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Teaching Intersectionality Intersectionally

Nancy A. Naples

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Teaching Intersectionality
Intersectionally

Intersectionality has captured my intellectual imagination and activist

energies ever since I was first introduced to the concept in the early 1980s.
My dissertation project along with almost every other research study I initiated
since then have been informed by my desire to capture the complexity of social
relations, experiences and structural dynamics that shape the diversity of
women’s lives, situated knowledges and resistance strategies.
Not surprisingly, every course I teach is organized around an intersectional
frame. When I first began teaching, I struggled to go beyond the additive
approach of race, class and gender that was dominant at the time to produce
a more nuanced course outline. In preparing my courses, I sought to identify
any research study or analysis that claimed intersectionality as the organizing
frame or methodological approach. Fortunately, the number of feminist
analyses using an intersectional frame has grown exponentially over the
past twenty-plus years. By 2000 it was possible to chronicle a wide array of
approaches to intersectionality that differed significantly by discipline,
epistemology, methodology and conceptualization.
Many of the scholars who have taken up intersectionality have generated
studies that incorporate data from women of different racial-ethnic and
class backgrounds as a way to advance their intersectional project (see
Naples 1998). These scholars argue that by incorporating an intersectional
perspective, we are forced to reconceptualize our understanding of different
conceptual frames. For example, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang and
Linda Forcey (1994) contest the traditional constructions of mothering based
on white, middle class nuclear family models (also see James and Busia
1993). My development of the conceptualization of ‘activist mothering’
(Naples 1992) and Mimi Abramovitz’s (1998) analysis of the ‘family ethic’
also reflect the power of intersectional analysis for reconfiguring notions of
politics and family.
Many of my graduate students have also been engaged in the challenging
and sometimes elusive goal of designing and implementing intersectional
research studies. They struggle, along with many of the anonymous authors
whose manuscripts I have reviewed over the years, to conceptualize and

International Feminist Journal of Politics, 11:4 December 2009, 566– 577

ISSN 1461-6742 print=ISSN 1468-4470 online # 2009 Taylor & Francis
http:==[Link] DOI: 10.1080/14616740903237558
operationalize intersectionality. In many instances their efforts fall short of
their goals. Many realize that it is not enough to assert that one’s study is inter-
sectional. To succeed, a researcher must clearly specify what makes the study
intersectional and to discuss why certain methodologies chosen for the study
are the most productive for intersectional research as well as to reflect on
which aspects of intersectionality are brought into the frame and which
ones are left out or treated less centrally in the analysis (Naples 2003).
Given the diversity of conceptualizations and disciplinary approaches, it is
often difficult for new researchers to identify the most effective intersectional
perspectives and models for their own research. In this context, I decided to
construct an interdisciplinary course that would highlight the diversity of
approaches to intersectionality and to attempt to map the field of intersectional
studies. My goal was to help provide students with a roadmap for their own
efforts to produce intersectional research. The course was called ‘Theories of
Intersectionality’ and was designed to focus on how different scholars theorize,
research and analyze intersectionality. Questions I considered in designing the
course included: What are the limits and possibilities of different approaches
to intersectionality for understanding and analyzing difference? How have
social scientists taken up the call to intersectionality in their research? What
types of methodologies are most effective for an intersectional analysis? My
objective was to make explicit what different scholars mean when they use
the term intersectionality, how the concept is defined in different disciplinary
and interdisciplinary contexts and what methodologies are used to produce
intersectional analyses. My course readings drew from the fields of law, policy
studies, science studies, comparative historical research, disability studies, sexu-
ality studies and cultural studies. I also reviewed work by feminist scholars in
social, cultural and political geography, anthropology, sociology, economics
and political science. The resulting overview incorporated postcolonial, post-
modern and queer theoretical approaches as well as other epistemological
approaches including Marxist and symbolic interactionist inspired studies.
In constructing the course, I had to make my own approach to intersectionality
explicit. I began with the following assumption to guide my course development:
an intersectional framework should include attention to historical, cultural,
discursive and structural dimensions that shape the intersection of race, class,
gender, sexuality, national and religious identity, among other identities. In
my view, the most powerful approaches to intersectionality also include atten-
tion to the ways in which these interactions produce contradictions and tensions
across both these different levels of analysis and dimensions of difference
(see, for example, Maynard 1994). I used this conceptualization to guide my
organization of the outline and to identify readings to illustrate the weekly topics.
The call for intersectional analyses were first heard from feminists of color
who critiqued approaches that constructed women’s concerns without atten-
tion to the ways that race, class and sexuality shaped the experiences of
women. Early challenges to reductive feminist analyses include the approach
taken by Johnnie Tillmon who organized ANC (Aid to Needy Children) Mothers

