On Difficulty: Intersectionality as Feminist Labor

On Difficulty

Why is intersectionality considered so challenging? Part of intersectionality’s difficulty emerges from the fact that it has myriad meanings across the disciplines. While there is general agreement that it describes how structures of domination intersect to produce experiences of oppression and to shape identities, there remains little consensus around whether intersectionality is a theory, a method, and/or a politics.

Many scholars treat intersectionality as a kind of theoretical innovation, even as there is widespread dissent over what it is a theory of. Much of the work on intersectionality has focused on how structure shapes identity, analyzing how racism and sexism (among others) collude to shape the lived experiences of all subjects, but particularly multiply-marginalized subjects.

As of late, many scholars have bemoaned intersectionality’s preoccupation with the structural, suggesting that it “tells us little about the fiscal, emotional, psychological, and other conditions nor the subjectivity of those caught in the trajectories of intersecting categories.”¹ To that end, many have advocated bringing the concept of subjectivity back to intersectionality to avoid suggesting that subjects are “determined by social systems.”² This new turn toward restoring subjectivity to intersectionality highlights the need to understand the interaction between structure and identity, and to capture how structures of domination mediate and enable identity formation.

Other scholars advocate transforming intersectionality from a theory into a methodology, an approach for formulating research questions. Ange-Marie Hancock, for example, suggests uncoupling intersectionality and “women of color studies” so that intersectionality can be used to “better conceive research designs and data collection through its attention to causal complexity.”³ Treating intersectionality as a methodological approach transforms it from a study of multiply-marginalized subjects’ experiences into a broader tool to understand power, social structure, and technologies of domination.

Debates over intersectionality as theory or method are underpinned by other challenges. Some attribute intersectionality’s laboriousness to its requirement that scholars analyze the intimate connections between race, gender, class, and sexuality, while also attending to the distinctiveness of each form of domination. As scholars study how, for example, race and gender bolster each other, they also examine how race and gender are structures that use distinctive technologies of domination and how they enforce their hegemony through differing strategies.

While scholars study structures of domination to capture how they shape subjects’ lived experiences, they also attempt to disrupt and destabilize these categories, revealing their constructed nature. The dance between the constructed and the material is always a challenging one as “it is not clear how to break down the boundaries of reified categories to show how multiple inequalities are simultaneously reproduced.”⁴ Intersectional scholars at once deploy categories—like race and gender—to study how they interact, and then disrupt those categories, revealing precisely how socially and historically embedded they are.

Finally, some scholars suggest that intersectionality’s difficulty emerges from a personal challenge: speaking honestly about the “politics of location.”⁵ Julia Jordan Zachery notes, “Beyond the struggles of confronting difficulties when the personal becomes your research, I also confront the challenge of doing intersectionality. Particularly, I am challenged by how to honestly tell the story of marginalized black women.”⁶ The struggle to “honestly” convey how marginalization affects lived experience renders intersectional work difficult, particularly for scholars who view intersectionality as a political strategy to remedy the injuries of racism and sexism.

While nearly every scholarly article praises intersectionality’s “complexity,” all of this complexity can, at times, feel a bit too challenging. Gill Valentine argues, “the complexity of intersectionality means that it is hard to include analysis of its full implications in a single article. The result of this limitation is that work on intersectionality often collapses back to a focus on the experiences of nonprivileged groups rather than on how privileged or powerful identities are ‘done’ and ‘undone.'”⁷ Scholars concede that intersectionality’s immense complexity means that any particular scholarly intervention is necessarily limited in its scope, and that any intersectional analysis is always partial and incomplete. And yet all of this complexity seems to be precisely what has made it so valuable.

1. Peter Kwan, “Complicity and Complexity: Cosynthesis and Praxis,” Depaul Law Review 49 (2009): 687. See also Dorthe Staunaes, “Where Have All the Subjects Gone? Bringing Together the Concepts of Intersectionality and Subjectification,” NORA 11.2 (August 2003). [↩]
2. Staunaes, 103. [↩]
3. Hancock, 251. [↩]
4. Joan Acker, “The Missing Feminist Revolution Symposium,” Social Problems 53.4 (Nov. 2006): 446. [↩]
5. Adrienne Rich, “Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” Blood, Bread, and Poetry (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1986). [↩]
6. Julia S. Jordan-Zachery, “Am I a Black Woman or a Woman Who Is Black? A Few Thoughts on the Meaning of Intersectionality,” Politics and Gender 3.2 (2007): 258. [↩]
7. Gill Valentine, “Theorizing and Researching Intersectionality: A Challenge for Feminist Geography,” Professional Geographer 59.1 (2007): 14. [↩]