UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA WGS 498/GSJ 598

Module 2 – SEMINAR

WATCH

“My race, my gender, my religion might very well have consequences whether I make it walking down the street alive.”  (Sikh musician Sonny Singh)

This short video is part of the #RaceAnd series produced by Race Forward, a non-profit organization that seeks to build racial justice movements through research and training. In the video, the American Sikh musician Sonny Singh reflects on the lived experience of his complex identity. The video arguably captures how intersectionality is often addressed in social justice activism and education. 

---

Mainstreaming Intersectionality?

“Having so many people claim intersectionality and use it in such disparate ways creates definitional dilemmas for intersectionality.” (Collins 2015, 4)

“How should we understand the concept of intersectionality given its ascendancy in feminist philosophy and in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies as the way to theorize the synthesis, co-constitution, or interactivity of “race” and “gender”?” (Carastathis 2016, 28)

In the above quotes, Patricia Collins and Anna Carasthasis, both leading intersectionality theorists, raise concerns regarding the effect the widespread adoption of intersectionality has had since it was coined first over 35 years ago. In this section, we turn to these intersectionality theorists as they reflect on the challenges and potentials intersectionality’s popularity poses. The broad questions we are considering in this module are these: 

• How has intersectionality changed since it was first coined and as it has travelled well beyond the boundaries of feminist queer black and women of color theorizing and activism? 
• Is the mainstreaming of intersectionality from BIPoC communities and from women’s and gender studies to many other disciplines a cause for celebration and a sign of a social justice success story? Or (or and?):
• Does mainstreaming intersectionality risk appropriating, deradicalizing, and invisibilizing BIPOC intellectual and activist labour?  

In this module, we approach these questions via three readings: Rita Dhamoon’s (2011) article “Considerations on Mainstreaming Intersectionality,” the introduction to Patricia Hill Collins (2019) book Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory, and the introduction to a special journal issue on intersectionality (Cho et al 2013). All of these texts are by prominent intersectionality scholars.

---

The Field of Intersectionality Studies

“Towards a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis” is the introductory essay to a special 2013  issue of  Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Signs is a leading international scholarly journal in Women’s and Gender Studies. This special issue is dedicated to reflecting on the state of intersectionality a decade ago. 

Before you start digging into the reading:

• Scan the article and map its structure and parts
• Based on the title and subheadings, what do you expect the article to be about?
• Read the introduction carefully, skip to the conclusion
• Reflect on your purpose in reading the article – how will this affect your reading strategies?  

As discussed in the critical skills section of this module, reading with a clear purpose in mind helps as you make your way through complex scholarly articles. However, when course readings are assigned, how do you decide what to read for?

Given that this module is about locating “intersectionality today”, you probably want to get a sense of:

• the history of the field,
• debates in the field, 
• the positions different authors take vis a vis these debates; and
• how this text responds to the topic of the module – mainstreaming intersectionality. 

Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall, the editors of the special Signs issue are prominent figures in intersectional and critical race scholarship. In their co-authored introduction, Cho et al. (2013) survey the “burgeoning field” of intersectionality. They outline three areas that have emerged within within intersectionality studies: 

1. intersectionality as an application in teaching and research; 

2. intersectionality as theory and methodology; and

3. intersectionality as praxis.

Here you might want to pause and reflect on what interests you most. Are you primarily interested in: 

• applying intersectionality to research and teaching? (And how is that different from from research and teaching that does not use an intersectional lens?)
• theorizing intersectionality? 
• activism and social justice praxis using an intersectional lens?

Depending your specific interests, you might focus your reading purpose accordingly.

Cho et al offer an important distinction here between intersectionality as “a tool” for questioning and changing teaching, research, and the social world as compared to analysing and theorizing intersectionality as a social theory and methodological framework (786).

This distinction is one that you can apply to future readings in this course and beyond: are these texts concerned with theorizing intersectionality or are these practitioners who use intersectionality as a tool in teaching, research and activism? (Of course, making this distinction does not imply that practitioners of intersectionality don’t theorize, nor does it mean that the intersectionality theorists don’t teach, research, or act.) 

