Very few theories have generated the kind of interdisciplinary and global engagement that marks the intellectual history of intersectionality. Yet, there has been very little effort to reflect upon precisely how intersectionality has moved across time, disciplines, issues, and geographic and national boundaries. Our failure to attend to intersectionality's movement has limited our ability to see the theory in places in which it is already doing work and to imagine other places to which the theory might be taken. Addressing these questions, this special issue reflects upon the genesis of intersectionality, engages some of the debates about its scope and theoretical capacity, marks some of its disciplinary and global travels, and explores the future trajectory of the theory. To do so, the volume includes academics from across the disciplines and from outside of the United States. Their respective contributions help us to understand how intersectionality has moved and to broaden our sense of where the theory might still go.

Intersectional analysis need not focus solely on differences within or between identity-based groups. Using intersectionality for cross movement mobilization reveals that, contrary to criticism for being divisive, attention to intersecting identities has the potential to create solidarity and cohesion. In this article, we elaborate this argument with a case study of the intersection of race, gender, and disability in genetic technologies as well as in organizing to promote a social justice approach to the use of these technologies. We show how organizing based on an intersectional analysis can help forge alliances between reproductive justice, racial justice, women's rights, and disability rights activists to develop strategies to address reproductive genetic technologies. We use the work of Generations Ahead to illuminate how intersectionality applied at the movement-building level can identify genuine common ground, create authentic alliances, and more effectively advocate for shared policy priorities.

This article advances an intersectional perspective in the analysis of racial inequities in special education so that theoretical refinement of this problem will strengthen educational equity research and theory. Racial disproportionality in some disability categories continues to affect a sizable number of students in the United States, with dire long-term consequences for the educational trajectories of these learners. After more than four decades, the problem continues to be debated in research, practice, and policy circles. There is consensus among researchers that the racialization of disability embodies complexities that defy linear explanations. But this debate has overlooked the potential of intersectionality to document complexity and to transcend the individual-structure binary that tends to permeate previous scholarship. Indeed, intersectionality's explicit attention to how the complexity of people's everyday experiences is connected to larger historical processes could offer key insights. I analyze how disproportionality research has addressed the intersections of race and disability (along with other markers of oppression) through a contrapuntal reading of works framed with medical, social, and cultural disability models. I conclude with reflections for future research on racial disparities in special education that is mindful of intersectional complexity.

To the extent that intersectionality is becoming a common term in mainstream social science, it is as a methodological justification to separate out different racial, ethnic, gender, class, and other social groups for empirical analysis. One might call this the “intersectionality hypothesis,” and in its best incarnation, it is about getting the facts right and finding the differences that matter. But an intersectional analysis in the social sciences often involves more than this. An intersectional approach also leads to potentially different interpretations of the same facts, or what we term a different social explanation. It is not only the intersection of categories that defines an intersectional project, then, but the theoretical framing that informs the analysis and interpretation of the subject under study. This framing often leads to an analysis of multiple and even conflicting social dynamics that enable certain kinds of social understanding that are otherwise invisible when scholars focus on a single set of social dynamics. Because the social theoretical aspects of research on intersectionality are rarely discussed, relative to the more methodological and ontological aspects of intersectionality, this is our main subject matter in this article. We focus on the process of developing social explanations rooted in the intersection of multiple social dynamics in several examples from our own research and across a variety of topics in social science research.

Psychological science that examines racial and gender bias, primarily located within social psychology, has tended to discount the ways in which race and gender mutually construct each other. Lay conceptions of racial and gender discrimination tend to see racism as primarily afflicting men and sexism primarily afflicting White women, when in fact race and gender are interrelated and work together intersectionally. Ignoring women's experiences of racial discrimination produces androcentric conceptions of racisms—in other words, many definitions of racial discrimination are to some degree sexist (Goff et al., 2008). Similarly, privileging the experiences of White women produces narrow definitions of gender discrimination—in other words, many definitions of gender discrimination are to some degree racist, such that they serve to reinforce the current societal hierarchies. Psychological science sometimes appears to reflect such conceptions. The result is that the social science principally responsible for explaining individual-level biases has developed a body of research that can undervalue the experiences of non-White women (Goff et al., 2008). This article examines features of social psychological science and its research processes to answer a question suggested by this framing: is the current psychological understanding of racism, to some extent, sexist and the understanding of sexism, to some extent, racist? We argue here that the instruments that much of social psychological science uses to measure racial and gender discrimination may play a role in producing inaccurate understandings of racial and gender discrimination. We also present original experimental data to suggest that lay conceptions parallel social psychology's biases: with lay persons also assuming that racism is about Black men and sexism is about White women.2 Finally, we provide some suggestions to increase the inclusivity of psychology's study of discrimination as well as reasons for optimism in this area.

