Intersectionality in U.S. Educational Research Lisa Sibbett, University of Washington https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.403 Published online: 27 October 2020 Summary Intersectionality is celebrated in education research for its capacity to illuminate how identities like race, gender, class, and ability interact and shape individual experiences, social practices, institutions, and ideologies. However, although widely invoked among educational researchers, intersectionality is rarely unpacked or theorized. It is treated as a simple, settled concept despite the fact that, outside education research, it has become in the early 21st century one of the most hotly debated concepts in social science research. Education researchers should therefore clarify and, where appropriate, complicate their uses of intersectionality. One important issue requiring clarification concerns the question: “Who is intersectional?” While some critical social scientists represent intersectionality as a theory of multiple marginalization, others frame it as a theory of multiple identities. Either choice entails theoretical and practical trade-offs. When researchers approach intersectionality as a theory of multiple marginalization, they contribute to seeking redress for multiply marginalized subjects’ experiences of violence and erasure, yet this approach risks representing multiply marginalized communities as damaged, homogenous, and without agency, while leaving the processes maintaining dominance uninterrogated. When scholars approach intersectionality as a theory of multiple identities, meanwhile, they may supply a fuller account of the processes by which advantage and disadvantage co-constitute one another, but they risk recentering Whiteness, deflecting conversations about racism, and marginalizing women of color in the name of inclusivity. A review of over 60 empirical and conceptual papers in educational research shows that such trade-offs are not often made visible in our field. Education researchers should therefore clarify their orientations to intersectionality: They should name the approach(es) they favor, make arguments for why such approaches are appropriate to a particular project, and respond thoughtfully to potential limitations. Keywords: intersectionality, marginalization, identity, theories of oppression, philosophy of education Intersectionality in Educational Research Intersectionality has become a buzzword in education research. The theory’s popularity is warranted, to be sure. Intersectional analysis helps practitioners and researchers explore students’, teachers’, and other education stakeholders’ identities with real complexity and illuminates how unequal power relations shape subjects’ experiences and social institutions. Rather than attending only to the impacts of racial inequality in education, for example, or Page 1 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 only to the impacts of gender inequality, intersectionality helps us account for how raced and gendered power relations interact, in complicated ways, to influence learning (Tate, 1997; Yosso, 2002). Thus, scholars of education—particularly those favoring a critical orientation— celebrate intersectionality’s capacity to describe educational experiences and outcomes for members of nondominant social groups (e.g., Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2013; LadsonBillings & Tate, 1995) and increasingly for members of dominant social groups as well (e.g., Case, 2013; McIntosh, 2012). Despite these affordances, I call intersectionality an educational buzzword because, while widely celebrated in our field, it is rarely unpacked or theorized. Education research mostly depicts intersectionality as a straightforward, settled concept when this is not the case. Outside of education, the meaning of intersectionality is hotly debated on nearly every front— including its origins, meanings, politics, purposes, applications, and methodologies (see Brah 1 & Phoenix, 2004; Lykke, 2011; Nash, 2017). By failing to locate their work in these broader conversations, education researchers miss opportunities both to learn from and to contribute to ongoing debates about how identity functions in social institutions, especially schools. Moreover, unexamined conceptualizations of intersectionality run risks. When mobilized without care, intersectionality may come untethered from its foundational critiques of oppression and violence against women of color. And like uncritical uses of the terms “diversity” or “multiculturalism” (Ahmed, 2012; Banks, 2012), uncritical mobilizations of intersectionality can be used to make individuals, research agendas, or institutions appear to have discharged the responsibilities of justice—without actually having done so. Therefore, as Lykke (2011) argues, the theory “deserves to be celebrated, but its use also needs to be critically reflected [upon]” (p. 207). In this article, I explore how education researchers might clarify and, where appropriate, complicate their uses of intersectionality. Rather than staking a definitional claim, I begin by describing the term’s contested history and meanings, highlighting Jennifer Nash’s (2008) question: “Who is intersectional?” I outline competing scholarly conceptions of intersectionality either as a theory of multiple marginalization or as a theory of multiple identities (as it has increasingly come to be used), and I examine the analytical and practical trade-offs involved. I then contrast these contested representations in the broader critical social sciences with near-consensus representations in education. Drawing on data from a review of over 60 empirical and conceptual papers, I show that although intersectionality is often invoked in education research, the term is only sometimes defined, rarely unpacked, and almost never complicated or questioned. I conclude by urging education researchers to clarify their orientations to intersectionality: to name the approach they favor, to argue for why it is appropriate to a particular project, and to respond purposefully to their selection’s potential costs. Intersectionality is not above interrogation. No theory—including intersectionality—can fully explain the complex interrelations of identity, subjectivity, and power. However, by locating intersectional educational research work within larger conversations about intersectionality’s meanings and uses, and making perspectives on intersectionality explicit, education researchers may leverage a powerful analytic tool indeed. Page 2 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Intersectionality: A Contested Social Science Theory Social scientists agree that intersectionality concerns how identities like race, gender, class, and ability interact to shape individual experiences, social practices, institutions, and ideologies. Beyond that, however, there has been considerable disagreement over intersectionality’s meanings. The concept has a rowdy intellectual history, and what Nash (2019) labels “the intersectionality wars” are ongoing over the theory’s origins, its definitions, its uses, and its methodologies. These debates are complex and far-ranging, and I do not 2 review them exhaustively here. A sampling of key contested questions may illustrate, however. Genealogically, scholars disagree about whether intersectionality represents an outgrowth of scholarship that preceded it or constitutes something fundamentally new (Lutz, 3 Vivar, & Supik, 2011). Regarding definitions and uses, scholars argue whether intersectionality should properly be used to understand social group identities or to dismantle the very notion of identity categories themselves (McCall, 2005). And as I do explore at length in this article, scholars of intersectionality disagree about who is an intersectional subject: Black women? All women of color? All people with multiply marginalized positionalities? All people? Aiming to clarify intersectionality’s meanings and uses, scholars have suggested a range of metaphors, including a basement or an intersection (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991), a matrix (Collins, 2000), a set of axes (Yuval-Davis, 2006), even mixing paint colors (Ehrenreich, 2002) or baking 4 a cake (Ken, 2008). These metaphors often seek to illuminate intersectionality’s multiplicative nature: The experiences of multiply marginalized subjects are not comprised merely through the addition of one form of marginalization to another; rather, multiple marginalizations have distinct interaction effects that shape subjects’ lived experiences (Choo & Ferree, 2010; Hancock, 2007). For this insight, intersectionality has been celebrated as “the most important contribution women’s studies . . . has made so far” (McCall, 2005, p. 1771)—and yet has elsewhere been called “outmoded and outdated” (Taylor, Hines, & Casey, 2011, quoted in Puar, 2012, p. 51) and even denounced as “illicitly import[ing] the very model it hopes to overcome” (Carastathis, 2008, p. 23). Some scholars have represented contests over intersectionality’s meanings and uses as a problem (e.g., Carbado, 2013; Tomlinson, 2013), while others view the term’s ambiguity as an opportunity, compelling scholars to grapple, deliberate, and thereby generate new inquiries (e.g., Lykke, 2011; Nash, 2016). Davis (2008) terms intersectionality a “buzzword” in the sense that it has had “spectacular success” while simultaneously generating much uncertainty and confusion. Indeed, for Davis, intersectionality’s ambiguity is precisely what makes it a “good feminist theory”: It takes up feminist theorists’ central concern with difference while “promising an almost universal applicability” (p. 72); it invites analyses grounded in identity politics as well as analyses that deconstruct identity categories; it appeals to generalists in search of simple, memorable frameworks as well as to specialists eager to dive into complexities; and it is so “obviously incomplete” (p. 76) that it begs for further critique and elaboration. All this perplexity was born almost simultaneously with the term, coined in two landmark articles by Kimberlé Crenshaw: “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) and “Mapping the Margins” (1991). Although sometimes cited interchangeably, in these Page 3 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 articles Crenshaw depicted intersectionality in overlapping but non-identical ways (Weigman, 2012). Crenshaw’s 1989 paper highlighted how Black women are “caught between ideological and political currents that combine first to create and then to bury [their] experiences” (p. 160). She analyzed legal cases in which Black women’s discrimination suits were denied based on what she called “single-axis” legal frameworks. In DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, for instance, Black women employees alleged that the company’s human resources policies discriminated against them: General Motors did not hire Black women until 1964, and in 1970 all of them lost their jobs in seniority-based layoffs. In this case, the court found claimants “should not be allowed to combine statutory remedies to create a new “super remedy.” . . . This lawsuit must be examined to see if it states a cause of action for race discrimination, sex discrimination, or alternatively either, but not a combination of both” (quoted in Crenshaw, 1989, p. 