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Intersectionality and Feminist Politics
Yuval-Davis, Nira
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Yuval-Davis, N. (2006). Intersectionality and Feminist Politics. European Journal of Women's Studies, 13(3), 193-209.
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Intersectionality and
Feminist Politics
Nira Yuval-Davis
UNIVERSITY OF EAST LONDON
ABSTRACT This article explores various analytical issues involved in conceptual-
izing the interrelationships of gender, class, race and ethnicity and other social
divisions. It compares the debate on these issues that took place in Britain in the
1980s and around the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism. It examines
issues such as the relative helpfulness of additive or mutually constitutive models
of intersectional social divisions; the different analytical levels at which social
divisions need to be studied, their ontological base and their relations to each
other. The final section of the article attempts critically to assess a specific inter-
sectional methodological approach for engaging in aid and human rights work in
the South.
KEY WORDS identity politics ◆ intersectionality ◆ social divisions ◆ social
positionings
In the introduction to her book Ain’t I a Woman, bell hooks (1981) poured
scorn on the then common analogue many feminists used between the
situation of women and the situation of Blacks. ‘This implies’, she argued,
‘that all women are White and all Blacks are men.’ That was one of the
starting points of an analytical and political move by Black and other
feminists and social scientists to deconstruct the categories of both
‘women’ and ‘Blacks’ and to develop an analysis of the intersectionality of
various social divisions, most often – but not exclusively – focusing on
gender, race and class (for a more detailed history see, for example, Brah
and Phoenix, 2004).
The term ‘intersectionality’ itself was introduced by Kimberlé
Crenshaw (1989), when she discussed issues of black women’s employ-
ment in the US. She was eventually invited to introduce the notion of
intersectionality before a special session on the subject in Geneva during
the preparatory session to the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR)
in September 2001 in Durban, South Africa. In her introduction to the
session of the Non Governmental Organizations’ (NGO) Forum in the
European Journal of Women’s Studies Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), 1350-5068 Vol. 13(3): 193–209;
http://ejw.sagepub.com DOI: 10.1177/1350506806065752
WCAR in which the issue was discussed, Radhika Coomaraswamy, the
special rapporteur of the UN Secretariat on violence against women,
stated that the term ‘intersectionality’ had become tremendously popular
and was used in various UN and NGO forums. Indeed, on 23 April 2002,
at the 58th session of the UN Commission on Human Rights, the resolu-
tion on the human rights of women stated in its first paragraph that it:
. . . recognized the importance of examining the intersection of multiple
forms of discrimination, including their root causes from a gender perspec-
tive. (Resolution E/CN.4/2002/L.59)
In this article, I examine some of the analytical issues involved in the
interrelationships of gender, class, race and ethnicity and other social
divisions. The main body of the article examines some 1980s (particularly
British) debates and considers how these issues have been represented in
ideas about intersecting social divisions used for political, legal and policy
purposes, especially in forums discussing UN human rights’ discourse.
Towards the end of the article, I assess the attempt to develop a specific
intersectional methodological approach for engaging in aid and human
rights work in the South.
CONTEXTUALIZING FEMINISM: GENDER, ETHNIC AND
CLASS DIVISIONS
In a recent paper, Alison Woodward (2005) argues that discussions on
issues of diversity and intersectionality have ‘arrived’ in European
equality policies as a result of the influence of consultants and thinkers
from the US. This is significant since these issues have been debated by
European (especially – but not only – British) feminist scholars since the
end of the 1970s but, apparently, without noticeable effect on policy-
makers.
In 1983, Floya Anthias and I published an article in Feminist Review
1
arguing against the notion of ‘triple oppression’ then prevalent among
British Black Feminists (in organizations such as the Organization of
Women of African and Asian Descent [OWAAD]; see Bryan et al., 1985).
That article also laid the foundations of the analytical framework that we
further developed in our book Racialized Boundaries (Anthias and Yuval-
Davis, 1992) and in our separate work since (e.g. Anthias, 1998, 2001, 2002;
Yuval-Davis, 1994, 1997, 2005, 2006).
As is shown later in this article, the issues raised by the 1983 paper are
no longer limited to the preoccupations of Black and other ethnic minority
feminists but continue, in some ways, to be at the heart of feminist
theory and practice. To the extent that the debate has not been lost in
European Journal of Women’s Studies 13(3)194
postmodernist discussions of ‘difference’ and has retained its original
political importance, the question of whether to interpret the intersection-
ality of social divisions as an additive or as a constitutive process is still
central. This debate can also be constructed as a debate between identity
politics and transversal politics
2
(Cockburn and Hunter, 1999; Yuval-
Davis, 1994, 1997) or between the recognition and recognition/distri-
bution models of the politics of difference (Benhabib, 2002; Fraser, 1997).
