Abstract
This special thematic issue includes some of the papers presented in two symposia on intersectionality theory and research that were presented at annual conferences of the Society for Historical Archaeology in 2017 and 2018. This introduction provides the historical context of the development of intersectionality theory, and the development of research and theorizing of intersectional identities and power dynamics in historical archaeology. Articles in this issue provide innovative theorizing and research that go beyond Crenshaw’s intersectionality theory, which analyzes the erasure and invisibility of the identity of Black women by intermeshed racism and sexism in the legal system administering anti-discrimination law.
Introduction
This special thematic issue includes some of the papers presented in two symposia on intersectionality theory and research in historical archaeology that were presented at annual conferences of the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA). In 2017, a symposium entitled “Intersectionality as Emancipatory Archaeology” was organized by Stefan F. Woehlke, Megan E. Springate and Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood, and in 2018 a symposium entitled “Intersections of Gender, Sexuality, Class, Race, Ethnicity, Age, Religion, the Military, etc.” was organized by Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood and Jennifer M. Cantú Trunzo. These symposia on intersectionality followed (1) Maria Franklin’s (2001a) article that first urged historical archaeologists to use Black feminist intersectionality theory; (2) explicit use of Black feminist intersectionality theory in historical archaeological research on African-American gender roles, identities, relationships and power dynamics (Battle-Baptiste, 2011; Brandon, 2004; Franklin, 2001b, 2004); and (3) publications in historical archaeology outlining feminist post-modernist theorizing of multiple intersecting identities and oppressions (Spencer-Wood, 1997; 2002a:207; 2004:243–4; 2007:46–7).
This introduction to our special issue on intersectionality theory and research in historical archaeology is divided into four sections. The first section outlines the development of intersectionality theory, from analyzing how intersecting racism and sexism make Black women invisible in American anti-discrimination law, to considering how more intersecting prejudices/oppressions are related to intersecting social identities and roles, including gender, class, ethnicity, race, age and sexuality. The second section summarizes research and theorizing in historical archaeology about identities and power dynamics that started in 1980 with ethnicity or race and racism, sometimes also considering class; followed by analyses of materializations of class hierarchies; and, with the advent of feminist historical archaeology, has expanded to increasingly include gender identities since the late 1980s, and identities of religion, sexuality and age, predominantly in the 2000s. Research in historical archaeology on intersectional power dynamics began in the 1980s with dominant ideology, expanded to domination/hegemony and resistance, and added social agency and critiques of androcentrism/sexism from feminist theory in the late 1980s. The framework of domination/hegemony and resistance was used to analyze class, racial or gender power dynamics predominantly separately until feminist historical archaeologists pointed out that sexism, racism, ethnocentrism and classism were intersecting oppressions connected to intersecting identities of gender, race, ethnicity and class. However, androcentrism and gender identities continue to be frequently overlooked in research on race or class in historical archaeology, although sexism is inextricably intermeshed with racism and classism and gender identities are inseparably intermeshed with age, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and other identities in everyone’s lived experiences. The third section summarizes articles in this special issue on intersectionality theory and research in historical archaeology that provide insights into the fundamental importance both of gender in intersecting multiple identities and sexism in intersecting multiple oppressions. The conclusion discusses the contributions of this issue to the development of intersectionality theory and research in historical archaeology and potential future directions.
Feminist Intersectionality Theory
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1989:139–40) coined the term “intersectionality” for the interactions between racism and sexism that systematically privilege whites and men in American anti-discrimination law and the legal system, resulting in the erasure and invisibility of Black women as a social identity category. Crenshaw’s theorizing is based on critical race theory and builds on two decades of Black feminist theorizing of intersecting oppressions of women of color, mostly using other terms, such as “double jeopardy” (Beal, 1970) and “simultaneity of oppression” (Smith, 1983) in relating racism and sexism to Black women’s identities (Minnich 1990). However, some Black feminists conceptualized “the intersecting, complementary nature of racist and sexist oppression” of Black women (hooks, 1984:54; also Collins, 1986; Hull et al., 1982). Some non-Black feminists discussed “intersection” (Smith et al., 1988), “interaction” (Shoben, 1980) or “connections” (Yamada, 1981; Spencer-Wood, 1978a; 1978b) between racism and sexism. Classism was considered another important intersectional oppression with racism and sexism by some Black feminist theorists (Davis, 1983; Murray, 1970; Spelman, 1988:14–16) and some non-Black theorists (Brittan & Maynard, 1984, cited in Spencer-Wood, 1997). Several previous feminist theorists of color (Anzaldua, 1987; CRC, 1983; Lorde, 1984; Lugones & Spelman, 1983; Smith, 1983), and some white feminists (Smith et al., 1988; Spencer-Wood, 1999a; 2010a), discussed intersecting identities, most often gender, race, class, and ethnicity, and sometimes sexuality, age and/or religion. In 1977, the Black Combahee River Collective (CRC 1983:210–13) early theorized the “identity politics” of Black lesbian women’s liberation through “integrated analysis” of “racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppression.” The long history of theorizing intersecting oppressions and identities provides greater understanding of aspects of their diversity and complexity as “indivisible” (Brittan & Maynard, 1984:180), interrelated, and “interlocking” (CRC, 1983).
Although Crenshaw (1991:1244–5) considered intersectionality as a “provisional framework” and not a “new, totalizing theory of identity,” it has become a feminist theory of intersectional identities and related oppressions that Crenshaw herself expanded, stating in a footnote, “While the primary intersections that I explore here are between race and gender, the concept can and should be expanded by factoring in issues such as class, sexual orientation, age, and color.” (Crenshaw, 1991:1244-5n.9). This statement shows that Crenshaw followed the modern norm of equating race with Black people, distinct from color, which designates other nonwhites. In an interview in the Equal Rights Review, (Crenshaw, 2016a) provided her abstract definition of intersectionality as “a relationship between identities – that is, a social categorization – and structures.” In her TED talk, Crenshaw (2016b) continued to focus on the intersection of racism and sexism but added their intersections with the oppressions of classism, heterosexism, homophobia, and xenophobia. This expansion of intersectionality builds on theorizing of “heterosexualism” and colonialism (Lugones, 2007); the “triple jeopardy” of sexism, racism and imperialism (TWWA, 1970), and the “multiple jeopardy” Black women suffer from racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism and homophobia (King, 1988). In 1990, Patricia Hill Collins (2000:299) discussed intersecting systems of oppression, including race, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, age and citizenship status.
