical for something to happen” (9). Whether intersectionality fulfills both criteria is, Collins claims, a question asked but left unanswered in the book (9). I would respectfully disagree: Collins's own parsing of “intersectionality as critical social theory in the making” (81) indicates an affirmative answer. Or, to put it another way (as I will go on to discuss), Collins opens a door through which we are invited to pass, joining a community of praxis that would restore to intersectionality its critical urgency. I found very interesting the discussion of reform versus transformation in relation to intersectionality (81–84). In a sense, this discussion foreshadows (the book was published in 2019) current debates around reform/abolition and the rise of abolitionist feminism in the aftermath of the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. I wonder how Collins would rewrite this section today, drawing precisely on the “perspective[s] of people who are subordinated within intersecting power relations” (84) to overcome the impasses and the hegemonic routes established through the quandaries raised in this section.

“The experience of doing intersectionality is praxis, and such praxis informs intersectional theorizing” (12). I sat, and will continue to sit, with this sentence for a very long time. In part II, Collins examines how intersectionality constitutes a “resistant knowledge project” and how it relates to various pathways of intellectual or epistemic resistance, or, as Lucius Outlaw has put it, “philosophizing born of struggle” (quoted on 88). She takes on the nearly impossible task of surveying (a) antiracism—critical race theory, Africana philosophy, racial formation theory, Black liberation theories, and Black feminism (89–98); (b) feminism—women's, gender, and sexuality studies; feminist theory; queer theory; trans theory; women of color feminisms; queer of color critique; and white/Western feminism (98–108); (c) decoloniality—postcolonial, Indigenous, and decolonial theories (108–16). Intersectionality is then presented as a distinct “resistant knowledge project,” which draws upon the aforementioned and “places the ideas of so many discourses . . . in dialogue”; Collins argues its relation to its “genealogy” is what makes intersectional “critical theorizing . . . especially complex” (120).

In part III, Collins asks, “what conception of social action as a way of knowing might intersectionality develop for its theoretical toolkit?” (13). Here, experience, community, and solidarity are explored as fundaments of an intersectional approach, which is not satisfied with merely describing the social world, but works to change it. As Collins explains, “experiences of oppression” are the “catalyst” to undertake the “tough job of theorizing . . . for people penalized by colonialism, patriarchy, racism, nationalism, and similar systems of power” (12). Putting intersectionality into conversation with the traditions of Black feminist thought and American pragmatism, Collins draws three lessons: first, “the substance of experience matters in relation to diagnosing social problems and in figuring out ways to address them” (186); second, “a more sophisticated construct of community might influence intersectionality's interpretive communities and how such communities might facilitate intersectionality's creative social action” (186); and third, “intersectionality's ideas come from people's self-reflexive experiences within the intersecting power relations of their social world” (188).

The invitation to a heterogeneous community is motivated by a desire for social justice. What might it mean for us to feel this burning desire , and to take up this invitation to collectively constitute intersectionality-as-community? This question can help us shift intersectionality studies from a set of safe, if interesting and relatively critical, ideas to an engaged—insurrectionary, even—resistant social praxis with the transformative goal of dismantling systems of oppression—for which this book makes a compelling case. And, indeed, we can answer this invitation only in and through collective praxis. Understanding intersectionality as critical social theory produced and contested in praxis in a heterogeneous community means that the struggle over meaning internal to the community—using reflexive “strategies of internal critical analysis” (120)—is seen as constitutive and not detrimental to the integrity of this community: “community is never a finished thing but is always in the making,” Collins tells us.

A more dynamic, future-oriented understanding of community creates space for imagining something different than the present and a worldview that critically analyzes existing social arrangements. In this sense, participating in building a community is simultaneously political (negotiating differences of power within a group), dynamic (negotiating practices that balance individual and collective goals), and aspirational. The challenge of sustaining this dynamic conception of community, however, lies in finding ways to negotiate contradictions. (185)

Moreover, Collins is clear that intersectional praxis, or synthesis of reflection and action, cannot be accomplished in “homogeneous theoretical communities” such as universities, invested with epistemic power (128), including the power to determine who counts as a knower: “academic communities of inquiry,” Collins reminds us, “draw upon taken-for-granted ideas about race, class, gender, sexuality, and similar categories to evaluate ideas in light of the people who raise them. These categories . . . align with prevailing hierarchies that privilege and derogate entire categories of people as capable of doing social theory” (130). Indeed, the struggles over the meaning(s) of intersectionality reveal these deep-seated structures of epistemic power, and the extent to which people (academics) privileged by them seek to undermine intersectionality's normative politics by detaching the concept of its formative relationship to identity politics and standpoint epistemology (136–42). Intersectionality turns the gaze on power, including that exercised by practitioners of intersectionality itself, as well as those who invoke it, thereby stepping into an incipient community of meaning-making and social transformation (whether they intended to or not). Thus, “to tell [intersectionality's] story without attending to power relations misreads its purpose and undermines its practice” (143).

Part IV examines three core principles (relationality, social justice, and ethics) in a “speculative and provisional way” in order to “sharpen intersectionality's critical edge” (226). By “[s]harpening intersectionality's critical edge,” Collins means “developing agreed-upon understandings, however provisional, of its core constructs and guiding principles” (15). She observes that “[u]pon its entry into the academy, intersectionality had a strong critical edge, one that reflected its ties to resistant knowledge projects and its commitment to decolonizing knowledges” (15). Yet, “uncritical” defenses or celebrations of intersectionality “as a finished critical social theory” have undermined its “critical potential” (120). Importantly, Collins reminds us that “[c]ritical theorizing means taking a position while recognizing the provisional nature of the positions we take. It means being self-reflexive not only about other people's behavior but also about one's own praxis” (17). In this section, Collins analyzes three modalities of relationality: addition (227–32), articulation (232–40), and co-formation (241–49) in order to arrive at “a provisional framework for describing relationality within intersectionality” (250). Controversially, perhaps, Collins argues that all three are “equally useful forms of relational thinking: one does not signify a better approach to intersectionality than the others” (250). So, although intersectionality is often presented as a critique of additive models of oppression and identity, in particular—models that intersectionality is taken to have supplanted—Collins counters this by rejecting “a linear narrative of progress from seemingly simple to ever-higher forms of achievement” (250). Finally, via negativa , Collins restores ethics and social justice as inherent and not merely contingent commitments of intersectionality by contrasting intersectionality to an ideology that despite being relational, obviously lacks these commitments: namely, eugenics (254–85). The conclusion she draws reiterates a central insight of the book: “the meaning of ideas is not intrinsic to the ideas themselves. Rather, it lies in how people use those ideas, not solely through intellectual prowess or political action, but also through how their ethical commitments inform their ideas and actions” (285).

Needless to say, as this brief review suggests, like Collins's earlier work—her germinal Black Feminist Thought : Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Collins Reference Collins 1990 ) or her previous book, co-authored with Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Collins and Bilge Reference Collins and Bilge 2016 ), now in its second edition and translated into multiple languages— Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory is a theoretical page-turner. Indeed, the book “raises more questions than it answers” (17); for precisely this reason, it is an ideal companion text for graduate seminars on intersectionality; for practitioners of intersectionality who wish to deepen their praxis; and for academic readers who could benefit from the commitments to self-reflexivity, intellectual heterogeneity, ethics, and social justice, which Collins aptly and deftly restores to intersectionality.

For me, Intersectionality as Critical Theory was a companion during the early years of the ongoing pandemic: I read and reread the book, as I tried to find the wherewithal to craft a review that would do it justice. This was especially challenging, as I recovered from multiple infections; dealt with the longer-term effects of COVID–19; tried to adjust to new (for me) conditions of social isolation and lockdown; and grieved the loss we have collectively experienced—and with which we have barely begun to grapple. Intersectional praxis is ever more critical if we are to collectively confront the intersecting crises of environmental catastrophe; ubiquitous structural, institutional, and interpersonal violence; human and more-than-human lives consigned to debility and death at differential velocities. These crises, wrought by interlocking systems of oppression—racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, bordered nations—and the unprecedented global, existential threat of which they are harbingers, coincide with a juncture or crossroads at which intersectionality finds itself: potentially a community of transformative praxis, if it can be wrested from the narrow, private interest of commodified knowledge-production within an increasingly obsolete, fortressed academy. For the companionship her book gave me, and for all the ways Patricia Hill Collins has awakened my critical consciousness and nourished my burning desire for social justice over the years through the page, I would like to extend to her my heartfelt gratitude.

Anna Carastathis is co-director of the Feminist Autonomous Centre for research, the author of Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons (University of Nebraska Press, 2016) and co-author of Reproducing Refugees: Photographìa of a Crisis (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020). She lives in Athens. Email: [email protected]

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• Volume 38, Special Issue 4
• Anna Carastathis (a1)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2023.27

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Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory

Patricia Hill Collins

1 University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 USA

Elaini Cristina Gonzaga da Silva

2 Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, São Paulo, SP 05014-90 Brazil

3 University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC 28223 USA

Inger Furseth

4 University of Oslo, 0851 Oslo, Norway

Kanisha D. Bond

5 Binghamton University – State University of New York, Binghamton, NY 13902 USA

Jone Martínez-Palacios

6 University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, Spain

Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (Duke University Press, 2019, henceforth IACST ) investigates how knowledge has been essential for resisting political domination. Whether visible or not, resistance to unjust power relations of race, class, and gender always exists, whether through faint memory or televised social protest. But what role does knowledge play in such resistance? Throughout my intellectual work, I return to this core question by examining how individuals and groups who are oppressed within systems of power create and pass on knowledge that fosters their survival, resilience, and resistance.

My intellectual journey to intersectionality informs this current book. In Black Feminist Thought, I analyzed how African-American women resisted the dehumanization of chattel slavery by producing a self-defined oppositional knowledge. Black women could see, feel, and experience how the treatment of their bodies as simultaneously raced and gendered shaped the contours of their subordination. This initial insight that both race and gender intersected reflected a methodology of bottom-up theorizing to address social problems. The terms race and gender signify the intersection of racism and sexism, with other terms added over time to flesh out contemporary understandings of intersectionality.

My focus on Black women’s knowledge is one case among many. The complexities of the multiple resistant knowledge projects that inform intersectionality lie in the parallel and intertwining narratives of Indigenous peoples, refugee and immigrant groups, women, LGBTQ teenagers, religious and ethnic minorities, and poor people. These and other similarly subordinated groups also find themselves facing social problems that can neither be understood, nor solved in isolation. In Race, Class, and Gender , Margaret Andersen and I drew upon these narratives to map the emergence of intersectionality as a field of inquiry. For over two decades, we selected articles that examined how race, class, and gender increasingly informed one another, thereby collecting empirical evidence for intersectionality (Andersen and Collins, 2020 ). We saw the field grow from its initial emphasis on race, class, and gender to encompass sexuality, nation, ethnicity, ability, age, religion, and similar categories of analysis. We also witnessed the increasing globalization of intersectionality as a field of critical inquiry and praxis. This painstaking work laid a foundation for the synthetic narrative of intersectionality’s ideas, scope, and practices that Sirma Bilge and I present in Intersectionality (Collins and Bilge, 2016 , 2nd edn 2020).

My intellectual journey in many ways parallels the emergence of the field. I came to intersectionality knowing that, while disciplinary specializations offer useful analyses of power relations, their conceptual blind spots can limit their theoretical insight. Privileged groups within disciplinary centers have long treated their partial perspectives on the social world as universal truths. Many such perspectives claim a critical stance that is more often assumed that realized. Such groups embrace a standard notion of criticism, namely, criticizing some idea, practice, discourse, or behavior. Yet when it comes to searching for critical analyses, subordinated groups require tools that go beyond simple critique. Critical analysis does not only criticize, but it also references ideas and practices that are essential, needed, or critical for something to happen.

This expansive notion of being critical informs knowledge creation in the crossroads spaces of a decolonizing and desegregating world. These meeting places enable those who enter them to retain the particularity of the insights and experiences that drive them there, while working through the meaning of what truly is universal with others who arrive from different paths. The term “intersectionality” references this big tent umbrella of an intellectual and political crossroads or meeting place for political and intellectual engagement across political, substantive, and methodological differences. Politically, intersectionality aspires for robust interpretive communities to house necessary dialogs among disparate ideas and people. Substantively, communities that incorporate people who theorize from the bottom up as well as from the top down can produce a wealth of new questions, interpretations, and knowledge that is far more concerned with changing the existing social order than in explaining it. Methodologically, this dialogical way of producing knowledge elevates the significance of intellectual and political coalitions and alliances within interpretive communities above the brilliance of the individual intellectual.

Building participatory, democratic interpretive communities across differences of experience, expertise, and resources has been the hallmark of intersectional projects. Dialogs among subordinated groups – who no longer see the path to knowledge creation as lying exclusively through old centers of race, class and gender – have sparked considerable intellectual energy and innovation. As individuals and groups who had been involved in an array of social justice projects came to see their commonalities across differences of race, gender, class, sexuality, age, nation, ability, and ethnicity, they increasingly claimed and used the term intersectionality to describe the space where their projects overlapped or “intersected.” Since the 1990s, the term has been taken up by an array of projects for social justice to describe ideas and actions that began decades earlier. The connections between the mid-twentieth century social justice movements that refused to accept prevailing social inequalities, and subsequent struggles to incorporate race/class/gender studies into the academy, highlight the recent visibility of the synergistic relationship between the trajectory of intersectionality as a resistant knowledge project and the changing social conditions that animate it (see, e.g., Collins and Bilge, 2020 , pp. 72–100). Just as the political struggles against political domination remain in process, so too does the emergence of intersectionality as a form of critical inquiry and praxis (Collins and Bilge, 2020 , pp. 37–71). And as it grows, intersectionality remains a work in progress in developing a language that enables similar conversations across differences in power. The idea of intersectionality as a broad, increasingly global, resistant knowledge project in its own right now provides a vibrant intellectual space for historically disparate projects that have had heterogenous responses to political domination.

As a form of critical inquiry and practice, intersectionality now stands at a crossroads. Virtually overnight, the term intersectionality burst into public awareness in social media and journalistic venues, a full two decades after the term underwent a similar swift uptake in the 1990s within academic venues. Many people now apply the term intersectionality quite loosely to a range of academic and activist projects. Yet labeling something as “intersectional” does not make it so. Many people who now use the term intersectionality seem unfamiliar with its history, core constructs, guiding principles, and possibilities. For example, the tendency to “mention” intersectionality in the title or in the first few pages of a research article often masks the absence of intersectional analyses in the remainder of the article. Through this mentioning strategy, an author can harvest the intellectual cachet now afforded the term intersectionality without directly engaging its political, substantive, or methodological substance. The prominence of mentioning highlights a parallel practice that characterizes intersectionality’s rapid uptake in academic venues. Many authors also mention intersectionality as already being a “theory,” often labeling it a feminist theory. If repeated often enough, this unsubstantiated claim has the potential of undermining both aspects of intersectionality’s critical possibilities, namely, as a form of critical analysis and as essential to resistant knowledge projects.

Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory takes up the core question of whether intersectionality is a critical social theory and, if not, what would it take to become one? Engaging this question presented epistemological and political challenges. My challenge was to invite, into the terrain of intersectionality’s theorizing, a heterogenous group of readers who had limited encounters with one another. How might I write to intellectual activists who were already contributing to the ever-growing knowledge base and practices of intersectionality, but who also rarely identified their work as “theoretical”? How might I craft the arguments in IACST for scholars who brought preconceived disciplinary definitions about what constituted “theory” to their reading of my text? Writing this book would have been far easier had I narrowed the scope of my audience. Some readers who engaged the book would find its ideas too abstract whereas others would think they already knew what it was.

Focusing on how these heterogenous social actors used intersectionality offered analytical tools for managing these definitional dilemmas (Collins, 2015 ). Avoiding fixed definitions of intersectionality enabled me to avoid elevating any one use over others. Drawing on the philosophical tenet from pragmatism that ideas gain meaning through use, I identified three characteristic uses of intersectionality – namely, as a metaphor, as a heuristic, and as a paradigm – that provide a conceptual foundation for intersectionality’s heterogeneous practices. Throughout the text, I frame intersectionality through the kaleidoscope of these cognitive tools, from the simplicity of a metaphor, through the utility of a heuristic device, to the structured nature of paradigmatic thinking that guides a field of study, to the possibility of an explanatory social theory that engages the issues that most concern scholars and practitioners of intersectionality. These cognitive tools invite readers into both my text and the field of intersectionality without privileging one entry point over another.

These multiple cognitive entry points into IACST parallel multiple entry points into intersectionality as a form of critical inquiry and praxis. Surveying the broad scope of how people used intersectionality solidified my choice of six core substantive constructs that in varying combinations would be recognizable to intersectionality’s practitioners, namely, relationality, power, social inequality, social context, complexity, and social justice. This focus on use also grounds my selection of four guiding premises of intersectional projects, namely, (1) race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, ability, age, and similar markers of power are interdependent and mutually construct one another; (2) intersecting power relations produce complex, interdependent social inequalities; (3) the social location of individuals and groups within intersecting power relations shapes their experiences within and perspectives on the social world; and (4) solving social problems within a given local, regional, national, or global context requires intersectional analyses. Together these cognitive entry points, core constructs and guiding premises provide a cognitive architecture for investigating intersectionality as critical social theory and the form that critical social theorizing might take.

These core substantive concepts anchor many of the arguments throughout the book. For example, because the construct of power has been a fundamental construct for intersectionality, it required a sophisticated treatment both as a topic of discussion and as a factor in how I wrote the book. Making sure that I focused on intersecting power relations, not just as a topical theme in the volume, but also on the political dimensions of intersectionality’s methodological practices, was essential. I aspired to make intersecting power relations as central to the construction of my text as they are for intersectionality’s critical inquiry and praxis. How could I examine the centrality of participatory democracy for intersectionality, e.g., how intersecting power relations shaped its construction and reception, without attending to questions of equitable, democratic participation within intersectionality’s internal practices?

This interpretive framework that organizes Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory offers an elastic structure for engaging the contributions in this Critical Exchange. As I initially read each contribution, I could see how different they are from one another in substance, tone, intent, and literary conventions. The following contributions represent scholars with extensive experience with or living in varying national contexts (Brazil, Turkey, Norway, the US, and Spain), academic disciplines (political science, policy studies, gender studies, sociology), career stages, institutional locations, and racial/ethnic/religious backgrounds. This heterogeneity shapes how each author entered the text and informs her choice of topic, questions, and analyses. How could this one symposium hope to achieve a uniform voice from such disparate contributions?

Intersectionality requires a new way of reading that focuses less on the differences between these contributions, either-or frameworks that produce mono-categorical thinking of race or gender, and more on intersectionality’s both/and relational thinking. Standard ways of reading that seek to mine intersectionality for what a reader can take from it give way to dialogical engagement that respects what each has to offer to the project of intersectionality. Such thinking searches for points of connection between each contribution and intersectionality as a field as well as connections among the contributions themselves. Reading these contributions as being in dialog with one another through the lens of intersectionality’s key concepts as well as its paradigmatic premises, provides a different interpretive framework. Just as the ideas of intersectionality are interconnected and find new meaning in intersectionality’s metaphoric meeting place as an exchange of ideas, so too do the distinctive views of people who are sufficiently grounded within intersectionality contribute to its critical ethos by offering critical analyses of their own.

Thus, Gonzaga da Silva kicks off the Critical Exchange by attempting to trace the evolution of my conceptualization of intersectionality over time. Ergun writes from within the field of translation studies and reflects on the role of translation in enabling both intersectional analyses and the formation of transnational solidarities. Furseth provides us with a persuasive argument about the mutually illuminating relationship that can develop between the sociology of religion and the scholarship in intersectionality. In her contribution, Bond then invites us to think about political violence both as a tool and a response to intersecting axes of oppression. Last but not least, Martínez-Palacios takes up a double challenge: to propose that intersectional thought can support both social agents in a practice of therapeutical self-socio-analysis that can enable them to build literacy regarding their own complex social positionalities; and can help public policy makers committed to social justice and the sustainability of human flourishing.

Intersectionality, then and now

I finish writing this text at a moment in history when there is an ongoing worldwide spread of a new disease called COVID-19. From December 2019, when the outbreak in Wuhan, China started, to early April 2020, when I hand this piece in, confirmed cases surge past 1.8 million, and deaths around the globe are above 115,000. At least, 185 countries now face the challenge of responding to the virus. It is nothing short of a global health problem. The rapid escalation and global spread of the disease, followed by mostly assertive governmental action, taken at face value, may give the idea that the coronavirus outbreak is a real threat to everyone equally on the planet, but one may wonder if that is indeed the case.

In Brazil, the country where I wrote this piece, for instance, the alarm was raised in early February, when thirty-four Brazilians who had been living in Wuhan were repatriated and arrived in Brasilia. It took two more weeks before a first case of a Brazilian infected with COVID-19 was confirmed: a 61-year-old businessman who lives in São Paulo and spent two weeks in Italy on business. Notwithstanding, the first ones to die afterwards never left the country: a lower class 62-year-old man in São Paulo, and a 63-year-old woman in Rio de Janeiro, who worked as a domestic worker for an employer who had just visited Italy. Differently from Brazil (where data only includes age, health condition, and origin of patients), early data on coronavirus deaths in Louisiana, Illinois, Michigan, and New Jersey, in the United States, allowed some conclusions regarding the racial profile of victims: African Americans account for 30–32% of the local population, but make up for around 70% of coronavirus deaths. The disproportionately high rate seems to indicate that inequality is a co-morbidity: the poorer, marginalized populations that lack access to health care, endure unstable and low-paying jobs, affecting living and nutrition conditions, make them disproportionally exposed to risk. Anyone may die from COVID-19, but some die more than others, because of existing social conditions.

Something similar happens in Brazil when we look into violence against women, and femicide, in particular. Murders of women in the country per year increased by 6.4% from 2006 to 2016, but when such data are detailed along racial lines, the picture is rather different: the homicide rate per year for non-Black women decreased by 8%, while that of Black women increased by 15%.

Women are murdered, but some women are at a higher risk, because public policies targeting violence against women do not take into account that the protection of Black and non-Black women might require different measures for each group. Violence, or the lack thereof, does not fall equally on everyone – and one can only reach this conclusion by adopting an intersectional approach. It goes without saying that the burden of explaining what intersectionality is in 2020, when the term is widely accepted by practitioners, activists, and scholars alike, is quite different from what it was thirty years ago, when the term was given a particular articulation by Patricia Hill Collins, in her effort to give Black women voice.

What might not be so evident – and this will be the key claim in this short contribution – is that although intersectionality is a constant in her scholarship, the definition thereof underwent change over time. In fact, it is possible to identify three phases: the first one includes her early publications, as Learning from the Outsider Within. The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought [hereinafter, Outsider Within ] (1986) and Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment [hereinafter, Black Feminist Thought ] ([1990] 2000), where she describes and names relevant aspects of Black women’s lives; the second phase encompasses, for instance, Intersectionality's Definitional Dilemmas [hereinafter, Definitional Dilemmas] (2015) and Intersectionality – Key Concepts [hereinafter, Key Concepts ] (2016), with Sirma Bilge, published after the widespread adoption of the term and introducing Hill-Collins’s effort to chart the field; the third phase centers on her latest book, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory [hereinafter, Intersectionality ] ( 2019a ), where Collins not only interprets what the practical knowledge of those at the margins is, but also points to what it might be, and how to achieve it. In this contribution, I will trace the changes in Collins’s intellectual development of her conceptual apparatus.

Naturally, the concern with complex inequality is not exclusive to this scholarship. In Brazil, for instance, Heleith Saffioti published A mulher na sociedade de classes in 1969, including references to different roles played by white and black women in the reproduction of capitalism in Brazil. But while Saffioti’s ( 2013 ) objective was to understand how differently racialized women were impacted by capitalism, a central preoccupation of Collins’ scholarship, since Outsider Within ( 1986 ), is with how the intersection of power and knowledge is connected to the oppression of the many by the few. That means Collins’ work is firmly anchored in a sociology of knowledge that speaks against the so-called scientific neutrality and objectivity of those who claim authority to speak for the other. It also underscores the importance of marginalized forms of knowledge that challenges mainstream ideological framing of people in groups.

This is a concern shared by other scholars who were publishing about feminist epistemology in the United States: Nancy Hartsock and her book Money, Sex, and Power ( 1983 ), Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka's collective work Discovering Reality ( 1983 ), Sandra Harding’s The Science Question in Feminism ( 1986 ), and Donna Haraway Situated Knowledges ( 1988 ), to name a few. Such scholars engaged in an effort to redefine the making of science, foregrounding the existence of women’s standpoint or situated knowledge, and showing how objectivity was supposed to be understood in dialog with the Western canon of philosophy and the sociology of knowledge. More than claiming the existence of a Black women’s standpoint, though, Collins was invested in the production of “facts and theories about the Black female experience that [could] clarify a Black woman's standpoint for Black women” ( 1986 , p. 16) – and that is a distinctive trait that will mark her work, not only Outsider Within , but also Black Feminist Thought a few years later.

The choice was not random, as the author clarifies in the first pages of Black Feminist Thought :

Oppressed groups are frequently placed in the situation of being listened to only if we frame our ideas in the language that is familiar to and comfortable for a dominant group. This requirement often changes the meaning of our ideas and works to elevate the ideas of dominant groups. In this volume, by placing African-American women’s ideas in the center of analysis, I not only privilege those ideas but encourage White feminists, African-American men, and all others to investigate the similarities and differences among their own standpoints and those of African-American women’ (2000, p. vii).

Collins, thus, reclaims Black women’s position as speakers.

Interestingly, that is a concern that will be present also in Black female scholars outside the US. In Brazil, in Racismo e Sexismo na Cultura Brasileira ( 1984 ) Lélia Gonzales took dissent to another level and refused to use formal Portuguese, because she understood Portuguese had been replaced by what she called Pretuguês (‘Blackiguese’, in free translation), a different language that should be used and respected. Later, Sueli Carneiro ( 2005 ) would recast the issue of how the production of knowledge and the transmission thereof could be used to subjugate populations at the margins and claim that the construction of the Other as a No-Being that serves as foundation for the Being is actually an “epistemicide.”

In contrast to these scholars, Collins’ approach goes beyond the identification of oppressive entanglements and offers us a way of transcending group-specific politics based upon a Black feminist epistemology – and here lies the relevance of intersectionality: as Black women sit at the intersection of two powerful systems of oppression, race, and gender, understanding this position opens up the possibility of identifying and understanding other cross-cutting oppressions, enabling a move to transform reality.

In Outsider Within , Collins did not use the term “intersectionality.” Instead, she speaks of the “interlocking nature of oppression” ( 1986 , p. 19). The author does not claim the novelty of the observation – to the contrary, she affirms that “the interlocking nature of race, gender, and class oppression is a second recurring theme in the works of Black feminists … While different socio-historical periods may have increased the saliency of one or another type of oppression, the thesis of the linked nature of oppression has long pervaded Black feminist thought” ( 1986 , p. 19).

“Intersectionality” will be found in Black Feminist Thought a few years later, which reads: “Subsequent work aimed to describe different dimensions of this interconnected relationship with terms such as intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991 ) and matrix of domination ” (p. 18). Although some readers mistakenly point to Collins as the creator “intersectionality,” the scholar herself makes an express reference to Kimberlé Crenshaw, a Black legal scholar in the United States who was also doing some research on the intersection between race and sex. The second edition of the book references Mapping the Margins : Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color ( 1991 ) , but this paper was published after the first edition. So, it is reasonable to conclude that Collins had contact with Crenshaw’s previous work Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics ( 1989 ).

In both works, Crenshaw applied intersectionality more as an analytical tool to show how Black women were in a disadvantaged position when it came to how courts framed and interpreted the stories of plaintiffs. Both in Outsider Within and Black Feminist Thought , intersectionality will be also an analytical approach, but Collins enriches our understanding thereof. In the former, the “interlocking nature of oppression” indicates a need to change the scope of previous investigations and investigate how systems of oppression are interlinked (Collins, 1986 , p. 21). In the latter, the term is to be read in conjunction with “matrix of domination,” which would explain how intersecting oppressions (both particular and structural, disciplinary, hegemonic) are actually organized (2000, p. 18).

