ABSTRACT

Studies on intersectionality have proliferated in recent years. For some, this development, which began in the late 1980s, can be understood as one effect of the ‘postmodern turn’ in the academy: an attempt to trace and account for a supposed fragmentation of identities within political movements of the late twentieth century. For others, the focus on intersectionality provides tools for complicating our understanding of the systems and processes that define the social: intersectionality is thus a method for interrogating the institutional reproduction of inequality, whether at the level of the state, the family, or of legal structures more generally. With some of its earliest applications in critical race studies, specifically critical race approaches in sociology (Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1983) and law (see Crenshaw, 1989; Duclos, 1993), research engaging intersectionality can now be found in a wide range of contexts. A survey of recent journal articles indicates the currency of intersectionality in political geography (Valentine, 2007), political science (Hawkesworth, 2003), feminist approaches to economics (Brewer et al., 2002), critical psychotherapy (Burman, 2004; Fernandes, 2004), sociology (Yuval-Davis, 2006), postcolonial studies (Arondeker, 2005), and socio-legal studies (Vakulenko, 2007; Deckha, 2004; Conaghan, 2007; Hannett, 2003; Grabham, 2006), to name only a few. This raises the question of why the concept of intersectionality, specifically, is being used, in such a ubiquitous way, to investigate social, political, and economic life. Certainly, the metaphor of the intersection appears to move beyond more static conceptions of inequality that focus on ‘multiple’ or ‘compound’ disadvantage. Apparently more fluid and responsive, intersectional approaches look to forms of inequality that are routed through one another, and which cannot be untangled to reveal a single cause. In this sense, intersectionality describes very well the coming together of forms of inequality through institutional and representational dynamics. It puts complexity centre-stage, and many scholars appear to find this approach refreshing and productive. At the same time, however, imagining social life through intersections inevitably directs the gaze away from the co-constitution of identities and inequalities to what, apparently, is not already intersected (Cooper, 2004: 48). Intersectionality requires

vectors and identities that exist apart from each other. Acting like a fastener, or zip, intersectionality presumes the gaps that it attempts to close. This raises the question of whether there are, in fact, any areas of the social that exist apart from the meeting point, or overlap, that intersectionality describes. Nevertheless, in drawing critical attention away from static conceptions of social life and experience, intersectionality continues to perform important conceptual work, and this work takes place on a number of registers. Intersectionality can be used to analyse law, in particular anti-discrimination law, to unpack the material and discursive effects of legal identity categories on socially constituted subjects. A cluster of arguments emerges here around the inadequate recognition of the complexly situated subject by various lawmaking or law-enforcing bodies or policy initiatives. The type of analysis then takes the following form: a subject might encounter the law, or the state, only to find that her experiences of inequality do not fit the dominant model. These analyses not only point to the repressive or coercive functions of top-down power, they also signal the exacerbation of hierarchical power relations through law’s failure to recognise the subject’s full identity, position, or the complexity or messiness of her experiences. From a liberal perspective, the law, or the state, therefore fails, and intersectionality can be presented as a way of showing this failure and asking for a better job to be done. From a radical perspective, the state has been successful in achieving its goals. As Joanne Conaghan points out in her contribution to this collection, (liberal) socio-legal narratives display a certain degree of confidence in legal or state apparatuses: the work of intersectionality is the work of improvement; it is optimistic about reform and representation. But they also take seriously concepts of state and nation as reified ‘things’: coherent, autonomous actors with institutional memory and the capacity for future planning. Explaining to the law its mistaken assumptions will lead the law/state to a consciousness of its omissions and to rational change. At the same time, intersectionality has been deployed to indicate the inherent limits of law. Within these narratives, legal and policy interventions to tackle inequality are inevitably flawed. By their very nature, they can only ever work through fetishising categorical constructions of identity and experience that never respond to the material circumstances of subjects’ lives. True subjectivity and experience are located ‘outside’ law and government: they will never be containable. Far from being a way of improving the functioning of legal or state apparatuses, intersectionality offers another argument against law reform. Intersectionality reveals how experience is incommensurable with the categorised representations of identity mobilised in human rights law and discourse, anti-discrimination law, and in government equality initiatives.On another register, intersectionality can be used to investigate how inequalities are produced on the institutional scale, through structures,

