Mapping the margins of intersectionality: Criminological possibilities in a transnational world

Locating the origins of intersectionality

Intersectionality constitutes more than a concept; it is arguably an academic field (Cho et al., 2013). Vrushali Patil (2013) has chronicled Crenshaw’s conceptualization of intersectionality as a domestic intersectionality that has traveled across academic disciplines and geopolitical spaces. Responding to conditions in the United States, Crenshaw’s concept expressly captures how at least two axes of subordination overlap, highlighting how women of color figuratively stand at the intersection of race and gender (as well as other social orders) and how that positioning renders their discrimination distinct. She initially explains intersectionality through the analogy of a traffic intersection, arguing that while US anti-discrimination law requires complaints to follow a unidirectional pattern, the act of discrimination,

like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, [or] it may flow in another. But if an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars travelling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them.

Black women, Crenshaw argued, endure discrimination in multiple ways, because it is rooted at the intersection of race and gender.

Crenshaw (1991) later elaborates, providing three foci: (1) structural intersectionality, which entails intersected forms of subordination that render the experiences of women of color qualitatively different than those of white women or men of color; (2) political intersectionality, which includes practices that fail to recognize women of color as unique (including anti-racist and feminist coalitions that evoke one axis of subordination); and (3) representational intersectionality, which encompasses the imaginary and symbolic practices that perpetuate the discursive (in)visibility of women of color. Although intersectionality is often associated with analyses of the race–class–gender ³ nexus, it need not focus only on these three axes of subordination. Instead, intersectionality can illuminate how other taken-for-granted categories of difference relate to each other in discursive and complex ways, enabling researchers to analyze how discourses (e.g. public, legal, empirical) overlook, obscure and do violence to people who occupy more than one axis of subordination.

The transnational dimensions of intersectionality rarely come to the fore. While Crenshaw’s notion of intersectionality is an outgrowth of longstanding black feminist concerns around how women of color occupy a distinct space of Otherness, it also has roots in broader political movements. ⁴ Feminists have long acknowledged that the considerations of race, class and gender are so interconnected that disentangling them is impossible (Anzaldúa and Moraga, 1981; Davis, 1981; Glenn, 1985). This observation has been a cornerstone of many feminist coalitions, including INCITE! Women of Color against Violence, the Combahee River Collective and the Third World Women’s Alliance (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Davis, 1981; Han, 2006). Grace Kyungwon Hong (2008: 100) writes that ‘because the racial project of Western civilization was always a gendered and sexualized project’, black feminism’s enduring tenet is its focus on ‘the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and class within the context of global colonial capitalism’. For Hong (2008: 101), intersectionality, like other forms of organizing that took shape in the Movement Era, ⁵ is an epistemological critique of ‘the white supremacist moment of global capital organized around colonial capitalism’. Black feminist intellectual thought, in turn, has a tradition of articulating narratives that both reveal and counter the imperial underpinnings of orthodox knowledge. Intersectionality shares this impetus by offering an important ‘check’ for our analyses—that is, as Trina Grillo (1995: 30) clarifies, it helps ‘make sure that we do not speak for those who cannot speak or ask others to share our agenda while they wait for their own’.

Given these roots, intersectionality seems an important development for anti-essentialist work across disciplines; however, with intersectionality’s proliferation, scholars have argued its orientation and focus have shifted. Nikol Alexander-Floyd (2012) contends that many social scientific applications of intersectionality appeal to dominant modes of knowledge production, conceding that such analyses under-theorize the concept by attributing complexities of subordination to the nexus of race–class–gender. She argues that there are substantial consequences of employing mainstream methodologies, remarking that it ‘invites and enables criticisms of intersectionality scholars’ perceived lack of sophistication or inadequate methodological elaboration’ (Alexander-Floyd, 2012: 21). This development, she contends, yields broader effects: it threatens to minimize the important contributions of black feminist intellectual thought, which has traditionally relied upon narrative methods, and, in doing so, it diminishes forms of knowledge produced by women of color. When applied in this way, intersectionality, an analytic conceived to explain dilemmas of misrepresentation, puts forth one of its own by serving as a conceptual catchall for various forms of inequality (Daly, 2010). This is no coincidence, according to Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2013), who warns that neoliberal and security-driven rhetoric has penetrated academic institutions in ways that undermine social justice activism and domesticated radical ideas, including applications of intersectionality. This danger is particularly relevant for criminology, given its tendency to embrace positivistic methods, posit universalist theoretical appeals and support national security agendas.

