Intersectionality and disciplinarity: reflections from an international perspective

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ “What is Women’s Studies,” National Women’s Studies Association, available online at: <http://www.nwsa.org/womensstudies> (accessed July 17, 2015).

² See, for example, Elizabeth Cole, “Intersectionality and Research in Psychology,” American Psychologist 64:3 (2009), pp. 170–180. For a critical discussion of the disciplinary appropriation of intersectionality, see Nikol Alexander-Floyd, “Disappearing Acts: Reclaiming Intersectionality in the Social Sciences in a Post-Black Feminist Era,” Feminist Formations 24:1 (2012), pp. 1–25.

³ Ange-Marie Hancock, Intersectionality: An Intellectual History (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2016).

⁴ Ibid., 26.

⁵ I elaborate on these questions in Leela Fernandes, Transnational Feminism in the United States: Knowledge, Ethics and Power (New York: New York University Press, 2013).

⁶ Hancock, Intersectionality: An Intellectual History.

⁷ Hancock rightly challenges critics that claim that the focus on black women marginalizes other women of color. For instance, transnational exchanges between activists, leaders, and knowledge producers have long historical roots. Consider two well-known examples: India’s leading Dalit nationalist leader B.R. Ambedkar corresponded with W.E. Dubois. Critics who fault the emphasis on black women certainly draw on dominant paradigms of mainstream feminist thought (including feminist post-structuralism and post-humanist work). This should give us pause when we consider narratives of Black feminist intellectual dominance.

⁸ Alexander-Floyd, “Disappearing Acts.”

⁹ Hancock, Intersectionality: An Intellectual History.

¹⁰ Ibid. See for instance Hancock’s important critical discussion of Leslie McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” SIGNS: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 30:3 (2005), pp. 1771–1800 and S. Laurel Weldon, “Intersectionality,” in Gary Goertz and Amy Mazur (eds), Politics, Gender and Concepts: Theory and Methodology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 99–102, 193–218.

¹¹ For purposes of discussion I draw on examples from my own area of expertise based on research on the intersections of gender, class, caste, and religion in contemporary India.

¹² Leela Fernandes, Producing Workers: The Politics of Gender, Class and Culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).

¹³ McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality.”

¹⁴ Hancock, Intersectionality: An Intellectual History.

¹⁵ Leela Fernandes, Transnational Feminism in the United States, p. 169.

¹⁶ See the mission statement, “What is Women’s Studies,” available online at: <http://www.nwsa.org/womensstudies> (accessed July 31, 2015). I develop an extended critical discussion of the paradigm of transnational feminism in Fernandes, 2013.