Intersectionality Notes
Preface
The book was born in conversation and written collaboratively.
Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge first met in 2006 in Durban, South Africa, at the 16th World Congress of Sociology.
They took the same bus tour to the Kwa Muhle Apartheid Museum and townships, conversing briefly.
Six years later, they met again at the 6th International Congress of French-Speaking Feminist Research in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The conference theme was "Interlocking power relations and the discriminations and privileges based on gender, race, class, and sexuality."
They discovered shared perspectives on the conference and intersectionality during a visit to the Musée de l'Art Brut.
Sirma is a painter, and Patricia is a dancer, infusing their intersectional sensibilities with the arts.
They felt the need for a book addressing the complexities of intersectionality for wider audiences.
They started from different locations within intersectionality and worked towards connections.
Sirma writes in French and English in Montreal, addressing translation problems across Turkish, French, and English and situating intersectionality within global frameworks.
Patricia, rooted in a working-class African-American neighborhood in Philadelphia, writes for US and UK academic and general audiences, focusing on institutionalizing intersectionality.
They hammered out arguments over two years, complementing each other and ensuring ideas were strong across differences.
A core premise of intersectionality concerns the relationships between ideas and practices, including the book's production.
Dialog is hard work, involving labor and generative tension.
The process involved becoming fluent in each other's language of intersectionality, perspectives, and perceptions.
Intersectionality is polyglot, speaking to activism, community organizing, academia, social media, popular culture, journals, and conferences.
The book aims to speak to different constituencies in ways that are not mutually exclusive, using an audible and sensible language.
Consider the book an invitation to enter the complexities of intersectionality, providing navigational tools for its vast terrain.
It is a roadmap for discovery, not a finished product, with limitations on what could be included.
The authors encourage readers to listen to one another and translate along the way, valuing the support of others.
They thank the team at Polity Press, including Louise Knight, Clare Ansell, Pascal Porcheron, and Nekane Tanaka Galdos.
Gratitude is expressed to Gail Ferguson, the copyeditor, and the anonymous reviewers.
Sirma thanks her partner Philippe Allard, her sister Gönenç Bilge-Sökmen, and her mother Figen Bilge.
Sirma thanks graduate students at the Université de Montréal and colleagues in the Sociology department, especially Anne Calvès and Christopher McCall.
Sirma expresses gratitude for the friendship and solidarity of feminists of color and allies, including Sara Ahmed, Paola Bacchetta, Leila Bdeir, Karma Chávez, Alexa Conradi, João Gabriell, Eve Haque, Jin Haritaworn, Délice Mugabo, Jen Petzen, Julianne Pidduck, Malinda Smith, and Michèle Spieler.
Arashi is thanked for bringing feline grace and playtime.
Sirma dedicates the book to her late father, Uğur Bilge.
Patricia thanks graduate students at the University of Maryland: Valerie Chepp, Margaret Austin Smith, Jillet Sam, Rachel Guo, Kendra Barber, Kathryn Buford, Kristi Tredway, Wendy Laybourn, Angel Miles, and Michelle Beadle.
Patricia thanks Ana Claudia Perreira for conversations about intersectionality and Afro-Brazilian women.
Special thanks to Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz for his leadership in the Department of Sociology.
Patricia thanks her family: Roger Collins, Valerie Collins, Lauren Pruitt, and her grandson Harrison, dedicating the book to him and his generation.
What is Intersectionality?
In the early twenty-first century, “intersectionality” has been widely adopted by scholars, policy advocates, practitioners, and activists.
It is encountered in interdisciplinary fields (women's studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, etc.) and traditional disciplines (sociology, political science, history, etc.).
Human rights activists and government officials include intersectionality in global public policy discussions.
Grassroots organizers use intersectionality to inform work on reproductive rights, anti-violence initiatives, workers' rights, and similar social issues.
Bloggers use digital and social media to debate hot topics.
Teachers, social workers, high-school students, parents, university support staff, and school personnel use intersectionality to transform schools.
People increasingly claim and use the term “intersectionality” for diverse intellectual and political projects.
A general description of intersectionality:
A way of understanding and analyzing complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences.
Events and conditions of social and political life and the self are shaped by many factors in diverse and mutually influencing ways.
Social inequality is shaped not by a single axis of social division (race, gender, class) but by many axes that work together and influence each other.