Intersectionality and feminist criminological commitments

In contrast to mainstream methodologies, intersectionality’s anti-essentialist stance complements feminist criminology’s longstanding commitment to deconstructing criminology’s embedded politics. Feminist criminologists have drawn attention to the field’s embedded androcentric biases, documenting how male experiences and perspectives dominate the study of crime and criminal justice systems. Many such works attest that canonical criminological theories are inherently sexist, even sometimes overtly misogynistic (Cain, 1990; Simon, 1981; Simpson, 1989). Criminology’s disregard of women as female offenders or as victims of crime evidences that its positivistic stance reiterates an androcentric purview (e.g. Daly and Chesney-Lind, 1988; Naffine, 1997). The gendered nature of crime, however, cannot be understood without also considering intersectional concerns. These relationships are complex: race, class and gender are not separate, additive variables, but intertwined; however, privileging this triad’s explanatory power can also be a mistake. Kathleen Daly and Deborah Stephens (1995: 205) have explicitly argued that ‘racism in criminological theories occurs when racial or cultural differences are over-emphasized or mischaracterized [and] when such differences are denied’. Such observations point to a need for further reflection on how various identities are outgrowths of ‘multiple social relations’ (Daly, 1997: 35).

In light of these sentiments, Burgess-Proctor (2006) suggests that joining intersectionality and multiracial feminism enables a fuller explanation of the linkages between inequality and crime. Multiracial feminism here is understood as a ‘theoretical orientation that recognizes issues of power and privilege without assuming a monolithic women’s experience’, and ‘examines gender through the lens of difference’ (Burgess-Proctor, 2006: 28–35). Although ambitious, Burgess-Proctor’s (2006: 30) prescription that intersectionality is the ‘most relevant to feminist criminology in the 21st century’ fails to address two important criticisms. First, it negates the discursive underside of multiracialism. Criticisms of multiracialism evidence its tendency to reinforce certain forms of racism, namely antiblackness (Gordon, 1997), while manifesting values of colorblindness, multiracial exceptionalism, and hetoronormative sexuality through the promotion of nuclear families and assimilatory values (Sexton, 2008). Second are the static features of Burgess-Proctor’s recommendation, which, as Puar (2005: 128) insists of intersectionality more generally, ‘demands the knowing, naming, and thus stabilizing of identity across space and time’.

Consequently, multiracial intersectionality may address a matrix of domination faced by particular individuals and groups, but it does not query the ‘matrix of intelligibility’ that ‘institute[s] and maintain[s] relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice and desire’ (Butler, 1990: 23). Judith Butler’s work points to a form of essentialism embedded within Burgess-Proctor’s intersectional prescription, which Joan Scott (1992: 27) attributes to the reliance upon ‘individuals [as] the starting point of knowledge’, a process that further naturalizes categories (e.g. male, female, white, black) ‘by treating them as given characteristics’. In other words, multiracial intersectionality tacitly accepts an assumed causality between sex/gender/identity/sexual practices. In contrast, poststructural and queer feminist work attests that the disjunctures between them are rendered legible when we observe a disruption to this anticipated logic. Such disruptive moments reveal a naturalizing regulatory apparatus at work: what appears to be a given identity is actually a position being actively (re)produced (Butler, 1990: 42). Multiracial intersectionality’s reliance on identity as a standpoint thus limits endeavors seeking to unveil how social forces conjoin to perpetuate matrices of unintelligibility.

How, then, might we adapt intersectionality to redress these shortcomings? In the remaining sections, we look to earlier intersectional criminologist analyses and critical feminist scholarship for guidance.

