The Concept of Intersectionality

(Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy, Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader, and Alison Stone,
editors)
by Tina Fernandes Botts
By turns a research program, a description of personal identity, a theory of oppression, a
counter-hegemonic political agenda, a symbolic antidote to mainstream (liberal) legal theory,
and a critique of the methods and practices of mainstream philosophy, the concept of
intersectionality (or simply intersectionality) wears many hats. The concept is at the center of
much contemporary research in the social sciences and humanities, is the fulcrum around which
contemporary feminist theory and practice rotates, and is at the same time systematically ignored
by mainstream philosophy.
As a research program, the concept of intersectionality is pervasively deployed in the
social sciences and the humanities, and stands for the proposition that no phenomenon is
adequately researched or understood without factoring in the ways in which socialized identity
markers like race, gender, sexuality, ability status, and class interact and affect the phenomenon
being researched (McCall 2005). As a description of personal identity, intersectionality disrupts
the idea that personal identity can be described in terms of neat, mono-linear, timeless categories
(See, e.g., Shrage 2009; Levine-Rasky 2013; Botts 2016; Garry 2011). As a theory of
oppression, intersectionality represents the idea that forms, modes, or axes of oppression (such
as race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability status) overlap and fuse in the lives of the oppressed,
resulting in an account of oppression that highlights its complexity and its resistance to being
addressed through means that focus exclusively on one form, mode, or axis of oppression or
another (See Crenshaw 1989, 1991). As a counter-hegemonic political agenda, intersectionality
is a call to remember the oppositionality that originally motivated intersectional analysis (Bilge

2013) as well as the concepts roots in radical women of color feminism (Gines 2014; Waters
2014). As a symbolic antidote to mainstream (liberal) legal theory, intersectionality is a practical
call to the complex legal and social needs of the oppressed, including a suspicion that
mainstream jurisprudence cannot meet those needs adequately (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall
2013). And finally, as a critique of the methods and practices of mainstream philosophy,
intersectionality calls the discipline of philosophy to take account of its European, androcentric,
and white biases as a rudimentary first step toward opening its curricular and conceptual vista to
the myriad ways of knowing and being the discipline currently systematically excludes from the
realm of legitimate knowledge and reality claims (Goswami, ODonovan, and Yount 2014).
The aim of this chapter is to examine the evolutionary trajectory of the concept of
intersectionality, with the goal of shedding light on both its centrality to contemporary feminist
work and its anomalous absence from mainstream philosophizing. To accomplish this aim, first
a genealogy of the concept will be developed, after which contemporary articulations of the
concept will be considered. After that, critiques and controversies surrounding the concept will
be explored, followed by an inquiry into the future of the concept.
Genealogy
While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact starting point for any concept, the concept of
intersectionality can be traced back at least as far as nineteenth century black feminist thought
(Gines 2014). For nineteenth century black feminists, race, gender, and class oppression
operated in tandem to oppress black American women in the post-Civil War era in unique ways.
For example, Maria Stewart was concerned with the exploitation of young black women in the
labor force, noting that many white womens hands had not been soiled, nor their muscles
strained in similar ways; Sojourner Truth interrupted representations of woman as exclusively
2

