European Journal of Women's

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The intersectional turn in feminist theory: A dream of a common language?

Maria Carbin and Sara Edenheim
European Journal of Women's Studies 2013 20: 233 originally published online 20 May
2013
DOI: 10.1177/1350506813484723
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484723
2013

EJW20310.1177/1350506813484723European Journal of Womens StudiesCarbin and Edenheim

EJ WS

Article

The intersectional turn in

feminist theory: A dream of
a common language?

European Journal of Womens Studies

20(3) 233248
The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/1350506813484723
ejw.sagepub.com

Maria Carbin and Sara Edenheim

Ume University, Sweden

Abstract
Today intersectionality has expanded from being primarily a metaphor within
structuralist feminist research to an all-encompassing theory. This article discusses
this increasing dedication to intersectionality in European feminist research. How
come intersectionality has developed into a signifier for good feminist research at
this particular point in time? Drawing on poststructuralist and postcolonial theory
the authors examine key articles on intersectionality as well as special issues devoted
to the concept. They interrogate the conflicts and meaning making processes as well
as the genealogies of the concept. Thus, the epistemology and ontology behind the
intersectional turn in feminist theory is the main concern here. The authors argue
that the lack of ontological discussions has lead to its very popularity. Intersectionality
promises almost everything: to provide complexity, overcome divisions and to serve as
a critical tool. However, the expansion of the scope of intersectionality has created a
consensus that conceals fruitful and necessary conflicts within feminism.
Keywords
Feminist theory, genealogy, intersectionality, postcolonial theory, poststructuralism

Introduction
We do not need a totality in order to work well; quite the opposite. (Haraway, The ironic dream
of a common language, 1983)

In the last 10 years the use of the concept intersectionality has practically exploded in
European and North American gender research. Special issues have been devoted to
the concept and it has been celebrated as one of the more important latest
Corresponding author:
Maria Carbin, Ume Centre for Gender Studies, Ume University, Ume, S-901 87, Sweden.
Email: maria.carbin@ucgs.umu.se

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interventions in feminist theory. As the American sociologist Leslie McCall points

out, feminists are perhaps alone in the academy in the extent to which they have
embraced intersectionality (McCall, 2005: 1771). It has been discussed whether it
should be regarded as a common platform for a new paradigm that can replace gender research (Hancock, 2007a) or as a nodal point for gender researchers (Bilge,
2010; Lykke, 2005). Intersectionality is also increasingly institutionalized within gender studies and has become a standard topic on both graduate and undergraduate
courses. Furthermore, the concept has been deployed within politics, and academic
articles are published on how to mainstream intersectionality (Dhamoon, 2011),
how it is might be relevant in the EU (Verloo, 2006) and how it can serve as a human
rights policy methodology (Yuval-Davis, 2006: 203). In light of this, one could
indeed claim that intersectionality is well on its way to become institutionalized and
included in the ongoing bureaucratization of politics.
There are different views and discussions on whether intersectionality should be
defined as a theory (de los Reyes and Mulinari, 2005; Yuval-Davis, 2006), a framework (Hancock, 2007a; McCall, 2005), or as politics (Crenshaw, 1991), but the
concept and the field as such is rapidly growing without any signs of major internal
clashes. In this article our endeavour is to examine and discuss the increasing dedication to the concept within feminist studies. We would like to examine how intersectionality has become such a success story and why the concept has developed into a
signifier for good research in feminist theorizing at this particular point in time. As
Norwegian sociologist Randi Gressgrd (2008) queries, could the terminology perhaps even be too promising? By drawing on international key articles on intersectionality as well as special issues devoted to intersectionality, we examine how the concept
has been introduced, articulated and used, primarily in European, but also in North
American research. We examine, in particular, the so-called constructivist approach
to intersectionality. For some of our examples we use the Nordic debate, not only
because this is a setting we are familiar with but also because the development of
constructionist intersectionality (Bilge, 2010; Prins, 2006) is, with some important
exceptions, particularly apparent in this setting, as well as the consensus-based
approach to other feminist positions. It is however our conviction that our examples
correspond to a general development concerning other (West) European feminist
debates and conflicts.
The aim of the article is to show how the concept has moved from being a sign of
threat and conflict to (white) feminism, to a consensus-creating signifier that not only
made the concept successful but also enabled an institutionalization of a liberal, allinclusive feminism based on a denial of power as constitutive for all subjects (and nonsubjects alike). Writing from a poststructuralist feminist perspective ourselves, this issue
will be put in the forefront even though we also briefly consider the liberal appropriation
of intersectionality from structuralist and (black) standpoint feminism. In line with this,
we also intend to discuss how the concept has functioned within a new European postrace feminism. Before we turn to our analytical readings of the proclaimed promises of
intersectionality, we give a brief introduction to the development of the concept in order
to show how the very concept itself implies a certain ontology that cannot be overlooked
without giving cause to theoretical confusion.1