Further in the book, Collins explains how different aspects of Black women’s lives operate as sites of intersectionality. As she argues, the investigation of Black women’s experiences of pornography, prostitution, and rape, for instance, allow us to understand how powerful groups act to regulate Black women’s bodies and how “connections between sexual ideologies developed to justify actual social practices and the use of force to maintain the social order” ( 2000 , p. 134). At the time, Collins was taking seriously the task to reclaim Black women’s voice and their power to tell their own story. In the 2010s, after the term was popularized and was widely incorporated not only in scholarship but also by social movements all over the world, Collins took upon herself the task of reviewing and exploring the definitions of intersectionality at work in these contexts – something evident both in Definitional Dilemmas ( 2015 ) and Key concepts (2016).

In Definitional Dilemmas, Collins reviews intersectionality as a field of study, as an analytical strategy, and as critical praxis. One year later, Collins and Bilge’s book Key Concepts ( 2016 ) will build on the previous analysis: intersectionality as an analytic tool, and as critical praxis and inquiry. Collins remarks that, while it is possible to note the coexistence of a general consensus about the contours of the idea of intersectionality, there is also a massive heterogeneity of definitions – with positive effects. For instance, the appropriation of the term by social movements allowed some aspects to blossom and others to fade away ( 2015 , p. 7). Moreover, the widespread adoption of intersectionality by both scholars and practitioners alike revealed a connection between knowledge and remedying social inequalities in a fashion that made sense for their social justice project – what Collins understands as critical praxis and inquiry. Notably, the expression “matrix of domination” that previously captured how intersecting oppressions are organized ( 2000 , p. 18) is nowhere to be found. Instead, Collins and Bilge now combine intersectionality with “domains of power,” in what resembles a downgrading of the concept in her theory: “power relations are to be analyzed both via their intersections, for example, of racism and sexism, as well as across domains of power, namely structural, disciplinary, cultural, and interpersonal. The framework of domains of power provides a heuristic device or thinking tool for examining power relations” ( 2016 , p. 29)

Despite admitting the risk that the very popularity of intersectionality causes it to lose meaning ( 2015 , p. 2), by then the scholar seemed to think it was too premature to define theoretical boundaries for the concept ( 2015 , p. 11) – a position that clearly changed by the time her latest book was published. There she proposes that “[i]f intersectionality does not clarify its own critical theoretical project, others will do so for it” ( 2019a , p. 3). In Intersectionality , the primary concern about the interconnection between knowledge and power, as well as the interlocking relation between different systems of oppression is still there, but Collins transcends previous categories that marked her work to put forward the contours of a wider theoretical model and develop it as a critical social theory (Collins, 2019a ). The expression “matrix of domination” will be used only once in an example that involves a comparison of the United States and Brazil. It is most definitely no longer a key concept. In fact, Collins expressly states that “I analyze power relations not by emphasizing domination, but rather by developing the concept of intellectual resistance and exploring intersectionality’s connections to it” ( 2019a , p. 10).

Instead of focusing on how oppression works and is organized, Collins opted for a different kind of theory, one that also challenges existing social orders and opens possibilities for change. In her words, “critical social theories aim to reform what is in the hope of transforming it into something else” ( 2019a , p. 5).

Interestingly, the release of Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory ( 2019a ) in the United States was almost concomitant to the release of the translation of Black Feminist Thought into Portuguese in Brazil. The Brazilian edition includes a preface to the volume that affords readers a glimpse of such change: differently from the prefaces to the first two editions, where the goal of examining how knowledge can foster African-American women’s empowerment is a main driver (that would be expected), in the preface to the Brazilian translation Collins calls upon readers to reflect upon how their own background influences their reading of the book, how being in different positions brings about particular views on racism, sexism, class exploitation, heterosexism, nationalism, and discrimination against people with different abilities and of different ages, ethnicities, and religions. Once one is able to tell their own story, they will be prepared to engage in authentic and well-founded dialogs with others.

In Brazil, the publication of Collins’s work is not only an academic invitation to produce sound science, but also the result of a political effort by intellectual activists (Black or not) engaged with a social justice project. Notably, Collins’ relevance includes her own history as a Black woman confronted with oppression, who became one of the globally most well-known intellectuals.

The journey of intersectionality in Collins’s thought – from the moment she first described intersecting systems of oppressions as intersectionality up to this latest project of critical social theory – has been long. The keyword is still intersectionality, but the content thereof has expanded to encompass new trajectories and horizons.

Transnationalizing intersectionality in and through translation

In Black Feminist Thought , Patricia Hill Collins highlights the urgency of transcending national borders to engage in conversations and collaborations that will reveal and forge liberatory transnational connectivities among differently situated women of African descent ( 2000 ). This call to transnationalize black feminist thought and action is an extension of her recognition of “a transnational matrix of domination” that is composed of multiple – simultaneously operating, mutually constituting, fluidly intersecting, and unpredictably assembling – local and global structures of domination that shape black women’s experiences in different yet interconnected ways (p. 231). Such a politically and ethically ambitious project of accomplishing intersectional and transnational justice for all black women, along with other historically oppressed groups, requires a relational ethics of “mutual stretching,” dialogic reciprocity, and polyphonic togetherness (Lorde, 1988 , p. 19). That is, transnational justice for all marginalized individuals and communities necessitates that we not only engage in difficult dialogs across differences and hierarchies but also democratize and decolonize our cross-border relationalities so that the dissonant stories, theories, visions, and knowledges we (co)produce serve to disrupt the assimilative mono-logic of neoliberal globalization. We cannot achieve such intervention, democratization, and decolonization without attending to the politics and ethics of translation (selection, production, validation, distribution, reception, and metabolization of translation) as a fundamental question of diversity, intersectionality, and transnationality.

As a facilitator of cross-border mobility, encounter, and exchange, translation can expand the geopolitical boundaries of intersectionality as a feminist analytic that, on the one hand, helps expose the locally and globally situated co-operations of multiple systems of domination and, on the other hand, envisions justice as a coalition-based and polyphonic transnational struggle. In fact, when simultaneously configured as a politically charged and invested epistemic practice of border crossing, localization, and globalization, translation appears indispensable to our imaginaries, theories, and actions of “justice for all,” which need to be guided by intersectional premises to live up to its promise of “for all” (Hill Collins, 2019b , pp. 45–50). Given that the world we live and dream in is made up of multiple interconnected localities – each with its own languages, ideological worldviews, intersectional assemblages, discursive regimes, and interpretive communities – and that these interdependent localities are infused with various global forces like capitalism and imperialism, our justice-oriented theories and actions have to correspondingly cross linguistic borders in their intersectionally informed pursuits. In other words, our dreams of heterogeneous, just, caring, and peaceful forms of planetary coexistence can come true only in and through translation, when we “cross without taking over” (Lugones, 2010 , p. 755). Translation, hence, promises to increase the critical and radical potential of intersectionality by transforming into it a project of world making.

Indeed, bringing the translation question to the center of feminist debates on intersectionality helps spatialize and transnationalize intersectionality, which, Vrushali Patil persuasively argues, has remained a largely domestic and US-centric theory, “leaving unexamined cross-border dynamics, processes beyond the local level of analysis that nevertheless are integral to the unfolding of local processes” ( 2013 , p. 853). In their collaborative piece exploring the political productivity of intersectional and transnational feminisms when put in dialog, Sylvanna Falcón and Jennifer Nash similarly critique “intersectionality’s unmarked preoccupation with U.S. locations” ( 2015 , p. 3). Three important interrelated critiques are raised here: (1) In comparison to gender, race, class, and sexuality, nationality, and geopolitics – or politics of location, if you will – are typically not incorporated as determining axes of power, identity, and knowledge in intersectional analyses, which have a tendency to overlook the questions of colonialism and imperialism. (2) Intersectionality’s analytical focus has largely been limited to the localities of the Global North, particularly the US, whose national configuration is too often taken for granted, rather than treated as a strategically orchestrated geohistorical accomplishment – hence, Patil’s term “domestic intersectionality” ( 2013 , p. 852). (3) Finally, these domestically focused intersectional analyses have ignored the transnational nature of locally or nationally conceived and experienced spaces, which are in fact complex contact zones permeated by numerous – violent and subversive – forms of border crossing.

We can respond to these calls to spatialize, de-westernize, and transnationalize intersectionality by factoring in translation as a bridge between intersectionality and transnationality, two predominant analytics of contemporary feminist thought and action that are often deemed mutually exclusive, if not competing or even oppositional, in the institutional context of the corporate US university (Falcón and Nash, 2015 , p. 4). In other words, translation can help reveal that intersectional feminism and transnational feminism not only are politically complementary theoretical and practical platforms of justice, but also need each other to envision and generate more effective coalitional strategies of social change and solidarity building, particularly for “women of color” – a vast and vague category that comprises differently interpellated and situated groups of US-based and non-US-based women of color, which Andrea Smith neatly explains in her article, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy” ( 2006 ). Because women of color experience, signify, and enunciate life in and through different languages, vernaculars, and interpretive conventions, we need translation to be able to engage in cross-border dialogs and collaborations so that our partial truths can inform and grow with one another, creating more thorough and truthful knowledges and visions of justice and liberation.

Translating the works of women of color intellectuals and expanding the reach of their theories and stories of dissent and protest beyond their immediate linguistic borders not only helps us validate and celebrate the epistemic authority of women of color – hence geopolitically expanding the mission of intersectionality – but also increases coalitional affiliations and potential solidarities among US-based and non-US-based women of color, who are often separated from, if not pitted against, each other by the neoliberal economy of difference. One revealing example that illustrates the ways in which translation can increase both the explanatory power and geo/politically transformative potential of intersectionality is Octavia Butler’s 1979 classic science-fiction novel, Kindred and my Turkish translation of it, Yakın [“Close/Akin/Intimate/Significant Other”], published in Turkey in 2019.

Kindred tells the story of an African-American woman, Dana, who finds herself travel back and forth in time between 1976’s California, where she lives with her white husband, and a slave plantation in 1815’s Maryland, where she finds her ancestors among both slaveholders and enslaved people. In fact, it is one of those ancestors that involuntarily calls Dana back in time so that she can save his life every time he finds himself in a life-threatening situation: the plantation owner’s son, Rufus, who grows up to be the plantation owner himself. He rapes Alice – Dana’s enslaved great grandmother – and in doing so, becomes Dana’s great grandfather. Kindred is woven around Dana’s navigation of slavery as a black woman and her dilemmas of saving Rufus for the sake of her family’s continuation, trying to survive the brutal reality of slavery, staying in solidarity with the other slaves, yet becoming complicit in the very system that is designed to dehumanize them all. Kindred is an intersectional story of racial, economic, and gendered oppression and survival, but it is not just Dana’s story. It is also America’s story. And it is Octavia Butler’s genius to merge these two stories in a plain yet arresting narrative and situate the unsuspecting science-fiction reader in the plot as one of the shareholders of that great American pain. What happens to this very American story when it leaves the locality of the US and travels to another place where that unfinished past of patriarchal slavery does not exist?

This is a compelling, yet slightly misleading question because while it seems like an exclusively local story, Kindred in fact depicts the US as a transnational space by not only focusing on the trans-Atlantic slave trade (and its continuing heritage across the globe), but also highlighting the interconnected nature of the various manifestations of genocidal logic citing, for instance, the indigenous genocide in the US, the South African apartheid, the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, and the Lebanese civil war – hence, relationally reconceiving the national configuration of the US as a transnational doing. As the protagonist Dana brings these transnational connections into her growing critique of the intersectional operations of race, gender, and class violence in the locality of the US, she also invites the reader to question the legitimacy of the US (and their allegiance to it) and reimagine systematic oppression as well as resistance and liberation beyond the oppositional parameters of the nation state. Hence, by treating racism, capitalism, patriarchy, nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism as locally and globally intersecting systems of violence, Butler’s novel highlights the significance of coalitional and intersectional resistance across borders. In that regard, we might consider Kindred as giving an account of a black feminist standpoint that is simultaneously intersectional and transnational. My Turkish translation of Kindred has sought to expand that intersectional and transnational web of relations that the novel claims by facilitating the book’s travel to Turkey, whose distinctive geohistorical landscape has witnessed its own locally and transnationally procured and contested violent intersectionalities.

In order to help facilitate such geo/politically connectionist readings, I introduced Kindred to the Turkish-speaking reader by adding a brief preface to it where, by citing Audre Lorde ( 1984 , p. 43), I first portrayed translation as a political project of sharing and expanding “the feminist word” across borders: “And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we do not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own.” I, then, added:

The second reason why I translated Kindred is the gratitude I feel for black American feminists whose theories, stories, poems, activisms, and friendships have always stimulated, nurtured, and transformed me in my own feminist journey and given me hope and strength to resist. So, the translation you are reading aims to ensure that the words of black feminists live on and blend in our own words, despite the world order that operates against them. Translating the works of women writers, especially women of color writers, and enabling their encounters with different readerships across languages is not only an intervention into the male-dominant, colonial publication world, but also an attempt of facilitating cross-border feminist exchange and solidarity … As you read this translation, I hope you too get inspired by its story, which is both distant and close, and find the courage to confront the historical truths that you have been afraid to confront by going on your own time-travel (2019, pp. 8–9).

I hoped witnessing Kindred ’s confrontation with the intersectionally and transnationally interwoven violent history of the US would similarly motivate readers in Turkey to intervene in their own intersectionally and transnationally assembled collective memories that remember, misremember, or forget several (open) wounds of racism and fascism, be it the officially denied Armenian genocide, ongoing massacres against Kurds, gross rates of femicide, or racist attacks against Syrian refugees and immigrants from Africa. As I further explained in the preface,

Forgetting the past entirely or distorting history in service of nationalist, racist, and patriarchal discourses allows us to habitually transmit the unfounded hatred (and fear) for ‘the other’ from generation to generation, makes it harder to interrogate those calcified scripts, and prevents actions of compromise, reconciliation, and solidarity between communities that are defined as irreconcilably different from each other. Kindred ’s attempt to intervene in the US’ collective memory is precious precisely because it invites us not only to remember, but also to question what we remember and search for what we have forgotten. No matter which geography we are a product of, we can only free ourselves from the hatred and fears that have been encoded in our minds through distorted historical discourses by accepting that invitation (2019, p. 9).

In short, just as the US needs to recover and recover from the intertwined legacies of genocide, slavery, and heteropatriarchy, Turkey also needs to engage in such acts of recovery in the face of its own legacies of genocide and ongoing mass violence against differently marginalized populations. I hoped that feeling the collective pain of African Americans in Kindred , no matter how mediated it is in translation, could cause an affective resonance among Turkey’s readers in regard to how they feel about their own Others and encourage them to forge new affective solidarities for justice, both locally and transnationally. I concluded the preface explaining this coalitional potential of translation:

Readers in Turkey may be mistaken thinking that this American novel with its focus on slavery has no relevance for the realities of their geography. But the story is in fact very close to us, even inside of us. No matter how much cultural, historical, or linguistic difference its details entail, the novel’s central concern is also our concern. We do not have to read Kindred or look to distant geographies to see the systematic discrimination, oppression, and violence that people who we construct in opposition to ourselves are subjected to just because they are different from “us” or because they refuse to become “us.” However, it will be beneficial to read Kindred to feel deep inside the injustices, longings, and hurts that the displaced “other” experiences or the resistances that they engage in to survive and live freely.

This brief analysis of Yakın suggests that translation can function as a critical mode of cross-border engagement that helps lay the epistemic and affective groundwork for intersectional analyses of oppression and transnational feminist solidarities. Hence, the analysis, by reimagining “justice for all” as an intersectional, transnational, and translational contact zone – or “borderlands” in Gloria Anzaldúa’s terms – seeks to motivate and mobilize us to translate the words and works of marginalized truth seekers and weavers, like women of color, more (and across all geographic directions, not just “from the west to the rest”) and touch one another more gently, generously, and responsibly in translation for cross-border solidarity, planetary justice, and polyphonic peace. This is an urgent task because the future of an intersectionally and transnationally just world lies, as Patricia Hill Collins argues, in “stimulating dialogue across the very real limitations of national boundaries, to develop new ways of relating to one another” ( 2000 , p. 232). And that mutual stretching demands translation.

Intersectionality and the sociology of religion

Intersectionality is finding its way into new fields of research. While it has traditionally been used in studies of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, it has largely ignored religion. With a few exceptions, intersectionality has been relatively absent in sociological analyses of religion, as well. Here, I would like to explore how intersectionality might influence debates in the sociology of religion and conversely, how the sociology of religion might influence intersectionality. Before I propose suggestions for a closer link between intersectionality and the sociology of religion, I will provide a brief outline of how religion is treated in the work of Patricia Hill Collins. The aim is to highlight different areas where intersectionality and the sociology of religion might beneficially learn from each other.

Collins has not developed a systematic view of religion, but religion appears as a topic in her work. Early on, her approach of viewing domination as a matrix led her to include religion as one form of oppression. In both Black Feminist Thought ( 2009 /2000) and Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (2019), Collins talks about religion in general, and discusses Christianity in more detail, especially the Black Christian churches in the U.S. As I will attempt to show, she tends to move between using feminism’s binary approach to religion and overcoming this binary.

Feminist theorists, including Collins, are deeply critical of several forms of binaries that are gendered. Nevertheless, feminist theory often operates with dichotomous thinking when discussing religious women. Its binary approach frames religious women as either subordinated or submissive to patriarchy or empowered if they subvert the existing tradition and offer resistance. Despite Collins’ criticism of binary categorizations, she often relies on feminism’s dichotomous approach to religion. She emphases one side of the binary, the oppressive elements in Christian teachings on women. In Black Feminist Thought she describes how religion was used to justify slavery and construct homosexuality as deviance. Likewise, she outlines how U.S. Black women often had subordinate roles in Black civil society organizations, including the Black churches, and that these organizations largely ignored Black women’s issues ( 2000 /2009, pp. 10, 12, 95, 140, 150). Collins also relies on the other side of the feminist binary by focusing on how U.S. Black women changed religion by subverting it. The women used male-run churches to advocate issues that concerned them ( 2000 /2009, p. 9). They questioned the scriptural interpretations preached by male ministers on their “rightful place” and challenged the perception of their role in the Black churches. Thereby, African-American women theologians and feminist thinkers helped to produce changes in church teachings on gender and sexuality (2006, pp. 132, 135).

Religious women have posed a challenge for feminist theory, because there has been an unwillingness to concede agency to religious piety. In Mahmood’s ( 2001 , p. 207) study of women in Egyptian Islamic movements, she criticizes feminism’s coupling of self-realization to liberal notions of freedom, which sees agency as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination. While the liberal understanding of freedom led American white feminists in the 1970s to call for the dismantling of the nuclear family, Collins and other African-American feminists opposed such a limited view of freedom. For them, freedom implied being able to form families, since the long history of slavery, genocide, and racism had prevented family formation. According to Mahmood, Collins’ contribution “expanded the notion of ‘self-realization/self-fulfillment’ by making considerations of class, race, and ethnicity constitutive of its very definition such that individual autonomy had to be rethought in light of other issues” ( 2001 , p. 208).

Collins’ move beyond feminism’s limited view of religion appeared early on in her work, in the first edition of Black Feminist Thought . She sees the possibility that women’s self-realization may take place within religious institutions. She shows that many Black women scholars, writers, and artists worked within the Black churches, and “churches typically formed the core of many Black women’s community activities” ( 2000 /2009, p. 65). Furthermore, the churches played a vital part in the civil rights movement; they created buffers against negative stereotyping, constituted important “safe spaces,” and were fundamental in developing moral and ethical teachings on social justice. In fact, they became “an arena for Black women’s political activism and as well as their consciousness concerning the political” ( 2006 , p. 128). Collins argues that the type of Black feminism that emerged within these churches and other Black civil society organizations expressed a more comprehensive commitment to social justice than what emerged first within western feminism. The focus on social justice also sensitized many African-American women to gender issues, which resulted in a growing feminist consciousness.

Collins shows that the community work and activism of many African-American women were based in the churches. They exerted different types of leadership and promoted the importance of education, sisterhood, self-definitions, self-valuations, and economic self-reliance ( 1989 , pp. 762–763; 2000 /2009, pp. 228–229). For Collins, religion has constituted and can still constitute a part in the matrix of domination for U.S. Black women. This does not lead her, however, to propose that the self-realization of African-American women must take place outside religious institutions. By seeing self-realization in light of class, race, and gender, she sees the Black churches as important institutions that have offered institutional support for the development of Black feminist thought.

So, how might intersectionality influence the sociology of religion? Just as many intersectional theorists have tended to list religion as one of many differences without offering a more profound analysis, there has been a tendency in the sociology of religion to undertheorize the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion. This led Wood ( 2006 ) to call for “Breaching Bleaching: Integrating Studies of ‘Race’ and Ethnicity with the Sociology of Religion.” Wood’s concern is that when several dominant theories of contemporary religion, such as secularization theory, ignore race and ethnicity, white religion is constructed as the “normal” form of religion and dominant theories become applicable to white religion only.

Furthermore, when race and religion are studied, there is a tendency to focus on single dimensions and not analyze the intersection of race and ethnicity with other dimensions, such as gender, social class, structural, and political developments. Since the 1990s, there has been a growth in sociological studies of religion that include race and ethnicity. For example, studies of post-1965 immigrant religious communities in the U.S. addressed ethnicity, social class, and gender (Ebaugh and Chafetz, 2001 ; Foley and Hoge, 2007 ), although few discussed race and the various ways in which these communities were affected by racial ideologies and structures. This stands in contrast to studies of Islamophobia and antisemitism, which often relate the construction of and prejudices against Jews and Muslims to racialization processes (see Meer, 2013 ). There has also been an increase in studies of racial attitudes and practices among white, conservative Protestants and racial diversity in Christian congregations (Emerson and Smith, 2000 ; see Dougherty et al. , 2020 ). A critique against these studies is that they provide individualistic and religious cultural forms of explanation, and they fail to recognize how religious racial attitudes intersect with racism, structural inequalities, gender, and the growth of the political right in the post-civil rights era.

In other areas, intersectionality has had a profound impact on the sociology religion. As with general sociology, these contributions often concern gender and sexuality. In the 1980s and 1990s, a considerable body of multi-disciplinary literature examined religion, gender, and sexuality. Many studies put women at the center of analysis, and this kind of feminist inquiry implied a reorientation in the sociology of religion, going beyond religious institutions to include religious practices and cultural discourse. Collins’ work on intersectionality influenced, for example, Gilkes’ work ( 2001 ) on the role of U.S. Black women in church and community. By emphasizing the intersection of gender, race, and class, Gilkes highlights the role of women in the Black churches as community workers, church mothers, and political agents. The same approach has been used to study the role of religion among Latina women activists in their work for empowerment and social change (Peña, 2003 ). Collins’ work has also inspired studies of race, gender, sexuality, and religion. In a study of how gay men and lesbians challenge Christian rooted notions of homosexual sin, McQueeney criticizes other studies of religion and sexuality for treating “race and gender as secondary,” stating that “sexuality is never separate from other systems of domination, such as racism and sexism” ( 2009 , pp. 152–153).

At first, Collins’ work had primarily an impact on American sociology. It soon affected sociology globally, especially the study of gender and sexuality. While intersectional analyses have often been absent in studies of European Muslim women, Nyhagen and Halsaa ( 2016 ) draw on Collins and other intersectional theorists in their study of lived citizenship among Christian and Muslim women in Spain, Norway, and the United Kingdom. They want to contribute to “the so far limited feminist scholarship on religion and intersectionality” by using “more complex feminist analyses of citizenship based on intersectional approaches to inequality” ( 2016 , pp. 58, 60). Additionally, Page and Yip ( 2021 ) apply intersectionality in their edited volume on religion and sexuality that include case studies from across the world. These studies highlight how religion is a complex phenomenon that both can produce inequality and stigmatization and be a resource that challenges other oppressions.

Intersectionality provides an important contribution to the sociology of religion in its focus on multiple and complex intersections of various dimensions. While there is a tendency in current research to either focus on religion and race, or religion, gender and sexuality, intersectionality might benefit the sociology of religion by giving attention to the various ways in which religion is linked to a wider set of dimensions, such as race, ethnicity, social class, gender, sexuality, politics, and nation, and the ways in which these dimensions intersect.

This brings us to the question of how the sociology of religion might influence intersectionality. First of all, the sociology of religion might contribute to taking religion more seriously, or as Gilkes argues, “religion needs to be placed in the foreground of questions” because “in any society characterized by the durable inequality of race, religion matters” (Gilkes, 2010 , p. 418). The sociology of religion also has a lot to offer in understanding the complexities of religion. While the dominant discourse in feminist research and intersectionality presents a relatively monolithic and binary understanding of religion, Collins criticizes the binary view of reason and faith towards the end of Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory ( 2019a , p. 283). For her, their assumed oppositional difference is a hindrance for exploring how they are related, and this binary aligns with other binaries that create constraints for Black women’s knowledge, which intersectionality challenges.

Furthermore, the sociology of religion can provide a wider understanding of religion. When intersectional analyses focus on religion as oppression/subversion, there is a tendency to emphasize religious doctrines and ideologies. In Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory , Collins goes further and discusses how faith-based ethics provides “meaning to everyday life … explanations for phenomena that are seemingly beyond human comprehension … meaning of life, birth, death, human suffering, evil, and beauty” (2019, p. 282). Faith-based ethics are often “collective and communal” and may provide the basis for political work. Collins does not present a one-sided positive view of faith-based ethics but argues that their consequences depend on how they are interpreted and practiced. While some religious communities legitimate and reproduce social inequality, others struggle with ideas of social hierarchies, try to see how they affect their own practices and change them.

Nevertheless, sociological studies of religion show that religion is a far more complex phenomenon than doctrines, ideologies, and ethics. Current sociology of religion includes studies of everyday and lived religion, religion and the body, rituals, material religion, the blurred boundaries between religion and nonreligion, and religious complexity of different and inconsistent religious developments, just to mention a few. Although Collins describes relatively broad aspects of religion in her work, she does not analyze them systematically: religious practices, activism, care work, spirituality, symbolism, language, poetry, music, organizations, leadership, and the link between religious and political consciousness. There is a need to include these dimensions of religion in intersectional analyses.

The argument here is that a closer link between intersectionality and the sociology of religion has a lot to offer to both. The sociology of religion provides a broader and more complex view of religion that can help move the understanding beyond the simplistic binary assumptions of religion. Intersectionality can also be broadened to studies of an array of topics that are relevant for the sociology of religion, such as nation states and its religion policies, electoral politics and political behavior, nationalist and right-wing ideologies, and public discourses on religion. Intersectionality can also be useful in studies of media coverage and images of religious majorities and minorities, religion and education, religion and public institutions, inclusion, exclusion, privilege, and disadvantage in majority and minority religions, as well as Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.

Intersectional interpretations of violence in the realm of politics

Scholarly and practical interpretations of violence in the realm of politics have offered centuries’ worth of robust debate over what the true relationship between the two is, or should be. One prominent argument is that violence is a tool that enables politics: bargains and compromises are facilitated by the possibility of paying the costs of physical injury, damage, distress, and/or death. A common alternative perspective is that violence instead indicates a failure of politics, where in the former’s presence paramount distributional concerns are superseded by a need to respond to the destruction that it yields. However, violence does not just reveal or assist politics: it is politics. Episodic threats and uses of physical force, when applied in social settings and with social intentions, reflect and operationalize clear attempts at the accumulation, distribution, use, and management of authority, autonomy, and agentic self-actualization. It is another matter altogether whether the process itself is revolutionary or status-quo affirming.

In this contribution, I aim to further develop two arguments that Collins briefly introduced while theorizing violence as a “saturated site of intersecting power relations” (Collins, 2019a , b , p. 238). First, I explore the possibility that episodes of violence represent points at which the confluences of systems of oppression are not only particularly visible but also particularly vulnerable to dismantling. Second, in dialog with the common conceptualization of violence as a social problem, I probe the possibilities of violence as a solution to the social problem of dominance itself. The embodied experience of collective violence as both a tool of and a response to domination ought to be at the forefront of any analysis of political order and change. An intersectional framework to understanding violence not only supports such an approach but also may in fact require it.

