Theorizing and Researching Intersectionality: A Challenge for Feminist Geography*

*I wish to thank Karen Dias and Jennifer Blecha in the strongest possible terms for inviting me to participate in the Department of Geography, University of Minnesota Fall 2004 speaker series, Feminism and Social Theory in Geography. Their hospitality was second to none and I was inspired by the conversations shared with them, and their colleagues, in both formal and informal settings during my visit. I am also very grateful to the three anonymous referees, to participants in a World University Network video seminar series, and to the staff and students at Christina Institute, University of Helsinki, Finland, where the paper was also presented for their very constructive comments and suggestions on the original draft of this article. The case study material used in the final section of this article is taken from a research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and carried out in collaboration with Tracey Skelton, Ruth Butler, and two research assistants (Sally McNamee and Carol Devanny). I wish to acknowledge their implicit role in this article through the use of the empirical material from one of the interviews conducted as part of this project.

Abstract

This article focuses on the concept of intersectionality, which is being used within the wider social sciences by feminists to theorize the relationship between different social categories: gender, race, sexuality, and so forth. Although research within the field of feminist geography has explored particular interconnections such as those between gender and race, the theoretical concept of intersectionality as debated in the wider social sciences has not been addressed. This article attempts to respond to that omission. It begins by tracing the emergence of debates about the interconnections between gender and other identities. It goes on to reflect on attempts to map geometries of oppressions. The emphasis then moves from theorizing intersectionality to questioning how it can be researched in practice by presenting a case study to illustrate intersectionality as lived experience. The conclusion demonstrates the contribution that feminist geography can make to advance the theorization of intersectionality through its appreciation of the significance of space in processes of subject formation. It calls for feminist geography to pay more attention to questions of power and social inequalities.

Key Words:

• feminism
• identity
• intersectionality
• lived experience

The gauntlet thrown down to authors by the editors of this special section was to write about challenges facing feminist geography and future agendas. This led me to reflect on my own pathway through the discipline and in particular my relationship with feminist geography. My research and writing in this field began with a clear focus on the category “women.” Although this work on women's safety paid limited lip service to differences within this category in terms of class and age, it ignored the way “woman” intersected with other identities. Subsequently, the emphasis of my research shifted from gender to sexuality, specifically the experiences of lesbians and gay men, and then to a concern with “age” through my work with children and young people. Most recently, I have been more broadly concerned with debates about the category “disability” through my research with D/deaf people. Through this evolving research agenda I have perhaps become quite disconnected from feminist geography and feminism. However, recent work on prejudice (Valentine and MacDonald 2004) has led me to draw on debates in feminism beyond geography's porous boundaries, about multiple discriminations and, more specifically, the concept of intersectionality that is used to theorize the relationship between different social categories: gender, race, sexuality, and so forth. Surprisingly, this concept of intersectionality has received relatively little attention in geography. Individual pieces of geographical research have looked at particular interconnections (e.g., Peake 1993; Kobayashi 1994; Ruddick 1996; Pratt 1999, 2002), but the wider theoretical concept of intersectionality as debated across the social sciences, and how to theorize it and to research it empirically, has not been addressed within feminist geography. This article attempts to respond to this omission and in doing so to answer the editor's call to identify new challenges and agendas for the subdisciplinary field of feminist geography.

The article begins by tracing the emergence of debates about the interconnections between gender and other identities. It goes on to reflect on attempts to map geometries of oppressions. The emphasis then moves from theorizing intersectionality to questioning how it can be researched in practice. Finally, I present a case study to illustrate intersectionality as lived experience, and use this to reflect on the contribution that feminist geography can make to advance the theorization of intersectionality, and the wider implications that arise from the significance of space in processes of subject formation.

Connections Between Categories

Feminism emerged in academia in conjunction with other social movements wanting to change inequalities of power resulting from racism, patriarchy, and class exploitation. Early feminist work within geography challenged the discipline for its failure to adequately incorporate women as subjects of research and for the lack of women in the profession (e.g., Monk and Hanson 1982). In a collectively written book, Geography and Gender, British geographers (WGSG 1984) demonstrated how feminist analyses could be brought to bear in relation to core geographical issues including the city, employment, access to facilities, and development. In the decade that followed, feminist work added women to a growing range of geographical research agendas, stressing women's distinctive experiences, and developing the theorization of patriarchy.

