ABSTRACT
Kimberlé W. Crenshaw’s first essay on intersectionality, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989), presented two spatial metaphors for intersectionality: the well-known horizontal metaphor of the traffic intersection and the lesser-known vertical metaphor of the basement. While the metaphor of the basement has been “largely forgotten”, the metaphor of the traffic intersection has been taken up as intersectionality’s central image – as the primary way to explain and to metaphorically visualise the concept. Although the concept of intersectionality has gained a remarkably strong foothold in feminist and other critical discourses aiming to reveal the complexities of oppression and social inequality, scholars have objected to Crenshaw’s traffic intersection metaphor, arguing that it contains misleadingly additive imagery. In the more than three decades that have passed since the publication of Crenshaw’s essay, an abundance of – more or less eccentric – alternative metaphors for intersectionality have been proposed. This chapter maps the landscape of alternative metaphors and takes this map as a starting point to reflect upon what drives the attempts to find new and, supposedly, better intersectionality metaphors. It is suggested that the accelerated search for new metaphors can be described as a quest for the right metaphor for intersectionality, where what counts as “right” invariably involves the transcendence of additivity. What can this quest for the “new” and the “right” reveal to us about dominant narratives seeking to describe the future of intersectionality?
