Abstract
Intersectionality has been lauded as a critical contribution to feminist theorizing across disciplines for the past several decades as a framework for understanding the interconnectedness of multiple oppressions and their impacts on women’s lives. In this book, Dill and Zambrana posit that intersectionality constitutes “an innovative and emerging field of study that provides a critical analytic lens to interrogate racial, ethnic, class, ability, age, sexuality, and gender disparities and to contest existing ways of looking at these structures of inequality” (p. vii). The editors have compiled a collection of empirical studies that use paradigms of intersectionality to examine structural inequalities within social institutions, such as welfare and higher education. The essays are written from social science perspectives and draw on multiple methods, including quantitative data analysis, case study, policy review, literature review, and historical analyses.
The first several chapters illustrate the ways in which historical legacies of inequality, socially constructed discourses, and institutional practices reproduce unequal power relationships for African American women in the legal profession through welfare and poverty discourses and for Mexican American women in higher education. The second half of the book focuses on institutional barriers and exclusions in the labor market; women’s employment decision making; disproportionate effects of welfare reform on women of color; impacts of race, class, and gender on school drop-out rates; and barriers to civic and political engagement for people of color. The final two empirical essays explore issues regarding knowledge production and institutional change for scholars of color within the context of higher education.
In her Foreword to the book, Patricia Hill Collins notes that over time, work on intersectionality has often focused on individual identity narratives, which has meant a turn away from structural analyses of inequality and power in the structural reproduction of social problems. In contrast, one of the strengths of the essays in this book is their collective insistence on directing attention to institutional- and organizational-level analyses and inquiry regarding the historical and contemporary processes that maintain social inequities. Given their methodological and topical differences, the essays vary in terms of how they apply an intersectional lens to their work, although all of them focus on race, class, and gender (within the United States) as primary foci of analysis. The chapters most often read like sociological, political science, and educational research. However, those that are focused on employment and welfare policy, reform, and implementation could be particularly useful with a social work audience.
In addition to providing a number of concrete, empirical, and diverse examples of the application of intersectionality theorizing in social science scholarship, one of the greatest strengths of this book is the issues raised in the Foreword, Introduction, and Concluding chapters. These essays provide an important framing to the empirical work and theoretical context in that they synthesize important ideas regarding intersectionality scholarship over time and begin to elucidate and encourage continued expansion of how intersectionality is and can be taken up across various disciplines and epistemological perspectives in the service of social justice.