Abstract
The new stage in research on children and childhood (since the 1980s) has broadly coincided with what has been called the “postmodern turn” in the social sciences—in fact, this “turn” was well underway when the movement for a differently conceptualized study of childhood was started. It may be even the case that many of the ideas that have animated researchers to move into social studies of childhood, and which they have put into work in their research, may have originated in the discussions and controversies on and around modernity/postmodernity and what the (contested) postmodern condition was claimed to imply for understanding society and social life, and for social science research. For the development of the social sciences in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has been substantially shaped by key assumptions underlying theoretical approaches that defend both the epistemic validity and the historical significance of the “postmodern turn” (Susen, 2015: 1). In his comprehensive and systematic analysis of (and critical reflections on) the “postmodern turn” and its significance for today’s social science, Susen illustrates the far-reaching importance of this paradigmatic transformation that has been reflected in as many as five influential dimensions or “turns”: in (1) epistemology, (2) research methodology, (3) sociology, (4) historiography, and (5) politics. It is not difficult to recognize that particularly the first three of these five “turns” have been particularly influential to the re-formation of childhood research: the turn to relativism in the epistemology of social science, the turn to hermeneutics-inspired interpretivism in its methodology, and the turn to cultural studies in sociology.
The engagement with postmodern thought peaked in the mid-1990s; the tide then started to change. Now postmodernism is thought to be “superseded” and has become “somewhat of an outmoded catchword” (Susen, 2015: 33). But even if its greatest influence is over, the presence of postmodernist modes of thinking continue in recent and current academic discourses—which provide exciting and inspiring ideas for childhood research to take on. This condition is important to keep in mind and to critically take account of. For postmodernism was never uncontroversial and continuities exist between modern and postmodern ways of theorizing. This being the case, the frameworks, approaches, concepts, and research questions that current academic—modern and postmodern—discourses suggest come with no guarantees. Theoretical challenges impose on us, and instead of relying on any given form of orthodoxy, we would do well to clarify what are the tacit assumptions and implications inherent in the conceptual tools and frameworks that we enthusiastically use in our research. Such a self-critical position of course applies to any serious researcher whatever his or her disciplinary field or research area. However, a call for particular analytical rigor and conceptual clarity might be needed in fields whose research community is comparatively young and small, and which needs to rely on “borrowed” tools for its development of theory, as is the case for the social study of childhood.
One such tool, open for adoption, is intersectionality. Since its invention by legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), intersectionality has been widely adopted and applied as well as extensively discussed and debated, particularly in feminist/gender studies where the term originated.
In recent years, intersectionality has been one of the fastest traveling concepts which has cut across geographical and academic borders, and has become transplanted in other intellectual environments. Currently it is claimed to provide a central paradigm in feminist theory (Geerts and Van der Tuin, 2013) and one of the most important contributions made to social theory by women’s studies (McCall, 2005). In any case, it has become a “buzzword” (Davis, 2011) and “intersectional studies” appears to be a burgeoning interdisciplinary research field in its own right (Cho et al., 2013). Moreover, its connection to postmodern imagination is obvious; “intersectionalization” is regarded as one of postmodernity’s constitutive dimensions (Susen, 2015: 220): in a postmodern world, social reality is taken to be intersectionally structured.
By now “intersectionality” has also pushed its way to research areas outside its feminist cradle, including areas that connect with the study of children, such as disability studies (e.g. Goodley, 2013), race studies (e.g. Bhopal and Preston, 2011), and human rights studies (e.g. Taefi, 2009). In social studies of childhood, it seems, the notion has not yet taken root. The term has not been indexed in sociological books on children and childhood and it rarely appears in papers published in relevant journals. In the pages of Childhood, so far only a handful of fairly cautious mentions of intersectionality have appeared, but no papers with a clear theoretical or methodological take on the concept, framework, or theory. Barrie Thorne (2004), however, in her editorial in Childhood introduced intersectional analysis as a way to theorize age (and other differences, as was given in her title).
