ABSTRACT
Barbara Foley’s essay provides a class analysis of intersectionality. What questions are encouraged by intersectionality, Foley asks, and which are foreclosed? The spatial metaphor that Kimberlé Crenhsaw used to define intersectionality theory, she argues, pre-empts a materialist analysis of the situations that the metaphor conveys, namely, a critique of bourgeois jurisprudence. Though this has nevertheless not prevented other social theorists from adding class to the intersectionality paradigm, the usefulness of intersectionality to Marxism is put into question. Because Marxism claims the explanatory centrality of class analysis, the difference between exploitation and oppression is crucial. Whereas race does not cause racism, and gender does not cause sexism, race and gender have been shaped by capitalist social relations. Marx defines class as an empirical category and an inherently antagonistic social relation of production. The centrality of class, Foley argues, does not deny experiences of oppression; it defines the way that production is organized in a capitalist society. The best that can be said of intersectionality, she concludes, is that it is symptomatic of the neoliberal era and the way that leftists have turned to a politics of new social movements and non-class-based reforms.
