Invited Reflection

Else-Quest and Hyde (2016) describe three epistemological perspectives that are commonly differentiated by feminist theorists and that are relevant to research in psychology. They explore how each of these perspectives might inform quantitative research approaches to intersectionality theory. As we explain in detail elsewhere (Warner, Settles, & Shields, in press), one debate among scholars who study intersectionality is whether intersectionality is best conceptualized as a theory, as a framework, or as an approach to social activism. Else-Quest and Hyde distinguish intersectionality as a critical theory in contrast to a falsifiable “grand theory.” We refer to intersectionality as a theory here to be consistent with Else-Quest and Hyde’s framing of intersectionality as a critical theory in the context of discussing epistemology.

We appreciate their focus on epistemology, because in psychology researchers do not typically articulate the theory of knowledge that underlies their scholarship. One exception is feminist scholars who reject positivist traditions, as their perspective and assumptions about knowledge and reality are at odds with the predominant viewpoint within the field. Dominant research in psychology, that is, “mainstream” research published in outlets that are granted high status and legitimacy in the field, operates under one of the two epistemic perspectives: (1) positivist epistemology, which assumes that there is an objective reality and truth that is discoverable, and that science is value neutral and without an opinion on the reality and the truth it seeks to find and (2) post-positivist (which includes feminist empiricism) epistemology, which asserts that bias can enter into research at any number of points in the process, but if bias is reduced or eliminated, science can discover reality. This latter perspective allows for scientists to attach values to the topics they study, for example, to note that sexism and racism are aversive social problems that should be eliminated (Campbell & Wasco, 2000; Eagly & Riger, 2014), as long as the scientific practice itself is not subverted by the intrusion of the scientist’s values. Else-Quest and Hyde go beyond epistemologies rooted in positivism to discuss ways of knowing that are more attuned to the questions raised by an intersectionality perspective, including social constructionism and standpoint epistemology.

We argue below that Else-Quest and Hyde’s discussion of these three epistemological positions must be expanded to effectively show how intersectionality relates to each in psychological research.

At a general level, it is important for researchers to be clear about their epistemic position. When position is left unstated, communication is made more difficult because researchers may have fundamentally different assumptions about knowledge, for example, whether research reveals “one truth” or how different people experience different realities. Further, there is a tendency to devalue scholarship that is different from a discipline’s dominant epistemological perspective. In psychology, intersectionality, which often employs social constructionist epistemologies, would fall into this group. A danger is that research undertaken outside the dominant epistemological perspective, such as intersectionality and other feminist scholarship, is dismissed as “bad science” because dominant assumptions about knowledge—how to know, who is the knower, and so on—place nondominant epistemological perspectives in the margin. In other words, dominant epistemological perspectives influence whether researchers view intersectionality and feminist scholarship as valuable; when these perspectives are not made explicit, however, what gets communicated is that this scholarship is weak or poorly constructed. Intersectionality, which challenges knowledge production that marginalizes people and their lived experiences (Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013), is susceptible to marginalization. In addition, by not articulating their own epistemic position, even if they occupy a favored position within the dominant framework, researchers may be unable or unwilling to see the ways in which their values and biases enter the research process; they may come to erroneous conclusions that their own scientific values and scholarship are value free.

A discussion about how intersectionality should be implemented or how it is implemented is itself a value-laden act, which makes articulation of one’s epistemology important. Debates about intersectionality demonstrate power struggles within disciplines, such as which texts about intersectionality come to be considered foundational, who comes to be seen as an “expert” on the topic, and who is empowered by scholarly attention on the topic (Bilge, 2013). In addition, Bilge cautions against being more concerned with institutional success of the knowledge produced “than institutional and social change through counter-hegemonic knowledge production” (p. 405).

Making epistemologies visible provides a language for articulating how intersectionality is employed in psychology. Relating intersectionality to feminist empiricism, social constructionism, and standpoint theory reveals underlying assumptions behind applications of intersectionality. Our goal in this reflection is not simply to build a better feminist empiricism but to show how different epistemological perspectives can inform one another and create novel investigative possibilities.

