Abstract
Intersectional analysis is an important theoretical contribution to sociology and is increasingly relevant beyond gender studies. As stressed in this book, intersectionality is not a clear-cut concept that can be applied readily. In fact, the different authors apply fairly diverse definitions depending on their theoretical framework, overall argument and empirical aim. For the majority of contributions, definitions and uses of the concept sit well, but for the reader it would have been helpful had the diversity across papers been better explained – not to remove the concept from its specific national and historical contexts, but to provide the reader with a clear idea about the possibilities and limits of intersectional analysis in general. After reading the book, I am still not sure what intersectional analysis really is and – perhaps more importantly – what it is not.
Framing Intersectionality is part of the series ‘The Feminist Imagination – Europe and Beyond’ edited by Kathy Davis and Mary Evans and based on a conference held at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany in 2009. The book is particularly useful for scholars already familiar with feminist theory and intersectional analysis, but anyone can with ease read the first chapter of the collection. It was a joy to re-read Crenshaw’s classic paper from 1989, which so clearly addresses the unique experiences of black women and discusses how to look beyond the prevailing conceptions of discrimination to obtain inclusion of marginalized groups. For some unexplained reason, however, the version in this book has been shortened, which is a shame as the original version is better.
The book is in three parts. Davis provides insightful discussion about the usefulness of intersectionality in the second chapter of Part 1: ‘Intersectionality’s Transatlantic Travels: Geographies of the Debate’. She ascribes its success to ‘The concept’s very lack of precision and its myriad [of] missing pieces’ (p. 51), arguing that intersectionality, with its lacking framework and guidelines, is opening up the complexity of the world(s) around us. Davis’s intriguing analysis could very well have framed the entire collection. In the third chapter, Ferree develops a dynamic model of political discourse, arguing that the framing of political terms such as rights, security, power and democracy is the product of historical struggles that intersectional inequality is part of. She argues convincingly that intersectional analysis will never be a simple list of oppressions, but rather feminists’ active struggle to engage in the framing processes of inequality.
While the book opens expectedly focused on theoretical understandings of intersectionality, the theme of the next part – ‘Emerging Fields in Intersectionality: Masculinities, Heteronormativity and Transnationality’ – surprised me. I would at this point have expected to read empirical contributions demonstrating the feminist ground covered by state of the art intersectional analysis. By emphasizing new territories for intersectional analysis, however, the next five chapters demonstrate that intersectional analysis is not alone a feminist concept, but one developing into a more general sociological concept. The chapters addressing masculinity, in particular, provide new insights.
In chapter four, Bereswill and Neuber use the image of Mikado sticks (on the book cover) to discuss intersectionality theoretically, and although well founded I am left wondering how intersectionality was – or can be – used in their empirical work on the relative marginalization of young men in prison. In the fifth chapter, Hearn discusses how intersectional analysis can overcome the limitations of ‘hegemonic masculinity’. He argues that one should study not only the intersections of class, ethnicity, racialization and sexuality, but also intersections of age(ing) and disability as well as dimensions of virtuality and transnationality. According to Hearn, these dimensions have been absent not only in intersectional analysis, but also in studies of masculinity more generally.
It was a pleasure to read Zarkov’s case-based analysis in chapter six, which integrates empirical findings and theoretical reflections. Studying sexual violence against men in former Yugoslavia and Abu Ghraib, she reveals how this kind of practice is actively producing ethnic groups and gendered understandings in ‘specifik geo-political times and spaces’ (p. 116, italics original). In chapter seven, Kosnick turns to migration studies and argues that although the visibility of specific intersections (here migrant ethnicities and ‘queer’ sexualities) may be positive at a personal level, the political consequences may be exclusion. Chapter eight, by Phoenix, discusses how adults who have different shades of skin colour from their parents experience their childhood. Not surprisingly she finds that their experiences are not alone grasped by including the ‘Big Three’ categories of gender, class and race in the analysis, but that ‘age, nation, locality, historical period and household cultural practices’ (p. 148) are equally relevant intersections in the process of identity work.
The third part – ‘Advancing Intersectionality: Potentials, Limits and Critical Queries’ – is the last part of the volume. Yuval-Davis introduces this by pointing to the shortcomings in existing theories of intersectionality and stratification, advocating for a mode of analysis sensitive to the creation of social categories as dependent on both individual and aggregate social and historical contexts. In chapter 10, Villa critically examines the usefulness of intersectionality when looking at complex bodily practices, in this case Argentinean tango. She argues that instead of adding more categories and more intersections of categories to the analysis, we need to de-ontologize categories and look at how practices are interpreted by the actors themselves. Villa thus delivers the most thought provoking paper in the book.
The following chapter by Knapp is highly complex in its theoretical discussion of the role of intersectionality in sociology. She argues that intersectional invisibility cannot be captured adequately by social-psychological theories and that intersectionality needs to be theorized as part of general social theory (Gesellschaftstheorie). Intersectionality, she writes, must be ‘embedded in the historical constitution of the capitalist system of utilisation’ (p. 201). In chapter 12, Lykke continues with the question whether intersectionality is really a useless black box. Using Butler’s works as an example, she finds that intersectionality is useful as a concept for social analysis, but that we have ‘to learn from previous ways of theorising intersections’ (p. 218) if we are to create more sophisticated analytical tools and not fixed definitions.
Finally, Crenshaw closes the collection with a postscript in which she shares her reflections on both the conference and the state of intersectional analysis by addressing the roots and history of the concept. She argues that there is not one concept or one theory of intersectionality, and that we should resist moves towards standardization. She ends with the statement: ‘Intersectional analysis may take us down many roads, but we will only discover what it is by using it’ (p. 233). According to Crenshaw, the quality of intersectional analysis is thus found by means of doing intersectional analysis and not in pre-described understandings of what the concept is or must be.
I learned a lot from reading Framing Intersectionality, but it was not until I stopped reading it as a coherent book with integrated chapters and instead thought of it as a collection of papers that I began to appreciate the individual contributions. Although all chapters address intersectionality, they are in my opinion too dissimilar to suit the format of a book. The contributions do not really combine or relate to one another and one contribution does not lead naturally to the next, the result being that I was overwhelmed with impressions and ideas about intersectional theory and analysis, but left with little coherent knowledge of the concept. In my view, the contributions would have been better appearing as articles in a special issue of an international journal.