Mapping intersectional criminological analyses

Feminist criminologists have been among the first to articulate the importance of understanding interconnected forms of marginality in relation to crime, offering reminders that any attempt to ‘understand the interface between patriarchal control mechanisms and criminal justice practices’ requires critical ‘analysis on the race/gender/punishment nexus’ (Chesney-Lind, 2006: 10). Constitutive criminologists, too, have analyzed discursive complications associated with race, class and gender using intersectionality. Intersectional criminological analyses, in turn, reflect the breath of intersectionality’s applications. Recent studies have examined the differential contours of punitive forms of governance (e.g. Spivakovsky, 2013; Turnbull, 2012) and shifting identities amid broader social change (Moolman, 2013), while earlier research focused on how intersectional identities mediate crime (Cunneen and Stubbs, 1997, 2004; Maher, 1997) and adapted poststructural theory to develop intersectional methodologies for criminology (Arrigo et al., 2005). Taken together, these works make up a literature distinct from criminological research that retains an androcentric purview through so-called ‘neutral’ epistemological claims.

Meda Chesney-Lind’s research, for instance, attests that, even though the letter of the law asserts gender and race neutrality, the criminalization of women’s victimization in the United States has resulted in increased rates of female arrests and incarceration that disproportionately affect women and girls from impoverished communities. Race and ethnicity directly implicate how women and girls become positioned as offenders, yielding evident differences across racial groups. ⁶ Chesney-Lind and Pasko (2004: 15) have criticized theories of delinquency that rely on and evoke ‘cavalier androcentricism’ instead of querying intersectional concerns as well as the criminal justice system’s continued disparate treatment of historically marginalized groups, even with the introduction of more evidence-based law enforcement practices. This, and other feminist criminological research highlighted within this section, points to a broader tension between so-called ‘objective’ measures of data collection and enforcement and the realities of systemic subordination (Cunneen, 2011: 257–258). In this case, the bodies of criminalized and punished women evidence the effects of such institutionalized violence.

Noted feminist criminological works have documented the complications of intersectional inequalities. Lisa Maher (1997: 171), for instance, offers one such examination of an illegal drug economy that attends to the cultural distinctions, social hierarchies, marketplace opportunities and identities that ‘underpin the organization of labor markets in the street-level drug economy’. Through a three-year ethnographic study of white, black and Latina female drug users in three Brooklyn neighborhoods, she demonstrates that understanding relationships between gender and crime requires accounting for other contextual dynamics, which, she found, include three overlapping spheres: drug business hustles, non-drug hustles and sex work. Maher explains that women were excluded from the most lucrative jobs (e.g. dealing drugs), leaving sex work as the most viable option for making money. Radicalized dynamics, however, mediate how different groups of women participated in these illegal economies. ⁷ As such, although Maher’s project is ethnographic, it is also comparative, as she regularly draws comparisons between women of diverse groups to demonstrate intersectional forms of difference. Identity, by serving as a point of reference, in turn, anchors her analysis.

Like Maher, Chris Cunneen and Julie Stubbs’ (1997, 2004) work offers a critical analysis by focusing on how particular women’s relationships to crime reveal intersectional dimensions. In particular, their research aids in better understanding the high victimization rate of Filipino women in Australia, illustrating how the convergence of hegemonic (white, Australian) masculinity, class differences, globalization and Orientalist myths about Asian women’s sexual and avaricious ‘nature’ inform these offenses. When Filipino women refuse to accept socially prescribed submissive roles, the violence of these axes crystallizes, sometimes in the form of murder. For Cunneen and Stubbs, the axes implicating these conditions are not static; they shift, especially when considered against the backdrop of migration, as do the risks they imbue.

Constitutive criminologists have also employed intersectionality to illuminate how crime is co-produced through various social discourses, actors, institutions and forces (Arrigo et al., 2005; Schwartz and Milovanovic, 1996). Consequently, human identities emerge as wide-ranging, yet closely tied to the structures that produce them. For example, in applying a constitutive analysis to women in an English prison, Mary Bosworth (1999) analyzes how incarcerated women’s identities take shape at the intersections of a range of factors, many of which are unique to each of them and their circumstances. While race, class and gender are important considerations, power, more generally, in prison, is something that individuals constantly negotiate, primarily due to the reality that there are multiple overlapping institutional discourses at play, many of which are contradictory and competing (Bosworth, 1999). Central to that analysis is the role of societal notions of idealized femininity (i.e. motherhood), which are not only utilized by prison authorities to control and/or discipline women, but are also appropriated by women as a means of resistance. Collectively, these subversive acts reveal instances where ‘the effects of class, sexuality, gender and race often divide the prisoner community even as they unite them’ (Bosworth, 1999: 152).