Although Crenshaw and some other feminist theorists continue to center intersectionality theory on the identity category of Black women and their experiences of intersecting racism and sexism (Alexander-Floyd, 2012:11; May, 2014:24; McCall, 2005:1774; Nash, 2014b:46), some theorists have re-framed intersectionality as a theory of the complexity of intersecting identities and power dynamics (Davis, 2008: Hancock, 2007:249–50), especially how privileged dominant groups of whites and men oppress, subordinate and marginalize nonwhite minorities and women, erasing them from history (May, 2014). Crenshaw (1989:140,145,148,166–7) identified Black women as “the” only intersectional identity and did not label as intersectional the identities of white women or Black men because in anti-discrimination law these groups can only suffer singular discrimination based on one aspect of their identity, in contrast to the intersection between racism and sexism suffered by Black women. Devon Carbado (2013:817,825,841) critiqued the failure of intersectionality theory to analyze how the intersectional identity category of white heterosexual men is the unnamed, and therefore invisible, naturalized norm against which other intersectional identities are differentiated as non-normative. Spencer-Wood’s article delves further into expansions of intersectionality theory by Carbado and by feminist postcolonial theory.
Intersectionality theory deconstructs the falsely opposed binary, either/or, culturally constructed categories of oppression and identities that are in fact inseparably interrelated. Crenshaw (1989:139; 1991:1242) explicitly critiqued the either/or construction of race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience resulting in binary opposed identities as either a woman or a person of color, and conducted an analysis of relationships among identities and oppressions that was not labeled as the feminist inclusive both/and analysis that it was. Although Crenshaw’s (1989; 1991) early publications on intersectionality theory predominantly analyze racism and sexism as categories of discrimination related to the identity categories of Black women, women, white women, and Black men (Crenshaw, 1989:140; 1991), she implies individual diversity within these categories by pointing out that a white woman “may be in no better position to represent all women than a Black woman” (Crenshaw, 1989:144).
Spencer-Wood (1991a:237; 1992:105; 1995:129–30; 2011:21) has critiqued either/or thinking and the resulting cultural construction of monolithic, static, binary, opposed social categories that define personhood identities within structural hierarchies. Spencer-Wood instead developed a feminist inclusive both/and perspective to theorize the individual diversity within polythetic overlapping/intersecting social group identities, experiences and power dynamics. For instance, the construction of women as a diverse polythetic set recognizes variety in their identities and experiences, which differ for lesbians, transgender women, cross-dressers and cis-gender women, among others. Feminist critique of the culturally constructed patriarchal gender dichotomy opposing men versus women opens space for deconstruction of such supposedly homogeneous mutually exclusive categories and the theorization instead of both men and women as diverse polythetic sets of individuals with complex, fluid, situationally-contingent and variable identities, performances, experiences and power dynamics due to intersections of gender with class, race, ethnicity, age, sexuality, religion, etc. (Spencer-Wood, 1994a:178; 1999a; 2002a:207; 2010a).
Spencer-Wood (1995:129–30) critiques the either/or thinking in the cultural construction of fixed social categories as oppositional dichotomies and proposes the more accurate feminist inclusive both/and construction of identities as continuums that include all the diversity along a social dimension between culturally constructed conceptualizations of mutually exclusive identity categories, such as men vs women. Gender, sex, and sexuality each exhibit variation along separate continuums with an ever-expanding diversity of changing identities in the continual process of identity formation. Gender ranges from a cis-gendered identity that corresponds to biological identity, to transgendered, and includes non-binary identities. Biological sex includes chromosomal and physical diversity on the continuum between the supposedly binary opposed categories of male versus female. Sexuality includes the traditional categories of heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual, but also incorporates attraction to intellect, emotional connection, asexuality and pansexuality, among many other categories. Rather than a set of culturally constructed discrete categories, race is more accurately envisioned as the continuum of shades between the culturally constructed, supposedly opposite categories of black and white. Class can also be more accurately constructed as a continuum instead of a set of discrete supposedly homogeneous opposed categories such as Marx’s either/or construction of capitalist owners of the means of production versus the proletariat workers; or the supposedly static cultural categories of upper, middle, and lower classes, which are actually constantly changing in negotiated relationships within and between classes. These and other continuums intersect each other at points that describe an individual or group intersectional identity. Movement of the intersection point represents the situationally-contingent fluidity of identity and power dynamics (Spencer-Wood, 1995:129–30; 2002a:207; 2004:248–9; 2005:208–9; 2007:47; 2011:21–2 article in this issue). Both/and intersectionality is about the complexity of multiple, flexible, situationally-contingent interacting identities and power dynamics.
Intersectional Identities and Power Dynamics in Research in Historical Archaeology
Prior to the feminist critiques of androcentrism/sexism in historical archaeology in the 1980s (Fratt, 1991; Handsman, 1984; Spencer-Wood, 1982; 1984; 1991a:234–40; Yentsch, 1991a), there was no research about sexism or its intersections with racism, elitism, etc.; nor was there any explicitly intersectional research in the historical archaeology of identities until the late 1980s. Nearly all research in historical archaeology followed the dominant practice in prehistoric archaeology of de-gendering the past by not analyzing gender ideologies, roles, identities, relationships or power dynamics, while representing men’s experiences and viewpoints as ungendered cultural norms for the whole society (Spencer-Wood 1992: 100). Androcentrism in historical archaeology was facilitated by androcentrism in histories and the under-documentation of women and children. “Women and children often disappear from the past” by being subsumed as “cultures are often defined according to male-controlled social, political and economic structures” (Spencer-Wood, 1999b:163). Traditional gender ideology that defined men as public and dominant over subordinate domestic women has long been invisibly assumed in functional site types. A ‘domestic site’ has been assumed to be patriarchally controlled by a male owner, while women’s traditional domestic roles have been assumed and de-gendered in artifact categories such as South’s (1977) kitchen artifact group. Public sites such as businesses and forts have been assumed to be men’s sites, as well as South’s architecture group, since everyone knows that men historically constructed buildings and ran forts and businesses, overlooking the presence and roles of women at those sites. The widespread use of South’s artifact categories has made it difficult to analyze gender by lumping together distinctive women’s and men’s types of artifacts in the personal category, and in the kitchen category by combining kitchen artifacts usually used by women at domestic sites, with tableware and teaware used by both men and women. Androcentrism was evident in the erasure of women and children, who were subsumed and made invisible in 1) classes defined by men’s occupations and 2) sites patriarchally named for men who owned or occupied them. Men associated with sites are usually named, but women are named far less frequently (critiques by Spencer-Wood, 1991a:236–8; 1992:99–100; 1995:119–21,126; 2007:32,34–5; 2011:6–7).
Because intersectionality research requires both/and thinking, it has been inhibited by structuralist either/or thinking that constructs all aspects of culture in sets of binary oppositions. The foundation of structuralism is the androcentric Western gender dichotomy between the gender identity of men, whose public roles have been valorized as the important drivers of the evolution of civilization, while the gender identity and roles of women have been devalued as domestic, biologically determined, unchanging and therefore not worth researching (Spencer-Wood, 1991a:237; Wylie, 1991:34). Jim Deetz, (1988:222) and others have mistakenly believed that binary either/or thinking is the biologically innate form of cognition, when in fact this is an ideology that results in the cultural construction of social groups in oppositional dichotomies. Structuralism is a major cultural context of archaeology that uses either/or thinking to construct the lived experiences of under-represented groups and individuals in sets of binary oppositions of gender, racial and ethnic roles and identities. The either/or mindset underwriting analyses of identities in oppositional dichotomies has made it difficult to conceive of both/and intersectionality.
