On Difficulty: Intersectionality as Feminist Labor

On Good, Hard Work

While intersectionality is considered hard work, it is also celebrated work. it is routinely described as feminism’s “most important contribution,” and its complexity has become the hallmark of excellence in feminist scholarship.

Because intersectionality is characterized as good, hard work, it is now commonplace for feminist scholarship to critique other scholarship for its failure to be sufficiently intersectional or to conclude with calls for more intersectionality. These pleas for more intersectionality are often originalist in their nature. They trace intersectionality’s roots to Kimberlé Crenshaw (even as they often recognize that intersectionality conceptually pre-dated Crenshaw) as a way of grounding their call for more intersectionality. ¹

These texts regularly begin by citing Crenshaw’s traffic metaphor. Darren Rosenblum, for example, begins his work on “queer intersectionality” by quoting Crenshaw, and then advocates a more expansive intersectionality which takes queerness into account “since most queers face multiple aspects of discrimination, as women, as people of color, as poor people, as cross-gendered people, and as sexual subversives.” ²

Similarly, post-intersectional scholar Darren Hutchinson notes, “the most important substantive addition that multidimensionality and other race-sexuality models bring to intersectionality scholarship is the examination of heterosexist subordination (alongside race, gender, and class), a topic that is omitted from much of the intersectionality literature.” ³ For both Rosenblum and Hutchinson, realizing the promise of intersectionality requires adding more intersections to the analytic frame. Using Crenshaw’s framework—the idea of cars colliding in the intersection—these scholars add sexuality, and other intersections, to the mix, examining how race, gender, class and sexuality operate together, producing a particularly complex traffic flow.

Under this logic intersectionality becomes a remedy for exclusivity and hegemony rather than a metaphor. That is, if the problem is feminist (or anti-racist) inattention to particular subjects’ experiences, the “cure” is studying more intersections, and crafting more complex intersectional frameworks. Calls for “more” intersectionality treat the labor of attending to multiple intersections as its own value added, and suggest that the consideration of ever-more traffic-clogged intersections will yield a greater truth about the experiences of multiply-marginalized subjects. Ultimately, the attention to Crenshaw’s traffic analogy as experiential rather than metaphorical has tended to constrain the feminist imagination, making an attention to more intersections rather than a deep interrogation of identity the hallmark of good, hard work.

Rather than reading intersectionality as actually describing how identity operates, I advocate reading intersectionality as a metaphor, as one illustration of how structures of domination might cooperate to maintain their power. The framework of metaphor invites scholars to interrogate assumptions, and encourages scholars to ask the important, and still under-asked, questions that post-intersectional scholars Robert Chang and Jerome McCristal Culp Jr. pose, “How does one pay attention to the points of intersection? How many intersections are there? Is the idea of an intersection the right analogy?” ⁴ Rather than presuming the accuracy of intersectionality, Chang and Culp suggest interrogating the very metaphor and invite an unleashing of the feminist imagination to envision alternative ways that identity and oppression might operate.

Certainly intersectionality’s hold on the feminist imagination is, in part, because of its visual resonance. Many of us now teach intersectionality by asking students to diagram what it means. Students draw configurations of roads: traditional intersections, four way stop signs, rotaries, and complex configurations of roadways that have yet to be constructed. Yet all of this work on intersectionality-as-fact, rather than intersectionality-as-metaphor has given it an empirical status, and a kind of hegemony within feminist theory despite Crenshaw’s own concession that intersectionality is meant as a “provisional concept linking contemporary politics with women of color,” as an invitation for re-conceptualization. ⁵

Rather than producing a “veritable theoretical industry” rooted in intersectionality, I encourage us to be conscious of how our theoretical frameworks can illuminate as much as they elide. ⁶ Intersectionality is good work: it is rooted in a commitment to putting multiply-marginalized subjects’ experiences at the center of our theory-making and organizing, and it is concerned with exposing how structures of domination cooperate and collude to ensure their continued power. But this doesn’t mean that the only way we can conceptualize multiply-marginalized subjects’ experiences is through the traffic clogged intersection metaphor, nor does it mean that simply considering more intersections will undermine the “problems” of essentialism that plagued earlier feminist theory.

Instead, treating intersectionality as a metaphor invites us to test the concept empirically, placing our theory into conversation with lived experiences of subjectivity. It also encourages us to consider precisely the moments when our intersection metaphor is imperfect. We can begin to ask questions like: When do we experience our identities along a single-axis? What are the social, historical, and contextual conditions that give rise to us experiencing identity in a multi-axis way? How do intersectionality and the contextuality of identity intersect?

While imagining identity outside of intersectionality will give us important new analytical frameworks for studying subjectivity and power, these explorations will also allow us to productively fulfill the promise of interdisciplinarity that stands at the heart of feminist studies. Curiously, most of the work that explores, complicates, and unsettles intersectionality has emerged from a vibrant group of legal scholars invested in “post intersectionality.” Yet because of the continued power that departments have in structuring institutional and intellectual life in the American academy, these innovative works rarely leave the legal academy. My hope is that imagining identity outside of intersectionality will also require us to imagine the very structure of our institutions in new ways, prioritizing and celebrating disciplinary promiscuity, departmental border-crossings, and transdisciplinary conversations.

1. While Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality,” black feminists have long been interested in studying the interplay of structures of domination. See, for example, Deborah K. King, “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology,” Signs 14.1 (Autumn 1988): 42-72; Frances Beale, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” Black Women’s Manifesto (New York: Third World Women’s Alliance, 1975); The Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995).[↑]
2. Darren Rosenblum, “Queer Intersectionality and the Failure of Recent Lesbian and Gay Victories,” Law and Sexuality 4 (1994): 89. [↑]
3. Darren Hutchinson, “Identity Crisis: ‘Intersectionality,’ ‘Multidimensionality,’ and the Development of an Adequate Theory of Subordination,” Michigan Journal of Race and the Law (2001): 311.[↑]
4. Jerome Chang and Robert Culp, “After Intersectionality,” University of Missouri Kansas City Law Review 71 (2002): 485.[↑]
5. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991), 1244 n.9, emphasis is mine.[↑]
6. Zine Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminist Post-Structuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the Hottentot Venus,” Gender and Society 15.6 (December 2001): 817.[↑]