processes and techniques of governance. Within these frames, inequality is imagined at the level of the home, the workplace, the state, or the international ‘community’: complex inequalities are constituted through the operation of global capital, through international relations, monetary policies, domestic social policies, the employment relationship or the family. Deployments of intersectionality help to trace the complex material effects of these processes, and, in some respects, parallel earlier models such as dual systems theory, which focused on the relationship between patriarchy and class oppression. Intersectional approaches can also assist in investigating how social identities are formed as the congealed effects of power’s workings rather than autonomous groups or identities (Cooper, 2004; Brown, 1995). Here, the analysis becomes less a question of finding the points at which inequalities meet and instead involves tracing the allocation and deployment of power in the organisation of social life.With these perspectives in mind, our aim in this collection has been to take stock of intersectionality’s significance after almost twenty years of discussion and analysis. Taken as a whole, the collection offers a critical picture of intersectionality’s relevance within a range of disciplines – socio-legal studies, political and social theory, and history. We present situated work from a range of contexts, tracing productive tensions and resonances in the way that different scholars conceive intersectional analysis. Aiming for a cross-national debate, we have included papers that consider developments in Canada, Rwanda, the United States, India, the United Kingdom, Korea, Ireland and Australia. With some pieces drawn directly from empirical or other grounded research (including experiences of activism), the collection contains a range of analytical perspectives (postcolonial, feminist, critical race, disability studies) and troubles contemporary narratives and institutional dynamics ranging from international law constructions of wartime rape to community relations rhetoric in the ‘transitional’ setting of Northern Ireland. Many contributions engage gender and sexuality as organising principles of social life, but contributors also interrogate racialising and abilist dynamics, as well as the effects of class and colonialism. We outline themes and disjunctures in more detail below, but if there is one theme to be found across this intentionally diverse collection, it is an endeavour to forge critical approaches to intersectionality that disembed or reframe received ways of thinking about complex inequalities. Our aim is to explore, and reflect critically on, how the concept of intersectionality has been used, and to address intersectionality’s future. The book thus includes contributions from scholars who are committed to working with intersectionality as a concept, as well as others who suggest that alternative frameworks are better able to elucidate the relationship between different forms of inequality and identification. Intersectionality and Beyond addresses four key questions:

What are the implications of intersectionality analysis for how we 1 understand relations of inequality, such as gender, race and sexuality? How do state agencies, including the courts, constitute, understand 2 and deploy the intersecting character of relations of inequality?Can intersectional analysis illuminate the gendered, racialised and 3 sexualised character of social structures? How useful is intersectionality analysis for understanding the capacity 4 of relations of inequality or difference to evolve and change? Do other frameworks offer better guides for understanding this? The first part of the collection, Mapping Intersectionalities, provides an entry into these questions with two examples of how concepts of the social have been complicated by intersectional approaches. The consideration, or re-consideration, of intersectionality that Joanne Conaghan and Leslie McCall undertake is shaped by almost two decades of feminist work in the academy on intersectionality, and a much longer engagement with anti-essentialism more broadly. Conaghan and McCall both reject approaches to inequality based on identity politics and liberal conceptions of the individual, focusing instead on material structures and processes. Yet they differ in their assessment of intersectionality’s continued use as a feminist tool of analysis. Conaghan argues that whilst intersectionality has been vitally important to feminist theory over the past twenty years, there is little more that it can now contribute. There are, as she argues, many reasons for this: intersectionality’s roots in law; its ‘mapping’ function; the tendency to frame intersectionality as a problem of representation; its focus on the individual and identity. Conaghan recalls socialist and materialist feminist work which, embedded in historical analysis of social and political life, theorised the connections between sex and class based oppression and produced ‘dual systems’ theory. She traces significant critiques of this work by black feminist theorists, who pointed out the importance of bringing an account of race to an approach that was intended to provide a ‘complete’ picture of social relations. Comparing more recent work on intersectionality with earlier accounts of complex inequalities rooted in historical materialism, Conaghan highlights intersectionality’s limits and the need for an analysis that connects experiences of inequality with structures, institutions and processes.McCall is more positive about intersectionality’s continued usefulness. This may be because she identifies different forms of intersectional research (anticategorical, intercategorical, and intracategorical analysis), thereby contributing a variegated picture of how the concept has been taken up. But it may also be because her account of intersectionality is deeply embedded in an understanding of social relations; that is to say, her working model of intersectionality already approximates Conaghan’s ‘social processes’ model and she therefore may feel less restricted by intersectionality’s legal roots. McCall’s main concern is the methodology of intersectionality and the

