8

Intersectionality Revisited
The synergistic relationship between intersectionality’s inquiry and praxis constitutes a core
organizing principle of this book. Moreover, this relationship between its intellectual
contours and its political action has also been essential for intersectionality as a form of
critical analysis. We argue that maintaining the creative tension joining these two dimensions
has been essential to intersectionality’s originality and growth. For example, the way we told
the history of intersectionality situated its emergence within social movement activism, while
also addressing institutional incorporation in the academy, a positioning that highlights the
vibrancy and necessity of intersectionality’s ties to social justice movements and the need to
continue to defend those ties within increasingly neoliberal colleges and universities.
Maintaining this creative tension between inquiry and praxis as intersectionality expands its
global reach characterizes dialogues within human rights venues, within reproductive justice
initiatives and digitally networked social justice activism. The juxtaposition of
intersectionality’s ties to various forms of identity politics – for example, the black women’s
movement in Brazil and hip-hop as a global discourse of youth – and identity debates within
intersectional scholarship highlights an important controversy that hinges on distinguishing
between praxis and inquiry. Our analysis of diversity in public schools and higher education
examines the challenges of placing intersectionality as a field of inquiry and praxis in dialog
with critical education, an area that faces similar challenges.
These examples suggest that this synergy between inquiry and praxis is simultaneously
critical and creative, catalyzing new ideas for inquiry and suggesting new forms of praxis.
Many of our examples highlight intersectionality’s contributions to creative solutions to
important social problems, such as violence against women and girls, labor exploitation in
unsafe working conditions, and the denial of education to youth. We include many examples
of critical intersectional analysis that flows from praxis, the case of social activism for
reproductive justice or immigrants’ rights. This dialogical sensibility between knowing and
doing has enriched intersectionality as a field of inquiry within academia, fostering new
questions, avenues of investigation, and explanations across many disciplines.
Maintaining this creative tension between critical inquiry and critical praxis remains an
ongoing challenge for intersectionality. Yet many people within academia, within activist
Copyright © 2020. Polity Press. All rights reserved.

settings, as well as within digital intersectionality do not see this relationship between inquiry
and praxis as foundational to intersectionality’s critical work. Some scholars wish to extract
intersectionality from praxis, leaving a purified set of ideas that can be manipulated
unencumbered by the kinds of political stakes that have concerned intersectional
practitioners. Similarly, activists who interpret intersectionality as being overly abstract and
not worth studying demonstrate an anti-intellectual bias that elevates praxis over serious
study. As the debates within online feminist publics and the spread of digital violence
suggest, intersectionality’s footprint within digital media can make conflict more overt and

Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality, Polity Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/city/detail.action?docID=6177666.
Created from city on 2021-09-15 17:31:47.
 amplified. Significantly, creativity honed by placing inquiry and praxis in dialog need not
generate consensus – indeed, it often catalyzes conflict. Yet being critical requires dialogs
across differences in power, as long as such dialogs are committed to strengthening
intersectionality.
The term “intersectionality” is very much in use these days, but is employed in a variety of
ways by different social actors. We see the impetus toward intersectionality as more
connected to the puzzles presented by the social world that we live in, rather than the
concerns of established disciplinary endeavors. Our efforts to provide a useful but not final
definition of intersectionality speak to the impetus to encompass intersectionality’s dual
focus on inquiry and praxis. Toward this end, we began this book by offering the following
description of intersectionality:
Intersectionality investigates how intersecting power relations influence social relations
across diverse societies as well as individual experiences in everyday life. As an analytic
tool, intersec-tionality views categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, class, nation,
ability, ethnicity, and age – among others – as interrelated and mutually shaping one
another. Intersectionality is a way of understanding and explaining complexity in the
world, in people, and in human experiences.
We settled on this working definition because it is broad and elastic enough to house the
diversity within intersectionality, yet provides some guidance on some important boundaries
around intersectionality. Throughout the book, we have aimed to deepen this working
definition in ways that embrace intersectionality’s heterogeneity and dynamism.
The significance of this working definition goes beyond its organizational utility for this
book. The definitional question is important because prematurely settling on one definition,
history, or canon can shut down intersectionality’s creativity and growth. We have tried to
avoid these pitfalls by providing a more expansive view of intersectionality than can be
found in any one location. We emphasize how using intersectionality as an analytic tool
introduces greater complexity into a host of topics, such as digitally mediated social
movements, climate change, and reproductive justice. Consensus often ends when we dig
deeper into intersectionality’s actual use. We have highlighted some of the debates within
intersectionality, for example, conflicting views of the meaning of identity within
intersectionality. We also discuss the challenges that intersectionality confronts in remaining
critical within varying venues that increasingly adopt neoliberal frameworks, for example, its
own placement within the normative standards of higher education and the changing meaning
Copyright © 2020. Polity Press. All rights reserved.

of diversity work within public schools and academia. We avoid some of the most
contentious debates that, in our assessment, sweep up intersectionality in service to other
agendas, for example, arguments that “we,” whoever that might be, should move “beyond”
intersectionality to some sort of “post-intersectionality” landscape.
Throughout the book, we emphasize several important premises that provide guidelines for
our approach to intersectionality. First, we highlight the significance of the social structural
domain of power for intersectionality. Not only do we build out this structural domain across
many social institutions, for example schools, prisons, the media, and the workplace; we also

Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality, Polity Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/city/detail.action?docID=6177666.
Created from city on 2021-09-15 17:31:47.
 present intersectionality’s structural context as traversing multiple layers of social
organization. Specifically, we include examples from microlevel analysis that highlights the
workings of individual creativity in social problem solving (Chapter 2 – Muhammad Yunus
and microcredit), as well as within small group social interaction (our close reading of the
meeting concerning intersectionality and human rights policy in Chapter 4). We provide
examples of how grassroots groups draw upon intersectionality to guide social action – for
example, the case of the Albuquerque initiative for reproductive justice. We do not treat
macrolevel phenomena such as the state and global geopolitics as background variables.
Instead, we present the nation-state as an important site of intersectionality’s structural social
context, stressing how heterogeneous nation-states stimulate diverse public policies. We also
present a transnational framework for human rights, social protest, and similar global
phenomena that strives to link and transcend national contexts.
Second, we pay close attention to selected philosophical traditions that influence
intersectionality’s ideas and politics. For example, we identify social democracy and
neoliberalism as important philosophies or systems of ideas within intersectionality’s
interpretive context. Fostering democracy has been an ongoing preoccupation for
intersectionality, with various intersectional projects aligned with liberal, social, or
participatory democratic projects. Intersectionality’s claims for inclusion, dialog, equity, and
social justice rest on deepening the meaning of democracy. Yet neoliberalism has challenged
these democratic ideals. The ideas of social democracy and neoliberalism remain contested
within many of the public policies discussed here, among them securitization and the
criminal justice system, the defunding of public education, and the FIFA business model (see
Chapter 1). The growing visibility of far-right populism, especially its denigration of
immigrants, people of color, and women, adds complexity to this mix. Certainly, there are
other philosophies with wide social impact. Yet focusing on democracy and neoliberalism
provides a context for seeing how power influences the synergy of inquiry and praxis
generally, and intersectionality specifically.
Third, we highlight the ideas and actions of people who make important, albeit often
unrecognized, contributions to intersectionality. Because the synergy between
intersectionality’s critical inquiry and praxis is often more visible in the work of women of
color, poor people, LGBTQ people, indigenous peoples, as well as young people, we bring
the ideas of historically disenfranchised people to the forefront of our analysis as much as
possible. For example, we highlight the ideas that emerged within the black women’s
movement in Brazil, as well as the identity politics of hip-hop, because black women and
Copyright © 2020. Polity Press. All rights reserved.

young people have made important contributions to intersectionality. Similarly, our approach
to intersectionality’s genealogy emphasizes the significance of social movement projects
advanced by historically disenfranchised people for intersectionality’s critical inquiry and
praxis. Standard intellectual histories routinely overlook the intellectual work of people who
are discriminated against within intersecting power relations of race, class, gender, sexuality,
disability, and nationality. Significantly, these are often the same people who are most versed
in social justice praxis.
Together, these premises concerning intersectionality’s social structural context, the

Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality, Polity Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/city/detail.action?docID=6177666.
Created from city on 2021-09-15 17:31:47.
 importance of philosophies in shaping intersectionality, and the importance of looking to
oppressed people as agents of knowledge have informed our analysis. Guided by these
premises, we settled on six core themes – namely, social inequality, intersecting power
relations, social context, relationality, complexity, and social justice – to provide some
guideposts in analyzing intersectionality’s critical inquiry and praxis. Just as these
characteristic themes reappear, albeit in different forms, within intersectionality itself, so we
discuss them in different ways throughout the book. Here we revisit these themes as a way
both of synthesizing some of the main ideas in the book and of discussing how
intersectionality might cast a self-reflexive eye on its own truths and practices. Some of these
themes have long been recognized and considered worthy. On others, the record is far more
contested. We close this book by asking, where might intersectionality be headed? We look
back in order to move forward.

Social Inequality
Social inequality is a fundamental object of investigation for intersectionality, and we treat it
as such throughout our book. For example, our discussion of income and wealth as
dimensions of global economic inequality lays a foundation for a more informed discussion
of social inequality that takes different philosophies into account. We also discuss how
philosophies that offer different explanations for social inequality impact public policies of
nation-states. Focusing on social inequality sharpens our provisional definition:
intersectionality constitutes a way of understanding and explaining complex social
inequalities in the world, in people, and in human experiences.
Intersectionality bundles together disparate traditions on social inequality. This is its
challenge and its strength. Understanding the historical patterns of scholarship and activism
that catalyzed antiracism, decolonialism, feminism, critical disability studies, and similar
critical projects requires serious study. These fields each have distinctive forms of critical
inquiry and critical praxis that speak to the particular forms of social inequality that they
study. Simply cherry-picking the ideas from several areas and bundling them together
provides a thin understanding of social inequality that can masquerade as intersectionality. In
one book, we could not do justice to the expansive literatures on social inequality that
intersectionality aims to pull together. Instead, we ground our analysis in specific social
practices, social problems, and social issues as one way of showing how using
intersectionality as an analytical tool can foster more robust understandings of social
Copyright © 2020. Polity Press. All rights reserved.

