Keywords

1 Introduction: Context and Objectives of the Proposal

In 2000, Patricia Hill Collins reissued Black Feminist Thought, a work in which this African-American sociologist traces the contours of the particular forms of knowledge of black women in the United States. In this work, the author describes the difficulties of researching the “subjugated knowledge” of these women with the standard tools of the social sciences (2000: 252). Collins refers specifically to the study of the point of view of African-American women and their “alternative” practices of development and validation of knowledge. In a different context, our research shares that author’s concerns about the absences and exclusions that the tools that we use reproduce in our research. Furthermore, these exclusions hinder emancipatory projects committed to inclusive democratic deepening oriented toward social justice. The premise guiding this approach is that “thinking domination from a dominated place” requires experimenting with complex tools (Ripio, 2019: 30). In the light of critical epistemologies, this invitation to reflexivity helps us understand that the tools—theories, methods, and concepts—that we use to think are themselves traversed by relations of domination. Black Feminist Thought, along with other works written from the “epistemic resistance” (Anzaldúa, 1987; Lorde, 1988; Harding, 1993; Quijano, 2000; Tuana, 2006; Lugones, 2008; Cabnal, 2010; Bidaseca, 2011; Ciriza, 2015), are examples of this call to place power at the center of our analyses and break “from past discriminatory practices that have served to rationalize and buttress systemic harm and inequality” (May, 2015: 12).

In the context of studies on participatory and deliberative democracy, several feminist thinkers have provided evidence as to the exclusionary nature of the normative genesis and practical application of proposals for democratic deepening. Critics have pointed out different ways in which these frameworks are traversed by relations of domination and epistemic power which, as Iris Marion Young (2000) intuited, reproduce exclusionary procedures even within different projects aimed at transformation and empowerment. Along these lines, we agree with Jone Martínez-Palacios when she states that democratic innovations are gendered, “but they are also traversed by systems structures of race, age, and a social class.” Mechanisms for deepening democracy are not decoupled from the social position occupied by the people producing them, or the dominant logics that have shaped the categories with which we think the world (Martínez-Palacios, 2017: 54). Intersectionality includes the idea that, in a given context, inequality is experienced and resisted at the intersection of gender, class, origin, race, age, language, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, and/or empowerment, among other factors. Together with the authors cited above, for us a viewpoint from intersectionality also represents an input to enhance reflexive interventions with respect to the relations of domination inscribed on our way of approaching social reality and contribute to the creation of more inclusive, egalitarian, and fair democracies. The ideas in this chapter are indebted to and oriented by the dialogue between democratic deepening and intersectionality explored in the monographs coordinated by Jone Martínez-Palacios and Patricia Martínez (2017) and Martínez-García and Martínez-Palacios (2019). In these, the authors inquire as to the possibilities of dialogue between democratic deepening and intersectionality, two frameworks seldom explored together but “closely related in their interest in nurturing social justice projects” (Martínez-Palacios & Martínez-García, 2017: 9). This proposal goes beyond the study of deliberative and participatory models of democracy from feminist perspectives. In the light cast by the “interpretive tool” of intersectionality (ibid.: 11), we are confronted by the strengths and limitations of the very analytical lenses from which we aspire to deepen democracy in inclusive terms (Martínez-Palacios, 2016). This reflection offers elements to deepen democracy in inclusive terms (Martínez-Palacios, 2016).

This chapter contributes to the framework proposed by Martínez-Palacios and Martínez-García and continues to explore different angles in these dialogues. As is Collins, we are convinced that intersectionality and democracy “are both aspirational social justice projects that take form through problem-solving and praxis” (2017: 21). Taking up the baton from Collins, this chapter explores some uses to which we have applied intersectionality in our own research and investigates the scope of intersectional praxis in the elaboration of knowledge. Specifically, the chapter aims to describe intersectionality as an “analytical sensibility” (Cho et al., 2013: 795). This can be useful for the development of knowledge that contributes to the design, implementation, and development of reflexive democratic deepening processes which take into account the complexity with which the relations of domination and privilege that we intend to deactivate are interwoven. As has already been noted, we explore this idea on the basis of the practical uses we have made of intersectionality in two of our own research projects.