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The beginnings of intersectionality

Most scholars locate the starting point for intersectional research to the late 1980s and
almost every text on intersectionality refers to the American lawyer Kimberl Crenshaw
(Crenshaw, 1991). Crenshaws major point was to show how white feminists excluded
black women from the feminist movement by setting a white, middle-class agenda and
how, at the same time, black women were not fully recognized within the anti-racist
movement because of a male bias.2 Feminist standpoint theorist Patricia Hill Collins was
then one of the first to pick up the term, specifically in her writings about nation and the
family (Hill Collins, 1998). Both Crenshaw and Collins were influenced by American
radical black feminist critique and used intersectionality as a metaphor for different sections of power structures interacting, which fitted the general theoretical settings of
coherent structuralist ontology.
The metaphor was explicitly filled with other connotations when European feminists,
inspired by Crenshaws text, adapted the concept to their specific field of research. For
them, intersectionality not only referred to a category or a metaphor, it became a theory or
a methodology. One example is sociologist Nira Yuval-Davis, who, probably more than
others, has tried to create a complete, theoretical field of research around the concept based
on (neo-)Marxism and certain revisions of Nancy Fraser (Yuval-Davis, 2006). Likewise, in
the Nordic context, historian of economy Paulina de los Reyes, cultural geographer Irene
Molina and sociologist Diana Mulinari introduced the concept in 2002 as an important part
of their critique of hegemonic white/Nordic feminism and its blindness to race and ethnicity (de los Reyes and Mulinari, 2005; de los Reyes et al., 2002). The preferred intersecting
categories for these researchers are class, gender and race since they are assumed to be
more than merely cultural.3 In their approaches, de los Reyes et al., as well as YuvalDavis, present a structuralist ontology close to American black feminism with a realist idea
of mapping intersections in relation to social positions and possible emancipation. It is
hence possible to deduct that intersectionality from the very beginning was a concept
deeply dependent on structuralist standpoint feminism. The idea to expand it and fit it to
other feminist positions came later on and was carried out by other researchers.

The expansion of intersectionality

Most articles dealing with the trans-Atlantic journey of the concept describe this same
rooting within structuralism (black feminism, especially) in geographical terms, where
the US context is named structuralist and the UK/European constructivist (Christensen
and Siim, 2006; Knapp, 2005; Phoenix and Pattynama, 2006: 188; Prins, 2006).
Geography is, however, not enough to explain the different turns the concept has made
over the last decade. As already seen, European-based Yuval-Davis, Mulinari et al.
adhere to the structuralist context, and the aforementioned text by American sociologist
Leslie McCall is one of the most central constructivist texts. McCall, though, has a
more ambitious project: she intends to expand the scope of intersectionality by way of
establishing intersectionality as common ground for all feminist research. In her terminology, gender research can be categorized into three approaches to complexity: intercategorical, intracategorical and finally, anticategorical. She writes that:

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Since my primary goal is a substantive one to expand research on intersectionality all other
philosophical and methods-related issues are important only to the extent that they impede or
facilitate this goal. My emphasis instead is on the convergence of several interrelated but
analytically separate developments that led to the current mode of research on intersectionality.
for now it is important that some similarities in the positions of all three groups compounded
and reinforced the conflation of the anticategorical and the intracategorical approaches into a
single widely received approach. (McCall, 2005: 17741776, our emphasis)

