ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the transformational potential of intersectionality. It begins by showing how certain analytical tools central to political science are incompatible with intersectional analyses and identifies the alternative analytics that can overcome these limitations. As a process-centered approach, intersectionality analyzes the mutual constitution of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality as these are transformed over time within specific social and political contexts. As an analytic technique, intersectionality explores 'dynamic processes: racialization rather than races, economic exploitation rather than classes, gendering and gender performance rather than genders'. Social science discourse on ethnicity provides a frame, which analyzes the white constructions of urban riots as an 'excuse to loot'. Ethnicity established a commonsense causal framework in which it became possible to discuss 'dysfunctional cultures' whose members suffer through their own refusal to improve their condition. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion of intersectionality's capacity to expand the parameters of politics and deepens contemporary understandings of embodied power.