The first, Unveiling Oppressions and Resistances of Women in Zumarraga (Basque Country): An intersectional analysis in order to deepen democracy in terms of social justice (hereinafter, Unveiling Oppressions), is a work that analyzes the logic of oppression and resistance of women in the town of Zumarraga (Basque Country) in a context of deindustrialization (Ahedo & Ureta, 2019).Footnote 1 The second, Stigma at the service of power: Domination and resistance from intersectionality (hereinafter, Stigma), addresses literature and public action around stigmatization processes of and from subordinate agents (Del Hoyo, 2019).Footnote 2 While focused on very different themes, these research projects serve as inputs to reflect on the analytical use of intersectionality and, more specifically, on the potential that this framework has to shake up the exclusions on which some approaches to privilege and oppression are founded and reproduced. In short, what we present here are two ways of mobilizing intersectional tools, through which we offer ideas for those who, from a commitment to social justice, aspire to design, implement, and produce knowledge from analytical tools that facilitate the promotion of more inclusive processes of democratic deepening.

We are aware that this project has been carried out in a context of “cognitive capitalism” (Montenegro et al., 2015) and of the “commodification of knowledge” (Expósito, 2007; Virno, 2003). Critical research in this context brings us uncomfortably close to political and academic tendencies to trivialize intersectionality, turning it into a in a “sweetened and sterilized” version of feminist “best practice” (Bilge, 2016: 85). Faced with the popularization of intersectionality as a “fast-traveling theory” (Knapp, 2005) or a “catch-all” notion (Carbin & Edenheim, 2013), the approach to intersectional praxis that we describe in this chapter tries to avoid stopping the mere description of crossroads. It confronts an inertia toward hypervisualization of abstract discourses around power, which can deactivate the transformative political potential of intersectionality (Collins, 2017: 20). The institutionalized forms that demand for democratic deepening have adopted can be evaluated using similar parameters. The practical application of participatory models has emerged “from very different fronts” (Ahedo & Ibarra, 2007: 37) and has found its expression in the emancipatory discourses and transformative practices produced in Latin America. In this context, critics identify a dynamic of co-option by the Global North, which turns citizen participation into a neoliberal product at the service of privilege (Martínez-Palacios, 2021). Therefore, when authors such as Collins and Bilge (2016) refocus on the dimension of social justice when working on the heuristic of intersectionality and its relationship with democratic deepening, this is to recover its radical character, respecting its genealogy and resisting attempts to place their contributions “at the service of neoliberal agendas” (Collins & Bilge, 2016: 63–87; Collins, 2017; Fassa, 2016; Bilge, 2013, 2014, Mohanty, 2013). The two research projects that we describe in this chapter share these concerns and try to exemplify, in different ways, possible means of working to mobilize intersectionality beyond the intersection, based on a commitment to a project of democratic deepening that does not exclude its radical, inclusive character and commitment to social justice.

The chapter is organized as follows. The first section describes an approach to intersectionality as an analytical sensibility that deploys a particular interpretive framework. Analytically, this interpretive framework is applied by means of different theoretical, methodological, and epistemological tools and approaches, which we illustrate through two research projects. We go deeper into these projects in second and third sections of the chapter. The text concludes with some ideas that emerge from these dialogues.

2 Beyond the Intersection: Intersectionality as an Analytical Sensibility Oriented to Praxis and Social Justice

The “coining narratives” (Collins & Bilge, 2016: 81; Collins, 2019: 123) or the recognized narratives of intersectionality locate its genealogy in Black Feminisms, specifically the moment in which Kimberlé Crenshaw proposes the metaphor of intersection (1989) to shine a light on the way in which the diversity of Afro-American women embodied a heterogeneity of experiences based on gender and race oppression. Thus, Crenshaw brought into public consciousness the complexity of African-American women’s experiences of oppression (Collins & Bilge, 2016: 65). She pointed out that the inequalities they faced could not be understood or resolved from monistic frameworks that thought subordination from a single category of social fracture (Crenshaw, 1989: 140, 1991). This initial contribution has been the subject of a wide range of uses, approaches, and reviews that have emphasized the complexity and relationality of inequalities from different approaches and theoretical sensitivities (vid. Bilge, 2010; May, 2015; Carasthasis, 2016; Hancock, 2016; Collins & Bilge, 2016; Collins, 2019).

