Research Handbook on Intersectionality 1800378041, 9781800378049

Table of contents :
Contents
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: intersectionality and transforming the production of knowledge • Mary Romero
PART I: FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
2 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist • Lori Amber Roessner
3 Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964): intersectionality and activism • Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge
4 Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality • Matthew W. Hughey
5 The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship • Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge
PART II: INTERSECTIONAL RESEARCH IN INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES
SECTION IIA: CRITICAL INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES
6 Intersectionality as an ethical commitment • Sophie Withaeckx
7 Disability and rural poverty in the global South • Shaun Grech
8 Anti-colonial praxis in community-based research in feminist food studies • Barbara Parker
SECTION IIB: CRITICAL SEXUALITY STUDIES
9 Researching sexuality and state • Jyoti Puri
10 Space, place, and urban future • Marcus Anthony Hunter and Terrell J.A. Winder
11 Making sexuality, gender, and migration intersectional • Salvador Vidal-Ortiz
SECTION IIC: CRITICAL INDIGENOUS STUDIES
12 Indigeneity, feminisms, and activism • Renya K. Ramirez
13 Intersectionality and ethnography • Robert Keith Collins
14 Thrivance: an indigenous queer intersectional methodology • Andrew Jolivétte
SECTION IID: CITIZENSHIP STUDIES
15 Intersectional insights into lived citizenship • Daniela Cherubini
16 Heterosexual marriage-related regimes • Laura Odasso
17 Intersectionality, citizenship and labor • Pallavi Banerjee and Carieta O. Thomas
18 Gender-based violence and citizenship in a migration context • Evangelia Tastsoglou and Lori Wilkinson
PART III: INTERSECTIONALITY AND APPLIED RESEARCH
SECTION IIIA: SOCIAL WORK, DISASTER RECOVERY AND HEALTH DISPARITIES
19 Intersectionality and immigrant and refugee trauma • Filomena M. Critelli and Asli Cennet Yalim
20 Power dynamics driving disasters’ impacts, response, and recovery • Lynn Weber and Anna Smith Pruitt
21 Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women’s health • Karen J. Leong, Kathy Nakagawa, and Aggie J. Yellow Horse
SECTION IIIB: SOCIAL JUSTICE AND COMMUNITY STUDIES
22 Scholar activist intersectional approaches • Akosua Adomako Ampofo
23 Multi-level analyses of homecare labor • Cynthia J. Cranford and Jennifer Jihye Chun
24 Environmental activism and immigrant women of color • Nadia Y. Kim
25 Children’s rights and social change • Brian Gran and Colette Ngana
PART IV: INTERSECTIONAL GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES: GLOBALIZATION AND TRANSNATIONALISM
26 Centering region and multi-scalar lenses • Ghassan Moussawi
27 Intersectionality and migrant smuggling research • Gabriella Sanchez
28 Intersectionality beyond its traditions • Bandana Purkayastha and Miho Iwata
29 Centering intersectionality in transnational research • Anjana Narayan and Erica Morales
Index

Citation preview

RESEARCH HANDBOOK ON INTERSECTIONALITY

RESEARCH HANDBOOKS IN SOCIOLOGY Series Editor: Hans-Peter Blossfeld, Professor of Sociology, University of Bamberg, Germany The Research Handbooks in Sociology series provides an up-to-date overview on the frontier developments in current sociological research fields. The series takes a theoretical, methodological and comparative perspective to the study of social phenomena. This includes different analytical approaches, competing theoretical views and methodological innovations leading to new insights in relevant sociological research areas. Each Research Handbook in this series provides timely, influential works of lasting significance. These volumes will be edited by one or more outstanding academics with a high international reputation in the respective research field, under the overall guidance of series editor Hans-Peter Blossfeld, Professor of Sociology at the University of Bamberg. The Research Handbooks feature a wide range of original contributions by well-known authors, carefully selected to ensure a thorough coverage of current research. The Research Handbooks will serve as vital reference guides for undergraduate students, doctoral students, postdoctorate students and research practitioners in sociology, aiming to expand current debates, and to discern the likely research agendas of the future. Titles in the series include: Research Handbook on the Sociology of Education Edited by Rolf Becker Research Handbook on the Sociology of the Family Edited by Norbert F. Schneider and Michaela Kreyenfeld Research Handbook on Environmental Sociology Edited by Axel Franzen and Sebastian Mader Research Handbook on Analytical Sociology Edited by Gianluca Manzo Handbook of Sociological Science Contributions to Rigorous Sociology Edited by Klarita Gërxhani, Nan Dirk de Graaf and Werner Raub Research Handbook on the Sociology of Organizations Edited by Mary Godwyn Research Handbook on Digital Sociology Edited by Jan Skopek Research Handbook on Intersectionality Edited by Mary Romero

Research Handbook on Intersectionality Edited by

Mary Romero Professor Emerita, Justice and Social Inquiry, Arizona State University, USA

RESEARCH HANDBOOKS IN SOCIOLOGY

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Mary Romero 2023

Cover image: Aedrian on Unsplash All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2023930295 This book is available electronically in the Sociology, Social Policy and Education subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781800378056

ISBN 978 1 80037 804 9 (cased) ISBN 978 1 80037 805 6 (eBook)

EEP BoX

Contents

List of contributorsviii Acknowledgementsxvi 1

Introduction: intersectionality and transforming the production of knowledge Mary Romero

PART I

1

FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH

2

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist Lori Amber Roessner

15

3

Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964): intersectionality and activism Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge

33

4

Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality Matthew W. Hughey

51

5

The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge

69

PART II INTERSECTIONAL RESEARCH IN INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES SECTION IIA CRITICAL INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES 6

Intersectionality as an ethical commitment  Sophie Withaeckx

90

7

Disability and rural poverty in the global South Shaun Grech

108

8

Anti-colonial praxis in community-based research in feminist food studies Barbara Parker

123

SECTION IIB CRITICAL SEXUALITY STUDIES 9

Researching sexuality and state Jyoti Puri

143

10

Space, place, and urban future  Marcus Anthony Hunter and Terrell J.A. Winder

158

11

Making sexuality, gender, and migration intersectional Salvador Vidal-Ortiz

170

v

vi  Research handbook on intersectionality SECTION IIC CRITICAL INDIGENOUS STUDIES 12

Indigeneity, feminisms, and activism  Renya K. Ramirez

186

13

Intersectionality and ethnography Robert Keith Collins

204

14

Thrivance: an indigenous queer intersectional methodology Andrew Jolivétte

223

SECTION IID CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 15

Intersectional insights into lived citizenship Daniela Cherubini

239

16

Heterosexual marriage-related regimes Laura Odasso

257

17

Intersectionality, citizenship and labor Pallavi Banerjee and Carieta O. Thomas

274

18

Gender-based violence and citizenship in a migration context Evangelia Tastsoglou and Lori Wilkinson

292

PART III INTERSECTIONALITY AND APPLIED RESEARCH SECTION IIIA SOCIAL WORK, DISASTER RECOVERY AND HEALTH DISPARITIES 19

Intersectionality and immigrant and refugee trauma  Filomena M. Critelli and Asli Cennet Yalim

313

20

Power dynamics driving disasters’ impacts, response, and recovery Lynn Weber and Anna Smith Pruitt

332

21

Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women’s health Karen J. Leong, Kathy Nakagawa, and Aggie J. Yellow Horse

351

SECTION IIIB SOCIAL JUSTICE AND COMMUNITY STUDIES 22

Scholar activist intersectional approaches Akosua Adomako Ampofo

370

23

Multi-level analyses of homecare labor Cynthia J. Cranford and Jennifer Jihye Chun

385

24

Environmental activism and immigrant women of color Nadia Y. Kim

404

Contents  vii 25

Children’s rights and social change Brian Gran and Colette Ngana

421

PART IV INTERSECTIONAL GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES: GLOBALIZATION AND TRANSNATIONALISM 26

Centering region and multi-scalar lenses  Ghassan Moussawi

443

27

Intersectionality and migrant smuggling research Gabriella Sanchez

458

28

Intersectionality beyond its traditions Bandana Purkayastha and Miho Iwata

476

29

Centering intersectionality in transnational research Anjana Narayan and Erica Morales

494

Index510

Contributors

Akosua Adomako Ampofo is Professor of African and Gender Studies at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana. At the heart of her work are questions of identity and power—within families, political and religious spaces, and the knowledge industry. In 2005 she became the foundation Director of the University of Ghana’s Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy and from 2010 to 2015 she was the Director of the Institute of African Studies. Adomako Ampofo was the founding Vice-President (2013) and immediate past President of the African Studies Association of Africa (http://​www​.as​-aa​.org/​); an honorary Professor at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Birmingham; and a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is Editor-in-Chief, Contemporary Journal of African Studies, and Co-Editor, Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa blog (http://​www​.cihablog​.com/​). Her recent book co-edited with Josephine Beoku-Betts is titled Producing Inclusive Feminist Knowledge: Positionalities and Discourses in the Global South (Emerald Publishing, 2021). Pallavi Banerjee is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary. Her research is situated at the intersections of immigration, gender, families, unpaid and paid labor, intersectionality, transnationalism. She is the author of the book entitled The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families and the Failures of Dependent-Visa Policy (New York University Press, 2022). Her other research has been published in many peer-reviewed journals including the American Behavioral Scientist, Contexts, Sociological Forum, Gender, Work and Organization, Women, Gender and Families of Color among others. Daniela Cherubini is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Culture at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. She is part of the research group “OTRAS. Feminist perspectives in social research” at the University of Granada, Spain. Her research focuses on gender, migration and citizenship, care and domestic work, gender-based violence and intersectionality, mainly from a qualitative perspective. She is the co-author of Global Domestic Workers. Intersectional Inequalities and Struggles for Rights (Bristol University Press, 2021). Jennifer Jihye Chun is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies and the International Institute at UCLA. She is the author of Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States (Cornell UP, 2009) as well as numerous articles and book chapters on the interconnected worlds of labor, gender, race, ethnicity, and migration under global capitalism. Robert Keith Collins, PhD, a four-field trained anthropologist, is Associate Professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University. He holds a BA in Anthropology and a BA in Native American Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. Collins also holds an MA and PhD in Anthropology from UCLA. Using a person-centered ethnographic approach, his research explores American Indian cultural changes and African and Native American interactions in North, Central, and South America. viii

Contributors  ix Cynthia J. Cranford is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research analyses inequalities of gender, labor and migration, and collective efforts to resist them. She is author of Home Care Fault Lines: Understanding Tensions and Creating Alliances, published in 2020 by Cornell University’s ILR Press, co-winner of the Distinguished Scholarly Book Award from the American Sociological Association Labor and Labor Movements Section, and co-author of Self-employed Workers Organize: Law, Policy and Unions (McGill-Queens University Press, 2005). Cranford’s work has also been published in several journals including Critical Sociology, Gender & Society, Gender, Work and Organisation, Just Labour, Social Problems, Work, Employment and Society, and in several edited volumes. Filomena M. Critelli, PhD, is Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo School of Social Work. She teaches courses in social welfare history and policy, diversity and oppression, trauma and human rights, and global social welfare. Her research focuses on human rights of immigrants and refugees and global migration, as well as women’s rights and gender-based violence in domestic and international contexts. Critelli is Co-Director of the Institute for Sustainable Global Engagement, which promotes cross-national research that advances trauma informed and human rights perspectives and international scholarly exchanges. She has been involved in research, and academic exchanges in India, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Brazil, Italy, and Haiti. Critelli’s work has been published in journals such as Violence Against Women, Critical Sociology, Women’s Studies International Forum, Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, and the Journal of Migration and Integration. She is the co-editor of the book Trauma and Human Rights: Integrating Approaches to Address Human Suffering (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Brian Gran is a sociologist and lawyer whose scholarship concentrates on human rights, including children’s rights, law, and social policy. He has published books as well as articles in various sociology, law, and policy journals. Gran recently published the book, The Sociology of Children’s Rights (Polity Press, 2022). Shaun Grech, PhD, is director of The Critical Institute (Malta), Honorary Associate Professor, Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Cape Town, and Affiliate Associate Professor the Department of International Relations at the University of Malta. He is also editor-in-chief of the international journal, Disability and the Global South and co-editor of the book series, Palgrave Studies in Disability and International Development. Matthew W. Hughey is Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. He holds affiliate faculty positions at Nelson Mandela University, the University of Barcelona, and the University of Cambridge. Professor Hughey’s research examines the forms and functions of race and racism in identity-formation, media, organizations, science, and religion. He has received numerous awards and support from sources such as the American Sociological Association, Fulbright Commission, National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. The author of nine scholarly books and over 80 peer-reviewed articles, he is a frequent voice in international media and a recurrent expert witness for legal disputes over racial discrimination. Marcus Anthony Hunter is the Scott Waugh Endowed Chair in the Division of the Social Sciences, Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, coiner of #BlackLivesMatter, and author of four books.

x  Research handbook on intersectionality Miho Iwata is Associate Professor of Sociology at Towson University. Her research interests focus on racist systems, racial hierarchies, migrants, and human rights. Passionate about social justice, she has analysed Japanese concepts of race and racial hierarchies and how ideologies and institutional arrangements affect migrants to Japan, including Japanese Brazilians. She engages in collaborative research and has published on religious minorities and human rights in the US, as well as marginalized religious groups building peace. She co-authored the book As the Leaves Turn Gold: Asian Americans and Aging (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012). Andrew Jolivétte is Professor and Chair of the Ethnic Studies Department as well as the founding Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is co-founder and co-chair of the UC Ethnic Studies Council and the author or editor of several books including: the Lammy Award Nominated, Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco’s Two-Spirit Community;  Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-Race Native American Identity; Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change,  Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community;  Cultural Representation in Native America;  Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority;  American Indian and Indigenous Education: A Survey Text for the 21st Century; and the forthcoming, Gumbo Circuitry: Poetic Routes, Gastronomic Legacies and Thrivance Circuitry: Queer Afro-Indigenous Futurity and Kinship. Jolivétte is the Board President of the San Francisco American Indian Cultural Center and the Institute for Democratic Education and Culture (Speak Out) and an Advisory Board Member of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal at the University of California, Los Angeles.  Nadia Y. Kim is Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies (and affiliated faculty in Sociology) at Loyola Marymount University. Her research focuses on US race and citizenship injustices concerning Korean/Asian Americans and South Koreans, intersectional and nativist racism in Los Angeles (e.g., 1992 LA Unrest), immigrant women activists, environmental racism and classism, and comparative racialization of Latinxs, Asian Americans, and Black Americans. Throughout her work, Kim’s approach centers (neo)imperialism, transnationality, and the intersectionality of race, gender, class, and citizenship. Kim is author of the multi-award-winning Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA (Stanford University Press, 2008); of multi-award-winning Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA, which chronicles the embodied, emotive, and citizenship politics of Asian and Latin@ immigrant women’s fight for cleaner air in Los Angeles (Stanford University Press, 2021); and of award-winning journal articles on race and assimilation and on racial attitudes. Kim has also long organized on issues of immigrant rights, affirmative action, and environmental justice, some of which she has incorporated into her research. She and/or her work have also appeared (inter)nationally on Red Table Talk, National Public Radio, Southern California Public Radio, Radio Korea, and local TV news and in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Korea Times, NYLON Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. Patricia Madoo Lengermann is Research Professor of Sociology at The George Washington University in Washington, DC. She has been writing with Gillian Niebrugge since 1985. They write in the areas of the history of women in sociology and are the authors of The Women Founders—Sociology and Social Theory, 1830–1930 (Waveland Press, 2007, originally pub-

Contributors  xi lished 1998) as well as numerous chapters and articles on the history of sociology and feminist theory. They have held visiting professorships at the University of Iowa, Gettysburg College, Wells College, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, American University. In 1998–99, they co-founded the American Sociological Association Section on the History of Sociology, each serving at various moments as that Section’s chair. They have been the co-recipients of Distinguished Career Awards from the Harriet Martineau Sociological Society, the District of Columbia Sociological Society, and the ASA Section on the History of Sociology and Social Thought. They are currently writing a volume for Routledge, Re-introducing Jane Addams. Karen J. Leong is Associate Professor in Women and Gender Studies and Asian Pacific American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on intersectional and relational histories of immigration, settler colonialism, and community resilience. Erica Morales is Associate Professor of Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her research interests include race, class, and gender; higher education, and historically marginalized communities. Her latest research examines issues of equity and inclusion for underrepresented groups, including students of color and student-veterans in higher education.  Ghassan Moussawi is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His work lies in the areas of transnational gender and sexuality studies, queer of color critique, and postcolonial feminisms, focusing on the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, empire, and nation. His book Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut (Temple University Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 National Women’s Studies Association’s Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize and the Sociology of Sexualities 2021 Distinguished Book Award, investigates everyday life disruptions and violence, and queer formations in post-war Beirut. Kathy Nakagawa is Associate Professor in Asian Pacific American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on inequities in education, racial literacy, and storytelling. Anjana Narayan is Professor of Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She is the co-author of Living Our Religions: Hindu and Muslim Asian American Women Narrate Their Experiences (Kumarian Press, 2009) and the co-editor of Research beyond Borders: Multidisciplinary Reflections (Lexington Books, 2012). She is currently associated with an international and interdisciplinary collaborative research network to advance the study of lived religion and gender in relation to Hinduism and Islam. Colette Ngana is a doctoral candidate in Sociology who studies social inequities through the lens of health. Her work centers on the intersection of housing and trauma injury, particularly burns. Ngana also serves as a reproductive justice advocate with a background in reproductive and medical ethics. Gillian Niebrugge is Professorial Lecturer at The George Washington University and Professor Emerita at Northern Virginia Community College. She has been writing with Patricia Lengermann since 1985. They write in the areas of the history of women in sociology and are the authors of The Women Founders—Sociology and Social Theory, 1830–1930

xii  Research handbook on intersectionality (Waveland Press, 2007, originally published 1998) as well as numerous chapters and articles on the history of sociology and feminist theory. They have held visiting professorships at the University of Iowa, Gettysburg College, Wells College, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, American University. In 1998–99, they co-founded the American Sociological Association Section on the History of Sociology, each serving at various moments as that Section’s chair. They have been the co-recipients of Distinguished Career Awards from the Harriet Martineau Sociological Society, the District of Columbia Sociological Society, and the ASA Section on the History of Sociology and Social Thought. They are currently writing a volume for Routledge, Re-introducing Jane Addams. Laura Odasso is researcher at the chair Migrations et Sociétés of the Collège de France, and Collaborative Institute on Migrations fellow, based in Paris. She is also a research associate at the Centre méditerranéen de sociologie, de sciences politiques et d’histoire (MESOPOLHIS), Aix-Marseille University (France) and at the Group for Research on Ethnic Relations, Migrations and Equality, Université libre de Brussels (Belgium), where, in 2014–16, she conducted the research project Awareness and Migration: Organisations for bi-national family rights Empowerment (AMORE) funded by the European program Marie Skłodowska Curie. Characterized by a comparative and qualitative intersectional approach, her research interests are situated at the crossroad of sociology of (family) migration, sociology of law, and public and contentious policies. Her current research explores intimacy as a skill for accessing rights in the light of the materiality of formal and informal, online, and offline, legal brokerage. She recently co-authored the chapter “Intimacy Brokers,” in Transnational Marriage and Partner Migration: Constellations of Security, Citizenship and Rights, edited by Anne-Marie D’Aoust (Rutgers University Press, 2022) and edited the book Faire et défaire les liens familiaux. Usages et pratiques du droit en contexte migratoire (PUR, 2020, with A. Fillod-Chabaud). Barbara Parker is an Associate Professor of Sociology, and a faculty member of the Anishinaabe Kendaasiwin Institute (AKI) at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada. Her research focuses broadly on gender and food justice (food security and Indigenous food sovereignty), critical dietetics, the school food environment, and more recently food pedagogy. Her edited collection: Feminist Food Studies: Intersectional Perspectives, was published in 2019 with Women’s Press. She has also published in Journal of Critical Dietetics, the Canadian Food Studies Journal, Global Health Promotion, the Journal of Hunger and Environmental Nutrition, and the International Journal of Indigenous Health. Dr. Parker’s research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Canadian Institute for Health Research (CIHR). She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on food, gender and health, food security, the sociology of food and nutrition, and qualitative research methods. Dr. Parker was the recipient of a Teaching Innovation Award in 2020 by the Senate Learning and Teaching Committee at Lakehead University. Anna Smith Pruitt, PhD, is faculty affiliate in the Department of Psychology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and a research associate with the Research Corporation of the University of Hawaiʻi. Using participatory and intersectional approaches, her research examines the effects of extreme poverty and disasters on individuals and communities. Her applied research on disaster and homelessness has been used to promote community wellbeing and resilience and to encourage equitable access to resources and voice in decision-making processes for traditionally marginalized communities.

Contributors  xiii Jyoti Puri is Hazel Dick Leonard Chair and Professor of Sociology at Simmons University. Her most abiding interests relate to issues of sexuality, gender, race, nation, and state from a transnational/postcolonial feminist lens. She is author of three books: Woman, Body, Desire in Post-colonial India (Routledge, 1999), Encountering Nationalism (Blackwell, 2004), and Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle against the Antisodomy Law in India’s Present (Duke University Press, 2016). Puri received the 2021 Jessie Bernard Award from the American Sociological Association. She is currently working on a project on death and migration. Bandana Purkayastha is Professor of Sociology & Asian and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has served as the President, Sociologists for Women in Society (2013–14), and is, currently, on the executive committee of International Sociological Association (2014–18). Her areas of research are migration, human rights, violence and peace and she engages intersectionality and critical transnationalism frames in her work. She has received awards for her research, teaching, and leadership, locally and nationally, including, most recently, the American Sociological Association’s Jessie Bernard award for a career of scholarship and leadership improving the lives of women and other marginalized groups. Renya K. Ramirez is Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz and an enrolled member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska. She is an author of Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond (Duke University Press, 2007) and Standing up to Colonial Power: The Lives of Henry Roe and Elizabeth Bender Cloud (Nebraska University Press, 2018). She is writing a third book, Native Women of the Alcatraz Occupation and Afterwards. Her interests are Native feminisms, diaspora, transnationalism, environmental justice, settler colonialism, and Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe family/tribal history. Lori Amber Roessner, a professor at the University of Tennessee’s School of Journalism & Electronic Media, teaches and studies media history and its relationship to cultural phenomena and practices, including the operation of politics, the negotiation of public images and collective memories, and the construction of race, gender, and class. Roessner’s journal-length cultural histories have appeared in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly and Journalism History, among others, contributing to her receiving the distinction of American Journalism’s Inaugural Rising Scholar in 2014. More recently, she co-edited Political Pioneer of the Press: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Her Transnational Crusade for Social Justice (Lexington Books, 2018) and served as a Faculty Fellow for the University of Tennessee’s Division for Diversity & Engagement, where she studied and offered recommendations for mitigating invisible and emotional labor. Mary Romero is Professor Emerita, School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She is the author of Introducing Intersectionality (Polity Press, 2018), the Maid’s Daughter: Inside and Outside the American Dream (New York University Press, 2011), Maid in the U.S.A. (New York University Press, 1992), co-editor of eight books, including Intersectionality and Ethnic Entrepreneurship (Routledge), When Care Work Goes Global (Ashgate), and Blackwell Companion to Social Inequalities. Her work appears in numerous social science journals and law review articles. She served as the 110th President of the American Sociological Association. She has received various awards from the American Sociological Association (ASA), Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS), and Study for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP).

xiv  Research handbook on intersectionality Gabriella Sanchez is a sociocultural anthropologist and research fellow at Georgetown university Collaborative for Global Children’s Issues whose work examines ethnographically the manufacturing of smuggling as a mechanism of irregular migration control. She is the author of Human Smuggling and Border Crossings (Routledge, 2015) based on her work with migrant smuggling facilitators along the US-Mexico border, and co-editor alongside Luigi Achilli and Sheldon Zhang of Migrant Smuggling as a Collective Strategy and Insurance Policy: Views from the Margins (European University Institute, 2018). Evangelia Tastsoglou, PhD, LLM, is Professor of Sociology and Global Development Studies at Saint Mary’s University. Her research engages feminist and intersectional perspectives on women, gender, and various aspects of international migration; Canadian immigration and integration; violence, citizenship, transnationalism, and diasporas. She is the co-editor of the book, Gender-Based Violence in Migration: Interdisciplinary, Feminist and Intersectional Approaches (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). She is the recipient of the Saint Mary’s University President’s Award for Excellence in Research (2021). Carieta O. Thomas is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary. Her areas of research expertise include intersectionality, care work, and immigration and technologies of surveillance. Her current research interrogates the role pre-employment screening is playing in the management of undocumented Caribbean care workers within the labor force in the US and Canada. Thomas is a 2019–20 recipient of the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship who has engaged in interdisciplinary work in the fields of immigration law, refugee resettlement, and diaspora studies. Salvador Vidal-Ortiz teaches for Sociology and the Department of Critical Race, Gender and Culture Studies at American University. He co-authored Race and Sexuality (Polity Press, 2018), co-edited, in English, The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men (New York University Press, 2009), Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism (University of Texas Press, 2015), and in Spanish, Travar el Saber (Transing Knowledges)—on education and trans people in Argentina (Universidad Nacional de La Plata, 2018). He is currently working on a Santería, race, gender, and sexuality manuscript. He is a member of the Grupo de Trabajo Feminista y Queer de las Américas (Cuir/Queer Américas Working Group) and has edited journals in multiple languages as part of their effort to challenge North-South knowledge formation and circulation. Lynn Weber, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Psychology and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina, has for nearly 40 years been a leader in developing the field of intersectionality. As co-founder and director of the Center for Research on Women at the University of Memphis and as director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina, she promoted intersectional research and practice through her scholarship, pedagogy, institution-building, and engagement with local communities. Her work in disasters explores inequalities in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and in the experiences of Katrina’s displaced across the country. Additionally, her work addresses intersectionality approaches to the social determinants of health. Lori Wilkinson, PhD, is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manitoba. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Migration Futures (2021–28). Her research agenda focuses on the integration experiences of newcomers to Canada, with particular interest on refugee families.

Contributors  xv She was recently awarded the Dr. and Mrs. Ralph Campbell Award for Community Outreach from the University of Manitoba (2019) and the National Metropolis Researcher of Excellence Award (2021). Terrell J.A. Winder is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests are racial and sexual stigma, sexual health, and identity development. In previous projects, he has assessed the role of mobile technology in the prevention and treatment of HIV, the impact of community organizations on religious and racial identity development, and the barriers to PrEP use among Black men who have sex with men. Winder’s current book project investigates the impacts that chosen family, community organizations, and visual media have on the gender expressions, racial and sexual identity formations, and the life trajectories of young Black gay men. Sophie Withaeckx is Assistant Professor in Philosophy (UD) at Maastricht University. Previously, she held the post of coordinator and post-doc researcher at RHEA (Centre of Expertise on Gender, Diversity and Intersectionality at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel), and as lecturer and researcher at Odisee University College. She holds master’s degrees in African Languages & Cultures (University of Gent), International Politics (University of Antwerp), and a PhD in Philosophy and Moral Sciences (Vrije Universiteit Brussel). Her research has studied understandings of culture, gender, and morality in experiences with gender-based violence among immigrant communities. In her current research, she explores how normative concepts of “the human” inform institutional spaces and practices. On the one hand, she examines discourses and practices of diversity and decolonization in higher education. On the other hand, she researches how taken-for-granted notions of humanness, family and kinship underlie ethics and practice in transnational adoption. Asli Cennet Yalim is Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida School of Social Work. Prior to entering academia, she worked as a psychologist with children and families across different educational and health settings in Istanbul. She received her master’s degree in Social Work from Florida State University and her PhD in Social Welfare from University at Buffalo. Yalim’s areas of research are refugee and immigrant mental health, forced migration in the Middle East, barriers to mental health services, refugee women, and community-based participatory research. She teaches courses in human development and social environment, research methods, micro level roles and intervention, social work in health settings, and social work with immigrants and refugees. Aggie J. Yellow Horse (she/her) is Associate Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on the social determinants of racial health inequities, community-centered data collection, and critical data literacy.

Acknowledgements

Back in the Spring 2020, when Daniel Mather approached me about editing a Research Handbook on Intersectionality, the project sounded like an ideal one to begin the next phase of my career as a retired university professor planning to spend time writing. However, I had no idea about the challenges that researchers and universities were to face as Covid-19 worsened and the pandemic continued. Several authors had to pull out of the project due to illness, caretaking responsibilities, and general disruption of home and work obligations. Many of these authors were delayed by ongoing changes in the mode of teaching classes switching during the terms, assisting their children with online school, caring for sick children and extra caretaking responsibilities for elderly parents and relatives, some dealing with their own health crisis demanding hospitalization, and the list of unexpected events over the last two years continues. I am extremely thankful to all the authors who devoted extensive time and effort to draft chapters and revise them based on reviewers’ comments and feedback. My heart-filled gratitude goes to Jean Bohner and Anna Smith Pruitt for helping to finalize Lynn Weber’s co-authored article with Anna. Given Lynn Weber’s path-breaking research using intersectionality, I was excited when Lynn accepted my invitation to contribute to the Handbook and she recruited her former student and friend, Anna, to co-author the chapter. Before receiving the revised chapter, a mutual friend contacted me to say that Lynn Weber had died from complications of Covid. She was fully vaccinated but other health conditions compromised her body’s ability to fight the virus. Lynn had left notes concerning the edits and her wife, Jean Bohner, worked with me and Anna to finalize the chapter. I appreciate Jean taking the time during this very difficult loss to help finish the chapter. A year prior, we had no idea that this would be Lynn Weber’s last publication. I am profoundly grateful to have known Lynn and that our paths crossed during our careers. Her work was an inspiration to me. I am extremely indebted to the many colleagues in the US, UK and Canada that agreed to review chapters. Their feedback and insights made the overall Handbook stronger. I acknowledge the following academics who graciously accepted the request to review: Margaret Abraham, Hofstra University; Bridget Anderson, University of Bristol; Amy Armenia, Rollins College; David Beccera, Arizona State University, Hae Yeon Choo, University of Toronto; Nassette Falu, University of Central Florida; Julian Go, University of Chicago; Shobha Gurung, Southern Utah University; Kimberly Ann Harris, Marquette University; Cheryl Llewellyn, University of Massachusetts, Lowell; Eric Margolis, Arizona State University; Sarah Mahler, Florida International University; Joya Mistra, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Ghassan Moussawi, University of Illinois at Urbana, Champaign; Kari Norgaard, University of Oregon; Chijioke Obasi, University of the West of Scotland; Anthony Ocampo, California State Polytechnic University; Mary Pardo, California State University, Northridge; Lisa Park, University of California, Santa Barbara; Celine Pascale, American University; David Pettinicchio, University of Toronto; Bandana Purkayastha, University of Connecticut; Fernando Rivera, University of Central Florida; Susan Spronk, University of Owatta; and Hyeyoung Woo, Portland State University.

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Acknowledgements  xvii I am extremely grateful to Eric Margolis’s willingness to put aside his many gardening, canning and woodworking projects to help with editing. I appreciate Dan Mather’s gentle guidance and patience throughout all the challenges.

1. Introduction: intersectionality and transforming the production of knowledge Mary Romero

If there was a single element contributed by intersectional scholarship it is transdisciplinarity. Writings on intersectionality continue to expand across the disciplines of law, humanities, and the social sciences moving from the margins toward the center. Women and Gender Studies has widely embraced intersectionality as an essential theoretical lens to understand social inequality and the power dynamics surrounding gender, race, class, sexuality, citizenship, ablism, agism, and other identities used around the world to marginalize groups. Many scholars have critiqued identity politics for its lack of representativeness for the larger collective. Political groups may not always share the same values or be situated similarly in their relations to social, economic, or political power structures. Debates surrounding differences, equality, and positionality (cf. Collins 2019; Yuval-Davis 1997; Yuval-Davis and Werbner 1999) emerge as scholars consider how to theorize various social locations and marginalized populations, as well as comprehending various axis of domination (cf. Anthias 2016; Collins 2019; Yuval-Davis 1997; Yuval-Davis and Werbner 1999). Feminist and critical race scholars acknowledge that dominant narratives and themes embedded in academic disciplines were constructed around privilege and power that excluded oppressed and marginalized groups. Most scholars using an intersectional framework share a commitment to transforming the production of knowledge by including marginalized groups’ experiences. They recognize that economic and political power structures reproduce and maintain knowledge production by privileged groups. The ways in which intersectionality research methods have been conducted are significant in understanding the production of knowledge, including theoretical systems, research tools, researchers and stakeholders, methods for studying intersectional social processes and ways of researching lived experiences. Once believed to only be applicable to qualitative research, intersectional methodologies have expanded to include quantitative and multi-method approaches.

INTERSECTIONAL RESEARCH METHODS Numerous collections have interrogated theoretical aspects of intersectionality (e.g., Collins and Bilge 2016; Dill and Zambrana 2009; Grazanka 2019; Hancock 2016; Lutz, Herrera Viva and Supik 2011). However, intersectionality is also used as a “framework or research paradigm to deal with the complex interaction of different social categories such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, or age, among others” (Rodó-Zárate and Jorba 2022, 24). It calls for an “interpretation of research findings within the sociohistorical context of structural inequality for groups positioned in social hierarchies of unequal power” (Bowleg 2008, 323). Attention has been given to identifying wrong ways of doing intersectional research; for example, employing a single-axis like gender to analyse a single system of domination. The authors in this anthol1

2  Research handbook on intersectionality ogy understand that research challenges increase as multiple identities and social locations are examined, the attention devoted to methodology has remained insufficient. As editor I try to remedy that. Even when they were trained in traditional disciplines, intersectional researchers differ by “incorporating more dimensions situationally specific interpretations, group dynamics and explicit emphasis on social change” (Weber and Para-Medina 2003, 222). Drawing on multidisciplinary approaches, critical intersectional scholarship enhances researchers’ ability to open new research frontiers. Applied fields similarly build on critical practices, such as community-based participatory research (CBPR) and other methods that embrace social justice and equality. Many researchers incorporate the methodology of intersectionality in their project design by inculcating social justice principals in their research methods, practices, and environments; they make certain the investigation is inclusive and employs more equitable “power dynamics among research team members from different social and professional backgrounds and academic ranks” (Agénor 2020, 805). As a motivation for this anthology. I have long noted that traditional research methodologies rarely include the complexity of more than one identity category; they prefer additive linear models or the expansion of previous research by adding additional groups (McCall 2005). They tend to simply compare subsamples to ascertain experiences of discrimination or privilege, instead of interlocking systems of domination. Even when not expressly stated, comparison samples between groups assume dominant groups as the norm and differences are mis-interpreted as deviations from the norm. There is also “the assumption of typicality/ normality of one group’s experience” (Cuádraz and Uttal 1999, 163). My literature reviews of many fields reveal tendencies focusing on the role of multiple social identities rather than axes of domination; thus, social inequalities resulting from sexism, racism, or heterosexism that shape, for example, wealth distribution, health outcomes, and educational disparities, remain invisible (Agénor 2020; Green, Evans and Subramanian 2017). The other approach common in the literature is additive or multiple models, which consists of analysing multiple axes such as race and citizenship separately and then adding the effects together (Bowleg 2008; Choo and Ferree 2010; Davis 2008; Hancock 2007; May 2015). Additive approaches imply a ranking of oppression, which does not consider individual experiences that include belonging to both dominant and subordinate groups (Weber and Parra-Median 2003). Social identities and social inequality are interdependent and mutually constitutive axes of discrimination and privilege—not independent or one-dimensional (Bowleg 2008; Collins 1995; Cuádraz and Utall 1999; Weber and Para-Median 2003). As Leslie McCall (2005, 1772) noted, complexity arises “when the subject of analysis expands to include multiple dimensions of social life and categories …” Various scholars have attempted to create and follow guideposts or hallmarks to assist the development of intersectional methodology. Some use six core ideas, social inequality, power, relationality, social context, complexity, and social justice to design and evaluate research projects (Collins and Bilge 2016). Although not always used as distinct methodology approaches, McCall (2005) identified three basic issues inherent in intersectional research processes and knowledge production: ● anticategorical complexity—“methodology that deconstructs analytical categories” (p. 1773),

Introduction  3 ● intercategorical complexity—“adopting existing analytical categories to document relations of inequality among social groups and changing configuration of inequality among multiple and conflicting dimensions” (p. 1773), ● and intracategorical complexity—“focus particular social groups at neglected points of intersection” (p. 1774). Researchers might also select one of the three styles outlined by Choo and Ferree (2010, 131) for understanding intersectionality in practice: Group-centered, process-centered, and system-centered. They identified inclusion, analytical interactions, and institutional primacy as “three defining aspects of intersectionality.” While, Misra, Curington and Green (2021, 10) acknowledged Collins and Bilge’s (2016) six core ideas, they sought to “integrate some categories and add others” and wrote that the key methodological tenets of intersectional research are: ● ● ● ● ● ●

oppression, relationality, complexity, context, comparison, and deconstruction.

Inequality, power, and social justice are integrated into the “oppression” category, thus capturing power relations and social inequality. In research, complexity and context are researched through comparison and “identifying the inherently instability of categories, or deconstruction” (Misra, Curington and Green 2021, 11). The category “relational” goes beyond recognizing social identities to acknowledge that one’s subordination is related to another’s privilege. “Complexity” exists because social identities are intermingled with oppositional identities, as well as constructing privileges or disadvantages. Categories are therefore not independent variables; they exist in time and have historical backgrounds that are crucial to understand the reproduction of social inequality over time. MCall’s discussion of intracategorical analyses deconstructs categories to avoid essentializing identities and includes “partial and fluid socially constructed categories” (2005, 14). Designing research that centers intersectionality demands researchers consider what conceptualization of intersectionality will best fit the research questions and address the challenges posed by this approach. “For example, if inclusion and voice are priorities for a specific study, then the issue of how much the mainstream itself is problematized needs to come to the fore and be as explicitly addressed as possible” (Choo and Ferree 2010, 146). Social science researchers examining the mechanisms by which inequalities function in economic, educational, and legal systems must interact with their own social identities. Some social scientists have built on the structural intersectionality that Crenshaw (1989, 1991) introduced to analyse individual legal or economic status. Structural intersectionality research designs and methodologies uncover policies and procedures assumed to be neutral but have differential impacts and reproduce a wide range of inequalities (Collins 2019; Crenshaw 1991). Researchers typically begin the study by identifying interconnecting social identities at the individual level (e.g., race, class, gender, and sexuality) and then connect to structural inequality exposing interconnectedness at the institutional level—social practices and policies reproducing inequality. For instance, case studies are frequently used to examine differences

4  Research handbook on intersectionality and the complexities of experience from multiple intersecting categories like race, sexuality, and social class, within specific social locations to unpack diversity and difference within intersecting categories. Other researchers are less interested in diversity and difference within multiple intersecting categories to focus on processes that produce and maintain resistance. An alternative proposed by Durfee in 2021 begins by identifying institutional mechanisms producing social inequalities and then examining groups with marginalized social identities. In her study on domestic violence civil protective orders, she argues that this approach “can reveal the interconnectedness of barriers, risks, and vulnerabilities faced by different groups of multiple marginalized survivors” (p. 342). Drawing on her interviews she compared lived experiences to assumptions embedded in the law and legal practices; the goal was to rectify a system relying on “the ‘universal woman’ and ‘universal risk’ discourse” (p. 360). Qualitative researchers using grounded theory (Glaser and Straus 1967) do not begin with a pre-determined sample but rather identify categories as they emerge from ongoing data analysis. However, researchers must be careful not to impose a particular matrix of domination on the data or end with discussions of identity construction and lose sight of power relations (Collin 1995; Weber 1995). Intersectional research requires analysing multiple dimensions of individual identity and social structures simultaneously. As Cuádraz and Uttal (1999, 158) observed: “it is particularly challenging to analyze how individual experiences and biography are embedded in social structure and history while simultaneously accounting for each of these multiple social structures.” They argue that the individual’s understanding of their own life is shaped by both their situational location (the contemporary moment that they are reporting about) and their social location (more than situational location; a location shaped by particular social histories of race, class and gender), as well as the contemporary social context (the stratification of society and the politicization of certain topics). (p. 173)

Designing a study to collect the data required for such an analysis is important, as the following examples demonstrate. In her study of Black lesbians, Bowleg (2008, 313) advises intersectional researchers to address “developing questions to measure intersectionality, analyzing intersectionality data, and interpreting them.” In terms of research questions, she warns that asking additive questions calls for additive answers, such as asking the respondent to rank their identities. Similar questions are better framed by asking about separate experiences of each identity, such as and/ or race, gender, and sexuality. Open-ended questions leave room for other social identities to emerge that the researcher did not expect. Recognizing unintentional exclusion requires data collection on embedded assumptions of groups or essentializing groups, such as women, LBGTQ individuals, or migrants. Examining the ways that “same” is equated with “fair” in services, treatment, for example, privileges those whose social position is constructed as the norm. Thus, other questions need to “highlight the importance of articulating intersectionality explicitly in interview questions,” in other words, “ask precisely what you want to know” (p. 315). Interpreting individual accounts always occurs in historical and social contexts since researchers’ identities are socially constructed. Contextualizing one’s findings in a sociohistorical framework is crucial in intersectional research. For intersectionality analysts, the key interpretative task is to derive meaning from the observed data on the one hand, and to on the other, interpret this individual level data within a larger sociohistorical

Introduction  5 context of structural inequality that may not be explicit or directly observable in the data. (Bowleg 2008, p. 320)

Early on, researcher-activists were drawn to a conceptual framework that aimed to uncover the different economic and political conditions of groups previously ignored in developing research designs, excluded in policy recommendations, and whose experiences had been distorted by comparing them to the status quo. Although intersectional theorizing began in and continues to dominate academic discourse, praxis is a crucial component. Intersectionality is an important analytical and practical tool for social justice movements building solidarity across the matrix of domination (Collins 2019; Collins and Bilge 2016). Research-activists collect data to analyse institutional practices and procedures that create hidden barriers for marginalized groups and is used to engage in strategic actions and political actions. Praxis is an integral part of intersectionality as demonstrated by Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper to the Combahee River Collective (1986). As I write this introduction, social justice groups and practitioners are using intersectionality as a tool to respond to the recent decisions by the US Supreme Court, the reversal of Roe v. Wade, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (allowing prayer in public schools), and West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (limiting its measures to controls at individual power plants). Taking the case of the reversal of Roe v. Wade, individuals and groups immediately began organizing and taking steps to assist women in vulnerable states. Individuals immediately began demonstrating and protesting and Rise Up organized nationwide protests for July 4th to call attention to women being denied freedom. Groups across the country are at work to defeat state ballot initiatives restricting or eliminating access to abortion. Vote Pro Choice is pushing forward with efforts to increase the number of all women voting in county and state elections. Abortion rights groups are also making sure women living in conservative states have access to funding and travel to have a safe abortion. Abortion rights litigators are filing lawsuits in numerous states to establish state rights giving women reproductive choice. Abortion providers are working toward expanding services to accommodate out-of-state women. Medical schools located in states that will restrict their training of physicians in all reproductive care are establishing available training to provide clinical experience, such as traveling residencies. Recognizing the struggle will be a long one; these efforts are not only aimed at protecting women’s choice but also their physical and mental health. Empirical researchers concerned with value-free and notions of objectivity discourage the scholar-activist approach and tend to view their methodology as less than rigorous and engagement with social justice as delegitimate findings (Romero 2020). Norms of research objectivity still dominate academic discourse in the US and engaged researchers tend to be dismissed as social justice warriors rather than scholarly empirical research (Abraham 2019; Romero 2020). As intersectionality becomes more accepted within subfields in traditional disciplines, scholar-activists are gaining more acceptance and social justice research agendas are gradually finding some support.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK This Handbook is not a textbook approach to intersectional research methods because a formal or standardized methodology is precisely what intersectional theory, methods, and practice crit-

6  Research handbook on intersectionality icizes (Cho, Crenshaw and McCall 2013; Misra, Curington and Green 2021). Intersectionality is “a fluid interpretive framework” and “thrives on the reality of tensions existing between categories” (Gill 2016, 69). This methodology requires examining the dynamics of individual and group identities as they intersect within the axes of power that comprise a structural level of analysis. The Handbook’s goal is to provide a sampling of promising research approaches from various disciplines that offer innovative advances in intersectional methodology. The editor solicited state of the art contributions beginning with foundational and empirical writings that explain historical developments of systems of oppression, interdisciplinary research on marginalized communities, and empirical power relations between groups. I included chapters that address applied research and emerging global perspectives of intersectional research. Most intersectional research includes feminist frameworks, and I sought critical race approaches for their specific contributions, and obviously because critical race theory has become part of the US culture wars. However, this research has also been labeled as “domestic intersectionality” (Patil 2013, 854). Over the last decade scholars have applied multiple social scales to include transnational scales, alongside intimate, local, and national scales (Mahler, Chaudhuri and Patil 2015). Global chapters address intersections emerging in the wide range of social issues to be considered alongside patriarchy and sexism—capitalism, white supremacy, nationalism, colonialism, climate emergencies, imperial decline, and public health are just a few of the issues comprehended by intersectionality. Others incorporate intersectional methods with participatory action research (PAR). Contributors to this book were asked to go beyond thinking of intersectionality only as an analytical tool and address how one goes about doing intersectional research. In drafting their chapter, contributors were asked to keep the following questions in mind as they described intersectional methodology: ● ● ● ●

What would a full array of intersectional methodologies consist of? What would be the actual research method(s) for each? What would a full array of intersectional projects consist of? What intersectional research captures the various levels of analysis: micro, meso, and macro? ● What are the future directions of intersectional methodologies?  ● And what are the methodological challenges? Before Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 law review article coined the term “intersectional” for conceptual approaches that seek to uncover overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination, researchers and activists, particularly Black feminists, had been contributing to its conceptual development. Recalling the history and intellectual origins of intersectional frameworks of analysis is important in acknowledging the extensive body of knowledge and contributions of women of color. Furthermore, it was important to avoid participating in the whitening of intersectionality (Alexander-Floyd 2012; Bilge 2013, 2014). In preparing this Handbook, I began with a section on foundations laid by scholars who have largely been written out of the cannon in numerous disciplines, such as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacob, Maria Miller Steward, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Frances E.W. Harper, and Ida B. Wells. As Hancock (2013, 263–4) noted: This intellectual tradition had three hall makers that continue to part of the Black feminist tradition: (1) Goals of empowerment and liberation; (2) Focus upon Black women’s experiences and knowledge—what Collins later termed ‘Black feminist epistemology’, and (3) Commitment to Black

Introduction  7 women’s self-determination—power over their political, economic, reproductive and artistic lives as Black woman, not as disaggregable identities of Black + woman.

Although, I was unable to include chapters on each of these scholars, I wanted to highlight the intersectional research they conducted and demonstrate both the empirical rigor of their studies and their commitment to social justice and social transformation. In short, “intersectional” is a useful new term for scholarship with a long tradition. I also wanted to acknowledge and include the (mostly) white women scholars in social settlement movements who supported and worked alongside many of these Black scholars. They practiced intersectionality speaking, writing, and conducting research in the fight for racial, gender, and class equality. Women scholars in the social settlement movement, and beyond, taught in universities and published in academic journals, “their major goal was to reach the general public, structure government policies based on principles of social justice and advocacy” (Romero 2020, 8–9). As Morris (2015) documented in The Scholar Denied, Du Bois and women scholars working at Hull House co-authored the first sociological book containing “the methodology mapping demographic information on urban populations according to their geographic distribution” (Deegan 1988, 55) and “the use of mapping as a statistical technique to reveal patterns of social groups” (p. 62). Not only was their research based on empirical methods, they also were engaged in social justice research and practice, transforming knowledge, and advocating for social change. Critical race feminist scholars are also using the opportunity to reclaim scholarly traditions previously made invisible in constructing the cannons of various disciplines. This is evident in the scholarship on scholars previously marginalized in my discipline of sociology, including: W.E.B. Du Bois (cf. Basevich 2020; Itzigsohn and Brown 2020; Morris 2015; Wright 2016); the role historically Black colleges and universities have had in producing and transforming knowledge (cf. Jones 1974; Wright 2020); women’s contribution to knowledge production (cf. Deegan 1988, 1991; Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley 1998), decolonizing knowledge (Blauner and Wellman 1973; Connell 2007; Go 2017); and addressing settler-colonialism (Banivanua Mar and Edmonds 2010; Patel 2021; Rifkin 2017; Veracini 2015). I constructed the Handbook to incorporate many of these efforts to reclaim silenced voices. Part I, “Foundational Research” begins with Lori Amber Roesser’s historical and journalist account of Ida B. Wells-Barnett as an activist and journalist. Engaged in antiracism and women’s rights initiatives, Wells-Barnett employed tools of investigative and data-based journalism, including empirical evidence like firsthand accounts and statistics. Her work has become a prototype for responsible activist journalism. Her intersectional analysis of race, gender, and class is evident in her writings about her removal from first-class train car, which she had purchased a ticket for, and forced into the second-class smoker’s car. More than a decade before the 1897 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, she lost her fight in court and recognized the lack of support in the patriarchal Black community to fight for Black women. Her campaign against lynching exposed the myths of the white southern gentleman, brute Black male rapists, the chaste southern white lady, and the immoral, hypersexual Black Jezebel and linked systemic oppression in maintaining violence against Blacks. Next is a chapter by Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge in which they analyse Anna Julia Cooper’s writings and activism to expose white domination from the standpoint of “a Black Woman of the South.” Cooper used narratives to link race, gender, class, and region to macrosocial structures. Her scholar-activism is evident in her critical scholarship and service to

8  Research handbook on intersectionality the Black community in face of the financial and professional risks. In Chapter 4, Matthew Hughey presents Du Boisian Sociology and reviews the debates surrounding his use of an intersectional paradigm to analyse the racial vulnerability of Blacks along various social, political, and economic axes of domination. Hughey demonstrates the interdisciplinary influences in intersectional sociology and emphasis on empirical data to inform policy. He points to Du Bois’s use of standpoint theory (long before the term was named) in conceptualizing “second-sight” and “double-consciousness,” as well as his continued interest in economic and political structures shaping oppression and opportunities in the lives of Black Americans. Having shown the foundational work for an intersectional approach in Du Bois’s work, he analyses The Talented Tenth, the Philadelphia Negro, Black Reconstruction America 1860–1880 and Darkwater to examine the understanding of race, gender, and class categories as simultaneously lived experiences. Part I concludes with a chapter on the social settlement movement and activist scholarship. After introducing the college-educated members and activities of the social Settlement Movement, Lengermann and Niebrugge present their activist scholarship on social problems and solutions appearing in their research reports, policy recommendations, theoretical discussions, and memoirs and autobiographies. They examine the use of intersectional analysis in five propositions, including the use of their own intersectional identity as white college-educated women and coalition building with Black men and women. The rest of the Handbook is organized into Part II, interdisciplinary studies, Part III, applied and community studies, and Part IV, global perspectives. Most readers may be surprised that Gender and Women’s Studies is not included under interdisciplinary studies. However, given the volume of writings and attention to intersectionality in women’s studies, I choose to include other interdisciplinary studies in the social sciences that incorporate intersectionality in their theory and research. As the reader will find, most contributors have already integrated gender and feminism in their research. Other multidisciplinary studies point to new ways of conducting intersectional research, other than feminism, such as settler-colonialism and colonialism. Part III present chapters on applied research and offers ways that intersectionality methods are used to address inequality and oppression in the professional schools, including social work and public health. This part includes a subsection on social justice and community studies, which offers perspectives into scholar-activism, researching social movements, and social change. Part IV offers global perspectives that include globalization and transnationalism. Although the Handbook is organized into these four parts and several subsections, there are overlapping themes throughout the Handbook, namely, sexuality, migration, activism, scholar-activism, colonialism, settler-colonialism, violence against women, and participatory action research. Part II, “Intersectional Research in Interdisciplinary Studies” is divided into four subsections: Critical Interdisciplinary Studies, Critical Sexuality Studies, Critical Indigenous Studies, and Citizen Studies. Sophie Withaeckx opens Part II with an essay on intersectionality as an ethnical commitment and suggests ways that values and normative commitments can anchor researchers to make decisions about interpretations and understandings of intersectionality. This is followed by Shaun Grech’s chapter on the multidimensional intersections of disability in rural poverty in the Global South beginning with the legacy of colonialism and continued by contemporary geopolitics and multiple other axes of power. Barbara Parker frames feminist food studies as anticolonial praxis in community-based research to discuss doing intersectional research. This subsection is followed by the Critical Sexuality Studies subsection, beginning with Jyoti Puri’s work on sexuality and state by researching antisodomy law in India in

Introduction  9 relation to colonial histories and contemporary context and transnational aspects of research. Marcus Anthony Hunter and Terrell J.A. Winder consider the significance of queer geographies by examining Bayard Rustin’s life, particularly an arrest in Los Angeles in 1953. They introduce the term “intersectional recovery” to describe “an intentional form and pathway for pragmatic and meaningful recovery, recasting, and reclamation of the overlooked and understudied biographies and geographies of Black queer figures.” Salvador Vidal-Ortiz examines the ways that researchers have approached the intersectionality of sexuality, gender, and migration, incorporating sexuality across sexual orientations and gender identity. Focusing on an interpretative approach, he analyses two special journal issues on the topic and addresses the uses and limitations of various methodologies. Three chapters compose the subsection of Part II on Critical Indigenous Studies. Renya Ramirez analyses intersectional research in understanding environmental racism as impacting Indigenous communities and feminist activist responses. Applying an Indigenous philosophy of “All of Our Relations,” she identifies a missing category that includes all living things by referencing “more-than-human” to call attention to the interdependencies of all life on earth including animals, plants, water, and land. Robert Keith Collins uses an integrated intersectional and person-centered ethnographic approach to examine intragroup differences among African-Native Americans as they navigate and negotiate their individual lives and make sense of their racial and cultural experiences. Andrew Jolivétte identifies a methodology for intersectional race, gender, and sexuality from a critical mixed-race, Afro-Indigenous perspective. The chapter builds on inheritance refusal, which refers to the inclusion of community voice and experience and in this case from a position of power rather than a place of damage. In his chapter, he develops a practice of “Thrivance Circuitry” and “Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness Model” (TC-CRM) within queer Indigenous communities (QIC) as well as across other queer communities of color (QCOC). Citizenship Studies is the last interdisciplinary subsection in Part II. Daniela Cherubini frames the intersectionality of “lived citizenship” as it is experienced, negotiated, reclaimed, or contested by marginalized groups striving for inclusive citizenship. Referencing her ethnographic research on migrant women’s work in grassroots associations in Southern Europe, she illustrates how she connected the macro and structural analysis of civic stratification, the meso level of collective action, and the micro analysis of individuals’ experiences, narratives, and actions. In her chapter on citizenship, Laura Odassa engages Plummer’s construction of intimate citizenship by using intersectional methods to examine the processes of heterosexual marriage-related migration and the screening of these mixed-status unions by state regimes. Pallavi Banerjee and Carieta O. Thomas place their chapter on intersectionality methods in the context of labor and citizenship in transnational regimes for paid and unpaid reproductive labor. They illustrate the challenges in using intersectional methodologies in researching intersectional citizenship-labor regimes. Evangelia Tastsoglou and Lori Wilkinson explain the use of intersection methods in their research on gender-based violence in Canadian immigrant communities. Part III, “Intersectionality and Applied Research” explores the ways intersectional methodology is used in applied research settings and research on social justice. In the subsection Social Work, Disaster Recovery and Health Disparities, Filomena M. Critelli and Asli Cennet Yalim examine various intersectional research methodologies to study migrant and refugee trauma. Lynn Weber and Anna Smith Pruitt’s chapter addresses the challenges of intersectional methodology in disaster research posing the ethical dilemmas and social justice com-

10  Research handbook on intersectionality ponents of disaster research. Their multi-method intersectional methods used in researching the devastation along the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Katrina are presented to show how they confronted the pitfalls previously identified in the field. Karen J. Leong, Kathy Nakagawa, and Aggie J. Yellow Horse report on lessons gained from conducting a pilot study of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women’s experiences of health inequity. They warn against losing sight of group differences, such as the different social, historical, and political contexts for migration. Akosua Adomako Ampofo wrote the first chapter in the subsection on Social Justice and Community Studies. She reflects on and interrogates her own privileges and disadvantages as a scholar-activist. Cynthia J. Cranford and Jennifer Jihye Chun developed a multi-level intersectional framework within the social organization of homecare that considers the social locations of workers, receivers, or both. The chapter recognizes individual, organization and multiple actors in the employment relationship as well as workers’ collective voice. Nadia Y. Kim’s research draws from the intersectional feminist methodology she used in her book, Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Los Angeles. Brian Gran and Colette Ngana review the range of intersectional methodologies used in conducting research on children’s rights and apply an intersectional lens to examine how human rights systems relate to children. They discuss the potential to exacerbate inequities—that have been designed to create an interpersonal power dynamic between children and their guardians. They analyse children taking political action and, in some cases, leading movements in gun control and in confronting global climate change. Part IV, “Intersectional Global Perspectives: Globalization and Transnationalism” considers intersectional methodologies in research on globalization and transnationalism. Ghassan Moussawi argues that multiple and different scales are required in intersectional methodologies used in research on gender, sexuality, or other categories located in international, regional, or global levels of analysis. Drawing from his research on sexuality in Lebanon as a case in point, Moussawi illustrates how he used multiple scales for different categories. Gabriella Sanchez illuminates ways that migrant smuggler narratives are perpetuated in government policies, policy publications based on secondary sources, as well as in some smuggling research. The narratives maintain the gendered, sexist, and racist images of violent men of color. An overview of how she employed intersectional methodology in her own studies of smuggling points to migration regimes manufactured to practice smuggling in the European Union, and how characterizations of violent and hypersexual African and Arab men as smugglers facilitate the dominant narrative. While acknowledging the significant contributions intersectionality has made in knowledge production, Bandana Purkayastha and Miho Iwata question the ability to create intersectional, relational, and social justice, without engaging with the Global South and scholars contending with decoloniality. To advance intersectionality, they critique methodological nationalism and knowledge hierarchies and identify issues to be addressed. Anjana Narayan and Erica Morales discuss the obstacles to use intersectional research conceptualized in the US and the challenges of employing those methods in transnational research. Drawing from scholarly writings on decolonial transnational feminist methodology and knowledge hierarchies, they illustrate a transnational research project, The “Women Living Hinduism and Islam Project,” rooted in a decolonial understanding of intersectionality. I hope this Handbook informs scholars and students interested in ways of doing intersectional research. It is intended to address some of the challenges posed in moving from theory to practice. Hopefully studies will be designed with a wide range of methods and issues to consider. Each contributing author offered their experiences and expertise in incorporating

Introduction  11 intersectional research methods within the confines of their disciplines, as well as pushing the boundaries to integrate interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches. Chapters illustrating how intersectionality can broaden feminism, settler-colonialism, and colonialism also articulate how an intersectional gaze can challenge or eliminate US-centric blinders and acknowledge the global range of marginalized knowledge. Reconsidering the ways we do research as scholar-activists in opposition to traditional value-free and notions of objectivity, as well as hierarchical relations with individuals and communities we study. A continued commitment to social justice moves us closer to producing meaningful research and to transforming knowledge.

REFERENCES Abraham, Margaret. 2019. “Introduction: Sociology and Social Justice.” In Sociology and Social Justice, edited by Margaret Abraham, 1–19. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Agénor, Madina. 2020. “Future Directions for Incorporating Intersectionality into Quantitative Populations Health Research,” American Journal of Public Health 110 (6): 803–6. Alexander-Floyd, Nikol G. 2012. “Disappearing Acts: Reclaiming Intersetionality in the Social Sciences in a Post-Black Feminist Era,” Feminist Formations 24: 1–25. Anthias, Floya. 2016. “Interconnecting Boundaries of Identity and Belonging and Hierarchy-Making within Transnational Mobility Studies: Framing Inequalities,” Current Sociology 64 (2): 172–90. Banivanua Mar, Tracey, and Penelope Edmonds (eds.). 2010. Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Basevich, Elviar. 2020. “W.E. B. Du Bois’s Socialism: On the Social Epistemology of Democratic Reason,” Philosophical Topics 49 (2): 23–49. Bilge, Sirma. 2013. “Intersectionality Undone, Saving Intersectionality from Feminist Intersectionality Studies,” Dubois Review 10 (2): 405–34. Bilge, Sirma. 2014. “Whitening Intersectionality, Evanescence of Race in Intersectionality Scholarship.” In Racism and Sociology edited by Wulf. D. Hund and Alana Lentin, 175–205. Berhn: Lit Verlag/ Routledge. Blauner, Robert, and David W. Wellman. 1973. “Toward the Decolonization Social Research.” In The Death of White Sociology, Essays on Race and Culture, edited by Joyce A. Ladner, 310–30 Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press. Bowleg, Lisa. 2008. “When Black + Lesbian + Woman Black Lesbian Woman: The Methodological Challenges of Qualitative and Quantitative Intersection Research,” Sex Roles 59 (5–6): 312–25. Cho, Sumi, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall. 2013. “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38 (4): 785–810. Choo, Hae Yeon, and Myra Marx Ferree. 2010. “Practicing Intersectionality in Sociological Research: A Critical Analysis of Inclusions, Interactions, and Institutions in the Study of Inequalities,” Sociological Theory 28 (2): 129–49. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1995. “Symposium: On West and Fenstermaker’s Doing Difference,” Gender & Society 9 (4): 491–4. Collins, Patricia H. 2019. Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Collins, Patricia H., and Sirma Bilge. 2016. Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Combahee River Collective. 1986. The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties. Kitchen Table. Connell, Raewyn. 2007. Southern Theory, The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge: Polity Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersections of Race and Sex: A Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–67.

12  Research handbook on intersectionality Crenshaw, Kimberlé W.1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43: 1241–99. Cuádraz, Gloria H., and Lynet Uttal. 1999. “Intersectionality and In-depth Interviews: Methodological Strategies for Analyzing Race, Class and Gender,” Race, Gender & Class 6 (3): 156–86. Davis, Kathy. 2008. “Intersectionality as Buzzword: A Sociology of Science Perspective on What Makes a Feminist Theory Successful,” Feminist Theory 9 (1): 67–85. Deegan, Mary Jo. 1988. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1920. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Deegan, Mary Jo. 1991. Women in Sociology, A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Westwood, CT: Greenwood Press. Dill, Bonnie Thornton, and Ruth Zambrana (eds.). 2009. Emerging Intersections: Race, Class and Gender in Theory, Policy, and Practice. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University. Durfee, Alesha. 2021. “The Use of Structural Intersectionality as a Method to Analyze How the Domestic Violence Civil Protective Order Process Replicates Inequality,” Violence Against Women 27 (5): 639–65. Gill, Victoria Singh. 2016. “Everyone Else Gets to Be Normal”: Using Intersectionality and Ms. Marvel to Challenge ‘Normal’ Identity,” The ALAN Review 44 (1): 68–78. Glaser, Barney G., and Anselm L. Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction. Go, Julian. 2017. “Decolonizing Sociology: Epistemic Inequality and Sociological Thought,” Social Problems 64: 194–9. Grazanka, Patrick (ed.). 2019. Intersectionality, Foundations and Frontiers. New York: Routledge. Green Mark A., Clare R. Evans, and S.V. Subramanian. 2017. “Can Intersectionality Theory Enrich Population Health Research?” Social Science & Medicine 178: 214–16. Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2007. “When Multiplication Doesn’t Equal Quick Addition: Examining Intersectionality as a Research Paradigm,” Perspectives on Politics 5 (1): 63–79. Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2013. “Empirical Intersectionality: A Tale of Two Approaches,” University of California Irvine Law Review 3: 259–96. Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2016. Intersectionality: An Intellectual History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Itzigsohn, José, and Karida L. Brown. 2020. The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois, Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line. New York: New York University Press. Jones, Butler A. 1974. “The Tradition of Sociology Teaching in Black Colleges: The Unheralded Professionals.” In Black Sociologists, Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by James E. Blackwell and Morris Janowitz, 121–63. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lengermann, Patricia Madoo, and Jill Niebrugge-Brantley. 1998. The Women Founders, Sociology and Social Theory 1830–1930. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Lutz, Helma, Marai Teresa Herrera Vivar, and Linda Supik (eds.). 2011. Framing Intersectionality: Debates on a Multi-Faceted Concept of Gender. London: Routledge. Mahler, Sarah J., Mayurakashi Chaudhuri, and Vrushali Patil. 2015. “Scaling Intersectionality: Advancing Feminist Analysis of Transnational Families,” Sex Roles 73 (3–4): 100–12. May, Vivian M. 2015. Pursuing Intersectionality: Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries. New York: Routledge. McCall, Lesley. 2005. “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” Signs: Journal for Women in Culture and Society 30 (3): 1771–800. Misra, Joya, Celeste Vaughan Curington, and Venus Mary Green. 2021. “Methods of Intersectional Research,” Sociological Spectrum 41(1): 9–28. Morris, Aldon. 2015. The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Patel, Leigh. 2021. No Study without Struggle, Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Patil, Vrushali. 2013. “From Patriarchy to Intersectionality: A Transnational Feminist Assessment of How Far We’ve Really Come.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38: 847–67. Rifkin, Mark. 2017. Beyond Settler Times: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Introduction  13 Rodé-Zárate, Maria, and Marta Jorba 2022. “Metaphors of Intersectionality: Reframing the Debate with a New Proposal,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 29 (1): 23–38. Romero, Mary. 2020. “Sociology Engaged in Social Justice,” American Sociological Review 85 (1): 1–30. Veracini, Lorenzo. 2015. The Settler Colonial Present. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Weber, Lynn, and D. Para-Medina. 2003. “Intersectionality and Women’s Health: Charting a Path to Eliminating Health Disparities,” Advances in Gender Research 7: 181–230. Wright, Earl II. 2020. Jim Crow Sociology: The Black and Southern Roots of American Sociology. Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati Press. Wright. Earl II. 2016. The First American School of Sociology: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory. London: Routledge/Ashgate. Yuval-Davis. Nira. 1997. Gender and Nation. London: Sage. Yuval, Davis Nora, and Pnina Werbner (eds.). 1999. Women, Citizenship and Difference. London: Zed Books.

PART I FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH

2. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist Lori Amber Roessner

INTRODUCTION Scholars have traced intersectional approaches to the antislavery lectures of Maria Stewart in the 1830s (Faulkner and Parker 2012; Collins 2021). Vivian M. May (2012, 18) contended: while the late twentieth century certainly marks the emergence in the critical lexicon of the term intersectionality … it is inaccurate to suggest that the past forty years constitute the only historical moment in which the examination of intersections among systems, identities and politics has been pivotal in the history of feminist thought in general and within black feminist thought in particular.

The “origin story” would remain invisible except that May (2012) called for historians to engage in a genealogy of intersectionality and offered a new intellectual origin story in her examination of Black feminist activist Anna Julia Cooper. Rather than examining race, gender, and class as separate categories of analysis, historians with an intersectional approach explore the multiple aspects of identity as interconnected, interdependent, inseparable, and unstable constructions that signify relationships of power. Moreover, they contend that engaging in a critical intersectional approach will “transform major themes in history” and offer more credible and complicated constructions of the past (Faulkner and Parker 2012, 2). Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931), like Cooper, was “a woman born into slavery” six months prior to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and as one of her earliest biographers Paula Giddings (2008) chronicled, her lived experience involved enduring racism, sexism, and classism that accompanied the rise of the Jim Crow regime. Wells learned the cruel reality and legacy of slavery firsthand and wrote of “the original fourteen slaves [who] became four millions” in order to contextualize the “beasts of burden,” their creation of “the vast wealth … [that] made the United States one of the mighty nations of the earth,” and the sustainment of white wealth and privilege through the disenfranchisement of Black people by way of the “twin infamies,” the convict leasing system and lynch law (Wells 1910, 43). Wells-Barnett became a dedicated crusader employing journalism and mass communication to pursue social justice and human rights. She relied upon scientific and empirical data to explore systemic interrelations of sexism, racism, and classism. She pinpointed binary identity constructions that were obstacles to justice, equity, and inclusivity. Moreover, her lived experience straddled the suffrage movement and the early freedom struggle; Wells-Barnett recognized that addressing racism was imperative to advancing women’s rights and that attending to sexism was crucial to making gains in civil rights. She used journalism and communication to expose the history of systemic oppression and offered enfranchisement as ways to effect change (Guy-Sheftall 1995). Describing her own experience as a Black woman in journalism, Lucy W. Smith contested the marginalization and erasure of Black women from popular histories. The Black journalist and social justice activist outlined the “double bind” that Ida B. Wells encountered as a Black 15

16  Research handbook on intersectionality woman in the predominantly males-only sphere of journalism (Gines 2011). Smith (1895, 100) wrote: Miss Ida B. Wells, “Iola” has been called the Princess of the Press, and she has well earned the title. No writer, the male fraternity not excepted, has been more extensively quoted, none struck harder blows at the wrongs and weaknesses of the race. Her readers are equally divided between the sexes. She reaches the men by dealing with the political aspect of the race question, and the women she meets around the fireside.

After her 1887 election as assistant secretary of the Negro National Press Association in Louisville, Kentucky, Wells confided to Smith that, despite navigating what late twentieth-century scholars would refer to as multiple jeopardies, she found “no agency so potent as the press in reaching and elevating a people” (ibid.). The resolute 36-year-old Wells, at the apex of her national fame, appeared in an illustration alongside Black male leaders of the race, including New York Age editor T. Thomas Fortune, author and orator I. Garland Penn, educator Booker T. Washington, and statesman Frederick Douglass, over the caption that read: “lecturer, defender of the race” (Gibson 2016). Wells richly earned the accolade associated with manliness and masculinity after launching a transnational social justice crusade to expose inequities in emerging segregated public spaces. She referred in her 1892 pamphlet, Southern Horrors, to the “twin infamies” of lynch law and the convict leasing system. The early years of Wells’s “crusade for justice” prompted the Reverend Norman Barton Wood to compare the “fiery reformer, feminist, and race leader” to the Old Testament Biblical prophet Deborah, a Judaic female military leader and judge (quoted in A. Duster, 1970, xv). Likewise, in the decade ahead, she would be celebrated in Robert S. Abbott’s Chicago Defender as the greatest “race … leader among the feminine sex,” “The Modern Joan [of] Arc,” for her part in integrating the 1913 inaugural Woman Suffrage Parade in Washington, DC, despite the “scorn of her Southern sisters” (quoted in Roessner 2018, 68). Despite Wells-Barnett’s ongoing activism in the realm of women’s and civil rights, less than two decades later she had been largely written out of emerging historical narratives surrounding anti-lynching efforts and the women’s suffrage movement by sexist, patriarchal Black men, and racist white women (DuRocher 2016; Roessner and Rightler-McDaniels 2018). By 1927, when asked to articulate why “Iola, the Princess of the Press” oft was compared to Joan of Arc, a young Black woman from Chicago drew a blank, prompting the 66-year-old Wells-Barnett (1970/2020) to write herself back into the historical record in response to the erasure of Black women. However, amid a failed bid for an open Illinois Senate seat in 1930, Wells-Barnett’s effort to integrate her story into our history remained incomplete. In 1931 she succumbed to kidney disease at age 68 and her untimely death went relatively unnoticed in national news outlets (DuRocher 2018). Feminist scholars and historians have contended that as a militant, Black middle-class feminist activist, Wells-Barnett was relegated to footnotes in our whitewashed US history and sexist, patriarchal Black history until the 1970s. Only after the release of her autobiography, posthumously published by her daughter Alfreda M. Duster, did a generation of historians and biographers contextualize her life and career within nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s and civil rights social movements (Tucker 1971; Sterling 1979; Giddings 1988). After the long collective silence surrounding her life—caused by a cultural amnesia from overt racist omissions by white supremacist US historians and covert acts of forgetting in sexist, patriarchal Black communities, did scholars inspired by

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist  17 the rich tradition of Black feminism restore the account of Wells-Barnett to the national narrative (DuRocher 2016, 2018; Locke 2017). Moreover, with collective research into the life histories of early Black feminists at the center of their minds, sociologists employed Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) theory of intersectionality to weave the contributions of Wells-Barnett into the “origin story” of the intersectional framework and analysed the proto-intersectional expressions embedded in her and her contemporaries’ work (including King 1988; Collins 1990; Guy-Sheftall 1995; V. Smith 1998; May 2007; Gines 2014; Romero 2018). Wells noted, at the beginning of her decades-long crusade against injustice, that she found agency to offer intersectional critiques about multiple jeopardies that Black men, women, and children encountered by shining “the light of truth upon them” (quoted in DuRocher 2016, 81). Moreover, as Collins contended: Without doubt, Wells-Barnett was an activist, and an extremely effectively one for her times. During her adult life, she participated in an impressive constellation of antiracism and women’s rights initiatives. Wells-Barnett also used her journalistic career, her speeches, her leadership in political organizations, her position papers, and her pamphlets to advance innovative analyses concerning the connections between African American disempowerment and the need for social justice. Because her activism and her intellectual work were so interconnected, she offers a window into the workings of Black women’s intellectual activism. (2019, 160)

As Collins suggested, Wells-Barnett’s work offers a model of flexible solidarity within Black women’s community work that might be implemented in intellectual activism and provided insight into the “testimonial authority” of lived experience as a form of “epistemic resistance” “to highlight the point of view of subordinated people” (ibid., 160–7). Furthermore, her use of tools of investigative and data journalism, including empirical evidence like firsthand accounts, and statistics, provides a prototype for responsible activist journalism (Broussard 2018; Vogt 2018). After offering context about Wells’s early life, this chapter re-examines five key moments during which she drew upon “her clarion voice and ready pen” to focus critical attention on categories, structures, and systems of domination and violence that contributed to the reification of social constructs and the multiple dimensions of difference and subjugation of her race and her sex (cited in Cooper 2014, 241–7). The historical essay thereby offers insight into ways in which the social justice activist applied a critical intersectional approach by recognizing that journalism and mass communication constituted knowledge-production apparatuses in “regimes of truth” (Tagg 1988, 189). Drawing upon the emerging endorsement of positivistic approaches and “objective” methods, Wells utilized empirical evidence: data and statistics, eyewitness accounts, and her own lived experience, to problematize inequities bound within the discriminatory practices of segregated education and transportation. She contested stereotypical narratives, including “the old threadbare lie,” the myth of male sexual crimes assaulting the “purity” of white womanhood (Wells 1892, 1). This was the blood libel propagated to maintain the barbaric practice of lynching as a mechanism to police and discipline Black bodies. She also critiqued unlawful and unjust practices, particularly the “twin infamies” of lynch law and the convict leasing system (Wells 1893 [1999], 19), to contextualize oppression by laying bare relations and operations of power. She simultaneously envisioned agency through a social justice crusade and addressed gaps and erasures in journalistic and historical accounts (Kuhl 2012; Forde 2021). My chapter is intended to formulate what French theorist Michel Foucault called “a history of the present” that makes visible lingering forms of oppres-

18  Research handbook on intersectionality sion and offers suggestions for a genealogy of intersectional approaches and future directions for repositioning a critical intersectional lens on our map of the past (cited in D. Garland 2014).

RAISING UP A “MODERN DEBORAH” Drawing upon the language of God-fearing from his standpoint as a white Christian ally involved in the persistent freedom struggle, Rev. Wood (1897, 381–2) wrote: We believe that the same God who raised up Moses and Joshua to deliver Israel from Egyptian bondage … has raised up this courageous and eloquent young woman that in the language of the prophet, she might cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my people their transgressions and sins.

Wood demonstrated his commitment to justice throughout his career as an historian. In 1897 he compared Wells to the Hebrew prophetess who inspired her people to victory over their oppressors. He beseeched his primarily white audience to embrace his primary objective, human equality, that he considered to have been the central mission of the Apostle Paul (ibid.). More than half a century later, Wells-Barnett’s youngest daughter, Alfreda Duster, selected the credible endorsement from a prestigious white ally as an excerpt to reframe her mother, not as the Defender’s modern Joan of Arc, but as a modern Deborah, in her introduction to her mother’s autobiography, one that she would struggle to publish due to the discriminatory practices of white publishers. Publishing companies were reluctant to promote the life history of a militant Black woman amid the radicalization of the Civil Rights Movement (Ochiai 1992). Nevertheless, Duster’s powerful forward was eventually published in the posthumous autobiography that repositioned her mother as a fearless social justice crusader. In her own intersectional analysis, modeled after her mother’s journalistic and historical accounts, she critiqued Wood’s white side of a Black subject and the knowledge-production apparatus. She used her mother’s primary source to re-contextualize the testimonial and make a greater point: “the odds against [Ida] were in many ways even greater” than those the French peasant girl faced “in rallying a generally sympathetic French people to a common patriotic cause” (A. Duster 1970, xv, xxxi). Wells faced worse persecution as she “was not only opposed by whites, but some of her own people were often hostile impugning her motives [and] fearful that her tactics and strategy might bring retribution on them, some actually repudiated her” (ibid., xxxi). After reclaiming and centering Wood’s religious analogy, Duster turned to her mother’s time-tested tools, empirical data and firsthand accounts, to share her intersectional insights about germinal moments in her mother’s life history, including: the condition of slavery into which her mother and her grandparents were born; the emphasis that her grandparents had placed on religion and education; her mother’s opening battles against racial discrimination in public spaces; Wells-Barnett’s embrace of journalism as agency when the legal system failed her and her people, her national and international anti-lynching campaign and social justice crusade, and her local organizing and agitation to address injustices faced by Black men, women, and children that came to dominate the lives of her family members. Drawing upon documentary evidence from her mother’s diaries and memoir and her own lived experience as her daughter, Duster contended that the “fire and zeal of her mother’s character,” which often was maligned as “militant” or “radical” by members of her own race, had been passed down to Ida from her grandparents. Grandmother Elizabeth “Lizzie”

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist  19 was “a deeply religious woman whose convictions about the essential dignity of man[kind] developed under the cruelties of slavery,” and grandfather James “Jim” Wells was “a man of independent spirit even in slavery, [who] sought and attained his full independence in the period following emancipation” (A. Duster 1970, xv). Both parents taught their firstborn the importance of their Christian faith and education in the pursuit of equity and social justice (M. Duster 2021). Before addressing her mother’s career and legacy with empirical evidence from primary and secondary sources, Duster shared a painful chapter in her family history—the untimely deaths of her grandparents and one of her mother’s siblings in the years surrounding the 1878 yellow fever epidemic (M. Duster 2021). Her mother was “steadfastly determined to keep her family together,” and like many of her sex who were “thrown upon their own resources” (quoted in Roessner and Rightler-McDaniels 2018, xxix), Wells turned to teaching, the most gender-appropriate profession of the era for ladies of the emerging middle class. Again, drawing from her mother’s diaries that detailed testimonial firsthand accounts of a Christian Black, middle-class woman, she shared Wells’s struggle “to earn a living and to assert herself as an independent young woman” after passing her teaching examination (A. Duster, 1970, xxx). Duster contended that Wells faced obstacles as one of only 20 or so Black public school teachers in a poor, rural school system with segregated, overcrowded classes and inadequate facilities. She remained steadfast in her pursuit of social justice in the face of the emerging Jim Crow system. Black feminist Beverly Guy-Sheftall (1995, 417) asserted that “such achievements within a generation of slavery did not inspire an ideology of racial equality” but of difference, largely based in attitudes about Black women, myths designed to maintain white supremacy. Thus, as Collins wrote: the search for social justice has constituted a necessary and defining feature of Black feminist thought, one that shapes intersectionality and flexible solidarity as important dimensions of this knowledge project. It is no accident that Ida Wells-Barnett’s autobiography is titled Crusade for Justice. (Collins 2019, 275)

Wells-Barnett’s testimonial autobiography revealed the systemic oppression that she encountered because of racial oppression and patriarchy among Black men and white women. In the roughly seven decades that comprised her life and bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she experienced the racial and gender discriminations that pervaded the US South and urban centers like New York and Chicago.

“NO PEACE, NO JUSTICE IN THIS LAND?”: THE INTERSECTION OF RACE, GENDER, AND CLASS ON THE CHESAPEAKE, OHIO AND SOUTHWESTERN RAILWAY In 1883, Wells was denied a seat in the “lady’s” car on the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railway. Four decades after the incident the 64-year-old Wells-Barnett still remembered the headline in the white supremacist Memphis Appeal Avalanche, “announcing the fact—Darky Damsel Gets Damages [What It Cost to Put a Colored Teacher in a Smoking Car … $500]” (Wells-Barrett 1970/2020, 17–18). For a moment it appeared as if the twenty-something Wells had scored a major legal triumph after the repeal of the 1875 Civil Rights Act that banned

20  Research handbook on intersectionality racial discrimination in public spaces. However, her victory against the injustice of the emerging separate but (un)equal Jim Crow system was short-lived. The Tennessee State Supreme Court reversed the decision and ordered Wells to pay $250 in court costs. Wells, “a well-dressed model of bourgeoisie womanhood,” sued the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in September 1883 after being ordered by a white male conductor to remove herself from the lady’s car, accommodations which were afforded by her purchase of a first-class ticket and be placed in the second-class smoker’s car (Green 2018, 3). Though “citizens of every race and color [were] entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of accommodations … in practice, however, the car set aside for [Black people] also was occupied by second-class white passengers whose smoking, profane language, and behavior went largely unchecked” (ibid., 13). During the years following the Civil War, the place of respectable middle-class Black women in public spaces was under contestation, and as Wells-Barnett later recalled, “encouraged by the attitude of the white ladies and gentlemen in the car,” the conductor, a baggage person, and a bystander enacted violence upon her unmoving Black body, viciously dragging her from her seat (Wells-Barrett 1970/2020, 17–18). Wells sought to appeal to the legal system for justice, and when that justice was denied, she turned to the pen, describing the defeat for her race in her diary: The Supreme Court reversed the decision of the lower court in my behalf, last week. Went to see Judge G [Greer, her lawyer] this afternoon and he tells me that the four of them [the judges] cast their personal prejudices in the scale of justice and decided in face of all the evidence to the contrary that the smoking car was a first class coach for colored people as provided for by that statute that calls for separate coaches but first class, for the races. I felt so disappointed because I had hoped such great things from my suit for my people generally. I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice. I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now, if it were possible, would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them. O God, is there no redress, no peace, no justice in this land for us? (Quoted in DeCosta-Willis 1995, 140–1)

Wells had been encouraged to widely share her story of battling an emerging separate but (un)equal system, later codified in the 1897 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. She gained much publicity amid her case’s litigation and appeal, but ultimately, her disappointment was made more bitter by the lack of support that she, as a woman, had received from a patriarchal Black community. “None of my people had ever seemed to feel that it was a race matter and that they should help me with the fight. So I trod the winepress alone,” she wrote (quoted in Green 2018, 8). Nevertheless, amid her legal battle that delved into sociocultural divisions bound up in constructions of race, gender, and class, Wells discovered the power of intersectional analysis, amplified by her voice and her pen, a mode that she repeatedly relied upon to fight barbaric violence and systemic injustice that her race and her sex continued to encounter in communities across the United States. Wells’s voice and its location, as Crenshaw (1991, 21) noted in her germinal essay, “Mapping the Margins,” “draws our attention to the margins as a site of knowledge and resistance and to lived experience as a criterion of meaning.” Being Black and female revealed the multiple oppressions along the margin of the Deep South during the interlude between the periods of federal Reconstruction after the Civil War and what white Southerners referred to as “Redemption,” or the return of white supremacist rule that eliminated many rights of recently freed Black people (Wells-Barrett 1970/2020). Through Wells’s testimonial, we gain insight into three guiding premises of intersectionality theory, as articulated by Collins (2019, 44):

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist  21 (i) Race, class, gender, and similar systems of power are interdependent and mutually construct one another; (ii) Intersecting power relations produce complex, interdependent social inequalities of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, ability, and age; (iii) The social location of individuals and groups within intersecting power relations shapes their experiences within and perspectives on the social world.

Moreover, over the course of Wells-Barnett’s career as a social justice crusader, we come to understand that solving social problems within any existing context requires intersectional analyses.

EXPOSING THE “OLD THREADBARE LIE” AND COMBATTING THE “TWIN INFAMIES” THROUGH ACTIVIST JOURNALISM AND A SOCIAL JUSTICE CRUSADE After experiencing racist discrimination during her hearing in the legal system, Wells increasingly turned to other means, namely, as Chicago Defender historian Elizabeth Lindsey Davis later suggested, wielding her press-amplified “clarion voice and ready pen” to expose injustice. She assumed the pseudonym “Iola,” in keeping with class and gender traditions in literary and journalistic circles of the day. Wells had “train[ed] [her] pen” as a freelance contributor and editor for a variety of religious publications, including the weekly journal The Evening Star, and still believed in the powerful agency of the press “in reaching and elevating a people.” When offered the editorship of a local newspaper, The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, Wells accepted the opportunity to become the “only Black woman of record to be an editor in chief and part owner of a major city newspaper.” She set out to effect change in her community through the knowledge-production regime of journalism (quoted in Green 2018, 9–11). But, shortly after accepting the position, as Wells-Barnett later recalled, “there came the lynching in Memphis which changed the whole course of my life” (Wells-Barrett 1970/2020, 47). The multiple lynchings in March 1892 murdered her good friend and local postman-turned-entrepreneur, Thomas Moss, and his two associates Will Stewart and Calvin McDowell. Sometime prior they had opened the flourishing People’s Grocery at “the Curve” in Memphis. In retaliation for business success a scuffle was orchestrated by their direct business competitor, the white grocery proprietor William Barrett. After learning of the lynching Wells wrote a series of editorials that called out the murderers and the 75,000 inhabitants of Memphis for not demanding justice for the victims and their families. She exposed the real reason for the lynching as economic retaliation not “the old thread-bare lie,” the myth “that Negro men assault white women,” and suggested protests in the form of boycotts to the urban transit system and mass migration to the West. She was undeterred by threats from her detractors, which included prominent city leaders, among them Black preachers (Broussard 2018; Haywood 2021). Through her public testimonial prompted by firsthand knowledge and her personal relationships, Wells advanced an intersectional analysis through her activist newspaper that exposed how the perpetuation of the myth of the Black male rapist in white mainstream newspapers was the driving force in the continued subordination and economic exploitation of Black people (Guy-Sheftall 1995; Collins 2019). As Guy-Sheftall (1995, 69) noted, Wells deconstructed notions of “white womanhood and black sexuality” and exposed the powerful interconnection between binary constructions of race and gender. She exposed the central myths: white Southern gentleman, brute Black male rapist, the chaste Southern

22  Research handbook on intersectionality white lady, and the immoral, hypersexual Black Jezebel. She revealed the patriarchal and racist systemic oppression maintained through lynching, violence, and economic reprisal. In retaliation for her courageous editorials, Edward Carmack, editor of the local white newspaper The Memphis Commercial, agitated for mob violence against the author of the fiery editorials, contending that “the fact that the [B]lack scoundrel is allowed to live and utter such loathsome and repulsive calumnies is … evidence as to the wonderful patience of Southern whites. But we have had enough of it,” which resulted in a threat to Wells’s life and the destruction of The Free Speech on May 27, 1892 (Wells 1892, 1–2). Wells found temporary refuge in New York, where T. Thomas Fortune not only offered the radical social justice activist a haven, but also a national forum to continue her nascent anti-lynching crusade writing in the New York Age. From this site and through the aid of her Black male ally, Wells continued to expose the “old thread-bare lie” through fiery editorials that circulated to Black and white audiences alike, above and below the Mason Dixon line, and through a regional lecture circuit, centered in major urban hubs, including New York and Boston. Wells produced resistant knowledge that challenged dominant narratives and was grounded in her own standpoint: public testimonials, lived experiences, firsthand sociological accounts, and scientific data. Though not credited as such in the “great [white] men’s history of public relations [and journalism],” Wells engaged in nascent public relations strategies that involved research, campaign planning, pamphlet writing, and a lecture series. Her work employed techniques of investigative journalism first developed in white mainstream newspapers of authoritative record, such as the repurposing of credible, reliable empirical evidence and eye-witness accounts that documented lived experiences of oppressed and subjugated members of her race (Broussard 2018, 40). As Collins suggested, in pamphlets, such as Southern Horrors (1892), The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), The Red Record (1895), and Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900), Wells, with some assistance from Black and white allies, exploited intersectional sociological techniques and emerging industry best practices in journalism and public relations, including “the power of testimonial authority to highlight the view of subordinated people” and the empirical credibility of raw data and statistics to hold individuals in power accountable and to sway public opinion (Collins 2019, 161). Giddings contended that in her first pamphlet alone Wells turned the existing “paradigm on its head, with empirical evidence gathered from her investigation of the circumstances of 728 lynchings that had taken place over the previous decade. Her meticulously documented findings … completely challenged the period’s assumptions. Black men weren’t rapist, white men were; Black women weren’t doing ‘what nature prompted,’ white women were” (quoted in Guy-Sheftall 1995, 421). Though Wells’s anti-lynching research came to dominate much of her professional life as a journalist and social justice crusader, she also exposed other injustices rooted in intersecting constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and class. She exposed the prevailing interpretation of Black masculinity that contributed to the acceptance of the convict leasing system, and as Collins (2019, 162) suggested, through her intersectional investigations, she offered a model for future analyses that “emphasize how social structures interlock to shape particular outcomes.” For instance, in her first two pamphlets, Southern Horrors (1892) and The Reason Why (1893), Wells explored the rule of elite Anglo-Saxon men and women to maintain the status quo. The “twin infamies” of lynch law and the convict leasing system operated to perpetuate oppression and subjugation of Black people. Her pamphlets denounced well-known orator Henry W. Grady, a University of Georgia graduate and managing editor of the Atlanta

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist  23 Constitution, condemning his “progressive, New South” for what it was: a new version of the Old South: Henry W. Grady in his well-mannered speeches in New England and New York pictured the Afro-American as incapable of self-government. Through him and other leading men the cry of the South to the country has been “Hands off! Leave us to solve our problem.” To the Afro-American the South says, “the white man must and will rule.” There is little difference between the Ante-bellum South and the New South. (Wells 1892, 26)

Grady did not listen (Forde 2021, 31). Instead, he built and maintained his vision of the New South upon the backs of Black men through dangerous stereotypes about Black masculinity that served as the foundation of the convict labor system, which as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Douglas A. Blackmon (2008) acknowledged was “slavery by another name,” and through the promotion of lynch law, to intimidate any Black person with mob violence and barbarous lynching if they threatened the white status quo. Despite threats and jeopardies as a radical Black feminist from a middle-class Christian background, Wells attracted additional allies and deployed intersectional techniques in her social justice crusade that continued throughout the remainder of her life.

“WHAT A COLORED WOMAN SAID”: IDA B. WELLS-BARNETT AND MULTIPLE JEOPARDIES Approximately a decade before Wells-Barnett was born, at the international Woman’s Rights Convention of 1851 in Akron, Ohio, Sojourner Truth cried out against the “double bind” that Black women endured under the institutions of slavery and patriarchy (King 1988). Based in her lived experience, Truth offered public testimony on the intersectional front in the battle to sway public sentiment in favor of granting enfranchisement and equal rights for all US citizens (Truth 1998). Four decades later, still engaged in the persistent struggle for “equal participation with [white] men” and justice for her race and her sex, Wells continued the primary strategy in the arsenal of abolitionists and suffragists; she delivered her public testimonial through a press-amplified lecture circuit to influence national and international public opinion against white supremacist practices in the United States (McMillen 2007, 9). As Wells-Barrett (1970/2020, 31) explained in her autobiography, “we, as a race, cannot get a hearing in the United States,” where both the white owned-and-operated press and pulpit were silent and complicit in immoral lynch law. Thus, she followed Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s model crusading throughout Great Britain from 1893 to 1894 for US anti-lynching legislation, amplifying her message in the commercial and advocacy presses, including two leading Chicago newspapers, where she served as correspondent: the Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean and Ferdinand Barnett’s Chicago Conservator, the oldest Black-owned newspaper in the city (Broussard 2018). Recognizing that the white-owned and -operated commercial press and the advocacy Black press had differing levels of cultural authority within the communal urban hubs, Wells sought to address audiences at all community intersections with news of her international speaking tour. Ultimately, she hoped international coverage from British newspapers of authority might influence public sentiment and affect change particularly in her birthplace, the US South.

24  Research handbook on intersectionality Within contested, male-dominated journalistic spaces, the radical Black feminist embraced a macro-level intersectional approach to highlight micro-level relational hypocrisies. In the international court of public opinion, she critiqued white American moral reform leaders, most notably the renowned suffragist and the president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Frances Willard, for failing to repudiate the barbarous lynching of Black people. For instance, when first asked directly about Willard, in 1893, Wells affirmed to reporters that Willard never “said anything to condemn lynching; on the contrary she had seemed to condone it in her famous interview after returning from her first visit in the South” (Wells-Barrett 1970/2020, 97). From her intersectional standpoint as a Black Christian woman, Wells recognized that though many white Christian women and feminist activists expressed disdain toward racism, Black people remained “objects” in public discourse, and she sought agency. The journalistic authority of leading newspapers reconstructed the narrative surrounding lynching by embracing “strong objectivity,” as Gigi Durham (1998, 117) later called it. Wells called out Christian women and feminist activists for their complicity in lynch law because of their failure to condemn the barbaric, unlawful, and unjust practice (Frances Willard House Museum). Moreover, after encountering press-amplified challenges and condemnation from the circle of elite white activists for her criticism, Wells recognized that information is not neutral, but a source of power and a form of resistance; she armed herself with empirical evidence in advance of her second lecture circuit in February 1894. She carried a newspaper clip from the October 23, 1890 edition of the New York Voice, the temperance newspaper that first carried Willard’s controversial remarks after her appearance at the Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s Atlanta convention in 1890 (ibid.). Wells continued to draw attention to the ways that supposed white Christian allies not only failed to condemn lynching, but also perpetuated dangerous tropes about Black men. Stereotypes of Black male sexuality were spread through the commercial periodical press and used, in the absence of evidence, as justification for the lynching of Black men. As Wells wrote in her March 24 Chicago Inter-Ocean column, Willard and some of her contemporaries published “utterances in confirmation of this slander,” namely that “old threadbare lie” that falsely claimed that “[Black] men were despoilers of the virtue of white women” (Frances Willard House Museum 1894). To substantiate her claim, Wells arranged to reprint Willard’s Voice interview in an upcoming issue of the antiracist British magazine Fraternity so that the world might see for themselves how Willard reinforced the myth of the drunken, menacing Black male rapist who threatened “the safety of [white] woman[hood], of childhood [and] of the home” (Frances Willard House Museum 1893). Wells’s (1894, 8) most powerful contention was many white people “made the mistake of judging the negro by what his accusers say of him and without hearing his side of the story.” Wells unleashed a two-year war of words in the press with Willard, who viewed Wells’s actions as an assault to her Christian reputation, but as Wells acknowledged, any risk to personal reputation was well justified, considering that “the life of [her] people … [was] at stake” (Wells-Barrett 1970/2020, 176). In an international forum Wells used her agency to call out the apathy of supposed white allies, in hopes that, pressured by British public sentiment, prominent white Christian reformers might change their position and demand federal anti-lynching legislation. Wells stated clearly in a letter to the editor that she penned to the Westminster Gazette:

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist  25 The fact is, Miss Willard is no better or worse than the great bulk of white Americans on the Negro question. They are all afraid to speak out, and it is only British public opinion which will move them … (ibid.)

Wells’s macro-level intersectional strategy proved effective—her agitation in international public forums, amplified by credible newspapers of authority, contributed to the passage of anti-lynching resolutions within national and international organizations and spurred the decline of racist mob violence and murderous lynching. Unfortunately, that was insufficient in halting the barbarous act, fueled by vicious racism, which proved more difficult to mitigate through the passage of federal anti-lynching legislation than Wells or any of her contemporaries could ever imagine (Wells 1910).

“HOW ENFRANCHISEMENT STOPS LYNCHING”: WELLS-BARNETT ENTREATS THE INTERSECTIONAL AUDIENCE OF FORMER ABOLITIONIST TO UNITE AGAINST INJUSTICE After yet another lawless, brutal act of mob violence against a Black man, in spring 1910 Wells-Barnett wielded her pen to entreat the new intersectional audience of former abolitionist Charles Lenz to unite (Wells 1910). Since the brutal murder of her three friends at the Curve in Memphis in 1892, Wells-Barnett had amplified her voice to speak to macro-level national and international audiences in her crusade against the “horrors of lynching.” Through activist newspapers, pamphlets, and lecture circuits and with great effect, as she reported, the barbaric practice had decreased annually over the next decade (Moses 1988, 129). However, in the first decade of the twentieth century Wells-Barnett witnessed a steep increase in lynching, particularly in her adopted state of Illinois. The latest act of violence, the lynching of William “Froggie” James, who was “accused of the usual crime—that of assaulting white women,” in Cairo, Illinois, on November 9, 1909 was “one of the most inhuman spectacles ever witnessed in this country.” That prompted Wells-Barnett to redouble imploring a primarily white national audience to help mold public sentiment in favor of anti-lynching legislation (Wells 1910, 45–6). In the June 1910 issue of Original Rights Magazine, Wells-Barnett highlighted the power of journalism as the first version of public history, and history as part of the knowledge-production regime. Acknowledging that the national historical record was wholly incomplete and inaccurate, she staged her own historical intervention and intersectional treatment of “the Negro question,” which she contended had been present since “the landing of the Dutch Slaveship in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619” (Wells 1910, 42). Five years after the release of Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s (1905) bestselling book, The Clansman, Wells-Barnett offered an alternative narrative, rooted in sociological data and lived experience, that reminded her national and international intersectional audiences of how, amid Klan violence and domestic terrorism, the U.S. government repealed civil rights legislation and affirmed Jim Crow policies, “removing in every way possible constitutional guarantees to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Wells 1910, 44). Without civil rights protections in place, white supremacists subjugated the Black race to inferior schools and unequal protection under the law. “With no sacredness of the ballot there

26  Research handbook on intersectionality can be no sacredness of human life itself,” Wells-Barnett (1910, 45) explained, reminding her primarily white upper-class audience that they all might aid in efforts to secure the ballot and abolish lynching. “Individuals, organizations, press and pulpit should unite in vigorous denunciation of all forms of lawlessness and earnest, constant demand for the rigid enforcement of the law of the land” (ibid., 52).

“MODERN JOAN [OF] ARC” PROMOTES “UNITED WOMANHOOD” Though Wells-Barnett encountered racism time and again at the micro-level in private circles and public spaces in her two-decade career as a women’s rights activist, including assaults suggesting that “Black women were incapable of ‘true womanhood,’” she returned to the notion of “united womanhood” at the meso-level within local, state, and national suffrage organizations. She sought middle grounds linking macro political-economic analyses with individual actions and psychological effects. In the 1910s the Alpha Suffrage Club was a mode to promote flexible solidarity among Black women and their white allies in local and national efforts to gain universal enfranchisement. The goal was to stop the steady rise of racial violence and lynchings. Nevertheless, sustained racism of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) made Wells struggle to convince Black women to join in the Illinois state chapter WSA. She later reflected in her autobiography: I had been a member of the Women’s Suffrage Association all during my residence in Illinois, but somehow I had not been able to get very much interest among our club women. When I saw that we were likely to have restricted suffrage … I made another effort to get our women interested. (Wells-Barrett 1970/2020, 345)

As the Municipal and Presidential Voting Act was being debated, Wells-Barnett and white suffragist Belle Squire decided to form an integrated, non-partisan suffrage club to promote the passage of a bill that would grant limited suffrage to approximately 1.5 million women in Illinois. That prospect was particularly important to Wells-Barnett, who “believed that the club [promoting united womanhood] might become a viable force for the advancement of members of her race and her gender” (Roessner and Rightler-McDaniels 2018, 63). “When I saw that we were likely to have restricted suffrage … I made another effort to get our women interested … I showed them that we could use our vote for the advantage of ourselves and our race” (quoted in DuRocher 2018, 67), she recalled years later. To that end, Wells-Barnett and Squire established the Alpha Suffrage Club in January 1913 for “all women interested in knowing how to become good citizens” (quoted in Roessner 2018, 67). Under the banner of “united womanhood,” the nearly 200 members of the Alpha Suffrage Club convened on a weekly basis nearby the headquarters of the Negro Fellowship League (NFL), the social club that Wells-Barnett formed shortly after the 1908 Springfield race riot. The NFL was in Bronzeville, a Black neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, and promoted the club and its mission regularly in the pages of the Chicago Defender and through the Alpha Suffrage Club newsletter. Wells-Barnett recognized early in her career that racial injustice intersected with gender oppression, and as Collins contended, through the knowledge-construction power of the advocacy press and in pamphlets and newsletters, Wells-Barnett in her role as an organ-

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist  27 izational leader drew upon “intersecting systems of power to solve racial problems” (Collins 2019, 162). Though women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony long ago had expressed that women and Black people should be granted the same voting rights as white men “irrespective of race, color, sex or class” (L. Garland 2005, 61), Wells-Barnett encountered lingering racism within the ranks of NAWSA leadership head on in what proved to be a direct challenge to a commitment to “united womanhood” (Giddings 2008). In March 1913, Wells-Barnett traveled to Washington, DC, with other members of the integrated Illinois Woman’s Suffrage Association, to march in the inaugural Woman’s Suffrage Parade to be held in conjunction with president-elect Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, but national parade organizers Alice Paul and Lucy Burns sacrificed “united womanhood” to comply with demands of white supremacist Southern NAWSA chapters, who demanded that Black delegates march at the back of a segregated procession (Dodd 2008; Giddings 2008; Roesner 2018). Appreciating the implications of the threat of a Southern boycott to the success of the event, Illinois Equal Suffrage Association president Grace Wilbur Trout conferred with Wells-Barnett about complying with the demands, and amid the recognition that the women’s rights movement continued to put gender before race, Wells-Barnett remained true to her convictions and integrated the Illinois delegation during the procession. “If the Illinois women do not take a stand now in this great democratic parade then the colored women are lost …,” Wells-Barnett retorted. “I was asked to march with the other women of our state, and I intend to do so or not take part in the parade at all” (quoted in Giddings 2008, 517). Much to Wells-Barnett’s chagrin, however, even Squire, who proposed that she walk alongside delegations of Black women from the Alpha Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta at Howard University and the National Association of Colored Women, was willing to compromise understandings of “united womanhood” to appease Southern white supremacists (Roessner 2018, 68). When the editorial staff at Robert Abbott’s Chicago Defender heard of her courageous act, Wells-Barnett once again was lauded as the greatest woman race leader. Though the writer succumbed to the heteropatriarchal attitudes of the time, they lauded Wells-Barnett as a “Modern Joan [of] Arc” in an above-the-fold, page-one headline. In comparing Wells-Barnett to the French heroine-martyr, the Defender paid tribute to the radical militant, acknowledging her courage and strength in the fight for racial equality (ibid.). Wells-Barnett had once again encountered the shortcomings of uniting women at the national macro-level and the Illinois Woman’s Suffrage Association and the Alpha Suffrage Club at the meso-level contributed to the passage of the Municipal and Presidential Voting Act that July. The voting act success culminated with the “Women’s Independence Day” in Chicago, a 2,000-person parade procession down Chicago’s Michigan Avenue (ibid., 69). After celebrating at the event, under Wells-Barnett’s leadership Alpha Suffrage members focused on collective civic education initiatives that encouraged Black women to recognize themselves as a class subjected to multiple types of oppression and hierarchies of power. The class was formed by interconnected factors: race, gender, and social class, and sought to “stick together” and “to unite their strength for their own advancement” to elect a “conscientious race man” in local elections (ibid., 70–1). In the short term, Wells-Barnett’s efforts were successful as the Alpha Suffrage Club helped elect Oscar DePriest, Chicago’s first Black alderman, but Wells-Barnett recognized that once in office, politicians did not always remember the identity-based power bloc of Black feminist constituents that helped get them there. Nevertheless, as Collins (2019) suggested, Wells-Barnett’s “united womanhood” provided

28  Research handbook on intersectionality a model for flexible solidarity for Black women’s community work. In the case of her work with the Alpha Suffrage Club, Wells-Barnett not only helped uplift the local Black community by promoting “conscientious” Black race men as governmental leaders, but also directly intervened in what was referred to in the local and national press as “the Colored Boy Problem.” She organized a series of “mother’s meetings” to address the mass incarceration of Black youth for petty crimes such as vagrancy, loitering, and trespassing (Roessner 2018, 73). Through coordinated efforts of the Alpha Suffrage Club and the NFL Wells-Barnett helped ensure the survival of Black youth. Likewise, after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Wells-Barnett’s latter-day efforts established the Third Ward Women’s Political Club, which encouraged Black women to enter politics, helped transform local, state, and national politics, and has provided a model for present-day social justice movements (Giddings 2008).

NO LONGER “OVERLOOKED”—MONUMENTS TO THE MEMORY OF “MAGNIFICENT [BLACK] WOMEN” Even as she wrote tirelessly on her memoir, so that children’s generations later might remember why she once had been referred to as the “Modern Joan [of] Arc,” leading white women and Black men of her generation continued to write Ida B. Wells-Barnett out of the historical narrative. Perhaps this was latent racist and patriarchal beliefs, but also because of her positionality as a militant middle-class Black woman without extensive higher education (Dickerson 2018; Roessner 2019). From their positional standpoints and social positions, her contemporaries Ida Tarbell, Ida Husted Harper, Mary White Ovington, and W.E.B. Du Bois minimized and otherwise discounted Wells-Barnett’s impact as a muckraking, investigative journalist, and her role as a leader within the women’s suffrage and anti-lynching movements (DuRocher 2018). Even the “father of Black History” Carter G. Woodson, then editor of the Journal of Negro History and director of National Negro History Week, neglected to mention Wells-Barnett’s role in the anti-lynching campaign in his history of the race (Woodson 1931). Wells-Barnett noted that fact as she prepared for a January 1930 “meeting of the local Negro History club” (DuRocher 2018, 93). This sexist omission vexed Wells-Barnett, who as president of the Negro Fellowship League provided Woodson with a forum for his talks some 15 years prior. Other era scholars who wrote about the history of lynching followed Woodson’s patriarchal cue. As other historians have suggested, due to Wells-Barnett’s status as a militant Black woman, elitist reform leaders within both the women’s rights movement and the freedom struggle marginalized Wells-Barnett and minimized her accomplishments (DuRocher 2016, 2018). Despite continued activism in the waning years of her life, she was the first Black woman probation officer and worked to limit the mass incarceration of Black people, and her encouragement for women to enter the political arena through the Third Ward Women’s Political Club, Wells-Barnett’s death was little noted. Her untimely death from kidney disease on March 25, 1931 (Dickerson 2018) attracted little notice in the primarily white-owned andoperated national press, even as reports noted with veneration the passing of her white ally Belle Squire eight years later (New York Times 1939). “We didn’t exist in the other papers,” Chicago Defender and Associated Negro Press reporter Vernon Jarrett recalled in Stanley Nelson’s award-winning documentary “The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords.” “We

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist  29 were neither born. We didn’t get married. We didn’t die …. We were truly invisible, unless we committed a crime” (California Newsreel 1998). Wells-Barnett’s life narrative exposed the persistent truth of “unbearable blackness,” Jared Sexton’s (2015, 162) term describing Afro-pessimism and political life; she offers a model of agency through advocacy journalism, social organizations, and public history. Her passing was unobserved except by her closest friends and loved ones and the initial commemoration efforts of individuals from local organizations, including the Chicago Defender (Giddings 2008) that demonstrated the potential for agency through advocacy journalism. True to its name, the Black activist newspaper protected the collective memory of Wells-Barnett, offering a tribute to the local woman that they once had praised as the “Modern Joan [of] Arc,” and as a “transnational social justice crusader” (Roessner and McDaniels 2018, xxxii). Defender journalist Rebecca Stiles Taylor continued to restore Wells-Barnett’s image as a pioneer in the Black freedom struggle and women’s rights movements. Her work as a militant martyr was worthy of being honored with a monument of brick and stone. From her own standpoint as a Black social justice activist, educator, and journalist, Taylor embraced an intersectional strategy to prevent the historical erasure of Wells-Barnett and other magnificent Black women. Relying on firsthand accounts from Defender historian Elizabeth Lindsey Davis to reconstruct a history of Wells-Barnett and other Black women, Taylor envisioned a future time when “the women of Mississippi and Tennessee and Illinois [might] join hands and together with those of the rest of the country and build to the memory of Ida B. Wells-Barnett some form of monument commensurate with the heroic service rendered by her” (Rosessner 2018, 108). Until the materialization of that monument, still nearly a century away, Taylor constructed an “intangible, abstract monument” relying upon a bricolage of memories and lived experiences, including the printed words of Davis, the former secretary of the Ida B. Wells Club. Davis, remained committed to “lifting as we climb,” the motto of the National Association of Colored Women. Taylor offered a nuanced intersectional characterization of Wells-Barnett’s standpoint and social status that extended beyond those that only remembered her as a Black feminist and social justice crusader. Teacher, writer, editor, lecturer, club woman, church and social worker, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a woman of strong character, forceful personality, and unflinching courage. Her clarion voice and ready pen were always waged vigorously in agitating and protesting any force of segregation and discrimination affecting the oppressed. (Quoted in Roessner 2018, 108)

Unfortunately, aside the handful of local tributes to Wells-Barnett, her life story remained incomplete for roughly the next half century. Her great granddaughter, Michelle Duster (2020), recently wrote in the afterword to a second edition of Crusade for Justice that amid entrenched racism and sexism, predominantly white and male book publishers in the 1960s remained hesitant to publish the posthumous autobiography of a militant Black woman, like Wells-Barnett. Nevertheless, a tribute to the persistence of these early Black feminist historians, who protected memories for their local communities, and to the continued saliency of Wells-Barnett’s intersectional approach and courageous social justice crusade, historians in the 1970s rescued Wells-Barnett’s life history from the footnotes. Duster acknowledged in her afterword the decades-long efforts to properly remember and memorialize her great grandmother, Wells-Barnett became something of a cultural touchstone for a generation of Americans committed to the ongoing freedom struggle. After decades of overlooking Wells-Barnett and her pioneering intersectional “reporting techniques that remain

30  Research handbook on intersectionality central tenets of modern journalism,” mainstream white news industry organizations, such as the New York Times and the Pulitzer Prize Board, eventually recognized Wells-Barnett for her “outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching” (Equal Justice Initiative 2020). We live in a world in which Ida’s refrain, “no justice, no peace,” remains incredibly germane in our collective freedom struggle; thus, when many of us ask ourselves, “what would Ida do?” we know with certainty that “she would blog. She would tweet. She would take to the streets” (Clark 2018, 155).

REFERENCES Blackmon, Douglas A. 2008. Slavery by Another Name: The Reinslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor Books. Broussard, Jinx Coleman. 2018. “Communicating an Anti-Lynching Crusade: The Voice, the Writings, and the Power of Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s Public Relations Campaign.” In Political Pioneer of the Press: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Her Transnational Crusade for Social Justice, edited by Lori Roessner and Jodi L. Rightler, 37–62. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. California Newsreel. 1998. The Black Press: Soldiers without Swords. https://​www​.pbs​.org/​blackpress/​ film/​pressrelease​.html. Accessed May 3, 2022. Clark, Chandra D. Snell. 2018. “What Would Ida Do?” In Political Pioneer of the Press: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Her Transnational Crusade for Social Justice, edited by Lori Amber Roessner and Jodi L. Rightler-McDaniels, 155–74. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2019. Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2021. “Intersectionality as Critical Inquiry.” In Companion to Feminist Studies, edited by Nancy A. Naples, 105–28. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Cooper, Caryl. 2014.“Selling Negro Women to Negro Women and to the World: Rebecca Stiles Taylor and the Chicago Defender, 1939–45,” Journalism History, 39 (4): 241–7. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (8): 139–67. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991.“Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 46: 1241–99. DeCosta-Willis, Miriam (ed.). 1995. The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells: An Intimate Portrait of the Activist as a Young Woman. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Dickerson, Caitlin. 2018. “Overlooked—Ida B. Wells,” New York Times, March 9. https://​www​.nytimes​ .com/​interactive/​2018/​obituaries/​overlooked​-ida​-b​-wells​.html. Accessed May 3, 2022. Dixon, Thomas, Jr. 1905. The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klun. New York: Grosset and Dunlap Publishers. Dodd, Lynda G. 2008. “Parades, Pickets, and Prison: Alice Paul and the Virtues of Unruly Constitutional Citizenship,” Journal of Law & Politics 24 (4): 339–428. Durham, Meenakshi Gigi. 1998. “On the Relevance of Standpoint Epistemology to the Practice of Journalism,” Communication Theory 8 (2): 117–40. DuRocher, Kris. 2016. Ida B. Wells: Social Reformer and Activist. New York: Routledge Historical Americans. DuRocher, Kris. 2018. “Ida B. Wells: Social Reformer and Activist.” In Political Pioneer of the Press: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Her Transnational Crusade for Social Justice, edited by Lori Amber Roessner and Jodi L. Rightler-McDaniels, 81–107. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Duster, Alfreda M. 1970. “Forward.” In Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, xv–xxxii. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist  31 Duster, Michelle. 2020. “Afterword.” In Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, 363–72. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Duster, Michelle. 2021. Ida B., The Queen. New York: Simon & Schuster. Equal Justice Initiative. 2020. “Ida B. Wells Honored with Posthumous Pulitzer.” https://​eji​.org/​news/​ida​ -b​-wells​-honored​-with​-posthumous​-pulitzer/​. Accessed May 3, 2022. Faulkner, Carol and Alison M. Parker. 2012. Interconnections: Gender and Race in American History. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Forde, Kathy Roberts. 2021. “Architect of the New South.” In Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America, edited by Kathy Roberts-Forde and Sid Bedingfield, 31–56. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. www​ Frances Willard House Museum. Truth Telling: Frances Willard and Ida B. Wells. http://​ .willardandwells​.org. Accessed May 5, 2022. Garland, Libby. 2005. “‘Irrespective of Race, Color or Sex’: Susan B. Anthony and the New York State Constitutional Convention of 1867,” OAH Magazine of History 19 (2): 61–4. Garland, David. 2014. “What Is a ‘History of the Present’? On Foucault’s Genealogies and Their Critical Preconditions,” Punishment & Society 16 (4): 365–84. Gibson, Samantha. 2016. Ida B. Wells and Anti-Lynching Activism. Retrieved from the Digital Public Library of America, https://​dp​.la/​primary​-source​-sets/​ida​-b​-wells​-and​-anti​-lynching​-activism. Accessed May 3, 2022. Giddings, Paula. 1988. “Woman Warrior, Ida B. Wells: Crusader-Journalist,” Essence, 18 (10): 75. Giddings, Paula. 2008. Ida: A Sword among Lions, Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching. New York: HarperCollins. Gines, Katherine T. 2011. “Black Feminism and Intersectional Analyses: A Defense of Intersectionality,” Philosophy Today 55: 275–84. Gines, Katherine T. 2014. “Race Women, Race Men and Early Expressions of Proto-Intersectionality.” In Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach, edited by Maeve M. O’Donovan, Namita Goswami, and Lisa Yount, 13–18. New York: Routledge. Green, Norma Fay. 2018. “Training the Pen, Ida B. Wells’ Journalistic Efforts to Combat Emerging Jim Crow Laws in Transportation.” In Political Pioneer of the Press: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and her Transnational Crusade for Social Justice, edited by Lori Roessner and Jodi L. Rightler-McDaniels, 3–16. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Guy-Sheftall, Beverly. 1995. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. New York: The New Press. Haywood, D. Weston. 2021. “The Fight for a New America.” In Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America, edited by Kathy Roberts-Forde and Sid Bedingfield, 57–81. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. King, Deborah K. 1988. “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology,” Signs 14 (1): 42–72. Kuhl, Michelle. 2012. “Uncountable Bodies, Uncountable Crimes: Sexual Assault and the Antilynching Movement.” In Interconnections: Gender and Race in American History, edited by Carol Faulkner and Alison M. Parker, 133–60. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Locke, Jull. 2017. “Against Nostalgia: The Political Theory of Ida B. Wells.” In American Political Thought: An Alternative View, edited by Jonathan Keller and Alex Zamalin, 1–17. New York: Routledge. May, Vivian M. 2007. Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist. New York: Routledge. May, Vivian M. 2012. “Historicizing Intersectionality as a Critical Lens: Returning to the Work of Anna Julia Cooper.” In Interconnections: Gender and Race in American History, edited by Carol Faulkner and Allison M. Parker, 17–50. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. McMillin, Sally G. 2007. Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement. New York: Oxford University Press. Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. 1988. The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925. New York: Oxford University Press. New York Times. 1939. “Miss Belle Squire Noted Suffragist, Writer on Women’s Rights Led Feminist Drive in Chicago—Dies at 69,” April 17, 23.

32  Research handbook on intersectionality Ochiai, Aloko. 1992. “Ida B. Wells and Her Crusade for Justice: An African American Woman’s Testionial Autobiography,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 75 (2/3): 365–81. Roessner, Lori Amber. 2018. “‘The Modern Joan [of] Arc’: Press Coverage of Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s Campaign for Women’s Suffrage.” In Political Pioneer of the Press: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Her Transnational Crusade for Social Justice, edited by Lori Roessner and Jodi L. Rightler-McDaniels, 63–80. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Roessner, Lori and Jodi L. Rightler-McDaniels (eds.). 2018. Political Pioneer of the Press: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Her Transnational Crusade for Social Justice. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Romero, Mary. 2018. Introducing Intersectionality. Medford, MA: Polity Press. Sexton, Jared. 2015. “Unbearable Blackness,” Cultural Critique 90 (90): 159–78. Smith, Lucy. 1895.“Miss Ida B. Wells.” In The College of Life; or, Practical Self Educator: A Manual of Self-Improvement of the Colored Race, edited by Henry Davenport Northrop, 99–101. Chicago, IL: Chicago Publication and Lithograph Company. Smith, Valerie. 1998. Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings. New York: Routledge. Sterling, Dorothy. 1979. Black Foremothers: Three Lives. New York: The City Press of New York. Tagg, John. 1988. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Truth, Sojourner. 1998. Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Introduction by Neil Painter. New York: Penguin Classics. Tucker, David M. 1971. “Miss Ida B. Wells and Memphis Lynching,” Phylon 32 (2): 112–22. Vogt, R.J. 2018. “Pioneering Advocacy Journalism: What Today’s Journalists Can Learn from Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s Methodology.” In Political Pioneer of the Press: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Her Transnational Crusade for Social Justice, edited by Lori Roessner and Jodi L. Rightler, 137–55. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Wells, Ida. 1892. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Wells, Ida. 1893/1999. The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition. The Afro American’s Contribution to Colombian Literature. Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Irvine Garland Penn, and Ferdinand L. Barnett. Edited by Robert W. Rydell. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Wells, Ida. 1894. “Ida B. Wells Abroad: Speaking in Liverpool against Lynchers of Negros,” Chicago Inter-Ocean, April 9, University of Chicago Library, Ida B. Wells Papers, 1884–1976. Wells, Ida. 1910. “How Enfranchisement Stops Lynching,” Original Rights Magazine, June, 42–52. https://​www​.lib​.uchicago​.edu/​ead/​pdf/​ibwells​-0008​-008​-05​.pdf. Accessed May 3, 2022. Wells-Barnett, Ida. 1970/2020. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wood, Norman B. 1897. The White Side of a Black Subject. Chicago, IL: American Publiction House. https://​blackwomenssuffrage​.dp​.la/​collections/​ida​-b​-wells/​ibwells​-0008​-010​-12. Accessed May 3, 2022. Woodson, Carter G. 1931. The Negro in Our History. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers.

3. Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964): intersectionality and activism Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge

And when farther on in the same section our train stops at a dilapidated station, rendered yet more unsightly by dozens of loafers …; looking a little more closely, I see two dingy little rooms with “FOR LADIES” swinging over one and “FOR COLORED PEOPLE” over the other; while wondering under which head I come … (Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South 1892)

Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964), in a long career, anticipated, as the above passage shows, many of the premises of contemporary intersectionality theory: (1) analysing as a scholar-activist the crisis of her time—the threat to Black existence posed by White domination; (2) employing standpoint epistemology to speak from the standpoint of the oppressed— as “a Black Woman of the South”; (3) explaining power in terms of systems of privilege and oppression that working together create its pathological configuration—domination; and (4) using narratives to illustrate the intersection of race, gender and class in individual lives and in macrosocial structures. To claim her as one of the foundational voices of intersectionality theory—a term Cooper did not use, we need to address a question central to all social science: when is the same the same? (Winch 1958). We do so by asserting a clear sameness between the problems Cooper confronts and the problems we identify today as intersectionality operating in society. The term “intersectionality” in this chapter describes a process, ubiquitous in social life, in which a society’s stratificational structures and practices, that is, its institutionalized ways of unequally distributing socially produced goods and services (e.g., through class, race, gender, ethnicity, age), relate to each other to shape how power is experienced in individual lives and in interactions, groups, formal organizations, and social institutions. We use “intersectional” as an adjective to suggest a stratificational category or practice that, by its relation to other such categories, has a material effect on the life chances of a person or group. This chapter is based in Cooper’s scholarly work and in major commentaries on that work. Cooper’s most important book, A Voice from the South (1892), is available in several editions—an early reprint by Negro Universities Press (1969), the Schomburg (1988) replica with a fine introduction by Mary Helen Washington, an online ebook by Google, an open access edition by Project Gutenberg, and in the essential collection of Cooper’s work, The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper (1998) edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan. Cooper’s 1925 dissertation L’Attitude de la France a L’Egard de L’Esclavage pendant la Revolution (1925) is available in Frances Richardson Kellor’s 2006 English translation Slavery and the French and Haitian Revolutionists along with Kellor’s commentary. Biographical studies of Cooper include Leona Gabel (1982) and the definitive Anna J. Cooper, A Voice from the South (1981) by Louise Daniel Hutchinson, prepared as the catalogue for the exhibit of the same title co-sponsored by the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum and the Smithsonian Institution. The major work of interpretation is Vivian M. May’s Anna Julia Cooper: Visionary Black Feminist 33

34  Research handbook on intersectionality (2007). Other useful commentaries include Karen Baker-Fletcher (1994), Janice Y. Ferguson (2015), Katherine T. Gines (2015), Karen A. Johnson (2009), and Vivian May (2009, 2012). Cooper’s scholarship and activism draw on her life as a member of two overlapping and remarkable cohorts, the first generation of Blacks to grow to maturity after the Civil War and the first generation of college-educated women (White and Black). Cooper’s work reflects this education in her research for case studies of the US and France/Haiti, including official statistics, archival materials reporting debates in the French Assemblies over slavery and the status of Santo Domingo (aka San Domingue and “Haiti”) and in her immersion in classical Greek and Latin, modern and medieval French, English and European literature and history, and contemporary American literature. Our chapter has five parts: “Life,” “Scholar-Activism,” “Standpoint,” “Social Theory,” and “Presentation.”

LIFE My mother was a slave and the finest woman I have ever known … Presumably my father was her master, if so I owe him not a sou. She was always too modest & shamefaced ever to mention him. (Anna Julia Cooper n.d. in Hutchinson 1981, 4)

While noting the concern expressed by other scholars that Black intellectuals often have their ideas neglected in favor of a focus on their biographies (Gines 2015; Gordon 2018; May 2007), we agree with May (2007, 52) that “it is essential to account for the contested political contexts in which [Cooper] lived.” We summarize Cooper’s biography in terms of four patterns: changes in US society in her lifetime, macrosocial constraints imposed on Black Americans, a chronology of her life, and moments of high intersectional pressure. Macrosocial Changes Over Cooper’s lifetime—1858–1964—American society moved from a rural-agrarian economy to a capitalist urban-industrial one; from a semi-peripheral, relatively isolated position in the world to global leadership; from a government preserved largely for the interests of wealthy White men to one where women, people of color, and the working class sought an active role in the state; and from a world where daily life was patterned by home-produced goods and entertainment to one where daily life was repatterned by mass production of goods and the technological breakthroughs that created the automobile, telephone, refrigeration, radio, movies, and television. Constraints on Black Americans These changes during the period from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Act (1864–1964) impacted everyone living in the US, but Black Americans, besides coping with these and seizing what opportunities they could, were forced into constant struggle by the deep contradictions in US policy and attitudes toward them (Alexander 1995; Ferguson 2015). A prime example of these contradictions is the volatility of Civil Rights law from 1865 to 1896. In 1865, when Cooper would have been about seven years old, the states of the Confederacy, seeing defeat close, began enacting “Black codes” restricting former slaves from jury duty, owning property, conducting business, buying or leasing land, or freely moving in public

Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964)  35 spaces. The US Congress responded to these codes with the Civil Rights Act of (March 1) 1875, declaring “equality of all men before the law” and forbidding discrimination in public places (e.g., restaurants and railway transportation). A year later, the contested Presidential election of 1876 was settled by the Democrats (then associated with the Confederate cause) giving Republicans (seen as “the party of Lincoln”) the Presidency in exchange for agreeing to withdraw Federal troops from the South, opening the way for more White supremacist legislation. In 1883 the Supreme Court decision declaring the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional further accelerated the passage of Jim Crow legislation. Repeatedly challenged in the courts by Black plaintiffs like Cooper’s contemporary, Ida B. Wells-Barnett (see Chapter 2 in this volume), these laws were often overturned in the lower courts—Wells-Barnett, for instance, won there—and then that victory was reversed on appeal. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the Supreme Court ruled 7–1 that “separate but equal facilities” are constitutional and that states have the right to regulate railroad travel. The “separate but equal” frame became the law of the land. (Plessy v. Ferguson was finally overturned in 1953 in Brown vs. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas which held that “separate facilities are inherently unequal.” Cooper, who had spent her life teaching in segregated school systems, was 95 years old.) Chronology Anna Julia Cooper was born “Annie Julia Haywood,” August 10, 1858 in Raleigh, North Carolina to an enslaved mother, Hannah Stanley Haywood; Cooper believed her father to be her mother’s enslaver. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Cooper attended St. Augustine’s (Episcopal) Normal School founded to educate newly freed slaves. A precocious student, she excelled in school and was happy there. In 1877, she married her tutor in ancient Greek, George Cooper, who died shortly after being confirmed as an Episcopal priest in 1879. Widowed at 20, Cooper taught at St. Augustine’s until 1881, when she applied to Oberlin College, explaining her situation—widowed, with little money, but willing to work and with good references. At Oberlin she lived with the family of (White) Professor Charles H. Churchill, did paid tutoring, and excelled in her classes. After graduation in 1884, she taught at Wilberforce University, returned home at her mother’s request, and taught again at St. Augustine’s. Through Oberlin connections, she was hired in 1887 to teach math and science in Washington, DC at the M Street School, the largest high school for colored youth in the US. The period 1887–1905 was one of outstanding productivity for Cooper: she self-published A Voice from the South (1892); was a frequently invited guest lecturer, most notably at The Congress of Representative Women, Chicago World’s Fair (1893); made lasting friends— especially The Reverend Francis Grimké and his wife Charlotte Forten; volunteered through service organizations and became principal of the M Street School (1902)—a singular honor for a woman. But that position drew her into the growing controversy over whether colored youth should follow a vocational or a classical curriculum; her firm stance, that the school should offer both, led to her losing her contract and moving to Lincoln University in Missouri (1906–10). In 1910, she returned to Washington, teaching Latin at the M Street School. Between 1910 and 1925, she took summer courses in France, and started work toward her doctorate, first at Columbia University and then, running afoul of their residency requirement, at the Sorbonne. In 1915, she became the legal guardian for her widowed nephew’s five children, occasioning her purchase of a larger home. By careful management and shrewd risk taking, she was able to put the children into private schools, allowing her to visit France to continue her disserta-

36  Research handbook on intersectionality tion research on French attitudes toward slavery during the Revolution. But the DC School Administration foreshortened her leave, which necessitated her hiring a “collaboratrice” to copy documents and send them to her at the Library of Congress; in March 1925 she defended the dissertation in Paris, in French (see The Third Step, Cooper’s autobiographical pamphlet self-published in her eighties; in Lemert and Bahn 1998). Retiring from the DC Schools in 1930, she became President of Frelinghuysen University, a pioneering night school for working-class Black adults, where she served in various capacities and lent her home for classes into the 1950s (Johnson, 2009). She lived to see the modern Civil Rights Movement March on Washington in 1963 and died peacefully at her home on T Street NW in 1964. Intersectionality Intersectionality permeated Cooper’s life. Remembering her parentage, she acknowledges her origins in one of the most monstrous practices of intersectionality—the sexual abuse of her slave mother by her owner. She recalls as a girl at school having to fight for opportunities that boys were granted easily, such as studying Greek. Her years at Oberlin College were marked by a growing awareness of “how the other half lived”—that “other” included both the Churchill family and classmates (but not friends) from the fledgling Black bourgeoisie—Mary Church (Terrell) and Ida Gibbs (Hunt) who led typical collegiate lives while Cooper, slightly older, a widow, living off campus, was doing paid tutoring. While teaching in Washington she seems to have traveled frequently by train, probably home to Raleigh, at the time Southern states were creating Jim Crow cars. She wrote about that experience in great detail as one defined by status inconsistency between her race and her class. Her professional rise at the M Street School, finally reaching Principal, engulfed her in the widespread and acrimonious debate about classical versus vocational education that came to involve personal attacks by the White supervisor of the colored school system and Black colleagues perhaps jealous of her prominence (Hutchinson 1981, 67–83). Her quest for the PhD, first at Columbia and then at the Sorbonne, was punctuated by recurring obstacles arising from her status as a “non-traditional student” before that concept was institutionalized. When she was working on her doctorate, the Library of Congress located her in a small private room, the main reading room being barred to Blacks. Her 1925 defense in Paris was done under threats of dismissal for absence from the DC school system—which would have meant loss of salary and retirement pension. Even the achievement that had perhaps meant the most to her—her career as an educator—was dependent on the workings of intersectionality: only as a widow could she teach, married women being barred.

SCHOLAR-ACTIVISM I may say honestly and truthfully that my one aim is and has always been, so far as I may, to hold a torch for the children of a group too long exploited and too frequently disparaged in its struggling for the light. (Anna J. Cooper in Hutchinson 1981, 131)

The role of scholar-activist was Cooper’s response to the pressures and opportunities of her life: education gave her upward mobility and a critical understanding of what was happening to Black Americans; religion strengthened her resolve to do justice, which meant to increase

Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964)  37 opportunity for others. As a professional educator in Washington, she lived the cultivated life she had experienced while boarding with the Churchills in Oberlin, creating a home for entertaining friends who shared interests in art, literature, and music, joining the Black Women’s Club Movement, building a reputation as a public speaker within the Black community. But she was not content to settle into the role of a member of the Black bourgeoisie. She understood Black Americans were in the fight of their lives, facing domination, the organized and unjust use of power—and her duty was to make that the object of her activism. Cooper brought to her activism an extraordinary aptitude for education which yielded broad cultivation, research skills, talent in writing and public speaking. She had, too, the character traits for activist leadership—will, confidence, eloquence, and steadiness (Ferguson 2015). Cooper’s scholar-activist role was of a distinctive type. Never a participant in visible protests, the path taken by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, she was a “loner” choosing her activist projects carefully: the cause of Black Americans, especially the poor; of women in general, but of Black women in particular; and the cause of African American youth, especially urban youth. She expressed this activism through critical scholarship, commitment to education, and duty to community service. Choosing activism posed risks, both financial and professional. Widowed at 20, she lived close to the bone on the modest salary she earned at the M Street School, responding on occasion to the needs of poorer relatives and assuming the expenses of the guardianship, when she was 55, for five great-nephews and nieces. Critical Scholarship Cooper shared her understanding of the crisis facing Black America through publications and lectures: ● “Womanhood—A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race” at the Convocation of Colored Clergy of the Protestant Episcopal Church of Washington, DC in 1886; ● “A Response to Fannie Barrier Williams” at the Congress of Representative Women at the Columbian World’s Fair, 1893; ● a reflection on education at the Second Hampton Negro Conference, Hampton, Virginia, 1894; ● “The Negro Problem in America,” Pan-African Congress, London, 1900; ● “The Ethics of the Negro Question,” Biennial Session of Friends’ General Conference, Asbury Park, New Jersey, September 5, 1902; ● “Ideals and Reals or What do You Want?” First Baptist Church in Guthrie, Oklahoma, 1909 (Hutchinson 1981, 82). Some of these lectures are incorporated into her highest achievement in activist scholarship, A Voice from the South. Education Cooper saw education as the major route for the empowerment of Black Americans to challenge White domination, and the second major strand in her contribution to Black resistance, one she pursued from about age 11 when she tutored adult students at St. Augustine’s, through decades of teaching in the DC Colored Public Schools, and, then, as President, registrar, and

38  Research handbook on intersectionality teacher at Frelinghuysen University for Colored adult workers where she founded the Hannah Stanley Opportunity School, in honor of her mother, for the least advantaged of adult learners, and fought to preserve it into her nineties. Cooper had a systematically developed philosophy of education: (1) it should be life-long, focused not on producing chemists or welders but human beings; inclusive across lines of sex, race, age, class, career goals, aptitudes, and respected by all sectors of the Black community as their best investment; (2) students should choose their curricular focus based on their “appreciation” of the subject matter; (3) vocational training should be valued for what it did for the student and for the Black community in building bridges to the White world; (4) the ultimate test of the success of a society is the kind of person its school systems produce. She paid a high price for her commitment to this philosophy by insisting, as Principal of the M Street School (1902–06), on dual tracks of vocational and classical education, charting a middle position in the complex debates among White and Black school administrators and community members over Booker T. Washington’s call for vocational education and W.E.B. Du Bois’s argument for classical education of the “talented tenth.” When her classical curriculum students won scholarships to “Harvard, Brown, Oberlin, Yale, Amherst, Dartmouth and Radcliffe” tension increased between Cooper and the White superintendent of Washington High Schools Percy Hughes who wanted to shut down the classical program (Hutchinson 1981, 67–8). In the end, Cooper was “out of a job” with all that meant for her as a single Black woman but, as she noted, the program was saved at least temporarily. Community Service Aware that most Black Washingtonians lived in dire poverty, Cooper worked with others to establish organizations to address that need. The Colored Women’s League, started in 1894, lobbied for better living conditions, especially for the city’s alley dwellers (Cooper became Chair of the Alley Sanitation Committee and corresponding secretary of the organization); the League instituted training for kindergarten teachers, provided emergency services for the indigent, and helped spearhead alliances with other clubs around the country that climaxed in the 1904 incorporation of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. The Colored Women’s League helped found the Colored Settlement House (1902) for which Cooper was an active volunteer and authored an article describing its origin and functions—providing daycare, nurseries, after school programs, savings programs, food for infants, sports and clubs for boys and girls, and summer camp. Cooper helped found the Black YWCA (known as the Phyllis Wheatley branch, 1906), which had an early project of housing women and girls seeking work in Washington, DC, and at which she started a Black Campfire Girls Camp in 1912. An Integrated Effort The categories we have made here, of course, are not how Cooper lived her life. Her various activist commitments frequently merged in a single project as when at the conferral ceremony in December 1925, she describes her PhD as an act of service: “I take from your hands … this diploma, not as a symbol of cold intellectual success … but with the warm pulsing heart throbs of a people’s satisfaction in my humble efforts to serve them” (Hutchinson 1981, 142).

Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964)  39

STANDPOINT Only the Black Woman can say “when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.” (Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South)

A Voice from the South begins with an act of genius—the identification on the title page of authorship, “BY A BLACK WOMAN OF THE SOUTH”; Cooper’s name appearing only once in the book—on the copyright page: Copyright 1892 BY Anna Julia Cooper We agree with Lemert and Bhan (1998, 48) that Cooper made a very deliberate move in constructing the persona of the author, her “decision not to sign her book was anything but false modesty or some other empty virtue.” And while they are also probably correct that “She very likely used the signature of the ‘Black Woman of the South’ instead of her own, because she was so very well aware of the power that could move the society when individuals assume a potent collective office,” the decision is not only political but aesthetic and not only aesthetic but sociological. Cooper is claiming “power” not for herself but as a representative of a group who stand at an intersection of race, gender, and region that made them perhaps the most disempowered group in US society. In her prologue, “Our Raison d’Être,” Cooper plunges this archetypal figure, the book’s speaker, and sometimes main character, into the drama of US race relations in the 1890s which she describes as “the clash and clatter of our American Conflict” (p. i). Cooper imagines an ongoing lawsuit over “the colored man’s inheritance and apportionment … still the somber crux, the perplexing cul de sac of the nation” in which everyone has been heard from except “the Black Woman.” Cooper then says that for a fair verdict, “truth from each standpoint [must] be presented at the bar” and so she speaks because “the ‘other side’ has not been represented by one who ‘lives there’” (boldface ours). Without using the label “intersectionality,” she suggests one operation of the process: the different sides have not experienced each other’s lives, the White lawyer cannot speak for the Black man nor the Black man for the Black woman (Cooper 1892, i–iii). The proof of Cooper’s assertion that the Black man cannot serve as a spokesperson for the experience of the Black woman can be found in the original source of the title “The Black Woman of the South,” an 1883 speech by Alexander Crummell, a Cambridge-educated African clergyman, who, although moved by the cruelties endured by this woman under slavery, describes her after Emancipation as almost irredeemably “coarse” in every aspect of her life, needing uplift through education in “industrial boarding schools … limited to reading, writing, arithmetic and geography” and domestic skills “for the raising up of women meet to be the helpers of poor men, the rank and file of black society” (Crummell 1883, 105–7). Cooper acknowledges Crummell’s precedence in the first chapter of A Voice but her argument suggests that he cannot speak from the standpoint of the Black Woman of the South as she, Cooper, can, because she is that person. In “Our Raison d’Être,” Cooper claims the validity of standpoint epistemology in the quest for truth, arguing that standpoint matters in general, and that the representation of different

40  Research handbook on intersectionality standpoints is a criterion for critical social investigation. Further, Cooper presents any standpoint as resulting from the intersection of vectors of oppression and privilege, placing directly on the table the ways race, gender, and region interact in the lives of different groups to create a stratificational hierarchy. Cooper’s self-presentation as “A Black Woman of the South” seems at first to omit the third part of what Mary Romero (2018, 1) describes as “the holy trinity” of much social research— class. The issue of class, or its absence, in A Voice has been dealt with by several critics. Mary Helen Washington (1988, xxx) sees Cooper maintaining a “discreet distance” from the lives of poor Black women. In contrast, May (2012) argues that Cooper is vitally concerned with the lives and fates of all Black people, but especially of poor Black working women. Our position is that Cooper, in taking on the very political act of speaking “as a Black woman of the South,” must navigate the problems of intraracial class antagonism and of White disparagement of Blacks as at best, poor and ignorant, and at worst, indigent and stupid. As she negotiates these issues, she is writing not only for “the Black race” but for herself, expressing what she understands of her own class position. What Cooper chooses to do by naming “A Black Woman of the South” as the author is to present herself as the educated person she is and by extension of the title “a Black Woman” what many Black women are—familiar with the struggles of Black people but also educated, professional, self-supporting human beings who mean to be listened to as such. This representation is of a class to which Black mothers and fathers may aspire for their sons and daughters and shows that Cooper’s class position is authentic and the aspiration, legitimate—an issue important to both Blacks and Whites. Even positive reviews of A Voice sometimes reflected the low opinion of Blacks held by white critics as when the Boston Transcript notes that Cooper writes “in excellent English”—a comment illustrating the shrewdness of Cooper’s choice in allowing class position to become clear in the work itself. In the voice of a Black Woman of the South, Cooper is energized, critical, confident, lyrical. But in her second major work, Slavery and the French and Haitian Revolutionists (1925 [2006]) (hereafter Slavery), that voice is missing, replaced by one that is cautious and objective in its description of the positions taken by key groups debating what Cooper recognizes as the anomaly of the persistence of Black slavery in the French-Caribbean colonies even as the French Revolutionists were rallying around the cry “Liberté, égalité, fraternité.” There are several possible reasons for what May (2007, 111) calls Cooper’s “somewhat subdued voice”: at age 65, after earlier disappointments, she is eager to crown her educational achievement with the PhD; she is writing not to a general public but to a small committee of prestigious French scholars at the Sorbonne; she is communicating in French, a language in which she is proficient but probably not colloquial; her knowledge of her topic comes not from her personal experience but from French archival sources, and accessing them is repeatedly interrupted by Washington school authorities, forcing her to delegate much of the archival search to her collaboratrice. Perhaps unsure about the completeness of her data, she produces a cautious, largely value-neutral document, which shows her skill at reading an audience. The dissertation defense required, in addition to the dissertation submitted in French, two essays, also in French, on topics set by her examiners, those essays—“Equality of Races and the Democratic Movement” (1925) and “Legislative Measures Concerning Slavery in the United States: 1781–1850 (1925)—written under extreme time pressure during the week before the oral examination, are much more in the critical, energized voice we identify with her.

Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964)  41

THE SOCIAL THEORY There are two kinds of peace in this world. The one produced by suppression, which is the passivity of death; the other brought about by a proper adjustment of living, acting forces. (Cooper, A Voice from the South)

The problematic of Cooper’s life and work is understanding the relationship among four stratificational variables—gender, race, class, and region. Most of her attention is focused on gender and race as factors in her life and in the life of the US in her time; class and region frame that central concern. The exact nature of this relationship ultimately eludes her but the effort to find it defines her career as a social theorist and the organization of her major theoretical work, A Voice from the South—by a Black Woman of the South. She organizes the book into two parts (plus the prologue “Our Raison d’Être”). She titles Part I “Soprano Obligato”— “obligato” meaning a part of a musical score “that must be performed as written without omission” and “soprano” indicating that this is the woman’s part. That is the exact message Cooper wishes to deliver, that the woman must be attended to, that she is an integral part of the race and of the nation. Part I moves from an opening chapter that considers the role of women “in the regeneration of the race,” to a chapter on discrimination against women in education, to the tour de force of the entire volume “Woman vs. The Indian,” her complex commentary directed especially toward White feminists on multiple experiences of gender and race discrimination, and concludes with the “Status of Woman in America” tracing the often invisible but vital contributions made by women, both White and Black, from the beginning of the nation, concluding with a note of rejoicing: “But to be a woman of the Negro race in America, and to be able to grasp the deep significance of the possibilities of the crisis, is to have a heritage, it seems to me, unique in the ages” (1892, 144). Part II where Cooper turns increasingly to macro analysis is entitled “Tutti ad Libitum”— “ad libitum” denotes that the music is to be played “without restraint” and “tutti” means that all are to be free to participate. Widening the lens through which she studies America, Cooper shifts focus not to men but to the Black community in the US. The first chapter in Part II, discussed shortly, is her most general statement of social theory; the next two chapters examine the place of Blacks in American literature and in the post-Civil War economy, and, conversely, in the final chapter, the place of religion in human but especially in Black life. Cooper’s sociological theory emerges as answers to the title questions of the first chapter of Part II: “Has America a Race Problem; If So, How Can It Best Be Solved?” She embeds her answers in the fundamental issue of social order, asserting “Progressive peace in a nation is the result of conflict; and conflict, such as is healthy, stimulating, and progressive, is produced through the co-existence of radically opposing or racially different elements” (1892, 152). Drawing examples from the natural world and history, she endorses French historian Francois Guizot’s argument that diversity is necessary to progress—and that the experience of diversity must be managed by an equilibrium among the multiple forces in a situation: “European civilization has within it the promise of perpetual progress … While in other civilizations the exclusive domination of a principle (or race) led to tyranny, in Europe the diversity of social elements (growing out of the contact of different races) the incapability of any one to exclude the rest, gave birth to the LIBERTY which now prevails …” Cooper concludes, “This is enough to show that the law holds good in sociology as in the world of matter,

42  Research handbook on intersectionality that equilibrium, not repression among conflicting forces is the condition of natural harmony, of permanent progress, and of universal freedom …” (boldface ours) (1892, 159–61). Thus, Cooper’s first answer to her title question is that “yes,” America has a race problem, but it is not a problem of diversity, of the presence of so many “foreign” elements, most especially Black people, as the popular mind has it—it is a problem of domination. Within this theory, the essential social unit is the group—people understood as individuals who share a common experience and identity within the stratificational practices of a society in which they are defined, and frequently self-define, as “different” from other groups. While Part I focused on the intersection of gender and race (with class and region as contributing factors), in Part II, the focus is on racial groups, again, with gender, class, and region as contributing factors. Groups have different projects and degrees of power, born out of their different locations in social stratification—the process we today name “intersectionality.” For Cooper, as for intersectionality theory, power becomes the issue. Cooper takes as one principle of social order that diversity makes collisions of interests a permanent feature of social life—and by diversity in this context, she means “stratificational placement.” To think of a moment when conflict ceases is really to imagine the erasure of that diversity, possible only under practices of monstrous tyranny (a theme she returns to in a circa 1942 essay “Hitler and the Negro” (Lemert and Bhan 1998, 262–5)). The solution to the problem of domination is to achieve sufficient empowerment of all parties in a negotiation so that conflict is minimized, and compromise is sought—in other words, to achieve a situation of equilibrium. The specific problem Cooper sees confronting America and its so-called “race problem” is that one group, Whites (or “Anglo-Saxons” as Cooper frequently prefers) are essentially not willing to share and live peacefully with another group, Black Americans—or with a number of other groups (the Chinese, Native Americans, immigrants). Whites in general, but Southern Whites especially, are constantly working to achieve domination—the situation in which their group always gets its way in negotiation or conflict. Much of Cooper’s theoretical work is devoted to understanding and explaining two potentially contradictory processes—how domination is achieved and how to arrive at equilibrium—that is, she explores how power works and how its excesses can be resisted and reformulated. This is not just a theoretical but a practical problem for her; understanding domination is a prerequisite to undermining a system bent on destroying her group, Black Americans. Domination To solve this problem, Cooper explores four factors that undergird domination—material resources, ideology, manners, passion—giving an analysis of power from the standpoint of the disempowered. ● Cooper explores the restriction of access to material resources through the Black worker’s experience of being denied a job at a decent wage. Looking at the North, Cooper sees White control exercised primarily by the resistance of White workers, unions, and immigrants who collectively or singly act to marginalize the Black man, denying him access to apprenticeship programs and threatening to boycott the employer who hires him (1892, 255). In the South, she sees that while “the colored man virtually holds the labor market,”

Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964)  43 the traditions of slavery persist and leave him unable “to demand anything like a fair share of the products of his toil” (1892, 256–7) and as a tenant farmer in debt to the White owner who pays him “fifty cents per day, … often … in tickets convertible into meat, meal and molasses at the village grocery, owned by the same ubiquitous employer!” (1892, 252–3). Domination in the labor market is a White versus Black issue based in White antipathy. ● Whites, particularly White Southerners, elaborate an ideology representing Black people as “Other”—beings unlike oneself and one’s group. This ideology spreads through personal contacts and through mass media built on deliberate distortion by the White Southerner “giv[ing] object lessons with his choicest specimens of Negro depravity and worthlessness” to illustrate “the stupendous and atrocious mistake of reasoning about these people as if they were just ordinary human beings” (1892, 108). Mass media—government documents, like the census, textbooks, novels, newspapers, magazines—present accounts that are fundamentally racist, as when the census gives crime figures but not labor figures for the Negro. The history of slavery and the Civil War are forbidden topics, anyone raising them “quickly told … that he is waving the bloody shirt” (1892, 106). ● Cooper presents manners as a method for prescribing, routinizing, and reproducing in everyday enactments dominant superiority and subordinate inferiority, the former through acts of avoidance and the latter through rituals of deference. Cooper lays the responsibility on the White woman for White manners: “With all her vaunted independence, the American woman of to-day is as fearful of losing caste as a Brahmin in India. That is the law under which she lives … the lesson which she instils into her children with their first baby breakfasts” (1892, 86–7). ● Passion is the mobilization of emotion for conflict and domination which rests on a desire for absolute control, a self-feeding, ever expanding pathology. This passion is intensified by any manifestation of autonomy by the subordinate, for within the emotional framing of the caste system of race, the subordinate’s autonomy triggers the dominant’s guilt-induced terror of reprisal, as Cooper shows in White poet Maurice Thompson’s poem “A Voodoo Prophesy” where he has a Black man say, “Within my loins an inky curse is pent/To flood/ Your blood/And stain your skin and crisp your golden hair/As you have done by me, so will I do/By all the generations of your race” (cited in Cooper, 1892, 215). This thesis of passion as the motivator for domination challenges the idea that rational discourse can be the solution to racial antagonism. Equilibrium For Cooper, the solution to domination, that she as a scholar-activist can effect, lies in identifying sources of power that the subordinate must access in order to establish a possible equilibrium. She gives special attention to five sources: self-knowledge, labor, education, alliances, and belief. In Cooper’s view, self-knowledge must begin with an honest assessment of the answer to the question “What Are We Worth?” that must be answered by calculating how much the world has paid to produce an individual and how much the individual has repaid. But this assessment must be set in historical context, especially of slavery, “As colored wage-earners, we are today under a double disadvantage destined sorely to try our fitness to survive … we are ‘let go’ to start from zero—nay, from a chasm infinitely below zero, to build up our fortunes” (1899).

44  Research handbook on intersectionality Against this environment, Black Americans must set themselves to adopt what Cooper herself seems to have taken much to heart, the Oberlin College motto— “Labor and Learning.” Cooper argues that “Work must first create wealth” (1892, 261) and that creation may lessen prejudice: “The average American is never too prejudiced, I think, [not] to have a keen appreciation … of the purchasing power of a dollar” (1892, 267–8). The key to work creating wealth lies in education; Black needs of formal education is in part a result of White prejudice that works to marginalize the Black worker in the labor market: “the only effective preparation for success [in labor] … lies in the establishment of industrial and technical schools for teaching our colored youth trades … a colored child can secure a trade in no other way … [For] to-day skilled labor is steadily drifting into the hands of white workmen—mostly foreigners” (1892, 260–1). At any point that she discusses education, Cooper brings to bear the underlying principles of her philosophy of education: that “education which is truly ‘educative’ must strengthen, develop, ‘lead out, these faculties … of the human soul … the power to think, the power to appreciate, and the power to will the right and make it prevail” (Cooper c. 1930s [1998], 251); that “The power of appreciation is the measure of an individual’s aptitudes; and if a boy hates Greek and Latin and spends all this time whittling out steamboats … try him at a trade” (1892, 259). In giving educational opportunities to people of the race, Black people practice the best kind of self-help, turning out skilled workers of all types, who will bear witness by their very character to the effectiveness of the Black worker in the world. The subordinate must also reach out to form alliances across lines of difference with other people who are in a subordinated status. Black women are especially well positioned to reach out to other women and to the growing White woman’s suffrage movement. Cooper attempts to take a lead in building this alliance in her conclusion to “Woman versus The Indian” which she repeated in her address to the Congress of Representative Women at the Chicago World’s Fair: Now, I think if I could crystallize the sentiment of my constituency, and deliver it as a message to this congress of women, it would be something like this … not till race, color, sex, and condition are seen as the accidents, and not the substance of life; … not till then is woman’s lesson taught and woman’s cause won—not the white woman’s, nor the black woman’s, not the red woman’s, but the cause of every man and of every woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong. Woman’s wrongs are thus indissolubly linked with undefended woe, and the acquirement of her “rights” will mean the final triumph of all right over might … (Cooper 1893 [1998], 204–5)

Cooper argues that the dominant’s passion for absolute control can be answered with an equal source of energy if subordinates hold onto their beliefs: “The great, the fundamental need of any nation, any race, is for heroism, devotion, sacrifice; and there cannot be heroism, devotion, or sacrifice in a primarily skeptical spirit … I do not mean by faith the holding of correct views … To me, faith means treating the truth as true” (1892, 297–8). Cooper did not believe that the practice of these principles would bring certain success but that “we may be sure, the colored man in America will one day be judged in the cool, calm, unimpassioned, unprejudiced second thought of the American people” and “Our only care need be the intrinsic worth of our contributions … If we contribute a positive value in those things the world prizes, no amount of negrophobia can ultimately prevent its recognition” (1892, 284–5).

Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964)  45 Testing the Theory In Slavery (1925 [2006]) Cooper, analysing an event that occurred over 100 years earlier, during the French Revolution, bases her account on many of the same concepts developed in A Voice: complex struggles over the arrangements of power among multiple groups, each shaped by distinctive intersections among the variables of class, race, and regional location; the tension between economic interests in the wealth produced by a plantation economy in Haiti and the revolutionary claims of liberty, equality, brotherhood propelling the French Revolution. Groups seeking to keep the colonial relation of domination over Haiti were White—the wealthy planter class, the poor petit blancs of service providers and transient adventurers, and a large portion of France’s own government. Groups challenging the structures of domination enslaving the large Black labor force working on Haiti’s sugar plantations included an amalgam of non-Whites and Whites—mulattoes, free Blacks, and slaves, the last represented in France by a group of progressive Whites, “the Friends of the Blacks.” Cooper’s account portrays relations between these two warring alliances as involving material advantage, racist ideology, mannered enactments of super- and subordination, and passion for or against the aspirations aroused by France’s revolutionary rhetoric. Her model in this test case excludes two important factors from Voice—gender and equilibrium. In Slavery, it is the passion of the subordinate that wins through a violent slave uprising, leading to France’s loss of its most valuable colony, and, to contemporaries, the extraordinary creation of a new nation by Black people who claimed freedom and equality, an event that traumatized White slave owners in the US and presented a challenge to the colonial empires of the European nations. Cooper’s model of groups, intersectionality, domination, equilibrium, and power resources had had its second empirical test.

PRESENTATION [W]hat is needed … to reverse the picture of the lordly man slaying the lion, is for the lion to turn painter. (Cooper, A Voice from the South)

The ultimate effectiveness of Cooper’s work perhaps lies in “her presentation,” that is, the way she makes the experience of intersectionality ubiquitous in her writing, expressing the simultaneous presence in a life of conflicting threads of identity, oppression and privilege. In doing this, she is true to that fundamental principle of composition that “one must show not tell.” We want to use this last section of our chapter to try to identify for current intersectionality scholars in the social sciences what Cooper does to achieve these effects—how she “shows.” One, she is at ease with a particularly modern research method, the autoethnography—in which the writer reports on their own biography (auto) in writing (graph) in to order to tell the story of a group or people (ethno). Autoethnography was formally proposed using that name in 1979 as an answer for sociologists’ discontent with the state of much sociological research that failed to utilize one of sociology’s most available resources, the stories people told in the course of investigation, rewarding instead ethnographic practices of “entering a culture, exploiting cultural members, and then … leaving to write about the culture for monetary and/or professional gain, while disregarding relational ties to cultural members” (Ellis, Adams, Bochner 2011, 1). These critics “were self-consciously value-centered” rather

46  Research handbook on intersectionality than value-neutral and saw that “stories were complex, constitutive, meaningful phenomena that taught morals and ethics, introduced unique ways of thinking and feeling, and helped people make sense of themselves and others” (Ellis et al. 1–2). If we measure what Cooper achieves against the concerns of autoethnographic proponents, we see that she has on her own done much of what they seek. She is writing about herself but about herself as part of a community; she is not doing that writing for money or advancement—she self-publishes as a part of her project to join in the defense of her oppressed group, using stories from her own and other group members’ experiences to show readers, both group and non-group members, what is really happening. She takes her work back to the community, regarding relational ties as central, and allowing group members to test by their own experience the validity of what she shows. The non-group members among her readers who have experienced such events— possibly as unwilling or indifferent witnesses—are called to accountability. Her work is not value-neutral but value-centered. In other words, Cooper, not knowing the project of autoethnography, catches for us here many of its promised benefits for the researcher. A second quality, somewhat tied to the autoethnographer’s wish for disciplinary freedom, is what Hutchinson (1981, 32) insightfully attributes to Cooper— “candor.” Candor is used today primarily to indicate “directness” or “openness” but also an attitude in which one exercises fair judgments, seeking only to present a clear statement of facts—and in Cooper’s case, one’s values and feelings are facts. Anyone writing for an academic audience knows the power of self-censorship that may work against candor in the interest of making a good impression, of saying what is expected rather than what is true. Hutchinson’s (1981, 32) comment is made in describing Cooper’s 1881 application letter to Oberlin, as done “with her characteristic directness and candor.” That letter shows a young Cooper, who perhaps has never been out of North Carolina, negotiating across lines of difference—gender, race, age, class—and looking for commonalities, here the love of learning: I am the widow of an Episcopal clergyman (Colored), Rev. G.A.C. Cooper, who died in Sept. ’79. I have for a long time, earnestly desired to take an advanced course in some superior Northern college, but could not see my way to it for lack of means. However, I am now resolved to wait no longer, if there is any possibility of my accomplishing my purpose. I am now teaching a two months summer school in Haywood: Southern schools pay very meanly, but I expect to have money enough to keep me one or two years at your College, provided I can secure a favor mentioned by Mrs. Clarke [an intermediary], of free tuition and incidentals … Please let me know if you think it likely that I can get any way of keeping myself after I come, by teaching, or something similar, during vacation. I desire to remain to be able to complete the course, if possible. Please let me know the lowest rate at which I can get suitable accommodations; also the examinations required for entering. I am extremely anxious to accomplish this long cherished wish, and will feel grateful for any kindly interest taken in my behalf. Yours respectfully, Annie J. Cooper

Cooper, the letter writer, while she needs help, does not present as a beggar but as a person, an agent, with active desires seeking ways to execute her projects. There is no apology for her condition. This practice in her own life, of facing things squarely, is a quality May (2007, 61) notes Cooper ascribing to the Black Woman, that of being “‘open-eyed’ … a phrase that connotes simultaneous awareness and agency, past and present … Rather than eyes lowered in

Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964)  47 submission or closed in denial, an open-eyed person is alert and perceptive—she takes in the world’s ugly or denied realities as much as its wonders.” In this vein, Cooper uses her moment as a speaker at the 1893 Congress of Representative Women at the Chicago World’s Fair to speak candidly about the condition of Black women. Cooper was invited to respond to the main address by Fannie Barrier Williams, a light-skinned and affluent woman of the North who some Black women feared would give an ingratiating address to the racially mixed audience; although she focused on the problems of Northern women of color aspiring to middle-class life, Williams did venture briefly into uncomfortable topics, warning “While I duly appreciate the offensiveness of all references to American slavery, it is unavoidable …” (1893 [1998], 21). Cooper, following, takes a different tack, emphasizing slavery’s cruelty and Black women’s heroism and placing intersectionality clearly before her audience—gender, race, location, class—at this proclaimed historical moment that was the Fair: [A]ll through the darkest period of the colored women’s oppression in this country her yet unwritten history is full of heroic struggle … The painful, patient, and silent toil of mothers to gain a fee simple title to the bodies of their daughters, the despairing fight, … to keep hallowed their own persons, would furnish the material for epics … I speak for the colored women of the South, because it is there that the millions of blacks in this country have watered the soil with blood and tears … (Cooper 1893 [1998], 201–2)

Cooper’s third quality is her ability to follow her own advice and become “the lion who turns painter”—a phrase she generates when objecting to distortions of Negro life presented in American novels: “What I hope to see before I die is a black man honestly and appreciatively portraying both the Negro as he is, and the white man … as seen from the Negro’s standpoint … [W]hat is needed … to reverse the picture of the lordly man slaying the lion, is for the lion to turn painter” (1892, 224–5). Assuming the mantle of the lion turned painter, Cooper produces a text that in describing life as A Black Woman of the South defies many “dominant” conventions of writing—a practice May (2009) labels “genre-bending.” In “Woman versus the Indian” Cooper’s narratives range in tone from gentle sarcasm, to painful revelations of embarrassment, rage at the duplicity of Southern politicians, disappointment in White feminism and a concluding exhortation to White feminists to see the light (see above “Equilibrium”). What holds these varying tales together is that they all turn in some way on intersectionality—frequently with one variable being the “problem” that puts the character at risk. In the most cited of these, a largely first-person narrative, A Black Woman of the South traveling by train in the Jim Crow era is shown as having to prepare for every eventuality—and the difficulty of never being able to be prepared enough, a dilemma of intersectionality illustrated with a series of vignettes. In one, the Black Woman thinking “she is quiet and unobtrusive in her manner, simple and inconspicuous in her dress, and can see no reason why in any chance assemblage of ladies, . . . she should be signaled out for any marked consideration,” finds the conductor, after assisting White ladies in disembarking, turning his back and leaving her “to alight—bearing her satchel, and bearing besides another unnamable burden inside the heaving bosom and the tightly compressed lips. The feeling of slighted womanhood is unlike every other emotion of the soul … Its poignancy … is holier than that of jealousy, deeper than indignation, tenderer than rage …” (1892, 90–1). In another story, the Black Woman is considering how to respond if a conductor tells her she must leave the Ladies car which is for Whites

48  Research handbook on intersectionality only; she works out in her mind the appropriate attitude toward someone who must execute a hostile policy that he had no part in creating but then, “a great burly six feet of masculinity with sloping shoulders and unkempt beard swaggers in, and throwing a roll of tobacco into one corner of his jaw, growls out at me over the paper I am reading, ‘Here gurl,’ (I am past thirty) ‘you’d better git out ‘m dis kyar ‘f yer don’t, I’ll put yer out’” (p. 95). The series climaxes with, which we began this chapter, the Black Woman’s arrival “at a dilapidated station, rendered yet more unsightly by dozens of loafers …; and when, looking a little more closely, I see two dingy little rooms with “FOR LADIES” swinging over one and “FOR COLORED PEOPLE” over the other; while wondering under which head I come …” (p. 95). These episodes are among her most effective analyses of intersectionality’s multiple vectors—simultaneously present in interactional situations and seen from the perspective of the lion. For Cooper’s fourth quality we borrow a phrase from May, though we may use it not quite as she intends it; Cooper practices “rhetorical activism” (2007, 52). What we mean by this is Cooper takes the potential risk of being misunderstood and uses language not only to give an accurate description but to give a value-centered one that excites a response—partly for what is said and partly in the way it is said. These instances of rhetorical activism are, in Cooper, achieved through word choice and tone, especially understatement. We give one example here—a long clause in a complicated sentence. Cooper is writing about the distortion of Black life in much of current American literature and the punchline is in an aside: Now, owing to the problematical position at present occupied by descendants of Africans in the American social polity, —growing, I presume, out of the continued indecision in the mind of the more powerful descendants of the Saxons as to whether it is expedient to apply the maxims of their religion to the their civil and political relationships,—most of the writers who have hitherto attempted a portrayal of life and customs among the darker races have belonged to our class II … (Cooper 1892, 185, italics ours)

The portion we italicize is in many respects Cooper at her best as a rhetorical activist— crystalline clarity, scoring emphasis through understatement, managing to cut to the quick in a perfectly controlled, devastating periodic phrasing that delivers its meaning only at its very end; it can be paraphrased: Black people in America are having a hard time because White people can’t make up their minds whether they have to apply Christian principles to the relations they are forced to share with Black people in commerce and governing. But what is lost in translation are the judgments implied in key phrases: “the problematical position” may refer to the difficulties facing African Americans or to the fact that the Negro is being constantly identified as a problem; “at present occupied” suggests a moment in history, subject to change; “continued indecision” implies a sense on the part of “more powerful … Saxons” that their understanding of the situation may not be exactly right rather than that they are hopelessly intransigent in their views; and then, the coup de grâce, the word “expedient,” “whether it is expedient to apply the maxims of their religion to their civil and political relationships” is a candid judgment on the moral quality of the thoughts of White Americans—for religious maxims are surely not a question for the believer of “expediency”; the maxim is either true or not true and Cooper will in her concluding chapter, “The Gain from a Belief,” make absolutely clear her definition of faith—“Faith means treating the truth as true” (1892, 298). Cooper is clever in her comment here but she is also candid, this is her judgment about the problems confronting the Black race in America in 1890.

Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964)  49

CONCLUSION Cooper in her 1925 dissertation defense faced one of the challenging issues for intersectionality theory today—taking as axiomatic the idea of a fundamental equality among all people, despite the distortion of that idea by practices of domination. In one part of that defense Cooper addresses the problem of the basis on which one asserts a doctrine either of “elite” and subordinate statuses or of egalitarianism. Speaking on a topic, the question of egalitarian ideas in democratic movements, set by one of her examiners, Celestin Bouglé, the pre-eminent figure on her examining committee, Cooper links the topic to Bouglé’s 1899 thesis “Les Idées Égalitaires” and two arguments therein, that the ideals of democracy and, its corollary, equality, are only found in “a certain culture known as Occidental Civilization” and that in understanding equality we must be “purely realistic and dissociated from moral sanctions as to whether it is either right or realizable” (Cooper 1925/1945 [1998], 291). Despite her consuming desire for the doctorate (she is 65 and cannot reasonably hope for another chance), she challenges the basic assumption of racial hierarchies. A better hypothesis it seems to me would be to postulate that process in the democratic sense is an inborn human endowment—a shadow mark of the Creator’s image, or if you will an urge-cell, the universal and unmistakable hall-mark traceable to the Father of all, that In the mud and scum of things There alway, alway something sings and it is that “Something”—that Singing Something, which distinguishes the first Man from the last ape, which in a subtle way tagged him with the picturesque Greek title Anthropos, the upward face, and which justifies the claim to equality by birthright from a common Father for the “Backward” no less than the “Advanced” among his varying but undeniable progeny. (Cooper in Lemert and Bhan, 1998, 292–3)

Cooper’s answer presents “the upward face,” as a universal human capacity to imagine in the face of injustice the possibility of good, a principal undergirding today’s scholar-activist confronting the processes of intersectionality and domination.

REFERENCES Alexander, Elizabeth. 1995. “‘We Must Be about Our Father’s Business’: Anna Julia Cooper and the In-corporation of the Nineteenth-Century African-American Woman Intellectual,” Signs 20 (2): 336–56. Baker-Fletcher, Karen. 1994. A Singing Something: Womanist Reflections on Anna Julia Cooper. New York: Crossroad. Cooper, Anna Julia. 1892/1988. A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South. New York: Oxford University Press. Cooper, Anna Julia.1892/1988. A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South. Reproduced by Project Gutenburg. https://​www​.gutenberg​.org/​files/​61741/​61741​-h/​61741​-h​.htm Cooper, Anna Julia. 1893/1998. “The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Women in the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation: A Response to Fannie Barrier Williams.” In Lemert and Bhan, 201–5. Cooper, Anna Julia.1899/2006. “Colored Women as Wage Earners.” Originally appeared in Southern Workman, August 1899. http://​panafricannews​.blogspot​.com/​2006/​11/​colored​-women​-as​-wage​-earn ers-essay-by.html Cooper, Anna Julia. 1902/1998. “The Ethics of the Negro Question.” In Lemert and Bhan, 206–15.

50  Research handbook on intersectionality Cooper, Anna Julia.1925/1998. “Equality of Races and the Democratic Movement.” In Lemert and Bhan, 291–8. Cooper, Anna Julia.1925/1998. “Legislative Measures Concerning Slavery in the United States: 1787–1850.” In Lemert and Bhan, 299–304. Cooper, Anna Julia. 1925/2006. Slavery and the French and Haitian Revolutionists. Trans. Frances Richardson Keller. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Cooper, Anna Julia. c. 1930s/1998. “On Education.” In Lemert and Bhan, 248–58. Cooper, Anna Julia. c. 1945–51. The Third Step (privately printed autobiographical booklet). In Lemert and Bhan, 320–30. Crummell, Alexander. 1883. “The Black Woman of the South.” n.p. https://​archive​.org/​details/​bla​ ckwomanofs​out00crum/​page/​n1/​mode/​2up​?ref​=​ol​&​view​=​theater Ellis, Carolyn, Tony A. Adams, Arthur P. Bochner. 2011. “Autoethnography: An Overview,” Forum: Qualitative Social Research. 12 (1): 1–18. https://​www​.qualitative​-research​.net/​index​.php/​fqs/​article/​ view/​1589 Ferguson, Janice Y. 2015. Anna Julia Cooper: A Quintessential Leader. Dissertation. Antioch University. Gabel, Leona C. 1982. From Slavery to the Sorbonne and Beyond: The Life & Writings of Anna J. Cooper. Intro. Sidney Kaplan. Northampton, MA: Smith College Department of History. Gines, K.T. 2015. “Anna Julia Cooper.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://​plato​.stanford​.edu/​ entries/​anna​-julia​-cooper/​ Gordon, Lewis. 2018. “Black Issues in Philosophy: On Teaching Anna Julia Cooper’s ‘What Are We Worth’ in Introductory Courses.” https://​blog​.apaonline​.org/​2018/​05/​30/​black​-issues​-in​-philosophy​ -on​-teaching​-anna​-julia​-coopers​-what​-are​-we​-worth​-in​-introductory​-courses/​ Hutchinson, Louise Daniel. 1981 Anna J. Cooper: A Voice from the South. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Johnson, Karen A. 2009. “‘In Service for the Common Good’: Anna Julia Cooper and Adult Education,” African American Review 43 (1): 45–56. Lemert, Charles and Esme Bhan (eds.). 1998. The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper—Including A Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers and Letters. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. May, Vivian. 2007. Anna Julia Cooper: Visionary Black Feminist. New York: Routledge. May, Vivian. 2009. “Writing the Self into Being: Anna Julia Cooper’s Textual Politics,” African American Review 43 (1): 17–34. May, Vivian. 2012. “Historicizing Intersectionality as a Critical Lens: Returning to the Work of Anna Julia Cooper.” In Interconnections: Gender and Race in American History, edited by Carol Faulkner and Allison M. Parker, 17–50. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Romero, Mary. 2018. Introducing Intersectionality. Medford, MA: Polity Press. Williams, Fannie Barrier. 1893/2002. “The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Women of the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation.” In The New Woman of Color—The Collected Writings of Fannie Barrier Williams, 1893–1918, edited by Mary Jo Deegan, 17–27. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Winch, Peter. 1958. The Idea of a Social Science. London: Routledge.

4. Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality Matthew W. Hughey

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois is arguably best known for The Souls of Black Folk, in which he penned: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line” (1903 [1994], v). Many have analysed, dissected, and interpreted this text and its celebrated line. Most settle comfortably on the conclusion that the Du Boisian “problem” of race is the principle organizing force of social life. For example, no less than Max Weber wrote a letter to Du Bois in which he stated, “I am absolutely convinced that the ‘color-line’ problem will be the paramount problem of the time to come, here and everywhere in the world” (Weber 1904; cf. Hughey and Goss 2018). And in their Du Boisian-inspired and field-changing Racial Formations, Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1986, 61–2) argued that race is the “central axis of social relationships which cannot be subsumed under or reduced to some broader category or conception.” Wedded to these interpretations, race is the primary force that pulls apart, pits against, and pools together. But did Du Bois isolate or incorporate other dimensions of social life to complicate the color line? And if so, how did Du Bois empirically document and theorize the multiple, divergent, and contradictory variables of social advantage and disadvantage—what we understand today as “intersectionality”? While there is little argument that Du Bois conceptualized race as a primary organizing structure within society, there is less consensus over when or how Du Bois incorporated other structures to enhance or diminish analyses of racialized vulnerability. In The Scholar Denied, Aldon Morris claims that Du Bois “was the first sociologist that engaged in intersectional analysis” (2015, 220). Yet, this claim is tenuous, given the intersectional sociology in Harriet Martineau’s writings as early as the 1830s (Adams 2018), Ida B. Wells’s 1890s sociologically informed journalism, and both Anna Julia Cooper’s and Jane Addams’s explicit sociological scholarship of the 1890s.1 Additionally, while many have defended Du Bois’s intersectionality, particularly in his approach to gender (Balfour 2011; Lemons 2009) and class (Marable 2015; Yuan 1998), so too have many critiqued it. Willard B. Gatewood (1994, 310) wrote that Du Bois possessed “a strong sense of elitism that influenced his personality, relationships, and thought.” Annie Menzel (2019, 34) found Du Bois to possess a “deeper logic of gendered and classed racial exclusion.” And Reiland Rabaka (2010, 88) opined that Du Bois often displayed a “palpable elitist disdain.” Moreover, Hazel Carby (1998, 12) wrote that Du Bois suffered a “complete failure to imagine black women as intellectuals and race leaders.” Joy James (1997, 35) argued that “a masculinist worldview influences his writing to diminish his gender progressivism.” And Celena Simpson (2015, 53) bluntly stated, “We should cease calling Du Bois a feminist.” In this chapter, I do not seek a coup de main in which I pronounce Du Bois’s sociology either a pure or essential “intersectional.” Nor do I argue whether he was the absolute first to use “intersectionality” among sociologists. Plenty of ink has already been spilled in these debates. Instead, I aim first to show the latent roots of intersectionality in Du Bois’s thinking. I next demonstrate the manifest foundations of intersectionality in Du Bois’s scholarship, indicating how his understanding of structural influences on action and order, coupled with 51

52  Research handbook on intersectionality his “outsider within” epistemology, created an intersectional leaning. Third, I cover Du Bois’s intersectional understandings of social life with particular attention to his theorization and empirics on race, class, and gender.

THE LATENT ROOTS OF DU BOIS’S EMPIRICAL INTERSECTIONALITY While at Harvard (1888–91 and 1894–96), Du Bois was influenced by many scholars, such as Royce, Santayana, Shaler, and Hart. But it was only the pragmatist, William James, whom Du Bois would describe as a “friend” (Ambar 2019, 367). James advocated a “double-barreled” approach to truth: one ascertains facts through both inductive “sense data” and through one’s internal deductive references to data—together the “thick” experience described in The Principles of Psychology (1890). But James also advocated a relationship between faith and empiricism. James wrote that it was acceptable to believe in an object without sufficient evidence if the conditions required answers to urgent moral or metaphysical questions (such as the existence of God or free will). Moreover, James argued that acting on belief could create the object of belief: “faith in a fact, based on need of the fact, can create the fact” (James 1896, 343). Hence, James used a pragmatic test—to live as if the object in question did exist. While Du Bois was highly influenced by James’s approach, he was not an uncritical devotee. Du Bois’s early directions reveal an initial uneasiness with his friend’s “as if” pragmatism. For Du Bois, such faith was too untethered from the plainly observable world (Taylor 2004). Du Bois thus sought out inspiration for a more rigorous and “pure” form of scientific empiricism. At Harvard in 1890, Du Bois found such a figure in Leonardo da Vinci. Calling Da Vinci “the founder of modern experimental science” (1890, 1), the young Du Bois went on to write that Da Vinci was “completely given to empirical investigation of nature … His method is wholly inductive—scarcely a single proposition can be found in his manuscripts which is not supported by a fact” (1890, 41; cf. Besek et al. 2020). The attraction to empirical scholars, opposed to supposedly superficial and naive assessors, whom Du Bois would later derisively call the “car-window sociologist … the man who seeks to understand and know the South by devoting the few leisure hours of a holiday trip to unraveling the snarl of centuries” (1903 [1994], 94), was a guiding force as Du Bois began a march away from philosophy toward the social sciences. After receipt of a master’s degree from Harvard in 1891, Du Bois traveled in Europe for a year before studying at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin (now the University of Berlin) in 1892–94. The burgeoning field of sociology, with a focus on inductive empiricism, was ascendant in Berlin. However, German empiricism was de-naturalized. Facts mattered, but only in context. Wilhelm Dilthey’s anti-positivism proved influential on Du Bois’s thinking. In opposition to the British Spencerian sociology that applied biological principles to social life, Dilthey argued that inductive empiricism clarified the natural world, but fell drastically short in explaining human values, ideals, and norms. Hence, a deductive science of interpretation or “verstehen” was necessary (Besek et al. 2020). Du Bois migrated away from the extreme induction of Da Vinci and came to adopt Dilthey’s demarcation between the natural and social sciences. But he would jettison neither deduction nor induction as outside the bounds of sociological inquiry, seeing both as necessary to “geisteswissenschaften” (“sciences of spirit” or social sciences) (cf. Gooding-Williams 2009, 48). Du Bois’s encounter

Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality  53 with German idealist interrogations of empirical social science were of fundamental import to his growing sociological imagination (cf. Barkin 2005; Holt 2008). Du Bois returned to the United States in the summer of 1894. Just as James published “The Will to Believe” (1896), Du Bois finished his doctorate in history at Harvard and was well equipped with a theoretical toolkit inclusive of inductive empiricism and deductive idealism (Lewis 1994, 95–6). Du Bois set to both illumine the heterogeneity of Black communities and to critique the waxing biological determinism of scientific racism. Toward this end, Du Bois published a methodological manifesto on the study of “Negro Problems” in the crown jewel of academic journals, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. In that 1898 essay, Du Bois revealed his early insistence on what we now call “intersectionality”: Now first we should study the Negro problems in order to distinguish between the different and distinct problems affecting this race. Nothing makes intelligent discussion of the Negro’s position so fruitless as the repeated failure to discriminate between the different questions that concern him … and yet each calls the problem he discusses the Negro problem, leaving in the dark background the really crucial question as to the relative importance of the many problems involved. Before we can begin to study the Negro intelligently, we must realize definitely that not only is he affected by all the varying social forces that act on any nation at his stage of advancement, but that in addition to these there is reacting upon him the mighty power of a peculiar and unusual social environment which affects to some extent every other social force [my emphasis]. (1898b, 9–10)

Du Bois’s contention that social forces not only affect the “Negro” but also “every other social force” is indicative of his sociological understanding that social variables enable and constrain Black lives. But also, Du Bois made clear that these variables interact to change one another. “Intersectionality” has only emerged in the past three decades as an interdisciplinary approach toward the co-constitutive interaction of race, gender, class, and other organizing structures of society. A key component of this approach is neither to document or fetishize varied identities, nor is it an “additive” approach that stacks marginalized statuses. Rather, focus is on the unique nexus of structural susceptibilities. As Kimberlé Crenshaw made clear at the “Women of the World Festival” in 2016: “Intersectionality is not primarily about identity. It is about how structures make certain identities the consequence of, and the vehicle for, vulnerability.” While Du Bois’s attention was arguably always focused on the polyvariant exposures of “Negro” people to violence, his stance was perhaps no more cemented then by a fateful experience in 1899 as he walked the streets of Atlanta: At the very time when my studies were most successful, there cut across this plan which I had as a scientist, a red ray which could not be ignored. I remember when it first, as it were, startled me to my feet … Sam Hose had been lynched, and they said that his knuckles were on exhibition at a grocery store farther down on Mitchell Street, along which I was walking … one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved. (Du Bois 1940 [2007], 67)

Aldon Morris (2017, 12) contends, “contemporary scholars devoted to the intersectionality paradigm … argued that it is impossible to separate science and politics.” With focused attention to the intersected experiences of Blackness, Du Bois presaged this devotion and gave up the quest for a supposedly unbiased, objective Truth, but dared not jettison empiricism. Du Bois’s ascendant empiricist and intersectional sociology was deeply interdisciplinary; he embraced the idealism of Hegel (Harris 2021) and Royce (Fontaine 1968) and the metaphysics of Dilthey (Gooding-Williams 2009). He echoed Schmoller’s and Meitzen’s emphasis

54  Research handbook on intersectionality on empiricism to inform policy (cf. Jakubek and Wood 2018, 16). And he blended the spirituality of Santayana (cf. Curry 2014, 391) with his old friend James’s “as if” pragmatism which gave ethical beliefs “a foothold in a universe” (James 1896, 341). By the turn of the twentieth century, intersectionality was germinating in Du Bois’s thoughts—a sociology with attention to race, class, and gender. This thinking would yield an academic and activist career attentive to what is (the empirical), what could be (the ideal), what might be (the policy), and a synthesis of what should be with what he believed to be (the ethical and spiritual).

THE MANIFEST FOUNDATIONS OF INTERSECTIONALITY IN DU BOISIAN THOUGHT Regardless of how consistent or generalizable such intersectionality was within Du Bois’s larger oeuvre, Du Bois was an early proponent of studying how an intersected relationship to varied structural inequalities of race, class, gender (and more) made for varied life chances. Du Bois’s unpublished manuscript “Sociology Hesitant” (c. 1905) formalized this approach. Critiquing sociologists for tendencies toward both abstract theories and overly broad generalizations, Du Bois advanced a notion of society as a “mystical whole” (c. 1905). Composed of both determinist rules and free will hazards, Du Bois argued that society has “a primary rhythm” (e.g., death rates) and “a secondary rhythm” (e.g., willful actions of a social group) that requires the assumption of “Law and Chance working in conjunction” (cf. Harris 2021). Recounting his “Sociology Hesitant” essay in a 1956 letter to the historian Herbert Aptheker, Du Bois (1978, 395) clarified: I assumed the existence of Truth … Also, of necessity I assumed Cause and Change … I proposed to make a scientific study of human action, based on the hypothesis of the reality of such actions, of their causal connections and of their continued occurrence and change because of Law and Chance. I called Sociology the measurement of the element of Chance in Human Action.

This dual attention to “Law” and “Chance” reveals Du Bois’s focus on the likelihood of one’s vulnerability relative to one’s position in the racialized, gendered, and classed stratification of social life—a core pillar of intersectionality. Such an approach to intersectionality percolated even earlier in Du Bois’s life and was borne not only from his studies at Harvard and Berlin, but during his time at Fisk and summers in Tennessee. While pursuing his first bachelor’s degree at Fisk (1885–88), Du Bois spent two summers (1886 and 1887) teaching Black secondary school students at the Wheeler School in Alexandria, Tennessee. He recounted that experience in The Souls of Black Folk (1903 [1994], 41): I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it, and yet there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness, sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from a common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and above all, from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity. All this caused us to think some thoughts together, but these, when ripe for speech, were spoken in various languages.

Here Du Bois signaled how the racial structure of “isolation” endemic to “the Veil” intersects with the economic structure of “poverty, poor land, and low wages” to fundamentally impact the chances of “Opportunity.” Du Bois wrote not simply of racial exclusion, but the unique

Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality  55 character of racialized poverty in the tenant farming system of 1880s Tennessee. For Du Bois’s students, these dual components of agricultural life fundamentally limited “the element of Chance in Human Action” (Du Bois 1978, 395) and were not just the added weight of poverty plus racism, but synthesized to create a unique set of limitations: “their weak wings beat against their barriers,—barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous moments, against everything that opposed even a whim” (Du Bois 1903 [1994], 42). Of clear import to Du Bois was the documentation of the heterogeneous experiences of Black people as their lives were cross-cut by their shifting locations in varied social structures. Blackness could neither be entirely reduced to, or fully explained by, racism. As Marcus Hunter (2015, 231) writes: “Du Bois’s use of heterogeneity demonstrates the importance and influence of the economic and political regimes of cities, religious diversity, and variations in social class while also affirming and asserting the importance of race, history, and Black agency.” Du Bois would emphasize the roles of urbanity, rurality, education, religion, health, crime, politics, and more in differently shaping the lives of Black Americans. No doubt mindful not to reproduce a pathologizing discourse about Black life, Du Bois was careful to address how structural intersections both constrained and enabled the development of Black America. The keystone to Du Bois’s understanding of intersectional sociology is his particular use of standpoint epistemology, or what Du Bois called “second-sight” and “double-consciousness.” Du Bois linked the insights of African Americans to structural opportunities, once again in The Souls of Black Folk: After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, [my emphasis] … It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity … He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being OK cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face [my emphasis]. (1903 [1994], 5)

For Du Bois, the African American experience afforded liminal knowledge production. Wisdom from this third space possessed a unique worldview. “Du Bois conceives of world as a kind of onto-ethical mode of being. Through a world, a given people come to share a peculiar aesthetic and ethical outlook, identity, and social structure” (Mittiga 2019, 184). Du Bois would later expand upon the insights afforded Black Americans, especially as they gazed upon the White world. In “Souls of White Folk” in Darkwater (1920 [1999], 17), Du Bois wrote: High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk. Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage … Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious! They deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth! My word is to them mere bitterness and my soul, pessimism. And yet as they preach and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped, —ugly, human.

56  Research handbook on intersectionality While this chapter echoes Du Bois’s earlier 1899 transition from armchair scientist (“high in the tower”) to engaged scholar (watching from “unusual points of vantage”), it also posits an ability to apprehend what others either try to hide or do not know themselves. This second-sight is quite literally a privileged insight that promises to illumine and reveal what was previously unknown or unwanted (cf. Hughey 2020, 2021). This acumen was not without its costs. “Throughout his career,” Anthony Appiah (2014, 79) wrote, Du Bois “struggled with the parallax that arose from sharing the insider’s perspective and the outsider’s perspective.” The combination of the insider and outsider perspective was captured in Du Bois’s reminiscences of his time at Harvard: “I was quite voluntarily and willingly outside its social life [my emphasis] … had my ‘island within’ [my emphasis] and it was a fair country” (1940 [2007], 18). If we take Du Bois’s notion of being simultaneously “outside of its social life” and having an “island within” as a point of departure, we witness Du Bois’s attempt to navigate an “outsider within” (Collins 1986) status. As Collins (1986, S29) wrote, “outsider within status seems to offer its occupants a powerful balance between the strengths of their sociological training and the offerings of their personal and cultural experiences. Neither is subordinated to the other.” This place of knowledge production is situated betwixt and between “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (1903 [1994], 2). Such a stance is unequivocally a form of standpoint theory, which provides the foundation for intersectional analysis. Accordingly, in “W.E.B. Du Bois: Intellectual Forefather of Intersectionality?” Ange-Marie Hancock (2005, 76) contends: Du Bois first foreshadows Black feminist theory, which emerged prior to more general forms of intersectionality theory, through his expression of a particular standpoint: the outsider within. Patricia Hill Collins identifies the origins of the outsider within perspective in Black women’s status as both workers and Black women.

Employing the tool of racial double-consciousness, Du Bois was well able to employ intersectionality to “critique an oppression that is not his own” (Dennie 2020, 2): “As I look about me today in this veiled world of mine, despite the noisier and more spectacular advance of my brothers,” Du Bois wrote, “I instinctively feel and know that it is the five million women of my race who really count” (1920 [1999], 179). Whether or not we call Du Bois an “intersectional theorist” or label Du Boisian sociology “intersectional,” I have above shown a manifest foundation of intersectionality in Du Bois’s work. His understandings of structural influences on action and order, as well as his “outsider within” epistemology, laid a necessary groundwork for an intersectional approach.

RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER IN DU BOISIAN SOCIOLOGY The Uncomfortable Intersectionality of “The Talented Tenth” Much of Du Bois’s understandings of race, class, and gender begin with his discussion of “The Talented Tenth.” Published as a chapter in Booker T. Washington’s The Negro Problem (1903), Du Bois advocated that one out of every ten (hence, the “talented tenth”) Black men had cultivated their ability to uplift the Black community through a classical education in arts and sciences. Du Bois (1903, 33) wrote:

Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality  57 The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.

Du Bois’s chapter was a vicious critique of Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise,” in which Washington advocated that Southern Blacks, newly freed from slavery, would not pursue a classical education but would limit themselves to agriculture and labor. As a consequence, many White Southern segregationists and White Northern philanthropists praised Washington as a prophet and decried Du Bois as a radical agitator. A prevailing logic of post-Bellum civil rights initiatives, the “talented tenth” strategy was coined not by Du Bois, but by Henry Lyman Morehouse (for whom Morehouse College is named).2 Du Bois’s commitment to lettered Black men as the agents of social change found expression even earlier. In his 1897 essay to the American Negro Academy entitled “The Conservation of Races” Du Bois wrote: Negroes of some considerable training, of high minds, and high motives … the talented, unselfish men, the pure and noble-minded women, to fight an army of devils that disgraces our manhood and our womanhood. There does not stand today upon God’s earth a race more capable in muscle, in intellect, in morals, than the American Negro, if he will bend his energies in the right direction. (Du Bois 1897, 13)

From this passage, Du Bois seems inspired by the social hierarchy of Plato’s The Republic. Du Bois’s model places the educated class of Black men as the rulers qua decision-makers for the race. Moreover, Du Bois’s gendered depiction seems equally influenced by the “cult of true womanhood” in which women’s worth (and Black women specifically) is measured by their proximity to moral purity and pious intellectualism. As Nneka D. Dennie (2020, 1) writes of Du Bois’s essay, “These were not simply rhetorical claims, but gendered declarations of Du Bois’s conceptualization of race leadership and racial progress.” Du Bois’s approach was mutually constrained and enabled by his training at Harvard and in Germany. The elitist circles in which he traveled gave him revolutionary ideas, which he brought to bear on American racism. Yet, even as he remained, as Ange-Marie Hancock (2005, 81) writes, “firmly committed to the liberation of Black people,” Du Bois demonstrated a naive expectation for “his fellow members of the Talented Tenth to do the same.” This was Du Bois’s early intersectional understanding of class, gender, and race. Du Bois’s “talented tenth” offered not a democratic vision, but an aristocratic mission in which educated Black men of the universities were responsible for leading “Negro” people. As Robert Gooding-Williams (2009, 32) puts it, “I wish to stress that Du Bois here envisions the cultured and civilized members of the talented tenth as issuing precepts to Negro communities: that is, as issuing commands, or injunctions, for the members of those communities to obey.” To avoid ahistoricism, it is important to contextualize Du Bois’s theorization as underpinned by his structural sociology and pragmatism, which considered the landscape of Black America at the turn of the century. By 1900, the illiteracy rate (for persons 14 years or older) for Blacks was 44.5 percent (compared to 10.7 percent for Whites), only 30 percent of Blacks ages 5–19 were enrolled in school, and less than 00.02 percent (approximately 2,000 out of 8.8 million Black people) earned college or graduate degrees (US Department of Commerce 1992).

58  Research handbook on intersectionality But Du Bois’s understanding of the talented tenth was not static. He reflected on, and greatly revised, the classism of the “Talented Tenth” argument in a 1948 meeting at Wilberforce University with the elite Black fraternity Sigma Pi Phi (known as “The Boulé”). In that speech, Du Bois doubled-down on the idea that university-educated African Americans were the key to liberation. However, he argued that such education should be made accessible to not just a “Talented Tenth” but to all, or what he called a “Guiding Hundredth”: It has been said that I had in mind the building of an aristocracy with neglect of the masses … It is clear that in 1900, American Negroes were an inferior caste, were frequently lynched and mobbed, widely disfranchised, and usually segregated … I looked upon them and saw salvation through intelligence leadership; as I said through a Talented Tenth …This, then, is my re-examined and restated theory of the “Talented Tenth,” which has thus become the doctrine of the “Guiding Hundredth.” (1948, 1–2)

He then boldly chastised the organization to whom he was speaking for failing to align their interests with the totality of the race: What the guiding idea of Sigma Pi Phi was, I have never been able to learn. I believe it was rooted in a certain exclusiveness and snobbery for which we all have a yearning even if unconfessed … we assume on the one hand our identity with the poor and yet we act and sympathize with the rich, an unconscious and dangerous dichotomy. (1948, 8–9)

As Stephanie Shaw (2013, 70) wrote, “It is no wonder that Du Bois sat alone on a bench on the college campus after his speech; it must have deeply offended his hosts, many of whom undoubtedly (mistakenly) saw themselves as true representatives of the Talented Tenth.” While Du Bois’s early model of race leadership was class-exclusionary and gender-restrictive, it was nonetheless an intersectional approach, as it synthesized his understandings of race, class, and gender within a theory of social change (Carby 1997). Urban and Rural Intersectionality: From Philadelphia to Farmville Before the problematic expressions of class and gender in “The Talented Tenth” (1903), Du Bois offered a rather robust and progressive form of intersectionality in his examinations of Black heterogeneity in an urban context. On the heels of his multidisciplinary training in Germany, Du Bois accepted an invitation from the University of Pennsylvania to study the predominantly African American community of the Seventh Ward of Philadelphia from August 1896 to December 1897. Du Bois meticulously catalogued the intersections of Black experiences in the Seventh Ward (bounded by Spruce and South streets and extending from 7th Street to the Schuylkill River). Just shy of 30 years of age, Du Bois “settled in one room over a cafeteria … in the midst of an atmosphere of dirt, drunkenness, poverty and crime. Murder sat on our doorstep, police were our government, and philanthropy dropped in with periodic advice” (Du Bois 1968, 194–5). Within this context, Du Bois collected nearly 5,000 door-to-door survey interviews (Holt 2008; Hunter 2014)—what was later published as The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899a). Du Bois’s structural understanding of race and class intersections shines brightest in his critiques of Black homogeneity:

Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality  59 There is always a strong tendency on the part of the community to consider the Negros as composing one practically homogeneous mass. This view has of course a certain justification: the people of Negro descent in this land have a common history, suffer to-day common disabilities, and contribute to one general set of social problems. And yet if the foregoing statistics have emphasized any one fact it is that wide variations in antecedents, wealth, intelligence and general efficiency have already been differentiated within this group These differences are not, to be sure, so great or so patent as those among the whites of to-day, and yet they undoubtedly equal the difference among the masses of the people in certain sections of the land fifty or 100 years ago; and there is no surer way of misunderstanding the Negro than by ignoring manifest differences … And yet well-meaning people continually do this. (Du Bois 1899a, 309–10)

Du Bois supplanted conceptions of a singular racial consciousness, culture, and class among Black Philadelphians, demonstrating the intersections of socio-economic stratification, educational attainment, political involvement, religiosity, and more. Du Bois’s greatest focus was on class, as he distilled the major cleavages of Black socio-economic life, with an emphasis not simply on a “talented tenth” but a “submerged tenth”: Grade 1 Families of undoubted respectability earning sufficient income to live well … Grade 2 The respectable working-class; in comfortable circumstances … Grade 3 The poor; persons not earning enough to kep them at all times above want; honest, although not always energetic or thrifty, and with no touch of gross immorality or crime. Including the very poor, and the poor … Grade 4 The lowest class of criminals, prostitutes, and loafers; the “submerged tenth.” (Du Bois 1899a, 310–11)

In other pages, Du Bois unpacks the variations of Black political activity, such as demarcation of “three classes of Negro voters” composed first, of a “large majority of voters who vote blindly at the dictates of the party and, while not open to direct bribery, accept the indirect emoluments of office or influence in return for party loyalty.” Next is a “considerable group, centering in the slum districts, which casts a corrupt purchasable vote for the highest bidder” and third is a “very small group of independent voters who seek to use their vote to better present conditions of municipal life” (Du Bois 1899a, 373). Whether in consideration of economy or polity, these are not simply typologies of behavior, but are articulations of how Black life is understood from the standpoint of each of these intersected factions. Du Bois was well attuned to the tendency of White America to pathologize the Black community. Du Bois would later identify White views of Black folks as a “tertium quid” (a being between man and animal) in Souls (1903 [1994], 55): “God created a tertium quid, and called it a Negro—a clownish, simple creature, at times even lovable within its limitations, but straitly foreordained to walk within the Veil.” And while he took no shortcuts in describing Black urban corruption and vice, he was quick to explain how each group formed, how it each changed, and the relationships that structured behavior, making a robust and antiracist intersectional sociology that exploded White America’s view of the “Negro” as a tragic figure situated between man and monster. This driven intersectional approach is also apparent in Du Bois’s consideration of religious institutions. Of the “Negro church,” Du Bois wrote: Is the peculiar and characteristic product of the transplanted African … Its tribal functions are shown in its religious activity, its social authority and general guiding and coordinating work; its family functions are shown by the fact that the church is a centre of social life and intercourse; acts as a newspaper and intelligence bureau, is the center of amusements—indeed, is the world in which the Negro moves and acts. (1899a, 201)

60  Research handbook on intersectionality Du Bois then highlighted that the Black institution of religion is both the hub of intra-Black social circles and is itself a complex and intersected institution that supports Black organizational life: Each church forms its own social circle, and not many stray beyond its bounds. Introductions into that circle come through the church and thus the stranger becomes known … Negro churches were the birthplaces of Negro schools and of all agencies which seek to promote the intelligence of the masses; and even to-day no agency serves to disseminate news or information so quickly and effectively among Negroes as the church. (Du Bois 1899a, 204, 207)

Bookending Du Bois’s focus on urbanity was his study of rurality. While still at the University of Pennsylvania on May 5, 1897, Du Bois wrote to Carroll D. Wright, the US Commissioner of Labor, to propose a study of the “industrial development of the Negro … after one or two experiments the whole inquiry might take the form of a series of simultaneous investigations” (Du Bois 1973, 41–3). Wright approved funding and Du Bois set out to conduct five studies on Black rural life (Du Bois 1898a, 1899b, 1901, 1904).3 Du Bois hoped “the results … could be published and would by allaying false notions & prejudices prepare the public mind for the larger work” (Du Bois 1973, 41). That “larger work” would become, at least in part, the yearly conferences, and publications which he would organize as a professor at Atlanta University, where he began work after completing data collection for The Philadelphia Negro in the fall of 1897. The first of these studies was “The Negroes of Farmville, Virginia: A Social Study” (1898a). Conducted in Prince Edward County, Virginia, in July and August 1897, Du Bois studied demographic changes, census tracts, archival material, institutional influences, and engaged in participant observation, taking detailed notes on housing and environmental conditions. These data points helped Du Bois to unpack the intersectional dimensions of Black community life, or as Du Bois put it, “as near an approach to scientific accuracy as possible, the real condition of the Negro” (1898a, 1). For example, echoing his evaluation of Black religious institutions of the 7th Ward in Philadelphia: Du Bois held that such institutions had not only religious significance, but also affirmed social ties and organized social life in places such as Farmville … Noting that cultural institutions such as “secret and beneficial societies” also had “considerable influence,” Du Bois’s analysis of Black life in Farmville, prefigured his concern with the ways in which indigenous institutions played a significant role in the socio-spatial organization of Black life. (Hunter 2015, 221)

Writing of the intersectional parallels between The Philadelphia Negro and Du Bois’s Bureau of Labor studies, Reiland Rabaka (2020, 45, 49) argues, “Du Bois’ discourse, above all else, has to do with his extraordinary early emphasis on what we call currently ‘intersectionality’ or, rather, ‘intersectionalism’ … ‘The Negroes of Farmville’ is something of a Rosetta Stone in terms of deciphering, not simply Du Bois’ contributions to rural sociology, but also his innovative offerings to urban sociology.” Accordingly, Du Bois was careful to document how age, education, labor, migration, and gender intersected to drive poverty, strip rural areas of talent, impose excess stress on families, and limit potential marriage partners. For instance, Du Bois noticed a trend of high school dropouts among rural Black boys, the relocation of industry and wages from rural areas to urban centers and concluded that “Farmville acts as a sort of clearinghouse, taking the raw country lad from the farm to train in industrial life and sending north and east more or less well-equipped recruits for metropolitan life” (1898a, 5). In an ana-

Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality  61 lysis of Du Bois’s research for the Bureau of Labor, Jakubek and Wood (2018, 22) concluded: “Du Bois’ community case studies illustrate his early attempts at analyzing the intersection of social class, race, and labor markets.” Of Wages and Women: Intersectionality in Black Reconstruction The early twentieth century class and race intersectionality of Du Bois found maturity in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935). The influence of Marxist thought is evident in its pages, but its analysis is not reducible to historical materialism. As Itzigsohn and Brown (2020, 82) note, “Du Bois modifies Marx’s class analysis by introducing the analysis of the intersections of race and class, and the fracture that these intersections create along class lines.” Du Bois (1935, 700) thus wrote, “The theory of laboring class unity rests upon the assumption that laborers, despite internal jealousies, will unite … this failed to work in the South, and it failed to work because the theory of race was supplemented by a carefully planned and slowly evolved method, which drove a wedge between the white and black workers.” Du Bois was clear to articulate the varied dimensions of this “wedge.” His theory did not mirror Marxist conceptions of laborers who, under the spell of “false consciousness” due to the influence of private property, pursue goals antithetical to their interests. Nor did Du Bois pathologize Black Southern laborers as either unknowing or unwilling dupes of the bourgeoise. Rather, Du Bois articulated how White laborers reaped real social benefits and privileges beyond those extended from the private ownership of the means and modes of production. Du Bois charted how working-class Whiteness was intersected by a freedom of movement in the public sphere that was cross-cut by status, education, policing, politics, and media—what historian David Roediger called the “wages of whiteness” (1991). Du Bois (1935, 700–1) wrote: It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage [my emphasis]. They were given public preference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this has small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.

While most concentrate on these race and class intersections, there also lurks within Black Reconstruction a gender-attentive analysis of the racial and class dimensions of slavery and the Civil War. Du Bois notes the exploitative system of chattel slavery depended on the acquisition of cheap land and labor. In regard to labor, Du Bois’s gendered and sexualized intersectionality finds expression. In the first chapter Du Bois (1935, 11) wrote: Human slavery in the South pointed and led in two singularly contradictory and paradoxical directions—toward the deliberate commercial breeding and sale of human labor for profit and toward the intermingling of black and white blood. The slaveholders shrank from acknowledging either set of facts, but they were clear and undeniable.

62  Research handbook on intersectionality Here Du Bois emphasized the sexual violence toward the literal reproduction of slave economies. He returned to this analysis in the third chapter: The “slaveholder and landlord,” Du Bois (1935, 41–3) argued, was forced, unless willing to take lower profits, continually to beat down the cost of slave labor … One method called for more land and the other for more slaves … surrounded it with certain secrecy, and it was exceedingly bad taste for any … planter to have it indicated that he was deliberately raising slaves for sale … that was a fact … A laboring stock was deliberately bred for legal sale.

While Du Bois’s gender-focused intersectional critiques of slavery pulled no punches, they were often bantamweight strikes whose force was blunted by Du Bois’s own gendered assumptions. According to Alys Eve Weinbaum (2013, 443–4), Du Bois’s understanding of such “sexual chaos” (Du Bois 1935, 44), exhibits both his understanding of slave women’s particular exploitation and an all-too-familiar sexist and bourgeois concern … As Du Bois’s moral ire surfaces, in other words, it undercuts the feminist potential of the analysis that precedes it. And yet, undercutting duly noted, what comes before—Du Bois’s account of sexual and reproductive exploitation as foundational to the interstate slave trade— remains of utmost importance.

Du Bois repeatedly returned to the brutality inflicted upon enslaved Black women in Black Reconstruction, but his intersectional analysis is particularly double-edged. On the one hand, Du Bois articulated a trenchant structural analysis of slavery centered on Black women’s reproductive rights. On the other hand, the toll of slaved-based violence on women’s lives was framed as a robbery of Black women’s ability to be unsullied mothers, wives, and daughters rather than as fully-fledged contributors to, and makers of, society. Du Bois’s analysis rendered a picture of slavery as revolving around Black women’s exploitation, while Black women still circumambulate around men. Gendering the Uplift of the Race Apropos Du Bois’s discussion of gender in Black Reconstruction, Barbara McCaskill (2003, 73) notes of Du Bois and many Black male writers of the early twentieth century: “African-American men were impressed into a patriarchy that disclaimed women’s equality to men in the political and professional spheres while simultaneously mythologizing this same sisterhood’s moral and domestic superiority over their brothers.” Despite this inclination, Du Bois occasionally exhibited a more robust intersectionality that assumed wide-ranging options and rights for Black women. This stance is perhaps no better expressed than in “The Damnation of Women,” a chapter in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920 [1999]). Darkwater was published the same year as the ratification of the 19th amendment to the US Constitution in 1920, which gave the de jure right to vote to women but did not de facto apply to Black women. In prescient fashion, Du Bois argued for the coincident significance of race and gender: What is today the message of these black women to America and to the world? The uplift of women is, next to the problem of the color line and the peace movement, our greatest modern cause. When

Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality  63 now, two of these movements—woman and color—combine in one, the combination has deep meaning. (1920 [1999], 187)

Du Bois positioned race and gender parallel to one another. While we might grant that Du Bois came to see that “the categories of race and gender matter simultaneously—a central claim made by intersectionality theorists of all stripes in the 21st century” (Hancock 2005, 78), these parallels do not intersect (cf. Harris forthcoming). Moreover, Du Bois did not use the chapter to make any claims of race and gender as co-constitutive. Yet, he did write that gender and race qua “woman and color” somehow do “combine in one.” While Du Bois’s supposed “intersectionality” in “The Damnation of Women” has “deep meaning” (1920 [1999], 187), that meaning is ambiguous. This is striking given more explicit intersectionality in earlier work by Du Bois. For instance, in “Of the Meaning of Progress” in The Souls of Black Folk (1903 [1994]) we encounter the character of “Josie.” A placeholder for a plight of the average working-class, Black women’s position in the United States, Josie is a “girl of twenty” (1903 [1994], 38), struggling to navigate occupational, familial, religious, educational, gendered, and raced social forces. Du Bois described these in detail through his encounters at Josie’s homestead: I loved to go to Josie’s, and sit on the porch, eating peaches, while the mother bustled and talked: how Josie had bought the sewing-machine; how Josie worked at service in winter, but that four dollars a month was “mighty little” wages; how Josie longed to go away to school, but that it “looked like” they never could get far enough ahead to let her; how the crops failed and the well was yet unfinished; and, finally, how “mean” some of the white folks were. (1903 [1994], 41)

A decade later, Du Bois returned to discover Josie has died. “Josie shivered and worked on, with the vision of schooldays all fled, with a face wan and tired, —worked until, on a summer’s day, some one [sic] married another; then Josie crept to her mother like a hurt child and slept—and sleeps” (1903 [1994], 43). Josie’s intersecting identities related to race, class, gender, and more, made for a highly vulnerable social location that eventually took her life in her early 30s. Yet, Du Bois never fully emancipated himself from the “cult of true womanhood,” which curtailed his excavation of the “deep meaning” (Du Bois 1920 [1999], 187) of gender and race intersections (cf. Simpson 2015). His view of Josie in The Souls of Black Folk as embodying “moral heroism” (1903 [1994], 39) whose ultimate role was “the centre of the family” (1903 [1994], 38) and his evocation in Darkwater of “dusky Cleopatras, dark Candaces, and the darker, fiercer Zinghas” as well as the “gentle Phillis [Wheatley]; Harriet [Tubman], the crude Moses; the sibyl Sojourner Truth; and the martyr, Louise De Mortie” (1920 [1999], 97) all seem to idealize Black femininity through both celebrating Black motherhood and bemoaning its limitations: “All womanhood is hampered today because the world on which it is emerging is a world that tried to worship both virgins and mothers and in the end despises motherhood and despoils virgins” (Du Bois 1920 [1999], 96). Reiland Rabaka (2003, 42) notes, “by viewing black women primarily as mothers or essentially in their maternal mode, Du Bois also limits black women to a biological function or ‘sex role’ and, in a sense, quarantines them to the domestic.” Relatedly, Celena Simpson (2015) found comparable conflations of motherhood and femininity to invade even Du Bois’s fictional writing, as she points out in her analysis of Du Bois’s historical fiction trilogy, The Black Flame (Du Bois 1957 [1976], 1959 [1976], 1961).

64  Research handbook on intersectionality These limitations notwithstanding, Du Bois managed to occasionally pivot from Victorian gender ideals to evoke a feminist perspective and intersectional thesis predicated on Black women’s agency. For example, Du Bois cited Anna Julia Cooper, “Only the black women can say ‘when and where I enter … without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me’” (1920 [1999], 100–1). Du Bois recognized the gendered contradictions that offer the forced choice of domestic labor (inclusive of intensive mothering) or employment outside the home, or the burden of what Hochschild (1989) would call the “second shift”). Moreover, Du Bois wrote with a concern for Black women’s relationship to motherhood that was fundamentally different than early (White) feminism’s quest for White women to enter the workforce. Black women had been denied their own motherhood and forcibly thrown into the workforce via slavery and Jim Crow. Black women thus advocated to both labor and mother “when and where” they wished. Du Bois unapologetically argued: The world wants healthy babies and intelligent workers. Today we refuse to allow the combination and force thousands of intelligent workers to go childless at a horrible expenditure of moral force, or we damn them if they break our idiotic conventions. Only at the sacrifice of intelligence and the chance to do their best work can the majority of modern women bear children. This is the damnation of women. (1920 [1999], 96)

Lines later, he summarized: “The future women must have life work and economic independence. She must have knowledge. She must have the right to motherhood at her own discretion” (1920 [1999], 96). This is an approach centered neither on a Black male elite cadre of the “talented tenth” nor of working-class Black women whose worth is inextricably tied to the roles as wife or mother. Rather, Du Bois occasionally places Black women at the epicenter of his intersectional sociology.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I addressed the latent intersectionality in Du Bois’s thinking, the manifest foundations of intersectionality undergirding his scholarship, and specific instances of intersectionality in his writings. I hope to have demonstrated that Du Bois’s intersectionality was both fierce and fraught. One is hard pressed to view a singular Du Boisian intersectionality, free of ideological or institutional distortion. Rather, Du Boisian intersectionality, if there is such a thing, is kaleidoscopic. Du Bois’s views on race, class, and gender morphed, becoming fractured at one moment and harmonious the next. And they were always multi-hued. If anything, Du Bois’s thinking was no less than an earthquake that shook the ground of the twentieth century. His writings rippled far and wide; they destabilized essentialist and homogenizing narratives even as these shockwaves formed cracks and fissures among the shared terrain of social movements. Today, the words of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois still reverberate, reminding us to carefully blueprint a new house, intersectional and undivided.

Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality  65

NOTES 1. Adams (2018, 128) finds “intersectional considerations of race and gender” in Harriet Martineau’s work; Carby (1987, 96) remarks that “Both [Anna Julia] Cooper and [Ida B.] Wells theorized the relationships among race, gender, and patriarchy in their writing,” and Sarvasy (2010, 300) writes of Jane Addams’s ability to “construct what feminists today call an intersectional location.” 2. Morehouse (1896, 1) wrote, “Concerning Negro education … ordinary education may answer for the nine men of mediocrity: but … The tenth man, with superior natural endowments, symmetrically trained and highly developed, may become a mightier influence, a greater inspiration to others than all the other nine …” 3. One of Du Bois’s studies, “The Sharecropping System in Lowndes County, Alabama” was “censored by the Department of Labor and never published, because, Du Bois believed, it was too critical of the social sources of rural poverty and social inequality in its findings” (Jakubek and Wood 2018, 18).

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Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality  67 Hunter, Marcus. 2015. “W. E.B. Du Bois and Black Heterogeneity: How The Philadelphia Negro Shaped American Sociology,” The American Sociologist 46 (2): 219–33. Itzigsohn, Jośe and Karida L. Brown. 2020. The Sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois: Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line. New York: New York University Press. Jakubek, Joseph and Spencer D. Wood. 2018. “Emancipatory Empiricism: The Rural Sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois,” The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 4 (1): 14–34. James, Joy. 1997. “Profeminism and Gender Elites: W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.” In Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals, 35–60. New York: Routledge. James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt and Company. James, William. 1896. “The Will to Believe,” The New World 5: 327–47. Lemons, Gary. 2009. Womanist Forefathers: Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Lewis, David Levering. 1994. W. E. B. Du Bois, 1863–1919: Biography of a Race. New York: Henry Holt. Marable, Manning. 2015. W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat. New York: Routledge. McCaskill, Barbara. 2003. “Anna Julia Cooper, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, and the African American Feminization of Du Bois’s Discourse.” In The Souls of Black Folk One Hundred Years Later, edited by D. Hubbard, 70–84. Columbia, MI: University of Missouri Press. Menzel, Annie. 2019. “‘Awful Gladness’: The Dual Political Rhetorics of Du Bois’s ‘Of the Passing of the First Born’,” Political Theory 47 (1): 32–56. Mittiga, Ross. 2019. “What’s in a World? Du Bois and Heidegger on Politics, Aesthetics, and Foundings,” Contemporary Political Theory 18 (2): 180–201. Morehouse, Henry Lyman. 1896. “The Talented Tenth,” The Independent 48 (April 23): 1. Morris, Aldon. 2015. The Scholar Denied. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Morris, Aldon. 2017. “W. E. B. Du Bois at the Center: From Science, Civil Rights Movement, to Black Lives Matter,” The British Journal of Sociology 68 (1): 3–16. Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 1986. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Rabaka, Reiland. 2003. “W.E.B. Du Bois and ‘The Damnation of Women’: An Essay on Africana Anti-Sexist Critical Social Theory,” Journal of African American Studies 7 (2): 37–60. Rabaka, Reiland. 2010. Against Epistemic Apartheid: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Disciplinary Decadence of Sociology. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Rabaka, Reiland. 2020. “Conceptual Coup d’État: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Inauguration of Intersectional Sociolog,” Raisons Politiques: Études de Pensée Politique 2 (78): 45–58. Roediger, David. 1991. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso. Sarvasy, Wendy. 2010. “Engendering Democracy by Socializing It: Jane Addams’s Contribution to Feminist Political Theorizing.” In Feminist Interpretations of Jane Addams, edited by M. Hamington, 293–310. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Shaw, Stephanie. 2013. W. E. B. Du Bois and The Souls of Black Folk. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Simpson, Celena. 2015. “Du Bois’s Dubious Feminism: Evaluating through The Black Flame,” The Pluralist 10 (1): 48–63. Taylor, Paul C. 2004. “What’s the Use of Calling Du Bois a Pragmatist?” Metaphilosophy 35 (1–2): 99–114. US Department of Commerce. 1992. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970; and Current Population Reports, Series P-23, Ancestry and Language in the United States: November 1979, revised September 1992. Weber, Max. 1904. Letter from Max Weber to W. E. B. Du Bois, November 17, 1904. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. Weinbaum, Alys Eve. 2013. “The Gender of the General Strike: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction and Black Feminism’s ‘Propaganda of History’,” South Atlantic Quarterly 112 (3): 437–64.

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5. The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge

This chapter has three purposes: to bring the lens of intersectionality theory to bear on an extraordinary moment in US history and the history of sociology—the American Social Settlement Movement of the Progressive Era, 1885–1920; to contribute to the project suggested by Patricia Hill Collins in her description of “intersectionality as a critical social theory in the making” (2019, 15); and to note the benefits to scholarship of using intersectional analysis on an established body of knowledge, the Social Settlement Movement in America, and its scholarly extension “settlement sociology” (Lengermann and Niebrugge 2002). The Settlement Movement was an experiment in which a class-privileged group set out to interact as neighbors with groups of relatively disadvantaged people, with the goal of ameliorating those disadvantages and reforming the social conditions that produced them. After a brief introduction of key concepts—intersectionality, social settlement, the Settlement Movement, activist scholarship, we present our analysis in five propositions. Our data come from four sources: Robert A. Woods and Albert Kennedy’s 1911 Handbook of Settlements whose time frame (1885–1910) loosely sets the period analysed in this chapter; publications by settlement activist-scholars listed in the Handbook, most especially Jane Addams, head of the Hull-House settlement in Chicago; accounts of Black settlement experience by Anna Julia Cooper (1913 [1998]), Sarah Collins Fernandis (1905), Ida B. Wells (1970), and Fannie Barrier Williams (1904, 1906); and later studies, most especially, Margaret C. Berry, The Settlement Movement 1886–1986 (1986), Joyce E. Williams and Vicky MacLean, Settlement Sociology in the Progressive Era (2016), and our publications (1998 [2007], 2002, 2007, 2018). Our studies have consistently shown that settlement activists and scholars identified their work as part of the new discipline of sociology and, in many cases, themselves as sociologists. This “settlement sociology” constituted a particular school within the-then emerging discipline of sociology, giving sociology clear roots in a social justice tradition.

KEY TERMS Intersectionality The term “intersectionality” is used in this chapter to describe a process, ubiquitous in social life, in which a society’s stratificational structures and practices—its institutionalized ways of unequally distributing socially produced goods and services by class, race, gender, ethnicity, age, etc.—interact to shape how power affects individual lives, relationships, groups, formal organizations, and social institutions. The concept intersectionality, originating in the experiences of African American women, was formally introduced by legal scholar Kimberlé 69

70  Research handbook on intersectionality Crenshaw in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) and expanded by sociologist Patricia Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought (1990). Both theorists rejected the conventional mode of explaining discrimination through “a single axis framework” (Crenshaw) or through “additive models of oppression” (Collins), advocating instead for a “multi-dimensional” (Crenshaw) or “interlocking model” (Collins) of stratificational variables that oppress people of color. From these beginnings, the idea of intersectionality spread, becoming a major concept in sociology, other social sciences, and in society at large. Collins (2019) worries that the increasing use of the concept has led to a loss of its critical edge. Addressing confusions over the concept’s use, sociologist Mary Romero (2018, 37) warns, “For a moment, it might help to make clear what intersectionality is not … Intersectionality is not concerned with ‘diversity’ or ‘multiculturalism’ but with power relationships, specifically the ways in which difference embeds domination and oppression.” This warning leading us to look critically at whether the settlements and the Settlement Movement confronted—or were blind to—the ways “intersectionality” functioned in the settlements themselves, and in their relation to their impoverished neighbors. The Social Settlement “Social settlement” refers to an invention of the late 19th century designed to address what that age called “the social problem,” the growing gap between rich and poor, by providing a mechanism for bridging class divisions by privileged-class people taking up residence— “settling”—in a poor neighborhood for extended periods of time and interaction with their impoverished neighbors. The residents sought to offer what help they could and to learn from the experience so that they might be informed voices in the battle to alleviate the horrific living conditions that evolved with the shift to an industrial economy which produced squalor and destitution for many of its workers while offering growing prosperity to other parts of the population. Central to this invention was the settlement house itself, typically a large building located in a poor neighborhood, that could accommodate a number of residents as well as provide meeting space for activities the residents might offer the community—childcare, classes, lectures, club meetings, debates, professional consultations, and social gatherings. Originally proposed by Canon Samuel Barnett, the first settlement, “Toynbee Hall,” opened in the desperately poor Whitechapel neighborhood of London, on Christmas Eve, 1884, with Barnett and his wife Henrietta as directors. The idea spread rapidly to the United States carried by a generation of young American college graduates inspired by Toynbee Hall—including Jane Addams, Stanton Coit, Jean Fine, Julia Lathrop, Helen Rand, Vida Scudder, Graham Taylor, Robert Woods, Charles Zueblin (McCabe 1893; Reinders 1982). Between 1885 and 1895, this cohort created settlements in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, where Jane Addams’s Hull-House became the archetypical settlement. While following the basic Toynbee Hall model, the US effort differed in the prominent role played by women and the initial impulse to establish “a neighborly relation” with the local inhabitants—disadvantaged workers and their families, who were frequently new, non-English-speaking immigrants. The residents lived together, paying for room and board in the settlement house, run by a “director” or “head resident.” This cross-class contact led to the discovery by residents that what was needed was practical help rather than cultural uplift and they turned to offering a staggering number of practical services: lessons in English; childcare, kindergartens, nursery schools, playgrounds; housing for single

The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship  71 working women and men; libraries, district nurses, legal aid, dining halls serving nutritious meals; lessons in sewing, woodwork, citizenship, debating and conducting meetings; meeting places for neighborhood clubs, unions, political groups, celebrations of major holidays, and a rich offering of lectures (Addams 1893b; D. Moore 1897 [1990]). Residents’ work was supported by many non-resident volunteers and by donors who gave resources ranging from money to whole buildings. The Social Settlement Movement Throughout this chapter, we draw on the general language of social movement theory to describe some key elements in the social settlement phenomenon that gripped the US in the period 1885–1920, shown in the rapid adoption of the settlement idea across the US—from three settlements in 1889 to 74 (1897), 103 (1900), 204 (1905), 413 (1910), and 500 (1920) (Woods and Kennedy 1911 [1970], 1922 [1990]). Those elements are ● diffuse but widespread concern about a perceived social problem; ● biographical availability of some people to give time and energy to addressing this problem; ● formulation of explanations for the causes of the problem and, usually, a solution; ● differentiation of the adherents into an organized, stratified effort of visionaries, leaders who spread their ideas, organizers of actions, activists, supporters, and allies; ● institutionalization over time into a recognized feature of the society—and always the threat of decay and disappearance. The US Settlement Movement became a large, geographically dispersed network of collective actors ranging from very small one-resident operations, to middle-sized, reasonably resourced institutions, to the large, well-resourced “core” institutions. The project of all these settlements was to establish “a neighborly relation” with the community around them and to deliver services to that community as the opportunities arose in the natural course of living side-by-side. This theme of neighborly relation is the common thread among all the settlements, along with the remarkable uniformity of the services they offered. Activist Scholarship “Activist scholarship” describes the settlements’ pioneering research into social problems and solutions for the people in their neighborhoods and for society. This literature takes four broad forms—research reports, policy recommendations, theoretical discussions, and memoirs and autobiographies. It is marked by ingenuity in conceptualization of the problem, creativity in research method and design, quality in the data produced, and sheer volume of works produced by these volunteer organizations. Settlement sociologists assumed that one contribution their movement could make to the solution of the social problem was accurate descriptions of the conditions of life for groups living in dire poverty—immigrants, domestic servants, African Americans, the indigent, elderly, disabled, sick, or mentally ill. The residents were aware of the various intersecting factors that can place people in this peril and focused particularly on oppressive working conditions, investigating key spaces—factories, stock yards, tenement sweatshops, department stores, employment bureaus, schools, saloons, public spaces, courts, police stations; witness-

72  Research handbook on intersectionality ing and participating in labor unions, strikes and protests; and interacting with the people involved in order to understand what the experiences meant to them and for their lives. Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, founder of Greenwich Settlement in New York (1902), summarized the significance of this work for the settlement endeavor in her autobiography, Neighborhood (1938): The realism of the settlement [is] its understanding that, before any help can be given, the situation must be felt, realized and understood at first hand … Only that which is lived can be understood and translated to others. The chief mission of the settlement has always been its accenting of contact as fundamental. At the university, one learned that scholarship is a sincere effort to get at truth … In the settlement one learned much the same thing, but in the first case it was through contact with minds and in the other by contact with people and situations. The settlement is, indeed, from this aspect a graduate school. (1938, 39)

Major settlement research reports include: 1895 Hull-House Maps and Papers by the Residents of Hull-House, research directed by Florence Kelley 1898 The City Wilderness: A Settlement Study by Residents and Associates of the South End House (Boston), principal researcher Robert Woods 1899 The Philadelphia Negro, W.E.B. DuBois with Isabel Eaton (College Settlement of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania) 1904 Out of Work: A Study of Unemployment, Frances Kellor (Henry Street Settlement) 1905 Five Hundred and Seventy Four Deserters and Their Families: A Descriptive Study of Their Characteristics and Circumstances, Lillian Brandt (Greenwich House Settlement and The Survey) 1909–14 The Pittsburgh Survey in six volumes, directed by Paul Kellogg (Kingsley House, Pittsburgh) and the Russell Sage Foundation) Women and the Trades, Pittsburgh 1907–1908, Elizabeth Butler (1909) Homestead: The Households of a Milltown, Margaret Bynington (1910) Work Accidents and the Law, Crystal Eastman (1910) The Steelworkers, John Andrews Fitch (1910) The Pittsburgh District Civic Frontage, Paul Kellogg (1914) Wage-Earning Pittsburgh, Paul Kellogg (1914) 1910 Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, Emily Green Balch (Denison House, Boston) 1911 Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York, Mary White Ovington (Greenwich House) 1917 The Immigrant and the Community, Grace Abbott (Hull-House) 1923 The Zone of Emergence: Observations of the Lower Middle and Upper Working Class Communities of Boston 1905–1914, Robert Woods and Albert J. Kennedy (South End House) 1936 The Tenements of Chicago, 1908–1935, Edith Abbott (Hull-House) Besides these well-known works, settlement sociology also produced thousands of smaller studies published as pamphlets, government reports, reports to the settlement, and journal or magazine articles. Settlement activists frequently followed a research report with policy recommendations to local, state, or federal government, or a special interest group. Prime examples of this

The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship  73 activist scholarship at work are the accomplishments of Crystal Eastman and Florence Kelley (Proposition V below). Above all, the Settlement Movement was held together by a theoretical explanation of “the social problem” and a recommended path for its solution. Five American settlement leaders— Addams, Kelley, Simkhovitch, Graham Taylor, and Robert A. Woods—are noteworthy for their work in constructing an activist theory for the Settlement Movement. Pre-eminent among these is Addams, the charismatic and central leader of the American Settlement Movement whose general social theory is outlined in Proposition II below. Settlement social theory often emerged in the memoirs written by settlement residents; this fact is critical in an intersectional analysis because in those memoirs the reader can see the positionality of the writer in terms of their neighbors—and the theorist/memoirist’s understanding of the issue of positionality.

INTERSECTIONAL ANALYSIS The five propositions in this section bring together the American Settlement Movement and intersectionality theory, enriching our understanding of both. Proposition I: Intersectional analysis both complicates and clarifies the established account of the American Social Settlement Movement, in two ways—first, by having us recognize the limits of the data that account is based on; second, by raising questions about the presence of intersectionality in the internal organization of the Settlement Movement itself. The established account, the one given in the first section, is told, mainly, from the perspective of residents of the earliest, most celebrated settlements (Kogut 1972)—those located in major metropolitan areas, supported by wealthy donors, and publishing much of the activist literature that provides the data used by scholars of this history. Of the 413 settlements listed by Woods and Kennedy (1911 [1970]) about the top dozen or less than 5 percent are the source of the information on which the established narrative is based. These, which we call the “core” settlements are listed in Table 5.1. But about 400 settlements—which we call “secondary settlements” in the movement are known to us primarily through their entries in the Handbook, many of these fairly brief. Settlement Handbook entries consist of statements by the settlement offering the name, address, date of founding, description of the “neighborhood”—usually demographic and occupational data of ethnicity/race and typical employment of the neighbors, sometimes supplemented by character assessments; the “activities” in terms of services and participatory events like classes; the names of the residents, and then the literature the settlement had produced. These secondary settlements were of two main types—those started by individuals or a small group of friends, often on the proverbial “shoestring,” and those sponsored by large established formal organizations, for example, churches (including the Salvation Army), the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the Charity Organization Society (COS), the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA), and various nurses’ associations. The Handbook shows that of these 400, 59 were settlements run for minority ethnic or racial groups—31 by and for Jews; 26 for African Americans—including branches of major White settlements, settlements founded, funded, and supervised by sympathetic Whites, and 12 founded by Blacks for Blacks; two settlements run by White residents focusing on Chinese immigrant workers; no Latinx neighbors are named as clients of settlements services, but

74  Research handbook on intersectionality Table 5.1

Core settlements

Settlement

Location

Date founded

Current Head as of 1910

Chicago Commons

Chicago

1894

Graham Taylor

College Settlements Association

Boston

1890

Board of college women

College Settlement

New York City

1889

Jean Fine

College Settlement (aka “St Mary’s”)

Philadelphia

1892

Anna Freeman Davies

Denison House

Boston

1892

Helena S. Dudley

Greenwich House

New York City

1902

Mary Simkhovitch

Henry Street

New York City

1895

Lillian Wald

Hull-House

Chicago

1889

Jane Addams

Kingsley House

Pittsburgh

1893

Kate A. Everest

South End House

Boston

1891

Robert A. Woods

University of Chicago Settlement

Chicago

1894

Mary E. McDowell

University Settlement

New York City

1885

Robbins Gilman

several settlements in Texas and California include “Mexicans” or “Spanish” as part of the neighborhood population; there is only one mention of Native Americans as neighbors. The remaining approximately 341 settlements were founded and run by Whites, most apparently Christians, largely Protestant, some Catholic—with a scattering of self-proclaimed secular (most of the core fall into this category but it was less represented in the secondary settlements). The Handbook shows the overall dominance of women in the movement with 1,077 women residents and 322 men; 5,718 women volunteers and 1,594 men; 216 women as head residents and 85 men. Of the core elite settlements, nine were headed by women—all WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) except Lillian Wald at Henry Street. Other minority women head residents were in the 400 less visible settlements—including about a dozen Black and 14 Jewish women. Within the secondary settlements, the women residents, even when formally listed as “head,” were often reporting to a male-dominated board, usually church related and in the case of the Black settlements, they many times were reporting to a White male board—except for those started and maintained by Black women for Black people. The most obvious differences between the smaller settlements and the core settlements are quantitative—fewer residents, volunteers, activities, funds, and, especially, publications, where many managed only an annual report. Lack of publication may have reflected not only lack of time but of contacts with formal organizations in publishing. Yet these secondary settlements did seem, through means not always clear to us, to take their lead from the core settlements, adopting both defining watchwords of the movement, for example, neighbor, neighborhood, the neighborly relation, morality, ethics and sociology, and the model of services offered to their neighbors, for example, childcare, temporary housing for working women, clubs aimed at specific groups in the population, milk stations. What emerges is a movement composed of 413 separate voluntary organizations, centered in different neighborhoods throughout the US, performing remarkably similar services, and communicating in terms of a common vocabulary of practical aims and social ideals. Besides a broad agreement on the purpose and spirit of the settlement, two other factors not uncommon to social movements held them together. The first was the role of its visionary leader, Jane Addams—always to be allowed for is the fact of her and Hull-House’s overwhelming presence. Her recurrence in the data seems a genuine reflection of her almost inestimable significance to this movement, resting heavily on her remarkable facility as a writer, a quality increasingly realized and commented on (e.g., Kathryn Joslin, Jane Addams, a Writer’s

The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship  75 Life 2004; Lengermann and Niebrugge 2022). Over the course of her career at Hull-House (1889–1935) Addams gave literally hundreds of evocative sketches of the settlement and the neighbors it served and was able both to position herself as an actor and to engage the reader in the narratives she crafted. In the terminology of social movement theory, Addams combined in her person the roles of visionary, leader, and activist. The second factor was the creation of a formal organization, the National Federation of Settlements, in which all the 413 separately governed settlements had membership, and which formally gave and assumed equality among its members. But, in fact, the core settlements exercised power over the others in terms of strategy and decision-making, as we show in a brief example of the process that set in motion the creation of the Handbook on which researchers so heavily rely. It was … decided to arrange for a series of settlement discussions at the following National Conference, which was to take place at St. Louis with Miss Jane Addams as its president. To these meetings every settlement house and neighborhood center in the country was invited to send representatives. Three sessions were held, and a national committee of ten was appointed to gather and collate the results of settlement experience as to the most needed and most promising directions of service, and to present a year later (1911) at a similar series of meetings in Boston a platform for united action. (Woods and Kennedy 1911 [1970], 1)

The Settlement Conference organizers, despite their experience of disadvantaged people, must have felt that by inviting “every settlement house and neighborhood center in the country … to send representatives,” they were being as inclusive as possible. But an invitation does not automatically enable attendance. So, in the seemingly fairest of ways, the Conference reproduces itself, getting members who, like the organizers, had the resources to attend the meeting. And they might be surprised to consider their actions an exemplar of Collins’s observation (2015, 16), “The complex social inequalities fostered by intersecting systems of power are fundamentally unjust, shaping knowledge projects and/or political engagements that uphold or contest the status quo.” But certainly, what we have here is the shaping of a knowledge project for all, and for subsequent generations, decided by a few. Intersectional analysis directs scholars to investigate this process. But having said this, we admit that in the remaining propositions we draw largely on data provided by the core settlements. Proposition II: Intersectionality Theory and Settlement Sociology share a common understanding that social inequality is a cause of human suffering; but their responses to inequality are framed differently. Intersectionality theory interprets inequality formally, identifying it as a core structural problem. Collins (2015, 14) centers on the concept of “complex social inequalities” as the product of power operating in a social system: “Intersecting systems of power catalyze social formations of complex social inequalities that are organized via unequal material realities and distinctive social experiences for people who live within them”—and are, as noted in Proposition I, “fundamentally unjust.” Romero illustrates this fundamental injustice with the concept of “unearned privilege”: “Intersectionality is interested in exposing the unearned privileges certain groups receive by simply being socially assigned or identified as white, male, heterosexual, or a citizen, or being non-disabled” (2018, 59). Settlement residents would have been uneasy about the facts, though not necessarily the concepts, of social inequality and unearned privilege, debating the practical implications of those terms. For the Settlement Movement issued into a world where White supremacy, male

76  Research handbook on intersectionality superiority, class privilege, and racial discrimination were accepted and practiced, a world in which Rudyard Kipling’s (now infamous but then widely approved) poem “Pick Up the White Man’s Burden” (1899) was being read into the Congressional Record and in which the norms of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era confronted each other. These were ideas settlement workers could not completely escape. The American public worried about the growing gap between rich and poor but their sense of the causes and remedies for this gap covered the range of political possibilities. Settlement workers were united by a desire to alleviate suffering but divided on what to do about social inequality—except perhaps agreeing to limit its most deleterious effects which so urgently needed remedy that internal settlement discussions and public statements were often focused on finding the best practical solution to them. In what was to become one of her most cited addresses, “The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements” (1893a), Addams provided a theoretical framing for a practical and far-ranging approach to social inequality that would become the understanding of the Settlement Movement. Her approach to the problem of inequality is both pragmatic and ethical: “the good we secure for ourselves is fragile and uncertain … until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life” (1893a, 7). The movement grew to act on this idea of sharing as the antidote to social inequality in the services and policies it advocated. This call to share the good was not only consistent with the period’s linkage of privilege to duty but with Addams’s social theory that saw ethics, rules for right relations with others, as an essential social structure and the absence of an appropriate system of ethics as the primary explanation of the existence of inequality in its present form of “poverty amidst riches.” The latter phrase, from Beatrice Potter Webb, was what most troubled people about the current shape of inequality—the starkly unjust contrast between so much abundance and so much misery that the new industrial economy was producing. Addams’s turn to ethics as a social structure rests on her understanding of the human being as motivated by emotional as well as material interests. She believes that emotionally people want sociability, to be in relationship for the sake of relating. Collectively, this desire gives rise to structures of ethics that offer guidelines for relating in satisfying and appropriate ways. A society’s ethics and its organization of material production are typically congruent. The crisis of her day, the intensifying growth of material inequality, arose from the lack of a system of ethics appropriate to the advanced production of capitalist organization, which Adams (1895, 184) explained as “the discovery of the power to combine,” the ways that capitalism organized large numbers of workers to produce an extraordinary surfeit of goods and services. But people still acted out of earlier “belated ethics”—the militaristic ethic, the family claim, and the individual ethic. Addams calls for “social ethics,” rules for right relation reflecting the principle of the power to combine, that the way to secure one’s own good is to work for it to be available for everyone, to identify with the needs not only of one’s own social circle but the larger neighborhood, community, society. Misalignment between production and ethics had broken the frame for sociability: The social organism has broken down through large districts of our great cities. Many of the people living there are very poor … without leisure or energy for anything but the gain of subsistence … They live … side by side, [but] without knowledge of each other, without fellowship, without local tradition or public spirit, without social organization of any kind … We find working-men organized into armies of producers because men of executive ability and business sagacity have found it to their interests thus to organize them. But these working-men are not organized socially … they are living without a corresponding social contact. (Italics ours) (Addams 1893a, 4)

The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship  77 The answer to this break in social contact is the social ethic which requires that people act to help secure for others the goods they have secured—or desire—for themselves. This can be accomplished in myriad ways—organizing labor, developing cooperatives, acting collectively to produce libraries, health services, parks; legislating improved wages and living conditions for workers, and treating large corporations as “public trusts.” This practical and ethical change is the duty of the Settlement Movement both through large-scale projects (Proposition V) and in face-to-face interactions with neighbors (Lengermann and Niebrugge, 2014). The complexities of sharing across lines of difference can be illustrated by one example, chosen deliberately for its simplicity and concreteness—Christmas at Hull-House. In her late-in-life memoir of her childhood as a Polish Jewish immigrant in the shadow of Hull-House, Hilda Satt Polacheck (1882–1967) tells of an Irish playmate asking her when she is about 12 or 13 to go to the Hull-House Christmas; remembering the violence directed toward Jews in Poland at Christmas, she declines saying “I might get killed!” The playmate, incredulous, says that is impossible; Hilda eventually attends and is overwhelmed by a feeling of safety as she sees how many kinds of people are there, relaxed and having a good time: “We were all poor. Some of us were underfed. Some of us had holes in our shoes. But we were not afraid of each other. What greater service can a human being give to her country than to banish fear from the heart of a child?” (Polacheck 1989, 52). And yet, after Hilda leaves this wonderful event— which she remembers as making her “a staunch American”—she “still hesitated telling mother where I had been. I was glad that she did not ask me” (Polacheck 1989, 52). In the space available we cannot “unpack” the attempt by Hull-House to “secure for others by incorporating … into the common life” the experience of a Christmas essentially rooted in the English-speaking tradition—a little religion mixed with Dickens and an experience, for one day, of bounty. Intersectionality theory would call attention to the biased, assimilationist current, the seeming blindness to the issues of whose choices, of the too simple approach to defining good or a too limited imagination of possible reactions, and of the ways this “happy” occasion might include elements of oppression. Settlement residents would argue that power in this event is agency, the ability to set and execute the projects, here the project is sharing as one neighbor might with another (see Proposition IV). Proposition III: In operationalizing this approach to inequality, the Settlement Movement invoked the concepts of “neighbor” and “the neighborly relation” as the appropriate orientation of the settlement resident to people in the surrounding community. “Orientation to other,” a foundational concept in sociology’s analysis of the nature of the social, can be seen as having at least two elements—the qualities the actor assigns or believes to be in the other as an independent entity and the motives the actor has for being in interaction with the other. Naming the other as “neighbor” heightened or defined the relationship in particular ways. “Neighbor,” deriving from the idea of “near-dweller,” is hallowed in Biblical admonitions familiar to all settlement workers to “love thy neighbor as thy self.” “Neighborly” means “having the characteristics of a congenial neighbor”—well intentioned, similar, friendly. To move in next door is to try to bridge the gap between rich and poor by arguing in the flesh the fact of equal footing in the world, asserting similarity rather than difference, saying to the community member “I come in peace, with good intentions.” Settlement Head Resident Robert Woods (South End House) wrote hopefully, that “one of the most remarkable … social facts [is] this instinctive understanding that the man who establishes his home besides yours, by that very act begins to qualify as an ally of yours and begins to have a claim

78  Research handbook on intersectionality upon your sense of comradeship” (Woods 1914 [1923], 151). But in fact, this orientation was not easy to realize—moving in was only a first step to it. The settlement residents faced—with greater or lesser reflective powers—three challenges to becoming neighbors. One was the fact that they had chosen to be where others were constrained to be by lack of resources, the choice itself reflecting the residents’ greater resources. Residents wrestled regularly with the question of how the fact of material inequality hindered the experience of being a neighbor: [T]here was always present the harrowing consciousness of the difference in economic condition between ourselves and our neighbors … for we … had a sense of security in regard to illness and old age and the lack of these two securities are the specters which most persistently haunt the poor. Could we, in spite of this, make their individual efforts more effective through organization and possibly complement them by small efforts of our own. (Addams 1910, 133–4)

The second challenge to the neighborly orientation was the residents’ own mix of motives, the struggle between duty and ambition. Many women college graduates took seriously the duty to fulfill the extraordinary future outlined for them by their colleges—as Wellesley founder Henry Fowle Durant described in a sermon to the student body about 1870: “You mistake altogether the significance of the movement of which you are a part if [for] you this is simply the question of a College education for I believe that God’s hand is in it … calling to womanhood to come up higher, to prepare for great conflicts, for vast reforms in social life, for noblest usefulness” (Kingsley 1924, 239). The effect of such exhortations led Smith graduate Vida Scudder to declare: “Into this world: —a world of paradox, weary with age, yet … bent, as no other age has ever been … on the righting of social wrong … we, the first generation of college women … represent a new factor in the social order” (1890, 3). A variation on this theme was the residents’ search for people in need who might be helped by their presence, an orientation based in values that Addams, like Scudder (1890), traces to “a certain renaissance going forward in Christianity. The impulse to share the lives of the poor, the desire to make social service, … express the spirit of Christ” (1893a, 17). But mixed with this is the ambition to use the settlement experience to gain the public legitimacy so long denied to women, a need Addams expressed in her college valedictory address, interpreting the story of Cassandra, whose prophecy of the doom of Troy was not believed, as a problem for all women: to find “what the ancients called auctoritas, right of the speaker to make themselves heard” (Adams 1881, 37). This orientation led residents, especially women, to become participants in an exchange: they would genuinely try to be of service—and they did—and out of that work achieve some measure of auctoritas which they did in unexpected ways as policy experts on the living conditions of the poor, expertise demonstrated in their activist scholarship (see first section). A third challenge was to understand and approach the neighbors across lines of enormous difference as individuals like themselves—embodied, agentic, with interests, emotions, and a capacity for ethical relations. This orientation played off against its counter view that the immigrant neighbors were somehow inferior in biological inheritance or cultural exposure and needed to be assimilated into a superior American culture. Addams argues that the poor neighbors have “come to grief only on the industrial side,” but were ethically more spontaneously kind and generous to others in trouble than the middle-class charity worker who seems to calculate her client’s general worthiness before doling out small measures of aid (Addams 1902, 13–32). Woods also notes the spontaneous hospitality of a working-class

The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship  79 neighborhood—“one of the most striking facts about the neighborhood is that, though it is not essentially an intimate circle, it is at bottom always a hospitable one, always ready to receive new recruits”—contrasting the working class with “the professional and commercial classes— … the … unneighborly classes … snatched … out of the neighborhood experience at an early age …” (1914 [1923], 151–2). (This positive view was not uniformly shared, especially among the secondary settlements in the American South, e.g. “Nashville Wesley House: “Neighborhoods: The people are most entirely American; many are of the unfortunate, shiftless or immoral class” (Woods and Kennedy 1911, 292).) A fourth, though limited, orientation debated making the settlement a base for sociological research. Woods sees in the settlement experiment the basis for a new, objective methodology of social science, referring to the neighborhoods as “laboratories in social science” (Woods 1893 [1923], 35–6). But many settlement workers were concerned that “settlements as sociological laboratories” might become destructive of the neighborly relationship, treating it as an ethical barrier to value-neutral research. In her introductory comments to Hull-House Maps and Papers, resident Agnes Sinclair Holbrook was firm that: Insistent probing into the lives of the poor … and the personal impertinence of many of the questions asked, would be unendurable and unpardonable were it not for the conviction that the public conscience when roused must demand better surroundings for the most … long-suffering citizens of the commonwealth. Merely to state symptoms and go no farther would be idle; but to state symptoms in order to ascertain the nature of the disease, and apply, what may be its cure, is not only scientific, but in the highest sense humanitarian. (Holbrook 1895: 13–14)

Addams calls for an activist response as neighbors rather than a value-neutral response as observers: by virtue of its very locality [the settlement] has put itself into a position to see, as no one but a neighbor can see, the stress and need of those who bear the brunt of the social injury…. If the settlement, then, is convinced that in industrial affairs lack of organization tends to the helplessness of the isolated worker, and is a menace to the entire community, then, it is bound to pledge itself to industrial organization … And at this point the settlement enters into what is more technically known as the labor movement. (Addams 1895, 183–4)

In 1895 in Chicago, this was a radical declaration of loyalty to one’s neighbors over one’s class. The Neighbors’ Orientation to the Settlements The neighbors seem to have been a good deal less interested in the settlements than the settlements were in them. (Demographic studies show more than 20 million immigrants from Southern, Eastern, and Central Europe coming to the US between 1880 and 1920, most of them not English-speaking.) One record of neighbors’ orientation is from the settlements themselves. The Handbook reports each settlement’s description of the “Neighborhood”— “A mill and factory district. The population is Italian and Slavic” (Bound Brook, New Jersey Neighborhood Settlement House); “Factory district. The people are Bohemians, Hungarians, and Slavs” (East End Neighborhood House in Cleveland, Ohio). But many descriptions note “Americans” (or even “100 percent Americans” presumably meaning “White” or “WASP”) among the population. Addams reports that the neighbors found the Settlement and its

80  Research handbook on intersectionality class-privileged residents “strange”: “I have never tried so earnestly to set forth the gist of the Settlement movement, to make clear its reciprocity as I have to [my neighbors] … I remember one man who used to shake his head and say it was ‘the strangest thing he had met in his experience’” (1893a, 25). Eventually, the neighbors just got used to the presence of the settlement residents. As one said about Woods, “when Mr. Woods kept staying on and we got used to having him go through the streets and seeing him so often, we got to think that he belonged to us” (Woods 1929, 55, in Williams and MacLean 2016, 191). The residents also leave records of disagreements where the neighbors challenged residents’ directives and plans. But overall fewer records survive than one would expect of the neighbors’ reactions to the settlements. The major angle on this lack of neighbor responsiveness comes from scholars who have raised the question of whether the settlements were too assimilationist in their orientation to the immigrants, causing the immigrants’ withdrawal into organizations they were building among their own ethnic groups. This argument is forcefully presented in Rivka Lissak’s penetrating study Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890–1919 (1989) which uses overlooked records kept by Hull-House on attendance at its activities by number, ethnicity, and gender. Looking at two communities of “new immigrants,” Russian Jews and Italians, she finds patterns of occasional use, followed by a falling away as their own ethnic enclaves developed associations. She attributes this pattern to Hull-House’s not providing sufficient recognition to Jewish culture and “criticiz[ing] the norms of the Italian family, [and giving] shelter to women who ran away from their husbands … Italian peasants regarded this policy as interference in intrafamily relations” (Lissak 1989, 102–3, in Crocker 1991, 255–6). Lissak herself provides begrudging evidence for the settlement’s potential usefulness in her critique of Addams’s account of the Averbuch Affair—an incident in Chicago history where the Chief of Police shot and killed a young Russian Jew and the Jewish community appealed to Addams for help, which she gave. Lissak sees Addams’s account depicting the Jewish community as helpless when they were just using Addams’s better position to present their case. This last example gets to what may have been the thread of the immigrant-settlement relationship. The settlement residents wanted to be of use; the immigrants used them when they could be useful. It was for the immigrants a straight exchange, giving acknowledgment of the settlement’s utility and getting help. The settlement residents were more emotionally and reputationally invested in these exchanges as they fulfilled significant career goals for the residents. This pattern of exchange—and with it the possibility of withdrawal from the exchange when it was not useful—may help explain the relationship of many of the settlements to the African American populations in or bordering on settlement neighborhoods. The relationship between the settlements and African Americans has been given a highly critical book-length treatment in Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn’s Black Neighbors and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement (1993)—a criticism answered by other commentators, most especially Deegan (2002) who stress the extraordinary esteem in which Addams was held by Black leaders—Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Fannie Barrier Williams, Booker T. Washington, and Anna Julia Cooper. But the Settlement Movement’s record with Black neighbors was mixed at best. A significant part of that mixture may be due to the exchange relation in which the settlements existed with their White immigrant neighbors who in many instances had absorbed the intense anti-Black attitudes predominant in the US and who objected, by refusing to participate, with Black neighbors in settlement undertakings. Facing this resistance many settlements, both core and secondary, made substantial efforts to serve African American

The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship  81 populations; often by creating branch settlements offering the same services for African Americans (College Settlement, Philadelphia; South End, Boston; Greenwich House, New York City; Henry St., New York City; Neighborhood House, Elmira, NY). Other settlements attempted to act to promote racial integration in the society, e.g., opposing the imposition of segregation in Chicago schools; establishing settlements designed to bring Black and White together, e.g., Frederick Douglass Center, Chicago; establishing other settlements to serve Black neighborhoods (e.g., Starr Center, Philadelphia; Sumner Settlement, Chicago); and, of course, Black leaders were founding settlements of their own—like the Negro Fellowship League, Chicago—but these were typically dependent on White funding and there were many issues over control. Six basic qualities seem to privilege or disempower neighbors in relation to each other and to settlement residents: (1) language facility, (2) skilled or unskilled employment, (3) appearance that “looks American” (aka “White”), (4) how the ethnic community to which they “belonged” was itself present, and, of course, (5) gender and (6) age. Of all these, the one perhaps most significant was “language facility”—the ability or inability to acquire not simply a knowledge of English but an English spoken “without an accent” (Polacheck 1989) was a major source of status and subordination and exclusion. Proposition IV: A major difference between Intersectionality Theory and Settlement Sociology is their conceptions of power, Intersectionality Theory focusing on power as oppression and Settlement Sociology on power as agency or ability. Power in sociology is frequently conceived in terms of Max Weber’s formulation as the ability to get one’s way despite opposition, regardless of the basis on which the ability rests (paraphrased from Weber 1947, 152, translation by Parsons). Oppression is an exercise of power that is cruel and unfair, exercised by one individual or group toward another individual or group or by a system toward an individual or a group in a way that inflicts unnecessary pain, violating rules of fairness. Intersectionality theory sees oppression operating through interlocking stratificational structures that in combination deny certain people the resources to resist. Settlement sociology is in many respects at its weakest in its formulation of power—if power is understood in the Weberian framework; but it shows more substance if power is understood as agency, “the ability to set and executive projects” (Lengermann and Niebrugge 1989, 3) or in a more social framing, “the ability to take one’s place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one’s part matter” (Heilbrun 1988, 18); the sharing of power as agency was part of the settlement mission, as Addams conceived it, of “socializing democracy.” Addams’s early (1893) statements on “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements” and “The Objective Value of a Social Settlements” offer an extraordinary depiction of power as agency, eloquent in their description of the goals of the Settlement Movement and exhaustive in their account of the actual execution of projects for social organization and material improvement. An examination of these projects shows the far-reaching tentacles of intersectionality as much of settlement success rested on the class and race/ethnic position of its leaders and donors. The achievements testify to what good intentions, hard work—and money can do. And in the conduct of these projects there seems to have been a real desire to avoid oppression: settlement records show many moments of opposition from neighbors where the settlement yielded and other moments when settlement and neighborhood united in opposition to some outside force, a force often working through the process of intersectionality—as did settlement resistance, though in subtler ways.

82  Research handbook on intersectionality A brief example from Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull-House illustrates this complexity of power, as both agency and oppression. (As always, Addams’s analyses are marked by a rich, and often poignant, imagery of the body which evokes the intersection of class, gender, ethnicity, and age in the individual biography.) [S]ome frightened women had bidden me to come quickly to the house of an old German woman, whom two men from the county agent’s office were attempting to remove to the County Infirmary. The poor old creature had thrown herself bodily upon a small and battered chest of drawers and clung there, clutching it so firmly that it would have been impossible to remove her without also taking the piece of furniture. She did not weep nor moan nor indeed make any human sound, but between her broken gasps for breath she squealed shrilly like a frightened animal caught in a trap. The little group of women and children gathered at her door stood aghast at the realization of the black dread which always clouds the lives of the very poor when work is slack, but which constantly grows more imminent and threatening as old age approaches. The neighborhood women and I hastened to make all sorts of promises of support of the old woman and the county officials, only too glad to be rid of their unhappy duty, left her to our ministrations. (1910, 155–6)

The reader sees the neighborhood united to save one of its own—the old German woman— from what all the neighbors dreaded as a fate only one step better than death, removal to the poorhouse. The old woman has fallen prey to the workings of intersectionality as age, gender, class leave her vulnerable; yet behind these intersections is the machinery that allows the government of Cook County through its administrative unit charged with overseeing the indigent to move in and seize the old woman’s life—because she is poor, because she, apparently, no longer can work to pay her rent, because she is, seemingly, without family (a deeply gendered relationship). From the perspective of agency, we see that the neighbors can assert some power. Addams does not step aside with the men and explain the situation to them as a negotiator for the neighborhood; she and the women work together to give assurance, affirming not only the women’s right but their duty, their ability “to take their place in discourse essential to action and have their part matter” (Heilbrun 1988, 18). This is low-level participation in terms of the effect of the decision, which touches only this one woman, but as an act of kindness it is complete and effective—the old woman is spared. But that success is affected, in part, by the summoning of Addams, whose power, whose agency, rests in a combination of intersectional factors which allows her to interact with these men—despite her gender. The advantages in summoning Addams are an intersection of her class position, which frees her from fear of old age or poverty; her achieved status as head of another institution, not state, but Hull-House; she is, presumably, known by this time, and seen as someone who uses the combined power of money, official position, ethnicity (native-born White American English-speaker) to help people out. The infirmary men do not want to be involved anyway, may know Addams by reputation, and are relieved that someone who presents as used-to-taking-charge does so. The women’s action here is one of power operating as agency and is based in the social ethic, “the identification with the common lot which is the essential idea of Democracy”—an identification based in exposure to “diversified human experience” and its “resultant sympathy” (Addams 1902 [1907], 11). In what is essentially a meditation on oppression, Addams identifies the injustice of the County rules, rules which come down on an individual as a series of intersections occur—age, gender, class.

The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship  83 This dread of the poorhouse … seemed to me not without some justification … To give an old woman only a chair and a bed, to leave her no cupboard in which her treasures may be stowed, not only that she may take them out when she desires occupation, but that her mind may dwell upon them in moments of revery, is to reduce living almost beyond the limit of human endurance. The poor creature who clung so desperately to her chest of drawers was really clinging to the last remnant of normal living—a symbol of all she was asked to renounce. (1910, 155–6)

What the reader sees is Addams and the neighborhood women activating their own agency to disrupt the processes of oppression they are witnessing. Proposition V: As Settlement workers approached conditions that Intersectionality Theory rightly labels “oppression,” they came over time to recognize the limits of their own powers and the powers of the settlement and to focus on the larger action of building coalitions that would rally public support and lobby for changes in the law. And it was in this work that their activist scholarship saw its fruition. The Settlement Movement’s role in beginning the transformation of US government to a more matriarchal state is partly reflected in an account Addams gives of Hull-House’s role in the smallpox epidemic of the autumn of 1893 that followed the Chicago World’s Fair: One of the first lessons we learned at Hull-House was that private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city’s disinherited. We also quickly came to realize that there are certain types of wretchedness from which every private philanthropy shrinks and which are cared for only in those wards of the county hospital provided for … in the city’s isolation hospital for smallpox patients … This aspect of governmental responsibility was unforgettably borne in upon me during the smallpox epidemic following the World’s Fair, when one of the residents, Mrs. Kelley, as State Factory Inspector, was much concerned in discovering and destroying clothing which was being finished in houses containing unreported cases of smallpox … the special smallpox inspectors from the Board of Health … had accepted without question and as implicit in public office the obligation to carry on the dangerous and difficult undertakings for which private philanthropy is unfitted, as if the commonalty of compassion represented by the State was more comprehending than that of any individual group. (Addams 1910, 310–11)

In the period focused on in this chapter, 1885–1910, when the settlements moved to lobby for changes at the local, state, and federal level, only four US states allowed women to vote and, as discussed in Proposition II, the belief in male superiority was pervasive. Settlement women lobbying for legislative changes would have been easy to dismiss except for two power resources they brought to the table: first, the fact that they were White college-educated Settlement workers, an intersectional identity that gave them confidence and made male politicians at least pause and listen; and second, that they were armed with a large body of social science evidence that supported their arguments, the fruit of their activist scholarship. Their sociological studies gave them the power resource of knowledge—at a time when, as historian Allen Davis acknowledges, “little reliable knowledge on social problems was available” (1967, 96). The self-reporting of activities in the Handbook shows that lobbying was a major activity among all settlements, and they did it at least at the local level if not the state and federal. We offer here an example of each of the following efforts by which settlements leveraged power for social reform: sociological research, voluntary organization creation, and coalition building.

84  Research handbook on intersectionality Research on Labor Conditions The exploitation of industrial workers in the new capitalist economy was perhaps the chief area of concern in the core settlements of Chicago and the Northeastern cities, producing a voluminous research literature on child labor; the stockyards; sweatshops; women’s work in those sweatshops, in factories, in mines, in department stores, as well as service industries like domestic employment and restaurant work; and, in the heavy, dangerous work expected of working-class men. This last was the focus of Work Accidents and the Law (1910) by Crystal Eastman, a resident of the Greenwich House Settlement in New York City whose research in this case was done under the auspices of Paul Kellogg’s Pittsburgh Survey. Eastman used coroners’ reports and hospital records in Pittsburgh to study 294 cases of non-fatal and 529 fatal work-related accidents of male workers that occurred between 1907 and 1908 at heavy industrial plants like Carnegie Steel, American Tube Company, and American Steel and Wire. She toured these sites, interviewed fellow workers, supervisors, medical personnel, friends, and family. Insisting that “social investigation should not only have evidence that there is an evil but have a rough plan for remedying it” (1910, 788), she argued that blame for these accidents should be allocated equally among the workers who misgauged the risk, the employer who profited from it, and the society that accepted it, and that compensation should be paid to the victim and his dependents. Eastman’s report was a major force in the passage of Workmen’s Compensation legislation at the state level, and, in 1916, the establishment of the federal Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs. Creating Voluntary Agencies for Social Reform Florence Kelley, as a Hull-House resident and later at Henry Street, worked tirelessly on issues of exploitative labor conditions, especially child labor and sweatshops (in-home labor sites for production of goods to be collected and sold by large companies who appropriated the profit of the scandalously underpaid home workers). Kelley published articles in the American Journal of Sociology on this topic and when appointed Illinois Inspector of Factories worked with others to regulate these abuses. A long-time Marxian thinker she then came to the idea of treating the purchasing of goods and services as a major work done by women and women consumers as a new social class who could be mobilized to monitor the conditions under which the goods they purchased were made and to boycott products made under oppressive conditions. The National Consumers’ League (NCL) was chartered in 1899 with Addams and Josephine Lowell as founders; Kelley was appointed its leader, a position she held for 38 years. Through the NCL, whose influence was frequently reported on by the secondary settlements in the Movement (see Handbook, Woods and Kennedy 1911 [1970]), Kelley exposed the horrific conditions in child and sweatshop labor. During its first three decades, the NCL sought regulations to protect in-home workers, promote the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906; champion minimum wage laws for women, provide the evidence used in the Brandeis Brief in Muller v. Oregon which both upheld the ten-hour day for women in 1908 and marked the first time social science data became part of a Supreme Court decision; and advocate for the creation of the federal Children’s Bureau (1912) and for federal restrictions on child labor. The Children’s Bureau under Hull-House alumna Julia Lathrop began a series of policy initiatives and reports showing the need for birth registration, infant mortality statistics, data linking poverty and prenatal care, visiting nurses, public sanitation, certified

The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship  85 milk stations, the education of mothers. The NCL’s work for the improvement of lives of all workers continues to the present time, reporting on their website that they helped lobby for the Consumer Protection Bureau, established at urging of Senator Elizabeth Warren in 2011 and currently being re-staffed by the Biden administration after being sidelined by then-President Trump. Forming Coalitions with African Americans for Justice Work The 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois, in which a White mob, and later White guerilla tactics, lynched two innocent Black men, burned Black businesses and homes and terrorized Black residents for months, clearly shocking White liberals and progressives, and moved settlement activists to demand some action to prevent further events of this type by developing social justice organizations for African Americans. On September 3, 1908, a meeting was held by three settlement residents, Henry Moskovits (Madison House), William Walling (Hull-House), and Mary White Ovington (Greenwich House). Ovington had called the meeting after reading Walling’s powerful article “Race War in the North” which described the Springfield race riot and called for a body of influential citizens, White and Black, to aid African Americans. Ovington, a prominent New York presence who had founded and administered two settlements (Greenpoint and the Lincoln Center) had devoted her career and scholarship to the cause of African American civil rights moved by speeches by Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. She was a friend and colleague of W.E.B. Du Bois, attending his Atlanta University summer conventions, and researched and wrote about employment and housing conditions for African Americans in Manhattan in her best known publication, Half a Man (1911). The group issued a call for a national conference on African American civil rights and persuaded Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of The Nation, to publish it. Sixty people signed the call, and the meetings among them in 1909 and 1910 led to the permanent organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Both Black and White citizens answered “The Call,” including African Americans W.E.B. Du Bois, Archibald Grimké, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Mary Church Terrell, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett; 19 respondents were women, 13 of whom were settlement residents, including Addams, Mary E. Dreier, Kelley, Helen Marot, Mary E. McDowell, Leonora O’Reilly, Ovington, Jane Robbins, Anna Garlin Spencer, and Wald (L. Moore 2013, 481). Settlement women were active participants in a variety of other organizations including the Suffrage Movement, women’s club associations, the National Consumers League, the Women’s Trade Union League, and the Immigrant Protection League. Settlement women built a coalition of these players as supporters for the NAACP—Addams was a powerful player in this network (L. Moore 2013). Ovington and Du Bois would work to build the organization and administration of the NAACP for 47 years, until her retirement. The NAACP today has more than 500,000 members and has been ranked third in importance among citizen voluntary associations, and first among Black civil rights groups (L. Moore 2013).

REFERENCES Addams, Jane. 1881. Cassandra. Essays of Class of 1881, Rockford Seminary, 36–9. “News” Steam Press.

86  Research handbook on intersectionality Addams, Jane. 1893a. “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements,” in Philanthropy and Social Progress, edited by Henry C. Adams, 1–26. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Company. Addams, Jane.1893b. “The Objective Value of a Social Settlement,” in Philanthropy and Social Progress, edited by Henry C. Adams, 27–56. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Company. Addams, Jane. 1895. “The Settlement as a Factor in the Labor Movement,” in Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems of the Social Conditions, edited by Residents of Hull-House, 183–204.New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Company. Addams, Jane. 1902/1907. Democracy and Social Ethics. New York: Macmillan. Addams, Jane. 1910. Twenty Years at Hull-House. New York: Macmillan. Berry, Margaret E. 1986. The Settlement Movement 1886–1986: One Hundred Years on Urban Frontiers. Milwaukee, WI: United Neighborhood Centers of America. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2015. “Definitional Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas,” Annual Review of Sociology 41: 1–20. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2019. Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cooper, Anna Julia. 1913/1998. “The Social Settlement: What It Is and What It Does,” in The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper and Other Important Essays, Papers and Letters, edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, 216–23. Lanham, MD.: Rowman, Littlefield Publishers. Crenshaw, Kimerblé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–67. Crocker, Ruth. 1991. “Review Essay—the Settlements: Social Work, Culture, and Ideology in the Progressive Era,” History of Education Quarterly 31 (2): 253–60. Davis, Allen F. 1967. Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914. New York: Oxford University Press. Deegan, Mary Jo. 2002. Race, Hull-House, and the University of Chicago. Westport, CT: Praeger. Eastman, Crystal 1910. Work-Accidents and the Law—The Pittsburgh Survey, edited by Paul Kellogg. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, Wm. Fell Press. Eastman, Crystal. 1910. “Work-Accidents and Employers’ Liability,” The Survey, September 3. Fernandis, Sarah Collins. 1905. “A Social Settlement in South Washington,” Charities 15: 64–6. Heilbrun, Carolyn. 1988. Writing a Woman’s Life. New York: Norton. Holbrook, Agnes. 1895. “Map Notes and Comments,” in Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems of the Social Conditions, edited by Residents of Hull-House, 3–23. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Company. Joslin, Kathryn. 2004. Jane Addams, a Writer’s Life. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Kingsley, Florence Morse. 1924. The Life of Henry Fowler Durant: Founder of Wellesley College. New York: Century Company. Kogut, Alvin. 1972. “The Settlements and Ethnicity: 1890–1914,” Social Work 17 (3): 22–31. Lasch-Quinn, Elizabeth. 1993. Black Neighbors and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Lengermann, Patricia M. and Gillian Niebrugge. 1989. “New Feminist Definitions of Power,” in Proceedings of the First Annual Women’s Policy Research Conference, 1–6. Washington, DC. Lengermann, Patricia M. and Gillian Niebrugge.1998/2007. The Women Founders: Sociology and Social Theory, 1830–1930. Longgrove, IL: Waveland Press. Lengermann, Patricia M. and Gillian Niebrugge. 2002. “Back to the Future: Settlement Sociology, 1885–1930,” The American Sociologist 33: 5–15. Lengermann, Patricia M. and Gillian Niebrugge. 2007. “Thrice-Told: Narratives of Sociology’s Relation to Social Work,” in Sociology in America, edited by Craig Calhoun, 63–114. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lengermann, Patricia M. and Gillian Niebrugge. 2014. “The Explanatory Power of Ethics: The Sociology of Jane Addams,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity: Formulating a Field of Study, edited by Vincent Jeffries, 99–123. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship  87 Lengermann, Patricia M. and Gillian Niebrugge. 2018. “Settlement Sociology,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Social Problems, edited by A. Javier Treviño, 185–202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lengermann, Patricia M. and Gillian Niebrugge. 2022. “Jane Addams’s Use of Story in Sociological Research: ‘As No One But a Neighbor Can See’,” in Oxford Handbook of Jane Addams, edited by. Patricia M. Shields, Maurice Hamington, and Joseph Soeters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lissak, Rivka. 1989. Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890–1919. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. McCabe, Lida Rose. 1893. The American Girl at College. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company. Moore, Dorothea. 1897/1990. “A Day at Hull-House,” in 100 Years at Hull-House, edited by Mary Lynn McCree Bryan and Allen F. Davis, 42–9. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Moore, Linda S. 2013. “Women and the Emergence of the NAACP,” Journal of Social Work Education 49 (3): 476–89. Ovington, Mary White. 1911. Half a Man. New York: Longmans, Greene and Co. Polacheck, Hilda Satt. 1989. I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl, edited by Dena Polacheck Epstein. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Reinders, Robert C. 1982. “Toynbee Hall and the American Settlement Movement,” Social Service Review 56 (1): 39–54. Romero, Mary. 2018. Introducing Intersectionality. Medford, MA: Polity Press. Scudder, Vida. 1890. The Relation of College Women to Social Need—a Paper presented to the Association of Collegiate Alumna, October 24, fS9o. https://​babel​.hathitrust​.org/​cgi/​pt​?id​=​wu​ .89099294480​&​view​=​1up​&​format​=​plaintext​&​seq​=​16​&​skin​=​20 (accessed April 24, 2022). Simkhovitch, Mary K. 1938. Neighborhood: My Story of Greenwich House. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. Weber, Max. 1947. The Theory of Social and Economic Organizations, edited with Introduction by Talcott Parsons, translated by A.M. Henderson. New York: The Free Press. Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 1970. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, edited by Alfreda M. Duster. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Williams, Fannie Barrier. 1904. “The Frederick Douglass Centre: A Question of Social Betterment and Not of Social Inequality,” Voice of the Negro 1 (12): 601–4. Williams, Fannie Barrier. 1906. “The Frederick Douglass Center [The Institutional Foundation],” The Southern Workman 35: 334–6. Williams, Joyce and Vicky MacLean. 2016. Settlement Sociology in the Progressive Years: Faith, Science, and Reform. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Woods, Robert A. 1893/1923. “Universities as Laboratories in Social Science,” in The Neighborhood in Nation-Building: The Running Comment of Thirty Years at the South End House, pp. 34–44 Cambridge, MA. The Riverside Press. Woods, Robert A. and Albert J. Kennedy, eds. 1911/1970. Handbook of Settlements. New York: Arno Press. Woods, Robert A. and Albert J. Kennedy. 1922/1990. The Settlement Horizons. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

PART II INTERSECTIONAL RESEARCH IN INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES

Section IIa

Critical interdisciplinary studies

6. Intersectionality as an ethical commitment Sophie Withaeckx

INTRODUCTION Intersectionality has been tremendously important for the study of violence against women of color. It has been indispensable in making visible the experiences of marginalized communities, while also warning about the pernicious effects of hypervisibility and stereotyping. It has demonstrated the need for understanding how differentiating factors like gender, “race,” class, sexuality, citizenship status and disability collide in cases of violence and how these factors form inequalities and structural barriers. Furthermore, it has inspired scholars to refine their theories and tools when studying violence and has helped them to challenge the boundaries between academy and activism (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 58; 2005; Cullen, Dawson, Price, & Rowlands, 2020; Richie, 1985). Intersectionality has been pivotal in denouncing the erasures affecting women of color, when policy development, activism and representational practices privilege the single-axis framework and neglect how the experiences of marginalized groups take shape at the intersection of multiple systems of discrimination. While adopting an intersectional lens in research on gender-based violence seems the right thing to do for any researcher studying this topic, intersectionality itself has become the topic of heated debates among feminist scholars. Numerous scholars have voiced their concerns about the co-optation, depoliticization and “whitening” of intersectionality in the academy and call for the recognition of intersectionality’s roots in Black feminist thought and women of color’s intellectual work. Others see intersectionality’s open-endedness as an opportunity to flexibly apply it to a variety of social positions and identities, including those that are privileged. With both sides firmly entrenched, it seems difficult to find common ground. In this contribution, I examine how research on violence against women can inform our thinking about intersectionality, and propose to approach intersectionality as an ethical commitment, centralizing the doing and key values that we, as a feminist scholarly community, delineate as important. The issue of violence, and the way it disproportionately affects multiply marginalized communities, presents an ethical challenge to feminist scholars committed to social justice. Indeed, as a theory and critical praxis, intersectionality has historically been developed in narrow conjunction with the study of violence affecting women of color. Therefore, I argue that such studies on violence can inform us about the norms and values that have shaped intersectionality, and that these cannot be brushed aside by researchers committed to social justice. Instead, thinking about intersectionality in terms of values and normative commitments can support us in determining how and why boundaries should be imposed upon interpretations and understandings of intersectionality. In the next section of this chapter I discuss the scholarly debates that have erupted around intersectionality. Intersectionality’s “success” and its traveling to a variety of scholarly contexts have also generated anxieties, mostly about the place accorded to Black women and women of color in intersectionality’s many adaptations, and have elicited calls to restore intersectionality to its “proper” meaning and origins. In the following section I suggest that 90

Intersectionality as an ethical commitment  91 an important, but yet underdeveloped ingredient in these debates is an understanding of intersectionality as an ethical commitment. An understanding of intersectionality in terms of ethics has yet not been fully pronounced. Nevertheless, values and commitments have been central in intersectional approaches from the beginning. Approaching intersectionality not merely as a theoretical tool but as a moral attitude may help to articulate what it is that we want intersectionality to do, and what commitments researchers take on when they embark on research projects they call “intersectional.” I end the chapter by discussing some examples of contemporary research on violence against women that demonstrate the urgency of this matter and the enduring importance of committing to social justice as a central and indispensable value of intersectionality.

INTERSECTIONALITY: A MATTER OF CHOOSING SIDES? Intersectionality’s institutionalization and its enthusiast uptake in feminist scholarship and activism has been accompanied with a host of contentious debates – referred to as “intersectionality wars” by Jennifer Nash – discussing issues of ownership, definition, application, and denouncing “improper circulations and devaluations” (Nash, 2018, p. 37). Two positions can be distinguished: one that defends intersectionality’s open-endedness and its applicability to a variety of social groups – no matter how marginalized or privileged they are – and a second position that expresses concerns with the perceived de-politicization of intersectionality and its separation from its roots in Black feminist thought. When Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in her landmark publications “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (Crenshaw, 1989) and “Mapping the Margins” (Crenshaw, 1991), her main concerns were the invisibility of women of color, their erasure in feminist and antiracist activism, the marginalization of the specific forms of discrimination that affected them but remained unrecognized. Her explicit aim then was to “demarginalize” Black women, to alert scholarship, policy-making and activism to the importance of fully including Black women, in all their complexity, as a precondition for fulfilled social justice. Crenshaw thereby aligned herself in a long-standing tradition of Black women’s scholarship developing the same aims (Collins, 2000). She did not present intersectionality as a “grand” totalizing theory (Crenshaw, 2011, p. 232) but as a theoretical lens with which to examine how women of color became invisible in single-axis frameworks. This refusal to narrowly delineate intersectionality makes it understood in multiple ways: as a political and methodological tool, a theory, a heuristic device or all at once (Lewis, 2013, p. 883). For numerous scholars, this ”multiplicity” has been experienced as “confusing,” and some set out to resolve the absences, contradictions and incoherencies they spotted by exposing “the assumptions that underpin intersectionality” (Nash, 2008, p. 4), developing it methodologically or theoretically (McCall, 2005). A first position in the debate therefore holds that intersectionality’s “open-endedness” implies that it does not need to be tied to a particular social group or topic but that it can be used to study a variety of social positions and identities. For Kathy Davis (2008), this open-endedness is precisely the reason for intersectionality’s tremendous success in feminist circles: intersectionality responded to the need among feminist scholars to engage with “difference.” At the same time, it succeeded in averting the specter of divisiveness that discussions on “difference” can invoke in feminism by offering a unifying “platform for feminist theory

92  Research handbook on intersectionality as a shared enterprise” in which “any social practice, any individual or group experience, any structural arrangement, and any cultural configuration can become a topic of analysis” (Davis, 2008, p. 72). Intersectionality therefore does not have to be solely about Black women or women of color, and does not necessarily need to “put race and racism on the agenda” (Davis, 2020, p. 121). Indeed, for some scholars, the excessive focus on women of color is itself problematic. For Puar, an exclusive focus on women of color produces those women as Others “who must invariably be shown to be resistant, subversive, or articulating a grievance” (Puar, 2012, p. 52) and Nash notes how intersectionality “has come to equate black women’s lived experiences with marginalization,” thereby neglecting “the heterogeneity of ‘black woman’ as a category” (Nash, 2011, p. 447). They argue that an expanded version of intersectionality, detached from its original application to women of color’s experiences, would make it a more versatile tool, able to offer a broad framework for analysing the multiplicities of all identities and configurations of power (Davis, 2020, p. 119) and inclusive of all types of positionalities, both disadvantaged and privileged. Calls to return to intersectionality’s “true” meaning and origins – an attitude described by Nash as “originalism” (Nash, 2016) – can become perceived as an inappropriate protectionism, stifling the generative force of criticism and preventing the “natural” reworkings of theories through common scholarly discussions and debates. The applicability to a variety of social contexts and groups can be seen as a welcome example of how theory formulated “in the margins” can successfully move to the center (Lewis, 2013, p. 871). However, there are also concerns with how far intersectionality can be stretched, before it loses all of its distinctiveness and, paradoxically, reproduces the same kinds of erasures of women of color’s voices that intersectionality explicitly aimed to denounce (Jibrin & Salem, 2015). The other position in the debate therefore expresses a number of concerns about how the interpretation of intersectionality has stretched in feminist scholarship (Jibrin & Salem, 2015) to the extent that its original aims and content are not recognizable anymore. Firstly, there are concerns that intersectionality has been detached from its roots in women of color’s activist and theoretical work, resulting in the performance of exactly those kinds of erasures that intersectionality aimed to address. Efforts to redefine intersectionality as detachable from its Black feminist origins, and to provide “improved” versions that do not need analyses of racism, are seen as an expression of an unwillingness or even inability, particularly among feminist scholars, to accept the role of racism in shaping their own societies and positionality (Tomlinson, 2013, p. 257). This results in the re-marginalization of women of color, and the deployment of their theories to centralize once again white women’s experiences, under the guise of “universalization” (Alexander-Floyd, 2012, p. 7; Jordan-Zachery, 2013, p. 102). A second concern relates to the epistemological project that is ascribed to intersectionality and which make intersectionality incompatible with some methodological stances. For Alexander-Floyd, intersectionality presented “implicit and explicit epistemological challenges” to dominant ways of doing research (Alexander-Floyd, 2012, p. 14). Black feminist scholarship has traditionally emphasized the importance of experience and the notions of “subjugated knowledge” and “standpoint theory.” Such a stance revalued the knowledge produced by oppressed groups, traditionally denied the status of “real” knowledge in dominant perspectives, but is “less likely than the specialized knowledge produced by dominant groups to deny the connection between ideas and the vested interests of their creators” (Collins, 1990, p. 234). Efforts to apply intersectionality in positivist, quantitative research can then be seen as an attempt to conform “intersectionality to the positivist dictates of traditional disciplines”’ (Alexander-Floyd, 2012, p. 14). Moreover, statements that declare the incompleteness,

Intersectionality as an ethical commitment  93 open-endedness and ambiguity of intersectionality can be seen as a dismissal of the alternative epistemologies of women of color, as being “naïve or nonempirical” (Alexander-Floyd, 2012, p. 17) or expressing women of color’s inability to formulate “proper” knowledge (Lewis, 2013, p. 886). Lastly, these scholars point to how intersectionality has been depleted of its critical potential in the neoliberal academy. Intersectionality’s enthusiast reception in the academy should be met with suspicion: just as happened with other initially subversive concepts like “diversity” and “decolonization,” intersectionality “has been commodified and colonized for neoliberal regimes” (Bilge, 2013, p. 407). Intersectionality’s institutionalization in the academy has also implied its reification, turning itself into a disciplinary regime and “as the paradigmatic frame through which women’s lives are understood and theorized” (Puar, 2012, p. 52), blocking other possible approaches to examine identity and difference. Its lingering association with critical thought invests it with moral value, allowing scholars to associate themselves with the “right” kind of theory merely by invoking the term. Such “ornamental intersectionality” (Bilge, 2013, p. 408) has become a substitute “for intersectional analysis itself” (Puar, 2012, p. 53). Intersectionality, once defined as a “synergistic relationship between critical analysis and critical praxis” (Collins & Bilge, 2016, p. 49) has been reduced “to an overly contemplative musing” (Bilge, 2013, p. 411), where the production of abstract theoretical reflection about what intersectionality should be like and how it can be improved have replaced the doing of intersectionality. Hence, changing and subverting the social order has slipped from the intersectional agenda, and marginalized groups are once more relegated to the margins and fixed in their position on the peripheries of knowledge production. The debates surrounding intersectionality have not settled yet, and maybe they never will. Both positions in the debate seem firmly entrenched, with one side aiming for definitional closure and an allegiance to intersectionality’s roots in Black feminist thought, while the other side prefers to use intersectionality to inform the study of differences and positionalities in a way that can accommodate a variety of epistemological, methodological, and even political stances. Any scholar claiming to do “intersectional” work seems called upon to “choose sides” and to express allegiance to one final “truth” about intersectionality. These disputes have been compared to a struggle over the “ownership” of intersectionality: Bilge accused “disciplinary feminism” of “laying claims of ownership of intersectionality” (Bilge, 2013, p. 415), while Kathy Davis (2020) accuses feminists who want to reconnect intersectionality with its Black feminist origins of exactly the same. Indeed, neither side seems able to escape the tendency of claiming “ownership” and thereby exercising a form of disciplinary power. While both sides of the debate enumerate arguments and points that merit reflection, my concern with them is that they also divert attention away from the enduring impact of violence and oppression that continue to mark the everyday experiences of marginalized groups. What are researchers to do, when faced with such vigorous debates and critically engaging with the question of whether their research can be “rightfully” qualified as intersectional? In the following section, I suggest that rather than taking sides, what matters in feminist research is to consider the emancipatory aims that have been central to feminism and therefore to privilege what we want our research to do. However, I take as my starting point that any “coherently feminist” project requires “the incorporation of voices of the margins” as a necessary precondition for the general aim to empower all women (Ciurria, 2020, pp. 3–4). Such a stance does require certain guiding principles. In the following section, I argue that intersectionality embodies certain fundamental values that were significantly informed by the study of violence

94  Research handbook on intersectionality against women. Considering intersectionality as an ethical commitment implies that these values are accepted as essential to intersectionality, and have implications for how we do research.

THE PROBLEM OF VIOLENCE Thinking about the ethics of intersectionality has several advantages: it allows us to refocus the debate on the aims and the doing of intersectionality, rather than to dwell in the theoretical and abstract “musings” that Bilge deplored (Bilge, 2013). Formulating an intersectional ethics implies delineating central values, from which normative commitments flow. This would result in the imposition of certain boundaries, preventing intersectionality from becoming a theory about everything, while simultaneously maintaining a certain open-endedness in terms of methods, perspectives and topics to be studied. This re-centers the discussion from one about “ownership” and finding out “the truth” about intersectionality to one about responsibility and accountability (Rice, Harrison, & Friedman, 2019, p. 416). Reconceptualizing intersectionality as an ethical commitment therefore ties it unambiguously to questions about how “we” as a feminist scholarly community want to do “good” and what this implies for the way we do research. In what follows, I present a short discussion of intersectionality’s engagement with violence to extract the main problems that spurred intersectional research, and how this translated into values and commitments which became central to intersectionality. I first start by describing those problems that historically have caused concern for feminist scholars and activists of color, and whose analysis eventually led to the development of intersectional thought. I continue by outlining the main values – social and epistemic justice – driving intersectional scholarship, and how this commits researchers to an ethics of responsibility and accountability. The Problem of Invisibility The development of intersectionality as a theory, a critical praxis, and a lens to analyse how women of color become erased in policy-making has been intricately intertwined with the history of studying and understanding violence against women of color. Early works that have been credited as predecessors of intersectional theorizing were profoundly informed by experiences of violence. Sojourner Truth’s speech itself is a testimony of violence: the violence of slavery and the colonial system, which could represent Black women as “not-women,” as outside the system of gender and hence as “bestial,” not-fully-human (Lugones, 2010, p. 743). The works of 19th-century Afro-American writers and activists, like Maria Stewart and Anna Julia Cooper, also denounced the epistemic violence, the systematic silencing and erasing of Black women’s voices, “the suppression of black women’s ideas and their denial of a narrative life in the historical and cultural record other than as silences or ellipses” (May, 2014, p. 97). Such violence was reproduced in the incipient Western first-wave feminist movement, whose notion of “woman” solely accommodated the experiences of a particular type of “woman”: white, upper-class, cisgender, depicted as “pure” and fragile, and complicit in the exploitation of those women unlike itself. It became reproduced in the identity-based activist movements and policies that emerged in the 1960s, where intragroup differences were ignored, resulting

Intersectionality as an ethical commitment  95 in the elision of those experiences shaped by the simultaneous interaction of multiple systems of discrimination (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1242). Even though violence against women became one of the central issues in the second-wave feminist movement, the issue of domestic violence against women of color remained for a long time unaddressed in academic research. The feminist movement increasingly succeeded in getting violence against women recognized as a matter of urgency and a topic of societal, political and academic interest, which resulted in a burgeoning theorization of previously ignored issues like rape, sexual violence, sexual harassment, domestic violence and marital rape (Brownmiller, 1975; Dworkin, 1981; MacKinnon, 1979). However, this field became quickly dominated by feminists who were mostly white and middle class, and hence a hegemonic understanding of violence against women started to dominate the field, eclipsing other perspectives produced by minoritized women (Rodriguez Martinez, 2011, p. 148). By explaining violence solely in terms of patriarchal oppression and (biological) gender differences, these hegemonic feminist perspectives constructed violence as an expression of universal male oppression, casting (white) women in the position of victims and ignoring other markers of identification that might bear on experiences with violence. Such accounts emphasized the commonality of experiences, thereby failing to address the experiences of women deviating from the implicit white middle-class norm (Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005, p. 41). However, alternative accounts were also around since the 1970s, and could be found in the writings of exactly such “deviating” women: authors like bell hooks (1981), Barbara Smith (Hull et al. 1982), Angela Davis (1981) and Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (1981) pointed to the wider frameworks of racist segregation and oppression, creating multiple layers of violence in which sexism and violence in Black, Chicano and other minority communities should be understood. Subsequent studies on violence against women of color therefore already exhibited the concern with complexity that would become a hallmark of intersectionality. Richie (1985), for example, pointed out the specific barriers she faced when addressing domestic violence in Black communities: domestic violence was understood solely as a corollary of the racist oppression targeting Black men; Black women were exhorted to put up with their men’s violence in order to uphold the harmony of the already threatened Black family; and the notion of the “strong Black woman” was invoked to normalize the idea of Black women as “willing and able to accept beating in support of her man” (Richie, 1985, p. 42). But she also denounced the “simultaneous sexual and racial oppression” faced by Black communities, as well as the raging homophobia within Black communities that erased the contributions of lesbian Black women to the struggle for racial liberation (Richie, 1985, p. 43). Problems of “voice” and invisibility therefore were seen not only to affect minority communities within identity-based movements, but also those members within communities where certain markers of identity (male, heterosexual) became privileged and presented as the only legible experience. Moreover, such analyses pointed out the problem of racist and culturalist representations of women of color in existing scholarship, policy development and activism (Mohanty, 1988). Alternative Epistemologies The invisibilities suffered by women of color victimized by domestic violence provided an insightful lens to see exactly how approaches based on simplified, monolithic notions of identity failed to address the complexity in women of color’s lives. But it was not just that women

96  Research handbook on intersectionality of color’s own voices were needed to provide recognition and analysis of their situation; the inclusion of marginalized voices became one of the main theoretical tenets of intersectionality, and thereby inspired a profound epistemological critique on dominant ways of knowledge production. Intersectionality thereby shared critiques simultaneously formulated from other disciplinary perspectives: notions like “subjugated knowledge” and the need for multiple perspectives were also formulated by (white) feminist, postcolonial and queer theorists, and arose from regions as diverse as the UK, West Africa and the Middle East (Hancock, 2016, p. 31). In these approaches, similar critiques were voiced against dominant ways of doing research and its reliance upon the Cartesian body/mind distinction. On this view, proper knowledge is produced by an assumedly neutral, disembodied researcher – a “God’s eye view” producing “a view from nowhere” pitted against its embodied and particular object of knowledge (Grosfoguel, 2013, p. 75). This “view from nowhere” and its understanding of “objectivity” recommends that researchers disengage from social values and interests (Harding, 2015, p. 1). It has also qualified women and non-Westerners as quintessential objects and not subjects of knowledge, since the embodiment, subjectivity, relationality and irrationality ascribed to them disqualify them from credibility and voice in academic settings (Mbembe, 2016; Mills, 1997; Wynter, 2004). Against such assumptions, intersectionality has denounced the unidimensional view that arises when hegemonic ways of knowledge production remain unchallenged. Studying inequality and power is simply not possible without examining the experiences of those most subjugated and oppressed, since it is only by including their experiences that we can gain a complete understanding of how systems of oppression work. As Romero argues, marginalized groups take the position of the “canary in the coalmine” for the diagnostic function they carry out. They are the first to exhibit difficulties arising from structural problems, and allow us to understand how systems of power and privilege become organized and naturalized (Romero, 2018). The problem of single-axis-frameworks as the basis for feminist and antiracist movement building became more explicitly theorized in the 1970s and 1980s, in the activist and intellectual work of women of color, not only in the US but in a variety of contexts, where other discriminating practices and markers of differentiation – like caste, religion, references to “tradition,” colonial and neocolonial oppression – also become integrated in the analysis (hooks, 1981; Hull, Bell-Scott, & Smith, 1982; Mohanty, 1988; Thiam, 1978). It was Crenshaw’s (1991) article “Mapping the Margins” that explicitly connected an in-depth analysis of violence against women to the notion of intersectionality. In “Mapping the Margins,” Crenshaw analyses violence as a case to demonstrate the insufficiency of approaches that fail to consider how racism and sexism intersect in the lives of women of color affected by violence. Monolithic, single-axis approaches, derived from identity politics, conceptualize one’s identity as a woman or person of color as “an either-or opposition,” thereby relegating the identity of women of color “to a location that resists telling” (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1242). As both antiracist and feminist discourses are shaped to respond to only one or the other of these identity markers (either gender or race), women of color “are marginalized within both” (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1244). She also indicated that race and gender are definitely not the only relevant frameworks to consider when explaining violence against women; her main point was “the need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed” (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1245). In cases describing the plight of women whose immigrant status was dependent upon their abusive husband’s residence status, she emphasized how race and class converge with a host of preexisting vulnerabilities arising from

Intersectionality as an ethical commitment  97 culture, class, language proficiency, to the extent that none of these can be seen as primary and separable from other ones (Crenshaw, 2005). These analyses then informed the important reconceptualization of the notion of “identity” itself. Such observations alerted researchers to the importance of considering such complexities when engaging with the study of violence against women. But they also raise questions about researchers’ responsibility in challenging their own assumptions and taking up responsibility in addressing violence.

COMMITTING TO JUSTICE: IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH ON VIOLENCE Intersectionality’s historical engagement with violence demonstrates how problems of invisibility and erasure of marginalized perspectives led to the challenging of dominant, objectifying epistemologies and of single-axis, reductionist understandings of violence. What intersectionality aimed to do then was make visible such subjugated voices, and re-center their perspectives to denounce systems of oppressions and contribute to emancipatory change and more just societies. What is it then that those researchers commit themselves to when labeling themselves and their research intersectional? Reconceptualizing intersectionality in terms of the ethical commitments and moral imperatives re-centers the discussion from one about “ownership” and finding out “the truth” about intersectionality to one about responsibility and accountability (Rice et al., 2019, p. 416). The concept of commitment is an important one here, as it guides us toward the importance of “doing.” For Ahmed “to make a commitment is to pledge to do something” (Ahmed, 2012, p. 114). It refers to “a state of being bound to a course of action or to another person or persons” (2012, 114). Thinking of intersectionality as a commitment also emphasizes the relationality of intersectionality: it implies a connectivity to others and the validation by others of what we are doing. In what follows, I outline the central values that emerge from intersectional scholarship and discuss how these can be operationalized in research on violence. While I enumerate some core principles and values of intersectionality, it must be clear that it will never be possible to lay out a neat manual prescribing “how to do intersectional research.” Indeed, committing to intersectionality also implies committing to flexibility and open-endedness, and being mindful to not repeat a form of “academic imperialism” by universalizing and imposing on others categories developed in certain locations and by certain communities – whether marginalized or not (Dhawan & Castro Varela, 2016). Every critical and emancipatory theory should be mindful of its politics of location and “be alert to the spatial and temporal coordinates that suffuse all theorizing” (Menon, 2015, 37). Here I illustrate these core values with examples from research on South Asian1 communities in the US and the UK. Despite the burgeoning research on violence against women since the 1970s, these communities remained invisible in research as late as the 1990s, when pioneering researchers like Abraham and Dasgupta in the US and later Gill in the UK developed an interest in them. I draw on their research to illustrate how an intersectional lens can reveal additional and specific vulnerabilities. It also demonstrates how intersectional commitments demand a continuing alertness and adaptability to find those methods and approaches that are most suitable to the particularity of the marginalized communities under study.

98  Research handbook on intersectionality A Commitment to Social Justice What clearly arises from intersectionality’s engagement with the issue of violence against women is the commitment to social justice. With its roots in “social justice research and struggle,” intersectionality can be understood as “an activist project” providing the “analytical tools for framing social justice issues” in order to expose how social exclusion and privileging work in a variety of social positions (Romero, 2018). As Rice et al. formulate it, the defining characteristic of intersectionality lies not in a particular content, methodology or the study of a particular social group but in “its particular purpose: justice” (Rice et al., 2019, p. 415). This commitment for social justice has largely consisted in “making women of color in general, but the intersectionally disadvantaged in particular, a visible and legible part of public discourse with an eye toward getting their policy needs met” (Hancock, 2016, p. 10). As described above, this project for visibility has been applied for a variety of Black women and women of color in Western countries since the 1970s. However, some marginalized groups seemed to grapple with specific conditions compounding such invisibilities and erasures, delaying interventions even more. This has longtime been the case for South Asian immigrant communities in the US. In the 1990s, Abraham noticed that, despite the considerable scholarship on domestic violence in the US, there was a general absence of research on its prevalence among ethnic minorities (Abraham, 2015, p. 93). The long-lasting silence surrounding South Asian communities seemed to arise from specific particularities unique to them. One of these is the myth of the “model minority” attached to South Asian immigrants: they were depicted as “economically successful, hardworking, and family-oriented,” distinguishing them sharply from more negatively perceived minorities like Afro-Americans (Abraham, 2005, p. 430; Sahota, 2016, p. 239).2 Abraham describes how the desire to uphold this image among segments of the Indian community led to the denial of social problems like domestic violence, poverty or substance abuse “as none of these fit into the concept of the model minority” (Abraham, 2005, p. 430). But there were also external factors which colluded in the erasure of South Asian immigrant communities, like researchers’ “unfamiliarity with the culture, the community’s small sized and communication needs” which “discouraged non-South Asian researchers from taking an interest in the group” (Dasgupta, 2000, p. 176). Despite this erasure in policy-making and research, researchers were quick to notice the pivotal importance of community organizations who had been addressing social problems and challenging the model minority myth since the 1980s (Abraham, 2005, p. 430). Motivated both by their exclusion in the mainstream women’s movement and their frustrations with the “model minority myth” (Sahota, 2016, p. 237), activists within these movements became concerned with problems of domestic violence and have considerably contributed to providing “more comprehensive ways of addressing the problem of violence against women” (Abraham, 2000b, p. 6). Their activism has hugely informed theorizing on violence in South Asian communities but was itself also affected by erasures in “organizational or social movement literature” that has neglected their pivotal role (2000b, 6). Committing to social justice then means that researchers should be able to make visible not only the social problems affecting communities, but also the efforts undertaken by the communities themselves to denounce, analyse and address them.

Intersectionality as an ethical commitment  99 Epistemic Justice This focus of understanding as the cornerstone of intersectionality’s social justice project also makes intersectionality into an epistemological practice, undergirded by a particular ontological framework (Hancock, 2016, p. 32). Restoring marginalized groups’ voices and bringing them “from the margin to the center” has been one of the main tenets of feminist and women of color theorizing (hooks, 1984). However, as Hancock notes, intersectionality goes a step further than “a margin-center understanding of power” (Hancock, 2016, p. 58). Merely moving certain identities to the center still leaves intact the assumption that one category of identification – whether race or class or gender – should prevail or may feed into additive approaches, where different forms of discrimination are seen as adding up to each other rather than interacting (Hancock, 2016, p. 61). Intersectionality rejects the idea that categories of identity can co-exist as “disaggregated identities” in favor of an understanding of such identities as always interconnected and mutually constructed. This implies, for example, that no category can take ontological primacy (Hancock, 2016, p. 58) and that systems of discrimination need to be addressed collectively and simultaneously. In research among South Asian communities, a concern with epistemic justice is visible from the way researchers emphasize the need to reconceptualize key concepts that are often invoked to explain violence in these groups. One of these is the notion of “culture” that has served ambiguous purposes. The importance of cultural differences has been singled out as an aspect that should be attended to when addressing violence in communities like the South Asian one. Especially the notion of “honor” has been considered important to explain dynamics of silencing among victims, families and wider communities. Honor and shame are considered important cultural precepts in these communities, resulting in patterns of violence that may be significantly different than those in other communities. Honor refers to a value system that attaches women’s moral and sexual behavior to the social and moral status of her family and community, who can become shamed when women breach the codes of honor. This can occur by “a variety of unacceptable behaviors, such as relationships with persons of different faiths, relationships not sanctioned by the kin network, or pre-marital sex” (Gill, 2006, p. 2). So-called “honor-based violence” (HBV) is motivated by a desire to preserve family or community honor and refers to a variety of forms of violence mostly perpetrated by male relatives against females seen as transgressing codes of honor. The moral obligations related to honor make it into “the glue that binds the victim to obligatory silence” since victims are reluctant to speak out about violence so as not to increase the “stain” of dishonor that their testimonies about violence – and their own “dishonorable” behavior – may provoke (Gill, 2004, p. 474). Downplaying the moral importance attached to honor can have lethal consequences: when victims’ stories are not taken seriously by police or social services, or insights into extended family dynamics are missing, their stories become illegible and they may be sent back to their families, sometimes with fatal consequences. But while the role of culture cannot be underestimated, researchers have also become alerted to tendencies to “culturalize” such experiences of violence by stereotypically representing perpetrators as driven by their patriarchal and backwards “culture” and representing women as passive victims needing to be saved by the “modern,” liberal and assumedly non-sexist Western states in which they found themselves (Abu-Lughod, 2011). Against such essentializing and racist representations, researchers have reconceptualized “culture” and

100  Research handbook on intersectionality notions like “honor” by arguing these should more appropriately be situated in a continuum of forms of violence against women because the aim of such violence is not restoring “honor” but upholding patriarchal oppression (Gill, Begikhani, & Hague, 2012, p. 76). Moreover, they point to the concrete political and socio-economic contexts in which such notions become shaped and transformed in immigrant communities. The phenomenon of forced marriages in the UK, for example, should not be understood as an expression of static traditions. It turned out to be motivated more by restrictive immigration policies that instigated parents to force their children into marriages with relatives abroad (Anitha & Gill, 2009). Such analyses of violence reinsert gender into the analysis and emphasize how sexism is intricately interwoven with patterns of racism and exclusions based on citizenship status, religion and class that equally affect these communities. As Ethics of Responsibility and Accountability Understanding intersectionality as a dialogic and interpretive framework has implications for the way researchers do research and situate themselves in relation to the individuals and communities they study. From her examination of Black feminist thought, Collins (2000) distilled key elements of a distinctive Black feminist epistemology which illustrates well the implications for researchers when the boundaries between subject/object become challenged. A first element is the importance of experiential knowledge and wisdom arising from the everyday know-how to survive. These have proven more useful for Black women’s survival than formal education and serve as the “main criterion for credibility” for those who want to make claims (Collins, 2000, p. 257). A second element is the use of dialogue and the assumption of connectedness rather than separation as “an essential component of the knowledge validation process” (Collins, 2000, p. 260). Knowledge claims are “developed through dialogues with other members of a community” and “connectedness rather than separation is an essential component of the knowledge validation process” (Collins, 2000, p. 260). Thirdly and fourthly, Collins outlines an ethics of caring and of personal accountability. Such an ethic takes personal expressiveness, emotions and empathy as central to the knowledge validation process. Emotions are valued since they express that “a speaker believes in the validity of an argument” and empathy in particular is important for anyone to acquire increased understanding of others’ positions (Collins, 2000, pp. 263–264). Personal accountability implies that people can be held accountable for their knowledge claims and take full responsibility for the ideas they express. On this view, a direct connection is made between individual moral character and the knowledge claims one makes (Collins, 2000, p. 265). Incoherencies between these different levels of character, belief, knowledge claims and actions would also undermine one’s credibility; a view which thus opposes the ideal of the disembodied, disengaged researcher of positivist research traditions. Such principles are also recognizable in the subjugated knowledge cultivated by other marginalized groups. In the feminist ethics of care, attentiveness and responsibility have been outlined as central moral values that should guide our social relationship. Attentiveness refers to the importance of recognizing the needs of those around us and lies at the origin of any meaningful relation of care. Responsibility implies the recognition that something we did or did not do has contributed to a need for care, which we must then assume (Tronto, 1993). A postcolonial feminist ethics adds to that “the explicit recognition of the asymmetries of relationships” as shaped in unequal colonial and postcolonial encounters, and a recognition of

Intersectionality as an ethical commitment  101 such inequalities through attentive listening and the cultivation of trust and empathy (Mooten, 2014, p. 1). From the research literature on violence against women in South Asian communities, such features are recognizable in researchers’ will to combine different roles when embarking on research because they are not just distant observers but actively team up with community associations and activists to make research into a common and shared endeavor. Abraham describes how throughout her career, she has combined the roles of scholar, public speaker, domestic violence expert and teacher (Abraham, 2015, p. 95). This combination of writing, speaking publicly, teaching, facilitating workshops, testifying in courts and consulting has allowed her to not only contribute to the discourse on domestic violence, but also to invest concretely in the struggle to end violence against women. Such an active stance also requires attention to appropriate research methods. While more positivist and objectifying methods of data collection are not always completely ruled out by intersectional researchers, there is a marked preference for qualitative research methods since they are deemed more appropriate to capture the variety and intensity of experiences. Methods like in-depth interviews, focus groups and participant observation are more in line with the interpretive and dialogic epistemological framework that intersectionality fosters. Information gathered in this way “is not assumed to be independent of the time, place, and people in that site” but addresses specific situations “instead of generalizing across cases and contexts” (Abraham & Purkayastha, 2012, p. 126). Moreover, a dialogic method implies that the research situation becomes “an arena for dialogue and conversation” (Begikhani, Gill, & Hague, 2012, p. 80). In such a situation, the interviewee is not merely supplying data for the disembodied interviewer to analyse: both parties contribute to the process of constructing meaning, and both can “bring their own feelings, personality, interests, and experiences to the interview situation” (Gill et al., 2012, p. 79). For Abraham and Purkayastha, action-oriented research has proven the most suitable approach for researchers who aim to “challenge traditional restrictions on knowledge construction, and bridge research and activism” (Abraham & Purkayastha, 2012, p. 125). Action-oriented research encompasses a variety of research approaches3 that have in common the will to engage in collaborative community building and aim to bring about social transformation. Abraham’s pioneering research has not only revealed the pivotal role of South Asian Women’s Associations (SAWOs) in the US in addressing marital violence, but also how indispensable it is for researchers to work with such partners when faced with persistent dynamics of silencing (Abraham, 2000b). Another pioneering researcher, Shamita Das Dasgupta, being herself the cofounder of the SAWO Manavi, has developed her research while also being an insider to such movements and can thus proudly describe herself as “a participant/observer of the growing advocacy movement and a chronicler of it within the South Asian community” (Dasgupta, 2000, p. 173). The sensitivity of the topic and the silence surrounding it can make the process of data collection particularly difficult (Abraham, 2000a, p. 223). Building relationships of trust, both with associations supporting victims and victims themselves, is therefore indispensable for researchers, but requires patience, investments in terms of time and emotional commitment, and often more long-standing activist engagement to express the values of responsibility and take-up care implied by intersectional ethics. Abraham concludes that for her “as a sociologist, it is important to talk the talk and walk the walk!” (Abraham, 2015, p. 97). For any researcher committed to intersectionality, this is indeed an exhortation

102  Research handbook on intersectionality that should be taken to heart and expresses precisely the body of values and normative engagements encapsulated by intersectionality.

CONCLUSION: THE ENDURING URGENCY OF INTERSECTIONALITY In this chapter, I have examined how the issue on violence against women has been fundamental for the development of intersectionality. I have traced the heated scholarly debates surrounding intersectionality in which two positions have become pitted against each other: one favoring intersectionality’s application to a variety of social groups, whether marginalized or privileged, regardless of intersectionality’s roots in women of color’s theorizing; the other deploring the perceived de-politicization of intersectionality and prioritizing Black women and women of color as intersectionality’s privileged subjects. Rather than investing in fruitless debates about who “owns” intersectionality, I have proposed to approach intersectionality as an ethical commitment, centralizing the doing and key values that we, as a feminist scholarly community, delineate as important. The issue of violence, and the way it disproportionately affects multiply marginalized communities, continues to present ethical challenges to feminist scholars who are, by definition, committed to social and epistemic justice and the realization of a more just society. These commitments remind us of the responsibilities we as researchers have. Moreover, if we take seriously the essential interpretive and dialogic character of intersectional knowledge production, this means that we cannot just brush aside these values. Instead, thinking about intersectionality in terms of values and normative commitments can support us in determining how and why boundaries should be imposed upon interpretations and understandings of intersectionality. We might indeed concede that intersectionality’s open-endedness can open avenues for a broad application, divorced from its roots in Black and women of color’s feminist thought. But our commitment to justice and the urgency of the social problems affecting marginalized communities today do justify a more restricted understanding of intersectionality. To remind us of this urgency, we might just consult some contemporary intersectional research publications on violence against women as the problems outlined in such publications clearly indicate which problems (still) occur, what the kind of values still associated with intersectionality are and what kinds of normative commitments can be deduced from that.4 From a short review of 25 recent publications, a first thing I noticed is that all display the same sense of urgency that Crenshaw voiced in “Mapping the Margins.” Leung and Williams remark how “[t]hirty years after Crenshaw (1989) first introduced the concept of intersectionality, the world discovered it still had a lot more to learn” (Leung & Williams, 2019, p. 367). Another publication deplores how “despite years of evidence upon which to assess violence against women, we found that dominant frames continue to homogenize women’s experiences and embrace the centrality of law enforcement in protecting survivors, with only superficial consideration of the effects of intersecting forms of marginalization” (Singh & Bullock, 2020, p. 352). Without exception, the studies under consideration describe how laws, service provision and intervention are still homogenizing, modeled upon the experiences of privileged groups and “idealized” victims, while posing as “neutral or even ‘victim-friendly’ policies and procedures” (Durfee, 2021, p. 640). Multiply marginalized groups continue to “face additional issues and pressures that compound their risks of DV [domestic violence]” (Day & Gill, 2020,

Intersectionality as an ethical commitment  103 p. 831). McCauley et al. (2019, p. 1916) have to conclude that “[w]e have not yet achieved justice for sexual violence survivors, particularly for women of color and members of other marginalized communities.” Secondly, the intersectional lens deployed by contemporary researchers reveals new kinds of vulnerabilities: while the marginalization of women of color remains constant (Cantalupo, 2019; Waller, Harris, & Quinn, 2021), intersectionality has allowed researchers to identify other groups exhibiting similar vulnerabilities, like transgender and gender non-conforming groups (TGNC), particularly of color (Lippy, Jumarali, Nnawulezi, Williams, & Burk, 2020), indigenous communities (Fotheringham, Wells, & Goulet, 2021), transnationally married women (Anitha, 2019), undocumented immigrants (Day & Gill, 2020), older people and people with disabilities (Cullen et al., 2020). The increased attention given by researchers to such groups obviously results from a more refined application of the intersectional lens, which gives due regard to those “differences that matter in a given situation” (Rice et al., 2019, p. 416) and from a heightened awareness concerning the vulnerability of sexual minorities and TGNC communities. But it obviously also arises from the specific contemporary socio-political contexts we find ourselves in. Donley and Johnson (2021) aptly point out the pernicious impact of two current pandemics, “white supremacist racism and COVID-19” which “affect Black, indigenous and communities of color more negatively than others in a variety of ways” (Donley & Johnson, 2021, p. 1). Moreover, both sides of the Atlantic have seen a rise in outwardly racist immigration policies and the increasing criminalization and harsh treatment of undocumented immigrants (Day & Gill, 2020, p. 831). Thirdly, it is remarkable how none of the studies report real difficulties in “doing” intersectionality or struggle with the ambiguities that are reported elsewhere as potential weaknesses. All studies remain remarkably close to Crenshaw’s formulation of intersectionality, refer to her work to explain their understanding of intersectionality, and while some do present some outlines for operationalizing intersectional analysis, most seem able to apply intersectionality in a straightforward way. If anything, intersectionality seems not to have lost its potential to detect and critically interrogate the “one-size-fits-all” approaches that still seem widely applied in policy and practice. The need to return and recycle the basic tenets of intersectionality, the importance of centralizing the experiences of marginalized communities, the self-evidence with which these researchers return to the “basics” of intersectionality, seem therefore not an expression of some misplaced “originalism.” It rather testifies of a world that seems unwilling to “hear” intersectionality’s message, of societies which tend to render intersectionality unrecognizable, unhearable and illogical (May, 2014, p. 105). In terms of values and normative commitments, such studies express a strong concern with the value of social justice and authors often express the hope that their work can provide an occasion for learning and will contribute to change. For example, Durfee expresses “hope of finding better solutions and support services for survivors” (Durfee, 2021, p. 659), Day and Gill hope to contribute to the establishment of “an intersectional approach to safety that offers genuine empowerment to end all forms of oppression and violence against all survivors” (Day & Gill, 2020, p. 847). But many contributions express a sense that our societies and services have failed those most vulnerable to violence. Values like anti-oppression, self-reflection, transformative and restorative justice, accountability and healing are mentioned as guiding these researchers in their efforts (Kulkarni, 2021; Lippy et al., 2020; McCauley et al., 2019). Intersectionality’s appeal lies in its openness and flexibility and can in an ideal world be used as a flexible tool, open for all to use, applicable to a variety of social groups. In theory,

104  Research handbook on intersectionality intersectionality does not have to be about Black women or women of color only. It should be about “the differences that matter.” But given the state of the world today, many social issues, like violence, will inevitably be marked by race and racism, as the “color line” is as relevant as ever. For the Black women and the women of color that were at the center of initial intersectional theorizing, violence and oppression are still intrinsic parts of their everyday lived experiences and have even become exacerbated. Moreover, contemporary intersectional scholarship has identified new kinds of vulnerabilities and groups that continue to fall through the cracks of dominant policy-making and redress measures. This cyclical nature of structural violence reminds us that returning to the origin of intersectionality is not merely a matter of choosing sides in a scholarly debate, but a matter of life and death for individuals and communities that continue to live reinvigorated exclusions and oppression. In such a state of urgency, an ethical understanding of intersectionality requires us to commit ourselves to prioritize marginalized communities in our research, and to take on full responsibility and accountability for our own contributions to a socially and epistemically just world.

NOTES 1. The label South Asian is generally used to refer to “countries found within the ‘Indian subcontinent,’ including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives” (Sahota, 2016, p. 231). 2. A first wave of South Asian immigration occurred in the 1800s, mainly from colonized India. A second wave of South Asian immigration to the US started in the 1960s and consisted initially of highly qualified individuals, who were seen as an asset to the economy. Despite an increasing diversification and heterogeneity in consecutive immigration movements, the model minority myth remained persistently attached to South Asians and a broader group of Asian Americans (Dasgupta 2000). Although it is also accompanied by more negative stereotypical tropes, like that of the “yellow peril,” it remains “the most influential and prevalent stereotype for Asian Americans” (Kawai, 2005, p. 109). 3. Abraham and Purkayastha mention descriptions like “action research, action-oriented research, community-based participatory research, collaborative action research, feminist participatory research, feminist action research, and some forms of public sociology” (Abraham and Purkayastha 2012, 125). 4. For this short review, I drew on recent academic research publications on violence against women from an intersectional perspective, published between January 2019 and May 2021. I used the keywords “intersectionality – violence against women – ethics” in searches on Google Scholar. I excluded articles that did not use or refer to empirical research. The aim was not to provide a representative and exhaustive overview of such studies, but to inquire how intersectionality was understood by these researchers, which topics they addressed and which kinds of values were associated with intersectionality. The final sample was composed of 25 articles.

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7. Disability and rural poverty in the global South Shaun Grech

INTRODUCTION It is estimated that 80 per cent of the over 1 billion disabled people around the globe are in the global South alone, disproportionately living in rural areas and in poverty. Disabled people are far from a minority and numbers continue to rise, especially in the global South, because of poverty and deprivation, inequality, wars, and conflict, forced migration, increases in chronic diseases, and climate change among other reasons (WHO and World Bank 2011). Over the past two decades we have seen the slow yet consistent establishment of linkages between disability and poverty, which in turn serves arguments for the need to include disability in international development. Often framed as a mutually reinforcing cycle, the central tenet is simple. Life in poverty increases the vulnerability to impairment, while disability leads to or intensifies poverty (see e.g., Groce et al. 2011; Palmer 2011). The resulting poverty in most instances is said to be multidimensional (Mitra 2018), that is, it traverses multiple areas, and disabled people are, as a result, among the poorest of the poor. The depiction of the relationship as a cycle emphasizes a view of the connection as a double bind, out of which it is difficult to climb without concerted and targeted attention and intervention. In particular, it served well the motives of those lobbying to find a place for disability in the development agenda and programming. Similar to patterns within the feminist development movement decades ago, discourse among international and national non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and even donors began to step up, calling for so-called “disability mainstreaming” as well as “disability targeting”, to ensure that disability is not only included in all dimensions of development, but also that disability-specific needs are addressed through targeted efforts (for example specialized health care and rehabilitation) (Miller and Albert 2005; NORAD 2012) alongside disaggregated disability data to inform policy (Pettinicchio and Maroto 2021). This formed part of a strategy called “twin-tracking” (DFID 2000). More recently, discourse evolved that called for Disability Inclusive Development (DID), defined as a process whereby: all stages of development processes are inclusive of and accessible to persons with disabilities. It requires that all persons be afforded equal access to education, health care services, work and employment, and social protection, among others. (UN 2017, 3)

However, despite these positive changes, the fact is that disability remains relatively marginalized in development policy, research, and practice (Niewohner et al. 2019). Indeed, development studies still struggle to grapple with disability within core content, instead it is often medicalized and/or pathologized and relegated to global health and rehabilitation. Intersectional areas, including those connecting gender, race, and disability, are sparsely addressed within international development, highlighting a tremendous gap in policy as well as practice (Munsaka 2014).

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Disability and rural poverty in the global South  109 More concretely, there remains a dearth of empirical research into the relationship between disability and poverty in the global South (Grech 2015a; Groce et al. 2011). Data remains scarce, including that drawn from censuses or surveys; moreover, data that is collected is often unreliable, because methods have not been standardized and/or because methods themselves may not be contextually adapted and responsive to local circumstances (Mitra et al. 2011b; Pettinicchio and Maroto 2021). Qualitative research is lacking, notably research looking into the dynamics operating within the relationship between disability and poverty. Indeed, while there is a growing body of studies into individual areas such as health, livelihoods, or education among disabled people in the global South, there is far less research addressing how barriers interact, operate, and shift within the context of this disability and poverty relationship, and how they shift it. There is also sparse intersectional research engaging with this relationship, for example, looking into other key thematic areas such as childhood, gender, race and indigeneity, legal status and forced migration. These are complex and critical relationships that deserve research into intersections that complicate and/or shift indigenous disabled people’s or disabled refugees’ lives through space and over time. This is hardly surprising given that theoretical and critical work linger far behind, which means that this relationship lacks epistemological work, including on the complex intersectional dimensions traversing history, power, inequality, and (geo)politics in multidimensional, dynamic, and heterogeneous lives, spaces, and places. Overall, one is frequently left with research that it is siloed, simplistic, and generalizing – too often monodisciplinary and disability-specific, while complex interacting areas are rarely explored with theoretical rigour. In this chapter, I respond to some of these concerns, providing a critical yet admittedly very partial analysis of this relationship, to address two key areas prioritized in this book, that is, issues that arise as disability and poverty intersect epistemologically, and the implications for intersectional methodologies.

FROM HISTORY TO GEOPOLITICS: ON POWER Intersectional analyses are typically preoccupied by and interrogate the structures and systems that create and perpetuate inequality: class, racism, ableism, and/or gender or poverty-based discrimination and oppression; and interrogate how these are interconnected (Winker and Degele 2011). These structures and systems (discursive or material), though, just like poverty, have strong historical foundations. Indeed, much of the poverty experienced in the global South did not happen overnight and the geopolitical asymmetries we witness today are established and propagated by centuries of colonial pillaging, violence, and exploitation, perpetually re-enacted in the current period of coloniality (Grech 2015b; Mignolo 2011). From racist discourse and constructions of the racialized other, to concentration of wealth and land ownership, gendered relationships, dramatic labour exploitation (e.g., sweatshops or mines), abuse, to institutionalized violence and the neoliberal globalizing metanarrative, colonialism provided the material and ontological foundations, including the perimeters of the metropole and the periphery that persist today. This has implications for intersectional research intent on historicizing and framing the disability and poverty relationship and engaging with and probing power dynamics and differentials in specific contexts. Research on disability and poverty in the global South cannot possibly bypass the colonial encounter since colonialism is perhaps the only shared experience

110  Research handbook on intersectionality within the hugely diverse and heterogeneous Southern space. Colonialism had not only material consequences, but also epistemological and ontological. Colonial power defined what is considered “legitimate” knowledge, where this resides and emanates from. It imposed tools and institutions that perpetually framed Other knowledge as illegitimate, or inferior. Much of the literature and discourse on disability and poverty in the global South, including methodological practice and poverty reduction that is considered legitimate and authoritative, emanates from the global North. Academic or knowledge imperialism also fuels and maintains academic dependency in the global South (Ajani 2020). Intersectional research questions, contests and shifts such binaries, including in what constitutes “real” knowledge and where it resides. Intersectionality supports alliances of resistance while promoting alertness to and valuation of complexities and differences. Stinson (2018, 1) articulated this process succinctly: An intersectional analysis can help researchers to build common ground between Indigenous and Western worldviews, by examining how power works on both sides. This facilitates connections across difference, and opportunities for building coalitions of resistance. An intersectional perspective can also help us to link different worldviews without erasing differences between them, because it upholds the complexity and specificity of each.

Understanding how poverty shifts disability requires an informed understanding of how poverty is created, sustained, and perpetuated, by whom and how, and that, in turn, necessitates an in-depth contextualized and historical analysis in intersectional research. Understanding why certain groups of disabled people such as indigenous people confront particularly intense barriers of oppression and disablement requires a detailed historical analysis of indigeneity, colonialism, and geopolitics within specific contexts (Soldatic and Gilroy 2018). It pushes researchers to engage with how such populations came to be Othered, even within their own countries and regions, and how these power differentials are maintained. Colonialism framed the Southern subject and space as Other and positioned them as inferior and sites of intervention, in need of “development”. Colonialism was not only the start of global capitalism as we know it, but also laid the foundations for what would become the industry of international development (Escobar 1995). Disability and development projects, such as those with a poverty reduction objective, stem from international organizations and donors based in the global North. Thus, they set the agenda, process, and conditionalities (Bezzina 2019). An intersectional analysis of disability and poverty, therefore, needs to contend with and probe the power embedded within poverty reduction strategies and measures crafted by a development sector, which many argue (e.g., see for example Langan 2018) is neocolonizing. Even more basically, “development”, amid geopolitical asymmetries, can be a major source of poverty as well as impairment, for example, through exploitative and even perilous labour (e.g., with mining companies), environmental degradation, discriminatory agricultural trade laws, or economic activities causing environmental pollution (Soldatic and Grech, 2022). In brief, an intersectional analysis needs to contend with multiple axes of power within which disability and poverty are situated and unveil multiple interactions including the sites of intervention.

Disability and rural poverty in the global South  111

GROUNDED UNDERSTANDING OF POVERTY Research on disability and poverty, including intersectional research such as that on disability and gender within specific countries, too often takes poverty as a given. In fact, disproportionate levels of poverty in the global South and the impacts on disabled people is what drives much of this research in the first place. However, this research rarely conceptualizes poverty or lays out how it can be understood. More importantly, as theorists and practitioners reference poverty as a source of impairment or hardship for disabled people, poverty is often generalized and simplified; rarely understood within context. The result is that the “condition” of disabled people or disabled indigenous people, for example, is treated in isolation, epistemologically and practically. The point here is very simple. No space of poverty is like any other. Poverty surrounds and co-exists with disability. In context, disability is framed and constructed through a shared poverty, with the implication that we cannot possibly understand disability without first understanding what life in what I termed “spaces of poverty” might mean: (dynamic) spaces that are as material as they are discursive and ontological … critical in understanding how disability is constructed and lived across space and time, but always constitutive of and constituted within/through the poverty space. (Grech 2014, 53–4)

Indeed, many of the barriers which are shared by poor people in rural areas become insurmountable obstacles when faced by specific impairments. As these axes meet and bind, disabled people confront complex difficulties traversing personal, social, political, economic, cultural, and ideological spheres. Basically, we need an in-depth understanding of what life in poverty is like for everyone (irrespective of dis/ability) as the epistemological starting point, because even the meaning of disability changes with these dynamic forces. It is also critical to not address disability in decontextualized isolation, which may lead to problematic assertions and generalizations as well as simplistic and possibly harmful “solutions”. Indeed, it is far too common to see disability research being done by researchers with absolutely no knowledge of livelihoods, the agricultural cycle, cultural and cosmological dimensions, political systems, and what life in poverty in specific areas looks like, and more importantly, how life is lived and survived by everyone. Each space of poverty is different from others. However, it is possible to identify some tentative dimensions, which are perhaps more common in rural areas. Common dimensions need to be understood in an intersectional analysis, including interdisciplinary engagements (e.g., rural development, agricultural economics, global health, etc.) if researchers are to begin comprehending the complex and interacting barriers faced by disabled people. These may include: ● Remoteness and isolation from main thoroughfares and key services such as health care and education. ● Poor infrastructure and erratic and costly transportation. ● Low levels of economic assets and few or no savings. ● Fragmented livelihoods, the bulk of which is in the informal sector: informal labour means that workers are not registered and hence do not pay taxes and contributions, with the implication that they have no rights, entitlements, or benefits such as a pension in the case of an accident at work.

112  Research handbook on intersectionality ● Dependence on agriculture to work and pressure to grow a portion of the food basket to reduce the cost of food overall as a portion of general outlays. ● Malnutrition and/or undernutrition. ● Dependence on natural resources and vulnerability to natural disasters. ● The bulk of household expenses are devoted to covering the food basket and merely surviving. ● Poor sanitation. ● No access to social protection. ● Limited or no health care, especially for those living in more isolated areas, notably specialized health care. ● Social and political exclusion and even discrimination. These aspects, despite their partiality, highlight how the meaning of disability and how it is experienced is constructed and indeed changes within context, and how understanding the spaces of poverty within specific communities may lead to understanding how disability interacts with and is shaped by poverty, as opposed to engaging with disability or intersectional relationships (e.g., disability and ethnicity) in isolation. As an example, it is very difficult to understand how disability impacts poverty for people located in areas vulnerable to natural hazards, without carefully understanding the natural and environmental dimensions, impacts of climate change, and how other poverty dimensions, like poor infrastructure and political exclusion, affect accessibility, including evacuation routes and shelters, and hence survival. In the following subsections, I illustrate a small number of areas where disability impacts and shifts poverty within these spaces of poverty. To be clear, there are many interacting routes of impoverishment (Grech 2015a). Nevertheless, they serve as examples of barriers to understanding of disability and what it means to live in different spaces of poverty. Access to Health Care Studies demonstrate that health care needs of disabled people are higher than for the general population, including specialized health care and rehabilitation, surgery, and medication and assistive devices (Hashemi et al. 2017). Those with serious and more chronic impairments may need even higher amounts of care with greater frequency. Maintaining some or other levels of functioning and/or controlling pain or that secondary impairments do not develop is therefore contingent on timely, accessible, and affordable health care. Disabled people in poverty contexts often confront extraordinary barriers to accessing and sustaining adequate health care and medication (Grech 2015a; Kuper et al. 2018). Indeed, the barriers are so rife, that, as I report in my ethnographic work in Guatemala (Grech 2015a), ill-health and disability are two of the greatest fears of the poor. Barriers and obstacles are many, including distance and the costs of reaching health care facilities, the bulk of which are in major cities, far away from remote rural areas. Medical supplies, equipment, and specialized treatments and medical personnel are often lacking in public health facilities. These may only be available in private health care, totally unaffordable to those living in poverty. Critically, the direct and indirect costs (see below) involved in obtaining health care are often dramatic for the poor. Seeking health care is a major source of impoverishment, especially when poor people have to incur debt through informal loans to be able to access a health care facility, because the poor

Disability and rural poverty in the global South  113 often have few to no savings. In Guatemala (Grech 2015a), I documented patterns where, after the trials and tribulations of reaching a health care facility, disabled people are then told they need to purchase consistent amounts of medication, and to return for repeat medical consultations and examinations. The result is that many simply return home with a prescription for medications and tests they can never afford; they see their health deteriorate, and their poverty accentuated, now even ridden with debt with informal moneylenders. Inability to access and sustain health care, especially for those with chronic conditions, means not only a life lived in extraordinary pain. Following the onset of an impairment, it also means inability to restart livelihoods especially in contexts where livelihoods require physical strength and dexterity (see below; Mitra et al. 2011b). Health care costs are dramatically impoverishing for poor people because, in the absence of social protection, they are invariably paying out-of-pocket. Even modest costs are especially serious when they have few or no savings to tap into, when these expenses far exceed earnings, and where any expense constitutes a major shock to the household economy – what is known in economics as “catastrophic health expenditure” (Hailemichael et al. 2019). Personal, cultural, gendered, and geographic dimensions, among others, also condition access to health care, with the implication that some are more disadvantaged than others. Literature documents the barriers encountered by disabled women (Matin et al. 2021), people with intellectual disabilities (Mkabile and Swartz 2020), those residing in rural areasas well as indigenous people (Grech 2015a). The implications here for intersectional research is the need for a gendered, cultural, ideological, racial, and ethnic analysis of health care barriers, as these are woven in and through the multiple webs of poverty. This means that an adequate understanding of poverty in context is inevitable, alongside critical engagement with the ideological, religious, cultural, familial, community, psychological and multiple interacting factors and processes. In brief, we need a constant updating of a complex analysis of a reality that can hardly be contained and much less generalized, as opposed to addressing health care barriers in an isolated and decontextualized way. Interruptions in Livelihoods A substantial number of studies from both the global North and South highlight how disabled people face very high levels of unemployment as well as well as underemployment (Hanass-Hancock and Mitra 2016; Trani and Loeb 2010), the consequences of which are not only fragmented livelihoods, but also dramatic impacts on poverty in a growing neoliberal context predicated on strong non-disabled individualist productive bodies. As many as 80 to 90 per cent of disabled people in the global South are said to be unemployed (UN n.d.). The barriers in starting or resuming livelihoods for disabled people in poor rural areas are multiple, bound to what life in extreme and chronic poverty often means: ● Livelihoods dependent on strenuous physical labour such as construction and farming with few to no “lighter” alternatives. ● Work that may be perilous (e.g., migratory labour), also on account of lack of health and safety measures and protective equipment, and that may lead to accidents, injury and even impairment. ● Little or no access to start-up capital, for example, through loans, assets, or savings to start a small business.

114  Research handbook on intersectionality ● Oversupply of able-bodied workers, all competing for the limited paid work available in the bid to simply survive. Within this ableist scenario, disabled bodies are continuously pushed further down the long line of available and “adequate” bodies. ● Inaccessibility of workplaces and failure to provide any accommodations (Grut et al. 2011). ● Lack of assistive devices, for example, wheelchairs or crutches. ● Transportation barriers, costs, and long traveling distances. Within such spaces, there is a high possibility of accidents and development of injuries, worsening of existing impairments and development of secondary ones, all of which have not only health, but also economic consequences, and which also act as a serious disincentive to find work. The importance of livelihoods cannot be stressed enough in any intersectional research and analysis, because in the absence of social protection, poor people have little other than their own labour power to sell – to earn a living, to merely feed themselves, or to survive. Studies highlight how disability within such contexts not only interrupts and fragments labour patterns, but also exposes disabled people and their families to a whole trail of abuse and exploitation by potential employers who know that their options are even more limited than those of others (Grech 2015a, 2019). Importantly, interruptions in labour patterns in the absence of social protection mean reduced economic capability to purchase health care, medication, as well as food and other basic necessities, and therefore impact consumption for the whole family, especially when the disabled person is the main income earner of the household. This calls for a focus beyond the disabled individual to incorporate the family (see below). Furthermore, the barriers to livelihoods are conditioned and even accentuated based on gender, race or caste, impacting also access to pro-poor policies and programmes (Kabia et al. 2018). The implications here are once again to conduct intersectional analyses and research capable of engaging multiple strands of discrimination woven through poverty dynamics including stigma, patriarchy, racism, as well as the ideological, class and political forces that create and maintain disparities and oppression. The Costs of Disability The costs of disability are extensive, multiple, interacting and both direct as well as indirect. The onset of an impairment introduces a whole new set of costs for disabled people and their families living in poverty, costs that are catastrophic because they must be covered by the poor themselves, with no assistance whatsoever. They shake whole households to the core because minor stresses and shocks constitute a potential disaster; that is, poor families are increasingly vulnerable. Costs are multiple and include (not exclusively) health care and rehabilitation for those who can and do seek them. In the absence of social protection, free or subsidized health care and medication, these need to be sought and purchased privately, meaning they are totally price prohibitive, and cannot be sustained. Other costs include medication (even if partially); purchasing of assistive devices, maintenance, and repair (because parts are often prohibitively expensively and only found in major cities or the capital city); and transportation. The latter is a major cost because negotiating rough terrains in rural areas together with inaccessible means of transportation (e.g., crowded minibuses) means that disabled people may frequently need to hire a private vehicle simply to reach basic services such as health care, pharmacies, and repair shops.

Disability and rural poverty in the global South  115 Disabled people also face indirect costs such as lost labour power, including that of family members (Mitra et al. 2017) as well as opportunity costs, that is, the value of lost earnings had such labour to be put to its next best use. Overall, a contextualized intersectional analysis adds critical awareness of such costs and how they impact poverty in multiple ways, or more specifically, the complex and interacting avenues of impoverishment. But this needs an acute understanding of the personal, circumstantial, social, economic, political, geographic, infrastructural, and other aspects that establish the conditions for these costs to be incurred. For example, poor people have few if any reserves of financial assets, including savings, meaning that any added expense, such as health care, severely drains these assets and can push families into profound debt, including debt traps. These result from the fact that poor people can only resort to informal moneylenders for emergency loans that come at exorbitant interest rates (in parts, like “payday loans” the poor in the global North incur). Within contexts of chronic scarcity, reduced consumption including of food, health care, and medication means basic needs compete against each other, forcing poor people to prioritize, for example, reducing medication intake or stopping altogether, to be able to eat and feed the children (Grech 2015a). Similarly, education and other needs now become secondary ones, with the implication that these are given up, thus impacting the children of disabled people.