Another major factor militating against intersectional theorizing and research was processual archaeology’s adoption of the either/or scientific mindset and methodology of only researching one variable at a time to distinguish the variations in material culture that each variable accounted for separately (Watson et al., 1971:6–9). Anthropology and archaeology have a long history of taking an either/or approach to identities, starting with equating ethnicities with whole cultures whose boundaries were defined by distinctive artifact types, in opposition to other ethnic cultures (Díaz-Andreu & Lucy, 2005:2–4). In historical archaeology, most early research on identities focused on material correlates/markers of one ethnicity, at most mentioning intersecting class identities (Deetz, 1977; Schuyler, 1980). Historical archaeologists began examining the power dynamics of personal and group identity formation in the 1980s, using anthropological theory (Barth, 1969; Spicer, 1975:41) underwritten by either/or thinking in considering the use of material symbols to signal ethnic group identity boundary maintenance in opposition to other ethnic groups (Kelly & Kelly, 1980). Until the late 1980s, the term “ethnicity” was usually used for both ethnic and racial identities to avoid the danger of reifying modern racist beliefs constructing races as static and biologically determined (Omi & Winant, 1986:121), when in fact races are culturally constructed changeable social groups, as are ethnic groups. Historically, ethnic groups, such as the Irish, Jews, Italians, Germans, Chinese and Japanese, along with African-Americans, were all considered separate inferior races and discriminated against by Anglo-Americans (Lee, 2019; Orser, 2007; Spencer-Wood, 1999a; 2010a).
One of the most influential books in historical archaeology has been In Small Things Forgotten (Deetz, 1977), which took a symbolic-structural approach to identify distinctive Anglo-American versus African-American material culture patterns in ceramics, architecture, and burial practices, in the contexts of changing Western worldviews, and African cultural practices, respectively. Deetz was following the culturological approach initiated in American plantation archaeology in the 1960s, which identified materialized African cultural survivals as part of investigating “slave lifestyle” that involved adapting to the harsh and cruel conditions of slavery (Ascher & Fairbanks, 1971; Fairbanks, 1984:2; both cited in Orser, 2001a:5–6). Deetz was unusual in labeling both sides of the ethnic structural opposition between African-Americans and Anglo-Americans, who are usually not labeled because, as the dominant social group, they are not considered to be an ethnic group, although they are. John Otto (1980:3,7–10) first used the term “race” and explicitly focused on race and class power dynamics at Cannon’s Point plantation in Georgia, analyzing archaeological evidence of (1) elite versus subordinate status and (2) the legal power of whites to enslave Africans, coerce their labor and control aspects of their behavior, such as labor requirements and alcohol consumption. Next, Charles Orser Jr. (1987:126) pointed out the racist ideology that gave African-Americans an “enforced personal feeling of inferiority” (Dubois, 1935:9), and researched whether race or class was a more important factor in consumer choices.
Perhaps consumer choice was the first explicitly intersectional both/and multiple-variable paradigm. The consumer choice framework was concerned with relating “dynamic interactions” among the variables of market access, socioeconomic status, class, race, ethnicity, age, family life cycle, and/or political identities of particular individuals, households or neighborhoods to material differences in lived experiences, including material expressions of power, prestige, domination, competition or display of status in the context of capitalistic society (Spencer-Wood, 1987a; 1987b:10–11). The consumer choice theoretical framework is one way of “giving life and meaning to archaeological data” (Spencer-Wood, 1987b:5). This early inclusive both/and intersectional framework consciously moved away from the previous scientific either/or single-variable methodology, and some chapters found that some individual, household or neighborhood consumer choices were related more closely to family life cycle, household size and structure, ethnic or racial identities than to class (Spencer-Wood, 1987b:11–12). Although individual women who lived at several particular sites were named, the consumer choice framework did not include gender because documentary research had not yet established which gender selected which artifacts of those acquired in the market or as heirlooms or gifts and used by a family or household (Spencer-Wood, 1987a; 1987b:10).
Prior to Maria Franklin’s (2001a) article discussing Black feminist intersectionality theory’s usefulness in providing greater understanding of historic social complexities, the concepts of intersectional identities and power dynamics were scarcely ever used in research that was actually intersectional. Perhaps the earliest analysis of intersectional identities and power dynamics in historical archaeology was Jim Deetz’s (1963:186) interpretations of archaeological evidence indicating how Native American men’s and women’s different economic roles were altered by assimilation to Spanish colonization at La Purisima Mission in California, including a major identity shift by indigenous men from hunters to farmers. Kathleen Deagan (1973:58; 1983:181–185,234) pioneered in analyzing how Native American women’s domestic roles and actions materially affected Spanish lifeways, especially foodways and gender relations, while indigenous women gained access to prestigious Spanish goods through trade or marriage to Spanish men. Deetz (1963) only interpreted unidirectional amount of assimilation by Native Americans to Spanish lifeways, while Deagan (1973; 1983) bidirectionally analyzed how Spanish men and indigenous women altered each others’ lifeways. These and other early research about Native American colonization did not address the intersecting racism and sexism in the white supremacist patriarchies that European men tried to impose on Native Americans.
In historical archaeology, power dynamics among people and social groups with intersectional identities have been related to ideologies legitimating inequalities. In the 1980s, historical archaeologists began analyzing materializations of dominant ideology created by eighteenth-century privileged-elite, white colonial Englishmen to naturalize and legitimate the hierarchical Georgian social order, masking elite white men’s domination of society from their white wives, African-American slaves, and lower-class whites (Leone, 1984; 1988:243,249–50,255–7). The “dominant ideology thesis” has been widely critiqued for assuming subordinate groups would be duped by elite ideology, which more likely functioned to incorporate an elite class during the socially disruptive conditions of colonization (Beaudry et al., 1991:156–8).
The Weberian either/or oppositional model of domination and resistance power dynamics between intersectional individual and group identities came to the fore with the 1988 SHA symposium on the Archaeology of Domination and Resistance that became Randy McGuire and Bob Paynter’s 1991 edited volume, The Archaeology of Inequality, which analyzes intersectional identities and power dynamics. Paynter and McGuire (1991:5–8,10,12) critiqued the traditional focus on formal institutional power, instead arguing, following Giddens (1984:14–16), that “power exists in all human relations, as the power to alter events” (Paynter & McGuire, 1991:13). Paynter and McGuire (1991:6,11–12) further advocated the concept of heterogeneity of power in multiple areas of society beyond elite social structures (Bowles & Gintis, 1976:23) and also argued for the heterogeneity of resistance and the ability of archaeology to reveal material remains of everyday resistance that is usually not documented (Scott, 1985:29). Paynter and McGuire (1991:4,11) exhibited both/and thinking in arguing that people can “concomitantly resist and succumb” to power, presaging the concept of “resistant accommodation” (Garman, 1998).