In this context, American scholars Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall reflect on the institutionalized forms that intersectionality takes in academic production and lay out an approach to intersectionality as a “heuristic tool” that captures “contextual dynamics of power” (2013: 786–8). From this point of view, intersectionality represents an “analytic disposition, a way of thinking about and conducting analyses” where “what makes an analysis intersectional is not its use of the term ‘intersectionality’, (…) [but] its adoption of an intersectional way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power” (ibid.: 795, emphasis added). We find this approach to intersectionality to be a suggestive starting point for putting into practice epistemological and methodological strategies that favor an intersectional perspective in our research. This objective implies contextualizing intersectionality as a praxis that emerges from knowledges for resistance which in turn arise from the activist and intellectual trajectories of women located, depending on the context, at the intersections of classism, sexism, racism, and imperialism. It demands a recognition of the value of, gives voice to, and legitimizes those subjugated knowledges frequently invalidated and made invisible (Collins, 1998). Along the same lines as Vivian M. May, we understand that from the experiences of oppression and resistance that emanate from these intersections, intersectionality represents not only an intersection but also “a critique of a range of established ideas, normative political strategies, and ingrained habits of mind that have long impeded both feminist and anti-racist thought and politics” (May, 2015: viii). To this list we would add all projects committed to deepening democracy in terms of social justice. In the context of this chapter, an intersectional way of thinking materializes this approach to intersectionality as a critical and reflexive perspective that both permits and demands a confrontation of the unjust distortions generated by existing tools which are at the service of power. In short, we maintain that thinking not only from intersectionality but engaging in an intersectional way of thinking implies a commitment to building more just forms of knowledge.

In the search for tools to put intersectional ways of thinking into practice, we take as a starting point the “core constructs” and the “guiding premises” that Collins (2019) emphasizes in her approach to the intersectional interpretive framework.

Taken together, these core constructs and guiding premises “constitute building blocks” for all critical inquiry or practice informed by intersectionality (2019: 45). Relationality, power, social inequality, context, complexity, and social justice are dimensions that appear throughout investigations that deploy intersectionality, either as research topics or as methodological premises (ibid.: 44). These take on different forms and unique meanings in works that adopt an intersectional perspective. They are dimensions that refine our analyses to dismantle epistemic violence, endowing power, presence, and voice to experiences traditionally relegated to alterity and otherness. In parallel, the guiding premises of intersectionality function as axiomatic principles shared by works that deploy an intersectional perspective. Understanding intersectionality as a “roadmap for discovery” (Collins & Bilge, 2016: viii), these ideas constitute reference points followed in a journey of critical inquiry. In the context of our research, the guiding premises and core constructs take into account the “multifaceted” nature of intersectionality and its “correlated, interconnected and concurrent qualities” (May, 2015: 33). Furthermore, these dimensions are mobilized by means of different theoretical approaches, methodological strategies, and analytical tools in the two research projects that we discuss in this chapter.

In the specific case of our research, Unveiling Oppressions and Stigma approach the intersectional interpretive framework by deploying a relational approach to inequalities and social reality, on the one hand, and a perspective on power from resistance, on the other. Analytically, this is specified in the following tools and approaches:

  1. 1.

    The heuristic of the intersection or a non-additive perspective on the experience of intersectional inequalities. The “basic heuristic” (Collins & Bilge, 2016: 194) of intersectionality addresses the relationality of structures of subordination in a given context. Matrix thinking (May, 2015) materializes the relationality of structures of inequality and also of social problems.

  2. 2.

    An approach that draws attention to the productive aspects of power, which recognizes not only domination but also the practices of resistance that arise to confront it. The dual ontology of power (Dhamoon, 2010; Baca Zinn & Thornton Dill, 1996) is oriented to praxis. It is integral to the orientation toward transformation and social justice of the “intellectual traditions” (Hancock, 2016) that share an intersectional perspective.

  3. 3.

    A concern about the epistemic power dynamics that control access to and expulsion from institutionalized fields of knowledge. This includes paying attention to the questions raised through practices of resistance that emerge in this area, which give voice to silenced experiences and invisibilized conflicts.

  4. 4.

    The heuristic of the domains of power (Collins, 2000, 2017; Collins & Bilge, 2016) as a tool “to examine the organization of power relations” in operation around a specific problem in a given context (Collins, 2017: 26). The domains encompass four sites in social reality in which power operates, weaving threads of resistance. These include the domains of structural, disciplinary, cultural, and interpersonal power.

  5. 5.

    Community politics as an analytical framework to approach dynamics of resistance. For Collins, the community constitutes the epicenter of both the elaboration of knowledges and the political action of groups subordinated by an intersection of oppressions (1998, 2000). It is a central place “for understanding the political” or to understand the experience of oppression and mobilizing action (Collins, 2017: 27–8).

Below we show the particular meaning that some of these tools and approaches take on in the works Unveiling Oppressions and Stigma in more detail.

3 The Women of Zumarraga: An Intersectional Approach Shed Light on Invisibilized Conflict and Resistance

Deploying an intersectional perspective means taking on the complexity and dynamism of interwoven systems of power. These intersect to generate dynamics of oppression and resistance that mono-categorical approaches do not capture. To this end, the research Unveiling Oppressions by Igor Ahedo and Miriam Ureta (2019) mobilizes an intersectional interpretive framework in a diagnosis of the problems faced by the women of Zumarraga. This diagnosis keeps in sight a commitment to deepening democracy in terms of social justice. How? Its objective is to deepen democracy in terms of social justice, by providing a complex view of power that can legitimize knowledge and experiences (previously invisibilized) of oppression and resistance, understanding absences to demand presences. Unveiling Oppressions is committed to the assumption that power is not only monopolized by privileged groups but that it is also empowering (Dhamoon, 2010: 239; Collins, 2017: 44).