Although feminist work in geography initially focused on patriarchy, the debates in feminism over the wider social sciences eventually led to attempts to look at the relationships between the different systems of oppression of patriarchy and capitalism. Tensions were evident between radical feminism, which emphasized the paramount importance of patriarchy as a system of oppression, and socialist feminism, which sought to understand women's position as both subject to male domination and also as participants with men in class struggle (WGSG 1984). Sylvia Walby's work (1986), which sought to theorize the dual inequality of class and gender, was particularly influential.

Despite the attempts of feminists to think about these interconnections, scholars working on gender, class, and race continued to struggle for primacy of each as an analytical category to explain inequality. In geography, conflict surfaced around an article by David Harvey (1993) making the case for the persistence and importance of capitalist economic exploitation. Harvey contrasted a fire in 1991 at the Imperial Foods chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina, in which twenty-five workers were killed and fifty-six were injured, with a similar disaster, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, that occurred in New York City in 1911. Whereas the Triangle Shirtwaist fire triggered mass protest marches about the conditions in which the employees were working, the deaths of the Imperial Foods workers were largely ignored by the media and political activists. Harvey attributes this political apathy to the fact that at the time both media and activists were preoccupied with the Hill–Thomas hearings (on allegations of sexual harassment) and the Rodney King trial (in relation to racist violence propagated by white police officers arresting a black man). Harvey used this example to claim that within geography there had been a shift away from class-based universalist politics and toward a relativist politics of difference, with the consequence that the specificities of sexist, racist oppressions were fragmenting a “progressive” politics.

Although Harvey's critique of the weakening in the United States of working-class politics has some merit, other writers have been quick to warn of the dangers of throwing the baby out with the bathwater in any retreat to a class-based analysis. Most notably, Young (1998) points out that part of the motivation for the emergence of so-called new social movements focusing on gender, race, and so on has been the failure of class-based universalist movements to be inclusive. She argues that “The suggestion that feminism … is more particularist than a working class interest-based movement seems odd. Women are everywhere, at least as universal a category as workers” (Young 1998, 38).

The development of postmodern feminist theory further troubled debates about the connections between different oppressions. In particular, black feminists identified the privileging of white middle-class experiences in feminist theory, pointing out that it is white middle-class women who do the theorizing; bell hooks (1984) for example has highlighted how feminism in the United States did not originate from the women who were most oppressed. Given the resources, cultural capital, and time necessary to progress through the educational system, few people from minority ethnic communities attend universities let alone make it into the academy. Rather, as black feminists have pointed out, it has been white middle-class feminists who have held the gatekeeping positions in terms of feminism and feminist journals (Zinn et al. 1986), and there has been a lack of participation by black women in white feminist organizations (Hill Collins 1990). Black feminists recognized that their white sisters had not consciously ignored their own whiteness, but, as geographers (e.g., Bonnett 2000) working on race and racism have argued, whiteness is so deeply entrenched as “the norm” that white people fail to recognize they too have a race/ethnicity.

Black feminists therefore challenged the use of women and gender as unitary and homogenous categories reflecting the common essence of all women. Spelman (1988, 124), for example, argued that

The problem of difference for feminist theory has never been a general one about how to weigh the importance of what we have in common against the importance of our differences. To put it that way hides two crucial facts: First, the description of what we have in common “as women” has almost always been a description of white middle class women. Second, the ‘difference’ of this group of women—that is, their being white and middle class—has never had to be “brought into” feminist theory. To bring in ‘difference’ is to bring in women who aren't white and middle class.

These debates led to the decentering of white, western, heterosexual, middle-class woman and a pluralizing of feminism. The tension between recognizing differences between women and yet the continued importance of feminist struggles led a number of feminists to examine, in different ways, the paradox of occupying the position of being inside and outside the center (e.g., hooks 1984; Hill Collins 1990; Fuss 1991). These reflections were deployed and elaborated by Gillian Rose (1993) in her book Feminism & Geography in which she evoked the concept of paradoxical space.

Such debates consequently exposed the limitations of privileging one system of oppression—patriarchy, racism, or capitalism, for example—over another. The general notion of what Andersen and Hill Collins (1992, xii) term “interlocking categories of experience” emerged out of a growing recognition that it is not possible to separate out the categories of gender, race, class, and sexuality, nor to explain inequalities through a single framework. Thus were challenged the assumptions implicit in some academic and popular writing that black people have race, white women have gender, black women experience race and gender, and white men of course are unmarked.