Five out of the 11 chapters in The Archaeology of Inequality included some analysis of power dynamics between gender and class, race and/or ethnic identities. Yentsch (1991b) conducted a symbolic-structural analysis of the ways the gender dichotomy between dominant public men and subordinate domestic women, children and servants was materialized in colonial gender divisions in elite household spaces, food and pottery. McDonald et al (1991) discussed a woman as well as men who led the rebellious Cheyenne escape from Fort Robinson, Nebraska. Three chapters proposed innovative forms of power. Spencer-Wood (1991b) researched how reform women not only resisted domesticity, but empowered themselves to become social agents creating new women’s public institutions and professions. Ferguson (1991) proposed the innovative concept of unconscious resistance through creation of a subculture, exemplified by colonoware pottery made by slave women as part of the subculture of the enslaved that unconsciously resisted slavery and its rationalization by slave owners. The chapter by Beaudry et al (1991:156) argued that “group identity, group membership – is inevitably linked to relations of power and to social differentiation” and they followed E.P. Thompson (1978:157) in arguing for research on class from the bottom up. Beaudry et al (1991:158–9) argued for a Gramscian concept of cultural hegemony as hegemonic discourse, in which social classes create competing ideologies and cultures to negotiate with other classes for leadership. Examples were provided from excavations of backlots of boardinghouses and tenements housing workers in the Boott cotton mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, which recovered material culture expressing working-class, immigrant, Irishmen’s intersectional ethnic identity in resistance to hegemonic rules against public smoking and alcohol consumption; and working women’s construction of aspirational identities through material emulation of middle-class fashions, but with less expensive teaware, paste jewelry, and black glass dress buttons (Beaudry et al., 1991:165–74).
Subsequent research using the either/or binary framework of domination/hegemony and resistance more frequently analyzed these power dynamics at the intersections of gender with race, ethnicity and/or class (Delle et al., 2000; Matthews, 2010), because of the introduction of feminist theorizing (Spencer-Wood, 1982; 1984; 1991a) and gender research (Deagan, 1973; 1983; Handsman, 1984) in historical archaeology. Following Beaudry et al’s (1991:156,158–9) adoption of theorizing by Gramsci and Thompson, research has revealed how hegemonic ideals operated in the past to create inequality by dominating oppressed, underprivileged and erased groups from the top down, while the subalterns resisted hegemonic privilege and worked to negotiate a place for themselves within the dominant social structure from the bottom up (Spencer-Wood and Baugher, 2001; Wilkie, 2000a). Some case studies have gendered elite dominance versus subordinate-group resistance, rule-breaking and/or negotiations in contexts addressing (1) indigenous resistance and negotiation of racist patriarchal colonialism (Clements, 2011; Lindauer, 2009; Middleton, 2013; Surface-Evans, 2016); (2) African American resistance to racism, sometimes including maintenance of African cultural practices in the face of forced acculturation (Delle, 2000; Ferguson, 1992; Franklin, 2001b; Hall, 1999; S.McBride, 2010a, b; Singleton, 1999; Stine et al., 1996; Yentsch, 1994); (3) worker-management relations in industrial settings (Mrozowski et al., 1996; Wood, 2004), and (4) attempts by the Anglo-American middle classes, often reformers, to curtail what they considered to be unrespectable behavior among the lower classes or immigrants, who often resisted (Baugher, 2010; Camp, 2013; Fitts, 2001; Kruczek-Aaron, 2013; Reckner & Brighton, 1999), and sometimes negotiated with reform women for (1) access to popular programs, (2) changes in some programs, or (3) new programs to negotiate becoming American citizens while retaining their ethnic cultures (Spencer-Wood, 1991b; 1994a:191–6; 1994b; 1996; 2002b; 2003; 2013a; Spencer-Wood & Blackburn, 2017).
In the “either/or” binary domination and resistance framework, the powerful dictated the rules to the less empowered, who were viewed as exercising "agency" after this concept was introduced in feminist publications (Spencer-Wood, 1987c:7; 1994a:177). Agency often entailed a “both/and” complex combination of conformity/accommodation and resistance. Conformity meant the system reproduced itself, while resistance meant there was the opportunity for sociocultural change (Trunzo, forthcoming). By the early 2000s, archaeologists began to examine how degree of cultural reproduction or resistance could vary in daily lives of individuals and households of different intersectional social identities, such as African-American gendered material aspirations for middle-class respectability (Mullins, 1999; also Spencer-Wood’s article in this issue); Chinese workingmen’s communities that preserved their culture while adapting to America (Greenwood, 2010; Williams, 2008) and Australia (Lydon, 1999); and the material resistances, accommodations and aspirations of Jewish immigrants to the Boston area, who varied from retaining patriarchal Orthodox culture, to Reformed sects that were influenced by the higher status of women in Protestantism (Spencer-Wood, 1999a; 2010a).
Feminist historical archaeology moved beyond the binary framework of domination/hegemony and subordinate reactive resistance to analyze individual and group independent social agency (Spencer-Wood, 1987c:7: 1991b:275; 1994a:177; 1996:409), and androcentrism/sexism (Spencer-Wood, 1991a:237; 1992:98–9; 1995:118–20; 2003:24–5; 2007:29–31; 2011:4–7; Spencer-Wood & Blackburn, 2017:937–8; Weber, 1991). Wurst (2006:193) argues that “earlier consumer choice models have morphed into an emphasis on agency and the individual.” Indeed, Spencer-Wood’s (1987b) multivariate framework for analyzing several factors involved in individual and household consumer choices is about the social agency of selecting goods used to express multiple identities, most often described as membership, participation in, or affiliation with, social groups. Once the term social agency became available, Spencer-Wood (1994a:177) pointed out in her feminist research that domestic “reformers were powerful social agents who used a variety of ideologies, strategies and material culture to transform the U.S. gender system”; and she also viewed material culture and landscapes as social agents shaping human actions (Spencer-Wood, 1996:407,409; 2010b). In the 1980s, identity research was given major impetus by feminist archaeology (Díaz-Andreu & Lucy, 2005:7), which critiqued the structuralist patriarchal dichotomy monolithically opposing dominant public men versus subordinate domestic women and instead found evidence of historic women’s public as well as domestic roles, identities, relations and powers (Spencer-Wood, 1991a:237–9; 1991b; 1992:105; 1996; 2013a). In the 1990s, identities, including roles, became understood as multiple, changing, fluid, situationally-contingent intersections of gender, sexuality, age, class, race, ethnicity, religion, etc. (Spencer-Wood, 1999a:284–5; 2002a:207; 2010a).