Engaging in an ontology of dual power in Revealing Oppressions brings us closer to the third premise of the intersectional interpretive framework (cf. Table 1) and takes on a feminist epistemological perspective. Through the generation of narratives less impacted by the biases produced by sexist, racist, or classist views (Collins, 2000: 221–228), epistemic power that controls access to and expulsion from institutionalized fields of knowledge is resisted. Knowledge is democratized through the epistemic recognition of local women from the town of Zumarraga. This occurs when these women make the oppressions and resistance they experience visible, as they have a much more incisive vision of the ways in which power is imposed on them (Guzmán & Pérez, 2005: 116). Therefore, the epistemological dimension of the intersectional perspective deployed in Unveiling Oppressions places the experiences of those who suffer exclusion at the center (Martínez-Palacios, 2017: 44), and the knowledge generated by these “testimonial authorities” is validated (Collins, 2019: 131–142). The elaboration of knowledge is democratized by mobilizing oppositional knowledge (Collins, 1998, 2000).

Table 1 The interpretive framework of intersectionality through its “core constructs” and “guiding premises”
Full size table

From this epistemological context, the domains of structural and disciplinary power and community politics have offered possibilities in terms of being able to advance in terms of the illumination of dynamics of oppression and resistance of some women from Zumarraga. Approaching structural power as that which regulates public policies organized by institutions (Collins, 2017: 26) implies understanding public policies not only as the actions of public institutions but also as non-decision processes (Dye, 1984: 3) and their causes (Hoogwood & Gunn, 1984: 21; Walt, 1994: 41; Platero et al., 2014: 162). It is in this sense that the complexity of intersectional analysis from the structural domain of power can illuminate these possible deliberate “absences” and forms of the exercise of power. Complementing this, the idea of the structural domain of power is closely related to the capacity of different social groups to access official public decision-making spaces, as subjectivities and practices of groups that represent difference and are subordinate can be excluded (Young, 2000: 250–251).

Therefore, intersectional analysis from the structural domain of power facilitates a democratization of knowledge in the sense that it endows epistemic power to the subjugated experiences of the women of Zumarraga. This makes it possible to shed light on the exclusions and expulsions that are reproduced in the official public spaces and to identify more precisely how the perspectives of the people most affected by social problems are “silenced” (Collins, 2017: 23). Thus, in a context of a shortage of employment and social resources, from the intersection of gender and class oppressions, complex realities emerge in which working women find themselves in a labor market that relegates them to the private sphere. They endure feminized, precarious, and poorly paid jobs, in many cases receiving cash wages under the table. This in turn excludes them from the social security system and makes them ineligible for unemployment benefits. These factors only increase the burdens placed on women who have to reconcile paid work with unpaid care work at home. This domestic labor can progressively trap women the “domestic sphere” generating “discomfort” and “suffering” produced by conflicts around work hours and the impossibility of integrating into the social life of the municipality.

If we add a further layer of complexity and interweave the power systems of gender, class, and race, the experiences faced by racialized working women are further compounded. For these women, care work is almost their only option for subsistence. This produces a paradox: taking on this type of work to earn the minimum wage, they cannot dedicate time/space to raising their own children. Some restrictions intersect with constraints inherent to being an immigrant: linguistic difficulties and difficulties due to irregular migration status and also to not having the emotional support that the presence of a family implies. This tangle of oppressions keeps these women “chained” to care work and also generates progressive exclusions and expulsions from the official public spaces. This makes it difficult for their experiences to be reflected in the design and implementation of public policies and perpetuates their exclusion from other sectors of the labor market.

Different life experiences coexist in the municipality at a complex intersection in which the power systems of gender, class, and age and mobility produce multidimensional experiences of oppression. Elderly women, for example, can be trapped in the private sphere, shamed by their inability to pay even the bills for basic products and services. This leads them to hide their experiences of oppression. These cases are compounded by the fact that many of these women have health or mobility problems. Those women who do not live near the center find in urban distances an added physical and symbolic barrier that separates them from public institutions. The exclusion or expulsion of all these women from official public spaces where social problems are identified has the consequence of unleashing a logic of misunderstanding and stigmatization.

