Indiana Journal of Law and Social

Equality

Volume 1 Issue 1 Article 4

Summer 6-5-2013

Invisible Ink: Intersectionality and Political Inquiry

Dara Z. Strolovich
University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, dzs@umn.edu

Follow this and additional works at: https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ijlse

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Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Other Political Science Commons, Political Theory
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Publication Citation
Dara Z. Strolovitch, Invisible Ink: Intersectionality and Political Inquiry, 1 Ind. J.L. & Soc. Equality 100
(2013).

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 Invisible Ink: Intersectionality and Political Inquiry
2013

INVISIBLE INK: INTERSECTIONALITY AND POLITICAL INQUIRY

DARA Z. STROLOVITCH*

This brief article is a tribute, of sorts, to interdisciplinary inquiry and social justice

scholarship, one that focuses on the debt owed by political scientists who are concerned

about inequality and marginalization to intersectionality, a framework that originated in and

has long been central to critical race theory, feminist legal scholarship, and critical race

feminism. More specifically, the article reflects upon some of the ways in which

intersectionality helps political scientists who study marginalization to question disciplinary

boundaries, to move beyond single isolable causal mechanisms, and to “unmobilize biases”

within political science so that we more accurately understand and address social,

economic, and political inequality.1

I begin below with a brief review of some of the central insights of intersectionality,

particularly as they apply to political science. I then discuss some of the ways in which

intersectional approaches highlight the value of interdisciplinarity and the importance of

understanding the multiple, dynamic, and enduring sources of inequality. Some of what

follows might admittedly seem to recapitulate standard refrains about the roles of race,

class, gender, and sexuality in political science, the academy, and the political world. But

* Associate Professor, Princeton University, Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Department of
Politics.
1 See E. E. SCHATTSCHNEIDER, THE SEMISOVEREIGN PEOPLE: A REALIST’S VIEW OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA
(1975).

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while perhaps not entirely novel, I think that they are ideas that merit repeating and

reinforcing in the first issue of this exciting and important new journal.

I. INTERSECTIONALITY

It is beyond the scope of this short article to engage in a detailed discussion about

intersectionality, much less to enumerate the many ways in which issues such as race, class,

gender, and sexuality matter for politics and scholarship about it. Briefly stated, however,

[T]heories of intersectionality were developed initially by feminists of color who

were frustrated with a feminist movement that privileged and essentialized the
experiences and positions of white women, representing these experiences as those
of ‘all women,’ and also with a civil rights movement that similarly privileged and
essentialized the experiences and positions of black men.2

As many readers know, theories of intersectionality contend that groups can be

marginalized along many axes within what Patricia Hill Collins has called the “matrix of

domination.”3 From an intersectional perspective, these multiple forms of

marginalization—including race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability—do not function as

“separate, fixed, and parallel tracks,” but are rather dynamic, simultaneous, and mutually

2 DARA Z. STROLOVITCH, AFFIRMATIVE ADVOCACY: RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER IN INTEREST GROUP
POLITICS 22–23 (2007).
3 PATRICIA HILL COLLINS, BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT (1990). For other foundational articulations, see
generally, ALL THE WOMEN ARE WHITE, ALL THE BLACKS ARE MEN, BUT SOME OF US ARE BRAVE (Gloria T.
Hull, Patricia Bell Scott & Barbara Smith eds. 1982); Combahee River Collective, A Black Feminist
Statement, in THIS BRIDGE CALLED MY BACK: WRITINGS BY RADICAL WOMEN OF COLOR, 210, 210–18
(Cherríe Moraga & Gloria Anzaldúa eds., 1981); Kimberlé Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of
Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist
Politics, 1989 U. CHI. LEGAL F. 139 (1989) [hereinafter Crenshaw, Demarginalizing]; Chandra Talpade
Mohanty, Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, 30 FEMINIST REV. 61 (1988).

