Session Abstract

This panel explores the way scholars from a variety of disciplines are applying, expanding and questioning the theory of intersectionality in their research. Intersectionality, a term coined by critical race theorist, Kimberlé Crenshaw, rejects the idea that race, gender, and class, among others, are separate or competing categories of identity. Intersectionality also encourages scholars in a variety of disciplines to think carefully “about the way power has clustered around certain categories and is exercised against others.”^[i]The panelists will explore whether and how historians, political scientists, sociologists, and literary critics differ in their approaches to this important theoretical model. Since intersectionality depends upon the concept of boundary crossing, we will discuss whether it has already helped to create a more interdisciplinary scholarship.

Intersectionality is not just an abstraction; some scholars-activists deploy intersectionality to initiate substantive changes in the American criminal justice system or in contemporary laws or policies. Can intersectionality build coalitions across disciplines, barriers, and categories in order to achieve substantive change in our society? Neither the formal inclusion promised by a now ostensibly “color blind” legal system nor the wide acceptance of equal rights as an ideal means that inequalities no longer exist. Rather, inequalities are masked behind a “neutral” legal system that refrains from an explicitly racist language and operation but still creates these inequalities.

The panelists will take up Leslie McCall’s insistence that researchers must reveal “the range of diversity and difference within” as well as between social groups by complicating the category of “black woman.” They will do so in part by showing the intragroup diversity of perspectives and experiences as well as levels of privilege or oppression. They will also explore the ways race, gender, and class intersect in the lives of all people. As a result, they will illuminate, in Jennifer Nash’s words, “privilege and oppression as complex, multi-valent, and simultaneous.” Political scientist and black studies scholar Julia Jordan-Zachery asks whether intersectionality has become a theory of the dominant culture that now further marginalizes black women. Sociologist Vrushali Patil puts intersectional and decolonial feminisms into conversation with each other, expanding and changing both in the process. Taking up multiracial feminism, sociologist Catherine Harnois advocates for more complex empirical intersectional research in the social sciences. Historian Alison Parker and literary scholar Jennifer Wilks each use intersectionality as a theoretical approach to understand the same prominent black American activist, Mary Church Terrell. During the panel discussion, all five scholars will explore together the disciplinary differences and similarities of their approaches.