The intersectionality framework allows for a more complete accounting of the mechanisms through which violence organizes inter- and intra-systemic power relations by centering its fundamental relationality. While subject and object experiences of violence alike describe the imperialist impulse that elevates domination as a political ideal, the scalability of violence illuminates this as much at the person level as in higher-order aggregations, like war among states or rebellion within them. Even one of the largest-scale structural representatives of the political status quo, the Weberian state – the government of which is expected hold a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its borders and with respect to its population – is simply one composite representation of the innumerate power relationships within and across human communities. The state serves also as a logic and a technology of violence that increasingly derives power from individuals’ willingness and abilities to distance themselves (physically and psychically) from the harms that they commit against others.

Notwithstanding its focus on systems rather than merely acts of oppression, the lens of intersectionality can greatly help us resist the pull toward abstracting away agents’ responsibility for violence when parsing its structural implications. For instance, consider Collins’s claim that political domination “seems hegemonic...when violence becomes naturalized and normalized to the point where it becomes invisible” (p. 239). Acknowledging violence as a saturated site of intersecting power relations allows us to push forward into a recognition that, at the point of hegemonic consolidation, status-quo domination may not be truly achieved unless all of its implications – the employment of violence included – enjoy legitimacy only in the image of the other. This logic seems succinctly summarized in Charles Tilly’s oft-cited aphorism, “War made the state and the state made war” ( 1975 , p. 42), as in it, violence and its perpetrators construct themselves in each’s image, along with the normative and institutional logics that sustain them. Returning to Collins’ claim, I submit that the invisibility of violence that she describes as a mark of a maturing domination complex only becomes so precisely because its agents have assumed a normalizing anonymity that masks their individual responsibility while eliding it to the system’s persistence. This is convenient, because in the power-saturated site of violence, only those who are visible can be assigned responsibility for it, because only they can be held to practical account for the empirical implications of their behavioral choices. However, when we can identify the system configurations that support domination and also their individual arbiters, we chip away at the hegemony of hierarchy as an orienting norm and move toward self-determination as a fully formed politics of collective control instead.

At the person level, it is critical to acknowledge individual-level decision making in the production of violence because it is as much kinesthetic as it is kinetic. For stewards of status-quo politics and their challengers, the observable act of violence is just one of many possible penultimate steps in an iterated process of political expression that involves the very human conditions of both experience (i.e., being and doing) and cognition (i.e., knowing). For example, when an object is launched in the midst of a riotous crowd, we are able to observe in that moment a crude operationalization of not only deliberations over whether arming has become feasible – let alone necessary – to someone, but also the discriminating moments by which that object is perceptually and actually purposed as a weapon. This moment of energy release constitutes a penultimate step because, again, the value of violence resides in its inter-subjectivity: For what meaning does violence have apart from the experiences that construct and communicate its “display” (Fujii, 2017 )? Once the physical act is complete, can the tool or the perpetrator be neutralized, or will it always retain the threatening patina of having once been fashioned as a weapon by the hands and minds of someone in particular? This may well be less the “co-formation” that Collins argues “is far easier to imagine intellectually than…to ‘find’ in the social world using standard tools of social science research” (p. 241) and more a selection process moving at an indeterminate pace, and in which individuals act on violence as a choice in dialog with social institutions that are indemnified by patterns of privilege, which themselves reflect the interpersonal negotiation of attempts at establishing dominance. (Ethnography and immersive methods that prioritize indigenous knowledges seem to be the social science tools best suited to for observing and analyzing such a process.) Each of these deeply political moments is directly informed by the stratified experiences of legitimacy, visibility, and protection that every individual lives.

From Machiavelli onward, there is a long and broad history of political thought that rightfully identifies violence as a tool commonly available to the structurally – and culturally – privileged for bolstering their own political dominance (even if this is not the specific language that those theorists would have used). However, episodes of violence – by status-quo representatives and challengers alike – may also indicate points of weakness in the complex systems that maintain multiplex oppression, not just points of strength. Consider, for example, the violent clashes during the 2012 Jo’Burg Pride Parade in Johannesburg, South Africa: after Black lesbian and feminist activists from the 1 in 9 Campaign disrupted the parade with a die-in and a call to observe a minute of silence to acknowledge members of the South African queer community who had been raped, killed, or otherwise victimized with physical violence, many White attendees were seen to have shoved, stepped on, and verbally assaulted group members during and after the insurgent activists’ dramatization of the physical inertia of (Black) death. The episode clearly highlighted the availability of violence as a means for reinforcing the intersections among race-, gender-, and class-based domination in the local LGBTQIA* community. However, it also shone a light on the fragility of those relationships: at the core of the violence was a recognition that the presumed powerless had been audacious enough to organize and deploy the strength of the powerful – not just to try but to believe that one can coerce and compel changes to the political status quo – against the latter’s domination.

Intersectionality’s embrace of relationality can also help to parse the potential of violence as a means of resistance. The idea that the use of violence may be a beneficial and ethically justified method for challenging multiplex oppression is certainly not new (Fashina, 1989 , p. 191; Coates 2015 ). However, the explicit lens of intersectionality further clarifies the ways in which moralizing about the value of violence as a political act, without acknowledging the causal and justificatory power of the interlocking power relations that shape it, is an attempt to invalidate the simultaneous vulnerability and agency of the multiply oppressed. It continues to strike me that this is the context in which many scholars and activists who are ourselves living the intersections of multiple oppressions come to debate the relative values of violent and nonviolent resistance as behavioral alternatives or political ideals. Over the decision to even discuss violence as an affirmation, this context also yields a nakedness that reveals our discourses as saturated sites of intersecting power relations themselves.

The danger of violence for those attempting politics under the influence of multiple systems of domination appears to be more so in being political – making and responding to claims that are of consequence to autonomy and self-determination – than in the actual practice of the violent act. Consider discussions of women’s participation in collective armed struggle: narratives that simplify and reduce their choices to either emotional outburst, blind allegiance to a romantic partner, or a uniquely savage personal disposition belie the anxiety that often accompanies recognitions of a disenfranchised individual’s willingness to make the political calculation to speak the language of the oppressor back to him (Bond et al. , 2019 ). The case of the Ketiba Banat (Girls’ Cadre) of the 1980s-era Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) provides a powerful example of how even as the agency of women’s participation in armed conflict has been used to validate the enterprise externally, the interlocking of womanhood with ethnicity and class still can be used to exploit women’s vulnerabilities at the same time. While the group’s leader John Garang developed the unit to facilitate women’s visibility in the broader revolutionary struggle, it functionally served as an “incubator for creation of a new female elite,” channeling different privileges (e.g., marriages with elite SPLA men) and protections (e.g., access to the post-conflict spoils of neo-patrimony) for its members than other militarily trained women enjoyed (Pinaud, 2015 , abstract). Nonetheless, the “new” elite class of women also came to reflect pre-existing social divisions among the predominantly Dinka recruits: girls drawn from the more privileged communities in the country often fought in fewer military engagements and did less of the domestic labor in SPLA camp areas (Pinaud, 2013 ). In discussing the general influence of ambient violence on why women kill, Asale Angel-Ajani and Nimmi Gowrinathan ( 2020 ) write “There is no vital distinction between the violence that shapes the lives of women engaged in armed struggle and the violence faced by women who live under the tyranny of threat and abuse … To forge connections between women who resist violence by turning to violence is not a fetishization of the act. It’s a reclamation of will.”

Among countless others, these examples of intersectionality as both a lived experience and a political analysis do support the possibility – as I have argued – that episodes of violence represent points of vulnerable fragility in multiplex systems of oppression, thus, exposing the possibilities of violence as a solution to the social problem of dominance itself. Collins’s treatment of the topic provides fertile soil for further developing the long-standing question of how necessary, beneficial, or inevitable the embodied experience of collective violence may be to the establishment of a truly emancipatory political order.

The power of metaphorical intersectional thought 1

In this text, I propose to explore the power of metaphorical intersectional thought, based on a reflection inspired by the latest book written by Patricia Hill Collins, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory ( 2019 ). First, I study the potential of intersectional thought through metaphor, as a tool for social agents to perform a beneficial, therapeutical form of self-socio-analysis and build literacy regarding their own complex social position in the world. This exercise in self-socio-analysis is important in order to demonstrate how individuals could learn to read the social context in which they live and make decisions based on their understanding of the “matrix of domination … that emerges from the multiple systems of oppression which frame everyones’s lives” ( 1990 , p. 229). Second, this text examines the capacity of intersectional thought through metaphor to help design public policies that put at their heart social justice and the sustainability of Good Living ( Buen Vivir , Sumak Kawsay ). My aim is to offer new tools so that individuals are able to understand the social position they occupy in the “domains of power,” and how policies whose objective is social justice can be formulated, following in the footsteps of the intellectual and activist Patricia Hill Collins. In her latest work, she reviews the possibilities for achieving such objectives from an intersectional perspective and invites us to think intersectionally, deploying the concept as a heuristics, metaphor, and paradigm.

As a heuristic oriented to the solution of social problems, for example, social loneliness, intersectionality reveals that subjects experience it in a variety of ways and in relation to the social, institutional, and economic structures. As a paradigm, there are six central ideas of intersectionality – relationality, power, social inequity, contextualism, complexity, and social justice (Collins and Bilge, 2016 ) – all of which contribute to a complex way of seeing the world. Intersectionality as a metaphor – the aspect to which this text is dedicated – can be seen as a way of seeing the world and its interlocking structures or as a daily praxis . I suggest that considering intersectionality through metaphor offers important explanatory images. As Collins explains, the reflective work of several authors provide us with inspiration when it comes to the use of metaphor: Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “intersection,” Gloria Anzaldúa’s “borderlands,” “live jazz,” the “spider web,” or Collins’ idea of the “matrix of domination.” To this list, I would like to add – and take as starting point for my reflection – the metaphor recently proposed by two Spanish feminist social scientists: “marked bodies” (López and Platero, 2019 ). I believe their metaphor facilitates the understanding of social facts in an intersectional manner, including the objectivized and embodied form of social structures.

In the first part of this contribution, I will focus, in an autoethnographic mode, on mental health, which is, in itself, an outsider’s or a taboo space. This is meant to exemplify the form of therapeutical form of self-socio-analysis I introduced above. I write these pages at a moment of losing my way and I seek, through them, to better understand what is happening to me; all of this, too, with the hope of offering light to other people who find themselves in similar situations, and to offer analytical tools to those in charge of designing public policies in a participatory way, as Collins’ suggest ( 2017 ), whether in the sphere of mental health, or any other field. I will explore the metaphor of the “marked body” to describe the experience of vulnerable and finite bodies, crossed by different structures of oppression. This metaphor connects with Collins' intersectional perspective for it can access the objectified and institutionalized matrix of domination in the structural, institutional, cultural, and individual domains of power.

Depression, chronic stress, burnout, obsessive-compulsive, anankastic personality – all these are labels which, for the last two months, have sprung up in my medical file, obstructing my relationships, my understanding of my position in the world, my writing, and my life. During this period, I have passed through the consulting rooms of different medical specialists. Each one of them has given a diagnosis of the situation in which I find myself, and in each a pattern repeats itself, namely the use of one metaphor or another as an explanation: “you are a burnt-out athlete,” “you have broken yourself,” “you have kidnapped yourself,” “you have come out of your body and left yourself empty.” The “burnout,” the “self-breaking,” and the “kidnapping” leave me little chance of resisting the pain and making myself whole again. With these metaphors come the medical protocols that put me in a position of vulnerability that I integrate, gradually, into my gestures when I walk, fearfully and gingerly. The more vulnerable they say I am, the more vulnerable I become. Furthermore, labels overlap and contradict themselves. I do not know which one to use as a support. I feel a vulnerability in which I can hardly express myself. I cannot find a metaphor through which I recognize my limits and the impossibility of individualist self-sufficiency. This vulnerability stops up my words, I can hardly speak and when I manage to do so, I do it through metaphors. The doctors use them, I use them, the people closest to me read me with the help of metaphors.

However, in their praxis of metaphors, the medical doctors speak of “scorched earth” and consider solutions to general and universal problems: “after a mental breakdown, take care of yourself, rest and be patient.” Yet how do you do that if you do not know how? “Read interior design magazines and watch television.” I do not even have a television.

Dejected and sad, I come away from my doctor’s appointments with my bunch of metaphors, supposedly designed to explain this general apathy that accompanies me. I look around the waiting room and see faces similar to my own: white women and men, with enough economic capital to access the care of a specialist doctor who dispatches patients while others wait in rooms that have the odor of expensive air freshener. No sweat, no noise, everything is neutralized. I wonder whether these metaphors of scorched earth and pills are the same they use with these apathetic faces, or whether they assume that these “mental breakdowns” are intersected by gender, race, social class, bodily functionality, and other series of structures that should oblige them to reconsider those metaphors and those pills, and to particularize them. That is to say that a crisis of exhaustion does not mean the same, or have the same signifiers, in a black woman with functional diversity without medical assistance, as in a 34-year-old woman who works in the public sector and has private medical insurance. I know my doctors are not academics who specialize in intersectionality, but I think it would be useful for them to reconsider metaphors to adjust the readings of their patients’ discomfort.

Each one of these metaphors connects me to the latest book by Patricia Hill Collins, in which she presents the possibilities of working on intersectionality as a critical social theory. The author talks about the power of metaphors to integrate an intersectional perspective when explaining social phenomena. She mentions different images on which I project that complexity and consider places of resistance based on which public action can be taken. Anzaldúa’s metaphor of the “bridge” mentioned by Collins evokes connection and not just rupture. The traffic-alluding “intersection” by Crenshaw brings to mind a complex place wherein one must to act. The “matrix of domination” proposed by Collins insinuates the existence of symbolic violence at the crossroads of structures of oppression. When I manage to overcome fear and get out of the house to talk to my feminist friends using the psychiatrists’ words, they say that “mental breakdown” and “athlete’s burnout” are images that are too abysmal to allow progress. What is more, they remind me that these metaphors dismiss problems of a social, economic, and cultural order. So they ask me whether these metaphors help me capture the complexity of the situation I am experiencing. I say no. And soon another series of images is triggered in order to explain the state of my being: a piece of chewing gum that has been stretched too far, a mass of clay that needs to be remodeled, the beam of a building that has been damaged by hidden structural faults. These are all ideas that put the emphasis on a state in which regeneration is an exercise that is less radical than that implied by breakage, as Collins proposes herself. I feel there is hope. I tell myself: “it is time to give shape from within yourself, to do it in a way that reflects on the position you hold in the world today and on the one you want to hold from now on, in order to channel your energy towards social justice goals.” As if part of a shoal, I feel accompanied and I understand better what is happening to me, although the pain persists.

Moving on to the second objective of this contribution, when I was reading Patricia Hill Collins’ latest book, I was also studying Cuerpos marcados (“Marked Bodies”) by Silvia López and R. Lucas Platero. In it, they propose the metaphor of a marked body as a starting point for designing public policies. My understanding of these authors’ proposal is that bodies are the means we have to relate to the environment. The body is a source of expression that speaks intersectionally with each gesture. Its internal and external forms, colors, scents, and pains are social marks that offer, to those who inhabit that mass, one position or another in the social world.

Therefore, the interest of this metaphor is that it refers to objectivized and embodied marks of structures and social institutions based on the experiences of the living body. Family, school, and the media, among others, are visible social institutions that channel an embodied norm reflected in social habitus, whose matrix of domination varies according to context and domains of power. Taking the example of the family, it is possible to say that being the “owner” of a white heteronormative family of upper social class is a source of symbolic capital in most societies within the capitalist Global North. The heteronorm, gender, social class, and race mark the body, reify a specific idea of marriage and family in which lesbian, gay and trans* people, single mothers, and fat, older, black women do not enter. Formally, these outsiders are reminded that they are not in a position of privilege on each administrative form they have to fill in to register the birth or adoption of a child, a form that requests, in hegemonic language: “mother’s name,” “father’s name,” and “permanent place of residence.” What is more, white, heteronormal, middle-, and upper-class families appear in the adverts and stories told at school, inoculating values, attitudinal norms, and wishes that become, in words of Bourdieu, doxa (desires based on beliefs that we do not even consider to be beliefs due to the high degree to which they are naturalized). The body marked by the heteronorm of class, gender, and race is learnt in institutions and is incorporated into attitudes, gestures, and tastes in the way reflected by the artist Catherine Opie in Cutting (1993).

So, both books (Collins, 2019a , b ; López and Platero, 2019 ) led me first of all to think about their value for beginning therapeutical processes of self-socio-analysis – that is, to begin to understand my social position via a kind of individual self-analysis that could be undertaken by non-academic social agents – at times when one cannot see the light and one is “mentally broken,” whatever that breakage might be. Second, these works made me think, about the value of metaphors for creating, in a participatory and intersectional way, public policies whose goal is social justice and the sustainability of life. If, generally, in political science, we explain the setting up of public policies by means of strategic plans with goals to be achieved in four or five years, why not also use intersectional metaphors to explain that these policies are experienced differently, depending on the position held by the subject?

The intersectional metaphor of the marked body can be useful in the academic practice of the participatory and intersectional public policies also advocated by Patricia Hill Collins ( 2017 ). It could be interesting, in terms of mental health, to design public policies participatively, by means of metaphors that inform people’s experiences and, in this way, see who has a life of suffering and who is living well. Thus, considering the creation of a community mental health plan, the technical agent responsible for participation could use the “marked body” metaphor as tool of participatory and deliberative processes, that is, as a method to guide participatory action and research processes. This could facilitate an understanding of the complexity involved for anyone suffering a psychiatric problem and the mapping of how mental illness is an axis with an embodied dimension (which can be expressed through gestures linked to the stigma of madness, such as tics), and an objectivized dimension (which is expressed in labels, medical diagnoses or the marks of suicide attempts). In conjunction with other axes such as race, social class, age, and cultural capital, illness marks a body and subsumes it to the category of “depressed,” “schizophrenic,” etc. Such processes would enable us to see different depressions, not only the generic type projected by the medical staff involved, but differentiated according to the social structures objectivized and embodied in each context.

In this regard, metaphorical thought, in academic experimental contexts, could facilitate the reading of complexity in two senses. First, talking about a “marked body” makes it possible to identify the external and visible marks of the body, those characterizing appearance and triggering processes of “external exclusion,” that is, the physical expulsion of a subject from the process of creating public policies. Second, this metaphor facilitates the understanding of embodied oppression, invisible to the eyes, which facilitates “internal exclusion” (Young, 2000 ): even though subjects are present, they know that what they say will automatically be excluded, whether for not knowing the linguistic code or the right way to dress or, more broadly, for not having practiced the bodily gestures required by the normative context.

The potential of the “marked body” metaphor to project and assess public policies that put the sustainability of life and social justice at their heart makes it possible, for example, to read, to give another example, the psychiatric effects of fatphobia by means of a marked, black, fat, lesbian, French body. Recently, fatphobia was used by Daria Marx and Eva Pérez-Bello ( 2018 ) to explain how functional diversity, gender, age, social class, and race intersect in bodies that are seen as obese and do not enter, quite literally, into the instruments needed for public policies to be carried out. So, via the metaphor of “marked body,” in this case, fat, black and belonging to a woman, it is possible to think about a collective viewpoint on mental health that can serve to assess public health policies, using participatory tools (participatory workshops, planning cells, meetings about future scenarios, etc.) rooted in the multiple experiences of day-to-day discriminations.

In this regard, the goal would be to think about how the practitioners of participatory and deliberative democracy who are going to design public policies could make use of the intersectional metaphor of the “marked body” in order to make it clear that the social agents at whom these policies are directed are affected by different matrices of domination in an embodied and objectivized way.

In terms of using metaphorical thought in order to decipher oneself and also to be able to transcend, collaboratively, these readings about oneself, metaphors that contain an idea of intersectionality may have a therapeutical use, oriented towards a life that is worth living, crucial in moments of personal crisis, when there is a need for self-literacy, whether as part of a participatory policy or as a process of self-care. In this regard, metaphors may come mediated by an external expert agent in intersectionality from the community or may arise from the individual’s own creativity.

In the specific case, I discussed in the first part of this text, changing the diagnosis from “mental breakdown” to one of the body “marked” by a matrix of domination (that involves the effect of neoliberal forms of accumulation of all kinds of capital, a socialized gender in a Christian culture of self-sacrifice, a social class, a race, an age, and a particular sexuality), invites us to think of the key aspects that should inform policies oriented towards social justice. The first idea is the impossibility of self-sufficiency and the inexistence of “independent individuality” (Hernando, 2012 , p. 103), i.e., the assumption that everyone should look after themselves and escape from the state’s marking processes. The second is the importance of inter-eco-dependence. All the metaphors considered by the medical structures gave a picture of me as an athlete who ran alone and burned out. The metaphor of the body “marked” by a complex matrix of domination, let us me see the constructed nature of that matrix and the naturalization process carried out by myself. Third, the “marked body” arises from a dough, one that is specific but also heterogeneous and elastic that one relies on permanently and without which one cannot carry out one’s actions: recognizing the body as marked does not mean we must reconcile ourselves with to the fact of a paralyzing vulnerability. On the contrary, this vulnerability is a resistant one that can act as a lever to perform a critical praxis , which is, by definition, relational and contextualist, and which includes the idea of social justice and the search for the sustainability of a good living.

Reflections

Intersectionality is a narrative of our times that was made possible by the loosening of political and intellectual borders of all sorts. Each author engages Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory through a different set of concerns and questions, thereby bringing a distinctive angle of vision to their reading of this book. Yet the significance of these contributions goes beyond their substance. IACST prescribes a different kind of reading that rejects the assumption that readers extract meaning from the text through prescribed reading conventions. Instead, IACST proposes a dialogical reading where the connection between the text and the reader is crucial. What we bring to these contributions in terms of what questions are meritorious, what counts as evidence, what constitute appropriate methodologies, and the ways in which these contributions speak to us is crucial to interpretation.

Elaini Cristina Gonzaga da Silva analyzes the genealogy of intersectionality, grounding her analysis in a close reading of my publications as evidence for the changing meaning and use of the term. She begins her analysis, not in the decontextualized space of abstraction, but rather in a specific context. By invoking how it feels to do social theory from the Global South during a global pandemic, her work reminds me of the uncertainties and challenges of doing intersectional work outside the protections of privilege. I read her detailed analysis of the travels of intersectionality within my own work as a metaphor for the struggles over the meaning of intersectionality and its trajectory as a field of study. Time figures prominently in her contribution, yet the significance of time for constructing knowledge as a process is often bracketed out of mainstream theory. Her narrative begins in a particular time and place, namely, COVID-19 in Brazil, which laid bare the correlation between social inequality and death. She traces my work across time and space, provoking my memories of how I wrote differently about intersectionality in order to reach different audiences. Doing so meant that I translated its ideas for different interpretive communities and learned much from those dialogs. I was especially intrigued by how the simultaneous release in Brazil of the Portuguese translation of Black Feminist Thought and Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory provided a distinctive reading experience. Although I wrote these two books in different times and places, their temporal conflation in Brazil, coupled with their release in two different languages highlighted the complexities of critical theorizing that is committed to dialogical engagement.

Emek Ergun’s analysis of the importance of translation for dialogical engagement sharpens intersectionality’s methodological edge. Ergun’s expertise in the field of translation studies, her social location within gender and feminist studies, and her experiential knowledge of Turkey uniquely position her to identify the need to deepen intersectionality’s transnational footprint and to recommend translation as one important tool in doing so. Ergun not only diagnoses the problem of the US-centric trajectory of intersectionality, but she also proscribes the intellectual action strategy of translation as essential to transnational engagement. It is fitting that she chooses Octavia Butler’s Kindred as a family story that is both personal and profoundly American to ask, what happens when this story is translated? By focusing on what happens within the space of dialog, Ergun identifies one core methodological challenge facing intersectionality as it moves toward being a critical social theory. Dialogical engagement is impossible without translation, and the act of translation occurs across differences of power. Significantly, by situating the theme of translation within the need for intersectionality to expand the universe of dialogs within a transnational context, Ergun provides compelling reasons why it is important to do so.

Inger Furseth’s chapter also engages intersectional border spaces that require skills of translation, namely, cultivating dialogical engagement between intersectionality and fields of inquiry that lie outside its borders. Intersectionality is currently in conversation with multiple disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields. But where are the missing dialogs with fields that also speak to intersectionality’s questions and concerns? In IACST’s closing chapter, I ask, is it possible to have intersectionality without social justice? This question challenges the taken-for-granted assumption within intersectionality that social justice is inherently a part of its discourse and that therefore, the ethical dimensions of intersectionality need not be examined. Furseth extends this question to explore the border space between intersectionality and the sociology of religion for a possible route to examine how ethics might inform intersectionality’s development as a critical social theory. Furseth contributes to this debate by laying the foundation for dialogical engagements between the sociology of religion and the call for ethical self-reflection within intersectionality. In doing so, she invites us to confront the contentious politics of how intersectionality participates in broader debates about politics and religion.

Kanisha D. Bond’s analysis of violence demonstrates that there is much at stake in rethinking the construct of violence as intersectionality deepens its critical theorizing about power relations. Bond’s succinct summary of the relationship between violence and politics brings important insights from political science to bear on intersectionality’s guiding premise that intersecting systems of power are interdependent and that they mutually construct one another. In IACST , I emphasize violence as a tool of domination, positing that violence constitutes a dense transfer point among systems of power that potentially highlight the intersectional nature of power itself. Because violence has long been a catalyst for political activism among Black, Indigenous, women, Latinx, LGBTQ and similarly subordinated groups, analyzing and responding to violence have been the subject of considerable critical inquiry and praxis. Yet my analysis does not consider the ways in which subordinated groups may also develop mechanisms of violence to counter political domination. Nonviolence is but one political strategy for resisting the violence of intersecting power relations. Bond suggests that the visibility of violence not only creates possibilities for political domination but also for political resistance. Notably, conceptualizing violence as inherently intersectional facilitates theorizing political resistance to violence through an intersectional lens.

Jone Martínez-Palacios provides a provocative use of intersectionality’s possibilities, offering an honest, embodied analysis of what it means to do intellectual and political work in the challenging space of intersectional inquiry and praxis. Using intersectionality as a metaphor, she positions two ostensibly separate ways of knowing in close proximity, the subjective world of individual experience that organizes everyday life, and the objective world of social structure that operates under rules that lie outside human agency. Martínez-Palacios presents an autoethnographic analysis of her emotional, intellectual, and political struggles to make sense of her own well-being during a global public health crisis (her contribution was completed early on in the 2020 pandemic). But she also offers a window into the value of metaphors for creating public policies whose goal is social justice and the sustainability of life. Juxtaposing the artificial distance between subjective and objective ways of knowing creates space for new insights, questions, and possibilities that are signature features of intersectional analysis. For example, Martínez-Palacios brings the emotional labor that accompanies much intersectional work into the center of her contribution, sharing with readers the emotional costs of caring about social justice, and the sustainability of life. Usually this emotional labor is hidden within theoretical analysis yet here Martínez-Palacios offers a holistic view of intersectional theorizing, one that incorporates the personal, the political, and the intellectual as a pathway to building more robust political communities.

The scope and breadth of these contributions in this Critical Exchange remind me how much is at stake in getting intersectionality’s journey toward becoming a critical social theory right. As an ever-growing, shape-shifting intellectual project that moves in tandem with decoloniality, intersectionality offers a conceptual lingua franca for people to engage one another about shared concerns regarding emancipation and equality. Significantly, intersectionality is also a language of discovery, whose commitment to dialogical engagement provides an alternative to a knowledge regime that upholds colonial conquest and neoliberal commodification. Eschewing narrow pathways into social theory that invite historically subordinated people into seemingly finished Western disciplines, intersectionality has been participatory and democratic since its inception. Making intersectionality less so, all in the name of prematurely elevating its status as a social theory, undermines its critical potential. This symposium provides a glimpse of the possibilities as well as the work that remains to be done. Intersectionality is a discourse of social change, of hope and, as these authors remind us, of possibility.

• The author would like to thank Jean-Nicolas Bach, Izaskun Artegui Alcaide, and Mihaela Mihai for their contributions to the text and the outsider sensibility shown in their feedback.

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Contributor Information

Patricia Hill Collins, Email: ude.dmu@hpnilloc .

Elaini Cristina Gonzaga da Silva, Email: rb.pscup@ceavlis .

Emek Ergun, Email: ude.ccnu@nugree .

Inger Furseth, Email: [email protected] .

Kanisha D. Bond, Email: ude.notmahgnib@dnobk .

