The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

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THE GENEALOGY AND VIABILITY OF THE CONCEPT OF INTERSECTIONALITY

Tina Fernandes Botts

The focus of this chapter is the concept of intersectionality, primarily in the North American context. By turns a research program, a description of personal identity, a theory of oppression, a counter-hegemonic political agenda, a symbolic antidote to mainstream (liberal) legal theory, and a critique of the methods and practices of mainstream philosophy, the concept of intersectionality (or simply “intersectionality”) wears many hats. The concept is at the center of much contemporary research in the social sciences and humanities, is the fulcrum around which contemporary feminist theory and practice rotates, and is at the same time systematically ignored by mainstream philosophy.

As a research program, the concept of intersectionality is pervasively deployed in the social sciences and the humanities, and stands for the proposition that no phenomenon is adequately researched or understood without factoring in the ways in which socialized identity markers like race, gender, sexuality, ability status, and class interact and affect the phenomenon being researched (McCall 2005). As a description of personal identity, intersectionality disrupts the idea that personal identity can be described in terms of neat, mono-linear, timeless categories (see, e.g., Shrage 2009; Garry 2011; Levine-Rasky 2013; Botts 2016). As a theory of oppression, intersectionality represents the idea that forms, modes, or “axes” of oppression (such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability status) overlap and fuse in the lives of the oppressed, resulting in an account of oppression that highlights its complexity and its resistance to being addressed through means that focus exclusively on one form, mode, or “axis” of oppression or another (see Crenshaw 1989; 1991).

As a counter-hegemonic political agenda, intersectionality is a call to remember the oppositionality that originally motivated intersectional analysis (Bilge 2013) as well as the concept’s roots in radical women of color feminism (Gines 2014; Waters 2014). As a symbolic antidote to mainstream (liberal) legal theory, intersectionality is a practical call to the complex legal and social needs of the oppressed, including a suspicion that mainstream jurisprudence cannot meet those needs adequately (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013). And finally, as a critique of the methods and practices of mainstream philosophy, intersectionality calls the discipline of philosophy to take account of its European, androcentric, and white biases as a rudimentary first step toward opening its curricular and conceptual vista to the myriad ways of knowing and being the discipline currently systematically excludes from the realm of legitimate knowledge and reality claims (Goswami, O’Donovan, and Yount 2014).

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The aim of this chapter is to examine the evolutionary trajectory of the concept of intersectionality, with the goal of shedding light on both its centrality to contemporary feminist work and its anomalous absence from mainstream philosophizing. To accomplish this aim, I will first develop a genealogy of the concept, after which I will consider contemporary articulations of the concept. After that, I will explore critiques and controversies surrounding the concept, and then end with an inquiry into the future of the concept. Despite being mired in controversy, the prospects for the survival of the concept of intersectionality look good, especially as a reminder to those who study and work to combat oppression to remain self-reflexive and attendant to the unique and multivariate experiences of the particular oppressed person(s) involved in a given set of circumstances.

Genealogy

While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact starting point for any concept, the concept of intersectionality can be traced back at least as far as nineteenth-century black feminist thought (Gines 2014). For nineteenth-century black feminists, race, gender, and class oppression operated in tandem to oppress black American women in the post-Civil War era in unique ways. For example, Maria Stewart was concerned with the exploitation of young black women in the labor force, noting that many white women’s hands had not been soiled, nor their muscles strained in similar ways; Sojourner Truth “interrupted representations of ‘woman’ as exclusively white and of ‘black’ as only male”; and Anna Julia Cooper identified that black women were simultaneously impacted by racism and sexism, while at the same time unacknowledged as agents in the examination or elimination of these forms of oppression (Gines 2014: 14–17). By focusing on the ways in which race, gender, and class overlapped to generate a distinctive form of oppression experienced by black women, nineteenth-century black feminists set the stage for the concept of intersectionality

