Since critics first alleged that feminism claimed to speak universally for all women, feminist researchers have been acutely aware of the limitations of gender as a single analytical category. In fact, feminists are perhaps alone in the academy in the extent to which they have embraced intersectionality—the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relations and subject formations—as itself a central category of analysis. One could even say that intersectionality is the most important theoretical contribution that women’s studies, in conjunction with related fields, has made so far. 1 Yet despite the emergence of intersectionality as a major paradigm of research in women’s studies and elsewhere, there has been little discussion of how to study intersectionality, that is, of its methodology. This would not be worrisome if studies of intersectionality were already wide ranging

I am grateful for comments from participants at the 2001 American Sociological Association meetings in Anaheim, California, especially Judith Howard and Lisa Brush; the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University, especially Dorothy Sue Cobble and Averil Clarke; and the Northwestern University Gender Workshop in the Department of Sociology, especially Ann Orloff and Jeff Manza; as well as from Vilna Bashi, Maria Cancian, Vivek Chibber, and Charles Ragin. The graduate students in my seminar on intersectionality provided invaluable feedback on an earlier version of this article, and their insights are woven throughout this version. I have also benefited enormously from conversations with Leela Fernandes and Irene Browne as well as from the reviewers’ comments. For financial support during the initial writing of this article, I thank the Russell Sage Foundation visiting scholars program. I alone bear responsibility for all errors and omissions. 1 A crucial note on terminology: it is impossible to find a term that is both recognizable and merely descriptive of the kind of work that is the focus of this article. Many scholars will not regard intersectionality as a neutral term, for it immediately suggests a particular theoretical paradigm based in identity categories (see, eg, Brown 1997). This is not the only sense in which I use the term here; rather, I intend for it to encompass perspectives that completely reject the separability of analytical and identity categories. As for the origins of the term itself, it was probably first highlighted by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989, 1991). Many other key texts introduced the conceptual framework and offered similar terms: see Davis 1981; Moraga 1983; Smith 1983; hooks 1984; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1984; Glenn 1985; Anzaldúa 1987, 1990; King 1988; Mohanty 1988; Spelman 1988; Sandoval 1991.