The specific concept of intersectionality is attributed to critical race theorists who, rejecting the notion of race, gender, ethnicity, class, and so forth as separate and essentialist categories, developed the term intersectionality to describe the interconnections and interdependence of race with other categories (Crenshaw et al. 1995). Specifically, Crenshaw, a legal scholar, is credited with developing this concept through a comparison of the legal status of black women and black men and white women, which led her to theorize the intersection of race, gender, and class for black women. She adopts an analogy with road junctions where violent accidents repeatedly occur but are never reported (Crenshaw 1993).

Minow (1997, 38) defines intersectionality as “the way in which any particular individual stands at the crossroads of multiple groups.” Fernandes (2003, 309) explains that “intersectional analysis names and describes these hidden acts of multiple discrimination and how they obfuscate damaging power relations, and it also brings to the fore how they construct, while paradoxically obviating, identities of the self.” In other words, intersectionality captures the recognition that difference is located “not in the spaces between identities but in the spaces within” (Fuss 1989). Despite contemporary interest in and attempts to develop the theorization of intersectionality within the social sciences (Brah and Phoenix 2004; Burman 2004; McCall 2005), feminist geographers have not really engaged directly with this debate. This is not to suggest that feminist geographers are unaware of the limitations of gender as a single category, nor to suggest that we have failed to think about the relationships between different categories such as between gender and race. There are numerous examples of feminist geographers writing about these relationships (e.g., Kobayashi 1994; Pratt 1999, 2002). Early work in this vein includes Linda Peake's (1993) attempt to tease out heterosexual and white cultural constructions that permeate geographers' treatment of patriarchy and Sue Ruddick's (1996) examination of the interlocking nature of gender, race, and class through the specific event of a murder in a Toronto restaurant, known as the Just Desserts shooting. More recent examples include a special themed issue of Gender, Place and Culture edited by Tobie Saad and Perry Carter (2005) that includes four papers exploring race and sexuality (Nash 2005; Raimondo 2005; Walker 2005; and Winders, Jones, and Higgins 2005). Rather, the specific debate about intersectionality as a concept has not yet been played out within geography despite its obvious spatial connotations. The next section outlines how thinking about this term has evolved, then the following section considers the implications for empirical research.

Geometries of Oppression

Initial attempts to think about the ways different categories interlock led to attempts to calculate oppressions involving various metaphors from geometry and mathematics including addition, multiplication, location, position, and so forth.

The additive or multiplication analogy assumes that one form of oppression would be merely additive upon another. Thus, someone at the intersection of three systems of oppression—a disabled black woman, for example—would be more oppressed than a black woman who was considered to be at the intersection of only two. This approach both champions an identity politics and implicitly ranks difference (McCall 2005).

This way of thinking has been challenged as dangerously essentialist because of the way it interprets identities as a set of separate and fixed differences added incrementally to one another. It also implicitly assumes a base identity—presumably white, heterosexual, able-bodied male—upon which other identities are added. Critics have pointed out that what it means to be a black women cannot be understood by adding the experience of being black to being a woman through combining studies of white women and black men, because the experience of race alters the meaning of gender. Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1982, 62–63) explain that “Race, gender, and class cannot be tagged onto each other mechanically for, as concrete social relations, they are enmeshed in each other and the particular intersections involved produce specific effects.” Writing about class and gender Kessler and McKenna (1978, 42) describe these effects in terms of the way that the two categories “abrade, inflame, amplify, twist, negate, dampen and complicate each other.”

More pertinently, although we may think of class, race, and gender as different social structures, individual people experience them simultaneously. Judith Butler (1990, 3) points out that

if one “is” a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered “person” transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out “gender” from the political and cultural intersections in which is it inevitably produced and maintained.

Despite the impossibility of separating out the intersections of different categories, various scholars have attempted to do so using Venn diagrams to model overlapping identities—those that fell outside the circles were presumably white, middle-class, able-bodied men. Rejecting such efforts, West and Fenstermaker (1995, 9) argue instead that “we need new models to rethink intersections of systems of oppression and how structures of power are organized around intersecting relations of race, class and gender to frame social positions of individuals … [and] to produce social locations for us all.” They contend that the focus in rethinking intersectionality should be on the way individuals accomplish identities. They conceptualize race, class, and gender not as naturally given or socially and culturally constructed categories but rather as emergent properties that are not reducible to biological essences or role expectations. In other words, their emphasis is on how identities occur in interactions, not on stable or given understandings of social difference.