First formally theorized in the 1950s, the social science research method known as multivariate analysis (or multilinear regression analysis) has also contributed to what we now call intersectionality. Multivariate analysis is a way of analyzing social problems that utilizes multivariate statistical methods (Randolph and Myers 2013). Multivariate analysis involves the examination of several interrelated statistical variables at the same time, including the causal effects of some variables on other variables (Anderson 2003). Based on the idea that social problems are more complex than traditional statistical methods are able to accommodate, multivariate analysis stresses the interrelatedness between variables and within sets of variables. Historically, most applications of multivariate research methods were in the behavioral and biological sciences, but recently interest in multivariate methods has spread into many other fields (Rencher and Christensen 2012). At least to the extent that the concept of intersectionality acknowledges the interrelatedness of seemingly disparate variables that affect research outcomes, multivariate analysis is at work in the concept.

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The critical legal studies movement also influenced the evolution of the concept of intersectionality. An intellectual movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s that stood for the proposition that there is radical indeterminacy in the law, and conceptually based in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, critical legal studies stood for the idea that legal doctrine is an empty shell. There is no such thing as the law, on this view (Binder 1999: 282). For the advocates of critical legal studies, “the Crits,” the liberal ideal of the rule of law devoid of influence from power differentials was an illusion. The disconnect the Crits saw between the law and its efficacy arguably laid the groundwork for what later became known as “critical race theory” and, after that, “outsider jurisprudence,” although part of early critical race theory was certainly the view that the Crits had failed to take adequate account of the fact that antidiscrimination law had proven effective for change for persons of color (see Crenshaw 1988).

In the late 1980s, legal scholars of color began explicitly interrogating the ways in which the law and mainstream legal theory (including that of the Crits) appeared to ignore and disregard the lived experiences of African Americans, particularly the ways in which African Americans were uniquely affected or ignored by the law. The main question for these scholars, was how to achieve racial justice in a society teeming with systemic racism. The starting point for all of these theorists was that a given culture constructs its social reality in ways that promote its own self-interest. This means denying the rights and realities of those whose very existence challenges that self-interest, for example, persons of color. One goal of these scholars was to confront the presuppositions upon which the racist institutional structures of American society have been built. The ultimate goal was to create new realities, new structures, and new laws in which the rights of African Americans could be satisfactorily addressed. The work of Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Randall Kennedy, and Patricia J. Williams were early examples of this movement in legal scholarship (Bell 1987; Williams 1992; Crenshaw et al. 1996; Kennedy 1998; Delgado and Stefancic 2012).

Within this context, legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw first used the term “intersectionality” to highlight the experiences of black women in particular with the American legal system (Crenshaw 1989). For Crenshaw, race and gender discrimination combined on the bodies of black women in a way that neither race discrimination nor gender discrimination alone captured or addressed. Crenshaw’s point was that ignoring race when taking up gender reinforces the oppression of people of color, and anti-racist perspectives that ignore patriarchy reinforce the oppression of women (Crenshaw 1991: 1252). But, more specifically, taking up any form of oppression in a vacuum ignores the way that oppression actually works in the lives of the oppressed. For the law to help combat oppression, it must grapple with the complexities and nuances of the lived experience of oppression. Intersectionality is alive and well in critical race theory today, operating as the key theoretical fulcrum around which it rotates (see, e.g., Walby 2007; Walby, Armstrong, and Strid 2012; Cho et al. 2013; MacKinnon 2013). To the extent that the intersectional frameworks central to critical race theory have been expanded to avenues of oppression beyond race, gender, and class—including sexuality, ability status, and other marginalized identity markers—these ideas have come to be subsumed under the title “outsider jurisprudence,” the key idea of which is that the law does not well accommodate the complexities of human difference (Delgado 1993).