141). Such decisions, Crenshaw explained, prioritize otherwise-privileged members of marginalized social groups: In this case, the decision prioritized Black men (presumed to represent all Black people) and White women (presumed to represent all women). Thus Black women are perennially subordinated to “women” and “Blacks.” In “Mapping the Margins” (1991), Crenshaw expanded her theory’s scope, citing a need “to account for multiple grounds of identity” (p. 1245). Here, she examined violence against women of color, defining and enumerating examples of what she termed structural, political, 5 and representational intersectionality. Crenshaw’s argument in 1991 echoed her 1989 paper: “Because of their intersectional identity as both women and of color within discourses that are shaped to respond to one or the other, women of color are marginalized within both” (p. 1244). However, whereas her first paper foregrounded Black women’s experiences, the second paper broadened the discussion to women of color generally, thereby opening intersectionality to what Ehrenreich (2002) has described as “infinite regress”: which identity categories should be included, and when to stop, remain unclear. Indeed, soon after Crenshaw coined the term, scholars began applying intersectional analyses to non-Black women of color. While some have urged drawing the line there (e.g., Alexander-Floyd, 2012), subsequent work has broadened the scope to include other marginalizations such as poverty, queerness, and disability. This proliferation of intersectional identities prompts Nash (2008) to make visible a fundamental question that often goes unasked: “Who is intersectional?” The usual emphasis on women of color, she explains, “has obscured . . . whether all identities are intersectional, or whether only multiply marginalized subjects have an intersectional identity” (p. 9). In other words, while intersectionality began as a theory of multiple marginalization—of how Blackness and femaleness combine to create and then bury Black women’s experience—the theory has increasingly been recruited to explain how any identities interact, marginalized and dominant alike. As I will show, a great deal is at stake when researchers shift the focus of intersectionality from Black women’s subjectivity to the subjectivity of all people. This shift may allow us to see more clearly how advantaged and disadvantaged identities are mutually constituted, but it can also function to move oppression—and the possibility of its redress—out of the frame. Page 4 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Who Is Intersectional? Intersectionality has been understood by some as a theory of multiple marginalization, and by others (especially beginning in the second decade of the 21st century) as a theory of multiple identities. Critical social scientists do not always state a position or supply a rationale, but even so, their work usually reflects one broad orientation or the other (Nash, 2008). In this section, I outline underlying assumptions of these two orientations, noting what each allows researchers to see—and what each moves out of view. Let me be clear that I do not advocate either over the other: Both orientations have many proponents because both have significant strengths. Both allow scholars to uncover important insights about how identities interact within hierarchical power systems. And yet, as I will enumerate, both orientations make certain phenomena visible at the expense of others. As Kenneth Burke put it: “A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing—a focus upon object A involves a neglect of object B” (quoted in Tyack, 1997, p. 35). When conducting intersectional analyses, I will suggest, education researchers would do well to name their approach. (Indeed, they may select different approaches at different times for different purposes.) Whichever approach researchers choose, they should be mindful of what their chosen lens brings into focus—and what it obscures. Intersectionality as a Theory of Multiple Marginalization Black feminists in the United States have been describing the interactions of race and gender for at least two centuries. Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, is one widely cited account of the erasure of Black women’s experiences. Responding to White feminists who would have prevented her from speaking at the convention, Truth demanded: Look at me! Look at my arm. I have plowed, I have planted, and I have gathered into barns. And no man could head me. And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much, and eat as much as any man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne children and seen most of them sold into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me. And ain’t I a woman? (Quoted in Brah & Phoenix, 2004, p. 77) Truth and other African American women activists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, including Maria Stewart, Harriet Jacobs, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells, are widely cited as intersectionality’s foremothers. During the 1970s and 1980s, another wave of Black women intellectuals began foregrounding the dynamics of multiple marginalization to describe the structural oppression they experienced. In 1970 Frances Beale outlined the concept of “double jeopardy,” and in 1977 the Combahee River Collective argued that “major systems of oppression are interlocking,” including racism, sexism, and heteronormativity, and that “the synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives” (n.p.). In her introduction to Ain’t I a Woman, bell hooks (1981) criticized comparisons between women and Black people, arguing: “This implies that all women are white and all blacks are men” (quoted in Yuval-Davis, 2006, p. 193), and the next year, Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (1982) sourced this observation Page 5 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 for the title of their edited volume, All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, but Some of Us are Brave, another widely cited precursor. Experiences of multiple marginalization were also being described by non-Black women of color during this period, including in Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1981) anthology, This Bridge Called My Back, and in Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s (1985) paper on “the intersections of race, gender, and class oppression” in racial ethnic women’s labor. From Sojourner Truth to the Combahee River Collective to Kimberlé Crenshaw, the originators of intersectional theory have called attention to the inadequacy of single-axis remedies and aimed to make visible multiply marginalized subjects’ embodied experiences of violence and erasure. Intersectionality as multiple marginalization expresses what Nash (2016) terms an ethic of redress, aiming to validate the epistemological standpoints of Black women and other women of color, and seeking adequate representation and legal protections. Embracing this ethic of redress, in recent decades many critical social scientists have expanded the scope to include all “hyper-oppressed people” (Carastathis, 2008). Redress of harm is sought not only by and for those marginalized at the intersection of race and gender but also by and for those at the margins of class, sexual orientation, ability, religion, citizenship status, or other intersecting axes of identity. As Hae Yeon Choo and Myra Ferree (2010) explain, this tradition of “groupcentered” approaches has emphasized “locating distinctive standpoints that could reveal complicated and contested configurations of power,” aiming to “give voice” to these standpoints (p. 132). Indeed, giving voice to multiply marginalized social groups has been a major contribution of intersectional theory and analysis. Viewing intersectionality as a theory of multiple marginalization is not without limitations, however. First, there are the risks of portraying marginalized subjectivities as fundamentally wounded (Falcón & Nash, 2015; Nash, 2016). Eve Tuck (2009) has critiqued how marginalized communities are often subjected to “damage-centered research,” cautioning that the costs of such research may outweigh purported benefits. She writes: Native communities, poor communities, communities of color, and disenfranchised communities tolerate this kind of data gathering because there is an implicit and sometimes explicit assurance that stories of damage pay off in material, sovereign, and political wins. . . . But does it actually work? Do the material and political wins come through? And, most importantly, are the wins worth the long-term costs of thinking of ourselves as damaged? (p. 414) For Tuck, damage-oriented narratives can compound rather than redress damage, representing marginalized social groups as victims without agency. While researchers cannot “paint everything as peachy,” Tuck observes, it is important to acknowledge that all people “at different points in a single day, reproduce, resist, are complicit in, rage against, celebrate, throw up hands/fists/towels, and withdraw and participate in uneven social structures” (pp. 419–420). By understanding intersectionality as multiple marginalization, critics have warned, researchers risk smoothing over this unevenness in human experience and representing marginalized subjects as uniformly oppressed—only ever acted upon by conditions—without acknowledging how these same subjects may be heterogeneously positioned or how they can and do act upon conditions (Mohanty, 2003; Nash, 2008; Staunæs, 2003). Page 6 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Further, there is the concern that when intersectionality is conceived as a theory of multiple marginalization, it leaves the processes and institutions maintaining dominance unquestioned. Brekhus (1998) described this phenomenon by contrasting social categories that are “marked” (e.g., Chinese American, welfare mother, Black woman) with categories that are “unmarked” (e.g., American, mother, woman) and that thereby function to “passively construct the normative case or generic type by [the] absence of any linguistic qualifiers” (p. 35). When researchers focus only on marked categories, Brekhus argued, they create “epistemological ghettos” that serve to reproduce common-sense ideology (p. 39). Drawing on Brekhus’s critique, Choo and Ferree (2010) warn that conceiving intersectionality as multiple marginalization risks “overemphasizing the differences of the group under study from an assumed middle-class readership,” thereby “obscuring the norm-constructing operations of power” (p. 137). In short, focusing exclusively on multiply marginalized subjects can actually re-marginalize them, leaving the center invisible and erasing the processes by which center and margins are co-constituted. Intersectionality as a Theory of Multiple Identities Aiming more fully to explore how dominant categories are normalized and maintained, scholars of intersectionality have increasingly advocated broadening the theory to include privileged subjectivities (e.g., Carbado, 2013; May, 2015; Nash, 2008; Yuval-Davis, 2006). Ehrenreich (2002) proposes a “hybrid” intersectionality that analyzes the positionality and practices of “singly burdened” individuals such as White women. “It may . . . be impossible,” she muses, “to eliminate one form of subordination without attacking