Everyday spatialities of intersectional solidarities and activism

As many of the concept’s originators emphasized, intersectionality is rooted in activism, and key intersectional theorists built on their engagement in social movements for inspiration and conceptual development (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013). As an outcome of earlier debates in identity politics, intersectionality theory emerged as both a critique of the essentialist understanding of identity in some forms of identity politics (Grillo 1995; Anthias 2012) and an attempt to shift the focus away from individual identity praxis towards intersecting systems and structures of oppression (Bachetta 2009; Collins & Bilge 2016). Yet intersectional activism in itself is not devoid of contradictions and it is also from the realm of activism and movement organisation that intersectional theory is critically interrogated. Intersectional thinking has opened up the possibility of building solidarity across differences in coalitional platforms (Butler, 2015; Collins & Bilge, 2016). By emphasizing how individuals face an interlocking matrix of oppressions, individuals can be connected along various lines in their struggles against oppression, to combine in a ‘universal rich with particulars’ (Chun, Lipsitz & Shin 2013), as was recently demonstrated by the International Women’s March (Doan 2017; Gökarıksel and Smith 2017; Rose-Redwood and Rose-Redwood 2017).