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On intersectionality: plenty has been written about it and plenty more will be. However, there are severe misunderstandings and purposeful misrepresentations of the theory. I'm not going to be an apologist for it here, but I do want to make note a few things re: its mechanics.
Intersectionality is an intervention in critical race theory, which itself was an intervention in critical legal studies. At its core, CLS argues that "the law" is inherently political--that it is not "corrupted by" politics, but rather is politics.
CRTheorists intervened in CLS, noting, essentially, that race is always political, that American politics are never detached from race, and that, therefore, the law is never race-neutral. That is, the law is either racist or aspiring to be anti-racist.
The issue for Crenshaw was that anti-discrimination law, which was aspiring to be (I guess) anti-racist and anti-sexist, was not designed to recognize the "intersection" of race and sex (and class and sexuality and so on, she footnoted).
Enter the case of DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, wherein black women were clearly being discriminated against in employment. The courts decided that firing by seniority was race and gender neutral because black men (racial) and white women (gender) were not facing job discrim.
Intersectionality, therefore, was a way of naming a particular institutional bias against a class of people who were not protected by a legal framework that treated race and gender as homogeneous categories.
In those first seminal articles, Crenshaw made clear (to me) that intersectionality was not primarily or even at all a theory of identity (in fact, the word identity is rarely mentioned in those early articles).
Intersectionality was an intervention in critical race theory, pointing out that not only was the law not race neutral, but that even critical theory did not always appreciate the ways race produces and is produced by "gender," class, ability, and so on.
In a rarely recognized footnote, Crenshaw even says that intersectionality is a *provisional concept* that opposes (in my reading) strategies of representation that treat categories like race and gender as essential, natural, and homogeneous.
If the only thing that intersectionality can ever accomplish is to convince us that oppression is not additive, then it will have done a great deal of good.
The problem is (and continues to be) that even when they say otherwise, people still understand intersectionality as an additive model of identity and oppression, rather than a language with which to describe institutions and analyze power.
In other words, taking the case of DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, intersectionality itself aims to tell us us very little about a category "black women"--indeed, it can't, but unfortunately it is quite easy to assume that is its goal and its end.
Rather, intersectionality, read on its own terms, exposes a system and its machinations. This makes sense given its *critical legal studies* genealogy. It's about demystifying the institution (the law) and its power. The "intersection" is merely a manifestation of power at work.
Even terms like "gendered racism" fail to grasp this, because they still treat gender and race as additive (or perhaps multiplicative). As a provisional concept, intersectionality tells us we have to think beyond such terms, but it is not equipped to tell us how.
In short, intersectionality *can* challenge us (though, unfortunately, does not demand of us) to dispense with the racial essentialism that is embedded in the heart of American politics and law.
However, the catch-22 is that because intersectionality is also a study of how to redress legal and political wrongs within institutions as they exist, it seeks inclusion rather than disruption--an inclusion that CRT already critiqued in terms of "interest convergence."
This thread was inspired by a tweet that suggested poor black men, for example, were not treated by scholars as an "intersection." There are, in fact, studies that do treat this "intersection." (God, I hate phrasing it this way, but I'm borrowing from the aforementioned tweet.)
If there's something amiss (and I think there is) with intersectionality as it relates to black men, it's not because serious scholars and students can't conceive of black men--even poor, cisgender, and/or heterosexual black men--as "intersectional subjects" (ew).
I don't really know how to end this thread except to say, as I say to my grad students in so many words, understanding needs to precede critique.