An analytic tool that gives people better access to the complexity of the world and of themselves.
Recognizing the tremendous heterogeneity that currently characterizes how people understand and use intersectionality.
Despite debates about its meaning or whether it is the right term, intersectionality is the term that has stuck and is increasingly used by stakeholders.
Using intersectionality as an analytic tool
People generally use intersectionality as an analytic tool to solve problems that they or others around them face.
Most US colleges and universities face the challenge of building more inclusive and fair campus communities.
Social divisions of class, race, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, sexuality, and ability are especially evident within higher education.
Colleges and universities now include more college students who formerly had no way to pay for college (class), or students who historically faced discriminatory barriers to enrollment (race, gender, ethnicity or citizenship status, religion), or students who experience distinctive barriers and discrimination (sexuality and ability) on college campuses.
Colleges and universities find themselves confronted with students who want fairness, yet who bring very different experiences and needs to campus.
Initially, colleges recruited and served groups one at a time, offering, for example, special programs for African Americans, Latinos, women, gays and lesbians, veterans, returning students, and persons with disabilities.
As the list grew, it became clearer that this one-at-a-time approach not only was slow, but that most students fit into more than one category.
First-generation college students could include Latinos, women, poor whites, returning veterans, grandparents, and transgender individuals.
In this context, intersectionality can be a useful analytic tool for thinking about and developing strategies to achieve campus equity.
Ordinary people can draw upon intersectionality as an analytic tool when they recognize that they need better frameworks to grapple with the complex discriminations that they face.
In the 1960s and 1970s, African-American women activists confronted the puzzle of how their needs simply fell through the cracks of anti-racist social movements, feminism, and unions organizing for workers' rights.
Each of these social movements elevated one category of analysis and action above others, for example, race within the civil rights movement, or gender within feminism or class within the union movement.
Because African-American women were simultaneously black and female and workers, these single-focus lenses on social inequality left little space to address the complex social problems that they face.
Black women's specific issues remained subordinated within each movement because no social movement by itself would, nor could, address the entirety of discriminations they faced.
Black women's use of intersectionality as an analytic tool emerged in response to these challenges.
Intersectionality as an analytic tool is neither confined to nations of North America and Europe nor is it a new phenomenon.
People in the Global South have used intersectionality as an analytic tool, often without naming it as such.
Savitribai Phule (1831−1897), an important first-generation modern Indian feminist, confronted several axes of social division, namely caste, gender, religion, and economic disadvantage or class.
Her political activism encompassed intersecting categories of social division − she didn't just pick one.
She organized a barbers' strike against shaving the heads of Hindu widows, fought for widow remarriage and in 1853, started a shelter for pregnant widows; opened schools for workers and rural people, and providing famine relief through 52 food centers that also operated as boarding schools; gave care for those affected by famine and plague, and died in 1897 after contracting plague from her patients.
These examples suggest that people use intersectionality as an analytic tool in many different ways to address a range of issues and social problems.
They find intersectionality's core insight to be useful: namely, that major axes of social divisions in a given society at a given time, for example, race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and age operate not as discrete and mutually exclusive entities, but build on each other and work together.
Many people typically use intersectionality as a heuristic, a problem-solving or analytic tool, much in the way that students on college campuses developed a shared interest in diversity, or African-American women used it to address their status within social movement politics, or Savitribai Phule advanced women's rights.
Even though those who use intersectional frameworks all seem to be situated under the same big umbrella, using intersectionality as a heuristic device means that intersectionality can assume many different forms.
What makes an analysis intersectional is not its use of the term “intersectionality,” nor its being situated in a familiar genealogy, nor its drawing on lists of standard citations, but lies at the heart of intersectionality what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is.
Power plays: the FIFA World Cup
Brazil's international reputation as a football (soccer) powerhouse raised high hopes for its winning the 2014 FIFA World Cup.
Hosting the FIFA World Cup would enable Brazil to shed vestiges of its troubled history of being ruled by a military dictatorship (1964−1985), as well as signal its arrival as a major economic player.
The potential payoff for a winning Brazilian team in Brazil could be huge.
The World Cup was the most widely watched and followed sporting event in the world, exceeding even the Olympic Games.