----------------------------------------------- Nancy A. Naples/Teaching Intersectionality Intersectionally 567

 Anonymous, the welfare rights group in Los Angeles; the analyses of the
Combahee River Collective; and Angela Davis’s (1983) now classic book
Women, Race and Class. I decided to open the course with the Combahee
River Collective’s (1997 [1977]) ‘A Black Feminist Statement’ and include
other early articles, such as Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis’s (1983)
essay on ‘Contextualizing Feminism: Gender, Ethnic and Class Divisions’ to
demonstrate some of the different origins of the concept intersectionality in
different geographic regions (see, also, Anthias and Yuval – Davis 1992). I
also included a more recent article by Avtar Brah and Ann Phoenix (2004)
to set the stage for a discussion of an historical overview of the changing
definitions and approaches to intersectionality.
The next class focused on defining intersectionality. Here I wanted to include
both early and more recent conceptualizations, again keeping in mind regional
differences as well as postcolonial interventions and philosophical debates.
Readings for this week included Patricia Hill Collins’ (1998) ‘It’s All in the
Family: Intersections of Gender, Race and Nation’ and Kimberle Crenshaw’s
(1991) ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence
against Women of Color’. I also included Nancy Stephan’s (1996 [1986])
‘Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science’ and the more recent
article by Nira Yuval-Davis (2006) on ‘Intersectionality and Feminist Politics’.
Drawing on these readings, we considered whether and in what ways the notion
of intersectionality functioned as an analogy or metaphor; what it offered as
a way of capturing the complexity of positionality and structural differences;
and what other metaphors might prove more effective or more useful for
different analytic purposes. We also contrasted the American and British
approaches to intersectionality. For example, Beukje Prins (2006: 280) argues
that, in contrast to the US model, ‘[t]he British approach to intersectionality
has adopted this more relational and dynamic view of power’ and ‘has
elaborated a constructionist interpretation of intersectionality’.
After mapping the field, which I confess is an ongoing project, I began to see
several major differences in emphases that tended to shape approaches to
intersectionality. Early work tended to offer what I call an embodied or individ-
ual approach, emphasizing the ways in which women’s social location at the
intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality shape their lived experiences.
Writings in this vein included efforts to theorize difference by race, class and
gender as they shape individual experiences, worldviews and oppression.
Subsequent work tended toward a relational approach and offered a more his-
torical and regional variation on the earlier themes of difference. The study
that I found most useful in illustrating this is Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s (2004)
Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and
Labor. While Glenn’s study offers a powerful historical and regionally
diverse lens through which to view intersectionality, I also introduced students
to the more focused social constructionist methodology offered by Sarah
Fenstermaker and Candace West (2002) and the rich ethnographic case
study by Julie Bettie (2002) as an example of the significance of social

568 International Feminist Journal of Politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

interaction and context for shaping identity construction and intersections of
race, class and gender.
A third approach can be identified that adopts a social structural stance
toward intersectionality. It typically draws on quantitative data and is illus-
trated by Leslie McCall’s (2001) Complex Inequality: Gender, Class and Race
in the New Economy. McCall (2001: 6) uses the construct ‘configurations of
inequality’ in her analysis of the ways ‘in which race, gender and class intersect
in a variety of ways depending on underlying economic conditions in local
economies’. She emphasizes the importance of regional variation, an emphasis
that is also featured in Glenn’s (1992) historical analysis of gender, race and
class in three different regions of the USA. While Glenn focuses on the
relationships between white women and women of color in interdependent
labor contexts, McCall uses quantitative data to examine the structure of
inequality in the labor markets as they vary across different regions.
McCall (2005) differentiates between ‘anti-categorical’ and ‘intra-categorical’
approaches to intersectionality. Finding both inadequate for her purposes, she
offers a third strategy that she calls ‘intercategorical’, which she applies to
what she calls the ‘new inequality’ within the American labor market. In her
weekly memo, class member Jayme Schwartzman describes the approach as
follows:

Following the directives of the intercategorical approach introduced by McCall,

the analysis brought out in Complex Inequality (2001) emphasizes the relation-
ships of inequality that exist between social categories such as race, gender
and class and uses them as ‘anchor points’ (McCall 2005: 1784 –5) to further
substantiate how they should be used as the focus of the analysis itself.

