Abstract
Intersectionality appears on course syllabi, frames student protests and informs campus diversity goals. But what does it mean and what is its history? Collins and Bilge respond to this question by guiding initiates through intersectionality’s complex conceptual terrain. They engage the tension between critical inquiry (interrogation of formal knowledge in academia) and praxis (interrogation of everyday events) as their central navigational strategy. For less informed readers, this approach connects critical historic events with contemporary uses of intersectionality. For social workers, it echoes a tradition of bridging theory and practice. They are successful in their use of case studies from international social movements, literary events, and academia to illustrate the wide applicability of the concept’s analytic power.
The book includes two discussions that define intersectionality’s conceptual boundaries. First, their careful trace of its history is especially noteworthy. It is anchored in African American women’s 19th-century literary and historical events that far precede its naming in academia. Collins and Bilge note that these events knit the dual goals of praxis and critical inquiry, while laying a foundation for the concept’s evolution. Having provided this rich history, they point to Kimberlè Crenshaw’s 1991 Stanford Law Review article as a moment when the concept was both named and taken up in academic settings. Their subsequent analysis highlights important tensions and opportunities. While they celebrate intersectionality as an analytic scholarship lens and guide to academic diversity efforts, they question how higher education’s organizational and methodological priorities truncate the critical force of the concept. This challenge can also be applied to social work practice. Social workers are tasked with embracing the mission of institutions we join (e.g., schools, hospitals) while maintaining a larger commitment to the social work profession. Integrating an intersectional lens into one’s work within institutions could have the unintentional effect of watering down its social justice intentions.
Second, they address the tendency to collapse intersectionality into another way of talking about identity. Rather than see the two as synonymous, this discussion advises readers to consider how an intersectional analysis of structures and systems influences identity. Both this clarification and historical analysis suggest that we ought to have parameters around uses of the term. While it is important to maintain its ability to operate widely as an analytic tool and mobilizing concept, it is equally important that it maintains conceptual rigor that reflects its history. This ethical challenge is a political project in and of itself.
Collins and Bilge suggestion of core intersectionality concepts may be a place to begin this important dialogue. Namely, they identify social inequality, power, relationality, social context, and complexity as concepts that should frame intersectional analysis. These categories function as initial criteria providing a place for thoughtful critique. Social work practitioners and scholars are in a position to contribute to this dialogue, given the field’s focus on intervention and everyday experience. We can ask, do these criteria apply in real life, and, if not, how do we modify them?
Throughout the book, Collins and Bilge reference historical events and social theory that may be unfamiliar to social workers and social work students. Far from being a deficit, this potential disjuncture points to the need for social work curriculum’s inclusion of content necessary for understanding contemporary social arrangements.
Collins and Bilge provide a brief discussion of intersectionality’s influence on research methodology, focusing on the potential for participatory action research. However, they do not dive deeply into the arguments occurring between conceptual and empirical intersectional scholars. This is the book’s biggest weakness. However, their argument throughout the book—that intersectionality is both thought and action—offers some guidance to these contentions. They suggest that rather than question the appropriate methodological place for intersectionality, we might consider how the concept influences the questions we ask and the voices we invite into our scholarship. Intersectionality is an accessible introduction to a concept pervasive across political projects, academia, and social movements. Affilia readers will benefit from this road map through its elaborate topography.