Set beyond the prison, Lisa Sanchez’s (1998, 1999) research on the sex trade in a ‘North Western US city’ further problematizes the traditional dichotomy between women as offender and women as victim. Focusing on how prostitutes experience victimization and develop strategies for protection, Sanchez addresses how these women express feelings of powerlessness, often committing crimes in the process. They emerge as ‘conflicted and multi-faceted’, their choices constrained by contextual factors, which legal processes later come to implicate and complicate (Sanchez, 1999: 54). The intersection of prostitution and victimization is a position that Sanchez (1999: 54–57) considers as space where law fails these women: law narrowly focuses on their status as sex workers, foreclosing the broader conversation of how sexual violence is a crime regardless of the victim’s identity or their choice to participate in sex work. Because of this positioning, participants in these analyses (all women) elude classification by evading the binary divide presumed between victimhood and criminality.

Constitutive criminologists have appropriated intersectionality under a rubric of constitutive interrelational sets (referred to as COREL sets) to develop a three-dimensional framing, or ‘portrait’, that captures intersectional and overlapping qualities of multiple relations of inequality (Henry and Milovanovic, 1996; Milovanovic, 1997; Schwartz and Milovanovic, 1996). Keeping with the foundational tenets of intersectionality, COREL sets address how representation mediates subordination in both a symbolical and material sense. Rather than provide a picture framed by positivistic devices, they enable the exploration of how multiple expressions of consciousness and inequality coalesce and inform crime, reiterating that we should always consider what we can—and cannot—claim to know as criminologists. Intersectionality, in turn, serves as a ‘necessary prerequisite’ to explore important dimensions of inequality (Milovanovic, 1997: 212–214). Destabilization is therefore unavoidable, making it a characteristic to recognize and preserve, not work against. To do otherwise would be to repeat the same error that feminists have diagnosed in criminology: that is, to make authoritarian claims that negate the contingent nature of knowledge in favor of narrow understandings of objectivity. In doing so, this approach takes seriously the intersectional imperative to examine how social forces ‘relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling’ (Crenshaw, 1991: 1241).

Although we can only offers a cursory summary of intersectional criminological scholarship within the space of an article, works collectively reviewed here attest that intersectionality offers a significant paradigm for studies of crime and deviance. These analyses, however, are, for the most part, deployments of the domestic intersectionality articulated by Crenshaw with only recent scholarship addressing postcolonial implications (e.g. Bosworth and Flavin, 2007; Spivakovsky, 2013). We therefore revisit earlier and contemporary feminist studies concerned with issues of postcoloniality to glean additional analytic insight.

Feminist insights about—and beyond—intersectionality

Feminist work in other disciplines offers alternative readings of intersectionality of benefit to criminology. Recent intersectional analyses focus on interrelations between ethnicity, nation, class, disability, sexuality, religion and diaspora across global contexts (e.g. Choo, 2006; Choo and Ferree, 2010; Cramer and Plummer, 2009; Rahman, 2010; Sylvain, 2011). In fact, scholars have built intersectional frameworks attuned to global and regional structural relations and how they yield ‘multiple modernities’ and inequalities (e.g. Walby, 2009; Walby et al., 2012). There are, however, many similarly critical engagements that predate these transnational intersectional analyses, which also provide important postcolonial insights. For instance, Evelyn Nakano Glenn (1985) has detailed how colonial labor systems shaped the (re)productive labor of ‘racial ethnic’ women in fundamentally different ways than that of white women. The nature of their work, she argues, reveals that their oppression was bound to their position as ‘colonized minorities’, not simply their status as women, under the law. Glenn’s claims, like Crenshaw’s arguments, reflect a broader scholarly critique levied at the academic representations of marginalized people, doing so in a way that also speaks to expressed concerns about the depictions of non-western people and contexts (Anzaldúa and Moraga, 1981; Harrison, 1991; Rafael, 1994). In calling for a ‘decolonized’ anthropology, Faye Harrison (1991: 3) argues that counterhegemonic strategies are imperative if scholars are to rethink the ‘race, gender and class inequalities at the heart of the world system’ and, in turn, research. Through their critiques, both Glenn (1985) and Harrison (1991) bring attention to entrenched colonial legacies undergirding not only intersectional concerns, but also academic knowledge production.

