Not additive,not defined: mutual constitution in feminist intersectional studies

Abstract

The term ‘mutual constitution’ appears with regularity in scholarship on intersectionality, but what does it mean? We could not easily answer this question in the usual way – by reading books and articles about it – because the term has not received direct, widespread or sustained engagement in feminist theory. This led us to analyse a wide range of feminist scholarship – the entire set of 379 articles in women’s studies journals that consider both intersectionality and mutual constitution – to determine whether there are patterns and commonalities in the ways this important theoretical term is used. Our analysis reveals that while there is widespread agreement that mutual constitution does not allow for an additive or binary approach, this is the only major point of shared understanding of this term. Scholars disagree over whether mutual constitution is, in fact, the same thing as intersectionality, and in practice, clusters of disciplines use the term with different norms and levels of precision. Because of the explanatory potential of this term in intersectional theory, we recommend on the basis of our analysis that social scientists reconsider the convention of asserting that entities such as race, class and gender are mutually constituted and borrow the methodological tools from feminist historians, literary critics and other humanists that would allow for a genuine determination and demonstration of when entities are mutually constituted.

Keywords

Additive discipline intersectionality mutual constitution theoretical terms women’s and gender studies journals

Introduction

On occasion, scholars of intersectionality use the term ‘mutual constitution’ to describe the relationships between the ‘categories of difference’ we study (Davis, 2008: 68). For instance, Peter Wade analyses ‘race, class, gender, and age hierarchies that, by shaping each other in a process of mutual constitution, play an important role in the sexualization of black and indigenous women’ (2013: 190). This is but one example of the use of this term in this interdisciplinary field, and it is not atypical. Other examples look and sound similar, even when they address vastly different topics: Alice E. Colón Warren, in an article on Puerto Rican feminism in Gender & Society, argues that Puerto Rico is an important site where ‘the intersections, conflicts, and mutual constitution of gender, national, class, race, and sexual identities and practices’ can be explored (2003: 669). Kiran Asher writes in Feminist Studies that ‘Black women’s concerns and the responses of Afro-Columbian women’s networks’ in her study ‘emerged within the context of multifaceted, intertwined, and mutually constitutive relations of power’ (2007: 35). In an article about the United Farm Workers in American Quarterly, Ana Raquel Minian argues that ‘the mutually constituted nature of race, gender, sexuality, and class meant that the union’s sexual discourse reinforced the hierarchical categories that oppressed all farmworkers’ (2013: 65). The list goes on.

This term has a ring of truth to it. It sounds right in studies like this that problematise the dynamics between enormously complex entities such as race, sexuality, disability, class, gender, age and nation. The term, though, seems imprecise in this body of scholarship, and we document in this article the wide list of objects that intersectional scholars state are mutually constituted, from relations to identities to contexts to subjects. We trace the use of the term in feminist intersectional work across a range of disciplines to reveal what may either be a cacophony of logical inconsistencies or a productive opportunity for theorising. In the main, we find that the term serves as a counterpoint to the notion that race, class, sexuality, gender, nation, disability or ethnicity could be additive, binary, separate or hierarchically ordered. If this is what mutual constitution is not, it is still not perfectly clear from the literature what mutual constitution actually is. However, a more robust theoretical engagement with the term in the fields of history and literary criticism provides clues for how the term may be demonstrated rather than asserted.

What we present in this article is our analysis of the sources that led us to this conclusion. Namely, we identify 379 articles on intersectional topics that include at least a nominal mention of mutual constitution, published in forty-one women’s studies journals. We catalogue the disciplinary fields in which these articles appear and analyse what scholars say mutual constitution is, what they say it is not and what disciplinary practices might serve as models for how to productively use it as an analytical tool. Our analysis is solely based on the written record. We have not interviewed the authors of the articles under consideration to ask them to articulate their understanding of mutual constitution. Instead, we have sought out patterns in how and in what disciplines the term is used and articulated. We have done this in service to the goal of theoretical specification. As Ivan Ermakoff argues in a recent symposium on ‘What is Good Theorizing?’, indeterminate concepts such as hegemony, modernity and, here, mutual constitution can facilitate empirically ungrounded claims-making. Without the clear definitions that allow concepts to be empirically traced:

we cannot figure out when we observe their putative referent and when we do not. They have the epistemic status of a Rorschach blot: indistinct and thus open to multiple interpretations. By way of consequence, we do not know when these concepts are empirically relevant and when they are not. Their meaning is primarily evocative. They resonate with an intuitive understanding (Ermakoff, 2017: 130).

While we honour intuition and enjoy resonance, and even remain open to the possibility that multiple interpretations of a concept can be a theoretical strength rather than a weakness, our assessment of the intersectional literature in which mutual constitution is used suggests that the problem is less with multiple interpretations than with unarticulated interpretations. If the term is simply claimed more than demonstrated, it is rendered nearly useless – evoking a sense that something important is going on in the constitutive relationships between certain social phenomena, but without the specificity to make evident what exactly that is. This prompts us to advocate for cross-disciplinary discussions between scholars of intersectionality that could potentially lead to developing a shared understanding of what the term means and of how to determine whether and where it occurs, or to considering the term from different theoretical and disciplinary vantage points and exploring the dissonance.

In what follows, we place our project within the context of other feminist theoretical work that attempts to clarify particular theoretical concepts, including the term ‘intersectionality’ itself. In this, we take intersectional theory to be one genre of feminist theorising, a genre that comprises concepts, approaches, origins and epistemologies that are rooted in Black feminist activism, art and scholarship. We then present our analysis of the concept of mutual constitution in the journals described above, and conclude with a consideration of whether women’s and gender studies disciplines share enough common ground to generate robust intersectional studies of mutual constitution.

Concepts and intersectional theory

In theoretical work, terms and concepts can be the focus of consequential debates. Arguments over the meaning or appropriate operationalisation of terms influence how the terms are understood and used, and can spark entire subfields of work by extension. Donna Haraway (1989) made us rethink the meaning of nature, for instance. Feminist engagement with the notion of social capital in Pierre Bourdieu’s work has revealed it to be, in Lisa Adkins’ (2005) words, a ‘troubled concept’. Scholars have traced the development of concepts such as compulsory sexuality (Gupta, 2015), while other terms, such as sexualisation, have been shown to be in widespread use without a single, shared meaning (Duschinsky, 2013). The same may be said of the term in question here: mutual constitution.

Concepts that are elusive or indeterminate can act in theoretical work. That is, they have effects on what we know. In Ermakoff’s argument, such concepts ‘introduce themselves as self-enclosed and self-propelling entities endowed somehow with agency. On the causal stage, they push things around and run a show of their own. Such imputations are possible only because they have been set free from their empirical moorings’ (2017: 130). Social scientists may be more concerned than others with action on the ‘causal stage’, but this critique of indeterminacy and discussion of its consequences in theoretical work is relevant across disciplines. Elusive concepts can be spaces to sort things out, but they also carry the potential to encompass too much. For instance, scholars may disagree over whether gender and sexuality are mutually constitutive within subjects or as social structural arrangements; this is a potentially productive space in which arguments can be laid out, evidence brought to bear and conceptual weaknesses revealed. To merely claim that gender and sexuality are mutually constituted, though, without a demand to articulate whether and how this occurs in subjects, in social structures or in other entities, we are left to simply accept the intuitive truth of the claim. With no clear definition of the term or opportunity to find evidence of it, we may stop or never even begin to determine the instances in which it is – and is not – at work.

It is significant that the term under consideration is used in intersectional work, given the explosion of multi-disciplinary scholarship over the last two decade that interrogates the meaning, methods and origins of intersectionality itself as a concept, a metaphor, a theory and a field of study. Kathy Davis’ 2008 article ‘Intersectionality as Buzzword’ is among those that confront the confusion and uncertainties provoked by intersectionality while interpreting these forms of ambiguity as a characteristic of the term’s ‘success’. She argues that intersectionality’s direct engagement with the core concerns of feminist theory, along with its open-endedness and potential for novelty among generalists and specialists alike, invites the continual attempts at elaboration we have witnessed since the early 1980s (Davis, 2008).¹ Along with Davis, Vivian M. May (2011: 59), former President of the National Women’s Studies Association, has remarked that intersectionality is ‘undeniably, one of the most significant developments in feminist thought’, and Leslie McCall (2005: 1771) has famously asserted (in a phrase that has clearly served as a balm of validation to those invested in intersectionality, as it has been quoted verbatim in over 150 books and articles since its publication) that intersectionality may be ‘the most important theoretical contribution’ made within women’s studies thus far. Indeed, the conspicuous proliferation of intersectional work across disciplines speaks to its engaging nature. Yet scholars, activists and, increasingly, popular writers differ in their interpretations of whether intersectionality is a feature of identities or social structures (Ken, 2010; Misra, 2018), whether the ‘origin story’ of the term can and should be uncovered (Nash, 2016, 2019), how intersectionality has been colonised and misappropriated by white women (Carastathis, 2014) and how we can move from analyses of what intersectionality is to what intersectionality does (Cho et al., 2013). Further, scholars in the European Journal of Women’s Studies, Maria Carbin and Sara Edenheim, argue that any ‘dream of a common feminist language’ (2013: 245) obscures necessary and fruitful conflicts between feminist theories, and moves the field of intersectionality unproductively towards a grand narrative.

