The concept of intersectionality has made a significant contribution to feminist theory. Intersectionality has now become a major feature of feminist scholarly work, despite continued debates surrounding its precise definition. Since the term was coined and the field established in the late 1980s, countless articles, volumes and conferences have grown out of it, heralding a new phase in feminist and gender studies (Salem, 2016).
The term intersectionality was specifically coined and developed by American critical race scholar Kimberle Crenshaw (1989, 1994) as a way to address legal doctrinal issues and to work both within and against the law. Crenshaw used the metaphor of intersecting roads to describe and explain the ways in which racial and gender discrimination compounded each other. In her work on discrimination against black women, she argued that a single-axis framework maintained a focus on either race or sex and subsequently failed to consider how marginalized women are vulnerable to both grounds of discrimination; thus, even a combination of studies about women and studies about race often erased the experiences of black women. The road metaphor specifically served to describe the way in which a minority group navigates a main crossing, whereby the racism road crosses with the streets of colonialism and patriarchy, and “crashes” occur at the intersections. Where the roads intersect, there is a double, triple, multiple, and many-layered blanket of oppression.
And indeed many feminists have used and developed the idea of intersectionality, although not all center the law or the language of intersectionality in their analysis. Patricia Hill Collins (2000, 18), for instance, uses intersectionality to refer to “particular forms of oppressions, for example, the intersections of race and gender, or of sexuality and nations.” She understands these to be micro-level processes regarding how each individual and group occupies a social position, which are located within a system of “interlocking oppressions.” The notion of interlocking oppression, for Collins, refers to the macro-level connections that link systems of oppression such as race, class, and gender.
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Many similarities and differences can be noticed between intersectional theories and feminist approaches. One of the fundamental contributions of intersectionality is that it points to the “limitation of gender as an analytical category” (McCall 2005, pp. 1771). Intersectionality shows how it is impossible to theorise about women’s lives by looking at one part of a person’s complex and multidimensional identity. Following from this, intersectionality decentralises gender as category of identity. This allows for theoretical consideration of other categories, such as race and class, the relationships between these categories, and how these relationships construct people’s experiences. This is significant because it challenges the problem of essentialism in feminist theory (Fuss 1989). Therefore, intersectionality is significant for feminist theory for two main reasons. First, intersectionality allows for feminist theorists to account for the differences between women. Second, as a result of the diverse applicability of intersectionality, it has been embraced by various strands of feminist theory, providing a means of cooperation between scholars who have differing theoretical stances.
However, intersectionality initially posed an important critique of Marxist feminists that were economically reductionist by showing that gender, race and other categories are not secondary but primary alongside class. The attention to capitalism emphasizes the usefulness of a Marxist framework in addressing intersections of social categories of gender, class and race, and thus may be a way of returning to intersectionality’s critical beginnings. Bhandar writes, ‘As an additive to Marxist theory, intersectionality leads the way toward a much higher level of understanding the character of oppression than that developed by classical Marxists’. Eve Mitchell, agreeing with Sharon Smith, emphasizes that the problem with the current use of intersectionality is that it is incomplete and therefore functions as a bourgeois ideology that prevents us from understanding identity as a form of alienation.
Moreover, she argues that the focus on identity or the intersections of identity means that we are focusing on the particular and ignoring the universality of the capitalist mode of production Feminists working within the Marxist tradition tend to look at the ways in which social relations (including race and gender) are co-constitutive and how are they tied to production. This serves as one way forward when it comes to the question of approaching gender in an intersectional manner. While some Marxist feminists, such as B. Bhandar , believe intersectionality has run its course and in fact was never a radical project to begin with, others have argued for its continued usefulness for Marxist feminist approaches.
Sharon Smith, for example, has argued that intersectionality cannot replace Marxist approaches to gender because intersectionality is an approach that helps us understand oppression but not exploitation . Sharon Smith, for example, has argued that intersectionality cannot replace Marxist approaches to gender because intersectionality is an approach that helps us understand oppression but not exploitation. In order to understand exploitation, and connections between different forms of exploitation, we need to locate these within capitalism – and this is what Marxist feminism does. Marxist feminism offers a means through which we can explain why different categories intersect and how they came about in the first place. As Sara Farris notes, while intersectionality has helped Marxist feminism see that it is not all about class, Marxist feminism can in turn help intersectionality explain why these intersections happen. This can be done by analyzing the root causes of exploitation using a methodology that is historical and materialist.
Also, a comparison between intersectionality and neoliberal academy should take into account.Neoliberalism can largely explain the process of co-optation of radical traits of intersectionality and other critical concepts within feminism. The questions raised by the various critiques of intersectionality are therefore intricately tied to the question of neoliberalization and the effects this is having on the production of feminist knowledge. This is where some of the limitations of intersectionality’s current uses become especially clear. The claim that the concept originated from within liberal feminism displays a lack of awareness about intersectionality’s roots in Black feminism and Third World Liberation movements, and thus renders some usages of intersectionality today unable to productively analyze relations between the North and South.
According to the criticism, intersectionality has become a catch-all approach that has been co-opted by liberal feminism for the purpose of identity politics, under the guise of being a critical gender approach. It is important to remember that within studies of identity and identity politics social identities are seen as intersecting and as reinforcing one another. However, this view does not often extend into an analysis of structural inequalities and power relations nor does it identify capitalism as the context in which these social identities are constituted.
References
- Intersectionality and Identity Politics: Learning from Violence Against Women of Color by Kimberlé Crenshaw
- Intersectionality in Counseling Psychology Research, Training, and Practice: Beyond the Theory/Talk/Twitter Tension by Anneliese A. Singh et al.
- Excellence with Inclusion: Identifying a Conceptual Framework for Successfully Delivering Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Programs in Post-Secondary Education by Kelli A. Canada et al.