Intersectional gender research grew rapidly following the two 1989 conference symposia on gender research in historical archaeology organized by Spencer-Wood at the annual conference of the Society of Historical Archaeology (SHA) and the Chacmool Conference, which published conference proceedings, including papers from Spencer-Wood’s symposium, on intersecting gender identities and power dynamics among colonial elites (Weber, 1991; Yentsch, 1991a), changing Native American gender roles, identities, relations and power dynamics due to colonization (Devens, 1991; Fratt, 1991; Scott, 1991a); a comparison of dominant gender ideology with actual flexible, cooperative and overlapping gendered role performances at African-American and white tenant farms (Stine, 1991); powerful influences of nineteenth-century middle-class women on men’s behaviors (Cheney, 1991; Derry, 1991); women’s nautical roles, including famous female pirates (Smith, 1990); and Spencer-Wood’s, (1991a:236–7) paper critiquing androcentrism in historical archaeology and the projection of the ideal Victorian “separate spheres” gender dichotomy as universal historical reality. The SHA intersectional papers analyzed colonial Native American and European gender roles, relationships and power dynamics (Scott, 1991b); expressions of patriarchy in gravestones and family plots in cemeteries (McGuire, 1988); Shaker gender segregation (Savulis, 2003); and the diversity of roles and social agency of working-class women (Praetzellis & Praetzellis, 1989), middle-class women (Dubrow, 1989; Spencer-Wood 1987c; Wall, 1991), and elite women (Weber, 1991).
The 1990 SHA symposium on gender research was organized by Donna Seifert, an editor of the journal Historical Archaeology, which published her edited 1991 special issue entitled Gender in Historical Archaeology that included the 1990 symposium and papers by Scott and Wall from Spencer-Wood’s 1989 SHA symposium. Most of the articles analyze gender roles that intersect with class at a variety of site types (Seifert, 1991). Two articles present research on materializations of Native American roles and identities (Scott, 1991b; Whelan, 1991), and one addressed materializations of Spanish colonial women’s identities and Native American and African-American women’s roles (McEwan, 1991).
In the 1990s, the rapid growth in historical archaeology of feminist theorizing and research focusing on gender roles, identities, relationships and power dynamics in intersections with class, ethnicity, race and/or religion was facilitated by previous (1) gender theorizing and research in prehistoric archaeology (Conkey & Spector, 1984; Gero & Conkey, 1991), (2) research on the systemic racism in American slavery and Reconstruction (Orser, 1987:126); (3) Neo-Marxism, including the domination/hegemony and resistance framework and critical archaeology (Leone, Potter & Shackel, 1987), (4) symbolic-structural archaeology (Deetz, 1977; Leone, 1984; 1986) and (5) post-structuralism, which all opened critical approaches to interpretation that were useful in feminist intersectional gender research. Critical archaeology exposed how modern politics influences archaeological interpretations, legitimating feminist gender research and critiques of androcentrism/sexism in historical archaeology. Thus, feminist historical archaeology did not suffer from the discrimination against feminist prehistoric research, which was dismissed by some male archaeologists as “just political” (Wylie, 1991:42), othered as “alternative” research (Hodder & Hutton, 2003:231,234), or derided as trivial and not allowed to be presented or published (Nelson, 1997:18,39–40). Post-structuralism and feminist intersectionality theory both critiqued the cultural construction of identities in supposedly universal structural dichotomies, leading to research on sociocultural complexity. Neo-Marxism interprets archaeological evidence of undocumented accommodation and resistance to oppressive, hegemonic racist-patriarchal capitalist ideologies supporting class, racial and gender hierarchies in lived experiences of historically marginalized women and men. Symbolism permitted interpretations of gendered symbolic meanings of material culture, including material arrangements, architecture and landscapes.
Feminist research on intersectionality is underwritten by combinations of Black feminist theory, critical race theory, Neo-Marxism for class intersections, and symbolic archaeology for intersections with belief systems such as religions. Intersections of critical theories, whether about class, race and/or gender, permit close critical readings of documents and histories for mentions, implications and absences that reveal information about the intersectional lived experiences of under-documented women and minorities in bygone eras. Feminist gender research on oppressed groups such as enslaved women and men often also uses the framework of domination/hegemony and resistance to interpret archaeological evidence (Galle & Young, 2004; Wilkie, 2000a). Intersections of symbolism and other theoretical approaches underwrite interpretations of different meanings of goods, or the lack of goods, for women and/or men in intersectional social groups, such as classes (Wall, 1991; 1994; 2000); ethnic groups (Brighton, 2009; Orser, 2007); African-Americans (Galle & Young, 2004; Mullins, 1999; Wilkie, 1997; 2000a; 2000b; 2003); the military (Clements, 1993); or religious groups (Gilchrist, 1994; Kozakavich, 2017; Nikolai, 2003; Spencer-Wood, 1996;407; 1999a; 2006; 2010a; forthcoming; Van Buren, 2006).
The first edited volume in historical archaeology devoted to analyzing gender identities, roles, relationships and power dynamics in intersections with race, class, ethnicity and/or religion was composed of expanded papers from the 1992 SHA symposium organized and chaired by Elizabeth Scott (1994). Most chapters analyzed intersections of gender and class at different types of sites, while two analyzed materializations of gender power dynamics between Native Americans and colonial European traders or later Anglo-Americans (Bassett, 1994; Jackson, 1994), two analyzed materializations of power dynamics in intersections between gender and class among African-Americans (Muller, 1994; Spencer-Wood, 1994a), and two analyzed power dynamics between immigrants and middle-class, predominantly Anglo-American women (Hardesty, 1994; Spencer-Wood, 1994a).
Many subsequent publications have researched intersectional identities and power dynamics between subordinated minorities and dominant white European or Anglo-American social groups. Several publications analyze materialized changes in Native American gender systems due to European colonization (Bragdon, 1996; Clements, 2013; Hann & McEwan, 1998; Lightfoot, 2005; Loren, 2008; Rothschild, 2003; Rubertone, 2001; Voss, 2008). An edited volume and a journal issue present research on intersectional colonialism (Frink & Weedman, 2005; Matackney & Palmer, 2016), including Spencer-Wood’s (2016) explicitly intersectional article gendering external and internal colonialism and conceptualizing patriarchal economic colonialism, patriarchal domestic colonialism and patriarchal sexual colonialism. Research on African-American lifeways and power dynamics has developed from ungendered (Otto, 1980) to sometimes considering gender (Delle et al., 2000; Blakey, 1998; Ferguson, 1992; LaRoche, 1994; Orser, 2001b; Singleton, 1999, except three ungendered chapters by Deetz, Emerson and Chappelle), to publications focusing on gender roles, identities, relationships and power dynamics (Delle, 2000; Edwards-Ingram, 2001; Galle & Young, 2004; Wilkie, 2000a; 2003), including some explicitly using Black feminist intersectional theory (Battle-Baptiste, 2011; Brandon, 2004; Flewellen, 2017; Franklin, 2001b; 2004; González-Tennant, 2018; Morris, 2017).
