UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA WGS 498/GSJ 598

Module 2 – ASSIGNED RESOURCES

Author Bio

Patricia Hill Collins, another leading intersectionality scholar, is Distinguished University Professor Emerita at the University of Maryland. Her work has been central to the development of intersectionality theory. In her groundbreaking book Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990), Collins shows how in the face of extensive racial, gender, and sexual oppression, Black women have forged unmistakable intellectual traditions, developed worldviews rooted in their specific standpoint, and took on distinct forms of social justice advocacy.

Later published works include the co-authored anthology Race, Class and Gender (1992), Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (1998), Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (2004), From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism (2006), in 2019 followed Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory, from which you will read the introduction.

• Begin by scanning the chapter and note the topics of the subsections
• Read the introduction and consider how this chapter and the book are contextualized
• Locate the main argument or concern and paraphrase it in your own words. What is the main goal of the book?
• The book is divided into 4 sections; try summarizing the intervention each section is making in your own words
• Reflecting back on Cho et al’s (2013) where would you fit Collin’s book in the conceptual mapping of intersectionality studies: centrifugal/centripetal, political/structural intersectionality, as a tool for intersectional research, teaching, theory, activism or else? 
• What other points and arguments stand out to you? What questions are you left with?

Author Bio

Rita Dhamoon is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Victoria. From 2005 to 2007, she held a Grant Notley Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta.

• Read the abstract slowly
• Begin by scanning the chapter, note the title and the topics of each section
• Read the introduction and identify the goals the author lays out

“In sum, the constitutive feature of an intersectional-type research paradigm is a critique of the work of power—how it operates, its effects, and the possibilities of transformation.” (Dhamoon, 2011, 240)

In the face of the “burgeoning of intersectionality” well beyond its initial domains of critical race and legal studies and feminist theory, Dhamoon lays out 5 methodological considerations she regards as pivotal to the mainstreaming of intersectionality.

According to Dhamoon, “intersectional-type” work needs to consider:

1. the conceptual language we use for intersectionality;  
2. the categories we employ: identities (Black woman), categories of difference (race, gender), processes of differentiation (gendering, racializing) or systems of domination and oppression (racism, colonialism) 
3. the ways we analyze multiple processes of differentiation and systems of domination within specific situated contexts;
4. the model we use to explain and describe “multiple interacting aspects of power and difference” (as venn diagram, multiple intersecting identities, stacked categories, matrix etc.);
5. the interactions we choose to study.

As intersectional-type work gets mainstreamed, so Dhamoon, we must continue to foreground this work as a social critique that seeks to analyze and interrupt oppressive power.