Mini-Symposium: Intersectionality Research

Since legal theorist Kimberle Crenshaw first spoke of intersectionality in the late 1980s, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have debated its relative strengths and weaknesses in theoretical, methodological, and policy terms. Intersectionality research is defined principally by its focus on the simultaneous and interactive effects of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and national origin as categories of difference in the United States and beyond. This symposium is a conscious attempt to draw on our expertise in intersectionality and our identities as political scientists to spotlight different approaches to intersectionality. Part of our goal is thus to facilitate the development of innovative theoretical arguments and new empirical research designs in this area of scholarship by featuring examples of intersectionality research from distinct subfields. The essays that follow this introduction speak to a broad audience, as they represent four distinct subfields: political theory, American politics, comparative politics, and public policy. Each essay addresses the growing body of research focusing on what Dara Strolovitch (2007) calls intersectionally stigmatized populations at different levels of analysis. Each article also brings the tools of political science to bear on topics ripe for intersectional analysis, again reinforcing the notion that intersectionality theory and political science have much to offer each other. Much of the early scholarship on intersectionality has focused almost entirely on the United States and is often critiqued as having utility solely in the American context. Later scholarship, in attempting to address this critique, opened another avenue of questions, such as, what happens to a concept when it "goes global" and is applied to contexts outside of the United States? Comparative politics scholar Erica Townsend-Bell provides one answer to this question. Her essay, "What is Relevance? Defining Intersectional Praxis in Uruguay," is less focused on intersectionality as a theoretical construct and more concerned with its development as political praxis. Using the 2005 International Women's Day March and the 2003 domestic violence coalition as illustrative examples, she identifies the conditions under which a normative philosophical commitment to intersectionality does not square with its adaption and translation on the ground. Through analysis of field interviews with activists Townsend-Bell attends to the ideological disputes over which identity categories are most relevant to single-issue and multiissue women's organizations in Uruguay. Linking her interests in intersectionality with traditional questions of social movements and group formation, Townsend-Bell exposes real-life circumstances that arise when social movement actors attempt to find the most productive and usable ways of provoking social change collaboratively. Through her critical analysis of intersectionality's applicability in the Uruguayan context, she provides further evidence of the need for intersectional consciousness (Greenwood 2008) prior to movement building, and her essay reminds us that intersectionality as a term travels across time and geographic regions. Like Townsend-Bell, Nancy Wadsworth's essay, "Intersectionality in California's Same-Sex Marriage Battles: A Complex Proposition," also focuses on a longstanding area of interest shared by intersectionality scholars and political scientists: the tensions and limitations of majoritarian efforts to protect the rights of minorities. From a very different political context Wadsworth examines the coalitional and rhetorical strategies used to mobilize support in favor of a ballot initiative in the United States, Proposition 8, which eliminated the right to samesex marriage in California. Wadsworth makes the case for a broader, more inclusive conceptualization of intersectionality, insisting that religion qualifies as yet another identity category of difference. …