Our work on mutual constitution is grounded in existing debates about the meanings and utility of intersectionality, but it is important to note that these are distinct terms. We explore how often scholars use them synonymously, as in, ‘Intersectional theory argues that gender race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class are mutually constitutive, intersecting in the lived experiences of those who occupy and negotiate different social locations in systems of power’ (Weber and Fore, 2007: 204). Conceptually, though, it could be argued that these terms contradict each other. If intersectionality is a ‘gridlock model’ (Grosz, 1994: 19) in which forms of oppression can be conceptualised within a ‘matrix of domination’ (Hill Collins, 1991), then mutual constitution seems to speak to a less chartable process of becoming. What is becoming what (specifically) is not always particularly clear, and some scholars have even required acknowledgment and appreciation of the ‘indeterminacy’ of the configurations involved (Puar, 2012). Indeed, it is the meaning and mechanics of this process that are at issue in this article.

Complicating matters is the list of similar concepts to mutual constitution that intersectional scholars use to describe the relationships between forms of oppression, including: mutual interdependence, mutual accommodation, mutually determining, mutually reinforcing, mutual dependence, reciprocal constitution, mutual construction, co-constitutive, mutually structuring, constructed and constituted, continually constituted, mutual interaction, mutually interdependent and constituting and being constituted by, among others (Rubin, 1975; Hartmann, 1979; Glenn, 1980; Hartmann, 1981; MacKinnon, 1983; Keller, 1985; Harding, 1986; Scott, 1986; Haraway, 1988; King, 1989; Glenn, 1992; Smith, 1995; Collins, 1998; Glenn, 1998). We argue elsewhere that the concept of the dialectic, borrowed in part from Taoist teachings of the mutual dependency of opposites (Peng et al., 2006), Hegel’s foundational philosophy (Hegel, 2007) and Marx and Engel’s oeuvre (Marx, 1909; Engels, 1954), have also influenced the use of the term mutual constitution in intersectional studies (Helmuth and Ken, 2013). Discovery of how the term came to be used, though, does not necessarily explain what writers currently intend to convey by it. This is especially true in a field as multi-disciplinary as intersectional studies, in which it may not be said that scholars, activists and popular writers all share understandings of even the most basic terms in the field such as ‘gender’ or ‘woman’. Without an analysis based on a thorough and systematic reading of literature in the field, then, we should not assume that the practice of using the term ‘mutual constitution’ reflects knowledge held in common.

Digging up mutual constitution’s ‘intellectual genealogy’ (May, 2011) and attempting to articulate the fullness of its meaning is not uncontroversial. It could be understood to be a form of ‘intersectional originalism’, to use Jennifer C. Nash’s (2016: 3) provocative term, in which claims to faithfulness to the meaning of concepts in early documents function in current practice as a form of re-interpretation. We seek, though, to consider the range in usage of this term rather than to adjudicate between correct and incorrect usage. That said, the possibility does exist that ‘mutual constitution’ is overused, or is used as an empty, ‘doxographic discourse’ to signal little more than its user is ‘well informed’ (Knapp, 2005: 252). In fact, mutual constitution is beginning to be recognised in some corners as a trope, as Kieran Healy (2017) boldly displays in the Sociological Theory article ‘Fuck Nuance’. ‘When faced with a problem that is hard to solve’, Healy says, or with:

a line of thinking that requires us to commit to some defensible claim, or a logical dilemma we must bite the bullet on, the nuance-promoting theorist says, ‘But isn’t it more complicated than that?’ or ‘Isn’t it really both/and?’ or ‘Aren’t these phenomena mutually constitutive?’ … This sort of nuance is, I contend, fundamentally antitheoretical. It blocks the process of abstraction on which theory depends, and it inhibits the creative process that makes theorizing a useful activity (2017: 119; emphasis in original).

Though he assiduously avoids naming intersectional theorising in his treatise, Healy could be read as waging an unsubtle attack on it, aimed at Patricia Hill Collins’ foundational ‘both/and’ orientation in Black Feminist Thought (1991); at the long project to ‘complicate’ the hegemonic and imperialist canons of white men’s scholarship with analyses of gender, race, sexuality, nation, embodiment and ethnicity; and of course, at our central concern here, the intersectionality-specific notion of mutual constitution.² Healy’s work – itself an article-length interrogation of a single theoretical concept, nuance – attempts to situate mutual constitution in the trash heap of unnecessary theorising even while it provides, for our article, an example of engaging with scholars’ use of a term whose meaning might otherwise seem obvious. In contrast, our aim is not to attack the use of this concept of mutual constitution, but to seek meaning about a term so frequently used in feminist scholarship, a field in which we enthusiastically participate.

It is with this eye towards seeking meaning that we turn to our consideration of how the term ‘mutual constitution’ is used in women’s studies journal articles published across a range of co-disciplines such as history and psychology. We provide extended analyses of examples from some of these articles, along with a broad accounting of the characteristics of the term’s usage across disciplines. In this, we identify what authors purport is being mutually constituted, what they agree on, what they disagree on and what is left unsaid. Our introduction to this analysis begins with a consideration of a key article in Feminist Theory.

Tracing ‘mutual constitution’ in feminist scholarship

Feminist Theory is an important source of knowledge production in the field of intersectionality, as indicated by the pronounced level of interest in Davis’ (2008) ‘Buzzword’ article, which has been cited over 1000 times. Davis only briefly mentions mutual constitution³ in this article, and eighteen additional articles in the journal use the term. Of these, ‘Queering Paradise’ by Heather Tapley (2013) is one of the most extensive treatments of mutual constitution across this entire sample of intersectional scholarship, and we consider it in depth here. Tapley engages in a queer reading of Toni Morrison’s 1998 novel Paradise as a site where raced, gendered and sexualised identity formation is disrupted and destabilised. Drawing particularly on the work of Hennessy (2000) and Somerville (1994), Tapley focuses on racial purity, masculinity and the management of sexuality as strategies⁴ that mutually constitute each other within the imposing logics of capitalism. In this framework, each of these is a form of property that must be repetitiously produced and protected if it is going to work to naturalise a capitalist network of power in which privileges are unevenly distributed.

Tapley makes an enthralling argument about how the stability of capitalism depends on the strategic production of identity categories and their associated practices, and she also gleans from Morrison’s narrative specific aspects of race (‘racial purity’), gender (‘8-Rock masculinity’) and sexuality (‘the management of sexuality’) rather than theorising broadly about everything that could possibly be entailed in terms like ‘race’, ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’. One specific example may help illustrate this. The ‘blue-black’ men who settled Morrison’s fictional communal town of Haven came to be known as ‘8-Rocks’ in reference to the deepest, darkest level of coal in a mine. Over generations, some of their descendants have strenuously protected their lineage by having children only with other descendants and by keeping track of who is racially ‘pure’. When an outsider becomes pregnant by a descendant, the 8-Rock men convene to decide her reproductive fate. Their demand that she have an abortion brings together their quest for racial purity with their gendered assumption of decision-making power. The men manage her and the descendant’s sexuality as a gendered practice of social control in service to maintaining their racial 8-Rock lineage.

While this compelling example demonstrates how these elements ‘work together’, and Tapley effectively argues how these practices are used to support and justify an unequal distribution of resources, she specifically states that ‘each of these strategies is mutually constituted by the other within capitalist regimes’ (2013: 32). It may seem like splitting hairs, but for elements to ‘work together’ they must have been already constituted, so both their constitution and the way they are used after constitution – or the way they are constituted by working together – must be demonstrated and distinguished. The care Tapley has taken to state and repeat the phrase ‘by the other’ in this and the other instances of her mutual constitution argument leaves little doubt that what she means by ‘mutual constitution’ is that racial purity, 8-Rock masculinity and the management of sexuality constitute each other. Yet the article also makes the case that capitalism ‘produces’, ‘generates’ and ‘designs’ these strategies, which means logically that the strategies are constituting each other and that capitalism is constituting them. This is not conceptually impossible, but Tapley is more persuasive in her demonstration of the capitalist production than the statement of mutual constitution.

