Over the course of the last few decades, intersectionality has been an increasingly adopted framework within peace studies. Generated out of the insights of Black feminist thinking, intersectionality is a powerful lens for analyzing oppression, domination, and many forms of violence in the contemporary world.
Though there are many debates about how to define intersectionality (and how to differentiate it from other social justice and/or identity politics theories), there is some debate about what exactly intersectionality is: some argue that it is a full blown theory of oppression,1 that it is a theory of representation,2 that it is a critique of representation,3 that it is a field of study,4 that it is a methodology,5 that it is an “analytical and political orientation,”6 “a provisional concept,”7 an “analytical framework,”8 and that it is both an “ontology” and an “epistemology.”9 It is helpful to begin with how two foundational theorists of intersectionality render its breadth and diversity.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, the originator of the term ‘intersectionality,’ distinguishes three kinds of intersectionality: structural, political and representational.10 For Crenshaw, structural intersectionality refers to the ways in which the structures of race and gender (and class, sexuality, and potentially other factors, as well) come together to produce a qualitatively different modality of oppression than those who face oppression on the basis of only one factor. Political intersectionality refers to the failures of social movements such as the feminist and anti-racist movements, to adequately conceptualize the oppressions they fight in terms that are representative of the experiences of women of color. In other words, political intersectionality highlights the failures of the anti-racist movement to think of gender as central to its project, and of the feminist movement to think of race as central to its project. Representational intersectionality refers to the tropes, stereotypes, and images of women of color that contribute to their exclusion, marginalization, and disempowerment.
Leslie McCall develops a triadic conceptualization of the multiple approaches to intersectionality: the ‘intercategorial’, the ‘intracategorial’ and the ‘anti-categorial.’11 For McCall, the intercategorial approach focuses on inequalities between “already constituted social groups.”12 The intracategorial approach focuses on the complexities and differences of lived realities inside a particular social group, calling attention to in-group differentiations that are caused by the ways in which multiple kinds of institutions and social structures intersect within them. The anti-categorial approach specifically deconstructs the social categories often under discussion in intersectional theories, categories like race, gender, sexuality, and others. This kind of approach calls attention to the internal contradictions, inconsistencies, and limitations of “fixed categories” in explaining complex social realities.13
In some parts of our shared discipline, intersectionality has been taken up in sensitive and careful ways, there are also some problematic and reductive ways that it is integrated into peace studies.
In my own estimation, peace studies has made great strides in integrating analyses of representational intersectionality and the intercategorial approach into the ways we think about our field and the power relations we study. It is now common to find positionality statements in many peace studies journals, as well as articles and books that focus on how many social groups are empowered or disadvantaged relative to one another. In some parts of the discourse, the intracategorial approach to intersectionality has also been taken up, drawing attention to how differences within an oppressed group might affect the conditions of conflict or the potentialities of peace. Generally, the discourse in peace studies is evolving to consider important aspects of group-constituted differential experiences and impacts of both conflict and peace. These developments are extremely welcome, and necessary if we are to hold fast to the normative commitment of ending violence in the world.
However, other aspects of intersectionality, to this point, have had much less consistent uptake in peace studies. Most integrations of intersectionality in social science generally (and peace studies in particular) lack the kind of anti-categorial analysis that questions the validity and fixity of social categories. And while aspects of structural violence are often explicitly thematized in discussions of intersectionality, these discussions rarely rise to the level of considering structural intersectionality in the way Crenshaw articulates.
A deeper engagement with both the foundational and cutting-edge developments in intersectionality has the potential to expand and nuance the field of peace studies. This engagement can and must start by expanding our engagement with structural intersectionality and the anti-categorial approach.
Endnotes
1 Sumi K. Cho, “Post-Intersectionality: The Curious Reception of Intersectionality in Legal Scholarship,” Du Bois Review 10, no. 2 (2013): 385–404.
2 Evelien Geerts and Iris van der Tuin, “From Intersectionality to Interference: Feminist Onto-Epistemological Reflections on the Politics of Representation,” Women’s Studies
International Forum 41, no. 3 (2013): 171–78; Eline Severs, Karen Celis, and Silvia Erzeel, “Power, Privilege, and Disadvantage: Intersectionality Theory and Political Representation,”
Politics 36, no. 4 (2016): 346–54.
3 Carastathis, Intersectionality, 117–20.
4 Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall, “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis.”
5 McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality”; Cho, “Post-Intersectionality: The Curious Reception of Intersectionality in Legal Scholarship,” 385.
6 May, Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries, 3.
7 Carastathis, Intersectionality; Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43,
no. 6 (1991): 1244-5n9.
8 Julia S. Jordan-Zachary, “Am I a Black Woman or a Woman Who Is Black? A Few Thoughts on the Meaning of Intersectionality,” Politics & Gender 3, no. 2 (2007): 255.
9 Hancock, Intersectionality.
10 Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.”
11 McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality.”
12 McCall, 1785.
13 McCall, 1773.
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Ashley J. Bohrer is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
