Revisiting intersectionality: reflections on theory and praxis

It is impossible to be familiar with the contemporary field of feminism and gender studies and not be aware of the massive intellectual influence of intersectionality. Having emerged in the late 1980s, intersectionality has now come to be not only the way to do feminist research, but has also been exported to other fields and disciplines. Many believe intersectionality has brought about a paradigm shift within gender studies. However, this supposed shift has taken on a performative rather than concrete form. The use of intersectionality today does not necessarily produce critical research that is vastly distinguishable from previous liberal approaches to gender studies. Instead, the claim to intersectionality is often only a performance of both something new and something critical that has increasingly reproduced older approaches to gender research, most notably liberal approaches. In this article, we address this performativity as emerging forms of identity politics that are distinct from intersectionality’s initial critical beginnings. We trace some of the ways that intersectionality has become stretched into an approach that fits all feminist ontologies and has thus lost much of this critical potential. It is important to clarify that we address intersectionality as a body of scholarly work, mostly produced in the academy, that has had impact on the ways intersectionality has evolved within activist movements.