Intersectionality Page 1 of 15 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy ). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 19 August 2015 Subject: Political Science, Comparative Politics, Political Theory Online Publication Date: Aug 2015 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199328581.013.20 Intersectionality Brittney Cooper The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory (Forthcoming) Edited by Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth Oxford Handbooks Online Abstract and Keywords Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, the term intersectionality has become the key analytic framework through which feminist scholars in various fields talk about the structural identities of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This chapter situates intersectionality within a long history of black feminist theorizing about interlocking systems of power and oppression, arguing that intersectionality is not an account of personal identity but one of power. It challenges feminist theorists, including Robyn Wiegman, Jennifer Nash, and Jasbir Puar, who have attempted to move past intersectionality because of its limitations in fully attending to the contours of identity. The chapter also maps conversations within the social sciences about intersectionality as a research methodology. Finally, it considers what it means for black women to retain paradigmatic status within intersectionality studies, whether doing so is essentialist, and therefore problematic, or whether attempts to move “beyond” black women constitute attempts at erasure and displacement. Keywords: intersectionality, race, class, gender, neoliberalism, black women, black feminism In the nearly three decades since black feminist legal scholar and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality, a host of debates within feminist theory have ensued about what the term means, the breadth of its intellectual history and genealogies, and the scope of its political possibility. Though intersectionality has taken on a kind of “citational ubiquity” (Wiegman 2012) in academic circles, giving the sense that “everyone” does intersectional work, there seems to be less agreement about what exactly intersectionality is and a growing sense that despite its expansive academic reach, the framework does not sufficiently attend to a range of critical questions. In this chapter, I provide both an overview of Crenshaw’s articulation of intersectionality and a sense of the broader genealogies of black feminist thought from which it emerges. I map the most significant recent arguments against intersectionality in the work of three feminist theorists: Jennifer Nash, Robyn Wiegman and Jasbir Puar. I then attend to the work of theorists who take up intersectionality as a kind of feminist methodology and consider whether this approach solves the problems attributed to intersectional approaches. Intersectionality emerged in the late 1980s as an analytic frame capable of attending to the particular positionality of black women and other women of color both in civil rights law and within civil rights movements. It is the most visible and enduring contribution that feminism, and in particular black feminism, has made to critical social theory in the last quarter century. Coined and elaborated by Crenshaw in a pair of essays published in 1989 and 1991, the term intersectionality asserted an analytic frame that disrupted the tendency in social-justice movements and critical social theorizing “to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis (Crenshaw 1989).” In “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” Crenshaw exposed the problems of this “single-axis” analysis when set against the backdrop of “the multidimensionality of Black women’s experiences.” “This single-axis framework,” she argued, “erases Black women in the conceptualization, identification and remediation of race and sex discrimination by limiting inquiry to the experiences of otherwise-privileged members