dearth of work on how to carry out intersectional enquiry. Her contribution, reprinted from Signs, is an attempt to pose methodology as a question in this area. What is impeding feminist research on intersectionality is not the ‘narrowly disciplinary’ subject matter under consideration in any particular instance but a reluctance to use a varied range of methodologies in response to substantive questions. Her own work on wage inequality in different regions of the US provides an example of an interdisciplinary methodological approach to intersectionality and the context-specific responses to inequality such enquiry suggests. The need for diverse methodologies is reflected in the contributions throughout this collection, many of which draw on interdisciplinary socio-legal analysis as a starting point and explore further methodologies in line with the demands of the subject matter. Having set out some core questions around intersectionality in Part I, we explore in Part II – Confronting law – the ways in which law, and legal institutions, have engaged with intersectionality’s challenge to essentialised concepts of identity and disadvantage. Legal practice may not always be best interrogated through the lens of intersectionality (Hunter and de Simone), and legal decision makers may ignore intersectionality in some circumstances (Buss) or implement intersectional perspectives with negative consequences for women in others (Williams). By criminalising Canadian Aboriginal women through ‘risk’ (Williams), or narrowly defining wartime rape in international law (Buss), law’s appropriation of intersectionality frustrates its radical potential, whilst operationalising anti-essentialism may run into practical difficulties at the level of activism (Goldberg) or may require a focus on structural dynamics instead of apparently intersectional identity markers (Hunter and de Simone). Toni Williams investigates how decision-makers receive feminist knowl-edges, including intersectionality. She focuses on a seemingly progressive legal provision: section 718.2(e) of the Canadian Criminal Code, which in-structs criminal courts to take into account the specific circumstances of Ab-original offenders, and she attempts to work out why, despite this provision, there has been an increase in the incarceration of Aboriginal women in Can-ada. Far from considering the impact of colonialism on Aboriginal peoples since European contact, decision-makers have assessed Aboriginal women as being at higher risk of re-offending due to their experiences of racialisation, community ‘dysfunction’, and economic vulnerability. In this way, as a form of feminist ‘knowledge’, the contextual assessment of Aboriginal women’s ‘intersectional’ circumstances works in favour of their over-incarceration. Doris Buss is similarly concerned with how intersectionality is constructed within legal decision-making regimes. Buss focuses on the prosecution of mass wartime rape as crimes against humanity by the Rwanda and Yugoslav Tribunals. She is particularly interested in how the Tribunals interpret large-scale gender-based violence and its role in the construction of ethnic identities. She analyses one decision of the Rwanda Tribunal in depth: the prosecution

of Sylvestre Gacumbitsi for the rape and murder of Tutsi women in Rusumo, Eastern Rwanda in 1994. In this judgment, the Tribunal held that the rape of a Hutu woman married to a Tutsi man was an attack on the Tutsi community and therefore a crime against humanity, and in doing so it concluded that the rape targeted not her, but her husband. This decision, as Buss points out, depicted rape in a superficial manner, failing to address intersections of gender and ethnicity that enabled rape to take place, and disconnected it from everyday violence against women. Buss advocates instead an interpretation that acknowledges the structural basis of sexual violence within societies and the intersectional dynamics of oppression affecting racialised women in conflict situations. In turn, her contribution provides a nuanced route into the formations of ethnicity that are produced through state and institutional practices, specifically in relation to women and women’s bodies.The picture of intersectionality that emerges so far is of a method of analysis with radical roots, but which can be mobilised within legal structures either in inadequate ways, or in ways that undermine its foundational critical impulse. This is not to say that pursuing intersectional scholarship is destined to failure. Instead, what McCall shows is that, as an analytical framework, intersectionality has many different methodological routes and a number of potential outcomes. Heeding Conaghan’s arguments, these routes should not overwhelmingly focus on subjective experiences and questions of identity but should instead account for material conditions and social practice. In juxtaposition with Williams’s chapter, for example, Buss’s suggested response to international law on mass rape arguably requires taking account of complex experiences and processes of inequality without further objectifying women in the legal process or classifying them through discourses of victimhood.The next contribution, by Suzanne Goldberg, shifts the debate to the sphere of legal activism, and to the question of how intersectionality functions in not-for-profit organising. Goldberg focuses on identity based law reform organisations in the United States and their practices around intersectionality and other dimensions of inequality. She analyses two features in particular: the tendency for organisations to put themselves forward as advocating on behalf of a single identity or inequality, and their practice of filing amicus curiae briefs to support the legal struggles of other groups. With regard to the former, Goldberg’s question is why, when the insights of intersectionality have been important to activists for so long, the not-for-profit field in the United States remains stratified by single identity groups. Using the mission statements of these groups as a starting point, she then considers a number of pragmatic reasons: infrastructural set ups that make it easier to incorporate intersectional practice into existing institutional arrangements rather than coming up with new structures; the necessity of defining the organisation’s target group clearly in order to access funding; and the single-identity structure of antidiscrimination law. But if organisations are single-dimensional, why

