Situating Intersectionality

Politics, Policy, and Power

Angelia R. Wilson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137025135
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A new generation of political science scholars who are comfortable employing intersectional analysis are emerging and their work hones in directly on the complexity of politics, governance and policy making in an increasingly small, technologically connected, ideologically nuanced, global Public Square.

1

INTERSECTIONALITY FROM THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK TO POLICY INTERVENTION

Wendy G. Smooth

Intersectionality, the assertion that social identity categories such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability are interconnected and operate simultaneously to produce experiences of both privilege and marginalization, has transformed old conversations while inspiring new debates across the academy. Intersectionality encourages recognition of the differences that exist among groups, moving dialogue beyond considering only the differences between groups. Originating from discontent with treatments of “women” as a homogenous group, intersectionality has evolved into a theoretical research paradigm that seeks to understand the interaction of various social identities and how these interactions define societal power hierarchies. Intersectionality encourages us to embrace the complexities of group-based politics by critically examining the variances in social location that exist among those claiming membership in groups.¹

At the same time that intersectionality helps to make sense of the experiences of people who find themselves living at the intersections of social identities, intersectionality also is concerned with the systems that give meaning to the categories of race, gender, class, sexual identity, among others. In other words, at the societal level intersectionality seeks to make visible the systems of oppression that maintain power hierarchies and organize society while also providing a means to theorize experience at the individual level.

Intersectionality scholarship has emerged as one of the most significant areas of research across academic disciplines. It has been considered “the most important theoretical contribution that women’s studies in conjunction with related fields has made so far” (McCall, 2005, 1771). It has opened a plethora of new and exciting research questions and analyses. Viewing the world from the intersections of various social locations, including race, gender, class, ability, nationality, sexuality, among other locations, has produced an important paradigm shift in terms of how we study and approach questions of hierarchy, inequality, power, and what constitutes the just society. As Berger and Guidroz (2010, 7) argue, intersectionality represents a new “social literacy” that challenges traditional framing of research questions and methodology. Speaking to the reach of this new social literacy, they assert that to be “an informed social theorist or methodologist in many fields of scholarly inquiry, but most especially in women’s studies, one must grapple with the implications of intersectionality.” (Ibid.)

In this chapter, I focus largely on the developments of intersectionality from a Western, predominately US, perspective. However, as intersectionality is at its core concerned with questions of power and inequities, this discussion is applicable to wider political contexts. In fact, as more scholars engage intersectionality in their work in non-Western contexts, under differing political regimes, power hierarchies, and varied historical understandings of how difference is constituted, we are able to further our collective understandings of power and the role that institutions play in giving meaning to identities. Not all claims of intersectionality theory as constituted through a Western, specifically US, lens are applicable to non-Western, non-US contexts. As I show here, this perspective reflects particular power hierarchies predominantly, though not exclusively around race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability. Social categories do not carry the same meaning across contexts and systems of oppression operate differently according to the context. While race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability have been central to intersectionality approaches in the United States, these same categories may be less salient in other contexts where citizenship, language, and region may structure the formation of social hierarchies.² For example, Anil Al-Rebholz in this volume illustrates the salience of religion and culture as categories of analysis, while race is less a determinant of social hierarchies in the lives of women in Turkey.

As intersectionality is used to understand power hierarchies in spaces outside the United States, the categories of analysis must change as well. However, as intersectionality travels, some elements are so fundamental that without these elements intersectionality becomes unrecognizable and incapable of doing the political work it was designed to do. Kimberle Crenshaw, who is credited with naming the concept of intersectionality, has remarked that intersectionality often appears as a traveler who shows up at a destination without her luggage (Crenshaw, 2011). As it has traveled it is often stripped of the very elements that made it a critical theory with a social justice imperative. One of my goals in this chapter is to connect intersectionality back to its origins and in doing so equip it for future travels. This volume attests that while the categories of analysis may alter based on the political context under study, core elements of understanding engagements with power remain salient. As scholars around the world continue to contribute to the development of intersectionality as a research paradigm, we are able to develop greater specificity regarding the processes by which groups are privileged and marginalized in societies.