inequality. Our discussion of FIFA in Chapter 1, for example, provides a good sense of how
multiple social inequalities are structured and replicated. Rather than grappling with social
issues in the abstract, as purely theoretical concerns, we instead adopted a more grounded
approach of using intersectionality to examine a range of social issues.
We have also been careful not to present social inequality as something that is natural,
normal, and inevitable. Using intersectionality as an analytical tool provides a powerful way
of analyzing how intersecting power relations produce social inequalities. The scope of social
inequality and the practices that organize it are certainly formidable. We pay attention to

Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality, Polity Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/city/detail.action?docID=6177666.
Created from city on 2021-09-15 17:31:47.
 nation-state power in this book, both as a topic of investigation and as an important context
for intersectionality’s own praxis. The effects of neoliberalism and state policies of
securitization suggest that elites wield inordinate power, with the resurgence of far-right
populism raising new challenges for subordinated people. Yet these same tools of
intersectionality can also be used to examine resistance to social inequality. The black
women’s movement in Brazil, hip-hop as a form of cultural politics, and digital activism all
suggest that the response to social inequality need not be capitulation. Throughout this book,
we provide examples where people not only do not give in, but actively protest the forms of
social inequality that confront them. Our choice of topics speaks to this theme of resistance:
global social protest, reproductive rights, digital activism, critical education, and the
significance of identity politics all speak to the myriad ways that people resist within
intersecting systems of power.

Intersecting Power Relations

Power, another core idea of intersectionality, is complex and contested. Throughout this
book, we approach intersectionality through a power-conscious lens or analytical framework.
Intersectionality strives to look at power from many angles and asks what kind of power
relations might be hidden behind those that are more apparent in a given context. We
conceptualize power as a relationship rather than as a static entity. Power is not a thing to be
gained or lost as in the zero-sum conceptions of winners and losers on the football playing
field. Rather, power is exercised via the relationships that created the very categories of
winners and losers.
Because the term “power” is widely used without there being much agreement as to what it
is, we emphasize intersecting power relations to sharpen our book’s approach to power and
do not shy away from difficult topics. Intersecting power relations permeate important global
phenomena: those that oppress – for example, global social inequality and violence – as well
as political actions that resist or oppose such oppression – for example, social protests that
flare up in various national settings, ongoing social movements that evolve as they engage
global phenomena, and digital media as new resources for oppressive and emancipatory uses.
These global phenomena permeated by intersecting power relations are also variably
impacted by the rise of far-right populism, which we attend to in this new edition, as it speaks
to important changes in our current conjuncture and encompasses the very real menace of
fascism. This power-conscious lens raises two important points about intersecting power
Copyright © 2020. Polity Press. All rights reserved.

relations and the political responses they can engender. First, intersectional frameworks
understand power relations through a lens of mutual construction. In other words, people’s
lives and identities are generally shaped by many factors in diverse and mutually influencing
ways. Race, class, gender, sexuality, age, disability, ethnicity, nation, and religion, among
others, constitute interlocking, mutually constructing, or intersecting systems of power. As
categories of analysis, race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation gain meaning from power
relations of racism, heterosexism, class exploitation, and nationalism. Within intersectional
frameworks, there is no pure racism or heterosexism. Rather, power relations of racism and

Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality, Polity Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/city/detail.action?docID=6177666.
Created from city on 2021-09-15 17:31:47.
 heterosexism gain meaning in relation to one another.
Second, power relations are to be analyzed both via their intersections, for example, of
racism and heterosexism, as well as across domains of power, namely structural, disciplinary,
cultural, and interpersonal. The framework of domains of power provides a heuristic device
or thinking tool for examining power relations. The FIFA World Cup case introduced this
heuristic by analyzing each domain of power separately. It broke them down into the kinds of
power relations that are solidified in social structures (for example, organizations like FIFA
and institutions like national governments) that are shared through ideas and media, or
culture broadly speaking, that appear repeatedly in the ways that informal social rewards and
punishments get distributed in everyday interactions, and that affect the players’ individual
identities. These are, respectively, the structural, cultural, disciplinary, and interpersonal
domains of power. Looking at how power works in each domain can shed light on the
dynamics of larger social phenomena, the case, for example of the IMF’s mainstream
economic philosophies, or the longevity of the Afro-Brazilian women’s movement. Yet, in
actual social practice, the domains overlap, and no one domain can be put as the most
determinant a priori.
Throughout this book, we investigate an important question: how is intersectionality situated
within the power relations that it seemingly studies? Positioning intersectionality within
contemporary power relations and analyzing the significance of that placement raise
additional questions. How does intersectionality critically assess power relations of race,
class, gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, nationality, and ability? How might intersectionality
better understand the way in which intersecting power relations shape its own praxis? These
questions must repeatedly be asked and answered under the changing conditions of
neoliberalism, far-right populism, and their challenges to social democracy.
In this book, we criticize intersectionality when it seems to be veering away from what we
see as its core concern areas that are clearly associated with intersecting power relations. For
example, because we have been especially troubled by the decreasing focus on social
inequality within intersectionality’s scholarship, we emphasize this theme. The hollowing-out
of meanings of rich scholarly traditions that critically analyze social inequalities – for
example, capitalism, colonialism, racism, patriarchy, and nationalism – and replacing them
with shortcut terms such as race, class, and gender may look harmless, but much is lost when
systems of power compete for space under some versions of intersectionality. The terms
themselves may appear to be equivalent and easily substituted for one another, yet the social
relations that these shorthand terms reference are far more complicated.
Copyright © 2020. Polity Press. All rights reserved.