More specifically, her project is to include those theories that are not explicitly intersectional and thereby to expand the scope of what is included into intersectionality studies.
In line with McCall, Nordic feminist scholar Nina Lykke (2005) also strives towards,
what she calls, a broader understanding of intersectional thinking. For this purpose, she
criticizes, e.g. bell hooks genealogy of intersectionality for not acknowledging European
feminists inclusion of class in the 1970s, since this implies that those feminists did,
indeed, think intersectionally (Lykke, 2005, our emphasis). It is hard not to see this
prolongation of intersectionality into a white feminist past as an attempt to clear this
same feminism from a compromising history. This expansion of the intersectional genealogy into a white, European feminism also ignores critique from feminists who had
migrated to Europe long before the 2000s. As for example Yuval-Davis points out, she
and Floya Anthias provided a critique of the triple oppression already in the early 1980s
(Yuval-Davis, 2006: 194). An interesting effect of Lykkes genealogy, hence, is that the
serious criticism from marginalized feminist groups from all over the world (black, lesbian, colonized) in the 1970s and 1980s, paradoxically, is reduced by only being acknowledged as examples of intersectional thinking alongside white and heterosexual feminist
intersectional thinking.
Most importantly, however, this quite un-Foucauldian idea that intersectional thinking predates the concept intersectionality runs the risk of emptying the concept of specificity and content by replacing it with a universalizing allegory for thinking in more than
one dimension. Even though Lykke does acknowledge the difference between explicit
use of the concept, implicit use and intersectional thinking (Lykke, 2005), there is no
argumentation for or problematization of the need to universalize this very specific word.
Rather, Lykke admits to desiring a feminism united around intersectionality as a common nodal point, i.e., a coherent framework for how to conceptualize different phenomena (Lykke, 2005: 9), including any feminism that thinks intersectionally, which
according to Lykke is any feminism that adheres to the idea of power being more than
one-dimensional.
American sociologist Kathy Daviss perspective is close to Lykkes, in the sense that
she believes in intersectionality as a nodal point that brings two of the most important
strands of feminist thought together:
While intersectionality is most often associated with US Black feminist theory and the political
project of theorizing the relationships between gender, class, and race, it has also been taken up
and elaborated by a second important strand within feminist theory. Feminist theorists inspired
by postmodern theoretical perspectives viewed intersectionality as a welcome helpmeet in their
project of deconstructing the binary oppositions and universalism inherent in the modernist
paradigms of Western philosophy and science (Phoenix, 2006; Brah and Phoenix, 2004).

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Critical perspectives inspired by poststructuralist theory postcolonial theory (Mohanty, 1988;

Mani, 1989), diaspora studies (Brah, 1996), and queer theory (Butler, 1989) were all in search
of alternatives to static conceptualizations of identity. Intersectionality fit neatly into the
postmodern project of conceptualizing multiple and shifting identities. It coincided with
Foucauldian perspectives on power. (Davis, 2008: 7071)

What Daviss genealogy does not answer is the question why poststructuralists supposedly were all in search of alternatives to static conceptualizations of identity. Neither
does she answer how the emancipatory project of the first strand of intersectionality
researchers fit into the Foucauldian perspectives of power. Poststructuralism is, after
all, already an alternative to static conceptualizations of identity and one specific theory
of power as complex is seldom reducible to another specific theory of power as
complex.
This expansion of the concept thus creates theoretic confusion in more than one way:
not only is the historization of the concept somewhat apprehensive, but the attempt to
reformulate intersectionality (with its structuralist rooting) to fit into poststructuralism is
also quite imprecise. Danish feminist researchers Dorthe Stauns and Dorthe Marie
Sndergaard quite early on tackled the same project as McCall and Lykke, and argued for
adjusting (justera) the concept intersectionality to a poststructuralist frame (Stauns,
2003; Stauns and Sndergaard, 2006). Poststructuralism can here be discerned as
mainly associated with terms such as subjectivity, doing categories and lived experience, and treated as a counter-weight to a structural macro-perspective (Stauns,
2003: 103; Lykke, 2005: 14; Christensen and Siim, 2006: 33) The main reason to introduce poststructuralism to the more structuralist tradition of intersectionality, they claim,
is to provide the opportunity for a balanced combination of perspectives by shifting
between structure and individual life. In these texts social constructivism is repeatedly used as synonymous with poststructuralism, ignoring the feminist critique of social
constructivism from, among others, Judith Butler or Elizabeth Grosz (see e.g. Butler,
1990, 1993; Grosz, 1994), as well as the obvious connection with post-Marxism. The
fact that poststructuralism was never about singling out an actor (and even less an individual life) in relation to a structure, or subjectivity in relation to politics, but rather to
implode such dichotomies, or at least to understand their political genealogy and impact,
is not considered. Rather, what we find here repeatedly are quite traditional, and unproblematized, humanist ideals of pluralism and emancipation ideas perhaps more appropriately attributed to classic liberalism.4
Despite the structural rooting of the concept, intersectionality has thus today become
a platform or been articulated as a common ground for all feminisms structuralist, liberal and poststructuralist alike. As Ann Phoenix and Pattynama have noted, intersectionality has become a catch-all phrase (Phoenix and Pattynama, 2006: 187). As studies on
fast travelling concepts have already pointed out, sometimes popularity and all-inclusiveness is guaranteed through theoretical vagueness rather than by specificity and
explicit limits (see Knapp, 2005). We believe it is precisely this dream of a common
language this inclusion, and its less visible exclusions, that calls for analysis. We therefore focus on the endeavour to include what McCall names the anticategorical, Lykke
indirect intersectionality and Davis postmodernist in intersectionality research. More

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European Journal of Womens Studies 20(3)

specifically, we want to understand and discuss why this has happened at this point in
time in feminist research and by what forceful reduction all feminisms are included in the
field of intersectionality? What answers, to what questions/problems, have been found in
this concept?