the entire edifice of interlocking oppressions” (p. 255), so she urges researchers to explore how multiple identities interact to shape subjects’ experience, whether those identities are marginal or dominant. Just as we cannot understand the situation of women of color without understanding the combined effects of their race, class, and gender, so we cannot truly understand the situation of white women without similarly exploring the impact of their own race and class, with gender, on their lives. (p. 273) Here Ehrenreich points out that Whiteness shapes White women’s experiences as profoundly as Blackness shapes the experiences of Black women. From this perspective, the processes by which privilege and oppression are co-constituted are crucially important. There can be no disadvantage without advantage, proponents of intersectionality as multiple identities maintain. In contrast with the group-centered approach, Choo and Ferree (2010) conceptualize this “process-centered” approach to intersectionality as one that “highlights power as relational” (p. 129). In other words, a process-centered approach focuses less on the experiences of individuals within a given group (e.g., Black women) and more on the processes of relating between groups (e.g., between Black women and White women). Choo and Ferree urge researchers favoring a processcentered approach to understand intersectionality “as implying a flow of knowledge and power across levels of social organization” (p. 146). Their process-centered approach is thus akin to what Patricia Hill Collins (1995) distinguished as “interlocking” oppressions. In contrast to “micro-level” processes of intersectionality which pertain to individuals’ day-to-day experiences and interactions, for Collins the concept of interlocking oppressions referred to Page 7 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 “macro-level connections linking systems of oppression such as race, class, and gender. This is the model describing the social structures that create social positions” (p. 494). Collins concluded that intersectionality’s micro-level processes together with the macro-level processes of interlocking oppressions make up oppression writ large, in what she elsewhere termed a “matrix of domination” (Collins, 2000; see also Collins & Bilge, 2016). Carbado’s (2013) study of what he terms “colorblind intersectionality” exemplifies approaches 6 that treat intersectionality as a theory of multiple identities. He conceptualizes White male heterosexuality as “a triply blind intersectionality” and warns scholars against fixating on the bottom of the social hierarchy lest they naturalize dominant identities as the norm. “We should avoid framing the intersection of race and gender as an intersection of nonwhiteness and gender,” he maintains. Doing so makes it easier for whiteness to operate as the natural and unmarked backdrop for other social positions. . . . [It] legitimizes a broader epistemic universe in which the racial presence, racial difference, and racial particularity of white people travel invisibly and undisturbed as race-neutral phenomena over and against the racial presence, racial difference, and racial particularity of people of color. (pp. 823–824) Framing intersectionality as only about women of color lets members of advantaged social groups off the hook, Carbado argues, leaving dominant identity categories uninterrogated. While understanding intersectionality as a theory of multiple marginalization makes appeal to an ethic of redress, understanding intersectionality as a theory of multiple identities often makes an appeal to what Nash (2016) terms an ethic of inclusivity. From this perspective, intersectionality’s value arises “through its ability to capture and describe all subjects’ experiences, locations, and identities” (p. 12). Intersectionality as multiple identities thus dramatically extends the theory’s reach. And yet, critics warn that focusing on Whiteness and other advantaged identities risks recentering them. Consider, for example, Zack’s (2005) claim that “intersectionality refers . . . to all women, because differences in sexuality, age, and physical ableness are also sites of oppression” (p. 7). Taken a certain way, this view returns White women to feminism’s center. Indeed, remaking intersectionality as an all-inclusive theory of identity may function to deflect conversations about racism. For example, Ahmed (2012) relates: When I give talks on race and racism a common question is “but what about intersectionality?” or “what about gender/sexuality, class?” I am not suggesting these are not legitimate questions. But given how hard it is to attend to race and racism, these questions can be used as a way of redirecting attention. In other words, when hearing about race and racism is too difficult, intersectionality can be deployed as a defense against hearing. (p. 195) Invoking intersectionality can thus become a strategy for avoiding the interrogation of racism. Nash (2016) cautions that when the ethic of inclusivity replaces the ethic of redress, intersectionality turns aside from the issues of violence and domination against women of color: “The analytic shifts from a specific form of redress rooted in experiences of violence, invisibility, and erasure toward a way of merely describing one’s social location . . . ensuring Page 8 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 that ‘white, heterosexual men’ can be captured” (p. 15). In short, intersectionality’s celebrated status may depend, paradoxically, on marginalizing women of color in the name of inclusivity. A related concern is that remaking intersectionality as a general theory of identity—rather than as a theory of multiple marginalization—sanitizes the construct so it can be folded into what Ahmed (2012) terms “happy stories of diversity.” According to Ahmed, diversity functions in institutions as “a happy sign, a sign that racism has been overcome,” and such signaling relies on excluding “unhappy stories of racism” (p. 164). Critics have noted intersectionality’s increasing association with the depoliticized rhetoric of diversity, as well as the theory’s accompanying institutionalization in American universities. Weigman (2012) describes how university documents “repeatedly posit [intersectionality] as both a core pedagogical tenet and . . . an institutional goal” (p. 240). She criticizes the belief that merely invoking intersectionality serves to disrupt oppression. From the perspective she describes, “intersectionality is [viewed as] in itself ameliorative, which is to say it does more than explicate Black women’s experience; it works against their domination” (p. 246). Like diversity rhetoric, intersectional rhetoric can thus come to substitute for action. In sum, scholars aiming to use intersectionality as an analytic tool must select their orientation with care. When they approach it as a theory of multiple marginalization, they may contribute to making visible multiply marginalized subjects’ experiences of violence and erasure and seeking redress for these harms. And yet this approach risks representing multiply marginalized communities as damaged, homogenous, and without agency, while leaving the processes maintaining dominance uninterrogated. When scholars approach intersectionality as a theory of multiple identities, meanwhile, they may supply a fuller account of the processes by which advantage and disadvantage co-constitute one another, but they risk re-centering Whiteness, deflecting conversations about racism, and marginalizing women of color in the name of inclusivity. This sanitized concept of intersectionality can then be appropriated for troubling institutional ends. Both approaches have strengths but are also accompanied by risks that deserve scholars’ serious attention. I am arguing, therefore, that social scientists should cultivate discernment about which orientation is most appropriate for their purposes (acknowledging they may have different purposes at different times) and that they should name their theoretical allegiances and respond thoughtfully to the potential tradeoffs their selections entail. I turn now to the uses of intersectionality in education research, where much such work remains to be done. Intersectionality as Educational Buzzword The meanings of intersectionality may be contested, but it would be difficult to ascertain this by consulting educational research. Indeed, in our field in the early 21st century, intersectionality is often represented as a near-consensus concept—a buzzword in that it is widely championed but rarely defined, unpacked, or problematized, and almost never located in the context of a contested scholarly conversation. While Davis (2008) highlights the ambiguity of this buzzword as it has been used by feminist theorists, I claim that education researchers have been treating intersectionality as fundamentally unambiguous. To be sure, they enact many approaches—some use intersectionality as a theory of multiple marginalization (to remain with the debate I highlight in this article), while others Page 9 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 increasingly use it as a theory of multiple identities—but education researchers seldom acknowledge that informed and critically conscious people might disagree over the concept’s framing. I suggest that when researchers fail to name the approaches they favor, they miss opportunities to advocate clearly for those approaches and to think purposefully about what— or whom—their lens moves out of view. My claims about the uses of intersectionality in education research are informed by data from a review of over 60 conceptual and empirical studies in our field. It was unfeasible to conduct an exhaustive review, so I sought a cross-section, examining conceptual and empirical studies from fields including teacher education; curriculum and instruction; multicultural education; education philosophy; higher education; special education and disability studies; educational psychology and the learning sciences; and educational leadership and policy studies. My initial search for “intersectionality and education” in the ERIC database yielded nearly 400 results, which I winnowed by limiting the search to peer-reviewed journal articles published 7 between 2007 and 2017. I randomly selected 100 of these papers (aiming for a number large enough to be somewhat representative), then retained all papers that focused on the United 8 States context and foregrounded intersectionality in the theoretical framework. This reduced the number of papers to 55. As this article was nearing completion, the 2018 issue of Review of Research in Education (RRE) was published. Co-edited by Adai Tefera, Jeanne Powers, and Gustavo Fischman, it consisted of a dozen literature reviews exploring the uses of intersectionality in a range of education literatures. Each article conceptualized intersectionality at length and several highlight the contested nature of the concept. Together, these papers supplied a high-quality injection of intersectional theorizing into education research, nudging our field toward greater complexity in intersectional analysis. I included in my review all papers from this issue that met my selection criteria, for a total of 66 papers reviewed (see Figure 1). Figure 1. Literature Reviewed, by Year and Methodology. For each paper, I asked: 1. To what extent was intersectionality defined or conceptualized? 