One class member Jamie Gusrang found McCall’s approach one of the most
valuable for her own research. As she explains, ‘inequality is an economic
condition directly affected by a combination of race, class and gender, [but]
given the gaps in much of the (new) inequality literature, [McCall] pays
particular attention to gender in her work’. Gusrang appreciated the effort to
apply intersectional analysis to quantitative data. McCall’s comparative
method also reveals the importance of examining the intersection of race,
class and gender in a regional context.
Prins (2006: 6) draws a distinction between what she calls ‘systemic’ and
‘constructionist’ approaches to intersectionality, both of which ‘adhere to an
anti-essentialist view of identity’. On the one hand, Prins argues that the sys-
temic approach ‘upholds that the meanings of social identities are determined
by racism, classism, sexism, etc., which are taken to be static and rigid systems
of domination’, thus ignoring ‘the agency of individual subjects by interpret-
ing identity constructions as not only made and as such contingent, but as
made by the powers-that-be and as such false’ (Prins 2006: 6). On the other
hand, for constructionist approaches ‘constructions of identity are not
ideological distortions of a suppressed and authentic experience, but the

----------------------------------------------- Nancy A. Naples/Teaching Intersectionality Intersectionally 569

 (symbolic-material) effects of performative actions’ (Butler 1990: 6). However,
a more effective approach to intersectionality requires a nuanced conceptual-
ization of the relationship between systemic and constructionist processes.
Many scholars who adopt an intersectional perspective emphasize the inter-
actional construction of power and oppression. For example, as University of
Connecticut graduate student Maura Kelly explained in her recent gender field
exam:

this tradition understands systems of oppression as grounded in relational power

differentials. Men’s domination is thus related to (and dependent upon) women’s
subordination and the status of poor women of color is related to (and dependent
upon) the status of affluent white women. Using a multi-lens approach or a race/
gender/class approach allows researchers to understand consequential power
differentials among women as well as those between women and men. Hence,
this framework can help explain why women’s common structural location as
women is not sufficient for mobilization against gender inequalities.

Feminist work on intersectionality is often linked to standpoint epistemologi-

cal frameworks and have some overlapping concerns with the construction of
experience, politics and epistemology. My own intersectional approach is
especially indebted to Dorothy Smith’s (1987, 1990) institutional ethnographic
methodology that avoids viewing women’s embodied experiences as the end-
point of analysis and also resists reifying systems of oppressions, arguing instead
for a contextualized and historicized angle of vision. Smith’s (1987: 3)
formulation of ‘the relations of ruling’ captures, in her words, ‘the intersection
of the institutions organizing and regulating society’ and ‘grasps power, organ-
ization, direction and regulation as more pervasively structured than can be
expressed in traditional concepts provided by the discourses of power’.
In exploring the epistemological grounds for different intersectional
perspectives, I conceptualized a fourth framework, that, in my view, offers
more analytic power than the other approaches in that it brings into view the
multiple dimensions of intersectionality. I call this type of intersectional
analysis, an epistemological approach. It is rooted in insights from the
different theoretical perspectives developed to analyze gender, race and class
inequalities as well as sexuality and culture. Thus, for my intersectional
research on social policy, citizenship and community activism, for example, I
draw on materialist feminism, racialization theory, political economic theory
and queer theory (Naples 1998). An epistemological view is also evident in
the work of both Patricia Hill Collins and Smith. Collins’ (2000) intersectional
approach centers the construct of ‘matrix of domination’. She identifies four
dimensions of power that are woven together to shape Black women’s social,
political and economic lives: a structural dimension (i.e. ‘how social institutions
are organized to reproduce Black women’s subordination over time’ (Collins
2000: 277)); a disciplinary dimension, which highlights the role of the State
and other institutions that rely on bureaucracy and surveillance to regulate