The cumulative audience for all matches during the 2006 World Cup was estimated to be billion people, with an estimated million people watching the final match in Berlin, an astonishing one-ninth of the entire population of the planet.
The initial plan presented to the public emphasized that the majority of the spending on infrastructure for the World Cup would highlight general transportation, security, and communications.
Less than 25 percent of total spending would go toward the twelve new or refurbished stadiums.
Yet, as the games grew nearer, cost overruns increased stadium costs by at least 75 percent, with public resources reallocated from general infrastructure projects.
The FIFA cost overruns aggravated ongoing public demonstrations in several Brazilian cities against the increase in public transportation fares and political corruption.
As the countdown to the kickoff began, Brazilians took to the streets with banners against the World Cup.
The potential payoff for a winning Brazilian team in Brazil could be huge.
Of the thirty-two teams that qualified for the World Cup, Brazil was one of four that reached the semifinals, facing an undefeated Germany.
Germany led 5−0 at half time, scoring an unheard of four goals in a span of six minutes, and went on to win the World Cup.
Using intersectionality as an analytic tool to examine the FIFA World Cup sheds light on the organization of power.
Intersectionality as an analytic tool examines how power relations are intertwined and mutually constructing.
Race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, ethnicity, nation, religion, and age are categories of analysis, terms that reference important social divisions.
But they are also categories that gain meaning from power relations of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class exploitation.
One way of describing the organization of power identifies four distinctive yet interconnected domains of power: interpersonal, disciplinary, cultural, and structural.
The interpersonal domain of power
Power relations are about people's lives, how people relate to one another, and who is advantaged or disadvantaged within social interactions.
Each team is composed of a constellation of individuals who, on some level, love football and have chosen to play.
As a people's sport, football can be played almost anywhere by almost anyone, only requiring a ball and enough players to field two teams.
Compared with ice skating, tennis, skiing, or American football, soccer has far fewer barriers between athletic talent and the means to develop that talent.
An estimated 270 million people are involved in football as professional soccer players, recreational players, registered players both over and under age 18, futsal and beach football players, referees, and officials.
When one adds the children and youth who play football but who are not involved in any kind of organized activity detectable by FIFA, the number swells greatly.
The fanfare granted to the World Cup is a small tip of the iceberg of the everyday social interactions that shape people's relationships with one another in regard to football.
From elite athletes to poor kids, football players want to play on a fair playing field.
The sports metaphor of a level playing field speaks to the desire for fairness.
When played well and unimpeded by suspect officiating, football rewards individual talent yet also highlights the collective team nature of achievement.
Whether winners or losers, this team sport rewards individual talent yet also highlights the collective team nature of achievement.
Football is a people's sport, but not all people get to play because men and women do not compete directly against one another.
Sports generally, and professional sports in particular, routinely provide opportunities for men that are denied to women.
By this rule of gender segregation, the 2014 World Cup showed that the kind of football that counts for FIFA and fans alike is played by men.
Using intersectionality as an analytic lens highlights the multiple nature of individual identities and how varying combinations of class, gender, race, sexuality, and citizenship categories differentially position each individual.
Regardless of the love of soccer, these axes of social division work together and influence one another to shape each individual biography.
The disciplinary domain of power
Different people find themselves encountering different treatment regarding which rules apply to them and how those rules will be implemented.
Within football's disciplinary domain, some people are told they lack talent and are discouraged from playing, whereas others may receive extra coaching to cultivate the talent they have.
In essence, power operates by disciplining people in ways that put people's lives on paths that make some options seem viable and others out of reach.
For example, South Africa's 2010 hosting of the World Cup helped highlight the disciplinary practices that African boys faced who wanted to play football in Europe.
Filmmaker Mariana van Zeller's 2010 documentary Football's Lost Boys details how thousands of young players are lured away from their homelands, with their families giving up their savings to predatory agents, and how they are often left abandoned, broke, and alone.
The increasing racial/ethnic diversity on elite European teams has also highlighted the problem of racism in European football.
When the national team of France won the 1998 World Cup, defeating Brazil 3−0, some fans saw the team as non-representative of France because most of the players weren't white.
Moreover, white European fans may love their teams, yet many feel free to engage in racist behavior, such as calling African players monkeys, chanting racial slurs, and carrying signs with racially derogatory language.