2. Was intersectionality presented as a settled or contested concept? 3. Was intersectionality treated as theory of multiple marginalization or as a theory of multiple identities? I now describe my findings. Page 10 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Conceptualizing Intersectionality I wanted to find out how education researchers have defined and conceptualized intersectionality, so I searched for the term “intersect” (to capture cognates), then closely read the passages in which the term clustered to isolate where, if at all, the concept was defined. My aim was not to assess the accuracy or comprehensiveness of definitions in relation to some predetermined set of criteria; rather, I wanted to know if researchers supplied any definition, and if they did, I wanted to know the extent to which they justified and elaborated it. I assigned each paper an intersectionality conceptualization rating (ICR) of “none,” “low,” “medium,” or “high,” based on (a) the overall length of the discussion in which intersectionality was conceptualized; and (b) the discussion’s depth of conceptual elaboration, including citational practices, historicizing, theorizing, and examples (Table 1). Page 11 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Table 1. Intersectionality Conceptualization Rating System Rating Discussion Length Depth of Elaboration Exemplar Exemplar Characteristics None No definition N/A Nishida and Fine (2014) No definition Low One paragraph or less Little elaboration HernándezSaca, Kahn, and Cannon (2018) Two-sentence definition Examples require readers to make many inferences about how intersectionality is conceptualized Medium One to three paragraphs Includes conceptual history, summary of theoretical framework, or extended example Johnson, Brown, Carlone, and Cuevas (2011) Three-paragraph conceptualizing discussion Elaboration = theory of Includes two or more of the following: conceptual history, summary of theoretical framework, or extended example Harris and Leonardo (2018) Ten-paragraph (twosection) conceptualizing discussion Elaboration = “rival formulations” → contributions → limitations High 4 or more paragraphs structures → matrix of oppression → intersectionality as interplay of advantage and disadvantage Page 12 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Length and depth did not always co-occur—as I will show, a paper might have a lengthy discussion full of poorly articulated ideas and unwarranted claims or, alternatively, a discussion that was brief but conceptually dense and insightful. To make a determination in such cases, I prioritized the depth of the discussion over its length. That said, I found that the more elaborated discussions were often thoughtful, well-informed, and compelling. Meanwhile, briefer discussions sometimes (but not always) corresponded to thinner theoretical articulations not necessarily aligned with the paper’s stated aims. In what follows, I describe the criteria I developed for each ICR, enumerate findings within each rating category, and supply examples. Appendix A lists the ICRs assigned to each paper. Intersectionality Conceptualization: None Papers were assigned an ICR of “none” when they included no definition. The concept was neither unpacked nor situated in any theoretical context. As Figure 2 indicates, 29% of papers reviewed (19 of 66) earned an ICR of “none.” In other words, nearly a third of papers reviewed—all of which identified intersectionality as a key theoretical lens—omitted a definition of the concept. The authors wrote as though readers know what the term means. Nishida and Fine (2014), for instance, advocated a curriculum “of and for activism at the intersections of class, race, ethnicity, gender and disability.” Describing how such a curriculum has been enacted in the first author’s disability studies class, the authors aimed to show how educators might support students in analyzing “the intersections of various axes of social injustices . . . in order to build an activist consciousness that can be deployed in the classroom and the community” (p. 8). A cornerstone of the authors’ argument was that teachers can and should introduce their students to narrative accounts of everyday experiences “shaped by intersecting social injustices” (p. 9), but since the authors supplied no definition of such intersecting social injustices, readers were left to draw their own conclusions about what these refer to. Similarly, in her conclusion to a special issue of Journal of Social Issues devoted to the emerging field of “privilege studies,” McIntosh (2012) argued, “everything about privilege should be analyzed in a nuanced and intersectional way” (p. 204), but she cited no sources, supplied no definition, and offered no explanation of how to analyze privilege intersectionally. Way, Hernández, Rogers, and Hughes’s (2013) paper exemplified how lack of a clear conceptual definition can limit otherwise-important findings. The authors examined how stereotypes about race intersected with stereotypes about gender, sexuality, and class to shape adolescents’ conceptions of their own and peers’ identities. Although the authors used the term “intersectional” three times in the paper’s abstract, and made it the focus of one of their research questions, intersectionality appeared only once in the theoretical framework, in a summation of a literature review, and no definition was supplied. Later, in the findings section, the label “intersections of stereotypes” was assigned whenever adolescents in the study referred to multiple identities in the same thought. For example, one boy was identified as expressing “intersecting stereotypes” when he linked his own Blackness to rap music and professional sports because “the intersections of race and gender in the construction of identity as being a rapper and a professional athlete are the domains of Black men in particular” (p. 415). These authors’ findings about how young people draw on stereotypes to construct their identities are compelling and important. However, using intersectionality Page 13 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 simply to express that multiple identities can be salient at once diminished the theory’s explanatory power. Indeed, taken a certain way it risked reproducing a single-axis framework —centering the experiences of Black men while rendering Black women’s experiences invisible. To be sure, understanding Black men as intersectional might be justified, but the paper supplied no such justification. Several papers included what I came to think of as “not-quite definitions.” For example, Sampson (2017) examined how “the intersectional identities of organizations” may impact community engagement in education reform, exploring the case of the League of Women Voters in Las Vegas in the 1960s and 1970s. In framing this discussion, Sampson claimed that critical race feminism uses an “intersectional perspective that emphasizes the experiences of women of color in terms of racial and gender oppression” (pp. 78–79). At first blush, the sentence reads like a definition, but after consideration I assigned it an ICR of “none” because the phrase “in terms of racial and gender oppression” communicates little about how intersectionality is being used. Such not-quite definitions recurred among papers earning an ICR of “none” (for selected exemplars, see Table 2). Table 2. Not-Quite Definitions of Intersectionality: Selected Examples Paper Not-Quite Definition Cohen et al. (2013) “The use of intersectional thinking (Crenshaw, 1991; Dill & Zambrana, 2009; Collins, 2000) throughout the course allowed us to contemplate people’s lived experiences as whole, rather than detaching aspects of a person’s identity into separate pieces and narrowly focusing upon distinct understandings of privilege, power and oppression” (p. 276). Nishida and Fine (2014) “A concept of intersectionality not only provides ways of understanding society and social (in)justices with greater complexity, but it also helps us understand who we are and how our standpoints relate with others’” (p. 9). Sampson (2017) Uses an “intersectional perspective that emphasizes the experiences of women of color in terms of racial and gender oppression” (pp. 78–79). Waldron (2011) “It is useful to draw on an intersectional approach. . . . According to Collins (2000), the interlocking systems of oppression refer to the macro-level connections, as well as the micro-level processes, that assume race, gender, and class are interconnected” (p. 1302). Intersectionality Conceptualization: Low Papers were assigned an ICR of “low” when the concept was defined in less than one paragraph and when the authors elaborated little on histories or theories and supplied few examples of the concept in their theoretical framework. As Figure 2 shows, 30% of papers reviewed (20 of 66) earned an ICR of “low.” In other words, while a nearly third of papers Page 14 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 reviewed included no definition whatsoever, almost another third included only a minimal definition. The authors treated intersectionality as so well-known as to require little explanation, so simple as to be readily understood, or both. Some papers earning a low ICR included only one-sentence definitions, as when Young (2016) defines intersectionality as “a theory that examines the interactions of multiple systems of oppression” (p. 68). Other papers earning a low ICR supplied much discussion but little definition, requiring readers to make a lot of inferences. For example, Hernández-Saca, Kahn, and Cannon (2018) reviewed 10 studies for how they navigate intersectionality disability discourses. They defined intersectionality in just two sentences: Intersectionality, a term Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) coined in her work examining how women of color, particularly Black women, experience employment discrimination and violence, explains how the experiences of individuals who occupy multiple marginalized identities can be silenced by intersectional forms of oppression. Intersectionality theorists argue that locations of oppression and discrimination interact and shape the multiple dimensions of those experiencing them in a way that is not fully captured by separate examinations of each hegemonic system. (p. 287) For its length, this definition was conceptually clear, but in such a short discussion it could not communicate much information about intersectionality’s histories or theories. However, since Hernández-Saca et al. examined all 10 studies for how they enacted intersectional discourse and analysis, their discussions of these examples conveyed messages about how they understood the concept. For example, these authors claimed several studies illuminated intersectional oppression by showing how “youth with dis/abilities at their intersections needed to actively navigate presumptions about not only their dis/abilities but also about their other identity markers while experiencing special education” (p. 297; emphasis added). This study’s findings are worthy of scholarly attention. And yet the “not only . . . but also. . . ” construction conveyed a simplistic, additive conception of intersectionality, which does not attend to how axes of identity interact to shape subjects’ lived experience. In describing