PATRICIA HILL COLLINS SYMPOSIUM The Transnational Journey of Intersectionality HAE YEON CHOO University of Toronto Black Feminist Thought is grounded in the experiences of African American women yet it does not stop there. . . . I also hoped that my ideas would travel beyond U.S. borders, not as yet another American export to the rest of the world, but rather as part of the beginnings of a dialogue with similarly subordinated groups in a global context as well as all those who wish to build vibrant, multiethnic societies. Patricia Hill Collins (2009), in the preface to the Korean translation of Black Feminist Thought What happens when Black Feminist Thought travels beyond the borders of the United States? What elements are necessary for the creation of a cross-border dialogue about intersectionality? In this essay I chart the book’s journey from the perspective of a junior sociologist who both participated in this travel as a translator and strives to utilize intersectional theory and frameworks in a transnational context. I am honored to share what the scholarship of Patricia Hill Collins has meant to me and fellow diasporic feminist researchers who are “outsiders within” North American academia. Furthermore, I discuss the process of translating and publishing Black Feminist Thought in South Korea, and offer my thoughts about bringing intersectional and transnational feminist analyses into a fruitful dialogue with one another. My initial encounter with Collins’s work occurred during my first semester as a graduate student in sociology at the University of Wisconsin– Madison. I was assigned to read Collins’s article on the significance of Black feminist thought (1986), along with the work of Chandra Mohanty, in the required sociological theory course—although only in the final week, which focused on “non-canonical” theory. I was immediately struck by the article’s encouragement to learn to “trust [one’s] own personal and cultural biographies as significant sources of knowledge” (Collins 1986, 529). After that first encounter, “When in doubt, read Collins” became my 40 GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 26 No. 1, February 2012 40-45 DOI: 10.1177/0891243211426724 © 2012 by The Author(s)