In defining identities as “situated accomplishments,” West and Fenstermaker's thinking has clear resonance with other theories that focus not on being but on becoming, most notably with Judith Butler's (1990) theory that gender is performative, and with Actor Network Theory's (ANT) notion that things do not have fixed/stable properties but rather that these emerge in practice (Law 1994). Thus, instead of starting from a location along an axis of differentiation where gender/race/class intersect to produce or classify subject in structurally stable ways, West and Fenstermaker think of the intersection of identities in terms of a doing, a more fluid coming together, of contingencies and discontinuities, clashes and neutralizations, in which positions, identities, and differences are made and unmade, claimed and rejected. In this way they trouble rather than reinforce identity demarcations. Fernandes (2003) suggests that this approach to intersectionality picks up on the full meaning of the word “difference”: clash, conflict, contention, controversy, debate, disagreement, discord, dispute.

This way of theorizing also overcomes some of the limitations of previous ways of thinking about intersectionality. First, by recognizing the fluid, unstable nature of intersections between categories, this approach does not assume that intersections between multiple-identity categories are always experienced or “done” in untroubled ways. Second, in understanding intersectionality as a situated accomplishment, this way of theorizing recognizes the ways that individuals are actively involved in producing their own lives and so overcomes some of the determinism of previous ways of thinking about identities that often classified individuals into fixed categories as oppressed or oppressor. Yet, despite the reference to identities as “situated” accomplishments, the wider social science theorization of intersectionality has paid scant attention to the significance of space in processes of subject formation. Perhaps this reflects the fact that, despite the advances outlined above in theorizing intersectionality, feminists in the wider social sciences have not given equivalent consideration to how to research empirically the way that categories work and intersect in the lived experiences of subjects (Staunes 2003). The following section reflects on the difficulties of “doing” research on intersectionality, and the subsequent section shows how attention to lived experience exposes the role that space plays in the processes of identification and disidentification. The conclusion suggests the implications of this for theories of intersectionality within the wider social sciences and for feminist geography.

Researching Intersectionality

The lack of empirical work looking at intersectionality in practice perhaps reflects a more general “theoretical turn” within feminism. The feminism that emerged in academia in the 1970s and 1980s—in parallel with the broader intellectual project and social movement of the time—had a strong empirical tradition grounded in a political commitment to understand and change women's lives. More recently, the wider incorporation of post-structural theory into feminist thinking has led to a loss of focus on the material and the everyday—a criticism Philo (2000), Smith (2000), and Thrift (2000) have also leveled at the influence of post-structuralism on the discipline of geography.

Where studies within feminist geography have looked at intersectional types of issues they have tended to limit their analyses to the relationship between particular identities such as class or gender rather than addressing the full implications of the above theorization of intersectionality. There are practical reasons for this; for the sake of comprehension, as well as the limitations of time and financial resources, it is often easiest to narrow the scope of empirical work. The complexity of intersectionality means that it is hard to include analysis of its full implications in a single article. The result of this limitation is that work on intersectionality often collapses back to a focus on the experiences of nonprivileged groups rather than on how privileged or powerful identities are “done” and “undone.” When we do explain what our research is about to participants and through the doing of our own identities, we also sometimes unwittingly shape or limit the narratives we are told by contributing to the enactment of some identities/realities rather than others. Finally, beyond academia, nongovernmental organizations that focus around particular equality strands such as race, gender, disability, or sexuality are often set up in competition with one another for resources. To win more funding or secure a more powerful political position, each group is under pressure to focus research on its dominant category and to demonstrate that that category is more oppressed than other strands (Valentine 2006).

McCall (2005) suggests that case studies represent the most effective way of empirically researching the complexity of the way that the intersection of categories are experienced in subject's everyday lives. She suggests starting with an individual, group, event, or context, then working outward to unravel how categories are lived and experienced. This approach means looking at, for example, accounts of the multiple, shifting, and sometimes simultaneous ways that self and other are represented, the way that individuals identify and disidentify with other groups, how one category is used to differentiate another in specific contexts, and how particular identities become salient or foregrounded at particular moments. Such an analysis means asking questions about what identities are being “done,” and when and by whom, evaluating how particular identities are weighted or given importance by individuals at particular moments and in specific contexts, and looking at when some categories such as gender might unsettle, undo, or cancel out other categories such as sexuality.