do they support other identity organisations? When filing an amicus curiae brief in favour of another organisation, a group may take into consideration their interdependence with the legal struggles of other groups; their wish to create an environment ‘friendly’ to civil rights claims; or their wish to contribute their authority to the struggle of a more marginalized group. In Goldberg’s opinion, the filing of supportive amicus curiae briefs indicates that intersectional approaches exist within the US legal activist field, but that they do not primarily take an organised form. What Goldberg’s contribution adds to the analysis so far is an appreciation of the subtle and contingent techniques through which alliances are formed within activism, leading to practices of intersectionality that undermine the apparently stratified and single identity structure of many large not-for-profit organisations.Accessing the law, this time in the context of legal aid decisions, is also the concern of Rosemary Hunter and Tracey de Simone. Hunter and de Simone discuss findings from a recent research project that aimed to identify barriers to women being granted legal aid in Queensland, Australia. Hunter and de Simone’s project took as its basis an environment of financial cut backs: it focused on scarce distribution of legal aid to women, and, heeding the intersectionality literature, they were interested in the potentially greater impact of this enforced scarcity on marginalised women in particular. What they found, however, was that despite some differences in women’s experiences by target group (Indigenous women, for example, had more trouble finding funds to pay for legal advice after being refused legal aid; older women were more likely to be refused legal aid due to the means test), there was a more significant association between refusals of legal aid, the matter that formed the basis for the application (for example, residence applications or anti-discrimination claims), and the conditions facing individual offices at particular moments. They conclude that disadvantage in applying for legal aid was shaped by the institutional context of the Queensland legal aid system and did not significantly correlate with pre-existing identity markers. In their view, analysing inequalities through identity categories is, in this context therefore, less productive than concentrating on context and structural dynamics such as institutional practices, access to adequate legal representation, and geographical location, for example.Hunter and De Simone’s conclusion echoes Conaghan’s argument that focusing on identity and experience should be balanced with an analysis of systems and processes of inequality, and it resonates with the careful approach to intersectionality evidenced in all of the contributions in this collection. It also raises the additional question of how to account for materially significant differences of circumstance beyond the usual ways that the social has been imagined. This question takes a different trajectory to questions around ‘doing’ intersectionality or intersectional scholarship. It challenges intersectionality’s relevance to socio-legal analysis (as opposed

to its effectiveness or how it is interpreted in law), especially where intersectionality is defined as the study of complex identities. A further critical angle on intersectionality, although from a different perspective, can be found in Emily Grabham’s contribution. Grabham draws on her experience of working as a discrimination lawyer to investigate problems with mobilising intersectional equality claims through employment tribunal claims in the UK. Engaging Wendy Brown’s analysis of rights claims in States of Injury, Grabham argues that intersectional approaches to rights claims cannot challenge law’s disciplinary constructions of identity and that they in fact function as ‘anatomies of detail’ which support law’s propensity to classify. Moving away from the regulatory effects of intersectionality within law, Grabham aims to reframe her understanding of the liberal subject’s experience of inequalities. She connects questions of justice with emotional and physical encounters through the cultural functions of trauma and the role of impressions (drawing on the work of Ann Cvetkovich and Sara Ahmed). Viewing discrimination claims as expressions/impressions of trauma, she argues, may yield new ways of viewing complex inequalities, shifting the focus of intersectionality away from disciplinary identity categories and towards the cultural circulation of emotions. In reframing the cultural significance of experiences beyond the individual, this approach arguably responds to Conaghan’s suggestion that we move beyond the identity model of intersectionality. What remains here is a question about what to do with the law. Like many of the contributions in this collection, Grabham is sceptical about how to envisage an effective, anti-essentialist encounter with law as an institution, and her focus on intersectionality’s potential for cooption resonates with Williams’s critique of technologies of risk-management in Canadian criminal law. Part III shifts the analysis to the level of the state. The contributions in this section – Power relations and the state – address critically how law and the state imagine and deploy single and multi-dimensional understandings of inequality. They highlight how not only gendered but racialised and other processes are at work in the constitution and reproduction of state power (Mullally). They explore from an intersectional and post-intersectional perspective the state’s deployment of one-dimensional figures: the trope for instance of woman is seemingly uncontaminated, yet inevitably saturated by other relations of power (Rooney). And they critically rebut any claim that relations of inequality work together neatly and symmetrically, to investigate how particular inequalities can be rendered invisible, overwhelmed or deployed instrumentally and culturally in the service of each other (Kim). Eilish Rooney’s focus is the policy discourse, and considerable academic literature, that has arisen in relation to Northern Ireland. Policy narratives spotlight the concept of ‘sectarian’ opposition between Catholic and Protestant men, leading to a ‘community relations’ rhetoric that leaves women’s experiences out of the picture. Likewise, the thriving field of