At the 2006 World Cup, France's Zinedine Zidane, a three-time winner of FIFA's world player of the year violated a rule of fair play by headbutting Italy's Marco Materazzi in the chest after being taunted by racist and sexist slurs
The cultural domain of power
Ideas matter in providing explanations for social inequality and fair play.
Televised across the globe, the World Cup sends out important ideas about competition and fair play.
Winners have talent, discipline, and luck, and losers suffer from lack of talent, inferior self-discipline, and/or bad luck. This view suggests that fair competition produces just results.
The cultural domain of power helps manufacture messages that playing fields are level, that all competitions are fair, and that any resulting patterns of winners and losers have been fairly accomplished.
Mass media has increased in significance for the cultural domain of power.
Through contests between nations, cities, regions, mass media stages entertainment that reinforces the myth of a level playing field where one doesn't actually exist.
When national teams compete, nations themselves compete. Yet because rich nations have far more resources than poor ones, few nation-states can field teams.
The competitive and repetitive nature of contests reflects intersecting power relations of capitalism and nationalism.
Competing mass-media spectacles reiterate the belief that unequal outcomes of winners and losers are normal outcomes of marketplace competition.
Mass-media spectacles may appear to be mere entertainment, yet they serve political ends.
The structural domain of power
Fair play on a level playing field may be the ethos of football, yet how much of this fair play characterizes the organization of FIFA football itself.
The structural domain of power here refers to how FIFA itself is organized or structured.
As a global industry, FIFA has organized the populist sensibility of football into a highly profitable global network.
With an executive committee of 25 businessmen, FIFA's headquarters are located in Switzerland, where the government provides it legal protection as an international NGO.
As big business, FIFA has managed to organize football into a global industry with tremendous reach and considerable influence with governments.
In 2012 FIFA succeeded in having the Brazilian parliament adopt a General World Cup Law that imposed bank holidays on host cities on the days of the Brazilian team's matches, cut the number of places in the stadiums, and increased prices for ordinary spectators.
The bill also allowed alcoholic drinks to be taken into the stadiums; exempted companies working for FIFA from taxes and fiscal charges; banned the sale of any goods in official competition spaces, their immediate surroundings and their principal access routes; penalized bars who tried to schedule showings of the matches or promote certain brands; and defined any attack on the image of FIFA or its sponsors as a federal crime.
In June 2015, the US Department of Justice issued indictments against top FIFA officials and others involved in FIFA, bringing FIFA's corruption allegations into public purview.
Accused of rigging the bidding process for awarding the games, the indictments traced financial payoffs to key FIFA figures in exchange for FIFA's endorsements.
At the heart of the corruption were charges of “pay to play,” rather than fair play.
Social inequality: a new global crisis?
The Eighteenth International Sociological Association (ISA) World Congress of Sociology convened in Yokohama, Japan on July 13−19, 2014.
Michael Burawoy argued that inequality was the most pressing issue of our time, spurring new thinking in sociology, economics, and related social sciences.
Burawoy stressed the significance of the 2013 election of Pope Francis, unusually committed to tackling social inequality, poverty, and environmental justice.
More than 220 business leaders and investors from 27 countries assembled in London at the May 2014 Conference on Inclusive Capitalism to discuss “the need for a more socially responsible form of capitalism that benefits everyone, not just a wealthy minority.”
Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), said that something needed to be done about global inequality.
The fact that a Marxist sociologist like Burawoy referenced the Pope, and that the IMF head cited both the Pope and Marx suggests the state of global inequality is serious enough to make people who are typically on opposite sides of many issues take notice.
Over the last thirty years, inequality in income and wealth has grown exponentially, both within individual nation-states and across an overwhelming majority of countries.
Seventy percent of the world's population lives in countries where economic inequality has increased in the last three decades.
Nearly half of the world's wealth, some US trillion, is owned by only 1 percent of the world's population.
If trends continue, by 2016, 1 percent is expected to own more than the other 99 percent together.
The combined wealth of the world's richest 85 people equals the total wealth of the poorest half of the world's population, which accounts for billion people.
Using intersectionality as an analytic tool can foster a better understanding of growing global inequality beginning with noting that, economic inequality does not fall equally on everyone.
Intersectionality provides a framework for explaining how social divisions of race, gender, age, and citizenship status, among others, positions people differently in the world, especially in relation to global social inequality.
