Beyond Category: Contextualize Intersectionality in Relational Power Dynamics

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 8) Identities: Race, Class, and (Other) Inequalities

Abstract

Intersectionality has traveled widely across disciplines, yet its diffusion has often diluted its grounding in Black feminist thought and its structural analysis of power. Instead of treating intersectionality as an additive model of identity categories, this article follows Crenshaw (1989), Collins (1990; Collins et al. 2021), and echoes Smith’s (1992) work on positionality by beginning from interpersonal and institutional interactions (Collins 1990; Luna et al. 2024). By contextualizing lived experience in specific encounters, the analysis resists the presumed significance of any single category. Privilege and disadvantage are defined empirically through interpersonal and institutional interactions, rather than assumed through preexisting hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, or profession.
Choosing a group presumed to hold certain privileges generates epistemological advantages. When we move away from preselected identity categories, social challenges and power domination appear less predictable and less ordered. Beyond its strength in identifying the most and multiply marginalized populations, this study argues that intersectionality reveals forms of inequality and discrimination that would otherwise be conveniently ignored. It therefore extends intersectionality’s analytic purchase in addressing structural injustice, including inequalities faced by non-Black women of color and in contexts where power imbalance is produced, enacted, or contested.
Empirically, this paper draws on 36 interviews with first-generation immigrant Chinese women scientists in American academia. It demonstrates how alleged privileges (such as STEM profession and legal status) can operate as marginalizing agents within interpersonal interactions and institutional structures. In doing so, the study contributes to gender and race theory by showing that privilege and marginalization coexist in relational space and that institutional power shapes who is recognized as naturally belonging and who is positioned as contingent.

Author

• Jane Jia-Yin Wang, University at Albany, SUNY