white and of black as only male; and Anna Julia Cooper identified that black women were
simultaneously impacted by racism and sexism, while at the same time unacknowledged as
agents in the examination or elimination of these forms of oppression (Ibid., 14-17). By focusing
on the ways in which race, gender, and class overlapped to generate a distinctive form of
oppression experienced by black women, nineteenth century black feminists set the stage for the
concept of intersectionality (Ibid.)
First formally theorized in the 1950s, the social science research method known as
multivariate analysis (or multilinear regression analysis) has also contributed to what we now
call intersectionality. Multivariate analysis is a way of analyzing social problems that utilizes
multivariate statistical methods (Randolph & Myers 2013). Multivariate analysis involves the
examination of several interrelated statistical variables at the same time, including the causal
effects of some variables on other variables (Anderson 1958). Based on the idea that social
problems are more complex than traditional statistical methods are able to accommodate,
multivariate analysis stresses the interrelatedness between variables and within sets of variables
(Ibid.). Historically, most applications of multivariate research methods were in the behavioral
and biological sciences, but recently interest in multiviariate methods has spread into many other
fields (Rencher 2012). At least to the extent that the concept of intersectionality acknowledges
the interrelatedness of seemingly disparate variables that affect research outcomes, multivariate
analysis is at work in the concept.
The critical legal studies movement also influenced the evolution of the concept of
intersectionality. An intellectual movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s that stood for the
proposition that there is radical indeterminacy in the law, a theoretical precursor to what became
known as critical race theory, and conceptually based in the critical theory of the Frankfurt
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School, critical legal studies stood for the idea that legal doctrine is an empty shell. There is no
such thing as the law, on this view (Binder 999: 282). For the Crits, the liberal ideal of the rule
of law devoid of influence from power differentials was an illusion. The disconnect the Crits
saw between the law and its efficacy arguably laid the groundwork for what later became known
as critical race theory and, after that, outsider jurisprudence.
In the late 1980s, several legal scholars of color began explicitly interrogating the ways in
which the law and mainstream legal theory appeared to ignore and disregard the lived
experiences of African Americans, particularly the ways in which African Americans were
uniquely affected or ignored by the law. The main question for these scholars, whose work came
to be known as critical race theory, was how to achieve racial justice in a society teaming with
systemic racism. The starting point for all of these theorists was that a given culture constructs
its social reality in ways that promote its own self-interest. This means denying the rights and
realities of those whose very existence challenges that self-interest; for example, persons of
color. One goal of these scholars was to confront the presuppositions upon which the racist
institutional structures of American society have been built. The ultimate goal was to create new
realities, new structures, and new laws in which the rights of African Americans could be
satisfactorily addressed. The work of Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Kimberl Crenshaw,
Randall Kennedy, and Patricia J. Williams were early examples of this movement in legal
scholarship (Bell 1987; Crenshaw, et al. 1996; Delgado & Stfancic 2012; Kennedy 1998;
Williams 1992).
Within this context, legal theorist Kimberl Crenshaw first used the term
intersectionality to highlight the experiences of black women in particular with the American
legal system (Crenshaw 1989). For Crenshaw, race and gender discrimination combined on the

bodies of black women in a way that neither race discrimination nor gender discrimination alone
captured or addressed. Crenshaws point was that ignoring race when taking up gender reinforces
the oppression of people of color, and anti-racist perspectives that ignore patriarchy reinforce the
oppression of women (Crenshaw 1991, 1252). But, more specifically, taking up any form of
oppression in a vacuum ignores the way that oppression actually works in the lives of the
oppressed. For the law to help combat oppression, it must grapple with the complexities and
nuances of the lived experience of oppression. Intersectionality is alive and well in critical race
theory today, operating as the key theoretical fulcrum around which it rotates (See, e.g., Cho,
Crenshaw, and McCall 2013; MacKinnon 2013; Walby, Armstrong, and Strid (2012); Walby
2007). To the extent that the intersectional frameworks central to critical race theory have been
expanded to avenues of oppression beyond race, gender, and class (including sexuality, ability
status, and other marginalized identity markers), these ideas have come to be subsumed under the
title outsider jurisprudence, the key idea of which is that the law does not well accommodate
the complexities of human difference (Delgado 1993).
Queer theory is another area of inquiry that has had significant impact on the concept of
intersectionality. An interdisciplinary way of thinking about personal identity, the human
experience, sexuality, knowledge, and politics that is rooted in work of Michel Foucault, Judith
Butler, and Eve Sedgwick, among others, queer theorys focus is inquiry into the perceived
difference between natural and unnatural (sexual) identities and acts (Turner 2000; Jagose 1996;
Foucault 1978; Butler 1990; Sedgewick 1994). Motivating queer theory is the debunking of
stable (sexual) identities in favor of understanding identity as a conglomeration of unstable
identities. Queer theory has been characterized as a precursor to contemporary intersectionality
theory in the sense that it has the power to wrench frames (Duong 2012, 371); that is, queer

theory, like intersectionality theory, is world-making (Ibid., 378), defined as capable of