I begin this chapter by first offering a brief genealogy of intersectionality locating its origins with black feminist scholars and activists. Next, I assert a set of general principles reflected in articulations of intersectionality, noting the shifting terrain of intersectionality scholarship. Since intersectionality scholarship is understood widely as under development, I pose the question, “What do social scientists, such as political scientists and others interested in institutions and institutional processes, offer to the further development of the intersectionality paradigm?” Using my own work as an example of deploying intersectionality in the study of political institutions, I situate the types of questions political science illuminates in relation to intersectionality. I also recognize that the tensions that make intersectionality attractive to so many, may limit its advancement within political science and other social science disciplines. The paradox for social science researchers is that intersectionality exists as both a highly structured theoretical framework, yet a loosely configured research paradigm. An overemphasis on this concern, as I argue at the close of the chapter, could derail the potential advocacy and policy work scholars are poised to do in an attempt to address inequality across identity categories.

Those of us who study the manifestations of power through societies’ political institutions are well positioned to push the development of intersectionality toward even greater attentiveness to the structures and institutions that give meaning to politicized identities. The legal apparatuses articulated through policies, conventions, resolutions, and institutions give individual subjects meaning by at times extending, and at others resending, rights. As well, these institutions and structures bound, direct, and order individual and group choices. These apparatuses configure prominently in determining the material consequences for individuals and condition how individuals articulate their identities. Ultimately, applying such structural analyses to intersectionality moves toward an expanded notion of what constitutes “identity politics.” Such a focus on structures and institutions does the political work of troubling essentialized notions of identity and interrogates the idea of naturalized categories with distinct boundaries by understanding identity as evolving as institutions (i.e., laws, policies, and conventions) shift and change. In addition, this focus allows the foregrounding of the material consequences and implications of identity categorizations on individual life circumstances and group politics. Understanding the internal logic and organizational patterns of the structures and institutions that dictate and enforce identity hierarchies, I argue, is a critical step toward reconfiguring the effects of these structures and their role in determining individual and group circumstances.

The chapters in this volume are representative of the work political scientists and others interested in the study of institutions are contributing to deepening our understandings of how institutions and political structures give meaning to identities and structure the relationships between social identity groups. The focus on institutions and institutional behavior allows us to add clarity to the conversation on the processes by which multiple identities are constituted and how the salience of identity categorizations shift and evolve over time as they interact with political institutions, structures, and movements. In honing political scientists’ contribution to this ongoing conversation in this way, I do not mean to undermine or limit the study of intersectionality at the analytical levels of individual subjective experience, cultural discourse, and representation for political scientists.³ Indeed, these are all relevant levels of analysis for intersectionality research and illuminate important aspects of how identity categories intersect and how social divisions are constructed and maintained (Yuval-Davis, 2006). However, in light of the specific claims and values of political science as a discipline, we are positioned uniquely to advance thinking about the role of institutions and structures in defining and maintaining identity categories.

In other writings, I have made the case for political science and policy studies more fully adopting intersectionality as a research paradigm and how intersectionality contributes to the study of politics and policy analysis (Smooth, 2006, 2011). Here, I adopt a different approach, reflecting on what political science and policy studies offer to further develop the intersectional approach. Beyond, how do we situate intersectionality in the study of politics and policy, the question I explore in this piece is, “What specifically can political science and policy studies contribute to the study of intersectionality as a research paradigm that crosses disciplinary locations?” In other words, “What tools of analysis do we offer to the development of intersectionality as a research paradigm?” As well, I consider the importance of political science and policy scholars well versed in intersectionality and policy, structures, and institutions to the emerging policy debates that seek to utilize intersectionality.

INTERSECTIONALITY AND THE POLITICS OF ORIGIN STORIES

Origin stories are important in terms of locating a historical trajectory and are equally important to determining what remains at stake in our politically engaged scholarship. Therefore, I find it critically important to locate intersectionality’s origins in struggles for inclusion that mark the experiences of those who first gave academic voice to the concept: black feminist theorists and activists. Intersectionality stems from investments in societal transformation, inclusion, and challenges to the status quo; therefore, in starting with this origin story I strive to maintain its critiques of durable hierarchies and privileges.