However, as demonstrated throughout the article, what is at the heart of
the debate is conflation or separation of the different analytic levels in
which intersectionality is located, rather than just a debate on the relation-
ship of the divisions themselves.
Before turning to more recent developments, it is useful to sum up the
original debate. When it was first presented, the ‘triple oppression’ notion
was basically a claim that Black women suffer from three different
oppressions/disadvantages/discriminations/exploitations (the analyti-
cal difference between these terms is not clear in the original OWAAD
formulations). They suffer oppression as: Blacks, women and members of
the working class.
Our argument against the ‘triple oppression’ approach was that there is
no such thing as suffering from oppression ‘as Black’, ‘as a woman’, ‘as a
working-class person’. We argued that each social division has a different
ontological basis, which is irreducible to other social divisions (as is
elaborated later in the article). However, this does not make it less import-
ant to acknowledge that, in concrete experiences of oppression, being
oppressed, for example, as ‘a Black person’ is always constructed and
intermeshed in other social divisions (for example, gender, social class,
disability status, sexuality, age, nationality, immigration status, geogra-
phy, etc.). Any attempt to essentialize ‘Blackness’ or ‘womanhood’ or
‘working classness’ as specific forms of concrete oppression in additive
ways inevitably conflates narratives of identity politics with descriptions
of positionality as well as constructing identities within the terms of
specific political projects. Such narratives often reflect hegemonic
discourses of identity politics that render invisible experiences of the more
marginal members of that specific social category and construct an
homogenized ‘right way’ to be its member. Ironically, this was exactly the
reason black women and members of other marginalized groupings felt
the need for what is known today as an intersectional analysis, except that
in such identity politics constructions what takes place is actually frag-
mentation and multiplication of the wider categorical identities rather
than more dynamic, shifting and multiplex constructions of intersection-
ality. Sandra Harding (1991) recognized this. Following the critique by
Baca Zinn and Stanley (1986) of the ways in which White feminists dealt
with issues of race and ethnicity, she claimed:
Yuval-Davis: Intersectionality and Feminist Politics 195
. . . the additive approaches to race issues could no more be contained
within the terrains one might have envisioned for them at the start than
could the ‘add women and stir’ approaches to gender issues. (Harding,
1991: 212)
However, 20 years later, while the picture is somewhat different, there
is still great confusion about these issues.
INTERSECTIONALITY IN CONTEMPORARY PUBLIC
INTERNATIONAL DISCOURSE
Although the use of the term intersectionality did not appear until later,
several discussion documents on intersectionality (such as that of the
Working Group on Women and Human Rights at the Center for Women’s
Global Leadership in Rutgers University and of the Women’s Inter-
national League for Peace and Freedom UK Section [www.wilpf.org] in
2001) point to the UN Beijing Platform for Action (1995) as including the
core elements of an intersectional approach. They call for governments:
. . . to intensify efforts to ensure equal enjoyment of all human rights and
fundamental freedoms for all women and girls who face multiple barriers to
their empowerment and advancement because of such factors as their race,
age, language, ethnicity, culture, religion or disability or because they are
indigenous people. (Center for Women’s Global Leadership, 2001)
The UN CERD Committee (2000) adopted General Recommendation 25
on the gender-related dimensions of racial discrimination, which recog-
nizes the need for sessional working methods to analyse the relationship
between gender and racial discrimination.
However, it was in the Expert Meeting on Gender and Racial Discrimi-
nation that took place in Zagreb in November 2000 as part of the prepara-
tory process to the UN WCAR conference that a more specific analysis
and a proposal for a specific methodology for intersectionality were
attempted.
The discussion on the methodological approach attempted in that
forum is presented later. However, the analytic attempts to explain inter-
sectionality in the reports that came out of this meeting are confusing. The
imagery of crossroads and traffic as developed by Crenshaw (2001)
occupies a central space:
Intersectionality is what occurs when a woman from a minority group . . .
tries to navigate the main crossing in the city. . . . The main highway is
‘racism road’. One cross street can be Colonialism, then Patriarchy Street. . . .
She has to deal not only with one form of oppression but with all forms,
those named as road signs, which link together to make a double, a triple,
multiple, a many layered blanket of oppression.
3
European Journal of Women’s Studies 13(3)196