Relations of difference: Power and inequality in intersectional and postcolonial feminist theories

Intersectionality

Intersectionality research has its roots in the feminism of black women and other women of color, which could never restrict its critical analysis to a single axis of differentiation, or to a single aspect of inequality – a case in point being the well-known 1977 Combahee River Collective statement that ‘racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression … are interlocking’ (Combahee River Collective, 2000: 272). ² In recent years, the field has broadly expanded. Since Kimberlé Crenshaw – a critical legal theorist and anti-discrimination legislation specialist in the United States – introduced the term ‘intersectionality’ in an essay published in 1989 (Crenshaw, 1989), this term has informed intense theoretical, methodological, and empirical work that increasingly transcends the original group-based orientation and seeks intersectional interpretations of policies, social dynamics and practices, social and political structures, and the like (cf. Clarke and McCall, 2013; Hancock, 2007a; Lykke, 2010; Weldon, 2008). ³ This expansion has gone hand in hand with intersectional insights moving from the margins of feminist studies to their center; a move that has been decidedly welcomed (cf. Davis, 2008; Lutz et al., 2011), but also problematized (cf. Carastathis, 2013a; Mirza, 2015: 3ff.; Puar, 2011; Rendtorff, 2008). ⁴ As Gail Lewis has noted, there is ‘a deep anxiety traceable in the reception of, and debates about, intersectionality that have arisen as it has traveled from the feminism that black women and other women of color have fashioned in the United States, via the feminism forged by black women and other women of color in Europe, and into the wider community of feminist scholarship’ (Lewis, 2013: 873). According to her, this anxiety did not stem from intersectionality as a research paradigm per se, but from the way it was employed and discussed in this wider community. It was an anxiety traceable particularly among ‘women who might claim to be among intersectionality’s central empirical subjects’ (Lewis, 2013: 873), namely black women and other women of color in Europe; and it was related to the perception that the way the intersectionality paradigm is used and discussed, or rather the topics it is being employed to address, often seemed ‘too distanced from the lived circumstances of women in all their diversity across Europe,’ due to ‘displacements contained in these debates … around the question of race’ (Lewis, 2013: 883). On a similar note, Umut Erel, Jin Haritaworn, Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, and Christian Klesse have stated their ‘dissatisfaction with the silencing of the knowledge production and political activisms of trans people of colour, queers of colour, women of colour and migrant women in the UK and Germany,’ which they claim has happened in the course of the travel of the concept of intersectionality between these two countries (Erel et al., 2011: 56). Sirma Bilge even speaks of ‘the whitening of intersectionality’ in this regard (Bilge, 2013: 412). To both Bilge and to Erel and her co-authors, such strategies of silencing and whitening signify a depoliticization of the intersectionality discourse.

If we look at these voices of concern with the current state of intersectionality scholarship closely, two distinct aspects come into view. One aspect is discomfort with the shift of much intersectionality research away from radical social critique and activism. The other aspect is discomfort with its transcendence of group-based approaches – namely its delinking from the feminism of black women and other women of color. Obviously, it is impossible to make any assessment of these shifts that is not in itself highly political – and therefore always likely to be contested. Nevertheless, most people might agree that a move away from radical social critique and activism almost naturally, and thus almost inevitably, implies a tendency towards depoliticization. But I hold that this is not necessarily the case with regard to the transcending of group-based approaches, to the shifting of intersectionality research from a focus on particular, multiply marginalized social groups to intersectional assessments of political processes and constellations in a general sense. Such shifts can indeed be seen as highly problematic examples of decentering the experiences of precisely those people who initially began the entire intersectional endeavor. On the other hand, they might also be a promising step towards being able to use its important insights for critical research in fields that had previously been untouched by it. Which of these two applies, cannot be answered on a general basis, but instead calls for critical evaluations of post group-based accounts one by one. In this light, I would like to present two social science adaptations of intersectional insights that I consider promising rather than problematic. The first is Leslie McCall’s seminal article ‘The complexity of intersectionality,’ in which she distinguishes what she calls anti-, intra- and intercategorical approaches to intersectionality and embraces the latter for conducting research on wage inequalities (McCall, 2005). The second is Iris Marion Young’s essay ‘Structural injustice and the politics of difference,’ which offers a critical theory approach to the relation of different forms of difference and injustice (Young, 2009). Since its publication, McCall’s article – or rather her distinction of three discrete approaches to intersectionality – has been widely quoted and referenced and can be seen as exemplary for the integration of intersectional insights into quantitative inequality research, and thus into the social science mainstream; Young’s essay, by contrast, attempts to anchor intersectional concerns in the field of political and social theory. Her position so far remains at the fringes rather than within the core canon of intersectionality scholarship – possibly since, due to her untimely death in 2006, she was unable to contribute further to the field. I hold that Young’s position contains insights that point the way ahead regarding the potentials of post group-based, yet decidedly movement-oriented approaches to intersectionality; compared to McCall’s position, it furthermore supplements the latter’s predominantly methodological concerns with decidedly theoretical considerations.