Although intersectionality analysis originates in a critique of legal doctrine and its confining approach to subject formation, intersectionality has been adopted widely outside of legal scholarship—nationally and internationally—to explain how fields of power operate and interact to produce hierarchy for any limitless combination of identities. Yet, within law, some scholars have raised questions precisely about the capacity of intersectionality to grapple with subjects who occupy multiple social positions and those with “partially privileged” identities in particular. Thus, over roughly a decade, a critique took shape about the theoretical capacity and normative commitment of intersectionality theory to address particular subgroups.

This essay tells part of the curious story about how a race-sexuality critique of intersectionality emerged, what may have motivated it, and how it has facilitated an emerging progressive masculinities literature that is “post-intersectional,” i.e., positioned over and against intersectionality. Like other post-intersectionality approaches, multidimensionality theorists decidedly seek to ‘get beyond’ something, and that ‘something’ that underwrites the turn away from intersectionality appears not as substantive theoretical or analytical content, or as political strategy, but rather, as identity-driven and engendered.

This article identifies a set of power relations within contemporary feminist academic debates on intersectionality that work to “depoliticizing intersectionality,” neutralizing the critical potential of intersectionality for social justice-oriented change. At a time when intersectionality has received unprecedented international acclaim within feminist academic circles, a specifically disciplinary academic feminism in tune with the neoliberal knowledge economy engages in argumentative practices that reframe and undermine it. This article analyzes several specific trends in debate that neutralize the political potential of intersectionality, such as confining intersectionality to an academic exercise of metatheoretical contemplation, as well as “whitening intersectionality” through claims that intersectionality is “the brainchild of feminism” and requires a reformulated “broader genealogy of intersectionality.”

This paper considers how a taxonomy of conjugality—marriage, common-law marriage, and visiting relationships—emerged as a specialized vocabulary to apprehend and govern the postcolonial Caribbean. Although the metaphor of intersections does not fully capture the ways these categories relate to each other to produce social meaning, I employ an intersectional framework to offer a close reading of the routes through which these and other social differences and equivalences are produced as dimensions of citizenship in specific historical contexts, such as the period of decolonization and Caribbean nation-formation. In so doing, I illustrate how the categorization of intimate relationships codified a hierarchy based on intersections of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, and established rough moral boundaries for a heterosexual Caribbean nation. The lives of working class Black women animate the categorization. I show how by centering these women in intimate relationship codes their sexuality is contained and patriarchy naturalized. In this paper, I suggest that we should mark the role intersectionality plays in constituting categories of intimate association, explore how these categories shape sentiments about belonging, and articulate the social costs of their instantiations.

This essay examines the case of Kelley Williams-Bolar—an African American single mother from Akron, Ohio—who in 2011 was arrested, charged with a felony, and jailed for sending her two daughters to a predominantly White suburban public school in Copley Township without meeting the township's residency requirements. This essay closely examines the case with particular attention paid to the important but often unacknowledged intersections of race, gender, economic privilege, spatial containment, and racialized criminalization that shaped the case. The Williams-Bolar case became a public site of contesting narratives, some obscuring these intersections, others acknowledging them. Those who supported Copley Township's prosecution of Williams-Bolar relied on a law and order mandate and fiscal responsibility that supported the dominant racial narrative while appearing to be race, gender, and class neutral. But many were critical of Williams-Bolar's arrest and the story used to justify it. Their response was a massive and heated online challenge that inspired existing and newly outraged parents and educational activists from a wide range of backgrounds, triggering petitions signed by hundreds of thousands of people requesting that the Governor of Ohio pardon Williams-Bolar.

This essay places the case in the context of what I call the “invisible intersections of colorblind racism,” the racial privileges of housing and educational resource hoarding via private property taxes for suburban upper-middle-class Whites and the expanded application of the criminalization of the Black poor to Black mothers who receive state assistance by the judicial system, in political discourse and mass media narrative. Williams-Bolar's supporters used the power of social media to build community activism and to generate alternative narratives that countered the discursive and structural forces that were at work. Finally, this article considers the value and impact of alternative narratives about Williams-Bolar and her actions as generated by supporters.

In this essay, I call for an “unshackling” of intersectionality from the narrow and restrictive ways in which legal scholars and activists interpret and mobilize the theory and critique the single-axis framework that has been deployed by legal scholars and advocates in the context of mass incarceration. Specifically, I assert that a single-axis analysis of mass incarceration is insufficient to capture the broad impact of the prison and the raced and gendered logics that animate its operation. As a consequence of the failure to engage intersectionality in the context of the prison, legal scholarship on incarceration tends to obscure the centrality of Black women's gender in the racialized system of control and posits Black men as the primary targets of mass incarceration. This undertheorization of incarceration also hinders the development of a framework that can account for why both Black women and Black men are vulnerable to multiple systems of social control.