Although it is important that Else-Quest and Hyde provided epistemological frameworks for understanding applications of intersectionality, their presentation of these frameworks is limited for two reasons. First, Else-Quest and Hyde present these epistemologies as unconnected when there is growing overlap between them. For example, some feminist philosophers have advocated for the merging of standpoint theory and feminist empiricism (Rolin, 2009; Solomon, 2009). Two central critiques of early notions of standpoint theory (Harding, 1986) were that it relied on essentialist categories and that experience was reduced to relativism. Scholars at the time struggled to emphasize that individuals from marginalized groups have an epistemic advantage, that is, a standpoint, without also implying that there is some stereotypical “essence” to individuals from that group that makes them so well suited to provide their perspectives on power relations. One way that standpoint theory scholars have addressed the problem of essentialism is to identify specific advantages that certain groups have in particular contexts, treating these expected advantages as testable hypotheses (Solomon, 2009). In other words, the focus has pivoted from claims that could imply that oppressed social groups have a broad strokes advantage to understanding social power toward one that emphasizes that lived experiences lead to rich, unique, and insightful perspectives that are contingent on the particular context. For example, Solomon (2009) argues that the psychological impact of achieving a standpoint (as through gaining political awareness as a result of being a member of a marginalized group) can be associated with cognitive mechanisms involved in creativity and that this is empirically testable. Thus, the utility of both standpoint theory and feminist empiricism is increased when they are fused. Such fusion opens a new domain of research: empirical investigations of standpoint theory, and in the present case, how intersections of social identities provide specific standpoints that can be empirically tested in psychology.

A second limitation of Else-Quest and Hyde’s presentation is their treatment of postmodernism as an epistemological approach to intersectionality. While Else-Quest and Hyde do highlight that postmodernism’s emphasis on the idea that there is no “objective” truth is compatible with intersectionality, they argue that postmodernism can result in relativism in which any perspective, including dominant perspectives, could be equally valued. Their representation of postmodernism, however, narrowly defines this position as one that does not allow assessment of the validity of truth claims. If we look at how feminist researchers in psychology actually do their work, however, we see that a radical notion of postmodernism is rare. Rather, postmodernism has played a significant role in advancing psychological research on intersectionality, and casting it in its most extreme version has the potential to further marginalize research that has already been relegated to nondominant research outlets in psychology (Eagly, in press; Eagly & Riger, 2014).

Postmodern analyses are important to studying intersectionality via their examination of multiple realities that construct our social experience; researchers can expose structures of inequality, for example, by showing how consensual versions of reality maintain the status quo (Olesen, 1994). Postmodern scholars of intersectionality are also often the strongest proponents of qualitative methodological approaches to intersectionality, often using discourse analysis in some form to examine how language constructs identity and reproduces power structures. Hurtado and Sinha (2008), for example, used discourse analysis to examine how Latino feminist men both operate within and outside of hegemonic understandings of masculinity in relation to their race, ethnicity, social class, and sexuality.

Additionally, scholars use narrative analysis to analyze intersections without requiring the identities to be separated (e.g., as would be required with an analysis of variance design). Ceballo, Graham, and Hart (2015), for example, employed the framework of intersectional invisibility to explain socioeconomically diverse African American women’s experiences with infertility. People with multiple subordinate identities, for example, African American women who do not usually fit the prototypes of their respective subordinate groups, in this case “African Americans” (the prototype being male) and “women” (the prototype being White), experience intersectional invisibility (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008), in that as a nonprototypical member of either group, the individual is overlooked or excluded when those groups are studied (see also Crenshaw, 1991). In this case, Ceballo et al. (2015) pointed out that research on infertility had exclusively been conducted on affluent White couples. They used narrative and qualitative interview methods and found that the motherhood mandate for African American mothers is influenced by interacting gendered, racial, and religious factors and that the women’s interactions with medical professionals were influenced by their multiple identities. In these examples, postmodernist scholars elaborate on elements of intersectionality theory that are in line with intersectionality’s focus on disrupting structures of inequality.

In addition to issues concerning the presentation of epistemologies, Else-Quest and Hyde’s application of epistemologies falls short of showing how intersectionality challenges or transforms dominant perspectives within psychology. We highlight three transformative effects here: (1) a commitment to social justice; (2) a challenge to dominant knowledge paradigms, such as striving for one-size-fits-all theory; and (3) a valuing of interdisciplinarity.

Intersectionality theory explicitly includes a social justice focus. The social justice element of intersectionality requires integration of theory with praxis, meaning that intersectionality scholars must consider the policy implications of their research, and the impact of that research on individuals’ lives, taking into account the ways in which social structural factors may advantage or marginalize those being studied (Cho et al., 2013). Another way in which intersectionality scholars address social justice is through using it as an approach to social activism. Intersectionality researchers can search for “similar or related experiences of oppression” (Cole, 2009, p. 445) among individuals who may belong to different social groups that can serve as the basis for activism or social change. By doing so, seemingly disparate social groups can form coalitions around shared concerns in a way that increases the impact people have on political or social policies.