The promise of complexity

By study how scholars describe what it means to use the concept and what it promises to
deliver, we have been able to discern some recurrent central themes. First of all, intersectionality promises to be new. It is in some cases proclaimed to be a rich intervention
(EJWS, 2009), to constitute a new method/methodology (McCall, 2005), as a potential
for new feminist agendas (Brah and Phoenix, 2004) and in other cases regarded as a
new perspective (KKF, 2010: 5). Intersectionality is furthermore presented as having
the potential to capture the complexity in social life, and provide multilevel models.
According to McCall, all intersectional approaches attempt to satisfy the demand for
complexity and explore the complexity of intersectionality in social life (McCall,
2005: 1773). This is seen as offering a way to overcome unitary and exclusionary
approaches in both academic and political feminism (Hancock, 2007b: 67). In the
European Journal of Women Studies the editors claim that:
As such, it [intersectionality] foregrounds a richer and more complex ontology than approaches
that attempt to reduce people to one category at a time. (EJWS, 2006: 187)
it [intersectionality] facilitates a form of feminist enquiry that aims to, and is capable of
capturing the complexity and multiplicity of axes of oppression. (EJWS, 2009: 207)

Thus, the aim is articulated as capturing complexity to offer a more fine-tuned way of
representing the world. Another similar example of this tendency can be found in the
editorial of Politics and Gender. Here the concept is announced to be the best way of
representing reality:
At the same time, viewing gender as a stand-alone factor necessarily distorts reality.
Gender never operates independently from other aspects in political life, so it is misleading
to think of gender as an autonomous category of analysis. The integrated, mutually
constitutive nature of identities is the central premise of intersectionality. (Politics and
Gender, 2007: 229)

Those sceptical of intersectionality are here defined as researchers who only want to
analyse one category (or just add categories together a much criticized approach among
all intersectionality researchers, but hardly ever illustrated with a reference). This pictures a schism between only two possible approaches: the one category-approach (of
radical feminism) and the nuanced, multifaceted intersectional-approach. The only
defined enemy of intersectionality in this discourse, then, is the feminist who believes
only gender is relevant for a feminist analysis. However, as Gressgrd (2008) points out,
this search for complexity falls close to a positivist research agenda that aims to map out
the world and hence ignores that we cannot have complete knowledge of complex

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systems; we can only have knowledge in terms of certain frameworks (Gressgrd, 2008:
5). In Gressgrds reading, the understanding of complexity within intersectionality literature is closely associated with a realist approach, perhaps even implicating complicated rather than complex. Something is complicated when the task of predicting its
behavior presents a difficulty due to incomplete information but when in principle it
is possible to explain and understand it by extending a simple, fundamental model
(Greco, quoted in Gressgrd, 2008: 9). In this sense, one could say that intersectionality
researchers are indeed (still) adding categories to each other, extending one simple model
in search of incomplete information as if a more difference-sensitive, sophisticated
scheme could solve the crisis of representation or the problem of categorization all
together (Gressgrd, 2008: 5).

The promise to be critical

Another characteristic of intersectionality is its seemingly critical approach. The special
issues, conferences and anthologies promise to provide critical voices from within. The
editorial to the conference Celebrating Intersectionality? (EJWS, 2009) notes:
the aim of the conference was to bring together protagonists as well as critics to discuss the
state of the art with many of those who had been influential in debates about the term
intersectionality. participants heard and discussed papers from Nira Yuval-Davis, Kathy
Davis, Gudrun Axeli Knapp, Myra Marx Ferree, Ann Phoenix, Gloria Wekker, Mechtild
Bereswill, Dubravka Zarkov, Jeff Hearn, Paula Villa, Nina Lykke and Cornelia Klinger. (EJWS,
2009: 203, our emphasis)

In this list of names, however, there are no scholars who are known for arguing against
intersectionality; instead they all argue for the usefulness of the concept and provide different ideas on exactly how intersectional analysis should be conducted, not if it should
be conducted. The critical effort rather seems to be a sort of pseudo-criticism, focusing
on issues like travelling concept and transformation, revisiting intersectionality,
additive tendencies and missing elements and how they can be included. The editorial
to the special issue on intersectionality in EJWS (2006) also asks:
Why are so many feminists both attracted to, and repelled by intersectional analysis? (EJWS,
2006: 187, our emphasis)

