Abstract
This chapter argues that intersectionality is both a way of understanding and a tool for social transformation created by and for women of color. Beginning in the mid-1800s, it takes up the issues of how we might think about intersectionality as a critical theory and an emergent field of study. The chapter poses the following questions: what are the political implications of boundary-drawing while preserving feminist commitments to freedom and gender equality and what does intersectionality’s complex evolution tells us about power, feminism’s fundamental unit of analysis? The chapter calls for feminist scholars’ stewardship of this important contribution of Women’s & Gender Studies.
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Notes
- 1.
Following Iris Marion Young (1997) and her engagement with Sartre, I nevertheless am able to build intersectionality further by adding certain aspects from DuBois to its liberatory aims.
- 2.
Along with other articles Nieto-Gómez’s landmark “La Feminista” was reprinted in Alma Garcia’s anthology Chicana Feminist Thought (1974/1997).
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Hancock Alfaro, AM. (2020). Stewardship of Intersectionality: A Complex Proposition. In: Fenstermaker, S., Stewart, A.J. (eds) Gender, Considered. Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48501-6_15
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