Another key feature of intersectionality that is at odds with psychology’s conventional practices is intersectionality’s disruptive character. Although there can be value in importing intersectionality into “mainstream” research, a common thread among intersectionality theorists is that applications of intersectionality, at their best, dismantle dominant knowledge production by employing subversive methods and asking subversive questions (Alexander-Floyd, 2012; Bilge, 2013; Cho et al., 2013). Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall (2013) argue that disciplinary conventions rely on assumptions that contribute to the marginalization that intersectionality seeks to undermine. Along these lines, there are limits to dominant quantitative methods, as described by Else-Quest and Hyde. For example, Else-Quest and Hyde challenge critiques of standardized instruments saying feminist-constructed scales, such as the Objectified Body Consciousness Scale (McKinley & Hyde, 1996), capture women’s and girls’ experiences. However, this example ignores a key question: On which girls’ and women’s experiences are these instruments developed? Even if large and diverse samples were included in all phases of instrument development and testing, it would be important to determine whether the validated, yet generic instrument, might be masking substantive differences between the intersectional positions represented in participant groups. That is, does the instrument “work” equally well for the intersectional positions represented in the validation samples? Intersectionality challenges the claim that a standardized scale about “women’s experiences” can adequately capture the lived experiences of women at different intersectional positions.

The problem of using standardized scales reveals how psychology is caught in a difficult position when applying intersectionality. New methods are needed to capture intersectional experiences and the field needs to value these new methods. Until these new methods are created, however, “old” methods need to be applied in novel ways with a full and explicit understanding of their limitations, particularly in terms of what elements of intersectionality theory can and cannot be captured from their deployment. For example, Warner (2008) recommends that researchers at minimum should consider a priori which intersections are most likely connected to the phenomenon being measured, and whether the self-report instrument has the ability to capture the lived experiences of individuals at these intersections.

Another way that intersectionality disrupts traditional paradigms in psychology is by challenging a long-standing value within psychology that the best theory and explanations for phenomena are those that are the most parsimonious. An emphasis on parsimony suggests that simplification is an important aspect of a strong psychological analysis. Intersectionality suggests that a theory or explanation may not apply to all groups; rather, relationships and outcomes may vary depending on intersecting identities. This social constructionist perspective suggests that reality may vary for individuals with different identities, rather than the view of a single reality posited by positivist or post-positivist epistemologies. Although the different theories or explanations for different groups may each be parsimonious, intersectionality may challenge the psychologist’s ability to derive a single, universal, parsimonious theory or explanation. In addition, intersectionality requires researchers to consider the social context and the role of power and social structural factors; doing so necessarily adds complexity to psychological theories and explanations. That is, the noise of the many interlocking identities and social structures is the important and interesting piece of an intersectionality approach. To a psychologist trained in a positivist or post-positivist epistemology, this idea may be unsettling, because if processes depend on the social context or intersecting identities, then there may be no single truth or positivist research design that can capture truth.

Intersectionality is also aided by interdisciplinary perspectives. Cole (2009) notes that by drawing on perspectives from multiple disciplines within the social sciences and beyond, researchers are less likely to think about social categories as fixed and essential. Instead, by drawing from scholarship in disciplines like history or anthropology, psychologists can better understand the ways in which the meaning of social categories has changed across time and culture. Further, including multiple disciplinary perspectives allows researchers to approach a scholarly question from different viewpoints and ways of doing science, as a means of “traingulat[ing] the problem” (Cole, 2009, p. 170). In addition, by drawing from other disciplines, we can avoid “ornamental intersectionality” (Bilge, 2013, p. 408), in which the term intersectionality is used without a deep understanding of the theory. Elements of other approaches of other disciplines (e.g., sociology, history) can help guide psychology toward understanding elements of the theory that are more “foreign” to psychological research, such as sociostructural analyses. Finally, by integrating other disciplines into psychological research, psychologists who employ intersectionality theory may be better able to critically see the dominant epistemologies within psychology and to consider other ways of knowing as well as other ways of doing (i.e., research methods and analyses).

An example of an interdisciplinary argument that psychologists would benefit from considering is the argument that race, gender, class, and so on, are not only identities but are social structures as well (Warner et al., in press). Recent legal scholarship on intersectionality suggests that conceptualizing social categories as social structures is fundamental to the study of intersectionality, and, in fact, future research on intersectionality should focus specifically on this quality of intersectional research (e.g., Cho et al., 2013).