Intersectionality as a Lived Experience

What follows is a modest attempt to reflect on the ways gender, sexuality, class, motherhood, disability, and the cultural/linguistic identity “Deaf” become salient/disappear, are claimed/rejected, and are made relevant/irrelevant in the narrative of Jeanette (pseud.), a white, now-middle-aged, woman. Through the processes of identification/disidentification and fluctuating emotional investment in these different subject positions, Jeanette's sense of self constantly emerges and unfolds in different spatial contexts and at different biographical moments. Jeanette's account attempts to capture the complexity and dynamism of intersectionality as she has lived it. To make the narrative comprehensible for the reader, a degree of chronology is required. However, to avoid the case study becoming a purely linear narrative, I adopt, in part, elements of a strategy used in an article by Moser and Law (1999) ¹ —in which they present a series of “stories” and passages to explore the relation between subjectivities, materialities, and bodily competencies—to highlight, through a set of stories, the specific identifications/disidentifications that emerge for Jeanette in particular spatial and temporal moments.

This account of Jeanette's life was collected as part of research about lesbians and gay men, and D/deaf people's experiences of marginalization in the United Kingdom, a study that was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (see also Skelton and Valentine 2003; Valentine and Skelton 2003). ² D/deaf is written in this way to reflect that there are two dominant constructions of D/deafness: deafness as a medical matter and the Deaf as a linguistic minority (Padden 1980/1991; Corker 1996; Lane 1997). The term “deaf” is commonly used as a medical description of deafness measured against the “norm” of hearing people. It usually signifies those who do not present a strong deaf identity and who generally rely on oral styles of communication (lipreading, speaking) rather than sign language. In contrast, “Deaf” is linked to the construction of a linguistic identity and culture. It is commonly used by those whose first or preferred language is signing, and whose identity and behavior are consistent with the norms, traditions, and practices of Deaf culture. As such, Deaf-aware hearing people who are fluent signers might be considered part of the Deaf community. A Deaf identity however, is not just something that can be claimed by an individual as a self-identity, rather a Deaf identity is also dependent, at least in part, on an individual being ascribed or accepted as Deaf by the community.

The boundary between what are known as “big D” and “little d” identities can be fluid over time and space. For example, learning sign language often results in a shift over time in an individual's self-identity from deaf to Deaf. Likewise, in different Deaf spaces an individual's behavior might be regarded by others as more or less consistent with the social practices of Deaf culture, and therefore the individual's identity might be ascribed in different contexts as Deaf or deaf (an ascription that may also differ from the individual's self-identity). Here, I use the convention of writing D/deaf in a dual form when I refer to both medical and cultural meanings, and in the singular form Deaf or deaf when I am referring to the specific differentiated meanings outlined above.

First Story

When Jeanette was nine months old her family recognized that she was deaf. Shortly after her birth her mother was very ill and Jeanette went to live first with her grandparents, and later with her uncles. As a result of living in a male household Jeanette took on a strongly gendered role of caring, cooking, and cleaning for her uncles, and she was strongly emotionally invested in this subject position. Like most D/deaf young people Jeanette had difficulties communicating with the hearing world, including her family. As such she had limited information about different subject positions available to her. Because Deaf young people do not pick up information about adult issues from television, overheard conversations, and so on, they often have no conception of heterosexuality, let alone alternative subject positions such as lesbian or bisexual (Valentine and Skelton 2003). Moreover, because Jeanette was living in an entirely hearing environment she had no awareness or understanding of the possibility of identifying as Deaf. In this spatial context, home rules and the domestic social relations weighted the importance of her gender identity.

Second Story

Jeanette married a deaf man, Donald, whom she met at Deaf school and with whom she subsequently had a daughter. Jeanette was a sign language user but Donald strongly preferred to use oral forms of communication and identified as deaf. As the self-ascribed head of the household he defined the home as an “oral” space and banned Jeanette from attending her local Deaf club. Isolated from a space in which to live her language, Jeanette's competence at signing declined. In the specific context of her marital home her Deaf identity was being undone by her gendered identity as a wife, and so it was her role as a mother that became most emotionally salient to her.

Jeanette: Well when I got married to Donald, he wouldn't let me go to the Deaf Club, I had to stay at home all the time, I would never mix with the Deaf community; he was a very jealous, possessive person, people would talk to me, he'd get jealous, when we'd get home, he'd beat me up, so the only way I could protect myself was to stay at home.