“Black male exceptionalism” is the premise that African American men fare more poorly than any other group in the United States. The discourse of Black male exceptionalism presents African American men as an “endangered species.” Some government agencies, foundations, and activists have responded by creating “Black male achievement” programs. There are almost no corresponding “Black female achievement” programs. Yet empirical data does not support the claim that Black males are burdened more than Black females. Without attention to intersectionality, Black male achievement programs risk obscuring Black females and advancing patriarchal values. Black male achievement programs also risk reinforcing stereotypes that African American males are violent and dangerous. An intersectional approach would create space for Black male focused interventions, but require parity for Black female programs.

In this essay, I contend that the elevation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and the evisceration of civil rights it has enabled, should be understood in part to reflect a tragic mistake on the part of Black America writ large. I will argue it represents the absence of a fully embodied vision of racial justice—one that genuinely symbolizes the entire panoply of concerns that must be addressed if the quest for racial equality is to ever be fully realized in the United States. Importantly, what this essay will point to is a political and discursive failure to center the concerns of Black females at the heart of our racial justice agenda.

In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw published Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, an article that drew explicitly on Black feminist criticism, and challenged three prevailing frameworks: 1) the male-centered nature of antiracist politics, which privileged the experiences of heterosexual Black men; 2) the White-centered nature of feminist theorizing, which privileged the experiences of heterosexual White women; and 3) the “single-axis”/sex or race-centered nature of antidiscrimination regimes, which privileged the experiences of heterosexual White women and Black men. Crenshaw demonstrated how people within the same social group (e.g., African Americans) are differentially vulnerable to discrimination as a result of other intersecting axes of disadvantage, such as gender, class, or sexual orientation.

This essay builds on that insight by articulating a performative conceptualization of race. It assumes that a judge is sympathetic to intersectionality and thus recognizes that Black women are often disadvantaged based on the intersection of their race and sex, among other social factors. This essay asks: How is that judge likely to respond to a case in which a firm promotes four Black women but not the fifth? The judge could conclude that there is no discrimination because the firm promoted four people (Black women) with the same intersectional identity as the fifth (a Black woman). We argue that this evidentiary backdrop should not preclude a finding of discrimination. It is plausible that our hypothetical firm utilized racially associated ways of being—performative criteria (self presentation, accent, demeanor, conformity, dress, and hair style)—to differentiate among and between the Black women. The firm might have drawn an intra-group, or intra-intersectional, line between the fifth Black women and the other four based on the view that the fifth Black woman is “too Black.” We describe the ease with which institutions can draw such lines and explain why doing so might constitute impermissible discrimination. Our aim is to broaden the conceptual terms upon which we frame both social categories and discrimination.

Here is a dazzling book, one that offers a rich genealogy for reflection about our current preoccupations. Open up any newspaper. Switch on any television news program. What you will read and hear is a cacophony of voices, many of them discordant, on how to fix, fund, and perhaps shrink the federal government's spending on those insurance programs first created in the 1930s by the New Deal welfare state. Equally factious are the debates on immigration policy that some hope will resolve how the republic will meet its future labor needs and how it will placate its rising Latino voting public. Will we deport eleven million workers? Will we construct electrified fences to protect our southern border from “illegal” invasion? Will we offer unauthorized immigrants a path to citizenship? Stay tuned. And while racial politics are clearly at the covert center of these polemics, the discussion of race is rarely overt probably because some now pronounce us a post-racial society.

In the early 1930s, with worldwide economies sinking deeper into what would become the Great Depression, upwards of 400,000 people crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. They were en route to what for most would be permanent relocation to Mexico.1 Though many traveled from established enclaves in the Midwest and Northeast, the vast majority came from the Southwest, where Mexican America was concentrated. Claims on both sides of the border to the contrary, the mass exodus could hardly be described as voluntary. In addition to the tens of thousands of immigrants subject to stepped-up deportation efforts and state-sponsored repatriations, countless individuals and families were intimidated, “scare-headed” (the term used by an influential local official to describe the Los Angeles campaign) or otherwise coerced into leaving lest they become burdens on the country's overtaxed relief rolls. Significant numbers of the departed were U.S. citizens, swept up in what the progressive journalist Carey McWilliams called “a determination to oust the Mexican.”2

Thanks to the work of numerous scholars, it is now well understood that African Americans were incorporated into the early twentieth-century welfare state—as it was then constituted—on a decidedly unequal basis. If African Americans were not altogether excluded by design from some programs, government officials were frequently less generous in determining the scope and extent of the benefits received by them compared to those received by Whites.