- Feminist Theory: Transforming the Known World
- Affect
- Agency
- Biopolitics
- Civilization
- Coloniality of Gender and Power: From Postcoloniality to Decoloniality
- Cyborgs and Virtual Bodies
- Development
- Diaspora
- Formal, Informal, and Care Economies
- Embodiment
- Experience
- Feminist Jurisprudence
- Feminist Standpoint
- Gendered Divisions of Labor
- Governance
- Health
- Identities
- Institutions
- Intersectionality
- Intersexuality, Transgender, and Transsexuality
- Markets/Marketization
- Materialisms
- Microphysics of Power
- Migration
- Militarization and War
- Nature
- Norms and Normalization
- Performativity and Performance
- The Personal Is Political
- Policy
- Politics
- Pop Culture/Visual Culture
- Posthuman Feminist Theory
- Pregnancy, Personhood, and the Making of the Fetus
- Prison
- Race and Racialization
- Religion
- Representation
- Reproduction: From Rights to Justice?
- Science Studies
- Sex/Gender
- Sexual Difference
- Sexualities
- State/Nation
- Storytelling/Narrative
- Subjectivity and Subjectivation
- Temporality
- Transnational
- Violence
Abstract and Keywords
Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, the term intersectionality has become the key analytic framework through which feminist scholars in various fields talk about the structural identities of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This chapter situates intersectionality within a long history of black feminist theorizing about interlocking systems of power and oppression, arguing that intersectionality is not an account of personal identity but one of power. It challenges feminist theorists, including Robyn Wiegman, Jennifer Nash, and Jasbir Puar, who have attempted to move past intersectionality because of its limitations in fully attending to the contours of identity. The chapter also maps conversations within the social sciences about intersectionality as a research methodology. Finally, it considers what it means for black women to retain paradigmatic status within intersectionality studies, whether doing so is essentialist, and therefore problematic, or whether attempts to move “beyond” black women constitute attempts at erasure and displacement.
Keywords: intersectionality, race, class, gender, neoliberalism, black women, black feminism
Brittney Cooper is Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University
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- Feminist Theory: Transforming the Known World
- Affect
- Agency
- Biopolitics
- Civilization
- Coloniality of Gender and Power: From Postcoloniality to Decoloniality
- Cyborgs and Virtual Bodies
- Development
- Diaspora
- Formal, Informal, and Care Economies
- Embodiment
- Experience
- Feminist Jurisprudence
- Feminist Standpoint
- Gendered Divisions of Labor
- Governance
- Health
- Identities
- Institutions
- Intersectionality
- Intersexuality, Transgender, and Transsexuality
- Markets/Marketization
- Materialisms
- Microphysics of Power
- Migration
- Militarization and War
- Nature
- Norms and Normalization
- Performativity and Performance
- The Personal Is Political
- Policy
- Politics
- Pop Culture/Visual Culture
- Posthuman Feminist Theory
- Pregnancy, Personhood, and the Making of the Fetus
- Prison
- Race and Racialization
- Religion
- Representation
- Reproduction: From Rights to Justice?
- Science Studies
- Sex/Gender
- Sexual Difference
- Sexualities
- State/Nation
- Storytelling/Narrative
- Subjectivity and Subjectivation
- Temporality
- Transnational
- Violence