producing schemas of reality that are beyond preconceived (metaphysical and epistemological)
sense-making mechanisms. Queer worlds, thus defined, transcend conventional notions of
personal identity and politics to create room for countercultural (sexual) practices, ways of being
in the world, and alternative accounts of phenomenological experience (Halperin 1990; Ahmed
2006). Such a vision of personal identity is central to the concept of intersectionality.
Postmodern theory, another key influence on the concept of intersectionality, focused
around skepticism regarding modernitys narratives of universalism. Having its start in the
1970s and gaining prominence in the 1990s, postmodern theory denies the existence of one,
universal, objective truth or reality in favor of a multiplicity of realities and ways of knowing.
Postmodernism holds that there are no grand narratives or metanarratives that accurately
describe the world, only micronarratives. In other words, there is only the particular for the
postmodernist, not the universal. And there are only stories about the world, no objective world
itself (Lyotard 1984; Hassan 1987; Benhabib 1995; Butler 1995). At the core of postmodern
theory is a profound antirealism that implicitly posits a world (or anti-world) beyond categorical
description.
Hermeneutic ontology can also be said to foreshadow intersectional themes. Contained
in the hermeneutical concepts of being-in-the-world and being-with-others, a core idea of
hermeneutic ontology is that things are what they are as a result of how they pragmatically
operate in the world (Heidegger 1999; Heidegger 1962). This characterization of the nature of
reality is at odds with traditional presumptions about a separation between mind and body that
allows, for example, a subject to stand back from an object and make an assessment about what
it is. From a hermeneutical point of view, such a process is nonsensical. Instead, to navigate the
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terrain of that which is, it is necessary to understand that the persons and things within what we
call reality, are world disclosing. In other words, what things are and what they mean (or in
the case of human beings, who they are) tell tales about the varied and complex ways in which
persons and things act on, and are acted upon by, each other and the world. This is particularly
the case with regard to phenomena such as race and gender, mired as they are in the messy
realities of our corporeal world (Botts 2014). Such an interpretation of (human) identity lies at
the core of the concept of intersectionality, calling the researcher to take sober account of the
wide array of factors affecting the lived experience of a given social agent.
Standpoint epistemology has arguably had one of the strongest influences on the concept
of intersectionality. While mainstream epistemology understands its objective as the pursuit of
justified true belief (code for so-called objective knowledge), standpoint epistemology begins
with the idea that all knowledge claims are (at least) gendered and, on closer inspection, drawn
from, bear the marks of, and perpetuate structures of power and privilege that are sustained as
much by racial, class, religious, ethnic, age, and physical ability differentials as they are by a
sex/gender system that could be discretely and univocally characterized (Code 1998: 174). For
the standpoint epistemologist, in other words, the business of knowledge production is
necessarily political. Within this context, standpoint theories take as their starting point the
material-historical circumstances of female lives (Ibid.: 180). According to standpoint theorists,
the minute, detailed, strategic knowledge that the oppressed have had to acquire of the workings
of the social order just so as to be able to function within it can be brought to serve as a resource
for undermining that very order (Ibid.). The concept of intersectionality can be understood to
have taken from this framework its focus on the experience of oppression of the marginalized
knower.

Within the realm of continental ethics, the work of Emmanuel Levinas in the twentieth
century in many ways presaged the concern for the radical alterity of the other inherent in the
concept of intersectionality. For Levinas, our encounter with the alterity of others (that which
makes them different from ourselves) is an ethical call to acknowledge the complexity of the
human experience (Levinas 1969). For Levinas, the Enlightenment focus on identity, sameness,
and the individual subject reflects an extreme neglect for the other that is indicative of a deep
neglect of the ethical. For Levinas, then, the traditional focus on the importance of
epistemology and metaphysics in Western philosophy must accordingly be abandoned in favor of
an ethics of alterity that places epistemology and metaphysics at the bottom of the priority list,
rather than at the top (Levinas 1987). In practice, this would seem to mean focusing on the
ethical needs of others qua others, which, in the case of the oppressed, means understanding their
oppression as it is experienced by them, and taking whatever steps are morally necessary based
on that understanding.
Finally, there are themes in care ethics that have had clear impact on the concept of
intersectionality. Care ethics, in its appreciation for context and its insistence that others should
be taken on their own terms, challenges mainstream ethical inquiry which blindly applies rules or
principles to facts without regard to the unique particularity of those facts, and without regard for
the alterity of the others affected by the ethical decision. From the vantage point of care, the
utilitarian focus on the greatest good for the greatest number and the Kantian focus on duty, just
to name two examples, both miss a key aspect of a satisfactory approach to morality: care, or a
concern for the welfare of the specific moral patient before one rather than an appeal to abstract
principle (See, e.g., Noddings 2003; Held 1995; Jaggar 1992).