Donald was violent toward Jeanette, but despite the fact that she often had visible injuries none of her hearing colleagues at the office where she worked asked about their origin or offered her any support. Then by chance—what Giddens (1990) would term a “fateful moment”—she met an old friend from the Deaf club who picked up on her domestic situation and supported Jeanette to leave her husband. Her reconnection through this individual with the emotional and institutionalized support represented by the space of the Deaf club enabled Jeanette to escape the marital home and so refuse the subservient gender role that she had adopted; she emotionally reinvested in the particular identity position of Deaf.

Third Story

Jeanette met a woman at the Deaf club, fell in love, and had a lesbian relationship. This marked a discontinuity in her identity as a heterosexual woman but a reinforcement of her Deaf identity because her lesbian partner, in contrast to her husband, was a sign language user, and so Jeanette's sense of self-identity as Deaf became more salient to her once again. However, when members of the Deaf club found out about Jeanette's sexual relationship, the couple was subject to homophobic abuse and harassment. In this sense, although Jeanette claimed a Deaf identity it was not ascribed to her by the community because of her identity as a lesbian. The Deaf community is no different from any other in that the very notion of community tends to privilege the ideal of unity over difference and results in boundaries being drawn to define those who are insiders from those who are not and the production of particular spatial orderings within the community (Young 1990). As such, Jeanette's sexuality overshadowed and threatened to undo her identity as culturally Deaf within the specific space of the Deaf club, although the weight Jeanette herself attached to her self-identity as a Deaf woman was unshaken by being made to feel “out of place” in the space of her local Deaf community.

Jeanette: It was a really, really bad time, the letters I got, the people in the Deaf Club spitting at me, it was an awful time, they damaged my car, scratched the side of it, spitting, oh, horrible … everybody said to me, well you're a dirty woman, being with women, women being with women is dirty and I said well it's love, it's love, I can't, I can't be with men, I prefer woman and they don't understand that, and also sometimes you know, I'd go up to somebody and touch them on the shoulder and they'd go don't touch me, particularly if another woman, ‘cos they think that I'm, I want to then be with them. Really horrible, see there are some people who are open minded but most are close minded, and it was also a bad time with my mum as well, my mum wouldn't accept me as a lesbian.

Fourth Story

Jeanette had been sent to a Deaf school when she was eight years old. This had a profound influence on her self-identity because for the first time she was in a Deaf space rather than a hearing space. The identity of the school as a Deaf space was produced and stabilized through the repetitive use of and importance ascribed to signing by the Deaf pupils. Surrounded by Deaf people Jeanette learned sign language, and for the first time experienced the sense of sameness and belonging that comes from the ability to communicate freely with others like ourselves. Paradoxically, at the same time, being Deaf in the specific spatial context of this school was so “normalized” that this sense of Jeanette's identity almost disappeared for her, so much did it become taken for granted when she was in a space where she was “in place” and where she was no longer differentiated by language from those around her. Here she describes the importance that the Deaf sign language community had to her:

Jeanette: You have that kind of bond with people, you mix with Deaf people, you have the same sign language, you feel like you're inside the Deaf world, whereas when you're in the hearing world you don't have the communication; you've got written language, but it's a real relief you can feel really relaxed, talking with Deaf people, I always look forward to going to the Deaf club, because you have such a full life there, there's always partying, travelling to do, it's never boring.

Fifth Story

When Jeanette left school she found employment in an office typing pool working for an industrial company that had a strong masculinist institutional culture. Having come from the safe space of a Deaf school where she shared an assumption of sameness with those around her, Jeanette found it a shock being differentiated from everyone else as the only deaf person in a hearing institution. She struggled to communicate orally with her colleagues and lost her confidence, which in turn unsettled her sense of self as a competent and successful agent in her own life. Because she found some written English challenging (a common problem for sign language users as sign language does not have the same grammatical structure as written language) Jeanette tried to select the easier work available in the typing pool. On discovering this, her workmates bullied her and made her life uncomfortable by, for example, refusing to talk to her at break time and not explaining to her issues that were arising in the workplace. She experienced institutionalized discrimination. Jeanette described how her sense of being deaf, in terms of being disabled by her hearing environment as opposed to culturally identifying as Deaf, became more salient in her life for the first time since she was a child living in a hearing family home. This occurred at the same time that her Deaf cultural identity and sense of belonging in the Deaf community was being further undone by her marriage to a deaf man.

