ABSTRACT
Job placement services for migrant women in Barcelona highlight intersectional issues for public social policies and the practice of social work. The imperative for intersectional social work practice is to attend ‘to specificity of the experience of difference whilst attending to the indeterminacy of difference’. In the example of the woman living in the intersectionality of disability, mental distress, caring for children and classified as older, a contextual intersectional lens would focus on the contexts that (re)produce the identity categories, for example a capitalist patriarchy. The Black feminist concept of intersectionality and Derrida’s concept of the supplement demonstrate that all experience/phenomenon is constituted of multiple, interdependent contextual meanings. Contextual intersectionality understands that certain differences in particular contexts produce particular relationships of discrimination and subalternisation. Contextual intersectionality questions the effects that emerge from the dynamics of subalternisation.