Jone Martínez-Palacios, Email: [email protected] .

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Intersectionality as Critical Method

by Kathy Davis and Helma Lutz

October 12, 2022

While many scholars in the field of gender studies are convinced that intersectionality is an essential part of good feminist theory, it is not always clear how intersectionality should be adopted in the context of research. In practice, intersectionality raises many questions, for example: What categories should be included in an intersectional analysis? Should researchers always stick to the “big three” of gender, race, and class, or should they cast a wider net? Some scholars have asked whether categories should be used at all, as they may be misleading and fail to capture the broad diversity of experiences and identities.

How to apply intersectionality

The US legal scholar Mari Matsuda came up with a simple procedure for intersectional analysis which she called “asking 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?’” This procedure turns out to be a surprisingly simple, but definitely useful way to begin analyzing the ways intersectional power works in people’s life stories and how these intersections can be both enabling and constraining.

How freedom can be seen to depend on integrating struggles

As an example, we applied this method to the life history of Mamphela Ramphele, a famous South African medical doctor, writer, and anti-apartheid activist. She was imprisoned and her work banned for many years, but she went on to become the first Black woman to head a South African university, a managing director of the World Bank, and a presidential candidate of the Democratic Alliance in the general elections of 2014 [1] . We used three ways of “asking the other question”: a) to situate ourselves as researchers prior to the analysis; b) to discover blind spots that emerged during the analysis; c) to complicate thinking about power relations .

a) Following Donna Haraway’s famous argument that (feminist) researchers need to admit that the knowledge they are producing is always situated, partial, and reflexive, we recognized that as White, feminist, European/US researchers with an anti-racist agenda, our desire to analyze Ramphele’s biography was not an innocent endeavor. Being critical of the neglect of race and racism in feminist scholarship, we hoped that Ramphele’s life history would allow us to implement our project, namely, to demonstrate that it is impossible to talk about gender without talking about race. We were initially surprised at her seeming reluctance to situate herself as a Black African in the context of apartheid or to talk about her own experiences with racism. She even seemed to distance herself from race and racism by drawing upon her privileged position or the ways that she was extraordinary or different. Even more remarkable was the fact that throughout the interview she seemed more comfortable positioning herself as a woman. It was her repeated emphasis on gender that stopped us in our tracks and made us realize that we needed to go back to the drawing board.

b) By again “asking the other question,” we considered more closely some of those moments when Ramphele insisted that gender inequality and sexism were the driving forces behind her development. In contrast to our assumption that racism would be the most salient feature of her life under apartheid, Ramphele continued to reference patriarchal gender relations in order to make sense of her life. Her narrative strategy was instrumental in establishing her special position, something she could more easily accomplish via her gender identity in racially bifurcated South Africa. She did not position herself as a Black woman or as a South African, but rather as a daughter and a sister who had to fight against the men and male-dominated institutions which prevented her from doing what she wanted to do. In this way, she established herself as distinctive: different from her family, friends, colleagues, and comrades.

c) By “asking the other question,” we were able to understand Ramphele’s determination to present herself as an independent-minded woman. Her deep desire to overcome the normative constraints of a woman’s role in society became the grounds for her success as a self-made scholar, an activist, a professional, and a single mother. She focused on the activities that she had accomplished under her own steam (and not, for example, as the lover of the famous Black Power activist Steve Biko) and emphasized repeatedly that it was not only race, the apartheid state, or the Black Consciousness Movement that mattered to how she saw her identity. She demonstrated how different aspects and social positionings in her life became salient at specific moments, depending on the context in which she found herself. Take, for example, her rebellion against the ANC’s prioritizing of the struggle against racism over feminism:

“You can’t have divided freedom. I asked, How am I going to define myself as a free person if I become free as a black person and remain trapped as a woman? There is no way in which my body can be divided between the woman in me and the black person in me. And if you’re going to address my freedom, it’s got to be integrated.”

In this beautiful example of intersectional thinking, she brings gender and race together, making it clear that for her, freedom depends upon both struggles being integrated.

Credit: I.B. Tauris.

How everyday strategies allow us to resist or accommodate power

The method of “asking the other question” enables us to make intersectional sense of Ramphele’s biography by allowing us to critically interrogate our own assumptions and social location, to recognize how our blind spots impede our analysis of the interview, and ultimately to uncover how the interviewee herself provided a complex reconstruction of her life, using an intersectional understanding of gender, race, and other social difference to create a narrative that made sense for her. The use of intersectionality is not restricted to researchers, sociologists, feminists, and critical race scholars; ordinary people use it themselves. Analyzing intersectionality requires that we pay attention to how people position themselves in different contexts and at different moments in their lives. It means acknowledging vulnerabilities which are not equal or similar in every situation and looking at how individuals develop strategies – often with considerable resourcefulness – to cushion or absorb these vulnerabilities. And, most important of all, it involves looking at the everyday strategies people use to resist or accommodate power: strategies that are inevitably more complicated and contradictory than we expect.

[1]  This analysis is based on an interview conducted by a colleague, the former civil rights activist and oral historian Mary Marshall Clark, as well as several autobiographies written by Ramphele herself.

Kathy Davis , Free University Amsterdam, Netherlands < [email protected] > Helma Lutz , Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany < [email protected] >

Read more about Intersectional Dialogues

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by Ann Phoenix

Intersectional Perspectives on Social Movements

by Barbara Giovanna Bello

Intersectional Solidarities and the Migrant Care Workers

by Ethel Tungohan

The Quest for the Right Intersectional Metaphor

by Amund Rake Hoffart

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Toolkit for "Teaching at the Intersections"

Introduction.

Adopting an intersectional approach means understanding that everyone has multiple identities—some visible and some invisible. But to truly understand intersectionality is to include identity and oppression in the conversation.

This toolkit for “Teaching at the Intersections” illustrates specific elements of the Teaching Tolerance Anti-bias Framework (ABF) and Perspectives for a Diverse America —standards, essential questions and central texts—that can be used to build student understanding of identity and oppression.

Essential Questions

• How does intersectionality relate to identity and justice?
• How can intersectionality be applied within the framework of anti-bias education to teach about multiple identities and oppression?

The ABF is a set of anchor standards and age-appropriate learning outcomes divided into four domains—identity, diversity, justice and action. The standards provide a common language and organizational structure for K-12 anti-bias education. Two anchor standards stand out in the ABF as particularly useful in thinking about intersectionality:

Identity 3 (ID.3):  “Students will recognize that peoples’ multiple identities interact and create unique and complex individuals.”

Justice 14 (JU.14):  “Students will recognize that power and privilege influence relationships on interpersonal, intergroup and institutional levels and consider how they have been affected by those dynamics.” 

Perspectives for a Diverse America , Teaching Tolerance’s free, literacy-based, anti-bias curriculum, integrates the ABF with two other key components—the Central Text Anthology and Integrated Learning Plan . 

Below are examples of how Perspectives can help teach about multiple identities (ID.3) and power and privilege (JU.14 ) to students in grades K-2, 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12. Each example incorporates a grade-level outcome, an essential question and text titles. Log in to Perspectives to explore further and build your own learning plan with tasks and strategies! (Free registration required.)

ID.K-2.3:  I know that all my group identities are part of me—but that I am always ALL me.

Essential Question:  What groups do I belong to?

Literature:  My Name Was Hussein (excerpt) by Hristo Kyuchukov (religion, race and ethnicity) 

Informational: “Storm” by Tamera Bryant (gender) “Julia Moves to the United States” by Sean McCollum (immigration)

JU.K-2.14:  I know that life is easier for some people and harder for others and the reasons for that are not always fair.

Essential Question:  How do I know when people are being treated unfairly?

Literature:  

“The Emerald Lizard: A Guatemalan Tale of Helping Others” by Pleasant L. DeSpain (class) 

Informational:  

“The Day I Swam Into a New World” by Margaret Auguste (race and ethnicity) “Jerrie Mock” by Tamera Bryant (gender)

ID.3-5.3: I know that all my group identities are part of who I am, but none of them fully describes me and this is true for other people too.

Essential Question: How does being a member of multiple groups change me?

Literature: My Name Was Hussein (excerpt) by Hristo Kyuchukov (religion, race and ethnicity) Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key (excerpt) by Jack Gantos (ability)

Informational: “Julia Moves to the United States” by Sean McCollum  (immigration)

JU.3-5.14: I know that life is easier for some people and harder for others based on who they are and where they were born.

Essential Question: How is my life easier or more difficult based on who I am and where I was born?

Literature: “Chicken Soup: A Russian Tale of Giving” by Irina Starovoytova (class) The Breadwinner (excerpt) by Deborah Ellis (gender)

Informational: “Beyond the Barbed Wire” by Helen Tsuchiya and Larry Long (immigration, race and ethnicity) Susan B. Anthony (excerpt) by Alexandra Wallner (gender)

ID.6-8.3: I know that overlapping identities combine to make me who I am and that none of my group identities on their own fully defines me or any other person. 

Essential Question: How do different parts of our identities combine to make us who we are?  

Literature: “Why Chicken Means so Much to Me” from The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (class, race and ethnicity) “We Live by What We See at Night” by Martin Espada (place, immigration)

Informational: “Welfare is a Women’s Issue” by Johnnie Tillmon (class, race and ethnicity, gender) Gay and Lesbian Parents (excerpt) by Juliana Fields (LGBT, race and ethnicity)

JU.6-8.14: I know that all people (including myself) have certain advantages and disadvantages in society based on who they are and where they were born.

Essential Question: How do differences in power and privilege influence the relationships we have with each other?

Literature: The Misfits (excerpt) by James Howe (gender, LGBT) Esperanza Rising (excerpt) by Pam Muñoz Ryan (immigration)

Informational: Always Running (excerpt) by Luis J. Rodriguez (immigration, race and ethnicity) “Fear” from Living Up the Street:  Narrative Recollections by Gary Soto (class)

GRADES 9-12 

ID.9-12.3: I know that all my group identities and the intersection of those identities create unique aspects of who I am and that this is true for other people too.

Essential Question: How do our intersecting identities shape our perspectives and the way we experience the world?

Literature: Saffron Dreams (excerpt) by Shaila Abdullah (religion, race and ethnicity) “A Room of One’s Own” (excerpt) by Virginia Woolf (gender) 

Informational: “My Life in the Shadows” by Reyna Wences (immigration) “Gawking, Gaping and Staring” by Eli Clare (ability, gender, LGBT)

JU.9-12.14: I am aware of the advantages and disadvantages I have in society because of my membership in different identity groups, and I know how this has affected my life. 

Essential Question: How do power and privilege impact the relationships people have with each other as well as with institutions? 

Literature: “Eight Hours” by I.G. Blanchard (class) The Jungle (excerpt) by Upton Sinclair (class) 

Informational: “Deaf Culture” by Paula Kluth (ability) “I Have a Dream” by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (race and ethnicty)

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While the appeal of intersectionality shows no signs of abating, it is not always clear what the use of the concept might actually mean for feminist enquiry. In other words, how does one actually go about thinking intersectionally? What does it mean to do an intersectional analysis? In 1991, the US legal scholar Maria Matsuda proposed the strategy of ’asking the other question’ as a useful way to initiate an intersectional analysis: 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?”.

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5 tips for developing intersectionality practices and awareness in your classroom

3. Engage in conversations about intersectionality, privilege, and oppression—and choose representative materials

Acknowledging and appreciating children’s lived experiences values their individual stories. Being seen and heard, as well as seeing themselves represented in the materials they consume, recognizes and affirms students’ identity. Creating a space to talk about the impacts of intersectionality and examining how privilege and oppression have affected their lives can make for powerful opportunities in both the path to self-awareness and empathy as well as rich self-expression. Self-expression might be achieved in more private modes, such as journals or story writing, or you can discuss wider issues more openly in a group for reflection later.

Providing opportunities for students to reflect on their own lived experience and creating a space for expression can serve intersectionality goals as well as linguistic goals for the emergent bilingual student in particular. When you do this, pair topics with linguistic and communicative goals. For example, ask students to reflect on a time when they felt they could not be themselves (or a time when they could be themselves). Teach language structures that will help them express past tense, feelings, and actions. Follow up with students to ask how they would express those thoughts in their home language. Make connections between cognates and sentence structures that might be similar between the languages. Encourage multilingualism and multiple modes of expression (for example, allow students to record their work and present it in a video, slideshow, or even the language of their choice).

For more on setting communication goals and building equity for emergent bilingual students, see Adam Withycombe’s post “2 simple ways to build equity in your classroom for emergent bilingual students.” To learn more about teaching tolerance and antiracist practices, I encourage you to visit the website for national nonprofit Learning for Justice and to download our e-book by Boston educator Casey Andrews, Anti-racism in the classroom: A primer .

4. Teach the language of inclusion explicitly and examine language in your antibias work

Emergent bilingual students, especially those who do not identify with different social categorizations, will likely not learn about inclusive language in school. For example, they may not be taught terms such as “nonbinary,” “cisgender,” “gender fluid,” “underserved,” or “undocumented,” nor will they be familiar with acronyms including AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) or BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color). Incorporating the language of inclusion into lessons and work will help students access shared language that is typically used in informal spaces. Additionally, teaching the language of inclusion allows all students to develop critical thinking about who and what is centered in language development.

[S]et goals for yourself on how to raise awareness, elevate your students’ voices, and change the course of their narrative for the better.

It is also important to examine if and how linguistic bias plays a role in your students’ experiences. Psychologist Katherine Kinzler’s work has shown that people have biases based on the way others speak. In her research, she describes how children often show preferences for people with the same accent they have, regardless of race. She has observed that linguistic bias is a more covert and less examined form of bias compared to racial bias. Examining languages and accents with your emergent bilingual students, then, can be a pathway to understanding perceptions of differences. With your emergent bilingual students, discuss how their languages and views of how others perceive them based on language have impacted their lives at home and at school. It can be beneficial to open up this discussion to your entire classroom, so that students can reflect on their own experiences and learn from each other’s.

5. Design lessons inclusively by working at the margins

The multidimensionality of social inequities that could impact your students highlights the need for multidimensional and multimodal strategies in instruction. That is, if you assume a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching, you run the risk of excluding students. Instead, create multiple pathways by designing activities and instruction to the margins, as described by Andrew Plemmons Pratt in “Designing for race equity: Now is the time.” This not only supports human-centered design , but it also elevates the assets and funds of knowledge kids bring to your classroom and will, ultimately, benefit all learners.

When introducing a poem, for example, scan the text for words that might be difficult for both native and non-native English speakers. Look for regionalisms or variations in language that might not be clear.  Plan for visual and audio support and allow translanguaging in your classroom. You do not need to speak the languages of your students to be a facilitator for translanguaging. Use the linguistic assets of students in your class to provide pathways to meaning and incorporate language-conscious practices to benefit all learners.

A call to action

In closing, I would like to issue forth a call to action: challenge yourself to let these five tips guide you to critically examine your teaching and language practices. In this pursuit, ask yourself if you are truly and fully addressing the intersectionalities that may exist in your classroom. Reflect on how the varied, complex factors of identity might contribute to systemic inequities for many of your students, and set goals for yourself on how to raise awareness, elevate your students’ voices, and change the course of their narrative for the better.

Not sure exactly where to start? Create an identity map for yourself, so you can begin to reflect on how you are the sum of multiple parts of your identity. In modeling and practicing self-reflection and awareness of your identity, you and your students can create a space for conversation together.

Many thanks to Kayla McLaughlin , Spanish Solution Specialist, for her contributions to this blog post.

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Diversity, equity, inclusion: intersectionality.

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• Last Updated: Sep 27, 2023 5:43 PM
• URL: https://libguides.atu.edu/c.php?g=1128168

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• Published: 28 June 2024

Intersectionality and discriminatory practices within mentalhealth care

• Mirjam Faissner   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9635-7850 1 , 2 ,
• Anne-Sophie Gaillard   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3768-4632 3 ,
• Georg Juckel   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9860-9620 1 ,
• Amma Yeboah 4 &
• Jakov Gather   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1681-7472 1 , 3  

Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine volume  19 , Article number:  9 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

Metrics details

Introduction

Through this article collection, we invite readers to get acquainted with intersectionality as a tool to help us challenge mental health care practices that reproduce social injustice. Social injustice describes how the set-up of societies, including social processes and institutions, can disproportionally disadvantage members of marginalized social groups, thereby unjustly constraining their possibilities for flourishing [ 1 ]. The stigmatizing effects of mental health diagnoses, which still, in many contexts, shape a person’s conditions of flourishing, are well known [ 2 ]. Yet it is less considered that when a person receives a mental health diagnosis, that person already occupies a social position characterized by various markers of identity that constrain and enable their possibilities [ 3 ]. We intuitively see that the situation of a White high school teacher with depression differs from the situation of a trans woman of color with anxiety. Yet what difference does this difference make? And how can we approach such differences within mental health care from a social justice perspective?

Intersectionality is at the core for understanding the lived reality of experiencing mental illness in societies shaped by social systems of power and oppression, such as ableism, sexism, classism, cis-heteronormativism or Whiteness. It has a long tradition within social justice work, research and activism. Ideas of intersectionality can be dated back to a famous speech by Sojourner Truth [ 4 ] who, at the Ohio Women’ Convention in 1851 at Akron, Ohio, urged her feminist audience to acknowledge her identity both as a Black person and a woman. Since then, intersectionality has been practiced, further developed and reflected upon by various people and groups, such as Mary Church Terrell [ 5 ], the Combahee River Collective [ 6 ], bell hooks [ 7 ] or Patricia Hill Collins [ 8 ]. In 1989, the legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw [ 9 ] coined ‘intersectionality’ as a metaphor, and introduced it into the academic realm, where it has encouraged justice-oriented research projects in many disciplines, including public health [ 10 ] and psychology [ 11 ].

Intersectionality describes a combined analysis and practice in the pursuit of social justice [ 8 ]. It highlights that different systems of power and oppression are inherently interlinked, and that experiences of discrimination are complex and occur in simultaneity [ 12 ]. Thus, a person’s challenges to navigate our social world – including the health care system – as a trans woman, and as a woman of color and as a person with anxiety cannot be reduced to any one axis of discrimination, and need to be addressed inclusively and under consideration of the complexities posed by co-constitutive power structures.

Bochum INSIST summer school

The articles collected here result from an interdisciplinary and international Summer School “Intersectionality as a tool to prevent structural discrimination. Ethical, legal and social aspects of strategies of anti-discrimination in mental health care” from September 5–9 2022 in Bochum, Germany. The summer school was organized by Mirjam Faissner, Jakov Gather and Georg Juckel, and hosted by the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Preventive Medicine, LWL University Hospital at Ruhr University Bochum. It was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (grant number: 01GP2188). The summer school aimed at bringing scholars from different fields together to understand the multifaceted and complex structures of power, various forms of discriminatory practices, and to discuss strategies for a more inclusive and social justice-based practice, as well as forms of anti-discrimination within mental health care.

Psychiatry, as an institution, has a long history of pathologizing and marginalizing people based on different forms of constructed ‘ab-normality’. For this reason, the central motivation of the initiators of the INSIST summer school, as part of the psychiatric institution, was to stimulate change from within. Opening a space for critique and self-reflection within the institution was an important aim of the summer school. To that end, we invited young scholars and senior researchers from psychiatry, philosophy, psychology, musical therapy, medical ethics, sociology, educational sciences, social work, disability studies and epidemiology. During the summer school, participants engaged with each other in workshops and paper presentations on the topics of intersectionality, heteronormativism, racism, transphobia, ageism, and human rights. Expert lectures were held by Claudia Bernard (Professor of Social Work at Goldsmith University London), Theresia Degener (Professor of Law and Disability Studies at Protestant University of Applied Sciences of the Rheinland-Westfalen-Lippe), Ulrike Kluge (Professor of Psychological and Medical Integration and Migration Studies at Charité University Medicine Berlin), Stephani Hatch (Professor of Sociology and Epidemiology at King’s College London), Katharine Jenkins (lecturer in Philosophy at University of Glasgow) and Amma Yeboah (psychodynamic supervisor, specialist and senior consultant in psychiatry and psychotherapy). During the summer school, participants were invited to collaborate in interdisciplinary writing groups with shared research interests. The groups were designed as a space to delve into a topic and to collaboratively develop article ideas. Three of the original articles published here were conceptualized during these workshops.

Overlook on the articles from this collection

The articles in this collection use intersectionality as an analytic lens [ 13 , 14 ], as a critical practice tool [ 15 ] and as a reflection tool [ 16 , 17 ].

Funer [ 13 ] provides an empirically informed argument to increase the use of intersectional frameworks within mental health research, policy and practice. Starting from a public mental health perspective, Funer notes the potential of intersectionality to understand how mental health disparities across social groups are related to co-constitutive and interrelated systems of structural oppression, including racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and homophobia, leading to unique positions of disadvantage that affect mental health. Funer argues that mental health professionals may be better able to support people experiencing mental health complaints if they acknowledge the social and structural causes of mental distress and consider the distinct positions of intersectional disadvantage that people experiencing mental distress occupy within structural systems of discrimination.

Langmann and Wessel [ 14 ] use intersectionality to critically interrogate the concept of ‘successful aging’, which has prominently been used in gerontology, a field with an important overlap with mental health care. More specifically, Langmann and Wessel, based on several examples from mental health care, identify ageist and ableist biases in the discourse on successful aging. In one case analysis, they show how the cumulation of classism, sexism, and racism leads to increased risks of depression in poor Black women, a risk often not adequately considered in the literature on good aging. The authors argue for a new approach to aging that rejects a universal definition of ‘aging well’ and, by contrast, considers the diverse experiences of ‘aging well’ that are influenced by race, gender, socio-economic status, and disabilities.

Faissner and colleagues [ 15 ] consider intersectionality as a tool for clinical ethicists. First, they provide reasons to use intersectionality in clinical ethics consultations: According to their normative argument, clinical ethicists are committed to pursuing social justice in health care and are well-positioned to do so. According to the authors’ epistemic argument, power structures influence both ethical conflicts in clinical practice and dynamics within clinical ethics consultations, so that not considering these influences leads to information losses and potentially insufficient or mistaken ethical analyses. Based on a concrete case example from mental healthcare, the authors explicate how intersectionality can contribute to addressing structural discrimination in clinical ethics consultations. To this end, they critically review existing approaches for clinical ethics consultants to address structural racism in clinical ethics consultations and extend them by intersectional considerations.

Epistemic appropriation is a process by which a marginalized community is harmed if the knowledge and ideas they have developed are detached from the originating authors and then misdirected through using them for goals not directed towards the originating community. Myerscough and colleagues [ 16 ] analyze how mental health research threatens to epistemically appropriate knowledge developed in trans communities. They provide an in-depth analysis of how concerns around detransition and transition regret have been misdirected for anti-trans goals. In line with intersectionality as a tool for critical reflection, the authors urge researchers to critically question their own motivation, subject position, and relationship to the trans community when engaging in trans mental health research.

In her original commentary, Villar [ 17 ] utilizes an interpretation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 gothic short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” to draw attention to socially unjust practices in mental health care practice and research. In the story, a White young woman diarist suffering from post-partum depression with psychotic features chronicles her experience of the “Rest Cure” provided by her physician husband. Following an intersectional analysis of the social positioning and power dynamics of the characters in the short story, Villar employs the narrative as a starting point to critically reflect on the representation of marginalized service users in clinical research.

The articles in this collection draw attention to different forms of social injustice, how they affect mental health, health care practices and research, and what could be done to address them. By creating spaces for the topic of social injustice, by acknowledging it, and by questioning the existing power structures and hierarchies that shape our professional care, the contributors of this collection already practice intersectionality. We invite readers who wish for a more inclusive mental health care practice to join this process as a joint effort. Together, we can think of intersectionality as a vision, as a forward-looking collaborative practice of improving mental healthcare in our shared social world.

Young I. Marion. Responsibility for Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mehta N, Thornicroft G. Stigmatisation of people with mental illness and of psychiatric institutions. In: Helmchen H, Sartorius N, editors. Ethics in psychiatry. European contributions. Dordrecht: Springer (International library of ethics, law, and the new medicine) 2010; pp. 12–33.

Oexle N, Corrigan PW. Understanding mental illness stigma toward persons with multiple stigmatized conditions: implications of intersectionality theory. Psychiatric Serv (Washington, D.C.). 2018;69(5):587–89. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.201700312

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Acknowledgements

Mirjam Faissner, Jakov Gather and Georg Juckel would like to thank the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for funding within the project INSIST (grant number: 01GP2188). The authors warmly thank the experts and participants of the INSIST summer school at Ruhr University Bochum for constructive discussions and valuable exchanges during the summer school. We extend our warm thanks to all contributors and all reviewers of the articles of this collection who supported and encouraged its development.

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Faissner, M., Gaillard, AS., Juckel, G. et al. Intersectionality and discriminatory practices within mentalhealth care. Philos Ethics Humanit Med 19 , 9 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13010-024-00159-7

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"There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives." These words, spoken by Audre Lorde, capture the essence of intersectionality.

Chances are, you've come across the term before. Intersectionality, as a term and concept, has surged in popularity in the United States and around the world, informing the work of activists and policymakers alike engaged in the fight for equity. 

Yet this critical framework is often misunderstood. Even within progressive circles that embrace intersectional thinking, there are countless encounters with "intersectionality" used as a vague description for the simple fact of being a member of more than one social group whose voice deserves to be heard. 

Intersectionality runs much deeper, and it offers a powerful lens to help us understand — and overcome — deep-seated inequity.

What Is Intersectionality?

Intersectionality is, in short, a framework for understanding oppression. 

Originally coined by American lawyer, scholar, and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw, the term has its roots in activism and the concept of "interlocking" systems of oppression was commonly referenced by the Combahee River Collective , a Black lesbian social justice collective formed in Boston in 1974. 

Drawing on these unique struggles and experiences, Crenshaw further defined the term in the context of anti-discrimination laws, which she felt insufficiently addressed the experiences of Black women who faced discrimination and exclusion in a variety of contexts. At the time, she argued, existing laws only accounted for gender and race, not the ways that the experiences of Black women are compounded by sexism and racism. Instead, Crenshaw said, oppression should not be analyzed separately but rather as interdependent, and "intersectionality" was born as the idea that individuals experience oppression differently based on where they stand across social markers.

To help visualize what that entails, Crenshaw offers the illustration of intersecting roads: "Racism road crosses with the streets of colonialism and patriarchy, and ‘crashes’ occur at the intersections,” she wrote . “Where the roads intersect, there is a double, triple, multiple, and many-layered blanket of oppression.”

Take the pay gap as an example. In the US, women earn 83 cents for every dollar a man earns. However, this number quickly changes when you factor in additional identities, with Black women earning a mere 64 cents for every dollar a white man earns. If we were to consider this solely as a gender issue, we wouldn’t be addressing how race magnifies this disparity. Similarly, if we were to understand pay gaps only through the lens of race, we would miss how gender affects Black women’s oppression.

This is why intersectionality is such a useful framework — it highlights how discrimination and exclusion are not simple and can't be solved by focusing on a single issue. Instead, it can help us understand how the experience of poverty is gendered and racialized and how it differs within different social contexts. This approach is crucial in understanding the inequalities different groups face — and by extension, how to overcome them by considering the complexity of the identities and patterns of oppression that individuals face within a given society.

What Are 3 Key Facts That People Should Know About Intersectionality?

• Intersectionality is how multiple identities interact to create unique patterns of oppression.

Originally coined by American scholar and lawyer Kimberle Crenshaw, who drew inspiration from Black feminist movements in the US, the term highlights how race, gender, class, and other factors are interconnected.

When it comes to fighting extreme poverty, intersectionality means looking at how these factors fuel various issues, ranging from health inequity to climate change and more.

How Does It Relate to the Global Goals and Extreme Poverty?

Extreme poverty — and the forces that exacerbate it — are deeply rooted in the social, cultural, political, and economic structures that shape our world.

The United Nations’ Global Goals operate as a framework for the elimination of extreme poverty by 2030, but achieving them requires paying particular attention to how certain groups are disproportionately affected by inequity due to an underlying set of social factors. Failing to look at them from a multitude of perspectives could jeopardize the achievement of the Global Goals and perpetuate inequalities in a vicious cycle of poverty globally.

When looking at issues on a global scale, intersectionality can help us understand just how interconnected these challenges are. 

