Intersectional Meditations: A Reply to Kathryn Gines and Shannon Sullivan

In this article the author responds to the mini-symposium on his work provided by Kathryn Gines and Shannon Sullivan, both of whom focus on the issue of intersectionality. Gines’s article looks at the treatment of race and gender in one of the chapters in Mills’s book with Carole Pateman, Contract and Domination (2007). Her major criticism centers on what she sees as Mills’s failure to recognize nonwhite men’s patriarchal domination of nonwhite women. However, the present article claims that this criticism is simply a misreading of what Mills says in the chapter. Sullivan’s article reviews the various stages in Mills’s career path, with special attention to race and class. Her major criticism is that while nominally conceding intersectionality, Mills still holds on to the assumption that different variables (class, race, gender . . .) can be discretely singled out. In reply, this article argues that a recognition of intersectionality need not commit one to rejecting claims about the possible differential causal and explanatory significance of the intersecting variables.