Furthermore, the editorials to both special issues on intersectionality in Kvinder, kn og

forskning states that:
The focus in the discussions [on intersectionality] are often for or against. (KKF, 2006: 3, our
translation)
Intersectionality is an open and contested concept. (KKF, 2010: 3)

We are curious: who is being repelled? Who is against? In what way is intersectionality
a contested concept? In all the special issues and anthologies we have examined there

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European Journal of Womens Studies 20(3)

is no such contestation going on, it is only stated that there are conflicts, but without
any references to such debates. Even feminist positions outside the field of intersectionality are treated as compliant with the ideals and promises of intersectionality as
long as these positions do not claim gender to be the only necessary category of analysis (which no one does). To paraphrase Sara Ahmeds critique of the critical in critical
whiteness studies, the declaration appears to be non-performative in the sense that it
does not perform what it declares (Ahmed, 2004). Even when intersectionality research
claims to be essentially critical of its own project and ideal, this critique never takes
place and instead the bulk of intersectionality literature is very much characterized by
consensus on this specific issue. Indeed, it can probably be argued in line with Ahmed
that intersectionality research constitutes itself as a field through these nonperformative utterances.
There are many such unhappy performatives in the discourse on intersectionality:
one apparent example is Lykkes recurrent invitations to critical debate, where critique
turns out to be welcome only if it adheres to intersectionality as a nodal point. However,
the very term nodal point derives from poststructuralist theorists Laclau and Mouffe
(1985) to designate what happens to a floating signifier (in this case feminist theory)
when it is given meaning within a hegemonic discourse (intersectionality). According
to Laclau and Mouffe, to endorse a nodal point is to exclude any discourse that refuses
to believe in this nodal point as a point of reference a strange metaphor, then, for a supposedly all-inclusive feminism.
Another discussion, passing off as criticism, is how (not) to use intersectionality as a
metaphor and whether it is a theory, a method, a perspective, etc. (Stauns and
Sndergaard, 2006). In the articles and books we have gone through we have only been
able to find three articles that present a critical view on intersectionality (Carbin and
Tornhill, 2004; Egeland and Gressgrd, 2007; Gressgrd, 2008). This lack of criticism is
not caused by us defining critical in a limited way that suits our approach to intersectionality; by critical we simply mean that the author asks if intersectionality is the only
solution to the problems it claims to solve. It is this if-question that we define as necessary for a critical approach, no matter if the final answer is affirmative or negative. But,
paradoxically, intersectionality research is instead articulated as critical while marginalizing both current and past criticism and conflicts.
The same lack of discussion can be discerned concerning the implications of the
broadening of categories and theories, as well as explicit confrontations concerning
different ontologies and key notions such as agency, power or resistance. Such discussions and debates, we believe, are important and crucial for the understanding of any
field, since they provide the possibilities to position oneself as either inside or outside
this field, or as either positive or critical (from within or from outside). Such confrontations and definitions within a field present an open position from which one speaks,
instead of a hidden or assumingly neutral or inconsequential one. Since we could not
find any such criticism in our search for the promise of intersectionality, we have
instead been forced to search for traces of conflicts and analyse this lack of debate on
ontological and theoretical issues and differences rather than any explicit positioning
and border-setting.

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The promise to overcome divisions

Almost all texts we have analysed bear such ghostly traces of conflict; conflicts and critique between structuralist and poststructuralist feminism, black feminists and white feminists, postcolonial feminism and western feminism are discernible. However, in many
cases these debates, based on long-term struggle, critique and different opinions concerning ontological and epistemological issues, are not articulated as conflicts, but instead
regarded as differences, divisions, different strands, different versions or perspectives, and as being kin-related, as if they could be combined, conjoined, in one single
entity called intersectional feminism. Somehow, conflicts seem to be foreclosed, while the
dream of a united feminism is revived. However, calling a conflict a division is not an
innocent synonym; it provides for the metaphor of bridging, where intersectionality is the
bridge that can help feminists overcome divisions, here defined in various terms:
It [intersectionality] proposes ways to overcome divisions in feminist theory, for example those
between systematic approaches (Collins 1998) and constructivist approaches (Phoenix and
Pattynama 2006). (KKF, 2010: 4)
the debates and opinions about the power and utility of thinking and working intersectionality
ranged quite broadly. Among the strengths were statements about the necessary reorientation in
perspective that thinking intersectionality requires because it involves thinking simultaneously
at level of structures, dynamics and subjectivities; that it conjoins rhetorics of voice and
presence and rhetorics of discourse and institutional form. (EJWS, 2009: 207)