Postcolonial conditions encompass and transcend the race–class–gender nexus. Embedded western worldviews can overlook radical divergences among women (among others) and the importance of their communities and social relations. For example, many cultural orientations do not ‘value the individuated person’ in the way western values presume (Jolly, 1996: 184, emphasis in original). The individual—or a notion of a singular self—is not necessarily the given starting point for conceptions of personhood, making identity-centered analyses problematic in many contexts. This reveals an embedded problem of western research: the presumption that women are—or should be—autonomous, rights-bearing subjects. ⁸ This stance, as Mohanty (1986, 2003) has elaborated elsewhere in relation to the plight of ‘third world women’, has brought about problematic consequences, often in the pursuit of ‘freeing’ women from domestic patriarchy. Specifically, by condemning local norms and embracing ‘modern’ solutions, many such interventions render their own imperialist (and patriarchal) underpinnings invisible. These rhetorics pose an uncanny resemblance to earlier colonial justifications, often doing so in ways that simultaneously rely upon and discursively disavow the foundation laid by previous imperialisms. In short, even though globalization has changed, a cyclical postcolonial logic persists.

Despite these longstanding observations, essentialist tropes still prevail in criminological research. There remains an abundance of research that attributes crimes against women as the outgrowth of ‘bad’ or backward culture, despite compelling accounts of how hybridized cultural systems inform subjectivity and oppression in complex ways (Jolly, 1996; Merry, 2006). Poverty, gendered norms, cultural and familial obligations and customary law all influence social constructions of crime and prescriptions of punishment. Meanings of even basic categories—like crime, person and gender—are contingent upon their interplay with other social dynamics. Amid globalized changes, imported western ideas may take on significant meanings in other places, but they do so through locally mediated practices. These convergences refigure cultural ties as well as notions of transgression, identity and violence. Fluctuating social relations can unpredictably shape outcomes in and around violence that may or may not culturally constitute acts labeled and treated as ‘crime’. While ethnography offers a method of documenting these nuances, critical reflections on anthropology’s legacies reveal that merely doing ethnography does not necessarily yield anti-essentialist analyses (e.g. Harrison, 1991). We therefore offer two ethnographic accounts that address criminological issues and embrace intersectional agendas here as instructive examples.

Ethnographic research by Anna-Karina Hermkens (2008) and Katherine Lepani (2012) paint two complicated pictures of gendered violence in Papua New Guinea. In both analyses, cases that appear as clear acts of crime to a (western) criminological gaze, including domestic violence and rape, do not register as such for many participants or are negotiated not through law but through other social mechanisms. Hermkens (2008) details how religious devotion operates in response to domestic and gender-based violence. Her account of Catholic women living in Madang analyzes how their worship of Mary empowers them to resist violence, while simultaneously enabling them to tolerate it. Although seemingly paradoxical, Hermkens’s analysis highlights how their negotiation is symptomatic of broader transformations in which these women are caught between tradition, Christianity and modernity. Lepani (2012) excavates similar conflicts through an analysis of HIV education, which functions—or at least intends to function—as a mechanism of social control in the Trobriand Islands, an area known for residents’ sexual openness. The failures of many campaigns are rooted in their inability to culturally resonate with Trobriand people. Communicated through messages of sexual restraint and fidelity, public health messages emerge in direct opposition to the sexual practices that solidify interclan networks. Rather than make localized appeals, campaigns rely on risk assessments, surveillance tools and behavior-change models that presume individuality, choice and the capability to be or become a ‘responsible’ citizen (Lepani, 2012: 17)—not unlike many criminal justice practices.

