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Intersectionality as an assembly of analytic practices: subjects, relations, and situated comparisons

Ange-Marie Hancock’s new a book, Intersectionality: An Intellectual History, is a timely and important intervention in the study of power and politics.1 Hancock proves to be a skillful guide, continually drawing out easy-to-miss insights and distinctions as she leads us through a rich history of intersectional thought and practice. Yet readers should not mistake this slender volume for an introduction to the field; it is far more than the story of a concept or a recounting of past debates. Moving freely across a selection of telling events—personal as well as political and intellectual—Hancock delivers an incisive meditation on the interplay of politics and scholarship that doubles as a significant critique of efforts to theorize and contest oppressive categories of difference. In this brief response, we focus on a core challenge highlighted by the book as well as the framing essay for this symposium: how to align ontology and methodology across the varied projects of intersectional scholarship and practice. Although this challenge is quite general in the social sciences,2 Hancock makes a compelling case that it has special significance for efforts to understand and address the ways oppressive relations operate, persist, and change conjointly. Most scholars of intersectionality share some commitment to the ontological claim that categories of difference such as race, gender, sexuality, and class are co-constitutive: “So-called categories of difference like race and gender cannot meaningfully exist apart from each other because they mutually construct each other.”3 Strong versions of this commitment are hard to reconcile with many of the methodological approaches that prevail in the social sciences today. Thus, as Hancock rightly points out, “ambivalence has ensued regarding just how far this idea of mutually constitutive categories should be incorporated into pre-existing research designs and methodologies.”4 In what follows, we reflect on Hancock’s contributions to the field, clarify differences between two broad modes of intersectional analysis, and recommend a methodology of “situated comparisons” for building on her approach to intersectional politics.5 In so doing, our aim is to suggest some of what intersectionality does for research while also engaging