570 International Feminist Journal of Politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

inequalities; a hegemonic dimension, which deals with ideology, culture and
consciousness; and an interpersonal dimension, the ‘level of everyday social
interaction’ (Collins 2000: 277). Collins (2000: 284) argues that ‘By manipulat-
ing ideology and culture, the hegemonic domain acts as a link between social
institutions (structural domain), their organizational practices (disciplinary
domain) and the level of everyday social interaction (interpersonal domain).’
Smith’s approach to intersectionality includes attention to historical, cul-
tural, textual, discursive, institutional and other structural dimensions that
contour the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, national and religious
identity, among other social phenomena. She uses the term ‘relations of ruling’
to capture the ways in which these different dimensions shape everyday life.
Her institutional ethnographic approach is especially powerful for revealing
how interactions within and across these different dimensions of social life
produce contradictions and tensions that can create the grounds for resistance
and politicization.
In order to broaden the factors to be incorporated into an intersectional
frame, I also foregrounded disability and sexuality studies in my class.
Readings for the week on this topic included Smith and Hutchison’s (2004)
Gendering Disability and Beckett’s (2004) ‘Crossing the Border: Locating
Heterosexuality as a Boundary for Lesbian and Disabled Women’. Class
member Michael Hardej found the focus on disability useful for his interest
in issues of the body. As he explained in his weekly memo:

By taking the disability framework and incorporating it into feminist critiques

and more importantly using it intersectionality the ability/disability binary
can be used to further understand the body. Not just one monolithic body, but
variations of the body that take into consideration issues of gender, sexuality,
race and class. Bodies with disabilities show how genders can be rethought of
and understood. When . . . a body . . . no longer works in [traditional ways in]
a given capacity alternatives are formed. It is with these alternatives that
gender is reinvented.

I also wanted to make sure that our discussion of intersectionality included

sensitivity to contemporary globalization as it shapes conceptualizations
of difference, feminisms and positionalities. I found work by Caren Kaplan
(1994), Amrita Basu (1995), Dorrine Kondo (1999), Daiva Stasiulis (1999),
Katie King (2002) and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003) to offer useful
introductions to the complexities associated with the interplay of local social
formations and transnationalism. In this regard, I also included a session on
geography and intersectionality, including readings from Lynn Staeheli,
Elinore Kofman and Linda Peake’s (2004) edited collection Mapping Women,
Making Politics: Feminism and Political Geography. In their essay in the book,
Doris Wastl-Walter and Lynn Staeheli (2004: 141) argue that:
As social powers, territory and boundaries are ways of enforcing ideas about who
and what belongs in particular places and the kinds of activities and practices

----------------------------------------------- Nancy A. Naples/Teaching Intersectionality Intersectionally 571

 that belong to a place or are seen as being appropriate; as such, questions of iden-
tity and difference are critical to the ways in which territory and boundaries are
constructed.

As class member Jayme Schwartzman explains: ‘Apparent in this assertion is

the malleability of boundaries and territories depending upon one’s social
location and position in “the state”’. Feminist social geographers offered
another angle of vision on intersectionality that destabilizes essentialist
notions of identity as well as that of place and space.
Queer intersectional analyses also proved productive in that they destabilize
gender, sexuality and the body. For this intervention, I included work by Judith
Butler (1994) and Paisley Currah (2006) whose work on transgender has been
especially useful in this regard. Given my recent work on sexuality and
migration, I also included a session on ‘gender, race, sexualities and migration’,
that featured work by Eithne Luibhéid (1998), Lionel Cantú, (2000, 2001) and
Martin Manalansan (2006). In our Introduction to the forthcoming book, The
Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men (Cantú
2009), my co-editor Salvador Vidal-Ortiz and I explain how Cantú takes up
the insights from theories of political economy, migration and places them in
dialogue with feminist and queer theories to produce a new framework for
understanding the immigration of Mexican men who have sex with men:

He complicates analyses of sexuality and gender, not merely with a gesture

towards intersectionality – the simultaneous study of gender, sexuality, race
and class – but by intentionally illustrating how migration is constitutive of sexu-
ality and how sexuality is constitutive of migration and as such, formulating a
distinctive kind of analysis. He refers to his approach as a queer materialist para-
digm and his goal, that of producing a queer political economy of immigration.
(Naples and Vidal-Ortiz 2009: 9)

Class member Miho Iwata found that ‘queering of and incorporating sexuali-
ties in transnational migration studies clearly has potential to provide yet
another dimension to the analysis and production of critical intersectional
understanding’ that ‘also challenges researchers to broaden the scope of
their research’.
I concluded the course with a discussion of methodology, featuring Donna
Haraway (1991) and Chela Sandoval (2000). I also included Ivy Ken’s (2008)
recent article that offers an innovative use of a culinary metaphor for intersec-
tional analyses. In her final memo for the course, class member Nikki McGary
wrote that:

