{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03099273607748184, 'fraction_numerical': 0.012590799031476998, 'mean_word_length': 5.537974683544304, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Intersectionality in a Transnational World

As a late entrant into the world of sociology, I read Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990) in a graduate seminar on gender. Amidst the rapidly growing scholarship on gender, this book served as my introduction to the literature on the intersections of race/class/gender within the United States. I eagerly read the work of Cheryl Gilkes, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Maxine Baca Zinn, Elizabeth Higgenbotham, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, and Himani Banerji to find out more about this stream of knowledge. Over the years, insights of many other scholars have helped me to understand intersectionality. As Hae Yeon Choo and Myra Marx Ferree (2010) have recently pointed out, these diverse work on intersectionality have highlighted the importance of “including the perspectives of multiply marginalized people, especially women of color; an analytic shift from addition of multiple independent strands of inequality toward a multiplication and thus transformation of their main effects into interactions; and a focus on seeing multiple institutions as overlapping in their codetermination of inequalities to produce complex configurations” (2010, 4). Nonetheless, I remain grateful to Professor Hill Collins for moving the conversation on intersectionality, in the early 1990s, to a more visible level. Professor Hill Collins’s work has remained dynamic, expanding far beyond the original idea of power relations organized through intersecting axes of race/class/gender (Collins 1990) to her recent articulation of the “intersecting power relations of race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age, ability, nation” (Collins 2010, 8). In this brief essay, I touch upon two related aspects of intersectionality that require additional clarification as we study social lives in the twenty-first century. My observations are focused on the ways in which we understand “race” even as our lives expand onto transnational—including virtual—social spaces. I also com-