Chapter 4: Understanding Intersectional Analyses

All human beings are intersectional. Every individual has a gender, an ethnicity, an age, a class position, a sexual orientation, a belief system, and a disability status, among many other categories of difference. In this chapter we define intersectionality as the unique way that categories of difference such as gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and others, overlap and sometimes contradict with each other and ultimately shape an individual or an organization’s identity, choices, and chances (e.g., Corrington, Nittrouer, Trump-Steele, & Hebl, 2018; Dennissen, Benschop, & Van den Brink, 2018a; Holvino, 2010, 2012; Ozbilgin, Beauregard, Tatli,&Bell, 2011; Roberson, 2018). Intersectionality is often defined at the individual level as “the interaction between various categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power” (Davis, 2008, p. 68). Starting from the 1990s, the use of the intersectional approach has gained momentum in order to analyse the complex interactions of demographic differences and social identities in the fields of social sciences and humanities (Acker, 2006; Baglama, 2018; Belkhir & Ball, 1993; Mueller, 2016). All significant works on intersectionality identify a number of challenges associated with its operationalization, and complexity in exploring the dynamics and consequences of intersectionality (e.g., Crenshaw, 1991; Kabeer, 2010; Kelan, 2014; King, Mohr, Peddie, Jones,&Kendra, 2017; Mik-Meyer, 2015; Okazawa-Rey, 2017; Wijeyesinghe&Jones, 2014). In this chapter, we focus on three distinct challenges facing intersectional analyses: notably the challenge of its individual focus, the challenge of operationalization and the challenge of essentialism in categories of difference.