Environmental racism is a prime example of that. According to a recent study  from the Environmental Justice and Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform, Black people in the US are 75% more likely to live near fenceline zones near chemical facilities than the rest of the population. This, in turn, exposes entire communities to chemicals that are linked to cancer, birth defects, and chronic illnesses, fuelling a cycle of poor health and living conditions. Globally, the trend follows the same pattern, with low-income and vulnerable populations bearing the brunt of the climate crisis.

Child marriage is another example of how gender, age, and health intersect with poverty. Young girls are particularly vulnerable to the practice of forced marriage, with an estimated  40% of young women in developing countries married before the age of 18, posing a serious threat to their full economic participation and access to reproductive health care.

The list goes on , but the takeaway remains the same: Poverty is a complex problem, and while the Global Goals are a step in the right direction toward its eradication, it cannot be eliminated through the siloed approaches of single-issue activism. It will take an intersectional approach — understanding how social factors such as class, gender, race, and others come together to affect people's quality of life — to move us forward.

What Can I Do?

You can put intersectionality into practice in your day-to-day life by being aware of how your own identity and relative privilege affect how you experience the world. And you can make room for those at the crossroads of multiple oppressions and compounded marginalization to share their stories.

As a step toward creating a more inclusive and just world, you can also support initiatives that work to combat discrimination through an intersectional approach. This list of Black women-led organizations is a good place to start.

Finally, you can make sure your activism doesn't end with Black History Month by staying engaged in the process of questioning, learning, and unlearning continuously. 

People globally face many intersecting forms of discrimination and marginalization every day, for many different reasons. Unjust social, political, and economic systems perpetuate this discrimination and keep people trapped in poverty. 

This June, take our  Equity Month Hero Challenge  to learn how we can all be champions for equity and justice every day, and earn your Equity Month Hero badge to wear proudly on your Global Citizen profile.  Take the Challenge now . 

Global Citizen Explains

Demand Equity

What Is Intersectionality and Why Is It Important?

Feb. 16, 2022

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What is intersectionality and why is it important.

In the almost thirty years since the term intersectionality was introduced, it has been taken up in a range of academic disciplines in the United States and beyond. It has even entered public discourse as a buzzword in the age of identity politics. Black feminist and critical race scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, the progenitor of the term, described intersectionality as “a method and a disposition, a heuristic and analytical tool” in a 2013 article she coauthored with other feminist scholars. The now-expansive use of the term speaks to its power to attend to what black feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins refers to as the “interdependent phenomena” of oppressions, whether based on race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, nationality, or other social categories.

Although Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in the late 1980s in the context of the rise of critical race legal studies and through her own research, it is based on a concept developed over many decades of thinking and struggle by black and indigenous feminists and other women of color. Within academe, the term has also traveled and developed well beyond legal studies to counter unidimensional and exclusionary analyses of oppression in many disciplines, such as the reduction of feminist inquiry to examining only the experiences of white, Western women or the absenting of women of color within antiracist scholarship and of indigenous women within decolonial scholarship. But as intersectionality becomes more institutionalized in academe and popularized in the wider culture, its meanings can also become diluted and even misappropriated. Too often it is reduced to ticking off identity categories in so-called politically correct ways or misrepresented in contemporary identity politics and culture wars, which have erupted recently into the right-wing politics of white male victimization. Thus, at this political moment, it is important to revisit the genealogy of this ever-evolving concept to understand both its theoretical and its practical value for addressing “gender issues” on campus and the costs of its dilution and misappropriation.

Crenshaw advanced intersectional analysis especially through her 1991 study of domestic violence against women of color, particularly immigrant women, in Los Angeles. She centered her analysis on the fraud provisions of the 1990 Immigration and Nationality Act. Because applications for permanent resident status could proceed only after two years of marriage and cohabitation and with the permission of spouses, the act effectively forced immigrant women to stay married to and cohabit with their US citizen or permanent resident spouses, regardless of any abuse suffered at the hands of these sponsors. Technically, spouses could escape an abusive partner without risking deportation if they reported the abuse. However, fear of reporting, economic obstacles to seeking redress, and the failure of legal authorities and battered women’s shelters to provide multilingual and other special services hampered the ability of survivors to do so. The confluence of these structural barriers acted to further subjugate women already vulnerable to racism, sexism, and classism while increasing the privileges (male, national, and, in some cases, racial or class-based) of abusive husbands who were enabled by official policy and practice to maintain legal, cultural, and social control over their wives.

Crenshaw argued that this “structural intersectionality” among forms of oppression based on race, gender, class, and national origin that emanated from both the state and intimate relations put immigrant women of color at most risk of violence. She also argued that this situation required the development of “political intersectionality,” which recognizes that women of color are members of at least two subordinated groups—women and people of color—and, thus, are critical to developing antiracist and antisexist agendas for social movements. Like other feminist women of color, Crenshaw observed that mainstream feminism had become dominated by and catered most to the experiences of white women, while traditional civil rights groups privileged the leadership and experiences of black or other men of color. This state of affairs pushed women of color to the margins.

When officials and feminists alike disregard the experiences of women of color who are subjected to domestic and sexual violence, prescriptions for addressing such violence overlook how both sexism and racism conspire to perpetuate it. Racism not only denigrates the experiences and voices of women of color but also silences women of color who would report abuses they may suffer at the hands of men of color. Black feminists, for example, have highlighted how racism within institutional cultures—from the police to social services—leaves them unwilling to report domestic violence. They fear feeding into racist stereotypes, including stereotypes of black men, who are already imagined in a racist society as violent and thus are subject to all manner of violence themselves, ranging from police brutality and murder to mass incarceration. Not only does this dynamic result in underreporting and lack of assistance, but it can also sideline issues of domestic violence and sexism more generally within civil rights agendas and other antiracist organizing efforts. When these kinds of violence are not resisted along their many fronts, social justice movements are weakened.

But theorists of intersectionality stress that forms of oppression are not just additive, as if they were wholly separate layers of domination. Rather, women of color actually experience a different form of racism from men of color, just as they experience a different form of sexism from white women. In this sense, gender is always “raced” and race is always gendered. Racialized sexist stereotypes of white women portray them, under the still-prevailing legacy of the Victorian age, as passive, physically weak, undersexed, and needful and deserving of protection. In contrast, racialized sexist stereotypes of black women (which can also be read as sexualized racist stereotypes), under the still-prevailing legacy of slavery and colonization, construct them as aggressive, physically strong, oversexed, and undeserving of protection. As intersectional theory has traveled across national borders, feminist antiracist and anticolonial scholars have observed that racialized sexist stereotypes also vary with respect to constructions of women in different regions of the world. As I have noted in my own intersectional work on global gender inequalities, these constructions typically justify, for example, which women are assigned to specific subjugated roles in the global political economy over time. As factories spread across the global South in search of “cheap” labor—made so by neocolonial relations, economic desperation, and patriarchal family discipline—poor Latina women were initially viewed as quiescent labor with “nimble fingers.” That changed when they began to organize and certain global factory work shifted to Asia, with poor Asian women taking on the imposed mantle of the most obedient and most suited for close work in garment and electronic assembly. With the fall of the Soviet bloc and its state-run economy, which left many state-employed women workers in that region unemployed, Eastern European white women were rendered available to and became preferred by Western white men as mail-order brides, on the assumption that they would not be uppity wives like their feminist-inflected Western counterparts. Thus, how women are simultaneously and differently racialized and sexualized (and classed) depends upon cultural and material legacies and contemporary cultural and material forces.

Intersectional theory has also traveled across more identity borders. Although Crenshaw’s early work centered on heterosexual immigrant women of color, intersectional theory is now applied to understanding how we all carry multiple, albeit constructed and provisional, identities. The salience of such identities— based not only on race, normative gender, class, and nation but also on sexuality, nonnormative gender, physical (dis)ability, religion, and age—varies in different times and contexts, conferring either disadvantages or privileges on each of us, again in relation to time and context. This recognition has gone a long way toward disrupting hierarchies of oppression based, for example, on claims that class oppression trumps all other forms of oppression or that gender oppression is the originary oppression or that racial oppression must be primary to the exclusion of others. In this way, intersectional thinking has also opened the way to more inclusive and coalitional social movements and agendas. We are now witnessing the advent of (currently transnational) movements like the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter, and the Global Justice Movement arising out of the World Social Forum, all of which are led or heavily influenced by women and prominently feature queer women and women of color. Such movements see struggles against racism, classism, neocolonialism, xenophobic nationalism, heterosexism, transphobia, ableism, ageism, Islamophobia, and ecological destruction as indivisible. In practice, of course, such movements are not always as inclusive or attentive to an intersectional analysis as they should be, especially when they are forced to respond to multiple attacks on many fronts, which causes them to prioritize certain issues and actors over others. Nevertheless, organizers and activists informed by intersectionality reject a monolithic movement based on a single, exclusionary identity or single-issue politics. Instead, movements informed by intersectionality remain flexible and forward-looking, continuing to listen for and to the voicing of new or previously hidden inequities not addressed in social justice movements. In this way, intersectional theory and practice is “a work in progress,” as Crenshaw and others have argued.

There have been, however, appropriations of the concept of intersectionality that have watered it down and wrested it from its radical foundations. Recall that multiculturalism in higher education has come to mean merely a respect for “different” cultures—a superficial celebration of many kinds of food, dress, music, and other such cultural expressions. In this diminished vision of intersectionality, institutional approaches to diversity are reduced simply to increasing the numbers of “different” bodies on campus, resulting in policies and practices that fall short of what is needed. Consider, for example, how campuses provide services to “diverse” students as if their bodies transparently cued a single identity, whether based on race, national origin, sex, or sexuality. Consider, too, the proliferation of separate offices and groups on campuses for women, racial minorities, sexual and gender minorities, foreign nationals, the disabled, and so on. Such practices are akin to what sociologist Sirma Bilge calls “ornamental intersectionality,” a neoliberal approach that “allows institutions and individuals to accumulate value through good public relations and ‘rebranding’ without the need to actually address the underlying structures that produce and sustain injustice.” Although “accommodating” difference in separate, serial fashion can reduce some barriers to teaching and learning, intersectional thought and analysis demands a far more transformative process in scholarship, the curriculum, and organization.

These are times of intense precarity within the academy and beyond. This political moment is fueled by what political theorist Wendy Brown calls “libertarian authoritarianism.” Brown defines libertarian authoritarianism as both an extension and a result of neoliberalism: it simultaneously guts public institutions, undermines democracy, and defines freedom as the freedom to be sexist, racist, homophobic, and xenophobic and to engage in speech and actions that uphold the violence of white male supremacy. In this political and cultural atmosphere, deeper intersectional insights and actions are all the more needed. As a structural and relational theory and a method or analytic tool, intersectionality is poised to reveal both the intersections of institutions, systems, and categorizations that produce oppression and the intersections of identity categorizations within individuals and groups. Ideally, intersectionality can disable hierarchical exclusions and enable peoples subjugated in different but connected ways to coalesce around more expansive agendas for social (and ecological) justice. As such, it is the opposite of—and resistant to—the vulgar, ugly, divisive, and exclusionary identity politics of white male victimization fomented by libertarian authoritarianism, which obscures and distracts from how structural oppressions harm us all. Right now, labor of all sorts is continually casualized. Public welfare, education, and services are starved to provide ever more private capital for the few. Democratic decision-making and human rights, already insufficient, further erode. Many kinds of violence are increasing, including the reappearance of threats of nuclear war. Environmental protections continue to steadily decline on a planet already in the midst of a climate-change crisis. If present trends persist, there will be little left to lord over.

This special issue on gender on campus happily coincides with the one-hundredth anniversary of the AAUP’s Committee on Women in the Academic Profession, long referred to as Committee W. This committee, which addresses such issues as pay equity, work and family balance, sexual harassment and discrimination, affirmative action, and the status of women faculty in rank and tenure, is now devoted to the advancement of all those who identify as women, femme, and nonbinary, in all their diversity. The committee’s mission reflects the influence of intersectional theorizing, analysis, and praxis on thought about gender and gender politics. Certainly, with the rise of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, themselves transnational in scope, the pervasiveness of sexual violence appears to be at the top of feminist agendas on US campuses and in US culture. But what we have learned from intersectional analysis and organizing is that we must consider how race, class, citizenship status, and sexuality significantly determine who is most at risk, who will report sexual violence, how they are treated, what supports they have, and what remedies are made available to them. Otherwise, efforts to combat sexual violence will fall significantly short. Moreover, we must equip our students and ourselves with the ability to perform intersectional analyses. If we do not, coalitions across identity categories that make connections between sexual and other violence cannot be built. Intersectional analysis can also enhance coalition-building among faculty, students, and staff as well as among committees of the AAUP, such as the Committee on Women in the Academic Profession, the Committee on Historically Black Institutions and Scholars of Color, and the Committee on Sexual Diversity and Gender Identity. The complication of gender and other social categories by the rise of intersectional thinking and activism makes possible what Patricia Hill Collins calls “flexible solidarity” informed by the politics of feminists of color. Such solidarity forges alliances conditional on shared commitments to resisting not only race and gender oppression but also a range of other interrelated forms of structural and direct violence.   

Anne Sisson Runyan , professor of political science and former head of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Cincinnati, has served as chair of the AAUP’s Committee on Women in the Academic Profession and published widely in the field of feminist international relations. Her latest book is Global Gender Politics (2018). Her email address is [email protected] . 

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• The Briefing
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Tuesday, June 25, 2024

How’s this for irony british snap election set to take place on the 4th of july — what’s behind it and why americans should watch it closely, the far-right and far-left in europe: the state of european politics and the conservative and liberal binary as it heads into crucial summer elections, israel is a divisive issue for the lgbtq community the left is imploding, and intersectionality is the ‘omnicause’.

It’s Tuesday, June 25, 2024.

I’m Albert Mohler, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

It’s virtually impossible to miss the fact that we are in a presidential election year in the United States, we’re looking at national elections. You add to that, that every single seat in the US House of Representatives is up for election or re-election and about a third of the Senate, and then you go to the statewide elections, local elections. Americans are being bombarded with all kinds of messaging about the election, and of course, the greatest focus, the greatest intensity is directed towards the presidential election. That’s why Thursday night, the first debate in the 2024 cycle between the expected Democratic nominee, the incumbent President Joe Biden and the expected Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump. Well, we’re going to be talking about it on Friday, and that’s because it is inescapably big news.

I’m not really going to talk about the American election today, I want to shift attention, go across the Atlantic and understand that big, big developments are happening in elections in Europe as well. This reaches as close as America’s closest ally there in Europe. You can look at the United Kingdom, the UK, Great Britain, where Rishi Sunak, the Conservative Prime Minister, called an election which is going to be held, how American does this look? On July the fourth. On July the fourth, the people of Great Britain are going to be going to the polls. This was because the Prime Minister called the election earlier than is required in the British constitutional system. He did so, because quite honestly, he saw it to the advantage of his party, but we are talking about an expected conservative party disaster in Great Britain, and the reasons for that are many.

I’m going to argue that the most important reason that the Conservative Party is in danger of being kicked out of office is because it has been insufficiently conservative. It has gone through so many prime ministers, it has gone through so many scandals, it has been in office so long. The reality is that in the British parliamentary system, it becomes more and more likely over time that an opposition party is simply going to look different than the incumbent party. In the case of the current leadership of the Conservative Party in Great Britain, we are looking at many years in which the Conservative Party has been giving away its electoral advantage, and quite frankly, has been compromising its convictions, no great surprise. Keir Starmer is the leader the Labor Party, and in the strangest turn of events, on at least some issues, the Labor Party, which at one point was officially socialist in the UK, is actually a little closer to what Americans might recognize as a position, than the Conservative Party, which has been decreasingly conservative over a fairly long period of time.

You look back to the 1980s and you think of the Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, she was a conviction politician. She came to office on conservative ideas. She applied those conservative convictions in terms of her leadership. By the way, this sometimes caused her problems inside her own party, where quite honestly, there were a lot of men in that party who had weaker conviction than Margaret Thatcher, and there were a lot of leaders in the party who would’ve trimmed their sales for political advantage. Margaret Thatcher wouldn’t do that. Now, after Margaret Thatcher was toppled by her own party, the party continued in power for some length of time, and then gave way to the Labor Party under Tony Blair. You just look at this and you recognize, this is an unfolding story. One party, then another party, it’s rather similar to what you see in the American pattern, but that pattern might just get broken when it comes to the United Kingdom.

That is because the conservatives are polling so low, they might actually not be the party in second place. There are those who are looking at the conservative apocalypse that seems to be impending in the United Kingdom, and they’re simply wondering what will be the political option for true conservatives going forward? Too early to tell, but the reality is that Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister is a technocrat. He is more a product of the City of London as it is known, meaning the financial district. And then you look at others who have been overblown personalities such as Boris Johnson, and you also look at the fact there’s so much instability, but in the Conservative Party, there is simply no central conservative message. One of the things many Americans have not yet figured out is that when you look at the Conservative Party in Great Britain, on many social issues, it’s anything but conservative. It is basically pretty much to the left.

That’s where conservatives who are principled conservatives need to recognize a party that has compromised that much on conservative principles, is basically false advertising when it calls itself conservative, and eventually, the electorate is going to figure that out.

Meanwhile, there’s another pattern going on in France. In France, the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, who has the constitutional power to call elections, called what is referred to in the French system as a snap election. He surprised everyone including his own party’s prime minister in calling for the election. The prime minister we are told, had the courtesy of finding this out an hour before the rest of the world. Why in France would there be this kind of call for a snap election? Why would Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, who sees himself very much in the role of a Charles de Gaulle, frankly, the French president giving leadership to the entire European continent. Why would he do this? It looks like an act of political desperation.

Well, there’s a story behind it, it’s a fascinating story. What’s going on in Europe right now as a whole? You could take Western Europe, and speak of those nations traditionally allied with the United States in particular, what you have going on there, but also in much of central and Eastern Europe is a turn to a far more conservative direction. You’ve seen this in Hungary, we’ve seen this in other nations. We are seeing it right now in France. Even before this, we saw it in what happened just a few weeks ago in Europe, which was the cycle of elections for the European Parliament. That is a super national body, by the way. It was brought about in the European adoption of what is known as the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. It was the high-water mark of the period after the fall of the Soviet Union, when there was this belief that all of a sudden, Europe could emerge as a super national body, a continental power to rival the United States of America and influence in culture shaping ability and in terms of economics.

Of course, what you have in the European Union after the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, it is not the creation of anything like the United States of Europe. There were those who wanted it that way, but there’s a very important historical and cultural reason why that is a very unlikely development. Just to put the matter simply, it is because when you look at those European nations and you look at different languages, different cultures, they do see themselves as in some sense a part of a common European project. But at the end of the day, and here’s something Christians need to understand, actually has deep theological roots. They see themselves as more French than European. They see themselves as more German than European. They see themselves as more Hungarian than European. The reason for that, as I say, there’s a theological principle here that theological principle is called subsidiarity.

That means that the greatest meaning, the greatest truth, the greatest simplicity, the greatest unity subsides at the lowest level of organization. You say, where does that show up? Well, it shows up in Genesis 1 where you have the creation of human civilization, by the creation of marriage with the union of a man and a woman and the creation of a family, the instruction to that married couple be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. It’s a reminder to us that marriage and the family are so basic to human civilization, that the loyalty there is stronger than the loyalty to a state, or for that matter, a nation, certainly some kind of international body. The more basic the unit, the deeper the loyalties, and that’s exactly what you see in Europe. It’s not just a matter of say some kind of principle working out, it’s also the matter of speaking the same language, understanding the same culture, and possessing the same history.

France is actually a very interesting example of this because under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle after World War II, France was about as French as you can get. In other words, Charles de Gaulle was not only about France having a role in Europe, but France having the leading role in Europe. And as you look at France right now, Emmanuel Macron who came to office years ago as something of a young pioneering technocrat who had created a middle way in politics and created a new political party, he was elected and then reelected the president of France. He is looking at the end of his term, limited period in office. Here’s what’s shaking everybody, the European Parliament elections, the elections for the European Parliament took place just a matter of weeks ago, and it’s that super national body that wasn’t intended to have an awful lot of power in the beginning, but as you know, those groups tend to accumulate power.

The election brought an unprecedented and absolutely shocking number of conservative office holders to the European Parliament. It has shocked many of the established historic European nations, and frankly, scared the leadership there to death. Because you can pretty much do the math. If the elections for those seats in the European Parliament went so overwhelmingly conservative when it was unexpected, well, you have national leaders thinking, “Well, the same thing could happen here.” That is exactly why Emmanuel Macron who does not want to see the right take power in France, that is why he called this snap election surprising even his own party, and it is seen as, if not a desperate act, then a very high-risk act because it could actually bring into power a conservative government, and the French president is not going to have much power to reject what the voters have done.

They haven’t done it yet, the election is still out there, but it tells us a great deal that the specter of a conservative turn in France and in other European nations has the attention of the media and political elites in the United States. That’s because there’s a predisposition on the American side, our own say, media elites, to be very friendly to the European left and very, very concerned about the European right. That’s exactly the way those same elites look at the conservative-liberal divide in the United States of America, so no surprise here. I want to point out something that you’re going to see over and over again in the media coverage of these European elections and their national elections, as I said, and countries as important as Britain and France in terms of American relationships. You also have other elections taking place all throughout Europe.

But the headline you need to watch out for, the terminology you need to watch out for is the term “far right.”

For example, just a couple of days ago, the Washington Post ran an article. Here’s the headline, “French Protesters Decry Far-Right Wins as Snap Election Looms.” Well, all right, if you look at the languages being used in the American media, you’re going to see this over and over again. This is the specter, of advance, of gains by far-right parties in Europe, far right candidates. Doesn’t that lead to a question? That is, what’s the distinction between right and far right? Well, I asked that question because apparently there is no fixed definition. There are a couple of things going on here. One is the political context in Europe, and the other is the political context in the United States. In the political context of Europe, there has been a long-term intellectual effort to try to rob the conservative side, the conservative parties of legitimacy.

One of the ways they do that is by calling them far-right parties. Now, if there is truth in that, if you’re far right, you have to be right of something. There has to be something of which you are on the right. As you look at the European context, here’s the thing you need to keep in mind. The European powers that be have for years tried to create a political mainstream that they would allow, say in terms of acceptable political discourse and policy, and then they would call everyone else outside that system. That was quite effective for a long time, it was quite effective in a nation like France. Not effective any longer, at least it appears that way. The specter in France is of the party known as the National Rally, and it had been known as the National Front. By the way, it did begin as something that even in the American system would’ve been seen as somewhat far right.

It has been moving to the political mainstream, or you might also say that events have been moving the French people in a more conservative direction. Now, one of the worldview issues we need to keep in mind here is that people make these kinds of judgments based upon both what they hope for and what they fear. This is what happens in an election. People vote out of hope, but they also vote out of fear. In Europe right now, the great fear is that France will cease being France, that Italy will cease being Italy, that Germany will cease being Germany. Now, there are other fears out there including an expansionist set of aims by Russia, and you’re looking at internal and external threats, financial threats. The big issue here really is cultural, it really is political, and that’s why it really should be of interest to Americans because there is no way our own election in November isn’t going to demonstrate many of the same challenges and patterns.

I want to point to something else. In the New Yorker, and the New Yorker is by the way, one of the clearest signs of how elites in the United States are thinking. The New Yorker, well, here’s a clue for you, it’s published in New York. It is very much a part of that cultural and intellectual elite and its media real estate is quite expensive and quite influential. In the comment, talk about the town section of a recent edition of the New Yorker. This is actually June 24, so it’s very current. You have this statement made by columnist, Adam Gopnik, and he says that right now the main tension in Europe is reflected in the largest groupings in the European Parliament. He says that the great hope will be that the European Parliament will still be basically grouped in terms of a range from the rational right to the reasonable left.

That’s very interesting language, isn’t it? You can see what’s going on here. You have an effort to try to say, we’ll give legitimacy to the rational right. The people among conservatives who are thinking the way think they ought to think and to the reasonable left, which means there’s a left that evidently is not reasonable, and you knew that already. It’s interesting to see the New Yorker seemingly acknowledge that. My point is this, if you have the power to determine in advance what is the rational right and what is the reasonable left, and you say everyone outside of that simply isn’t allowable in the political discourse, in the political system, then you have vast power. That’s exactly what the American media tried to do with so many conservatives in Europe by referring to them as far right. By putting far in front of right, they’re trying to say they’re outside the political legitimacy.

Now, here’s the thing, as you understand that, it’s morally explainable that there could be parties that would be outside that acceptable range. Some of these parties and some of these arguments and some of these nations have struggled with this for a long time, particularly on some of the most difficult questions that were raised in the 20th century in terms of some forms of nationalism, nationalist ideology. You could just go down the list. The fact is that the electorate in Europe is looking at the conservative side with a whole new light, which is to say they’re looking at the liberal side as now having less credibility. What would be the issue? What would be the one issue? The one issue is immigration, and it’s sometimes more often described in Europe as migration. The reason for that is because it’s often from closer sources across the Mediterranean than what is true in the United States.

Looking at this, you understand the immigration, migration, out of control. One of the things you hear over and over again is that there is no control of the border. We have lost control of the border. You have French citizens asking, and this is over against the specter of what’s been happening in Europe, and in particular places like France and Belgium and other countries where you have, for instance, an influx of Muslims who are not assimilating into French culture. They’re not assimilating into German or Belgian culture. You have people who are now voting their concerns, and it’s going to be very interesting to see what happens in these European elections over the summer. And as is so often the case, they may tell us at least something of what to expect in the United States come November.

Now we’re going to come back to the United States, although there are parallels to what we’re going to be talking about here in Europe and elsewhere. Recently, the New York Times ran a headline and you got to just look at this and take it for what it is. Here’s the headline, “The Gaza War is Dividing the LGBTQ Community.” Now, you look at putting two things together, only the New York Times perhaps can figure out a way to put that on the front page of the newspaper, how the war in Gaza is dividing the LGBTQ community. Now, wait just a minute, it’s not dividing L from G, from B, from T, from Q. No, it is dividing different political and moral polarities within the LGBTQ community. Liam Stack is writing the article and we are told that these divisions are now showing up and, “They have been on full display during pride month, a time typically focused on celebration and solidarity.” Here’s his explanation, “The fight over how the community,” that means the LGBTQ community, “should respond to the war in Gaza has played out in fiery online comments and false accusations of pro-Hamas activity.”

It goes on and on. One man who is a journalist we are told who is also an activist, “Who has been highlighting the stories of LGBTQ people in Gaza on his popular social media channel since the war began.” He said, “I think queer people are mostly on one side of the debate. It feels like queer people are coming out for Palestine in a really large way.” That turns out largely to be true. I want us to understand why it’s so, and that will take us back to a word that we’ve used in the past called intersectionality. It’s a word that was coined by liberal academics in a neo-Marxist context. It is a critical part of what is called critical theory. The idea of intersectionality is that you have multiple identities in a person, and a person can have any number of these multiple identities.

The greater the intersections of these different identities that are the subject of oppression, the greater moral value, the greater moral concentration is to be found, which is to say, just to put it bluntly, that the argument is made that a lesbian is discriminated against as compared to a heterosexual woman, but a Black lesbian is at the intersection of personal identity than includes lesbian and Black, and thus is even more oppressed. You can just understand in critical theory how this unwinds. You can have people who say, well, okay, here, you have someone who is aged, or here you have someone who is in another situation. Pretty soon you got five or six points of intersectionality, which is why the left just recently has been blowing itself up because it’s like everyone shows up with the argument, I’m more oppressed than you are.

There’s something else in intersectionality and that is that you got to say, okay, well this is good and that is bad. This is where on the left, increasingly folks are saying, Palestine, Palestinian cause, even increasingly horrifyingly enough “Hamas good, Israel bad.” There you have old patterns of anti-Semitism with the overlay of the new problem of critical theory and this idea of intersectionality and it made the front page of the New York Times, the Gaza War is dividing the LGBTQ community. At least some, let’s just say sane, rational people are responding to this saying, “How is it that the LGBTQ community is siding with Hamas? If not explicitly with Hamas, then at least with the perception of the Palestinian cause against Israel?” The answer is because they are oppressed. Well, let me just say that this is something that requires a little bit of clear-headed thinking and a little bit of honesty just to say before we can say anything else, let’s just say that the one place you better not show up as LGBTQ is in territory controlled by Hamas.