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constitutive.4 Intersectional approaches also typically object to “either/or” approaches that

regard economic and social injustices as distinct or mutually exclusive.5

While intersectionality has a long lineage, the term itself was coined and developed

by critical race feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, and derives from a “traffic”

metaphor she employed to illustrate the functioning and impact of multiple forms of

marginalization.6 Race, gender, and other forms of discrimination, she explains, are “roads”

that structure the social, economic, and political terrain.7 These roads, though often framed

as distinct and mutually exclusive, in reality overlap and intersect, creating what she calls

“complex intersections” at which multiple “disempowering dynamics” meet.8 Those

situated at the juncture of multiple “roads” of oppression and disadvantage (such as those

based on race, gender, and economic status) are subject to injuries by “the heavy flow of

traffic” traveling simultaneously from many directions and along multiple roads.9

The effects of the injuries resulting from these manifold forms of discrimination are

compounded, exponential, and unique products that are different from and far greater than

the sum of their parts, creating unique dimensions of disempowerment and differently

situated subgroups.10 Because these injuries are mutually constituted, it is impossible to

4 STROLOVITCH, supra note 2, at 24.

5 Id. at 23.
6 See Crenshaw, Demarginalizing, supra note 3, at 149.
7 KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW, THE INTERSECTIONALITY OF RACE AND GENDER DISCRIMINATION, 9 (2000).
8 Id.
9 Id. at 11–12.
10 See Crenshaw, Demarginalizing, supra note 3.

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understand or address specific forms of disadvantage in isolation.11 Since all forms of

subordination are interconnected, understanding each one requires doing what legal scholar

Mari Matsuda describes as “asking the other question.”12 For example, when we see

something that “looks racist,” she says, we should also ask, “[w]here is the patriarchy in

this?”13 When we see something sexist, we need also to look for the heterosexism in it.14

When we see something homophobic, we must also understand the class interests

embedded in it.15

More generally, intersectional theories “reject the notion that one particular form of

domination or social relation—be it race, class, patriarchy, or heteronormativity—is the

primary source of oppression.”16 While not denying the importance of categories such as

race, gender, class, or sexuality, proponents of intersectional frameworks insist that “what

makes a group is less some set of attributes its members share than the [class, gender, race,

nationality, religion, etc.] relations in which they stand to others.”17 As a consequence,

11 STROLOVITCH, supra note 2, at 25.

12 Mari Matsuda, Beside My Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory out of Coalition, 43 STAN. L. REV. 1183,
1189 (1991).
13 Id.
14 Id.
15 Id.
16 STROLOVITCH, supra note 2, at 23.
17 IRIS MARION YOUNG, INCLUSION AND DEMOCRACY 90, 100 (2000). Young is referring here most
specifically to the category of “women.” Applying Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of “seriality” to theorize
women’s structural position, she argues that the gender position of being a woman does not itself imply
sharing social attributes and identity with all those others called women. Instead, “women” is the name of a
series in which some individuals find themselves positioned by virtue of norms of enforced heterosexuality
and the sexual division of labor. Both the norms and expectations of heterosexual interaction and the habits
developed in certain social activities such as caring for children will condition the dispositions and affinities of
people, without constituting their identities.

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while acknowledging important inequalities that persist among racial, gender, or economic

groups, intersectional approaches “highlight the ways in which social and political forces

manipulate the overlapping and intersecting inequalities within marginal groups.”18 They

also emphasize the consequent unevenness in the effects of the political, economic, and

social gains made by marginalized groups since, and as a result of, the social movements

and policy gains of the 1960s and 1970s.19

These many forms of oppression and disadvantage are not static or rankable, and

they do not operate along single axes in simple or additive ways.20 Instead of functioning as

separate, fixed, and parallel tracks, they are at once dynamic and structural, and they create

cumulative inequalities that “define, shape, and reinforce one another in ways that

constitute the relative positions and opportunities of differently situated members of

marginalized groups.”21 For example, low-income women, disadvantaged both

economically and by gender, are an intersectionally disadvantaged subgroup of women and

of low-income people. The effects of these multiple forms of discrimination are

compounded, exponential, and unique products that are different from and far greater than

the sum of their parts, creating unique dimensions of disempowerment for differently

situated subgroups.22 Most central for analytic purposes, and, as I have written elsewhere, is

18 STROLOVITCH, supra note 2, at 23.

19 Leslie McCall, The Complexity of Intersectionality, 30 SIGNS J. WOMEN CULTURE & SOC’Y 1771 (2005).
20 STROLOVITCH, supra note 2, at 24.
21 Id.
22 Crenshaw, Demarginalizing, supra note 3, at 57.