Intersectionality, by becoming the very nodal point of feminism, will hence overcome
divisions within feminism by linking two analytical levels variably named systematic
approach and constructivist approach; structures and subjectivities; or rhetorics of
voice/presence and rhetorics of discourse and institutional form. But since poststructuralism was a response and revision of structuralism where the binarism between structure and agency was questioned and completely replaced with a theory of subjectification
(assujtissement) it makes no sense to frame the division as standing between levels of
structure and subjectivity, or voice and discourse, as if structure was synonymous
with discourse and subjectivity with voice. This can only be done if you side-step the
poststructuralist critique of structure vs agency and power vs freedom. Instead of
accepting this difference (or conflict) between two ontologies, poststructuralism here
seems to have been appropriated and translated into structuralist terminology so that a
problem between a poststructuralism that supposedly only deals with the symbolic and
representations and a structuralism that struggles to capture the voice of concrete
individuals could be formulated. In other words, with the advent of intersectionality, the
problem that poststructuralism pointed out a long time ago (structure vs agency does not
work) was more or less hijacked, but the terms were scrambled around and, paradoxically, resulted in a critique of poststructuralism for not having worked on this problem.
Why this lack of acknowledgement of an already existing feminism that has worked
with issues of power in more than one dimension, but with a different ontological
framework?5

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The ghost of poststructuralist feminism

In the late 1990s academic feminism was almost exhausted by the discussions on difference and identity. As Robyn Wiegman wrote in 2000: academic feminism finds itself so
deeply troubled about the internal dynamics of difference that womens very incommensurabilities with one another serve as one of the most powerful forces narrating feminisms apocalyptic end (Wiegman, 2000: 808). One could in line with Wiegman say that
the self-identical feminism was in a state of crisis. Wiegman defines this threatened and
apocalyptic feminism as equating itself with continuity, history, and origin. Such equations make feminisms own history a story of maternal order and generational succession, thereby reproducing a model for feminist subjectivity that requires it to be
self-identical across time (Wiegman, 2000: 809). She points out how attempts to reconcile critique of this feminism can lead to a situation in which [t]he apocalyptic is thus
countered by a critical imaginary that seeks inclusion in order to lose nothing (Wiegman,
2000: 815).
Poststructuralist feminism is not coincident with womens subjectivities and therefore
requires a politics that could not be recognizable within the self-identical frame (Wiegman,
2000: 822). As a school of theory that can be found outside the frames of feminist writings, and requiring a reading list including continental philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is very much a non-identical feminism.6 It is also an ambitious theory, trying to
take up not only the matter of power in a self-critical way, but also the very matter of
matter questions not asked by structuralist or social constructivist feminists (and only
recently appropriated by the school of New Materialism).7 With feminist theorists such as
Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak or Elizabeth Grosz, matter seemed to come back in the
forms of sex, sexuality and race concepts many academic feminists were quite uncomfortable using and discussing. All put together, this period was probably a confusing time
for feminists who had struggled to introduce the concept of gender to be able to avert
biologist and essentialist ontologies. Thus, we believe that at the time intersectionality
was introduced, feminism was most probably haunted by the ghost-of-the-future named
poststructuralism; a ghost that not only enforced the sense of apocalypse, but also opened
up for intersectionality as a way to save a self-identical feminism.
Given this, it is interesting to note how intersectionality today is legitimized by including scholars such as Judith Butler, Beverly Skeggs, Wendy Brown or Gayatri Spivak in
intersectional literature. And this even when these very scholars are explicitly (or otherwise obviously) critical of the field. Wendy Brown, for example, writes:
Insofar as subject construction does not take place along discrete lines of nationality, race,
sexuality, gender, caste, class, and so forth, these powers of subject formation are not separable
in the subject itself. These powers neither constitute links in a chain nor overlapping spheres of
oppression; they are not intersectional in their formation (Kimberl Crenshaw), There is
not as Judith Butler recently remarked first gender and then the apparatus that regulates it;
gender does not exist prior to its regulation. (Brown, 2005: 123124)

In an interview, Beverly Skeggs is asked about her opinion on intersectionality. She

answers: when people say that we need the intersectional gesture to include race, class,
gender, and everything else, what it usually means is to think about these things which