In McCall’s definition, intersectionality refers to ‘the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relations and subject formations’ in order to overcome ‘the limitations of gender as a single analytical category’ (McCall, 2005: 1771). The focus of her account is clearly not on marginalized social and political actors and their struggles, but rather on research categories – on the question of which categories are chosen for a particular study, and how these categories are employed.

In order to systemize and to evaluate such category usage within the broad field of intersectional research, McCall introduces the aforementioned distinction between anti-, intra- and intercategorical approaches. According to this distinction, anticategorical approaches are concerned with the homogenizing, essentializing, and excluding effects of common analytical categories, and thus challenge them by employing methods such as genealogy, deconstruction, and ethnography. Intracategorical approaches, by contrast, are critical of ‘broad and sweeping acts of categorization’ rather than of ‘categorization per se’ (McCall, 2005: 1779). They subdivide common categories in order to focus on complexities within given social groups. Therefore, of the three approaches, they relate most closely to the group-based, or, in Ange-Marie Hancock’s terminology, content-based beginnings of intersectional analyses in black and women of color feminism (Hancock, 2007a: 249). Intercategorical approaches, finally, assess the complex relations among multiple social groups. They do not presuppose the nature of such relations, but empirically study ‘whether meaningful inequalities among groups even exist in the first place’ (McCall, 2005: 1785). The focus of this approach is on ‘relationships among multiple social groups within and across analytical categories’ (McCall, 2005: 1786). It must be stressed, however, that the aspects of relationality that come into play here are restricted to the results of complex comparisons of group distinctions – for example with regard to income. Taking McCall’s own empirical work as an example, intercategorically intersectional studies of income inequality would examine, for instance, the income gaps among various subgroups distinguished by gender, class, and ‘race’ in different types of economies (in her case high-tech manufacturing, immigrant, postindustrial, industrial) to be able to make claims about the exact types of wage inequalities that can be found in such differing economies. McCall’s main finding is that ‘heavily unionized blue-collar cities with a recent history of deindustrialization such as Detroit exhibit relatively modest class and racial wage inequality among employed men but elevated gender wage inequality and class inequality among employed women (relative to average levels of wage inequality in the United States as a whole). In contrast, a postindustrial city such as Dallas exhibits the opposite structure of inequality – it is marked more by class and racial inequality than gender inequality’ (McCall, 2005: 1789). McCall uses such findings to at least briefly suggest type-of-economy specific policies to reduce these differing types of wage gaps, and writes: ‘deindustrialized regions are ripe for comparable worth and affirmative action approaches to reducing earnings inequality, whereas in postindustrial and immigrant-rich regions, more universal and non-gender-specific strategies (e.g., minimum- and living-wage campaigns) may be more appropriate’ (McCall, 2005: 1790).

What I find noteworthy about this account is that despite its clear transcendence of any focus on a specific marginalized group, such as black women and women of color, and despite its relatively narrow focus on income gaps, which are in fact only one among several noteworthy aspects of contemporary forms of inequality, it can hardly be accused of diverting attention away from patterns of discrimination and privilege and from political struggle. Going decidedly beyond a single aspect of differentiation – for instance, that between men and women – when researching wage gaps, McCall does not merely increase the complexity of her results in comparison with non-intersectional studies on income disparities. Going even further, she is able to deduce a refined set of policy suggestions from the complex scenario she provides. Therefore, I would be hesitant to claim that her post group-based research necessarily goes in the wrong direction of silencing those who should instead be amplified, or even of depoliticizing the entire field – for, in fact, it might contribute to decreasing wage gaps. Nevertheless, it is also telling that McCall does not address power in its own right when employing intersectional methodology.

Iris Marion Young examines issues of intersectionality not with a particular methodological interest in quantitative research on inequality, like McCall, but with an interest in theorizing structural forms of injustice beyond the liberal, difference-blind equality paradigm, and in thinking about suitable ways of redressing these. Like most other intersectionality theorists, Young explicitly addresses issues of ethnic and ‘racial’ inequality, as well as of gender inequality; furthermore, she focuses on issues of dis/ability. But instead of merely interrogating the categories involved in these issues (as proponents of the anticategorical approach would do), or of focusing on how these issues subdivide common categories such as abled and disabled, men and women, or blacks and whites (as the intracategorical approach would suggest), and furthermore in contrast to intercategorical comparisons of the differences between such subgroups, Young chooses another path – one that transcends, thereby also revealing the limitations of, McCall’s influential taxonomy. Deliberately thinking from a social movement perspective, Young differentiates between politics of positional difference that concentrate on issues of structural inequality, and politics of cultural difference that are mainly concerned with matters of freedom (Young, 2009: 275).