Tapley’s work points to the type of insightful and intuitive, but ultimately imprecise and difficult-to-decipher, use of the term ‘mutual constitution’ that we address in this article. The term sounds right when she states it: ‘masculinity works in conjunction with racial purity and lineage, each constitutive of the other and functioning as capitalist strategies’ (Tapley, 2013: 34). This constitution is not spelled out, however. What is demonstrated in Tapley’s analysis is that the unequal distribution of resources (i.e. capitalism) depends on masculinity and racial purity in the context Morrison conveys. But mutual constitution, as a signification of either becoming or being, is only speculative here and possibly even contradictory to the argument Tapley makes.

Data and analysis

‘Queering Paradise’ is hardly the only scholarly work to assert rather than demonstrate that mutual constitution occurs. In fact, the article is exemplary in how far it goes compared to other intersectional studies across feminist journals to clarify this process. To place Tapley’s approach within the wider body of feminist work, we wanted to assess a broad and thorough range of women’s studies scholarship. To this end, we consulted the InCites Journal Citation Reports from Web of Science⁵ for the category ‘women’s studies’, which listed a total of forty-one journals. This set included many important publications such as Feminist Theory and Gender & Society, but excluded others such as Women, Politics, and Policy. It also did not capture feminist work that appears in other disciplinary journals or in books. Although it is an imperfect list, it included journals used in a wide variety of fields including cultural studies, sociology, history, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, health, economics, linguistics, politics, social work, therapy, international affairs, geography, law and others.

To isolate the articles that reference both intersectionality and mutual constitution, we used ProQuest Central to search each journal using the search term (‘mutual* constitut*’ AND intersect*) which included all variations of these terms. Thirteen of the forty-one journals on the list were accessible through ProQuest, and among these, 107 articles included at least one variation of the search term. For the remaining journals, we used other search engines⁶ to do clusters of searches.⁷ In total, among the thirty-seven journals we were able to search,⁸ we gleaned 379 articles that addressed mutual constitution and intersectionality.⁹ The sample included research articles, book reviews, editorials, calls for papers and any other form that used the search terms, since we were interested in how scholars made use of and explained mutual constitution regardless of the publication form. The journals and the number of articles that included at least one variation of the combined search terms are listed in Table 1.

Table 1.

Women’s and gender studies journals and number of articles on mutual constitution and intersectionality.

Journal	Number of articles
Signs	45
European Journal of Women’s Studies	26
Gender, Work & Organization	25
International Feminist Journal of Politics	22
Politics & Gender	22
Women’s Studies International Forum	22
Gender & Society	21
Hypatia	21
Sex Roles	21
Feminist Theory	19
Feminist Review	16
Feminist Studies	15
Social Politics	13
Journal of Women’s History	11
Journal of Women, Politics & Policy	9
Australian Feminist Studies	8
Frontiers – A Journal of Women Studies	8
Psychology of Women Quarterly	7
Differences – A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies	6
Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies	6
Affilia – Journal of Women and Social Work	5
Feminism & Psychology	5
Feminist Economics	5
Gender, Place and Culture	5
Gender and Language	4
Violence Against Women	3
Feminist Legal Studies	2
Indian Journal of Gender Studies	2
Radical Philosophy	2
Women’s Health Issues	2
Asian Journal of Women’s Studies	1
Health Care for Women International	0
Journal of Gender Studies	0
Journal of Women & Aging	0
Journal of Women’s Health	0
Women & Health	0
Women & Therapy	0
International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics	n/a
Asian Women	n/a
Travail Genre et Sociétés	n/a
Feministische Studien	n/a
n/a = not analysed
Total	379

We downloaded the full text of each of these 379 articles, which included 540 uses of the term mutual constitution, and analysed those 540 passages and their context using MaxQDA software. Specifically, we identified:

each conceptual category of items the authors identified as being mutually constituted (for example, relations between race, class and gender, or systems of race, class and gender);

each item the authors included among what is being mutually constituted (for example, race and class; or race, gender, nation and disability);

stated definitions of mutual constitution;

explanations of how mutual constitution works or how it is accomplished; examples used to demonstrate what mutual constitution is, and evidence used to demonstrate mutual constitution;

discussions of what mutual constitution is not;

and lists that included mutual constitution (for example, ‘Gender and race are intertwined, interdependent, socially constructed, patterned and mutually constituted’).

We coded every passage with this framework, and also clustered the journals by discipline so we could compare whether and how particular items are handled differently. In what we present below, we articulate the basic themes we identified. Our findings focus first on the conceptual umbrellas under which scholars placed items such as race, class and gender. These umbrellas are important for feminist theory as the nouns that are acting and being acted upon in the process of mutual constitution. We then refer to the small set of specific passages among these articles in which scholars stated what they meant by the term ‘mutual constitution’, including those who used examples or evidence to concretise their definitions. This is followed by a discussion of what scholars said mutual constitution is not, and whether scholars argued that the term is synonymous with intersectionality. Finally, we focus on the important disciplinary distinctions that emerged in order to articulate how method and the presentation of a narrow topic allowed us to best understand what an author meant when using the term ‘mutual constitution’. In all this, we attempt to use these scholars’ work to develop recommendations for the use of this term within feminist theoretical scholarship.

Umbrellas, synonyms, definitions, disciplines and denunciations

Conceptual assumptions

Intersectional scholars in the women’s and gender studies journals we analysed dealt with an enormous variety of topics, and within those topics they asserted the mutual constitution of a wide cumulative range of items: races and nations; language, knowledge and power; heteronormative monogamy and racial hierarchy; social and spatial relationships; subjects and objects; and dozens more. It was not only gender, race and class that were considered, but these were the most commonly analysed elements of mutual constitution. In these analyses, though, the authors tended to presume a shared understanding of what race, class and gender are, as though all scholars agree that they are social categories or relationships or social structures. For example, an article may state that ‘the categories of race, class and gender are mutually constituted’.¹⁰ In that instance, the author is focusing on race, class and gender as categories. Another article may state that ‘the relationships between race, class and gender are mutually constituted’. Here the author focuses on the relationships, not on categories in and of themselves. This is not an insignificant distinction. We list in Appendix A the 138 different conceptual umbrellas under which race, class and gender were assembled in these articles: as factors, struggles, positions, systems, discourses, conditions, registers, problems, axes, even intersections themselves.¹¹

To emphasise the theoretical implications of this, consider how struggles of race, class and gender might mutually constitute each other (e.g. how one struggle constitutes other struggles), how systems of race, class and gender might mutually constitute each other (e.g. how one system constitutes other systems) and how intersections between race, class and gender might mutually constitute each other (e.g. how one intersection constitutes other intersections). These are vastly different concepts. The meaning of the term intersections alone has proven so difficult to articulate that it is a major challenge to conceptualise how intersections could possibly mutually constitute each other. One article stated that a single intersection can accomplish this: ‘interdisciplinary discourse on the mutually constituting intersection of race and gender has had a profound effect on numerous disciplines within women’s studies’ (Allen and Kitch, 1998: 280). Authors do not consistently explain what this sort of mutual constitution might entail.

What it is

Because we are eager to understand what it does entail, we sought out all instances in which authors did define the term mutual constitution in their work. In forty passages within these articles, authors articulated in a straightforward way what they meant by the term, such as this clear statement from Stephanie A. Shields in Sex Roles: ‘By mutually constitute I mean that one category of identity, such as gender, takes its meaning as a category in relation to another category’ (2008: 304; emphasis in original). This is one definition that found fairly wide support, as Shields was cited often among the other articles, especially in the social sciences. Her notion of taking meaning ‘in relation to another category’ complements the assertion that entities like gender, race and class ‘shape each other’ (Wade, 2013: 189) or that each one ‘influences the others’ (Andersen, 2005: 445). Yet it would be incorrect to assume that all intersectional scholars agreed with this, or that the definition of the mutual constitution of identity categories can easily be transplanted onto a definition of the mutual constitution of processes, axes, discourses or any of the other 138 conceptual umbrellas in use. The forty definitional passages – like Shields’ in form but not necessarily in content – appeared in thirty-three articles (meaning that in 346 of the articles, authors did not directly state what their understanding of the term was).

