ABSTRACT
Intersectionality constitutes a provocative site for examining how ideas are taken up by different sets of social actors, but also how resistant knowledges change as they navigate heterogeneous social contexts. This chapter examines how intersectionality's travels into academia shed light on two different forms of epistemic injustice: the epistemic injustices that intersectional approaches are responding to, diagnosing, and offering critical tools to address and fight, and the epistemic injustices that are committed within the academy against scholar-activists who claim intersectionality. It explores the treatment of social justice within mid-twentieth century Black feminism in social movement. Versions of intersectionality's stock story that discredit identity politics and standpoint epistemology perform epistemological gate keeping that erases and sanitizes the radical potential of a more-unruly intersectionality and installs a more orderly, recognizable, disciplined intersectionality in its place. For many subordinated people, identity politics and the distinctive standpoints on social inequality that it engenders remain important tools of empowerment, especially outside the academy.
