Description: A 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Intersectionality intervenes in the field of intersectionality studies: the integrative examination of the effects of racial, gendered, and class power on people's lives. While "intersectionality" tends to circulate merely as a buzzword, Anna Carastathis joins other critical voices in urging a more careful reading. Challenging the narratives of arrival that surround it, Carastathis argues that intersectionality is a horizon, illuminating ways of thinking that have yet to be realized; consequently, calls to "go beyond" intersectionality are premature. A provisional interpretation of intersectionality can disorient habits of essentialism, categorical purity, and prototypicality and overcome dynamics of segregation and subordination in political movements. Through a close reading of critical race theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw's germinal texts, published more than twenty-five years ago, Carastathis urges analytic clarity, contextual rigor, and a politicized, historicized understanding of this pervasive concept. Intersectionality's roots in social justice movements and critical intellectual projects--specifically black feminism--must be retraced and synthesized with a decolonial analysis so that its potential to actualize coalitions can be enacted.Review Quotes: "This is, perhaps, Carastathis's greatest insight: she urges us to think about intersectionality as a 'profoundly destabilizing, productively disorienting, provisional concept' whose work remains to be done. In this account, intersectionality refers to our desire to keep dreaming of a more just social world."--Jennifer C. Nash, American Quarterly
-- (6/1/2018 12:00:00 AM)