Abstract
Patricia Hill Collins’s cutting edge scholarship on intersectionality and interlocking systems of oppression has had an enormous impact on the sociology of gender; on studies of race, racism, and ethnicity; and on inequality research in the 20-plus years since Black Feminist Thought (1990) was first published, surpassing the intellectual influence most scholars will have over our entire lifetimes. Indicators of her influence are found in the vast number of “Google Scholar” hits generated by her name, or by her name in combination with “intersectionality,” as well as by the fact that her work is cited by virtually every graduate student on sociology comprehensive exams in gender, race and ethnicity, or stratification.
The development of intersectional theory significantly advanced research on women of color and about others who experience multiple forms of oppression in society (McCall 2005). Indeed, few contemporary scholars have been so adept or successful at instigating a paradigmatic change in how we understand our world. This shift is especially visible in work by U.S. scholars who focus on various types of inequality, with somewhat more muted ripple effects in other sub-fields such as demography or political sociology.
Furthermore, since their introduction, the concepts of intersectionality and matrices of domination have not remained static. Scholars have applied this approach to dimensions beyond the original foci on race, ethnicity, gender, and class to incorporate citizenship, sexuality, religion, age, and other dimensions of subordination, across many different social settings. Indeed, the concept has found a place in the intellectual toolkit of scholars around the world, whether they live in their home countries or in national diasporas, and is used to interrogate problems and policy issues in their national or regional settings. My contribution to this symposium is to examine some of these global applications with which U.S. readers may be less familiar.
Worldwide, the concept of intersectionality has proved fruitful in law and policy, or theory and methods, as well as in research studies on specific inequalities. U.S. scholars should not be surprised that an intersectional approach is useful to European, Asian, or African scholars studying inequalities in nations with diverse native populations or polarized class structures, or with increasing numbers of migrants and contract workers from other countries. And although intersectionality is rarely thought of as a policy issue in the United States, feminists in European Union (EU) countries, where gender mainstreaming is common and where cross-national equality policies are being developed, view intersectionality as directly useful for such policies and considerably better than approaches that tend to foster a sense of competing oppressions (Kantola and Nousiainen 2009). Indeed, in 2009 an entire issue of the International Feminist Journal of Politics was devoted to various aspects of “Institutionalizing Intersectionality in the European Union.”
There is also a substantial international literature that engages in elaborating the concept of intersectionality. For example, Yuval-Davis (2006) compares the debates around the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, and gender in Britain in the 1980s with those surrounding the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism, focusing on their implications for feminist politics. Meanwhile, Staunaes (2003) writes on how to bring together the concepts of intersectionality and subjectification, and Rahman (2010) focuses on “queer” as intersectionality.
Despite the rapid worldwide adoption of intersectionality as both a concept and a research approach, there is no consensus on exactly how to carry out an intersectional analysis (Choo and Ferree 2010). Indeed, Choo and Ferree (2010) identify three different understandings of intersectionality that have been used in sociological research, with each producing distinct methodological approaches to analyze inequalities. Their typology of group-centered, process-centered, and system-centered practices provides a useful framework for examining the global usage of intersectionality, and a way of thinking intersectionally about variations in political approaches to gender.
Choo and Ferree (2010) identify the first, and probably initial and most common, style of intersectionality research as including the perspectives of those who are “multiply-marginalized” and placing these groups at the center of the analysis. They argue that this practice is important for giving voice to those who previously were excluded, but that it can easily stop at creating a “content specialization” on particular disadvantaged groups or subgroups (Hancock 2007), and may not look at the groups in power. There are many, and wide-ranging, global intersectional projects examining particular groups. For example, Sylvain (2011) researches the intersectional discrimination experienced by San (Bush) women in Namibia, describing how their self-construction makes it hard for them to work with international groups of indigenous people. Or consider Nakamura’s (2002) argument about deafness in Malaysia as an intersectional identity that is structured by language, religion, and ethnicity, among other issues.