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Queer theory is another area of inquiry that has had significant impact on the concept of intersectionality. An interdisciplinary way of thinking about personal identity, the human experience, sexuality, knowledge, and politics that is rooted in work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick, among others, queer theory’s focus is inquiry into the perceived difference between natural and unnatural (sexual) identities and acts (Foucault 1978; Butler 1990; Sedgwick 1994; Jagose 1996; Turner 2000). Motivating queer theory is the debunking of stable (sexual) identities in favor of understanding identity as a conglomeration of unstable identities. Queer theory, like intersectionality theory, is “world-making” (Duong 2012: 378), that is, it has the power “to wrench frames” (Duong 2012: 371). It is capable of producing schemas of reality that are beyond preconceived (metaphysical and epistemological) sense-making mechanisms. Queer worlds, thus defined, transcend conventional notions of personal identity and politics to create room for countercultural (sexual) practices, ways of being in the world, and alternative accounts of phenomenological experience (Halperin 1990; Ahmed 2006). Such a vision of personal identity is central to the concept of intersectionality.

Postmodern theory, another key influence on the concept of intersectionality, focuses on skepticism regarding modernity’s narratives of universalism. Having its start in the 1970s and gaining prominence in the 1990s, postmodern theory denies the existence of one, universal, objective truth or reality in favor of a multiplicity of realities and ways of knowing. Postmodernism holds that there are no “grand narratives” or metanarratives that accurately describe the world, only micronarratives. In other words, there is only the particular for the postmodernist, not the universal. And there are only stories about the world, no objective world itself (Lyotard 1984; Hassan 1987; Benhabib 1995; Butler 1995). At the core of postmodern theory is a profound anti-realism that implicitly posits a world (or anti-world) beyond categorical description.

Hermeneutic ontology can also be said to foreshadow intersectional themes. Contained in the hermeneutical concepts of “being-in-the-world” and “being-with-others,” a core idea of hermeneutic ontology is that things are what they are as a result of how they pragmatically operate in the world (Heidegger 1962 and 1999). This characterization of the nature of reality is at odds with traditional presumptions about a separation between mind and body that allows, for example, a subject to stand back from an object and make an assessment about what it is. From a hermeneutical point of view, such a process is nonsensical. Instead, to navigate the terrain of that which is, it is necessary to understand that the persons and things within what we call “reality,” are world disclosing. In other words, what things are and what they mean (or in the case of human beings, who they are) tell tales about the varied and complex ways in which persons and things act on, and are acted upon by, each other and the world. This is particularly the case with regard to phenomena such as race and gender, mired as they are in the messy realities of our corporeal world (Botts 2014). Such an interpretation of (human) identity lies at the core of the concept of intersectionality, calling the researcher to take sober account of the wide array of factors affecting the lived experience of a given social agent.

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Standpoint epistemology has arguably had one of the strongest influences on the concept of intersectionality. While mainstream epistemology understands its objective as the pursuit of “justified true belief” (code for so-called objective knowledge), standpoint epistemology begins with the idea that all social knowledge claims are not only gendered but also

drawn from, bear the marks of, and perpetuate structures of power and privilege that are sustained as much by racial, class, religious, ethnic, age, and physical ability differentials as they are by a sex/gender system that could be discretely and univocally characterized.

(Code 2000: 174)

For the standpoint epistemologist, in other words, the business of knowledge production is necessarily political. Within this context, standpoint theories take as their starting point “the material-historical circumstances of female lives” (Code 2000: 180). According to standpoint theorists,

the minute, detailed, strategic knowledge that the oppressed have had to acquire of the workings of the social order just so as to be able to function within it can be brought to serve as a resource for undermining that very order.

(Code 2000: 180)

The concept of intersectionality can be understood to have taken from this framework its focus on the experience of oppression of the marginalized knower.