You would think that would be obvious even to liberal LGBTQ activists in the United States. Here’s where the critical theory dynamic is more powerful than even an instinct towards self-preservation because you have this idea, we have to side with this side in this equation. I think it’s the wrong side in terms of understanding who invaded whom. It was Hamas that invaded and attacked Israel, not vice versa. Now, as you look at this, there’s a long history. We all acknowledge that, but the point is we are now looking at a major division in the United States on the left, and Israel is the loser, and Palestine and the Palestinian cause as it is perceived is the winner. I want to point out something else in this, and that is that overwhelmingly over the course of say the last 100 years, the Jewish community and Jewish voters in the United States have voted overwhelmingly with the Democratic Party, and they have voted overwhelmingly more on the political left than on the political right.

You have to wonder if that’s going to change simply over questions of anti-Semitism and opposition to Israel. Now I’m going to go back to France just to make that point. Serge Klarsfeld, who is one of the most famous and influential Jewish figures in France, one of the survivors of the Holocaust, and someone who has been a Nazi hunter, he has announced he is going to support the conservative cause. Remember in the United States, the parties referred to as a far-right party. He now says he is going to support the National Rally Party simply because of its support for Israel and the Jewish people over against the increasing anti-Semitism of the left. That’s a major political shift. You have to wonder if something similar will soon come in the United States as well, and Israel is going to be the dividing line. This kind of article in the front page about the Gaza War dividing the LGBTQ community, it’s a signal of things to come.

I also want to point out that Andy Kessler at the Wall Street Journal is caught onto the same pattern. You got to love his headline, “The Omnicause is Collapsing.” He speaks of Omnicause in terms of the pattern on the left, whereby every cause is simply thrown into one great cause. All right-minded people must hold the position, LGBTQ plus, second-wave feminism plus, you just go down the list. Non-binary, you have to be for that. You have to be for everything. Palestine is now added into this, which means opposition to Israel, seeing Israel as the enemy. The Omnicause is collapsing, says Andy Kessler, add the climate issues to that as well. Because even as viewed through the lens of oppression, he says, “Every cause is linked.” He says, “You know? That just doesn’t work out.” Andy Kessler asked, “Why would something like this Omnicause, this general liberal blob, how could it emerge?” He says he thinks it’s because of what he calls affluenza. Now, he didn’t come up with a word.

That means the disease of having too much affluence. It shows up in very rich kids showing up at very expensive campuses holding very, very expensive liberal and leftist ideas. That simply can’t survive contact with reality. He writes this way, “My theory is that society is afflicted with a bad case of affluenza. Life has become too easy. We Google and use artificial intelligence instead of thinking, shoot up Ozempic instead of exercising and rely on Obamacare instead of working. Even the well-off,” he writes, “need to complain about something so they complain about everything.” Everything becomes a moral imperative. He says, “The problem for the Omnicause is that it is beginning to unravel “as hidden agendas are revealed.” “With few exceptions, you don’t see many left-leaning Jews at pro-Hamas rallies waving from the river to the sea, or this is genocide flags.” Here, he just points to this falling apart because as I say, in France right now, the anti-Semitism of the left is becoming very apparent to the Jewish people who are saying, “We have a problem here.”

As we’re thinking about this and draw these issues to a close today, let’s also remind ourselves of something else. It is Hamas, a terrorist group that has proved itself murderous over the course of years. It’s the declared enemy of Israel. Yes, it’s also the declared enemy of any understanding and morality that we can recognize. Hamas is now adamantly opposed to a ceasefire and it has gone on the record again as being adamantly opposed the existence of the state of Israel. Again, we know what we’re up against, and thus you ask the question, why does Israel act as Israel acts in so many cases, and why is Israel and Israeli political leadership so unconcerned, for example, of all these rich American kids protesting and faculty co-protesters on these campuses? It is because Israel understands something, and that is that it is fighting for its existence. This takes us back to Kessler’s indictment that the Omnicause that marked so much of the left in the United States is fueled by affluence. You have rich kids in rich places showing up with ideas that they can afford, perhaps, in their own economic context to entertain. Ideas that Israel cannot entertain for a moment and survive.

One final thought, it is going to be very interesting to see how these issues work out in the 2024 presidential election cycle in the United States because so many of these issues are going to be clarified and they’re going to be clarified in ways that will both influence the voter in the United States, and will be very clearly revealed by voters when you get to the November election. We’re going to find out what Americans really believe about these things. My guess is, they’re going to be some surprises here for just about everybody.

Thanks for listening to The Briefing.

For more information, go to my website at albertmohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter or X by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com.

I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

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Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory

Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory, Patricia Hill Collins, Duke University Press, 2019

• Critical Exchange
• Published: 17 May 2021
• Volume 20 , pages 690–725, ( 2021 )

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• Patricia Hill Collins 1 ,
• Elaini Cristina Gonzaga da Silva 2 ,
• Emek Ergun 3 ,
• Inger Furseth 4 ,
• Kanisha D. Bond 5 &
• Jone Martínez-Palacios 6  

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Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (Duke University Press, 2019, henceforth IACST ) investigates how knowledge has been essential for resisting political domination. Whether visible or not, resistance to unjust power relations of race, class, and gender always exists, whether through faint memory or televised social protest. But what role does knowledge play in such resistance? Throughout my intellectual work, I return to this core question by examining how individuals and groups who are oppressed within systems of power create and pass on knowledge that fosters their survival, resilience, and resistance.

My intellectual journey to intersectionality informs this current book. In Black Feminist Thought, I analyzed how African-American women resisted the dehumanization of chattel slavery by producing a self-defined oppositional knowledge. Black women could see, feel, and experience how the treatment of their bodies as simultaneously raced and gendered shaped the contours of their subordination. This initial insight that both race and gender intersected reflected a methodology of bottom-up theorizing to address social problems. The terms race and gender signify the intersection of racism and sexism, with other terms added over time to flesh out contemporary understandings of intersectionality.

My focus on Black women’s knowledge is one case among many. The complexities of the multiple resistant knowledge projects that inform intersectionality lie in the parallel and intertwining narratives of Indigenous peoples, refugee and immigrant groups, women, LGBTQ teenagers, religious and ethnic minorities, and poor people. These and other similarly subordinated groups also find themselves facing social problems that can neither be understood, nor solved in isolation. In Race, Class, and Gender , Margaret Andersen and I drew upon these narratives to map the emergence of intersectionality as a field of inquiry. For over two decades, we selected articles that examined how race, class, and gender increasingly informed one another, thereby collecting empirical evidence for intersectionality (Andersen and Collins, 2020 ). We saw the field grow from its initial emphasis on race, class, and gender to encompass sexuality, nation, ethnicity, ability, age, religion, and similar categories of analysis. We also witnessed the increasing globalization of intersectionality as a field of critical inquiry and praxis. This painstaking work laid a foundation for the synthetic narrative of intersectionality’s ideas, scope, and practices that Sirma Bilge and I present in Intersectionality (Collins and Bilge, 2016 , 2nd edn 2020).

My intellectual journey in many ways parallels the emergence of the field. I came to intersectionality knowing that, while disciplinary specializations offer useful analyses of power relations, their conceptual blind spots can limit their theoretical insight. Privileged groups within disciplinary centers have long treated their partial perspectives on the social world as universal truths. Many such perspectives claim a critical stance that is more often assumed that realized. Such groups embrace a standard notion of criticism, namely, criticizing some idea, practice, discourse, or behavior. Yet when it comes to searching for critical analyses, subordinated groups require tools that go beyond simple critique. Critical analysis does not only criticize, but it also references ideas and practices that are essential, needed, or critical for something to happen.

This expansive notion of being critical informs knowledge creation in the crossroads spaces of a decolonizing and desegregating world. These meeting places enable those who enter them to retain the particularity of the insights and experiences that drive them there, while working through the meaning of what truly is universal with others who arrive from different paths. The term “intersectionality” references this big tent umbrella of an intellectual and political crossroads or meeting place for political and intellectual engagement across political, substantive, and methodological differences. Politically, intersectionality aspires for robust interpretive communities to house necessary dialogs among disparate ideas and people. Substantively, communities that incorporate people who theorize from the bottom up as well as from the top down can produce a wealth of new questions, interpretations, and knowledge that is far more concerned with changing the existing social order than in explaining it. Methodologically, this dialogical way of producing knowledge elevates the significance of intellectual and political coalitions and alliances within interpretive communities above the brilliance of the individual intellectual.

Building participatory, democratic interpretive communities across differences of experience, expertise, and resources has been the hallmark of intersectional projects. Dialogs among subordinated groups – who no longer see the path to knowledge creation as lying exclusively through old centers of race, class and gender – have sparked considerable intellectual energy and innovation. As individuals and groups who had been involved in an array of social justice projects came to see their commonalities across differences of race, gender, class, sexuality, age, nation, ability, and ethnicity, they increasingly claimed and used the term intersectionality to describe the space where their projects overlapped or “intersected.” Since the 1990s, the term has been taken up by an array of projects for social justice to describe ideas and actions that began decades earlier. The connections between the mid-twentieth century social justice movements that refused to accept prevailing social inequalities, and subsequent struggles to incorporate race/class/gender studies into the academy, highlight the recent visibility of the synergistic relationship between the trajectory of intersectionality as a resistant knowledge project and the changing social conditions that animate it (see, e.g., Collins and Bilge, 2020 , pp. 72–100). Just as the political struggles against political domination remain in process, so too does the emergence of intersectionality as a form of critical inquiry and praxis (Collins and Bilge, 2020 , pp. 37–71). And as it grows, intersectionality remains a work in progress in developing a language that enables similar conversations across differences in power. The idea of intersectionality as a broad, increasingly global, resistant knowledge project in its own right now provides a vibrant intellectual space for historically disparate projects that have had heterogenous responses to political domination.

As a form of critical inquiry and practice, intersectionality now stands at a crossroads. Virtually overnight, the term intersectionality burst into public awareness in social media and journalistic venues, a full two decades after the term underwent a similar swift uptake in the 1990s within academic venues. Many people now apply the term intersectionality quite loosely to a range of academic and activist projects. Yet labeling something as “intersectional” does not make it so. Many people who now use the term intersectionality seem unfamiliar with its history, core constructs, guiding principles, and possibilities. For example, the tendency to “mention” intersectionality in the title or in the first few pages of a research article often masks the absence of intersectional analyses in the remainder of the article. Through this mentioning strategy, an author can harvest the intellectual cachet now afforded the term intersectionality without directly engaging its political, substantive, or methodological substance. The prominence of mentioning highlights a parallel practice that characterizes intersectionality’s rapid uptake in academic venues. Many authors also mention intersectionality as already being a “theory,” often labeling it a feminist theory. If repeated often enough, this unsubstantiated claim has the potential of undermining both aspects of intersectionality’s critical possibilities, namely, as a form of critical analysis and as essential to resistant knowledge projects.

Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory takes up the core question of whether intersectionality is a critical social theory and, if not, what would it take to become one? Engaging this question presented epistemological and political challenges. My challenge was to invite, into the terrain of intersectionality’s theorizing, a heterogenous group of readers who had limited encounters with one another. How might I write to intellectual activists who were already contributing to the ever-growing knowledge base and practices of intersectionality, but who also rarely identified their work as “theoretical”? How might I craft the arguments in IACST for scholars who brought preconceived disciplinary definitions about what constituted “theory” to their reading of my text? Writing this book would have been far easier had I narrowed the scope of my audience. Some readers who engaged the book would find its ideas too abstract whereas others would think they already knew what it was.

Focusing on how these heterogenous social actors used intersectionality offered analytical tools for managing these definitional dilemmas (Collins, 2015 ). Avoiding fixed definitions of intersectionality enabled me to avoid elevating any one use over others. Drawing on the philosophical tenet from pragmatism that ideas gain meaning through use, I identified three characteristic uses of intersectionality – namely, as a metaphor, as a heuristic, and as a paradigm – that provide a conceptual foundation for intersectionality’s heterogeneous practices. Throughout the text, I frame intersectionality through the kaleidoscope of these cognitive tools, from the simplicity of a metaphor, through the utility of a heuristic device, to the structured nature of paradigmatic thinking that guides a field of study, to the possibility of an explanatory social theory that engages the issues that most concern scholars and practitioners of intersectionality. These cognitive tools invite readers into both my text and the field of intersectionality without privileging one entry point over another.

These multiple cognitive entry points into IACST parallel multiple entry points into intersectionality as a form of critical inquiry and praxis. Surveying the broad scope of how people used intersectionality solidified my choice of six core substantive constructs that in varying combinations would be recognizable to intersectionality’s practitioners, namely, relationality, power, social inequality, social context, complexity, and social justice. This focus on use also grounds my selection of four guiding premises of intersectional projects, namely, (1) race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, ability, age, and similar markers of power are interdependent and mutually construct one another; (2) intersecting power relations produce complex, interdependent social inequalities; (3) the social location of individuals and groups within intersecting power relations shapes their experiences within and perspectives on the social world; and (4) solving social problems within a given local, regional, national, or global context requires intersectional analyses. Together these cognitive entry points, core constructs and guiding premises provide a cognitive architecture for investigating intersectionality as critical social theory and the form that critical social theorizing might take.

These core substantive concepts anchor many of the arguments throughout the book. For example, because the construct of power has been a fundamental construct for intersectionality, it required a sophisticated treatment both as a topic of discussion and as a factor in how I wrote the book. Making sure that I focused on intersecting power relations, not just as a topical theme in the volume, but also on the political dimensions of intersectionality’s methodological practices, was essential. I aspired to make intersecting power relations as central to the construction of my text as they are for intersectionality’s critical inquiry and praxis. How could I examine the centrality of participatory democracy for intersectionality, e.g., how intersecting power relations shaped its construction and reception, without attending to questions of equitable, democratic participation within intersectionality’s internal practices?

This interpretive framework that organizes Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory offers an elastic structure for engaging the contributions in this Critical Exchange. As I initially read each contribution, I could see how different they are from one another in substance, tone, intent, and literary conventions. The following contributions represent scholars with extensive experience with or living in varying national contexts (Brazil, Turkey, Norway, the US, and Spain), academic disciplines (political science, policy studies, gender studies, sociology), career stages, institutional locations, and racial/ethnic/religious backgrounds. This heterogeneity shapes how each author entered the text and informs her choice of topic, questions, and analyses. How could this one symposium hope to achieve a uniform voice from such disparate contributions?

Intersectionality requires a new way of reading that focuses less on the differences between these contributions, either-or frameworks that produce mono-categorical thinking of race or gender, and more on intersectionality’s both/and relational thinking. Standard ways of reading that seek to mine intersectionality for what a reader can take from it give way to dialogical engagement that respects what each has to offer to the project of intersectionality. Such thinking searches for points of connection between each contribution and intersectionality as a field as well as connections among the contributions themselves. Reading these contributions as being in dialog with one another through the lens of intersectionality’s key concepts as well as its paradigmatic premises, provides a different interpretive framework. Just as the ideas of intersectionality are interconnected and find new meaning in intersectionality’s metaphoric meeting place as an exchange of ideas, so too do the distinctive views of people who are sufficiently grounded within intersectionality contribute to its critical ethos by offering critical analyses of their own.

Thus, Gonzaga da Silva kicks off the Critical Exchange by attempting to trace the evolution of my conceptualization of intersectionality over time. Ergun writes from within the field of translation studies and reflects on the role of translation in enabling both intersectional analyses and the formation of transnational solidarities. Furseth provides us with a persuasive argument about the mutually illuminating relationship that can develop between the sociology of religion and the scholarship in intersectionality. In her contribution, Bond then invites us to think about political violence both as a tool and a response to intersecting axes of oppression. Last but not least, Martínez-Palacios takes up a double challenge: to propose that intersectional thought can support both social agents in a practice of therapeutical self-socio-analysis that can enable them to build literacy regarding their own complex social positionalities; and can help public policy makers committed to social justice and the sustainability of human flourishing.

Patricia Hill Collins

Intersectionality, then and now

I finish writing this text at a moment in history when there is an ongoing worldwide spread of a new disease called COVID-19. From December 2019, when the outbreak in Wuhan, China started, to early April 2020, when I hand this piece in, confirmed cases surge past 1.8 million, and deaths around the globe are above 115,000. At least, 185 countries now face the challenge of responding to the virus. It is nothing short of a global health problem. The rapid escalation and global spread of the disease, followed by mostly assertive governmental action, taken at face value, may give the idea that the coronavirus outbreak is a real threat to everyone equally on the planet, but one may wonder if that is indeed the case.

In Brazil, the country where I wrote this piece, for instance, the alarm was raised in early February, when thirty-four Brazilians who had been living in Wuhan were repatriated and arrived in Brasilia. It took two more weeks before a first case of a Brazilian infected with COVID-19 was confirmed: a 61-year-old businessman who lives in São Paulo and spent two weeks in Italy on business. Notwithstanding, the first ones to die afterwards never left the country: a lower class 62-year-old man in São Paulo, and a 63-year-old woman in Rio de Janeiro, who worked as a domestic worker for an employer who had just visited Italy. Differently from Brazil (where data only includes age, health condition, and origin of patients), early data on coronavirus deaths in Louisiana, Illinois, Michigan, and New Jersey, in the United States, allowed some conclusions regarding the racial profile of victims: African Americans account for 30–32% of the local population, but make up for around 70% of coronavirus deaths. The disproportionately high rate seems to indicate that inequality is a co-morbidity: the poorer, marginalized populations that lack access to health care, endure unstable and low-paying jobs, affecting living and nutrition conditions, make them disproportionally exposed to risk. Anyone may die from COVID-19, but some die more than others, because of existing social conditions.

Something similar happens in Brazil when we look into violence against women, and femicide, in particular. Murders of women in the country per year increased by 6.4% from 2006 to 2016, but when such data are detailed along racial lines, the picture is rather different: the homicide rate per year for non-Black women decreased by 8%, while that of Black women increased by 15%.

Women are murdered, but some women are at a higher risk, because public policies targeting violence against women do not take into account that the protection of Black and non-Black women might require different measures for each group. Violence, or the lack thereof, does not fall equally on everyone – and one can only reach this conclusion by adopting an intersectional approach. It goes without saying that the burden of explaining what intersectionality is in 2020, when the term is widely accepted by practitioners, activists, and scholars alike, is quite different from what it was thirty years ago, when the term was given a particular articulation by Patricia Hill Collins, in her effort to give Black women voice.

What might not be so evident – and this will be the key claim in this short contribution – is that although intersectionality is a constant in her scholarship, the definition thereof underwent change over time. In fact, it is possible to identify three phases: the first one includes her early publications, as Learning from the Outsider Within. The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought [hereinafter, Outsider Within ] (1986) and Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment [hereinafter, Black Feminist Thought ] ([1990] 2000), where she describes and names relevant aspects of Black women’s lives; the second phase encompasses, for instance, Intersectionality's Definitional Dilemmas [hereinafter, Definitional Dilemmas] (2015) and Intersectionality – Key Concepts [hereinafter, Key Concepts ] (2016), with Sirma Bilge, published after the widespread adoption of the term and introducing Hill-Collins’s effort to chart the field; the third phase centers on her latest book, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory [hereinafter, Intersectionality ] ( 2019a ), where Collins not only interprets what the practical knowledge of those at the margins is, but also points to what it might be, and how to achieve it. In this contribution, I will trace the changes in Collins’s intellectual development of her conceptual apparatus.

Naturally, the concern with complex inequality is not exclusive to this scholarship. In Brazil, for instance, Heleith Saffioti published A mulher na sociedade de classes in 1969, including references to different roles played by white and black women in the reproduction of capitalism in Brazil. But while Saffioti’s ( 2013 ) objective was to understand how differently racialized women were impacted by capitalism, a central preoccupation of Collins’ scholarship, since Outsider Within ( 1986 ), is with how the intersection of power and knowledge is connected to the oppression of the many by the few. That means Collins’ work is firmly anchored in a sociology of knowledge that speaks against the so-called scientific neutrality and objectivity of those who claim authority to speak for the other. It also underscores the importance of marginalized forms of knowledge that challenges mainstream ideological framing of people in groups.

This is a concern shared by other scholars who were publishing about feminist epistemology in the United States: Nancy Hartsock and her book Money, Sex, and Power ( 1983 ), Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka's collective work Discovering Reality ( 1983 ), Sandra Harding’s The Science Question in Feminism ( 1986 ), and Donna Haraway Situated Knowledges ( 1988 ), to name a few. Such scholars engaged in an effort to redefine the making of science, foregrounding the existence of women’s standpoint or situated knowledge, and showing how objectivity was supposed to be understood in dialog with the Western canon of philosophy and the sociology of knowledge. More than claiming the existence of a Black women’s standpoint, though, Collins was invested in the production of “facts and theories about the Black female experience that [could] clarify a Black woman's standpoint for Black women” ( 1986 , p. 16) – and that is a distinctive trait that will mark her work, not only Outsider Within , but also Black Feminist Thought a few years later.

The choice was not random, as the author clarifies in the first pages of Black Feminist Thought :

Oppressed groups are frequently placed in the situation of being listened to only if we frame our ideas in the language that is familiar to and comfortable for a dominant group. This requirement often changes the meaning of our ideas and works to elevate the ideas of dominant groups. In this volume, by placing African-American women’s ideas in the center of analysis, I not only privilege those ideas but encourage White feminists, African-American men, and all others to investigate the similarities and differences among their own standpoints and those of African-American women’ (2000, p. vii).

Collins, thus, reclaims Black women’s position as speakers.

Interestingly, that is a concern that will be present also in Black female scholars outside the US. In Brazil, in Racismo e Sexismo na Cultura Brasileira ( 1984 ) Lélia Gonzales took dissent to another level and refused to use formal Portuguese, because she understood Portuguese had been replaced by what she called Pretuguês (‘Blackiguese’, in free translation), a different language that should be used and respected. Later, Sueli Carneiro ( 2005 ) would recast the issue of how the production of knowledge and the transmission thereof could be used to subjugate populations at the margins and claim that the construction of the Other as a No-Being that serves as foundation for the Being is actually an “epistemicide.”

In contrast to these scholars, Collins’ approach goes beyond the identification of oppressive entanglements and offers us a way of transcending group-specific politics based upon a Black feminist epistemology – and here lies the relevance of intersectionality: as Black women sit at the intersection of two powerful systems of oppression, race, and gender, understanding this position opens up the possibility of identifying and understanding other cross-cutting oppressions, enabling a move to transform reality.

In Outsider Within , Collins did not use the term “intersectionality.” Instead, she speaks of the “interlocking nature of oppression” ( 1986 , p. 19). The author does not claim the novelty of the observation – to the contrary, she affirms that “the interlocking nature of race, gender, and class oppression is a second recurring theme in the works of Black feminists … While different socio-historical periods may have increased the saliency of one or another type of oppression, the thesis of the linked nature of oppression has long pervaded Black feminist thought” ( 1986 , p. 19).

“Intersectionality” will be found in Black Feminist Thought a few years later, which reads: “Subsequent work aimed to describe different dimensions of this interconnected relationship with terms such as intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991 ) and matrix of domination ” (p. 18). Although some readers mistakenly point to Collins as the creator “intersectionality,” the scholar herself makes an express reference to Kimberlé Crenshaw, a Black legal scholar in the United States who was also doing some research on the intersection between race and sex. The second edition of the book references Mapping the Margins : Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color ( 1991 ) , but this paper was published after the first edition. So, it is reasonable to conclude that Collins had contact with Crenshaw’s previous work Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics ( 1989 ).

In both works, Crenshaw applied intersectionality more as an analytical tool to show how Black women were in a disadvantaged position when it came to how courts framed and interpreted the stories of plaintiffs. Both in Outsider Within and Black Feminist Thought , intersectionality will be also an analytical approach, but Collins enriches our understanding thereof. In the former, the “interlocking nature of oppression” indicates a need to change the scope of previous investigations and investigate how systems of oppression are interlinked (Collins, 1986 , p. 21). In the latter, the term is to be read in conjunction with “matrix of domination,” which would explain how intersecting oppressions (both particular and structural, disciplinary, hegemonic) are actually organized (2000, p. 18).

Further in the book, Collins explains how different aspects of Black women’s lives operate as sites of intersectionality. As she argues, the investigation of Black women’s experiences of pornography, prostitution, and rape, for instance, allow us to understand how powerful groups act to regulate Black women’s bodies and how “connections between sexual ideologies developed to justify actual social practices and the use of force to maintain the social order” ( 2000 , p. 134). At the time, Collins was taking seriously the task to reclaim Black women’s voice and their power to tell their own story. In the 2010s, after the term was popularized and was widely incorporated not only in scholarship but also by social movements all over the world, Collins took upon herself the task of reviewing and exploring the definitions of intersectionality at work in these contexts – something evident both in Definitional Dilemmas ( 2015 ) and Key concepts (2016).

In Definitional Dilemmas, Collins reviews intersectionality as a field of study, as an analytical strategy, and as critical praxis. One year later, Collins and Bilge’s book Key Concepts ( 2016 ) will build on the previous analysis: intersectionality as an analytic tool, and as critical praxis and inquiry. Collins remarks that, while it is possible to note the coexistence of a general consensus about the contours of the idea of intersectionality, there is also a massive heterogeneity of definitions – with positive effects. For instance, the appropriation of the term by social movements allowed some aspects to blossom and others to fade away ( 2015 , p. 7). Moreover, the widespread adoption of intersectionality by both scholars and practitioners alike revealed a connection between knowledge and remedying social inequalities in a fashion that made sense for their social justice project – what Collins understands as critical praxis and inquiry. Notably, the expression “matrix of domination” that previously captured how intersecting oppressions are organized ( 2000 , p. 18) is nowhere to be found. Instead, Collins and Bilge now combine intersectionality with “domains of power,” in what resembles a downgrading of the concept in her theory: “power relations are to be analyzed both via their intersections, for example, of racism and sexism, as well as across domains of power, namely structural, disciplinary, cultural, and interpersonal. The framework of domains of power provides a heuristic device or thinking tool for examining power relations” ( 2016 , p. 29)

Despite admitting the risk that the very popularity of intersectionality causes it to lose meaning ( 2015 , p. 2), by then the scholar seemed to think it was too premature to define theoretical boundaries for the concept ( 2015 , p. 11) – a position that clearly changed by the time her latest book was published. There she proposes that “[i]f intersectionality does not clarify its own critical theoretical project, others will do so for it” ( 2019a , p. 3). In Intersectionality , the primary concern about the interconnection between knowledge and power, as well as the interlocking relation between different systems of oppression is still there, but Collins transcends previous categories that marked her work to put forward the contours of a wider theoretical model and develop it as a critical social theory (Collins, 2019a ). The expression “matrix of domination” will be used only once in an example that involves a comparison of the United States and Brazil. It is most definitely no longer a key concept. In fact, Collins expressly states that “I analyze power relations not by emphasizing domination, but rather by developing the concept of intellectual resistance and exploring intersectionality’s connections to it” ( 2019a , p. 10).

Instead of focusing on how oppression works and is organized, Collins opted for a different kind of theory, one that also challenges existing social orders and opens possibilities for change. In her words, “critical social theories aim to reform what is in the hope of transforming it into something else” ( 2019a , p. 5).

Interestingly, the release of Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory ( 2019a ) in the United States was almost concomitant to the release of the translation of Black Feminist Thought into Portuguese in Brazil. The Brazilian edition includes a preface to the volume that affords readers a glimpse of such change: differently from the prefaces to the first two editions, where the goal of examining how knowledge can foster African-American women’s empowerment is a main driver (that would be expected), in the preface to the Brazilian translation Collins calls upon readers to reflect upon how their own background influences their reading of the book, how being in different positions brings about particular views on racism, sexism, class exploitation, heterosexism, nationalism, and discrimination against people with different abilities and of different ages, ethnicities, and religions. Once one is able to tell their own story, they will be prepared to engage in authentic and well-founded dialogs with others.

In Brazil, the publication of Collins’s work is not only an academic invitation to produce sound science, but also the result of a political effort by intellectual activists (Black or not) engaged with a social justice project. Notably, Collins’ relevance includes her own history as a Black woman confronted with oppression, who became one of the globally most well-known intellectuals.