A lot of intersectional gender research in historical archaeology is summarized according to the scales of households, institutions and communities in Deb Rotman’s (2018) book. Some edited books, chapters, journal issues and articles focus on intersecting gender and class, racial, ethnic and/or religious roles, identities, relationships and power dynamics (Sweely, 1999) in the Irish diaspora (Brighton, 2009; Griggs, 2001), households (Barile & Brandon, 2004), utopian communities that were often religious (Kozakavich, 2017; Spencer-Wood, 2006; Van Buren 2006), industrial communities (Mrozowski et al., 1996; Hardesty, 2010; Metheny, 2010), institutions (Spencer-Wood & Baugher, 2001; Beisaw & Gibbs 2009), and landscapes (Baugher & Spencer-Wood, 2010; Rotman & Savulis, 2003), sometimes at sites of social reform (Springate & Christiensen, 2017; Spencer-Wood, 2013b). A few publications use queer or other feminist theories to research intersectional sexual identities, including queer identities, and power dynamics (Arjona, 2017; Schmidt & Voss, 2001; Voss & Casella, 2012; Williams 2008).
Feminist historical archaeology has played a major role in further theorizing the “either/or” and “both/and” approaches to researching power dynamics in relationships among different intersectional identities. Crenshaw’s (1989:139; 1991:1242) intersectionality theory explicitly critiqued the “either/or” construction of race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience in anti-discrimination law, resulting in binary opposed identities as either a woman or a person of color. In historical archaeology, Spencer-Wood further critiqued the “either/or” mindset involved in structural constructions of culture in sets of binary oppositions. The construction of men versus women as opposed, either/or, mutually exclusive categories underwrites androcentric decisions to research men’s important roles, identities, relationships and power dynamics, while erasing women from interpretations of both domestic and public contexts. This research reifies the social empowerment of privileged men and disempowerment of women, who are often muted or erased in histories and documents. Spencer-Wood further critiqued the gender dichotomy opposing dominant public men versus subordinate domestic women, which erases women’s public roles, identities and relationships. This critique opened the space for Spencer-Wood to propose a feminist inclusive “both/and” perspective to research how both men and women had important roles, identities, relationships and power in both the private-domestic and public spheres of life (Spencer-Wood, 1991a:237–8; 1992:105; 1995:129–30; 2011:21–2). Feminist archaeologists have found historical information about women’s major roles in managing their households (Rotman, 2009; Spencer-Wood, 1991b:250–2; 1996:419–22; 2013a:179–81; Trunzo, forthcoming; Wall, 1991; 1994; 2000; Wood 2004) and in creating and implementing public social reform (Spencer-Wood, 1987c; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 1996; 2003; 2013a; 2013b; Springate & Christiensen, 2017).
Spencer-Wood’s article in this issue further critiques the intersections of sexism, racism, ethnocentrism, classism, ageism and ableism involved in privileging elite and middle-class healthy white Anglo-American men’s roles, identities and relationships as historically important and culturally normative, while erasing the lived experiences and accomplishments of minorities and women. In one general example, elite and middle-class white male heads of households are commonly said to have built their houses and gardens that were actually built by craftsmen and slaves or waged laborers. Feminist research corrected the previous androcentric focus solely on “men’s power gardens” with research uncovering historical sources identifying gardens with women’s closeness to nature, middle-class and working-class women’s kitchen gardens (Spencer-Wood, 1991a:237; 1999c; 2003), and the important roles of elite white women in designing ornamental gardens (Metheny et al., 1996; McKee, 1996; Weber, 1991; 1996).
To overcome the “either/or” approach, scholars began to consider that men and women operate in spaces where there is often significant overlap, cooperation, or complementarity in the roles of women and men, as well as in the social ideals they were expected to follow, despite the ways in which both primary and secondary historical sources may depict past reality as universally conforming to gender ideologies that legitimate patriarchal hierarchies privileging men and erasing the social agency of women. For instance, archaeological research at utopian communities has found evidence of complementary and cooperative gender roles, identities, and power dynamics, while at the same time the Shakers and some other utopias also practiced stated ideologies of gender segregation (K.McBride, 2010a, b; Spencer-Wood, 2006; Starbuck & Dennis, 2010). Contrary to either/or thinking, the dominant ideology and practice of gender segregation involved complementary and cooperative gender roles. Recognizing that men’s and women’s social spaces, roles, and daily activities overlapped and/or complemented one another reveals that men and women operated in relationships with power dynamics that were much more heterarchical than hierarchical, affording women some measure of power in both domestic and public contexts (Spencer-Wood, 1991a:237–8; 1991b; 1996; 1999b; 1999d; 2003; 2004:248–9; 2007; 2013a:176–80; Stine 1991; Trunzo, forthcoming).
Theorizing heterarchical power dynamics in interpersonal or intergroup relationships of any kind requires recognizing that there are different types and different scales of power that range from Weberian domination that Miller and Tilley (1984:5–8) called “power over” others to what they called “power to” create change, following Giddens’ (1984:14–16) concept of individual agency. Spencer-Wood (1999d:178–0) critiqued the widespread top-down androcentric Weberian view of power only as domination and built on Miller and Tilley’s two types of power, along with Carole Crumley’s (1987) theorizing of heterarchy, to create a more inclusive both/and heterarchical model of multiple intersecting types of powers employed both by individuals and by social groups: dominating “powers over” others, resistant “powers under” others, cooperative “powers with” others, and “powers to” maintain the status quo or create sociocultural change. These powers can operate separately or be combined by both dominant and subordinate groups. For instance, individuals or social groups in different situations can simultaneously wield “powers over” and “powers under” different intersectional individuals in the same or different social groups. Either of these types of powers can be “powers with” a group and/or “powers to” maintain the status quo or create sociocultural change. Spencer-Wood (1999d:179; 2011:22–3) argued that “powers with” others may be the strongest type of “powers to” create cultural change. When power is examined in one-on-one or in small group contexts, power relations are often heterarchical—especially when the parties have skills and/or knowledge that potentially overlap, hold equal value, and require cooperation or can be identified as complementary (K.McBride, 2010a, b; Spector, 1983; Spencer-Wood , 1994b; 2003; 2006; 2013a; Starbuck & Dennis, 2010; Stine, 1991; Trocolli, 1992).
