Inequality, Intersectionality & the Politics of Discourse

Paying attention to the history of the concept of intersectionality is essential if it is to be used to illuminate rather than disguise the dynamic politics of multiple inequalities in particular sites. The European borrowing of an originally US-centered term raises interesting questions of the kind of political work it is intended to accomplish. The naming of certain issues as “intersectional” (which implies that others are not) and the frequent use of the term “diversity” as a near-synonym to intersectionality as a process (which tends to remove it from a political to a managerial context) are two of the potential problems that arise in transplanting this term from one specific context to another. Intersectionality arose as Crenshaw’s means of naming the exclusions in US antidiscrimination law targeting race and gender separately; what work does intersectionality do instead in a context in which diversity is framed as an addition to gender mainstreaming (“gender plus”) or as localizing and individualizing culture as “differences” in Europe? Can intersectionality travel transnationally without either obscuring the distinctive history of racialized nationalism in the US or encouraging avoidance of confronting modern forms of racialization in Europe? Looking at several specific cases illuminates this argument about the "traveling discourse" of intersectional feminist policy discourse.