The journey of intersectionality in Collins’s thought – from the moment she first described intersecting systems of oppressions as intersectionality up to this latest project of critical social theory – has been long. The keyword is still intersectionality, but the content thereof has expanded to encompass new trajectories and horizons.

Elaini Cristina Gonzaga da Silva

Transnationalizing intersectionality in and through translation

In Black Feminist Thought , Patricia Hill Collins highlights the urgency of transcending national borders to engage in conversations and collaborations that will reveal and forge liberatory transnational connectivities among differently situated women of African descent ( 2000 ). This call to transnationalize black feminist thought and action is an extension of her recognition of “a transnational matrix of domination” that is composed of multiple – simultaneously operating, mutually constituting, fluidly intersecting, and unpredictably assembling – local and global structures of domination that shape black women’s experiences in different yet interconnected ways (p. 231). Such a politically and ethically ambitious project of accomplishing intersectional and transnational justice for all black women, along with other historically oppressed groups, requires a relational ethics of “mutual stretching,” dialogic reciprocity, and polyphonic togetherness (Lorde, 1988 , p. 19). That is, transnational justice for all marginalized individuals and communities necessitates that we not only engage in difficult dialogs across differences and hierarchies but also democratize and decolonize our cross-border relationalities so that the dissonant stories, theories, visions, and knowledges we (co)produce serve to disrupt the assimilative mono-logic of neoliberal globalization. We cannot achieve such intervention, democratization, and decolonization without attending to the politics and ethics of translation (selection, production, validation, distribution, reception, and metabolization of translation) as a fundamental question of diversity, intersectionality, and transnationality.

As a facilitator of cross-border mobility, encounter, and exchange, translation can expand the geopolitical boundaries of intersectionality as a feminist analytic that, on the one hand, helps expose the locally and globally situated co-operations of multiple systems of domination and, on the other hand, envisions justice as a coalition-based and polyphonic transnational struggle. In fact, when simultaneously configured as a politically charged and invested epistemic practice of border crossing, localization, and globalization, translation appears indispensable to our imaginaries, theories, and actions of “justice for all,” which need to be guided by intersectional premises to live up to its promise of “for all” (Hill Collins, 2019b , pp. 45–50). Given that the world we live and dream in is made up of multiple interconnected localities – each with its own languages, ideological worldviews, intersectional assemblages, discursive regimes, and interpretive communities – and that these interdependent localities are infused with various global forces like capitalism and imperialism, our justice-oriented theories and actions have to correspondingly cross linguistic borders in their intersectionally informed pursuits. In other words, our dreams of heterogeneous, just, caring, and peaceful forms of planetary coexistence can come true only in and through translation, when we “cross without taking over” (Lugones, 2010 , p. 755). Translation, hence, promises to increase the critical and radical potential of intersectionality by transforming into it a project of world making.

Indeed, bringing the translation question to the center of feminist debates on intersectionality helps spatialize and transnationalize intersectionality, which, Vrushali Patil persuasively argues, has remained a largely domestic and US-centric theory, “leaving unexamined cross-border dynamics, processes beyond the local level of analysis that nevertheless are integral to the unfolding of local processes” ( 2013 , p. 853). In their collaborative piece exploring the political productivity of intersectional and transnational feminisms when put in dialog, Sylvanna Falcón and Jennifer Nash similarly critique “intersectionality’s unmarked preoccupation with U.S. locations” ( 2015 , p. 3). Three important interrelated critiques are raised here: (1) In comparison to gender, race, class, and sexuality, nationality, and geopolitics – or politics of location, if you will – are typically not incorporated as determining axes of power, identity, and knowledge in intersectional analyses, which have a tendency to overlook the questions of colonialism and imperialism. (2) Intersectionality’s analytical focus has largely been limited to the localities of the Global North, particularly the US, whose national configuration is too often taken for granted, rather than treated as a strategically orchestrated geohistorical accomplishment – hence, Patil’s term “domestic intersectionality” ( 2013 , p. 852). (3) Finally, these domestically focused intersectional analyses have ignored the transnational nature of locally or nationally conceived and experienced spaces, which are in fact complex contact zones permeated by numerous – violent and subversive – forms of border crossing.

We can respond to these calls to spatialize, de-westernize, and transnationalize intersectionality by factoring in translation as a bridge between intersectionality and transnationality, two predominant analytics of contemporary feminist thought and action that are often deemed mutually exclusive, if not competing or even oppositional, in the institutional context of the corporate US university (Falcón and Nash, 2015 , p. 4). In other words, translation can help reveal that intersectional feminism and transnational feminism not only are politically complementary theoretical and practical platforms of justice, but also need each other to envision and generate more effective coalitional strategies of social change and solidarity building, particularly for “women of color” – a vast and vague category that comprises differently interpellated and situated groups of US-based and non-US-based women of color, which Andrea Smith neatly explains in her article, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy” ( 2006 ). Because women of color experience, signify, and enunciate life in and through different languages, vernaculars, and interpretive conventions, we need translation to be able to engage in cross-border dialogs and collaborations so that our partial truths can inform and grow with one another, creating more thorough and truthful knowledges and visions of justice and liberation.

Translating the works of women of color intellectuals and expanding the reach of their theories and stories of dissent and protest beyond their immediate linguistic borders not only helps us validate and celebrate the epistemic authority of women of color – hence geopolitically expanding the mission of intersectionality – but also increases coalitional affiliations and potential solidarities among US-based and non-US-based women of color, who are often separated from, if not pitted against, each other by the neoliberal economy of difference. One revealing example that illustrates the ways in which translation can increase both the explanatory power and geo/politically transformative potential of intersectionality is Octavia Butler’s 1979 classic science-fiction novel, Kindred and my Turkish translation of it, Yakın [“Close/Akin/Intimate/Significant Other”], published in Turkey in 2019.

Kindred tells the story of an African-American woman, Dana, who finds herself travel back and forth in time between 1976’s California, where she lives with her white husband, and a slave plantation in 1815’s Maryland, where she finds her ancestors among both slaveholders and enslaved people. In fact, it is one of those ancestors that involuntarily calls Dana back in time so that she can save his life every time he finds himself in a life-threatening situation: the plantation owner’s son, Rufus, who grows up to be the plantation owner himself. He rapes Alice – Dana’s enslaved great grandmother – and in doing so, becomes Dana’s great grandfather. Kindred is woven around Dana’s navigation of slavery as a black woman and her dilemmas of saving Rufus for the sake of her family’s continuation, trying to survive the brutal reality of slavery, staying in solidarity with the other slaves, yet becoming complicit in the very system that is designed to dehumanize them all. Kindred is an intersectional story of racial, economic, and gendered oppression and survival, but it is not just Dana’s story. It is also America’s story. And it is Octavia Butler’s genius to merge these two stories in a plain yet arresting narrative and situate the unsuspecting science-fiction reader in the plot as one of the shareholders of that great American pain. What happens to this very American story when it leaves the locality of the US and travels to another place where that unfinished past of patriarchal slavery does not exist?

This is a compelling, yet slightly misleading question because while it seems like an exclusively local story, Kindred in fact depicts the US as a transnational space by not only focusing on the trans-Atlantic slave trade (and its continuing heritage across the globe), but also highlighting the interconnected nature of the various manifestations of genocidal logic citing, for instance, the indigenous genocide in the US, the South African apartheid, the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, and the Lebanese civil war – hence, relationally reconceiving the national configuration of the US as a transnational doing. As the protagonist Dana brings these transnational connections into her growing critique of the intersectional operations of race, gender, and class violence in the locality of the US, she also invites the reader to question the legitimacy of the US (and their allegiance to it) and reimagine systematic oppression as well as resistance and liberation beyond the oppositional parameters of the nation state. Hence, by treating racism, capitalism, patriarchy, nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism as locally and globally intersecting systems of violence, Butler’s novel highlights the significance of coalitional and intersectional resistance across borders. In that regard, we might consider Kindred as giving an account of a black feminist standpoint that is simultaneously intersectional and transnational. My Turkish translation of Kindred has sought to expand that intersectional and transnational web of relations that the novel claims by facilitating the book’s travel to Turkey, whose distinctive geohistorical landscape has witnessed its own locally and transnationally procured and contested violent intersectionalities.

In order to help facilitate such geo/politically connectionist readings, I introduced Kindred to the Turkish-speaking reader by adding a brief preface to it where, by citing Audre Lorde ( 1984 , p. 43), I first portrayed translation as a political project of sharing and expanding “the feminist word” across borders: “And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we do not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own.” I, then, added:

The second reason why I translated Kindred is the gratitude I feel for black American feminists whose theories, stories, poems, activisms, and friendships have always stimulated, nurtured, and transformed me in my own feminist journey and given me hope and strength to resist. So, the translation you are reading aims to ensure that the words of black feminists live on and blend in our own words, despite the world order that operates against them. Translating the works of women writers, especially women of color writers, and enabling their encounters with different readerships across languages is not only an intervention into the male-dominant, colonial publication world, but also an attempt of facilitating cross-border feminist exchange and solidarity … As you read this translation, I hope you too get inspired by its story, which is both distant and close, and find the courage to confront the historical truths that you have been afraid to confront by going on your own time-travel (2019, pp. 8–9).

I hoped witnessing Kindred ’s confrontation with the intersectionally and transnationally interwoven violent history of the US would similarly motivate readers in Turkey to intervene in their own intersectionally and transnationally assembled collective memories that remember, misremember, or forget several (open) wounds of racism and fascism, be it the officially denied Armenian genocide, ongoing massacres against Kurds, gross rates of femicide, or racist attacks against Syrian refugees and immigrants from Africa. As I further explained in the preface,

Forgetting the past entirely or distorting history in service of nationalist, racist, and patriarchal discourses allows us to habitually transmit the unfounded hatred (and fear) for ‘the other’ from generation to generation, makes it harder to interrogate those calcified scripts, and prevents actions of compromise, reconciliation, and solidarity between communities that are defined as irreconcilably different from each other. Kindred ’s attempt to intervene in the US’ collective memory is precious precisely because it invites us not only to remember, but also to question what we remember and search for what we have forgotten. No matter which geography we are a product of, we can only free ourselves from the hatred and fears that have been encoded in our minds through distorted historical discourses by accepting that invitation (2019, p. 9).

In short, just as the US needs to recover and recover from the intertwined legacies of genocide, slavery, and heteropatriarchy, Turkey also needs to engage in such acts of recovery in the face of its own legacies of genocide and ongoing mass violence against differently marginalized populations. I hoped that feeling the collective pain of African Americans in Kindred , no matter how mediated it is in translation, could cause an affective resonance among Turkey’s readers in regard to how they feel about their own Others and encourage them to forge new affective solidarities for justice, both locally and transnationally. I concluded the preface explaining this coalitional potential of translation:

Readers in Turkey may be mistaken thinking that this American novel with its focus on slavery has no relevance for the realities of their geography. But the story is in fact very close to us, even inside of us. No matter how much cultural, historical, or linguistic difference its details entail, the novel’s central concern is also our concern. We do not have to read Kindred or look to distant geographies to see the systematic discrimination, oppression, and violence that people who we construct in opposition to ourselves are subjected to just because they are different from “us” or because they refuse to become “us.” However, it will be beneficial to read Kindred to feel deep inside the injustices, longings, and hurts that the displaced “other” experiences or the resistances that they engage in to survive and live freely.

This brief analysis of Yakın suggests that translation can function as a critical mode of cross-border engagement that helps lay the epistemic and affective groundwork for intersectional analyses of oppression and transnational feminist solidarities. Hence, the analysis, by reimagining “justice for all” as an intersectional, transnational, and translational contact zone – or “borderlands” in Gloria Anzaldúa’s terms – seeks to motivate and mobilize us to translate the words and works of marginalized truth seekers and weavers, like women of color, more (and across all geographic directions, not just “from the west to the rest”) and touch one another more gently, generously, and responsibly in translation for cross-border solidarity, planetary justice, and polyphonic peace. This is an urgent task because the future of an intersectionally and transnationally just world lies, as Patricia Hill Collins argues, in “stimulating dialogue across the very real limitations of national boundaries, to develop new ways of relating to one another” ( 2000 , p. 232). And that mutual stretching demands translation.

Intersectionality and the sociology of religion

Intersectionality is finding its way into new fields of research. While it has traditionally been used in studies of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, it has largely ignored religion. With a few exceptions, intersectionality has been relatively absent in sociological analyses of religion, as well. Here, I would like to explore how intersectionality might influence debates in the sociology of religion and conversely, how the sociology of religion might influence intersectionality. Before I propose suggestions for a closer link between intersectionality and the sociology of religion, I will provide a brief outline of how religion is treated in the work of Patricia Hill Collins. The aim is to highlight different areas where intersectionality and the sociology of religion might beneficially learn from each other.

Collins has not developed a systematic view of religion, but religion appears as a topic in her work. Early on, her approach of viewing domination as a matrix led her to include religion as one form of oppression. In both Black Feminist Thought ( 2009 /2000) and Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (2019), Collins talks about religion in general, and discusses Christianity in more detail, especially the Black Christian churches in the U.S. As I will attempt to show, she tends to move between using feminism’s binary approach to religion and overcoming this binary.

Feminist theorists, including Collins, are deeply critical of several forms of binaries that are gendered. Nevertheless, feminist theory often operates with dichotomous thinking when discussing religious women. Its binary approach frames religious women as either subordinated or submissive to patriarchy or empowered if they subvert the existing tradition and offer resistance. Despite Collins’ criticism of binary categorizations, she often relies on feminism’s dichotomous approach to religion. She emphases one side of the binary, the oppressive elements in Christian teachings on women. In Black Feminist Thought she describes how religion was used to justify slavery and construct homosexuality as deviance. Likewise, she outlines how U.S. Black women often had subordinate roles in Black civil society organizations, including the Black churches, and that these organizations largely ignored Black women’s issues ( 2000 /2009, pp. 10, 12, 95, 140, 150). Collins also relies on the other side of the feminist binary by focusing on how U.S. Black women changed religion by subverting it. The women used male-run churches to advocate issues that concerned them ( 2000 /2009, p. 9). They questioned the scriptural interpretations preached by male ministers on their “rightful place” and challenged the perception of their role in the Black churches. Thereby, African-American women theologians and feminist thinkers helped to produce changes in church teachings on gender and sexuality (2006, pp. 132, 135).

Religious women have posed a challenge for feminist theory, because there has been an unwillingness to concede agency to religious piety. In Mahmood’s ( 2001 , p. 207) study of women in Egyptian Islamic movements, she criticizes feminism’s coupling of self-realization to liberal notions of freedom, which sees agency as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination. While the liberal understanding of freedom led American white feminists in the 1970s to call for the dismantling of the nuclear family, Collins and other African-American feminists opposed such a limited view of freedom. For them, freedom implied being able to form families, since the long history of slavery, genocide, and racism had prevented family formation. According to Mahmood, Collins’ contribution “expanded the notion of ‘self-realization/self-fulfillment’ by making considerations of class, race, and ethnicity constitutive of its very definition such that individual autonomy had to be rethought in light of other issues” ( 2001 , p. 208).

Collins’ move beyond feminism’s limited view of religion appeared early on in her work, in the first edition of Black Feminist Thought . She sees the possibility that women’s self-realization may take place within religious institutions. She shows that many Black women scholars, writers, and artists worked within the Black churches, and “churches typically formed the core of many Black women’s community activities” ( 2000 /2009, p. 65). Furthermore, the churches played a vital part in the civil rights movement; they created buffers against negative stereotyping, constituted important “safe spaces,” and were fundamental in developing moral and ethical teachings on social justice. In fact, they became “an arena for Black women’s political activism and as well as their consciousness concerning the political” ( 2006 , p. 128). Collins argues that the type of Black feminism that emerged within these churches and other Black civil society organizations expressed a more comprehensive commitment to social justice than what emerged first within western feminism. The focus on social justice also sensitized many African-American women to gender issues, which resulted in a growing feminist consciousness.

Collins shows that the community work and activism of many African-American women were based in the churches. They exerted different types of leadership and promoted the importance of education, sisterhood, self-definitions, self-valuations, and economic self-reliance ( 1989 , pp. 762–763; 2000 /2009, pp. 228–229). For Collins, religion has constituted and can still constitute a part in the matrix of domination for U.S. Black women. This does not lead her, however, to propose that the self-realization of African-American women must take place outside religious institutions. By seeing self-realization in light of class, race, and gender, she sees the Black churches as important institutions that have offered institutional support for the development of Black feminist thought.

So, how might intersectionality influence the sociology of religion? Just as many intersectional theorists have tended to list religion as one of many differences without offering a more profound analysis, there has been a tendency in the sociology of religion to undertheorize the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion. This led Wood ( 2006 ) to call for “Breaching Bleaching: Integrating Studies of ‘Race’ and Ethnicity with the Sociology of Religion.” Wood’s concern is that when several dominant theories of contemporary religion, such as secularization theory, ignore race and ethnicity, white religion is constructed as the “normal” form of religion and dominant theories become applicable to white religion only.

Furthermore, when race and religion are studied, there is a tendency to focus on single dimensions and not analyze the intersection of race and ethnicity with other dimensions, such as gender, social class, structural, and political developments. Since the 1990s, there has been a growth in sociological studies of religion that include race and ethnicity. For example, studies of post-1965 immigrant religious communities in the U.S. addressed ethnicity, social class, and gender (Ebaugh and Chafetz, 2001 ; Foley and Hoge, 2007 ), although few discussed race and the various ways in which these communities were affected by racial ideologies and structures. This stands in contrast to studies of Islamophobia and antisemitism, which often relate the construction of and prejudices against Jews and Muslims to racialization processes (see Meer, 2013 ). There has also been an increase in studies of racial attitudes and practices among white, conservative Protestants and racial diversity in Christian congregations (Emerson and Smith, 2000 ; see Dougherty et al. , 2020 ). A critique against these studies is that they provide individualistic and religious cultural forms of explanation, and they fail to recognize how religious racial attitudes intersect with racism, structural inequalities, gender, and the growth of the political right in the post-civil rights era.

In other areas, intersectionality has had a profound impact on the sociology religion. As with general sociology, these contributions often concern gender and sexuality. In the 1980s and 1990s, a considerable body of multi-disciplinary literature examined religion, gender, and sexuality. Many studies put women at the center of analysis, and this kind of feminist inquiry implied a reorientation in the sociology of religion, going beyond religious institutions to include religious practices and cultural discourse. Collins’ work on intersectionality influenced, for example, Gilkes’ work ( 2001 ) on the role of U.S. Black women in church and community. By emphasizing the intersection of gender, race, and class, Gilkes highlights the role of women in the Black churches as community workers, church mothers, and political agents. The same approach has been used to study the role of religion among Latina women activists in their work for empowerment and social change (Peña, 2003 ). Collins’ work has also inspired studies of race, gender, sexuality, and religion. In a study of how gay men and lesbians challenge Christian rooted notions of homosexual sin, McQueeney criticizes other studies of religion and sexuality for treating “race and gender as secondary,” stating that “sexuality is never separate from other systems of domination, such as racism and sexism” ( 2009 , pp. 152–153).

At first, Collins’ work had primarily an impact on American sociology. It soon affected sociology globally, especially the study of gender and sexuality. While intersectional analyses have often been absent in studies of European Muslim women, Nyhagen and Halsaa ( 2016 ) draw on Collins and other intersectional theorists in their study of lived citizenship among Christian and Muslim women in Spain, Norway, and the United Kingdom. They want to contribute to “the so far limited feminist scholarship on religion and intersectionality” by using “more complex feminist analyses of citizenship based on intersectional approaches to inequality” ( 2016 , pp. 58, 60). Additionally, Page and Yip ( 2021 ) apply intersectionality in their edited volume on religion and sexuality that include case studies from across the world. These studies highlight how religion is a complex phenomenon that both can produce inequality and stigmatization and be a resource that challenges other oppressions.

Intersectionality provides an important contribution to the sociology of religion in its focus on multiple and complex intersections of various dimensions. While there is a tendency in current research to either focus on religion and race, or religion, gender and sexuality, intersectionality might benefit the sociology of religion by giving attention to the various ways in which religion is linked to a wider set of dimensions, such as race, ethnicity, social class, gender, sexuality, politics, and nation, and the ways in which these dimensions intersect.

This brings us to the question of how the sociology of religion might influence intersectionality. First of all, the sociology of religion might contribute to taking religion more seriously, or as Gilkes argues, “religion needs to be placed in the foreground of questions” because “in any society characterized by the durable inequality of race, religion matters” (Gilkes, 2010 , p. 418). The sociology of religion also has a lot to offer in understanding the complexities of religion. While the dominant discourse in feminist research and intersectionality presents a relatively monolithic and binary understanding of religion, Collins criticizes the binary view of reason and faith towards the end of Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory ( 2019a , p. 283). For her, their assumed oppositional difference is a hindrance for exploring how they are related, and this binary aligns with other binaries that create constraints for Black women’s knowledge, which intersectionality challenges.

Furthermore, the sociology of religion can provide a wider understanding of religion. When intersectional analyses focus on religion as oppression/subversion, there is a tendency to emphasize religious doctrines and ideologies. In Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory , Collins goes further and discusses how faith-based ethics provides “meaning to everyday life … explanations for phenomena that are seemingly beyond human comprehension … meaning of life, birth, death, human suffering, evil, and beauty” (2019, p. 282). Faith-based ethics are often “collective and communal” and may provide the basis for political work. Collins does not present a one-sided positive view of faith-based ethics but argues that their consequences depend on how they are interpreted and practiced. While some religious communities legitimate and reproduce social inequality, others struggle with ideas of social hierarchies, try to see how they affect their own practices and change them.

Nevertheless, sociological studies of religion show that religion is a far more complex phenomenon than doctrines, ideologies, and ethics. Current sociology of religion includes studies of everyday and lived religion, religion and the body, rituals, material religion, the blurred boundaries between religion and nonreligion, and religious complexity of different and inconsistent religious developments, just to mention a few. Although Collins describes relatively broad aspects of religion in her work, she does not analyze them systematically: religious practices, activism, care work, spirituality, symbolism, language, poetry, music, organizations, leadership, and the link between religious and political consciousness. There is a need to include these dimensions of religion in intersectional analyses.

The argument here is that a closer link between intersectionality and the sociology of religion has a lot to offer to both. The sociology of religion provides a broader and more complex view of religion that can help move the understanding beyond the simplistic binary assumptions of religion. Intersectionality can also be broadened to studies of an array of topics that are relevant for the sociology of religion, such as nation states and its religion policies, electoral politics and political behavior, nationalist and right-wing ideologies, and public discourses on religion. Intersectionality can also be useful in studies of media coverage and images of religious majorities and minorities, religion and education, religion and public institutions, inclusion, exclusion, privilege, and disadvantage in majority and minority religions, as well as Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.

Inger Furseth

Intersectional interpretations of violence in the realm of politics

Scholarly and practical interpretations of violence in the realm of politics have offered centuries’ worth of robust debate over what the true relationship between the two is, or should be. One prominent argument is that violence is a tool that enables politics: bargains and compromises are facilitated by the possibility of paying the costs of physical injury, damage, distress, and/or death. A common alternative perspective is that violence instead indicates a failure of politics, where in the former’s presence paramount distributional concerns are superseded by a need to respond to the destruction that it yields. However, violence does not just reveal or assist politics: it is politics. Episodic threats and uses of physical force, when applied in social settings and with social intentions, reflect and operationalize clear attempts at the accumulation, distribution, use, and management of authority, autonomy, and agentic self-actualization. It is another matter altogether whether the process itself is revolutionary or status-quo affirming.

In this contribution, I aim to further develop two arguments that Collins briefly introduced while theorizing violence as a “saturated site of intersecting power relations” (Collins, 2019a , b , p. 238). First, I explore the possibility that episodes of violence represent points at which the confluences of systems of oppression are not only particularly visible but also particularly vulnerable to dismantling. Second, in dialog with the common conceptualization of violence as a social problem, I probe the possibilities of violence as a solution to the social problem of dominance itself. The embodied experience of collective violence as both a tool of and a response to domination ought to be at the forefront of any analysis of political order and change. An intersectional framework to understanding violence not only supports such an approach but also may in fact require it.

The intersectionality framework allows for a more complete accounting of the mechanisms through which violence organizes inter- and intra-systemic power relations by centering its fundamental relationality. While subject and object experiences of violence alike describe the imperialist impulse that elevates domination as a political ideal, the scalability of violence illuminates this as much at the person level as in higher-order aggregations, like war among states or rebellion within them. Even one of the largest-scale structural representatives of the political status quo, the Weberian state – the government of which is expected hold a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its borders and with respect to its population – is simply one composite representation of the innumerate power relationships within and across human communities. The state serves also as a logic and a technology of violence that increasingly derives power from individuals’ willingness and abilities to distance themselves (physically and psychically) from the harms that they commit against others.

Notwithstanding its focus on systems rather than merely acts of oppression, the lens of intersectionality can greatly help us resist the pull toward abstracting away agents’ responsibility for violence when parsing its structural implications. For instance, consider Collins’s claim that political domination “seems hegemonic...when violence becomes naturalized and normalized to the point where it becomes invisible” (p. 239). Acknowledging violence as a saturated site of intersecting power relations allows us to push forward into a recognition that, at the point of hegemonic consolidation, status-quo domination may not be truly achieved unless all of its implications – the employment of violence included – enjoy legitimacy only in the image of the other. This logic seems succinctly summarized in Charles Tilly’s oft-cited aphorism, “War made the state and the state made war” ( 1975 , p. 42), as in it, violence and its perpetrators construct themselves in each’s image, along with the normative and institutional logics that sustain them. Returning to Collins’ claim, I submit that the invisibility of violence that she describes as a mark of a maturing domination complex only becomes so precisely because its agents have assumed a normalizing anonymity that masks their individual responsibility while eliding it to the system’s persistence. This is convenient, because in the power-saturated site of violence, only those who are visible can be assigned responsibility for it, because only they can be held to practical account for the empirical implications of their behavioral choices. However, when we can identify the system configurations that support domination and also their individual arbiters, we chip away at the hegemony of hierarchy as an orienting norm and move toward self-determination as a fully formed politics of collective control instead.

At the person level, it is critical to acknowledge individual-level decision making in the production of violence because it is as much kinesthetic as it is kinetic. For stewards of status-quo politics and their challengers, the observable act of violence is just one of many possible penultimate steps in an iterated process of political expression that involves the very human conditions of both experience (i.e., being and doing) and cognition (i.e., knowing). For example, when an object is launched in the midst of a riotous crowd, we are able to observe in that moment a crude operationalization of not only deliberations over whether arming has become feasible – let alone necessary – to someone, but also the discriminating moments by which that object is perceptually and actually purposed as a weapon. This moment of energy release constitutes a penultimate step because, again, the value of violence resides in its inter-subjectivity: For what meaning does violence have apart from the experiences that construct and communicate its “display” (Fujii, 2017 )? Once the physical act is complete, can the tool or the perpetrator be neutralized, or will it always retain the threatening patina of having once been fashioned as a weapon by the hands and minds of someone in particular? This may well be less the “co-formation” that Collins argues “is far easier to imagine intellectually than…to ‘find’ in the social world using standard tools of social science research” (p. 241) and more a selection process moving at an indeterminate pace, and in which individuals act on violence as a choice in dialog with social institutions that are indemnified by patterns of privilege, which themselves reflect the interpersonal negotiation of attempts at establishing dominance. (Ethnography and immersive methods that prioritize indigenous knowledges seem to be the social science tools best suited to for observing and analyzing such a process.) Each of these deeply political moments is directly informed by the stratified experiences of legitimacy, visibility, and protection that every individual lives.

From Machiavelli onward, there is a long and broad history of political thought that rightfully identifies violence as a tool commonly available to the structurally – and culturally – privileged for bolstering their own political dominance (even if this is not the specific language that those theorists would have used). However, episodes of violence – by status-quo representatives and challengers alike – may also indicate points of weakness in the complex systems that maintain multiplex oppression, not just points of strength. Consider, for example, the violent clashes during the 2012 Jo’Burg Pride Parade in Johannesburg, South Africa: after Black lesbian and feminist activists from the 1 in 9 Campaign disrupted the parade with a die-in and a call to observe a minute of silence to acknowledge members of the South African queer community who had been raped, killed, or otherwise victimized with physical violence, many White attendees were seen to have shoved, stepped on, and verbally assaulted group members during and after the insurgent activists’ dramatization of the physical inertia of (Black) death. The episode clearly highlighted the availability of violence as a means for reinforcing the intersections among race-, gender-, and class-based domination in the local LGBTQIA* community. However, it also shone a light on the fragility of those relationships: at the core of the violence was a recognition that the presumed powerless had been audacious enough to organize and deploy the strength of the powerful – not just to try but to believe that one can coerce and compel changes to the political status quo – against the latter’s domination.