Retaining this understanding of intersectionality’s origin is especially critical as it moves across disciplinary locations and expands from its roots in black feminist theory to function as a theoretical paradigm that may or may not center on negotiations of race and gender hierarchies. With this expansion, it becomes easy to separate intersectionality from its roots in black feminist theory, thereby erasing the intellectual contributions of black feminist scholars and more so their commitments to dismantling race and gender hierarchies.

As intersectionality has grown into an academic “buzzword” (Davis, 2008), it has come to operate as shorthand verbiage used to signify a host of meanings. In its status as the current “it” theory, it takes on assumptions and connotations that move away from its foundation. It has also become all too easy to gesture to intersectionality as a means of mentioning interrogations with difference and power hierarchies without substantively taking up the demands of intersectional analysis. As Knapp (2005) argues, it allows scholars to use the terminology and gesture to inclusion, while continuing to pursue research in ways that do not substantively challenge the status quo. Stephanie Shields (2008) illustrates this tendency through the use of what she refers to as the “self-excusing,” often apologetic disclosure paragraph authors may include in their work. In this ceremonious paragraph, authors acknowledge the importance of intersectionality, yet absolve themselves from actually substantively including such analyses in their work (Shields, 2008, 305). In this way, scholars are credited with recognizing the significance of such an analysis and are credited with being politically and intellectually relevant, but their refusal to participate in developing the concept through empirical and theoretical analysis contributes to a stagnating process. Such treatments transform intersectionality into a signifying keyword. Keywords, as Fraser and Gordon (1994) assert, assume a taken-for-granted common-sense status that elide critical reflection. In the wake of becoming academic cache, we can too easily take for granted the historical roots of intersectionality and the politicized struggles associated with the term.

My locating and centering the origin story of intersectionality with black feminist intellectuals also represents an attempt to return attention to intersectionality’s critical stance on uncovering the operation of power and privilege that render individuals and groups marginalized. This stands in contrast to deployments of intersectionality that explore how power is most familiar, or explore the compounded privileges of the powerful.⁴ Intersectionality can tell us much about the ways in which intersections of privilege collide to produce greater privilege. For example, a white, Western, middle-classed, heterosexual, able-bodied man presents interlocking social identities that help to explain how he experiences the political world. Intersectionality theory is capable of shedding light on his experiences, identities, and the resulting compounded privileges. However, I maintain that intersectionality is most useful not when it is used to explore how power is most familiar, but when intersectionality offers us a means to make visible hidden power differentials that are naturalized through systems of inequality, or when it helps researchers disrupt dominate narratives of privilege. In such projects, intersectionality is aligned more closely with its origins and does the political work of unraveling oppressive systems of power.

A BRIEF GENEALOGY OF INTERSECTIONALITY

While critical race legal theorist Kimberle Crenshaw is credited with coining the term intersectionality in her writings on black women’s experiences with employment discrimination (1989) and domestic violence (1991), scholars including Crenshaw acknowledge the foundations of intersectionality as emerging much earlier in the works of early black feminist intellectuals. Around the same time of Crenshaw’s writings, scholarship reflecting upon oneself as belonging to multiple identity groups and understanding that identity as a qualitatively different experience was developing also beyond the United States (see, for example, Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1992).

Crenshaw (1989) coined the term “intersectionality” as a metaphor to explain the ways in which black women under the US legal system are often caught between multiple ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 Intersectionality from Theoretical Framework to Policy Intervention
• 2 Intersectional Advances? Inclusionary and Intersectional State Action in Uruguay
• 3 ID Cards as Access: Negotiating Transgender (and Intersex) Bodies into the Chilean Legal System
• 4 International Adoption as Humanitarian Aid: The Discursive and Material Production of the “Social Orphan” in Haitian Disaster Relief
• 5 Gendered Subjectivity and Intersectional Political Agency in Transnational Space: The Case of Turkish and Kurdish Women’s NGO Activists
• 6 Gender Variance: The Intersection of Understandings Held in the Medical and Social Sciences
• 7 Intersectional Analysis at the Medico-Legal Borderland: HIV Testing Innovations and the Criminalization of HIV Non-Disclosure
• 8 Crossroads or Categories? Intersectionality Theory and the Case of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Equalities Initiatives in UK Local Government
• Notes on Contributors
• Index