Within the realm of continental ethics, the work of Emmanuel Levinas in the twentieth century in many ways presaged the concern for the “radical alterity of the other” inherent in the concept of intersectionality. For Levinas, our encounter with the alterity of others (that which makes them different from ourselves) is an ethical call to acknowledge the complexity of the human experience (Levinas 1969). For Levinas, the Enlightenment focus on identity, sameness, and the individual subject reflects an extreme neglect for the other that is indicative of a deep neglect of the ethical. For Levinas, then, the traditional focus on the importance of epistemology and metaphysics in Western philosophy must accordingly be abandoned in favor of an ethics of alterity that places epistemology and metaphysics at the bottom of the priority list, rather than at the top (Levinas 1987). In practice, this would seem to mean focusing on the ethical needs of others qua others, which, in the case of the oppressed, means understanding their oppression as it is experienced by them, and taking whatever steps are morally necessary based on that understanding.

Finally, there are themes in moral particularism and care ethics that have had clear impact on the concept of intersectionality. According to moral particularism, there are no moral principles that can be applied broadly across all cases and the legitimacy of moral decisions is limited to particular situations (see, e.g., Hooker and Little 2001; Dancy 2004). Care ethics, in its appreciation for context and its insistence that others should be taken on their own terms, challenges mainstream ethical inquiry, which blindly applies rules or principles to facts without regard to the unique particularity of those facts, and without regard for the alterity of the others affected by the ethical decision. From the vantage point of care, the utilitarian focus on the greatest good for the greatest number and the Kantian focus on duty, just to name two examples, both miss a key aspect of a satisfactory approach to morality: care, or a concern for the welfare of the specific moral patient before one rather than an appeal to abstract principle (see, e.g., Jaggar 1992; Held 1995; Noddings 2003).

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Contemporary Articulations

Whatever its origins, the concept of intersectionality is at the center of an ever-growing field known as “intersectional studies” that some scholars characterize as an “analytic disposition,” that is, a “way of thinking about and conducting analyses” (Cho et al. 2013: 795). For these scholars, what makes an analysis intersectional is “its adoption of a particular way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power” (2013: 795). Keeping the focus on the permeability of categories and emphasizing what intersectionality does instead of what it is, say these thinkers, is the core of intersectional studies. Also important is continuing to expand our conception of intersectional methods to include interdisciplinary projects that bring critical theoretical, methodological, and substantive resources to the table. There is much scholarship on the scene that self-consciously adopts the concept of intersectionality as its “analytic disposition.”

For example, Priscilla Ocen has suggested that applying intersectional analysis to black women in prison could have a liberatory effect as yet unexplored (Ocen 2013). Focusing on legal scholarship, Ocen has pointed out that although black women are the fastest growing segment of the prison population, they are largely invisible in mass-incarceration discourse. She cites the handling of prison rape, medical services, and reproduction concerns in prison as examples of this intersectional fissure. In the case of prison rape, mainstream feminist legal scholarship, according to Ocen, fails to account for the ways in which the construction of black women as sexually available influences the forms of violence imposed upon black women in prisons. In terms of medical services, the same feminist legal scholarship focuses on access to abortion rather than the ways in which black women have been historically punished for exercising their reproductive capacities.

Similarly, Tricia Rose uses the concept of intersectionality to confront head-on what she calls the “invisible intersections of colorblind racism” (Rose 2013). Through deconstructing the case of Kelly Williams-Bolar, an African American single mother from Akron, Ohio who in 2011 was arrested, charged with a felony, and jailed for sending her two daughters to a predominantly white suburban public school in Copley Township without meeting the town’s residency requirements, Rose self-consciously deploys the classical critical race theory method of storytelling. Rose’s goal is to generate outrage and concern over a clear and unambiguous example showing that the concept of intersectionality is uniquely suited to explain and address the oppression experienced by black women in the United States of America in the twenty-first century. The retelling of the real details of a real story about a real experience of a real woman who underwent a ludicrously racist and sexist experience reminds the reader that these sorts of things actually occur, not just in theory but in life; which simultaneously reminds the reader that simplistic, mono-linear, theoretical solutions to the lived experience of oppression cannot and do not exist. One must begin with the complex reality, grounded in facts.

