In feminist theory, intersectionality has become the predominant way of conceptualizing the relation between systems of oppression which construct our multiple identities and our social locations in hierarchies of power and privilege. The aim of this essay is to clarify the origins of intersectionality as a metaphor, and its theorization as a provisional concept in Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s work, followed by its uptake and mainstreaming as a paradigm by feminist theorists in a period marked by its widespread and rather unquestioned--if, (...) at times, superficial and inattentive--usage. I adduce four analytic benefits of intersectionality as a research paradigm: simultaneity, complexity, irreducibility and inclusivity. Then, I gesture at, and respond to some critiques of intersectionality advanced in the last few years, during which the concept has increasingly come under scrutiny. (shrink)

In this article we ask what it means for sociologists to practice intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological approach to inequality. What are the implications for choices of subject matter and style of work? We distinguish three styles of understanding intersectionality in practice: group-centered, process-centered, and system-centered. The first, emphasizes placing multiply-marginalized groups and their perspectives at the center of the research. The second, intersectionality as a process, highlights power as relational, seeing the interactions among variables as multiplying oppressions at (...) various points of intersection, and drawing attention to unmarked groups. Finally, seeing intersectionality as shaping the entire social system pushes analysis away from associating specific inequalities with unique institutions, instead looking for processes that are fully interactive, historically co-determining, and complex. Using several examples of recent, highly regarded qualitative studies, we draw attention to the comparative, contextual, and complex dimensions of sociological analysis that can be missing even when race, class, and gender are explicitly brought together. (shrink)

This paper uses a study of the life story narratives of former classmates of Dutch and Moluccan descent to argue that the constructionist approach to intersectionality, with its account of identity as a narrative construction rather than a practice of naming, offers better tools for answering questions concerning intersectional identity formation than a more systemic intersectional approach. The case study also highlights the importance of the quest for origins in narratives. It demonstrates that theories of intersectionality are unjustified in subsuming (...) the issue of belonging under the identity marker of ethnicity, when all identities are performatively produced in and through narrative enactments that include belonging. Belongingness is a precarious achievement. The case study illustrates that if narrative accounts of a life fail to achieve narrative closure regarding roots, attempts to trace routes are seriously hampered. (shrink)

The highly publicized killing of Black people in spring 2020 sparked a national and global social movement to address racial violence. This led to heightened national discourse about the deeply entrenched nature of systemic racism in American institutions, prompting organizations to make public statements supporting racial justice. While an essential first step in addressing systemic inequities within the workplace, these statements are primarily performative and do little to combat systemic racist practices and policies within their ranks. For instance, research has (...) shown that women of color, and particularly Black women, experience daily racial and gendered aggressions that negatively impact their career trajectories. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews of twenty Black women lawyers, this article demonstrates how systemic racism is deeply entrenched in white spaces, preventing a genuine and effective path to diversity, equity, and full inclusion. Moreover, it theorizes how emotional, cognitive, financial, and relational labors amount to an inclusion tax levied against Black women professionals in white spaces. The article concludes with practical implications and ethical considerations on how to address this dynamic across various occupations and industries. (shrink)

Literary trauma theory has traditionally been a humanist concern, and the concept of witnessing, so central to the theorization of trauma, has focused on human experience and relationships. This article stages an interdisciplinary intervention by conceptualizing trans-“species” trauma testimony as a literary encounter involving a double-layered witnessing; the human artist witnessing nonhuman animals’ witnessing to the failings and crises brought about by human society. Focusing on a selection of contemporary Australian poems, a view emerges of poetic witnessing and testimony that (...) exceeds and complicates the sub-genre lenses of old such as “nature poetry,” “ecopoetry,” and “protest poetry.” I propose a new conceptual category that testifies to traumatic structures and consequences of human practices. I explore how this testimony proceeds through a two-way channel of witnessing in which nonhuman animals are active witnessing agents and not merely witnessed by humans. I concentrate on witnessing as primarily experiential, as a corporal, affective operation in which the senses figure centrally. I argue that when poets witness nonhuman animal experience in poetry, testimony advances as an ethical engagement in an act of solidarity and advocacy. Poetry offers productive potential in this respect due to its affinity for engagement with the senses, its capacity to communicate heightened affect, and its scope for expression, articulation, and evocations of meaning outside of conventional sense-making and the limits of rational understanding. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to engage critically with feminist HIV/aids research from an ‘intersectional’ perspective. Focusing in particular on the work of Tamsin Wilton and Janet Holland et al., the article examines how ‘race’, ethnicity and class are theorized and conceptualized in this literature. Through a scrutiny of their empirical analyses, the article points to the pitfalls of a descriptive approach to ‘differences’ and problematizes Wilton's and Holland et al.'s theoretical focus on gender and sexuality. The benefit of (...) including a critical perspective on ‘race’ and ethnicity and other axes of domination is illustrated further using some empirical examples from the Swedish HIV/aids policy context. The article concludes by arguing that an intersectional perspective poses a challenge to feminist HIV/aids research that needs to be addressed in order to produce an effective sexual health policy. (shrink)

