Intersectionality and Beyond: Law, Power and the Politics of Location (review)

In 2010, I was asked to teach a seminar in feminist legal theory for the first time in several years. To assist in my planning, I asked some feminist students whether they would like to see a general overview of feminist approaches to law or whether a particular focus might work better. For instance, we could focus on feminist theories of autonomy or on the intersectionality of gender with race, class, sexuality, disability, and so on. Most students that I canvassed spoke strongly in favour of a focus on intersectionality, so I chose that option.¹ Some suggested that such a course might draw in students who are wary of feminism. There was interest in the strong critiques of feminism and feminist legal theory from those with intersectional experiences, notably women of colour.² Given this feedback, I ordered as the core text the 2009 collection Intersectionality and Beyond: Law, Power and the Politics of Location, edited by four feminist scholars from the United Kingdom, Emily Grabham, Davina Cooper, Jane Krishnadas, and Didi Herman.³ This book is the first in a new series on social justice published by Routledge-Cavendish,⁴ and it features contributions from both junior and senior scholars from the United Kingdom, Canada, India, South Korea, Ireland, and the United States. I will review the book in the context of its use as a core text for my seminar.

When term began, the seminar was almost cancelled because only five students had registered, but by the second week the class included six J.D. students, two Ph.D. auditors, and two LL.M. students.⁵ All were women and had a clear interest in feminist legal theory. Several, though, had had little exposure to feminist literature, making me second guess my decision to leap directly into the intersectionality debates. The group coalesced well, with all students taking the readings and the discussions very seriously indeed. Together we read our way through the book (and a few other articles I assigned) and discussed each reading in some detail. We were often challenged by the difficulty of some of the chapters, and their reference to literatures that we had not necessarily read. By and large, though, each author offered us considerable insight.

In retrospect, it is a bit of a miracle that students did not drop out after the second week, when we read the two (excellent but difficult) chapters by Joanne Conaghan and Leslie McCall in Part 1 of the book entitled “Mapping Intersectionalities.” Without having much background in feminist theory, students for the most part were plunged into two complex, and quite different, treatments of intersectionality. Conaghan’s “Intersectionality and the Feminist Project in Law” focuses on the trajectory of feminist approaches to law, going back to socialist feminist and materialist feminist work that theorized the relationship between sex and class-based oppression. I myself found this historical approach focusing on the legacy of historical materialism refreshing, given how often this early intersectional literature is omitted from feminist accounts. My students, however, were offered an overview of several bodies of literature for which they had little reference point. Moreover, Conaghan offers a trenchant critique of the potential for intersectional analysis in terms of feminist strategizing, calling for a more structural and institutional approach. Her argument is that intersectionality has reached its limits, due to its focus on identity, its roots in law, and the limits of law and rights claims. Specifically, it is more powerful as a critique of law’s representational role than it is as a basis for praxis. While this critique and Conaghan’s call for more collective political agency are picked up in several of the later chapters, some students found her arguments abstract at this early stage.

As for McCall’s well-known “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” which was reprinted from Signs, her categorization of intersectional literature into anti-categorical (deconstructive), intra-categorical (the...