Intersectionality is widely used by scholars, policy advocates, practitioners, and activists in various fields.
It is encountered in interdisciplinary fields like women’s studies, ethnic studies, and traditional disciplines such as sociology and political science.
Human rights activists and government officials incorporate intersectionality in global public policy discussions.
Grassroots organizers apply it to reproductive justice, antiviolence initiatives, and workers’ rights.
Teachers, social workers, and school personnel use intersectionality to transform schools.
A general description of intersectionality:
It investigates how intersecting power relations influence social relations and individual experiences.
It views categories like race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, ability, ethnicity, and age as interrelated and mutually shaping.
Intersectionality explains complexity in the world and in human experiences.
Core insight: Power relations of race, class, and gender are not discrete but build on each other, affecting all aspects of the social world.
Despite debates about its meaning, intersectionality is increasingly used by stakeholders for various purposes.
Using Intersectionality as an Analytic Tool
Intersectionality is used to solve problems faced by individuals and communities.
North American colleges use it to build more inclusive campus communities, addressing social divisions created by class, race, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, sexuality, and ability.
Colleges initially addressed groups one at a time but realized that students often fit into multiple categories.
Intersectionality provides a framework to achieve campus equity.
African American women activists in the 1960s and 1970s used intersectionality to address how their needs fell through the cracks of antiracist social movements, feminism, and unions.
These movements elevated one category of analysis, such as race, gender, or class, leaving little space to address complex social problems faced by black women.
Intersectionality emerged as a response to these challenges.
People in the Global South have also used intersectionality, even without naming it as such.
Example: Savitribai Phule (1831–97), a Dalit social reformist in nineteenth-century colonial India, advocated for anti-caste ideology and women’s rights.
She fought against the subjugation of women and stood for Adivasis and Muslims.
She organized a barbers’ strike against shaving the heads of Hindu widows and fought for widow remarriage.
She opened schools for workers and rural people and provided famine relief.
Phule confronted social divisions of caste, gender, religion, and economic disadvantage.
Intersectionality is a heuristic, a problem-solving tool that can accommodate a range of social problems.
Cho et al. (2013: 795) argue that intersectionality is defined by “what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is”.
Examples of using intersectionality as an analytical tool:
Analyzing international football to illuminate the organization of institutional power.
Recognizing global social inequality as an intersectional phenomenon.
Examining the black Brazilian women’s movement in response to racism, sexism, and poverty.
Power Plays: The FIFA World Cup
An estimated 270 million people are involved in football globally.
Intersectionality can be used to examine how power relations of race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality organize sports.
Rich and poor nations offer different opportunity structures, privileging European and North American nations while disadvantaging others.
Black and brown youth from poor countries often lack access to training and opportunities.
Differences of wealth, national citizenship, race, gender, and ability shape patterns of opportunity and disadvantage.
The FIFA World Cup is a case to show how intersecting power relations underpin social inequalities.
Four domains of power shape FIFA World Cup soccer:
Structural
Cultural
Disciplinary
Interpersonal
These domains are durable across time and place but also characterized by change.
The structural domain of power
Intersections of class (capitalism) and nation (government policy) are key to organizing sports.
The World Cup tournament has become a highly profitable global business since its inception in 1930.
FIFA, headquartered in Switzerland, operates as an international nongovernmental organization (NGO).
FIFA has considerable influence with global corporations and national governments.
Example: For the 2014 games in Brazil, FIFA influenced the Brazilian parliament to adopt laws that benefited its sponsors and penalized local businesses.
Brazil's experiences illustrate how national concerns shape global football.
Hosting the World Cup signaled Brazil’s arrival as a major economic player, but it required billions of US dollars in preparation.
Cost overruns increased stadium expenses, leading to public demonstrations against the exorbitant costs and political corruption.
FIFA has been accused of corruption for years due to its unregulated nature.
Corporate sponsors, wealthy backers, and global media outlets benefit most from the World Cup’s global success.
Nations may have reasons beyond financial gain for hosting the games.
An intersectional analysis of capitalism and nationalism sheds light on structural power relations that enable FIFA to influence public policies of nation-states.
Gender inequalities are also hardwired into FIFA’s structural power relations, with more opportunities for men than women.
The men’s FIFA World Cup was launched in 1930, while the women’s FIFA World Cup was launched in 1991, fostering accumulated advantages and disadvantages based on gender.
The cultural domain of power
Emphasizes the increasing significance of ideas and culture in organizing power relations.
The FIFA World Cup is the most widely watched sporting event in the world.
FIFA’s audit of the 2018 World Cup in Russia reports that a combined 1.12 billion viewers worldwide watched the final, and 3.572 billion tuned in overall.
The possibilities of reaching this massive global consumer market of sports fans are limitless.