THE HETEROGENEOUS DISABILITY EXPERIENCE IN POVERTY Substantial literature from disability studies as well as other fields highlight how the disabled population is profoundly heterogeneous, including how disabled people experience their disability, not least based on different social meanings, as well as barriers (Dowse et al. 2016; Grech 2015a). Indeed, disability and its interactions with poverty, and hence this relationship itself, are ultimately dependent on a range of social, contextual, cultural, locational, personal, and familial aspects, among others. This means that any engagement with and understanding of this assumed cycle or relationship in intersectional research, needs to account for these intersecting dimensions, including the “cultural specificities of personhood and to reconsider the unstable boundaries of the category of the human” (Ginsburg and Rapp 2020, S4). Moreover, these dimensions change across space and time. When one considers heterogeneity, the most obvious dimensions include the type of impairment, gender, race and ethnicity, and age, among others. Multiple literature across a range of contexts documents how disabled women confront a double bind, oppression based on gender as well as disability; studies highlight how disabled women face higher levels of violence, including sexual violence and rape (Rohwerder 2018; Shah and Bradbury-Jones 2020). Indigenous disabled people as well as those from racial and ethnic minorities confront a complex set of barriers, including racism and profound exclusion and even ill-treatment – most with strong historical foundations and baggage, including in colonialism (Soldatic et al. 2018). Examples abound as to how disability and poverty are experienced differently by a range of disabled people. For example, those with working family members confront different experiences and also hardships from those who have no supporting members to provide care, food, and other basic needs (Grech 2015a). Even people with the same impairment do not experience poverty in the same way, when, for example, they live in more precarious areas. Those in more remote locations, and those with certain types of impairments (e.g., with more serious, chronic impairments) also live disability and poverty differently. Disabled refugees and asylum seekers, for example, confront a distinct

116  Research handbook on intersectionality set of barriers requiring an intersectional analysis that also incorporates space and time as well as legal status, and how rights travel across borders (Pisani and Grech 2015). Disabled people with impairments requiring large and consistent amounts of health care and medication will also deal with more severe poverty. This translates into pressure on family members for support, thus impacting labour, care, and other patterns, including dire constraints on time. Remoteness, physical isolation, climate, quality of land, land ownership, access to assets (including productive inputs), infrastructure, governance structures and multiple, interacting factors and processes mean that an analysis of this disability and poverty relationship needs to not only account for complexity and heterogeneity, but importantly to adopt an approach that is theoretically informed and nuanced to engage with all these areas. Alertness to such heterogeneity has serious implications for intersectional research and methodologies. Experiences and outcomes are shaped by a range of factors and processes, including, for example, ideological or religious beliefs about the provenance of disability as well as the perceived role and responsibilities of women within particular communities, all of which are often rooted and backed by years of tradition. The result is therefore the need to critically understand and support local efforts that challenge and also “subvert, dominant forms of representation” (Swartz 2018, 281). Given the range of disability experiences, it is important to explore those specifically in under-researched communities. The implication here for intersectional research and methodologies is therefore acute engagement with the various and hybrid historical, contextual, and cultural dimensions, and how these frames not only disability (e.g., the belief that disability is the result of sin in a previous life among certain cultures), but also gender, sexual orientation, class, and caste relationships, among others. Even more basically, oppression and the means that oppress are found in social and cultural constructions, themselves with strong historical lineages, but which may not necessarily be fixed or unchanging. Similarly, there needs to be openness to the fact that not all disabled people are neglected or even oppressed in the global South, pushing us to constantly renegotiate how disability is understood and responded to on the ground. In this regard, challenging fixities of thought, generalizations, and myths fits within open and decolonizing intersectional approaches. The attention to the heterogeneity of disability also has impacts on policies and programmes claiming to adopt an intersectional and inclusive approach. In practice, alertness, and responsiveness to the heterogeneity of the disability experience, means that one cannot adopt one size fit all approaches to poverty and its reduction, requiring instead informed, nuanced policies and action. The heterogeneity and interplay of complexities highlights how policies, including rights, declarations, and law cannot be assumed to be enough, or that indeed all people can in fact claim their rights. Social policies, too, including those designed to protect and ensure that basic needs are attended to, also often bypass disabled people, which means that they are too often ignored in poverty reduction measures, or these are designed in ableist exclusionary ways. For example, measures aimed at facilitating access to the labour market or basic needs through initiatives such as food for work (e.g., on public infrastructural projects) do not consider the needs of persons with physical disabilities for whom such work may be impossible, too strenuous, or even dangerous. Similarly, targeted social protection requiring repeated registration at government offices in cities may not account for those with mobility impairments and/or with scarce economic resources and who may not even be able to pay for transport. Literature also highlights how government departments may be unresponsive and even antagonistic towards disabled people asking for benefits and/or services they may be

Disability and rural poverty in the global South  117 entitled to by law, patterns borne also of stigma and lack of education on disability, especially at regional and local government levels (see Grech 2015a).

THE POVERTY THAT IS SHARED: SPOTLIGHT ON FAMILIES Any understanding or analysis of the disability and poverty intersections requires the adoption of a family approach. The importance of family cannot be stressed enough in contexts of poverty because in the absence of social protection, poor people only have other poor people to depend on and to merely survive, because resources as well as strategies for survival are often pooled. From the provision of caregiving (notably by women), to changes in labouring patterns to cover the costs of disability and to compensate for the lost labour of the disabled person, to changes in consumption (including food) on account of increased costs and dwindling assets, one cannot but speak of what elsewhere I have called the “disabled family” (Grech 2019). The family effectively becomes the only source of social protection. Women, for example, are often pushed to reduce or withdraw their labour input to provide care, impacting their own opportunities for self-development and care, thus tightening the trap of poverty. Others must work harder or are pushed prematurely into the labouring market, including children and adolescents (Grech 2015a). Working harder means additional stress and exhaustion alongside exploitative and potentially hazardous work, exposing family members to illness, accidents, and disability. Disability also impacts educational and socializing opportunities, especially when family members, notably women and girls, must be pulled out of school to provide care for the disabled family member and/or to free other members, for example, siblings or mothers, to start working. Education is interrupted, often for good, opening an additional trail of abuse and impoverishment including through lower levels of human capital within the family. Family members may have to forsake their own health care to prioritize care for the disabled person, opening new possibilities of ill-health and impairment for the family unit. Once again, an intersectional approach leads to an in-depth understanding of poverty as a shared collective experience, illuminating well-being and survival as conditions and outcomes contingent on networks. Intersectional approaches focus on “the relational nature of well-being”, and one would also add suffering, especially in contexts where “relationships between people is a dominant social structure” (Mahali et al. 2018, 384). Disability intensifies poverty for whole families, who are frequently poorer than other households (Mitra et al. 2011a; Palmer et al. 2010). Family units survive as a collective but are unprepared when new costs are involved. Because they have few or no assets, poor families are vulnerable and fragile in the face of disability stresses and shocks. Disability, for these families, is therefore reframed as a major impact on the system, casting many disabled people and their families (including extended members) among the “ultra-poor”, a poverty most likely intergenerational. A Long-haul View: The Need for Longitudinal Research Understanding disability and poverty in an intersectional analysis requires a family analysis that crosscuts psychological, emotional, personal, physical, and social dimensions as well as economic ones. It also calls for interventions that address the voices, needs, and demands of the whole family as opposed to focusing only on disabled people or sub-populations such as disabled children. Overall, as Pinilla-Roncacio et al. (2020, 2) conclude, “people with disabili-

118  Research handbook on intersectionality ties and their families have fewer tools to move out of poverty and may require more supporting strategies (e.g., social protection programmes covering for the extra costs of disability) to reach at least a minimum acceptable level of wellbeing”. At the most basic level, any support given to families will likely translate into support for the disabled family member. Importantly, poverty experienced by disability families is likely intergenerational (Pinilla-Roncancio 2015); it will impact children and other members over years and years, which implies not only the need for longitudinal research, but also well-planned strategic responses with a clear vision of addressing poverty for generations to come. Longitudinal research is critical for understanding the impacts of disability over time and for different people, social groups and cultures. It is extremely important because neither poverty nor disability are static; they are constantly changing and dynamic. For example, in times of drought when food is in short supply and expensive, poverty is dramatically accentuated, consumption is reduced, and the experience of disability is worsened, for example, by having fewer financial resources to purchase medication or access health care. Similarly, maintaining a basic level of food consumption may mean reduced access to education and health care by family members who may prioritize these for the disabled person. This has serious consequences not only for their own health, but also on missed opportunities such as livelihoods which require travel, physical strength, or additional training and education. On Resilience and Resistance Finally, and to round off this section, while disabled people and their families are impacted within spaces of poverty, they are far from weak or powerless. Specifically, while the focus on barriers is extremely important, an intersectional engagement with the disability and poverty cycle needs to account for agency, resilience, and resistance, issues too often raised by disability theorists to counteract ableist and disabling narratives (Runswick-Cole and Goodley 2013). Poor people, including disabled people, ultimately survive on their own, using their own resources and resourcefulness within poverty spaces that are rough to navigate, physically, economically, infrastructurally. Disabled families too, despite the hardships, are instead: … constantly engaged in a dialectic of weakness and agency, conscious and unconscious. People are always developing systems tailored to their own context, needs, resources, and their own poverty. (Grech 2015a, 185)

Indeed, while the focus on vulnerability is important, Yeo (2020, 676) contests an exclusive focus on weakness and fragility, when these obscure “systemic oppression and distract[s] from the rights and achievements of disabled people”. The point here is very simple and has critical implications for intersectional approaches. The poor continue to exist and to ensure the survival of their own disabled people thanks to their own resourcefulness, their strategies to adapt and change, and indeed stories of strength emanating from these agentic bodies are many. These are strengths that need to be understood, carefully, documented sensitively, and then built upon and to ensure that any discourses or interventions do not interfere or weaken these in any way.

Disability and rural poverty in the global South  119

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS This chapter has briefly and partially attempted to explore the intersectional space between disability and poverty, to highlight concerns and implications for social researchers. The disability and poverty relationship requires serious interdisciplinary theorizing backed by empirical longitudinal research and needs to employ theory from a range of disciplines and fields including critical disability studies, global health, rural development, anthropology, and decolonial theory, among others. We are at no point yet where it is possible to even think about simplifying and/or trying to contain this relationship or how we understand oppression and inequality. On the contrary, we need all the theorizing we can muster, we need questioning and probing, and we need openness to how this relationship traverses time, and how it changes across people, spaces and places in a poverty that is complex and dynamic. We also need to question and probe simplified cyclical representations of disability and poverty, to reframe and reposition the relationship as “a fluid dynamic association, a relationship that is open, hybrid and hybridising and that is changing” (Grech 2015a, 250), that requires a consistently changing and responsive analysis of theory and data. I argue that attempts at understanding this relationship, including intersectional approaches, methodologies, and interventions, cannot but adopt a family and/or community approach as opposed to addressing disability in isolation. Disability in rural areas in the global South is experienced as a family, and strengthening families not only protects them, but also indirectly impacts the disabled family member. This necessitates active efforts at listening to and prioritizing the needs and demands of these persons. Overall, a critical and decolonizing approach to this relationship is essential to global disability studies (Grech 2015b; Nguyen 2018). Such an undertaking also includes a serious questioning and challenging of power relationships, including who dominates discourse, the power of the development sector and agenda, and who produces so-called “knowledge” and where. Most importantly, the voices of disabled people living in poverty in the global Southneed to be heard and represented – in a word, prioritized – and the research process needs to be owned and designed by disabled people.

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122  Research handbook on intersectionality Winker, Gabriela, and Nina Degele. 2011. “Intersectionality as Multi-level Analysis: Dealing with Social Inequality,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 18 (1): 51–66. Yeo, Rebecca. 2020. “The Regressive Power of Labels of Vulnerability Affecting Disabled Asylum Seekers in the UK,” Disability & Society 35 (4): 676–81.

8. Anti-colonial praxis in community-based research in feminist food studies Barbara Parker

INTRODUCTION Intersectional feminist food studies seek to advance social justice through research, activism, and pedagogy (Lloro 2021; Parker et al. 2019; Swan 2020; Williams-Forson and Wilkerson 2011). Like other interdisciplinary areas of scholarship that take up intersectionality, Black food scholars have led the way in centering the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and social class in their analyses of food practices, food systems and inequality structured through White supremacy and imperialism, heteropatriarchy, and neoliberal capitalism amongst other systems of power (Harper 2010, 2012; Nettles-Barcelón et al. 2015; Reese 2019; Williams-Forson 2006; Williams-Forson and Wilkerson 2011). Indigenous scholars, activists, and allies also urge us to look more closely at settler colonialism as another interlocking system of power that constitutes Indigenous and settler identities in relation to food, food systems, and food movements (Pictou et al. 2021). High levels of food insecurity in First Nations’ communities and among Indigenous Peoples1 living in urban settings and violence against Indigenous women are the effects of the ongoing violence of settler colonialism and have led to a resurgence of Indigenous food sovereignty (IFS) focused on land, food, health, well-being, responsibilities, and justice, with feminist food scholar-activists attending to structural inequalities through intersectional research and activism (Pictou et al. 2021; RAIR 2022; Ray et al. 2019; Robin et al. 2021).2 With growing attention to settler colonialism, decolonization, and Indigenous-settler relations in IFS research (Kepkiewicz 2017; Phillipps et al. 2022; Ray et al. 2019; Robin et al. 2021), there is a need to consider how intersectionality is approached methodologically, or the methods employed in intersectional research praxis. The absence of attention on how to do intersectional research is not unique to feminist food studies, with McCall (2005) suggesting that the absence of an intersectional methodology may be the result of “the complexity that arises when the subject of analysis expands to include multiple dimensions of social life and categories of analysis” (1773). This is also complicated by anti-colonial theory that cautions against homogenizing anti-oppression research and activism because settler colonialism is different from other forms of oppression in that it demands the erasure and elimination of Indigenous Peoples through ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands (Tuck and Yang 2012). Although tensions arise when working across differences (Roth 2021), alliances are necessary in our anti-racism and decolonization activism and research (Arvin et al. 2013; Lawrence and Dua 2005). Tuck and Yang (2012) propose that we begin from an “ethics of incommensurability” saying: there are portions of these projects that simply cannot speak to one another, cannot be aligned or allied … [and] we make these notations to highlight opportunities for what can only ever be strategic and

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124  Research handbook on intersectionality contingent collaborations, and to indicate the reasons that lasting solidarities may be elusive, even undesirable. (28)

In recognizing these struggles for solidarity, I suggest that it is generative to think about how we do intersectional research within a settler colonial framework. Following Levac et al. (2018), I propose that possibilities for anti-colonial intersectional research must link Indigenous ways of knowing with feminist intersectional research as the epistemologies underlying these methodological approaches have shared principles that can be productive in research practices. Specifically, Indigenous research epistemologies and methodologies position all knowledge as relationships and therefore, subjective, with multiple ways of knowing to represent diverse knowledges (Absolon 2022; Wilson 2008; Wilson et al. 2019) while feminist intersectional epistemologies position knowledge(s) as socially situated, dependent on the positionality or standpoint of individuals and the groups to which they belong structured along the lines of gender, race, social class, among other intersections of identity, which are also relational and interconnected (Collins 1990; Collins and Bilge 2016). In terms of methodologies and methods, both Indigenous and feminist intersectional research is closely attuned to power in research relationships and within the research context. According to Wilson (2008), Kovach (2009), and Smith (1999), relational accountability between researchers and communities or participants underpins knowledge construction while for feminist intersectional approaches, researchers attend to the interconnections within research relationships (e.g., researcher as expert) and seek epistemological and ontological accountability, which Doucet and Mauthner (2012, 123) conceptualize as “knowing responsibly.” In both Indigenous ways of knowing and feminist intersectional research, researchers pay close attention to the temporality and socio-historical contexts of our inquiries and use reflexivity to understand different standpoints or subjectivities of participant positionalities (Collins and Bilge 2016; Rice et al. 2019; Rotz et al. 2022). Moreover, Indigenous and feminist intersectional approaches to research share the goals of seeking equity and social justice (Hankivsky et al. 2014; Levac et al. 2018). Community-based research provides one methodological framework to put these shared research approaches and principles into action (Hayward et al. 2021; Parker et al. 2018; Phillipps et al. 2022). Like feminist intersectional research that is driven by social justice through participatory action research (PAR) (Bailey et al. 2019), community-based research is also undertaken collaboratively based on needs identified by the community (Etmanski et al. 2014). I suggest that by taking up these parallel ways of knowing, which model Mi’kmaw Elders Albert and Murdena Marshall’s research principle of Two-Eyed Seeing (TES) (Bartlett et al. 2012; Martin 2012; Roher et al. 2021), in a respectful way whereby researchers endeavor to learn with humility (Hayward et al. 2021; Regan 2010; Wilson et al. 2019) and pay close attention to power within the research itself (Levac et al. 2018), we are better positioned to undertake anti-colonial intersectional research and build alliances across Indigenous-settler relations. Before I explore further, I briefly explain what an intersectional approach entails, followed by a description of how settler colonialism functions as a structure and system of power and oppression shaping Indigenous and settler identities, and make connections to intersectionality as “a method, a disposition, a heuristic and analytic tool” to study interlocking axes of oppressions (Carbado et al. 2013, 312).

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INTERSECTIONALITY Intersectionality has been widely taken up as an analytical tool through interdisciplinary scholarship to think through complex social problems (Collins and Bilge 2016).3 Intersectionality foregrounds power to underscore the relationality of social identities (individual and collective) and discourses as these are constituted through interlocking systems and structures of oppression with very real material consequences (Carbado et al. 2013; Collins and Bilge 2016). For example, in Indigenous communities and for urban Indigenous Peoples, an intersectional approach helps to see how glaring social and health inequities are compounded by gender, sexuality, income, age, where one lives, and one’s access to land, among other intersections as these are experienced relationally with Indigeneity (Pictou et al. 2021; Munro et al. 2014). Exploring these relational interconnections opens up possibilities for understanding the complexity of these social inequalities. As Carbado et al. (2013, 305) state: No particular application of intersectionality can, in a definitive sense, grasp the range of intersectional powers and problems that plague society. This work-in-progress understanding of intersectionality suggests that we should endeavour, on an ongoing basis, to move intersectionality to unexplored places.

As I will describe, we can employ intersectionality analytically, heuristically, or as a method (2013, 312) alongside Indigenous ways of knowing and methods using TES to examine settler colonialism through an anti-colonial intersectional approach in community-based research. This expanded intersectional approach opens up possibilities for deepening our understanding of how gender, sexuality amongst other categories of social difference intersect with Indigeneity through systems of power, which structure Indigenous-settler experiences of land, food, and the settler state.

THINKING THROUGH SETTLER COLONIALISM AND INTERSECTIONALITY IN OUR RESEARCH PRAXIS Settler colonialism is a persistent social and political formation in which newcomers/colonizers/ settlers come to a place, claim it as their own, and do whatever it takes to disappear the Indigenous Peoples that are there. (Arvin et al. 2013, 12)

Settler colonialism operates as a system of power and domination structuring experiences of Indigeneity, oppression, and violence as these occur through the settler state and its institutions. Settler colonialism differs from other forms of colonialism because “settlers come with the intention of making a new home on the land, a homemaking that insists on settler sovereignty over all things in their new domain” (Tuck and Yang 2012, 5). Settler colonial expansion required capital, with Arvin et al. (2013, 12) explaining that “extracting value from the land also requires systems of slavery and other forms of labour exploitation,” which produced wealth for landowners in the US and similarly, for colonialists on the land known now as Canada (Cooper 2006).4 In the settler colonial state: Land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence. (Tuck and Yang 2012, 5)

126  Research handbook on intersectionality These authors point out that “settler sovereignty imposes sexuality, legality, raciality, language, religion and property in specific ways” (21) with “citizenship rights historically denied to women, Indigenous peoples and those without property” (Strong-Boag 2002, 41–2, in Abu-Laban and Nath 2020). Settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and neoliberal capitalism amongst other domains of power interlock to shape Indigenous, settler, and immigrant experiences of citizenship, land, and food (Kim et al. 2021; Pictou et al. 2021). Specifically, through heterosexuality and heteropaternalism, gender and sexuality were sanctioned and managed by the colonial state through regulations on kinship and structures of government (Arvin et al. 2013, 14) which “in Canada, the Indian Act of 1876 regulated the marriage of Indigenous Peoples to confer lines of descent, property, and landholding to men even though most societies were matrilineal” (15). The Indian Act also ensured that Indigenous women would lose their legal status if they married a non-status man, as would their children (Green 2017).5 Indigenous women experienced multi-level structural violence within their communities when they lost their power in governance structures imposed by the colonial state. Their subjugation continued through residential schools (Green 2017). Today, their ability to practice IFS, such as harvesting Indigenous foods and medicines, is impacted through continued settler expansion, industrialization, and economic development that decimates and pollutes the land and waters contaminating Indigenous foods and water (MMIWG 2019; Pictou et al. 2021, 94). As Collins and Bilge (2016) explain, an intersectional approach requires scrutiny of how power operates relationally in specific socio-historical and political contexts and “across domains of structural, disciplinary, cultural and interpersonal power” to produce compounded inequalities (27). By attending to analyses across micro, meso, and macro levels of power we unravel relationalities between land, food, gender, and Indigeneity. Settler colonial violence occurs at the interpersonal, community, and institutional levels including in our research and pedagogical approaches (Arvin et al. 2013; Dhamoon 2015; Wolf 2006). Settler colonialism also functions through knowledge systems and in the institutions which legitimize knowledge (Smith 1999), For example, Western systems of knowledge6 are dominant over Indigenous storytelling or Traditional Knowledges (TK) in similar ways to feminist knowledge(s), which are constructed through reflexive, subjective, and qualitative accounts (Pictou et al. 2021; Skinner et al. 2018). Hegemonic knowledges are enforced through epistemic violence embedded in patriarchy and settler colonialism and ignore or minimize divergent ways of knowing or knowledge systems, particularly in relation to land (Haywood et al. 2021; Smith 1999). Settler food scholars have a responsibility to learn Indigenous epistemologies of the land as these constitute knowledge about food production, ecology and the environment, food access, food consumption, and identity knowing that they can never really know because settlers are positioned differently ontologically to land.7 That is, in Western ontologies of nation, land is capital or “a commodity whether privately owned or collectively [and] commonly shared, that man can [and] must master nature in [and] as the nation” (Dhamoon 2015, 23). In contrast, Indigenous ontologies and axiologies position land “as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations” which are “non-exploitative and based on material survival, constitutive meanings of identity, and relationships between humans and between humans and the environment” (Coulthard 2014, 78–80, in Dhamoon 2015, 24). Thus, knowing who we are, where we come from—our own ontological and epistemological relationships to land, and our material socialization to the land and the ecology around us—our positionalities and the specific social

Anti-colonial praxis in community-based research  127 context we are working in shapes how as intersectional feminists we can understand our responsibilities for food justice, environmental justice, and social justice in our research. Within a settler colonial framework, the epistemological and ontological relationship to land is at the heart of our differences and it is necessary to recognize the ongoing structural violence in relation to land that is required to maintain this system of domination. Specifically, policies, laws, and the courts authorize and sanction settler occupation of land while denying Indigenous claims to sovereignty and self-determination (Kepkiewicz 2017; Wolf 2006). Altamirano-Jimenez and Kermoal (2016), RAIR (2022) and Pictou et al. (2021) explain that through resurgence and resistance, Indigenous women are leading the IFS movement that centers land and Indigenous ways of knowing, aimed at both social and environmental justice. Arvin et al. (2013, 9) argue that “attending to the links between heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism is intellectually and politically imperative” and “opens us to the possibility of new forms of activism based on critically thought-out alliances.” As discussed, Levac et al. (2018, 4) propose linking frameworks in intersectional research to bridge Indigenous and Western approaches to knowledge creation as they are complementary and “allow us to gain new ways of thinking about and approaching existing problems.” Much like Dhamoon (2015) and Arvin et al. (2013), Levac et al. (2018) explain that “it is not enough to include colonialism, as one axis of oppression, … [because] colonialism conditions the whole matrix of intersecting systems of power in colonized spaces, such as North America” (9). These authors propose seven principles for intersectional, decolonial research including (1) relationality, (2) reciprocity, (3) reflexivity, (4) respect, (5) reverence, (6) responsivity, and (7) responsibility (10). Importantly, researchers must also recognize that like Western knowledge systems, there are multiple Indigenous ways of knowing and our research should reflect the “specific context and conceptual landscape in which you work” (v). Therefore, an anti-colonial intersectional research practice must pay attention to the temporality and historical context of our research inquiry and participants, and Indigenous ways of knowing must be made explicit (Levac et al. 2018). Two-Eyed Seeing (TES) as a guiding principle (Bartlett et al. 2012) is one approach that can facilitate these connections, which I describe below.

FEMINIST INTERSECTIONAL RESEARCH SYNERGIES WITH INDIGENOUS METHODOLOGIES AND WAYS OF KNOWING USING TWO-EYED SEEING There is a rich scholarship in feminist research that has focused on the relationships between the knower and the known and the practices of accountability to power in researcher-participant and researcher-to-researcher relationships (Hesse-Biber and Brooks 2012). Critical reflexivity provides us with a method for learning about who we are in relation to systems of power (Hesse-Biber and Piatelli 2012; Rice et al. 2019). Similarly, Indigenous scholarship posits research is relationships with Indigenous ways of knowing positioning knowledge itself as relational (Kovach 2009; Smith 1999; Wilson 2008). Relationality in research requires that we value multiple worldviews or standpoints in intersectional approaches (Collins and Bilge 2016; Wilson et al. 2019). Moreover, we must endeavor to conduct research “in a good way” (Hart 2004), or through practices of “knowing responsibly” with our attention on epistemological accountability within our research relationships (Doucet and Mauthner 2012, 123).

128  Research handbook on intersectionality Doucet and Mauthner (2012, 136) remind us that our research responsibilities extend to the “persons and communities who will read, use and build on our knowledge” which may also include non-human subjects.8 Specifically, in “knowing responsibly” there is an ethical and moral imperative to think about the relational ontologies in our research relationships, which might include plants or other non-human participants (Doucet and Mauthner 2012, 123). Within Indigenous ways of knowing, being on the land or in relationship with land is good research practice (Absolon 2022; Wilson et al. 2019).9 As discussed earlier, within an anti-colonial framework, it is necessary for researchers to think about the positionality of land in relation to Indigenous-settler relationships—asking ourselves and centering our research, questions about land as it sits relationally and intersectionally with our participants. An Indigenous guiding principle of research that seeks to value both Indigenous and Western worldviews use the metaphor of “Two-Eyed Seeing” (TES) or “Etuaptmumk, the Mi’kmaq word for ‘the gift of multiple perspectives’” (Roher et al. 2021, n.p.; Bartlett et al. 2012). TES refers to seeing the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing with one eye, while the other eye sees the strengths of Western ways of knowing with the goal of producing knowledge that benefits everyone (Martin 2012). TES “encourages researchers to consciously weave back and forth between Indigenous and western ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies, and can be implemented through action-based approaches which encourage flexibility on the part of the researcher and meaningful involvement of Indigenous people and their knowledge systems” (Wright 2019, in Ray 2021, 98). Roher et al. (2021) suggest that TES is like intersectionality in that they both offer flexibility as a research approach.10 As Martin (2021, 38) explains: Two-eyed seeing holds that there are diverse understandings of the world and that by acknowledging and respecting a diversity of perspectives (without perpetuating the dominance of one over another) we can build an understanding of health that lends itself to dealing with some of the most pressing health issues facing Indigenous peoples and communities. (38)

TES is understood as a useful underlying principle of research as it is relational, participatory and it can be meaningfully employed to co-construct diverse knowledges together (Roher et al. 2021). TES is also a decolonizing approach in that it “promotes reflexivity, challenges institutional norms and do[es] not reassert unequal power relations” (Ray 2021, 97). Moreover, “when applied in the context of diverse knowledges, Two-Eyed Seeing entails an ongoing reflection on self, openness to new perspectives, and readiness for adjustment” (n.p.). One way in which researchers can practice relational accountability is to use reflexivity (Kovach 2009; Smith 1999; Wilson 2008). Intersectional approaches to research also encourage the use of reflexivity to practice epistemological accountability and disrupt power in research relationships (Pictou et al. 2021). It is through reflexive practices, whether writing in a research journal or through some other intentional means of interrogating power both within research relationships and in our researcher-participant or community relationships that we can bring together Indigenous ways of knowing and intersectionality. This can be done on an individual level or with our co-researchers, community members and participants. Employing TES as a guiding principle and drawing on Indigenous ways of knowing and relational accountability (Wilson 2008) alongside intersectional research practices that are reflexive and responsible (Doucet and Mauthner 2012) we become better positioned to do anti-colonial intersectional research. Specifically, committing to being in relation with one another as researchers and community or participants, as well as in relationship to the land, we

Anti-colonial praxis in community-based research  129 share commitments to the principles outlined above by Levac at al. (2018). That is, through reciprocity, respect, reverence, responsivity, and responsibility towards and within our research relationships, which include relational accountability with the land (Abolson 2022; Wilson 2008). These considerations of our ethical and moral responsibilities as researchers usefully provide a path for thinking about synergies between feminist epistemologies and Indigenous ways of knowing. Community-based research provides a research framework for anti-colonial intersectional research. Central to community-based research are the key principles of ethical responsibility and reciprocity (Jull et al. 2017). As I will describe below, researchers attend to power by minimizing the expertise of the researcher and the institutions represented, and instead, center participants’ knowledge in the research process and research outcomes (Etmanski et al. 2014; Hayward et al. 2021). Community-based research brings together Indigenous ways of knowing and intersectional research producing space for an anti-colonial intersectional framework. Such an approach requires that Indigenous research partners and participants guide or participate in aspects of the research process, including analysis and reporting. Moreover, data should remain firmly in the hands of Indigenous communities and participants through ethical agreements such as OCAP–Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession, developed by the First Nations Governance Centre (Hayward et al. 2021). What this looks like will vary depending on the community in which the research is being undertaken (Hayward et al. 2021). However, methodologically, researchers can use the guiding principle of TES and center relationality, respect, reciprocity, and reflexivity within our research frameworks to attend to relational and epistemic accountability (Haywood et al. 2021; Wilson 2008). In what follows, I provide reflections and examples of anti-colonial intersectional research practices that stem from my experience doing community-based research. I make connections to the seven principles Levac et al. (2018) outline for anti-colonial intersectional research. I begin by situating myself in this work as a practice of reflexivity, relationality, reciprocity, and respect to acknowledge that I write from multiple intersecting standpoints and acknowledge my own positionality in this work. This is followed by a discussion of residential schools, food, and colonial trauma to provide context for why an anti-colonial intersectional approach to research is needed with IFS activism and scholarship. In bringing together intersectionality and settler colonialism in an anti-colonial intersectional research practice, I suggest that we must find ways to recognize the centrality of land to Indigenous-settler relations, and have reverence for the ontological and spiritual relationships Indigenous communities, participants, and co-researchers have for non-human relationships to land, water, and animals in our research practices.

SITUATING MYSELF In the settler colonial state of Canada, where there is growing recognition of the impact of residential schools (TRC 2015a, 2015b) and ongoing violence of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls (MMIWG 2019), settler scholars have a responsibility for theorizing settler colonialism and our ethical responsibilities in relation to Indigenous Peoples and the land in our research and teaching (Carlson 2017; Regan 2010). As a White woman settler11 who owns land and has been socialized through persistent settler colonial systems, my privileged vantage point has obscured truths about the history of Canada, Indigenous

130  Research handbook on intersectionality Peoples, and residential schools which has required that I re-learn the history of the land my family settled four generations ago. For example, growing up and now working in Thunder Bay, Ontario, which is on the territory of the Anishinaabe and Metis peoples, and the Fort William First Nation in the Superior Robinson Treaty area signed in 1850, I was unaware that St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School operated in my community from 1870 to 1966, and like other residential schools, served the purpose of “separating Indigenous children from their families … weakening family ties and cultural linkages, and indoctrinating children into a new culture—the legally dominant Euro-Christian Canadian society” (TRC 2015c, v). The impacts and trauma of residential schools on Indigenous Peoples, which I discuss more fully in the next section, have been intergenerational, and several students at the regional university where I teach are children and grandchildren of Survivors. As an anti-racist, feminist scholar activist, it is being in relationships with my students that has pushed me to undertake reflexive learning about settler colonialism in relation to my own history as a settler and think more deeply about land, systems of power and my ethical and epistemic responsibilities. Specifically, as a settler feminist food scholar-activist, it is necessary to center intersectionality alongside colonialism and settler colonialism in my research and teaching because of the centrality of land to food systems, food production and consumption (Young 2011).12 As a settler ally, I can never claim to know all the many ways in which Indigenous Peoples embody the land, their health and food systems, however I understand that these relationships are physical, emotional and spiritual (Ray et al. 2019, 55) and “achieved through relationships to other people, to the land and creation, and to our ancestors in the spiritual realm” (Dennis and Robin 2020, 4).

RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS, FOOD, AND COLONIAL TRAUMA In late May 2021, 215 unmarked Indigenous children’s graves were found at the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School on the land of the Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓ pemc, or Interior-Salish Secwepemc (Shuswap) First Nations’ peoples of British Columbia (Dickson and Watson 2021). As the largest residential school in a system of over 160 schools spread across the country, the Kamloops Indian Residential School operated between 1890 and 1978. Since this news, over 1,300 burial sites have been located and the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation has documented 4,118 children’s deaths at residential schools between 1831 and 1996 (Ka’nhehsí:io Deer 2021; National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation 2022). For the children who were forced to attend, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015a), residential schools were “a systematic, government sponsored attempt to destroy Aboriginal cultures and languages and to assimilate Aboriginal peoples so that they no longer existed as distinct peoples” (153).13 The trauma woven onto the land through residential school gravesites manifests itself in numerous ways that are undeniably connected to food. Food in these schools was completely inadequate and severely rationed with corporeal punishment for any child who sought ways to feed themselves, their siblings, or friends (Dennis and Robin 2020; TRC 2015a). Colonial state policies sanctioned research on children through nutrition experiments in many residential schools, withholding foods and essential nutrition to study the effects of malnutrition on these young bodies (Burnett et al. 2016; Ray et al. 2019). This genocide corresponds with the words of Doris Young, a Survivor, who shared, “I was always hungry” (TRC 2015a, 72).

Anti-colonial praxis in community-based research  131 Children were forced to work in the institutional kitchens, on the farms and in the gardens of these schools and through assimilation and abuse, lost or displaced traditional food knowledges and skills such as hunting and harvesting, practiced by their families and in their communities (Dennis and Robin 2020; Pictou et al. 2021). For example, one residential school Survivor explained, she was not taught “how to be an Inuk woman, how to clean seal skins, and that kind of thing” (TRC 2015a, 182). Colonial heteropatriarchal beliefs about gender, femininity and masculinity, and food produced hegemonic gendered food experiences. Thus, girls were trained in domestic science and worked in the kitchens and gardens, while the boys labored on the farms and learned animal husbandry (Acoose 2016). Although the children were intimately involved with the production of food, they were rarely able to eat the fruits of their labor and instead were forced to eat “mush” or porridge, “vitamin enriched biscuits,” potatoes and canned foods, often served rancid or full of bugs (TRC 2015a, 76). Meat and fresh vegetables were reserved for the priests, nuns, staff, and government officials who might visit, with one Survivor noting “how well they ate compared to the food that was given to us students” (76). Food has long been used as a colonial tool of oppression and assimilation through the destruction of Indigenous food systems and by controlling food access through laws, policies, and programs including the Indian Act, the reserve system, hunting and fishing laws, family allowance, the 60s scoop and today through food subsidies programs (Burnett et al. 2016). As described by Robin et al. (2021) and Phillipps et al. (2022), hunting, harvesting, and family food practices continue to be constrained by settler colonial legislation, policies and programs that impact Indigenous communities and women’s ability to practice food sovereignty. Structural violence14 continues to disrupt Indigenous food systems and maintains the conditions of food insecurity through ongoing settler colonialism, which has severe social, economic, spiritual, and health consequences on Indigenous Peoples’ health and well-being (Phillipps et al. 2022; Ray et al. 2019; Robin et al. 2021). An intersectional approach to understanding how power intersects through settler colonialism as a system of power interlocking with other systems of oppression including heteropatriarchy and neoliberal capitalism can elucidate the inequalities experienced in specific contexts, such as Northern communities or urban environments, as I will describe. Kim et al. (2021) remind food scholars that “in order in analyze inequities in the Canadian food system, we must first acknowledge the ongoing processes of colonialism in Canada, in which settler control of land and subsequent migrations are directly involved in the ongoing violence against Indigenous lands, Peoples and food systems” (76). The ongoing interlocking gendered, racialized, and socio-economic forms of oppression through heteropatriarchy (e.g., gender structures and norms), neoliberal capitalism (globalized agriculture and resource extraction), and settler colonialism affect First Nations’ self-determination to food systems and the ability of individuals to practice their responsibilities for land and food (Burnett et al. 2016; Neufeld 2020; Phillipps et al. 2022). The impact of residential schools on Indigenous communities and individuals cannot be overstated (Marshal et al. 2014) and when it comes to food practices and IFS, this history must be centered in anti-colonial research with Indigenous communities (Dennis and Robin 2020).

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IFS, HEALTH, AND DOING COMMUNITY-BASED RESEARCH IFS broadly describes the resurgent relationships between Indigenous Peoples to the land, their food, and their food systems and provides a conceptual framework for health and healing (Dennis and Robin 2020; Martens et al. 2016; Ray et al. 2019).15 Ray et al. (2019) explain that viewing IFS in this way: acknowledges that relationships with land have been negatively impacted by colonialism, globalization, and neoliberalism and [IFS] thus seeks to decolonize these relations so that Indigenous people can be self-determining in their relationships to their food and food systems. (58)

IFS has existed since time immemorial, in the relationships, respect, reciprocity, and responsibilities that Indigenous Peoples have with the land (Morrison 2011, 2020), with Indigenous activists, scholars and their allies pointing to the health and healing benefits of IFS, which center on the land itself, as resistance to the trauma and health inequities produced through the violence of settler colonialism (Dennis and Robin 2020; Morrison 2020; Ray et al. 2019; Robidoux and Mason 2017). Research connecting Indigenous foods with health and identity through IFS land-based activities and scholarship expands our understanding of the deep and meaningful relationships Indigenous groups have with land and food and the need for self-determination in managing food, land, and health (Ray et al. 2019). As I discussed earlier in the chapter, there is a need to develop our understanding of the specific intersectional and anti-colonial research practices (methods, methodologies) to undertake research in a “good way” with Indigenous communities and peoples, particularly as a settler ally. What follows are reflections and examples of how I have engaged both intersectionality and Indigenous ways of knowing in research. First, in one community-based action research (CBAR) project, we took an explicit anti-colonial and intersectional research approach in decolonizing the research design. We applied TES as a guiding principle in the project thinking through intersectionality as a heuristic device to understand how power was operating through gender, Indigeneity, and settler identities in the context of the research. More specifically, we chose to employ an Intersectionality Policy Based Analysis (IPBA) (Hankvisky et al. 2014) to examine urban Indigenous women’s experiences of access to Indigenous foods (game, fish) and land in the context of provincial Natural Resources Management and Public Health policies regulating hunting and food respectively (Phillipps et al. 2022). As a framework for intersectional analysis, the IPBA: allows for understanding the fluidity and fluctuations of identities shaped by socio-historical conditions and social structures such as settler-colonialism, racism, and sexism to get at the deeper and more contextual meanings of Indigenous women’s individual and group experiences, needs, and strategic resistance to the existing policy while proposing policy solutions. (Phillipps et al. 2022, 3)

Specifically, the IPBA required attention on the social and historical context in which the participants lived and worked, and the assumptions built into the policies and an interrogation of power in how policies affected stakeholders.16 Stakeholders included Indigenous women who were seeking to access Indigenous foods in urban environments, non-Indigenous employees in Indigenous-serving organizations and policy makers, public health inspectors, and natural resource officers who go out on the land to monitor hunting and fishing. Using in-depth inter-

Anti-colonial praxis in community-based research  133 views, we explored the policies from the perspectives of those who experience the effects of the policies to those who manage and monitor the policies by undertaking in-depth interviews with these three stakeholder groups. Close attention was paid to the specific contexts of each community situated within the wider context of Indigenous-settler relations and settler colonial histories shaping the policies under consideration. We centered the stories and experiences shared by Indigenous women about their experiences in accessing Indigenous foods and lands to practice IFS within our policy analysis (Phillipps et al. 2022). Although there is not the space here to share detailed findings, briefly it is important to note that through the IPBA it was evident that the policies are tools of settler colonialism that reinforce unequal Indigenous-settler relations and structural violence, including a lack of access to Indigenous foods and ongoing food insecurity for Indigenous women and communities (Phillipps et al. 2022). Indigenous women participants were deeply distressed that they were unable to feed their families traditional cultural foods, which they saw not only as healthier, but as their inherent responsibility for caretaking the land. This was compounded by food insecurity for some and feeling unsafe in their communities because of the very real threats of violence and ongoing racism they experienced as Indigenous women (Phillipps et al. 2022). As this intersectional and anti-colonial research suggests, our concerns for environmental, food, and social justice must center the struggles and racism Indigenous women and communities face in enacting self-determination over food choices, and sovereignty over lands in relation to other interlocking axes of oppression such as White supremacy, neoliberalism, and settler colonialism. In addition to using the IPBA in our research framework and analysis, we paid attention to power within the research team using reflexivity to center the standpoints of our Indigenous women participants and the diverse knowledges they shared. Specifically, our Indigenous women participants were invited to became involved in the research process as co-researchers, assisting in the direction of the analysis and reporting because of their lived expertise. They were given copies of their interview transcripts and the preliminary analysis to review as well as drafts of journal articles prior to publication. Furthermore, relational accountability was practiced in regular meetings among co-researchers,17 where we clearly discussed that Indigenous women’s experiences and voices needed to be centered in the analysis and reporting. Through our intentional research practice, we were able to disrupt the power relations embedded in the relationships between our Indigenous participants and the settler co-researchers yet I am aware that power operating through racial differences is systemic and structural. At the individual level however, we were all able to deepen our relationships that have continued beyond the life of this project. Building alliances and solidarity through our research and learning is often discomforting (Kepkiewicz 2015). For me as a settler-scholar, I experienced discomfort in another community-based research project where as a co-researcher, I was invited to attend a culture camp in a remote northern community in Ontario that was focused on IFS and manoomin.18 Beyond the normal anxieties of travel, this trip entailed driving five plus hours into the bush on an old logging road and out of cell service range.19 Once at the camp, we were then able to put canoes in the lake and learn from Elders how to harvest manoomin with a traditional manoomin stick with our health team community partners from the Waasegiizhig Nanaandawe’iyewigamig Aboriginal Health Access Centre from Kenora, and high school youth from the community (Ray et al. 2019). This experience on the land and water was unforgettable. First, the beauty of the lake and the experience of witnessing the manoomin

134  Research handbook on intersectionality plants growing in the lake was breathtakingly beautiful, peaceful, and calm. Canoeing is a very mindful activity, and this was enhanced by learning how to harvest manoomin with other Indigenous and settler participants, as a practice of IFS. Physically, however, it was also uncomfortable because it rained most of the time we were there, and I was cold. I also felt uneasy at times because I was unfamiliar with the cultural food practices spiritually connected to land and water. I did not know what to expect in each moment that we were there. Although I was outside my comfort zone, everyone participating was kind and generous in explaining the process and detailing changes to the area, the land and water, that they have witnessed over time through their annual visits to this ceremonial harvesting place. My experience of gathering data in this setting was truly unforgettable. Again, I approached this research and learning using intersectionality as a heuristic device to organize my understanding of Indigenous-settler relationships within the context of the settler colonial state and its histories of settlement and displacement. In this research, I practiced humility, reverence, respect, and an openness to learn new perspectives on IFS including the meanings of land, food, and water. My role was that of a learner and participant and the Elders and Knowledge Keepers were there to guide our gathering of knowledge, which stayed with the community. As my work has evolved, I have come to believe that in anti-colonial intersectional community-based research, the most important aspect of the research are relationships and practicing relational accountability with epistemic accountability as the goal. Through reciprocity and respect, centering Indigenous ways of knowing in the research process with Indigenous partners, the research focus changed as we consciously disrupt power relations in the knowledge gathering process (Absolon 2022; Levac et al. 2018). For example, attention is placed on the ceremonies of research, which include gifting Elders with tobacco and Knowledge Keepers with other gifts such as food, blankets, or scarves, in addition to paying honorariums for their time and sharing of knowledge(s). As with any relationship, building trust takes considerable time and often goes beyond the expectations or timelines that are explicitly and implicitly communicated through Western research norms (funding agencies, ethics boards, graduate school timelines). Imposed timelines are challenging to overcome when relationships and relational accountability are central to the research (Etmanski et al. 2014; Smith 1999). Community-based research emphasizes the co-creation of knowledge with Indigenous communities whereby research partners and participants lead the research process in determining research goals, aims, and questions (Etmanski et al. 2014; Hayward et al. 2021). Like other frameworks of PAR, community-based research is participatory, and the goal is social justice. Smith (1999) explains: In all community approaches, process – that is, methodology and method – is highly important. In many projects the process is far more important than the outcome. Processes are expected to be respectful, to enable people to heal and educate. They are expected to lead one small step further towards self-determination. (127–8)

Smith’s words resonate with my experiences of doing community-based research within an anti-colonial and intersectional research framework. I understand that the process of conducting research facilitates my learning not only in terms of research outcomes, but also in terms of the process and building research relationships that are reciprocal and respectful.

Anti-colonial praxis in community-based research  135

CONCLUSION There are many synergies between intersectional research approaches and Indigenous ways of knowing that can guide our research practice, particularly when we incorporate TES. First, in a settler colonial framework, our research must be grounded in the specific socio-historical and political contexts to understand how axes of oppression and power are operating specifically in relation to the social identities we are studying. Levac et al. (2018) provide principles for anti-colonial intersectional research which include relationality, reciprocity, reflexivity, respect, reverence, responsivity, and responsibility that can act as guideposts for our research practice (10). As discussed and illustrated in my reflections and examples I provided, the principles outlined by Levac et al. (2018) can guide our research practices, particularly when undertaking community-based research. As researchers we can commit to centering relationships and relationality in the research process through reflexive processes that are respectful, reciprocal, responsive, and reverent. Rice et al. (2019, 415) state, “reflexivity disrupts power relations embedded in acts of naming and narrating others from the top down and allows space for research to be understood as a dynamic process that transforms researchers and participants” saying further that “such reflexivity can facilitate cross-movement building.” For settlers, this might mean recognizing when we are complicit in maintaining settler colonialism even when we wish to work in solidarity and as an ally with Indigenous Peoples (Lawrence and Dua 2005). Although tensions can arise in reflexive research practices when individuals do not attend to the power dynamics embedded in positionalities, it is perhaps “the best method researchers have for building inclusive theoretical perspectives and transformative movements from divided, asymmetrical interests” (Rice et al. 2019, 416). Finally, an anti-colonial intersectional approach to research must begin by recognizing land as another axis of oppression that interlocks with gender, race, sexuality among other intersections of identity. This is particularly important given the centrality of land, and the lack of self-determination over land and food to understanding the violence and harms caused by settler colonialism in Indigenous communities. Although not without tensions, acknowledging land as an essential relationship and relational to other social identities is important for thinking about how we overcome the “incommensurability” of settler colonialism (Arvin et al. 2013, 16). An anti-colonial intersectional approach to research which centers land in its analyses may help to facilitate deeper alliances and improve Indigenous-settler relations with shared goals for social, environmental, and food justice.

NOTES 1. My use of “Indigenous Peoples” in no way asserts a pan Indigenous perspective as I recognize that there are many Nations on Turtle Island and beyond. 2. Feminist Indigenous scholars, such as Pictou (RAIR 2022) and Dennis and Robin (2020, 9) see tensions and contradictions with the word “sovereignty” because of its imperialist connotations of land. 3. As earlier chapters have discussed, Black women’s intersecting experiences of race and gender were articulated through the writings of Sojourner Truth and Anna Julia Cooper long before Crenshaw (1989) coined the term intersectionality. Zitkala-Sa wrote an essay in 1924, “Regardless of Sex or Age” observing Indigenous women’s intersectional experiences (Nason 2010, 52, in Clark 2016, 49).

136  Research handbook on intersectionality 4. For example, agricultural labor exploitation continues in Canada through the federal government’s SWAP program, or Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program, which enables corporate and family farm employers to hire temporary foreign workers (TFW), often coming from Mexico and the Caribbean. See Weiler (2018). 5. This has enormous implications on Indigenous women’s access to housing, health, social and economic benefits. 6. Western knowledge systems include natural and social science models grounded in positivism (quantitative) as well as interpretive approaches (qualitative) that are uncritical in their conceptions of power. 7. Elizabeth Carlson (2017) talks about this more holistically in terms of knowing. 8. Their work examines Evelyn Fox Keller’s work (1983, 1985) on Barbara McClintock, who as a geneticist had research relationships with plants, specifically, the corn that she studied calling them her “friends,” disrupting the conventions of research in her field, reorienting ideas about ethical and epistemological accountability (Doucet and Mauthner 2012, 126–128). Moreover, their work builds on the scholarship of Canadian philosopher Lorraine Code (1995) and their work on knowing, ethics and epistemology as these are shaped by relationality and accountability. 9. I have had the privilege of learning on the land from my father, who grew up on a homestead in Northern Ontario, but also have learned so much about Indigenous understandings of land from the book, Braiding Sweetgrass (2015) by Robin Wall Kimmerer and my Indigenous friends and colleagues. 10. See also Collins and Bilge (2016, 73–4). 11. My use of “settler” is to signal my privilege to land and in this work as it denotes a relationality in signifying my relationship to colonialism (Flowers 2015, 33–4). 12. As Young (2011) states, “those who are beneficiaries of racialized structures with unjust outcomes … can properly be called to a special moral and political responsibility to recognize our privilege, to acknowledge its continuities with historical injustice, and to act on an obligation to work on transforming the institutions that offer this privilege” (187). 13. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), established in 2007, followed the largest class action lawsuit in Canadian history: the Indian Residential Schools Agreement. The Commission produced key reports documenting the experiences of over 6,500 Survivors and witnesses in 2015 with 94 Calls to Action, with recommendations 71–76 urging Canadians to recognize the Missing Children and burial sites at residential schools and commemorate and honor the memories of the children who attended these institutions (TRC 2015d). 14. I use Farmer’s (2005) concept of structural violence here as it is the state that produces and reproduces the social conditions that lead to discrimination and racism. 15. Settler colonialism produces tensions between the food sovereignty movement in Canada and IFS as any agriculture or food production in so-called Canada is happening on stolen land. See Kepkiewicz (2017). 16. See Phillipps et al. (2022) for a detailed discussion of the questions explored in our IPBA analysis. 17. Although all six Indigenous women participants were invited to participate, only three took up an active role in the research process itself. 18. Manoomin is the Anishinaabe word for wild rice. 19. I am an avid camper with experience canoeing and I was familiar with northern Ontario having grown up here, so I had some idea about what bush roads and a bush camp entailed.

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Section IIb

Critical sexuality studies

9. Researching sexuality and state Jyoti Puri

On rare occasions the state, once described by Michel Foucault as the cold monster, brings sheer joy. Every once in a while, the courts make us collectively believe in the possibility of justice and the righting of wrongs. On September 6, 2018, the Supreme Court of India decriminalized homosexuality in no uncertain terms, and in soaring language affirmed the fundamental rights and dignities of LGBT persons. Images of joyous celebrations marking this momentous ruling filled my computer screen as I followed the news from a distance. This moment had been long in the making. Although the first writ petition against the antisodomy law was filed in 1992, efforts to decriminalize same-sex sexual activity began gathering momentum after 2001. At the time an HIV/AIDS organization, Naz Foundation (India) Trust, filed a petition in Delhi High Court asking that the law no longer apply to same-sex adult consensual sexual activity in private. While this legal challenge was not well known initially, I chanced on the information in 2002 and began formally researching the emerging campaign for legal reform. Additional fieldwork over the years provided insight into the winding legal process, which resulted in the upholding of the antisodomy law in 2013. But the momentum against the criminalization of same-sex sexual activity led to a fresh writ filed in the Supreme Court by a group of concerned citizens, resulting in the 2018 historic ruling. The first round of fieldwork that I conducted in 2003 was concentrated on understanding how the impetus toward decriminalization emerged, why the focus on legal (as opposed to social) reform, and what were the possibilities and limitations of a legal campaign. Issuing from an intersectional methods perspective, my understanding was primarily framed around sexuality and the state, especially law and its enforcement. This perspective meant seeing the state not as a monolith, but as an assemblage of institutions, agencies, archives, practices, and discourses. Following this, it became important to do fieldwork among the Delhi police to understand how the antisodomy law is implemented and gather data from the National Crime Records Bureau about the volume of police complaints filed under this section; it became necessary to conduct research at other state agencies, for example, the Judicial Division of the Ministry of Home Affairs, which is charged with responding to writ petitions, and obtain archival data on the legal cases registered under the section. Taking an intersectional methods lens also entailed beginning with sexuality’s tight links to issues of class and gender, since the antisodomy law does not have a uniform impact on subjects across differences in class, gender identity, and gender expression. For example, many of the activists that I spoke to early on registered their concerns that the Naz Foundation writ had included the caveat of privacy to the legalization of same-sex sexual activity. This would potentially expose LGBT and other sexually and gender-diverse groups who did not have access to private spaces, a matter of class privilege, to being criminalized even if homosexuality were to be decriminalized. An intersectional methods perspective too fostered alertness to the relevance of additional social factors. In this case, subsequent rounds of fieldwork revealed the relevance of religion and racialization to the antisodomy law. Furthermore, given the Indian context, it was clear from the outset that the intersectional lens needed to be complemented with a transnational 143

144  Research handbook on intersectionality approach, for it was necessary to place the antisodomy law within histories of the colonial and postcolonial state to understand how the law first came to be and how it had been used over the course of some 150 years. Taking such an approach would also link the emergence of the legal campaign to other such initiatives in other parts of the world, for example, the historic Lawrence and Garner v. Texas ruling in 2003 that invalidated sodomy laws, thereby setting the stage for gains at the federal level, including marriage equality. This chapter showcases and highlights the indispensability of an intersectional and transnational methods perspective to field research. At one level, it delves into how to assure attention to the intersections and transnational connections that shaped the institutionalization of the antisodomy law in India as well as the struggle to overturn it. This involves investigating the transnational context of the antisodomy law’s introduction, its racialized and gendered colonial origins, and the intersections of gender, class, race, and religion that shape the implementation of the law. This stance shapes the data that needs to be gathered from the archive as well as from the field; indeed, as is explored below in more detail, an intersectional and transnational methods perspective shapes decisions on what counts as data and the significance of what seems to merely be a sidenote or prelude to the gathering of data. At another level, this chapter explores the intersectional and transnational aspects of research itself. It alerts us that matters of gender, sexuality, class, and nation are ever-present in fieldwork, not just in the substance of what we are trying to research, but also in the process of research and data gathering. This chapter models an intersectional and transnational methods perspective by taking the position that the antisodomy law must be understood in relation to colonial histories as well as the contemporary context. Weaving together intersectional and transnational approaches, it highlights the relevance of ciswomen, heterosexuality, racialized religious differences, and gender-variant groups, namely Hijras, to the governance of the antisodomy law. The third section of the chapter reflects on the research process itself, before ending with some points for further consideration.

SECTION 377: COLONIALISM, RACE, GENDER, AND BODIES An intersectional and transnational methods perspective begins with paying attention to the colonial racialized and gendered histories of the antisodomy law. Section 377 was introduced in India in 1860 by the British colonial state and was part of 511 codes that became the Indian Penal Code developed by the colonial state to standardize legal systems in the colony. The language of the law was deliberately vague, requiring judicial interpretation of what constitutes carnal intercourse against the order of nature, and it remained unchanged when India became a sovereign state in 1947. Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.

Explanation: Penetration is sufficient to constitute the carnal intercourse necessary to the offence described in this section. At the same time, it is important to note that Section 377 was uniquely a product of the colonial encounter since neither England nor precolonial India had a parallel to it. Therefore, accounting for the introduction of the penal code has meant bringing the spaces of colony and

Researching sexuality and state  145 metropole into the same analytical field, leading to two kinds of speculations on how it came to be. David Skuy (1998) has suggested that the penal code that India received actually reflected the needs of England, given its messy, bloody, and inchoate legal system at the time. This is to say, the desire for legal reform was displaced on to the colonies in a way that could not be undertaken in the metropole. However, another angle of critique suggests that the Indian Penal Code was the colonial state’s effort to harness lawlessness among European communities in the colony (Kolsky 2005). My point here is not to settle these differences, but to underscore the transnational colonial conditions that allowed for the imposition of the Indian Penal Code and more specifically the introduction of the antisodomy provision. What is indisputable, though, from this engagement with colonial history is that these laws were part of the broader racialized and gendered project of colonial reform that had been evolving in the prior decades. For example, widow immolation, known as Sati, was outlawed just a few years prior to when the first draft of the penal code was submitted in 1837. Its prohibition was justified by the colonial state as a matter of improving Indian civilization and transitioning it toward modernity. The point is not that Sati was a supportable practice, but that the British colonial state took a custom associated with a select group of upper-caste Hindus and rendered it into a reflection of Indian culture and civilization. The additional point is that the state justified colonial occupation by advancing discourses of improvement and progress that were typically related to issues of body, race, gender, and sexuality. Thus, if abolishing Sati was an alibi for justifying colonial rule, then so was the introduction of the antisodomy law. It was rooted in the colonial beliefs that the natives were prone to sexual deviance and sexual licentiousness. The irony, of course, is that a law that has come to be seen as so problematic in the West, now understood as a sign of anti-modernity, was first introduced in India and other colonies by the British under the pretext of modernization and curbing racially based proclivities toward sexual deviance. Lawmaking, though, is not just a matter of imposing social order and governance but also about the making of subjectivities, altering social relationships and popular consciousness (Haldar 2007; Merry 2000). This is especially the case in colonial contexts, where law is designed to ensure racialized forms of subjugation rather than notions of citizenship (Sundar 2011). Thus, even though case law indicates that the antisodomy provision was infrequently used during the colonial period as well as in postcolonial India, it introduced, institutionalized, and amplified homophobic beliefs that still exist. Alongside its troubling symbolism, the law has been used to harass and inflect violence on gender and sexually diverse groups in India. Its existence became increasingly relevant as a result of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in India that led to the targeting of marginalized communities, including gay men, Hijras, sex workers, and others. Section 377 became an impediment for sexuality and gender rights activists who were not only challenging the state’s targeting of these marginalized groups but also seeking rights and protections for them. It was too symbolic of the warping of the Indian sexual-social fabric that began with the British colonial state and endured in the postcolonial nation, thereby accounting for why the 2018 Supreme Court judgment was welcomed as the overdue reversal of a 158-year alien history. When I began researching this history as well as the efforts to overturn this law, a few writers had already paved the way by discussing the law and the body of cases related to it (Bhaskaran 2001, 2004; A. Gupta 2002). Their insights were particularly useful in apprehending the intersections between sexuality, gender, and class, as well as the inconsistencies between the letter of the law and how it was used in the courts. For example, even though

146  Research handbook on intersectionality the number of cases is relatively small across the long arc, Section 377 has been wielded as a threat by police and ordinary and marginalized people to harass, threaten, and harm people thought to be gender or sexually diverse, a point confirmed by two key reports (Fernandez and N.B. 2003; PUCL-K 2003). What became clear, then, is that gaining a fuller understanding of the antisodomy law required broadening the scope of research to include key state institutions implicated in upholding and implementing the law. Alongside analysing case law related to Section 377, I extended the research to Delhi police, police crime reports, the unit charged with responding to legal challenges on behalf of the government of India, the National AIDS Control Organization, among others. At the same time, I also met with individual activists and organizational representatives who had a stake in the outcome of the legal campaign. Stretching across five of the major cities, these individuals and groups also included those who were opposed to the decriminalization of homosexuality. Below, I focus primarily on my interactions with Delhi police, while also gesturing to encounters with other state officials and individual activists.

RESEARCH CHRONICLES: CISWOMEN, CHILDREN, AND HETEROSEXUALITY On a summer late morning, I find myself in the office of a senior police official, N.N. Khanna, at the Police Headquarters in Delhi. I was directed to him by the Delhi Police Commissioner after our abortive meeting during his open office hours. Upon being ushered in alongside a few other people seeking the ear of the commissioner, I was given only a few minutes. Dismissing my inquiry about the police response to the Naz writ, he took offense as I shared the allegations of police violence against LGBT persons in Delhi and discounted any merit to them. Then relenting as I pressed for the police response to the Naz petition, he sent me on to Khanna as the official charged with responding to writs involving the Delhi police. Although Khanna was not aware of the Naz writ, he too sought to discount my interest in the antisodomy law by noting that “This is a peripheral aspect. Because of the total volume of crime, very little attention is paid to Section 377 by the police.” Remarkably, he instructed me that should I wish to make any meaningful impact, I ought to turn attention to crime against women. He continued, “The social attitudes to women’s issues and gay criminal activity cannot be compared. You should be studying Section 375 (rape law), not 377. There is more social impact of 375. If you want to make a contribution, you should study crime against women.” This was by no means an anomaly, for on other occasions too state officials had exhorted me to focus on crime against women, especially heterosexual crime. In the case of a senior-ranking policewoman, a Joint Commissioner of Police who oversaw the Crime against Women police cell, there was puzzlement: why would I want to focus on Section 377? It could be argued that moments such as these belong in the margins of fieldnotes and are merely preludes to obtaining data. But an intersectional and transnational methods perspective suggests otherwise, for such field-based happenstances are indications of dominant ideologies and discourses that shape the governance of sexuality and its intersections with other social factors. Such moments can be as important to the research as are conventionally defined data—that is, number of criminal complaints, case law and such. Indeed, understanding and analysing these encounters alongside numbers, interviews, and other research modes expands and enriches the very conception of data. Juxtaposed with background research and previous

Researching sexuality and state  147 round of interviews conducted, these field encounters shed light on the tight intersections between the antisodomy law and heterosexual violence against women. From an intersectional methods perspective, I paid attention to how these links have been encoded in the Indian Penal Code, where Section 377 follows Sections 375 and 376, which criminalize and punish rape. The three sections are part of the penal code’s Chapter 16, covering other violent offenses relating to the body, including kidnapping and assault. Furthermore, Sections 375 and 376 were constructed around rape, which meant that forms of heterosexual assault exceeding narrow definitions of rape (as forced penile-vaginal penetration) were sometimes prosecuted under Section 377. This is to say, the provision of carnal intercourse against the order of nature was used to fill the gap created by rape laws. To assure an intersectional methods stance, I gathered and analysed case law related to Section 377 case law from 1860 onwards. The law was most typically used to prosecute sexual assault on boys, since they were not included as victims under the rape laws. In fact, the vast majority of cases under this section have to do with sexual assault on boys and girls, typically young children, by adult men. Alok Gupta (2002, 2011) notes that more than 60 percent of the cases prosecuted involved child sexual abuse and that Section 377 trended toward increased use in the 1990s to prosecute sexual assaults on girls. As I delved further into the archival record, including not only case law, but also sampling police crime reports related to the antisodomy law, I found an even higher percentage related to violence against children. From the 66 Delhi police crime reports, it turns out that as many as 59 entailed crimes against children, while the remaining were complaints of assaults on young adult men. This legal landscape changed after the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act was passed in 2012, recognizing boys as well as girls as victims of sexual violence. Similarly, the enactment of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 2013 introduced important changes to the rape laws, expanding their scope and the implementation processes. As Sunita V.S. Bandewar, Amita Pitre, and Lakshmi Lingam (2018) note, this Act introduced long overdue changes in combatting sexual assault, including making it easier for survivors to report the violence, providing them care, issuing guidelines for maintaining their dignity and autonomy, safeguarding their rights, among others. At the same time, the links between the antisodomy law and heterosexuality do not explain why officials repeatedly dismissed my inquiries related to the antisodomy law, while seeking to redirect them to the issue of sexual violence against women (and girls). Their responses speak to the different legal as well as social logics that underlie the juxtapositions of histories of Sections 375, 376, and 377 interwoven in the Indian Penal Code and in case law. While the rape laws pivot around the question of consent—whether a woman could or did consent to the sexual activity—consent is seen as irrelevant to Section 377. Regardless of whether adults consent to same-sex sexual activity, it is criminalized. Where rape laws are meant to protect girls and women, the antisodomy law is meant to punish and prohibit. While rape as heterosexual violence is presumed to be “natural,” same-sex sexual activity is not. Thus, by seeking to deflect attention from the antisodomy law, Khanna and other officials were reflecting deep-seated legal and social discourses about the wrongfulness of same-sex sexual practices, regardless of consent. Officials’ attempts to turn the spotlight on to crime against women was an extension of the ways that heterosexual violence has been discursively rendered into a problem of global, transnational as well as national proportions. Since the colonial period, the “woman question” has been used as the line to draw differences between colonizers and the colonized, which is to say,

148  Research handbook on intersectionality matters of women’s social reform was central to rationalizing colonial rule and occupation. In the postcolonial era, women’s issues, especially heterosexual violence against women, are now underwritten by transnational organizations, including the United Nations and others, as measures of cultures and modernity. As Inderpal Grewal (1999) remarks, the need to protect and endow women with rights was supported by international and national development agencies and backed by streams of aid and funding. Placing the burden on states in the Global South, such as India, for addressing the problem of violence against women, this discourse of women’s rights are human rights reshaped older colonial hierarchies. Western nations encouraged and incentivized states like India to adopt the discourse of violence against women, even though feminist critics have repeatedly noted that it has expanded the reach of governance in women’s lives without necessarily bringing relief from violence. Nonetheless, the discourse of crime against women was repeatedly used by state officials as a counterpoint to same-sex sexualities and to subvert the possibilities of decriminalizing homosexuality. At another moment of fieldwork, as I was gathering archival data related to Section 377, I visited the National Crime Records Bureau. I was told by the first bureaucrat that archival data on police crime reports related to Section 377 did not exist, but she offered me information and a stack of reports on crime against women. When I pressed the issue, she sent me on to a senior official, who echoed her. I heard the same refrain from each official at this organization that is charged with gathering, processing, and tabulating data on a variety of crimes. These responses speak volumes about the ways that crime against women, especially heterosexual crime, has been rendered into a social problem, while issues related to the dignity and rights of LGBT persons in India were being denied or discounted. Indeed, it was over the long haul of the legal campaign to decriminalize homosexuality, including the impact of other social forces such as HIV/AIDS-related activism, neoliberal policies, and expanded internet access, that changed national conversations about sexual orientation. LGBT rights are increasingly embraced as signs and symbols of a nation aspiring toward modernity (Rao 2015).

RACIALIZING RELIGION One afternoon, I accompanied a Naz Foundation outreach worker to a police station in Delhi while he conducted an informational session for police constables. The aim of this program was to create awareness and provide information related to HIV/AIDS. In the second part of the session, I led a discussion among the 25 constables about Section 377, seeking to understand what they knew about it and how they implement it. As they offered examples of the kinds of behaviors that fall under the antisodomy law’s purview, I was caught off guard when one of the constables said, “It happens more among Muslims.” At a subsequent group discussion, this time with middle-rung police officers who were gathered for a gender sensitization program, I heard similar sentiments. Several police officers asserted that most crimes related to the antisodomy law are committed by Muslims. Even though I shared evidence from my research that this was neither the case nor could it be statistically possible in a country that is dominated by Hindus, they remained unconvinced as a group. The intersectional and transnational methods perspective that led me conduct research among the police also compelled me to analyse the ongoing histories and implications of police associations of Muslims with sexual crime and deviance. In India, Muslims are the largest religious minority, and they are beleaguered with harmful stereotypes, especially

Researching sexuality and state  149 related to myths of hypersexuality. For example, the falsehood of a “Muslim growth rate” pervades the Indian context, especially among majoritarian Hindus. It is premised on the idea that Muslims are expanding at a much faster rate than other religious groups, posing a potential threat to India as a Hindu nation. Popular discourses in social media, for example, have repeatedly advanced claims that Muslims constitute 30 percent of the population even though a recent study confirms otherwise.1 This study systematically shows that although India’s population grew significantly between 1951 and 2011, Hindus still make-up almost 80 percent of the population and Muslims account for less than 15 percent.2 Contrary to myths about the “over-sexed Muslim and his over-fertile Muslim wife/wives,” this study reveals that Muslims have experienced the sharpest decline in fertility rates in recent decades.3 The myth of Muslim overpopulation is not limited to India, but has transnational resonance wherever there is sizeable Muslim presence as immigrants or minoritized groups.4 In the Indian context, though, these representations of sexual and reproductive excess are also compounded by pejorative forms of queering. Paola Bacchetta (1999) notes that Hindu nationalists assign queer gender and sexuality to Indian Muslims, who are cast as hyper-masculine and hypersexual, sexually violent as well as sexually deviant. However, these projections of “queer” sexuality are not limited to the Hindu right wing, but also resonate among ordinary people and among police. An intersectional and transnational methods perspective induces attention to the colonial histories of such police biases against Muslim communities in India. The first strand of colonial impact has to do with the institution of policing, forged by the Indian Police Act of 1861 and the Indian Evidence Act of 1872. Intended to strengthen colonial control over native society, policing in India, David Arnold (1990) suggests, was derived from another part of the British empire, namely Ireland. He further notes that institutional hierarchy was distinctively racial as relatively few European officers occupied the highest positions out of an entrenched distrust of Indians, and a low opinion of their abilities and character. At the same time, recruitment policies disaggregated people into convenient stereotypes of “martial races,” giving preference to some groups over others and recruiting from the “low castes” only when others were unavailable for recruitment.5 Most importantly, the role of the police was to impose and maintain law and order and the constabulary was accountable to the colonial authorities. The institution was not designed to protect and serve native communities. The second related strand, which amplifies police hostility against Muslim and other minoritized communities, such as Dalits, Sikhs, and others, has to do with what is described as communalism in the Indian context. Rooted in British colonial administrative politics, and coming into usage by the 1920s, the term communalism continues to be widely used in India to represent sectarian differences, as well as mutual prejudices and hostilities, and symbolizes loyalty to one’s community over nation and an impediment to patriotism. It is predominantly applied to religious differences, and it is believed to be the primary challenge facing Indian nationalism—loyalty to faith over nation, intercommunal strife, competition for resources, politicization of religion, dissidence in Kashmir, and (Muslim) terrorism. Since most of Delhi police is constituted by the ethnically and religiously distinct Hindus from northern India, prejudicial associations of (homo)sexual crimes with Muslims by police could be seen as communalist. But a grounding in these legacies and the entrenched nature of the anti-Muslim biases revealed through the fieldwork highlight the need to rethink dominant frameworks, such as communalism. The deep-seated nature of these biases and prejudices led to a reconsideration of the extent to which communalism is a useful analytical tool in the Indian context

150  Research handbook on intersectionality and whether the concept of racialization is better suited to understanding these entrenched anti-Muslim prejudices. Gyanendra Pandey (2006) observes that the term communalism persists, despite its declining relevance in the Indian context, not only because it serves as a shared language for discussion but also because of intellectual inertia. It is less and less useful to explaining religious tension and strife, for typically Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and Dalits are the ones who are grievously hurt through instigations of majoritarian Hindu groups with the implicit and explicit collusion of state institutions and agents. When violence broke out in Northeast Delhi in March 2020, the worst such violence in decades, it was described as religious riots among Hindus and Muslims. But the reality of it is that among the 53 dead and the hundreds wounded most casualties were borne by Muslims.6 In the past decades, what has occurred are not so many riots or mutual conflict and hostility as much as genocides, pogroms, forcible conversions to Hinduism, torching and looting of the property of minority religious communities (alongside inter-caste, inter-ethnic violence, and gender-based violence). The term communalism is also inadequate to understanding the institutionalization of socio-economic inequalities and discriminations that are captured, for example, by the Sachar (2006) committee report, “Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India.”7 In its survey of 13 states in India, the report documents widespread and disproportionate gaps faced by Muslim communities across educational attainment, income, bank credit, and high-level government jobs. It too identifies widespread perceptions among Muslim communities of prejudice and discrimination toward them. Increasingly, in lieu of communalism, what is required is an understanding of the ways that Indian Muslims are racialized in this majoritarian Hindu context. Even though Hindus and Muslims are not phenotypically different, majoritarian Hindu discourses give a racial character to Islam, cultural practices associated with Muslims, and the presence of Muslims in India. For example, Muslims are cast as alien outsiders and are seen as innately physically and psychically different from Hindus. These racist stereotypes also drive a Hindu politics of Muslim extermination, not only in the form of periodic genocides but also in the routinized targeting and killing of Muslims (Bharucha 2003). As a result, an intersectional and transnational methods perspective prompted me to innovate an analysis of racialization to understand the perilous implications of police associations of Muslims with sexual crime and deviance.

POLITICS OF GENDER-VARIANT BODIES At other moment during the meeting with Delhi police constables, attention turned to Hijras. As the discussions related to Section 377 progressed in each of the groups, I shared that my field research among Hijras had resulted in reports of widespread police harassment and violence against them due to their gender non-conformity and sexual practices. Outraged by these accounts, constables vehemently accused them of being criminals, thieves, and sex workers and therefore requiring pre-emptive policing (read: police violence). And, the constables charged, using the English language word, even in a discussion largely in the language of Hindi, “Hijras are antipolice.” Delhi constables’ outpourings come in response to the mention of the grievous police violence reported by Hijras. They are clearly offended by such allegations and react by highlighting the ways that Hijras transgress law and all manner of social norms. Unwilling to accept any criticism implied by Hijras, they go so far as to say that Hijras

Researching sexuality and state  151 are anti-police, thereby foregrounding the puzzle of how to understand its meanings, ironies, and links to criminality and sexual transgressions. An intersectional and transnational methods perspective, which led to research among the police is equally indispensable to an analysis of these police responses, for such a perspective highlights the relevance of nation, state, and law to matters of gender and sexuality. To say that Hijras are antipolice is to imply that they are opposed to the police, against the police, or antagonistic to them. As a prefix, “anti” derives from Greek and is frequently associated with speaking against, contradicting, rivaling, or really, being on opposite side of figures of authority. Thus, the constables quite specifically suggest that to be anti-police is synonymous with being anti-law and anti-state, a point further confirmed by the accusations that Hijras are thieves, sex workers, and such. Insofar as the why and wherefore of the state is to manage and regulate on behalf of the collective, anti-police also takes on the connotations of being anti-social and anti-national. To an extent, the constables’ responses reflect the deep-seated popularly held beliefs, especially among the urban middle classes, that Hijras are utterly without shame, but they also trail colonial and postcolonial histories of law and law enforcement that render Hijras as adversaries. Once again, engaging the colonial archive is a central part of an intersectional and transnational perspective, and of particular note is the Criminal Tribes’ Act (CTA), 1871, requiring all groups assumed to be “addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable offences” to register with the local authorities.8 Discursively producing the very social categories intended for regulation, the law sought to suppress “hereditary criminals” believed to transmit crime from one generation to another, much like how caste-based professions were thought to be passed down (Radhakrishna 2001). So-called Eunuchs were given a prominent place in the Act, requiring that all names, residences, and properties of those who might be even reasonably suspected of kidnapping or castrating children (in order to expand their community), or violating the antisodomy law introduced in 1861, be registered with the Superintendent of Police. The CTA’s apparatus of surveillance and regulation was chiefly enforced by police— through extensively monitoring Hijras, their homes and activities, but also controlling their movements by determining whether they could leave a village or change residence. The Act was primarily the outcome of strongly held colonial prejudices against itinerant groups and their arguable proclivities to licentiousness that seemed to the colonial authorities especially pronounced in the case of Hijras (Narrain 2004). As Meena Radhakrishna (2001) argues, itinerant groups were viewed as difficult to control, believed to be perennially disloyal and missing respectable codes of conduct and norms of morality. As street entertainers and performers at public events, weddings, births, and such, Hijras appeared all the more suspect, accounting for why the Act criminalized activities that were their sources of livelihood. Perhaps the most egregious violation per the colonial moral order was that Hijras were feminine presenting, frequently dressed in feminine clothing, which was also explicitly outlawed. Indeed, one of the first cases populating the annals of the colonial antisodomy law involves a Hijra, Khairati, who appeals her conviction for a “crime,” since the allegation of crime was not supported by any evidence, witness, or indication of harm to anyone (Arondekar 2009). Since the threshold for CTA’s enforcement was as low as “if the local government has reason to believe,” it was open to indiscriminate use, leading to more abuses in the 1920s when the Act granted police added powers to inspect residences, summon people to the police station, report daily to the police, and more.

152  Research handbook on intersectionality Even though Hijras were denotified as a criminal group in postcolonial India, they are still seen as having an “innate” propensity to crime and are regulated accordingly. In the contemporary setting, they are subject to the cluster of colonial codes that became the legal backbone of the postcolonial nation, especially the edicts against same-sex sexual practices (Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code) and voluntary or involuntary castration (Sections 320 and 322 of the Indian Penal Code), and the more banal but more frequently used laws aimed at curbing vagrancy and public nuisance (Puri 2016). The anti-prostitution legislation, Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956, was also amended in 1986 to be gender neutral, thereby further targeting Hijras and other non-conforming gender subjects. Since, aside from being opportunistic, the police take their cue from these laws and dominant social moralities, Hijras are among the communities most vulnerable to them. The handful of reports and scholarly accounts detail intense police abuse and violence toward Hijras; the report, Human Rights Violations against the Transgender Community, by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties describes the routine and egregious police physical and sexual violence to which Hijras are subjected on and off the streets, which is also confirmed by another damning report, Broken System: Dysfunction, Abuse and Impunity in the Indian Police.9 When police wield allegations of subaltern communities being anti-police, they are in fact pointing to the deeply subjective and affective aspects of law and law enforcement. In this institutional view, embattled communities pose an intrinsic threat and are imminently out of order. Such perceptions are equaled and exceeded with law enforcement practices aimed at neutralizing the threat—whether by use of excessive force, subduing, arresting, sexual harassment, among others. Even as histories of law and law enforcement construct these communities as essentially non-compliant, constabularies expect that they will unquestioningly submit to them in ways that are consonant with militarized environments. Compliance is often not enough to shield the vulnerable, but it appears to be a prerequisite for organizing relations between communities seen as outside the pale of the law, state, and society and those who embody them. The perceived failure of Hijras to unquestioningly succumb justifies extra-judicial policing that is, in fact, normalized.

REFLECTING ON RESEARCH: INTERSECTIONAL AND TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES An intersectional and transnational perspective provides an invaluable window to the transnational histories of the antisodomy law that intersect with cisgender women, heterosexuality, racialized religious communities, and gender-variant groups like Hijras. At the same time, it also calls attention beyond the content of research to the research process itself. One aspect that stands out has to do with the patronizing stances of several state agents that I encountered throughout the fieldwork, whereby officials such as Khanna sought to inform me as experts on matters related to policing, law, and governance. Such responses are to be expected, for as Max Weber (1978) has noted, they are engendered by bureaucracies and their hierarchical and status-driven structures. But they are also heightened by heterosexual and gendered hierarchies—the maleness of the respondents and the embodied presence of the researcher. In this case, my status as a relatively young cisgender, presumably heterosexual woman, with a caste Hindu name routinely impacted the nature of my interactions in the field and the kinds of data that I was able to obtain.

Researching sexuality and state  153 These identity markers helped get me an audience with state officials and other senior figures during the fieldwork, even as they shaped their responses to me. For example, while I was at the Judicial Division of the Ministry of Home Affairs, another government official lectured me at length, prompted by my initial and brief inquiry about the role of this division in responding to the Naz writ against Section 377. Self-assuredly relaxing back in his chair with hands crossed at the back of his head, he launched into a long explanation meandering between public order, the Geeta, a pre-eminent upper-caste Hindu epic, and the place of sex in Hindu philosophy. Presenting (his) ideas about morality and law and order, he eventually took a stand against same-sex sexual activity on the premise that it was against the order of nature. In another example, this one involving a senior cisgender male (and presumably heterosexual) activist, I experienced an especially difficult moment during fieldwork. As a one-time medical doctor who gave up his practice to become a grassroots activist, this person started to reprimand me, launching into a tirade that lasted over an hour. His grouse was that I had given a public talk on the Naz writ without consulting his group about their efforts to decriminalize homosexuality. While this was not exactly true, I was at the receiving end of his complaints at being sidelined in the struggle against Section 377, his concerns about the focus on legal reform, and his criticisms at LGBT persons for not engaging in public forms of activism. Notwithstanding the problems of ordinary LGBT people outing themselves at the time, this and other examples illustrate the ways that my gender status was directly relevant to the research process. Equally notable about most of these interactions is that the state officials or others, such as the activist noted above, did not meet with me alone. At the meeting with the activist, there were two other people, including a woman, who was silent throughout the meeting. At the Judicial Division meeting, another official with the designation of Director stayed as a mute witness to our meeting. He was invited to join the meeting before it started. In fact, throughout the research process, no male-presenting state official met with me without the presence of a third person. This, I believe, was as much about the need to maintain heterosexual decorum that is seen as culturally proper. It is also, as I see it, about having witnesses to delicate or difficult conversations involving sexuality, especially same-sex sexual activity. An intersectional and transnational methods perspective too foregrounds the relevance of caste, religious, and class status to the process of research. These markers, reflected in my name and subtle aspects of self-presentation, opened the door to these meetings, helping me secure interviews, requests for data, etc. Undoubtedly, police constables, state officials, and others interpreted these markers, coloring what they could say and how they said it. It enabled police constables and others to speak openly and pejoratively about Hijras and Muslims, even as they shared with me the challenges of policing in Delhi. Also relevant to the field research were my transnational credentials—the fact that I was a faculty member at a university in Boston. It gave legitimacy to my inquiries and, indeed, more than one official mentioned that they would not have agreed to see me had I not been affiliated with a US university. This affiliation lent weight to my quest validated as the pursuit of research. While there are now many more established and emerging scholars doing fieldwork on sexuality as well as state institutions, it was still uncommon at the time. As a result, officials were more curious but also more likely to take it upon themselves to inform and educate me in ways that are directly related to my gender, caste, religious status, and transnational affiliations to higher education. At the same time, an intersectional and transnational methods stance brought moments of friction and opportunity to be an engaged researcher—to say something, to do something.

154  Research handbook on intersectionality Even as police constables were eager to share their views with me, being present in the field meant contending with racist and discriminatory views. During one trip to another police station to gather FIRs on Section 377, a constable followed me into the Records Room, dusty and cramped with a couple of tables, several chairs, and metal shelves stacked with files, ledgers, where I looked through the ledgers with FIRs, across from another constable at an adjoining table. Curious about my presence, he inquired about my purpose and upon hearing of my interest in police crime reports related to Section 377, he volunteered that it’s a crime mostly committed by Muslims. Once again, pointing to the evidence, I insisted that data does not support this claim, citing the overwhelming representation of Hindu names in these crime reports. While I was not able to convince the constable or his colleague, who periodically joined the conversation what became clear were the deep-seated anti-Muslim prejudices among the mostly Hindu police in Delhi and their colonial antecedents. After several such encounters, I returned to report my provisional findings to a senior police official. I sought to share with him my concerns about the extent of the biases and prejudices against Muslims that were rife among a mostly Hindu Delhi police force. This senior official, a member of another minoritized group, the Sikhs, had previously given me access to data about police complaints related to Section 377. But he vigorously dismissed my concerns, saying that these biased police constables were just a “a few bad apples.” When I pressed him on the deep-seated nature of these hostilities and the need for anti-bias training among the Delhi police, our meeting was quickly terminated. My efforts to “do something,” to let the research shed light on to the dangerous biases toward those who need the most protection from those who are sworn to protect, fell on deaf ears. Each time there are reports of Delhi police’s collusions with Hindu right-wing groups, the most recent case being Northeast Delhi in which police tacitly and actively supported the violence against Muslims, the significance of field research is once again underscored. The irony is that Delhi police constables live at the edges of poverty, working long hours under arduous conditions. In many ways, they are subalterns too. They perform 12-hour beats daily, are required to be available 24 hours a day and have no fixed days off. They return to their families no more than three days a week. In fact, during my repeated visits to Delhi police stations, I glimpsed the meager conditions of dorm-style rooms where the constables spend much of their off-duty time. As I heard their accounts of the difficulties of the working and living conditions, Delhi police constables shared with me the problems that they routinely face and the ways that they must navigate a politically corrupt system. But my attempts to mitigate their hostile perceptions of Hijras, much like in the case of Muslim communities, were for the most part futile. Police constables were inflexible in their perceptions of Hijras as inherent criminals and as always on the wrong side of law and the nation. Nonetheless, fieldwork can sometime present unexpected openings among unsuccessful attempts to changes hearts and minds. One such moment came when in the discussion on Section 377, one constable turned to his colleagues and, interpreting my presence as a teaching moment, went on to defend the right to be gay. His interjection contrasted sharply with a string of homophobic responses—it’s against Indian culture, it would diminish the country’s population—about why the antisodomy law should not be overturned. The extent to which this constable’s intervention was persuasive to his peers in the room is unclear, but what it illustrates is the unpredictability of research and its possibilities. Ultimately, though, while there seemed to be some leeway in the possibility of decriminalizing homosexuality, constables remained intractable on their anti-Muslim and anti-Hijra biases.

Researching sexuality and state  155

CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS “The field” is a complex terrain and fieldwork is a complicated process. Doing research can be exciting, anxiety-provoking, exhilarating, and can even invoke “bad feelings” (Moussawi 2021; Moussawi and Puri 2022). If part of the challenge is how to constitute “the field,” then the other uncertainty is how to go about researching it. Intersectional and transnational perspectives are invaluable in both respects, for they provide important guidelines in framing the field and alerting researchers to the insights that emerge in the process of conducting the research. As this chapter shows, taking such a perspective to researching the antisodomy law in the Indian context begins with investigating colonial and postcolonial archives. Thus, this chapter underscores the colonial origins of the antisodomy law and its racialized and gendered aspects, but also the colonial introduction of policing and policies such as the Criminal Tribes Act, the combined legacies of which endure until now. It investigates the body of case law related to Section 377, identifying the links between the criminalization of same-sex sexuality with cis-heterosexuality, as well as the application of the law to prosecute crimes against boys. In the chapter, fieldwork is an equally important part of the implementation of intersectional and transnational methods. Such a stance entails “dehomogenizing” the state and pursuing research among its various institutions and agencies—police, legal records, Judicial Division of the Ministry of Home Affairs, among others. It means remaining alert to sexuality’s intersections with social differences of gender, gender expression, class, and racialized religion. Instances from research among the police, but also other field-based encounters, foreground homophobic attempts to dismiss the importance of undoing the antisodomy law by highlighting violence against women or by linking the law to racialized Muslim communities and to Hijras. An intersectional and transnational perspective further illustrates the need to go beyond conventional understandings of data and to analyse the seemingly insignificant encounters that occur before, after, and alongside the formal interview or access to quantitative data. Thus, this chapter is developed around more formal moments in fieldwork, including the group discussions with police constables and police officials, but also around informal meetings and conversations. Although such informal moments are more likely to be relegated to the margins of a researcher’s fieldnotes—the interaction with Khanna, the police constable who followed me to the records room—they provide invaluable insights into dominant ideologies and discourses in ways that expand and enrich the scope of data collection, insights, and findings. Emphasized too in this chapter are the ways that intersectional and transnational perspectives are indispensable for locating the researcher in the field. These reflections raise important ethical and activist questions of what is to be done in the face of homophobic, transphobic, and racialized discourses that surface during the process of research. While I share the ways in which I intervened, largely unsuccessfully, it seems to me that intersectional and transnational approaches compel us to do what we can. They too draw attention to unexpected openings that emerge during the research process as well as the work that still needs to be done in ensuring social justice to those who are still denied.

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NOTES 1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

https://​w ww​. indiatoday​. in/​f act​- check/​s tory/​f act​- check​- viral​- post​- muslim​- population​- india​ -1733926​-2020​-10​-22, consulted on October 5, 2021. https://​www​.pewresearch​.org/​fact​-tank/​2021/​09/​21/​key​-findings​-about​-the​-religious​-composition​ -of​-india/​, consulted on October 5, 2021. The Hindu Right has fanned fears about an explosive fertility rate among Muslims, pejoratively called the Muslim Growth Rate, and especially so after the release of reports from the 2001 census. On this, see Ashish Bose (2005), “Beyond Hindu-Muslim Growth Rates”; Charu Gupta (2004) “Censuses, Communalism, Gender, and Identity.” As Mehar Singh Gill (2007) observes, despite the fact that fertility rates among Muslims have decreased over a period of time, data and reports have been twisted by leaders of the Hindu Right to make specters of explosive Muslim growth rates. Also see Roger Jeffery and Patricia Jeffery (2005), “Saffron Demography, Common Wisdom, Aspirations and Uneven Governmentalities.” https://​www​.theatlantic​.com/​international/​archive/​2017/​11/​muslim​-overpopulation​-myth/​545318/​, consulted on October 5, 2021. Martial races was a category invented by the British to create groups who seemed well suited for warring and policing. These groups were characterized as physically strong, fearless, and loyal to British interests and were recruited for the military, police, etc. The groups varied regionally. The clubbing together of various ethnic and caste groups as “Brahmans” or as “low castes” by British administrators was a related strategy of reducing and enumerating the tremendous cultural, religious, class, and caste-based differences in the sub-continent. https://​www​.npr​.org/​2020/​03/​07/​812193930/​delhi​-riots​-aftermath​-how​-do​-you​-explain​-such​ -violence, consulted on October 16, 2021. https://​casi​.sas​.upenn​.edu/​sites/​default/​files/​iit/​Minority​%20Report​.pdf, consulted on October 16, 2021. The full text of this Act is available at: https://​docs​.google​.com/​viewer​?a​=​v​&​pid​=​forums​&s​ rcid​ =​MDk​3NzM5NDU0N​DkyNjkxNzc​wNjIBMDI2O​TYzMTU4Njk​wNTQ1MzkzN​jYBNXBXSHp​ BRUlpTzRKATAuMQEBdjI, consulted on October 16, 2021. Human Rights Watch (2009). “Broken System: Dysfunction, Abuse, and Impunity in the Indian Police.” http://​www​.hrw​.org/​reports/​2009/​08/​04/​broken​-system, consulted on February 10, 2017.

REFERENCES Arnold, David. 1990. “Bureaucratic Recruitment and Subordination in Colonial India: The Madras Constabulary 1859–1947.” In Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by Ranajit Guha, 1–33. New York: Oxford University Press. Arondekar, Anjali. 2009. For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Bacchetta, Paola. 1999. “When the (Hindu) Nation Exiles Its Queers,” Social Text 17 (4): 141–67. Bandewar, Sunita V.S, Amita Pitre, and Lakshmi Lingam. 2018. “Five Years Post Nirbhaya: Critical Insights into the Status of Response to Sexual Assault,” Indian Journal of Medical Ethics 3 (3): 215–21. https://​doi​.org/​10​.20529/​IJME​.2018​.025. Bharucha, Rustom. 2003. “Muslims and Others: Anecdotes, Fragments, and Uncertainties of Evidence,” Economic and Political Weekly 4 (October): 4238–50. Bhaskaran, Suparna. 2001. “‘The Politics of Penetration: Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code’, in Ruth Vanita.” In Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society, edited by Ruth Vanita, 15–29. New York and London: Routledge. Bhaskaran, Suparna. 2004. Made in India: Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities, Transnational Projects. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bose, Ashish. 2005. “Beyond Hindu-Muslim Growth Rates: Understanding Socio-Economic Reality,” Economic and Political Weekly 40 (5): 370–4.

Researching sexuality and state  157 Fernandez, Bina, and Gomathy N.B. 2003. “The Nature of Violence Faced by Lesbian Women in India.” Research Centre on Violence Against Women, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Gill, Mehar Singh. 2007. “Politics of Population Census Data in India,” Economic and Political Weekly 42 (3): 241–9. Grewal, Inderpal. 1999. “‘Women’s Rights as Human Rights’: Feminist Practices, Global Feminism, and Human Rights Regimes in Transnationality,” Citizenship Studies 3 (3): 337–54. https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1080/​13621029908420719. Gupta, Alok. 2002. “Trends in the Application of Section 377. ” In Humjinsi: A Resource Book on Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Rights in India, edited and compiled by Bina Fernandez, 66–74. Mumbai: Indian Centre for Human Rights and Law. Gupta, Alok. 2011. “The Presumption of Sodomy.” In Law Like Love: Queer Perspectives, edited by Lawby Arvind Narrain and Alok Gupta, 115–61. New Delhi: Yoda Press. Gupta, Charu. 2004. “Censuses, Communalism, Gender, and Identity,” Economic and Political Weekly 39 (39): 4302–4. Haldar, Piyel Law. 2007. Orientalism and Postcolonialism: The Jurisdiction of the Lotus-Eaters. Oxford and New York: Routledge-Cavendish. Jeffrey, Roger, and and Patricia Jeffrey. 2005. “Saffron Demography: Common Wisdom, Aspirations, and Uneven Governmentalities,” Economic and Political Weekly 40 (5): 447–53. Kolsky, Elizabeth. 2005. “Codification and the Rule of Colonial Difference: Criminal Procedure in British India,” Law and History Review 23 (3): 631–83. Merry, Sally Engle. 2000. Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Moussawi, Ghassan. 2021. “Bad Feelings on Trauma, Nonlinear Time, and Accidental Encounters in ‘the Field’,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 10 (1): 78–96. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1525/​dcqr​ .2021​.10​.1​.78. Moussawi, Ghassan, and Jyoti Puri. 2022. “"Bad Feelings: Reflections on Research, Disciplines, and Critical Methodologiees.” In Silences, Neglected Feelings, and Blind-Spots in Research Practice, edited by Kathy Davis and Janice Irvine. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Narrain, Arvind. 2004. Queer: Despised Sexuality, Law, and Social Change. Bangalore: Books for Change. Pandey, Gyanendra. 2006. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. New York: Oxford University Press. PUCL-K. 2003. “Human Rights Violations against the Transgender Community.” Bangalore, Karnataka. Puri, Jyoti. 2016. Sexual States: Governance and the Decriminalization of Sodomy in India’s Present. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Radhakrishna, Meena. 2001. Dishonored by History: Criminal Tribes and British Colonial Policy. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Rao, Rahul. 2015. “Echoes of Imperialism in LGBT Activism.” In Echoes of Empire: Memory, Identity and Colonial Legacies, edited by Kalypso Nicolaïdis, Berny Sèbe, and Gabrielle Maas, 355–72. London: I.B. Tauris. https://​eprints​.soas​.ac​.uk/​19606/​. Sachar, Rajindar, Salyid Hamid, T,K. Oommen, M.A. Basith, Rakesh Basant, Akhtar Majeed, and Abusaleh Shariff. 2006. “Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India,” Development Economics Working Papers 22136, East Asian Bureau of Economic Research. Skuy, David. 1998. “Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code of 1862: The Myth of the Inherent Superiority and Modernity of the English Legal System Compared to India’s Legal System in the Nineteenth Century,” Modern Asian Studies 32 (3): 513–57. Sundar, Nandini. 2011. “The Rule of Law and the Rule of Property: Law-Struggles and the Neo-liberal State in India.” In The State in India after Liberalization, edited by Akhil Gupta and K. Sivaramakrishnan, 175–93. London: Routledge. /2017/11/muslim-overpopulation-myth/545318/, consulted on October 5, 2021. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Vols 1 and 2. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

10. Space, place, and urban future  Marcus Anthony Hunter and Terrell J.A. Winder

INTRODUCTION Black queer geographies matter. Intersectionality is at the core of living and existing in this world as fully realized persons in a social landscape that would ask us to cast aside aspects of the self or hide them from view (Collins 2002, 2019; Collins and Bilge 2020; Crenshaw 1991). While these affirmative statements may ring true, even apparent, they tend not to guide many in practice and scholarship. Black queer geographies are often ignored, subsumed in a vacuum of details on or about Black people writ-large, or LGBTQ people writ-large (Cohen 1999, 2004; Cohen and Hunter 2007; Lorde 2012). In turn, our relative ignorance generates presentism on the development and articulation of racialized and queer urban geographies. Such maps of urban life are believed to be relatively new, lacking a true historical genealogy.  Yet, where did Langston Hughes or Lorraine Hansberry go to be gay and Black and unwind? Where are the sites of leisure and pleasure? Where are they nestled inside a predominantly heterosexual Black experience or inculcated within a scene dominated by White gay cis-men? Or both? Or neither?  Hidden and erased as they often are, Black queer geographies reveal the limits, possibilities, and continuities of space and time, especially in urban America (Bailey 2013; Greene 2014; Johnson 2011; McCune 2014; Moore 2011; Roane 2020). The Great Migration, or the Great Escape (K.L. Brown 2018), reflects a period whereby staggering numbers of Black Americans urbanized, shifting the populations of urban America coast to coast. From Jewel’s Catch One in Los Angeles to Langston’s in Brooklyn, Black queer sites of pleasure and leisure are few and far between, underlying the ephemerality of urban American Black and queer geographies (see, e.g., Bell and Binnie 2004; Doan 2007).  Taken together, the historical omission and contemporary erasure of urban Black queer life make the conjunction of urban life and intersectionality an even more pressing endeavor. More than simply arguing for the accurate and comprehensive inclusion of urban Black queer lives, we utilize this critical juncture in Bayard Rustin’s life to bring into sharp relief the intersectional geography it reveals—the probable and possible futures unrealized and underdeveloped. We must recover the otherwise erased Black queer urban geographies. To this end, this chapter offers what we term intersectional recovery—an intentional form and pathway for pragmatic and meaningful recovery, recasting, and reclamation of the overlooked and understudied biographies and geographies of Black queer figures.  To do so, this chapter uses Bayard Rustin’s socio-political biography and the historical context of Black life in Los Angeles as a template to perform and demonstrate the returns to intersectional recovery. In so doing, we offer a replicable pathway to investigate and apprehend the convergence of urban geography and intersectionality to produce a more inclusive urban and identity-based analysis nested within the dynamic dialogue afoot in the broader field. Thus, this chapter utilizes Rustin and Los Angeles to amplify historical figures whose 158

Space, place, and urban future  159 lives and contributions to the social sciences have been flattened through intentional neglect of intersectional methods. We begin by briefly re-engaging the landscape of Black queer scholarship to date. We follow this engagement using the case of Bayard Rustin to underscore both how an intersectional focus would have radically shifted Rustin’s self-perceptions while also noting how a lack of this focus has come to impact our perceptions of present Black queer geographies. By recasting and reclaiming Black queer figures, we can better apprehend the relational field between intersectional perspectives and the urban condition more broadly. To be sure, the focus on one Black gay man’s socio-political biography is but a small reflection of the broad spectrum comprising the experiences and perspectives of the larger Black LGBTQ+ community. The following analysis and discussion joins with several recent explorations and demonstrations of the power of reclaiming and building social theories based upon quotidian experiences at the nexus of urban geography and intersectionality (Hartman 2019; Hunter and Robinson 2018; Hunter et al. 2016; McKittrick 2006, 2011; Roane 2020; Robinson and Hunter 2019).

THE GEOGRAPHY OF CHOCOLATE RAINBOWS  What is the intersectional potential for Black queer liberation when social actors express their entire selves? What is the intersectional urban potential for embracing Black queer spaces, places, and bodies? As we have outlined elsewhere (see, e.g., Hunter and Winder 2019), invisibility—historical, geographic, or otherwise—has devastating consequences on the lives of Black queer peoples.  Populations that have gone unrecognized tend to be erased from history both in theory and practice; their lived realities are rendered absent from the pages of histories of the city, their roles in society undervalued, and their hopes unheard to the masses. Yet, Black queer urban geographies make patterns of race, class, sexuality, and political economy even more visible. As Black queer urban people move about the city, whether for work or leisure, the pathways they take reveal elements of safety and inequality otherwise unable to be discerned with singular analyses that do not take intersectional approaches. In recent decades, dynamic literature has emerged in various disciplines and mediums to illustrate the indelible marks Black queer people have had on our society and understanding of social equality. For example, scholars that have examined Black gay identity have highlighted how race, place, class, sexuality, religion, and social spaces shape and inform the proclaimed identities of Black gay men (e.g., Crichlow 2003; Ferguson 2004; Hawkeswood 1996; Hunter 2010; Johnson 2011; McKittrick 2006, 2011; Moore 2011; Walcott 2015; Winder 2015). While many works consider that either race or sexuality must dominate as a primary identifier, both Hawkeswood (1996) and Hunter (2010), for example, emphasize the dynamic variations in Black gay men’s understanding of their sexualities and that, for many cases, Black gay men find race and sexuality as inseparably linked. These analyses underscore the analytic potential for intersectional methods that attend to the contours of the multiple jeopardies (King 1988) imbuing social categories and their consequences on the human condition.  Employing oral histories of Black gay men, Johnson’s (2011) seminal text revealed the historical and contemporary lives of Black Southern gay men in the United States. Through these narrative histories, Sweet Tea is a corrective to the familiar narratives of gay life in the United States, which often fail to account for the experiences of queer people in the South and Black

160  Research handbook on intersectionality gay life. Immortalizing these men’s memories and contemporary realities, Johnson’s work illuminates how dynamic social conditions and processes like stigmatization, discrimination, and marginalization shape the formation of racial, sexual, and gendered identities. Focusing on the intersection of urban and Black queer life in Detroit, Bailey (2013), for instance, highlights the complex chosen families and social support networks that make up the house/ballroom scene which is now prominently featured in media like FX’s Pose and HBOMAX’s Legendary. Building on the legacy of 1980s early ballroom documentaries like Paris Is Burning, Bailey’s autoethnographic account of the ballroom scene vividly depicts how Black queer people fashion new communities and support networks in the face of continued discrimination from both Black communities and White communities. Their erasures and often fraught historical experiences illustrate the impact of simultaneously being erased from the national consciousness. For example, the role of Black queer activists such as Marsha P. Johnson in movements like Stonewall are finally being recognized and the historical record revised (see, e.g., Calafell 2019; Feinberg 1997; France 2017; Hunter amd Robinson 2018; Jackson 2021). Shows such as Pose, loosely based on the documentary Paris Is Burning (Livingston 1990), highlight the crossover appeal of Black queer culture to mainstream and illustrate the potential for lived recognition. These erasures and subsequent recasts highlight both invisibility and visibility’s constant promise and perils.  Illustrating how Afro-Caribbean and African Canadian same-sex attracted men prioritize “safety and pleasure” (Crichlow 2003, 4) in their social interactions, Crichlow demonstrates the fragility of the inclusion of Black queer communities. Indeed, secular spaces can become centers for exploring the relationship between religious teachings, both affirming and stigmatizing, and the formation of racial and sexual identities (Winder 2015). Furthermore, Black gay men are frequently criticized by members of the Black community and other non-Black persons who combine race-based and sexuality-based stigmas to denigrate their social identities as Black gay men. This phenomenon, which Berger terms “intersectional stigma” (2004), shapes how stigmatized individuals can craft identities when their identities are under attack. Even further, Moore’s (2011) assessment broadens the focus from gay men to explore the overlaps among communities of Black lesbians. It contrasts emergent when considering how Black gay women navigate family and child-rearing in urban America. In this work, Moore (2011) persuasively shows how Black lesbians are often structurally obscured from local queer neighborhoods and often create intimate social networks for socializing in personal homes. Scholarship—and more recently, mainstream media—has extensively documented young men’s social sanctioning and fears navigating racial and sexual stigma (see, e.g., Young 2018). Scholarship in performance studies has been indispensable for understanding how Black gay people respond to social stigma through specific practices and behaviors. Jeffery McCune’s (2014) qualitative participant observation highlights the social and cultural avoidance practices men who sleep with men, perhaps unbeknownst to others, employed to manage their stigma by identifying as discreet rather than queer or gay.  Furthermore, research at the intersection of religion, race, and sexuality collectively have found that Black LGBT persons often maintain their connections with religious communities and spirituality even in the face of direct attacks on their sexualities by prioritizing racial connections (Moore 2011) discrediting the speaker but not the text (Pitt 2010), and reinterpreting religious messaging to justify their sexualities (Winder 2015). Much of this literature on religious-based stigma coalesces around the high levels of Christian religiosity among Black

Space, place, and urban future  161 Americans. Consistently, these studies have found that religious-based stigma and discrimination persists even as the number of LGBTQ-affirming and accepting churches are increasing across the United States. Taken collectively, these works underscore the overall import and thrust of the scholarship in this area—the mechanisms constraining and facilitating identity and community building are rendered especially visible when the conditions of urban queer of color perspectives are centered (Baldwin 1989; Ferguson 2004; Muñoz 1999). The findings of these studies help to carve out the importance of understanding how social stigmas for people with multiple marginalized identities make visible the collision of intersectionality and urban formation.  The imports of this critical work reframe our understandings of how the intersections of racial, sexual, and gendered identities have placed marginalized urban communities in uniquely stigmatized social positions. Each of these works is a testament to the importance of understanding the interlocking aspects of identities that constrain and influence Black queer communities as they respond to social stigmas. These scholars envision their contemporary ethnographic works as correctives to the long legacy of research neglect on the lives of Black queer men often obscured by a focus on Black heterosexuals and White queers. On the one hand, invisibility has catalysed the development of unique Black queer rural and urban cultures, knowledge, and survival practices across the globe. On the other hand, however, this invisibility has been its own kind of socio-political message whereby Black queer lives do not matter and are vulnerable to state-sanctioned harms and disposability. As a result, Black queer lives are overlooked and forgotten in the annals of history or left behind, significantly as gay rights movements gain mainstream acceptance and socio-political success. Once visibility is obtained, it can mean a social reckoning for forgotten and under-resourced communities, revealing futures unrealized because of the precarity, isolation, and wayward outcomes invisible geographies can produce (Hartman 2019; Wynter 2003). However, it can also mean the distortion and mainstreaming of Black queer cultural elements like vogue, house-ballroom culture, slang, and more.  Within the context of the rich, vast scholarship, the aim of this chapter is formed. In what follows, we call for and provide a workable demonstration of another form of correction, intersectional recovery, to the historical record by going beyond those who can be readily interviewed and observed. We aim to show how the impacts of stigma, lack of social research, and ignoring of intersectionality came to bear on one life in the hopes that we can reimagine a queer utopia yet to arrive. 

WHERE BAYARD’S RAINBOW BURST In this section, we take up the story of Bayard Rustin to illustrate how an intentionally intersectional analysis can help us not only recover the historical ways that intersectional identities were erased but also to envision what an intersectional queer methodology offers for the contemporary moment in the face of shifting public acceptance of queer persons and more considerable demographic change in the United States. We offer this recasting of Bayard Rustin’s experience on a visit to Los Angeles that fundamentally shifted his worldview and self-perception as a guide for the intersectional reclamation of queer activists, figures, and scholars of color whose impacts have been less understood due to intentional obscuring of their queer identities. 

162  Research handbook on intersectionality Table 10.1  

Black population, Los Angeles County, b. 1950 Negro Women

Negro Men

Colored Women/Mena

1890

a

a

6 421

1900

1 451

1 390

a

1910

4 869

4 555

a

1920

9 870

8 868

a

1930

24 598

21 827

a

1940

39 959

35 250

a

Note: Source:

a Please note ‘Colored’ category includes all non-Whites. ESRI, NHGIS, and US Census.

Beginning in the 1850s, Black migrants began arriving in Los Angeles and surrounding areas. Rather than arriving as free people, many arrived alongside their enslavers, journeying as a part of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. Indeed, the story of Bridget “Biddy” Mason is critical here. The legal property of Robert Mays Smith, a White Mormon, Mason arrived in Los Angeles and her family in 1850 (Beasley 1919; Demaratus 2002). Although California was a Free State, it did not intervene in the legal slave ownership rights of arrived White Southerners like Smith. This laissez-faire approach to slavery came to a head once Smith determined to leave California and take Mason and her family to Utah, where fellow Mormons had begun establishing a persisting community around the Great Salt Lake. When Mason refused, Smith filed a petition at the California court, requesting that his slaves be legally compelled to comply with his demand to leave. The court denied his claim, and Smith’s slaves, including Mason, were immediately freed and allowed to stay in Los Angeles (Reiter 1978, 213). This history is the foundation for the Black geography of Los Angeles over the 19th and 20th centuries. Within one hundred years of the legal enforcement of Mason’s freedom, she, her family, and a host of Black migrants emerged as entrepreneurs, professionals, property, and business owners, establishing several vibrant and persisting Black communities across the Los Angeles area. So much so that by the time a weary and well-traveled social justice warrior, Bayard Rustin, arrived, Altadena and South Pasadena were among the established Black communities and residential areas in the Los Angeles area. South Pasadena, in particular, has historically maintained a persisting Black population adjacent to middle-class and upper-middle-class White people (Table 10.1, Figures 10.1 and 10.2) (see, e.g., J. Anderson 1997; Carbado and Weise 2003; D’Emilio 2003; Haskins 1997; Podair 2009). Rustin’s arrival in Los Angeles was a part of a series of meetings, conferences, and planning sessions he had been engaged in for more than a decade. Born in 1912, Rustin was reared in a Quaker household anchored in a philosophy of non-violent protest. Rustin was raised primarily by his grandmother, Julia, a lifelong member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—joining the organization shortly after its founding in 1909 by Black leaders including W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Moorfield Storey, and Mary White Ovington, among others. Despite his peaceable upbringing, Rustin had been a bit of a rabble-rouser early in his life having been expelled from Wilberforce in 1936 (D’Emilio 2003). A lifetime member of Omega Psi Phi, one of the Black Greek “Divine Nine,” he was a renaissance man known for his leadership and singing abilities and fondness for Blues and Spirituals. Beginning in 1947, Rustin organized the first Freedom Rides as a test to Morgan

Space, place, and urban future  163

Source:

ESRI, NHGIS, and US Census; map created using GIS.

Figure 10.1

Los Angeles area Black population, c. 1950

v. Commonwealth of Virginia. Throughout 1948, Rustin trained in India on non-violent practices, integrating those teachings into his approach, strategies, and civil rights and social justice organizing. For five years, 1947–52, Rustin led and organized advocacy for Ghanaian and Nigerian Independence, meeting with international peace and African leaders (see, e.g., J. Anderson 1997; Carbado and Weise 2003; D’Emilio 2003; Haskins 1997; Podair 2009). In 1951, he also established the Committee to Support South African Resistance, advocating non-violent measures to resist and end the Apartheid Regime. Primed to become the leading race man among race men, Rustin was well on his way into the upper echelon of the national and global racial and Civil Rights movement vanguard. However, all of the upward momenta would come to a crashing halt after a late evening in Pasadena on Wednesday, January 21, 1953 (see, e.g., J. Anderson 1997; Carbado and Weise 2003; D’Emilio 2003; Haskins 1997; Podair 2009). Earlier that evening, Rustin’s speech on world peace before the American Association of University Women at the Pasadena Athletic Club had been well received. After attending to the inspired crowd that lingered, Rustin declined a ride back to his hotel room, choosing to walk back along the edge of the Black neighborhood and the neighboring White neighborhood.

164  Research handbook on intersectionality On a mild yet windy evening seeking sexual pleasure and release, Rustin walked the streets of Pasadena cruising, as gay men did in the area, for potential partners (see, e.g., J. Anderson 1997; Carbado and Weise 2003; D’Emilio 2003; Haskins 1997; Podair 2009). Rustin biographer John D’Emilio (2003) noted that although he was not closeted, many were aware. Rustin made no public remarks about his sexuality. Instead, like many Black and professional men and women then and now, Rustin compartmentalized his sexuality taking up with sexual partners in his off-hours and never presenting a partner publicly for fear of it affecting the momentum of his career and leadership aspirations. Without any known or readily available club, speakeasy, or bar to meet indoors, especially for an out-of-towner, Rustin strolled along the streets slow enough to get noticed and notice and purposeful enough to not be stopped by suspicious police officers. D’Emilio (2003, 191) writes of the critical events that followed:  Just before 3:00 A.M., a car with two young white men cruised by slowly, and Rustin waved. After the driver pulled over, Rustin approached the car. “He asked us if we wanted a good time,” one of them said later. “We asked him what he meant, he replied that he couldn’t offer us much, but he could blow us.” The two still had the box of unused condoms they were carrying that evening from their unsuccessful search for female companionship, and they accepted Rustin’s offer. Rustin was in the back seat performing oral sex when two county police officers approached the car. The police promptly arrested the three of them on charges of lewd vagrancy, and Rustin’s world began to unravel.

The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a Christian social justice organization Rustin helped lead for many years, was immediately contacted about the situation. Declining to offer meaningful help, the FOR instead chose to publicly release and widely distribute a damning statement that “Bayard Rustin was convicted on a ‘morals charge’ (homosexual) and sentenced to 60 days in the Los Angeles County Jail on January 23, 1953 … [H]is service as an FOR staff member terminated” (D’Emilio 2003, 192). With the West Coast papers’ coverage of the ordeal of a “nationally known Negro lecturer” (D’Emilio 2003, 192) being arrested, Rustin’s fate was sealed.  By the time Ruth Brown’s “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean” and (Willie Mae) Big Momma Thornton’s “Hound Dog” climbed the 1951 R&B charts, Rustin was a pariah listening to the tunes from a jail cell over his 60-day sentence. Following the completion of his sentence, he was unemployed and forced to take up odd jobs. The incident also creates a Black and religious leadership power-grab, whereby heterosexual cis-gender men supplant Rustin, never again allowed to occupy the head of the vanguard he once held. Over the subsequent five years, new figures rose to the top of the ranks of the global racial justice and Civil Rights movements, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rustin would eventually find his way back within the fold, but never again as the leading figure. Instead, he would have to accept being a sidekick and quiet influencer of sorts within the Civil Rights movement, never again the frontman. To be sure, the constrained geography of Black queer leisure and collection alongside Rustin’s sexual desires were the source of his reputational downfall. His straight counterparts could quickly and effectively find such outlets for their sexual desires. To lead, he would have either had to deny himself pleasure or hide it behind a mask of a seemingly heterosexual relationship. Rustin’s story comes before the communal spaces for Black queer gatherings emerge on the Los Angeles landscape. The lack of social spaces for Black queer people and the rampant vagrant laws in California of the 1950s and 1960s created the conditions necessary for spaces

Space, place, and urban future  165 like Jewel’s Catch One. “The Catch,” as it was affectionately called, was one of the oldest Black-and-queer-owned discos in the United States having opened in 1973 and established just two decades after Rustin’s original arrest (A. Brown 2018). Places like “The Catch,” and others that came after across the country, were hard-fought spaces that have held the memories of Black queer lives and continue to be sources of joy for those living at the intersection of racial and sexual stigma.

Source:

ESRI, NHGIS, and US Census; map created using GIS.

Figure 10.2

Los Angeles area Black population, c. 1960

These spaces did not exist for Bayard Rustin and other Black queer people of the generation. And their absence, as Rustin’s case demonstrates, upends individual and collective outcomes on liberation, racial justice, and social movements. Had Rustin been afforded a safe and meaningful geography of sexual pleasure and leisure that did not bring the added risk of harmful intervention by the police, might we have a visible Black gay leader at the front stage of Civil Rights and global racial justice movements? What potential future would have been unlocked had he not been jailed and ostracized? Until recently, there were rarely any spaces where they could live out the full expressions of their intersecting identities without being marginalized, and even where they did exist, they were constantly under the vigilant eye of the state. Although Black queer spaces were beginning to emerge in the 1970s, Rustin still faced the same major issues affecting these

166  Research handbook on intersectionality Black queer spaces. An observation that Jewel Catch One’s owner, Jewel Thais-Williams, also experienced. In her discussion of the historical constraints on Black queer life in Los Angeles, Williams explains that “There was a restriction on same-sex dancing, women couldn’t tend bar unless they owned it. The police were arresting people for anything remotely homosexual” (as quoted in Chicago Tribune May 2, 2018). The Pasadena, California, of Rustin’s past with a thriving Black community has shifted drastically in racial composition. By the 1980s and 1990s, Black Americans made up nearly 20 percent of the population in Pasadena; the most recent Census reports fewer Black/ African-Americans in the area than in 1920. These drastic demographic shifts due to migration (both voluntary and forced) illustrate how contemporary perceptions of neighborhoods and geographies can erase their pasts, making it difficult to understand how and why Black figures move through space. Today, Pasadena has become increasingly understood as “White space” (E. Anderson 2015) in the public imaginary, making it difficult for us even to understand why a Black queer man might be cruising for fun in 1950s Pasadena. By illuminating the larger structural contexts of Pasadena and Rustin’s fated visit, we aim to uncover how intersectional recovery functions as a method to correct the record and underscores the potentially deleterious effects that a lack of intersectional recognition can have on both individuals and communities. 

CONCLUSION I know now that for me sex must be sublimated if I am to live with myself and in this world longer. (Bayard Rustin)

In 2020, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti posthumously pardoned the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin for his 1953 conviction for lewd public acts. The significance of this moment cannot be overstated, yet it also highlights the historical and continued tensions of visibility and invisibility that we have outlined in this chapter. Sadly, Rustin died before he was fully exonerated and acknowledged by the state and the country. His inability to recover from the shame and stigma associated with his arrest led him to cast his sexuality into a sort of darkness. As Carbado and Weise note in Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, Rustin decided that to continue living in the world, he must sublimate his sexuality, saying: “I know now that for me sex must be sublimated if I am to live with myself and in this world longer” (as quoted in Carbado and Weise 2003, xx).  Recovering the life of Black queer figures like Bayard Rustin allows us to reimagine what the liberation of intersectionality can provide for those subjected to multiple forms of oppression. It allows us to re-envision what the Civil Rights Movement could be if it considered the multiply marginalized person and genuinely reckoned with the complexity of the human condition. Intersectionality offers a chance to uncover the nuance and intricacies of Black queer life in a time when they were mostly erased from view even as they worked to ameliorate the lives of their Black neighbors. Intersectional recovery offers a practice and a potential pathway for researchers to recast the narratives of significant figures through an extensive understanding of the moments and experiences that have come to shape our contemporary understandings of their historical impacts. Rather than reach forward, we can reach back and

Space, place, and urban future  167 attend to those figures whose lives and experiences, while overlooked, bring the collision of intersectional identity and the urban condition into sharp relief. While Black queer people still face the challenges of stigma and discrimination, there have also been considerable gains in the social acceptability of Black queer identities. From the famous Black queer artists, activists, and actors to the everyday Black queer teenager, we see the importance and centrality of understanding the interconnectedness of race and sexuality for the liberation of Black queer people. We are also witnessing, whether through the #BlackLivesMatter movement and global trans-activism, the new realities and new futures unlocked when Black queer leadership is affirmed and at the forefront.  As the first Black, queer president of the Human Rights Campaign, Alphonso David noted in a 2021 interview for Elle magazine, “I cannot be free as a Black man if I’m not free as a gay man. I cannot be free as a gay man if I’m not free as a Black man.” Perhaps in this assertion is the realization of the visibility Rustin believed was too dangerous to survive. Intersectional recovery is an inclusive method that affirms that Black queer geographies, histories, and lifeworlds matter, especially in building theories and explanations of the causes and effects of political and economic development and change.

REFERENCES  Anderson, Elijah. 2015. “The White Space,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1 (1): 10–21. Anderson, Jervis. 1997. Bayard Rustin: Troubles I’ve Seen. New York: HarperCollins. Bailey, Marlon M. 2013. Butch Queens up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Baldwin, James. 1989. Conversations with James Baldwin. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi. Beasley, Delilah. 1919. “The Negro Trailblazers of California,” Los Angeles: Times Mirror. Bell, David, and Binnie, John. 2004. “Authenticating Queer Space: Citizenship, Urbanism and Governance,” Urban Studies 41 (9): 1807–20. Berger, Michelle T. 2004. Workable Sisterhood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brown, August. 2018. “The Story of L.A. Club Jewel’s Catch One and Its Pioneering Owner Finds Its Way to Netflix,” Los Angeles Times May 2. Accessed August 27, 2021. https://​www​.latimes​.com/​ entertainment/​music/​la​-et​-ms​-jewels​-catch​-one​-documentary​-20180502​-story​.html Brown, Karida L. 2018. Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Calafell, Bernadette Marie. 2019. “Narrative Authority, Theory in the Flesh, and the Fight over the Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 6 (2): 26–39. Carbado, Devon, and Weise, Don. 2003. Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin. San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press Start. Cohen, Cathy. 1999. Boundaries of Blackness. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cohen, Cathy. 2004. “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics,” DuBois Review 1 (1): 27–45. Cohen, Cathy J., and Hunter, Marcus Anthony. 2007. “Race, Sex and Space: The Reproduction and Policing of Race and Segregation in Sexual and Intimate Spaces,” Paper presented VI IASSCS Conference: Dis/organized Pleasures: Changing Bodies, Rights and Cultures, Lima, Peru, June 20. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2002. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. London: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill, 2019. Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Collins, Patricia Hill, and Bilge, Sirma. 2020. Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Reveview 43 (6): 1241–99.

168  Research handbook on intersectionality Crichlow, Wesley. 2003. Buller Men and Batty Bwoys: Hidden Men in Toronto and Halifax Black Communities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. D’Emilio, John. 2003. Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Demaratus, DeEtta. 2002. The Force of the Feather: The Search for a Lost Story of Slavery and Freedom. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press. Doan, Petra L. 2007. “Queers in the American City: Transgendered Perceptions of Urban Space,” Gender, Place and Culture 14 (1): 57-74. Feinberg, Leslie. 1997. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Marsha P. Johnson and Beyond. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Ferguson, Roderick A. 2004. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. France, David. 2017. The Life and Death of Marsha P. Johnson. Public Square Films. Greene, Theodore. 2014. “Gay Neighborhoods and the Rights of the Vicarious Citizen,” City & Community 13 (2): 99–118. Hartman, Saidiya. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Haskins, James. 1997. Bayard Rustin: Behind the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Hyperion. Hawkeswood, William G. 1996. One of the Children. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hunter, Marcus Anthony. 2010. “All the gays Are White and All the Blacks Are Straight: Black Gay Men, Identity, and Community,” Sexuality Research and Social Policy 7 (2): 81–92. Hunter, Marcus Anthony, and Robinson, Zandria F. 2018. Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hunter, Marcus Anthony, and Winder, Terrell A. 2019. “Visibility is Survival: The Chocolate Maps of Black Gay Life in Urban Ethnography,” Urban Ethnography (Research in Urban Sociology) 16: 131–42. Hunter, Marcus Anthony, Pattillo, Mary, Robinson, Zandria F., and Taylor, Keeanga Y. 2016. “Black Placemaking: Celebration, Play, and Poetry,” Theory, Culture & Society 23 (7–8): 31–56. Jackson, Jenn M. 2021. “Black Feminisms, Queer, Feminisms, Trans Feminisms: Meditating on Pauli Murray, Shirley Chisholm, and Marsha P. Johnson against the Erasure of History.” In The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories, edited by Janell Hobson, 284–94. London: Routledge. Johnson, E. Patrick. 2011. Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. King, Deborah K. 1988. “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14 (1): 42–72. Livingston, Jenny. 1990. Paris Is Burning. Off-White Productions. Lorde, Audre, 2012. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: Crossing Press. McCune, Jeffrey Q. 2014. Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. McKittrick, Katherine. 2011. “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place,” Social & Cultural Geography 12 (8): 947–63. Moore, Mignon. 2011. Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships, and Motherhood among Black Women. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Vol. 2. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Pitt, Richard N. 2010. “‘Killing the Messenger’: Religious Black Gay Men’s Neutralization of Anti‐ gay Religious Messages,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 49 (1): 56–72. Podair, Jerome E. 2009. Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Reiter, Joan S. 1978. The Old West: The Women. Fairfax, VA: Time-Life Books. Roane, J.T. 2020. “Queering Growth in Mid-20th Century Philadelphia,” The Review of Black Political Economy 47 (2): 194–211.

Space, place, and urban future  169 Robinson, Zandria F., and Marcus Anthony Hunter. 2019. “Measuring, Interrupted: Queer Possibilities for Social Scientific Methods.” In Imaging Queer Methods, edited by Amin Ghazini and Matt Brim, 163–229. New York: New York University Press. Walcott, Rinaldo. 2015. Disrupting Queer Inclusion: Canadian Homonationalisms and the Politics of Belonging. Vancouver: UBC Press. Winder, Terrell J.A. 2015. “Shouting It out”: Religion and the Development of Black Gay Identities,” Qualitative Sociology 38 (4): 75–394. Wynter, Slyvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, its Overrepresentation—an Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337. Young Jr., Alford. A. 2018. Are Black Men Doomed? Malden, MA: Polity Press.

11. Making sexuality, gender, and migration intersectional Salvador Vidal-Ortiz

INTRODUCTION The visibility of immigrants, a perceived immigration crisis, and the challenges of an idea of the dangers and pleasures – to borrow from a critical approach to gender and to a certain extent, sexuality research (Vance 1992) – all frame how gender, sexuality, and migration are approached by governments and Nation-States. These ideological approaches to how immigration is gendered and sexualized permeate academic and research circles and endeavors, co-constructing a web of scholarly work with the potential to change how these three aspects – gender, sexuality, and (im)migration – influence one another, and how they relate to other elements such as race and ethnicity, class, and a notion of citizenry. Citizenry necessitates of an immigrant other in order to fulfill its promise; the border where they meet is no longer a fence or wall, but a set of imbricate forms of exclusion and bordering that challenge previous ways of engaging with immigration. In the US American imaginary, as well as in the real material conditions and needs of immigrants, this is a border that contains, on either side (but also within the belly of the beast), an excess of surplus populations – in other words, the border as a space (everywhere) regenerates more people, more bodies, for even more labor. The fear of immigrants is combined with various forms of White supremacy in the US and other countries – even when the language used references xenophobia, not anti-Blackness, or even when the strategies are an interwoven form of expulsion or exclusion by ironically “saving” workers (Doezema 2001; Vidal-Ortiz, Robinson, and Khan 2018). Because Asian, Latin American, and African bodies are often constructed as those racialized others that cater to fantasies of the erotic yet embody fears of counter conquest (since those are also reproductive bodies), the challenge in a neoliberal era is to absolve the surveilling entities by rescuing (Agustín 2007) while also eliminating them from the territory. This chapter seeks to bring together recent literatures on migration, sexuality, and gender in order to account for an intersectional lens in sociology in particular, while bringing in, at times, some other disciplines. My goal is to show how sociology, and to a certain extent the social sciences, can produce work that is more intentionally intersectional – whether they bring forth the foundations of the field, or not. The focus on sociology is not merely for reasons of space limitations; given the disciplinary investment in the framework of intersectionality (Collins 1990; see also Romero 2018) and the subsequent advancements in thinking through sexuality in intersectionality (Collins 2004; see also Vidal-Ortiz, Robinson, and Khan 2018), sociology is poised to offer a critical canvas from which to theorize power and structural connections. Moreover, as a discipline, sociology has increased an analysis of the interrelation of migration and race (Vidal-Ortiz, Robinson, and Khan 2018), and of gender and sexuality, adding to the reasons for narrowing the focus on sociology. 170

Making sexuality, gender, and migration intersectional  171 Sociologists and other scholars have tended to an understanding of what migration does to the family unit, to remittances, to the social service provision in host countries, and to the value of the experience for those leaving hostile conditions that produce what Cantú called a well-founded fear of prosecution (Cantú 2005), as commonly referred to in legal (and academic) terms. Yet, it has only been as recent as the last three decades where scholars have made explicit the economic linkages of migration and production to the specific gendered and bodily reproduction that we are now witnessing, as well as to sexuality. Lionel Cantú, Jr., for example, explored in The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men (2009) how these two categories – sexuality and migration – are not mere variables but articulated in and through each other in processes of migration and notions of sexuality that were seldom explored before the 1990s; in doing so, he followed the work of sociologist Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994), who remedied in many ways the study of women in migration as variables (debates in the earlier decades – mainly the 1970s and 1980s – fostered the idea that studying women in migration would take the focus away from structural analysis and processes that more evidently centered the State, class, and capital labor exploitation). Moving the discussion from women to gender as structure, she studied migrant women coming from Mexico and moving to the San Francisco/Bay Area. While for Hondagneu-Sotero gender was a stand-alone formation, for Cantú, it was a combined gender and sexuality dimension that intercepted migration. Sexuality – at least in this chapter – is not limited to same-sex sexualities; it encompasses sexuality across sexual orientations and gender identity; it also focuses on reproduction and the inherent threat implicit in the bodies of those border crossers. Moreover, this chapter operates on an approach that considers intersectionality at its core, and that makes evident connections between sexuality and other axes of power such as race and class. For instance, Cantú outlined the dynamics in a popular highway – interstate 5 freeway – in Southern California, a site where families of immigrants constantly cross that highway at night, in order to arrive and either settle in the area, or go through in order to conclude their travels by arriving onto other states. Support groups had been formed as early as the 1990s for truck drivers who have accidentally hit highway crossers. Cantú (2009, 118) argues that this image – a yellow sign that depicts “a fleeing family (father leading, mother, and child, legs flailing behind)” is an image that connotes not just the risks many immigrants take, but also the way we imagine them. Cantú also insists that while this image may not alert motorists of a sexual component, it is there, if we only look: a sign symbolic at multiple levels, it shows a nuclear heterosexual family, but one that is also a threat to the racial social order by its reproductive potential. Likewise, I want to take a close look at articles that focus on gender, sexuality, and migration, seeking to extend their potential intersectional reading.

CHAPTER AIMS The methodological approach for this contribution is quite specific. I am concentrating on an interpretative approach of how the themes of gender, sexuality, and migration flow in two recent special issues that aimed to foreground them (one in a sexualities venue, another in ethnic and race studies). The two special issues in question (Sexualities special issue focused on “Queer Migration, Asylum, and Displacement” and Ethnic and Racial Studies special issue focused on “The Sexual Politics of Border Control”) are ideal sites of analysis that showcase

172  Research handbook on intersectionality the uses and limitations of the place of intersectionality on the topics, particularly the research methods. As you will see, most research relies on single-site qualitative interviews, with the exception of a legal case study at multiple sites, and a multiple site project (also with qualitative interviews, but including ethnographic work as well). The research at times directly brings up race, class, and gender, while at others, it seems to depend on the focus on sexuality and migration in lieu of an intersectional framework. I have only foregrounded two venues where the crossroads of gender, sexuality, and migration authored by sociologists have circulated the most – there have of course been other efforts and special issues.1 As well, it is important to note that almost all of the articles are published by sociologists in collaboration with non-sociologists; as a result, this chapter may offer tools to better engage with intersectional methods in disciplines beyond sociology – even the social sciences. One of the central propositions of this chapter is to better connect the focus of gender and sexuality (which is at times reduced to LGBTQI communities, or cis gender women’s issues) with the focus on migration (immigration and, by extension, displacement and refugee and asylum status). Often, we see that those special issues foreground one over the other. That is a first methodological challenge I pose to the readings. However, it is also important to note that the structure of academic journals themselves actually preclude intersectional work, in that the journals are topical, and very much work in isolation by design, minimizing the chance to produce cooperative work across the fields this chapter focuses on. In what follows, I hope to show how intersectional work in gender, sexuality, and migration can be more intentional in research conceptualization and design, by engaging, at times incisively, some of the works that have connected gender or/and sexuality to migration. Unlike other scholars in this book that might discuss their own research as part of their exploration of what data to collect in order to produce an intersectional analysis, I pose questions to explore what it would take to consider similar projects to those outlined while also valuing the extent of the work I’m discussing for its intersectional potential. While all of the sources I am discussing depend on an ethnographic lens and qualitative interviews, and I would agree that qualitative and intersectional run parallel paths, the question of whether only qualitative methods are the only forms of data collection that fit well, or are best suited for, intersectional work, goes beyond the scope of the limited focus of this chapter. As well, thinking about how qualitative data collection forms offer permeability to wander toward race, class, and gender analytics in projects that do not center any of those analytical dimensions, it is a base, and not a demand, to how I approach my reading of the authors’ engagement with gender, sexuality, and migration. To be clear, none of the articles in the two special issues I review intentionally propose or invest on an intersectional methodology. I am instead bringing forth the missed opportunities to further the otherwise exceptional work on gender, sexuality, and migration, with an intersectional methodological approach. Of course, it is quite safe to evaluate how these sources did or did not provide an intersectional approach; my published work may be held to these very same standards. After this section, I address two of the main special issues in sexuality and ethnic studies that help us consider these reframing questions. I will focus on two interrelated tasks to stake this chapter’s claim: first, I will review two specific, recent moments of sociological scholarship on borders, migration, and displacement in relation to sexuality, gender, and the body; then, I will discuss the implications of these studies to a truly intersectional sociology.

Making sexuality, gender, and migration intersectional  173

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE In this section, I compare two special issues connecting gender, sexuality, and migration – one, a recent special issue journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies (“Sexuality and Migration at the Border”) and a special issue from several years back in the Sexualities journal (special “Migration and Displacement” issue). I begin with the Sexualities one, then weaving race explicitly with the discussion of the second. Because of space limitations, I center my analysis on articles authored by at least one sociologist. Sexualities and Migration Sociologist Nancy A. Naples, along with Musicologist Rachel A. Lewis, guest edited a special 2014 issue of the Sexualities: Studies in Culture and Society, on “Queer Migration, Asylum, and Displacement” (Lewis and Naples 2014). Among the special issue contributors are two articles, out of six articles (excluding the afterword), co-authored by trained sociologists. Motivated by the increasing exposure to the issues faced by queer (or LGBTQI, in the special issue’s language, referencing lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and intersex) immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Given the focus of the editors, which was “to bring queer migration and sexual citizenship studies into critical conversation” (911), their stated claim is their wish to connect migration and sexuality studies. Drawing on feminist and queer scholarship which has queered migration studies, Lewis and Naples sustain, and seek to expand on, previous scholarship that called on the heteronormativity of migration studies (until the 1990s if not 2000s) while recognizing the interdisciplinary efforts of the foundational work in the field. As well, the introduction situates an inherent articulation of sexuality with race, class, gender, and nation, in order to interrogate how borders are managed, made impermeable, and how internal and international migration take shape because of the impact of the hierarchies in those intersectional aspects (912). Cantú figures at the center of these analytics, as his work depends on the mutual constitution of gender, sexuality, migration, and the material conditions connected to migration quests, as well as the conditions once in the US. At the time of their writing, politics swayed the practice of migration and refugee experiences for LGBTQI refugees and asylum seekers, given the engagement of President Barack Hussein Obama in – at least in principle and verbal commitment – support of these populations. Indeed, one of the editors’ claims is that law and policy have often remained the privileged site of study (913). Their focus in the introduction also centers the question of citizenship, perhaps narrowing a bit the larger set of variables connected to processes of migration: from desire to migrate, to attempts to do so, to “settlement” in host countries or territories. In my estimation, so much of how gay and lesbian rights in the late 20th century were framed already invoked questions of State-sponsored citizenship – that is, of becoming legally, formally recognized by the State as departing one’s country of origin when assuming (assimilating) the US as a home country, the country that incorporates sexual minority immigrants. In a future interdisciplinary scholarly effort, a focus on belonging, instead of citizenship along the lines of sexuality, will prove more open to porosity and the management of geopolitics across a border, for instance, and will diminish the principle of equality inherent in the language of citizenship (in other words, undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees, and international border migrants may not center a quest for citizenship in the limited ways the term suggests).

174  Research handbook on intersectionality What would it mean to imagine transnational subjects whose legality is temporal, indicative of statuses in between citizenship and so-called illegality? If, as Lisa Lowe registers in The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015), acts of forgetting encapsulate a politics of memory and thus, colonial erasure, then thinking citizenship beyond Nation-State notions of citizenship – and the very idea of insider and outsider in such studies – is necessary. How malleable is it for non-citizens to be in that stage of liminality, even with limited mobility or access? Can non-citizens forego the dream of becoming citizens – is that unintelligible to those of us who are citizens? Following Lowe’s (2015) lead in the context of empire, how must we reimagine research projects that re-evaluate gayness in and through citizenship and rights? These are elements central to the genesis of any project, including its research design, because the premise beneath these conceptualizations embeds the process, and it potentially reduces a chance of it being intersectional – as we shall see next. Sociologist Jorge Fontdevila, along with public health scholar Héctor Carrillo, coauthored research based on Carrillo’s R01 National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Carrillo and Fontdevila 2014). Their research expands on the earlier research focused on Mexican immigrant men who have sex with men, and in particular, challenges the notion that these Mexican men bring their own “pre-migration” ideas of gendered sexualities (based on the activo-pasivo model), and furthermore, that they assume a gay-based identity model upon arrival and “settlement.”2 With a sample size of 80 participants, Carrillo and Fontdevila extend previous analyses of same-sex desire in order to give more nuance to interpretations of the relationship between sexuality and migration. An inherent critique through a comprehensive intersectional lens is the scope of the article by the authors. While on the surface, focusing on Mexican immigrants may be perceived as raced, racialized, or even ethnic, this is not discussed in their contribution. Diversity is only evoked in terms of about half of the Mexican states from which their participants migrated; however, the race/class continuum is reduced to how “they vary in terms of their social class position, education, and skin color shade and ethnic features” (923). Similarly, discussions of sex and space in the Mexico/US binary portrayed reproduce the very underdeveloped/modern pattern that the authors seek to interrogate: in one instance, a 21-year-old young man from Oaxaca, Armando, is portrayed as exploring sex with gay men in the US, and he “also began seeking sex in gay bathhouses” (928). Mexico has a multitude of cities where gay bathhouses, and non-designated baths where men gather, also have sex – but that clarification goes absent. Furthermore, the sexual relations, intimacy, and emotional links of some of their immigrant participants who expressed being in some type of relationships with non-self-identified gay men, called mayates, is not addressed in terms of its racialized markings: a mayate is often referenced as a non-gay, usually of dark skin, and working-class man (similar to what a bugarrón is referenced in the Caribbean) who “tops” gay men (for more on mayate, refer to Almaguer 2017). Their sampling includes a person whose experience is that of a “top” sexual partner, who had a girlfriend; however, we know nothing about this participant’s ethno-racial markings, identifications, or how these connect to the choice to be the penetrative partner. We are left with the tension between a kind of international model of gay respectability politics, where Mexican men can show that they too can be gay, while not engaging in questions of how racialized sexualities operate in the lives of the interviewees, or their sexual partners, while on the other, a non-gay identification is unimportant to the researchers. Because the focus is on pre and post migration of same sex desire, it is inherently assumed that neither the Mexican racialization of Mexicans in Mexico merits discussion, nor that those migrant Mexicans both

Making sexuality, gender, and migration intersectional  175 become racialized and now engage in racializing readings of other Mexicans, other Latin Americans, and other non-Latinos – and that racialization still, if not structures, at least influences such desire (whether in object choice models or not). In research on non-US populations, the assumption that we only address race in terms of how immigrants are racialized in the US absorbs, and dismisses/evacuates a whole host of racializing practices, dynamics, even invocations of mestizaje in their countries of origin that play a significant role in self racialization and racialization of other non-US populations, as well as African Americans from the US. Still, data from which the authors develop their analysis is a powerful public health and sociological analysis of, and critical stand against, logics of Mexico as a place where gay men understand their experience in highly gendered terms. Their results show that less patterns of interpretation and practice of same sex desire result from their migration to the US. The categories Carrillo and Fontdevila utilize in their paper are fruitful in sustaining a provocative sense of a less underdeveloped Mexican gay man, while also showing how migrating influences the interpretation of experience and practice as less varied as in their countries of origin. Based on the article, the codebook lens to select coding categories was narrowed to migration and sexuality, identity, and experience, thus shrinking chances for race, class, and gender identity and experience in their analyses. A promise for an intersectional project on sexuality and migration among Mexican men who have sex with men requires moving beyond the negation of raced discussions – if not in terms of self-identification of participants, at least in terms of unpacking racialized categories deeply imbued with gendered and racialized sexuality meanings. I suggest how the mayate might have been a point of departure from which to begin to do so in this article, but I also want to be cautious that outlier categories like a non-self-identified Mexican gay man becomes the intersectional one in this type of research: what I have meant to suggest is that categories of identification, and non-identification with gender and sexuality nomenclatures, are often racialized by social scientific projects, and to begin to consider how to do so in scholarship, whether it calls its project intersectional or not. Further sociological work on migrants, and people from other countries, should – whether focusing on intersectionality or not – situate race as more than a US American reading or – as some call it, obsession – by taking a stand against the invisibility and negation of race elsewhere, by weaving in a better acknowledgment of how distinctively unique racialization, and racism, operates in those other countries, so that it is not, by default, read as a United States insistence on seeing race (where one ought to).3 Carol Bohmer, sociologist and lawyer, coauthors an article on cultural silences, and gender and sexuality in asylum processes with anthropologist Amy Shuman. Having worked with political asylum applicants, the authors consider the invisibility of addressing gender and sexuality circumstances in legal proceedings, and how that may have disastrous results for them. The authors demonstrate non-state actors’ perpetuated violence against gender and sexual minorities as the criteria used by policy makers in reviewing asylum applications. Gender is central in their analysis, however. Shuman and Bohmer sharpen the courts’ analyses where rape ends up being considered outside the purview of non-state actors’ violence, since it often times happened among family circles or by family members (2014, 942), showing the impossibility of how notions of different violence markers such as incest, rape, and unlawful or non-consensual sexual relations get excluded from the mandate of claims considered. Their quest is to show how ultimately the presence of gender markers produce an exclusion that serves women and sexual minorities as excluded from the asylum processes because there are

176  Research handbook on intersectionality no direct political actions influencing their lived experience with violence. It is only in the 1990s when this begins to shift. Their article is based on over a decade of cases for political asylum that they have intercepted/worked with at both the Community Refugee Immigration Services offices (Columbus, Ohio) as well as with “refugee aid lawyers and organizations in New England and London” (942); they supplement at times with already published cases in order to guarantee the asylum seekers’ safety and anonymity. From here on, I refer to their work as a legal case study, given their insistence on “reviewing the law.” Their approach is certainly interpretivist, aiming to provide a discursive analysis of “cultural silences” – what I interpret as assumptions about both the sending country and the host society dissecting their asylum case; those cultural silences often clash with the imminent pressure to name and disclose experiences, violence, and to decode sending countries’ cultural and social norms and mores, all as a matter of factual evidence in asylum cases. What’s more important is that familiar and cultural or religious forms of violence and molestation or rape are not considered clear evidence by US or UK asylum legal systems if the sending countries’ governance does not categorize them as violence or rape. Quests for political asylum claims are not universally understood nor applied similarly, and because they are often “measure[d] [against] public display, exposure, and/or recognition” (944) of sexual minorities, the efficacy of the claim may render the claim itself as credible enough, or lacking credibility. In some of the cases Shuman and Bohmer discuss, sexual behavior itself is not considered a fundamental base for prosecution if that behavior is potentially camouflaged or disguised. As well, stereotypical aspects of gay identity based on gender markers such as effeminacy, or taste for specific music or arts and fashion are considered valid elements for interlocutors to inquire about, as discussed in the article. (In a US case, a gay man was denied asylum since his gender presentation was “too masculine” for the courts to see it as a threat to his life; in a UK case, a video showing sexual activity was proposed as evidence of homosexuality.) The complexity of these cases is partial to the geopolitical context, the courts’ reading, and the ideas of experience, identity, consumer culture, preconceived ideas of sexual minority subcultures, and gender expression. Gay male cases show a connection between sexual orientation (as potentially innate – at least how it is interpreted by some courts), sexual behavior and desire, and gender expression, and only sometimes crossing into gender identity. Lesbian cases may also offer a complex reading, in that in some countries, stigma is assigned to unmarried women who may defend their lesbian sexual orientation, or their choice to live alone, while in others, marriage is compulsory, and maybe used against an asylum applicant as proof that they aren’t lesbian-identified. (Trans cases are similarly constituted, except that gender identity is a central claim that is disputed by courts as something that is still read as cross dressing.) The use of the direct voices and narratives of applicants complement well the legal language that reveals the asylum granting institutions’ unspoken rules about visibility and translatability. All in all, the article produces a complex asylum-seeking set of procedures where the identities and experiences of those seeking asylum must be intelligible to the host country’s gatekeepers in ways that reproduce a global north and global south, a developing other and a developed core, and silences that serve as failures in the advocacy for asylum. In intersectional research that cuts across racialization, gender, and religion, considering the conditions of violence narrated by the applicants are insufficient for a suspect State. Intersectionality in these procedures might not ever be articulated in terms of a straight law, and what the asylum seekers produce as

Making sexuality, gender, and migration intersectional  177 evidence. But complicating the situation in the “global south” with, say, both advances and contradictions in countries that grant same-sex marriage, but where the Police is the primary violent actor against LGBTI people in procedures and paperwork, including expert witness affidavits, helps elucidate the complexity often reduced to “underdeveloped” elsewhere (Cantú 2005). Yet as noted before, the article foregrounds gender (and sexuality), to the detriment of the raced processes that, on a global scale, produce a global north and global south that have unequal access, and a global south that is often racialized. Using an intersectional lens to potentialize their analysis, one could argue for an unpacking of the mechanisms from the institutions in the global north that misread, and perhaps intentionally misinterpret, cues and experiences from migrants from global south regions, in order to regulate the border. As well, this is inherently central in notions of symbolic and actual citizenship for these asylum seekers. This article is one of the few ones that elicits thinking about mixed methods as a potential way of successfully engaging the politics of asylum systems and their evaluations – in particular, a project of combining policy with quantitative data on number of cases and variables with those asylum seekers’ narratives. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to argue whether quantitative methodologies are (or not) suitable to think through intersectionality; suffice it to say that qualitative and interpretivist approaches seem to be foundational to a complete understanding of how intersectionality is operating in and through sexuality and migration. Thus, while “immutability” is at the center of these social readings that validate a claim based on gendered expression, this is not always the measure from which courts depart. While particularly effeminate behavior among assigned male at birth applicants get a lot of attention – whether they are gay or transgender (although both carry different weight depending on the political context of the country where they come from, and of course, the political turn of the era), this might be the case for lesbian women as well, and for trans men. In sum, while early on, the inherent claim was that their identity was conceived as unchangeable and thus irrevocable, added elements have complicated the quest for asylum based on these claims. In the end, Shuman and Bohmer make gendered cases based on a notion of specific public/ private scenarios in ways that make the asylum processes multilayered and complex beyond the typical gay activist seeking asylum. This set of readings then complicate the pathways of not only migrants, but sexual messages as well as intelligible sexualities and genders that can be validated by the US (even though they are most likely racialized in the process). The focus on sexuality and citizenship provides a symbolic use of the category citizen, either by virtue of the possible salvaging of one’s body and integrity by recognizing violence to it; the symbolic citizen is also that which assumes an object choice, identity-driven (not behaviorally driven, nor engaged in highly gendered sexual readings) in opposition to the (non-citizen) left behind. The border is less porous in these instances, as there is an understanding of a before and after that does not get problematized because the border crossing is seen as a variable of impact in this before and after. The readings from the Sexualities special issue on queer migration, asylum, and displacement engaged with qualitative interviews and legal case studies, although in both cases, while data collection was differently produced, it offered a more systemic, discursive level of analysis for the models the authors sought to explain (for the former, on the traditional gendering versus object choice/gay migrant; for the latter, on the discursive capacity for explanation in the interrogation of asylum system logics that perpetuate cultural silences as lack of evidence). Their analysis remained grounded at the level of data presented, with codes and cases cementing the specific project they brought forth in their articles. In some ways, the narrow focus

178  Research handbook on intersectionality on Carrillo and Fontevila’s concepts/models prevent an opportunity to think intersectionally – if one assumes that an immigrant gay man is already intersectional. In an era of individual identity-making as legitimate politics (inside and outside academia), scholars and activists claim an intersectional stand that denies any reading of racial systems, racialization, and power. A discussion about how these articles could potentially address their projects through an intersectional lens is a way to develop a path forward. Another would be to continuously question the premise of the salient intersectional categories – be it race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, ability – as a scholar is exploring a case study, an interviewee’s excerpt, the social context of a focus group, or an ethnographic account. The special issue of the Ethnic and Racial Studies helps illustrate a more complex mapping of the “here” and “there” that makes for a stronger transnational engagement.

BORDER CONTROL, MIGRATION, AND SEXUAL POLITICS Billy Holzberg, a sociologist in an education, communication, and social studies unit in Kings College, along with Anouk Madörin (“Minor Cosmopolitanisms” in Germany) and Michelle Pfeifer (Media, Culture, and Communications) edited this special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies, focusing on “The Sexual Politics of Border Control,” in 2021. Two of the eight contributions to the special issue are written by trained sociologists, to which I turn my attention after discussing their introduction. Like the introduction to Sexualities seven years before, the introduction to this special issue connects the issues of sexuality and migration. However, and perhaps because of the time between the two issues, perhaps because of the several significant moments of “migration crisis” in the world, or perhaps because of the switched focus on sexuality on the ethnic and racial (not on migration, but migration as a connector to race and ethnicity), the volume as a whole offers more critical analyses of migration systems, by focusing on the border – and border control. The editors explicitly name the border – and border control – as a racialized method that sustains populations and core groups as inherently different, and keeps them apart. Also because of the impact of COVID-19 on the writing of the special issue, a focus on disease and possible contagion is evidenced in Ethnic and Racial Studies in ways not visible in the Sexualities special issue in terms of HIV/AIDS, for instance. (An HIV/AIDS diagnose served as a ban against a lot of predominantly gay men from entering the US for decades in the 1980s and 1990s.) These three editors underline the border regimes much more clearly – in parallel ways to how the Sexualities editors did with asylum procedures, but in clear conversation not with agents and institutions of the State – but the State itself. They, plainly and directly, “argue that sexuality is also a method of bordering” (1487, emphasis in the original). The notion of borders as transnational was evidenced in the Sexualities special issue, but it becomes a central topic for the 2021 special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies. This might also be related to the number of scholars from non-US universities that contributed to the Ethnic and Racial Studies special issue. (While the Sexualities journal is also located in Europe, the two are distinctive in how many non-US scholars collaborated, and how much non-US work is included in Ethnic and Racial Studies.) Criminology and legal studies scholar Grace Tran addresses marriage in Canada for Vietnamese women who agreed to “fake wedding” (a literal translation of the term đám cưới

Making sexuality, gender, and migration intersectional  179 giả), or marriage fraud, in order to migrate, by paying their hosts or sponsors large sums of money to marry them. This article is based on three interviews (out of a study for which 18 interviews were completed) with women whose experiences of paid arranged marriages evolved into a newer intimacy with their husbands; those interviews were supplemented, like other articles reviewed in this chapter, by ethnographic, part-time employment at an immigration law and consulting firm as a legal assistant – in her case, 15 months of such work (2021, 1574). Perhaps because of her positionality as a Vietnamese-Canadian (who also happened to be in a relationship with a non-Canadian), her article seems to be one of the best in triangulating data access, data, and forms of data collection. This important research takes place against the backdrop of moral panics that signal to these arrangements as marriage frauds, which Tran insists is a way to try to elevate ideas that presuppose the immigration system is coherent across the board, honorable in its intentions, and neutral or objective when encountering marriages of this kind. Tran documents how some of her informants had indeed begun to form emotional ties to their sponsors, and in doing so, shows us how “‘fake’ marriages only come into being and are rendered necessary through exclusionary and racialized border policies of the state” and furthermore, crystalizes the ways in which “the messiness of intimate relationships do not fit neatly into the migration policies and logics of nation-states” (1570). Governance that seeks to sanitize and “straighten” migration and marriage is faced with these slippages that may exceed the surveillance mechanisms in place. Another significant element to underline is the fact that when emotional bonds and romantic feelings are developed – either by being in close proximity, because of the arrangement itself, and a potential anticipation that develops into a bond and emotional ties – then love and romantic feelings fall outside of the essentialized experiences that are often assumed to emerge before a commitment is made. “Legitimate” and “authentic” relationships get suspended in a temporality that no longer presume love and romance happens before the marriage contract is established – making evident how all marriage contracts run the risk of losing that legitimacy based on “real” emotional romantic love. Overall, Tran contributes to the larger academic debates on border control discourses with “strategic intimacies” – what serves them in negotiating their relationships, but also, how these may serve as building blocks that both enrich relationships to a point of emotional involvement, while questioning (and in many ways, queering) the boundaries of legitimacy and authenticity in marriage. All of her informants lead the author to consider an alternative view to strategic intimacies, which Tran calls “transformative moments.” In this model, kissing for the first time, giving a speech appreciating having their new partner in their life, even how the distribution of the money as the foundation of the transaction in these marriage contracts was reconfigured are all examples of how “fake” and “real” are imagined and reimagined by Tran’s informants in ways that collapse them, giving those transformative moments new evocative meaning for the couple. Tran resorts to Goffman’s ideas of frontstage and backstage to trouble that logic in the marriage relationships she was able to document through her research. The power relations embedded in Asian migrants marrying Canadian citizens is subtly discussed in the article. The author seeks to utilize her article to foster more “empirical and intersectional undertakings of research [in migration scholarship] on the variety of other forms that transnational intimate relationships can take” (1585). This, however, is framed in the context of the form of marriage arrangement, as well as whether it is successful or not – when Tran illustrates a tri-part comparison (between “genuine” marriages across border, successful spousal sponsorship, and unsuccessful or rejected ones) would better respond to

180  Research handbook on intersectionality this empirical question. Beyond this mention, Tran does not go further in this publication in pushing the notion of intersectionality with methodologies or theoretical proposals. Yet the concept of “strategic intimacies” is itself loaded with potentiality around notions of power and ethno-racial, classed, and migration hierarchies, making her contribution an early step in this direction. I look forward to reading and engaging with Tran’s wonderful contributions. Sociologists Nicola Mai, Calogero Giametta, Heidi Hoefinger, and Jennifer Musto, along with P.G. Macioti, Calum Bennachie, and Anne E. Fehrenbacher (2021), focus on the racialized border politics by connecting the experiences of Asian cis women and Latina trans women across four countries: Australia, France, New Zealand, and the US. The focus of these sites’ research brought together migration, sex work, and trafficking as experienced by their informants. They conducted ethnographic fieldwork and interviews between 2017 and 2020 in those four countries based on the Sexual Humanitarianism (SEXHUM): understanding agency and exploitation in the global sex industry (ERC Consolidator Grant 2015-682451), including 221 sex workers sampled for semi-structured interviews, and 80 informants. While Australia focused on cis gender Asian migrant women, in France, the study focused on this population, along with Nigerian cis women, and Latin American/Latina trans women. This was, out of the articles in these special issues, the one most connected to intersectionality, in that the lives, experiences, identities, and social locations from the interviewees offered potential analysis. Namely, this multi-site data collection research project conceptualized the focus of their interviews as based on cis and trans racialized women – although their larger sample included cis gender Asian migrant women, Nigerian cis women, and Latin American/ Latina trans migrants, the article offers a four-site comparison of Asian cis women and trans Latina women. They explain this comparison in the following assertion: “The strategic value of this comparative focus is supported by existing research highlighting the way Asian cis women and trans Latina sex workers are stereotypically racialized and represented respectively as passive victims and offenders while both are constructed both as non-citizens/outsiders, and therefore targeted by law enforcement and immigration controls” (Mai et al. 2021, 1609). Their focus on cis Asian women and trans Latina sex workers helped them illustrate a focus on “extreme bordering” – a concept they deploy in thinking about the new interrelation between State operations/sovereignty with globalized labor and neoliberal capitalism that return to a state of xenophobia and nationalist discourses, leaving behind a more neoliberal form of border control that still intended to portray itself as progressive (1608). The authors do state that the research team “adopts an intersectional and self-reflexive approach to understand and analyze existing inequalities, hierarchies and divisions” (1610), which they consider an “ethical and methodological approach” (1610). Given the Whiteness of the research team, a conscious decision to incorporate and collaborate with members of the groups being studied, including shared engagement in data collection and publications – although they consider this a post-colonial and decolonial theoretical influence. Thus, the reduction of a mention of intersectionality to methodology is noticeable as a tool for easing for the research team the very evident structural barriers – of not having peer-research team members with training and recognition that aren’t White, which is systemic, and is only temporarily repaired with a band-aid “let’s share the work” approach of bringing in non-White participants to collection and analysis. Yet, it is a start. While in Australia, particularly in their focus on Sydney and Melbourne, the team explored the experiences sex workers had with decriminalization versus legalization through bordering, respectively. In these cities, they found the figure of the Asian cis-female as the main victim of

Making sexuality, gender, and migration intersectional  181 exploitation (1611). Critically, they shut down the idea of the victimized Asian parlor woman: “Our data dispute the racialized sexual humanitarian moral panics framing Asian women providing sexual services in ‘illegal’ massage parlors as passive, easy prey for traffickers” (1612). The authors expand on the avoidance of full-service sex work by working on massage pretenses that may allow hand jobs and oral sex for additional money, without the stigma of sex shops. In France, migrant sex workers were the focus of research, and based on 59 qualitative interviews, the researchers explored the meaning given to trans Latina women as perceived to be “marginalized” by the public debates, and Asian and Nigerian cis women seen as most vulnerable and more potentially exploited for trafficking (1614). Social policy attempts to destitute sex workers from continuing to engage in erotic labor by offering 330 Euros through a 2016 law and temporary residence permits, to the contrary, challenged their chances to remain in France; furthermore, the laws targeting the clients lessened their work – all in the name of rescuing them from the industry. And in New Zealand, with 58 interviews with a majority Chinese and other Asian countries, the research team uncovered the contradictory model of rescue that really magnified the xenophobia of the governance. Lack of opportunity to work on the sex trade legally was by far the variable that most influenced the capacity for Asian cis women to retain work and remain in New Zealand; likewise, they would not see medical professionals for migration/deportation fears. And in the US, through 58 interviews, including 20 key informants in Los Angeles and New York, the team found that trans migrant sex workers are at the center of a clash between control and protection in ways that were loose enough to provide a humanitarian “face” yet still regulate and impact the sex work industry. Overall, the “bordering” they documented tended to mask neoliberal forms of regulation and control of migrants via sex work and prostitution regulations, while victimizing them in a “moral panics” discourse. All in all, this special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies pushes the limits of how border control is implemented, symbolically, and in terms of State surveillance. The projects of regulating marriages, on Tran’s work, and the four sites’ experiences with the xenophobia curtailed as care for so-called vulnerable populations by Mai et al. show two sides of the same regulation and control of female (cis or trans) bodies, racialized bodies, and bodies that are perceived to be comfortable enough to be “saved” in the neoliberal yet repressive State.

IN CLOSING My goal with this chapter – a critical review of succinct sources that merit exploration – was to begin to make room for more intersectional lenses applied in the social sciences – sociology in particular. I asked the question: Can intersectionality become more central to social scientific scholarship on gender, sexuality, and migration? Whether intersectionality will continue to operate as a field that ignites sociological scholarship remains to be seen. Meanwhile, sociology continues to maintain a sophisticated line between intersectional methodologies, conceptual and theoretical incorporations of intersectionality, and making operational an intersectional approach – the latter we only saw in one of the two special issue articles discussed. Some of the lessons learned from the review provided in this chapter are specific to the topic at hand, such as when defining a question, and selecting a sample that allows the scholars to collect data that answers the question. First, choosing the sample carefully, evidencing the sameness that often takes place in saturation and moving beyond the common pattern and into

182  Research handbook on intersectionality outlier cases is of utmost importance in qualitative techniques of data collection, and I would argue required in intersectional forms of studying migration and sexuality. This may simply mean making explicit categories of difference beyond common notions of general demographics (interviewees are all from the same country, therefore the diverse sampling is evaluated in terms of SES, religion, urban versus rural, etc.), and also interrogating the sameness in the actual design and conceptualization – even the research question. Second, and related to this previous issue of careful sample determination, is the issue of what constitutes the boundaries of difference within the groups we seek to study. This interrogating of categories demands that we suspend our knowledge about a topic, particularly if we are from the group we seek to study, or mildly identify with some of the components of that group. Regional categories that become naturalized when we operate from a national or ethno-racial group need to be questioned and rethought, in order to seek a deeper level of difference (beyond diversity in sample) that allows for a more pronounced reading of the group as members of various – whether distinctive or overlapping – categories of social analysis such as race, gender, and class. And lastly, I would argue that the boundaries of the project are dependent on re-envisioning categories that connect with intersectional lenses in more intentional ways. The sample size does not need to grow, but the ways scholars formulate the sample composition may offer a more heterogeneous sample. Given the limited work that intentionally zeroes in on intersectionality in gender, sexuality, and migration scholarship, it is important that more training by the professorate embeds an intersectional approach in approaching traditional research, community-based, or participatory action research; that it instills a critical view of how categories of difference on which intersectionality is based are placed in constant conversation, “switching” back and forth those categories to demonstrate how gender is racialized and classed, in the context of migration, displacement, gender, and sexuality more specifically. Perhaps then can the work of sustaining a multi-lens analytical lens and approach be achieved.

NOTES 1. Earlier special issues that go beyond the scope of this chapter include: Mobilities on Love, Sexuality, and Migration (Mai and King 2009); and The International Migration Review (Donato, Gabaccia, Holdaway, Manalansan, and Pessar 2006) on Gender and Migration Revisited. A more specialized linguistic anthropology journal was not included in this chapter; it is the Journal of Language and Sexuality, and its special issue was Queering Borders: Language, Sexuality, and Migration (Murray 2014). Among the journals that do not represent sociological scholarship, or to which I had no access, are: Gender Questions (Unisa Press), entitled Transnational Migration, Gender and Sexuality in the Global South (Rugunanan 2020), accessed here: https://​journals​.co​ .za/​doi/​abs/​10​.25159/​2412​-8457/​7346; Migration Letters (published online by Transnational Press London), entitled Special Issue: Sexuality and Migration (Cvajner and Sciortino 2019), accessed here: https://​journals​.tplondon​.com/​ml/​issue/​view/​5. Special issues forthcoming at the time of this chapter’s writing include: Anti-Trafficking Review, with a call for Migration, Sexuality, and Gender Identity, call for papers accessed here: https://​www​.a​ntitraffic​kingreview​.org/​index​.php/​atrjournal/​ announcement/​view/​31; Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies, with a call on Queering Middle East Migrations, call for papers accessed here: https://​ lebanesestudies​.ojs​.chass​.ncsu​.edu/​index​.php/​mashriq/​announcement/​view/​20. 2. Because of space, I will limit the explanation of the focus on activo/pasivo to an endnote. Beginning in the 1970s, White anthropologists (Carrier 1995; Lancaster 1992; Murray 1995) began to explore the non-gay model of sexual engagement between men who were the active (presumably insertive/

Making sexuality, gender, and migration intersectional  183 penetrative, masculine, also read as heterosexual), sexual partners of the pasivo (effeminate, publicly read as homosexual, insertee/penetrated). Tomás Almaguer (1991) elucidated the “sexual aim” (seeking particular sexual activity) of the people engaged in the activo/pasivo equation, based on cultural attributes of Chicano, US Latino, and by extent Latin American culture almost in opposition to US models of “object choice” (a person who is male-identified who sees himself as attracted to other men as seeking a man, not a particular form of sexual release). That binary model has been widely critiqued by numerous scholars in the social sciences and humanities (for a sample, see Cantú 2009 and Guzmán 2007), and in the case of this article by Carrillo and Fontdevila, it is criticized as a “traditional” (read backwards) model of cultural understandings of sexuality. See also Vidal-Ortiz, Decena, Carrillo and Almaguer (2010) for more on this discussion. 3. One direct resistance to US American analyses of race is often voiced as the “US obsession with race.” At least in my experience, this language repeats often regardless of whether scholars come from Europe and Latin America – the places I often work with or networks with which I collaborate.