Contemporary Articulations
Whatever its origins, the concept of intersectionality is at the center of an ever-growing
field known as intersectional studies that some scholars characterize as an analytic
disposition, that is, a way of thinking about and conducting analyses (Cho, Crenshaw, and
McCall 2013, 785). For these scholars, what makes an analysis intersectional is its adoption of a
particular way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to
power (Ibid., 795). There is much scholarship on the scene that self-consciously adopts the
concept of intersectionality as its analytic disposition.
For example, Priscilla Ocen has suggested that applying intersectional analysis to black
women in prison could have a liberatory effect as yet unexplored (Ocen 2013). Focusing on
legal scholarship, Ocen has pointed out that although black women are the fastest growing
segment of the prison population, they are largely invisible in mass incarceration discourse
(Ibid., 474). She cites the handling of prison rape, medical services, and reproduction concerns
in prison as examples of this intersectional fissure. In the case of prison rape, mainstream
feminist legal scholarship, according to Ocen, fails to account for the ways in which the
construction of black women as sexually available influences the forms of violence imposed
upon black women in prisons. In terms of medical services, the same feminist legal scholarship
focuses on access to abortion rather than the ways in which black women have been historically
punished for exercising their reproductive capacities.
Similarly, Tricia Rose uses the concept of intersectionality to confront head-on what she
calls the invisible intersections of colorblind racism (Rose 2013). Through deconstructing the
case of Kelly Williams-Bolar, an African American single mother from Akron, Ohio who in
2011 was arrested, charged with a felony, and jailed for sending her two daughters to a
9

predominantly white suburban public school in Copley Township without meeting the towns
residency requirements, Rose self-consciously deploys the classical critical race theory method
of storytelling to generate outrage and concern over a clear and unambiguous example of why
the concept of intersectionality is uniquely suited to explain and address the oppression
experienced by black women in the United States of America in the 21st century.
The concept of intersectionality is frequently deployed in contemporary inquiries into the
transgender experience. Julie Nagoshi, Stephan/ie Brzuzy, and Heather K. Terrell recently used
the concept, for example, to interview eleven self-identified transgender individuals about their
definitions of, understanding of the relationships between, and perceptions of their own gender
roles, gender identity, and secual orientation (Nagoshi, Brzuzy, and Terrell 2012). What was
revealed was that all of the participants viewed gender roles to be social constructs, viewed
gender identity as fluid, and viewed gender itself in a way that transcended both essentialist,
traditional ideas and the social constructionist views of feminist and queer theories (Ibid.).
Citing transgender theorists like Katrina Roen and Surya Monro (Roen 2001; Monro 2000),
Nagoshi et al. highlight that through an intersectional lens, transgenderism can be understood
more as transgressing the gender binary than as a story about physically transitioning from one
gender category to another. The concept of intersectionality is at work in this analysis, through
the focus on the lived experiences of transgender people as the starting point for the research.
The field of disability studies is heavily infused with intersectional inflections. For
example, Alfredo J. Artiles has recently approached racial inequities in special education through
analysis of the problem through an intersectional lens (Artiles 2013). Noting that within the
educational system, both racial minorities and disabled learners have complicated and
politically charged histories linked to assumptions of deficit often used to justify inequities
10

(Ibid., 329), Artiles highlights that remedies for one group can have deleterious consequences for
the other, thus muddling the effects of well-intentioned justice projects (Ibid.). Artiles
provides the example of a double bind that is created when disabled students of color seek to
obtain benefits under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Although a disability
diagnosis is often beneficial to covered students, in practice there is a disproportionate diagnosis
of disability in students of color, further compounding the structural disadvantages that each
group has historically endured.
Feminist philosophy engages with the concept intersectionality primarily at the meta level;
that is, with notable exceptions, feminist philosophers tend to engage in defenses and critiques of
the concept, rather than taking a more hands-on approach to the subject (See, e.g., Dotson 2014,
Garry 2011, Zack 2005, Lugones 2003). Feminist philosophers who see a window through
which to theorize anew socialized difference tend to defend the concept; while those who see it
more as an ideological plaything that accomplishes little to combat oppression tend to critique it.
The most popular defense of the concept is that it can operate as a vehicle through which
differences among and between women, and groups of women, can finally be theorized and
addressed satisfactorily. Some popular critiques of the concept are that (1) it contains no clear
theory, (2) it contains no clear method, (3) it is too focused on black women, (4) it has been
disturbingly appropriated by white feminism to the detriment of black feminism, (5) it is
vacuous, (6) it is a disturbing form of identity politics, (7) the concept has an ontological
problem that cannot be surmounted.
In addition, within feminist philosophy, intersectionality has recently developed a
metaphilosophical strain that operates as a statement on the ineffectiveness of traditional ways of
doing philosophy. Notorious for excluding information coming in from the lived realities of
11