Feminist literature on care has extensively addressed inequalities that cut across the social categories of gender, class and ethnicity in relation to care work. One category that has received less attention in theories of caregiving so far is age. Built on the feminist literature of care and taking young (female) carers as its subject matter, this article tackles age as a third social category of intersectional inequalities along with class and gender. Firstly, through dealing with Nancy Fraser’s justice framework of (...) participatory parity, it is argued that addressing the intersectional inequalities that young (female) carers face necessitates a justice framework that contemplates both the distributional and recognitional aspects of care. In this respect a dual conceptualisation of care is presented – both as a social good and a social process. Secondly, a critical analysis will be presented of the elements of the justice framework of Fraser, where the notion of subordinated status will be related to the identities of young carers. Lastly, the normative framework participatory parity will be discussed in relation to the politics of need, as care practices define the needs of young carers that are contextualised in the care processes, but also in a childhood space. (shrink)

Drawing on archival and published sources from 1926 to 1932, this chapter analyzes “Three Independent Factors in Morals” (1930) as a blueprint to Dewey’s chapters in the 1932 Ethics. The 1930 presentation is Dewey’s most concise and sophisticated critique of the quest in ethical theory for the central and basic source of normative justification. He argued that moral situations are heterogeneous in their origins and operations. They elude full predictability and are not controllable by the impositions of any abstract monistic (...) principle. Moral life instead has at least three distinct experiential roots that cannot be encompassed in one ideal way to proceed. More specifically, Dewey hypothesized that each of the primary Western ethical systems (represented for him by Aristotle, Kant, and the British moralists) represents a basic, non-arbitrary force, or factor of moral life: aspiration, obligation, and approbation, respectively. Each factor is expressed in that system’s leading fundamental concept: good, duty, and virtue, respectively. Yet he contended that aspirations, obligations, and approbations are distinctive phenomena that cannot be blanketed by a single covering concept. By exposing Dewey’s own generalizations to scrutiny, the promises and limitations of his approach can be critically evaluated. (shrink)

Recent defenses of same-sex marriage and polygamy have invoked the liberal doctrines of neutrality and public reason. Such reasoning is generally sound but does not go far enough. This paper traces the full implications of political liberalism for marriage. I argue that the constraints of public reason, applied to marriage law, entail ‘minimal marriage’, the most extensive set of state-determined restrictions on marriage compatible with political liberalism. Minimal marriage sets no principled restrictions on the sex or number of spouses and (...) the nature and purpose of their caring relationships, nor on which marital rights are exchanged, and whether they are exchanged reciprocally or asymmetrically. Minimal marriage supports adult care networks, urban tribes, friendships, and other forms of relationships as well as ‘traditional’ marriages. I provide a publically justifiable rationale for a legal framework supporting non-dependent caring relationships between adults. The argument is that caring relationships are primary goods, and that liberal justice accordingly requires legal frameworks supporting caring relationships. Minimal marriage is one such framework. (shrink)

This article contributes to the revision of the concept of system in social theory using complexity theory. The old concept of social system is widely discredited; a new concept of social system can more adequately constitute an explanatory framework. Complexity theory offers the toolkit needed for this paradigm shift in social theory. The route taken is not via Luhmann, but rather the insights of complexity theorists in the sciences are applied to the tradition of social theory inspired by Marx, Weber, (...) and Simmel. The article contributes to the theorization of intersectionality in social theory as well as to the philosophy of social science. It addresses the challenge of theorizing the intersection of multiple complex social inequalities, exploring the various alternative approaches, before rethinking the concept of social system. It investigates and applies, for the first time, the implications of complexity theory for the analysis of multiple intersecting social inequalities. Key Words: complexity theory • inequality • intersectionality • social theory. (shrink)