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that because they are mutually constituted, specific forms of disadvantage and privilege

cannot be understood, much less addressed, in isolation.23

II. WHAT THINKING INTERSECTIONALLY HELPS POLITICAL SCIENTISTS SEE

As I have discussed at greater length in previous work, over the last several decades,

political scientists have trained intersectional lenses on analyses of marginalization in a

wide range of social, economic, and political realms.24 As a result of this work, we know a

tremendous amount about the constitution and effects of intersectional marginalization in

realms including public opinion, legislative politics, interest groups and social movements,

and public policy.25 Examinations that focus on a single axis or cleavage, such as race,

gender, union membership, poverty status, or sexuality continue to be the norm in political

23 STROLOVITCH, supra note 2, at 25.

24 See generally id.; Dara Z. Strolovitch, Intersectionality in Time: Sexuality and the Shifting Boundaries of
Intersectional Marginalization, 8 POL. & GENDER 386 (2012). See also McCall, supra note 19; Ange-Marie
Hancock, When Multiplication Doesn’t Equal Quick Addition: Examining Intersectionality as a Research
Paradigm, 5 PERSP. ON POL. 63 (2007).
25 See MICHELE TRACY BERGER, WORKABLE SISTERHOOD: THE POLITICAL JOURNEY OF STIGMATIZED
WOMEN WITH HIV/AIDS (2004); CATHY J. COHEN, THE BOUNDARIES OF BLACKNESS: AIDS AND THE
BREAKDOWN OF BLACK POLITICS (1999); SHARON KURTZ, WORKPLACE JUSTICE: ORGANIZING MULTI-
IDENTITY MOVEMENTS (2002); DARA Z. STROLOVITCH, AFFIRMATIVE ADVOCACY: RACE, CLASS, AND
GENDER IN INTEREST GROUP POLITICS 24 (2007) [hereinafter STROLOVITCH, AFFIRMATIVE ADVOCACY]; S.
LAUREL WELDON, WHEN PROTEST MAKES POLICY: HOW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS REPRESENT DISADVANTAGED
GROUPS (2011); Ange-Marie Hancock, When Multiplication Doesn’t Equal Quick Addition: Examining
Intersectionality as a Research Paradigm, 5 PERSP. ON POL. 63 (2007); Carol Hardy-Fanta, Pei-te Lien,
Dianne M. Pinderhighes & Christine Marie Sierra, Gender, Race, and Descriptive Representation in the
United States: Findings from the Gender and Multicultural Leadership Project, 28 J. WOMEN PUB. POL’Y 7
(2007); Mary Hawkesworth, Congressional Enactments of Race-Gender: Toward a Theory of Raced-
Gendered Institutions, 97 AM. POL. SCI. REV. 529 (2003); Evelyn M. Simien, Race, Gender, and Linked Fate,
35 J. BLACK STUD. 529 (2005); Wendy Smooth, Intersectionality in Electoral Politics: A Mess Worth Making,
2 POL. & GENDER 400 (2006); Dara Z. Strolovitch, Do Interest Groups Represent the Disadvantaged?
Advocacy at the Intersections of Race, Class, and Gender, 68 J. POL. 894 (2006) [hereinafter Strolovitch, Do
Interest Groups]; Erica Townsend-Bell, What is Relevance? Defining Intersectional Praxis in Uruguay, 64
POL. RES. Q. 187 (2011).

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science. However, intersectional scholarship in political science has provided strong

evidence that marginalization occurs along multiple intersecting and overlapping axes such

as gender and race and poverty.26 And because, as I have argued elsewhere,

intersectionality takes as one of its starting points the insight that marginalization is not

static, it is also attentive to the historical processes and contexts in which marginalization is

constituted.27 Intersectionally oriented research in political science has consequently served

also as an important corrective to what Paul Pierson calls “snapshot” analyses of the

political causes and consequences of marginalization, revealing a great deal about the

dynamic intersections between race, class, gender, and sexuality.28

These contributions of intersectional approaches in political science research also

underscore the crucial role of intersectionality’s epistemological origins and of the

importance of interdisciplinarity in studies of inequality. At their best, disciplines provide

angles or “ways in” to problems, giving scholars ways to position their scopes and structure

their conversations. From this perspective, boundaries and divisions can be helpful in trying

to bracket questions, isolate processes, make the scope of a question manageable, and focus

the lens in ways that enable us to examine some questions in detail. But disciplines and

their incentive systems can also interfere with our ability to bring the scope back out again

in order to study what we need to study to understand politics. Originating as it does outside

26 See supra note 25.

27 See Strolovitch, Do Interest Groups, supra note 25, at 896.
28 PAUL PIERSON, POLITICS IN TIME: HISTORY, INSTITUTIONS, AND SOCIAL ANALYSIS 48 (2004); see also
JULIE NOVKOV, RACIAL UNION: LAW, INTIMACY, AND THE WHITE STATE IN ALABAMA 1865–1964 (2008).