With regard to the politics of positional difference, social groups are conceptualized as ‘constituted through interactions that make categorical distinctions among people in hierarchies of status or privilege’ (Young, 2009: 275). Redress requires the recognition of group differences and a reworking of these differences – be it by means of compensation for disadvantage, by a revaluation of attributes that members of particular social groups are faced with, or by other means of empowerment and meeting special needs. For Young, a paradigmatic case of such structural forms of inequality and injustice is disability; but she also discusses institutional racism and gender inequality under this rubric (Young, 2009: 276).

Politics of cultural difference, by contrast, refer to liberal concepts of multiculturalism and address forms of injustice arising in societies that are diverse in terms of ethnicity, nationality, or religion, but do not sufficiently accommodate different ethnic, national or religious groups’ practices and cultural expressions – politics of cultural difference address issues concerning the public recognition of ethnic, national, and religious diversity in liberal societies (Young, 2009: 285).

According to Young, both approaches – the politics of positional difference and the politics of cultural difference – are important and complement one another. Nevertheless, she criticizes the latter approach on three grounds: first, for underplaying structural forms of injustice such as racism; second, for being too state-centered and therefore neglecting the role of civil society with respect to the enactment and redress of injustice; and third, for relying too much on notions of toleration. As an effect of the latter, politics of cultural difference would reproduce problematic dominant social norms, rather than challenge them. According to Young, this happened particularly when gender relations were employed to differentiate between a supposedly liberal, gender-equal ‘us,’ and a decidedly more sexist ‘them’ (Young, 2009: 289ff.).

Apart from this last insight, which describes a discursive and political move that has been critically addressed within postcolonial theory since Frantz Fanon’s famous essay on the politicization of the veil in colonial Algeria (Fanon, 1967: 35–67), Young’s focus is not on the ways in which forms of inequality interact with one another, on how they might intertwine at the structural and institutional level; nor is it on how different disadvantaged groups might possibly interact. Rather, she offers an account that combines insights and demands from single-axis social movements in order to link and combine them on the theoretical level. By suggesting the distinction between politics of positional difference and politics of cultural difference, she allows us to better understand what is at stake in the demands of these movements, and to better assess political and social theories that address injustice and forms of possible redress. And I claim that Young is able to do so precisely because she abstains from prioritizing the concerns of particular social movements over those of others, but instead looks at the logics that determine a whole range of such movements. By her deliberate attempt to analytically detach from specific disadvantaged groups, which enables her to avoid sidelining the claims of other such groups, she manages to provide us with a differentiated tableau of similarities, but also of differences among such claims. Considering that current interventions in the intersectionality debate are often focused on stressing that particular categories and problems have been (becoming) underrepresented and merited more attention – be it ‘race’/blackness (cf. e.g. Bilge, 2013; Lewis, 2013; Tomlinson, 2013), faith (cf. e.g. Smiet, 2015; Weber, 2015) or postcolonialism/transnationalism, the latter to undo the debate’s domestic and Euro-American bias (cf. e.g. Patil, 2013; Puar, 2011; Purkayastha, 2012) – Young sets out with the assumption that all categories and problems addressed by emancipatory social movements need to be acknowledged and theorized. She is far from endorsing a post-racial agenda, or from considering a particular concern with black women’s marginality as outdated, and thus as something that should be overcome – both of which are concerns that Jennifer Nash (2014) has put forward with regard to the current state of post group-based approaches to intersectionality. It is true that Young decentralizes not only gender, but also ‘race.’ But this is not in an attempt to replace these founding categories of intersectional reasoning, but rather in an attempt to supplement them. This theoretical decision does not prevent her from critically assessing different ways of meeting the claims that different social movements put forward. So we can say that not entirely unlike McCall, yet on a decidedly different level, Young’s post-content account sheds critical light on political goals and practice – and thus should be characterized as a turn towards politics, and not as a turn away from it. Against this backdrop, I hold that the limits of both accounts – namely, the lack of a direct engagement with power relations and interactions among political activists – need not (and should not) lead us to rejecting them, or to assessing them as inferior, for instance vis-a-vis intersectionality’s inaugural texts. ⁵ Rather, such accounts have their own approach – which might prove problematic only when it becomes the only game in town concerning matters of multiple, intersecting differences.

