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POST-INTERSECTIONALITY

The Curious Reception of Intersectionality in Legal Scholarship1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2014

Sumi Cho
Sumi Cho*
Affiliation:
DePaul University College of Law
*
Professor Sumi Cho, DePaul University College of Law, 25 E. Jackson Blvd., Chicago, IL 60605. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Although intersectionality analysis originates in a critique of legal doctrine and its confining approach to subject formation, intersectionality has been adopted widely outside of legal scholarship—nationally and internationally—to explain how fields of power operate and interact to produce hierarchy for any limitless combination of identities. Yet, within law, some scholars have raised questions precisely about the capacity of intersectionality to grapple with subjects who occupy multiple social positions and those with “partially privileged” identities in particular. Thus, over roughly a decade, a critique took shape about the theoretical capacity and normative commitment of intersectionality theory to address particular subgroups.

This essay tells part of the curious story about how a race-sexuality critique of intersectionality emerged, what may have motivated it, and how it has facilitated an emerging progressive masculinities literature that is “post-intersectional,” i.e., positioned over and against intersectionality. Like other post-intersectionality approaches, multidimensionality theorists decidedly seek to ‘get beyond’ something, and that ‘something’ that underwrites the turn away from intersectionality appears not as substantive theoretical or analytical content, or as political strategy, but rather, as identity-driven and engendered.

Keywords

IntersectionalityPost-IntersectionalityMultidimensionalitySexualityMasculinitiesCritical Race Theory
Type
Intersectionality
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , Fall 2013 , pp. 385 - 404
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2013 

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Footnotes

1

I thank the Du Bois Review editors for their helpful feedback on this piece. I also thank the African American Policy Forum for its generous support to present an early version of this paper in at the Social Justice Writers workshop, and for comments received there, particularly from Barbara Tomlinson, George Lipsitz, Alvin Starks, and Luke Harris. This work was strengthened due to conversations with my friend, Athena Mutua, who is a gracious and challenging dialogue partner. Of course, this work would not be possible without the inspiration of the author originating intersectionality theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw.

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