Intersectionality as Critical Inquiry

Abstract

In this chapter, I investigate how intersectionality's practitioners conceptualize and use intersectionality's ideas. I am less concerned with the content of intersectional knowledge than with ways of thinking that people use in creating such knowledge (Michel Foucault's use of genealogy provides an important methodological framework [Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory]. Genealogy is a historical methodology that traces the emergence and descent of the technologies and practices used to produce discourses-in this case, discourses of intersectionality. Genealogy is also a form of political critique that diagnoses how such discourses, practices, and technologies are embedded in unequal power relationships – in this case, how shifting patterns of unequal power relations frame the emergence of intersectionality. A genealogical account of intersectionality would not assume nor seek to posit any so-called scientific hypotheses about intersectionality. Rather, a genealogical account would examine the social structures of power and knowledge that made it possible for thinkers to produce claims about intersectionality in the first instance. Genealogy constitutes an alternative to the linear narratives of history and causal analyses of social science. Using this approach, I identify important thinking tools that provide a cognitive foundation for intersectionality as a critical social theory in the making.

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