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of political science—mainly in critical race legal scholarship, ethnic studies, gender studies,

and sociology—and entering political science through political theory, intersectionality

exemplifies the intellectual vibrancy and critical political insights that can come from

transcending disciplines and engaging instead in interdisciplinary conversations. In

particular, its incorporation into political science has allowed political scientists interested

in race, class, gender, sexuality, and other axes of oppression and marginalization to engage

in conversations with scholars of race and gender from these other disciplines. In particular,

it has encouraged us to engage with scholars of legal studies, ethnic studies, and gender and

sexuality studies—disciplines in which theories and conceptualizations of categories such

as race, class, gender, and sexuality are typically more central, more incorporated, more

constructivist, and more nuanced.29

Intersectionality is not, by any means, the only example of the value of cross-

fertilization, but it is a particularly compelling one, encouraging empirically- and

quantitatively-oriented political scientists to question the implications of what it means to,

for example, operationalize “sex” as a biologically based, socially and politically

meaningful, and binary concept that can be controlled using what quantitative researchers

call “dummy variables.”30 Rather than treating race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and

29 See Hancock, supra note 24, at 64.

30 Dummy variables make it possible to manipulate nominal scale data (i.e. “qualitative” measures) as
independent variables as if they were interval scale data (i.e. “quantitative” measures) so that multiple
regression and other forms of quantitative analysis may be performed. Each category on a nominal scale is
assigned a dummy variable which can take only two values, 0 or 1. One category is “omitted,” and its value is

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the like as variables for which we can fully account by including them as variables in

multivariate analyses, intersectionality and related concepts ask that we treat the roles of

these and other forms of marginalization as constructions and formations that are

simultaneously foundational for and constituted by political, economic, and social

processes.31

At its most basic level, intersectionality is a shortcut articulation of something that

scholars across many disciplines have come to acknowledge—that inequality, like most

social, political, and economic phenomena, is complicated.32 Many scholars have also come

to acknowledge that inequalities are cumulative across time and space—both domestically

and internationally—as well as over economic, political, social, and cultural spheres of life

in ways that can rarely be isolated into single mechanisms or locations.33 And many have

also come to accept that categories such as race and gender are not constants that inhere in

nature but are instead constructed through social and political processes and contestations.

But while many scholars are sympathetic to and even persuaded by such claims, the

divisions of labor within the academy make it difficult to conduct research that addresses

that complexity and can instead create hurdles or impose costs on work that attempts to do

so, feeding a fragmentation in the ways in which we study power by fueling incentives to

represented by the intercept, which is the value of the dependent variable when all other variables are zero; P.
MCC. MILLER & M.J. WILSON, A DICTIONARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE METHODS 34 (1983).
31 See Hancock, supra note 24, at 70.
32 Id. at 64.
33 See Rita Kaur Dhamoon, Considerations on Mainstreaming Intersectionality, 64 POL. RES. Q. 230, 230–31
(2011).

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stay within narrow areas—to pick a “niche” or a “thing” and define “what we are.”34 These

incentives can, in turn, interfere with our ability to understand inequality, which

intersectionality suggests cannot be understood as uni-dimensional.35 That is, as Ange-

Marie Hancock explains, focusing on single causes leads to attempts to “treat multiple

diagnosis problems with a single magic policy prescription,” thereby creating a permanent

set of marginal groups who remain unaided by the proposed solutions.36

In this light, intersectionality's emphasis on the centrality—and the co-

constructedness—of multiple, dynamic, and enduring sources of inequality consequently

reminds political scientists about the pitfalls of trying to identify single, isolable causal

mechanisms for complicated inequalities. It reminds us that we cannot understand

American politics, economics, or society without foregrounding and connecting multiple

and co-constituted forms of inequality, oppression, and marginalization because they are

“deeply embedded in the basic fabric of American institutions, law, and legal thought.”37

To use an example that I have elaborated elsewhere, trying to understand and

address the effects of gender without taking race and class into account obscures many

issues that are unique to or that disproportionately affect disadvantaged subsets of women.38

Gender discrimination in the labor force, for instance, “intersects with other forms of

34 Hancock, supra note 24, at 69.

35 See id. at 70.
36 Id.
37 Paul Frymer, Dara Z. Strolovitch & Dorian T. Warren, New Orleans is not the Exception, 3 DUBOIS REV.
37, 42 (2006).
38 See STROLOVITCH, AFFIRMATIVE ADVOCACY, supra note 25.