Nonetheless, the limitations of these accounts merit further consideration – which I would like to begin by addressing how they conceptualize, or at least refer to, relations of difference. To begin with, it can be stressed that both authors – but McCall much more so than Young – focus on different categories and the effects such categories (as well as the acts and processes of categorization that go with them) have on the societal position of individuals. In doing so, they draw on categories and refer to social groups that are commonly seen as politically relevant, and that therefore precede any intersectional study. The principal aim of both accounts is to enhance complexity and inclusiveness in research on gender, inequality, and injustice – precisely by addressing various difference categories and their effects in conjunction. Gender, as a research and difference category, is thereby both fragmented and decentered.

It must be noted that both authors also refer to relations among social groups. Nevertheless, when McCall assesses relations, she merely compares group distinctions – it is numbers and figures that relate, rather than individuals or social groups that interact. Furthermore, due to the nature of the research she is engaged in, McCall’s comparisons and assessments of relations are always quantifiable. She can give detailed accounts of wage gaps between two given groups, but she must remain silent with regard to more subtle power relations through which these two groups may be connected. Iris Marion Young, for her part, focuses on ‘relations of privilege and disadvantage where some people’s opportunities for the development and exercise of their capacities are limited and they are vulnerable to having the conditions of their lives and action determined by others without reciprocation’ (Young, 2009: 283). But she, too, is more interested in the gaps among social groups that arise in such relations, and in suitable ways of closing such gaps, than in the complex interactions that members of groups differing in such a way have, or might have, with each other.

With their focus on relations of categories and of inequality, McCall and Young are far from alone in the field of current intersectionality theory. In fact, this focus is shared by several other authors, as well. Thinking about the most suitable ways in which intersectionality scholarship should best conceptualize the conjunction of the differences it focuses on, Lena Gunnarsson (2015) has for instance argued in favor of a dialectical view on the issue of whether the basic difference categories employed by intersectionality scholars are separable or inseparable. Evelien Geerts and Iris van der Tuin (2013: 177) have criticized the fact that many intersectional theories lack a profound analysis of power, and try to make up for this shortcoming by drawing on a new materialist notion of interference, which according to them offers us precise case studies that can show how power is ‘intrinsically out of phase with itself.’ Maria Carbin and Sara Edenheim (2013), finally, have problematized the fact that due to the openness of the concept, intersectionality seems to resonate with structuralist, poststructuralist, as well as with social constructivist varieties of feminist scholarship. They have further claimed that this has led to an easily achieved consensus among feminist scholars that intersectionality is a concept one could and should embrace, and they criticize the fact that this consensus has drawn attention away from both inner-feminist theoretical discord and from a critical approach to capitalism. As thought-provoking and important as such interventions might be, they share a focus on the need for better, and more accurate, theorizing of intersectionality in order to provide us either with more precise accounts of categorical relations, or with an answer to the question of what should be considered part of the debate and what should not. None of these authors primarily reflects upon interactions of differently positioned actors who try to undo, or at least to diminish, intersectional entanglements of differentiation, inequality, and power. ⁶ The same can be said for the numerous attempts at designing intersectional research methods (cf. endnote 3). And I claim that it even holds for the debate on who owns, and who should own, current intersectionality scholarship, and thus about whether the success of the concept has led to a positive transformation of gender research, or has instead been an expropriation, and a dilution, of radical ideas by the feminist establishment. Still, in these debates the main focus is on which content, and whose primary political concerns, get taken up in current intersectionality scholarship. As the next section attempts to show, this is different in postcolonial feminist theories – at least with regard to some of the major voices in this field.

Postcolonial feminist theory

Postcolonial studies critically assess the ways in which legacies of colonialism, as well as forms of neocolonialism and imperialism, inform and shape our postcolonial world. Despite the tremendous range of this academic field, and considerable differences within it, I hold that postcolonial studies share three primary concerns. First, they acknowledge that the global, postcolonial world as we know it is in fact the result of historical processes. This implies assessing, and taking seriously, the influences of European colonialism on current forms of political, social, and economic structures, as well as on current patterns of thought; it also implies the need to consider, and to study, contemporary re-actualizations of colonialism and imperialism. In doing so, postcolonial studies oppose all attempts at de-historicizing and naturalizing – for instance, by means of ethnicization – forms of life or any other state of affairs. This applies particularly to the Global South, to the world regions that have a long tradition within Euro-Atlantic thought of being de-historicized, naturalized, and thus fixed.

