Intersectionality: diagnosing conceptual practices of power

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Notes

Symposium Responses to Intersectionality: An Intellectual History, by Ange-Marie Hancock, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, 2016.

¹ As intersectionality scholarship has grown, so too have its critics. For helpful overviews of these debates, see Kathy Davis. “Intersectionality as Buzzword: A Sociology of Science Perspective on What Makes a Feminist Theory Successful,” Feminist Theory 9:1 (2008), pp. 67–85; Brittney Cooper, “Intersectionality,” in Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth (eds), Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, forthcoming), pp. 385–406; and Ange-Marie Hancock, Intersectionality: An Intellectual History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2016).

² Shireen Roshanravan, “Motivating Coalition: Women of Color and Epistemic Disobedience,” Hypatia 29:1 (2014), pp. 41–58; Breny Mendoza, “Coloniality of Gender and Power: From Postcoloniality to Decoloniality,” in Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth (eds), Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 100–121.

³ Davis, “Intersectionality as Buzzword,” p. 79.

⁴ Julia Jordan-Zachery, “Am I a Black Woman or a Woman who is Black: A Few Thoughts on the Meaning of Intersectionality,” Politics and Gender 3:2 (2007), p. 256.

⁵ Evelyn Simien, “Doing Intersectionality Research: From Conceptual Issues to Practical Examples,” Politics and Gender 3:2 (2007), p. 266.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ange-Marie Hancock, “Intersectionality as a Normative and Empirical Paradigm,” Politics and Gender 3:2 (2007), pp. 249–250.

⁸ Ange-Marie Hancock, “When Multiplication Doesn’t Equal Quick Addition: Examining Intersectionality as a Research Paradigm,” Perspectives on Politics 5:1 (2007), p. 67.

⁹ Ange-Marie Hancock, “An Untraditional Intersectional Analysis of the 2008 Election,” Politics and Gender 5:1 (2009), pp. 96–105, p. 97.

¹⁰ Breny Mendoza, “Coloniality of Gender and Power: From Postcoloniality to Decoloniality,” in Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth (eds), Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, forthcoming), pp. 100–121.

¹¹ Cooper, “Intersectionality.”

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Ange-Marie Hancock, Intersectionality: An Intellectual History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2016).

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ American Political Science Association (APSA). Report of the Task Force on Political Science in the 21st Century (Washington, DC.: American Political Science Association, 2011) noted that “studies conducted since the 1980s have consistently shown a bias against the study of race and inequality within political science as compared to most other social science disciplines…. Flagship journals have, on the whole, rarely addressed issues of race, ethnicity, and gender (Walton, Miller, and McCormick 1995; Orr and Johnson 2007; Smith 2004) … [and] text books treat race, ethnicity, and gender … as marginal aspects of the political system, rather than as woven into the fabric of American politics (Aoki and Takeda 2004; Wallace and Allen 2008; Lavariega Monforti and McGlynn 2010; Novkov and Barclay 2010).”

¹⁸ Imre Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (eds), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 132.

¹⁹ Theodore Roosevelt, American Ideals and Other Essays Social and Political (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1897), pp. 293–294.

²⁰ Theodore Roosevelt, Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (London: Grant Richards, 1902), p. 2.

²¹ Pinar Bílgín and Lili Ling, “Transcultural Asia: Unlearning Colonial/Imperial Power Relations,” Perceptions: Journal of International Affairs 19:1 (2014), p. 1.

²² Charles Mills, “White Ignorance,” in Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger (eds) Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 237.

²³ Jane Junn, “Square Pegs and Round Holes: Challenges of Fitting Individual-level analysis to a Theory of Politicized Context of Gender,” Politics and Gender 3:1 (2007), p. 130.

²⁴ See, for example, James Bryce, James, The American Commonwealth, 3 volumes (New York: Macmillan, 1888), James Bryce, The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of Mankind (London: Clarendon Press, 1902); John Burgess, Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law (Boston, MA: Gunn and Company, 1890); and Edward A. Ross, “The Causes of Race Superiority,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, July 18, 1901.

²⁵ As part of its study of Political Science in the 21st Century, the APSA Task Force (2011, pp. 15–16) sampled the curriculum at 15 “highly ranked” departments and at 3 historically Black universities that offer the Ph.D. Their findings suggest that “four of the eighteen—about one in five—of the programs have subfields that include race/ethnicity or gender … Our analysis suggests that issues of race in American politics, for example, are not considered an essential part of what a student specializing in that subfield needs to know … Not surprisingly, those programs with faculty who have race/ethnicity or gender as areas of focus in their research also tend to have more course offerings that included these topics. Those universities, of which there are many, that have only one or no faculty whose scholarship focused on difference and inequality are much less likely to provide this type of content to their graduate students.”

²⁶ Michele Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning, Women, Philosophy, etc. Trans. Trista Selous (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 43.

²⁷ In The New American Exceptionalism, Donald Pease (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, 28) points out that American exceptionalism has been retroactively assigned to the distant origins of the British colonies in North America. But the term did not in fact emerge into common usage until the late 1920s when Joseph Stalin invented it to accuse the Lovestonite faction of the American Communist Party of a heretical deviation from Party orthodoxies. “Extracting ‘exceptionalism from Communist Party jargon, scholars moving centerward from the anti-Stalinist left injected it into the central vocabulary of American social and political science. An absence—the relative failure of socialism in the United States—became the defining point of the nation’s history, a ratification of the special dispensation of the United States in a revolutionary world where Marx still tempted.”

²⁸ Charles Mills, “White Ignorance,” in Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger (eds) Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 239.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ Tricia Rose, “Public Tales Wag the Dog: Telling Stories about Structural Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era,” Du Bois Review 10:2 (2013), pp. 447–469, p. 448.