Intersectionality’s embrace of relationality can also help to parse the potential of violence as a means of resistance. The idea that the use of violence may be a beneficial and ethically justified method for challenging multiplex oppression is certainly not new (Fashina, 1989 , p. 191; Coates 2015 ). However, the explicit lens of intersectionality further clarifies the ways in which moralizing about the value of violence as a political act, without acknowledging the causal and justificatory power of the interlocking power relations that shape it, is an attempt to invalidate the simultaneous vulnerability and agency of the multiply oppressed. It continues to strike me that this is the context in which many scholars and activists who are ourselves living the intersections of multiple oppressions come to debate the relative values of violent and nonviolent resistance as behavioral alternatives or political ideals. Over the decision to even discuss violence as an affirmation, this context also yields a nakedness that reveals our discourses as saturated sites of intersecting power relations themselves.

The danger of violence for those attempting politics under the influence of multiple systems of domination appears to be more so in being political – making and responding to claims that are of consequence to autonomy and self-determination – than in the actual practice of the violent act. Consider discussions of women’s participation in collective armed struggle: narratives that simplify and reduce their choices to either emotional outburst, blind allegiance to a romantic partner, or a uniquely savage personal disposition belie the anxiety that often accompanies recognitions of a disenfranchised individual’s willingness to make the political calculation to speak the language of the oppressor back to him (Bond et al. , 2019 ). The case of the Ketiba Banat (Girls’ Cadre) of the 1980s-era Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) provides a powerful example of how even as the agency of women’s participation in armed conflict has been used to validate the enterprise externally, the interlocking of womanhood with ethnicity and class still can be used to exploit women’s vulnerabilities at the same time. While the group’s leader John Garang developed the unit to facilitate women’s visibility in the broader revolutionary struggle, it functionally served as an “incubator for creation of a new female elite,” channeling different privileges (e.g., marriages with elite SPLA men) and protections (e.g., access to the post-conflict spoils of neo-patrimony) for its members than other militarily trained women enjoyed (Pinaud, 2015 , abstract). Nonetheless, the “new” elite class of women also came to reflect pre-existing social divisions among the predominantly Dinka recruits: girls drawn from the more privileged communities in the country often fought in fewer military engagements and did less of the domestic labor in SPLA camp areas (Pinaud, 2013 ). In discussing the general influence of ambient violence on why women kill, Asale Angel-Ajani and Nimmi Gowrinathan ( 2020 ) write “There is no vital distinction between the violence that shapes the lives of women engaged in armed struggle and the violence faced by women who live under the tyranny of threat and abuse … To forge connections between women who resist violence by turning to violence is not a fetishization of the act. It’s a reclamation of will.”

Among countless others, these examples of intersectionality as both a lived experience and a political analysis do support the possibility – as I have argued – that episodes of violence represent points of vulnerable fragility in multiplex systems of oppression, thus, exposing the possibilities of violence as a solution to the social problem of dominance itself. Collins’s treatment of the topic provides fertile soil for further developing the long-standing question of how necessary, beneficial, or inevitable the embodied experience of collective violence may be to the establishment of a truly emancipatory political order.

Kanisha D. Bond

The power of metaphorical intersectional thought 1

In this text, I propose to explore the power of metaphorical intersectional thought, based on a reflection inspired by the latest book written by Patricia Hill Collins, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory ( 2019 ). First, I study the potential of intersectional thought through metaphor, as a tool for social agents to perform a beneficial, therapeutical form of self-socio-analysis and build literacy regarding their own complex social position in the world. This exercise in self-socio-analysis is important in order to demonstrate how individuals could learn to read the social context in which they live and make decisions based on their understanding of the “matrix of domination … that emerges from the multiple systems of oppression which frame everyones’s lives” ( 1990 , p. 229). Second, this text examines the capacity of intersectional thought through metaphor to help design public policies that put at their heart social justice and the sustainability of Good Living ( Buen Vivir , Sumak Kawsay ). My aim is to offer new tools so that individuals are able to understand the social position they occupy in the “domains of power,” and how policies whose objective is social justice can be formulated, following in the footsteps of the intellectual and activist Patricia Hill Collins. In her latest work, she reviews the possibilities for achieving such objectives from an intersectional perspective and invites us to think intersectionally, deploying the concept as a heuristics, metaphor, and paradigm.

As a heuristic oriented to the solution of social problems, for example, social loneliness, intersectionality reveals that subjects experience it in a variety of ways and in relation to the social, institutional, and economic structures. As a paradigm, there are six central ideas of intersectionality – relationality, power, social inequity, contextualism, complexity, and social justice (Collins and Bilge, 2016 ) – all of which contribute to a complex way of seeing the world. Intersectionality as a metaphor – the aspect to which this text is dedicated – can be seen as a way of seeing the world and its interlocking structures or as a daily praxis . I suggest that considering intersectionality through metaphor offers important explanatory images. As Collins explains, the reflective work of several authors provide us with inspiration when it comes to the use of metaphor: Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “intersection,” Gloria Anzaldúa’s “borderlands,” “live jazz,” the “spider web,” or Collins’ idea of the “matrix of domination.” To this list, I would like to add – and take as starting point for my reflection – the metaphor recently proposed by two Spanish feminist social scientists: “marked bodies” (López and Platero, 2019 ). I believe their metaphor facilitates the understanding of social facts in an intersectional manner, including the objectivized and embodied form of social structures.

In the first part of this contribution, I will focus, in an autoethnographic mode, on mental health, which is, in itself, an outsider’s or a taboo space. This is meant to exemplify the form of therapeutical form of self-socio-analysis I introduced above. I write these pages at a moment of losing my way and I seek, through them, to better understand what is happening to me; all of this, too, with the hope of offering light to other people who find themselves in similar situations, and to offer analytical tools to those in charge of designing public policies in a participatory way, as Collins’ suggest ( 2017 ), whether in the sphere of mental health, or any other field. I will explore the metaphor of the “marked body” to describe the experience of vulnerable and finite bodies, crossed by different structures of oppression. This metaphor connects with Collins' intersectional perspective for it can access the objectified and institutionalized matrix of domination in the structural, institutional, cultural, and individual domains of power.

Depression, chronic stress, burnout, obsessive-compulsive, anankastic personality – all these are labels which, for the last two months, have sprung up in my medical file, obstructing my relationships, my understanding of my position in the world, my writing, and my life. During this period, I have passed through the consulting rooms of different medical specialists. Each one of them has given a diagnosis of the situation in which I find myself, and in each a pattern repeats itself, namely the use of one metaphor or another as an explanation: “you are a burnt-out athlete,” “you have broken yourself,” “you have kidnapped yourself,” “you have come out of your body and left yourself empty.” The “burnout,” the “self-breaking,” and the “kidnapping” leave me little chance of resisting the pain and making myself whole again. With these metaphors come the medical protocols that put me in a position of vulnerability that I integrate, gradually, into my gestures when I walk, fearfully and gingerly. The more vulnerable they say I am, the more vulnerable I become. Furthermore, labels overlap and contradict themselves. I do not know which one to use as a support. I feel a vulnerability in which I can hardly express myself. I cannot find a metaphor through which I recognize my limits and the impossibility of individualist self-sufficiency. This vulnerability stops up my words, I can hardly speak and when I manage to do so, I do it through metaphors. The doctors use them, I use them, the people closest to me read me with the help of metaphors.

However, in their praxis of metaphors, the medical doctors speak of “scorched earth” and consider solutions to general and universal problems: “after a mental breakdown, take care of yourself, rest and be patient.” Yet how do you do that if you do not know how? “Read interior design magazines and watch television.” I do not even have a television.

Dejected and sad, I come away from my doctor’s appointments with my bunch of metaphors, supposedly designed to explain this general apathy that accompanies me. I look around the waiting room and see faces similar to my own: white women and men, with enough economic capital to access the care of a specialist doctor who dispatches patients while others wait in rooms that have the odor of expensive air freshener. No sweat, no noise, everything is neutralized. I wonder whether these metaphors of scorched earth and pills are the same they use with these apathetic faces, or whether they assume that these “mental breakdowns” are intersected by gender, race, social class, bodily functionality, and other series of structures that should oblige them to reconsider those metaphors and those pills, and to particularize them. That is to say that a crisis of exhaustion does not mean the same, or have the same signifiers, in a black woman with functional diversity without medical assistance, as in a 34-year-old woman who works in the public sector and has private medical insurance. I know my doctors are not academics who specialize in intersectionality, but I think it would be useful for them to reconsider metaphors to adjust the readings of their patients’ discomfort.

Each one of these metaphors connects me to the latest book by Patricia Hill Collins, in which she presents the possibilities of working on intersectionality as a critical social theory. The author talks about the power of metaphors to integrate an intersectional perspective when explaining social phenomena. She mentions different images on which I project that complexity and consider places of resistance based on which public action can be taken. Anzaldúa’s metaphor of the “bridge” mentioned by Collins evokes connection and not just rupture. The traffic-alluding “intersection” by Crenshaw brings to mind a complex place wherein one must to act. The “matrix of domination” proposed by Collins insinuates the existence of symbolic violence at the crossroads of structures of oppression. When I manage to overcome fear and get out of the house to talk to my feminist friends using the psychiatrists’ words, they say that “mental breakdown” and “athlete’s burnout” are images that are too abysmal to allow progress. What is more, they remind me that these metaphors dismiss problems of a social, economic, and cultural order. So they ask me whether these metaphors help me capture the complexity of the situation I am experiencing. I say no. And soon another series of images is triggered in order to explain the state of my being: a piece of chewing gum that has been stretched too far, a mass of clay that needs to be remodeled, the beam of a building that has been damaged by hidden structural faults. These are all ideas that put the emphasis on a state in which regeneration is an exercise that is less radical than that implied by breakage, as Collins proposes herself. I feel there is hope. I tell myself: “it is time to give shape from within yourself, to do it in a way that reflects on the position you hold in the world today and on the one you want to hold from now on, in order to channel your energy towards social justice goals.” As if part of a shoal, I feel accompanied and I understand better what is happening to me, although the pain persists.

Moving on to the second objective of this contribution, when I was reading Patricia Hill Collins’ latest book, I was also studying Cuerpos marcados (“Marked Bodies”) by Silvia López and R. Lucas Platero. In it, they propose the metaphor of a marked body as a starting point for designing public policies. My understanding of these authors’ proposal is that bodies are the means we have to relate to the environment. The body is a source of expression that speaks intersectionally with each gesture. Its internal and external forms, colors, scents, and pains are social marks that offer, to those who inhabit that mass, one position or another in the social world.

Therefore, the interest of this metaphor is that it refers to objectivized and embodied marks of structures and social institutions based on the experiences of the living body. Family, school, and the media, among others, are visible social institutions that channel an embodied norm reflected in social habitus, whose matrix of domination varies according to context and domains of power. Taking the example of the family, it is possible to say that being the “owner” of a white heteronormative family of upper social class is a source of symbolic capital in most societies within the capitalist Global North. The heteronorm, gender, social class, and race mark the body, reify a specific idea of marriage and family in which lesbian, gay and trans* people, single mothers, and fat, older, black women do not enter. Formally, these outsiders are reminded that they are not in a position of privilege on each administrative form they have to fill in to register the birth or adoption of a child, a form that requests, in hegemonic language: “mother’s name,” “father’s name,” and “permanent place of residence.” What is more, white, heteronormal, middle-, and upper-class families appear in the adverts and stories told at school, inoculating values, attitudinal norms, and wishes that become, in words of Bourdieu, doxa (desires based on beliefs that we do not even consider to be beliefs due to the high degree to which they are naturalized). The body marked by the heteronorm of class, gender, and race is learnt in institutions and is incorporated into attitudes, gestures, and tastes in the way reflected by the artist Catherine Opie in Cutting (1993).

So, both books (Collins, 2019a , b ; López and Platero, 2019 ) led me first of all to think about their value for beginning therapeutical processes of self-socio-analysis – that is, to begin to understand my social position via a kind of individual self-analysis that could be undertaken by non-academic social agents – at times when one cannot see the light and one is “mentally broken,” whatever that breakage might be. Second, these works made me think, about the value of metaphors for creating, in a participatory and intersectional way, public policies whose goal is social justice and the sustainability of life. If, generally, in political science, we explain the setting up of public policies by means of strategic plans with goals to be achieved in four or five years, why not also use intersectional metaphors to explain that these policies are experienced differently, depending on the position held by the subject?

The intersectional metaphor of the marked body can be useful in the academic practice of the participatory and intersectional public policies also advocated by Patricia Hill Collins ( 2017 ). It could be interesting, in terms of mental health, to design public policies participatively, by means of metaphors that inform people’s experiences and, in this way, see who has a life of suffering and who is living well. Thus, considering the creation of a community mental health plan, the technical agent responsible for participation could use the “marked body” metaphor as tool of participatory and deliberative processes, that is, as a method to guide participatory action and research processes. This could facilitate an understanding of the complexity involved for anyone suffering a psychiatric problem and the mapping of how mental illness is an axis with an embodied dimension (which can be expressed through gestures linked to the stigma of madness, such as tics), and an objectivized dimension (which is expressed in labels, medical diagnoses or the marks of suicide attempts). In conjunction with other axes such as race, social class, age, and cultural capital, illness marks a body and subsumes it to the category of “depressed,” “schizophrenic,” etc. Such processes would enable us to see different depressions, not only the generic type projected by the medical staff involved, but differentiated according to the social structures objectivized and embodied in each context.

In this regard, metaphorical thought, in academic experimental contexts, could facilitate the reading of complexity in two senses. First, talking about a “marked body” makes it possible to identify the external and visible marks of the body, those characterizing appearance and triggering processes of “external exclusion,” that is, the physical expulsion of a subject from the process of creating public policies. Second, this metaphor facilitates the understanding of embodied oppression, invisible to the eyes, which facilitates “internal exclusion” (Young, 2000 ): even though subjects are present, they know that what they say will automatically be excluded, whether for not knowing the linguistic code or the right way to dress or, more broadly, for not having practiced the bodily gestures required by the normative context.

The potential of the “marked body” metaphor to project and assess public policies that put the sustainability of life and social justice at their heart makes it possible, for example, to read, to give another example, the psychiatric effects of fatphobia by means of a marked, black, fat, lesbian, French body. Recently, fatphobia was used by Daria Marx and Eva Pérez-Bello ( 2018 ) to explain how functional diversity, gender, age, social class, and race intersect in bodies that are seen as obese and do not enter, quite literally, into the instruments needed for public policies to be carried out. So, via the metaphor of “marked body,” in this case, fat, black and belonging to a woman, it is possible to think about a collective viewpoint on mental health that can serve to assess public health policies, using participatory tools (participatory workshops, planning cells, meetings about future scenarios, etc.) rooted in the multiple experiences of day-to-day discriminations.

In this regard, the goal would be to think about how the practitioners of participatory and deliberative democracy who are going to design public policies could make use of the intersectional metaphor of the “marked body” in order to make it clear that the social agents at whom these policies are directed are affected by different matrices of domination in an embodied and objectivized way.

In terms of using metaphorical thought in order to decipher oneself and also to be able to transcend, collaboratively, these readings about oneself, metaphors that contain an idea of intersectionality may have a therapeutical use, oriented towards a life that is worth living, crucial in moments of personal crisis, when there is a need for self-literacy, whether as part of a participatory policy or as a process of self-care. In this regard, metaphors may come mediated by an external expert agent in intersectionality from the community or may arise from the individual’s own creativity.

In the specific case, I discussed in the first part of this text, changing the diagnosis from “mental breakdown” to one of the body “marked” by a matrix of domination (that involves the effect of neoliberal forms of accumulation of all kinds of capital, a socialized gender in a Christian culture of self-sacrifice, a social class, a race, an age, and a particular sexuality), invites us to think of the key aspects that should inform policies oriented towards social justice. The first idea is the impossibility of self-sufficiency and the inexistence of “independent individuality” (Hernando, 2012 , p. 103), i.e., the assumption that everyone should look after themselves and escape from the state’s marking processes. The second is the importance of inter-eco-dependence. All the metaphors considered by the medical structures gave a picture of me as an athlete who ran alone and burned out. The metaphor of the body “marked” by a complex matrix of domination, let us me see the constructed nature of that matrix and the naturalization process carried out by myself. Third, the “marked body” arises from a dough, one that is specific but also heterogeneous and elastic that one relies on permanently and without which one cannot carry out one’s actions: recognizing the body as marked does not mean we must reconcile ourselves with to the fact of a paralyzing vulnerability. On the contrary, this vulnerability is a resistant one that can act as a lever to perform a critical praxis , which is, by definition, relational and contextualist, and which includes the idea of social justice and the search for the sustainability of a good living.

Jone Martínez-Palacios

Reflections

Intersectionality is a narrative of our times that was made possible by the loosening of political and intellectual borders of all sorts. Each author engages Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory through a different set of concerns and questions, thereby bringing a distinctive angle of vision to their reading of this book. Yet the significance of these contributions goes beyond their substance. IACST prescribes a different kind of reading that rejects the assumption that readers extract meaning from the text through prescribed reading conventions. Instead, IACST proposes a dialogical reading where the connection between the text and the reader is crucial. What we bring to these contributions in terms of what questions are meritorious, what counts as evidence, what constitute appropriate methodologies, and the ways in which these contributions speak to us is crucial to interpretation.

Elaini Cristina Gonzaga da Silva analyzes the genealogy of intersectionality, grounding her analysis in a close reading of my publications as evidence for the changing meaning and use of the term. She begins her analysis, not in the decontextualized space of abstraction, but rather in a specific context. By invoking how it feels to do social theory from the Global South during a global pandemic, her work reminds me of the uncertainties and challenges of doing intersectional work outside the protections of privilege. I read her detailed analysis of the travels of intersectionality within my own work as a metaphor for the struggles over the meaning of intersectionality and its trajectory as a field of study. Time figures prominently in her contribution, yet the significance of time for constructing knowledge as a process is often bracketed out of mainstream theory. Her narrative begins in a particular time and place, namely, COVID-19 in Brazil, which laid bare the correlation between social inequality and death. She traces my work across time and space, provoking my memories of how I wrote differently about intersectionality in order to reach different audiences. Doing so meant that I translated its ideas for different interpretive communities and learned much from those dialogs. I was especially intrigued by how the simultaneous release in Brazil of the Portuguese translation of Black Feminist Thought and Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory provided a distinctive reading experience. Although I wrote these two books in different times and places, their temporal conflation in Brazil, coupled with their release in two different languages highlighted the complexities of critical theorizing that is committed to dialogical engagement.

Emek Ergun’s analysis of the importance of translation for dialogical engagement sharpens intersectionality’s methodological edge. Ergun’s expertise in the field of translation studies, her social location within gender and feminist studies, and her experiential knowledge of Turkey uniquely position her to identify the need to deepen intersectionality’s transnational footprint and to recommend translation as one important tool in doing so. Ergun not only diagnoses the problem of the US-centric trajectory of intersectionality, but she also proscribes the intellectual action strategy of translation as essential to transnational engagement. It is fitting that she chooses Octavia Butler’s Kindred as a family story that is both personal and profoundly American to ask, what happens when this story is translated? By focusing on what happens within the space of dialog, Ergun identifies one core methodological challenge facing intersectionality as it moves toward being a critical social theory. Dialogical engagement is impossible without translation, and the act of translation occurs across differences of power. Significantly, by situating the theme of translation within the need for intersectionality to expand the universe of dialogs within a transnational context, Ergun provides compelling reasons why it is important to do so.

Inger Furseth’s chapter also engages intersectional border spaces that require skills of translation, namely, cultivating dialogical engagement between intersectionality and fields of inquiry that lie outside its borders. Intersectionality is currently in conversation with multiple disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields. But where are the missing dialogs with fields that also speak to intersectionality’s questions and concerns? In IACST’s closing chapter, I ask, is it possible to have intersectionality without social justice? This question challenges the taken-for-granted assumption within intersectionality that social justice is inherently a part of its discourse and that therefore, the ethical dimensions of intersectionality need not be examined. Furseth extends this question to explore the border space between intersectionality and the sociology of religion for a possible route to examine how ethics might inform intersectionality’s development as a critical social theory. Furseth contributes to this debate by laying the foundation for dialogical engagements between the sociology of religion and the call for ethical self-reflection within intersectionality. In doing so, she invites us to confront the contentious politics of how intersectionality participates in broader debates about politics and religion.

Kanisha D. Bond’s analysis of violence demonstrates that there is much at stake in rethinking the construct of violence as intersectionality deepens its critical theorizing about power relations. Bond’s succinct summary of the relationship between violence and politics brings important insights from political science to bear on intersectionality’s guiding premise that intersecting systems of power are interdependent and that they mutually construct one another. In IACST , I emphasize violence as a tool of domination, positing that violence constitutes a dense transfer point among systems of power that potentially highlight the intersectional nature of power itself. Because violence has long been a catalyst for political activism among Black, Indigenous, women, Latinx, LGBTQ and similarly subordinated groups, analyzing and responding to violence have been the subject of considerable critical inquiry and praxis. Yet my analysis does not consider the ways in which subordinated groups may also develop mechanisms of violence to counter political domination. Nonviolence is but one political strategy for resisting the violence of intersecting power relations. Bond suggests that the visibility of violence not only creates possibilities for political domination but also for political resistance. Notably, conceptualizing violence as inherently intersectional facilitates theorizing political resistance to violence through an intersectional lens.

Jone Martínez-Palacios provides a provocative use of intersectionality’s possibilities, offering an honest, embodied analysis of what it means to do intellectual and political work in the challenging space of intersectional inquiry and praxis. Using intersectionality as a metaphor, she positions two ostensibly separate ways of knowing in close proximity, the subjective world of individual experience that organizes everyday life, and the objective world of social structure that operates under rules that lie outside human agency. Martínez-Palacios presents an autoethnographic analysis of her emotional, intellectual, and political struggles to make sense of her own well-being during a global public health crisis (her contribution was completed early on in the 2020 pandemic). But she also offers a window into the value of metaphors for creating public policies whose goal is social justice and the sustainability of life. Juxtaposing the artificial distance between subjective and objective ways of knowing creates space for new insights, questions, and possibilities that are signature features of intersectional analysis. For example, Martínez-Palacios brings the emotional labor that accompanies much intersectional work into the center of her contribution, sharing with readers the emotional costs of caring about social justice, and the sustainability of life. Usually this emotional labor is hidden within theoretical analysis yet here Martínez-Palacios offers a holistic view of intersectional theorizing, one that incorporates the personal, the political, and the intellectual as a pathway to building more robust political communities.

The scope and breadth of these contributions in this Critical Exchange remind me how much is at stake in getting intersectionality’s journey toward becoming a critical social theory right. As an ever-growing, shape-shifting intellectual project that moves in tandem with decoloniality, intersectionality offers a conceptual lingua franca for people to engage one another about shared concerns regarding emancipation and equality. Significantly, intersectionality is also a language of discovery, whose commitment to dialogical engagement provides an alternative to a knowledge regime that upholds colonial conquest and neoliberal commodification. Eschewing narrow pathways into social theory that invite historically subordinated people into seemingly finished Western disciplines, intersectionality has been participatory and democratic since its inception. Making intersectionality less so, all in the name of prematurely elevating its status as a social theory, undermines its critical potential. This symposium provides a glimpse of the possibilities as well as the work that remains to be done. Intersectionality is a discourse of social change, of hope and, as these authors remind us, of possibility.

The author would like to thank Jean-Nicolas Bach, Izaskun Artegui Alcaide, and Mihaela Mihai for their contributions to the text and the outsider sensibility shown in their feedback.

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Collins, P.H., da Silva, E.C.G., Ergun, E. et al. Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Contemp Polit Theory 20 , 690–725 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00490-0

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 Special Issue CFP for TWC: Disability

Robert McRuer writes in Crip Theory that at some point in every person’s life, if they live long enough, they will be disabled. Yet, while disablement is an extremely common experience and ableism a hegemonic form of marginalization, disability is largely understudied across fields (Minich 2016, Ellcessor 2018). Fan studies has neglected to consistently explore disability or acknowledge the presence of ableism, resulting in a dearth of peer-reviewed publications on this intersection and a silencing of crip critique from disabled fans and scholars.

Disability studies formed in critique of the medical model of disability, which views disability as a problem to be solved. Most of the field’s critical work historically centers the social model, which frames disability not as a medical condition but as a social process discursively situated in histories of power (Siebers 2008). Contemporary disability scholarship more frequently works from Kafer’s (2013) political-relational model of disability, which clarifies that disability and impairment are both socially constructed, while also making explicit room for material realities of disablement, such as chronic pain and fatigue, and the inextricable mental-physical experiences of the bodymind, such as aging and neurodivergence (Price 2015). Approaching disability across the humanities has produced diverse modes of analyzing disability as identity (Shakespeare 1997), community (Clare 2017), and mediated representation (Garland-Thomson 1997), leading to crip theories exploring disability intersectionality to critique the ideology of ability (Samuels 2003, McRuer 2006). Disability studies especially draws from queer theory, building on the concept of compulsory heterosexuality—the hegemonic framework which renders heterosexuality the only thinkable option—to propose compulsory able-bodiedness, the requirement that disabled bodies perform as able and desire ability, highlighting homophobia and ableism as intersecting oppressions (McRuer 2006, Clare 2017). Further intersectional crip critique comes from Puar (2017) and other postcolonial and antiracist scholars (Schalk 2018), who describe how the violence of ableism is inequitably applied across multiply marginalized populations, illustrating how disability is not only missing from many intersectional theories of identity, but intersectionality has been lacking in disability theories.

We, as the editors of this issue, understand disability within the framework of the intersectional political-relational model, and believe that fan studies is well situated to contribute to discussions of disability. For example, Sterne and Mills (2017) propose “dismediation” as one mode of aligning media and disability studies’ often divergent goals through recognizing disability and media as co-constitutive—media concepts are awash with metaphors of disablement, and disabilities are so often figured against the cultural narratives and technological specifications of media. Further, fan studies’ continued claims to fandom’s transformative capacity and attention to “bodies in space” (Coppa 2014) desperately require the incorporation of disability critique. Fan studies has not entirely neglected disability as a marginalized identity, as fan scholars have begun to explore the accessibility of online fandom (Ellcessor 2018), examine the disability implications of fanfic as care labor (Leetal 2019), and advocate for thinking with disability to become a “default setting” in our field (Howell 2019). However, the disciplinary lacuna between these two fields has made it difficult for these conversations to develop a strong institutional foothold. By centering disability in fan studies’ discussions, this special issue can foster an encouraging environment for emerging dialogue between the fields to develop, as well as a supportive space for marginalized scholars and fans who do not see themselves represented in media, fan communities, or scholarship spaces.

We encourage submissions from scholars writing about disability from a fan studies perspective, as well as disability scholars writing about topics intersecting with fans/audiences/reception practices. We especially welcome intersectional perspectives that engage with disability as it operates in relation to intersecting identities such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and nationality (Bell 2016). Pieces for this special issue may explore questions of disability and fandom from an embodied, textual, or discursive perspective, for instance: What are the experiences of various disabled fans in fandom? What discourses of disability are circulated, perpetuated, and/or critiqued in fan spaces? How do fans negotiate portrayals of disability in their subjects of fandom, from movies to podcasts to celebrities? How has disability accessibility figured in various fandoms and fan spaces? How do rhetorics of disability, illness, and health affect fan communities and discussions? How does disability identity intersect with fan identity, and/or other marginalized identities?

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Works Cited

Bell, Chris. 2016. “Is Disability Studies Actually White Disability Studies?” In The Disability Studies Reader edited by Lennard Davis, 406-425. New York: Routledge.

Clare, Eli. 2017. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Minich, Julie Avril. 2016. “Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now.” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, 5.1. https://csalateral.org/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-critical-disability-studies-now-minich/ .

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