The second major concern of postcolonial studies is a focus on global entanglements and connections, both historically and currently (cf. Bhambra, 2007; Randeria, 1999). With this, assumptions and accounts of autonomous developments are challenged, not only, but particularly in Europe. Postcolonial studies thereby counter both modernization theories that locate the motor of world history exclusively in Europe, and notions of multiple modernities that do, in fact, acknowledge formations of high civilization outside of Europe, but nonetheless stress predominantly autonomous processes of the respective emergence of these modernities. Third, postcolonial studies critically assess and address North–South power relations and asymmetries. In doing so, they explicitly focus on discursive aspects, thus differing from some of the former materialist accounts of world affairs, insights of which are gradually being reintroduced into postcolonial studies; thus, one can say that, particularly since the ‘materialist turn’ in the field (Procter, 2007: 173), postcolonial studies attempt to look at discursive, material, and – in particular – economic aspects of global power relations in conjunction. ⁷ Postcolonial feminist theories concentrate on the gender aspects of these issues, as well as on the challenges that they create for the political project of global feminism. It is due to this approach that postcolonial feminist theories are more globally and more historically oriented than most positions put forward within current intersectionality research. Over the last several years, core topics have included the role of gender and sexuality with regard to colonialism, its legacies and re-actualizations; the instrumentalization of (queer-)feminist claims to colonial and imperial aims; representations of non-Western women, including within Western feminism itself; agency and resistance of non-Western women; the implications of postcolonial feminism for practical considerations in fields such as gender and development, pedagogy, or research ethics; debates on subalternity and on indigeneity; and finally female diaspora subjectivities in the metropoles, particularly concerning intersections of gender, culture, and faith, as well as the interplay of sexism, racism, and anti-Islamism – the latter not only, but particularly, with regard to debates on the veil and the headscarf (cf. e.g. Andersen et al., 2015; Lewis and Mills, 2003; Narayan and Harding, 2000; Ozkazanc-Pan, 2012; Rajan and Park, 2000; Schutte, 2007). It almost goes without saying that it is the last topics mentioned that resonate, and actually overlap, most with current intersectionality research. In this section, however, I will not concentrate on these overlaps. Rather, I will focus on the divergences between the two fields, and therefore turn towards the more transnational themes of feminist postcolonial theory. These themes have been put forth with unsurpassed clarity in the by now classic texts of Chandra Mohanty and Gayatri Spivak, two of the most influential postcolonial feminist theorists with transdisciplinary reach. As I will attempt to show, the work of both authors is not only highly insightful as such, but furthermore contains valuable theoretical impulses for the current debate on intersectionality: namely their take on relations, the decidedly relationship- and interaction-oriented mode that characterizes their addressing of differences among women. The following considerations are driven by the conviction that despite the classic status of texts by these authors, these impulses have not yet been (sufficiently) taken up in the debate on intersectionality.

To start with Mohanty, I claim that a relationship-oriented mode shapes her work in a double sense – a problematizing, and hence negative, sense and a political action-oriented, and thus positive, sense. The negative one is most clearly formulated in her famous essay ‘Under Western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses,’ which later became the opening piece of her monograph Feminism Without Borders (Mohanty, 2003). In this essay, Mohanty critically analyzes Western feminist scholarship on the Global South and takes issue with occidentalist representations of ‘Third World women’ that she finds there. She problematizes three representational strategies. First, a notion of ‘women’ as a coherent, homogeneous, pre-social group with common concerns and interests, which furthermore translates into concepts of gender and gender relations that are assumed to be universally and cross-culturally applicable. Second, uncritical methods of providing supposed ‘proof’ of universality and cross-cultural validity, like a hasty arithmetic (‘the greater the number of women who wear the veil, the more universal is the sexual segregation and control of women,’ [Mohanty, 2003: 33]) or the lack of contextualization. Finally, and as an effect of the former two aspects, homogenizing assumptions of female oppression, which lead to the notion of an average ‘Third World woman’ who is sexually constrained by her gender, and who is seen to be poor, uneducated, ignorant, traditional, etc. because she is from the ‘Third World’ (Mohanty, 2003: 21ff.). Mohanty holds that such images are in stark contrast with Western feminist self-representations as free, educated, and modern; and she problematizes what she identifies as an ‘inadequate self-consciousness about the effects of Western scholarship on the Third World in the context of a world system dominated by the West’ (Mohanty, 2003: 21ff.).