Labor market discrimination that pushes some people into part-time jobs with low pay, irregular hours, and no benefits, or that renders them structurally unemployed, does not fall equally across social groups.
Similarly, intersectionality also fosters a rethinking of the concept of the wealth gap.
Differences in wealth reflect structures intersecting power relations. The racialized structure of the wealth gap has been well documented in the United States where disparities between whites, blacks, and Latinos have reached record highs.
The wealth gap is not only racialized but also simultaneously gendered; is generally analyzed through an either/or lens, race or gender, but with noteworthy exceptions (see, e.g., Oliver and Shapiro 1995), less often through an intersectional both/and lens.
The racialized structure of the wealth gap has been well documented in the United States where disparities between whites, blacks, and Latinos have reached record highs.
Second, using intersectionality as an analytic tool complicates class- only explanations for global economic inequality.
Intersectional frameworks reveal how race, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and citizenship relate in complex and intersecting ways to produce economic inequality.
Third, using intersectionality as an analytic tool highlights the significance of social institutions in shaping and solving social problems.
The rise in economic inequality grew during the same forty-year period that nation-state policies shifted from governmental philosophies of social welfare to neoliberalism.
Drawing on philosophies of representative and participatory democracy, social welfare states had long concerned themselves with protecting the interests of the public, grounded in a belief that democratic institutions could flourish only with a strong citizenry.
In contrast, as a philosophy, neoliberalism is grounded in the belief that markets, in and of themselves, are better able than governments to produce economic outcomes that are fair, sensible, and good for all.
The state practices associated with neoliberalism differ dramatically from those of social welfare states including: increased privatization of government programs and institutions; scaling back, and in some cases elimination of, the social welfare state; fewer economic regulations and more trade that is free of government constraints protects jobs; a form of individualism that rejects the notion of the public good
Citizens within democratic nation-states with strong social welfare traditions find themselves facing a dilemma: in what ways will their respective nation-states continue to endorse social welfare policies and in what ways will they embrace social policies informed by neoliberalism?
Intersectionality certainly has many conceptual tools to analyze state power and how it articulates with global capitalism.
Yet intersectionality's focus on people's lives provides space for alternative analyses of these same phenomena.
Drawing inspiration from Pope Francis, they may also view growing economic inequality, as well as the social forces that cause it, as “the root of social evil,” yet refuse to sit passively watching it destroy their lives.
Latinidades: the black women's movement in Brazil
Two weeks after the raucous fans departed from Brazil's 2014 World Cup spectacle, more than a thousand women of African descent, their friends, family members, colleagues, and allies travelled to Brasilia, the national capital, to attend the seventh meeting of Latinidades, the Afro-Latin and Afro-Caribbean women's festival.
The event was scheduled to coincide with the annual International Day of Black Latin American and Caribbean Women.
Latinidades's expressed purpose lay in promoting “racial equality and tackling racism and sexism.”
The festival drew mostly women of African descent but also many men and members of diverse racial/ethnic groups from all areas of Brazil's states and regions, as well as from Costa Rica, Ecuador, and other Latin American and Caribbean nations.
Community organizers, professors, graduate students, parents, artists, schoolteachers, high- school students, representatives of samba schools, government officials, and music lovers, among others, made the journey to Brasilia to attend Latinidades.
Latinidades had elements of an academic symposium, a political organizing event, an African cultural heritage event, and a mass-music festival rolled into one.
Latinidades's academic component resembled a standard academic conference, complete with plenary sessions and an array of panels on issues as varied as health, psychology, literature from the African diaspora, and a session devoted to new books by and about black women.
Important Afro-Brazilian feminist intellectuals attended; some sessions examined community-organizing initiatives in favelas (low-income urban communities), as well as forms of wisdom associated with land, sustainability, and the environment.
Angela Davis's keynote address got the audience on its feet, many with fists raised in the Black Power salute.
The festival also set aside time for a planning meeting to educate attendees about the upcoming Black Women's March for a National Day of Denouncing Racism.
Another programming strand throughout the festival's many activities emphasized the significance of African diasporic cultural traditions, especially in Brazil.
Conceição Evaristo, Afro-Brazilian author and professor of Brazilian literature, attended the festival. Her novel Ponciá Vicencio, a story of a young Afro-Brazilian woman's journey from the land of her enslaved ancestors to the emptiness of urban life, was a landmark in black Brazilian women's literature.