Feminist heterarchical approaches to gendering historical archaeology provide insights into how women as social agents empowered themselves to become cultural brokers in their homes and communities, albeit of different types and varying degrees (Trunzo, forthcoming). In colonial interactions, Native American women used “powers with” European men to become cultural brokers as translators, producers of goods for trade, and as traders (Cantwell & Wall, 2011; Holliman, 2005; Jackson, 1994; McEwan, 1991; Nassaney, 2004; Scott, 1991b), while also creating creolized cultures by incorporating European practices and material culture into their mixed-ethnic homes in ways that maintained indigenous culture and practices to some extent (Deagan, 1973; 1983; Lightfoot, 2005; Woodhouse-Beyer, 1999). African-American women were culture brokers who exerted their social agency to alter Anglo-American foodways (Ferguson, 1991; Franklin, 2001b; Yentsch, 1994). Middle-class white women exerted their social agency to restrict men’s alcohol consumption (Cheney, 1991), to domesticate mining towns with churches and schools (Hardesty, 1994; 2010); and to reform society, including schools/classes (Spencer-Wood, 1987c; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 1996; 2002b; 2003; 2013a; 2019; Springate & Christiensen, 2017).
As urban men’s businesses and work increasingly moved out of their homes and into the public sphere during the nineteenth century, women raised their status by arguing they should control the domestic sphere by materially symbolizing and implementing emergent gender ideologies regarding the role of wives as cultural brokers of taste in consumer choices for performing middle-class gentility or working-class respectability (Clements, 1993; Spencer-Wood, 2013a:179,182; Wall, 1991; Young, 2003:60–1,72,91), the sanctity of the home and motherhood, and the elaboration of domestic roles in the cult of domesticity (Fitts, 1999; Rotman, 2009; Spencer-Wood, 1996; 1999b; 2013a; Wall, 1994; 2000). Predominantly middle-class Anglo-American, but also African-American and immigrant reform women were cultural brokers who created new gender ideologies that naturalized and legitimated the expansion of their domestic sphere to encompass large areas of supposedly masculine, urban public-sphere landscapes by transforming domestic roles into new women’s cooperative domestic-public organizations, institutions and professions for morally mothering society at large. In the municipal housekeeping movement, reform women used their new gender ideologies, organizational skills and “powers with” of moral suasion to gain men’s cooperation in creating reform landscapes and built environments (Spencer-Wood, 1994b; 2002b; 2003), as well as men’s appointments of women to positions in federal agencies, as state legislators and inspectors, and to positions in state and/or municipal institutions and landscapes for recreation, childcare, education, the poor, the insane, and the juvenile and women’s justice systems. In this largest sociocultural transformation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women demonstrated their abilities both in managing homes and families and as public professionals and workers, moving society, culture and public landscapes toward greater gender equality as women demonstrated their important contributions as public citizens prior to attaining suffrage (Spencer-Wood, 1987c; 1994a; 1994b; 1996; 2001; 2013a). In mediating between public and private, women were articulating home and community through intricately nuanced ideologies that empowered women as wives, mothers, household managers and producers, and community organizers (Trunzo, forthcoming). In short, men were most often the legal and business face of their family, but women were social agents managing their households, including household production and sometimes family businesses or working in public occupations or professions, while also serving as moral guardians and sometimes social reformers in the cultural vanguard by articulating their household and their community in a bidirectional manner (Spencer-Wood, 1991b; 2013a).
Intersectionality theory encourages archaeologists to think in terms of the relationship between privilege and power, and to look at what has been left out of accepted historical narratives in terms of where privilege comes from and how it operates in a given time and place to affect a specific individual, household, social group, or community. Intersectionality theory identifies privilege as a function of power; however, one’s degree of privilege is contextually and situationally variable because power is really heterarchical and individuals and groups often have overlapping, cooperative, or complementary roles in society, which means everybody moves in spaces where power often exists in “both/and” rather than “either/or” contexts (Spencer-Wood, 1994a; 1995:129–30, 2003, 2004:110; 2007; 2011:21–2; 2013a; Trunzo, forthcoming). In short, intersectionality focuses archaeological research on uncovering the lived experiences of historically subordinated, ignored, underprivileged, and erased groups through the lens of an agentive heterarchy that exists in spaces where un/underrecognized connections or brokering activities occurred (or could occur) between what seem like highly disparate social entities. Intersectionality augments the dynamism of feminist archaeology and the concern with complexity that Neo-Marxism, post-structuralism, and symbolic archaeology introduced, by adding layers of diversity and acknowledging that no site, no family, no group, no community, and no individual are going to experience life exactly the same way within a single society.
Intersectionality Frameworks used in Articles in this Issue
This Introduction to our special issue entitled “Intersectionality Theory and Research in Historical Archaeology,” has provided an overview of the development of Black feminist intersectionality theory and theorizing and research in historical archaeology about materializations of intersectional identities and powers, which started before intersectionality theory developed but did not use the theory until Franklin (2001a) argued for the new insights to be gained from using Black feminist intersectionality theory in historical archaeology. Articles in this issue have used the concept of intersectionality in a variety of ways to frame research on intersecting identities and oppressions. Different intersectionality frameworks are involved in research on different interacting social dimensions or identities. The articles are organized with the most theoretical ones first, and secondly organized temporally and by topic.
Dawn Rutecki’s article argues for the value of using intersectionality theory to increase understanding of European colonialist oppressions of indigenous people and their negotiations of intercultural identities. Rutecki analyzes how Spanish conquistadors and Roman Catholic missionaries in Spanish Texas exerted interacting oppressions that shaped indigenous colonized Caddo racialized identities, gender performances, and religious conversion and adherence. She further analyzes relationships to power situated in intercultural negotiations of intersectional identities which are essential for interpreting the use and meaning of archaeologically recovered cultural materials.
Suzanne Spencer-Wood’s article develops an innovative intersectionality framework based on her research, her theorizing of intersectional diversity of identities in polythetic social groups interacting with heterarchical powers, and drawing on the development of feminist intersectionality theories. In contrast to Crenshaw’s (1989) finding that Black women are invisible in the intersectionally racist and sexist legal system, Spencer-Wood’s research on historical markers in the Detroit area found that minorities and women are labeled as deviant from the social norm, so they can be disregarded, while the unlabeled dominant group of middle-class and elite, white, healthy Anglo-American men are made invisible and naturalized as normative, universal and representative of the whole society. Spencer-Wood’s research finds that historical markers embody the intersection of racism and sexism in being predominantly about these white men. She undertakes an activist archaeology for social justice by suggesting the inclusion of more intersectional information to begin to address the under-representation of minorities and women and re-enfranchise marginalized groups of their important histories.
Matthew Reeves and Christopher Pasch’s article considers the intersections of gender, race, and generational hierarchies in analyzing how a white widow’s plantation house and landscape expressed her generational domination of her son, subverting the norm of male dominance in the gender hierarchy. Her white racial dominance over her slaves also subverted the gender hierarchy because she dominated her male slaves. Interestingly, this female-dominated eighteenth-century Piedmont Plantation in Virginia was the home of the future President John Madison into his early adulthood.