Este trabajo parte de la idea de que en el marco de una lógica occidental moderna, y de sociedades capitalistas patriarcales, se relega a las mujeres al lugar de alteridad en relación a lo masculino, y se las homogeneiza bajo la representación de una “arquetípica Mujer”, que se articula con otra que homologa mujer a madre. Mostraremos que para que estas representaciones sean internalizadas, es necesario que operen discursos que circulan en tecnologías sociales como el cine, en los que se (...) prescriben normas y criterios de “lo normal”. Frente a estos discursos normativizantes con sesgos sexistas, racistas, elitistas y capacitistas, sostengo que las posiciones discursivas excéntricas, al decir de Teresa de Lauretis, son potentes para subvertir los procesos de subjetivación/sujeción que determinan qué lugar ocupar dentro de la estructura social. Para ello se recuperan críticas desde el margen como las de Adrienne Rich, y sus reflexiones en torno a la experiencia personal sobre la maternidad, experiencia que comprende simultáneamente como institución. Así mismo son recuperados los aportes del pensamiento feminista negro y su importancia de narrar en primera persona las experiencias vividas. Todo esto tiene el propósito mayor de cuestionar nuestros propios posicionamientos y experiencias, y de abogar por el reconocimiento de un sujeto múltiple, contradictorio, disidente y otro. (shrink)

En este trabajo proponemos mostrar que las múltiples experiencias de opresión –como efecto de las imbricaciones simultáneas entre instancias de diferenciación social y relaciones de poder- tienen como reverso experiencias de lucha, organización y resistencia colectiva como formas de participación política. Para el abordaje de las desigualdades entrecruzadas y diversas formas de violencia proponemos un enfoque interseccional por su carácter multidimensional y complejo, así como por sus raíces de lucha. Para ello, en primera instancia, trazaremos genealogías políticas que permitan historizar (...) la interseccionalidad y anudarla a sus luchas y demandas fundacionales. Analizaremos en esta dirección, las experiencias de la Combahee River Collective y de laThird World Women's Alliance, organizaciones feministas negras de la década del setenta en los Estados Unidos que buscaban enfrentar las desigualdades estructurales producidas por las articulaciones entre distintos sistemas de dominación y que direccionaron su participación política antiimperialista, anticapitalista, anticolonialista y antisexista. En un segundo momento, proponemos recuperar las genealogías críticas de la interseccionalidad para repolitizar y recomplejizar la perspectiva crítica. Finalmente, proponemos subvertir los binarismos dicotómicos y excluyentes bajo los cuales se han estructurado espacios de jerarquías y privilegios; que reproducen violencias y desigualdades. (shrink)

In South Africa, race has been subverted by the fall of official apartheid. Specifically, the “invisibilization” of black others is overturned and white-black relationality problematized, thereby deeply troubling whiteness. However, the logic of race continues to reverberate through social relations against a global backdrop in which this category proves remarkably adaptable as purveyor of inequality. The end of official apartheid is not the end of the power effects of the apartheid discourse. The postapartheid field is a site of contestation over (...) previously normalized hierarchies, including over gender and class. Applying a discourse analysis to texts generated in research interviews with respondents who self-identified as women, white, Afrikaans-speaking, and middle class, this study finds attempts at re-securing race. First, the strategy of “elision and misattribution” seeks to recuperate apartheid's racial binaries to bolster present-day whiteness. Second, “intersectional shifting” of social markers aims at ameliorating the secondary status of femininity through the wielding of whiteness and middle classness. These strategies are complicated by affective practices. Particularly the social emotion shame holds transformative potential, but with a caveat. Shame brings self into relation with the other and the social and can usher white subjects into an expanded conception of being human, but only if acknowledged. (shrink)

This essay analyses how Australian postcolonial discourses, influenced by both Republicanism and Reconciliation, deploy the trope of woman to signify political change in both feminist and cultural debates about belonging, national legitimacy and sovereignty. I point out that white feminist rejection of the Queen in favour of embracing indigeneity is itself complicit with a history of ‘incorporating’ and assimilating indigeneity – a complicity that is sublimated in favour of a triumphant rejection of Imperial white womanhood. The essay looks at a (...) contemporary Australian novel, media depictions of Paul Keating's ‘embrace’ of Queen Elizabeth II (as a kind of captivity narrative), critical whiteness studies’ ‘rejection’ of the Queen and the misrecognition of Australia's distinct characteristics as a ‘settler culture’ (that incorporates indigeneity) within Australian feminist debates and claims of ‘transgression’ that are made for interracial relationships in Australia. (shrink)