Sixth Story

When she became a lone parent Jeanette's job opportunities were limited by childcare constraints. She had to take a job in a factory where the work was less skilled and the pay was lower but the working hours could be accommodated more readily to her child care arrangements. At this time Jeanette's identity as a mother was foregrounded, overshadowing her sense of identification as an experienced secretary, and producing a discontinuity in her “professional” identity. Although, Jeanette was more qualified than her factory workmates, she claimed a strong sense of identification and belonging with them, while disidentifying with the more skilled and middle-class office colleagues at her former job.

Jeanette: I don't know, I mean maybe I'm wrong but I guess the factory people are not so snobbish, erm, much more everyday, not rough but just you know common like us, whereas office people thought that they were superior to everybody, I don't know, it was like you know as if they felt that they were quite superior class, quite upper class.

Though she was bored by her job in the factory, Jeanette took pride in her work and in working hard. Her fellow employees often tried to talk her into slowing down because the productivity targets she achieved would then be expected of all the employees. The factory employed a number of Deaf people who would often try to distract her from her work by signing to her. Jeanette struggled to fit in with the hegemonic workplace culture. She disidentified with her fellow worker's lack of aspiration or pride in their work, adopting what some Deaf people might term a hearing or “heafie” attitude, refusing the particular identity position her colleagues occupied. Eventually, Jeanette left the factory for more professional employment, becoming a sign language teacher working with hearing people, and so reconstituting her “class' identity.”

These six specific stories taken from Jeanette's narrative of her own life highlight the constant movement that individuals experience between different subject positions, and the ways that “who we are” emerges in interactions within specific spatial contexts and specific biographical moments. Moreover, these stories demonstrate that the ways Jeanette experiences the intersection of categories such as gender, class, sexuality, and disability in her life are not stable; she does not have a fixed sense of identification or disidentification, rather she is in a constant and unpredictable process of becoming. She describes varying levels of emotional investment in different subject positions at different temporal and spatial moments, as well as continuities and discontinuities in her sense of identification/disidentification. At specific times and in specific spatial contexts she has refused particular identity positions, or particular positions have become more salient, stabilized, or institutionalized. Moreover, she has encountered clashes between different identity positions as particular categories have overshadowed, reinforced, or destabilized one another, and she has experienced the “undoing” of one identity by another. The one aspect of Jeanette's identity that is not evident in her stories is her ethnicity, but as a white woman living and working in predominantly white communities her whiteness is presumably unacknowledged because of the privileged position it affords her.

Jeanette's stories capture the fluidity and complexity of the subject positions she has adopted. They also demonstrate, first, how she has come to see herself differently in different spaces (e.g., in the space of the school, marital home, the Deaf club) and, second, the ways that specific spaces (home, work, community) are produced and stabilized by the dominant groups who occupy them, such that they develop hegemonic cultures through which power operates to systematically define ways of being, and to mark out those who are in place or out of place. In other words, Jeanette's stories also implicitly describe the operation of patriarchy, heteronormativity, oralism, and so on and their connections to the production of space. Yet concern with these broader social structures (and indeed their intersection) has been somewhat forgotten by academic feminism following the theoretical turn within the subdiscipline (akin to the cultural turn within Anglo-American cultural geography; c.f. Philo 2000; Smith 2000; Valentine 2001) that has resulted in a depoliticalization of academic feminism and a disengagement with some of the key issues that continue to preoccupy feminists beyond the academy.

Conclusion

This article has responded to a call to identify new challenges for the future of feminist geography. It focused on the contributions of feminism in the wider social sciences to debates about intersectionality, and then demonstrated the need for geographers to join and advance this emerging theoretical debate by illustrating the significance of space in processes of subject formation. At the same time it has highlighted the importance of developing a new body of empirically grounded research into the lived experience of intersectionality rather than relying on theorization alone to develop this concept.

The concept of intersectionality, which is circulating within the wider social sciences, offers feminist geography a theoretical framework in which to develop geographical thinking about the relationship between multiple categories. Its appeal lies in the emphasis this approach places on the complexity of and fluidity in the ways that identities are unmade as well as made, and undone as well as done—to an extent greater than is found in much geographical writing. In particular, by working out from an empirical case study of an individual—an approach not evident in previous attempts by feminist geographers to reflect on multiple identities—it is possible to move beyond theorizing about the intersection of categories to an understanding of how identifications and disidentifications are simultaneously experienced by subjects in specific spatial and temporal moments through the course of everyday lives.