Latinidades was a festival where serious work and play coincided.
Not only was Latinidades a success, its very existence constituted one highly visible moment of an Afro-Brazilian women's movement that took several decades to build.
Since the 1930s, when Brazil adopted an ideology of racial democracy, Brazil officially claimed not to have “races.”
The Brazilian government collected no racial statistics and, without racial categories, Brazil officially had neither race nor black people.
By erasing the political category of race, Brazil's national discourse of racial democracy effectively eliminated language that might describe the racial inequalities that affected black Brazilian people's lives.
Black women challenged Brazil's national identity narrative concerning racial democracy.
The end of the dictatorship in 1985 created new opportunities for seeing the connections between racism and Brazilian nationalism, as well as for social movements.
Second, using intersectionality as an analytic tool also sheds light on how women of African descent or Afro-Brazilian women are situated within gendered and sexualized understandings of Brazilian history and national identity.
Brazil's cultivated image of national identity posited that racism did not exist and that color lacks meaning, other than celebrating it as a dimension of national pride.
Appearance not only carries differential weight for women and men, but different stereotypes of black women rest on beliefs about their sexuality. These ideas feed back into notions of national identity, using race, gender, sexuality, and color as intersecting phenomena.
A third dimension of using intersectionality as an analytic tool concerns how intersectionality's framework of mutually constructing identity categories enabled Afro-Brazilian women to develop a collective identity politics, cultivating a political black feminist identity at the intersections of racism, sexism, class exploitation, national history, and sexuality.
The political space created by reinstalling democracy in the late 1980s benefited both women and blacks. Yet there was one significant difference between the two groups.
Brazil's success in electing women to political office reflected alliances among women across categories of social class.
However the framing of the women's movement, was inflected through other categories because upper-class and middle-class women were central to the movement, their status as marked by class yet unmarked by race (most were white) shaped political demands.
Neither Brazilian feminism led by women who were primarily well off and white, nor a Black Movement that was actively engaged in claiming a collective black identity that identified racism as a social force could by itself adequately address Afro-Brazilian women's issues.
Those in each separate social movements of feminism, anti- racism, and workers' movements, formed their own because no one social movement alone could adequately address Afro-Brazilian women's issues.
Taking a step back to view the issues that shaped the lived experiences of black Brazilian women illustrates how a collective identity politics emerged around a politicized understanding of a collective black women's identity based on common experiences of domination, exploitation, and marginalization.
For example, when black domestic workers organized, it was clear that women of African descent were disproportionately represented in this occupational category.
From the content of sessions, to a workshop for girls on black aesthetics and beauty, a session on the art of turbans and their connections to black beauty, a capoeira workshop, and a tree- planting ceremony of the seedlings of sacred baobab trees, Latinidades saw culture as an important dimension of Afro-Latin and Afro-Caribbean women's lives.
Women of African descent in Brazil knew on one level, through personal experience, that they were part of a group that shared certain collective experiences, but lacked a political identity and accompanying analysis to attach to these experiences, they couldn't articulate a collective identity politics to raise their concerns.
Lacking a language that spoke directly to their experiences, black women such as Léila Gonzalez, Sueli Carneiro and a long list of activist/scholars painstakingly organized the various constituencies of black women that were needed to address black women's concerns.
Core ideas of intersectional frameworks
Intersectionality is a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world, in people, and in human experience.
The cases of the FIFA World Cup, the global social inequality social problem, and the black Brazilian feminist social movement also help clarify six core ideas that appear and reappear when people use intersectionality as an analytic tool: inequality, relationality, power, social context, complexity, and social justice.
These ideas are neither always present in a particular project, nor do they appear in projects in the same way. Instead, they provide guideposts for thinking through intersectionality.
Social inequality
All three cases grapple with social inequality, albeit from very different vantage points.
The case of social inequality within World Cup football juxtaposes the search for fairness on the playing field with the unfairness of FIFA's global organization.
The case of how growing global social inequality came to the attention of ISA and the Conference on Inclusive Capitalism emphasizes different perspectives on social inequality that flow from intersectional analyses of capitalism and neoliberalism.
Latinidades illustrates how the Afro-Brazilian women's movement responded intellectually and politically to historical and contemporary forms of social inequality, especially the intersections of racism and sexism, in shaping social class differences within the particular history of the Brazilian nation- state.