Through analyses that do not presume identity or gendered subordination as their starting point (but, rather, as relations within cultural milieu), both Hermkens and Lepani document how transnational contradictions materialize through localized, embodied acts. Their anthropological inquiries provide important criminological insight into violence, deviance and social control as not the outgrowth of backward or oppressive culture, but as constitutive social formations. Western interventions cannot simply ‘fix’ the peoples and beliefs they target, even if they are well intended. Instead, and similar to the original intentions of intersectionality, the very formations of subordination are culturally contingent and reveal friction. Friction, writes Anna Tsing (2004: 25), embodies the ‘awkward, unequal, unstable and creative qualities of interconnection across difference’; it manifests across the globe in various ways, complicating how axes of race and gender operate, even in familiar spaces. For instance, in the US context, racial management strategies and their gendered effects have changed in response to earlier antiracist social movements. Contemporary strategies, Hong (2008: 102–103) argues, have appropriated antiracist language, enabling ‘racist and sexist structures’ to persist despite the ‘seeming disavowal of overt racism and white supremacy’. Thus, in light of globalized shifts, intersectionality can take on unpredictable features that are not necessarily manifest in overt acts of discrimination.

These volatilities are precisely what Puar (2005) diagnoses as exceeding intersectionality’s analytic scope. She employs assemblage as an alternative through which to explore how terror reigns—that is, not simply through acts of war but also through transnational circuits. The War on Terror, Puar explains, has generated precarious partnerships between modalites of modernity, inequality, violence, sexuality and xenophobia. Terrorist bodies, she argues, are corporal sites where we can observe the queer nature of the War’s perversions. The perceived threat of a (foreign or outsider) terror nourished by narratives that render ‘Muslim’ bodies as intolerable and perverse serve to justify and sustain US-sponsored mobilizations of terror. These ties ‘suture U.S. nationalism through the perpetual fissuring of race from sexuality—the race of the (presumptively sexually repressed, perverse, or both) terrorist and the sexuality of the national (presumptively white, gender normative) queer: the two dare not converge’ (Puar, 2005: 126). While Puar acknowledges a form of boundary work at play, it is not binary in nature: that is, it is not scripted as separate forces colliding at an intersection nor is it necessarily embodied by an individual experience. Instead, the nonlinearity of these logics, as well as their temporalities, surpasses identity politics. Race and gender are not clear axes, but pieces that may fit somewhere in complex puzzle.

Feminist challenges as criminological possibilities

The promise of intersectionality, we contend, emerges when considered alongside other feminist contributions that glean insight into how ‘subjects’ of research are not static and may not present the same identity across contexts. Butler’s (1990: 23) warning that social forces underpin the ‘very notion of “the person”’ points to the importance of critically considering the positions and processes unintelligible to a multiracial feminist gaze. Recognizing the destabilized nature of categories and persons across time and space, we are concerned with how criminology might utilize intersectionality to query subjectivities that supersede naturalized constructs, including presumptions of identity.

Poststructural feminist readings of postcoloniality have unveiled and engaged these spaces and forces. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988, 1999) has scrutinized how discourses render ‘subaltern’ subjects unable to speak (let alone be heard, read or fully explained). Of the subaltern, she writes,

‘Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling that is the displaced figuration of the “third-world woman” caught between modernization, culturalism and development’ (Spivak, 1999: 304).

While her description directly applies to women in colonized spaces, the subaltern, as a category, encompasses subjects marginalized to the extent that their experiences seem unintelligible. Though Spivak (1999) recognizes the subaltern’s capacity for agency (albeit situated and mediated), her characterization reminds us of our inability as researchers to fully represent the subaltern’s experience. These inescapable predicaments are challenges to dwell on, not to mask over. Instead of contemplating the complications and contextual specificities of subject-formation, positivist methods would prescribe a category or categories to capture subaltern subjects—or its gaze would not see them in the first place.

Similarly, the ‘intersectional location’, according to Han (2006: 180–181),

cannot be spoken from. What Crenshaw’s writing takes as its goals is not … to speak from that untellable location, but rather to create a discursive shift so that that location might become somehow tellable—a shift to make it know[n], to reveal it, account for it.