The second, process-centered, practice of intersectionality (Choo and Ferree 2010) focuses on analytic interactions in a nonadditive fashion, while paying less or more attention to statistical main effects (and the “unmarked categories”) as well. This often involves a comparative and contextual analysis of inequalities, and the examination of selected interaction effects among the various intersectional dimensions. Quantitative studies of immigrants in the United States, both historically (Bose 2001) and in the contemporary period (Torres Stone, Purkayastha, and Berdahl 2006) have used census data to research the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and class in occupational segregation and/or earnings inequalities across a wide range of groups. In contrast, qualitative methods have been used in the growing global research literature on allegations of sexist behavior that are made against a racialized “othered” group, and which become one basis on which that group is treated as backward. To take a few examples, Bilge (2010) uses an intersectional approach to analyze Western discussions about migrant, veiled Muslim women and to argue that we need to move away from dichotomous interpretations of the veil as signifying either subjugation to (sexist) men or resistance to Western hegemony; Choo (2006) examines the gendered construction of citizenship for North Koreans in South Korea, noting how patriarchal attitudes are attributed to the northerners as a kind of ethnic marker that they are expected to give up as they “modernize”; and Gianettoni and Roux (2010) use attitudinal research to describe the confounding of sexism with racism by native-born residents of Switzerland in their conceptions of other groups.
The third, system-centered, practice of intersectionality (Choo and Ferree 2010) works to disassociate specific inequalities with specific institutions (e.g., equating the economy with social class or the family with gender) and demonstrates how the systems themselves generate intersectional effects. One recent and influential international example of this approach is Walby’s (2009) Globalization and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modernities. Several international activist-research groups, such as Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), also use this intersectional model in their work for global South economic and gender justice. DAWN members research and create policies to deal with complex, multi-institutional interactions such as those among violence, discrimination, and state neglect or between maternal mortality and human rights (www.dawnnet.org). Similarly, the Central American Women’s Network (CAWN) has the goal of promoting gender equality and equity and the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, as well as helping Central American women’s voices be heard in Britain, the European Union, and internationally (www.cawn.org). Recently, CAWN published a report on “intersecting violences” (Muñoz Cabrera 2010), arguing that an intersectional approach is vital to understanding how multiple macro-level structures, like economic neoliberalism, politics, and patriarchy, operate at a regional and national level and are linked to the micro-level of local economic, social, sexual, or cultural forms of violence against women and women’s poverty.
As a U.S.-based scholar interested in global gender inequalities, I find myself drawn to this third, complex system approach. But rather than using the system model, in its more typical way, to understand inequalities among groups of people within a single nation, I use this approach to develop an intersectional framework for analyzing variation in the forms of gender inequalities across many nations (Bose 2011). I find this transnational angle on intersectionality a useful alternative to the broad brush that paints national-level gender inequalities as fundamentally all the same, differentiated only between the global North and South, or all unique. Not only is the global North/global South dichotomy a poor depiction of reality, as geographic mapping of many gender inequalities reveals (Seager 2009), but theoretical developments over the past several decades have begun to expose the intersectional variation across issues and regions of the world and have illustrated how geographic dichotomies can homogenize real conditions.
Just as there is diversity among individual women, based on their intersecting axes of age, race, ethnicity, class, marital status, sexual orientation, religion, or other characteristics, there is diversity across countries in their national-level gender inequalities based on intersecting axes of transnational, regional, cross-cutting, and unique national issues that structure gendered differences and concerns (Bose 2011). Truly global dynamics, such as neoliberal economics, migration, or violence, intersect with regional dynamics, such as histories of nation-building or gendered inequalities in education and property ownership, to produce two interrelated foundations on which broad gender inequalities are built. Additionally, unique national trajectories and broader cross-cutting themes, such as health, religion, or militarization, which are found in a few nations in every region, contribute two more levels of variation to those basic inequalities (Bose 2011).
Of course, to date, much of the global research that explicitly uses an intersectional framework or enhances intersectional theory is focused on the diversity within particular nations or regions, rather than globally. But the fact that so much research makes use of Patricia Hill Collins’s ideas is a tribute to the importance of her scholarship. Her work has become indispensable for analyzing the numerous global gender inequalities that persist, and the multiple dimensions of globalization processes that have created both adverse conditions and favorable prospects for women around the world. Addressing these gender-differentiated impacts will need multiple types of intersectional approaches in shaping present and future research agendas.