At the same time, geography has much to offer the wider social sciences take on intersectionality through its appreciation of the significance of space in these processes of subject formation. As the empirical material in the preceding section clearly illustrates, the stories through which specific identities emerge for a particular individual do not occur in a vacuum; rather, identities are highly contingent and situated accomplishments. In other words space and identities are co-implicated. Where Jeanette is located is constitutive of her identity, not incidental to it, so that she has understood herself differently when at school than when in her family home, or when in the office environment rather than in the factory. The identity of particular spaces—the home, the school, the workplace, or a community space such as a Deaf club—are in turn produced and stabilized through the repetition of the intersectional identities of the dominant groups that occupy them (in Jeanette's experience the Deaf club is produced as Deaf, heterosexual, and white; the office workplace as a hearing, masculinist space) such that particular groups claim the right to these spaces. When individual identities are “done” differently in particular temporal moments they rub up against, and so expose, these dominant spatial orderings that define who is in place/out of place, who belongs and who does not. Jeanette's experiences of, for example, being disabled by the hearing space of the workplace or excluded from the dominant heterosexual culture of the Deaf club also expose the ways that power operates in and through particular spaces to systematically (re)produce particular inequalities. As such, this article offers an example of how attention to space can extend the wider social science theorization of the concept of intersectionality.

The existing theorization of the concept of intersectionality overemphasizes the abilities of individuals to actively produce their own lives and underestimates how the ability to enact some identities or realities rather than others is highly contingent on the power-laden spaces in and through which our experiences are lived. Notably, the contemporary focus within the social sciences on the fluidity of identities and the complexity of their intersections risks losing sight of the fact that in particular spaces there are dominant spatial orderings that produce moments of exclusion for particular social groups. In the rush to theorize intersectionality, feminists within the social sciences, when they overlook the importance of space, are not being sensitive to the continued importance of questions of power and social exclusion. Yet, Jeanette's stories remind us that although our identities as individuals might be multiple and fluid, power operates in and through the spaces within which we live and move in systematic ways to generate hegemonic cultures that can exclude particular social groups such as women, Deaf people, lesbians, gay men, and so on.

In other words, in our contemporary concern to theorize the intersection of categories we must not lose sight of the fact that the specific social structures of patriarchy, heteronormativity, oralism, and so on that so preoccupied feminists of the 1970s still matter. As such this article ends with a call for feminism, and specifically feminist geography, to reengage with questions of structural inequalities and power, while at the same time retaining a concern for theorizing the relationship between multiple categories and structures. Here, attention to lived experience, through rigorous empirical work, offers an important potential tool for feminist geography to understand the intimate connections between the production of space and the systematic production of power, thereby increasing its effectiveness to develop and employ its critical insights within and beyond the academy. It is in the sort of moments of disidentification and discontinuities in identities described in Jeanette's stories that an appreciation of intersectionality as spatially constituted and experienced offers feminists a way of addressing the tension between the fluidity and multiplicity of individual identities and the continued importance and necessity of group politics.▪

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Notes on contributors

Gill Valentine

A Professor

Notes

¹I am grateful to Soile Veijola for suggesting this article as an example of how I might consider presenting the case study material, although I have not implemented this in as radical a way as she intended.

²This research was a joint project with Tracey Skelton, Department of Geography, Loughborough University, U.K., and Ruth Butler, Centre for Applied Social Studies, University of Hull, U.K.

*I wish to thank Karen Dias and Jennifer Blecha in the strongest possible terms for inviting me to participate in the Department of Geography, University of Minnesota Fall 2004 speaker series, Feminism and Social Theory in Geography. Their hospitality was second to none and I was inspired by the conversations shared with them, and their colleagues, in both formal and informal settings during my visit. I am also very grateful to the three anonymous referees, to participants in a World University Network video seminar series, and to the staff and students at Christina Institute, University of Helsinki, Finland, where the paper was also presented for their very constructive comments and suggestions on the original draft of this article. The case study material used in the final section of this article is taken from a research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and carried out in collaboration with Tracey Skelton, Ruth Butler, and two research assistants (Sally McNamee and Carol Devanny). I wish to acknowledge their implicit role in this article through the use of the empirical material from one of the interviews conducted as part of this project.