The article by Kimberly Kasper, Dwight Fryer, Jamie Evans and Claire Norton analyzes intersections of race, gender and sexual identities and oppressions on southern American plantations. The research centers on an enslaved woman who endured the intersectional sexist and racist oppression of rape by her white master and then served his widow, who moved from North Carolina and bought a plantation near Memphis, Tennessee. Documents revealed the brutal treatment of slaves on neighboring plantations, while archaeological evidence excavated at the Dickens plantation shows how captives exerted their social agency to play music and draw or learn to write despite being held in the oppressed condition of chattel slavery.
Broughton Anderson’s article researches the social agency of an enslaved man who bought his and his family’s freedom and the land where they built a home and farmed. This historical archaeological research is unique for Kentucky and is one of the few concerned with an enslaved man who managed to save enough money to free himself and his family, and also buy land to farm. Anderson furthers this research topic by using intersectionality theory to ask “acute questions” about the intersecting oppressive power dynamics of race, gender, and class that shaped the lives of women in this family.
Ayana Flewellen uses a Black feminist theoretical framework to analyze how intersecting oppressive power dynamics of race, gender and class shaped post-emancipation African-American women’s sartorial practices expressed in archaeologically recovered clothing, adornment, and hygiene artifacts from what had been the slave quarters area that became tenant farmer houses on the Levi Jordan Plantation in Brazoria, Texas. The women’s dress and adornment practices are analyzed as aspects of southern Black women’s identity formation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that involved dressing for the types of work they performed and also negotiating intersecting racial, gender, and class ideologies that shaped hegemonic ideas about femininity.
Jennifer Trunzo and Maggie Needham present an intersectional analysis of children’s material culture from the Augusta, Georgia, Arsenal in the mid-nineteenth century, revealing children’s agency in accepting, contesting, or rejecting their parents’ socialization efforts, which were shaped by religious, age, and gender ideologies that were, in turn, shaped by regional cultural ideals. Applying intersectional methodology reveals how a conservative Virginia Episcopalian family in liberal Episcopalian Georgia interacted with the southern cultural conceptualizations of class, gender, and age to affect negotiations of individual identity, personal power, and personal agency between parents and children at the Augusta Arsenal. Imbuing John and Anne Galt’s children with social agency and recognizing the role mothering played in shaping relationships between Anne Galt and her children and between the older Galt daughters and their younger siblings, provides a nuanced analysis of children’s social agency as it materializes in toys and other play objects to reveal the contested nature of childhood socialization in the patriarchal family of the Antebellum South.
Alexandra Jones brings the use of intersectionality theory into the modern practice of archaeology. She discusses Archaeology in the Community (AITC), a pioneering urban-based archaeology organization that provides after-school science education in archaeology to marginalized youth who are victims of our unequal education system and would not be exposed to archaeology through their formal educational institutions. AITC leverages unique models of intersectionality that positively impact and resonate with urban, socioeconomically challenged students of color in the Washington, DC metropolitan area.
Conclusion
Maria Franklin (2001a) brought Black feminist intersectionality theory from critical and feminist legal studies into historical archaeology, and it has been applied so far predominantly to analyze intersections of racism and sexism connected with intersectional identities of race, gender and class in African diaspora archaeology in America (Battle-Baptiste, 2011; Brandon, 2004; Flewellen, 2017; Franklin, 2001b, 2004; González-Tennant, 2018; Morris, 2017). Articles in this issue further use intersectionality theory in research on more intersecting oppressions connected to intersecting roles, identities, relationships and power dynamics experienced by (1) indigenous women and men interacting with Europeans in colonization processes, (2) African-American women and men in slavery and freedom interacting with whites, and (3) white children’s social agency in interacting with the generational power of parents. In addition, two articles use archaeology for publicly visible social justice activism to connect modern marginalized African-American youth, minorities and women with their important histories. All of the articles work for social justice by recovering evidence of lived experiences of erased or marginalized people with intersectional identities that have been lost to history.
Intersectionality theory might lead historical archaeologists to further unpack intersecting oppressions and umbrella concepts such as “gender,” “sexuality,” “class,” “ethnicity” or “race” through considering how factors such as religious affiliation, profession/occupation, citizenship status, regional cultures, physical health and ability, mental health, intellectual ability, educational levels, and age can play major roles in negotiating individual or group identities and social acceptance, if researchers can find a way to operationalize these variables. One way to operationalize such intersectional research in archaeology is exemplified by Spencer-Wood’s (1999a, 2010a) research on interactions among religion, ethnicity, class, gender and age in the built environments on landscapes of the Jewish diaspora in the Greater Boston area.
Vivian May (2014) notes that intersectionality theory effectively acknowledges that multiple historical realities can exist in the same space and it directs research toward uncovering the levels of multivocality that existed in the past in order to bring to the forefront the identities and power dynamics that hegemonic narratives erased and exposes how that hegemony continues to operate today. Feminist intersectional theorizing and research in historical archaeology expands beyond Crenshaw’s intersectionality theory. Spencer-Wood’s article expands Crenshaw’s critique of the either/or opposition between gender and race in anti-discrimination law, to make a broader critique of either/or structural constructions of social identities in oppositional dichotomies, and instead proposes feminist inclusive both/and constructions of social identities in continuums, including gender, race, sexuality, class, age, etc. Intersectional identities are abstractly represented as a contextually and situationally changing intersection point among all the continuums. Spencer-Wood’s article also advances feminist inclusive both/and theorizing of intersectional power dynamics with her heterarchical framework of multiple interacting powers.
The other articles in this issue research a heterarchy of powers exerted by diverse intersectional identities. Rutecki’s article brings to light intercultural identities as a strategy to negotiate Spanish colonial oppressions; Kasper et al. find archaeological evidence of enslaved men and women’s social agency despite the documented cruelty of slavery, including sexual assault; Anderson pioneers researching self-emancipation by an enslaved family and the freed women’s negotiations of the racist and sexist white supremacist culture; Flewellen examines how women’s clothing was involved in the formation of post-emancipation African-American identities that negotiated intersecting ideologies of femininity; Reeves and Pasch pioneer in researching how generational and racial power dynamics can subvert the patriarchal gender hierarchy; Trunzo and Needham research the often-overlooked social agency of children; and Jones‘s archaeology program empowers African-American youth with knowledge of their history. Articles in this special issue make significant contributions to advancing intersectionality theorizing and research in historical archaeology.
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Spencer-Wood, S.M., Trunzo, J.M.C. Introduction to Archaeologies Special Issue on Intersectionality Theory and Research in Historical Archaeology. Arch 18, 1–44 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11759-022-09442-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11759-022-09442-5