made space for exceptional individuals such as Benedita da Silva. Yet when it came to race as a category of analysis, black women faced similar pressures to subordinate their special concerns under the banner of class solidarity. These separate social movements of feminism, antiracism, and workers’ movements were important, and many black women continued to participate in them. Yet because no one social movement alone could adequately address Afro-Brazilian women’s issues, they formed their own.
Taking a step back to view black Brazilian women’s ideas and actions illustrates how a collective identity politics emerged around a politicized understanding of a collective black women’s identity based on common experiences of domination, exploitation, and marginalization (Caldwell 2007). For example, when black domestic workers organized, it was clear that women of African descent were disproportionately represented in this occupational category. Not all domestic workers were “black,” but the job category was certainly closely associated with black women. Afro-Brazilian women were more vulnerable to violence, especially those living in favelas and who did domestic work. Drawing on cultural ties to the African diaspora, black women activists also saw their roles as mothers and othermothers as important for political action. Women of African descent in Brazil knew on one level, through personal experience, that they were part of a group that shared certain collective experiences. They were disproportionately engaged in domestic work. Their images were maligned in popular culture. They were disproportionately targets of misogynistic violence. They were mothers who lacked the means to care for their children as they would have liked, but had ties to the value placed on mothering across the African diaspora. Yet because they lacked a political identity and accompanying analysis to attach to these experiences, they couldn’t articulate a collective identity politics to raise their concerns. None of their closest allies – black men in the Black Movement, or white women in the feminist movement, or socialists in organizations that advocated for workers’ rights – would have the best interests of such women at heart as fervently as they themselves did (Carneiro 1995).
Latinidades marked one moment within a long struggle to acknowledge race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality as mutually constructing multidimensional aspects of Afro-Brazilian women’s lives. It was simultaneously a celebration and a recommitment to continue the struggle. Yet as the premature death of Marielle Franco (1979–2018) suggests, building an Afro-Brazilian women’s movement is neither easy nor finished. A black bisexual woman who grew up in a Rio de Janeiro favela, Franco was one of the most outspoken Brazilian activists and politicians of her generation. Elected to the City Council of Rio de Janeiro in 2016, she chaired the Women’s Defense Commission and fiercely condemned police killings and violence against women. Her strong grassroots and social media mobilizing presence made her a highly effective advocate for the rights of black women, youth, and LGBTQ people. Her political assassination made her an icon of democratic resistance and of the struggle for social justice in Brazil and beyond. A champion of human rights, Marielle Franco’s death and life remind us of the significance of intersectionality for movements for social justice.
Core Ideas of Intersectional Frameworks
Our three uses of intersectionality as an analytic tool – namely, how the FIFA World Cup illuminates intersecting power relations, the growing recognition of economic inequality as a global social problem, and how intersectionality unfolded within the black women’s movement in Brazil – may seem quite different from one another. But together they shed light on six core ideas within intersectionality: social inequality, intersecting power relations, social context, relationality, social justice, and complexity. Just as these themes reappear, albeit in different forms, within intersectionality itself, they repeat in different ways throughout this book. We briefly introduce them here, develop them in future chapters, and return to them in Chapter 8.
First, each of the three cases discussed above sheds light on intersectional analyses of social inequality, albeit from very different vantage points. The case of FIFA World Cup football contrasts the depiction of fairness on football’s playing field with social inequalities of gender, race, nation, and class that characterize FIFA’s business practices. In contrast, the case of how growing global inequality came to the attention of ISA and the Conference on Inclusive Capitalism emphasizes how intersectionality might inform different explanations for economic inequality. Philosophies of social democracy and neoliberalism that shape public policies have important effects on the economic inequality that characterizes social inequality. The Afro-Brazilian women’s movement explores how social movements constitute important political responses to national patterns of social inequality, in this case, the intersections of racism, sexism, class exploitation, and national identity. Recognizing that social inequality is rarely caused by a single factor, intersectionality adds additional layers of complexity to understandings of social inequality. Using intersectionality as an analytic tool moves beyond seeing social inequality through race-only or class-only lenses and instead, understands social inequality through the interactions among various categories of power.
Second, these cases highlight different dimensions of intersecting power relations as well as political responses to them. The case of the FIFA World Cup illustrates how intersecting power relations are organized and operate in a social institution where the ideology of fair play masks significant power differences. This case introduces how intersecting power relations are to be analyzed both via specific intersections – for example, of racism and sexism, or capitalism and heterosexism – as well as across domains of power – namely, structural, disciplinary, cultural, and interpersonal. The case of global social inequality shows how intersectional frameworks that take power relations into account, especially those that analyze how nation-state power works with different philosophies of social democracy and neoliberalism, raise new questions about global social inequality. In contrast, the Afro-Brazilian women’s movement emphasizes how everyday people organize to oppose intersecting power relations that harm them. By examining how black women in Brazil organized to resist multiple forms of social inequality, black women’s activism illustrates how community organizing and grassroots involvement generated intersectional analysis and praxis.
These cases illuminate a third core theme of intersectional analysis, namely, the importance of examining intersecting power relations in a social context. Because analyzing intersectionality in a global social context is a strong theme of this book, we have selected cases that offer different lenses on intersectionality in a global context, taking care to highlight national contexts as well as particular contexts within them. Contextualization is especially important for intersectional projects produced in the Global South. Just as the women athletes from South Africa, Jamaica, and Nigeria encountered obstacles when playing FIFA World Cup soccer, so scholars and activists working in nation-states of the Global South face difficulties in reaching wider audiences. We selected the case of the black women’s movement in Brazil to illustrate how many of intersectionality’s more prominent ideas reflect the specific concerns of a group within specific social contexts – in this case, black women within the Brazilian nation-state with a history of slavery and colonialism. Just as Afro-Brazilian feminism situates intersectionality within a Brazilian context, so too might other expressions of intersectionality require a similar contextualization. The analysis of the World Cup examined the global contours of intersecting power relations. The analysis of growing recognition of global economic inequality emphasizes the importance of nation-state policies and the social contexts of government institutions.
Fourth, these cases point to how relationality informs all aspects of intersectionality. Relationality embraces a both/and analytical framework that shifts focus from seeing categories as oppositional, for example, the differences between race and gender, to examining their interconnections. Relationality takes various forms within intersectionality and is found in terms such as “coalition,” “solidarity,” “dialog,” “conversation,” “interaction,” and “transaction.” But the terminology is less important than seeing how this shift in perspective toward relationality opens up new possibilities for intersectionality’s inquiry and praxis. For example, regarding inquiry, the case of global economic inequality illustrates how class-only