Among the thirty-three articles that provided definitions, there was some general agreement within the definitions that the meanings of race, class and gender are not static, which allows a focus on ‘the processes by which racialization and engendering occur, rather than on characteristics of fixed race or gender categories’ (Soni-Sinha and Yates, 2013: 739). Yet even these articulations of ‘processes’, ‘influencing’ and ‘taking meaning’ can be vague, which may lead to misinterpretation. For example, an article in Psychology of Women Quarterly quoted Shields and then interpreted mutual constitution as a sort of sum of experience: ‘Intersectionality is defined as the “mutually constitutive relations among social identities” (Shields, 2008: 301) that affect a person’s psychology. In other words, all of us have multiple cultural backgrounds that impact our experiences’ (Lee, 2012: 110).

This simple nod to people’s ‘multiple backgrounds’ contrasts appreciably with work in the humanities where intersectional scholars are much more likely to focus on the complex constitution of the subject. For example, Elizabeth Stephens’ article on ‘Bad Feelings’ in Australian Feminist Studies considered ‘new forms of becoming for women’ (2015: 275). She relied on Rosi Braidotti’s work to articulate the appeal of the concept of ‘becoming’, since ‘becoming does not describe the influence of one subject or state on another … but rather, their condition of mutual constitution’ (2015: 275). Then Stephens explained this mutual constitution: ‘That is, the constant becoming of the subject, its ongoing and dynamic actualisation of encounters and intensities, means that it is not simply the passive product of power, but rather represents a constant reconfiguration of the systems of power that produce subjectivities’ (2015: 275).

This is something altogether different from the notion that ‘all of us have multiple cultural backgrounds that impact our experiences’ (Lee, 2012: 110). It justifiably diminishes the common social scientific practice of attempting to quantify the effect of one ‘subject or state on another’ (and indeed, the entire social scientific preoccupation with the relationship between structure and agency), and specifies that it is the details of ‘encounters’ and ‘intensities’ that must be considered.

Readers will notice that it was ‘subjects or states’ that Stephens analysed, not ‘race, class and gender’ as Lee and others did. Indeed, Stephens might not consider herself an intersectional scholar, even while she engages with arguments about feminism, race and intersectional spaces in this article. This is undoubtedly true of other scholars included among the set of articles we analysed. Yet if the project is to determine, from a feminist perspective, how scholars who engage with intersectionality define and make use of mutual constitution, the work of this broad range of scholars provides compelling material to consider.

What the broad range tells us is that even in the tiny number of articles where mutual constitution was defined, the definitions tended to clash and failed to provide the sort of consistent theoretical precision that would indicate shared understanding of the term. Each author analysed a specific set of items in specific contexts using specific methods relying on specific epistemological assumptions, so perhaps it is theoretically robust that this set of scholars would identify such disparate ways that items could mutually constitute each other. If mutual constitution were too narrowly defined, these authors may have been limited in their ability to conceptualise and demonstrate what the coloniality of power and the modern gender system have to do with each other (Lugones, 2007), say, or the relationship between the discursive construction of maquiladora workers and the stigmatisation of women’s bodies (Bachour, 2015). The problem, though, is that each author did use the same term, and analysts may want or need some consistency in its application.

Synonymous with intersectionality?

Along with the small degree of overlap in how authors define or explain this term, there was a lopsided sense of whether mutual constitution is the same thing as intersectionality, or whether these are distinctive. Most commonly, they were rhetorically equated. That is, intersectionality was defined as the understanding that race, class and gender are mutually constituted: ‘“intersectionality,” understood as the interactions and mutually constitutive relationships of gender and other inequalities, such as ethnicity, class, age, disability, and sexual orientation’ (Bustelo, 2017: 92); intersectional theory has been conducive to the analysis of a wide variety of differences as intermeshed and mutually constitutive (Davis and Zarkov, 2017: 315); ‘In essence, womanism provides an intersectional framework that emphasizes the unique, mutually constitutive, and holistic integration of race, ethnicity, culture, and gender identities that are related to African American women’s lived experiences (Cannon, 1995; Settles, 2006)’ (Borum, 2012: 318); this article employs an intersectional analysis of the mutually constitutive relationships among place, gender, and sexuality (Kazyak, 2012: 825).

Where those above, like many others, assumed synonymy, a small set of authors recognised a difference and set the terms apart to explain them. For instance, Gail Mason presented her work on violence as potentially intersectional:

The problem with intersectionality, however, is its claim that experience is constituted at the intersection of identity categories such as gender, sexuality, and race. Identities remain autonomous or discrete until they intersect with each other at a given point or moment in time. An alternative approach articulated by theorists of the body is that identities of gender, sexuality, and race are mutually constitutive (Grosz 1994, 20) and provide the ‘conditions of articulation’ for each other (Butler 1993, 117): gender is lived through race, sexuality through gender, and so on (2006: 200; emphasis in original).

In a related way, Nikol Alexander-Floyd problematised intersectionality in the vein of Black feminists who have critiqued it as an inherently additive model. Rose Harris (1999) in particular, Alexander-Floyd said, established that ‘the boundaries of a particular category, such as gender, are elaborated through the boundaries of race. In this light, the language of intersectionality falls short of recognizing the “mutually constitutive” nature of identity formation. For this reason, I prefer to think of these categories as mutually constitutive, and elsewhere argue for an approach based on this constitutive model’ (2008: 430).

The main (if infrequent) rationale for distinguishing mutual constitution from intersectionality was the authors’ critique of the additive nature of intersectional approaches. However, as we demonstrate next, a wide swathe of articles across disciplines specifically agreed that additive approaches are problematic, but this led them to equate mutual constitution with intersectionality.

What it’s not

While scholars may not have much shared understanding of what mutual constitution is, there was widespread agreement over what it is not. This was sometimes phrased in the positive, often with the term ‘inextricable’: ‘Intersectionality theory has largely been devoted to the conceptualization of inequalities as mutually constitutive. This involves emphasizing that social structures such as race, gender or class are not independent from one another. Rather, they inextricably shape each other in a manner that makes it impossible to capture their autonomous effects’ (Alonso, 2012: 599); ‘The subjective, conceptual and cultural dimensions of these sites are understood as inextricable from (mutually constituted by) material conditions, social practices, and institutional structures’ (Peterson, 2008).

Relatedly, authors made strong assertions about separability: ‘Social identities are not separable, but rather are mutually constitutive’ (Shields, 2013: 430); ethnicised, gendered and class-based discrimination are not separate but rather connected and mutually constitutive (Chapman et al., 2008: 195). ‘From an intersectional perspective, these multiple forms of marginalisation – including race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability – do not function as ‘separate, fixed, and parallel tracks, but are rather dynamic, simultaneous, and mutually constitutive’ (Strolovitch, 2012: 388); individuals’ social identities cannot be separated, and instead are interdependent and mutually constitutive (Wang, 2015: 868).

The focus on inextricability and its ilk relates to the very common way these authors explained what a mutually constitutive relationship is not: additive, dichotomous, oppositional, hierarchical, dualistic, isolated, discrete, fixed, independent or binary: ‘At issue is how to ask questions about experiences that are intersecting, interdependent, and mutually constitutive, without resorting, even inadvertently, to an additive approach’ (Bowleg, 2008: 314); ‘One of the core aspects of this theoretical framework is that these social constructions are not hierarchically ordered, but instead mutually constitutive’ (Bedolla and Scola, 2006: 9); ‘According to the conceptual framework of intersectionality, race and gender experiences cannot be dichotomized because these categories are mutually constituted and cannot be simply added’ (Jackson et al., 2012: e330).

‘Additive’ was the most common of these. The use of these similar terms appeared to reflect, in part, a few shared citation sources, suggesting common reliance on influential scholarship. The fact, though, that these terms – in such familiar form, repeatedly, across disciplines – were asserted rather than demonstrated calls into question the robustness of the concept of mutual constitution, against which they were posed. Mutual constitution served in so much of this scholarship as little more than a placeholder for ‘not that’.¹² It seemed to be a way of signalling that an author understood that an additive approach is problematic, whether or not they were able to fully articulate an alternative. The distinction is rooted in the important intersectional work of Deborah King (1988), whose work on ‘multiple jeopardy’ shifted the collective conversation away from additive categories to the relationships between them. When her work and the debates it sparked are reduced to a summary statement, though, the term ‘mutual constitution’ is emptied of its ability to signify anything other than ‘the correct way to do intersectional work, rather than the wrong way’.