Crenshaw once suggested that we envision a traffic intersection in order to see

how gender, race and class literally intersect on bodies and have very real
affects in terms of lived experiences. I have carried that analogy with me all
semester. And as our readings deepened my understanding of intersectionality,
the traffic intersection became increasingly [too] simple . . . too one-dimensional

572 International Feminist Journal of Politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 . . . Ivy Ken’s analogy of sugar, however, does take it a step further. By looking
at food, especially sugar, we are able to see how it is grown, processed, manu-
factured, consumed and recycled. In terms of the embodied intersectionality of
social categories and lived realities, the analogy is useful when considering how
complex social power relations are taught, maintained, consumed in the market,
internalized and perpetuated. However, this approach focuses on the body and
does not focus so much on the intersectionality of methodology. Instead,
imagine a multidimensional star, with lines that have no beginning and no
end and that the point where they intersect is the point of focus. These lines
could represent embodied social categories (gender, sexuality, race, class,
ability, ‘etc . . .’) or social systems (education, the family, law, disciplinary prac-
tices . . .) or academic disciplines and theorists (cultural theory, racialization
theory, poststructuralism, Foucault, Fanon, Butler . . .). But then imagine that
the point of focus can slide endlessly along any part of any line, making an infi-
nite number of possible foci for intersectional research. What lines are selected
for examination, the boundaries between the lines, locating invisiblized lines
and where the lines meet becomes the methodological point of departure.

In response to concerns raised by Barbara Gurr, one of my graduate students

whose research focuses on Lakota women’s prenatal care and child birth, I
wove in readings throughout the course by scholars who analyzed indigenous
or native women’s positionality and political activism. In her final memo for
the course Gurr commented on Luana Ross’s (2005) essay on ‘Personalizing
Methodology: Narratives of Imprisoned Native Women’, which we read for
the concluding session:

Ross hints at the complexity of Native identity at several points in her essay; yet
at the same time, she seems to find a sense of solidarity with the Native women
prisoners she describes, despite the variable ‘states’ of their Native-ness (for
instance, reservation, off-reservation and non-reservation). Thus there seems
to be a unity forged among Native women in the face of a common ‘enemy’
(white people? The prison system? Colonization?) The cultural and historical
production of ‘Native-ness’ shared by both Ross and the Native prisoners
seems to create community between them those non-Native prisoners and staff
members cannot (or do not) access. Is this sense of community amongst these
Native women, similar perhaps to a common ‘Black’ identity, forgeable only in
the face of a common oppositional force?

One of the goals of intersectional studies should be the ability to link analysis
across different fields. Few scholars discuss how to place different intersec-
tional approaches in dialogue with one another. In fact, I wish more scholars
who assert an intersectional analysis for their work would make their method-
ology explicit. In my view, Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnographic
approach offers one of the most powerful methodologies for intersectional
research. Smith’s (1987, 1990, 2005) focus on reflection, action and account-
ability forms a core component of what I have come to identify as a fifth
approach to intersectionality, that is, ‘intersectional feminist praxis’. This

----------------------------------------------- Nancy A. Naples/Teaching Intersectionality Intersectionally 573

 form of intersectionality foregrounds the ways in which activism or experience
shapes knowledge, an insight that is often lost when theoretical approaches are
institutionalized in the academy. It also reflects the feminist praxis that gave
rise to the concept and honors the fact that theory develops in a dialogic
fashion from practice. Intersectional analyses require crossing many different
kinds of borders including those drawn between academic disciplines, between
academic feminism and feminist activism, and between local and transnational
politics. From the point of view of praxis it is necessary to create stronger links
between local organizing and transnational politics and, in turn, to translate
the political strategies and organizing frames developed on the transnational
political stage to benefit local social and economic justice movements.
Each approach to intersectionality we examined during the course offers a
different angle of vision on the complex processes, relationships and structural
conditions that shape everyday life, relations of ruling and the resistance
strategies of diverse actors. Taken together, different intersectional approaches
provide a powerful analytic lens through which scholars can uncover what
Indepal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (1994) term the ‘scattered hegemonies’ that
differentially structure our everyday lives. However, without making explicit
its epistemological grounds, methodological strategies and implications for
praxis, feminist research will fail to achieve the promise of intersectionality.

Nancy A. Naples
University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA

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