As an alternative method of conducting scholarship, a method that avoids the representational problems just mentioned, Mohanty suggests what she calls ‘careful, politically focused, local analyses,’ which refrain from applying pre-given notions of ‘women’ and ‘female oppression’ to ever new contexts, and from over-generalizing their results (Mohanty, 2003: 32). This implies studying the local specifics of what at first sight might appear to be universal patterns and problems. Aspects as diverse as female genital cutting, marriage, dependency and family arrangements, the sexual division of labor, religious practices, and the gendered effects of the economy should be interpreted and theorized within specific societies and contexts – in order to be able not only to fully understand them, but also to effectively work towards changing them.

Concerning such political activism, it is important to stress that Mohanty is far from opposing transnational feminist practices. Nevertheless, and in line with her critique of representational practices in ‘Under Western eyes,’ she is highly critical of the homogenizing concept of global sisterhood. In an essay she wrote on the politics of experience, she decidedly takes issue with that concept for implying transcultural correlations of experiences, perspectives, interests, and the political goals of women. To Mohanty, such thinking is strongly reductive – which is why in place of sisterhood, she prefers strategic coalitions that acknowledge internal differences, power relations, and conflict. Mohanty holds that experiences of women are influenced by more components than solely femaleness – and that due to frictions between different influences and loyalties, these experiences would often be discontinuous and fragmented (Mohanty, 2003: 122). With regard to a global feminist project, she furthermore insists that it should not restrict itself to antipatriarchal struggle. Instead it is ‘the current intersection of antiracist, anti-imperialist and gay and lesbian struggles which we need to understand to map the ground for feminist political strategy and critical analysis’ (Mohanty, 2003: 120) – in more recent texts, she has added anticapitalist and anti-neoliberal forms of critique to this list. ⁸

In contrast to many (inequality-oriented) intersectionality scholars, Mohanty clearly names and problematizes power relations between different subgroups of women: Western feminists (throughout the world) on the one hand, and so-called Third World women on the other hand. It is important to note that she does not conceptualize these power relations as something merely determined by factors that are external (e.g. structural) and thus precede them – which is a path one may choose in comparisons of different actors’ power as a resource, stemming, for instance, from access to education, or to the public sphere. Mohanty does not seem interested in undertaking such comparisons when she looks at differences, however. As stated above, she is interested, rather, in relations in the sense of relationships and interactions. Thus, when she critically stresses the discursive power of Western feminist representations of women in the Global South as Third World women, the power dynamic she is focusing on is part of the relation she puts center stage. It must once more be noted that this relation is not restricted to this power dynamic; it also has another, a positive side. For Mohanty also discusses, further and in considerable detail, alternatives to the global sisterhood concept, and thus decidedly focuses on modes of transnational feminist solidarity that are both inclusive and attentive to differences; on cross-border dialogue and activism; and on transnational coalitions of left struggles.

To apply the vocabulary stemming from the intersectionality scholarship sketched out above, Mohanty might be said to start off from an intracategorical position. She does not remain at this point, however, but rather challenges it in four ways. First, she stresses the plurality of women in the Global South, and thus further subdivides what, in her opinion, appears in much Western feminism as a homogeneous female subgroup, or a unitary collective figure: the Third World woman. Second, she counters the orientalist – and thus occidentalist – assumptions according to which this figure is structured. Third, she reminds us of the power mechanisms and potential ethical problems which accompany all acts of representing someone, or something, different from oneself – and thus introduces certain anticategorical (or rather, categorization-critical) sensibilities. Finally, and most importantly, she deliberately transcends what we might want to call intracategorical identity politics – any representation of supposedly common interests of a supposedly homogeneous subgroup of feminists. Instead, Mohanty is interested in possibilities of dialogues across differences, even though – and particularly because – she holds such dialogues to be linked with conflict and pain. So for her, I argue, the truly challenging matters are not the merely academic questions of how intersections of differences can best be theorized and studied, nor the fight to make one’s own group’s (marginalized) voice adequately heard in the louder and louder concert of intersectional scholarship – as important as such tasks may be. For Mohanty, the real challenge is how to transform relations of difference into relationships of solidarity; or, in her own words, ‘how to engage in ethical and caring dialogues (and revolutionary struggles) across the divisions, conflicts, and individualist identity formations that interweave feminist communities’ (Mohanty, 2003: 125).

