Intersectionality

Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, 2020

The spread of Covid-19 and the lockdown have brought in acute deprivation for rural, marginalised communities with loss of wages, returnee migrants and additional state-imposed barriers to accessing facilities and public provisions. Patriarchal norms amplified in such a crisis along with gender-blind state welfare policies have rendered women in these communities "invisible". This has impacted their access to healthcare, nutrition and social security, and significantly increased their unpaid work burden. Several manifestations of violence, and mental stress have surfaced, diminishing their bare minimum agency and rights and impacting their overall health and wellbeing. This article looks at these gendered implications in the context of rural, tribal and high migrant areas of South Rajasthan. We have adopted an intersectional approach to highlight how intersections of several structures across multiple sites of power: the public, the private space of the home and the woman's intimate space, have reduced them to ultra-vulnerable groups.

Very few theories have generated the kind of interdisciplinary and global engagement that marks the intellectual history of intersectionality. Yet, there has been very little effort to reflect upon precisely how intersectionality has moved across time, disciplines, issues, and geographic and national boundaries. Our failure to attend to intersectionality's movement has limited our ability to see the theory in places in which it is already doing work and to imagine other places to which the theory might be taken. Addressing these questions, this special issue reflects upon the genesis of intersectionality, engages some of the debates about its scope and theoretical capacity, marks some of its disciplinary and global travels, and explores the future trajectory of the theory. To do so, the volume includes academics from across the disciplines and from outside of the United States. Their respective contributions help us to understand how intersectionality has moved and to broaden our sense of where the theory might still go.

Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 2021

As its title indicates, Patricia Hill Collins' Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory intervenes into significant conversations about intersectionality as a theoretical framework for looking at social problems in the global west. The term 'critical' in the title could take the reader on two different interpretive paths. On one hand, it announces that intersectionality is part of the field of noteworthy contemporary social theory. On the other hand, it signals intersectionality's belonging with strands of social theorising which have had co-constitutive genealogies with social movements, thus mutually shaping each other's analytical terms and political agendas. Collins' scholarship has been crucial to the study of oppression as an interlocking system of power relations, which she termed the 'matrix of domination' in her seminal 1990 work Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Throughout her work, she has consistently foregrounded the relevance of knowledge production in the study of social issues, calling attention to differential lines of access to epistemic privilege, particularly with regard to black women's knowledge, experiences, and politics. Intersectional modalities of social analysis are rooted in the work of civil rights activists such as Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells, and later on to black lesbian feminists like Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and the Combahee River Collective. By asking how, when, and toward what ends categories of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, age, nation, and citizenship are deployed, intersectional analyses unearth complex structures of social, economic, and political inequality and power which shape experiences of multiple, interdependent, and simultaneous oppression. Collins' volume is an analytical tour de force of remarkable depth which astutely demonstrates that intersectionality must remain connected to resistive knowledge production projects and social justice movements. In arguing for intersectionality's place within the field of critical social theories, Collins engages with vast and varied sources in an effort to map and elucidate its critical theoretical possibilities, objectives, modes of analysis, and context-specific practices. Her theoretical work and secondary analysis reach across social theories and sociopolitical practices, and in doing so, she foregrounds important dialogues that are crucial to theorising through social action, and most importantly, to bringing about social change. The analytical category of intersectionality was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to account theoretically and methodologically for violence experienced by women of colour and migrant women at the confluence of USA race and gender regimes. It soon crossed the disciplinary boundaries of legal studies into all the disciplines and inter-disciplinary areas clustered into the larger field of social studies. Over the course of the past three decades, intersectional analysis has become the preferred framework of inquiry into inequalities structured by race, class, and gender violence. Its influence is also evidenced by the expansion of its geographical Lovin / Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory

South Asian Journal of Sociual Science and Humanities, 2020

The Civil Rights Movement and Feminist Movement in the 1960's America fought for their basic rights and eventually were successful in achieving them. These two movements promised a new beginning for African-American men and White American women, but ironically these movements were relegating an equally important issue and that was of Black American women. Both the Civil Right and Feminist activists did not fulfill their promise to help Black women of America to come out of their century's old bondage of multi-dimensional oppression. It was high time for black women activists, writers and intellectuals to raise their voice against the injustice they faced in their own homes where they confronted domestic violence in the hands of male family members and in the homes of their white masters and landladies where these black women worked as maids or nannies. Black feminists argued that feminism which was in vogue at the middle of the 20 th century has always been Euro-centric in its approach; they didn't see a promising future for themselves even when Civil rights movement was successful. For them, it was male dominated movement, sexiest and misogynist in its approach. Also, feminism was not giving enough space to black women as it always carried white supremacy at its core. Black women were left out in protest and rallies which were organized by white middle class American women because of the racist attitude. Black women of America started their own campaign against the oppression they faced in the society to make their voices heard and their identities recognized. In this paper, I have tried to present the core issues of Intersectionality (study of multiple oppressions), its inclusive nature, its difference from traditional feminism and the major arguments of Intersectional theorists who have tried to use Intersectionality as a new research paradigm in women studies.

