Abstract
During the past few years, debates about intersectionality have been particularly prevalent. These debates have focused predominantly on what intersectionality actually is, and how it should be applied. Questions such as: Where did it come from (genealogy)? Is it a form of Black Feminism (subjects)? How should it be revised in order to be more scholarly (methodology)? How should it be revisited in order not to lose sight of politics (activism)? What kinds of flaws does it have (theory)? Or, what is its level of analysis (identity vs structures)? However, one of the most debated question concerning intersectionality is its travelling, namely how it has changed as it has travelled from the USA to Europe. In their much needed and timely book Intersectionality, Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, both widely published academics who have made important contributions to the development of intersectionality, address all these questions. Intersectionality is an excellent summary of what has happened in the field of scholarship named as intersectionality, and how it should be conceptualized in ways that do not waste its political potential.
Hill Collins and Bilge foreground intersectionality’s double role as a critical mode of enquiry and critical praxis. Their focus is not on academic debates on intersectionality – ‘metatheoretical musings’, to use Bilge’s (2013) term – but on its functions in the world, in global movements and in concrete situations. As such, the book is exemplary of the dialogue of critical enquiry and critical praxis: it uses several case studies, examples and recent real life debates, in demonstrating what (else) we can see with an intersectional lens when we look at the FIFA World Cup, for example. The book is designed to be pedagogical and highly accessible to students and other practitioners of intersectionality in its tendency to avoid heavy notation and academic discourse. Theory and praxis are presented as always intertwined and mutually complementary and the many practical case studies in the text evolve from chapter to chapter so that the reader can easily see intersectionality at work.
In the first two chapters, Hill Collins and Bilge introduce their key ideas, illustrating them with apposite case studies. They open by using the case of the 2014 FIFA World Cup held in Brazil to extract six core ideas of an intersectional framework. These are: (1) Social inequality, (2) Power, (3) Relationality, (4) Social context, (5) Complexity and (6) Social justice. These six core ideas will no doubt find their way into lectures on intersectionality in the near future. The writers explain that ‘intersectionality’ for them always means this kind of synergy between theory and praxis, rejecting approaches that prioritize theory (pp. 33, 42). Even though a reader can spot that this text is written by authors who are positioned as American, the examples used in the book are transnational, coming from most of the continents in the world so that they are globally identifiable and recognizable.
As mentioned earlier, the politics of genealogy and the travelling of theory have led to heated debates within intersectional studies. Hill Collins and Bilge dedicate a whole chapter to both issues. They emphasize that intersectionality’s history cannot be divided into neat time periods or geographic locations. However, they are clear that intersectionality’s roots lie in social movement activism, particularly on Black feminism, but also on ‘multiple narratives of intersectionality’ (p. 71) including Chicana-activism, Native American women and South Asian women, as well as several heterogeneous alliances between social movements forged during the 1960s and 1970s. Political activism, and particularly American-based political activism, remains at the heart of their intersectional genealogical discussions.
The exceptional feature in the authors’ reading of genealogy is their thorough analysis on how and why intersectionality became institutionally incorporated during the 1990s with Kimberlé Crenshaw ‘coining’ the term intersectionality. They make a convincing analysis of Crenshaw’s 1991 article ‘Mapping the Margins’, explaining why that particular text was so important at that time. They describe how Crenshaw, as an ideally located academic, seeing the possibilities afforded by the linguistic turn within social theory, was able to do the ‘coining’.
As well as permeating academia, intersectionality’s global dispersion through and into digital and social media has been widespread and fast. Hill Collins and Bilge have many transnational and insightful examples of how activism related to human rights has utilized digital media in spreading intersectionality. Twitter, blogs, digital petitions, and many forms of digital feminism are related to intersectionality, and particularly its emphasis on relationality and social justice. As an academic discourse, on the other hand, intersectionality has travelled widely accompanying scholars in many kinds of critical studies, including queer studies, critical race studies, or disability studies. However, Hill Collins and Bilge remain critical of those white feminists, more prevalent in Europe, who have devalued intersectionality either claiming that it lacks theorization, or that it has an excess of theorizing. In both cases the authors criticize the ignoring of what they see as intersectionality’s central commitment to social equality and social justice.
Intersectionality’s relation to identity has also been a much debated issue. Hill Collins and Bilge give this debate a novel start by beginning with hip hop. They note that critics of the ties between identity and intersectionality typically write from a Global North perspective. In contrast, they are not afraid of connecting intersectionality with identity politics (as a form of critical praxis) and claim that ‘given the centrality of identity politics within both intersectionality and hip hop, contemporary academic debates about identity can seem strangely out of touch’ (p. 123). The difficult question of identity politics is tackled with a sophisticated analysis of intersectionality as a form of praxis that is critical, but manages to reclaim the strategic goals of identity politics. Identities are understood, however, as coalitional and holistic, involving complex social structures and inter-group alliances that serve to constitute identities, not as essentialist or exclusionary entities.
Hill Collins and Bilge pay particular attention to intersectionality’s potential for considering the workings of neoliberalism, global social protests, current developments in securitization, and neoliberalist tendencies in education. Intersectionality’s role in activism, as a critical praxis, is foregrounded for good reasons. Intersectionality has the potential to be a tool that sheds light on seemingly discrete phenomena of racism, coercive neoliberal state policies, global capitalism, sexism, and several types of hierarchical divisions. In their thorough analysis of the US education system Hill Collins and Bilge warn that it is important not to water down intersectionality to managerialist diversity talk (cf. Ahmed, 2012), but always to keep in mind its goal of increasing social equality and justice. Furthermore, the writers emphasize the contextualized nature of intersectional knowledge; that is why it would have been interesting to read more reflections on how they position themselves in the field of intersectionality. All in all, Intersectionality is a rich book foregrounding praxis, which is often over-shadowed in theoretical scholarship. In the book, intersectionality becomes a ‘creative sensibility between knowing and doing’ (p. 191); an inherently relational and complex concept with an ethos of social justice.