Similar questions drive the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who in her famous essay ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ addresses some of the challenges of such dialogues. Spivak employs the Gramscian term ‘subaltern’ following the usage of Ranajit Guha from the Indian Subaltern Studies Group, who defines it as ‘an identity-in-differential,’ as an ‘irretrievably heterogeneous’ social group embracing everyone who does not belong to the dominant groups in society (Spivak, 1988: 284). According to Spivak, both in the context of colonial production and of its displacement – the international division of labor – the subaltern cannot speak (Spivak, 1988: 287). By this she does not mean that individuals belonging to this social group lack the ability to voice their concerns. Instead, she means that they are not heard, that they are hardly taken seriously – because the Western discourse does not care about members of the subaltern classes, and does not reckon with complex self-representations on their part. Among her examples for this constellation is the codification of Hindu law by the British in colonial India, particularly the colonial reinterpretation of the rules for the so-called ‘widow sacrifice.’ When the British abolished this practice in 1829, they represented this abolition as the termination of a sexist tradition – Spivak therefore interprets it as an act of ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ (Spivak, 1988: 297). Yet according to Hindu scriptures, the self-sacrifice of widows was far from a common practice, but seen as an exception from the effective prohibition against suicide. According to Spivak, the reason the practice was nevertheless rather common in Bengal in the 18th and early 19th centuries can be attributed to the fact that in this region widows were entitled to inherit property – and that the relatives of the husband appealed to a widow’s devotion to her deceased spouse in order to encourage her self-immolation to protect their belongings. While Spivak is far from approving of such practices, she nevertheless denounces the way ‘imperialism’s image as the establisher of the good society is marked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection from her own kind’ – for it implies the victimization of non-Western women as an effect of precisely the Western claim to speak for these women (Spivak, 1988: 299). And it must be stressed that according to Spivak, an anti-Western stance that is nurtured by nostalgia for precolonial roots is no solution, either. Parts of the indigenous colonial elite romanticized female acts of self-sacrifice and thereby also left women in a highly precarious situation (Spivak, 1988: 297).

How then could alternative ways of representation and communication look, especially if they are to transcend the strong boundaries of difference once drawn by colonialism and re-actualized today by the international division of labor? According to Spivak, this would require a serious effort by those on the privileged side of such boundaries ‘to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted subject of the subaltern woman’ (Spivak, 1988: 295) – and thus to attempt to communicate on an equal level. In a number of interviews, she has qualified efforts to ‘unlearn one’s privilege as one’s loss’ (Spivak, 1990: 9, 42, 57) as a suitable means in such a learning process.

Compared to Mohanty’s plea for caring dialogues, the communication Spivak envisions goes far beyond communities and coalitions of activists; in this way, her idea may be characterized as much more radical (but also as less immediately useful) than Mohanty’s. And there is another important difference between the accounts of the two authors: Spivak stresses a precondition for successful dialogues across differences. This precondition is the act of deliberately undoing all traces of occidentalist assumptions about the subalterns, or about any other dialogue partners who can be said to be clearly less privileged than oneself. This means that the main responsibility for enabling such dialogues lies undeniably with those at the top, or in the center, and not with those at the bottom or the margins of any given constellation. This obligation is both a functional and an ethical one: it is necessary for making dialogues across stark differences possible, and it is a kind of prior concession that promises a decrease of inequality and injustice. Not unlike Mohanty’s plea, it furthermore entails an orientation towards relationality, the willingness to connect and to enter into an at least temporary relationship with the other.

I hold that with both their global focus and their emphasis on power and interaction, Mohanty and Spivak work at crossing boundaries. These boundaries are in part national borders. This is rather obvious for transnationally oriented theories, but still important and thus noteworthy. What is furthermore of particular interest is their crossing – or rather bridging – of boundaries between subgroups of women and other social and political actors. This second mode of boundary crossing is connected to the strong relational underpinnings of both accounts. On a practical level, it is achieved through dialogues, the willingness to learn from one another, and – in the case of Mohanty – a commitment to coalition building, and thus to political solidarity across differences and despite foreseeable conflict. Furthermore, there is an affective dimension to the project of subgroup boundary crossing that appears in the work of both authors. As quoted above, Mohanty qualifies the dialogues she envisions as both ethical and caring. Also Spivak’s suggestion, to try to unlearn one’s privileges and to learn from others, can be interpreted as entailing affective moments, insofar as her suggestion to unlearn privileges in order to be able to relearn through dialogue with others is a suggestion to recognize loss, to give something away, and thus basically to change – processes that are unimaginable without noteworthy implications for one’s (necessarily at least partly affective) self-relation, namely the self-recognition as always already incomplete. Furthermore, it can be argued that due to its requirements, the process of subgroup boundary crossing that Spivak envisions starts before an actual act of communication. It starts precisely at the moment in which a privileged subject sets out to unlearn, and thus directs herself towards dialogue, and thus towards the other – in an attempt to at least momentarily connect, as difficult as this might be.