Routledge eBooks, 2023

This article is one chronicle of a pandemic foretold. The consequences of COVID-19 in the United States were not inevitable, and my goal is to trace the humanly and inhumanely authored trajectory this pandemic has taken. Who could be surprised that the burden of morbidity and mortality would follow the color/class/poverty/gender lines that riddle this society? I begin by considering historyspecifically the 1918 flu epidemicand what public health messages from that pandemic reveal about gender, health behavior, and messaging aimed at men who were resistant to barrier methods of flu prevention. I then consider the politics of disposability. How are certain communities made "unimaginable," such that their deaths provoke a presidential "it is what it is"? Disposability and the lack of national grieving invites us to consider the drastic interruption in rituals of mourning, and to investigate Donald Trump for crime against humanity. In April 2020, I joined a group of colleagues for a podcast about COVID-19 and intersectionality (Facebook 2020). By viral reckoning, April 15 seems a long time ago; the pandemic was poised to spiral out of control in the United States, a biological disaster well on its way to becoming a manmade crisis of mismanaged proportions. I began by noting that many of us had heard COVID-19 was the "great equalizer," and that I hoped my comments would convince our viewers it was not. Just days before, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot had said, "we are all experiencing this crisis together, but we are not all experiencing this crisis in the same way" (Matthews 2020). These were prescient words from the mayor of a city in which African-Americans account for 30 percent of the population yet comprise more than 70 percent of all COVID-19 deaths. Native American leaders were also clearly aware of the danger that lay in their path. The Yankton Sioux Tribe of South Dakota issued a Declaration of Disaster (Ortiz 2020). Navajo Nation president Jonathan Nez lamented that, once again, the US government had ignored indigenous people. His nation alone had, at that time, more confirmed cases of COVID-19 than any states except for New Jersey and New York. In the previous two weeks, deaths in the Navajo Nation had increased a staggering 367 percent (Miller 2020). Histories of slavery, Jim Crow, and red lining converged with histories of settler colonialism, ethnic discrimination, and economic dispossession. These are components of the "underlying conditions" that shape disease occurrence, progression, and outcome. No, this virus was not the great equalizer. Another term also appeared in the headlines, alerting the public to the "silent pandemic" of domestic and intimate partner violence . As citizens were warned to shelter in place-to stay home and stay safe-feminist scholars pushed back on the notion that "home" was a safe place to be for many women and, I might add, children. Trapped at home CONTACT Kimberly Theidon

Critical Proposals in Social Work, 2021

This article examines how intersectional perspectives can contribute to a deeper understanding of the operations of power in a context of sanitary crisis while delivering a reflection on the theoretical premises and political potential of these perspectives in the historic situation we are experiencing. The central argument is that intersectional approaches not only help us understand the differentiating impact of sanitary measures on the structural inequalities that construct the social order, but they also allow us to identify how this order can be transgressed, resisted and negotiated in a crisis situation.

KULT_online. Review Journal for the Study of Culture, 2020

In Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory Patricia Hill Collins explores intersectionality’s potential to become a critical social theory. Collins asserts that in order for intersectionality to develop fully as a critical social theory, its scholars and practitioners have to profoundly engage with its methodologies, epistemologies, and the activist works upon which it is based. Collin’s monograph can be seen as a dialogical engagement of intersectionality with other theoretical schools of thought and furthers its development into a theory of its own.

European Journal of Women's Studies, 2006

This article explores various analytical issues involved in conceptualizing the interrelationships of gender, class, race and ethnicity and other social divisions. It compares the debate on these issues that took place in Britain in the 1980s and around the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism. It examines issues such as the relative helpfulness of additive or mutually constitutive models of intersectional social divisions; the different analytical levels at which social divisions need to be studied, their ontological base and their relations to each other. The final section of the article attempts critically to assess a specific intersectional methodological approach for engaging in aid and human rights work in the South.

2015

It is impossible to be familiar with the contemporary field of feminism and gender studies and not be aware of the massive intellectual influence of intersectionality. Having emerged in the late 1980s, intersectionality has now come to be not only the way to do feminist research, but has also been exported to other fields and disciplines. Many believe intersectionality has brought about a paradigm shift within gender studies. However, this supposed shift has taken on a performative rather than concrete form. The use of intersectionality today does not necessarily produce critical research that is vastly distinguishable from previous liberal approaches to gender studies. Instead, the claim to intersectionality is often only a performance of both something new and something critical that has increasingly reproduced older approaches to gender research, most notably liberal approaches. In this article, we address this performativity as emerging forms of identity politics that are distin...