possible limitations of papers earning ICRs of “none” or “low,” my purpose is not to disparage what is often compelling and important work. Rather, I aim to show that it is common for education researchers to assume everyone already knows what intersectionality is, what it does, and who it applies to. Indeed, well over half of the papers I reviewed deployed only thin or implied conceptions. In contrast, as I discuss in the next sections, papers earning higher ICRs supply models of the conceptual complexity available to education researchers interested in using an intersectional framework. Intersectionality Conceptualization: Medium Papers were assigned an ICR of “medium” when the concept was defined in one to three paragraphs, and when the authors narrated a history of the concept, summarized an influential framework for understanding it (e.g., from Choo & Ferree, 2010; Collins, 2000; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991; or McCall, 2005), or supplied an extended real or hypothetical example. As Figure 2 indicates, 18% of papers reviewed (12 of 66) earned a medium ICR. Page 15 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Figure 2. Literature Reviewed by ICR. In one widely cited article, Annamma et al. (2013) combined critical race theory and disability studies to inaugurate what they termed “DisCrit.” They explained: We find Crenshaw’s (1991) work on intersectionality useful for theorizing the ways in which race and ability are likewise intertwined in terms of identity. Similar to Crenshaw’s articulation of race and gender, students of color labeled with a dis/ability likewise “have no discourse responsive to their specific position in the social landscape; instead they are constantly forced to divide loyalties as social conflict is presented as a choice between grounds of identity” (Annamma et al., 2013, p. 8; Crenshaw et al., 1995, p. 354). Drawing on Crenshaw’s concepts of “divided loyalties” and of having to choose between their identities, Annamma et al. (2013) illuminated how they understand intersectionality in their research context—namely, as potential divided loyalties felt by people of color with disabilities, who may at various times be required to choose between their racial and their disability identities. In contrast to discussions with lower ICRs—those that, for instance, represented Black men as intersectional subjects without justifying the claim, or that reduced intersectionality to “not only . . . but also . . . ” constructions—these authors highlighted how multiple marginalized identities interact to influence subjects’ lived experience. Johnson, Brown, Carlone, and Cuevas (2011) described how women of color navigated inequitable schooling experiences to legitimize their identities in science-based fields in another paper earning a medium rating. The paper’s discussion of intersectionality began from Collins’s (2000) “matrix of oppression,” emphasizing how it situates marginalized and privileged subjects alike. “Multiracial feminist theories posit that . . . ‘systems of domination’ affect everyone, not just those who are on the stigmatized end of the systems,” they wrote. According to these theories, we all live in what Collins (2000) calls a “matrix of oppression,” and the structures of race, class, and gender that “create disadvantages for women of color” also “provide unacknowledged benefits for those who are at the top of these hierarchies” (Zinn & Dill, 1996, p. 327). Thus, to understand the structural constraints and opportunities experienced by our informants, we needed to locate them in a matrix of oppression. Intersectionality can help us do this. (Johnson et al., 2011, p. 343) The authors went on in a second paragraph to describe how discussions of gender and race in science education often oversimplify “the experiences of a Black woman . . . as her experiences as Black, added to her experiences as female” (p. 343), and in a third paragraph Page 16 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 they advocated exploring how systems of oppression mutually construct one another. In contrast to discussions that represent intersectionality as though readers already know what it means, this elaborated discussion included synopses of the theoretical lenses on which it drew (e.g., Collins’s matrix of oppression) and made visible its conception of intersectionality. Intersectionality Conceptualization: High I assigned an ICR of “high” when intersectionality was defined in four or more paragraphs, and the paper elaborated at length on the histories or theories of intersectionality, included extended examples, or both. As Figure 2 shows, 23% of papers reviewed (15 of 66) earned a high rating. Most papers with high ICRs were conceptual papers (n = 7) or literature reviews (n = 6), which had space to devote in-depth discussions to intersectional theory. For example, Harris and Leonardo (2018) defined the concept and described its polyvalent meanings in two sections over four pages, citing more than 20 sources along the way. These included a range of scholars who have proposed “rival formulations” to Crenshaw’s (p. 4). Harris and Leonardo not only elaborated on how intersectionality functions to disrupt single-axis identity frameworks but also described limitations and critiques. Importantly, they noted intersectionality’s “incomplete theory of power,” citing its location “one dangerous step away from diversity, a term that has been used to efface power analysis altogether” (p. 8). Although they did not use Nash’s (2016) terminology, Harris and Leonardo (2018) concluded by advocating what Nash might identify as an ethic of redress. They wrote: “The move to speak to the multiplicity of subordination cannot be accomplished absent a clear attempt to explain and alleviate the challenges experienced by . . . despised or denigrated races and genders” (p. 18). In other words, in these authors’ view intersectionality’s purpose is not simply to illuminate the complexity of identity, but rather to explain how social forces like patriarchy and racism impact multiply marginalized subjects. Only two empirical studies earned high ICRs. One was Ramirez’s (2014) study of Chicano/a and Latino/a students navigating their first year of graduate school. Extending over four paragraphs, the intersectionality discussion noted the theory’s origins in women of color feminism and standpoint epistemology, enumerated variations in terminology, and elaborated intersectionality’s attributes, including the claim that intersectionality can be used to map “structures of oppression and privilege” (p. 172). Intersectionality, Ramirez maintained, illuminates difference not only between groups but also within them, so using an intersectional lens can help researchers and educators think about the particular needs of diversely positioned students. Such students, Ramirez emphasized, should be understood as a heterogeneous group at risk of “estrangement from each other as a result of internal (e.g., class, cultural, political) differences” (p. 182), and should therefore be supported in building within-group solidarity. Ramirez’s elaborated conceptualization of intersectionality allowed her to highlight the in-group diversity of Chicano/a and Latino/a students—diversity that might otherwise have been smoothed over or erased. In investigating how education researchers conceptualize intersectionality, I was primarily interested in whether they supplied, justified, and elaborated on a definition, paying less attention to the substance of the definitions themselves. However, some patterns did emerge among papers earning medium and, especially, high ICRs: They generally shared an interest Page 17 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 in examining how identities not only co-occur but interact to shape subjects’ experiences, and they often described intersectionality’s intellectual origins, unpacking the work of scholars whose thinking shaped their own and using this work to justify their approach. Less frequent, even among papers earning a high ICR, was the move to situate intersectional analysis in the context of ongoing theoretical debates. On the contrary, as I show in the next section, educational researchers usually represented intersectionality as a concept whose meanings are settled. Intersectionality: Settled or Contested? Having assessed the extent to which the reviewed papers conceptualized intersectionality, I turned to the content of educational researchers’ conceptual discussions. As I have explained, intersectionality is a hotly contested term among critical feminists and other critical social scientists, and I wondered how education researchers situated their own work in the context of these debates. I assessed each paper’s conceptualizing discussion of intersectionality (if any) to determine whether its authors acknowledged debates over the term’s meanings and uses. Papers representing intersectionality as settled offered a unitary narrative of the theory’s origins and meanings. In contrast, papers representing intersectionality as contested supplied multiple narratives of the theory, often using words like “differences” or “debates” and phrases like “while some argue . . . others claim . . . ” Often, these papers’ authors located their own intervention within these debates, making a reasoned argument for the view(s) they favored. In this section, I note frequencies with which papers represented intersectionality as a settled or a contested concept, and supply exemplars of each. Appendix B lists my findings. Intersectionality as a Settled Concept Seventy-one percent of the papers reviewed (47 of 66) represented intersectionality as a settled concept, offering a unitary narrative of the theory’s origins and meanings. When I disaggregated this finding by ICR, I found papers with lower ratings were more likely to represent intersectionality as a settled concept, while papers with the highest conceptualization ratings did so less often. By default, all papers with an ICR of “none” treated the concept as settled: They did not define the concept, so they could not outline competing conceptions. Most papers with low and medium ICRs also treated the concept as settled: 95% of those with a rating of “low” (19 of 20), and 67% of those with a rating of “medium” (8 of 12). In contrast, only 7% of papers rated “high” represented intersectionality as settled (1 of 15). Figure 3 depicts these findings. Page 18 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Figure 3. Intersectionality in Reviewed Literature as Settled or Contested, by ICR. Almost invariably, the most concise definitions depicted intersectionality as a settled concept —they had no room to do otherwise. For example, in his conceptual paper outlining what he terms a “third wave” of critical racial studies (which earned a low ICR), Akom (2008) defined intersectionality by referring to how “race at the intersection of other forms of oppression such as class, gender, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, immigration status, surname, phenotype, accent, and special needs . . . interlock[s,] creating a system of oppression” (p. 257). This was the extent of his conceptualizing discussion, and while few would argue with its basic claim, such a discussion afforded little space to outline diverging conceptions. Longer discussions might outline intersectionality