Disciplinary power becomes manifest in the in groups of low-skilled unemployed women. This collective is subject to feelings of failure that materialize in a negative self-perception and low expectations for their futures. This is accompanied by processes of (self)censorship and surveillance by women of each other in a context of competition for scarce resources—especially employment and social assistance. This competitive dynamic is amplified in the case of racialized working women. It plays a role in the configuration a discursive construction of “others,” a group subject to a greater degree of suspicion. Women in this group are accused of receiving more social assistance on the assumption that they have a greater number of children. This assumption reproduces gender stereotypes that label these women as caregivers. In this context, the control and vigilance of racialized women are especially accentuated and disciplinary power translates into prejudice. The experiences of racialized, older, and working women all feature disciplinary power as surveillance. This impedes processes of deepening democracy in terms of social justice because, once again, all those people who do not fulfill the communicative and corporal norms of conduct that are supposedly universal are excluded/expelled from political decision-making processes (Pateman, 1970: 42).

Through the fields of structural and disciplinary power, we have thrown some light on the complex experiences of oppression of women in Zumarraga. The framework of community proposed by Collins now allows us to focus on logics of resistance, endowing these women’s sub-alternized experiences with epistemic power. Practices of resistance include the following: With respect to work, many women are investing energy and time in ongoing education for adults in order to expand their options. These training processes have implications in terms of the community: spaces are created in which to share experiences, thus facilitating the development of empathy between the women participating. Whenever personal and collective empowerment processes are unleashed, they have a positive impact on the community, on occasions even overcoming entrenched distrust.

When the axes of gender and class intersect with that of race, these types of initiatives also promote language acquirement—mainly of Spanish—and familiarization with community traditions. This provides immigrant women with tools for integration. Another interesting group that emerges at the intersection of gender, class, and age is that of mothers with children in school. In this context educational centers also function as a brokerage and multicultural spaces that build community. Collins (2017) understands community as a framework for understanding political behavior. From this perspective, we have observed tendencies to weave together mechanisms of resistance based on mutual support and collective self-organization around points of conflict, which triggers processes of politicization. Thus, various women are advocating for the creation of spaces that are not segregated along the lines of origin or gender, such as a school for parents.

An intersectional framework was deployed to carry out the Unveiling Oppressions research. This is demonstrated in the testimonial authority of sub-alternized voices, the heuristic of the domains of power and community politics being understood as places from which to access experiences of oppression and resistances. Thus, from a complex viewpoint, this work sheds light on experiences that previously remained in the dark: where before there were “absences,” “presences” are made visible. In this sense, Unveiling Oppressions brings into the spotlight the emancipatory possibilities of the resistance strategies that these women mobilize. It does this from a critical epistemological position—feminist standpoint theory—which leads to a process of knowledge elaboration that recognizes and prioritizes the lived experience of various women from Zumarraga. It is also in this sense that Unveiling Oppressions shows its strength with respect to the idea of democratic deepening in terms of social justice. It gives epistemic power to the women of Zumarraga intersected by systems of power, makes their sub-alternized experiences visible, grants testimonial authority to their narratives of resistance on their own terms, and recognizes their processes to advance toward social justice. It proposes a diagnosis as a starting point for deepening democracy in Zumarraga.

In a similar vein, Stigma shares a concern for the particular knowledge that characterizes modern forms of knowing and the relationship between these and intersectional power dynamics. Through an intersectional interpretive framework, Stigma problematizes these dynamics with the aim of rethinking stigma and contributing to its reconceptualization. The next section goes into detail on this point.

4 Stigma: An Intersectional Approach to Reveal the Architecture of Social Stigmatization

In relation to processes of democratic deepening, several authors agree that an ever-greater effort is being made by generalist theories to “get into the detail of diversity.” Platero Mendez and Martínez-Palacios capture this idea with the premise “when they enter, we all enter” (Platero & Martínez-Palacios, 2018: 212–218). Reflecting on this premise, however, raises further issues. The concept of “entry” demands that we ask ourselves, as a first step, which norms and devices constitute and make intelligible these “other” categories. Thus, the premise comes to imply a commitment to unraveling the complex forms that structure relations of domination. Thus, in this work we approach the expulsions of those abject and despised subjects whose exclusion seems to be (re)produced and is, therefore, naturalized, through “daily habits” and “nervousness and rejection” (Young, 2000: 210). We are referring here to social stigma and the subjects traversed by it.

