Thinking through Intersectionality at Work : A Feminist-and-Labour Geographer's Approach

This chapter takes Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando” as its point of departure. Orlando lives through centuries and spaces, from the reign of Elisabeth I to the reign of King Charles II in England, and as the story ends, finds her-himself caught up in the 19th century. As such, Orlando quite aptly illustrates the idea of identities as complex, and as historically variable and spatially contingent. Like with Orlando, workers’ identities are at once particular, complex and fluid. In spite of this, labour is assiduously compartmentalized, differentiated and remunerated along the axes of age, skin-colour, gender, nationality and skills, and workers become associated with (and disassociated from) certain occupations, work-tasks and spaces of work through a series of stereotyping practices. This chapter provides a review of leading feminist and labour geographers’ writings on intersectionality, in order to think through how space and time matter. Furthermore, it discusses the possibility that intersectional analysis is imbued with cartographic reason, and subsequently that it may fall short in portraying the multi-dimensional, evolving Self. Finally, it proposes an understanding of people as both being and becoming, as relational stories-so-far and as progressive biographies in evolving time-space.