Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons (Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality)

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 Kimberl 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.