In his now classic work, the American sociologist Erving Goffman defined stigma as “a deeply discrediting attribute” that turns its “owner” into someone “different from others (...) in someone less desirable for interaction” (2012: 13). More than half a century has passed since the publication of his work. Despite the fact that “there has been an explosive growth of research and theorizing about stigma” (Hinshaw, 2009: 25; Link & Phelan, 2001: 363), it cannot truly be said that the general ideas around stigma in sociology have notably advanced since Goffman’s intervention (Scambler, 2004: 29, original italics). In the context of cognitive capitalism mentioned above, stigma has been reduced to a “catch-all” notion due to a conceptualization that is “individualistic, ahistorical and politically anesthetized” (Tyler, 2018a: 746). Faced with this, there have been multiple voices that have declared the urgency of reconceptualizing stigma from critical positions. These embrace the challenge to produce knowledges that distance themselves from the “willful ignorance” of frameworks that are adjusted to and reproduce the status quo (May, 2015: 190; vid. Oliver, 1990; Parker & Aggleton, 2003; Farrugia, 2009; Tyler & Slater, 2018; Tyler, 2020). In parallel to these criticisms, we are also witnessing a proliferation of political demands and social movements emerging from subjects traversed by social stigmatization. The emergence of these “voices of resistance” in public space pushes us toward the abandonment of knowledges that have naturalized and normalized stigmatic experience and practice, systematically ignoring its underlying basis (Tyler, 2014: 2). It is in this context that we have accepted the invitation to think and revindicate stigmatized subjects’ capacity for agency. Beyond this, we also recognize the analytical potential that rethinking stigma, and reconceptualizing and politicizing it from an intersectional framework, has for all those people committed to social justice.

There are many authors who understand not just Goffman’s work but the general hegemonic position of the socio-cognitive approach as factors which explain the decline in analytical use of stigma (Link & Phelan, 2001; Parker & Aggleton, 2003; Tyler, 2018a, b). In this context, we identify a need for a reading of stigma as a field of study that is not abstracted from the social and political conjunctures through which process of institutionalization of those particular knowledges that come to occupy the center takes place. In this sense, an intersectional project offers useful tools to problematize this and delve into its complexity. In the case of social stigma, if the norms that govern a given “research community” end up determining its intellectual production (Collins, 2019: 127; May, 2015), the hegemonic position of a socio-cognitive approach and the promotion of empirical experimental modes of research operate and react as elements of epistemic power. These elements, based on the legitimation of a narrow set of ways of studying and conceptualizing stigma, reproduce and sustain inequality within the framework of a discipline whose position as a cultural apparatus sometimes works at the service of power (vid. Ibáñez, 1990; Ovejero, 1999; Pons, 2008; Parker, 2010).

Beyond this critique of hegemonic knowledges, intersectionality also invites us to question even those works that, distancing themselves from uncritical and atomistic approaches that naturalize stigma and point to it as part of the human cognitive endowment, embrace critical perspectives. This is because epistemic power relations run through the whole of knowledge, even through critical knowledge projects (Collins, 2019: 126). We are referring here to research receptive to a recognition of the centrality of power and which, resultantly, theorizes stigma in relation to the broader process of social discrimination (vid. Link & Phelan, 2001). In this sense, in opposition to those “postulates that reduce political power to oppression and locate power exclusively in privileged social locations” (ibid.), an intersectional project sees power as productive logic and reminds us that “one is never just privileged or oppressed” (ibid.). In doing so, it reads stigma from a position that takes as given that “where there is power, there is also resistance” (Foucault, 2019: 88), which allows us to transcend frameworks that reduce the agency of stigmatized subjects to the defensive management of stigmatization as a private and individual experience (Siegel et al., 1998) and to explore the possibility of transgressing and resisting from otherness (Bhabha, 2002: 92).

However, an intersectional project warns us of another factor: the fact that the experience of stigma is not universal (Tyler & Slater, 2018). In fact, rejection, the central experience around which stigma is structured, is not distributed equally. This is because “people’s lives and the organization of power in a given society are better understood as being shaped not by single axis of social division, be it race or gender or class, but by many axes that work together and influence each other” (Collins & Bilge, 2016: 2). The non-additive perspective integral to an intersectional approach is part of the heuristic of intersection that we mentioned above. It dispenses with the dominant logic of thinking about power in general, and stigma in particular, rejecting its cumulative explanations (see Jones et al., 1984; Crocker et al., 1998; Link & Phelan, 2001; Panchakis et al., 2018). Intersectionality, then, shows us that these “othered” and stigmatized figures are positioned in terms of class, race, gender, and sexuality. They are the whore, the junkie, the madman, or the AIDS infected, all figures produced in and from a concrete matrix of power.