Social science assertions and humanities analysis

The common assertion (if not practice) that intersectional work demands a rejection of additive, binary approaches and an embrace of a framework of mutual constitution was particularly prevalent in the social sciences. In sociology, the pattern was to assert that race, class and gender are mutually constituted, rather than to demonstrate or interrogate the possibility. Scholars in the social sciences augmented this assertion with thorough and complex lists of commonly used terms in the field. For example:

Intersectionality is a way of thinking that understands gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion and other categories of social difference as interlocking and mutually constitutive at the micro level of individual experience and at the macro level of institutional and societal structures and cultural ideologies. These intersections are understood as relations of power – privilege and disadvantage – that result in complex inequalities, which are more than the analysis of any one category by itself or the mere sum of various categories (Ruiz Castro and Holvino, 2016: 329).

According to this assertion, categories of social difference are intersectional, interlocking and mutually constitutive. The intersections themselves are relations of power, with complex inequalities being the result. While we do not fault these authors, and as feminist sociologists we have written sentences similar to these ourselves, we find it challenging to work through a concrete example of how this could be illustrated or verified. It is a statement rather than a summary of an empirical or theoretical argument at which the authors have arrived. The list of terms articulates the assumptions on which the authors’ work relies, but even as such, it is so far-reaching as to be nearly unusable. We wonder, why does it matter to their project that social categories are both intersecting and interlocking, and then mutually constituting to boot? How can we actually identify relations of power at intersections? What are those intersections? How have complex inequalities resulted from the intersections? Feminist theorist Clare Hemmings (Hemmings et al., 2011: 31) might identify these assertions as stories we tell about intersectional theory. When our theorising could begin with phrases such as ‘As we all know’ or ‘There is no disputing that’, we contribute to the erasure of any dissonance that would allow for critical questioning or substantiation, which allows a relatively monolithic story to travel quickly (Knapp, 2005; Wiegman, 2012). The meaning of mutual constitution in this story loses precision even as the term gains traction. As we are reminded by Carbin and Edenheim, ‘sometimes popularity and “all-inclusiveness” is guaranteed through theoretical vagueness rather than by specificity and explicit limits’ (2013: 237).

While this pattern of assertion or storytelling appeared to some degree in disciplines other than sociology, social scientists were the biggest culprits. They did sometimes use examples to illustrate what they meant by mutual constitution, which could be helpful, as in this article from the psychology journal Sex Roles:

Another reason for gender inversion stereotypes is that gender and sexual orientation are mutually constitutive (Parent et al. 2013). Part of what it means to be a man/masculine is to be heterosexually active and eager; heterosexual desire and behavior, meanwhile, are defined in terms of gender roles and complementarity (Eaton and Matamala 2014; Sanchez et al. 2012). Therefore, society expects gay men to be gender-atypical, and gender-atypical men to be gay (Barrantes and Eaton, 2018: 550).

In another example of an example, in Gender & Society Alice Colón Warren described the mutual constitution of gendered social hierarchies: ‘For example’, Colón Warren wrote, ‘the respectability of women in upper-racial/class categories has been defined in opposition to what was deemed as the “less respectable” behavior of lower-class women’ (2003: 674). The crux of mutual constitution here seems to be the oppositional definition: respectable women as against less respectable women. This is a compelling – and not unusual – example, although it was not pursued in any depth in the article, which was also not unusual. Very few articles did provide examples, though, and very few of those provided much clarity.

A stark difference of approach was notable in one field in particular: history. Historians were more apt to use the term ‘mutual constitution’ later in an article as a way of summarising a relationship they had demonstrated in the body of their work. This more direct engagement with mutual constitution may also be related to the practice in history and other humanities fields of considering the mutual constitution of narrower entities than race, class and gender, such as in discourses of vodou and science; the relationship between antiblack racism and the criminalisation of black subjects; domesticity and hygiene; or sexology and sexual reform in Europe from the 1890s to the 1930s. This by itself suggests that their use of the concept was less a signal than an actual tool of analysis, for it is much more demonstrable that specific things like discourses of vodou could mutually constitute other specific things than to imagine that race, class and gender could accomplish this.

An example is worthwhile, even if it is necessarily a bit complicated. In the Journal of Women’s History, Tomomi Kinukawa (2012) wrote about a Dutch artist named Maria Sibylla Merian who went to the colony of Surinam in 1699 to study its natural resources. Merian wrote Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium based on her empirical observations, with illustrations of the insects, animals and plants she found there. Like other colonial entrepreneurs, she used her nature studies upon return to Europe as a form of what activists and scholars now call bioprospecting. Books like hers ‘served not only as entertainment but also as sales catalogues and inventories that offered accurate information of the commodified natural objects to potential consumers and investors’ (Kinukawa, 2012: 94). Part science, part art, part colonial project to ‘prove the profitability of nature’ (Kinukawa, 2012: 108), Metamorphosis turned bugs and plants into investible knowledge, and condensed membership in the group for whom possession of knowledge about such ‘natural’ objects was legitimate.

Merian’s theft and exploitation of the knowledge and labour of indigenous Surinamese and enslaved Africans in the colony were only some of the ways her art/science/entrepreneurial/colonial work also served as a racial project. Her audience, an imagined community of scientists and investors across national European borders, was composed of those who would admire how Merian so deftly pursued her curiosity in the products of ‘nature’ in Suriname that were novel to the colonists. This pursuit was not something Merian or her audience imagined could emerge from those who were indigenous or enslaved, despite their position as the sources of the knowledge that Merian’s public would consume. ‘Being curious meant having white desire’, Tomomi Kinukawa (2012: 95) argued, and being able to package the spoils of that curiosity as science and sell it as a commodity was to present whiteness itself as an exclusive property.

Kinukawa made both a grand and modest claim in her article, that ‘the construction of whiteness’ and ‘the ownership of natural knowledge’ were mutually constitutive in these activities. It is grand in its sweep, but Kinukawa presented convincing evidence that a form of whiteness is constructed anew via the ownership of this natural knowledge, and that said ownership is enabled by the delineation of whiteness that Merian’s work contributed to. The dominion of whiteness and the ownership of natural knowledge can be understood as two distinct things that took particular form simultaneously in and through each other. What is modest about this argument is its specificity – something that is largely lacking in intersectional social science. Kinukawa did not say that race and class are mutually constitutive. Rather, her evidence led her to conclude, specifically, that this particular construction of whiteness and this particular type of ownership of natural knowledge are mutually constitutive. Whiteness is constituted as a property that begets the ownership of nature, and the ownership of nature is constituted as a social practice only available to those in possession of whiteness. Here, the meaning of mutual constitution seems to be that two sets of social practices only exist because they enable each other and are accomplished together. Kinukawa’s characterisation of these social practices as such was more of an afterthought than a pronouncement – certainly not a political position or a trope – and was mentioned only once in the article, in a way that clarifies rather than demands.

What we learned from this example in the context of this article’s full analysis is that mere assertions about race, class and gender’s mutual constitution are insufficient for describing specifically how these forms of oppression are related, and in most cases do not provide conceptual clarity in terms of a shared definition of what mutual constitution means. Instead, our analysis reveals how studies that peer more narrowly but deeply into the specific workings and outcomes of social practices make more convincing demonstrations of the concept. If – like over 90 per cent of the articles we analysed – these studies do not provide even a parenthetical definition of the concept, the narrower focus allows for a manuscript-length disquisition of its workings. It also allows the scholar to avoid the murkiness and contradictions inherent in the 138 umbrella terms we noted across these articles. An article that is precise about analysing ‘ownership of knowledge about nature’ does not have to take a position on what race, class and gender are (struggles? factors? systems?). Nor would it have to state or declare whether mutual constitution is the same thing as intersectionality or something altogether different. This does not mean eliding or ignoring productive debates over these terms; it means not having to make assertions without evidence or direct theoretical elaboration. Finally, our analysis leaves no doubt that the scholars in this set of articles have firmly established that they are willing to advocate for non-additive, non-hierarchical approaches to understanding race, class and gender. It has been important to the field for them to establish this, as an indication of awareness of the theoretical contributions of Black feminist scholarship over the period of the 1980s to the present, and as a form of pushback against methodological decisions that rely precisely on the determination of whether race, gender or class has the biggest effect on variables of interest. However, the signification of mutual constitution as nothing more than a story about ‘non-additiveness’ is a severe underutilisation of a concept that scholars such as Tomomi Kinukawa have established can accomplish deep analytical work.