in some depth and supply elaborated examples while still communicating a unitary narrative. In her review of education research documenting the practices and experiences of Black girls (which earned a medium ICR), Butler (2018) introduced what she called “Black girl cartography.” This framework emphasized citing Black women scholars who work with Black girls and—while acknowledging the systemic marginalization of Black womanhood—also enacted an assetbased rhetoric of solidarity, celebration, capacity, and resilience. And yet in situating Black girl cartography in the context of an ostensibly unified Black feminist intellectual tradition, Butler represented intersectionality as a settled theory. “The rhetorical work of Black feminists who penned the Combahee River Collective Statement were grounded in a politics of spatiality,” she wrote. “Crenshaw (1989) builds on Black feminism’s interest in mapping and analyzing Black women sociopolitical locations” (p. 31). By using phrases like “grounded in” and “building on,” and by depicting intersectionality as by and for Black women, Butler portrayed intersectionality as a single theoretical trajectory with a settled focus on Black women. She did not acknowledge alternative conceptions of intersectionality that might, for example, focus on Whiteness, maleness, or other privileged subjectivities. I argue that when education researchers fail to situate their theoretical interventions in the context of ongoing debates about intersectionality, they miss an opportunity to advance the larger conversation about who is intersectional. Butler’s (2018) paper could have contributed in this way: She skillfully modeled how to approach intersectionality as a theory of multiple marginalization while evading the pitfall of damage-centered research (Nash, 2016; Tuck, 2009). Black girl cartography expresses an ethic of redress while also showcasing Black girls’ agency and cultivating solidarity and empowerment. If Butler (2018) had named debates over who is intersectional and situated her intervention in the context of these debates, she might have framed Black girl cartography as a contribution to intersectional theory writ large, explicitly modeling a way forward for like-minded scholars and activists using intersectionality to understand multiple marginalization. Intersectionality as a Contested Concept Twenty-nine percent of papers reviewed (19 of 66) represented intersectionality as an open or contested concept, supplying multiple and often competing narratives of the theory and using words like “differences” or “debates” or phrases like “while some argue . . . others claim. . . ” Sometimes, but not always, these papers’ authors located their own interventions in the context of the debates they outlined, making a reasoned argument for the view(s) they Page 19 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 favored. When I disaggregated these findings, I found papers with lower ICRs rarely framed the concept as contested, while papers with high ICRs often did so. No papers earning an ICR of “none” represented intersectionality as contested, and only one with an ICR of “low” did so. 33% of papers with a medium ICR (4 of 12) represented intersectionality as contested, while 93% of papers with a high ICR (14 of 15) represented intersectionality as contested (Figure 3). Flintoff, Fitzgerald, and Scraton (2008), whose paper on using intersectionality to understand difference in physical education earned a high ICR, framed their work as a “contribut[ion] to ongoing debates around intersectionality” (p. 9). They explained that while some scholars outside physical education have focused on particular intersecting identity axes (e.g., the intersection of race and gender), others use intersectionality “in more general terms as an analytic tool to study stratification” (p. 4). They also highlighted scholarly disagreements over additive versus multiplicative conceptions of intersectionality, clarifying that they “strongly rejected” (p. 5) the additive approach, and emphasizing the interrelation not only of identity axes but also of subjects’ micro-level experiences and the macro-level of “changing socioeconomic and political conditions” (p. 6). Rather than treating intersectionality as a known quantity, these authors outlined key debates among intersectional theorists, then located their own perspective within these debates. In her review of intersectional analyses in critical mathematics education research, Bullock (2018) began by outlining the distinction between Choo and Ferree’s (2010) “group-centered” and “process-centered” approaches. Whereas, she explained, intersectionality was “once understood only as a theory of identity” that aims to give voice to particular, multiply marginalized subjects, the theory “has taken on broader meaning over time” such that as of 2018, it could also be used to explore processes and relations between social structures (pp. 128–129). Bullock synthesized several theorists’ work—including Crenshaw’s (1991) and Choo and Ferree’s (2010)—to propose her own typology of approaches. Her review then drew on her typology to show how critical mathematics education researchers who use intersectional frameworks deploy them in different ways to illuminate different phenomena. For each study she examined, Bullock concluded by “propos[ing] a way that the researcher could approach the study differently through another model” (p. 134). Rather than portraying intersectionality as a unitary theory upon whose meanings everyone agrees, Bullock mapped the terrain of intersectional mathematics education research by emphasizing the diverse ways intersectionality can be used. I have been describing how education research represents intersectionality: Just under a third of papers reviewed emphasized diverse perspectives on what intersectionality is and how it should be used, while the majority treated intersectionality as though its meanings are simple and settled. I am arguing that rather than defaulting to a unitary narrative, education researchers should make purposeful decisions about when to locate intersectional analyses within a larger, often contested scholarly conversation. As I demonstrate in the next section, researchers in education sometimes enact contested approaches to intersectionality without making the debate itself visible—for example, regarding who counts as an intersectional subject. Page 20 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Who Is Intersectional in Education Research? Having examined whether authors acknowledged debates over the term’s meanings and uses, I turned finally to explore the question of who is intersectional in education research. As I have explained, while intersectionality began as a theory of multiple marginalization, in the 21st century, the theory is increasingly being recruited by critical social scientists to explain how any identities interact, marginalized and dominant alike (Nash, 2016). To explore this tension in education research, I examined not only the reviewed papers’ conceptualizing discussions of intersectionality but also their descriptions of their participants (for empirical 9 research) or the social group(s) of interest (for conceptual research). I operationalized the distinction in this way: I determined that education researchers treated intersectionality as a theory of multiple marginalization when they examined the intersection(s) of two or more marginalized identities (e.g., Blackness and femaleness); I determined researchers treated intersectionality as a theory of multiple identities when they focused on the intersection(s) of advantaged and disadvantaged identities, using either Choo and Ferree’s (2010) “group-centered approach” (examining intersecting identities within a particular group, e.g., White women) or their “process-centered approach” (examining the processes by which identities intersect between groups, e.g., between Black women and White women). In what follows, I note how often papers depicted intersectionality as a theory of multiple marginalization and how often they depicted it as a theory of multiple identities, supplying exemplars of each. Appendix C lists the papers designated to each category. Intersectionality as a Theory of Multiple Marginalization Forty-six percent of the papers I reviewed (28 of 61) treated intersectionality as a theory of multiple marginalization. Of these, about half highlighted the experiences of women and girls of color, while the rest explored other multiply marginalized subjectivities. These included intersections of race and disability (e.g., Annamma et al., 2013; Erevelles & Minnear, 2010), intersections of English-language learner status with other identity axes like disability or socioeconomic status (e.g., Cioè-Peña, 2017; Jiménez-Castellanos & García, 2017), and more general identity umbrellas including “underserved populations” (Kraehe & Acuff, 2013) and “multiply minoritized children” (Souto-Manning & Rabadi-Raol, 2018). Some researchers’ conception of who is intersectional was apparent in their definition. Assessing the usefulness of the term “first-generation student,” Nguyen and Nguyen (2018) critiqued intersectional analyses that “obscure how individuals are multiply disadvantaged” and advocated conceiving intersectionality as “a theory of marginalized subjectivity” (p. 150). In other cases, researchers’ assumptions about who is intersectional became apparent in their descriptions of participants and findings. Salinas, Fránquiz, and Rodríguez (2016) described historical narratives created by Latina preservice teachers in a bilingual social studies methods course. In outlining a counter-storytelling method featured in the course, they described their aim “to give voice to the experiences of individuals positioned or positioning themselves as members of oppressed groups” (p. 424). As I have explained, giving voice is a common objective when researchers treat intersectionality as a theory of multiple marginalization. Page 21 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Intersectionality as a Theory of Multiple Identities Fifty-four percent of papers reviewed (33 of 61) treated intersectionality as a theory of multiple identities. Of these, about half used intersectionality as a lens for understanding identities that are simultaneously privileged and advantaged, deploying a form of Choo and Ferree’s (2010) group-centered approach. Blankenship-Knox (2017), for instance, conducted a critical autoethnography of what she called “my own intersectionality” and “my own sources of privilege and oppression” (p. 63) as a queer White woman teaching for social justice in the Deep South. Similarly, several studies reported how they used intersectionality as a lens for supporting predominantly White groups of students in understanding their own advantaged and disadvantaged identities, often in the interest of building empathy for multiply marginalized groups (e.g., Cole, Case, Rios, & Curtin, 2011; Zingsheim & Goltz, 2011). While some studies examined the intersections of advantage and disadvantage within groups, others explored the processes by which advantage and disadvantage are mutually constituted between groups, effectively adopting Choo and Ferree’s (2010) process-centered approach. By focusing on how privilege and oppression are co-constituted, these papers often managed to avoid reducing