Re-Thinking Intersectionality

Abstract

Intersectionality, the notion that subjectivity is constituted by mutually reinforcing vectors of race, gender, class, and sexuality, has emerged as the primary theoretical tool designed to combat feminist hierarchy, hegemony, and exclusivity. Despite intersectionality’s theoretical dominance as a way of conceptualizing identity, a number of paradoxes embedded in its literature remain uninterrogated by feminist and anti-racist scholarship. The re-creation of cumulative conceptions of identity is most apparent in Crenshaw’s seminal critique of anti-discrimination law. Crenshaw attacks the assumptions underpinning anti-discrimination law, arguing that black women are compelled to assert either race-based or gender-based discrimination claims instead of causes of action, which reflect their positions as intersectional subjects. Intersectionality’s reliance on black women as the basis for its claims to complex subjectivity renders black women prototypical intersectional subjects whose experiences of marginality are imagined to provide a theoretical value-added.

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