Discussion and proposals

Much about this project is tedious and annoying. Counting the number of times a particular term is used by scholars is not nearly as theoretically productive as generating better and clearer explanations of that term. It also feels hypercritical to dwell on the structure of what might be minor sentences in these authors’ otherwise laudable work, especially since we have written just these types of sentences ourselves. We are not criticising authors or journals for publishing work with the term ‘mutual constitution’ in it. Rather, we imagine that a well-defined or at least well-debated understanding of mutual constitution may have real utility in intersectional studies, and what we have written is based in our respect for this field. Our observations here lead us to propose that intersectional scholars consider amending the way we use the term ‘mutual constitution’ in the following ways.

First, were the field of intersectionality scholarship to coalesce around a shared definition of mutual constitution, we might better be able to debate, test and demonstrate the merits of an argument that race, class and gender are mutually constituted. Given the compelling example provided by Kinukawa, we suggest we start by adopting the meaning of the term her research reveals. A preliminary definition might be something like the following: When we say that multiple sets of social practices or institutions are mutually constituted, what we mean is that they only exist because they enable each other and are accomplished together – e.g. in the case where a new construction of whiteness emerged from its constitution with the ownership of nature. If not this definition, we think that intersectionality scholars ought to define and demonstrate what they mean by the term in future analyses that rely on it.

In this vein, our second recommendation, since we are sociologists, is that social scientists refrain from using this term merely as a signal, and instead define how we mean to use the term and empirically demonstrate evidence of its presence or absence. If, for example, the particular dynamics of the constitution of a racial category operate to constitute the particular dynamics of the constitution of a sexual identity category, and vice versa, those dynamics must be clearly and thoroughly demonstrated. Having attempted to accomplish this sort of specification ourselves, we can attest that it is very difficult. And yet, efforts to further specify and empirically demonstrate what is meant by mutual constitution give way to fruitful opportunities for more thorough understandings of the social mechanisms that produce unequal outcomes and circumstances between groups of people, and further, could provide a more detailed road map for imagining how we might undo and resist such processes.

As Ivy Ken notes in her book Digesting Race, Class, and Gender (2010), it may be more logically consistent and observable that race, class, gender and other systems of oppression depend on each other than that they mutually constitute each other. This dependence may be temporary or long-lasting, and it may bring forms of oppression into being or prompt existing forms to take on different characteristics. White men's economic exploitation of others within a highly manipulated global capitalist regime depends on their maintenance of boundaries around their own socially constructed and pathologically protected racial and gender privileges, for example. Actively making it difficult or impossible for Black Americans to vote is one observable example of this, as is amending the constitution to formally ‘grant’ Black men the right to vote while denying that right to women of colour and white women. White men’s hold on economic power would be weak if they could not maintain this boundary around their positions making laws to secure it. One need only observe the voting patterns from any recent election to imagine how representation of Black women’s economic interests would change, for example, if white men were denied the franchise.

Dependence, such as the dependence of exploitation on boundary maintenance, is relatively easy to observe, document and even test empirically. Constitution – let alone mutual constitution – is not, at least for social scientists.¹³ Historians, though, may have a better time of it. The very concept of constitution requires the identification of a beginning. Constitution can be ongoing, to be sure, but origin points seem more conclusive and persuasive, as Kinukawa's work above demonstrated. Historical methods may lend themselves more easily to analyses of mutual constitution because of the ability to identify evidence of practices, institutions and events in existence before and after particular moments. Things are quite literally constituted in time, and evidence may point to the confluence of factors that come into existence because of each other.

Close readings of literature, such as Tapley’s work on Morrison described above, may also be an especially rich practice for explications of mutual constitution. This interpretive method allows a scholar to consider how characters develop over the course of a novel, much as historians can track origins. ‘8-Rock masculinity unfolds’ (Tapley, 2013: 22) in the novel Paradise – it does not simply exist or maintain itself in the narrative in isolation. The men of the town have a counter, a group of women whose failure to comply with the town’s norms of family, reproduction, utility and capitalist accumulation is used as justification for the 8-Rock men’s violence against them in the story. Tapley homes in on specific details of characters and settings, and could further draw out the moments and events in which the quests for masculinity and racial purity mutually constitute each other.

Similarly, conceptual work in the humanities on the constitution of the subject may be much more amenable to explorations of mutual constitution. As in Michel Foucault’s (1990) canonical work, subjects may emerge mutually with forms of discourse such as medical classifications or laws. Both the constitution and the mutuality of such a process could potentially be observed and documented. This does not, though, necessarily mean that ‘race, class, and gender are mutually constituted’, as the mantra goes. It means that specific subjects and specific discourses may be mutually constituted. If it can be substantiated that a particular discursive construction is or has or requires a specific race dimension, for instance, and that this particular construction is what constitutes a specifically gendered aspect of a subject, half of the constitutional claim would be demonstrated. The other half – the mutual part – would need to reveal how this construction of gendered subjects constitutes the racialised discourse, maybe at the same time. It is not an easy project.

Interestingly, feminist science and technology studies may have the same infrastructural advantage that the humanities have: their subject matter emerges and develops, which makes its constitution somewhat easier to isolate. For example, the authors in this sample considered full-body scanning technology, which was developed in the 1980s (Redden and Terry, 2013); a ‘new forum’ called ‘weblogs’ (van Doorn et al., 2007); the introduction of personal computers in homes (Kennedy, 2005); and the digitalisation of public administration (Nygren, 2012). These forms and uses of technology occur at specific points, which can be studied along with what Nygren calls ‘the gender practices by which the relationship between gender and technology is constructed’ (2012: 618).¹⁴ These studies fall into a trap, however, in that some parts of the alleged mutual constitution of gender and technology are visible while others are difficult to identify or articulate. The digitalisation of municipal offices in the early 2000s served to differentiate between men and women workers in new ways according to Nygren, for instance, but she was not fully able to explain how new (or renewed) gender practices constitute the form that digitalisation took. Similarly, full-body scanners produce new forms of gendered surveillance, according to Redden and Terry, but how does gendered surveillance constitute the implementation or use of full-body scanners? It is not that these second aspects are impossible, but rather that the constitution of gendered practices by ‘innovations’ in technology is much more readily explainable.

The humanities, then, seem to carry more capacity to deal with mutual constitution than the social sciences. Sociologists and others may be able to use the work of scholars such as Kinukawa and Tapley to refine and specify their own intersectional concepts, which we encourage. The precise isolation of what is constituted, when, how and by what, characterises the practices that some in the humanities have modelled and from which we might all benefit. The contributions the social sciences could make to the study of mutual constitution in intersectional studies could potentially be significant, since race, class and gender as social structures, relations of power and systems of oppression may be less likely to come through in work from other fields. This must result, though, from analyses of specific structural arrangements, specific relations of power and specific aspects of systems whose genesis or reconstruction can be observed, not from race or gender or class as indeterminate concepts.

Conclusion

As scholars of intersectionality, we have struggled for years to articulate exactly what it would mean for race, class and gender to mutually constitute each other. Through our analysis of this concept in 379 articles in women’s studies journals, we learned that others share our struggle. Scholars are not keen to define this term, and most of those who do neither get into the nitty-gritty of what and how and when constitution occurs, nor do they differentiate between instances of ostensibly plain constitution and mutual constitution. Instead, the term is largely used as a signal. It means, ‘This is an intersectional project, and it does not rely on an additive approach’.

The deconstructionist Jacques Derrida (1990) might analyse this signification as a ‘speech-act’ in the ‘quotation market’ in which concepts are merely mentioned, not actually used. The social scientist Gudrun-Axeli Knapp relies on Derrida in describing mentions of terms like this as nothing more than ‘shorthand for the latest news in feminist theory’ (2005: 254). Although Knapp focuses on the phrase ‘race-class-gender’, her argument may apply to mutual constitution as well: a concept ‘merely to be mentioned, being largely stripped of the baggage of concretion, of context and history’ (Knapp, 2005: 255).

