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introduction
Intersectionality, the notion that subjectivity is constituted by mutually reinforcing vectors of race, gender, class, and sexuality, has emerged as the primary theoretical tool designed to combat feminist hierarchy, hegemony, and exclusivity. Leslie McCall stresses intersectionality's importance, calling it '...the most important theoretical contribution that women's studies, in conjunction with related fields, has made so far' (McCall, 2005: 1771). This 'important theoretical contribution' has become the 'gold standard' multi-disciplinary approach for analysing subjects' experiences of both identity and oppression.
The term intersectionality, coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, underscores the 'multidimensionality' of marginalized subjects' lived experiences (Crenshaw, 1989: 139). Intersectionality emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s from critical race studies, a scholarly movement born in the legal academy committed to problematizing law's purported colour-blindness, neutrality, and objectivity. From its inception, intersectionality has had a long-standing interest in one particular intersection: the intersection of race and gender. To that end, intersectionality rejects the 'single-axis framework' often embraced by both feminist and anti-racist scholars, instead analysing '... the various ways in which race and gender interact to shape the multiple dimensions of Black women's ... experiences' (Crenshaw, 1991: 1244).
Intersectionality serves a few theoretical and political purposes for both feminist and anti-racist scholarship. First, it subverts race/gender binaries in the service of theorizing identity in a more complex fashion. The destabilization of race/gender binaries is particularly important to enable robust analyses of cultural sites (or spectacles) that implicate both race and gender, like the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings,1 the O.J. Simpson trial,2 or the Kobe Bryant rape case.3 Because intersectionality is attuned to subjects who 'exist ... within the overlapping margins of race and gender discourse and in the empty spaces between', it is a tool particularly adept at capturing and theorizing the simultaneity of race and gender as social processes (Crenshaw, 1992: 403).
Second, intersectionality aspires to provide a vocabulary to respond to critiques of identity politics. While liberal critiques of identity politics criticize its failure to transcend difference, Crenshaw argues that the real problem of identity politics is that it elides intra-group difference, a problem that intersectionality purports to solve by exposing differences within the broad categories of 'women' and 'blacks', and serving as a force for '...mediating the...