REFERENCES Agustín, Laura María. 2007. Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. London: Zed books. Almaguer, Tomás. 1991. “Chicano Men: A cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3 (2): 75–100. Almaguer, Tomás. 2017. “Longing and Same-Sex Desire among Mexican Men.” In The New Latino Studies Reader: A Twenty-First Century Perspective, edited by Ramón a Gutiérrez and Tomás Almaguer, 510–25. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cantú, Lionel Jr. 2005. “Well Founded Fear: Political Asylum and the Boundaries of Sexual Identity in the US-Mexico Borderlands.” In Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings, edited by Eithne Luibheid and Lionel Cantú Jr., 61–74. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Cantú, Lionel Jr. 2009. “A Place Called Home: Mexican Immigrant Men’s Family Experiences.” In The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men, edited by  Nancy A. Naples and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, 118–42 New York: New York University Press. Carrier, Joseph. 1995. De Los Otros: Intimacy and Homosexuality among Mexican Men. New York: Columbia University Press. Carrillo, Héctor and Jorge Fontdevila. 2014. “Border Crossings and Shifting Sexualities among Mexican Gay Immigrant Men: Beyond Monolithic Conceptions,” Sexualities 17 (8): 919–38. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2004. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge. Cvajner, Martina and Giuseppe Sciortino. 2019. “Editorial: Migration and Sexual Change,” Migration Letters 16 (4): 473–80. Doezema, Jo. 2001. “Ouch! Western Feminists’ ‘Wounded Attachment’ to the ‘Third World Prostitute’,” Feminist Review 67 (1): 16–38. Donato, Katharine M. Donna Gabaccia, Jennifer Holdaway, Martin Manalansan, IV and Patricia R. Pessar. 2006. [Introduction to the Special Issue] “A Glass Half Full? Gender in Migration Studies,” International Migration Review 40 (1): 3–26. Guzmán, Manolo. 2007. Gay Hegemony/Latino Homosexualities. New York: Routledge. Holzberg, Billy, Anouk Madörin, and Michelle Pfeifer. 2021. “The Sexual Politics of Border Control: An Introduction,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 44 (9): 1485–506. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. 1994. Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lancaster, Roger. 1992. Life Is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

184  Research handbook on intersectionality Lewis, Rachel A. and Nancy A. Naples. 2014. “Introduction: Queer Migration, Asylum, and Displacement,” Sexualities 17 (8): 911–18. Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mai, Nicola and Russell King. 2009. [Introduction to the Special Issue] “Love, Sexuality, and Migration: Mapping the Issue(s),” Mobilities 4 (3): 295–307. Mai, Nicola, P.G. Macioti, Calum Bennachie, Anne E. Fehren Bacher, Calogero Giametta, Heidi Hoefinger, and Jennifer Musto. 2021. “Migration, Sex work and Trafficking: The Racialized Bordering Politics of Sexual Humanitarianism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 44 (9): 1607–28. Murray, David A.B. 2014. [Preface to the Special Issue] “Queering Borders: Language, Sexuality and Migration,” Journal of Language and Sexuality 3 (1): 1–5. Murray, Stephen O. 1995. Latin American Male Homosexualities. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Romero, Mary. 2018. Introducing Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity. Rugunanan, Pragna. 2020. [Introduction to the Special Issue] “Transnational Migration, Gender and Sexuality in the Global South,” Gender Questions 8 (1): 1–2. Shuman, Amy and Carol Bohmer. 2014. “Gender and Cultural Silences in the Political Asylum Process,” Sexualities 17 (8): 939–57. Tran, Grace 2021. “‘We’re Dating after Marriage’: Transformative Effects of Performing Intimacy in Vietnamese ‘Marriage Fraud’ Arrangements,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 44 (9): 1569–88. Vance, Carole (ed.). 1992. Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. London: Pandora Press. Vidal-Ortiz, Salvador, Carlos Decena, Héctor Carrillo, and Tomás Almaguer. 2010. “Revisiting Activos and Pasivos: Towards New Cartographies of Latino/Latin American Male Same-Sex Desire.” In Latina/o Sexualities: Probing Powers, Passions, Practices, and Policies, edited by Marysol Asencio, 253–73. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Vidal-Ortiz, Salvador, Brandon Andrew Robinson, and Cristina Khan. 2018. Race and Sexuality. Cambridge: Polity.

Section IIc

Critical indigenous studies

12. Indigeneity, feminisms, and activism Renya K. Ramirez

In this chapter, I examine Native feminisms and Indigenous philosophies of All of Our Relations not only to demonstrate the link between racial and environmental justice movements, but also to challenge settler colonial, racist, and capitalist ideas that privilege humans over more-than-humans and position Indigenous peoples as disposable and their lands as wastelands. I also illustrate that intersectionality, at its core, is ancient wisdom based upon an Indigenous philosophy of All of Our Relations, meaning the other beings on planet Earth. Because settler colonialism is less well understood than racism in US popular culture and academic theory, Indigenous philosophy has too often been ignored within intersectionality, feminism, and environmental justice scholarship. First, I begin with Indigenous intersectionality based upon All of Our Relations. Second, I describe my journey and decision to become a Native feminist and why intersectionality became so crucial to me. Finally, I address how Indigenous intersectionality is fundamental to environmental justice research and activism, including my own involvement with feminist anthropologists and our struggle against climate change. I highlight Grace Thorpe’s 1996 article about fighting back against dumping of radioactive toxic waste on Indigenous lands and Kim TallBear’s and other Indigenous women’s 2016 battle against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock to illustrate Indigenous intersectionality. I focus on TallBear and Thorpe as Indigenous women activist scholars to emphasize the enduring and long struggle of Indigenous women’s fight for environmental justice. I conclude with a discussion of incorporating Indigenous intersectionality in David Pellow’s work. The Native philosophy of All of Our Relations incorporates kinship between humans and all living things (Deloria 1973 [1992]; LaDuke 1999) and is fundamental to intersectionality, feminism, and environmental justice research and activism. More-than-human relates to the worlds and complex webs of interdependencies of countless beings co-dwelling on the planet (Whatmore 2006). The term emphasizes beings other than humans—animals, fish, bees, water, plants, and land—without creating a hierarchy, but rather points to how humans and more-than-humans are intertwined and connected (Hernandez 2019; Todd 2017a). More-than-humans as a concept has become particularly relevant in the context of climate change, environmental devastation, and the Anthropocene—a planetary epoch marked by humans becoming the dominant force shaping geophysical processes—compelling us to contemplate the end of the world for humans and other beings and lives (Bernardes De Souza Jr. 2021). Indigenous notions of intersectionality depart from Crenshaw’s definition (Crenshaw 1991) that focuses on humans’ experience of oppression but neglects the struggles of more-than-humans. Indigenous intersectional approaches include all life and use multiple categories of analysis: race, class, gender, sexuality, tribal nation, sovereignty, white supremacy, capitalism, and settler colonialism. Settler colonialism impacts people, but also more-than-humans, using up resources and dumping toxic waste in the air, water, and on land, contaminating humans and all life (Todd 2017a). 186

Indigeneity, feminisms, and activism  187 Gaard (2017) noted in her essay on “Feminism and Environmental Justice” that gender, sexuality, age, ability, race, and class issues are often lacking within environmental justice activism and scholarship, thus neglecting women, men, and transgendered persons’ experiences with environmental difficulties. Unfortunately, more-than-humans also occupy the margins of environmental justice scholarship (Pellow 2016). David Pellow (2016) observed that environmental justice research can be categorized into first generation studies that emphasized race and class, and second generation studies including gender, sexuality, and other differences (Buckingham and Kulcur 2010; Smith 2005). He further noted the growing numbers of scholars emphasizing gender, nation, sexuality, Indigeneity, and citizenship (Adamson 2011; Bell 2013; Buckingham and Kulcur 2010; Gaard 2004; Smith 2005). What is often missing from environmental justice research is an intersectional analysis that centers on settler colonialism (Adamson 2011; Bell 2013; Buckingham and Kulcur 2010; Pellow 2016). More recently, Kojola and Pellow (2021) argue for positioning the state in environmental justice studies, through interlocking systems of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and enslavement. Many environmental justice scholars, who research Indigenous peoples, use settler colonialism to frame environmental problems (Bacon 2019; Gilo-Whitaker 2019; Norgaard 2019; Reed 2020; Todd 2017a, 2017b; Whyte 2017a, 2017b, 2017c; Yazzie and Baldy 2018). Settler colonialism is different from other colonialisms because the focus is on the elimination of Indigenous peoples and relationships with the land (Wolfe 2006). Patrick Wolfe (2006) asserts that settler colonialism is a structure rather than an event, settlers come to stay, and the land is the primary motive for eliminating the Native. As Wolfe (2006) acknowledges, the elimination of the Native includes genocide, assimilation, and removal. Settler colonialism is a system that not only eliminates Indigenous people from the land but takes the land for capitalistic profit. J.M. Bacon (2019) describes settler colonialism as an eco-social structure that causes extreme and enduring inequalities between settlers and Indigenous peoples. His analysis illustrates how this structure disrupts Indigenous eco-social relations, causing colonial ecological violence that produces terrible harms and risks for Indigenous peoples. Environmental justice scholars further examine how western and racist philosophy imagines Indigenous peoples as waste and our land as wastelands, justifying the contamination of Indigenous lands by dumping toxic wastes and viewing Indigenous people as disposable (Baker et al., 2020; Reed 2009; Silko 1991; Slough Sayers 2022; Voyles 2015).

INTERSECTIONALITY, ALL OF OUR RELATIONS, AND MY NATIVE FEMINIST JOURNEY Native feminists, Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill (2013), contend that settler colonialism causes the erasure of Indigenous knowledge and theory as part of feminism, gender studies, and ethnic studies. I argue that settler colonial positions also eliminate Indigenous philosophy of All of Our Relations and contribute to its absence in theories of intersectionality, feminism, and environmental justice. Now, I turn to my journey to become a Native feminist. When I was in graduate school in the early 1990s at Stanford University, I was a member of a group of Indigenous women graduate students interested in Native feminisms, including Verna St. Denis (Cree/Metis), Victoria Bomberry (Muscogee), Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca), and Tina Pierce Fragoso (Lenni-Lenape). I related to them along multiple

188  Research handbook on intersectionality aspects of our identities, which provided our group a sense of cohesion and feelings of safety and connection. At the time, unfortunately, there was not much written about Native feminism. I recall Lee Maracle’s (1996) book, I Am Woman, Kate Shanley’s (1984) short essay, “Indian Feminism,” and the article, “American Indian Women: At the Center of Indigenous Resistance in North America,” by M. Annette Jaimes and Theresa Halsey (1992). However, Jaimes and Halsey (1992) refuse to embrace the term Native feminist and encourage Indigenous women to ignore sexism and instead privilege tribal nation and sovereignty. This article was upsetting to me given my experiences growing up excluded because of my gender and race as a Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe girl. My Indigenous mother, Woesha, called me a tomboy because I hated to wear dresses, refused to play with dolls, and was physically active. She reassured me that growing up she too had identified as a tomboy. My gender identity as a tomboy meant I desperately wanted to play Little League baseball like my brother, but girls were not allowed. In elementary school, my teacher forced me to wear dresses or skirts. My mom told me to do housework, another female activity I despised, and I preferred to take out the trash like my brother did. My brother spent five minutes doing chores daily whereas female family members spent hours weekly washing dishes, and cleaning. As a young tomboy it felt unjust. I received a doll for my fifth birthday, and I yelled, “I don’t want a doll. I want a truck!” I attended a mostly white elementary school, and I happily took out a piece of an Indian frybread from a paper bag and the other kids wrinkled their noses and said, “Ewww, what’s that?” As a little Indigenous girl, I did not feel like I belonged. I felt afraid to speak up in my mostly white classes and hated to hear my tentative voice reading aloud. These memories rushed back as we read Jaimes and Halsey’s article. I understood Jaimes’s and Halsey’s argument that as Indigenous women we should unify with our Native men and tackle racism together and fight for tribal sovereignty. Only after racism is overcome, they argue, can we deal with gender issues, such as sexism and rampant violence against Indigenous women. While discussing these early Native women scholars with my Indigenous women colleagues, I grappled over the decision to claim the term Native feminist. Jaimes’s and Halsey’s stance that feminism is a white idea and automatically means one is assimilated is problematic. Verna St. Denis, my Cree, and Metis Stanford colleague from Canada, pointed out that First Nations’ women were challenging the patriarchy of the Indian Act because many Indigenous women were disenrolled from their tribal nations when they divorced Native men, while white women became tribally enrolled when they married Aboriginal men. Verna St. Denis shared how First Nations’ women in Canada suffered from racism, sexism, and class discrimination and later wrote the excellent 2005 article, “Feminism Is for Everybody: Aboriginal Women, Feminism and Diversity.” Listening to Verna, Victoria, Tina, and Mishuana discuss Indigenous women’s multiple oppressions, reading Maracle’s (1996) book, and Kate Shanley’s (1984) essay, I was motivated to say, “Yes! I am a Native feminist!” After being hired at UC Santa Cruz as an assistant professor, I wrote about Native feminism, “Race, Tribal Nation and Gender: A Native Feminist Approach to Belonging” (Ramirez 2007). In this essay, I criticize the argument of Jaimes and Halsey that Indigenous women must defend tribal nationalism that neglects sexism to survive as women and to become free of colonialism (Ramirez 2007). I explain how this common idea is problematic because we as Indigenous women perish from domestic violence at much higher rates than other women. Therefore, domestic violence is an issue of survival (Ramirez 2007). I further argue that intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991) and Indigenous philosophy of All of Our Relations can link race, gender, tribal nation, and sovereignty together and justify claiming the term Native feminist

Indigeneity, feminisms, and activism  189 (Ramirez 2007). After these early beginnings of Native feminisms, there has been tremendous growth on the topic (see, for example, Goeman and Denetdale (2009), Baldy (2018), and Nickel and Fehr (2020) and many others).

INTERSECTIONALITY, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND THE ANTHROPOCENE In February 2020, I gathered with women of color anthropologists committed to use our research knowledge and experience to reach a broader audience (Ramirez 2021). Our aim was to craft an essay on climate change and the Anthropocene for publication in a popular magazine to bring to public awareness the negative impacts of climate change and the Anthropocene on African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous communities. We developed a coalition based upon intersectionality by coming together around our shared identities as feminist anthropologists. We committed to write an essay to contribute to the survival of the earth and all living things and publicize marginalized communities’ struggles with climate change and the Anthropocene. We met in Davenport, a tiny town ten miles north of Santa Cruz, California, for a three-day weekend. We shared stories about climate change, our ethnographic research, the Anthropocene, and the struggles of disenfranchised communities. We decided to write for the environmental magazine, Orion. We named our group, the “Slough Sayers.” I discussed the Laguna Pueblo novelist Leslie Marmon Silko’s (1991) book, Almanac of the Dead, because she tells stories about the sacredness of Mother Earth, the relatedness of all life, and the ecological devastation and destruction created by extraction and dumping of toxic waste into clean water, air, and the land, and contaminating our food. Our intersectional research process began with sharing and discussing stories to identify environmental justice themes emerging from our communities. In analysing these stories, our attention was drawn to systems of domination destroying Mother Earth and all of life. For instance, Almanac of the Dead calls for Indigenous sovereignty and return of all Native lands. The last part of the book advocates for a coalition of humans as ecowarriors to unify and heal Mother Earth. I announced to the group, “We are ecowarriors coming together to fight for the earth and all living things!” Following Silko’s call to action, I used Indigenous intersectionality based on the philosophy of All of Our Relations to connect us as ecowarriors, build a coalition across differences to come together as scholars and activists to fight for all beings. Our group entered the research and writing process as scholar activists, sharing stories, and the process of coalition building, identifying systems of domination of humans and more-than-humans—all activities intersectional projects include. We published our essay on disenfranchised communities, the earth, humans, and more-than-humans’ struggle for survival in Orion (2020). Along with other environmental justice scholars, we conceptualized Indigenous intersectionality by incorporating more-than-humans in analysing intersecting systems of domination destroying Mother Earth. I discuss the meaning of Indigenous philosophy’s respect of all life that does not privilege humans over more-than-humans, which is fundamental to an intersectional analysis that links racial and environmental justice.

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INDIGENOUS PHILOSOPHY—ALL OF OUR RELATIONS In my essay, “Race, Tribal Nation and Gender: A Native Feminist Approach to Belonging,” I analyse the Lakota concept of All of Our Relations to discuss how this Indigenous philosophy offers an alternative vision of tribal sovereignty. This Lakota concept encompasses the connectiveness between humans and more-than-humans, including animals, plants, birds, insects, land, and all beings. In my 2018 book, Standing Up to Colonial Power, I explain Ho-Chunk philosophy relating to animals by drawing on a 1941 speech of my Ho-Chunk grandfather, Henry Cloud made to the Wildlife Society in Pendleton, Oregon. He said, Conservation of game bulked large in the Red Man’s Philosophy. According to [Ho-Chunk] tradition, animals were created before man. Priority of existence carried to the Indian mind the endowment of greater powers. The great Creator gave the animals something more than He gave to man. Animals therefore were akin to the beings known as supernaturals [or spiritual beings]. Animals belong to the category of creatures meriting worship and adoration from man. It was believed that the animals also could do the work of supernaturals. These [supernaturals] had power and control over the Red man’s most vital interests—over sickness and health, victory or defeat in war, success on the hunt and chase. In the foregoing I have used some big words simply to say that when the Indians’ respect for the animal kingdom amounts to a religion, wanton destruction of game can find no room in his thinking. Such practice has never been heard of in Indian experience. From time immemorial game was the means of subsistence for the Indian. Its conservation meant self-preservation for the Indian race itself. Its conservation meant self-preservation of the Indian race itself … When Indians killed deer, buffalo, or any other game they never wasted any part. The hair was made into mattress material. Pads were made of it while it was wet for pack saddles. Ropes were made from buffalo hair. Indian trunks were made from buffalo hide. The tail was used for head dress, and in buckskin dresses. The hoof was heated to be cut for ornamental dress purposes. When cut and strung, it had a clear, ringing sound. The Indians ate the inside of the hoof. Tripe was cut, its contents emptied, cleaned thoroughly, and cured by smoking for winter food, or boiled for eating immediately. The lungs were soaked for winter use. The bones were cut into pieces and preserved for soup making in winter. It was cut very thin and hung up. Sometimes it was broken up for tallow by making it into cakes. The meat was sliced very thin and hung to dry in the sun and inside the tepee. The ear a most valuable dish for the Indian. The skin was peeled, and the ear gristle was eaten as a great delicacy. The hide, Indians make into gloves, moccasin and ready to wear clothing. The horns were used for drinking purpose, rings for decoration of the hand, awl handles for scraping hair off the hide. Elk hides were used for robes with hair retained like buffalo robes. When hair is removed, Indians use it for blankets and robes, and for panoply decorations with long fringes on horses. The bearskin being waterproof was used for drum coverings and as throw rugs. (Cloud 1941, 1–2)

My grandfather’s narrative shows how stories are essential for identifying what is important, and points to the types of data to be collected and analysed. Part of the intersectional research process is examining how systems of domination intersect, which Cloud shows in explaining the reciprocal link between animals and humans. As Cloud’s account demonstrates, animals, an example of more-than-humans, are central to Ho-Chunk spiritual philosophy and are valued above humans—very different from white and western assumptions that rank and privilege humans over animals. Cloud stresses a deep sense of human and animal respect and kinship. Furthermore, Cloud links the preservation of animals to the survival of humans. Unlike white hunters who track and kill animals for sport, Natives hunt to feed their loved ones (Ramirez 2018). Indeed, settlers tried to kill all buffalo to take away Natives’ food source and as a tactic of genocide (Phippen 2016), another settler colonial example of elimination.

Indigeneity, feminisms, and activism  191 This Indigenous respect, care, and environmentally sustainable relationship between animals and humans is very different from the settler colonial and capitalistic worldview that causes widespread poisoning of Indigenous peoples, animals, fish, and all beings from oil spills, uranium mining, toxic dumps, and pesticides that threaten Native peoples’ very survival and all of life. I argue that an Indigenous conceptualization of intersectionality links systems of domination to race, tribal nation, gender, and the environment. Therefore, Native feminisms contribute to our survival as human beings, and fundamental to being a Native feminist researcher is to use intersectional methods. Native feminist environmental justice researchers employ an expanded notion of intersectionality that includes humans and more-than-humans as research subjects and utilizes an ethic of care and respect. While conducting research, the connections between all life are incorporated into multiple categories of analysis. According to Hernandez (2021), ethics of care and respect must come from love (Moraga and Anzaldua 2015). Respectful relationships between humans and all of life can be healing and create collaborative futures (Hernandez 2021). Researchers listen respectfully and carefully to Indigenous peoples’ stories regarding all living things and the land (Baker 2019, 2020; Simpson 2017). Stories become significant data in examining relationships between all life, how both Indigenous people and more-than-humans are threatened by the same policies and practices embedded in settler colonial domination. They follow Indigenous philosophical and intersectional frameworks to examine Indigenous people and all beings as active and powerful agents, who have real bodies and lives that co-create, intersect, and overlap (Baker 2019, 2020; Black Elk and Baker 2020; Hernandez 2021; TallBear 2014, 2019; Todd 2017a). Researchers use archival and/or ethnographic methods, such as collecting government documents, environmental impact reports, letters, newspaper articles, attending meetings, interviewing tribal and government officials, and conducting field and participatory observations of more-than-humans and humans (Hernandez 2021; Hoover 2017, 2018; Manning 2018; Todd 2017a). They often utilize both macro and micro levels of analysis, analysing how systems of oppression at the macro level impact Indigenous people and all of life at the micro level. Environmental justice scholars argue that western, colonial, and capitalistic discourse connect Indigenous peoples and waste and their lands as wastelands (Baker et al. 2020; Reed 2009; Silko 1991; Slough Sayers forthcoming; Voyles 2015). From the start of colonization to the present, colonizers have treated Indigenous lands as empty and undeveloped (terra nullis), Indigenous peoples as savages, and along with more-than-humans as ultimately disposable waste (Anderson 2013; Reed 2009). In Almanac of the Dead, Silko maps the wasting of Indigenous peoples and lands as continual and uninterrupted. Natives continually fought against the colonizer stealing and taking over Indigenous lands with their guns and disease in the sixteenth century and the toxic colonialism of the twenty-first century, such as the dumping of toxic waste on Native lands. The neutral terms may shift and change, such as “national security logic” to “national sacrifice zones” but the wasted lands or wastelands include Indigenous reservations and the impoverished neighborhoods of people of color (Reed 2009). This mapping process constructs an Indigenous framework that compares western, colonial, and capitalistic ways of seeing and knowing.

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CASE STUDY: GRACE THORPE In the following, I discuss the Native feminist, intersectional, and environmental justice work of Grace Thorpe (Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Sac and Fox, and Menominee) by analysing her scholarly writing and activism against the dumping of toxic waste on Indigenous lands. I recollect my mom, Woesha Cloud North, talking about Grace Thorpe fondly, whom she met while she lived on Alcatraz Island during the 1969 Native occupation of Alcatraz Island. Her daughter, Dagmar Thorpe, lived with us on the mainland while she attended Stanford Law School. I remember Dagmar as tall, thin with long blonde hair and as incredibly smart and beautiful. Because Dagmar lived with us, I decided to write about and honor her mom’s scholarship and activism. I was happy to find archival material about Grace Thorpe’s work in the National Museum of the American Indian archives. My Native feminist intersectional methods consisted of using a life story approach by searching archival material, including newspaper articles, pictures, newsletters that her family had collected. Thorpe was a World War II veteran, having served as a Women’s Army Corps corporal in New Guinea, the Philippines, and Japan. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and a paralegal degree from the Antioch School of Law in Washington, DC in 1974. After her involvement in the occupation of Alcatraz and her founding the Native American Women’s Action Council, Thorpe served as a Congressional Intern for Senator James Abourezk from 1974–75. She was later appointed Legislative Assistant for the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs and as a Task Force Program and Policy Analyst for the American Indian Review Commission. As the daughter of the Olympic athlete, Jim Thorpe, she restored her father’s 1912 Olympic record in 1983. She returned to her tribal homelands and became active in tribal affairs. In later years, she was a tribal judge, health commissioner and an environmental activist and scholar, opposing nuclear waste on tribal lands (Grace Thorpe Collection; Indian Country News 2008). Grace Thorpe, Intersectionality, and All of Our Relations Thorpe’s environmental justice activism and research was based on intersectionality shaped by Indigenous wisdom and philosophy. She collected data in archival research of government documents, newspaper articles, scholarly books, essays, and environmental justice meeting reports; as well as notes from ethnographic research of community meetings and interviews with people about how humans, the land, and all of life were being harmed by radioactive waste (Thorpe 1996). This data collection provided Thorpe with material to analyse micro and macro levels, and uncovered a more inclusive understanding of how all living things suffered from systems of oppression of settler colonialism. As an environmental justice scholar and activist, Thorpe (1996) published a powerful article, “Our Homes Are Not Dumps: Creating Nuclear Free Zones,” in the Natural Resources Journal. Thorpe was a corporal stationed in New Guinea at the end of World War II when the first atomic bomb was released into the air and exploded over Hiroshima. While decades had passed since Hiroshima, Thorpe emphasizes the lack of safe disposal of radioactive waste from commercial and military reactors. Thorpe stresses how rich capitalists have more access to government representatives and the media compared to the disadvantaged; thus, the nuclear industry targets those without close contact with the powerful. Consequently, impoverished neighborhoods, and Indigenous lands, become places to dump nuclear waste.

Indigeneity, feminisms, and activism  193 Thorpe begins her article by noting: The Great Spirit instructed us that, as Native people, we have a consecrated bond with Mother Earth. We have a sacred obligation to our fellow creatures that live upon it. For this reason, it is both painful and disturbing that the United States government and the nuclear power industry seem intent in forever ruining some of the little land we have remaining. (Thorpe 1996, 955)

In this quote, Thorpe uses Indigenous philosophy, encouraging Native people to feel a spiritual connection with Mother Earth and to protect the land and all living things. She contrasts this Indigenous philosophy with the United States government and nuclear power industry that seem committed to spoiling Indigenous land. Her words appear to suggest a settler colonial, racist, and capitalistic mindset that facilitates dumping toxic waste on Indigenous lands, endangering Natives’ lives, and land bases, contributing to a settler colonial process of elimination. Thorpe’s intersectional research using race, class, settler colonialism, and environment together provides macro-level analysis that shows how the nuclear industry operates as a system of oppression, which negatively impacts Indigenous peoples at the micro level, making us sick. She reports that between 1950 and 1980, approximately 15,000 people worked in uranium mines located on Navajo and Pueblo land, and one-quarter of these laborers were Indigenous. She points out that radiation from tailings piles—the debris after uranium has been extracted—leaches into groundwater that ends up in Indigenous homes, ranches, and farms. Furthermore, high concentrations of radon gas constantly seep out of the radioactive piles and Natives breathe in this toxic gas and experience radiation at dangerous levels. Therefore, she argues that Natives who reside near uranium mines experience the same negative health consequences as those working in underground uranium mines. Thorpe’s macro and micro levels of analysis establish the nuclear plant industry’s settler colonial process of elimination and environmental racism: building a nuclear plant near Indigenous land and people, contaminating their drinking water, endangering their health and safety, and potentially causing sickness and death. Fundamental to settler colonialism is eliminating Indigenous peoples for settlers’ land use and capitalistic exploitation. Thorpe (1996) examines the consequences of operating a nuclear power plant in Minnesota near the Prairie Island Mdewankanton Sioux. A consortium, Northern States Power (NSP), contacted Minnesota state officials about building a storage facility near the NSP plant at Prairie Island. This nuclear plant was built on an old tribal village and burial mound that was more than 2,000 years old. While the NSP plant supplies 15 percent of the state’s electricity, no energy had reached the Mdewankanton community, which is adjacent to the plant. On October 2, 1979, there was a 27-minute release of radiation that forced evacuation of the nuclear plant. Plant officials did not notify the nearby tribal nation until several days later. By 1989, radioactive tritium was found in the drinking water, compelling the tribal nation to build an 800-feet-deep well and water tower that was not finished until 1993. The Prairie Island Sioux fought the nuclear waste proposal and won and determined their Prairie Island Reservation a Nuclear Free Zone. The United States Department of Energy (DOE) started to consider placing a permanent nuclear repository in basalt and granite hard rock deposits in Minnesota. The United States government considered the White Earth reservation as a disposal site. The Anishinaabe, who live on White Earth, conducted a study on the potential health impact to humans and all of life to assess the overall harm of radioactive waste. At the micro level, they investigated the negative effects of toxic waste on humans and more-than-humans. They investigated the negative

194  Research handbook on intersectionality effects of radioactive waste on living beings. Nuclear power and government officials’ decision to dump toxic waste on Indigenous land showed the intersection of systems of oppression the Anishinaabe faced. In response, the Minnesota legislature passed the Radioactive Waste Management Act, stating that this kind of nuclear repository could not be built within the state’s boundaries without the legislature’s authorization (Thorpe 1996). As a Native feminist and environmental justice scholar and activist, Thorpe acknowledges the agency of Indigenous peoples as powerful actors as they struggle against environmental racism and settler colonialism. An example is the creation of the National Environmental Coalition of Native Americans (NECONA) in 1993—an organization developed to fight against Monitored Retrieval Storage (MRS) or any nuclear waste dumping on Indigenous lands, and to encourage tribal nations to proclaim their lands as Nuclear Free Zones. As fewer and fewer tribal nations considered locating MRS on their lands, the pressure on Washington increased. NECONA was able to convince US Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico to contest the MRS on the energy and appropriations committee. Consequently, Congress did not fund the MRS program (Thorpe 1996). At the same time, Thorpe (1996) reports that Congress voted to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, which is located 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, on Western Shoshone land. Federal officials planned to open the facility in 2010. Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, government officials began searching for a temporary facility for nuclear waste until Yucca Mountain became operational. Again, tribal nations and Indigenous lands were targeted. Thorpe (1996) describes the process of tribal nations being approached to accept the MRS facility to store uranium waste on Indigenous land. At the time Thorpe wrote the report, 17 tribes had been approached by federal officials. The three remaining were the Mescalero Apache of New Mexico, the Goshutes in Utah, and Fort McDermitt Reservation in Nevada, which includes the Paiutes and Western Shoshone (Thorpe 1996). Furthermore, Thorpe (1996) stresses the complicated political landscape of Native Americans and the nuclear power industry. She recognizes that tribal officials do not all struggle against nuclear utility companies, but some agree to build MRS facilities on Indigenous land. As Thorpe notes (1996), NSP had signed an agreement with the Mescalero Apache to build an MRS facility in New Mexico. The agreement required the tribe to sign two 20-year licenses to provide a repository for 40,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel. NSP estimated that total revenues over the 40-year period would be $2.3 billion, and the tribe would receive $250 million. Using its authority, the Tribal Council believed it could work towards this agreement and presented a public referendum to tribal members. The January 31, 1995, referendum was voted down by 490 to 362. Soon after the vote, a petition asking for a new election started circulating. Tribal members voted again on March 9, 1995, and the measure passed 593 to 372. At the time the essay was written, there was uncertainly of what would happen at Mescalero. Opponents of MRS sought another referendum. The State of New Mexico prohibited transport of already used nuclear fuel to overturn the proposal. At the same time, NSF officials announced they planned to move ahead with the project. Thorpe provides an example of how systems of oppression of capitalism, environmental racism, and settler colonialism cross national borders. Thorpe (1996) recognizes that the issue of nuclear waste on Indigenous lands is not isolated to the United States, but also is a problem in Canada. Federal and utility company officials in multiple countries consider Indigenous lands as suitable places for the dumping of toxic waste and Indigenous peoples’ health and

Indigeneity, feminisms, and activism  195 lives as collateral damage for capitalistic profit. Thorpe supports this claim by pointing to the free trade agreement article between Canada and the United States that forbids Canada from stopping nuclear waste from entering the country. The Meadow Lake Cree in Saskatchewan considered the proposal to become a permanent repository made by the Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL), a corporation of the Canadian government, which sells nuclear technology throughout the Americas. Thorpe (1996) describes the situation in Mexico as even more horrible because of a lack of environmental regulation. NECONA had heard of “jelly babies,” babies born without bones because of environmental contamination. Thorpe (1996) astutely analyses the complications of tribal sovereignty. Tribal officials at Mescalero and other reservations invoked tribal sovereignty in support of building an MRS facility on Native lands. Thorpe analyses the use of tribal sovereignty as a reason to not protect the environment. She wonders about telling tribes not to build MRS facilities on tribal lands to protect the earth. Tribal officials respond by claiming their right to do as they please to exert tribal sovereignty. While Thorpe recognizes that in a sense, they are right, their argument is not truly an expression of sovereignty but sells tribal sovereignty. Thorpe asserts the issue is not sovereignty, but the real concern is Mother Earth’s and all of life’s survival and environmental racism. She explains that the goal of NECONA is to encourage tribal nations to articulate their sovereign rights in support of Mother Earth and unite an increasing number of tribal governments that are proclaiming their tribal lands as Nuclear Free Zones. She points to the contradiction of utility companies working for years to abolish tribal sovereignty, and now are promoting tribal sovereignty to dump nuclear waste on Indigenous land. As a Native feminist researcher and activist, Thorpe’s analysis of environmental racism, settler colonialism, and capitalism points the finger at nuclear utility and federal government officials. Assuming Native lands are suitable for dumping toxic waste is an example of environmental racism. Placing toxic waste on Indigenous land is a settler colonial process of elimination as Indigenous peoples often get sick and die; and are, therefore, sacrificed for utility companies’ capitalistic profit. Thorpe (1996) documents the DOE and utility company officials’ normalizing Natives’ acceptance of nuclear waste and dumping it on their lands as natural. Utility company officials have persuaded some traditionalists, who are keepers of the land, to accept nuclear waste. Thorpe (1996) argues governmental and nuclear power officials try to frame the acceptance of nuclear waste as part of Natives’ strong role as earth stewards. However, as an activist, scholar, and powerful actor, Thorpe had already declared to the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) in 1993 that such an interpretation was a perversion of our beliefs and an insult to our intelligence to say we are natural stewards of these wastes. She argues the goal of the United States government and the utility companies is to dump this highly hazardous waste on Native lands and to continue to create more of it. As stories are central to Native feminist and Indigenous intersectional research, they provide data on the harm that yellow powders from uranium poses for humans and all life. Thorpe (1996) calls attention to the many hundreds of years our traditional Indigenous spiritual leaders cautioned us against extracting resources from the land. They warned us that the earth will become ruined and destroyed. She describes a Navajo story that forewarns the hazards of uranium, The people emerged from the third world into the fourth and present world and were given a choice. They were told to choose between two yellow powders. One was yellow dust from the rocks, and the other was corn pollen. The [People] chose corn pollen and the gods nodded in assent. They also issued

196  Research handbook on intersectionality a warning. Having chosen the corn pollen, the Navajos were to leave the yellow dust in the ground. If it were ever removed, it would bring evil (961).

Thorpe (1996) cautions that living near uranium mines, nuclear power plants, and nuclear testing puts one at high risk for cancer. Because of nuclear testing in Nevada, thyroid cancer rates among the Western Shoshone increased. They contracted leukemia and are losing their lives at a young age—something not experienced before. Similarly, pollution and toxic waste from the Hanford nuclear weapons facility in the State of Washington threatened and still threatens Native people who fish and eat Columbia River salmon (Thorpe 1996; Tolson 2014). Thorpe (1996, 961–2) stresses that “those who visited all of these horrors upon us want us to accept their nuclear waste, too.” She continues with a quote from Darelynn Lehto, the Vice President of the Prairie Island Mdewankanton, who testified before the Minnesota State Senate while fighting against putting a MRS on their tribal land. “It is the worst kind of environmental racism to force our tribe to live with the dangers of nuclear waste simply because no one else is willing to do so” (Thorpe 1996, 962; Lehto 1994, 17). Thorpe asks why as a society do we tolerate the manufacture of products that cannot be safely disposed of. While honoring the activism of a tribal official and NECONA, Thorpe portrays the federal government and uranium utility companies as oppressive forces of settler colonialism and environmental racism, placing toxic waste on Indigenous lands, and alluding to the common perception that Indigenous peoples are waste, and our lands are wastelands. Thorpe ends her essay, As a mother and grandmother, I am concerned about the survival of our people just as Mother Earth is concerned about the survival of her children. There is currently a moratorium on construction of nuclear power plants in the United States. There is also current legislation, however, that would allow new building if arrangements were made for the waste. Is this the legacy we want to leave our children and for our Mother Earth? The Iroquois say that in making any decision one should consider the impact of seven generations to come. As Thom Fasset, who is Iroquois, reminds us, taking such a view on these issues often makes us feel we are alone, rolling a stone up a hill. It keeps rolling back down on us. That may be the only way, however, for us to live up to our sacred duty to this land and to all of creation. (963)

Thorpe as an activist and scholar underscores the importance of respect, care, and kinship between humans, Mother Earth and all living things, while critiquing nuclear plant officials’ perversion of tribal sovereignty that opens the door for placing radioactive waste on Indigenous lands. She criticizes tribal officials as genocidal and short-sighted by asserting this twisted sense of tribal sovereignty and choosing not to protect the health of Mother Earth, humans, and all life in exchange for money and profit. She highlights federal and nuclear plant officials’ efforts to use Indigenous lands as toxic waste dumps, threatening Indigenous peoples’ health, causing cancer, and shortening our life spans.

INTERSECTIONALITY, STANDING ROCK, AND INDIGENOUS WOMEN ACTIVISTS/SCHOLARS Native women activist scholars have continued to research, write, and fight against capitalist and corporate interests using Indigenous lands to make a profit. An example is the Native feminist anthropologist Kim TallBear’s 2019 essay, “Badass Indigenous Women Caretake Relations.” TallBear’s chapter is part of a collection of essays, Standing with Standing Rock,

Indigeneity, feminisms, and activism  197 edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon (2019) that connect #NODAPL to centuries of Indigenous resistance against gender violence, white supremacy, environmental destruction, capitalism, and colonization, Using Indigenous intersectionality, TallBear (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate) interviewed Native activist scholars, collected data from newspapers, books and essays, listened to interviews on CNN and other news sources to examine how humans and more-than-humans were negatively impacted by the Dakota Access Pipeline and the process Standing Rock organizers used to build coalitions with other movements and people across differences to increase their political power. TallBear identified women of the Oceti Sakowin or Seven Council Fires to be central to the Standing Rock movement. They created allies in many countries as they worked to protect the water and land from the capitalistic interest of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Her research found that the Standing Rock movement builds on the energy of the Idle No More (INM) and Black Lives Matter (BLM) movements. In 2012, three Indigenous women, Sylvia McAdam, Jessica Gordon, and Nina Wilson, and one non-Indigenous woman, Sheelah McLean, founded INM. TallBear (2019) describes how INM linked Bill C-45, an omnibus bill affecting over 60 acts, legislation that was supported by the Conservative Harper Canadian government that opposed environmental protections. The foundation of their movement is based on Indigenous ways of knowing and sovereignty to fight to safeguard our air, water, land, and all life for future generations. They recognized that Indigenous peoples connect our lives and treaty rights to the well-being of our more-than-human relatives. This linkage is not only to protect Indigenous peoples’ lives but the lives of everyone. TallBear (2019) honors LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, founder of Standing Rock’s Sacred Stone Camp and a Standing Rock Tribe’s historic preservation officer, who tragically died recently on April 10, 2021. Brave Bull Allard (2016) as a scholar activist analyses settler colonialism and genocide. She describes how federal officials not only ordered genocidal killing of our people, but also used another elimination tactic, the cutting of our deep relationships between our more-than-human relatives and the land. She considers police violence against the peacefully protesting Standing Rock Water Protectors, linking the fate of Indigenous people to the destiny of more-than-humans and the land. She emphasizes that the land was cleared of our relatives and the buffalo nation for white ranchers to graze their cattle. Brave Bull Allard (2016) uses Indigenous intersectionality, describing how settlers worked to cut Indigenous peoples’ deep connection to the land and more-than-humans by removing Natives from their land and widespread killing of the buffalo—an important resource of buffalo meat, leather for clothing, and blankets to keep us warm. TallBear (2019) argues that white supremacist citizens and the United States settler colonial state includes white ranchers and the fossil-fuel corporate executives in the past and in the present, who worked hard to eliminate Indigenous peoples’ relationship to our more-than-human relatives, the land and water, while supporting white occupation and capitalistic profit. These processes of elimination are indeed examples of settler colonialism (TallBear 2019). TallBear’s use of Indigenous intersectionality as a research method and analysis is evident in her inclusion of both more-than-humans and humans. In connecting #NoDAPL to other struggles, TallBear notes that Faith Spotted Eagle, founder of the Brave Heart Society and Ihanktonwan Dakota elder, showed how assaults on all life contribute to increased sexual violence against Indigenous women. Laborers who build pipelines to carry oil and fossil fuel live in “man camps” and Indigenous women near these camps experience high rates of sexual assault (Cook 2019). Spotted Eagle identified

198  Research handbook on intersectionality the connection between settlers sexually assaulting Indigenous women and itinerant workers committing sexual assault and environmental damage. According to TallBear, Spotted Eagle honors the revival of nations, which includes humans and more-than-humans nations having good relationships. TallBear emphasizes that her name “Faith” is not Barack Obama’s US exceptionalist “progress” or “hope” for restoring the nation-state founded on white supremacy. Instead, using Indigenous intersectionality, TallBear (2019) argues, it is the faith in Indigenous women as the leaders of environmental justice movements, who stress relationships of care and respect with other humans and more-than-humans, and the planet. Again, using intersectionality, TallBear (2019) identifies the central role that Two Spirit leadership has been in both the Idle No More and Standing Rock movements. Alex Wilson is a Two Spirit Scholar and Idle No More activist and defines Two Spirit peoples’ role in the struggle is to encourage and motivate others to transform and grow politically and personally. Melody McKiver, a Two Spirit videographer with Idle No More, argues that Two Spirit people motivate open-mindedness and play various roles in different Indigenous communities they belong to. At Standing Rock, they built a Two Spirit camp and are part of a Two Spirit Nation. The significance of Two Spirit people in the environmental movement is recognized by Indigenous nations and TallBear cites the case of Honduran environmental activist Berta Caceres as another leader who connected Indigenous rights and environmental justice work with LGBTQ oppression. Caceres argued that the same powerful interests attack both the planet and LGBTQ vulnerable communities. Sadly, she was killed in her home on March 3, 2016, after many threats to her life (TallBear 2019). TallBear (2019) honors the activist work of Black Lives Matter founded by African American women, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. This movement began in 2013 as a response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon Martin in Florida. BLM as a movement responded to police brutality against African Americans nationwide. BLM also worked on behalf of other vulnerable communities’ rights, including queer and trans people, criminal justice reform, domestic workers, immigrant justice, and for human rights overall. This political coalition work across differences is based on intersectionality and increases the political power and strength of disenfranchised communities. TallBear sees their activist work as strong acts of queer and women-led governance and activism (TallBear 2019). As a Dakota feminist and strong supporter of BLM, TallBear (2019) sees the connection between Black women of BLM with Indigenous women leaders of Standing Rock and Idle No More. All these women are caretakers of their relatives and kin. TallBear clarifies the word “kin” and differentiates it from white, settler colonial, and patriarchal notions of relationships. TallBear, however, stresses that she does not view only women as caretakers, but also includes men as caretakers too. She honors Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault II, and his fight against Dakota Access Pipeline’s invasion on Oceti Sakowin territory and the young men on the frontlines of the #NoDAPL movement (TallBear 2019). Standing Rock, Idle No More, and BLM incorporate intersectionality into their organizing to help build coalitions between people from various racial, ethnic, sexual, gender, tribal, and other identities. All benefitted from the momentum of BLM. Both Standing Rock and Idle No More use Indigenous intersectionality involving humans and more-than-humans and the planet. In this way, Standing Rock and Idle No More movements link racial justice and environmental justice movements. Now, I turn to Erik Kojola and David Pellow (2021), two critical environmental justice scholars, who use intersectionality. Pellow (2016, 2018) works to develop a framework of

Indigeneity, feminisms, and activism  199 critical environmental justice studies, which builds on and extends earlier generations of environmental justice studies. He pays attention to how multiple categories of difference are involved in environmental injustice, including race, gender, sexuality, class, and species. David Pellow (2016) expands Crenshaw’s definition of intersectionality by including humans and more-than-humans, arguing that BLM is both a racial justice and an environmental justice movement, while making the connection between intra-human inequality and oppressions and their interaction with human and more-than-human oppression. If BLM as a movement was created to challenge state-sanctioned violence against Black people, Pellow (2016) argues, one understands why BLM activists choose to address environmental racism. Pellow (2016) argues environmental racism can be seen as a form of violent control over bodies, knowledge systems, and space, yet state violence is an analysis often lacking in environmental justice scholarship. According to Pellow (2016), both BLM and environmental justice activists might consider how to make communities places of safety beyond state control. The BLM and environmental justice activists and scholars have relied on the state to control and regulate industry and deliver justice. The track record of the state’s law enforcement and regulation and control of industry in communities of color has been awful, as when Indigenous peoples and communities of color are viewed as disposable or as waste. To address this problem, Pellow (2016) recommends that critical environmental studies must view communities of color and more-than-humans as subjects of research and essential and imperative to our collective futures. What is missing from Pellow’s (2016) analysis, however, is a deep engagement with settler colonialism—a pivotal category of analysis to understand Indigenous peoples and their environmental difficulties. Settler colonialism as already mentioned was, however, addressed more recently in the 2021 article of Kojola and Pellow, “New Directions in Environmental Justice Studies: Examining the State and Violence.” Like TallBear and Brave Bull Allard, Pellow (2016) acknowledges a historical link between using violence against animals, killing of livestock as food sources during wartime and colonization of Indigenous peoples (Pellow 2016; TallBear 2019). As Native feminists, scholars, and activists, we encourage critical environmental justice scholars to take seriously critiques of settler colonialism and its implementation and to acknowledge we are on Indigenous land (Teves and Arvin 2018).

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I argue that Native feminism and Indigenous philosophy of All of Our Relations helps bring together racial and environmental justice scholarship and activism and challenges the racist, and settler colonial mindset that Indigenous peoples are waste, and their lands are wastelands. Intersectionality shaped by Indigenous philosophy of All of Our Relations encourages me to claim my identity as a Native feminist and enables me to see the connection between race, gender, tribal nation and sovereignty, and environmental justice. Indigenous intersectionality has been a research methodology and concept that motivated me to work together with a group of women of color anthropologists, the “Slough Sayers,” to support Native women-led environmental justice activism, and research. Indigenous intersectional environmental justice research includes humans and more-than-humans as research subjects, investigates with respect and care all life, including the land, the relationship between humans, plants, animals, birds, and all living things. It also uses multiple categories, including

200  Research handbook on intersectionality race, tribal nation and sovereignty, gender, class, sexuality, and settler colonialism at the center of the analysis. I argue that intersectionality, at its core, is wisdom and philosophy of All of Our Relations that includes humans and more-than-humans. I argue that settler colonialism contributes to the erasure of Indigenous philosophy of All of Our Relations. As a critical legal scholar, Kimberlé Crenshaw did not consider more-than-humans in her definition of intersectionality since the legal framework used for analysing civil rights and discrimination is a settler colonial construct. Finally, I argue that Indigenous women activists and scholars influenced by Indigenous philosophy of All of Our Relations certainly contribute to feminism, intersectionality, and environmental justice research and theory.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Zoe Todd, Janelle Baker, Anna Tsing, Paulla Ebron, Rosa Ficek, Sarah Vaughn, Karen Ho, Darcey Evans, Yve Chavez, Mary Romero, and Karie Marie Norgaard for feedback.

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13. Intersectionality and ethnography Robert Keith Collins

The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite – that it frequently conflates or ignores differences. (Crenshaw 1991, 1242)

INTRODUCTION When Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) wrote, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” one of her goals was to illuminate the problems of ignoring intragroup differences and how these differences shape lived experiences, particularly for African American women. In the epigraph above, she reminds us that ignoring differences within groups lends to conflict among groups based on inconsistencies between racial and class identities, racial and sexual identities, etc. This chapter expands on this theoretical discussion by examining the need – and useful observation and interviewing tools – for investigating the subjectivity of race and culture in lived experience. Central in this discussion is an examination of the relevance of intersectional research to ethnography and how taking intersectional lived experiences as the central focus of analysis lends to theoretical descriptions and specifications of how individuals make sense of their multidimensional identities. The fieldwork examples provided, and the lives that informed the research conducted, will show how being a self-reflexive researcher, while observing individual interactions within social and cultural environments, and focusing interviews on what individuals say and do during these interactions, provides insight into the multidimensionality of experiences and identities that individuals can embody. These complexities in experiences and self-understanding can often be missed using standard ethnographic approaches. Although the discussion in this chapter may seem like a critique of standard ethnographic approaches, it is merely an attempt to expand on these tools, illuminating the strengths of an integrated intersectional and person-centered ethnographic approach. For over 20 years, my rationale for using an integrated approach to the study of African-Native Americans or individuals of blended cultural and/or racial African and Native American ancestry, particularly during the creation of the Smithsonian’s traveling banner exhibit, “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas” (Tayac 2009), is that it enables respondents to explain how they see the consistencies and inconsistencies between social recognition and self-identification (Collins 2009, 2021a). These explanations further enable the investigation of how race and culture, being both African American and culturally specific Native American, are navigated and negotiated in individual lives, when and in which social contexts self-understandings conflict with and are not determined by race and culture, and how individuals make sense of racial and cultural experiences (Collins 2006). Understanding that race and culture influence individual senses of being and belonging within families and communities scratches the surface of the many meanings behind identities. The challenge for ethnographers is to develop more tools that expand our abilities to investigate the consistencies and inconsistences between racial and 204

Intersectionality and ethnography  205 cultural identities in a person’s life and why public racial identities may shape self-understanding for some, while private cultural identities shape self-understandings for others. Discussion of the need for an intersectional ethnography is particularly timely as ethnographic approaches within anthropology are actively being modified to understand the lived experiences of multiethnic and racialized populations in the United States. Twentieth century descriptions of culture offered generalized mappings of everyday life guided by seemingly stable community or racial group expectations. Twenty-first century ethnographers are attempting to understand what it is like for community members and members of racialized groups to navigate and negotiate these cultural and racial expectations, particularly within racialized cultures, and why some aspects of culture are accepted as elements of self-understanding, while others are rejected (LeVine 1963, 1982; Valverde 1999). These new approaches to understanding lived experiences within racialized cultures seem to be evolving in tandem with anti-racist liberation movements and re-examinations of the anthropological record that reveals how and why race and culture intersect in a person’s life over time and that a cultural construct, like race, is not “master programmer” of these intersections (D’Andrade and Strauss 1992; Strauss 1992, 1–2). An ethnographic approach to the intersections of race and culture can enable greater understandings of the conflicts that inconsistencies between the two create in a person’s life. In practice, such an approach can aid ethnographers’ abilities to speak to respondents with attention to when race and culture cause individuals of similar backgrounds to have different understandings of self within different contexts related to appearance and lifeways. The response received can lend to greater academic attention to – and explanation of – explanatory gaps in the literature on the overlapping relationships between race and culture that manifest in people’s lives. The remainder of this chapter discusses and illuminates the relevance of intersectionality to person-centered ethnography, explanatory gaps in analyses of intersectional experiences, the relationship between intersectionality and how person-centered ethnography leads to constructing intersectional interview questions, preparing for intersectional interviews, showing respect, and examining what people say about intersectional experiences, what people do with intersections, how people embody intersections, and the implications an intersectional approach holds for future research into subjective racial experiences.

THE RELEVANCE OF INTERSECTIONALITY TO ETHNOGRAPHY Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), intersectionality is a term used to describe the confounding and converging ways in which race, class, and gender shape the experiences that identities represent. Centered in legal scholarship, the coining of this term is premised on the notion that too often analysis of these elements of lived experiences, particularly within the United States, are “predicated on a discreet set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the intersections of race and gender” (Crenshaw 1989, 140). The relevance of Crenshaw’s assertion to ethnography becomes evident when observing and listening to African-Native Americans. One can see and hear individuals navigating and negotiating cultural, racial, and gendered experiences in pursuit of being and belonging within community, family, and society (see Tayac 2009). While culture and race shape these experiences, their intensity and subjective nature may also vary given the gender of the individual. These experiences generate everyday understandings of what life is like for the person to live within

206  Research handbook on intersectionality cultural, racial, and gender dimensions of being African-Native American (Chamberlain 1891; Collins 2006, 2009, 2017, 2020, 2021a, 2021b; Hallowell 1955). Over the past 30 years, intersectional legal studies of race, class, and gender have produced a body of analytical research that illuminates the subjectivity of human experiences with these social constructs that offer tools for ethnographic analysis. For example, Crenshaw’s (1989) exploration of how “single-axis” frameworks provide a foundation for understanding how marginalization occurs and produce multifaceted subordination experiences. Devon Carbado’s (2013), “Colorblind Intersectionality” sought to expand the discussion of intersectionality to include the extent to which critiques of the approach led to new arenas of investigation in which intersectional experiences could become the central focus of analysis. Three critiques that illuminated the need for methodological expansion were that intersectionality “is only or largely about Black women, or only about race and gender,” “is a static theory that does not capture the dynamic and contingent processes of identity formation,” and “is overly invested in subjects” (Carbado 2013, 812). These scholarly critiques sought to illuminate the limitations of the legal theory based upon how it was applied. For the ethnographer, mapping the normative concerns held in people’s lives about race, class, and gender and how these same individuals have come to understand their own experiences over time offer new avenues for investigation (Alcoff and Mendieta 2003; Cho et al. 2013; Sacks 1989, 1994). During the same year in which Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality, anthropologist Karen Brodkin Sacks (1989) highlighted the need for – and relevance of – “a unified theory of class, race, and gender” in comparative anthropological studies of culture. These studies, grounded in ethnographic case studies, have been central to anthropological practices. On the one hand, the goals have been to “understand, appreciate, and interpret cultural uniqueness in its own terms.” On the other, the goals have been “to generalize, to discover similarities amid diversity, and to develop cross-cultural explanations and theories that proceed in practice from a much more restricted range of Western cultural frameworks” (Sacks 1989, 534). For Sacks, these goals were contradictory and in need of attention to the differences that exist within the class, race, and gender sameness that was characteristic of Marxist and social feminist theorizing of the time. By investigating the extent to which race and gender “reduce” to class in the United States, scholars are encouraged to expand their expertise in the tensions between “specificity and generalization in cross-cultural comparison” to include ways in which comparisons of race, class, and gender could reveal the tensions of social transformation, how class could produce communities just like cultures, the agency of people of color and white working-class women within these communities, and how and why gender identities, particularly the gender identities of women, should not be considered analytically separable from racial and class identities in a person’s lived experiences (Sacks 1989, 534).

EXPLANATORY GAPS IN INTERSECTIONAL STUDIES Although theoretically sound, when trying to understand the relationship between intersectionality and lived experiences, two major explanatory gaps can be found in the literature. One, it is difficult to find how many aspects of culture and race intersect in the lives of individuals. Building from Crenshaw’s foundation, scholars of intersectionality have explained the importance of understanding the salience of intersecting experiences with race, class, and gender. What remains elusive is what it is like to experience and make sense of racism, violence, etc.

Intersectionality and ethnography  207 in everyday life and over time (Carbado 2013; Collins and Bilge 2016; Crenshaw 1989, 1991; Devereux 1968; Sacks 1994). Two, as Crenshaw and others have asserted and observed, experiences with race, class, and gender are varied in the social and cultural worlds that individuals navigate and negotiate. For example, the experiences of women of color, at the intersections of race and gender, reveal a need for qualitatively different analytical frameworks for understanding their experiences than those used for white women; however, “representational intersectionality” can lend to explorations of the similarities and differences in women’s identity politics and experiences with discrimination (Crenshaw 1991, 1245). This variation in experiences with discrimination suggests the need for an ethnographic approach that accounts for how individuals cope with discrimination in the cultural and racial worlds that they share, live as individuals representing marginalized groups, and make sense of as part of their own identities. These gaps lend to an incomplete picture of how individuals navigate and negotiate these intersections, and understandings of being and belonging within context, particularly when formulating the answer to the question, “Who am I?” (Bauman 2001; Beck-Gernsheim and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Bourdieu 1977; Csordas 1997; Hollan 2005). Do analyses of intersectionality only lend to qualitative analyses of cultural constructs like race, class, and gender? The multidimensionality of Black women’s experiences discussed by Crenshaw and those that followed show the limitations of generalizations about women’s experiences. It is not that generalizations are not useful for understanding common trends in experience and identities; however, to understand how these experiences relate to individuals’ lived experiences requires methodological approaches that transcend these generalizations and illuminate their significance in context. This ability to account for variations in racial experiences within social and cultural worlds suggest that intersectionality is relevant to more than the current foci and scopes of analyses.

INTERSECTIONALITY AND PERSON-CENTERED ETHNOGRAPHY How does one holistically investigate, interrogate, and understand the unique cultural and racial experiences that created the variation that individuals embody? For scholars of culture, the relevance of intersectionality to ethnography can be seen when an ethnographer takes intersectional identities as the central focus of analysis. For example, when I began researching African-Native American lived experiences, a standard ethnographic approach was used with individuals of various tribal backgrounds and varying degrees of African American and Native American cultural and/or racial ancestry and knowledge of tribal specific cultural practices and languages. Interviews occurred during one session, with perhaps a follow-up. Questions centered on telling me about being African-Native American experiences with racism, and the extent to which individuals felt accepted by society. These narrated experiences enabled me to explore the experiences of African-Native Americans and offer generalizations about their marginalized interactions within Native American communities and societies when encountering anti-Black sentiments from relatives, tribal members, related and non-related individuals of European and Native American ancestry, and skin discrimination or colorism from other African-Native Americans; however, an explanatory gap emerged that made my investigations limited: my analysis centered on social recognition and what African-Native

208  Research handbook on intersectionality Americans experienced from others. What was it like for respondents to be African-Native American and how did the ways they made sense of their experiences shape how they saw and understood themselves? Integrating the intersectional frameworks into this research provided a lens through which to examine the convergence of cultural, racial, and social worlds salient in collective African-Native American experiences; however, wedding this lens with an ethnographic approach centered on subjective human experience further illuminated how variations within group experiences occur, and how individual African-Native American lived experiences both related to and differed from generalized common experiences. Such an approach expanded my understanding of how African-Native Americans made sense of the dynamic natures of acceptance, discrimination, and rejection experienced in everyday life, in their own words, while simultaneously expanding the implications of person-centered ethnographic approaches to understand individual experiences within cultural and social worlds. Person-centered ethnography has made significant contributions to academic understandings of individuals’ subjective experiences within cultures and societies. A frontier for person-centered analyses is exploring subjective experiences in racial contexts. Originally used by Robert LeVine (1982) to describe ways anthropologists sought to gain first person insight into subjective human experiences and associated behaviors, person-centered ethnography is a useful tool for exploring how the dynamics of individual experiences are shaped by social and cultural processes. During interviews, attention is centered on respondents as both responders to questions asked by the interviewer and informants about how they make sense of their own experiences within culture and society. Respondents are also understood as active – rather than passive – agents in the formulation of their own identities and the nexus of variation in identity formation that exists within cultures and societies (Briggs 1986; Csordas 1997; Gorden 1992; Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994, 1996; Levy and Hollan 2015; Wikan 1990). To map how person-centered ethnographic interviewing and observations have been used to research African-Native American lives, it is important to map the approaches characteristic of the person-centered ethnography. Three approaches characterize person-centered ethnography: (1) What do individuals say about their experiences? (2) What do people do during their experiences? (3) How do people embody their experiences? Although all these questions are analysed simultaneously in my fieldwork and can be found to have similar usage with both person-centered ethnographers and scholars using person-centered approaches, it is important to note that these approaches can be used independently.

WHAT PEOPLE SAY ABOUT INTERSECTIONS? For over a century, ethnographers of culture and cultural identities have focused on what respondents say during interviews, as this is the easiest way to obtain responses to research questions that offer an understanding of what it is like to be them. What an individual discusses during the interview process reveals how they answer the question “Who am I?” and how these events have shaped the answer given in a variety of contexts, from family settings to social settings with non-familial members of the same ethnic or racial background. Narrated lived experiences also reflect respondent comments on the experiences that have shaped their lives. Most ethnographers assume that this is the respondent’s answer, which is why participant observations are often wedded with interviews that illuminate what respondents say about

Intersectionality and ethnography  209 their experiences to gain a more holistic understanding of what respondents go through and the nature and source of conflicts that arise within cultures (Hollan 2005; Obeyesekere 1984; Quinn 2005; Rubin and Rubin 1995; Wikan 1990). Person-centered studies expand on the strengths of what respondents say and have observed during interpersonal interactions by adding tools intended to limit the overlook of potentially important information. For example, scholars taking both a standard ethnographic and person-centered approach to identity engage interviewees as informants on research topics and respondents to interviewer questions. Subsequent analyses examine how individuals’ self-identity, and their ethnic and racial group affiliations are achieved and maintained. The ways interviewees talk about ethnicity, identity, race, their intersections, experiences with racism, even when class and/or gender is or is not salient in the interview. Although the similarities between standard ethnographic and person-centered approaches represent the strengths found in studies aimed at revealing the relationship between class, gender, identity, race, etc., two major differences emerge from the person-centered approach that reveals information potentially overlooked (Collins 2006, 2009, 2017, 2020, 2021a; Hollan 2005; Quinn 2005; Rubin and Rubin 1995). A major difference is the length of the interview. For users of the standard ethnographic approach, this usually consists of one interview session with a follow-up. Using a person-centered approach, individuals may be interviewed 15 to 20 times over a longer period stretching into years. Person-centered interviewers can learn how the respondent’s understandings of cultural and racial identities, for example, change over time and within various social and cultural contexts, vary by socio-economic status, and ultimately reveal the inconsistencies between identification (self-understanding) and recognition (what one represents to others). While both practices are frequently discussed as “identity,” categories like race often gain and hold importance in publicly asserted understandings of self-formulated by individuals over time. Taking race as the central focus of investigation in one interview session may limit the depth of lived experiences with race and culture that a respondent can convey. Interviewing individuals multiple times enables the respondent to think about the situations where their own culture(s), class, race, and racism experienced in interpersonal interactions converged and had an impact on their understandings of self and their experiences, and elaborate further on the meanings these events held. Interviewing over time generates a more holistic description of recalled circumstances, events, and situations. Respondent understandings of variability in identification and recognition, within context, becomes more evident (Bauman 2001; Beck-Gernsheim and Beck-Gernscheim 2002; Douglas 1985; Hollan 2005; Quinn 2005; Rubin and Rubin 1995). Ethnographies of identity also tend to examine social constructs like class, gender, and race, etc. as aspects of identity. In many studies, interviews and observations tend to focus extensively on what respondents feel and think about class, gender, and/or race, or infer bias from an event, and leave the interpersonal and social situations that influence experiences with racism, for example, and how they are confounded and complicated by class and gender illusive and in need of further investigation. Ethnographers using person-centered approaches have also conducted interview and observational fieldwork in international settings and with indigenous communities. In both settings, their attention to the interpersonal interactions where gender impacts class attitudes towards community responsibilities, social acceptance impact social mobility, etc., sheds light on the situational complexities that caused different individuals to make sense of and talk about experiences with class, caste, gender, and racial bias in both dif-

210  Research handbook on intersectionality ferent and similar ways while remembering reactions to such oppression (Hollan 2005; Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994, 1996; Parish 2008; Whyte and Whyte 1984).

WHAT PEOPLE DO WITH INTERSECTIONS? It is important to engage in participant observations of human behavior, as interpersonal interactions often reveal the actions that serve as motivations behind why people say what they say. Observations of what people do can also shed light on the relevance of culture to racial identities. Since narratives and oral histories are frequently viewed as having an element of “tall-tale” associated with the respondents’ motives, engaging in participant observation affords the interviewer a chance to observe what people do when making sense of circumstances and events where culture and race intersect (Bauman 2001; Collins 2006, 2009, 2020). For example, during my own fieldwork, I have observed numerous respondents’ claims of Native American heritage being challenged as the assertions of “wanna-be” Native Americans by African American, Native American, and non-Native American co-workers, despite the presence of the individual’s full-blood grandmother or grandfather, or the individual speaking a tribal language to his or her grandparents. Other observations have included those of African-Native American respondents retaliating against similar acts by ignoring the taunts of co-workers or in some cases resorting to violence or merely identifying as only African American because it is “easier” for the respondent to go along with the expectations others have of how he or she should identify (Collins 2006, 2009, 2020). Using a person-centered approach to examining how African-Native Americans coped with the inconsistencies between identification and recognition, I found that many respondents’ actions matched their words. Not only did they defend their right to identify as tribal specific Native Americans, both culturally and/or racially, the ways that they identified educated detractors about the misplaced nature of the expectations they held about the respondents’ identity, and simultaneously reinforced their pride in being of African descent as well. Although, a longer interview period is more conducive to understanding the evolving ways that respondents remember their lived experiences, when time is of the essence, this format is useful. Not all ethnographers have one to two years to devote to the ethnographic process. The following are examples of person-centered interviews on a short research time frame with respondents that had the previously discussed experiences. Conducting multiple small interviews, over the course of two days, while observing the gathering of the California Creek Association, during the creation of the traveling Smithsonian banner exhibit “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas” (Tayac 2009), enabled me to understand the linkages between what African-Native Americans said and did. It is important to note that the African-Native American individuals that participated in the California Creek Association were not only of Creek or Muskogee Native American ancestry. This community organization was intertribal and therefore the African-Native Americans interviewed were of several different cultural backgrounds (i.e., Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, etc.). For example, observing Mr. Reed, his actions matched his narrative. He was not only active in the association but was enthusiastic to share his understanding of the inconsistencies between how he identified and how he was recognized by others.

Intersectionality and ethnography  211 Mr. Reed: … I am Cherokee citizen … Around the age of 16, I moved out to Muskogee, Oklahoma. That is where my father is from. In some way it is good, because the communities are small. Muskogee is small. Every kind of knows everyone. “Oh, you’re a Roberts. I know your family.” You know. But, on the other hand, people are still part of the past and race relations aren’t where they should be in Oklahoma. Me: What were race relations like? Mr. Reed: Very segregated. Like in high school. I went to Muskogee High School, graduated … At lunch time … the blacks would sit on one side … the whites would sit on one side. You know, coming from California, I was not used to see Confederate flags and, you know, Confederate flag clothing and stuff like that. You know, I was not used to that. There were not a whole lot of interracial couples. It was totally different. We have a long ways to go, you know, living up to our Constitution … living up to being a great country. Me: How does this make you feel? Mr. Reed: Well the skin tone issue is twofold. Because one, being African American, you kind of catch it from the African American community too. There is this whole light skinned – dark skinned thing that, of course, can go all the way back to slavery. There is an issue for the African American community, but for the most part, you’re black, so you are accepted. But, you know, every once and a while, there is still that tension. The ways I was raised is you know … you are this. This is your background. You’re black, you are Euro-American, and you are Native American, but society is going to treat you this way, so be prepared. Me: So how do you answer the question, “Who am I?” Mr. Reed: I am African American, but I am also Cherokee … At no point in time do I choose, oh I am just Native American. I am just that: A black Cherokee. I also have Euro-American ancestry … but most of all, I am just a human being. Me: What does being Cherokee mean to you? Mr. Reed: You know, being a Cherokee, to me, is just being a survivor … Specifically, I am a descendent of Freedmen … and that this different. I run into Black Indian all the time. I am Sioux and black; I am Navajo and black. That it totally different from being a member of one of those five tribes … because my ancestors were chattel. They were slaves … that legacy alone is clearly unique … to me, I am a survivor. I got it two-fold. My ancestors were enslaved by Euro-Americans. We made it. We survived. They were enslaved by Native Americans. We adapted and we survived. So, I am a survivor.

This interview illuminates the complicated intersections of race and culture in the lives of African-Native American individuals. He is not only proud of his Native American ancestry that is a result of enslavement by Native Americans, but also of the African and European ancestry that characterizes how he is recognized.

HOW DO PEOPLE EMBODY INTERSECTIONS? The embodiment approach engages how the bodies of individuals represent cultural constructs and “become culturally elaborated into experiences of self and other” (Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994, 228). The focus on the body in relationship to what people say and do enables the interviewer to consider how race, age, ethnicity, class, and gender (etc.) shape respondent’s identification practices and influence how they are recognized by others. Scholars using this person-centered technique tend to focus on qualitative information received from – and observations of – respondents, which includes “how bodily senses become culturally elaborated in different ways in different places” (1994, 228). How individuals embody and experience cultural and racial difference is most relevant to intersectional studies, particularly where gender is concerned. Examining what individuals have to say about their experiences with

212  Research handbook on intersectionality gender discrimination or how gender shaped interpersonal interactions, wedded with participant observations, enables the researcher to analyse the relationship between the body and subjective experiences. Such analyses also enable the researcher to explain how interviewees make sense of why there are difference in interpersonal interactions based on the body or bodily appearance. A frontier for ethnographic investigations is the relationship between body and subjective experiences, particularly as discussed by scholars of intersectionality. “Who Made That up?” The following is an example of an interview using this approach. To protect their anonymity, these respondents, Ms. Bird and Ms. Brown, are given fictitious names. They are sisters that grew up in and around the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and affiliated with the California Creek Association. Their different lived experiences reveal how Choctaw lifeways can vary even between African-Native American individuals, when upbringing is varied. This notion is important to raise, because Erik Erickson, who analysed the notion of identity crisis in the social sciences, reminds us that people gain their identities from their parents; however, this interview illuminates what happens when upbringing occurs with varying parentage (Tayac 2009). Me: What was life like growing up for you? Ms. Brown: For me, I really did not understand that I have two cultures until my teens … but I am getting it now. Ms. Bird: For me, it’s been really different. I mean we grew up together … It is just hat I am darker complexioned. OK. I have always known that we are Choctaw and African American, of course. And, I have always held that like dear to me. I have known both. So when you have to fill out applications or things in school and you put on there, you know, African American and other, which is Choctaw, people would go, “What is that?” “What are you talking about?” I have even had teachers that would erase that and say, “You just need to go with one.” And that was basically with what you look like. OK. So I have had it really different because I am dark complexioned and people take you for what you look like versus what you really are. You know, I have always known who I was, since a little girl. You know, my parents always told us, you know, what background we come from – who we are. Me versus my sister … I was on both sides … you know, I kind of grew up in it because I went to an all Native American school. You know, I went to the boarding school, and I did stuff like that, and I went to the Pow-Wows and all of the gatherings and stuff like that so, you know, it was really difficult, and it made other people learn too. You know, not to look for people on the outside, as that is what they are. Now, as an adult, it is really good, I fine with everything. I’m good. I’m blessed. Ms. Brown: You learn to embrace both sides. Me (Asking Ms. Brown): So, what was it like for you? Ms. Brown: You know … I did not go to the Pow-Wows, but as far as, how they taught their children in school, I didn’t know because I was not around like that … I learned a lot from her. Me: So, this term Black Indian? When you hear it, what does it mean for you? Ms. Bird (Smirking and Sighing): You know, honestly, it kills me. You know, I kind of hate to hear the term and this is why: it’s because, here I come, walking up, coming from somewhere and the majority of people would say, “That’s a black girl.” OK. “That’s an African American girl.” OK. But you are only going on the outward appearance. Then, when you speak to me and I speak to you about being Choctaw and my ways, you know, really, when you speak to me and I tell you about my ways and things that I like to do, it’s not what a lot, the norm would like to do, it’s not … The norm people like to do the worldly type of things … I like to keep the old ways dear to me. Like prayer is very dear to me. That’s the number one thing, you know is prayer, and knowing where you came from and what it our purpose here. You know, it’s just basically other people having to accept. You know. I’m good. I’m fine.

Intersectionality and ethnography  213 Ms. Brown (Smirking): I personally think that it’s ignorant to say black Indian, white Indian. Ms. Bird: If you come across, white complexioned, they were gonna’ say you’re a white Indian. Ms. Brown: You know, what is that? Ms. Bird: Really. It’s kind of strange to say, “Here we have some black Indians” … I don’t know who came up with that. But that is kind of crazy. I am not a black Indian. I am Choctaw and African American and I am a woman.

In this interview, despite interrogation from non-family members, memories of childhood map to concerns about inconsistences between identification and recognition, but also the roles that appearance and gender play in the respondent’s senses of being and belonging within their family. Although the previously discussed interview data is contemporary, person-centered questioning, particularly what people say about their subjective experiences, can also be applied to analysis of historical interviews of African-Native Americans. Between 1936 and 1938, Works Project Administration (WPA) fieldworkers conducted over 2,000 interviews with former slaves. Although the fieldworkers did not claim to use a person-centered approach, their desire to research the life histories of former slavers and what they said, in their own words, about how they experienced slavery is consistent with the approach. Interviews, such as that of Mr. Lindsey, whose father was full-blooded Creek and mother was half Creek and half African American, offer an examples of former slave vernacular, enslaved African-Native American identity, and why an enslaved individual, despite being three-quarters Native American, would identify as only African American. More specifically, as WPA fieldworker Lottie Major heard in October 1937 in Wichita Falls, Texas: Why I don’t tell dese ‘ventures at one time is ‘cause I can’think of it all at same time. Didn’t all happen same time, did it? Well, den dah you is. I’s mo’ Injun mix dan I is nigger, but makes no difference. I’s a nigger. You all know how dat is. I’s proud of it. I was borned in Rocky Branch, Kentucky, on October 10, 1847. My mother was half-breed Creek Injun – half-Negro, half-Injun. Her name was Charity. She died ‘long ‘bout 1853. My father’s name was Faithful. He was a full-blood Creek. He was killed in the war ‘tween Mexico an’ ‘Nited States. (Minges 2004, 145; Library of Congress 1936)

To understand Mr. Lindsey’s identity, one would have to interview him, like WPA fieldworker Lottie Major, with questions that explored his recollection of what it was like to be a slave. We could assume that society told him that he was African American or that his mother told him that he was because slavery followed the condition of the mother. Unless he recalled this imparting of identity during the interview or had observed the interaction through participant observation, our assumptions would be mere speculation. During the interview, one would need to have asked questions aimed at understanding why Mr. Lindsey said what he said. Through participant observations, one would need to examine why he did what he did, or what aspects of his cultural practices or everyday lifeways suggested that he was only African American. Much can be learned from the participant observations missing from Mr. Lindsey’s interview. While we can’t go back and observe Mr. Lindsey’s everyday experiences, these two practices, interview and observation, used in tandem with one another during current fieldwork, can illuminate the consistencies and inconsistencies between words and actions and interviewer bias and the realities of respondent lived experiences. Participant observations would have also allowed us to accompany him during everyday interpersonal interactions, which could reveal the when, where, and in which contexts Mr. Lindsey’s identification of

214  Research handbook on intersectionality self was consistent or inconsistent with how he was raised and recognized by his community, family, and the larger society (Erikson 1959). This “situational variance” in identification and subjectivity in identity assertion would also offer the ethnographer insight into the relationship between Mr. Lindsey’s appearance or body action, and his experiences (D’Andrade and Strauss 1992; Quinn 1992, 2005). The researcher could also observe how other people reacted to his appearance in the context of interpersonal exchanges, how these reactions shaped memories of self-understanding over time, desires to accept or reject how he was recognized by others or changed identification practices to reduce the extent to which the African American identity he asserted was challenged. While standard ethnographic approaches create useful maps of how recognition impacts the identification practices of individuals, individual-centered approaches, like person-centered ethnography, lead to descriptions of what it is like to live with misplaced recognition of identities. For example, as a soldier, Mr. Lindsey encountered Geronimo. This is what he remembered: I see ole Geronimo jus’ befo’ he s’render to Gen’l Miles. I wasn’t as dark as ah is now, mo’ red like. Geronimo see me, he say “You ain’t no nigger. You’s an Injun.” Ah say, “My fathah may been Injun, but my mother’s a nigger, an’ ‘at’s the race I chose … In 1885, ah was sent to Arizona to he’p hunt fo’ Geronimo. (Minges 2004, 148)

Ethnographers using these contemporary and historical approaches have developed a body of literature that is amenable to intersectional analyses of identity. These works draw distinctions between experience near (emic) and experience distant descriptions (etic) of subjective experiences. The goal is to avoid imposing social and cultural constructs, like cultural and racial identities, allowing them to emerge in people’s interviews to a greater or lesser degree. The ethnographers seek to understand how individuals perceive their world from the inside and as it intersects with structural aspects of being and belonging, like kinship or legal status (Hallowell 1963; Herskovits 1928; Katz 2012; Lauber 1913; Porter 1932; Woodson 1920). Like WPA fieldworkers, historical individual-centered analysis does not refer to their approach as “person-centered,” despite sharing characteristics with contemporary practices. In a similar vein, scholars of African-Native America did not refer to person-centered ethnography, despite taking the experiences of African American individuals and populations as the central focus of analysis. For over a century, scholars have engaged in socio-cultural studies of Americans living at the intersections of culture and race and created the foundation for using person-centered techniques to research on African-Native Americans. For example, Alexander Francis Chamberlain (1891, 90), in “African and American: The Contact of Negro and Indian” reminds us that studies of the individuals resulting from the contact and intermarriage between African Americans and Native Americans must include “the results of intermarriage of Indians and negro, the physiology of the offspring of such unions” … “the social status of the negro among the various Indian tribes”… “the influence of the Indian upon negro, and of the negro upon Indian, mythology and folklore” and the physical anthropology and social and cultural formulations of being and belonging that shaped their lives. Frank Speck’s (1915) examination of the lived experiences of the “Moor Indians” or “Nanticoke” illuminated how the community self-segregated along color lines, which not only created variation among individual’s identities as Native Americans, but also how they included and excluded one another. For example, in reaction to the State of Delaware classifying the Nanticoke as Negro, and providing them with schools, many individuals refused to associate or intermarry with African Americans. They formed the “The Indian River” and

Intersectionality and ethnography  215 “Warwick Indians,” which led to the creation of the “Nanticoke Indian Association.” Those who did not desire to be called “Indians” in Cheswold, Kent County, Delaware, continued to intermarry with African Americans, particularly those of lighter phenotypes, and became known as the Harmonia people (Foster 1976, 17; Speck 1915, 2–9). With the aid of his research assistant Zora Neale Hurston, Melville J. Herskovits (1928) studied the frequency and nature of racial variation among African Americans in Harlem, NY, students at Howard University, and various communities in West Virginia (Herskovits 1928). Among students at Howard University, they found that out of a total of 1,551 individual interviews, 97 identified as Negro mixed with Indian, 106 identified as more Negro than white, with Indian, and 133 identified as Negro, Indian, and white (Herskovits 1928). For Herskovits, this indicated that knowledge of Native American ancestry and self-identification as being of Native American ancestry was not a recent phenomenon. This also suggested that these individuals were raised in families with the same identities. J. Hugh Johnson’s (1929) research revealed the dilemma faced by commissioners taking the first Creek Nation census in 1832. The commissioners’ desired to assess the rights and status of community members of African American ancestry, to make definitive decisions about their being and belonging. They encountered both Creek men living with an enslaved African American wife and free African Americans that were culturally Creek. For Laurence Foster (1976), this data, and others examined in the creation of his dissertation titled, “Negro-Indian Relationships in the Southeast,” suggested that the identities these individuals embody reflect variations in contacts with Native Americans. For example, some individuals descended from direct intermixture between African Americans and Native Americans, but others descended from more complicated intermixtures between African Americans and Caucasian-Native American ancestors. According to Foster, this data could be interpreted as: The social order is so constructed in the United States that a person classed as white must have no Negro blood; and in cases where the Indian is classed as “white”, he must not have a “drop” of Negro blood. But where it is financially or politically advantageous, one drop of Indian blood does not make a white man an Indian. In the final analysis this all explains why there are so many different colors of persons in the United States classed as Negroes. (Foster 1976, 73)

A. Irving Hallowell’s (1963) research into people of African and Native American descent, like his earlier research on persons of European and Native American descent, was conducted within Native American communities. His study of families and social groups revealed how the phenomenon of Native American culture impacted all three populations. The resulting phenomenon he called “transculturalization” whereby individuals became permanently identified with Native America. Coined by Hallowell in 1963, “transculturalization” is “the process where individuals, under a variety of circumstances, are temporarily or permanently detached from one group to enter the web of social relations that constitute another society. To a greater or lesser degree, they come under the influences of the new customs, ideas, and values” (Hallowell 1963, 523). For individuals that have gone through transculturalization – like their descendants – changes in culture, such as manners, speech, values, etc. may vary greatly or slightly from both groups which they embody, and produced different lived experiences, identities, and lifeways. A theory of transculturalization was crucial for Hallowell since anthropological approaches to the study of experience had been predominantly culture-centered, and that empathized the

216  Research handbook on intersectionality actions of the group and group cultural impact on individuals; little to no attention was paid to the behavior of individuals within cultures or cultural environments. Consequently, cultural and experiential data derived from interviews leaned towards the analytical focal points of the participant observer, rather than the “meaningful aspects of the world of the individual” as experienced, motivated, or satisfied by him or her (Hallowell 1955, 88). The latter potentially reveals consistencies and inconsistencies in cultural practices, the experiences of minority populations and conflicts have within culture and their contributions to intracultural variations. Edward Sapir’s (1958) linguistic analyses and studies of subjective experiences would cause him to later suggest that: The true locus of culture is in the interactions of specific individuals and, on the subjective side, in the world of meaning which each one of these individuals may unconsciously abstract for himself from his participation in these interactions. (Sapir 1958, 515)

While the cultural studies conducted by these scholars illuminate examples of the depth and breadth of ethnographic literature focused on subjective lived experiences, individual and person-centered ethnographers, like Hallowell, have created a useful body of interviewing techniques, as well, that allow for the investigation of subjective intersectional experiences within socio-cultural constructs (Hollan 2005; Quinn 2005; Spradley 2016; Valverde 1999; Wikan 1990). As previously discussed, person-centered ethnography describes anthropological attempts to describe subjective experiences, based in human behavior, as close to first person experiences as possible. Three lines of inquiry characterize the person-centered approach to intersectional investigations: Why do people say what they say? Why do people do what they do? How do people embody subjective experiences? (Hollan 2005; Lowe and Strauss 2018). Using these questions to approach a research problem, either individually or in combination, helps develop academic understandings of the need for individual-centered studies of cross-cultural conflict and experiences. To analyse the questions also enables the separation of individuals’ experiences as themselves and as members of groups. As individuals recall their experiences, participant observations enable interviewers to witness the person’s actions during subjective experiences, such as how the body, especially racial appearance, may cause individuals to represent an identity to themselves that they do not represent to others. Although often separated for the purposes of analysis, these questions provide the framework for questions constructed and asked during interviews, as well as providing a rationale for the resulting intersectional analysis (Berry 1969; Cobb 1939; Collins 2009, 2020; Forbes 1983; Foster 1976).

CONSTRUCTING INTERSECTIONAL INTERVIEW QUESTIONS Drawing from person-centered interviewing strategies, which take individuals as active agents in their lived experiences, intersectional interviews with marginalized or racialized individuals require an understanding of how embodied individuals respond to interview questions. Therefore, it is important for questions to be both open-ended and focused because identity is both public and private: public in the sense that race shapes their lived experiences and private in the sense that culture and family identities may have similar, if not more, importance and relevance to the answer to the question, “Who am I?” For example, there is a difference between asking African-Native American respondents, “Please tell me how race impacts

Intersectionality and ethnography  217 African-Native Americans?” and “Have you experienced racism?” “How did that anti-Black experience make you feel?” (Biehl et al. 2007, Borneman and Hammoudi 2009; Briggs 1986; Hollan 2005; Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994, 1996; Spradley 2016). The first question, which person-centered ethnographers would refer to as treating the interviewee as an informant, may illicit a performative response. The respondent may provide a general response about what he, she, or they know about their own experiences – and those of others – with individuals directing anti-Black opinions and sentiments towards them. The respondent may also attempt to provide the interviewer with what he, she, or they believe(s) should be said about the impact of race on African-Native Americans. It is important to note that anti-Black sentiment is being used here as an example, which is a more prevalent experience among the African-Native American respondents that I have interviewed over the past 20 years than anti-Indian or Native American sentiments. The second question and sample follow-up can enable respondents to be self-reflexive and consider their own experiences. Their experiences may include examples of how African Americans and Native Americans that are non-family members mis-identify the respondent and accuse them of trying “not to be Black” by claiming Native American ancestry (Collins 2009, 2017, 2020; Hollan 2005; Sturm 2002; Whyte and Whyte 1984). On the other hand, these examples may also reveal how the individual felt about the experiences and coped with the accusations. On the one hand, did the respondent feel the need to internalize the accusations and assert a culturally specific or tribal specific Native American identity in the face of this racism, or on the other hand, did the respondent reject the assertions and respond with silence? Did the coping mechanism cause the respondent to feel more belonging with family members, rather than other African American and Native Americans? This second line of questioning is important because usually, as with standard ethnographic approaches, the first line of questioning is asked only once in an interview setting. What enables the tools of the person-centered approach to engage the intersectional experiences of individuals is that both lines of questioning may be used simultaneously over a period, usually 20 interviews over the course of one to two years, depending upon fieldwork time constraints. The constraints can include, but are not limited to, respondents’ abilities to participate, dissertation deadlines, grant report deadlines, etc. (Hollan 2005; Lowe and Strauss 2018; Quinn 1992; Rubin and Rubin 1995). The simultaneous use of informative and responsive questioning, over a period, also reveals how individuals recall information to make sense of their experiences. For example, initial experiences with racist acts may provoke anger, the respondent may lash out of pride in kinship and self. However, discussing and recalling these experiences as part of their everyday life over a period can lead to respondents understanding the recalled situation(s) differently. The respondent may not have reacted because such experiences were typical of everyday experiences within or outside of familial settings with other African Americans and Native Americans (Collins 2006, 2009).

PREPARING FOR INTERSECTIONAL INTERVIEWS When preparing for intersectional interviews it is important to understand the cultural and social intersections that one may encounter in the lives of respondents. Where intersections of culture and race are the central focus of analysis, required preparation includes knowing the

218  Research handbook on intersectionality literature of the ways skin color confounds or shapes identities based upon sex or sexuality and the ways that race shapes or negates cultural identities (Campbell and LeVine 1961). Like all ethnographies grounded in lived experiences, it is important for researchers to have competence in respondent’s language(s). Although working with racialized populations in the United States is likely to ensure that English is the language of the interview setting, working with populations, such as African-Native Americans, whose Native American origins may represent different tribal specific populations, from respondent to respondent, knowledge of their language makes the interview setting more comfortable and more conducive to receiving a genuine response to interview questions. This also holds true when working with historical narratives such as the previously discussed slave narratives. Studying and understanding the vernacular used by former slaves or Black English Vernacular in general allows contemporary researchers to check bias projects onto past forms of speech and use the everyday speech of individuals to explain their experiences (Collins 2006; Hallowell 1955, 1963; Kahn and Cannell 1957; Labov 1972).

SHOWING RESPECT Although most Americans are familiar with surveys, there are those that are still unwilling, in both rural and urban environments, to participate in surveys, and even more so in interviews. From big cities to small towns, showing respect is crucial. African Americans and some Native Americans in the urban environment of the United States still maintain the respectful forms of Mr., Ms., and Mrs. and not being alone with unmarried individuals without a chaperone. Although these cultural practices may not be fashionable in this digital age, they can be the key to respondents agreeing to being interviewed, or complete rejection of one’s research project by potential respondents. In both urban and rural Native American communities, knowing the proper ways of self-introduction, showing respect to elders, youth, and those in between, land acknowledgement, and sharing one’s own background, before asking information about another’s, can be crucial to merely recruiting interest in one’s research project (Campbell and LeVine 1961; Collins 2006; Lowe and Strauss 2018). For multicultural and multiracial populations, like African-Native Americans, these practices may be magnified because racism may have caused individuals to not only avoid strangers but reject participation in research because of past misrepresentation. And, as with all populations, it is important to know that some things may not be conveyed during interviews, because some things that others freely talk about in US society should just not be discussed. The latter is particularly relevant for anthropologists and ethnic studies scholars alike because it takes local populations a long time to forget research and researchers that cast their communities in a negative light or caused social rifts that lasted longer than the research project that created them (Collins 2006, 2009, 2017). Establishing rapport, interacting with individuals within the community, attending non-restricted community functions, and being seen within the community is often crucial to building trust. In some communities, respondents assuming that researchers are not beneficial is a natural defense mechanism to ensure harmony and stability. Although less common in big cities, in small communities, particularly tribal communities, or small Southern towns, where everyone knows everyone, it is important to show respect in all interaction and observe the customs of the community. The jargon that is spoken in academic settings does not always

Intersectionality and ethnography  219 translate within these contexts. Potential respondents may be more willing to talk to an outsider with good manners than a fellow community member, for fear that their “business” will be shared with their peers. It has been my experience that people living in these communities are willing to teach researchers what they know; however, bad manners can turn even the starkest enemies into allies, with a common goal of rejecting proposed research (Collins 2006; Hollan 2005; Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994).

IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSION The goal of this chapter is to show the relevance of intersectionality to ethnography, particularly tools useful to illuminating how individuals cope with the intersections of race and culture. The intended outcome is an expansion of intersectional identity analyses to include person-centered understandings of lived experiences within cultural and social worlds, particularly race and culture. Overlooking variation within identities has been a limitation of group-centered ethnographic analyses. Identity politics, like standard ethnographic approaches, has limited academic understanding of the complex identities that individuals embody. By taking multidimensional understandings of self as the central focus of ethnographic analysis, researchers can further reveal the aspects of class, race, class, culture, gender, and other culturally constructed environments that shape senses of being and belonging within identities (Bernard 2011; Bernard and Gravlee 2015). Exploring an integrated intersectional and person-centered approach reveals opportunities for much needed theoretical description and specification of how individuals make sense of their multidimensional understandings of self. As diversity within racial and cultural continues to increase, it is no longer viable to assume that group-centered approaches can account for the variations in lived experiences that exist within them. The limitations of this line of inquiry can be seen in the inability to account for several phenomena. First, the links between culture, race, and gender and sense of being and belonging in one or more of these cultural and social worlds are alluded to without a clear specification of how they manifest in the lives of individuals. Second, the illusion is that cultural and social worlds are salient in the lives of all who seem to publicly represent them, even though constructs like culture and race are internalized differently by different individuals due to life circumstances. Third, different individuals will accept and/or reject different aspects of cultural and racial expectation due to experiences with acceptance and rejection during interpersonal interactions within culturally and socially constructed environments. To understand the lived experiences of individuals navigating and negotiating the intersections between culture and race requires an approach that is amenable to ethnographic descriptions of this variation within groups. Intersectionality and person-centered ethnography provide tools that lend to such a methodology (Crenshaw 1991; Hollan 2005).

REFERENCES Alcoff, Linda M., and Eduardo Mendieta. 2003. Identities: Race, Class, Gender, and Nationality. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2001. The Individualized Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.

220  Research handbook on intersectionality Beck-Gernsheim, Ulrich, and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. 2002. Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences. London: Sage. Bernard, Russell H. 2011. Research Methods in Anthropology. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Bernard, Russell H., and Clarence C. Gravlee. 2015. Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology. 2nd edn. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Berry, Brewton. 1969. Almost White. London: Collier-Macmillan. Biehl, João, Byron J. Good, and Arthur Kleinman, eds. 2007. Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations. 1st edn. Vol. 7. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Borneman, John, and Abdellah Hammoudi. 2009. Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Briggs, Charles L. 1986. Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research. New York: Cambridge University Press. Campbell, Donald T., and Robert A. LeVine. 1961. “A Proposal for Cooperative Cross-Cultural Research on Ethnocentrism.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 5 (1): 82–108.  Carbado, Devon W. 2013. “Colorblind Intersectionality.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38 (4): 811–45. Chamberlain, Alexander Francis. 1891. “African and American: The Contact of Negro and Indian.” Science 17 (419): 85–90. Cho, Sumi, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall. 2013. “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38 (4): 785–810.  Cobb, W. Montague. 1939. “The Negro as a Biological Element in the American Population.” The Journal of Negro Education 8 (3): 336–48. Collins, Robert Keith. 2006. “Katimih o Sa Chata Kiyou? (Why Am I Not Choctaw?): Race in the Lived Experiences of Twom Black Choctaw Mixed Bloods.” In Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country, edited by Sharon P. Holland and Tiya Miles, 260–72. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Collins, Robert Keith. 2009. “What Is a Black Indian? Misplaced Expectations and Lived Realities.” In IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas, edited by Gabriella Tayac, 183–96. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books. Collins, Robert Keith. 2017. African and Native American Contact in the U.S.: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives. San Diego, CA: Cognella Press. Collins, Robert Keith. 2020. “How Africans Met Native Americans during Slavery.” Contexts 19 (3): 16–21. Collins, Robert Keith. 2021a. “How Did Black Folks Become Indians? What Lived Experiences Say about Belonging, Culture, and Racial Mixture in Native America.” In The Complexities of Race: Identity, Power, and Justice in an Evolving America,  edited by Charmaine Wijeyesinghe, 126–47. New York: New York University Press. Collins, Robert Keith. 2021b. “Toward an Inter-American Study of African Transculturalization in Native America.” In Colonialism, Coloniality, and Decolonization in the Americas, edited by Josef Raab and Alexia Schemien, 91–102. Tempe, AZ: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier/Bilingual Press. Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. 2016. Intersectionality. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (8): 139–40. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–99. Csordas, Thomas J. 1997. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. D’Andrade, Roy G., and Claudia Strauss, eds. 1992. Human Motives and Cultural Models. New York: Cambridge University Press. Devereux, George. 1968. From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences. The Hague: Mouton. Douglas, Jack D. 1985. Creative Interviewing. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Intersectionality and ethnography  221 Erikson, Erik H. 1959. Identity and the Life Cycle: Selected Papers. New York: International Universities Press. Forbes, Jack D. 1983. “Mustees, Half-Breeds and Zambos in Anglo North America: Aspects of Black-Indian Relations.” American Indian Quarterly 7 (1): 57–83. Foster, Laurence. 1976. Negro-Indian Relations in the Southeast. New York: AMS Press. Gorden, Raymond L. 1992. Basic Interviewing Skills. Itasca, IL: F.E. Peacock Publishers. Hallowell, A. Irving. 1955. Culture and Experience. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hallowell, A. Irving. 1963. “Papers in Honor of Melville J. Herskovits: American Indians, White and Black: The Phenomenon of Transculturalization.” Current Anthropology 4 (5): 519–31. Herskovits, Melville. 1928. The American Negro: A Study in Racial Crossing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Hollan, Douglas. 2005. “Setting a New Standard: The Person-Centered Interviewing and Observation of Robert I. Levy.” Ethos 33 (4): 459–66. Hollan, Douglas Wood, and Jane C. Wellenkamp. 1994. Contentment and Suffering: Culture and Experience in Toraja. New York: Columbia University Press. Hollan, Douglas Wood, and Jane C. Wellenkamp. The Thread of Life : Toraja Reflections on the Life Cycle. Honolulu, Hawaiʻi: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1996. Johnston, J. Hugh. 1929. “Documentary Evidence of the Relations of Negroes and Indians.” Journal of Negro History 14 (1): 21–43. Kahn, Robert L., and Charles F. Cannell. 1957. The Dynamics of Interviewing: Theory, Technique, and Cases. New York: Wiley. Katz, William. 2012. Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage. New York: Atheneum. Labov, William. 1972. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lauber, Almon Wheeler. 1913. Indian Slavery in Colonial Times within the Present Limits of the United States. New York: Columbia University Press. LeVine, Robert A. 1963. “Culture and Personality.” Biennial Review of Anthropology 3: 107–45. LeVine, Robert A. 1982. Culture, Behavior, and Personality: An Introduction to the Comparative Study of Psychosocial Adaptation. 2nd edn. New York: Aldine Publishing. Levy, Robert, and Doug W. Hollan. 2015. “Person-Centered Interview.” In Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, edited by Harvey Russel Bernard. 2nd edn, 313-342. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Library of Congress. “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938.” Accessed June 1, 2021 at https://​www​.loc​.gov/​collections/​slave​-narratives​-from​-the​-federal​-writers​ -project​-1936​-to​-1938/​about​-this​-collection/​? Lowe, Edward D., and Claudia Strauss. 2018. “Introduction: Person‐Centered Approaches in the Study of Culture and Poverty.” Ethos 46 (3): 299–310. Minges, Patrick. 2004. Black Indian Slave Narratives. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair Publisher. Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1984. Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Parish, Steven M. 2008. Subjectivity and Suffering in American Culture: Possible Selves. 1st edn. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Porter, Kenneth W. 1932. “Association as Fellow Slaves.” Journal of Negro History 17 (3): 294–7. Quinn, Naomi. 1992. “The Motivational Force of Self-Understanding: Evidence from Wives Inner Conflicts.” In Human Motives and Cultural Models, edited by Roy D’Andrade and Claudia Strauss, 90–117. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quinn, Naom. 2005. Finding Culture in Talk: A Collection of Methods. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rubin, Herbert J., and Irene S. Rubin. 1995. Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sacks, Karen Brodkin. 1989. “Toward a Unified Theory of Class, Race, and Gender.” American Ethnologist 16 (3): 534–50. Sacks, Karen Brodkin. 1994. “How Did Jews Become White Folks.” In Race, edited by Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek, 78–112. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Sapir, Edward. 1958. Selected Writings of Edward Sapir. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

222  Research handbook on intersectionality Speck, Frank G. 1915. Nanticoke Community of Delaware. New York: The Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation. Spradley, James P. 2016. The Ethnographic Interview. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Strauss, Claudia. 1992. “Models and Motives.” in Human Motives and Cultural Models, edited by Roy D’Andrade and Claudia Strauss, 1–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sturm, Circe. 2002. Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tayac, Gabrielle. 2009. IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas. 1st edn. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in association with the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. Valverde, Mariana. 1999. “Identity Politics and the Law in the United States.” Feminist Studies 25 (2): 345–61.  Whyte, William Foote, and Kathleen King Whyte. 1984. Learning from the Field: A Guide from Experience. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Wikan, Unni. 1990. Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Woodson, Carter G. 1920. “The Relations of Negroes and Indians in Massachusetts.” Journal of Negro History 5 (1): 45–57.

14. Thrivance: an indigenous queer intersectional methodology Andrew Jolivétte

When I first began conducting research within queer spaces in 2007, the impetus arose from my own personal experiences as a queer man of color. I was particularly interested in understanding the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality from a critical mixed-race, Afro-Indigenous perspective. We still know very little about trans-disciplinary routes and research methodologies that are impacted by culture, Indigenous knowledge construction, and genealogies of queerness and gender fluidity that pre-date most Western models of research. Creating an archive of Indigenous knowledges is one of the first and most important steps for any intersectional methodology that seeks to document, understand, and transform the disparate measures for addressing justice, liberation, and self-determination at the community level. Today, my scholarship is grounded in the philosophy of Research Justice developed by the DataCenter in Oakland, California, where I was a board member for several years. According to the DataCenter, “Research Justice is a strategic framework that seeks to achieve self-determination for marginalized communities. It centralizes community voices and leadership to facilitate genuine, lasting social change” (DataCenter 2013). In addition to the restorative and transformative nature of Research Justice, I am also guided by my training in American Indian Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Sociology. Taking community voice, experience, and what I term in this chapter as inheritance refusal into account, I argue that a full array of intersectional methodologies must focus on the subjectivities of the community(ies) involved in the research, but this type of research must also address the inheritances of Western empiricists that have sought to silence, erase, and foreclose the leadership and knowledge of communities seeking to find solutions to their own problems. Speaking of “problems” we must remove the specter and violence associated with research agendas that seek to begin from a place of identifying queer, Indigenous, Black, and people of color communities as starting from a place of “damage.”1 In this chapter I seek to outline both the ideological and operational steps necessary to develop and practice a Thrivance Circuitry and Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness Model (TC-CCRM) within queer Indigenous communities (QIC) as well as across other queer communities of color (QCOC).

THRIVANCE CIRCUITRY AND COLLECTIVE CEREMONIAL RESEARCH RESPONSIVENESS (TC-CCRM) PRINCIPLES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Center Kinship Relations Engage Inheritance Refusals Foster Relational Accountability Embolden Radical Love Envision Multiplicity 223

224  Research handbook on intersectionality 6. Prioritize Transformative Justice 7. Activate Ceremonial Responsiveness 8. Weave Collective Thrivance Circuits Together these principles should inform intersectional research approaches within and across queer, Indigenous, Black, and other communities of color. TC-CCRM aims to disassemble, redirect, and co-construct a research system based on intellectual and cultural stewardship at individual, community, researcher, knowledge keeper, and institutional levels with direction starting from community rather than institution. In what follows, I describe and layout the tenants and tools for each of the eight principles to encourage whole-system reform and dialogue at every level of society where research is conducted and more importantly where knowledge is constructed, articulated, and remade.

CENTER KINSHIP RELATIONS To center kinship relations is to focus on the form, length, and quality of relationships built between communities and researchers. In this principle, community experts and scholars work together to co-construct new knowledge while advancing existing understandings of culture and history, as well as political, social, economic, and legal constructs. A defining aspect of this principle is the development of ceremonial bonds that place the greatest value on community wellness, collective stewardship of place-based experiences, and a deep commitment to research that is hope based, rather than trauma informed. Much of the research about queer communities over the past several decades attempts to address the disparities in knowledge about queer people of color and non people of color people. In a kinship relations approach, we begin by taking stock of the place and site of initial identity development to foster an understanding of the populations that we are working with to uncover the ways that location impacts not only identity, but individual and collective belonging. If all research started with a kinship relationship, with a place-based framework, we would lessen the many assumptions related to trying to “solve social problems” by acknowledging the unique implications of landscapes, sites, and territories as meaning making for the development of all aspects of queer life. This principle also supports a model of distinctiveness among queer peoples by highlighting how each social location differs from the others. An example of site-specific relations and centering kinship stems from my work with the Native American AIDS Project (NAAP) in San Francisco from 2010 to 2012. My work with NAAP came to fruition because of my teaching which is deeply interwoven into my research and community work. It was the spring of 2007, and I was teaching a People of Color and AIDS course at San Francisco State University. The course hadn’t been taught for several years and a former middle school student of mine, Jordan Auleb’s grandmother Ann reached out to me (Ann was a Professor in the Biology Department at San Francisco State and was part of the original faculty group that created the course) and one summer we were talking, and I mentioned my personal interest in HIV/AIDS in communities of color and she asked if I’d teach the class and get it back in circulation. I agreed and revamped the course and during the second cycle of teaching I invited one of my mentors and a leading national and international expert on HIV to give a guest lecture in the course. Dr. Rafael Diaz, author of Latino Gay Men and HIV (1997), shared during his lecture that mixed-race identified young

Thrivance: an indigenous queer intersectional methodology  225 men between the ages of 15 and 22 had the second highest prevalence rates of HIV. Rafael turned to me at one point and said, “Andrew you study mixed-race issues, and you are now looking at HIV … something has to be done so we can understand what is going on here. You should look at this.” Usually when a mentor tells me something I try to follow their advice. So, I set out in earnest over the next several years to conduct a project on mixed-race gay men and HIV and eventually I landed on working with NAAP to try to initially understand how ethnic-specific community-based health organizations responded to the needs of Indigenous and people of color differently than mainstream, non-ethnic-specific hospitals, and medical centers. Eventually my focus turned really to listening to what NAAP told me (Jolivétte 2016). As I began conducting focus groups it struck me that this was also a mechanism where kinship was not only being centered but it was being cultivated, honored, and celebrated as a mechanism for achieving what I would later define as radical love. Radical love is about being vulnerable. It is about being unafraid to speak out about issues that may not have a direct impact on us on a daily basis. Radical love is about caring enough to admit when we are wrong and to admit mistakes. Radical love should ask how the work in which we are engaged helps to build respectful relationships between ourselves and others involved in social justice movements. Radical love asks if we are each being responsible in fulfilling our individual roles and obligations to the other participants in the struggle for social justice and human rights. Finally, radical love in a critical mixed-race studies framework means asking ourselves if what we are contributing is giving back to the community and if it is strengthening the relationships of all those involved in the process. Is what is being shared adding to the growth of the community and is this sharing reciprocal? Is what we are working toward leading to a more peaceful and equitable society? (Jolivétte 2012, 219)

Radical love is also something that stems from sharing our collective vulnerabilities with those who come from similar backgrounds and struggles. So, it was in this space at NAAP that myself and the participants in a study on HIV, mixed-race Native, and queer identities came to form an urban Indian kinship network of support that would allow us to share our stories and to heal and to identify ways that we could thrive. In intersectional research we must ask is it really an intersection of identities or is it the full sum of who we are embodied in one experience that speaks the truth of who we are as people? When we center kinship relations in queer intersectional research methods, we are identifying the ways that our stories are interconnected and that our resolve is deeply intertwined.

ENGAGE INHERITANCE REFUSALS Engaging inheritance refusals means recognizing both the positive and negative inheritances we have received. On the one hand, we engage the inheritance and teachings and knowledge systems of our communities while also refusing those colonial inheritances that extend violence, terror, and subjugation against the bodies of queer, Indigenous, and Black communities as well as other marginalized populations. We should first engage before we can fully refuse to ever engage these ideas again. For example, the who, what, why, how, and where of research in the Western world is deeply based on a system of knowledge that was created to control rather than to understand. To speak for rather than to listen to communities. We refuse the inheritance of research systems that place a higher value on that which can be measured,

226  Research handbook on intersectionality quantified, and validated using applications that do not consider the experiential, spiritual, and community-driven understandings of how knowledge is created, reproduced, and transformed. Inheritance refusals open the necessary space for marginalized populations in colonial nation-states to address, deconstruct, and abolish those previously understood and canonical methodologies that are intrusive, temporal, and pathologizing. Previous scholars such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999), Eve Tuck (2009), Browne and Nash (2016) and others have articulated counter-hegemonic methodological approaches both within Indigenous and queer communities. While intersectional research has been articulated by feminist of color scholars such as Audre Lorde (2018) and Kimberlé Crenshaw (1994), I want to offer an additional concept to this approach which is deeply centered in the notion of inheritance refusal. While an intersectional approach examines various social identities such as race, class, gender, and sexuality it also lends itself to a compartmental analysis of each category rather than a whole-self approach. The whole-self approach activates all our collective identifications into one complex, multifaceted identity that cannot be understood as intersectional so much, as it should be articulated as a complete and inseparable, fully integrated identity.

FOSTER RELATIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY Over the past year I’ve given over two dozen talks, workshops and other presentations. In the Trumpian and COVID era we see the re-emergence or perhaps the more publicly visible face of ongoing racism, xenophobia, anti-gay, anti-Black, anti-Asian, anti-Indian violence, and ideology across the United States and elsewhere. In these talks and presentations, I often focus on the need for what many refer to as relational accountability. But what does this mean in an intersectional queer research framework? We cannot begin to foster relational accountability until we build the types of intentional, loving, and sacred relationships that support the liberation of all peoples. I’ve had much to reflect on over the past summer months. The passing of Indigenous Rights and Multiracial Justice Movement icons, Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez (2017) and Haunani-Kay Trask (1999) remind us that organizing and justice struggles must be linked across individual and group identities, so in a queer, relational paradigm for research justice we must activate our understanding and sincere commitment to humbly learn from those who are different from us. We must fight for justice and decolonization in Palestine, we must fight Asian hate, we need to also honor our past and present work to dismantle systems of knowledge production that disappear our long histories of working across race, sex, class, gender, and nation to thrive. In my own struggles these past months, whether from a deep sadness with family health care needs or anti-Black racism against Afro-Indigenous peoples, I have witnessed how relationships can heal. The most central aspect of this principle is accountability. We must show up for the long term as researchers and organizers. A friend many years ago said to a crowd of us, “Anyone can be an activist, but it takes real commitment to be an organizer.” His statement struck me as significant for two reasons. First, it spoke to the temporal and spatial aspect of research and struggles for social justice. Activism is often temporary or focuses on the individual or singular figure. An organizer often works over many years and without much attention for their efforts. The organizer not only fosters relationships but remains deeply accountable to communities.

Thrivance: an indigenous queer intersectional methodology  227 As a queer, Afro-Latin, Afro-Indigenous researcher I work to listen, share, and advocate in ways that speak directly to the multiple identities that I carry. I also seek to foster relational accountability by asking questions rather than making assumptions. The key to fostering relational accountability is acting with humility and actively listening to community. For queer communities to thrive there must be a connection across identities that are not simply based on sexual identities. An example of relational accountability in my own journey was after my HIV/AIDS diagnosis in 2002. Dine medicine man, Daniel Freeland, was a dear friend who told me during ceremony that I had a responsibility to carry the stories of others and that this responsibility was greater than my own story and personal experience. When we endeavor to produce new knowledge or conduct research, we must follow these steps in our efforts to foster relational accountability: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Stop and listen Build and co-create Reflect and re-assess Shift and transform

When we stop and listen, we are demonstrating our deep concern for the well-being of the whole person whether it be in a queer context or otherwise. We see one another as relations. Building and co-creating is an active and intentional process of claiming and reclaiming those aspects of our lives that have been ravaged by colonial systems of violence and erasure. Co-creation entails mutual respect and accountability for the outcomes of research, and we see these outcomes and “data” not as end points but as the beginning of an ongoing cycle that leads to healing, collective ceremonial research responsiveness, and queer thrivance across difference. Once data has been built and co-created between researcher and community we must always reflect upon findings and re-assess next steps to ensure those most marginalized have had their voices and concerns represented. When we start from this place of centering those least heard, we know that we have not left anyone out. This reflection and re-assessment in turn provides a space for shifting and transforming current structural conditions and systems that perpetuate colonial violence and queer erasure. We know that much of the research data in and about queer communities usually ignores Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Arab, Asian, and other racially coded bodies. Relational accountability calls upon all researchers, both those of color and white, to resist the urge to simply “solve a problem” and to instead build a relationship based on kinship, healing, and responsibility.

EMBOLDEN RADICAL LOVE Once we can foster relational accountability, we can then turn to embolden radical love. A project that emboldens radical love focuses on creating new and ongoing opportunities for queer individuals, communities, and organizations to identify areas of shared vulnerability while also addressing collective and individual trauma. During a talk at the University in Oregon I suggested that “To turn our traumas and vulnerabilities into moments to change our lives, is radical love.” We embolden radical love by making self-love possible. There is so much pain and fear within queer spaces that we often seek out more injury or assume that others in queer spaces will injure us. We must begin from a place of trust which is incredibly difficult. How do we as social science researchers, and researchers more broadly, engage in

228  Research handbook on intersectionality the type of scholarship that does not presuppose that this type of involvement is unethical? In the Western canon we are to remain “impartial,” and “objective” and the truth of the matter is there is no such thing as impartiality or objectivity. In a queer intersectional research approach, we embolden radical love by setting an agenda that is first and foremost about healing and identifying circuits of joy. Here I define circuits of joy as the passing of joy from relative (person/community) to relative (person/community). From this place of intentional healing, I believe that radical Black Indigenous queer love is born again and again for the generations still yet to come. And from this point of departure, and with a centering of the Indigenous Thrivance Model (see Figure 14.1), we can collectively find joy through healing with others with whom we share common kinship. When we thrive … When we center reciprocity and culture as medicine … we will know that no matter what, we will always remain a people connected by common and divergent histories. A project that emboldens radical love in queer spaces might bring together trans youth of color with experiences in foster care, for example, to explore meaning making in terms of gender and family structures. In this context meaning making refers to how individuals and groups make meaning out of their lived experiences with social structures and institutions by sharing their experiences with others who share similar experiences and identities. In 2016 I created a group called Black Men’s Space to make meaning out of the shared and diverse experiences of Black men in US society. This gathering space allowed us to not only make meaning out of shared stories and experiences, but it also emboldened radical love by enacting collective healing with other Black men. Such a project for queer and trans youth of color would immediately understand that there isn’t a “problem” to be solved but rather a story and experience to be articulated. In other words, in research we should never start from a place of pathologizing victimhood, social problems, etc. Instead, research should be a space to address issues of healing but more important it should center hope not trauma, damage, or despair which has been a central feature of Western research with queer, Indigenous, Black, and people or color communities. When operationalized, radical love is not an easy process. It takes time for community to share their stories but even before sharing can happen, trust must be built. In this example of a trans of color radical love project, we would want to begin by understanding the youth and that can only happen when they tell us who they are and who they hope to become. Often in research, and particularly in queer research, the basis of our analysis stems from trying to define people, events, and ideas/social phenomena. Rather than seeking a closed definition we must remember as Clifford and Marcus (1986) suggest that all research is a type of “partial truth.” I would like to add to Clifford’s notion of partial truth, however, by arguing that there are whole-partial truths or whole-specific truths. Clifford argued that time and place told us only about that moment, place, and experience for the group or set of individuals involved in the research. However, the word “partial” implies that it can never be a whole truth or a whole-specific truth for those people. We are telling complete and whole truths that might be partial for that group of people, but we should try not to make sweeping pronouncements about the experiences of all queer people or any community of folks. We must invite queer people whether researchers or community members to embolden radical love by activating their truths in ways that aren’t dependent on social constructions of what has been, but rather on what can be. An intersectional queer paradigm must embolden radical love by prioritizing the whole person—mentally, physically, and spiritually. Projects that value spiritual and experiential knowledge as valid and significant will always capture the

Thrivance: an indigenous queer intersectional methodology  229 whole-partial truths of queer communities. To embolden radical love in this sense is to focus on multiplicity rather than singularity.

ENVISION MULTIPLICITY Intersectionality is ultimately about multiplicity. Multiplicity in research is accepting the many realities and contradictions that exist simultaneously as opposed to presupposing an either/or answer to research questions. When we envision multiplicity, we embrace the full stories that each individual and each community brings to bare based on a full array of life experiences. As a person of multi-ethnic heritage, I’ve had to navigate multiple spaces, issues, and communities. In this experience I have learned that multiplicity opens possibilities. In research singular or linear steps and processes limit and silence participants. In Indigenous communities and queer communities, multiplicity is essential to one’s existence. To envision multiplicity in a queer, Indigenous, intersectional context one might conduct a project that speaks not only to tribal/nation diversity, but also to gender diversity. Ultimately in this principle we want to get away from the Western empirical urge to define everything and everyone and make space for open, fluid, and evolving stories. In my work with the American Indian Cultural Center in San Francisco this has been abundantly clear. The needs, wants, histories, and goals are multiple. The community focus includes veterans, elders, youth, two-spirit and queer, housing, women and families, cultural bearers, and others. We work to bring the full complexity of all these various segments of our populations together, so no one is left behind. Another salient aspect of envisioning multiplicity entails a reimagining of cultural protocols that center our past and our present. In other words, how we balance living in both Western, colonial societies where we can also see examples of how we thrive when we center our own cultural knowledge systems and practices. When I was studying Native American cultural contributions to Louisiana Creole identity, I found so many hidden or unknown aspects of Indigenous (North American and African) practices that have sustained and allowed Creoles to thrive even in the face of a colonial system that has sought to reduce their identity to one group or practice over the others. Louisiana Creoles are a prime example of multiplicity. In their language, foodways, spiritual practices, and ethnic make-up they are deeply impacted by not one but all ethnic groups (Jolivétte 2007). I think about my own great-grandmother, Rozina Guillory Fontenot, for example. A deeply Catholic woman, on the one hand, because of the French and Spanish colonial influence, she was also a traiteur or a medicine person who specialized in the treatment of blood disorders and conditions. Traditionally, the knowledge of the traiteur is passed down to the opposite gender, so in Rozina’s case from a male relative. Gender balance and maintenance of traditions is an important aspect of both Creole and Ishak (Indigenous) culture. Having both male and female traiteurs/medicine people will ensure continuity across the entire group where no one gender holds and passes down cultural knowledge and practices. This approach fosters a collective sense of responsibility by all community members where multiple people shape the present and future of the Ishak and Creole people. Western, non-Native, science and research has not respected this form of medicine or spirituality. Here we see the bringing together of multiple aspects of one’s identity to address real life issues such as health and well-being. Rather than separate our health and wellness from our spirituality as is done in the colonial United States, we respect and honor the traditions

230  Research handbook on intersectionality passed from generation to generation. Rozina is the embodiment of multiplicity. Together with my great-grandfather, Francois Fontenot they were land stewards or what some call “farmers.” In this research principle we understand that words carry meaning and that it is important to have many ways to describe and explain the complex histories of formerly colonized peoples. In other words, envisioning multiplicity requires an articulation of group practices using Indigenous (Ishak) concepts and words rather than those given to us by colonial governments. Distinguishing a farmer from stewardship takes us from an individual framing of “the farmer” to a community or multi-person framing of stewardship which involves responsibility beyond one’s own individual land base. Queer intersectional research cannot work within Indigenous and other communities of color without a deep commitment to transformative justice. We can only transform society by seeing the “intersectional” or the multiple identities we hold as a whole-self/community phenomenon.

PRIORITIZE TRANSFORMATIVE JUSTICE Centering the whole self in a queer intersectional, Indigenous framework requires a commitment to seeing the various aspects of one’s identities as all equally connected not as separate identificatory labels. As a young sociologist one of the very first questions I was asked in an undergraduate seminar was about the goal of sociology. “Is the goal of sociology [the sociological researcher] to reform or transform society?” As the event co-coordinator and moderator for a panel on research justice, years later, I posed the same question to Dr. Angela Davis, Chief and Traditional Leader of the Winnemem Wintu, Caleen Sisk, and Dr. Jason Ferreira. Something Dr. Davis said that night has remained with me since. She said, “it’s both!” I’ve always argued that our mission or at least the one I’ve tried to take up as a sociologist of race, ethnicity, and sexuality is to transform society. And if we see our priority as transformative justice we must begin from a reformative place. We need to understand that transformation cannot take place until we reform the manner and methods we use to achieve greater understanding of the human experience. This is again a moment of both/and rather than either/or pedagogical reasoning. As a former board member of the DataCenter and the GLBT Historical Society and Museum in San Francisco, I am all too familiar with the challenges of an agenda that seeks to center transformative justice. Often in the belly of the neo-liberal beast that is embedded in the non-profit industrial complex, the goal can sometimes be too narrowly focused on donor base, marketing, and mission-central activities. We must be careful, however, not to overstate the importance of representation. The GLBT Historical Society and the DataCenter worked to create exhibits and community-led research justice initiatives that came from community rather than from a board or staff perspective. Some of these projects include migrant worker-led campaigns in Marin County, California, to obtain fair housing access and employment benefits, a queer of color and two-spirit exhibit curated and led by the people being represented. Research justice requires that any project give authority to community experts in developing research questions, tools, and frameworks. This type of reformative and transformative work is never easy in a colonial nation-state where we have all been conditioned to see the world in either/or terms.

Thrivance: an indigenous queer intersectional methodology  231 As the Board President for the Institute for Democratic Education and Culture (Speak Out), and later as a public speaker, I have found myself responding to the kind of colonial and white supremacist “well-intended” campaigns of universities and non-profit organizations. I can recall speaking out against the Dan Savage campaign, “It Gets Better” to combat anti-LGBTQ bullying in schools. Savage and his husband Terry Miller launched (n.d.) the “It Gets Better Campaign” in September 2010 to address the growing number of LGBTQ youth suicides across the United States. The campaign failed to understand the diversity of LGBTQ youth and oversimplified the intersectional identities that make life more difficult for queer youth of color, queer immigrants of color, trans youth of color, and a whole host of other double and triple marginalized queer people. The co-occurrence of race and sexuality-based discrimination continues to be a pressing concern for researchers, organizers, and everyday community members who want to live in a better world. Transformative justice seeks to dismantle the structural systems that not only produce in-school bullying against queer kids, but against kids of color as well. If we prioritize transformative justice, we begin from a place of assuming everything that we think we know is wrong or incomplete. When we start from this place of unknowing, we are honoring queer and Indigenous communities and we are operating from a place of humility and relational accountability. Transformative justice, social justice, and justice itself have at times become co-opted terms or terms that get over-utilized with no specific actions connected to these terms. Keeping this in mind I’d like to outline five specific action steps to work towards transformative justice in queer, Indigenous, intersectional research: 1. Deconstruct and challenge US, European, and other colonial methodological practices. 2. Redefine research as space based rather than measurement based. 3. Intentionally co-create research as opposed to replicating disproportionate power relationships. 4. Make no permissible for all involved in the research process. 5. Shift the ideology of research from university based to community based. As discussed throughout this chapter, intersectional research by necessity must not only challenge but completely move away from Western approaches to science. We must start anew rather than constantly face the fight of legitimizing other forms of knowledge production. As we do this, we will have to redefine research as space based—focused on people and relationships and active listening rather than measurement based, where we seek to “solve problems” or tell people “What’s wrong with them” and we should stop centering measurement/ quantification. An intersectional, Indigenous queer approach turns to forms of kinship and inter-relationships space of social, cultural, political, and legal location. As we move towards an embrace of familial or kinship relations rather than “participant” or “data set” relationships we are more likely to work with specific intention to co-create, produce, and disseminate our shared learning. In summary, transformative justice is an approach that attempts to move away from controlling knowledge production/dissemination to actively seeking to learn for the sake of learning. In other words, sometimes a research project should simply focus on learning and articulating social realities as opposed to “solving” or “fixing” things that queer and Indigenous communities may not see as broken. At times we also need to be able to say no, hear no, and respect no. When Indigenous and queer folks say no to working with you, accept it! When you as a queer, Indigenous researcher are asked to take on yet another level of commitment without compensation or without respect for your work and ideas, say no

232  Research handbook on intersectionality and mean it! Finally, transformative justice as a principle of queer, Indigenous intersectional research must move away from the university as the cite where research is stored or to be more specific, the place where knowledge gatekeeping transpires. We must understand that the mere word, “research,” as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) argued more than 20 years ago, is a dirty word. Let us move the work and knowledge production to a place where we activate what I’ve defined as ceremonial responsiveness. What happens when we replace the word research with the words, ceremonial responsiveness? Our intentions, our practices, and most importantly our responsibilities and commitments shall also shift to a place of care.

ACTIVATE CEREMONIAL RESPONSIVENESS To activate ceremonial responsiveness, I call on researchers to imagine culturally relevant mechanisms to expand how we conduct research and that we excise the colonial violence of research by using models that come from within queer communities. These models should lead to collective healing and more importantly, it should move from resilience to thrivance. Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness is defined as: CCRR in a Research Justice model contains three fundamental aspects: (1) it defines research processes as a collective endeavor and a shared knowledge creation process between academic and community researchers; (2) it creates, maintains, and engages with the knowledge that is produced by community experts, as well as cultural leaders in ways that envision research as a ceremonial act of mutual respect and co-sharing; and (3) only research that is responsive to the social, legal, economic, cultural, and political policy needs as identified by community experts should be conducted. The Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness model takes Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and Participatory Action Research (PAR) models a step further by shifting more dramatically the distribution of power in the research process by seeking to build ceremonial relationships by yielding to the specific needs or community experts and researchers. An example of CCRR in action would entail the creation of cultural protocols and IRB (Institutional Review Board) procedures controlled not by universities alone, but in a separate review process controlled by community groups. (Jolivétte 2015, 7)

CCRR shifts the colonial power relations involved in research from not just a practice standpoint, but perhaps more importantly from an ideological framework. While some might caution that the invoking of ceremony in research is dangerous like any theoretical approach it all comes down to intention and ethics. As Cree scholar, Shawn Wilson (2008) notes, research as ceremony shifts us away from the disproportionate power relations to a place of what he terms, “‘relationality” or “relational accountability.” In the five years since the CCRR was first published some of my thinking has evolved on this issue. I now think we must go even further in the cultivating of relationships and these relationships need to be based on kinship. In many social justice movements over the decades, there has been a focus on terms like “solidarity,” “allyship,” “co-conspirator,” and “accomplice.” I hope kinship is one way of moving away from these temporal and transactional or Eurocentric terms. To co-conspire or be an accomplice implies that something is being doing that is illegal when struggles to decolonize research and everyday life are about much more than one singular moment or event. To be in solidarity with someone also can turn to the performative. It doesn’t go far enough. Allyship and solidarity are alliances that seem to be based on singular issues and struggles rather than deeply aligned ways of understanding and moving in the world. Similarly, it is my hope that

Thrivance: an indigenous queer intersectional methodology  233 queer, Indigenous, intersectional, or whole-self research (as noted above intersectionality implies a division of parts rather than a unified whole person in one body with different lived experiences) will turn from resiliency to what I define as thrivance.2 In Figure 14.1, we see an approach specific to the Ishak or Atakapa-Ishak peoples of Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Texas.

Figure 14.1

Model for Louisiana Indigenous Thrivance (Jolivétte)

Among the Ishak tribe, Wi hokišak kuš means we are all related/relations/connected. The Ishak traditional territory extends from the Southwest region of Louisiana in Opelousas and St. Landry Parish all the way to Southeast Texas, into present day Harris County and the city of Houston. For the Ishak people the concept of kinship has allowed us to not only “survive” but to resist, maintain, and thrive under the brutal conditions of forced land cessions and attempts at cultural genocide. When we go to the water, we are going to be with relatives. We are going to offer prayers. We are remembering and giving thanks for the ability to live and sustain our communities because of everything that the land offers. As I seek to dismantle colonial research methodologies steeped in white supremacy in this chapter, I want to center the Indigenous knowledge systems and practices of my own tribe to suggest that when we see all living things as connected and treat those living relatives as if we really love them and care for them, then we allow humankind to collectively thrive. So, when we make relationships as queer, Indigenous peoples with humans, as well as with land and water, we can then create cer-

234  Research handbook on intersectionality emony (relationships) that allow us to see one another as medicine and to share that collective healing and joy work through an Indigenous model of thrivance that sees us all as connected/ as relatives. The model for Louisiana Indigenous Thrivance depicts the interconnected, intersectional components of a research process intended to support relational accountability and collective ceremonial research responsiveness. As this book works to identify the routes by which intersectional research can advance new and important methodologies for examining the holistic experience of research participants, the thrivance model offers one Indigenous-specific framework for articulating a method to move from problem-based inquiry to culturally based methods to enact communities where thrivance is more possible. As more queer and Indigenous communities enact methods for thrivance, they can create circuits where more communities share approaches for living better lives. This co-sharing primarily takes place through a collective weaving process where communities work together to identify and dismantle structural barriers to wellness and joy production within and across queer and Indigenous populations.

WEAVE COLLECTIVE THRIVANCE CIRCUITS When I traveled to Sydney, Australia, for the first time in 2014 for the International Indigenous Pre-Conference on HIV/AIDS, I quickly noticed many similarities between the local Indigenous communities there and with Native communities in the United States. The relationship building felt like a weaving process as stories were shared and kinship was created in a sustainable way. To this day, I continue those relationships with Indigenous peoples I met from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The theme of the conference where I was to deliver a keynote address spoke powerfully to this concept of collective weaving to produce thrivance circuits, “Our Story, Our Time, Our Future” centered our interdependent relationships as community members, knowledge keepers, organizers, scientists, and researchers. It was during the conference meetings and events that I got this strong sense of kinship from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples that I was fortunate to meet. The best way to describe the experience is that I felt like I was at home in Louisiana. Reflecting on that moment, it wasn’t just the similarities in terms of gift exchanges, land acknowledgments, or cultural protocols and dances, it was the shared sense of humor, the connection around land and food and family. I also felt one of the strongest senses of belonging in my life. Black Australians, like me, face color discrimination and yet are quite proud of their identities even in the face of anti-Blackness and “settler” violence. It was there, in those moments, that I knew kinship, not citizenship was the driving force behind Indigenous thrivance. Enacting queer Indigenous kinship requires an understanding and a centering of Indigenous practices, knowledges, and critical engagements of reciprocity or what Shawn Wilson (2008) terms “relational accountability.” To examine queerness across Indigenous landscapes in different regions of the world, it becomes necessary to “indigenize queerness” (Tallie 2019, 9). To indigenize queerness in this sense requires a re-evaluation of how queer life is studied, understood, and archived across time and space. As a queer, mixed-race, Afro-Indigenous person of Latin-European descent, I’ve grown up unknowingly weaving for the better part of my 46 years of life. To me it wasn’t so much about the intersections … these were all equally important parts of the same person. It was indeed outsiders—people, institutions, lovers, government, that sought to reduce or gatekeep, or perhaps most violently inform me of who

Thrivance: an indigenous queer intersectional methodology  235 I was or who I could be based on a Western notion of “purity” and “authenticity.” Thus, to archive queer life, is to document, map, and explain the stories, histories, and contemporary experiences of queer folks outside the colonial confines that limit archival work to museums, libraries, and other institutions. Here, I am talking about a living archive mapped by queer and Indigenous people themselves in their tribal nations and communities as well as in social, cultural, and political spaces. So, what then does collective weaving look like? It includes showing up for one another across Indigenous and queer communities, it means developing a global force where ideas are transmitted across time and space in ways that honor our own knowledge systems. It means deconstructing a queer archive, so we know there isn’t just one archive but rather there are many archives, many voices, and many stories. I think of the erasures of queer people of color and who get left out of public archives when scientist center Western empirical knowledge over community-based knowledge construction. For example, I think of the organization, Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits (BAAITS, https://​www​.baaits​ .org) who celebrate their 11th annual Two-Spirit Powwow in 2022. They created this space to celebrate, honor, and acknowledge two-spirit cultural contributions to the broader American Indian community where two-spirit people have often been silenced or erased or objectified by colonial and Western archives of American Indian and queer people respectively.

CONCLUSION  So, what then is queer about these eight theoretical principles for queer intersectional research from a collective ceremonial responsiveness approach? Everything. During the writing of this chapter, I shared my initial thinking on several of these principles in very different settings. In one context as a consultant to the San Francisco Unified School District on implementation strategies for incorporating Ethnic Studies into Social Studies curriculum. In another context, at a google talk for Pride month where I was asked to speak about the intersections of mixed-race identity and queerness. Audiences in both instances were drawn to the ideas of weaving and thrivance because they focused on action, kinship, and relational accountability. Both audiences also appreciated the shift not just in ideology, but in practice, in method. Queerness is about transformation. It is about a movement away from those normalized everyday colonial ideas and practices that we are all taught to comply morally, socially, culturally, and political. So, to be queer, is to be different, to challenge heteronormativity and colonialism. Therefore, everything about these principles is queer. They challenge, reconfigure and map out other ways we can and have been working outside the confines of imperialism in the United States and globally. It is crucial that graduate programs re-examine their methods courses to ensure that they truly focus on the robust and growing ways that intersectional, queer, and Indigenous-centered research provides important pathways for achieving new knowledge and practices to transform the world in ways that are more just and equitable. One goal of thrivance circuitry and collective ceremonial research responsiveness is to address real and ongoing colonial violence against Indigenous peoples, land, and communities. As more and more universities and institutions (including non-profits) seek remedies to adjudicate and reconcile injustice for queer and Native peoples we must turn to more meaningful and strategic actions. Two specific areas that come to mind in this regard are calls for Cultural Protocols to address research in Indigenous communities and Land Back/repatriation and rematriation plans that seek to do

236  Research handbook on intersectionality more than simply acknowledge the land and territories of Indigenous peoples. This chapter is a call to action to all researchers from early career to senior scholars who want their work to be connected to transformative justice rather than an ongoing arm of colonial terror in queer Indigenous communities. Let your work be done in connection, in kinship, and in ceremony. Let your work be linked to a deep responsibility to people not institutions or to tenure and promotion. Let your work seek to create and expand thrivance networks across geographies, communities, and ideologies. As you begin, always center relationships over findings. The stories are here waiting to be told.

NOTES 1.

For more on the problems associated with research agendas that center “damage” in Indigenous and other marginalized communities, see Tuck (2009). 2. I defined thrivance circuitry as “the ability to use pre-colonial, settler colonial, and contemporary experiences (both negative and positive) to adjust, reset, build, and center Indigenous histories, languages, intellectual traditions and relationships with a focus on self-determination, collective wellness, and joy” in my edited book, American Indian and Indigenous Education: A Survey Text for the 21st Century. San Diego: Cognella (2019).

REFERENCES Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits. 2022. Accessed 14 January 2022. https://​www​.baaits​.org Browne, Kath and Katherine Nash. 2016. “Queer Methods and Methodologies: An Introduction,” in Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research, edited by Kath Browne and Kathereine Nash, 15–35. New York: Routledge. Clifford, James and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986. “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1994. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” in The Public Nature of Private Violence, edited by Martha Fineman and Rixanne Mykitiuk, 93–118. New York: Routledge. DataCenter. 2013. Research Justice: A Strategic Framework to Achieve Self-Determination for Marginalized Communities, Accessed August 1, 2021. http://​www​.datacenter​.org/​services​-offered/​ research​-justice/​ Diaz, Rafael. 1997. Latino Gay Men and HIV: Culture, Sexuality, and Risk Behavior. New York: Routledge. Jolivétte, Andrew. 2007. Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-Race Native American Identity. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Jolivétte, Andrew. 2012. “Obama and the Biracial Factor: An Introduction,” in Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority, edited by Andrew Jolivétte, 218–20. Bristol: Policy Press. Jolivétte, Andrew. 2015. “Research Justice: Radical Love as a Strategy for Social Transformation,” in Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change, edited by Andrew Jolivétte, 5–12. Bristol: Policy Press. Jolivétte, Andrew. 2016. Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco’s Two-Spirit Community. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.  Jolivétte, Andrew. 2019. “Conclusion: Indigenous Education as Lifeblood,” in American Indian and Indigenous Education: A Survey Text for the 21st Century, edited by Andrew Jolivétte, 251–70. San Diego: Cognella. Lorde, Audre. 2018. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. New York: Penguin Classics.

Thrivance: an indigenous queer intersectional methodology  237 Martinez, Elizabeth. 2017. De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century. London: Verso Books. Savage, Dan and Terry Miller. n.d. It Gets Better Project. Assessed January 20, 2022. https://​itgetsbetter​ .org/​ Smith, Linda. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Tallie, T.J. 2019. Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in South Africa. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Trask, Haunani-Kay. 1999. From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Tuck, Eve. 2009. “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” Harvard Educational Review 79 (3): 409–28. Wilson, Shawn. 2008. Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Black Point: Fernwood Publishing.

Section IId

Citizenship studies

15. Intersectional insights into lived citizenship1 Daniela Cherubini

FRAMING “LIVED CITIZENSHIP” IN INTERSECTIONAL TERMS Since the late 1990s, an interest in lived, embodied and subjective experiences made its way into citizenship studies. The notion of “lived citizenship” was proposed (Lister et al. 2003) to signal this new research direction. This concept overcomes the normative idea of citizenship as coinciding with a formal status and static set of rights and opens to an exploration of meanings that people attribute to being citizens (or non-citizens), their experience of access to or exclusion from rights, and the practices used to demand recognition as citizens. In other words, it refers to “how individuals understand and negotiate the three key elements of citizenship: rights, belonging, and participation” (Lister et al. 2007, 168). Against the idea of citizenship as an abstract and neutral device, this perspective focuses on concrete subjects, contexts, and power relations, to understand “the ways in which people’s social and cultural backgrounds and material circumstances affect their lives as citizens” (Hall and Williamson 1999, 2). The focus on lived citizenship is part of a broader micro-sociological and cultural turn in the academic debate on citizenship, which renewed a research agenda focused on normative dimensions and extended the analysis to multiple aspects of everyday life (Kallio et al. 2020; Ong et al. 1996; Rosaldo 1994). It is rooted in feminist, anti-racist and difference-centred approaches that expanded the notion of citizenship to include the perspectives of women and other disadvantaged groups (Carey 2009; Collins 2000; Lister 1997; Moosa-Mitha 2005; Pateman 1988; Roseneil 2013; Werbner and Yuval-Davis 1999). These critical reconceptualizations draw on the experience of subjects who are far from the “ideal citizen”, the latter tending to be defined as male, adult, white, heterosexual/procreative, cisgender, worker/ consumer, physically and mentally able, native-born, secular, or Christian, as we will see. For this reason, these subjects hold marginal or outsiders’ positions in the structure of rights and privileges that comes with membership to the community of citizens. In tune with these conceptual roots, the lived citizenship perspective allows us to see how citizenship is experienced and negotiated, but also reclaimed or contested, by disenfranchised people located at the margins of a social and political community. It focuses on the redefinitions of citizenship emerging from “below” and from the “margins” (Caldwell et al. 2009; Cook and Seglow 2016; Dobrowolsky and Tastsoglou 2006; Kabeer 2005; Moosa-Mitha and Dominelli 2016; Neveu et al. 2011; Stasiulis and Bakan 2005; Warming and Fahnøe 2017). Moreover, it sees citizenship as a governmental mechanism that categorizes subjects according to normative notions of belonging; but also as a space of struggle which involves those who lack the legal and symbolic recognition of belonging to the community and who do not have full rights. In other words, the idea of lived citizenship can be explored as both a disciplinary and emancipatory tool, testing the possibilities of building a more “inclusive” citizenship2 (Kabeer 2005; Lister 2007). In this chapter, I show that lived citizenship is key to the study of the current processes of inclusion, exclusion, and transformation of citizenship in plural societies. I contend that, when 239

240  Research handbook on intersectionality framed in intersectional terms, the lived citizenship perspective allows us to recognize that “the specific location of people in society – their group membership and categorical definition by gender, nationality, religion, ethnicity, ‘race’, ability, age or life cycle stage – mediates the construction of their citizenship as ‘different’ and thus determines their access to entitlements and their capacity to exercise independent agency” (Werbner and Yuval-Davis 1999, 5). In addition, an intersectional understanding of lived citizenship centres the experiences of inclusion and exclusion, and the agency and transformative potential of people located at the margins and/or at neglected points of intersection between multiple axes of social division. To show the utility of this approach, in the first part of the chapter I reconstruct how critical studies advancing a lived, difference-centred, and intersectional perspective have reconceptualized the three key elements that constitute citizenship, namely, rights, belonging, and participation. In the second part, drawing from my research work, I discuss an ethnographic study of migrant women promoting their own grassroots associations in a Southern European context, and their lived experience and practice of citizenship. In the conclusion, I go back to the central questions of the book and share some methodological thoughts, lessons learnt and open challenges, arising from the application of intersectional lenses in this research field. I reflect on how the situated intersectional approach and the ethnographic gaze adopted in my case study help to: (a) capture the macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis involved in the study of lived citizenship, (b) grasp the contextual and emergent character of the intersecting identities and social divisions around which the contestations of citizenship are articulated, and (c) acknowledge the (re)making of citizenship on the ground by multiply-marginalized subjects.

HIERARCHIES OF STATUSES AND DIFFERENTIATED RIGHTS Citizenship defines rights, duties, and legal statuses. Regarding this first dimension, the critical approaches under analysis in this chapter emphasize the processes of inclusion and exclusion lived by people with different positions in society. Instead of looking at the “community of the citizens” as an internally homogeneous field, these approaches bring to light the structure of stratified rights and unequal opportunities which emerges in the space between full citizenship and non-citizenship. In this space, people may find themselves located at different positions, according to their legal status (formal citizenship, type of residence permit if foreign citizens, illegal stay) as well as their social identity and background (age, gender, social class, education, cultural capital, ethnicity, race, ability, family situation, and so on). As such, they may experience different gradations of “second-class” citizenship, for instance, if they lack the resources to exercise the rights they are formally entitled to, or if they have a reduced set of rights, compared to those enjoyed by other (full) citizens. Some may suffer severe forms of exclusion, with no recognition or enjoyment of basic rights, when they find themselves in a condition of “non-person” (Dal Lago 1999). Different authors have proposed the term “civic stratification” to describe this layered structure (Kofman 2002; Lockwood 1996; Morris 2002), which is shaped by three interrelated processes: “civic inclusion/exclusion” (the differential granting of rights by the State), “civic gain/ deficit” (informal mechanisms hindering or enhancing the enjoyment of rights), and “civic expansion/reduction” (changes in rights regimes resulting from the recognition/withdrawal of new rights and new categories of citizens) (Lockwood 1996, 536–46; Morris 2002, 7).

Intersectional insights into lived citizenship  241 Migration policies certainly constitute a preferred field of application for the concept. A growing literature shows how these policies create different legal categories for international migrants, and while they expand the rights granted to some (qualified workers, long-term residents, European Union (EU) citizens, and so on), they also restrict the rights of others (asylum seekers, unqualified workers, sex workers), who often enter precarious and illegal stay. In doing so, these policies actively produce internal borders and act as mechanisms of differential inclusion (Bauböck 2006; Ong 1999). Yet despite their relevance in contemporary societies, migration policies are not the only factor at play, nor do they operate alone. In fact, current research advances an intersectional understanding of civic stratification and shows that migration regimes interact with other systems of social and political regulation, such as the nationality model, the welfare and labour regime, the gender and care regime, and the racial and sexual politics that characterize each context. For instance, the partial citizenship of migrant women (Dobrowolsky and Tastsoglou 2006; Lister et al. 2007; Spijkerboer and Walsum 2007; Staiano 2016) and of migrant domestic workers (Bosniak 2006a; Luppi et al. 2018; Parreñas 2013; Romero 2002; Stasiulis and Bakan 2005) has been pointed out by several scholars as resulting from the interplay of migration, labour, care, and gender regimes operating at transnational, national, and local levels. More broadly, according to this intersectional view, gender, nationality, origin, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, age, social class, and education have proven to be significant factors of stratification in immigration policies, including those regulating entry and employment (Anderson 2013; Kofman 2002), family migration and reunification (Kofman 2018; Kraler and Bonizzoni 2010), asylum (Danisi et al. 2021; Giametta 2017), naturalization (Fortier 2021), sex work and trafficking (Mai et al. 2021), access to social rights (Amelina et al. 2019), and law enforcement and deportation (Romero 2008). In my view, this literature should be brought into dialogue with the large body of studies showing how civic exclusion, civic deficit, and civic reduction also mould the experience of several other subjects – beyond international migrants – limiting their access to the range of rights enjoyed by most “fully-fledged” citizens. Among them, women, ethnic and sexual minorities, racialized people, the working class and those in poverty, the disabled, dependent people, children, and underage citizens. For instance, feminist citizenship studies have pointed out women’s historical exclusion from civil, political, and social rights, as well as their imperfect citizenship status today, due both to formal and informal (but systemic) mechanisms of exclusion (Lewis 1998; Lister 1997; Lister et al. 2007). Another example comes from the literature on sexual, reproductive, and intimate citizenship, which has shown how people who do not meet dominant norms of gender identity and sexuality often hold second-class citizenship. These may include, among others, people living outside conventional family forms, transgender or non-binary people, sex workers, and single or non-heterosexual people wishing to access medically assisted reproduction (Hanafin 2013; Roseneil 2013; Roseneil et al. 2020; Sabsay 2011). Lastly, recent critical interventions in migration studies look at the connections between the experience of inclusion/exclusion of both migrants and non-migrants, address the “migrant-citizen nexus” and invite academics to “de-migrantise migrants” and “migrantise citizens” (Dahinden and Anderson 2021). Coupling the insights from these multiple strands of scholarship, in my view an intersectional and lived citizenship focus enables us to see how the structural framework is reflected in people’s everyday lives and gives body to different experiences of inclusion and exclusion

242  Research handbook on intersectionality in multiple domains, including those conventionally considered to be “private” matters (e.g., family, and intimate life).

BELONGING AS A TERRAIN OF POLITICS Citizenship is also a matter of identity, belonging, and affection, related to feeling attached and recognized as part of a community3 (Fortier 2010; Isin and Wood 1999). Lived and intersectional approaches in this field start from this widely shared premise and look at belonging as a terrain of power, negotiation, and conflict. They focus on how the definitions regulating the symbolic borders of the community apply to different categories of subjects, on the one hand, and how they are adopted, contested, or rejected by these subjects, on the other hand. They point out how different definitions of belonging (having different normative force) are confronted in our societies, through bottom-up and top-down processes, creating and recreating the frontiers between citizens and non-citizens, insiders, and outsiders. In this regard, Nira Yuval-Davis and colleagues (2006) highlight the importance of the “politics of belonging”, meaning those dynamic processes of self-identification and Othering which are oriented towards maintaining or redrawing the frontiers between “us” and “them” in a political community. The politics of belonging entail two processes, one related to the definition and reproduction of these frontiers by hegemonic powers, and another produced by its adoption or resistance on behalf of other political agents, including social movements and ordinary people. They not only take shape in public policies, laws, and administrative procedures but also in everyday interactions, as well as in discourses and cultural artefacts where shared meanings of “Us” and “the Other(s)” are created and circulated. The politics of belonging should be viewed as spatially, temporally, and intersectionally situated (Yuval-Davis et al. 2006). They are constructed in specific ways – and lead to different political projects of belonging – according to the historical and social contexts, and in relation to a range of social divisions and identities. Research in this field follows a twofold agenda. On the one hand, interventions focus on the normative definitions setting the boundaries of the political community (the nation and beyond) and constructing the figure of the “ideal citizen” as a standard that delineates who is and is not worthy of inclusion. On the other hand, research casts light on how people reproduce, adapt, or contest these definitions both in their everyday actions and discourse. In the first research direction, a long tradition of critical thought has focused on the construction of the “citizen” as an ideal figure that is modelled on a privileged social position, despite being perceived as neutral and universal. The moral, intellectual, and bodily characteristics that are implicitly associated with this “upstanding” and “archetypal” citizen (such as autonomy, impartiality, rationality) coincide with those traditionally attributed to the ideal figure of an adult, able-bodied, cisgender male, belonging to the dominant ethnic or racial group, heterosexual and involved in productive work (in addition to consumption and leisure) (Lister 1997; Moosa-Mitha 2005; Pateman 1988). The literature has also reflected on the racialized, gendered, and sexual borders of the nation and other communities of belonging (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992; Luibhéid 2002; Mongia 1999). As summarized by Rutvica Andrijasevic (2009), this literature shows that alongside boundaries drawn on essentialized notions of descent, culture, ethnicity, and race, “sexuality and gender play a constitutive role in the formation and definition of the nation insofar as the reproduction of nationhood and citizenship remain premised on heterosexuality and heteromasculinity. These denote certain bodies as

Intersectional insights into lived citizenship  243 desirable, and others racialized or non-procreative …, as being a threat to nation’s survival” (Andrijasevic 2009, 390). These types of criteria underlie the negotiations of belonging with which all people must reckon, yet this is especially the case for those who do not immediately match the image of the ideal citizen. These criteria are also at work in policies regulating international migration and access to nationality, setting benchmarks of acceptability for migrants as new citizens, and creating categories of desirable and undesirable migrants (Anderson 2013; Bosniak 2006b). As seen in the previous section, far from remaining confined to the realm of the symbolic and to interpersonal (mis)recognition dynamics, these categories have concrete effects in terms of status, rights entitlements, and structural position. In addition, research on homonationalism and femonationalism (Farris 2017; Puar 2007) demonstrates that such sexualized, racialized, and classed figurations of (un)belonging and (un)deservedness can come through as much from conservative policies in the field of gender and sexual equality, as from seemingly progressive ones. The second direction of analysis focuses on the counter-narratives of belonging mobilized by marginalized subjects to contest the symbolic exclusion – or partial and subordinated inclusion – they experience. Through narrative and ethnographic methods, these studies show how such subjects tactically or strategically negotiate hegemonic narratives that entrench their non-membership and formulate alternative scripts of belonging (Coll 2005; Erel 2009; Miri et al. 2020; Salih 2000). Equally relevant, especially in more recent literature, is the focus on “everyday bordering” (Yuval-Davis et al. 2019), meaning the ordinary and pervasive (re) making of the symbolic, social, and spatial frontiers dividing community insiders and outsiders, which takes place in spaces of everyday life. For instance, in the workplace, at school, in the family, in the urban environment, on public transport and in everyday interactions mediating access to basic goods and services (banking, accommodation, health, mobility, leisure) (Agergaard and Lenneis 2021; Blackwood et al. 2015; Diatlova and Näre 2018). According to these authors, everyday bordering involves people with different locations and social roles, and multiple points of view. As such, they should be analysed through a “situated and intersectional” gaze (Yuval-Davis et al. 2019).

PARTICIPATION FROM THE MARGINS The third dimension deserving attention is that of active participation. The lived perspective is of course interested in the performative aspects of citizenship and centres the research agenda on the practices through which people enact their rights, renew their bonds with the political community, express their sense of being a citizen or seek recognition as such. These include both coded routines (e.g., voting, paying taxes) and dissident practices that break with established norms and roles assigned to citizens. The latter potentially opens new ways of enacting citizenship and generates novel political subjectivities requiring recognition as “citizens”. In this regard, Engin Isin (2008, 18) speaks of “acts of citizenship”, defined as “the moments when, regardless of status and substance, subjects constitute themselves as citizens – or, better still, as those to whom the right to have rights is due”. The focus on and from the margins characterizes the lived citizenship approach and leads us to take as a privileged point of analysis those practices that come from “non-citizens” and “second-class citizens”. This line of analysis includes research on the demands for inclusion by people in conditions of economic and cultural marginality, such as the poor, racialized

244  Research handbook on intersectionality minorities, disabled people (Kabeer 2005; Pontrandolfo 2018; Warming and Fahnøe 2017), or in liminal positions, such as young people and children (Lister et al. 2003; Smith et al. 2005). Equally extensive is the research on migrant participation, including those lacking legal residence status (Koopmans et al. 2005; Martiniello 2006; Suárez-Navaz et al. 2007), and on requests for rights and recognition made by migrant women (Andall 2000; Chun et al. 2013; Tudela-Vázquez 2016). Overall, this literature confirms that while many of the classic channels for exercising active citizenship are difficult or inaccessible to people in conditions of socio-economic, cultural, or legal precarity, these people often elaborate alternative means of participation, which may be understood as forms of “citizenship from below”. Indeed, opportunities and barriers to participation are not equally distributed in society, between genders, generations, social classes, and so on. Many forms of civic-political participation (e.g., party politics, informed and conscious voting, collective organizing, demonstrations) are excessively demanding or inaccessible to some people or social groups, who lack key resources such as time, social and cultural capital, or have different abilities and dispositions. It is not only a matter of resources. Feminist and difference-centred analysis have shown that normative models of citizenship define the duties of an active citizen not only according to the political tradition of each context (e.g., civic republicanism, liberalism) but also in relation to the ideal figure of the “good citizen” described in the previous section. For subjects who deviate from this “ideal citizen”, active participation is channelled towards a limited range of possibilities for legitimately taking the public stage and contributing to the “public good”. The intersectional and lived approaches do not limit themselves to these critical issues, but also bring into focus the question of visibility and recognition of participation practices by multiply-marginalized people. Frequently taking place outside legitimate spaces and forms of the “political”, in fact these practices often have little (or no) visibility and fail to be recognized for their political purpose and value. Again, this tendency has been widely described in the case of women’s participation, which even in its collective and organized forms has been systematically undervalued throughout history. Women’s experiences of empowerment, voicing, and organizing have often been downgraded as having little value and impact, as if they were second-rate forms of participation for being associated either with the private sphere (and therefore, by definition, “apolitical”), or “pre-political” interests and forms of solidarity. These forms have been excluded from the realm of what counts as “active citizenship” (Lister 1997; Naples 1998; Rowbotham 1992). Misrecognition and misrepresentation in the political field are even more pervasive for racialized and migrant women, who are often depicted as incapable of political action, and whose ways of enacting and seeking rights are not read as (sufficiently) political. A large tradition of critical thought, from Black and Chicana, to Third World and postcolonial feminisms, shows that their specific needs and interests as well as their intersectional identities frequently fail to be acknowledged in the political sphere (Collins 2000; Crenshaw 1991; Kóczé et al. 2018; Moraga and Anzaldua 1983). Pivotal to an intersectional and lived perspective is the ability to grasp the ways marginalized subjects engage politically and the innovative, transformative forms of engagement that are acted out from below.

Intersectional insights into lived citizenship  245

MIGRANT WOMEN’S LIVED CITIZENSHIP: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC ACCOUNT In this second part of the chapter, I present a research example that is in dialogue with the body of scholarship explored thus far, incorporating many of its questions and research directions. In detail, I share some empirical and methodological insights from an ethnographic study on migrant women’s collective organizing (Cherubini 2018), which I believe can be useful to the core question under analysis in these pages: that is, how to do intersectional research on lived citizenship. The fieldwork was carried out in Andalusia, Spain, and was based on document analysis, participant observation, and narrative interviews with 40 activists from 27 associations, located in different towns and cities in the region. These are grassroots groups led by and mostly composed of migrant women, either from the same or from different geographical origins (e.g., Latinas’ associations, Moroccan women’s associations, intercultural associations, and so on). Created since the mid-1990s, these associations fight to defend and expand migrants’ and migrant women’s rights, countering multiple discrimination and securing migrant women a better position in society. To this end, they develop community-based services aimed at their members and the local population, campaigns for legal reforms, awareness-raising and lobbying activities.4 Interviewees had heterogeneous profiles. They came from new EU-27 and non-European contexts (Romania, Morocco, Ukraine, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, and Latin American countries). Aged between 23 and 61 years at the time of the interview, they held different legal statuses (temporary or permanent residency, Spanish, or dual nationality, undocumented in a few cases) and had been living in Spain between two to 25 years. Most had a medium to high level of education, and some were pursuing their graduate or postgraduate degrees in Spain. Most of the interviewees were employed as domestic and care workers or cultural mediators or engaged in full-time unpaid family work. Some of them were in other service jobs (call centre shops, hostelry), while a small minority of cases were professionals in the education, banking, and media sectors. The study explored the lived experience and practice of citizenship and the politics of belonging enacted by these activists, both in their associations and in their life and migration trajectories. I first looked at the experiences of inclusion and exclusion from rights and recognition lived by these women in various spheres of life. Second, I explored their formulations of belonging and their self-representations as citizens, non-citizens, or partial citizens vis-à-vis Spanish society and the local community. Lastly, I looked at the participatory practices and collective demands being elaborated in their associations. In the next section, I present some of the main findings related to these three analytical dimensions. Before doing so, I would like to mention my positioning vis-à-vis the research topic and the fieldwork. As a native-born, white, childless Southern European woman, holding an Italian passport, enrolled in a public university as a PhD student and living off my grant at the time of the study, I held the entire array of formal rights that come with European citizenship, I had no major economic concerns and I was not racially targeted. I approached the field as a young researcher, and as an ally. I was interested in the study of citizenship and intersectional inequalities, and I was in solidarity with migrant women’s struggles for rights, respect, reforms in immigration laws and against the interlocking systems of racism, sexism, nationalism, and classism. These intertwined forces produced forms of oppression that did not coincide with what I lived firsthand, but that I cared about as a feminist. I saw my choice of

246  Research handbook on intersectionality research topic, and my relationship with those involved in the study, as a compelling opportunity to create new awareness about mechanisms of social injustice at play in migration laws, in the institutional regulation of work and welfare, as well as in everyday social interactions, which are building an increasingly stratified and unequal Europe (Lutz 1997; Rigo 2007). Mapping Experiences of Subordinated Inclusion To contextualize the women’s accounts of inclusion and exclusion, let us examine the main elements of the civic stratification systems in Spain, and Andalusia in particular, at the time of the study. Among the most noteworthy characteristics is a frame of institutional discrimination (Cachón Rodríguez 2009), which results from the interplay of restrictive and selective immigration laws, a labour regime segmented by gender and nationality, and a familistic welfare and care regime (Bettio et al. 2006; Solé and Parella 2003). This is compounded by widespread mechanisms of discrimination at the informal level, related to forms of everyday racism, sexism, and classism. Immigration policies in effect at the time of the fieldwork regulated (and still regulate) entry, residency, and access to rights, directly by country of origin and indirectly by class, gender, and sexuality (Agrela Romero and Gil Araujo 2005; Lister et al. 2007, 77–108). Other key elements relate to a labour market characterized by high rates of unemployment, irregular work, and gender and ethnic segregation, and to a care regime marked by an imbalance in the distribution of responsibilities between genders, generations, socio-economic layers, and nationalities. The interplay between these structural forces results in high demand for a flexible labour force in the care and domestic sector, which restricts professional options for migrant women. Notably, the laws regulating domestic work at the time of the fieldwork5 restricted labour rights, in comparison with those accorded to other workers. This affected the partial citizenship status of many of the women in the sample. How do the women involved in the study cope with the setting described so far? How does such a normative and structural framework impact on their lives? Analysis of the narratives allowed us to map the most salient issues from the subjective experience of inclusion or exclusion of rights at the time of the interviews, as well as throughout their life stories. Notably, these issues involve many spheres of everyday life commonly associated with discourses of citizenship (management of residency documents and passports, participation in the public sphere and the labour market, mobility and use of urban space, access to public services), and others regarded as private matters in the common sense (family and relational life, intimate choices, emotions, and the sense of self). The mechanisms of civic inclusion/exclusion and gain/deficit reported vary according to the interviewees’ profiles, due to the combination of migration status, country of origin, length of stay, age and phase of life, family and professional situation, education, race, ethnicity, and religion. These elements cast women in different, yet dynamic, positions in the structure of civic stratification, and have differentiated impacts on their life trajectories and their ability to act and pursue their plans. It is not possible in this chapter to illustrate these processes in detail. Nevertheless, I point to two fundamental issues which cut across many of the interviewees’ narratives and may be specific to the migrant women’s lived experience of citizenship. The first one concerns the constraints of “los papeles” (the papers), which regulate the entry and residency of foreigners in Spain, as they strive to acquire and maintain regular immigra-

Intersectional insights into lived citizenship  247 tion status, possibly obtain a permanent residency permit providing more rights and guarantees, and in some cases get formal Spanish citizenship. This introduces different degrees of dependence on state authorization in the lives of these women (at least, until they are naturalized) depending on the type of residence permit they have. This constraint has a pervasive impact on the interviewees’ ability to make plans, accomplish their personal and professional goals, and make choices in numerous areas of life. In a nutshell, this issue raises questions of freedom, personal autonomy, and self-determination, which do not have an equivalency in the experiences of women who are citizens by birth. In addition, the emotional dimension to the handling of “the documents” should not be overlooked since it appears to be pivotal in the narratives. The “journey” across immigration statuses is punctuated by feelings of fear, anxiety, uncertainty, insecurity, anguish, anger, pain, loss, relief, and serenity. These feelings depend to a large extent on the permanent or reversible nature of the permit and the corresponding rights, the degree of attaining future regular residence, and arbitrariness and pervasiveness of policing (illegalized) migrant people. The second transversal issue which emerged from the interviews is the gap between “real” and “superficial” inclusion. The former – desired but unattained – condition implies access to equal opportunities (not only to equal rights) and being treated as equal partners of social interaction, as envisaged by Nancy Fraser (2005). The latter refers to a condition experienced in the present and past by most of the interviewees, which results from informal and less visible barriers that “at the moment of truth, stop us from getting ahead in life”6 and confine them to predetermined and subordinate roles in society. Here the problems lie in the mechanisms of discrimination that women commonly face in the labour market, in everyday encounters, and at times in civil society organizations, even when they have relatively privileged formal status as long-term, permanent residents, EU citizens, or Spanish citizens. Counter-narratives and Grassroots Politics of Belonging The analyses of migration, welfare, and labour policies discussed in the previous section, in parallel with studies on media representations of migrant people in the context of the study, converge to paint a picture of national identity that is drawn around ethno-cultural, religious, and economic boundaries. They highlight hegemonic definitions of belonging that are built around a white, European, Catholic and/or secular “us”, opposed to “them”, associated with the non-European and non-Western “underdeveloped” world, the colonized “Other” and, often, with Islam. Within this framework, migration is managed as an issue of the security and integrity of the nation. Thus newcomers, as well as settled migrants, are perceived as more or less “integrable” depending on their usefulness in labour, economic, and social terms, to the extent that they enter essential but low-paid jobs (domestic work being the key example), and according to the perception of their cultural, ethnic, and religious affinity. During field research, a parallel principle of active participation of migrants begun to appear at a rhetorical level.7 This shift in discourse nevertheless had limited effects on the public in the years covered by the study and appears to be ambivalent in the case of migrant women. Once ignored, they are increasingly being addressed in national and local integration policies; however, greater visibility is related to stereotyped representations (Gregorio Gil 2011). Migrant women are depicted as subjects who are over-determined by their “culture of origin” and at the same time, as caring subjects, well versed for mediation and social work. As a result, they tend to be included in the political field only if they embody certain subject positions, either as vulnera-

248  Research handbook on intersectionality ble subjects and recipients of social provisions, or as “mediators by nature” and facilitators of immigrants’ integration processes.8 Interesting observations emerge from the ethnography about how migrant women activists respond to these dominant definitions of belonging, both individually (in their self-presentation and identity) and collectively (in the discourse produced by the women’s groups). The core element of the politics of belonging enacted by research participants relies on simple yet radical demands. They ask to be acknowledged as part of the society in which they live, to be appraised as having as much worth and deserving as much respect as the “native-born” population, and lastly, to be recognized as political subjects. They have something to say and do in collective decisions about how we live together in society. Notably, in departing from the dominant nationalist, culturalist, and sexist rhetoric described above, these demands mobilize alternative understandings of belonging. This does not mean that signifiers of national, cultural, and religious identities are discarded but rather are reworked in original ways. For example, self-definitions referred to as “hyphenated identities” are very common (Moroccan-Spanish, Spanish-Romanian, and the like) as well as terms which refer to transnational and diasporic identities (“a Romanian intellectual of the diaspora”9) and purposive assemblages of affiliations that are widely perceived as irreconcilable (“a Spanish Muslim citizen”10). Overall, they resort to creative reassemblages that erode the “us/them” essentialist dichotomy and pave the way to new citizen identities. Besides that, one of the main arguments mobilized by women in support of their demands for recognition is their “lived experience”, which refers to living in a place, pursuing their lives, daily activities, work, relationships and, sometimes, plans in relation to the neighbourhood, city, and country they inhabit. In other words, the request for recognition is often made based on a rootedness that already exists in the lives of these women (“my life is here now”), and that goes hand in hand with subjective feelings of being at ease and connected to the place where they live (“I feel good here, I feel from here”).11 Equally important is the logic of merit, as a further element that underpins the women’s sense of belonging. The contribution made in the context of residence is understood not only in the economic realm (doing essential jobs, contributing to the economy, paying taxes) but also in the social and political domains. There is a sense of doing one’s duty, playing one’s role within Spanish or Andalusian society, or the local community. This includes working, studying, taking care of one’s family, but also being organizers and playing an active role in civil society. This theme is central in the discourse and politics of belonging enacted collectively by the women’s groups. The associations’ members often present themselves as competent subjects who successfully managed their own “integration” process and who can help other migrants in this challenge. They often take a role that can be labelled “expert immigrants and mediators”, presenting themselves as skilled in cultural mediation and social interventions with female sectors of the immigrant population. In doing so, they rely on the expert knowledge they have in these fields, as well as their gender and migrant identity (variously intersected with nationality, ethnicity, religion, and class) as resources that put them in the position to better understand migrant women’s needs and facilitate the reciprocal comprehension between migrant women and other sectors of society. A last dynamic observed in the processes of negotiating belonging comes from a minority of activists’ and grassroots’ collectives who explicitly distance themselves from the role of the “expert mediator”, and do not want to engage in cultural mediation and service provision for the migrant population. Rather, they carry out cultural and artistic projects (which often escape

Intersectional insights into lived citizenship  249 a folkloric and ahistorical vision of the “culture of origin”) and practices of mutual solidarity among the members. These activists and groups denounce the pressure exerted on migrant women when they organize collectively and enter as active subjects in the public sphere. In fact, migrant women tend to be pushed towards just a few circumscribed areas of action and limited (often subordinate) roles, based on a stereotyped understanding of their capabilities, orientations, and roles in the family and the community, as racialized, ethnic minority women. Although this position concerns a small part of the network of associations included in my study, it nevertheless stands out in highlighting the normative force of the categorical definitions of the “migrant woman” described at the beginning of this section. These groups pose a challenge to the mono-dimensional images of migrant women and the narrow views about their potential contribution to the social and political community. (Re)making Citizenship in Migrant Women’s Collectives The migrant women’s associations in the study demonstrate a process of empowerment and collective organizing of multiply-marginalized subjects confronted by forms of exclusion based on nationalism, sexism, racism, classism, economic exploitation, and state bordering and control. Migrant women organizers confront male and reductionist biases of Spanish integration policies, and state agencies and non-governmental organizations addressing the migrant population. They denounce the marginalization of migrant women’s voices, not only in society but also in the political projects that promise to support them (including migrant and pro-migrant organizations). Thus, they create their own self-organized groups to become visible and create solidarity bonds based on common experience and structural location. The collective identity that emerges in these groups is built around their members’ complex positioning as women who are migrants, racialized, working class or professionals who experience descending mobility due to migration, mostly employed in care and domestic work or in other low-paid and precarious jobs. While the nexus between gender and migration, and the specific experiences as “migrant women”, are centred by all the associations I met in the fieldwork, other elements of collective identity vary from group to group. Different associations attribute distinct political salience to the social forces that shape the experience of inclusion and exclusion of their founders and participants (among the ones mentioned above, sexism, nationalism, racism, and so on). They emphasize different parts of their lived experience and various identity traits as the basis around which their practice of solidarity and resistance is organized. For instance, national and geographic origin is a relevant aspect that defines the group (e.g., associations of Ukrainian, Latin American, Moroccan women) and is often intertwined with race and religion. In other cases, it is the professional position that combines and complicates the intersection between gender and migrant status, as in the case of associations for female migrant students, or women employed as domestic workers.12 Lastly, affinity for cultural interests and political orientation also factor in the constitution of the group. As a result, the intersectional collective identity as “migrant women” forged in these associations takes a different nuance in each local context and group. If we look at the activities and political demands put forward by these associations, we see that they simultaneously address distinct systems of power relations, thus reflecting the intersectional position of their members and the collective identity described so far. They involve multiple domains of intervention (socio-economic, cultural, legal, and political) and envisage both short-term pragmatic interests and long-term ambitious goals. In fact, most of

250  Research handbook on intersectionality the associations develop forms of voluntary social work aimed at supporting people in managing the “paperwork” related to residency documents, accessing public services, and dealing with their everyday needs in the context of immigration. They offer legal advice and support with work and training courses, as well as linguistic and cultural mediation. In addition, specific activities address migrant women’s personal well-being and self-determination in the intimate field, such as talks on sexual and reproductive health, childcare, maternal health, education, and family relationships. Through this work, these associations are committed to enlarging the enjoyment of rights and access to key resources that allow a liveable life for their members. A few, larger and long-running associations simultaneously carry out more structured activities, joining working groups which monitor the implementation of local policies on immigration and employment in highly feminized job sectors (domestic work, agricultural seasonal work), or policies against gender-based violence. Another area concerns awareness-raising activities aimed at fostering mutual understanding between Spaniards and migrants, promoting intercultural relations, and fighting ethnocentric and racist prejudice. This is often done through cultural events and artistic projects based on the cultural production of the country of origin, or in a few cases, the diasporic and immigrant community. Beside these specific interventions, other more spontaneous activities bring members together to address their leisure, relational, and affective needs. Lastly, these groups also mobilize for campaigns and demonstrations aimed at reforming migration laws and policies. In my view, such heterogeneous activities suggest that migrant women’s struggles represent a convergence of what Nancy Fraser (2005) called “politics of recognition”, “distribution”, and “participation”. This means that they combine demands for symbolic recognition as legitimate and valued members of society, with demands for equal access to economic and material resources as well as for parity of participation, access to a political voice and capacity to influence public decisions. Indeed, it is difficult to separate these different strands in the social justice struggles developed by multiply-marginalized groups. As Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge (2016, 128) point out, “there is a vast literature documenting how disenfranchised groups tackle the issue of social justice on both fronts and view cultural empowerment (race, gender, sexuality) and economic redistribution (class) as inseparable. Out of necessity, women of color integrated their claims for equality, recognition, and redistribution.” This integration shows how citizenship is reinterpreted by the women who mobilize in these associations. For them, as for other disenfranchised subjects, it does not make sense to divide issues of symbolic, material, and legal inclusion/exclusion. From their point of view, inclusive citizenship concerns the three dimensions of social justice identified by Fraser simultaneously, and they should therefore be addressed together.

