Intersectionality’s will toward social transformation

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Notes

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

¹ Marilyn Richardson (ed.), Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987), p. 39.

² On the Jewish Question and Critique of Hegel were both published in 1843; the German Ideology was published in 1845, while the Communist Manifesto and Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy were published in 1848 and 1859, respectively.

³ “Black” in Britain indicates a broad set of national identities, including Afro-Caribbean, Afro-British, Indo-British, and Pakistani British. I use the term black elsewhere to indicate a US definition of black identity, which separates African-American, Caribbean, and Afro-Latino from South Asian identities, which fall in the US census categories under Asian/Asian American/Pacific Islander.

⁴ See Jennifer Jihye Chun, George Lipsitz, and Young Shin, “Intersectionality as a Social Movement Strategy: Asian Immigrant Women Advocates,” SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38:4 (2013), pp. 917–940; Erica E. Townsend-Bell, “Intersectional Advances? Inclusionary and Intersectional State Action in Uruguay,” in Wilson, Angelia (ed.), Situating Intersectionality: Politics, Policy and Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). For more information about NDWA and CRIAW, see: <http://www.domesticworkers.org/> and <http://www.criaw-icref.ca/en/>, respectively.

⁵ 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; Sumi K. Cho, “Post-Intersectionality: The Curious Reception of Intersectionality in Legal Scholarship,” Du Bois Review 10:2 (2013), pp. 385–404; Julia Jordan-Zachery, “Now You See Me, Now You Don’t: My Political Fight against the Invisibility of Black Women in Intersectionality Research,” Politics, Gender and Identities 1:1 (2013), pp. 101–109; Vivian May, Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries (New York: Routledge, 2015); and Silma Bilge, “Intersectionality Undone: Saving Intersectionality from Feminist Intersectionality Studies,” Du Bois Review 10:2 (2013), pp. 405–424.

⁶ Bilge, “Intersectionality Undone.”

⁷ Ibid.; Gudrun-Axeli Knapp, “Race, Class, Gender: Reclaiming Baggage in Fast Travelling Theories” European Journal of Women’s Studies 12:3 (2005), pp. 249–265.

⁸ Alexander-Floyd, “Disappearing Acts”; Bilge, “Intersectionality Undone”; May, Pursuing Intersectionality.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ 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), pp. 254–263; Julia Jordan-Zachery, “Now You See Me, Now You Don’t,” pp. 101–109.

¹¹ See also May, Pursuing Intersectionality, p. viii.

¹² Ange-Marie Hancock, “When Multiplication Doesn’t Equal Quick Addition: Examining Intersectionality as a Research Paradigm,” Perspectives on Politics 5:1 (2007), pp. 63–79; Ange-Marie Hancock, Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the Oppression Olympics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Hae Yeon Choo and Myra Marx Ferree, “Practicing Intersectionality in Sociological Research: A Critical Analysis of Inclusions, Interactions, and Institutions in the Study of Inequality.” Sociological Theory 28:2 (2010), pp. 129–149.

¹³ Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati, Acting White? Rethinking Race in “Post-Racial” America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 71.

¹⁴ I have elsewhere characterized this shift as a paradigmatic shift. See Ange-Marie Hancock, “When Multiplication Doesn’t Equal Quick Addition”; Ange-Marie Hancock, Solidarity Politics for Millennials.

¹⁵ Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati, Acting White?; Ange-Marie Hancock, “Empirical Intersectionality: A Tale of Two Approaches,” University of California Irvine Law Review 3 (2013), pp. 259–296.

¹⁶ Sumi K. Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall, “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications and Praxis,” SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38:4 (2013), p. 785–810.

¹⁷ Vivian May, Pursuing Intersectionality, p. 12. Italics Mine.

¹⁸ Nina Lykke, Feminist Studies: A Guide to Intersectional Theory: Methodology and Writing (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 49.

¹⁹ Michele Tracy Berger and Kathleen Guidroz (eds), The Intersectional Approach: Transforming the Academy through Race, Class and Gender (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), p. 7.

²⁰ An abbreviated list of recent special issues include: European Journal of Women’s Studies (2006); Gender and Society (2008); Sex Roles (2008); Lutz et al. (eds), Framing Intersectionality (2011); Political Research Quarterly (2011); Du Bois Review (2013); SIGNS (2013); Wilson (ed), Situating Intersectionality (2014). This issue of New Political Science is the latest in this growing field.

²¹ See Sumi K. Cho, “Post-Intersectionality: The Curious Reception of Intersectionality in Legal Scholarship,” Du Bois Review 10:2 (2013), pp. 385–404.

²² Personal conversation, April 2014.

²³ James H. Davis, F. David Schoorman, and Lex Donaldson, “Towards a Stewardship Theory of Management,” Academy of Management Review 22:1 (1997), pp. 20–47.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Alanna Frost, “Literacy Stewardship: Dakelh Women Composing Culture,” College Composition and Communication 63:1 (2011), pp. 54–74; p. 56.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ One way in which it achieves the latter, less well-attended dimension is by conceptualizing marginalized people as in possession of resources to engage in what Frost calls a community’s “hybridity of literacies” (Ibid., 58).

²⁸ Patrick Grzanka’s edited volume Intersectionality: A Foundations and Frontiers Reader (Boulder: Westview Press, 2014) traces “foundational moments” and “several origin stories” (p. xiii), as does Lykke, Feminist Studies. As I’ve mentioned before, scholars like Bilge take serious issue with this conceptualization. I aim to chart a middle ground by expanding the origin story that centers women of color in a more comprehensive and inclusive way than previous efforts.

²⁹ Crenshaw explicitly alludes to Truth in her 1989 work via footnote.

³⁰ See May 2015.

³¹ As I mentioned above, while the field has coronated Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, she herself situates her work in a longer historical tradition of Black Feminist advocacy and research.

³² Vrushali Patil, “From Patriarchy to Intersectionality: A Transnational Feminist Assessment of How Far We’ve Really Come,” SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38:4 (2013), pp. 847–867.

³³ Anil Al-Rebholz, “Gendered Subjectivity and Intersectional Political Agency in Transnational Space: The Case of Turkish and Kurdish Women’s NGO Activists,” in Angelia Wilson (ed), Situating Intersectionality: Politics, Policy and Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 122–123.

³⁴ See Barbara Smith (ed), Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983); Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983); Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller and Kendall Thomas (eds), Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York: The New Press, 1995); Alma Garcia (ed), Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings (New York: Routledge, 1997); Adrien Katherine Wing (ed), Critical Race Feminism: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1997).