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exclude understandings of the relationship to the capitalist system (Skeggs, 2008: 41).
In a sense, the inclusion of scholars such as Wendy Brown and Beverly Skeggs has thus
made it possible to not relate to this and other criticisms, because if intersectionality
researchers were to relate to the criticism, it would become clear that not every feminist
who has used terms like class or ethnicity together with gender can be labelled an intersectionality researcher.
It may be that poststructuralism, as it is defined within intersectionality research, is
rather used as a general symbol of a multidimensional, nuanced and complex view on
power; a perspective that brings to the fore concepts such as differences and complexities, and therefore thought of as somehow needed within the field. Yet, the basic premise
of poststructuralism is missing in this inclusion: that of the fundamental impossibility of
accurately representing the world. It is as if those very elements of poststructuralism its
ontology are overlooked and only the empty signifier (along with some key terms) is
included in the intersectionality field. That which remains outside the field is left on its
own, without any possibility of talking back to the appropriator, not without being classified as either already-included or as an obsolete ghost from the past.

The ghost of black feminism

But perhaps the success of intersectionality does not only stem from the anxiety caused
by poststructuralism; similar relations between heterosexual feminism and queer critique, or liberal, middle-class feminism in relation to Marxist critique can also be discerned. As Gudrun Axeli Knapp notes, there was in the beginning of the 2000s a growing
fear of a lessening social relevance of gender and a crisis of feminist theory altogether
(Knapp, 2005: 256). Rumour had it that gender would be overshadowed by multiculturalism or race/ethnicity (see also Lykke, 2003a).8 Knapp notes that the introduction of
race-class-gender was accompanied with certain irritation (Knapp, 2005: 250). The
sense of threat was not only present in academic circles in Western Europe but also in the
US. As late as 2008, Kathy Davis concludes that:
However tarnished the ideal of inclusivity has become, feminist theory still needs a theoretical
and normative platform if it is not to disappear altogether. (Davis, 2008: 71)

The risk that gender, gender studies and feminist theory would disappear was seen, perhaps not as an immediate threat, but at least as a potential one. In our reading it represents
another apocalyptic threat that produced yet another ghost that haunted European feminism in the beginning of the 2000s: the ghost of black feminism, or, as it was named in
the Nordic countries: postcolonial feminism. Feminists inspired by both black feminism
and postcolonial criticism were part of a strong critique of white-centred feminism incapable of handling debates on race, ethnicity and migration (see e.g. de los Reyes et al.,
2002). At the time, this critique, however, seemed to have been met by harsh resistance
from some of the established feminist researchers who defended the idea of gender as the
prime category to understand inequality, but at the same time refused to see their own
feminism as racialized, and even racist. In the Nordic countries this debate was public
and heated: one side accusing the other for splitting the feminist movement and the other

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European Journal of Womens Studies 20(3)

one for being blind to racism and ignoring the situation of immigrant women in relation
to issues of violence (Carbin, 2010: 14).9 It is right after such a debate, springing from a
traumatic murder of a young immigrant woman (a so-called honour killing), that Lykke
claims to introduce intersectionality as a way to overcome this particular division (Lykke,
2003a: 48).
In their response, Mulinari and de los Reyes point out the obvious: they had already
introduced the concept one year earlier and it is clear that Lykke uses it not only without
giving them credit but they also believe she introduces it for a different reason:
As opposed to Lykke, who wants to use the concept intersectionality from a meta-feminist
position to solve the schism between two feminist fractions, we are interested in making visible
and challenging power relations that in different temporal and spatial settings create, articulate,
and reproduce inequality and submission. (de los Reyes et al., 2003: 160, our translation)

Here the schism is not only acknowledged, but extended into the very discussion itself.
However, this is the only mentioning of the conflict; in later articles on intersectionality
all researchers here positioned as opposed to each other inscribe each other into the
same field. There is therefore, we believe, more to the story than a simple strategy for
consensus. There is also anxiety and affect: anxiety from white feminists about how to
handle these non-white feminists with strange accents and non-European pasts that suddenly started to talk to them, and affect from those feminists who tried to make themselves recognizable as feminists within an ethnically homogenic field of feminist
research.10 By including intersectionality in a European white feminism, the radical criticism from black feminism seems almost to have turned into a way to paraphrase Spivak
for white feminists to save black feminists from black feminism. Black feminisms
contribution to intersectionality research is, for example, routinely defined as that of theorizing the relationships between gender, class, and race (Davis, 2008: 70). Even here we
can find an erasure of one of the central political aims with black feminism that of making hierarchical and problematic relations within feminism visible. In this sense, intersectionality can provide a way to cover up a conflict, while at the same time recognizing the
importance of (the less critical parts of) black feminism and postcolonial feminism.
A broadening of the concept, and, most importantly, of the analytical categories, provided a possibility to think intersectionally together, no matter our (many and, for some,
embarrassing) differences. Intersectionality, then, promised a common ground where we
could all talk about gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. without either neglecting or being
neglected, leaving the old conflicts, the awkwardness and the guilt behind. It is as if intersectionality as a term makes it easier to talk about differences. This may serve as a relief to
some feminists, but it also offers most self-identical feminists at least one category that they
feel more comfortable to talk about and identify with. Especially if even more categories are
introduced, where each etc. always opens up a possibility for each individual feminist to
feel both less anxiety and less affect. But in all those cases, it is still a feminism that requires
self-identification and is hence based on foundationalist ontologies.
From this perspective, intersectionality arrived just in time to preserve both a unifying history and a guarantee for a recognizable future (still filled with women of some
kind). In other words, intersectionality could save an otherwise disappearing field of