members of marginalized, oppressed, and subjugated groups from the systems and structures of
philosophical knowledge production on the grounds that these realities are insufficiently
universal to count as philosophically relevant, intersectionality theory has recently been
deployed in an attempt to disrupt the business-as-usual dismissiveness of mainstream
philosophy. The claims to knowledge-access and production of persons other than white, cisgendered, heterosexual, able-bodied, property-owning males, insist thinkers who use
intersectionality theory in this way, are legitimate claims; and if philosophy is to truly seek
wisdom, it should open itself up to include the knowledge production of those historically
excluded from the philosophical canon (Goswami, ODonovan, and Yount 2014, 1).
For example, Kristin Waters is concerned with mainstream philosophys summary
dismissal of intersectionality as a topic worthy of consideration (Waters 2014). Given that
research guidelines, codes of ethics, and institutional review boards place restrictions on studies
that do not include representative populations, as well as the fact that both private and public
funding agencies in the United States (such as the National Science Foundation and the National
Institutes for Health) are hesitant to finance research restricted to select populations, particularly
those that occupy dominant positions of power, Waters argues, philosophys rejection of the call
to implement intersectional research methods is self-deception at best and bad faith at worst.
Waters paints a picture of philosophy, borrowed from critical philosopher of race Charles Mills,
in which whiteness is central to philosophys self-conception (Waters 2014, 28; Mills 2013).
The result, for Waters, is that common topics often assumed not to be raced or gendered may
reveal themselves to be so under close scrutiny (Waters 2014, 33).

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Critiques and Controversies

In recent years, along with immense popularity within the social sciences, the humanities,
and feminist scholarship more broadly, the concept of intersectionality has elicited much
criticism.
The charge has been levied, for example, that intersectionalitys claim that the social
world is beyond categorization inherently entails that combatting the oppression is an exercise in
futility (Ludvig 2006; Sengupta 2006; Russell 2007). These thinkers raise the question of how
exactly the responsible intersectional researcher can or should go about addressing oppression if
not through each axis of oppression, one at a time.
The concept of intersectionality has also been charged with lacking clarity as to the scale
of its applicability (Gimenez 2001; Razack 2005). Does the concept apply to structural and
institutionalized oppression or does it apply to the lived experience of oppression of individuals
or both? (See Collins 2000; Davis 2008). If both, then just exactly how would the responsible
intersectional researcher go about doing that?
Similarly, to the extent that intersectionality grapples with intergroup, and not intragroup,
oppression, some charge the concept with being necessarily reduced to additivity (Yuvul-Davis
2011; Cole 2008). Moreover, some are concerned that the concept simply cannot deliver on its
promise of inclusion, generating, as it does, a seemingly infinite number of micro-groups leading
to a fragmentation among women that undermines the achievement of common goals (Zack
2005).
Still others are concerned that intersectionality has been systematically depoliticized by
mainstream academic feminism through the calibration of intersectionality with neoliberal
knowledge production (Bilge 2013). For these thinkers, restricting feminist engagement with
intersectionality to metatheoretical contemplation or understanding intersectionality as the
13

product of (white/mainstream) feminism are counterproductive for intersectionalitys original