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The concept of intersectionality is frequently deployed in contemporary inquiries into the transgender experience. Julie Nagoshi, Stephan/ie Brzuzy, and Heather K. Terrell recently used the concept, for example, to interview eleven self-identified transgender individuals about their definitions of, understanding of the relationships between, and perceptions of their own gender roles, gender identity, and sexual orientation (Nagoshi, Brzuzy, and Terrell 2012), and what they perceive to be the intersectional relationships between gender roles, gender identity, and sexual orientation. What was revealed was that all of the participants viewed gender roles to be social constructs, viewed gender identity as fluid, and viewed gender itself in a way that transcended both essentialist, traditional ideas, and the social constructionist views of feminist and queer theories. Citing transgender theorists like Katrina Roen (2002) and Surya Monro (2000), Nagoshi et al. (2012) highlight that through an intersectional lens, transgenderism can be understood more as transgressing the gender binary than as a story about physically transitioning from one gender category to another. The concept of intersectionality is at work in this analysis through the focus on the perceptions of transgender people themselves as the starting point for the research, rather than, say, available data on the relevant topics derived from other sources. The authors explain,

While previous qualitative research with female-to-male transsexuals by Devor (1997) and Rubin (2003) has attempted to discuss [the issues of gender roles, gender identity, sexual orientation and the intersections between these], the present research advances this knowledge by interviewing a more diverse sample of trans individuals using a comprehensive interview that explicitly gave participants a chance to compare and contrast concepts of gender identity, gender roles, and sexual orientation.

(Nagoshi et al. 2012: 406; emphasis added)

In other words, explicitly asking study participants not only to provide testimony, but also analysis provided new (intersectionally generated) and important insights into the relevant topics. Moreover, deductive qualitative analysis of the data was done based on verbatim transcripts of the responses to interview questions rather than characterizations of the data by the researchers. Some of the results were surprising. For example, when asked about whether they considered themselves masculine or feminine, all eleven participants responded that they expressed both masculine and feminine behaviors and physical characteristics. This is in contrast to the popular idea that a transgender person feels like “a man trapped in a woman’s body” or “a woman trapped in a man’s body.” Instead, at least according to the study, transgender persons feel “trapped” somewhere in between, finding the entire notion of having to choose out of step with their experience.

The field of disability studies is heavily infused with intersectional inflections. For example, Alfredo J. Artiles has recently approached racial inequities in special education with analysis of the problem through an intersectional lens (Artiles 2013). Noting that within the educational system, both racial minorities and disabled learners have “complicated and politically charged histories linked to assumptions of deficit often used to justify inequities” (Artiles 2013: 329), Artiles highlights that remedies for one group can have deleterious consequences for the other, “thus muddling the effects of well-intentioned justice projects” (2013: 329). Artiles provides the example of a “double bind” that is created when disabled students of color seek to obtain benefits under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Although a disability diagnosis is often beneficial to covered students, in practice there is a disproportionate diagnosis of disability in students of color, further compounding the structural disadvantages that each group has historically endured.

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Feminist philosophy engages with the concept of intersectionality primarily at the meta level; that is, with notable exceptions, feminist philosophers tend to engage in defenses and critiques of the concept, rather than taking a more hands-on approach (see, e.g., Lugones 2007; Zack 2005; Garry 2011; Dotson 2014). Feminist philosophers who see a window through which to theorize a new socialized difference tend to defend the concept; while those who see it more as an ideological plaything that accomplishes little to combat oppression tend to critique it. The most popular defense of the concept is that it can operate as a vehicle through which differences among and between women, and groups of women, can finally be theorized and addressed satisfactorily. Some popular critiques of the concept are that: (1) it contains no clear theory; (2) it contains no clear method; (3) it is too focused on black women; (4) it has been disturbingly appropriated by white feminism to the detriment of black feminism; (5) it is vacuous; (6) it is a disturbing form of identity politics; and (7) the concept has an ontological problem that cannot be surmounted (see Gimenez 2001; Razack 2005; Srivastava 2005; Zack 2005; Ludvig 2006; Sengupta 2006; Russell 2007; Cole 2008; Yuval-Davis 2011; Bilge 2013; and Carastathis 2014).

