When Multiplication Doesn't Equal Quick Addition: Examining Intersectionality as a Research Paradigm

Abstract

In the past twenty years, intersectionality has emerged as a compelling response to arguments on behalf of identity-based politics across the discipline. It has done so by drawing attention to the simultaneous and interacting effects of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and national origin as categories of difference. Intersectional arguments and research findings have had varying levels of impact in feminist theory, social movements, international human rights, public policy, and electoral behavior research within political science and across the disciplines of sociology, critical legal studies, and history. Yet consideration of intersectionality as a research paradigm has yet to gain a wide foothold in political science. This article closely reads research on race and gender across subfields of political science to present a coherent set of empirical research standards for intersectionality.

Hybrid Activism: Social Movement Mobilization in a Multimovement Environment

“…Thus, hybrid organizations have the potential to serve the intersectional identities (Cohen 1999;Hancock 2007;McCall 2005;Strolovitch 2007 Lichterman's (1995) case study of left-leaning environmental organizations similarly suggests that the absence of organizations that bridge movement cultures may be a barrier to mobilizing across movements. He argues that white, middle-class activists from the left side of the political spectrum may have difficulty uniting with non-white and low-income activists -even if these groups possess strong ideological compatibility -because of differences in organizational style and culture.…”

Race and the Local Politics of Punishment in the New World of Welfare

“…Indeed, the racialized system of discipline that targets the poor today can be understood as gendered in four senses. First, its institutions have been built, politically, around gender-specific cultural images of poor racial minorities: the lawless, violent male of the underclass ghetto (Wacquant 2009) and the lazy and licentious welfare queen (Hancock 2004). Second, the system operates through gender-segregated institutions, with women making up roughly 90% of adult welfare recipients and men making up roughly 90% of prisoners (Haney 2004).…”

“…At the same time, media coverage of poverty shifted toward a disproportionate emphasis on images of the black poor, especially in stories that focused on behavioral pathologies (Gilens 1999). The public image of the "lazy and licentious welfare queen" took center stage in debates over public assistance (Hancock 2004). These developments were strengthened by the racialized rhetoric that opportunistic political elites deployed in using welfare dependence and underclass pathology as electoral wedge issues (Neubeck and Cazenave 2001).…”

Women and economy: complex inequality in a post-industrial landscape

“…It gives voice to experiences of oppression (and privilege) and provides thinking space for how social structures interact in the social and material realities of lives to (re)produce power relations (Brown 2012;Rodo-de-Zarate 2014). For reasons concerning its breadth, intersectionality has generated debate regarding its definition, what it involves and how it is methodologically employed in research (YuvalDavis 2006;Hancock 2007). It has been critiqued for the 'oppression olympics' that it has unleashed as 'subjects are additively valorized by the number of oppressions they face' (Brown 2012, 543) and for its hunkering around identity categories leaving the complexity and ambiguity of subjectivity in the shadows (Staunaes 2003).…”