Scholars who subscribe to intersectionality, by contrast, affirm rather than transcend boundaries. This holds particularly for group-based accounts, but also applies to those accounts that go beyond focusing on the situation of a particular social group. For what the latter usually seek to analytically integrate into a complex depiction is a variety of common and therefore pre-existing difference categories. According to Jasbir Puar, intersectionality in this way ‘presupposes identity and … fixes a permanence to forever’ (Puar, 2007: 212). This might sound like a rather harsh critique. But most current intersectionality scholarship is indeed more interested in demonstrating the interplay of socially and politically relevant differences in the present than in theorizing ways of overcoming the social and political relevance of current differentiations in the future. ⁹

Combining intersectional and postcolonial feminist theories

This reflects one of the major points at which intersectionality and postcolonial feminism diverge, and might in the future move even further away from each other. One direction leads towards inequality research, firmly grounded within the social science mainstream and already equipped with a broad range of empirical methods that are currently being refined and modified to suit intersectional needs. The other, the postcolonial path, is the methodologically rockier and politically more disruptive road of critiques of power, and of what I would like to call global critical theory. This road is rockier methodologically because, as we know from Max Weber, power is sociologically amorphous, and therefore both theoretically and empirically much harder to grasp than inequality. It is more disruptive politically because it is constitutively, by way of its own core standards, critical. Therefore, it never contents itself with assessing whichever constellation it focuses on, with determining the precise configuration of constellations, or with understanding how they work. Rather, it also aims at problematizing such constellations against general standards of justice, equal worth, and general well-being. Neither of these two paths – neither inequality research, nor critiques of power and critical theory – can be said to be generally better than the other. The two are different, and attempt to reach different goals. Yet, for the most part, these goals seem compatible. Thus in the end, the way ahead might well consist of efforts to combine the two. But how might such combinations look? To conclude, I offer two suggestions in this regard.

First, and as noted above, postcolonial feminist theorists deliberately work at transcending boundaries of difference. What must be stressed, however, is that they hardly undertake empirical investigations of these boundaries – at least not with regard to their more material aspects. The theorists’ considerations rely primarily on left-leaning, critical, everyday knowledge of such boundaries; they presuppose that they are there. When Mohanty and Spivak, for instance, address boundaries and relations of difference, they are predominantly driven by an interest in modalities of power and in critiques of such power. They are much less explicitly concerned with discussing patterns, or even statistics, of inequality – even though inequality is clearly in the background of their considerations. The increasing body of social science scholarship employing intersectional methodology, by contrast, attempts to shed light precisely on such boundaries in order to obtain a clearer view of them. With this agenda, it might in the long run empirically support (or, for that matter, challenge) postcolonial feminist considerations. In this sense, postcolonial feminism might indeed profit from knowledge gained by intersectional research – if the latter becomes more global.

Second, it is noteworthy how within the last few years – after decades of theoretical and empirical scholarly work and of political activism by black feminists and other feminists of color – intersectionality research has not only led to a rather rapid ‘intersectional turn’ within gender studies, but has also begun to reach the social science mainstream beyond gender studies – including explicit attempts at ‘mainstreaming intersectionality’ (Kaur Dhamoon, 2011). I would claim that, at least thus far, the same does not hold true for postcolonial (feminist) theories; at least not outside of English literary studies, where postcolonial texts, theories, and considerations have in recent years become an integral part of scholarship. The reasons for this difference might be random, but they might also be connected to methodology, or rather to terminology. I suggest that part of why it appears relatively easy to assimilate intersectional accounts into mainstream ways of doing (feminist) research is that – due to its abstractness and openness (cf. Davis, 2008) – the metaphor of intersectionality can easily be detached from the radical social critique of black and women of color feminism, which is precisely where the idea of intersectionality originates. In this sense, one might say that at least in some cases, it is the metaphor rather than the idea that has so successfully traveled from the margins of feminism to the center of gender studies and the social sciences in general. McCall’s definition of intersectionality – as referring to ‘the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relations and subject formations’ (McCall, 2005: 1771) – is a case in point. The label of postcolonial feminism, by contrast, is less abstract and retains more critical drive. Accordingly, postcolonial feminist theories question mainstream ways of doing research, asking what such research does, how it does so and what it leaves out – and what the representational effects of such choices might be. Furthermore, they do so in a decidedly transnational fashion.

As Ofelia Schutte has noted, ‘postcolonial studies acts as a necessary internal critical voice challenging both the imbalance of power existing between north and south, east and west and the representational practices that frame the less powerful of these in the discursive codes of those with the greater power’ (Schutte, 2007: 167). The frame of reference she is referring to in this quote is the globalized academy. I would argue that it also applies to intersectionality. In this light, postcolonial feminist theories appear as a constant corrective of mainstream ways of conceptualizing differences within feminist scholarship. They encourage the latter to become more transnational, more historical, more focused on power and more relational.