DOING INTERSECTIONAL RESEARCH ON LIVED CITIZENSHIP: METHODOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS In this chapter I have engaged with the core question of this book – namely, the directions and methodological challenges of intersectional research – through a focus on lived citizenship. My aim has been to reflect on what an intersectional perspective on lived citizenship might look like, how it can be used for exploring the struggles around inclusion/exclusion lived by disenfranchised and multiply-marginalized subjects, and how it can help grasp the transfor-

Intersectional insights into lived citizenship  251 mation of citizenship and belonging that arises from these struggles. To this end, I followed a twofold strategy. First, I traced the academic debate, focusing on interventions that help establish an intersectional research approach to lived citizenship. The long-standing and composite tradition of critical thought that emerges in the research reconceptualizes citizenship as a dynamic, situated, and contested construction, whose boundaries are written and rewritten by insiders and hegemonic powers, as well as by outsiders and those at the margins. Such a critical body of thought also redraws the contours of the key elements constituting citizenship, namely, rights, belonging, and participation. It spotlights people’s lived experiences of hierarchical statuses and unequal rights, conceives of belonging as a terrain of contention and, lastly, considers participation to be a performative testing ground of citizenship from the margins. Second, I presented an empirical example to identify possible ways to study citizenship through intersectional lenses, by starting from and being sure to include on-the-ground experiences and practices of migrant women in the picture. My ethnographic work on migrant women’s associations in Spain shows that these subjects live in a condition of partial and subordinated inclusion, which limits their potential for self-determination and their ability to pursue their projects. They nevertheless deploy individual and collective strategies to resist and overcome this condition and assert themselves as equal members of the society, as political agents, and ultimately as deserving to be recognized as new citizens. From a methodological point of view, I implemented an analytical framework that connects the macro and structural analysis of civic stratification, the meso level of collective action, and the micro-sociological analysis of the individuals’ experiences, narratives, and actions. To look at these three levels and their interactions means to observe not only the impact of the structural forces and dominant representations of belonging on the lives of the women involved in the study, but also the ways in which these women exercise agency and cope in the context of individual and collective forms of resistance. As pointed out in previous studies (Lister et al. 2007; Warming and Fahnøe 2017), the lived citizenship perspective does not in fact lead citizenship studies to retreat into individual and subjective aspects alone. Rather, it requires an integration of the macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis to pursue “a more holistic study of citizenship, which combines analysis of citizenship regimes ‘from above’ with study of the cultural, social, and political practices that constitute lived citizenship ‘from below’” (Lister et al. 2007, 168). In my view, the lived citizenship approach appears in tune with a “situated” vision of intersectionality (Anthias 2013; Yuval-Davis 2015) which, according to these authors, on the methodological level requires us to combine the analysis of the structural and subjective aspects involved in the intersections among multiple axes of power. In this way, “situated intersectionality” allows us to emphasize the contextual and emergent character of the categories around which social inequalities, as well as social and political struggles, are articulated in each context and at different points in time. This focus requires us to give account of how dimensions such as gender, race, class, nationality, immigration status, and so on may be given different meanings and have different power in structuring migrant women’s experiences of inclusion and exclusion, and their struggles for enlarging citizenship. A last methodological reflection regards the use of ethnography, which was strategic in grasping the conceptions of citizenship and belonging that emerged from the associations, as well as from the life trajectories of their members. As also highlighted by other works (Caldwell et al. 2009; Neveu et al. 2011), the ethnographic method entails an emic perspective

252  Research handbook on intersectionality on the situated agency of the research subjects which may help in capturing the making of citizenship on the ground. In our case, the ethnographic method aided in understanding the specific experiences of exclusion lived by these women as well as their collective action, both in their own terms, making a point of the resistant and transformative character of these experiences and practices. Notably, it helped to acknowledge grassroots migrant women’s collectives, and the life narratives of their members, as sites of production of a salient critical knowledge on the determinants of their marginalization and possible pathways towards their empowerment (Collins 2000). More broadly, these are spaces of critical thinking on, and action against, the dynamics of exclusion from rights, recognition, and belonging that are at play against migrant and racialized women in the Spanish context, as well as in many other contexts in Europe. From this point of view, the focus on lived citizenship through intersectional lenses is therefore not a mere analytical exercise, but also a political one, which may intersect and contribute to diverse feminist social justice projects aimed at redefining citizenship in more inclusive terms.

NOTES 1. I thank the interviewees for sharing their stories and perspectives. I also thank the anonymous reviewers and the book editor for their valuable suggestions. 2. Reformulating citizenship from a feminist, intersectional, and demarginalizing standpoint is the subject of an intense epistemological debate. Scholars have contested the feasibility of talking about an “inclusive” version of an intrinsically exclusionary device. Citizenship always operates through processes of “differential inclusion” (Bauböck 2006; Ong 1999); exclusion and domination are constitutive parts of both its historical development and present history (Bhambra 2015). Thus, while there might be a “more” inclusive citizenship, this inclusion will never be complete(d). Some understand the movements for inclusion of disenfranchised people as assimilationist rather than disruptive (Bhambra 2015), or even as reinforcing “normative violence against abjected others” (Brandzel 2016, x). Other interventions have warned against the limits of using this concept in critical thought (Ansems de Vries et al. 2017): critical studies on migrants’ struggles entail the risk of assuming “citizenship as the yardstick for judging the politicality of migrants’ practices” (91), as a uniforming language that overwrites other ways of thinking about politics and ends up reproducing the modern and colonial notions they meant to challenge. 3. Current citizenship studies address belonging at multiple scales, including the nation as well as local (e.g., the city), supranational (e.g., the European Union) and “post-national” communities (e.g., transnational and diasporic groups, the global ecumene). 4. During my study (2007–10), Spain was hit by the global financial crisis, the long-term consequences of which impacted and partly modified migrants’ collective action in the region. Nevertheless, I believe that the results and methodological observations on migrant women’s lived citizenship are still valid and telling today, under the current global pandemic crisis (and its aftermath). 5. Real Decreto 1424/1985. The following law approved in 2011 partly removed discrimination but failed to equate domestic workers’ labour rights to those enjoyed in other professional sectors (Marchetti et al. 2021). 6. Esmeralda, from Ecuador, in Spain for 12 years. All names are fictional 7. “Active citizenship” was a key principle of the national immigration plan released in 2007 (PECI Plan Estratégico Ciudadanía e Inmigración 2007/2010). 8. Here I am reporting the public language spread in the field. For a critical reading of the idea of migrants’ “integration”, see among others Schinkel (2018). 9. Caterina, from Romania, in Spain for six years. 10. Zineb, from Morocco, in Spain for 15 years. 11. Lidia, from Romania, in Spain for 16 years.

Intersectional insights into lived citizenship  253 12. In the period under analysis, there were no migrant domestic workers’ organizations in Andalusia. This kind of movement started to emerge in the region in the following decade (Marchetti et al. 2021). However, awareness of the exploitative conditions of migrant workers employed in the sector is a relevant factor in the creation of many associations included in my study.

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256  Research handbook on intersectionality Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pontrandolfo, Stefania. 2018. “Roma ‘Acts of Citizenship’: Negotiating Categories and Housing Solutions,” Nomadic Peoples 22 (1): 83–103. Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages. Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rigo, Enrica. 2007. Europa di confine. Trasformazioni della cittadinanza nell’Unione allargata. Roma: Meltemi. Romero, Mary. 2002. Maid in the USA. New York: Routledge. Romero, Mary. 2008. “The Inclusion of Citizenship Status in Intersectionality: What Immigration Raids Tells Us about Mixed-Status Families, The State and Assimilation,” International Journal of Sociology of the Family 34 (2): 131–52. Rosaldo, Renato. 1994. “Cultural Citizenship in San Jose, California,” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 17 (2): 57–64. Roseneil, Sasha (ed.). 2013. Beyond Citizenship? Feminism and the Transformation of Belonging. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Roseneil, Sasha, Isabel Crowhurst, Tone Hellesund, Ana Cristina Santos, and Mariya Stoilova. 2020. The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm: Intimate Citizenship Regimes in a Changing Europe. UCL Press. Rowbotham, Sheila. 1992. Women in Movement: Feminism and Social Action. New York: Routledge. Sabsay, Leticia. 2011. “The Limits of Democracy. Transgender Sex Work and Citizenship,” Cultural Studies 25 (2): 213–29. Salih, Ruba. 2000. “Shifting Boundaries of Self and Other. Moroccan Migrant Women in Italy,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 7 (3): 321–35. Schinkel, Willem. 2018. “Against ‘Immigrant Integration’: For an End to Neocolonial Knowledge Production,” Comparative Migration Studies 7 (1): 1–17. Smith, Noel, Ruth Lister, Sue Middleton, and Lynne Cox. 2005. “Young People as Real Citizens: Towards an Inclusionary Understanding of Citizenship,” Journal of Youth Studies 8 (4): 425–43. Solé, Carlota, and Sonia Parella. 2003. “The Labour Market and Racial Discrimination in Spain,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 29 (1): 121–40. Spijkerboer, Thomas, and Sarah Van Walsum. 2007. Women and Immigration Law: New Variations on Classical Feminist Themes. London: Routledge. Staiano, Fulvia. 2016. The Human Rights of Migrant Women in International and European Law. Giapichelli: The Hague Eleven International Publishing. Stasiulis, Daiva, and Abigail B. Bakan. 2005. Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the Global System. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Suárez-Navaz, Liliana, Raquel Pareja Macià, and Ángela García Moreno (eds.). 2007. “Las luchas de los sin papeles y la extensión de la ciudadanía,” Perspectivas críticas desde Europa y Estados Unidos. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. Tudela-Vázquez, María Pilar. 2016. “La organización de nosotras. Procesos de ciudadanía a partir de experiencias de “ilegalidad” en Estados Unidos,” Aprendizajes con Mujeres Unidas y Activas. PhD dissertation, University of Granada. Warming, Hanne, and Kristian Fahnøe (eds.). 2017. Lived Citizenship on the Edge of Society: Rights, Belonging, Intimate Life and Spatiality. New York: Springer. Werbner, Pnina, and Nira Yuval-Davis (eds.). 1999. Women, Citizenship and Difference. London: Zed Books. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2015. “Situated Intersectionality and Social Inequality,” Raisons politiques 58: 91–100. Yuval-Davis, Nira, Kalpana Kannabira, and Ulrike Vieten (eds.). 2006. The Situated Politics of Belonging. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Yuval-Davis, Nira, Georgie Wemyss, and Kathryn Cassidy. 2019. Everyday Bordering: Belonging and the Reorientation of British Immigration Legislation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

16. Heterosexual marriage-related regimes Laura Odasso

THE EMERGENCE OF A CONCEPT Embedded in lesbian, gay, and queer scholarship and inscribed in the theoretical debate about citizenship as a lived experience, intimate citizenship sheds light on those “choices that cluster around personal life, which are themselves not just personal but political and social” (Plummer 2003, 70). First employed in his book Telling Sexual Stories (1995) and later developed in the eponym book, Intimate Citizenship (2003), Kenneth Plummer aims to highlight the changes in the making of intimate lives in post-modern societies, and the new language that evolves with them. Grasping the “concerns over the rights to choose what we do with our bodies, our feelings, our identities, our relationships, our genders, our eroticism and our representations” (Plummer 1995, 17), the expression tackles the “public language of ‘intimate troubles’” (Plummer 2003, 13) and the ensuing controversies. By this notion, Plummer seeks to provide a conceptual base and an agenda for understanding the developments in the relation between intimacy and citizenship. Although the term hints at the “sexual” and the “reproductive” (Evans 1993; Richardson 2000; Richardson and Turner 2001), Plummer considers the word “intimate” to be more neutral and inclusive to define what underpins citizenship. Intimate citizenship further retraces and questions intersections, continuums, and frictions between the private and the public spheres. The close intertwining of such spheres is anything but new. As a discourse, history shows that the family becomes a “metaphor, symbol, but also origin of the nation” (Porciani 2002, 12). This discourse goes hand in hand with an increased attention to marital choices, reproduction, birthright, and parenthood, called to “produce” and shape citizens and workers – even conscripts, during certain periods that are respectful of national values. A new culture of family intimacy emerged during the 20th century (Asquer and Odasso 2020). But the increased attention for the nuclear family and the needs of women and children went hand in hand with a closer scrutiny of male-female relations, gender roles and care (Collins 1993; Yuval Davis 1997). According to Donzelot (1977), wealth became a matter of production in the mid-18th century and it became necessary to pace bodies and manage populations, which implies intervention in the family sphere. The family as a unit became the nerve center of the “social sector” developed at the beginning of the 20th century. Intended as a new ideology at the service of national power that extends beyond simple control, “policing of the family” wasn’t, and still is not, the sole prerogative of state authorities. Depending on the contexts and the periods, such “policing” has been carried out by other actors, that is, philanthropic companies, the Church or other religious authorities, education institutions. In the colonial territories, control over affects and surveillance of sexuality were key parts of the colonial project’s racialized and class-based logic (de Hart 2014). The policing of ethno-sexual boundaries and the government of intimate (illegal) practices safeguarded the power relations underpinning the white colonial domination (Pesarini 2020; Stoler 2002). Along with the economic exploitation, this racial 257

258  Research handbook on intersectionality order kept colonial subjects in a subordinate position (McClintok 1995). Thus, legal statuses created by the state conditioned fates and future lives (Saada 2007). Without overlooking this historical context, Plummer’s concept offers an innovative indictment in the wake of the post-1960s movements for gender and sexual equality from the unprecedented demand for changes around how to live one’s personal and private life and its significance in political, public, and cultural discourses. These requests have impacted established gender regimes that are taken for granted, offering a new normative and institutional impetus around intimate lifestyles. Lauren Berlant demonstrates that “since ’68, the sphere of discipline and definition for proper citizenship has become progressively more private, more sexual and concerned with personal morality” (1997, 177). The tensions between the new horizons that emerge through grassroots struggles for social justice, on the one hand, and the political efforts of framing these new realities and related rights through a process of category building and street-level implementation, on the other hand, display once more that “there is nothing more public than privacy” (Berlant and Warner 1998, 547). More recently, queer and trans scholarship has attempted to theorize intimacy and citizenship beyond the public/private divide by revealing how state regulations and moral social codes that define “good authentic intimacies” tend to (re)produce a vision of societal cohesion and national belonging along racialized, gendered and class-based axes (Duggan 2003; Luibhéid 2008; Manalansan 2018; Warner 1993). Institutions and public opinion are invested in intimacy, which is also at the core of individual and collective choices, actions, grievances, and claims that can be taking shape as forms of inclusive performative citizenship. What this means is that citizenship is both a “practice: it is more what individuals do than what individuals have” (Odasso 2021, 76), and a “relationship, inflected by identity, social positioning, cultural assumptions, institutional practices, and a sense of belonging” (Yuval Davis and Werbner 1999, 4). This web of relationships and practices can be further explored by employing an intersectional lens as both a methodological and analytical tool that helps to further clarify intimate citizenship, which Plummer himself considered a “loose term” (1995, 151). Here I argue that an intersectional intimate citizenship project should disentangle the contrasting, yet somehow conflicting, social mechanisms that coalesce around identity positioning, power relations, and “domains of powers – structural, disciplinary, cultural and interpersonal” (Collins and Bilge 2016, 200). To empirically explore what an array of intersectional projects and related methods concerning intimate citizenship consist of this chapter proposes a reflexion at the crossroads of migration, politics of belonging, and regimes1 of intersection. Firstly, I identify important transversal issues and methodologies that marked scholarship on intimate citizenship and lay the groundwork for remaking an intersectional intimate citizenship’s project. Secondly, yet little explored through the prism of intimate citizenship, I posit that migration is an illuminating domain for understanding the manifold intersections of domains of powers drawn by the interplay of borders and social boundaries. Public discourse around the migration apparatus and the subsequent social representations outline the specific matrix of inequalities and domination that impact, expose, and reshape (some) the geography of intimacies on the way to gain full national membership and belongingness. Thanks to empirical case studies concerning binational heterosexual unions2 and the manifold discourses surrounding them, I propose empirical scenes that help to capture the micro, meso, and macro levels of an “intersectional regime perspective” (i.e., securitization, economization, humanitarianism of migration) along with more investigated lines of oppression (Amelina and Horvath 2020),

Heterosexual marriage-related regimes  259 which concern the public intimate life of “Others” and their beloved ones in every day. The conclusion suggests avenues for future research and advocates for reinforcing the dialogue with civil society.

LONGING FOR INTIMATE CITIZENSHIP: AN INTERSECTIONAL FIELD PER SE? Until recently, intimate citizenship scholarship did not adopt a clear stance for an intersectional critical inquiry but rather mobilized categories – mainly race, gender, and class – as descriptive tools. Although an attentive review of the literature shows that the study of intimate citizenship is grounded on some constitutive dimensions that bridge the gap to intersectional thinking and can overcome the controversies over categories that reposition the focus on domains of power and related resistances. As an analytical concept, intimate citizenship has been mostly exploited in the field of gender studies under the prism of a feminized (i.e., women more than men) or a LGBTQ perspective at the crossroad of social spaces, public policies, individual narratives, and social movements (e.g., Halsaa et al. 2012; Kulpa and Mizieliñska 2011; Moreira 2020; Roseneil 2010). Indeed, these social groups have driven the ongoing political, legal, and cultural transformations demands in the treatment of body autonomy, organization of private life, gender identities, and sexual practices. They argue in favor of considering complexity and combatting inequalities to achieve more social justice. These claims made through grassroots actions create a contextual frame that influences individuals’ experiences and narratives. Intimate citizenship was mainly explored in North American and North-Western Europe using this explicit concept, before studies appeared in other regions, such as Eastern and Southern Europe, Mexico, India, etc. (Donner and Santos 2016; Halsaa et al. 2012; Willis 2014). It is evident that intimate “choices are not equally [globally] distributed” (Plummer 2004, 82) and the socio-political context contributes to shaping feelings about citizenship and its related rights. Such understandings of rights also concern the use of social public spaces. These spaces are structured both by implemented and oriented public policies and by the capability of individuals who occupy them, while remaining mediated by social divisions, such as ethnicity, class, race, etc. (see Smyth, 2008 about Northern Ireland politics to promote breastfeeding). Taking place in public spaces is an exercise of everyday lived citizenship marked by intersubjectivity, performativity, and affects (Kallio et al. 2020). Social contexts and public spaces resonate with individual usages and demands, as well as with collective organized actions. Who has the right to raise their voice, and who can be heard and be listened to in public and decisional public spheres? These questions matter in enhancing a more inclusive conception of citizenship. As Lister (2002) reminds us, “intimate citizenship has not to be confused with intimacy itself: it concerns public talks and action about the intimate” (Lister 2002, 199). Understanding the move from the private to the public sphere, and how the transformation of a personal experience into the voicing a claim takes place, is fundamental to signifying intimacy as a valuable dimension of citizenship. The dynamics governing the transition from individual to collective action are not smooth, they are imbued by mechanisms of power and lines of differentiation that change over time. We can simply point to the interactions between organizations made up by migrant or immigrant background women and those constituted by white women. Studies have shown how the first felt “on the margins” of the wider women’s movement in Europe. In its struggle

260  Research handbook on intersectionality for equality and justice, this movement neglected the racist and discriminatory experiences women faced for a long time. These women were, consequently, searching for “safe” spaces to speak freely and to set their own agenda (Ellerbe Dueck 2011; kennedy-macfoy 2012). In the era of economic and migratory crisis, feminist, but also queer, civil society actions have attempted to more carefully take into consideration the diverse nature of women’s skills and claims, and to work on issues of mutual prejudices and representations to encourage a convergence of racial, gendered, and classed-based fights (Arruzza et al. 2019). An excellent example of this relationality is the mobilization Toutes au frontières (All at the borders) made in June 2021, to call for “a European feminist action for a Europe without walls.” This organization signaled that there was a place for exiled women in feminist and anti-racist movements and a place for feminists in movements for the defense of exiled people. Alongside these experiences in the flesh, virtual spaces offer a particular platform where internet users and digital activists speak out about their intimate claims. They are building interesting bridges among scattered realities. “Intimate citizenship 3.0 defies out-of-date digital dualisms like ‘real life’ and ‘online’” (Vivienne 2016, 148) and draws new power relations and alliances of cooperation within networked publics – those imagined communities created by the technological practices of people that share their intimate and common concerns, interests, and requests. Dominant, competing, and subaltern counter publics may congruently cohabit but not without clashes or conflict. This plurality of opinions represents a “world of subpolitics emerging wherein political issue become part of everyday talk” (Plummer 2003, 74), and weaves a complex social framework in which law, policies, civil society actions, and individual choices are embedded. This overview isn’t meant to be an exhaustive state of the art, but rather a selected perspective on the scholarship to explain some characteristic issues that frame the longing for intimate citizenship. These issues (such as socio-political, public spaces, interactions, relationalities, etc.) rely on the same dimensions stressed by those authors that invite us to re-think intersectionality, namely, social context, temporality, and relationality (Choo and Ferree 2010; Nash 2008; Romero 2018), but also power, complexity, social inequalities, and social justice (Collins and Bilge 2016). Another commonality invites to adopt intersectionality for investigating intimate citizenship: it is the social movements nexus. Intersectional thinking born and grown through social movements’ struggles for social justice, as well as intimate citizenship performances account for a cluster of intimate demands for recognition that are embedded in social movements’ claims. Yet, this does not mean that intimate citizenship is intersectional per se but rather that there are fertile convergences when we approach intimate citizenship through an intersectional perspective. To say it differently, I deem that a suitable choice of intersectional methods can boost the heuristic potential of intimate citizenship. Scholarship on intimate citizenship mainly draws on individual self-narrations, public policy analysis, and media studies. An affirmed alliance of critical inquiry, conceptualization and praxis is particularly timely to thwart the critics that consider the concept of intimate citizenship the fruit of modern consumerism elaborated in high-income societies by and for wealthy social groups, and to tackle head on the contradiction emerging from “the simultaneous growth of ‘choice’ and the prevalence of restrictions in intimate lives” (Plummer 2004, 94). De facto “a politics of inequalities and a politics of choice” (2004, 88) still coexist and operate a divide among deserving and non-deserving subjects along the lines of their intimate choices. The persistence of certain moral or normalized assessments of the “correct” way to

Heterosexual marriage-related regimes  261 live one’s intimacy addresses the thorny question of the “universals” on which a society should agree (Plummer 2003). Beside acknowledging that “everybody belongs simultaneously to multiple categories that are historically and geographically located and that shift over time” (Phoenix 2006, 28), an intersectional intimate citizenship project should understand how political, cultural, interpersonal, and economic regimes affect intimate life and citizenship entitlements, including their interplay of actors, discourses, and institutions that are often approached separately. Migration management, in particular marriage-related migration, is a crucial field to explore this potential. Migration governmentality is a boundary work based on assumed shared “national” values and norms that imbue political rationalities used daily to select who deserves the right to enter the nation and the citizenry.

MARRIAGE-RELATED MIGRATION AND REGIMES OF INTERSECTION There is a growing research field on “marriage-related migration,”3 which stems from socio-historical lessons on the colonial edifice of citizenship and the sexual and emotional turn in migration studies. It offers insight into the frictions generated by the migration apparatus and the multilayered symbolic boundary work related to migrants’ personal choices on their paths towards citizenship. For decades, research has overlooked that migrants too are “allowed to love, express their sexualities, have emotions, be intimate” (Mai and King 2009, 297). Intimate and sexual desires underpin, enable, and shape international (and social) mobility (Groes and Fernandez 2018), which are “acceptable”’ personal and affective relationships that are allowed to enter the nation, and enjoyed during residence and applying for citizenship. Indeed, in the new geography of mobility, “key aspects of social reproduction – marriage and childbirth, parenthood and the socialisation of children, intergenerational care throughout the life course – are increasingly being questioned as (more or less) legitimate entry points for claiming or contesting the membership of outsiders” (Bonizzoni 2018, 225). Anxious to preserve the outline of the national community and to ensure the reproduction of “good” citizenry, the state is deeply concerned with intimate ties. Migration management is an enterprise of constructing exclusion/inclusion by legal means and administrative practices established to control bodies and affective relations based on civic ideologies and moral presuppositions. Migration politics are politics of belonging (Yuval Davis 2006) that define who is the deserving future citizens, through racialized, gendered, class-based, national, and religious intersecting lines of desirability, as well as through political rationalities. Structures, law, world economy, and international relations partake in the individual and collective identities of those on the move and their beloved ones. Acknowledging the relevance of intimacy for both migrants and the host society, there have been three main domains of study on this question that compensate for how relatively little attention migratory issues have received in the field of intimate citizenship, such as migrants’ and refugees’ affective and sexual choices in relation to community and family traditions/ injunctions and the new norms and opportunities in the residence country (Cherubini 2011; Muchoki 2017), children adoption and the inclusion/exclusion of the adopter (de Graeve 2010; Schrover 2020), and the screening of mixed-immigration status unions made by migrants and nationals (Bonjour and de Hart 2021; Nehring and Sealey 2020). In the following, I address

262  Research handbook on intersectionality this third topic to argue that intimate life is a particular site where the conformity of foreigners to national expectations is tested, and the extent migration rationalities jeopardize the position of national citizens. Public discourses, legal restrictions on marriage-related migration, and corresponding administrative implementation designed to select the newcomers create a more sophisticated apparatus that burdens national partners who choose to live with a foreigner. National partners discover that their freedom in intimate choices has limits, and so does their status as citizens (Odasso 2016). This field provides a valuable perspective into both migrant and non-migrant intersectional agency deployed in legal-bureaucratic experiences and socialization. It also participates in deconstructing taken-for-granted categories, summarized by the polarized “we” and “us” that shape migration regimes by showing how a certain heterosexuality partakes in the nation building4 (Luibhéid 2008). To better understand this point, I will draw on vignettes from my fieldworks. Located in different social public spaces (immigration office, parliament, the web) and socio-political contexts (France and Belgium), they capture specific interactions and individual and collective “acts of intimate citizenship.” Those logic and acts “through which citizens, strangers, outsiders and aliens emerge not as being already defined but as beings acting and reacting with others” (Isin 2008, 39). Based on a long-term multi-sited ethnography involving the collection of life stories and the mapping of heterogeneous actors pivotal in couples’ administrative formalities and drawing on the relevant dimensions common to both intersectionality and intimate citizenship mentioned above, these empirical scenes enact migration rationalities and condense micro, meso, and macro realms of intersectional intimate discourses and representations. None of these situations can be understood per se, rather they require a complex contextualization and a combination of methodologies that highlight the rationalities and power relations embedded in the experiences of migration management, as I will explain in the next section after presenting the vignettes and commenting on them below. Vignette 1: A Moral Economy of Suspicion in Administrative Spaces After a three-year long-distance relationship, in 2013, Sandrine, a 50-year-old white French woman, and Mor, a Senegalese man a few years younger, got married with the intention of living together in France. The couple were interviewed by migration administrations to verify the veracity of their relationship: Mor, who was still in Senegal, was received at the French consulate in Dakar and Sandrine, at the town hall of her village in France. The results of these hearings will allow Mor to obtain the visa to enter France. The man reported he had experienced a half-hour interview with factual questions about his life and plans in France, while Sandrine says: I was in there for two hours. At the same time, there was something of a friendly confidence and unsettling questions. You can feel both well protected and harshly accused … The older woman civil servant spoke to me as she was understanding me, but then, suddenly she moved on to another question and before listening to my answer said: “Madam, you know, we know everything, there is no need to lie.” She was on the relational and human side, while attempting to destabilize me and perhaps to spill the beans about an arranged marriage for residence papers. She even asked me if I had received any money, and I reacted curtly by saying, “I am a woman who has never been paid for anything!”

Heterosexual marriage-related regimes  263 Sandrine – who now lives happily with Mor – has joined the activities of an organization defending binational couples’ rights. She explained: after that event, I felt guilty, already with my heavy background as a white middle-aged woman brought up in a time of prohibitions. The clerks took me back to my mother’s time. They succeed, for a moment, as I had doubts about Mor’s intentions. But I was supported by a friend who, married to a Kurdish man, must have had it worse than us and said to me: “No one can oppose a marriage” and another one working as a lawyer: “Don’t forget that it’s your love story” … Now, I repeat the same to the couples who come to the association’s legal clinics to search for help, but I also tell them that “legality: is something relative. Doing things legally does ensure almost nothing.”

Sandrine’s intimate decisions, like those of other thousands of French citizens, have been exposed to invasive administrative scrutiny since the 2000s. Civil servants are requested to screen affective motivations to contain migratory risk, and to deter and reduce the entrances of certain foreigners for marriage. This means that clerks evaluate the intimate story presented by partners, often employing Eurocentric references of true love, daily supposed romantic interactions and plans to sustain an “acceptable” heteronormative relation. Due to the new political attention to target “abusive foreigners” from entering the country only to enjoy its benefits, the street-level migration bureaucrats have become “specialists of the intersection between legality and intimacy” (Lavanchy 2013, 680) and contribute to a moral economy of suspicion that pervades public immigration offices. The type of relationship, its public performances, as well as the materiality of the relationship’s history (i.e., application documentation) fuel never-ending administrative procedures. An intersectional analysis of the interactions reported by Sandrine deepen this factual reality of marriage-related management. In this fragment of fieldwork, three French white women from three generations interact from their own cultural and economic capital. If their gender, origin, age, and social class would not seem to put them in an unequal positionality, their roles in this specific configuration, as nation gatekeepers and as a spouse of a foreigner, point to unattended dimensions of power concretized by the contrasting tone of the exchanges. These oscillate between “rescuing” national women who might be under the influence of foreign men and accusing these women of opening the nation’s door to non-desirable foreigners. Policing the intimate border of the nation is emotional work rooted in a complex web of paternalistic and securitizing regimes of control deployed not only over foreign partners but rather over national partners, even more often if they are women. Considered as weak actors by the state agents and some politicians, women that choose to marry a certain category of foreign men are seen as putting the national community at risk. The dangerous masculinity that characterizes these men is not new in representations of otherness in society and the family. Black, Arab, and Muslim men embody a supposed incommensurable alterity. Apprehended too often as homogeneous categories, they are perceived as incapable of adhering to the majoritarian culture regarding men-women roles and equality, and gender issues at large. Orientalist stereotypes persist and lead to an underestimation of the emotional and affective life of migrant men. Whereas in the past, French women were supposed to be the “vehicle of French civilization” in mixed marriages recognized in specific colonial settings (Marchand 1954, 210–11), nowadays, on the contrary, they are to be supervised, since their marital freedom may be the vehicle for the entry on national territory of unwanted individuals. After this outrageous encounter with her own state’s agent, Sandrine realized that being a white French well-off citizen was not enough to protect her relationship against discrimina-

264  Research handbook on intersectionality tion, patriarchy, and racism that structured the French migration dispositive. Only an intersectional approach allows us to grasp to what extent she felt treated as a second-class citizen but able to give voice to these feelings of injustice. Like Sandrine, some national partners organize campaigns to denounce their own state’s regime of securitization based on invasive practices surrounding binational intimacy. In an opposing move, other citizens who feel they have been the victims of marriage scams ask for more state intervention to better sanction the “cheating” foreigners. Nevertheless, their claims do not all seem to be equally valuable in the eyes of the state. This is the counterintuitive case of Mounir, presented in the next vignette. Vignette 2: The Limits for Performing Intimate Citizenship in Political Public Space Mounir, a 35-year-old Belgian taxi driver born to Moroccan parents, recounts his unhappy experience with Samia, a 24-year-old Moroccan woman, in front of politicians, community workers and lawyers gathered at a public event dedicated to the fight against “grey marriages” in the Brussels Francophone Parliament in 2015. Grey marriage is the expression imported by Belgian political and public language from France to signify marriages entered by migrants seeking to take advantage of unsuspecting citizens in order to secure their residency and other social benefits. Such marriages are punished by law, and the contractors may ask to annul the marriage. Mounir has undertaken this hard process under advice of the association Coeurs Piegés (Trapped Hearts), of which he is nowadays a member. Founded in Belgium in 2012 to support the victims of fraudulent unions, the association campaigns to increase awareness about these “risky” phenomena (to use the expression of the association) among citizens and requests accelerated legal procedures as well as harsher sanctions for the fraudulent “spouse.” Mounir married Samia in Morocco a few months after their first encounter. She obtained the visa to move to Belgium, and then a resident permit. Soon afterward, the situation at home shifted because Samia was pregnant. Once she had given birth, she left her home and started working in a nightclub while accusing Mounir of violence. At the end of Mounir’s emotional speech concerning the difficulties he encountered to defend himself, the audience applauded supportively. Nevertheless, when the time came for questions, a politician in the audience asked: “but you knew that you would have run this risk by marrying a Moroccan woman met during your summer holiday …” A moment of heavy silence blocks the room. No such comment had been addressed to the previous speakers, two white Belgian women telling similar unfortunate stories. The interaction presented and the politician’s statement are charged with manifold meanings in the specific Euro-Belgian context of wider migration restrictions, administrative inquiry into sham, forced, or arranged marriage, and animated debates about the failed models of integration of the 2000s. With his speech, Mounir performs both his personal and intimate grievances, and plays the role of the “good” citizen that denounces fraud in marriage migration. Positioning himself as a Belgian man with a migration background, he presents himself as being at the service of a cause that is often thought of as a female cause (as women are supposed to be those duped by male migrants), reversing the expected social dynamics of power. This was at least the desired aim of the organization that asked him to testify about his emblematic story in front of such class-, gender-, and race-mixed audience. But the question of the politician cancels his efforts and reduces the facts, as well as Mounir’s emotions, to traditional practices and ethno-cultural modalities that new restrictive laws should break. The

Heterosexual marriage-related regimes  265 interaction captured by this vignette is not simply a question of intersecting categories (such as race, gender, class, and so forth) and relations (such as racism). It is rather the coalescence of dynamic forces and regimes of power that filled the management of migration and diversity in Belgium. Thus, Mounir, even if he is a Belgian-born citizen, is not regarded as a “victim” of grey marriage in the same way as others, namely, the Belgian citizens without visible migrant origins. In the national imaginary, he remains a descendant of Arab and Muslim immigrants not completely able to adhere to the majority culture, as his choice of marriage confirms. Beyond the marriage migration dispositive here, there is the political rationale concerning the integration and separatism of certain migrant communities and, beyond, another facet of the supposed “correct” heteronormativity that reproduces the Belgian national community. In a similar vein, some online dynamics that appeared during the Covid-19 pandemic suggest how some couples are considered as “superfluous” (Marks 2011) by the state. It is the law itself that produces this superfluity when it justifies and normalizes the exclusions of certain groups from the enactment of a right, or when it considers that granting them rights will be a major risk for the homogeneity of the nation. Vignette 3: Online Activism for Separated Binational Couples during the Pandemic Flore, a 46-year-old French teacher, has been in a relationship for years with Aziz, a 38-year-old Algerian teacher. They met in France, where Aziz came for an academic exchange program with a regular visa. After a five-year relationship, they decided to leave each other because it was difficult to spend time together. Flore has children from a previous marriage who were minors then, and her ex-husband did not allow her to take them out of France. Aziz for his part had had several refusals for his visa requests. But Aziz and Flore never really left each other, they kept in touch, and restarted a romantic relationship during the summer of 2019. Flore was due to visit Algeria in March 2020 when her daughter had reached the age of majority. But when the pandemic broke out, Algeria closed its borders. Flore and Aziz were not eligible for the laissez passer implemented by the French government to permit some couples to temporarily meet during the pandemic. The attribution of such a document was submitted to restrictive criteria: the couple needed to prove that their relationship began more than six months before the outbreak of the pandemic, demonstrate that they had already met in France at least once, and that the foreign partner was able to travel back after the visit period. The laissez passer did not replace the visa. Due to the extremely low rate of visas issued by the French consulate in Algeria in normal times and the closure of Algerian borders even to Algerian nationals, these criteria were impossible to fulfill by Franco-Algerian couples. Aware of the uncertainty of her situation, Flore approached the online group #LoveIsNotTourism-France created to defend the right of non-married and unconventional couples to meet during the pandemic. But she explains, At a certain point, as many Franco-Algerian couples, we realized that we were being sidelined and we created our group, firstly, because we depended on the Evian accords and not only on migration law; secondly, we are part of one of the few countries whose borders have remained completely closed, so all the other solutions proposed were pointless for us, and then, it’s true that despite everything, we must have represented a third or a quarter of the couples in the online group, but we didn’t feel at all put forward … the fact that our spouse is from the Maghreb has a negative connotation in French and European society in general and so in order to make things happen at the media and political level, our

266  Research handbook on intersectionality requests were hidden, they put a lot of emphasis on Franco-Russian, Franco-Asian, Franco-Canadian and Franco-South American couples and we felt very isolated and we never talked about our cases.

Flore is the moderator of a new online group called Couples Franco-Algériens – les Oubliés (Franco-Algerian Couples – The Forgotten Ones) created after the scission from #LoveIsNotTourism-France. The choice of the term “forgotten” is significant in the context presented by Flore in the excerpt. The intimate life restrictions during the pandemic accelerated online activism. In this “third space,” in between the private and the public, individuals share their intimate constraints, offer emotional support, and argue for the protection of all kinds of family rights in a global world whose norms are impacted by hierarchies of mobilities. In France, measures implemented to limit the spread of Covid-19 brought to light relationships that were not considered at all by public policy, that is, non-formalized long-distance and long-term relations maintained by individuals via touristic visas. But the urgent measures to ensure some of these couples could reunite remained highly affected by social inequalities inscribed on the axis of desirability that characterize migration management in normal times. The case of Franco-Algerian couples is emblematic. That their legal treatment is different isn’t new, as the French visa policy for Algeria confirms. But these political rationalities, tied with colonization and economic questions, affected even the couple’s imaginaries and their struggles for intimate citizenship. Not all couples are equal, and the partners in these couples who participate in activism and campaigns are aware of this state rationale. Furthermore, beside the legal official frame, individuals’ ability to find alternative strategies to circumvent blockages or follow the many rules imposed during the pandemic require economic and social capital. In the unprecedented global mobility’s reconfiguration produced by the health crisis, we observed a continuity in the discriminatory system already in place that is based on desirability (Odasso and Fogel 2022). An intersectional intimate citizenship project can clarify how some groups of individuals were doubly burdened by health risk containment measures and by the ongoing assessment of their intimate mobility. Longitudinal and relational multiscalar analysis permits us to discern how a crisis may change or perpetrate the matrix of oppression. Vignette 4: Campaigning against Economic Criteria in Marriage Migration Policies In 2021, at the 10th anniversary of the law concerning binational couples, a Belgian association started online and offline pressure lobbying against some legal requirements. One can read on their website: In Belgium, binational couples suffer from numerous obstacles and discrimination in their procedures to formalise their relationship or recognise a child. Even if they manage to get “permission” from the authorities to get married or to legally cohabit, their struggle is not yet over: family reunification is essential for the person of non-European Union (EU) nationality to obtain a residence permit in order to have the right to live as a family in a dignified way. The condition of “stable, regular and sufficient means” (equivalent to at least 120% of the social integration income, i.e., EUR 1628.83 net/month amount as of 1 July 2021), payable by the sponsor for family reunification, introduced by the 2011 law has created an insurmountable obstacle by requiring a threshold of income which is much too high. For many couples, this means living apart for years or living their love clandestinely. When the amount is less than 120%, the Immigration Office is obliged to carry out an examination of the family’s own needs. But the administration does not take into account certain incomes. The law discriminates against employees with incomes below 120% of the guaranteed minimum income (e.g., care assistants, household helpers, non-tenured teachers), part-time employees, self-employed persons, temporary workers, people receiving supplementary assistance schemes, people, often

Heterosexual marriage-related regimes  267 women, with a partner who has income outside the EU or owns a business in Belgium but whose income cannot be considered. Furthermore, Belgian “regrouping” citizens are discriminated against compared to non-Belgian EU citizens, because for the latter, European law applies, which does not require any income threshold.5

The statement is explicit: class is an axis of differentiation for equal intimate citizenship. Economic criteria had been introduced in family migration policies in some European countries and, thus, class has become a central variable for the success of such migration formalities. By these criteria, “immigration law can undermine self-determination in the field of intimate life” (Cherubini 2011, 125). Belgian citizens, rather than the migrant partners, must prove the economic requirement, confirming how the marriage migration law impacts nationals. But the discrimination stated by the law is more than a simple matter of categories and marginalization of some social groups, it is the symbol of a certain migration rationality. Migration regimes are shaped by a utilitarian economic vision that supports the idea that no migration should be a burden for the state and its social security system, which is based on the prejudice that family migration would be an “endured” migration (Odasso and Salcedo Robledo 2022). The civic stratification of the Belgian migratory legal system is imbued with class-based distinction that hides gendered and racial differential treatments based on the Belgian migration apparatus. State, civil society, and the market are intertwined in the political economy of citizenship. These four vignettes point to how the intersection of gender, race, age, social class, nationality, as well as religion, and culture partake in political rationalities shaping migration governmentality, and how such rationalities as specific domains of power reinforce inequalities and uncertainty that leave many at the margin of the citizenship. Accounting for their socio-cultural-economic meaning and their socio-political construction is essential to better grasp the matrix of inequalities that lies behind the politics of choice; since, even if they have different genealogies and categories, their effects are interlocked. They operate in specific contexts, times and private and public social spaces which leads to creating complex and changing identities that proves their instability. They shape representations and, thus, the virtual social identities of migrants and, in turn, their national partners, impact their encounters through the migratory state apparatus and their feeling of legitimacy and belonging. Nevertheless, the consciousness of the incongruence between virtual and the physical, or at best affirmed and performed, social identities allow migrants and, more often, their beloved ones, to assert their citizenship by navigating social and legal constraints to find a way out of the oppressive situations and by publicly asserting the deservingness of their intimate and personal choices. Beyond the axis of differentiation, these vignettes invite us to undertake a wider analysis of intersecting rationalities created by the interrelated effects of borders (understood as the control of access to the territory undertaken in the name of state sovereignty) and boundaries (understood as the work of social classification related to hierarchies of desirability and sameness based on racial and cultural logic and assumptions). A bordering regime is created by international migration management that de facto selects suitable migrants by screening through boundary (emotional) work, screening their intimate relationships and the several aspects of their materiality under the prism of heteronormativity that “animates both anti- and pro-immigrant imagery and discourses” (Luibhéid 2008, 175) or femo-  (Farris 2017) and homonationalism (Puar 2017) according to the relationship pattern.

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FOR AN ETHICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF STORIES The examples of analysis elaborated in the previous section suggest that an intersectional project requires a set of methodologies capable of gathering data accounting for the multilevel dimensions that underpin the acts of intimate citizenship observed. As working on intimacy means entering a delicate emotional field, researchers must be able to provide an “interaction-seeking and context-sensitive” analysis (Choo and Ferree 2010, 146) that does not participate in reproducing domination relations. For this, two presuppositions are, in my view, essential. Firstly, it is necessary to define and clearly state from where we are observing while both undertaking fieldwork and writing. A situated standpoint is crucial to take intersectionality and intimacy seriously. We sought to “see from the inside” the knowledge conveyed by the actors themselves, since they give meaning to the world and to the experiences the researcher tries to apprehend. Secondly, as this gaze is based on the use of the researcher as a “detector” in their inquiry, intersectional scholars need to consider the (in)adequacy of the categories and relations of power that, with their social characteristics, representations, and language, they bring into the field. How does a critical inquiry partake in highlighting and deconstructing boundaries or in maintaining them? This attention to the research positioning plays a crucial role for building trust during fieldwork, and on the quality of the data collected. It also prefigures an ethic of research that translates intersectionality tools in a praxis. Considering methods, the collection and the follow-up of life stories are key methodologies for studying intimate citizenship. Understood as “symbolic interactions and as political processes” (Plummer 1995, 19), stories, both life stories and accounts of experiences, have situated plots and turning points that convey significant “sociohistorical fragments” (Bertaux 2013) and allow the identification of broader social dynamics. The life story method captures the influence of social structures on individual trajectories, and apprehends how society interacts with biographies, as well as how individuals (re)act to the structures that encompass them. Thus, stories represent a perfect starting point to connect different scales of analysis. The “biographical policy evaluation” method (Apitzsch et al. 2008) helps assess the effects of policies and political rationalities on personal and family lives. Biographical information, personal and relationship plans, and tactics provide unique materials for understanding the social mechanisms underpinning changes in the intimate boundaries between individuals and their public/private consequences. To consider the complexity of individual trajectories, and to articulate the diachronic-synchronic relationality in the trajectories, it is suitable to include biography and stories in a broader multi-site investigation that articulates the analysis of legislation and of political debates, in legal practice, media documents, social movements’ actions and archives, and their significant networks (see Harrison 2008). While the multiplication of methods may reveal discrepancies, in particular between what individuals say and do, or between what they say in one context and do not say in another, these are understood less as a means of “correcting” what is said than as an opportunity to grasp the processes of performative construction of the self and of intimate choices, and the way in which identities are negotiated in social relationships, in articulating the domain of powers. Furthermore, to better enter a micro-situated analysis to identify the temporalities, the spaces, and the actors partaking in intimate choices, narratives can be associated with a detailed participatory explanation of documentation prepared for administrative formalities. This dialogue between researcher and respondent(s) on the materiality of intimate choices can be associated to critical cartography (Mekdjian 2015). For instance, the creation of mental

Heterosexual marriage-related regimes  269 maps allows the identification of factors that shape the feelings of applicants and their lived experience. These maps are used to fix individual opinions in a certain space-time context and to obtain socio-geographical information regarding the expectations and the options of couples through specific social public space, events, agents, and procedures, which were translated into intimate practices and preferences. This combination of methods makes it possible to overcome the pitfall of the narrative demanded by administrations and the limitation of speech, to include other forms of expression that are particularly useful for those who have experienced trauma or are less literate, for example. Due to the sensitivity of the materials that the research collects, an ethic of respect, reciprocity, and compensation/valorization should be implemented. To employ Marcus’s expression, this comprehensive set of methods brought together in a multi-sited ethnography “follows the people, the thing, the metaphor, the plot, story, or allegory, the biography and following the conflict” (1995, 106–10) beyond the stories. This concretely means to play with the scale of analysis and prefer doing long-term immersive fieldwork, as well as a full engagement in the field, that is, observant participation where the participation is paramount. This is particularly true in choosing the attitude towards social movements, or institutional organizations. The objective is the production of observational data, but also of experiential data. The researcher can, through the sharing of the activity, gain knowledge of the existential perspective from the inside (Tedlock 1991). Furthermore, the long timeframe allows the researcher to observe ongoing changes, accounting for the fluidity of the categories, as well as for the genealogy of power dynamics. Hence, the study of the present requires a perspective enriched by the knowledge of the past and of the several contexts in which the object of study is situated. The history of international relations, colonialism and post-colonialism, local and national policies, legislative developments, the dimension of European integration, but also past personal experiences and the weight of personal ties of interlocutors are all important clues for observing the emergence of new frameworks of action and fluid identity that we can hardly apprehend through the prism of categories and without considering the dynamic forces and the regimes of power that govern them. Key categories of international analysis are not all equal in nature and are not located at the same manner in the public sphere (Verloo 2006). Bordering and debordering, social division of labor, economy and legality are shaped by the active mechanisms that run through political rationalities and individual agency. Comparative iterations among intimate-based claims and public interactions, socio-political contexts, networks, and social geographies may help consider similarities and differences in intersectional regimes, and circulation of practices. An inductive and dialectical approach to comparison should be engaged to be open to unexpected discoveries.

CONCLUDING REMARKS AND FUTURE PATHS The chapter has suggested how the fields of intersectionality and intimate citizenship converge and can benefit from one another. Most of the scholarship of intimate citizenship deems intersectionality as taken-for-granted based on the implicit idea that all identities, and experiences, are intersectional or reiterate the class-gender-race nexus as the main axis of differentiation. Here, I argue, instead, that to push the heuristic potential of an intersectional intimate citizenship project forward, it is essential to be more explicit about what intersects, by attempting to disentangle the domains of power at stake according to configurations and

270  Research handbook on intersectionality their space-time dimensions. The example of marriage-related migration has shown that the matrix of oppression and resistance is the result of interlocking lines of oppression supported by “intersectional dynamics of political rationalities that gives rise to boundaries and border” (Amelina and Horvath 2020, 487). Their interplay supports the complex framework that discriminates towards migrants, as well as their beloved ones, and coalesce around a certain representation of the “suitable” heteronormativity. A multi-sited long-term ethnography is suitable for acknowledging the instability of categories, grasping their internal stratifications and their variations according to the configuration and situation. This method associated with a sociology of stories and experiences sets the basis for a trans-scale analysis that “reconceptualize[s] the power relations of the center and margins” (Choo and Ferree 2010, 147) and shows how “privileges and oppressions intersect, informing each subject’s experience” (Nash 2008, 12). Social spaces and their usages are important, as interactional dynamics are always situated in spaces that mirror private/public multifaceted dynamics and rationalities, and structure the performances of virtual, social, and personal identities of the actors. To apprehend the interrelation of this multiple dynamics one should follow the excellent advice offered by Mari Matsuda, “ask the other question” (1990, 1189) to deepen the analysis beyond what appears at first glance to grasp more hidden domains of power. The awareness of the sensitive nature of research material collected in research on intimacy is primordial for building a methodology that does not reproduce domination and where all participants, including the researcher, recognize their role positioning and characteristics. Hence, intersectionality as a critical praxis is able to reduce the distance between societal analysis and social justice, and to make intellectual inquiry as a site of praxis (Collins, 2012). In particular, it is worth noting that, in light of the current challenges that intersectionality is facing in some European political discourses, an intersectional intimate project should be able to impulse a praxis of critical inquiry that enhances (legal) consciousness, and individual and collective agency emerging at the convergences of struggles, and not only those concerning intimacy. Finally, a dialogue with civil society should be reinforced not as an exceptional alternative – or an over-committed – way of conducting research on intimate citizenship but rather as a constitutive manner of thinking about intimate citizenship through intersectionality for understanding how state-citizen relations are mediated from below and crossed by lines of oppression both inside and outside of administrative waiting rooms.

NOTES 1. Under a Foucauldian perspective, regimes are here understood as a network of discourses, institutions, and practices that assess controls and practices. 2. I am aware of the relevance of same-sex and queer unions in the conceptualization of intimate citizenship. My work is fed by gay, lesbian, queer, and trans scholarship that offers new perspective on heterosexual marriage migration that has been my main field of expertise until now. 3. The migration for the purpose of joining a partner to marry or a spouse, either within a country (family formation) or in another country (family reunification) (see Charsley 2014). 4. “Heterosexuality is an unstable norm, however, which requires anxious labor to sustain. Public discourses, like migration policies, reflect heterosexuality’s instability” (Luibhéid 2008, 174). Similarly, Alexander observed that “heterosexuality is at once necessary to the state’s ability to constitute and imagine itself, while simultaneously marking a site of its own instability” (1997, 65). 5. Available at https://​www​.amoureuxvospapiers​.be/​droit​-de​-vivre​-en​-famille/​(accessed December 6, 2022).

Heterosexual marriage-related regimes  271

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Heterosexual marriage-related regimes  273 Plummer, Kenneth. 1995. Telling Sexual Stories. Power, Change and Social Worlds. London: Routledge. Plummer, Kenneth. 2003. Intimate Citizenship: Private Decisions and Public Dialogues. Seattle, WA and London: University of Washington Press. Plummer, Kenneth. 2004. “Intimate Citizenship in an Unjust World.” In The Blackwell Companion of Social Inequalities, edited by Mary Romero and Eric Margolis, 75–99. Wiley Online Library. Porciani, Ilaria. 2002. “Famiglia e nazione nel lungo Ottocento,” Passato e presente, 57: 9–39. Puar, Jasbir. 2017. Terrorist Assemblages. Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Richardson, Diane. 2000. “Constructing Sexual Citizenship: Theorizing Sexual Rights,” Critical Social Policy 20 (1): 105–35. Richardson, Eileen H., and Bryan S. Turner. 2001. “Sexual, Intimate or Reproductive Citizenship?” Citizenship Studies 5 (3): 329–38. Romero, Mary. 2018. Introducing Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Roseneil, Sacha. 2010. “Intimate Citizenship: A Pragmatic, Yet Radical, Proposal for a Politics of Personal Life,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 17 (1): 77–82. Saada, Emmanuelle. 2007. Les enfants de la colonie: les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté. Paris: La Découverte. Schrover, Marlou. 2020. “Parenting, Citizenship and Belonging in Dutch Adoption Debates 1900–199,” Identities 28 (1): 93–110. Smyth, Lisa. 2008. “Gendered Spaces and Intimate Citizenship. The Case of Breastfeeding,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 15 (2): 83–99. Stoler, Anne Laure. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tedlock, Barbara. 1991. “From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography,” Journal of Anthropological Research 47 (1): 69–94. Verloo, Mieke. 2006. “Multiple Inequalities, Intersectionality and the European Union,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 13 (3): 211–28. Vivienne, Sonja. 2016. “Intimate Citizenship 3.0.” In Negotiating Digital Citizenship: Control, Contest and Culture, edited by Anthony McCosker, Sonja Vivienne, and Amelia Johns, 147–65. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. Warner, Michael. 1993. Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Willis, Kate. 2014. “Intimate Citizenship and Social Change in Contemporary Mexico.” In Intimacies and Cultural Change: Perspectives on Contemporary Mexico, edited by Daniel Nehring and Rosario Esteinou, 13–33. Farnham: Ashgate. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997. Gender and Nation. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Yuval Davis, Nira. 2006. “Belonging and the Politics of Belonging,” Patterns of Prejudice 40 (3): 197–214. Yuval-Davis, Nira, and Pnina Werbner. 1999. Women, Citizenship and Difference. London and New York: Zed Books.

17. Intersectionality, citizenship and labor Pallavi Banerjee and Carieta O. Thomas

INTRODUCTION The origins of intersectionality as a theoretical approach and a methodological orientation by now are well documented in sociology and the social sciences in general. Black feminist activists and Black sociologists had been unraveling the multiplicative effects of structural oppressive constructs based on identities such as race, class, gender, and sexuality since the early 1970s without using the nomenclature of intersectionality (Combahee River Collective 1979; King 1988). The term intersectionality, as is now a radiant part of women of color feminist intellectual history, was coined in 1991 by Kimberlé Crenshaw to define the perspective that posits that forms of inequalities work together and reproduce each other in the lives of those who live marginal existences, namely Black women, and women of color in White dominant societies. The term soon made its way to sociology (Collins 2002, 2015) and across other disciplines, providing tools to “problematize static, homogenizing categories and analyze how power is situated within multiple shifting identities and social locations” (Allison and Banerjee 2014, 70). It is the ability to multiply while remaining bounded by lived reality that makes intersectionality a remarkably useful theory and method. Termed the et. cetera problem (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013), intersectionality must be concerned with the inclusion of new categories and subjects within its purview not because it should be restrictive, but because these processes of inclusion are also imbued with power (Glenn 2011). It is this concern with disarming power in social locations that subsequently made intersectionality an important prism for feminist, critical race theorists studying immigration, citizenship, and labor. Citizenship and immigration are integrally intertwined, and a handful of critical scholars in immigration have effectively used right to citizenship as an analytical category in critiquing the immigration regime (Banerjee 2022; Bloemraad 2000; Bloemraad, Korteweg, and Yurdkul 2008; Purkayastha 2018; Romero 2008). In conceptualizing citizenship, we tie definitions from Glenn (1992, 2004, 2011), who emphasizes belongingness in citizenship, and Bloemradd, Korteweg, and Yurdkul (2008), who highlight participation in political communities. In this chapter, we understand citizenship as a concept that encompasses an individual’s understanding of their access to rights, participation, and sense of belonging in political, social, and cultural communities. However, for immigrants, citizenship and belongingness are often connected to the labor regime in the host country which is framed by the intersecting inequities tied to gender, class, race, nationality, and legal status. These intersecting statuses dictate if an immigrant is even able to and allowed to work as well as in which fields their labor is seen as most desirable. Moreover, they determine an immigrant’s ability to work in relative safety, without the fear of being fired, deported, or exploited and under employment conditions that afford them rights and agency. Scholars of labor and employment argue that intersectionality is necessary to understand the nuances at play in organizations. Specifically, intersectionality pushes labor, employment, and employment-relations researchers to not only explore relations within categories of differ274

Intersectionality, citizenship and labor  275 ence but to also expose the power relations and invisible hand at work between categories of difference—where intersectionality brings the matrix of domination into view through institutional analysis (McBride, Hebson, and Holgate 2015; Rodriguez et al. 2016). Unfortunately, many organizational and employment studies fail to move beyond individual identities and subjectivities toward analysis of structures and processes (Rodriguez et al. 2016). In overlooking this level of analysis, employment studies rarely explore labor and immigration as connected and overarching regimes operating in the lives of the subset of employees that immigrant and migrant workers represent. The idea that intersectional analysis begins and ends with a recognition or description of different identities and categories runs counter to its notion that identities are not the seat of power, but rather the mechanisms through which power can be revealed. Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall (2013) understand identities as revealing springboards rather than the end point of analysis. Other studies use identities as a way of situating larger systems within local relations (Choo and Ferree 2010). It is a misunderstanding of intersectionality that should be credited for the failure of studies to engage in this level of analysis, not intersectionality itself. Here, it is important to note the methodological strengths and challenges of intersectionality. As a method, intersectionality does not stop at inclusion but is instead focused on processes (Choo and Ferree 2010). Meaning, it is not simply concerned with including different marginalized groups, but also with the dynamics occurring. In short, intersectionality has not remained focused on differences and categories of identities for their content, but has instead focused on identities for the structures, truths, and processes that they reveal. A seemingly overlooked, but nonetheless fundamental declaration, Crenshaw (1991, 1297) states that it “is not the existence of the categories, but rather the particular values attached to them and the way those values foster and create social hierarchies.” One of the major complications of using intersectionality as a method for research is understanding identities as multiplicative rather than additive. This is an especially important distinction to make in research because it is the difference between fully utilizing the potential of intersectionality and falling short of its promise in illuminating institution and regime power. The difference between additive and multiplicative is especially difficult to delineate within research projects. In their review of articles exploring the intersection of race and gender within the US labor market, Browne and Misra (2003) inadvertently raise the question of whether quantitative studies can adequately represent the nuances that intersectionality hopes to examine and critique. They conclude that “the evidence for the intersection of gender and race is mixed and depends on the question posed, the method employed, and the type of labor market process under investigation” (2003, 507). This underscores the importance of allowing the objective of the project to determine which identities and subjects are included in an intersectional approach. Windsong’s (2018) discussion of taking an intersectional approach in qualitative research offers concrete directives on incorporating intersectionality into research in a non-additive manner. For Windsong (2018), because identities, interactions, and social structures do not map out in additive ways, demonstrating relationality is an important factor. Overall, in approaching research from an intersectional perspective, methods are paramount in ensuring that the study represents identities as multiplicative and relational as well as part of an overarching matrix of domination. Feminist research on labor and citizenship regimes represents some of the earliest work that met the challenges of conducting intersectional research and analysis, thus reaping the benefits of the depth of understanding that intersectionality provides in this area of research.

276  Research handbook on intersectionality Evelyn Nakano Glenn (1992) was one of the earliest scholars who argued that the systemic inequities within the intersecting institutions and regimes of labor and citizenship in the United States are co-constituted by race, gender, and class. Further, Glenn (1992) demonstrated that race/ethnicity and gender were primary frames organizing labor in the US South, Southwest, and Hawaii. This was possible in part because the State restricted citizenship rights for certain racial/ethnic groups, allowing employers to limit their authority and autonomy. Along similar lines, Lisa Lowe (1996)—without an explicit intersectional analysis—argues that race intersects with the immigration regime to produce an image of Asian-Americans as the perpetual other by creating a controlling image that posits them as cheap, docile, and obedient labor while rendering them constant outsiders in America. Enumerative of citizenship and labor in the studies of intersectionality, Romero’s (2008) work on undocumented families and citizenship is perhaps the most compelling deployment of intersectionality in unraveling the intersecting oppressions at play in the citizenship and labor regimes in the United States. She contends that only an intersectional orientation, theoretically and methodologically, will allow us to unravel the State’s construction of citizenship in relation to immigrant and transnational families and veer away from the dominant assimilation models in the study of immigration. Romero, in her analysis of police raids and profiling of Mexican immigrants, unpacks in minute detail the intersectional processual nature of these raids based on racial profiling subverting the often-uncritical methodological use of “thick descriptions” (Geertz 1973) into intersectional detailing of the process of a carceral immigration regime. The assimilation literature that Romero critiques is the literature that has dominated US citizenship and labor scholarship, often deploying additive and categorically distinct methods to make claims about the immigrant labor market that either look at ethnicity or gender or citizenship status as discrete categories. What such methodological orientation is guilty of is fostering piecemeal conceptualization of systemic inequities. This literature takes transnational mobility at face value and does not theoretically or methodologically address the entangled relationship between labor (extraction), gender, race, class, and citizenship status. It is to be noted that all types of immigrant families perform labor—both paid and unpaid—and are an important part of the US capitalist and neoliberal projects (Banerjee 2022; Guevarra 2009). And yet, the conjunction of citizenship and labor—paid and unpaid—is perhaps the least explored through the lens of intersectionality. Having recently survived the Trump era and coming out of a global pandemic, both of which severely wounded the intersectionally most vulnerable, it is perhaps ethically imperative to illuminate the insights offered and challenges experienced by studies deploying intersectionality theoretically and methodologically to understand matrices of oppression related to labor and citizenship. In this chapter, we underscore the importance of conducting intersectional research in the context of understanding labor and citizenship transnational regimes and the methodological challenges such research could potentially encounter in fully explicating the co-constituted nature of race, class, gender, and nationality in the study. We do this through the discussion of immigrant workers of color in the paid and unpaid care work regime. We contend that immigrants inhabit an transnational citizenship-labor regime that is intersectional and make a twofold argument: (1) that it is imperative to reconceptualize labor regimes as part of the citizenship regime and (2) intersectional analysis of these entangled regimes disentangles the power nodes embedded in the regimes, laying bare the oppressive mechanisms while underlining subversive possibilities when a transnational approach to intersectionality is adopted.

Intersectionality, citizenship and labor  277 In explorations of these two different labor spaces—paid care work and unpaid reproductive labor done by migrants and non-citizens of color most of who are women—we can see the inextricable link between the citizenship and labor regimes. For care workers, their gender, race, immigrant status, and low-status employment coalesce to make them ideal subjects of exploitation, so much so that studies find they internalize the essentialized ideas of certain groups of women that characterize this field of work (Arat-Koc 2001; Glenn 1992; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007; Parreñas 2015). Understanding these processes through an intersectional citizenship-labor regime lens produces a broader and more institutionally focused analysis while also unpacking the challenges and gains that a transnational intersectional approach includes.

INTERSECTIONALITY, TRANSNATIONAL APPROACH, AND CITIZENSHIP AND LABOR REGIMES Political scientists have conceptualized citizenship as a regime—meaning that it is a stable institutionalized system of formal and informal rules and norms within a polity that determines the limits of membership as well as rights and duties within that polity (Vink 2017). The dissolution of borders that globalization promises is therefore a falsity. Instead, nationhood and citizenship are enduring facets of the immigration regime and by extension the labor regime (Lemke 2002; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Nations are imagined communities that are open to new inclusions but are nonetheless bounded (Anderson 2006). As such, frames of deservingness are used to decide which immigrants knocking at the door should be accepted (Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas 2014). In excluding some from the nation and limiting access to citizenship, immigration regimes do not simply preserve nationhood, they create exploitable workers supplying labor power while living outside the protection of citizenship (De Genova 2002; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Thobani (2007, 10–11) describes this process as the exaltation of citizenship and race, where nationality is imbued with certain favorable characteristics, which in turn “institutionalizes the differential rights of nationals in relation to their Others, thereby realizing its very tangible and material correspondences and consequences in the social order.” The material correspondences of these differential rights are manifested most significantly within labor regimes that are populated by unstable and undefined citizenship, which have been labeled as migrant labor regimes (Fan 2004). Labor regimes in Marxist terms are designed to extract the most labor time at the least cost and time, exploiting the labor of workers in any form possible. This exploitation intensifies when labor regimes are framed by citizenship status and co-constituted by gender, race, and class in a transnational context. These regimes feed into each other and feed off each other, creating hardy marginalizing structures for the most vulnerable and making intersectional labor and legal inequities more durable. Gopal Guru (2019), an Indian Dalit scholar, argues that migration for the most peripheralized is simultaneously laden with pain and is an exercise in moral protest given that the positionalities of those migrating force them to migrate to survive and the exodus is also a moral resistance against the system that makes the lives of the most marginalized unliveable. This type of orientation to migration that comes from the Global South adds another dimension of complexity because it shows that the labor and citizenship regimes operate in a transnational space and, as documented by scholars of transnationalism, that transnational approaches fundamentally reorient intersectionality to include transnationalism as an axis of marginaliza-

278  Research handbook on intersectionality tion and/or privilege (Ong 2006; Patil 2013; Purkayastha 2012, 2021). Ong (2006) argues that definitions of citizenship, especially in the context of labor, need to account for transnational lives of people wherein neoliberal global capitalism makes citizenship simultaneously flexible for some and restrictive for others, calling to transnationalize citizenship. Transnational feminists since the early 1990s have critiqued the domestic (US-centric) rendition of intersectionality for discounting transnational processes and thus inadvertently excluding experiences of oppression that are suspended in the liminality of transnational spaces (Grewal and Kaplan 1994). Patil (2013, 848) calls for intersectional analysis to “be formed and transformed within transnational power-laden processes such as European imperialism and colonialism, neoliberal globalization, and so on.” The transnational approach then inherently confers intersectionality with the ability to traverse borders and co-constitute the sub/national and the trans/ national processes in how they perpetuate gendered, racialized, classed, heteronormative and other forms of oppressions for those whose lives are suspended in these transnational contexts (Patil and Purkayastha 2015; Purkaystha 2012). The workings of the labor and citizenship regimes are often most pronounced for the most vulnerable and exploitable workers, such as migrant live-in caregivers and domestic workers of color from the Global South whose lives are bound by transnational processes and despite employer claims of their membership in the family (Cranford 2020; Rollins 1985; Romero 2002; Romero and Pérez 2016). Instead, imagined familial ties serve as tools of exploitation while the very work they perform signifies their status as outsider and forces them to put their own transnational families as secondary (Banerjee, Chako and Piya 2020; Montes 2013). As enumerated earlier, this interaction also affects immigrants in the high-skilled workforce. The outsider status of immigrant workers in the high-skilled “professional” sphere is maintained and reinforced by their low position within the organizational hierarchy and their temporary status both within the organization and in the country (Bauder 2006). In this context, immigrant workers of color must engage in additional labor to demonstrate their belonging. For instance, Showers (2015) found that West African nurses in the United States practiced professional distancing in forming their professional identity to create identities that would separate them from negative associations with their race and immigrant status. Banerjee (2022) found that Indian tech-workers and Indian nurses are saddled with different expectations at work based on their legal status, gender, and the structures of the labor regimes. Akin to this are the emotional tasks and carefully curated self-presentations that minorities in professional occupations must engage in to cement their sense of belonging (Wingfield and Alston 2014). Thus, in labor settings, citizenship is framed by gender, race, class, and transnationality. It is then more than a legal status; for both those within its bounds and those standing on the outside.

THE LABOR AND CITIZENSHIP REGIME OF CARE WORK Paid Care Work The people who perform care work are mostly poor, women of color, often migrating from the Global South with lives that are inherently transnational. As such, studies on care work have necessarily but implicitly highlighted the utility of intersectionality in understanding the systems of oppression at play. Since the women performing care are most often at the intersections of gender, class, race, immigrant status, coloniality, and low-wage work, researchers

Intersectionality, citizenship and labor  279 of care work have long been required to conduct intersectional analysis. As studies on care work expanded, so too did the intersections within the matrix of oppression used to discuss this labor. In fact, care work is increasingly stratified along these intersectional lines. At its highest rungs, care work is performed by a group of women disadvantaged by gender. At the lower rungs, care work occupations are dominated by racialized, immigrant, women with liminal citizenship status often transnationally situated (Arat-Koc 2001; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007; Parreñas 2015). Care work research is thus a particularly good example of intersectional migration analysis that is embedded in a transnational approach. Foundational studies on care work, such as Hochschild and Machung’s The Second Shift, focus on the impact of women’s labor outside of the home on the care work performed inside the home (Hochschild and Machung 2012). Despite entering the workforce in increasing numbers, women face the devaluation of their labor on two fronts: in the gender stratification of the labor market and in the persistent existence of the double shift for women (Acker 1990; England 2010; Hochschild and Machung 2012). Paid care work performed outside the home is undervalued in both status and accorded wages because it is believed to be a form of “maternal sacrifice” fitting within the traditional family model (Dodson and Zincavage 2007). Notions of this sort conceptualize care within the realm of a loving family relationship, thus prioritizing the emotional aspects of the work over other skills and distancing it from an employer-employee framework (Romero 2002; Romero and Pérez 2016). However, the intersectional early work of Glenn (1992) deconstructs the notion that care work ever existed solely within the home. This work attributes the devaluation of care work to its characterization as reproductive labor rather than productive labor. The idea of care work as reproductive labor stems from its early formulation as a form of social reproduction within the family that, although outside the market, sustains production by providing the necessary sustenance for current laborers and the necessary socialization for future laborers (Glenn 1992). Glenn’s (1992) work is intersectional in practice if not in name because her historical analysis recognizes the racial stratification of care work that thus serves the matrix of gender and racial oppression. She discusses the reproductive labor performed by Mexican, African American, and Japanese women across the United States that in turn served to maintain the ideal of domesticity and womanhood of White women. She postulates that the failure of the feminist revolution to question the gendered division of domestic work is a leading factor in the racial and national stratification of care work. Furthermore, this work recognizes what later authors highlight about care work: women are recruited for domestic work based on the specific racial stratification of the area. Thus, it is no surprise that domestic work has become a field dominated by immigrant women from the Global South caring in the Global North. Building on Glenn, Duffy (2005) argues that a theoretical framing of care that recognizes the societal division of care labor as organized around the intersections of race, class, gender, and ethnicity, engenders an intersectional definition of reproductive work as care work. Care work studies using intersectionality as a method of analysis (even in instances where that is not explicitly stated) are able to dissect the factors contributing to its low status and highlight issues of recruitment, job security, low wages, and other forms of exploitation that are based on how care work links back to the oppressive regimes of immigration and labor. The transition from women in the family, to racially subordinate groups, to migrant workers is not a great leap. This is a unique aspect of care work recruitment: workers are not hired mainly for their skills and qualifications, but rather based on essentialized ideas of certain groups of women (Arat-Koc 2001; Glenn 1992; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007; Parreñas 2015; Romero 2002).

280  Research handbook on intersectionality Immigrant care workers are often recruited because the conditions of immigration induce them to accept lower wages and remain in these positions longer. In Bourgeault’s (2015, 121) study of immigrant workers in elder care she uses intersectionality to examine two subordinate statuses that contribute to some engaging in care work: immigrant status and age. She points out that “[a]lthough most employers did not cite any specific reasons for recruiting immigrant over domestic care workers, a number did note that immigrant care workers were more likely to stay in their positions because of the difficulty they had in finding other sources of employment.” Bourgeault’s (2015) study further shows the connection between the immigration and care work regimes by outlining how privatization leads to care being relegated to settings that are considered non-professional and unregulated, such as homecare. Similarly, in Hondagneu-Sotelo’s (2007) study of domestic workers in Los Angeles, she found a mostly informal and stratified recruitment system based on race, immigration status, and length of time in country. She found that in the recruitment agencies, “racial stratification within domestic work is matched by stratified employment agencies,” with top-tier agencies serving mostly White nannies, middle-tier agencies serving Latina workers who spoke English and had references, and low-tier agencies serving newer immigrants with less language skills and references (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007, 86). In a similar vein, Marchetti (2014) found continuities between colonialism and the women recruited for domestic work in Europe, adding colonial subject to the trinity of gender, race, and migrant status that structures the recruitment of domestic workers. Other studies also point to how privatization leads to more vulnerability for care workers, arguing that once within the home, governments claim the sovereignty of a home so as to exclude care workers from vital labor protections as well as access to union membership and organizing rights (Armstrong and Armstrong 2005; Fish 2017; Romero and Pérez 2016). Live-in care has been shown to be lower paying and more exploitative than care work in institutions and live-out or day-work (Arat-Koc 2001; Fish 2017; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007). On the other hand, workers in facilities and institutions fare better. In their study on home health aides and nursing assistants, Price-Glynn and Rakovski (2015) found that among low-wage workers those working in facilities were better paid and more likely to receive benefits such as health insurance. Dill (2015, 63) found that wages and benefits differed based on the structure of the organization: “while acute care hospitals and other outpatient settings tend to be hierarchical and have many levels of specialized occupations within each organization, long-term care organizations are typically ‘flat’ in structure … Consequently, long-term care organizations have a higher concentration of the lowest skill occupations.” These findings on wage differentials highlight that, unlike other occupations, care worker wages are very much dependent on the context of care. This is troubling because the context in which a person performs care work is linked to the stratification of the field along racial and immigrant status lines, with racialized immigrants more likely to perform low-status and live-in care work (Duffy, Armenia, and Stecey 2015; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007; Sassen 2004). In short, intersectional analysis shows that the low status of the care workers can also be said to reflect the marginal status of the care recipients (Bourgeault 2015; Cranford 2020). Much like care work performed in homes, the stratification of health care positions in institutions occurs along gender, racial, and immigrant status lines. Describing the proletarianization of Caribbean immigrant nurses in Canada, Flynn (1998) argues that Caribbean immigrant nurses were relegated to subordinate positions regardless of their qualifications. Calliste (1996) found similarly in her study of anti-racism organizing among nurses in the

Intersectionality, citizenship and labor  281 1970s; while White nurses were concentrated in the administrative, specialty, and supervisory positions, Black nurses normally occupied non-leadership staff positions in the least desirable specializations. In this context of stratification, racialized undocumented immigrant women occupy the lowest rung of the ladder in almost all cases. Living at these intersections and also working in a low-status field creates several challenges for these women. The same is true for Indian migrant nurses on temporary work visas who are segregated in bedside nursing and floor nursing work despite having bachelor’s in nursing (BSN) degrees (a requirement of their visas), while US born mostly White nurses with BSN degrees are quickly channeled into administrative positions in hospitals (Banerjee 2022). As is the case with temporary status migrants or otherwise restricted migrants, racialized undocumented women are channeled into low-status, unskilled care work positions by their immigration status (or lack thereof) (Menjívar 2006). Their lack of work authorization and sometimes lack of identity documents often prevents undocumented workers from entering the formal labor market. In the United States, this is especially true in states and localities where specific laws are crafted more stringently than federal laws and seek to punish employers of undocumented workers as well as make undocumented workers more visible for deportation (de Graauw 2017). As such, undocumented women are also more likely to accept live-in care work because of their limited opportunities, a factor the renders them more vulnerable for all the reasons discussed above but also because they are even more hidden from any possible lines of protection (Zarembka 2003). These positions are also lower-paying as well as lack benefits and opportunities for upward mobility (Price-Glynn and Rakovski 2015). Additionally, an undocumented care worker may be more dependent on their employer due to their limited access to employment. This is especially troubling in a field like care work, where dependency, inequality, and uneven power relations seem to be built-in and are certainly exacerbated (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007; Marchetti 2014; Parreñas 2015). Intersectional analysis allows research on care work to move beyond the individual care workers to the system of globalization shaping their interactions on the labor market. It further requires an extension of local intersectionalities to transnational ones. The concept of global care chains refers to the transnational connections created by women migrating to perform care work. Included in this chain are the women who migrate for work, the women who employ the care workers, and the women in the sending countries who fill the care void left by the migrant care workers (Parreñas 2015; Williams 2017). By hiring a migrant care worker rather than challenging the gendered division of labor in their households and the wider society, the women who employ migrant care workers are implicated in the global system of inequality (Boyd 2017; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2004; Glenn 1992). In turn, the women who migrate to perform care in other women’s stead implicate the more marginalized women in their home countries who are unable to migrate. Not only does the global care chain allow men (in both the sending and receiving countries) to continue abdicating responsibility for care but it also creates cleavages for the societies that these women leave, specifically for their children (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2004; Foner 2001; Parreñas 2015). Based on the conditions leading to these transnational exchanges, the unequal formulations they take, and the exploitation that is involved (see Stasiulis and Bakan 1997 on the exploitation that is inherent in globalization), Parreñas (2015) and others argue that the term global care chains is inadequate. Instead, she proposes using the term international division of labor to emphasize the inequalities in both sending and receiving countries, highlighting the fact that this work is a part of a relationship between women on the global market and reminding

282  Research handbook on intersectionality us of the sustained gender division of labor that precipitates these exchanges (Williams 2017). All these facets of globalization and care work lead to intertwined immigration and care work regimes with distinct features based on a country’s location within the global system of inequality and its level of neoliberal indoctrination. These linkages would not be as visible without the intersectional analysis that is necessary for conducting care work research. Without an underlying intersectional analytical lens that also engages a transnational perspective, the experiences of migrant women care workers of color would be monolithized as exploitative with no nuanced understanding of the mechanistic conditions that fester exploitation or how these conditions vary based on the intersections that care workers with precarious citizenship status inhabit. Unpaid Reproductive Work Unpaid reproductive labor is the labor almost always provided by the feminine identified adult members of the family to other members of the family across ages—spouses, children, and the elderly. This form of labor makes it possible for men to be unencumbered by care work and be unfettered in the public sphere. This form of labor has been called (unpaid) reproductive work by feminist scholars (DeVault 1991; Hochschild 2004). In recent times, the sphere of the home and caregiving within the family has been explained through the construct of citizenship and transnationalism (Longman, De Graeve, and Brouckaert 2013; Zajicek et al. 2006). Intimate citizenship has been used to make sense of the personal practices that form “zones of conflict” through public and private discourses and influence the most intimate practices in a relationship (Plummer 2005). Affective citizenship is predicated on the economy of feelings and belongingness to multiple communities, including the nation-state (Johnson 2010; Mookherjee 2005). However, in the private sphere intimate and affective citizenship operates through labor and is mediated via political citizenship along with dimensions of gender, race, class, and nationality. For instance, for undocumented parents of color in the Global North, the denial of their political citizenship status does not only affect their legal status, it also undermines their intimate and affective citizenship practice that includes normative care work within the home as well as the political work of fighting to keep their families together and doing the arduous work toward gaining legal status when possible (Longman, DeGraeve, and Brouckaert 2013; Rodriguez 2018; Romero 2008). In what follows we conduct a meta review of the scholarship on mixed-status immigrant families, families of marriage and sexual migrants, and families of professional temporary workers on visas that implicitly or explicitly adopt an intersectional approach. In this review, we analyse the affordance of intersectional analysis in unraveling nuances of power, complexities, and contextual relationalities— aspects that Misra, Curington, and Green (2021) herald as some of the key pillars of intersectional methodology— in interactions marginalized immigrants and non-citizens have within families, transnationally, and with the matrices of domination that encumber their lives. Mixed Status Immigrant Families Critical intersectional feminist scholarship on undocumented families and mixed-status families in the United States has underlined how differential citizenship status of family members impacts the entire family and has intersectional ramifications for not only family members with various statuses but across families (Dreby 2015; García 2017; Romero 2008). Immigrant

Intersectionality, citizenship and labor  283 mothers of color with legal status who are suddenly relegated to single motherhood because of the deportation of their spouses find themselves hurled into multiple levels of unjust situations of unjust situations. Within the home, she must negotiate the struggles associated with being the sole provider and the caregiver of her children while navigating internal family conflicts that arise because of the new family arrangement (Dreby 2015). In the public sphere, she must navigate paid work and the carceral logic of racialized illegality where due to her race, her legality is already in question (Banerjee, Chacko and Piya 2020; Dreby 2015; García 2017). When Immigration and Citizenship Enforcement (ICE) targets racialized Latinx men in their work sites leaving the women and children to do the emotional, political and legal work of processing family separation (Rodriguez 2018; Romero 2008), or when global migration of labor creates transnational families enforcing transnational parenting arrangements which are gendered, raced, and classed (Menjívar, Abrego, and Schmalzbauer 2016; Montes 2013; Parreñas 2015), the unpaid labor of caregiving becomes a regime constructed within the bounds of citizenry and by intersectional matrices that creates unequal families within the host societies and transnationally. Families with liminal legal status, particularly undocumented or mixed status, are in the constant throes of negotiating questions of political citizenship with intimate citizenship. The State’s enforcement of legal migration, surveillance, and criminalization of families without legal status is the way that citizenship becomes salient in the context of unpaid labor in families. It is important to note here that almost all feminist scholars interrogating the linkages between the citizenship regimes and reproductive labor in mixed-status immigrant families have adopted an intersectional framework both methodologically and theoretically even when they did not explicitly say they utilized an intersectional approach. For instance, Rodriguez’s (2018) work on adult children in undocumented households that epistemologically sits at the intersections of legal status, class, and race allowed the author to simultaneously unpack the structural, affective, and interpersonal relational consequences of mixed-status relationships within the families. Intersectionality necessarily tackles complexities of entangled lived experiences, so in the absence of an intersectional epistemological orientation the research possibly would only have explored one of these aspects. Romero (2008) and Dreby (2010) both explicitly engage intersectionality as their analytic framework. While Romero’s work is an analysis of immigration raids in the United States as the statist enunciation of the intersections of race, class, gender, and ethnicity as the pivot for these raids, Dreby (2010) takes a transnational approach to intersectionality. She focuses on the gendered and classed division of care labor that ensues when parents and children live on two sides of the border and what it means for the everyday lives of the parents and children. The transnational approach to intersectionality here affords an analysis where it is hard to separate how gender, class, ethnicity, and legal status operates within transnational households. This approach also accounts for the standpoint of the researcher and demonstrates in the most nuanced form how unpaid reproductive labor is shaped by racist, gendered, and classist border policies and citizenship regime. Marriage Migrants and Sexual Migrants Another form of mixedstatus families are marriage migrants or sexual migrants (Acosta 2013; Adur 2018; Brainer 2022; Carrillo 2018; Longo 2018; Scheuths 2012). Adur (2018) in interrogating how queer immigrants of color negotiate security and safety in the United States shows the transnational raced/classed/gendered/sexualized vulnerabilities experienced

284  Research handbook on intersectionality by documented and undocumented groups of queer migrants. By deploying an intersectional lens, Adur shows the racialized sexual minoritization experienced by queer immigrants at various levels—within their co-ethnic communities, and natal families, with intimate partners, especially if they are White and citizens, within the asylum apparatus and within the mostly White mainstream and White LGBTQ+ communities in the United States. In a similar vein, Brainer’s research (2022), on mixed-status binational queer and trans couples in the United States based on interviews with couples and narratives collected from online forums about their migration and long-distance relationship stories exposes US family immigration as a colonial and racial project. Brainer shows the mechanism through which a queer migrant is denied access into the United States is through denial of their subjectivities, making a case that the gender of the applicant in conjunction with their class and sexual identity shapes the resources they can access that makes their migration possible or not. Brainer, through an intersectional epistemological focus, shows how migration based on marriage for queer people when one person is a US citizen and another a non-citizen becomes a cipher for marriage equality (post the overturning of DOMA—Defense of Marriage Act—defining marriage as between one man and one woman). She explores this from her own standpoint as a queer femme academic previously married to a transmasculine, non-citizen person of color having to navigate the US immigration system. Her inquiry into the family migration law as gendered, heteronormative, and colonial project, manifested in the dismissal of the appeals of non-citizen trans (as opposed to cis) and LGBTQ+ individuals (as opposed to heterosexuals) to migrate to be with their partners often to provide care for their conjugal families in the United States both by the State and the US citizenry as displayed in online discourse. This work points to the ripple effect and aftershocks of a discriminatory law (DOMA) and how it undermines and delegitimizes right to equality under family immigration law for queer couples where one partner is a non-citizen (often of color) in the United States. Other research on mixed-status families that are not queer has also shown how marriage migration is a deeply gendered and racialized experience (Longo 2018; Scheuths 2012). This understanding of marriage migration shows deployment of a gendered criteria for love, conferring more sexual and legal privileges to (White) men citizens when they pursue young, foreign, often women of color for marriage as opposed to women, who if they fall in love with non-citizen men of color in another country are seen as either gullible or vulnerable to predatory men and individuals. They are blamed for not being able to control their emotions and thereby jeopardizing US borders (Longo 2018). The citizenship regime then enforced a gendered, racialized, and heteronormative regime of control on marriage migrants creating unpaid emotional and judicial labor for both partners in these families—labor that is differentially experienced by gender and sexuality of the migrant. Scholars of sexuality and migration like Acosta (2013) and Luibhéid (2013) studying non-normative families deploy intersectionality centrally to explore how heteronormative configurations of the citizenship regime monolithize and marginalize women who do not fit into the statist heteropatriarchal conceptualization of families, whether these are pregnant asylum seekers (Luibhéid 2013) or Latina lesbians (Acosta 2013). Acosta’s use of intersectional approach is noteworthy because she disrupts the notion that LGBTQ+ Latinas are disconnected from their natal families expressing how lesbians “do family” (do the emotional labor of remaining connected with families) transnationally with their biological families and in the United States with their chosen families while navigating the interconnections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship in their transnational lives. This research is an excellent example where without an intersectional approach

Intersectionality, citizenship and labor  285 the analysis would be depleted of the relational and complex context that is embedded within this work. Again, the corpus of critical work on marriage and sexual migration that adopts a transnational intersectional approach interrogates the assumptions of equality under law. This multiplicative approach unravels how deep-seated matrices of structural oppression are entrenched in the alleged neutrality of the immigration legal systems that burden those beholden by these laws with the labor of fighting this system that is stacked against them. Families of Legal Professional Temporary Workers A group less discussed in this context are families of legal professional temporary workers who live in the United States on temporary visa status where their spouses are legally prohibited from working for pay for years, creating what Banerjee (2022) has called a state imposed dependence structure with women often forced to perform all of the unpaid work of household and caregiving labor given that they are legally bound in the home (Banerjee 2022; Banerjee and Rincón 2019). Mothers in these families often engaged in what Banerjee calls “transcultural cultivation,” which has them engage in a form of middle-class parenting that involves raising their children wholesomely in two cultures—that of the home country as well as that of the host country. Such parenting, Banerjee argues, is predicated on the dependent status of the mother as it involves intensive mothering that is gendered, classed, and framed by the legal status of the mother. The families on these visas are almost always of color and the legally dependent spouse in most cases is a woman, making this an intersectional issue and necessitating an intersectional transnational approach. When the dependent spouse is not a woman and is a man, it adds gendered conflicts of different forms within the household forcing the woman breadwinner to often endure transnational familial arrangements or contend with the deep gendered scars imprinted in and by the men who struggle with the sense of emasculation because of their dependent status (Banerjee 2015; George 2005). These are again examples of the ways in which the intersectional approach to citizenship and labor regime points to the heteropatriarchal orientations of the United States as a state—a state that enforces legal unpaid reproductive labor on a dependent (feminized) spouse of immigrant workers to govern the composite labor of the families of economic migrants. However, despite the oppressiveness of the intersecting regimes, there is space for subversion and agency available, much like the care workers. For instance, highly educated dependent spouses, especially women spouses of temporary knowledge workers in the United States who are not legally allowed to work, have been shown to both organize for their rights as well as engage in subversive self-employment using their class and gender resources (Banerjee 2019). In the study of subversive self-employment, through intersectional analysis that entailed exploring experiences of dependent spouses at the intersections of gender and class as a pair of matrices and gender and legal status as another pair of matrices, the results show that women often engaged in under the table self-employment risking deportation, not to earn money but to gain back their dignity that they had lost as legal dependents and also as resistance against the immigration regime. This type of methodological approach to intersectionality allowed Banerjee to deconstruct another pillar of intersectional methodology as explicated by Misra, Curington, and Green (2021) each aspect of dependence in the paired matrices of oppressional experience to unpack the possibilities of hidden subversion. By introducing the concept of “doing family,” Acosta (2013) demonstrates how Latina lesbians navigated race, class, gender,

286  Research handbook on intersectionality sexuality, and legal status in the United States in the same way and also explored the possibilities of agency where apparently there was none. Opening up intersectionality conceptually and methodologically not only allows for exploration of oppressive power within the axes of social location but also to unbox the possibilities of agentic and subversive power within those social locations for those who are marginalized.

CONCLUSION Questions of citizenship make intersectional analysis transnational, expanding the horizons of intersectional analysis both methodologically and theoretically. A transnational approach to intersectionality therefore troubles the category of unpaid reproductive labor as much as it does paid care work. Underscoring intersectionality in the scholarship of the paid care work regime shows the intertwined nature of immigration, race, gender, and care work regimes that are embedded in the needs of the global care chain. Research on migrant families across the spectrum of legality has illustrated the ways in which unpaid reproductive labor within the family is framed by citizenship, transnational relationalities, gender, sexualities, race, class, and paid care work. In this chapter, as we have chronicled, studies in paid care work and unpaid reproductive work that account for intersectionality and/or studies that are concerned with the intersectional experiences of migrant workers address the questions of either how the citizenship regime or the labor regime exacerbates other intersectional oppression for people who migrate for work. Appraising these bodies of literature to unravel the simultaneous workings of the labor and the citizenship regime as they interact with the intersectional matrix of oppressive experiences, we argue that without deploying an intersectional citizenship-labor regime lens to understand the migration of labor, we will work under the assumption that labor and citizenship regimes are distinct and disparate. This supposition leads to omissions and erasures in accounting for the intersectionally oppressive experience of immigrants who simultaneously inhabit the citizenship regime and the labor regime. Our analysis has not afforded us the scope to analyse the roadblocks in the use of intersectionality as a method because the studies reviewed in this area to make our argument mostly used intersectionality as an underlying framework instead of a methodological tool. Studies that explicitly used intersectionality as an approach almost always offered profound and new theoretical generalizations, whether using the concept of “doing family” (Acosta 2013) or “subversive self-employment” (Banerjee 2019) or “transcultural cultivation” (Banerjee 2022) or immigration raids as intersectional pivot (Romero 2008) or transnational division of labor (Dreby 2010). Deploying an intersectional citizenship-labor regime lens also challenges the deep-seated assumptions in mainstream studies of migration and labor that single out discrete variable-based analysis as enough to understand how inequity operates for immigrant workers. An intersectional lens analysis helps us see the interconnection of oppression that is complex, comparative, context specific and allows for the deconstruction of (labor and citizenship) regimes that wield enough power to reshape life courses of the most vulnerable residing in the regime. Our analysis of unpaid reproductive labor also disrupts the myth that families of professional migrant workers are shielded from the wounds of the intersectional citizenship-labor regime while also illustrating how an understanding of the intersectional oppressions creates spaces

Intersectionality, citizenship and labor  287 and possibilities of resistance that in time may dismantle the regimes of oppressive power. The dual intersectional regime of paid and reproductive migrant labor lens also affords possibilities of resistance and change as those on the margins navigating these regimes become aware of these regimes and resist them to destabilize the hardened inequities underlying them. For instance, the creation of an activist migrant domestic worker’s movement in the context of specific nation-states led to the first ever formal recognition of domestic work as labor and granting of right to protection and global employment standards for care and domestic workers by the United Nations’ International Labour Organization (Fish 2017). This is an example of the change that is possible when labor injustices are seen as part of the citizenship regime and injustices concerning citizenship are seen as part of the labor regime as both are circumscribed by intersectional inequities.

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18. Gender-based violence and citizenship in a migration context1 Evangelia Tastsoglou and Lori Wilkinson

INTRODUCTION This chapter presents a feminist intersectional analysis of exclusions faced by migrant and refugee women (MRW) in Canada who are surviving gender-based violence (GBV). We argue that intersecting discriminations, originating in reduced rights/incomplete citizenship exacerbate vulnerability to, or experiences of, gender-based violence for migrant and refugee women thereby reproducing a diminished citizenship for them in terms of social, economic, and political participation and sense of belonging. Our understanding of citizenship involves a dynamic interrelationship of economic, social, political, civil, and psychological dimensions (Dobrowolsky and Tastsoglou 2006) and an emphasis on citizenship as “practice” (Abraham et al. 2010). Our methodology involves applying heuristically a “situated intersectionality” (Yuval-Davis 2015) approach to illustrate how the exclusions in the lives of MRW operate on the macro, meso, and micro levels. It is the relationship of these multi-level intersecting exclusions, “exclusionary intersectionalities” (Kiwan 2021) to GBV, coupled with an assessment of what this means for MRW citizenship, that we are zeroing on in this chapter. We claim that a multi-level, situated intersectionality approach is necessary to understand the forms of GBV that MRW experience, how these forms re(produce) vulnerabilities and aggravate experiences of GBV thereby further reducing their incomplete citizenship, and how some MRW and allies challenge the obstacles raised by exclusionary intersectionalities and develop resistances in their “practice” of citizenship (Abraham et al. 2010). This agency points to the fault lines of existing legal and political citizenship notions and suggests, on a substantive level, new paths for understanding post-national citizenship, and, on a methodological level, the need to adopt a multi-scalar, contextual intersectionality analysis. Our research focuses on Canada and our data derive from 43 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with “key informants” who are service providers, policy makers, immigrant and refugee advocates and others in direct contact with MRW. After a brief overview of our theoretical and intersectional methodological approach, we analyse the macro, meso, and micro GBV layers in the migration/refugee context of Canada and draw the citizenship implications. We end by discussing the methodological challenges that we faced and offer some commentary on future directions for intersectional research.

THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS Before we discuss the intersectional framework and its application to understanding the citizenship of MRW survivors of GBV a short discussion of citizenship theory is needed because it is a central feature of our analysis. As Romero (2018) reminds us, social inequality 292

Gender-based violence and citizenship in a migration context   293 cannot be understood without including citizenship status, linked with gender, race, class, sexual denomination, disability and age as some of the necessary characteristics used in an intersectional framework. Beyond citizenship as status generating social divisions intersecting with others, we also understand citizenship as ongoing practices and social justice struggles to broaden and create more inclusive rights of participation (Glenn 2000; Isin and Wood 1999). Drawing upon the ideas of Yuval-Davis (2015) we use a “situated intersectionality” approach to first understand the precarity/vulnerability relating to MRW experiencing GBV. We end this section by brief definitions of our understanding of the associated concepts of GBV and precarity/vulnerability. The development of the legal and political concept of citizenship has a long and contested history (Lister 2003) with gender, racialization, class, and other forms of social inequalities inflecting differently the status of citizens in various times and places (Dobrowolsky and Tastsoglou 2006). Legal and political citizenship status involves an assortment of duties and rights between individuals and states that vary over time. Under ideal conditions of equality and democracy, individuals enjoy full rights to participate in the state of which they are citizens and enable them to live as “full” and “competent” members of that society (Marshall 1964; Turner 1993). However, there are distinct boundaries even among citizens and non-meritocratic but clearly delineated group memberships. Such boundaries are not visible at first sight and often hide a range of “others” with various “degrees of citizenship,” rendering citizenship “nodal” (Stasiulis and Bakan 1997). In this context, for example, the accomplishment of formal equality for women is still accompanied by “incomplete,” “ambivalent,” “fragmented,” or “partial” citizenship as it is undermined by sexism, racism, and other forms of social divisions (Arat-Koc 1992; Parreñas 2001; Tastsoglou 2010; Werbner and Yuval-Davis 1999; Yuval-Davis 1993). To expand the boundaries of citizenship inclusion in the collectivity of the state, those “others” have historically engaged in social justice struggles, and transformative social practices in civil society (Isin and Wood 1999). These are the practices of citizenship that contest the legal/political status of “citizens” and ultimately aim to extend the boundaries of citizenship. These practices of citizenship are dynamic, shifting and fluid processes, involving – beyond legal, civic, and political rights and responsibilities – socio-economic, cultural, and psychological dimensions that develop differently in specific contexts and are subject to non-linear change over time (Dobrowolsky and Tastsoglou 2006; Werbner and Yuval-Davis 1999). This history calls for a sociological understanding of citizenship beyond formal rights and responsibilities, but as actual participation, interaction, and interdependence beyond the state level and include the plurality and diversity of communities (Abraham et al. 2010). Citizenship as practice and process signals an ongoing contestation of the legal and political boundaries, with variously under-privileged groups in solidarity with fully entitled citizens, demanding deeper inclusion in the collectivity of “citizens” for social justice (Glenn 2000). In the 20th and 21st centuries, states are caught in an ongoing contradiction: on the one hand, they increasingly prioritize transnational market relations that disrupt the spatial context for legal/political citizenship status and point in the direction of socio-economic practices being central to citizenship. On the other, their borders are policed in ways that reinvigorate territorial identities. Furthermore, states are paradoxically engaged in transnational cooperation for border control against unauthorized flows (McNevin 2011). At the same time, within states, socio-economic policies create new legal categories of individuals (e.g., a trusted tourist, an unauthorized migrant). The embodied illegality or semi-legality of some creates a

294  Research handbook on intersectionality “forced invisibility” (Angulo-Pasel 2019) of (their) rights (entitlements and protection rights). It further marginalizes non-status or precarious status women, children, and various minorities, rendering them more vulnerable to sexual and gender-based violence. As the legality of group categories becomes the outer boundary of access to rights for individuals and groups, the state then becomes complicit in legally condoning violence and constructing violent relationships (Angulo-Pasel 2019). Not only do state immigration and citizenship policies create divisions and hierarchies among migrants and citizens shaping politics of belonging, but they often reflect already existing intersections of gender, race/ethnicity, nationality, religion and class (Ellermann 2020). An additional complexity has emerged in the last twenty years because legal precarity (i.e. the absence or loss of legal status) no longer characterizes only undocumented and temporary migrants, but has expanded to include certain permanent resident and citizen statuses which have consequently become eroded (Ellermann 2020). Intersectionality provides a schema for understanding the interaction and outcomes of different forms of disadvantage, including race, sexuality, gender, and citizenship status. Moreover, it provides a particular model of how these aspects of social identity and location converge – whether at the level of subjectivity, everyday life, in culture, or in the institutional practices of state and other bodies (Grabham et al. 2008). Grounded in Black feminist scholarship and activism and formally coined in 1989 by Black legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality has garnered significant attention in the field of public policy and other disciplines/fields of study. The potential of intersectionality, however, has not been fully realized in policy, largely due to the challenges of operationalization. Recently some scholars and activists began to advance conceptual clarity and guidance for intersectionality policy applications; yet a pressing need remains for knowledge development in relation to empirical work that demonstrates how intersectionality can improve public policy (Collins 2019; Yuval-Davis 2015). There is an interrelationship of violence and intersectionality: violence is shaped by social positions and gender orders, namely, multiple intersecting inequalities engender the vulnerability and precarious states that lead to GBV which, in turn, reinforces the social divisions and marginalization of GBV survivors. Consequently, there cannot be a sound understanding of GBV and its mechanisms without including intersectional components of gender inequality (Strid and Verloo 2019). However, there cannot be a clear understanding of GBV in a migration context without a “context-specific analysis to reveal the specific, varying effects produced by different intersectional configurations” (Reilly et al. 2022, 39). Such analysis allows us, on the one hand, to acknowledge group and even individual difference without identity politics and essentializing vulnerabilities and, on the other, to recognize universal situational vulnerability and how it may be reinforced or reduced by institutions and states. It is this understanding that Yuval-Davis’s “situated intersectionality” aims to achieve. This type of intersectional approach is ultimately a complex social stratification theory that applies to everyone, not just marginalized groups. Yuval-Davis identifies three interrelated facets of social analysis at the micro level: people’s positioning along socio-economic grids of power; their experiences and sense of identity and belonging; and their normative value systems. This micro-level analysis needs to be placed in “geographic, social and temporal locations” (Yuval-Davis 2015, 95). More specifically, the researcher needs to pay specific attention at the macro level to state governance of political boundaries, to production and distribution processes, to political pro-

Gender-based violence and citizenship in a migration context   295 jects of belonging and, at the meso level, to familial, intergenerational, and informal networks concerned with “social, biological and symbolic reproduction” (2015, 98). Our analysis applies heuristically Yuval-Davis’s blueprint. In our research design, we paid specific attention to intersectionalities on macro, meso, and micro levels and their impacts as far as vulnerability to /aggravation of GBV in the lives of MRW. The challenge of GBV is recognized as an issue for the state and for the whole community. Women’s rights as citizens continue to be undermined by violence, specifically GBV. The persistence of violence against women is implicated in the sexual politics of citizenship (Franzway 2016). However, this recognition does not go far enough as the state does not place all its citizens on a par regarding rights. Usual obstacles to accessing services form the most common impediments to citizenship (Voolma 2018). The present chapter is based on empirical material deriving from interviews with key informants who are speaking about their professional knowledge and perceptions of protection from and experience with GBV of MRW in Canada. The analysis that follows should be contextualized first in the geographic, social, and temporal location of Canada’s structures of settler-colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and racialization, shaped, in turn, by a historical international environment. These structures and their intersections are illustrated in various areas of public policy such as anti-terrorism and asylum. These areas of public policy interface with domestic and global forces, both carrying gendered implications (Abu-Laban and Nath 2020). The unique benefits of a situated intersectional approach to the citizenship of MRW survivors of GBV are that we can understand, first all the forms of GBV that MRW experience, second how these forms re(produce) or aggravate GBV experiences, thus further reducing “competent participation” in society, and third how and under what conditions, despite the obstacles, MRW may resist and co-create social citizenship practices. A final note on gender-based violence (GBV) and precarity/vulnerability in this chapter. Starting from the feminist common understanding that violence or its threat is part and parcel of the concepts of gender and gender inequality, in operational terms we understand GBV as encompassing all forms of violence – physical, sexual, psychological, economic – directed against a person because of that person’s sex, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity and gender expression. This definition is in line with that of international organizations such as UNHCR (2021). In the context of migration, we view GBV as a continuum taking different forms in various stages of the journey, and encompassing not just interpersonal expressions but also lack or failure of protection mechanisms at the local, national and international levels (Freedman et al. 2022). While the many and multi-faceted theoretical dimensions of precarity and vulnerability are outside the scope of this chapter (for a discussion see Freedman et al. 2022; Reilly et al. 2022), our own operational use of precarity refers to the politically induced precariousness or insecurity brought about by barriers preventing access or full access to social and political supports and services by those victimized (Butler 2009). Similarly, our operational understanding of vulnerability refers to experienced oppression that is structurally and discursively produced (Reilly et al., 2022).

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THE INTERSECTIONALITY OF GBV IN A MIGRATION CONTEXT: IMPLICATIONS FOR CITIZENSHIP Understanding Intersectionally: How MRW Vulnerability to GBV is Generated at Systemic Levels Drawing on their professional experiences, our key informants provided insider information on how systemic obstacles worked to undermine protection. Using semi-structured interviews, we analysed our macro-level findings in this regard in terms of systemic fault lines, prejudices and discriminatory practices, and systems knowledge navigation. Systemic fault lines Systemic gaps and inconsistencies are present in Canada’s existing frameworks for addressing GBV, including that experienced by women born in Canada. Some of these systemic challenges for MRW include organizations without the capacity to handle situations involving GBV against immigrants or non-Canadian citizens, and a lack of resources available for organizations dealing with GBV. These instances are examples of how macro forces can be understood as barriers to support, using intersectionality as a framework. For example, many of these service providing organizations do not have adequate funding, and staff feel overworked as a result. KI31, one of our key informants, explained how these limitations affect the quality of service they can provide. I’m one mental health professional in a group of seventy staff, and we work with thousands of clients, like I can’t do it all … we’re all feeling stretched, or our resources are getting maxed.

The status of MRW can pose significant barriers in accessing GBV services, especially those that involve the law. Women without status fear the potential consequences if they contact such services. In most cases women who do not have a legal status will forgo contacting services due to fears of being deported, being arrested, or having their children taken away. Although these problems are present for all immigrant women, those without status face additional challenges, making them more vulnerable. KI25 explains: I think that, you know, other barriers are especially for non-status women are fear of what might happen if they reach out in terms of their own kind of precarity. So, you know, fear of deportation. When we’re thinking about women who are experiencing violence, who are in danger and want to reach out to the police, that’s definitely that the barriers are related to the potential for … being arrested themselves, of having their immigration status interrogated, or having child protection services become involved.

If MRW are dealing with GBV and lose their immigration status, they end up in a precarious situation without access to necessities because of designing services that are not based on an intersectional understanding of their vulnerability, which amounts to a systematic exclusion. K18 highlighted this gap in our current system: They can’t go through income assistance, they are not eligible, they can’t apply for BC housing, they can’t use medical services, and if in that situation when their sponsorship is either being considered or when they are in limbo, if they actually apply for medical services, that information is passed on to the immigration … Yah, so, you have systems here, criminal system and immigration system, and, you

Gender-based violence and citizenship in a migration context   297 know, family law system, not talking to each other and this is what I am saying that you need these things in place for a society to function.

Moreover, migrant women without status are excluded from some services because many settlement and anti-violence organizations do not serve women without status. This presents many challenges for those without status, as many of these services are essential especially for newcomers, such as education and language classes that enable them to communicate effectively. Denying services to women without status is a common problem, which extends beyond educational courses and includes work permits, income assistance, and healthcare. KI38 argues that having migration services tied to status marginalizes and excludes migrants from vital services and, “pushes people further to the fringes … marginalizes people … excludes them from essential vital services.” Additionally, service providers expressed concerns about clients not having access to information, which also prevents access to services. The issue is linked to systematic exclusion or a gap in the services that impact experience at the micro level. For example, language and cultural barriers can be obstacles for women’s understanding of available services or prevent them from accessing those services. Many organizations are not equipped to deal with MRW and lack the necessary accommodations to support them, such as interpretation services. In many cases, the competition for interpretation services available to Legal Aid may result in an available interpreter in the courtroom, but not for preliminary meetings with MRW. Similarly, if women wish to consult a doctor, they are expected to provide their own interpretation services. To examine this accessibility as both a national and a local issue, intersectional research methods require collecting data to analyse the problem at both the meso and macro levels. Even if MRW become aware of services, the services, and resources themselves are not always available in the languages they speak, which is exacerbated by limited interpretation services. KI42 specifically highlighted the unequal access of services to migrant and refugee women compared to those born in Canada: because they’re not familiar with our system, and often there’s a language barrier, and these services don’t offer interpreters. You know, if a woman in Quebec needs to meet with a lawyer and she has a Legal Aid mandate to pay for that lawyer, an interpreter will be provided in the courtroom, but all of the meetings that she has to have with her lawyer in order to explain her story and write up the initial paperwork and make you know what she needs and what she wants from the lawyer clear, she’s expected to bring a friend or somebody who can interpret for her.

In some extreme circumstances, women do not have access to services if they do not speak English or French, as is the case with emergency intervention in certain provinces. Since this is a legal process, an interpreter is not allowed, and clients must speak for themselves. This is severely limiting for MRW who do not speak any English and French and are therefore not able to access the emergency intervention at all. It is problematic even for MRW who do speak English or French as their second, third or even fourth language. Prejudices and discriminatory practices Stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination contribute to GBV vulnerability for migrant and refugee women. Stigmas continue to shape how immigrants are perceived, especially if they are a visible minority or come from a different ethnocultural background. This, too, is a macro-level problem in Canadian society. As KI5 put it, “Well, like I mean most of them

298  Research handbook on intersectionality are, are black or brown. So, you’re dealing with racial kind of discrimination for sure.” When MRW seek help, preconceived notions of their cultures and systemic racialized stereotypes can have significant influence on whether they receive support or not. Migrants and refugees often experience racism and discrimination in public and when dealing with service providers, such as in shelters. Moreover, it is particularly crucial when service providers themselves identify such attitudes and practices. Another common stereotype is that GBV only happens to certain people, such as those who face greater marginalization. This stereotype can result in ignoring the violence occurring to those who do not meet expected criteria since there is the belief that GBV does not happen to all people. In addition, the myth that GBV victims somehow deserve it because of the way they dress or the color of their skin continues to be embedded in institutions such as police departments and the criminal justice system, which favor white, middle-class, Canadian-born women as victims worthy of receiving help. KI25 provided insight on how this affects MRW: if you were to disclose violence, it is often dependent on how close you are to adhering to that stereotypical, that stereotypical sort of story, including, you know, being all of the things that we think about for a sexual assault victim, for instance, that you’re white, that you are not wearing anything revealing.

There are also myths concerning the stereotypical victim based on the country of origin. There is a preconception that women seeking asylum must come from war-torn countries experiencing human rights violations, yet women from all countries experience GBV. The Canadian immigration system does not recognize the risk when coming from a democratic society like Canada with laws preventing GBV. The country-of-origin argument is based on a “culturalist” interpretation of violence, namely, that GBV is exogenous, coming only from other “violent cultures” and countries, which feeds into an anti-immigration discourse (Freedman et al. 2022; Standke-Erdmann et al. 2022). Another important element of stereotypical thinking surrounding GBV is that it occurs in the “private sphere” of families and relations. This construction of GBV leads to silence and a reluctance to intervene. Although this conception has been challenged and is gradually changing, this may not be the case everywhere. MRW may feel that they need to protect the family name and may not want to confess that they are experiencing GBV. Similarly, there may be feelings of shame associated with experiencing GBV that prevent women from wanting other people to know their situation. In addition, certain forms of intervention may be unfamiliar or unacceptable, depending on countries of origin. For instance, counseling is not something many women want to pursue, and as KI5 described, “you talk to somebody in your family, or you keep silent. But you don’t go and talk for an hour…” Systems knowledge navigation Another challenge facing MRW is related to a lack of contextual, cultural knowledge on how to navigate the systems to access support. KI25 describes the difficulty experienced: It’s really confusing. We know that reaching out for support, or reporting gender-based violence, no matter what, is a really, really vulnerable and really challenging thing to do. And then putting all these other factors, kind of layering all these other factors on top of it, I think makes it even more difficult and sometimes understanding, you know, like the differences between the different organizations, and what each one does, who you should call, and what you should know, what it is you’re looking for, can be a bit overwhelming.

Gender-based violence and citizenship in a migration context   299 Cultural misunderstandings can also make navigating the systems more complex. Depending on her country of origin, MRW may not be familiar with certain services or concepts used in Canada. Without having someone explain these services, women may be further prevented from seeking support. The following is a micro-level example demonstrating how differential macro- and meso- level cultural and institutional knowledge results in interpersonal misunderstandings. It is only through an intersectional analysis that such misunderstandings can be understood and dispelled. K18 relates working with a client whose husband had already been arrested and charged, she accidentally discovered that the client did not share the same taken-for-granted everyday knowledge: I was just kind of brought in like a month later to help her get a permit and then it was just kind of by happenstance, I said so what shelter are you staying at, and she said, “what’s a shelter’?

Concepts that Canadians perceive as basic can be confusing to someone who does not speak a different language or does not have prior experience with available services. KI40 explained that the very nature of free services “doesn’t exist in every country, and most countries do not have anything called free services.” There are challenges in navigating a new country, from choosing an area to live or raise your family to accessing public transit. Navigating a new community also poses additional challenges for MRW. In many cases, women are preoccupied with all the other areas of their life that navigating the systems to deal with GBV becomes secondary. Understanding Intersectionally: How Vulnerability to GBV Operates in the Lives of Migrant and Refugee Women In applying heuristically Yuval-Davis’s (2015) “situated intersectionality” in understanding GBV and vulnerability to GBV in the lives of MRW we moved next to a micro-level intersectional analysis of data collected from the key informants who are interfacing with MRW. We began by identifying commonalities between MRW and Canadian-born women so that we could isolate and focus on aspects that are unique in the MRW experience. Our semi-structured interview questions to key informants included inquiries about differences in their perceptions of the GBV experiences and accessibility to related services between MRW and Canadian-born women. Despite many differences, there are similarities between MRW and Canadian-born women who are experiencing GBV. Both Canadian and MRW tend to not want to leave their relationship but only to stop the violence. Unfortunately, both MRW and Canadian women share some of the same impediments in trying to accomplish that. MRW however face additional unique challenges posed by their legal status, which increases their vulnerability to GBV. In this section, intersectional analysis is used to identify and examine the forms or types of vulnerability unique to MRW and how this reduces protection and the women’s ability to address GBV in their lives. The threat of withdrawing sponsorship is a reoccurring theme found in MRW experiences when their spouse is the sponsor in their immigration status. Women tend to stay in dangerous situations out of fear of their spouse withdrawing their sponsorship. KI2 described sponsorship being used as a weapon against these women:

300  Research handbook on intersectionality When women are with precarious immigration status, then it’s incredibly risky, then they might stay in a situation and, and sometimes risking their own physical safety for much longer, because sometimes, if their partner is their sponsor they can, you know, threaten to withdraw sponsorship …

The abusive spouse’s power over the dependent wife and her fear of his threats are based on the woman’s legal/institutional precarity, which results in MRW not seeking help when needed. Out of fear of losing their sponsorship, they might forego calling law enforcement or seek medical help if hurt. In some instances, MRW are under the impression that their partner can have them deported. Husbands may take control of the wife’s legal documents. KI27 summarized the importance of MRW understanding their rights and having accurate information concerning their immigration status. You know, the partner will say, if you denounce, or if you accuse me of conjugal violence … if you, you know, press charges against me, you’re going back to where we came from.

Lack of or inaccurate information plays a key role in preventing migrant and refugee women from seeking help when needed. A micro-level analysis of intersectionality is crucial in understanding dynamics at the individual/family level. Spousal threats of deportation are not valid grounds. In the absence of a legal immigration status however, a migrant woman can ask for a temporary residence permit (TRP) and a work permit for six months until she decides what she wishes to do next. More recently, the permit fee has been waived.2 When MRW do not speak the language or do not understand legal system, their vulnerability to GBV increases. Ensuring access to accurate information and resources is key to securing their safety and reducing their fears in seeking help and protection from GBV. The threat of losing children makes many women reluctant to report GBV. Women often fear that they might be arrested or deported if their immigration status is interrogated and may also involve child protective services. These threats are compounded when the women do not speak the language or understand local laws. Using a micro-level intersectional analysis is needed to understand the precarity of the women’s situation. These points were made apparent in the previous excerpt by KI27 and further added the other threat of losing her children, “the partner will say, if you denounce, or if you accuse me of conjugal violence, they’re taking our kids.” The threat of children being taken away is often made by partners who instigate domestic violence. This threat places MRW between the perceived risk of losing their children or staying in an unhealthy relationship. As KI42 explained: they start to doubt their ability as a mom, doubt, like if I leave, I won’t be able to provide for my children, I won’t be able to protect them, we’ll end up on the street, they’ll take my kids away from me.

However, if a couple or the woman divulge that the violence is occurring in front of the children, counselors are obligated to involve children’s protective services. This knowledge can discourage women from seeking professional help. Although, women may perceive the risk to be greater than it is, it can be a very real threat. As KI26 stated, “Children’s Aid has a disproportionate history of taking away racialized kids, right?” The threat to family members back home: occasionally, though less frequently in the experiences of our key informants, there may be other transnational, coercive and even criminal contexts involving threats against loved ones in the country of origin, which contribute to

Gender-based violence and citizenship in a migration context   301 MRW staying in violent environments. For example, KI32 mentioned that “we actually had somebody in Africa whose husband’s family killed somebody of the wife’s family to send a message … um then there’s nothing we can do about that.” Cultural/social unwillingness: while the extent and seriousness of domestic violence is increasingly coming into focus globally, there is still a certain denial or cultural/social unwillingness to address it, or worse to “blame-the-victim.” This theme emerged as we trace the intersectional effects of macro-level cultural differences on micro-level experiences. KI30 describes how GBV is, in various degrees, “underground” in Western societies. This general attitude affects not just MRW but survivors of domestic violence in general: this undergroundness that we have with domestic violence, like no one wants to talk about domestic violence. When people do talk about domestic violence, people don’t know how to help or what to do or what to say.

The issue becomes further complicated when dealing with MRW who come from backgrounds and societies with long periods of involvement with war, drug violence, or settler colonial violence. In such contexts, domestic violence often is becoming a secondary concern and possibly concealed from public view. Such perceptions of domestic violence in other cultural/institutional contexts can result in MRW being unaware of their rights in Canada. As KI30 described: I mean some, I don’t think there’s a culture in the world that really thinks that domestic violence is ok … but there’s just, maybe, larger boys’ groups that are more complicit, and so it becomes more accepted in male culture, or it’s much more underground, there’s not as many supports, there’s not as good laws and regulations.

Experiencing the marginalization as MRW makes seeking help against GBV more challenging. As KI30 said: For women who have experienced domestic violence and they’ve been kind of hiding it for a long time, it’s really difficult for them to talk about it, and then, I think, for migrant and refugee women who feel marginalized already and are afraid to admit then that there’s another problem.

MRW might also feel that issues such as domestic violence can be handled without external help, as KI1 noted, “sometimes just that you know whatever happens we’ll deal with it within our own community, we don’t need any outside help.” The fear of being deported if domestic violence is reported inadvertently works to overshadow the fear of harm from domestic violence. To understand this choice of self-help within the community (or no help), an intersectional micro-level lens of linking the fear to the individual decision is necessary. Understanding Intersectionally: Predisposing Social Factors In Yuval-Davis’s “situated intersectionality” research approach, two of the three lines of inquiry aim at understanding MRW’s experiences at the micro level by placing them within a socio-economic power grid and identifying the relevant value systems. To understand this power grid, MRW experiences are examined with reference to those of Canadian-born populations. While commonalities that render Canadian-born and MRW vulnerable to GBV exist, there are several factors that are unique or more likely to occur among MRW, which means greater risks for them as well as delays in a timely or appropriate intervention. In this section,

302  Research handbook on intersectionality deploying an intersectional analytical framework, we identify and discuss those power grids and value-system factors that either are more likely to be found among MRW or to render them less likely to receive societal intervention and support. Such an intersectional analysis bridges individual experience to broader systemic and institutional factors. Social isolation A condition shared with Canadian women living in remote and rural communities, MRW experience the isolation of no longer having the same sense of community they had in their home country. Language barriers (as discussed under the systemic fault lines earlier) work in tandem with the lack of social and family connections in Canada and both are major causes of isolation, which make women more vulnerable to GBV. KI29 explained how isolation is often a key component of GBV: You know that violence or abusive control depends upon isolating the victims. Now when you have someone who does not have language, who does not have social connections, who has left her entire family network behind and has come here as an economic dependent, you are looking at multiple risk factors in isolation.

As in the case of Canadian-born women, spouses perpetrating domestic violence can use isolation as a direct control technique. Many women are forced into situations of isolation as a way by their spouse to control them. As KI42 explains, their “isolation” is constructed: It’s a dynamic where there’s a dependence that’s developed, often orchestrated by the spouse who controls the money, the comings and the goings, the possibility of learning French or getting a job or volunteering, all of those, so those are the types of violence that we see that are installed, and, of course, there’s the psychological abuse that makes them feel less.

In some cases, the isolation is not only physical but includes mental and digital isolation. Controlling access to technology can digitally isolate women from their former networks such as family and friends while also preventing them from learning the language and making new networks. KI29 sheds light on the connection: Who prevents whom from attending digital literacy classes? Who controls the wifi passwords? Who limits the amount of time that a person is online because if you can isolate them, you can isolate them every way not just physically but also electronically. These are all subtle and really bloodless and they’re not looked at. All of the emotional ramifications as well. So, for example, if he returns a computer and her passport, she knows how to use her laptop. She knows how to use her documentation. She can’t look up, she can’t book anything. She can’t go home. She can’t see her family. She can’t ask them to come over to visit her. She can’t Skype with them. All of those have severe impacts on mental health.

Immigration-related stress With immigration, many families face stressors not previously experienced in their home country. Stressors can lead to disputes and conflicts within the family, which, if severe enough, can lead to GBV. Key informants noted in their interviews several stressors faced by MRW and their families. The primary stress results from moving and settling in a new country, which require figuring out how to navigate different systems, learning the language, finding affordable housing,

Gender-based violence and citizenship in a migration context   303 obtaining employment, and finding adequate schooling for their children. KI6 notes how these stressors can contribute to GBV: They need support with finding schools for their children, they need support with upgrading themselves, they need support with finding jobs and, some of them, find themselves in an abusive relationship because of the pressure expected in a new country.

An important stressor in families was having their children retain their cultural identity by learning their mother language, following religious practices, or following the home country’s norms and values, for example, respecting elders. When one parent is trying to enforce these learnings more than the other, disputes can emerge between the parents. As KI24 points out: So, this is why I find that parents struggle more, you know, and … because they came older and they needed to establish themselves while, at the same time, to take care of the children and the family.

Another stressor relates specifically to changing gender norms from the country of origin to Canada. This is a macro-level issue that is experienced at the interpersonal level as male discontent at best and violence at worst. Much of this stress corresponds to a lack of respect some men feel in the new country: men feel such rage in this country, they’re held even lower than pets even lower than household pets … Sometimes they are men working three to four jobs and supporting the families back home and they feel enraged, and the rage is manifested. (KI29)

Changing gender roles in the migration process, such as who is the actual breadwinner, can be conducive to GBV. KI29 provided insights to the structural factors contributing to violence when she explained that diasporic stress and the responsibility of caring for family members transnationally contribute to stress that may lead to GBV. Overall, many immigrants and refugees were not expecting to face so many challenges and disappointments after arriving in Canada. As KI6 noted, it is “not the picture of the new country they had.” Ambivalence in accessing services While most women experiencing GBV may be initially ambivalent in accessing services, MRW are more so for reasons linked to their precarious immigration status, along with fearing deportation, the loss of children, or cultural differences about sharing one’s personal life and accessing counseling and services. Women waiting for immigration decisions, such as a refugee claim, may neglect to seek services for GBV out of fear that this will negatively influence the decision. As previously addressed, the situation is further complicated when the abusive spouse is sponsoring the MRW. Additionally, women hoping to sponsor other loved ones may avoid accessing services because sponsorship requirements stipulate the need to prove that they are self-sufficient and do not require state support. KI32 recognizes this misunderstanding, “and so, then it’s our job to say, ‘you can do everything but get financial support’ so, like, go to the food bank and come to us …” The case is similar for temporary foreign workers threatened by their employer who attempt to use their immigration status to control them. The power imbalance between them can prevent women from speaking in fear of an employer pulling their permanent resident applica-

304  Research handbook on intersectionality tion or taking away their work permit if they access gender-based violence services and speak out about abuses. Subjective assessments culturally rooted may cause ambivalence in accessing services, such as MRW discomfort in discussing intimate details about their life with a stranger. KI27 shared her experience encountering cultural difference in accessing services: Well, I would say that, you know, it’s not all women who come from, you know, different cultures, to open up to a stranger. You know, it’s never been done in their country of origin, it was like you turn to family, you turn towards the Imam or the church or, you know, your place of worship … talking about sexual abuse is very difficult.

In many cases, counseling may not be accessible or even exist in their home country, as KI5 noted that counseling is largely a “white thing, a Canadian, North American you know.” Depending on the cultural differences and lack of counseling in their home country, MRW may associate seeing a counselor as something for “crazy” people. Even once in Canada, this stigma can persist and the perceived ramifications of seeing a counselor may be deemed too high of a risk. As KI30 further explained, “they’ve been told, maybe even by their own community, that ‘oh no, don’t go see a counsellor, you’ll be stigmatized, you’ll be labelled crazy, you’ll never get a job in Canada if you’re you know, crazy’ right.” Law enforcement perceptions affect MRW willingness to contact police or other organizations about GBV. In the absence of reliable information about Canada, MRW perceptions derive from past experiences and cultural knowledge from their country of origin. Finally, as argued earlier, in certain cases, there may be social pressure to deal with GBV within the migrant community and avoid outside help. GBV is not spoken about in certain cultures and countries and attempts to receive outside assistance is condemned. Prior trauma MRW often have traumatic experiences before arriving in Canada in situations prior to leaving their country of origin or during their migration journey. This is especially the case with refugee women fleeing active war or persecution. KI24 encountered migrants and refugees and noted the immense complexities in dealing with past traumas and then arriving in Canada as a migrant or refugee: All my clients, they come with trauma, past trauma. Like working on the trauma, it’s like opening a bag of worms. If abuse is happening before or if there’s any, especially the war, what’s happening like most of the refugees, they came from war zones.

Dealing with trauma complicates how migrant and refugee women display and deal with GBV, which tends to perpetuate the cyclical nature of it. Many women may be still dealing with previous trauma, which can develop into post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) without proper care. Recognizing mental health challenges from prior trauma is crucial in helping MRW overcome the traumas while processing and addressing the GBV they are currently facing.

Gender-based violence and citizenship in a migration context   305 Understanding Intersectionally: The Social Identities of MRW Survivors The third line of inquiry that “situated intersectionality” research calls for pertains to social identities. While the entry point to understanding identity may be individual experience, there is a direct link with the macro-level forces that shape the experience. While progress has been made in understanding GBV in MRW populations, recognizing how different intersectionalities perpetuate and encourage GBV is still needed. GBV experiences in MRW lives is a compounded experience that involves gender-based discrimination intersecting with socio-legal discrimination based on citizenship status, in addition to multiple other intersections such as racism or poverty. To be effective in counseling, service providers need to understand these intersectionalities. KI27 describes intersectionality as the “layers of a woman” needing to be identified for her as a service provider to understand the complete picture: intersectionality is a big one … there’s multiple layers that we have to look at in order for our work to be effective. It’s like peeling back, if you want, an onion, okay, where conjugal violence is one element but there’s many other elements. There’s oppression, there’s culture, there’s values, there’s, poverty there’s – so I believe that although we’ve done a lot of work in that area, there’s much more to do around the immigrant population and some of their needs.

Current GBV understandings and frameworks tend to use a stereotypical lens, which only considers domestic/intimate partner and sexual violence and misses its structural roots. Understanding the various intersectionalities that make MRW more vulnerable to GBV is crucial. KI25 notes how failing to use an intersectional approach derails understanding the scope of GBV and those who are most vulnerable: So, I think that there’s still a sense that those are what GBV looks like. And we’re still stuck a little bit in responding to it within those frameworks and that really erases the experiences of most people actually, and then particularly the experiences, you know, of, say, non-status women, or other women with disabilities, other populations who have the highest rates of GBV, but whose experiences aren’t always being reflected in the public conversation around it.

LGBTQ+ women and men are both susceptible to GBV. The intersection of gender identity, sexual orientation, and violence have resulted in horrifying cases of persecution. Many countries still do not recognize LGBTQ+ individuals nor the heinous crimes against them. Women have been forced into exceptionally traumatizing situations such as “corrective rape,” in attempts to change their sexual orientation. Many service providers identified the violence facing the LGBTQ+ community as one of the most pressing. As KI38 noted, Violence against people who are making [refugee] claims based on sexual orientation or gender identity and expression some of those cases are really the most kind of horrifying I have interacted with. But then, at along the same line, many of the cases of intimate partner violence have given me nightmares.

In addition to the traumatic experiences faced in their home countries, it is more difficult for MRW in the LGBTQ+ community to access services and support. Furthermore, they may not be accepted in their ethnocultural community in Canada. Migrant and refugee parents may not acknowledge or accept the sexual orientation or gender identity of their children when they do not follow the heteronormative tradition. KI6 observed the rejection of children for liking

306  Research handbook on intersectionality someone of the same sex, “and some parents will not accept their children for being a child who likes a child of the same sex you know,” while KI41 cited the violence that can occur when the parents do not accept their child’s gender identity: I think when I’m working with this current project the youth and mental health, they have been saying that there’s violence in families because the parents don’t understand the child’s gender identity.

Agency and Contestation: Citizenship as Practice As discussed in the previous section, obstacles are mutually reinforced and intersectional discriminations that MRW face render them more vulnerable to GBV. Consequently, MRW ability to rebuild their lives in Canada by utilizing their skills and education to support their families and live autonomously is greatly compromised. This further diminishes their ability to economically participate in Canadian society. Despite the obstacles that MRW face, they can and do work out solutions, and craft strategies strengthening their resilience to GBV and gradually exercise economic and social agency in their lives. Recognizing the need for a stronger voice, they have created outlets that allow their voices to be heard. These outlets exist in both informal groups where they can share their experiences, but also formal groups and associations that aid future MRW. KI8 described this process in the development of a council founded by MRW: They identified that as an issue here and so they got together, formed at first it was just, you know, an informal, they came up with a name and but then they applied for a grant and they got government funding and then they incorporated, and they’ve been doing a lot of work to educate the community here about gender-based violence and newcomers.

Methods that MRW use as strategies of change vary. Service providers described women participating in small get-togethers, potlucks, and even creating a WhatsApp group to provide support to other women. In one case, a group of women who had experience with GBV created a social enterprise where they shared their experiences and available resources with newly arrived migrants and refugees. An example is the GBV platform created by African women who experienced similar types of violence as recently arrived African women facing severe trauma and GBV. MRW display tremendous acts of strength in their everyday life. From their decision to leave their home country and start a new life in an unfamiliar place, to dealing with abusive situations and reaching out to support services. KI27 discussed these strengths while speaking about one of their clients: She called me recently to say that she finished her fourth year of university. She went back to school I’m so proud of her. She was being abused. She went back to school and finished … I think a lot of that was that woman has a spine of steel honestly speaking because, yeah, she made it through on her own, with a little bit of emotional support from me and a little bit of support from the outreach worker, at strategic points when she really needed it to the rest of the time it was all her doing.

The decision some MRW make to leave their abusive spouse requires strength. Leaving an abusive situation often involves changes for both the woman and her family, such as finding new accommodation or employment. In cases in which the abusive spouse was the family’s

Gender-based violence and citizenship in a migration context   307 primary or only source of income, leaving requires relying on social assistance and a shelter for accommodation. MRW also find and create strength in their community. These strengths are noted by women who create support systems and networks for each other, as KI37 observed, “I’ve seen, you know, some of the migrant communities here have a really tight social network within themselves.” Despite facing their own challenges, KI22 identified safety networks outside of official capacities that women created to better protect other women facing GBV: Yeah, I’ve seen a group of newcomer people who will, who will become a safe space for the other. Where quietly it’s not public, but some of the women will know “Okay, at so and so house that’s the safe space. If I am experiencing high crisis GBV and I need to run away I know I can go to (that) house.

GBV not only renders refugee women vulnerable, but their families as well. Often, the husband is the one applying for refugee status. If domestic violence occurs, the rest of the family loses their refugee status alongside the husband. The other family members are forced to apply through special immigration procedures (on Humanitarian and Compassionate grounds) to address the associated repercussions from a loss in status despite being victims of GBV. Yet, our study found that even in dire circumstances, MRW have displayed considerable acts of resourcefulness and resilience in finding their own solutions. They have the courage to reach out and find support or assistance, and then work with the organizations to find the best solution for them. Collaboration and co-creation are important components for organizations delivering services to MRW. The level of involvement can vary between organizations, in some cases they may have MRW leading the programming while providing support and information. In other cases, organizers consult MRW in developing services. KI2 explains the consultation process used to design the curriculum in their organization and highlights the importance of ensuring the consultation involves women from different ethnocultural groups: … our project is a pilot project, we need consultations with about nine women from different ethnocultural groups, some of them had experienced violence themselves, because we wanted to know um throughout their perspectives and from their culture and their migration journey what did they think that was missing or could have been different or helpful when they were going through all of this.

MRW can and do co-create practices of citizenship (Abraham et al. 2010) in the direst of circumstances by renegotiating the limits of citizenship, by practising citizenship differently in the era of globalization when boundaries appear abolished and yet are constantly reinforced. A multi-scalar (multi-level) contextual intersectionality analysis allows us to understand this non-deterministic outcome of MRW citizenship in practice, despite the challenges to “competent” citizenship practice they experience because of GBV.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, we presented our research using a feminist “situated” intersectional approach to investigate intersecting multi-level inequalities and exclusions that impact on migrant and refugee women’s experiences with gender-based violence. We subsequently assessed this impact in terms of a broadly defined citizenship – that is MRW participation in social, eco-

308  Research handbook on intersectionality nomic, and political life in Canada. Using data collected from interviews with 43 settlement and anti-violence sector key informants, we were able to identify unique forms of violence faced by migrant and refugee women. Threats of sponsorship loss and removal of children from the family, threats to family members back home, and a contextually and culturally justifiable social reluctance in reporting violence make it extremely difficult for MRW to escape violent relationships in Canada. Our data illustrate the exclusions and discriminations the MRW experience because of their variable, incomplete or non-existent citizenship rights, which increase their vulnerability to GBV or aggravate the experience and further reduce their abilities for participation. Finally, our data analysis shows that some MRW and allies challenge the obstacles raised by the exclusionary intersectionalities and develop resistances, engaging in citizenship “practices” (Abraham et al. 2010). Service providers working in the newcomer settlement sector are frustrated by the obstacles in Canadian legal and settlement systems, which make it easier for abusers to continue to commit violence and make it difficult for the women to escape it. Our analysis suggests that many of these barriers are systemic and not connected to any group, region, or religion. A feminist intersectional understanding helps identify the unique forms of GBV in a migration context and the conditions that sustain the systemic imbalance of power affecting the lives of thousands of women in Canada. What can we learn from a “situated” intersectional analysis? First, the analytical challenges of applying intersectionality are significant. There are multiple combinations of situations and characteristics for groups and individuals who are not always positioned on the underprivileged side. In any given context or locale, persons having the same characteristics and victimized by GBV may experience different outcomes. In other words, intersectionality cannot be understood as a list of conditions, barriers, and social divisions itemized and corrected individually. While communities are connected to a degree, the ways in which locales, institutions and individuals interact in response to problems are different and unpredictable. A situated intersectionality approach enables us to identify the uniqueness of outcomes. Second, the multiple dimensions for investigation that the situated intersectionality approach identifies are in fact overlapping and flowing into one another, while the particular historical–social context may suggest other fruitful dimensions for exploration. In our heuristic application, we have treated these dimensions as points of departure and allowed space for others to emerge “bottom-up,” from the empirical data. Third, we found the multi-scalar (macro, meso, micro) analysis to be most productive. While we made connections between the various levels, we treated each one as an entry point to understand the way systemic intersectional exclusions manifest themselves. We found the connections between levels non-deterministic. Understanding the citizenship impacts of intersectionalities on one level did not mean we were able to “predict” findings on other levels. So, where do we go from here? The present analysis is only a beginning in the direction of a contextual, multi-scalar, dynamic approach to the understanding of intersecting processes of discrimination and exclusion in migration contexts but also of the agency and struggle to expand rights and accomplish a more just society. It is on the basis of such understanding that we can move towards addressing GBV effectively, coherently and holistically at the micro, meso, and macro levels of society. At the same time, the situated intersectional analysis of MRW agency and struggles both challenges and greatly expands our current understandings of citizenship.

Gender-based violence and citizenship in a migration context   309

NOTES 1.

The empirical data of this chapter derive from the Canadian GBV-MIG project that involves collaboration of researchers between four Canadian Universities. It is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (FRN 161903) and forms part of the international GBV-MIG consortium project (“Violence against Women Migrants and Refugees: Analyzing Causes and Effective Policy Response”) of University researchers from seven countries. 2. See Government of Canada, “Immigration Options for Victims of Family Violence” (2021-04-08). https://​www​.canada​.ca/​en/​immigration​-refugees​-citizenship/​services/​immigrate​-canada/​family​ -sponsorship/​fees​-permits​-victims​.html (accessed December 12, 2022).

REFERENCES Abraham, Margaret, Esther Chow, Laura N. Maratou-Alipranti, and Evangelia Tastsoglou. 2010. “Re-thinking Citizenship with Women in Focus,” in Contours of Citizenship. Women, Diversity and Practices of Citizenship, edited by Margaret Abraham, Esther Chow, Laura N. Maratou-Alipranti, and Evangelia Tastsoglou, 1–21. Surrey: Ashgate. Abu-Laban, Yasmeen, and Nisha Nath. 2020. “Citizenship, Multiculturalism and Immigration: Mapping the Complexities of Inclusion and Exclusion through Intersectionality,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Gender, Sexuality and Canadian Politics, edited by Manon Tremblay and Joanna Everitt, 507–27. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Angulo-Pasel, Carla. 2019. “The Categorized and Invisible: The Effects of the ‘Border’ on Women Migrant Transit Flows in Mexico,” Social Sciences 8 (5): 144. Arat-Koc, Sedef. 1992. “Immigration Policies, Migrant Domestic Workers and the Definition of Citizenship in Canada,” in Deconstructing a Nation: Immigration, Multiculturalism and Racism in ‘90s Canada, edited by Vic Satzewich, 229–42. Halifax: Fernwood. Butler, Judith. 2009. “Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Policies,” Aibr-Revista De Antropologia Iberoamericana, 4 (3): i–xiii. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2019. “The Difference That Power Makes: Intersectionality and Participatory Democracy,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Intersectionality in Public Policy, edited by Olena Hankivsky and Julia S. Jordan-Zachery, 167–92. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dobrowolsky, Alexandra, and Evangelia Tastsoglou. 2006. “Crossing Boundaries and Making Connections,” in Women, Migration and Citizenship: Making Local, National and Transnational Connections, edited by Evangelia Tastsoglou and Alexandra Dobrowolsky, 1–35. Surrey: Ashgate. Ellermann, Antje. 2020. “Discrimination in Migration and Citizenship,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 46 (12): 2463–79. doi: 10.1080/1369183X.2018.1561053. Franzway, Suzanne. 2016. “The Sexual Politics of Citizenship and Violence,” Women’s Studies International Forum 58: 18–24.  https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.wsif​.2016​.04​.006. Freedman, Jane, Nina Sahraoui, and Evangelia Tastsoglou (eds.). 2022. Gender-Based Violence in Migration: Interdisciplinary, Feminist and Intersectional Approaches. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 2000. “Citizenship and Inequality: Historical and Global Perspectives,” Social Problems 47 (1): 1–20. Grabham, Emily, Davina Cooper, Jane Krishnadas, and Didi Herman (eds.). 2008. Intersectionality and beyond: Law, Power and the Politics of Location. London: Routledge. Isin, Engin, and Patricia Wood. 1999. Citizenship and Identity. London: Sage.  Kiwan, Dina. 2021. “Inclusion and Citizenship: Syrian and Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon,” International Journal of Inclusive Education 25 (2): 283–97. Lister, Ruth. 2003. Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives (2nd edn). New York: New York University Press. Marshall, Thomas. H. 1964. Class, Citizenship, and Social Development. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company. McNevin, Anne. 2011. Contesting Citizenship. New York: Columbia University Press. Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. 2001. “Transgressing the Nation-State: The Partial Citizenship and ‘Imagined (Global) Community”’ of Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers,” Signs 26 (4): 1129–54.

310  Research handbook on intersectionality Reilly, Niamh, Margunn Bjørnholt, and Evangelia Tastsoglou. 2022. “Vulnerability, Precarity and Intersectionality: A Critical Review of Three Key Concepts for Understanding Gender-Based Violence in Migration Contexts,” in Gender-Based Violence in Migration: Interdisciplinary, Feminist and Intersectional Approaches, edited by Jane Freedman, Nina Sahraoui, and Evangelia Tastsoglou, 29–56. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Romero, Mary. 2018. Introducing Intersectionality: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Standke-Erdmann, Madita, Milena Pieper, and Sieglinde Rosenberger. 2022. “Countering ‘Their’ Violence: Framing Gendered Violence against Women Migrants in Austria,” in Gender-Based Violence in Migration: Interdisciplinary, Feminist and Intersectional Approaches, edited by Jane Freedman, Nina Sahraoui, and Evangelia Tastsoglou, 59–83. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Stasiulis, Daiva, and Abigail Bakan. 1997. “Negotiating Citizenship: The Case of Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada,” Feminist Review 57 (1): 112–39. Strid, Sofia, and Mieke Verloo. 2019. “Intersectional Complexities in Gender-Based Violence Politics,” in Intersectionality in Feminist and Queer Movements: Confronting Privileges, edited by Elizabeth Evans and Éleonore Lépinard, 83–100. London: Routledge. Tastsoglou, Evangelia. 2010. “Less-Preferred Workers and Citizens in the Making: The Case of Greek Domestic Women in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s,” in The Contours of Citizenship: Women, Diversity and Practices of Citizenship, edited by Margaret Abraham, Esther Chow, Laura Maratou-Alipranti, and Evangelia Tastsoglou, 23–40. Surrey: Ashgate. Turner, Bryan. 1993. “Contemporary Problems in the Theory of Citizenship,” in Citizenship and Social Theory, edited by Bryan S. Turner, 1–19. London: Sage. UNHCR. 2021. “Sexual and Gender-Based Violence.” https://​www​.unhcr​.org/​eg/​what​-we​-do/​main​ -activities/​protection/​sgbv Voolma, Halliki. 2018. “‘I Must Be Silent Because of Residency’: Barriers to Escaping Domestic Violence in the Context of Insecure Immigration Status in England and Sweden,” Violence against Women 24 (15): 1830–50. Werbner, Pnina, and Nira Yuval-Davis. 1999. “Introduction: Women and the New Discourse of Citizenship,” in Women, Citizenship and Difference, edited by Nira Yuval-Davis and Pnina Werbner, 1–38. London and New York: Zed Books. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1993. “Gender and Nation,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 16 (4): 621–32. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2015. “Situated Intersectionality and Social Inequality,” Raisons Politiques 2 (58): 91–100.

PART III INTERSECTIONALITY AND APPLIED RESEARCH

Section IIIa Social work, disaster recovery and health disparities

19. Intersectionality and immigrant and refugee trauma Filomena M. Critelli and Asli Cennet Yalim

This chapter provides insights into how intersectionality theory can be applied within research to better understand immigrants and refugee trauma in its complexity and provide rich, layered examinations of immigrant and refugee experiences. Research using an intersectionality framework has the potential to highlight oppression as well as emancipation, reveal the systematic discrimination in refugee and migration policies and systems, point to disparities in accessing durable solutions and social supports, and challenge rigid labels and categories (Taha 2019).

INTERSECTIONALITY AS A RESEARCH FRAMEWORK WITH IMMIGRANTS AND REFUGEES Migration involves the movements of people across nation-state and territorial borders so that issues of ethnicity, and cultural and social dislocation are prominent concerns. Therefore, the study of migration requires a contextual, dynamic analysis that recognizes the interconnectedness of different identities and hierarchical structures at local, national, transnational, and global levels (Anthias 2012). Intersectionality attempts to capture the multifaceted nature of migrating persons’ experiences and to uncover overlooked subgroups that substantially differ due to intersecting sources of exclusion and marginalization that may produce trauma, violence, or privileges. These are shaped by the interaction of social locations such as race, ethnicity, indigeneity, gender and gender identity, class, sexual orientation, geography, age, disability/ability, migration status, and religion and occur within a context of connected system and structures of power such as laws, policies, state governments and other political and economic structures such as colonialism, imperialism, racism, homophobia, ableism, and patriarchy (Hankivsky 2014). Interlocking social identities and oppressions operate in a synergistic manner that are more than the sum of its parts, generating complexity and difference even within the same social group. The challenges of categorization are evident with immigrant and refugee populations. For example, it is difficult to distinguish clearly and easily between different types of migrants such as “forced” and “voluntary” migrants (Zetter 2007) or economic versus political refugees. The construction of these categories can lead to a “cookie cutter approach” which homogenizes and over-simplifies the complexity of experiences of the people they contain (Gupte and Mehta 2007). Politics also underlie the interpretation of these categories so that who is deemed to fit under one of these categories may still depend on where an immigrant is coming from (Drew 2003; Gzesh 2006; Zetter 2007). For example, during the 1980s, the Reagan administration characterized Salvadorans and Guatemalans as “economic migrants” (Gzesh 2006). The United States denied that the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments were violating 313

314  Research handbook on intersectionality human rights since the United States was enmeshed in the civil wars in the region with the goal of preventing socialism’s spread in the Western Hemisphere. As a result, approval rates for Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum cases were under 3 percent in 1984, while in the same year, the approval rate for Iranians was 60 percent, 40 percent for Afghans fleeing the Soviet invasion, and 32 percent for Poles (Gzesh 2006). In the same vein, the US government has historically treated undocumented Cuban and Haitian would-be immigrants differently. Cubans are generally considered political refugees and Haitians are viewed primarily as people fleeing economic distress, which ignores the political realities of Haiti (Drew 2003).

DISTINCTIONS IN TYPES AND CATEGORIES OF IMMIGRANTS An intersectional understanding of migration also must consider disparate experiences that stem from immigration statuses and categories. To be an immigrant can comprise a variety of experiences, some more legally privileged than others. Migration policies provide an important means by which categories of immigrants are constructed, serve political agendas, and are associated with hierarchical systems of “worthiness” and access to bounded systems of rights (Crawley and Skleparis 2018, 51). Refugees are people who have been forced to flee their country because of persecution, war, or violence. To be granted refugee status by the international community, migrants must demonstrate that they have a “a well-founded fear of being persecuted because of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion; and is unable or unwilling to avail him or herself of the protection of that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution” (UNHCR 2011, 3). Being identified as a refugee affords individuals a certain level of legal protection, such as the right to petition for third-country resettlement and material resources. In the United States refugees are eligible to apply to be a lawful permanent resident status after one year of continuous presence in the United States. Asylum seekers have similar reasons for fleeing their home country as refugees. However, asylum seekers obtain their legal status by petitioning for it. They must apply and undergo the legal process to become an asylee in the country where he or she wants to live which may involve a lengthy and complicated process. An asylee has the right to be recognized and receive the same protections that are afforded to someone with a refugee status. Undocumented, unauthorized, irregular, or clandestine immigrant are those who have no lawful legal status and are unlawfully present in a country. Undocumented migrants are often marginalized and labeled as security risks, as undesirable and disposable and are subjected to the greatest punitive state controls in transit and destination sites. They comprise the most precarious immigrant group due to the intersection of their non-citizenship statuses that leaves them highly vulnerable to hyper-exploitation and their inability to receive social benefits (Stasliulis et al. 2020). Discussion of unauthorized immigrants often treats this population as a monolithic whole. In fact, no simple dichotomy separates “documented” from “undocumented” immigrants. The term twilight or liminal status has been applied to immigrants whose legal standing goes beyond undocumented status, but short of permanent residency (Martin 2005). An estimated 1–1.5 million of the unauthorized immigrants have claims to legal status in the United States because they are either relatives of lawful permanent residents or have been granted temporary protected status (TPS) (Martin 2005). Twilight status also includes young people who

Intersectionality and immigrant and refugee trauma  315 are recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), U Visa holders who are beneficiaries of the Violence against Women Act provisions and political asylees (Abrego and Lakhani 2015). Authorized immigrant status and a path to US citizenship are accompanied by tangible freedoms and privileges that include increased levels of protection from traumas such as deportation and family separation, educational and occupational opportunities, and the ability to legally drive in the United States. It also proffers psychological benefits including feeling protected and decreased levels of worry regarding issues such as working, driving, encounters with immigration authorities or the police, criminalization, and racial implications that emanate from precarious immigration status (Daftary 2018).

MIGRATION: VULNERABILITY TO HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS AND TRAUMA Migration is inextricably linked with issues of human rights abuse and trauma, defined as the exposure to actual or threatened death, serious violence/injury, disaster, or actual or threatened sexual violence via direct experience, witnessing, or learning about the event (American Psychiatric Association 2013). These frequently occur in contexts such as war, ethnic conflicts, state-sponsored persecution, and/or situations that deprive people of their economic, civil, or political rights. Understanding the complex interplay of trauma, dislocation, and adjustment in the migration process is an essential foundation for trauma informed intersectional research. The interplay of colonialism, racism, nativism, gender bias, heterosexism, and ableism contribute to layers of complexity that are manifested in trauma and/or well-being across the lifespan. The migration process consists of multiple stages including a pre-migration or pre-flight stage, a migration or transit stage, and a post-migration or resettlement stage and each stage contains potential traumatic events (Pumariega et al. 2005). Refugees and asylees have been forced to flee from their homes and are survivors of persecution, political repression, torture, civil war, rape, and other violations of human rights. The migration or transit stage often involves difficult journeys including hunger, fear, hiding, separations from loved ones and death of traveling companions. For refugees, detention in refugee camps often takes place for prolonged periods with chronic deprivation of basic needs such as adequate living conditions, nutrition, sanitation and water, and access to healthcare (Filges et al. 2015). Undocumented immigrants may experience traumatic transits with abuses by smugglers or “coyotes” and are often victims of assaults, rape, thefts, drowning, and other bodily harm (Pumariega et al. 2005). Despite their strengths and resilience, immigrants also face a wide range of stressors and risks in their new land. The post-migration stage and survival in the host nation’s social and economic structure include experiences of poverty, discrimination, dangerous or hazardous occupations, fewer years of schooling, and social isolation (Alegría et al. 2007; Corral and Landrine 2008; Coll and Marks 2012). Undocumented and twilight status holders’ insecure status produces harms and vulnerabilities such as blocked mobility, persistent fear of deportation, and prolonged insecurity (Abrego and Lakhani 2015). Immigrants and refugees have been found to generally be at high risk for mental health problems. The main problems reported amongst adults are those of depression and anxiety

316  Research handbook on intersectionality disorders, particularly post-traumatic stress disorders (Maddern 2004; Suhaiban et al. 2019). Torture severity and cumulative trauma are the strongest predictors of post-traumatic stress disorder and are associated with chronic physical and mental health problems (Suhaiban et al. 2019; Tran et al. 2020). Immigrants who are not classified as refugees, of low socioeconomic status, and/or without authorization can experience some of the same traumas experienced by refugees (Perreira and Ornelas 2013). The following section addresses the challenges and potential traumatic events within vulnerable immigrant and refugee populations. The unique experiences of these groups are often overlooked in research and are best revealed through an intersectional research process. Race and Ethnicity Immigrants who are racially distinct from the majority are at greater risk for experiencing discrimination than those who are not (Berry and Sabatier 2010). Racial discrimination can have a substantial impact on the health and mental health of immigrants (Brown et al. 2000). Racism, xenophobia, and intolerance emanating in transit and destination countries can result in hate crimes which are defined as criminal acts motivated by bias or prejudice toward groups of people like immigrants (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2015). An intersectional study regarding employment discrimination found that female job applicants with a Turkish migration background were less likely to be called for an interview, and the level of discrimination increased substantially if the applicant wore a headscarf, revealing the ways in which immigrant women who wear a headscarf suffer discrimination based on multiple stigmas related to ethnicity and religion (Weichselbaumer 2020). Gender Although migration may benefit women through economic and sociocultural empowerment, due to their dual vulnerability as migrants and women, they are still disproportionately exposed to a variety of risks arising from their mobility such as discrimination, exploitation, and abuse compared to their male counterparts (International Organization for Migration 2009). Gender-based violence is a driver of migration and a risk along the journey, as well as in destinations countries (Paris 2017). As an example of an intersectional research approach, Critelli and Yalim (2020) illustrate how the intersections of gender, race and ethnicity, immigration status, social-cultural barriers, and English proficiency inhibit domestic violence survivors’ access to and support from institutions such as police and social services. Gender-sensitive intersectional research must recognize that gender is not limited to women and the multifaceted ways in which gender shapes migration and resettlement experiences (Affleck et al. 2018). The conflation of “gender” with “women” limits understanding of issues facing heterosexual men, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and non-binary people as gendered (Myrttinen et al. 2017). Men suffer from vulnerabilities that occur in different contexts and for different reasons than women. While masculinity entails privilege in “normal” situations, in the context of war or exile it can engender violence, trauma, or exclusion. During wars, men are subjected in greater numbers to potentially traumatic events such as physical combat, assault, injury and witnessing violent injury and death as well as torture and imprisonment (Spiric et al. 2010; Tolin and Foa 2006). Gendered stereotypes of refugees reinforce the notion of the

Intersectionality and immigrant and refugee trauma  317 male refugee, especially young single males of Arab background as undesirables and security threats. For example, resettlement programs for Syrian refugees in several countries, including the United States, severely restrict access to resettlement for single Syrian men, despite the conditions of vulnerability, insecurity, and danger in which they live, that has consequences for their mental health and well-being (Yalim and Critelli 2023). Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender or Intersex (LGBTI) Immigrants LGBTI asylum seekers experience an accumulation of trauma, which continue even after attempting escape to a new country (Hopkinson et al. 2017). It is still illegal to be gay in 70 countries and it is punishable by the death penalty in 12 of them. These circumstances generate great fear and stigma surrounding the lives of LGBTI people (American Psychological Association 2012). Punishments for gender non-conformity often begin in childhood and can occur daily from multiple persecutors (Reading and Rubin 2011; Shidlo and Ahola 2013). LGBTI refugees can apply for asylum in the United States if they have been persecuted for their sexual orientation, gender assignment, gender identity, or for being HIV positive. The process of seeking asylum as an LGBTI person is complicated bureaucratically and emotionally (Heller 2009). Claims are particularly difficult to file, argue, and win, even with substantial evidence of persecution and ill-treatment (Sridaran 2008). LGBTI asylum seekers may also face discrimination in their ethnic immigrant communities and marginalization in mainstream US LBGTI organizations after resettlement (Heller 2009). Age Different stressors and risks for trauma emerge at various life cycle points. Due to their developmental stage and dependence on adults for care, children are especially vulnerable. Recent hardline policies in the United States (and other parts of the world) toward migrants and asylum seekers have deeply impacted children. Rising immigration enforcement in the United States has resulted in massive apprehensions, detention, and deportations. Between fiscal years 2009 and 2013, nearly four million non-citizens were deported, with estimates that a half a million of them were parents of a US citizen child (Capps et al. 2015). Deportation of a parent can have significant and long-lasting harmful effects on children’s well-being and mental health and has disproportionate impacts on a large segment of Latinx children (Capps and Fix 2020; Capps et al. 2015). In a policy that brought widespread global consternation, more than 5,500 children were separated from their parents from July 2017 to December 2019 as part of a zero-tolerance policy for unauthorized adult migrants crossing the US-Mexico border (Habbach et al. 2020). The United States has also seen a large increase in unaccompanied immigrant minors (UIM), primarily from Central America who have been detained at the border (US Department of Health and Human Services 2021). These young people left their home country because of experiences of violence including gang violence, violence perpetrated by organized crime or governments, and sexual violence as well as abuse at home. Others have migrated to reunite with parents or family members living in the United States (UNHCR 2014). Older migrants have been less visible than children in migration research. They are a substantial and rapidly growing part of Europe’s and North America’s aged population (Ciobanua et al. 2017). Key issues facing older refugees and asylum seekers are low income, language

318  Research handbook on intersectionality barriers, lack of social networks, reduced mobility, and a high number of chronic medical conditions compounded by a lack of adequate and culturally appropriate healthcare (International Federation on Ageing 2021). Access to care is a crucial dimension of well-being, particularly for older persons. The “feminization of migration” and the outmigration of younger women for employment in migrant sending countries has great impact on the provision of care of older adults who remain in countries of origin, often caring for children left behind and unable to depend on traditional sources of family care in their old age (Critelli et al. 2021). The situation is complicated further because in the United States, there is also the criterion of financial independence to gain entry. The vulnerability of older immigrants due to the intersection of race and age, amplified by the context of anti‐immigrant political rhetoric is illustrated in the spate of hate crimes against Asians in the United States. Many older Asians and women have been singled out as vulnerable targets based on false linkage of people of Asian descent and the spread of COVID-19 which has re-energized historical narratives and racial tropes connecting Chinese people and communities to disease (Stop AAPI Hate 2021). Asian Americans are also burdened by the “perpetual foreigner” image that views all Asian Americans as foreigners no matter how many generations their family has resided in the United States (Sue and Okazaki 2009). Asian women are fetishized, sexualized, and marginalized. The way their race intersects with their gender also makes Asian and Asian American women uniquely vulnerable to violence (Kaur 2021). Disability Refugees and displaced persons living with disabilities are amongst the most hidden, excluded, and neglected of all displaced persons (Reilly 2007). Data regarding the numbers of migrants with disabilities is lacking. Given the nature of forced migration, where persons are forced to flee from dangerous conditions, as well as the large numbers of older immigrants and refugees, it is speculated that the number of persons with disabilities is high. One study found that 22 percent of surveyed Syrian refugees had an impairment, with 6 percent claimed to have a severe impairment. These figures include physical, intellectual, and sensory impairment. Disability and aging closely intersect whereby older refugees present an even higher degree of special needs; 66 percent of older people had an impairment, with 33 percent of older people reporting a severe impairment (HelpAge International and Handicap International 2014). Some refugees and displaced persons may have lived with their disability all their lives. Others become disabled because of war, violence, conflict, natural disasters, and unhealthy and unsafe living and working conditions. Many others become disabled in the migratory journey, experiencing a change of dis/ability status and identity as they transit across space and time (United Nations n.d). Displaced women, children, and older persons face multiple discrimination due to intersections of their gender, age, and disability, including sexual violence and abuse, physical assault and for children exploitation, neglect, and exclusion from education (United Nations n.d).

Intersectionality and immigrant and refugee trauma  319

INTERSECTIONAL APPROACH TO RESEARCH WITH IMMIGRANTS AND REFUGEES The multidisciplinary nature of the research with immigrants and refugees and the great heterogeneity and complexity of these groups lead to variations between the approaches adopted toward research. Designing a research study with immigrants and refugees is a complex process due to both participants’ and researchers’ diverse backgrounds, experiences, skills, and expectations. The diverse experiences of immigrants and refugees and the interactions of multiple systems and social identities underscores the importance of research using an intersectionality framework. While identity categories must be carefully considered by researchers, hierarchical structures among these identities must also be considered in study designs. A single methodology cannot account for the interplay between identity categories, power, and oppression (Hillsburg 2013). The following section discusses the priorities to develop research studies using an intersectionality framework with immigrants and refugees.

DEVELOPING A RESEARCH STUDY USING INTERSECTIONALITY Given the heterogeneity within different immigrant and refugee groups, these groups’ exposure to human rights violations, discriminative immigration policies, and situating in various contexts, research with these groups is not able to fully detect the complexity of and interactions between social identities without an intersectional lens (American Psychological Association 2012). Since immigrants and refugees inhabit various contexts and encompass various social memberships, these can create advantages or disadvantages depending on their intersecting identities. Researchers studying these individuals must consider “when and where a particular set of overlapping conditions matter the most” (Misra et al. 2021, 13). Their experiences of oppression, trauma, discrimination, or privilege can change depending on social, cultural, and historical context and not be ranked in some linear fashion (Else-Quest and Hyde 2016; Warner 2008). Researchers should also challenge the notion that independent variables in quantitative research are fixed in a hierarchy and never change (Misra et al. 2021). A “matrix” lens can help researchers consider simultaneous membership in multiple social groups and contexts and how power relations and inequality contribute to being in that location. Race, gender, nationality, immigrant or citizenship status, documentation status, class, sexual orientation, and other social memberships are contextual and change depending on the location of the person in the matrix (Collins 1990). Misra et al. (2021) also address a common misunderstanding that intersectional researchers must incorporate all potential socially constructed dimensions of difference in their sample and analyses. The addition of all categories is not only impractical, but simple additive categories may not fully uncover the social processes relevant to the research questions. For example, Rodriguez (2019) studied Latinx citizen children of undocumented parents and examines how those young adults manage their parental illegality. The research question demonstrates what identities matter most to understand the experiences of the participants. The results highlighted differing experiences among undocumented young adults, the children of lawfully present parents, and minor children in mixed-status families. Focusing primarily on citizenship status of children, documentation status of parents, and age

320  Research handbook on intersectionality help the researcher understand parent-child relationship, how young adults manage the legal constraints of their parent’s status and become breadwinners and sponsors of their parents’ legal residency. This highlights how researchers should consider which intersections seem most critical and salient for the research question.

