Intersectionality

3 units

This course explores and engages the intellectual and political genealogies of intersectionality, a theory, analytic, framework, metaphor, and approach primarily employed by Black feminists and other feminists of color. We will examine intersectionality as a theoretical framework with attendant analytics, as well as the socio/political projects out of which it emerges and influences. In so doing, the scholarly materials in this course, primarily, examine the ways in which structures and categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability create and maintain intersecting forms and experiences of difference that underpin overlapping social inequalities in U.S. society and abroad. Some of the other intersecting forms of social difference we will explore include, ethnicity, nation/migration, class, ability/disability, and indigeneity, reproduction, and HIV/disease status. Our approach to examining these categories/vectors of power will include feminisms of color, critical race theory/studies, queer theory/studies, queer of color critique, transgender theory/studies, and critical geography, all of which have shaped and been shaped by intersectionality.