Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons

ISBN-13: 9780803285552 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 300 str.

Anna Carastathis

Opis

Intersectionality intervenes in the field of intersectionality studies: the integrative examination of the effects of racial, gendered, and class power on people's lives. While -intersectionality- circulates as a buzzword, Anna Carastathis joins other critical voices to urge a more careful reading. Challenging the narratives of arrival that surround it, Carastathis argues that intersectionality is a horizon, illuminating ways of thinking that have yet to be realized; consequently, calls to -go beyond- intersectionality are premature. A provisional interpretation of intersectionality can disorient habits of essentialism, categorial purity, and prototypicality and overcome dynamics of segregation and subordination in political movements.


Through a close reading of critical race theorist Kimberle Williams Crenshaw's germinal texts, published more than twenty-five years ago, Carastathis urges analytic clarity, contextual rigor, and a politicized, historicized understanding of this widely traveling concept. Intersectionality's roots in social justice movements and critical intellectual projects--specifically Black feminism--must be retraced and synthesized with a decolonial analysis so its radical potential to actualize coalitions can be enacted.