In addition, within feminist philosophy, intersectionality has recently developed a metaphilosophical strain that operates as a statement on the ineffectiveness of traditional ways of doing philosophy. Notorious for excluding information coming in from the lived realities of members of marginalized, oppressed, and subjugated groups from the systems and structures of philosophical knowledge production on the grounds that these realities are insufficiently “universal” to count as philosophically relevant, intersectionality theory has recently been deployed in an attempt to disrupt the business-as-usual dismissiveness of mainstream philosophy. The claims to knowledge access and production of persons other than white, cis-gendered, heterosexual, able-bodied, males, insist thinkers who use intersectionality theory in this way, are legitimate claims; and if philosophy is to truly seek wisdom, it should open itself up to include the knowledge production of those historically excluded from the philosophical canon (Dotson 2011; Goswami et al. 2014: 1; Botts 2016).

For example, Kristin Waters is concerned with mainstream philosophy’s summary dismissal of intersectionality as a topic worthy of consideration (Waters 2014). Given that research guidelines, codes of ethics, and institutional review boards place restrictions on studies that do not include representative populations, as well as the fact that both private and public funding agencies in the United States (such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes for Health) are hesitant to finance research restricted to select populations, particularly those that occupy dominant positions of power, Waters argues, philosophy’s rejection of the call to implement intersectional research methods is self-deception at best and bad faith at worst. Waters paints a picture of philosophy, borrowed from critical philosopher of race Charles Mills, in which whiteness is central to philosophy’s self-conception (Mills 2013; Waters 2014: 28). The result, for Waters, is that “common topics often assumed not to be raced or gendered may reveal themselves to be so under close scrutiny” (Waters 2014: 33).

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Critiques and Controversies

In recent years, along with immense popularity within the social sciences, the humanities, and feminist scholarship more broadly, the concept of intersectionality has elicited much criticism.

The charge has been levied, for example, that intersectionality’s claim that the social world is beyond categorization inherently entails that combatting oppression is an exercise in futility (Ludvig 2006; Sengupta 2006; Russell 2007). These thinkers raise the question of how exactly the responsible intersectional researcher can or should go about addressing oppression if not through each axis of oppression, one at a time.

The concept of intersectionality has also been charged with lacking clarity as to the scale of its applicability (Gimenez 2001; Razack 2005). Does the concept apply to structural and institutionalized oppression or does it apply to the lived experience of oppression of individuals or both? (see Collins 2000; Davis 2008). If both, then just exactly how would the responsible intersectional researcher go about addressing that fact?

Similarly, to the extent that intersectionality grapples with intergroup, and not intragroup, oppression, some charge the concept with being necessarily reduced to additivity (Cole 2008; Yuval-Davis 2011). Moreover, some are concerned that the concept simply cannot deliver on its promise of inclusion, generating, as it does, a seemingly infinite number of micro-groups leading to a fragmentation among women that undermines the achievement of common goals (Zack 2005).