This article argues that a state-centered theory of global justice exhibits an epistemic problem of perspective, and that this worry exhibits a gendered character. Within a liberal domestic theory of justice, the public/private distinction has been repeatedly shown to be bad for women because it creates a domain for injustice that becomes invisible to public policy and the law. This article argues that state-centered theories of global justice create an analogous space that is cut off from questions of global justice. (...) The article therefore suggests that this way of framing questions of global justice is problematic, and is problematic for women in particular. Just as the public/private distinction in liberal domestic justice leaves cases of injustice outside the vision of the law, the hard distinction between the domestic (state) sphere and the international realm of justice leaves cases of injustice invisible to international law. For the question of global justice, the privileging of sovereignty and non-intervention compromises the ability of the theory to achieve its purported goal of universal justice. (shrink)

James Baldwin wrote: "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster." When people impute meanings to events--such as the 2020 killing of George Floyd, the shooting of Jacob Blake, and subsequent upheavals--they do so with ideas that already make sense to them. And what makes most sense to people is typically due to others with (...) whom they share identities and experiences, and from whom they’ve inherited their basic intellectual scaffolding. But making sense of an event isn’t enough. We’re driven to mobilize action by convincing ourselves that our cause is morally or politically in the right. So people build on their stable-yet-evolving intellectual scaffolding and explanatory schemes to rationalize, justify, and sanctify their conduct. The easiest part of becoming what Baldwin called a moral monster is to build up these self-justifying rationalizations. The more complicated part is to construct a justifying consciousness that insures we’ll arrive safely at foregone conclusions with little risk of confronting others’ experiences in a way that might unsettle our equilibrium or sap our vehemence. In this way, people avoid facing realities that might upend their pretenses, so they are now ideally positioned to be, in Dewey’s words, “profoundly moral even in their immoralities.". (shrink)

Sensationalized representations of autistic families in film and other media frequently feature violent encounters between mothers and sons. This essay analyzes two media stories and three films that suggest how limited—and therefore misleading—popular representations of the autism family are. Except for one of the films, these representations blame the problem of adult autistic dependency on either monstrous autism or bad mothering. Doing so elides collective social responsibility for autism care and denies the reality that autistic adults continue to have complex (...) dependency needs that families cannot always meet. Narratives that sensationalize youth and adults with autism or scapegoat their maternal caregivers also diminish opportunities for social inclusion and for autistic people to live fully and dependently. (shrink)

Even as feminist analyses have contributed in important ways to discussions of how gender is raced and race is gendered, there has been little in the way of comparative analysis of the specific mechanisms that are at work in the production of each. Feder argues that in Michel Foucault's analytics of power we find tools to understand the reproduction of whiteness as a complex interaction of distinctive expressions of power associated with these categories of difference.

In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's “The Damnation of Women,” which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath.

ABSTRACT This contribution examines the implementation of the ‘British’ values agenda within Early Childhood Care and Education settings in England, as introduced by the Prevent Duty. It begins by tracing the rise of the ECEC setting as the primary place of education of the young child, as this has shifted from the home environment. It examines the place of values education, culminating in the Government directive on the promotion of ‘British’ values, and how these values must be seen as integral (...) to effective ECEC provision. Using a case study of two focus groups and subsequent in-depth semi-structured interviews, the implications of the introduction of this strategy are identified, focusing in particular on the relationships between the ECEC leaders and parents. This presents clear evidence of the potential for a negative impact on interpersonal professional relationships. (shrink)

: In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's "The Damnation of Women," which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath.

Female migrant workers are doubly disadvantaged in China's urban labor market because of their doubly marginalized identities as both women and rural residents. This article takes a process-centered approach to explore how female migrants' two identity categories generate intersectional effects on their job-search experiences in cities. Data from in-depth interviews conducted in Xi'an city, China, in 2010 and 2011 reveal that three patterns of relationship explain the processes where the gender–hukou intersection affects female migrants. In the first pattern, a splintering (...) relationship, hukou and gender work singly to form employment discrimination against female migrants. The second, a contesting relationship, indicates that hukou and gender alternate as the primary identities that affect their employment opportunities. In the third, a collaborating relationship, hukou and gender work together to either positively or negatively shape female migrants' employment prospects. No matter which of the relationships plays out, female migrants' disadvantages as cheap urban laborers have become deeply entrenched in the urban labor market. This can be explained by two powerful social institutions in contemporary China, the hukou system and patriarchy. (shrink)

