Intersectional conversations are often framed as very hard work or as "difficult dialogues."[1] While intersectionality is imagined as hard work, it is also celebrated as good work; intersectionality has been lionized as "the most important contribution that women's studies, in conjunction with related fields, has made so far," and there are more special journal issues, conferences, and edited volumes devoted to it than ever before.[2]

The imagined laborious nature of intersectionality has led feminist scholars and activists to view it as the remedy for simple theoretical frameworks which attend exclusively to gender. If it is challenging to study race/gender/sexuality, and even more challenging to study race/gender/sexuality/class, then the latter is presumed to be more fruitful and more inclusive, particularly if the goal is to disrupt simplistic, essentialized theorizing.

Feminist scholarship is now filled with calls for more intersectionality, for more complex analyses that address multiple structures of domination, particularly those often relegated to the periphery, like age and ability. Generally, this body of scholarship commences by describing intersectionality's "unrealized analytic bite"[3] or promising "prospects."[4] Oftentimes this scholarship addresses the importance of bringing intersectionality into the mainstream of a particular discipline. For example, Hae Yeon Choo and Myra Marx Ferree describe "the underutilized potential in the concept of intersectionality," and argue that a deepened engagement with intersectionality can enhance sociological work on "institutions, power relationships, culture, and interpersonal interaction."[5] Their plea for more intersectionality—a plea they share with many scholars—is underpinned by the idea that studying increased intersections will create a more nuanced body of scholarship, and will remedy the problems of exclusivity and essentialism that have haunted feminist theory and activism.

I read the trope of intersectionality's difficulty with great suspicion, and treat the call for "more" intersectionality with analytic skepticism. While the interdisciplinary push towards intersectionality has led to rich scholarship on identity and power, it has also produced an uncritical notion of intersectionality as a theoretical constant rather than as a dynamic theoretical innovation within a terrain of struggle. This call for more intersectionality elides how intersectionality, which began as a kind of radical outsider knowledge and was institutionalized in the late 1980s, has been transformed in its various transitions from activist practice to academic theoretical innovation. Scholars calling for more intersectionality all too rarely ask what kind of intersectionality they are promoting, and instead treat intersectionality as a uniform, uncontested practice.

More importantly, the fetishization of intersectionality's difficulty suggests that the labor of theorizing intersectionally will repair problems of feminist exclusivity. My objection to this logic is two-fold. First, one of feminism's fundamental challenges has been to organize across difference, a tension that will remain at the heart of feminism as it attempts to theorize equity, and to study how gender is necessarily bound up with other structures of domination. An attention to more intersections, and to new intersections, will not alleviate this "problem;" instead, feminism's renewed commitment to speaking about multiple structures of domination will mean that organizing across difference will likely always be foundational to feminist work.

Second, the fetishization of intersectionality suggests the existence of a kind of feminist theoretical utopia, a promised land where the "etc." that marks so much scholarly writing on identity ("race, gender, class, age, ethnicity, etc.") will be replaced by an attention to all difference. I am suspicious of the idea that an attention to all intersections—as though that could ever happen—would undo the problems of hegemony that have plagued feminist projects. The "etc." stands as an important marker of the rich complexity of identities, of the variety and heterogeneity that we always strive to capture but never quite do. Indeed, I think the "etc." is good for our work in that it calls attention to the limitless multiplicity of experience.

Yet the call for more intersectionality presumes that attention to additional intersections will get us to "etc.," allowing us to replace "etc." with an endless list of intersections (race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, ethnicity...). Ultimately, this plea for increased intersectionality suggests that "attending to" or naming difference will undo hegemony and exclusivity within our own ranks. While naming difference certainly allows feminists to bear witness to power's operations, it does little to analyze the mechanisms by which these systems of exclusion are replicated and re-created.

In place of reading intersectionality as the remedy for feminist exclusivity, I advocate treating intersectionality as a metaphor which strives to describe how identity and oppression work by conceptualizing race and gender as intersecting streets through which discrimination, like traffic, flows. In "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics," Kimberlé Crenshaw famously analogizes a traffic-clogged intersection to women of color's experiences of discrimination. She writes, "Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them."[6] Her intersection metaphor reveals that the injuries multiply marginalized subjects experience are neither exclusively the result of racism or sexism nor simply the aggregate of racism and sexism. Instead, multiple marginalized subjects experience oppression in the intersection where racism and sexism collide. More recent scholarship treats the intersection metaphor as an empirically supported articulation of how identity and oppression operate. In fact, intersectionality has come to be regarded as a kind of feminist truth, a proven account of how both identity and oppression are experienced.

