Intersectionality - (Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies) by Anna Carastathis (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Intersectionality intervenes in the field of intersectionality studies: the integrative examination of the effects of racial, gendered, and class power on people's lives. While "intersectionality" tends to circulate merely as a buzzword, Anna Carastathis joins other critical voices in urging a more careful reading. Challenging the narratives of arrival that surround it, Carastathis argues that intersectionality is a horizon, illuminating ways of thinking that have yet to be realized; consequently, calls to "go beyond" intersectionality are premature. A provisional interpretation of intersectionality can disorient habits of essentialism, categorical purity, and prototypicality and overcome dynamics of segregation and subordination in political movements.

Through a close reading of critical race theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw's germinal texts, published more than twenty-five years ago, Carastathis urges analytic clarity, contextual rigor, and a politicized, historicized understanding of this pervasive concept. Intersectionality's roots in social justice movements and critical intellectual projects--specifically black feminism--must be retraced and synthesized with a decolonial analysis so that its potential to actualize coalitions can be enacted.

Review Quotes

"Intersectionality follows a clear theoretical arc and stages multiple interventions throughout, making it a resource for one well versed in the field or encountering it for the first time."--Desiree Valentine, Critical Philosophy of Race

"Anna Carastathis confronts an enduring obstacle to taking up intersectionality's potential: she illustrates how an ongoing, monist fragmentation of identities, communities, politics, and perceptions buttresses power hierarchies and reinforces exclusion by design."--Vivian M. May, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy

"Anna Carastathis's careful and sustained engagement with Kimberlé Crenshaw's work is uniquely illuminating and helpful."--Zenzele Isoke, author of Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance-- (2/25/2016 12:00:00 AM)

"Better theory is what Carastathis wants, and that implies for her a more fundamental critique of naturalized and essentialized groups and a 'profoundly destabilizing, productively disorienting, provisional concept that disaggregates false unities, undermines false universalisms, and unsettles false entitlements.'"--Myra Marx Ferree, Contemporary Sociology

"Carastathis's citational practices and the subsequent conversations she generates are a vital intervention in this current moment in academia. For both novices and experts in black feminist theories, this book is a crucial review of the literature for all academics at any stage of their career, especially those scholars naming their work as 'intersectional.'"--R. Aliah Ajamoughli, Journal of Folklore Research-- (3/13/2020 12:00:00 AM)

"This is, perhaps, Carastathis's greatest insight: she urges us to think about intersectionality as a 'profoundly destabilizing, productively disorienting, provisional concept' whose work remains to be done. In this account, intersectionality refers to our desire to keep dreaming of a more just social world."--Jennifer C. Nash, American Quarterly

-- (6/1/2018 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

Anna Carastathis is the codirector of the Feminist Autonomous Centre for research in Athens, Greece, where she coordinates the research area, Intersectionality: Critiques of Power and Coalitional Politics. Carastathis is the coauthor of Reproducing Refugees: Photographìa of a Crisis.