academic work around the conflict leaves women, particularly working-class women, invisible, thereby erasing important dynamics of gender and class in the construction of the Northern Irish political scene, both during and post conflict. The impetus for Rooney’s analysis is a recognition of how state discourses impact on low-income women in Northern Ireland through government social policy initiatives, research, and legislation. For her, intersectionality has a great deal of promise as a tool that enables scholars to focus on the material contours of women’s lives and on the intersections of gender, class and sect that generate poverty over time. Rooney’s work thus taps into an important theme in the intersectionality literature: that of highlighting erasures in dominant discourses and bringing into view what would otherwise be obscured. The role of intersectionality analysis in revealing the partiality of legal frameworks and government rhetoric is a vitally important one which, for all of intersectionality’s potential pitfalls, should not be discarded without careful thought. Eunjung Kim also addresses state policy initiatives in her chapter Minority politics in Korea: disability, interraciality, and gender. She investigates the recently created Republic of Korea National Action Plan for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, which sets out eleven categories of vulnerable social groups. Kim’s analysis specifically points to the importance of maintaining a critical attitude to the type of intersectionality that is imagined in anti-essentialist scholarship. She focuses on the paradoxes raised by two clusters of intersections in Korean law: disabled women or female disabled persons, and interracial bodies, disability and nationality. Despite the rise of disabled women’s activism in Korea, a 1994 provision that imposes harsher sentences for those raping disabled women has led to Korean law constructing disabled women as unable to consent to sexual intercourse, and to a definition of rape as requiring the use of force. Furthermore, the historic construction of bi-ethnic children of Korean mothers and US fathers (from the military occupation) as disabled has lent the concept of disability a great degree of flexibility in Korean society but has failed adequately to connect this construction with other social categories such as disabled people and mothers engaged in sex work. Kim concludes that the most useful model of intersectionality to apply in this context is one based on the interdependent construction of categories. Theorising intersectionality through separate axes, she contends, leaves essentialism intact. Kim’s grounded analysis poses a challenge to forms of anti-essentialist thinking that, as we have seen, require categories to be intact before imagining how they merge.Siobhán Mullally’s focus is the treatment of migrant women in Ireland. Mullally traces in particular the many ways in which the Irish state has recently deployed the intersectional figure of the (fertile) asylum-seeking woman to shore up the boundaries of the nation state. Non-Irish women claiming rights to family life under the European Convention on Human Rights in order to stay with children born in Ireland have provided a pretext for the Irish