Sexism, racism, and heterosexism all contain the “ism” that makes them recognizable as
unjust systems of power, an important feature that is lost when these systems become
reframed as identity categories of gender, race, and sexuality. The term “nation” cannot
capture the complexities that accompany its use. Historical expressions of nationalism, both
state-sanctioned repression and anticolonial movements for emancipation, replicate binary
categories of nation as an entity that is inherently bad or good. Replacement terms such as
“citizenship status” or “undocumented migrants” aim to take up the theoretical slack by

Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality, Polity Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/city/detail.action?docID=6177666.
Created from city on 2021-09-15 17:31:47.
 referencing selected populations that are penalized by nationalist ideologies and nation-state
policies. Similarly, when understood as a synonym of socioeconomic status which is often
measured by the use of income, the term “class” performs a different kind of reductionism
within some versions of intersectionality.
This strategy of using shortcut language to describe intersecting power relations seemingly
solves one set of problems, but it creates others. Over time, for example, these terms no
longer invoke the original meanings of racism, sexism, nationalism, and capitalism, but
instead become recast as floating signifiers that, unmoored from specific critical analytical
traditions, can be assembled and reassembled at will. This reduction of intersectionality to an
assemblage of shortcut terms does appear to be more democratic in that it encompasses more
categories than before. Yet the mantra of “race, class, and gender” can be repeated so often
that it becomes meaningless. The phrase serves as an unexamined litmus test for scholars
who can claim that their work is better than race-only or class-only analyses, primarily
because it references more terms of social inequality. Our analytical framework of power,
which offers a dual analysis that identifies intersecting categories of power that are organized
across domains of power, is designed to counter these trends. This power-conscious analysis,
in turn, suggests that intersectionality is a form of critical praxis within a response to
complex social inequalities that are organized by a complex matrix of power.

Social Context
With regards to social context, our book sits in a difficult position: we firmly believe in the
importance of thinking and deploying intersectionality in context-specific ways that attend to
both historical particularities and the increasing significance of a global context. Yet given
the scope of intersectionality, we stress whenever possible the importance of contextualizing
intersectionality in a global context, for example, the identity politics of hip-hop and the
organization of networked global social movements as simultaneously local and global
phenomena. We have done this in part by selecting important social issues and highlighting
the political dimensions of a global framework. The term “contextualize” comes from this
impetus to think about social inequality, relationality, and power relations in a social context.
Using intersectionality as an analytic tool means contextualizing intersectionality’s
arguments, both via our selection of examples, but also by being aware of how particular
historical, intellectual, and political contexts shape intersectionality’s inquiry and praxis.
Our decisions throughout the book speak to the many ways that we investigate the
Copyright © 2020. Polity Press. All rights reserved.

relationship between intersectionality, local issues, and global phenomena. Knowing that it is
impossible to give an exhaustive account of social context for every topic, we instead provide
cases where place and space, both geographic and digital, constitute key components of
social context. Our discussion, in Chapter 5, of the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh shows
how this event went far beyond Bangladeshi national borders. Instead, this event illustrates
the significance of working for an employer that provides dangerous working conditions in
factories in other countries. It also shows how the global anti-sweatshop movement redefines
global social movement space by exposing how FIFA paraphernalia that was produced by

Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality, Polity Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/city/detail.action?docID=6177666.
Created from city on 2021-09-15 17:31:47.
 sweatshop labor in Bangladesh was marketed and sold in Brazil. The Rana Plaza case also
illustrates how historically disenfranchised people can develop new understandings of their
institutional and geographic social context by seeing connections that were formerly
obscured. Global social protest occurs both geographically in local places, as well as in
cyberspace.
Social context is such a broad term that, in this book, we emphasize the importance of nation-
states for providing an often taken-for-granted social context for intersectional analysis.
Whenever possible, we make mention of national context to remind readers that the ideas of
intersectionality take different forms. For example, we introduce the ideas of Afro-Brazilian
feminism, black feminism in the US, and Chicana feminism as sites where intersectionality
evolved, not to compare them, but rather to contextualize the arguments of each. National
context writ large matters, as do the positions of different social groups within each national
context. The term “indigenous peoples” does speak to shared global experiences and
challenges, but it also minimizes the unique experiences and challenges of groups within
very different nation-states. This theme of varying perspectives that can arise within and
across diverse social contexts informs differences within intersectionality itself.
Our emphasis on nation-states within our power-conscious intersectional analysis highlights
the significance of political geography of intersectionality’s social location as shaping its
intellectual context. For example, here we approach nation-states both as the object of
intersectional analysis as well as the setting for intersectionality’s critical inquiry and praxis;
for example, using intersectionality as a critical tool differs in South Africa, India, and
Canada. Here we stress the institutional setting of academia as a social context for
intersectionality’s intellectual and political endeavors. Our analysis of the shifting meanings
of intersectionality within social movements and incorporation into the academy contrasts the
effects of these two institutional environments on intersectionality; our analysis of neoliberal
state power, its discourse of securitization, and how institutional structures are shaped by
these ideas, is a primary theme of our book; our comparison of varying interpretations of
identity politics within academia and hip-hop also highlights the significance of the
university and mass media as two institutional sites of cultural production; our analysis of the
changing contours of intersectionality and diversity within higher education highlights the
significance of context. In brief, intersectionality’s institutional trajectories are important for
understanding how its ideas instantiate differently in different contexts.
At several points throughout this book, we express our concern that the growth, acceptance,
and legitimation of intersectionality within academia and some public policy venues
Copyright © 2020. Polity Press. All rights reserved.