There is something dismissive and cynical in this interpretation that leaves us uncomfortable. Our reading of this set of articles does reveal struggle, but it also suggests a collective striving over a period of decades to adopt the pioneering work of Black feminists, to assert membership in an intellectual community and to do better scholarship than that which emerged from the illegitimately protected spheres of white men’s knowledge production. There may be confusion about the precise meaning of this term, but its usage across these articles communicates an undeniable hunger to engage with the larger project of intersectionality. In this way, ‘mutual constitution’ as an indeterminate, elusive and even troubled concept has acted within feminist theory not to ‘push things around’ on a ‘causal stage’, as Ivan Ermakoff argued (2017: 130), but as an invitation to take up the social, activist and intellectual work that intersectionality encompasses.

Now recognising that the term has been used this way, we can break from the practice of using it as a signal and explore the concept’s potential. Analysing whether and how very specific social practices and institutions come into being at moments and in ways that are traceable, as feminist historians and literary critics do, and determining what does or does not make the constitution of these practices and institutions mutual, has the promise of a new planting season. Intersectional and feminist theory can explore many other dynamics, to be sure, but the defensible articulation of mutually constituted entities, rooted in empirical and interpretive scholarship across women’s and gender studies disciplines, would be cause for great excitement among those of us who are deeply invested in understanding how intersectionality works to create and maintain oppressive power structures.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Ivy Ken

Notes

References

Adkins, Lisa (2005) ‘ Social Capital: the Anatomy of a Troubled Concept’. Feminist Theory, 6(2): 195–211. DOI: 10.1177/1464700105053694.

Alexander-Floyd, Nikol (2008) ‘ Framing Condi(licious): Condoleezza Rice and the Storyline of “Closeness” in U.S. National Community Formation’. Politics & Gender, 4(3): 427–449. DOI: 10.1017/S1743923X08000354.

Allen, Judith A. and Sally L. Kitch (1998) ‘ Disciplined by Disciplines? The Need for an Interdisciplinary Research Mission in Women’s Studies’. Feminist Studies, 24(2): 275–299. DOI: 10.2307/3178698.

Alonso, Alba (2012) ‘ Intersectionality by Other Means? New Equality Policies in Portugal’. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society, 19(4): 596–621. DOI: 10.1093/sp/jxs017.

Andersen, Margaret L. (2005) ‘ Thinking about Women: a Quarter Century’s View’. Gender & Society, 19(4): 437–455. DOI: 10.1177/0891243205276756.

Asher, Kiran (2007) ‘ Ser Y Tener: Black Women’s Activism, Development, and Ethnicity in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia’. Feminist Studies, 33(1): 11–37. DOI: 10.2307/20459116.

Bachour, Mary-Kay (2015) ‘ Disrupting the Myth of Maquila Disposability: Sites of Reproduction and Resistance in Juárez’. Women’s Studies International Forum, 48: 174–184. DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2014.11.010.

Barrantes, Renzo J. and Asia A. Eaton (2018) ‘ Sexual Orientation and Leadership Suitability: How Being a Gay Man Affects Perceptions of Fit in Gender-Stereotyped Positions’. Sex Roles, 79(9–10): 549–564. DOI: 10.1007/s11199-018-0894-8.

Bedolla, Lisa García and Becki Scola (2006) ‘ Finding Intersection: Race, Class, and Gender in the 2003 California Recall Vote’. Politics & Gender, 2(1): 5–27. DOI: https://dx-doi-org.web.bisu.edu.cn/10.1017/S1743923X0606003X.

10.

Besbris, Max and Shamus Khan (2017) ‘ Less Theory. More Description’. Sociological Theory, 35(2): 147–153. DOI: 10.1177/0735275117709776.

11.

Borum, Valerie (2012) ‘ African American Women’s Perceptions of Depression and Suicide Risk and Protection: a Womanist Exploration’. Affilia, 27(3): 316–327. DOI: 10.1177/0886109912452401.

12.

Bowleg, Lisa (2008) ‘ When Black + Lesbian + Woman ≠ Black Lesbian Woman: the Methodological Challenges of Qualitative and Quantitative Intersectionality Research’. Sex Roles, 59(5): 312–325. DOI: 10.1007/s11199-008-9400-z.

13.

Bustelo, María (2017) ‘ Evaluation from a Gender + Perspective as a Key Element for (Re)gendering the Policymaking Process’. Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, 38(1): 84–101. DOI: 10.1080/1554477X.2016.1198211.

14.

Carastathis, Anna (2014) ‘ The Concept of Intersectionality in Feminist Theory’. Philosophy Compass, 9(5): 304–314.

15.

Carbin, Maria and Sara Edenheim (2013) ‘ The Intersectional Turn in Feminist Theory: a Dream of a Common Language?’. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 20(3): 233–248. DOI: 10.1177/1350506813484723.

16.

Chapman, David, Laura Dales and Vera Mackie (2008) ‘“ Minority Women will Change the World!”: Perspectives on Multiple Discrimination in Japan’. Women’s Studies International Forum, 31(3): 192–199. DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2008.04.002.

17.

Cho, Sumi, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and Leslie McCall (2013) ‘ Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis’. Signs, 38(4): 785–810.

18.

Collins, Patricia Hill (1998) ‘ It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation’. Hypatia, 13(3): 62–82.

19.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams (1989) ‘ Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: a Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’. University of Chicago Legal Forum: 139–167.

20.

Davis, Kathy (2008) ‘ Intersectionality as Buzzword: a Sociology of Science Perspective on What Makes a Feminist Theory Successful’. Feminist Theory, 9(1): 67–85. DOI: 10.1177/1464700108086364.

21.

Davis, Kathy and Dubravka Zarkov (2017) ‘ EJWS Retrospective on Intersectionality’. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 24(4): 313–320. DOI: 10.1177/1350506817719393.

22.

Derrida, Jacques (translated by Anne Tomiche) (1990) ‘Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms and other Small Seismisms’. in David Carroll (ed.) The States of Theory: History, Art, and Critical Discourse, pp. 63--94. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

23.

Duschinsky, Robbie (2013) ‘ What Does Sexualisation Mean?’. Feminist Theory, 14(3): 255–264. DOI: 10.1177/1464700113499842.

24.

Engels, Friedrich (1954) Dialectics of Nature. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

25.

Ermakoff, Ivan (2017) ‘ Shadow Plays: Theory’s Perennial Challenges’. Sociological Theory, 35(2): 128–137. DOI: 10.1177/0735275117709774.

26.

Foucault, Michel (1990) The History of Sexuality . Vol. 1: An Introduction. London: Penguin Books.

27.

Glenn, Evelyn Nakano (1980) ‘ The Dialectics of Wage Work: Japanese-American Women and Domestic Service, 1905–1940’. Feminist Studies, 6(3): 428–471.

28.

Glenn, Evelyn Nakano (1992) ‘ From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor’. Signs, 18(1): 1–43.

29.

Glenn, Evelyn Nakano (1998) ‘ Gender, Race, and Class: Bridging the Language-Structure Divide’. Social Science History, 22(1): 29--38.

30.

Grosz, Elizabeth (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Theories of Representation and Difference. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

31.

Gupta, Kristina (2015) ‘ Compulsory Sexuality: Evaluating an Emerging Concept’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 41(1): 131–154. DOI: 10.1086/681774.

32.

Haraway, Donna (1988) ‘ Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. Feminist Studies, 14(3): 575–599. DOI: 10.2307/3178066.

33.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge..

34.

Harding, Sandra G. (1986) The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

35.

Harris, Rose (1999) Signifying Race and Gender in Feminist Theory . PhD Dissertation. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.

36.

Hartmann, Heidi I. (1979) ‘ The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union’. Capital & Class, 3(2): 1–33.

37.

Hartmann, Heidi I. (1981) ‘ The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: the Example of Housework’. Signs, 6(3): 366–394.

38.

Healy, Kieran (2017) ‘ Fuck Nuance’. Sociological Theory, 35(2): 118–127. DOI: 10.1177/0735275117709046.

39.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2007) Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind . Trans. of 1930 edn. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press.

40.

Helmuth, Allison Suppan and Ivy Ken (2013) ‘Mutual Constitution in Race-Class-Gender Scholarship,’ at the American Sociological Association meetings, August, New York NY.

41.

Hemmings, Clare, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (2011) Why Stories Matter: the Political Grammar of Feminist Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

42.

Hennessy, Rosemary (2000) Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. New York: Routledge.

43.

Hill Collins, Patricia (1991) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. London: HarperCollins Academic.

44.

Jackson, Fleda Mask, Diane L. Rowley and Tracy Curry Owens (2012) ‘ Contextualized Stress, Global Stress, and Depression in Well-Educated, Pregnant, African-American Women’. Women’s Health Issues, 22(3): e329–e336. DOI: 10.1016/j.whi.2012.01.003.