purposes. Sirma Bilge uses the examples of SlutWalks and the Occupy Movement to develop
this concern. Bilge reports that during an October 2011 NYC SlutWalk at least two young white
women carried placards reading: Woman is the N* of the world (referencing a John Lennon
and Yoko Ono song and using the complete racial slur). Similarly, the Occupy Movements
motto (Occupy) re-enacts colonial violence and disregards the fact that, from the indigenous
standpoint, those spaces and places it calls for occupation are already occupied (Ibid, 406). On
this view, to the extent that intersectionality is deployed within the context of neoliberal political
agendas, it is robbed of its power due to the inability of neoliberalism to speak a complex
language of diversity (emphasis in original) (Ibid., 408). In order to get back to the root aims of
intersectionality, on this view, the task at hand for feminist work is to counteract this trend by
encouraging methods of debate that reconnect intersectionality with its initial vision of
generating counter-hegemonic and transformative knowledge production, activism, pedagogy,
and non-oppressive coalitions (Ibid).
Finally are those who are concerned about what they see as the flippant and nonsubstantive way that intersectionality has been brought into mainstream feminist theorizing. For
these thinkers, this mass appropriation of the concept has brought into the light of day the fact
that intersectional identity and intersectional oppression are not side issues in feminist work but
rather lie at the very core of it (Carastathis 2014). Problematically, according to Anna
Carastathis, intersectionality has come to play a role in the historical construction of white
feminist moral identity which has been historically focused on benevolence and innocence
(Ibid., 68). Citing Sarita Srivastava, Carastathis points out that some of the deadlocks of
antiracist efforts are linked to white feminist preoccupations with morality and self (Ibid.;

14

Srivastava 2005). The observation is that often when white feminists are challenged on their
stance of non-racism, they reply defensively and with emotional resistance. Anger, tears,
indignation and disbelief are common reactions, reactions that can be summed up in the
defensive question, Youre calling me a racist? (Srivastava 2005). Carastathis point is that
such defensive posturing often serves to impede personal and organizational change: [T]he
problem is that discussions about personnel, decision-making, or programming become derailed
by emotional protestations that one is not a racist and by efforts to take care of colleagues upset
by antiracist agendas, (Cararastathis 2014, 68). Intersectionality is often used, in these
contexts, says Carastathis, to diffuse moral anxieties about racism, and to project an ethical white
feminist self (Ibid.).
Carastathis concludes that intersectionality reassures white feminists that they have not
become obsolete or superfluous in what is heralded as a new feminist paradigm that decenters
them and centers women of color (Ibid.). Meanwhile, white, liberal feminists motivated by the
internalization of egalitarian values to appear non-racist have also internalized a systemic
racism, which influences their implicit, unconscious and automatic attitudes, of which they are
typically unaware or unreflective (Ibid., 69). One result is that the reification of the concept of
intersectionality as the guarantor of inclusion and diversity may actually impede meaningful
engagement with the lived experience of oppression itself, and with women of color feminisms
(Ibid.). In this way, to the extent that mainstream (white) feminism purports to speak for women
of color feminisms, the ethical and epistemological issues raised by the concept of
intersectionality can remain unresolved. Here, Carastathis cites Linda Martn Alcoff, [T]he

15

impetus to always be the speaker must be seen for what it is: a desire for mastery and
domination (Ibid.; Alcoff 1991-1992: 7).
Future of the Concept
Here, early in the 21st century, the concept of intersectionality has a lot on its plate. The
concept lies at the core of contemporary feminist theory and practice, and stands for many
different things at once. The concept is (or includes) by turns a research program, a description
of personal identity, a theory of oppression, a counter-hegemonic political agenda, and a
symbolic antidote to mainstream (liberal) legal theory. In feminist philosophy, the concept
operates primarily as a vehicle through which to critique mainstream philosophy, charging it
with a Eurocentric, white, gendered, heteronormative, cis-gendered, classist bias that is both out
of step with standards for scholarly research programs in most other related disciplines, but also
undermines and meaningful knowledge production in a disturbing and pervasive way.
Moreover, for many, the concept of intersectionality is so vague and amorphous that
attempts at pinning down a methodology or modus operandi for it have proven almost
impossible. While the concept calls on scholars, thinkers, and seekers of social justice to
proactively include considerations of race, gender, sexuality, ability status, class, and other
socialized identity markers into their programs, the concept provides little or no guidance on just
how that process should take place.
Nonetheless, when one digs into specific examples of intersectional analysis at work, the
lesson of intersectionality is clear: As regards the lived experience of oppression, the responsible
approach to addressing that oppression is through attendance to the multiple modes of oppression