necessarily change its composition and purpose, often for the better, but also for the worse.
For example, we explore the politics of intersectionality’s naming and incorporation into the
academy as a bona fide discourse. Is intersectionality the victim of its own success?
Contemporary trends that reduce intersectionality to a theory of identity also reflect the
challenges of absorption. Within US higher education, the splitting of intersectionality into an
academic component of scholarship and diversity initiatives of institutional service signals an
attack on intersectionality’s critical perspective. Via these concerns, we raise the question of
who benefits from intersectionality’s legitimation within academic social contexts. The

Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality, Polity Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/city/detail.action?docID=6177666.
Created from city on 2021-09-15 17:31:47.
 answers to this question are far from clear and may vary from one situation to the next. It is
not enough to simply bury oneself in one’s own work, claiming intersectionality as a set of
stimulating ideas while ignoring the conditions that make that work possible.
The tongue-in-cheek phrase “saving intersectionality from intersectionality studies” (Bilge
2013) reminds all scholars to be self-reflexive regarding our own practices in the context of
intersectionality’s newfound visibility and legitimation. Saving intersectionality might
involve reclaiming intersectionality from people who often have little or no commitment to
intersectionality’s social justice ethos. This may also mean saving intersectionality from
ourselves if we practice intersectionality as “business as usual,” namely, as just another
scholarly discourse or content specialization without implicating our work within the power
relations that shape the field and academy at large. Such practices often follow the well-
known path of mentioning some canonical figures within the field without really engaging
with their work, and then using this familiar genealogy as a proxy for the field itself.
Then there is the issue of historic context. The version of intersectionality that we present in
this volume reflects the specific historical moment of the early twenty-first century and aims
to be a critical intervention in that moment. For many scholars, the time of intersectionality
as an idea came “precisely because of the plethora of authors working independently across
the globe making vastly similar sets of claims” (Yuval-Davis 2011a: xii). Our discussion of
intersectionality’s genealogy takes this perspective. Yet it is important to point out that
history is always in the making and is never finished. While intersectionality analyzes
contemporary issues, it is also simultaneously formed and transformed by them. We see an
important role for critical analytical inquiry and praxis at this specific historic moment. In so
doing, we corroborate Stuart Hall’s insights: “Movements provoke their theoretical moments.
And historical conjunctures insist on theories: they are real moments in the evolution of
theory” (Hall 1992: 283). For current debates inflected by the growing influence of
intersectionality within UN venues, juxtaposed with increasingly verbal critiques of
intersectionality within European academia, intersectionality seems to represent both a
promise and a threat. Accordingly, we reflect upon the specificities of historical events in
which intersectionality is embedded, with the aim of understanding and describing how
different historical periods frame different theoretical and political moments of
intersectionality.

Relationality
Copyright © 2020. Polity Press. All rights reserved.

Relationality references the connections among ideas, among discourses, and among political
projects. The term “intersectionality” invokes a different understanding of relationality than
that advanced within Western scholarship and political practice. Intersectionality’s basic
heuristic, the seemingly simple idea that entities that are typically treated as separate may
actually be interconnected, has had a major impact on disciplinary knowledge. The creation
of interdisciplinary fields concerned with social justice illustrates the effects of new forms of
relational thinking (Parker et al. 2010). This basic idea of examining the possibilities of
interconnections and new political relationships among historically disenfranchised groups of

Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality, Polity Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/city/detail.action?docID=6177666.
Created from city on 2021-09-15 17:31:47.
 people also informs desegregation within nation-states and decoloniality as a signature global
phenomenon.
The insight that entities that historically have been conceptualized as separate and
oppositional are interconnected and interrelated constitutes a major contribution of
intersectionality to a variety of intellectual and political projects. Intersectional scholarship
challenges forms of binary relational thinking that oppose theory to practice or scholarship to
activism. Instead, intersectional frameworks strive to go beyond assumptions of oppositional
thinking to forge a complex understanding of the relationships among history, social
organization, and forms of consciousness, both personal and collective (Bannerji 1995: 12).
Inspiring scholars and activists alike, intersectionality’s conception of relationality replaces
notions of oppositional difference (either/or thinking) with notions of relational difference
(both/and thinking) and has generated new questions and avenues of investigation (Collins
2019: 225).
Identifying the centrality of both/and understandings of relationality within much
intersectional inquiry and practice, in this book we engage relationality in varying ways. For
instance, our core premise that intersectionality is a form of critical inquiry and praxis is a
statement of relationality between knowing and doing, a view that sees theory and practice as
interconnected. We investigate the ways that the relationships among different groups across
differences in power informs their analysis and praxis. We took issue with versions of
intersectionality that reduce identity to an apolitical, individualistic category, arguing instead
that identity is always constructed in relationship to and within social contexts shaped by
intersecting power relations. We have also foregrounded the importance of relationality for
building co-resistance between various social justice-oriented struggles that often seem to be
scattered, but may in actuality be interrelated phenomena. Our case of the Afro-Brazilian
women’s movement sketches out how coalitions that took relationality seriously and attended
to both similarities and differences were crucial to the creation and maintenance of a vibrant
social movement.
We devote less time here than we would like to examining intersectionality’s relationship
with similar projects, such as critical race theory, feminism, ethnic studies, or the intellectual
debates in which these areas participate. Intersectionality’s interconnectedness with other
similar knowledge projects is mentioned at various places, but a substantial investigation is
beyond the scope of this book (see Collins 2019: 87–120). When engaging with these
projects globally, intersectionality must be wary of annexing other perspectives, such as
decolonial and transnational approaches, under its wide tent umbrella. When intersectionality
Copyright © 2020. Polity Press. All rights reserved.

enters the Global South via top-down humanitarian, developmental frameworks, and projects
from the North, it often erases local resistant knowledges and praxis and silences local
knowledge producers (Bilge 2019). A similar erasure occurs through academic moves that
ostensibly introduce intersectionality into new Northern contexts, where local struggles and
racialized knowledge producers disappear (Bilge 2013). There is a fundamental difference
between situations where disenfranchised groups around the world themselves claim versions
of intersectionality, as evidenced by Dalit and Romani transnational feminist activisms, Afro-
Brazilian women forming an independent black feminist movement, or the global contours of

Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality, Polity Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/city/detail.action?docID=6177666.
Created from city on 2021-09-15 17:31:47.
 reproductive justice initiatives, and situations where some national or supranational instance
imposes a top-down, watered-down diversity qua intersectionality agenda upon historically
disenfranchised people.
This caveat also applies to knowledge projects that have an affinity with intersectionality. In
a context of increasing commodification of post-1960s knowledge projects, for example,
ethnic studies or women’s and gender studies, within neoliberal academia, the current
decolonial turn in higher education risks treating indigenous knowledges as simple add-ons
(Bilge 2020). In the same way that scholars hope to fix their disciplines by adding
intersectionality, indigenous knowledges increasingly face similar opportunistic shallow
incorporation. There is reason to be wary about easy calls for integrating indigeneity into
intersectionality, because such incorporations risk reproducing colonial academic practices.
Rather than incorporation, intersectionality scholars should aim for an ethics of deep
conversation with indigenous knowledges and question why intersectionality is not
systematically used by indigenous scholars. Andrea Smith explains the reticence of
indigenous scholars to engage with ethnic studies: “Many Native studies scholars have
refused engagement with ethnic studies or critical race theory because they think such
engagement relegates Native peoples to the status of racial minorities rather than as members
of sovereign nations” (2012: 76). Taking our cue from Smith, we can extrapolate and
presume that this could also very well be the reason for indigenous qualms with
intersectionality in our current moment, although collaborations between black, indigenous,
and women of color were frequent in the formative years of intersectional thinking and action
(see Chapter 3).
But annexing other perspectives need not be the case. Here, the challenge for
intersectionality’s scholars and practitioners is to engage in ethical conversations with other
emancipatory thought traditions and knowledge producers, whether they are in the Global
South or the Global North, and to do so in ways that do not reproduce knowledge hierarchies
and the power conferred by intersectionality’s academic capital on the global market of
scientific ideas. In the face of the political, social, economic, and ecological urgencies of our
times, the viability of social movements that may build an alternative future depends on how
well we can practice radical relationality and deep reciprocity with each other and with
nonhuman animate and inanimate beings, and work together in co-resistance.

Complexity
Copyright © 2020. Polity Press. All rights reserved.

Overall, these core ideas of social inequality, intersecting power relations, social context, and
relationality highlight intersectionality’s complexity. Because these ideas interact with one
another, collectively they contribute to intersectionality’s complexity. Thinking about social
inequalities and power relations within an ethos of social justice, and doing so not in abstract
generalizations but in their specific contexts, brings complexity to intersectional inquiry and
praxis. Attending to how intersecting power relations shape identities, social practices,
institutional arrangements, and cultural representations and ideologies in ways that are
contextualized and historicized introduces a level of complexity into everything. Moreover,

Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality, Polity Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/city/detail.action?docID=6177666.
Created from city on 2021-09-15 17:31:47.
 the creative tension linking intersectionality as a form of critical inquiry and critical praxis
introduces complexity into intersectional projects.
As we argue throughout this book, this creative tension raises important questions about
which understandings of intersectionality will prevail. When we focus on intersectionality as
a form of critical inquiry, we find a rich tapestry of scholarship produced by people who use
intersectionality as an analytic tool in new and creative ways. Not all scholarship is like this,
and not all people who advocate intersectionality share this vision. But, overall,
intersectionality’s scholarship record thus far has been impressive. When we broaden our
lens to include intersectionality as critical praxis, both its initial expression within social
movements and its global reach beyond academia, the practices and ideas of diverse people
past and present, in the Global North and in the Global South, come into view.
Conversely, if we reverse the object of our gaze and begin with an expansive lens that
focuses on the social actions of projects to counter social inequality, we uncover the ideas of
intersectionality in places that remain underemphasized. Grounding intersectionality in social
action to address social inequalities and the social projects they engender greatly expands
intersectionality’s context of discovery. Moreover, this broader view of intersectionality’s
critical praxis provides a different context for analyzing intersectional inquiry. Narrowing this
expansive lens to specific social contexts brings intersectionality within academia into
sharper focus.
Intersectionality faces the challenge of sustaining the creative tension between its critical
inquiry and practice as a route to stimulating complexity. Building greater complexity into
intersectionality’s arguments requires cultivating dialogs with and among scholars and
activists of the Global South as well as examining social issues that do not seem to be part of
intersectionality’s focus. The analysis of intersectionality in this book may be of universal
relevance, yet there is no way of knowing so without greater participation of scholars,
activists, practitioners, policymakers, and teachers from the Global South. We have
emphasized the ideas and experiences of social actors from historically disenfranchised
groups within the Global North as well in the Global South whenever possible, taking care to
do so in ways that do not reduce their experiences to data that reinforce the frameworks of
the Global North. For example, our case studies of the black women’s movement in Brazil
and their successful project of Latinidades and the increasing visibility of the anti-sweatshop
movement following the Rana Plaza collapse both illustrate the significance of starting our
analysis in the Global South, Brazil and Bangladesh, respectively. We also reject trying to fix
problems of exclusion by simply adding missing people and experiences into
Copyright © 2020. Polity Press. All rights reserved.

intersectionality as a preconceived entity. Instead, intersectionality requires a rethinking of

these approaches in ways that democratize the social construction of knowledge.
Incorporating a global analysis into intersectionality is an ongoing process of broadening
dialogs and introducing ever-greater complexity into its critical inquiry and praxis. Attending
to global phenomena means that intersectionality must take a critical stance concerning its
own social location as a legitimated discourse within the Global North, and must use this
position as a way of broadening participation in ways that are not exploitative or tokenistic.

Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality, Polity Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/city/detail.action?docID=6177666.
Created from city on 2021-09-15 17:31:47.
 Currently, the growth of social media and access to a wide array of ideas within popular
culture suggests that intersectionality’s ideas are no longer rationed by academic gatekeepers
or legacy media. Bringing more people into intersectionality’s dialogs bodes well for its
impetus toward social justice.

Social justice
We emphasize the core theme of social justice because, in the face of institutional
incorporation that seemingly severs intersectionality from political praxis, we have concerns
with versions of intersectionality that may only pay lip service to social justice. As a form of
inquiry that grapples with complex social inequalities, intersectionality’s raison d’être is not
simply to provide more complex and comprehensive explanations of how and why social
inequalities persist, or to bemoan social injustices in the world, leaving someone else to fix
them. Better explanations of social inequality and social injustice have long been used to
defend these realities, not dismantle them. Social inequality and social injustice are not the
same, although these ideas are often used interchangeably.
As we point out, intersectionality should not be conflated with social justice. Intersectional
projects must be interrogated for their connections to social justice, without simply assuming
that, because intersectional scholarship examines some facet of social inequality, it is by
default furthering social justice. We raise a similar argument concerning diversity initiatives
within higher education as a case where intersectionality may invoke earlier social justice
traditions, yet where actual programs have been pressured to relinquish initial emphasis on
access and equity. Critical engagement has been a strong theme within intersectionality as a
field of inquiry, often through questions of social justice. The work of practitioners shows not
only how social justice is critical, but also how social justice work challenges the borders
between academic and activist work. For example, by challenging myths that racial
democracy had been achieved, or that the Black Movement could handle the gendered
concerns of women, or that Brazilian feminism was adequate for all women, the social justice
activism of the black women’s movement in Brazil provides a different angle of vision on
social inequality and social justice.
We find there is more to be learned from examining the ideas and actions of people who use
intersectionality as an analytic tool for social justice than from merely criticizing those who
don’t. Working for social justice is often seen as synonymous with intersectionality, primarily
because the people who use intersectionality as an analytic tool, and people who see social
Copyright © 2020. Polity Press. All rights reserved.

justice as central rather than as peripheral to their lives, are often one and the same. These
people are typically critical of, rather than accepting of, the status quo. We highlight
intersectional projects that express a social justice ethos, yet also caution that a commitment
to social justice is not present in all scholarship that claims intersectionality. Our arguments
throughout the book have varying implications for social justice. For example, the FIFA
World Cup case suggests that competition is not inherently bad. People accept the idea of
winners and losers if the game itself is fair. Yet fairness is elusive in unequal societies where
the rules may seem fair, but differentially enforced through discriminatory practices. Fairness

Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality, Polity Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/city/detail.action?docID=6177666.
Created from city on 2021-09-15 17:31:47.
 is also elusive where the rules themselves may appear to be equally applied to everyone, yet
still produce unequal and unfair outcomes: in democratic societies, everyone has the “right”
to vote, but not everyone has equal access to do so.
Social justice can be an overarching theme that brings the possible connections among
critical discourses into sharper focus. The fields of critical race theory, critical race feminism,
gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, ecological feminism, disability studies, and
critical animal studies all speak to the ways in which various social categories of difference
work to place particular bodies at risk of exclusion, marginalization, erasure, discrimination,
violence, destruction, and othering. Intersectionality has been focused on bringing together
the separate struggles of blacks, Chicanos, indigenous peoples, women, and similar
historically disenfranchised people. Yet this strong focus on the significance of the collective
identity politics of such groups can overlook the importance of overarching issues that affect
these groups and all others. We wonder whether social justice and similar ethical concerns
can provide a unifying ethical framework for intersectionality. Shared oppression provides a
powerful point of departure for dialogs among historically disenfranchised people. While it is
important to recognize shared discrimination and victimization, can this recognition provide
a shared vision for intersectional inquiry and praxis?
When it comes to social justice, intersectionality demands more than simply being critical
and entails turning critical analyses into critical praxis. Moreover, as intersectionality
develops a deeper self-awareness of how social justice has and might inform its own critical
inquiry and praxis, it becomes better positioned to investigate its connections to projects that
share similar justice concerns. For example, while we only scratch the surface of questions of
climate change and the environment, the growing visibility of environmental justice
approaches provides an important site for dialog and building co-resistance (Malin and Ryder
2018). Environmental justice studies recognize that social inequality and oppression in all
forms intersect, and that actors in the more-than-human world are subjects of oppression and
frequently agents of social change. These insights are important for building an
understanding of the ways that intrahuman inequality and oppressions function and how they
intersect with human-nonhuman oppression (Pellow 2018). In this sense, social justice may
provide an aspirational framework of shared interest that simultaneously expands and
deepens intersectionality’s critical project.

Coda
Copyright © 2020. Polity Press. All rights reserved.

Throughout this book, we have cast a self-reflexive eye not simply on intersectionality but
also on our own praxis. One important objective of this last chapter is to clarify our choices.
Telling the story of intersectionality does a certain kind of political work in terms of
authenticating and legitimizing particular schools of thought and subjects and privileging
particular genealogies and national locations at the expense of others. Particular histories that
chart intersectionality as a field of study in particular ways might be rightly viewed as acts of
closure, however temporary they are. These histories pursue, in their own ways, scientific
recognition, authority, and legitimacy and settle intersectionality within the Euro-American

Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality, Polity Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/city/detail.action?docID=6177666.
Created from city on 2021-09-15 17:31:47.
 scientific archive in particular ways. As such, they participate in the establishment of
intersectionality as a legitimate field of knowledge, which might be at odds with the pursuit
of social justice. Our history of intersectionality has emphasized praxis, a dimension of
intersectionality that does not routinely appear in these legitimated histories, although a
critical praxis does permeate intersectionality.
As we wrap up this book, we ask: what ideas and experiences are not here? In what way is
our interpretation of intersectionality limited by these omissions? More importantly, how
might we go about expanding the breadth of intersectionality to encompass the heterogeneity
of ideas and experiences that are global without flattening their differences? Intersectionality
can’t engage with these expansive questions if it severs its critical inquiry from its critical
praxis. These questions have no straightforward answers, certainly none that can easily be
resolved. Rather, they call out for more people working on them via expanded global
conversations.
We wish that we could have written a book that incorporated more knowledge projects and
points of view from various regions of the globe and within a more expansive time period
than the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We want to see more people involved
in the kind of dialogical intellectual and political work that pursuing intersectionality entails.
This openness would encourage a dialogical methodology for intersectionality that would
advance a more democratic construction of knowledge itself. Equally important is the task of
moving intersectionality into the politics of the not-yet, or, in the words of late queer of color
scholar José Muñoz, “a utopian political imagination” that enables us to envision something
else, a “not yet,” driven by “a desire that resists mandates to accept that which is not enough”
(2009: 96). Moving into the politics of the not-yet is moving to a place of sustained hope in a
social, political, and ecological climate that may not inspire hope. To move toward this place
of the not-yet, it is imperative, we believe, that intersectionality remain open to the element
of surprise.
Intersectionality now stands at an important crossroads. Thus far, it has managed to sustain
intellectual and political dynamism that grows from its heterogeneity. This is immensely
difficult to achieve when faced with the kinds of intellectual and political challenges that we
have explored in this book. But just because something is difficult does not mean that it’s not
worth doing. In order to remain a vibrant, growing endeavor, intersectionality must cast a
self-reflexive eye on its own truths and practices. We see intersectionality’s heterogeneity not
as a weakness but, rather, as a source of tremendous potential for emancipatory social
change. Intersectionality is a tool that we can all use in moving toward a more just future.
Copyright © 2020. Polity Press. All rights reserved.

Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality, Polity Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/city/detail.action?docID=6177666.
Created from city on 2021-09-15 17:31:47.