Under the subheading “Engaging Intersectionality” the authors offer a brief  genealogy of intersectionality and outline ongoing debates among theorists and practitioners about intersectionality. 

Debates have concerned: 

• the various metaphors for intersectionality beyond the intersecting roads Crenshaw (1989) first introduced;
• the number of categories (race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality etc.) intersectionality should consider;
• whether intersectionality is only about marginalized or also about privileged groups; 
• whether intersectionality is primarily or exclusively about Black women or about all marginalized groups (788)?

While noting these different approaches to intersectionality, Cho et al. (2013) are less interested in explaining or defining “what intersectionality is” or manufacturing agreement across different approaches to intersectionality. Instead they hope to enhance “greater theoretical, methodological, substantive, and political literacy” –  by way of a “template” for “collaborative intersectionality” assembled under the sign of what they call the “field of intersectionality studies” (792).  

The authors’ distinction between “centrifugal” and “centripetal” (793) developments of intersectionality is especially relevant to our focus in this module on mainstreaming intersectionality. 

Centrifugal is a term from physics and refers to “moving or tending to move away from a center”:

intersectionality travels from its groundings in Black feminism to critical legal and race studies; to other disciplines and interdisciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences; and across countries and continents as well. It adapts to the different discursive and research protocols in these environments, perhaps modifying how race, gender, and other social dynamics are conceptualized and intertwined or, alternatively, how the central subjects and social categories of intersectionality are identified. (Cho et al 2013, 792)

Cho et al compare this development where intersectionality travels and becomes increasingly mainstreamed beyond Black feminism and women’s studies with what they call the “centripetal” process. Also, a term borrowed from physics, it means “moving or tending to move toward a center”:

Scholars interested in intersectionality strike out mainly in the margins of their disciplines and are often skeptical about the possibility of integrating mainstream methods and theories into their intersectional research. As they are less beholden to disciplinary conventions, their projects may draw on a variety of methods and materials, integrating them into innovative insights that might otherwise have been obscured. (793)

The authors voice some concerns with both centrifugal and centripetal developments. However, they are more skeptical about the ways that mainstreaming intersectionality can be constrained by pre-existing disciplinary habits and conventions that contravene the radical commitments of intersectionality (793). Centripetal developments put the researchers themselves at risk of marginalization due to institutional and disciplinary power dynamics.

Rather than arguing for a rigid definition of “the best” approach to intersectionality, Cho et al (2013) argue for an “interface” between centrifugal (or mainstreaming) and centripetal approaches. 

Moreover, they propose to understand intersectionality as an “analytic sensibility,” and as a doing rather than a being:

If intersectionality is understood as an analytic disposition, a way of thinking about and conducting analyses, then what makes an analysis intersectional is not its use of the term “intersectionality,” nor its being situated in a familiar genealogy, nor its drawing on lists of standard citations. Rather, what makes an analysis intersectional—whatever terms it deploys, whatever its iteration, whatever its field or discipline—is its adoption of an intersectional way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power. (795, my emphasis)

For the remainder of the text, the authors discuss issues that have been central as intersectionality developed, are key to its future, and taken up across the different articles that make up this special issue. :

Structural Intersectionality focuses on an analysis of power relations, rather than identities, and on the political and structural inequality that affects members of different groups differently. Understanding intersectionality as a structural analysis means attending to the “[m]ultilayerd and routinized forms of domination” (Crenshaw cited in Cho et al 2013, 797). Or put differently: “Intersectionality primarily concerns the way things work rather than who people are” (Chun et al cited in Cho 2013, 97, emphasis added).

This focus on structures of domination is key, as intersectionality often (problematically) is reduced to account for complex and multiple identities.

Political intersectionality involves two main aspects: 

1. To challenge systemic forces that affect the differential opportunities and life chances that people experience, and 

2.  to resist these forces without falling back into a single-axis analysis. (It’s sexism! Or: It’s racism!) 

Political intersectionality takes the ideas of structural intersectionality and develops ways to contest existing structures of power by linking theory to ongoing social and political movements.

Of course, there is much more to be said about this text. You might find other points noteworthy and insightful for your own understanding. Keep track of them, maybe write a journal entry about other points from the reading or contribute them to discussions in this course.