16

that may be at work in the given oppressed person before one, particularly as regards the ways in
which the various modes of oppression may operate in tandem so as to overshadow each other.
So, it seems that if the concept of intersectionality is to have longevity, its focus may
have to stay on specific applications; that is, it may be best to avoid abstract discussions about
whether intersectionality can work conceptually and focus on attending to the particular needs of
the specific oppressed person(s) at hand. If the concept of intersectionality has any lasting
lesson, in other words, it may be that the key to combatting oppression is a radical openness to
the other. In practice, this would mean, at a minimum, consultation with the particular victim of
oppression herself for clues as to what exactly the problem is and what she thinks should be done
about it.
In keeping with this train of thought, Tina Chanter has suggested that if we are to achieve
the ostensible goals of intersectional analysis (for example, combating the essentializing and
otherwise limiting epistemological frameworks for analyzing oppression rooted in
Enlightenment thought), it may be necessary to get beyond intersectionality as an abstract
ideal and back into the specific particularities of the individual lives of the oppressed (Chanter
2014). As the history of antiracism within feminist struggles has shown, in other words, the
masters tools -- in this case abstraction -- will never dismantle the masters house (Lorde 1984).
Accordingly, since a radical openness to the other seems to be at the heart of the concept
of intersectionality, it should be no surprise that the concept has not found a home in mainstream
philosophy. With mainstream philosophys focus on abstraction, the making of distinctions,
universal principles, endless categorization, and the fetishization of the objective, in a sense
mainstream philosophy cannot hold a concept as amorphous, fluid and subjectively grounded as
intersectionality within its tightly held grasp, a grasp forever attempting to impose order and

17

structure on a world (including multivariate personal identity and oppression forms) that is
arguably far more complex and unstable than the boundaries of the discipline can accommodate.
However, intersectionalitys necessary incompatibility with mainstream philosophy need
not bode its imminent demise. On the contrary, mainstream philosophys failure to acknowledge
its Eurocentric, androcentric, homophobic, white biases arguably says more about mainstream
philosophys prospects for survival than about the survival prospects of intersectionality. For
intersectionality is not a theory, nor an epistemological paradigm, nor a fantastical metaphysical
fantasy designed to reinforce its own privileged status in the Western intellectual hierarchy.
Instead, it is a sober acknowledgment of the epistemological, metaphysical, ethical and political
value of the lived experiences of the vast majority of human beings on the planet (who are not
white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, and wealthy). Posterity will decide which is more
valuable and has more endurance.

WORD COUNT: 5225 words

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Further Reading
Alarcn, Norma (1995) The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and AngloAmerican Feminism in Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and
Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, Gloria Anzalda, ed., San Francisco: Aunt
Lute Books, pp. 356-369.
Brooks-Higginbotham, Evelyn (1989) The Problem of Race in Womens History, in Coming
to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics, Elizabeth Weed, ed., New York: Routledge, pp.
122-133.
Combahee River Collective, A Black Feminist Statement, The Combahee River Collective in
Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, Beverly GuySheftall, ed., New York: New Press, pp. 232-240.
Espiritu, Yen Le, Race, Class and Gender in Asian America, in Making More Waves: New
Writings by Asian American Women, Elaine H. Kim, Lila V. Villaneuva, and Asian
Women United of California, eds., Boston: Beacon Press Books, pp. 135-141.
Grande, Sandy (2003), Whitestream Feminism and the Colonialist Project: A Review of
Contemporary Feminist Pedagogy and Praxis, Educational Theory, 53:3.
Hartstock, Nancy (1998) The Feminist Standpoint Revisited, And Other Essays, Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Lorde, Audre (2016) There is No Hierarchy of Oppressions, UC San Diego LGBT Resource
Center online publication, https://lgbt.ucsd.edu/education/oppressions.html.
Mohanty, Chandra (1991), Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial
Discourses in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Chandra Mohanty,
Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 5180.
26

Ngan-Ling Chow, Esther, (1987) The Development of Feminist Consciousness among Asian
American Women, Gender and Society, 1:3, pp. 284-299.
Pateman, Carole and Charles Mills (2007) Contract and Domination, Cambridge: Polity Press.

27

Related Chapters
7

Social Contract Theory

10

Black Womens Intellectual Traditions

12

Phenomenology

12

The Sex/Gender Distinction and the Social Construction of Reality

12

Essentialism

17

Border Identities

22

Ignorance and Epistemic Injustice

29-36 Intersectional Themes

43

Care Ethics in International Context

47

Postcolonialism and Multiculturalism

48

Neoliberalism and Global Justice

49

Structural Injustice and Responsibility

50

Latin American Feminist Ethics and Modernity

56

Philosophy of Law

28

Biographical Note
Tina Fernandes Botts is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Fresno.
She has a J.D. from Rutgers University, a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Memphis,
and is the editor of Philosophy and the Mixed Race Experience, Lexington Books, 2016.

29