Many contemporary definitions of intersectionality emphasize social inequality, but not all do.
Intersectionality exists because many people were deeply concerned by the forms of social inequality they either experienced themselves or saw around them and adds additional layers of complexity to understandings of social inequality, recognizing that social inequality is rarely caused by a single factor.
Using intersectionality as an analytic tool encourages us to move beyond seeing social inequality through race-only or class-only lenses. Instead, intersectionality encourages understandings of social inequality based on interactions among various categories.
Power
All three cases highlight different dimensions of the organization of power relations.
The case study of the World Cup examines the multi-faceted power relations of FIFA World Cup football.
The case of global social inequality shows how intersectional frameworks that take power relations into account, especially those that emphasize intersections of neoliberalism, nationalism, and capitalism, provide more robust interpretations of global social inequality.
The Latinidades case shows how power relations operate within political projects and social movements, from the space of community organizing and grassroots coalition politics.
First, intersectional frameworks understand power relations through a lens of mutual construction, meaning people's lives and identities are shaped by many factors in diverse and mutually influencing ways.
Second, power relations are to be analyzed both via their intersections, for example, of racism and sexism, as well as across domains of power, namely structural, disciplinary, cultural, and interpersonal.
The framework of domains of power provides a heuristic device or thinking tool for examining power relations.
Looking at how power works in each domain can shed light on the dynamics of a larger social phenomenon, like the social unrest around the 2014 World Cup.
Relationality
The Latinidades case of the Afro-Brazilian women's movement illustrates a historical and contemporary commitment to develop coalitions or relationships across social divisions.
Relational thinking rejects either/or binary thinking, instead embracing a both/and frame.
The focus of relationality shifts from analyzing what distinguishes entities to examining their interconnections.
The global inequality case illustrates how class-only arguments may be insufficient to explain global social inequality, and that intersectional arguments that examine the relationships between class, race, gender, and age might be more valuable.
Relationality takes various forms within intersectionality and is found in terms such as “coalition,” “dialog,” “conversation,” “interaction,” and “transaction.”
Power is better conceptualized as a relationship, as in power relations, than as a static entity.
Social context
All three cases also provide opportunities for examining intersecting power relations in context.
The Latinidades case highlights the significance of specific historical contexts in the production of intersectional knowledge and action, even in the absence of the term itself.
Intellectual and political activism work by growing from a specific set of concerns in a specific social location, in this case the identity politics of Afro- Brazilian women.
Using intersectionality as an analytic tool means contextualizing one's arguments, primarily by being aware that particular historical, intellectual, and political contexts shape what we think and do.
Contextualization is especially important for intersectional projects produced in the Global South
Complexity
These core themes of social inequality, power, relationality, and social context are intertwined, introducing an element of complexity into intersectional analysis.
Intersectionality itself is a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world that makes using it as an analytic tool difficult
Social justice
These cases engage varying angles of vision on social justice, though it may be most contentious core idea.
The World Cup case suggests that competition is not inherently bad if the game itself is fair, though not always a reality.
The case of global social inequality illustrates how complex the solutions to global economic inequality need to be in order to foster social justice.
Rather, the social justice activism of the black women's movement in Brazil provides a different angle of vision on social justice by challenging myths that racial democracy had been achieved, or that the Black Movement could handle the gendered concerns of women, or that Brazilian feminism was adequate for all women.
Working for social justice is not a requirement for intersectionality, but are often one and the same.
The goal is to democratize the literature of intersectionality.
Intersectionality as Critical Inquiry and Praxis
Far too much intersectional scholarship starts with the assumption that intersectionality is a finished framework that can simply be applied to a given research project or political program.
Generalizing about intersectionality based on a particular case or one group's experiences in a particular social context risks missing the process of discovery that underlies how people actually use intersectional frameworks.
Intersectionality itself is constantly under construction and these cases illustrate different ways of using intersectionality as an analytic tool.
This chapter investigates intersectionality's two organizational focal points, namely, critical inquiry and critical praxis.
Intersectionality as a Form of Critical Inquiry
Gained visibility in the academy when the term seemed to fit scholarship and teaching already underway.
In the 1990s, the term came into use both inside and outside traditional disciplines,