In this sense, a reconceptualization of the stigma informed by an intersectional project, but one which also draws on works that allude to its long criminal genealogy (Tyler, 2018b), leads us to think of stigma as a tool of neoliberal governance that, directed toward the discipline and punishment of certain populations, is instituted as a product and vehicle of neoliberal dynamics of government (Tyler & Slater, 2018: 723). It is imperative to deactivate this apparatus in the interests of moving toward more just and democratic societies. This understanding permits a reinterpretation of stigma. As opposed to understandings which end up naturalizing stigma, we understand it as something more than an individual cognitive response subject to emotional and/or perceptual components that trigger complex forms of domination (Stangor & Crandall, 2000; Link & Phelan, 2001; Phelan et al., 2008). Beyond this, it responds to a historical process of consensual production of aversion based on the normative standards of behavior within the framework of a technology of power, which aims at the control and regulation of life (Foucault, 2001).

On the basis of the above, we see how an intersectional project allows us to develop alternative forms of knowledge that divert attention from those particular knowledges that (re)produce and legitimize the social order. Given this, a reading of stigma that tries to distance itself from the hegemonic individualistic gaze of the socio-cognitive approach and that mobilizes a conceptualization informed by productive and matrix thinking on power demands the implementation of useful analytical tools. Moreover, these tools must be accompanied by a clear commitment to generate socially transformative spaces and to deactivate systems of domination (Montenegro et al., 2015: 1835). It is along these lines that Collins, in the final lines of her work Black Feminist Thought, asks: “How does one develop a politics of empowerment without understanding how power is organized and operates?” (2000: 274). It is not enough to think about what stigma is, but we must pay attention to what stigma does, how it does it, and more specifically, the strategies to confront it mobilized by those whose lives are affected by it. There is therefore an urgent need to expose the complex architecture of social stigmatization with an analytical tool that breaks with perspectives anchored in passivity, victimhood, or possibilities of handling stigma as an individual and private experience. This would allow us to “stimulate dialogues about empowerment” (Collins, 2000: 276). In short, we need tools that make it evident that the achievement of more just and democratic societies will not be possible without deactivating the stigmatic structures that traverse the experiences of stigmatized subjects.

Unveiling Oppressions applied the heuristic of the domains of power to identify the complexity with which the oppressions affecting the women of Zumarraga are structured. Stigma uses the same approach with the aim of tracking the processes of (re)production of stigma. In both cases this was motivated by a conviction that understanding the complexity of absences allows us to demand and structure strategies aimed at achieving presences. In this way, an intersectional reading of stigma based on the domains tool implies asking ourselves about those discourses, practices, and institutions through which social stigmatization is organized, managed, justified, and subjectified in a concrete spatial and temporal context. Furthermore, it is also a means to understand how strategies to confront stigma are founded transversally across all domains (Collins, 2017: 27).

Although stigma acts on bodies and is materialized as a corporealized individual response motivated by an aversive perception and/or emotion (Stangor & Crandall, 2000), an intersectional project allows us to adopt the principle, as Sara Ahmed suggests, that “emotions show us how power shapes the very surface of bodies,” so we must understand them “not as psychological dispositions, but as investments in social norms” (Ahmed, 2004: 56). In this sense, a reconceptualization of stigma, informed by an intersectional project and based on the domains tool, allows us to unravel how, in addition to becoming a set of practices aimed at controlling and punishing certain populations, stigma has a strategic function. This function meshes with the political rationality of a power whose functioning stigma conveys. This idea becomes more relevant as we tighten our focus on specific forms of stigmatization, such as the so-called “whore stigma” or the stigma attached to the practice of prostitution (Pheterson, 1993).

Taking the framework of cities in the Spanish state as an analytical example, the daily practice of stigma that emerges is of a need for distance (interpersonal dominance). A study that mobilizes the domains tool and that, therefore, addresses legislative products, public policies, formal and informal means for applying sanctions, discursive frameworks, and daily interactions that occur within the framework of a city facilitates a deeper analysis. It sees that stigma attached to prostitution revolves around a series of discourses and images that only serve to justify the supposed dangerousness of those racialized women who practice prostitution on public roads toward the normal order of cities (hegemonic/cultural domain). Discourses around public safety and order subsumed under the ideal of civility as part of neoliberal rhetoric identify those who practice prostitution in public spaces as polluting and uncivil figures, that is, figures of aversion. They are therefore read as a danger to the desirable collective standards of maintaining safety and order. This understanding can be felt, for example, not only in the various ordinances referring to public space and/or citizen safety, which are the established guarantors of a quiet, safe, accessible public space optimized for use in accordance with civic values, penalizing the exercise of prostitution (structural domain), but also in the development of a formal administrative-police system of sanctions that, in turn, is sustained by informal mechanisms of community control within the framework of which those of us who inhabit a space emerge as guarantors of public order (disciplinary domain).