Still others are concerned that intersectionality has been systematically depoliticized by mainstream academic feminism through the calibration of intersectionality with neoliberal knowledge production (Bilge 2013). For these thinkers, restricting feminist engagement with intersectionality to “metatheoretical contemplation” or understanding intersectionality as the product of mainstream feminism is counterproductive for intersectionality’s original purposes. Sirma Bilge uses the examples of SlutWalks and the Occupy Movement to develop this concern. Bilge reports that during an October 2011 NYC SlutWalk, at least two young white women carried placards reading: “Woman is the N* of the world” (referencing a John Lennon and Yoko Ono song and using the complete racial slur). Similarly, the Occupy Movement’s motto (“occupy”) “re-enacts colonial violence and disregards the fact that, from the indigenous standpoint, those spaces and places it calls for occupation are already occupied” (Bilge 2013: 406). On this view, to the extent that intersectionality is deployed within the context of neoliberal political agendas, it is robbed of its power due to the inability of neoliberalism to speak a “complex” language of diversity (emphasis in original) (Bilge 2013: 408). In order to get back to the root aims of intersectionality, on this view, the task at hand for feminist work is to counteract this trend by “encouraging methods of debate that reconnect intersectionality with its initial vision of generating counter-hegemonic and transformative knowledge production, activism, pedagogy, and non-oppressive coalitions” (Bilge 2013: 408).

Finally are those who are concerned about what they see as the flippant and non-substantive way that intersectionality has been brought into mainstream feminist theorizing. For these thinkers, mass appropriation of the concept has brought into the light of day the fact that intersectional identity and intersectional oppression are not side issues in feminist work but rather lie at the very core of it (Carastathis 2014). Problematically, according to Anna Carastathis, intersectionality has “come to play a role in the historical construction of white feminist moral identity,” which has been “historically focused on the benevolence and innocence” of white women (2014: 68). Citing Sarita Srivastava, Carastathis points out that some of the deadlocks of anti-racist efforts are linked to white feminist preoccupations with morality and self (Carastathis 2014: 68; Srivastava 2005). The observation is that often when white feminists are challenged on their stance of non-racism, they reply defensively and with emotional resistance. Anger, tears, indignation, and disbelief are common reactions that can be summed up in the defensive question, “You’re calling me a racist?” (Srivastava 2005). Carastathis’ point is that such defensive posturing often serves to impede personal and organizational change:

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[T]he problem is that discussions about personnel, decision-making, or programming become derailed by emotional protestations that one is not a racist and by efforts to take care of colleagues upset by antiracist agendas . . . . Intersectionality is often used, in these contexts . . . to diffuse moral anxieties about racism, and to project an ethical white feminist self.

(Carastathis 2014: 68)

Carastathis concludes that “intersectionality reassures white feminists that they have not become obsolete or superfluous in what is heralded as a new feminist paradigm that decenters them and centers women of color” (2014: 68). Meanwhile, white, liberal feminists motivated by the internalization of egalitarian values to appear non-racist “have also internalized a systemic racism, which influences their implicit, unconscious and automatic attitudes, of which they are typically unaware or unreflective” (Carastathis 2014: 69). One result is that the reification of the concept of intersectionality as the guarantor of inclusion and diversity may actually impede meaningful engagement with the lived experience of oppression itself, and with women of color feminisms. In this way, to the extent that mainstream feminism purports to speak for women of color feminisms, the ethical and epistemological issues raised by the concept of intersectionality can remain unresolved. Here, Carastathis cites Linda Martín Alcoff, “[T]he impetus to always be the speaker . . . must be seen for what it is: a desire for mastery and domination” (Alcoff 1991–1992: 7; Carastathis 2014: 69).

Future of the Concept

Here, early in the twenty-first century, a lot is demanded of the concept of intersectionality. The concept lies at the core of contemporary feminist theory and practice, and stands for many different things at once. The concept is by turns a research program, a description of personal identity, a theory of oppression, a counter-hegemonic political agenda, and a symbolic antidote to mainstream (liberal) legal theory. In feminist philosophy, the concept operates primarily as a vehicle through which to critique mainstream philosophy, charging it with a Eurocentric, gendered, heteronormative, cis-gendered, classist bias that is both out of step with standards for scholarly research programs in most other related disciplines, but also undermines meaningful knowledge production in a disturbing and pervasive way. At the same time, however, mainstream feminist philosophy itself has been subject to intersectional critique on charges of a Eurocentric, bias that operates to exclude from received feminist discourse the voices of women of color feminist thinkers (see, e.g., Botts and Tong 2014).