RECOMMENDATIONS Different research methods are valuable for getting at different issues and groups within immigrant and refugee communities. Quantitative methods are useful when collecting data with an emphasis on statistical inferences (e.g., scales, surveys, and experiments) and comparing groups within and between refugee and immigrant communities. Layers of trauma, discrimination, and oppression might be differentiated among individuals with intersecting identities by comparison. Although the comparison across groups and cultures are useful in prioritizing groups for interventions based on their unique needs, a research study informed by intersectionality does not search for the most vulnerable or oppressed identity. Researchers must see all participants as vulnerable specifically, but not equally (Hillsburg 2013). Research with immigrants and refugees should attempt to explore the specificity of individuals’ vulnerability and underline systematic factors such as the unequal distribution of wealth, state violence, racism, and colonialism (Fellows and Razack 1998). Qualitative research serves the purpose of exploring unnamed processes that are not necessarily identified through quantitative research. This type of research tries to explore individuals in all their complex backgrounds and lived experiences while considering social factors and systematic issues. Qualitative researchers engage in explorations of topics with refugees and immigrants, observation of daily interactions, or may conduct focus groups with community members, leaders, and key figures, to identify meanings of specific events, behaviors, and mechanisms. Working with cultural informants can facilitate trust-building with the community and the data interpretation (Smith 2009). The use of focus groups informed by an ethno-cultural methodology can be useful to understand what constitute concepts in local taxonomies and meanings of being a refugee or an immigrant in specific contexts (Shannon et al. 2015). The use of the qualitative inquiry is not simply to identify differences and similarities among different groups but to understand how the members of a refugee or immigrant community are connected in complex ways and to locate invisible groups within that group (Lenette et al. 2015). Qualitative research helps to explain enduring pathological behaviors as well as how new resources, capacities, skills, and hopes emerge from newcomers’ experiences (Benezer and Zetter 2015). Although qualitative methods are good at revealing unexplored processes and identifying interlocking systems of oppression, they might be limited in their capacity to meet the prerequisites for evidence-based policy-making due to generalizability issues (Bailey et al. 2019). However, qualitative studies even with small numbers of participants can gather personal and unique understanding of the phenomenon, which can greatly contribute to the knowledge base. Thus, generalizability should not be the primary concern of qualitative researchers since the value of qualitative findings with thick and rich descriptions of the corresponding phenomenon can go beyond this concern. As with quantitative methods, follow-up studies with immigrants and refugees are rare in qualitative research studies as well. However, the ethnographic studies have much value for longitudinal investigation due to their in-depth focus on everydayness, context and change

Intersectionality and immigrant and refugee trauma  321 over time (Creswell 1998; Gifford et al. 2007). Ethnography allows the researcher to remain attuned to the “politics of everyday life” (Loon 2001, 281). Refugees and immigrants lived experiences cannot simply be placed into categories that would impose on their experiences a structure beyond the experience itself (Loon 2001). Grounded theory can be another approach to effectively illuminate the diversity of refugee and immigrant groups (Sherwood and Liebling-Kalifani 2012). Various socioeconomic, ethnic, and religious backgrounds exist within immigrant and refugee groups and how these backgrounds impact on the dynamics of the intragroup relations are worth considering. These relations are often explored through individuals’ narratives to draw out power relations and social locations embodied in these individuals’ lived experience as well as their intragroup diversities. Grounded theory gives the researcher flexibility and fosters seeing the data in fresh ways (Charmaz 2014). It offers a systematic approach to integrate subjective experiences with contextual factors. Unlike quantitative studies’ recruitment strategies (e.g., reaching refugees through large organizations, hospitals, etc.), typical recruitment strategies among qualitative studies require greater involvement in refugee and immigrant communities and development of personal connections that help the researcher approach and engage community members. For instance, although most researchers target camps in Jordan to study Syrian refugees, Boswall and Al Akash (2015) spoke to Syrian women residing outside the camps whose lives reflect most women refugees in Jordan. Mixed-methods approaches are useful to identify unnamed processes, invisible groups, and atypical outcomes, which are not usually defined or prioritized within the Western-dominated discourse on research (Ungar 2012). Mixed methods can distinguish the unique aspects of the refugee and immigrant experiences, and ultimately researchers can generate better ideas to find answers to their research questions. To fully incorporate intersectionality, mixed-methods research should incorporate four key tenets and the multiple realities of Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) immigrants and refugees should be embraced. It is also essential to consider identity-related variables such as structural racism and for scholars to engage in critical reflexivity. Research questions should prioritize multiply marginalized individuals and the multiple realities of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) immigrants and refugees are embraced, identity-related variables such as self-reported discrimination are studied alongside systems-level variables such as structural racism, and that scholars engage in critical reflexivity (Watson-Singleton et al. 2021). These approaches can lead to improved training of researchers and the development of more diverse research teams (Guarnaccia 2009). Community-based participatory research (CBPR) or participatory action research (PAR) are also methods that facilitate intersectional knowledge production. They reduce power inequities, democratize the research process by engaging with voices frequently excluded from mainstream research, and can empower immigrant and refugee community members. Another community engaged method, Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) draws extensively from the praxis—the research-action model developed by South American activist scholars (Fine et al. 2021). CPAR is based on the premise that research should not be a monopoly of experts and intellectuals, that it should be receptive to counter narratives, and should reject the imposition of dominant interests (Fals-Borda 1995). CPAR projects are purposefully comprised of research teams of very differently positioned people who bring distinct levels of power, lines of analysis, experience, and forms of expertise. Together they can craft research questions and designs, gather and analyse qualitative and quantitative material, and center the perspectives of those most impacted by injustice (Fine et al. 2021).

322  Research handbook on intersectionality The underlying principles of these CBPR methods include building on strengths and resources in the community; facilitating collaborative and equitable partnerships; engaging in power-sharing processes that attends to social inequities; fostering co-learning; and capacity-building among all partners (Minkler and Wallerstein 2008). For example, one study focused on Karen refugees and their education experiences in the United States via a PAR. Researchers and Karen community youth members designed the study, collected qualitative data (interviews, participant observations, artifacts), and analysed the data. They identified challenges facing Karen youth in and out of school such as the English language divide, parental involvement in their children’s schooling, bullying, gangs, and gender. This process promoted new awareness and agency for minority youth (Gilhooly and Lee 2016).  Bailey et al. (2019) elaborate on the strengths of the use of PAR with mixed methods to address intersectionality. This approach encourages researchers to begin with the perspectives of underserved or marginalized groups (e.g., Muslim refugees or undocumented LGBTQ immigrants) and move from dominant research approaches to approaches that critically look at the structural causes of inequality and oppression and enable emancipation for these groups. PAR can challenge preconceived procedures in research while honoring experiences and narratives of ethnic racial communities. With respect to PAR, Stanton (2014) suggests incorporating Kirkness and Barnhardt’s (1991) “four Rs” of respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility when planning and implementing research projects with underserved and marginalized groups. To advance decolonization of research with immigrants and refugees, researchers should collaborate in genuine ways with members of these groups through respectful dialogue (respect), making decisions based on community-defined purposes and being flexible when change is needed (relevance), staying connected with the community to demonstrate commitment to them (reciprocity), and recognizing anxieties and challenges that arise (responsibility). This approach can give marginalized communities voice, a choice, and an opportunity to advance the lives of all members of the community, which is one of the major purposes of the intersectionality framework in research. With the integration of PAR approaches to sampling, many hidden or mobile members of immigrant and refugee communities can be accessed. Women, older people, LGBTQ individuals, widowed, and people with disabilities have been identified as difficult-to-reach groups in research. Engaging with these groups and including their voices about unseen conditions may provide a stronger advocacy base to strengthen resources for different groups (Bottrell 2009). Purposive sampling is appropriate to select members of a difficult-to-reach population and identify types of cases for in-depth investigation (Neuman 1997). Snowball sampling is also an alternative method to study hidden populations. Snowballing can alleviate the problems regarding the lack of social visibility of some potential participants. Multiple starting points can generate a heterogeneous and representative sample that includes intersecting identities (Bloch 2007). Personal contacts, community leaders, and variety of initiation points are important to locate these refugees and to reduce selection bias (Smith 2009; Sulaiman-Hill and Thompson 2012). Community leaders in refugee and immigrant communities are typically men, which may result in overlooking marginalized women such as those who are widowed or illiterate (Vigneswaran and Quirk 2013). Identifying and engaging female contacts who have connections to those women is necessary to recruit a balanced sample. When designing a study with refugee and immigrant populations, flexible and alternative ways of data collection should be considered to obtain representative samples and it is vital to learn as much as

Intersectionality and immigrant and refugee trauma  323 possible about the population prior to the data collection, such as their language, literacy skills, and cultural norms, as this knowledge informs modes of the data collection (Bloch 2007). CBPR, PAR, and CPAR although labor intensive have much added value for research with this population. They emphasize social justice goals and perspectives and particularly in the case of CPAR, social transformation (Fine et al. 2021). These approaches foster civic engagement and political participation and empower community members to become political agents who integrate evidence into their social justice organizing strategies and advance system and policy changes (Devia et al. 2017). Other innovative methodologies such as critical/cultural narratives and testimonies, arts-based methods, and photovoice offer key elements to research especially under the conditions of ongoing marginalization (Atallah et al. 2018; Burrell and Hörschelmann 2019). For example, photovoice is an innovative, image-based community-based research tool informed by Paulo Freire’s notion of critical consciousness, where participants take photographs of the people and objects that have meaning to them. Rather than simply responding to questions developed by researchers, photovoice also involves participants more deliberately in the collection, generation, and sharing of data (Humpage et al. 2019). Although photovoice can be effective with many age groups, it is often used with immigrant youth. One noteworthy study combined photovoice with Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) to understand the life-worlds of undocumented migrant youth facing the dilemma of precarious legal status (Del Vecchio et al. 2017). The combination of YPAR with photovoice was consciously chosen to root the photovoice method in youth ownership of ideas and intentions and the research was viewed as a means through which young people could engage in resistance. Participatory theatre also serves as a medium for intersectional participatory research with immigrants and refugees. It is particularly beneficial to explore narratives of identity of marginalized groups, as well as to illustrate perceptions and experiences of social positionings and power relations in and outside community groupings (Yuval-Davis and Kaptani 2009). Participatory theatre is also considered as a form of action research that produces different kinds of knowledge and insights for the participants as well as for the researchers. For example, participatory theatre methods were used in a research project that involved working with four refugee community organizations in East London (Kaptani and Yuval-Davis 2008). The theatre events focused on the refugees’ lives since coming to London and their encounters with helping agencies. The project involved Playback theatre performances (Fox 1994), where the audience tells stories based on their own experiences that are then “played back” to them by actors on stage and Forum Theatre workshops (Boal 1979). Personal stories of conflict and oppression are acted out by the participants themselves who by stepping in and replacing the protagonist test out strategies for action. Individual interviews were also carried out with a selection of members of the different groups. In this approach, the intersectional perspective is deconstructive, avoiding essentialist and reified constructions of subjects’ identities (Kaptani and Yuval-Davis 2008). The study participants were Kosovan, Kurdish, and Somali, all Muslims, but with very different histories of migration, as well as different social, economic, and political locations as refugees in Britain. The narratives and performances as theatre uncovered how their experiences transpired in very different ways from each other and challenged homogenized constructions of “ethnicity,” “religious affiliation,” and “refugee” migratory status (Kaptani and Yuval-Davis 2008). These approaches are also among what are known as decolonizing methodologies that place the local knowledge, worldviews, values, and experiences of marginalized population groups

324  Research handbook on intersectionality at the center of the research process. Decolonizing methodologies can produce research that is relevant and meaningful to the group with whom research is undertaken and decenters Western or Eurocentric assumptions (Atallah et al. 2018; Barnes 2018; Keikelame and Swartz 2019; Stanton 2014). Decolonizing methodologies are seen as more “empowering” than other ones since researchers work “with” not “on” marginalized communities. These can help educate community members on their rights, give them voice in planning, implementation, and data analysis through member checking that reduces social injustices (Barnes 2018). Critical ethnography or decolonizing ethnography is another method that has been employed with immigrants. It is a qualitative approach to research that explicitly sets out to critique hegemony, oppression, and asymmetrical power relations to foster social change. While all forms of critical ethnography seek to interrogate the structures of power and uncover inequities suffered by marginalized communities, some critical ethnographers work directly with community members, engaging in participatory research and ongoing dialogue with those being researched (Bejarano et al. 2019).

SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS IN THE RESEARCH PROCESS There are additional considerations related to the vulnerability of participants when engaging in research with immigrants and refugees. The principles of human research ethics committees are often designed for medical research and the language is influenced by experimental designs, which is not commonly used in refugee and immigrant studies. Thus, the definition of vulnerability is informed by medically derived language that homogenizes immigrant and refugee participants’ adverse experiences into the same categories (Gifford 2013; Perry 2011). Block et al. (2013, 6) point out that “deeming whole populations or categories of people as vulnerable, lacks sensitivity to context and fails to consider what a person might be vulnerable to.” The characteristics and cultural strengths of participants and the nature of the context may get lost in Westernized understandings of medical research principles. For instance, a pregnant refugee woman in a temporary camp environment may be more medically vulnerable compared to other refugees in the camp, but the same pregnant refugee woman participating in an ethnographic study in the United States may not be more vulnerable than other pregnant women in the same community whether they are a refugee or not (Perry 2011). Ethics committees should identify and recognize the interactions between the person’s intersecting characteristics, context, and research designs and have guidelines for researchers to address unique vulnerabilities of refugees and immigrants in a research study. Researchers must take extra precautions to protect participants with hidden social identities (e.g., undocumented, LGBTQ, HIV status, or political views) (American Psychological Association 2012). Some recommendations include carefully crafted informed consent procedures, oral consent, and providing assurance that their responses will be kept confidential. Power dynamics between researcher and participant are also important particularly with immigrant and refugee populations. Participants may hesitate or refuse to participate in a research study due to their understanding of hierarchy in their culture. Participating in a research project should be part of a solution and opportunity for participants to exercise their human agency and should not create additional problems for them (Hugman et al. 2011). Researchers must give thought to these dynamics when formulating their study or recruiting participants and be mindful of their participants’ culture, privacy, and confidentiality.

Intersectionality and immigrant and refugee trauma  325 Western approaches to research may also impact interactions between the researchers in the global South and global North. In cross-national studies, issues related to the positionality of researchers in the global North and South also must be addressed. When researchers from the global North conduct research studies in the global South and position themselves “expert” and see researchers in the global South as only fieldwork managers, these researchers are given no or little opportunities of having a conceptual role in the design or post-data collection phases (Barnes 2018). To decolonize this process, researchers in the global North must recognize these power differentials and position themselves as “partners” rather than “experts” and to be open to learn from their colleagues in the global South. Effective global North-South partnerships are essential for much migration research. Many inequalities also exist in the global academic arena; and therefore, researchers from the global North must apply an intersectionality framework to their interactions and collaborations with their colleagues in the global South. They also must understand the motivations of Southern-based researchers, which can include the material, professional, and personal incentives, since the insecurity of financing and research funds are evident in the global South (Landau 2012). It is crucial for researchers to improve methodological approaches that support the global North-South partnerships and ensure that the voices of colleagues in the global South are heard on their own terms.

CONCLUSIONS An intersectional approach can guide best research practices with immigrants and refugees to produce research that more fully represents their lives and experiences. Research with immigrants and refugees is challenging due to their vastly diverse circumstances and backgrounds. An intersectional approach strengthens the rigor of research with immigrants and refugees. When incorporated into research designs, this framework more accurately captures the depth and complexity of migration experiences. Rather than treating categories of difference such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, immigration status, ability, and age as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, an intersectional research framework reveals how these identities operate as reciprocally constructing phenomena that shape complex social inequalities (Collins 2015). With a core tenet focused on power relations and social inequalities, an intersectional approach can elucidate previously hidden identities, exclusions, and traumas and can unearth and challenge underlying causes of inequities. It draws attention to strengths, resilience, and protective factors and supports social justice goals and principles. A range of methods are available to researchers to incorporate intersectional theoretical frameworks into research designs. They are continually being explored and refined and hold much promise for research with immigrants and refugees. To date, intersectionality has been applied predominantly in qualitative research which aligns well with the core tenets of intersectionality. Qualitative methods can effectively generate findings that provide insights into issues from multiple perspectives. They also center the voices of those most directly impacted by policies and programs and who are frequently excluded from mainstream conversations (Opportunity Agenda 2017). More recently, intersectionality is being incorporated into quantitative research and has value for research with this population (Bauer et al. 2021). Intersectionality scholars have advocated for mixed-methods studies and its use has risen considerably with immigrants and refugees, especially regarding public health and health inequity research (Bowleg 2012; Bowleg and Bauer 2016; Weine et al. 2014). PAR and other

326  Research handbook on intersectionality community-based and arts-based collaborative methodologies particularly lend themselves to an intersectional theoretical framework and present much potential for decolonized, action-oriented research that is truly collaborative (Zavala 2013). By centering the voices, vision, and worldviews of immigrants and refugees, these methods can generate research that counteracts dominant discourses about them. These innovative intersectional research approaches have transformative potential and can serve to build coalitions, engage in solidarity, and promote political agency whereby immigrant community members can be empowered to become political agents and spokespersons concerning issues that affect them. Intersectionality opens new avenues of inquiry for scholars as well as research that can better evaluate the impact of programs and policies and produce valuable findings that promote social change. It is critical to continue to explore and develop innovative research approaches that seek to comprehensively understand refugees and immigrants’ lived experiences, intersecting identities, oppression, and trauma that they face at all stages of the migration process.

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20. Power dynamics driving disasters’ impacts, response, and recovery Lynn Weber and Anna Smith Pruitt1

INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS DISASTER? Disasters are complex phenomena operating at multiple levels of society—macro, meso, and micro—within an ever-changing context. They simultaneously play out across various social domains—political/government/law, economic/industry/labor, ideological/education/ media—and across multiple systems of oppression—race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age, and others (Weber 2010). Most characterizations of disasters assume they are naturally occurring events. They are “natural disasters” that presumably affect everyone equally. Since the 1970s, however, disaster scholarship has documented that much of what we characterize as “natural,” in fact, is created and shaped by human intervention, construction, and organization—by the global distribution of power and human choices about human and environmental development (Enarson and Pease 2016; Enarson et al. 2006). Although disasters disrupt everyday life for large groups or populations, often affecting both privileged and marginalized groups, research consistently shows that the poor, people of color, women, the elderly, persons with disabilities, non-native speakers, and children are at higher risk of the harsh effects of disasters (Davis et al. 2013; Thomas et al. 2013) and fare worse during recovery. In other words, the groups with the least power disproportionately bear the effects of disasters. Because they are complex socially constructed phenomena, disasters provide unique opportunities to see the power relations that structure inequity in particular times and places and—at least in theory—to imagine and to enact policies and practices in response and recovery that would mitigate inequities in the future. As Cutter et al. (2014, 186) concluded, “The lessons learned after extreme events not only improve emergency management, especially at the federal level, but also help us better understand issues of equity, power, social location, and even the changing physical nature of the threats themselves.” Even though disasters provide opportunities to see inequities and to “build back better” in ways that reduce them, quite the opposite typically occurs—pre-existing inequities are enhanced in the aftermath of disasters and the recovery process (Cutter et al. 2014). To conduct research that challenges inequities and advances social justice in the context of disasters, we must consider the ways in which societal domains (e.g., economy, polity), systems of oppression (e.g., race, class, gender), and levels of effects (micro, meso, macro) interconnect and play out over time. This interconnectedness is both illuminated by and is a central tenet of an intersectional approach to understanding disasters’ causes and effects. For example, ten years after the storm, in a review of lessons from Katrina learned by social justice advocates, William Quigley (2015, 698–9) concluded:

332

Power dynamics driving disasters’ impacts, response, and recovery  333 Interdependence is a fact of life for people, but also for issues. Professionally, no one [studying Katrina] had the luxury of deciding they were only going to be involved in one issue area. Every issue was inter-related with many more. There are no single-issue Katrina advocates. The survival of the Mardi Gras Indian community was intertwined with the housing campaign. Bringing schools back online was part of the struggle for families and the human right to return. Addressing the needs of the homeless required working on health care.

As these issue domains are intertwined, so too are the systems of oppression that structure inequities within and through them. The extent to which any of these factors are ignored portends less effective, potentially inequity-producing outcomes. Despite substantial literature and activism on gender and its intersections with other oppressions in disaster contexts (Bradshaw and Fordham 2013; Enarson and Morrow 1998; Enarson et al. 2006; Gender and Disaster Network n.d.), both the predominant research and media representations of disasters have neglected gender’s role in disaster and recovery, focusing largely on race and class (Luft 2016). As a corrective, Luft (2016) proposes “racialized disaster patriarchy” as an intersectional framework to reveal the ways that race and class intersect with gender in shaping the impacts, response, and recovery of disasters, arguing: Almost every dimension of disaster experience is mediated by economic resources, which are also gendered and racialized: housing vulnerability, disaster preparedness, evacuation transportation, use of public or private shelter, access to quality medical care, employment benefits, and post-disaster employment. (9)

Luft’s research on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, for example, revealed that housing vulnerability was especially acute for public housing residents, 90 percent of whom were Black women. Also, as personal and professional caregivers, women were more likely than men to be responsible for “disaster preparation, caring for children, the elderly, the sick, and disabled” (Luft 2016, 8). Luft argued that because of their concentration in gendered and raced services, (e.g., health care, education), hospitality/tourism (hotels, restaurants, transportation), and informal economies (domestic, childcare), women—especially low-income women of color—earn lower wages and are especially vulnerable to losing employment and health care during normal times and in times of crisis. The confluence of each of these obstacles also made returning home after the storm more difficult for women, particularly for low-income Black women (Luft 2016, 8). Not only do disasters have disparate effects on different social groups, but also recovery policies often exacerbate pre-existing inequities among these groups. For example, recovery policies often are uniquely harsh on women. After Katrina, FEMA distributed emergency funds to households, not individuals; thus, abusive or estranged male partners were able to receive women’s share of post-disaster aid (Luft 2016, 8).

DISASTER RESEARCH CHALLENGES AND INTERSECTIONAL METHODOLOGY Because of the complexity in the types and duration of disasters, the intersecting and multi-level effects, and the diversity of experiences in disaster and recovery processes, researching disasters is difficult to do well and comprehensively. For those very reasons, intersectionality

334  Research handbook on intersectionality is a uniquely powerful framework for conducting research and providing pathways to social justice within a disaster context. Collins (2019, 289–90) identifies three constructs essential to understanding intersectionality as critical social theory—truth, power, and ethics—that can be useful in conducting intersectional disaster research. Developing intersectionality’s potential as a critical social theory rest on attending to questions of how we know what we know (the truths of epistemology), what social actions are possible within the complex social inequalities that organize our daily lives (the politics of power), as well as our agency and actions in response to the social injustices that confront us (the commitments of ethics).

Collins (2019, 290) concludes that the methodologies “we choose to use to analyze our worlds shape the truths that we find.” Although multiple methods should be employed in an intersectional analysis of disasters, the methodology should be guided by intersectional sensibilities. Below are three major types of challenges that researching disasters poses and some of the ways in which an intersectional approach grounded in truth, power, and ethics is particularly suited to addressing them. Uncovering Truths: Capturing the Diversity of Impacts and Experiences Challenge: lack of transparency in the “fog of disaster” Early pressures in disasters to produce quick responses in chaotic circumstances produce the “fog of disaster,” providing opportunities for powerful groups to define disasters quickly and to shape the response and recovery processes. After large-scale disasters, vast amounts of new funding flow from the federal government into states—funding unavailable in “normal” times. These federal funds largely flow through state government administrations, providing states with the opportunity to shape recovery and to allow those in power to direct funds based on their own priorities (Lowe and Shaw 2009; Weber 2012). Power brokers capitalize on the chaos and disorientation by ignoring or bypassing laws, policies, and procedures designed in non-disaster times to provide oversight on public expenditures and ideally to prevent corrupt practices, worker exploitation, price gouging, and other nefarious practices. Transparencies enable marginalized groups and the public to know how resources are allocated so that they might advocate to direct them to those groups that need them most. In short, the powerful act to eliminate these existing transparencies under the guise of removing bureaucracy and the need to act quickly during the chaos of disaster. Ultimately, lack of oversight allows for misuse of funds, corruption, and cronyism. Those in power also use the “fog” to justify and more firmly establish policies that further exacerbate inequities. For example, four years after Katrina, Governor H. Barbour, having been publicly praised for his stewardship of the recovery (Pao 2015; Trenkner 2006), especially by the Republican Party, which controlled all branches of government at the time, was invited to appear before the US Senate. Encouraging the practice of providing little to no oversight in the early stages of disaster, he contended that although the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program is an effective way to deliver disaster relief to states, it is “extremely necessary” and “essential” that “waivers” of certain requirements be granted upon request to allow states the “utmost flexibility” in their response (Barbour 2009). In other words, a program meant to primarily benefit low- and moderate-income (LMI) residents could and should be used by states to direct funds however they see fit.

Power dynamics driving disasters’ impacts, response, and recovery  335 Without oversight and transparencies, large sums of money can be directed to those already in power and least in need. Lack of transparency can also make understanding the socio-political context difficult. Thus, understanding disaster contexts requires a research approach that explicitly attends to power and works to uncover the actions and impacts obscured in the fog of disaster so that marginalized groups can access resources and power. Challenge: identifying circumstances and needs of subordinated groups Disaster research is often complicated in its efforts to identify the circumstances and needs of marginalized groups. These groups have limited avenues to shape social, political, and economic structures, policies, and practices pre-disaster and fewer resources to recover. Marginalized groups are especially likely, for example, to be displaced by disasters through loss of housing and jobs and to have their communities disrupted or destroyed as well as to have difficulties returning after displacement (Helmuth and Henrici 2010; Luft 2016; Thomas et al. 2013). In short, disasters tend to promote social and physical isolation for marginalized groups, making it difficult for researchers literally to “find” them, to identify their experiences, and to conduct research that promotes their interests. Displacement is further disempowering because it removes individuals from their social networks and dissolves community connections that can be mobilized to advocate for recovery resources. In a study of displacement from Hurricane Katrina conducted in Columbia, S.C. (Weber 2012), one African American man, who had been a chef in New Orleans and was evacuated to Columbia, owned a home that had suffered limited damage in the storm. Even though two years after the storm, he had traveled back to New Orleans “40–50 times,” often to bury relatives and friends, he was unable to return permanently because “It’s not ready.” The rest of his community had been destroyed: there were no services, no neighbors, and no idea when or if they would return. In short, no members of the community were on site to advocate for recovery because there was no livable place to be while doing so. Any research conducted “locally” would have missed his lived experience. Even among more privileged economic groups, displacement can lead to less collective power. Without research with marginalized groups, we miss the opportunity to understand the unique experiences, needs, and strengths of these groups and their communities and to produce research that encourages more equitable recovery policies and practices. Those people who stay behind also experience challenges that are difficult to capture in research. Community-based organizations (CBOs) in disaster-affected communities, for example, can become key avenues for advocating and providing services for marginalized groups, yet they typically operate with limited resources, have limited power to direct disaster policy, and must navigate the fog created by power brokers to “explain” the disaster and their actions in its aftermath. And as many individual members of CBOs are often victims of the disaster themselves, they face challenges to their own survival and that of their families and communities (Cutter et al. 2014; Smith 2016; Weber and Messias 2012). Working with marginalized groups—those who leave and those who stay—requires complex analyses that center them and their communities. Intersectionality and uncovering truths Intersectionality places marginalized groups at the center of inquiry and emphasizes uncovering the truth behind the fog. From its inception, intersectionality has been centered in the vision and experiences of women of color and, consequently, has provided a unique and

336  Research handbook on intersectionality especially insightful perspective on the nature of power (Collins 2019; Romero 2018; Weber 2010). Intersectional research and theory have consistently demonstrated that the workings of power are obscured for those wielding it and are illuminated for those marginalized by it. Thus, any intersectional analysis must prioritize the vision and experiences of groups situated in marginalized social locations. The effect of this core intersectional tenet is to place both marginalized groups and the power relations that shape the contexts they live within at the center of the analysis. An intersectional approach, thus, leads us to ask different research questions and to interrogate our own social locations as researchers, thereby shaping the entire research process. An intersectional approach to disaster research asks: How is the disaster defined? Who does the defining? Whose definition carries the weight to justify and to implement the actions it suggests? In other words, whose “truth” dominates and to what extent, if any, does it reflect the voices and experiences of marginalized groups? To answer these questions requires interrogating the connection between truths and the actions of actors situated in multiple social locations of power. Thus, intersectional research often employs methods more likely to facilitate uncovering those relations of power and to “find” marginalized groups not readily foregrounded in the disaster context (Weber and Peek 2012). Qualitative, multi-method, snowball and purposive samples, in-depth interviews, focus groups, observation/ participant observation are all methods commonly used to interrogate these multiple dynamics of power while centering the perspectives of marginalized groups. Additionally, researchers must interrogate their own social locations in relation to the groups represented in the study—both the powerful and the relatively powerless. This research requires reflexivity as an ongoing element of the research process and can be enhanced by collaborative and collective methods that engage multiple researchers as well as study participants who are struggling to survive the disaster or are in crisis (Peek et al. 2014; Pruitt et al. 2021). Although these methods are certainly not unique to disaster research or to the analysis of power, what makes disaster research different from other types of research is the especially challenging context within which it is conducted (Stallings 2002, 21). Analysing Power in a Complex Context Challenge: complex, evolving contexts, complex analysis, and long-term commitment Disasters occur within a challenging context and must be understood considering historical and socio-political contexts that also are in flux. For example, although the dominant US ideology of individualism (of individual rights, freedoms, and autonomy) pervades our everyday social and political lives, disasters fundamentally belie the notion of our independence and individual responsibility for our circumstances. Instead, disasters are all-encompassing events that foreground our interconnectedness, our context-driven circumstances, and the multiple levels (macro/meso/micro) and societal domains (e.g., economy, polity, ideology) through which power relations structure our everyday lives and that must be addressed in any response to disaster (Cutter et al. 2014; Weber 2010; Weber and Messias 2012). And this response occurs against a backdrop of national and local ideologies and socio-political dynamics. While fully exploring the power dynamics that shape everyday life is always complicated, the disaster context both demands a complex analysis and, through the fog of disaster, makes achieving it harder.

Power dynamics driving disasters’ impacts, response, and recovery  337 Further complicating disaster research is the fact that disasters create rapid contextual changes that evolve over time. Often the most vulnerable are still struggling to recover years or decades later. Long after the spotlight has shifted to other events, federal funding and charitable contributions have dried up, and volunteers and other forms of initial support have gone away, marginalized groups remain challenged to address broader social changes as they continue to struggle to recover (Smith 2016). In a study investigating long-term recovery from Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (Smith 2016, 43), three years after Katrina and during the economic collapse, the leader of a CBO that provides housing and education services for low-income residents described how the changing social and political context affects long-term recovery: It’s a double whammy. It’s the whammy of Katrina plus the national economic scene. You know, it’s just not Katrina. Now it’s the national economics.

The same leader explained the combined effects of the recession, Katrina, and the BP Oil Spill in 2013: And for a lot of people, they got knocked off their feet and they haven’t been able to get back up … We were just getting up and running when the recession hit. So, that double whammy has been pretty profound and all this [controversy] about the BP money and where is it going … some non-profits have gotten some bits and pieces of money but nothing that commiserate with the resources that the social services had to put into helping the people impacted by the storm. (Smith 2016, 63)

To understand the dramatic changes that disasters evoke, researchers must first grasp the pre-disaster political, social, economic, physical, and environmental contexts of the affected communities. But fully capturing the ever-evolving challenges disaster recovery poses for the least powerful and conducting effective research for social justice demands a long-term commitment from researchers. Intersectionality and analysing power in a complex context Intersectionality is especially useful in the disaster context because the analysis of power across multiple levels, societal domains, and dimensions of oppression is a central tenet of the framework. Further, an intersectional methodology foregrounds understanding the historical and place-specific nature as well as the simultaneous expression and co-creation of multiple dimensions of oppression—race, class, gender, etc. (Hankivsky et al. 2014; Weber 2010). Intersectional feminist scholars have complicated the analysis of power further, arguing that power is not a singular construct but also functions as a set of social relations. For example, power can function as “power over” and “power with.” Guinier and Torres (2002) describe “power over” as a zero-sum with winners and losers. The powerful are those who have the advantage on three fronts, the three faces of power: ● the power to design the rules ● the power to win the game ● the power that winners must name the game and to tell the story about the game, its significance, and why they won—the power to spin it. Alternatively, “power with” reflects the power that marginalized groups can wield collectively to achieve what they could not accomplish alone in resisting oppression and promoting social

338  Research handbook on intersectionality justice (Townsend et al. 2000; Weber and Messias 2012). Intersectionality works toward understanding the former and advancing the latter. In the context of disasters, intersectional researchers focus on how power brokers set the rules for recovery priorities and expenditures, how they are advantaged under those rules, and how they spin their arguments—often through narratives that separate the “deserving” from the “undeserving” (Cutter et al. 2014; Lowe and Shaw 2009; Weber and Peek 2012). Additionally, intersectional methodology pushes these researchers to identify the extent to which various groups buy into the spin or reject it, offering their own counterarguments. In other words, they look for evidence of “power over”—the power to set the rules, to win the game, and to define the outcome—and “power with”—the power to resist and to achieve together what the less powerful could not accomplish alone. By focusing on power, intersectional researchers can see consistencies amid the changing contexts and to identify opportunities for generating “power with.” Ethical Dilemmas and Social Justice Challenge: tensions between providing resources and conducting research In addition to complex contexts and the disorientation of the fog of disaster, the disaster context poses some unique ethical challenges for researchers, particularly when researchers enter the scene at or near beginning stages of disaster recovery. For example, a collaboration of 12 researchers across 13 locations studying the displacement of Hurricane Katrina survivors described the conflict between conducting research and providing resources to the displaced (Weber and Peek 2012). Especially in the early stages of recovery, researchers asked themselves if their efforts would be better spent working to obtain resources for the displaced. Some of the people interviewed were amid crisis—often depressed and alienated in a new place and desperately needing help. Although the researchers dealt with this tension in a variety of ways, many found a way to do both: helping the displaced find housing, childcare, schools, and other resources while finally acknowledging that—in this crisis—their ability to provide all that these families needed was limited. Challenge: pressure for quick results fosters “helicopter” research not long-term commitments Since disaster recovery processes play out over time in an ever-changing context, a second ethical challenge to disaster research is the pressure to quickly produce accessible results that can inform the ongoing response. This pressure is in part the result of the need for quick applied results and in part of the priorities of funding agencies. Consequently, an abundance of “helicopter” research on short-term impacts—completed weeks or months after the disaster—exists at the expense of long-term or longitudinal studies (Norris 2006). In a comprehensive bibliography documenting research published up to six years after Hurricane Katrina, for example, 35 percent (n = 383) of the 1,104 research citations were published in 2005–06, the first year after the storm, and 70 percent (n = 778) were published within the first three years, while only 4 percent (n = 46) were published in the sixth year (Erikson and Peek 2011). Acknowledging the challenge as well as some recent progress in conducting long-term research after disasters, the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado recently selected “Advances in Longitudinal Disaster Research” as the theme for its 2021 research meeting.

Power dynamics driving disasters’ impacts, response, and recovery  339 Quick research, particularly when conducted by outsiders, can neglect important contextual factors, leading often to misinterpretation of results as well as assumptions based on stereotypes. Additionally, outsider researchers using the knowledge and labor of disaster survivors but leaving little lasting benefit to the affected communities can lead to unintentional exploitation of local “informants.” Intersectionality ethics and social justice The primary ethical aim in intersectional research is to promote social justice. As Collins (2019, 289) describes it, “intersectionality is a knowledge project of resistance that aims to bring about change. Without political resistance there would be no intersectionality.” So, researchers can play multiple roles in intersectionality’s justice project and employ a variety of methods in the service of resistance to bring about change. Understanding and elevating the voices of marginalized groups as they experience and envision the workings of power in the disaster context is critical to an intersectional analysis aimed at justice. Empathic listening to the stories of those living at the intersections of multiple systems of oppression can provide them with the opportunity to gain some measure of at least temporary relief from the trauma they have experienced. It may also help them to clarify their own understanding of the workings of power in their lives. Realizing the ever-evolving nature of disaster response and recovery requires researchers to be flexible, to change in coordination with participants as new issues and points of resistance are revealed. A focus on the linkages of power dynamics between micro, meso, and macro levels can illuminate where points of resistance exist and how to facilitate them. Clearly this ethical commitment to social justice encourages immersion in the disaster context and long-term, not helicopter, research engagement.

APPLIED INTERSECTIONALITY IN DISASTER RESEARCH: THE CASE OF HURRICANE KATRINA AND THE PORT OF GULFPORT To demonstrate an intersectional approach to disaster research, we present our work on long-term recovery from Hurricane Katrina along the Mississippi Gulf Coast (MSGC). Hurricane Katrina represents a turning point—both in how the American public viewed the government’s role in disaster response and in how researchers conceptualize and study disaster. Katrina initiated a paradigm shift in disaster research, which moved from organizing disasters into neat categories to understanding disasters as complex and multifaceted (Picou et al. 2010). Katrina also challenged predominant cultural narratives. Aid pouring in from other countries, for example, challenged American Exceptionalism. Beliefs in America as classless and post-racial were hard to maintain, particularly given the images of Black bodies and neighborhoods submerged in water. Additionally, the publicized failure at all levels of government eroded the public’s trust in the government’s ability to respond to wide-scale catastrophic events. In short, Katrina disrupted the status quo at multiple levels, laying bare power structures and inequity in ways that were undeniable and, perhaps, unprecedented in modern US history.

340  Research handbook on intersectionality Our Approach We used a multi-method intersectional approach to understand how these complexities played out in the recovery process on the MSGC. Our project consisted of two studies conducted in 2007–08 and 2013–14 and involved complex analyses of in-depth interviews with key leaders involved in recovery, extensive review of public records, participant observations, and focus groups. In this section, we describe our overall research process, highlighting our intersectional approach at each step, and end with a discussion of findings as seen through the case of the Port of Gulfport. The diversion of federal housing dollars to fund the expansion of “the Port” represents a microcosm of the recovery process as a whole and demonstrates both the role of power driving recovery and the measured but hard-won success of less powerful advocates and CBOs. Multi-level framework—complex contexts and power relationships Hurricane Katrina and its recovery played out across multiple levels, involving interrelated issue domains (e.g., housing, jobs, education, etc.). While we could not conceivably focus on every domain, we could focus on the power dynamics that occur within and across these domains. We employed a multi-level framework (Figure 20.1) that conceptualized power as expressed and maintained through linkages and interactions between macro levels (e.g., social institutions) and micro levels (e.g., face-to-face interactions). Within our framework, CBOs occupy a unique position, operating in an intermediary space between macro and micro levels and potentially serving as a conduit for change (Lowe and Shaw 2009; Luft 2009; Smith 2016; Weber and Messias 2012). This framework guided our research process—from the development of our research questions to our analysis and conclusions.

Figure 20.1

Multi-level framework

Power dynamics driving disasters’ impacts, response, and recovery  341 This framework emphasized the MSGC’s complex historical, geographical, and socio-political contexts, highlighting both the MSGC’s advantages and disadvantages. For example, its geographic location meant the MSGC was susceptible to natural disasters. Indeed, the Coast experienced multiple disasters of various types while recovering from Hurricane Katrina. Less than a month after Katrina, Hurricane Rita made landfall, followed by Gustav in 2008 and Isaac in 2009. Additionally, the 2008 housing crisis and subsequent recession affected the Coast as did the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. As a more rural area, after Katrina, the MSGC felt “forgotten” by the rest of the nation, which focused its attention almost exclusively on the city of New Orleans (Cutter et al. 2014), even though the devastation along the MSGC alone would have qualified Katrina as one of the costliest disasters in US history (Savich 2006). On the other hand, the MSGC was in a politically advantageous position. In 2005, the Legislative and Executive branches of the US government were controlled by the Republican Party. Not only was Mississippi’s Governor Haley Barbour the former chair of the Republican National Convention but also Republican Thad Cochran from Mississippi was the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. This dynamic meant that the State of Mississippi was well positioned to direct large sums of money to the state, and, indeed, Mississippi received a disproportionate amount of disaster recovery funds compared to Louisiana when considering its share of the overall damage (Weber 2014). These geographic and socio-political contexts were set within a larger historical context that included the legacy of Mississippi’s plantation/slave economy and ongoing racial segregation. While Mississippi was advantaged politically at the time, only some groups were poised to benefit. To uncover the workings of power, we centered marginalized groups in our research. Research questions—attention to power and uncovering truths Our study broadly asked, What are the power relations shaping the recovery process along the Mississippi Gulf Coast? Because our initial research questions were driven by the broad intersectional aim of explicating the power dynamics shaping recovery, we prioritized remaining flexible so that new information and the local context could direct our work. In 2013–14, we returned with a more in-depth focus on CBOs, the Port, and long-term recovery, asking, How have CBOs navigated long-term recovery and the Port controversy? Methods—multi-methods and multiple angles of vision Intersectional approaches almost always demand a multi-method approach, multiple data sources, and multiple angles of vision that go beyond the individual level. Participants We identified key stakeholders involved in the recovery process on the MSGC and purposely chose individuals from different sectors and social locations. A total of 72 individuals participated across both studies: 18 in both studies, 38 only in the first study, and 16 only in the second study; 57 percent (n = 41) of all participants were women, and 43 percent men (n = 31), with an average age of 52 at latest interview. Most participants identified as White (67 percent; (n = 48), 25 percent (n = 18) as Black or African American, two as multiracial, and one as Asian.2 Five indicated Latino/a ethnicity. Participants included leaders from business, local and state governments, universities, and nonprofits/CBOs. Forty-three of the participants represented 32 different CBOs. Of these 32

342  Research handbook on intersectionality organizations, 46.9 percent (n = 15) participated in both studies, 37.5 percent (n = 12) only in the first study, and 15.6 percent (n = 5) only in the second study. Data sources We sought data sources that would provide both “deep” and “wide” data. We conducted one- to four-hour in-depth interviews with the 72 stakeholders as well as focus groups with community leaders. Additionally, we observed public forums, meetings, and hearings and analysed public and government records, including Congressional hearings, court documents, state action plans, government correspondence, Housing and Urban Development (HUD) monitoring reports, and local, state, and federal legislation. Analysis We conducted thematic content analyses of interviews and extensively reviewed public documents, identifying common themes at the intersection of macro and micro levels. We triangulated data from interviews with public documents foregrounding both the macro-level policies and the micro-level spin about those policies (for a detailed discussion of project methods, see Weber and Messias 2012). Navigating an unequal recovery: the base of the Port of Gulfport Our findings revealed complex power dynamics—power over and power with—at the local and state levels. No aspect of the recovery process better illustrates these power relations than the protracted battle over Mississippi’s allocation of $600 million in CDBG (Community Development Block Grant) funds to repair the Port of Gulfport and to expand it to four times its pre-Katrina size (Augustin 2008). In particular, the “Port story” reveals the interests of a government/corporate/elite alliance promoting large-scale economic development pitted against the ongoing needs for affordable housing among the poor, the working class, the elderly, single mothers, and people of color. In our interviews with people in multiple social locations—business, government, nonprofits—the Port came up consistently. For the most part, the views of people in business and people in nonprofits were diametrically opposed—on where the money was coming from, on whom it was intended to benefit, and on the value of Port expansion set against the housing needs of vulnerable populations. The controversy rested on a central question: When it allocated $600 million to the Port expansion project, did the State of Mississippi and HUD violate a Congressional mandate to spend CDBG monies on LMI housing? The conflict over this question was public and intense. Not only did this transfer of monies have practical significance, as the $600 million would have made an enormous difference in availability of affordable housing for LMI residents, but also funding the Port with CDBG monies originally intended for housing held symbolic significance, particularly for LMI residents and advocacy groups. Since the CDBG program was established in the 1970s with a mandate that 70 percent of the funds be spent to benefit LMI people, this diversion was seen as evidence of the state dismissing the needs of the vulnerable to favor the interests of the wealthy—of robbing the poor to give to the rich. In our work, we encountered a complex maze of official records often overlaid with contradictory and clearly inaccurate rationales. In combination with interview data, we see evidence of “power over”—the power to set the rules, to win the game, and to define the outcome—and

Power dynamics driving disasters’ impacts, response, and recovery  343 “power with”—the power of marginalized groups to achieve together what could not be accomplished alone. Uncovering truths—seeing through the fog The Port of Gulfport is a state-owned bulk, break-bulk, and container port on the Gulf of Mexico. Before Hurricane Katrina, the Port supplied 3,200 jobs to the region (MDA 2007). During the storm, it received an estimated $50 million worth of damage, much of which was covered by insurance (Complaint 2010). However, recovery funds were used not only to repair but also to expand the Port. The state capitalized on the influx of recovery money to advance this underfunded Port expansion project that can be traced back to at least the 1990s. In 1998, the Mississippi Port Authority (MSPA) developed a plan to expand the Port—a plan that the Mississippi Development Authority (MDA) updated in 2003. When Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005, within a matter of weeks, the MSPA hired the JWD Group to update the “2003 Master Plan” (Complaint 2010). In December 2005, Congress awarded the State of Mississippi $5.058 billion administered as HUD CDBG funds and in August awarded an additional $423 million (DOD 2006). In February 2006, at the request of the state, HUD announced a waiver that lowered the requirement that 70 percent of CDBG funds be spent to benefit LMI. In March 2006, it waived the requirement entirely (Allocations 2006; Waivers 2006). These waivers allowed the State of Mississippi through the MDA to have full discretion over use of these funds. Over the next year, the MDA submitted a series of action plans to HUD, the first of which was the Housing Assistance Grants Program (HAGP) in March 2006. It prioritized homeowners with insurance who experienced flood damage but lived outside the pre-Katrina flood zone (HAGP; MDA 2006). The plan requested $3.26 billion, 59 percent of the total allocation, primarily to benefit homeowners with property insurance. Earlier that month, on March 6, 2006, Governor Barbour testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee asking for additional funding from the US Department of Transportation and Corps of Engineers for three infrastructure projects, one of which included the Port project (Ladd 2006). He was denied this additional funding (Radelat 2006). Six months later, in June 2007, the MSPA adopted the updated Port Restoration Master Plan. And in September 2007, the state opened for public comment the latest Action Plan to redirect $600 million of the $2.15 billion remaining in HAGP to the Port expansion. Resistance came from many groups. The Speaker of the House of Mississippi, William McCoy, a Democrat, sent a letter to Barbour expressing concern over the use of CDBG funds for the Port. In his response to McCoy, Governor Barbour (2007) responded that $600 million was always earmarked for the Port—clearly not the case. Despite extensive public opposition, in December 2007 the MDA submitted the Action Plan for the Port project, and in January 2008 HUD approved it. Appearing before the House Financial Services Committee in early March 2008, HUD Secretary Jackson testified that he had “no discretion” to refuse the requested waivers and was compelled by the legislation to approve the request—even though he doubted that the plan would benefit LMI residents and was clear that their housing needs had not been met (Oversight of HUD 2008, 30). By the end of 2008, three years after the storm, Mississippi had spent none of its $101 million LMI housing allocation, even though over 90 percent of public housing was damaged or destroyed (MDA 2021). And by 2012, when all its allocation had been spent, only 7.81

344  Research handbook on intersectionality percent ($423.7 million) of its total allocation had been spent on all LMI housing programs, while 49.6 percent ($2.69 billion) was spent on non-low-income housing programs and 42.6 percent ($2.31 billion) on economic development and regional infrastructure (MDA 2021). Attaining significant—although not sufficient—funds to build LMI housing had required a lawsuit. In December 2008, local advocacy organizations and four LMI residents filed a suit against HUD for approving the waiver that allowed the diversion of funds to the Port project. In 2010 after a protracted legal battle, the plaintiffs accepted a settlement during the appeals process (MOA 2010). The settlement provided $132 million for a new Neighborhood Home Program to assist LMI residents and renters, who had received no assistance to date—nearly five years after Katrina. Notably, $101 million of these funds came from the Long-term Workforce Housing project (MDA 2010). Over 18,000 Mississippi residents applied for Neighborhood Home Program assistance before the January 2011 deadline. A year later, only 8.3 percent (1,500) of the 18,000 applicants had received any assistance (Giardina 2012). In addition to the settlement, the lawsuit garnered national publicity for the housing crisis in Mississippi and compelled the Obama administration to pressure Mississippi into re-examining its housing policies. By 2013, HUD cited MDA for eight instances of non-compliance, including the finding that the MDA had not retained adequate records to help demonstrate compliance with the national objective of creating LMI jobs (USHUD 2019) and could show documentation for only 50 of the 1,286 jobs it claimed (Lee 2013). Later that year, the MS Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review (2013) in its final status report found that the Port would not be able to meet its job production goal until 2027. By 2016, a new Republican administration took a different stance toward the Port. The MDA originally promised that the Port would maintain or generate 5,400 jobs by 2015 (MDA 2007). By 2019, however, the job totals were nowhere near that promise. Initial reporting in March 2019 showed only 588 jobs, 326 (55.8 percent) of which were at a nearby hotel (USHUD 2019). Because these low job-creation numbers were troubling, HUD officials assisted the MDA in recalculating those hotel jobs to full-time equivalent based on hours worked. This recalculation raised the number of hotel jobs to 1,167 (3.5 times the original report) and to 81 percent of the total 1,429 jobs created—still only 26 percent of the promised 5,400 and significantly fewer than the 3,200 Port jobs before Katrina. Yet since these hotel jobs were virtually all low paying jobs, the LMI portion of total jobs increased to well over the 51 percent threshold. And HUD closed the August 2013 non-compliance finding—illustrating the power to determine the outcome (Lee 2019; USHUD 2019). Power in a complex context—power over Through this story, we see the State of Mississippi, at times in concert with HUD, wielding “power over” in all its aspects—power to make the rules, win the game, and spin the story. Through a series of waivers, Governor Barbour and his recovery team were able to direct billions of dollars with little oversight, prioritizing homeowners with insurance and economic development projects at the expense of marginalized and subordinated groups who bore a disproportionate share of the disaster’s impacts. Even though these groups received some assistance, it was far less than the amount for other projects, and the money was slow to be spent. Not only did the Governor and his recovery team wield power over the recovery process by setting the rules and winning the game, but they were also able to control the narrative in a way that benefited them and explained why they won. In our interviews with business/corporate

Power dynamics driving disasters’ impacts, response, and recovery  345 leaders and in our review of public statements by government officials, we saw remarkable continuity in the way the argument for Port funding was spun, offering several, sometimes at-odds, narratives. People in power contended that funds were always earmarked for the Port—never for LMI housing. A business leader put it this way: In the original way it was written, you had this much for economic development, this much for housing, and this much for general recovery. The Port always fell under the economic development one. It always did. [emphasis added] (White male, business leader, 2007)

A second corporate leader echoed this theme of inevitability and suggested the MSPA mishandled the public relations: But see, that’s the problem is the Port doesn’t know how to communicate and they’re their own worst enemy. Now the money that they had, the $600 million was set aside prior. They didn’t know how to explain that to people. [emphasis added] (White male, business leader, 2007)

Another predominant narrative included the argument that the Port would be an economic boon by providing jobs for LMI residents, and as we noted above, as of 2019 job numbers were below pre-Katrina levels. Even with these setbacks, the government/corporate alliance continued to remake the rules and spin the narrative by offering explanations for the failure of job creation and getting HUD to sign off on the 2013 monitoring finding. In interviews we conducted in 2013, the business community offered several explanations for the jobs/hiring failure of the Port, still emphasizing that people did not understand the complicated processes surrounding the Port of Gulfport. In addition to claiming that the public did not know that the money was always intended for the Port and that enough money was available for both the Port and housing, they also claimed that people didn’t understand that the Port was a long-term investment, which explained the lack of job creation in the short term. What they never understood is we had enough money to do both … [Governor Barbour] never got wrapped up into the politics of it ‘cause it was real simple. One, he knew the resources were there to take care of unmet housing needs and the Port. And two, he viewed it as very long-term in nature. (White male, business leader, 2013) I view the Port as a benefit to the community, and I think that the people that thought that the benefit was going to be short-term were possibly misinformed or didn’t maybe understand that it was a long-term benefit … (White female, business leader, 2013)

Despite the underlying narrative that CBOs and housing advocates did not understand the process and purpose of the Port, our data indicates that people on the MSGC—advocates and residents—were very aware of the complex processes. Community advocates and nonprofit leaders were actively involved in holding the Port accountable and in educating and organizing the community. Advocacy groups like the Mississippi Center for Justice and the STEPS Coalition kept up-to-date postings of Port progress on their websites, and members from various CBOs regularly attended public meetings and Port events. MSGC leaders recognized the importance of economic development on the Coast and wanted the Port to succeed. However, they were concerned that the new Port mechanization as part of the expansion could lead to fewer laborers. They also worried that if there were increased numbers of jobs, who would get these jobs, would they be permanent jobs, and would the jobs pay a living wage?

346  Research handbook on intersectionality … because it’s CDBG money, that Port was supposed to provide jobs for low-income people, and they have not shown that even when this Port is completed that it would be able to provide the number of jobs that they said they were going to provide to the Port. With the mechanism of new Ports that you have now, you don’t need that many laborers—because the machines do the work. (Black male, CBO leader, 2013)

Notably, given the net loss of jobs from pre-Katrina, this interviewee seemed to have been right (Lee 2019). Contrary to being misinformed and confused, interviews with these community leaders indicate a community that was well informed. Additionally, our work showed that these leaders were fighting relentlessly to be heard and to wield the power needed to direct recovery money to their communities. In the first few years after the storm, the Governor and his Advisory Board conducted numerous town halls across the affected areas and invited community members to recommend how to structure recovery and how to spend recovery dollars to meet their needs. Our interviews suggest that far from incorporating their recommendations, the state largely ignored citizen input and proceeded with its own agendas (Weber 2014). This “illusion of voice” caused frustration and disillusionment with the government while also taking up valuable time. Years later, one interviewee gave an assessment of this process, seeing it as part of a larger tradition of the general recovery process: I stand back and look at the big picture of things, the Port, the recovery money … and I see a real layer of decisions that happened somewhere other than at the local community level. There was such a disconnect between the infinite number of occasions where people were asked to come and give input about recovery and what they needed and what they wanted and how they wanted it to look. None of that ever happened … It was the same large hands of the money players that ultimately made what happened happen. (White female, CBO leader, 2013)

CBO leaders recognized this tactic as part of “the spin,” a way to maintain the concentration of power among the government/corporate/elite. … people who are in charge of the end game have gotten very good at making people feel like a public hearing process matters while installing a pretty impermeable barrier between the public hearing process and what decisions finally get made. (White female, CBO leader, 2013)

Power and social action—power with By 2013, despite this disappointment, because of being a “thorn in the side” of the government, CBOs had secured $132 million for a LMI housing program and additional oversight from HUD (MDA 2010; MCJ 2016; Robertson 2010). The persistent collaborative efforts of marginalized people, advocates, and service providers have improved the lives of the less powerful people on the MSGC. While acknowledging their losses, CBO leaders were also aware of the changes they accomplished together, their “power with.” [T]he Port of Gulfport I think has been a success in making sure that those monies are being spent like they should be spent. If they’re not, they’re going to be recouped, hopefully, by the federal government … The other aspect … was that the community was better educated by our organization as to what was taking place, [and] how you could go about securing money. (Black male, CBO leader, 2013)

Power dynamics driving disasters’ impacts, response, and recovery  347 CBO leaders and advocates spent much time trying to navigate the convoluted recovery process. When processes for recovery clearly do not work for the vulnerable, and most affected by disaster, we must continue to expose the power structures supporting those processes—to look beneath the “spin” for the stories of the “rest of us.” Our research identified a variety of policy priorities that could contribute to future research and more equitable disaster policy. (For a detailed discussion, see Cutter et al. 2014.)

CONCLUSION Despite the unprecedented magnitude of the devastation along the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, the recovery was in some ways unremarkable. Those in positions of power before the disaster enhanced their power, and the inequities between them and marginalized groups grew. Because disaster recovery is largely funded and managed through the political system, this outcome is almost inevitable: those who already have political power gain; those who do not lose. And while advantage to the powerful is the norm in everyday life, in disasters the stakes increase, and the social systems and physical landscape structuring everyday life— at least temporarily—break down. Massive infusions of cash descend from multiple sources, routine access to information is interrupted, normal regulations to ensure transparency and accountability are rewritten, and social networks among the marginalized are disrupted. And it is under these extraordinary conditions that potential for either a more extreme inequality or a more equitable future motivate and energize many to work hard for change. To capitalize on disruptions of disasters to create more equitable power structures, disaster research must look beyond the individual-level to understand the complex dynamics at all levels—and it must attend to power. While disaster research increasingly recognizes the complexity and intersectional natures of disaster, the bulk of the research focuses on individual-level impacts (e.g., mental health distress or financial loss). But as our work shows, macro-level factors interact with the micro level to affect individuals and groups in significant ways. As power is constructed through these interactions, some groups tend to win, and others tend to lose. By understanding how this process works, we can better plan to intervene. An intersectional approach can help us identify opportunities for wielding “power with” to disrupt existing and harmful power structures and to create a healthier, more equitable society.

NOTES 1.

2.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant CMMI-0623991. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The authors thank members of the research team: Steve Hardin, Christina Griffin, Joanne Stevenson, Jennifer Castellow, Tara Dunnavant, and Katelyn Noel Singleton. A special thank you to Deanne Messias for assistance in data collection, analysis, and research design and to Jean Bohner for manuscript review and editing. Missing racial data n = 3.

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350  Research handbook on intersectionality Pruitt, Anna S., Eva McKinsey, Tien Austin, and John P. Barile. 2021. “Showing up and Standing with: An Intersectional Approach to Understanding a Participatory Evaluation Partnership among Individuals Involved with a Housing First Program in Honolulu.” In Case Studies in Community Psychology Practice: A Global Lens, edited by Geraldine L. Palmer, Todd L. Rogers, Judah Viola, and Maronica Engel. OER: Rebus. Accessed December 12, 2022 from https://​press​.rebus​.community/​ communit​ypsycholog​ypractice/​chapter/​showing​-up​-and​-standing​-with​-an​-intersectional​-approach​-to​ -a​-participatory​-evaluation​-of​-a​-housing​-first​-program​-on​-oʻahu/​. Quigley, William P. 2015. “A Letter to Social Justice Advocates: Thirteen Lessons Learned by Katrina Social Justice Advocates Looking back Ten Years Later,” Loyola Law Review 61 (3): 623–704. Accessed December 12, 2022 from https://​dspace​.loyno​.edu/​xmlui/​bitstream/​handle/​123456789/​47/​ Quigley​_For​%20Publication​_CCD​_2​.14​.16​.pdf​?sequence​=​1​&​isAllowed​=​y. Radelat, Ana. 2006. “Mississippi Still without Funds to Fix Port,” Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion Ledger, A-1, July 12. Roberston, Campbell. 2010. “Katrina Victims in Mississippi Get More Aid,” New York Times. Accessed December 12, 2022 from http://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2010/​11/​16/​us/​16mississippi​.html​?​_r​=​2​&​. Romero, Mary. 2018. Introducing Intersectionality. New York: Polity Press. Savich, Martin. 2006. “Mississippi Quietly Recovers from Katrina,” NBC News, January 23. Accessed December 12, 2022 from https://​www​.nbcnews​.com/​id/​wbna10994793. Smith, Anna. R. 2016. “‘I Might Talk Slow But I Think Fast’: Changing Contexts and Lessons Learned from Community-Based Organizations Undergoing Long-Term Recovery on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.” Master’s thesis, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Scholar Space. Accessed December 12, 2022 from http://​hdl​.handle​.net/​10125/​51541. Stallings, Robert A. 2002. “Methods of Disaster Research: Unique or Not?” In Methods of Disaster Research, edited by Robert A. Stallings, 21–44. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris. Thomas, Deborah S.K., Brenda Phillips, William Lovecamp, and Alice Fothergill, eds. 2013. Social Vulnerability in Disasters, 2nd edn. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Townsend, Janet G., Emma Zapata, Jo Rowlands, Pilar Alberti, and Marta Mercado. 2000. Women and Power: Fighting Patriarchies and Poverty. London: Zed Books. Trenkner, Tina. 2006. “Haley Barbour, Governor,” Governing.com. Accessed December 12, 2022 from https://​www​.governing​.com/​poy/​haley​-barbour​.html. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (USHUD). 2019. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Management Review Report: Mississippi Development Authority. Accessed December 12, 2022 from https://​www​.documentcloud​.org/​documents/​6176020​-HUD​-letter​-and​ -report​.html. Waivers Granted to and Alternative Requirements for the State of Mississippi’s CDBG Disaster Recovery Grant under the Department of Defense Emergency Supplemental Appropriations to Address Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, and Pandemic Influenza Act, 2006, 71 Fed. Reg. 34457-61. Weber, Lynn. 2010. Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: A Conceptual Framework, 2nd edn. New York: Oxford University Press. Weber, Lynn. 2012. “When Demand Exceeds Supply: Disaster Response and the Southern Political Economy.” In Displaced: Life in the Katrina Diaspora, edited by Lynn Weber and Lori Peek, 79–103. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Weber, Lynn. 2014. “Powering an Unequal Recovery.” In Hurricane Katrina and the Forgotten Coast of Mississippi, edited by Susan Cutter, Christopher T. Emrich, Jerry T. Mitchell, Walter W. Piegorsch, Mark M. Smith, and Lynn Weber, 90–113. New York: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Lynn, and Deanne K.H. Messias. 2012. “Mississippi Front-line Recovery Work after Hurricane Katrina: An Analysis of the Intersections of Gender, Race, and Class in Advocacy, Power Relations, and Health,” Social Science & Medicine 74 (11): 1833–41. 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.08.034. Weber, Lynn, and Lori Peek, eds. 2012. Displaced: Life in the Katrina Diaspora. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

21. Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women’s health Karen J. Leong, Kathy Nakagawa, and Aggie J. Yellow Horse

Until we can all present ourselves to the world in our completeness, as fully and beautifully as we see ourselves naked in our bedrooms, we are not free. (Merle Woo 1981)

INTRODUCTION As the main driver of the population health inequity in the United States, racial health inequity is an urgent public health concern requiring multiple and complex interconnected strategies to reduce and eliminate health inequities across racialized and minoritized groups (David and Collins 2021). Women’s health is a critical dimension of racial health inequities that warrants careful attention and understanding. Women’s health is shaped by the cumulative consequences of social, economic, and/or political exclusions women experience across their life spans (Geronimus 2001); and at the intersection of women’s multiple social categories including race and ethnicity, citizenship and immigration status, class, sexuality among many social factors (Bowleg 2012). That is, women’s health is not simply the sum of effects from multiple social identities; rather, women’s health reflects their unique experiences as multiply-marginalized status across multiple interlocking dimensions (Bowleg 2012). Women’s health inequity is influenced by social, economic, and/or political inequalities that translate to poor health through interconnected mechanisms (Arber and Ginn 1993). Thus, investigation and understanding of women’s health must focus on gender-specific interrogation and inquiry (Heidari et al. 2016). Furthermore, centering women’s experience in racial health inequity dialogue is imperative for anti-racist public health research and praxis (Ford and Airhihenbuwa 2010a, 2010b). This work requires explicit acknowledgement of how intersecting oppressions contribute to women’s health inequity. Designing research about Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) women’s experiences of health inequity thus requires an awareness of the diversity among AANHPI populations who are often inappropriately aggregated under the “Asian and Pacific Islander” or “Asian American and Pacific Islander” category (Sasa and Yellow Horse 2022). The different social, historical, and political contexts for migration to the United States – voluntary migration informed by the economic and political shifts resulting from globalization; involuntary relocation and refugee status as the result of U.S. involvement and neoimperialisms in Southeast Asia – are just a few examples of the different contexts of relocation and U.S. residency. Accounting for these contexts is critical as they result in a diversity not only of ethnicity, but also of socioeconomic and citizenship status, as well as when and how long one or one’s family has resided in the United States. This diversity also renders quantitative data as currently collected unable to account for the specificity of AANHPI women’s social locations. 351

352  Research handbook on intersectionality In this chapter, we explain how intersectionality informed our pilot study about how AANHPI women understand and define health for themselves and motivated us to identify salient social factors that particularly affect their sexual and reproductive health. First, we briefly address basic information about AANHPI communities in the United States. We also explain how data collection relating to AANHPI health flattens the vast range of experiences, making it difficult to identify the ways social factors influence AANHPI women’s understandings of health and their experiences learning about sexual and reproductive health. We then discuss how we addressed the lack of data and ways we attempted to capture some of the context and diversity of experiences in designing a small, localized pilot study. We conclude by noting what we learned from conducting this pilot study; and what changes we intend to make for improving our future inquiries.

BACKGROUND Invisible Complexities in AANHPI Women’s Health The Asian American (AA) and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) populations have been the two fastest growing racialized and minoritized groups in the United States since 2000 – with the AAs as the fastest, and NHPIs as the second fastest population growths (López et al. 2017). In 2019, about 22 million Asian Americans (6.8 percent) and 1.5 million Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (0.4 percent) comprised of 7.2 percent of the total U.S. population (U.S. Census Bureau 2019).1 Despite the rapid population growth and the long historical presence of AANHPI persons and communities in the United States (Lee 2015; Spickard et al. 2002); AANHPI women’s health often is less visible in public health dialogue about racial health inequity and women’s health inequity (Đoàn et al. 2019; Kaholokula et al. 2019; Ro 2002; Shah and Kandula 2020; Yellow Horse 2021). For example, between 1992 and 2018, only 0.17 percent of the total budget from the National institutes of Health was given to clinical research projects focused on AANHPI persons and communities (Đoàn et al. 2019). The reasons behind such invisibility are complex and rooted in structures of White supremacy that erase the experiences of AANHPI persons and communities through use of White logic and methods that result in inadequate representation of non-White individuals and communities in research (Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva 2008). The ways AANHPI persons and communities are represented in data collection and data practices significantly contribute to the invisibility of AANHPI women’s health (Sasa and Yellow Horse 2022). As both Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are “numerically-small” populations in the United States, Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, American Indians, and Alaskan Natives (AIAN) are not accurately represented in survey data collection including large-scale “nationally-representative” surveys (Korngiebel et al. 2015). This is part due to high cost associated with data collection because AANHPI populations are comprised of more than 50 different ethnic groups; and would require more than 100 language translations (Shimkhada et al. 2021). However, the lack of meaningful inclusion of AANHPI and AIAN persons in national surveys also reflect the long historical legacies of systematic racism in science and who is deemed worthy of inclusion (Yellow Horse and Huyser 2021). We focus on two specific mechanisms. First, lack of just representation of AANHPI populations in data through meaningful inclusion masks the important differences within and across the communities

AANHPI women’s heath  353 within the aggregate AANHPI category. Second, when they are included, reliable and accurate measurement of AANHPI health is limited given current health measurement strategies that disregard intersectionality. Invisibilities from Lack of Equitable Representation of AANHPI Populations It is critical to begin the public health dialogue about AANHPI women’s health by explicitly acknowledging problems leading to invisibilities from lack of just representation of AANHPI populations in data. This lack of equitable representation of AANHPI populations in data may come from multiple mechanisms. At large, most national-level administrative and health survey data does not oversample the AANHPI populations, which leads to small samples inappropriate for quantitative multivariate analyses (invisibility through omission). For example, in the largest “nationally-representative” dataset for aging and health in the United States, the Health and Retirement Study, AANHPI participants make up for less than 1 percent of the sample with over 3800 respondents (Yellow Horse and Patterson 2021). Even when AANHPI populations are haphazardly included in national health data, they further become invisible through aggregation and extrapolation – inappropriately generalizing the aggregated group characteristics evenly applies to all groups within the aggregated category (Holland and Palaniappan 2012). There is a common practice of conflating Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders with the aggregated “Asian American and Pacific Islander” category (Nguyen et al. 2013; Shimkhada et al. 2021; Srinivasan and Guillermo 2000) – who have qualitatively distinct historical and contemporary contexts and relations to the United States. This use first came from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from the 1980s (U.S. Office of Budget and Management 1997). It is now widely used in the national-level health data collection efforts and epidemiological assessment in public health. This practice is highly problematic as it masks important differences among heterogeneous groups within the AANHPI category, especially for Pacific Islanders (Sasa and Yellow Horse 2022). In 1997, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget revised the “standards” against using the “Asian and Pacific Islander” category in federal data in 1997 (U.S. Office of Management and Budget 1997); and separated AANHPI into “Asian” and “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders.” However, this aggregation continues to be used in federal and national data collection and research and researchers continue to look at AANHPI health without careful attention to critical nuances (Shimkhada et al. 2021). Invisible Complexities in Migration and Health Measurements AANHPI populations are the only racialized groups whose population growth is driven by in-migration to the United States (López et al. 2017) – other populations’ growth is driven by the birth rates. Using U.S. Census data information on “nativity” (i.e., whether born in the United States and U.S. territory), we can estimate that about 66.1 percent of Asian Americans were foreign born, and about 22.7 percent of Pacific Islanders were “foreign born” in 2019 (U.S. Census Bureau 2019). Despite the common and extremely prevalent practice of understanding Pacific Islanders’ in-migration to the U.S. mainland in the framework of “immigration” in health research (e.g., Frisbie et al. 2001; Takada et al. 1998), this is highly problematic and inaccurate. That is, given different historical contexts and contemporary relationships

354  Research handbook on intersectionality Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders have with the U.S. nation-state, Pacific Islanders’ in-migration to the U.S. mainland should not be examined as “international migration” but rather as displacement2 from the legacies of U.S. settler colonialism (Sasa and Yellow Horse 2022). For Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders, individuals who are born in U.S. territories in the Pacific (i.e., Guam, American Samoa, and Northern Mariana Islands) are considered as U.S. Citizens/Nationals. Thus, when they migrate to the U.S. mainland, they are not counted as “immigrants” although they experience similar disruptions and changes associated with migration. This makes Pacific Islanders born in Hawaii or in U.S. territories who subsequently moved to the U.S. mainland invisible in data. On the other hand, Pacific Islanders born in the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau (collectively) known as the Freely Associated States (FAS) are considered “foreign born.” If Pacific Islanders from FAS regions migrate within the Pacific (e.g., Marshallese living in Hawaii), they are considered “immigrants” (Spickard et al. 2002). Given the complexities in migration and their effects on AANHPI women’s social locations (e.g., citizenship status and access to U.S. health care), current health measurement strategies, which often use broad self-reported questions, require an intentional focus on intersectionality. Several systemic reviews document that the self-reported health measure is an unreliable measure for Asian Americans because limited English proficiency was associated with them tending to report to not be in good health (Kandula et al. 2007; Lommel and Chen 2016). Pacific Islanders are more likely to report poor health than Asian Americans (Taualii 2007), but there is lack of systemic investigation on the reliability of the self-reported health measure for Pacific Islanders. Beyond linguistic barriers, the cultural meanings of health not only differ for AANHPI women within their own cultural backgrounds, but they can also change in the process of migration (e.g., before, during, and post-migration). Intersectionality Approach to Health Research to Visibilize AANHPI Women’s Health While it may be apparent that individuals occupy different social locations including race, class, and gender, we extend those social factors to specifically address the diversity within the context of AANHPI communities. Namely, we recognize that while age is an important factor in relation to women’s sexual and reproductive health, AANHPI women also may differ in immigration generational status. Individuals who migrate to the United States are first-generation immigrants. Children of immigrants who migrate before their teens often are identified as being 1.5 generation, because they have participated in U.S. culture from a younger age. Children of immigrants who are born in the United States are second generation. Studies suggest that cultural differences may exist between the first and 1.5 or second generations. Furthermore, the fluid and dynamic nature of AANHPI women’s experience and health related to their migration experiences add additional challenges for quantitative methods (Agénor 2020; Else-Quest and Hyde 2016). It is important to note that first-generation AANHPI women also may have different levels of acculturation based on their experiences in their homelands, how long they have lived in the United States, whether they work outside the home and with whom they socialize. Even among first-generation immigrants, their fluency in English may reflect where they were raised; English is spoken widely in India, particularly among those who have received education in India, as a result of the British legacy of colonization. English fluency may be more

AANHPI women’s heath  355 common for Pacific Islanders who attended schools where instruction was in English or have worked on U.S. military bases in their country of origin. College-educated immigrants from Asia may have studied English. Knowing English also may influence some immigrants to feel more comfortable interacting beyond their immediate immigrant and/or ethnic community. Different experiences and acquisition levels of the English language may contribute to greater self-efficacy in describing one’s health. For example, the 2017 American Community Survey indicated that 50 percent of Vietnamese Americans reported limited English proficiency, in comparison to 20 percent of Asian Indian Americans (AAPI Data 2020).

CURRENT STUDY We conducted a pilot study to explore how AANHPI women understand, perceive, and feel about their health at the intersection of multiple social categories, which can be used to design and implement more culturally competent health care services that center and respect health experiences among AANHPI women across their life span. Our study explored how AANHPI women in a large metropolitan area in Arizona define health. We wanted to identify what particular social factors informed the ways women talk about health as well as the ways they learned about sexual and reproductive health. We designed the study to generate transdisciplinary and socially engaged scholarship that draws from both humanities and social science scholarship and to collaborate with different community organizations that serve AANHPI persons. Due to the limited research about AANHPI (especially NHPI) women’s sexualities, we drew upon rich histories and literature relating to AANHPI women’s sexual and reproductive health to identify key themes for our research. The humanities literature inspired us to develop a storytelling component with community members. However, this chapter only focuses on our use of the focus group and surveys. Because we work at a public university in Arizona and have developed relationships within the surrounding AANHPI communities, our work is based on this population. However, beyond our personal ties with local communities, Arizona provides an important context for understanding AANHPI women’s health. The smaller number of AANHPI populations in Arizona restrict the use of available state-based quantitative data as AANHPI populations, are often not included due to lack of sample size for statistical significance (invisibility through omission) or are aggregated into one category without meaningful data disaggregation by ethnicity (invisibility through aggregation). Furthermore, Arizona is an emerging destination for AANHPI persons. Since 2000, Arizona experienced the second fastest growth of AANHPI population in the United States after Nevada (Asian Americans Advancing Justice 2015). In 2019, about 311,000 Asian Americans (4.4 percent) and 32,000 Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders (0.5 percent) comprised 4.9 percent of the total state population in Arizona (U.S. Census Bureau 2019). From 2000 to 2019, the Asian American population grew by 262 percent; and the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander population grew by 241 percent (Table 21.1). While still numerically small, the rapid growth often accompanies additional challenges for equitable access to culturally and linguistically appropriate health services for AANHPI communities compared to regions with larger AANHPI populations. In contrast to work that often centers Asian Americans over Pacific Islanders, in our study Pacific Islander women were not “added on” but were an integral part of all research processes from the beginning.

356  Research handbook on intersectionality Table 21.1

Demographic changes of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Arizona, 2000, 2010, and 2019 2000 N

2010 %

N

118 672

2.3

13 415

0.3

AANHPI

132 087

AZ Total

5 130 632

Asian American NHOPI

Source:

2019 %

N

%

230 907

3.6

310 727

4.4

25 106

0.4

32 339

0.5

2.6

256 013

4.0

343 066

4.9

 

6 392 017

 

7 050 299

 

2000 and 2010 Decennial Censuses, and 2019 American Community Survey from U.S. Census.

METHOD Study Design and Setting To encourage discussion among women across differences and to create a more inclusive environment, we decided on focus groups as our primary method of data collection. In addition, we relied upon our established relationships with community organizations to ask community members for their input as we created surveys and focus group questions. We designed semi-structured, open-ended questions for the focus groups. Rather than impose or assume a common definition of health, we asked participants how they defined health. Their responses demonstrated how they understood health and what they valued when talking about health. Our next structured question asked about their first period or menstruation experience. Originally, we had written the question about their reproductive health. When we asked a community member who worked with immigrant women to provide feedback on our questions, she noted that the women would not understand what we were asking. She suggested changing the question to be more attentive to women’s actual lived experience. We changed the question to ask them to describe their experiences “coming of age”; and used that question to set up follow-up questions about how much the women knew about pregnancy, who taught them about sexual activity and sexual health, who they spoke with about sexual health, and – if they had children – how they spoke about sexual health with their children. Thus, while we defined the focus of the discussion around sexual and reproductive health, we worded our questions to allow the participants themselves to choose what to prioritize in their answers. We also developed a post-focus group survey to capture more nuanced information about the intersections of each participant’s social location. The survey questions reflected our review of existing literature about AANHPI women’s health and the salient social factors that inform AANHPI women’s experiences. The survey first asked age, place of birth (national origin), highest educational level achieved, whether the individual was employed or not, their current employment if applicable, their marital status, number of children if applicable, and their age and gender. We then asked questions about their general health, including where they go if they are ill or have health concerns, their sexual health, which included what methods, if any, they used to prevent pregnancy, who they would speak to about their sexual health and places they associated with their sexual and reproductive health. Because we relied on focus groups with participants from different ethnicities, we conducted our conversations in English. This removed one of the key differences among AANHPI women. This may have limited the

AANHPI women’s heath  357 responses depending on English comfort, fluency, and preference for participants. We also included the one-item self-reported health question that is typically used to assess health: “Think about your health. Would you say your health in general is excellent, very good, good, fair, or poor?” The question itself is so broad that it is only through an intersectional framework that we can make sense of how participants interpret and define health. Recruitment and Data Collection We recruited the participants by distributing flyers at two local community events in 2018. A community partner also shared the information with various Pacific Islander communities. Snowball sampling was used. Participants were invited to participate in the study if they met the following three criteria: (1) self-identified Asian American, Native Hawaiian and/or Pacific Islander American women; (2) aged 25 or older; (3) spoke and understood English. The study included four in-person focus groups, ranging in size from three to nine, which occurred from March to June 2018. Each focus group was held at a community organization’s meeting space, and each took about 90 minutes. We chose the community organization site because it was centrally located, had easily accessible parking, and was familiar to many community members. The focus group discussion was recorded on a laptop or iPad while simultaneously transcribed. After each focus group, respondents were invited to complete the post-interview survey that included questions on socioeconomic and demographic information, family, and relationships. We asked questions about their general health and where they go if they are ill or have health concerns. We asked specific questions about their sexual health, which included what methods, if any, they used to prevent pregnancy, and who they speak with about their sexual health, as well as the places they associate with their sexual and reproductive health. Based on our past data collection experience using oral histories, focus groups, and surveys, we kept the consent and permission forms simple and straightforward. This decision was also based on community members informing us that some immigrants from specific Asian countries are reluctant to fill out paperwork and forms because of their lack of trust in the authorities in their countries. Additionally, older individuals might find the process of reading and understanding the paperwork intimidating. After conducting the focus groups, the recorded conversations were used to supplement the transcription taken during the focus group. This was a cost-effective way to identify changes in who was speaking and to be able to match what was said with the demographic information provided for each participant. The small size of our sample (n = 24) made it possible for us to accomplish our research design relatively well; however, in the future having video footage of the focus groups would help to transcribe and cross-reference the speaker to provide a more explicit intersectional analysis based on the participant’s social locations more accurately. Participants Twenty-four participants were recruited for this study including 11 Asian American women and 13 Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander women. All participants self-identified as Asian/ Asian American (i.e., Filipina, Chinese, Asian Indian, Japanese, and Vietnamese), or Pacific Islanders (i.e., Chamorro, Marshallese, and Tongan). The average age for our participants was 48.8 years of age. Three out of four women in our study (63.6 percent of the Asian American

358  Research handbook on intersectionality women and 84.6 percent of the Pacific Islander women) were born outside of the United States. On average, participants had lived 18.1 years in Arizona at the time of the focus group interview and survey – placing the average year our participants relocated to Arizona as Year 2000. This corresponds with the time of rapid growth of AANHPI populations via migration to the United States, and a starting point for the geographic diversification and emergence of the “new (AANHPI) immigrant destinations” (Budiman and Ruiz 2021). Education, employment status, marital status, and the average number of children varied substantially between Asian American women and Pacific Islander women. Whereas 81.8 percent of Asian American women reported being employed, in comparison 30.8 percent of Pacific Islander women were employed. While all Pacific Islander women in our study reported being married or cohabitating with a partner, about 36.4 percent of Asian American women reported being married. Compared to Asian American women, Pacific Islander women averaged more children (1.4 vs. 4.0) The strength of this sample for intersectional research about AANHPI women is that it provided us with an opportunity to explore differences based on AANHPI ethnic background and culture, age/generation, place of birth (U.S. born vs. non-U.S. born3), and education. Overview of Data Analysis We initially analysed data using the consensual qualitative research methodology (CQR) which is an integrative methodology emphasizing consensus among multiple researchers to construct findings from the data gathered (Hill et al. 1997; Hill et al. 2005). We followed the suggested steps of the CQR methodology by first developing the domains, constructed core ideas, then conducted collective analysis to find consensus to identify the cases for domains (Hill et al. 1997). The process of finding consensus forced us to use more of an intersectional analysis to look more closely at differences in generation and U.S. born or not as factors that helped to illuminate and explain some of the findings. All three authors participated in data analysis. Prior to the data collection and data analysis, researchers regularly engaged in conversations to reflect on our own positionalities, experiences, and biases (Morrow 2005). As the first step, we independently reviewed the transcripts from all focus group interviews and reached the consensus on the four main domains. Once the main domains were identified, each member read the transcripts to identify the quotes and assigned them to the main domain categories. After compiling the list, we used a cross-comparison to identify consensus. The consensus quotes and their correlating demographic data allowed the authors to identify social factors that were salient in the shared experiences and perceptions relating to interactions with health care professionals and how they learned about sexual health. A couple of consensus quotes highlighted the generational differences in how women were taught about sex and how they sought to teach their children or grandchildren about sex. Another consensus among immigrant Pacific Islander women also emerged relating to health and body size. Nonetheless, identifying consensus in the focus group responses was not the same as identifying how social factors for each participant intersected to inform their individual responses. Since the questions used in the focus groups centered on ethnicity and gender, it follows that the key themes emerging from the focus groups emphasized collective experiences based on the intersections of ethnicity and gender. Given the relatively small size of the ethnic communities, we chose to not ask questions that highlighted differences of socioeconomic status, health insurance coverage, or citizenship status because of the likelihood that participants

AANHPI women’s heath  359 share community spaces and know each other. We interpret these findings as resulting from focus group participants responding to our questions on the status of identifying as AANHPI and women. Some of the discussions addressed differences in generation, language, and culture in response to how they discussed sexual health with their children. Identifying specific factors that might contribute to different behaviors regarding health and sexual health required closer analysis of the data from the post-focus group survey. The survey asked about: (1) where one went to receive health care; (2) self-perceptions of one’s health and the places one identified with health; (3) who one first spoke to about one’s sexual and reproductive health; and (4) sexual activity and contraceptive use. For each set of questions, we compared the responses to find any key distinctions by age, U.S.-born vs. non-U.S.-born status, employment, and education. These distinctions were then compared to the focus group discussions. In the case of certain themes, the focus groups provided richer context. Other topics such as contraceptive use or other methods to avoid pregnancy were not discussed in detail in any of the focus groups.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS The intersectional analysis of survey data revealed four possible themes: (1) connections between a person’s assessment of their health, access to health care, and their citizenship and/ or socioeconomic status; (2) distinctions between how immigrant vs. U.S.-born participants understand or define health; (3) patterns in how and when non-U.S.-born AANHPI women speak about sexual health; and (4) generational differences in cultural barriers experienced in seeking care. However, as noted above, the relatively small number of participants in this study mean that these results only suggest future directions and methods for research as opposed to any definitive findings. We will further elaborate this point at the conclusion of this chapter. Theme 1: Good But Not Great Health and Access to Health Care Most women in our study reported having good health (91.7 percent). Of 11 Asian American women, only one indicated that she did not have good health; similarly, of 13 Pacific Islander women just one indicated that she did not have good health. Although the self-reported health measure is universally used as a measure for assessing quality of life (Zack et al. 2004), our survey results showed that it may not be a reliable measure for AANHPI women as there were no meaningful variations that capture the intersectional health and health experiences among AANHPI women. Contrary to the previous research documenting that Pacific Islanders are more likely to report poor health than Asian Americans (Taualii 2007), we did not find much variation in how AANHPI women evaluate their own health when using the self-reported health measure from our survey. Through our focus groups, we found indications that the “self-reported health” status measure grossly fails to capture the heterogeneous health definitions, perceptions and understandings among AANHPI women and many women shared their health conditions like hypertension, diabetes, high blood pressure, and even recent recoveries from cancer and surgeries. For example, a dominant definition of good health among the AANHPI immigrant women was the lack of illness. Comparing survey responses to discussions of diseases in the focus

360  Research handbook on intersectionality groups, it appears that being able to have access to some sort of health treatment, including medications to manage conditions, meant their health was “good.” Part of the context for this response may relate to how non-U.S.-born participants received health care. Many of the Pacific Islander participants were not eligible for Medicaid or Medicare given their citizenship status. In some instances, they went for a period without access to regular health care. Focus group discussions addressed how health care increasingly became modernized under U.S. influence by relying on doctors as opposed to local healers, which made accessing health care for cancer and chronic disease before migration difficult. Many were able to receive their health care through a community health center, which provides care to those who have fewer economic resources. The intersections of place of origin/ ethnicity, first-generation status, and lack of citizenship limited their access to health care. Additionally, focus group discussions also provided context that highlighted the essential importance of having community advocates present to explain cultural differences, which improved communication with the health care providers at the health center, resulting in an increase in these women being willing to return to receive the care they needed. Without a large metropolitan area offering both a federally subsidized health center and a community organization that provided advocacy, Pacific Islander women were less likely to seek care when needed. This example illustrates the importance of location that includes both a significant size ethnic community and the existence of the health care center, which are mitigating social factors for improving women’s health. Theme 2: Places Associated with Health and Changing Meanings of Health Fewer participants responded to the survey question about important places they thought about in relationship to their health. Using an intersectional analysis allowed us to identify differences based on immigration status. U.S.-born participants were much less likely to respond (just four of 12) to the question, whereas most non-U.S.-born participants did so. In addition, more non-U.S.-born respondents were likely to name the doctor’s office as a place of health. In contrast to the doctor’s office, many U.S.-born respondents cited another space, such as a friend’s house or a garden, as important to health. For example, one participant who has spent three decades in the United States reflected about how her understanding of health changed over time: … [W]hen growing up … health was more illness. Sickness. All the negative parts of health. Whereas as I got older and wiser, I learned health to be wellness. Balance. You know … how do you wrap yourself around this health stuff? And … I am a 10 year breast cancer survivor as well. But I have to tell you my most demanding health challenge is diabetes. (FG1, P1)

Having grown up outside of the United States, this participant initially thought of health as a lack of health or having an illness. She developed a broader definition of health after surviving several illnesses. Although she attributed this shift to age and wisdom, it may be that she was also influenced by how health in the United States is defined. One younger U.S.-born participant defined health as being “in [a] good physical and mental state.” However, she also described health as a collective endeavor, “the health of the community in general” (FG3, P1). Another specifically associated health with her family’s wellbeing, adding, “Yeah, about the quality of life and your environment and the way that that affects you and your family. And the ability to do the things you want and need to do to have a successful

AANHPI women’s heath  361 and a happy life” (FG3, P2). These quotes suggest that generational and cultural differences may shape the way that AANHPI women define health. Community health or social wellbeing of the community was key to understanding what health means. This involves community members supporting and caring for each other. Living in the United States also may influence how health is understood. Changing definitions of health as the absence of illness to more holistic concepts of wellness and balance is one example. The language of wellness was introduced to U.S. audiences by Dan Rather in 1979 as “a new health movement,” and became more commonplace in describing health by the 1980s (Zimmer 2010, 20). Another’s emphasis on individual choices and happiness suggests a level of affluence or attainment that may not be available to all AANHPI women, particularly those living in poverty, facing pressures to work, or providing care for older family members. Thus, health for these participants depends not simply on gender, race, and culture, but on the larger community context in each woman’s life. These different definitions of health matter for health care practitioners as well. As noted earlier, nearly all participants indicated “good” health in the survey. In the focus groups, however, several participants identified chronic conditions including high blood pressure and diabetes. Participants may be applying their broader definitions of health in responding to the self-rated health measure rather than how practitioners or researchers interpret this measure. Further research with larger sample sizes is needed to tease out the ways that generation, immigrant status and culture may influence how AANHPI women define and understand health. Theme 3: Sex, Birth Control, and Trust Nearly all the participants (92 percent) responded to the survey questions about sexual health and birth control. Of the seven U.S.-born participants who responded, four participants spoke first to a health care professional, one with their partner/spouse, one with a friend, and one spoke to no one. In contrast, the non-U.S.-born AANHPI women were much less likely to speak with a health care provider; instead the majority spoke with a friend or partner, and five participants said they spoke with no one. In the focus groups, many non-U.S.-born participants emphasized elders’ reluctance to talk about sex, learning about sex after marriage, and having greater trust in the local community’s alternative “folk medicine” and practices than “medical experts.” One participant explained, “Once a year I go and do all the women wellness, but I also go to acupuncture, acupressure, Chinese treatment, massage. Because we don’t have a medicine woman to go to – otherwise I’d go to a medicine woman” (FG2, P1). Strong cultural taboos exist in AANHPI cultures about discussing sex before marriage or only talking openly about sex with other women after marriage. Some of the older women shared stories of not knowing about menstruation until their first period and the fear they experienced at suddenly bleeding with no explanation. A couple of women shared specific family traditions acknowledging their first menses with some ritual. U.S.-born AANHPI women, on the other hand, reported not speaking about sex in the family until they were about to go to college, at which point some of their mothers took them to the doctor to get birth control. The older women mentioned tacit understanding that sex was all about their husband’s pleasure. Generational differences, however, were also apparent in many of the women emphasizing that they did not want their daughters to learn about sex the way they did. They talked about their plans to speak with their daughters (and sons, as well as grandchildren in some cases)

362  Research handbook on intersectionality about sex in age-appropriate ways so that the shame and silence they experienced does not continue. Finally, as has been noted with other studies about older women (Addis et al. 2006: Tetley et al. 2018; Thomas et al. 2015), our survey suggests that AANHPI women remain sexually active after menopause. Although AANHPI women, especially those not born in the United States, are more modest about addressing their sexual health with people they do not know, including health care practitioners, our findings suggest that health professionals should not assume modesty and age means that sexual health is not relevant in these women’s lives. However, it is also relevant that, for some cultures, women have been raised to only speak with women about these matters and may not disclose information to male health professionals. The intersection of gender and cultural practice was especially crucial in decisions involving some Pacific Islanders. One participant stated, “For us, we have to see a woman doctor. Cause that’s our culture. Never see a man. ‘Cause you cannot ask the man, the doctor … I am this, how can I have this, can you tell me about this? But [with] the woman you [can be] really open” (FG4, P1). She explained that an advocate was sometimes necessary to explain these cultural practices to health care providers before making an appointment. However, the concerns over needing to advocate and explain culture to a health care provider adds another element of stress in seeking care. In fact, the community navigator and advocate shared that she met with management to report how a health care provider had dismissed one immigrant woman’s health concern and loudly scolded her as fat. The conventional ways that the health care system interacts with patients contributes to these problems. In the end, the failure of health care workers to ask about or recognize basic needs of AANHPI communities led one participant to simply state “I have to trust that they have my best interests at heart” (FG1, J2). These examples illustrate the importance of intersectionality in understanding AANHPI women’s health. Analysing age/generation and immigrant status uncovered differences previously hidden in the data. In addition, the voices of the women in our study provide a contrast to how AANHPI women are often framed as silent, compliant, and healthy. Instead, participants in our study reveal the ways in which their health is overlooked; and how power operates in commonplace interactions with the health care system to erase their needs and experiences. Their voices exemplify how AANHPI women learn to navigate the system and how these navigations differ along generation, cultural background, and place of birth. Understanding the ways these differences operate in AANHPI women’s choices helps to explain why participants seek out knowledge on their own and sometimes ignore health care providers’ views and instead trust their own cultural knowledge. Theme 4 highlights the ways in which women chose alternatives to the health care system that empowered them to do what they believed was best for their own health. Theme 4: Frustration with Cultural Barriers and Generational Differences Several of the participants’ perspectives of health were influenced by the multigenerational contexts growing up with grandparents’ illnesses and needing assistance, or those currently caring for aging parents. Cultural barriers may manifest as frustration with elders’ reluctance to ask for help or call attention to themselves. A participant noted, “Well part of it is because Asians for the most part don’t discuss illnesses.” She continued,

AANHPI women’s heath  363 … [A]nother thing that a lot of us don’t dwell on until it actually happens is things about our elders [“Oh yes.”]. Because a lot of our elders are having problems and the elders will NOT ask you for help until they are hurting so bad. [“Right.”] You have to kind of watch for signs that they are having distress or somethings not quite right. (FG1, P4)

Another participant recalled her mother and aunts minimizing health issues, which also extended to her father minimizing her mother’s health issues. [O]ne thing that I noticed also on my relatives here, all immigrants, is that my aunts and my mom would have health issues, but they usually minimized them. And so I think it’s made me, I’m an immigrant as well but an assimilated Asian immigrant, I am much more vocal about my health issues – I don’t minimize them because I feel that often in the South Asian community and maybe in the Asian community, women’s health issues aren’t necessarily – you know, their aches and pains are just “oh” everyday aches and pains that people complain about as opposed to an underlying cause. And I’ve noticed that the tendency between my parents of my dad minimizing my mother’s health issues to an extent. (FG3, P1)

This daughter clearly believed gender, generation, and culture affected how older women in her family described their health, whether a result of trying not to draw attention to oneself or being socialized to put others’ needs ahead of themselves. This may also be reflected in how AANHPI women respond to the self-reported health measure as noted earlier. Even as an immigrant, she credits being assimilated into U.S. culture for understanding these gendered cultural dynamics in her own family and community, which then motivated her to speak up about her health issues. One Pacific Islander participant specifically spoke about pressures she felt to be perfect: Don’t disgrace the family. And there’s shame – don’t bring shame there, to the family … thinking about that and how it effects my health, um, there is that expectation in my mind that you have to, whatever you do has to be great, don’t bring shame. And so that stress of trying to be perfect and trying to build this person of “Everything is great in my life,” you know, even though my health may be falling apart. So, for me personally I’m borderline diabetic, um, it’s not yet high blood pressure but it’s elevated, how do we, how do we go back to preventative care? (FG1, P7)

This intergenerational pressure to fulfill expectations of a perfect life comes at the cost of physical and mental health. Noh (2018) noted that “many Asian American women see their families as being responsible for imposing their expectations of success” (321–2). Instead of reflecting on Asian or Pacific Islander cultural expectations, she argues that U.S. culture of racism, sexism, and classism are actually “reproducing pathological racialized, gendered, and classed thinking” (334), which impact physical health conditions related to stress such as metabolic disorders and high blood pressure.4 Participants’ responses to inadequate health care differed depending on various factors, such as age, immigrant status, class, and ethnic background. Younger participants (under age 50) born in the United States tended to question the system whereas newer immigrants and elders sometimes sought relief in their own cultural practices when the formal medical system failed them. In the discussion of these alternatives, the women demonstrated their use of agency in developing strategies and practices in addressing their health needs when they recognized the limitation of the formal medical system. Several women reported that workshops about healthy diets or drug interactions never mentioned food specific to their culture. To fight the

364  Research handbook on intersectionality erasure they experienced in the health system, many participants also sought experiences that built community with other Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in women’s groups and churches that offered supportive and informational function. As one woman explained, “That’s how we get these kinds of information from each other” (FG4, P1). Another participant illustrated blending their ethnic community with communal practices with a popular U.S.-based television show competition about weight loss, “[Y]eah we even have a committee … we call it Biggest Loser …” (FG4, P2). Community members pitch in money each week for a weigh in, and the biggest loser at the end of the designated time also gets the cash as well. In her book Minor Feelings (2020), Hong discusses the ways that she seeks to “decenter whiteness” (104) and notes that even citing the “Asian American” experience is a form of acknowledging and reacting to the system of Whiteness. Gathering these AANHPI women from a various backgrounds, ages, and experiences to participate in our study felt like a chance to decenter Whiteness. In certain moments, it also felt like a celebration – stories told for our communities, without extra explanation and need for approval or acceptance from the (White) health care system. The alternative response to the individualized, decontextualized nature of the U.S. health care system is to create what the women in our study did: to establish a liminal space to affirm the cultural health-related knowledge and experiences AANHPI women already have. What intersectional analysis allowed us to do was to better understand the relation health care access has to employment status, income, and citizenship status, place of birth, religion, and generational status and the way these intersections informed AANHPI women’s definitions of health, practices of sexual and reproductive health, and impact their experiences in the health care system. Intersectionality allows a much more critical, nuanced, and fine-grained approach to understanding and amplifying the health needs and experiences of AANHPI women.

CONCLUSION Overall, this chapter demonstrates the importance of utilizing an intersectional approach in both methodological design and analysis. In studying AANHPI women’s health, we recognized that our research required an intersectional approach to fully address the complex diversity among AANHPI women’s experiences. As illustrated with our analysis, women’s stories brought rich and detailed information about how AANHPI women understand, feel, and perceive health differently at the intersection of their identities and experiences – which is grossly masked when the standard self-reported health measure is used. Instead, using qualitative methods allowed data on lived experiences to be collected and analysed through an intersectional lens. Qualitative data collected from focus groups and interviews provided nuanced data that were missed in previous survey results. For example, one survey respondent identified a garden space as a site of health and wellbeing; however, the focus group allowed rich discussion about outdoor spaces and the relationship between their mental, emotional, and physical health. Our findings revealed our own limitations as researchers as well as the limitations of relying upon literature regarding AANHPI women’s health that does not disaggregate data. In organizing our project, our primary reliance on the English language necessitated conducting the focus groups in English. This meant that one of the key factors that limits immigrant AANHPI women’s access to health care was not part of this study. Even knowing the importance that the

AANHPI women’s heath  365 church holds in some local Pacific Islander communities, we neglected to ask about religion, which clearly impacts on use of contraceptives. Asking about sexuality also is important in a study about sexual health, as studies have shown that the heteronormative health care system continues to discourage lesbians, bisexuals, pansexuals, and transgender women from openly discussing their sexual health or seeking health care. Identifying which social factors contribute to aggregate patterns of access to and successful navigation of an unknown health care system by non-citizen and/or a recent immigrant instead of using monolithic understandings of AANHPI communities and culture all are important avenues for further study on the effects on health and wellbeing. Our pilot study also highlights the complexity of researching a numerically small community on a local scale. Given the political climate toward immigrants of color during the Trump administration, we were concerned about asking detailed information about citizenship status. Therefore, we did not ask about naturalized citizenship or visa status, nor household income. In addition, our community partner had informed us about survey fatigue among certain ethnic groups that, due to their numerically smaller size, are underrepresented in AANHPI-specific data; therefore, we chose to administer our surveys only after achieving participants’ engagement through the face-to-face focus groups. While our small sample size allowed us to cross reference different demographic information for intersectional analysis, being able to conduct this research on a larger scale requires significant expertise in setting up the survey and coding the social factors in ways that allow cross referencing. Being able to collect this data in large enough numbers to be considered significant is a considerable challenge. A mixed methods study on a larger scale requires resources that cover the cost of incentives and language translation (and back translation). Although intersectional methods address some aspects of the limitations of quantitative research relating to AANHPI communities, doing research about AANHPI women in Arizona, where disaggregated communities can be quite small (n < 100 for some ethnic groups) also presents a challenge. Applying qualitative methods like focus groups with smaller, more tight-knit communities also might undermine open responses, particularly for a study about sexual and reproductive health. In the case of this chapter, we omitted certain findings because describing our participants’ specific intersectional locations might result in participants being able to identify each other. Large sample sizes are necessary to help maintain the confidentiality of participants; but if region is an important factor, collecting a sample large enough to disaggregate data to apply an intersectional analysis that takes ethnicity into account may not be possible. A key lesson from our pilot study is the importance of doing intersectional research to capture differences that are often overlooked in the study of AANHPI women. Intersectional analysis allowed us to highlight and examine how those individual experiences contextualized health experiences. Connecting the survey data and the qualitative focus group data required multiple readings and analyses to accurately identify the key points of intersection from the survey data that informed the points of agreement in the focus groups. The implications of this study suggest better ways of collecting data on AANHPI populations, which advocates for more meaningful inclusion of AANHPI persons from areas with smaller AANHPI populations as well as inclusion of key factors associated with migration such as citizenship status. The study also suggests the need for navigators or partners to negotiate the health care system depending on the background of the participants. This is especially critical to first-generation immigrant groups, who may approach the health care system with a different view of health

366  Research handbook on intersectionality and health care than providers or do not utilize the system without support from a trusted community member. Even in our own experience designing the focus group questions to be more accessible to all the participants, we benefited from working with a community member. Having a better understanding of specific cultural norms based on gender and age than we did, they drew from their experience working with immigrant communities and advocating for specific individuals to access health care. Providers and other researchers with little experience working with AANHPI populations might similarly benefit by using an intersectional and community-based approach to capture critical but nuanced differences in this diverse community.

NOTES 1. The numbers include Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who reported one race (i.e., “Asian Alone” and “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander Alone”) as well as individuals that reported multiple races (i.e., “Asian Alone Or In Combination With One Or More Other Races” and “Native Hawaiian And Other Pacific Islander Alone Or In Combination With One Or More Other Races.”) When only single race is used, there were about 18 million Asian Americans (5.5 percent) and 600,000 Pacific Islanders (0.2 percent) – comprising about 5.7 percent of the U.S. total population in 2019. 2. We use the term “displacement”, but we acknowledge that settler colonialism mostly applies to Hawai’i, and relocations from other islands are due to U.S. colonization and militarism. 3. By “non-U.S. born” we mean those not born in the 48 contiguous U.S. states. 4. Noh (2018) cautions against easy cultural explanations for these pressures, suggesting that “the complex gender, sexual, and class sexualization process involved in intergenerational Asian American relationships is lost within a narrow culturalist framing” (322) of intergenerational conflict. While Noh’s analysis of how pressures for Asian American women to fulfill the needs of the neoliberal state results in “cultures of terror” (334) specifically may inform suicidal ideation, the negative effect of trauma and stress on health is not within the purview of this chapter.

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AANHPI women’s heath  367 Budiman, Abby, and Neil G. Ruiz. 2021. “Key Facts about Asian Americans, a Diverse and Growing Population,” April 29. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. https://​ www​ .americ​ animmigrat​ ioncouncil​.org/​research/​temporary​-protected​-status​-overview (accessed March 10, 2021). David, Richard, and James W. Collins. 2021. “Why Does Racial Inequity in Health Persist?” Journal of Perinatology 41 (2): 346–50. doi:​10​.1038/​s41372​-020​-00885​-8 Đoàn, Lan N., Yumie Takata, Kari-Lyn K. Sakuma, and Veronica L. Irvin. 2019. “Trends in Clinical Research Including Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Participants Funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, 1992 to 2018,” JAMA Network Open 2 (7): e197432-e32. doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.7432 Else-Quest, Nicole M., and Janet Shibley Hyde. 2016. “Intersectionality in Quantitative Psychological Research: I. Theoretical and Epistemological Issues,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 40 (2): 155–70. doi: 10.1177/0361684316629797 Ford, Chandra L., and Collins O. Airhihenbuwa. 2010a. “Critical Race Theory, Race Equity, and Public Health: Toward Antiracism Praxis: The Science of Eliminating Health Disparities,” American Journal of Public Health 100 (Suppl 1): S30–S35. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2009.171058 Ford, Chandra L., and Collins O. Airhihenbuwa. 2010b. “The Public Health Critical Race Methodology: Praxis for Antiracism Research,” Social Science & Medicine 71 (8): 1390–998. doi:​10​.1016/​j​ .socscimed​.2010​.07​.030 Frisbie, W. Parker, Youngtae Cho, and Robert A. Hummer. 2001. “Immigration and the Health of Asian and Pacific Islander Adults in the United States,” American Journal of Epidemiology 153 (4): 372–80. doi​.org/​10​.1093/​aje/​153​.4​.372 Geronimus, Arline T. 2001. “Understanding and Eliminating Racial Inequalities in Women’s Health in the United States: The Role of the Weathering Conceptual Framework,” Journal of the American Medical Women's Association 56 (4): 133–50. Heidari, Shirin, Thomas F. Babor, Paola De Castro, Sera Tort, and Mirjam Curno. 2016. “Sex and Gender Equity in Research: Rationale for the Sager Guidelines and Recommended Use,” Research Integrity and Peer Review 1 (1): 1–9. doi: 10.1186/s41073-016-0007-6 Hill, Clara E., Barbara J. Thompson, and Elizabeth Nutt Williams. 1997. “A Guide to Conducting 10​ .1177/​ Consensual Qualitative Research,” The Counseling Psychologist 25 (4): 517–72. doi:​ 0011000097254001 Hill, Clara E., Sarah Knox, Barbara J. Thompson, Elizabeth Nutt Williams, Shirley A. Hess, and Nicholas Ladany. 2005. “Consensual Qualitative Research: An Update,” Journal of Counseling Psychology 52 (2): 196–205. doi: 10.1037/0022-0167.52.2.196 Holland, Ariel T., and Latha P. Palaniappan. 2012. “Problems with the Collection and Interpretation of Asian-American Health Data: Omission, Aggregation, and Extrapolation,” Annals of Epidemiology 22 (6): 397–405. doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.annepidem​.2012​.04​.001 Hong, Cathy Park. 2020. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. New York: One World. Kaholokula, Joseph Keawe’aimoku, Scott K. Okamoto, and Barbara W.K. Yee. 2019. “Special Issue Introduction: Advancing Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander Health,” Asian American Journal of Psychology 10 (3): 197–205. doi:​10​.1037/​aap0000167 Kandula, Namratha R., Diane S. Lauderdale, and David W. Baker. 2007. “Differences in Self-Reported Health among Asians, Latinos, and Non-Hispanic Whites: The Role of Language and Nativity,” Annals of Epidemiology 17 (3): 191–8. doi: 10.1016/j.annepidem.2006.10.005 Korngiebel, Diane M., Maile Taualii, Ralph Forquera, Raymond Harris, and Dedra Buchwald. 2015. “Addressing the Challenges of Research with Small Populations,” American Journal of Public Health 105 (9): 1744–7. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2015.302783 Lee, Erika. 2015. The Making of Asian America: A History. New York: Simon and Schuster. Lommel, Lisa L., and Jyu-Lin Chen. 2016. “The Relationship between Self-Rated Health and Acculturation in Hispanic and Asian Adult Immigrants: A Systematic Review,” Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health 18 (2): 468–78. doi:​10​.1007/​s10903​-015​-0208​-y López, G., Ruiz, N.G., and Patten, E. 2017. “Key Facts about Asian Americans, a Diverse and Growing Population.” Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. https://​pewrsr​.ch/​2leXin (accessed March 10, 2021). Morrow, Susan L. 2005. "Quality and Trustworthiness in Qualitative Research in Counseling Psychology,” Journal of Counseling Psychology 52 (2): 250–60. doi: 10.1037/0022-0167.52.2.250

368  Research handbook on intersectionality Nguyen, Bach-Mai Dolly, Mike Hoa Nguyen, and Tu-Lien Kim Nguyen. 2013. “Advancing the Asian American and Pacific Islander Data Quality Campaign: Data Disaggregation Practice and Policy,” Asian American Policy Review 24 (2013–2014): 55–67. Noh, Eliza. 2018. “Terror as Usual: The Role of the Model Minority Myth in Asian American Women’s Suicidality,” Women & Therapy 41 (3–4): 316–38. doi:​10​.1080/​02703149​.2018​.1430360 Ro, Marguerite. 2002. “Moving Forward: Addressing the Health of Asian American and Pacific Islander Women,” American Journal of Public Health 92 (4): 516–19. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.92.4.516 Sasa, Steven M., and Aggie J. Yellow Horse. 2022. “Just Data Representation for Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders: A Critical Review of Census with Recommendations for Psychologists,” American Journal of Community Psychology. doi:​10​.1002/​ajcp​.12569 Shah, Nilay S., and Namratha R. Kandula. 2020. “Addressing Asian American Misrepresentation and Underrepresentation in Research,” Ethnicity & Disease 30 (3): 513–16. doi: 10.18865/ED.30.3.513 Shimkhada, Riti, A.J. Scheitler, and Ninez A. Ponce. 2021. “Capturing Racial/Ethnic Diversity in Population-Based Surveys: Data Disaggregation of Health Data for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islanders (AANHPIs),” Population Research and Policy Review 40 (1): 81–102. doi: 10.1007/s11113-020-09634-3 Spickard, Paul, Joanne L. Rondilla, and Debbie Hippolite Wright. 2002. Pacific Diaspora: Island Peoples in the United States and across the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Srinivasan, Shobha, and Tessie Guillermo. 2000. “Toward Improved Health: Disaggregating Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Data,” American Journal of Public Health 90 (11): 1731–4. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.90.11.1731 Takada, Erika, Judy M. Ford, and Linda S. Lloyd. 1998. “Asian Pacific Islander Health.” In Handbook of Immigrant Health, edited by Sana Loue, 303–27. New York: Springer. Taualii, Maile. 2007. “Self-Rated Health Status Comparing Pacific Islanders to Asians,” Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice 1 (2): 107–16. https://​digitalscholarship​.unlv​.edu/​jhdrp/​ vol1/​iss2/​7 (accessed March 12, 2021). Tetley, Josie, David M. Lee, James Nazroo, and Sharron Hinchliff. 2018. “Let’s Talk about Sex – What Do Older Men and Women Say about Their Sexual Relations and Sexual Activities? A Qualitative Analysis of Elsa Wave 6 Data,” Ageing & Society 38 (3): 497–521. doi: 10.1017/S0144686X16001203 Thomas, Holly N., Rachel Hess, and Rebecca C. Thurston. 2015. “Correlates of Sexual Activity and Satisfaction in Midlife and Older Women,” The Annals of Family Medicine 13 (4): 336–42. doi: 10.1370/afm.1820 U.S. Census Bureau. 2019. 2015–2019 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates. In: U.S. Census Bureau (ed.). Washington, DC. https://​data​.census​.gov/​ (accessed March 10, 2021). U.S. Office of Management and Budget. 1997. Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal Statistics and Administrative Reporting (as adopted on May 12, 1997), Directive No. 15. Washington, DC: Bureau of the Budget. Woo, Merle. 1981. “Letter to Ma.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 140–7. New York: Kitchen Table Press. Yellow Horse, Aggie J. 2021. “Anti-Asian Racism, Xenophobia and Asian American Health during Covid-19.” In The COVID-19 Crisis: Social Perspectives, edited by Deborah Lupton and Karen Willis, 195–206. New York: Routledge. Yellow Horse, Aggie J., and Kimberly R. Huyser. 2021. “Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Covid-19 Data Issues for American Indian and Alaska Native Tribes and Populations,” Journal of Population Research (Canberra) 2021: 1–5. doi: 10.1007/s12546-021-09261-5 Yellow Horse, Aggie J., and Sarah E. Patterson. 2021. “Greater Inclusion of Asian Americans in Aging Research on Family Caregiving for Better Understanding of Racial Health Inequities,” Gerontologist. doi: 10.1093/geront/gnab156 Zack, Matthew M., David G. Moriarty, Donna F. Stroup, Earl S. Ford, and Ali H. Mokdad. 2004. “Worsening Trends in Adult Health-Related Quality of Life and Self-Rated Health – United States, 1993–2001,” Public Health Reports 119 (5): 493–505. doi: 10.1016/j.phr.2004.07.007 Zimmer, Ben. 2010. “Wellness,” New York Times Magazine, April 18, 20. Zuberi, Tukufu, and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. 2008. White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Section IIIb

Social justice and community studies

22. Scholar activist intersectional approaches Akosua Adomako Ampofo

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. (James Baldwin) As I swept the last bit of dust, I made a covenant with myself: I will accept. Whatever will be, will be. I have a life to lead. I recalled words a friend had told me, the philosophy of her faith. “Life is a journey and a struggle,” she had said. “We cannot control it, but we can make the best of any situation.” I was indeed in quite a situation. It was up to me to make the best of it. (Wangari Maathai, Unbowed) Charles de Gaulle airport, Paris. September 7, 2021 Almost an hour in the shower my first shower in four days (you know how we Africans are with personal hygiene). Washing off the pain and confusion of the last 72 hours. Returnee. Evacuee. Those words sounded better than … but here it was in black ink on the yellow envelope: deportee!! Grateful for the hot shower camouflaging tears of anger, humiliation, exhaustion. Mostly exhaustion. My soul is weary. 48 hours earlier: Washington Dulles airport, Washington. September 5, 2021 Hanging out with US Border control police: black, brown, white; ordinary guys. How long were you in Amsterdam? Do you have a close relative you’re visiting who is a US-citizen? Sorry, ma’am, we don’t make the rules. They bring me tea, and crackers, and a blanket. If I was a US citizen, I could have entered without a negative Covid-19 test. Or being vaccinated. Half of my brain is numb. The other half watches, dismayed as shackled Afghan refugees are escorted God knows where. My whole soul is so weary. And I contemplate, with guilt I don’t know where to place, how my privilege saved me from what might have been: the power of woundedness clothed in class privilege. This subaltern could speak.

INTRODUCTION This chapter, based on recent personal experiences, is a reflection on how privilege and disadvantage intersect, and how they can serve as tools to enhance our work as scholar activists. The metamorphoses it has been through since I began writing are a function of the ways in which the oppressiveness of state structures, as well as the ways in which my own reflections of oppression as structural, have evolved. As I lay the original version alongside this current version, and as I survey what has been chopped, included, rewritten and with which carefully 370

Scholar activist intersectional approaches  371 chosen words, I can see a trajectory. This chapter has been on a 20-month journey of pain, trauma, frustration, fear, fury; but also, joyfulness, gratitude, learning, and hence hope and the extension of grace. This has not been a linear path with evolving relief and clear signposts of discovery; these months have been more of an arc of encounters, sometimes connected, other times not so much. James Baldwin and Wangari Maathai cited above capture my view that justice is thwarted by the intersection of power and ignorance. Sometimes as scholar activists who pursue social justice, we get thrown one of life’s balls that compels us to walk in the shoes of the oppressed. Other times we must very consciously come as close to picking up another’s shoes so we can walk in them for a little while. I approach this chapter through references to both sets of experiences, suggesting how an effort to personalize disadvantage can refine our understanding of how intersectionality operates and can inform our research praxis. Scholars and activists have long acknowledged that various forms of inequality—income, racial, ethnic, and gender—are interlinked. However, while scholars recognize that we can simultaneously experience privilege and disadvantage (Young 2014), and that this experience is context-driven, we have paid less attention to how the one can inform our responses to the other as researchers—in other words, how our intersecting experiences of privilege and disadvantage can inform how we approach and carry out our research. The ways in which we engage with notions of privilege and disadvantage intellectually also expose the extent of our own power, privilege, or/and lack thereof, and our abilities to consider what is possible. How do we come to our research? How do we gauge our methods so that our work can alleviate inequalities and lead to justice? Do we address the multidimensional character of inequalities, and if so, how? When Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality as a legal concept in 1989 she could not have imagined its potency for justice work, nor the cultural wars that it would eventually unleash.1 Minofu, a former student of Crenshaw’s, described the concept as “not really concerned with shallow questions of identity and representation but … more interested in the deep structural and systemic questions about discrimination and inequality” (Coaston 2019, n.p.). In Crenshaw’s original paper (1989) she exposes the conceptual limitations of “single-issue analyses” regarding how the law considers both racism and sexism. Today we get it: the various strands of my identity, some immediately obvious, others less so, impact the ways in which I encounter the world and the ways in which the world sees and treats me. While scholars recognize that we can simultaneously experience privilege (for example, myself as a middle-class, straight, university professor) and disadvantage (as a black woman), and that this experience shifts depending on the context, it seems to me that we have paid less attention to how the one can inform our experiences of, and responses to the other. I daresay that typically we discuss and employ them in a discrete manner without acknowledging their connections. So, my experience of not being allowed to enter the US because I had transited through a Covid-19 red-listed country, the Netherlands, enabled me to experience the horror of the new Covid-19 apartheid border because I was privileged enough to be able to travel in the first place. However, a typical response would have been to underscore the different travel restrictions imposed on US versus non-US citizens irrespective of their country of travel origin. In the rest of this chapter I first discuss issues of privilege, disadvantage, and social justice and invite the reader to examine my own positionality as a scholar activist. I then go on to reflect on two recent experiences that allow me to unpack the simultaneity of privilege and disadvantage and to suggest how the intersection of experiences of dis/advantage, discrimination, favoritism, even trauma, can enhance our research through the design and use of intersectional

372  Research handbook on intersectionality methods. The first is as an international traveler experiencing Covid-19-related apartheid;2 the second as a religious person experiencing criticism from some members of the Christian community for opposing draft homophobic legislation. I conclude by suggesting how consciously inserting experiences of both privilege or advantage and disadvantage in the design and use of intersectional methods can enhance the relevance of our work and contribute to creating a more just society. This approach would impact the questions we ask and don’t ask, how we ask these questions, who asks them, the language(s) used, the analytical tools we employ, and the ways we choose to publicize our data from academic publications, through policy briefs, to popular culture and social media (Adomako Ampofo 2020; Adomako Ampofo forthcoming; Bouka 2018; Purkayastha 2021).

SOCIAL JUSTICE AND THE SCHOLAR ACTIVIST: THE INTERSECTIONS OF PRIVILEGE AND DISADVANTAGE In Spivak’s renowned essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) she refers to the notion of epistemic violence, to describe and explain the subjugation or disqualification of women’s and indigenous peoples’ “situated knowledge” because of racialized and colonial power structures. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (1986) described this process poignantly when he referred to it in terms of an invasion of the mental universe of colonized people—the removal of the hard disk of previous African knowledge and memory and the downloading into African minds the software of European knowledge and memory. Since the resurrection of calls for decolonizing the academy and knowledge systems more generally, scrutiny of Western cultural underpinnings of knowledge production have exposed the historical continuities of the marginalization and exclusion of African-descended peoples’ knowledge (Beoku-Betts and Adomako Ampofo 2021; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018). Recent discourse also explains the ways in which epistemic violence continues (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018; Santos 2017; Teo 2010). New alliances between fundamentalist religious groups, political power structures, local and global capital, and intellectuals can produce revisionist narratives that rewrite or erase our histories. Both newly disadvantaged and historically disadvantaged groups are having to reassess the socio-political processes that oppress them and find new emancipatory approaches “from binary assessments to kaleidoscopic ones” (Asumah and Nagel 2014, xvi). For example, the queer community in Ghana has historically been ignored or tolerated, albeit by invisibilizing them; but I do not recollect, growing up, that they were ever described as foreign creations or invasions. However, with the 2021 introduction of a Bill in Ghana’s Parliament that seeks to criminalize a multitude of queer identities, behaviors, associations and even the work of allies; gay, trans and inter-sex people are suddenly faced with new experiences of abuse and oppression in which class, being perceived as “foreign-located,” and sexuality intersect in interesting ways. I return to this later. Young’s “Five Faces of Oppression” (Asumah and Nagel 2014) provides a very useful discussion of cultural imperialism that is relevant for this discussion. She divides oppression into five categories—exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. For purposes of the experiences that I discuss in this chapter, I focus on the question of cultural imperialism since I argue that the marginalization, disadvantage, and powerlessness I experienced as a traveler, and the marginalization, powerlessness, and violence queer people experience in the Ghanaian context, are functions of cultural imperialism, and epistemic violence. Young argues that the dominant group’s cultural expressions receive wide

Scholar activist intersectional approaches  373 dissemination and their cultural expressions become the normal, the universal and thus the unremarkable. On the flip side, and paradoxically, the oppressed group are both stereotyped (as the strange or deviant other) and rendered invisible (their experiences and very essence erased from narratives). Scholars of race have long contended how whiteness has been left unraced and thus not been problematized (Du Bois 1903; Frankenberg 1993; Kolchin 2009), while blackness has been embodied at its very core (with notions of athleticism, physical strength, high tolerance of pain, promiscuity, violence, drug abuse, welfarism, and so forth). Similarly gay people in Ghana have been essentialized as promiscuous, pedophiles, and sexual predators. Young notes, “This, then, is the injustice of cultural imperialism: that the oppressed group’s own experience and interpretation of social life finds little expression that touches the dominant culture, while that same culture imposes on the oppressed group its experience and interpretation of social life” (2014, 25). How can one, then, experience a sense of positive subjectivity and employ this in ways that can enhance research and teaching? In most academic fields, the training that prepares you to become a researcher involves many years of perfecting sophisticated research methodologies. Consequently, research awarding agencies and academic presses place a premium on methodologies while the practical implications of the results are less obvious (Todson 2018). For most global South3 and feminist scholars, however, scrupulous scholarly research on an issue and active political commitment to finding practical ways of addressing that issue are frequently embedded in the methodological approaches we bring to the research we engage in. Indeed, for many third world, black and African feminists who live in environments where we are confronted with issues of poverty, deprivation, and injustice daily, scholarly, and activist work are merely two sides of the same coin (Adomako Ampofo et al. 2015). Scholarly research enhances activist work such as advocacy, policy design or lobbying government, while the insights gained from the “on the ground” work of activists improve scholarly research by providing deeper empirical knowledge and theoretical propositions. Further, if we read Spivak’s notion of strategic essentialism and the voice of the subaltern (1988), together with Dawson’s (1994) notion of “linked fate,” the intersection of group and individual interests for members of minority groups across geo-political contexts should be self-evident. Demessie (2018) uses the work of the Congressional Black Caucus in the US as an example of how, from the onset, their civil rights work at home was linked to the push for black liberation globally, especially their support for African independence movements, and the fight to end apartheid.4 Similarly, and more recently, the murder of George Floyd in the US led to statements, petitions, vigils, and demonstrations among Africans and African-descended people around the world. For scholars from minority populations, we understand that our experiences are shared; are context-driven and intersect across diverse layers of our realities (age, sex, gender, class, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, (dis)ability, and so forth); and cannot just be theorized about but must lead to specific actions. Many of us are public intellectuals and engage in social justice work. However, while we pay attention to the ways in which variables intersect to produce power and privilege, as well as the ways in which they intersect to (re)produce disadvantage, we have been less intentional about bringing these sometimes contradictory experiences into our methodological approaches, because they are messier and more difficult to isolate in analyses. In a study among people in the arts and cultural sector in the UK, Tatli and Özbilgin (2012) argue that a multiplicity of identities and forms of disadvantage should introduce complexity into the analysis of inequality; indeed, they find that intersectionality operates in unexpected ways to produce disadvantage.

374  Research handbook on intersectionality As researchers and teachers we must think carefully about the methodological approaches for our work and the specific research methods that we will employ—which conceptual approaches will best prepare us to understand a social issue; which body of existing work should we embed our work in (who will be our intellectual ancestors?); will we carry out a survey, live in the community for a year, or “triangulate”; what has our training made us most competent at; where will we present our work, and for whom? For those of us in the “global South” these questions and our answers to them and others are both constrained and defined by cultural imperialism in very particular ways. For example, what does it profit refugees from Africa or South Asia if the researcher’s compelling work is published in the prestigious Journal of Refugee Studies because so-called “local” journals are not considered worthy for a tenure-track career in our own institutions? Does it matter if I want to understand same-sex intimacies among people who do not adopt, and possibly reject the labels “gay” or “queer,” yet I accept funding from an organization who consciously politicizes these terms? Before I proceed to discuss the specific experiences that I employ as examples for my arguments, it is important to locate my own academic and activist persona in this chapter and offer some reflections from the vantage point of research. How do public intellectuals from/in the global South navigate matters of research questions, how is the research design a reflection of their multiple and contradictory locations, how do their privileges give them access to sites and communities, how do their writings and stances make them vulnerable in various ways, and so on. African and other feminist scholars from the “global South” have written about this extensively (see e.g., discussions in Adomako Ampofo 2009) and I hope that in the rest of this chapter I can convey some of my own relationship to these questions. I have worked at the University of Ghana since 1989 as a teacher, researcher, and administrator. My scholarly interests are broadly centered around gender, race, and knowledge production. I also belong to professional and civil society organizations and serve on boards of organizations that address these issues such as the Ghana Domestic Violence Coalition; the Network for Women’s Rights, Ghana (NETRIGHT); the African Studies Association of Africa (of which I am a founding member and the immediate past president); the Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa (CIHA) blog to name but a few. Through these and other networks I have been able to marry the research that I do with activist work. This is how I describe myself on my website: “Adomako Ampofo considers herself an activist scholar, and at the heart of her work are questions of identity and power—within families, institutions, political and religious spaces, and the knowledge industry.” By “activist” I mean someone who not only researches and theorizes on questions of inequality, injustice, and oppression, but also who very intentionally participates in activities that seek social and political change. So, I consider the classroom an activist space, and this is not simply because I introduce students to material that challenges hierarchies of power, but we also consider and discuss how we can confront specific issues of gender inequality. For example, when we examine new cultures of domesticity, we analyse its manifestation on our campus today through a discussion about the normalization of women students cooking for men who are not (even) their intimate partners. I use “even” because although we do not agree that the expectation that women students should cook for their boyfriends is acceptable, we acknowledge that in contemporary Ghanaian culture there is a revival of notions of domesticity, including that good wives will cook for their husbands (Kyere 2019). Therefore, since universities are frequently viewed as marriage markets (England and Kilbourne 1990; Kirkebøen et al. 2021), girlfriends cooking for boyfriends on campus is normative behavior. However, we find that the expectation that

Scholar activist intersectional approaches  375 there is a broader, accepted gender division of labor on campus where women are expected to cook for men, and men are expected to be the transmitters of knowledge is a very precarious path. In class we then discuss whether and how we can confront these practices. When I ask myself, which Africa I am writing about, and for whom, I bring to my work a complex background: I am an African woman, located on the African continent, who was born, raised, and principally educated in Ghana, a former British colony. I have undertaken graduate studies in Germany (development planning) and the US (PhD in sociology at a prestigious, private university in the US). In his award-winning satirical essay, “how to write about Africa” the late Binyavanga Wainaina (2008) shows us Africa through Western eyes, while simultaneously challenging Africans about our audience. My multiple training in European-devised disciplines, on three continents, and interacting with people who essentialized Africa, others who exposed the European construction of Africa, as well as (especially) African scholars who opened my eyes to histories and contributions previously buried or reduced, have informed my approach to doing research. While I will not say that these diverse backgrounds make the activist scholar schizophrenic, I will concede that we must perform very complex academic footwork to remain relevant to the communities we serve, progress in our careers as academics, and train our students to be caring human beings. In the next sections I employ two experiences to illustrate the intersection of privilege and disadvantage, and how we might incorporate such experiences in the design and use of intersectional methods to enhance the relevance of our work and contribute to creating a more just society.

SCENARIO 1: THE PRIVILEGED TRAVELER DEPORTED In August 2021 I planned for and embarked on a trip to the US on some personal business and to spend a few days with friends and family for some much needed physical and mental rest and recovery. Normally I would not reveal the social advantages I enjoy in such a public way; it makes one sound pretentious, but it also makes you vulnerable. Furthermore, I have not always enjoyed these privileges; some have come with age and seniority, and others, such as my dual-citizenship status, only became accessible when the law in Ghana was changed to allow me to legally carry both my Ghanaian and non-Ghanaian parent’s citizenship. However, because I argue that my privilege enables my disadvantage, and my disadvantage exposes my privilege I must personalize this narrative. Privilege 1: I am a dual Ghanaian-German citizen and while Ghanaians need to go through rigorous and time-consuming visa applications, European Union (EU) citizens have an almost automatic 90-day visa waiver entry into the US. EU citizens do not need to queue online for appointment dates to apply for a US-visa, we can apply for an ESTA5 that is typically approved in 24 hours or less.6 Privilege 2: I possess a credit card with a credit card limit that enables me to purchase a ticket online. Privilege 3: I am a KLM Platinum (priority) member, well known to KLM staff at the airport in Accra, Ghana, and usually checked in with the minimum of fanfare.7 So, I was able to get my ESTA for travel, buy my ticket online and board a KLM flight from Accra to Washington Dulles (IAD) via Amsterdam when I should not have been able to transit through the Netherlands. At the time the US was not allowing travel from most European countries, including the Netherlands. Had I applied for a US-visa with my Ghanaian passport, had I purchased a ticket across the counter in the KLM office in Accra, and had I been an “ordinary” traveler exposed to greater scrutiny at check-in, I likely would have been alerted to the fact that not only were people barred from

376  Research handbook on intersectionality flying from the EU to the US, but one could not even fly through the EU to the US. And so it was that when I arrived at IAD airport I was denied entry. Herein lies the paradox: I had been double vaccinated, and I had a negative result for a Covid-19 PCR test prior to travel, and yet, while people like me were being denied entry, US citizens and permanent residents who were neither vaccinated, nor required to produce a negative test result could enter freely. Privilege 4: Cultural imperialism worked to my advantage as well. Technically I should have been placed in a holding room awaiting deportation to Ghana. Usually, deportees do not receive special treatment, however, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers who handled my situation were respectful and gracious. Having lived in the US for some years, I could share a common cultural language with them and even converse with a semi“American” accent. After scanning my color-privileged passport and being redirected to an immigration officer, he found that my ESTA was missing from the “system.” Rather than expressing suspicion, he assured me that he was sure it was an error that could be easily corrected and directed me to his colleague CBP officers. I joined an assorted crew of other travelers, mostly US citizens and permanent residents, with presumably similar errors. I sat as patiently as I could, watching each person receive their clearance to enter the US. However, when it came to my turn, the officer I met, let’s call him Alejandro,8 seemed very confused as he stared at his computer. Eventually he asked me how long I had been in the Netherlands, if I lived there, and so forth. My explanation that I had merely been in transit for a few hours and never left the airport seemed to score me some sympathy points. He asked if I wanted to speak to his supervisor. I agreed. The supervisor, let’s call him Charles,9 was very friendly and asked a series of questions he felt might assist in getting me permission to enter the US. (Did I have any close family living in the US who were US citizens—that could pave my entry he said. My brother-in-law I ventured. No, he wouldn’t count, I needed a spouse, parent, or child.) Charles went back and forth between me and other higher-ups until he returned, looking rather despondent, to let me know he had done his best, but the boys upstairs wouldn’t budge. All this while I had been texting with my friends and daughter, and all of us had been certain that I would be permitted to enter the US—I was a university professor, a German citizen, with multiple trips to the US over several decades under my belt, including having been a three-time Fulbright scholar. While I waited with the officers for the next Air France or KLM flight back to Ghana, they did their best to make me feel comfortable: a blanket, snacks, tea, a meal of rice and chicken, and even a trip to Starbucks to get me a hot chocolate I had dared to request when asked whether there was anything else I needed. (The trip to Starbucks was unsuccessful as they were closed.) My fellow deportee with an “African” accent less clear to the American ear, who had flown in from Sweden and resided in the UK, was initially ignored, and subsequently appeared to receive more attention through a vicarious association with me. For the most part the officers left him alone. Before Alejandro closed his shift for the night, he informed me that we should have been moved to another location, however, he could not imagine placing me in the same space as refugees from Afghanistan. So, he informed his colleagues to allow my fellow deportee and me to remain with them through the night. “Just let them know if you need to use the bathroom or anything,” he said. Indeed, I saw several Afghan refugees shuffle by, their legs in cuffs, led and followed by officers; I felt a sense of guilt for my relative freedom.10 When I did need to use the bathroom, they merely smiled and nodded. I was gone for a long time because I attempted to wash myself as best I could and change my clothes; but no one came after me to check if I was still there.

Scholar activist intersectional approaches  377 Privilege 5: The law required that I be handed over to the airline and put on the next flight home. In addition to my Priority status, I also held a business class ticket. The Air France Airline agent came down to see me to explain what the procedure would be, she helped me with my bags and handed me over to a new set of US officers who drove me to the plane and enabled me to board before the rest of the passengers. My documentation was handed over to the purser and I was told my passport would be returned to me in Paris. I was the last passenger to disembark in Paris, and rather than hand my passport over to me I was handed over to the French airport police. At this point I had a meltdown, lamenting that I was being treated like a criminal. The purser was at pains to reassure me, and thinking I was afraid of the police assured me that the French police were not like the American police and would not hurt me! When I got to the police station in Charles de Gaulle airport, I had another meltdown: I cried that I had not had any sleep, a proper meal, or a shower in 48 hours, and that I had expected to be released in Paris, where I would be able to meet these needs in the Business class lounge! Which individual under arrest seeks these creature comforts? My French was insufficient to fully understand the conversation that ensued among the officers, but I could tell they were sympathetic as they opened the yellow manila envelope that contained my passport and other documents, rolled their eyes, shrugged, and told me I could leave, while pointing me in the right direction. Privilege 6: While I was largely to blame for the predicament I was in since I had not read the travel restrictions carefully, I was still expecting KLM/Air France to compensate me for my wasted ticket. That I could even have such an expectation was due to my platinum elite (priority) status. I enjoy a special email address and phone number through which I can communicate with the airline directly; I have access to the internet and can be reached on my cell phone; and importantly, I have the socio-legal language with which to convey both how I suffered, but also why I deserve to be heard and attended to. Although the airline did not refund the cost of my ticket, they did give me some airmiles for future travel. The experience left me keenly aware that my color-privileged passport and access to the money to travel, which had enabled me to even contemplate border crossing in this taken-for-granted way during times when travel was so restricted and uncertain, had contributed to my misfortunes. The uncertainty of travel during a global pandemic, the discriminatory travel requirements for passengers based on nationality and originating country, had caused me to experience deportation—an experience that millions go through without the benefit of a hearing, understanding or compassion. According to the official website of the Department of Homeland Security, the US “removed” or “returned” a total of 531,330 individuals in 2019.11 I had now become one of those statistics, and however remotely, what had been a theoretical appreciation had suddenly become so much more real.12

SCENARIO 2: GHANA’S HOMOPHOBIC BILL AND CHRISTIAN JUDGEMENT In January 2021 an LGBT community center intended to be a safe space for LGBTQ+ people to meet and find support was opened in Accra, Ghana’s capital. Following protests from some government ministers and religious leaders the center was closed by the police (Africa News 2021) though no specific laws in Ghana state that being LGBT is illegal. However, under Ghana’s Criminal Code (Government of Ghana 1960) consensual same-sex sexual activity, or

378  Research handbook on intersectionality rather peno-rectal sexual activity, is criminalized by a penal code—introduced under British colonial rule—that mentions “unnatural carnal knowledge” under section 104, it makes non-consensual unnatural sexual intercourse a first-degree felony punishable by a minimum of five years in jail and a maximum of 25 years if convicted. On May 20, 2021, a group of LGBT+ rights advocates held a meeting in a hotel in Ho, in the southeastern Volta Region of Ghana. Shortly after the meeting began, police raided the hotel and arrested them, citing unlawful assembly and the promotion of a LGBTQ+ agenda, which was deemed a crime under section 104 of the criminal code of Ghana on unnatural carnal knowledge—although the law is silent on the promotion of gay rights. On June 11 they were granted bail in the sum of GHS 5,000 each, about US $880 at the time. In August 2021 the case was dropped after the Attorney General advised there was insufficient evidence to continue with a prosecution. A few months after the closure of the LGBT+ community center a group of parliamentarians, collaborating with a group known as the National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values,13 introduced a Bill into the Ghanaian Parliament titled the “Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill 2021.” The Bill was laid before the sub-committee on parliamentary and legal affairs in August 2021 and was prepared for a second reading in October. In its preamble the Bill claims that its object is “to provide for proper human sexual rights” in line with “God’s will” and “Ghanaian family values.” This is a highly punitive Bill, which, if accepted into law, would impose a penalty of up to five years imprisonment for being LGBTI and a penalty of up to ten years imprisonment for anyone who engages or participates “in an activity that promotes, supports sympathy for, or a change of public opinion towards an act prohibited under the Bill.” Amnesty International’s response to the Bill notes, “this vague and overbroad provision potentially places anyone in Ghana at risk of being accused under the Bill, and creates an environment of hostility, discrimination, and active stigmatizing of people who are LGBTI or perceived to be such; or anyone linked to them socially, through family, professionally, or otherwise.” Several other provisions in the Bill have been condemned by various groups, including NETRIGHT, of which I am a member, for being in violation of the Ghanaian Constitution which universally protects all persons’ rights to freedom of association and expression. The Bill also contradicts the 2014 Resolution of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights which calls on State Parties “to ensure that human rights defenders work in an enabling environment that is free of stigma, reprisals or criminal prosecution as a result of their human rights protection activities, including the rights of sexual minorities” (African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights 2014). Some other dangerous aspects of the Bill include the promotion of conversion therapy, for which there is no scientific proof of its success. On the contrary, there are incidents where it has been found to cause significant psychological distress and harm to the recipient, not to mention that it has been rejected by many of its own early proponents (Lati 2019). The Bill restricts transgender people from accessing gender affirming treatment, thereby violating their rights to health and psychological wellbeing, which is protected under international human rights law, including by the United Nations (UN) Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR, Article 12). The Bill, if enacted into law, also places medical professionals at risk of criminal penalties, namely, between three to five years imprisonment for providing medical services for gender affirmation procedures. This is deeply worrying because it would make it impossible for people who identify as transgender to access the psychological and other health care they need from professionals. According to a group of experts from the UN special procedures who made a common analysis of the Bill, it “describes

Scholar activist intersectional approaches  379 a system of State-sponsored discrimination and violence of such magnitude that its adoption … would appear to constitute an immediate and fundamental breach of State’s obligations under international human rights law.” In October 2021 Ghana’s parliamentary and legal committees’ cluster invited the public to submit memoranda to Parliament on the Bill. In an interview on national TV, the Chairman of the parliamentary and legal committee of Parliament indicated that over 100 memoranda had been received and that he considered it imperative that the sub-committee study them all so their work could be enhanced. NETRIGHT was among the groups that submitted a memorandum, and subsequently attended a public hearing in respect of the Bill on November 29, 2021. I joined seven other members of NETRIGHT to speak to our memorandum. Other groups who attended the hearing on that day were the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice, a constitutional body; The National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values, a sponsor of the Bill; The Consortium of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Service Delivery; The Ghana Catholic Bishops Conference; and The Coalition of Muslim Organizations, Ghana.14 Before then, in a bid to get my fellow Christians to (re)discover grace in their responses to what I read as a cruel piece of legislation against the rights of queer-identified and intersex people, I had written an Opinion piece titled, “Why Christians Should Extend Grace and So Not Support the ‘Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values’ Bill” (Adomako Ampofo 2021). I was invited by a few media stations to discuss my views, in all cases by thoughtful moderators, but not always well received by fellow discussants. On one program, The Point of View on Citi TV, my co-panelist, a fellow academic from my university, contested my position that Ghana is a secular and not a Christian nation (he was corrected by the host) and questioned my knowledge of scripture and my Christian faith. The anonymity of social media means that the reproach and judgement meted out in the space comes as no surprise and should not be taken to heart. However, my faith was questioned in Christian circles among people who should have known me well enough not to have been in any doubt. People also questioned my presence in Parliament to speak against the Bill, and my alignment with a group of legal, academic, and civil society professionals who have challenged the Bill.15 The abuse that they, and I, encountered,16 including for some even death threats, cannot compare with the stigma and fear that many LGBTQ+ persons who do not belong to the “elite” or political class in Ghana live with daily. Furthermore, even though this account allowed me to experience anxieties related to having my sexuality and sexual identity questioned, I do not run the real risk of the emotional and mental agony that accompanies belonging to a minority sexuality. Privilege 1: I am a heterosexual, married, Christian woman, whose sexuality is not really questioned in heteronormative spaces. Thus, I can speak about minority sexualities without the same risks of being attacked that a lesbian or other queer person might. Privilege 2: As a middle-class professor with young friends who work in media spaces, I have access to radio and TV platforms to share my views and respond to allegations. Some of these young people follow me on social media and amplify my opinions. Privilege 3: My family, social, and professional networks offer me a level of assurance that if something should happen to me—if I were arrested, for example—they would come to my aid.

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KNOWLEDGE IN THE SERVICE OF THE SUBALTERN When I was invited to join this collection by Mary Romero, I welcomed the opportunity to engage in some introspection and suggest some answers to the question of how to do research in a way that is truly in the service of the disadvantaged. My appreciation of how the subaltern may experience discrimination in her attempts to navigate borders, or my appreciation of how it feels to be at the receiving end of homophobic attacks can be tools for a more empathetic way of approaching research. By universalizing expectations for international travelers (national identities, countries of origin, knowledge of the English language), and establishing gender and sexual identities and experiences as the norm (heteronormativity), the experiences of people who fall outside these categories are stereotyped, othered and paradoxically, rendered invisible even as they capture our imagination. While heightened polemics in the academy, and social media wars seem to suggest that we should hold to the same beliefs and values, we cannot experience the world in the same way, or agree on universal standards of ethics and morality. Of course, we all encounter othering at some point in our lives—some more than others—yet as researchers we usually study and write about, and even for, the subaltern without necessarily placing ourselves in the category of the research subject. We may work on migration and have been rejected a visa, on race and have experienced racism, on gender and have experienced misogyny, on religion and had our faith derided, or on sexuality and faced prejudice about our own sexuality. However, the position of the researcher gives us immense power to decide what will be known, and how, and this often distinguishes us from the people we research. If we approach our work by creating the scenarios of disadvantage and exclusion, we can very intentionally consider what questions we should be asking, which body of literature we should engage with, and how we would enter “the field” and engage with the “population of interest.” If I was doing research on travel, migration, including illegal migration today, I would introduce scenarios, ask for suggested alternative scenarios, include myself in the narratives, and ask very specific questions about emotions. While these are not new questions, it is less common to begin an interview with, “when I was waiting for the border control officer to return with my passport I felt a barrage of emotions, I began to play out different scenarios for different outcomes. Some created fear and panic, others offered more hopeful possibilities. I knew that the color of my skin and the fact that I carried a passport from a less desirable country made me a target for discrimination. How did you feel …?” If I was doing research on minority sexualities, I might share the apprehension I felt about sharing my views on social media, or before a Question-and-Answer session after sharing my views on radio. In other words, researchers should offer each other permission to be vulnerable. Such an approach contributes to the larger body of knowledge by placing the researcher and the researched into the story together, opening the possibility that, as the Akans say, mmre sesa, literally, times change, and tomorrow I might find myself in your shoes of good or bad fortune. The Akans are not merely stating the obvious, that change comes with the passage of time, what they are signaling is that no one should ever be so arrogant as to imagine that what befalls another may not come their way—our fortunes and status will change. In this way, by rethinking the complexity and inevitable relationship between privilege and disadvantage our research work can be more empathetic and more organically connected to our activism—not merely doing for, or even with others, but for each other and for ourselves. Crenshaw (1989) acknowledges that intersectionality is not an attempt to create the world in an inverted image of what it is now, but rather, to make room “for more advocacy and remedial

Scholar activist intersectional approaches  381 practices” to create a more egalitarian system (Coaston 2019, n.p.). We must recognize and accept that scholars are only one set of actors in what Purkayastha calls “transnational assemblages” (2021, 24) of knowledge systems, and that we must also consider both the collaborations as well as the contestations between generations, the local and diasporic, the elites and grassroots (Beoku-Betts and Adomako Ampofo 2021). And so, a full array of intersectional methodologies must begin or at least include the perspectives and experiences of diverse groups, with the actual research method being context-driven. The language, concepts, and questions must be built from what is real and familiar for the place and people and allowing for sufficient time for levels of trust and comfort to grow. The researcher would ask those questions and seek help from the “researched,” inviting a questioning of her work—for there is as much to be learned from questions as from answers. As we hopefully rise above the worst assaults of the Covid-19 pandemic, but aware that there will likely be more pandemics of this nature and scale awaiting us, we must be constantly ready to understand new forms of disadvantage and privilege—just as Covid-19 brought untold hardship and poverty for many but newfound millionaire status for others. There will be human- or nature-driven challenges and catastrophes that will bring untold pain and trauma, but there will also be human and humane responses in the true spirit of ubuntu17 if we allow our methods to inform both our intellectual work and our activism, remembering our shared vulnerability that comes from being mortal.

NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

The political pundit Ben Shapiro (2018) offers a description of how those who oppose the use, if not necessarily the concept, of intersectionality see it as a means to create hierarchies of victimhood. In a 2018 video clip for Prager University, he describes intersectionality, simplistically and of course erroneously, as “a form of identity politics in which the value of your opinion depends on how many victim groups you belong to. At the bottom of the totem pole is the person everybody loves to hate: the straight white male.” Two terms in more common usage since the onset of Covid-19 are vaccine apartheid and travel apartheid. The former refers to the ways in which Covid-19 vaccines were kept away from certain demographic groups and nations, and the second refers to the ways in which nationals from certain countries (from the so-called global South) have been kept out of other countries (in the so-called global North). I am sensitive to the ongoing debates around the terminology. What I mean to emphasize here are the economic and political power relations between rich and poor nations, this term is not applied in purely geographical terms since not all countries located in the South are poor or formerly colonized. Further, there are pockets of exclusion in the North, and pockets of colonial and capitalist privilege in the South. Other terms used that avoid such binaries are “one third world” and “two thirds world” (Mohanty 2003; see also Beoku-Betts and Adomako Ampofo 2021). Between 1972 and 1986 the Congressional Black Caucus in the US introduced more than 15 bills aimed at ending apartheid in South Africa (Demessie 2018). Electronic System for Travel Authorization. While my color has meant that I have experienced racial profiling in airports and at borders multiple times, my EU passport has provided significant protection from the major harassment and abuse that others with less “acceptable” ones have suffered. This privilege doesn’t necessarily extend to other jurisdictions. I recollect one occasion when I was in the priority check-in lane at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, the third in line after two young, white men. An Air France/KLM representative walked past the two young men and came to me, to ascertain if I was in the “right queue.” Such examples abound. Not his real name.

382  Research handbook on intersectionality 9. Not his real name. 10. My abortive trip to the US came some weeks after the Taliban took over Afghanistan, leading to a renewed refugee crisis, and the US being a favored destination. Alejandro informed me that IAD airport was the main or only port through which they were being assessed for transfer or deportation. 11. See Homeland Security. “Removals are the compulsory and confirmed movement of an inadmissible or deportable alien out of the United States based on an order of removal. An alien who is removed has administrative or criminal consequences placed on subsequent reentry owing to the fact of the removal. Returns are the confirmed movement of an inadmissible or deportable alien out of the United States not based on an order of removal.” https://​www​.dhs​.gov/​immigration​-statistics/​ yearbook/​2019/​table39 (accessed May 27, 2020). 12. In September 2022 I attempted, with some trepidation, to reenter the US. I was not even asked about my deportation status, and was given the usual 3 months. 13. The group has links to the US organization, World Congress of Families, which Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ rights group, calls “one of the most influential American organizations involved in the export of hate” (McKenzie and Princewill 2021). 14. As at the time of the penultimate draft of this chapter in December 2022, although the Bill is yet to go forward for a next reading in Parliament, in a document addressed to the Chair of Ghana’s Parliamentary Committee on Constitutional, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, the Attorney General in November 2022, noted, “Parts of the bill in its present form violate some fundamental rights and freedoms enshrined in the constitution, including the right to freedom of expression, thought and conscience and freedom from discrimination … Caution is necessary, as any unconstitutionality or illegality exposes the state to unwarranted civil actions.” Other sections of his statement are more equivocal. See https://​www​.opendemocracy​.net/​en/​5050/​ghana​-attorney​-general​-godfred​-yeboah​ -dame​-anti​-lgbtiq​-bill/​(accessed December 11, 2022). 15. See https://​citinewsroom​.com/​2021/​10/​renowned​-activists​-academics​-want​-parliament​-to​-reject​-un democratic-anti-lgbtq-bill/ (accessed November 3, 2021). 16. This was not my first time being attacked for speaking out against homophobia. In 2011, at the12th lecture in a series in honor of William Ofori Atta, a Christian parliamentarian who was respected for his integrity, wit, and grace to colleagues on both side of the house, I called out Ghanaians for their selective morality and homophobia. The backlash in online newspaper discussion groups included accusations that I was a lesbian hiding under the cloak of marriage to have sexual relations with my female students. 17. Ubuntu, a term that comes from the Zulu language, has been described as a form of humanism that emphasizes the existence of the self through others—“I am because of who we all are.”

REFERENCES Adomako Ampofo, Akosua. 2009. “One Who Has Truth, She Has Strength: The Feminist Activist inside and outside the Academy in Ghana,” in African Feminist Research and Activism—Tensions, Challenges and Possibilities, edited by Akosua Adomako Ampofo and Signa Amfred, 28–51. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute. Adomako Ampofo, Akosua. 2020. “How to Decolonize Academia. In an Interview with Prof. Duncan Green,” February 14. Decolonizing Knowledge Systems. https://​www​.lse​.ac​.uk/​lse​-player​?id​=​4803 Adomako Ampofo, Akosua. 2021. http://​www​.cihablog​.com/​why​-christians​-should​-extend​-grace​-and​ -so​-not​-support​-the​-promotion​-of​-proper​-human​-sexual​-rights​-and​-ghanaian​-family​-values​-bill/​ Adomako Ampofo, Akosua. forthcoming. “Elvis Presley, Miriam Makeba and Bob Marley Walk into a Bar: Cross-examining Epistemic Violence and Working towards Epistemic Freedom,” Sharjah: The Africa Institute. Adomako Ampofo, Akosua, Edwin Adjei, and Maame. K. Brobbey. 2015. “Feminisms and Acculturation around the Globe,” in International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by James Wright, 905–11. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Africa News. 2021. “Ghana Police Shuts Down LGBTQI Office.” https://​www​.africanews​.com/​2021/​ 02/​24/​ghana​-police​-shuts​-down​-lgbtqi​-office/​ (accessed May 12, 2022).

Scholar activist intersectional approaches  383 African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. 2014. https://​www​.achpr​.org/​sessions/​resolutions​ ?id​=​320 (accessed May 30, 2022). Asumah, Seth and Mechthild Nagel. 2014. “Preface,” in Diversity, Social Justice and Inclusive Excellence. Transdisciplinary and Global Perspectives, edited by Seth Asumah and Mechthild Nagel, xiii–xx. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Beoku-Betts, Josephine and Akosua Adomako Ampofo. 2021. “Positioning Feminist Voices in the Global South,” in Producing Inclusive Feminist Knowledge. Positionalities and Discourses in the Global South, edited by Akosua Adomako Ampofo and Josephine Beoku-Betts, 1–22. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing. politi​ calviolenc​ Bouka, Yolande. 2018. “Collaborative Research as Structural Violence.” https://​ eataglance​.org/​2018/​07/​12/​collaborative​-research​-as​-structural​-violence/​ Coaston, Jane. 2019. “The Intersectionality Wars the Highlight by Vox.” https://​www​.vox​.com/​the​ -highlight/​2019/​5/​20/​18542843/​intersectionality​-conservatism​-law​-race​-gender​-discrimination Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–67. https://​chicagounbound​.uchicago​.edu/​uclf/​vol1989/​iss1/​8 Dawson, Michael. 1994. Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Demessie, Menna. 2018. “From Exclusion to Electoral Empowerment: The CBC and the Black Agenda. Defining the Black Agenda in a Post-Obama Era,” Journal of the Center for Policy Analysis and Research 1 (1): 17–37. Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago, IL: A.G. McClurg. England, Paula and Barbara. S. Kilbourne 1990. “Markets, Marriages, and Other Mates: The Problem of Power,” in Beyond the Marketplace: Rethinking Economy and Society, edited by Roger Owen Friedland and A.F. Robertson, 74–98. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Frankenberg, Ruth. 1993. The Social Construction of Whiteness. White Women, Race Matters. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Government of Ghana. 1960. Criminal Offences Act, 1960 Act 29. Accra. Kirkebøen, Larn, Edwin Leuven, and Magne Mogstad. 2021. “College as a Marriage Market.” https://​bfi​ .uchicago​.edu/​insight/​finding/​college​-as​-a​-marriage​-market/​ Kolchin, Peter. 2009. “Whiteness Studies,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 95 (1): 117–63. Kyere, Abena. 2019. For God and Man: A Study of the Clergy-Wife. PhD Dissertation, African Studies, University of Ghana. Lati, Marisa. 2019. “Conversion Therapy Center Founder Who Sought to Turn LGBTQ Christians Straight Says He’s Gay, Rejects ‘Cycle Of Self Shame’.” https://​www​.washingtonpost​.com/​religion/​2019/​09/​03/​conversion​-therapy​-center​-founder​-who​-sought​ -turn​-lgbtq​-christians​-straight​-now​-says​-hes​-gay​-rejects​-cycle​-shame/​ (accessed May 2, 2022). McKenzie, David and Nimi Princewill, 2021. “How a US Group with Links to the Far-right May Have influenced a Crackdown on Ghana’s LGBTQ Community.” https://​edition​.cnn​.com/​2021/​10/​08/​ africa/​ghana​-lgbtq​-crackdown​-intl​-cmd/​index​.html (accessed February 12, 2022). Mohanty, Chandra. 2003. Feminism without Borders. Dirham, NC: Duke University Press. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. 2018. “Revisiting Trajectories of Epistemological Decolonization in Africa,” Codesira Bulletin 1: 11–17. Purkayastha, Bandana. 2021. “Knowledge Hierarchies and Feminist Dilemmas: Contexts, Assemblages, Voices and Silences,” in Producing Inclusive Feminist Knowledge. Positionalities and Discourses in the Global South, edited by Akosua Adomako Ampofo and Josephine Beoku-Betts, 23–42. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing. Santos, Boaventura de Soussa. 2017. Decolonizing the University: The Challenges of Deep Cognitive Justice. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Shapiro, Ben. 2018. What Is Intersectionality? https://​www​.prageru​.com/​video/​what​-is​-intersectionality Spivak, Gyatri. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Tatli, Ahu and Mustafa Özbilgin. 2012. “Surprising Intersectionalities of Inequality and Privilege: The Case of the Arts and Cultural Sector,” Equality, Diversity and Inclusion 31 (3): 249–65.

384  Research handbook on intersectionality Teo, Thomas. 2010. “What Is Epistemological Violence in the Empirical Social Sciences?” Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4: 295–303. Todson, Ivory. 2018. “Editorial Introduction: Defining the Black Agenda in a Post-Obama Era,” Journal of the Center for Policy Analysis and Research 1 (1): 11–12. Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. 1986. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Oxford: James Currey. Wainaina, Binyavanga. 2008. How to Write about Africa. Nairobi: Kwani Trust. Young, Iris Marion. 2014. “Five Faces of Oppression,” in Diversity, Social Justice and Inclusive Excellence. Transdisciplinary and Global Perspectives, edited by Seth Asumah and Mechthild Nagel, 3–32. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

23. Multi-level analyses of homecare labor Cynthia J. Cranford and Jennifer Jihye Chun

Feminist scholars have long recognized the fraught relationship between domestic servitude and caring work. Black and women of color feminists developed an intersectional analysis of servitude, revealing domestic workers’ experiences of abuse and resistance under slavery and industrial capitalism (Collins 1990; Glenn 1992; hooks 1984, 13–14; Romero 2002). Focusing on the relationship “between women” (e.g., Rollins 1985), much scholarship delineated how micro-power relationships reflected and reinforced relations of domination and subordination within a white supremacist society. It did so in part by engendering white women’s consent to a gendered political economy that defined care as the responsibility of families and household labor as a protected sphere of activity from state regulation. Comparative studies of Asian, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous domestic workers augmented our understanding of how racialized gendered servitude, and white women’s consent to it, endured across time and place (Glenn 2010; Higgenbotham 1983). Gender and migration scholars extended intersectional analyses of domestic servitude by placing micro-level indignities between women within the global political economy that structures inequalities between rich and poor countries, prompting migration and fueling citizenship inequalities (Lan 2002; Parreñas 2015). Across this literature, domestic workers’ resistance is a key focus (Chun et al. 2013; Collins 1990; Guevarra and Lledo 2013; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007; Romero 2002), which is crucial for analysing challenges to servitude. This rich scholarship provides foundational insight into how intersecting power relations shape one of the most devalued yet rapidly expanding sectors in the labor market: state-funded but highly personal paid care delivered in receivers’ homes (hereafter homecare)]. In urban areas of white settler countries like the United States (US) and Canada, poor Black and immigrant women of color provide the vast majority of paid, daily assistance to aging, disabled, or chronically ill people in their homes – like help with bathing, cooking, and cleaning. However, unlike in private household labor systems, multiple actors influence how and under what conditions state-funded homecare is provided and received, including care receivers and advocates, social workers, government agencies, and labor unions. Furthermore, different homecare programs classify workers variously – as paid family providers, domestic workers, independent contractors, or employees – and consider the receivers as consumers, clients, employers, or welfare recipients. Under subsidized homecare programs, most receivers like workers are poor and racialized, complicating familiar class and status hierarchies. Governments’ efforts to provide care at little cost is also generating new configurations of care provisioning that exacerbate intimate tensions and structural fault lines linked to the level and form of state funding (Cranford 2020). Given new configurations of actors, it is becoming increasingly important to ask: (how) is servitude reinforced, or undermined, when the state funds reproductive labor? In this chapter, we develop a multi-level, intersectional framework that places dilemmas of servitude experienced by workers within the social organization of homecare, which is shaped by the state’s central role in the care political economy. The framework highlights three related dynamics of how the state arranges care: (1) to consider the social locations of workers, 385

386  Research handbook on intersectionality receivers, or both; (2) to recognize individual, organizational, or multiple actors in the employment relationship; and (3) to support workers’ collective voice. We illustrate the value of this framework by analysing three cases of homecare in urban centers of California and Ontario (Canada). We find that a state’s “hands-off” approach to employment conditions – combined with conflicting axes of oppression of workers and receivers – continually risks the slippage of homecare into servitude, even when receivers are also marginalized. Yet where there are mechanisms for workers’ collective voice, there is potential to challenge domestic servitude. The conclusion elaborates how these dynamics mark key differences between private domestic work and state-funded homecare labor. It also comments on the challenges, and opportunities, for scholars to extend intersectional analyses of domestic servitude further to encompass the complexity of homecare labor.

BUILDING BLOCKS OF A MULTI-LEVEL, INTERSECTIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR HOMECARE Glenn (1992, 2010) identifies a central problematic that plagues the social organization of caring in countries facing increased demand for care workers: the persistence of racialized gendered servitude. As a coercive labor system, racialized gendered servitude utilizes ideologies of gender, race, and class inferiority to enable a dominant group to command the social reproductive services of a subordinated group (2010, 7). Racialized gendered servitude persists through a combination of de jure and de facto practices. Many workers continue to be denied basic labor protections through Jim Crow era exclusions of domestic workers from the US National Labor Relations Act that regulates unionization and parallel exclusions from Labor Relations Acts in Canada (Boris and Klein 2015; Fudge 1997). The consignment of poor Black women and immigrant women of color to jobs on the bottom rungs of racially and gender-stratified labor markets intensify their vulnerability to racialized gendered servitude as a form of unfree labor. As Glenn (2010, 129) emphasizes, due to lingering assumptions – often steeped in racist ideologies­– that view household domestic and care employees as disposable and hired property, “the employer is assumed to be entitled to the services of the employee at whatever time the employer wants him or her, and the employee is assumed to be obligated to be available at any time to do whatever is asked.” Glenn’s racialized gendered servitude concept directs us to the central role of the state in perpetuating conditions of un-freedom through labor regimes that limit domestic and care workers’ labor protections, and the enduring de facto consequences of conditions of servitude on the job. Domestic and care work scholars have shown how states preserve racialized gendered servitude through intersecting labor and migration regimes. The difficulties of challenging continuities in racialized, gendered servitude link to the institutional conditions of un-freedom that restrict the ability of migrant domestic workers “to maintain their own families and exercise their full range of labor rights” (Romero 2018, 1180). Some studies uncover how migration regimes restrict the choices of domestic and care workers without legal status through risk of deportation and the power that threat gives employers (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007; Nazareno et al. 2022). Others illuminate how temporary work schemes legislate un-freedom by tying workers to employers and requiring workers to live-in (Parreñas 2015; Tungohan et al. 2015). Whether the state directly regulates un-freedom, or indirectly does so by empowering employers, this scholarship reveals how domestic and care workers have limited ability to quit, in

Multi-level analyses of homecare labor  387 hopes of finding a better job or kinder employer, and commonly endure poor conditions, thus reinforcing servitude on a global scale. The significance of state schemas in fostering the conditions of unfree labor for migrant domestic and care workers fuels robust studies on intersecting regimes of care, migration, and employment. This scholarship uses comparative analysis to show how various states shape the demand for migrant care workers through clusters of policies, like migration quotas for care workers or cash grants to hire domestic workers (Williams 2010). This work also interrogates assumptions embedded in policies showing how, for example, systems of familial care rely on gendered ideologies but in different ways depending on the meaning of nation underlying the migration regime (Michel and Peng 2012). Yet, these institutional analyses tend to neglect how local labor market dynamics reinforce, or undermine, intersecting inequalities. Many state-funded care workers in the US, Canada and other white settler countries are immigrants with permanent citizenship, although some entered with precarious status (Cranford 2020; Tungohan et al. 2015). For these workers, what is important to understand is how the care labor regime meets up with racialization of immigrant workers in the labor market generating such precariousness that choice is limited de facto (Anderson and Shutes 2014; Chun and Cranford 2018). Glenn (2002) argues, in her comparative-historical study of the US, citizenship is less about one’s contractual status than the way in which race, gender, class, migration, and other dimensions of social difference shape perceptions of who does and does not belong to a national polity (i.e., substantive citizenship). This is largely due to “individual actors operating at the local level” – be it local police, merchants, elites, or others with decision-making authority – who play a consequential role in interpreting and enforcing laws (Glenn 2002, 2). Thus, local labor market actors play a significant role in the actual rights and freedoms to which subjugated populations have access. Extending intersectional theory to incorporate the case of homecare thus requires an analysis of how interlocking care, migration, and labor regimes take form and have effect at the organizational level. Unlike in private domestic work where the employer is an individual paying out of pocket, state policy makers exert growing influence on homecare through the way they fund and deliver it. The privatization of the US and Canadian welfare states shapes the outsourcing of care to a range of non-profit and for-profit organizations that are government subsidized to provide direct services, or to individuals to purchase their own care (Armstrong and Armstrong 2005; Boris and Klein 2015). Although states fund workers’ wages and determine eligibility requirements, they rarely serve as the direct employers-of-record. Homecare workers are classified either as independent contractors without labor protection, hired by individuals as domestic workers with partial protections or through subcontracted arrangements by organizations with little oversight. A growing number of studies include agencies or other labor market intermediaries linking care workers and receivers in a context of state outsourcing of care provision (Bakan and Stasiulis 1995; Cranford 2020; Showers 2018). These studies can illuminate how for-profit intermediaries accommodate care receivers’ gendered and racialized preferences for workers, possibly reinforcing racialized gendered servitude. Expanding intersectional theory to include the case of homecare also requires an analysis of how organizations that provide or mediate homecare interact with immigrant community organizations. Immigrant social networks are a key community structure shaping the labor market in both domestic and care work (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007; Showers 2018). Similarly, social networks funnel immigrant women into precarious sectors of homecare in cities as different as Toronto and Los Angeles (Cranford 2020), suggesting continuity with racialized

388  Research handbook on intersectionality gendered servitude. Ethnic economies are a second community structure. Nazareno (2018) argues that the nexus of economic globalization, colonial relations between the US and the Philippines and the austerity of the US welfare state have led to the emergence of immigrant Filipina-owned long-term care enterprises, which operate as a “welfare-state replacement” catering to low-income chronically ill and aging adults who qualify for government assistance. Owners of homecare businesses have become middlewoman minorities connecting white middle-class older citizens to Filipina undocumented workers, reinforcing domestic servitude through new citizenship inequalities between women of color (Nazareno et al. 2022). Lan (2002) analyses Taiwanese and Hong Kong immigrant families’ “subcontracting filial piety” to other ethnic Chinese workers in California, reinforcing its ideological gendering. In state-funded homecare, community-based organizations link poor immigrants to homecare services, marking another community structure. Here the state both uses and reinforces filial duties in immigrant communities (Chun and Cranford 2018). Given the organization of homecare, we might expect conditions of servitude to be different from those in private domestic work. A key conflict discussed in studies of domestic work is its construction as menial or dirty work when women of color do it (Roberts 1997; Rollins 1985). As Roberts (1997, 52) argues, “the ideological distinction between spiritual and menial housework,” that is, the valued caring labor linked to gendered morality versus labor that is considered lacking in skill, justifies the unequal racial and class division of reproductive labor between women. Homecare, however, introduces unique dilemmas of servitude. Care work scholars emphasize that poor aging and/or disabled people’s need for state services, and ideologies vilifying dependence, complicate power relations on the job (Duffy et al. 2015). Conditions of servitude are even more complex where a limited welfare state intersects with racialization of poverty, resulting in over-representation of people of color, including immigrants, as receivers. Yet, building on Glenn (1992), Aronson and Neysmith (1996, 70) argue that the reality of homecare workers’ provision of unpaid “extras” to people in need is “more or less coerced” by a gendered “sense of moral compulsion” and lack of bargaining power, especially for immigrants. How can workers challenge the slippage of care work into servitude? To understand how state-funded homecare operates as a contested sphere of racialized, gendered servitude, we highlight the significance of worker collective organizing, which has long defined how poor women of color and immigrant women challenge intersectional power and inequality (Chun et al. 2013; Guevarra and Lledo 2013; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007; Romero 2002). Several studies have analysed homecare unions in alliance with receivers’ organizations to enable unionization and improvements to wages and benefits (Delp and Quan 2002; Rhee and Zabin 2009). Identifying shared interests and implementing collective solutions also require careful consideration of the tensions that undermine quality care provision (Cranford 2020). Stacey (2011) argues that unions need to understand that homecare workers cultivate a “caring self,” that finds dignity in dirty work, if they want to organize them to be active in the union, suggesting the need to both recognize and undermine ideologies of gendered servitude. However, unions must also challenge racialized servitude. To do so, homecare unions need to cultivate immigrant women workers’ leadership as evident within community-based labor organizing (Chun et al. 2013; Cranford et al. 2005). However, we have not theorized the difference unions and other labor organizations could make in the ever-present possibility of care work sliding into racialized, gendered domestic servitude. We build on these insights to

Multi-level analyses of homecare labor  389 analyse how the state, local labor market, community, and workers’ organizations interact to reinforce, or undermine, domestic servitude through comparative analysis.