45.

Kazyak, Emily (2012) ‘ Midwest or Lesbian? Gender, Rurality, and Sexuality’. Gender & Society, 26(6): 825–848. DOI: 10.1177/0891243212458361.

46.

Keller, Evelyn Fox (1985) Reflections on Gender and Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

47.

Ken, Ivy (2010) Digesting Race, Class, and Gender: Sugar as a Metaphor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

48.

Kennedy, Helen (2005) ‘ Subjective Intersections in the Face of the Machine: Gender, Race, Class and PCs in the Home’. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 12(4): 471–487. DOI: 10.1177/1350506805057102.

49.

King, Deborah (1988) ‘ Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: the Context of a Black Feminist Ideology’. Signs, 14(1): 42–72.

50.

King, Ynestra (1989) ‘Healing the Wounds: Feminism, Ecology, and Nature/Culture Dualism’. In: Allison M. Jaggar and Susan Bordo (eds) Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 117–141.

51.

Kinukawa, Tomomi (2012) ‘ Science and Whiteness as Property in the Dutch Atlantic World: Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705)’. Journal of Women’s History, 24(3): 91–116. DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2012.0031.

52.

Knapp, Gudrun-Axeli (2005) ‘ Race, Class, Gender’. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 12(3): 249–265.

53.

Lee, Matthew R. (2012) ‘ Teaching Gender and Intersectionality: a Dilemma and Social Justice Approach’. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 36(1): 110–115. DOI: 10.1177/0361684311426129.

54.

Lewin, Ellen (1993) Lesbian Mothers: Accounts of Gender in American Culture. The Anthropology of Contemporary Issues. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

55.

Lugones, María (2007) ‘ Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System’. Hypatia, 22(1): 186–219. DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2007.tb01156.x.

56.

MacKinnon, Catherine (1983) ‘Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence’. Signs, 8(4): 635–658.

57.

Marx, Karl (1909) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I: The Process of Capitalist Production. Edited by Freidrich Engels and Samuel Moore. Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr & Company.

58.

Mason, Gail (2006) ‘ Fear and Hope: Author’s Response’. Hypatia, 21(2): 196–206. DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2006.tb01102.x.

59.

May, Vivian (2011) ‘Intellectual Genealogies, Intersectionality, and Anna Julia Cooper’. In: Kim Marie Vaz and Gary L. Lemons (eds) Feminist Solidarity at the Crossroads: Intersectional Women’s Studies for Transracial Alliance. New York: Routledge, pp. 59–71.

60.

McCall, Leslie (2005) ‘ The Complexity of Intersectionality’. Signs, 30(3): 1771–1800.

61.

Minian, Ana Raquel (2013) ‘“ Indiscriminate and Shameless Sex”: the Strategic Use of Sexuality by the United Farm Workers’. American Quarterly, 65(1): 63–90. DOI: 10.1353/aq.2013.0015.

62.

Misra, Joya (2018) ‘Categories, Structures, and Intersectional Theory’. In: Messerschmidt

James W.

Martin

P. Y.

Messner

M. A.

, et al. (eds) Gender Reckonings: New Social Theory and Research. New York: NYU Press, pp. 111--130.

63.

Nash, Jennifer Christine (2016) ‘ Feminist Originalism: Intersectionality and the Politics of Reading’. Feminist Theory, 17(1): 3–20. DOI: 10.1177/1464700115620864.

64.

Nash, Jennifer Christine (2019) Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

65.

Nygren, Katarina Giritli (2012) ‘ Narratives of ICT and Organizational Change in Public Administration’. Gender, Work & Organization, 19(6): 615–630. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0432.2010.00531.x.

66.

Peng, Kaiping, Julie Spencer-Rodgers and Zhong Nian (2006) ‘Naïve Dialecticism and the Tao of Chinese Thought’. In: Uichol Kim, Kuo-Shu Yang, and Kwang-Kuo Hwang (eds) Indigenous and Cultural Psychology: Understanding People in Context. New York: Springer, pp. 247--262.

67.

Peterson, V. Spike (2008) ‘“ New Wars” and Gendered Economies’. Feminist Review, 88(1): 7–20. DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400377.

68.

Puar, Jasbir K. (2012) ‘“ I Would Rather be a Cyborg than a Goddess”: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory’. philoSOPHIA, 2(1): 49–66.

69.

Redden, Stephanie M. and Jillian Terry (2013) ‘ The End of the Line’. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 15(2): 234–253. DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2012.741429.

70.

Rubin, Gayle (1975) ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’. In: Rayna R. Reitner (ed.) Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, pp. 157–210.

71.

Ruiz Castro, Mayra and Evangelina Holvino (2016) ‘ Applying Intersectionality in Organizations: Inequality Markers, Cultural Scripts and Advancement Practices in a Professional Service Firm’. Gender, Work & Organization, 23(3): 328–347. DOI: 10.1111/gwao.12129.

72.

Scott, Joan W. (1986) ‘ Gender: a Useful Category of Historical Analysis’. American Historical Review, 91(5): 1053–1075.

73.

Shields, Stephanie (2008) ‘ Gender: an Intersectionality Perspective’. Sex Roles, 59(5): 301–311. DOI: 10.1007/s11199-008-9501-8.

74.

Shields, Stephanie (2013) ‘ Gender and Emotion: What We Think We Know, What We Need to Know, and Why It Matters’. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 37(4): 423–435. DOI: 10.1177/0361684313502312.

75.

Smith, Barbara Ellen (1995) ‘ Crossing the Great Divides: Race, Class, and Gender in Southern Women’s Organizing, 1979–1991’. Gender & Society, 9(6): 680--696.

76.

Somerville, Siobhan (1994) ‘ Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body’. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 5(2): 243–266.

77.

Soni-Sinha, Urvashi and Charlotte A.B. Yates (2013) ‘“ Dirty Work?”: Gender, Race and the Union in Industrial Cleaning’. Gender, Work & Organization, 20(6): 737–751. DOI: 10.1111/gwao.12006.

78.

Stephens, Elizabeth (2015) ‘ Bad Feelings: an Affective Genealogy of Feminism’. Australian Feminist Studies, 30(85): 273–282. DOI: 10.1080/08164649.2015.1113907.

79.

Strid, Sophia, Sylvia Walby and Jo Armstrong (2013) Intersectionality and Multiple Inequalities: Visibility in British Policy on Violence Against Women. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 20(4): 558--581.

80.

Strolovitch, Dara Z. (2012) ‘ Intersectionality in Time: Sexuality and the Shifting Boundaries of Intersectional Marginalization’. Politics & Gender, 8(3): 386–396. DOI: 10.1017/S1743923X12000372.

81.

Tapley, Heather (2013) ‘ Queering Paradise: Toni Morrison’s Anti-Capitalist Production’. Feminist Theory, 14(1): 21–37. DOI: 10.1177/1464700112468568.

82.

van Doorn, Niels, Liesbet van Zoonen and Sally Wyatt (2007) ‘ Writing from Experience: Presentations of Gender Identity on Weblogs’. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 14(2): 143–158. DOI: 10.1177/1350506807075819.

83.

Verloo, Mieke and Sylvia Walby (2012) Introduction: The Implications for Theory and Practice of Comparing the Treatment of Intersectionality in the Equality Architecture in Europe. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 19(4): 433--445.

84.

Wade, Peter (2013) ‘ Articulations of Eroticism and Race: Domestic Service in Latin America’. Feminist Theory, 14(2): 187–202. DOI: 10.1177/1464700113483248.

85.

Walby, Sylvia, Jo Armstrong and Sofia Strid (2012) Intersectionality: Multiple Inequalities in Social Theory. Sociology, 46(2): 224--240.

86.

Wang, Yixuan (2015) ‘ The Mystery Revealed—Intersectionality in the Black Box: an Analysis of Female Migrants’ Employment Opportunities in Urban China’. Hypatia, 30(4): 862–880. DOI: 10.1111/hypa.12171.

87.

Warren, Alice E. Colón (2003) ‘ Puerto Rico Feminism and Feminist Studies’. Gender & Society, 17(5): 664–690. DOI: 10.1177/0891243203256024.

88.

Weber, L. and M. E. Fore (2007) ‘Race, Ethnicity, and Health: an Intersectional Approach’. In: Vera

Feagin

J. R.

(eds) Handbook of the Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations. New York: Springer, pp. 191–218.

89.

Wiegman, Robyn (2012) Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.