I advocate restoring our understanding of intersectionality to a metaphor, and encourage treating intersectionality as one platform from which scholars can examine the interconnections of identity and oppression. By emphasizing intersectionality's status as one metaphor (rather than the metaphor) we can use to better understand identity and oppression, scholars can hold in mind that analytical frameworks capture and describe as much as they obscure and elide. Continued efforts to imagine identity in new ways are critical, not to displace intersectionality, but to encourage our transdisciplinary explorations of the messiness of subjectivity and domination. Finally, a recognition of intersectionality's status as one metaphor for understanding identity will disrupt the pervasive logic that more hard intersectional work will lead us to a feminist utopia, a promised land outside of hegemony and exclusivity.

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."[7] To that end, many have advocated bringing the concept of subjectivity back to intersectionality to avoid suggesting that subjects are "determined by social systems."[8] 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."[9] 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."[10] 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."[11] 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."[12] 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.'"[13] 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.

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.[14]

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."[15]

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."[16] 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?"[17] 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.[18]

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.[19] 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.

Finally, my hope is that new explorations will invite us to interrogate difficulty more generally. Difficulty has long stood at the heart of academic enterprises. One of the great insights of feminist theory has been disrupting the idea that theory is necessarily abstract, removed from the experiential. Yet our work on intersectionality is increasingly invested in complexity and celebrated for its difficulty.

It seems to me it is worth asking how intersectionality's institutionalization has led to its "complexity." When the Combahee River Collective, Frances Beale, Deborah King, and others articulated their own versions of intersectionality in the 1970s and 1980s, complexity was not the virtue they were celebrating. Instead, they were invested in giving a name to subject positions that had long been unnamed. Theory-making isn't an exercise in opacity, or at least it needn't be, nor does it need to be a celebration of complexity for complexity's sake. As we continue to imagine intersectionality, it is worth asking how the fetishization of intersectionality's difficulty and complexity can operate as a pernicious tool of exclusion, one which silences the very voices it intends to project.

Endnotes

1. Difficult Dialogues was the name of the 2009 National Women's Studies Association Conference which focused on intersectionality. [Return to text]

2. Leslie McCall, "The Complexity of Intersectionality," Signs 30.3 (2005): 1771. [Return to text]

3. Hae Yeon Choo and Myra Marx Ferree, "Practicing Intersectionality in Sociological Research: A Critical Analysis of Inclusions, Interactions, and Institutions in the Study of Inequalities," Sociological Theory 28.2 (June 2010): 129. [Return to text]

4. Ange-Marie Hancock, "Intersectionality as a Normative and Empirical Paradigm," Politics & Gender 3.2 (2007): 250. [Return to text]

5. Choo and Ferree, 130. [Return to text]

6. Kimberlé Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics," University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 149. [Return to text]

7. 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). [Return to text]

8. Staunaes, 103. [Return to text]

9. Hancock, 251. [Return to text]

10. Joan Acker, "The Missing Feminist Revolution Symposium," Social Problems 53.4 (Nov. 2006): 446. [Return to text]

11. Adrienne Rich, "Notes Toward a Politics of Location," Blood, Bread, and Poetry (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1986). [Return to text]

12. 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. [Return to text]

13. Gill Valentine, "Theorizing and Researching Intersectionality: A Challenge for Feminist Geography," Professional Geographer 59.1 (2007): 14. [Return to text]

14. 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). [Return to text]

15. Darren Rosenblum, "Queer Intersectionality and the Failure of Recent Lesbian and Gay Victories," Law and Sexuality 4 (1994): 89. [Return to text]

16. Darren Hutchinson, "Identity Crisis: 'Intersectionality,' 'Multidimensionality,' and the Development of an Adequate Theory of Subordination," Michigan Journal of Race and the Law (2001): 311. [Return to text]

17. Jerome Chang and Robert Culp, "After Intersectionality," University of Missouri Kansas City Law Review 71 (2002): 485. [Return to text]

18. 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. [Return to text]

19. 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. [Return to text]