COLLABORATIVE, COMPARATIVE METHODOLOGY The questions, methods, and goals of our research are guided by the principles of activist scholarship – that is, a way of doing research that is “in dialogue, collaboration, alliance with people who are struggling to better their lives” (Hale 2008, 4). As indispensable partners, social movement organizations bring crucial expertise and practical knowledge to understanding urgent social problems through the “situated knowledges of communities in struggle” (Lipsitz 2008, 90). Their efforts to make sense of and overcome the multiple contradictions of everyday life for aggrieved groups also challenge existing paradigms and epistemologies in ways that have helped create path-breaking modes of inquiry such as the field of intersectionality studies (Cho et al. 2013; Lipsitz 2008). The long-term commitment of our community partner, Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA), provides a powerful lens for theorizing intersectionality as a social movement strategy (Chun et al. 2013). AIWA’s emphasis on immigrant women – rather than specific jobs and industries – enabled the organization to redirect their focus from exploitative supply chains in the global garment industry to the intimate and unregulated sphere of private homes. As their aging members faced increasingly restrictive job options in the context of ongoing deindustrialization and the rapid growth of the care labor market, AIWA uncovered a key dilemma for the predominantly unionized In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS) workforce. Young Shin, AIWA’s Executive Director, recalled that their members had the protection of union collective bargaining when it came to issues such as wages and benefits, but they had little recourse against individual employers when it came to unjust treatment and retaliatory firings. To develop an organizing strategy that could strengthen homecare workers’ voice and job security, the organization sought to answer the following questions: What constraints did labor unions face when it came to the intimate sphere of care provisioning in state-funded care? How could community-based organizations like AIWA utilize creative, grassroots organizing to overcome the gaps and contradictions of basic employment protections for immigrant homecare workers?1 The co-authors worked collaboratively with AIWA to conduct a comparative study that could clarify the complex tensions and alliances that characterized state-funded homecare, building on previous and new research (Chun et al. 2019; Cranford 2020).2 This chapter compares three cases. Direct Funding: Self-Managed Attendant Services (DF) in Toronto, based on interviews with 10 workers and 15 receivers; Outreach Attendant Services (OAS) in Toronto, based on interviews with 11 workers, 17 receivers, and 7 managers; and In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS) in Los Angeles and Oakland, based on 28 and 17 interviews with Korean and Chinese immigrant workers, respectively. We also draw on program documents and 15 interviews with actors from unions and community-based organizations in these cities. These cases allow us to illuminate how the varied organization of homecare shapes workers’ capacity to undermine domestic servitude when the state neglects to regulate employment standards in the giving and receiving of paid reproductive labor. They do not encompass private-paid homecare, although in some cases state-funded homecare are supplemented with out-of-pocket expenses. They also do not include variation across other cities within, or states/ provinces outside, California and Ontario.

390  Research handbook on intersectionality These programs assemble within different care regimes, which shape who is eligible for services. The Canada Health Act guarantees universal funding of hospital care, but leaves homecare funding up to provincial governments, yet need, not ability to pay, defines eligibility in Ontario. In contrast, to qualify for California’s IHSS, funded by a mix of state, county, and federal (Medicaid) funding, one must be at the poverty level. Notwithstanding this difference, our comparison rests on the organization of services across similarly state-funded programs within an Independent Living model of disability. Key variations we consider are employment and labor relations. Labor legislation classifies DF workers as “domestic servants,” with no ability to unionize, and unions have not taken up the challenge of organizing DF workers. By contrast, in OAS non-profit agencies are the legal employers, encouraging unionization by several unions including Local 40, which pursues a “grassroots social unionism” emphasizing worker involvement, to quote one organizer. In IHSS, an alliance of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) with movements representing employer-receivers passed innovative legislation allowing for unionization in 1999. Yet, workers have had to push their union to address intersectional oppression (Chun et al., forthcoming). To guide our analysis of these cases, we focus on how the nexus of the organization of state provision and labor as a collective voice variously shapes the ability of workers to challenge domestic servitude. State-Funded Servitude: Direct Funding3 DF was the most similar among our cases to private domestic work and relations of racialized, gendered servitude that pervade it. The state classified care receivers as employers, called “Self-Managers,” who had a unique social location as people marginalized by a disabling society, but relatively privileged as young, predominantly white people with higher levels of education and more employment experience than the average disabled person, reflective of the program requirement to manage one’s own services. Due to intermittent needs, Self-Managers hired a diverse range of individuals as “Personal-Attendants,” from white men and women for whom this is a supplemental job to migrants with precarious citizenship. For racialized women workers, the conditions of DF work were most likely to slip into servitude due, in part, to intersecting labor market inequalities of race, citizenship, class, and gender that undermine their ability to maneuver the conditions on the job, in line with Glenn’s (2010) theory. For example, Sarina, a South Asian woman born and raised in East Africa who migrated to Canada in the 1990s with precarious citizenship and little education, faced intense labor market discrimination. Sarina was working only five hours a week for a single Self-Manager, who paid less than the maximum DF wage, so Sarina combined the DF job with direct work for a private-paying, aging client and through two temporary agencies that placed her in homecare jobs. DF was one of the few jobs open to Sarina, and its funding and delivery shaped her precarious labor market position and related (in)ability to challenge servitude on the job. The organization of DF introduced new relations and actors, but the state played a significant role in the possibility of its slippage into domestic servitude. As funder, the Ontario government shaped working conditions by setting guidelines for service hours and wages and contracting transfer payment to a disability advocacy organization: Centre for Independent Living Toronto (CILT). CILT determined Self-Managers’ hours and thus budget, within policy parameters, through an assessment that incorporated their own and peers’ input. Yet, CILT did not enforce labor standards, and sometimes it merely advised Self-Managers on how to navigate intermittent needs by hiring a range of casual workers. The state delegated

Multi-level analyses of homecare labor  391 responsibility for enforcing standards to Self-Managers and Personal-Attendants. CILT provided support to Self-Managers who sought it but labor legislation that regulated unionization excluded Personal-Attendants and unions had not developed alternative strategies to organize them. Thus, DF left workers acutely vulnerable to the good employer/bad employer distinction so prevalent in the private market. Most Self-Managers considered hiring and firing as key to their autonomy, yet the state’s subcontracted delivery of DF meant their relative position of privilege created proximities to what Glenn (1992) described as the “contradictory location” of white women managing domestic care and services in private households. Jennifer, a white, middle-aged Self-Manager who used a wheelchair explained that she moved from agency services to DF to gain “more control over who I choose to have in my life.” Jennifer described her extensive yet fragmented need for personal support workers. “They’re essential. I can’t get up without them,” she said, yet as a professional she needed help at home only in the mornings and evenings, and had another person assist her at work. Thus, Jennifer used her 34 hours a week to employ four Personal-Attendants all but one of whom were women of color, and two also immigrants. Jennifer paid them the maximum funded rate, but their hours were few. CILT guidelines directed her to pay social security benefits and submit reports showing how she spent the budget. However, she was under no obligation to complete a formal training about how to ensure just and dignified working conditions. CILT also had not been able to pressure the government to increase hours for people who needed 24-hour support, and such cases are at most risk of encouraging working over paid time and other forms of exploitation. In this way, even advocacy organizations can reflect intersectional, contradictory interests that reinforce state power and both workers’ and disabled people’s oppression, and these contradictions bubble up on the job. Lack of labor market choice limited the ability of women of color and immigrant Personal-Attendants to challenge conditions of servitude on the job, despite potential to recognize devalued social reproductive labor. Jennifer emphasized that a key difference between DF and other homecare services is “you don’t have 3 different people coming in doing different functions” and insisted, “my laundry is as important to me as dressing.” Jennifer also avoided a division of tasks to make the shifts longer and more worthwhile, a strategy suggested in CILT documents. Since Self-Managers were the employers, however, they could impose a gendered and racialized division of labor, and some did. Sarina said the other PA working with the Self-Manager who employed her had more hours, would leave dirty dishes in the sink for Sarina to wash, and go home early but still be paid. Sarina linked this to long-standing racialization of tasks seen to be menial and dirty. The guy I was working with, he was just looking for somebody to do cleaning. And it happens a lot when you are dark, I guess. So, if you’re a white person you wouldn’t see it, because it doesn’t happen to you.

White women Personal-Attendants largely consented to cleaning work because their better labor market position allowed them to choose to work for good employers who valued their contributions, but racialized Personal-Attendants did not have nearly as much freedom. Sarina said sometimes she would “keep bad clients … because I need the job.” Thus, as Glenn predicted, there is considerable continuity in the ability of race, class privileged women, even

392  Research handbook on intersectionality those marginalized by disability, to command the labor of women of color. This pervasive dynamic was bolstered by a program design that limited workers’ collective voice. The hands-off, educational and peer support approach with Self-Managers promoted by CILT was in line with ideals of empowerment within the Independent Living movement of which it is a part, but it also provided an avenue for CILT, and some Self-Managers, to distance themselves from responsibilities as employers. Since the Ontario Labor Relations Act (OLRA) excluded employees of individuals, and unions had not developed alternative organizing strategies for this sector, Personal-Attendants had no collective ability to push CILT or the state to regulate bad employers. Sarina called to complain about the Self-Manager who was showing racialized favoritism in shifts and tasks, but CILT has no system for hearing workers’ complaints. At first they didn’t want to take that down. They told me it would be too much to go through. They wanted to ignore it, I think. And I have to really push and say, “I have to talk to somebody ‘cause it’s not fair.”

Sarina was not sure if CILT did anything to address the problem, but she did know she would not be given equivalent work if she quit or was fired. Sarina had worked with three Self-Managers in the past. One man, Sarina quit due to sexual harassment, and a woman who was “so mean” about how she wanted things done, fired her, but Sarina went back to CILT’s Consumer Attendant Roster since “you can find some nice people.” Sarina felt Personal-Attendants needed “someone to complain to” and a union or association that could raise pay. But unions organizing workers in other homecare sectors were opposed to DF at its inception, viewing it as an individualization that “runs counter to all our principles,” to quote one union official, and as part of a “cheap labor strategy,” tied to privatization to quote another. Unions’ critique of DF, for which Independent Living activists fought hard, meant those activists were unwilling to work with unions. However, homecare programs could also be designed to support both receiver and worker voice, as we show next. Challenging Servitude: Outreach Attendant Services OAS was the most different among our cases to private domestic work, and relations of racialized, gendered servitude that pervade it, although the threat of slippage into servitude was still present. Like DF Self-Managers, OAS clients were marginalized by disability and (most) had white privilege but, unlike Self-Managers, most OAS clients were poor, reflecting the correlation of poverty with disability. Marginalized in the polity, economy, and society, OAS clients had little ability to command the labor of multiply oppressed workers in the broader labor market, yet given that market’s racialization, most OAS workers were immigrant women, and some men, of color. Gail came to Canada from St. Lucia as a temporary domestic worker in the early 1980s, although by the time we interviewed her she was a Canadian citizen. In Toronto, Gail completed health and personal care assistance courses and worked in temporary health care jobs before securing a position with a unionized, OAS employer with guaranteed hours. Through unionization, OAS workers like Gail were able to challenge their position in the stratified labor market, and conditions of servitude on the job. Our analysis of OAS thus further builds the claim that the state plays a significant role in the possibility of care work’s

Multi-level analyses of homecare labor  393 slippage into domestic servitude but shows the potential for a progressive impact of the state through its support of workers’ collective voice. The state structured OAS to encourage responsibility of the multiple parties involved, enforced through mechanisms for representation and voice of both workers and receivers. The Ontario government contracted service provision to agencies who sent workers to disabled people’s homes. Thus, OAS clients did not hire or fire, but the state designed the program to support their ability to direct their services, which did give them influence over which services were provided and when. A manager described OAS as “client-directed independent living.” Thus, clients were involved with the needs assessment done by the agency. As Owen, a single man with a 9th grade education on Ontario’s low-income, disability support program, who had received services for 11 years due to a muscular disease, described: “Ok and you tell [the agency] basically what your days and needs are and then they figure out, you know, who to send you and how much time.” OAS clients also had collective voice through mandated representation on the agencies’ Board of Directors. Program design did not require workers’ voice but encouraged it by designating non-profit agencies as the legal employers, which fit better with the system of collective bargaining assumed by the OLRA, thus encouraging unions to organize. Furthermore, OAS immigrant workers of color actively sought out unions beginning in the 1980s, organizing through their social networks across workplaces. Due to near complete unionization of the sector, workers were able to negotiate both respect on the job and labor market security. OAS workers were able to push employers to provide more job security through their membership in labor unions, marking a challenge to domestic servitude. An OAS manager described six provisions in the collective agreement on wages and hours. For example, if a worker lost a client because the client died, moved to an institution, or some other reason beyond the workers’ control, “they have a provision in their collective agreement that [the employer] has five days to do the replacement of hours.” The union also pushed for a minimum payment for four hours of work even if the client cancelled with short notice, paid travel time, more full-time workers with guaranteed hours, and increases in hourly wages and benefits. Importantly, unions that ally with collectivities of clients can support the quality care that bolsters secure work. As Owen said: “Well I think if they get paid fairly well, they’re inclined to keep working.” Workers’ retention was also shaped by fair conditions on the job. Union representation not only allowed workers to gain more job security but also to contest the slippage of home-based reproductive labor into work resembling servitude. The union helped workers negotiate with clients’ family. A union informant and former worker said workers “recognize that yes there is a bit of a gray area of how much work we do for able-bodied family members, but it was getting fairly clear that with some people, they were going just way overboard in terms of their demands” and this issue was a key reason workers wanted a union. Clients directed their services, but managers required them to negotiate tensions, including clients’ or their family’s expectations of servitude. As one manager explained: We’re trying to encourage both client and staff because they need to work with the office team so we can coach and work through – negotiate through issues. Because the clients have responsibilities as well as the staff.

Managers’ intervention to require negotiation linked to unionization. As Gail said: “And if you cannot resolve it, then … well, manager first. You don’t get results; you go to the union.” In

394  Research handbook on intersectionality sum, the OAS case demonstrates the possibility of care work slipping into domestic servitude (even when the receivers are poor people in need), but also shows the counter force a union can make. Our comparison of the limits of DF and the promise of OAS should not imply, however, that service delivery through agencies is the only program design that could facilitate challenges to domestic servitude. Rather, the key mechanism the comparison reveals is the importance of workers’ collective voice. Next, we consider IHSS where unions in alliance with the Independent Living movement created a new model of voice, thus building the argument that homecare introduces actors overlooked in intersectional scholarship, yet vital for challenging servitude. Confronting servitude: Asian immigrant workers in California’s IHSS program4 On the surface, the relationship between workers and employers in California’s IHSS program bore little resemblance to the intersecting inequalities that have long tracked poor women of color and immigrant women into servitude. In communities such as Oakland’s Chinatown and Los Angeles’ Koreatown, the people who “commanded” domestic and personal services were low-income, monolingual Asian immigrant seniors who qualified for home-based public assistance due to age and disability. The workers who became “obligated” to provide daily care for aging persons in need were from similar racial and ethno-linguistic communities and faced related economic hardship as aging, monolingual, Asian immigrant women with few job options beyond minimum wage work in co-ethnic economies. In addition, a significant proportion of homecare workers were once paid family providers, who left low-paid jobs in factories, restaurants, and small businesses to care for ailing parents, aunts, uncles, and other relatives. Myung-ja, a Korean immigrant woman in her early 60s who left Korea with her father in the early 1970s, quit her minimum wage job in a Korean-owned dry cleaning store and entered IHSS when her father needed care. After he passed away, she decided to work permanently as a homecare worker and spent the last two decades providing end-of-life care for Korean-speaking seniors in Los Angeles’ Koreatown. Similarly, Zhaoli entered IHSS as a paid family provider soon after she moved to Oakland from Guangzhou, China, in 2014, coming out of retirement at the urging of her 88-year-old mother-in-law. She cooked, cleaned, bathed, and assisted her mother-in-law with a variety of daily activities, three hours each day, six days per week, and occasionally worked as a “substitute” for other residents of the subsidized senior apartment building to supplement her low wages. Despite similar locations of workers and receivers within intersecting hierarchies of race, class, and immigrant status, the way in which the IHSS program was designed by the state means that here, too, workers confronted the prospect of servitude. The state’s organization of IHSS introduced new actors that potentially gave workers leverage, but workers still faced dilemmas of servitude. As an Independent Provider system, the IHSS gave individual “consumers” the autonomy to choose their own “providers,” including family members or friends. By hiring, firing, and supervising, IHSS recipients acted as employers. However, most workers we interviewed felt “grandmothers are not the bosses,” as Myung-ja put it, because they did not directly compensate workers or determine wage rates or number of paid hours. Social workers for the IHSS program, housed in the county government’s Department of Public Social Services (DPSS), assessed eligibility, approved the number of hours, authorized tasks, and approved timesheets submitted by recipient-employers. The California State not only funded the program but also issued workers’ paychecks and

Multi-level analyses of homecare labor  395 contributed to unemployment insurance and social security. Hourly wage rates and job-related benefits were determined through collective bargaining with SEIU. However, SEIU did not bargain over intimate aspects of care provision or engage in workplace strikes that could jeopardize the health and well-being of people who need continuous care. These concessions, which aim to safeguard employer-recipients’ autonomy, were crucial in securing disability rights advocates’ support for SEIU’s organizing (Rhee and Zabin 2009). Welfare state retrenchment also set limits. The state’s insufficient funding and lack of monitoring shaped a disconnect between the services and hours an employer-recipient was authorized from the state to ask a worker to do and the actual services the latter fulfilled, thus moving this job towards de facto servitude. To “remind” the “consumers” to adhere to the list of “authorized tasks,” the California DPSS mailed a document to them that stated, “REMEMBER: IHSS will only pay for services that have been authorized by your social worker.”5 Despite the state’s note of advisement, they did not enforce their own regulations so there was little workers could do if employer-recipients asked them to complete tasks not on the list or stay beyond authorized hours. Myung-ja described the IHSS list as just a piece of paper (Kim 2020, 145). It had little influence on the tasks she or other workers did in Los Angles’ Koreatown. Workers talked at length about the “extra” tasks they performed, especially for the “grandmothers” who pressured them to prepare home-cooked foods for their adult children such as kimchi, which is a fermented pickled cabbage that involves handling heavy boxes of Napa cabbage and takes days to prepare. Yingzi, who provided care for three non-family employer-recipients in Oakland’s Chinatown, echoed Myung-ja’s sentiments: The government mails a sheet [to the employer-recipient] with the number of hours written on it and what to do. However, the employer-recipient says, “I want you do this or that,” and often it is outside of the hours that the government gives you.

By leaving it up to employer-recipients to “remember” to “not ask your provider to do things you can safely do yourself,” the state did little beyond offering superficial guidance, rendering workers vulnerable to unfair working conditions. The state’s hands-off approach was particularly disadvantageous to immigrant women workers of color who were dependent on their jobs for economic survival, marking another similarity with domestic servitude. Ruhua, who spent eight years as an IHSS live-in worker for Chinese immigrant seniors in Oakland, worked far more hours than she was paid, but employer-recipients often threatened to replace her if she continued to “complain.” Many workers simply consented to employers’ unreasonable demands because they could not afford to lose their jobs. Myung-ja explained that even though workers repeatedly emphasized they were not required to do tasks outside the authorized list, employer-recipients commonly responded, “then, go ahead and quit. There are many people I can use besides you.” The proximity to domestic servitude came up repeatedly among Korean immigrant workers, who expressed a heightened sense of resentment when seniors treated them like maids or sigmo, which was a type of domestic servitude associated with Korea’s feudal system of slavery. IHSS workers such as Myung-ja tended to assert their identities as ganbyeongin, which is the term used in South Korea to refer to workers who receive their pay directly from the government. She explained:

396  Research handbook on intersectionality Hardly anyone recognizes us [homecare workers] as people who work for and get paid by the government through the ganbyeongin [IHSS] program. Even though they [Korean immigrant seniors] don’t pay us directly, the people who feel like we owe them for our livelihood call us helpers (doumi) and personal aides and their servants. 99 percent of them, I think, have the image that we have to do what they say [because they think we owe them].

Myung-ja and others recognized this attitude as an expression of the kind of prejudice associated with the “older generation” of Korean immigrants who experienced war and poverty and brought “outdated” ideas with them after they immigrated. However, their ability to understand where employer-recipients were coming from did not mean their attitudes were considered acceptable. By reframing their identities as government employees rather than domestic servants, Yang-Sook Kim (2020, 163–4) argued that “the ‘government pays us’ narrative provide[s] workers with leverage to guard their dignity.” Homecare workers consistently challenged the idea that they were “servants.” Ok-ja, who had been caring for her mother-in-law for the past six years, emphasized her refusal to be dehumanized by IHSS recipients, including relatives, who viewed state-funded homecare as an opportunity to have their own “maid.” Ok-ja recognized that public subsidies for home-based care enabled poor and low-income immigrants to continue living independently in their own homes. But she was deeply critical of employer-recipients who were of “sound mind” yet took advantage of their eligibility “to have people work under them.” When encountering this kind of “scheming” and “strategizing,” she explained that homecare workers were “old enough” to resist. Ok-ja emphasized, “We don’t want to go under them. It’s not like they pay us. I just want to work and be treated as a human being. I don’t want to be treated like their maid.” This rejection of their treatment as servants was part of a collective consciousness that shaped, and was shaped by, workers’ engagement with their union and other unionized workers. Korean-speaking IHSS workers in Los Angeles had become actively involved in their union, which provided members with a crucial support system when faced with employer-recipients who insisted on treating them as “servants,” instead of paid workers. Since they began organizing with SEIU in 2013, Korean-speaking homecare workers developed a strong level of internal organization, with about 60 active rank-and-file members gathering virtually every month to share information and conduct trainings at the union office. Although the union cannot bargain collectively over basic aspects of care provisioning in their contract negotiations, workers consulted union leaders to intervene on their behalf when faced with abusive employer-recipients and unreasonable demands. One worker, Hyun-sook who has been working through IHSS for seven years, explained how a worker-union leader intervened on their behalf with employer-recipients: We have our own Korean group “captain” inside the union. She has gone out to talk to the grandfathers and grandmothers, maybe two or three different times. [For care receivers] who are still beholden to their old way of thinking, our captain firmly tells them that it is not okay to think that way.

For Myung-ja, engaging in these types of face-to-face interventions was not only essential for helping advocate for the dignity of fellow workers. It was also essential for the optimal operation of the co-ethnic labor market, ensuring the match between employer-recipients and workers was a “good fit” and that both parties could give each other what they needed. It is crucial to note that this type of advocacy was not provided by paid union staff, which does

Multi-level analyses of homecare labor  397 not employ a bilingual Korean speaker, but rather the volunteer leadership structure that Korean-speaking workers have established within the union. Unionized IHSS workers in Oakland’s Chinatown also relied on collective representation to address the challenges of working for abusive employer-recipients, marking the potential for challenging relations of domestic servitude. Fuzhen sought help from the union to intervene on her behalf when the employer-recipient’s family began insisting that she work 24 hours per day for their 90-year old mother without leaving the home, even though she was only getting paid 137 hours per month by IHSS. She explained, “After I told them what the union said, the family was more reluctant because I had the backing of the union [and] they didn’t bring up this issue again. They do, however, still say they can still find someone who works for less.” The union played an important role in strengthening workers’ voice, but its unwillingness to invest resources into more actively supporting member needs and leadership reproduced exclusions along race, ethnicity, and language that have long plagued unions. In this context, grassroots community organizations such as Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) played a crucial role in addressing limitations of unions as part of immigrant workers’ movements (Chun et al. 2013; Cranford and Ladd 2003). Although the union made crucial interventions on behalf of workers like Fuzhen, this type of support was no longer possible after they eliminated the paid Chinese-speaking organizer position, much to the dismay of rank-and-file members. According to one AIWA leader, who did part-time work as an IHSS provider for her mother, AIWA has helped many Chinese immigrant homecare workers organize collectively outside the union to advance their interests. This includes demanding language-accessible translation and hotline services from IHSS, advocating within the IHSS bureaucracy to address payment problems, and providing trainings to workers about issues ranging from how the IHSS program works to how to protect themselves against unsafe working conditions. In sum, the lack of job options for aging, limited English-speaking, Chinese and Korean immigrant women perpetuated highly unequal relations of domination of subordination, even when both parties were from similar class and ethnic backgrounds, yet through self-organizing within the union or in community-labor organizations, immigrant women confronted servitude.

TOWARDS MULTI-LEVEL ANALYSES OF HOMECARE LABOR Extending formative analysis of domestic servitude by Black and women of color feminism to encapsulate the organizational dynamics of in-home, aging and disability support programs augments our understanding of care work as a site of intersectional inequalities and power. As assistance with daily activities in private spaces – often while people are vulnerable like during bathing and dressing – quality homecare relies on relations of trust and obligation forged between individual care providers and receivers. Yet, in entering different institutional arrangements for care provisioning, the state creates opportunities for a multitude of actors, including labor unions, community organizations, and care receiver advocates, to contest intersectional inequalities and power in homecare. In this chapter, we built on Glenn’s (1992, 2010) ground-breaking analysis of continuity in racialized, gendered servitude – a coercive labor system that utilizes ideologies of gender, race, and class inferiority to enable a dominant group to command the social reproductive services of a subordinated group – despite changes in the organization of caring. The intersectional relations between homecare receivers – marginalized by disability and class, and

398  Research handbook on intersectionality sometimes race and immigrant status – and, mostly, immigrant women workers, reflect a more complicated set of contradictory interests than those theorized from the hierarchical relationship between white, middle-class women who command the reproductive labor of women of color. This complexity is the norm in state-funded services, at least in white settler nations with austere welfare states like the US and Canada. At the same time, the state plays a significant role in the ever-possible slippage of homecare into servitude. Integrating foundational analyses of domestic servitude with carework scholarship analysing multiple, meso-level dynamics (Chun and Cranford 2018; Cranford 2020; Nazareno 2018; Showers 2018; Williams 2010) we analysed how homecare work is at risk of falling into servitude, and the organizational dynamics that provide workers leverage to resist this slippage, with a comparative, intersectional methodology rooted in activist scholarship. Our comparison of three homecare cases reveals how immigrant women, homecare workers face constant dilemmas of servitude, even when receivers of their labor are aging and disabled, and/or poor and immigrants, but also that their ability to challenge servitude hinges on how the state’s design of homecare meets up with organized labor. What becomes starkly evident in our examination of DF is how the state’s reliance on and reinforcement of gendered and racialized servitude works both through labor law based on an outdated factory model that does not protect domestic workers and more specifically through the design of homecare programs, both of which discourage unions. As a result, immigrant women DF workers are most subject, among our cases, to a central dilemma of domestic servitude – the good employer/ bad employer dichotomy – even though state funding introduces a range of institutional actors beyond the care provider-receiver dyad that could theoretically give workers leverage. In contrast, our investigation of OAS illustrates how the state can choose to design a homecare program that supports collective representation through which workers can undermine servitude. The organization of OAS, in that it incorporates voice for workers and holds employers accountable, allows workers to negotiate collectively over what the job entails. It is this mechanism, not just an institutionalized legal regime, which supports workers’ challenges to servitude. Our analysis of OAS thus illuminates potential for progressive impact of the state via organized labor. The delivery of OAS through a non-competitive agency model encourages unions to organize workers, since labor legislation works relatively well in such settings. Yet, workers’ organizations must organize more individualized programs since states continue to download responsibility and some receivers need and want more individualized personal support. Our analysis of IHSS shows how unions have forged new models of collective voice in alliance with movements representing care receivers, but the specter of servitude is still evident in part due to labor’s concessions in the face of both receiver demands for autonomy and state austerity. The unionization of homecare workers has demonstrated the capacity of one of the most excluded groups – poor women of color and immigrant women workers engaged in domestic and personal service for private households – to secure labor protections. Despite impressive strides, state-funded homecare programs, such as IHSS, can remain entrenched in conditions of de facto servitude. Once again, workers are empowered to confront conditions of servitude not simply through institutionalized protections. Instead, our analysis of Korean and Chinese immigrant women shows how workers’ self-organizing, within unions or in community-based workers’ centers, provides a means to challenge racialized, gendered servitude.

Multi-level analyses of homecare labor  399 Table 23.1   Social location

Multi-level framework for analysing homecare labor Private Domestic Work:

State-funded Homecare:

Key Dynamics in the

micro and macro levels

elevating meso level

Organization of Homecare Servitude

Dilemmas of

Race, immigrant status,

Multiple configurations of

Does the state organize

At risk of

of actors in care class inequalities and power

intersecting oppression and

services to mitigate

slippage

relationship

between women

privilege

oppression of receivers,

Actors in

Householder-receiver as

Multiple legal and/or de facto

Receivers by deeming

Continuity/

employment

single legal employer

employers, including state,

them employers/both

change

agencies, individuals

by recognizing multiple

workers, or both?

relationship

employers Mechanisms supporting

Individual acts of resistance

Unions and community-based

Workers by facilitating

Potential to

workers’ organizations

community unionism

challenge

collective voice

By comparing these case study findings to domestic work scholarship, we emphasize three contrasting dynamics evident in state-funded homecare but overlooked in most studies of private domestic work (Table 23.1). The first involves the social location of the actors in the care relationship. Studies of private domestic work understandably foreground race, immigrant status and class inequalities and power between women employers and workers. Some studies include an analysis of these racialized and class inequalities between workers and receivers who are not employers (like children) but emphasize race, immigrant status and class privilege of the care receiver, despite age differences. In contrast, the study of homecare reveals multiple configurations of intersecting oppression and privilege. In some programs, like DF, receivers are privileged by race and class but marginalized by disability, while workers are oppressed by race, class, and gender, but privileged in relations of disability. In other programs, like OAS, receivers are privileged by race and immigrant status but marginalized by class and disability, while workers are exploited through inequalities of class, race and immigrant status yet advantaged in relations of disability. Still in other cases, like IHSS, both receivers and workers are oppressed through multiple relations especially race, immigrant status and class, but workers are relatively advantaged in relations of disability although they are older and suffer from health and safety problems on the job. Other homecare cases introduce different interlocking relations of oppression and privilege but the consistent difference from private domestic work is that homecare introduces a broader and more complex array of inequality and power configurations (Cranford 2020). Despite greater variation of power and privilege patterns, we find that homecare is at risk of slippage into servitude, as theorized by Glenn (2010). However, homecare compels us to analyse a key dynamic: namely, whether the state organizes services to mitigate the oppression of receivers, workers, or both. Considering how the state addresses complex relations of power and privilege brings us to a second dimension of difference between private domestic work and homecare: the actors in the employment relationship. Private domestic work scholarship foregrounds the legal employer, who is an individual householder. The analysis of homecare, however, requires we consider the state as a de facto employer, given its power over funding, whether the legal employer is the individual receiver or an organization contracted to the state. In our cases, the state organizes services to address the marginalization of receivers by acknowledging principles articulated by the Independent Living movement. This reflects the broader reality that care services are receiver-focused, which meets up with neoliberal ideologies (Nazareno

400  Research handbook on intersectionality 2018). Analysing this dynamic through the lens of domestic servitude, we argue that the state’s singular focus on the marginalization of receivers, coupled with neoliberal practices and ideologies, results in continuity with servitude, as Glenn (1992, 2010) theorized. In homecare organized through agencies, receivers are also de facto employers (i.e., OAS), yet when multiple (state, receiver, organizational) level entities are recognized (i.e., IHSS), we see an important change in social organization that begins to address both receiver and worker social locations. Nevertheless, change in social organization is not sufficient to challenge domestic servitude and the third dimension in the framework is mechanisms supporting workers’ collective voice vis-à-vis multiple actors in care and employment relations. Many studies of private domestic work emphasize individual acts of resistance (i.e., Rollins 1985), although others document domestic workers’ organizations (Boris and Nadasen 2008; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007; Moore 2018). We found that when mechanisms for collective voice were evident, like in IHSS and OAS, there was potential for workers to challenge servitude. However, this does not erase the need for community-based worker organization to address the gaps of trade unionism evident in its troubled application to the complex interlocking power relations in homecare. Analyses of multi-level intersecting inequalities and power in homecare would thus place dilemmas of servitude within meso-level organizational dynamics, which are, in turn, shaped by a political economy defined by welfare state retrenchment in line with the ideology of care as a private problem. A theoretical challenge is to extend multi-level, intersectional analyses of care with new sites of inquiry (i.e., Kim 2020; Nazareno et al. 2022). One empirical challenge for future research is to analyse care programs within countries where homecare is not means-tested (i.e., US), or only contingently universal (i.e., Canada). More integration of institutional-level insights from scholarship on intersecting gender, migration, and care regimes is a fruitful way forward, yet we must not lose sight of the everyday negotiations of servitude in home-workplaces (Williams 2010). One way to capture multiple levels of analysis, which we have employed here, is to focus on worker’s collective struggles with ongoing legacies of servitude in paid reproductive labor; yet an important dynamic we largely bracketed is the potential for alliances between workers’ and receivers’ organizations to undermine servitude through a broader community unionism. We could only hint at how civil society organizations embed intersectional interests. The National Domestic Workers Association in the US, its local and international affiliates and allied organizations representing care receivers, like Caring across Generations, provide a multi-level optic on domestic servitude at the intimate and infrastructure levels. The challenge, and opportunity, is to continue to develop intersectional, multi-level frameworks to analyse homecare through activist scholarship.

NOTES 1. Chun was Principal Investigator on this research funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Research Grant “Overcoming Exclusion, Organizing for Change: Labor Unions, Community Organizations and the New Immigrant Workforce” (2008–11) and the Hampton Fund Partnership Development Grant (2012–13) from the University of British Columbia. 2. Cranford was Principal Investigator on this research funded by SSHRC Standard Research Grant “Negotiating Quality Care and Quality Work: Personal Care Providers and People with Disabilities in Ontario” (2006–09). Cranford and Chun collaborated with AIWA on the sub-project

Multi-level analyses of homecare labor  401 “Understanding and Improving Immigrant Labour Markets for Personal Care Work” within SSHRC Partnership Grant, “Gender, Migration and the Work of Care” (2012–19). 3. This section draws on and extends Cranford (2020). 4. This section draws on and extends Chun and Cranford (2018). 5. https://​w ww​. cdss​. ca​. gov/​P ortals/​9 /​D ocuments/​2 021​% 20Forms/​I HSSAuthorizedTasks​. pdf (accessed May 31, 2021).

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24. Environmental activism and immigrant women of color Nadia Y. Kim

In this chapter, I will be chronicling the intersectional feminist methodology I used to answer the key questions of my recent book Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA (2021). Although immigrant women-led fights against environmental racism and classism are among the most vibrant movements in our global cities (Pellow and Park 2002) we still know little about them. As such, I had only a handful of feminist-minded research methodologies specific to environmental (in)justice to draw from when I embarked on my study of these mostly Asian and Latina immigrant women. Given these organizers’ multiple social locations, I knew that intersectionality would be needed to grasp why and how they inventively fought the pollution they breathed from goods movement – that is, diesel-shrouded ships, trains, trucks, freeways – and from the oil refineries that prop it up and are thus disproportionately placed in and near their neighborhoods. As Kimberlé Crenshaw (1993) first proffered, intersectionality is a useful tool for analysing social positionality, especially that of women of color, and for designing research. To illustrate the ongoing need for this framework, recent news about the massive supply chain log jam (especially for the 2021 holiday season) has certainly featured consumers’ inability to get their goods and presents on time; it has said almost nothing, however, about the (immigrant) communities of color who live near the goods through-points that make them sick and die prematurely, nor about the women and mothers of color who fight back despite not having the resources, time, and emotional energy to do so. My ability to ascertain the multi-layered nature of this Los Angeles environmental justice (EJ) movement attests to the acuity and richness of the intersectional feminist method of research. Such an approach has honed my ability to truly center the following: marginalized groups’ social locations and standpoints (and question researcher assumptions), the intersectional complexity of the people and situations involved (particularly when more than two axes are involved), a comparative lens along several scales and identities, and relational processes that show that privilege and disadvantage are inextricable – namely, concerning the state and corporate officials, on the one hand, and the immigrant women, on the other. In this way, a feminist intersectional method compels me to see the Mexican-led Latin@ movement for clean air in West Long Beach and Wilmington and the Filipin@-led Asian American movement based in Carson through the lens of specificity, complexity, and comparison (Moraga and Anzaldua 1981). Otherwise, I would have merely found that two largely discrete movements of Asian and Latina immigrant women had politically organized in response to the maladies and early deaths of their children, partners, and neighbors. While this manner of conceptualizing resistance is important, it does not delve into the social construction and the cultural-political use of social identity that is at the heart of critical feminist analyses (e.g., Pardo 1998, 2017; Shah 2011; Taylor and Whittier 1992; Teske and Tetreault 2000). 404

Environmental activism and immigrant women of color  405 The intersectional feminist methodological approach also throws into relief the role and influence of the macro context in the most micro of moments (Choo and Ferree 2010; Kang 2010; Misra, Curington, and Green 2021). The power of context is not something to be taken for granted, to be sure. From the early decades of sociology, Mishler (1979) argued that social science methods often ignore or minimize social context in the effort to mimic positivist empiricism, or the “scientific method” (see Kim and Dhingra, in press). The immigrant women of color of some of Los Angeles’ biggest environmental justice movements prove otherwise, that we cannot understand any aspect of their lives without context – more specifically, a context of power. One of the signal arguments of this chapter is how the women experienced environmental injustice within a broader context not just of US White supremacy (and its nativist, gendered axes), but of colonialism/imperialism, transnationality, and neoliberal capitalism. This chapter hopes to demonstrate that students of (immigrant) women of color grassroots activism are enriched by capturing this broader power context in any local analysis. Indeed, such a perspective helped me understand how their gendered status and discourse shaped their organizing and sense of motherhood; why they grappled with whether race or class was more central; why, from a migrant women of color perspective, the activists were more apt to see racism and classism as embodied and emotionally unequal; of who and who not to consider part of their community given this unjust context; of how they had to live a life of transnational oppression and neoliberal false choices. This chapter is a methodological meditation on how I arrived at these findings and how my positionality played a role. Informed specifically by existing models, I chose to employ a mixed-methodological approach. I ended up doing so for 3.5 years, collecting data by way of ethnographic participant-observation with the Asian American and Latin@ activists and allies in the port-industrial city of Los Angeles. I also conducted in-depth interviews with a subset of activists. Finally, I engaged in systematic analysis of political literature, public policy reports, and presentations. Noteworthy is that the Asian and Latin@ immigrant activists and their environmental justice organizations most often worked discretely from each other, owing to a focus on different cities and neighborhoods (the Asian American activists came from Carson, the Latin@s from Wilmington and West Long Beach) and on different political strategies (grassroots organizing, service provision, or, most typically, a mix). At the same time, their English-speaking leaders would periodically come together to work in a loose Southern California coalition. I collected the data between mid-2008 to late summer 2010, then again from mid-2011 to late 2013.

BACKGROUND I gained inspiration from existing studies that used intersectional feminist methodologies and the studies of women and girls of color on the front lines of environmental justice fights; this allowed me to create my research design from a composite of what had already been done successfully. To be certain, I should note that many of the Latina activists of my study did not identify as “feminists” per se, in part because of the more immediate and vicious class and ethnoracial politics of hyper-pollution and the exclusionary, biased history of the White- (and middle-class-) led feminist movement, among other dynamics (Pardo 2017). Yet, this in no way meant that the gendered vectors of their social location did not overlap with a feminist-minded politics: in every way it did, from their gender socialization to give care and

406  Research handbook on intersectionality take mothering seriously; to center family, emotional expressiveness, emotional life; and the daily struggle with the images and manifestations of gendered/sexualized racism and nativism; and finally, their battles with the (mostly White) male elites across the political divide.1 Krauss (1993), for instance, showed that White, indigenous, and Black American women fighting against toxic waste in their communities understood environmental justice from a similar vantage of group-specific race, gender, and class experiences and of marshalling their traditional role as mothers as a resource for resistance. In a related vein, Hay’s (2009) study of Lois Gibbs demonstrated the importance of narratives of family, motherhood, and children in trying to get the state to bend, and yet how these were based on (unconscious) heteronormative family precepts. Brown and Ferguson (1995) addressed how women transcended fear and disempowerment to become some of the most forceful organizers against toxic waste siting in their neighborhoods. Focusing on youth environmental justice organizers, Shah (2011) found that Laotian American teenage girls in Northern California negotiate their interlocking race, ethnic, class, and refugee status in relation to their parents, peers, and the market-led state; for instance, parents often did not understand their gendered power and their peer-influenced adoption of Black American hip hop culture, yet the girls harnessed these effectively to fight for a Lao language disaster warning system and other state resources. In my study, the predominantly Filipina Asian immigrants and the Latina activists of mostly Mexican descent shared commonalities with the women of color on the front lines of environmental justice fights. Like Krauss (1993) and Hay (2009) found, the women in Refusing Death used their intersectional and mothering identities as a political resource, as Shah (2011) found, relationships with others could be both a political resource and a hindrance. As with Brown and Ferguson (1995), most of the women in Los Angeles understandably felt anxious, inexperienced, and thoroughly marginalized at different moments – mostly in the early stages – something they would overcome or workaround to become formidable changemakers. Some important differences from previous literature were that the women in my study did not always see their political work as an extension of the politics of family or of their mothering duties (Coll 2010; see Pardo 2017); rather, family and mothering politicized the women to become grassroots organizers (Coll 2010). In this way, the women did not stuff politics into their preexisting roles and arrangements as “mothers” (Kim 2021). This owed in part to their intersectional race/immigrant/class/gender identities – not all of which center mothering – and how these shaped their perception of politics and their strategies for fighting back. In this vein, most instructive for my work was Mary Pardo’s (1998) groundbreaking research on the Mothers of East Los Angeles (MELA), as her study was most similar to mine. She studied MELA’s 1986 movement which emerged after the East LA Latinx community was besieged by the possible placement of a state prison, hazardous waste incinerator, and an above-ground oil pipeline in their racially segregated neighborhood of working-class and mixed-status Chicanas/os. Pardo lucidly demonstrated that comparing two socioeconomically unequal Latinx neighborhoods was the best way to grasp the intersectional race, gender, and especially class standpoint of the activists as well as how it shaped their approach to organizing. As class has often been underappreciated in mainstream sociological study of intersectionality (particularly in comparison to race and gender), Pardo’s attention to class differences between these two neighborhoods was also highly instructive.

Environmental activism and immigrant women of color  407

METHODS TO THE MADNESS Because intersectionality is – as Misra, Curington, and Green (2021) write – “complex,” this was one of the first indicators of my need to conduct mixed methods. The complexity of intersectional interviews and ethnography required me to attend specifically to the injustices and inequalities of race (including immigrant status), gender, and class, as both groups of women of color experienced these axes at the collective level (see Moraga and Anzaldua 1981). I was also conducting a comparison between the Asian and Latina ethnic activists such that I was analysing which intersectional locations that they shared – as immigrants, women, the overly polluted – and those they did not – the Asian/Filipina immigrants were largely middle-class, citizens, English-speaking, and living in diverse neighborhoods that included Whites, while the Latina/Mexican immigrants were mostly low-income, Spanish-speaking, unauthorized, and residentially segregated from Whites. As intersectionality asks that we center (multiply) marginalized groups, in large part by premising our understandings of social processes on group standpoint, Refusing Death did so within each group but also by comparing between groups. Intersectionality also points us to a process-centered analysis (Choo and Ferree 2010) that features relational dynamics (see also Kang 2010; Misra, Curington, and Green 2021). In other words, Choo and Ferree (2010, 33) enjoin for a critical, nuanced framework that gives primacy to intersectionality in any theory of the social world, in large part by attending to processes rather than ideal types, marking “unmarked categories of privilege and power” (e.g., White maleness), and eschewing liberal, reformist notions of inequality anchored in “diversity” absent of power contexts. In studying the Los Angeles-based clean air movement, this requires understanding how Whites’ environmental privilege (Park and Pellow 2011) pivots on the disadvantages that these women suffer as a direct result of it. My study demonstrated this relational process by way of the immigrant women’s perception of the divided order between bodies who enjoy environmental privilege and bodies who die prematurely from the environment.

INTERSECTIONALITY AS SPECIFICITY AND COMPARISON Ideally, prior to ethnographically studying a group of people – especially if it is a social movement – researchers have already been active in the mobilizations and had established the necessary trust, bonds, and relationships before deciding to ask the organizers if they would mind being formally studied (see Burton, Purvin, and Garrett-Peters 2009). This preexisting relationship is precisely what affords the researcher to conduct up-close ethnography and to develop formal questions and conjecture what she might find. Yet, I had to approach my study in an atypical manner, as I had been living outside of California (where I am from) for much of the decade prior and had just moved back, with a research agenda to study environmental racism in LA. That is, I had no experience with the LA-based movement I sought to study (though I had done environmental justice organizing elsewhere). Rather, I was bringing debates and trends in sociological, Ethnic Studies, American Studies, and feminist writing to the “real world.” Approaching as a stranger asking to conduct research on, and with, the activists in LA’s South Bay and Long Beach, some initially expressed having been “burned” by professors and journalists before. Yet, they were also very excited to have a researcher in their

408  Research handbook on intersectionality midst who had similarly been active in social justice organizing; who would bring publicity to, and thus advance, their movement; and who was a fellow immigrant woman of color. I also assured the activists that they could read the completed manuscript before it was published, and, in the spirit of participatory action research, that I would help with whatever research, informational, and organizing needs that they had. I conjectured that the Filipin@ community (as fellow Asian Americans) might be more accepting of me than the largely Mexican Latin@ activists given the structural inequality and periodic tensions between Korean immigrant entrepreneurs and Latinx workers throughout LA. The potential distrust was completely understandable. While all the above certainly helped, the most profound icebreaker was, to my surprise, my status as a fellow mother. Once they met my happy, chubby little baby girl, they peppered me with questions and advice. I found our simpatico as mothers to be somewhat ironic since being a mother can be a disadvantage when it comes to research. Given the intersectional nature of fieldwork, Espiritu (2003) writes that, among other things, methodology is gendered, as women are constrained by motherhood and/or the extra burdens that women of color faculty face. As a mother and someone who advises, mentors, and counsels many (female) students of color, this certainly applied to my case, especially in the early stages of fieldwork. At the same time, my concern over a few of the Latin@ activists possibly seeing me as suspect seemed to matter less after we talked “shop” about our children’s eating habits and behavioral phases, and juggling work, activism, and maternal caregiving. At other times, the organizational leaders would surprise me with their comments, such as a few months after working with Anya, Long Beach Alliance for Children with Asthma’s (LBACA) project manager. She remarked out of the blue as I was putting folding chairs away after a meeting, “You know what, Nadia? I just want to say that I appreciate that when you asked to study us, that you mentioned that you could also help with the day-to-day, like putting chairs away and cleaning up … I can’t tell you how much that matters to us!” I remember momentarily stopping in my tracks, smiling widely, and thanking Anya. I really did not think that doing what many would call “grunt” or behind-the-scenes work would matter as much as my “activist bona fides” or the research/organizing help I could offer LBACA. At the same time, Anya reminded me that putting chairs away and cleaning up was organizing, one of its many, boundless tasks. Bringing It to Center: Intersectional Knowledge To be sure, gaining entrée was one negotiation. Knowing who to be and how to act when one is “part” of the group is another. In my case, once I had enough time and experience to center the women’s standpoint, I was even more convinced of my predominantly outsider status to their community and to their political movement in its name. On balance, it seemed that both the Asian and Latina immigrant activists were seeing me as an outsider to their community. I was someone who had just come along to study it and assist them however I could. If that worked best for them, then that was fine with me. As afforded by the capacious grounded theory method, one of the findings I did not expect, however, was most of the Latinas’ perception that class injustice was the primary reason for the disproportionate pollution – that the more widely known explanation of environmental racism (since middle-class people of color are often worse off than working-class whites) did not resonate as much as that of environmental classism. This was not to say that being of

Environmental activism and immigrant women of color  409 the Latino “race/raza” did not matter. It certainly did. But in terms of the women’s political choices, they were most compelled by the view that classism mediated racism. Since the main form of oppression that they had experienced in Mexico was poverty, now a transnationally affirmed reality in LA, and since they were residentially segregated from White America, their focus on class injustice as causing disproportionate pollution stood to reason. Considering this finding, I presumed that the Latina organizers saw me, a middle-class professional who lived in a more environmentally privileged neighborhood, as fully outside the bounds of their community – that I was just someone for whom they made an exception. They would upend my expectations, however, by showing me that my perception was too limited and misguided. What follows is a very telling ethnographic moment that elucidated this for me more clearly than any other. At a pivotal public comment meeting about the possible widening of the I-710, the most cancerous freeway in the country, I was happy to see my favorite person, Laura, the staff community liaison and widely adored activist of the non-profit Long Beach Alliance for Children with Asthma (LBACA). Donned in business casual and a gentle smile, she was supervising the computer process when I asked her, “What are the people doing in front of the computers?” She explained, “They’re typing in their comments instead of going up to the mic. Are you going to speak tonight? Why don’t you go up to the mic?” Immediately, my mind went to the primacy that Mexican immigrant activists like her had given to poverty as defining membership in “the community.” Thinking that I was respecting her self-described community boundaries and showing reflexivity, I replied, “Oh, I don’t feel right about going up there when I’m not a member of the community, taking time away from others who actually live here.” In her typical poised manner, she betrayed no disappointment but quickly offered up, “OK, why don’t you write your comment on the computer then?” Satisfied that there was another option, I replied, “OK, great!” When I read over my field notes some years later, however, my cheeks got hot as I realized that I had gotten this moment completely wrong. Because foremost in my mind was how organizers like her had conveyed that low-income people constituted their “community,” I missed that she had a more fluid view of who could represent it. As such, I did not intuit her disappointment that I had opted for a less impactful method to help uplift her community when what would have been most forceful was presenting my class-privileged body and voice in solidarity. My head was so buried in insider/outsider dichotomies (Merton 1972; see also Võ 2000) about (middle-class) researchers and those they research (often less privileged), that I completely missed the human connection. I neglected to realize that she would never perceive me as overstepping or being entitled if I took time away from residents to “represent” their community because she, in effect, saw me as a symbolic member of it. Another moment in the field that completely upended my assumptions about who was more of an authentic member of their tightly held community involved my research assistant. I had asked Marisol, a young, Spanish-fluent Chicana to record and note-take at a Community Partners Council (CPC) meeting that I could not attend. Although she had done so at a meeting once before and although most CPC staff and regular attendees knew her as an assistant to me, when Marisol moved the tape recorder right under Carmen (the staff leader facilitating the meeting), Carmen immediately stopped the meeting to suspiciously interrogate Marisol as to who she was, why she was recording, and what her intentions for attending the meeting were. Laura and Marta, two influential coalition leaders with whom I had a much closer relationship, quickly came to Marisol’s defense by making clear that she was “Nadia’s” assistant and there was no impropriety about which to be concerned. Carmen’s treatment of my research

410  Research handbook on intersectionality assistant utterly surprised me. Ultimately, my fluent Spanish-speaking, bicultural Chicana undergraduate research assistant was more suspect than I, a Korean American bearing much less proficient Spanish skills. I had long presumed that I would make the immigrant organizers more uncomfortable than a co-ethnic and co-linguistic woman like Marisol. This moment demonstrated three things about the construct of “community” among most of the Latina organizers: first, that to be included in the embodied community one need not look like most of the community’s “bodies.” That is, one did not have to share a race and an ethnic culture; those who looked the same but did not fully occupy the same geographic and class locations, like Marisol, could be deemed inauthentic. To be sure, I was much more removed from the community in terms of class status and race/ethnicity. Yet I learned that my participation in the community’s activism, which in their eyes presupposed some level of concern and empathy, superseded a shared racial/ethnic, linguistic, and cultural status. That rendered me an honorary member of the embodied community, at least in the minds of most of the people for most of the time, though it was unbeknownst to me until late in the study. Again, it was only once I had learned to center the women’s perspectives, truly grapple with them, and understand them by way of day-to-day experiences and one-on-one interviews, that my presumptions, assumptions, and tentative conjecturing were thoroughly challenged. Comparative Clarity Another effective approach for capturing intersectionality is to compare two different groups and ascertain how their social locations might shape their world views. Indeed, comparative research designs provide invaluable insights in conjunction with other elements of analysis (Choo and Ferree 2010). To illustrate, Pardo’s (1998) astute comparison of working-class Latina residents of inner-city Boyle Heights, East LA and of middle-class Latinas in the suburb of Monterey Park allowed us to see how they similarly and differently marshalled their women’s networks to become fierce changemakers. Pardo’s exegesis of how both fought off unwanted blights on their neighborhood prompted me to think carefully and critically about class, namely, the relationship of class to the axis of race. Focusing my analytical lens on the potential effects of the two groups’ social locations, a comparative approach allowed me to see that both the Filipin@ and Mexican immigrant organizers stressed the embodied and emotive politics of their environmental justice work. Yet, while the Filipin@ ethnic organizers cited racial injustice as the primary cause of the environmental pollution and of their community’s sicknesses, as noted, the mostly Mexican immigrants cited class injustice; that is, the Asian ethnic activists deemed race to mediate class, while the Latin@ ethnics saw class as mediating race. More importantly, I was only able to arrive at this understanding by pinpointing the distinct class, transnational, and other political characteristics of the two. In response to the question of “What explained the difference?” I started with what was most apparent: the middle-class and legal profile of the Asian American activists, save for a few exceptions, and the largely working-class and unauthorized status of the Latin@ organizers. While living in low-income undocumented neighborhoods was something most of the Filipin@ and other Asian American activists did not have to endure, they still could have blamed the wealthy (more so than “Whitey”) for the environmental contamination or seen both on an equal plane. In relation to Whiteness, however, the activists led with “our Filipino community,” “we minorities,” and “we people of color” before weaving class issues in. The

Environmental activism and immigrant women of color  411 comparison then led me to the paradox that, despite the Asian and Latin@ ethnics’ obvious differences (including their political ideologies), they also shared notable similarities: both hail from countries with a history of colonial and (neo)imperial subjugation (involving Spain and the US for both). Indeed, Filipinx Americans at times consider themselves the “Latinos of Asia,” that is, being Latino and Asian American at once (Ocampo 2016). Furthermore, both groups are racialized as “forever foreigners” with Latinos specifically maligned as “illegals,” and Filipinx ethnics suffering historical riots (for being economic and sexual threats to White men) and today’s Covid-19 racism for being deemed “not-Americans.” In this way, both groups of women are part of what Pardo (2017, 647) would call a “decolonizing feminism” within “decolonial imaginaries.” She writes of decolonizing feminism as “rethinking conceptual frameworks and political agendas and redefining and widening the analytical terrain to include other bases of oppression, including race, ethnicity, and imperialism” (cf. Johnson-Odim 1991; Spelman 1988). At the same time, the difference between the two groups of immigrant women of color under colonial regimes made sense. Although People’s CORE (or PCORE) avoided officially naming itself “a Filipinx group” so as not to appear as if other racial/ethnic groups, or their issues, would be excluded, it was founded by an anti-US and anti-Marcos dissident and predominantly staffed by Filipinx Americans and had a much more explicit ethnic focus. In contrast, the Latin@-dominant Long Beach Alliance for Children with Asthma (LBACA), Community Partner’s Council (CPC), and Coalition for a Safe Environment (CFASE) were less willing than PCORE to concede a racial/ethnic membership or focus. To be sure, these latter groups understood most of the residents, staff, and community members in these movements were Mexican (or other Latin@) ethnics and that the Spanish language and Mexican food anchored every meeting and event. Still, these activists chose to keep the floodlight on “low-income people” rather than “Latinos” or “people of color,” in part to be as politically expansive as possible. Another reason for the emphasis on class had to do with transnationality, for the main oppression that the activists suffered in Mexico was poverty. That is, the Mexican activists’ transnational positioning was as “poor people,” not as racial/ethnic minorities. While undocumented organizer Marta, for instance, was fully cognizant of and forthcoming about anti-Latin@ racism in the US context, she used the example of Mexico’s politicians to prove that race was not why American politicians dismissed them. When I queried about the demographic background of most of the US officials to whom she testified at public comments, Marta initially replied, “The majority are men. Americanos [Anglos].” Among other follow-ups, upon asking whether she thought that the officials’ status as “Americanos” had an impact on why they were not empathizing with them and fighting contamination, she remarked, It is not because they are just American [Anglo] men. Over there in Mexico we are Mexican and [it’s] the same thing when there is politics. They don’t pay attention to us … To put it simply, they are people who are not in a lower class like us. They separate themselves from us and they don’t know the people.

She believed that the gap between rich and poor ultimately explained why political elites abused their power rather than served their impoverished constituents – and the similarity between Mexico and the US was proof enough. While the Mexican immigrant activists did not have strong political histories and transnational political connections to their sending state (albeit personal/financial ties were strong),

412  Research handbook on intersectionality the Asian ethnics had strong transnational political histories in, and ties to, the Philippines. This is precisely what translated into the Filipin@s’ strong racial consciousness about environmental injustice in their local Carson community. In other words, the Asian ethnics’ emphasis on race owed in part to ongoing US (neo)colonial power in the Philippines, their pre-US activism, and/or their transnational ties to progressive political movements there. Membership in such a politically-anchored transnational social field highlighted White US (masculine) power over the sending country on a regular basis and irrespective of the issue at hand. For instance, PCORE did not just focus on Filipinx American issues, but had a signature program to promote literacy among the indigenous Moro of Mindanao on the archipelago. This program stemmed in part from the contrast between the Philippines and the soulless White US (neo)colonizer that anchored PCORE’s politics. It seemed that an activist’s own political relationship to Philippine activist networks concretized the cause of the problems in ethnoracial terms; it was their “of color-ness” that rendered them and their cities – Carson, California and Manila, Philippines – disposable.

INTERSECTIONALITY AS RELATIONAL PROCESS Intersectionality points us to a process-centered (Choo and Ferree 2010) and relational analysis (Kang 2010; Misra, Curington, and Green 2021). In my study, this required understanding how Whites’ environmental privilege is a direct result of the immigrants of color’s environmental suffering. The activists made this clear when they conveyed who their political adversary was (the “they/them”) and who, as I have noted, were the “we/us” whom they considered community. Spotlighting not just the bodily injustices but the emotional suffering from environmental pollution, the Asian and Latina immigrants alike saw these as a form of neglect and assault. In other words, on the other side was “the (White) healthy wealthy,” or more accurately, a neoliberal system built on privileging White and higher-income bodies and emotional lives at the expense of those of people of color and the lower income. In this way, the activists saw themselves as an embodied community, yet one that did not just carry the hazards and sickness, but the beauty, of their collective in their bodies. To elaborate on an earlier point, the Latina immigrants demonstrated that the boundary that marked who was in the embodied community, and who was out of it, pivoted on an identity politics of class and of class-based morality. CPC and LBACA activist Marta articulated these morality-framed class boundaries while narrating the political gulf between her community and the “healthy wealthy,” between mothers like her who cared about sick children and the (mostly male) elites who did not care about imperiling them. Marta: On one occasion when I went to talk [testify] I told [the officials] that you do not understand us because you live very far away from us in the mountains [LA or OC (Orange County) foothills]. You do not have contamination. If you live in this neighborhood where I live, where there is contamination and your children get sick, you will understand me. Nadia: What did they say [in response]? Marta: They stood quiet. They didn’t say anything. They just look at each other. Like my son said, “He [that official] got mad.” It’s true. They don’t pay attention. That is the truth: when people have money they leave. But they have a beautiful mansion, and they have a good neighbor. It doesn’t interest them.

Environmental activism and immigrant women of color  413 Marta specifies two criteria for membership in her community: first, “we” are the poor and second, “we” are those who must breathe toxic air and care for sick neighbors and children, as a result. With respect to moral boundary-drawing, she is explicit that she separates herself from the wealthy, who are too busy living in clean air communities or are too busy acting as callous politicians to feel empathy and to help. Marta was also pinpointing an unequal affective relationship in which the dominant gets mad (“Stop complaining about the air”) while the subordinate must be sad (and mad). Particularly striking about Marta’s narrative is how she excludes the officials for their alleged use of wealth to leave or avoid hyper-hazardous neighborhoods where she and her children struggled to breathe each day, something a mother like her could not just lose “interest” in or ignore. In another example, the Latina and Asian immigrants’ “us versus them” boundaries became most evident when the women would passionately testify about their kids’ myriad ailments and neighbors’ cancers and the “(White) healthy wealthy” would retort with, “Well, why don’t you just move?” Both groups of women made clear that the officials’ question could only come from the standpoint of environmental privilege (Park and Pellow 2011), one that flowed directly from the women’s environmental disadvantage. Hence, one of the proudest badges of honor they wore as members of their embodied community was their refusal to move to slightly cleaner neighborhoods, even as the air killed them and their children slowly each day. To do so was to betray and abandon their community – and by extension, their only network – and to continue to allow the (White) healthy wealthy to do nothing about environmental racism and classism and to reify the power and privilege spawned by both. It was the women’s commitment to the politics of emotional support networks – that is, to citizenship for the embodied community – that drew most on women of color’s view of family and community as a bastion of resistance and thus resonated with a feminist of color ideology (see Pardo 2017). In other words, owing to the social responsibilities of most to care for children and others, the largely undocumented women deemed not moving the hallmark of true, moral citizenship, much more vital than voting, running for office, and the like. Since the state waged violence against and virtually abandoned their communities, not just by allowing disproportionate pollution but by providing so little in the way of legalization and social services, the women affirmed that providing each other emotional, resource, and informational support was the key form of political resistance. So effective was this method of stepping into the gap and of recruiting and keeping residents in the clean air movement, that male leaders of organizations largely followed the women’s lead. In other words, the men had to learn how to see and act through a feminist of color approach to organizing. In brief, while poverty, infirmity, and empathy were clear in the Mexican Latinas’ view of who belonged in their embodied community, the clear markers of nonbelonging were wealth, better health, and most importantly, the indifference that flowed from both. In drawing political and moral boundaries thus, the activist women revealed a view of poverty as an engineered system imposed on them, one that made them perpetually exploited, low-income, sick, and emotionally drained (in addition to being surveilled for deportation). Indeed, women (and especially women of color, Global Southern women) are those who first notice and are most intensely hurt by poverty (Voyles 2015). By extension, the US state could choose to legalize their populace and provide more economic and healthcare options, but class elites chose to keep their neighborhoods hazardous and deadly, in the women’s eyes. Furthermore, it was precisely the manufacturing of poverty (and, to the Asian ethnic activists, the manufacturing

414  Research handbook on intersectionality of racism) that propped up the middle- and upper-class status of the (White) politicians and corporate officials. Intersectionality as Macro Meets Meso/Micro Intersectional approaches also pay strong attention to the macro-level context and how it interrelates with group members’ intersectional identities. In my study, these dynamics were the most apparent in corporate decisions and practices to put profit over people and in the state’s weak regulation of oil refineries and diesel pollution. Yet, to the immigrants, they could not just sit down while their communities became infirm under this regime of “letting die” (Giroux 2006) a perspective that profoundly shaped their politics and movement resistance. As intersectionality approaches make clear, it is not possible to examine environmental racism and classism without interrelating the macro-level system. We cannot grasp what top-down power and bottom-up resistance movements are doing without examining the two relationally. An intersectional lens on relationality, however, affords us the ability to see how systems interlock and overlap as well as how the largely White male elites and immigrant women of color experience, and respond to, race, class, and gender per this system. In my study, the macro-level system – which includes ideology and discourse – was the neoliberal racial state (and racial capitalism). Neoliberalism solidified in the 1980s under the Reagan/Reaganomics era essentially runs on a market-based fundamentalism, weak or non-existent regulation of corporations and Wall Street, the withering of the social welfare state and safety net, the supplanting of democracy and the public good for individual “rights”/“choice” and the politics of respectability (associated with personal freedom, e.g., consumerism), token solutions and coopting of the margins’ resistance, among others (Giroux 2006; Hong 2015; Pulido 2017). Omi and Winant (2014; also see Duggan 2003) add that neoliberalism in the US (and elsewhere) has a racial core. They specify that the US discourse of “color-blind” racism has been used since the post-World War II context to justify the shrinking of government and the abandonment of poor White and non-White people, whom it then pits against each other (Omi and Winant 2014). As Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, makes plain, “race” is the “major reason America treats its poor more harshly than any other advanced country” (2005, A27 cf. Giroux 2006). For instance, racism is usually the main determinant of who lives in the most polluted areas and who is the sickest and who most often dies prematurely (Gilmore 2007; Sims 2010; Williams 2008). Applied to environmental (in)justice, Pulido (2017, 18) writes that neoliberalism is primarily responsible for the state’s cozy partnership with industry (Harrison 2015; Heynen et al. 2007; Kohl 2014; Liévanos 2012; London et al. 2013). As Daniel Faber (2008) notes, such a “pollution industrial complex” manifests in EPA appointments, priorities, and “regulations” that are pro-market and pro-industry, in White Americans’ prevalence on zoning boards and planning commissions (Bullard et al, 2011, 18–19), and in the vacating of laws such as the Toxic Substances and Control Act (Silbergeld and Mandrioli 2015). Even former President Bill Clinton’s unprecedented Executive Order on Environmental Justice, the product of movement pressure, has replaced substantive regulatory power with superficial and voluntary policies (Bullard et al. 2011, 40). Holifield (2004) has dubbed it “classic roll-out neoliberalism.” As a result, contaminating facilities and transportation projects continue to railroad through working-class neighborhoods and those of color (Pellow and Brulle 2007). Despite the hazards and health consequences, immigrants, and people of color – not the neoliberal system – are

Environmental activism and immigrant women of color  415 saddled with the burden of proof. “Is there really that much pollution? Are you really that sick?” query disbelieving state and corporate officials. For instance, Samoan American teacher Cindy invoked many of the tenets of neoliberalism (without using this nomenclature) when explaining why she thought regulatory agencies and elected officials were so inactive. Addressing “Shine,” the truck-washing company next to her elementary school in highly polluted Carson – one whose washing of all the chemically laden Mack trucks that brought goods from the port to US stores had made them sick for years – Cindy condemned the government’s market imperative at the expense of their lives; she also condemned the smoke and mirrors “show” of the public meetings. Cindy: I can almost guarantee that for the city of Carson, they don’t say anything against Shell or against BP… Nadia: What about Shine [truck washing company]? They’re a small little business. Cindy: Yeah, and then, well, they actually want Shine to move because they’re going to redevelop that, build homes there … They [the city/mayor] don’t understand it. The mayor comes to our meetings and just talks, he stands with us, but he doesn’t do anything. I said, “Well, can you revoke the permit of Shine?” [Mayor:] “Well now, you know, we can’t do that.” [Cindy:] “Then you can’t help us! Don’t come to our meetings! … Don’t waste our time!” I’m not into conspiracy theories, but I just really don’t think AQMD [the Air Quality Management District] is doing as much as it can. “So how can you allow all of this to happen?” … these regulatory agencies that are supposed to be regulating? … They come and hold these little meetings to just appease us, give us these [air] samples, and then don’t do anything … That’s why I don’t need to get as upset anymore because I don’t see a future for us in these meetings. It’s nothing! … So, we’re going to have to work on our own …

In addition to neoliberalism telling these lower-middle-class Asian American and working-class, undocumented Latina women, “You’re on your own,” it offered false choices. For instance, Mexican American youth activist Bella censured corporations’ strategies to stifle opposition from schools: “They say, ‘Okay, we’ll give you money and [you’ll] … fit our [plant] close to your school.’ [School says]: ‘Okay, we need the money now, the governor is coming down on us, okay, we need the money.’ Like I mention, they can control us.” Given the threat of losing oil industry and other funding, schools themselves often ousted environmental justice activists from their halls. Youth organizer Tomas gave the example of when he and other Communities for a Better Environment members were expelled from one of these schools. Tomas: CBE was kicked out of Bowdoin High School. Nadia: Why? Tomas: Because Bowdoin High School gets money from industries. Nadia: Ohhh. Tomas: [Also the] Trucking industries. Nadia: So that’s what kept everyone quiet? Tomas: Exactly, to hush them. And basically, what happened was that everyone [at Bowdoin] was nervous because everyone was like, “Who are you blaming?”

One of the most ironic and tragic issues had to do with neoliberalism’s lesser-of-evils choices imposed on disadvantaged communities. Molly, a White woman, and former Long Beach Alliance for Children with Asthma (LBACA) project manager, described to me a tortured decision that the immigrant mothers had to make when LBACA, per standard practice, decided to protest a new school being built right next to the I-710, the most cancerous freeway in the United States. Thinking it a no-brainer that, like always, this is precisely what the

416  Research handbook on intersectionality activist mothers wanted, Molly and the LBACA staff were shocked to find that the mothers in fact supported the siting, as they were in dire need of a school within walking distance, even if it made their children sicker. As low-income and undocumented people often do not have cars and driver’s licenses, the school’s convenient location would prove to be the lesser of two evils. While LBACA was initially thrown by the mothers’ choice, they quickly understood. What other choice did the Latina mothers have? An Asian American teacher named Lana also invoked this conundrum when she referred to her activism against schools being built so close to freeways:  The one thing that we thought that we could get possibly passed … was a rule about [not] building new schools within 1,000 feet of the freeways. And they had to think of that with all of the pollution from the freeways and from like BP [refinery], for example. But [the ordinance is] for new schools, and so if you take that to the old schools, you’d lose all the old schools … You don’t want to get rid of all the schools that are by the freeways, because this is an issue of accessibility.

Neoliberal mistreatment also played out in the state’s dismissal of the knowledge professed by low-income immigrants of color. Activists like undocumented Mexican immigrant Maria shared that the government agencies were disbelieving of even physicians who supported the women. Maria shared, One day I saw that they asked a doctor about the pollution of the air and the doctor said that it also contributes to obesity; and they just said that that was unbelievable to them, like “What does being obese have to do with the air?” And they were just being narrow-minded because, first of all, when a kid is obese, they need to exercise, and they can’t exercise when the air is polluted; and I mean it was very clear that it did relate, but they were like, “What does that have to do with the polluted air?” He said that he wanted statistics and numbers to prove that the pollution of the air contributes to obesity. 

In part through the dismissal of community knowledge or “street science” (Corburn 2005; see also Foucault 1998), macro-level neoliberalism shaped both the physical suffering as well as the social movement strategies of the Asian and Latina ethnic organizers; importantly, it also shaped their attentiveness to emotional injustices waged by the (White) healthy wealthy against their immigrant communities of color. As an example, the Asian American activist teachers found the disproportionate pollution to be the product of racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and male indifference, but they also bemoaned its emotional tyranny. Upon my asking whether it was PCORE’s message or methods that reeled these teachers into another political fight for which they had no time, energy, or resources, Nina corrected me. She immediately invoked the emotional support of a Filipina American named Cara, PCORE’s Environmental Justice leader, when I queried her in the following way: Nadia: … you said you guys were tired, you didn’t have, I guess, any … formal organizational thing going on, but was there anything else, was there anything about PCORE’s message, like their ideas, or …? Nina: Well, I liked [that] when they, when Cara first came, she was sad for us too – they really sympathized with us. They just, they didn’t even know us. But you could see that Cara was really moved by the stories we told, the things going on, how we feel, about the kids. That was quite impressive to me, that they didn’t know us or anything, and [that] they just found out and they really empathized with what we were going through. And we felt, the group of us teachers felt, like, “Wow, we’ve finally got someone fighting for us” …

Environmental activism and immigrant women of color  417 Unlike what I had presumed, it was the deep empathy of a stranger that got the teachers into the clean air fight in addition to their taxing fights against the school and the medical establishment. It was how well Cara listened and how moved she was by their suffering. This was remarkable to the teachers precisely because they were so used to the apathy, callousness, and faux concern of the state and corporate officials, which the activist women considered a form of emotional power and domination. One of the other common tactics of the state and corporate officials was to draw on anti-women of color stereotypes to deem the women’s “street science” research unscholarly and to derogate their emotional testimonies, which often tearfully or angrily pled for concern for their ailing children, as “hysterical” (see Kirk 1997). Not only did the women’s emotions of anger, sadness, frustration, and a combination thereof emerge in their interactions with the officials, they saw these as a form of resisting nativist gendered racism and classism with their own emotional power. *** To conclude, a social justice-minded research design – specifically, an intersectional feminist methodology – enabled me to ascertain the multi-layered nature of a Los Angeles environmental justice movement. It honed my perspective to grasp how collective standpoints fostered social identities that the women creatively and strategically used to define their own politics and fight the power (those that often had me questioning my researcher assumptions). The immigrant women-led movement for clean air against the goods movement apparatus, oil/fossil fuels, and the “non-regulating” regulatory agencies allowed me to ascertain the ever-present role of context, whether it is neoliberal, global/transnational/diasporic, colonial and decolonial, or personal and communal. In doing so, the intersectional complexity of the people and situations involved were thrown into relief, in part through the utility of a comparative lens to pinpoint relational processes (e.g., the differences between the affective strategies of officials and those of the immigrant women). Indeed, we cannot really begin to answer the questions that the immigrant activists were asking and debating – for instance, whether race or class was more central, how racism and classism are embodied such that bodies and emotional lives are tragically unequal, of who and who not to consider part of their community given this unjust context – without truly listening to and seeing how they were affected and effecting back by way of their social location and standpoint. For instance, we saw how politics could also differ between the Mexican and Filipina ethnic activists, not just because they largely worked discretely from each other, but per their social class position – working- or middle-class – and legal status – citizen, unauthorized, or some tenuous position in between.2 Furthermore, these women were always located within global-local and transnational contexts of power, and as such, unless one is ethnographically engaged with the women, the power of each context on their efforts to refuse death cannot be fully understood either.

NOTES 1. In my book Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA (2021). I also explore the women’s gendered struggle with the men in their households and communities. 2. Of course, there are other related and influential factors, such as length of tenures in the US, degree of engagement with mainstream (White) America and its dominant institutions, the capacity to speak English, and the like. See the above-noted book for a longer treatise on these issues.

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REFERENCES Brown, Phil, and Faith I.T. Ferguson. 1995. “Making a Big Stink: Women’s Work, Women’s Relationships, and Toxic Waste Activism,” Gender and Society 9 (2): 145–72. Bullard, Robert D., Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres. 2011. Environmental Health and Racial Equity in the United States: Building Environmentally Just, Sustainable, and Livable Communities. American Public Health Association Press. Burton, Linda M., Diane Purvin, and Raymond Garrett-Peters. 2009. “Longitudinal Ethnography: Uncovering Domestic Abuse in Low-Income Women’s Lives.” In Female Students and Cultures of Violence in Cities, edited by Julia Hall, 37–88. New York: Routledge. Choo, Hae Yeon, and Myra Marx Ferree. 2010. “Practicing Intersectionality in Sociological Research: A Critical Analysis of Inclusions, Interactions, and Institutions in the Study of Inequalities,” Sociological Theory 28 (2): 129–49. Coll, Kathleen M. 2010. Remaking Citizenship, Latina Immigrants and New American Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Corburn, Jason. 2005. Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. 1993. “Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live Crew.” In Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment, edited by Mari J. Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence III, Ricard Delgado, and Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, 111–32. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Duggan, Lisa. 2003. The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and That Attack on Democracy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Espiritu, Yen L. 2003. Home Bound: Filipino American Lives across Cultures, Communities, and Countries. Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA, London: University of California Press. Faber, Daniel. 2008. Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice: The Polluter-Industrial Complex in the Age of Globalization. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Foucault, Michel. 1998. The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality Volume 1 (1976) (trans. R Hurley). New York: Vintage. Gilmore, Ruth W. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA, London: University of California Press. Giroux, Henry A. 2006. “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability,” College Literature 33 (3): 171–96. Harrison, Jill L. 2015. “Coopted Environmental Justice? Activists’ Roles in Shaping EJ Policy Implementation,” Environmental Sociology 1 (4): 241–55. Hay, Amy M. 2009. “Recipe for Disaster: Motherhood and Citizenship at Love Canal,” Journal of Women’s History 21 (1): 111–34.  Heynen, Nik, James McCarthy, Scott Prudham, and Paul Robbins. 2007. “Neoliberal Environments: False Promises and Unnatural Consequences,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 16 (1): 209–13. Holifield, Ryan. 2004. “Neoliberalism and Environmental Justice in the United States Environmental Protection Agency: Translating Policy into Managerial Practice in Hazardous Waste Remediation,” Geoforum 35 (3): 285–97. Hong, Grace K. 2015. Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Johnson-Odim, Cheryl. 1991. “Common Themes, Different Contexts: Third World Women and Feminism.” In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, edited by Chandra T. Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, 314– 27. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kang, Miliann. 2010. The Managed Hand: Race, Gender and the Body in Beauty Service Work. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kim, Nadia Y. 2021. Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Kim, Nadia Y., and Pawan Dhingra. In press. “Introduction: How We Got Here, Where We’d Like to Go Now.” In Disciplinary Futures: Sociology in Conversation with American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies, edited by Nadia Y. Kim and Pawan Dhingra. New York: New York University Press.

Environmental activism and immigrant women of color  419 Kirk, Gwyn. 1997. “Ecofeminism and Environmental Justice: Bridges across Gender, Race, and Class,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 18 (2): 2–20. Kohl, Tristan. 2014. “Do We Really Know That Trade Agreements Increase Trade?” Review World Economics 150 (3): 443–69. Krauss, Celene. 1993. “Women and Toxic Waste Protests: Race, Class and Gender as Resources of Resistance,” Qualitative Sociology 16 (3): 247–62. Krugman, Paul. 2005, September 19. “Tragedy in Black and White,” New York Times. https:// www .nytimes .com/ 2005/ 09/ 19/ opinion/ tragedy -in -black -and-.html. Liévanos, Raoul S. 2012. “Certainty, Fairness, and Balance: State Resonance and Environmental Justice Policy Implementation,” Sociological Forum 2 (2): 481–503. London, Jonathan, Alex Karner, Julie Sze, Dana Rowan, Gerardo Gambirazzio, and Deb Niemeier. 2013. “Racing Climate Change: Collaboration and Conflict in California’s Global Climate Change Policy Arena,” Global Climate Change 23 (4): 791–9. Merton, Robert K. 1972. “Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge.” In Varieties of Political Expression in Sociology, edited by Robert K. Merton, 9–47. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mishler, Elliot. 1979. “Meaning in Context: Is There Any Other Kind?”Harvard Educational Review 49 (1): 1–19. Misra, Joya, Celeste V. Curington, and Venus M. Green. 2021. “Methods of Intersectional Research,” Sociological Spectrum 41 (1): 9–28. Moraga, Cherríe L., and Gloria E. Anzaldua. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table. Woman of Color Press. Ocampo, Anthony C. 2016. The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 2014. Racial Formation in the United States (3rd edn). New York: Routledge. Pardo, Mary. 1998. Mexican American Women Activists: Identity and Resistance in Two Los Angeles Communities. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Pardo, M.S. (1998). Mexican American Women Activists: Identity and Resistance in Two Los Angeles Communities. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Pardo, Mary. 2017. “Latinas in US Social Movements.” In The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Women's Social Movement Activism, edited by Holly J. McCammon, Verta Taylor, Jo Reger, and Rachel L. Einwohner, 643–63. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Park, Lisa S.H., and David Pellow. 2011. The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden. New York: New York University Press. Pellow, David N., and Robert J. Brulle A. (eds.). 2007. Power, Justice, and the Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pellow, David N., and Lisa S.H. Park. 2002. The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy. New York: New York University Press. Pulido, Laura. 2017. “The Personal and the Political: Evolving Racial Formations and the Environmental Justice Movement.” In The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice, edited by Ryan Holifield, Jayajit Chakraborty, and Gordon Walker, 15–24. London, New York: Routledge Handbooks. Shah, Bindi V. 2011. Laotian Daughters: Working toward Community, Belonging, and Environmental Justice. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Silbergeld, Eellen K., and Daniele Mandrioli. 2015. “Evidence from Toxicology: The Most Essential Science for Prevention,” Environmental Health Perspectives 124 (1): 6–11. Sims, Colette M. 2010. “Ethnic Notions and Healthy Paranoias: Understanding of the Context of Experience and Interpretations of Healthcare Encounters among Older Black Women,” Ethnicity and Health 15 (5): 495–514. Spelman, Elizabeth. 1988. Inessential Women: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Taylor, Verta, and Nancy E. Whittier. 1992. “Collective Identity in Social Movement Communities.” In Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, edited by Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg, 104–29. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

420  Research handbook on intersectionality Teske, Robin, and Mary Tetreault. 2000. “Framing the Issues.” In Conscious Acts and the Politics of Social Change, edited by Robin L. Teske and Mary Ann Tetreault, 104–29. Columbia, OH: University of South Carolina Press. Võ, Linda T. 2000. “Performing Ethnography in Asian American Communities: Beyond the Insider-Versus-Outsider Perspective.” In Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America, edited by Martin F. Manalansan IV, 17–37. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Voyles, Traci B. 2015. Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Williams, David R. 2008. “Racial/Ethnic Variations in Women’s Health: The Social Embeddedness of Health,” American Journal of Public Health 98: 38–47.

25. Children’s rights and social change Brian Gran and Colette Ngana

INTRODUCTION Intersectionality provides a critical lens through which we can comprehend multiple and intersecting barriers to producing meaningful social change for children. Children experience intersecting oppressions like adults but are more vulnerable as young people. Of all social groups, children stand to benefit the most from human rights. Crenshaw’s (1989) early work on intersectionality describes the experience of being both Black and a woman as a “double-discrimination,” which accounts for the systemic marginalization associated with both race and gender. Intersectionality theory has since expanded beyond race and gender to include class, ability, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, and other social identities. Intersectionality also is useful in understanding access to and enjoyment of our human rights as they relate to social identities. Social structures that intertwine resources like housing, health care, and education create a system in which the realization of one right is inherently connected to the realization of another. This is important because rights contribute to the realization of a person’s developmental, physical, psychological, and spiritual needs. The interconnectedness of these rights makes them complex, but necessary to understanding full human dignity. Central to intersectionality is power. Collins and Bilge (2016) detail four domains of power: interpersonal, disciplinary, cultural, and structural. Interpersonal power, or who is advantaged over others in social situations, is used to discuss the power differential between parent (or similar figure) and child. Disciplinary power, how rules are implemented and to whom they apply, is used to understand how children’s rights are enforced, including how minoritized children are uniquely vulnerable to violations of their human rights and their experiences overlooked. In cultural power lies the accepted rationale behind phenomena like inequity and fairness. In this chapter, we use these domains to understand how children advocate for social change and exercise their limited power. We examine young people’s freedom from gun violence in the United States and children’s efforts to advocate for their rights to prevent and reduce climate change to show how children use cultural power (Collins and Bilge 2016) in the form of social movements. Human rights systems are expected to bring significant change, yet a close examination of children’s rights reveals that, despite their near-universal qualities, impacts of international frameworks have been limited. Employing an intersectional approach suggests that children’s rights may exacerbate inequalities and undermine dignity belonging to young people. Adoptions of international treaties, such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, have raised the prominence of children’s rights. Yet, at the end of the day, changes to children’s lives do not match the treaties and efforts to implement those treaties. Intersectionality is often critiqued for its “identity politics,” but identities are attached to shared oppression(s) that bring people together to form social movements. Under the common 421

422  Research handbook on intersectionality identity of children, young people are coming together across nationalities, ethnicities, races, genders, and social classes to combat threats to their future. They are embracing intersectionality as the way forward. Essentially, intersectionality teaches us that nuance and specificity are necessary for change. Perhaps this international framework of children’s rights requires evolution with specificity to maintain momentum, possibly even legitimacy. Definitions of intersectionality vary, but Collins (2015) encourages this flexibility. In essence, a definition of intersectionality is one that arises “from more iterative, grassroots processes that enable intellectual and political consensus to emerge through everyday practices” (3). One such everyday practice is academic research. Citing Etherington and Baker (2018) and Ghavami, Katsiaficas and Rogers (2016), Nadan and Korbin (2018, 11) assert that researchers can employ intersectionality to draw attention to impacts of “power, oppression, and identity” of children. Intersectionality has posed methodological challenges for researchers as they attempt to capture the mutually constructive, not additive, nature of identity and experience (Nash 2008). We hope to contribute to understandings of intersectionality as they pertain to children and their human rights. Intersectional analyses of children’s rights suggest these frameworks have the potential to exacerbate inequities. What prevents rights frameworks from producing the meaningful change needed to realize equality? What about rights frameworks denotes that young people are not full members of their societies? This chapter employs an intersectional approach to answering these questions for children. It examines intersectional methodologies and their advantages to reaching intersectional objectives, including when and how to use children’s rights to produce social change. This chapter investigates two consequences of this problem: intersectional analyses of gun violence against young people in the United States and impacts of global climate change on young people. We then examine whether children’s rights are means of overcoming these and other social problems.

CHILDREN’S RIGHTS An international framework both establishes and communicates norms and expectations around human rights (Gran 2021). This framework consists not only of treaties articulating children’s rights, including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of Children (ACRWC), but governing bodies charged with monitoring implementation of those rights, along with procedural rules. This framework not only declares rights belonging to young people, but how national governments should go about ensuring young people can exercise their rights. This framework of children’s rights is in addition to other human rights frameworks. Why do these frameworks exist? The horrors of the Second World War prompted the creation of the United Nations (UN) and contemporary human rights frameworks. During the Second World War, Nazis denied citizenship to members of certain social groups, which enabled the Nazis to discriminate against these groups. Eliminating citizenship meant those individuals could not file “legitimate” claims in court, could not vote, could be denied opportunities to own businesses and to work, and should not be able to exercise free speech or practice their faith. Arguing that members of these social groups were non- or even less than citizens, the Nazis aimed to strip away dignity and humanity. By contending that members of these social groups were less than human, the Nazis believed they could conduct genocide.

Children’s rights and social change  423 The contemporary framework of human rights is designed to prevent these discriminations and their atrocious consequences. A key feature of human rights is that they belong to everyone, thereby ensuring everyone possesses dignity. A trio of treaties are considered foundational to human rights and are known as the international Bill of Human Rights, consisting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted in 1948, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), adopted in 1966, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), adopted in 1966. The UDHR is a declaration, meaning that national governments indicate their agreement with the UDHR’s principles. The Preamble of the UDHR states that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world …” The UDHR goes on to say that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights …” (Article 1). UDHR’s Article 2 emphasizes that human rights are available to everyone. All people are entitled to rights, including children. When a national government ratifies a covenant or convention, they promise to incorporate the respective treaty into their national legal system. The ICCPR articulates civil and political rights, such as a right to self-determination, equality, and voting, as well as freedoms from torture, servitude, and freedoms to travel and liberty. The ICESCR states economic, social, and cultural rights, including rights to education, health, work, and social security. The ICCPR and the ICESCR apply to everyone, including children. Why, then, do we need children’s rights? The reality is that children are different. The UN contends that children possess these rights because their interests and welfare are distinct from non-children. They assert that these rights are both necessary and a component of a child’s dignity, but does the children’s rights framework ironically foster inequities? As part of the international framework, children’s rights are articulated in multiple international treaties. Chief among these treaties is the UNCRC. Adopted in 1989, the UNCRC is the most widely ratified of all UN human rights treaties. Only one UN member party, the United States, has yet to ratify the Convention. Even then, the United States government has not remained on the UNCRC sidelines. The US government played a significant role in drafting the UNCRC and has signed the treaty, the step before ratification. The US government has ratified two optional protocols to the UNCRC, the Optional Protocol on Sale of Children and the Optional Protocol on Children in Armed Conflict. While framed as additions to the UNCRC, these optional protocols are distinct treaties. National governments must ratify these optional protocols and, as is the case for the UNCRC, can sometimes ratify optional protocols without ratifying the original treaty. A third optional protocol to the UNCRC, the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on a communications procedure, is relatively new and only a fraction of UN member parties has ratified. Below we discuss an innovative strategy young people have taken to employ this optional protocol to try to produce significant social change. The UN Committee of the Rights of the Child is charged with monitoring implementation of the UNCRC by national governments. The UN Committee consists of 18 independent experts who hold annual sessions where national government representatives file reports about the implementation work. Member parties are expected to file reports two years following ratification, then every five years. The Committee also takes testimony of government and nonprofit sector representatives that monitor and advocate for children’s rights. Most ratifying governments fail to follow this timeline. What can the UN Committee do to negligent member parties to ensure they adhere to the timeline? Nothing. What can young people do if their

424  Research handbook on intersectionality governments fail to comply with UN procedures, norms, and expectations? They can employ the new optional protocol and participate in social movements. One challenge to this international framework of children’s rights is decoupling. Decoupling is when a national government has ratified a human rights treaty, but in practice, does not implement the treaty domestically. When decoupling occurs, an individual attempting to exercise their rights may conclude that the international framework does not work, and they cannot employ it to exercise their human rights. Through this optional protocol, an individual can directly file a complaint with the UN Committee. For an individual to use this procedure, however, their national government must have ratified the optional protocol. As of June 1, 2021, only 46 national governments have ratified this optional protocol. Even if a national government ratifies, leaders of the national government must be willing to respond to the individual’s complaint. Children’s rights, like human rights, are supposed to be universal, inalienable, indivisible, interdependent, and interrelated. An irony of this framework of children’s rights is that instead of ensuring that young people enjoy human rights available to all, it treats children as different. Children’s rights seem contingent on this separate framework. One benefit of delineating children’s rights as distinct from other human rights is that it sets up a system through which extra attention and resources must be devoted to young people. This framework may succeed in ensuring that special protections and other measures are instituted that advance interests and well-being of young people. Another viewpoint is that this framework may designate children as less than human. Intersectionality, however, reveals whether children’s rights truly possess universal and inalienable qualities. A crucial aspect of children’s rights is that, in comparison to broader human rights, they are designed to depend on adults enforcing those rights. This creates an interpersonal power dynamic between children and their guardians. An international framework of children’s rights may be based on Eurocentric standards that are not universally supported. Young people do not possess political rights, such as voting and forming political parties, that are associated with these Eurocentric standards. Instead, children rely on cultural power shifts that alter phenomena like inequity and fairness. Intersectional, cultural shifts around equity are particularly difficult in countries like the United States where neoliberal attitudes around individual responsibility are widely accepted. Social movements advocating for children’s interests and well-being recognize these differences and call on adults to adapt to and accommodate them. These social movements have intellectual, historical foundations in Black feminist theory and movements.1 Intersectionality remains crucial in human rights movements, including reproductive justice. SisterSong (n.d.), a Southern-based organization in the United States, defines reproductive justice as “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” Ross and Solinger (2017, 9) specify that reproductive justice is “a political movement that splices reproductive rights with social justice to achieve reproductive justice”  (emphasis in original). Reproductive justice understands intersectionality in the family context and families as complex units impacting the social development of children. It also functions as a guide to putting human rights and intersectionality into praxis to serve young people and their families. Reproductive justice highlights a means to bodily control and health for everyone, especially young people. Achieving justice necessitates access to a variety of material resources, some of which are required for parenting children in safe and healthy environments. Reproductive justice is

Children’s rights and social change  425 effective in connecting not only human rights to intersectionality, but explicitly relating the human rights of guardians to those of the children for whom they care. In essence, this interpersonal power in which children’s rights are intricately dependent upon others leaves children distinctly vulnerable to human rights denials and violations. This intergenerationality “suggests that the identities of children and others are produced through interactions with other age/generational groups and are in constant state of flux” (Hopkins and Pain 2007, 289). Intersectionality reminds us that human rights are relational: the exercise of human rights depends on social relationships. Intergenerational considerations take into account that the relationships between children and their caregivers change overtime. This change adds complexity to researching children’s rights as youth age, reaching milestones that potentially expand independence. Incorporation of shifting identities may be indicative of growth, change, and the steady centering of people who are at society’s margins – this is what intersectionality looks like. Intersectionality may not only identify problems for this international framework of children’s rights, but strategies to bolster the utility and legitimacy of human rights for children.

INTERSECTIONAL METHODOLOGIES When social scientists employ methodological approaches to examine intersectionality, the stakes are high, as Gemignani and Hernández-Albújar (2019) remind us, particularly when it comes to children’s rights. There are many ways to study children’s rights, but Gemignani and Hernández-Albújar (2019) urge researchers to reflect critically on disciplinary norms and practices that may influence our scholarship. Collins and Bilge (2016, 29) warn that “a tidy methodology for intersectional analysis” is difficult to establish. We must, specifically, “guard against hegemonic thought on the pretext of presenting human rights theory or policy” (Gemignani and Hernández-Albújar 2019, 142, citing Foucault 1982, 472). Part of this insight is not to “uncritically refuse local knowledges …” (2019, 142) that inform intersectional research of young people and their rights. As Black feminism evolves, so do understandings of intersectionality and its application, including intersectionality as an analytic lens and tool. Intersectionality as an analytic tool stresses how systemic power relations, couched in terms of individual identity (e.g., race, class, gender, age, sexuality, etc.) place people in distinctive, but complex social positions (Collins and Bilge 2016). Employing intersectional methodologies can fortify and inform public policy in a nuanced, holistic manner that accounts for the enmeshed nature of personal identity with overarching (possibly overriding) social structures. In particular, intersectional methodologies have the opportunity to highlight the effects of age, alongside other dimensions, on access to and the exercise of human rights. Research methods are typically placed into a quantitative-qualitative hierarchy, which implies that quantitative research is more rigorous and empirical than qualitative research. McCall (2005) objects to this hierarchy and asserts that methodological differences between disciplines is normal. Remaining in disciplinary and methodologic silos impedes innovative and intersectional research. Considering the erroneous interpretation of qualitative research as less rigorous, does the methodological approach – qualitative or quantitative – alter the potential for social change? Black feminist methodologies, including intersectionality, are traditionally centered on qualitative approaches. Adhering to quantitative superiority is a direct

426  Research handbook on intersectionality commentary on the effectiveness of Black feminism to make large-scale change. Policy makers, political leaders, and perception influencers can and do undermine the legitimacy of some analytical approaches and their results by failing to take some analyses seriously. This question intensifies when considering the fact that children frequently use their individual and collective stories to justify and fuel social change. But what would a full array of intersectional methodologies consist of? Virtually any social science methodology can be employed to study intersectionality and children’s rights. In practice, we observe qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods approaches. Qualitative methods have potential to “uncover the unobservable” (Gerson and Demaske 2021, 6) between social structures and the individual by inviting participants to share personal experiences. Quantitative research captures larger-scale patterns or count phenomena. A challenge for quantitative approaches is difficulty in creating models that adequately and accurately capture the interactive, as opposed to additive, natures of intersectional experiences. Franklin and Toft (2020, 8) urge us to “make research accessible, meaningful and impactful for [young people].” International research protections should reflect and honor children’s rights. Initiatives like the Ethical Research Involving Children (ERIC) project outline ethical research strategies that embrace children’s rights. Some scholars employ innovative steps to providing confidentiality around participation as well as assuring informed consent of participants. Kyritsi (2019) uses boxes into which young people can place papers indicating their desire to participate in a study, a decision they can change at any time. Some children may use silence as a means of refusal (Kyritsi 2019, citing Gallacher and Gallagher 2008). McCall (2005) states that the defining characteristic of intersectional research is “the complexity that arises when the subject of analysis expands to include multiple dimensions of social life and categories of analysis” (1772). We gain complexity in research when we understand social phenomena not as experienced along discrete variables, but as multiple variables held at once. Collins (1999) explains, “gender and race operate within science less as parallel dimensions in constructing scientific knowledge than as intersecting dimensions of social organization where knowledge and power are intimately linked” (265). McCall (2005) proposes three methodological approaches to capturing intersectional complexities: anticategorical, intracategorical, and intercategorical. Each of these complexities considers social categories and their relationships as producing measurable inequalities. Anticategorical complexity is based on a methodology that deconstructs or rejects traditional analytical categories. Likewise, Bailey, Steeves, Burkell, Shade, Ruparelia, and Regan (2019, 10) maintain that the issue with quantitative methods is not in their ability to address the interactive experience of socially constructed categories, it is in the subsequent analysis where these socially created categories are then imposed on groups where oppressions are studied. The categories in which we interpret data may not fit neatly with the lived experiences of participants. Bailey et al.’s concern particularly applies to intersectionality of young people. This point highlights the importance of a child’s right to participation, including participation in research and the human right to science (Gran, Waltz, and Renzhofer 2013). Intracategorical complexity questions the “boundary-making and boundary-defining process itself” (McCall 2005, 1773). This approach employs in-depth qualitative analysis of individual groups or cases. With case studies researchers use traditional social categories to initially identify previously understudied or overlooked groups, but “the researcher is equally interested in revealing – and indeed cannot avoid – the range of diversity and difference within the group” (1782). Lessons from intracategorical complexity tell us that children’s experi-

Children’s rights and social change  427 ences are related and similar but are not a monolith. Essentially, intracategorical complexity challenges the falsehood that single groups have uniform social experiences. It encourages the incorporation of multiple groups that constitute a larger category. It also challenges the desire of generalizability often necessitated by quantitative methods. McCall advocates for the intercategorical approach, which has a goal of understanding the essence of relationships among social groups and how they are shifting. This method is “systemically comparative” in that it analyses within and across social groups. Statistically, this translates to the use of interaction effects (multi-level, hierarchical, ecological, or contextual models) to adequately understand this complexity. McCall is clear that intercategorical analyses are not free of critical reflection. Data interpretation necessitates researchers consider whether general indicators of inequality, such as income and education levels, adequately represent new and shifting forms of inequality. This critical reflection is necessary in children’s research given the limited social capacity of young people and their connectedness to others for social stability. Contemporary research presents exciting quantitative methodological innovations useful to studying intersectionality and children’s rights. Scheim and Bauer (2019, 225) report that when it comes to population health research, “quantitative discrimination and health studies have tended to focus on a single axis of discrimination (e.g., racism, homophobia).” As a result, Scheim and Bauer established the Intersectional Discrimination Index (InDI). Employing an online survey of Canadian and US participants, they find evidence of construct validity and reliability for the InDI. Scheim and Bauer contend that their index can be employed to assess impacts of discrimination on health inequalities and discrimination in heterogeneous populations. Researchers widely use qualitative methods to study intersectionality. Qualitative methods may be especially useful to studying intersectionality of young people, a social group who are routinely subordinate, despite knowledge and expertise they possess around children’s rights and oppression. Bailey and colleagues (2019) note, however, that qualitative research suffers from important limitations. They contend that qualitative methods cannot readily demonstrate “how socially constructed categories and related oppressions work to produce both subordination and power.” Bailey and colleagues remind us that qualitative and quantitative approaches can reify categories. Category reification, of course, conflicts with objectives of intersectional research. Bailey and colleagues advocate for concept mapping and q-sorting, which arguably ensures participant autonomy. They avoid problems of categorization because they sort information according to participants’ responses yet allow researchers to pay attention to intersecting experiences. They also employ deliberative dialogue. According to Bailey and colleagues, via deliberative dialogue, participants “drive inquiry,” ensuring that the research frames according to experiences and needs. Participatory Action Research and Community-Based Participatory Research also are approaches to collaboration (Gemignani and Hernández-Albújar 2019). Gemignani and Hernández-Albújar call for employing a philosophical framework of process or relational ontology, a framework which they assert enables researchers to identify “inseparability of dimensions of possibility and actions, which are continuous reconstructions” (2019, 136). A concern is that participatory methods may promote adults’ research objectives and strategies, instead of young people’s goals and preferences (Kim 2016; Kyritsi 2019, citing Gallacher and Gallagher 2008). Cairns, Byrne, Davis, Johnson, Konstantoni, and Kustatscher

428  Research handbook on intersectionality (2018) established a project incorporating young people’s participation and voices. In return for their contributions to an academic seminar on children’s rights and intersectionality, young people were invited to ask researchers to collaborate on a project of importance to young participants. Young people chose to concentrate on school experiences. Fifteen young people between ages 14 to 18 of diverse class and ethnic backgrounds and different genders opted to participate in focus groups and interviews as well as research meetings. While the participants did self-select to participate, Cairns and colleagues offer an interesting approach to respecting power and interests of young people. Larsen (2020) employs mixed methods to study the “right to be forgotten,” which enables a person to ask a search engine to remove links associated with personal information (Larsen 2020, citing European Commission 2014). Larsen’s (2020, 1246) intersectional approach concentrates on aspects of intersectional oppressions around “rights at the intersection of technology, personhood, and the public/private divide.” Following Matthes and Kohring (2008), Larsen takes an inductive, computer-assisted approach to sample texts purposively and randomly to set up working frames. These frames are developed to identify specific words that Larsen then quantitatively mapped via keywords and natural language processing. Employing Media Cloud to gather and “scrape” stories and other Internet data, Larsen used a grounded theory approach to create a list of frames based on those data. Larsen then conducted semi-structured interviews with individuals who participated in public discussions of the right to be forgotten. These interviews were guided by the frames and categorization of texts. Larsen’s innovative, multi-methodological approach is useful to studying intersectional oppressions young people encounter while determining their identities in face of technologies that other entities often control. The CRITT (Critical Race Intersectionality Think Tank) collective combines qualitative methods into Critical Race Quantitative Intersectionality (CRQI), then places quantitative data with testimonios of people of color (Covarrubias, Nava, Lara, Burciaga, and Solórzano 2018). According to Covarrubias et al., a CRQI with Testimonio (CRQI+T) approach is founded in oral history traditions and human rights struggles in the Americas. Testimonio “is purposeful storytelling, grounded in praxis, utilized to expose and disrupt histories that are otherwise subsumed” (2018, 145, citing Cruz 2012). Collectives build testimonios; “they place individual experiences in conversation with sociohistorical factors and memories that help demonstrate context” (145). According to Covarrubias and colleagues, CRQI+T challenges researchers to reflect on their intersectional positions and experiences. These positions and experiences not only include researchers’ common elite educational experiences, but “patterns of institutional neglect, microaggressions, whitestreaming of educational spaces, and generally under-resourced conditions …” in some parts of California (145). Njeze, Bird-Naytowhow, Pearl, and Hatala (2020) combined Indigenous Methods (IM) with a case study approach. An IM framework “emphasizes the embedded nature of knowing and informs decisions about what knowledge is sought, and how it is gained, analyzed, and used by researchers” (2020, 3, citing Gerlach 2018). Indigenous epistemologies approach people relationally – to others, the environment, and the spiritual world (2020, 3, citing Morton et al. 2020). Njeze and colleagues assert that IM informs use of “Etuaptmunk, a Mi’kmaw word for ‘two-eye seeing’.” Etuaptmunk is an approach through which Western and Indigenous ways of knowing work together (2020, 3, citing Wright et al. 2019). Using this model, studies of intersectionality and children’s rights can gather and analyse data through taking advantage of strengths of both ways of knowing.

Children’s rights and social change  429 Fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), a cousin to Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) (Ragin 1987), permits a researcher to study degrees of membership, including presence and absence, as well as multiple causal configurations, that outcomes of interest may be explained by multiple combinations of conditions. Ragin and Fiss (2016) employ fsQCA to study how configurations of race, gender, family background, education, and other conditions combine to shape life chances.

INTERSECTIONAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE Age is one dimension of our intersectional experiences (Holman and Walker 2020). Multiple aspects of our social life are shaped by age including the ability to vote. While the ICCPR articulates a right to vote and a right to run for office, regardless of age, the UNCRC fails to articulate theses rights for young people. These absences are troubling. Voting age is a significant barrier to young people exercising political rights and deploying political power, particularly in democratic societies. This barrier seems to necessitate children’s reliance on others, particularly adults, in realizing their political power and rights. The assumption seems to be that when a parent or guardian votes, their vote incorporates children’s interests. Of course,

Source: http://​www​.youthrights​.org/​issues/​voting​-age/​voting​-age​-status​-report/​; https://​www​.cia​.gov/​the​-world​ -factbook/​field/​suffrage/​.

Figure 25.1

Voting ages across the world (selected)

430  Research handbook on intersectionality interests of parents and other adults and children may conflict. Adults may resist paying more taxes to benefit schools. Adults may resist causes that matter to young people, such as climate change and gun control. Fortunately, evidence indicates that more jurisdictions are lowering their voting ages. Figure 25.1 presents information about voting ages across a handful of jurisdictions. Because young people are socially and legally barred from using political rights, young people often seek and enact change through cultural and interpersonal domains. We see social movements gaining speed in the West where conversations around gun control and climate change are on the forefront of young people’s concerns. We examine young people’s freedom from gun violence in the United States and children’s efforts to advocate for their rights to prevent and reduce climate change to show how children use cultural power (Collins and Bilge 2016) in the form of social movements to produce social change. We present methodological approaches useful to studying how rights are used to challenge young people’s oppressions.

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND HOW CHILDREN PRODUCE SOCIAL CHANGE Most young people are prohibited from exercising political rights. Because young people are legally incapable of holding positions of political influence, social changes produced by children often occur within cultural and interpersonal domains of power (Collins and Bilge 2016). We showcase ways in which children challenge cultural and interpersonal domains of power to produce social change with a focus on gun control in the United States and international environmental advocacy. Gun Control in the United States Human rights doctrine, including Article 19 of the UNCRC, indicate that young people have a right to be free from violence. This Article states that parties to the Convention will pursue all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse, while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other person who has the care of the child.

Given young people are in adult care, this Article seems to call for freedom of violence and injury for all young people. Indeed, the UN Committee’s General Comment 13, published in 2011, establishes that Article 19 applies to all young people and any violence against young people cannot be justified. Prevention of violence, according to this General Comment, “is of paramount importance.” The General Comment insists that a public health approach to prevention is appropriate and can be used to prevent violence and its root causes. While we can understand children as victims of violence, the UN Committee insists that young people are rights-bearing individuals who possess dignity and whose physical and psychological integrity must be promoted and respected. As rights-bearing individuals, children are entitled to have their rights heard. The United States, as noted, has infamously not ratified the UNCRC. Yet the United States, at the state level, has established legislation that should prevent violence against children,

Children’s rights and social change  431 including gun violence. For now, wide-scale efforts to use legislation to prevent gun violence in the United States must take place across states and jurisdictions. Only 28 of 52 states have passed laws holding individuals criminally liable when a young person accesses a firearm due to negligence (Kaiser Family Foundation 2019, citing the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence 2019). While these laws articulate young people’s rights to be free from violence, including gun violence, the government approach places a young person’s freedom from violence on the shoulders of adults. Does this arrangement of interpersonal and disciplinary power succeed in the United States in ensuring that young people can exercise rights to be free from gun violence? The answer clearly is no. When it comes to other well-to-do countries, no country experiences gun violence like the United States. In a US National Public Radio report, the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation reports that the United States has the 32nd highest rate of gun violence deaths in the world, and the highest among well-to-do countries (Aizenman 2021). The Institute reports that 3.96 gun violent deaths per 100,000 were reported in the United States for the year 2019, in comparison to 0.47 for Canada, and 0.04 for the United Kingdom. In the United States, nearly 1,300 children die from firearms every year (Nationwide Children’s 2021). These deaths are usually unintentional, but distress around the threat of mass shootings, particularly school shootings, and police violence aimed at children in the United States is heightened and palpable. Shootings at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado (1999), Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut (2012), and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida (2018) were piercing calls for

Figure 25.2

Firearm deaths by race/ethnicity and sex (2001–19), CDC WISQUARS

432  Research handbook on intersectionality policy form. The deaths of Aiyana Stanley-Jones (2010), Tamir Rice (2014), Adam Toledo (2021), and Ma’Khia Bryant (2021) highlight the particular vulnerability to gun violence that children of color experience at the hands of the state. In addition, poor children of color experience gun violence at higher rates than their peers. Figure 25.2 displays the disproportionate number of firearm deaths that Black boys endure. Progress on these fronts remains contentious and slow. We also recognize that conversation around gun violence and gun control in the West is distinct from international threats, including war, that children face. We study gun violence as an example of how young people are organizing to produce effective social change despite their youth and lack of political rights. Youth Movements for Gun Control The movement “March for Our Lives” was created following the 2018 shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people were killed and 17 people were injured. The mission of March for Our Lives is “to harness the power of young people across the country to fight for sensible gun violence prevention policies that save lives.” The movement has resulted in chapters around the United States where youth are organizing for cultural and political change around gun control. March for Our Lives declares gun violence as a “deeply intersectional issue, inextricably bound with our long journey for racial justice, economic justice, immigrant rights, and the rights of our LGBTQ allies.” A 2019 article recognized, “The March for Our Lives movement, which has made intersectionality one of its calling cards, has helped draw attention to the violence that is often forgotten” (Gontcharova 2019). The advocacy work of March for Our Lives has impressively resulted in over 50 gun safety laws in the United States (Kannan 2020). Youth of color are confronting this movement with the reality that school shootings are one, but not the foremost form of gun violence facing youth in the United States. Black children have the highest rates of firearm mortality due to homicide in the United States (Fowler, Dahlberg, Haileyesus, Gutierrez, and Bacon, 2017). Conversely, white and Indigenous children were at greater risk for suicide. The point of highlighting these differences is not to diminish the tragedy of school shootings. The goal is to showcase the complexities for which intersectionality calls. This comparison underscores that gun violence in the United States is an intercategory issue that concerns youth across social groups (McCall 2005). Mainstream conversation around gun violence is focused on school shootings, which obscures disproportionate and systemic harms of gun violence on non-white and poor youth. Because young people primarily create social change through cultural power, it is important to note which aspects of youth-led movements are being culturally reproduced and which are not. We present a limit list of youth-led organizations to showcase advocacy tactics of these youth organizations and how they reflect cultural and interpersonal power. Team ENOUGH is a “youth-led organization whose mission is to educate young voices about gun violence and mobilize them to take meaningful action against it.” Team ENOUGH takes an intersectional approach by recognizing the interconnectedness of gun violence with police brutality, white supremacy, the criminal (in)justice system, poverty, homophobia, access to affordable housing, and proper health care. Enough is supported by Brady, a gun violence prevention group founded in 1974. Enough offers training programs to students and young people (ages 13–26) on how to lobby for gun violence prevention in their states. Enough’s policy plan includes supporting legislation that makes it easier to track and solve

Children’s rights and social change  433 violent crimes, expanding background checks, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and establishing an extreme risk protection order (ERPO) for individuals at risk of harming themselves or others. A New York City-based organization called Youth Over Guns is a grassroots organization that advocates for reducing gun violence in communities of color. Youth Over Guns has joined the group New Yorkers Against Gun Violence (NYAGV), which has been advocating for gun violence reduction policies since 1993. The group’s resistance lies partly in “young people of color and underserved communities who have been impacted by the gun violence epidemic at disproportionately alarming rates” and that “deaths and injuries in communities of color are barely given a second on any mainstream media outlet.” Youth Over Guns offers advocacy training in their “Anger to Advocacy (ATA) Activist Incubator.” The goal of this program is to support the most marginalized in using their voice for change. Youth Over Guns’ policy agenda includes fostering safer schools, funding gun violence research and evidence-based intervention and prevention programs, implementing universal background check, and establishing ERPOs. Students Demand Action is a national organization that operates through grassroots community organizing. They equip “student leaders” to create advocacy chapters in their communities. Their tagline is “turn outrage into action.” Students Demand Action advocates for increased background checks, funding research on gun violence, tackling the link between domestic abuse and gun violence, repealing gun industry immunity to promote safer gun production and sales, and protecting children and families by allowing the temporary blockage of firearm possession. A comparison of these groups reveals qualities that bolster young people’s rights. Each group employs intersectionality in their work, uses online platforms, offers state-based options, and is supported by larger, adult-led advocacy groups. Online platforms are important because they offer youth accessibility in undertaking online advocacy by sharing information, including their stories, quickly and widely. Essentially, they support their prerogative as rights bearers to be heard. From a policy standpoint, each group calls for more rigorous background checks, ERPOs, and funded gun prevention research. Each group calls for ending gun violence, especially towards young people. These strategies highlight the powerful utility of intersectionality to studying young people and their rights. Confronting Global Climate Change Do young people possess rights to protection from and prevention of climate change? While the UNCRC does not explicitly address climate change, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) does articulate rights when it comes to climate change. Entering into force in 1994, as of June 1, 2021, every UN member party has ratified the UNFCCC. The UNFCCC was adopted to improve greenhouse gas emissions, ensure food production is not threatened, and enable sustainable economic development. While the UNFCCC does not articulate human rights, this convention certainly does influence and is based upon human rights and children’s rights. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has not yet published a General Comment on climate change but has taken various steps to articulate children’s rights when it comes to climate change. For example, Morocco hosted the first technical briefing in 2017 on the UNFCCC and human rights when it was President of the 22nd Conference to the UNFCCC. This briefing included a special event on

434  Research handbook on intersectionality climate change and children’s rights. It served as an opportunity for experts to share insights, information, and potential guidance on human rights and children’s rights for climate action. Among the experts speaking at this event was Ms. Joanna Sustento, a young person who survived a typhoon but whose family did not. Ms. Sustento lost her parents, her oldest brother and his wife and their three year-old son during Typhoon Haiyan. In the same year, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (2017) published its report, “Analytical Study on the Relationship between Climate Change and the Full and Effective Enjoyment of the Rights of the Child.” Through this report, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights noted that consequences of climate change, such as more frequent and intense natural disasters, food and water shortages, and increased transmission of communicable diseases, strongly affect young people. This is an example of how one social issue can impact children’s rights across categories because they are interrelated and reliant upon one another. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights not only calls on states’ parties, but on business and civil society actors to ensure that children’s rights are not infringed when it comes to climate change. This call is notable given that national governments are considered responsible for implementation of UN human rights treaties. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights specifically demands participation of young people when charting a path forward in climate justice. Youth Movements for Climate Change A comparative, socio-legal analytical approach to studying intersectionality can reveal global dynamics as factors that shape utility of young people’s rights. We first consider the work of Greta Thunberg, who has earned international recognition for her efforts to prevent climate change while calling on adults to do more. We then examine two US cases of social movement organizations that employ ideas of intersectionality to stop climate change. We then return to an innovative rights-based strategy Thunberg and her colleagues have employed to challenge leaders of national governments and international organizations to end climate change. Ironically, their strategy reveals impacts of intersectionality when employing children’s rights to stop climate change. We conclude with a discussion of a human right that is denied to most young people. Greta Thunberg is a Swedish environmental activist whose work has received attention across the world. In 2018, as a 15-year old high school student, Thunberg skipped classes to demonstrate in front of the Swedish Parliament building, demanding Skolstrejk för klimatet, “School Strike for Climate.” Young people following Thunberg’s example set off a wave of similar School Strikes for Climate. On March 15, 2019, more than a million people participated in over 200 strikes across 125 countries. About two months later, a second strike occurred. This one consisted of over 1,600 strikes across 150 countries and was timed to coincide with the 2019 European Parliament elections. In a news article, Thunberg was described as succeeding in “creating a global attitudinal shift, transforming millions of vague, middle-of-the-night anxieties into a worldwide movement calling for urgent change.” On September 23, 2019, Thunberg addressed the UN’s Climate Action Summit in New York City. Thunberg’s speech, to which we encourage readers to listen (NPR 2019, https://​www​ .npr​.org/​2019/​09/​23/​763452863/​transcript​-greta​-thunbergs​-speech​-at​-the​-u​-n​-climate​-action​ -summit) was striking. She strongly criticized world leaders for failing to act in response to 30 years of scientific evidence that demonstrates worsening climate change. She also challenged

Children’s rights and social change  435 them to prioritize action over empty promises. She demanded UN leaders surpass UN goals, noting that even meeting those goals will lead to intolerable climate changes that will harm future generations. Through her speech, Thunberg unforgivingly stated, “You are failing us … We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.” It is an understatement to say that Thunberg’s address to the UN’s Climate Action Summit attracted global attention and was a precursor to the largest climate change strike in history. On the same day that she addressed the UN’s Climate Action Summit, Thunberg and her colleagues filed a complaint to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. Sixteen young people, ages 8 to 17, complained that national governments that have ratified the UNCRC have failed to protect young people’s rights and interests around climate change. This strategy of using the complaint procedure is unusual. The procedure is known as an individual complaints or communications procedure. We believe this is the first time a group has used this approach with the UNCRC. The complaint procedure is outlined in the “Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on a communications procedure.” Adopted in 2011, the optional protocol is a human rights treaty that is distinct from the UNCRC. While the UNCRC is the most widely ratified human rights treaty, all member parties must separately ratify optional protocols. Without ratification, a national government is not committed to implementing the protocol’s provisions. The provisions of the optional protocol are that a national government agrees to receive complaints from residents of their country through the UN Committee. The resident completes a form, which includes a statement of facts about the complaint, then files the complaint via email. To successfully file a complaint, the resident must indicate an inability to seek resolution with the relevant government. The individual complaint procedure is governed by other important limitations. For instance, the procedure can only be used by a resident whose national government has ratified the optional protocol. As of March 2022, only 48 national governments have ratified the optional protocol. Thunberg and colleagues came from a diverse group of countries, of which only half have ratified the optional protocol, meaning only half of these young people will receive responses from their national government. Why then would this group include individuals from countries whose national governments have not ratified the optional protocol? A comparative, socio-legal approach reveals three factors. First, climate change is a global issue that connects youth across the world. Basing responsibilities on national governments through the UN Convention and its optional protocol presents a barrier to battling climate change. Using the individual complaint procedure by residents of countries whose national governments have not ratified the optional protocol identifies crucial problems for the UN and the enforcement of its international frameworks of human rights and climate change. Second, there is power in numbers. Filing a complaint as a group reflects the community-based approach many youth movements hold valuable. This approach showcases another weakness of the UN human rights framework. Taking individual complaints, one by one, is time consuming and ignores the concerns of groups of people. Essentially, it does not allow pathways for communities of people to file complaints against their national government. Shared identity and interpersonal power are important to intersectionality and intersectional movements. Implementing international human rights frameworks through individualistic means is limiting, especially for youth who lack political rights needed to influence systemic change. Third, a group using the individual complaints procedure whose

436  Research handbook on intersectionality members are not covered by the optional protocol reveals a significant failure in recognizing that young people do not possess a full range of political rights. A means of influencing one’s national government to ratify the optional protocol is through elections, running for office, and forming a political party. These three political rights – the right to vote, to run for electoral office, and to form a political party – are not articulated in the UN Convention. Thunberg and colleagues’ strategy of including residents of countries whose national governments have not ratified the optional protocol highlights a significant failure of the UN’s approach to children’s rights and a crucial barrier to young people employing their rights to fight climate change. In 2019, the UN Committee found the group’s complaint to be admissible. Nearly two years later, the UN Committee sidestepped the complaint and concluded that the group should take their complaint to national courts. Rather than supporting the innovative approach to tackling a borderless-problem, the UN Committee preserved their empty words, Thunberg noted. Nevertheless, these efforts do provide hope. The UN Committee announced its intention to draft General Comment 26, tentatively titled “Children’s rights and the environment with special focus on climate change.” Thunberg’s quick rise to notoriety prompted international and intersectional conversations around the global dynamics of racism, sexism, and ableism. Thunberg is diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and understands her neurodiversity as beneficial to her activism (Alter, Haynes, and Worland 2019). She has been praised, and also ridiculed, for her direct communication and unrelenting focus. Her rapid success has also overshadowed, in particular, generations of Indigenous environmental activists. Others have noted that the effects of climate change disproportionately harm youth of color, yet children from these communities are overlooked. Like Thunberg, other young people are acting independently in the fight against climate change. Teen Vogue, an American magazine, showcased youth activists of color in the United States and Canada organizing around climate change (Janfaza 2020). The article features activists from regions most directly affected by climate change. For instance, Autumn Peltier, a 16-year-old water protector, activist, and Chief Water Commissioner for the Anishinabek Nation in Ontario, Canada, spoke to the UN General Assembly at the 2019 global summit on climate change (Janfaza 2020), yet did not receive the similar global recognition as Thunberg. This comparison demonstrates that global issues, like climate change, similarly concern youth at the individual level but the attention brought to these individuals differs. Broader influence and recognition of individual youth efforts can and should be understood in an intersectional way. Because young people primarily create social change through cultural and interpersonal power, analysis of where this power in youth movements is concentrated can provide important intersectional insight. For instance, despite being of similar age, living in Western countries, and sharing a global platform there is unequal acknowledgement of Peltier’s efforts, which center Indigenous people. We offer an overview of youth-led environmental advocacy organizations to highlight the complexities of environmentalism. The Sunrise Movement is a US-based youth organization focused on stopping climate change. The organization’s goal is to “build an army of young people to make climate change an urgent priority across America” while disrupting detrimental policies. The Sunrise Movement proposes three areas of change: people’s power, political power, and the people’s alignment. People’s power entails interpersonal connections that lead to meaningful cultural changes over time. Political power consists of electing and supporting political officials willing to legislate climate change. Alignment means organizing “an extensive network of

Children’s rights and social change  437 movements and groups united by the shared vision of a government that fights for dignity and justice for all.” The Sunrise Movement showcases success through their “election impact” numbers. These numbers consist of the number of outreach attempts via texts, calls, postcards and other contacts. They credit these efforts in helping to elect climate-focused legislators. Part of Sunrise Movement’s principles are community building that recognizes differences in experience, non-violence, allowing for change, and working with other movements on holistic efforts. Uplift is a Colorado-based organization that envisions a “land that is healthy, habitable for the more-than-human world, and free from colonial exploitation and ownership.” Their principles are couched in the power of young people and community connection while implementing an intersectional and anti-oppressive framework. The group states, “We know our issues are interconnected and liberation must happen collectively. Our fight for climate justice is inextricably intertwined with other struggles for justice worldwide.” Among Uplift’s principles are valuing community power, leadership, and intersectionality along with diversity in advocacy tactics and room for growth and change within the movement and organization. These organizations and individuals share rights-based and intersectional approaches to climate change. They also believe in the power of communities and community care. Yet we note differences across these efforts. Thunberg demonstrates an individual exposure that highlights the benefits afforded to whiteness and class privilege, but also the marginalization stemming from sexism and ableism. The Sunrise Movement showcases a national-level, Congressionally supported movement with resources. This movement confirms that the power of grassroots organizing in fighting climate change. Uplift, on the other hand, takes a focused, state-based approach to community organizing. These various efforts may not only offer insights into potential impacts of social movements on climate change, but reveal utilities of young people’s rights, including political and participation rights, when it comes to pursuing significant social change.

CONCLUSION Social movements that seek to counter gun violence and climate change demonstrate that youth activists are taking an intersectional stance on key social issues facing them today. These young people’s movements illustrate not only appealing aspects of these movements, but the power of intersectionality to their efforts of employing human rights to producing social change. Social scientists can learn a great deal from young people’s social movements, particularly when it comes to intersectionality concerns. First, youth movements are interconnected and mutually inspired. Despite a focus on one issue, these grassroots groups recognize and accept that their efforts are connected to others’ concerns and efforts. Second, youth are taking an intersectional, community-based approach to combat large social problems. In doing so, children are shifting cultural understandings from individual to community responsibility, both nationally and internationally, to change minds and policies. Third, youth understand that the large-scale success of their goals is reliant upon adult cultural and political participation. This is necessary to gain and use political power. Youth-led movements use the power of their stories and identities alongside the power of statistical evidence to paint the full picture of the social problem. In Black feminist tradition, “the most profound and potentially radical

438  Research handbook on intersectionality politics form directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody’s else’s oppression” (Combahee River Collective 1977). Social scientists undertaking intersectional research on young people and their rights enjoy vast opportunities. Scholars are employing quantitative, qualitative, comparative, and mixed-methodological approaches to undertake this intersectional research. While these scholars often look to intersectional research on other social groups, research on young people and their rights reminds us that if we take seriously oppression of children and their rights, we must incorporate an intersectional methodological approach. Research on children and their rights demonstrates power of intersectional methodological approaches to studying all oppression.

NOTE 1. See the Combahee River Collective (1977) as an example of using intersectionality in Black feminist movements. Their collective statement, published in 1977, is a pivotal attestation to intersectional thought.

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440  Research handbook on intersectionality Morton, Darrien, Kelley Bird-Naytowhow, Tamara Pearl, and Andrew R. Hatala. 2020. “‘Just Because They Aren’t Human Doesn’t Mean They Aren’t Alive’: The Methodological Potential of Photovoice to Examine Human-Nature Relations as a Source of Resilience and Health among Urban Indigenous Youth,” Health & Place 61: 102268-10. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.healthplace​.2019​.102268. Nadan, Yochay, and Jill Korbin. 2018. “Cultural Context, Intersectionality, and Child Vulnerability,” Childhood Vulnerability Journal 1 (1): 5–14. Nash, Jennifer C. 2008. “Re-thinking Intersectionality,” Feminist Review 89 (1): 1–15. https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.1057/​fr​.2008​.4. Nationwide Children’s. 2021. “Gun Safety.” https://​www​.nationwidechildrens​.org/​research/​areas​-of​ -research/​center​-for​-injury​-research​-and​-policy/​injury​-topics/​general/​gun​-safety (accessed April 27, 2022). Njeze, Chinyere, Kelley Bird-Naytowhow, Tamara Pearl, and Andrew R. Hatala. "Intersectionality of Resilience: A Strengths-Based Case Study Approach with Indigenous Youth in an Urban Canadian Context," Qualitative Health Research 30 (13): 2001–18. NPR. 2019. “Transcript: Greta Thunberg’s Speech at the U.N. Climate Action Summit.” NPR. September 23. https://​www​.npr​.org/​2019/​09/​23/​763452863/​transcript​-greta​-thunbergs​-speech​-at​-the​-u​-n​-climate​ -action​-summit (accessed April 27, 2022). Ragin, Charles. 1987. The Comparative Method. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ragin, Charles, and Peer Fiss. 2016. Intersectional Inequality: Race, Class, Test Scores, and Poverty. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ross, Loretta J., and Rickie Solinger. 2017. Reproductive Justice: An Introduction. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Scheim, Ayden I., and Greta R. Bauer. 2019. “The Intersectional Discrimination Index: Development and Validation of Measures of Self-Reported Enacted and Anticipated Discrimination for Intercategorical Analysis,” Social Science & Medicine 226: 225–35. SisterSong. “Reproductive Justice.” https://​www​.sistersong​.net/​reproductive​-justice (accessed April 27, 2022). Students Demand Action. 2022. https://​studentsdemandaction​.org/​#top 2022 (accessed April 27, 2022). TeamENOUGH. “Who We Are.” https://​www​.teamenough​.org/​who​-we​-are (accessed April 27, 2022). The Sunrise Movement. “Who We Are: About the Sunrise Movement.” https://​www​.sunrisemovement​ .org/​about/​?ms​=​Abo​utTheSunri​seMovement (accessed April 27, 2022). UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. 2017. “Analytical Study on the Relationship between Climate Change and the Full and Effective Enjoyment of the Rights of the Child.” https://​documents​ -dds​-ny​.un​.org/​doc/​UNDOC/​GEN/​G17/​110/​91/​PDF/​G1711091​.pdf​?OpenElement (accessed April 27, 2022). Uplift. “Our Story.” https://​upliftclimate​.org/​our​-story Last Assessed April 27, 2022. Wright, A., C. Gabel, M. Ballantyne, S. Jack, and O. Wahoush. 2019. “Using Two-Eyed Seeing in Research with Indigenous People: An Integrative Review,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 18: 1–19. https://​doi. org/10.1177/1609406919869695.

UN Treaties International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. https://​www​.ohchr​.org/​en/​instruments​-mechanisms/​ instruments/​international​-covenant​-civil​-and​-political​-rights International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. https://​www​.ohchr​.org/​en/​instruments​ -mechanisms/​instruments/​international​-covenant​-economic​-social​-and​-cultural​-rights (accessed April 27, 2022). Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict. https://​chil​drenandarm​edconflict​.un​.org/​tools​-for​-action/​opac/​ (accessed April 27, 2022). Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. https://​www​.ohchr​.org/​en/​instruments​-mechanisms/​instruments/​optional​ -protocol​-convention​-rights​-child​-sale​-children​-child (accessed April 27, 2022). United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. https://​ www​ .ohchr​ .org/​ en/​ instruments​ -mechanisms/​instruments/​convention​-rights​-child (accessed April 27, 2022).

Children’s rights and social change  441 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. https://​www​.ohchr​.org/​en/​instruments​-mechanisms/​instru ments/convention-rights-child (accessed April 27, 2022).

PART IV INTERSECTIONAL GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES: GLOBALIZATION AND TRANSNATIONALISM

26. Centering region and multi-scalar lenses Ghassan Moussawi

Berlin is one of the most gay-friendly cities. India is a wonderful touristic destination. New York City is the center of the world. Lebanon is the most progressive country in the Arab World. The War on Terror. Scandinavia welcomes immigrants. The South is not progressive for women.1

What do these statements have in common? They seem to be conveying information about nations (Lebanon, India), cities (New York City, Berlin), regions (the South, Scandinavia), and transnational and global colonial projects targeting certain populations (The War on Terror). At a closer look, these statements can be read as “objective” claims and/or sweeping generalizations that do not take intersectional analyses into account. For example, while Berlin is represented as one of the most gay-friendly cities, who gets to experience it as such? What parts of the city are considered gay-friendly and for whom? As Jin Haritaworn (2015) shows, Berlin’s gay-friendliness is based upon excluding queer Turkish and other Muslim migrants, whom Haritaworn refers to as “hateful Others,” always in relation to what are seemed as appropriate white LGBT subjects. Thus, Berlin’s gay-friendliness embraces certain queer formations over others. Scandinavia is a region in Western Europe that is seemingly open for immigrants, yet what about its dominant whiteness and ethnocentrism, and its strict immigration policies toward Black and Brown migrants? What racial formations emerge among white populations, such as Eastern European migrants in Scandinavia? For whom is India a touristic destination, and is every part of India welcoming to all tourists? The “War on Terror” seems to convey a war on acts of terrorism, yet how has the war on terror allowed further military occupations in the Middle East, Islamophobia, and the racialization of Muslims? To nuance these statements, one must ask on what basis are such distinctions made and how do they shift across time and space? What populations do these statements target, and whom do they erase or render invisible? What do the above formulations of cities, nations, and regions obscure or render invisible in the information they are trying to convey? Taken all together, these statements operate on multiple and different scales: global, geopolitical, national, regional, and cities. In this chapter, I ask how does scale complicate our intersectional research on nations, race, and gender? And what intersectional methodological tools can we use to be attentive to scale? While intersectional methods and analyses take into account the various and simultaneous ways that certain populations are dispossessed and oppressed, I argue that to get at a more nuanced analysis means to have to contend more seriously with issues of shifting notions of scale. That is, we must pay attention and name what scale we are looking at (nation, state, city, region, to name a few) to determine what intersectional methodologies to use. Nations and states do not simply exist on their own as singular and homogeneous formations. States are political entities that govern sovereign territories, whereas nations encompass 443

444  Handbook on intersectionality groups of people or entities who share historical experiences and cultural practices (Puri 2003). Nation-states, however, refer to entities where states govern certain nations and when nations and state overlap. Moreover, nations exist within geographic regions that in turn contain multiple nations (such as Indigenous nations in the United States), as well as regions (such as the South, Northeast, Midwest, etc.) in and of themselves. Regions are demarcations which encompass nations and states, yet also go within and beyond them. That is, regional analysis encompasses both supra- and subnational regions within nations and/or states. While supranational analysis centers the level or scale that transcend the boundaries of the nation, subnational analysis attends to regions within the nation. Accounting for regions in intersectional research means to be attentive to their multiple manifestations, while simultaneously moving between multiple scales of analysis. Our positionalities and identities are not static. Rather, they shift and gain different meanings in different settings and contexts. Thus, we ought to be open in our methodologies to account for these changes to better get at the shifting experiences of oppression and subordination. For example, if one experiences privilege in a particular site this doesn’t necessarily translate to their experiences in other sites. While migrants can move and relocate from a city, nation, or region to another, these movements—whether across national or state borders—and their positionalities shift, and they start to inhabit and experience different sets of oppressions based on where they are. In a similar vein, one need not cross national or state border to be subjected to shifting experiences of subordination or oppression. A regional analysis—whether sub or supra-national, for example—helps us understand processes of shifting racializations at the level of nation-states, nations within states, and regions within nations and/or states. Moreover, nations and regions exist in relation to one another. A lack of engagement with such relational lenses means to abandon one scale over the other. Using intersectional tools and analysis to unpack gender, nation, and race means to examine the various state apparatuses (in the case of nation-states) that uphold certain populations as “good” while policing, surveilling, and dehumanizing others. To assume that every population belongs to a nation-state is to erase the experiences of those who have and continue to be dispossessed through racial capitalism and who are seen as sources of exploitative labor and/ or cast as unwanted or marked for death. Using intersectional methodologies means moving away from a single axis analysis of identity categories to centering on the multiple axes of oppression and an unearthing of how these categories and identities came to be. This can be done by examining populations’ relations to state power that most often than not reflects the exclusionary processes that nation-states and regions are built on. Focusing on the nation enables us to analyse how the nation produces relational constructions of normative or unmarked and non-normative or marked subjects and populations, particularly through gender, class, sexuality, and processes of minoritized racialization. Foregrounding the power of the nation-state in framing certain population as non-normative, unwanted, and polluted means being attentive to the relational and changing nature of these formations at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, including others. The nation imagines what entities and populations represent it and/or be part of it and which ones do not. Thus, a nation becomes constituted not only by what it imagines it is, but also by what it is not. For example, by using exclusionary and state-sanctioned violence against certain populations, at the border or within the nation-state, nations become defined by their constitutive outsiders. To understand who belongs to the nation, we must also pay attention to who doesn’t, or who is regarded as suspect/foreign.

Centering region and multi-scalar lenses   445 Nationalisms, which precede the formation of nations or nation-states, further produce and highlight these relational distinctions (Puri 2003). However, not all nationalisms are tied to nation-states, as is the case with Indigenous nations and stateless peoples (for example, Kashmiris, Palestinians, Kurds, Armenians) who have been forced outside their land through the transatlantic slave trade, chattel slavery, settler colonialism, foreign emplacements and military occupations, and genocide. Thus, we must also consider those who have no autonomy over the regions and territories they inhabit. However, what intersectional methodologies are useful to capture these changes? While focusing on the nation is crucial for intersectional analyses, I prod us to think of how intersectional methodologies might benefit from taking into account multiple geographic layers and scales by attending to the formations of geographical regions and the experiences of various populations at multiple scales of analysis (city, nation, region, country, etc.). Moreover, I argue for the need for interdisciplinary analysis in how we deploy intersectionality. For example, taking my cue from feminist geography, critical ethnic studies, sociology, anthropology, postcolonial feminisms, queer theory, and queer of color critique, I center scale and region to help us better get at the multi-scalar nature of how we conceive of the interrelations between nation, gender, and race, and how we define our units/subjects of analyses. In what follows, I first provide a brief overview of transnational feminisms and nation-states. Second, I move on to discuss the importance of regional and multi-scalar analyses by using examples from my own fieldwork and other studies. I shed light on the different manifestations of regions, at the sub- and supranational levels. Throughout, I offer, methodological tools that can help us capture these intersectional nuances.

INTERSECTIONALITY, FEMINISMS, AND NATION-STATES Intersectionality is a feminist lens introduced by Black feminist thought which centralizes the interconnections between class and racial formations and oppressions and how race, class, and material conditions are engendered by the nation-state. While intersectionality is central to a nuanced understanding of nation and the production of race, class, and gender, nation is often taken for granted or it is used synonymously with the state, without further attention to region. As the Combahee River Collective Statement (1977 [1979]) indicates, intersectional analysis foregrounds material conditions and oppressions, as opposed to an additive approach to identity categories. The Combahee River Collective Statement draws on and makes transnational linkages that are often left unexamined in more contemporary iterations of intersectionality and the now widely misunderstood notion of identity politics. As per the Combahee River Collective Statement (1977 [1979]), identity politics refer to the material dispossession of Black women in the US and Black and Brown women in the Global South, as opposed to using de-contextualized notions of identity. Thus, the Combahee River Collective, the first iteration of intersectional analysis, draws connections between the experiences of dispossession in the US, foregrounding it as a transnational site and by making important links to the experiences of peoples in the Global South. More contemporary intersectional studies on the US, however, have disregarded how the Combahee River Collective and Black Feminist thinkers in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Audre Lorde, June Jordan, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker (to name a few) analysed the US as a transnational site, regarding it as part and parcel of global and transnational analysis, as opposed to treating it as “an unnamed center of

446  Handbook on intersectionality analysis” (Moussawi and Vidal-Ortiz 2020, 1272). As a very recent example, I co-organized an open-call for a panel on rethinking transnational sexualities for the American Sociological Association in 2021. Though my organizer and I made sure to include studies of the US as a transnational site for understanding sexualities, we received only one submission on the US. This shows how dominant US-based studies of gender, race, and sexuality do not consider the US as a transnational site and assume that the transnational is about the Global South (which was reflected in the majority of the submissions we received). When US-based gender and sexuality scholars read “transnational,” they relegate it to “other” places, misunderstanding what transnational means. Feminist transnational scholars have argued for the relevance of the nation, state, and nationalisms, despite the assumption of the declining role of state and nation due to neoliberalism (Kim-Puri 2005; Puri 2016b). Nations gender, racialize, and sexualize people. Using intersectional tools and analysis, we cannot parse these ongoing and concurrent processes from one another. Rather, we must see them as inherently and simultaneously interconnected, producing bodies that ascribe to certain visions of normativity, and others that are almost always deemed as non-normative, being denied basic rights (Alexander 1994; Cohen 1997). These forces with the primary intention of policing populations can and do historically shift, where nation-states continually determine who is part of the nation and who isn’t. In the article “Not Just (Any) Body Can be a Citizen,” M. Jacqui Alexander (1994) makes the distinction between being a national and a citizen: “I am an outlaw in my country of birth: a national, but not a citizen” (5), in reference to her marked position as a queer subject through her non-normative and non-procreative sexuality in Trinidad and Tobago. As Alexander points out, nationals may not be considered part of the nation-state, since not all nationals receive citizenship rights afforded to others. As Kim-Puri (2005, 138) importantly reminds us, “feminist analyses of the state consider it as being equivalent to the nation, and they are referred to interchangeably. Furthermore, the state is seen as a monolith, undifferentiated and homogeneous, rather than as a fragmented set of institutions with complex and uneven relationships” (138). I take seriously Kim-Puri’s (137) argument for the need to shed light on “the flawed promises of nationalism as an all-inclusive, horizontal community are especially visible from the positions of women and marginalized groups.” Nationalisms that are tied to autonomous nation-states are often exclusionary, yet they function on multiple scales. The nation, like the state, is not a monolith; one way by which we can further unpack this designation is by bringing attention to scale and region. Groups’ positionalities and relations to power cannot be fully explicated or understood without attention to region. Regional analysis sheds light on an often missed and under-utilized scale in how we understand the nation. I propose that we center the simultaneous nature of multi-scalar analyses (micro, macro, region, and transnational contexts). For example, multiple nations can and do exist within nation-states, such as Indigenous nations in the United States. Thus, to examine the experiences of people at one scale doesn’t mean to let go of another scale. They are not mutually exclusive; rather, I see them as mutually constitutive. Therefore, an intersectional approach to nation might have to contend with questions of region and scale that complicate how we conceive of the nation in our understandings of race and gender. In India, for example, each region has its own history of racializing peoples, thus, we must locate the region that we are studying. To study Kashmir and the experiences of Muslim populations might be very different than studying the experiences of Muslims in predominately Hindu regions. The same applies to the US. Can we speak of the experiences of populations without

Centering region and multi-scalar lenses   447 centering region? Latinx formations and experiences at the border look very different than examining Latinx experiences in a city like New York. That is not to say, one is better than the other, rather, it is to show how we need emergent intersectional methodologies that pay attention to the shifting meanings that Latinx categories have in different regions. The same goes for Arab-American experiences. If one was to study the experiences of Arab-Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, a city known for its high Arab-American and Muslim population, would produce different outcomes than to study the experiences of Arab-Americans in Lincoln, Nebraska.

ON REGIONS AND STATES Regions complicate our understanding of nation by centering the simultaneous and multiple scales of processes of gendering, racializing, and sexualizing populations both at the supranational scale/level and the subnational one. Paying attention to the supranational, nations and nationalisms needs to be understood in relation to the geographic regions that they are emplaced in, through settler colonialism, empire, and/or foreign military occupations. These supranational regions are almost always colonial conceptions, such as the Middle East, a region placed in relation to the binary of East/West; this formulation always centers the West as unmarked, yet, hegemonic through its power to name and organize regions only in relation to the assumed but unnamed centers of empire. On the subnational level, regions also play an important role in complicating hegemonic or unilateral understandings of nation and nationalisms. Regions within nations produce different manifestations of normativity and belonging, and have their own complex histories. For example, even within a small country like Lebanon, queer formations across regions have distinct cultural and linguistic practices that do not conform with the dominant view of LGBT formations in the capital city, Beirut. I take up Vrushali Patil’s (2013) important call regarding the ways that intersectionality has been erronesouly extended to non-US settings, without suffiecient attention to how space and scale matter for its historical formation or emergence, rooted in Black women feminisms and activisms in the US.2 Patil (2013, 853) points out that few scholars use intersectional analysis and methods at the “international, regional or global levels of analysis.” Instead, most intersectional analyses primarily focus on the local and micro levels of analysis or what Patil calls “domestic intersectionality” (853). In addition, as Grewal and Kaplan (1994) have argued, “few of any of these analyses deliberately examine phenomena across scales—at the intersection of the local and global, or ‘the lines cutting across them’” (13). Thus, to complicate intersectionality in our studies of nation, gender, and race means to rethink what counts as international, regional, and global and to address their interconnections, by simultaneously moving between and across scales of analysis. Nation-states police and celebrate/uphold certain bodies and populations as normative and others as non-normative that are deemed or marked for death or further dispossession. One form that this violence is enacted is through material dispossession of certain populations vis-à-vis others. While this is part and parcel of the projects of racial capitalism and neoliberalism, we tend to forget that capitalism and neoliberalism are always racialized and gendered. That is, we still find a dearth of research in sociology that uses the terminology of racial capitalism, thinking about capitalism as a project that is purely based on class and material conditions of production, without its racialized and gendered aspects. Another aspect of racial

448  Handbook on intersectionality capitalism helps us shed light on what populations nation-states deem as worthy of protection and rights, in relation to others. Distinguishing between being a national and a citizen, Alexander (1994) prods us to think of subnational processes that produce categories of normativity within the nation-state. Those who are deemed non-normative are seen as outside the nation by being denied rights or not seen as worthy of rights, such as rights to healthcare, education, housing, etc. In the US, Alexander becomes a diasporic subject, occupying both statuses as a non-national and non-citizen. Thus, she becomes a constitutive outsider to the imagined nation and thus, outside the purview of the rights afforded to citizens. I seek to highlight the importance of moving between multiple scales at the same time. To do so, I draw on my research on queer formations in Lebanon. I will focus on two examples: Lebanon’s designation as an exceptional and progressive nation in the Arab World; and how the state’s capital city Beirut becomes the gender and sexually progressive face of the nation, while obscuring lives in multiple and diverse areas and regions within Lebanon. In both of these cases, the dominant narratives obscure ongoing conditions of dispossession and inequalities that are at once racialized, classed, and gendered—even within a small country and/or territory. I draw on other studies to show how the case of Lebanon can teach us about other cases and contexts, where colonial and settler-colonial formations continue to minoritize populations in attempts to police, neglect, and kill, such as the case of the US.

WHAT DO SCALE AND REGION HAVE TO DO WITH INTERSECTIONALITY? Regions and the Matrix of Oppression While nations need not be spatially or geographically bound, regions—despite also being porous—are imagined as geographically bound. I am not suggesting that we take “region” for granted, rather, we must explicate the role of regions in how we apply intersectional analyses. I build on Kim-Puri’s (2005) argument that in place of nation-to-nation comparison, or the conflation of society and nation, the place or scale in focus must be addressed. Depending on whether we locate the research and analysis in a particular city, town, or village, whether across national borders, whether in a specific intranational or international region, or whether across two noncontiguous cultural settings, the unit of analysis will be contingent and provisional. (148)

While Kim-Puri rightfully call for addressing the place or scale of our analysis, I seek to push this further, by considering how regional and national analyses are both multi-scalar and simultaneous. We need not abandon one scale to another, rather, by addressing the multiplicities of our units of analysis and their simultaneity, nation and region are not seen as mutually exclusive. Such lenses produce intersectional analyses as three-dimensional models that are never static, instead as always evolving and changing. For example, nation states’ governmentalities and governing apparatuses manifest themselves differently in various subnational regions. We can see that in the ways that different regions of the US restrict women’s autonomy over their own bodies, or by looking at how different regions have different racial formations based on their diasporic communities and proximities to the Canadian and Mexican borders.

Centering region and multi-scalar lenses   449 To conduct an intersectional approach, I am suggesting that we reimagine the role of the nation by focusing on regions, both in their supranational and subnational regions. Nation and region are not strange bedfellows. Rather, seeing their interconnections complicates our understandings of oppression and how regions become seen as outside the nation-state or become sites of state-neglect and/or state-sanctioned violence. To spatialize our analyses means to be attentive to the multiple scales by which our positionalities in relation to power shift and keep being re-conceptualized. The three-dimensional model, I offer, is an intersectional tool that would better help us get at the intersection of matrixes of oppression and subordination. This can be done by how we define intersectional methods and analysis. To better capture inequalities and experiences of dispossession at the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality, nation is central. However, national formations are only one scale by which we can understand the shifting and contextual nature of racial, gender, and class formations. Thus, an attention to regional specificities within and outside the nation means to take into account how regions are always relational, whether at the global, national, transnational, or geopolitical levels. It also means to understand the relational construction of regions within nations (for example, the South, Midwest, and so on, in the US). As a research tool, having a three-dimensional model of intersectionality means to first, locate our site of study by taking into account the scale and particular histories of our sites. To do so, means to collect data and map how distinctions in particular sites are specific to the site in question. Data here refers to what we consider to be important sources of information in our research projects. However, data is never de-contextualized. First, we must contextualize our data by looking at the histories of our site that can best inform the present interlocking hierarchies. Second, we need to pay careful attention to how these hierarchies are particular to our site and how these hierarchies shift in different settings. So as to not create sweeping arguments about populations, we ought to define our populations as part and parcel of our site of study—keeping in mind that these experiences change based on the location and our scales of analysis. Thus, an intersectional methodology that pays attention to scale would first name the scale of our units of analysis and then locate it within larger scales. This would change our research questions that in turn shift our intersectional methodologies or tools that are appropriate to capture or answer the questions we pose. To further complicate the uses of intersectionality, we have to consider not just the importance of region, but also cross-regional analysis, a point made by feminist geographers and transnational and postcolonial feminists. Subnational regional analyses and cross-regional analyses offer us a lens of understanding the particular histories and contexts of certain regions that help us better understand how categories of normativity are created, regulated, and enforced. A focus on nation and national formations helps us unpack how gendered and racialized formations are part and parcel of forming the nation. However, to get at the complexity of studying gender, race, and nation, we must grapple with multiple racialized and gendered formations that are produced in various regions. Drawing on Gayatri Gopinath (2018), I highlight the tensions between region and nation. Gopinath (2018) argues that “quotidian forms of queerness and gender nonconformity that mark the space of the region, as defined both supranationally and subnationally” (5). Gopinath contends that such practices raise the issue of what she terms “‘a queer regional imaginary’ … that stands in contradistinction to a dominant national imaginary that effaces nonconforming bodies, desires, and affiliations” (5). Naming national formations and their exclusions is important, yet if we treat nations as

450  Handbook on intersectionality taken-for-granted (such as in the case of centers of empire, like the US), we bypass the nation by making it an unmarked formation that doesn’t involve any explication of how nation-states come to be and their centrality to intersectional analyses (Puri 2003). As Patil (2013) argues, “if we continue to neglect cross-border dynamics and fail to problematize the nation and its emergence via transnational processes, our analyses will remain tethered to the spatialities and temporalities of colonial modernity … Thus, we need to think of the multiple processes, at different scales, that contribute to the emergence of particular local dynamics having to do with gender” (863). However, these local dynamics do not exist in a vacuum. They are always formed in relation to region and scale. While transnational feminist scholars have called for an attention to scale in our applications of intersectionality, this is seldom taken up in sociological intersectional methodologies, except for a few exceptions. For example, in their piece “Scaling Intersectionality: Advancing Feminist Analysis of Transnational Families,” Mahler, Chaudhuri, and Patil (2015) show how simultaneously considering multiple scales of analysis, the “intimate, local, national and transnational” (100), can better help us understand the shifting positionalities, privileges, and marginalization that people occupy. They consider the importance of attending to the transnational in our understanding of intersectionality, which makes possible a more nuanced explication of people’s standpoints and experiences as they traverse and move between nations, cities, and states. Building on migration literature, they allow us to see how “the same person may be privileged locally while marginalized transnationally or vice-versa” (103). That is, we cannot understand one’s positionality by freezing them in time in place, as these aspects change depending on context. Similarly, Miguel Avalos (2022) illustrates the experiences of Mexican border commuters to the US, by looking at their differential and shifting experiences of mobilities and waiting at the San-Diego/Tijuana border. While these border migrants are considered suspect when entering the US, they are received differently when they move from the US to Mexico. I build on such studies by considering the importance of scale at the level of region. However, how do we design our intersectional research to do this? As noted above, to design our research using intersectional methodologies, we need to first lay out the specificities of our sites of study. Second, when we locate the populations we seek to study, we need a historical and contemporary understanding of what these designations mean in our particular site. This would allow us to ask research questions that take into account the historical and contemporary dispossessions of populations and how these have changed and continue to do so, based on larger questions of geopolitics, transnational social movements and mobilities, racial capitalism, among others. When we do that, we can then have a better understanding of how intersectional methodologies ought to take into account these shifting distinctions and power-dynamics. If we do not pay attention to these processes, we might fall short in conducting intersectional research and we might end up reproducing hegemonic categories of analysis that homogenizes peoples and places. When we examine postcolonial nation-states, we have to keep in mind a number of questions about how nations and regions came to be. For example, the Middle East as a region came to be called so, by centering the unnamed centers of empire, such as Europe. Recently, however, there has been a marked shift by decolonial activists and scholars, from using the designation of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region to a less colonial naming, that of South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA), which situates the geographic region as part of West Asia as opposed to being in relation to centers of empire, such as Europe or the US. Such practices show how the naming of geographical regions is not an objective designa-

Centering region and multi-scalar lenses   451 tion. In addition, the reframing of MENA to SWANA illustrates how regions can and continue to be formulated differently, based on one’s positionality and theoretical frameworks that one draws upon. How do we use intersectional methodologies to get at the nuances named above?

THE CASE OF LEBANON After gaining independence from the French in 1943, Lebanon was hailed as a nation that is multi-cultural and diverse given its multi-religious society constituted by the co-existence of 18 different religious sects, where no religious group is a majority. The French positioned Lebanon as exceptional in the Arab World, as a nation that seemingly embraces differences, especially religious, as opposed to the presumably homogeneous Muslim nations around it. This colonial discourse of Lebanese exceptionalism remains as a guiding narrative to speak about Lebanon. Lebanon has been considered as an exceptional site in the Arab World, but only in relation to the supranational region it is emplaced as part of “The Arab World.” Drawing on my work on the framing of nations as “gay-friendly,” Lebanon in particular, I show how such designations can only be made possible in relation to other nation-states that are part of supranational regions. Narratives of exceptionalism—such as “gay-friendly” distinctions or the “status of women” used as a litmus-test or sign of progressiveness of nations and regions—obscure the distinct and contextual nature of surpra- and sub-regional understandings of gendered and racialized national formations. Such national designations that emplace nations within certain regions have had and continue to have material and devastating consequences. For example, the “War on Terror,” supported by some white feminists’ projects in “saving” Muslim women, and more recently, the attempts of saving LGBT peoples, is a colonial project which seeks to demarcate what populations need “saving,” through waging wars and occupying land in the guise of supporting those of who need help. In my research on queer formations and everyday violence in Beirut, Lebanon, I ask when Lebanon as a country is described as gay-friendly, what parts of it are gay-friendly? For whom is it gay-friendly? What do these distinctions set in place? When perceived as a gay-friendly destination, which is at odds with the experiences of segments of LGBT people in Lebanon (Moussawi 2020), such designations have had tremendous effects on the ability of LGBT Lebanese people to gain asylum, based on their lived experiences of discrimination, harassment, and physical and emotional violence enacted by the state and non-state actors. When conducting my research, I had to first contend with questions of scale. While I first approached my research by only looking at Beirut, I missed the transnational discourses of modernity that have real lived experiences among my interlocutors. Since 2005, Lebanon has become recognized as an exceptional site for gay life and tourism in relation to the SWANA region, namely, the Arab World. That is to say that the nation has come to be seen as sexually and gender progressive in the region. This designation was first produced and circulated by Euro-American touristic guides, travelogues, and touristic organizations, as well as some segments of Beiruti society and Lebanese tourism agencies. However, during my research, I found that I first had to trace the histories of gay tourism in the SWANA region and Lebanon, in particular, and the histories of gay migration to Lebanon. Placing gay tourism in relation to gay migration allowed me to unpack the distinctive experiences of white gay tourists versus asylum seekers and migrants from other parts of the Arab World. While white gay tourists

452  Handbook on intersectionality have the privilege of their whiteness and passports to gain them access to the world, gay or queer migrants’ experiences are relationally produced. Queer migrants, for example, do not have the same transnational mobility that white gay tourists have. This distinction prodded me to think of how the site I studied—the city of Beirut—cannot be fully understood without taking into account these distinctions in transnational mobility. After studying the historical experiences of gay travel to the SWANA region, dating back to the late 1800s, I was able to understand the history of such formations, yet at the same time, I needed more. I could not assume that these representations of “gay Beirut” only operate in Euro-American contexts, thus, my questions shifted to account for how these narratives circulate both in Euro-American contexts and within the context of the city, nation, and region. I found that I needed to be more attentive to the multiple manifestations of such designations and how they circulate. While gay tour guides and travelogues showed me one part of the story, how these narratives get circulated and embodied in Beirut showed me another part. However, I could not only focus on Beirut, as it is a particular site and a major city in Lebanon. While it was hard to capture all the transnational and regional articulations of gay life in Beirut, I had to redesign my research to employ an intersectional approach by attending to the manifestations of these designations on multiple levels. Therefore, while gathering my data, it was not enough for me to focus on the level of the city—my site of study—rather, I had to design my research in ways that allowed me to move between multiple scales of analysis in gathering my data. Instead of only focusing on the tour guides or the experiences of LGBTQ people in Beirut, I had to ask questions about how these two are interrelated. To do so, I relied on a three-dimensional model of intersectionality that allowed me to zoom in and out of the experiences of people within the city. That is, I had to contend with the questions around how Beirut came to be a gay-friendly destination, while LGBT individuals in Beirut didn’t all experience it as such. By zooming out, I first started with the transnational circulation of these designations, attending to the global and regional distinctions being made. Second, I zoomed in, into the level of the nation, state, and city. However, to conduct my research, I couldn’t separate these different levels. I had to pay attention to how these transnational discourses operate within the country, city, and regions. My data was collected by simultaneously moving across multiple scales of analysis. While I first started collecting data on these representations of gay-friendly Beirut, I didn’t know that by looking at transnational depictions, I would gain knowledge about the multiple scales that these discourses travel. I found that these transnational and local designations of gay-friendly Beirut were constructed by positioning Lebanon in relation to other Arab countries that are seen as less progressive (Moussawi 2020). Lebanon becomes distinguished as gay-friendly and progressive only in relation to other countries in this region. However, during my fieldwork, I found that these designations elide linguistic, cultural, and regional distinctions in the region at large that produce various racial, gendered, and sexual formations—for example, other cities in Lebanon or the Arab World, such as Damascus, which are depicted as less progressive, modern, and therefore less amenable to gay life and tourism. This can also be seen by conflating SWANA with “the Arab World,” for example, by comparing life in Lebanon to Kandahar. While Lebanon is a country part of SWANA and the Arab World, Kandahar is the second largest city in Afghanistan, a country in central Asia and the greater Middle East. To compare cities to countries creates false distinctions that are meant to conflate “the Middle East” and the “Arab World,” as undifferentiated regions and formations. Gendered and racialization processes in the two contexts are dissimilar and have specific

Centering region and multi-scalar lenses   453 regional and historical contexts. Such analysis of binaries can be applied in multiple contexts and settings. For example, in the US, it helps us understand various racialization within certain contexts and regions. Moral Panics The ongoing attempts at representing Lebanon positively, while degenerating other nations and peoples in the region, is illustrated by the story of the arrest and humiliation of an allegedly HIV-positive, gay Syrian tattoo artist. In November 2018, the Lebanese state arrested a twenty-something year old Syrian gay man who worked as a tattoo artist, for allegedly being HIV positive and threatening the safety of his clients (and the city and nation). The man whom I call Karim was humiliated at police stations, in addition to being asked to dance and perform demeaning acts at the police station. While the Lebanese state and the Medical Association of Lebanon have outlawed the uses of the French colonial “anal probings” to prove one as having engaged in acts of anal penetration, the state continues to use it but only when targeting certain vulnerable populations: working class, non-Lebanese nationals, refugees, and gender non-normative individuals. This is not surprising, given the contradictions of the state, its irrational and irregular crackdowns mostly—if not, exclusively—targeting already vulnerable populations, in the name of protecting the nation (Puri 2016b). Using intersectional methodologies to understand this case requires us to think, not only of Karim’s gender and sexuality, rather, it asks us to rethink the multiple and shifting positionalities that he occupies. The case above mobilized moral panics around race, gender, sexuality, and its ties to “foreign bodies.” Puri’s (2016b) concept of “sexual states” usefully shows when and how the state simultaneously creates and reacts to moral panics around HIV/AIDS and employs police crackdowns on working-class LGBT minorities and trans individuals. The period from 2005 to 2021 in Lebanon was marked by a series of assassinations, an Israeli war in 2006, multiple ISIS suicide bombings, the continuous targeting and murders of dissenting voices, a complete economic collapse, a failed state, and shortage of basic services (such as electricity and clean water), including a garbage crisis. Sexual states do not simply regulate sexuality, but they create sexual projects that are always tied to class, gender, and processes of racialization. States use sexuality as a means of re-asserting their relevance, and in the case of Lebanon, an immediate state intervention to “protect” the nation. The state mobilized Karim’s case to further spread and sediment myths around the transmission of HIV, however, more so, it linked it to racialized and “foreign” persons. The state disclosed his identity—going against the confidentiality laws it has put in place—and created a moral panic about what it deemed his “malicious” and “reckless” behaviors. While it was later found that Karim was not HIV-positive; rather, he had a fight with his Lebanese boss, who reported false accounts about him, Karim’s life and career were ruined. Karim’s national identity as Syrian, his racialization as Syrian, his sexual orientation as gay, and his “unconventional” work as a tattoo artist are relevant here. Despite the Lebanese Ministry of Health’s response clarifying that HIV-positive persons do not threaten public health by working at their jobs, the state mobilized against Karim to cast him, and other racialized bodies like him, as foreign threats that need to be policed and punished. Even though this happened during the middle of multiple crises in a failed state, grassroots-led protests against the governing body, and the lack of a functional government, still the (sexual) state decided to pursue Karim’s case— reifying which racialized populations need to be policed. Despite the fact that Syrians

454  Handbook on intersectionality are racialized in Lebanon as “different,” this was heightened during the war in Syria and the influx of Syrian migrants and refugees. Thus, to understand Karim’s story means to employ intersectional tools that take into account not only his gender and sexuality, but also what is happening at the geopolitical levels that led to these new emergent racializations. As Alexander (1994, 14) powerfully reminds us, nation-states “register a suspicion of an unruly sexuality, omnipotent and omniscient enough to subvert the economic imperatives of the nation’s interests. From the point of view of the state, it is a sexuality that has to be disciplined and regulated in order that it might become economically productive.” Thus, I ask who becomes suspicious in the eyes of the nation? How can we understand such processes without centering the role of racial capitalism and who is deemed as productive (and potentially exploitative) by the state? The story of Karim cannot be understood without centering his positionality as a working-class Syrian migrant, seen as expendable labor. Karim became racialized as a threat to Lebanese society due to his “foreignness,” sexuality, and alleged HIV status. Karim’s case is not an aberration—Syrian and Palestinian populations’ access to space was and continues to be controlled and manifested differently in various regions in Lebanon. During the war in Syria, some regions in Lebanon placed a curfew on the mobility of Syrian refugees, who were seen as suspect, oversexualized, and posing potential dangers to Lebanese citizens and the nation. In other regions, Syrian settlements were destroyed and burned. These regions have their particular connections to Syria and are shaped by their political allegiances, which orient them toward enacting policies and actions that police Syrian refugees. These forms of racializations have implications beyond sexual and gendered representations of immigrants within Lebanon. On August 4, 2020, an explosion happened at the Port of Beirut in a warehouse storing over 2,000 tons of ammonium nitrate—which had been stored for over six years. This explosion killed over 200 people, injured more than 7,000, and destroyed the whole city. Though working-class Bangladeshi citizens were one of the migrant groups most affected by this blast, their stories were erased and rendered invisible in the coverage of this event. Due to state neglect and corruption, this turned out to the be the third biggest explosion after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This happened in the year 2020, where, in addition to the COVID-19 pandemic, Lebanon went through (and is still going through) an economic collapse and crisis, another failed government, and ongoing violence against anti-government protestors. Racialized working-class migrants, such as the Bangladeshi population, become regarded as surplus, cheap, and expendable labor, not worthy of life. The Lebanese nation-state employs racialized distinctions on some populations, like Syrians, Palestinians, and Bangladeshis, to name a few, who become seen as “foreign” and constitutive outsiders to the imagined Lebanese nation, and therefore outside the purview of the rights afforded to citizens.

