ABSTRACT
The question of how race and gender oppressions intersect, its effects on individuals and society, and how to resist and build alternative communities, is the focus of intersectional research and activism. Rooted in Black feminism and Critical Race Theory, intersectionality is concerned with analysing, dismantling and challenging institutionalised, structural and interpersonal power relations and oppressions of gender, race, class, sexuality, nation, abilities and others, though the chapter focuses on race and gender. It illustrates this with brief examples from the US, the UK, Germany, Turkey and Kurdistan. Exploring origins and development of intersectional thought, through activist knowledges and their academic articulations, the chapter explores different levels of intersectional analysis. It outlines the principal contributions of intersectional thought as a project to render visible experiences and positions of those affected by multiple oppressions. This entails understanding the complexity of multiple oppressions, which are irreducible to each other. Intersectional thought’s key contribution to epistemology is shown, both as critique of the power effects of dominant knowledges and as a project to develop new forms of knowing. The chapter addresses critiques and debates of intersectional thought, about imprecise epistemologies, the marginalisation of issues of sexuality, and the decentring of race, colonial and whitening practices. It concludes with an outlook on the continuing relevance of intersectional thought, through dialogues with decolonial and indigenous approaches, as well as through the cross-over into everyday discourse.
