Intersectionality and feminist politics

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