CITIES AND REGIONS While Lebanon has been depicted as gay-friendly, a closer look shows that it is primarily, if not exclusively, Beirut that has gained Lebanon this designation. In the case of the SWANA region, there is a large focus on studying urban areas or what Hallberstam (2005, 36) calls “metronormativity.” The showcasing of the capital city of Beirut, while excluding other regions within the nation is a case in point. This has the unintended effect of equating major cities and state capitals to the nation, while obscuring life in other cities and regions within the nation. For example, LGBTQ lives in Beirut become a stand-in for LGBTQ formations in the

Centering region and multi-scalar lenses   455 country, concealing conditions of life in other cities like the northern city of Tripoli—one of the poorest and most state-neglected cities on the Mediterranean—and the region of the south of Lebanon, which endured decades of Israeli military occupation. Beirut becomes projected as “gay-friendly” by segments of Lebanese society, as well as Euro-American representations, which cast it as a city where gay life can and does exist. Such designations situate Beirut as the cosmopolitan and touristic center of Lebanon in contrast to what are deemed as homogeneous cities and rural regions in the country. Even within Beirut, not all neighborhoods are seen as “gay-friendly.” Even though there is no “gayborhood” in Beirut, Christian areas become regarded as more gay-friendly than their Muslim counterparts, and seculars are seen as more gay-friendly than Muslims and Christians, though Muslims are painted as much less likely to have gay-friendly places. These designations are circulated and made possible through the prism of Euro-American understandings of gayness and gay-friendliness, which gauge gay-friendliness through the presence of gay-friendly establishments, mainstream LGBT organizing, visibility of LGBT groups, and so on. While historically, French and British colonial centers deemed Muslims as backward and barbaric through their “sexually licentious nature” and where same-sex sexualities were abundant, the shift in the narrative in the late 1900s painted Muslims as being homophobic (Moussawi 2020, 51). Understanding projections of Lebanon within the SWANA region, as well as how Beirut comes to stand in for the nation, provides another methodological tool for how we can use scale to better understand experiences of oppressions at the intersections of nation, race, and gender. This requires an understanding of how geopolitical regions are used to create national narratives that are gendered, sexualized, and racialized through the discourses of modernity, progressiveness, and proximity to the West. At the same time, these discourses also resonate internally, for not all groups within the nation are treated equally. For instance, in Lebanon, Christians are racialized as similar to Europeans by tracing their genealogy, especially of Maronite Christians, to Phoenician descent, in sharp contrast to Lebanese Muslims who are seen in relation to their heritage as Arabs. In this case, religion dovetails with other gendered, sexual, and racial distinctions to create hierarchies of belonging within the nation. Thus, Lebanon’s national representations also draw on internal regional and provincial differences. Considering the region within the nation allows us to look at and examine the simultaneous and multiple scales by which nation-states operate to understand that oppression and inequalities are not only national but also look and function differently at different levels within the nation. The nation produces hierarchal distinctions among its own populations. Even as Beirut is lauded for its sexual progressiveness, people from the south of Lebanon and other regions remain disappeared through Syrian and Israeli military occupations and become conveniently and deliberately forgotten by the state. This is not an uncommon practice, as we can see links to the Kashmiri case (Zia 2019). The example of Kashmir is quite relevant, where Muslims are cast as undesirable and as separate from the Hindu nation-state (Zia 2019). Kashmir becomes erased in the representation of Indian diversity and India as a touristic destination. It deliberately becomes a “forgotten” region, so as not to showcase the Indian state’s neglect and violence against Muslim Kashmiris. China serves as another example, where the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority in the north-western region of Xinjiang—the largest subnational region in China—are persecuted, killed, and put into “re-education” camps (BBC News 2021). The Chinese government has been accused of genocide in its treatment of Uyghurs, in its attempts to kill them, place them in camps, where they are “tortured and sexually abused,” and using them as forced free labor and forcibly sterilizing women (BBW News 2021, para. 2).

456  Handbook on intersectionality Studying China, then, must attend to these differential regional formations and racializations to better get at the experiences of racially minoritized populations. To not do so means to dismiss the state’s violent projects against certain populations and how China perceives itself as a nation. Similarly, other areas or regions of Lebanon are rendered opaque and not worthy of the nation—this is seen through state neglect of other cities and rural areas. To be sure, there is state neglect of Beirut, particularly in the case of the explosion, but this neglect is even more salient in some areas of the city, other cities in Lebanon, and regions in the nation.

INTERSECTIONALITY: SCALES, REGIONS, AND NATIONS In this chapter, I examined what it means to conduct intersectional analysis on race, nation, and gender. In doing so, I explored some methodological tools inspired by postcolonial and transnational feminist lenses to highlight the importance of colonial legacies, their afterlives in nation formation, and the significance but also the limits of nations. My discussion pivots around two key points: that nations include and exclude groups of people based on racial, gender, and sexual associations; and that nations also assume gendered, sexual, and racial distinctions. The focus on Lebanon shows that postcolonial nations build on colonial legacies to marginalize and criminalize their own populations, drawing lines between those who belong and those who do not regardless of citizenship or national status. The representation of rural areas and provinces outside of Beirut as backward demonstrates how nations imagine themselves as well as the material consequences of these imaginations. Techniques of policing those who transgress gender-normative boundaries, the state’s targeting of marginalized populations or actively neglecting them shapes who is racialized or seen excluded from dominant nationalisms. Using the methodological tools, I outline above, a regional analysis makes it possible for us to unpack the same issue at multiple scales, thereby allowing us to attend to the multi-dimensionality of people’s experiences. In practice, intersectional methodologies can inform our research questions and how we go about them. For example, instead of assuming people’s experiences—as frozen in time—we must ask how people experience their lives in various parts of the city, region, and nation. The experiences of populations at micro levels can and do shed light on their racializations in broader settings, such as the regional, transnational, and global. To get at these connections, our questions must consider and move between scales to get at the “full picture.” While Lebanon is a small country, I illustrated how attention to multiple scales and regions helps us unpack the various racialized and gendered projects that seek to police and restrict certain populations versus others. It is not enough to center gender, race, and sexuality—we must think of these as evolving formations that have different meanings at multiple levels. Scale allows us to zoom in and out of a particular issue at hand, showing us the various intersectional manifestations of oppression such as gendered and racialization processes within the nation.

NOTE 1. 2.

The format of these statements is inspired by Jyoti Puri’s (2016a, 477) “Sexuality, State, Nation,” in Introducing the New Sexualities Studies, edited by Nancy Fischer and Steven Seidman. Personal communication with Vrushali Patil on July, 5th 2022

Centering region and multi-scalar lenses   457

REFERENCES Alexander, M. Jacqui. 1994. “Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas,” Feminist Review 48 (1): 5–23. Avalos, Miguel. 2022. “Border Regimes and Temporal Sequestration: An Autoethnography of Waiting,” The Sociological Review 70 (1): 124–39. BBC News. 2021. “Who Are the Uyghurs and Why Is China Being Accused of Genocide?” https://​www​ .bbc​.co​.uk/​news/​world​-asia​-china​-22278037, accessed September 25, 2021. Cohen, Cathy. 1997. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3 (4): 437–46. Combahee River Collective. 1977 [1979]. “A Black Feminist Statement,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 42 (3–4): 271–80. Gopinath, Gayatri. 2018. Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. New York: New York University Press. Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan (eds). 1994. Scattered Hegemonies. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Halberstam, Jack. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press. Haritaworn, Jin. 2015. Queer Lovers and Hateful Others: Regenerating Violent Times and Places. London: Pluto Press. Kim-Puri, H.J. 2005. “Conceptualizing Gender-Sexuality-State-Nation: An Introduction,” Gender & Society 19 (2): 137–59. Mahler, Sarah, Mayurakshi Chaudhuri, and Vrushali Patil. 2015. “Scaling Intersectionality: Advancing Feminist Analysis of Transnational Families,” Sex Roles 73 (3): 100–12. Moussawi, Ghassan. 2020. Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Moussawi, Ghassan and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz. 2020. “A Queer Sociology: On Power, Race, and Decentering Whiteness,” Sociological Forum 35 (4): 1272–89. Patil, Vrushali. 2013. “From Patriarchy to Intersectionality: A Transnational Feminist Assessment of How Far We’ve Really Come,” Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38 (4): 847–67 Puri, Jyoti. 2003. Encountering Nationalism. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Puri, Jyoti. 2016a. “Sexuality, State, Nation,” in Introducing the New Sexualities, edited by Nancy L. and Steven Siedman, 477–84. London: Routledge. Puri, Jyoti. 2016b. Sexual States: Governance and the Decriminalization of Sodomy in India’s Present. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zia, Ather. 2019. Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.

27. Intersectionality and migrant smuggling research Gabriella Sanchez

The persona of the migrant smuggler looms large in the rhetoric of migration worldwide. A quick look at the literature on migration almost immediately reveals depictions of smugglers as inherently violent predators. There is an overabundance of graphic narratives of their engagement in the rampant abuse of migrants, including forms of financial, physical, and even sexual exploitation. Smugglers are also described as having an almost preternatural predisposition to partner with others like themselves who operate in what are described as the dark criminal corners of the world. These depictions, captured in detail in academic articles and popular literature, often find their way into government reports and policy briefs. In them, the transnational, tentacular ties of smugglers are so convincingly narrated that isolated or even extreme cases of smuggling-related violence are often sufficient to justify entire immigration enforcement strategies or used to make the case for the vast budgets that support them. Over the years, these smuggling narratives have been exported, adapted to migratory corridors in need of enforcement. Police accounts often describe how smuggling actors from distant places, members of underground and obscure networks, seem to suddenly emerge as connected to groups operating in newer countries even if they have never set foot in them (Varese 2011). Once transplanted, they are no longer engaged in smuggling alone but in the trafficking of anything from organs to weapons, and from sex slaves to children (Shelley 2018). When questioned about the sources of these claims, researchers (often male, often white) tend to refer to trusted yet confidential and obscure informants and intelligence sources, or to special investigations into the world of smugglers, arguing they obtained unique and exclusive access to the world of those who for a fee or in-kind payment facilitate the journeys for those unable to access the increasingly restrictive landscape of visas and passports worldwide. I do not mean for any of these statements to suggest that smuggling facilitators do not engage in abuse or exploitation, or that their trade cannot be violent or cruel. Neither do I question their contacts or connections with many other people around the world – this is after all, an essential part of their role and ultimately the basis of their success. My own work documents countless examples of the forms of violence and abuse migrants traveling irregularly face during their transits, quite often at the hands of those who facilitate their journeys. What is troubling is how the nature of smuggling claims remain unquestioned despite the scant empirical evidence that supports them. Most official and policy publications on smuggling continue to be based on secondary sources – often publications citing each other – rather than on the perspectives of those targeted by counter-smuggling processes. But what is truly concerning is how mainstream characterizations of smuggling and its actors are systematically, uncritically reproduced and consumed by migration scholars. In other words: even despite their clearly gendered, sexist, and often racist undertones, the depictions of smuggling facilitators and their practices have hardly been questioned intersectionally – especially by those examining the convergence of criminal justice with migration control. 458

Intersectionality and migrant smuggling research  459 I have found disconcerting how migration scholarship often relies on problematic tropes of the people who facilitate irregular migration – namely, their monolithic characterization as violent men of color – in ways that leave unquestioned the oppressive systems of migration enforcement and control in which they operate. This should not come as a surprise. Immigration studies have historically and traditionally focused on demographic aspects of population movements, and on the so-called pull and push factors, often leaving outside of their analysis other critical processes at the core of migration, like the social construction of race and citizenship (see Sanchez and Romero 2010). Most migration scholars often speak of the persona of the smuggling facilitator along the same terms used by the state, as if it constituted a neutral construct, devoid of all the markers of identity that have transformed it into the quintessential predator in migration governance discourse. In the process, most engagements with smuggling from within migration studies are complicit of the reproduction of state-centric racialized and racist tropes. There is some room for hope. The lurid tales that often surround migrant smuggling narratives have been increasingly subjected to questioning. There are growing numbers of researchers and journalists who relying on empirical work, have highlighted how most of those identified as smugglers by law enforcement tend to be in fact migrants or asylum seekers themselves facilitating their own journeys (Achilli 2018; Alagna 2020). Empirical work has also confirmed how smuggling facilitators are quite often people who lack connections to criminal networks (Maher 2018). Many in fact are members of marginalized communities, working independently and using their often-limited means to support the journeys of migrants unable to travel regularly (Arrouche forthcoming; Richter 2019). And while largely ignored in the literature, they also include women (UNODC 2021) and children (Moreno-Mena and Avedaño-Millán 2015). The growth of critical insights in smuggling and counter-smuggling research certainly constitutes a motive for excitement. Yet again, even among the efforts to question the validity of the dominant smuggling narrative, direct engagements with the ways race, class, and gender intersect to foster criminalization continue to be minimal at best. And many researchers, despite their good intentions, end up privileging graphic, decontextualized depictions of migration enforcement and control, which ultimately vilify those behind migrants’ journeys and by proxy, the people who rely on them. In line with the contributions to this Handbook, this chapter argues that intersectionality-informed methods, through their focus on identifying social inequality and the deployment of critical and engaged research (Romero 2018), expose how racism is normalized in smuggling policy and scholarship. I argue that race, gender, and citizenship are elements mobilized as part of the social construction of smuggling actors – specifically the creation of the gendered and racialized persona of the smuggler as a male of color. I rely on intersectionality to shed light on the ways policy and most academic research have been complicit in the manufacturing of smuggling by reproducing racialized and racist perceptions that echo those of the state. Simultaneously, I also rely on intersectionality-informed case studies to show how the concept can help researchers identify the vilification of those behind the mobility efforts of the poor and the criminalization of irregularized migration. With these goals in mind, I first provide an overview of my own methodological approach to the study of smuggling and how it has relied on intersectionality. I then move to show how the smuggling narrative is being introduced in countries around the world by nations vested in migration control. I examine two examples from my own fieldwork to show ways

460  Research handbook on intersectionality in which intersectionality can help researchers understand the way migration regimes have manufactured the practice we refer to as smuggling. First, I explore the European Union (EU) migration discourse surrounding the “smuggling business model,” a term that has been systematically deployed by the European Union as part of its strategy against irregular migration, and its specific deployment via characterizations of smuggling facilitators as violent and hypersexual African and Arab men, often referring to their potential to engage in terrorism. I then turn to the smuggling narratives concerning the facilitation of irregular migration in Latin America. I argue that said narratives emulate the decades-long tropes used in connection with the War on Drugs. Narratives of cartels and organized crime provide an exceptional framework to foster fear towards smuggling and its actors, by connecting them to drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) operating in Mexico. The alleged ties between smugglers and drug traffickers have become a claim few migration scholars and commentators have dared to challenge or criticize, despite the lack of empirical data to back them up. My hope is to showcase how intersectional approaches can help researchers, policy makers, and activists identify how migration narratives, even those critical of immigration control strategies by both the EU and US, often rely on a series of racialized, gendered, and racist tropes, that pose actual risks to migrants’ access to justice. For this I rely on EU and US cases as examples of how intersectionality-informed research can reveal the weaponization of migrants’ mobility practices as criminal, but also re-signify the processes present in the facilitation of irregular migration while denouncing their growing criminalization. I argue that the use of an intersectional lens in the study of highly criminalized practices like smuggling effectively reveals the gendered and racialized targeting inherent to migration enforcement and control, and the ways in which this disproportionately impacts the poor, women, young people, and people of color along the migration pathway.

A FEW NOTES ON METHODS For the last 15 years I have studied migrant smuggling and the state’s responses to its facilitation. I have researched smuggling dynamics along the US-Mexico border, in the Americas, North Africa, the Middle East and throughout Europe. Relying on personal contacts and referrals from past interviewees, as well as friends and colleagues and a great deal of happenstance, I have been able to conduct work directly alongside smuggling facilitators, their clients, friends, and family members. Contrary to the work that many journalists and academics do, my goal has never been to map smuggling criminal networks or facilitators’ ties to other criminal groups. And while money matters are ultimately and always discussed, I have never needed to ask a facilitator how much money they make or how they spend it. Instead, I have always been more interested in how race, class, gender, and citizenship as social identities become operationalized in smuggling by facilitators, the migrants who rely on their services, and the people they come in contact with – from law enforcement to members of criminalized groups, and from scholars to members of humanitarian organizations. But this process did not start as part of an academic project. As an undergraduate student, I was hired as a bilingual intake interviewer by the Maricopa County Superior Court, in Arizona. My job – described in detail in Sanchez (2014) – involved interviewing men and women charged with felony offenses prior to their sentencing hearings. My initial interviews

Intersectionality and migrant smuggling research  461 were quite general – they involved questions on employment, drug use, and residential histories. As a result of changes in prosecutorial priorities in the county, I started to interview almost exclusively men and women charged with migrant smuggling and related offenses. Pretty soon I became interested in the ways the people I interviewed were spoken of by my colleagues, my supervisors and the judicial staff hearing their cases. Behind doors, judges, probation officers, migration agents, and jail staff always described smuggling facilitators as criminals and rapists; as greedy, abusive, and exploitative, but more specifically as Mexican men. I was also intrigued by the ways in which the migrants who traveled with smugglers and who were often the subject of acts of violence and other crimes also described their interactions with the latter in terms of co-responsibility, care, fear, and mutual respect in ways that clashed with those of my colleagues. As a woman of color and a migrant myself whose relatives had relied on smuggling to enter the US for at least three generations, it did not take long to see how race, class, and gender were essential elements in socially and legally constructing smuggling facilitators. Yet at this time my interviews were still guided by plain curiosity rather than by any intellectual aspirations. It took several years before I had a better grasp of how the social identities assigned to smuggling facilitators and their groups had real outcomes in their life’s experiences and opportunities. Having quit my job, as a doctoral student and drawing on the information my former interviewees had shared, I began conducting ethnographic work. This involved visiting the places they had recommended, occasionally running into them, spending long periods of time speaking with their friends and acquaintances – people who despite performing smuggling-related tasks did not consider themselves part of the smuggling process per se. I also began interacting with law enforcement officers, this time as a researcher, drawing from the seven years I spent working in the court system. No longer being a colleague often allowed them to share insights that would have not been seen as professional or appropriate for the workplace. Their responses taught me how to approach other law enforcement personnel on the ground. Over the years, these interactions have allowed me to conduct community-based, participatory research with smuggling facilitators and their families (Sanchez 2017; Sanchez and Zhang 2020), as well as with migrants who rely on facilitators for their transits. This has required often living for long periods of time in predominantly migrant communities where smuggling is common – in fact an important source of income for their members. Researching smuggling has required “uncovering power, privilege, and opportunity structures and their link to social identities” (Romero 2018: 11). The two cases I describe below, constitute examples of intersectionality-informed research, as Kamala Visweswaran says, “moved by different sets of questions concerning power, domination and representation” than those typically examined in smuggling, and have required an examination into how I am myself “positioned (and not always by choice) in opposition to dominant discourses and structures of power” (1994: 140).

A WORLD FULL OF SMUGGLERS? Empirically-informed data and ethnographic work from around the world increasingly shows the ways in which the concept of migrant smuggling – the facilitation of the irregular entry of a person into a country different from their own in exchange of a material benefit (UNODC

462  Research handbook on intersectionality 2000) – is being exported to a growing number of countries. This is done as part of externalization efforts, primarily by countries seeking to curtail migration from specific regions and their citizens. Aside from the designation of vast budgets to counter migration (Fakhry 2021), and the training and deployment of law enforcement officials around the world (see INTERPOL 2022; UNODC 2011), a key component of this expansive effort has been the introduction of smuggling statutes into countries’ criminal legislation (Brachet 2018). These measures do not impact smuggling facilitators alone. There are data that clearly point to the growth of counter-smuggling activities as a wider criminalization project impacting migrants themselves and those they meet throughout their journeys. In other words, as part of migration enforcement and control efforts, governments are expanding the concept of both smuggling and the facilitation of irregular migration, in the process casting a wider criminalizing net, reaching a much more diverse group of actors. For example, a 2021 report on smuggling caselaw from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) showed that across countries like Spain, France, and the UK, the wives of irregular migrants have been charged with smuggling for sharing a place of residence with their undocumented husbands (UNODC 2021). In Turkey, Greece, and Senegal, grieving parents have been prosecuted for smuggling following the tragic deaths of their children on board of shipwrecked dinghies and boats, on the grounds they financed or sponsored the journey that ultimately cost their children’s lives (AP 2020; Fallon and Malichudis 2020; Wallis 2020). In Niger, the long-standing transportation system that once allowed for the expansion of industry and trade in the Sahel virtually changed overnight with the introduction of a smuggling statute, under the guidance of UNODC (Brachet 2018; Fakhry 2021). Seeking to contain migrants’ journeys towards destinations in North Africa, the new law turned truck drivers and other transporters into smuggling facilitators. This deprived entire communities of their livelihoods and left thousands of people stranded – not to mention even more dependent upon clandestine forms of transportation to migrate (Moser 2020; OMCT 2019). In Central America, Mexico, and the US-Mexico Border, community activists have increasingly been the target of authorities accusing them of smuggling migrants across borders simultaneously in coordination with criminal networks (Frank-Vitale and Cordero-Diaz 2019). Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) systematically report having to deny emergency aid or transportation assistance to migrants out of fear of being labeled as smugglers or traffickers by local police departments eager to fulfill migration enforcement agreements (WOLA 2019). Journalists and migrant advocates across Europe have documented countless cases involving extremely vulnerable young, male African and Arab migrants who in an effort to offset or reduce their smuggling fees accept to steer flimsy boats loaded with migrants onto Italian coasts, what often leads them to be labeled as the boats’ captains or pilots when detected by police, or in the event of an unfortunate shipwreck, to be charged with the deaths of the victims (Alagna 2020; Tondo 2021). All these examples showcase both the expanding nature of the global smuggling complex and researchers’ increasingly critical eye. Ultimately, they also stand as evidence of how law enforcement’s claims of smuggling as a form of organized crime have ultimately been used not to go after dangerous gang members, transnationally organized criminals, and networked criminal barons. Instead, the evidence shows how the target of counter-smuggling most often are migrants, their families, independent, low-scale facilitators, and the many people who working independently and without criminal intentions provide humanitarian assistance that allows migrants to survive along the migration pathway.

Intersectionality and migrant smuggling research  463 As mentioned above, there is a growing body of research which has been critical in revealing the holes that exist in many of the official claims surrounding smuggling. Yet multiple scholars, policy makers, and activists seem unaware of the ways in which race, class, and gender are mobilized in smuggling rhetoric, and by extension, in policy and practice. For example, even when charged with almost identical crimes, humanitarian organizations and activists insist on situating their actions as diametrically opposed to those of smuggling facilitators – or even of migrants facilitating their own journeys. In the process of portraying themselves as legitimate humanitarians, some activists echo the official claims that reduce the acts of smuggling facilitators to crimes, in the process reinscribing notions of the white male (which constitute the majority of those represented as working in search and rescue processes) as savior/rescuer, where brown and black men appear as predators or invaders. The racist, colonial tropes that describe smugglers as inherently violent and savage men of color preying on their own are ubiquitous in migration control discourse. Graphic depictions of smuggler-initiated violence are widely recreated in academic and policy texts without context and shared virtually by demand with audiences in both public and closed-door events. Such tropes distinctively privilege voyeuristic characterizations of migrants’ racialized bodies as the suffering and captive bodies of other racialized men. This degree of fetishism is particularly visible when discussing the experiences of migrant women in smuggling. There is a problematic and excessive focus on accounts of sexual violence impacting migrant women, who are in turn are depicted as young, naive, virginal, and heterosexual sex “slaves,” all images evocative – in fact, a continuation of – imperialistic, colonial narratives. This focus, far from shedding light on gender-based violence, demonstrates scholars’ narrow understandings of it, and by extension their limited awareness of the ways in which sexuality, intimacy, and power are mobilized by people on the migration pathway (Vogt 2018). This essentialism is worrisome. It solidifies and reproduces the western aspiration of establishing the smuggler as a nefarious, immoral brown and black male who targets other brown and black migrant bodies to hurt them (Abu-Lughod 2002). Recirculated and repeated by scholars and policy makers, mainstream characterizations of smuggling facilitators are also complicit in exempting the state of its role at creating the very conditions that lead people to travel clandestinely and requiring the help of guides and brokers. Furthermore, they leave intact the ways in which identity markers become neutralized before being weaponized as components of immigration enforcement. Using intersectionality to make visible the intersections of race and colonialism as a tool is essential at helping us identify the mobilization of these tropes, and to question the ways in which together they are assembled in smuggling discourse. For example, European pleas to position white humanitarians as rescuers often ignore the way in which class, race, and citizenship already privilege their recognition as legitimate saviors, which ultimately exempts them from the smuggler label. This privilege is not granted to young African migrant men piloting boats to European shores for no profit, who despite their humanitarian efforts on behalf of the migrants they transport are systematically charged with smuggling (Tondo 2021). By remaining blind to their privilege (see Romero 2018: 10), most European engagements with humanitarianism opt not to expose that race is a major element of smuggling convictions.

464  Research handbook on intersectionality

THE NEVER CHANGING STORY There is a quite defined set of ideas at the core of the EU’s migrant smuggling discourse. An examination of virtually any official EU publication attributes irregular migration into the continent to smuggling. This is described as an organized, transnational crime carried out by ethnic mafias and groups operating in and outside of the EU, under an alleged “business model” (Europol and INTERPOL 2016) – a model that as Brachet (2018) shows, has never been clearly defined. Smugglers are mainly described as Arab and African predators of naive, ill-informed migrants from the Middle East and Africa, who out of desperation and financial misery fall prey to false lies and promises, or who die while on route through the desert or the sea after having blindly trusted the words of conniving criminals. During the pandemic and despite the lack of data, multiple publications argued that smugglers were taking advantage of the reduction on their demand to reorganize their networks, reaching out to actors in even farther locations, and relying on even more advanced technology to carry out their trade (IOM 2021). Others have argued that the only way to contain the ever-evolving, highly complex operations that smugglers carried out required countering the drivers behind migration (namely, poverty, unemployment, underdevelopment, and conflict), alongside the deployment of more intensive information campaigns, and a more aggressive, coordinated counter-smuggling response (GITOC 2020; UNODC 2020). It is undeniable that the pandemic has impacted the mobility patterns of migrants. As an increasing number of countries closed their borders allegedly to contain the spread of COVID-19, both migrants and those facilitating their journeys had to devise new routes and strategies allowing them to move across territories (Sanchez and Achilli 2020). It is quite plausible that as shown by other researchers, many smuggling facilitators, under an increased level of surveillance, turned to violence and abuse with more frequency. In the process, undoubtedly the lives of those who travel with them, their families and their communities were compromised (Achilli 2018). Hundreds of migrants have reportedly died during the pandemic, the deaths of many traceable at least in part to the actions of smugglers. On December 9, 2021 alone, a truck carrying an estimated 180 migrants overturned in the vicinity of the Guatemala-Mexico border, leaving at least 54 dead (Lopez 2021). The nationalities of the migrants who arrive in the EU and the UK also suggest people are traveling from a wider range of countries, which could be a potential indicator of the transnational reach of some smuggling groups and the ability of some to build connections despite the distance. And while the pandemic initially led to a significant reduction in the number of crossing attempts in the Mediterranean, by 2021 the number of migrants arriving at the coasts of Spain and Italy had indeed surpassed prior records, and remained high for most of the calendar year, which also suggest the continued reliance on smuggling services after the initial months of the pandemic (Arrouche forthcoming). It would be a mistake not to recognize the importance that migrant smuggling plays in both US and the EU’s migratory trends. Yet to label any of these dynamics as new, emerging, or as proof of smuggling’s “evolving” nature, would be equally amiss. A quick examination of the empirical literature on smuggling reveals that the very nature of smuggling has always relied on its actors’ ability to overcome ever-changing surveillance controls, ramped up enforcement, conflict and warfare. Deaths and tragedies have also been a constant in smuggling and a tragic reminder of the way enforcement leaves few options to people other than migrating clandestinely. Similar if not identical claims of smuggling “evolving” are so commonplace that they

Intersectionality and migrant smuggling research  465 were in fact part of the original language used by a small group of European countries which in the late 1990s first introduced what ultimately became the UNODC Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants in 2000 (Gallagher 2002). Indeed, the discourse against smuggling facilitators has remained virtually intact, what has in turn driven data collection approaches. For the last 20 years the practice has been largely articulated as a foreign transnational threat (Kuschminder and Triandafyllidou 2020) under the control of greedy and violent men from the global south, allegedly constituted into gangs (Maher 2018). The almost uncontrollable reach of these foreign syndicates, we are told, constitutes an extreme threat to the stability of the global north, for the other forms of crime that it can, ironically, smuggle – terrorism being at the top of European and American policy makers’ concerns, despite the lack of empirical evidence concerning connections between these practices (Achilli and Tinti 2019). In the case of the EU narratives, it is an intersectional content analysis that allows us to identify the articulation of the smuggler as racialized, gendered, and foreign, a construct that has proven to be quite resilient and dependable, for it is systematically redeployed whenever tragedy strikes. The so-called racialized gangs are not seen or depicted as white or European, but as African, Arab, or Muslim. Their actions are often explained as rooted in “cultural practices” like juju, voodoo, or “honor killings,” rather than to the lack of legal, safe, and equally accessible paths to access visas or passports allowing migrants to travel freely and at low risk. Official communications from the EU and international organizations, as well as journalistic coverage, often include references to facilitators’ tribal ancestry, suggesting a primitive, hostile nature in opposition to western forms of governance. Specially in the case of Libya, tribal groups involved in smuggling tend to be depicted as backward and fixed in their ancestral desert ways (see, for example, Martin 2017); or as savage nomads operating along the dangerous routes migrants travel through, turning them into captives and subjecting them to slave-like conditions (Bocchi 2018). Devoid of context and perspectives of smuggling facilitators themselves, academic, legal, and policy depictions of migrant smuggling in Africa become reduced to voyeuristic, orientalist representations of black and brown bodies victimized by no other than people like themselves.

BRINGING IN THE – AFRICAN – WOMEN The need for intersectionality-informed approaches becomes quite evident in the excessive focus EU academic and policy publications have placed on documenting the sexual violence experienced specifically by black African women. Graphic descriptions of torture, abuse, and assault concerning women on the migration trail focus almost exclusively on the experiences of black women and are centered on the persona of the smuggling facilitator as the perpetrator. While well intentioned, the efforts by EU academics and policy makers to document gendered forms of violence and the focus on sexual victimization – rather, on the sexuality of black African women alone – are problematic. By this I do not mean to suggest that black African women do not experience violence, or that it is less real that the kind experienced by other women. My point resides on the ways violence on the migration trail is articulated and the tropes it reproduces. In official reports, academic articles and journalistic content on smuggling, migrant African women racialized as black are almost solely spoken of as victims of trafficking – Nigerian women figuring prominently in official reports – at the hands of

466  Research handbook on intersectionality African and Arab men who turn them into “sex slaves” (see, for example, Austrian Red Cross 2017; HRW 2019). This tendency in the texts is clearly evocative of the historical, colonial fetishization of female and male black bodies – especially in research circles (Holmes 2016) that depicts them as hypersexual and deviant. Methods like narrative inquiry used in content analysis of reports allow us to see how bodies of color – particularly black and indigenous bodies – “have long been a site on which ideas about racial inferiority and difference are inscribed” (Collins 2004; Strings 2019, in Stacey and Forbes 2022). “Saturated with sexuality,” the experiences of black African women on the migration pathway become “deviant, abnormal and in opposition to European values and beliefs. The depictions of both black, male and female African bodies – namely, the portrayal of black women “as promiscuous and hypersexual,” and of black men “as hypermasculine, virile and domineering” (Collins 2004: 42, in Stacey and Forbes 2022) – are used, not just to explain black men’s alleged propensity for violence, or their alleged treatment of women, but also to explain, and even justify, the kinds of violence women encounter during their journeys (see Ghani 2020). In the smuggling discourse, black bodies carry what Stacey and Forbes call “[an] inscribed inferiority, … racial fetishization [being] part and parcel of the reproduction of racism” (2022: 374). Constructing black African bodies as inherently propense to or as the target of sexual misconduct reifies the ways in which black men and women have been historically portrayed as both primitive and mysterious, yet sexually available (Holmes 2016). In fact, I argue that the reliance on graphic depictions of sexual violence, enslavement, and exploitation of black African women at the hands of black African men present in smuggling reports and other publications should not come as a surprise, for they are part of the larger Eurocentric rhetoric that has relied on the imposition of notions of deviance, abnormality, and inferiority upon black bodies. This in turn facilitates the invisibilization of the dynamics and complexities present in the negotiation of survival, friendship, love, care, intimacy, and power on the migration pathway (Vogt 2018), and their trivialization by policy makers and academics, for they are seen as outside of the parameters crafted by colonial perceptions of normalcy. This in turn facilitates the construction of black African bodies as sites of abnormal and primitive desire.

THE INTIMACY OF SMUGGLING Just as in the case of the EU, smuggling narratives are also present in the Americas, particularly in the context of US-bound migration through Mexico. Present in government, academic and policy circles as part of a rather cohesive security discourse, smuggling facilitators are systematically constructed as men organized into complex criminal networks that have hijacked US border security (Kulish 2018) and as savvy merchants whose fees generate high earnings (Campoy and Groskopf 2017). As in the case of the EU, smugglers (often racialized as Mexican) are also described as foreigners who despite residing in distant locations outside of the US can execute their trade from afar, relying on sophisticated, expensive technology (Kulish 2018). It is also common to find references to smugglers as possessing an almost preternatural ability to build connections to the criminal underworld. Some scholars and policy makers, based on law enforcement statements and secondary sources, have claimed smugglers partner with sex traffickers, nuclear smugglers and even terrorists (Bensman 2018; Shelley 2018) in

Intersectionality and migrant smuggling research  467 their attempts to penetrate the US-Mexico border. By the start of the COVID-19 pandemic one of the most widely accepted and circulated of these partnerships involved the alleged merger of Mexican DTOs with migrant smuggling groups (Seiff 2021; Slack and Campbell 2016). These claims, despite being widely accepted, are not supported by the empirical record. Research conducted on migrant smuggling in the region among its facilitators shows that while members of DTOs and migrant smuggling are aware of each other’s activities, and often share similar routes, they do not engage in both activities simultaneously, often to protect their cargo (Sanchez and Zhang 2020; Spener 2009). While reports on the ties between terrorists and smugglers occasionally appear in sensationalistic media, it is hard to believe that a carefully crafted operation as a terrorist act, seeking to send a strong political message, could rely on the often unsuccessful, poorly organized smuggling attempts of facilitators at the US-Mexico border. Intersectional analyses demonstrate the narrowness of the security narrative. Smuggling research in the Americas, and particularly along the US-Mexico corridor has often relied on the testimonies of migrants unable to secure the basic protection of smugglers: those who have been scammed and lied to. People who have been victims – and at times also perpetrators of – acts of violence like sexual assault and kidnapping (Yates and Leutert 2020) often end up at shelters and other centers where they receive basic support during their journeys. Conveniently located, they are almost invariably interviewed by well-intentioned researchers eager to document their experiences of suffering and vulnerability. Here I do not suggest that the experiences of these migrants are untrue or less valid, but that methodologically, shelters and camps have become the preferred points of data collection for researchers seeking information related to smuggling activities, what undoubtedly narrows down the kinds of experiences that are narrated. These experiences belong to people who rely on these locations for rest and relief. Not only do the people who rely on shelters and camps have different kinds of social capital than those available to migrants who can avoid these locations by virtue of their social networks or access to financial capital – Hagan (2012) and Sanchez (2014), for example, describe the experiences of women who complete faster, safer, and at times dramatically pricier journeys with smugglers. Recent research also suggests migrants have effectively learned the value of their stories to researchers, retelling and deploying them strategically (Puga and Espinosa 2020). Some migration scholars have attributed the lack of direct engagements with smuggling facilitators to the latter’s ties to organized crime, and the risk that they pose to researchers’ safety. I do not underestimate the potential for violence present in criminal markets, nor disregard the importance of personal safety in the field. Yet I often find the claim baseless. In fact, I believe that the reluctance to engage with migrant smuggling facilitators derives from the very perceptions associated to smuggling facilitators that researchers themselves circulate. The imaginary that has reduced the persona of the facilitator to hyper-violent male predators associated with the so-called cartels is in fact indicative of some researchers’ inability – or unwillingness – to examine how racist, gendered constructions of crime create and perpetuate the smuggling narrative. The narrow framing of smuggling as inherently male and criminal has placed barriers in researchers’ ability to see beyond organized crime frameworks and male-centered characterizations of crime. Few researchers include as part of their line of questioning queries about gender. The fetishization of violence also narrows down the scope of research, questions often preventing respondents from describing dynamics beyond victimization or abuse.

468  Research handbook on intersectionality Furthermore, issues of positionality to which many researchers opt to remain oblivious often reduce the scope of responses from intimidated, but also amused or even previously interviewed respondents who have learned to articulate their suffering on demand (Puga and Espinosa 2020). Echoing Wilson, I argue that by deploying an intersectional approach, “intimate identities and relationships, specifically gender, ethnicity, and sexuality [that] have been and continue to be centrally involved in the operations of … markets” (Wilson 2004: 8), provide the elements to launch research inquiries into hyper-represented practices like smuggling. While not easily –or willingly – visible to outsiders eager to map networks and mafias, examining smuggling through an intersectional lens reveals a series of deeply intimate transactions in which identities, relationships, and desires become deployed specifically with the goal of countering mechanisms of migration enforcement and control. Information about trusted, reliable smuggling services are shared by friends, family members and at times even by strangers out of concerns over safety, protection, and care. An intersectional approach allows researchers to uncover the private, intimate dimensions present in smuggling interactions, and on how they intersect, and at times also clash with the efforts to criminalize irregular migration. This redirects the focus from the persona of the male smuggler to the relationships built among smugglings’ actors, while simultaneously weakening the monocular gaze of securitization. Furthermore, this approach allows us to identify the specific forms violence takes when transformed/embedded in migration enforcement contexts. Once lines of questioning that “illuminate the power and the limits” present in the facilitation of irregular migration are deployed, researchers can see the ability of smuggling to “remake social worlds” (Wilson 2004: 9). By being aware of the discursive fields in which we move – especially again when tackling hyper-represented topics like smuggling – scholars can effectively prevent reinscribing the mainstream rhetoric of criminalization and victimization, avoiding narrow and problematic representations of researched “others” (Fonow and Cook 2005: 2222). This avoids the simplistic reduction of the role of smugglers to that of predators or saviors and situates their actions in the larger continuum of migration enforcement and control, and on the growing restrictions imposed on the mobility of specific groups of people.

SMUGGLING AS A WEAPON OF THE POOR By shifting the gaze away from the narrow discursive fields of male narcos and organized crime into the dynamics of the intimate and the private, the narratives of smuggling as the domain of highly structured networks, cartels or mafias relying on advanced technology and generating untold profits seem to lose their raison d’ȇtre. Shifting the questions away from their securitized focus to the relationships that emerge between facilitators and those who rely on their services, the commonalities among actors start to emerge. To echo Scott (1985), smuggling is “a weapon of the poor,” a form of protection from below. Once smuggling is framed as a practice privileged by those denied access to basic mobility protections, it is easy to understand how only those who have been repeatedly denied the same protections become ideally situated to become facilitators. Most smuggling facilitators are in fact irregular migrants themselves, who by repeatedly attempting to reach a destination, acquired the skills necessary to facilitate the journeys of others like themselves.

Intersectionality and migrant smuggling research  469 By expanding a line of questioning into the everyday lives of smuggling facilitators, ethnographic work and surveys can reveal the kinds of precarity they face. Facilitators who also happen to be migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers tend to lack employment authorization, what leads them to be employed in low-paying, seasonal, temporary, or hourly jobs almost always in addition to the tasks they perform in smuggling (Richter 2019; Spener 2009; Zhang 2009). Migrant or refugee women who work as facilitators are also employed in highly gendered occupations like fast-food preparation, janitorial services, and the provision of care work, all historically underpaid, feminized roles (Stone-Cadena and Álvarez-Velasco 2018; UNODC 2021). It should not come therefore as a surprise that most of those convicted for smuggling tend to be working-class men and women, elderly and disabled people, members of indigenous communities, stranded irregular migrants and/or refugees (Sanchez 2014; Spener 2009), and while an understudied group, children (DHIA 2021; Sanchez and Zhang 2020). Most facilitators, despite the claims of smuggling generating untold profits, lack significant wealth or resources. They, however, tend to possess significant social capital and deep knowledge of the geographic landscape. Across the US-Mexico border, knowledge of deserts – most often derived from experience alone – constitutes one of the most valuable and profitable skills among guides (Sanchez 2014). Contrary to the claim that they carry out technologically advanced tasks with sophisticated equipment, most facilitators provide rather ordinary tasks, many of which are gendered: they prepare meals, care for elderly, sick or injured migrants, pregnant women, and children (Hagan 2012; Spener 2009). It is not uncommon for women to perform most of these tasks. Smuggling facilitators do not cite ties to organized crime nor other forms of transnational criminal connections. Rather, when the questions shift from an organized crime focus to one of collaboration, support, and networks, most facilitators cite immediate friends and family members as their most trusted partners. In fact, the success of a smuggling-organized journey depends heavily on the trust that exists among those who participate in the process, rather than to their ties to any other criminalized activity (Greenfield et al. 2019). Also, in terms of trust, smuggling services are most often provided for friends, family members, their extended networks, and past customers. They hardly ever involve services for complete strangers (Spener 2009). New customers are often recommended by former clients who attest to the efficiency and reliability of specific smugglers. This tactic tends to reduce the likelihood of exposure and is perceived by migrants as creating safer travel conditions.

THE ALIEN SMUGGLER The dominant narrative concerning smuggling in the US portrays facilitators as “alien” men operating from outside US borders. It is true that most smuggling convictions do involve men. However, the number of women being convicted for smuggling in the US alone increased almost 10 percentual points between 2012 and 2020 (UNODC 2021). Women have been largely ignored in smuggling policy and research. There is scant data concerning their roles in smuggling, and on the impact of criminalization on their everyday lives (UNODC 2021; Vogt 2018). Media and official coverage on smuggling cases often emphasizes facilitators’ origin and/ or ethnicity, and racializes them as Mexican, furthering the collective perception of smuggling

470  Research handbook on intersectionality as a crime carried out by foreigners. Data available via the US Sentencing Commission show that, on average, at least 60 percent of those convicted for smuggling in the US since 2012 have been US citizens. In fact, the number of convictions of US nationals has been on the rise: it went from 51 percent in 2012 to 71 percent by 2020 (US Sentencing Commission 2021). Children and adolescents are systematically apprehended and held in US custody for the commission of smuggling-related activities (DHIA 2021; Podkul 2016). Under Operation Juvenile Referral Program, US Customs and Border Protection held several hundred adolescents in detention facilities with the intention of “removing” them from the criminal “cycle of smuggling” (Podkul 2016). Interviews with the children, however, revealed that they were often apprehended as intelligence targets, and forced by law enforcement to provide details concerning those who employed them, which placed them in situations of high risk upon their return to Mexico. Known in Mexican child protection circles as “circuit children,” teenagers (most of them male) engage in smuggling activities, working independently or alongside friends and family members, and with smuggling groups within communities on both sides of the border. Most children participate in smuggling attracted by the feeling of partnership and camaraderie created by these groups, in addition to the financial returns they can generate (DHIA 2021). This participation, however, is not devoid of risks. The children face intimidation and harassment at the hands of their peers and the people who hire them, but also by US and Mexican law enforcement (Sanchez and Zhang 2020).

BEYOND NARCOS AND CARTELS As mentioned earlier, one of the most common claims concerning smuggling on the US-Mexico border points to its merger with DTOs. This is in fact a claim made by most migration commentators (Campoy and Groskopf 2017; Slack and Campbell 2016), and one that has hardly been questioned. The arrests involving migrants carrying bales of drugs, and testimonies of many others who report having been forced to carry smuggling loads in the context of their journeys, have been often cited as evidence of this merger. Multiple illicit and criminal activities take place on both sides of the US-Mexico divide. It is not uncommon for the people and groups who benefit from them to meet one another. In fact, knowing who they are, what they do, and having ways to communicate expeditiously are essential to their operational success (see Guerra 2015). But their workspace is limited, and stepped-up enforcement has pushed markets to operate alongside discrete regions and areas. This translates into different groups often having to share routes, meeting and crossing points as these provide logistical advantages that improve their chances of success. In the case of smuggling, facilitators devise and rely on verbal agreements with other groups (primarily DTOs), set up schedules and/or decide on the use of specific routes. This reduces the potential for conflict and – most importantly – unwanted encounters with law enforcement officials (Sanchez and Zhang 2020). This, however, does not constitute a merger. Another element that has often been cited as evidence of amalgamation is the toll system known as piso. It has been widely reported that criminal organizations, and in particular DTOs, impose a tax-like toll to groups or individuals involved in criminalized activities seeking to travel through their territory. The fee is intended to provide “safe” transits to specific routes and/or locations prior to arriving at the US-Mexico border (Slack and Campbell 2016). Both migrants and smuggling facilitators often cite the potential consequences of non-payment and

Intersectionality and migrant smuggling research  471 have graphic anecdotes of people who failed to comply with agreements. However, most often threats, and verbal and physical intimidation are enough to guarantee payment (Sanchez and Zhang 2020). This allows DTOs to profit from smuggling activities without having to perform them, eliminating the need for a “take over.” Migrants lacking financial or social capital often report negotiations they carry out with people involved in criminalized activities to either generate income to cover their smuggling fee, or to pay this off through the provision of services or tasks. (These kinds of agreements are quite like those between young people and smuggling facilitators in the Mediterranean.) Male and female migrants lacking access to financial capital to cover smuggling fees agree to perform a wide range of tasks, which can range from smuggling illicit substances, recruiting more migrants, acting as guards, driving vehicles, cooking and cleaning at safe houses, to caring for migrants, other people in transit, or even the family members of smuggling facilitators. This ultimately allows many of them to reach their destinations. However, many others enter situations of intimidation, abuse, and forced labor. Furthermore, in the event of a raid or any other law enforcement activity or operation, they are likely to face criminal charges because of their roles in the overall execution of smuggling activities. While testimonies concerning migrants being forced or coerced to join drug trafficking operators abound in the media, unpacking the interactions between them reveals a degree of complexity not identified in mainstream engagements of smuggling. Again, examining the private, intimate spaces where smuggling takes place allows us to identify the extreme situations of precarity and vulnerability shaped by immigration enforcement that leads to migrants partnering with criminalized actors as their only viable option towards mobility (Leutert 2017).

CONCLUSIONS Around the world, the smuggling experience constitutes a complex if granted unequal transaction towards safety and survival that cannot be merely examined through a traditional criminological lens. It involves a degree of social complexity largely absent in mainstream narratives of tribes, gangs, and cartels, which feed the imagination of a public hungry for accounts of migrant suffering rich in neo-colonial depictions of primitivism and violence. Collected incessantly by journalists, scholars, humanitarian workers, and policy makers eager for documented accounts of racialized suffering and victimization, smuggling is sold as a pre-packed, easy to digest, monolithic phenomenon, its narratives subjected to scant questioning if at all. Not only do these accounts spread fear over borders and those who cross them clandestinely. They reinscribe notions of otherness while erasing the geopolitical complexities that lead people to rely on smuggling services in the first place. In other words, the narratives of smuggling fail to question the reasons at the root of the phenomenon’s existence: the lack of equally accessible paths for legal and safe migration worldwide. Yet there are tools that can be deployed to disrupt the linear claims concerning smuggling. In this contribution, I show how the deployment of intersectional approaches allows us to amplify the discursive field of smuggling, in turn enabling to see how aspects like gender, sexuality, care and intimacy become present in the facilitation of irregular migration. Perhaps most importantly, this contribution seeks to highlight how the use of intersectionality-informed methods give rise to different research questions (Romero 2018: 140). For example, in recent years, a growing number of researchers has increasingly ques-

472  Research handbook on intersectionality tioned the long-taken-for-granted claims concerning the economics of smuggling. An intersectionality-informed approach reveals the gender, race, class, citizenship dynamics present in the market, and the ways in which men, women, and children seek to supplement incomes already decimated by the prevalence of precarious jobs. Intersectional approaches also show us that far from generating untold profits, smuggling income simply supplements already limited earnings from low-paying tasks and occupations. Thinking intersectionally invites us to examine the dynamics of power relations. In discussing smuggling it is essential to identify how differences in social and economic capital help some people secure access to more reliable services, while furthering the vulnerability of others. It is quite clear that racial, class, and gender-based inequalities are reproduced to the inside of smuggling markets. While personal connections and access to capital can facilitate the journeys of some migrants, others seeking to migrate have few paths outside of becoming part of the very informal and clandestine economies that facilitate the mobility they aspire for. Where should we go from here? One answer is not to give up and to continue to collectively challenge the implications of the monolithic narrative promoted by counter-smuggling policy and discourse in Europe, the Americas and beyond. Another one is to shift the gaze from already hyper-criminalized actors to the ways in which the state’s measures to counter criminal activity impact the lives of migrants in transit everywhere. Demanding accountability related to counter-smuggling efforts also relying on intersectionality-informed approaches is, as Romero shows, part of “the struggle to resist and actively challenge all forms of oppression” (2018: 173).

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Intersectionality and migrant smuggling research  475 UNODC. 2011. “In-depth Training Manual on Investigating and Prosecuting the Smuggling of Migrants.” https://​www​.unodc​.org/​documents/​human​-trafficking/​Migrant​-Smuggling/​In​-Depth​_Training​ _Manual​_SOM​_en​_wide​_use​.pdf. UNODC. 2020. “COVID-19 and the Smuggling of Migrants: A Call for Safeguarding the Rights of Smuggled Migrants Facing Increased Risks and Vulnerabilities.” https://​www​.unodc​.org/​documents/​ human​-trafficking/​SOM​_and​_COVID​-19​_Publication​_final​_EN​_final​.pdf. UNODC. 2021. “Women in Migrant Smuggling: A Caselaw Analysis.” Vienna. https://​www​.unodc​.org/​ documents/​human​-trafficking/​2021/​Women​_in​_Migrant​_Smuggling​.pdf. US Sentencing Commission. 2021. “Quick Facts: Alien Smuggling Offenses, Fiscal Year 2020.” US Sentencing Commission. https://​www​.ussc​.gov/​sites/​default/​files/​pdf/​research​-and​-publications/​ quick​-facts/​Alien​_Smuggling​_FY20​.pdf. Varese, Federico. 2011. Mafias on the Move. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Visweswaran, Kamala. 1994. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Vogt, Wendy A. 2018. Lives in Transit. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wallis, Emma. 2020. “Fathers in Senegal Sentenced to Jail for Pushing Their Sons to Migrate.” InfoMigrants. December 9. https://​www​.infomigrants​.net/​en/​post/​28998/​fathers​-in​-senegal​-sentenced​ -to​-jail​-for​-pushing​-their​-sons​-to​-migrate. Wilson, Ara. 2004. The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and Avon Ladies in the Global City. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. WOLA. 2019. “México debe cesar hostigamiento contra defensores de personas migrantes.” WOLA. August 14. https://​www​.wola​.org/​es/​2019/​08/​mexico​-hostigamiento​-albuerges​-migrantes​-2/​. Yates, Caitlyn, and Stephanie Leutert. 2020. “A Gender Perspective of Migrant Kidnapping in Mexico.” Victims and Offenders. 15 (3): 295–312. Zhang, Sheldon. 2009. Chinese Human Smuggling Organizations: Families, Social Networks and Cultural Imperatives. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

28. Intersectionality beyond its traditions Bandana Purkayastha1 and Miho Iwata

This chapter is written from the standpoint of sociologists. We use the American version of intersectionality as the fulcrum for two reasons. Both of us, first-generation immigrants, were introduced to this version during our own training in the US. At the same time, our engagements with global sociologies and sociologists situated overseas, and our awareness of prevalent global knowledge hierarchies lead us to recognize the power of knowledge production structures, including wide distribution of publications in English, that has made American versions of intersectionality preeminent around the globe. As Roth (2019) has argued, the dominance of English as the lingua franca of global conversations means that the imaginaries encapsulated in this language dominate conversations. Equally important, as we have argued earlier, the structures of publications and knowledge distribution (Purkayastha 2016, 2021) and the transnational assemblage that amplifies certain types of knowledge (Patil and Purkayastha 2018) contribute to the association of intersectionality with American roots. This statement about the political economic structures that promote American versions of intersectionality is not meant to diminish the importance of scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins, whose names are most often associated with intersectionality globally, and whose contributions have challenged prior theorizations on gender and racisms within and beyond the US. As first-generation scholars in the US, we have been beneficiaries of Hill Collins’ powerful writings to recenter the work of black women and black scholars, along with the writing of other scholars of color, as part of our training. These challenges opened spaces in sociology and drew attention to the whiteness of unmarked categories of gender. The general feminist challenges to sociology and other disciplines were developed through reassessments of epistemologies and methodologies, leading to emphases on standpoints to center women’s voices and experiences to make sense of the social world. While these ideas were powerful to challenge the unmarked patriarchies in the practice of science, nonetheless the failure to look beyond women qua women was problematic. This is the critique that Crenshaw, Collins, and others brought to the scholarly conversation in the US. The importance of the intersectional challenge within the US cannot be overstated. Nonetheless in a global landscape dominated by English, North-dominated assemblages, and American publication corporations, it is important to mark and reflect on the trajectory of American knowledge.2 As Sujata Patel (2014) and others have argued, we need to provincialize knowledge systems, and assess its fit with other streams of knowledge, to do global sociologies.

INTERSECTIONALITY IN THE US Intersectionality challenged scholarship which was explicitly devoid of any discussion of racism. It arose through the work of several scholars within the US including Spelman (1988), Baca Zinn and their colleagues’ discussion of the matrices of domination while centering systems of racism (1986, 1996), as well as being foreshadowed in R.W. Connell’s work on 476

Intersectionality beyond its traditions  477 masculinities (e.g., Connell 1987, 1993). The publication of Crenshaw’s work in 1989, and Collins’s Black Feminist Thought in 1990 offered a powerful challenge to feminist epistemology and methodology based on black women’s experiences. Other scholars have grappled with the challenges of weaving histories, and looking across racialized groups, including migrants who arrived in the 20th and 21st centuries under a range of restricted circumstances. A vast corpus of work now exists on contemporary intersecting structures, including the conversations generated by a focus on Latinx groups the (e.g., Romero 1992, 2011), Asian Americans (e.g., Glenn 2002), South Asian Americans (e.g., Abraham 2000; Purkayastha 2005), and racialized privileges of white groups. By the 21st century a spate of work has pushed intersectionality in new directions, including the work on sexualities (see Puar 2007), Purkayastha, Adur, Iwata, Ray, and Tiamzon (2012) on the intersections of race/class/gender with age, and disabilities (e.g., Mauldin 2017). Intersectionality is now widely recognized, even though how scholars use this framework, as epistemology, methodology or methods (see Choo and Ferree 2010) varies; many symbolically acknowledge intersectionality without systematically unpacking structures of white privilege. There are multiple strands of debates even with the Global North and South, including debates about origins and the axes and locations of power (see Anthias 2019; Bilge 2013; and Yuval Davis 2006 for more on the debates). To outline some of the structures and assumptions of the most well-known articulations of intersectionality, as sociologists, we focus on Collins as an example of widely referenced American version of intersectionality, to reflect on the decolonial challenges that is at the heart of this chapter. In the 1990s, Collins drew upon African American women’s experiences to discuss the idea of power relations organized through intersecting structures of race/class/ gender. She argued that researchers failed to analyse the relative positioning of, for instance, African American men and women who were marginalized because of their location within intersecting race, class, gender hierarchies, compared to white men and women. Collins described the hierarchy, but also, importantly, pointed out the urgent need to examine the epistemological boundaries of feminism that assumed all women were similarly positioned within social hierarchies. As her challenge extended to sociology, she highlighted that the standpoints of African American women, long marginalized economically and socially because of stringent and persistent racism, revealed different types of knowledge about matters of interest to scholars such as labor, family, mothering, and community. Since they were situated in different lived realities, African American women’s standpoints were key to understanding relationships of power between women, and between different groups of women and men. Her work has continued to expand to include intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age (Collins 2010). Working with Sirma Bilge, Collins examined global level implications of intersectionality within contemporary structures of neoliberalism. Using a variety of global level events such as the soccer (men’s) World Cup, they argued, compellingly, that neoliberalism fostered inequality; any state that refuses to comply with neoliberal dictates becomes less competitive within the global economic system, so the state-neoliberal intersections are unlikely to wane easily. At the same time, they pointed out that those same strategies that eliminate jobs and suppress wages, leaving closed factories, unemployed workers [but also] the potential for social unrest … Intersectionality certainly has many conceptual tools to analyze state power and how it articulates global capitalism … intersectionality as focus on people’s lives provides the space for alternative analyses of these same phenomena. (Collins and Bilge 2016, 18)

478  Research handbook on intersectionality They also articulate the importance of contextualization, especially for Global South scholars who they describe as facing “specific sets of difficulties in reaching wider audiences” (29). While they emphasize that intersectionality is relational and often embedded in social justice practice, without a systematic engagement with streams of ideas from the Global South and perspectives of scholars grappling with decoloniality leaves open the question of exactly how these other versions ought to be centrally part of our intellectual horizons.

DECOLONIAL REFLECTIONS AND INTERSECTIONALITY At the heart of decoloniality is the questioning of Eurocentric biases, especially the failure to interrogate colonial modernity by unpacking its effects on large numbers of people who were and continue to be marginalized by colonial structures, including knowledge structures (e.g., Quijano 1993; Mignolo 2002). According to Quijano (1993, 141), The history of modernity itself began with the violent encounter between Europe and America at the end of the fifteenth century. From then on, there followed, in both worlds, a radical reconstitution of the image of the universe. It is not necessary to insist here on the implications of the Conquest for the Ptolemaic image of the universe. What was important at the time was the recognition of the imperative to study, explain, doubt, discuss, and investigate all that exists and happens in the universe, and to modify ideas, images, and experiences correspondingly-that is, to reconstitute on a new, experimental basis the relations between human beings and the universe, and their relations with themselves.

The violent encounters mentioned in this passage led to reorganization of societies and territories, the colonial histories of enslavement and indenture, justified through the modern ideologies and structures of racial hierarchies, and the development and use of knowledge systems and machinery to reorganize and control global territories and populations. Decoloniality, in questioning the epistemologies of the powerful, also provides a perspective to understand what intersectionality achieves within disciplines like sociology which are focused on specific nations. Beyond this perspective, decoloniality has strong roots within indigenous knowledge systems, which denaturalizes settler colonial logics and structuring violence. As Purkayastha (2021) has written elsewhere, indigenous systems of knowledge are heterogeneous and marked by many nuances and complexities. To link the discussion of decolonization to indigenous knowledge, we use the perspectives of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2012, 2017) to highlight that coloniality and settler governance­are transnational in scope and include territorial occupation, conquest, removal, economic exploitation, resource extraction, displacement, and dehumanization. Settler colonialism is also a way of knowing that permeates institutions, including education, the law, science, economics, politics, and religion. Decoloniality disrupts and departs from settler logics, structures, myths, stories, archives, institutions, affects, embodiments, aesthetics, desires, ontologies, categories, cartographies, and politics. At one level there is a broad overlap between US intersectionality and decolonial approaches. Intersectionality, with its emphasis on racism provides a critical perspective into the epistemologies of the powerful versus the epistemologies of the marginalized. Along with anti-racism scholarship, intersectionality identifies structural racisms that control people, especially African Americans, and unpacks the foundations and structures of white privilege. From this vantage point, with racism structures as a key fulcrum, US intersectional and anti-racist approaches point to US empire and its manifestations through global hierarchies

Intersectionality beyond its traditions  479 of racialized labor (e.g., Christian and Namaganda 2018), gendered skin color preference (Glenn 2009), global migration regimes (Purkayastha 2018) and related topics. These studies show that within the processes of globalization, power is held and operated by Global North nation-states (and their representatives in quasi and non-governmental organizations) so that the power of the North, which shores up the hegemonic position of white groups, shapes most global agendas and efforts. As Collins and Bilge (2016) have argued, this imbalance of power among countries is broadly captured through intersectionality frameworks since structures of racism/class/gender (among other structures) shape the relationships between countries. In 2013, Bilge argued that attempts to weaken the racism fulcrum—a charge she directs at feminists in general, and European feminists in particular—results in “undoing” intersectionality and eroding the voices of racism scholars. The gravamen of her challenge, about the fulcrum of intersectionality and whether racism is being adequately addressed, is drawn from the stream of US racism scholarship. In the US, racism scholars are acutely aware that people who appear to be white, or black, or brown, or yellow belong to a variety of white, African American, Asian, Latinx, Native American racialized categories created from several factors including country of origin (see e.g., changing “race” classification in the American Census in TheSocietyPages). As racism scholarship and decoloniality conversations indicate, the project of modernity rests upon the power to classify people in ways that drain them of histories and agency and to position them in lower rungs of hierarchies relative to powerful whites. While such ascriptions served the purpose of maintaining white supremacy within the US, and continuing colonization elsewhere, the question here is whether using the historical lineage and knowledge roots of African Americans or others racialized as non-whites in the US helps us to understand the social realities within other societies. In other words, should the epistemological roots hold across the world, or US racism fulcrum—that Bilge argues for—be appropriate to consider in other parts of the world? Intersectionality scholars mean to develop solidarities with those who are racialized and marginalized. However, the language or referents continue to be Global North based. The implications of power embedded within terms such as women of color or emphases on configurations of racism make sense within the US racist structures. Racist structures in the US are organized around the relationships of whites against all those who are deemed non-white others; that is, ideologies, interactions, and institutional arrangements bestow greater power to whites, maintaining a fixed white-black binary, with other groups positioned in between. When American intersectionality uses US racism as a fulcrum, it draws upon this racial hierarchy and vantage point of the most marginalized, to challenge the structures of whiteness that imbue epistemologies, methodologies, and the research enterprise. Indeed, this structuring makes sense if we are to contextualize intersectionality to its American roots. In 1988, Mohanty critiqued US feminists’ use of the concept of “third world women,” that is, the overgeneralization and ascription of lack of power and non-modernity to vast swaths of the world. Intersectionality’s critique of overgeneralized feminism has continued. In her book on Intersectionality and Critical Theory, Collins (2019) embarks on a similar critique of the ways scholars credit Crenshaw with “coining” the term intersectionality, a credit that takes on a life of its own through academic publications, while erasing the histories of struggles for social justice that are part of intersectionality’s epistemological roots. Nonetheless her examples continue to be drawn from the subset of scholars within and most familiar to audiences in the Global North.

480  Research handbook on intersectionality There are other streams of discussion in the Global North that critically assess white supremacy. For instance, transnational critical theorist Patil’s (2018) criticism of Judith Butler’s heterosexual matrix. Patil uses a deeper reading of colonial histories across the globe to point out that powerful Global North scholars fail to take colonial histories into account. As a result, they simultaneously erase the colonial racist history of forcible imposition of gender binaries within colonized spaces (and institutions of ruling), while they uphold Global North privilege because their theoretical statements about gender and sexuality are positioned as new insights, and the political economy of knowledge production, dominated by the Global North, ensures their insights will be lauded widely in Euro America (and other parts of the world) as new insights. On the one hand, Patil’s objective is to critique white feminist versions of intersectionality; much like Bilge, on the other, she engages with other histories to unpack the racist structures that uphold Butler’ version. To continue our examination of intersectionality, we present two related discussions—on methodological nationalism and knowledge hierarchies—for thinking through partial answers to the theme of intersectionality beyond its traditional emphases. First, we turn to the critique of methodological nationalism and the failure to engage concepts developed within Global South scholarship. Second, we discuss knowledge hierarchies.

METHODOLOGICAL NATIONALISM AND APPLICABILITY OF AMERICAN RACISM Global South scholars have been critical about methodological nationalism of the Global North, or the tendency to assume that nations are the logical unit to study society (e.g., Chernilo 2006; Patel 2014). For most of the world that was colonized by Global North powers, nation-states are relatively recently imposed administrative units for the purposes of centralized ruling. The charge is that by failing to consider society beyond nation-states, Northern imperial theories developed based on the realities of the North are simply ascribed onto nations elsewhere irrespective of contexts that are more salient to people in those places. Importantly, approaches that uphold methodological nationalism erase histories and diversities within nation-states in the Global South and remain effective tools in silencing a variety of Southern voices. Thus, an uncritical and/or ahistorical expectation that intersectionality will fit elsewhere, even though the objective of intersectionality scholars is to be in solidarity with the marginalized in other places is problematic. To build deep solidarities, we need to provincialize American intersectionality, pay heed to the privileged positions American scholars occupy—even though they are marginalized at home—within the political economy of English language-based knowledge production and dissemination in the world,3 and discuss the problems of methodological nationalism. Before we discuss the implication of methodological nationalism on applications of intersectionality, it is important to define the concept, which naturalizes the global regime of nation-states, often erasing or ignoring other units that might be salient for understanding social life in particular places. Indeed, indigenous scholars have repeatedly pointed out how the appropriation of territories and the imposition of nation-state contours has led to their silencing, even on matters of genocide. Examining the social sciences, Sujata Patel (2014) and others have argued:

Intersectionality beyond its traditions  481 methodological nationalism in social sciences of the Atlantic region promoted Eurocentrism [and permeated] to that of the newly independent countries valorized the nation and the state; the visions of its elite became the frames of doing social science … Instead of creating what Farid Alatas (2003) calls “autonomous intellectual traditions”, in some countries these trends have led to the reframing of a new dualism in social science. For nationalist social sciences have become closely associated with the official discourses and methods of understanding the relationship between nation, nation-state and modernity; while other contending perspectives have become marginal. (608)

From this perspective, US scholars’ uncritical use of national societies as the unit of analysis, when they imagine the applicability of intersectionality, without any serious discussion of the histories and other possible levels that might be relevant to the analyses, is a challenge. For instance, Bilge’s insistence that racism remain central to intersectionality to foreground the work of black scholars, ironically, raises the problem of configuring how this is reconciled with other identified axes of domination in other places within other intellectual traditions. Or, when Collins repeatedly draws upon US and Global North roots as ways to structure her logic of critical social theory, it makes sense in the US and in Europe, but it is not clear how other scholarly streams might be braided into these lineages of intersectionality. Nor is it clear when scholars focus on nation-states as the unit of reference whether ethnicity and inter- and intra-ethnic struggles and conflicts, or inter- and intra-tribal conflicts and struggles, be erased, subsumed, or added on as another vector of intersectionality? Or is it sufficient to name a concept but use it for specifying very different axes of stratification? We offer several cases to illustrate why it is important to pay attention to local specificities to indicate how intersectionality can work beyond its traditional emphases. In her critique of Global North theorization, Reddock (2019) discusses intersectionality in the Caribbean contexts and discusses competing victimhoods of Afro-Caribbean, indigenous Caribs, and formerly indentured Indo-Caribbean people. A former colony of Britain, where forced and indentured migration streams brought in migrants in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, to the territories of the indigenous groups—to serve the labor requirements of the colonial power. The primary struggle now is not against a white group, but a struggle among “non-white” groups. For American intersectionality to fit, we would have to explain exactly how American racism overlaps with wholly, partially, or not at all with Caribbean ethnicities, as well as finding the mechanism to trace colonial structures in these intersections. Before we discuss this point further, it is important to emphasize that there are global level American racist/capitalist structures, ideologies, and practices that are relevant for understanding forces that intersect with what happens within societies today. For instance, racist media imageries and racist marketing practices (beauty pageants and beauty products) export and normalize racism including white privilege. Through the political-economic systems, racist labor structures (Aneesh 2015; Christian and Namaganda 2018) are inserted into a variety of societies. America continues to hold colonies and control what Victoria Reyes (2015) calls global borderlands—semi-autonomous, foreign-controlled geographic locations geared towards international military and or economic exchange, where American practices prevail more directly. Yet, thinking of American intersectionality with a focus on the American racism fulcrum can erase other histories. If we look at the work on light skin color preference, there are many studies that focus on skin color hierarchies in different societies and use these to point to racist practices (e.g., Abdi et al. 2021; Glenn 2009). While lighter skin among females is valorized in many places and expresses social hierarchies, are the causes rooted in the same

482  Research handbook on intersectionality versions of racial hierarchies that affect gender and class structures in the US? Abdi traces both British colonialism and the global beauty industry’s impact on Northern Indian upper caste skin tones preferences. The British and other European colonialists imposed a color line in the same way as that between plantation owners and enslaved people in the US (Fields and Fields 2014). This hierarchy endured for over 200 years of colonization and left its traces (Anandhi and Kapadia 2017) (see also Adur and Narayan 2019). In India, earlier hierarchies prevail as a section of the northern population tend to be fairer than their Southern and Eastern Indian counterparts because of migration from different parts of the world including Iran, Iraq, Central Asia, Turkey, and Ethiopia, over centuries. Moreover, upper caste women did not work outside the house which marked their difference from the lower caste/class women who labored in fields, markets, and factories, and partly explains the desirability of lighter tones. Further, the beauty industry sells fair-skinned look to these parts of the world, which is aided by Bollywood imageries of beauty. Clearly there are racist influences from the Global North in the making of white skin preference, but the local hierarchies and contemporary marketing are also salient forces. Thus, we should pay attention to frameworks within nations for understanding oppressive structures and trace racist influences, without collecting all these local, national, and global forces into racism discussions alone. Not considering the details within nations and paying heed to scholars in these parts of the world simply enhances the power of the Global North to use unexamined assertions of racism. This is not a claim that we need to search for pure knowledge, but to pay attention to the concepts and processes that scholars from the region emphasize. Several examples will illustrate this point further. In Njiru’s work (2018) on internally displaced persons in Kenya, she described the long history of British colonialism and displacement of specific ethnic groups from their ancestral land—to clear lands for plantation agriculture—into other groups’ territories. She points out that despite the imposition of the boundaries of the nation-state of Kenya by the British (and the assumption that citizenship within a nation-state provides the main organizational structure for people’s lives), such ethnic-tribal groups and their territories remain a major force in organizing people’s lives. During the 2007–08 election, violent conflicts caused groups to flee. Displaced people moved to other regions where they were resented as newcomers who consumed local resources and garnered local power. During the elections, previously displaced groups were targeted by the longer-settled residents; many of the former ended up in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. Njiru and Purkayastha (2015) also document gendered violence in the camps, pointing to the ways that layers of ethno-gendered vulnerability develop. Examining this case from a decolonial perspective, American intersectionality documents this conflict as struggles among blacks, which emphasizes racism over ethnicity.4 It is not clear that intersectionality built around a particular idea of racism works in a black majority country where the past two centuries witnessed changes from white to black actors in power, with a small group of Asian Indians as marginalized outsiders, along with the American power that is exerted through economic and humanitarian enterprises (Njiru 2020). Is the level of the nation-state within a global racist regime the correct contextual layer for using intersectionality for this analysis? Should the fulcrum of intersectionality change? Relevant factors in this Kenyan case are capitalist and imperialist expansion that led to forced displacement of indigenous groups in the US, or to forced migration historically and ongoing in the world now. As Criollo (2010) asserted in discussions on Palestinian and Chicana experiences, dispossession and enclosure are part of capitalist imperialist projects.5

Intersectionality beyond its traditions  483 Emphasis on subjugation through displacement, appropriation of land, and cultural genocide are being studied through the framework of settler colonialism (see Glenn 2015; Goeman 2013; Nohelani Teeves and Arivin 2018; Simpson 2017). To use intersectionality in this black majority country requires weaving aspects of settler colonialism and versions of situated intersectionality, which Anthias described (2019). Perhaps ethnicity or tribe would replace race at an important axis of domination within this specific context, though, nationally, powerful Global North’s neocolonialism continues to influence Kenya, structured through humanitarian initiatives (Njiru and Purkayastha 2015). Another case, centered on Japan reveals a different facet of this problem. In Iwata’s research on the Japanese Brazilians and other foreigners in Japan, she points to Japan’s racial logic based on ancestry and nationality (Iwata and Nemoto 2018). These ideologies and structures configure which groups are appropriate migrants; Japan has historically rejected other Asians such as Koreans, from claiming Japanese citizenship. As a highly developed country with falling birth rates, Japan has experienced the kind of demographic challenge that Europe has faced. It addressed this labor shortage by opening doors slightly to other Asians without giving them citizenship rights. But the country also began allowing Japanese descendants from Brazil and Peru to migrate and work in Japan. The Japanese government welcomed people of Japanese ancestry from these nations through its immigration policies to counter the migration of people of non-Japanese ancestry. Despite their official welcome, Japanese-Brazilians faced severe discrimination from people such as employers, landlords, and potential neighbors who did not want people of different cultures to be part of Japanese society. In this case, the application of intersectionality should consider racism, but it requires reworking to center the Japanese ideologies and structures to explain why and how these Japanese-origin people (phenotypic Japanese) were being rejected and subjected to severe discrimination. To further complicate the configurations of racism, the powerful impact of Americans during and after World War II placed Americans ideologically and structurally in a superior position than other migrants, including Japanese-origin Brazilians. Iwata and Nemoto (2018) powerfully document that Americans, white, black, and Asian American gained privileged positions because they were American. On the one hand, Japanese racism policy logic is based on origin and phenotypic similarity, unlike the American logic where phenotypic difference remains a central marker of racism. On the other, Western nationality brought dividends to all types of Americans. Also interesting is the presence of the American military in Japan and in other countries emphasizing American national power, even though an increasing number of American troops are drawn from communities of color. In this situated context, Americans of color benefit from nationality. This case reveals that to extend intersectionality to different parts of the world, nationality has to become a key axis in analyses of intersecting structures. As in the case of Trinidad and Kenya, the Japan case suggests another reason for provincializing the traditional American version of intersectionality. This step towards provincialization does not diminish the role of US intersectionality. Lessons from the other countries suggest that taking multiple roots of differently racialized groups into account expands how we think of US intersectionality’s understanding of racism. The discussions on Latinx and Asian American migrants in the US that point to the constant changes in the boundaries of citizenship (and nationality) is one key structure to include.6 The repeated bans on migration, deportations, access to citizenship and other policy-based restrictions which affect family reunification, availability of work, work conditions, access to political rights, housing, education, health and family formation have created racist struc-

484  Research handbook on intersectionality tures that overlap and somewhat diverge from the structures identified by scholars as black experiences. Currently, the American challenge is to figure the extent that structures creating barriers to substantive citizenship documented through the experiences of African Americans or Native Americans affect migrant (or perceived migrant) groups from formal citizenship in similar ways. Recognizing differences and similarities between these groups as important dimensions of racism expands our understanding of racism in American intersectionality, and its intersections with the other structures including gender or sexuality. Another critical axis missing from most accounts of American intersectionality is discussion of religion (Purkayastha 2012). While the ongoing targeting of Muslims is better recognized in the 21st century US (Kibria 2011), all minority religious groups—Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jews—have experienced repeated incidents of violence and killings, as well as ideological and institutionalized discrimination (e.g., Chowdhury-Lahiri, Iwata and Purkayastha 2020; Kibria, Narayan, Purkayastha, Khan and Yousaf 2021). Even though these groups also differ significantly in their access to formal political power, Khyati Joshi (2006, 2020). has accurately highlighted Christian privilege, and specifically structures of white Christian privilege, as a key axis of domination and marginalization at the heart of America. Interestingly, even though a sizeable section of African Americans are Muslims, the discussions of religion as an axis of racism is not central to models of American intersectionality. While we are aware of the critical role of churches in the lives and organization of black communities, a deeper delving into this axis reveals some privileges—such as having Sundays as a day of worship—while recognizing the regularity of violence against black churches. Attempts to bring religion in as an axis of domination and marginalization remains a work in progress, fostered by scholars who study more recent non-Christian migrants to the US. For questions about caste, bringing in religions makes sense because it also explains caste-type hierarchies among Muslims (Syeds versus others) and Christians (Syrian Christians versus others) and Sikhs (followers of Guru Ram Das versus other Sikhs) in India. From a decolonial perspective, this invisibility of Christianity in the US is extremely problematic. After all, colonialism was justified as civilizing the “other” and the tactics included vilification of other religions and practitioners, with a special emphasis on their supposed mistreatment of women (see e.g., Patil 2018; Patil and Purkayastha 2018). Christianity was used to justify genocide (such as of Native Americans) and colonization (Burke 1983; Sinha 1998). It remains the nexus of ongoing struggle in the US, and across the world as attacks on Muslim societies continue to be justified as civilizing missions (Narayan and Purkayastha 2009). The failure to bring religion into the axes of power and domination remains a drawback in the US intersectionality model. Bringing the dominance of Christianity at a global level into the American framework adds new insights about the privileges of white and non-white Christians compared to others who do not benefit from Christian privilege. A Note on Transnational Spaces While the previous section focused on the problems of methodological nationalism and how it erases or stifles other salient contexts, we also wish to raise the importance of transnational contexts. With the phenomenal expansion of hyper digitalization of socio-political lives via communication technology and social media, a consideration of transnational spaces is important for understanding not only the lives of migrants but the lives of people who are either indigenous or groups that are no longer considered migrants in that nation-state. The questions

Intersectionality beyond its traditions  485 about intersectionality become more complicated if we juxtapose it within transnational spaces. For first-generation migrants and their children, there is a growing trend of countries of origin offering some form of citizenship to “their diasporic citizens,” motivated by economic interests. In 2019, the World Bank estimated that diasporic remittances are three times larger than development aid. India received $78.2 billion and Bangladesh received $15.5 billion from their diasporic communities. This economic calculus makes origin-country governments eager to welcome persons with origins in the nation to build lives across countries. Additionally, significant improvements in social media and communication platforms mean that many people can live simultaneously in more than one country, woven by an endless series of communications from families, friends, and organizations in these transnational spaces. As Purkayastha (2012) argued, migrants positioned within transnational spaces are likely to be perceived as minorities and majorities simultaneously. Purkayastha illustrated her point by talking about an “Indian” migrant whose ancestors moved to Uganda during British colonial rule and then becomes racialized as a minority Asian American in the US. This person is still a minority in Uganda, while her black Ugandan neighbor becomes a racial minority in the US but part of the majority in Uganda. The Indian-origin person from Uganda might be part of the majority or minority in India, based on her religion, but her former Ugandan neighbor would be a minority there. Being able to live across transnational spaces complicates intersectionality, partly because the racism structure was imagined with the conditions of a single country and does not consider the multi-country structures that shape the lives of people who build lives across countries driven by formal restrictions on family formation within Global North countries, especially the US. Meanwhile, the differing power of countries remains relevant to understanding the transnational dimension. For instance, since global surveillance regimes focus on Islamic terrorists, Muslims must contend with these regimes shaped by different country-of-residence and country-of-origin regimes. The discriminatory structures might be severe for black Muslims from Somalia to the US, but not as much for US black Christians in Somalia. Or under the condition of rising authoritarianism in India, the plight of Indian Muslims worsened far more than the pace of discrimination in the US (where it remains severe). Without creating any typology of vulnerabilities, it is important to add transnational contexts to analyses of power relations, that are at the heart of reflections of US intersectionality.

INTERSECTIONALITIES AND KNOWLEDGE HIERARCHIES Knowledge hierarchies and the political economy of knowledge production and dissemination are also germane to this discussion; they are wide ranging, and complex. To provide a link between the earlier discussion on methodological nationalism and knowledge hierarchies, we can reflect on Leanne Simpson’s (2017) linking of justice and settler colonialism. Justice is a concept within Western thought that is intrinsically linked to settler colonialism. Indigenous thought systems conceptualize justice differently. We have experienced four centuries of apocalyptic violence in the name of dispossession in the part of the Nishnaabeg nation I am from and live in. White supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy have targeted and continue to murder, disappear, attack, criminalize, and devalue our bodies, minds, and spirits. Several of the plant and animal nations we share territory with have been exterminated. “Justice” to me, in the face of all that, means the return of land, the regeneration of Indigenous political, educational, and knowledge

486  Research handbook on intersectionality systems, the rehabilitation of the natural world, and the destruction of white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. “Justice” within the confines of settler colonialism gets paralytically overwhelmed in the face of that. So, I don’t think about justice very much. I think about resurgence and movement building. (20–1)

Simpson’s narrative directs attention to settler colonialism’s institutions, including the building and imposition of nation-states, territorially/institutionally/ideologically. She asks, which institutions and which realities should justice be configured? Even this brief quotation, that includes the acknowledgement of the indivisibility between human and other life forms, indicates that decolonial efforts must be as much about ontologies as about epistemologies and methodologies (see also Alatas 1972; Chaudhuri 2012; Houndtondji 1997; Pearce 2021). Since intersectionality has focused on epistemologies and methodologies thus far, we can find some commonalities between marginalized groups’ quest for survival and justice, but we also must be able to unearth different ontologies—different realities—which modernist knowledge systems have silenced but not fully destroyed as yet. If we try to conceptualize multiple ontologies, part of our critical reflection must include our own positioning within these settler colonial processes, even as we are negatively affected by dominant white systems. We do not embark on a full discussion of ontologies in this chapter, a subject that is growing rapidly with discussions of decoloniality. However, at least two aspects of knowledge hierarchies are relevant. Both indigenous and several scholars from the South have been critical of the failure to consider scholarship beyond what is easily available in the Global North and in English. They charge that the language, logics, even ontologies of the Global North continue to be imposed on the South, thus continuing the colonial relations of dominance and erasures of other realities. The place of English as the language of publications is part of structuring whose voices will count as influential in constructing knowledge. As Roth has mentioned (2019) in her discussion of linguistic hegemony in humanitarianism, English has become the most used language for science, including social science. At one level this is simple to understand; the reach of English is far greater than Spanish or Bangla or Hindi or Urdu. However, Collins and Bilge (2016) quote Savitribai Phule’s discussion of intersecting structures in 19th century India and point out that though Phule did not use the term intersectionality, the substance of her discussion is intersectional. Indeed, we are aware of many other similar publications that discuss intersecting structures but do not use the term intersectionality. Indians have continued to document their diverse histories, cultures, and social hierarchies through multiple languages; English language assimilationist forces were added by the European colonialists. Even a brief review of women’s writings in the 19th and early 20th centuries shows difficulty in finding a social treatise that did not attend to intersections of structures that affected women. Looking at the recent Indian scholarship in English, it is also clear that there have long existed a range of ongoing debates about intersectionality (e.g., Sharmila Rege 1998 versus Chaya Datar 1999; Omvedt 2006). Indian scholars such as Kannabiran and Swaminathan (2017) discussed how exactly should intersectionality balance historical and contemporary colonial projects, nation-building structures, and local structural hierarchies. India’s multiple languages, socio-political realities, diverse regional histories emerge as a variety of pathways to delineate power and discuss dominance and marginalization within the same nation. There is a ruthless nation-building process underway in India currently, aided by digital media and technologies of surveillance, however, the contours of these different debates can be discerned in different languages. Like the Indian scholarly streams, Southern voices do not circulate across the world

Intersectionality beyond its traditions  487 as much as the Northern voices even though some of these debates are likely to have greater relevance for societies where caste, tribal, intra- and inter-religious hierarchies are salient within their boundaries. This hierarchy is not about language alone. This point is exemplified by Connell (2007) whose work carefully highlights the work of scholars from the Global South to challenge the continuing hierarchies of Euro-American theory making. Given her own access to work in English alone, the featured authors’ writings are either primarily in English or excellent translations to English. Yet, it is extremely rare to find that people in the North that have read any of the work featured in this book. Everyone has heard about, and many have read Connell’s book, so her name is cited and circulated with reference to Southern theories, but not those of the scholars from the Global South. The related issue is about the materiality and power of Global North publication outlets. Due to their proximity to publication outlets, the ideas of Northern scholars including intersectionality are distributed much more widely than publications in many Global South countries. Even groups like Sage which have operations in the US, UK, and India do not distribute the Sage publications from India as widely through the Global North markets. Powerful publication outlets, distributional mechanisms, and the institutionalization of standards of good scholarship—for instance, citation counts, and publication in “high impact factor” outlets—continue to be located and better financed in the Global North (see also Purkayastha 2021; Purkayastha and Abraham 2019). These structures position many Global North scholars advantageously compared to those in the Global South, even as some of the Global North scholars, typically racial minorities, are marginalized within their own countries and professions. Consequently, Northern articulations of intersectionality contribute to the erasures and silencing of the South, resulting in the knowledge hierarchies that they sought to address in their own societies. Sujata Patel, who has written about methodological nationalism and decoloniality, explains the hierarchy in this way: While mapping the many permutations and combinations of the decolonial critique of western sociology, I make a plea for a decolonial methodology, which combines the following multiple claims: (a) that there are geographically varied and intellectually diverse decolonial critiques being formulated using sociological theory to critique the universals propounded by the traditions of western sociology/ social sciences; (b) that though the decolonial critiques are presented as binaries: east vs west or south vs north (Connell, 2007; de Sousa Santos, 2014; Quijano, 2000), these engage with the heritage of academic colonialism in each specific nation-state/region/territory in distinct time periods and in relation to specific colonial states; (c) that some of these recent critiques also interrogate their own distinct “native” scholarships and question both colonial/western and native/indigenous scholars who propagate these; (d) that collectively these diverse intellectual positions argue that sociology/social sciences are constituted in and within the politics of “difference” organized within colonial, nationalist and global geopolitics; (e) that this “difference” is being reproduced in everyday knowledge practices and is being structured through the political economy of knowledge. I suggest that these different knowledges are connected through colonial and global circuits and have thereby created knowledge geographies. Most importantly, I argue that the destabilization of this power structure and democratization of this knowledge is possible only when there is a fulsome interrogation of this political economy, its everyday practices of knowledge production within universities and research institutes and when this critique is buffered by the constitution of alternate networks of circulation of this knowledge. (2021, 374)

488  Research handbook on intersectionality In summary, when we fail to consider the structures of knowledge production within and across countries, or overlook the complexities of how American theory travels, we do not destabilize the power hierarchies that decolonial projects seek.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS While our limited decolonial engagement with intersectionality was articulated through queries about methodological nationalism, knowledge hierarchies, and life on transnational spaces, as part of our conclusion we return to the use of the term “tradition.” We have argued that powerful critiques such as intersectionality have successfully interrogated white supremacy in theorization and history of erasures of the knowledge of the marginalized within the Global North. Without these efforts and successes of scholars, the nodes of power in American academia may have remained white. Nonetheless, American intersectionality has been produced within the traditional structures of knowledge production in the Global North. The realities of the US, where English is the dominant language, has been distributed across the world to societies with different realities and histories as part of the global reach of Americanism. Since knowledge production is a process, we conclude by suggesting some ways of working through these current challenges with traditional versions of intersectionality. Indeed, the core idea of intersectionality—that social structures intersect, and that the knowledge of the marginalized, the subalterns, the disposed, and the downtrodden are critical for understanding societies—are insights that prevail in many parts of the world. What is missing are the attempts to go beyond methodological nationalism and map the multiple contexts while scrutinizing methodological nationalisms within our own work. It is also important to make the effort to center the work of scholars from other countries even as we battle for recognition in the US. Reading Southern scholars and indigenous scholars in different nations reveal multiple salient levels of social lives, and variable fulcrums of intersectionality. We offer some other suggestions for debate and action for addressing some of the issues we raised in this chapter. A key impetus for proposing intersectionality in the US was to make power visible, especially the power to ignore and silence the voices, experiences, and knowledge of the marginalized. This broad objective is not different from the objectives of scholars struggling elsewhere. However, we know that the powerful English language outlets have carried the American version to different corners of the world and attributed the inception of the term to a few Global North scholars. What if the English term intersectionality was replaced by multiple other terms, phrases, or sentences, in local languages that capture the histories and injustices in specific regions and societies? Indigenous scholars in North America and elsewhere, Latinx scholars in the US have begun to introduce terms from other languages (e.g., Anzaldua 1987). This can be a global process. We know languages are carriers of histories. For instance, in Bangla/Bengali, one of the languages spoken by many people around the world, the words udbastu, probashi, and parajoyi are all descriptors of migrants, but each carry different histories that are indelibly imprinted on Bengali-speaking people’s minds.7 Our vision is that intersectionality and the American citations need not be used (or added as an addition) ,while the local versions of intersectionality—phrases, sentences, terms—can be used, cited, and foregrounded in English language publications8 for the purposes of decolonization and to open up spaces for voices and people within societies. We are very much aware that this is unlikely to be an easy process. All the hierarchies within countries will also prevail to make

Intersectionality beyond its traditions  489 this a conflictual process (for more, see Purkayastha 2021; Purkayastha and Abraham 2019). Reviewers of English language journals need to train themselves to expand beyond traditional English terms that are normal to their academic lexicon, which is another area of potential struggle.9 Nonetheless, this vision of adopting other language conventions to interrupt one strand of the colonizing process might be a fruitful endeavor. At least it can be the start of a process of deeper changes. Using non-English referents addresses another problem. The critique about methodological nationalism, and the foci on nation-states as the unit of study has led to the erasure of other salient social contexts. By reintroducing the need for languages and local historical lineages, we can reopen the need to specify the contexts that we are studying. Using analytical frames for the whole world partially minimizes the power of Global North theories. We begin to recognize multiple contexts and intersections of power at each of these levels and contend with multiple hierarchies. And, importantly, free ourselves from the assumption that the structures in these contexts coalesce from local to national levels; we need to foreground multiple levels of coalescing and disjunctured axes of power within these different situated contexts. Earlier, Purkayastha (2005) suggested a version of intersectionality that includes simultaneous and multiple levels of structures, some coalesce to concentrate privilege or marginalize with simultaneous levels that disjuncture from these layers and interrupt the coalescence of those privileges and marginalization. To imagine power as expressions of greater complexities, we must analyse these coalescing, disjunctured, and intersectional structures that exist within and across nation-states. We can consider simultaneous majority and minority positions for individuals (including knowledge producers), and groups (including people of specific nationalities) at any given point of time to provide more nuanced pictures of intersecting power tapestries in which we are enmeshed and continue to negotiate and challenge to understand the need for decoloniality. Working towards more nuanced versions of power within multiple (coalescing and disjunctured) contexts reopens the question of fluidity that many activist groups have argued for across the world. It is correct to present and fight for caste and racist discrimination together at the international level because of the broad similarities and the power structures that are being challenged. It is not sufficient, however, to simply take these global level similarities as the whole picture and lose sight of which structures to fight for, which ones to target for dismantling, the processes, coalitions, and solidarities that have been built, and may need to be built for achieving these objectives across contexts. A key mechanism for shoring up colonialism across the world was through ideologies that emphasized the superiority of whites, imperialist capitalist modernities as world-spanning processes. These assumptions and ideologies, valorized through social science theories about societies, led to centuries of understanding the very idea of theory. We need to rethink such grand theories and work towards many, loosely operating theoretical frameworks that identify, document, and analyse sources of power hierarchies and inequalities, but not lose sight of multiple histories, languages, visions, authors, and agents in different parts of the world. These historically grounded, multiple geographies of situated intersectionality, articulated to express the complexities of coalescing and disjunctured power structures, address some of the current challenges that linger within more traditional versions of intersectionality.

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NOTES 1.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

The chapter is written from Bandana Purkayastha/my social location as a critical transnational feminist scholar who works in a research-focused university in the US and is one of the few immigrant South Asian American women in this space. What is relevant for this chapter is my vantage point based on my work interrogating intersectional processes emanating across, through, and within transnational social realms across global through the local, tangible geographies and web-based spatialities. Miho Iwata’s research into racism in Japan is a key contributor to our vision here. We are very grateful to Vrushali Patel for her discussions that led us to rewrite the conclusion. We also thank Professor Mary Romero and the anonymous reviewer for their comments. A historical perspective considers different nodes of knowledge that emerged through activist reflections about structures and knowledge created through activism, as much as it emerged and gained traction through academia. (For instance, see Keenaga-Yamahtta Taylor (2020) on the Combahee River Collective, or Grace Kyungwon Hong’s (2019) account of the Third World Women’s Alliance.) For more on this topic of hierarchies of knowledge, built within and outside academia, see Purkayastha (2021). This question of ethnicity and race within intersectionality is more complicated since Asian American and Latinx scholars have written about racialized ethnicity, configured with reference to racist systems within the US. While Collins’s 2010 article includes ethnicity as an axis, it is not clear exactly how racism and ethnicity operate in the model. We are also indebted to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this addition. Here we refer to America’s history of denying citizenships to groups of people and treating American citizens as foreigners or enemies of the state when the US is engaged in an imperialist project in the region where these citizens are supposed to have roots. Military engagements over oil, control of ocean territories and strategic land to guard passages, such as Afghanistan, are critical to US geopolitical interests and economic competition has led to extra surveillance and scrutiny of Asian origin and other groups. Sociologist Maroona Murmu, Jadavpore University, Kolkata, India, has spoken about these slurs in many of her speeches. During the writing of the Indian constitution Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes were supposed to structure addressing historical harms through affirmative action policies. In a depraved way those terms have been coded, from ST, SC to Sonar Tukra, Sonar Chand—roughly translated in English as a piece of gold, golden child—as coded language of micro-aggression against marginalized groups. It is important to note that International Sociological Associations’ Global Dialogues is translated into 16 languages. It would be interesting to look at those translations to find out if some terms are already being used and can be adopted. In a presentation on decoloniality at the 2021 American Sociological Association conference, Ghanaian sociologist Akosua Darkwah discussed the problem scholars in other countries face. If they do not teach their students about the Northern scholars, their student is disadvantaged by admissions committees, grant agencies, and all the other structural arrangements that shore up Northern power. Both short-term and longer-term strategies are important to this discussion.

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29. Centering intersectionality in transnational research Anjana Narayan and Erica Morales

INTRODUCTION Intersectionality was developed to understand how axes of identification such as race, gender, and class impact the lives of people of color in the United States (Cho et al. 2013; Choo and Ferree 2010; Collins 2015; Crenshaw 1991). However, with the rise of social media, transmission of popular culture, international corporate ties, and the migration of people to various parts of the world, it is evident we live in an increasingly global society. Many people live transnational lives, residing in one country but remaining connected to another (Fresnoza-Flot and Shinozaki 2017; Mahler et al. 2015; Purkayastha 2012). This begs the question: What role might intersectionality play in helping us understand people’s experiences at the transnational level? Intersectionality has largely focused on the local, regional, and national scales (Dhawan and Castro Varela 2016; Patil 2013; Roth 2013). Collins (2015) acknowledges that some intersectional studies have begun to provide transnational analysis. However, researchers have pointed out the overwhelming emphasis intersectionality places on nation-states (Mahler et al. 2015; Patil 2013). This national focus presumes that people’s lives are shaped almost exclusively by what happens in the country in which they live and ignores the power of social, political, and economic ties that they may have abroad. These ties can impact the ways people might self-identify, relate to others, and engage with larger communities, both at “home” and abroad. Intersectionality has also been critiqued for centering analysis on axes of identification such as race, gender, and class while paying less attention to axes such as generation and religion (Dhawan and Castro Varela 2016; Fresnoza-Flot and Shinozaki 2017; Purkayastha 2012). Axes of identification such as generation and religion can become particularly relevant in some transnational contexts. Scholars have noted axes of identification can shift, become more salient, and change meanings when we examine them in transnational contexts (Dhawan and Castro Varela, 2016; Fresnoza-Flot and Shinozaki 2017; Purkayastha 2012; Robert and Yu 2018). As such, it appears that intersectionality needs to be expanded and more fully embrace other axes of identification to examine how they shape people’s experiences. Some scholars recognize the potential for intersectionality’s expansion, criticizing the assumption that it has a prescriptive research design. Roth (2013) argues for a broader, more inclusive intersectionality that accounts for diverse identities and experiences. Similarly, Collins (2015) conceives of intersectionality as a broad-based knowledge project that is constantly responding to social conditions and environments. As such, intersectionality remains ever-evolving analytically, methodologically, and in practice (Collins 2015). Given the call from some scholars to expand intersectionality to be more inclusive in terms of scale and axes of identification, we argue that part of this inclusivity should include the adoption of decolonial methodologies. Decolonial methodologies work to destabilize tradi494

Centering intersectionality in transnational research  495 tional Western approaches to research and center non-Western theories, methods, and analytic frameworks. By doing so, we prioritize the communities and local contexts where the research is being conducted to guide our research process. This allows for intersectionality to evolve and embrace different ways of conceptualizing research that are relevant for particular contexts. Drawing on decolonial methodologies provides us with the means to better understand how intersectionality operates at the transnational scale. In this chapter, we synthesize the literature on intersectionality and transnationalism to identify two significant threads in the field: (1) intersectionality must move beyond the nation-state and critically analyse transnational contexts; and (2) decolonial methodologies must be adopted to better understand transnational forces and connections. We also provide an example that illustrates these ideas in our analysis of the Women Living Hinduism and Islam Project. This project, undertaken by one of the authors of this chapter, lends keen insight into how to apply intersectionality at the transnational scale and highlights the use of decolonial methodologies to capture the rich, multi-layered experiences of Hindu and Muslim women in South Asia and the United States.

INTERSECTIONALITY: A CRITICAL OVERVIEW One of the critiques of intersectionality is that it is mainly concentrated on the Western and Northern regions of the world, especially the United States (Patil 2013; Robert and Yu 2018). This may be attributed to intersectionality’s origins as a framework developed in the United States based on the experiences of Black women (Cho et al. 2013; Collins 2015). With much of the focus on the United States, less attention has been paid to other contexts and populations (Cho et al. 2013; Patil 2013). Moreover, there has been far less focus on non-Western conceptualizations of intersectionality. Patil (2013) notes this lack of attention is emblematic of power imbalances between academic thought centered in the West and that of other countries. Some researchers have criticized intersectionality as a Western concept being imposed upon other parts of the world without accounting for non-Western views of this approach (Menon 2015; Roth 2013). Given its emphasis on the US context, some scholars have questioned the usefulness of intersectionality to understanding the dynamics taking place in other parts of the world outside of the United States and Europe (Dhawan and Castro Varela 2016; Purkayastha 2012; Robert and Yu 2018; Roth 2013). In examining Patricia Hill Collins’s work on intersectionality, Purkayastha (2012) finds that Collins does not analyse how “race” may be constructed differently in other areas of the world and not fit neatly within Euro-American racial hierarchies. Indeed, as intersectionality moves around the globe, debates have arisen about its applicability to other locales such as India, Brazil, and Colombia (Menon 2015; Roth 2013). However, other scholars have pointed out that intersectionality has been tied to non-Western contexts abroad, noting the long history of Black feminists acknowledging transnational connections and pushing for global change (Cho et al. 2013). Intersectionality also tends to largely examine issues within a nation-state as opposed to relations between nations (Mahler et al. 2015; Patil 2013). Patil (2013) calls this nearly exclusionary focus “domestic intersectionality.” With domestic intersectionality, the relationship between race, class, gender, and other axes of identification are interrogated within the boundaries of a nation-state without fully examining how these social locations might

496  Research handbook on intersectionality interconnect in transnational spaces (Patil 2013). By doing so, we run the risk of maintaining national boundaries and ignoring the ways in which social forces and people cross borders and formulate transnational connections (Mahler et al. 2015; Patil 2013; Purkayastha 2012; Robert and Yu 2018). Further, when considering scale, there has been considerable attention to more local levels within a nation-state as opposed to a larger transnational focus (Mahler et al. 2015; Patil 2013). With increased movement and interactions across borders, scholars have noted that there is a need for increased analysis at the transnational scale (Mahler et al. 2015; Patil 2013; Purkayastha 2012; Robert and Yu 2018). Purkayastha (2012) asserts that “it is within-country and between country structures that shape people’s experiences” (59). While an examination of local and transnational scales can reveal the way they impact groups as well as larger social forces, we must also pay attention to how these scales intersect and relate to one another. For example, the transnational scale can influence dynamics at the local scale and vice versa yet the relationships between scales remain largely understudied (Mahler et al. 2015; Patil 2013). By examining the intersections of multiple scales, we can better understand how these scales connect and subsequently shape power structures, processes, and institutions (Mahler et al. 2015; Patil 2013). Concerns have also been raised about intersectionality’s focus on specific axes of identification that may not be reflective of transnational contexts. Intersectionality has been critiqued for placing too much emphasis on race, class, and gender at the risk of marginalizing other axes of identification such as religion or generation (Dhawan and Castro Varela 2016; Fresnoza-Flot and Shinozaki 2017; Purkayastha 2012). Fresnoza-Flot and Shinozaki (2017) assert that generation is a particularly important category in migration research as groups establish families in their new host country, yet generation is not a widely used category in intersectionality research. In other contexts, religion is especially salient and central to people’s lives, yet this axis of identification is often overlooked in intersectional analysis (Purkayastha 2012). Intersectionality needs to encapsulate other axes of identification that are relevant in transnational spaces. Scholars have noted that axes of identification may need to be analysed differently in transnational contexts (Dhawan and Castro Varela 2016; Fresnoza-Flot and Shinozaki 2017; Purkayastha 2012). For example, religion is a category that tends to be situated as distinct from race within intersectionality yet in many transnational contexts, religion and race intertwine to impact how groups are controlled, as is the case for Muslims who are routinely surveilled by state governments (Purkayastha 2012). By focusing on the connections between religion and race, we can better understand how religious groups can be racialized. The relationship between axes of identification should be considered when applying an intersectional framework at the transnational scale. Moreover, axes of identification can shift and change across different contexts and along various scales which underscores the need for a deepening of intersectional analysis (Mahler et al. 2015). As Purkayastha (2012) states, “It is quite possible for groups to be part of the racial majority and minority simultaneously” (60). Such nuances can be captured in transnational intersectional research by examining the ways that axes of identification intertwine, shift, and move between different nations and within them (Fresnoza-Flot and Shinozaki 2017; Mahler et al. 2015; Purkayastha 2012; Robert and Yu 2018). To that end, some researchers call for a broadening of intersectionality so that it can be better applied to transnational contexts (Dhawan and Castrol Varela 2016; Roth 2013). Roth (2013, 4) argues that “an intersectional

Centering intersectionality in transnational research  497 approach pays credit to a diversified, multilayered, and fragmented understanding of identities and experiences …” By incorporating diverse categories, contexts, and scales, we develop a more robust intersectional framework that illuminates complexity and nuance.

TRANSNATIONALISM: IN FLUX AND EVOLVING If intersectionality is applied to transnational contexts, a critical examination of transnationalism is warranted to understand how this field has been critiqued, changed over time, and where intersectionality might fit in a transnational framework. In its beginning stages, transnationalism was conceived to describe people’s movements, lives, and connections to the home country and country where they currently reside (Glick Schiller et al. 1992). However, transnationalism has been criticized for being too broad and lacking grounding for not having developed further theoretically and conceptually (Boccagni 2012; de Jong and Dannecker 2018; Pries 2008; Vertovec 1999). In response to these issues, researchers began to define transnationalism more concretely, identifying units of analysis and typologies of transnational practices (Portes et al. 1999). Researchers pushed for studies that moved beyond a binary conceptualization of transnationalism that examines home and host countries, and focus on multiple contexts (Narayan et al. 2011). Moreover, transnational studies started focusing further on areas such as economic, social, and political processes, cross-border connections, citizenship, and gender and sexuality (Dalum Berg and Rodriquez 2013; Faist 2004; Gopalkrishnan and Babacan 2007; Levitt 2001). These developments have allowed for axes of identification to be linked to transnationalism. These studies have also helped to provide a more solid foundation for transnationalism as it continues to change and grow. Recently, transnationalism has been brought into dialogue with other concepts and fields of study, leaving further room for intersectional approaches to be applied to transnational contexts. Researchers have pointed out now that transnationalism has been clearly defined, it should be connected to other concepts, rather than treated as separate or distinct (de Jong and Dannecker 2018). As de Jong and Dannecker (2018, 498) state, “This implies centering transnationalism without decentering other concepts.” Studies have emerged that focus on transnationalism and identity, transnationalism and diaspora, transnationalism and gender, and transnationalism and virtual spaces (Bretell 2006; Narayan et al. 2011; Pessar and Mahler 2003; Vertovec 2001). In addition, scholars have moved to analysing multiple concepts and fields such as “queer,” “border studies,” and “the state” to shed light on new ways of thinking about transnationalism (Klapeer and Laskar 2018; Nieswand 2018; Shepard 2016). Prior work that focuses on axes of identification (e.g., gender, sexuality) or related concepts such as “queer” lay the groundwork for more intersectional analysis of transnational spaces (FresnozaFlot and Shinozaki 2017; Gopalkrishnan and Babacan 2007; Klapeer and Laskar 2018; Mahler et al. 2015; Shepard 2016). There is a need for research that continues to synthesize intersectionality and transnationalism to reveal deeper connections and meanings. Such analyses will allow both intersectionality and transnationalism to develop and evolve further.

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INTERSECTIONALITY: METHODOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS FOR TRANSNATIONAL RESEARCH The critiques of the framework of intersectionality have also led scholars to reflect upon methodological approaches and the unique challenges in developing intersectional research designs and methods that can be applied to transnational research (Anthias 2008; Cho et al. 2013; Choo and Ferree 2010; Falcón 2012; Falcón and Nash 2015; McCall 2005; Nash 2008; Yuval-Davis 2015). The following pathways offer ways to think about methodological frameworks. First, scholars have called for expanding intersectional analysis beyond the national frame of reference and challenge “the explicit or implicit assumptions about the nation-state being the power container of social processes and the national being the key-order for studying major social, economic and political processes” (Beck 2002, 21). The concept of translocational positionality (Anthias 2008) is one such approach that opens possibilities to think about an intersectional methodology that moves beyond the “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer and Schiller 2002) of intersectional research that treats the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis. Challenging an exclusive focus on intersecting identities of class, race, gender, and ethnicity, a translocational positionality approach calls on researchers to pay attention to location, context, and space. Anthias (2008, 5) states, “As an intersectional frame it moves away from the idea of given ‘groups’ or ‘categories’ of gender, ethnicity and class, which then intersect (a particular concern of some intersectionality frameworks), and instead pays much more attention to social locations.” She demands a more fluid and nuanced approach where social categories such as race and gender are viewed as a process based on one’s social positioning rather than as a fixed set of attributes. In this way, translocational positionality, Anthias (2012, 102) argues, should be understood “within a contextual, dynamic and processual analysis that recognizes the interconnectedness of different identities and hierarchical structures relating to gender, ethnicity, race, class, and other social divisions at local, national, transnational and global levels.” Similarly, Nira Yuval-Davis’s concept of situated intersectionality also acknowledges the importance of context and how the meanings and power of categories such as race class, gender etc. vary depending upon considerations of “translocality – that is, the ways particular categories of social divisions have different meanings – and often different relative power – in the different spaces in which the analysed social relations take place; of transcalarity – that is, the ways different social divisions often have different meanings and power when we examine them in small-scale households or neighborhoods, in particular cities, states, regions and globally; and of transtemporality – that is, how these meanings and power change historically and even in different points in people’s life cycle” (2015, 95). Other scholars (Choo and Ferree 2010; Erel and Acik 2020) also emphasize the need to consider how identities can change and contradict one another across time and place. Falcón (2012) uses the term “contextualized intersectionality” to challenge the decontextualized and universal application of identity categories. She states, “For the concept of intersectionality to have transnational salience, an awareness of social location and power relationships must be incorporated into its application” (101). Grosfoguel et al. (2015) state that researchers must pay attention to the how the constructions of categories such as race and racism are context specific and can vary considerably across societies. Similarly, Purkayastha (2012, 59) is critical of taken for granted constructs of race, class, and gender that do not often “fit the white-yellow/brown-black hierarchy in Western Europe and North America.” Choo and Ferree (2010) offer three perspectives to

Centering intersectionality in transnational research  499 apply intersectionality: group centered, process centered, and system centered. Choo and Ferree (2010) favor a system-centered methodological approach because it views intersectionality as complex, interactive, and historically co-determining. Overall, these scholars argue that methodological frameworks need to take a contextual and historically grounded approach to deconstruct and rethink categories that are often influenced by national contexts. Second, transnational scholars also recognize the need to adopt a more methodologically flexible and unrestrained approach to intersectional research. Cho et al. (2013, 788) describe the field as “as a nodal point than as a closed system – a gathering place for open-ended investigations of the overlapping and conflicting dynamics of race, gender, class, sexuality, nation, and other inequalities.” Similarly, Falcón and Nash (2015) argue that intersectionality can be applied and used in multiple ways because it is an elastic concept. Falcón states, “What I love about intersectionality is that it is also always slippery – analytic, method, theory, politic, framework – a way of describing experiences, structures, identities, resistance, legal doctrine, and a mode of capturing the multiply-marginalized or the social location of all subjects” (3–4). Kathy Davis (2008) states that the theoretical and methodological advantage of intersectionality is that it is ambiguous and vague making it suitable to apply the concept in multiple ways. McCall’s (2005, 1773) concept of anticategorical intersectionality “is based on a methodology that problematizes analytical categories” and is critical of research that uses categories in a fixed and simplified way. The synthesizing of intersectional and transnational methodological frameworks also raises questions about concrete methods that can be employed in the field. The emphasis on context, flexibility, and adaptability in intersectional and transnational methodologies explain the predominant adoption of qualitative methods such as life narratives and interviews by researchers (Atewologun and Sealy 2014; Karimi 2020; Narayan et al. 2021). They argue that qualitative methods are best suited to understand subjectivities and capture the lived experiences, give voice to marginalized communities, challenge hegemonic ways of producing and representing knowledge and allow for analysis of experiences at multiple scales ranging from individual to institutional levels. However, there are others who call for more methodological pluralism and mixed methods approaches (Hankivisky 2012; McCall 2005; Nash 2008; Ruiz 2018). Drawing on research that examines the effect of gender and education on transnational professionalization of IT workers, Ruiz (2018, 73) argues that “application of intersectionality concepts enriches the practice of mixed research methods as well as the research of gender and work, particularly the transformation of work in digitalizing and globalizing societies.” Similarly, Rodriguez et al. (2016, 207) state that scholars should move beyond conventional methods and embrace “the complexity of navigating this terrain rather than strive for one distinct methodology.” They argue that combination of methods such as participatory action research, visual methodologies, and longitudinal research designs can capture the fluidity of intersectional categories across time and space. Again, critiquing the divide between quantitative and qualitative methods in feminist research, McCall (2005, 1775) contends it is “severely underterminitive of the philosophical and substantive issues involved in any study of intersectionality.” Finally, Fehrenbacher and Patel (2020) and Hankivisky (2012) state that future intersectional research should employ a variety of methods and hybrid approaches to capture the dynamic and complex interactions across multiple levels and contexts. Thus, scholars have noted the diverse methodological approaches that can be utilized when conducting intersectional and transnational research. Through ongoing dialogues and debates, transnational scholars are pushing the boundaries of intersectional research both conceptu-

500  Research handbook on intersectionality ally and methodologically. Overall, there is a strong tendency to question and not adhere to orthodox research methodologies and methods. Accordingly, in the next section, we argue that the adoption of a decolonial lens to methodological approaches and research design can offer researchers a useful framework to do the very difficult work of researching these complex identifications across multiple contexts. We present insights from the Women Living Hinduism and Islam Project to critically discuss the research design and methodological strategies we adopted to apply a decolonial intersectional, and transnational framework to the study of lived religions.

INTERSECTIONALITY, TRANSNATIONALISM AND DECOLONIAL METHODOLOGIES Critical Transnational feminist scholars (Beoku-Betts and Ampofo 2021; Connell 2014; Desai 2015; Falcón 2016; Patil 2013; Purkayastha 2012, 2021) have contributed to some robust conversations on intersectionality, calling on scholars to adopt decolonial methodologies (Smith 1999) to address the methodological nationalism of theoretical frameworks developed in the Global North. In her recent work Collins (2019) argues that though intersectionality has its foundations in Black feminist thought, decolonial and intersectional approaches have methodological similarities as both aim to challenge and destabilize white, Western feminism. She states that when combined with a decolonial approach, intersectionality has the potential to offer a more global critique of transnational structures of inequality. Similarly, Sara Salem (2014) argues that bringing together intersectionality and decolonial approaches “can help in developing a non-exclusionary transnational solidarity.” She states that it is important to carefully think about how we use categories of oppression and “challenge Western notions of universality, neutrality and linear evolution” that are normalized as hallmarks of scientific research. Finally, Purkayastha (2021, 25) argues that to move beyond a US-centric conceptualization of intersectionality, “there is an urgent need to use more decolonial methodologies that question the continuing imperial frames that we use explicitly and implicitly to conduct research.” At its core, decolonial research refers to an array of epistemologies and methodological practices that call on researchers to “have a more critical understanding of the underlying assumptions, motivations and values which inform research practices” (Smith 1999, 20). Decolonial scholars (Battiste 2000; Chilisa 2012; Datta 2018; de Sousa Santos 2015; Lugones 2011; Mignolo and Walsh 2018; Smith 1999; Tuck and Yang 2012) argue that academic research in the West, often assumed to be neutral, scientific, generalizable, and universal, has been instrumental in establishing a colonial mind frame that has led to the dominance of Western structures, institutions, and paradigms of knowledge globally. These scholars call for researchers to challenge Eurocentric and taken for granted assumptions of what constitutes knowledge and research and open spaces for historically marginalized and silenced populations who have been excluded from the knowledge production process. While there are no specific models of decolonial research design and methodology, transnational feminist scholars who identify their methodological approach as intersectional and decolonial have recently initiated important scholarly conversations about the practical applications and guiding principles that inform such an approach. Falcón (2016) proposes four criteria for a decolonial transnational feminist methodology. These include researchers

Centering intersectionality in transnational research  501 negotiating imperial privilege in the research field, building a research community that extends beyond academic researchers, integrating multilingualism to both move beyond Western scholarship and reach new audiences, and incorporating social justice into the research design Similarly, Bandana Purkayastha (2021, 36) calls on scholars to analyse the silencing mechanisms and knowledge hierarchies created outside of academic spaces through a “transnational assemblage of actors” such as funding organizations, social media, publication houses etc., and warns scholars to be cognizant of the cooptation of the language of decoloniality by Western scholars. In this chapter, we draw on these discussions and exemplars from the literature to highlight a transnational intersectional research agenda rooted in a decolonial understanding of intersectionality. The project analysed here is the Women Living Hinduism and Islam Project (WLHIP), a collaborative and transdisciplinary research team examining the methodologies through which religions have been typically studied. Established in 2017, this network is unique in its approach by defining, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the South Asian Diaspora in the United States, that is, places where Hindu and Muslim women are part of a majority or minority, as a focus of our study, with the purpose of documenting the variety of lived practices that make up these religions. In an effort to decolonize how we think about theories immersed in Western epistemologies, we draw on composite examples from WLHIP to offer four strategies for conducting transnational intersectional research guided by decolonial methodological principles: (1) engage in collaborative reflexivity; (2) re-examine and unpack analytical social categories and theoretical frames developed in the Global North to make them more inclusive for research in a transnational context; (3) embrace improvisation and diversity of methodological choices that depend on the context we are analysing; (4) actively try to address imbalances in knowledge dissemination and circulation. It is important to emphasize that these strategies are deeply embedded in our own research experiences and are not designed to be a blueprint formula. Yet, we believe these ideas can offer researchers some guiding principles for conducting decolonial, transnational and intersectional research. Reflexive Collaboration As Purkayastha (2021) has recently argued, dominant systems of knowledge production, such as publication outlets, funding sources etc., structurally advantage theoretical frameworks such as intersectionality developed in the Global North to travel globally unquestionably and uncritically. Therefore, an important criterion for a decolonial, intersectional and transnational methodological design is to shift from an individualistic to a collective model of knowledge production that moves “beyond the paradigm of authorial individualism privileged by the epistemologies of the North” (de Sousa Santos 2018, 54). WLHIP brought together collective energies and diverse insights of scholars of religion and gender from different disciplines and from universities in the Global North and South into a common conversation about study of lived religions. This network was unique in its approach because, though scholars worked on independent projects in different national contexts, the objective was to develop a shared conceptual framework that pushes the boundaries of the existing field and facilitate a more robust understanding of the dynamics of lived religious practice. The WLHIP team, comprised of senior and junior scholars including graduate students, met twice a year during which the researchers provided updates on their own studies including research design, data collection techniques and research questions. As the collaboration

502  Research handbook on intersectionality evolved, it also heightened the attention of the researchers in the team to critically analyse their own epistemological assumptions, methodological training, and institutional constraints. Falcón (2016, 185–6) argues that collaboration “is about perceiving research beyond individual research agendas and not as an isolating process. Conceptualizing research as a community endeavor means being transparent, encouraging feedback and partnerships, and thinking about collective models of knowledge production.” Accordingly, an important methodological tool that emerged from this collective endeavor was a process of “collaborative reflexivity” (Linabary et al. 2021). This tool offered WLHIP researchers “the opportunity to hear, and to take into account, multiple voices and conflicting positions” (Finlay 2002, 220). They were able to share scholarship on religion generated in different contexts and strengthen their ability to critically reflect on their own theoretical and methodological limitations. The iterative process not only established trust, over time it also helped the researchers who have worked in varied geographical locations understand how their methodological approaches and research practices are deeply influenced by their race, class, gender, and religious orientations. In addition, it allowed the team to navigate political realities of which researchers can access which fields – get visas to travel or develop sufficient trust locally – constantly interjecting intersectional realities – in this case the researchers lived realities – into the research process. Finally, the collaborative reflexivity helped the network moved beyond methodological nationalism in academic disciplines, through cross-disciplinary and cross-field theorizing. As the project unfolded, researchers were able to better utilize, draw from, or be intellectually stimulated by the concepts and theories available across disciplines. Overall, the collaborative model, we argue, is particularly salient for research with an intersectional and transnational focus as it expands the “methodological depth and breadth” (Pardee et al. 2018, 685) and facilitates an “expansive research cross section” (Pardee et al. 2018, 685) that is hard to achieve through individual studies. Centering Diverse Voices in Theorizing Analytical Categories A second criterion of a decolonial transnational intersection research design is to redefine concepts and categories, “in more inclusive ways that reflect the specificities of our historical, economic, political, and social contexts” (Beoku-Betts and Ampofo 2021, 7). Therefore, a key question for WLHIP in adopting an intersectional perspective is how do researchers study religions, starting not from the epistemological position of Christianity, but from the logic of two religions – Hinduism and Islam? “Western” feminist discussions of women’s status in religions continue to operate on the often-unexamined ideas about Christianity as the norm, and the social organization of church-state separation in the United States as the ideal against which other religions are to be ranked (e.g., Andersen 2005). Thus, the voices of Hindu and Muslim women are rarely heard in academic and public conversations on these religions (see Ahmed 2002; Barlas 2002; Saxena 2004 on the role of feminine principles in religion). Accordingly, this research network provided a unique opportunity to present an alternative framework for understanding these religions and decolonize our understanding of religion, moving away from church-based and congregational understanding of religions and religious structures. WLHIP adopted a lived religions framework to provide a powerful critique to the hegemonic understanding of religion as well as how religion is studied. Moving beyond a Judeo-Christian framework of religion, the lived religions framework allows for a more dynamic articulation

Centering intersectionality in transnational research  503 of religion that spans religious cultural, spiritual, and political contexts. This allows us to define religion beyond just places of worship, rituals, and beliefs but also as a way of life. For instance, scholars in the network repeatedly spoke about dharma in Hinduism, which is partly translated as duty or responsibility of being human (acting in a just manner towards all), and partly as the essence of human beings, which can be reflected in life through faith-based practice but is, in its diverse expressions, far beyond faith-based practice or religious practice in groups. Similarly scholars in the network also contested orientalist, fundamentalist, and conventional Western feminist discourses about the place and (subordinated) status of women in the religious traditions of Hinduism and Islam and pointed out that both religions are replete with imageries of strong women and construct religious freedom for women and men in very different ways than freedoms embedded in congregation-type religions (Ahmed 2002; Barlas 2002; Mernissi 1987; Narayan and Purkayastha 2010). Yet these knowledges have not shaped discussions about intersectionality and the study of religion. Accordingly, the WLHIP researchers felt that these perspectives are essential for analysing how groups situate themselves within the contexts of their religion to contest the influences that are attempting to shape a more unitary, homogenized structure of religion. Equally important, the project also highlighted the need to track religion-based marginalization centrally in their conception of intersectionality to understand how lived religious practices change as people migrate. Specifically, WLHIP wanted to understand the explicit use of religion as a process of creating racial hierarchies within countries such as the United States (Chowdhury-Lahiri et al. 2020; Joshi 2006; Kibria, Purkayastha, Narayan, Khan, and Yousaf 2021; Narayan and Purkayastha 2010, 2011; Smith and Narayan 2019). Methodological Flexibility As Floya Anthias (2012) has commented, “we need a new imaginary for studying the complex mobilities in the modern era of transnationalism and the new emerging forms of power involved” (108). Hence, the third criterion for a decolonial intersectional research design in a transnational context is to adopt an open-ended and fluid methodological approach that allows for the complexities of spatial and temporal contexts to come through (Hankivisky 2012; McCall 2005; Nash 2008; Ruiz 2018). The WLHIP adopted a research design in which the context determined the method selection, allowing researchers enough scope to respond and rethink their approach as the project unfolded. The research team embraced a variety of data collection methods such as focus groups, in-depth interviews, ethnographic methods, archival data, and content analysis of web data. Initially, the data for WLHIP primarily focused on life narratives of Hindu and Muslim women from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the South Asian Diaspora in the United States with the purpose of documenting the variety of lived practices that make up these religions. Following the methodology of intersectionality, the researchers allowed for different definitions of religion to emerge from the accounts of Hindu and Muslim women who are rarely seen as informants, leaders, and shapers of religion. Second, instead of working with a generalized group of Hindus or Muslims, they carefully delineated which group they were focusing on – middle-class, highly educated women to better analyse the intersecting axes of power that these groups are enmeshed within. By focusing on highly educated women, the study was able to demonstrate the obstacles Hindus and Muslims face irrespective of their education and achievements. Overall, life narratives as a method allowed the researchers to theorize lived

504  Research handbook on intersectionality religious practices from the standpoint of these highly educated women, while remaining aware of the multiple contexts, structures, and social locations that shape their lives (Narayan et al. 2021). Yet, as the project unfolded, the WLHIP researchers felt that it was also important to consider social lives in transnational – including virtual – social spaces to better capture contemporary forms of power, privilege, and marginalization. Scholars in the research team pointed out that religion-based discrimination that migrants face in many host societies leads them to use virtual spaces to create new religious networks that transcend nation-state boundaries. Accordingly, WLHIP researchers in the United States did a content analysis of the web discourse of dominant Hindu organizations in the diaspora to better understand the gendered and racialized aspects of the public assertion of ethno-religious identities. More recently the researchers also examined websites and personal blogs of progressive Hindu women in the United States who present an alternative narrative to the conservative and right-wing discourse that dominates diasporic online platforms. This gave the researchers a more layered insight into their world view and lived experiences of these women not often featured in public discourse in the West (Narayan and Smith 2019). Overall, content analysis of the web data proved particularly suitable for a transnational intersectional analysis as it highlighted the power differences between the various voices on the internet. In addition to life narratives and content analysis of virtual discourse, the WLHIP research team also drew on ethnographic, archival, and focus group data for the larger project. Instead of adhering to a ready-made research design and a prescribed toolbox of conventional methods, the team introduced “tools, methods, and techniques of representation and interpretation” (Denzin and Lincoln 2005, 4) depending upon what was appropriate in a particular research context. In fact, the focus of WLHIP was on producing inclusive and non-dominant knowledge rather than implementing a conventional set of research methods. Furthermore, the methodological breadth allowed the researchers to not only account for the complexity and layered nature of intersectionality, but it also contributed to the process of decolonizing the larger research design. As Levac et al. (2018, 12) have argued, “Mixing methods fosters multi-directional idea sharing, which can in turn lead to new data collection tools and new theoretical frameworks and contributes to the work of bridging between knowledge systems, particularly by privileging Indigenous knowledge and/or intentionally re-balancing power.” Address Imbalance in Knowledge Dissemination and Circulation Critical transnational feminist scholars from the Global South have noted that decolonizing methodologies “is the conscious rejection of imperial frames” (Beoku-Betts and Ampofo 2021, 12) at all stages of the research process ranging from the theoretical conceptualization, data collection, data analysis as well dissemination of the findings. Given that the knowledge produced outside the academic centers of power in the Global North is rarely acknowledged and counted, a key challenge for the WLHIP project is to find spaces and platforms where these perspectives can circulate and garner influence. The WLHIP members who are in multiple locations globally have tried to build a range of pathways to broaden the scope and intellectual impact of this project, including scholarly publishing, public scholarship, and networking. In addition to mainstream scholarly publishing such as journal articles and book chapters, the scholars have been actively involved in public scholarship including public talks and articles in non-scholarly outlets. Scholars have also been active at various professional meetings glob-

Centering intersectionality in transnational research  505 ally both through open call sessions as well as through special sessions and workshops. The research team has also promoted more web-based options to reach out to a broader audience and facilitate more engagement and dialogue with scholars globally. The WLHIP website serves as a hub for outreach and dissemination of resources generated by WLHIP such as video archives of talks, working papers, links to social media and educational resources. However, there is much work yet to be done such as training graduate and undergraduate students in the methodological paradigms of intersectionality, transnationalism, and decolonialism. Moving forward, WLHIP researchers also foresee the integration of the knowledge generated from this project into academic programs and courses and to build new research and educational practices that will provide a model for collaborative and cross-disciplinary approaches to studying other topics that cross disciplines and places.

CONCLUSION In sum, the conversations about the relationship between transnationalism and intersectionality suggest the need for scholars to reimagine and reconceptualize intersectional theories, approaches, and methodological frameworks to account for the complexities of social lives in transnational contexts. While scholars disagree on the utility and relevance of intersectionality in transnational spaces, our brief overview of the Women Living Hinduism and Islam Project shows that intersectionality is a valuable theoretical and methodological tool to study transnational dynamics. However, designing and executing an intersectional study through a transnational lens continues to be a formidable task. Joining several critical transnational feminist scholars, we advocate the use of decolonial methodological approaches and research designs to study contemporary forms of transnationalism both in tangible and virtual spaces from an intersectional perspective. Though not without its challenges, we argue a decolonial lens can assist researchers in adopting methodological approaches that both respect the roots and foundations of intersectionality yet broaden and expand intersectional research to a transnational scale.

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Index

Abbott, Robert S. 16, 27 Chicago Defender 16, 27 Abourezk, James 192 academic imperialism 97, 110 accountability principle 226 relational 226–7 action-oriented research 101 activism online 265–6 researcher activist 5 rhetorical 48 scholar activists 370–81 activist scholarship 71–3 Addams, Jane 51, 69, 70, 74 administrative spaces 262–4 African Americans 69, 73, 81, 85, 204, 207, 210–15, 217, 218 African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC) 421, 422 African-Native Americans 9, 204–8, 210–14, 216–18 African Studies Association of Africa 374 Afro-Americans 94, 98 Alatas, Farid 481 Albert, Mi’kmaw Elders 124 Alexander, M. Jacqui 446 All of Our Relations (Indigenous philosophy) 9, 186–96, 199–200 alternative epistemologies 95–7 American Social Settlement Movement 71, 73 coalitions with African Americans 85 complex social inequalities 75–7 core settlements 73, 74 intersectional analysis 73–5 labor conditions 84 neighbor and neighborly relation 77–9 neighbors’ orientation 79–81 oppression 83 power as agency/ability 81–3 power as oppression 81–3 secondary settlements 73 voluntary agencies 84–5 Amnesty International 378 Ampofo, Akosua Adomako 10 Andrijasevic, Rutvica 242 Anthias, Floya 503 Anthropocene 186, 189 anti-colonial intersectional approach 123–35

colonial trauma 130–31 residential schools trauma 129–31 antisodomy law 8, 143–8, 151–2, 154–5 Anzaldúa, Gloria 95 Appiah, Anthony 56 applied research 6, 8, 9 Aptheker, Herbert 54 Archambault II, Dave 198 Arnold, David 149 Arvin, Maile 187 Asian American 10 Native Hawaiian 351–66 Pacific Islander 351–66 women's health see Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) women’s health Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) women’s health 351–66 invisible complexities 352–5 health measurements 353–4 lack of equitable representation 353 racial health inequity 351 women’s health inequity 351 Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) 389, 397 asylum seekers 314 auctoritas 78 autoethnography 45–6 Avalos, Miguel 450 Bacchetta, Paola 149 Bacon, J.M. 187 Baker-Fletcher, Karen 34 Baldwin, James 371, 445 Bandewar, Sunita V.S. 147 Banerjee, Pallavi 9 Barnett, Canon Samuel 70 Barnett, Ferdinand 23 Barrett, William 21 Bennachie, Calum 180 Berlant, Lauren 258 Berry, Margaret C. 69 Bhan, Esme 33 Bilge, Sirma 250, 477 Bingaman, Jeff 194 Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) 321 Black Lives Matter (BLM) 197–9

510

Index  511 Blackmon, Douglas A. 23 Bohmer, Carol 175 Bomberry (Muscogee), Victoria 187 Bouglé, Celestin 49 Brave Bull Allard, LaDonna 197 Brown, Ruth 164 Bryant, Ma’Khia 432 Burns, Lucy 27 Butler, Judith 480 Canada Health Act 390 Cantú, Lionel Jr. 171 The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men 171 Carbado, Devon 206 Carby, Hazel 51 care work direct funding 390–92, 398, 399 paid 278–82, 287 Carmack, Edward 22 Carrillo, Héctor 174 Centre for Independent Living Toronto (CILT) 390–92 ceremonial responsiveness 232–4 Chamberlain, Alexander Francis 214 Cherubini, Daniela 9 children’s rights 421–38 decoupling 424 double-discrimination 421 identity politics 421–2 international framework 422–5 methodology/research 425–30 reproductive justice 424–5 social changes see social movements social movements see social movements Chun, Jennifer Jihye 10 Churchill, Charles H. 35 cisgender women 146–8 cis women 180 citizenship active 244 acts of 243 elements of 239 inclusive 239 intimate 257–70 acts of 262 biographical policy evaluation 268 complex social framework 260 description of 257 ethical ethnography 268–9 interaction-seeking and context-sensitive analysis 268 labor regime see citizenship-labor regime legal and political 293

lived 239–52 active participation 243–4 awareness-raising activities 250 belonging politics 242–3 differentiated rights 240–41 hierarchies of statuses 240–41 institutional discrimination 246 methodological point of views 250–52 migrant women 244–50 situated vision 251 (re)making 249–50 politics of recognition/distribution/ participation 250 practices of 293, 295, 306–7 regime see citizenship-labor regime second-class 240, 241 subordinated inclusion 246–7 substantive 387 citizenship-labor regime 274–87 doing family concept 285–6 DOMA 284 employment studies 274–5 immigration 274 legal professional temporary workers families 285–6 marriage migrants 283–5 mixed-status binational queer and trans couples 284 mixed status immigrant families 282–3 paid care work 278–82 domestic workers 280 immigrant workers 280 low-wage workers 280 undocumented care worker 281 see also labor sexual migrants 283–5 subversive self-employment 285 transcultural cultivation 285 transnational approach 276–8 unpaid reproductive labor 282 civic expansion/reduction 240 civic gain/deficit 240 civic inclusion/exclusion 240 civic stratification 240 Civil Rights Act (1875) 19, 35 Clinton, Bill 414 Cloud, Henry 190 coalition building 8, 83, 189 The Coalition of Muslim Organizations, Ghana 379 Coit, Stanton 70 Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness (CCRR) 232 Collins, Patricia Hill 69, 70, 250, 476, 495 Black Feminist Thought 70, 477

512  Research handbook on intersectionality Collins, Robert Keith 9 colonialism description of 110 Indigenous food sovereignty with health 123, 132–4 Section 377 144–6 settler see settler colonialism colonial power 110 colonial trauma 130–31 color-line problem 51 Combahee River Collective Statement 445 community-based methods/research action research (CBAR) 132 anti-colonial action research 124, 129, 132–4 organizations (CBOs) 335 participatory research (CBPR) 2, 321–2, 427–8 Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program 334 Connell, R.W. 476 The Consortium of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Service Delivery 379 Cooper, Anna Julia 5, 6, 7, 15, 33–49, 51, 64, 69, 80 autoethnography 45–6 epistemic violence 94 “Equality of Races and the Democratic Movement” 40 life 34–6 Black Americans 34–5 chronology 35–6 intersectionality 36 macrosocial changes 34 presentation 45–8 racial hierarchies assumptions 49 rhetorical activism 48 scholar-activism 36–8 community service 38 critical scholarship 37 education 37–8 integrated efforts 38 self-presentation 40 Slavery and the French and Haitian Revolutionists 33, 40 social theory 41–5 domination 42–3 equilibrium 43–4 testing 45 standpoint 39–40 A Voice from the South 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 45 The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper 33 Cooper, George 35 counter-narratives 247–9 Cranford, Cynthia J. 10

Crenshaw, Kimberlé 6, 17, 53, 200, 204, 205, 226, 274, 371, 404, 476 “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” 70, 91 Creoles, Louisiana 229 crime drug trafficking 471 organized crime 460, 462, 467–9 see also smuggling Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of (2013) 147 Criminal Tribes Act 155 Critelli, Filomena M. 9 Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa (CIHA) 374 Critical Race Intersectionality Think Tank (CRITT) 428 Critical Race Quantitative Intersectionality (CRQI) 428 critical race theory 6 critical social theory 334 cross-regional analysis 449 Crummell, Alexander 39 Cullors, Patrisse 198 cultural power 421 cultural unwillingness 301 Dasgupta, Shamita Das 101 David, Alphonso 167 da Vinci, Leonardo 52 Davis, Allen 83 Davis, Angela 95, 230 Davis, Elizabeth Lindsey 21, 29 Davis, Kathy 91, 93, 499 decoloniality 478–80, 500–505 decolonization 93, 123, 226, 322, 478, 488 deconstruction 3, 286 decoupling 424 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) 284 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) 315 de-migrantise migrants 241 D’Emilio, John 164 Dennie, Nneka D. 57 DePriest, Oscar 27 Dhillon, Jaskiran 197 Diaz, Rafael 224 Dilthey, Wilhelm 52 disability 108–19 costs of 114–15 geopolitics on power 109–10 heterogeneous 115–17 mainstreaming 108 targeting 108 Disability Inclusive Development (DID) 108 disaster research 332–47

Index  513 complex contexts 340–41 complex socially constructed phenomena 332 critical social theory 334 description of 332 Hurricane Katrina with Mississippi Gulf Coast case study 339–42 multi-level framework 340–41 see also methodology/research multi-method intersectional approach 340–42 multiple angles of vision 341–2 multiple data sources 342 natural disasters 332 Port of Gulfport case study 342–7 Port story 342–3 power and social action 346–7 power in complex context 336–8, 344–6 power relationships 340–41 racialized disaster patriarchy 333 truths of epistemology 334–6 identifying circumstances 335 intersectional approach 335–6 lack of transparency 334–5 subordinated groups 335 uncovering truths 343–4 disciplinary power 421 displacement 335 Dixon, Thomas, Jr. 25 domestic intersectionality 447, 495–6 double-consciousness 8, 55 double-discrimination 421 Douglass, Frederick 16, 23, 85 Dreier, Mary E. 85 drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) 460 Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt 7, 28, 38, 51–64, 80, 85 Black homogeneity 58–9 Black Reconstruction America 1860–1880 8, 61–2 car-window sociologist 52 “The Conservation of Races” 57 Darkwater 8, 55, 62–3 as intersectional theorist 56 manifest foundations 54–6 Negro Problems 53 race and gender 62–4 religious institutions 59–60 “Sociology Hesitant” 54 The Souls of Black Folk 51, 54, 55, 63 “The Talented Tenth” 56–8 wages of whiteness 61 Durant, Henry Fowle 78 Durham, Gigi 24 Duster, Alfreda M. 16, 18 Duster, Michelle 29

Eastman, Crystal 73, 84 embodied community 412 environmental activism 404–17 background studies 405–6 comparative clarity 410–12 embodied community 412 racial/ethnic minorities 411 relational process 412–17 environmental justice research 186, 187, 191, 199, 200 environmental racism 193–6, 199 epistemic justice 99–100 epistemic resistance 17 Estes, Nick 197 Ethical Research Involving Children (ERIC) 426 ethics and social justice research 90–104 epistemic justice 99–100 helicopter research 338–9 institutionalization 93 intersectional research 339 marginalization 91–4 model minority myth 98 one-size-fits-all approach 103 resources and conducting research 338 responsibility and accountability ethics 100–102 social justice 98 standpoint theory 92 subjugated knowledge 92, 96, 100 urgency 102–4 violence 94–104 ethics of incommensurability 123–4 ethnography 204–19 critical 324 see also methodology/research decolonizing 324 ethical 268–9 explanatory gaps 206–7 implications 219 integrated intersectional approach 204, 219 intersectional interviews 217–18 interview questions 216–17 multi-sited long-term 270 person-centered 204, 207–8 body and subjective experiences 212 characteristics 208 embodiment approach 211–16 implications 219 individual-centered approach 214–16 individuals experience 208–10 interpersonal interactions 210 intersectional interviews 217–18 interview period 210–11 interview questions 216–17 situational variance 214

514  Research handbook on intersectionality transculturalization 215–16 respect 218–19 single-axis frameworks 206 in twenty-first century 205 Faber, Daniel 414 Fehrenbacher, Anne E. 180 feminisms Black feminisms 17, 425–6 Native feminisms 186–9, 191, 199 feminist food studies see anti-colonial intersectional approach feminist methodology 10, 404, 417, 500 feminist analysis 446 feminist scholarly community 90, 94, 102 feminist scholarship 91, 92, 282, 294 feminist theory 56, 91, 424 Ferguson, Janice Y. 34 Fernandis, Sarah Collins 69 Ferreira, Jason 230 Fine, Jean 70 Fontdevila, Jorge 174 Fontenot, Francois 230 Fontenot, Rozina Guillory 229 food studies Canadian food systems 131 feminist food studies 123–35 Indigenous food sovereignty (IFS) 123, 132–4 Indigenous food systems 131 Forten, Charlotte 35 Fortune, T. Thomas 16, 22 Foster, Laurence 215 Foucault, Michel 17, 143 Fragoso, Tina Pierce 187 Fraser, Nancy 247, 250 Freeland, Daniel 227 French civilization 263 Gabel, Leona 33 Garcetti, Eric 166 Garza, Alicia 198 Gatewood, Willard B. 51 gender-based violence (GBV) 292–307 agency and contestation 306–7 ambivalence in accessing services 303–4 immigration-related stress 302–3 migrant and refugee women (MRW) vulnerability 296–301 cultural/social unwillingness 301 discriminatory practices 297–8 lack of/inaccurate information 300 prejudices 297–8 social identities 305–6 systemic fault lines 296–7

systems knowledge navigation 298–9 threat of losing children 300 threat to family members back home 300–301 withdrawing sponsorship threat 299–300 social factors 301–2 social isolation 302 theoretical and methodological considerations 292–5 context-specific analysis 294 forced invisibility 294 traumatic experiences 304 gender-variant groups 150–52 geopolitics 109–10, 173, 450 The Ghana Catholic Bishops Conference 379 Ghana Domestic Violence Coalition 374 Giametta, Calogero 180 Gibbs (Hunt), Ida 36 Gibbs, Lois 406 Giddings, Paula 15 Gines, Katherine T. 34 Glenn, Evelyn Nakano 276 globalization 8, 10, 277, 278, 281–2, 307, 351, 388, 479 Global South 8, 10, 108–19, 148, 176–7, 277–9, 325, 373, 374, 445–6, 478, 480, 487, 504 Goeman, Mishuana 187 Gooding-Williams, Robert 57 Grady, Henry W. 22, 23 Gran, Brian 10 Grech, Shaun 8 Grewal, Inderpal 148 Grimké, Archibald 85 Grimké, Francis 35 grounded theory 4 Gupta, Alok 147 Guy-Sheftall, Beverly 19 Hallowell, A. Irving 215 Halsey, Theresa 188 Hancock, Ange-Marie 56, 57 Hansberry, Lorraine 158 Haritaworn, Jin 443 Harper, Frances E.W. 6 Harper, Ida Husted 28 Herskovits, Melville J. 215 heteronormativity 270 heterosexuality 146–8 heterosexual marriage-related regime 257–70 Hijras 144, 145, 150–55 Hoefinger, Heidi 180 Holbrook, Agnes Sinclair 79 Holzberg, Billy 178 home care labor 385–400

Index  515 in-home supportive services (IHSS) program 394–7, 398, 399 see also labor Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette 171 honor-based violence (HBV) 99–100 Hughes, Langston 158 Hughes, Percy 38 Hughey, Matthew 8 human rights 315–18, 378–9, 421–5, 428, 430, 433–5 Bill of Human Rights 423 children 421–38 Hunter, Marcus Anthony 9, 55 Hurricane Katrina with Mississippi Gulf Coast (MSGC) case study 339–42 Hurston, Zora Neale 215 Hutchinson, Louise Daniel 33 identity politics 421–2 immigrants/immigration clandestine 314 irregular/clandestine 314 liminal status 314–15 mixed status immigrant families 282–3 research framework 313–14 research process 324–5 research studies 319–24 social networks 387 unauthorized 314 undocumented 314 vulnerabilities 316–18 withdrawing sponsorship threat 299–300 women of color 404–17 Immigration and Citizenship Enforcement (ICE) 283 Indian Act 126, 131, 188 Indian Evidence Act (1872) 149 Indian Penal Code (Section 377) 144–7 Indian Police Act (1861) 149 Indigenous philosophy (All of Our Relations) 9, 186–96, 199–200 humans and more-than-humans 186, 189–91, 193, 197–200 Indigenous queer intersectional methodology 223–36 ceremonial responsiveness 232–4 inheritance refusals 225–6 kinship relations 224–5 Louisiana Indigenous Thrivance model 233–4 multiplicity 229–30 radical love 225, 227–9 relational accountability 226–7 thrivance circuits 234–5 transformative justice 230–32

inequality class 3, 54 gender 54, 294, 295, 374 racial 3, 54 reproduction 3 social 1–3, 75–6, 292–3, 459 inheritance refusal 9, 223, 225–6 institutional discrimination 246 intercategorical complexity 3, 427 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) 423 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) 423 intersectionality anticategorical complexity 2, 426 anticategorical intersectionality 499 anti-colonial approach 123–35 children see children’s rights comparison category 3 complexities approach (AANHPI) 3, 354–5 contemporary intersectionality theory 33, 102, 104 context category 3 contextualized 498 decoloniality 478–80 definitions of 6, 422 disaster impacts/response/recovery see disaster research domestic 447, 495–6 empirical 52–4 ethics see ethics and social justice research ethnographic approach see ethnography exclusionary 292 gender see gender-based violence (GBV) global South see disability group-centered 3, 499 heterosexual matrix 480 homecare labor see labor immigrants see immigrants/immigration Indigenous 186–200 intersectional collective identity 249 intersectional integrated 9, 204, 219 intersectional intimate citizenship 258–9 intersectional recovery 9 intersectional tools and analysis 446 labor and citizenship see citizenship-labor regime lived citizenship see citizenship methodological nationalism 480–85 multi-dimensional/interlocking model 70 multi-level framework 386–9, 397–400 de facto practice 386 de jure practice 386 immigrant social networks 387 inequalities and power 400

516  Research handbook on intersectionality state-funded homecare 388 welfare-state replacement 388 nations, race, and gender 443–56 metronormativity 454 national vs. citizen 448 postcolonial nation-states 450–51 regions and states 447–8 neoliberalism 477 one-size-fits-all approach 103 oppression 3, 81 additive models of 70 power as 81–3 ornamental 93 power as agency/ability 81–3 as oppression 81–3 process-centered 3, 499 racism 480–85 autonomous intellectual traditions 481 in Caribbean contexts 481 internally displaced persons 482 religion 484 settler colonialism 483 transnational context 484–5 refugee see migrants/migration rural 58–61 settler colonialism 478 sexuality see sexuality situated intersectionality approach 293, 294 system-centered 3, 499 third world women 479 transnationalism 494–505 urban 58–61 violence see gender-based violence (GBV); violence women see migrant women intersectional recovery 9 intracategorical complexity 3, 426–7 invisibility, problems of 94–5 Iwata, Miho 10 Jacob, Harriet 6 Jaimes, M. Annette 188 James, Joy 51 James, William “Froggie” 25, 52 Jarrett, Vernon 28 Johnson, J. Hugh 215 Johnson, Karen A. 34 Johnson, Marsha P. 160 Jolivétte, Andrew 9 Jordan, June 445 Kelley, Florence 73, 84 Kellogg, Paul 84 Kellor, Frances Richardson 33

Kennedy, Albert 69 Khanna, N.N. 146 Kim, Nadia Y. 10 King, Martin Luther Jr. 164 Kipling, Rudyard 76 knowledge dissemination and circulation 504–5 hegemonic 126 hierarchies 10, 476, 480, 485–8, 501 imperialism 110 Indigenous 187, 223, 233, 478 intersectional 408–10 production 2–3, 7, 10, 17–18, 21, 25, 55, 56, 93, 96, 102, 226, 231–2, 321, 485, 488, 500–502 subaltern service 380–81 subjugated 92, 96, 100 transforming 7, 11 Western systems of 126, 127 Kojola, Erik 198 Krugman, Paul 414 labor 385–400 care work 278–82 citizenship regimes see citizenship-labor regime conditions 84 domestic work 287, 399 domestic workers 280 employment studies 274–5 homecare 385–400 immigrant workers 280 legal professional temporary workers families 285–6 see also migrants/migration low-wage workers 280 migrant 277, 287 paid 278–82, 287 racialized gendered servitude 386, 397 subversive self-employment 285 unions 72, 385, 389, 393, 397 unpaid reproductive 282, 283 Labor Relations Acts, Canada 386 Lasch-Quinn, Elizabeth 80 Lathrop, Julia 70, 84 Lemert, Charles 33 Lengermann, Patricia Madoo 7 Lenz, Charles 25 Leong, Karen J. 10 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) 143, 146, 148, 153, 377–8, 443, 447, 451–3, 455 lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) 158, 159, 161, 198, 231, 259, 284, 305, 322, 324, 377–9, 432, 452, 454

Index  517 lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) 172–3 LeVine, Robert 208 Lewis, Rachel A. 173 Lincoln, Abraham 15 Lingam, Lakshmi 147 Lissak, Rivka 80 Lorde, Audre 226, 445 Louisiana Indigenous Thrivance model 233–4 Lowe, Lisa 174, 276 Maathai, Wangari 371 Macioti, P.G. 180 MacLean, Vicky 69 Madörin, Anouk 178 Mai, Nicola 180 Maracle, Lee 188 Marot, Helen 85 Marshall, Murdena 124 Martineau, Harriet 51 Martinez, Elizabeth “Betita” 226 Martin, Trayvon 198 Matsuda, Mari 270 May, Vivian M. 15, 33, 34 McCaskill, Barbara 62 McDowell, Calvin 21 McDowell, Mary E. 85 McKiver, Melody 198 Meat Inspection Act 84 Menzel, Annie 51 methodology collaborative, comparative 389–97 direct funding 390–92 in-home supportive services 394–7 outreach attendant services 392–4 community-based research 125–7 cross-regional analysis 449 disaster research 338–9 double-barreled approach 52 feminist methodological approach 404–5 institutionalization 93 interaction-seeking and context-sensitive analysis 268 intersectionality-informed research 461–3 interviewing 210–11, 216–18 open-endedness 91 longitudinal research 117–18 macro-level context 414–17 madness methods 407 mapping 427 micro-level analysis 294–5 mixed-methods research approach 321 participant observation 60, 101, 160, 208, 210, 212, 213, 216, 245, 336, 340, 405

participatory action research (PAR) 322, 427–8 anti-colonial intersectional approach 124, 134 critical participatory action research 321 youth participatory action research 323 participatory theatre method 323 process-centered analysis 407 purposive sampling 322 relational process analysis 412–17 subnational regional analysis 449 transnational research implications 498–500 anticategorical intersectionality 499 contextualized intersectionality 498 group centered/process centered/system centered intersectionality 499 transcalarity 498 translocality 498 translocational positionality 498 transtemporality 498 methodology/research 425–30 action-oriented research 101 anticategorical complexity 426 collaborative reflexivity 501–2 community-based participatory research 321–2, 427–8 critical/decolonizing ethnography 324 critical participatory action research 321 feminist methodology 500–501 fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis 429 Indigenous methods 428 intercategorical complexity 427 intersectional 123–35 research characteristics 426 intracategorical complexity 426–7 knowledge dissemination and circulation 504–5 mapping and q-sorting concepts 427 methodological flexibility 503–4 mixed methods 321, 428 multidisciplinary nature of research 319 nationally-representative surveys 352 non-exclusionary transnational solidarity 500 numerically-small populations 352 participatory action research 321, 322, 427–8 participatory theatre 323 photovoice method 323 purposive sampling 322 qualitative methods 320 quantitative methods 320–21 quantitative-qualitative hierarchy 425–6 reflexive collaboration 501–2 snowball sampling 322

518  Research handbook on intersectionality social categories and theoretical frames 502–3 structural intersectionality research 3 youth participatory action research 323 metronormativity 454 migrant-citizen nexus 241 migrantise citizens 241 migrants/migration 170–82 Asian 353–4 border control 178–81 citizenry 170 cultural silences 175–6 economic 313–14 fake marriages 178–9 forced 313 governmentality 261 immutability 177 legitimate/authentic relationships 179 LGBTQI 172–3 management 261, 262, 266, 267 marriage migrants families 283–5 marriage-related migration 261–7 mayates 174 non-citizens 239, 242–3, 245 policies 241 political asylum cases 175–6 politics 261 precarity/vulnerability 293, 295 refugee women (MRW) 292 cultural/social unwillingness 301 discriminatory practices 297–8 lack of/inaccurate information 300 prejudices 297–8 social identities 305–6 systemic fault lines 296–7 systemic level vulnerability 296–9 systems knowledge navigation 298–9 threat of losing children 300 threat to family members back home 300–301 vulnerability types 299–301 withdrawing sponsorship threat 299–300 regimes 10, 241, 262, 267, 386, 387, 460, 479 same-sex sexualities 171 smuggling see migrant smuggling voluntary migrants 313 vulnerabilities 316–18 women see migrant women migrant smuggling 458–72 African women 465–6 alien smuggler 469–70 business model 460, 464 counter-smuggling 458, 459, 462, 464, 472 cultural practices 465

drug trafficking organizations 460 evolving nature 464–5 facilitators 468–9 migrant women 244–50 awareness-raising activities 250 belonging politics 247–9 counter-narratives 247–9 institutional discrimination 246 subordinated inclusion 246–7 Miller, Terry 231 mixed-status binational queer and trans couples 284 Moraga, Cherríe 95 Morales, Erica 10 Morehouse, Henry Lyman 57 Morrill, Angie 187 Morris, Aldon 51, 53 Moskovits, Henry 85 Moss, Thomas 21 Moussawi, Ghassan 10 multiplicity 229–30 Muslims 148–50, 153–4, 323, 443, 446–7, 455, 484–5, 496, 503 Musto, Jennifer 180 Nakagawa, Kathy 10 Naples, Nancy A. 173 Narayan, Anjana 10 Nash, Jennifer 91 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 85, 162 National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values 378, 379 National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) 195 National Crime Records Bureau 143, 148 National Domestic Workers Association, US 400 National Environmental Coalition of Native Americans (NECONA) 194 Native feminisms 186–9, 191, 199 see also feminisms Naz Foundation 143, 148 Negro National Press Association 16 neoliberalism 414–16 Network for Women’s Rights, Ghana (NETRIGHT) 374, 378, 379 Ngana, Colette 10 Niebrugge, Gillian 7 non-exclusionary transnational solidarity 500 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 462 normativity 270, 454 Nuclear Waste Policy Act 194 Obama, Barack Hussein 173 Odassa, Laura 9

Index  519 Omi, Michael 51 Ontario Labor Relations Act (OLRA) 392 Optional Protocol on Children in Armed Conflict 423 Optional Protocol on Sale of Children 423 Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child 423, 435 O’Reilly, Leonora 85 outreach attendant services (OAS) 392–4, 398, 399 Ovington, Mary White 28, 85, 162 Pacific Islander 10 women’s health see Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) women’s health Pandey, Gyanendra 150 Pardo, Mary 406 Parker, Barbara 8 Patel, Sujata 476, 480, 487 Patil, Vrushali 447 Paul, Alice 27 Pellow, David 187, 198, 199 Peltier, Autumn 436 Penn, I. Garland 16 Pfeifer, Michelle 178 photovoice method 323 Phule, Savitribai 486 Pitre, Amita 147 Plato 57 The Republic 57 Plummer, Kenneth 257 Telling Sexual Stories 257 Polacheck, Hilda Satt 77 Port of Gulfport case study 342–7 power structures authoritarianism 485 capitalism 123, 126, 131 colonialism 127, 130, 313, 372 institutional level 3 patriarchy 313 White supremacy 123 praxis 5, 8, 90, 93, 94, 270, 321 anti-colonial see anti-colonial intersectional research privilege 372–7 process-centered analysis 407 Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act 147 Pruitt, Anna Smith 9 Pure and Food and Drug Act (1906) 84 Puri, Jyoti 8 Purkayastha, Bandana 10, 501 q-sorting concept 427

qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) 429 queer Black queer communities 158–67 communal spaces 164 discrimination 161, 167 historical context of 158–9 intersectional stigma 160 nuance and intricacies 166 population in Los Angeles 162–6 racial, sexual, and gendered identities 161 scholarship 160–61 social spaces 164–5 queer communities of color (QCOC) 9, 223 queer geography 158–61, 164 queer Indigenous communities (QIC) 9, 223 queer of color 161, 230, 445 Quigley, William 332 Rabaka, Reiland 51, 60, 63 race/racial capitalism 447–8 disaster patriarchy 333 double-consciousness 56 gendered servitude 386, 397 hierarchies 49 radical love 225, 227–9 Radioactive Waste Management Act 194 Ramirez, Renya 9 Rand, Helen 70 reflexive collaboration 501–2 relational accountability 226–7 relationality 3 religions lived religion 500–503 Muslims 148–50, 153–4, 323, 443, 446–7, 455, 484–5, 496, 503 racializing 148–50 reproductive justice 424–5 reproductive labor paid care work 278–82 unpaid 282 research multidisciplinary nature of research 319 research framework 313–14 research process 324–5 research studies 319–24 community-based participatory research 321–2 critical/decolonizing ethnography 324 critical participatory action research 321 mixed-methods approaches 321 participatory action research 321, 322 participatory theatre 323 photovoice method 323

520  Research handbook on intersectionality purposive sampling 322 qualitative methods 320 quantitative methods 320–21 snowball sampling 322 youth participatory action research 323 transnational 494–505 decolonial methodologies 500–505 feminist methodology 500–501 knowledge dissemination and circulation 504–5 methodological flexibility 503–4 nation-state transnational contexts 495–7 non-exclusionary transnational solidarity 500 reflexive collaboration 501–2 social categories and theoretical frames 502–3 Women Living Hinduism and Islam Project 495, 500, 501–2 see also methodology research ethics ethics of incommensurability 123–4 research methods 1–5 anticategorical complexity 2 ethnographic approach see ethnography feminist research 93, 127, 275, 499 grounded theory 4 individual identity and social structures 4 intercategorical complexity 3 interdisciplinary research 6, 53, 111, 119, 445 interviewing 210–11, 216–18 intracategorical complexity 3 levels of analysis global level 10, 313, 447 international level 295, 489 macro level 24, 25, 126, 192, 193, 258, 296–9, 339, 414–17 meso level 9, 26, 27, 251, 295, 299, 398–400, 414–17 micro level 191, 193, 240, 251, 292, 294–5, 299–301, 385, 414–17, 447 multi-scalar 307, 308, 446 relational process analysis 412–17 methodological nationalism 480–85 methodological tenets 3 participant observation 60, 101, 160, 208, 210, 212, 213, 216, 245, 336, 340, 405 participatory action research 124, 134, 321, 322, 427–8 research designs 3, 5, 132, 174, 295, 324–5, 374, 405, 417, 494, 498–505

sociohistorical framework 4–5 structural research 4 see also methodology Resolution of African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (2014) 378 Reyes, Victoria 481 Rice, Tamir 432 Robbins, Jane 85 Roediger, David 61 Roesser, Lori Amber 7 Romero, Mary 70, 380 Rustin, Bayard 9, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164–6 Sacks, Karen Brodkin 206 Salem, Sara 500 same-sex sexual activity 143, 147, 148, 152, 153, 155, 171, 377, 455 Sanchez, Gabriella 10 Sapir, Edward 216 Savage, Dan 231 Scudder, Vida 70 settler colonialism anti-colonial praxis 125–7 decoloniality 478 definition of 125 Indigenous intersectionality 186–7, 192–7, 199 two-eyed seeing (TES) 124, 127–9 Sexton, Jared 29 sexuality 170–82 heterosexuality 143–55 migrants families 283–5 policing 257 queer 149 see also queer, Black queer communities violence 62, 115, 147–8, 152, 197, 305, 463, 465 vulnerabilities 283–4 Shanley, Kate 188 Shaw, Stephanie 58 Shin, Young 389 Shuman, Amy 175 Sigma Pi Phi 58 Silko, Leslie Marmon 189 Simkhovitch, Mary Kingsbury 72 Simpson, Celena 51, 63 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake 478, 485 single axis frameworks 70, 90, 91, 96 situated intersectionality 251, 293, 294, 301, 305 situational variance 214 Skuy, David 145 Smith, Barbara 95 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 226, 232 Smith, Lucy W. 15 Smith, Robert Mays 162

Index  521 smuggling counter-smuggling 458, 459, 462, 464, 472 migrants see migrant smuggling snowball sampling 322 social isolation 302 social justice commitment 98 crusade 21–3 disaster research 338–9 ethics 339 intimate citizenship 259 practice 7, 478 principles 325 research methods 98, 124 scholar activists 372–5 social locations 1, 2, 4, 10, 21, 63, 180, 224, 274, 286, 313, 321, 332, 336, 341, 342, 351, 354, 356, 357, 390, 399, 400, 404, 405, 410, 417, 495, 498, 499, 504 social movements children’s rights 424 gun control in United States 430–32 young people 432–3 Sunrise Movement organization 436–7 young people global climate change 433–7 for gun control 432–3 intersectional experiences 429–30 voting ages 429–30 social movement theory 71 social public spaces 259 social reproduction 261 social settlement see American Social Settlement Movement social spaces 159, 164, 259, 267, 270, 504 social theory critical race theory 6 critical social theory 334 feminist theory 56, 91, 424 spaces of poverty 111, 112 Speck, Frank 214 Spencer, Anna Garlin 85 Squire, Belle 26, 28 standpoint theory 8, 39–40, 56, 92 double-consciousness 8, 55 epistemology 33, 39, 55 second-sight 8, 55 Stanley-Jones, Aiyana 432 state-funded servitude 390–92 St. Denis (Cree/Metis), Verna 187, 188 Steward, Maria Miller 6, 15, 94 Stewart, Will 21 Storey, Moorfield 162 storytelling 126, 355, 428

St. Pierre Ruffin, Josephine 6, 85 Students Demand Action organization 433 subnational regional analysis 449 subordinated inclusion 246–7 TallBear, Kim 186, 196 Tarbell, Ida 28 Tastsoglou, Evangelia 9 Taylor, Graham 70, 73 Taylor, Rebecca Stiles 29 Team ENOUGH organization 432–3 Terrell, Mary Church 6, 36, 85 terrorism 25, 149, 443, 460, 465 testimonial authority 17 Thais-Williams, Jewel 166 third world women 479 Thomas, Carieta O. 9 Thompson, Maurice 43 Thornton, Big Momma 164 Thorpe, Dagmar 192 Thorpe, Grace 186, 192–6 thrivance circuitry and collective ceremonial research responsiveness (TC-CCRM) model see Indigenous queer intersectional methodology thrivance circuits 234–5 Thunberg, Greta 434–7 Toledo, Adam 432 Tometi, Opal 198 Toxic Substances and Control Act 414 Toynbee Hall model 70 Tran, Grace 178 transculturalization 215–16 transformative justice 230–32 transnational assemblages 381 transnational spaces 484–5 Trask, Haunani-Kay 226 trauma colonial 130–31 gender-based violence 304 residential schools 129–31 vulnerable immigrant/refugee populations 315–18 Trout, Grace Wilbur 27 Truth, Sojourner 6, 23, 94 Tubman, Harriet 6 Tuck, Eve 187, 226 two-eyed seeing (TES) 124, 127–9 unauthorized immigrants 314 undocumented care worker 281 see also labor; migrants/migration United Nations (UN) Climate Action Summit 434–5

522  Research handbook on intersectionality United Nations Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 378 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) 421–3 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 433 United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights 434 United Nations’ International Labour Organization 287 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) 462 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 423 Uplift organization 437 US National Labor Relations Act 386 Vidal-Ortiz, Salvador 9 Villard, Oswald Garrison 85 violence domestic 188 gender see gender-based violence (GBV) sexuality 62, 115, 147–8, 152, 197, 305, 463, 465 against women 94–104 Visweswaran, Kamala 461 voice, problems of 94–5 voluntary agencies 84–5 voluntary migrants 313 Wainaina, Binyavanga 375 Walker, Alice 445 Walling, William 85 Warren, Elizabeth 85 Washington, Booker T. 16, 38, 56, 57, 80, 85 Washington, Mary Helen 33, 40 Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi 372 Webb, Beatrice Potter 76 Weber, Lynn 9 Weber, Max 51, 81, 152 Weinbaum, Alys Eve 62 Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 5, 6, 7, 15–30, 35, 37, 51, 69, 80, 85 intersectional audience 25–6 macro-level intersectional strategy 24–5 magnificent Black women 28–30 modern Deborah 18–19 modern Joan of Arc 26–8

multiple jeopardies 23–5 “no peace, no justice in this land?” 19–21 “old threadbare lie” 17, 21–3 social justice crusade 21–3 twin infamies 17, 21–3 united womanhood 26–8 whiteness 61 whole-partial truths/whole-specific truths 228–9 widow immolation (Sati) 145 Wilkinson, Lori 9 Willard, Frances 24 Williams, Fannie Barrier 47, 69, 80 Williams, Joyce E. 69 “The Will to Believe” (James) 53 Wilson, Shawn 232 Winant, Howard 51 Winder, Terrell J.A. 9 Withaeckx, Sophie 8 Wolfe, Patrick 187 women African, smuggling 465–6 cis women 146–8, 180 crime against women 146–8 immigrant women of color 404–17 migrant 180, 240, 244–51, 282, 297, 405, 463 violence against 94–104 women of color 90–99, 102–4, 404–17 Women Living Hinduism and Islam Project (WLHIP) 10, 495, 500, 501 Wood, Norman Barton 16 Woodson, Carter G. 28 Woods, Robert A. 69, 70, 73, 77 worker/labor see labor Wright, Carroll D. 60 Yalim, Asli Cennet 9 young people global climate change 433–7 for gun control 432–3 intersectional experiences 429–30 voting ages 429–30 Youth Over Guns organization 433 Yuval-Davis, Nira 242 Zimmerman, George 198 Zinn, Baca 476 Zueblin, Charles 70