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gender studies and at the same time, provide the field with a progressive way of doing
feminist analysis. Thus, gender could paradoxically be saved as the most important
category for feminist research, despite or because of listings such as gender, race and
class.11

Conclusions: Intersectionality as a consensus-creating

signifier
Today intersectionality is no longer just a metaphor. It is presented as the feminist theory.
As has been shown here, however, it is a theory that provides us with an ontology of
neither the subject nor power. Intersectionality has foremost become successful precisely
because it does not meet these requirements of a theory and hence everyone feels that
it fits their way of doing research.12 Anyone can recognize themselves in (at least) one
of the categories provided by intersectionality, making it a profoundly self-identical feminism that closes off not only other futures, but also those feminisms that refuse such a
self-identical project. Intersectional feminism, and maybe especially its constructivist
version, we fear, has come to signal a liberal consensus-based project (that ignores capitalism as oppressive structure) in an increasingly neoliberal and conservative European
context. Just as liberalism forecloses tensions and critique by subscribing to values that
are so generalized that no one can be against them (democracy, equality, freedom, human
rights, etc.), all feminists agree with sentences like social positions intersect, categories are intertwined or power relations are complex. In the same way as liberalism
passes itself off as non-political, such sentences seduce the feminist reader into a discourse where opposition is made impossible, a discourse that claims the obvious (everything relates) as belonging to one specific feminist theory, now named intersectionality.
Intersectionality, even though intended as a critical concept and derived from a much
needed feminist intervention, has thus been successful through the lack of ontology, and
this lack has in some cases led to a diminishing of the explicitly structuralist (Marxist)
ontology of black feminist but also a de-legitimization of a poststructuralist (postMarxist) ontology that does not share this dream of a common feminist language. What
we have found within the field of intersectionality, then, is not only a refusal to deal with
and engage in feminist theories, and especially poststructuralist, postcolonial and other
anti-foundationalist ontologies, but a refusal to recognize that these feminisms cannot
and should not be included in the field of intersectionality.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. This introduction follows the canonical narrative of the concept and we wish to re-narrate it
here to point out that the theoretical origin of the concept is not really hidden or hard to see.
2. For a contextualization of the social movements and feminist debates, see for example
Mohanty (2004), especially Chapter 2.

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European Journal of Womens Studies 20(3)

3. This refers to the debate between Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler in which Fraser declared
sexuality to be merely cultural (Butler, 1998; Fraser, 1998). The marginalization of sexuality
as merely cultural is also central to the intersectional approach of de los Reyes and Mulinari
(2005).
4. For an explicit verbalization of intersectionality as mainly about diversity and liberation,
see the special issue of Politics and Gender 3(2) (2007).
5. For some discussions on diverging ontologies, see Bilge (2010) or Walby (2007). They do,
however, fall prey to the same definition of poststructuralism/postmodernism as the aforementioned researchers.
6. Sndergaard, in her introduction of Judith Butlers work in Denmark, explicitly distanced
herself from the psychoanalytical perspective of Butler (Sndergard, 1996). See Edenheim
(2008) for further discussion.
7. See Ahmed (2008) for a critique of New Materialism related to our critique of intersectionality.
8. Even though Lykke makes a comment primarily about a political situation in Denmark, she
makes the link between politics, academia and feminist theory.
9. The introduction of queer perspectives probably played a similar part as a sensed threat to
gender studies; there is, however, not much written on this issue during the period and hence
it would be difficult to compare.
10. Our example is from Sweden, but we are quite convinced that the same anxiety and affect
could be found in many feminist/women studies contexts around the same period.
11. See for example Nina Lykke (2003a, 2003b) who claims that gender should be prioritized in
an intersectional analysis.
12. This is quite widely acknowledged by intersectionality researchers as well, see e.g. Bilge
(2010: 60).

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