Research has established that the burdens of externalities associated with industrial production are disproportionately borne by socially and politically vulnerable groups, and this is particularly true for farmworkers who are at high risk for environmental exposures and illnesses. The impacts of these risks are often compounded by farmworker communities’ social vulnerability. Yet, less is known about how the intersection of race, class, and gender can position some farmworkers to be at higher risk for particular types of oppressions. We extend the (...) literature by analyzing the case of Black women farmworkers in Apopka, Florida, which was historically home to a large agricultural community. Drawing on the concept of critical environmental justice, we investigate the lived experiences of these women in the context of racialized, gendered, and economic oppressions during their time working on the farms. We use the case of Apopka to ask: how the policies and socio-historical context of the agricultural industry in the American South contributed to injustices experienced by Black women farmworkers in Apopka, Florida; and how race, gender, and class intersected and intersect to create and legitimize environmental injustices in the workplace for these farmworkers. Our data include semi-structured in-depth interviews, newspaper and media coverage, and archival materials. Our analysis advances work on critical environmental justice and intersectionality by mapping the relationship between structural and environmental intersectional oppressions for Black women farmworkers. (shrink)

A right to family privacy is considered a cornerstone of American life, and yet access to it is apportioned by race. Our notion of the “racialization of privacy” refers to the phenomenon that family privacy, including the freedom to create a family uninhibited by law, pressure, and custom, is delimited by race. Building upon racial formation theory, this article examines three examples: the Native American boarding school system (1870s to 1970s), eugenic laws and practices (early/mid 1900s), and contemporary deportation. Analysis (...) reveals that state-sponsored limitations on family privacy is a racial project that shapes the racial state. Performing an ideological genealogy with our cases, this article makes three contributions: it illustrates how the state leverages policies affecting families to define national belonging; it reveals how access to family privacy is patterned by race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and national origin; and it distills how Whiteness and a national racial hierarchy are socially constructed and maintained over time. With the racialization of privacy, we identify how the state seeks to reproduce institutionalized White supremacy and the effects this has on families. We argue that families are the linchpin in state-sponsored racial projects that construct the nation and that the racialization of privacy, as a form of inequality, is a defining characteristic of the color-line. (shrink)

Under the Canadian labour laws that govern workplace safety, wage, and other work conditions, ‘family’ workers are not covered by the law under special rules for agriculture. Among other legal exclusions, the family farm exclusion contributes to a dearth of basic work, health, and safety standards in the sector, despite the commercialization and industrialization of family farming activities. Through a focus on Alberta, Canada—where farm labour rules have only applied to agriculture since 2016—this article explores the family exclusion in relation (...) to family farming experiences with work and risk, based on interviews with farm operators, their family members, and farm employees in Alberta. While some participants continued to press for exemptions for farms from labour rules under the rationale that there is intrinsic safety within families, the findings also reveal how other participants have begun questioning this rationale, despite their overall support for the family farm exemption in Alberta. Using the lens of legal geography and critical perspectives on the family, we argue that the family is a significant but under-examined dynamic in the legal regimes governing farm labour and agricultural safety and health. Together, the law and dominant narratives about family farming treat farm operations as hyper-private domains, where operators have disproportionate power to dispose of their own work and the work of others how they wish. These legal geographies of hyper-privacy contribute to the indecent work conditions that characterize farm labour systems in Alberta and other jurisdictions. (shrink)

This paper draws on the ‘new wars’ literature and global political economy research to explore how feminists and other critical analysts might investigate linkages between, and the gendering of, licit and illicit informal activities in relation to transnational financing of new wars. The paper considers the interdependence (co-constitution) of reproductive, productive and virtual economies, and aims to illuminate the intersection of race, gender, and economic inequalities (within and among states) as structural features of neoliberal globalization. Finally, the paper develops an (...) analytical framing of coping, combat and criminal informal economies, which overlap and interact but entail distinctive sets of actors, motivations, and activities. A brief description of each economy is followed by suggesting how it is gendered and how this might inform feminist theory/practice in relation to war. (shrink)

This article compares Honneth’s attempt to revise socialist thinking on women’s subordination in the family with feminist work on the topic. Both identify economism as the reason why socialism has historically failed to come up with an adequate account of women’s oppression in the family. However, their attempts to overcome economism proceed in different directions. Feminists overcome economism by expanding and enriching ideas of the economic and value producing activity and applying these reworked categories to women’s reproductive labour. Honneth overcomes (...) economism by suspending materialist explanation and focussing on emancipatory ethical dynamics implicit in the family. In comparison to feminist work, Honneth’s ethicised account of gender and family is as reductive as the economism it aims to surmount. First, his progressive historiography engenders a Whiggish narrative of the steady expansion of women’s social freedom in the family that downplays ambiguous and negative historical developments related to the changing nature of patriarchy. Second, his reified archetype of the family obscures the systemic causes of persistent gendered asymmetries within households. Finally, his Hegelian endorsement of institutionally expressed normativity leads in a reformist political direction and away from the radical, deep-democratic options that socialist feminists deem necessary to counteract women’s subordination. (shrink)