intersectionality from an ethic of redress to one of mere inclusivity. For instance, Quinn and Ferree (2017) examined interrelations between predominantly White teachers and women of color paraprofessionals as a form of “inequality regime”; that is, “the loosely related practices, processes, actions, and meanings that result in and maintain class, gender, and race inequalities” (p. 2, quoting Acker, 2006, p. 443). In another paper, Leonardo and Broderick (2011) described how “smartness” operates as a form of property for White students, emphasizing how smartness and Whiteness function in tandem to construct their supposed opposites: Constructs such as smartness only function by disparaging . . . those deemed to be uneducable and disposable. In both cases, the privileged group is provided with honor, investment, and capital, whereas the marginalized segment is dishonored and dispossessed. And each of these ideological systems (of Whiteness and of smartness) tends to operate in symbiotic service of the other. (p. 2208) Focusing on how advantage depends on and creates disadvantage, process-oriented approaches like these made explicit their commitment to redress. Because treating intersectionality as a theory of multiple identities may be increasingly common—as Nash (2016) suggests—I concluded my review by assessing whether this approach appears ascendant in education research. Judging by the papers I reviewed, both approaches are widespread, and intersectionality as multiple marginalization does not appear to be losing ground to intersectionality as multiple identities (Figure 4). Education researchers, it seems, continue to see value in both. Page 22 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Figure 4. Intersectionality in Reviewed Literature as Multiple Marginalization vs. as Multiple Identities Over Time. While most of the papers I reviewed took a position on who is intersectional, only a few made the question itself visible (e.g., Blankenship-Knox, 2017). In research investigating the intersections of advantaged and disadvantaged identities, this omission was both common and conspicuous. Indeed, in these papers, intersectionality was often framed as always having been about the intersections of privilege and oppression. For example, Museus and Griffin (2011) claimed that intersectionality “can be defined as the processes through which multiple social identities converge” (p. 7), while Minnick (2015) claimed that “intersectionality refers to the simultaneous occupation of both oppressed and privileged positions” (p. 3). Neither acknowledged how their definition functioned to shift intersectionality from a theory of multiple marginalization to a theory of multiple identities, and so neither was able to respond to the risks of re-centering dominant social groups in their analysis. Directions for Future Research As a theoretical lens and an analytic tool, intersectionality has strong traction in educational research, yet how it is being used is less well-understood. This article, along with the articles in the 2018 issue of Review of Research in Education, have made a start at reviewing the literature, but much work remains to be done. For example, this article has used the metric of the “intersectionality conceptualization rating” (ICR) to review the extent to which educational researchers attempt to define intersectionality, but time and resources did not allow an in-depth exploration of the substance of those definitions. Under what circumstances is intersectionality represented as a theory of multiple marginalization, for example, and when is it framed as a theory of multiple identities? What purposes are these definitions serving? What uses are they being put to, and for whose benefit? Important normative questions also require investigation -- questions about how intersectionality should be used in educational research. For example, when researchers do mobilize intersectionality as a theory of multiple identities—when they point the lens away from multiply marginalized subjects—how can they retain the theory’s foundational commitment to an ethic of redress? When using intersectionality to examine the interrelations of privilege and marginalization, and especially when using an intersectional lens to examine privilege itself, what are redress’s requirements? What kinds of theoretical framing, methodologies, and action might be necessary? I have suggested that one way forward might involve adopting a process-centered approach along the lines Choo and Ferree (2010) describe. Page 23 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Conclusion Intersectionality is powerful. Indeed, it is powerful in (at least) two senses, which may be difficult to reconcile with each another. First, intersectionality is a powerful, and potentially empowering, analytic tool. As Falcón and Nash (2016) observe, it is the “first theoretical, political, and epistemological concept developed by women of color to have profound resonance in the academy” (p. 2). Intersectionality began with and validates the experiences of the multiply marginalized, treating these experiences as central to understanding the social world. Intersectionality illuminates oppression’s complexity, challenging social scientists to resist the allure of oversimplified frameworks (Collins & Bilge, 2016; McCall, 2005). At the same time, it is memorable and accessible, inviting widespread mobilization to identify and redress oppression (Davis, 2008). Intersectionality persistently reminds us to investigate who is being obscured and excluded. It is thus instructive both for diagnosing oppressive social dynamics and for exposing the social transformation that needs to occur (Harris & Leonardo, 2018). The second sense in which intersectionality is powerful is as a rhetorical and political tool— one susceptible to abuse. Intersectionality has acquired enormous institutional power in the early 21st century, dominant in critical social science research and in progressive activist spaces alike. Harris and Leonardo (2018) contend that “we are all intersectionalists (if that is a word) now” (p. 4). Indeed, intersectionality may maintain such sway because, as Nash (2018) argues, it can be used as a way for scholars and activists to signal that their analysis is “good, ethical, [and] right.” Invoking intersectionality often elicits approval among social scientists and activists; failing to do so can draw their censure. Chandra Mohanty (2013) explains how radical theories can become “commodit[ies] to be consumed; no longer seen as products of activist scholarship or connected to emancipatory knowledge, [they] can circulate as . . . sign[s] of prestige in an elitist, neoliberal landscape” (p. 971). Intersectionality has capacity to give voice to the disempowered, to be sure, but researchers must also be wary of how it can be misused as a tool of power. As I have attempted to show in this paper, intersectionality is not above reproach, and the ways researchers use it come with trade-offs. When conducting intersectional analyses of multiply marginalized people and communities, researchers must take care not to depict them as homogenous and powerless, and to consider whether mapping the margins also requires better illuminating the center. When researchers conduct intersectional analyses of those who are simultaneously privileged and marginalized, or of the interrelations between such groups, they must attend to the risk of re-centering single-axis frameworks and dominant identity groups. In either case, scholars need to beware how their intersectional analyses may be coopted by institutions to serve ends they did not intend—ends that may reproduce the very oppressions they aim to disrupt. The good news is that attending to risks also illuminates opportunities. Education researchers using intersectionality to understand the experiences of multiply marginalized subjects have opportunities to emphasize their subjects’ capacity and resilience, as Butler (2018) did in her paper on Black girl cartography. When conceptualized as a way of mapping within-group difference, intersectionality can help researchers and educators think about the diversity of multiply marginalized subjects and better attend both to their resources and their needs, as Page 24 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Ramirez (2014) did in her study of first-year Chicanx and Latinx graduate students. Meanwhile, education researchers using intersectionality to understand the interrelations of privileged and marginalized identities can take care to ground their analyses in an ethic of redress. From this perspective, intersectionality’s primary purpose is to expose and disrupt oppression. Choo and Ferree’s (2010) process-centered model may supply a particularly powerful approach to intersectional analysis. Education researchers can find excellent models of this approach in two studies I have discussed: Quinn and Ferree’s (2017) study of interrelations between White women teachers and women of color paraprofessionals, and Leonardo and Broderick’s (2011) investigation of how Whiteness and smartness co-construct the categories of non-Whiteness and incompetence. By focusing on how advantage depends on and creates disadvantage, process-oriented approaches like these illuminate how dominance is produced and maintained while also retaining intersectionality’s foundational ethic of redress. How we think and write about intersectionality matters, to schools and society. Education researchers do not need to take a deep dive into intersectional theory every time we deploy an intersectional lens, but we can and should be purposeful about our choices and avoid defaulting to simplistic conceptualizations. When we omit to name the approaches we favor, we miss opportunities to advocate clearly for those approaches and respond thoughtfully to potential risks. But we have opportunities to enrich our usage. By locating our work within larger conversations about intersectionality’s meanings and uses, and making our own perspectives explicit, education researchers may leverage a powerful analytic tool indeed. Acknowledgments Many thanks to Barbara Applebaum, Chris Busey, Kathy Hytten, Deborah Kerdeman, Jennifer Nash, Priti Ramamurthy, and Mark Windschitl for their encouragement and invaluable insights on this project. Thank you to Jenni Conrad, Stephanie Forman, Sunun Park, and Sooz Stahl for being careful readers and good friends. Finally, thank you to Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education’s anonymous reviewers. Further Reading Berger, M. T., & Guidroz, K. (Eds.). (2010). The intersectional approach: Transforming the academy through race, class, and gender. 