Abstract
In Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries, Vivian May argues that despite being critiqued as definitionally unclear and running its course, intersectionality is and will continue to be necessary for social transformation and eradicating injustice. From the book’s onset, May demonstrates how the pervasive use of intersectionality parallels its misuse. Moreover, May illustrates how critics and supporters alike erode intersectionality’s radical vision. One description of this erosion is the unmooring of intersectionality from its deep historical roots in early black women writers in the 1800 and 1900s and contemporary black feminist theory and politics. May also identifies the reduction of intersectionality’s scope to social identities ignoring its equal commitment to praxis and social structural transformation and the gravitational pull of hegemonic single-axis analysis as examples of this erosion. To counter this, the book shores up intersectionality’s multifaceted quality including epistemological practice, ontological project, coalitional political orientation, and resistant imaginary. May concludes with recommendations for two epistemological strategies to more rigorously take up intersectionality: bracketing dominant logics and practicing bias toward intersectionality. Although May’s approach of layering each chapter with extensive references to and quotations from other intersectional writers provided a choral quality to her writing, at times this blurred the lead idea melodies.
For those familiar with intersectionality, the appeal of the book is its careful and thorough examination of intersectionality flattening and co-opting, threatening to extinguish its radical aim of justice. At the same time, the book provides causal or unfamiliar readers of intersectionality texts with a faithful consideration of its multiple facets in an accessible form and progression. The book clearly confirms the shared values and commitments between social work, feminism, and intersectionality, such as seeking social justice and social transformation, and holding onto the individual (social identities/micropolitical) and the environment (structural/macropolitical) approach in theoretical work and praxis. What the book challenges feminists to consider is how we have and may still drift toward a single-axis gender first approach (e.g., research methodologies and analysis), even when identifying our theoretical approach as intersectional. This leads May to ask and answer the question which we are also called to answer: Are all intersectionality applications intersectional?
To strengthen the understanding, critique, and application of intersectionality in social work education, the book offers several chapters particularly fitting for graduate-level courses. In master’s courses focused on theoretical frameworks of understanding oppression and privilege (e.g., I am thinking here of Educational Policies and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) Competency 2: Engage Diversity and Difference in Practice and Competency 3: Advance Human Rights and Social, Economic, and Environmental Justice), the Introduction and Chapter 1 illuminate the fundamentals of intersectionality without the erasure of its’ historically relevant grounding in black feminism and with a firm grasp on its radical commitment to uprooting epistemological and structural systems of oppression. Likewise, Chapter 4 “Intersectionality—Now You See It, Now You Don’t” could be particularly useful in doctoral-level theory and research courses, as May points out the “slippages in intersectionality applications” (p. 141) that occur even as researchers are using it. This dissection of these slippages reveals the various gravitational pulls from hegemonic research methodologies, funders, and journals steeped in single-axis modes of conceptualization and analysis. If used as a textbook, the limited but still distracting repetitious nature of some points may result in students’ frustration and dismissal of the book’s ideas.