ABSTRACT

Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries offers a sustained, interdisciplinary exploration of intersectional ideas, histories, and practices that no other text does. Deftly synthesizing much of the existing literatures on intersectionality, one of the most significant theoretical and political precepts of our time, May invites us to confront a disconcerting problem: though intersectionality is widely known, acclaimed, and applied, it is often construed in ways that depoliticize, undercut, or even violate its most basic premises. May cogently demonstrates how intersectionality has been repeatedly resisted, misunderstood, and misapplied: provocatively, she shows the degree to which intersectionality is often undone or undermined by supporters and critics alike. A clarion call to engage intersectionality’s radical ideas, histories, and justice orientations more meaningfully, Pursuing Intersectionality answers the basic questions surrounding intersectionality, attends to its historical roots in Black feminist theory and politics, and offers insights and strategies from across the disciplines for bracketing dominant logics and for orienting toward intersectional dispositions and practices.

chapter |17 pages

Introduction

The Case for Intersectionality and the Question of Intersectionality Backlash

chapter |45 pages

What is Intersectionality?

Matrix Thinking in a Single-Axis World

chapter |35 pages

Intersectionality's Call to Break from Single-Axis Thinking

Still Unheard, Still Unanswered?

chapter |45 pages

Intersectionality—Now You See it, Now You Don't

Slippages in Intersectionality Applications

chapter |40 pages

Being “Biased” toward Intersectionality

A Call for Epistemic Defiance

chapter |27 pages

Fostering an Intersectional Disposition

Strategies for Pursuing and Practicing Intersectionality