The intersectional location is thus an inarticulable space that prompts us to reflect on how our ‘subjects’ become obscured through the disjuncture between their experiences (which we cannot know) and their representations in the form of texts, images and other ‘data’. This, an otherwise unintelligible move, prompts a necessary rethinking of how criminological tools depict a variety of subjects and persons such as victims and perpetrators (often as separate and opposing categories), the chronically surveilled, the disenfranchised and bodies that fall in between or outside representative categories.

This speaks to a fundamental issue within criminology. The discipline, regardless of its orientation and scope, is predicated upon the study of subaltern subjects. Criminological claims to expert knowledge rely primarily upon empirical understandings of crime’s representation, not its tangible practice. If we think about crime as a recited event (through narratives, statistics and/or reports), the act of crime occupies the space of the subaltern, as it cannot be spoken from, seen or heard. Alison Young (1996: 27) pointedly makes this observation: ‘like a ubiquitous ghost’, crime ‘haunts the images we believe in’. Despite criminological attempts to analyze crime, she contends, we can never really know it, because crime, as an object, is not so much tangible as it is imagined through the texts and images that document it (1996: 16). A positivistic criminology therefore fundamentally misrepresents crime. Through a veneer of objectivity, its claims to predict causality and control for biases are contaminated notions. By maintaining a distance from its objects of study, criminology dismisses—or cannot see—the inherent excess of crime. In other words, its ‘objective’ stance actively sustains its own matrix of intelligibility. The neutrality of criminological truth claims operates as another formation of violence that obscures marginalized and subaltern subjects. Its violence is cyclical and continually engrained through its disengaged disposition.

This recognition of intangibility is not without methodological and ethical challenges, but intersectionality offers a mode of critical engagement. While a discomforting thought to think that a researcher cannot know her subjects, it is precisely this kind of visceral reaction—a shudder—that Han (2006) describes in relation to the viability of intersectionality in engaging such ghosts. This stance, she argues, enables the reader to reflexively engage them. It requires, writes Han (2006: 185):

an acute and self-conscious sense of history, not as events of the past, but as past events that are instantiated by the work of a text and the reader’s desire to work with the text. Perhaps most important, this desire is premised on an ‘intersectional sensibility’ and the openness of readers to subject themselves to the experience of the shudder.

The shudder, provoked by intersectionality, feels overwhelmingly real and imbues a sense of actuality, but it also offers a reminder that the reader’s knowledge of these experiences can only be metaphorical in nature.

This sensibility moves us away from a positivistic project and closer towards a feminist objectivity. By feminist objectivity, we refer to Donna Haraway’s (1988) contention that knowledge is always situated and, at best, partial in nature. Rather than claiming to know acts of crime that we cannot, and offering interventions based on that limited knowledge, feminist objectivity requires querying the messiness of our worlds and their intelligible features. It is antithetical to androcentric empiricism, which relies on the distancing away from one’s subjects of inquiry—as if that distance can provide an all-knowing gaze. Similarly, Han (2006) warns against interpreting recounted narratives as authentic truths. Instead, they are texts to reflexively read. To be ethical readers, we should approach crime as a constitutive object—that is, not as tangible evidence, but as its likeness. This sensibility is an epistemological astuteness that intersectionality can instill as part of our methodological toolkit. It does not deliver a complete picture of crime or other subaltern categories; rather, it forces us to confront race, gender and crime as ghostly subjects with experiences we cannot know in full.

Employing an intersectional sensibility has practical implications for criminological research. Rather than relying upon identity as a starting point for analyses, it requires considering how the events of crime become constructed and narrated. It is similar, as Crenshaw (1989) suggested, to recounting an accident in an intersection. Not only must one account for the specific actors affected, but one must also pay careful attention to the patterns of traffic, the rules and conditions around the interchange, even how the area is policed. As accidents vary in severity and regularity, one must differentiate how structures enable and constrain the possibility of collisions and who travels these paths. If we take seriously the metaphor of the intersection, we realize it is a space with human, nonhuman and cyborg actors who interact with each other, informing the constitutive moment of crime. A variety of accidents and offenses can occur in these areas, and, depending upon whether or not and how legal authorities become involved, they can be recounted in variety of ways and forms.