As we have stated, demanding and contributing to the inclusion of populations traversed by stigma and, subsequently, the deactivation of the relations of domination and privilege that sustain their marginalization, requires, among other things, an understanding of the complex rational which structures absences and exclusions. For this reason, we argue that a study based on structured thinking and a productive reading of power informed by an intersectional approach, has allowed us to suggest that stigma, beyond an individual “rejection reaction” derived from social categorization processes (Fiske, 1998: 357), is erected as a normative apparatus of governance by dehumanization, configured within a concrete “matrix of domination” (Collins, 2017), whose objective is to organize life at the service of the neoliberal dynamics of government (Tyler & Slater, 2018; Tyler, 2020). Intersectional tools thus allow us to add complexity to our reading of “rejection,” by showing the orchestrated and, as such, political nature of the aversion that underlies stigma. In this sense, intersectionality invites us to use complex analysis tools to approach equally complex realities. This is not a question of scholarly taste, but, fundamentally, because naming and making visible ways in which the life experiences of those who occupy the margins are structured are essential steps in deactivating the logics and inertias that reproduce domination. This is also relevant in negotiating the frameworks of projects committed to social justice and democratic deepening.

5 By Way of Conclusion: Intersectionality as a Perspective in Under Construction

The investigations with which we have dialogued in this chapter have responded to the idea that “complex questions may require equally complex strategies for investigation” (Collins, 2019: 47). The objective of this chapter has been to show that, in the context of two research projects, an intersectional interpretive framework has provided valuable input. It contributed toward understanding, from a critical point of view, two particular fields of conflict. It identified absences and blind spots traceable to the use of non-intersectional approaches. This objective allowed us to focus on absences and demand presences, facilitating the epistemic empowerment of subjugated and sub-alternized discourses and practices. This, as we have insisted, is part of the democratization of knowledge in terms of social justice. In this context, the dialogue between these works places an emphasis on intersectionality as an approach to reality that does not propose universalizing models or approaches to inequality. Rather, it is a flexible, open, and porous framework, strongly rooted in context. It mobilizes different analytical tools and approaches to shed light on the dynamics of oppression and resistances, with an orientation toward praxis or social transformation in contexts of deepening democracy.

We began this text by introducing some inertias that exclude democratic deepening and the need for processes and tools that link democracy, inclusion, and social justice. From this premise, we understood that emancipation and social transformation projects demand interpretive frameworks that make it possible to complicate and problematize one-dimensional and disempowering approaches to relationships of domination. The use that our two research projects make of an intersectional interpretive framework, both in terms of their commonalities and also from their points of friction, suggests, perhaps, a slippery understanding of intersectionality. However, this is also solid evidence of the creative tension between theory and praxis to which its implementation in specific contexts appeals (Collins & Bilge, 2016; Cho et al., 2013). As Collins and Bilge explain, “we think that intersectionality is best served by sustaining a creative tension that joins inquiry and praxis as distinctive, yet interdependent dimensions” (2016: 192). Thus, the projects that we have presented are simply the crystallization of a non-singular, but rather multiple, way of approaching intersectionality. This takes different forms depending on the needs, interests, and priorities demanded by the analysis of each specific problem. Collins and Bilge may have this in mind when stating that they “think that it is imperative that intersectionality remain open to the element of surprise” (2016: 203). A surprising element derived from each situated context allows, through creative tensions, an advance toward the realm of the possible, denouncing absences to demand presences and endowing sub-alternized discourses with epistemic power, in a commitment to the democratization of knowledge and social justice.

Along these lines, we understand that avoiding standardized and universalizing frameworks are mandatory steps in this project. If this is the case, it leads to questioning the existence of a properly intersectional methodology. We do not understand intersectionality in this way, instead choosing to emphasize that “there are ways in which intersectionality’s core premises, especially its premise of relationality, can influence methodological choices within intersectional scholarship” (Collins, 2019: 152). As we have shown throughout the text, this perspective reads intersectionality as an interpretive framework that allows us to think differently, making visible what common frameworks do not allow us to see. However, all tools must be used critically, reflexively, and responsibly. We insist that the mere use of intersectionality in our research is not, in itself, a panacea for deactivating the relations of domination that we reproduce in our analyses. Far from following a straight and narrow road, the investigative projects described in this chapter have shown flexibility in the forms and limits of intersectionality as applied in each case. This testifies to the artisanal and flexible nature of this interpretive framework. Ironically, we conclude by stating that intersectionality represents a radical “starting point” (Hancock, 2016:118) from which we can move forward in different projects of democratic deepening and social justice, echoing the following slogan: democratic deepening will be intersectional, or it will not be.