government’s renewed focus on women’s bodies and sexual roles, linking racialised notions of citizenship and belonging to gender and reproduction. Citizenship for the children of migrant parents, having been based on geographical location (being born within the boundaries of Ireland, or, more emotively ‘on Irish soil’), shifted in 2004 after a government referendum to being based on lawful residence of the parents within the state for three years or more. Alarmist media coverage of ‘pregnant asylum-seekers’ moving to Ireland to claim health care and Irish citizenship and ‘asylum seekers … breeding like rabbits’ contributed to a set of public discourses that connected racialised others with the spectres of overpopulation and citizenship tourism. Mullally juxtaposes these developments with the difficulties Irish women faced in accessing safe abortions. The fact that many Irish women obtain abortions in the UK every year highlights disjunctures in the ways that migration and reproduction are constructed, depending on the direction of, and reason for, travel. Mullally concludes that intersectional analysis provides tools for understanding how citizenship excludes migrant women in Ireland in specific ways, but she is more sceptical about its potential for providing a feminist praxis around migration, gender and reproduction.In the context of the state, intersectionality plays the useful role of challenging nationalised, racialised and sexualised versions of belonging, whether this belonging is linked to citizenship status (Mullally), legal protection against discrimination (Kim), or social policy initiatives (Rooney). In this sense, intersectionality teases out what is at stake in decision-making processes, how these processes construct norms across multiple sites of power and identity, and the distributive consequences of complicated norms. Yet the question of how these different flows of inequality exert pressure on each other remains difficult to answer. In many senses, intersectionality as a method of analysis can raise more questions than it answers.With this in mind, Part IV – Alternative pathways – addresses different springboards for theoretical and interpretive analysis in law, political theory, critical race studies and feminist theory. The contributions in this section engage with questions of how to imagine the projects of equality and social justice and how such an imagining changes our approaches to intersectionality. Thinking through the politics of difference yields a range of approaches to questions of structure, culture, and social relations, which in turn affect how we visualise the building blocks, flows of power, and axes through which intersectionality is usually theorised. If the aim of anti-essentialism has been to challenge the erasures inherent within the dominant paradigm of liberal universalism, can universalism be reconfigured outside the liberal model? How does our conception of social justice affect the work that we want intersectionality to do? The focus of Iris Young’s contribution is the problems that ensue when a politics of cultural difference fails adequately to take account of structures of power and their role in constituting the ‘normal’. Young begins by setting

out two different but related ways in which the politics of difference has been framed in recent political thought: the politics of positional difference and the politics of cultural difference. These, she argues, have often been read together, erasing in the process important definitional distinctions and issues of justice. The politics of positional difference focuses on dominating structural axes in Western societies, such as the social division of labour, and Young examines three groups – women, people with disabilities, and racialised people – in order to discuss the structural features of inequality that affect each one.The politics of cultural difference, following largely from the work of Will Kymlicka, focuses on groups defined by ‘societal culture’, that is to say, cultural difference coalesces in these literatures only through ethnicity and nation. Young argues that the politics of cultural difference underplays structural analysis of certain inequalities, for example racism; it attaches itself to liberal theorising that promotes a focus on individuals and groups to the detriment of social relations; and it normalises dominant power relations through an uncritical discourse of tolerance. Her aim in drawing attention to these theoretical lacunae is to put structural dynamics of power back on the agenda for political theorists as they contemplate issues of ethnicity, nation, and religious difference.The next chapter, Intersectional travel through everyday utopias: the difference sexual and economic dynamics make, maintains a similar focus on the stakes involved in different ways of framing questions of injustice and inequalities. Davina Cooper looks behind debates around intersectionality to the ways that we think about ‘inequality’s conceptual building blocks’. She uses the concept of social dynamics – in this chapter the economic and the sexual (although previous work has looked at the intimate/impersonal) – to navigate away from visualising the social through groups, axes or vectors of inequality, systems, or gendering and racialising processes. The social dynamics approach provides a perspective on social life that focuses on the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of inequality. In this way, studying the social dynamics of the economic (here, generation-access-use) and the sexual (desire-intimacy-embodiment) enables us to trace the shifting ways in which relations of inequality become attached to aspects of social life, and Cooper uses two prefigurative social sites – the Toronto Women’s Bathhouse and UK Local Exchange and Trading Schemes – to examine how this works. The pieces in the first section of this Part, therefore, return to the task of re-thinking theoretical models to respond to questions of injustice. Young’s intervention, in particular, should be understood in the post 9/11 climate as an injunction to remain critical about who ‘we’ are when theorising difference. Young reminds us of the significance of structure in analysing what are traditionally viewed as ‘cultural’ forms of inequality, thereby challenging deterministic readings of social configurations. For her part, Cooper uses the lens of counter-normative social sites to challenge the