The conditions of the intersection are arguably just as, if not more, important than the axes of the crossing. Framing the intersection through a transnational lens highlights that not all intersections are the same. While Crenshaw (1989) evoked cars in her discussion of US discrimination law and the metaphor of the intersection may conjure an image of clearly marked roads with traffic signs or signals in western researchers’ minds, this is certainly not a universal way of imagining paths and crossings. Keeping in mind that there are disparate modes of travel in different places of the world, which yield different norms and patterns of traffic, it becomes more apparent that structural conditions and contingent histories inform how intersectional axes of subordination take shape. Crossings entail national and communal borders, military zones, occupied territories, even digital hubs. All of them have distinct contextual contours that are the outgrowth of particular histories. Thinking of the intersection in relation to the imagined event of crime as well as its representation enables a more nuanced analytical account, one that is not so narrowly focused on the interplay of structure and agency, but, rather on how forms of inequality shape the emergent nature of crime across sites. The three foci of intersectionality—structural, political and symbolic—offer analytical guides for assessing the interplay of these various considerations, especially when we cannot see axes of intersections or the actors involved in the event.

An intersectional sensibility is therefore a critically attuned way of tracing these various crossings as well as the maps we may (or may not) have and the pictures of crime they present. Advocating this stance extends feminist deconstructions of criminological knowledge and its power by offering an adept and reflexive mode of intersectional inquiry that extends Crenshaw’s original framing and accounts for poststructural insights, including those of constitutive criminology. Further, it preserves intersectionality as a corrective lens—in this case, one that requires feminist objectivity rather than the essentializing criminological gaze.

Conclusion

In light of transnational shifts, the precarious nature of criminological categories and their meanings has become evident. They can fluctuate and shift in paradoxical ways. Employing intersectionality therefore requires careful consideration of the ways through which transnational dimensions influence points of intersection and departure. Even ‘objective’ academic knowledge is not immutable. If anything, fields like criminology are susceptible, because they have historically disavowed how they have been (and continue to be) ensconced by postcoloniality. As many feminist scholars have acknowledged and debated, applying intersectionality in a way that appeals to mainstream methodologies undermines this analytic, thus threatening to replicate forms of violence originally repudiated through intersectional analyses (Alexander-Floyd, 2012; Mohanty, 2013; Patil, 2013). Intersectionality, however, is not a universalist concept, but rather, a corrective tool at which to take aim at the violence underpinning such epistemological claims. If we are to pursue a transnational intersectionality within criminology, it needs to attend to, not negate, previous iterations of globalization that have informed the complexities of difference and subordination manifest in not only our research sites, but also our worldviews and methodologies. An intersectional sensibility as we have discussed here offers one alternative mode of trying to see how conditions of crime take shape, one that resists the androcentric standpoint of criminological empiricism and its imperialist influences also.

Following other feminist warnings, this article also offers foreboding words for criminologists. Criminology, for the most part, still lacks nuanced ways of querying how postcoloniality haunts the worlds through which crime takes shape. Many empirical tools have actually naturalized crime as an object, hindering the ability to deconstruct the intelligible mechanisms underpinning its construction. As such, appropriations too often dismiss the subaltern; the scholarly recognition of racial and gendered difference is but an artifice if it fails to engage the ghosts manifest in criminology. Critical observations of intersectionality attest that the concept can naturalize race, class, gender and identity as determinant forces that can fit and retain mainstream worldviews. The ghostly figures we engage do not stand at the axes of subordination, but emerge as lingering elements at the margins of intersectionality as we know it. Incorporating an intersectional sensibility as an ethic of reading the texts of crime available to us opens a space in criminology’s present to consider how earlier iterations of globalization haunt the field and its trajectory.

Perhaps more importantly, this analysis of intersectionality marks an attempt to model how engaging longstanding feminist criticisms can nurture counterhegemonic tools within criminology. Our aim has not been to reject existing intersectional criminological analyses, but to posit a formulation of intersectionality that explicitly reflects upon and responds to the postcolonial dimensions of criminology. It is not simply a critique, but an invitation to pursue alternative futures by taking up similarly critical evaluations—even those targeted at this piece—of how we query tacit meanings embedded in criminological knowledge production.