It is important to ask what cultural messages concerning race, gender, class, and sexuality are being broadcast to this vast global audience.
Promoting and televising football offers a view of fair play that explains social inequality, suggesting that winners have talent, discipline, and luck, while losers lack these qualities.
This view suggests that fair competition produces just results, which is then used to explain social inequalities.
The idea of a level playing field is crucial for this frame to remain plausible.
The cultural domain of power helps manufacture and disseminate this narrative of fair play, claiming that everyone has equal access to opportunities.
This myth of fair play legitimates the outcomes of major global sporting competitions and reinforces cultural narratives about capitalism and nationalism.
Mass media spectacles reiterate the belief that unequal outcomes of winners and losers are normal outcomes of capitalist marketplace competition.
Sporting events, beauty pageants, reality television and similar popular competitions broadcast on a regular basis the idea that the marketplace relations of capitalism are socially just as long as there is fair play.
Mass media also presents important scripts of gender, race, sexuality, and nation that influence one another.
The bravery of male athletes on national teams makes them akin to war heroes, while the beauty of national beauty pageants are thought to represent the beauty of the nation.
Sports often serve as the template for equality and fair play because many people enjoy sporting events or play sports themselves.
Football seemingly creates far fewer barriers between individuals with athletic talent and access to opportunities to play the game compared with other sports.
The fanfare granted to the World Cup shapes cultural norms of fairness and social justice.
Mass media spectacles may appear to be mere entertainment, yet they are essential to the smooth working of the cultural domain of power.
The disciplinary domain of power
Refers to how rules and regulations are applied based on social categories like race, sexuality, class, gender, age, ability, and nation.
Individuals and groups are “disciplined” to fit into and/or challenge the existing status quo.
Within football, disciplinary power operates through differential opportunities, coaching, and facilities.
Intersecting power relations create pipelines to success or marginalization based on gender or race.
Intersections of race and nation are important dimensions of disciplinary power.
Example: South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 World Cup highlights the obstacles faced by African boys in playing professional football.
The lure of European football makes youth vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous recruiters, resembling human trafficking.
The racial/ethnic diversity of elite European teams highlights the problem of racism in European football.
Racist behavior includes calling African players monkeys, chanting racial slurs, and carrying racially derogatory signs.
FIFA’s gendered rules also reflect disciplinary power, producing different experiences for male and female athletes.
An intersectional analysis suggests pay inequities and differential opportunities after a professional soccer career.
The US women’s team filed a federal gender discrimination lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation (USSF) on March 8, 2019.
The USSF denied unlawful conduct, attributing gendered pay differentials to “differences in the aggregate revenue generated by the different teams and/or any other factor other than sex.”
Frameworks that are only gender-focused miss intersectional dimensions of how both the rules and tools for fighting social injustice discriminate.
In 2019, the US women’s team was paid less than the men but had the legal rights to file a lawsuit.
The Reggae Girlz of Jamaica had difficulty raising funds to attend the World Cup; the Super Falcons of Nigeria protested for increased financial support.
Gender differences intersect with differences of race and class within both men’s and women’s games.
The rules of soccer shape team rankings that discipline players through differential expectations.
Intersections of race and gender characterize both men’s and women’s football, with important financial implications for all players.
The interpersonal domain of power
Refers to how individuals experience the convergence of structural, cultural, and disciplinary power.
Shapes intersecting identities of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and age that organize social interactions.
Intersectionality recognizes that perceived group membership can make people vulnerable to bias.
Complex identities shape the specific ways that individuals experience bias.
For the FIFA World Cup, intersecting identities are hypervisible on a global stage.
Athletes must craft their identities within intersecting power relations.
The embodied nature of intersecting identities is on constant display.
Athletes must cultivate the right image and brand for endorsements and contracts.
Individual players decide how they will play the game and how their image will be received by fans.
Fans can be fickle, rooting for the home team but hurling racial epithets at players on the opposing team.
Managing identities of masculinity and femininity takes on significance in this global public area.
Women have faced an uphill battle to play sports at all, to do so on an elite level, and to receive equitable compensation.
Women’s sports have faced efforts to manage women’s dress and appearance.
The treatment of women athletes who appear to violate norms of femininity offers a window into how elite athletes deal with hegemonic masculinity and femininity in professional sports.
Athletes are increasingly contesting rules of heteronormativity.
Athletes attended to their hair and makeup and brought children and male partners to games to signal their sexual orientation.
Players are increasingly embracing an androgynous fashion style that is more in tune with contemporary notions of gender fluidity.
Norms of heteronormativity are closely aligned with these disciplinary practices that shape individual decisions about identity, masculinity, and femininity.
Intersecting identities and experiences reflect power plays across the structural, cultural, disciplinary, and interpersonal domains of power.
Professional football offers a rich site for using intersectionality as an analytical tool.