coupling of predetermined social groups with overarching systems of power. Her analysis opens up a fluid understanding of how power, structure, and systems fold into each other in the constitution of social inequalities. The significance, for intersectionality, of the approaches that both Young and Cooper advocate (albeit in different ways) is that they broaden analysis of inequalities away from the archetypal multidimensional subject towards an open-ended, dynamic account that reflects the evolving interactions between inequalities and social structures. Working with similar concerns, albeit in a different register, Lakshmi Arya uses a case study of the Universal Civil Code debate in India to consider whether it is possible to construct an alternative understanding of universalism from a postcolonial perspective. The Universal Civil Code debate – the proposal for a common civil code for India instead of civil laws stratified by religion – raises many issues that are pertinent to this study: whether such a development would be beneficial for women and consequently who is the subject of Indian feminism; and whether, recognising the problems with universalist Western discourses, this initiative should be welcomed in any case from a postcolonial, poststructuralist standpoint. Arya contrasts these debates with discussions around an earlier piece of uniform civil legislation, the Child Marriage Restraint Act 1929, within which subjects did not limit themselves to speaking from Dalit, or Hindu, or Muslim perspectives. Arya’s aim is to retrieve an understanding of intersectional subaltern resistances within the anti-colonial movement, which challenged the categorisation of identities in the colonial state. Undertaking this exercise, she concludes, makes it possible to delineate an empowering, non-Western discourse of the universal. This challenges the presumed problem that intersectionality intends to address, that of the universal subject being essentially the hegemonic subject.Momin Rahman similarly focuses on universalism, but Rahman’s project aims to theorise intersectionality through an understanding of materiality. There are considerable dilemmas involved in thinking through the specificities of lived experience alongside, or through, structural and systemic oppression. Rahman’s approach retains a focus on identities, but destabilises the apparent fixity of identity markers by addressing how they are materially constructed through intersections of social processes and structures. Such a materialist interpretation of intersectionality works against a liberal, universal conception of equality and requires instead a social ontology in which widely varying social locations and experiences require a radically differentiated set of equality demands. As Rahman indicates, resonating with Toni Williams’s concerns, moving away from the liberal universal also presents a challenge to liberalism’s technologies: the abstract citizen, rights discourse, the conception of equality as a mainly legal endeavour. Contesting liberal technologies in this way, he advocates approaching inequalities through lived experience, but with an understanding of how this ontology is

materially structured through social processes of oppression. This focus on ‘effective materiality’ provides one alternative to viewing intersectionality through discrete categories of oppression, which, as he argues, has not provided us with the tools to challenge universalising essentialism within identity politics. Having provided a brief outline of the collection, we would like to conclude by raising some ongoing questions regarding intersectional scholarship, many of which have been inspired by our engagement with the contributors and with colleagues. It seems that there are a number of concerns with the present use of intersectionality within socio-legal analysis and within connected fields. One preliminary question concerns intersectionality’s role or function. In this introduction, we have been referring to intersectionality as a type of analysis, implying an overarching theoretical or ideological framework (such as Marxist analysis or feminist analysis, for example, although these terms also require complication). Yet intersectionality does not assume any particular ideological stance. Without ignoring its strong connection to Black feminist thought, intersectionality has been, and is, mobilised from a number of different standpoints and in conjunction with a number of different intellectual frameworks. It has no particular conceptual home, apart from the imperative to de-essentialise categories and complicate our understanding of social dynamics of inequality. In some institutional or legal settings, as we have seen, this intersectional endeavour need not even be particularly critical or used to improve the lives of targeted groups. With this in mind, what are the implications of referring to intersectionality as a methodology? Does this capture the political development of the term and its current use within the academy? If it is a methodology, or a methodological orientation, then McCall has highlighted very clearly the range of techniques that it spans (see also Yuval-Davis, 2006). Furthermore, if it is a methodology, this implies that it can be applied alongside a range of different frameworks of thought. Are we happy to assign intersectionality such an instrumental role? In doing so, do we risk making a false distinction between conceptual framework and methodology itself?If the role of intersectionality is difficult to discern, this is probably because of its fundamentally challenging nature; yet there is a concern that intersectionality can be used rhetorically, as a way of performing apparently situated analysis without changing prevailing structures of thought. This is typified by work that contains a sentence along the lines of: ‘and it is also important to recognise the gendered/sexualised dynamics of this process’, where the significance of an intersectional viewpoint to a particular project has not been explained. A connected issue is the use of intersectionality to criticise work that does not appear, to some, to be sufficiently complex. Here, the injunction is to ‘take account of race/class/gender/age in this analysis’ in such a way that intersectional analysis may appear to require a number of disciplining add-ons.1