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subordination based on race, sexuality, or class and cannot be effectively understood or

addressed without addressing all of these dimensions.”39 As such, if we treat the

concentration of low-income women of color in low-wage and unsafe jobs in the United

States purely as a function of gender discrimination, we ignore its racial, ethnic, and class

determinants.40 On the other hand, if we treat this concentration as a function solely of

racial discrimination, without acknowledging its disparate impact on men and women, “we

obscure the gendered nature of racial discrimination and class structures.”41 Both of these

possibilities lead to piecemeal, and therefore incomplete understandings of and inadequate

solutions to, “the many vulnerabilities that conspire together to create and reinforce one

another through these labor force inequities that concentrate some women, but not all

women, in jobs such as these.”42 Neglecting the multiple dimensions of this concentration

also obscures the ways in which “intersecting forms of domination produce both oppression

and opportunity” for differently situated subgroups such that more privileged women and

people of color might, in fact, benefit from or contribute to such inequalities.43

In my 2007 book Affirmative Advocacy, I show that such “single-axis” approaches

are quite common among the advocacy organizations that represent women, people of

39 See id. at 25.

40 Id.
41 Id. at 25–26.
42 Id. at 26 (emphasis omitted).
43 Maxine Baca-Zinn & Bonnie Thornton Dill, Theorizing Difference From Multiracial Feminism, 22
FEMINIST STUD. 321, 327 (1996).

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color, and low-income people in U.S. politics.44 Instead of working on issues affecting

intersectionally constituted concerns directly, officers at these organizations often assume

either that other organizations will address them or that representation for disadvantaged

subgroups will occur as a by-product of their efforts on other issues and that the benefits of

their other efforts will “trickle down” to intersectionally-disadvantaged constituents.45

When organizations do work on issues affecting intersectionally-disadvantaged groups, this

work tends to be more symbolic and less vigorous than it is when it comes to other issues.46

The net result of these dynamics is a paucity of attention to the issues that affect

intersectionally marginalized groups—and a great deal of attention to issues that affect

disadvantaged subgroups—by the interest groups that claim to speak for them.47 As a

consequence, the benefits of the policy gains made possible by their advocacy are

distributed unevenly among members of these groups, with members of constituencies who

are privileged “but for” one axis of disadvantage reaping the greatest benefits of their

efforts. Such disparities serve, in turn, to amplify many inequalities within the populations

represented by these organizations, further heightening stratification.48 Conversely,

organizations that demonstrate a commitment to an intersectional framework of

representational redistribution that I call affirmative advocacy are more likely recognize the

44 See STROLOVITCH, AFFIRMATIVE ADVOCACY, supra note 25, at 26.

45 Id. at 27.
46 Id. at 121.
47 Id. at 126.
48 Id. at 27.

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need to elevate issues affecting disadvantaged subgroups on their agendas and more likely

as well to advocate extensively and effectively on their behalf.49

CONCLUSION

Writing in the mid-twentieth century about the state of “pressure group politics,”

political scientist E. E. Schattschneider argued that through the process that he termed the

“mobilization of bias,” the concerns of weak groups were “organized out” of politics by

elites who manipulated the agenda toward their own interests.50 As a consequence, he

asserted, the interests of weak groups were not merely opposed but were actually excluded

from the political agenda.51 Taken together, the ways in which intersectionality promotes

interdisciplinarity and complicates our research about inequalities serves in turn to

“unmobilize biases” within political science.

A full consideration of the debts owed by political science to feminist and critical

race theory in general and to intersectionality in particular is, of course, impossible in this

short article. Instead, I hope that the abbreviated examination that I have offered here makes

clear some of the ways in which intersectionality’s interdisciplinarity has encouraged

political scientists who study inequality to engage new frameworks, to bring a critical

interdisciplinary lens to our research, and to push beyond single-axis analyses. In these and

other ways, intersectional approaches have led to deeper understandings about systems of

49 Id. at 10.
50 See SCHATTSCHNEIDER, supra note 1, at 30.
51 Id. at 35.

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marginalization and about the ways in which analyses and remedies that fail to address

issues and inequalities that fall between the “standard categories” of race, class, and gender

can serve to compound marginalization even as they may attempt to alleviate it.

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