Economic Inequality: A New Global Crisis?
2014 was a pivotal year for highlighting global economic inequality as an important social problem.
The Eighteenth International Sociological Association (ISA) World Congress of Sociology convened in Yokohama, Japan, with more than 6,000 participants.
Michael Burawoy argued that inequality was the most pressing issue of our time.
The 2013 election of Pope Francis, who expressed a strong commitment to tackling social inequality, poverty, and environmental justice, was significant.
The May 2014 Conference on Inclusive Capitalism in London gathered business leaders and investors to discuss the need for a more socially responsible form of capitalism.
Christine Lagarde, then head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), invoked Pope Francis’s depiction of increasing inequality as “the root of social evil.”
Economic inequality in income and wealth has grown exponentially since the 1990s, affecting 70 percent of the world’s population.
Nearly half of the world’s wealth, some US$110 trillion, is owned by only 1 percent of the world’s population.
By 2014, people on opposite sides of issues took notice of the state of global inequality.
Examining the specific histories of nation-states fosters different angles of vision on global economic inequalities.
Global income inequality has been in decline since the mid-1970s due to economic growth in countries like India and China, but absolute income inequality has increased dramatically within countries.
Income inequality has increased exponentially in North America, China, India, and Russia, moderately in Europe, and remained relatively stable in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and Brazil.
Using intersectionality as an analytic tool points to several important dimensions of growing global inequality.
Social inequality does not fall equally on women, children, people of color, differently abled people, transgendered people, undocumented populations, and indigenous groups.
Intersectionality provides a framework for explaining how social categories position people differently in the world.
Intersectionality brings a framework of intersecting social inequalities to economic inequality.
Black people, women, young people, rural residents, undocumented people, and differently abled people face barriers to finding well-paying, secure jobs with benefits.
Intersectionality fosters a rethinking of the concept of the wealth gap, positing that differences in wealth reflect interlocking systems of power.
The wealth gap is racialized and gendered, with disparities between whites, blacks, and Latinos reaching record highs.
Intersectional analyses demonstrate how the structure of the inequality gap is simultaneously racialized and gendered for women of color.
Intersectionality complicates class-only explanations for global economic inequality.
By suggesting that economic inequality can neither be assessed nor effectively addressed through class alone, intersectional analyses propose a more sophisticated map of social inequality.
Intersectional frameworks reveal how race, gender, sexuality, age, ability, citizenship, and so on relate in complex and entangled ways to produce economic inequality.
Using intersectionality as an analytic tool reveals how differential public policies of nation-states contribute to reducing or aggravating growing global inequality.
Social democracy and neoliberalism differ in important ways on their interpretations of social inequality.
Social welfare state policies strive to protect the interests of the public.
Neoliberal state policies take a different view of the role of the state in promoting public well-being, fostering privatization, scaling back the social welfare state, and promoting individualism.
Neoliberal philosophies have been used to launch sustained attacks on the public programs of social democracies that were put in place to address social inequality.
Global social inequality has grown in tandem with the weakening of the social democratic state.
Democratic states that pursued neoliberal policies identify big government not as a solution to social inequality, but as one of its causes.
Increasingly, many social democratic nation-states that try to remedy social inequality by adopting neoliberal economic policies face serious challenges, among them, the rise of far-right populism.
The economic development of the nation-state does not necessarily reduce economic inequality.
Intersectional analysis illuminates the differential effects of public policies on producing economic inequality of people of color, women, young people, rural residents, undocumented people, and differently abled people.
People who bear the brunt of shrinking benefits from social welfare states or neoliberal marketplace policies may be more hopeful than their public officials about the possibilities of social democracy.
The Black Women’s Movement in Brazil
More than 1,000 black women and their allies attended the seventh annual meeting of Latinidades, the Afro-Latin and Afro-Caribbean women’s festival in Brasilia.
Several decades of black women’s activism in Brazil had created the political, social, and artistic space for this annual festival.
In 1975, black women presented the Manifesto of Black Women at the Congress of Brazilian Women, calling attention to how black women’s life experiences were shaped by gender, race, and sexuality.
White feminists remained unwilling or unable to address black women’s concerns during the Decade of Women.
Brazil’s national policy concerning race and democracy militated against such activism, claiming not to have “races” and erasing race in order to construct a philosophy of racial democracy.
This erasure of “blackness” allowed discriminatory practices to occur in areas of education and employment because there were neither officially recognized terms for describing racial discrimination nor official remedies for it.
Black women challenged these historical interconnections between ideas about race and Brazil’s nation-building project as setting the stage for the erasure of Afro-Brazilian women.
Black feminists’ ongoing criticisms of racial democracy and advocacy for the needs of black women provided a foundation for the new generation of activists to organize Latinidades.
