Intersektionalitet - ett användbart begrepp för genusforskningen

Abstract

This article presents the concept of "intersectionality" and argues for its usefulness for feminist research. The concept is used in recent international feminist debates in order to theorize how gender and other sociocultural power differentials such as ethnicity, race, sexual preference, age and nationality interact in the construction of subjectivity and material conditions of subjects. The first part of the article introduces the concept, a couple of key reference texts and political contexts. It is argued that thinking in terms of intersections between gender and other markers of sociocultural power differences is a much more integrated part of feminist thinking than a first glance at the actual use of the concept "intersectionality" reveils. The argument is based on references to feminist theoretical and political debates around the relationship between gender and class, gender and sexual preference, gender, race and ethnicity, gender and age - and discussions, started in the 1970s and early 1980s. Other related feminist theoretizations, transversalism (Yuval-Davis), nomadism (Braidotti), inappropriate/d otherness (Haraway), are also interpellated in order to sustain the argument that thinking in terms of intersections is an integrated dimension of much feminist thought.

The second part of the article mobilizes key arguments for the usefulness of intersectionality as a theoretical and political tool in feminism and refers, moreover, to possible problems. Six principles are articulated on which feminist intersectionality analysis, according to the author, should be based. The main argument in favour of feminist intersectionality analysis is that this approach makes it possible to speakabout differencesand diversity in political collectives, as for exemple, women's movements, and to take into account different positionalities, without creating a slippery slope towards a discursive situation, where gendered power differentials can be "legitimately" ignored in favour of an exclusive focus on other diversity markers.