The question to ask is as follows: how new or useful “intersectionality” is as a concept, perspective (“lens”), method, or even theory for the theoretical-conceptual advancement of childhood research? To start with, what is intersectionality? In the article which introduced the term to feminism, Crenshaw (1989) criticized the limits of single axis notions of identity as practiced in legal doctrine and also in feminist and antiracist politics. Gender seen through an intersectional “lens” is to emphasize that women are not only women but also Black, White, rich, poor, and so on. Through socially constructed categories (e.g. gender, “race,” and ethnicity), women are situated within several frameworks of interacting forms of subordination and privilege. Therefore also such aspects of women’s identity cannot be thought of as operating independently of each other; being woven together, they produce people’s lived experience and their (fragmented) identity. It is this idea of entanglement of the structured “sections” of subordination and inequality that “intersectionality” is meant to express, in contrast to a purely “additive” approach (e.g. gender + class + “race”). 1
A non-additive intersectional analysis would start from observations of the differences that exist between individuals (e.g. women). The multiple, separate and intersecting “sources” of subordination would then be concurrently brought in and analyzed as to the way they produce the observed individual-level differences. It is here that intersectional analysis becomes troubling to execute, for in many cases, these material and symbolic sources of oppression, subordination, and/or disadvantage are not directly observable and must therefore be theorized. The unobservable power structure(s) that in feminism has considered the “source” of women’s disadvantaged position has been variously named (e.g. “patriarchy”). Naming in itself does not make for a convincing analysis. To do so, an empirically based intersectional analysis requires that one or more social “mechanisms” of power can be assumed to be at work in producing positions of subordination (as well as counterpositions of privilege), and their working then needs to be empirically “tested.” What makes a truly intersectional analysis even more difficult is that also the other unobservable “sources” of subordination and disadvantage (e.g. class, ethnicity, “race”) need to get a similar analytical treatment, opening the possibility to analyze the combined working of their “mechanisms.” 2
Intersectionality was a parsimonious term for expressing this problematic, but it has proved quite complicated to move from the idea to successful empirical analysis. Not only does this empirical-cum-theoretical exercise require an elaborated research design; at stake are also basic assumptions on the nature of social reality. And here, postmodernism has brought in much diversity and complexity, instead of clarity.
Intersectionality, as the postmodernist literature tells us, is a current social reality, and by implication also children’s lives are intersectionally structured. We need not be postmodernists to believe this. Also common sense and everyday experience tell us that also children are not only children; they are girls/boys (i.e. gendered) and they are also in many cases “raced,” dis/abled, classed, and ascribed ethnicity. Whether inspired by such everyday observations, or “the new paradigm” for the social study of childhood, or also postmodernist sociologies more broadly, much if not most of the (“new”) research on childhood has taken as its main task to empirically study and analytically describe this diversity of children’s everyday worlds. The challenge that intersectional thinking appears to be a similar thought experiment in the case of children as it is in the case of women.
Jens Qvortrup, the Danish sociologist of childhood and former editor of this journal, points to the same observation and formulates it as a dedication to “diversity of childhood.” Such dedication has long been popular in childhood studies, manifesting itself in the recurrent idiom of childhoods (in the plural). In a conference speech (Qvortrup, 2008), he is concerned about “diversity’s temptation and its hazards” and argues for the necessity of using “childhood” in the singular form, as a (social) category that is by no means dissolved by the existence of a plurality of (empirical) childhoods. Childhood moreover is not a stand-alone category: it can be an intelligible category (as has been shown in childhood studies) only in its necessary interrelationship to a counter-category, which in modern societies tends to be adulthood, but may also be some differently constructed generational category. Thus, generation—or (inter)generationality 3 —should be for the social study of childhood, the equivalent of gender in feminist studies and class in class studies. This surely is a significant insight with which to productively confront the challenge of intersectionality.
Bringing childhood researchers to face this challenge will, first, help us to clarify the limitations of the long-held “diversity perspective” (Qvortrup) in childhood research and open vistas for not only describing the multitude of children’s childhoods—their lifeworlds, identities, and experiences—but also for analyzing the causal social mechanisms at work. On these grounds, I also hold with Qvortrup that the insight in the structural position of childhood to be gained in such an approach to childhood will also aid us in understanding what would be a political intervention on behalf of childhood (in the singular).