One approach to integrating social structures is a both/and approach. Else-Quest and Hyde refer to a both/and approach but interpret it as relating to statistical effects, which is something quite different from the way the term has been applied in intersectionality theory. Both/and (Collins, 1998) refers to acknowledging both the complexity and the diversity within an intersectional position, and the commonalities that connect across these positions. Collins and others contrast the both/and logic with the either/or, likening both/and to a matrix in contrast to a binary either/or. For example, the intersection “Black women” describes a complex matrix of social class, age, sexualities, and other dimensions of social identity that make “Black women” a varied and heterogeneous category. This is in contrast to being categorized as either “Black” or a “woman,” as Crenshaw (1991) problematized the intersections, in the context of Black women’s legal standing in discrimination cases.

How does a both/and approach translate to psychological research, particularly research that might meet the approval of the mainstream? An intersectional approach employs a dual focus on the diversities within an individual intersectional position (the additional intersections contained within it and the diversity of experience across those intersections), even while it contrasts that position and others in group-level comparisons. There is clearly no one-size-fits-all methodological application of this perspective. As developed by Risman (2004), the both/and strategy entails examining intersectionality at the individual level: comparing individual identities to each other, as well as considering intersections as systems of inequality. The both/and strategy compels researchers to be mindful of the specific historical and contextual features that create and sustain individual identity categories. As May (2015, p. 65) observes, “the either/or approach, while straightforward, can suppress contradictions and alternative possibilities: by adhering to a dichotomous view, it may also create conflict or enforce divisions where there may in fact, be none.” She goes on to observe that the both/and lens,

though a less tidy, more difficult place to begin (and end), offers ways to evaluate a situation from multiple standpoints, creates room to identify shared logics while accounting for differences, and can be used to approach tensions or contradictions … rather than treating them primarily as problems to smooth over.

As an example of the both/and strategy, Risman (2004) describes Espiritu’s (1997) examination of Asian men who immigrated to the United States in the first half of the 20th century, in which intersections of individual identities are considered along with systems of inequality. In particular, Espiritu (1997) demonstrates how racism occurs through gender- and class-based oppression. Stereotypes of Asian men as effeminate, and therefore implicitly possessing subpar skills for the workforce, led to Asian men being pigeonholed into positions held by working-class women, such as in laundry services. This action undermined both their felt sense of autonomy and their claim to citizenship. According to Risman (2004), a both/and strategy would examine the individual experiences of Asian American men during these time periods, and while doing so, acknowledge the variability of experiences depending on ethnicity (e.g., Chinese and Vietnamese), the reason for the immigration (e.g., economic opportunity and war refugee status), and education, among other factors. At the same time, one would also examine how the larger structures that construct Asian American identities are formed and maintained, from immigration policies to propaganda campaigns (such as directed toward Japanese Americans during World War II).

The consideration of intersectionality as an epistemological challenge to psychology leads us to reflect on a long-standing concern of feminist psychologists: feminist psychology’s relationship to “mainstream” psychology. The popularization of intersectionality has contributed to increasingly sophisticated analyses of power. However in mainstreaming intersectionality, psychological researchers have flattened the term through emphasis on individual identity, with little reference to the sociopolitical power relations that the term was intended to name.

An implicit nagging worry that seems to propel discussion of intersectionality in psychology is how to square intersectionality with publication standards and demands of mainstream psychology. First, this is an old worry. Since feminist psychology was revitalized in the 1960s and 70s, feminist psychologists have worried about whether our research was having a sufficient impact on the larger field, and whether mainstream research conventions are compatible with a feminist agenda. For example, in 1979, Carolyn Sherif critiqued the hierarchy of methods that drives what counts and what doesn’t count as valuable scientific science. Although mainstream psychology may resist the “activist science” component of intersectionality as biased and not scientific, feminist psychology has long supported the use of empirical research to address social problems and concerns.

A second worry underlying the first is less often directly confronted. Specifically, what constitutes “mainstream” and why do we worry about it? Emerging from the different epistemologies, feminist psychological traditions have become broadly and less apologetically interdisciplinary in perspective, theory, and method over time (Morawski, 1994; Stewart & Dottolo, 2006). Maybe the question is not how to reconcile our work on intersectionality with an amorphous disciplinary center that is imagined to be critical or at least at odds with this work. The real issue may not be how to satisfy the mainstream but how to bridge (or whether to bridge) different epistemological positions within feminist psychology.

In closing, we are pleased to see that scholars are continuing to consider the use and application of intersectionality to psychological research and explicitly discussing how it relates to different epistemologies. Intersectionality has the potential to strengthen psychological research through its focus on power structures, the social context, and the complexity of human lives. Although there are many issues that remain, we note Davis’s (2008) argument that part of the strength of intersectionality is found in its generativity: “intersectionality has precisely the ingredients which are required of a good feminist theory. It encourages complexity, stimulates creativity, and avoids premature closure, tantalizing feminist scholars to raise new questions and explore uncharted territory” (p. 79).