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Moreover, for many, the concept of intersectionality is so vague and amorphous that attempts at pinning down a methodology or modus operandi for it have proven almost impossible. While the concept calls on scholars, thinkers, and seekers of social justice to proactively include considerations of race, gender, sexuality, ability status, class, and other socialized identity markers into their programs, the concept provides little or no guidance on just how that process should take place.

Nonetheless, when one digs into specific examples of intersectional analysis at work, the lesson of intersectionality is clear: As regards the lived experience of oppression, the responsible approach to addressing that oppression is through attendance to the multiple modes of oppression that may be at work in the given oppressed person before one, particularly as regards the ways in which the various modes of oppression may operate in tandem so as to overshadow each other.

So, it seems that if the concept of intersectionality is to have longevity, it may be most productive to keep the focus on specific applications; that is, it may be best to avoid abstract discussions about whether intersectionality can work conceptually and focus on attending to the particular needs of the specific oppressed person(s) at hand. If the concept of intersectionality has any lasting lesson, in other words, it may be that the key to combatting oppression is a radical openness to the other. In practice, this would mean, at a minimum, consultation with the particular victim of oppression herself for clues as to what exactly the problem is and what she thinks should be done about it.

In keeping with this train of thought, Tina Chanter has suggested that if we are to achieve the ostensible goals of intersectional analysis (for example, combating the essentializing and otherwise limiting epistemological frameworks for analyzing oppression rooted in Enlightenment thought), it may be necessary to “get beyond” intersectionality as an abstract ideal and back into the specific particularities of the individual lives of the oppressed (Chanter 2014). As the history of anti-racism within feminist struggles has shown, in other words, the master’s tools—in this case abstraction—will likely never dismantle the master’s house (Lorde 1984).

Accordingly, since a radical openness to the other seems to be at the heart of the concept of intersectionality, it should be no surprise that the concept has not found a home in mainstream philosophy. With mainstream philosophy’s focus on abstraction, the making of distinctions, universal principles, endless categorization, and the fetishization of the “objective,” in a sense mainstream philosophy cannot hold a concept as amorphous, fluid, and subjectively grounded as intersectionality within its tightly held grasp, a grasp forever attempting to impose order and structure on a world (including multivariate personal identity and oppression forms) that is arguably far more complex and unstable than the boundaries of the discipline can accommodate.

However, intersectionality’s necessary incompatibility with mainstream philosophy need not bode intersectionality’s imminent demise. On the contrary, mainstream philosophy’s failure to acknowledge its Eurocentric, androcentric, homophobic biases arguably says more about mainstream philosophy’s prospects for survival than about the survival prospects of intersectionality. For intersectionality is not a theory, nor an epistemological paradigm, nor a fantastical metaphysical fantasy designed to reinforce its own privileged status in the Western intellectual hierarchy. Instead, it is a sober acknowledgment of the epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, and political value of the lived experiences of the vast majority of human beings on the planet (who are not white, male, heterosexual, “able-bodied,” or wealthy). Posterity will decide which is more valuable and has more endurance.

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Related Topics

Feminism, philosophy, and culture in Africa (Chapter 4); feminist engagements with social contract theory (Chapter 7); Black women’s intellectual traditions (Chapter 10); feminist phenomenology (Chapter 12); the sex/gender distinction and the social construction of reality (Chapter 13); essentialism and anti-essentialism (Chapter 14); feminism and borderlands identities (Chapter 17); epistemic ignorance, injustice, and trans experience (Chapter 22); intersectional themes (Chapters 29–33); feminist ethics of care (Chapter 43); multicultural and postcolonial feminisms (Chapter 47); neoliberalism, global justice, and transnational feminisms (Chapter 48); feminism, structural injustice, and responsibility (Chapter 49); feminist philosophy of law, legal positivism, and non-ideal theory (Chapter 56).

References

Ahmed, Sara (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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