A 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Intersectionality intervenes in the field of intersectionality studies: the integrative examination of the effects of racial, gendered, and class power on people’s lives. While “intersectionality” tends to circulate merely as a buzzword, Anna Carastathis joins other critical voices in urging a more careful reading. Challenging the narratives of arrival that surround it, Carastathis argues that intersectionality is a horizon, illuminating ways of thinking that have yet to be realized; consequently, calls to “go beyond” intersectionality are premature. A provisional interpretation of intersectionality can disorient habits of essentialism, categorical purity, and prototypicality and overcome dynamics of segregation and subordination in political movements.
Through a close reading of critical race theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s germinal texts, published more than twenty-five years ago, Carastathis urges analytic clarity, contextual rigor, and a politicized, historicized understanding of this pervasive concept. Intersectionality’s roots in social justice movements and critical intellectual projects–specifically black feminism–must be retraced and synthesized with a decolonial analysis so that its potential to actualize coalitions can be enacted.
Anna Carastathis is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University in Athens, Greece. She coedited an issue of Refuge journal titled “Intersectional Feminist Interventions in the ‘Refugee Crisis.'” She has published work in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Feminist Review, Philosophy Compass, and Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach.
