The Complexity of Intersectionality

Key takeaways

content: "@mccallComplexityIntersectionality2005" -file:@mccallComplexityIntersectionality2005

Reading notes

Imported on 2025-04-27 17:42

⭐ Important

• & The three approaches, in brief, are defined principally in terms of their stance toward categories, that is, how they understand and use analytical categories to explore the complexity of intersectionality in social life. (p. 1773)
• & The first approach is called anticategorical complexity because it is based on a methodology that deconstructs analytical categories. Social life is considered too irreducibly complex—overflowing with multiple and fluid determinations of both subjects and structures—to make fixed categories anything but simplifying social fictions that produce inequalities in the process of producing differences. (p. 1773)
• & Jumping to the other end of the continuum next, the third approach is neither widely known nor widely used, making its introduction a key purpose of this article. This approach, intercategorical complexity, requires that scholars provisionally adopt existing analytical categories to document relationships of inequality among social groups and changing configurations of inequality along multiple and conflicting dimensions. (p. 1773)
• & Finally, although the approach I call intracategorical complexity inaugurated the study of intersectionality, I discuss it as the second approach because it falls conceptually in the middle of the continuum between the first approach, which rejects categories, and the third approach, which uses them strategically. Like the first approach, it interrogates the boundary-making and boundary-defining process itself, though that is not its (p. 1773)
• & raison d’eˆtre. Like the third approach, it acknowledges the stable and even durable relationships that social categories represent at any given point in time, though it also maintains a critical stance toward categories. This approach is called intracategorical complexity because authors working in this vein tend to focus on particular social groups at neglected points of intersection—“people whose identity crosses the boundaries of traditionally constructed groups” (Dill 2002, 5)—in order to reveal the complexity of lived experience within such groups. (p. 1774)
• & a theoretical perspective, and male dominance as a major social institution all became necessary to counter the tendency toward neglecting and misrepresenting women’s experiences (Scott 1986). (p. 1776)
• & second, critiques by feminists of color of white feminists’ use of women and gender as unitary and homogeneous categories reflecting the common essence of all women.6 (p. 1776)
• & At least initially, the emphasis for both groups was on the socially constructed nature of gender and other categories and the fact that a wide range of different experiences, identities, and social locations fail to fit neatly into any single “master” category. (p. 1777)
• & Moreover, the deconstruction of master categories is understood as part and parcel of the deconstruction of inequality itself. (p. 1777)
• & The primary philosophical consequence of this approach has been to render the use of categories suspect because they have no foundation in reality: (p. 1777)
• & In psychoanalytic versions of the anticategorical approach, complexity is contained within the subject and therefore the very notion of identity on which categories are based is fully rejected: (p. 1778)
• & “Locating difference outside identity, in the spaces between identities, [ignores] the radicality of the poststructualist view which locates differences within identity. In the end, I would argue, theories of ‘multiple identities’ fail to challenge effectively the traditional metaphysical understanding of identity as unity” (Fuss 1989, 103). (p. 1778)

⛔ Weaknesses and caveats

• ! s stated in the anticategorical approach above, these vexing questions about how to constitute the social groups of a given social category, which have often arisen in the context of empirical research, have inevitably resulted in questions about whether to categorize and separate at all. (p. 1778)

❔ Questions

• @ Many feminists who are trained in social science methods and who are interested in intersectionality use the case study method to identify a new or invisible group—at the intersection of multiple categories—and proceed to uncover the differences and complexities of experience embodied in that location. Traditional categories are used initially to name previously unstudied groups at various points of intersection, but the researcher is equally interested in revealing—and indeed cannot avoid—the range of diversity and difference within the group. (p. 1782)