ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the geopolitical travels of intersectionality, focusing on how intersectionality has been taken up in different European contexts. Offering a reconstruction of the emergence and development of intersectionality scholarship, the chapter distinguishes four key phases of European intersectionality debates. First, there is a phase of feminist theorizing on the intersections of gender and race/ethnicity prior to the articulation of intersectionality that I understand as proto-intersectional phase (1980s-1990s), a phase of introducing intersectionality (beginning of 2000s), a phase claiming intersectionality (mid 2000s), and lastly, a phase of looking back, when scholars start reflecting on the trajectory of intersectionality in European gender studies (2010s-present). In all these phases, an exchanges and dialogues between feminist scholars from the US and Europe plays an important role, as I will highlight. However, the chapter argues that construction of strict binary distinction between US and European intersectionality scholarship can end up being reductive and unproductive.
