ABSTRACT
This chapter takes Virginia Woolf’s novel about the young noble man “Orlando” as its point of departure, in order to think through intersectionality at work. The story of Orlando quite aptly illustrates the idea of identities as complex, and as historically variable and spatially contingent. Like with Orlando, workers’ identities are at once particular, complex and fluid. In spite of this, labour is assiduously compartmentalized, differentiated and remunerated along the axes of age, race, gender, nationality and skills, and workers become associated with (and disassociated from) certain occupations, work-tasks and spaces of work. This chapter provides a review of leading feminist and labour geographers’ writings on intersectionality, in order to think through how space and time matter. Furthermore, it suggests that intersectional analysis is imbued with cartographic reason and, subsequently, that it may fall short in portraying the multi-dimensional, evolving Self. Finally, it proposes an understanding of people as both being and becoming, as relational stories-so-far and as progressive biographies in evolving time-space, in congruence with the spirit of Woolf’s Orlando.
