Considering intersectional theorizing

Bourdieu’s tools provide an: “astute guide in helping to identify the complex social processes implicated in intersecting axes of inequality (class, race and gender)” (Dillabough 2004: 491). Bourdieu’s interdisciplinary approach, inflected in part through feminist theory, holds out the perspective of moving beyond cultural (re)production theories that draw on a single explanatory factor (ibid: 492). Therefore, there is a strong argument for analyzing the interplay of gender, class and ethnicity and many social theorists have used intersectionality

in their work.42 _{I will now briefly analyse the strengths and weaknesses of}

intersectionality, considering how each category is foregrounded at different times or depending on the field of interaction. It is not my intention to combine or merge a Bourdieusian framework with intersectionality, though Bourdieu’s theoretical tools have been synthesized in other works regarding theories of learning (cf. Lachicotte 2009). Intersectionality has overlaps with all sociological theory and I prefer to think of it as intersectional questioning of the data rather than intersectional theorizing of the data.

80 Intersectionality, as an epistemology, theoretical construct, methodology or hermeneutic, is innately about power, inequality and identity. Intersectionality embodies “how to analyse and understand differences,” both inter-group and intra-group differences (Phoenix 2010b). Intersectional theorizing can bring either class, gender and ethnicity to the fore depending on the field. Intersectionality stems from wider shifts in identity analyses where new research presents identity as fragmented, discursive, hybridized and global under the banners of poststructuralism, postmodernism, performativity and queer theory (Wetherall and Talpade Mohanty 2010). Since its inception, intersectionality has focused on multiple axes of inequality and multi-layered stories, but the term itself is problematic, particularly since ‘section’ contradicts the main goal of intersectionality, which is to break down sections or categories (Anthias 2010; Braun 2010). Michelle Fine (1997) argues that our analyses cannot persist: “‘as if’ races/ethnicities were distinct, separable, and independent rather than produced, coupled, and ranked” (64). Scholars such as Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1983), Gilroy (1987) and Skeggs (2002; 2004b) have shown how identities are experienced in different identity categories: “such that gender is always lived in the modalities of ethnicity and class, nationality in the modalities of gender and race, and class in the modalities of gender and nationality” (Prins 2006: 278). Interestingly, when separating out the advantages and disadvantages of using intersectionality in research, it becomes apparent that its strengths and weaknesses – as with any sociological theory – are deeply intertwined.

Beginning with Crenshaw’s analysis of the experiences and struggles of women of colour, intersectionality is concerned with how theorists take ‘categories of difference,’ or power differentials, and show how they interact or become entangled with one another (Crenshaw 1991). As an approach, intersectionality has come to represent people always simultaneously positioned in many categories so that there is no essence to any category (Phoenix 2010a: 303). Davis (2008) writes how intersections refers to the interaction between gender, race, and other categories of difference in individual lives and also: “the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power.” (68) Considering intersectionality as a tool, Lykke writes how it can be used to:

81 analyze how historically specific kinds of power differentials and/or constraining normative, based on discursively, institutionally and/or structurally constructed socio-cultural categories such as gender, ethnicity, race, class, sexuality, age/generation, dis/ability, nationality, mother tongue and so on, interact, and in so doing produce different kinds of societal inequalities and unjust social relations. (2011: 50)

Within these socio-cultural categories, Lykke notes, theoretical frameworks will – to varying extents – centre around binaries of: “dominance/subordination, possession/dispossession, privilege/lack of privilege, majoritizing/minoritizing and so on” (Lykke 2011: 50) that define the ways people experience their daily lives in terms of: “inclusion and exclusion, discrimination and disadvantage, specific aspirations and specific identities” (Yuval-Davis 2006: 198). Intersectionality considers the:

interlinking grids of differential positionings in terms of class, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, ability, stage in the life cycle and other social divisions, tend to create, in specific historical situations, hierarchies of differential access to a variety of resources – economic, political and cultural. (Yuval-Davis 2006: 199)

In her work on intersectionality, McCall (2005) has devised three approaches to the study of intersectionality which illustrate that different methodologies produce different kinds of knowledge and a wider range of methodologies are required to fully engage with topics falling under the heading of intersectionality (1774). First, anticategorical complexity which considers social life to be irreducibly complex, multiple and fluid and any effort toward fixing categories is ultimately counterproductive. Second, intercategorical complexity requires research to provisionally adopt existing categories in order to document: “relationships of inequality among social groups and changing configurations of inequality among multiple and conflicting dimensions” (1773). And thirdly intracategorical complexity involves scholars attempting to focus on particular social groups at neglected points of intersection: “in order to reveal the complexity of lived experience within such groups” (1774). McCall argues that these approaches are on a continuum with much overlap. It is debatable whether intersectionality should be limited to understanding individual experience,

82 collective experience, theorizing identity or if it should be considered merely an effect of larger shifts in social structures and the acceptance of post-structuralism. Intersectionality, I would argue, is not an approach; it is rather the questioning of too narrow an approach.