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Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Appendix A. Literature Reviewed by Intersectionality Conceptualization Rating (ICR) ICR: None Annamma et al. (2016) Becker and Paul (2015) Brown (2013) Cohen et al. (2013) Dyce and Owusu-Ansah (2016) Ellison and Langhout (2016) Huber (2010) Leonardo and Broderick (2011) McIntosh (2012) Nishida and Fine (2014) Patton, Crenshaw, Haynes, and Watson (2016) Roy (2017) Salinas, Fránquiz, and Rodríguez (2016) Sampson (2017) Waldron (2011) Way, Hernández, Rogers, and Hughes (2013) Welton, Harris, La Londe, and Moyer (2015) Woyshner and Schocker (2015) Zingsheim and Goltz (2011) ICR: Low Akom (2008) Artiles, Dorn, and Bal (2016) Ashcraft, Eger, and Scott (2017) Bramesfeld and Good (2016) Cioè-Peña (2017) Cole, Case, Rios, and Curtin (2011) Covarrubias (2011) Hernández-Saca, Kahn, and Cannon (2018) Jones, Kim, and Skendall (2012) Page 34 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Kim and Scantlebury (2012) Lester (2014) Lundy-Wagner and Winkle-Wagner (2013) Mayes and Moore (2016) Minnick (2015) Ng, Lee, and Pak (2007) Quinn and Ferree (2017) Rodriguez and Freeman (2016) Thomas and Stevenson (2009) Vickery (2016) Young (2016) ICR: Medium Aléman (2018) Annamma, Connor, and Ferri (2013) Blankenship-Knox (2017) Butler (2018) Covarrubias and Liou (2014) Johnson, Brown, Carlone, and Cuevas (2011) Leyva (2016) Museus and Griffin (2011) Schudde (2018) Souto-Manning and Rabadi-Raol (2018) Vaccaro (2017) Vickery (2017) ICR: High Agosto and Roland (2018) Bullock (2018) Erevelles and Minnear (2010) Flintoff, Fitzgerald, and Scraton (2008) Harris and Leonardo (2018) Ireland et al. (2018) Jiménez-Castellanos and García (2017) Kendall and Wijeyesinghe (2017) Page 35 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Kraehe and Acuff (2013) Mayo (2015) Murphy, Acosta, and Kennedy-Lewis (2013) Naples (2009) Nguyen and Nguyen (2018) Ramirez (2014) Tefera, Powers, and Fischman (2018) Appendix B. Literature Reviewed, Depicting Intersectionality as Settled or Contested Settled Akom (2008) Aléman (2018) Annamma et al. (2016) Artiles, Dorn, and Bal (2016) Ashcraft, Eger, and Scott (2017) Becker and Paul (2015) Bramesfeld and Good (2016) Brown (2013) Butler (2018) Cioè-Peña (2017) Cohen et al. (2013) Cole, Case, Rios, and Curtin (2011) Covarrubias (2011) Covarrubias and Liou (2014) Dyce and Owusu-Ansah (2016) Ellison and Langhout (2016) Hernández-Saca, Kahn, and Cannon (2018) Huber (2010) Johnson, Brown, Carlone, and Cuevas (2011) Jones, Kim, and Skendall (2012) Kim and Scantlebury (2012) Leonardo and Broderick (2011) Lester (2014) Page 36 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Leyva (2016) Mayes and Moore (2016) McIntosh (2012) Minnick (2015) Murphy, Acosta, and Kennedy-Lewis (2013) Museus and Griffin (2011) Ng, Lee, and Pak (2007) Nishida and Fine (2014) Patton, Crenshaw, Haynes, and Watson (2016) Quinn and Ferree (2017) Rodriguez and Freeman (2016) Roy (2017) Salinas, Fránquiz, and Rodríguez (2016) Sampson (2017) Souto-Manning and Rabadi-Raol (2018) Thomas and Stevenson (2009) Vickery (2016) Vickery (2017) Waldron (2011) Way, Hernández, Rogers, and Hughes (2013) Welton, Harris, La Londe, and Moyer (2015) Woyshner and Schocker (2015) Young (2016) Zingsheim and Goltz (2011) Contested Agosto and Roland (2018) Annamma, Connor, and Ferri (2013) Blankenship-Knox (2017) Bullock (2018) Erevelles and Minnear (2010) Flintoff, Fitzgerald, and Scraton (2008) Harris and Leonardo (2018) Ireland et al. (2018) Jiménez-Castellanos and García (2017) Page 37 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Kendall and Wijeyesinghe (2017) Kraehe and Acuff (2013) Lundy-Wagner and Winkle-Wagner (2013) Mayo (2015) Naples (2009) Nguyen and Nguyen (2018) Ramirez (2014) Schudde (2018) Tefera, Powers, and Fischman (2018) Vaccaro (2017) Appendix C. Intersectionality as Multiple Marginalization or as Multiple Identities Multiple Marginalization Agosto and Roland (2018) Annamma et al. (2016) Annamma, Connor, and Ferri (2013) Artiles, Dorn, and Bal (2016) Butler (2018) Cioè-Peña (2017) Erevelles and Minnear (2010) Hernández-Saca, Kahn, and Cannon (2018) Huber (2010) Ireland et al. (2018) Jiménez-Castellanos and García (2017) Johnson, Brown, Carlone, and Cuevas (2011) Kim and Scantlebury (2012) Kraehe and Acuff (2013) Leyva (2016) Murphy, Acosta, and Kennedy-Lewis (2013) Nguyen and Nguyen (2018) Patton, Crenshaw, Haynes, and Watson (2016) Rodriguez and Freeman (2016) Roy (2017) Page 38 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Salinas, Fránquiz, and Rodríguez (2016) Souto-Manning and Rabadi-Raol (2018) Vickery (2016) Vickery (2017) Waldron (2011) Way, Hernández, Rogers, and Hughes (2013) Woyshner and Schocker (2015) Young (2016) Multiple Identities Akom (2008) Aléman (2018) Ashcraft, Eger, and Scott (2017) Becker and Paul (2015) Blankenship-Knox (2017) Bramesfeld and Good (2016) Brown (2013) Cohen et al. (2013) Cole, Case, Rios, and Curtin (2011) Covarrubias (2011) Covarrubias and Liou (2014) Dyce and Owusu-Ansah (2016) Ellison and Langhout (2016) Flintoff, Fitzgerald, and Scraton (2008) Jones, Kim, and Skendall (2012) Kendall and Wijeyesinghe (2017) Leonardo and Broderick (2011) Lester (2014) Lundy-Wagner and Winkle-Wagner (2013) Mayes and Moore (2016) Mayo (2015) McIntosh (2012) Minnick (2015) Museus and Griffin (2011) Ng, Lee, and Pak (2007) Page 39 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Nishida and Fine (2014) Quinn and Ferree (2017) Ramirez (2014) Sampson (2017) Thomas and Stevenson (2009) Vaccaro (2017) Welton, Harris, La Londe, and Moyer (2015) Zingsheim and Goltz (2011) Excluded Bullock (2018)—terrain mapping Harris and Leonardo (2018)—terrain mapping Naples (2009)—terrain mapping Schudde (2018)—methods Tefera, Powers, and Fischman (2018)—terrain mapping Notes 1. Intersectionality is so contested that scholars cannot even agree whether it is a theory, a concept, a framework, an analytic tool, a methodology, or some fixed or shifting combination of these (Davis, 2008). Depending on context, there are defensible arguments for all of these. In this article, I refer to intersectionality as a concept when discussing its definition—when I explore what the word itself means or has been taken to mean. When referring to intersectionality more broadly—e.g., when discussing its genealogy—I follow the most common usage and call it a theory. 2. While this article focuses on scholarly conversations surrounding intersectionality, it is worth acknowledging the term’s contentiousness in the public sphere and in popular media. In an article for Chronicle of Higher Education, Bartlett (2017) supplies a useful overview of major salvos in the public debates over intersectionality’s value and usage. 3. For example, Nash (2017) identifies three monographs published around the same time, which feature competing histories. May (2015), she reports, foregrounds intersectionality’s 19th-century precursors, decentering Crenshaw’s contribution (Nash, 2017, p. 120). Collins and Bilge (2016) focus on the contributions of Black feminists of the 1970s and 1980s—on the “activist underpinnings” of intersectionality (Nash, 2017, p. 122). Meanwhile, Carastathis (2016) re-centers Crenshaw’s work through a close reading of her foundational contributions (including footnotes), critiquing the notion that “double jeopardy” or “interlocking oppressions” are synonymous with intersectionality (Nash, 2017, p. 124). These examples, particularly Carastathis’s volume, demonstrate what Nash (2017) calls a “battle over origin stories” among feminist scholars of intersectionality (p. 126). For genealogies that take a somewhat broader view of intersectionality’s history, see Brah and Phoenix (2004); Hancock (2016). Page 40 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 4. Crenshaw’s initial metaphor of intersecting roadways came under criticism in part because it calls up a mental image of discrete entities meeting in two-dimensional space, whereas intersectionality is often more fully understood as multidimensional, with each factor fundamentally intermixed with the others (as in Ken’s [2008] baking metaphor). For further discussions of the affordances and limitations of various metaphors for intersectionality, see Carastathis, 2016; Harris and Leonardo, 2018; Lykke, 2011; Yuval-Davis, 2006. 5. While these forms of intersectionality are not central to my argument, the reader may be interested. Structural intersectionality, Crenshaw (1989) explained, refers to how women of color are marginalized in their lived experiences and access to resources, as compared with White women. For example, support services for battered women may incur added costs in attempting to connect with communities of color, putting them “at odds with funding agencies” and leaving battered women of color ultimately underserved or unserved (p. 1250). Political intersectionality refers to how feminist and anti-racist politics often subordinate women of color, and “permits . . . deadly silence” (p. 1282). For example, the Los Angeles Police Department refused to release statistics on domestic violence against women of color, for fear of fueling narratives of domestic violence in minority communities (pp. 1252–1253). Representational intersectionality refers to how women of color are culturally constructed to minimize or erase violence against them. For example, when the rap group 2 Live Crew were arrested on obscenity charges, their songs’ violent, misogynistic representations of Black women were excused by anti-racists as art or satire, while simultaneously appropriated by feminists to protect White women from Black male sexuality. Neither view prioritized misogyny against Black women (p. 1294). 6. In the special issue of Signs in which Carbado’s article appears, co-editors Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall (2013) sanction Carbado’s expansion of the scope of intersectional analysis, praising how he “excavates the erasure of whiteness from intersectional consciousness” (p. 802, n.8). Through the first decades of the 21st century, Crenshaw has continued to focus on how Black women are multiply marginalized within social, political, and legal institutions—for example, in her 2016 TED Talk foregrounding police use of force against Black women. Her endorsement of Carbado’s work suggests some flexibility in her own concept of the intersectional subject. However, we might use caution before deferring entirely to Crenshaw to settle disputes over meanings and applications. As Nash (2016) observes, Crenshaw’s work has often been invoked as a means to fix intersectionality in place while policing and discrediting alternative constructions. 7. In their review of the uses of intersectionality in transnational education policy research, Robert and Yu (2018) excluded theses, books, and book chapters, noting “there is unevenness in their cataloguing in databases” (p. 100). By selecting only peer-reviewed journal articles for the present review, I follow these authors’ lead. 8. At the outset, I had planned to select sources that named intersectionality in the title, abstract, or keywords, but to my surprise several such sources addressed it only once or twice in the body of the paper, and then only in passing. One article used the term “intersectionality” in its title, then never mentioned the concept again. Because intersectionality was not truly functioning as a primary lens in these cases, I rethought my selection criteria. 9. I excluded papers focused exclusively on intersectional research methods and those that only mapped the terrain of intersectional research without expressing a perspective on who is intersectional. This reduced the pool to 61 papers. Related Articles Gender, Justice, and Equity in Education Page 41 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ). Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy> Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2020 Page 42 of 42 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). 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