Intersectionality

As we were editing this special issue we learned of four international conferences on intersectionality as well as of discussions of it in other national forums and in print. While it would be far fetched to suggest that everyone is talking about intersectionality, it is certainly an idea in the process of burgeoning. Indeed, the idea of focusing a special issue on intersectionality was generated from the European Journal of Women’s Studies 10th anniversary conference where Kathy Davis and Pamela Pattynama stimulated a discussion so animated that it seemed obvious that we should open the pages of the journal to debating it with a view to establishing areas of agreement and points of contention in intersectional theory and practice. Why are so many feminists both attracted to, and repelled by intersectional analyses? In various ways, the six articles in this collection provide insights into this question. Together, they make clear that the concept is popular because it provides a concise shorthand for describing ideas that have, through political struggle, come to be accepted in feminist thinking and women’s studies scholarship. Long before the term ‘intersectionality’ was coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the concept it denotes had been employed in feminist work on how women are simultaneously positioned as women and, for example, as black, working-class, lesbian or colonial subjects (see Brah and Phoenix, 2004). As such, it foregrounds a richer and more complex ontology than approaches that attempt to reduce people to one category at a time. It also points to the need for multiplex epistemologies. In particular, it indicates that fruitful knowledge production must treat social positions as relational. Intersectionality is thus useful as a handy catchall phrase that aims to make visible the multiple positioning that constitutes everyday life and the power relations that are central to it. The articles that follow give an indication of the plurality of ways in which intersectionality is currently being applied, the range of methods to which it has given rise and its utility in research and policy circles. Not surprisingly, they all critique identity politics for its additive, politically fragmentary and essentializing tendencies. Even those who agree with intersectional theory in principle can