These intergenerational social movement ties enabled younger black women to highlight the connections between gender, race, and class.
Latinidades promoted “racial equality and tackling racism and sexism” and showcased the use of intersectionality as an analytical category within Afro-Brazilian feminism.
Conceição Evaristo, Afro-Brazilian author and professor of Brazilian literature, attended the festival.
The festival cultivated a range of relationships that typically were seen as separate, accommodating people from all walks of life.
Transregional and transnational heterogeneity enabled participants to share strategies for tackling how racism and sexism affected Afro-Latin women.
Latinidades promoted opportunities for relations across social divisions of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, nationality, and ability.
Angela Davis’s keynote address got the audience on its feet, and the festival set aside time for a planning meeting to educate attendees about the upcoming Black Women’s March for a National Day of Denouncing Racism.
Latinadades’s use of intersectionality as an analytic tool for structuring the conference reflects the specific social context of Afro-Brazilian women’s experiences.
Brazil’s specific history with slavery, colonialism, dictatorship, and democratic institutions has shaped its distinctive patterns of intersecting power relations of race, gender, and sexuality.
Appearance became a de facto racial marker for distributing education, jobs, and other social goods.
“Popular images of Brazil as a carnivalesque, tropical paradise have played a central role in contemporary constructions of mulata women’s social identities” (Caldwell 2007: 58).
Intersectionality’s framework of mutually constructing identity categories enabled Afro-Brazilian women to develop a collective identity politics.
The political space created by reinstalling democracy in the late 1980s benefited both women and black people.
Afro-Brazilian women experienced differential treatment within both the feminist movement and the Black Movement.
Black Brazilians had to create the collective political identity of “black” in order to build an antiracist social movement that highlighted the effects of anti-black racism.
Neither Brazilian feminism nor a Black Movement could by itself adequately address Afro-Brazilian women’s issues.
Black women formed their own movement, taking a step back to view black Brazilian women’s ideas and actions illustrates how a collective identity politics emerged around a politicized understanding of a collective black women’s identity based on common experiences.
Latinidades marked one moment within a long struggle to acknowledge race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality as mutually constructing multidimensional aspects of Afro-Brazilian women’s lives.
The premature death of Marielle Franco (1979–2018) suggests that building an Afro-Brazilian women’s movement is neither easy nor finished.
Her political assassination made her an icon of democratic resistance and of the struggle for social justice in Brazil and beyond, reminding us of the significance of intersectionality for movements for social justice.
Core Ideas of Intersectional Frameworks
Six core ideas:
Social inequality
Intersecting power relations
Social context
Relationality
Social justice
Complexity
These themes reappear within intersectionality itself and repeat in different ways throughout this book.
Each case sheds light on intersectional analyses of social inequality from very different vantage points.
The case of FIFA World Cup football contrasts the depiction of fairness with social inequalities.
The case of growing global inequality emphasizes how intersectionality might inform different explanations for economic inequality.
The Afro-Brazilian women’s movement explores how social movements constitute important political responses to national patterns of social inequality.
Recognizing that social inequality is rarely caused by a single factor, intersectionality adds additional layers of complexity.
These cases highlight different dimensions of intersecting power relations and political responses to them.
The case of the FIFA World Cup illustrates how intersecting power relations are organized and operate in a social institution where the ideology of fair play masks significant power differences.
The case of global social inequality shows how intersectional frameworks that take power relations into account raise new questions about global social inequality.
The Afro-Brazilian women’s movement emphasizes how everyday people organize to oppose intersecting power relations that harm them.
These cases illuminate the importance of examining intersecting power relations in a social context.
Contextualization is especially important for intersectional projects produced in the Global South.
The analysis of the World Cup examined the global contours of intersecting power relations, while the analysis of growing recognition of global economic inequality emphasizes the importance of nation-state policies.
These cases point to how relationality informs all aspects of intersectionality, embracing a both/and analytical framework that shifts focus from seeing categories as oppositional to examining their interconnections.
The case of global economic inequality illustrates how class-only arguments may be insufficient to explain global social inequality.
The Afro-Brazilian women’s movement illustrates how intersectionality emerged within coalition building for an intergenerational social movement.
These cases highlight the complexity of doing critical intersectional analysis, requiring intricate strategies to understand the complexity in the world.
Some commitment to social justice has historically informed much of intersectionality’s critical inquiry and praxis.
The analysis of global economic inequality illustrates how fostering social justice requires complex analyses of global economic inequality.
Many people believe that social ideals have already been achieved, but our cases challenge this view, suggesting that FIFA reproduces social inequality in ways that are neither fair nor just.
Social justice is elusive in unequal societies where the rules may seem fair yet are differentially enforced through discriminatory practices.
The goal is to democratize the rich and growing literature of intersectionality and invite readers to use it as an analytic tool to examine a range of topics.